Mokley

The Zephyr Extinct

Hiiii! I've been MIA, but thinking about this! I'm pretty sure I know what to do, just a matter of getting it down in writing... 😅

The Zephyr Extinct

Everyone please be safe and be well! Hugs!! 💚💜

The Zephyr Extinct

I'm unsure whether we should be worried.... 😄

The Zephyr Extinct

Hmm it looks like we're entering another phase of the story, so there'll be opportunities to jump in. If you PM me your updated CS we can discuss! 😊

The Zephyr Extinct

Hiya Lucky!! We're going about a round a month at this point (mostly due to my own slowness) but we're all here and keeping on! Also probably an hour has passed in game. 😅

The Zephyr Extinct

The Highrise

Silence hung like cobwebs from the cracked ceiling and settled in the grimy floor.

Something clattered and fluttered on the other end of the hallway, where a pigeon disappeared through an open twisted door.

"Oh... Oh, no. They got you, didn't they? They got you, too."

...hteet ruo neewteb sluos rieht ward...

A sussurus of hissing voices shimmered inside the open room where the pigeon had just gone. The bird now lay shivering among shards of fallen drywall, its eyes gleaming black then chalky white.

"It's dark in here. It's always going to be dark. I'm so sorry, Vern. I wish I'd been there to warn you."

The wall beneath Rose's fingers was crackled and peeling, full of burrow holes from insects and pecking birds. There was a rectangle impression, almost imperceptible, where a door had long ago been sealed shut and painted over.

"YOU'LL NEVER LOCK ME UP!" a familiar voice roared on the floor above. "I KNOW THE TRUTH! THE NOX, THE RAVEL, AMALGAM, THE END OF THE WORLD! YOU WON'T KEEP ME QUIET, DEVOURERS!" Ruskali's voice roared as if he were charging the enemy. A resounding BANG rattled the ceiling and rained bits of dust and drywall down on Rose's head.

The Alley

{Signal's lit} A metallic voice buzzed almost inaudibly inside Iris' pocket, where the ring lay dormant. Iris would hear it clearly, like an echo inside her head. Listener would hear it like a distant staticky radio, the words barely understandable. Cedar would not hear it at all.

{We've got the preacher} said a second, feminine voice. The rumble of the motorbikes faded in the distance. {Is Damari with you?}
{Why would he be with me? He was supposed to recruit the preacher and meet you in the square.}
{Well he wasn't there. Just a bunch of Ze. It's fine, they didn't even look at us.}
{That doesn't explain why Damari's not saying anything! Damari!}
{What if someone else--}
{Shit. I'm out.}

Iris, Cedar, and Listener would all hear the skid and clack of an opening window high above.

A skinny young man leaned out of it, bald and draped in orange robes. He didn't look down, didn't see the group of Ze gathered in the narrow alley -- instead, he braced a sandaled foot against the windowsill and leaped like a cat across the alley. He caught himself on the edge of the next roof and swiftly pulled himself up and over, disappearing onto the flat rooftop above the spice shop.

The Zephyr Extinct

If anybody's planning another reply, now's the time! 😊

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