Broken Space

"...there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." -Hunter S. Thompson

Sam was trying to get familiar with his new surroundings, but the whole situation was surreal--and that was saying something, for someone who'd led the kind of life he had. He still wasn't entirely convinced that his mind hadn't just entirely snapped (for more than one reason, but he was ignoring that).

The place seemed real, if too good to be true, and he'd spent some time exploring the more civilized areas in the last few days, whenever Dean would let him out of his sight. He understood how Dean felt, but if what his brother said about this island was true, it wasn't as if he needed supervision. No demons, no ghosts, no skinwalkers, shapeshifters, werewolves, vampires, none of it. A magical island without a trace of the supernatural. It was as if the universe had decided to send them to the only place where they could truly relax.

Sam wasn't relaxing, wasn't letting his guard down. The world was never what it seemed, and Sam had seen the dark shadows that accumulated in the corners if you didn't keep an eye on them. He knew how deceptive trusting face value was. He was a Hunter, and this place didn't change any of that.

He went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee from the pot someone else had prepared, stirring a little sugar into it and surveying the room with a sigh. He didn't flinch when a darkly cheerful voice spoke up. "Settling right into Fantasy Island, aren't we, Sammy? Gosh, it's nice. I haven't had a vacation in millenia--not one you'd want to send a postcard from, anyway." There was a chuckle, and even though Sam pretended not to see or hear anything, he could see Lucifer moving in his peripheral vision, strolling into the kitchen and perching on the table, hands clasped loosely between his legs.

"Maybe I'll learn to surf. What do you think? Satan on a surfboard, now that is a photo op. You could join me, get some sun on that pasty skin of yours." Sam didn't answer, gave no sign of hearing, and Lucifer tsked and shook his head. "You may as well enjoy your time here, because it won't last forever. I have plans for you, Sammy-boy. Big plans." Sam's jaw tightened and he took a sip of coffee through clenched teeth, eyes narrowing. He was so busy ignoring the fact that he was either hallucinating or being haunted by Lucifer, he didn't realize an actual flesh-and-blood person had entered the room.

It's been three days.

Three days since Dean discovered his brother's body unconscious on the beach. Three days since he'd carried his brother's unconscious body to the clinic. Three days that he'd cursed the fact that there was no doctor who could help Sam. Jack had helped to get his brother stabilized with an IV and catheter, but that was all they could do. Nobody could get into his brother's head and find out what was going on.

He'd been here too much over the years. Sitting by Sam's bedside. Waiting for him to wake up. And he wasn't sure how much longer he could take it.


(Open to all! Dean is unusually vulnerable right now, which might result in conversation, or grumpiness.)

The Doctor is strolling down the beach, hands in his pockets, whistling.

From the evidence thus presented, one would be well within the realm of understanding to assume him to be quite happy. In reality, this is an act. He's twitchy, not entirely comfortable, and there's a crawling under his skin as if something is about to happen. A feeling, if you will.

He pulls out a pair blue and red 3-D glasses from his pocket, puts them on, has a good look around--then sighs and tucks them away again.

"Well, it's all very well for you," he says to the cat sitting calmly under a palm tree, watching him. The cat looks unimpressed.

"I don't suppose you want to come in," he offers. Donna is asleep, Jack still isn't comfortable around him, most of the others are uncomfortable in a different way entirely. Fionchadd he gets on with, but the Faerie's out hunting. Will is supposed to be coming over for tea, but not for a good hour yet. The Doctor is lonely. "I have some tuna. Fresh, Jack's only just caught it. And there's probably cream."

The cat yawns and starts to lick its paw.

"Oh, all right." The Doctor tries not to pout. "I'll just keep myself entertained. I can do that, you know. I'm very clever." The cat does not look certain it believes him on either count. He supposes it has a reason to. He's clever, but he's also very, very bored.

Inside the TARDIS, he starts banging things around just because he can. Worst case scenario, it'll wake up Donna, and---actually, he should probably not wake up Donna.

And then he hears the engines start up.

"What? Now? Now!" He's beaming, exhilerated. And slightly panicked. Jack is not going to forgive him if he gets left behind. He races back toward the door, but there are more corridors and turns and things that then were a few minutes ago, as the TARDIS grows back into her thorough old self. "Jack!"

And then he feels it, all the universe shifting and moving and warping around them. It's already too late. He's done this for so long, he can feel the exact moment when it becomes too late.

And by the time he yanks open the door--just to check, just in case--he can only see stars.

[The Doctor, the TARDIS, and the long-idle Donna have left the island. Reactions here are fine, or elsewhere, or not at all, as you like. Don't worry, the island won't be without a Doctor for too long.

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. :)]

( Cut for Spoilers for episode 7x01 )

He closes his eyes and covers his ears and waits to die, but it doesn't come. The light fades, though it's still bright, and there's still white noise, but it's different too. Soft. Like one of those cds that sounds like the ocean.

Dean cracks open one eye and squints into the bright light which is, he realizes, not an angel's true form but sunlight. Ridiculously bright sunlight shining off of water, but still just sunlight. And the sound of waves? Actual waves. Because instead of the lab, he's on a beach.

"What the fucking fuck."

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.

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.

One thing Vermouth would never tire of was the beach and the ability to sunbathe for as long as she liked without having to think about any pressing missions, or whether anyone in the Black Organisation was plotting to kill her this week. So spending some time each day (when random monsters were not attacking) on the sand and then in the sea was a habit now.

Finding a sunny spot, she spread out her towel and after sitting down, twisted up her hair into a knot and put on the sunglasses she'd found in the laundry. Humming to herself, she squirted a generous dollop of sunscreen onto her hands and started applying it to her legs. Just because she was a sun worshipper was not reason to turn into a red lobster.

Since finding out that Amelie's birthday is today yesterday, Ianto had been hurriedly attempting to make plans for a celebration. He'd asked Bran for a cake, as had threatened to do, but in addition to the cake, had made plans to take over the lobby, their usual party location.

It was last minute, but Ianto didn't want to disappoint, and so had spent the morning preparing fruit punch, tea, and of course, coffee. Entertainment was a little harder to come by, but after bemoaning the situation to Alec and Lilly, Lilly decided that Ianto was far too uncool, and that she would take care of it herself. Ianto had no idea what she had planned, but he hoped that it would prove entertaining.

Luckily, getting word that there was a last minute celebration was not an unusual occurrence on the island, and Ianto had faith that people would show up, since any excuse for a celebration was generally embraced by the local population.



[Gathering post! Informal cake & punch, and Lilly promises special entertainment later. Even I don't know what she has planned, but I'm willing to bet it involves things that will make Alec blush ;) ]

For a variety of reasons, Amelie is throwing a masquerade ball. It had not occurred to her until the later stages that this meant that she would be attending a party. Thankfully, she had found a suitable dress in the basement. Elizabethan, by the look (and feel) of it, but it had a matching mask. Both were light green and embroidered with gold. The mask also had golden feathers.

Of course, there were too few people here for her to be truly anonymous, but that hadn't actually occurred to her until just now.

She tries not to panic - breathing too quickly might make her faint - as she surveys the room. Food, music, and she had found flowers as well. Now all she had to do was hope everything went all right. And play matchmaker. And hope no one talked to her.

She took the biggest breath she dared to take. Should be easy.

There was, Bright thought, something pretty cool about being able to have a New Year's party on the beach. He'd made a bonfire, got some brews, fired up the grill, and harassed everyone he knew into hauling a whole lot of food down to the main beach. His iPod was hooked up to some speakers Alec had gotten working again, and there were some towels and cushions tossed onto the sand for people to sit on.

Success was his.

"Happy new year celebration in progress!" he yelled. "Let the party begin! Who's got karaoke?"

[NYE party! Tag now/late/slow/whatever at will!]

So, there were, as the Doctor had said, opportunities. They just needed to figure out how to use them.

Which was why Ianto was in the Torchwood Lab. Because if there were opportunities, he wanted to make sure that everyone was going to get them. So he's interviewing Misato about her astral travel, trying to see if she can sense where the Void might be leaking. Fionchadd is there not only for moral support, but will get his turn as well.

But new powers are unpredictable, and thus far there's been more frustration than success, which has left them all a trifle edgy.

"Shall we try it again?" Ianto asks, his smile strained.

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!]

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.

Misato's hit a gold mine. Between the mini-mart (now unfortunately vanished) and some careful scrounging, she's come up with more extra rounds for her sidearm than she's likely to need--which is good, because as important as it is to save bullets, it's also important to keep in practice, so that when you actually have to shoot something, you hit it the first time.

So she thinks it's safe to waste a couple of them, and has set up a target out of a bit of wood and scrap metal in a clearing off the beach. (It might be a bit more therapeutic to shoot up some of the nonfunctional technology, but you never know when one of the others will figure out how to make it work.)

Misato lifts the gun and takes level aim, lowers it again--then lifts it in one swift motion and empties a pepper of rounds into the centre of the target.

At a rustling sound behind her she spins, raising the gun again--reflex, that, but she probably doesn't actually want to shoot whoever it is coming up from behind.

Misato'd heard the story, of course--the mini mart world turned into a crime scene, the whole thing marked off-limits till they could be sure there'd been no lasting damage. She'd offered at one point to go and check it out in a military capacity, but so far there hadn't been a need. The offer still stands-it would be something to do beyond examining the bits of technology the others find washed on their metaphorical shores, and most of that she does just to make sure it's not any part of the Eva project. Oh, she's learning--she can't help that; she's a quick learner and pretty good at figuring things out--but she still worries sometimes that one of them will turn up some day, and the rest of Torchwood will have put it together before she can stop them.

But for now, there is nothing new, and she's indulging in a hobby she didn't have much time for back home--sunbathing. She'd always had a thing for hot springs and beaches, and so now she's taken a blanket, a book, and a six-pack of beer and headed to the beach for some well-deserved lounging.

The water still makes her think of LCL sometimes, and the island is nothing like post-Second-Impact Japan, and the beer is something cheap and American that barely tastes like beer at all, but it's hard not to let her thoughts stray back home sometimes. She pops open one of the cans and holds it up to the sky before she tilts it back. "Ritsuko, Kaji...kampai."

Contrary to what some people have been led to believe, Fionchadd is not a total stranger to that wonder of technology known as the coffee maker. Oh, most wonders of technology are utterly foreign ground, but this particular metal and plastic monstrosity he had once taken special care to learn, while the others of his party rested in a house belonging to Dale Sullivan. He had learned the futility firsthand of attempting an adventure with uncaffeinated mortals.

What he had never counted on was becoming such a mortal himself. There are some aspects that frustrate him more than others, and the capacity for chemical addiction is a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things, but it does, he think, lend him some previously unfathomable insight into how the mortals' brains work.

All of which is a very long and convoluted way of explaining why there is currently a damp, half-dressed Faery in the kitchen, munching absently on an orange and muttering at the coffee maker.

[Pointless kitchen post! But he hasn't had a public one in a while. Come by, however long or short a thread, and say hello. :)]

The worst heat of the day has died down and Ukyo stands at the edge of the beach, on the firm sand, with bare feet and her over-sized spatula. Her eyes are focused on a point far away, her expression serious.

Drawing in a deep breath, she exhales with a 'Haaa!' sound and starts a complex and rather deadly kata which involves sweeping swings and slices of her spatula. At each move, she speaks aloud, "I am, I'm! I have, I've! I had, I'd!"

It's a unique way to learn how to use contractions, but Ukyo finds mingling martial arts with learning helps her remember English, just as she learned how to cook okonomiyaki in a similar manner.

"They are, they're! They have, they've!" she thrusts the handle of her spatula into the sand and continues on with punches and kicks. "We are, We're!"

The island was very, very frustrating. Or, rather, Tony was very, very frustrated in many, many ways. The only people propositioning him were women with kids or teenagers. The worst of the stuff with Sue is now she'd probably avoid him and he had actually liked talking with her.

To avoid dealing with how incredibly ticked off he was at himself and other people, he tried to concentrate on larger projects, but after awhile, he'd go for a walk wishing he had a segway or a golfcart. Anything that could move faster than he could.

Eventually he dug up his suit from where he'd hidden it, taking time to deal with the sand and everything else. Only a few stray grains here and there, but he didn't want the stupid thing to rust. He wanted to put it on, but it wasn't going to work. The newer suit was different than the first one he'd made back in that cave. Sure, it ran on his arc reactor, but it also really needed Jarvis. It needed a computer monitoring its systems and various functions. Getting bugs in his mouth or crashing into the ocean lacked a certain appeal.

Instead, he made a travoy out of some cloth and bamboo. Then he set all the pieces on it, dragging it behind him as he headed to the Hub. He could change things around or he'd try to come up with a way to make a suit a little less advanced so he could fly again.

Jack has been on the island long enough to start wondering. He'd read what Dairine gave him about people's powers disappearing, but at first it hadn't occured to him that it might apply to him. He doesn't think of his own inability to die as a special power; if anything it's a curse.

But the fact that he's suddenly found himself needing to sleep on pretty much a daily basis has made him start wondering if this place might have lifted that curse. The thought is on his mind again tonight as he finds the kitchen empty, dinner already cooked, served and put away a few hours ago. He gets a glass of water, and then after a moment's pondering, a good-sized kitchen knife.

Setting the knife in front of him as he sits down at the table, Jack leans back and slowly sips his water, gaze fixed on the gleaming metal. Oh hell, why not? he decides, sitting upright. The water glass is placed on the table and the knife picked up all in one smooth motion that doesn't hesitate as Jack splays his left hand flat on the table, jaw clenched. He plunges the knife into his hand with a strangled cry of pain, hissing as he pulls it back out and looks at the bleeding wound.

"...Shit." It's not closing up, the bleeding's not stopping. The upside is it looks like whatever the Time Vortex did to him doesn't apply here. The downside is...whatever the Time Vortex did to him doesn't apply here, and he's starting to make a mess. "Uhh..." He gets up, grabbing a dishtowel and wrapping it tightly around his hand, holding it above his head to help slow the bleeding as he calls out hopefully. "Ianto? Someone? Little help?" This...is going to be difficult to explain.

[Why yes, he does have his stupid moments. Set to late evening, anyone's welcome. ;)]