revivalproject | Storm (relatively speaking) One

Entry tags:

Storm (relatively speaking) One

WHO: Dustin and anyone
WHERE: Temba, various locations
WHAT: Dustin's first storm and he's having a Bad Time
WHEN: During the storm (October)
WARNINGS: Dustin's standard warnings, second prompt will have some medical gross, will edit with anything else as needed

1. Suddenly No Powers | OTA

For as many questions he's asked and poking around on the network he's done, Dustin still does not anticipate the storm. He'd been expecting something a little more...dramatic. Roiling black clouds and gusting winds, electrical storms, perhaps. Instead there's just overcast skies - the sort that he's familiar with seeing back home that come in during early fall and stay until mid-spring, bringing the cold with them. It feels normal.

Until, suddenly, he wakes up in the breakroom of his shop, unfurls himself from his nest of blankets and jackets, and sees the fog seeping through the cracks in the door and windows like soup through a broken bowl. It's so thick outside that the whole Temba landscape is obscured. Everything, except the distinctive silhouette of Rose Thatcher, peering in at him through the window.

Dustin's brain stutters for a few moments. Logically this doesn't make any sense and he knows it. But that ends up being a secondary thought; what he remembers instead is how he never told Rose about how he stole her research, never said he was leaving. She came home late from work that night and he pretended to be asleep. What was the last thing he even said to her?

He doesn't remember.

That realization hits him late, and by that point Dustin's already rushed out of the building and deep into the fog, chasing Rose's shadow down the pavement uneven from weathering and dead plants. He jogs to a stop. The back of Rose's head disappears into the storm miasma ahead.

"Rose? Mom?" Panic creeps into his voice; at this point Dustin knows that she's an illusion, but he can't help feeling like he needs to find her anyway. There's unfinished business, and also, he feels...very lost. Literally lost. There aren't any visible landmarks and he's not sure how long he's been running.

He can't remember.

The recognition that his powers are gone hits him like a ton of bricks. Dustin's head turns on a swivel. If I can just get a good landmark, I can determine my location and retrace my steps, then find the Hangar and--

But the fog is too thick, his memories of the map are too vague, and he can't remember what direction he came from to get here. Panic intensifies and his brain shuts off completely. Dustin picks a direction and runs, nearly slamming head-first into the building he finds, but any relief at seeing something solid is drowned by the fact that he can't tell what building it is. It's old and ruined, just like all the others. He circles it to the next building - same result. Desperate, Dustin reaches for his tablet that should be in his satchel - only to remember that he left it, and several layers of coats, back in his shop that he can't find. Now that he's not running, it's getting awfully cold out here.

Panic gives way to frustration. "Useless!" Dustin howls into the fog, feeling his face grow hot with rage and flustered tears. "Fucking useless!"

Then he spins on his heel, stomps into the closest building he's found and, exhausted from anger and chilled to the bone, slumps into a heap against the back wall.

2. Suddenly Too Much Powers (CW: brain injury) | OTA

It's a minor relief when Dustin wakes back up in the middle of the night and finds Temba looking relatively clear. He can even see stars outside through the window. Perhaps the storm has passed already? Wouldn't that be nice?

Well, no - his memory is still annoyingly fuzzy and the fog persists, albeit thinned to the point where Dustin's feeling a little more confident about finding a safer, hopefully warmer place to stay. The 'Welcome Center,' perhaps? Lauri-Ell had mentioned that it tends to stay untouched from storms. At least he remembers that much.

Stepping out of the ruined doorway, Dustin can't help but note how bright the night sky is. Must be a full moon. He glances up to check.

That...sure is a full moon. With a face. And a mouth, opening up to a scream.

Yet another one of those things Dustin had been warned about and not nearly prepared enough for. The moon's scream rattles him to the bone, bad enough that he can't even cover his ears. He grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut against the noise, waiting for it to pass and his ears to stop ringing, which thankfully it does after a minute or so. Dustin blinks his eyes open.

Wish Keith had given me a little more detail on that, he thinks ruefully. Maybe he did, and I just can't--wait a fucking second, I can!

Sure enough, the memory is right there waiting for him in perfect precision. Dustin can't help grinning as his eyes flicker, greedily going through everything he's wanted to recall over the last thirty hours. Temba map--perfect! I'm not too far from the Greenhouse. Just follow the street here, and...

A couple blissful minutes of skipping down the road pass before Dustin starts to realize something is wrong.

It starts with a headache, sharp like a spike directly through the center of his forehead. The pain stops him dead in his tracks. Then, shortly after, a powerful wave of nausea riding with it.

Oh fuck.

Dozens of possibilities for what could be happening flicker through his mind at once, some of them reasonable, most of them confused nonsense. He tastes blood. Smells blood? Or is that copper, like the metal, or the color? Dustin isn't sure when he vomits, but he does, staggering away on an instinct for somewhere to curl up and hide until the pain goes away.

He makes it only a few feet before his feet go out from underneath him and he collapses, has a quick but violent seizure, and goes still.

3. Suddenly Shades | OTA

Dustin doesn't go outside at night after that. But he does still need to travel for food and supplies from the Hangar, which means he has to brave the storm at least a few more times before it passes. Considering his options, the wandering shadows of his adopted mother and his average memory are a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to almost dying in the middle of the road somewhere.

Except, Dustin doesn't factor in the fact that the storm has more tricks up its sleeve after the first day.

The visions find him. One minute he's pawing his way along the side of an old building, waiting for the turn in the road he expects to find soon (based on the crude Temba street map drawn on his forearm that he frequently references), the next minute a shock of crimson lightning strikes the fog and it coalesces rapidly into the swirling, hulking figure of a monster. It's easily nine feet tall in spite of the fact that it's arched forward to loom over Dustin's head, and mostly formless except for the vaguely humanoid features of a head, two spindly arms, and several pairs of beady, glowing eyes in places they shouldn't be.

Then it slips into the ground, disappearing into Dustin's shadow.

His feet are locked in place. The fear is so powerful that he doesn't even notice the rest of the fog billowing into other shapes: The outlines of an abandoned house, overturned furniture, a broken staircase leading to a collapsed upper floor. Dustin might remember it from a rerun of his favorite show growing up if he wasn't so fucking scared.

The glowing eyes of the Shade peer up at his back, waiting for him to move.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The man doesn't speak with a heavy accent, just the slightly clipped words of a Chicagoan. His tone's heavier than Steven's, his face set more tightly than the other's more relaxed, malleable one. Not that such details probably help in the wake of a screaming moon, but at least it's ceased to do so. Marc remains blissfully ignorant as to just what it's sparked.

For a moment he looks lost as he's not sure what else he's supposed to do. The blood can't be good, but at least Dustin's aware of him now. He pauses, clearly hesitant before he pushes ahead. "It's Marc. Come on, it's not safe lying around out here." Not when you see people who aren't here. Not when things come out for you.

"I'm going to sit you up, okay? We'll start slow, see if you can handle bein' on your feet after."

Marc. Dustin's memories narrow in with a laser focus on all of the impressions he has tied to that name and this person looming over him. There's Marc, weighing several tools like weapons in his hands, dodging questions, and then Steven's clear voice describing how his counterpart has a proclivity for violence.

Dustin's eyes widen as his paranoia ramps up in a flash. He's lying. He's going to hurt me. Can't run, legs don't work. Need time. Closest pressure point--

Without warning, Dustin's hand whips up to punch Marc in the throat.

The widening eyes is a pretty big give-away, and with how Dustin had been in their previous encounter, Marc's not surprised at all at the response. His own is practically reflex, a shift to the side, a hand lifting to intercept the fist as he knows in this proximity he wouldn't be able to completely avoid it.

"Really, kid? We gonna do this now?"

Dustin doesn't really hear him over the sound--is it a sound? The sensation of his fist impacting Marc's hand, which he somehow feels in his ear like the pressure wave of a bomb. Hurts like one, too. Dustin seizes up, eyes and teeth clamping shut.

"--Leggo!" he manages to bark through a grimace. Marc probably hasn't elected to keep holding onto his hand, but his nerves would still be screaming about it anyway and so would he. "Back off! W--Warning you!"

Marc's hold instantly releases, his hands raised in a placative gesture.

"You're the one that attacked me," he says, his voice quiet. No point in getting into a shouting match with an already flighty kid, just recovering from- or is he recovered? The response is a lot more extreme than he'd expect of the kid, cautious but calculated as he'd seemed when he'd first met him. This storm's just putting everyone on edge, not that he can blame them.

"I'm not doing anything. Saw you on the ground- think you had some kind of seizure. You okay? I'll leave you if you want, but I don't think lying on the ground with all this going on is wise."

Reason is far from Dustin's mind at the moment. The only things occupying his mind for some seconds after being released are panic, pain, and fear. Just like how all his nerves are on fire and his brain keeps cycling over the same memories over and over, his emotions overwhelm and consume him entirely, driving Dustin into a frenzy. He does recover insomuch as he's able to scrabble his way onto his elbows, though he has to fight his lead-like limbs and the agony they're causing him to get there.

"Don't toy with me," Dustin snarls - the most coherent thing he's managed to say so far, probably. Now upright, he has to pause to swipe away the goop dribbling from his nose onto his lip, at which point he realizes that this isn't quite the bloody nose he was expecting it to be. His eyes flicker between the back of his raised hand and the blood-and-Element puddle left behind on the ground.

Thankfully for Marc, confusion about this cleanly sweeps his more paranoid thoughts under the rug. "...I...what? How long...?"

The man clamps his mouth shut, catching himself from a sharp retort. He watches as Dustin starts to register other things, arching a brow at the strange mix of blood on there.

"Yeah, that," he says after a moment, sighing as he scrubs a hand through his hair, turning his head to look towards the creepy moon. "A few minutes. Not too long after I heard the moon doin' its thing. That was maybe...ten minutes ago now, give or take..."

Dustin starts to think - probably a mistake, given the circumstances. About a dozen different scenarios pop into his head based on the evidence given and they all scream just as loud in his brain, regardless of how reasonable or probable they might be. Dustin curls his head into his knees, trying to will the chaff and pounding migraine away so he can actually focus on a real, viable working theory.

This is surprisingly effective. Sitting upright is helping drain out the Element excess quite well, so it's only a minute or so later when his head starts to properly clear, leaving behind just one, painfully obvious conclusion.

"Same as the caves," Dustin groans, muffled by his legs. "So much worse. Tripping balls."

"The caves?" Marc echoes. "This has happened before?" That's a little concerning to hear. Still, the kid must be pretty tough if he's experienced something like this before and on his own.

"...you gonna be all right?"

"Yeah," Dustin murmurs. "Didn't let it get this bad. Fuck."

He pauses to twist his head to the side and cough, spitting up a mouthful of the blood-and-Element mixture that's managed to drain into the back of his throat. It's like the world's worst sinus infection playing out in the span of twenty minutes, except it also includes hallucinations, manic paranoia, and a nontrivial amount of brain swelling. Finding a way to avoid this in future is now at the very top of Dustin's list.

...And now he's having a hard time remembering what else is on that list.

Dustin leans back on his elbows, face smeared with blood and looking oddly crestfallen. "...Fine," he croaks. "I'll be fine."

The kid doesn't look fine but he's at least coherent. Mostly. "Right. Well, soon as you think you can move, we better do that. This moon's makin' me nervous."

At least Khonshu didn't grin, but he did like to loom. Didn't scream either. "-you think it was because it screamed?" Marc asked as he thought about it. It had been the most unsettling thing ever, but he's not sure why it would induce whatever it had on Dustin. The storm itself was plenty weird, maybe he'd seen something?

Oh, right - the moon. Dustin looks sharply upwards to see it looming overhead, still with that horrible, toothy grin. At least his short-term memory isn't as fucked as his long-term, and he doesn't have to be especially smart to recognize a correlation like the one Marc is suggesting. Moon screams, powers come back...then they come back a little bit too much. It makes sense. Well, insomuch as 'moon screaming causes power catastrophe' makes sense.

Dustin lets his face fall into one hand for a moment so he can knead the aching and swollen bridge of his nose. "Probably," he groans, then makes an effort to stand up. It's a successful effort, but also a very unsteady and wobbly one. His whole body aches. "How...the fuck...do we make it not do that again?"

Marc watches him get up before rising to his feet. He reaches a hand out for Dustin's shoulder as he sees him sway.

"Your guess is as good as mine. I've never seen anything like this before." He casts a wary look back towards the moon. Is it really watching? He'd love to wipe that awful grin off its face but he's not sure how anyone manages something like that short of a rocket-powered missile launch.

"Not sure if earplugs would make a difference either." He's not even sure why it would have affected Dustin as it had and not himself, but given the weird blue stuff that had come out along with the blood, there definitely has to be some other factors in there, not that he figures the kid will be forthcoming about.

Dustin immediately sidesteps that hand - or tries to. It comes out as more of a stumble, but the deeply suspicious glare shot in Marc's direction makes it clear what his intent really was. Although his paranoid outburst earlier was exaggerated, it's still based on an underlying mistrust of the man that's only grown deeper the longer Dustin's had to think about it. The only thing keeping him from running away now is the fact that Marc has subverted all of that and stayed by his side to help. It doesn't fit the mold.

"I can't go through that again," he says quietly. The reason should be obvious enough to not voice it. "Need to try...something. Anything."

No other solutions spring to mind. It's a starkly empty place in his brain, and Dustin doesn't like it.

That stumble makes it kind of awkward as Marc can figure what the kid was attempting but his own hand wavers between pulling back and trying to catch Dustin if he looked to be falling. Thankfully Dustin manages to remain upright, although it still leaves Marc holding a hand up awkwardly before he gives it another slight lift in a conciliatory gesture and lets his arm settle at his side again.

He absolutely hates feeling helpless about being able to do anything. He can't even be sure that he would've been able to make a difference if he were still Khonshu's avatar. Everything is so weird here and the only thing he is sure about is that he hardly understands how anything works in this place.

"...try muffling it, maybe," he says, talking out his thoughts. They couldn't plug up the moon but maybe they could stop it on the receiving end. "-I heard something about the welcome center being a safe haven usually, during these kinds of things, you try there?"

Dustin huffs a laugh, but it's a sullen, heartless thing, accompanied by a slow shake of his head.

"Can't fucking find it," he says, scowling in frustration. "I was so goddamn close."

"Can't be too far," Marc considers, looking around for landmarks. He's wandered around the city enough to remember most of it, and at the very least, the creepy moon offered some light.

"Come on. I think we're on the right track. Least there's no fog," he adds, which would make things considerably more difficult to navigate.

"...Right," Dustin mumbles, although he doesn't sound convinced. His eyes lock onto the ground and stay there. "The worst that can happen is we get more lost."

And then the moon screams again, and I have another seizure and die. Dustin sniffs and tries to wipe away some of the goopy mess still on his face, unsuccessfully. His nose is still bleeding a bit and the center of his face feels like one giant bruise. With the other hand, Dustin limply gestures for Marc to lead the way.

"Unless the whole city's started warping with everything else, I'm not too worried about getting lost around here so long as I can see more than two feet in front of me." Marc raises his hands, gesturing with both of them straight ahead. "Look, there's buildings that way and the taller ones are closer to the city square. Can't go wrong there."

He starts ahead, glancing back to make sure the kid's following, something he'll repeat as they head onward.

Dustin barely spares a glance at where Marc is pointing before returning his gaze to the ground by his feet. He makes a good point, but Dustin is entirely too sullen to be grateful for it; all he can think about is how he was too stupid to think about it first.

The boy follows along at a silent, listless shuffle.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Storm (relatively speaking) One

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject