I've got blood on my name.

[gutpunching]

CHARACTERS: Jason. ft. Lucina, Asher, Sigma, Aqua, & OTA if you want to deal with this, ig, why would you ever.
DATE: I've lost track. vaguely late march, shortly before (tentatively during??? idk I'm flexible) the 3/25 log.
WARNINGS: Violence, gore, death, reference to cannibalism and other zombie rage virus things. Embarrassing angst logs. A mess, basically.
SUMMARY: finally gonna get full horror game up in here.


ONE.

[In the days following their discovery of the tunnels, he spends most of his time in and out of them to try and track down their presumed guilty party. As distractions go, it's not bad. Gives him something productive to focus on that isn't the acid hollow feeling crawling its way up his gut. His increasingly unraveling hold on his hunger and his temper, the way his instincts are screaming at him to bite back. (Go for the throat.) It's easier, just barely, when he can duck out alone. Without a target to focus that on. But after a while, tracing the halls of the winding maze lends itself to too much opportunity to lose traction.

He loses time for the first time a few days in. He'd done the math, and all things considered, it should have happened sooner. Most of the reported cases involving the locals had the worst parts of the virus kicking in anywhere between 3 to 5 weeks after showing symptoms. He's been sick for at least the upper end of that. Maybe even more, if you count the parts where the symptoms were small enough to slide under the radar. Is it a physiology thing? Alternate earth humanity just different enough to slow the process? An immune system thing? One last parting gift from the Lazarus Pit? Whatever it is, it isn't slowing things enough. He'd been taking the edge off his hunger pangs with nicotine, because it was easy to find, but that had stopped helping a long time ago. The next thing he knows he's drifting, (searching for something,) and he doesn't recognize the tunnels around him when he pulls his focus back.

Really pushing his luck, now.

He gets the hell out of the underground and back into the fresh air of the city as if it'll clear his head. (It doesn't, but he starts putting some distance between him and the higher traffic of the sewer entrance nearest the search. Pacing his way out from where the people pulling mapping duty are coming and going.) Distantly, he can feel the phone that serves as his connection to the magitek network buzzing in his pocket. And he ought to answer it, because maybe they've made a breakthrough on the search, or the treatment, or any number of pressing problems on their plate. But right now, it just registers as unimportant.

He ignores it. He never even notices when it stops buzzing.]


TWO.

[It would be so much easier, it occurs to him once again, as he slams a late-stage Bristol-zombie back against the brick facade of a building, if they just thinned out the herd. (The man looks at him wildly, snaps and lunges at him like an animal, something (someone?) else's blood dried around his mouth and down his neck, crusted into his filthy clothes and caked under his nails. A fetid iron stink on his breath.) All's fair isn't it. You don't blame a rabid dog for what it becomes, but you still put it down when it starts baring its teeth at your neighbors. How much of Woodhurst's population has been attacked, consumed, or poisoned by this madness because they've been holding out vain hope for a quick cure? How long would it take to outnumber the rest of the city? Worse, to breach the walls of the quarantine? Odds are that one's happened already.

The smell of blood in the air should turn his empty stomach, but mostly it just pulls at him. Sharpens his focus, narrows his attention, spurs him into action before he's even aware he's come to a decision. He swings a fist for the man's jaw, colliding with a crack that staggers him. Follows it up with a knee to the gut that drops him onto the pavement, gasping.

His hands curl at his sides while he stands over the man—still struggling for breath, grasping at the straws of his own fleeting sanity without success. (Two birds, one stone. It would make so much more sense.)]


THREE

[There aren't a lot of places in Woodhurst that he'd really consider secure. (And that includes the ALASTIAR-maintained petting zoo they've set up for the infected. Not really the most attractive of options.) But at some point, he happens to duck through a familiar door in an effort to find a place to get his bearings. (His own, yours, a public place that's at least a little out of the way. Etc. Surprise me, I'll roll with it.)

He lets himself in. Slipping through the door quietly but fumbling the effort at the finish line. It closes with an audible rattle that echoes through the room, and he drops back against it for a second, or a handful of them. Eyes closed, hands shaking.]

FOUR

[A MYSTERY. if none of this bullshit works for you, feel free to wildcard me or hassle me for a different starter or ping me via PM or plurk, you know the drill. I'll be slow for a bit while handling network nonsense but gets this up now.]

Comments

i honestly don't know, all of the above??

[heritors]

[ Lucina knows that the disappearance of Jason Todd was a sure thing, despite her hoping otherwise. Every piece of evidence, everything she knows about him, speaks in favor of it — the quarantine wouldn't hold him, and the virus had proven it doesn't leave its victims docile. He's not the type of person to ask others for assistance, either; which meant that once his time in the sewers started rivaling his time away from it, it was only a matter of time before he stopped showing up at all.

She expected it, but that doesn't mean she's going to accept it.

So she turns on the tracker once she's back above ground. It's irresponsible to abandon her post by the tunnels, especially with her partner-in... justice(?) already gone. But her messages — simple updates that quickly turned into questions about his well-being — aren't getting a response anymore, and desperate times call for desperate measures. The rest is pretty much cakewalk, her ski bag hung loosely around her shoulders, the gun in the holster on her belt. She's in her police uniform, bulletproof vest and all ( it never hurts to be safe ), thankful that the little dot indicating Jason's position is no more than a 20 minute walk away ( either he circled the city a few times, or he didn't really get far in the first place ). ]

Jason? [ The tracker leads her to the far side of the university, in a temporarily closed ( but unlocked ) lecture hall. She purposely makes her presence known, though her eyes search for a sign of life. He should be here, but for where exactly— ]

TWO

[keeper]

(( aqua just keeps showing up after lucina everywhere but ig that's ic, this is her life, chasing after not-siblings. ))

[ Skip past the searching, the speculating, fast-forward several streets and stoplights.

She wouldn't have spotted him if she didn't know what to look for in the first place, if it weren't for the trackers on each of the Audentes. He looks no different from the rest of the infected overtaking the city, pale and gnarled, bloodstained.

(But he is different. He's one of her teammates.)

Even were she to call to Jason she doubts he'd hear her, engrossed in his violent reverie as he is. The best she can do is to clamp a hand down on his shoulder, cinch her fingers at his neck and hope what little contact she can manage is enough to inject some oxytocin (and sense) into him. ]

Stop.

[ ...She doesn't even know what she's trying to stop, here. Between two murderers, who is she to save? The man on the ground is long gone, and there's no cure coming any time soon. (Even if she were to grant him sleep, restrain him somewhere, he'd wake up within a few hours and pry himself loose in a red frenzy.)

She's granting no favors here, only delaying the natural course of things. Stop a black marble at the top of a funnel, and it'll still spiral down just as quickly, as soon as you let go.

(Still...)

She keeps her grip firmly on his shoulder, eyes hard. ]

i'll take full stupid for Three-hundred alex

[12inches]

[ As if it needs to be said, things aren't going great. And the least great part about things is that once the ball really gets rolling, there's no stopping it once it begins to snowball. People are sick, crazy, dying--the hospital, the quarantine, everything is stretched to capacity or hardly effective, there's zombies plaguing the streets and breaking in, and the most frustrating part of it all is that things... just haven't been coming to him. ]

[ Not that it's ever been a perfect, infallible ability; hell, he still barely understands how it works himself, despite all this time, but if he'd gathered one thing from the Nonary Game, it's that things tended to make themselves clearer the longer things wore on and the more desperate he became. And things have gotten pretty fucking desperate. But so far... Somehow, it seems as if they're on their first run. ]

[ He'd toyed briefly with the prospect of manufacturing more runs, however the hell he'd even begin to do that, but for whatever decisive choices he could remember being made over the past month or so, everything's been completely jumbled into haphazard, chaotic nonsense. He could still make a conscious effort to jump, sure, but where would he even end up? Would he even find anything? Impossible to know if he never tried, but the whole trying thing has been equally unappealing, especially since people kept trying to take chunks out of him again. He'd had a long, nice recess from feeling like dying; despite what anyone might say, he did thoroughly enjoy avoiding it as much as possible. ]

[ But really, it's because of that that things have been feeling so hopeless and desperate, best-laid plans and off-the-cuff stupidity all falling into last-ditch-effort territories. Friends and strangers dead, Ramir on the fast track to becoming a barely coherent killing machine... The least that could happen is... he dies. ]

[ Which is to say, orchestrating one's own death preferably without dying, but still getting enough spook to jump... hasn't come to him either. In fact, it sounds about as stupid as it sounds possible, but lo and behold, they say the brain works most efficiently in a time crunch, right? The sound of the reinforced door clattering gently shut from the front room has Sigma jolting in his kitchen chair and immediately drawing up the tracking app (no cause for panic unless there's no name... maybe.) It blinks into life and immediately a motionless blip about twenty feet away labels itself Jason Todd. (Or Red, or whatever he shows up on the network as, dweeb.) ]

[ Which is ultimately a cause for panic anyway. The guy hadn't been much better off than Ramir last he'd seen, and without all the cuddles, who knows just what kind of state he's in by now. And what he's doing here. But honestly, this might be exactly what he needs; this might be a sign. Not that being faced with a mindless superpowered binge eater once has him eager to go this way again, but even if Jason is technically better than him, they're much more equally matched. And besides, when #YOLO doesn't apply, one should always #YOLO the hardest, right? ]

[ After the quickest, stupidest text conversation of his life shot to Olivia in at least some semblance of a contingency plan (If I don't text back in ten minutes, please come find me), Sigma watches the dot on the radar for a few seconds more before letting out a huff and standing. Making his way down the hall, he leans around to peek into the front entryway. ]

[ Sure enough, there he is. The guy's slumped against the door he's just slid through, shaking and miserable, collecting himself... Boy it's time to not let that happen. Sucking in a breath, Sigma grabs the most annoying voice he can muster (and it's pretty impressive: a little too loud, too drawn out, pitched up with borderline-faux concern (and definitely not fear). ]

Heyyy, buddy, how's it goin'..?

don't challenge me to surprise you (three)

[feytality]

[Prior to the infection, Oakea had been packed. A furniture store, warehouse, department store with its own restaurant and ball pit for the kiddies? It was hopping. Even now, a few people have taken cover there, and Maya herself has found it a great place to scavenge for food, since that famous restaurant has been abandoned, for the moment. Not only is there an abundance of snacks, there are still prepared meals she can squirrel away for herself, the infected, and anyone else who needs some. Food is getting scarcer every day, with this infection growing out of control.]

[She's loaded up her bags and her arms with food and a sample lamp for self-defense, cutting through the kids' area to get out -- when she thinks she hears a noise. Now, Maya's all about helping the infected -- probably to a foolhardy degree, but she doesn't know what's coming, and it's instinct to search for cover. She makes a beeline to the ballpit and dives in it, holding her breath, then realizes---]

[She's not alone. There's already somewhere here -- someone who already had the idea to take cover in the children's playpen. And by jumping in, she's just showered his general area with balls]

-Waaah!

[Hopefully Jason managed to dodge. Or not]

god lmao i don't know

[moneyballer]

[Outside is the last place he should be right now.

This is a bad idea, all thing's considered. The team has just buried a dead man, and what does Asher Millstone choose to do? Go out for a walk in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, equipped with every possible weapon or magical article of clothing that he's acquired to date. They're all hidden somewhere on his person as he skulks the city alone,
desperate for a breath of air.

Bloodshot eyes catch sight of a thing that moves, and immediately, he freezes in place. It's not until he sees the familiar outline of those rigid shoulders does he recognize who it is.]

Yo, bitchface!

[The words are practically spit out, and he moves in the other's direction, clearly on edge.

No answer.]

Hey. Hey!!!

[A hand reaches out and grabs the ex-bat's shoulder, perhaps a little too forcefully.]

Are you even listening to me-