This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie + OPEN (Grab me if you want a custom starter, even if they haven't interacted yet!)
WHERE: Dreamscape!
WHEN: September 22-25 2512
WHAT: Ellie's managed to keep y'all out of her head until now, but everything's got a breaking point.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Violence, death, torture, body horror (zombie-type), violence towards a teenager.

Radio Nowhere

Comments

The Cracked Mask (Open) (cw: violence, zombie-type infection, combat)

[notathreat]

It's dark, and it smells like rot. The only light comes from the flashlight pinned to the shoulder of the young woman immediately in front.

You are inside the twisted, dark remains of what might have once been a subway car. You are underground in a place long-abandoned to things that live in the deep.

Together, you are together. You are moving. You are going somewhere important. You are in danger. You have to stay hidden. You are being chased.

There is a gas mask over your face, making it harder to breathe, restricting your field of vision still more in the darkness, and in your hands there is a weapon. A sword, a knife, a gun, maybe your hands are your weapons. Who knows-

But then the whole world breaks, and tilts and jolts violently with the sound of rending metal. And the car breaks in half.

The young woman in front of you twists and tries to catch herself, but falls through and down a level with a sickening cracking noise of shattering glass. She yelps in pain, muffling herself immediately, but there is an inhuman, monstrous screeching in the distance, echoing through the rooms of the abandoned subway station.

Things move. They are coming.

Even in the very dim light, the air is cloudy with what look like... spores.

Beneath you, the floor crumbles, and you have no choice but to fall heavily down into the dark.

[baum]

What

the hell is happening here.

Nothing about this makes sense. He wants to pull the mask off, but he's smart enough to know it's there for a reason. He's holding a rifle, and the fact of that settles him somewhat. He holds it like he knows how to use it, and scans the area on instinct.

Until the person ahead of him falls.

John curses, and surges forward. He jumps through after her, landing hard but in a crouch, and then flattens himself against the wall. He can hear someone approaching, and he lifts the gun, training the sight up ahead. He can't see properly with the damned mask, but he doesn't have to be from this world to know that the air's heavy with something unsafe.

A quick glance back at the girl - enough that his eyes dawn with recognition.

"Ellie? What's going on, what's coming?"

It's nothing human, but it still sounds alive.

[notathreat]

Ellie is crumpled on the ground, her visor of her gas mask is cracked in a spiderweb pattern across her face, likely obscuring at least some of her vision, but worse... letting in the spores.

She catches sight of John and freezes, letting out a low and guttural curse, and drags herself painfully to her feet as the screaming echoes down the distant tunnels. It sounds both animal and human, somehow, or human but wrong, like it isn't anymore.

"Infected." Ellie spits the word out and pulls out a pistol, reaching up to touch the side of her mask. She swears again, this time in recognition of something much worse.

"Whatever you do, you keep your fucking mask on. We're gonna have to get to the surface. If we stay here we're gonna be pinned down. Don't let them get you, don't let them bite you. Understand?"

[baum]

Infected?!

There is so much about this that John doesn't understand. Her orders, though, he does. At once his eyes go to the cracking on her mask. If whatever's in the air is about to infect her, he has to do more than shoot the enemy.

"Kill them, retreat, get back up. Yeah."

He jerks his head behind them. She needs to lead the way, not least because she knows this place, but also because she needs to get out of the spores faster than he does.

"Go, I've got this."

And then the first of them comes, and he fires at once, getting the first directly between the eyes. He covers the opening with a spray, and glances at her again.

"Go!"

[strove]

Clarke lands with a crunching sound: a broken bone, a flashlight flying from her grip, sliding across the rusted floor beneath her. Her leg is bent in a funny direction. Her teeth grind as she tries to push herself up. By now, Clarke's had a lot of nasty falls, but she's been lucky. The suddenness of this, complete with the falling of one person after another, has done a number on her.

She tries to survey her surroundings. She knows her flashlight had been in her right hand, a gun—now lost, but hopefully close by—in her left. The mask on her face helps, but she doesn't know where she is.

(For a moment, she thinks she's remembering the lead up inside of Mount Weather differently. Tunnels upon tunnels, all filled with reapers. Couldn't that be the sound? Doesn't this look like it could be connected?)

Tears come in Clarke's eyes as she changes position and looks up. She wishes she had gotten a better handle on who she was with, on who's supposed to be here. Certainly not Anya. The surroundings are similar, but not the same. No, there's someone else here. Another Displaced? Call out and risk what happens, or sit here and struggle to keep going?

Clarke's had her moments of being a lone wolf, but she's also a survivalist. That means ask for help, at least if it exists.

"Hey," she calls out, voice cautiously low. She's not screaming. The pain makes that almost impossible, anyway. "Where'd you land? It's Clarke. Clarke Griffin." The full name is a habit, a remnant of her life before this world. "Let me know if you need me to come help." She's a medic, after all. Never mind the impossibility of working with a broken bone.

[notathreat]

Ellie knows that cracking sound, and worse, it's a voice she recognizes. She can just hope that it's her brain conjuring up a version of Clarke from her memories. That it's just one more way the nightmares are closing in, but she can't say for sure.

"Fuck," Ellie gasps, and tests her limbs, finding them sound. She can't see. She frees her flashlight and finds her vision spiderwebbed, her mask cracked completely across the eyes.

"Fuck," she says again, with feeling, and crawls free, making her way to Clarke's side. For now, the sounds are a ways off. Maybe they can hide.

"It's Ellie. Stay quiet. Where'd you hit?" She keeps her voice in a low whisper, letting the sounds cover the softness of their voices.

[strove]

"Leg. The right one." It's the same one that she once caught in a bear trap when she first met her daughter. (At the time, Madi was very much not her daughter.) But it's a scar she bears, a memory she has. Whether it influenced things here is hard to say.

She mimics Ellie's whisper. The familiarity here is apparent, but not as much. Most of the buildings were in ruins by time she went back to the ground, already taken over by nature. The biggest standing structure was Polis, and the rest belonged to Becca Franko. So she starts to piece this together. It's probably not something that belongs to her. Does it belong to Ellie? Hard to say.

After the Aerie and Zerzura, anything could be a dream or reality. Anything.

"I can heal." That's true in any reality. "But it needs to be set right." Which will hurt. Oh, it's really going to hurt.

[evasives]

Cassian has taken many tumbles in his life, the worst of them quite literally broke his back; so when he falls through the floor and lands with a thunk, when the pain is in his leg and not his spine, he's pretty grateful. His wrist might be damaged too, fortunately not in his dominant arm. Still, with - whatever happened above, he doesn't move for a moment, just listening - for who he thinks is Ellie, or one of the strange moving beings he's noticed in the shadows with awful screams.

It helps that he realizes shortly into the experience, following Ellie through the trains with a gun in his hand that he does not possess on Earth, that this must be a dream.

He rolls over, testing weight on his limbs, but stays seated on the ground, blinking into the dark as best he can through the gas mask. Judging the creatures far enough away (he hopes), he dares to quietly ask out loud: "Are you here?"

She must be nearby - that's simply how these dreams tend to work.

[notathreat]

"M'here," Ellie says with a rough breath, moving slowly. The screams are still distant, but she stays quiet anyway, breathing as softly as she can, pushing away the debris and taking stock of the damage. Bruised, shaken, but hopefully nothing permanent.

The light flashes, swings, and she gets to a crouch, moving towards him, reaching for his shoulder. She thinks she recognizes him, but can't be sure.

"You hurt?" she asks, and this close the spiderwebs of the shattered visor are visible, covering most of her face, obviously impeding her vision.

Spores, visible in the air, swirl around them.

"Keep your mask on, okay?"

[evasives]

He hears her moving towards him first, looking over as she gets closer. One of the first things he notices is her cracked mask, and upon her advice to keep his on, Cassian can feel concern swelling, but he doesn't jump at it immediately.

"Leg and wrist, but it does not seem to be completely incapacitating." Which honestly doesn't say much, given his bar for incapacitation is abnormally high now.

"Yours is broken," he says, more calmly and matter-of-factly than anything else, even in the face of whatever is floating in the air. "Do you have another? Are you hurt?"

The Farmhouse (Closed to Joel)

[notathreat]

Joel comes to, standing at the upstairs window of a well-maintained farmhouse.

It's nearing sunset. The day is calm, the wind rustling through the long grass, bending tops heavy with seeds. It's late summer, but cool enough to be comfortable, the mountain air clear and sweet. There's a forest, running water nearby, and the sweep of the mountains is peaceful and vast.

There's a fence around the property below, high and well-maintained, something clearly built after the infection. A broad yard. Sheep bleat softly, from somewhere on the other side of the house. The soft cluck of chickens.

There is a broken-down tractor down in the yard amidst the long grass, made more visible by Joel's vantage point. Even from this distance, the young woman sitting there transfixed by the sunset is clearly Ellie. She has her face turned away from him.

Inside the room, he'll find it warm, almost homey. It's covered in paintings, sketches, projects. Some in progress, some pinned to the walls. Landscapes, portraits of a woman that's clearly Dina, but older, more composed.

In one of the drawings, she's cradling what looks like a small boy in her arms.

In another, there is a detailed drawing of a baby, nearly grown to toddlerhood. Chubby cheeks and pouty lips and huge dark eyes with long eyelashes. Ellie's handwriting, underneath.

My Little Potato

Downstairs, someone is humming. The distant clatter of dishes. It's peaceful, but everything about it feels muffled and far away. Real but not entirely connected.

charlie i love you but not enough to do prose ('anything for love' by meatloaf plays in the bg)

[texas]

（ home is a concept he ain't troubled himself about in more decades than he ever had one to start. it was almost tess, once. but even then — in a world where anyone can be torn from you at any time, it's a dangerous, dangerous thing to hitch your star to their shine.

his house in jackson was a place to hang his hat. he had books he read. he had a room where he could sink into the smell of sweet pine and wood dust — the way it always smells faintly burnt as you work it. the rough callouses on your hands that catch on the stray threads of old wool and tug. that was almost home, though it was always cold and loveless in those walls after he and ellie fell out.

but this place.

he smells the remnants of a hearty dinner. the clatter of what he knows instinctively to be dishes rather than something any amount more sinister. everything feels lived in, soft and warm and real. he sees ellie — who else but her? — silhouetted by sunset, and his fingers grip the windowsill as he looks at her, feeling the splinter of old paint beneath them. he doesn't know how long he watches her, only that it'll never be enough time. not really.

when he finally shifts away from the window, his attention drifts to the desk. he sifts through those drawings, and when he sees the one of the child he looks at it, silent, for a long, long time.

(he notices that one of the statues he carved, of an old cowboy on a bronco, is dusty on the top shelf of her cabinets, and something seizes like a suckerpunch in his chest.)

his fingers trace the writing he recognizes all too well as ellie's, and then he sets it back among the other pictures. it's a dream. it's gotta be. but he can't tell if it's something he's imagining based on the small fragments of what he'd hoped ellie might have one day, or if it's something of hers.

only one way to know for sure.

he heads downstairs slowly, one hand steady against the wall as he comes down the stairs. he finds dina in the kitchen and just... freezes a little, not quite sure what to say. if he ought to say anything. if she can even see him. ）

I've found your weakness

[notathreat]

[Music floats up as he makes his way down the stairs. Parts of them squeak, the old familiar friendly way that old houses do. There's a record player in the corner, playing something familiar, with Dina humming along. She pulls a dish out to dry, running a yellowed cloth across it, and gives him a half-smile.]

Hey, Joel.

[She nods out the window, toward where Ellie's seated on the tractor.]

They're right out there.

[Her heavy eyelashes and dark eyes mirror the features of the little boy in the drawing. She turns back to the sink, taking up humming again.]

The Lodge (Closed to Jason) (cw: violence against a minor/DAVID BEING A CREEP)

[notathreat]

The air is freezing cold and thick with smoke and ash.

Jason is inside what looks like an old lodge, long dilapidated and abandoned, with threadbare carpet and broken plates and dishes strewn treacherously across any place someone might walk. Outside there is a whiteout blizzard, howling. Fire is licking up the door to the outside.

He is trapped here, inside this place. It was once a restaurant, with huge booths and a large kitchen, now haunted and struggling to breathe, the world thick with terror and anger and pain, like someone's drenched the air in a nightmare that can be breathed in along with the ash.

Someone, near the entrance and obscured by booths, is struggling to catch their breath. It sounds young. Too young. And in terrible pain.

A soft, breathy male voice rushes across the back of Jason's mind, deceptively gentle, pleasure twined with sadism. Something terribly unhinged. Horribly familiar the way only memories can be.

This one isn't his, but he hears it like it is.

"Run, little rabbit. Run."

[reneger]

( ah.

this isn't his nightmare, no, but he knows the feeling. how shit being trapped feels. recognizes the inability to breathe, the anger and terror and pain.

recognizes the voice plenty, too. it's not one from his own side of the universe, but they're all the same. sickos and freaks who should have stayed locked in a basement and never let out. but. we can't always get what we want, and clearly this guy is here. jason doesn't turn to look for him. just feels his hip, verifies that his gun holsters are still strapped to his thighs and that the guns that are usually present during these dreams are still there before he's. turning and moving to quickly run his way across the restaurant, to the sound of those little breaths. )

Hey, ( voice low, soft, careful. ) it's okay. I won't let him get you.

[notathreat]

[She moves before he can catch more than a glimpse of her. Tiny and skinny and pale, halfway to starved, with flushed cheeks and glittering eyes. Jason's voice is gentle, but the terror and rage only intensifies, a kind of trapped-animal fear.

But she is thinking.

There isn't much warning when she rounds the corner, the very same switchblade flashing in her hand -- but she catches sight of his face and stops, eyes very wide and very young. She said fourteen, but she could pass for twelve.

She's not dressed warmly enough for the weather, covered in half-melted snow and splashed with blood, bruises darkening on her skin. Her hair is falling out of her ponytail. Her canvas sneakers are soaked with icy snowmelt. Every breath is a strain- something is broken.

Ellie's scar is still there, through her eyebrow, but most of the others on her face are missing.]

But he could get you.

[And by the sound of her hissing whisper, it's not an option. It's not. Not here where she is small and scared and armed only with a knife, and flames licking up the walls.]

The Vigil (Closed to Peter) (cw: death mentions/grief)

[notathreat]

The air is thinner here, and cold. Crisp and clear. The sunshine is bright, the sky blue, and snow forms a quiet blanket over too many things, leaving the world to stillness.

Peter is sitting in a cemetery.

It's circular, filled with old-growth trees and high fences on all sides. A path, and benches, and a crumbling angel statue.

It feels cold, here, and still. Breathless. Grief has a weight, and this is a place thick with mourning.

Across the path, a familiar young woman in a tattered coat sits in front of a gravestone with fresh-turned earth, digging her fingertips into it until it must hurt her hands, but she doesn't seem to notice. There are flowers on the grave, artificial and in a chipped vase.

Her eyes are sleepless, her face pale and drawn and hollow, like she's somewhere else.

[nerded]

It takes Peter a moment to get his bearings, or at least feel a little more like there's solid ground beneath his feet. He doesn't recognize this place but it's cold; it's winter here. When he glances down at his hands, at his arms and legs, he notices that he isn't wearing the right kind of clothing for the season but that doesn't seem to bother him — it's sunny though, so that's nice at least.

When he gets to his feet and takes in the rest of his surroundings, it all feels a little fuzzy around the edges, like he can't see it all quite so clearly no matter how many times he tries to blink his vision clear, but it's real enough that he could move without trouble. Even without recognizing this particular place, cemeteries feel too familiar.

He notes the small scattering of worn gravestones packed into this space, and when he lets his gaze wander past the nearest ones, reading unfamiliar names, he spots Ellie too.

"Hey." He approaches slowly, snow crunching under his weight, and hovers somewhere between wanting to be close enough to be supportive, but polite enough to keep his distance as well. He studies his friend, and then the flowers (white and blue ones), the dirt, and finally ... the gravestone itself.

Joel Miller.

He doesn't recognize this name either, but it's not hard to figure out how important he must be.

[notathreat]

The dreams of being back in Jackson don't come as often now, but they're harder to break free of than they were, now that she's so far away. Ellie still feels sometimes that she's living in a dream, that maybe the infection finally took over and she's lurching around a broken-down trailer somewhere, hallucinating a city from the future where she has magic powers and Joel's alive.

This place feels more real sometimes than her apartment, even though she knows, logically, that the dirt on his grave is years old now, not fresh. That these flowers have long since rotted away and faded in the sun.

So Peter's voice startles her. Normally, this is a silent vigil. Alone.

Ellie swipes at her eyes, looking up with a start, then breathes out, rough and shaky.

"... hey."

Of all the people to be here, he's definitely not the worst option.

"You been here long?"

The View (Closed to Abby)

[notathreat]

"Are you kidding me? You gotta see this!"

Abby's in the hallway -- back in a place that's familiar, overgrown and warm, where the air smells familiar and green. A younger girl's excited voice echoes down the hallway, a flash of reddish-brown hair.

She's small, fragile, with stick-thin limbs. There are buttons and pins stuck to her backpack, and there's a smile on her face, visible in profile.

She keeps running ahead.

"C'mon! Hurry up!" She darts across the bridge, and the skyline is familiar.

Salt Lake City.

The girl stops, ahead, silhouetted by green in the light of a doorway, sunlight shining through.

"You see this?" she whispers, her voice soft as Abby catches up, gesturing. They are several floors up, and eye to eye with a giraffe, feeding slowly on the greenery.

[armd]

It takes Abby a moment or two to place her.

Coming into a dream for the first time is fuzzy, indistinct and slow to connect. Abby finds herself taking in as much detail available to her for a long and hazy moment. As is common in dreams, everything blurs out a little at the edges. The moss on the walls crowds in ill-defined lumps of green, the wall doesn't have a pattern save for the odd chip here and there, the product of a young mind focused intently on something other than trivialities of the surrounding environment.

Her voice is familiar. So is that flash of the scar through her eyebrow when Abby dares to look closer at her, paused halfway down the hallway, but even if she didn't have it, she thinks that she would just know who she was anyway. Instinctively, perhaps. A warning system, rigged into her psyche.

She hasn't ever seen Ellie smile before. It seems warped to Abby, and unsettling, but as Ellie turns on the spot to start racing away she discovers that she has to follow along behind her whether she wants to or not.

The outline of Salt Lake is instantly recognisable to her. She can even see the hospital from here. If Ellie is this young, it means that Abby's dad is in there, right now. It takes her breath away more than anything else does, and her gaze darts from the distant city line to Ellie, and then up to the giraffe, unaware of any tension between the spectators as it chews.

Is she supposed to reply? Is this meant for her? What the fuck does this mean, to be dreaming about Ellie in a capacity Abby has never known her before? Like filling in a gap, something that she never asked for.

"Yeah," she says eventually.
Slow and uncertain, feeling her way.

[notathreat]

The sun streams in around them, and the animal watches them with huge dark eyes, long eyelashes, chewing.

A footstep sounds behind Abby, next to her -- and Joel walks past her. Younger, stronger, moving slowly.

"Shhh... don't scare it," Ellie says, her voice soft with wonder and delight, and Joel's voice is incredibly gentle. Reassuring.

Fatherly.

"I won't, I won't."

Joel approaches the giraffe with open hands, moving slowly, and Ellie from behind him pipes up, distressed. "What are you doing...?"

And Joel reaches out to it, placing his hand on the giraffe's cheek. It allows it without a single ounce of fear or hesitation.

"S'all right... c'mere," he says softly, coaxing Ellie forward, a protective hand grazing her shoulder as he urges her to hurry up. Ellie's eyes are wide, with joy and wonder, as she reaches up to pat the animal.

"Hey there," she whispers, breathless and transfixed, sounding so young, her hand soft on the bristly fur. Joel, in profile, watches her with a profound loving warmth in his eyes. Neither of them seem to notice Abby there.

The Aquarium (Closed to Mako) (cw: violence, intimidation, interrogation, death)

[notathreat]

There is blood on Mako's hands.

It's sticky and hot, and his heart is still pounding, his mind spinning, adrenaline rushing. The rest of him is icy-cold with salty seawater, with sheets of rain. Desperation and fear fuel him. Rage and grief. He is in a hallway, a glass tunnel with wet, slick floors. The concrete below is painted with fanciful sea creatures, the walls and ceiling glass, nearly completely obscured with algae.

A storm rages, somewhere distant, rumbling through the floors.

There is a gun in his hands, and he knows how to use it.

There is a bloodstained map in his pocket.

And there are memories in his head, of someone lost, someone he loved, someone who was his whole world. Brutally and cruelly taken from him.

He is hunting.

[browbeater]

It takes some adjustment-- he's had blood on his hands before. He's dreamed about it, but it's always been jarring every time. Time for his mind to both wrap around, and adjust to the feelings that he's dreaming, to even attempt to resist them? It had been a long, long time since he'd felt that feeling of loss. But since then, he'd grown up. He knew what it was like to go searching, if not quite what it felt like to "hunt."

He turns the gun over in his hands, both perplexed and understanding at the same time (and distantly aware that this was a significant threat he'd never faced). But he sets it aside and looks around at the aquarium, and then he presses forward.

This doesn't feel right, but he can't place it. Not yet. And it's only years of control that tamps down the rage just enough to move forward not clutching the gun desperately. He considers calling out, but honestly.

Calling out's always a bad move.

And so he moves quickly and quietly forward, eyes peeled out for other people.

[notathreat]

She's here. The one he's hunting. He knows it. The details are a blur, but the blood on his hands isn't the first and won't be the last. He's hesitated, he's made himself sick with the brutality of it, but he has to keep pressing onward.

The rage and grief won't allow for anything less.

He keeps remembering. Flickers of horror. The memory of Bolin's screams. It's a hot sick blur -- but he's almost found the one responsible.

She's close. And he paid a steep price for this information. For the chance to deal with her himself.

He was helpless last time.

This time he won't be.

The blood is drying already, and the shadows move over him as he traverses the hallways. Comes to a doorway. The room on the other side is dark and indistinct, with a single bright light over a makeshift gurney. The acrid smell of rubbing alcohol and burnt flesh.

There's no sign of a body, but something awful must've happened here.

There are voices past another door. One of them sounds angry, and female. On the edge of shouting.