Jackson Fuller (modulations) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-12-26 16:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, ! plot: kidnapping, astrid marquette, daisy hughes, damien harrington, jack fuller, kieran keaveny, vanessa upton |
WHO: Astrid Marquette, Daisy Hughes, Damien Harrington, Jack Fuller, Kieran Keaveny, & Vanessa Upton
WHAT: The North American group of kidnapped students wakes up & gets their bearings.
WHEN: Sometime in the night between December 26th & December 27th.
WHERE: North American holding location.
WARNINGS: None.
STATUS: Complete.
KIERAN: He came to consciousness slowly. It wasn't quite like waking up in the morning with a sharp jolt of alarm, but instead his mind just slowly bubbled up to the surface, sensations coming back to him in piecemeal form. First, tingling in his bones, followed by the alternate stretch and slack of muscles, and lastly, pain. Not sharp like a knife, but dull and throbbing at his temple and his shoulder. He knew he was collapsed in something of a heap before he opened his eyes and attempted to unwind himself into a sitting position. The elevation made his head throb harder and he put a hand to his temple as he rolled over and caught his first glance at the ceiling. Cement lit by a small, high window, leading to more cement as his followed the wall down to the ground, ending in a body. His breath caught in his chest as he scrambled to his feet and away from the motionless figure, only to trip on another collapsed form. "Oh... oh my god. Daisy?" DAISY: Through the darkness, Daisy heard her name. Something jerked her back to reality, the feeling of another person, someone who was standing above her. Why was she sleeping? She couldn't remember going to bed and her head was throbbing in pain. There was an absence of something, too, a feeling that something was missing. Her phone was gone. She could tell without opening her eyes that it was nowhere near. "Carter?" She croaked the name out of instinct, though she knew almost immediately that he wasn't here. That wasn't his voice. She couldn't feel him next to her, where he should be. As Daisy struggled to gain coherency, a cold feeling of dread was beginning to take over. Something was very, very wrong. "What happened?" Daisy asked the question as her vision began to clear. Were they back at IVI? VANESSA: The first thing Vanessa had done upon waking was, as she did every morning, look for her phone. It wasn't until she realised she didn't have it with her anymore that she worked out that something wasn't right. She never went anywhere without her phone! Come to think of it, she couldn't even remember going to sleep. And this wasn't her bed, at home or at IVI. She was just about to panic, to scream, when the voices started, naming names. Daisy. Carter. Not people she knew well but names that she recognised from IVI. Wherever she was at least she wasn’t alone. Her eyes adjusted to the dark and she was able to make out the other people in the room, counting five other people. Then she looked down. The light was still not perfect but she could see well enough to realise she was not wearing something of her own. Who would even buy clothes like that? How had she gotten into these clothes?? "IDK," she replied to Daisy, saying the letters out loud instead of the actual words, "But oh my god where are we and who dressed me like this?" JACK: They were all starting to rouse each other now, and Jack continued to lay in his cot, eyes open to stare at the concrete ceiling while his brain whirred faster than a computer booting up, trying to process his situation. He could remember exactly what had happened - up until a very abrupt point, beyond which there was nothing but crippling spasms of pain throughout his body, and then darkness. He needn’t inspect the spartan furnishings of their shadowy cell to know it was one, nor did he need to look to recognize two of the voices, and the third gave a strong hint toward her identity with a distinct lack of grammatical prowess. He did sit up to better survey the clothing; disturbingly close to prison uniforms, though in a much subtler shade. Wherever he was now, Jack was discomforted by a certain instinctive knowledge that it was in fact, the most secure place imaginable. "We’re hostages," he declared. If they had been recovered by IVF agents, authorized to use whatever means necessary to collect their charges, there would be someone else there with them. Half the school had fallen into nightmares, and half the remaindered students had been adamant in their refusal to leave the bedsides of the dreamers. There had been nurses on shift all hours, to look out for them. They wouldn’t leave them sedated without medical supervision if they were in some sort of perverse drill scenario invented by Sam to try to force him into getting a chip... Jack reached down with his hand though he could already feel a conspicuous and ironic sense of freedom in his left leg. Yes, it was missing. "They -" Jack’s voice faltered, keeping in the indignation that was bubbling up in his chest, though his tone stayed flat. They tracked us, too. "They took the trackers." Now he studied Daisy, best known to him among their little company, trying in vain to remember if she’d been frightened enough to let them stick a transmitter in her head. Maybe not, since she still had a head left. KIERAN: He immediately went for his wrist and saw that the bracelet he’d been wearing since he left Australia was indeed gone. Hostages? He tried to drum up memories through the fog of his head, automatically dropping down to sit on the edge of Daisy’s bed as if being lower to the ground might somehow help him avoid the cloudy feeling. The sudden jolt forward and then the extreme rotational motion. Hitting the barrier and his whole body locking in place as the Explorer teed against the snow drift. He touched his forehead just as he’d done then, noticing again that there wasn’t any blood but, hell, by now it had to look like he was growing a softball under there. And then... fuck. "Fuck," Kieran breathed out as the memory of getting socked in the stomach with a taser came back to him. He was going to miss Christmas... hell, he might of already have. "I wonder how long we’ve been out." he said as he started on getting a good look around the room. Cement walls ended in a large metal door that looked fairly impenetrable. There was a smaller one near it that looked definitely penetrable. DAISY: Daisy's arm reached out instinctively for Kieran as he sat next to her on the bed. Panic was starting to rise inside of her, and she fought it back by grasping onto something solid. She rested her hand on his shoulder; they weren't close friends by any means, but she felt like maybe she could comfort him. And that maybe by comforting someone else, she might start to feel a little bit better. It had worked for Daisy before. "You don't know that," she interjected, not answering Kieran's question but instead turning to Jack, whose voice she had recognized in the dimly lit room. "We might be..." Daisy tried to think of other reasons they might be here, in this room. The only things that came to mind had definitions that were even worse than what Jack was proposing. "We might not be hostages," she whispered. Still, she couldn't stop the bad thoughts from coming. Carter wasn't here. Was he safe? Was he locked up in a room just like this, or was he already dead? And what about Hunter, and Vic? And Jodi and Lottie and... The list swirled on and on in Daisy's head and she gripped Kieran's shoulder for support. ASTRID: The first thought Astrid had upon waking was oh no, I've been caught. Caught doing what, she wasn't quite sure, but there was a distinct feeling of dread that weighed heavy on her entire body as she slowly started to process her surroundings. The headache came thundering in next, causing her to sit up on the cot and grab the top of her head with a loud moan. "Oh my God." This was so not her room. It wasn't her brother's either, though he had that weird minimalist aesthetic so maybe if she squinted - maybe she was just really hungover, maybe -- One of her hands slowly moved away from her head to tug at the strange clothes she was wearing. Panic rose in her chest and she shot up right, whispering oh my God oh my God oh my God and spinning around before finally tripping over her own foot and landing with a smack on the ground. Astrid looked up from the ground and saw - people! Had they all been here the whole time?! She had a brief memory of the conversations from seconds ago, but it was hazy. "Why are we here?!" she blurted out at last, her eyes trained on Daisy. Oh my god this was the worst. JACK: There was no way to tell how long they had been unconscious. It was evening, that much he could tell from the narrow patch of sky visible through the window at the top of one wall. It might not have meant anything given the global nature of IVI and vols in general, but taking inventory of his companions - fantastic, Miyu’s level-headed friend Astrid was among them - and his relative certainty that most of them were American, it seemed plausible that they had stayed somewhere on the same continent. If it was a matter of hours or days passed since being hit with a taser, however... He didn’t answer Astrid’s question directly - if a smack drew comparisons to Chris Brown, he didn’t care to know what she would call him were he to surmise they were here to die, or worse, kill hundreds of others in a spectacular display of what vols were capable of - but he did pose a related one. "Where was everyone?" asked Jack. How widespread the kidnappings had been would possibly give a better scope to where they might be - though the last he’d heard Daisy was in New York and Kier was... no, he didn’t remember where Chrismas fit into Kier’s daunting itinerary. Regardless, they weren’t specifically targeting a vol-heavy area, if they had made it to rural Alabama. "I was outside of Birmingham, the day after Christmas, and I got a text from IVF, to get to a secure shelter, but..." Jack stood up, moving to further inspect the room while trying to smother the worry that had crept into him at the thought of who he’d made the choice to leave behind, outside Birmingham. Malcolm had gotten her to safety, that’s why she wasn’t here. DAMIEN: A loud groan came from where Damien was lying. He'd hit his head while running to find safety, and while it wasn't bad it still was painful. He pressed a palm to his head, pushing it down to try and stop the gentle throb of pain that happened every few moments. He sat up slowly, taking in his surroundings in an almost-dazed manner. It hardly seemed real; a cold concrete wall and the jumpsuits. He looked across at the others, trying to take in names. Astrid, Daisy, Jack, Kieran, Vanessa. He remembered all of their faces, but didn't really know much about any of them. "I was out, near home," he told Jack, the first words that he'd spoken since being there. "Don't think I was anywhere around you lot. I got the text too and-" he shrugged his shoulders. The full gravity of the situation was yet to hit him, but already there were ideas. Kidnapped Vols had been made to do terrible things. JACK: "Where’s home?" He could remember that Savannah’s boyfriend’s name was Damien, but not a whole lot else, not at the moment at least. KIERAN: "Canada. Near Silas, right? He said something before break about going skiing or something. And I was in Colorado." He looked over at Daisy, who he really only knew as Jodi’s Roommate, who looked to be trying to steady her own wavering eyes in the face of both Astrid and Vanessa’s obvious panic. He gave her a small, lopsided sort of grin. "That’s a lot of fucking area to cover. I mean, shit, if they wanted bang for their buck, seemed like everyone and their grandmother was in California. Gotta be a lot easier to mobilize in one location than all over the continent." It baffled him, particularly because the idea that they’d all be taken for their power made zero sense to him. Okay, maybe Daisy. Or maybe a couple of them because he could really only identify Jack’s and, he thought, Astrid’s powers. None of them seemed to be ample for the kind of destruction that’d been caused so far. He suddenly thought of the blue message light on his phone and wondered if that’d been IVI trying to warn him. Great. Trying to be a responsible driver and now he was kidnapped in a cell for God knew what reason. Kieran gave Daisy’s hand a squeeze in the practiced sort of way he might give his ex-girlfriend Gen and got up to go examine the door. "We need to get the fuck out of here," he said, mouth a thin line. DAISY: "Yeah," Daisy replied numbly, unhelpfully. She followed Kieran in standing, although she didn't move toward the door, opting instead to steady herself in an attempt to clear her head. Daisy placed a hand against the wall. She was reaching mentally for signals, for any kind of signal. She wanted that familiar feeling of possession and control. It was literally a shot in the dark, grasping for possibilities. You're not helpless, Dais, she could hear Hunter's voice in her head. He'd said those words to her before. She tried to live up to him now, but there was nothing. If any computers or technological devices of any kind lay beyond that wall, she couldn't reach them. She sighed, closing her eyes, praying that this was all just another bad dream -- that she might open them again and wake up, safely pressed against Carter's side. It was a silly thing to hope, she knew. Daisy opened her eyes to reality. "I think -- maybe we should all get to know each other's powers," she said, finally. "Make sure we all know what everyone can do." Daisy went to sit next to Astrid, putting an arm around her shoulders. She lowered her voice. "Because if we get a shot to get out of here, it'll prob'ly be our only chance. We should try and be ready." |