estella ames. (camposanto) wrote in rulethenight, @ 2011-09-11 10:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, estella ames, plot: night of the living dead, selia andrade |
log: estella ames and selia andrade
WHO: Estella Ames & Selia Andrade.
WHERE/WHEN: S.I.D. Headquarters, basement morgue. Sunday evening.
WHAT: Selia finally tracks down Estella as the source of the Zombiepocalypse and attempts to put and end to the situation.
SELIA: By the time Selia finally found her way to the centre of the disturbance that had steeped Boston in an all out zombie incursion for the better park of a week the city was all but wrecked. Superficial damage some might say but there was a lot of glass that needed replacing, shell casings that needed sweeping up and blood stains that would never come out. It was the S.I.D. building that she had honed in on. Here in the bowels of the structure she would find the necromancer at the core of the plague. Sick to death (pun intended) of the oppressive heat of the city under the seething black clouds, Selia was sweating like a dog by the time she had managed to dig her way into the ruined ground floor. The crunch and thud of her boots on the stone floor, strewn with grit and rubble were booming in the darkness and silence, ricocheting off the walls around here. There was a distant groaning of corpses shuffling around, a common sound in Boston at the moment. They were beneath her, most of them anyway. Selia could feel them through the floor under her feet, protecting their master. It was instinct. It was a problem. One she would have to solve.
Selia picked her way down one flight of stairs before finding the way blocked my maligned fragments and twists of metal, like fingers clawing their way up from beneath to ensnare poor, unfortunate humans who happened to come down here. Steeling herself with a breath of stagnant air she dug her gloved fingers into the rocks and began to hoist herself up onto the avalanche of rubble. An hour later she was dirty, sweaty and slick with blood from the rocks that hid dead bodies like secrets, those unfortunate enough to have been caught in the stairwell in the initial quake.
There was a bare patch of nothing at the bottom of a violent slope of concrete staircase that she had to press herself through flat on her stomach. A woman was shuffling back and forth in the confined space, her right knee was broken and she staggered on every other step, the weight buckling her bones a little more with each snap of dead muscle. Selia dropped to her feet, sliding out of the narrow stone passage, she stayed low and reached out with her powers, feeling the clamour of death all around her down here. A guard? A sentinel? It didn’t matter ultimately. Selia didn’t need her and didn’t want to offer up any more bodies for her stray necromancer down the hall (close now, very close). When the woman turned her heavy, grey head to stare with dusty eyes at the new arrival, Selia launched herself forwards, grabbed the snapping maw in her leather hands and fistful of auburn hair and wrenched it hard. Snap. Crackle. Down she went.
Selia turned her eyes down the hallway; it was tilted to an angle underfoot and she trod carefully as she made her way down to the morgue. Fitting, she thought. There just wasn’t enough irony in her life on any given day.
ESTELLA: It wasn't as though this was something that Estella wanted. She wasn't destroying Boston on purpose. Unlike some people, she'd never entertained daydreams of a zombie apocalypse taking out all the coworkers she didn't like, or wrecking havoc on a city full of frustrating cashiers and obnoxious movie ushers and bitchy baristas. Zombies were not the answer. Bodies, in her opinion, should stay in their silver drawers or their graves where they belonged. After all of this, she was going to strongly consider writing a will that demanded cremation in the event of her own untimely death. She'd been trapped down in the basement of her own workplace for so long. Days, maybe weeks, feeding off some source of energy that kept her alive just as much as it channeled inexorably through her, using her as a hand through which to reach out and touch the city above -- it was some kind of tiny, unwanted miracle that she hadn't simply lost her mind yet, surrounded by the horrific caretakers in that room who swayed tirelessly back and forth in an unyielding circle around her body. What they were guarding her from, she didn't know. Thoughts like that were fleeting, however. It was difficult for her to wonder anymore. She couldn't even feel her arms and legs, much less guess why they needed to be protected, how anyone was ever going to find her down here in the first place, and sometimes when she closed her eyes and fell into the sound of paper-dry skin rubbing like a soft instrument all around her, it didn't matter where she was, either.
But she felt the disturbance in the hallway unexpectedly. The city above was full of people trying desperately to bring down corpses, and she felt every headshot and broken bone as it snapped but the dead kept dragging themselves onward, all of it blending together in a hum of activity. That spinal disconnection was different. It was close. And she felt the power behind it too, a surge of strength and iron will that somehow scared her more than anything she'd witnessed so far. She'd thought about being found before, but now that someone was finally coming for her, the bile of fear rose in her throat. Unconsciously, the energy inside of her twisted, buckled. Building up a defense against the intruder. Without hesitation, the bodies around her shifted jerkily, moving towards the door to bolster the shield between Estella and this new presence. Whoever it was, they weren't getting to her easily.
SELIA: If anything the very fact that Estella’s powers were stretched so far that played to Selia’s advantage. That and her extensive training. Approaching the room she could feel the source of the power as though it were a flame she was holding her hand out towards, intense and dangerous and overflowing from somewhere beyond the world that even the likes of her could see and feel and taste. It was unbridled power, unnatural, and it was all spilling through whomever was behind that door. As she picked her way closer, Selia sought out what corpses she could find and commandeer; like a thief she stole into their bodies and called their consciousness to hers, a stronger, more focused voice to tell them what to do. When she broke down the door she had two. They turned to their nearest companions and dug their hands into dead flesh, rending it from bones, shoving backwards and going in with their teeth. Selia moved into the room, unholstering a snub-nosed gun, ramming it into the first dead eye socket that crossed her path and blowing brains out the back of a skull.
There was a woman in the room, on a table, she could see her now and Selia made for her without hesitation. It was as much about saving this necromancer as it was about stopping the clusterfuck going on upstairs in the city proper, Selia wanted to get her out of this alive.
ESTELLA: The zombies roaming the surface were like animated toy pieces to her, parts of the whole vast articulated net cast across the whole of Boston, but it was different inside that little room. Here, the corpses rushing and shambling on their broken limbs were directly connected to her in a immediate, plugged-in sense. She'd felt Agents Travers and Valdez trying to shoot their way through the mass of bodies crowding the hall and roped lines of power around the undead to strengthen them even as tears of empathetic pain rolled down her temples. The tearing of a bullet through the skull of a body nearby made her body arch against the table -- the first time she'd been able to move since the spell had caught hold of her, wrapping her in its tight embrace. It hurt. Dead things shouldn't be able to die again, but here she was, feeling their pain. And when her powers fumbled to take control over those two bodies who seemed to be fighting back against their own mob, she found nothing but smooth glass in her way, like a mental shield that her mind recoiled from in shock. The intruder who shouldn't be here was strong and subtle and a threat. Her eyes rolled in her head as she struggled to somehow get away, to free herself, but barring that -- the zombies threw themselves with more unrestrained hunger at Selia, their teeth snapping the air and limbs catching at her clothes and attempting to drag her into their waiting mouths. Still, they were being pulled off by the other corpses who were being controlled by a much more discerning master, and as the floor filled with body parts being torn away and ripped free in the battle, a path eventually opened between Selia and the young woman lying prone on the medical examining table. Inaudible beneath the raging zombies, Estella moaned. Helpmeleavemealone.
SELIA: It was a quick and dirty rescue. Selia knew she didn’t have time to mess around trying to be clean about it with the chaos that was boiling over on the surface of the city. A little pain now to spare lives was the best she could do. Apologies could wait. With the help of her stolen zombies she tore down the path carved through the protective horde. When a woman with a bullet-hole for an eye lunged for her, Selia caught her not with her hands but with her powers, just for a moment, just long enough to get an unopposed grip against her and hurl her out of the way and into the waiting arms of a man whose y-incision had popped open, leaving him half dissected. Selia fell upon the table, spattered in blood and gore, broken teeth embedded in the leather arm of her jacket. Gloved hands grabbed the prone woman by the upper arms and she leaned over from the head of the table, looking down into her face. Now that she was finally here, in the centre of it all she could feel the unbridled power that was gushing through the place, pouring through this woman and amplifying her powers so that they spilled out over a huge range. On a deep breath of rancid air, cloudy with the smell of decay in the morgue, Selia closed her eyes and sought out that connection, the crack that was letting the power through and trapping the necromancer beneath her in its hungry belly. With the training she had been brought up on, the regimental lifestyle that had forged her mind and body into one of powerful action she tried to lift that weight, the mass bearing down on her, taking some of the pressure off. At first it resisted, like an entity in and of itself the power pushed her back, hungrily clinging to the woman on the table, digging itself deeper, holding on harder and pushing through her with more vigour and Selia felt a stabbing pain go through her chest, like a sword of pure energy. She gasped and tightened her fingers around the woman. If she could just worm her way in there, if she could just wedge herself into the equation she thought she could stop this.
ESTELLA: She screamed. She couldn't help it -- the first sound out of her lips in all this time, and her voice was raw with disuse as much as it was layered with fear and agony and the voices of the dead. It felt like there were hooks and nails digging into her body, crushing her, crucifying her to the table. The woman's hands on her were nothing in comparison but she knew that it was happening because of this pale stranger and she wanted to push her off, to shove her away, to stop this from getting worse. As the pressure built and the stale air was driven from her lungs until Estella thought that she might suffocate, a sudden stab of cold relief jammed into her solar plexus -- and there was a lightening of the pressure, a brief moment of blessed relief that allowed her to curl her fingers and close her eyes for just an instant. She didn't realize until that instant that the only thing she needed to be afraid of was the power itself. It was feeding her paranoia, not to protect her, but to protect its connection to the tangible world, and it would burn her from the inside out until it was done with her. So she stopped fighting. The zombies around her hesitated, confused by the sudden lack of orders and their own hunger, and she pushed them away with her mind, keeping them apart from the woman above her even as the power in her raged against her and struggled to reclaim control. Estella felt the moment that the link rose up and tried to break free -- and in doing so, presented a weakness, just enough for the stranger's powers to slice through and cut the connection, leaving her nothing more than an empty shell. Bodies fell without warning, the sound of their rotting flesh hitting the floor a sickening chorus around her. And all of Boston went quiet. She gasped in the cracked hollow of her throat and struggled against the woman holding her down, not to fight the woman off so much as to reclaim her own body, needing the freedom after her entrapment.
SELIA: When the bodies dropped to the floor in heavy raindrops Selia released a breaths he hadn’t noticed she was holding. With the woman fighting her off she released her hands from her arms and leant against the table instead, breathing hard. The inside of her skull felt gritty, like little hands had been scratching to get out of there and she squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s okay--” she heard herself saying to the other necromancer, “it’s all right, I’m here to help.” It didn’t seem to make much difference what she said, though, and Selia didn’t much blame her in that moment Calming her down didn’t work, even when she tried explaining things a little more extensively and Selia became very aware of the time they were wasting. Boston had ground to a halt above them, the zombies had all fallen back to their inert states, the humans and therianthropes who had been bitten passed out where they stood, the infection in their blood evaporating as soon as the control of the zombies who had bitten them disappeared. Selia resorted to brute force, knocking the woman out with the heel of her gun to the temple. It was safer that way. She cast her eyes down on the zombies that lay on the floor, picked the two least obvious ones (not easy considering the carnage she had needed to unleash just to get past them) and reanimated them. They carried the unconscious woman behind Selia who lead the way out of the morgue and up through the decimated staircase. They would find somewhere safe and then work on explaining the situation first to the people who had sent here here and then to her new friend.