[AJBuwalda]

Ruckus levels his rifle and walks to the central room with some messure of care, which is quite the controlled impluse for him. Scanning the te envoirment as he goes he mumbles "Come out, come out where ever you are."

[Kontact]

Ruckus moved forward at a steady pace, planting one foot carefully after then next, braced to fire with a thought.  A patch of what he assumed was more floor in front of him resolved itself into a nest-covered balcony railing as he approached.  The vast darkness beyond and the light below now made more sense.  As he reached the doorway he could see out into the whole room proper, a grand auditorium of some sort.  Not high above his head, suspended below the hive-covered ceiling were spotlights and machines he couldn't figure out.  Down on the lower level, there was a corner of an apartment building, complete with street, signs and graffiti, but with one wall missing.  The building itself and much of the area surrounding it were the only places in the past 5 floors not completely covered in the flaky hive wall.  The old trideo equipment near the missing wall made it plain that this was a set, a street scene for some sort of trideo show.

The astral meanwhile was quite a different story.  As Devoted walked towards the door, he was gripped by a massive, full-body sickness.  The energies of the place felt like a wind, like a hand reaching through him.  The whole of reality pulsed and swayed and still he moved forwards.  The assault on his senses began to coalesce from the distant howl of hollow winds to a scream, and the scream properly into a massive buzzing hum.  In front of him he saw what looked like a swirling dome of thickest energy, but looking at it, he saw now that it paused it's mad swirling and stared back at him.  He felt the full force of countless eyes boring into him.  That's when the whole world went away.

[joe15552]

Devoted hears a scream echoing down the halls of reality, and feels his sanity start to slip. Instinctively he switches his perception back to the material realm to find his mouth wide open and the scream being emitted by his own mouth! He stops screaming, only after his lungs are empty, and kneels on the ground panting while nervous sweat begins to make his comfort level inside his hazmat suit drop even more. With the urge to run fighting his common sense that there is no-where to run, Devoted looks around to the other members of the group and manages to say in broken English, "Bad spirits. Sorry."

After catching his breath, he explains, "The spirits did not cause me harm, it is almost as if they just wanted privacy. Perhaps if we are respectful of them, we will be left alone."

[inca1980]

At the mention of spirits Machete double checks the pilot on his flame thrower and makes sure it's ready to fire on anything that might close ranks.

[joe15552]

Rising from his kneel, but still shaky, Devoted follows Ruckus towards the doorway.

[Kontact]

The balcony section went all around the outskirts of the studio in a semi-circle to your right.  To the left was stairs, flattened to more of a ramp with the thickness of the nesting material in this area, headed down to the lower floor.  The whole walkway was thick with the crunchy hive material.  The double doors were more like two rounded portals the way it built up around the corners.  All of this contrasted rather sharply with the bizarre street scene down on the studio floor, where no trace of the stuff could be found.  Taking in more of the chamber, there was a series of catwalks overhead, and a ladder to them from the center of the balcony's semi-circular arc.  Above that, were several holes in the center of the ceiling.  With no utilitarian reason to be there, one would have to assume they were burrowed through by the wasps.  The problem at this point was that the catwalks over by the holes came within the area where Devoted had seen the swirling sphere of spirit energy.

Wandering around the balcony to reach the ladder up allowed for a better view of the set down below where the wall was broken away.  There, in the false building was a sparse old room.  An old-style kitchen area lay on the right, the left wall was covered in armaments from katanas to what seemed to be a 4-pod rocket launcher, and in the middle was a couch with a lamp beside it and one occupant.  It seemed to be a dried up old corpse, but even as you watched it laying still as a board, sound from before continued to issue forth from somewhere inside of it.

"Fact is a lack of space... with no baby-fat to hibernate on..  the nursery births the path we're on...
Tears turn corrosive... now everybody smiles and hums...  the dogs serve nation within.. spilling our blood before we can..
The brother's-keepers-downers by the yuppies taking uppers... when the saints come marching in.. sell them their deflated flags back..
And tell them the condominiums in heaven are in a petri dish... and you'll never make it out of the petri dish..
No matter how many pills you take... your head is the conspiracy...
Defend the family... try not to sleep... because you've never been killed before..  trying to enter my home no one lives in..
But I'll be a bird in my next life.. if I can escape the claws of christ in this one..  when the lord calls for loss of life..
You're going to be saved like free-range cattle..  with a burger in your mouth..
This isn't a test.. it's an avalanche...  if you don't watch your head while it rolls and goes to null...
There is no heaven.. there is no heaven inside of me..
There is no heaven.. there is no heaven inside of me..
There is no me there is no me there is no.. ha! 
There is no heaven.. there is no heaven inside of me..
Faith is where's the money..  ain't our day closed.. and dying's our alone time..
In defining self worth.. we're all dirt with digital watches..
Nothing lasts.. not even this.. next year don't vote.. beware of jingoism and bad sloganeering.. 
If you had to read the headlines.. you'd know the truth is not happening..  not today.. not ever..
Due to recent preoccupation with impending doom.. the unending evil.. made its living off us..
All I have to say to the wall is.....  Oh!"

The "corpse" still hasn't moved, but seems to have stopped talking to itself and begun addressing your presence.

"Hello there... I... well..
My.. but you are fine hallucinations aren't you.."

[joe15552]

Still shaken by his experience in astral space, Devoted has to fight his childish nature to run and hide from the noisy corpse. He observes the reactions of the other members of the group, not sure what to do.

[inca1980]

Machete's usually cool blank demeanor seems suddenly shaken for an instant.  "La chingada...." He mutters pulls down his little gas-mask and quickly sniffs some betel-meth into his nose and pulls it back down.  "La chingada...."....and clutches his shiawase blazer a little more tightly. 

He looks toward Devoted, whispers sub-vocally "Alright chavolito, you're gonna have to hold it together.  You gotta tell us what the hell your mage eyes are seeing....this is what we brought you along for so don't crap out on us now!"

[joe15552]

Suddenly, Devoted's survival instinct kicks in. He steps forward and speaks to the corpse with a voice full of youth and a slight dash of naivety, "We were on our way to the upper floors. How can we travel to the upper floors without disturbing the hive?"

[Crossbow]

Digger kinda fades to the background and sidles off to the edge of the room, keeping eyes on his team, the hive above and the 'corpse'.  He looks ready to open up with the Crusader on the first sign of wasp or corpse movement.

[Kontact]

"Oh!  Good!  Good!  Goodgoodgood!  Unexpected!  The upper floors!  I suppose.."  The thin dried out frame started to shift slowly at first, and with great effort pull itself up. "..I've long needed an excuse to put on my face." The very fabric of reality seemed to forcibly warp with magical energy, apparent to all.  Energy from the surrounding air flowed visibly into the dried up body, swelling it from an emaciated husk to a wildly grinning elf of striking appearance.  His face was glowing picture of bemusement framed in deep red hair. "Tell me more!  Promises!  Stories!  The end of all things, how was it?!  Worlds of words exploding out from subway tunnels to paint the open sky shut tight?!  Rifts in the fabric singing out apocalypse groans while hoards of mailmen with weaponized light bills march formations down the dead city strip?!"

Even now restored, there remained the strange sense of words emanating from the man as much as they were spoken.

[inca1980]

Upon seeing the reaction of the elf to Devoted's question, Machete relaxes a little.  It becomes readily apparent that scrounging to survive in the Zone has given Machete a certain level of tolerance for strangeness.  He yells over at the stranger, "Hey cabron, mind speaking English?  Mine's not so good!"

[Kontact]

"English!  A fine choice!  I'm a word machine, without enough words to be composed or the worms to decompose!  Excellent choice, really!  Trying again!"  *ahem* "Melt me a princess thought, like an open wound.  To bleed to sleep, to plead to work, to heal no loyalty to things that don't keep clean."

He pauses for a moment searching your faces from 30 meters away.

"Don't know that one then? 
I force myself to write, but have no paper and no pen.  Only words to keep the self without separated from the self within...
Your story.  Everyone carries a story in them.  Give yours quickly before the wasps get tired of living and throw themselves on your swords. 
No, seriously... 
It's only a matter of time before one leaves the clean air of my bubble.  They are all quite idiotic little things.  Too stupid to live, but too stubborn to die.  Prisoners and keepers both of us.  A... Mexican standoff, a lifetime in the making.  'Nobody moves or everybody gets it!'  Ha!"

[joe15552]

At the mention of the "clean air", Devoted switches his perception to astral to see if he is still under the effect of the bug spirit's magic.

[Kontact]

At Machete's insistence, Devoted centered himself and glanced once again with his true eye at the sight before him.  He could see again, in the world of forms, but that was no comfort.  What he saw and what he felt was surely Hel.  All the speech of the end of days snapped to focus and he could see it clearly.  The red sphere of energy, no longer swirling, but pulsing with mad fury was the egg which would birth the first cock whose crow would signal Ragnarök.  His naked soul was being buffeted by the winds of Hel as he stood witness to the birthing of the world's demise.  And that man, that "elf" was the center.  Though he could see nothing past the mad swirling of the egg's shell, he knew it to be so.  Consumed with this knowledge, he didn't notice when the voices started, but he could feel them in his mind, reaching out, making promises and assurances, massaging his beleaguered brain.  The effect served to calm him enough that, no longer shock-stiff in terror, he became aware of their presence like a song in his mind, promising never-ending peace and total acceptance. 

Luckily, Devoted didn't get his name by being easily swayed.  He felt the strength of Tyr charge though his mind, extirpating the song, so that he could turn back to his task and back to the world of shadows.  The material world.