Mokley

The Zephyr Extinct

Post is up! A few things to keep you on your toes:

If anyone goes inside after Archer, you won't be able to find Archer or Rose. Similarly, Rose won't see or hear anyone else in the building. If you enter alone, you stay alone. If you enter alongside someone else, you'll stay together.

The highrise is 4 floors. There are two stairwells, one on each end of the hallways. All floors are basically the same, with open and shut/locked doors, and a few more spaces where doors should logically be but there's only wall. Both stairwells lead up to the roof.

Outside, the healers are about to take off and go back to the hospital with Ruskali. If they aren't stopped, you can assume this happens.

The smoke that Iris saw on top of the highrise is starting to dissipate.

There's still a black cloud on the distant horizon.

The Zephyr Extinct

The Alley

Silence weighed heavy in the narrow space, as if death clung to the air and devoured all sound and light. While Cedar and Iris discussed what to do about the corpse in the dust, the drone whirred idly overhead. The controller's screen offered a stagnant view of the other end of the alley, all empty dirt to the weedy edge of the sidewalk. Another armadillo hurried waddling into frame, then scrabbled at the edge of the wall before squeezing inside a crack in the foundation. It was the second such animal to hurry inside the same building, where a dim voice had just stopped singing.

uoy era how? tnaw uoy od tahw? echoed the voice in Cedar's head, and he could hear the mocking grin in its hissing words.

Cedar's hand involuntarily twitched. It was almost imperceptible, perhaps a temporary tremble of nerves, but his fingers had moved toward Iris' pocket. An inexplicable desire burned in the back of his throat: a tingling curiosity to see the ring again.

That desire was foreign, and didn't belong to him at all.

An echo of Archer's voice shouted from the square, but Cedar and Iris wouldn't make out the words, only a tone of fierce warning.

The Square

"Rose, don't go anywhere alone!" Archer snapped, but the faded door had already creaked shut behind Steel Rose. "Fer cripes' sake, am I the babysitter now? Listener! Stay here with Fluke and wait for Iris and Cedar. I'll bring Rose back in a minute, and we'll plan our next move, right?"

But Archer's voice rumbled like thunder in Listener's eardrums, her words almost unintelligible to Listener's heightened sensitivity to sound. By the time the painful noise faded and Listener could hear properly again, Archer had rushed inside the building in pursuit of Steel Rose.

To Listener, new sounds emerged out of the distance. She could hear Fluke breathing with his mouth open beneath his mask-- and then she could hear the slow thrum of his heart. She could hear the rustle of fabric and the quiet grunts of the healers as they moved Ruskali to a stretcher. She could hear Cedar and Iris, their movements and distant voices in the alley, as clearly as if they were next to her.

And she could hear a hissing chorus of snakelike voices, whispering almost imperceptible even to her sharp senses, murmuring together inside the building where Rose and Archer had gone:

gnimoc era sretsis ruo. thginot tseaf lliw ew. stiaw maglama. stiaw maglama.

"Stiaw maglama..." Ruskali whispered as the healers suspended his stretcher between their hoverbikes and revved their engines. The roaring noise drowned out all other sound in Listener's ears.

She could smell smoke, and the distant pungent stench of burned flesh, billowing on the roof of the highrise.

The Highrise

Inside the abandoned building, the air shifted and glimmered with curtains of dust. The wooden floor was twisted and cracked, scattered with trash and a film of greasy dirt, and the plaster walls were coming apart, darkened by swaths of mold and mildew beneath fresh graffiti painted on the wall that led to the stairwell: a perfect blue circle with a dot at its center.

Jay laughed hollowly in a hallway above.

Rose would not see nor hear anyone follow her. To her, the front door remained shut, and she remained alone in the building: alone with her thoughts, the thrash of her heart, the voice in the dust.

Upstairs she was faced with a long passage of doors: some of them hung brokenly open, inviting into sun-bleak rooms full of rotted furniture, twisted pipes and sagging walls; a few others were shut tight, and would open into rooms that were darker and stained cold, as if the windows looked out on a different time.

But in the hallway, a voice murmured softly behind an uneven section of wall where a door should be.

"I'm not sure where I am....Vern?....Where are you?"

The Zephyr Extinct

Last call for any additional posts/responses! :D

Lantern

Yooo c3! Honestly I just had a covid test on thursday after a health scare, turned out negative, I'm still sitting at home eating all my food, haha. Oy. Hope you're doing better!

The Zephyr Extinct

@Plank Sinatra Yup!! Depends on how close she'll look. At first the corpse's forearm will seem clean, but there is a lighter discoloration, like old scars in the shape of a winding tree. Like something was there but had since been removed.

The Zephyr Extinct

Should have my post up today barring the local deer population rising up against me

@Grey Omen

I'm ....... curious and concerned.

The Zephyr Extinct

Thanks Lucky! 💜 Ye, all's ok, just distracted and exhausted, haha. 😅 I think it worked out though!

I feel like I instinctively just make life difficult for @drewccapp's characters out of habit. 😈

The Zephyr Extinct

"It doesn't matter!" she snapped. "I doubt anyone much likes you either, yet you wouldn't want to be in his place! So quit watching with popcorn and go get help, which two of us here need! Is everything some big joke to you?"

@LuckyBlackCat

"Don't say that, Rose. I like Fluke. Hey, uh, Fluke, if you do help out... I'll do your laundry or something."

@drewccapp

"A little bit more courtesy would be appreciated, Fluke."

@Grey Omen

"Hey it's not my fault it's funny," Fluke protested, shifting from one foot to the other. "Look, he's drooling!"

But no one else was laughing. In fact, Rose and Listener and Cedar seemed the very opposite of laughing. All of them were hurt, some more than most, Ruskali most of all. The old man seemed to have aged a decade in three minutes, his skin sagging and eyes glazed, brittle fingernails scratching into his frail palms. Rose especially seemed upset by this.

While they all turned their backs on him, Fluke fidgeted with a metal piece on his mask and squeaked it back and forth while he scuffed his boots in the dirt.

Finally Fluke knocked on Cedar's shoulder and shoved the drone controller into his hands. Between the thumb controls was a little screen with a live video feed of the drone's camera. It was currently hovering over the half-buried corpse in the alley.

Fluke jammed his hands in the pockets of his shorts and strode away toward an empty flower shop, where he'd spotted a landline telephone.

"Archer, I know you wanted to test us all, but please you've gotta do something!"

@LuckyBlackCat

Archer approached with a grave gait, the horns of her mask glinting blue and green. She slung Ruskali's arm behind her neck and cradled his weight away from Rose, then carefully laid him down on his back in the sandy street. While she held Ruskali's face between her hands, the old man whimpered and fidgeted and breathed loudly through his nose.

"Ruskali," she said, calm and firm, like an anchor for a ship in the storm. "What is coming? What did the voices say to you?"

In Cedar's head, a voice laughed like a pit of snakes.

When Ruskali's only answer was a gurgling sob, Archer sighed and laid a comforting hand on his forehead. She moved instead after Listener.

"Now, you'll only be a liability scuttling about like that," she warned, taking Listener's shoulders in her hands. Once Listener was standing still, Archer pressed her palms against Listener's neck to gauge her heartbeat.
"It's one thing if you know what you're doing, but you've obviously never been blind before. If ya don't want to go home, I've got something that might help temporarily."

Confident that Listener's blood pressure was mostly normal, Archer reached into a pocket and popped the cap of a little pill bottle. She pressed a gumdrop-sized candy into Listener's hand. "Lose one sense, rely on the others, yeah? Sound, taste, touch, smell. Just be careful of the kick, it's like seven cups of coffee, but you can handle it right?" There was a small grin in her words as she gave Listener an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

Archer looked up and took a step behind Rose. "Steel Rose," she said solemnly, her mask's scanners drifting between Rose and the jagged window above, where the singing continued. "What is it, what's wrong? Is someone in trouble?"

Fluke stepped out of the flower shop and stood alone with his hands in his pockets again, watching the clouds.

A whirring noise in the sky drowned out Jay's song, and a pair of hoverbikes appeared over the low rooftops. The two healers were bright in their orange robes, medical kits slung over their shoulders, a stretcher balanced between them.

They landed in a soft swirl of wind and sand, and with practiced efficiency they tossed supplies between them and scurried to Ruskali's side.

"etsaw a!" laughed the voice in Cedar's head.

The singing had stopped.

The Zephyr Extinct

I am actually stalling time ... it's been quite a week ... brain no go ... but I am here and thinking about this! 💜 (I really hope the next post will be epic when it actually happens) 😂

The Zephyr Extinct

Thanks so much Eodwyn! 💚

Here's a last call for posts!!