faderift | CLOSED | if i cut off your arms and cut off your legs,

Entry tags:

CLOSED | if i cut off your arms and cut off your legs,

WHO: Mhavos, Barrow, Sawbones, Ellis, Vanadi, Edgard, Athessa, Leander, Dick, & Holden.
WHAT: Slasher Plot / Murderhaus / I should really have come up with a set name for this thing.
WHEN: Late Harvestmere / Early Kingsway.
WHERE: Ostwick.
NOTES: This plot is based on the idea of slasher movies, so there will be blood, violence, torture, cannibalism & NPC death.

YOU MAY REMEMBER going to Ostwick on a Riftwatch mission, closing a rift on the property of the noble Pickney house, and being accosted by the Lady Elsed Pickney. Her (adult) son is missing! Terrible things are afoot!

But that's easy to ignore; Gawen Pickney rather publicly announced his intention to elope with a Dalish elf a few weeks ago. Assurances are made, yes, we'll let you know if we see him, and what can you do but that?

It's time to move on. Traveling back to Kirkwall, a storm breaks out, and everyone decides it's better to find a place to stay for the night than push forward. The Silver Lamp is a cozy Inn on the roadside, and the proprietor, an elderly man named Medrod, is very kind. It's not tourism season in these parts, so he's happy to give everyone a discount for the night, and the meal is on the house. Everyone eats well, has a pleasant enough time, and wanders off to bed for the night.

(The food your characters ate was not people and did not taste strange in any way.)

And then Medrod will let the sleeping gas seep through the Inn, laced with Magebane just in case, and everyone will wake up a few hours later, dizzy and, in many cases, in pain.

(Look for a toplevel with your character's name below.)

HOW WILL THIS WORK? Well, I'll be NPCing Medrod the Murderer. Medrod will be showing up in each thread eventually, after a number of tags I RNG'd. It's entirely possible to escape before he shows up! And don't worry, if you guys get in a rut, I'll make him show up early to spice things up ;)

I'll also be doing dicerolls!

If you have a situation where you feel your character will need to roll (I'm going to let you decide this!) put ROLL in the subject line, and bold what you need me to roll for.

(For example, you can have a whole tag like normal, and then Bob tries to pick the lock. Then I'll roll for success or failure, as well as other factors, and reply to that thread with the results. But if you don't want to rely on dicerolls, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. The dicerolls are an opt-in feature. Use it as much or as little as you want.)

I'll also be rolling for discovery, which will work the same way: if your character is looking for something, put ROLL in the subject line and bold what they're looking for (normal tag normal tag then Alice looked for a lockpick) and I'll reply with results after rolling. But if you just want your character to find the thing without dicerolls, go for it.

IN SHORT, I'm only making this as hard as you want it to be. Your characters are already waking up to torture. If you want them to find the special key and escape in two comments, it's totally fine. (Just respect other people's difficulty levels, if they want to give their characters a harder time.)

The only thing that has to rely on rolls is killing, apprehending or injuring the Murderer, but since I'll be NPCing him, those rolls are automatic and will be baked into his reply comments.

IF YOUR CHARACTERS GET FREE, let me know what they'd want to do next oocly (options below), and I'll set that up for you!

Other potential goals to keep in mind besides escaping:

- Finding / saving others.
- Killing / apprehending Medrod the Murderer.
- Getting evidence of Gawen & his Dalish wife's murder to eventually send to Lady Elsed.
- Getting your stuff back (all obviously visible weapons / staves have been taken away).

You got questions? Lemme know!

DETAILS:

- ~~While in the torture room, your character is free to hear (or not hear) distant screaming. It's muffled enough that you can't identify the source (it's Edgard).~~ The screaming has stopped.

- The hallways between the rooms are pitch-dark, and even those who can see in the dark will find it difficult to navigate, as the walls and ceilings are mirrored, distorting the size, shape, and direction of the hallways.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Halfway through a failed effort on the last manacle, Richard Dickerson has all systems flooded by the blinding instinct to thrash his way out and has to stop his work cold under the watchful eye of the former elf at his side. The break is short-lived but distinct, marked by the absence of any clicking or scraping or creaking. He breathes.

What was Jim saying?

The calipers rattle; he wipes them across his shirt. Work is resumed.

“Try not to look down, once we have you out.” One last pained grunt, and he forces his way free from the table, and his corpse bride. “You’ll bleed out more quickly if you panic.”

He vanishes from view, hobbling, only to reappear up close, keen blue eyes at the mouth and then the seam at the side, assessing the damage.

Yikes.

“Your calm so far has been admirable.” He wedges the flat hinge of the calipers into the seam, and takes a step back to grip the claws, already leaning in to begin the process of levering that seam into a wider crack. These calipers are all purpose. “Have you been tortured before?”

OUTCOME: Richard manages to wedge the iron maiden open just barely enough for get Holden out, though it's a slow and rather painful process for both of them.

Have fun with all that blood.

He notes the lapse — can hardly blame Richard for it, under the circumstances — but doesn't draw attention to it. He has a brief flash of memory to Shed on the Knight, hyperventilating and panicking, nothing like this.

"Yeah, I'd prefer to avoid that."

Looking down; bleeding out too fast. He almost laughs at the question, but that would sound, probably, a little hysterical. Which is something else he'd prefer to avoid.

"I could say the same for you." And then, as Richard starts in on that seam, "Look, if this doesn't work — "

But he was, clearly, wrong to doubt those calipers. The door starts to creak open, cutting him off as the spike starts to pull free. Mostly, he tries not to pass the fuck out as the pain mounts and the wound really starts to bleed, but once it's as open as it's going to get, he shakily starts to pull himself out.

OUTCOME: Holden stumbles ungracefully out of the iron maiden.

Better catch him before he falls on his face, Dick.

A more sentimental soul might vest some significance in the role these calipers have played, and take them along as a momento.

Dick drops them in the hard-packed dirt to catch(?) Holden as he pushes free, one lean, slippery scarecrow struggling to find purchase on another. He’s unduly comfortable in the bloodslick, the butt of his broken hand pressed quickly into the pulse of blood at Holden’s middle. A stiff splay of his bony fingers gives him some insight into exactly how terrible it is before he closes them again, and cranes back to check how conscious Holden is and is likely to stay.

“I have been tortured before.”

He claps his good hand over Jim’s shoulder, and mugs into a reassuring crook at the corner of his mouth. His certainty that this is a survivable situation reads genuine, and only about 20% manic with adrenaline.

ELSEWHERE, Ribbon races towards hushed voices and heavy footsteps, gold lines and pale belly muted in the dark.

ELSEWHERE, Athessa tilts her head toward the sound of voices, and sees on the ground something moving.

The elf blinks. Is she seeing things?

"Ribbon?" She questions, quietly. Yes, that's definitely Ribbon. Athessa rushes forward and gracelessly kneels (falls) down, reaching for the snake to...well, snake up her good arm, past the chain in her hand. To Barrow: "This way, I think I see—"

Snake in tow, Athessa clamors to her feet again and forges on, foregoing her prior diligent smashing of mirrors in favor of reaching the light coming from that door. It's unlocked, but she still puts some shoulder into opening it, staggering squinting into the full light of the room.

Barrow is close behind, chainhand and heavy book at the ready.

It's maybe just as well that Richard's comment goes lost on him because, wow, that's worrying!

He tries to stumble more than fall onto the other man wholesale, but it's not entirely effective; he's dizzy from blood loss and the gut's the worst of it, but not the whole of it. His consciousness blurs in and out, but he does have the presence of mind to also try to staunch the flow of blood at his midsection. And, when the door opens, to look up with alarm —

"Who's there?"

Dick is keeping Holden up like one lightning-struck tree barely withstanding the weight of another. He’s trembling in his vest, dirt-streaked and doused with blood heavy and cool enough to go black where it’s layered thick over his left hand and up his sleeve to the shoulder. At a glance, it looks like he’s holding Holden’s guts in.

His look to the door is bright with panic -- for a split second, he stiffens his grip. Cornered animal fear shines in his eyes and bares his teeth at a sliver, only to boil off in flash of invisible steam.

“Athessa.”

He hasn’t seen Barrow, yet.

“I can’t heal him.”

Edited (SORRY HI SORRY) 2020-11-01 22:01 (UTC)

Athessa's still holding her right arm folded, hand resting against her collarbone. A sling-less sling. But she can still use her left. After depositing her chain-flail on the table beside the dead elf that she purposely ignores, she tears the sleeve off of her right arm with a wince and gestures with the cloth to Richard.

"Here, we can at least try to staunch the bleeding," she says, then asks: "How bad is it?"

Coming to kneel beside Jim, and still bleeding from a million little cuts himself, Barrow reaches for Athessa’s torn sleeve so he can help with the bandaging.

“Might have to carry you, mate,” he says with a wince, looking at the wound.

If they need to move him to better deal with the wound, he'll try to help make that easier — or at least not make it harder. Reaches back one-handed to find the edge of the table, something to balance part of his weight against.

"It's not as bad as it could've been."

Which is true, in the strictest sense. The stake didn't impale him all the way through; an exit wound would pose additional problems right now. And this isn't Eros, fully stranded, surrounded by a hundred thousand people dying in agony, by those making it happen, staggering across the station in hopes of finding the docks before the radiation poisoning kills him.

A memory surfaces, and — truth be told, he does miss the first aid station he and Miller'd found. The stims and painkillers had kept them going till their legs had given out; he could use that now, with the status of most of the others a question mark, with the person who did this still at large.

Which is a thought that pulls him out of that bleary slip into memory, and back to the people in front of him.

"What happened to you two?"

Considering Barrow is also bleeding all over, and Athessa's clearly favoring one arm over the other.

“It’s a puncture, freshly withdrawn. I’m not sure how deep.”

He hadn’t gotten around to sticking a finger into it yet.

With Barrow (he looks twice, the second time with a furrowed brow for the owed favor this probably entails) and Athessa on handier support, Dick is reduced to tripod status. He’s braced in place to keep Holden on his feet. Bloodsoaked as he is, none of it appears to be his.

“Have you seen any of the others?”

It's a funny little parallel they draw, with Holden and Barrow both full of holes, and Athessa and Richard both one-handed.

"I hit someone in the hallway. They scarpered before I could get a good look at him but it wasn't any of ours. Barrow was in one of those things," Athessa nods to the iron maiden with a look of distaste. "I was on a rack. Wrenched my arm out of its socket before we could get the knots undone. It's back in place now, but it hurts like hell to move it."

And then the mirrors, that room, the dead elves, Ribbon...

The snake is beneath Athessa's collar, almost peeking out of where her sleeve used to be.

“Right, got out of it faring a little better than you, by the look of it, but I still bloody woke up with a wall of spikes in my face.”

He scoffs, seeming to keep a relatively good humor about it as he acknowledged Dick with a little nod. No bad blood between them, at least at the moment— they’re all on the same side here.

“Let me support him,” he suggests, “give your arm a rest.”

"Jesus," he says, looking from Athessa to Barrow. "Someone needs a new goddamn hobby."

Why does anyone have one, let alone multiple iron maidens? Multiple rooms full of torture devices? Not to mention the bodies. What the fuck.

(He remembers: dead eyes, cold and empty, on Dresden, on Cortazar, on the rest of them. Eros is hardly a rounding error by comparison. Jules-Pierre Mao and a facility full of stolen children, fodder for his Project Caliban, Everything done here has been to stop what's happening on Venus.

He would've wondered what kind of person would do this once, but not anymore.)

"We have to find the others as soon as possible. Anything could be happening to them." Which they all know already, so he adds, "All three of you don't need to be here with me right now. Do you?"

The question tacked on because, you know, he's not the one doing emergency first aid here.

There’s a scrap wire edge to the next glance Richard casts to Barrow in aside, more becoming of a viper than a rat, but it’s fleeting, and he yields easily, stepping away and aside. Glimmers of Fade green diffuse through the blood in his hands; he cradles one in the other, and gives his blessing for Ribbon to remain where she is in muted, hissing Abyssal.

“Without knowing what we’re up against, we’re more vulnerable separated than we are together,” he speaks up to contribute, in Trade: “We need to leave.”

Don’t split the party.

Edited (the more people who track this the more times i have to edit) 2020-11-02 04:05 (UTC)

"We're not leaving anyone anywhere in this hellhole alone," Athessa says, resolute. It's absolutely not a suggestion. Perhaps punctuating how serious she is, she makes the (rather unwise) decision to use her right hand to tear at her left sleeve, which she then tears in half to make two new bandages. While Barrow is knelt, she wraps his head wound to make sure it doesn't bleed any further, it being the most prolific of his injuries.

"Lemme see your hand," she says to Richard, knowing she won't be able to simply coach Barrow through setting a finger injury.

Barrow’s mouth is open to agree, but he’s interrupted by cloth wrapping around his head. He closes it again, letting Athessa finish, before he murmurs “thanks, love,” and looks back to Jim.

“No one’s left behind,” he says, tired but still somehow amiable, “you’re coming with us, and you’re going to live.”

Richard's response is the one that lands most successfully, with its inarguable logic. They all probably have a pretty good guess about who the murderer is, but what he's fully capable of, what help he might have, even what's in the other fucking rooms is an unknown.

He thinks, I wasn't worried about being left behind.

He thinks, If someone dies because we didn't get out of this room fast enough, that's going to be my fault.

He thinks, If anything else happens to you three, that will be too.

"Together, then."

Edited 2020-11-02 18:23 (UTC)

The cavity of Richard’s clutched hands is a bony, bloody mangle. He separates them to shake a clot of coagulation off the better one at Athessa’s prompt, as if he might have been thinking about handing the broken one over.

He doesn’t.

"I’m -- not sure you’re qualified -- "

Also they are leaving. He looks uncertainly to Barrow, not quite a prompt to pick Jim up like a sack of presents so they can move out, but getting there.

Athessa gives Richard a flat look that looks an awful lot like his own look of impatience, and steps closer as if to take his hand whether he wants to give it or not.

But instead she just lowers her voice slightly, not quite conspiratorial, to say:

"I can reset the bone so it doesn't get any worse before we can get you healed."

Subtler than he's used to her being, probably. She hasn't told anyone he's a mage, and to Holden and Barrow it would just seem like she's asserting her qualifications to a skeptic weenie.

"It'll take less than a minute, Then we can get out of here, find the others, kill the fucker who did this to us, and go...home."

"Going up," Barrow grunts as he kneels next to Holden, slipping one arm under the crook of his knees and the other around his back, "arm over my neck, mate, we'll keep you steady and upright."

He is, at least, fairly confident in his ability to keep his footing when the others are around to spot danger.

"...Barrow, by the way. Didn't get a chance to introduce ourselves before." They'd been too busy missioning, and what better opportunity than while he's literally holding the other man in his arms?

He rearranges his arms as directed, lets Barrow pick him up with minimal resistance — which isn't hard. The bandaging is helping him not lose blood so quickly, but it's not like he's remotely able to carry his own weight anymore.

"Holden." Then, with some wryness, "We'll have to meet under better circumstances next time."

Next time they work together and/or hang out, absolutely no horrorterror torture chambers.

Athessa steps closer and Richard tenses in on himself, discomfort spring-loading through the stiff of his neck, wiry muscle in the backs of his arms plucked sharp through glossy blood.

“I’m not sure if it’s broken,” is the reply, just as low.

It is.

The hand he holds out under the pressure of her presence is kinked at the thumb, torn ligaments twisted away, with a palpable click where a fracture spirals through the bone. It’s also shaking. He is shaking all over, lending credence to the otherwise absurd implication that he is, in fact, a skeptic weenie.

CLOSED | if i cut off your arms and cut off your legs,

ROLL

ROLL: NARROW SUCCESS.

ROLL

ROLL: MEDIUM SUCCESS.

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ROLL

ROLL: ∞