witheredblum | sinking down, down

Death is a drop into a blackness that swallows you. You feel the movement of not air but shadow across your face as you plummet, and there is no bottom. No crash.

If there is another side, you do not reach it.

It is neither the light of heaven or the fires of hell that greets you when you wake. And wake you do, to the buzz and flicker of old fluorescent lights.

You are laid out beside a full-size competitive swimming pool, half-filled with stagnant water. The doors out are blocked off by locked doors covered in caution tape. The locker rooms are long since emptied, paint peeling from the humidity. The only signs of habitation are a few pieces of scattered graffiti.

Welcome to your new home. There's no sunlight, no indication of time passing. Just you and each other and your thoughts. the stagnant water bubbles a little occasionally, but there's nothing in it.

Before long you'll realize that you no longer need to eat or drink. You might notice your hand go through something if you don't focus. You're a ghost now. What's that they say about unfinished business?

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[Dorothy wakes coughing and sputtering, instinctively acting based on her last memory of being suffocated.

Her surroundings couldn't be more different than the kitchen, though. Once she catches her breath, if it can even be called that anymore, she starts to recognize the environment. It looks a little different, but...]

... Oh, shit.

[The underground pool. The séance. That Mari girl wasn't lying about their 'friends', was she?]

That headmistress woman…who gets the 15,000 she owes for your hair, exactly?

[ Hi, Dorothy. Chris is offering you a hand up. ]

[Oh, Chris... that actually gets a small smile out of her as she accepts that hand.]

Not exactly how it works. I kind of need to be alive to claim it.

Plus, I'm not sure my hair was ever actually damaged...

[Anthy was... really weird about this whole thing.]

Well, I guess it sucks to be you then.

[ She sighs, as she helps Dorothy up. ]

I'm really sorry it ended this way, Dorothy...

[Dorothy sighs as well, for a different reason entirely.]

It's only ended for us.

[Everyone else is still in danger, after all. Though, now that she's here with Chris, thinking about it...]

You should be the most upset of all of us, don't you think? After... what happened to you...

[ A dangerous look crosses Chris’s eyes. ]

That bitch will get what’s coming to her for all that, Dorothy. For everything.

[ But then she smiles. ]

But besides. I haven’t given up.

Oh, hey—— [Misty freezes, realizing too late who is in front of her.]

[She turns around. Starts quickly moving away.]

Misty Quigley do NOT make me chase after you! I am not in the mood!

[No, this isn't a gagtag.]

[Maybe she can phase through a wall and put herself in a locker, save them all the time. She briefly considers it, but… well, she’s Misty. She turns around again.]

Oh, hiiiiiiii!

Misty. Have you been haunting us this whole time?

[She demands with all the tired authority she can muster, being freshly dead and all. Forget being weirded out by ghosts being real, this is the real pressing issue at hand.]

No. Just the past week. Unless you mean haunting as a whole. I've been in the locker rooms for weeks, now. You wouldn't believe the condition people left them in, before I got to them.

Uh-huh.

[She does not know what to make of that. At all.

So on to the next question for one of the resident oldest ghosts of their group.]

... You wouldn't... happen to have seen a man with a bell pepper head around? I think Kana said he was wearing a tracksuit?

[A pause.

Then, Misty laughs, as cruelly as she can manage.]

Oh. I get it. You're still making fun of me!

[Ah. Well. Here we go.]

[Anthy waits until Dorothy is no longer actively choking to draw attention to herself, given how closely associated she is with said choking. Seems kind of in poor taste to jumpscare her. Once she's begun to recalibrate, though . . .]

I can help you out.

[Anthy's made it over to the side of the pool now, toes drifting slowly back and forth just above the stagnant water.]

I understand if you'd prefer I didn't. You're welcome to any retribution you'd like.

[But she's not going to move until Dorothy says it's all right or moves herself.]

[Ah. This is awkward.

She'd thought they were having a nice conversation, before she started to feel ill. Belatedly realizing the tea tasting slightly off might not have been something innocuous. The way she'd fought Anthy, she probably seemed pretty violent at the time. Hard not to thrash about when one's being smothered and doesn't want to die.]

Answer me first. Why me?

[Well. That's a fair question and a fair condition. She just wishes she had a better answer. Generally speaking, people seem to respond better when there's a personal motive.]

Because you were the first person I saw that night.

[. . .]

I didn't want to kill anyone. I had to kill someone. So I let the story decide, and it chose you. I like you. I think you're a good person. You never did anything to me.

[Part of her thinks, if only she hadn't gone to check on Kohaku. She'd simply crossed paths with Anthy, never considering that Anthy would just take the opportunity. She would have assumed if she was going to kill, she would already have a victim chosen. She couldn't imagine a reason she'd choose her... because she hadn't.]

I see.

[With that, she moves closer to Anthy.]

So you didn't want to kill anyone, but you had someone you desperately needed to protect. At least I can rest easy knowing I had no real reason to suspect you.

[She gestures with her hand, showing that she's willing to accept if Anthy plans to offer her help. She's at least assured that Anthy never held any ill will towards her.]

You're in it with the rest of us, yup.

[welcome to hell, Dorothy]

[There are no lights to flick on and off, at least none Vanity can control, but it's not NOT her tone.]

So scale of one to bullshit, how okay actually WERE you when you figured out what Himeya was doing?

Ugh, really?! One week, and I have to put up with you again?!

[She ordinarily wouldn't be quite this upset, but a week isn't long enough to get over the whole attempting to kill everyone else and escape on her own thing.]

Bet you enjoyed watching, didn't you? At least she probably didn't want me to suffer... don't know why else she would have suffocated me after I started to feel sick.

You wouldn't believe me no matter what I said. And honestly, we're putting up with EACH OTHER here.

[A week ago she would have said she'd be ecstatic to see Dorothy dead- maybe only in the privacy of her own head, but she'd have said it. Now though?]

sinking down, down

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