sixthiterationlogs | 001 ♥ i'm standing on my own two feet

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001 ♥ i'm standing on my own two feet

WHO: Isabelle Lightwood
WHERE: The Fountain, The Inn, and probably the rest of the village, too.
WHEN: 18th.
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Your general panicked-crawling-out-of-the-fountain, some violence because she might punch some people
STATUS: Open

The Fountain; somewhere hanging in between

She's dreaming. She's back at the Adamant Citadel, where the Iron Sisters reside and craft their weapons. This is one of the places she's always dreamed of going, wanting the meet the highly renowned Sisters and see the Citadel with her own eyes. But when she'd gotten the chance to lead up that mission, she'd managed to mess things up. This time, when she's in the water, she doesn't burn. It doesn't bubble and mark her of the sins she's committed, of the impurities she's put herself through.

This time, the water is cool against her skin, and her white dress clings to her thighs. When she opens her eyes, she can see sunlight streaming through the water's surface. She reaches out to touch it, to break her fingers past the surface. But it never happens. The pool at the Citadel isn't that deep.

Her lungs begin to burn. She reaches further, trying to push herself upwards. There's nothing for her feet to find purchase on, and she finds herself scrambling, panic beginning to set in. There's no way she can die like this. Not after dedicating her life to fighting demons. A pool of water is nothing compared to some of the things she's faced, she can't--

Fingers break the water's surface. Air touches her hands, and one last push has her surfacing complete, dragging in a deep breath. This isn't a dream — it's a nightmare. Her surroundings are unfamiliar, her clothes are unfamiliar, her hair hangs wet and heavy around her, and she can only imagine how terrible her makeup must look. But more importantly, she needs to find the others. Alec, Jace, Clary, anybody.

This has to be some sort of portal gone wrong. Really, really wrong.

The Inn; my life and the death of me

She searches. She searches, and she searches, and she searches. There's a police station holding farm animals, a hospital and a town hall that she peers into. Dozens of houses, of which she looks through the windows of. Some appear empty, some appear occupied. Some actively have people in them, and she's always quick to duck away before she can be seen. It would probably be helpful to talk to some of the people she sees, ask them if they've seen her friends.

Normally, she's willing to give everyone a chance. Right now, she doesn't know who she can trust and who she can't. Any of these people could be the reason she's here, and she needs to gather her bearings first. There was a pack with her when she climbed out of the fountain, and she's already searched it. Clothes, mostly. No stele, no whip, no weapon of any kind.

All she has going for her are the runes already burned into her body and her natural angel-infused powers.

After searching the village, she delves into the woods. Here, there are less people. Here, she calls her brothers names until her voice is hoarse. She searches and she yells until she's lost track of time, and she all but tumbles out of the woods, sticks and leaves stuck in her hair. For once, she doesn't care how she looks. She walks towards the lights of the town, and walks into the Inn. She'd peered through the windows before, but deemed it too full and busy to go inside.

But now, she doesn't care. She doesn't care how she looks, or how many people she runs into. She's tired and she's dejected and she has no idea where she is, or what's going on, and she needs some answers. It's warm in the inn, and there's a few people around. She clears her throat, and picks a few sticks from her hair before speaking up, voice strained and raw.

"Would somebody mind telling me where the hell I am?"

[ ooc: feel free to find her around the village too! ]

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Jean felt the distress before the girl said anything. Her powers were much weaker here, sure, but strong emotions still leaked through and just before she'd asked where she was Jean had felt the confusion, the exhaustion and a thread of frustration. She looked up from the book she'd borrowed from the schoolhouse (Vanity Fair, which was actually interesting for once) and gave her a little smile.

"Yeah, you're actually in one of the circles of hell. That's the short version. The long version is that you're in a creepy village in a place nobody recognizes and there's about two dozen more of us here with you."

Isabelle is well-read on Hell and demons, but she doesn't need that knowledge to recognize the joke. It might be amusing if she weren't in such a fowl mood, throat sore and exhausting and feeling unusually weak. If she had her stele, she could simply slap on a strength rune and an izrate and keep going. She feels naked and vulnerable without it and her whip.

She returns the smile. Her's is thin and icy, laced with an obvious lack-of-patience. She wishes she could approach this situation with a little more calmness and grace. She wishes she would've sat down and worked out her thoughts and the information she had before barging into an inn and demanding answers. Sometimes, she was very good at thinking ahead. Most times, she left that to her brother, and he had yet to show his face here.

"Those both sound like pretty short answers to me." She comes in a little closer, and though she's short and slim, he general confidence and sure attitude tend to cut a pretty intimidating figure at times. "Give me a longer one. I'm looking for answers here."

"There's not enough information to give a long answer," Jean said, closing her book and carefully marking her place.

"Everyone gets here through the fountain. There's no way out. People have tried to go back through the fountain but that doesn't work. Neither does climbing the canyon walls or trying to follow the river back to its source. Everything ends up back here, in this village. There's no phones, there's no radio. Everything is isolated."

Isabelle wants to lash out. Not just at the girl in front of her, but at everyone in the room. She's tired and sore from walking and searching, but more than anything, she's frustrated. The longer she's here, the more she feels trapped. The longer she goes without seeing a familiar face, the more she feels alone and lost. The longer she doesn't have a weapon in her hand, the more she feels vulnerable. And she's just about at her wits end.

"I don't think you understand," she says, her voice terse, but not as icy as before. "I need to get home. I have very important stuff to get to. Life-threatening stuff."

"Yeah, we all do," Jean said. It was more defeated than antagonistic because, honestly, after a few months here she'd gotten over the need to fight about things and had just accepted the new normal. It had been difficult at first for her but she'd acclimated and this girl probably would too. It was either that or struggle.

"When I left my world, it was literally the end of mine. We were fighting in a war. I need to get back but when I tell you that we can't? We can't."

Isabelle wants to keep fighting. She wants to argue and until she's breathless, and search until her legs give out, and find a way back home until it works, or it kills her, whichever happens first. But she's starting to find herself at a loss, all arguments and questions and answers slipping between her fingers. She might actually be stuck here. There might be no way home. Her family might not be around.

"We have to." But there's defeat in her voice, and she sits down in a chair at the table without invitation or asking permission. "We can't be stuck here. I have to find my friends. I have to get home."

"Look, I get it, I promise," Jean said. Her voice was softer now, more sympathetic. She'd gone through similar when she'd first shown up and clearly this girl had something important going on back home that she needed to get back to, a mission that had to be carried out. Jean didn't know what it was, didn't know if it was on the world-saving scale or just on the need to get back to my daily life scale but she could tell it was important to her, at least. That was all that mattered.

"None of us asked to be here. If I could tell you a way out, I would, I promise. It's just that there's not one. I've been stuck here for like, three or four months. I tried to get out for the first few weeks but I gave up. I think we all kind of give up after a while."

Isabelle props her elbows on the table, placing her face in her hands. She hates feeling defeated, and hates showing it even more, but here she is — her hair's a tangled mess and her clothes are damp and her shoulders sag. And despite how incredibly tough she is, how strong she's been trained to be, she finds herself fighting back tears for the hopelessness of the situation.

She will not cry. She will not cry. Instead, she pulls in a deep breath, and lifts her head again, composing her expression. She pushes her hair back from her face, and looks at the girl beside her. "Okay. Then what's next? We're stuck here indefinitely. How do things work around here?"

"We work together on the chores to keep the place running," Jean explained. "Some people cook, some hunt. Some work on the gardens and the fields that we have growing. It hasn't been that bad here lately but earlier, when I first got here, it was really cold. There were feet of snow on the ground."

That had been more than a little uncomfortable and Jean was glad it seemed to have melted away for now. "People overall are pretty patient if you don't know how to do that stuff."

Isabelle considers this. She can probably do chores. Cleaning is not something she's made to do often, but it's not exactly a hard concept. She can probably work on the gardens and fields, too, even though she's never done that either. It's probably easy though, right? Just put some seeds in the ground, water it. How hard can it be?

"I can hunt." That, at least, is something she knows she can do, no questions asked. "I do it at home all the time."

Of course, that's with her whip and her brothers backing her up, and some freshly applied runes to give her a good boost. But taking down a deer is nothing compared to taking down a hoard of demons.

"See? Already assimilating." Jean gave her a small smile, tipped her head a bit and offered her hand to shake hers. She had kind of missed the introduction part of this welcome and she wanted to rectify it.

"My name is Jean. Jean Grey. I've been here for, hmm, maybe about four months now? Just long enough to get into a routine, anyway, but it's hard to keep track of the time. No calendar."

Isabelle returns the smile gently, even though she's not sure if assimilating is really a good thing. Assimilating implies that she's going to be here for awhile, and she's really, really hoping (beyond hope, she thinks, at this point) that that won't be the case. For awhile, she'll just have to go with the flow. Get a feel for things before trying to throw herself full force into getting out.

"Isabelle Lightwood," she introduces, shaking Jean's hand with her own. "They're really not making it easy on us here, are they?"

"No, not really. No tech and no media? They're trying to cut us off from everything that might keep us from dying of boredom."

Jean liked to read, so that had helped, but she would give her right arm for a radio or a tape deck to be able to do something other than sit in silence all the time.

"Well," she decides, flipping her hair casually over one shoulder. Nevermind that it's still a bit tangled with twigs and leaves, diminishing the overall calm-and-collected affect that she was aiming for. It's a well practiced move all the same. "Guess we'll have to make our own fun, then. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty good at causing trouble, and always up for a challenge."

Jean laughed at that. "I'm more of a book girl but I guess I could go along with some trouble. There's someone else around our age here, her name's Moana. She's from some kind of tropical island. She can do the survival stuff a lot better than I can. I'm not really good for much other than chores and the occasional moral support."

There was, of course, her mutation but Jean had tried to be quiet about that since the number of mutants in the village seemed to be rapidly dwindling. Pietro and Logan were both gone now. Who was next?

"Moral support's important," Isabelle says, resting her elbows on the table in front of her. "In a place like this? Where we're all separated from our friends and families? We need all the support we can get."

Especially for people like her, who royally screwed up shortly before arriving here, and hadn't even gotten the chance to start patching things up with her siblings. It left her feeling even more alone and isolated than she would have normally. Right now, she definitely needed some friends. A chance to rebuild some semblance of the family she's lost.

"Yeah. People come and go from here," Jean explained. "There's been a few people from my world to come through the fountain since I got here? So maybe some of your friends and family will come too. You never know."

It was hopeful, yes, but Jean had experienced that herself and could speak to it with evidence - that was a strong thing to give someone who had just gone through the turmoil of coming here, at least in Jean's opinion.

Now that she thinks about it, and considers the information she's been given (assuming it's true), she's not sure she'd want her family to stumble their way here. If she's really and truly trapped here, she doesn't want them to have to be trapped, either. If they're out there, they'll at least be able to find her at some point. If they're here, they're trapped just like she is.

"Go where?" she asks curiously. "Do they go back home? Or are they taken somewhere else?"

"Don't know. They just disappear from here," Jean explained. "And I don't know why. I don't know if they go back home or if they just...disappear. It's not really clear to me what happens."

She shrugged slightly. "I've tried to examine the fountain, too, but I haven't had any success in figuring it out."

It would be nice to have something to take notes on, she thinks. At home, she'd had an entire computer system to research on and take notes with, with endless databases and information to go off of. Right now, she'd just settle for an old school pencil and paper. Something to keep track of her thoughts with.

"It sounds like a portal to me," she says, as if that's a normal thing to talk about. "I've never heard of a portal that only goes one way. The fountain can't be that deep, can it?"

"I can't see the bottom," Jean confirmed. "If it was a portal, just saying, I guess that would explain why we're coming through to this place. I don't know any mut...anyone who has the power to make interdimensional portals, though."

She'd almost slipped and said mutants but held her tongue. It was better not to advertise things like that.

"I do," Isabelle sighs, resting an elbow on the table, her cheek against the palm of her hand. Really, she shouldn't be advertising these sorts of things to mundanes, either. Shadowhunters, downworlders, the shadow world in general — it's all shrouded in secrecy, all meant to be kept away from humans and their fragile minds. But Isabelle's never been particularly good at keeping her mouth shut about it, and most mundanes don't believe her anyway. It helps, probably, that she only talks to mundane boys, and they usually just think she's one of those crazy hot goth girls, emphasis on the crazy and hot.

Besides, she figures in this case, portaled into some strange village where they're being held captive against their will, all bets are sort of off.

"Well--," she amends, tipping her head a bit. "Warlocks can open portals to just about anywhere. I'm not sure about interdimensionally, though."

"I don't know if we have warlocks where I'm from," Jean said. Still, she took it under advisement because genuinely, she had no idea; her world was limited by the scope of Xavier's School and she knew there were a great many mutants who hadn't had the privileges she had.

"I figured it was a mutant like me. Different powers? But still some kind of mutant. I'm not sure what to think now."

"Mutant?" Isabelle echoes, head tipping a little. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar term for her, of course — they'd ran across mutated demons before, especially recently with Valentine mucking things up. Demons wouldn't call themselves mutants, though, and would be very unlikely to out themselves to a Shadowhunter. She supposes warlocks and the fey could be considered mutants — human/demon hybrids and angel/demon hybrids, respectively. But it still doesn't sound quite right.

"I feel like I keep coming up with more questions and not enough answers," she says, sighing.

"That's what this place is. Speculation and rumor," Jean said. She was sympathetic to her plight considering she had spent the last several months trying to puzzle out how she had gotten here and why she couldn't escape. Why had this place gathered a bunch of people - mutants and humans - and locked them away in this place? Jean couldn't say. The not knowing was worse than anything else.

"It's not so bad in the day to day but when you look at the big picture it's frustrating. I want answers, too, but nothing is forthcoming."

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