ArchivedLogs:Remember This

Remember This
Dramatis Personae Jim, Nox	2013-06-13 Jim tries to tell Nox about what's happened...and can't.
Location <MOR> Below New York
Buried beneath the bustle and noise of New York's busy streets, the world underneath the city is a quieter place. Quieter, but far from deserted. Occasional ladders, often rusting, ascend to the city above and are evidence that at /one/ point these tunnels had been in use, or had been planned for it; perhaps by way of maintenance, or access to subways or sewers. These stretches have been abandoned by civic infrastructure for some time now, though, but occasional scraps of evidence -- discarded food wrappers, piles of tatty blankets or moldering old mattresses, sometimes voices carrying echoes through the dank concrete -- give evidence that /someone/ still uses these tunnels. The rumbling of subway trains sounds frequently through the walls, many of the train routes accessible through various doors and openings. Gray water sloshes open like messy flower petals around tromping boots, churning up shallow puddles into a beaten froth. Morningtime in the world below still finds dark tunnels, cramped and narrow, sliced into prison bars where sunlight pours in through storm grates above. It bounces off odd angles, illuminating patches of slimy green moss, bruisy-purple slabs beneath, bound by crumbling mortar. "-my flashlight's flickering." "Shh." "You can borrow mine." "Don't shove!" There are five men in total, smelling of last night's alcohol, sweated partly out with the late heat of a New York springtime to sit in a /smell/ atop their skin, sharp, punky human smells. They travel down a narrow tunnel in a packed cluster, shoulders jostling off one another in an animal huddle, all of their heads turned to face outwards, eyes wide and rolling against the dark. In their hands: flashlights. Tire irons. Crowbars. A gun. A backpack full of spraypaint cans. "There's not gonna be anything down here but /rats/." "Shut up, Boo." One of them, walking towards the front, balding with sharp gray eyes and his tongue compressed against his upper lip, seems to be leading. His name is Gordan, 45, pawnshop owner. He sounds more absently intent than angry. "There's somethin' here. Isn't this where that childnapper monster was hauled up from?" "Was it?" They are wrong about only one thing: there are no rats. There is, in fact, a surprising dearth of rats. But for the distant drip of water and the ever fainter sounds of the city, there is no scurrying, to skittering noise of tiny claws over packed earth and stone. To all outward appearances, these tunnels are deserted by everything but cockroaches and plantlife partial to damp, dark places. It has been a trying week. Perhaps not as trying as for some, given Nox’s current state of ignorance of the world above, but she’s had her own demons to wrestle with. Distraction, /focus/, has been found in work and there has been a great deal of that for the shadow lady to busy herself with. Every time it seems a tunnel is securely closed, weaknesses are found. Each time it seems she might be left with minutes alone with which to dwell on the events of a Sunday that grows more and more vivid in memory, there is something else to do--a patroller fallen to a cough or wetrot of the feet, their shift to be taken over, a tunnel that needs shored up, an argument solved over a morsel of their sharply rationed food items. She’s found no shortage of things to occupy herself with. And with each passing day it grows harder and harder to not fall into a dreamlike state of half-consciousness. To drift. The park, the police, the sound and feel of a body collapsing from the inside out, cages, a beloved face, a hated one, a window of one-way glass and a voice coming from a speaker... Perhaps she’s finally reached the end of her stamina, this lady who’s rowed children to shore from sea, and protected others from the bloody blades of a man lost to insanity. As she courses up the tunnels, on a path towards those unfamiliar voices, her thoughts are elsewhere. The shadows /hum/ with whatever memory has captured her. It is not a happy sound. As the men continue on their way, whispering steady, there builds a high edgy-keening /excitement/ in their voices; rising in periodic bursts that are shushed in almost childish giddiness - but so much more serious. Little boys, or hunters in a primal land. There's an infectious wildness here, in these lawless lands. A thrill of being somewhere secret and forbidden, private and /strange/. And it only gets stranger, the deeper down the rabbit hole they go. "...what the fuck." "/This/ is what's under New York?" "Holy Hell." It's not a /massive/ corridor but it's not small either - a circular hub where, far above, a rotary pours excess rainwater into channels that then pool towards this wide open center, barely lit by watery streamers of second hand lighting. But it's... /green/ - wall to wall, thirty feet wide, the sweep of their flashlights is across a soft carpeting of kudzu vine, washing up the walls to make the room a lush bowl, smelling of plant and green and brown like some curious enchanted glade hidden in the murk beneath the city. Dust motes gling silvery as they pinwheel through the weak light. Somewhere, water can be heard giggling over stone as the men fan out, all of their necks craned to look upwards at the high vaulted ceiling over head, purring with the distant sound of cars that, if anything, only /pronounces/ the sense that the land of civilization is beyond some intangible boundary now. "- I think I found a tunnel. It's blocked." "Blocked how?" "There's this - jesus. I think it's some kinda thorn bush. Looks like it musta been here for /while/." "Boy, you're not kidding. Gordan?" Gordan, still looking up along the ceiling as he fits a cigarette into his mouth, frowns grimly, "Break it down." The crunch of feet over the floor vines twist, tear loose leaves and shred stems. Through the interconnected network of plant nerves, unprocessing of pain in any human capacity, but still /feeling/, still /capable/ of sensation, signals of distress wash back into the dark beyond the thornbush, grown floor to ceiling like fractal bars. When a crowbar slams down against the first layer of branches... a pair of blue eyes begins to open, in the dark. Wood creaks quietly, as a head leans forward, pulls loose of the wall where vines had connected it, and slowly a face turns towards the sound of commotion. She has no access to the undercurrent of distress but there are sounds with unpleasant connotations in Nox’s mind. Destruction, no matter where it’s aimed, sounds much the same anywhere you go. Her path diverts. In the blink of an eye, the time it takes to draw a breath in a nightmare, she’s there among the vines and beneath the leaves. Hidden but present. As one of the crowbar-wielders soon will be too. An ankle near-buried in vine-litter is wrapped with something a little darker--and pulled sharply, dragging him back into the tangle of kudzu that cushions the center of the chamber floor. "Waah-!" The man goes down, his cry cut off /sharply/ when his back hits the ground, dragged beneath the thick rise of rustling vinery. He thrashes, seen in the storm of bobbling, jerking foliage. "Harry! Oh, jesus, Harry, what happened!" "Did he fall? He fell right?" "--something's got me!" Harry's voice rises in a shrill animal panic, his voice breaking and suddenly watery. "Oh god, oh jesus, oh jesus." They all begin to converge upon the thrashing patch they'd last seen their friend, the kudzu seeming to impede them worse at every moment, dragging, catching across their thighs like nets, rushing up their legs until another scream join's Harry's - this one brief and startled, "Bwah!" - when he realizes the vines have grown higher, snaring around one of his wrists, then twining higher. He yanks free only to find it scaling his other arm as well. "-g-/guys/!" With the group moved into the center of the room, entangled by verdant tendrils rather than shadowy ones, Nox diverts again. Sliding beneath the foliage, she places herself beneath the mat of vines between the men and the tunnel they’d been trying to enter. It’s child’s play, really. Building mass, making the plants rise in an immense hump--and then casting her voice through every shadow in the room until the stone itself seems to be groaning. A frequent favorite of the Morlocks: frighten, rather than harm. It's pandemonium for a while. Sweet sweet pandemonium. Harry manages to haul himself, arms windmilling, up from beneath the layer of flora, leaf shreds thrown up to seesaw towards the ground. The other men are tearing loose now, at different speeds - two stand frozen and gaping at the terrible ominous swell of /swampmonster/ rising up from the very floor. One of their bladders fail them; the tangy-sulphuric smell of urine dampening cloth, another is whimper-weeping as he lurches back the way he'd come, falls, is grabbed by an arm and /hauled/ forward by one of his friends. Their retreat is a wretched, disorganized scramble, shedding objects in their hands, flashlights, Harry's backpack, a loud /clang/ of a the tire iron, their desperate hunched-over gaits simian as the sounds they make. Hugging and grasping at one another, they vanish back in the direction they'd come, to seek out the world of laws and civility with a new desperate appreciation. In the silence that follows, the kudzu... slithers. And begins to pull away like a blanket being gradually dragged across the floor. Slurping into a pillar of rough bark and green that begins to shape itself into legs. Into arms. Into a head and shoulders and torso. With the brush and plant fading away - being /sucked/ back into himself, Jim's 'The Whomping Willow' kilt begins to take shape beneath. As does his Hawaiian print shirt, dirty and shredded at the shoulder seams where branches come and go - but it makes for fair camouflage in the dark and the undergrowth. "Nox," he says it while coming forward towards her, hands held out, palms up. Face all business. When's it not. No impediment is offered to the fleeing riffraff. Nox maintains a low profile until the sound of their retreat has faded and then gathers herself, to the tune of rustling flora. Her transformation is perhaps less impressive, she simply rises and gradually resolves into something more human--if only because the speaking of her name is a dead giveaway of a desire for human style communication. “James,” she whispers, eyes turning from arms to hands to face. Her own remain indistinct, all of her edges soft and a-curl with wisps of grey and black. The marks earned so many weeks ago in captivity linger but paler now. Fading, if slowly. “Another story for them to tell. Upstairs. Are you harmed?” "Broken leaves're like chipping a nail," Jim flat-boasts, with a sniff. He seeks out a handful to either side of her elbows, making a brief /pained/ grimace at her use of his proper name, and uses this pair of handholds to possibly just, mild squeeze, move aside, move /past/. To walk towards the thick thornbush, to inspect the damage rendered to it. "-- Where you been?" He says it with his back turned. A quiet creak of strain can be heard as the bush is coaxed to heal. "Been lookin' for you." There isn’t a great deal /to/ squeeze until after the gesture’s completed--it takes Nox that long to solidify her arms to allow him the comfort. Her smile is small, almost invisible in the faint light; more easily seen is the way her head turns to track him towards the thornbush. “Around.” One moment she’s in the center of kudzu. The next there is a silhouette of Nox against the wall, over the leaves, where he’s working. Observing. “Watching. Helping.” She pauses. “Hiding. But I am well. As well as one can be.” Jim frowns deeper to his work; it doesn't seem to be /at/ Nox, as her presence by him doesn't seem to trouble him. "Yeah." As well as can be... all anyone can hope for. Thin fibers of fresh-grow green re-link a break in the brush, sealing it fully once again. Once it's knit, the boundary perfected again, he turns to stroll amongst the wreckage of what all has been dropped - booty fairly gained, in these mean environs. And he kneels down to rummage around inside the dropped backpack. "...Anole turn up?" “No.” A bleak syllable, even softly spoken. Nox follows to help with the looting. This time she’s more amorphous, a shape capable of lifting a crowbar while continuing to rummage beneath the leaves. The Knights will appreciate the weapon. “I cannot remember. If he knew all of the entrances. Perhaps...perhaps he went to his friends. Have you seen sign of him?” Even if she had eyes, it would be clear she isn’t looking at Jim while she asks this. Hope is something one averts one’s gaze from, these days. "..." Jim pauses, for only a moment, head still bowed over his work. Then carries on, "...nah." He re-zips the backpack partways, swings it over his shoulder and moves on foraging. Oh, ho, they dropped the one gun amongst them - a little six round Smith & Wesson number - and /this/ Jim has a brief happymomment, fanning open his hands over it like what-do-we-have-HERE, with his eyebrows hiking up. He flips out the cylinder to see what kind of live ammo its carrying, his other hand reaching over a shoulder to stick a stray flashlight into the backpack. "I'll put out the word about him." Possibly easier, sharing a mind with Hive. Maybe he's doing it RIGHT NOW. "Listen. Nox, I gotta tell you something." The second and third crowbars are gathered up, held easily as if they were a bouquet of flowers rather than an arrangement of stainless steel. Nothing else is found but Nox carries these prizes over to Jim. Perhaps she thinks they can fit in the backpack just as easily as the flashlights. Such is her mind right now. But she shies from the sight of the gun. “Dangerous. Here.” It takes a moment longer for her to realize he’s said something else. When it gets through, she adopts a pair of eyes in order to properly look at the man. “Yes?” "Dangerous everywhere." Jim agrees, snapping the cylinder back home, engaging the safety and tucking it into the back waistband of his kilt. He -- -- oh gosh, Nox. He takes the cowbars form her with that same /pained/ face as before, looking down at them like some awkward gift of /dead bird/ from a well-meaning ladycat, and he kind of... slings down his backpack to see if he can fit them in along the side like a set of unwieldy arrows stuck up from a bulky quiver. He says down into the backpack's interiors, "Need you t'keep with me here for this, a'right? Can you do that? Cause I been around, uptop. And things - you're gonna have to hear this." He’s studied solemnly for a time while Nox processes. During those moments, she gradually rebuilds herself into that more human form. Special effort is made to keep her edges from fraying, to prove that she’s doing as he’s asked. “I am here,” she assures the man. “I had thought...it would be bad. Upstairs. No one has seen, or said. Tell me, please?” "They're lookin' for you." Jim rips it off like a bandage, standing up to face Nox full-on. One hand on backpack strap, the other in a fist at his side. "Up top. They're lookin' hard. Fuckin' pigs. We need you to stay down here, a'right? If they see you up there, they'll fuckin' kill you." Some of the intensity with which she’d studied him fades. Small tears appears in her silhouette as Nox severs eye contact and looks to the side. “That is no strange thing. It was expected. One of theirs is gone and so they will want me,” she murmurs. Her voice trails off as she bends to retrieve a coil of vine that had been cut from its moorings. She wraps it around her hand, studying the effect of green against grey. “I will stay. I am needed here.” "Nox," Jim doesn't have a voice suited well for treating names gently; it twangs out his nose, curls up the side of his lip -it's a more common facial tick now, with scar tissue to contend with. One of his hands hovers in the air over the broken vine encircling the shadowy forearm and it... twitches. Writhes, sending off little curlicue tendrils that seek out substance to climb, to fasten to. Some parts might grow through Nox, where she is incorporeal, corkscrewing little creepers through shadow like green arteries. But Jim's eyes are on the woman's face. "Look at me." A small, whimsical moment there in the sewers. Nox smiles at the living decoration, turning her arm to better observe how it’s now adorned inside and out. “You have such a gift.” The observation ends with her looking up at the man. The smile lingers only as long as it takes for her to study his expression. Then it fades, in lieu of something mildly puzzled. Mildly expectant. Her unoccupied hand curls over the vine, as if he might take it away, while she asks quietly, “Yes, James? I have promised. I will stay.” "-Yeah, I know." Jim shrugs /that/ right off, literally with a roll of his shoulder /and/ his head, because eyerolling just isn't expansive enough to convey how beyond this fact he is. The vines adorning Nox's arm reach maturity in a speed-motion rush, dot-dot-dot!ing up in stepladder stems small purple buds, that open up one by one into surprising trumpets of fuchsia. "But y'know. 'm not just saying this 'cause you're /needed/, right?" “Of course. You do not want me to be killed,” she whispers, reasonably enough. But it’s a reason soon stolen by the appearance of the buds. When they /flower/, she dips fingers into her own arm to touch those hidden within the gloom. Nox hums. “Night-blooming blossoms.” Jim looks for a moment like he might say something else, grimacing at the gloom in a diligently /awkward/ manner. "Yeah." Is all he goes with. But while Nox is looking at the blossoms formed, he's looking at /her/. "...S'what we got down here." “It is better,” Nox says, as if coming to a decision, “with you here. Before it was only...moss. Green slime. Now there are flowers.” Careful manipulation by her fingers guides each tiny curl of vine outside of her arm, so she can solidify the whole and wear it as a proper bracelet. Then the scans the ground around them for anything that might have been missed in the looting process. “Do you think they will tell the police? Monsters, mutants, in the sewers?” "Maybe," Jim doesn't sound worried - he doesn't sound /cocky/ either. Just... realistic. He puts a fist absently on a hip, studying the way the men had come, "I'll move the briers up the tunnel, long before they reached this far. Maybe grow some moss up 'em - they try coming back, or bringing cops or friends along, it'll look like no one's been down this way in years." His attention keeps getting tugged back, though. To Nox's face, to her little bracer of green and flowers. And he says abruptly, "--just remember this, right?" He sucks his teeth, "...whatever else you hear. From up there." There seems to be more but he's - grinding his molars just /chewing/ on it. His plan meets with approval--another soft hum--as Nox drifts back towards the second entrance, the one so capably defended by Jim and his green brigade. She slides easily between the weave of vines, though keeping her new bracelet requires a pause, and a careful manipulation of her arm. “I will try,” is her earnest answer--she will most certainly try. Whether she succeeds is between the woman and her brain, but there’s a glimpse of smile through the barrier of thorns. Jim stays where he is, backpack still over a shoulder - he'll make a trek to the common area to distribute the flashlights to those without night vision and the blunt tools of convenient bludgeoning to those inclined to patrol. With his head turned, he traces that flicker of smile with his eyes, wild and elusive beyond the leaves as it is. /Still/, something is chewed, ground down in his jaw that never seems to quite unclench. And, twisting scar tissue and the tell-tale parallel dents dragged up the side of his face, he issues a ragged, worn out smile back. Then reaches out a hand to prompt a branch on the thornbush through a few rapid stages of its life cycle, until it drops a mature berry into his hand. If nothing else could be said of his time down here, in the dark, it's that his energy /thrives/. And, armed with these small seeds from which any manner of potential can grow, he moves up the tunnel from which the men had come. Work to be done yet, ever more work...