longestnight_old | Once Upon a Time...

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Once Upon a Time...

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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It's automatic. Howard's hand goes from around his upper arm to his pocket, to the folding knife he keeps there, and he flips it open as the teenagers approach. They're all bigger than him, clean, well-fed, he notices. They also don't seem to be targeting him at all, though they don't stop as they approach. He holds his ground.

He holds his ground and they pass through him, like ghosts. Like projected images. He holds his breath.

"Just a dream," he tells himself, even if this is far too linear to be a dream. He holds the knife close, but flicks the blade closed. "Just a dream."

He follows the teens; after a moment, he reaches out to take a wallet. His hand passes through the guy's pelvis just fine, but while he seems to get a grasp on the wallet for a second, it can't get past the kid's body. It's like Howard can touch it, but it still exists on a different plane.

Weird.

Going to sleep in one place and waking up in someplace completely different? That was never a good sign, as far as Sam knew. It usually meant that either Gabriel was fucking with him (impossible, as the archangel had been dead for years now) or somebody was fucking with him (more plausible, but one hell of a list). And considering Sam's head had only recently STOPPED being screwed with by one of the best (himself/Lucifer, it was hard to tell), he wasn't that thrilled with the new state of things.

Still, he pushed himself to his feet and got a good look at his surroundings. Definitely NOT the hotel where he and Dean had bedded down, only a few days out from the whole shōjō thing. They hadn't found a new job yet and Sam had been about to ask Dean about swinging back to the hospital to check up on Cas.

"Guess that's not going to happen," he muttered to himself, brushing his hands down his body. Then paused and double checked. Yes, he had his gun and Ruby's knife on him. Which was weird, because he didn't normally sleep with either of them on. At least whoever had brought him here hadn't brought him unarmed.

It only took a little wandering around to get the gist of something that was happening. He wasn't being seen. He couldn't seem to affect anything by touching it. Which did, really, put more to the side of somebody fucking with him.

Or somebody actually having killed him. He felt a chill of fear for Dean, wondering if his brother was around here somewhere.

It was while looking for his brother that Sam comes across somebody who seemed to be in a similar position to him, judging by the way his hand passes through some kid's hip. He blinks, raising an eyebrow. "You know. I don't think money's going to do us much good right now."

At least, he kind of hopes the kid was in the same situation he is. He's getting kinda tired of talking to himself.

Howard jumps when he hears a voice talking to him. Immediately he tries to pass himself off as if he just innocently bumped into those ghost teenagers, rather than trying to steal from them. Then he gets a good look at who he's looking at.

He sees a gun. That's not good. His hands go into his pocket and feel his folding knife, but he's well aware of the laws of weaponry: gun beats knife. Even though the gun isn't in Sam's hands, it's within reach.

The more he sees Sam the more worried he gets about this situation, wondering if this dream is about to turn into a chase. Sam's...huge. Gargantuan. Well over six feet tall while Howard barely breaks five, and probably three times Howard's weight. Healthy-looking, rather than emaciated and sickly. Walking with confidence rather than slinking around.

Howard pulls his hands back out of his pockets and raises them slightly in the universal gesture of 'please don't hurt me'. "I-I'm not looking for money. Who're you?"

It's not exactly a sight that Sam is unfamiliar with, unfortunately. That's the problem with having several inches and often a lot of muscle on people. He'd slouched through high school and a lot of college. It was something he'd stopped doing when he'd gone back to hunting and accepted that his life wasn't going to change from that for a while.

Still, he takes a conscious step back, holding his hands out at his sides, palms toward the kid and showing that they were absolutely empty. "Hey. Hey, it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you. You're just the only other person I've seen in the same boat as I am, with the people not seeing you and not being able to touch things." He does his best to look...if not truthworthy, at least non-threatening. "I'm Sam. Sam Winchester. You?"

Howard doesn't look terribly convinced that Sam's not going to hurt him, but he does lower his hands. And he appreciates the step back, because if Sam didn't do it, Howard was going to.

"Howard. Howard Bassem. And usually I don't dream about the town where A Christmas Story took place."

He yelps a bit as another person, a little girl, runs through him from behind. It's not that it hurts, but it's surprising to see another human being pass through your chest like a bloodless re-enactment of Alien. The little girl's hands open to try and catch a butterfly that's flying in front of her and she passes through Sam, in turn. The butterfly, by contrast, flits just around Sam's face, as if consciously avoiding him.

Sam blinks down at himself as the girl runs through him and grimaces. "Okay, that's...not going to stop being weird." The butterfly avoiding him, on the other hand? That was interesting. "We must be putting off some sort of energy field. Humans don't seem to notice it, but the animals do. Or insects do. That's...kind of fascinating, actually."

Yeah, seriously. Sam's just not going to threaten Howard. The rest of what's happening is just too weird. "Kinda wonder if other animals notice it as well. That said, we might wanna get off the sidewalk and just...try not to be run through again." It didn't really feel like much, but it was just so wrong.

"You're...probably not dreaming, though. I mean, unless we're sharing a dream. Not impossible, but it usually requires that you know about it." Not entirely, of course. "Where were you before you were here? Out of curiosity."

"I can touch objects." Howard doesn't want to say he could grab the wallet, because that would be admitting that he was trying to pickpocket, but he can mention other things. "I climbed a fence earlier. Did you...did you also just open your eyes here? Like you didn't fall asleep or anything?"

He heads over to a patch of flowers - standing there means no one's going to come walking through it.

"That's what a dream person who wanted me to think I'm not a dream person would say. I got no way to know you're actually dreaming and not just saying you are." Howard raises an eyebrow, then sarcastically says, "I was at fat camp."

"Okay, fair enough. I kind of avoided climbing things." Good to know he can't just walk through walls. It might have hurt a lot if he'd tried. Also, it saved him from being embarrassed while trying.

Sam looks over Howard and raises that eyebrow again. Because, seriously. "Well, good to know that your sarcasm defenses are in good working order." Between himself and Dean? He knows sarcasm very well. "There's not exactly a lot I can do to convince you otherwise, man. I was in a hotel in north Texas before I woke up here. My brother was in the other bed and he's not here, near as I can tell."

"Sarcasm is the foundation of any good relationship." Howard squints a bit, kicking at one of the flowers just to see how it crumples under his foot. Yes, he can definitely affect the environment. "You were in Texas? I was in California. Perdido Beach, to be exact."

And he's certain of that, because the only way to leave would be to poof out or die, and he missed his shot at the former and didn't think he did the latter.

"Bet you're missing your family vacation right now." Howard doesn't really know how to talk to adults. It's been a while.

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.

"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?"

Edited 2013-04-29 22:01 (UTC)

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.

"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?"

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."

"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."

"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."

"I didn't pick a pocket." When in doubt, continue denying. In as sulky and defensive a tone as possible. This always works, clearly. "You're just racial profiling."

He looks around. "Maybe this is supposed to be some suburban creepville where everyone's actually a robot or host to a bodysnatcher."

"Told you. Not a cop. And fine, whatever. Testing whether your hand would go through the kid just as well as the rest of your body, then." Even if it had been Howard's hand right at the pocket. And the kid is too defensive for his own good.

Sam glances around again, frowning. "Not sure about robots. Bodysnatchers? Maybe. Never seen any of them in so large a concentration, though."

Howard laughs, as if Sam's joking about bodysnatchers. Then he pauses.

"You are joking, right? I known some people who wouldn't be."

He really wasn't joking, but that was more than the kid needed to know. And if they WERE somehow in the middle of a demon infestation, knowing probably would only scare Howard.

So Sam grinned, with every bit of skill he had for lying with his face. He'd been doing it since long before he was Howard's age. "Well, it's been a long time since I've seen the movie, but I'm relatively sure it wasn't the entire town."

"Oh. The movie." Howard's seen similar stuff in person, but he doesn't want to say that yet, because he's sure Sam already thinks he's weird - let's face it, starving kid in the middle of nowhere acting defensive and walking through people, kind of weird. Even if Sam's also walking through people.

"Maybe we should split up. I go down this street and you go up it, and we see if we run into anyone and give a holler if we do."

Sam nodded. Splitting up was probably not the greatest idea, though he had a feeling it was more for Howard's peace of mind than anything else. "Yeah, okay. Just shout really loudly. With luck, I should hear you."

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Once Upon a Time...

Re: Howard | warning for starvation

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