wipeawaythedebt | Doors Plot: Night Has Fallen

The Midnight Isle is no longer empty, if it ever was. There are people now, four of them, people from far away and they don't know where they are or how they got there. They've been wandering, lost, worried, watching the long dark halls and listening to the strange sounds in the walls. They were alone, then in pairs and now they're together, locked in the command center. Time has passed, but there's power and there are records if the people are smart enough to pull them up. The door's got a good lock... for now.

Night, or what passes for it has come. The sounds are getting louder, whatever's there knows there's people on the Isle again. New people. Whole people. They have a taste for people now and they're wandering inside the walls, claws scratching inside their new metal home, looking for the people. They don't see well in the light, they don't like it, but power can't last forever. The generators have to cycle down every few months, they did six months ago and they're overdue. Must be running pretty hot by now. Tonight, maybe tomorrow, they'll shut down.

Tonight might be the last night these people have.

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There are horrors that Sybil has seen, mostly because of the war and the hospital work that she did. But she would prefer broken bodies to this emptiness. This reminds her too much of that other Darrow, that place she found herself abducted by the Kaine-like abomination. She does her best to not shiver at the thought of the spider-like man and the things that he’d done, but the memories aren’t welcome ones at all.

“I don’t think they did either,” she says finally, laying the doll carefully back in the drawer she’s been searching. “Holding together. Focusing on other things as best I can.”

“You?” She shuts the drawer and turns back to her friend, already tired of this place. She wants food and perhaps sleepbut she hasn’t found the former and likely can’t achieve the latter. “You must be relieved to have him here.”

Elizabeth glanced over at Booker's direction when Sybil mentioned him. She was more relieved than she could put into words, truthfully, to see he was there. If anyone could protect them, it was him. The only problem that arose from that, however, was that unfortunately the reason he was so powerful was because he could do things that would shock anyone who saw them - anyone not from Columbia.

Which apparently was all of Darrow, from what she'd seen.

"Holding together, too," she replied with a weak smile, trying to shake the worries from her mind. They would deal with things when they came, she supposed. "And yes, I'm glad. I'm glad he found you, too - though I hope he wasn't too gruff around you."

“Not very. At least, he wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, and I did try to accost him with a chair leg.” She offers something of a smile herself, though it is nearly as weak as Elizabeth’s. Finding humour is hard right now, not knowing where it is they are or how it is they’ll get back. She only hopes that like the last time she found herself elsewhere there is something they need to do in order to return to what has become her home.

“Do you think there’s a purpose to this? That we have a task to complete?”

Elizabeth had to hold back a chuckle at the mental image of Booker dealing with that. She supposed he was used to it - their first meeting had gone in a somewhat similar way. In her defense - and in Sybil's, she was sure - he'd surprised her.

"I'm sure he understood why you almost hit him," she assured, though she hoped even he had said as much to her already. Her question caused her to pause in what she was doing, considering it. In the end, she could only shake her head. "I'm not sure. What could we possibly even do here? Everything and everyone, it seems, is gone."

Or at least she hoped everything was gone. The noises she kept hearing sounded too much like movement and too little like the sounds an old, broken down place like this would sound like for her liking.

“I hope they’re gone,” she says, shivering. It’s a different hope than when she arrived just hours before and had been desperate to try and find anyone from this place. “But they must be. There’s been no sign of anyone.”

Only the blood and the strange noises. Sybil shakes her head, focusing instead on a panel in the wall with buttons. It’s like an oversized version of the computers that she’s learning to use at the college, really, and she’s wary of pressing any buttons lest she break something. “He was very concerned with finding you. Which, to be honest was a relief. It helped me to place him as from Darrow and not as the person who’d brought us here.”

After another moment of staring she presses a green button and isn’t that surprised when nothing actually happens. “The last time I found myself somewhere else because of Darrow a friend – Kaine – he had to overcome another version of himself. A horrible version.”

Elizabeth wasn't so sure, but she also didn't say so. Being pessimistic in a time like this would do no one any good. In a little metal box that seemed to hold a lot of tools, she did finally find out thing that looked useful. She started fiddling with the switch on the small flashlight, wondering if he did what she thought it did.

"Yeah, we knew each other back home," she explained, though she still knew they were probably an odd pair to most people. She was surprised, sometimes, that he hadn't cut her loose too - but by now, she was certain he wasn't protecting her for any sort of gain. There was no New York here.

"This place has done something like this before?" she asked, though she found herself a little unsettled at her mentioning seeing another side of someone. She knew Booker would never turn his Vigors against someone, and if she had the ability to open tears again, she wouldn't - not with the chaos stepping into other versions of the same place did. But it still was something she didn't know and she wished, again, that she could just be honest.

“I hadn’t been in Darrow long, only a few months. It was as if another version of Darrow just appeared and we found ourselves trapped there.” She’s busying herself looking through a cupboard, finding it easier to focus on that than to look at Elizabeth as she talks. “This creature, monster in the truest sense, it took me.”

Sybil remembers the fear that she felt, though it seems as if she’s now seeing it through a haze. It had been bone chilling, her life threatened in a way she’d never imagined. But she’d stayed strong then, fighting back. She would do the same now. “Only the monster was my friend, another form of him.”

"I'm sorry," she said, frowning. It sounded terrible - she honestly couldn't imagine such a thing. No one that had gone after them in Columbia were people they knew. That detail made a whole lot of difference. "That must have been terrible."

Any courage she had in considering telling her a little more was cut off at that point. Her ability didn't hurt people on purpose, but they did hurt people. A lot of people.

"It was," she says seriously, with a heavy sigh. There's nothing in the cupboard of any real use, she's convinced, pushing it shut in her frustration. "But it was behind me. Then this. I can't help but wonder if I attract such things, I suppose."

Doors Plot: Night Has Fallen

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