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I'll Walk Alone

This city fucking sucks.

Rose sulks her way up Peachtree Street for the sixth time in... she isn't even sure how long. Her trips to the twilight here have been short-lived and frustrating, and she hasn't been hitting up the daylight newspaper kiosks to pay scrupulous attention to the goddamn date. But what she has pieced together over the last however-long is not encouraging.

Firstly: she can't just walk out of town. Nor does it seem she can ride out of town, as evidenced by the two occasions in which she vanished out of a trucker's cab a little north of East Hallow. She's tried her luck with some local kids as well, but when she suggested driving beyond the city limits, they acted like she was crazy. (Maybe it was a little vindictive to disappear right in front of them, but by that point, she wasn't in a very polite sort of mood.)

Secondly: the only ghostroad she's been able to land on runs in a tangled loop, devoid of any other travelers, refusing to take her anywhere. Unless you count the chapel, but she avoids that landmark like her afterlife depends on it. Chapels of the dead aren't uncommon in the twilight, but they're not the kind of place you just visit. They play for keeps, and she doesn't like to think about what she'd become if she stepped inside.

(Except it's starting to look like Darrow plays for keeps, too. Out of the smaller glue trap, into the bigger fucking glue trap.)

So she's back in the daylight to try her luck again. It's one of those sticky-hot summer days that she doesn't entirely mind not being able to feel, though she's dressed herself in denim shorts and white tank top in deference to the idea of it. If she was really dedicated, she'd have her hair stick to the back of her neck or add a sheen of sweat, but she's not going that far, because fuck this place. They're not getting her at her best.

She'll work her way north, see if she can catch a ride once she nears the highway. Then she'll cut over to the west, give Woodward Avenue or Barclay Place a shot. After sunset, it should be cool enough that she can wheedle a coat off someone. If she can't at least score a meal, she's going to—

Her jaw clenches. She's not sure there's a joke to be made, even just to herself, about what she might do if she can't be a hitcher.

—She's going to try again.

[ooc: find Rose at any point during the day or evening on any given road you please. If she's on the northern edge of the city and there's no law enforcement in sight, she'll have her thumb out for a ride. Per her intro post, she's been doing this long enough to have started some rumors that your pup is free to have heard. Hit me up with any questions you may have. Open until this says otherwise, ST/LT welcome!]

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(no subject)

Ninety-one. He reads the number, written on the wrist chart and then, his heart as heavy as a piece of lead in his chest, he turns back the bloodied sheet. Nobody’s had time to see to Leah, yet, and she’s still intubated; it seems obscene, somehow, the plastic tubing jutting into the air. Robby stands back, helpless, and he watches as Jake looks down at his girlfriend. Robby wonders if he’s ever been in love before. In that moment, he can’t quite remember how it felt, the first time. He thinks that, maybe, he was about Jake’s age.

He doesn’t have an answer for Jake, when he asks him why he couldn’t save Leah. He doesn’t have an answer because, sometimes, there isn’t one. Sometimes, the hurt is just too great, the damage too grave, and there’s no pulling back from the edge.

Sometimes, you just have to let go.
Which is easier said than done, in the end.

( Spoilers for The Pitt )

He just needs to catch his breath.

ooc: one ER cowboy, reporting for the day shift! Robby is bloodied and so out of it that he doesn't actually know he's not in Pittsburgh anymore. Feel free to put him anywhere that makes sense for your pup. ST/LT welcome -- I'm so excited!

Entry tags:

Ready for Anything

“Hi, um, hi.” Bellara tries, for the second time, to get the man’s attention, now with an anxious little wave to go along with her timid stammering. The man finally looks at her. He’s human, same as everyone else she can see. He’s wearing clothes that look… well… different. Same as everyone else. Actually, she’s the different one here, and she knows that, and she doesn’t love it. There are a lot of them — everyone else — all bustling around this enormous, overwhelmingly bright room she’s stumbled into, and they’re all human, and all dressed similarly, in clothes that look different, and they all seem like they belong here, or at least like they know where ‘here’ is, which she, importantly, doesn’t. She’d awakened in some sort of transport, which is funny, because as far as she knew, she hadn’t been asleep. And now she’s here, in this big, bright, crowded place, the only elf, the only one dressed like this, the only one looking lost and out of place. It’s like visiting Minrathous, but worse. Much, much worse.

But at least she has the man’s attention now. He’s sitting in what appears to be a work station, an enclosed desk in the center of the room, so she thinks he must be important. Or have some answers at least. He’s also wearing a tag on his vest that reads Charles, which is probably his name. He doesn’t look happy to see her, but she’s not entirely happy to see him, either, so that’s fine.

“Help you?” he says, sounding remarkably unenthused by the prospect.

“I don’t know! I hope so!” she says, trying to sound chipper and coming out a little hysterical. “I think I’m lost? I mean. I don’t know where I am. Or how I got here. Which sounds pretty lost to me!” She tries to laugh but coughs instead. “It wouldn’t the first time. But it’s the first time like this. Sorry. That doesn’t make any sense, probably. Can you, uh, help me with that…?”

She trails off, her voice growing smaller as her already fragile confidence starts to dissolve. Charles looks incredibly put upon, but he’s started rooting around behind his desk as if he knows what he’s looking for. She waits, doing her best not to fidget.

“Name?” he says.

“Oh! Um. Bellara? Sorry. I mean. Yes. I’m Bellara. Bellara Lutare.”

He answers her continued babbling with a grunt, thrusting a packet of paper in her direction. “Welcome to Darrow.”

Wordless, she takes the packet and stares at it. There’s her name, in big, excessively neat letters: Bellara Lutare.

“Um,” she says. “Thank you.” She looks up at him. “What…?”

“It’s all in there,” Charles says with a dismissive gesture, and goes back to his book, making it inescapably clear that as far as he’s concerned, this conversation is over.

Bellara stands there for a moment, feeling both very small and very in the way, what with her huge pack and all her accouterments. No one else around her is carrying so many things. It makes them all blend together, and makes her seem even more of an obvious outsider. “Okay,” she says in a tiny voice. “Thank you.”

She takes her packet and wanders until she finds a little out-of-the-way spot where she can sit down on the well-polished floor. She takes a few deep breaths, then opens up the packet, spread out its contents neatly in front of her, and starts looking through them all one by one.

About twenty minutes later, she’s gathered everything back up and gone outside, into the streets of this new city.

“Okay,” she says to herself. “Darrow. Okay.”

She looks at the dizzying, unfamiliar skyline. The sky looks normal. There’s trees, and grass, though it’s all a lot neater than what she’s used to. There’s noise and smells and movement — machines, contraptions, all kinds of strange sights. Too much to catalog right now. And there’s people. Lots and lots of people.

Well, people are what she needs. If they’ve been brought here just like she has, they’ll have their own understanding of the situation, their own experiences and advice, their own data. And data is what she needs. Lots of it.

She picks one at random, walks up to them, holds up her packet and says loudly, “Hi! I’m Bellara. I just arrived. Could you tell me… um…” She stops to think. “Maybe… who you are, where you come from, how long you’ve been here, and… well. That’s probably enough for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more. If you don’t mind?”

She probably should’ve led with that last part, but it’s too late now.

[Welcome, Bellara! As I said in her City Hall post, she's already given herself the basic primer on Darrow and drawn a lot of her own conclusions, so she doesn't need the rundown so much as she wants to know everything about everything. As she will be wandering around like this throughout the day, she can approach you literally wherever you want. The first things most people will notice about her are: really long pointy ears, a simply staggering amount of trinkets and jewelry, and some fancy-looking face tattoos. Open as long as it needs to be, ST/LT welcome forever.]

Entry tags:

meme: anonymous confessions

MEME: Anonymous Confessions

MEME MEME MEME MEME.

Tag your characters in. Other characters can respond to them with confessions and messages made anonymously, ranging from the silly to the solemn. They don't even need to be relevant to the original poster, if you wanna complicate things a step further. (Who among us hasn't had a stranger tell us way too much?) OP and others can then take a crack at guessing who's confessing to what.

If you'd prefer to use

citysecrets, the login info can be found here. Feel free as well to just top level random secrets all on their own, rather than to a name. Go wild!

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Late April, 2025:

John comes across a newly-arrived house and a newly-arrived spectral teenager. Things immediately devolve into mutual snippy rudeness.

[ HERE | ongoing | accidental compulsion ]

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(no subject)

October 31, 2024:

On the night of the second Purge, Greta hunkers down at the cottage with family and friends.

[ HERE | complete | lowgrade anxiety ]

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Alphinaud is gone when she wakes.

At first, Alisaie mistakes it for him having gone out early, leaving her alone in their small apartment. It's quick work to discover the truth.

She's furious.

She's furious with this absurd, backward city. She's furious with the Exarch, for putting them both in a position where this could be possible. She's furious with her brother. Irrational, she'll admit later, but for now it feels good to direct it somewhere.

Her twin, older by minutes and proud of that as much as he's proud of anything, is gone out of the city that they'd both been dragged to against their wills and, for better or worse, has made their home for the better part of two years.

And that makes her all the more furious.

She needs to do something with that fury, she knows, before her aether shifts aspects. She isn't sure that could happen in a few hours, but she's not of a mind to wait and see, so she goes to an out-of-doors training ground — a firing range, it's called, but there are simple standees with paper taped to their fronts shaped like hyur silhouettes.

Crude, but it will do the job.

Alisaie draws her sword and crystal and begins to cast like her life depends on it. She throws herself forward, slashes at the target with violent zwerchau before launching backward and starts it over again.

Her fringe is in lank silver clumps against her forehead when she stops for a breath, but her arms are exhausted and the fury has dulled to a bitter ache.

“Damn this city,” she murmurs. “Twelve damn this city straight to the Seven Hells.”

[ Blue Alisaie is gone and she's BIG MAD about it. Find her at an outdoor firing range, on her way there, shortly after she left the apartment they shared; anywhere that works best for you! Despite her anger, it isn't a bad time to meet her and she could use some friends! ]

Entry tags:

'cause blood is thick but water is forever

The house is empty when Beverly wakes up.

It's an eerie feeling, that stillness, like the air itself has gone out of the space. She's been home alone here plenty of times, everyone's schedules not always aligned, but it's different like this in ways she wouldn't know how to describe. There's no aroma of coffee wafting up from the kitchen, no sound but her own breathing, and then what she realizes is El's cat scratching at her door, meowing a demand to be fed. Maybe it's because she's been here so long and seen this before, or maybe it's something she dreamed, although she doesn't remember doing so. Either way, as she leaves her room and pads through the house as if on autopilot or watching someone else do these things, she thinks she already knows they're gone.

Soon enough, she confirms it. She calls Hop and El — her father and her sister — and both phone lines have been disconnected. She calls the station, and Hopper hasn't shown up for work or let anyone know he'd be absent. She texts some mutual friends, too, just to see if anyone else has run into either of them, hoping for some other explanation, and yet with each passing moment, that certainty grows. They've both disappeared. At least, she thinks, that means they were able to go together — but, fuck, that still leaves her here, in an empty house, without her family.

For a while, she continues going through the motions, still with that detached sense of observing someone else rather than actually doing things herself. She feeds the cat and makes coffee for herself. She lets Bill know that she won't be working today and why.

Everything is still so quiet and so still, which is maybe why she reaches a breaking point, unable to take any more. Standing by the kitchen sink and staring vacantly out the window, she nearly slams her coffee mug on the counter, desperate and angry and so fucking sad. She at least manages not to break the cup, but it's still not enough, and before she even has a chance to think it through, she's grabbing a nearby pair of scissors with one hand and gathering her hair into her fist with the other, cutting just above the line of her hand. It's a better cut job than the last time she'd done this, thirteen and terrified in her apartment back in Derry (and how the fuck had she forgotten about that before now?), but it still falls jaggedly just above her shoulders, the hacked-off strands left in the sink alongside dishes for one, because she's the only one here now.

Some time later, by afternoon, Beverly goes outside to sit on the steps leading up to the townhouse. Her townhouse now, she supposes, which is all sorts of fucking weird that she isn't prepared to deal with yet. For now, the most she can manage is to light a cigarette from the pack she's brought out with her — Hopper's, not hers, taken from his empty room. The first thing she said to him, the first day they met, was asking if she could bum a smoke. Somehow this feels right, except that nothing feels right. Her eyes unfocused and bloodshot, she stubs out the cigarette butt on the step beside her when she's smoked it all the way through, then with trembling hands, lights another one.

[ Timed to Wednesday afternoon-ish. Bev is... extremely going through it. If you know her (or Hopper or El), feel free to say that she called or texted with the news of their disappearances, or if you'd rather, it's reasonable enough that she might not have gotten to everyone! If you don't know her, anyone is still welcome to notice and come say hi to a chainsmoking mess of a 21-year-old. ST/LT welcome forever. ♥ ]