[04] Arctic Sector

[DA 2009]

ARCTIC SECTOR

Time Of Day: Night

Bunker: Active

Starting Players: Alexander Trafford, Sage, Sophia, Tamsin, Ashe, Kaden

[Tamsin]

Tamsin wandered the Arctic Sector, looking for the bunker located amidst it. The cold seemed to have subsided somewhat....or she had simply become numb to it. Either way, she did not pay it much heed as her mind was filled with the occurences of her last battle. Her insides still felt sickly from the venomous ki that had been pumped into her body as she still held the throat Sophia had grabbed. It was only due to the priestess`s mercy that the maid was still among the living. Remembering their moment of happyness when they built a snowman, Suzaku could not help but feel sad. Had the circumstances been different, the two females might have even become friends.

After walking for hours, the girl noticed a silhouette of a building in the distance. Quickening her pace, she quickly reached her destination. It was indeed the bunker she was looking for, standing alone in the middle of nowhere...not unlike herself. With a sigh of relief, she entered it and a beep on her collar told her that it had deactivated itself. Wasting no time, she called: "Maleficus!" Her voice clearly echoed inside the structure, but there was no response. Wanting to make sure, she began to search through the building.

As she checked room after room, the soles of her black shoes began to hit the floor increasingly violently. The bunks, the kitchen, the bathroom....everywhere she looked, the green rogue was nowhere to be found. As it became increasingly clear that the Namekian was nowhere to be found, the prodigy became increasingly concerned for her master. After finding herself back at the entrance after triple checking the entire bunker, she exclaimed: "...Mal?" But the only response she got was silence.

"Do not panic. He might still be looking for the bunker," she thought as she tried to calm herself. Afterall, she was the only one there at the time. Thinking it wise to wait and see, she sat down on one of the bunks and waited patiently for her master`s arrival.

Tamsin enters the Arctic Sector Bunker

[Ashe]

She wasn't sure what had happened. Part of her believed that she had accidently killed the man who had been attempting to do the same to her, and she wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. A completely different part of her was trying to argue that the man had not actually been killed from her weapon.

"Ok, Ashe, its simple," she argued into the open air, pulling her jacket in tightly around herself as she trudged through the gathering snow flurries. "When you shot that guy with your wand thing, he didn't fall over dead or anything like that. He just... Pew pew... and then he glowed for a moment and then disappeared."

Her fingers tensed and relaxed repeatedly around her wrists, each hand shoved into the sleeve of the other and locking around her opposite wrists to help keep the wind out. "That doesn't sound like how I would expect someone to die," she reasoned. She laughed a bit nervously. "Heh, that actually sounds more like something out of a video game. Like that game where you are that green elf and you shoot laser beams from your sword. They flash a bright color and then fade away or something."

Looking around her to each side, she saw nothing but white for as far as she could see. "So... You definitely didn't kill this guy. This is some type of game, and he was probably just teleported away or something like everyone." Her breath was almost burning in this biting wind as it rushed past her mouth, but she just couldn't stop talking to herself to shake the boredom. She'd already tried to use some of her electronics, but the headset of the music player only hurt her ears and using her phone just exposed her hands to the elements. Drinking from her water bottles proved pointless when they were essentially frozen solid.

Talking to herself was the best way to keep from letting the cold just set in and work her down into a frost induced exhaustion. "So what we do is get to the bunker - where ever the heck this thing is - and we find Kaden, Sage, Sophia... Anyone. I don't really care as long as I find warmth." A clump of snow found its way into the top of her shoes in response and further froze her wrinkled toes within the miserable protective gear. Glaring down at them, she looked back up sharply at the sky to whine. "Are you serious? Ugh, Damon, you promised punch and pie, and we all know the cake's a lie, so I want cocoa at the bunker or I'll punch you in the eye!" she threatened in rhyme.

It took her a moment before she laughed at her sing song way of coping, making her consider writing out entire songs about her frustration in the frozen wasteland. Various verses went in and out of her lips, but eventually she gave up. "Damon Dukes, I don't like youuu. Now I don't know what to dooo. I hope the bunker is active too, because, uh, I've got wet snow in my shoe!" She barely finished the line before she scoffed. "Yeah, that'd totally win a Battle of the Bands, Ashe. Thus why you let the others take care of the song lyrics." In the snow, she half yearned for her guitar at that moment, something, anything to keep her mind occupied. Then again, with her fingertips as frozen as they were, it wasn't as if she could handle the agony that would be involved trying to do so.

Even her attempts to practice with her energy had proven wasted effort.

Ashe emerged from the pounding blizzard suddenly as she realized that the path had taken a curve to lower elevations. The act of doing so had put the winds at her back as flying directly overhead and leaving her to a clearer path than the one she had been walking. To further contrast, she could see with perfect clarity in every direction, from the jagged ice structures to her left and the large sturdy shelter to her right, all the way into the -

Shelter.

That was as far as her mind processed the things she could see as it rewound back like a tape. Her hand came out from her jacket without her realizing it, subconciously rubbing its cold and numb nerves over the strangely comfortable collar that she had been wearing. "I don't... Have I reset this thing yet for this time period or... I can't tell. Ugh, I totally wouldn't have lost track of time if that guy hadn't decided to get up in my business earlier. Now he's out of extra men," she complained, citing her video game reference to explain things. "And I'm wandering around on the snow level with no snowboard at all."

Snowboard.

Her mind made a mental note. She had yet to go snowboarding this year, and if there was one thing she was going to take advantage of while she stuck in the frozen tundra, it would be to check the bunker for a snowboard. She was never really good, but transportation was transportation, especially when it involved going down a mountain a faster than light speeds while pretending there is an enormous avalanche falling behind you. It was completely rational.

How else would one handle an avalanche about to fall on you? Roar defiantly and punch it?

She would leave that type of method to those with something to prove. Her way was to ride the waves - or snow curves - and live on the edge. Of course, the first thing her eyes fell upon as she stepped through the doors to the bunker, hearing her collar beep on arrival, was the kinky sex slave - Tamsin.

"Mal?" she asked hopefully.

Ashe counted the number of people inside of the room. Two. No Kaden, no Sage, and no Sophia. Just Tamsin... Which meant the green guy was here. This was not what she meant about living life on the edge.

"FML," she mumbled, covering her mouth immediately in the event that the creature was present and understood the acronym.

Ashe has entered the Arctic Sector Bunker.

[Sage]

Sage nearly collapsed. She had just wanted to be nice to Belle, after she terrorized him nearly half to death, and instead, she offended him so much that he’d run away. The hybrid went outside, after poor Belle, but he was already gone.

She didn’t mean to. She laughed... because she was relieved. All of the racing thoughts and disturbing imagery just- stopped upon realization that Belle had no idea what Sage was talking about.

But she had to move. Sage began to retrace her steps, and headed back into the arctic, knowing she had to get to a bunker before she could do anything else - including talk things through with Belle. She hoped he wouldn’t be too offended.

Traveling through the city had proven just as creepy and uncomfortable as it had the last time she had done it, but she managed to make it to the still-bewildering transition between city and frozen wasteland quicker this time. She was learning the land, she thought with more than a little sarcasm.

Immediately, sundown plunged into the dead of night, but the gorgeous starry sky revealed itself overhead once again. It was quiet - no wind - and she could see for miles in every direction, except through the city behind her. She walked.

Sage trudged through the ice and snow, happy to be back in the frigid landscape, on her way toward the bunker that seemed to sit right in the middle of the place, as if to spite those that couldn’t handle the cold. Not that Sage minded, as it made the place quieter than it could have been.

Finally, the structure poked up from the totally flat horizon, sticking out like a pimple on the face of the land. It was a good pimple, though. Coming from Sage, that was high praise. She hated pimples. Or any unsightly blemishes, really.

The girl burst through the door into the bunker, finding the entire place totally abandoned. How awesome was that? Sage closed the door and immediately headed to the fridge; it had been hours since she last ate.

“Hope there’s something- aww!”

There was nothing left except bread and margarine. She sighed, and awkwardly took both with her one good hand. Belle and Ashe got great food and she was stuck with... filler.

Great.

The girl found herself a butter knife, and sat down at the table, gazing morosely at her ‘food’ for a moment, before she finally set about preparing a sandwich, with nothing but bread and butter.

Sage moves from the City Sector to the Arctic Sector

Sage enters the Arctic Sector bunker

[Alexander Trafford]

Of all the bunkers, in all the sectors, in all of Dante, he had walked into this one. He was sure that, at one point, the small fortress had been useful to someone, but it was useful no longer. There had been no supplies, no food, no nothing that would have served any real purpose. This was a shame, because he had really enjoyed the prospect of spending time in the forest. At some point, he noted, he would have to return to the evergreen woods. The opportunities that it provided were too good to pass up.

“God Damnit . . .” Alexander muttered to himself as he closed in on his new destination. His teeth were chattering with such force that he could hardly keep a cigarette tucked in his lips. At this point he fucking despised cold weather, but there had been no other location, to his knowledge, that housed the amount of supplies that were available in the arctic sector’s frozen bunker.

And so he trudged through the shin-high piles of snow with the tundra’s howling wind biting furiously against his numbed flesh. Flakes of snow and ice rocketed down against his body as if they were kamikaze. His clothes quickly became soaked and froze against his skin.

He was hungry. He was freezing. He was fucking miserable.

After what seemed like an eternity, he could see the bunker through the thick, opaque blackness of the arctic night. Had the barren cold not heightened his senses, he most likely would have either walked past the bunker, without noticing it, or collided with its stone walls. He had been lucky, then, that he had been marching in the right direction.

It was about time, he thought to himself, he was due for some good luck.

Pushing open the massive, metallic doorway, Trafford took a long step into the warm, isolated bunker. Throwing his arms out to the side, he allowed himself a mighty stretch, before lighting up a fresh cigarette and heading towards the kitchen.

“What the fuck!?” Alexander exclaimed as he turned the corner and entered the kitchen. Some woman was sitting at the table enjoying a meal, and her presence had startled him. As he screamed, he leapt backwards and nearly drove his head into the concrete wall. He had not seen one of the other competitor’s outside combat. He pulled his Desert Eagle from its holster and leveled it at the girl’s head.

But then he lowered it. He recognized this female from Mercy-Sei . . .

Alexander Trafford leaves the Forest Sector and enters the Arctic Sector, then enters the Arctic Sector bunker.