Audrey Devine (indelicate_) wrote in mountzenithrp, @ 2019-11-20 21:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 036, audrey |
Who: Audrey
When: All day
Where: The great unknown
What: A really long hike
Audrey woke to the unexpected sensation of being outdoors - cold, though not unbearably so, especially given she was wearing multiple layers of clothing. She sat up and took stock; nothing she'd asked for save what she'd been wearing seemed to have made the trip with her. She had a backpack, a granola bar, and a bottle of water.
Checking her phone, she saw that a check-in post had already been set up - she ignored it in favor of the GPS program that had been cued up. She surveyed the map with the obvious directional cues and the other dots that she assumed were fellow housemates, then glanced around and couldn't find any cameras. Peeling off the unnecessary layers, she packed up the backpack and decided that despite the lack of supplies, she couldn't risk missing a potential opportunity to escape. Orienting herself, she set off directly south.
It wasn't more than ten or fifteen minutes at a brisk pace before she was brought up short by the hot spark of pain from her implant. She immediately backed off, dropping to her knees and breathing deeply to ride out the jolt. She'd hoped the barrier would be gone, and the evidence that it was intact, at least in this location, was both disheartening and enraging. Gritting her teeth, she got back to her feet, oriented herself west, and started walking.
After a few more run-ins with the barrier, it became clear that at least the section she'd walked was curved. Audrey wished she could test the barrier more - it killed her to think of potentially skipping over a hole because she had to space out how often she tested for the barrier's existence - but she also didn't want to incapacitate herself and had to guard her stamina well. She could already feel a headache building, and she had limited resources.
Roughly five hours after she'd gotten started, Audrey was just past the halfway mark and was getting better at guessing where the barrier was based on the fact that the zone was clearly going to be a circle, or close enough to it. She'd been zapping herself all day and had a raging headache, stomach-churning nausea that half her granola bar hadn't helped, and was going to have to cross the river at least twice more that she could figure. But she couldn't give up. Not until she was sure for herself that the barrier enclosed them completely.
By the time she was almost back to her starting place, her pace had slowed tremendously compared to that morning. Her body hurt from head to toe, she'd thrown up twice after being shocked and was fighting not to repeat the performance each time she tested the barrier - but if she'd learned only one thing in her life, it was how to put aside pain and keep going. So she did - until she reached the marker she'd left at the first encounter with the barrier and knew that the boundary was whole.
Shrugging off her pack, fighting a bone-deep anger and weariness, Audrey sat down and gave herself fifteen minutes to rest. She drank as much water as she felt she could hold without bringing any back up, having refilled her bottle twice at each river crossing, and forced down a quarter of her granola bar. Then she took a deep breath, slung her backpack back on, and trudged off - this time due north to whatever awaited her at the end of the GPS trail.