pineslog | ( june event ) who's that pokemon?

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( june event ) who's that pokemon?

EVENT: WHO'S THAT POKEMON?

For the residents of Wayward Pines, the 19th is just your typical boring Monday. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping.

Until suddenly, they're not.

That's the first sign. Maybe you don't even notice — you're far too busy with your nine-to-five, or maybe even by poolside, blissfully ignorant to the trouble brewing just out of sight, or to the fact that SPF 15 is basically just water anyway. Or maybe you aren't quite so lucky. You notice the birds have gone silent. You feel the eyes upon you, unseen but still raising goosebumps on the back of your neck.

And then from the woods, that telltale scream.

No, two screams, then three, then five, then more than a dozen. You can't count them, can't figure out which direction they're coming from. It's like they're all around you now. Even above you. Now you spot them on the rooftops — god, they're huge, you can't even fathom how they made it up there unnoticed.

But they're not playing at stealth anymore. One leaps off the roof, a single fluid bound on long thick limbs, and barely lands on the sidewalk for a moment before it lunges at the nearest person — your neighbor mowing his lawn, or maybe the woman carrying that armful of bags out of French's Grocery — long claws slicing through their flesh like a hot knife through butter. Then comes another, and another. Into the streets, the backyards, and the ill-timed pool parties, tearing through every living soul they can find.

By nightfall, the creatures have retreated back into the woods en masse, but anyone foolish enough to wander too far from the safety of their homes runs the risk of being picked off one by one if they're not careful. The 20th and 21st follow a similar pattern; during the day, the Sheriff and a team of volunteers comb through the woods looking for survivors, and during the night, these creatures do much the same.

The morning of the 22nd dawns with the last of the vicious "murder potatoes" (as Linda had hysterically dubbed them on the first day while wielding a butcher's knife with astonishing proficiency) have fallen, and the danger is gone.

For now, anyway. The questions they leave behind, however? Those are here to stay.

MOD NOTES

This is a catch-all for any and all threads pertaining to the Who's That Pokemon event! It covers the battle on the 19th and the lingering danger over the course of the 20th and 21st.

PLEASE INCLUDE IN YOUR TOP-LEVEL SUBJECT LINE: Character Name, date, location, and open or closed, to help keep things a bit more organized.

If you have any questions regarding this event, feel free to ask them here!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( early ) in town, fighting

❰ this is it. the other shoe has finally dropped. the capitol took their sweet time with this one — long enough even that katniss herself had begun to doubt. even after they took peeta from her to punish her subversion, such a transparently 'capitol' thing to do, she still humored the delusion that she'd been... what? lifted away to some far-off land?

katniss doesn't know what she'd thought.

but now they've shown their hand. now they've sent mutts. humanoid mutts — but they did those in the 74th arena, too. if the capitol's citizens are watching whatever mess this is quickly becoming, they're sure to complain about the repeat performance, however much more effective these seem to be. however quickly they brutalize their prey. maybe it's too quickly. she's made it just a block and a half from her home, and already she's seen four separate people torn apart at the seams and summarily devoured. where's the entertainment value in that? it's surely getting old already, and it's barely even begun.

which makes her decision to leave the safety of her home a pretty stupid one, really. she's not sure what possessed her to do it. the breaking of glass from a neighbor's windows, maybe, or the way they screamed while they were eaten alive. katniss refuses to sit and wait for that to happen to her. so now she's creeping along the line of houses, as flush with the buildings as she can manage, taking excruciating care to make each movement silent. she's not been noticed so far, and she has no plans to change that.

until suddenly, she does.

one of them sprints past the shadows she's hiding in. it's chasing someone, and at this range, katniss can't justify just standing by and watching the mutt take them down. in the next moment, she's nocked an arrow and sent it sailing to lodge into the creature's back. ❱

Get out of here! ❰ she shouts, not at the mutt but at the person the mutt was chasing as it lets out an abrupt plaintive screech and skids to a halt, eyes turning on katniss now.

needless to say, she takes off running the other way. ❱

( mid-battle ) in the woods, climbing

❰ maybe you heard her reply to roman's call. maybe you just heard the commotion, the ragged scoff-like shouts of a creature in sore likelihood of being thwarted, coming from a whopping fifty feet up a tree not far from the river.

peering up that tree will reveal one of the monsters in pursuit of a slim teen girl, bow and quiver slung over a shoulder as she scrambles up the tree about as fast as she can. the creature's pretty agile, but the trees are dense and the spaces between the branches are narrow, so she's managing to keep space between them so far...

but eventually, katniss is going to run out of tree to climb. ❱

( dusk ) in town, bleeding

❰ the battle's over.

it doesn't feel over. but then, katniss probably shouldn't trust how anything feels right now. that's twice today she's nearly died, and her desperate scramble up a hundred-foot pine turned out not to be the closest call she would experience today. an hour and a half. that's how long she spent backed into a crawl-space between two buildings, half again too narrow for any abominations to follow her in but one of them sure did try. and while it was too narrow for the beast to climb in behind her, their limbs are just fractionally shorter than the space was deep. its claws barely had to touch her to draw an alarming amount of blood.

but then it left. retreated for the woods, just like all the rest apparently had before it.

and katniss is making tracks for the hospital. realistically, if she rests and hydrates, she should survive these injuries just fine. but those things are still out there, katniss is currently a little too lightheaded to let her pride hold her back from getting help for a wound that might get her killed in battle if they attack again. when they attack again.

but night is falling rapidly, and twice now she's been sure the hospital was around the next bend, only to realize she'd lost track of her navigation somewhere between the dizziness and the fatigue. it's time to suck it up and ask for help. to the next person she sees, she calls: ❱

The hospital. Which way? ❰ it's a little weak and more than a little grudging. ❱

Edited 2017-06-20 10:57 (UTC)

[ Steve runs.

It's a pretty effective deterrent in and of itself — the creatures could probably keep pace with him, maybe even outrun him, but there's slower prey to be had. He has to put blinders on to make it across town with enough time to help her, and he'd meant what he'd said to Wanda, that you can't save everybody, and you've just gotta find a way to live with that. He'll see to that part later. He'd never said it was easy or that he's got it all figured out himself, because the flipside is that sometimes that means letting other people die. For now he'll run to where he needs to be and hope the rest get saved, knowing not all of them will.

But he owes this girl.

He makes good time, almost to the treeline before he hears her signal him with that whistle, and he only needs to head into the woods in that direction for a handful of seconds more before the shredded sound of its vocal chords — he can hear the scream in them now — guide him the rest of the way. By the time he can see them—

He's still not close.

He throws the shield through the trees, angling it in a blur against another tree and hitting it, then another, hard enough to shake leaves from the tops before it rebounds toward the one Katniss is stuck in. From its position below her feet the creature smacks it out of the air to the ground, as Steve thought it might, but the blow on its long forearm distracts it from its climb, at least, even if he hasn't hurt it. That's alright. Steve knows now where they do hurt. For a moment he locks eyes with the thing, seeing the same thought pass between them, an unnerving intelligence behind the murderous hunger.

He runs for the shield, just as the creature drops from the tree with an unholy thud, heading at it from the opposite direction. ]

❰ katniss could let this unfold. she should, really. she's no match for this muttation, this rampant killing machine that can scale trees nearly as well as it stampedes across land. if she were smart, she'd take this chance to disappear into the branches of an adjacent tree — even travel tree to tree like rue.

instead, in a fit of reckless idiocy she berates herself for pretty continuously over whatever events might follow, katniss half-scrambles and half-slides down through the branches in the mutt's wake, dropping just low enough to whip her bow down off her shoulder and fire off arrow after arrow at the creature's retreating form.

she has no chance of stopping it, but maybe she can slow it down. ❱

_{[Man, some people do not know how to panic in an orderly fashion around here. Spooked into running in any direction that doesn't have an uber-violent, slobbering monster in it, Jack notices clutches of people trading the reliable cover of the buildings for the sketchy cover of the woods, and in trying to herd them back, he keeps getting pushed further and further into the trees by leaping, darting monsters.

It's like trying to catch frogs with a net; they lunge and circle, darting out of reach of his fatally-sharp katana more like dancers than beasts. The longer he engages in confrontations, the quicker they seem to grasp the reach of his sword and account for it.

It's more than a little unnerving, and when he gets in a swing that separates a beefy head from even an even beefier neck, he takes off running before the body hits the ground. It's in the course of trying to find somewhere to catch his breath that he comes up on the sounds of heavy panting and scrabbling claws. Through a break in the trees, he looks up to find the source--

And up. And up.

Dang, he really hopes they're not afraid of heights, whoever they are.]}

Hey, you! Jump!

_{[No, not to her death--hopefully not, if the quick and dirty barrier spell he throws up sticks. Jack doesn't know what the hell he's doing until he's already doing it, and abruptly Katniss will find a solid glass bridge under her section of tree, thick enough to support the weight of several people despite seemingly suspended in air and unconnected to anything around it.

It slopes directly toward another tall copse of trees. Not quite a yellow brick road to follow, but close.]}

Jump on it!

_{[Should the creature get the same idea, however, it'll find out the horizontal wall isn't so solid for it as for its human prey; it'll fade out under its feet and it's a long way down.]}

❰ and suddenly there's a boy, not much older than she is (at least by the looks of it), yelling at her to jump. letting the deja vu pass a little, she has 'are you insane' at the tip of her tongue when what looks like a sloped glass platform appears between her and the mutt climbing rapidly below her.

congratulations, jack: it's enough to shock her out of her her reflexive obstinance, and for genuine lack of anything else to do beyond keep climbing to her inevitable death, she sucks in a breath and jumps.

and it catches her — she half-expected it not to — so now she scrambles down the bridge as hastily as she dares, reaching the tree at the other end just in time for the mutt to make a leap at the bridge in pursuit. a leap that should have made it, really. if there's one thing she's noticed for certain, it's that these things are uncanny in their calculation of survival-based moves, and yet rather than closing hard around the edge of the bridge as intended, the beast's clawed hands(?) fall straight through, sending it screeching and tumbling headlong down the tree, seemingly unable to snag quite enough purchase on any given branch to slow its momentum.

katniss watches until it drops too low to see through the branches, then starts scooting down from branch to branch herself. she's only made it a couple of feet before the sickening crunch of its landing.

that's that, she supposes.

she's on the ground before long, eyes finding jack if he's anywhere near where he was when he shouted. ❱ Others would've heard the scream. We should move. ❰ before more of them show up. ❱

_{[To all the Militesi haters out there: this is why magic is awesome. Moments like these, when he gets to unravel the threads holding together a spell and send a monster hurtling to earth like a particularly vocal meteorite.

Not exactly your standard battle move, but they seem to have thrown the handbook and the standard it's measured by out the window a while ago.

Had the girl been trying to outpace a normal human without the extra pounds of corded muscle and serrated claws, she would've had the clear advantage; she scampers quick as a squirrel, never missing a handhold, and he loses sight of her as he zig-zags through the heavy brush in the direction of her tree.

Katniss won't have to search long; the cape at his neck's a red beacon against the green backdrop. Upon seeing her earthbound, he nods at her, greeting and acknowledgement both.]}

Yup!

_{[Short and simple and about three degrees too perky for the situation, but she'll get no argument out of him. These things are tough enough when it's one-on-one, forget a pack. He'd seen a handful fall on a man taking his three mid-sized dogs for a walk--that's a level of evisceration he does not care to experience firsthand.

Arrowing in a direction away from the body, he joins her in booking a hasty retreat, resisting the instinct to cut branches clear rather than duck around them. Stealth isn't his strong suit, but these things seem smart--smart enough to maybe even track by way of telltale signs of someone hacking at the foliage.]}

I heard water earlier--the river?

_{[Harder to track by water.]}

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( june event ) who's that pokemon?

katniss everdeen | 19th, town & woods | ota

in the woods;

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Mid-battle

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