meadowlarklogs | https://i.imgur.com/Fe9yilS.gif

WHO: Cain, Markus, Fitz, Peggy, Riku, and Sora. We're doing our best.
WHERE: The Facility.
WHEN: October 12, during the sleep event.
WHAT: Continued from here. Cain went in guns blazing, rolled a crit fail, wiped out the party, and now they're going to need the power of friendship to save them.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Language, gore, disassociation/ego death, psychic death, JUST DEATH, buckets of guilt, and Disney Magic™ (including KH3 spoilers). Will update as necessary.

[The impact of their actions doesn't register at first. Due in part to the immediacy of his ability, Cain can only watch as the spear is extracted from its tangled bed of roots, blinking out of visible existence and reappearing several meters to his direct left. The weapon glints in a refraction of eerie, milky-blue underwater light. Where there would be a rush of success upon victory — moving the immovable — and where he might feel the tickle of curiosity in the aftermath, there's nothing but a peculiar emptiness. Slight and small, like he's disengaged from the part of his brain that processes raw information into higher function, a brief interim where no single thought enters his head, and he looks at his surroundings with a detached faraway appreciation. Meditative, almost, all pain and pressure from the landscape's oppressive environment gone.

And then it grows.

A yawning void eats through the peripheral of his awareness, even as he turns at last to check on Fitz and Markus. It's at that point his sense of individual self begins to slip, and the people he's looking at have no names, felt more in physical warmth and closeness. Cain extends a hand out as if to touch one of them on the shoulder — but stops, fingers spread, dark eyes lowering down to look at his own arm as if he doesn't recognize it. It doesn't feel as though it should belong to him. His gaze travels further, over limbs and torso dressed in the sleek black material of a flight suit, and that feeling of disconnect only heightens, mind elevated above the anchor of an unfamiliar body.

Slowly, gradually, another sense begins to bleed into the fine boundary of Cain's (but not Cain anymore, not Alexei, not anyone, what is he?) consciousness. Pinpricks of light at the edges of his mind, little flashes of red scales, the gauzy white outlines of humanlike shapes in the distance, and the two solid pillars of men in front of where he stands. Life everywhere. Death, too, clinging onto the dredges of what once was. Cain watches himself begin to fade from the feet up as if unattached to the process.

Death, watching Fitz and Markus now succumb to an intense and severe pain he doesn't feel at all. There's no fragment of sympathy, there's no sadness — only an impression of responsibility. The entire facility becomes a single entity stationed somewhere in his mind. And then Fitz and Markus are no longer alive, they're dead, a hot spray of blood and red guts and cooler blue mechanical shards across the surrounding area, but he doesn't feel anything beyond the understanding that it happened as the effect of a singular cause.

An imminent air of rightness overtakes the man who was there only moments ago, before he's gone, disintegrated into nothing.]

Threaded | Flat

[It hits him the moment the spear is spatially dislodged, jarring and jolting. But it tears through him only a breath of a moment later, dissipating any shred of remaining focus as if it were made of vaporous haze, flung away in favor of—

Pain. Hideous, clawing pain blossoming in the core of his gut (how? it shouldn’t, it can’t, a synthetic body not programmed for it not hardwired not possible) lancing outward with its many teeth, shearing and tearing at his insides. For a harried moment still cursed with lucidity, Markus thinks he’s lost his android body again, but flashes of incomprehensible code spilling into his vision imply otherwise. It’s torture unlike what he’s ever felt before, android or human — it’s nerve endings pulled apart, it’s every atom of each biocomponent (WARNING: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE, SHUTDOWN IN 15, 14, 13, 12_ /ERROR, ERROR, ERROR...) unhinging itself from its proper place, leaving an interlocking interior of agony on its wake. He hunches over, loses strength in his legs, crashing his knees into the ground; a hand gripped at his middle and the other at his temple, eyes squeezed shut, so tight that the hard plastic beneath faux skin cracks.

A circular, infinite noise in his head overrides the scream that falls from his lips. He wants to echo the words, form them, as if repeating the mantra might free him of how they fill his head until it may burst.

(Torn apart. My insides are all being torn apart! Torn apart. My insides are all being torn apart! Torn apart. My insides are all being torn apart! Torn apart. My insides are all being torn apart! Torn apart. My insides are all being torn apart!)

Markus cries out in stubborn desperation, mauled from the inside, harassed in his own head (WARNING: MY INSIDES ARE ALL—) opening his eyes to view only briefly a fading Cain and, closer, a suffering Fitz. He strains, screaming still, reaching out for him on instinct; hopes to grab his shoulder, his arm, a wrist, anything to anchor himself to the other man, it’s what they’ve always done when fraught and frightened and in so much pain, a reliance on the one another that has always helped them, god let it help them now.

Fingertips shake and brush against the man. But the world goes a brilliant, deep black when his whole body shudders, cracks in violent paroxysm, and (WARNING: —BEING TORN APART) shatters in a cobalt cloud of blue, of scattered and ruined components, coiled tubing, and shining pieces of once-pristine white.

This mass of detritus drifts lazily in the sea, all the life gone from it.]

[ A firm turn then, eyes flickering to Riku. Once within reach, he holds out his hand, palm up. ]

He's safer with her, anyway. [ Sora with Peggy; it's meant to be comforting. A jerk of his head indicates that they should get a move on. ] Show us your way, then. [ a beat. ] Sorry about the pain.

[ of radiated organs and exploding insides, still working through his skin. ]

[ Sora lifts a hand in a brief sort of greeting as he approaches Peggy. She's going to be an expert at this by the time that they're done, and Sora can only hope she's feeling a little less panicked now that they've successfully managed to bring back one of the three who'd been lost. Especially since she and Fitz seem to be close. ]

I met Cain once, back at the safehouse. He was nice, he answered my questions and tried to explain a lot to me about everything going on here.

[ He looks up, seeing the steeliness clear in her eyes, and then offers his hand to her. Again, that empathy bond will have to be invoked. When they touch, Peggy will be able to feel some other emotions hiding beneath Sora's overwhelming optimism. There's uncertainty, after how Fitz responded to him, along with worry at the thought of having to separate from Riku.

He'll push past all of that, though. He has to.

His Keyblade appears again in his other hand, and he nods firmly. ] Just like before. Both of us need to focus on him. [ It's possible Cain will be harder to track down, seeing how they can't even find his ghost here, but Sora closes his eyes and concentrates on him all the same. On their simple conversation in the safehouse kitchen, sharing pieces of apricot.

He lifts his Keyblade, and the way becomes clear. ] Let's go.

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