singillatim | you can run but you can't escape

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you can run but you can't escape

THE DARKWALKER COMES

The Darkwalker strikes again. This time, it does not come for one Interloper — but four.

WHEN: March 2nd.
WHERE: Milton.
CONTENT WARNINGS: death of playable character; supernatural death; mention of dead body; themes of death; supernatural beings; themes of terror; themes of peril.

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T ESCAPE

The sun sets on another day in the Northern Territories. The night is calm but cold, scant clouds drifting low in the skies promising snowfall soon. A waning moon sits in the skies amongst its sea of stars, and those looking up may notice it — slowly, one by one, the stars begin to go out.

Then the moon's light is swallowed whole, and a blanket of green gloom descends upon the town of Milton. One more, the sky is dark and green and terrible. Many of those will recognise it, what this means and what will come. Others will not understand it, not know what it is that awaits them all.

They will soon find out: the Darkwalker comes.

Fear washes over you like a cold wave, a vice-tight grip that squeezes the breath from you. Interlopers will find themselves over-come, and everything in their bodies and minds tells them to run. To flee. And so you run, heading for cover indoors. Curtains will be drawn, some may hide under beds, within closets or wardrobes. Some desperate attempt to conceal themselves, make themselves small, unseen. Some Interlopers, in that fear, may rush to friends or loved ones to hide with them, others may simply cowered alone — crawling and whimpering away from the night. The fear is irrational, unable to be overcome — even by the bravest or most stoic of Interlopers.

The Darkwalker howls: indescribable, unnatural, demonic. Low moans and groans. It comes from the east, the faint booms of footsteps in the distance growing ever nearer. It is coming, once more. It's coming for one of you. And still, you are powerless, unable to do anything. And it is an agony, awaiting its arrival. You cry, you whimper, you cower. Curling up for some shred of comfort, and finding none.

The footsteps draw closer and closer, and you feel like the ground itself may be threatening splitting open beneath you. It isn't you that it hunts, but you notice its path — a straight line from the east towards Milton Church. It seems to go on forever, building into a crescendo. Your heart beats so hard you fear it may burst from your chest, as if you might die of fright.

There is an almighty sound; the Darkwalker devours and suddenly the sky is alight: streaks of pale colour shoot across the gloomy green — almost blinding for one long moment. A woman's scream fills the air and then snaps into silence.

The skies return to normal, the green is gone, the fear melts away from you. It is done.

There is no body in the street. Interlopers venturing out will need to go looking for whoever it is that's fallen victim to the Devourer. The answer will be found within Milton Church.

Towards the altar, peppered amongst faint glimmers of intangible green that will fade by morning, lie the twisted and mangled bodies of Nicholas Wolfwood, Millions Knives and both iterations of Vash the Stampede. There's no blood, no physical wounds — simply the contorted bodies that lie dropped like ragdolls. Each of their faces stare with wide eyes, frozen in horror — just as La'an Noonien-Singh was.

The Darkwalker has devoured more. There is a story, told by Methuselah: It is said that the Darkwalker will awake from its slumber and swallow the world whole. One head will swallow the stars and moon and sun. Another will swallow the seas and lakes and rivers. The third will swallow the land, and every living thing upon it — and only then will the Darkwalker be satisfied and return to sleep once more.

It feels as if the Darkwalker is making good on its story: one by one, it will devour you all whole. And now the Interlopers of Milton must grapple with more death.

FAQs

1. Essentially, a 'party post' for reactions to the Darkwalker's attack, the immediate aftermath, and any funerary preparations. Have... fun???

2. Information on the Darkwalker's attack can be found here.

3. An OOC Rundown for the original Darkwalker's attack, which includes some FAQs can be found here.

4. Notes about the characters:

Wolfwood: He doesn't leave any messages behind. Folks are welcome to go through his house, which is the cabin by the pond -- there's nothing in there of his, and the only changes he made to the house was pulling a twin bed over in front of the fireplace. The wall of the cabin is also scorched from inside, from where his Lightbringer power erupted at one point.

Vash The Stampede (Trigun Stampede): He really didn't have much belongings or anything in particular of note, so it is a free for all situation in terms of possessions.

Vash The Stampede (Trigun Maximum): He'll be leaving behind his meager belongings. all of it can be found on either his person or in the church's living quarters which is also decently stocked with foraged foods. alas he's prepared no messages because he is absolutely atrocious at saying goodbyes.

Millions Knives: He'll leave behind sharpened hunting and skinning knives (hah), some fishing equipment, and scattered feathers around the church.

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"An ancient immortal master of monsters? How utterly diabolical."

He'll venture the risk of a touch of dark humour, given this new development in his understanding of the dear Miss Rose. People who have truck with monsters in their day to day life, be those monsters real or imagined, tend to be less precious about the subject than those sheltered by modernity's loving arms - as her little grin seems to tell him.

"I suppose true evil can never be rooted out of the world." Certainly not any world he'd find fit to live in. "But if it can be driven back, or warded off, we would all sleep far more soundly in our beds at night. Tell me - you wouldn't happen to have any sort of potent talisman or sanctifying rites tucked away for just such an occasion?"

Lalo files that away. He'll have to ask Fraser about this later. He pats Levi on the shoulder. "Thanks, kid. You're a smart cookie, you know that?"

Levi freezes and tenses up at the pat, but tries not to draw attention to that fact. "Thanks."

Dismay makes itself plain in the widening of Lestat's eyes, a look that would have been far more appropriate for the chapel itself than any other he adopted there. He goes so far to wince at Louis' mention of cremation, the rictus of distaste he would don for a sour note in a performance of a beloved composition.

"Mon cher," Lestat says, his accent inflected by all those long years of Louisiana French. He reaches out to touch the curve of Louis' jaw lightly, as if balancing a globe of spun glass on his fingertips. "Why speak of such things?"

He cannot help but wonder if Louis shared this dark wish with one of the mortals he's confided his true nature in. The image of Louis, stilled in eternal silence, butchered, consigned to flames by some indifferent human hand -

"Do you think our nature gives itself up to the poking and prodding of the natural philosopher? All they would find in our veins is death itself." He does not know if this is true, but there's a poetry to it that demands it to be so. The idea of all they are reduced to a mere scientific curiosity under glass revolts him.

"And I would dissect whoever dared to presume upon this beautiful body with their own knives. Also, I forbid you to die. You worry about such ridiculous ideas."

The empty sort of smile that spreads across Louis's lips and stops at his eyes is the most abhorrent kind. Louis doesn’t like feeling this way, and he can become quite disagreeable too, but sometimes he watches himself like a terrible moving picture. At least they make a pretty one, the two handsome gentlemen who arrange themselves so nicely around each other.

“Are you master of death as well? I think you forgot to tell me. It ain’t just vampires that abhor the dissectin’ table so much that they’ll delude themselves into thinkin’ it can’t turn up anythin’.” He raises his eyebrows pointedly at him.

“I expected to ease myself into the different eras as I got older. This place is a century ahead, and very suddenly. They got kids talkin’ about blood experiments. They got things in their schoolbooks I ain’t never heard of. A little harder than just a new wardrobe, mon cher.”

Or even a new accent, another to add to a vampire’s long years of amalgamation. His fingers gently pinch the lapel of Lestat’s jacket with a familiarity he didn’t have when he, then human, convinced Lestat to dress in the twentieth century.

[ It does prove comforting to hear the words from him — in whatever form he can muster — because she knows, deep down, that he can see the strength that exists in her. Whatever she'd suffered through before, whatever treatment she'd been subjected to at the whims of terrible men, somehow, she hadn't given up.

These days, she feels like a far cry from the woman she'd been back then, someone who hadn't been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, she knows she's capable of surviving awful things because she's already been through them. It doesn't make them any less easy to endure when they happen, but she can pride herself on being made of stronger stuff. What matters here, though, is that Bigby doesn't view her as a victim, doesn't handle her like she's something fragile. She wouldn't accept it if he tried.

In the moment, even once she realizes she's still holding his hand, and that he hasn't moved to pull away from her, she doesn't look down at their shared clasping — as if bringing attention to it might make it feel more significant somehow, beyond just attempting to offer comfort. ]

I know, but it doesn't change the fact that I am.

[ Her voice is still soft, but there's an insistence in it too — even if he would've readily protected her from experiencing this, neither of them is powerful enough to send her back home, and more than that, she's not sure she would be willing to return if it meant knowingly leaving him behind, either.

His words do elicit a half-smile from her, a quiet chuckle, and she finally uses her free hand to pat the top of the one she's still holding onto before slipping out of that clasp altogether. ]

Kind of feels like being partners again, doesn't it? Only instead of trying to solve a murder, we're trying to solve... whatever the hell this place is.

“Wait, really?”

With the Darkwalker attack, she doesn’t think anyone would want to go near anything close to supernatural like Jessica. After that horrid light and the gut wrenching screams, a vampire walking around would be like the shitty sprinkles on an awful sundae. So to him just offering his blood like that, it touch her. “I suppose it will…”

But also -

“How do I pay you back?” In her experience, no one offer up being bitten by her without some compensation. The guys in Fantasia get to have their hard-ons by being bitten by her, her boyfriend’s (ex-boyfriend now) mother got bit because she was a crazy mean bitch and Jessica was starving and the trucker…

Well, the trucker was just some guy looking for a hot girl to make out with. She never gave him the chance to offer his blood. A moment of predation driven by heartbreak and hunger.

Lalo, of course, can't help but feel him tense up a little, but he can also tell Levi is trying to suppress it, so he doesn't mention it. He does file the information away for later, though. But it makes sense that a child soldier would be jumpy at being unexpectedly touched.

"So what brought you down here?" For all Lalo knows, Levi came here for the same reason he did. That, too, would make sense for a child soldier.

"I..." Why did he come here? "I wanted to see for myself. See if anything was different." If he could learn anything or do anything to protect people from this happening again.

Lalo's smile shines like the apocryphal dead man's hand, made all the more appealing by the knowing edge to it. There's a time and a place for the sweetness of those unaware of their own charms, but Lestat tends to prefer those who carry themselves with confidence through the world. If one doesn't value oneself, one becomes a cheap commodity once the bloom of naivety has faded.

Lestat personally considers himself all but priceless. He cocks his head to accentuate the fall of his curls, serenely accepting the returned admiration for what it is. There's no intention behind it - not yet, at least - merely the simple pleasure of two men appreciating each other in tacit understanding.

"Terror, perhaps," he says, airily, as if it isn't his first suspicion. Whether that terror is incited for the creature itself, or for some shadowy author of its existence, remains to be seen. "We have been told we are unwanted guests. The general inhospitality of our hosts, whoever they may be - if they even exist - has yet to drive us off. If we had anywhere to go, I'd imagine this display would prove quite motivating for a general exodus."

Lalo could be speaking of the reasons for killing in the abstract, or as a man with a staunch opposition to those who commit the second of all sins. He rather hopes that isn't the explanation.

The accent can come and go. He never sounds quite as if he belongs to any one place, anymore. The French he was raised speaking is no longer spoken as it was anywhere, caught only occasionally in stray inflections from foreign mouths.

Louis thinks to tell him that times can change. Lestat does not have to wonder if he was so arrogant as a young vampire. He was, and is, an absolute monster of vanity. Louis has the grace of intending to warn, not boast, and only this tempers Lestat's churlish impulse to rebuke him.

Or perhaps not only that, as he allows himself to lean towards the lightness of Louis' fingers on his jacket.

"I am not death's master." He drops his hand to Louis' shoulder, brushing imaginary lint from it. (As if Louis, ever particular, would allow such a thing outside of his own house, even under these circumstances.) "I am death's playmate, fickle thing that it is. It is not death I am forbidding from you. It is you I am forbidding from death."

A perfectly sensical notion. Not at all akin to a childish stomping of the foot, insisting that the impossible be made possible only for the sake of his whims. And if it is that, at least it is nothing like an icy pang of remembrance, or the ashen silt of grief on his tongue.

"But if you insist on entertaining this fancy - so be it. I, Lestat de Lioncourt, swear on my adoration for you that not one curious soul will pry the secrets of our existence from your exhausted veins."

There would be fire. The conflagration would burn this accused cluster of hovels to ash, and he would crack whatever empty-eyed skulls remained under his feet as he danced madly amid the ruins.

[ The man shakes his head. ]

They're his. [ Which is.. practically the same thing Bigby said a moment ago, and technically also the same thing as the other man is saying here.

But he doesn't mean they were Vash's property or collection. Not in that sense. What he's about to say may not really work in Bigby's favour when it comes to convincing Konstantin that he is not some delusional weirdo, but-- ]

He had wings. Only whenever the Aurora hit town, for some reason. But that's where all those feathers around here had to be coming from.

[ He misses her hands the instant they leave his.

He doesn't mention a thing about it, though. Of course he doesn't. This is exactly the sort of thing Bigby has kept to himself for so long that it's just easier to do this than to actually say anything at this point. ]

Except this time we already know one culprit.

[ He flexes the fingers of his hand a little, like he's remembering the ghost of her touch there, and then pulls his arms back to himself to cross them across his chest. ]

Not that I think the Darkwalker is what dragged us here. It wants us gone, after all. So as far as I see, what we can do here is both track down the real force behind our arrival here, and find some way of dealing with the Darkwalker before it hurts even more people in this place.

[ His mouth tugs into a soft frown, empathetic. ]

You shouldn't have to figure any of it out. You're so young.

[ Despite what horrors Levi has been through.... and the fact they've no doubt matured him too quickly. He's still just a boy. ]

But it sounds like you've faced... more than most of us have. You're tough. I'd want you on my team when the next bad thing happens. [ He smiles again, playful but not disingenuous, meaning it. ]

Wings.

[ He repeats the word, staring at his companion. ]

As in.... on his body? Like some kind of angel?

[ That's the mental image... especially given how big and white the feathers are. But it's extremely difficult for him to accept that image as real; still, Konstantin doesn't challenge it. Not now. Not when this man just lost a friend. Instead, he stares for a moment longer and then gives a soft exhale, stooping to collect one of the feathers and hold it up in his hand, fingers pinching the quill of the thing. Thoughtfully, mouth tugged tight at the corners— ]

....If that's the case, I suppose it was fitting he lived in the church.

I-i'm not a kid. I'm 18. I've...

[He hesitates. Does he want to say this? The other man seemed to worry about him already. But enough people knew some of what he'd seen that it would reach Konstantin eventually.]

..I've been to war.

[ Eighteen. No, it's not a kid — but it's still so young. Maybe it's easier to see it that way now, as a man nearly in his forties, a man now with a son of his own, but it makes his heart ache.

Of course, Konstantin also has military experience, and he was around Levi's age when he enlisted. But it's... surprising all the same, to learn that the boy had been through such a thing, on top of everything else he's revealed over time. He watches him: quiet, thoughtful, and brow pinched. 'Been to war'.... ]

That must have happened not long before you came here?

[He just...shakes his head.]

I was conscripted when I was 13. I've seen more than most people should.

[ Age thirteen. Konstantin, usually rather good at controlling his expressions, can't quite conceal the widening of his eyes, the expression of surprise. ]

...You really were just a kid then.

[ In that case... yes, he can see how much Levi might have matured by age eighteen. Been forced to mature. All of it is a highly upsetting thought. He can't imagine his own son being forced into service at such an age, just freshly a teenager.

He runs a hand over his mouth, looking back over to the bodies nearby. When he speaks, it's softly. ]

Do things like this... make you upset? Make you remember things you don't want to?

Sometimes it’s more about the little thrill of brushing off imaginary lint than true fastidiousness. Impossible like Lestat is impossible, like how he asks the impossible.

“And I would do the same for you, mon cher,” Louis says with difficulty.

But he didn’t. He wrapped Lestat in a rug and threw him out with the trash. He could not stand to truly send Lestat from this world. Louis looks guiltily down and smooths an imaginary crease from Lestat’s lapel, the back of his knuckles following the contour of his chest. So much for wearing only bitterness. Louis does not think he could let Lestat go except perhaps by removing himself from the equation.

So there it is. Louis cannot let Lestat go. This spells some sort of doom or damnation, he’s sure.

Yeah. I grew up too quickly.

[He shrugs.]

Death stopped bothering me a long time ago. It's just another part of life.

[Usually it came too soon or in horrible ways, but it was still a part of the cycle.]

A corpse transforms into a thing very unlike the person who inhabited it minutes before. Louis has visited this transformation on strangers and friends alike. Eternal life, and it is steeped in nothing but death.

“You know, I just spoke with a man who actually lives in outer space. Or, not on Earth. No one like that where I come from… or when. He encountered life previously unknown to us. Not little green spacemen exactly, but… things that were just fiction to me before. The unexplained, or rather the undiscovered."

He suspects, but can’t know, that Konstantin is giving only a little truth. Louis himself cannot start a vampire scare in town. He fixes him with an unblinking stare.

“Monsters do roam. Humans are very capable of the most abhorrent mischief. Hunt not the monster but the one who causes him. In my country, many an innocent man has been killed by those claimin’ to do justice. They become the monsters they hate.”

God he could go for a cigarette. Or a drink of the sanguine kind. Poor manners to do that here though.

He shakes his head. "No need to pay me back. If you wanna do anything in return, just make sure you never drink from someone here without asking."

Because that would cause chaos real quick, and that's the last thing they need in this place. Bigby isn't even really sure how it works for her, if it's something that could go out of control if she hasn't had blood for a while, but he might as well say it just in case. He doesn't need to know the details of what's going on with her - just enough so that he can ensure both her safety and the safety of the other people here.

"We're a community," he explains. "And that sort of thing only works out if we all look out for each other. If you have some sorta special diet that you're having trouble with, you should tell other people about it so they can help you. I'm pretty sure at least a fourth of this place consists of people who aren't just your ordinary human beings, y'know."

Lestat knows Louis is lying. He smiles benevolently at Louis' downcast face, the gravity of his guilt anchoring him ever down to the uncommon filth of Lestat's existence. He is the stain Louis cannot scrub away, however he strives to. There is a romance to that, if only Louis would permit himself to see it.

"Of course you would," he lies in return, unburdened by remorse. He does not know if he is sparing or condemning Louis, or which of the two he would prefer. Perhaps it is both, or neither, or all of that and a hundred things more. "My constant Louis."

It does not matter what Louis might do, if Lestat were to depart unlife before him, because Lestat does not imagine worlds in which he does not exist. He covers Louis' hand on his chest with his own, tenderly, mapping the ridges of his knuckles with the pad of his thumb.

"Now - shall we hunt for the sacramental wine?" He teases, irreverent in the oldest sense.

"You can say that again." Is the best she can say about that. Look- She knew Salem's story and there was a part of her that probably could feel bad for what happened. At the same time she had caused a whole lot of pain, and Ruby and her friends had suffered personally because of it.

The second question catches her by surprise and she shrugs. There was a time where she wore a couple crosses pinned to her cloak but in her world they didn't quite have the same prevalence that they did here.

"Uh- No. Not to my knowledge. I could shoot lasers from my eyeballs that could do things to the monsters back in my world. But I'm guessing if my other abilities aren't working here, then those are a no go too."

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you can run but you can't escape

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cw: death, gore

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no worries at all!

cw: death, fantasies of violence

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cw: death, murder, suicidal ideation

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