entrancelogs | + It's good that we can't see what isn't there +

Entry tags:

+ It's good that we can't see what isn't there +

Who: EVERYONE
Where: Wonderland and adjacent dimensions!
When: Friday, April 21st to Monday, April 24th
Rating: PG-13, warn if higher!
Summary: A place to list your tears throughout the event, and describe the worlds that can be seen or accessed through them. Event Post.
The Story:

While invisible zombies ravage Wonderland, tears are popping up everywhere! Through them characters can see versions of themselves from alternate universes. Some of them show a different version of Wonderland, some a different version of their home. Some are as benign as a character drinking coffee instead of tea, others are as drastic as somebody's entire personality changed completely.

On day one tears are so small as to barely even be recognisable. Faint voices and melodies can be heard through the tiny cracks if you step really close, but these brief and indistinct glimpses are barely even worth describing.

On day two tears have opened up wide enough to recognise them for what they really are. Yesterday's melodies will sound clearer, and the voices will become decidedly familiar, belonging to people characters know, sounding perhaps even like the characters themselves. Look through the tears and they may catch sight of home, or something that merely looks like another part of Wonderland. The tears are yet narrow and instable though, and the field of vision is correspondingly poor.

On day three the tears have grown a great deal. The worlds beyond them can be seen and heard, though most cannot be interacted with at all. Only the biggest ones are already stable enough for characters to stick their hand inside, and pulls through any objects within reach.

On the fourth and last day some tears have finally become large and stable enough for characters to pass through whole. Not all tears will reach this stage, but those who have can be visited, and the world beyond them explored... at each character's own peril.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This is bad. It's bad because it's not even a visual snapshot of the thing, it's not some shared hallucination, it's not Wonderland aping the thing's shape and movement. It's everything going, inexplicably, to shit, because It is leering through the gaps in space and peeling Its way through into his head again, and no matter what he does he'll never escape it. It'll burn Its way in, in the back of his head, into the pieces of his skull that may as well have been scattered like ashes.

It sets his teeth on edge, burning into the back of his eyes when he sees It, when he sees someone else seeing it.

"What - " Shit. Shit, shit, shit, goddamn. "Get away!"

Seth shakes his head, blinking, knowing he needs a clear view to get a shot. Not certain he can get one though. Jumping when he hears a voice, one familiar to him. Shifting, putting himself in a way to position himself between Tim and ... whatever the fuck that is.

Glancing towards Tim, bringing the gun up slowly, barely glancing back to make sure he was in the general range of that monstrosity.

"What the ever loving fuck is that?" He demands to know, though he kind of listens, taking a step back, moving closer to Tim.

Just looking at It is like staring at the sun, a headache immediately settling behind his eyes, forcing him to duck his head with gritted teeth, tamping down the raw scrape of Its mental shock over every nerves, over every arc of every neuron. One hand instinctively plunges into his pocket, into the orange bottle of medication grasped in his fist. Shit. Shit. And goddamnit, he liked Seth - he thought he was all right, more than mildly shady, but genuinely amiable and they had an entire conversation without Tim putting his fucking foot in it, and now this.

"N-no, no, you need to get away from It," he hisses frantically, but It's already mantled Itself across his head, digging invisible claws into the burn behind his eyelids. Generating a brief, painful spasm that shudders from his lungs to his spine, chaining his words into an abrupt coughing fit.

Fuck.

Seth hasn't know what it's like having something else in his head, though he's witnessed what it did to his brother. With the way things are feeling though, the pain in his head, leaving him feeling nauseated, uncertain but hating the idea of doing what Tim's says. Not that he thinks Tim is wrong, that running isn't the right thing but he'll be damned if he takes the chance.

"Then fucking run, Tim. I'll cover your back."

He thought Tim was a decent kid, kind of messed up but who of them wasn't? But he wasn't going to run and leave this kid trailing him and dealing with whatever that is.

"You run without taking something down and it's just going to follow you. Something's got to slow it down, right?"

Trying to find some kind of focus past the pain as he brings the pistol up, squinting one eye and closing the other as he tries to sight for a good shot. He fired, coughing as he did, doubling over. "Fuck."

"It doesn't work like that!" The bullet passes harmlessly through the thing, the tear flickering like a television with a bad signal. Whether It engineered that or the tear did, Tim can't say - nor is he about to. This is gonna raise questions, if they ever get to be clear of the thing, he knows. This is gonna raise questions, and there's no guarantee that It will fade from their heads once It gets Its phantom claws in.

"Nothing stops it, nothing holds it, you have to - " He breaks off with a sharp, pained intake of breath as a fresh spike of agony lances through his temples, his lungs heaving.

You have to run.

Just run.

"What the ever loving fuck." See? This is why Seth is so fucking done with supernatural anything. Give him a living human being he can put down with a bullet and he's much happier. This though? This has Seth well beyond what he'd call happy. Pissed as fuck came to mind.

"I swear to God you're going to be answering some serious questions." Snarling as he says it, turning and moving to give Tim a shove. "GO!"

He plans to follow him. Much as he can feeling like something is sitting on his chest and there's a knot in his throat. That knot could explain why his head feels like it's going to explode, if he's not getting enough oxygen.

"Dammit, go!"

Edited 2017-04-27 19:57 (UTC)

Great. Great, yeah, he knew it'd come to this. To answering questions he can't answer, for fear of inflicting It upon everyone else. But It's already here, and this isn't some shadowy projection Wonderland's inflicted upon him for the sake of a little inspired motivation. This time It is very much real, and very much pinning them both with a faceless glower, as if It takes personal issue with being shot at and wants to make the pair of them consequently regret it very much.

He stumbles into a run, stymied more often than not by frequent glances over his shoulder to ensure Seth is keeping up. And It's always there, watching, sending a hot lance of pain through to his skull, worse than any migraine. His teeth ache with how he's been gritting them, his head feeling as though it's just gotten injected with molten lead.

The bottle rattles in his hand as he works it out of his pocket, white capsules tapping in plastic orange in syncopation to the beat of shoes against grass. First chance he gets, he plants one foot into the ground, using it to pivot and skid to a halt, shaking one of the pills into the palm of his hand and dry-swallowing it with a painful contraction of the muscles in his throat.

Seth might be one to shoot first, and then shoot a few more times all because he could, but he's not going to risk another shot to that coughing. The same coughing that made running hard, but he's doing all he can to keep up with Tim.

It wasn't easy though. Not with the pain pounding in his skull, the pain lancing through his brain, right behind his eyes.

Nearly skittering into Tim, gun still in hand. "What the fucking hell are you doing?"

"Making sure I don't die, if that's all right with you," Tim snaps, gulping the thing down with a pained grimace. Dry-swallowing always leaves a searing ache behind in his throat, but there's no choice in a moment like this.

Immediately the fog starts to clear, misting into obscurity as whatever's in the synthetic compound starts to take effect.

It can't touch him. It can't touch him as long as he has that chemical shield.

"Then why are you stopping?"

First he tells him to run, and then he's coming to a sudden stop. What the hell was even going on?

Seth turns to face whatever was behind them.

"And what the fuck are you taking? If that was a cyanide pill, I swear I will kick your ass when you come back."

"Wh - " He blinks at Seth in flurrying incomprehension, his mouth gaping for a moment before the panic in his chest metabolizes into something a little more easily recognizable and thus tangible: anger.

"It's my meds, you asshole," he hisses. "It's what keeps me from - it's - "

It's what keeps that thing from digging Itself too deep into his head, not that he can say that. Not right now.

"Never mind."

"Yeah, I'm the asshole in this moment," he says, rolling his eyes even as he turns back towards whatever the fuck that is. Focusing is nearly impossible. Pain is shooting through his brain, making his eyes water and leaving him fighting to try and focus.

He's not even sure it's possible, knowing the muzzle of the fun is wavering. "How the fuck do you stop it?" His voice is low, coming from between clenched teeth, biting the inside of his cheek to try and clear his mind and find a way to think about anything but how he was feeling. "There has to at least be a way to slow it down."

Everything had a way to kill it, right? Stop it for a minute? Course, that could mean dissecting them or ripping a snake out of their chest so...

Yeah, okay, now he feels like the ass. Which, sure, fine, he is one. His jaw clenches tight enough to crack, a painful pull and flex of muscle as he hisses a breath in through his nose and tries to yank what little of himself exists together.

"These," he mutters. He shakes the bottle once, the white capsules rattling against the edges, but knowing the way Jay reacted to him trying to share that chemical shield - no way he's forking them over unless it's clear there's no other choice. It's not like it's anyone's prescription here but his. Hell, even Jay is probably better off without it. "That's...that's the only thing that's helped."

Seth is good for that, making people feel bad for being themselves. It was a natural trait of his.

Glancing over at Tim when he makes that comment, nose wrinkling. "Well, that's not happening, and if that's true, then act logical and tell me what the fuck to do," he growls, or tries to despite the coughing, the pain in his head that is leaving his eyes watering.

"I don't know." The words escape in a panicked hiss. "There's no fighting It or - or - you just run. You just try to get away from It before It gets you and you don't think about It, because if you think about It it's like It can find you."

He breaks off to scan his surroundings, wildly, eyes raking across the stillness. A phrase bounces across the walls of his faulty, fragmented memory, cutting into him from a haze of poorly-remembered encrypted videos: lakes in stillness. Lakes in stillness will take -

Doesn't matter.

He snaps himself away from the tangent in a mental lateral jerk. Focus. Focus.

Seth hates this. He fucking hates so much having someone in his head. He hates the idea of where it leads. Richie had that bitch in his head for so long and then she killed him, turned him, and he wasn't about to be the bitch to some spindly ass freak.

"Then we need to find out way back to fucking Wonderland and hope it can't follow us."

Because honestly, it's the only thing he can fucking think of, much as he can think. He's not the one to plot, and he's hurting so bad he might nearly want to be turned just for this shit to stop.

"It has to be back over that way," he says, gesturing with the muzzle of his gun. "Go. I'm right behind you."

Despite all he is, and the things he's done, it's not in him to leave Tim here. Not just because Tim is the only one that knows a damn thing about whatever the hell that is either. Not entirely.

A determination not to get raveled up in Its collective shit is, at the very least, a good place to start. Tim breathes out between clenched teeth, a nervous hiss of air that preempts the urge to shoot a frantic glance over his shoulder. Turn his thoughts away. Turn everything aside, and let It fester in obscurity. Let It out, let him out, let him out. It'll never get into him again.

It already has.

"You can't think about It," he says, numbly, even as he's pressing one hand against the trunk of the nearest tree to keep up some form of support as he starts to move - away from the tear through which he saw It. "Just don't think about It."

Saying it, he knows, is liable to prompt thoughts about little else. Maybe that's what It kept him around for.

At first the words don't even really make sense in Seth's mind. How the fuck don't you think about something that looks suited for a dark alley when it's fucking with your head and you feel like it's choking you from the inside out.

Except he remembers one thing. As a kid, after the fire, when he'd try and sleep, all he could remember was the fire. He started thinking about other things then. Movies he'd seen. Televisions shows that had been on that night. Anything but the fire and holding Richie's hand and leaving their dad behind.

"Right so..." His voice is rough, the cough taking its toll. "A couple of months ago my brother and I found ourselves in a fucking temple of the goddamn damned where they were turning humans into dinner," he says, as much to try and get Tim thinking about something else as to put himself right back into the middle of the Titty Twister and all they had gone through.

It's the only thought he can imagine can get him to think about anything else but that thing.

It takes him a moment to register what kind of conversational shift that's meant to be, and another minute longer for him to remember that Seth even has a brother at all. The drilling of an eyeless stare in the back of his head, like the laser sight of something ready to blow his skull to pieces, and he forces his eyes forward, trying not to let the breath tear raggedly in his throat as he breathes.

Try not to let the panic seed its way into his bones, an electric sequence of hot-tin rattles pinging the inside of his bones.

"Cannibals?" There's no room in his tone for disbelief, but his eyebrows glide upward regardless, intrigued despite himself.

"Tim, don't stop fucking looking at me," he mutters, voice soft, a low and rumbling growl.

"Well, yeah I guess so. Except vampires. Fangs and fucking appetites to kill, and they were running a factory to feed all their favorite little puppets," he says, feeling bile rising in the back of his throat as he talks about it. All of it was horrific and sick, and he's just kept going because he has no choice.

Except now he has Wonderland and no freak being was taking that from him.

"So we realize we got dragged into this shit all because I offered to do a job for some fucking bearer bonds."

Right. Right. He stays - focused. Stays locked on Seth, on the narrative that's unspooling. Vampires, as absurd as it sounds, only it's not real absurd at all, because what's vampires compared to zombies, to underwater zombies, to fucking parasitic faceless specters that scrape at the back of his mind like -

Swallow. Breathe.

Focus.

"How the hell'd you end up going from a that to vampires?"

"Because that's what fucking happened to me," he admits, expression hardening. "Because that's my fucking life before this place. When I said turning them into dinner? They were putting them through a giant, human juicer," he says, even as he starts moving, edging towards the tear. He didn't know if that thing could follow them, but getting out of there was the only thing that made sense.

"So right now, fucked up as Wonderland is? Life gets more fucked up," he says, hating that admission so much. But at least if he avoids all the culebra but Richie, he doesn't have to deal with them. Unlike here where this thing is in his head, and he can still feel it while trying to focus on his fucked up life.

"Jesus." That takes him out of it for a moment, for a blissful shred of a second. For all the assorted unpleasantness in his life he's trying his best, his best to not think about, there's something viscerally fucked up in the intricacies of that world - where humans are reduced to livestock, where they're forced through a process, stripped of all agency, put through a gauntlet to sate some monstrous being's appetite.

He can't muster much more besides a dull revulsion at the notion of it, but it's close enough. Better to think of that than something else, right?

"Not anywhere as fucked up as it could be," he mutters in quiet agreement. "Long as your world doesn't come through to here, anyway."

Seth felt the same when they crawled down into the "belly" of the Titty Twister, seeing the gears that worked there and all that it was meant to be. Not just meant to be, but had been for years, centuries either for all he knows.

Yet Seth snorts, chuckling softly at Tim's comment. "Yeah well, right now I'm just thinking about the fucked up and nothing else." So he wasn't thinking about here, about what is happened and could happen to either of them.

"Yeah well, it does and I'll be killing everything I can. They can be killed, if that helps."

It's pretty fucked up, in its own way, that Tim can think on that and come away with a conclusion that's something along the lines of: good. Good, because it's better by far than the things he can't escape, the things he can't fight, the things that no one can shoot or claw away or kill.

"You can't ever think about It." The words erupt before he can reconsider the wisdom of spouting them. "Don't ever think about It. Never happened. Just let yourself forget."

It'll be forgotten. It has to. That's what It does, the first time. When there's no one here to lead it about - isn't it?

Then, as if he'd never broken away to digress, he launches onward: "How do you kill them? Those...vampire things?"

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