02-04-2020, 08:40 PM
[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]You were supposed to steer clear of the crater - it was one of the few things he hadn't been left to figure out on his own upon joining. Anyone who went in did not come out the same. He'd heard a few stories - how Leroy had fallen ill, bled and deteriorated until there was nothing left. How the bunkers were crammed with packets of iodide pills, thick rubber masks, suits to keep an invisible dust off of your skin. How, occasionally, Selby would be swamped with unnamed Tanglewood folk complaining of headaches that quickly devolved into shaky fevers and a slow, agonizing death. It was a disease they could not cure. There was a chance that it wasn't even a disease, some kind of parasite or bacteria. It was just a quality of the broken, beaten earth on which they stood - and it wanted nothing standing in its wake.
(He'd seen the symptoms once before. Stood beside her body and waited on her every need, day and night, until he was losing too much sleep and it became too much and he knew she'd never get better at this rate so he -
An empty white house where no one lives. He thinks, shame - this stranger didn't have long and he doesn't even know it. He makes himself forget the rest, at least for now.)
Kazuhira isn't sure how to avoid getting closer to the hole. It's a wide dent - a massive canyon carved into the earth that smells of nothing, not even of Tanglewood's mildewed rot, and holds no life except for the stranger wandering around within it. He isn't even sure if he should be this close to the outskirts, not when the few trees that managed to spring back up to repopulate were warped, leaves splayed in asymmetrical shapes and bark patterns knotted, crooked. Hell knew what would happen to him if he stuck around for long. He'd grow a third eye or something, an extra leg. (Molecular genetics wasn't exactly his forte.) The cheetah lingers, barely peering over the dusty edges where soil gave way to sand, fragments of outcropping glass where stone could not withstand the heat of a hundred suns. Like a sandy dune, bits of dirt give way under the lightest touch and crumble down the hills at his approach.
"You're gonna want to get out of the pit, first." Another body fallen ill was another patient to fill Selby's schedule - and he'd rather see the medic treating people who belonged to the clan already, not extraneous strangers that happened to wander too close for too long. It wasn't any better that Sterling was attracting more Tanglers into the fallout zone. "You don't want to be down there, buddy. It'd be a shame to see something bad happen to you so soon."
Not that he was going to elaborate. Snarl was playing her own game and he wouldn't hesitate to play along, too.
(He'd seen the symptoms once before. Stood beside her body and waited on her every need, day and night, until he was losing too much sleep and it became too much and he knew she'd never get better at this rate so he -
An empty white house where no one lives. He thinks, shame - this stranger didn't have long and he doesn't even know it. He makes himself forget the rest, at least for now.)
Kazuhira isn't sure how to avoid getting closer to the hole. It's a wide dent - a massive canyon carved into the earth that smells of nothing, not even of Tanglewood's mildewed rot, and holds no life except for the stranger wandering around within it. He isn't even sure if he should be this close to the outskirts, not when the few trees that managed to spring back up to repopulate were warped, leaves splayed in asymmetrical shapes and bark patterns knotted, crooked. Hell knew what would happen to him if he stuck around for long. He'd grow a third eye or something, an extra leg. (Molecular genetics wasn't exactly his forte.) The cheetah lingers, barely peering over the dusty edges where soil gave way to sand, fragments of outcropping glass where stone could not withstand the heat of a hundred suns. Like a sandy dune, bits of dirt give way under the lightest touch and crumble down the hills at his approach.
"You're gonna want to get out of the pit, first." Another body fallen ill was another patient to fill Selby's schedule - and he'd rather see the medic treating people who belonged to the clan already, not extraneous strangers that happened to wander too close for too long. It wasn't any better that Sterling was attracting more Tanglers into the fallout zone. "You don't want to be down there, buddy. It'd be a shame to see something bad happen to you so soon."
Not that he was going to elaborate. Snarl was playing her own game and he wouldn't hesitate to play along, too.
[align=center][div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:verdana;color:#4c5461;letter-spacing:-2pt;"][i][b]—-— I GET [color=#4c5461]MEAN WHEN I'M
NERVOUS, LIKE A BAD DOG
NERVOUS, LIKE A BAD DOG