Something Slender || Rescue (Jessie; Jono)
Jul. 5th, 2024 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xp_chameleon posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsSharon finds Jessie - and finally a target for her aggression.
TW: Body Horror
Jessie tried to scream as she batted uselessly at the tentacle-like arms trying to consume her again, drag her back into that nightmare with her father. One Slenderman got behind her, arms snaking out to wrap around her in the worst kind of hug. Her arms were trapped, and she was lifted off the ground.
There was a scream, but it did not come from Jessie. It sounded like the rending of tortured metal, and it was coming from right behind them.
Sharon was furious. Once again she had awoken in a strange place separated from her friends, but this place was -- wrong. Dirt, grass, trees: these things all existed, but they had no smell, no substance in a way she couldn't quite define. The air, still and heavy, seemed to drink the sound of everything but her own breathing. No sounds of life. No stir of wind. A dead world. A wrong world. It made her hair stand on end.
And now, finally, she had a target.
She hit the thing trying to envelop her friend at full force, jaws closing around its neck with enough force to shatter bone.
To her shock, what she'd expected to be flesh instantly collapsed into a mass of slime. Cat and girl fell together in a viscous clump, Sharon gagging as she did.
Jessie made a noise that might have been a sob as she registered who had rescued her, concluded it was a friend, and then wrapped her arms as tight as she could around Sharon. She could only imagine what she looked like, with her mouth apparently smoothed over by skin and her ears seeming to fold on themselves. She wanted to scream and cry and run and never look back at the horrors she had woken up to.
But all she could do was heave breaths through her nose and exhale roughly while she keened in her throat.
Sharon's adrenaline was running so high it was all she could do to keep herself from meeting the desperate embrace with a bite, but she checked herself just in time. Jessie's appearance barely registered; the girl smelled real, and the feel of her body against Sharon's grounded her in a way nothing else in this place did. Fully shifted as she was, Sharon could not speak, but she rumbled deep in her chest to assure Jessie that she, too, was solid and real -- and more, ready to fight.
It only took a moment for Jessie to register the movement around them -- right, they were still surrounded by Slendermen. Sharon had only killed one. There were three more (though it seemed like more with the way their arms and tentacles were waving around), ready to overwhelm them and drag them back into some nightmarish world. Jessie backed away from Sharon, recoiling slightly under the Slenders towering forms, her hands desperately searching the ground for some kind of weapon. She grabbed it and threw it in a way only a kid who had spent four baseball seasons on the bench could -- it missed completely and clattered to the ground behind the Slenders.
Sharon spun on the demons, her tail lashing like a whip. The way they moved set off some primal response in her: smooth and unhurried, like their joints were ball bearings wrapped in skin. Something unnatural. Something to be eliminated.
With a snarl the great cat launched herself at the nearest Slenderman, snapping at the tentacles that moved to intercept her. The thing's center mass collapsed under her claws, and Sharon wasted no time charging the next. She sank her teeth into its shoulder and began to rake its side with her powerful hind legs. Something like viscera bubbled through the shreds of its dark suit before it, too, lost cohesion and disintegrated beneath her.
But she had miscalculated. While her attention had been on the Slenderman in front of her the third had come upon her from behind. Tentacles twined around her, constricting like a serpent suffocating its prey. Sharon thrashed, snarling, but she couldn't twist enough to strike her assailant.
A surprisingly large piece of debris came down on the Slenderman's head. Jessie had forgone trying to throw it this time, instead hauling up the biggest rock she could find and raising it over her head to bring it down on -- and then through -- the Slenderman's head. It wasn't quite enough to kill it completely, but the thing fell apart long enough for Sharon to tear herself away.
The cat's shriek of rage was ear-piercing. Freed, Sharon was on the thing in an instant. Within seconds it, too, was nothing more than a semi-solid pile of remains, and the girls were alone.
Sharon stood with her head down and front legs braced, panting from the frenzy of battle. Chunks of the creatures slid from her fur like globs of scrambled egg, and her mouth was foul with the taste of them.
Jessie slowly approached, dropping to her knees beside Sharon. Then, with nothing else to do, and no way to offer words of comfort, she started picking the bits of Slenderman out of Sharon's fur, smoothing down whatever patches she managed to clean.
The contact brought Sharon out of her daze. Instinctively, the cat shook herself -- which happened to send chunks of disintegrated Slenderman in every direction. Including Jessie's.
Jessie winced, and would have smiled if she'd had a mouth to smile with. But there was amusement in her gaze.
Finally getting her bearings, Sharon turned to the other girl. She blinked as Jessie's lack of mouth and diminished ears fully registered. Puzzled, Sharon shifted into her hybrid form so she could communicate. This was an advantage she currently had over Jessie.
"You have changed?" Sharon said, reaching out to gently tap Jessie's arm with curled fingers. She wasn't alarmed; whatever her eyes were telling her, the other girl smelled right.
Jessie wilted a little, her hand going to where her mouth should have been. Yes, she had changed, but not on purpose. How did she convey that without a mouth?
She settled for shrugging and looking sad.
The cat grumbled in a way that managed to sound pensive rather than threatening, as if there was only a nominal difference between shifting hair color and the loss of an entire orifice.
"This is a form of active camouflage, maybe?" Sharon remarked, studying Jessie. Her tail lashed. "Is this place," she concluded. "All is wrong here. We must find the others. Then our next course of action shall become clear."
Ashley and Mel find each other, and then Jono.
“Ashley! Is that you?” Mel had acquired a long metal pole-thing and nerves of steel in the past however long she had been searching for the others, yet she still approached the other girl carefully. Who knew what lurked in the fog in this place.
Ashley's cute hiking outfit was now a tattered set of shorts that used to be her leggings, and the top half of her yellow tanktop, tattered and ripped to show far more skin than she'd started. "I think I'm me." She said, still hugging a giant rock to herself like it was a stuffed bear. "I've been Ashleyzilla for ages, but I think I'm me again." She was barefoot - but otherwise uninjured, not even a bruise to show whatever she had been through.
“Thank the Lord yer okay.” There was an undeniably shaky quality to Mel’s voice, as if keeping stronger emotions at bay. “I haven’t been able to find anyone else in this damn fog.”
"I found people, but it was all Match Hares and Cheshire Sharon." There had been a tremble in her voice, until Ashley heard the warble in Mel's and then she shook her head. Both of them couldn't fall apart, Mel had a spear, Ashley had a rock... she stood up, and dusted off the rubble sticking to her legs, and the fear started to flake away. "We found each other though. Two down, however many more to go. I'm not letting some Johnny Depp looking black and white mad hatter creep keep us from getting home."
Okay, yeah. Yer right.” Mel took a deep breath and set her shoulders. “We should keep movin’, I don’ reckon it’s good to stay in one spot in a place like this. That way maybe?” She pointed in the opposite direction from which she came, squinting ahead as if trying to search when she could barely see twenty feet in front of her.
"Good enough direction as any, I guess." Ashley hefted her rock onto her shoulder. "I'm keeping my rock though. I threw it at a Jack of Clubs and took it's head off."
Mel nodded and gripped her makeshift spear more confidently, like she’d been taught. She started off next to Ashley back into the mist. “Before I found you I kept feelin’ like something was watchin’ me, but I didn’t come across anythin’.” No tall thin men in suits so far. “But if we do…” A stab motion was made with the pole.
"Same vibe.' Ashley stood and dusted half herself off. "This entire time, it's been ~I've got a feeling somebody's watching meeee~' She sang, on-key despite everything. "Even when it wasn't Twisted Wonderland minus the anime, where ever we are, the vibes are rancid and creepy.'' She tilted her head. "Maybe we should, what are the things you do in hiking to mark paths? Cairns? So we're not walking in circles."
“That’s a good idea. That’ll let anyone else know we’re around as well.” What went unsaid was that it might also make a trail for anything nefarious to also find them. Mel leaned down to pick up a few rocks to try and stack them, but a wave of something familiar washed over her and she clutched her head. “Fuckin’ hell-“
Fire. Fire and pain and fear. Paige reached out a hand to try to pull Jono towards her but the flames around him proved a barrier.
"I can't." His voice whispered hollow. "I'm so sorry. I can't."
Ashley's screams echoed in their minds even as their visions were momentarily filled with nothing but the inferno that engulfed the three of them. Burning away all it touched except for the man in the middle of it all, who was curled up in a ball on the ground, begging for his own powers to stop.
Mel reeled from the mental image, something twisting in her gut at the telepath’s anguish. It’s all so awful she can’t even bring herself to curse his name for getting in her head again. Spinning around, she scanned for Jono, and spotted a crumpled black shape on the ground to her left that must be him. She barely glanced to make sure Ashley was alright before rushing over and kneeling beside him. “Jono! Wake the hell up!”
Jono didn't wake at first, and a wave of grief washed over Mel and Ashley as Jono actively mourned the fact that he was still alive. Angry over the fact that his powers kept him animated. Furious that he was a threat to everyone he cared about. Heat radiated from his core, threatening to spill from the confines of the bandages wrapped tightly around him.
“Jono!” Mel was in no way equipped to deal with him if he decided to blow, and he wasn’t waking up from being shaken. The overwhelming emotion of it all was making her lightheaded.
“Fer fucks sake,” she grumbled under her breath, and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It made a resounding noise that echoed in the fog around them as Mel scrambled back.
The fire within Jono surged outward as he sat up, hands flying to his face to pull the bandages up to ensure that none escaped as he glared at the woman across from him. "What the fuck is wrong with you? I could have killed you!"
“Oh wow Mel! Thank you fer waking me up from that awful nightmare that I was projectin’ into your heads. You’re the best!” Mel retorted in a purposefully awful, high pitched mockery of Jono’s accent, before returning to her normal voice. “You were actin’ to blow either way. Figured it would be better if you were awake fer it.”
"And you fucking wonder why you're my least favorite Guthrie and I haven't even met Sam." Jono thought, grumbling as he pushed himself up, reflexively checking his bandages again, tightening them where he thought they might be loose. His eyes landed on Ashley and his chest felt tight. "You okay Ash? We've got to stop hanging out like this."
Ashley had taken a half step towards Mel to stop further slapping, but she wasn't quite sure why. Jono was reacting, and not looking like he was one step away from exploding more of his face off. She stared at him until her brain remembered that even if Jono could think words, she had to use her mouth to make hers. "How do we keep ending up where I'm half naked? I don't even like men." She said, voice warbling into a hiccuped gurgle at the end. "Can we have drama later, and figure out how to get out of Halloweentown first?"
TW: Body Horror
Jessie tried to scream as she batted uselessly at the tentacle-like arms trying to consume her again, drag her back into that nightmare with her father. One Slenderman got behind her, arms snaking out to wrap around her in the worst kind of hug. Her arms were trapped, and she was lifted off the ground.
There was a scream, but it did not come from Jessie. It sounded like the rending of tortured metal, and it was coming from right behind them.
Sharon was furious. Once again she had awoken in a strange place separated from her friends, but this place was -- wrong. Dirt, grass, trees: these things all existed, but they had no smell, no substance in a way she couldn't quite define. The air, still and heavy, seemed to drink the sound of everything but her own breathing. No sounds of life. No stir of wind. A dead world. A wrong world. It made her hair stand on end.
And now, finally, she had a target.
She hit the thing trying to envelop her friend at full force, jaws closing around its neck with enough force to shatter bone.
To her shock, what she'd expected to be flesh instantly collapsed into a mass of slime. Cat and girl fell together in a viscous clump, Sharon gagging as she did.
Jessie made a noise that might have been a sob as she registered who had rescued her, concluded it was a friend, and then wrapped her arms as tight as she could around Sharon. She could only imagine what she looked like, with her mouth apparently smoothed over by skin and her ears seeming to fold on themselves. She wanted to scream and cry and run and never look back at the horrors she had woken up to.
But all she could do was heave breaths through her nose and exhale roughly while she keened in her throat.
Sharon's adrenaline was running so high it was all she could do to keep herself from meeting the desperate embrace with a bite, but she checked herself just in time. Jessie's appearance barely registered; the girl smelled real, and the feel of her body against Sharon's grounded her in a way nothing else in this place did. Fully shifted as she was, Sharon could not speak, but she rumbled deep in her chest to assure Jessie that she, too, was solid and real -- and more, ready to fight.
It only took a moment for Jessie to register the movement around them -- right, they were still surrounded by Slendermen. Sharon had only killed one. There were three more (though it seemed like more with the way their arms and tentacles were waving around), ready to overwhelm them and drag them back into some nightmarish world. Jessie backed away from Sharon, recoiling slightly under the Slenders towering forms, her hands desperately searching the ground for some kind of weapon. She grabbed it and threw it in a way only a kid who had spent four baseball seasons on the bench could -- it missed completely and clattered to the ground behind the Slenders.
Sharon spun on the demons, her tail lashing like a whip. The way they moved set off some primal response in her: smooth and unhurried, like their joints were ball bearings wrapped in skin. Something unnatural. Something to be eliminated.
With a snarl the great cat launched herself at the nearest Slenderman, snapping at the tentacles that moved to intercept her. The thing's center mass collapsed under her claws, and Sharon wasted no time charging the next. She sank her teeth into its shoulder and began to rake its side with her powerful hind legs. Something like viscera bubbled through the shreds of its dark suit before it, too, lost cohesion and disintegrated beneath her.
But she had miscalculated. While her attention had been on the Slenderman in front of her the third had come upon her from behind. Tentacles twined around her, constricting like a serpent suffocating its prey. Sharon thrashed, snarling, but she couldn't twist enough to strike her assailant.
A surprisingly large piece of debris came down on the Slenderman's head. Jessie had forgone trying to throw it this time, instead hauling up the biggest rock she could find and raising it over her head to bring it down on -- and then through -- the Slenderman's head. It wasn't quite enough to kill it completely, but the thing fell apart long enough for Sharon to tear herself away.
The cat's shriek of rage was ear-piercing. Freed, Sharon was on the thing in an instant. Within seconds it, too, was nothing more than a semi-solid pile of remains, and the girls were alone.
Sharon stood with her head down and front legs braced, panting from the frenzy of battle. Chunks of the creatures slid from her fur like globs of scrambled egg, and her mouth was foul with the taste of them.
Jessie slowly approached, dropping to her knees beside Sharon. Then, with nothing else to do, and no way to offer words of comfort, she started picking the bits of Slenderman out of Sharon's fur, smoothing down whatever patches she managed to clean.
The contact brought Sharon out of her daze. Instinctively, the cat shook herself -- which happened to send chunks of disintegrated Slenderman in every direction. Including Jessie's.
Jessie winced, and would have smiled if she'd had a mouth to smile with. But there was amusement in her gaze.
Finally getting her bearings, Sharon turned to the other girl. She blinked as Jessie's lack of mouth and diminished ears fully registered. Puzzled, Sharon shifted into her hybrid form so she could communicate. This was an advantage she currently had over Jessie.
"You have changed?" Sharon said, reaching out to gently tap Jessie's arm with curled fingers. She wasn't alarmed; whatever her eyes were telling her, the other girl smelled right.
Jessie wilted a little, her hand going to where her mouth should have been. Yes, she had changed, but not on purpose. How did she convey that without a mouth?
She settled for shrugging and looking sad.
The cat grumbled in a way that managed to sound pensive rather than threatening, as if there was only a nominal difference between shifting hair color and the loss of an entire orifice.
"This is a form of active camouflage, maybe?" Sharon remarked, studying Jessie. Her tail lashed. "Is this place," she concluded. "All is wrong here. We must find the others. Then our next course of action shall become clear."
Ashley and Mel find each other, and then Jono.
“Ashley! Is that you?” Mel had acquired a long metal pole-thing and nerves of steel in the past however long she had been searching for the others, yet she still approached the other girl carefully. Who knew what lurked in the fog in this place.
Ashley's cute hiking outfit was now a tattered set of shorts that used to be her leggings, and the top half of her yellow tanktop, tattered and ripped to show far more skin than she'd started. "I think I'm me." She said, still hugging a giant rock to herself like it was a stuffed bear. "I've been Ashleyzilla for ages, but I think I'm me again." She was barefoot - but otherwise uninjured, not even a bruise to show whatever she had been through.
“Thank the Lord yer okay.” There was an undeniably shaky quality to Mel’s voice, as if keeping stronger emotions at bay. “I haven’t been able to find anyone else in this damn fog.”
"I found people, but it was all Match Hares and Cheshire Sharon." There had been a tremble in her voice, until Ashley heard the warble in Mel's and then she shook her head. Both of them couldn't fall apart, Mel had a spear, Ashley had a rock... she stood up, and dusted off the rubble sticking to her legs, and the fear started to flake away. "We found each other though. Two down, however many more to go. I'm not letting some Johnny Depp looking black and white mad hatter creep keep us from getting home."
Okay, yeah. Yer right.” Mel took a deep breath and set her shoulders. “We should keep movin’, I don’ reckon it’s good to stay in one spot in a place like this. That way maybe?” She pointed in the opposite direction from which she came, squinting ahead as if trying to search when she could barely see twenty feet in front of her.
"Good enough direction as any, I guess." Ashley hefted her rock onto her shoulder. "I'm keeping my rock though. I threw it at a Jack of Clubs and took it's head off."
Mel nodded and gripped her makeshift spear more confidently, like she’d been taught. She started off next to Ashley back into the mist. “Before I found you I kept feelin’ like something was watchin’ me, but I didn’t come across anythin’.” No tall thin men in suits so far. “But if we do…” A stab motion was made with the pole.
"Same vibe.' Ashley stood and dusted half herself off. "This entire time, it's been ~I've got a feeling somebody's watching meeee~' She sang, on-key despite everything. "Even when it wasn't Twisted Wonderland minus the anime, where ever we are, the vibes are rancid and creepy.'' She tilted her head. "Maybe we should, what are the things you do in hiking to mark paths? Cairns? So we're not walking in circles."
“That’s a good idea. That’ll let anyone else know we’re around as well.” What went unsaid was that it might also make a trail for anything nefarious to also find them. Mel leaned down to pick up a few rocks to try and stack them, but a wave of something familiar washed over her and she clutched her head. “Fuckin’ hell-“
Fire. Fire and pain and fear. Paige reached out a hand to try to pull Jono towards her but the flames around him proved a barrier.
"I can't." His voice whispered hollow. "I'm so sorry. I can't."
Ashley's screams echoed in their minds even as their visions were momentarily filled with nothing but the inferno that engulfed the three of them. Burning away all it touched except for the man in the middle of it all, who was curled up in a ball on the ground, begging for his own powers to stop.
Mel reeled from the mental image, something twisting in her gut at the telepath’s anguish. It’s all so awful she can’t even bring herself to curse his name for getting in her head again. Spinning around, she scanned for Jono, and spotted a crumpled black shape on the ground to her left that must be him. She barely glanced to make sure Ashley was alright before rushing over and kneeling beside him. “Jono! Wake the hell up!”
Jono didn't wake at first, and a wave of grief washed over Mel and Ashley as Jono actively mourned the fact that he was still alive. Angry over the fact that his powers kept him animated. Furious that he was a threat to everyone he cared about. Heat radiated from his core, threatening to spill from the confines of the bandages wrapped tightly around him.
“Jono!” Mel was in no way equipped to deal with him if he decided to blow, and he wasn’t waking up from being shaken. The overwhelming emotion of it all was making her lightheaded.
“Fer fucks sake,” she grumbled under her breath, and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It made a resounding noise that echoed in the fog around them as Mel scrambled back.
The fire within Jono surged outward as he sat up, hands flying to his face to pull the bandages up to ensure that none escaped as he glared at the woman across from him. "What the fuck is wrong with you? I could have killed you!"
“Oh wow Mel! Thank you fer waking me up from that awful nightmare that I was projectin’ into your heads. You’re the best!” Mel retorted in a purposefully awful, high pitched mockery of Jono’s accent, before returning to her normal voice. “You were actin’ to blow either way. Figured it would be better if you were awake fer it.”
"And you fucking wonder why you're my least favorite Guthrie and I haven't even met Sam." Jono thought, grumbling as he pushed himself up, reflexively checking his bandages again, tightening them where he thought they might be loose. His eyes landed on Ashley and his chest felt tight. "You okay Ash? We've got to stop hanging out like this."
Ashley had taken a half step towards Mel to stop further slapping, but she wasn't quite sure why. Jono was reacting, and not looking like he was one step away from exploding more of his face off. She stared at him until her brain remembered that even if Jono could think words, she had to use her mouth to make hers. "How do we keep ending up where I'm half naked? I don't even like men." She said, voice warbling into a hiccuped gurgle at the end. "Can we have drama later, and figure out how to get out of Halloweentown first?"
