God in Three Persons

[PlatFleece†]

((Natalie Winters continued from In A World of Shit))

Natalie was alone again.

She was eating by herself on that bridge. Finishing up one of her rations. She didn't want to finish all of them though. At some point she has to find real food.

They have to have real food, right?

She didn't want to venture in further, but she didn't want to stay either. Venturing further meant possibly dealing with the fact that there may be killers on the island. At leas with the bridge, she can see someone coming from a mile away.

Speaking of...

...She saw two people approaching.

They were carrying someone. Were they hurt? Unconscious? Natalie couldn't tell at this distance.

As the two approached closer, Natalie looked closer at what they're carrying.

Dangling feet, limp body.

It can't be...

...Can it?

[MethodicalSlacker]

[Lili Williams continued from My Human Gets Me Blues.]

How long had they been carrying her for? It felt like it had been hours, but it couldn't have been many minutes since they left the group therapy room. Darius seemed to keep up with his side pretty well, for what it was worth, although getting through the front door had been difficult. At one point, Lili had taken Jasmine's arm and draped it around her shoulders for support. She'd never get used to her bony fingers occasionally bumping into her body.

As they approached the bridge over to the radio tower, Lili saw someone sitting down by themselves, eating, not looking like they wanted to be disturbed.

She wasn't about to tell Darius to turn around and take the long way across the southern half of the island, and she wasn't about to begin to entertain the thought of carrying a dead body in broad daylight for all that distance. Add on the pain of walking around in Jennifer's shoes, which were already starting to cramp up on her feet, and it would be one hell of a hike. The same broad daylight that would betray them in a longer journey allowed the person on the bridge to seem them, plainly, carrying Jasmine's corpse.

Was she well adjusted, or just horribly repressed? In her mind, she felt like she was coping well, but when it came down to it, she was still carrying a corpse around with a guy she had barely known for an hour.

Her glasses still in her pocket, Lili was in no shape to make out exactly who it was standing in their way. Was calling out to them even the right thing to do, in such circumstances? What would she even say? It was quite possible that they'd come running at them with some kind of sword, or aim a gun at them, but it was also a possibility that Darius knew them, or that they'd help out in some other way.

I hope I don't regret this.

...

Well, even if I do, it won't be for very long, right?

Lili waved at the person with her free hand. She hoped they didn't have the same vision problems that she did.

"Hi!" yelled Lili with a smile, "You're not going to jump up and start shooting at us, are you?"

[RC†]

((Darius Van Dyke continued from My Human Gets Me Blues))

Walking sucked. Carrying his bag sucked. Touching and carrying a corpse sucked. The weather seemed like it was about to suck. And oh jesus, Lili sighted company at the bridge. Yes, that's what Darius needed. More people to deal with. And Lili even tried to communicate with the other junior.

He stared at Lili. Strictly.

"Hey. I talk."

Who's the leader of the group that's made for you and me? D-A-R-I-U-S Mouse. That's right.

Then, he dropped his part of Jasmine so he could focus all of his attention to the short girl. And, to take a quick break from carrying her. Goddamn, weren't there any smokes on the island?

"Whatcha looking at? Have you never seen a corpse before?"

He shouted that at Natalie with a mocking tone. No need to be indirect.

[PlatFleece†]

Natalie heard the two shouting at her.

She recognized one of them by name. Lili, the girl, was a Junior as well. When they called to her, she really didn't know how to react.

Then the boy dropped the bomb on her.

"Have you never seen a corpse before?"

Natalie's heart sank. Her chest began to hurt. Like stage fright, but much much worse. That word was just casually tossed towards her.

Corpse...

Corpse!?

How are they so casual about it?

Were they going to attack her?

Natalie hadn't realized, but she'd been slowly crawling backwards as they approached her. As her right hand accidentally grabbed the edge of the bridge, she wobbled her body, only to safely grab onto the railings.

She could've fallen.

She could've died just then.

Then she'd become a...

...A corpse.

Natalie's stomach became nauseous.

"Uh... I'm not gonna jump you. If anything you guys kinda scared me, hehe..."

As they got closer to her, she gulped.

"So, uh... Why um... Why are you two carrying a c-... Why are you two carrying that girl with you, again?" said Natalie, grabbing hold of the bridge railing as she slowly stood up, making sure her bag was in sight, in case they jump her.

[MethodicalSlacker]

She would've liked to think that, in a different time and place, Darius' words wouldn't have stung as much as they did now. Lili stayed silent as he poked fun at the girl, her face still blurry. She couldn't muster the energy to speak

As the blurry girl swayed close to the edge of the bridge, Lili felt a shout rise up in her throat. Before she could say anything, however, she suddenly found the entirety of Jasmine's weight on her shoulders. She stumbled backwards as she pulled Jasmine toward her, careful not to let her drop on the ground too hard. Even if she was dead, and sort of icky, she was still a person. Even if she tried to bury it, Lili still thought of her as such. As she tried to get the body upright, she could hear the girl trying to speak with Darius.

Lili took the time to try and find a new way to carry the girl, one that wouldn't completely break her back. Jasmine was both taller and heavier than Lili, making the task close to impossible. Each moment she spent grappling with the tense skin and rigidness of the corpse, she found herself less willing to touch it, but she knew she was even less willing to lay her down on the bridge all alone.

So Lili was reduced to staring from a distance at two blurry people saying blurry words in a blurry place, holding up the body of a girl whose entire world had been reduced to smudges and scratches on a lens; a camera lens. She'd interject if she needed to, right?

Her head began to burn again with longing for cigarettes.

[RC†]

"Why we're carrying a corpse? None of your business."

He raised his eyebrows. No, not gonna explain his escape plan to a junior who probably did not know anything about the world. Then, he looked to Lili who seemed to have problems with just dropping Jasmine as if it was a sick bass.

"You okay?"

Then, he turned back to Natalie.

"What are you doing on the bridge, Gandalf?"

If she had nothing better to do than freaking out, she could also help. Yeah, Darius' aching arm muscles liked that idea.

[PlatFleece†]

These guys seemed friendly. Okay, that doesn't answer the part where they're carrying a corpse. They also said it's none of her business, and in the case that they could be cold-blooded killers, then yes... It's probably none of Natalie's business. If she wanted to live.

"Um, well... Rough day, honestly. Thought I'd snack a break and grab some lunch before," said Natalie as she casually dragged her pack back to her.

She slung it across her back as she took a look at the-

Corpse.

That's when the face hit her.

That's the girl.

That's the girl from before, the first girl she met on the island. She's dead? That's her?? They're carrying her, and they're carrying her-

C-Corpse...

Natalie felt something come up. She'd just eaten too. Oh god... Why...

She puked on the side of the bridge.

"Gk... Glah... Haff.. Huff... Oh god, I uh... I know it's probably none of my business but... Ngah, that girl, w-w-where'd you find her?" she asked nervously, ready to run if they wanted to turn her into a corpse too.

If that's the girl, what happened to her friend? Did they kill her too? She seemed so tough and strong, she could probably take both of them, though if they had a gun, body strength didn't matter.

Oh god, what if they had a gun?

Natalie thought that the question may not have been a good idea now.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Not okay," Lili said, struggling to keep Jasmine upright. Each passing second felt like it added another pound to Jasmine's corpse, weathering away Lili's strength. Eventually, she gave up, laying the body down on the bridge as carefully as she could. It might not be what Darius had wanted, but as far as Lili was concerned, it was the right thing to do. It shouldn't really matter what happens to her, right? She's dead, I'm not. Simple.

The blurry-faced girl made an awful sound as the bile from her stomach squeezed itself up and out of her throat. Lili turned and looked over; if there was anything to see, it'd be too blurry to recognize at this distance, but she wanted to make sure that the sound she heard was someone throwing up and not someone's throat gurgling out. Darius didn't really seem violent, but then again...

"We found her in the asylum," Lili said, walking over. Her shoulders still shook as they struggled to regain their strength. At this point, she didn't care if Darius tried to get her to shut up. He had been friendly to her, but to this blurry-faced girl, he was nothing but rude, rude, rude. If there was anyone who should be doing the talking, it was Lili. "Well, really, I was the one to find her. Her throat had been slit."

As she got closer, Lili could make out who the other girl was, but as for who they were, all that came back was a name. Natalie.

The first step to giving something human qualities was to give it a name. Her father told her that, about the kites that she had flown, a day or two after her favorite kite had gotten stuck in a tree and torn to shreds by the gnarled branches. Lili had named the kite Walter, and spent the rest of the day cooped up in her room with the broken pieces of the kite, silently staring out her window, wondering where kites went when they died. She was only nine years old. If you want to keep yourself from getting attached to your stuff, her father had said, then you don't give it a name. It's a thing, not a person. Inconsequential.

The shaking in her shoulders turned to barely noticeable nervous twitching in her tensed limbs.

Natalie?

No. There was no one named Natalie here.

Only a blurry-faced girl.

[RC†]

Ew. Gandalf puked. Darius shipped JonathanxGandalf. They would fit together, since they would be the emotionally unstable puking couple. Perhaps Natalie would not be too bad for the crew, since being a wreck is a thing that Jon was, too. Even though, if they had too many trainwrecks on board, it would get dangerous, since it could happen that one of them snaps and ruins his plan.

"Yeah, we are not the killers of her. You can join us, if you want."

Yup, strength in numbers. If they snap, he can just get the fuck out of the group.

"After you clean your mouth", he added. "It's gross."

Lili also finally let the body hit the floor (floooor). She approached them and Darius looked closer, he noticed the white shoes. Oh, her shoes laces were loose.

"Hey, should I tie your shoes? You could trip."

He moved to the direction of her to kneel down.

Well, hopefully they will get off the bridge soon. There was no time for small talk and Gandalf was wasting their time. Well, perhaps there was enough time for a little prank.

[shotgunkid†]

((Leslie Price continued from St. Patrick's Purgatory.))

Her resolve had not faded. The initial shock that came with finding it had, and consequentially she expected that energetic feeling to vanish. It didn't; the source of drive her introspection had tapped was something far more fundamental, far more powerful than mere emotion. Purpose. Justification. Reason. Even as she recognized how simplistic the survival instinct and a desire for revenge was, it didn't make any difference. The drive was somehow above mental criticism, immune to the vagaries of her internal self-doubt and reflection mechanisms, no matter how severe she tried to make them.

Inside her mind, it could only be seen as one of two things, depending. She knew for a fact now that her coping mechanism, the one that had gotten her through... six? seven? years of life after that day, was finally cracking and failing. The comfortable apathy was being steadily ground out of her and she now risked falling into a sort of madness. or worse, being forced into it by the raw power and gravity of everything happening.

Both of those choices were equally terrifying, in a way. If she became delusional, she might never recover, if she began to care about things everyone else would take advantage of that in an instant. Nevertheless, the drive remained. The drive persisted.

It made her walk, it made her move, it made her crawl all over the eastern side of the island in search of the answer, it made her hide in quiet stairways and hidden nooks and out-of-the way portions of rooms, it made her wander. All in search of only one thing: Kimiko.

Waking up again to the announcement, then hearing Tracen sound off the deaths and mock them, added to the fire. Not as it had the day previously, of course, but each and every name, victim and perpetrator, resounded in her mind. People she'd never see again except as rotting corpses, and people she couldn't bring herself to see again except as mortal enemies. There was a surreal lilt to his voice that she hadn't picked up on previously. There was a new, surreal air about everything now, really. Disintegrating apathy aside, it felt as though her mind simply wasn't entirely processing the scope of this tragedy - and she reminded herself it was a tragedy - as some kind of defense mechanism.

In all her searching, Leslie hadn't run into anyone both whose name she heard and who she recognized personally. But the drive still didn't die.

She wandered off the asylum's eerie chapels and rotting bell towers eventually, during the.. morning. The clouds had broken; maybe this wasn't taking place where she'd expected two mornings previous. The southern half of the island was now open, and the western complex now half-closed, but it was still somewhat 'forbidden' inside her mind. How many people would have gone there anyway, in the time between yesterday morning and now? How many of those were the people she was actually looking for?

The bridge was cast in a yellower and brighter light than yesterday, but other than that essentially the same as she had remembered it; it was only that the different light, and the new focus of her eyes, brought different, new, and previously forgotten features to her full attention.

Including those three figures, hanging near the edge, that she was steadily approaching.

[PlatFleece†]

Natalie straightened up.

Did she just hear them right? They're willing to let her join up? There was a bit of conflict in her head. On one hand, they were carrying the corpse of someone she knew... Albeit only for a few minutes.

But at the same time, safety in numbers right?

There's more chances of her dying alone, right?

She remembered her breathing practices. This is how she gets by when she feels a bit nervous. She's always been good with handling things, and this shouldn't be any different.

Don't think of it as life or death, just think of it as going to the next objective.

The next objective now has been achieved, find safety in numbers.

The next objective... food and shelter.

"Alright... So, if you guys are cool with it, I'm sticking with. Where to? Any place we can get some food maybe? That'd be good, don't you think?" she said, each word slowly rebuilding her confidence... Though still not enough to stand next to the corpse.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Well, that's one way of turning the conversation around. In the span of a second, Darius went from berating the blurry-faced girl to inviting her to join them. Confusing. Everything had gotten confusing so fast, moving faster than the clouds above her head, the same ones that weren't moving at all. Strange.

Even stranger, the invitation that Darius extended was an invitation that the girl decided to accept. Dramatic self-importance aside, if she was an ally, there'd have to be a name to go to her face. That could wait, though. There were words, coming out of people's mouths, mouths trapped in the static of slippery circumstance, that she had to say things back to.

Dizzy. She felt dizzy.

"There was a pub on the map, wasn't there?" Lili asked, straining her memory, "I don't know if they'd have any left over food, but it's worth a shot."

Lili turned back around to the corpse. Still there. She went to take it by the hand, but stopped midway. There was a new shape, somewhere in the distance. Was it new, or was it just something that she hadn't yet noticed that was there all along? The shape was too far away to be anything other than a smudge on her vision, so as far as she concerned, it wasn't worth paying too much mind to. Her main concern was picking up the sack of stilled meat that had once been a person, slumped before her. Interlacing her fingers with that of the body, Lili turned back around and dragged her over to her other two companions.

"I'm all set," Lili said, ignoring the headache and longings still throbbing through her skull, "and I think I'm fine on the shoe front, but thanks for offering." Su's shoes were not to be touched by someone as slippery as Darius, not yet, not ever. Lili would rather throw them into the sea. Disproportionate? Probably. Appropriate? No. The shoes, however, meant something to Lili, even more so than anything else she had with her. They could take her food, her weapon, her own toy light saber, but never the shoes.  

Too important.

Lili was losing both focus and interest in what was going on around her, so she turned her gaze to the sea. Having something far away to look at, far away and moving just a little, eased her headache slightly. At the very least, she felt tranquil, like she had on the morning of the previous day.

Before she carried the weight of one - no, two - dead people with her.

[RC†]

Darius stood up. Oh, well. Then he was not going to tie Lili's shoes together for the lulz. Well, she probably would have not received it well. Perhaps she would have and Darius would have brought good mood in this bizarre situation where they carried a corpse. He'll never know.

Natalie was joining the group, which was cool. One more member. One more person to help. Though, Darius seriously doubted that she would be able to carry Jasmine's corpse. She seemed weak and he did not want vomit on his corpse. Wait, that sounds weird.

So Darius looked at the direction where the bridge would end, not looking back to see a girl standing there. Just forward, to the pub, to the radio tower, to freedom. The Pub was perfect. It was near the Radio Tower, he could dump Jasmine there. He went to the corpse to carry it again.

"Yeah, the pub is a good location."

Please let there be drinks.

"Let's go."

((Darius Van Dyke continued in ONE MILLION TROOPS))

[shotgunkid†]

As she got closer, she recognized their motion, too. One of them - a vaguely familiar greenhaired boy she didn't know - stood up, grabbed something large and amorphous, maybe a burlap sack or flag, and made some noises about leaving. They hadn't noticed her presence yet. It was strange, but perfect: she was within earshot and could simply eavesdrop, but still some distance off, enough that she went unnoticed, whatever noises she had made. That allowed her the luxury of some choice as to when she dropped in more overtly.

And she would exercise that choice. Wherever they went, she'd follow. Until the time was right.

((Leslie Price continued elsewhere!))

[MethodicalSlacker]

Then it was settled.

"Off we go," Lili muttered, throwing a passing glance in Natalie's direction. Though she looked her over for any kind of distinguishing feature, something she could make a nickname out of, Lili saw nothing of any real note. She'd have to be Natalie for a little while longer. Of course, it was more likely that Lili would just forget about her long mental tirades on and on about dissociation and more kinds of overthinking than was healthy, but in the present moment Lili was caught deciding to think on it later.

Glad that Darius had respected her answer to her request, however awkward it may have been, Lili followed eagerly, body in tow. She was getting used to the feeling of Jasmine's hand, almost like a stress toy that she could squeeze whenever she started to shake again. Judging from the fact that her need for cigarettes had yet to evaporate, Lili guessed she'd be needing something to take out her frustration on.

As she walked away, her glasses fell out of her pocket and onto the ground.

Lili failed to notice.

[Lili Williams continued in ONE MILLION TROOPS.]