sixthiterationlogs

Entry tags:

arrival

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: Arriving out of the Fountain, later at the Inn - evening or night
WHEN: December 15
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Open

When you're a kid, even growing up on the Hudson, there's something magical about snow. You watch it fall from the grey sky, you catch it on your tongue--it's pure, and light, and you barely feel the cold.

At 26, face-down in it with his hood flipped over his head, Kira's fucking sick of it. His face is going numb, his cheeks burning and chapped, and it tastes like the smell of the nearest dumpster with a fine dusting of cigarette ash. The footsteps of the rioters grows closer, pauses. His fingers don't so much as twitch over the 6mm in his pocket, though the opposite hand strokes one finger against the side of his cards, seeking the smallest comfort. The deck told him to come back, and he can feel the three of swords at the top, his message to Ty scratched to the back of it--go home.

The gun isn't an option, against so many footsteps. He has to play it safe, just another body in the alley, waiting for them to pass. He has to get into the building, find the stash. He has to get these antibiotics, or Ty isn't going anywhere.

He grits his teeth, grey snow melting against his lips. Exhaustion saves him from flinching when a silencer taps against his hip. "Leave it man, shit's still dirty out here. We've got places to be." The rifle lifts; someone steps over his body. The snow crunches, broadcasting their footsteps down the alley and around a corner. He'll give it another minute, until the sounds fade and the silence only Winter can bring falls again.

It's the span of his body relaxing, his head ready to tilt up, his eyes ready to open--he swears he falls asleep. Passes out, loses the plot: when he blinks awake the world isn't divided between cold snow and cold wind. It goes deeper, swallows everything around him, keeps the world dark when he opens his mouth and eyes and starts to gasp--only to find himself choking. He doesn't wonder if the earth gave way under him, if he's fallen through the concrete and subway into the fucking sewers, if he's lost his mind and someone's dragged him back to toss him in the river. All he can do is kick his feet, hit a hard surface below him and push for the surface, breaking it moments later with a whooping cough and a hoarse "What the fuck?"

The surface of the water provides no substantial answers, though it reveals the edge to be within reach. Expecting a waterlogged parka to weigh him down, he tugs hard at the lip of a stone fountain, rolling himself several times over--a backpack?

Laid on his side, a parenthesis to the foreign landmark, he coughs and gasps again, air no warmer than Manhattan's assaulting his soaked body. He's close enough to reach out a hand and lay it on the edge once more, his panic and confusion elaborating on their theme: "Fucking christ, what is this?"

[optional - at the pub]

Shockingly, a second dip in the freezing waters hadn't improved the situation, or his understanding of it. He can't swim back to the alley and his hypothermic delusion is so advanced it's also trying to give him hypothermia, until he Inceptions himself out the other side and sets himself on fire in a daze, probably. Hopefully--crazy and freezing to death is better than trapped. At least his body combined with the note he left might lead someone to the supplies.

He stares down at the food left in front of him, wondering why he couldn't imagine a step up from what he'd been serving at the safehouse, and nudges it around on the plate just to feel his hand moving, see the signal his brain sends reach his body, try to decide if this is actually real.

He should eat, his fingers shaking from that as much as the cold, as much as the fear--but he pushes the plate back and hides them in the pockets of his new coat, burrowing into the warmth, missing his dirty old parka.

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"A few people have disappeared," Raleigh says, thinking over the last couple of months. There's been a death - Karen - and there's been a couple people who have disappeared but other than the clothes on their backs, nothing else has gone. Raleigh's not sure how they got to go back and the one who appeared again, Kylo Ren, doesn't seem to remember his first stint (at least as far as Raleigh is aware).

"And no, arriving in summer isn't much better other than not dying of frostbite when you first show up. It's the only real benefit to it."

He makes himself release Raleigh's hand at an appropriate beat, instead of letting his fingers claw in and hold on for dear life. It's tempting--the need for reassurance, or the need to tempt someone capable with a show of weakness that might inspire them to do something about it.

Raleigh's in the shit as much as he is, and still a stranger. He needs to keep his head down and play along with this place until the cracks start showing. He needs to hide his own cracks.

"There was a man earlier, a kind of doctor. He said something about animal attacks."

Edited 2016-12-26 19:40 (UTC)

"Yeah, some kind of weird creature thing," Raleigh says. "Don't know much about it. Group of people went up into the canyon, scaled it, fought the thing? Brought the body back but it's...not like anything I've seen before."

It's strange considering the things that Raleigh has seen before in his life - kaiju are commonplace at this point, sure, but he's never seen a yeti or whatever the hell that body was. It'd been impervious to everything, so far as the ones who'd gone out to kill it could tell him, and that was scary in and of itself. Still, that's a lot to drop on someone who's just showed up.

"Only instance of that happening, though. We've never seen anything else like it before or since."

In sharper condition than he is now, he might have dug in more, considered all of the things a normal man could see and physically fight: he considers Credence's shadowy second presence, he takes in the increasing presence of strangeness--

and he hits the wall of what he can worry about in a given time. He could be dead and in limbo or a kind of hell, right now, but the goal is the same--get home, save Ty.

"I was told a bit about this place... is there really no way out? Are they going to climb the wall again?"

"I think it's probably worth a shot to climb that wall again. We need to keep trying until someone finds a way out of here," Raleigh says. He's determined to be a part of that, however that takes place, and while it seems a little weird to be having the recruitment conversation with someone brand new it seems like Kira wants out too.

"Sitting around idle isn't going to help any of us get back home. More people keep coming and coming and not that many leave? There's got to be a breaking point."

He hopes that point is soon. He doesn't have a war to win or a family that might immediately miss him--they've already been doing that, assuming their helicopter made it to safety on the Jersey shore. There's just one person, clinging to life, no one trying to save it but Kira himself.

He hopes Nicky got the note. He hopes he breaks character for once, and follows it.

"I'm not sure what use I can be, but if you find one, I hope you'll let me know."

"Yeah, once all this damn snow clears we'll be in a better position to try and scout it. It gets dark so early now and the snow makes it hard to climb. It'll be easier in the spring," Raleigh points out.

"The days are really short here, actually, so I think we might be far north. In the summer, they might be longer - we might have a lot more daylight to work with than we would in a lower latitude. That's just me guessing, though. I don't have anything to back that up other than experience."

Ty doesn't have until spring, which means Kira doesn't either. It wouldn't make the walls any easier to climb, or the thaw any sooner, if he told Raleigh it was a matter of life or death. No one he's met seems desperate to stay, but there's an acceptance in some, and a kind of--caution, in the others. They're still waiting it out, waiting to see what opportunities present themselves.

His mind runs up against the wall of it, over and over: this isn't real, or it is, and he doesn't know how to make it stop regardless.

Ty is going to die.

He knew it the moment he woke up to find him gone, but he'd at least hoped, up to the moment he'd crawled out of the fountain. A hollow feeling opens, closes up in his chest, leaving him nauseated. "What's the point of this fucking place?"

"I wish I knew that to tell you," Raleigh says, laughing. It's a hollow sort of sound, the kind of defeated noise that he so rarely allows himself to make. Usually he keeps a good attitude about the place considering there's no kaiju out to kill them and most of the obstacles are things they can deal with on a day to day basis but this conversation has made him think about the grand scheme of things and it's frustrating as hell.

"Been here for months and I don't have any more answers than I did when I first got here. I don't know how or why we're here. The information I can give you could fill a thimble and I'm pretty sure you're going to ask questions I don't have the answers to. No one knows the point of this place."

He could laugh, he could cry: he pushes the plate a bit further away and lets his head drop back against a steadying hand. He won't let a stranger see him break down over it, but he doesn't have to grin and bear it either.

"The thimble, what would you fill it with? Because I have even less to work with than that, right now. The man--Mark, he explained some of it, but what do you know?"

"From what I can tell, the area's not that big. I've walked over a good bit of it," Raleigh explains. "But it's not any bigger than a couple square miles in each direction. Somehow, whoever is keeping us here wants to be sure we're not going to starve. There's plenty of fish in the river, there's game in the woods - you have to work for it but there's enough food for the moment."

Raleigh pauses, thinking about what else he knows. "The first group of us, the one I was in? We came all at once. It was one afternoon. Since then, everything has been staggered. No mass arrivals like the first time. I don't know if that's ever going to happen again."

Whoever, mass arrivals, work for it--it all feels too close to Manhattan, like each scenario had a loose thread, and if he could tie them together in his head, they wouldn't unravel. It makes him feel crazy, for all that he's spent his life knowing he isn't, when something just feels a certain way, or when he was sure people were keeping tabs on the shop.

Someone drove his parents out of their home, someone released a virus into New York, someone pulled him here. The only feeling that connects them is cruelty, a faceless and uncaring adversary, and it's nauseating.

"And there haven't been any mass disappearances to match?"

"Nope, nothing like that. There's been a handful of people, all scattered, but nothing like that one mass arrival. And? When we first got here, it was like the place had been abandoned for a while," Raleigh goes on to say.

"I think our first group was the first group to be here in a long time. There was dust everywhere."

Dust could collect faster than one would think, in his experience. Especially with bodies to accumulate it from, or the dry air of a long winter. He won't insult Raleigh by thinking no one else might grasp the fact--understanding how and why the place emptied might shed light on its purpose, or how to get home.

Instead, he lets his questions flow from the assumption that such things had been explored, as Raleigh intended to explore the walls: "Were there signs of, I don't know, a struggle? Shrouded bodies in new sneakers? Or did it seem like everyone had disappeared where they stood?"

The last one might be hard to determine, but it was only months ago. Surely Raleigh would remember if a bunch of day to day items had been dropped under the layer of dust.

"Looks like the place had just been abandoned for a while. Things were just left here like people had evacuated," Raleigh explains. It's strange, going back through it with someone who hadn't been in the first group and as he does, he recalls further details.

"There were tools and things but they were all broken. Dishes were out on the tables sometimes, everything was still like people were going to come back and had just left...temporarily."

"Or like they had all disappeared," he asks, brow lifting, mind turning over and examining the possibility. He was too fresh out of the water to know what it was really like, when a person left, but Raleigh seemed to hold it as a possibility. It certainly didn't sound like the last group had gotten up from their meals and jobs to casually climb the walls and wander away.

"You said something attacked after the first try to climb out--did it come from the canyon wall, or from whatever's above us?" He's spent enough time being herded into his neighborhood by rioters and psychopaths with flamethrowers, to imagine a similar confinement.

"It was like nature," Raleigh says. "Bees, other animals. Sometimes you just forget what you're doing and wander off. It's never the same thing twice. It always feels pretty organic, too, as if it's designed that way so you're not supposed to figure out where the edges are."

Of course, as he says that, Raleigh realizes that he has figured out where the edges are. Hmm.

"So it's just, very suspicious coincidence," he asks, struggling to imagine canyon walls and attacking bees. For all the danger he'd dodged in Manhattan, and all the rough living he'd done since the quarantine--at least it had been the same old grey skyline. Barking dogs, crazy people in too many clothes.

Not that different from certain parts of town, just with more bodies.

Which, they had at least one of here: "Someone mentioned animal attacks? I assume it wasn't bees who killed someone."

"That was some kind of monster," Raleigh says. "Some kind of...man, I don't know what it was. It was like a yeti or something. It had fur, walked on two legs. I've never seen anything like it."

It's not something that Raleigh ever wants to see again, either, especially since it'd killed their livestock and it'd killed Karen.

He and his mother were far from the hunters of her family tree, but she had passed down what she knew to him, following her own mother's example of assimilating local knowledge and lore. Not just the cards, which had their own equivalent overseas--beautiful red and black calligraphy on white stock, hanafuda decks of birds and flowers--but the ghosts, and the creatures.

Death could warp a soul into something dangerous, no matter the continent you lived and died on. A man with fur that attacked animals could be any number of things--some of which didn't exist alone. "Was it just a furry man, or were there other features?"

His concern feels a bit manufactured, tired as he is, disbelieving as he is--but the mystery was a lifeline to hold onto, a distraction from all else.

"Didn't get that close of a look at it myself," Raleigh admits. "I should have. I just thought the body would still be there for one of the doctors to do an autopsy and they'd give us a report. It disappeared, though, and nobody knows what happened to it."

Raleigh doesn't think the thing came back to life. It'd been dead for a while; all of them had seen the carcass and known it to be dead. "Makes me wish I had examined it myself."

"Is there really someone to do that," he asks--in no position to disbelieve the qualifications of another person to examine a fucking cryptid, but wondering what tools they had available to what minds in this village of strangers.

He wants to ask if Raleigh knows who did see it, but then he might have to explain his interest. There's no way of telling what time it is--he hadn't known when he'd laid down in the snowy alleys of New York--but it feels far too late to have the my family believes in ghosts and I see the future talk.

"Sorry," he says instead. "It's not like there's anything I can do about it, I'm not sure why I'm asking."

"Yeah, one of the women who went on the expedition to hunt the thing seems to know about them," Raleigh points out. He doesn't know her well, or anything, but she'd spoken with authority on the matter and it felt like a good choice. Riza, too, had her experience with monsters. Between the two of them, there couldn't have been a better team.

"I don't know how true that is but how are we going to check out qualifications here?"

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