We're Painted Red [.plot-drei.]

Jacalyn, Robbert, and Jeremy are located in adjacent cells. There is a significant amount of drying blood in Jackie's cell, though it would be impossible to tell without stepping into it since the nearest light is flickering dimly from a place around a corner and far away.

Somebody around the corner is sobbing, and it sounds like somebody near her is trying to get her to hush up with furious whispers bordering on the hysteric.

Jeremy wasn't fully unconscious. He wasn't sure if he could ever be fully unconscious. It had never happened before, since he didn't really sleep. No, he drifted in and out of a stupor that left his limbs feeling heavy and sluggish. "Mmmmmfng," he groaned, feeling his head complain about even trying to sit up by sending blinding white flashes of pain behind his eyelids.

This was a nightmarish place, to be certain. The lack of light didn't bother him so much as the texture and the smell of the cot beneath him. It also had a good amount of fleas- fleas that immediately took a liking to him. His skin prickled uncomfortably as he sat up and rose to his feet. Whatever they'd given him to dull his senses had been strong. Really strong. He wobbled a little on his feet, walking to where he could vaguely see bars.

Not a bit of this seemed to faze him, but being in a cage was worrisome. He croaked, "Hello? Who's there?" He rubbed his arm because it felt funny and found a bit of gauze taped to the inside of his elbow. In the dark, one of his eyebrows shot up. Was that where they administered the drug?

The air was cool, but damp. It reeked of decay and the metallic smell of a butcher shop. Good thing he hadn't eaten recently.

Robberts eyes flicked open as he began to recover from his groggy state, he rolled off of the mattress and onto the ground with a dull thud, a groan coming from his mouth. After a few moments of staying like this he seemed to come into realization that this wasn't where he was supposed to be. He sat up quickly, looking around wildly and fearfully, he backed against a wall only to find that his hand met a sticky substance, when he looked down at it he gagged quietly. His hand was covered in blood that had only recently been there, possibly a few hours old, but still grimy and sticky.

Robbert began to breathe in and out slowly, trying to regain some of his composure. He forced himself to stand up, walking over to the bars of the cell, head turning left and right, searching for some sort of clue to where he could be. He grabbed onto the bars and sighed, trying to think back. He remembered the market, and entering the van, he heard a woman's voice and then.... blackness. Only blackness, and a terrible feeling in his gut that he would meet an end soon. His heavy dutch voice rumbled out of his throat, the fact that he was groggy only made it sound like he was an intoxicated mess.

"He-Hello? Ansleigh, are you there?"

    Jackie slowly woke up in the darkness of her new quarters.  The shock of being in an unfamiliar place hadn't sunk in yet.  The last thing she remembered was being at the lake and falling asleep while relaxing there.  "Did someone pick me up and bring me back to my ro-" her thoughts were interrupted mid way through when she saw that this definitely was not her room.  Between the flickering of light Jackie was able to clearly see the splatters of dry blood painting her cell.

     Jackie's first reflex was to reach for her Katana she carried with her all over campus, only to find it was not with her.  Frustration started to get to her, Jackie next checked her right leg under her jeans where she kept a sheath knife only to find it was taken too.  Reality was sinking in even more and starting to hit her hard.  Who ever it was that took her knew her weakness, and swore the second she gets her hands on something they'll pay for taking her.

    Jackie approached the bars of her cell and looked around to see what she could.  The only thing to stand out to her were more cells in a line and the whispers of people around her she couldn't see.  Jackie's heart was full of defiance and loathing for whoever did this to her, but for now she would play along and wait for her chance to do something.  "Where am I?" she called out in a slightly hoarse tone.

Jeremy tilted his head when two more voices rang out next to him. At least, very close by. He breathed a little more deeply, which turned out to be a bad idea as the scents of fear and decay made him gag a little.

"R-Robbert? You're from the marketplace. Man, it's good to hear a familiar voice," he said unsteadily. "I'm the guy you and... Ansleigh? Ansleigh rescued in the marketplace. I think those people from the van were bad news." He paused. "I don't think she's here. Maybe she... got out?"

Even as he said it, it seemed relatively unlikely. But then, he wasn't sure what her power was. Maybe she could teleport or something. All he knew of her was what he'd witnessed in the marketplace, which was not much. He moved around the edges of his cell, feeling his shoes stick to the floor in a couple places. He also managed to bang his shins against the cot. He grunted and made a mental note of the location in the gloom.

A girl's voice reminded him that they weren't alone. "I'm not sure where we are. Who are you? How'd they get you? I'm Jeremy." He felt pretty calm still, despite the situation. Maybe it was due to the fact that he routinely encountered weirder stuff than this.

Or maybe it was because he knew that panicking would not help anything. "What are your powers? Anything good for getting out of cages?"

Robbert growled deeply in his throat, his mind going back to the marketplace, he remembered the angry men and couldn't help but think that they may have had something to do with this, he quickly dismissed the thought however. Whoever it had been who had taken them had gone past angry words and violent actions, he was in a cell that was covered in blood, some of it not dry. No, it wasn't them who had brought this to all of them. He sighed heavily, the action forcing out a ragged cough. He hung his head dejectedly, hands clasping around the bars of the cage that he was caught in, leaving a large sticky area on the bar from the blood on his hand.

"Ansleigh... No, she's here somewhere, I'm not entirely sure where, but I have a bad feeling she's still here, fire really won't do to much damage to these bars... Sorry that we met under these circumstances Jeremy, you seem like a stand up guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time..."

Robbert's eyes locked on the bars, head quietly shaking, with the words that he had just said, that fire wouldn't do much, he suspected that eroding the bars away with wind and air had an even lower chance of aiding with escape. He looked behind him, there was hardly anything in the cell, let alone anything that would help them escape. He jammed a foot against the bars, sending a ringing clang to resound throughout the darkness.

"You're out of luck, I would have even less of an effect on these bars than fire would. I think that eroding the bars is out of the question..."

Robbert paused for a few moments as he heard the girls voice ring out in the darkness, he looked down at the ground and sighed softly, looking straight through the bars into another cell that had naught but a disembodied, blood caked skull in there.

"...Sorry to break it to you, but I think that we may just be at the gates of whatever hell you believe in. I'd make peace with your god and try to move on at this point..."

    Listening to those around her mildly irritated Jackie.  It was like they had already given up on life.  The thought made Jackie flash back to seeing her parents dead on the floor and the two tactical soldiers standing over their corpses searching for her.  Jackie quietly started to sob in her cell.  "I never asked for this, all I wanted was to be normal.  Was that too much to ask for in life?"  she sobbed into her arms.  "I've got to survive.  I need to survive.  I WILL SURVIVE NO MATTER WHAT!" she thought to herself trying to keep it together.  "All I need is something that can be used as a weapon and I'll make it."

Jeremy listened to Robbert's negativity, standing in non-judgmental silence. He was trying to work through the situation, identify the variables. He was no great shakes at strategy, at least not outside sports. In dreams, he did what was required to get through safely.

In... dreams... His train of thought was getting somewhere interesting when the girl started crying. Jeremy moved to the side of his cell, trying to get close enough to her to offer some kind of assistance. "It wasn't. You've been dealt a difficult hand. These scumbags are going to get caught and you're going to get out of here. Just stay alive."

He leaned away from the cell bars and stretched his neck. "I-I've never told anybody about my power before," he said with a little misgiving. "It's a bit complicated, but I can travel through dreamspace. I might be able to get out and go get help, so please don't give up." His voice got a bit steadier. "I've never had to do this under duress. I'll be back with help as soon as possible, guys."

Jeremy closed his eyes and felt his consciousness (and his physical body) start entering the dreams of the nearest sleeping person. His presence in the physical plane disappeared.

The dream is a nightmare where he was caught in a ring, surrounded by monsters. The sides of the ring are shadowed and the dreamer is kneeling in the center of the ring, her hands trying to hold in her insides. Jeremy is coated in blood.

It is inside his mouth and nose and it percolates in his lungs. Sand clings to his feet and he can feel the cold gazes of those lurking outside of the circle of light. He crouches down next to the woman, placing a hand on hers. It makes him sweat, but he bends the dream to his will and closes the worst of the wounds.

The woman, now an amazon in her stature and determination, rises to her feet. He says something lost to the roar of the crowd, but she seems to understand. He runs from this dream, leaping over a wall.

Robbert immediately began to regret his decision to say what was going through his mind, entirely due to the fact that the girl began to cry, he shrugged however, what he said was most likely true,  he had yet to hear anything of the sense of escaping once somebody had been kidnapped, but he accepted this fact and began to search around for anything that he might be able to use to escape this hellish prison. As was predictable,  he found nothing, he looked across the way however and saw the bones a fully grown man, he leaned forward and focused in, forcing the wind to slowly blow a sharp, broken bone from whomever was dead over there, but it made a loud scraping sound on the ground.


Robbert sighed, giving up on what he was doing quickly enough, he ran his fingers down the cold, lifeless bars of the cage,  eyes closing as he leaned his forehead on the bars of this place, a deep sigh flowing out of him.

"I haven't given up quite yet, but we need to be realistic, you follow me?"

|| Bladebringer passed his turn. ||

"Doesn't get any more real than this," said a voice from the darkness, words thick with a Cuban accent. "Are you enjoying your stay?" A light flickered on, dimly illuminating the space and the filth the two resided in. A shortish woman with thick, jet-black hair that fell to her mid back in thick ringlets looked from Robbert to Jackie... then frowned when she noticed the empty cell. "There were three."

She rounded on the fellow who had followed on her heels- another familiar face from the truck. He was pale where she was tan, and his hair was a bluish-white, with a texture like water. His eyes, a Mediterranean teal-blue looked at the woman levelly, blankly. Large spheres of water floated around his person lazily, occasionally splitting up from themselves or joining.

"Where is the third, Alejandro?!?" She yelled a few words that, when translated, wouldn't be very nice. Another figure arrived, illuminating the darkness beyond the scope of the feeble light. The girl was covered in blood, both fresh and drying. Not a bit of her person lacked the stuff, not even her face. Despite all of this, she emitted a glow that broke through. Granted, the light itself was polluted and dingy-red.

The Latina turned to the newcomer and bit out, "Find the boy that was brought in earlier. He was unplanned. Kill him." The girl nodded and broke into an easy lope, her light quickly disappearing from view.

The Cuban woman was not pleased and her tone was clipped when she said to Alejandro, "Hold the boy." Immediately, the globe of water rushed at Robbert.

---

For somebody who usually didn't get weirded out or bothered by the odd, he was rapidly beginning to panic. There were walls within the dreamworld he had never encountered before; walls that made him take routes within a definable space. When he passed through the same dreamer's head three times, he knew he was trapped.

Jeremy phased back into the real world from the dreamspace in a place of pitch-blackness. He was close to a person trying to muffle her sobs. He tried not to hyperventilate, but the dreams all had similar themes. He tested his surroundings and was relieved to find he was not in a cell. That, at least, was something he could consider a blessing.

He shuffled around for a little bit, attempting to get some bearings or locate a better-lit place. Was this really preferable to the dreamspace?

Robbert, at the sound of the woman's voice, quickly stumbled backwards, half out of fear, and half over the rage that began to overcome him. The voice was one that he had heard before, it was the last voice he had heard before he went unconscious in the van. His anger only grew when he saw Alejandro move up behind the woman, yet another face that he remembered from that fateful bit of time. After he had recovered from the few moments of fear, his teeth clentched and his face turned a bright red. His hands slowly balled up into fists, eyes locked on the woman beyond the bars of his prison.

Robbert's hair and clothes began to whip about as a humming sound came from his cage, the humming soon turned to a howling as the near gale-force winds that surrounded the few feet around him began to spread out. He stomped to the bars, his fists pounding heavily on the cage, his brown eyes, at this point, looked black from the darkness and the shadows drawn over his face. The winds that were around him soon stopped at the edge of the cage, though behind him dust, dirt, water, and blood spun around as though it were a gale from the depths of hell stirring behind him.

It was about this time the orb of water had lunged towards him, directly searching to restrain him. Before he allowed this to happen with all of him, as he knew it would be coming quite soon, he rammed a fist into the bars, directly in front of the Cuban woman's face. A crunching sound came from the hand as he broke two of the fingers on his left fist, the middle and ring fingers, a bit of blood spurting from the hand, through the bars, towards his captors faces. He growled in pain and anger for a few moments before, through clentched teeth he spoke, the bass, dutch accent vibrating through his pearly whites.

"I swear that if I get out of here, I will find you, and I will ensure that you go through as much pain and suffering as you deserve. I swear, if you lay a single finger on Ansleigh, I will crush your throat myself, as slowly as possible."

It was at this point, where he was most likely overdoing it, he rationalized that he most likely would never be able to follow through with his words, but his words soon switched from English to Dutch.

-"Remember my face, remember my voice so that you remember this moment. So that you remember my promise."-

It was at this point that he stopped any struggling that he was doing and submitted himself to his fate.


(Ooc: -"--"-Between those marks he was speaking dutch.)

    Jackie sat curled up in a ball with her back against her cot.  Her knees were held tightly up against her chest, while her face feigned a look of innocence.  Her eyes dared not break contract from the woman talking to them.  "So is this the woman who aims to make our lives a living hell?"  Jackie thought to herself.  The woman seemed to be infuriated by the fact that one of them escaped and how much of a panic they had been thrown in because of it.

    Jackie just kept thinking of all the things that she could potentially do to escape from the current situation, but her own power had it's limits.  She would need to settle down first.  "As long as I am breathing I can still escape." she thought.  "Right now I need to look around and see what little detail can cause this whole house of cards to fall."  Jackie then started to intently inspect all of the people hoping for something, or anything really to give her a little more hope.  "If I can just get my hands on some sort of material and fashion it into something, then I can really start the fight."

Renata stared at Robbert, completely unfazed by his display. "Keep that up, you'll need it." Her tone was absolutely dismissive. When Alejandro had gotten Robbert down, she sighed. "We'll have to dose you with Demon to fix your hand before you go into the ring. As for Ansleigh... I promise you that I will not be touching your friend. I can't say the same for anybody else."

She placed her hands on either side of his face and closed her eyes. A second later, and a smile spread across her face.

"Gotcha."

---

Time Lapse

---

Jeremy was going to puke. Of all of the places to be, he had to be wandering through one where there was no respite in the awake plane or the dreaming plane. He was coming to a rapid understanding of Hell and his role.

He was a runner. Thank his lucky stars for rugby or he wouldn't have had the stamina or the capacity to deal with pain that had gotten him this far. He clutched his left arm to his chest and tried to breathe normally. Jeremy looked over his shoulder, petrified that he'd see the telltale glow of his pursuer through the blood flowing out of a gash on his forehead.

The boy's bright blue eyes could see nothing but impenetrable darkness behind him. He's adapted to the gloom enough to see right in front of his feet, but he knew that his only strategy was to duck into the dreaming as soon as things got hairy. He'd never had this much practice going into dreams and leaving them. While it was becoming almost second-nature, he was exhausted. There were no dreams here that were peaceful. He'd gotten the gash in a person's dream.

He skidded to a halt when his shoes started sticking to what he could only assume was blood. His brow creased as he took in his surroundings. Robbert was gone, but the girl was still there. He stood in front of her cage and said in a rush, "Are you okay? I tried to get out to get help, but there's something in the way. I can't explain it and there's a-a-I dunno- she's friggin' nuts. Broke my arm. I think I shook her off... so is there anything I can do to help you get out? What's your power? Where'd Robbert go?"



||Ansleigh, PM me- there's stuff we can establish. For now, it's Blade's turn.||

OOC: Due to inactivity, we're going to retcon this after the fact. Just send me a PM if you have questions or specific requests. I will be setting up the closing threads for the plot here shortly and I will PM you with where your characters will be when the end is here.