sixthiterationlogs | [EVENT] The Simulation Ends

[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

WHERE: 6I Fountain Park & Elsewhere
WHEN: April 1
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
WARNINGS: N/A

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

Far, far away, in a place that isn't really there, people begin to blink out of existance.

It is the first of April.

It is precisely ten o'clock in the morning.

[Please see event details and guidelines here.]

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She holds out her wrist, high and imperious, giving Baze a look like he might as well get cracking, because if he doesn't, then she's just going back to taking a knife to hers. "My world needs to track you, so if you're not killing the others, they can work out ways to force you to or just kill you with an entertaining accident."

She won't throw Annie under a tank, but she almost wants to bring up the flooding in her Games, seeing as she can only imagine the thrill of watching the children outlast each other.

Old Gods, did he thank them for his sister and her unwavering strength. The solidity of her grip on his hand, the assuredness in her face, the determination in her eyes .. he takes what he can from her for himself, allowing her hope to peak into his mind like sunlight.

Yes, the house. They might be there. And if they weren't, it didn't mean they'd disappeared or gotten sent back or whatever it was that happened when they disappeared. It could simply mean they were elsewhere, perhaps at the Inn.

He begins to walk towards the structure, trying to find conviction in each step. It gets easier as he goes, and he knows it's because of having Lyanna at his side. What would he have done, had he been alone?

"I should have thought to bring something myself," I say as I turn to watch Kira step away. The fact that I forgot when the obvious place for us to start is in writing down what we know just goes to show how thrown for a loop I am. I'm managing, putting one foot in front of the other, but I know this numb forward motion well enough to recognize it.

"You're right about needing another census. That's going to have to be a priority. And we might have to ask people some uncomfortable questions. If things have changed for them physiologically." If they are now, to their knowledge, fucking zombies.

The watch doesn't remind him of anything in the village--even with the bands matching scrubs. It reminds him of the room tucked in the now disappeared cavern, the computer sitting between coolers and fluorescent lights.

Dropping his gaze, he thinks of the vials, the initials, the colors on each label. He thinks of the sun failing to set and the canyon opening into an identical village across the way.

"No, I don't think we'll manage that," he says, voice thinning as his mouth dries.

Jude wouldn't call it stupid, just--nothing he can do anything about, and nothing he has the energy to feel anything for. He's upright, he's breathing, Bodhi's accounted for. Find some dry clothes and the dog and his life is functionally what it was.

He'd never think Bodhi felt the same, or that he has to. He doesn't know what to do about that either.

When his hand swings to meet Bodhi's, he isn't thinking about who might be around. There are reunions and theories happening all around them, attention on so many other things--Jude's attention included. If panic crawls his skin after the fact, fingers laced with Bodhi's and realizing what he's done, well--he need only glance up to see that no one has noticed. Giving that hand a squeeze, he lets himself step the slightest bit closer, but not quite up in Bodhi's space.

"Let's check the house."

The difference is more pronounced for Owen: ghost towns he rolled through were usually worse off. Tore up, carpet bombed, plant life growing over the shells of old buildings. Signs of fire, signs of fights. They could do worse than a layer of dust. They could do worse than a few cows to greet them.

If there isn't something waited beyond the immediate buildings. It's a little early in her acquaintance to ask Claire where the village might store weapons, but he might work it out while answering her own questions. For now, he keeps his eyes on a swivel, assessing shadows, movement, placing people behind them and looking for anyone ahead. No canyon might mean something getting in, as much as it means getting out.

And her question is especially fair, where he's from, so there's only an answering beat before his reply. "Got shut in a door, years ago. Nobody around to fix it." Best he could do to cut the rest and burn the ends, and that had been it's own set of problems.

"I do alright," he assures her. "Don't need a pinky for most tools or weapons."

It's funny. The house? Shouldn't mean anything. Bodhi's lived two places since he got here. Three if you count the time he spent quietly haunting the inn without even taking up a bed before Kira adopted him using deceit and chicken wings. But he immediately turns toward Jude's. That's the space they inhabit together. If he's with Jude, there's only one house.

He keeps Jude's hand as he turns, the sense of duty still there but warring with actual comfort. He's not okay, but he's a little better if Jude's here. "Wonder what the chances of firewood are," he says, finding a mental sanctuary in logistical problems as he often does. He pushes a bit of still-damp hair out of his face and tries to smile. Fails, but tries. He's never been as good as he should be at hiding things from Jude.

Something different might be nice, just to separate from what once was--that previous iteration who has only ever been the disappointment in Bodhi's face and writing on a page. That Kira who meant so much to people he hadn't met, might never meet. That Kira who lived in New York, that Kira who thought maybe this ride had a point where he could jump off. A solution, a way home.

Home is where they're put. He believes it more with each day, each revelation and challenge.

And, the length does wonders to hide that hook of a scar, on the side of his head. Voicing none of that, he tilts his head in her grip, mouth quirking at one edge. "Maybe I just want to give you more to grab onto."

Rhetorical and impossible for him to answer, besides. Dust is just dust, and there are enough plants and animals threaded through the area that a lack of human occupants doesn't strike him as necessary to create it. "It's just dust," he says, letting himself shrug free of the dog. Aurora drops, whines spectacularly, and turns hopeful eyes to Nerys.

"It's short enough that we aren't going to be trimming ivy off the walls, and everything looks sturdy enough. Nothing like it's been through earthquakes and hail storms."

Or the incident that destroyed the schoolhouse. He still isn't sure about that; his own notes hadn't been extensive, and that had almost backed him off of asking. The journal dodged around it, and if the old him hadn't wanted to put it into words--he probably doesn't want to know.

Shivering through a long exhale, he leaves damp footprints in the dusty floor as he wanders toward his room. "Watch out," he tells Nerys. "If the dog's here, there might be a crow in one of the rooms." Sure enough, his door opens to a flurry of black feathers, Hoshi launching himself the short distance he can glide from the bed frame to Kira's chest. "Sorry," he tells her, as he backs up into the frame and puts up both hands to catch the bird. "If you want to check the closet, you can pick from whatever's in there."

They don't need a tracker like this, not an obvious one. Finnick and Annie (and Johanna) have had them implanted in their arms before, the hard little under-the-skin lumps injected there before their Games. Maybe they're afraid of someone working out how to get the things out, but the question then is why tracking them -- or being seen to be tracking them -- is important now when it wasn't before.

Finnick drops his hand back down, but Annie's comment about their hair makes him lift it up to his face and run it along the mess of hair on his chin.

"I've never grown a beard this long," he says. "It's got to be months' worth."

Yet the still-young peafowl haven't grown since he saw them the morning before he found himself here. If it was the same morning.

His head rolls back and he stares at the ceiling. There's still the light fixture there, though he hasn't checked if there's electricity. It makes no sense, not by the rules of the arenas he's so long ago learned to try to read, where everything is about the balance between the deaths of most of the tributes and the ability for one of them to survive.

"Keep us guessing as some sort of distraction?" he eventually offers, a sort of tentative extrapolation from Annie's suggestion.

He'd long ago given up on expecting people here to understand his fears. Nobody could fear the arena and its games as much as someone who'd survived it and then had to relive it every year on behalf of his tributes as he tried to help them survive. The people here had shown little willingness to listen to his warning, but now, surely this was evidence that he was right.

He wasn't the only one with loved ones here, and he nodded in agreement when she asked to join him in the tree. There was a risk, but he felt little to fear from Lyanna, for all she was the age of a tribute and he knew well enough not to dismiss her based on that.

"Do you remember anything about how you got here?" he asked. They may as well compare their experiences, and see if she knew anything more than he did. He doubted it, though, when there had been so little the first time he'd come up out of the fountain.

"She will," Beverly says with conviction, though this is also more for Raleigh's sake than her own. They don't know that everyone will come through the fountain like they have. Given how many already have, it's a good bet that Sansa will as well. And hopefully she will soon, so Raleigh doesn't have quite as much to worry about.

"In the meantime, it would be better for you to get dry and into another set of clothes," she points out gently. "The next group won't be here for another fifteen minutes or so and there's no use in you getting chilled in this weather."

"The blanket would be welcome," Ren says. Maybe he won't be able to improve his skills on a short walk from Jude's to his own home but the need for independence is strong, especially since he's come to the realization that this world he's been living in the last few months hadn't been a reality after all. He needs time to process it all, to be something more than stunned.

"If you'd asked me when I arrived what I thought of this place, I don't think discovering it had all been a dream would be high on the list."

"You're right. I would sit here and freeze to make sure Sansa was here but she's not going to want to take care of me if I have a cold," Raleigh says, laughing a little.

"Do you think I could help you with triage? It won't take me long to get changed and I want to be useful instead of sitting around and worrying. I'm no doctor but I can at least help get people over to the hospital if I have to."

"Looks like months, but the weather's the same, though, which is kind of wei--" Nerys cuts herself off, shaking her head, and rolls her eyes at herself. Fuck it, this is all weird, what's the point in classifying every single instance of it? "Never mind."

Kira opens the bedroom door, and Nerys ducks as the bird dives at them--well, more at her friend, but she's just behind him and the crow ends up being in her line of sight. She doesn't shriek, though, again, just moves her head out of the way. "It's okay, at least they're here," she says, making her way towards the closet. It sounds like such a banal thing to say, but considering the amount of unsettling things at present, she can imagine that losing companion animals would be incredibly painful.

"Huh," she says, looking at the remaining pieces inside. It's slim pickings.

His gaze draws up, following Bodhi's arm to shoulder, face, as the pull draws his own arm out from his body. As momentum bids him follow. He doesn't question where Bodhi might lead him--nice as it might be, to see the brick house again. Confirm the dog, the tea. Even the bird and its dubious owner.

For a moment, just to make the next breath easier, Jude amuses himself trying to imagine Kira's fussy frame under a beard.

If there isn't firewood, he'll deal with it. If there isn't clothing, isn't a dog, isn't anything but the pair of them and the walls--he'll deal with it. He doesn't need Bodhi to try too hard. "You don't have to be okay with this," he makes himself say, with a fortifying squeeze to Bodhi's hand.

Funny, the things that break a dam. Or maybe not funny at all. Bodhi talks about nothing. No wonder his response to even the shallowest, simplest suggestion that he's allowed to have feelings is enough to snap the flimsy fiction. He stops for a moment, looks back at Jude with his eyes even wider than his natural earnest puppy expression leaves them and a hint of something frantic underneath. "I'm... I'm not," he finally says after a too-long pause, voice thick and halting.

He's not, but what can he do about That? Shouldn't have said anything. Swallowing hard, he turns his feet back toward the house.

She almost rolls her eyes when she sees Steve check her over with a critical eye but she can't blame him. He was over-protective and she had done the same to him. She was glad to see that he was okay. They were both okay.

"I'm fine. Little confused but fine." Mary was used to going with the flow but even this was getting to be a bit much. "Good. I'm glad he made it here too." She was happy that Danny was here. He was Steve's best friend and she knew it would drive her brother nuts that he wasn't here.

She laughed. "They're definitely pink Steve." She looked down at her scrubs which were also a different colour than the navy blue she usually sported. "Why do you think I did anything?! None of this is my fault!" She glared at him. "But I'm glad I'm wearing red and not pink like you."

It's been a stressful few hours, but now that he's located Danny and Mary, with both of them being relatively unharmed, at least not more than they were, the tension in him washes away and he grins at his sister in relief. "Yeah, I think we are all a little confused. This place looks exactly like where we were but..." He runs his hand over his unkept beard. It's more than a few months worth of growth. If he had to guess, he'd say the seven months he'd been here. "Not at the same time, I certainly didn't wake up this morning with this."

Pursing his lips and putting his hands on his hips he shakes it's head. "They are not pink. And there is nothing wrong with purple... But I wonder what happened to the green. To be honest I preferred those over..." He waves his hand in front of him indicating the purple scrubs. Then he chuckles at her, mostly out of relief but there's a tease in his voice now. "Because you are always doing something! It's a logical conclusion!" The chuckle turns into a glare. "Purple!"

"I wonder why we were brought here. And why we're in different colour scrubs." She glanced down at the band on her wrist and she held it up to show Steve. "Or what this is." Even though she was full of questions, she wasn't overly worried. She had been stuck in the old place for months and while weird things happened, it wasn't anything she couldn't handle. The main thing was that Steve was also here and he wasn't hurt.

She moved her now semi-dry hair out of her face. "My hair has never been this long. I kind of like it so I guess something good came out of whatever the hell is going on right now." She gave a small smile which grew into a grin when Steve emphasized that his scrubs are not pink. "I think you need to get your eyes checked Steve. That's pink." She was going to enjoy teasing her brother about this for days to come.

"Well for once, whatever just happened is not my doing." She looked at her brother. "I don't like that you're stuck here but I'm happy you are. I was going to our house. When I couldn't find you, I thought maybe you might still be at the house. Or already there. Maybe it's not even there anymore."

"Of course I'm right," he answers, briefly imperious, posed. One more joke to see them through this insanity. When he breaks, dropping his chin, he also drops a pad and pen at Mark's elbow. Writing will help Mark as much as cutting hair helps Kira. Then, cooking, eating. Have a glass of water and chill the fuck out.

Then: zombies.

Kira gives it another few beats before he picks up the scissors. All that's really left is the top, to trim down and mess up to his satisfaction. "It can't be any worse than your doctor starting in on how sexuality active you are," he says, working out from the crown of Mark's head. "Which, maybe also worth asking, considering how Ravi said the zombie plague was spread." What a wonderful world, having to worry if his dick is going to rot off in the literal sense.

"Mark," he says after another beat, "please put scream-into-a-pillow on the list."

Seeing that mouth quirk, Bela raises her brows and gives Kira an almost coy smile. Maybe she will reconsider her earlier decision to not flirt with him. The slight tilt of his head makes it easier for Bela to slide her fingers into his hair, and that's exactly what she does.

"How considerate of you." She teases gently, fingers still threading through Kira's hair. "I think I ought to try it out sometime. See exactly how much I can grab onto."

Bela isn't even attempting to be subtle and well, she'll blame Kira for instigating it. Maybe he could use the distraction too, at least until things settled down in the village again.

She offers something of a helpless shrug. "Everything's in the right place and it seems to be at the same stage of growth." Eerily so. And the sight did nothing to quell her holodeck theory.

"There might be a few things that will work," she muses, her mind already thinking back to her garden. She'll have to make sure it's all actually okay to eat and not just looking like it's the way it should be, but she's fairly sure she can find something to help out a bit. "Are you feeling any specific symptoms? Fatigue, nausea? Or is it more general?"

There's a nod at both her suggestion at the explanation that follows. Not that it's terribly comforting to know that one of their primary theories about the nature of the village had been right, admittedly, but it does lend that particular theory a certain amount of credence besides.

"It doesn't, no. Although it would suggest that they have the capability to add things into a holo-projection relatively seamlessly. Especially given that they would have had to convert anything of ours to a projected version thereof before sending them on their way."

And the fact that the first village had been something akin to a holodeck doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of their new surroundings also being virtual. But for the time being that isn't something that he particularly cares to think about. Especially when they've only just escaped the one simulated reality.

"So does the Federation," she points out, though they both know the merits of that. Starfleet holodeck technology can do a lot of things, but even it would have begun to show the strain after so much time running straight. Which brings up another thought.

"It does make you wonder, though... How much of our time was spent in that simulation and how much wasn't? Would we have been able to tell if the simulation paused or was turned off, if the simulation itself was located right on top of the area it was an exact copy of?"

It's something to think about and though they might wonder if this is another simulation, it feels different having come back through the fountain. Of course, her most recently-spoken theory would war a bit with this feeling, but at this point, she's willing to entertain just about anything. And she wouldn't put anything past the Observers, either.

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Page 13 of 14

[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

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