logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: ENTER MR. SANDMAN (DREAMERS)

Entry tags:

EVENT LOG: ENTER MR. SANDMAN (DREAMERS)

characters: all characters that signed up as a dreamer for the event.
location: dreamland feat. beacon of the past.
date/time: november 16-29.
content: the dreamers investigate beacon as it once was.
warnings: psychological/existential horror. further cws will arise depending on the location; mods will cw tags appropriately, and you will too!

say your prayers, little one.

Hello, dreamers. Welcome to Beacon.

Below, each group has a toplevel ready and waiting for the investigation to begin. Feel free to tag in however to establish a tag order, and mod responses will begin once each character has tagged in. If you need a refresher on how the event will work, give the OOC info another read!

As for those of you in the ~~sin bin~~ opt out area...

The Beacon of the past isn't all too different from the Beacon of the present, frankly, except for a few notable exceptions. For one, it's far better lit: daylight leaves everything feels a lot brighter and more sensible than eternal night does. Several advertisements for community theater in the Invincible are hung up (Tryouts for the Ice Man Cometh! Cometh try your luck!) and minor lost and found posters are tacked to a community bulletin board nearby. Oh, and a merry little tune is playing on loop from a record player set up outside the Invincible.

It's cheerful, if not a little off-putting. But the signs of life are clear, even if the forest still looks darkly oppressive over yonder.

Additionally, since investigation threads 1) rely on mod responses, and 2) will likely move on the slow side given the nature of the event/size of the groups, if you would like to have your characters "mingle" in their assigned location, please feel free to write your own toplevels! We ask that you post them as separate toplevels not in response to the mod toplevels (so our inboxes don't get super flooded/we don't accidentally miss stuff). Remember that groups may only interact with each other during the event, but you're welcome to assume timey-wimey shenanigans to excuse why your characters are mingling instead of searching for clues—they do have two weeks in this dream, technically, and dreams are not always linear. If your investigation thread has not yet progressed to a point in which you've got enough of a handle on the setting to write a separate mingle starter, ask the mod you're working with! We'll fill you in on some OOC details so you can mingle accordingly while still allowing for characters to discover those details ICly in the investigation thread.

If you're still jonesing for more threading action during the event, we encourage you to check out the TDM!

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[This time it's Villanelle who gets left behind as she makes her way across the room and down the stairs. Does it seem different? Yeah different is one word for it. Skipping time, skipping universes, she's not particularly bothered, at least it's something different. She raises her hand to the scratch marks, measuring the space between her fingers. Could it have been them walking up and down over and over, scratching at the walls? She tilts her head. On second thought, that doesn't sound like something any version of herself would do. The boys maybe. Seems strange though. They could just walk right out the doors couldn't they?]

We could just leave.

[Villanelle calls down to Peter and Bruce too if he's still alive.]

[She skips lightly down the stairs, counting steps, waiting to see if it'll stretch just like before. Things are getting strange, she twitches her nose, sneezes at dust. Things are getting interesting. In the absence of fear, she tends to see the funny side of things. Anyway, apparently they're all dead already. What's the worst that can happen?]

[It's clear enough that the scratches couldn't have come from them--at least, their nails seem fine, no chips or damage done. These seem old, deep. Nothing hinders them on their downward path. This time, the stairs, although creaky and worn, don't display any other unnatural effects. They reach the bottom quickly.

And when they do, Bruce will just have noticed a splash of red underneath one of the pews. It's hard to make out what it is, exactly, but there's definitely a marking there. Paint, maybe? It's definitely something else to look into, as the note seemed innocuous enough, no further clues arising upon a deeper inspection of it.]

[It doesn't seem that they've been away for very long, but then, the passage of time itself is questionable. After all, it'd looked like midday when they arrived and now the sun is sinking. Bruce is not alarmed by this outright because there is no reason to believe that Beacon obeys any other rules about day and night or the length of an hour. It's possible that the stairs are long, he hasn't seen them for himself. And the bell has stopped ringing, which means it's possible that they've found the cause. To pursue them in a pique of worry would probably hinder their progress.

He must, against his nature, trust them.

He doesn't hear the drumming of their feet on the stairs but perhaps it's a testament to light-footedness, or the insulation of the church- or distraction. Bruce isn't immediately visible to his companions but that's because he hasn't just paused over the strange streak of color. One hand reaches out and he touches the tip of two fingers to the edge of the mark, testing its wetness but also its texture. Any lingering scent.

Instead of upending the pew to examine it directly, Bruce's tendencies have been shaped by the people around him- who were, in no small number, detectives themselves. Whatever it is he's going to see, he wants to see it in context. So he sinks down onto hands and knees on the floor, lower now than the rows of seats around him, until he's all but laying on the ground- looking for the mark.]

[ that the journey down feels much quicker than the way up is a thought that occurs to peter. he thinks that it could be a quirk of beacon, a mind game not entirely unlike the hallucinations; or it could simply be that it feels quicker in much the same way that the journey to anywhere — like, say, the journey to shea stadium — always feels so much slower than the way back.

bruce's lack of immediate visibility is momentary startling and peter shifts his weight, glancing over the tops of the pews and towards the door. maybe he'd left? unlikely, given what peter had ascertained of his personality from their previous interactions, but not out of the realms of possibility. still, what else? it's unusual, to have nothing from his spider-sense — it's ordinarily a constant, a kind of background noise that warns of him tiny threats that frankly barely deserve recognition; peter had commented once to mj that he could write a book on the many, many dangers of new york city that no-one ever thinks about and the same had seemed to hold true for beacon so far.

peter thinks that, perhaps ironically (and not in the alanis morisette way), it's more unsettling than having it at all. ]

—Bruce? [ beat; a moment of consideration. he continues conversationally: ] There wasn't anyone up there, [ punctuated by a pause, and peter takes several steps forward, scanning the rows of pews one by one ], and the bell looks like it hasn't physically been used in years.

But the stairs do. [She calls from the stairwell.] They're old all of a sudden, creaky. [She bounces on the bottom step.] See?

[She jumps off the bottom step and walks into the church.] Oh, has he gone? [Was Peter talking to an empty room?]

[Bruce already tried the doors, maybe he tried them again while they were upstairs and walked out. Or maybe he's dead, only, there's no sign of struggle. Either way, since the doors have already been looked at, she decides to go in the opposite direction, to where the altar would sit.]

Shouldn't there be more things in here? [Soviet Russia has never been big on religion, so church going didn't feature in her childhood, but she has an idea of what a church should look like and this one seems lacking.] Aren't churches supposed to have those wooden stands for the preacher to go up and tell us we're all going to burn in hell. [She spins on her heel, directing the last to the others, her fingers waggling in the universal 'spooky' gesture.]

[Bruce will discover the red substance is dry. It flakes lightly as it's touched. It stretches on beneath the pew, some kind of object that he can't make out with the furniture covering it.

As Villanelle approaches the front, as she makes her statement, the walls between the stained glass begin to ooze.]

[They're old all of the sudden, she says. The bell looks like it hasn't physically been used in years.

Bruce's brows come together despite the otherwise stillness of his body, despite the way his gaze follows the shape until he can't follow it any further. A puzzle piece then. He'll need to move it. Around the corner and presumably still on the staircase, he can hear the creak and groan of a well-worn step. It's the kind of demonstrative performance he would expect from Mary, a child seeing the details separated from the context.

Their voices continue conversationally and Bruce's palms find the stone floor underneath him, a point of leverage to push himself up.]

Your observations suggest that the passage of time happened in seconds. But perhaps they didn't change at all.

[For the angle and for his height, it means that only his hair and the top half of his face are visible around the pews.]

Those hallucinations just finished. It's possible that the stairs and the bell have been like that all along, that they haven't changed and instead only our perception of them has.

[This isn't a difficult leap for him to make. Of course it seems less possible for time to run in reverse and then move in fast forward, treated like a cassette tape of Beacon's history meant for only their viewing. But Bruce has seen less-possible things happen hundreds of times in Gotham. He's seen people do things they shouldn't be capable of, he's seen people die only to walk down the city streets again. But it's more plausible, he's found, to control people than to control a space. It wouldn't be unlike Crane's fear toxin; the mind has always been more powerful than the body.

He climbs to his feet and lingers there, too close to the pew.]

Peter, could you help me move this please?

Edited 2019-11-24 02:46 (UTC)

They don't normally tell you you're going to Hell, [ peter replies, glancing over at villanelle. ] And maybe the point is avoiding pointed iconography and allowing people private, quiet worship.

[ when bruce's head pops out from behind a pew, peter finds himself relaxing a little; at bruce's request, he makes his way over the pew and eyes it just for a moment, and then eyes bruce. peter tends to opt for layers: loose shirts and sweaters worn over t-shirts; it had never been a conscious decision to hide the fact that he's not quite the skinny nerd he'd been pre-spider bite, but the result is the same. ]

Lift with your legs, right? [ it's easy enough for him to move, but as with everything, it's a careful balancing act of making sure it doesn't seem too easy, otherwise you get marnie watching your bedroom window and discovering you're spider-man, all because you carried some groceries up some stairs because some people don't like elevators. ]

There was a— [ the corners of peter's lips twitch in slight amusement ], I think he was a special effects artist, back home. [ beck seems like a safer topic than kraven the hunter, even if kraven's jungle potions are a little more on the nose than quentin's illusions. ] I think he died. [ it didn't stick, but when does it ever? that beck's still alive isn't relevant to the conversation at hand. beside, he's died, both actually and technically, and it didn't stick — and now he's here and it's debatable whether it'd stuck this time. ]

He ended up pursuing crime because he was tired of not having his genius recognised. [ beat. peter still wishes all of this — beacon, from beginning to end, was the work of mysterio or arcade. it'd make things so much easier. ] His thing was illusions. He mostly used hallucinogens and robotics, and they were all pretty large scale, worst fears kind of thing. [ peter shoots bruce a glance; if he leaves it at that, there'd be a question. ] I covered him a couple of times for the paper I used to work at. It's possible this is something like that. [ semi-agreement then, with bruce. he's doubtful that's the full story, because he should have noticed, but it's a loose, workable theory, although the more important question right now is why. ] We were all at the party, right? Something could have been in, or released into the room, and now— [ they're here. peter's attention flickers briefly to one of the walls, then away, then back again.

oh boy, is that—? ugh. once the pew's been set back down, he starts to edge towards one of the walls. ] But for the record, I don't think we're in Vertigo any more.

[He ended up pursuing crime because he was tired of not having his genius recognised. Sounds like an entirely reasonable career choice.]

[She watches them lift the pew but doesn't offer to help.] Hallucinations? I did say it was drugs... but, not any drug I know. They don't usually work like this. [Then again, her pharmaceutical expertise is limited to poisons and knockouts, not hallucinogens.]

[She's about to join them at the pew, ask why exactly they're rearranging church furniture, when she notices movement from the corner of her eyes, turns in time to see the walls lose their form.] All right, I take it back, maybe it is hallucinations.

[She takes a step toward the walls. The oozing slime is thick and dark, black and reflective like an oil slick. Makes her think of dead birds, fish drowning in an ocean suddenly turned hostile. She licks her lips. Up close, the walls seem to glisten. She breathes deep, has the smell in the church changed? No longer dust and disuse, there's something almost organic about the way the slime drips down to the floor. She turns to look at Peter, smirk on her lips.] What did I say? Going to hell.

[She walks back to the pews, picks up a bible and, completely casual, rips the cover off. Then she returns to the wall, and runs the cover up it in an attempt to scrape off some of the gloop.] This is a lot more dramatic than a crying Madonna. [Her tone of voice says she approves. This place is fucking strange, but she appreciates the change of pace. True hell is boredom.]

[The smell has changed. It's faint, underneath the smell of many, many burning candles: disease.

And there are more candles, now, scattered around, like they'd always been there. Not an altar, not yet, not exactly, but clusters of wax in different stages of use, lining the walls, away from the center of the room.

Villanelle will be able to scrape it off without any issues. Removed from the wall, it seems to grow thicker and sticker still, foul smelling, like tar.

When Bruce and Peter move the pew, the design stretches on to the next one. Literally, it stretches itself, growing as the space is revealed, racing forward in an arc, almost as if urging them on.]

[He's less inclined to believe their meal has been dosed because if that is the case then he thinks- why only the three of them? Where is everyone else? But instead of mentioning it aloud he focuses instead on the muscle that pulls through his knees and back, the warmth in his arms that tells him that his body is working. That he's not just lifting the pew but holding it aloft, holding it steady. They seem to fall into step with relative ease, though Bruce has no memories of helping friends haul furniture into new apartments to compare it to. His experience with synchronization has involved heists instead- breaking into buildings and vaults, coordinating rescue missions and infiltrating high security areas. He suspects that the spirit of it must be the same.

Still, this concern for tandem is exercise is the reason that he nods in the direction they should put it down, instead of interrupting Peter's train of thought. This seems to be a thing he just, does. Elaborating. Filling the space. Bruce wonders what it is he's trying to avoid- what the silence represents that prompts him to it.

The pew comes down and wood creaks quietly, it doesn't groan. Unfortunately it reveals only a small fraction of their puzzle, the necessity of moving a few more. Bruce straightens and looks over at Villanelle, watches her approach the wall without apparent reluctance or fear. He makes a conscious choice, to keep his expression clear. To nod instead in the direction of another pew to be lifted- to take his position and trust Peter to join him.

He makes a similar choice not to look at the candles that have manifested. They have enough distractions at the moment.]

What drugs were those, by the way?

[ he gives villanelle a moment to answer bruce: he's interested in the answer, too. his own thoughts remain with kraven, with the last hallucination-slash-vision he'd had before waking up in central park, the one that kraven had taunted him with. the one that kraven warned him that there was no way of knowing if it was premonition or imagination.

whilst the sun outside is setting and the church should, in theory, be darker than it had been when they first entered, the increase in candles is a sudden, valiant attempt to create a little more light. peter's never been good with surprises — part and parcel of being, ostensibly, difficult to surprise, at least negatively, which means he stiffens; a mild look of distaste and discomfort grace his features, though he manages to remain silent, at least for a moment.

it's not always a deliberate ploy, spider-man being funnier than peter parker: sometimes it's simply that the mask hides the minutiae of his expression. for all intents and purposes, peter's an open book — his emotions are almost always plain and easy to read, if not in his face than in his mannerisms and his body language. now it's hard to deny that he's less than happy with the situation at hand. the design beneath the pews is — well, it's certainly something, and as peter moves towards a second bench, ready to lift it again with bruce, he looks up at the ceiling. maybe it'd be easier to work out what it is from up there — easy enough for him to do, less easy for him to explain.

perhaps there's a feasible vantage point slightly higher up. ]

[Villanelle recognises the smell and rears back, flicking the bible cover away from her.]

Sickness.

[She hisses the word. It's not exactly fear that tightens here expression, but it's something very close. She can imagine little worse than hacking and coughing your way into an early grave. She wipes her hands on her clothes, studies her fingertips carefully. Did any get on her? She's distracted, still studying her hands when Bruce's question comes.]

Chl- [Chloroform] Coke. [She recovers, it's only a small slip, unfortunately for her, she's in a room with the kind of people who'll notice. She's supposed to be keeping these things a secret, isn't she? She had a plan, didn't she? Before today, before they ended up here.] Maybe some E. [She turns, and her grin is all bashful party girl.] Just a little, you know, to get the party started. [She gives Bruce an obvious once over.] Okay, maybe you don't know, but you do right? [She turns to Peter.] Takes the edge off.

[Subject change please.] There's something on the floor? Oh that's what you're doing. [She approaches them, a wary eye on the walls.]

Edited 2019-11-27 00:40 (UTC)

[The more pews they move, the more the picture becomes clear. It stretches and stretches until it forms a circle. But it's not a circle, of course. A circle is just the shape it takes. When all the pews are moved out of the way, the image becomes clear.]

[The second pew is moved, then a third. A fourth. Bruce watches her from his periphery, the way that she leans away from the wall in immediate, reflexive disgust. The way she looks at her fingertips and the way her syllables clip, sound like cloak. It's a curious stumbling block. Bruce has not known cocaine to be easily mistaken for anything else.

He watches as Peter's gaze travels up instead of following the movements of their feet- trying to be sure he doesn't bump or knock or stumble. Conscious of the way the face betrays, of the truths an expression will tell, Bruce is very aware of his eyebrows and the way they remain even slopes across his head, the absence of furrow between them. And without changing anything else at all, Bruce slowly begins to slacken his grip- lowering his elbows in degrees at a time to allow Peter to take incrementally more weight. It tests a theory, but it also comes with the veneer of laziness, the perception of a lack of strength, a lack of competence.

And slowly the image comes into view.]

Ouroboros?

[Is this also a message? He's disinclined to believe it is simple coincidence. The bell is broken, the stairs are old and weathered, the light is waning. It suggests that time is passing and not just hours but perhaps even years. The ouroboros. Repetition. A cycle?]

Uh, no, not really... [ it's not quite awkward, but not not awkward either: he'd always been teased for his distinctly unpartying ways, but drugs had otherwise never entered the picture for any of them, not even quintessential party girl mary jane watson, until — harry. they'd all wondered what had set harry off on that path, which had been stupid of them, him most of all. he knew norman osborn, knew what he was capable of even then. it shouldn't have been a surprise that harry might have searched for a way to try and deal with all of that.

otherwise distracted then, the shift in weight is slow and incremental enough that peter doesn't notice, not at first. when he does his attention snaps back to bruce, expression a somewhat startled, questioning frown. jason has told him enough about bruce and it hadn't been that peter hadn't taken it on board — he had, only he'd filed it away as something to be dealt with later. peter doesn't know enough of what had happened there to make a judgement call, can't say that the way jason's dealing with it is entirely the way that peter would recommend, but with all of that said and done, peter's managed to gather the distinct impression that bruce doesn't make it easy.

any version of him, he supposes. ] —Look, if you're getting tired, all you had to do was say.

[ when they set the final pew down, peter wipes his hands on his trousers, attention shifting to the pattern in the meantime. villanelle had hissed something about sickness, and now— ]

Life, death, and rebirth. [ he comments, in response to bruce's half-question. peter doesn't think it's a question about what the ouroboros is or what it stands for; peter thinks it's likelier a statement, the question being what it means here and now, for them, for their situation. ] I think I read something about the transmigration of souls as well, but the ancient Greeks were never my favorite, I always had more of a thing for Egypt... [ he runs a hand through his hair, thinking. it's been a while since he's read anything on the subject matter — there'd been that incident with jennifer, but that... was hardly this. that had been cats. ] I want to say ... it was used to represent the beginning and end of time. [ beat. ] And periodic renewal. [ resets?

to bruce, then: ] Did you find anything else down here?

Edited 2019-11-27 09:11 (UTC)

[Neither seem particularly bothered by her slip, though the younger one, Bruce, has quite the poker face, she's not entirely sure.]

[She looks down at the symbol. She's not up on her mythology. Ouroburos to her means hackers, cyber warfare, that job in Ukraine where she'd worn a scratchy black wig and painted her eyelids neon green. Knowledge of a subculture that had been hard to fake, but a death that had been easy as spiking an energy drink and watching a hacker choke on his own vomit. He'd gone on twitching for so long. Talking about drugs, that had been a good one.]

[It takes her a moment, but eventually she refocuses on the subject at hand. Pokes the snake symbol with the toe of her boot.] Round and round it goes. [It feels laid out for them, like a music box, waiting to be opened, like they've stepped inside of a film, or a ghost's looped recreation of its final moments.]

If we're seeing what happened to Beacon, then where are the people that it happened to? The ones who scratched up the walls and painted this on the floor? [She looks up at the walls, at the candles clustering around them.] Isn't that why you light candles? For the dead?

[What an excellent question. What did happen to the people of Beacon?

Footsteps come from below the floor. Someone pacing quickly about a confined space. The clinking and clattering of many items hurriedly moved about.]

[It's difficult to say that his interest is renewed when it hasn't waned to begin with- but there are more variables to consider now. Not just where the church is concerned. Parker seems to recognize the additional weight as an afterthought, not because he begins to show considerable strain or because his grip becomes unwieldy. Bruce remembers what it was like when he first started to train- the shaking, the sweat, the numbness and the clumsy slide of his fingers, the awareness of his muscles. And there is no sign of any of it here.

Stronger than he looks is an understatement.

Villanelle touches the edge of the shape with the toe of her shoe and Bruce can admit she vocalizes many of the same questions he's turning over. But among them too is who painted this, and why? It's natural to want for a motive and he can recognize the kneejerk desire for one within himself, but experience has taught him that nothing easy lies in that direction. People do strange and even horrible things to each other all the time, for no reason at all. Better the how than the why just yet. How gives them something to control for.

Bruce reaches wordlessly into his pocket and withdraws the piece of paper he'd found earlier, we're all going to die, letting it hover in the air for the first hand to take it.]

This was inside one of the bibles.

[His head turns, towards Villanelle, but his face remains angled towards the floor, to the sound of pacing. Before he crosses to look once again, to see if the trapdoor is still absent.]

You didn't get any of that tar on your skin, did you?

[ peter reaches out to take the slip of paper; there's a moment of silence as he reads it, the corners of his lips quirking as he holds it out towards villanelle to allow her to read it. ominous and creepy: two of his absolutely least favourite things. ]

If we're talking about the original inhabitants of Beacon, I always assumed they'd died: the planet originally had at least one sun, the plant life is green and bears resemblance to plant life from Earth — although how any of it's still alive is beyond me. [ he'd considered symbiotic relationships, but there had been nothing to back that passing thought up, he wasn't a botanist and without access to a lab as well equipped as, say, tony's or reed's, there's little chance of figuring the how out. trees might be able to last decades, but smaller plants? not so much. that said, the temperature of the planet should be much lower, so whatever the details of beacon still being inhabitable actually were, they're apparently not anything that makes logistical sense. ] Sure, we're managing to exist in a fashion without sunlight, but we're apparently already dead. Most of the other groups brought to Beacon have ended up being reset, either through — failure or through madness and—.

[ he'd been about to say murder, but what if it was just madness? (with a side of murder.) what if the hallucinations they'd experienced recently weren't strictly the result of the spirits, what if they were part and parcel of beacon? the fingernail scratches on the stairs spoke of desperation, whatever the cause; imagined or otherwise. ]

—Point is, the resets keep happening, right? So maybe they're not entirely unrelated to whatever happened here originally or just a means of figuring out how to stop the World Eaters — assuming you're right and this is the Ghost-of-Beacon-Past... [ or maybe it's wildly off base. who knows!

he glances over at bruce, as he heads in the direction of what would have once been the trapdoor. maybe it is there, given the peculiarities of the bell and the stairs. he weighs up his options: they're not in any immediate danger, not so far as his spider-sense can tell, but with the gross wall-ooze, he's disinclined to trust it's working as advertised. (flossy the magic spider, you did him poorly, thanks.)

there's a temptation to squat, to crawl along the floor on all fours and see if he can feel any vibrations in the floor that indicate where the noise below them is coming from, but— god, couldn't he have just woken up in the suit? couldn't there be a convenient place to slip off and slip into something that's weirdly way more comfortable than it looks; a convenient something something and "oh you know that peter, runs off at the first sight of danger". no? no. apparently not.

so instead of crawling across the floor, he does squat; places a hand on the floor — if the sound's audible, whoever it is can't be that far beneath them, quirks of sound travelling aside. the question is how far does whatever the space below them extend for — the entirety of the floor? ]

[She takes the note, reads it, then flicks it between her fingers.] There should be bodies. Dead people don't just... evaporate. [She looks at the lines of pews, the candles against the walls.] They came in here, into the church, for shelter. [That's what people do, isn't it? Pray to God for deliverance, for a miracle.] And then what? They got trapped here? [She looks down. Painting the floor? That seems an odd thing to do in your last days.] Maybe this was here already. [She walks around the snake.] Maybe it was part of their worship. [Or maybe it was to ward something off? Magic? Since the impossible is possible here, maybe magic is too.]

[The clattering from beneath their feet is unexpected. She stiffens, eyes on the ground, tracking the movement. Sounds like just one person, not the people who died then, but maybe someone who has answers. Maybe if they had something sharp they could lever up the flagstones, but the noise would alarm the person below. If there even was a person below and this wasn't more hallucinations.]

Get it on me? No. [She replies to Bruce. Her tone confident, but her fingers curl around the note, she thrusts it into her pocket. She's not going to be sacrificed for the safety of the others. If they want to check her hands they'll have to fight for it. Still, she rubs her fingertips together, feels no stickiness. She doesn't think she's lying.]

[They're both studying the same patch of ground, and she belatedly remembers talk of a trapdoor. She leaves them to it, walks carefully across and over the symbol, feeling for loose flagstones.]

Isn't this what they say about crazy people? They try the same thing over and over hoping it will be different. The lighthouse keeper, right? She's the one who makes the resets. [She looks up at the two of them.] Do you think she was here? Part of this? The first time. Do you think she was trapped here?

[She looks up at the doors.] If they even were trapped here... [If they're living through the villager's last moments, a sped up version of events at least, then shouldn't the doors be locked? She walks around the pews, heading for the doors and pulls on the handle once she gets there.]

[The trapdoor is there now, as if it had always been, though the wood around the door is rough, as if it's been clawed at by desperate fingernails. If either Bruce or Peter test the handle, they'll find no resistance. It's unlocked.

When Villanelle tries the doors that lead out of the church, they creak open noisily on rusted hinges. The flowers are dried out and sagging, the grass withered and ashen. It looks like the life has been sucked straight out of the land itself.]

[He doesn't stop short when he finds that the trapdoor is there, but instead of reaching first for the handle, Bruce's fingertips trace the claw marks that are found there. They're deep enough, uneven enough, to suggest more than authenticity. It betrays a degree of desperation. How many of these marks look distinct from one another? How many suggest smaller fingers, shorter hands? How many people tried to get inside?

And why was it necessary to keep them out?

These questions are more immediate than anything he might entertain about Robin or the resets. Too many pieces to a puzzle that he cannot even be sure it belongs to. It wouldn't be his first time with an investigation that branched out in unattached directions. Gotham has secrets and it buries only half of them.

Villanelle's footfalls create an audible trajectory, allowing Bruce to follow her movements without raising his head. It means that when he does look up with his eyes it's at Peter instead, who has come down to his level, who presses his palm against the floor to seek out vibrations. The glance isn't an unspoken conversation or even a request for permission so much as it is a moment of warning. Bruce doesn't make a habit of telegraphing what he intends to do, that he finds space for it now is a matter of courtesy.

And then he pulls the trapdoor open.]

Hard to say, [ peter says, attention flickering back up to villanelle. ] She says she's from Earth, but that doesn't preclude her from having been here whenever whatever happened here happened.

[ he thinks, vaguely and loosely, of a time across time when he'd been stuck with logan — oh, sure, it'd been fun in retrospect, a total barrel of laughs living on a sort-of version of planet of the apes, worrying about the cretaceous-tertiary extinction event, about eating aunt may's muffins and lying about it, robotic dinosaurs and doctor doom (unrelated), but the point is that none of this needs to be linear or make a degree of rational sense.

(doom had helped him time travel once, too, back into (a version of) his past to deal with the issue of the tinkerer and aliens and—

—why is his life so complicated? whilst it means he has a wealth of similar-yet-different scenarios to compare and contrast this — all of it — to, it still hasn't provided him with any absolute answers.) ] Time isn't linear, and Beacon's particularly egregious in its approach to it, so... [ a breath of a pause, and peter looks briefly at bruce, the slight movement of his head drawing peter's focus. he shifts his weight and shuffles back a couple of steps; bruce pulls open the trapdoor with relative ease.

he doesn't think there's a person in beacon that hadn't wondered what was below the trapdoor. he's not convinced it'll answer the question of what brings them back when they die, but that doesn't mean he's not curious. based on their bell escapade, he's also not entirely expecting the cause of the noise to still be down there by the time they're down there, but—

only one way to find out, right? ]

[She takes a couple steps outside, reaches down to pluck a fading flower between her fingers. The desiccated stalk snaps off, the petals, greying and old, fall to the ground around her feet.]

World eaters.

[She looks up at the sky once, a shiver, unbidden, running across her shoulders, before turning back to the church.]

Do you think the spirits did this? [She calls it out. The candles provide a flickering light and she can't tell if the other two are still outside the trapdoor, or if they've found it and climbed inside.]

They brought us the food, didn't they? [The time before now is foggy, but she knows she didn't simply stroll into the past.] Are they trying to help us? Show us what happened so we can do something different?

[Though how you defeat an enemy that can pull the life out of the ground itself is beyond her. She's not sure she's interested in trying. She makes her way back across the church to where the others are.]

Or are we being lead into the same trap?

[Then again, this whole place has the feel of a memory, not present danger, not to them at least. She spares the snake a watchful glance as she crosses the flagstones.]

EVENT LOG: ENTER MR. SANDMAN (DREAMERS)

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