[MINGLE] PLOT: Siren's Call

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: Anywhere
WHEN: August 25-26
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Mental manipulation, drowning, death
NOTES: Details here. This post is for EVERYONE, not just the affected. Please make sure and note if your thread is locked for plot purposes.

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It began slowly.

A wisp of song or familiar sound on the breeze swept in from the lake. No source to be found, only the uneasy feeling it had been heard before as it coiled itself steadily inside the minds of the chosen. The sound was a mantra, pulsing soft at first and then louder, growing over days until it seemed to fill the skull, relentless. Come here, the lake whispered, cajoled, shouted. It is cool and quiet beneath the waves.

Come here, it presses now in time with the melody until there is nothing but to blindly follow. The water is calling.

Comments

[oorah]

He reaches for her as she's pulling away but she's stronger than she looks and then she's gone. You're not responsible, Frank. But it doesn't matter. It can't. He takes a deep breath and follows after her as fast as he can. hating the way his heartbeat sounds underwater, loud and garbled in his ears. Is there something on the lake's floor that she's after? Does she know something? It doesn't matter if she kills herself getting there, does it?

Frank is fast, and a stronger swimmer than one might think, and when he catches up to her again, he reaches for her ankle, determined to drag her back to the surface even if he has to fight against her the whole damn way.

[copingskills]

She doesn't want to fight him. That's not why she's here, and if she could just find what she's looking for, she'd return to the surface without a second thought.

Or would she? It felt so peaceful here. She felt like she had purpose, like she was right where she was supposed to be.

So when she feels a hand trying to grasp her ankle, she feels panic, first and foremost. She's so close, and the song is reaching a sort of crescendo in her head, and if she doesn't so this she'll never hear what comes at the end.

It's almost enough to make her forget the inferno in her lungs, the one that makes her cough and choke under the lake's weight.

His hand gets a firm grip on her just as she reaches her destination, her hands finding the handle; she wasn't sure what she was looking for, but this had to be it. She makes one more desperate action, tugging on it hard, and it gives way just as her body gives out.

It's then that the song releases her, as she inhales the coldness into her lungs, as she turns toward her would-be rescuer with terror in her eyes, though it isn't for her. She knows this feeling, already knows how it will end. Will he drown here in the deep with her too?

As everything starts to go dark, her heart beating sluggishly one more time, she desperately hopes that he doesn't.