taxonomites | Haunted Holo March 2nd [visual] Backdated like whoa

Entry tags:

Haunted Holo March 2nd [visual] Backdated like whoa

The feed opens up with a close up of a very grim face belonging to a certain private eye vampire. Then he backs up to reveal...a shop full of stuff more closely associated with Taxon's own resident inventor-slash-scientist-slash-veteran. And said inventor scientist veteran Taxonian is right there, taking up half the frame. Mick'd appreciate no comments regarding possible blood relations.

"I'll make this brief," he tells the screen. "Glitch has told me things take a turn for the worse every now and then, David Lynch style, and it would seem we're in for another round. Scott Summers and Bagoas," he glances at Glitch for confirmation of the name, "have vanished from the city, despite both of them showing up on the map. If you can see this, Scott, Bagoas, please let us know you're okay.

"As for everyone else, if you see anything at all out of the ordinary,aAnything, please let us know." Turning to Glitch, gesturing at the screen. His turn to say his piece.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm thinking the disappearances have to do with the so-called ghosts, so let us know if you see any," Glitch says and leans in. "I've been plotting them for a while and have been working on an algorithm to sort out a pattern."

Now he's just throwing science words around.

"And...I've got this." He holds up something that looks a bit like a brass compass with a corkscrew antenna. "It emits a harmonics field and will pick up any disruptions. If you...find yourself in a situation like Bagoas and Scott have, we'll find you on the map and use it to try and get you back."

And maybe, perhaps, find a way to cross over themselves.

Scott comes to lying in the street, recognising the voice in his head and the alien drives that fight to try and control him.

It is Mick's voice that rouses him. He hears it at a distance, swallowing as he feels around for his glasses and realises he can't feel them.

He holds a hand over his eyes and opens them. When only a trace of red light flickers over his hand he curses softly and fights back the surge of grief and fear before rolling onto his side and looking around.

Bright light and colour flood his vision. He grabs his glasses and then the tablet, not questioning where it came from. "Mick? I- It was sunrise." He isn't sure he's making sense, but the world isn't making sense right now. "Is this one of those things, where everything goes insane?"

Mick starts right into alert mode, grabbing the tablet to get a better look. "Scott."

It takes him a moment to get past the...new look. And another moment where he wonders if it isn't new at all, like his own two-faced self. First things first: Make sure Summers is okay.

"Yes, it was sunrise. Right before dawn, actually. You were in Osten, right? Are you hurt?"

Scott looks away, swallowing hard again. "I'm... not seriously, no. Just some bruising and scratches." He runs a hand over his face; he can't feel the blue lines, but he knows they're there. "I'm still in Osten. I don't know how long I was out. And I- Christ." He closes his eyes, pressing a hand to his brow. "I can feel him. In my head. Laughing."

Mick's at times very eloquent brows hike up a notch. "Him? Can you tell me what happened, Scott?"

"I don't know."

It's an emotional response that he kicks himself for. "No. I, thought I saw something, like a heat haze, or static. Then... I heard a child. Laughing. Squealing. Happy." He pushes himself up fully and looks around. "Then I started to hear him. Feel it again."

So it has happened before... Revising his strategy quickly, Mick turns his focus onto familiar ground: one professional levelling with another.

"You disappeared. I was there, heading roughly in your direction. I got a bad feeling and ran towards you, but by the time I got there, you were gone. No trace of you anywhere.

"Glitch and I are working on getting you back. From wherever it is you went."

"What do you mean, where I went? I'm right here." He looks around the becoming familiar surroundings. "Where the window was exploded out. I expect the aliens won't be too happy I did that. Anyway... it's not just me here."

He closes his eyes. "I saw my son, Mick. The one I lost. I'm sure that laughter is him, but he's... trapped in the reflections somehow."

Mick's heart sinks like a rock in deep waters. His son

"I'm sorry." And suddenly, he falters, not knowing how to phrase any of this.

"It seems...like reality as we know it in Taxon has-- shifted, somehow. People sometimes vanish, but then they're actually gone. This time it's different.

"Both you and a kid named Bagoas have gone missing. Both your markers are live, and we can communicate with our tablets, but you're not here."

He looks around again. "There's no Extras."

It's where the eerie silence comes from, that carries the laughter and shrieking so well.

A shriek and giggle that echoes around him again, a delighted child. "Dada!"

"Tell me you can hear that," he whispers. "I can't take going crazy again."

Mick shares a look with Glitch over his shoulder, one of alarm. "Yeah. Crystal clear.

"Listen, Scott. You're not the only one trapped. We're not yet sure if Bagoas is all right. Last we know, he was hiding from an angry mob in an underground laundry room."

He gives a slight sigh. "Again, I'm sorry you have to go through this. We've been having a weird few months. Ghost sightings, malfunctioning trams and hatches, lots of strange things happening. And now this."

"Underground laundry room..." He nods and pulls himself together, making himself ignore his son calling to him. "I can try and find him. I'll be going on foot, I don't trust the transport system, but I can run fast."

Faster if his body is currently under the influence he thinks it is.

He calls up the map on his tablet, searching for Bagoas.

"... Bagoas? As in the Persian courtier and or Alexander the Great's personal... attendant?"

There's a moment's delay as Mick's gears turn. "Oh...uh." He shrugs, shaking his head in tiny swiveling motions.

"I don't know. Maybe, I guess? In any case, he's clearly not from modern times. He's a small, waifish guy with black hair. Looks Mediterranean."

And adding with some weariness. "At least he runs fast."

Well, if they both survive this, maybe Scott can try and talk history with him. If he speaks Arabic or English.

"Okay, I'm going to start heading his way, see if I can help him at all." Keep moving, keep busy, keep focused. His own experiences weren't dangerous here, just disturbing on a deep level. Harrowing.

There is another shriek, less happy this time. "Dada?! Ow! Ow, Dada!"

He leaves the tablet on and starts running. "Talk to me, Mick, is he holed up somewhere safe for now? And if there anyone else closer who can help?" He'd sooner not stop to double check the map now.

"Just a sec," he says, bringing up the map and looking for said eunuch. "He's in Wilde. Northwest. Party Poison's with him. You might want to get in touch, get their twenty."

...Mick may or may not have dabbled in ham radio once upon a long time ago.

"It's a narrow street lined with shops. They're probably somewhere marked with a spider, or some very distinctive graffiti."

"Get their... sure. I'm on my way, I'll try and raise Party on his tablet. Or could you do it, save my breath for running?" He'd learned to delegate, he doesn't have to do everything himself.

And here Mick thought he was the one delegating, but then again, he might want to cut the guy some slack.

"All right. I'm leaving this channel open. I'll get right back to you."

This is Mick. Please respond. Urgent.

busy, tumbleweed. bags n i r safe.

Gee, would've been good to know that sooner. I've sent backup your way. Summers.

"Do we know where they were when they disappeared?" asked DG, her forehead creasing into a frown of concern as she picked up the tablet from the kitchen counter. She suspected that Scott could take care of himself, but Bagoas was still trying to get used to the city, let alone anything else. "We've got to try and find them!"

Sitting and waiting for the city to return them wasn't an option she wanted to consider. There was no way of knowing what would happen to them while the other prisoners just sat around and hoped for the best.

"Summers was in Osten, near the tech store. Bagoas' last known location was in Wilde, and I couldn't agree more.

"We're going to try tracking the anomaly, like Glitch said. We just have to figure out where to start."

"If we can predict it, we can warn folks to avoid it or..."

And then there was one of those Glitch grins of the manic and confident sort. "Or hitch a ride and either get them back here or find a way home for all of us."

Yeah, that was totally the plan.

The grin that DG flashed back at Glitch made the option that she intended to take perfectly clear.

"We can't work out a pattern from two disappearances, but I don't want to sit and wait for the next person to be taken." None of them did. "Has anyone taken a look at the last place they were seen? I could do that. There might be something useful there."

"This vanishing," states the low voice of the ex-god. "Is it not natural, in this world?"

She has seen nothing out of its place, nothing. To her eyes, time and space are intact. A part of her, long forgotten and long dead, would be energized by the simplistic talk of numbers and patterns. But she is no longer, and Illyria has no will to feign her, at the present.

"People exist, only to be torn away and returned with no memory of the time that's passed. How is this different?"

Mick's bottom lip juts out in response to the deepening crinkling between his eyebrows. He shakes his head to the first question.

"It's different 'cause they're still here." As strange as it feels to talk about concepts like this, he's enough of a sci-fi nerd that he can use terms like time-space continuum without feeling like an utter moron.

"It's like they're..." He hesitates, not wanting to use this particular term. "Ghosts. Summers just contacted me on his tablet, and Bagoas was broadcasting in holo mode yesterday, being chased by a very angry mob.

"...have you ever heard of anything like this?" He figures he might as well ask. If anyone would know loads of weird stuff, it's the blue lady. The older you get, the more random trivia you tend to accumulate.

She looks off, just slightly away from the tablet's view, searching through the ancient files of her memory, and hers. She finds it, blurry and distant.

The halfbreed.

Lost in the depths of that place, the Wolf, Ram, and Hart, he walked as a ghost, once. Two realities, distinct and yet merged and distorted. But it was not the place itself that merged them. It was the doing of another.

"Yes." Her gaze returns, blue and unblinking and sure. "Another world, dwelling underneath the folds of this one. It is a cage within a cage, a mere distortion of what is real."

The vampire nods, lips thinned with the gravity of the situation. "That sounds about right. You wouldn't happen to know a way into the other cage? So to speak."

Her pause is lengthy and heavy.

Spike's descension was as much his control as the restoration of his corporeality. This much she remembers with clarity. Such is the way of the wolf, the ram, and the hart. Their spidery fingers of power stretched far.

But this world is different. The vanished are flesh and blood, not wisps of thin air.

"I once held the power over dimensions," she says, sounding both prideful and full of regret. "I could enter and leave them as I pleased, like passing through water. But no longer." She lifts her chin and hesitates before granting the halfbreed an answer. One he should be grateful for. "There is no order here. No purpose. It will consume you as easily as it consumed your companions, and spit you back out only when it is finished. You need only open your eyes, halfbreed. If you do not find it, it will find you."

Edited 2012-03-04 23:17 (UTC)

How many times had he heard the same sentiment from his best friend's lips, and just returned it with a glare, or a grin, or a quip? He couldn't say.

Right now, he can't help but feel weighed down by his own age, insignificant as it is. There's no glares now, nor grins or quips, just silent acceptance that that's how Illyria views him.

The halfbreed bit is new, though.

"I already did, but it was gone until I could catch up with it. It took Summers and left me in the streets. I don't need to see it to be able to smell it."

...he could smell it. I could--!

"Thanks, Illyria." He gives her a small smile, eyes glinting with sudden epiphany. "You've been a great help."

And there it was. The appearance, the sound of someone who seemed to comfort Beth, to make her feel safe simply by existing. It felt like they had been missing each other lately, two ships passing in the night. So she was happy to see him on her tablet, even if the news he brought with him wasn't exactly good.

"Vanished? What does that mean? Are we going to start a search party? Put together some sort of plan, divide up the grid of Taxon to find them?"

While Taxon was big, it wasn't that big. It wasn't like having an entire world to search. And Beth could only imagine what it was like to be lost here, to be stuck, away from what little comforts one was given here. No; they had to be found.

What does that mean? She always knows how to get right to the important questions. Lately I don't even know half the answers, but that's never stopped me before. So far, it hasn't stopped either of us.

Mick shrugged, half smiling despite himself at Beth's eagerness to dig into the situation. It felt like home just to hear her voice. "I don't know. We don't know, other than it's shaping up to be a bad one."

He should tell her to stay indoors, to bar the windows and lock everything ten times over (and if it were fifty years ago, he might've even had some authority to do so). He wanted to tell her that she had to stay safe, take every precaution.

But what came out of his mouth wasn't admonitions or cautions. It's a small huff of laughter. "And yeah, to answer your question, that's pretty much it. Me and Glitch are heading out soon for a first run. How about you take the night shift with me?"

Better if she's with him if anything happens, the voice of reason pointed out at the back of his mind. More to the point, he'd been itching to get his hands on a real puzzle for ages now. He couldn't imagine Beth felt any differently.

Beth had a feeling that Mick was holding back his protective side, the side that told him that he didn't want her in the thick of this. The side that would be happiest if she stayed behind locked doors in her apartment, checking in with him every hour on the hour.

But they both knew that would never happen. She had shown Mick pretty early on that she wasn't one to sit out of the action. And while it had put her in harms way a few times, requiring a quick rescue or two from Mick, she had also saved him a few times as well. So she figured they were even.

Minus the whole 'vampire with vampire abilities' thing.

Beth couldn't help but smile when he laughed, "Do I even need to answer that? Just tell me what time to be ready."

The first time Mick told her to stay in the car, she didn't, and ended up saving him from a fiery, silver-lined death at the hands of a sociopath. So, no, Mick knew better than to deny Beth her leeway.

"Tell you? Since when does that ever work out?" He teases fondly. "How about I pick you up at ten? We go check out the known ground zeroes, do our thing. Work our way outward."

Beth laughed lightly, "You've got a point. And ten is perfect. Do you want to meet at the apartment, or somewhere else?" It would save time if they just met at one of the ground zeroes, but she knew Mick would never go for that. Her walking around without her vampire escort and all.

Her mood quickly changed to that of a more pensive one, her voice softening, "I like this. You and me working together - it's almost like being back home."

"I said I'm picking you up, I'm gonna pick you up, Beth," he said, his smile warming by degrees into a grin. It's as though Glitch wasn't even there, it was so easy to slip back into the comfort of familiar ground.

" And yeah...me too. So, uh, I'll swing by your place around ten, you know the drill," he went on, affecting casual nonchalance and falling just short of it. He knew this thing between them couldn't be healthy for anyone involved, but she was still his closest friend here. Through thick and thin. Despite everything.

"I'll see you then."

ooc: edit of tag being eated by browser, and my brain not remembering the tag correctly until I'd already re-posted. XD

It was now five until ten, and Beth sat on the sofa in her living room waiting impatiently for Mick to arrive. She'd been like that all day, really - impatient. Obviously, she wasn't happy that two people had simply disappeared, that anyone could disappear at any time. But to have a mystery to solve again, a case to work on with Mick?

Her legs started to bounce up and down in anticipation.

Finally, Beth stood up and went into the kitchen. She would get herself a glass of lemonade. That would take time, right? Get the cup, get out the lemonade, pour the lemonade, add some sugar, put the pitcher away, put the sugar away, take a few sips...

9:57.

For her sanity, Mick had better be on time.

9:59, there's the familiar distant rumble of a certain, familiar car coming down the street. Mick had always liked being on time - with perhaps the exception of the early years after his siring, which were lost in decadence and a consuming air of couldn't care less, in equal measures thanks to Coraline and Josef - but what he didn't like was being too early.

At least not right in the here and now, because a guy can't come off as too eager to a girl for whom he shouldn't technically harbor anything beyond friendship. But fact of the matter was, no matter what he told himself, their relationship was complicated, and seemed doomed to continue in that vein for a long time to come.

He only hoped, as he turned the car around, that this spur of the moment investigation thing could help ease away some of the lingering awkwardness.

He hopped out, walked up to her door, and knocked twice. "Beth, you ready?"

Before Mick could finish his second knock, Beth was opening the door. She pulled on her coat, closing the door behind her on the now four glasses of iced tea chilling on the kitchen counter. "Ready."

And then she was leading the way to the car, already in reporter mode, "So I spent the rest of the day trying to dig into the disappearances, but whatever is going on is being kept well under wraps. I was thinking that, whatever we do find out tonight, we should let everyone else know. I mean, maybe it will keep it from happening to more of us. I even talked to Helen and she thought that maybe I could continue being a reporter here. Relay the information that I'm able to gather to the rest of us stuck in Taxon. And I..."

Cut her off at any time, Mick. Or she'll just keep talking.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Haunted Holo March 2nd [visual] Backdated like whoa

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

Re: [visual]

[visual]

[text: locked to Party]

[text: locked to Mick]

[text: locked to Mick]

no subject

[visual] don't forget your formats <3

[visual]

[Visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual]

[visual] [>location next? :D]

[location: her apartment]

[location]

[location]