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Summary: After waking up in the grave yard, Connor, Quenton, Sage, Shane and Tara find themselves surrounded by zombies.
Date: November 19, 2011
Log Title: The Haunting
Rating: PG-13
Westchester - Abandoned Cemetery
This cemetery has seen better days. And by the looks of things, those days are long past. Broken headstones, overgrown grass, rundown mausoleums, the epitome of spooky graveyard. One oddness stands out, though. Starting at the far left end of the graveyard, some of the gravesites seems to have been cleaned up, the headstones washed, the grass trimmed, even flowers left on each one. Of course, some of the first rows' flowers are now dead.
The full moon leaves an eerie sort of lighting in the grave yard, creating long shadows against the dark. There's the occasional breeze of wind that causes the leaves to stir up and rustle. Quenton, Sage, Shane and Tara find themselves all waking up in the graveyard, lying in the dirt and grass amongst the headstones. Whatever they were wearing at two o'clock in the morning, if they were sleeping or not, they are wearing right now. There is a chill to the air that seems to hit the bone and the silence is almost unnerving.
The grass rustles, and the sound of a sharply drawn breath is heard, shortly followed by a mumbled "…the fuck…?" A tousled mop of fire-engine-red hair peeks over the grass-line, and as Shane's eyes fall on the nearest gravestone, her follow-up question is a good deal more explosive. "THE FUCK?!" Scrabbling to her feet, she crouches, eyes flickering over the decayed site, then down at herself. Oversized Heartless T-shirt, underwear, bare feet, exactly what she went to bed in. Wrapping her arms around herself, she shivers, biting hard at her bottom lip.
Quenton is face down in dirt. Yep. Dirt. Wearing only a pair of synthetic pajama pants, this does not bode well with him. Thinking that it's the work of some of his classmates, first, there's a chuckle. Then he smashes his fists into the ground, hard enough to propel him onto his feet. "You guys are about to have a -" And then, he, too, glances around, confused.
Tara snaps awake with a start, sitting up with a jolt and shouting, "NOT THE POTATO!" She exhales in relief as she realizes that it was just a bad dream, whatever it was. In the time it takes for her mind to switch gears from being fully asleep to fully awake that she realizes that all is not right in Taraland. The air pressure around her increases noticeably as she takes stock of her surroundings. "Why are we in the graveyard?" she asks, shivering herself, as she's dressed similarly to Shane, except her oversized t-shirt is pink with the entire cast of My Little Pony on it.
It's the cry from Tara that wakes up Connor from his spot on the ground… dressed in his bike leathers from where he was in the kitchen getting a quick drink after a late-night delivery. Pushing himself up to stand, almost immediately the man takes out a handkerchief and begins wiping what dirt there is off of him over and over, and as he looks around a moment, the frist thing he says is, "Not again."
Pushing himself up off the ground, Sage looks around confused. "Clover, where are we?" He asks in a groggy voice before he jumps to his feet and realizes where exactly he is. "Blood hell, I'm in the fae lands." He mutters as he's dressed in just a pair of loose fitting pants and looking around with a bit of worry. "Quenton, Shane, is that you?"
Before the five have much time to figure out what's going on there's a heavy fog that sweeps through the graveyard at a supernatural speed. Within seconds there's about a foot of fog that hangs on the ground making it almost impossible to see their feet. There's a rumble in the ground, much like a light earthquake, followed by a second rumble and then a third, each time getting heavier and heavier.
Shane says, "Wait wha— Quenton? Sage?!" Shane's first reaction is to tug the hem of her shirt down further, crouching a bit… then as the rumbling sets up, her priorities get an immediate reshuffling, half a step taken toward the others. "…Okay what's going on here?""
Quenton rises both brows. "Again?" he wonders to Connor, while he keeps his fists clenched. He already begins to step closer to Shane, either blaming her for it or protectively, it's hard to tell by the look on his face. "If this is some kind of stupid fucking trick…" And then he sees Sage, whom he furrows his brow. "Did someone go into our room and…" The earthquake is ignored at first, muttering as he glances about. Then the second. Then he murmurs, "Uh… guys?" To avoid losing his balance, he begins to float off the ground.
"Right. Waking up in the graveyard. At midnight. Do we have zombies yet?" Becuase of her Awesomevision, the fog is actually a little bit denser around her, not that Tara could tell. "At least, I'm assuming it's midnight. Or night at least." When the ground starts rumbling she quickly gets to her feet, and then rises about a foot off the ground, using her telekinetics so she doesn't get thrown off balance. "Woah."
Taking a wide stance as the first rumbling comes, Connor reaches behind his back, and slips his hands up into the small of it. When he draws back out, there's a six-inch long metal tube in his grip. He flicks it, pressing his thumb in against a hidden pressure switch turns it from six inches to a six foot combat staff. Spinning it once he starts backing up towards the others, snapping out, "Back to back everyone, Tara, keep us all on your radar. Stay alert, stay together, stay alive." The words coming out in rote, and he takes a sort of relaxed stance, the staff over one shoulder at an angle.
At the rumble, Sage stumbles and grabs onto the nearest headstone, with both hands and hair, to keep standing. "This isn't natural." At least he doesn't think it is. He's about to start walking towards Shane and Quenton when the rumbling ground strikes again and he chooses to stay still. "Zombies, what is a zombie?" He asks as he's unfamiliar with the dead that rise.
The rumbling, shaking ground gets stronger and stronger until it doesn't stop. The sound of the ground breaking apart can be heard shortly before the sound of moans fills the cemetary. Rotted hands from various graves start to break out of the ground, grabbing at nothing, except for one hand that finds it self grabbing onto Shane's ankle.
"GAH!!" The moment Shane feels that rotted hand around her ankle, she stumbles back half a pace, shoving her captured foot forward and dropping. There's a brief instant as her foot flushes, then glows red, then explodes with an earsplitting *CRACK!*
Quenton recoils at the scream at first, thinking he did something wrong. But when he sees Shane explode, and then the rotting hands, he growls, dropping down onto the ground, exhaling sharply. "Alright, then," he murmurs. "Zombies. What do you fucking know, Tara, is it? You were right." He backs up, wetting his lips. "I'm not sure if uh… teeth can get through my skin, but…" He trails off, moving back towards Shane.
"Yup. There they are," says Tara with some amount of satisfaction, as she floats back towards Conner. "Zombies are animated corpses that usually hunger for living flesh," she explains to Sage. "Can you make it over here?" She's willing to give him a lift if neccessary.
There's a brief THUNK as Connor plants his staff in the dirt, and pulls off his riding gloves, handing them back towards Quenton, "Here." Not even looking as he then slips the coat off over the opposite side, and passes it over towards Sage, "Put this on, stay close, the jacket has kelvar, so they can't bite through it." As the items are handed off, he pulls the staff out, and readies himself into a fighting stance, "Tara… keep cover on Sage, and let us know where they're coming from. Everyone keep close." With the jacket off, anyone who looks can see that beside the staff he also has a pair of long-looking knives with odd grips that have triggers on them. Readying himself, he spins the staff a couple times, his eyes taking a rather cool set.
Sage hurries close to Conner and takes the jacket putting it on. He looks around the area wide eyed and fearful and words seems to have left him as he just nods at Connor. His hair even seems tense, and when Shane screams he jumps before looking over at her. He opens his mouth to say something but it doesn't seem like any words manage to escape him.
With the crack and explosion, dirt goes flying everywhere, along with body parts of a rotted zobmie. A bit of blood splatters around but it seems like that first zombie is dead. Though the groaning gets louder and louder as a forms quickly rise out of the ground and start shambling their way towards the group. In every direction there seem to be zombies shuffling towards them.
"God *damnit,*" Shane grouses, stumbling backward and tugging down on the hem of her shirt again. "Of all the times to be without my headphones… …. ….Y'know what fuck it. Doesn't matter *why* this is happening. Zombies go down. That's it. Sage, we can't talk our way out of this. Sorry." And with that, she thrusts a hand out in front of the nearest walking corpse, loosing another blast less than a foot away from its chest.
Quenton slides on the gloves quietly, nodding his agreement. "Yeah. They die. They die." For once, Quenton is actually afraid. He's never fought zombies before. But without further ado, he grabs a chunk of the grave that got destroyed from Shane's footgasm and moves to fastball it into the next walking corpse that's away from Shane's own target. "Not how I wanted to spend my night."
"Are you kidding? Things were getting a little dull around here," says Tara with sheer glee. There's a slight shimmer in the fog as she puts up a defensive barrier around herself and Shane. "Yeah. They're zombies, Connor. They're coming from everywhere." If any of them get to close, Tara sends them sailing into the night air.
"Think of this like stress relief… they're already dead, so you can't hurt them… cut loose a bit. But not too much. We don't want to get overwhelmed." Connor replies, then with a grin he spins and with a two-handed grip he lashes out the closest one with his staff, slamming into the head to send it spinning. Then he turns and keeps up his momentum to thrust hard into another to knock it back and down. Keeping himself moving, like it was a kata, he begins to smack and slam any who get close to his side of the attack. He's not smiling, nor is he tossing out any witty banter. Instead he seems almost hyperfocused, and in 'the zone'.
At Tara's words, Sage finds his voice. Granted it's high pitched and squeaky but he just gapes at her before he speaks. "Things were dull? Are you bloody mad? These things…they shouldn't be here!" He says as he looks around for a good place to run and hide the problem is, there is nowhere to run without plowing through zombies. His hair starts to slowly wrap around him protectively, as if putting him in a cocoon.
Shane blasts a hole through the zombie and it lets out a moan before slumping to the ground. Quenton's chunk of gravestone takes out another zombie and Connor is having luck taking down a few himself. They aren't difficult to take down but there's lots of them and when one is taken down it seems like another one, or three, is right there to take it's place. Hands start beating on Tara's barrier trying to break it down. Another few clawed hands go to scrape at Quenton but his toughened skin stops them, just leaving an unnaturally eerie cold where the fingers touched. Shane and Connor get
Shane and Connor get a few clawed hands trying to grasps at them and take away bits of flesh.
"Of *course* they shouldn't!" Shane snaps, lips skinning back from her teeth, as she steps back a pace, then a second, eyes flickering back and forth. "That's the whole *point* of zombie movies! But guess what!" Her back presses up against an unoccupied chunk of the barrier, and briefly she throws a panicked look over her shoulder. Then, heaving a sigh, she leaps…. forward. Into the nearest cluster of the walking dead. A full-body blast rips through the horde, the rolling wave of pressurized air painfully tangible to Tara's shield.
"Yeah, well, guess what, geniuses?" Quenton mutters, while he growls and moves in an attempt to grab one of the zombies by the neck and shoulder, and if he gets ahold of said zombie, use that zombie as… well, a weapon, to smack away any other zombies. "While you think it's all fun and fucking games, we're forgetting one detail. We were all kidnapped and… fucking 'ported here. Like out of an an-" Well. He shuts up. And then the zombies overwhelm and get close, and the claws scrape at Quenton's hand. The unnatural cold causes him to shiver slightly, but the zombie-flail he's made is held out in front of him. "High School of the Dead all over again," he comments, but when he sees Shane get clawed, he throws his zombie into the crowd near her. Or tries anyway. If he even gets ahold of a zombie prior. Her little explosion probably kills it anyway.
"Yeah," says Tara, grinning crazily at Quenton. "Isn't that awesome?" The girl's never been right in the head, and this only goes to prove it. After flinging some more zombies around, and grunting as Shane's explosion weakens her shield a little bit she says, "You know what? To hell with this. Zombies can't fly." With a grunt of effort, she grabs all four of her companions and lifts them up about fifteen feet into the air, well out of reach of the zombie horde.
In the middle of stabbing his staff through the mouth of another zombie and snapping it's head off, Connor feels the pull, and is suddenly yanked up into the air by that invisible grip, "Hey?!" His legs kicking out as one riding boot tags a flailing set of arms in the shoulder and sends it back a few steps, the lift bringing to view that his shirt is scratched on the chest and one arm, and there's a trail of shallow blood on one cheek, "Warn a guy first, Tara… How long can you maintain this. Can anyone make out any landmarks?" Trying to look for something, ANYTHING to go towards that's not zombies and ground.
Sage's hair just keeps wrapping around him in a defensive cocoon as Sage starts to curl up in a ball on the ground. He doesn't want to fight and he's just too scared to do anything so when he starts to float up from Tara's abilities, he barely notices.
Shane's explosion manages to take out more zombies and leaves here as the epicenter in a ring of re-dead bodies and body parts but more are closing in fast. Quenton finds the zombies make good and horrible weapons. When one zombie connects with another they both seem to explode in a rain of blood and bodily goo all over him and the area.
Then as they're all raised up in the air they get a good look at the zombie packed graveyard, anything beyond the graveyard is a foggy haze. Towards the back of the cemetery there's a greenish glow of light shining through the fog.
"WHAT THE FU—" SHane's strangled yelp as she's lifted into the air is cut off as she breaches the crowd… and the slight young student suddenly remembers that not *all* of her clothing is made of unstable molecule fabric. Arms snap down to cover her chest, and a poisonous glare is hurled at Tara. "WARN ME BEFORE YOU DO THAT!!"
Quenton furrows his brow, rising at the nudge, though not before grabbing one zombie by the face, and tossing them into the air so that he can grab it by the legs when it falls. "You're weapon number two," he tells the zombie, while he squints at the light, then glances over towards Shane. Eyes QUICKLY avert, and he clears his throat. "Alright. I can make us a path, but you're gonna have to keep up, Tara."
Once they're all up in the air, and there's less confusion around them, it becomes apparent to Tara why Shane is just wee bit pissed off. "Oh! Um. Sorry about that," she says, apologetic and swings the other girl closer to herself to make for a kind of human modesty shield. She answers Connor's question first. "I can keep this up for maybe a half hour? I don't know. I've never lifted this many people before. I don't sense anything out of whack so it's not an illusion. Or if it is it's really really good." Blind eyes glance helplessly at Quenton as she admits, "Um. I don't do fast. I can only really sense things about thirty feet away, unless I concentrate, and most of that is being taken up by keeping everybody afloat. If you go too far ahead I won't know where you are."
Thankfully Connor came in his 'work' uniform, so he has a collared shirt to strip off and resettle the rig that held the staff, and still hold the knives float attached to him for several moments. Once that and his tie are off, he passes them over to Shane, and is down to a rather conforming light grey t-shirt, "Here… to cover up. Here's the plan. Take us back down… let the strongman take the front. I'll cover the rear. Tara make us a protective tube so that you can protect Sage and Shane. We're going towards the light. It might be nothing, might be something. Either way staying here does no one any good. Shane, I need you to keep Sage going with us. Talk to him, get him up and working with us. No one gets left behind. Believe me, we'll get out of this, but it's important we stay together." Those words snapping out with a calm sort of clarity of someone who's not used to being a leader, but is used to making decisions.
Sage has seemed to just kind of go along with things, nodding as Connor speaks but it's hard to tell if things register in the terrified teens mind. He definitely looks strange as his hair is wrapping him up from his neck down but some how he's still able to move a bit. "Please just be some horrible horrible dream." He says quietly to himself as he doesn't know what to do in this situation.
The green glow gets brighter and brighter, illuminating the fog. Softly chanting can be heard coming from that direction over the moans of the zombies. They reach up to try to get at the group, rotted, boney hands grasping at the air. Where they were standing is now filled with zombies so to find a landing spot for people isn't easy at the moment. Suddenly two of the zombies look up and exhale a long breath, foul looking green mist escaping their mouths as it starts to float up towards the group.
Shane snatches the shirt out of the air with one hand, squirming to turn her back to the crowd as she pulls the baggy top over her head. "Sage," she says, her voice less harsh than it would normally be when dealing with nearly anyone else. "Sage, listen up, okay? Need you to help Tara. Get your hair under our feet, okay? Just need a place to stand outta the way. Lot easier for you t'hold us than for her. Can y'do that?"
Quenton is already swan diving to the ground, using his flight powers to make the landing seem more graceful than it would be as his body gyrates one hundred and eighty degrees into the air and his feet touch the ground, the zombie being let loose and sent sailing through the air and into whatever poor undead creature it finds. He jerks to one side, uprooting one grave stone with one hand and another with the other, opting to use these as weapons. "Hey, Sage, buddy, we make it out of here in one peice, I'll fucking pray to the Durdledums with you."
"I can hold it," says Tara confidently. However, unless somebody warns her about the foul mist she's not going to move anybody away from it since it doesn't seem she can sense it. "You said there's a light?" she asks Conner, as she swoops them down to follow behind the path of destruction that Quenton's leaving, leaving her free to snap up shields to either side of them. "What kind of light is it?'
"Green Lights, chanting, about four o'clock from the way you're facing… and up higher please… they're spitting some kind of gas at us." Connor replies as he looks to the others, and then towards where Quenton is in the middle of the fight, "We can't leave him down there without backup. Drop me." Feeling Tara's grip slip from him he falls the fifteen feet to the ground, landing with the grace of a cat, and swings his weapon out, deftly knocking the heads off the two mist-spitting fiends. Spinning the weapon defensively around him for a moment, he moves closer to the other ground-based person and says, "We just need to buy enough time to get everyone moving. Allright?"
Sage looks at Shane for a bit before the words she said register in his head and he just nods. He lets his hair start to extend out to about a ten foot radius circle around them, it undreads and fans itself out to a almost a disc shape with Sage at the center. "Okay, I did it. I'm helping Tara." He says as he looks around a bit. But then he can't keep them in the air without Tara's help.
As Quenton lands, he finds that he's surrounded by zombies and even though he splatters several with a head stones but they still try to grab him to hold him down so they can bite and claw at the living meat. The green mist spreads out further and anyone who takes a breath of it will start to fell nausea and dizziness as the sickly odor invades their nostrils. The chanting seems to be getting louder as they start to move, and as the chanting gets louder it seems the zombies are getting stronger.
"You are, Sage," Shane says quietly. "You're doin' great too. Thanks a lot." Dropping to her knees at the edge of the hair disc, she leans over, eyes locked on the melee below. "Tara, we figger out where this shit's coming from, I wanna make sure I give 'em a big hug, get me?"
Quenton is right in the mist, so the dizziness is affecting him rather profoundly. And as he gets weaker, the zombies get stronger. While naturally at first, weak little zombies are no match for the boy with the strength of a crane, the dizziness causes him to get sloppy. Scratches start appearing on skin usually tough enough to take bullets (though not deflect them). The former superhero is getting woozy. And the nausea prevents him from doing the one thing that can save him: Raging. "Not uh… not feeling too hot down here, guys," he mentions, smashing a gravestone into another zombie, almost sluggishly.
Tara gives Shane a wicked grin at her plan. "I get you," she says, but that grin pulls down into a frown as Quenton seems to be slowing down. "Uh. Better get back up here. You, too, Connor." She sits on the edge of the hair disk, keeping them out of range of grasping hands, but just barely. "I can take us up as high as we need. I just need somebody to point me in the right direction."
Jumping into the air as he coughs some, Connor lets himself be grabbed by the telekinetic and is pulled up to the hair platform to settle back in, taking several ragged breaths before settling himself and retracting the staff for a moment, "Quenton! Get up here!" Turning to look at the others, he then says, "This is a good idea. If you can support Sage, Quenton can pull or push us along towards the chanting. That's the epicenter… we better move fast. Those things are getting stronger."
"Four O'clock, Connor said four o'clock." Sage says to Tara in terms of direction. He is trying not to look down but focus on Shane at the moment, just something to look at that doesn't have body parts exposed that shouldn't be visible. He just concentrates on his hair at the moment, keeping it spread out for the others as a sort of surface, hoping for the best.
Looking over the side of the disc Shane notices that some of the zombies seem to be getting bigger and start moving a bit faster. Especially now that the chanting seems to have reached the peak of it's crescendo, echoing through out the grave yard. The deep voice resonates in an obscure language and there's something eerie about the voice, almost like it penetrates the skin. Each scratch from the zombie seems to burn a bit as they break the surface of Quenton's skin. At least the zombies go down easy enough not taking much to be destroyed, it's just the numbers that aren't easy to deal with. As Tara moves towards the direction referenced t
to where the green mist is, the silhouette of a giant cauldron can be made out with a form standing behind it. Green light and mist seem to be spilling out of the cauldron at a rapid pace.
"Holy fuck, it's the Black Cauldron," Shane mutters sourly. "All we need is a ten-foot Viking with a black axe and this'll be a goddamn metal video. Quenton! Get up here, hurry! Sage, Tara, can you get 'im up? He's gonna get wrecked down there, and we still got Baccano to watch."
Quenton woozily looks up, at the sound of the voices from his companions. One zombie's head gets clapped off, before he throws the gravestones at more of the monsters and crouches down, smashing his fists into the ground as hard as he can. The air ripples around him and propels him upwards, but the dizziness causes him to hover a few seconds before sluggishly dropping towards the others, stopping just before he hits them. "I don't know what was happening. I was doing fine…"
"Zombie spit and magic," explains Tara, helping him onto the disk, zipping them along with all due haste towards the cauldron (only needing to be nudged in the right direction here and there.) "Let me know when we're getting close so I can slow down. I'm kind of flying blind here."
Reaching over to Quenton when he lands on the hair platform, Connor puts a hand on his back, and says softly, "Head between your knees and breathe easily… it'll clear in a few moments." Spoken as he looks around for a moment and then down towards where the giant green cauldron bubbling up and the chanting. He exhales once, and then shakes his head again before adding, "Shane… how much of a blast have you got ready? When we're close as we can without being over the cauldron, I want you to drop down without the shirt, and rip off the biggest boom you can. Quenton and I will back you up… think you can do it?"
"What…what do we do once we get there?" Sage asks in a voice that is about an octive higher than usual. He just wants to run and hide but he can't find anywhere to run and hide to, besides he knows his friends need him right now. "Tara, we're almost there." He squeaks out as he tries not to look at what's in front of them.
At least for Quenton the effects of the mist aren't getting worse, but they aren't getting better either. Just enough to be an inconvenience. As they get closer the smell of rot, death, decay gets worse and the beginnings of nausea starts to set in on all. The cloaked figure behind the cauldron looks up, glowing red eyes focusing on the group. There's an evil sounding laugh before he mutters something in that strange language and green fire seems to start pouring out of the cauldron and rush up and out towards the five.
Shane's stomach ripples as the mist penetrates her nostrils. "…Augh… Sage… Just… try not to get hurt, okaHOLY SHIT!" Scrabbling back out of the way from the jet of fire, her lips skin back. "I got enough boom to blast that bucket apart if I have to," she snarls, "just get me down there 'n I can clear out a spot."
Quenton does as instructed. Usually he'd argue, but now's not the time. He'll regain his macho later. Head between knees, deep breath, before the muscle bound teen stretches languidly as he can, stumbles a little, than glances over towards Sage. A brief moment of weakness as he lifts a hand and drops it onto Sage's shoulder. "Don't worry, buddy. I'm not gonna let you get hurt, alright?" And then he stares at Connor at his plan, then glances towards Shane, then away. At the sight of the flames, however, he moves to grab at Connor and sort of maneuver his way in the line of fire.
Tara makes a weak moaning sound as she's hit by the awful smell, trying to keep herself from retching. "Auugh. That's… what is that smell?" When people start panicking their platform of hair wobbles as she sends her senses out see if she can tell what's going on. "What's happening?"
Ducking down as the fire comes blasting their way, he says, "Tara! Brace!" And Connor then reaches back and gets his staff back in his hands once more, "I think it's… ugh… rot…" Trying not to throw up, but it's obvious from his eyes that he's a good hit away from losing what late meal he'd had before coming here. Closing his eyes a moment he waits for the wash of flame to pass so the counter can begin.
It's just instinct that causes Sage to move and his hair shifts under them all and what isn't being stood on fans up to make a barrier around them. Lucky for the group Sage's hair can take a bit of fire, though there is a wince on his face as it pushes his limits. "Oh god…don't throw up." He mutters to himself as he's pushing himself to keep his friends safe.
The flames go up and over the group, and they can all feel the heat but Sage's hair barricade protects them from the damage the flames would cause. The cloaked figure speaks in a voice that seems to echo and come from all directions at once. "You will soon join my undead army and become one of us. Prepare to die." He says and laughs an eerie chuckle that also seems to come from all sides. He starts to chant again and as he does the cauldron starts to bubble and something seems to slowly start to rise out of it.
Shane's head snaps up, looking from left to right as the voice echoes all around them. "You… *fucking*… *cheeseball!* Y'know what that's it I'm sick of this bullshit. Get outta my way, Sage," she snarls, elbowing her way past the barrier, hauling the shirt over her head once her back is all that's visible to the rest. "…Someone wanna pick me up when the smoke clears?" And with that, she simply hurls herself off the 'platform' and toward the cloaked figure, tucking herself into a cannonball and charging up as rapidly as she can. Just before she hits, a full-power blast roars outward in all directions, knocking her momentum askew and keeping her from truly hurting herself upon landing.
"Uh…. Tara, you might… have to be the one that does that," Quenton murmurs, already averting his gaze, though when he glances over and sees Shane hurl herself off he scowls and moves after her, floating just out of reach of her explosion, but diving down now, back into the mist to start trying to knock zombies away. "Fuck, give a little warning before you just fucking dive in the middle," he growls out. As if she didn't say what she was gonna do.
Tara says, "Wait, Shane! I can…" Tara says before the girl leaps off and literally cannonballs into the whole mess. "… Wow. That was aweosome." she says with awe in her voice. Now that the raft is two people lighter she can get some semblance of stability on the hair raft. She takes a couple of swallows to keep her bile down and she settles down to see what she can do to help out. Flinging zombies will take more than she has, but she can get some pebbles up and moving them at near-bullet speed if she has to."
Grabbing the shirt, Connor is the last one over the side, taking the fifteen foot drop with all the training that the Danger Room provides, and rolls a couple times, coming up with the staff extending. Moving to where Shane is, he holds out the shirt to her and says, "I got you covered! Here!" It drops over the girls form as he then says, "That was perfect."
Once the fire subsides, Sage lowers his barrier in time for Shane to jump off with ease. "Shane!" He calls out fearing his friend just jumped to her death, that is until she explodes and he turns his face away in fear of seeing the results.
With the large explosion the cauldron cracks and acid green liquid starts to pour all over the ground bubbling like an acid, eating anything it touches. What ever was raising out of it lets out a scream of pain and vanishes into a wisp of smoke. The green liquid also hits the cloaked form who lets out a loud scream of pain that shakes the ground. Like when he speaks, the scream echos and comes from everywhere and this time it's loud and seems penetrate the ears to the bones. Tara is successfull in hitting zombies, that is until they start to fall apart. Limbs start dropping and they seem to be shuffling slower and slower as the screaming just goes on, not stopping. Things are in turmoil as it seems they are starting to be defeated.
"AND YOUR MOTHER TOO!" Shane roars in defiance of the scream, gritting her teeth as the inside of her skull seems to vibrate… something *definitely* new to her, no matter how loud her favored music gets. Snatching the shirt from over her body, she starts pulling it back on over her head, snarling invective under her breath. "I got enough for a couple more if it comes to it," she calls over the penetrating shrieking. "What's left?!"
Quenton shoves a zombie aside, though he's still just a little woozy, making his way over to Connor and Shane. "Not much," he mutters, smashing his fist through another's skull and dragging it along until he's there. "So, I do got a question. We're a little scratched up. Are we about to become zombies? And if there's anyway to just, like, skip that, that'd be fucking awesome."
The scream causes Tara's head to ache, causing her to put her hands over her ears, since she's a little more sensitive to sound than the average person is. "Oww, oough, somebody make that stop!" She reaches out with her TK, almost reflexively to smash in the source of the sound, before it rattles some fillings out of her teeth.
At the same time that Tara reaches out to smash down, Connor does a practiced draw of one of the spring knives from the small of his back and flicks up the aiming piece to arm it. Sighting in, he winces one eye shut as a trickle of blood starts to dribble down onto his lip and then past onto the ground, "Shut. The Hell. UP!" And he launches the weighted blade in a shot towards the cloak's 'skull'!
Sage coves his ears and tires to make the voice go away but it doesn't seem to help. He's not as sensitive to it like Tara but he's still scared by it. NOw that everyone's climbed down his hair starts to wrap back around him protectively, like he's hugging himself.
The combined TK smash and Connor's weighted blade smashing into the 'head' of the figure at the same time causes the voice to die instantly before he slowly starts to vanish into a black mist. Shortly after all the zombies start to fall over and the fog fades. Once everything seems to start to go back to normal there's a flicker of the environment. Like things aren't real. Then it flickers a few more times before the five find themselves in the danger room.
Shane's eyes snap to the 'flicker' the first time it happens, instantly dropping down into a crouch, arms rising to cross over her chest; apparently the unreality of reality terrifies her more than the zombies and the fog and the graveyard. "I *knew* it," she whispers, head turning this way and that in an effort to look in every direction at once, and the slight young mutant even lets loose a small squeak when the scene dissolves… into the Danger Room. Shane simply stares in numb shock, apparently unable to process their true surroundings.
Quenton grabs his head, finally reacting to the scream, before his hands drop and he glances around at the danger room. "What the fuck?!" he suddenly bellows, shaking his head, clenching his fists. "What the hell was this? Some kind of drill?" And then his eyes settle on the oldest person in the room: Connor. "You did this, didn't you?
"
Tara drops to the floor once the room evens out into the smooth walls of the Danger Room. "Wait a second…" she says, squinching her toes against the floor. To nobody in particular she asks, "Danger Room right?" She turns to where she things the control booth is and shouts up at it. "Hey! Dickweed! Next time you do something like that you might wanna choose people who are wearing more than just their panties!"
Walking over, Connor picks up the knife off the floor, and locks it back into the spring-release mechanism before he puts it away, "Danger Room… yeah, Tara." Standing to his full height, he turns to look at Quenton directly, and meets the larger boy's eyes, saying with as calm a tone as he can muster, the blood still marring his lip, "No, this wasn't anything I did. If I WAS going to do a surprise drill, I wouldn't pull four random students, one of whom has ISSUES with violence." Speaking of which, he walks over to Sage, and puts a hand on his hair-wrapped shoulder, "Sage… Sage… it's Connor… your friend. You're safe now. It was just an illusion. Thanks for being so brave about it."
Blinking as the room turns into the Danger Room, Sage just sinks to his knees before sitting there and curling up. "Day..danger room." He says looking around. "It wasn't real." It's more like he's confirming it to himself. He looks over at Connor and blinks, the fear still clinging to him. "Why…what happened?"
As if on queue, a blue furry doctor bounds into the danger room. "Oh my stars and garters." Says Hank McCoy as he walks over to the students. "Are you all okay? The Danger Room just started up a session and we couldn't get in to here or the control booth to stop the session." He seems a bit distraught as a situation like this hasn't really occurred before. "Let's get you all out of here."
The moment the door opens, Shane is off. Without any more explanation than a hurried "Gotta go check somethin' later everyone" she elbows past Beast, bare feet slapping against the polished floor as she scrambles for the elevator.
Issues with violence. Quenton isn't sure if he's referring to Sage or himself. But he, too, approaches his classmates, glancing towards Shane a moment. "Uh, hey, you alright?" he wonders over, before glancing towards Beast. "Isn't this school supposed to be really fucking secure? We're all terrified." Speak for yourself, Quenton. "Oh your stars and garters is right. What the fuck happened? How'd we get in here?" And then Shane's gone, and he scowls even deeper.
Tara scowls as she tugs down the hem of her shirt. "You might also wanna check out how we got in here in the first place." she says to the professor, echoing Quenton's concern. "I'm going to go grab my uniform and go check on Shane." With that she pads off after the other girl.
Sage just nods at Quenton and then pushes himself up on shaky legs. "I, think I'll head up to the kitchen, warm glass of milk, yes." He says as he starts to walk out of the Danger Room in a bit of a daze.
Hank looks at Quenton and nods. "You are absolutely right which is why we must do everything we can to find out what happened and why. You are all safe now and how about we all leave here to make sure there's no other…strange business."
Connor rubs at his eyes a moment, "Language please." is his only response to Quenton before walking towards the teacher, and saying with a rub to the back of his neck, looking down and away, "Doctor McCoy… we all woke up here. I was walking towards the kitchen after dropping off a packet from Mutant Town to the security area, and I blacked out. Woke up on the ground in a graveyard. We all did. The others woke up in their sleeping clothes. Then zombies… and some weird guy with a cloak chanting… it was all really surreal. Sir." He pauses and looks back at the other boys, "Sage needs something to help calm him down. This wasn't good for him. Not at all."
"Language, schmanguage. And you're supposed to be teaching us some fucking responsibility." Quenton shakes his head. "I'm going to go change into some real clothes. Thanks for the drill, assholes." He shakes his head, peeling off the gloves and tossing them in Connor's directions. At least not at his face.
