trans_9 | What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

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What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

In her sealed, silent, sensory-deprived meditation room, Roxie is sleeping. It's a special sleep: for all dreams are connected, she knows, and by spinning her mind out along the web of thought, she might step into others...

[Roxie is dream-hopping, getting a look at the subconsciousnesses of the other people on the ship. So, how it works - if you're interested, go ahead and post with a dream your character is having, and Roxie will slip into it, subtle at first but more obvious as she tries to satisfy her curiosity. Just her being around will make the dreamer more lucid and more likely to remember the whole thing when they wake up.

Also, feel free to ask any OOC questions in a thread here, or poke me on AIM at 'anagramarye'.]

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Roxie's free hand, with the ring, clenches shut tightly enough that the tendons in her arms stand out. The shot hits—

—against an invisible wall, the initial part of the flare spreading—

—and Roxie's eyes go wide—

—and her shield shatters soundlessly, the backlash suddenly pounding ragged patterns of narrow cuts into her, like being slammed into glass—

—as the rest of the explosion pours through—

--Knocking them apart.

They both go plummeting into the open air, and everything dissolves into a black nothing that covers her in its squeezing coldness. When it recedes, there's a bright light in her face. She's bound to an examination table.

There's a table to the left of her and through the tall, overly skinny figures clothed in sanitary green doctor's uniforms milling around it, she can see Aang, older still, strapped to a table like she is, unconscious. A harness hangs nearby, like a metal spine, with needles sticking out of it, as if it's meant to be affixed to someone's back.

These tall things have no faces that can be seen. They're obscured by a black blur.

"Don't be afraid," says one of the beings, as it preps surgical equipment. "This is only going to hurt a little."

If it was just her, Roxie wouldn't be. But Aang isn't made like her, she's sure.

Breath out. Breath in. Breath out—

Her muscles clamp up, pulling all at once and then relaxing. And then again. Crack. Crack. Crack. She's struggling at the straps hard enough that she's starting to hurt herself, but the pain just helps her focus.

There is a gasp from the other bed as its occupant wakes up, and thrashing, and then a massive gust of flame spouted from Aang's mouth with a roar that sends the "doctors" at both tables recoiling, giving Roxie a moment to struggle more openly.

"The subject's awake! Sedate him, quickly!"

Aang, in turn, look over and sees Roxie, and starts to melt through the straps with a jet of fire from his finger.

"Now's our chance! Get free if you can!"

Roxie's cloak whips wildly, boiling around her as she strains all at once. Her face twists as she forces the joints of her arms past their normal limits.

Creak. Creak. If the straps don't give, it might end up being the table that does instead.

The straps twist and break. She's free. Aang's snap just as the doctors get that needle of black stuff near him, too, and he sweeps the doctor away with a gust of air, frees his feet, rolls off the table, and then kicks it towards the scientists with a gust of air behind it, pinning them against the wall with it.

A sweep of his arm breaks a tank of liquid behind them, and the wave he sends in the direction of the others, advancing towards them, knocks them all off their feet.

He goes to Roxie, unstrapping her foot straps, and doesn't notice the one "doctor" with a scalpel advancing behind him.

"Down!" Roxie hisses, and metal and wood flash in her hand as her cloak sweeps around her like a living thing. The silver-headed carpenter's hammer isn't really balanced for throwing, but at this close the brute force will do to make it impact before it can substantially veer... as long as Aang can very, very quickly get out of the way.

She's one of those people who tends to go for the more immediately lethal options, it would seem. Unless the "doctor" is particularly tough, a successful strike is practically guaranteed to be kind of nasty.

Aang ducks instinctually, and normally he would not approve, but these things...well. They aren't actually people.

Roxie is freed, and Aang yanks her along by the hand again.

"The whole running part isn't over yet, sorry!"

Got some more of it to do, through the ship. The layout is slightly different now, but it's the same ship or at least similar to Stacy. There's a straight drop near where they are and Aang drags her towards it.

There's fog sunken into the hole however. It's slightly alarming.

As she's pulled away, Roxie yanks her hammer out of the "doctor"'s chest, stuffing it away into her cloak. The reason for the choice of red for her color is, perhaps, a bit more obvious now. And there's the clotting blood across her face and hands, too, where the broken shield impacted and scarred her...

"So how deep does this rabbit hole go?" she asks, breath fairly even despite running high-speed to keep up with him.

"What do you mean 'rabbit'? A rabbit-what? And it goes pretty dee--EEEEEEP--!" Aang says, breathlessly, as they jump.

There's darkness again, and an intense heat, like they're passing through flame, and then there's an explosive force that tears them away from each other again.

This time Roxie lands in a foggy alley.

Hard. Not as hard as she could have, but Aang is nowhere to be found.

Where she is now doesn't make sense. It's a foggy little town at night. The air is cold and everything is run down and rusted.

Roxie pushes herself to her feet, and grunts as she pushes on her shoulder hard, popping a half-maladjusted arm back into its proper alignment. Her face is a bloody mess, but she can make up a story for that. She pulls her cloak—no, her jacket, here—tighter around her. She doesn't need to, it isn't cold enough to really bother her, but it's a reflex.

A breath in, a breath out, and she steps forward, worn-down sneakers touching lightly against the ground.

There is the sudden echoing sound of sirens.

And around the corner, the sound of something metal being dragged on the asphalt.

Shhhhhnnnk. Shnnnnnk. Shhhhhnnnnnnnnnk.

This feels...

Familiar.

Roxie slides the brass ring onto her finger, again, and from out of the depths of her jacket glints an ivory-and-silver circlet that she pulls onto her head.

The sound. A pipe? No. Too sharp-edged. Something thin, but blunted by use. An axe, maybe. Poorly-maintained, overly abused.

Her hand goes to her neck.

If Roxie had a different mindset, she might have just gone up one of the walls. But that's not how she thinks. She expects a fight. She expects to get hurt and cause hurt.

She dashes forward, as her circlet gleams—and then is hidden, as a sudden surging tide of darkness fills the alleyway just ahead of her.

It teeters and totters and jerks on its pin legs, yet every movement is graceful in the most macabre way possible. It dances its dead dance and moves in circles and graceful, dead movements. The strange metallic sound isn't any sort of blade, no. It's barbed wire, dragged against the ground as it moves, in place of its hands, just like the barbed wire that hangs in loops like hair at the sides of her head.

It's a vision of one of the most beautiful things Aang knows, turned into a twisted nightmare horror, but that's what the girl did this to him during his time here. Tried to do all she could to break both him and the other girl in the blue dress.

This was one of the things she had created to do it.

Roxie keeps running forward, pitch darkness that she can see through as if it wasn't there flowing with her like the crest of a wave.

If the thing attacks her—if it even gets too close to her—the silver bell from her head will flash out as an ornate silver mace (http://i34.tinypic.com/xlf02x.jpg), with enough force behind it to crack stone or penetrate steel armor.

The dark doesn't stop something that has no eyes.

Lightning-quick movement send barbed wire whipping in her direction, trying to rend flesh from bone.

Roxie's hand with the ring flashes up. An invisible wedge—just enough of a moment's deflection for her to skip forward into the thing's range and swing the mace flowing out from her hand. As the flanges of the weapon catch the air in the swing, they let out a sharp-edged nauseating keening.

But it's still a risky move—if a single strike doesn't finish it, she's left herself wide-open for a counterattack.

It's enough. They hurt, and are fast and hard to outrun, but the dancers they die easily. This is because they were created to hurt him another way.

As the creature falls, there is a horrible keening noise, that sounds all the world like Katara's voice sobbing quietly and piteously, until the sounds die down and end as it dies for good.

"Ooh, you're new!" pipes up a voice behind Roxie, and standing behind her is a little girl with a hole in her stomach. If Roxie's wondering where the chasing shadows went, wisps of them can be seen coming out of the hole in her stomach. This is just the new tormentor taking the form of an old one.

"And a friend of his, I take it, just like little Susie Q. Shyness in her blue dress. That'll make this all the more entertaining, when I leave your flayed corpse for him to find. He's just so squeamish."

And as the forced darkness melts away into little evaporating specks, Roxie—

smiles. It's a wicked, irregular smile that wouldn't belong anywhere on a normal person. She's back in her element, now.

"But I'm not," she says, holding up the mace before her horizontally like a holy symbol, and suddenly it lets off a sharp, screaming whine. Nauseous, churning fear. Even if the push of emotional content doesn't work, it feels good to try.

The girl gives an exaggerated yawn.

"Is that really supposed to scare me, you stupid bitch? I'm dead. And I live here--for a given measure of 'live.'" She skips around in a circle. "Well, I did anyway, not that Aangy-wangy-poo remembers it. It's all locked away in his subconscious because he couldn't handle his little bunkmate Alessa spreading her nightmares all over the waking world during the hellish experimentation, even though he survived it. God, what a whiner."

Roxie turns into a smooth circle to keep her gaze on the girl, still holding her mace at the ready. The insult flows off her—or off her face, anyway—like water, as if she simply didn't notice it.

She stays silent, watching the girl's face, as the mace softly thrums between emotions. Joy. Trust. Fear. Surprise. Sadness. Disgust. Anger. Anticipation.

Nothing. No emotion touches her.

"Christabella!"

The voice is hoarse and tired, and he's a sad figure, in tattered clothes, his leg broken and healed in a way that looks horribly painful.

"Stay away from her!"

Roxie takes a step back, her mace still held up. Her face is a mess, still, but even with that short exchange, under the crusted blood, it's a little less of one than it was.

She glances between the girl and the new figure, still silent.

"What are you going to do, Aang?" says the girl, hands on her hips. "Kill me again?"

Aang's eyes narrow, and he says, simply, "It's not killing if you're not alive."

A burst of fire is sent in her direction, sending her diving back, and Aang screams at Roxie, "Hit her!"

She didn't need the words. The moment the fire started to flare up, Roxie was already charging forward, swinging the mace above her head.

She brings it down, a sharp diagonal swipe, the tines of the weapon whistling through the air like flutes. Her face is more than merciless—it's almost enjoying this, hints of pleasure creeping in around the edges.

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Pic in the youtube video is NSFW in the gory way

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