(no subject)

[amuse_box]

 

the "There is Someone Else Here" meme

Rules: 

Roll the RNG 1-20 and choose a location.  
Post with your character and the number.  
Your character is now in that location and must believe or at least suspect that they are completely alone.
Tag someone with your character; your character is now in that location with theirs.  
The second character may believe they are alone, or they may not.  Maybe they are looking for the first character, or maybe they are coming after them.  Maybe it's just a chance meeting.
Malicious intent/violence is not mandatory, but possible.
 

 

1)  At home, alone.  

2)  A forest/wood.  It could be day or night.

3)  A bad part of town, at night.  There is nobody around, and very few street lights.

4)  A school.  Nobody should be here at this hour.

5)  A dilapidated, old hotel.  You're stuck, and need a place to stay, but nobody is at the front desk.

6)  A hospital.  Any kind, and you are trying to leave.

7)  Your car has broken down on a long, deserted road.  It is night.

8)  An abandoned farm.  There is an old barn, a ruined house, and a scarecrow stuck in a cornfield that goes for miles.  

9)  A theme park, complete with circus and house of mirrors.

10)  A morgue.

11)  A castle.  Nobody comes here anymore, and you don't think anybody lives here.

12)  A wharf.  There are old warehouses around you, and it's too foggy to see more than several feet ahead.

13)  A dark cave.  You might have a small light, or not.  The rock walls are sharp, and you can hear something in the distance, maybe running water, maybe something else.

14)  An abandoned lighthouse.  The lamp doesn't work anymore.

15)  Shipwrecked on a very small, rocky island.  The tide is coming in, and you'll be stuck very soon.

16)  A larger boat, maybe even a yacht.  The smell of salt is from the sea surrounding you.

17)  A completely black room.  It's impossible to see a thing, and you can't even feel the walls.

18)  A maze.  Whether it's hedges or rooms, you are completely lost and nobody is there to help you.

19)  A research station.  Whether it's the Amazon, the Sahara, or the Arctic, it is not an easy place to reach.

20)  Space.  Whether a craft of your own, or a space station, you are very alone.

 

 

Comments

[intothewoods]

[Jay holds on to his camera like it's a lifeline as he follows the trail into the woods. It was a mistake to come here. He knows better by now -- nothing good ever comes of going into places like this, alone or not. But it's the only lead he has.

The shadows lengthen and elongate as it the sun begins to set, long, spindly fingers that reach for him until he turns his flashlight on them. How long had he spent in here? He'd only meant to stay for an hour or two, more than enough time to leave with daylight to spare. He knows you don't stay in the woods after dark.

It's time to get the hell out of here.]

[topopathy]

[Even if it wasn't for the pieces the Slender Man had already taken from Jay's mind - the shattered, ragged edges of his wounded psyche conspiring with the entity to disorient him, draw him deeper into its lair - finding his way out of the forest would still have been no easy thing. The Slender Man itself, a broken skein of spacetime folded prionlike around a nucleus of primordial, inhuman, incomprehensible malevolence, distorts reality through sheer abhorrence of its presence.

The camera might capture some standing wave it leaves upon reality, making it impossible for the entity to approach unseen, but that doesn't change the effects of its presence. Unless it releases him, the odds of Jay escaping the woods are slim.]

[intothewoods]

[It's getting darker by the second, and he's sure he's made no progress out of here at all. He should have made it to a signpost, a bridge, something he's passed by in the few hours he's followed the trail. Instead there's nothing but the endless expanse of skeletal trees and the small beam of his flashlight swallowed up by the darkness.

It makes him think of Brian's home, the way the house itself seemed to fight against him, toying with him, leaving him trapped in a loop of unhappiness from which he couldn't break free.

It makes him think of how that tape ends, too.]

[topopathy]

[The shadows move like live things in the beam of his flashlight, seeming to twist like tentacles as they move to flank him. Between the trees, the sky is beginning to turn dark blue, but more important than the fading light is the faint static developing on the camera's display screen, as though the inanimate object understands the horror of what it's capturing and is striving not to.

There, just for an instant, when he pans the camera over his shoulder, is a shape darker than the gathering dusk, surmounted by something paler than the bark of the trees.]

[intothewoods]

[Dread crawls down his spine in a full-body shiver as the too familiar static builds. He knows what this means. He knows it's somewhere close by. He forces himself to stop, breathe, get his bearings and come up with some vague semblance of a plan before moving on.

And then, just for a moment, he sees it.

(No. No no no no no)

That glimpse is all Jay needs. For a moment he just freezes, wide-eyed and terrified as fear claws through him--

--and then he just fucking bolts.]

[topopathy]

[Running from an entity that doesn't obey the laws of time and space isn't all that effective, as Jay might notice when the blind animal panic begins to recede enough that he realizes he's still blundering in circles. Still, the static has diminished for the moment - there's some small, brief solace in that.

At least, there is until the image on the display dissolves into blobs of color, its frame rate dropping dramatically. And when Jay takes his eyes off the screen, there is is again - the Slender Man is standing not ten feet from him, even more horrible in the fading light than it ever looks on film.

There's an odd static-ripple in its appearance, something akin to the hallucinations of bugs on everything that sleep deprivation produces, except more solid - as though its humanoid form is projected on a surface of quicksand, or perhaps exists only in Jay's mind, desperately censoring something that he's completely unable to process. It seems more like a trick of perspective than the thing actually changing shape as it begins to tower over him.]

oh wow I thought I sent this last night whoops

[intothewoods]

[Nope. No plan, not even a vague semblance of one. Jay just runs. It doesn't matter that he's essentially going nowhere -- all he cares about it putting as much distance between him and his stalker. He goes long enough for a painful stitch to develop in his side, forcing him to slow down. He glances down for a split-second to make sure the camera's clear, notices the snow crash has lightened up in favor of a prismatic spray, looks back up.

It would have been a comedic moment anywhere and anytime else: Jay skids to a halt, slipping on the dead leaves on the forest floor to come crashing gracelessly to the ground. He scrambles backward, abandoning the camera in his desperation to get away. The beginnings of a headache start to pound in his temples as he stares, unable to tear his eyes away from the nightmarish, impossibly wrong thing looming over him.

What if he never actually managed to get away at all? he wonders as he finally manages to haul himself upright. What if those times he escaped were only because it let him go?]

ditto x_x;

[topopathy]

[As the entity towers impossibly over Jay, it opens its arms; where a human's would end, they spill off into a a fractal cascade of tendrils, curling and waving like broken cobwebs caught in a gentle breeze, though that probably isn't where Jay's attention is focused; it might not even set in.

Within the Slender Man's outstretched arms is a yawning, fathomless abyss, an impossibility of broken spacetime and shining, non-Euclidean darkness in which there is nothing but the silent yet palpable roar of oblivion, like the surf of madness pounding on the rocks of all that is real and certain in the world and bit by bit eroding them to nothingness. The sight is horrifying in its incomprehensible wrongness, yet somehow soothing - beckoning. The void seems to be expanding, consuming Jay's entire world, and drawing him in - or has Jay's body begun to move of its own accord toward it?]

[intothewoods]

[The headache ratchets up to an almost blinding intensity, and a vague sense of deja vu washes over him with the sound of white noise. Something draws him closer even as everything within him screams to run away; he tries to resist, to ignore the quiet, insistent call, and oh god, he doesn't want this.

He doesn't want to take step after halting step toward the ending chasm threatening to obliterate him. He doesn't want the horrifyingly comforting embrace of the thing that ruined his life. He doesn't want to be taken again, to lose bits and pieces of his memories and himself until there's nothing left.

But the static in his mind rushes louder, and he just can't stop himself.]

[topopathy]

[Darkness enfolds him, and then the tentacles make contact with the sensation of pins and needles that, though faint, seems to pierce clear through his viscera. It brings with it, eerie in its clarity, the knowledge that the entity is evaluating him, determining whether he's ready to be harvested. There are faint echoes of its jealous hunger, its desire to rend his flesh asunder with a precision that even the most skilled surgeon would deem impossible; yet, for some unfathomable reason, the tendrils fail to become solid, fail to rip him limb from limb. Instead, they do something that some distant part of Jay, some reptile hindbrain instinct, knows is even worse.

It's like sinking, drugged, into a bath of tepid water as the entity dissects away pieces of his mind, half-memories suddenly flaring into bright and vivid existence before they're lost forever, disappearing one by one into the roaring darkness at the heart of madness. Animal instincts and the impossible, sickening reflections of the things he's seen within the abyss move in to not-quite-heal the voids - quiet, almost soothing whispers, repeating just below the threshold of hearing,

they all must know
they all must know--
they all must die--
they all must know

Then, Jay's lying on his side in the leaf litter with lungs that feel as though they're full of treacle. The memory of what's been done to him will, as it was all the other times, be desperately purged as his mind struggles to pull itself back together in a shape that's slightly smaller than before.]

[intothewoods]

[Jay trembles, breath hitching in his chest as the tentacles sink into him. He feels utterly naked, peeled open and laid bare and judged, violent intent echoing into his bones. His fingers twitch by his sides, the most of his attempt to try to push away, pull, somehow escape this violation -- but there's nothing to touch, no way to protest being turned yet again into a vector for this infection. A quiet, desperate noise manages to escape him before he falls utterly silent.

He's snuffed out like a tiny candle in the dark as he's subsumed by an utterly alien will; the subliminal reprogramming takes hold, filling in the ragged holes in his mind, and then everything

fades

out.

He wakes like a drowned man, gasping and struggling for air. He curls in on himself almost defensively, trying to bring himself under control. Eventually the coughs subside and he manages to push himself upright, squinting up at the morning sun and brushing dirt and bits of dead leaves out of his hair and clothes.

The realization that he has no idea where he is or how he got here hits him like a sledgehammer. Dread curls in his stomach as he shakily gets to his feet, grabbing the camera. He doesn't want to look at what's on the tape. He needs to look at what's on the tape. There might be something important on it; maybe someone else online will be able to help him piece things together. They have to know.]