[ OPEN ] waking up to ash and dust

[rekt]

WHO: Everyone!!
WHERE: De Chima
WHEN: Feb 25th - 28th
WHAT: A disastrous radiation leak that needs containing/cleaning up after, before De Chima citizens can return to the homes they had to evacuate. See OOC post.
WARNINGS: See thread headers






The morning, after Murphy first felt the bark of a tree under his hand rapidly turn brittle and decay, is a deadly quiet thing, eerie in the clarity in the air, the blue of the sky, as if nothing has changed. The terrible thing about rising radiation is that it goes unseen until it's too late to run from it. In anything less that a nuclear death wave, all fire and devastation rampaging on, that is. Somehow, the earth knows, and the animals, like sensing a coming storm, flee. That's the first sign of it.

Either outward into the Virginia wildness, or into the city they typically avoid, animals scatter and run from the forest, the bugs and smaller creatures at first, and eventually the birds, raccoons, deer, bears and all else. Still, it's only a fraction of the forest's inhabitants - the ones that managed to flee before the swift flood of unnatural radiation swallowed them up. The animals aren't so exotic in nature that you'd think the local zoo had a prison break, but the sheer number of them running from their habitats ought to be alarming in and of itself. Some may even be hungry, as a large part of their food source has just died out, so all curious children and onlookers should be on guard, to avoid either being trampled or made into a quick snack. ImPorts may need to step in to keep things in order.

Later, that day, the city officials will have looked into the source of the chaos, and reports of mass destruction and abnormally rapid decay in the forest and surrounding areas (encroaching on city limits) will have flooded in. A mandatory evacuation of neighborhoods and businesses near the forest line is put into effect, civilians ordered to leave all their belongings behind, abandon their houses, and follow emergency routes into safe zones marked further out. There may be some stubborn or stuck by the spreading radiation that need rescuing or encouraging.

A call is issued to imPorts for aid - in assist evacuation, contain the spread of radiation, and purge the remnants of it. Radiation levels have skyrocketed by this point, as if the ground itself could seer any bare foot or hand that touched it. Without the help of some kind of imPort power to resist or heal through the effects of intense radiation levels, any entering the infected area will need to be entirely robed up in protective biohazard suits or risk immediate effects - boils and burns pulling up on their skin, vomiting (a sickening, inky blackness at the worst of times), internal bleeding, seizures, cataracts, cardiac arrest, and other fun, horrifying, grossness.

At the center of this is John Murphy, hiding out deep in the forest, miles from where the radiation has begun to touch the city, relatively unaware of just how devastating his loss of control over this power has become. There's a tent put together near a fire that'd burned out long ago, the site looking near abandoned, tent zipped up and quiet, but inside there's John Murphy, head in his hands, eyes closed, trying to calm the panic that started this entire thing. Somehow, he's thinking, if he doesn't see the blackened, dead, silent forest around him, he can convince himself it isn't there, and there's nothing to be alarmed about. Murphy's never been that skilled at lying to himself. Richard Gansey will be able to help soothe his panic with an empathic ability, and the Justice League has power nullifiers that can keep the source contained, but it'll take getting to him through the radiation first. In the aftermath, there's still radiation contamination poisoning the forest and part of the city - a solution to cleanse the area to save it from permanent restriction will be required as well.

Comments

joseph kavinsky | ota;

[pillz]

open;

[many things about joseph kavinsky have changed, since he entered and left dr. chilton's home for lost boys. he wears chinos and tennis shoes and button down shirts and sometimes even argyle. sometimes the argyle has pink in it. he works out, he eats vegetables, and he loves and cares for his boyfriend, to the extent that that's possible when you're emotionally impaired beyond most recognizable definitions of the word— love.

but some things absolutely have not changed. among which: he's still a hell of a city boy.

and right now, lost as fuck.]

Murphy!

[his voice sounds smaller and thinner in the empty silence of radiation-blackened trees than it ever does during races or publicity events. he's more of a lost boy than the king of a small hill now.] Murphy! [he cups his hands around his mouth and shouts into a motionless sky. he's been wandering in circles for at least fifteen minutes now. help a brother out, will you?]

closed to murphy;

Hey, [he says.] Hey, hey. Hey.

[they sectioned murphy off, somehow. say what you will of adam parrish— kavinsky doesn't have much to say of him at all these days, but between him and the other dream thief and some uncomfortably emotional input from kavinsky himself, they figured it out. they figured out how to stop the waves of radiation rolling off murphy from killing any more of the verdant world around them.

kavinsky wishes he could get in there, be with him through this, but that would defeat the fucking point of having this shit contained. instead, he's left sitting outside. his normally clean-pressed polo shirt is rumpled and skewed on his skinny shoulders, his hair falling out of it carefully groomed spikes. he touches his fingers to the clear pane that separates inside from out. he had already dialed murphy's phone, which makes it mildly less stupid when he speaks into the eerie quiet of the poisoned forest:]

Hey babe. Can you hear me?

[rekt]

[ kavinsky. of course he's here. he's what started this entire thing, and murphy half wants to punch him through the barrier that's keeping him and all his radioactive death separated from the rest of the world, and half wants to just crawl into his arms, and he hates himself for that a little. he'd been an idiot, thinking they'd be this partners in crime thing. that he got to be the only one to know Everything.

He feels the phone buzz in his pocket, and looks to his boyfriend past the plexiglass, staring with that dull, distant gaze he'd mastered back home, as if he intends to entirely ignore the call. they can't even discuss then one thing they need to in here, not with the entire de chima city government around, so what's the point?

eventually, on the fourth or fifth ring, murphy sighs, answering the call. ]

I can hear you.

[pillz]

[the kavinsky behind the protective wall is uncharacteristically somber. even for the version of kavinsky that chilton had renovated with a mysterious and ill-advised brand of psychiatry. usually, the buttondown and khakis version of kavinsky manages to look semi-serious mostly by virtue of keeping people at arm's length. polite is just another way of making sure nobody sees the reality of you.

but murphy saw the reality of him. in high-definition, with the odor of blood and death, and the full realization of all the lies of omission that had come with them in the months before.

the tattoo on the side of his neck pulses as he swallows. not just uncharacteristically somber; also uncharacteristically nervous. and it isn't even about the government goons hanging around. not even a little.]

Listen, [he says. you can file this one under 'pointless statements by white boys.'] I know I let you down.

[rekt]

Figured that one out all by yourself, huh?

[ a dull drawl, the kind he takes with too friendly journalists and reporters that annoy him on the street or at a restaurant. not the kind of tone kavinsky usually gets from him - the one that makes it clear he'd rather be having dental surgery than having this conversation. ]

And?

[ anything besides the pointless white boy statement? it's almost laughable - that's the kind of thing you say for 'sorry i ate your leftovers' or 'oops i stood you up because i was high'. not 'hey, sorry you stumbled on that hours old corpse i stuffed in the closet, also i've been lying out my ass and using you for months and months and months'. the latter part is almost more offending to him than the former. maybe it is. not things kavinsky gets to know right now. ]

Come to patch up your cover story now?

[pillz]

[kavinsky's fingers leave a translucent print on the screen, when his arm sags down. his eyes drop too, before climbing back up to murphy's face. for a young man who doesn't really experience much in the way of normal guilt anymore, he looks awfully guilty.]

Can you give me a break? I ain't talking about a cover story. I'm just-- I want to get you out. I want--

[he manages to resist the urge to look over his shoulder. better not to be that fucking obvious. but he bends nearer.] I wanna go back to how shit was. I know you liked it. The normal life. [this is. probably, the wrong thing to say. it borders on your classic scenario, husband telling wife that the problems are in her imagination; that if she went back to pretend, all would be well again. that the lies upon which their happiness had been built, in and of themselves, had been good and beneficial.] We can do it again.

[rekt]

[ The audacity of what Kavinsky is telling him leaves Murphy shaking his head for a second, before letting out a loud, abrupt laugh. What even do you say when your serial killer lover tells you to come back to the 'normal life', and 'the way things were'. The way things were was Murphy sitting around getting pampered in the public eye so no one would catch on to the bodies Kavinsky was dropping, and him, like an idiot who never got hugged enough as a kid, going along with it, none the fucking wiser. ]

You honestly think I'm that stupid, don't you?

[ maybe he is. he let it happen for so long, didn't he? there were signs, he knows, and maybe he was just ignoring him, because he's that freaking desperate for it. hearing things like 'i know you liked it, the normal life' make his stomach churn now. like he wants he'd rather smash kavinsky's face into the glass than kiss and make up. ]

Nothing about this, us, was normal to begin with. [ they were two psychos playing house. murphy and his baggage with kavinsky and his over-medicated psychosis. they were a massacre waiting to happen, and look where they are now, and still, all they're concerned about is each other. the rest of the world would be sick with them. ] Find another damaged idiot to hide behind. There's plenty who look a lot better in suits and expensive hair gel than I do.

[pillz]

[kavinsky opens his mouth. he is one truly moronic mistake away from telling murphy to stop being crazy, to think about something else; he's one stupid line from telling murphy what to think. he truly is every world's perennial shitty husband archetype, which is not much of an upgrade from every world's perennial wanna-be-mobster creep archetype, which he had been before.

maybe at least kavinsky has good intentions, these days. he looks at murphy, thinking about him splayed out drowsily on egyptian cotton or eating his way through an over-priced plate of charcuterie with messy, indiscriminate crackers. or standing out on a twenty-fifth balcony, making billowing, terrycloth wings out of expensive bathrobes. sometimes kavinsky would pick dandelion seeds out of his hair. there was one time they'd experimented with shaving their pubes into different polygons, and another where they'd snuck into the deepest part of a ball pit and made out until a seven-year-old stepped in kavinsky's groin. it hadn't felt like a lie.]

You're not stupid. I wasn't hiding behind you, [he says.] Don't break up with me. That would be a bad decision based on inaccurate information. Murph. You-- [he looks left then right again, reassuring himself.] You seen more of me than anyone.

closed to gansey;

[rekt]

[ by now, murphy's realized Shit Has Gotten Bad. there's been a few helicopters he'd heard passing by up above, and his phone has been buzzing with news feeds of an expanding radioactive fog, eating away at the land on it's way into the city. none of this has done anything to aid in calming murphy down. if anything, it's sped the progression up, and petrified him inside his little tent.

murphy isn't typically one to panic, except for when everything around him is dying and the world is falling apart, and unfortunately, from where he's sitting, it sort of feels that way. so what happens when they get to him, through the dead zone? they lock him up somewhere in some decontamination chamber for the rest of forever? in jail? or maybe they just decide he's too dangerous to keep alive and kill him. ridiculous notions for a civilized world, but murphy isn't from a civilized world, and he'd been mob lynched for the simple thought that he might've killed someone. nearly sacrificed to execution because he was conveniently there.

a million reasons why he'd won't survive whatever outcome this incident ends in swarm in his head, and it feeds the intense barrier of flaring radiation around his campsite, like a shell of miniature death wave to keep the rest of the world out until he can think his way out of this, or find a means of escape. he thinks to call kavinsky, of course he does, but then... that's the entire reason he's here in the first place. he found something he shouldn't have, he's not as thick skinned and callous as he thought he was.

the sound of footsteps outside the tent shakes murphy's attention from thoughts of kavinsky and the lifeless body he'd dragged in, head snapping up and hand reaching out for the knife he'd brought with him, quickly tucking it underneath the jacket he has laid over his front, waiting for whoever's finally reached him to enter. ]