Broken Space

Cal had gotten the idea to host a movie night after he'd found not one, not two, but three Chuck Norris movies. Clearly something like that was a sign, and so he'd scrounged up some blank paper and made a few signs to post on doorways and the bulletin board.

He wasn't really the kind to head the refreshment committee, but he'd set out some juice and punch (and sweet tea made by Alec) and cups, and whatever he could find in the kitchen: fruit, stuff to make sandwiches, a plate of cookies that someone had baked up and left on the counter. If anyone else was feeling ambitious, they could add to it, he just wanted have some basic offerings.

He got everything set up and ready to roll on the first movie, then sat back with a banana and waited for people to show.

[Gathering post! Tag in, tag each other, enjoy some cheesy 70s and 80s Chuck Norris movies. They will be watching Breaker! Breaker!, An Eye for an Eye, and Firewalker, which can all be found on wikipedia or IMDB if you need more info about them. ;) This post serves to fast forward us by three months, too, so keep this in mind if anything significant has happened to your pup in the interim. :)]

It's been a hell of a day.

After being shown around "The Hub", Dean had cleaned up in the empty clinic, washing Cas's blood and his own.

And that's when it hit, the thought that had crept into his mind earlier.

Blood.

Balthazar had sent them to another dimension using a blood spell, and they'd gotten back the same way. When the angel had been stuck without his mojo, he'd used fake Cas's blood to communicate with Raphael.

Maybe he could do the same thing.

It took some time to get set up.

He chugged some juice he found in the fridge, borrowed a few supplies from the clinic, and found an empty room.

Ready.

Dean casts his gaze heavenward once more. "Cas, where ever you are...I hope you can hear this." It's the closest thing to a real prayer he's said in a long time.

The sting of the blade against his skin is barely noticible, and as the blood started to flow he drew the sigil from memory, the red a stark contrast against the white walls.



[For Alec, Cal, and/or Finno]

Calvin hadn't set out to start a party or anything. He'd been out hunting earlier and had shot a few wild chickens before stirring up a boar's resting place completely by accident. Fortunately Cal's tree-climbing skills got him out of goring range, and a few well-placed arrows from above meant there was a lot of boar meat to cook up, as well as the fowl.

So what was a guy to do? He cleaned and butchered the meat, then built a small bonfire on the beach and got it burning. Now it's fading toward dusk, the fire is getting to just the right point to start cooking, and Cal's made a few more trips to get some fruit and vegetables, as well as juice (and a kettle of boiling water, in case anyone wants tea), and he's just hanging out, prepping the meat by threading it onto carefully cleaned and sharpened sticks and waiting for anyone to respond to the "Free meat on the beach" sign he'd tacked to the refrigerator.

The draclings were restless. They were also possibly too large to be called draclings any longer, although that was how she'd always think of them. They were as large as the Stark's direwolves, and would grow yet larger. The cave was no longer a safe hiding place. It was getting cramped. And while she knew that they could easily survive without her, she couldn't yet bring herself to sleep away from them. They were her last reminder of home, and it was to the point where she couldn't sleep if not surrounded by their warmth and peaceful thrumming.

What she needed was another cave--a larger cave. But she didn't know if one existed. She was out searching, regardless. Synge walked by her side while Embyr scouted ahead and Pyro crashed through the brush. It still amazed her how different they could be coming from the same dam, and how different they were from Fiora, but she supposed, in some ways, that was her fault. They'd grown up without dragonkin, and she more than anyone could understand how it felt. She just hoped that the draclings didn't feel as alienated as she had. She didn't think they did, anyway. Being able to speak to them again helped, and she had Fionchadd to thank for that.

"Pryo, stop crashing about," she scolded playfully. "You'll never be a fearsome hunter if you don't learn how to be quiet."

It's an annual tradition, and this year Johnny is feeling particularly celebratory. The island seemed to have gone easy on them this year, for some reason. A few people coming, a few people leaving, and mostly not craziness. In fact, it was so incredibly mundane that Johnny was going stir-crazy. He wouldn't even have minded if the dinosaurs came back, so long as something interesting happened. So this year he'd decided to ring in the next year with a particularly exceptional party in the hopes that something would happen--even if it was just another baby in nine months. With any luck it wouldn't be his.

There was alcohol. Lots of alcohol. And a feast of barbecued boar, roasted fish, fresh vegetables and fruits. There were torches lighting the path from the Compound to Summerfell, and on the beach a large bonfire burned. Best of all, he'd spoken with the sciency types and they'd managed a very special countdown for midnight.

Fireworks. Raw, experimental--but still big explosions of sparks and light. It was going to be awesome.

Baby dragons were still babies, despite their talons, teeth, and appetites. And though Kaeldra tried to keep an eye on them, she couldn't be there all the time. On once such an occasion, she returned to the caves to find brown stickiness ground into the dirt, and three filthy draclings covered with she knew not what.

A short time later she'd managed to get them to the hot springs, and using some of the soap she'd recently made for herself, perfumed with the exotic scents of some of the flowers she'd never encountered before this place. The draclings, however, didn't seem to have the same appreciation for it.

"Hold still!" Kaeldra said crossly, first in her own language and then, when that didn't do anything, she cursed and tried to remember how to say it in Sidhe, but her command of the language is still limited, despite her lessons with Fionchadd. "Ní bhogann sé" she tries, and Pyro gives her a baleful look before he grumbled, tail thrashing as Kaeldra attempted to scrub the sticky substance from his scales.

Flushed from the heat of the hot springs, her cheeks were pink and damp with sweat, her blonde hair now long enough to be plaited and out of her way, for which she was thankful, but she was hot, and sticky, and wet from Pyro's thrashing. Embyr and Synge sat nearby waiting for their turns, clearly enjoying the hot steam from the spring. "What is this?" she complained, half to herself as she knew the draclings' understanding of her was limited. "Did you not think you were dirty enough, you had to put some extra on? Protection maybe?" Pyro, for his part, squawked indignantly.

Things are getting pretty weird. Not that there's a better way to describe a day, or a week, that starts with getting knocked out of bed because your girlfriend's sprouted wings, especially when that morning finishes off a night where your best buddies can now both change into stuff and the stone you thought was dormant is very much awake again and hungry for blood.

But there's more to it than that. It started when his eyes started tingling. It was the weirdest thing, they just started burning a bit from the back, like when there's a wind blowing too hard in your face--only there wasn't, just a flicker of something silver, and then things were back to normal for a bit.

Only it keeps on happening, and every time the flashes of silver get a little stronger, a little thicker, until he thinks he's not imagining them anymore. How could he be? How could he imagine a long, straight, shimmering line of flickering silver stretched across the island in front of him and out to the west, across the water?

A Straight Track. Silver, not gold, but a Straight Track all the same.

"Fuck," he whispers, rubbing at his eyes. "David, this is so your department. I'm not supposed to have this shit." Not all the the stinging is from the Sight, but it's a good excuse. "Where the hell are you, man?"

[Sad!Alec is sad. Open to anyone, though especially wanting Finno and Calvin.]

What do you get when you combine one already creepy compound and two party addicts with way too much time on their hands?

One amazing party.

The entrance to the Compound has been lined with black and fake cobwebs, and an old tape recorder playing a casette of scary sound effects on a loop. All lights have been covered up, and the only lights one can see are at the end of the hallway.

The end of the hallway is the Lobby, and it's been turned into one hell of a party room (no pun intended). The walls are also covered in black, with the harsh fluorescent lights covered with sheer fabric and mounted squares of colored glass. There's a bar, a non-alcoholic fruit punch for the kiddies, a table full of appetizers and bowls of sugar cane sticks and other sweet things. There's not much left in the basement anymore--Bright and Johnny scoured the shelves and hijacked everything that could be used for a speaker system and begged Alec and the Doctor to help.

Well, Johnny begged. Because he's not above begging a Timelord to play the Professor from Gilligan's Island when it comes to wanting a kickass sound system.

Music from someone's forgotten ipod is now blaring, the bass so loud it makes Johnny's chest vibrate--the perfect volume, in his opinion.

And what would be Halloween without costumes? Because otherwise Johnny Storm wouldn't be the devil his sister always accused him of being and just be a man in a red catsuit, carrying a pitchfork with sparkly red horns on his head--and that would just be silly.


[Set to Halloween Night, naturally, but as we're all going to be gone...pre-play to your heart's content!]

In days long past, before Alec or any of his friends had discovered there were actual fantasy worlds, they'd run rampant over quite a few pretend ones. AD&D had been the vehicle of choice, especially since Second Edition came out and made the combat rules about a hundred times easier.

After Faerie they'd kept gaming a bit, but it didn't have quite the same thrill--it tended to make some of them miss what they didn't have anymore and bring back bad memories for others. But on the island (surely the weirdest place of all of them) there'd been a bit of luck with a weekly game night where Dairine had consistently kicked everyone's ass at Risk.

Alec hasn't actually thought about any of this much lately, but the brightly-coloured, stained-glass-looking book labelled Changeling had caught his attention, and when he pulled it out and started looking through it, he realised he'd found what was definitely a book of gaming rules.

Live action gaming rules based on Faeries. Just great. And yet here he is, curled up on the floor of the library leaning against the bookshelf, reading all about Kiths and Glamour and the Seelie Court.

It's been a few days since the Doctor's arrival and the barbeque, but Ukyo has been thinking a lot about Jack's suggestion that she go to Cardiff with him. It's a big step, to go from a chef-schoolgirl-martial artist to an unknown job in a place she knows relatively little about. She doesn't even know exactly what Torchwood does, except that they must deal with time, space and aliens if Jack knows the Doctor so well. Plus there's the factor of disappearing from Nerima completely, leaving Ranma and the rest behind. Would they miss her? Would Konatsu be able to cope? What would happen to her restaurant? It's not that she regrets her decision, or plans to change her mind, but now she's mindful that it could affect the ones left behind.

Sitting on an outcrop of rocks jutting out from the beach and overlooking the sea, her spatula in hand, Ukyo regards her reflection in the shiny surface. "Ne... Ranchan," she says softly. "Will you miss me if I'm gone? You'll look out for Konatsu, right? Don't let him go back to his step-family. And you better not marry Shampoo..." she pauses and grimaces. "Aho! How stupid am I? He can't hear. I might even be in a different time! In Cardiff too!" she laughs and then stops abruptly when she hears someone behind her.

Calvin soars over the landscape of Galunlati, scanning below for any sign of Fionchadd with the sharp eyes of a falcon. He hopes he doesn't see him, of course--by now Finno's hopefully well on his way to the Powersmiths, but well, the Faery boy hadn't looked all that hot when he'd departed Uki's cave, bound for the shores that lead to the Powersmiths' world. So Cal's just gonna make sure nothing happened between there and here, that's all.

A shift of wingtips and he glides lower, looking for evidence of the Faery's passing if nothing else. There! Footprints, faint but detectable with the eyes he's using now. He circles, dropping lower still, but then...it feels like the air grows thicker around him, and suddenly the pain of transformation rips through him, his body feeling like it's stretching, turning inside out, the familiar sensation an unwelcome one now. "No..." he chokes, half birdscreech, have human voice, and then he's falling, and he only has a second or two to realize the landscape's changed, the world is not the same one he was in only moments ago--

And then impact. A cloud of sand puffs up around his body, though it feels like solid cement as he slams facedown onto the beach, the wind knocked out of him. "...Ow," he groans as soon as he can breathe again. Maybe he'll just not move for a spell, at least until every inch of his body stops throbbing in pain.

[Nekkid injun boy sprawled facedown on the beach!]