Gods and Monsters [cs: torture and murder and scary stuff]

[beetlebutt]

Jaime Reyes was standing on a street in El Paso, looking very confused, and talking to himself. Well, at least it looked like he was talking to himself. Really, he was talking to the scarab, because the two of them were trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. The world had blurred, Jaime had passed out and now...

"This is so not El Paso."

Now he was in a place that was home and yet not home.

|T L[][]KS \|/E|RD. \|/HERE'S THE PUTT-PUTT?

"Exactly. And that - what is that? That building wasn't there yesterday. Neither was that bank building. And where's the El Diablo?"

/-\LTERN/-\TE D|/|\ENS|[]N?

"Are your sensors picking up anything weird?"

...SENS[]RS /-\RE |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L.

After doing a systems check, the scarab trilled a little wordless cry of alarm.

"What's wrong?"

/|\UTIPLE SYSTEMS |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L. []NLY B/-\S|C L|FE SUPP[]RT, B/-\SIC TR/-\NSF[]O/|\/-\T|[]N /-\B|L|T|ES, /-\ND C[]/|\/|\S /-\V/-\|L/-\BLE. D|/-\GN[]ST|CS UN/-\BLE TO DETER/|\INE WHY.

"Whoa, whoa, okay, calm down, you're kinda panicking. Stop with the brain klaxons, okay?"

|'/|\ RUNN|NG BL|ND. Y[]U C/-\LM D[]WN!

"I know this is freaky, and you're not used to being blind like this, but you're still conscious and I'm still conscious, and we're not fighting an evil death satellite or, I don't know, being shot at by aliens. We'll figure this out, okay? Just keep a cool head."

The response was a very surly, | D[]N'T H/-\VE /-\ HE/-\D.

Jaime rolled his eyes. "You know what I meant, Mr. Literal. Look, we'll figure this out, okay?"

In fact, maybe he could just talk to someone and get some answers. Some teenagers ran down the street towards him.

"Hey! Very, very lost superhero here," he said, waving them down. "Any chance you could -"

They didn't notice. In fact, with a feeling like cold mist, they ran right through him. Jaime froze up after they did, expression stricken.

"Okay, we're a ghost or something and no one can see, hear, or touch us. Time to panic."

| T[]LD Y[]U!

Comments

[mywarrenmyrules]

The look Bunny gave Sam was sort of incredulous, not as if he were quite disgusted, but as if Sam had suggested solving a land ownership dispute by blowing up the land.

"Do me a solid and run it by me before you do that here," he said. "I get you're working with the best of what you've got back where you're from, and it sounds like a terrible place, but it doesn't have me."

He laid the last of the puppet-bodies in the forming circle and waved Sam after him.

"Next room. This is not going to be a short day."

[beetlebutt]

The next room didn't have much in it but that made it all that much more ominous. There were meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. One was hanging by itself, mostly free of having any other meat hooks around it, almost like it was - in its own morbid way - a strange place of honor. It was the focus of the room.

Under that meat hook there were more fragments of blue and black armor, and there was more blue blood. Quite a bit of it had dripped here and the circular patterns the drips made on the concrete made it clear that the dangling body that had bled them out had been knocked around, like a pendulum making circles in the sand during an earthquake.

The setup near the hook wouldn't have looked out of place in a Saw movie. A table was there and on it, there were scattered rusty tools that had brown bloodstains on them. A sledge hammer rested against the table, but this was smeared with blue. A pinata was hanging from another hook and had vague meat shapes leaking out of the middle where it'd been split open. A half eaten cake shaped like a creepy clown face was also on the table and next to the table was an oversized teddy bear sitting in a chair. It looked like a broken zombie of a doll, with teeth that were far too sharp for a children's toy, something purposefully constructed by some evil doll Dr. Frankenstein to be terrifying.

Most of the torture tools were bloody but it was long since faded to brown and on many of the tools none of it was blue. The drill, however, was dripping in blue blood and drill bit had been broken off. There was also a spool of wire, like the kind used to pose the others - clearly the person that had done this had wanted to add the boy in the blue armor to her "family."

On the ground with the fragments of armor were some fragments of rope and duct tape that had been cut by something that chewed them up - most likely a chainsaw. There was a small smattering of fresher red blood - belonging to the woman behind all this - as if she'd been kicked in face and bled a little, but most of the blood that had dripped on the floor was blue.

The hook was hanging in clear view of the other room, where the the dead puppet people had been propped up, meaning the boy that had been here had been shown them as she'd started to torture him. The trail of blue blood led off to a door that had been sawed through by a chainsaw and seemed to lead to possibly a kitchen. The trail had smears along the way that made it clear that the person dripping all the blood had been limping, dragging their injured leg as they tried to escape.

[fromfryingpantofire]

"I haven't seen the same sorts of things happening here." Yet. "That said, if I do run into a spirit who is causing a lot of issues, I'll give you a shout first."

Because, yeah. They didn't have Bunny back home and, honestly, Sam wasn't sure that what he did would work back home. Though they'd probably never, ever find out. But he really wasn't going to dispute that it was a pretty terrible place.

He paused as they stepped into the next room, taking a moment to look around and take in what he was seeing. Which was uncomfortably close to a few things he remembered from Hell. Luckily, the memories had a level of distance to them these days. "The person who was here? Yeah, pretty screwed in the head. The Guardian who got away was pretty lucky."

Creepy. Creepy as anything was what his mind kept circling back around to.

[mywarrenmyrules]

They'd have to go back to where the kid was resting at the Pole and make sure this horror hadn't gotten to him in similar ways.

Some people, when something this terrible was done to them, didn't come out the same.

He sniffed at the meat pinata to see if the remains were human, eyeing the blue-blooded hammer and the hook with its telltale pile of armor parts.

Bunny took a quick pause aside to take a deeper sniff of the woman's blood. He had to be able to pick her out by a papercut after this. Had to, because someone who did this to children could not be allowed to live anymore in his world, even if she had been a child who'd needed protecting once.

"Let's keep going," he said, moving on to the next room. They weren't done finding victims.

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam took another look around them for a moment before nodding. "Yeah, okay. Just...be careful."

Somebody like this might have felt that they were safe enough that they couldn't be found. But that didn't mean that there weren't traps there somewhere. More than just the one on the door. Especially since this was pretty much definitely the work of at least one of the 'anti-Guardians', as Sam was calling them to himself.

Sure, Bunny was probably better equipped to sense them before Sam did, but that didn't stop him from readying a shield in his mind. Just in case.

[bringinghopewithme]

"I brought you, didn't I?" he pointed out, with the briefest wry smile.

So much of his instincts had said do to this alone, without exposing one of the new Guardians, but that would have been an irresponsible risk at this point. And Sam was already so jaded, something that saddened Bunny even as he was in a way glad that someone as competent as Sam was available for horror and danger of this scale.

He crept on through the warehouse, on to find the rest of the victims.

[fromfryingpantofire]

There were plenty of people who would say that bringing a Winchester along wasn't the best way to be careful, but Sam just snorted and forced a crooked smile for Bunny.

He stalked the other Guardian's footsteps, staying close and keeping his steps as silent as possible, head and gun up as he scanned the area. Just in case they weren't alone.