Night of the Cruising Dead

A sense of foreboding filled Thorn’s mind as he walked ahead on full alert, even as the halls leading to the cabin area were dead silent. Cloaked or not, he didn't run into a single Possessed on the way here; that didn’t feel like it should have been possible. His head felt like it was being split open, for whatever reason.

What was going on? Was this all due purely to the demonstration at the theater, or was the ship itself to blame?

“Sergeant Bradshaw,” someone said, as if someone was whispering from behind.

Out of instinct, Thorn turned on his heel to face the source of the noise, only to find the previously empty - if dirty - hall awash with blood and bodies. These weren’t just bodies, however - they belonged to people that he knew. They had been people he previously fought alongside.

The closest body was a clean-shaven man in his mid thirties, with a chiseled jawline, in special operations gear. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head, and blood trailed - like tears - down his cheeks.

“Lieutenant Walker…” Thorn trailed, before simply adding, “Martin”.

The commanding officer of his platoon, Martin Walker had been one of the relative few to have actually survived the initial psionic shockwave that accompanied the awakening of Thorn’s power. It wasn’t without consequence, as Walker had been reduced to an invalid, spending the rest of his days fed by an IV, unable to move, talk, or even think rationally.

The lights were on in those eyes, but nobody was home…a man who was still alive, but could no longer live.

Thorn blinked his eyes rapidly, hoping to whatever deity existed - if they existed - that this hallucination would pass. But the vision failed to dissipate, what with all the feeling of psi in the air.

“Arthur…” another murmur came, and he turned to see someone else, standing up from the bodies.

Corporal Christopher Winter stood with unfocused eyes, waving his sidearm in Thorn’s general direction. But with his higher reasoning functions completely fried from Thorn’s original psionic awakening, and his motor cortex damaged on top of that, the round that was fired missed Thorn completely, despite the meager two meter distance between the two.

“Why?” seemed to come out of the hallucination’s mouth.

“I…I didn’t know. It was an accident,” Thorn pleaded.

But it was of little comfort to the dead. Thorn got so caught up in his past that he had accidentally decloaked. Possessed seized the opportunity to attack. The sharp impact to Thorn’s skull was all it took to refocus back into reality.

Fortunately for him, the armor took the brunt of the impact, meaning the worst he felt was the sudden stop of kinetic energy against his body, with no breaking of the skin. Being caught off guard, his rifle was knocked away from him, but even in hand-to-hand fighting, Thorn was no less dangerous.

The artificial muscle fibers along his HEV suit interacted with his psionic abilities, boosting his physical strength. The hooks and punches would kill any normal man, but the Possessed still came, and it forced Thorn to improvise with whatever was at arm’s length. The psi interference wreaked havoc with his ability to focus and - consequently - use his psionic abilities.

Furniture and doors became his makeshift cudgels and blades. The door, in particular, was swung with enough force to embed halfway into the Possessed’s neck. Nabbed from behind, Thorn kicked his heel back right through his attacker’s knee. Still, if he didn't get an assist soon, he was liable to be overwhelmed, particularly if more Possessed show up.

Ellen barely acknowledged Elijah leads the Myers family to safety. She handled the key with intense curiosity, snapping to attention only when Astrid deigned to rudely address her. She had been around the block for a long time and a snippy little teenager was not going to make her lose her cool. “Child, investigating and containing this anomaly from escaping into the wider world is what I do. Try to keep up.”

Ellen led them to an elevator that would bring them to the ring level. “From here on out, nothing you might see is real. Stay close, we need that agent’s help if we’re going to succeed. If you want to hold my hand, just say so.”

Thorn had rather brashly moved forward on his own, exposing him to the dangers of the reality-shift phenomenon. By the time she could find him he was beset by possessed surrounded by some anomalous readings.

Her Blackstar eye could sense the anomalous manifestations as energy readouts, but, her normal human eye overlapped it with images of departed souls. How they could manifest according to an observer’s memories was definitely a prominent feature.

Thorn showed up not long after searching, beset by the possessed. A Dark Light blast screeched through the halls, creating burn marks on the walls and momentarily turning turning the colors in the hall negative, like analogue camera film. In close confines, the Dark light was dangerous, but Ellen hesitated to deliver a second blast.

The possessed reshaped themselves from Ellen’s memories, it was her brothers who had perished, while Astrid would likely suffer her own dark visions.

“Emiko-chan…” Ellen felt the utterance of her birth name like a dagger to the heart. Her father had given her a western name, with plans of bringing her the America, when the Japanese empire took her two brothers and put them in bomb-laden kamikaze planes. “Emiko-chan.”

The possessed creatures take the moment to close the gap, moving as quickly as one could blink. “You are dead. You have been all dead for 80 years.” Ellen gathers her resolve and zaps them as one came in, unable to help Astrid in the moment. The presence of the Dark Light energy fizzled out the anomalous energies, not to mention reducing the possessed corpses into well done pieces of meat reeking of otherworldly radiation.

“Might want to stick close.” She said to Thorn.

After a grueling walk through the ship’s hallways, the Queen of the Atlantic’s interior feels as though it stretched out further than it should now. It was now a completely certainty that they were no longer quite in the real world; any signal to the outside was gone, and it now boiled down to what was in front of one’s eyes. They had crossed over into the unknown.

The changes were a subtle, gradual thing, only noticeable when the minimalist ship interior gave way to art deco, metal and plastics giving way to varnished wood, geometric furnishings to stylized furniture and the LED giving way to incandescent lamps. Gone were the wide screens and in place were paintings of the bizarre and otherworldly. Paintings in the style of Bosch, depicting a grand cruise from a bygone time and era, where the rich guests indulged in dancing and feasting, and later, more debased things. These guests soon began donning the skin and flesh of innocent victims, and repeated their indulgences throughout the years across many ships.

Other paintings swirled and came to life when looked at, reflecting the past of the onlooker, and the worst future they could have. For Ellen, horrific scenes of her living alone, all her family dead – or perhaps her eye, conjuring forth a force of unknowable horror, devouring her.

As the cabin door came within reach, Ellen’s normally calm, stoic voice cracked, as a palpable cold dryness hung in the air, condensing her breath with each word. “Try… try… not to look at the paintings… too much…” She said, but the sight of her family and children in the paintings unsettled even her steely façade. She and the others could hear- feel- a ringing in their ears, and soon she fumbled with the key and it fell on the ground in a single heavy thud. The key itself was icy to the touch, and was much too heavy for such a small object. Reyold’s cabin door loomed before them, a threshold to a far more sinister place.

Astrid followed silently, down into the depths of hell itself. The lower floors of the ship twisted and writhed with obscene forces, the likes of which Stareater had never witnessed before. She could feel the energy seeping through the walls, and it didn't sit right in her body. It felt cold, wrong. As the Possessed started to make themselves known, Stareater fired bolts of energy at them, detonating their bodies like vibrant grenades. It was dangerous to use her power in a confined space, meaning she had to be careful.

Astrid brazenly trudged forward with little regard for what lay ahead. She wasn't scared. Worried, yes, but she had seen worse things than zombies.

As they descended, the walls warped and changed into something older. Wood, not metal. The atmosphere might've felt fine to Ellen and Thorn, but to a person who consumed ambient energy, this place felt like swimming through static.

"There's something in the air. It's energy, but it's not natural." She looked at the monitor on her arm, and it only read static as a percentage. Stareater didn't feel as though she was overloading, but she wasn't draining either. "It's-" The paintings shut her up.

All of them looked foul. She turned her eyes away.

And as she did, she could hear the sounds of a ghost haunting her. "Astrid."

She didn't turn around, but kept walking. He was dead, and Astrid wasn't.

"If the key doesn't work, just move over." Astrid commented, hearing it sound heavier than it should have. She stepped in front of the door and blasted it with fist-sized shot of Whitespace energy, disintegrating matter it came into contact with, and no doubt alerting anyone on the other side of their presence.

"Astrid..." It repeated. But she ignored it.

"Whatever's on the other side of that is likely the source of all this, and we have no idea what'll happen if we destroy it while we're trapped in this. The way the walls and floor started changing, there's something non-Euclidian going on here. Either that or we crossed a portal somehow. Theoretically the source will collapse it and spit us out somewhere on the ship, but what are we doing if that doesn't happen?" She asked Ellen and Thorn, knowing they were experts at things like this.

“SpEcTre…tHe...rAdIo,” Castle’s voice started in Thorn’s implants, before disappearing into static completely.

He was bailed out of his grapple by a timely save from Nakamura, and he double-checked his OPSAT. While the local objectives he entered remained intact, all forms of GPS and satellite uplink were gone, as if no longer able to receive a signal regardless of actual position. It was like something was jamming it.

Powerful psionic energy still radiated in the air, playing havoc with his ability to use his more active powers. And the ringing that was starting to settle in his ears made it difficult to think. Nonetheless, he could sense that beneath her ice queen persona, Ellen Nakamura was being shaken up by whatever she was seeing.

He didn’t know if Star-Eater could feed on psionic energy or if she was reacting to some other form of energy Thorn was unaware of; even so, beneath that teenage bravado was someone who was clearly unsettled about something present in the atmosphere.

Star-Eater destroyed the door they came to, not paying mind to the key anymore, which was somehow supernaturally heavy in clear defiance of what one would expect from the physics of it. Thorn was hardly an authority on any form of anomalous happenings, being more of an assassin and intelligence field agent; he just occasionally got wrapped up in them.

“Theoretically, we could also be trapped in the same realm as the source, too - particularly if it also functions as the gate between realms,” Thorn replied to Star-Eater’s theory. “Still, if it’s the gate, it’s in the interests of whoever remains on the ship to seal it, even if it risks trapping us in.”

Thorn’s eyes narrowed as he turned to look at Ellen. His face was impossible to see behind his mask, but his voice carried a stoic edge to it.

“I get caught up in anomalies on occasion - I don’t go out of my way to study them like you do,” he said. “Your guess is likely better than mine as to what will happen. I say we risk it, but I want your input.”

Ellen got to her feet, like attempting shaking off a heavy hangover. Astrid’s power, which would’ve vaporized a normal door, instead simply caused them to swing open, revealing a dimly lit realm. Or did they get destroyed and materialized again? It was so hard to think, to perceive here. “We are going somewhere; the key is shifting us from our reality to another.” An ephemeral fog, formed not of condensation but of the space between realms, hung low in the air concealing the floor. Ellen took the first few steps into the beyond.

A few steps were taken, but Ellen’s determined stride seemed to bring her further than those steps should’ve. A familiar voice echoed around them, as a phantom materialized, crossing their path but paying them no mind. “My children… where are my children…” The paraplegic woman from the theatre, the one who expired of old age, searched desperately for her children, before vanishing into the fog.

“We…” Ellen took a gulp of air, taking her eyes off the lost soul that passed them. “We have crossed over. Don’t linger in one spot too long, don’t look them in the eye. Let’s move forward.” In front of them and behind them meanwhile, the phantoms of the recently deceased passed through the fog, including the adult children who attempted to keep their matriarch alive. Huddled close, lost and afraid, they passed through the trio insubstantially. They paid the living no mind, unless the living made eye contact- the warmth of life was a candle, and the dead souls were moths.

The lit path led to a large, lavishly decorated art deco bar. Ellen pushed forward on the large French doors, the warm lights and vibrant colors were a welcome change from the ghostly realm behind them. The bar had a name in silver letters, “The 9th Circle”, as well as a vintage sign announcing tonight’s occasion. “Queen of the Atlantis Soiree.” The hall was quite vast, and seemed like a party had just blown through; wine glasses and plates were scattered all about the round dining tables.
Custodians in full suits were in the process of cleaning up. One such older gentleman, of Caucasian origin and bald, if spared a glance, returned only a silent stare. “I must tend to my duties… sir.” After which they’d excuse themselves.

A band of dapper gentlemen on stage was playing a very old song, in a hauntingly familiar voice. “Maybe… you’ll think of me… when you are all alone… Maybe the one who… is waiting for you… will prove untrue… then what will you do?”

“Impossible. The last time I saw this group was…” Ellen muttered to herself, reminiscing her young adulthood. The band finished their song, and looked at the trio with as much eerie fascination as they did the band. At the bar, a man suddenly materialized, beginning to mix drinks.

“Well. I was expecting you would come here someday. I wasn’t expecting… company of such... diverse moral fibre. I suppose there is a first time for everything.”

Ellen’s stoic demeanor was shaken up at this point. The man did not teleport, or sneak in, or enter via any energy sources. He was simply not there, and now he was. “Now, I know you have many questions. I am not the organizer of the Queen of Atlantis affair, but I know who is. First, you are guests here, so it is only right I offer a warm refreshment… after your trip through the chilly place outside.”

He poured the sparkling red fluid into shot glasses, one for each guest. Even for the inexplicably handicapped Astrid, the drink seemed tempting. Ellen only eyed it with grave suspicion.

Oh dear.

Fuck. Fuck this. All of this. None of this felt right, the air was distorting and warping in ways Astrid hadn’t felt since the Whitespace. Logically, she should’ve felt fine given that spent billions of years there in the blink of an eye. Pages of ethereal paper littered the ground. It was both there but also not there, and as she lifted a page to read it… It contained everything she ever learned about the parallel reality she traveled. Everything she learned, distilled into an abstract stream of information that only she could see. To Ellen, it would’ve been unfathomable.

”What the he-“ A humming noise droned out beneath the ghostly song plaid by the band of Ellen’s nightmare. Like digital static, it was a pressure on the back of their necks. Their skin pricked as if there was electricity in the air. It was the sound of a blackout diffuser, something Ellen wouldn’t know. Astrid recognized it all too well. All these ghosts made her forget she was hearing it. Astrid assumed these were just in Ellen’s head and that they could all see the inner demons of each other.

Whenever the ghostly bartender emerged, she felt the urge to blast him. The only reason Astrid didn’t was because he started speaking. Was the 9th Circle some sort of purgatory? A weird jazzy afterlife? Was Astrid fucking dead? These were all questions Astrid wondered about as the man spoke about Ellen’s presence being expected, and when he poured the drinks. She didn’t pick one up, for obvious reasons. At least if there were to be poisoned, one of them would survive- Better her than Ellen. Astrid looked around, not trusting this as far as she could vaporize it.

”If you’re not the orchestrator of all this, who is?”

The sooner she got the hell out of this, the sooner Stareater could get back to Rose.

Thorn was taken off-guard by the fact that the door was completely undamaged, but otherwise voiced no complaint as he joined his companions of circumstance in their journey onward. Some people passed them by as if they weren’t there, and Thorn knew some of their faces…because they were people whose bodies he had blown apart just recently.

“I see dead people…” he referenced, attempting to use his psionic capabilities as a form of shielding if the shades could indeed affect them.

Where they ended up was the “9th Circle”...and for all the intimidating name, it seemed on the surface level to be a bar of sorts. Old, but refined, not unlike something out of a film noir setting. It even had a song that would have been prevalent during the golden age of the film noir genre - “Maybe”, a song that was nearly 93 years old at this point.

Thorn’s grandparents - themselves born late in the Silent Generation - grew up on music of the Forties and Fifties, and often would not shut up about them. Thorn gave the music of the period a shot, and while not his favorite, even he had to concede that some of them were catchy.

A man seemed to materialize at the bar, mixing drinks for them. It seemed he had expected someone. Not them…or maybe he was expecting someone. Damn, a man could be driven to madness thinking it over.

As a simple gesture of courtesy, Thorn picked one of the glasses up, but did not actually drink. He merely held it up to the light to look through the fluid, almost carrying himself with the demeanor of a hard-boiled detective.

“You say you were expecting someone - but you imply it was someone other than the three of us,” he commented. “Perhaps people of even greater ambition, or of altruism.”