#stranded open starter

When: Event Times

It happened again. Countless times now. Toni couldn’t blame herself, and she  wouldn’t latter on either. She kept accidentally setting her own damn self on fire. This time it was barely smoking charred remains of a fire the elder attuned hadn’t even noticed before she walked on by and it burst back into life.

“Fuckin’ hell, brimstone, fire, death and tarnation.” Toni smacked at the flames as it ate up her last remaining ‘good shirt’.

Some grave amount of absolute fuckery had obviously occurred.  

Grave being the optimal word, given that the corpse of the fellow on the ground at his feet wasn’t in one.  A corpse - just beginning to attract insects.  A feast for the flora and fauna.  It’s half covered by bushes, so whether he died here, or crawled away from an unfortunate incident only to meet his fate at this spot isn’t obvious at first glance.  Nor is the cause of his death...  But given the grim, open eyed visage...  It’s safe to say it wasn’t a natural one.

Not that anyone ever really passed naturally on Meridium.

The island ate, swallowed, tore, clawed and brutalised the survivors here.  Like a rabid dog trying to rid itself of fleas - biting and scratching at the irritant on it’s back.  

It only made Gabriel dig his heels in deeper.

But uncertainty - could be an animal ravage... Could be a fucking sky dragon given the shit he’d seen so far.  Uncertainty enough to have him pull a three foot machete from a leather strap at his waist.  

Silence. Listening for any sounds that might reveal the perpetrator of the unfortunates recent demise.  Not air attuned but acute enough to hear a close range attack.  What he does hear, are footsteps.  A shadow of another person peeling onto the edge of perception.

“Is this what we’re doing now?”

An idle question - posed grim and deep, gesturing with the rounded end of the machete toward the spectacle.  Of course the ‘we’ is ironic coming from him.  He tends not to consider himself part of that overall collective.  Even coming this close to the farm was a rare occasion.  A journey based on need rather than desire for any kind of interaction.  He’d come for some supplies.  He’d found -- a fucking mess.

“Just leaving bodies to rot where they fall.”

Shrugging off his outer shirt, he crouches next to the corpse, fingers turning the torso toward him.  It’s clearer now.  Neck broken...  No animal did this.  The shirt is draped across the face of the body - perhaps to spare the other from a gruesome sight.  Perhaps to mask the twist of his blade into a better grip should they turn out to be the one who separated soul from body - and weren’t quite sated with the taste of one death on their tongue...

On the other hand, as terrible of a situation these people had been forced into, they seemed to be thriving. They had shelters, a farm, and from what she could see, people seemed to be working together to build such a beautifully well organized life for themselves. Emilia was fascinated and with so many more people here she hoped that surely these people were capable of giving her more data so she could potentially discover clues about what was going on with this island and how and why certain people ended up here.

She made her way along the beach, head turning to make sure she took in everything like a young child at an amusement park not wanting to miss a thing. At the sight of someone else on the beach, probably taking advantage of the stormy weather briefly subsiding, she decided now was a good a time as any to see if she could get a few answers. They seemed busy so for a brief moment Emilia simply watched them, not wanting to get too close, waiting for an opportunity before stepping in and speaking up in her approach. “Hi! Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt, I just-I’m one of the ones from the jungle. I was wondering if I could bother you for a moment? I have some questions and, well, frankly that tall blonde man and his bodyguards make me feel uneasy.”

Toni whistled to herself. And what with being an accomplished whistler of many sorts--idle music, exclamation, pitching it high between to fingers, signals of warning--the sound carried. She’d only just dug herself out of the most recent crevice she wheedled down into when she felt the rumblings of rising water. More rain meant the water table shifted, even when there weren’t a lot of land for it to shift for. Rainy season was no place to find yourself trapped in a cave system with no way out. Even if the deep earth felt like the warm hearth of home and the pitter patter of strangers’ feet made her teeth ache to their roots. 

She’d explain that to the next person she saw, once she got her throat warmed up for conversational pursuit. Thinking on strangers there sure did seem to be a lot more of them lately. 

“Shii-eet,” Toni plodded to the plane wreckage, letting out a long sweet note of exclamation. “Sure did miss a lot of commotion this time.”  She rummaged about, all of the flotsam picked over, kicking idly at a memorial pile here and there like she couldn’t tell what it was. Toni bent over and picked something up in her hand.