#mauscleum

question prompts // accepting

He had to laugh as he dropped down from the ledge he was traversing to stand beside Jake. "Thought you said you could always see me coming from a mile away?" True, certainly, in the darker pockets of the realm -- where the bright lines of his suit cut starkly through the fog. He'd taken to wearing a borrowed jacket in most trials just to be a little less conspicuous.

But not here.

Now it was the other survivor who looked out of place, a contrast to how at ease he normally seemed slinking through the fog. Ram blended easily with the landscape highlighted in blue-white accents. For as warped and dilapidated as this version of the Grid was, he still looked -- and felt -- like he belonged here. Jake, though, hardly seemed comfortable. The approximation of circuitry lining his figure shone a bold yellow, drawing attention he usually tried to avoid. Not exactly friendly colors in Flynn's system, though it was closer in shade to the marks of a hacking program than an Administrator gone rogue. Fitting, Ram thought as he looked Jake up and down. He wondered idly if the Entity put any thought into the survivor's circuitry or if the choices were random.

"Do you want a tour, or am I supposed to let you wander around on your own to prove a point?" Their brief interactions thus far had been tepidly amicable at best, but Ram was never one to write someone off based on first impressions alone. And besides that, he wasn't about to leave anyone to struggle. "The rules are a little different here."

     They had started wandering together for separate reasons: Quentin, to chase off boredom, and Jake, possibly, to go scavenging. With those innocuous goals in mind, Quentin usually would not have cared where they ended up. But Badham always snuck up on him like a bad scare. A coalescence of bad memories and dilapidation, carrying an undertow of blood and smoke smothered barely by the crisp pine, it almost looked like a normal neighborhood when outside of a trial. As they stood at the end of the street, with Jake to his left and his own house to the right, Quentin stuck his hands in his pockets and sighed.

【 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐘 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒 】 //  open !

josh  stands  there,  shaken and silent---  awkwardly rigid for a long moment as he gazes beyond alessa.  his fingers twitch, forming a tightly wound fist as his nails  bite  against his palm.  it takes a second before he finally seems to realize that he was just addressed.  with a start, he looks back at her, blinking rapidly.  earth  to  josh.

When he comes to, he’s in a place that he doesn’t recognize. Not right away. Then again, he can’t know every inch of the forest in Hope County. Despite that, nothing makes sense, his surroundings aren't familiar. There’s fog swirling around him, and as he gets to his feet, he realizes he doesn’t hurt the way he should. None of his usual aches and pains are there. The last thing he remembered was being thrown from the blast of the tunnel, so he should be in some intense kind of agony from that.

Oh shit, the tunnel.

Alex spins around but doesn’t see anything resembling the tunnel or the road. Nothing but trees and spindly branches. He rubs at his arms, fingers catching on the bandages that were there from the injuries that hadn’t yet healed, courtesy of John Seed. There’s no one as far as he can tell, and the weapons he had on him are also missing.

      Miles just kept putting his foot in his mouth. 

      It had been a persistent problem throughout most of his life – taking actions that didn’t exactly go a long way in making him likable. Such was the side-effect of living adherent to one’s own principles regardless of the opinions of others. It tended not to make him very popular, even if it meant that he could at least rest easy at the end of the day feeling like he’d done right by himself at the bare minimum. Of course, such an attitude made bridges almost too easy to burn, and apparently his pyromania in that respect had finally begun manifesting in inadvertent ways. Karmic, almost, that after so long spent not giving a fuck about what anyone else thought, the minute having allies mattered he couldn’t seem to keep himself in their good graces for more than five seconds.

      He didn’t know why this time was different. He’d faced Wraith in trials before, allowed him to kill other survivors – even himself – without really trying to stop the slaughter. It was just something to accept. Whatever bond they had dissolved under the Entity’s watchful, hungry eye, and Miles just tried not to have any hard feelings about it the next time they met up after hours. But something was different, even if it was just an unconscious desire to protect Jake after he’d been willing to at least hear Miles out. A desire to maintain one of the few semi-positive connections he had left.

      Figured it would blow up in his face.

      “Hey, hey, just—look at me. You know me, right? We… we’re friends. You know me.” Spoken directly to the specter. Jake’s movement behind him momentarily broke the spell, and for a moment Miles was certain that they’d both get their spines torn out in tandem. But he shifted his weight and blocked Wraith’s line of vision, and it seemed to distract him once again.

      “Jake, just… trust me, alright?” A big ask, all things considered. He wouldn’t have blamed the other man for taking his chances with a full out sprint in the opposite direction, but he hoped for a little more reason than that. Miles didn’t take his eyes off of Wraith even as he spoke to Jake with a head turned just slightly over his shoulder. “He’s… he isn’t doing this because he wants to, it’s this fucking fog demon—“