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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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.

The girl dodges the fire but is knocked back from the blow, her face now smashed and ugly, and with that space between then, there's a stamp of Aang's foot against the ground and rocks swells up between Roxie and Christabella like its bursting through dead skin, curling around the latter girl in a wave. (Though he doesn't seem to be compressing it enough to crush her with it).

"Time to run again!" For a given measure of running. Metal pipe and impromptu staff in one hand, he grabs at Roxie's arm with the other.

"Come on! We can't kill it, only slow it down. It can't die because it's not alive--it's just taking faces from my memories."

She speeds up—no. He's slower than her now.

She turns, grabs his arms, and sweeps Aang off his feet, launching back into a full run once she's got a good grip on him in her arms. "Then where are we going?" she asks, entirely businesslike, despite the distinct lack of dignity of his current situation.

His response to being unceremoniously picked up like a baby by a girl with preternatural strength that's smaller him is: "Actually, I can, um--you know what? Never mind."

Okaay, so he's getting carried. She's running much faster than he could. His leg had been hurt pretty badly during this time until it'd be repaired later when the whole ordeal had ended.

"Go right at this street up here!"

There's a mountain there, and a tunnel. There's something scraping along the ground behind them. The sound of metal, but heavier this time. Aang's eyes go wide as he sees what's following them.

"Don't look back and go right reallyreallyreallyreally fast!" He holds out a hand to lessen the wind resistance around them both so Roxie can run faster.

Roxie doesn't look. It's not because he said not to—it's because it doesn't matter if she does. Either she'll outrun or she won't... and if she won't, she can get a look at it then.

Instead, she runs. She's starting to reach the limit of what she can manage and still have some degree of traction.

They're through, into the dark, and the scraping fades behind them. There are voices around them, whispers, in the same kinds of voices as the doctors, but more pleading.

"--the ohm threat--"

"--please help us--"

"--deepest apologies for your ill treatment--"

"--desperation--"

"--cooperation--"

"--worlds dying--"

"--life ending--"

"--help us fight--"

"--please help us fight--"

Aang gets...heavier. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and Aang says, in a somewhat deeper voice now, in the dark:

"Put me down! I can run now."

Roxie half-skids, slowing down enough that she can let her momentary passenger down. She's starting to breath hard, now. She can run, still, but that burst of speed has left her a little slower than she was.

"What next?" she hisses.

"Uh. I know there's been -- a lot of it--" Even he's a little winded and he's freaking kung fu Tibetan Jesus. "But unfortunately..."

How does he break this to you, Roxie?

"...We have to keep running."

Sorry.

"But we're almost there! When we clear the tunnel, don't stop. Don't worry about me, I'm just memories, just thoughts. I can't be hurt, so I'll hold them off! If you make it over the bridge and through the door, you'll be safe."

They're out in the sunshine again, and Aang is older now, perhaps sixteen, only slightly younger than he had been in Katara's dream. He's wearing one of the ship's plantsuits, but with some sort of light armor affixed, that looks like it could repel projectiles and maybe even plasma fire, but is light enough for him to still stay very mobile. His limp is gone, though that one leg is noticeably weaker to one who's perceptible enough to notice such things. In his hand, he carries a different staff than the others he's carried along the way--this one is made of some kind of light metal instead of wood.

They're on a dusty alien world with a sky bluer than it rightly should be. The sun is up, low in the sky, and at the same time two moons are rising. They're in the massive bowl of some sort of crater, with rocky scrags jutting up, and streams of water running between the rocks. Aang licks his finger as he runs and holds it up into the air to check the breeze, and his expression twists up into the slightest of grins.

Conditions for Bending are, shall we say, slightly on the side of good.

The ground starts to rumble, and crawling over the cliff sides into the bowl-shaped valley are foggy shadow creatures, outlines of something insectoid. The shadows are unnatural in the light of such a bright sun, but that chasing shadow is causing it, in them now, using them as yet one more vessel to follow Roxie.

Up ahead is a stone bridge across a crevasse, and across from it is a huge formless building, one that reaches far, far up into the sky, with a massive open door.

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Pic in the youtube video is NSFW in the gory way

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