[Dolly]

Word Count: 899

Dolly wasn't so sure about this kind of arrangement. Returning to Miracle after months of traveling was one thing, especially with how they had been treated in their last encounter - mugged at the only inn open at that time, which was run by a band of thieves who stole from their customers nightly as payment. It was a great scheme, from an outside, less than savory perspective. The inn claimed to be free, and was... if you didn't have the money to begin with, no one could take it from you. So, it truly benefited the ones who needed it the most. That is, until sex slavery became all the rage in Miracle, and they started taking the people as well as anything they carried. It didn't paint a pretty picture of Miracle. But, what was Miracle supposed to be, if not a cesspool of criminals looking to 'make it' in this broken land they fittingly call Torn. Coming back to Miracle was a last ditch effort at normalcy. "Maybe that MCC has done some work on it," Grope had suggested, about a week ago when they had begun to feel the tire of endless travel and mixed bedfellows on a good day. A stray village here and there, maybe, but not a place you could settle down in. Besides, those people had enough of their own problems without a whole group of mouths to feed, regardless of the meager work the scavenging group could offer. Miracle was their last chance.

The sky was a sickly gray overhead. There was a storm about to pass through, and ever since the Fall, storms were something you avoided on the basis of safety rather than preference. Torrential downpours and lightning that seemed to home in on innocent bystanders running across broken pavement to the nearest shelter; it was Gaia's Wrath, some said. Dolly didn't know what to think. Anything she had ever thought about religion had been compromised since waking up in this hellish version of her former life, but she wasn't about to start attributing every little mishap to an angry God. She refused to live the life of some sort of radical. She could find importance without having to feed off the mystifying existence of some bitch in the sky, whom may very well be Satan, himself. This whole thing could be Hell. Or Purgatory. A rapture, perhaps? Dolly found that, in her forced state of silence, she could wonder about things and never feel too guilty. There was only time for thinking before speaking, because the speaking part would never come. And she wondered, this moment, whether or not Gaia was raining her wrath upon Miracle, for their insolence, their direct betrayal of her first orders, or to pretense the coming of the Second Fall. In the spirit of humanity, there was of course still Armageddon-talk plaguing the rumor-ways.

"Guys, this can't be a good idea." The group had found a cramped corner of an alleyway, one with a direct view of a gaping hole in the tower that housed the Yggdrasil. There were some sprigs of blue-green grass poking out of the upended stone all over the place, which meant this was still very much protected grounds. In the past few months, though, Dolly was beginning to wonder just how much protection these trees afforded. On multiple occasions, they had been awoken to the sound of some beast or helpless victim. Rocky, the teenage girl they were all happy to call the physical manifestation of team-spirit, of course ran out first to scout ahead and report back while the group retrieved their weapons. One of the occasions involved a massive dire-dile, a crocodile creature of sorts that lived off the sand in Dried. It was terrorizing a young Castitas in an oasis presided over by an Yggdrasil which, though small, should still have easily warded off any dangerous creatures with its natural repellant aura. There was no time to consider the implications in that moment, and many had either failed to, or else intentionally avoided those ideas... At least, until it happened again not two days later in a different camping spot miles away from the first. So, Dolly wasn't sure the Yggdrasil really offered them that much protection, but perhaps the size would account for whatever phenomena was enabling beastkind to overstep their bounds.

"I'll take first watch." That was Malachai, ever-ready to take one for the team. He and Grope playfully argued about it for a while, as they often did in the attempts to woo Wanda, or Dolly, or maybe even Rocky (Malachai could be creepy like that) with comical displays of masculinity. An arm-wrestling contest or a quick wrestling bout would settle the more, but this time Grope had allowed the matter to pass, Dolly assumed because of his own exhaustion. They had been going at it for two days straight this go around, wanting to make the last step of the trip the shortest possible. That meant a tired band of scavengers holing up in an alleyway for fear of being mugged elsewhere. It was a strange world they lived in, when the streets were safer than the buildings. Too much false security within walls, and too many muddled emotions for one very small chunk of city to hold. People were desperate.

Nevertheless, with Malachai watching, things were assured to be fine.

[King]

The winds fell flat.

These tall towers, once majestic in their own time, now a testament to humanity's failure as a cooperative species. Decay, destruction, consequence, repercussion, it was all painfully obvious and yet humanity would never come to understand their own faults and failures out of pride, pure and innate, intrinsic and deep-rooted.

He walked amongst the desolation.

The emptied streets, one busied with machines that carted these lazy meat-bags to and fro from one place of monotonous stupor to the next, were left wide open for him. The tapping of his shoes against whatever hardened surface echoed throughout and, as though offering an accompaniment to the percussive sound, was the crunching overgrowth of withered fauna that pushed through from beneath the cracks to simply die underneath the new sun of this new world.

Nevertheless, he walked.

Completely apathetic toward the dangers of the new world around him, he simply flaunted his own self there, out in the vastness of the empty streets. For the most part, he loved the scenery for this was a grand display of humanity in it's most deserving and natural state; Downtrodden, low, diminished, and inferior and yet his only thought was that of regret, regret that it hadn't been his own doing with his own hands that brought humanity to it's knees to deliver the mocking kick to the face.

How saddening.

And he couldn't help but to feel that anger.

[Dolly]

Word Count: 1079

Broken concrete. Cold. Somehow dump. Having lived in an urban community for as much as she remembered of her past life, Dolly was accustomed to the wet, griminess of alleyway pavement. There must be a man who stalks the nooks and crannies of cities and paints the ground with unidentified moisture. Dolly took solace in her musings as she lay against the cushion of her thick, brown hair, enjoying her own scent for as long as it would keep the less savory smells of Miracle out. Chicago... she thought, her back against stone, staring up at the sky with narrowed eyes, counting the stars. It was strange how this place on Earth could be so very different from what it used to be a few years back, yet the sky was identical. That is, aside from the luminous clock that took the place of both of Earth's celestial bodies... No matter how strange this place had become, there was a nostalgia held within each twinkling pinpoint. She remarked mentally on how weird that was, finding a bit of home in a sky that, for years, had been such a paragon of ambiguity and foreign concepts. The galaxy. The cosmos. Other planets, aliens. At least those ideas provided a sort of link to the culture Earth had once prospered under, albeit at the price of its inhabitants well-beings and pollution of its atmosphere. The very fact that life had changed so much could make a person long for those boring days of nine-to-five shifts and coming home to a broken family; an abusive husband; a handful of a child; a family so close-knit, a girl could be driven insane; each with their own golden quality, now that they were gone. That old saying held true, especially when not only the things you once had were gone, but also the accompanying sense of being eternally lost, considering everyone elses' things are gone too.

There was no one to be, nowhere to be, and no way to get anywhere. A person just had to live and breathe and hope for the best. Did whatever being who had commanded the Earth be restored honestly believe an entire race of procrastinators, who had taken centuries to make it to the moon and still fucked over their place back home in the meantime, could make Earth great again. No one had even noticed the decline of Mother Earth. No one lived long enough to see it happening, and there was only so much empathy one could evoke from a few news reports here and there about global warming, the extinction of fossil fuels and the rising prices of electricity (which had become just as monopolized as gas) and impending war? All so hazy and distance. War was here and now, Dolly supposed, but an easy thing to ignore or even take pride in, despite the death tolls on TV that her grandmother or she, herself, would turn off in anger. She supposed she should feel guilty for not doing more. But perhaps, this time, using the excuse, 'I was only doing what everyone else was doing.' could quell her guilt. After all, could she really feel indebted to a force that had turned her life upside down, no matter how crappy it might have been at the time?

Plink. It was a small sound, but a disturbance nonetheless. This was remote and in direct earshot of the Yggdrasil, where quite a few officials took residence in some of the upper levels. No one would try anything out here. Dolly set her worried mind at ease and lowered her head, which she had reflexively lifted. Something of a curse from months in the open wilderness, where no one is safe and nothing is certain. She felt like a war veteran with some form of low-maintenance PTSD- Plink plink. Dolly was up on her knees immediately, her eyes darting around in the blackness of night like a cat hunting mice. Of course, she was far too passive and, if anything, defensive to make a first move. If there was someone out there armed and dangerous, there was no way they would attack a whole group of people, especially not at this proximity to the Yggdrasil. It was like mugging at a Church. Dolly turned her attention to Malachai, who had hopped off his dumpster-top perch to investigate. He was slower, less tense, more confident. No one would dare try to shank a guy of his stature, who looked so calm about doing his rounds. He passed Dolly by, briskly, and flashed her a toothy grin. "Back to sleep little lady," he muttered, taking a step out of the alley and looking both ways down at the sidewalk.

Dolly saw him flip a bird, and then he came back to his perch. She stood there, still awaiting some form of response, but unable to provoke one. He liked to do this to her, irritate her just slightly by using her muteness against. Finally, after she was just about to confront him despite that she might wake up a light-sleeping Rocky, he gave her a complimentary glance and a 'Oh, you're talking to me?' look. And? Dolly proposed, widening the obvious hole for an explanation. It was just a kid. No older than fifteen. Dolly stared, letting her eyes fall under after a roll. His light-heart was refreshing at times, but a real peeve for someone as high-strung as Dolly had become. What? I would have invited him to sleep with you, but he didn't look like your type. Dolly gave him a sarcastic half-smile and returned to her sleeping spot by Grope. If I wanted to sleep with someone, I could... Malachai made a lot of cracks about getting Dolly shacked up, after the countless times she had refuted his and Grope's attempts. Even Rocky had offered herself up for involvement in a few college-phase type lesbian experiences, probably just to give Malachai something to dream about. The two of them had an odd, semi-flirtatious, uncle-niece bond that Dolly could understand, coming from a family where all your siblings took turns playing parent or child to one another, but that didn't stop the age difference from making it somewhat unsettling. Rocky would never give into him, but there was no telling what Malachai would do. He was like a bolder, less stable version of Grope. Whiter and older, too. At least he was capable of defending the base.

[King]

Fools.

Even now, in the sorry and miserable state they had been reduced to, they resorted to violence against one another as means of survival. This, all of this, was it not meant for a second chance at redemption; a second chance at life itself? Yet here, in the midsts of the silence, in the midsts of their own undoing, they resort to the same pathetic squalor that had enticed her wrath on that day.

He stopped;

He stared.

His footsteps coming to a calm and quiet halt as he took sight of another one of humanity's most blatant examples of highly refined folly. A man, a thief most likely, stalking prey as prey stalkers did with their creeping gaits beneath tattered garbs of rubbish, unbeknown to him that a single pickpocket such as himself would prove a lesser match in comparison to the numbers that lay in wait; the numbers that he had made his target.

He laughed quietly.

Quiet enough for any and all within reach to catch an earshot of that sound; maniacal in it's essence and laced with a spirit devoid of any kind of humanity.

The thief turned his attention then to the sight of this "thing," as he would come to think of him. Though struck by an odd sense of fear and confusion, his pride and his humanly instinct to favor aggressive and animalistic hostility would overshadow the compulsion and necessity to run.

"The hell you laughing at there, freak?" Harsh words; they seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.

The taller man in the mask stared for a moment.

"I said," The thief walked closer, "What the hell are you laughing at?" He pulled a rusted knife from underneath his tattered cloak and brandished it in a manner fit to intimidate the weak-hearted. It was instantaneous and inevitable that this man, this thief, would fall victim to simply being shot in the shoulder both purposely and swiftly.

Falling back against a rusted and inoperable vehicle, the thief simply inhaled and exhaled in rapid succession as the pain near paralyzed him. Fear filled eyes gazed upward at the mask that approached him with slow steps as though the grimacing death come to lay claim on his claim. He trembled in that fear and could utter no words in the shock and disbelief that his life was about to be taken by this ridiculous looking man in a mask.

"What I laugh at, dear boy," That voice was deep and slightly nasally, "Is humanity itself."

The gun's barrel was raised and aimed now at this thief's face.

"Do you want to live, rodent?"

"P..please don-"

The trigger was pulled.

The merciless gunshot echoed through the stillness of the night.

[Dolly]

Word Count: 748

True to her nature, the laugh roused Rocky in an instant. Her head perked up to meet Dolly's narrowed eyes, her hair trapping dirt and cobwebs from the side of the dumpster she lay against, her poised expression betraying the panic that now beset her psyche. A laugh was nothing more than a light, right? People laughed when things were funny, laughing was a positive thing. Careful not to disturb the others, Dolly floated up off the ground with all the grace of an amazon huntress, and she carefully danced around the others as if avoiding broken glass. She met with Malachai at the end of the alleyway. The two of them checked both ways, like children preparing to cross a street, before stepping out onto the pavement and gazing down the length of the storefronts. A shattered glass square inhabited by victim mannequins of a modeled clothing robbery; the peeking of ivy, where the residents of a florist shop had perchance found freedom in the midst of Gaia's enslavement of the human race; the rustling of clothing and the clinking of a glass as a young man in an overcoat slunk out of his own home, clutching broken milk bottles and parading a group of rats behind him. The laugh had disturbed creatures of all races. There was a howling in the distance, not uncommon to the region. All kinds of hostile noises were in earshot of the Yggdrasil, but their presence now beget an omen of dire misfortune.

"A quick patrol." Malachai offered, though his offer did not need any sort of acceptance. He would patrol anyways, and would give Dolly no time to refute him with her mental chiding about the dangers of going out alone in the middle of the night, no matter its proximity to the Yggdrasil. People had become crazed since the Fall. It was true that few of them could be found in organized company, such as the population of the First City, Herself, but there were crazies everywhere. Dolly had heard talk of sewer dwellers who crept out of their manholes at night and mugged innocent children running errands for foster parents filling a void left by their own children. That void was securely reinstated after the sewer-dwellers had their way, usually kidnapping whomever, child or not, for some dastardly purpose down in the muck of the abandoned pipelines. If there weren't so many stories about nefarious sewerfolk living down there, it might have been the ideal place to settle. But now, there could be one of those type running around here, and Dolly somewhat regretted not being affiliated with them, despite their reputation. She could handle a thug or two, maybe, but she would rather not resort to violence when there were already so many forces against humankind; why add herself to the list?

Malachai didn't have a problem with violence, here or there. Dolly wasn't sure if it was some coping method, but his tireless humor was almost dramatically inoculate in nature. Was he delusional? Did he truly believe this was just some sort of adventure, or dream? He had mused with the group openly about his fantasies that this was all some adventure he had created in his head (This is more of a nightmare... Dolly would have chimed in, were she possessive of the capacity to interrupt) and that the people he surrounded himself with (Of course, it was hethat chosethemto surround himself with, the self-important bastard!) were versions of people from the real world. Like some twisted Wizard of Oz scenario, (Who am I, Toto the ex-wife? quipped Rocky, clever and awkwardly seductive, a strange combination...) And here he was, playing the antithesis of the Cowardly Lion and charging off blindly into some alleyway. Instead of following him, which Dolly would normally have done were the group either elsewhere or incapacitated, she elected to wake the others and prepare them for anything. This could all be a big show of over-dramatizing, but Dolly didn't cut corners when it came to safety. Or was that just an excuse for being fearful? 

Then, a gunshot, and a cry. Rocky leaped off the ground and ran out into the street with abandon. She didn't know where Malachai had gone, only that she needed to get to him. Dolly followed her, partly to get her to go back and partly to show her the way, and follow the same course of action. Conflicted, she chased Rocky toward the sidestreet.

[King]

He stood over what was once a living body now a corpse.

Lifeless yellow eyes stared down at the lifeless bag of flesh that was now undergoing a more rapid series of decay and disintegration as it's spirit left him.

Dead silence.

Or it would have been if not for the sound of footsteps nearby.

Some crept, others ran and those that ran were filled with human folly, stupor, stupidity at it's finest as the footsteps didn't run away but closer. If he had lips to show a sinister and anticipate smile, it would clearly have been displayed for all the world, and the world itself, to see. It was a trivial matter; humans would always resort to their own stupid methods and he could only exploit it to the not-so-bitter end.

Therefore he turned his back on the rotting piece of meat that would soon become fodder for flies, rats, and whatever manner of carrion would soon come to feast upon it, and walked. A slow and steady pace toward a place not so far off from this one where he'd come to find more and more of these pathetic beings, perhaps. Perhaps he'd find nothing and of course he'd be more content with finding nothing at all than something.

He chuckled at the thought of his own thoughts as he walked.

A low, resounding , and bass filled sound that teemed with an otherwordly and almost demonic air.

[Dolly]

Word Count: 474

"And where do you think you're going?"

Malachai cracked his knuckles as he neared the mystery assailant, paying little heed to his latest victim. Every step was a solid one. Every movement was intended and serious, betrayed by his seeming ease with the situation at hand. It was the way an old man with a knack for violence functioned; keep all aloof and unaware of the windings and cranking of the gears inside, whose purpose was to secure a quick end to whatever danger threatened he or his friends. Rocky could barely keep herself still in anticipation. The only thing that kept the hyperactive sprite at bay was Dolly's soothing pats against her upper back. The tenseness in the air could barely be spoken through. But, Malachai managed it regardless, and with his usual smartass tone and phrasings. This would be a streetside brawl, short and sweet. Vigilantes taking care of a rogue problem, a small one at that, and nothing more. The guard would be out not too long after this to clean up victim and to take the masked man into custody and all would be settled and regarded as irrelevant the next day. Things would be fine as they always had.

But something kept Dolly from believing it all. Woman's intuition? Was that even a real thing? Could she predict the course of these events with her gender as sufficient reasoning? Something was wrong. The air was suffocating, the blackness was swallowing them whole. There was a streetlamp a block down, a poorly constructed, temporary source of light that some early technomancer had likely erected in the early days of Miracle's foundation. Other than that, darkness. The last strip of blue-green grass could be found a few yards back before the lip of the alleyway; this was not the territory of the Yggdrasil, which was a protective force even without having the actual ability to protect. A person could die just as easily within or without its land, but there was something about sacred ground that offered even the dastardly solace. And these folk were certainly not dastardly. Not that anyone of them knew of, but secrets were all too common in the company of humans.

"I'll rip you apart, like I have others." Rocky punched the air like she was cheering him on but managed to remain silent for now. No use alerting Malachai's foe to the presence of reinforcements, even if this was all tame and routine. Dolly felt the malice behind his words, though. Did he know this man, personally? Was there some sort of beef between them? "You're my next stop on the road to hell, friend." Malachai rushed the guy, ready to uppercut him into the stratosphere. Dolly shielded her eyes. She didn't know why. But she knew she didn't want to see what came next.

[King]

He stopped at the sound of this brutish man's voice;

Even the inept would acknowledge that unseen and glee-filled grin hidden beneath that mask.

"Rip me apart?" He retorted with no particular tone given aside from that naturally comical accent embodied therein. It wouldn't be long, about the span of a second, a second's second, that Malachi's fist would come into painful contact with something solid that should not have been there, but it was. And though such a fist as this did indeed strike against the mandible regions of the masked man's head, it by no means attained the desired result, for Malachi's own hand would perhaps be broken by his own force given striking against an immovable object placed.

"Insects shouldn't speak to their gods in such a way."

It was instantaneous, like the quickness of a clap of thunder, and the mark was hit exact; a fist of his own to the sternum the likes of which would send brutish men and men alike a flight some distance with shattered organ, bones, and traumas alight.

"Allow me to hasten your steps, friend." This he spoke of in regard to this man's alleged course to hell shortly after delivering that blow. All the while, that grim smile painted upon that mask adding further insult to the simply fact that this man, this Malachi, was simply no more than an ant and the masked man a god.                               

[Dolly]

Word Count: 889

The moments that followed ran in eerie slow motion, the air deadened and the atmosphere thickened. Dolly felt a sensation akin to changing altitudes, such as when flying or taking a trip up to a mountain. Those thoughtless times she remembered, hazy as they were, drew up short to the sheer intensity with which the sensation was now attributed. Popping, deathly popping, and then a bout of tangible silence. The popping was actually the sound of cracking, first from the punch Malachai had thrown at the masked man. The force of his fist against the head of the masked man should have certainly shattered something, but not what it had; Malachai stood, frozen, the beginnings of a moan gurgling out of his mouth as he made a move to clutch his hand. He forgot himself and his predicament, which earned him a swift rebuttal by the man in the mask. The second pop-crack, as his opponent's own fist returned the favor with a swift jab, no- slam, to the abdomen, sending Malachai flying backwards several yards. His barely covered back skidded against the concrete. Dolly watched in terror as everything seemed to move with precision and planning, like this was all meant to happen and Malachai had just been following through with some crazed scheme of his.

Distantly, she heard Rocky's cries, and barely saw her run to her 'uncle's' side. She bent over him on her knees and pleaded for him to respond to her, but his eyes were glossy and what gestures he could muster were like a blind man feeling through the air for stability. Wanda showed up shortly after with Grope not far behind and the two of them, ignoring Dolly's steadfast placement a good distance away, eyes agape, rushed to join Rocky in her revival. No one paid attention to the masked man, who stood on the other side of the group disgustingly still. Why? He had deserved what was coming to him, having just ended the life of another. Not that Dolly was a big promoter of justified vengeance, but something about Malachai's defeat made his efforts, misguided as they often were, heroic. Blood coursed through her veins at what seemed like a quickened pace; her hands clenched into fists and rose up from her sides as if by the force of some ghostly puppeteer above her; eyes, bloodshot, stared straight on as the head they inhabited shook with fury. A feral screamed erupted from somewhere within her, one that would never reach the others around her. They continued their muted confrontation with a dying man. Dolly did not think a mere punch could kill a person, even if it sent them tumbling a distance. But sure enough, as Rocky shook his shoulders and tears streamed down her face, the unusual nature of the situation was confirmed. Dolly had known it to be true before it had come become so, as if she could sense a malice emitted by the masked man that ensured his single hit would be a killing blow. Dolly had said her goodbyes when she warned him. For now, she had to control herself and get her friends to safety.

She clapped, once, above her hand, her palms stinging from the force of her best form of alert. Clarice moved to stand beside her, having just arrived and being thoroughly confused as to all the commotion. Wanda looked up, stone-faced, and tried to rouse the group to their feet. Before the Fall, Wanda and Malachai had known eachother. There was no telling in what capacity because neither of them remembered, but that sense of companionship in a friendless world was a rarity likely to never be restored. She was silent, though, and it took the most time getting Rocky away from the still body of her uncle, time that Dolly knew they did not have. Clarice, finally catching up to the recent events, made a full rush to Malachai's side, her Castitas marking glowing as she did so. Dolly's arm jerked out, controlled by that same invisible puppeteer, and dragged her back with no attention to gentleness. There was no time for it. She shook her head at Clarice's unspoken plea, and turned to leave with Wanda and Grope dragging Rocky behind her. The silence was deafening, as it had been the past minute and a half. 

Once within the sanctuary of the alleyway, Dolly broke out into a sprint and the group followed suit. No one quite knew what to do so it was natural they would follow the matriarch, who seemed to be the only one acting with a purpose in mind. To be truthful, Dolly had no idea where this night would go from here. She only knew that, at the moment, Miracle was a place they could never return. Being stolen from was a deterrent; having a piece of you ripped aside without conscience was intolerable. Miracle was no home. There was no home. But in the Wilds, at least there were fewer people. As time passed and Dolly reflected on the way things had turned out since her life had been turned upside down, she realized how deserving of suffering the world had been. And returning it to this state, in which suffering had become constants... perhaps the Fall had never ended, after all.