raptorcanaria | Labyrinth

Entry tags:

game: milliways

Labyrinth

Here's the thing about Milliways: It's not the Real World. Dinah has a very clear delineation in her mind: there're things that happen in the bar, and there are things that happen at home, and even if people visit from one to the other, they're very different places.

Justice League, supervillains, Oliver. Those things don't follow her in. Which is good and bad, because it becomes a place to escape. And escape becomes too safe, somewhere where actual threats aren't real. That's the problem with the place. It's not home, and it doesn't touch home, and if she wanted, she could stay in the bar, rent a room, and never have to worry about outside. And that's what's so dangerous.

Not that she's thinking of danger right now, even deep in the forest where there might be demon rabbits. She's just thinking of the run, and the exercise, and also where she wants to take Ollie for dinner tonight. That's how she manages to get lost.

And how she finds herself facing a rough hewn stone wall, with a door cut into it.

Dinah stands in front of it, stretching out her warm muscles, staring at the door. Has that always been here?

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She looks surprised - and then she looks like nothing at all as her head explodes into blood and brains and shards of bone. The the rest of the body, grey and clawed under the white armor, slumps down, lifeless.

Dinah landed against a tree when she was flung, hard enough to hear a crack but right now she has no idea whether it was wood or bone. Now, she scrambles up, one arm dislocated at the shoulder, the other snapped in the humerus, and hurries towards him.

"Voodoo," she says breathlessly, apology for being an idiot and concern for him all in one word.

He's doubled over, clutching at his abdomen. Blood spreads across his sleeve as his other arm hangs limp at his side. His breaths are shaky are irregular as he looks down at the corpse of the Claymore.

At Dinah's voice, he looks up and nods. "Hey," he says.

Slowly, he takes his arm away from the wound, revealing a massive blotch of blood spreading fast over his abdomen.

He looks at Dinah again, his eyes blank from shock.

"I think it's pretty bad."

"Okay."

Dinah drops to her knees beside him and tries to move, squeaking when she realizes she can't use her arms.

"Okay, Voodoo. I need your help first, please. Right shoulder."

Voodoo nods, puts his hands in just the right places, and pushes-

-and then there's a loud POP.

"That better?"

"Mmm-hmmm."

Just ignore how white her face is and the tears streaming from her eyes. She is.

With one functional arm, she clears the shirt away from his wound, and quickly moves to applying pressure.

"Oh, this isn't bad at all," she white-lies. "Nothing Guppy can't stitch up when we get back to the bar."

Voodoo nods. His head is starting to get fuzzy, and that old pins-and-needles feeling begins to creep up his arms.

(Of all the days to forget his blowout kit...)

"Long way to go. Long way."

"Yeah."

Possibly.

"Lie down for me, okay?"

She keeps the pressure down with her right arm, looking around for something to use as a field dressing. Then she grabs his hands, puts them on his wound, and stands, walking towards the Claymore's body.

Voodoo keeps up the pressure on the wound as Dinah gets up, his gloves slicking with blood.

"Careful," he warns. "For booby traps."

He lets his head fall back to the grass as he focuses on taking big, deep breaths. Then his tactical sense pops in and he unfastens his helmet before setting it beneath his head, propping the front grip of his MP5 on his opposing forearm as he scans the forest ahead of them.

His index finger is light on the trigger. Just in case there's more than one.

"Yeah."

She's being careful as she approaches the inhuman looking corpse, holding her left arm carefully in front of her as she uses her foot to push the body over.

She grabs the thing's gray cape with her right hand and using a foot against its shoulder she rips the cape from the body before coming back to him.

"Well, this is dirty as hell, but it'll do."

Voodoo takes it before bandaging up his wound. The fuzzy-headedness isn't going away. Neither are the pins and needles.

He looks up at Dinah before pulling his Sig out of his chest holster and offering it to her, gripfirst.

"Here. Take it."

Dinah's reassuring smile vanishes and it replaced with a stubborn frown.

But she takes it anyway, tucking it into the front of her running shorts.

She's not going to use it, but it'll make him feel better to know she has it.

That it does.

Voodoo gets to his feet, fastening his helmet.

"You think this is just an extension of the rabbit hole?"

Because he wouldn't put it past whoever made this.

Dinah glances around, and pauses to pull her shirt off over her head, maneuvring it gently around her broken arm.

"I don't know," she says, when she's finally in her sports bra, arm held carefully in front of her, "I can't tell one forest from another, but I don't here any of the regular bar noise."

"Help me make a sling?"

"Yeah, okay," Voodoo says, slinging the gun behind his back. He takes Dinah's shirt and assists in the slingmaking, putting her arm and shoulder through it just so.

"Don't think we can count on any friendly faces 'round here. Anything moving gets one warning. After that, we blast it."

He looks her in the eye for comprehension - she's good with that, right?

She's - not good, and her unhappy face when she meets his eye proves it.

But she nods.

"Yeah, okay."

She tests the sling - it's pretty tight and it keeps her arm straight in front of her - and looks past him to the nearest thing in this forest to a path.

"I'm going to vote that way."

Voodoo follows her gaze, shaking away the dizziness as best he can. The blood loss is staunched, but he's still lower, lower than he's ever been.

"Conquest via the democratic process. I dig it."

He steps out, his weapon raised.

"Stay behind me."

Edited 2013-07-10 14:03 (UTC)

Dinah comes up beside him, placing her good hand on his shoulder lightly.

"Hey, big man. It's okay. I still have three quarters of my limbs working. I don't need protecting."

And if she sees another of those girls in armor, she'll scream at her.

"Come on."

A few yards away, she can see a tree with a triangle engraved on it.

"Three-quarters ain't four-fourths," Voodoo says, making his way over to the triangle. "But if you insist, then at least keep out of my nine-to-three."

He tugs on one knot of the bandage, grimacing as it tightens, then taps the triangle.

She obediently takes a half step back to come out past his three, and keeps her hand touching him as he presses, using a minor force of will not to tighten her grip.

The trunk of the tree swings open towards them, exposing a stairway down, below ground.

"Oh no, I was just enjoying the fresh air."

Voodoo grunts, keeping his eyes forward. "You too?"

He starts down the stairway, one step at a time.

He's really starting to wish he brought some NODs.

"Yeah."

She lets him take the lead, and glances over her shoulder before following him down. There's a card she can play better outside.

The staircase is worn, wooden, and leads down into what looks like an old flower shop, lit by a dusty electric light in the ceiling, and a flickering streetlight through a shop window that doesn't have an associated door. Broken shelves of potted and cut plants line the walls, are littered in soil and water. And the cause of this destruction fills the center of the room. A large plant with a central bulbous leaf arrangement that stands taller that Voodoo, roots breaking out among shards of terracotta, looping and reaching into the shop floor.

"Oh, fuck me."

He keeps the submachine gun up, but keeps scanning the shop as he enters.

"Little Shop of Horrors. It's Little Shop of Horrors."

"Never seen the movie, though," he admits. "Get that fuckin' pistol ready."

Edited 2013-07-12 10:21 (UTC)

Dinah stares at the plant with a puzzled frown on her face. She nods blankly and reluctantly reaches for the gun in her shorts...

...only to have to leap back as a green shoot rockets out of the broken floor beneath her, wrapping tentacle like around her wrist. Before Dinah can react, the plant has jerked violently, to the sound of bones cracking in her wrist, forcing her hand open and the gun to drop.

"Ah-ah-AH," a rich, male voice booms - from the large plant in the center. "That won't help you now, Sugar."

Edited 2013-07-14 00:53 (UTC)

"Dinah!"

As the crack of bone echoes through the room, he grits his teeth and raises the MP5, centering the front sight post on the bulbous center.

"Pal, I am a long goddamn way from home. You get one warning: drop her or die."

Dinah was already pale from the last limb some monster broke. She's white from this, and the sprout wrapping around her forearm seems to be doing it just to lift her arm up, against the protests of the shoulder that's been dislocated and reset twice in as many hours.

The huge bulb of leaves moves, tilting down to a horizontal position, two of them peeling back in a way that looks like lips around what are definitely white teeth.

"Lotta tough talk, Son. How do you plan on following up on that?"

Another shoot, thin and tentacle like as the last, shoots up from the floor towards Voodoo, racing towards the barrel of his submachine gun.

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