Who: Joss and Sherri What: Arrivals Where: NYC --> Vectura When: Night when people first showed Warnings:IDK? Notes: NOT LATE.
The last thing Joss remembered was a shove and the sudden remembrance that she wasn’t invincible. Sometimes Joss forgot it. When she was drunk or in the arms of someone gorgeous and attentive. When she was on an adrenaline rush, she felt confident and that she could do anything - no one could really touch her. As she’d slammed a frying pan into flesh and bone, over and over, she felt like she could possibly do anything. Even when the man had turned from the slumped Sherri, Joss still felt like she could fix it. She could beat him, Sherri couldn’t be dead, she’d wake up and they’d defeat him - like they were supposed to. It wasn’t until she was in vertigo, over the stairs and tumbling that she remembered she was human and breakable.
The world went dark before she could feel her spine snap or her bones break, though she’d been prepared for it. Screaming in pure fear, but ready for it. Instead she felt her back not crumple and bend, but instead fold into a mattress. Joss kept her eyes shut, tears leaking from the edges and tried to not burst into tears. Instead she whimpered, curling her hands up to her face. “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh god.” There had been pain, at first, when he had wrapped his hand around Sherri’s throat. An ache in her neck. A burning in her lungs. And then things had started to fade into blackness, and the pain stopped. It had been almost like going to sleep, and if she hadn’t questioned where she would be going when it was all over she would have been content with that. For a moment she worried about Joss, but it all seemed trivial when everything was fading away.
Waking up was just as slow, and for a moment Sherri was certain that she was dead, and that there must have been an afterlife, after all. The mattress she found herself on, however, wasn’t quite comfortable enough to be Heaven, and not painful enough to be Hell. Had someone come? Had Joss managed to fend him off? She lifted her hand to her neck, took a deep breath through her formerly constricted airway. Things seemed to be in order there, she could at least breathe, and that was certainly better than it had been the last she could remember.
She would have been content to lay there much longer, but Joss’s voice made her jerk upright without a thought. “Joss? What happened? Where are we?” Joss had become aware enough to realize she was in a fetal position, on the bed in...wherever. Her body shook until Sherri’s voice came in. Her eyes snapped open and her whimpering stopped. From where she was lying down, she could see Sherri on a bed opposite to her own, in a small room - almost like a hotel but not. But Joss had only stayed in shitty hotels in the last year. “You’re not dead,” she said, voice hoarse. A pause. “Or are we both dead? Oh god, this doesn’t look like heaven, I knew I wasn’t going there, but you were supposed to go there, where’s the gates and St. Peter - it is St. Peter right? Crap, crap, crap, you’re in hell, we’re in hell how did we get to hell?”
Joss curled up and began to cry. She was way too young to die. They both were. And they’d failed. Crap. Crap. Crap
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Sherri pressed her palms over her eyes, focusing on just breathing for a moment. She’d missed being able to, and she promised herself she would never take it for granted again. “I guess we have to be dead. My throat doesn’t hurt anymore, and unless we’ve just been in a coma there’s no way it would have healed up... except we can’t have been, since we’re not in a hospital.” Logic hadn’t been so hard since Bellum Letale.
Finally, she lowered her hands and raised her gaze. “Maybe we’re in Limbo. I know, it’s way too Catholic, but this can’t be Hell. If it was Hell, we’d probably be in a lot more pain.” Not that Sherri was sure on that, either. It was hard to be sure of anything, and this whole dying and there being something afterward thing was putting a real block in the way of her considerations that religion might be all stories to scare children with and nothing more. Joss continued to cry, even as Sherri pointed out reason. Not fair, this was insane, and oh crap, crap, crap. The swears continued on in her head, a drum beat matching her headache and she sniffled as a further accompaniment. She managed a tight nod when Sherri mentioned pain. She should have had her back killing her and if her throat was okay...
“Limbo shouldn’t be like this. Not from what Dad said.” Joss at this point was willing to believe in her father’s rants on religion. Maybe not to his extent, but pretty damn close. She sniffled once before rubbing her hand across her nose. “Limbo still means we’re dead though, right?” “I... yes. It does.” Sherri couldn’t bring herself to be too upset about that. If they were dead, they were safe from him. They were safe from their parents. And they were still together, so it couldn’t be that bad. “I guess we should look around, see what’s here.” It would be better than just sitting, and it would distract Joss from her tears and Sherri from how hard it was to stay calm.
To practice what she preached, Sherri eased herself off the the bed. She was still a little lightheaded, and at first she swayed - vanishing injuries or not, her body still knew that her brain had been deprived of oxygen for quite some time. It took a moment of blinking and shaking her head before she felt comfortable moving forward, looking around the small room. Joss sniffled once more before pushing herself up from the bed. She didn’t wobble like Sherri did, only rubbing her hands against her denim skirt. Her eyes scanned the room, running from item to item, glancing over the furniture until she caught sight of the phone on her side of the nightstand. She pocketed it, turning it on as she navigated her way to the other side of the room where a large curtain hung.
With little hesitation she pulled open the curtain, expecting a street or another room or possibly water. Instead there was large, sweeping blackness, only changed up by swirls that littered the view here and there. Joss exhaled, in utter awe.
“Sherri? We’re really not at home anymore.” Sherri had been poking around on the other side of the room, but she looked up when she heard her name. When she saw what was outside the window, her jaw dropped. “What...”
Unable to help herself, she drifted closer. There was a fear, in the back of her mind, that she’d get sucked right out in spite of the glass. How could a window hold up against something as vast as that? “I don’t think we’re in Heaven, or Hell, or Limbo. I’ve never heard of anything like this.” Wouldn’t she have known, being her father’s daughter? It felt like she should know if there was anything like that after you died.
With a sigh, she pressed a hand to the window. All she could think of to say was, “At least it isn’t France.” Joss didn’t move as Sherri drifted over. The view made her feel small - smaller then normal - and less than significant. There was a beat before she shifted closer. “Or Chicago,” she said glumly. “And if we died once, we can’t die again.” Not exactly.
Heaving a sigh, she reached up to pull back her hair - the phone in her pocket sliding out from the movement. It hit the floor, button revealing a screen. Joss frowned and opened it up, before offering it to Sherri. Her buttons found the large buttons with an envelope quickly, leading to a forum. Joss didn’t say anything this time, just wincing. Sherri leaned in to look over her shoulder, biting her lip as she realized what exactly it was. “Forums never end well. Never.” But at least it meant there were other people. Though... that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
A quick check of the pockets of her jeans found a similar device, and she followed the link much more slowly than Joss. “I wonder if it’s anyone we know.” Some people she wouldn’t mind seeing again. Others...
Surely the vampires (and, less importantly, their human counterparts), out of all the other people in the building, wouldn’t have found their way to the strange new place. Joss pulled it back and began to fiddle away with the keys, in an old practiced habit. She hit up several posts in succesion, tongue sticking out between her teeth. “Mmrh,” she agreed. She looked up and managed a nervous look. “This guy named Archer wants us to head down for a meeting. Shall we take off?” Joss would keep texting along the way. “We might as well.” The sooner they figured out who else was there, the better, Sherri thought. She smoothed down her hair, straightened out her clothes, and enjoyed another deep breath. “Let’s go. Maybe someone will have some idea of where we are.”