Once Upon a Time...

[morethanmyth]

They likely felt the world shift, a fragmentation of all they thought they knew. It was the way a fictional character might feel if they could feel every page turn in the book they lived in. It was the beginning of a new story and that meant an end to an old one and they would each feel that.

To some it would feel like they had just died. To others, it would feel like they had just been born. To many, it would feel like both at the same time. It all really depended on who they were and what they were leaving behind.

In any case, this world had something New appear in it. After lightning crackled in the evening sky without any storm fueling it, they would find themselves waking up in the streets of a small town called Burgess. It was a perfectly ordinary Pennsylvania town, a place where the modern mixed with the old, American suburbia at its finest, making it all the stranger that something extraordinary would happen somewhere so ordinary.

[ooc: Make a subthread for each character and those of you that would like to toss your character at someone else before Bunny and Jack show up, tag a subthread already there.]

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[spellitonce]

She did whirl around to look, and determined that the owner of the voice was probably only a little older than her, but that that made him old enough.

"You can't really talk when it comes to clothing," she said, bringing her Staff to bear on him. "So how about we have a different conversation? Topple!"

A moment or two of nothing happening was enough. Nico shook her Staff, its crystal decorations jingling against the metal, before turning angry eyes to Jack again. "What did you do?!"

[mywarrenmyrules]

Invisible or not, Bunny had picked up a scent and tracked it to the foot of the fire escape.

He'd spotted the wraithlike image among the New Guardian lineup at the North Pole, and wondered about Manny's choice then. He wonders a little more now, seeing the undead-looking - and smelling - guy jetting up the fire escape, to the roof.

"Oi!"

He knows a little about not liking surprises from people following him, so he calls out loudly before following Al up the fire escape, leaping straight from platform to platform, bypassing the stairs to give him speed.

He leaps onto the roof, sliding one of his boomerangs into his paw, but holding it harmlessly at his hip. Maybe the presence of the weapon is due to the prey animal in him, or maybe it's a healthy respect for the danger of things that look dead but move around like they're not.

"I'm havin' a load of trouble figurin' how you manage to be child-friendly."

A weird greeting from one strange creature to another.

[hellofhisown]

"Are you fucking kidding me."

A giant, man sized rabbit. Al was invisible to kids, but apparently not to giant, man sized rabbits. Who could talk.

Not that he hasn't seen things that could be considered stranger, but giant talking rabbits were certainly up there.

The ridiculousness of the situation doesn't distract him enough to not notice the boomerang though. Innocuous as a weapon as it might seem, Al didn't feel like he was in a position to take chances.

"Who the hell are you supposed to be," he said, glowing green eyes locked with Bunny's as he brandished the rusted pipe he'd picked up earlier, "The australian easter bunny?"

[mywarrenmyrules]

"Got it in one."

He reached casually with his other paw to pick a speck of imagined dust from the boomerang. His body language was carefully armed, but unaggressive - important, he thought given the rusty pipe in the others' hand, and Al's own aggressive language.

"Meanwhile, I have no idea who - or what - you are. Which makes sense, because as far as I've been told, you're not from around here. Are ya, mate?"

[animalhats]

"No I'm not!" she protested, voice shaking. "I got stole outta the Leapfrog and then I was trying to ask some people if they'd seen it and they walked right through me!"

She is not doing well at the "not panicking" thing.

"I don't wanna be a ghost! I wanna go home!"

[hellofhisown]

Really? Really.

Al isn't even going to go there.

"No, I'm not," he snarls, punctuating his sentence by tossing the pipe just ever so slightly off to the side of Bunny's head as a warning shot. The chains draped around his waist suddenly seem to come alive, positioning themselves threateningly around Al as a sickly green glow emanates from his hands.

"So how's about we cut the coy bullshit before I decide you'd make better stew meat than conversation partner, and you tell me what exactly is going on here."

[letskicksomeice]

"I didn't do anything other than find you just now," said the boy, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Unless you're wondering why you're here. I do have an answer for that, but you're not getting it unless you stop trying to make me fall off things with the power of your brain."

[letskicksomeice]

"You're not a ghost."

Technically. He left that off, though, because unlike some of the others (blood and gums, honestly) he was better at talking to kids.

He lowered himself into a crouch, making himself physically nonthreatening, and leaned his staff against his shoulder.

"You're something that you weren't before, but you're not a ghost, not really, and if you calm down, I can explain things. I can explain why you're here and what happened to you and how to fix it as best as we can. I came to try to help. I know all this is scary, but you don't have to deal with it alone."

[mywarrenmyrules]

Bunny didn't even dodge the pipe. He'd already been using thrown weapons for more than a thousand years, and a deliberate miss with one was as clear to him as day.

It brought his sarcasm out in full force. "Strewth, no one's ever threatened to eat me before."

Said as dry as the desert.

The chains were interesting, though. He eyed them with curiosity but didn't waste time whipping his other boomerang out and snapping into a martial stance.

"The Man in the Moon said you were a Guardian, but I don't think I believe him. All I care about is this - are you here to hurt kids? Seppo, if you wanna go, all you gotta do is say it."

He held his stance, eyes narrowed, ruminating somewhere in the back of his mind that all he ever seemed to do anymore was fight things.

[animalhats]

Molly... has not started crying. Yet. But she's getting a little sniffly 'cause she's getting really scared, so she snuffles and wipes her nose on her sleeve. He doesn't look scary, or grown-up, and until she finds Nico or somebody, she's decided to stick with this guy, whoever he is.

He looks like Tommy.

"'Kay," she says, mumbling a little. "Did I get another superpower? Like Kitty Pryde? She can walk through stuff..." She doesn't sound very certain of that, but mostly because she's pretty sure walking through walls on command and having people unable to see or touch you are two different things.

[hellofhisown]

That answer was...certainly interesting.

"I may be an ugly motherfucker, but I don't...I don't hurt kids."

His tone of voice wavered slightly as he said that, like the accusation brought back unpleasant memories.

"Besides that," he said, shaking off that feeling, "what the hell is this Man in the Moon crap? If this is more of Mother's bullshit, she's doing a lousy job with it."

[spellitonce]

Nico masked the bubbling fear in her chest with fury, glaring up at the guy on the street lamp.

"Fine," she snarled, "get your bad guy monologue over with, then."

Her hands are locked too tightly on the Staff to do anything else with them, so she starts chewing on the inside of her cheek. Maybe the Staff needs more blood for some reason -- maybe it has something to do with her being intangible.

[mywarrenmyrules]

Alright, that took a lot of the tension out of the situation.

Not that Bunny wasn't still fully prepped for a serious fight. You walked around even as mythkind in the form of a prey animal, even a human-sized legendary warrior of one, you tried not to let people who threatened to eat you go without making them eat a mouthful or two of dirt first.

Still, explanations were in order.

"The Man in the Moon chose you to protect the kids of this world. You might have been pulled over from another, I don't know why, or you might have just been made new from a story."

Maybe one of those newfangled comic book things that kids've been reading so much lately. "Lately" being the flash in the pan to him that was the last 70 or so years.

It's a rough explanation, but hey, this is a rough guy. And Bunny's not exactly Mr. Soft and Cuddly himself ... aside from physically.

"There's your explanation. It's not perfect, but it's deadset. Any other questions?"

[letskicksomeice]

"Well, for one, I'm not the bad guy. I'm here to make sure the bad guy doesn't get you first," Jack said, jumping off of the street lamp, flipping, and landing gracefully on the ground.

"You are, as you've probably noticed, in a world different from your own. There are some bad things happening here, something threatening to rip this world apart, and me and my team-mate think that it's pulling people from other places out of their worlds and into ours."

[letskicksomeice]

"Possibly. I'm only going on a little bit more information than you are. But first thing's first, what's your name?" he asked gently.

[hellofhisown]

'Chosen'.

A word that to Al just meant 'picked to do someone else's dirty work'.

Malebolgia. Mammon. The Mother of All Creation. And now a nursery rhyme character gets added to the list of people who have decided to use Al for their own ends.

Even if the story sounds like bullshit, given what he's seen, he knows it's not entirely impossible.

"And why would he pick someone like me? I'm not exactly a cute and cuddly bed time story character here."

[spellitonce]

"Who's the bad guy? What did it do to me?" Nico hadn't stopped glaring, and she'd only stopped chewing on her cheek to speak. "And why should I trust you?"

It sounded ridiculous, but then so many other things in her life had become ridiculous since she'd followed Alex down that secret passage. Maybe this was some other weird sub-plane of existence, like where Chase had found the Gibborim the second time.

[animalhats]

Molly, thankfully, has a bit of a sense of self-preservation. Unfortunately, that's kicking in at a not-so-useful time. She shoots Jack a look. "I know Stranger Danger is kind of silly 'cause there's all sorts of people you don't know that you gotta talk to, but maybe you brought me here for your creepy magic ghost cult or something. If I tell you my name, you might eat my soul!"

She says it with just enough sincerity that she might not 100% think that's an unlikely situation...

[letskicksomeice]

"We call it Kuk, after the Egyptian god of primordial darkness. We think that that's what the Egyptians were worshiping back then; actually, my team-mate thinks almost every god of darkness and death that people worshiped through the millennia were just facets of it. As for what it is, think Lovecraft. An empty sentient thing outside of time and space. Another enemy of ours pulled the world's stupidest move and, thinking he was going to gain an army of darkness from it to use as his own, he opened the gate that locked Kuk away from the world a crack."

Jack walked towards her, but he moved slowly and tried to keep his gestures from looking aggressive.

"Just a crack was all Kuk needed to stick its foot in the door. It's captured most of the other myths of the world it thought would be a threat and it's imprisoned them so it can feed off of the belief people have in them. It's trying to shove the door open more and more to get all the way in to destroy the world and in the process, the world's gotten a little more...unstable. Belief and fear, human emotions - they can all influence it more than they used to in the past. That's how we think you got pulled in from your world - there are cracks now. You fell through."

Jack leaned against a car with a sort of casual grace that came either from years of practice or possibly personal coaching from James Dean.

"I'm not here to hurt you or make you do anything you don't want to do. The Man in the Moon, the spirit that chose me and my team-mate as Guardians thinks you have what it takes to be one, but you're hardly more than a kid. You shouldn't have to fight. I just want to make sure you wind up somewhere safe, though. Kuk goes after anyone he thinks will be a threat. So, I can't give you any reasons to trust me - I'm a stranger. All I can offer is to actually try to earn it if you give me the chance."

[letskicksomeice]

Actually, given the world this was, ghosts eating people using their true names wasn't that out there.

Therefore Jack treated her fear as very understandable.

"Okay, okay," he said gently. "How about I give you my name first, and then maybe you can make up a name I can call you? Does that sound fair?"

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Yeah. It's all too logical for something completely illogical."

School uniforms. That, to him, say boarding school, which translates to this girl being some sort of delinquent with money. Probably dangerous. She doesn't look physically intimidating which makes him wonder if she's been in trouble for stealing or cheating or bullying or what.

"You think they're all ghosts?" Howard probably looks more dead than any of them.

[lifelinked]

Mami remembers being on the verge of death. True, it was a car accident and nothing so...dire as what this boy seems to have gone through, but it makes her wonder if he's more correct than he realizes.

"Perhaps we're the ghosts." The thought terrifies her, but she keeps her face carefully neutral.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"I feel dead," Howard says quietly. "Or, no, that's wrong. I don't know what being dead feels like. But I don't feel alive."

Being alive means hunger, it means itches and aches and pains and all the infections that malnourishment can bestow upon you. And Howard feels a distinct nothingness where that once would be.

"What's your name, Curly?"

[animalhats]

She scrutinizes him, underneath the smiling face of her bunny hat, then nods decisively. She literally can't think of anything he could do if he doesn't give him her actual name, and he's offering to give her his... it should be ok, right?

"Okay. But then you gotta help me find my friends!"

[letskicksomeice]

"If they're here, I promise I'll help you find them," he promised. "I'm Jack. Jack Frost. Though if you want a little leverage on me for any very unlikely instances of ghost cults and other creepy magic, my old name before that was Jackson Overland. What should I call you?"