It is when the sky is the color of richly dyed preacher's robes that the first scent of strangeness is carried in on the wind and your lips [[go numb.]]
(color: red) [Content Warning: Asphyxiation and Biological Weaponry]In the direction of New Bravado, the tiny scrap of dirt at the functional center of the newly established San Saba Territories, a great plume of colorless smoke is pouring out of some terrible crack in the dirt. It is perhaps - three miles distant.
You can only make out the shape of the cloud in the oily blackness of near-midnight because it is thick enough to absorb what little of the full moon's light makes it to the surface of the Blastlands.
[["What the fuck is that?" A nearby voice inquires with rising panic.]]For a lingering moment you watch the smoke rise - then fall as if heavier than the air that suspends it. Ribbons of the stuff cascade down in oily sheets from what you now realize is the telltale mushroom cloud of a distant explosion.
With a twinge of your own panic, you realize something has gone terribly wrong in Bravado.
"That's a gas leak," another nearby voice clarifies stiffly - [["Probably all that fucking digging Felicity and her crew are getting up to."]]From somewhere to your left you hear the worried and weary assertion that you should probably evacuate. Around you - the other survivors begin to make their own plans and the hush that accompanies a quick exit overtakes the group of travelers with whom you find yourself in unintentional cahoots.
[[Abberants: Feel the Death]]
[[Nonabberants: Realize the Stakes]]There's something about being tapped into a psionic network of impression and expression that leaves you raw and vulnerable to the whims of the Mortis. One instant you are yourself - among peers and survivors who are themselves packing and loading their respective Rides to make some distance between themselves and the heavy fog that hangs on the horizon, [[and the next you are not.]]Someone, a psion you know, buckles and kneels. They keen - air whistling through their teeth like grief - and develop an immediate nosebleed.
"They're all dying." The psion wheezes from their position on the ground, "Anyone who breaths it - that's [[what killed them.]]You are instead, just for a moment, a hundred asphyxiating citizens of downtown Bravado whose noses run red with mucus and blood - and whose lungs perforate in realtime to uselessness. You feel the heat and shadow at the edges of your vision that accompany rapid and serial organ failure and - as if they all draw their last ragged breath at the same moment - you feel several hundred people shudder and suddenly stop living.
And for just a moment longer you feel their absence. And you realize [[what killed them.]]""That's toxic fucking gas." Someone nearby, their own nose dripping blood with a similar realization, asserts wildly. "We need to get somewhere with its own air supply - I felt it killing people with Deathmasks on."
The fog creeps steadily over the Blastlands as inevitable as the ocean's tide. You imagine you can feel all those deaths too as it rolls over a distant caravan - which stutters and stops in its tracks. A figure stumbles out of the cab and into the dirt. It does not move.
Guess you'd better fucking book it if you don't want to end up like those guys.
"I know somewhere we can go." Someone says. [["But I hate to say it."]]"Killhouse." The survivor continues. "I hear it's got its own ventilation system on account of how tight St. Tabitha's gotta keep those Lifers locked up."
"On the eve of the Indulgence?" Another survivor points out incredulously. "When all them maniacs in orange are about to run roughshod over the whole damn territory?"
"I'd rather get stabbed than suffocate. Least one I can defend myself against." The first survivor returns.
You figure, privately and to yourself, that there isn't much of a choice to be made. [[Gotta live.]] Your eyes turn towards the opposite horizon. Our Good Home; Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized, huh?
Well - as of about fourty-five seconds ago you felt yourself become both peregrine and penalized. You can almost hear the fog creeping towards you.
If there was ever a place to flee for you life - you suppose the penultimate Longhouse of Sin and Sacrement will do.
For what ugly sights and saintly mights we find and master - we who wander these wastes in search for our better selves only know.
[[Fin]] OOC: Time for Mod Series 0! Escape to Killhouse!
See you there!
<3 - The DRTX Team