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| Blast of the Past; Holly's Challenge | |
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| Topic Started: August 11, 2015, 6:40 pm (166 Views) | |
| Storyteller | August 11, 2015, 6:40 pm Post #1 |
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Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Holly’s room of Murderworld ![]() ![]() The door out of the factory that had “Mulholland” written on it opened to an old rundown hospital room. The building looked abandoned. Paint and plaster was falling off of the walls and forming dirty piles. The soft materials in mattresses and curtains had long since rotted off of whatever was supporting it and transformed into piles of dirt under the rusty metal bed frames. Everything that had obviously been white at some point had turned either a dingy brown or mossy green. Beyond the windows was utter blackness. The room was lit by strings of electric lights that were obviously new additions. Along with the lights, another obvious addition to the room was a metal wall running wall to wall, and floor to ceiling about twenty feet into the room. It was completely blank except for a screen positioned directly in the center. As soon as Holly tried to move into the room, he would find that the air felt very thick, almost like trying to walk through a pool and that effect also carried through to breathing. It was still possible to breath in the room, but it took far more effort than normal. Once he had entered and closed the door behind him, the screen lit up to show Arcade. The way he smiled would lead one to believe they should expect fangs instead of pristine even teeth. “Mulholland, what an interesting name and what an interesting ability you have. Let’s put that to the test shall we. If you haven’t guessed already, this room is part of a hospital, one that received a lot of use during the second world war. There are five steel walls like this between you and an open door on the other side. All you have to do is bash through them and you can move on. Oh and the reason it feels like your underwater is because I’ve suppressed kinetic energy in the room. You’ll have to draw a lot more energy than normal, thankfully there is plenty here. You have five minutes before the door out locks and you are stuck here until you die.” The image of Arcade vanished to be replaced by the countdown in oppressive red numbers “5:00” Tag: Urbane |
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| Matthew | August 14, 2015, 7:38 pm Post #2 |
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Character: Urbane Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Murderworld: Urbane's Room To say that Mulholland was underwhelmed to have stepped through the door marked with his name and into a room that looked like a dilapidated hospital was an understatement. He bet everyone else got something cool for a room. Spaceships. Museums where everything came to life. Shark tanks. A Flintstone's town. They likely got all that and more. And he got a rundown hospital. Full of mildew and decay. Wasn't he the lucky gay boy? Of course he was. Because this guy who wanted to be known as Arcade knew too much about him. Knew how his powers worked. Knew exactly the kind of place he could use his powers easily. So things had to be way more complicated than they seemed. Put him in a hospital he would draw on the memories there and break his way out in no time. Metal walls or no metal walls. The television screen in the room seemed to sense his thoughts and sprung to life. It explained everything in detail. It was an old abandoned hospital. Duh, thanks Captain Obvious. He was expected to use his powers. The place had some sort of kinetic power blocker. He would have to use every bit of memory he could in order to blast his way out. Or take a lot of time to build up power. He had five minutes. Clever. So that meant that he had to just use as much as he could, as quickly as he could. Great. Cuz Holly never soaked up emotions. He never pulled in raw unfiltered pain. He never ever used negative emotion. Except he did. Because the world was full of negative. Negativity seemed to imprint the most strongly on the past. Be it a war won, or a battle lost. It may have been the greatness that everyone remembered. The bravery, the honor, the valor. But the land, the very structures and items involved, they remembered a different story. They remembered the unfiltered version that included blood, sadness, heart ache. Holly had seen it over and over again. And he clearly would see it again now. And he only had five minutes to do it this time. So he focused on the nearest of the beds and his mind was filled with sights and sounds. A woman standing near the bed, tears in her eyes as she looked over the body of a man. A dead man. In her hand she held a letter. The letter was easy to see, the woman had read it many a time. The man's last letter to her before she found out he hadn't survived, had fought her way to the hospital to find him. The sadness in pain in her was almost overwhelming. The sadness and pain IN the letter WAS overwhelming. Holly's knees buckled and he fell to the floor as he read the letter in his mind.
As he knelt on the floor and tears poured from his eyes they actually glowed with unreleased power. As they hit the floor they exploded with dull thuds into the warn linoleum, kicking dust motes into the air. The dinosaur, so out of place with its colorful stylized design seemed completely out of place in the room. It glowed. Brighter. Brighter. Until the light was almost blinding. And Holly threw it at the metal wall. Tags: ST Edited by Matthew, August 14, 2015, 7:40 pm.
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| Storyteller | August 19, 2015, 12:19 pm Post #3 |
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Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Holly’s room of Murderworld Holly had done his job well, even with dampening in the room, the dinosaur flew through the air at a normal speed and crashed into the first wall. The effect was like it being hit by a cannon ball. In the blinding light of the charged figurine, the metal peeled back with a horrible cracking sound. Shards broke off and caught in mid air, falling slow motion. By the time it cleared and the light from the dino had died down, there was a hole big enough for Holly to climb through. In his control room, Arcade had just finished needling Callie about her plants when he caught sight of Holly's glowing tears. His breath caught in his throat and he flailed a hand at Miss Locke. "Oh please tell me you have that recorded!" This was art. He was a playwrite and he was seeing his world debut with actors that weren't acting. It was raw and real and the gratification he was feeling made all the cost and effort and time worth it. Even if none of them died, though he doubted that would be the case, his first Murderworld had been a success in the moment those blue shards of concentrated emotion had fallen from Holly's eyes. "Bravo." He said to no one in particular and clasped his hands together. Back in the hospital room, the timer was ticking down towards 4:00 left. Holly would have to keep up that pace if he wanted to make it through the remaining four walls in time to escape. Tag: Urbane |
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| Matthew | August 22, 2015, 9:10 am Post #4 |
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Character: Urbane Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Murderworld: Urbane's Room The wall did just what it was expected to do under an onslaught of Urbane's powers. It buckled and it broke, allowing an opening wide enough for him to step through to form within its now twisted and mutilated form. Arcade Zero. Urbane One. Urbane's psyche... negative three. And the poor dinosaur which he had used as an impromptu weapon? He had already lost the battle completely. As Urbane stepped into the next room in his own personal hell he could see the crumbled bits of plastic scattered freshly across the debris strewn floor. He felt a pang of guilt at having committed cartonacide, killing off an innocent cartoon dinosaur. But he also felt a surge of anger that any of this was happening, that he was forced into such a situation, that any of them were. Unfortunately for Holly, his own emotions did not power his mutation. Sure he could call upon old memories of his own when they were attached to other things, his hammer for example held quite a few painful memories. He could not pull memories off himself though like he could from say Josh Guthrie's wings or Bobby Drake's ice. That meant more emotional turmoil sucked into his world. He would have to pull in whatever he could again. Because otherwise he wouldn't make it out. While he could live with personal failure. Holly had no idea if that act in itself would only impact himself directly or if it would have repercussions for the rest of the Utopians he had been traveling with. What if some stipulation untold to them resulted in someone else's death if another person failed? He had death on his hands, he had killed before, but that did not mean he wanted another life to end because of his inaction. Bad enough when they ended due to his action. Fully in the second room, Holly scanned it briefly and walked to the nearest of the broken down bed frames. He grabbed a hold of the metal and pulled and twisted until a sizable metal pipe had broken off. He hefted the metal in his hand and instantly realized two things. One. It would work as a substitute for his hammer for now. Two. It held a slew of emotions and memories. Urbane walked up to the next wall, spat at it as if issuing a challenge and focused on the piping in his hands. Suddenly he could see the face of a young man wearing an army aircorps uniform. The man sat on the edge of that very bed, bandaged, thinking back to a time before. Not when he got injured, but a worse time, when he had seen so many others injured. In that moment Holly was in the man's mind, looking through his eyes, seeing what he saw, feeling as he felt.
Fresh tears held back this time, yet still glistening around the corners of his eyes with unreleased power, Urbane focused on the memory, but more than that, he could feel the history pouring in from each body the man had seen, each death he had witnessed in that moment. So he swung the hammer with all his might, the hammer glowed brighter, brighter, almost as bright as a star, too blinding to look at, and it hit the wall. The wall stood NO chance. His psyche felt the blow too, and another bit of him was forever saddened, forever stuck remembering that sad moment of someone elses life. Tags: ST |
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| Storyteller | September 6, 2015, 3:42 pm Post #5 |
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Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Murderworld: Urbane's Room Arcade wished he knew the story that was playing in Urbane's head. He knew the kinds of stories that went along with hospitals from that era, but not the specific ones for this particular room. What a fantastic gift he had; to relive history merely by being in a place and drawing power from it. Of course Arcade would never trade his own ability for another. In his one way, he was a god. He could alter the very laws of nature in any dimension he resided in. The drawback was that it wasn't selective, it had to apply to the whole dimension and for universe everyone was familiar with, it was so close to infinite that he couldn't affect any real change. But when given a finite space like Mr. Chamber's pockets, he could change whatever he wanted. It was how he'd dampened the kinetic energy in the room, ensuring that Urbane would have to draw heavily on the memories of the room to break through the barriers. Again the boy had tapped into something and strong and charged up his makeshift hammer. It collided with the wall and the metal shattered, blowing shards into the next segment of the room. Like a firework in the sky, the glowing shards expanded from the point of impact but quickly slowed to a near stop, forming a rough hemisphere on the other side of the wall before they begrudgingly crept down towards the floor. "If you survive this," Arcade's voice purred through the speakers in the room. "You should take up writing about your powers. I can only imagine the kinds of experiences that have been lost to the rest of the world, but not to you." There were three more doors, and he couldn't afford to wait too long before he'd have to do it again. Tag: Urbane |
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| Matthew | September 9, 2015, 12:19 pm Post #6 |
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Character: Urbane Date: March 14 Time: Evening Place: Murderworld: Urbane's Room Two rooms down. Three to go. Time was not on Mulholland's side though. Each and every door he had to smash his way through took just that little bit too much of time so as to make sure by the time he made it to the final door he would lose. It was like a carnival game. Make it seem simple. Make it seem doable. But make sure that in the end the player ALWAYS lost and walked away with some tiny sawdust stuffed fake pikachu doll. Except there wouldn't be a straw filled toy in his future. There would be some inevitable death. Rigged. And Evil. What made it worse was just how much joy the man behind the whole set up seemed to be getting out of it. He was in sheer glee at the prospect of watching Holly fight his way through the room. He even had the stupidity to suggest he write some sort of book of memoirs about what he encountered. False hope. The man would toss you in a trap, tell you that you could live, make sure you couldn't, but then keep assuring you that you could. A seller of false hope. No better than the televangelists on TV who claimed sending them money would cure your cancer or the snake-oil salesmen of ye olde west. "Shut up," Holly said through clenched teeth as he held the metal pipe firmly gripped in his hands like a little leaguer about to step up to his first ever at bat. He didn't need the sociopath talking to him as if they were friends, as if they had anything in common. As far as he could tell the only thing they even remotely had in common was they both had unique names. That was not something he was about to declare camaraderie over. Time was ticking away. He was just standing there. The way he figured it he had time to get through two more doorways before time ran out. He had left school a long while back but even Holly knew that two did not equal three. What it equaled was failure. Death. So why continue onward? Why subject himself to all the memories around him if it would be all for naught in the end? Why not just give up? Why not just give in? His mind flashed back to every other time he could have simply given in. The day his powers exploded outward in the showers of the group home. The guard who had been set to rape him now dead on the floor with his pants around his ankles. A hole the size of a minivan smashed through the exterior wall of the building, the water still flowing from the shower head, mixing with red blood as it pooled and flowed not towards the drain but out the gap in the building. The metal rod in his hands began to vibrate slightly, between his fingers where his grip had intensified, sparks of blue light could be seen etching their way across the fatigued metal's surface. He never pulled in his own personal memories. He never focused on his own past. But doing so now was enough to kick him into motion. He turned past his own fear and hatred, past the memories of his own self loathing and his own inner demons and faced something far worse. In the far recesses of the room was a memory he had been actively avoiding. A memory that was so strong and so fixed into the space that he could tell where every tear had fallen from the person who made the memories. The floor an intricate pattern of speckled drops of water. Each one a tear drop. Each one resonating with a long lost memory. Lost to time. Lost to pain. Lost to generations gone by. But now fully available to him. He did not want it. He had purposely NOT focused on it. Tapping into the edges of his own memories had shown him that he had to do whatever it took to survive though. And so he would. Mulholland focused his mind on that area of the room he had so tried to neglect, and immediately his own tears began to flow from his eyes, uncontrollable as his own emotions synced up with the ones he was now feeling from whoever had stood across the room from him in the past. A child. Young but having seen so much. Standing by a bed, refusing to climb into it, afraid that laying down may all be a trap, that surviving may be a dream they did not want to wake from.
Holly pulled in all the emotion. All the pain. All the sadness, the depression, the fear. He cut the memory off there, knowing it went on longer, but not wanting or needing to know more, yet at the same time knowing it was all stored away inside his mind anyway, and would always be there, always be a part of him from that moment on. The metal pipe glowed the brightest it had ever glown, his power SURGED through it, the pipe vibrated in his hand and a low hum could be heard throughout the room. He had never held so much power at one time. Never before had it flowed through him at such a strength and rate. He focused on the little girls tear filled and dirty face. The tears from his own eyes hit the floor laced with kenetic power and left divots where they landed. Holly charged forward at the first door, pole held straight out like a lance. As the metal contacted the metal of the door, the doorway erupted into pieces, exploding outward into the next section of the room, overcome with his power each piece itself contained a small charge and smashed into things with kenetic energy to spare. To overcome a kinetic barrier, one simply had to have MORE kinetic energy. And at this moment, Holly had it in spades. He continued to run forward, holding onto the image of the little girl, allowing her sadness, humiliation, and pain to flow through him. Door number two shattered. And then he was in the last room, still charging forward. Door number three. His speed faltering a step or two as fatigue and the invariable force of anti kinetic barriers worked against him. Yet he kept on his feet. That little girl had kept on hers. She had survived hell on earth. He could survive this. If not for himself, than for her memory. A memory that would live on forever inside of him. Door three, he hit it with all the energy he had left, swung the pole downward in a crushing arc as he continued to charge forward. It exploded outward and he ran through the opening into... well he wasn't sure, because as he made it to his promised freedom his world went black, Holly passed out onto the floor, tears still flowing down his face. Tags: ST |
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3:20 AM Jul 11