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.]

Comments

[lifelinked]

"Someone you need to protect?" Mami wonders aloud from a safe distance away. She's gentle, understanding....it's been so long since she's had anyone close to her, but she knows what it's like to want to protect.

"We both need to go back, then. But we should learn all we can about the situation and plan, right?"

She bites her lip and looks over at Jack and Bunnymund, hoping she can trust them. But if not, she can defend herself regardless of their opinions.

[spellitonce]

Nico finally tasted blood and grinned as the sensation of magic loosed to her command rolled through her body. Now the odds were a bit more even.

"Thanks for the science lesson," she said, keeping her voice flat. "My point is, you could have just soured things here for your buddy Jack if I were a little more suspicious about your intentions. I'm pretty good at running when I put my mind to it."

She straightens the rest of the way up from her defensive crouch, shaking the cramps out of first one hand, then the other. "Well?" she asked Jack, lifting her chin defiantly. "Did whatever grab me grab my friends too, or are they back home, safe as any one of us ever gets?"

[mywarrenmyrules]

Bunny stopped in his tracks, holding up his open paws in a gesture of harmlessness. He even took a step or two back. They were nervous, suspicious, untrusting. Good. They should have been.

"Neither of us are gonna keep you anywhere, mate. But your best bet isn't running off just yet."

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam nodded. "Well, Texas is where we stopped for the night." Between jobs and moving around so as not to be noticed, if possible. "It wasn't exactly a vacation." More like their jobs. But that's difficult to explain, even in their current states.

"I spent time in California, though. I went to college at Stanford." Not that he has a diploma. He mostly had the credits but he would always be that one and a half semester away from graduating. "Only times I've been anywhere else in the state were flying trips."

Some more literal than others.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Oh, whoop de doo. Fancy." Howard's got an air of distaste around him - even being isolated with this guy in a strange land isn't enough to overcome that flaunting a prestigious education rankles Howard. He's never been the bookish sort, but even if he had been odds of going to Stanford would have been extremely low for him.

"You a police officer or something? With the gun and all?"

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam shrugs. "I got lucky." He really did and knew it. Though, these days, he isn't entirely certain he got into Stanford on his own merits anymore.

He looked down at himself, then back up at Howard. "Something like that." Not entirely, but...well, it was difficult to explain.

[letskicksomeice]

"We want to help," Jack said earnestly. "We'll do all we can."

[letskicksomeice]

"Depends. What do they look like? We've ran into a few people already. We sent them to the pond across town to meet up while we gathered up the rest."

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam hadn't much wanted to split off from Howard, but it was obvious the kid wasn't that comfortable around him. Better to let him go, though Sam did his best to keep his eyes out for him as he moved through the town.

He was also keeping his eye out for Dean. He wasn't sure WHAT was going on, but he wanted some answers.

And for people not to walk through him. That was just mentally uncomfortable.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"If you really believed that you wouldn't flaunt it," Howard says with a bit of a sniff, backing up. "Have you ever shot anyone?"

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Just someone, okay?!" His hands are shaking. He wraps his arms around himself and hunches over in the back, but he doesn't make a run for it. "What...what's happening back home without us?"

[letskicksomeice]

You know what else is uncomfortable? Getting stared at by a teenage boy that looked closer to corpsey than alive.

He was perched on the roof of a gas station, looking down, trying to get a good look at Sam's face as if trying to match it.

When he was sure it was one of the faces he'd seen in the crystal, he called down, "Hey, new guy! I need to talk to you."

His eyes were a bit sunken in and his lips were just a bit too pale. That wasn't even getting into the white hair and limbs so spindly that he looked a bit like a spider up where he crouched.

[lifelinked]

Mami nods quietly. She can definitely understand this, and she agrees with the concern. "Yes, can you tell us?"

Not that she'll trust them just because, but...

[fromfryingpantofire]

He opens his mouth to defend himself, then closes it. It's quite possible that, for a lot of people, that would have sounded like flaunting it. Okay, he can deal with that.

Again, Sam shrugs. "Yeah, I have. It's not something I like to do, but to defend myself and others? I have."

[fromfryingpantofire]

Yeah. Yeah, that was definitely uncomfortable.

Sam had noticed the guy, mostly because he'd gotten used to looking up. Too many things came at him and Dean from above. It kind of sucked, but learning to look up had saved his life.

Besides that, no crooks ever thought to look up in the comics and they always got put down by Batman.

Still, he hadn't expected the...what? Weird, spindly-limbed kid to talk to him? Sam drew himself up, frowning. "What makes you think I'm going to listen?"

Yeah, fine, getting the kid's attention. And maybe figuring out just what he was.

[letskicksomeice]

"Oh, I don't know, the fact that you have no idea where you are, what you've become, and why you're here?" said the boy, standing up from his crouch and walking along the edge of the roof, swinging his staff idly.

He looked sideways down at Sam again.

"But I can leave if you want and take all the answers with me." At least until Bunny talked to him, because Jack would never leave a spirit lost and alone and unseen like he'd been. "Or you can drop the defensive thing and listen."

He stopped walking and leaned on the staff.

"Because I am here to help."

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"I've never shot no one." Howard raises his hands slightly again. "Like I said, I wasn't looking for money, college boy. I don't want trouble. I just want..."

Well, not to go home. "I want to find out what's going on."

[mywarrenmyrules]

Bunny just spread his paws, looking as sarcastically baffled as possible. "How does that even follow?"

His sarcasm gave way to a much more pointed look, as he stepped a little closer, protectively, to Jack.

"In case you haven't noticed, the amount of call we've got to assume you newcomers are all harmless is not high. Pardon me for checking in, but you're not the only one with friends to keep safe."

He sniffed the air as she spoke, glad that Jack had decided to speak to her downwind, whether the frost spirit had done it consciously or not. Was that blood he smelled?

Aside to Jack, he added, "Wait 'till you see the one I just talked over. Bloody Pitch would applaud if he met him."

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam raised a finger, watching the...kid? Creature? Difficult to tell. "Yeah, sorry. The defensive thing's probably not going anywhere." Because, seriously, he had a gun, a knife and couldn't recognize what this kid was. Zombie, maybe, but that was going to make putting him down a severe pain in the ass.

"But you have a point. I will, at least, listen to what you have to say." Keep the kid--thing talking. Give himself more time to sort out what it was.

[fromfryingpantofire]

"Kid. I wasn't going to do anything to you for picking a pocket." Sam's not that much of an asshole. And it wasn't like he'd never done worse to get some money. "And yeah, we're both in the same boat on that one, at least. I don't know any more about what's happening than you do."

[letskicksomeice]

"Do you want the bad news or the good news first?" Jack asked.

[fromfryingpantofire]

"That depends. Is there actually any good news?" Because, Sam wasn't used to there being much in the way of good news.

[letskicksomeice]

Jack looked upward as if searching his brain.

"This might be reversible and it might be possible to send you back home, turned back into your normal form, and also there are people here willing to help you out. I'm one of them. That's the good news."

[fromfryingpantofire]

He wasn't entirely convinced of all of that being good news, but Sam tilted his head slightly in acquiescence. "Getting back to my brother would definitely be good news," he agreed. "So what's the bad news?"

[mywarrenmyrules]

"Pretty much the rest of the news," drawled a down-under accented voice, as a giant rabbit rounded the corner of the house the kid was standing on. "An ancient enemy opened up a crack in the world and let through slices of another, more ancient enemy. Now the rest of it's trying to follow through, and we're already stonkered dealing with the first of the fearlings."

Bunny leaned against the house, arms crossed, eyeing Sam for a threat level. He didn't appear to be horrific, and wasn't openly carrying an obviously magical weapon, but the conversation was still young.

"The world's in danger, and we're not enough to save it. That's why the Man in the Moon called you here."