On the Silent Planet [Open]

[Overhand]

Silence. Silence was all that was heard as Rockwell Malone slowly awoke from unconsciousness. His eyes fluttered opened and focused in the unnatural darkness. The gears of his mind ground forward and panic manifested itself. He couldn't breath. Squirming under whatever was keeping him down, Rockwell desperately tried to free himself from its grasp. Pushing with all his might, he heaved his captor off his back. Light slowly filtered through the lenses of his has mask and he saw what had been keeping him down. Rockwell grabbed some of the substance in his hand and let it run through his fingers

"Sand?" His voice sounded strange and foreign inside the mask as he looked around his surroundings. "What just happened?"

Rockwell slowly staggered to his feet, sand falling from his back and shoulders. He couldn't make heads or tails of what he was witnessing. He stood upon a sand dune on the edge of a desert that seemed to be shifting as he looked on. Away from the desert lay a lush forest, the likes of which he had never seen. Rockwell had to pause to verify that they were indeed trees and not just figments of his imagination. The trees of the wastes were charred and barren. One would be the luckiest person alive if they were to witness one as lush as those he was looking at. Yet, there they were, a whole forest of green, lively trees sitting what seemed a few miles away.

The gravity of his situation brought Rockwell out of his state of wonderment. This place was not the wastes. He tried to remember how he'd become buried under a sand dune in this surreal landscape. The Raiders, the anomaly, the falling; it all came rushing back into his mind like a tsunami. What never came to him was when he had stopped falling. Was he dead? He slowly looked to the sky for an answer, but was only met with more questions. There was no sun in the sky, yet the ground was still gifted with a dull luminosity. Nothing in this place made any sense, he had to be dead. This was almost to much for him to handle. Rockwell exhaled deeply, causing his gas mask to audibly wheeze and haphazardly dropped into a sitting position. A jolt of pain ran up his spine. Running his hand over the ground, it seemed the sand had turned to soil and grass had grown. The sand dunes had shifted away from him and the forest had crept within a few hundred yards. He couldn't take it anymore.

"WHY?" Rockwell threw his arms up in defeat and screamed to the sunless sky. "Why me? Why not kill someone else!?" His voice echoed in the silence, distorted by the mask. His own echo was the only response he received.

[Nephry]

Milda and her husband Kuruku waved their last customer good-bye. The man had told a good, long story, and if he had told them any more of it, they might have been in debt. The two were about to make their way back into their shop, when the landscape flashed around them. It flickered like a broken light bulb and then went out altogether, leaving an odd, unfamiliar landscape.

"Oh," said Milda, blinking. "Seems we're not home anymore." Kuruku tilted his head to the side, the snapped it back, making a clicking noise as he did so. Milda simply nodded and stepped forward to explore. They seemed to be in a barren desert that was quickly becoming a forest. Kuruku clicked in a questioning tone.

"Don't roost in the trees just yet," said Milda. "We don't know what's in them." Kuruku replied with a compliant click. They walked along until they came by what looked to be a fellow dressed from head to toe in a cloth that Milda wasn't familiar with. He plopped onto the ground just as it turned from the desert sands to the forest floor and cried, "Why me? Why not kill someone else!?"

Milda grinned and sidled up to him. "Because," she said, "Life hates you." She placed a tentacle on his shoulder and made a move to pat him on his head.

[Overhand]

"Because, life hates you."

Rockwell tensed up as these words crept through the cloth hood of his gas mask and into his ears. He instinctually reached for his assault rifle at his side, but his hand met nothing but thin air. Sitting on his pack not but a few feet away was his rifle. Rookie mistake. Well, if Rockwell was already dead, what's the worst that could happen? Taking his destiny in his own hands, Rockwell turned his head in the direction of the voice. A woman's face edged into the lens of the mask as he turned his head. Blinking a few times to clear any doubt from his mind that his was indeed the visage of a female.

His eyes jumped from the face of the strange to the pressure on his arm. Now, what was resting on his shoulder made Rockwell pause. A tentacle. This was an interesting development. His mind was at an impasse. One side of his brain told him to kill it, kill it and never speak of it again. On the other hand, maybe it was some sort of angel come to bring him to St. Peter or whoever was the herald of the gate nowadays. Then again, this might be hell. It was safer to kill it. In one blundering motion, Rockwell pushed the tentacle from his shoulder, dived to his pack, and grabbed his rifle, pointing it at the woman-octopus thing. Squeezing the trigger, Rockwell was surprised to heard nothing but an hollow click.

Empty mag, fantastic. Well if I really am in hell, this will probably suck for the rest of eternity. This thought sat on his mind as he sat on the ground with a useless firearm pointed at some octopus woman.

[Nephry]

The man did not speak, but flinched away and took up his weapon and tried to fire. Milda simply stood there the whole time, her hands behind her back. She could tell that he probably wasn't from the human world that she knew so well. There was something about this fellow's homeland that would keep him on edge like that, something that would condition a human to react so quickly.

Of course, this wasn't the first time someone had waved a weapon at Milda and her husband. In any case, the poor guy thought he was dead. Milda walked over to him and sat down a good distance away, hoping he wouldn't get up and run from her. If he was a human, perhaps she could eke a story or two out of him.

"I don't think you're dead, really," said Milda. "We just got here, too. The scenery kinda flashed on and off, and then we were here." She shrugged. She watched as the trees of the forest overtook them. The trees were made of emeralds, and they bent over in an arch, their leaves touching the ground. A few birds--or, to be accurate, the empty shells of birds--hopped along the ground for a few paces before falling apart and rotting away.

"It's a very interesting place, this. I wonder where you'll find food?"

[Overhand]

As the woman sat down, Rockwell slowly lowered his weapon. Watching her intently, he barely heard was she was saying. He'd never seen a person that was only half-mutated, only fully mutated or not at all. He was still uneasy about this whole situation. This could be some sort of dream or hallucination brought on by god knows what. It could also be a trap, but at the moment, Rockwell decided to play along.

"Yeah, I won't need to find food.... Miss," He slowly reached behind him to his pack and pulled a small box from its depths. "I carry plenty with me."

As he said this a pain shot through his stomach. He didn't realized how long he'd been dead or dreaming or what have you. Ripping the flimsy cardboard tab from the box, Rockwell shook a small piece of something out onto his hand. He paused for a moment, looking at his hand. He needed to remove his gas mask. That could result in one of many things. He could die from inhaling toxic gas, he could get rad-poisoning or, his favourite outcome, everything could just be normal. As the pain shot through his abdomen, Rockwell made a quick decision. Unclipping a few metal grips and giving the mask a forceful pull, Rockwell's head was met with a rush of cool air. His hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. Taking in a deep breath, he awaited for death. Nothing happened, just the way he liked it.

He slowly looked on in awe at his newly formed surroundings. The trees were formed from some sort of green crystal, not wood or leaves, but crystal. The crystalline forms were shaped in unnatural arcs and bends, adding to the awe that had overcome Rockwell. A third hunger pain snapped him out of his trance and he popped some of the contents of the box into his mouth. As he chewed, Rockwell read the side of the box in his hands. It appeared that he was eating "Sampson Gregory's Dehydrated Pork Bits". How appetizing. Glancing over at the woman, Rockwell stopped chewing for a moment.

"You want some?" He shook the box as he tried not to spit food on the ground.

[Nephry]

"No thanks," said Milda. "Human victuals don't sit well in my stomach." That wasn't particularly true, but it would take too long at this point to explain the digestive system of spirits. She tilted her head and looked at him closely, trying to imagine what kind of world he came from.

"You know, where we were, there were a lot of 'people' like us." she said. "They all took random shapes, though. The fellow right next door had his [private bit] right on the middle of his forehead." Milda put the back of her hand to her forehead and made a fist, leaving her pointer finger to illustrate what she meant. "He's a nice fellow," she continued, "he just doesn't understand basic biology." As she spoke, the trees began to melt a bit, making it look as if a child had tossed a bucket of paint against a vaguely tree-shaped gem.

Bored, Milda picked at the grass beside her, watching the individual strands turn into pudding and float toward the sky.

"So, how about you, mister? What's it like where you live?"

[Overhand]

Rockwell raised an incredulous at the woman's story regarding her "neighbor". He'd never heard of people who could change their shape at will. Where in the world had this woman come from? Maybe Europe. He'd heard that they had some weird things going on from radiation. People getting super powers, mutants becoming unstable, all sorts of unpleasant stuff. Then again, this woman didn't seem to have any sort of accent. He'd met someone from Europe a fews years back. The two had met while Rockwell was scavenging around an abandonned coastal warehouse. The girl had told him she was from "Unglend" or "Anglind", Rockwell couldn't understand her accent through his gas mask.

As Rockwell's fingers scrapped the bottom of the cardboard box, something dawned on him. That woman he'd met at the pier, he'd never see her again. He'd never see anyone he knew again. He merely sighed at the fact and nonchalantly tossed the cardboard box away from him. As the box landed, it slowly melted into a thick gray liquid. Rockwell shook his head at this odd display and returned his attention to the woman and her partner (whom Rockwell had just noticed) sitting near him.

The tension that Rockwell had been feeling towards this woman was slightly less than when he'd pointed a dangerous weapon in her direction and pulled the trigger. He absently scratched the back of his neck for a moment before leaning back into a relaxed position. If he wanted to get the jump on any trap in the waiting, Rockwell knew he needed to play along.

"Well, where I 'live' my neighbors aren't nearly as.... pleasant as yours are. They range from a simple trader, just trying to make a living, to deranged, blood thirsty cannibals. Fun bunch the second ones are, in fact I was trying to get away from a group of them right before I ended up here.... Wherever 'here' is."

[Nephry]

It was small, but the minuscule story he had told would be enough to get Milda through the rest of the day and part of the next. Normally she'd just let him be after that, but this was a strange world, and she didn't know how soon it would be until she ran into another human. Until she found someone else like him, he was her and her husband's only source of food. Kuruku tilted his head to the side and made a clicking noise before laying his hand upon Milda's shoulder.

"You think? From where he stands, we're probably just a pair of monsters waiting to eat him." At this, Kuruku blinked and walked over to Rockwell. He plucked a feather from his eyebrows and offered it to Rockwell, tilting his head to the side and clicking.

Milda raised an eyebrow, wondered how this fellow who had to deal with hunters and cannibals would take to a man that had feathers growing out of his eyebrows and elbows. Many humans had thought he was simply wearing a bird mask, but his facial feathers were simply stiff.

"He says that we're not going to eat you, and that you may eat one of his feathers as a sort of treaty," she explained. "Although, you might not want to. Kuruku hasn't preened in a few days." Milda laughed as Kuruku turned his head toward her with mild irritation. He turned back to Rockwell and made a clicking noise that any man might be able to interpret as "Bah. Women" and rolled his eyes.