Issue 1 Downtime

If Will noticed their presence, he didn't acknowledge it in any meaningful way, just continuing to stare out of the window, slowly rocking.

Jennifer could now identify that weird humming, which was all she had been getting from telepathy as "Hush Little Baby" on a nigh-endless loop

"Oh man." Vertie sighed sadly. "This explains a lot."

"What the ever-loving fuck?" Jennifer blinks while she tries to shut out the creepy nursery rhyme from her mind.

Sara... Robin...

"Will. It's me. John," he said gently, heart aching for his old friend as he drew closer, "You're not alone anymore."

Will's head lolled to one side a bit, but that was about all. At least it seemed that he was aware of them? Maybe?

"Please Will, snap out of it. There are real, living people who still need you."

Will turned his head slightly, staring at John, blinking.

"Should we knock him out? Try to snap him out of it?"

"Knocking him out is highly improbable if he's distributed himself, as for the latter... let's try an experiment," he replied before turning back to Will.

"Nightcrawler sucks!"

Will looked at John, confused, hesitantly raising an arm up.

"Well that clearly didn't work." Jennifer says and decides to go with Trev's suggestion and slaps Will across the face hard.

Jennifer's hand passes through Will's head, sending clay splattering on the far wall.

After a moment, Will's Head reformed, and he looked in Jennifer's general direction, looking a little confused.

"Try a telepathic slap."

"That's not how my telepathy works. And there's barely anything there to slap anyway, he's got this creepy nursery rhyme on endless repeat in his head."

"Nursery rhyme?"

"Yeah, you know that old 'Hush little baby' song? He's singing that in his head and little else."

"Oh God..." he said, "His wife and daughter were at Muir Island when everything went to hell."

"It's very possible they're fine. Most of Scotland's big cities were shaken, loosing all things tech, but Muir...as far as I know, was pretty isolated and off the main grid...unless he's heard differently. I only know what I encountered coming south from the Brora."

"Look at him. He clearly believes he's lost them."

"Then we need to give him something to fight for again...or else we leave him to his fantasy. Check up on him every now and then."

"We've all lost enough friends, we can't leave him like this. There's got to be something he'll still fight for."

While all this was going on, Will was slowly moving his head from person to person, looking more and more perturbed.

While the others were talking to Will, Gemma busied herself looking at the door with the runes on it.

"I only really new him as a teacher, but I knew he was close to Ms. McManus and Ms. Weaver." She lightly chewed her lip and turned to Will. "Mr. Stanton...Will. Miranda is alive. She needs guidance. You need to literally and figuratively pull yourself together. We want to take you to her, but we can't if you don't pull your self out of the darkness."

Gemma Sloan wrote:While the others were talking to Will, Gemma busied herself looking at the door with the runes on it.

Anyone well-versed in ancient runes--i.e., likely not Gemma--would notice that while the runes were close, they were wrong--as if whoever had painted them on had done so without a full understanding of them or the perfect knowledge of how they worked.

The inside of the old McManus apartment was trashed. Destroyed. Unlike the rest of the campus, no apparent fix-up work had been done in here, and things had been left smashed, for the most part.

The center of the room, however, had had some work done. A make-shift shrine, with some feathers and, by now, well-congealed liquids had been set up. Candles, which had been burnt down to the stump long ago, sat on either side.

In front of the shrine lay two coffins, one notably smaller than the other. "R" and "S" were the only things carved into them.

Vertie Easley wrote:"I only really new him as a teacher, but I knew he was close to Ms. McManus and Ms. Weaver." She lightly chewed her lip and turned to Will. "Mr. Stanton...Will. Miranda is alive. She needs guidance. You need to literally and figuratively pull yourself together. We want to take you to her, but we can't if you don't pull your self out of the darkness."

Will turned to look at Vertie, his eyes flashing up and down her form. It was clear he was hearing them and reacting somewhat to them, but there seemed to be some disconnect between the people standing there and what that actually meant in reality.

Gemma knelt next to the coffins, looking at them and the shrine closely. She reached out towards the one marked 'S', but didn't actually touch it. She inhaled deeply, taking in the scents of the room and around the shrine. Her senses weren't as keen as some of the fuzzier ferals, but they weren't bad either.

The room didn't smell of decay, per se--if anything, it was cleaner than the Stantons' apartment across the way. It was bit mustier, but that might just be from the windows being intact and closed.

There may be the faintest whiff of incense or potpourri around the shrine, though it's all very, very old at this point.

The coffins were clearly hand-made, and not particularly well-done. They were really little more than appropriately-shaped boxes, to be frank.

It was fairly clear no one had been in here for quite some time.

Gemma scratched her chin, then her nose as she considered the conundrum. No dead people smell and she would have expected that in a room with two coffin-box-things. There was no way they were airtight. "Rumor was," she muttered to herself, though her thoughts were loud enough that Jennifer might pick up on them, "he went off to look for them when things went to shite." She gave the boxes another critical look. "The question is did he find them or is he assuming?"

"Will, please... I don't know what happened to them, but I do know Sara and Robin wouldn't want you to give up like this."

Will turned to look at John...

..and he poked him in the nose. And then again. It wasn't like being punched, perse, because there was no force behind it, but it was still odd.

"It doesn't smell like dead bodies in here..." Jennifer says quietly from behind Gemma.

"No, it doesn't," Gemma said, inhaling more deeply along the seems in the box marked 'S'.

A vaguely earthy scent, and some pine from the box.

"Need some better noses? Something...shocking?" Vertie asked as a large rat poked his head around one of her shoes.

"I'm doing okay at the moment," Gemma said, moving to inhale deeply at the edges of the other box.

Nothing too distinct from the other box--a bit saltier, perhaps.

"Yes Will, I'm here. Not dead. Not the doll version either," John said, eyes locked on Will's.

This seemed to confuse Will, and he leaned back in his chair, cowering a little.

"Not sure if this is them or not or whether that even matters, I guess," Gemma said, eyeing the boxes. "I don't smell bodies, but Sara was an rock shifter, so depending on how she died, her body could smell earthy. The little one... I didn't really know her, so I can't say, but her box doesn't smell any different."