Chapter Text
The world feels like Anima’s dreams. The fog presses in around him while he sits silently by the fire and observes the other people here. Tamarak feels naked without his weapons, but when he awoke to the sounds of shrill arguing they had been nowhere to be seen.
He hadn’t said anything, watching the others around him alternate between rocking back and forth while whimpering in panic and arguing with each other. Idly he wondered if Rayn, Umbras or Ionis had ended up here as well. If there were other campfires, other places to go.
The people around the campfire were obviously not Secret Worlders. If nothing else, they didn’t have the telltale muteness of Gaia’s chosen. Though they had toolboxes, medkits, flashlights and maps it seemed that none of them had weapons either. Tam had done his best to keep his hood up to conceal the filth stains on his face and his grey sclera because the way these folks spoke it sounded like they hadn’t even been in the real world for the Tokyo event. If they were ignorant of the supernal beyond this strange nightmare plane he wanted to avoid any dramatics or suspicion.
Eventually a young man, wearing glasses and reeking of old blood, approached him.
“I-I’m Dwight, I’d s-say welcome to Hell but uh…”
Tamarak snorted a bit while taking the shaking hand that had been offered to him. He had been to Hell. There was too much greenery here to be Hell.
Slightly taken aback by his reaction, Dwight paused before squaring his shoulders and continuing:
“Soon, probably real soon, there’s going to be a path open up in the woods. W-when it does w-w-we gotta go okay? Four people at the most, but we gotta go”
Tam made a show of nodding to show he understood the order, but tilted his head as if to ask why.
“There’s a… thing here… It’s what brought us all here. It makes us do the trials… that’s where we go. We go to do the trials… there’s going to be a uh… You’re going to think I’m nuts here, but there’s going to be a monster”
A monster huh? Tamarak frowned while the man continued to speak, doing his best to hide his frustration at no longer being able to talk.
“It’s not always the same Killer… but the point is, we gotta find generators during the trial. Fix up five of them and then it powers exit gates, we go to those and we uh… Well, we open them and escape… Then we come back here to the fire and just… well”
“We wait like fucking cowards until it rips us back out again and sets us up for more torture”, the bitter anger was spat from a red head across the fire. She had been pacing back and forth like a caged animal, hissing curses for the last few hours.
‘Torture?’, Tam wanted to say. Dwight had said there were monsters, but he hadn’t really explained what happened beyond their objective.
Before he could write the question in the dirt below him, Tamarak heard a strange shuffling noise in the woods beyond the fire, as if a gust of wind was passing through. Dwight, the redhead and a woman Tamarak had heard the others call Claudette slowly rose. They all looked to be in various stages of nausea and Tamarak nervously stood to go with them.
Whatever it was the monsters did, it seemed it was a lot worse than just killing these people. He wondered if Gaia’s power extended to this place, or was he as easy to damage as when he had been mortal?
Well, he considered, there was really only way to find out.
It couldn’t be any worse than having his legs cut off over and over again. Or being ripped apart by giant claws, or having swords slice at him. Or being blown up, or falling off a moving train….
Come to think of it, he had taken quite a few licks in his time. Tamarak faintly smiled as he followed the others into the mist. For a moment he was reminded of Tyler Freeborn, of the filth mind space… of John. The shiver that ran through him almost made him stumble and suddenly Tam felt less at ease.
Whatever this thing was that had captured him in the Transylvanian woods… was it as bad as John?
Tamarak was the tank. He took hits and followed orders. Fighting faceless entities was usually something he left up to the higher ranking members of the Dragon.
Without his weapons, possibly without any of his powers, could he kill whatever was here?
The strange sound of wind running through the trees sounded behind him and Tamarak turned in curiosity, only to find himself face to face with a brick wall that certainly hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Well then.
Bracing himself for a change, Tamarak turned again to find that yes, indeed, the world had definitely shifted while he had realized he was blocked off from escape.
The others were gone and all Tam could see was a sprawling cornfield. In the distance a barn seemed to slump and sulk while a rickety shed was off to his left. To his right was a hay baler and several cylinders of the stuff, thought Tamarak couldn’t see anywhere nearby that the stuff could have been grown.
Set pieces, maybe. Just a bunch of stuff to fit a theme. A weird copy made by something that didn’t quite know what any of this should look like. Or maybe it had been so long since it had been human that it was just going by memory.
Maybe this was like Nathaniel Winters with his awful fairground.
Figuring he should make himself useful he started to move, heading towards the hay baler to see if one of the previously mentioned generators was near it. He had seen one off in the cornfield, but the man didn’t fancy going into the middle of the arena when he had no idea what he was doing. As he moved he heard a strange sound in the distance. Was that someone… singing?
Perhaps it was the monster, it didn’t sound at all like either of the women who had gone into the forest.
Sounded pretty human for a monster, but Dwight had also called them killers. Tamarak had met his fair share of human monsters. Humans were, at least in his limited experience, easier to kill than big nasty monsters. He had found a generator during his musing and Tamarak dutifully knelt down and worked at trying to start the thing. As it slowly grumbled to life it began to make an awful racket but Tamarak persisted. The more of the pistons that started to move, the better he felt about attaching belts and bringing wires together.
A few minutes in he heard a strange clink some ways to his left and some lights started to glow faintly in the distance. Looking up at the lights above his own generator Tamarak grinned. Someone else must have been working on one as well.
The same noise sounded from his generator a few moments later and Tamarak rose to continue moving, only to pause in confusion as the humming he had been hearing suddenly became accompanied by the pounding sound of a heartbeat in his ears. As the tempo increased Tam curiously checked his own pulse. Nope, definitely wasn’t him- what the fuck was she wearing?
A woman, well someone with a womanly figure, rounded the corner in front of him. She stood easily two feet taller than him and was wearing the weirdest looking rabbit mask he had seen.
This coming from the guy who had recently been dealing with that serial killer who wore a schoolgirl outfit and a bunny mascot head. Somehow, giant lady with an axe, overalls and a bunny mask was weirder.
She only paused a moment, as if surprised he wasn’t running, before she raised a smaller hatchet over her head and threw it at him.
The flash of pain was familiar as the axe lodged in his shoulder, but thankfully it felt like it normally did when he was hurt. Wondering how sentient these killers were, Tamarak felt a grin pull across his face as his hand rose to remove the axe.
This? This wasn’t torture. This was a joke.
He calmly pulled the weapon out of his shoulder. There was a moment of sadness when he realized he couldn’t use it to channel his powers, but he held the axe firmly and met the oily black eyes of the woman in front of him.
That mask looked an awful like a chaos focus, now that the adrenaline was helping him think. His mana knit the flesh in his shoulder together and Tamarak, with all the confidence of a man who had suffered death multiple times, started to move towards the woman.
Apparently, this was a new development for the thing. Her singing stopped and suddenly her large axe was being brandished. He heard a soft hiss as he continued to move forward and the masked killer started to move backwards as Tam moved forward.
‘Oh c’mon darlin, I just want that mask of yours. After that you can axe me any questions you’d like’, once more he idly wished he could talk. One liners were really what would make things epic in his line of work.
The woman in front of him tensed and then, quick as any other predator, she rushed forward. As her axe swung Tamarak moved to the side, reaching to grab the veil and the mask from her face. It slid off easily, revealing closely cropped brown hair and strangely delicate features for a woman so large and strong.
Rather than wait to meet her new fury, Tamarak hurled the hatchet at the woman’s newly exposed face and ran as fast as he could while clutching his prize.
It wasn’t his lovely augmented sprint, it seemed that his supernatural speeds were limited here. However, even as he ran he felt the spark of magic in the mask. Yes, he grinned, this would do nicely as a prize.
Another two clinks had sounded during his stare down with the killer, meaning there was only one generator to be done. The pounding of blood in his ears felt strange and alien, definitely not his own. It signalled, he supposed, that the woman was chasing him. Not that he needed such a warning, her howls of fury were plenty indication that he had broken the expected rules of this twisted game. Deftly the young man hopped through an open window into the barn house. He nearly stopped, the smell of rotting meat so sweet and thick in the air that he gagged.
The entity couldn’t figure out the difference between hay and corn, but it got the smell of rotting meat down to an art?
It really wasn’t the time he sternly thought as he skidded around a corner, hopped through another window and then held still and quiet. The woman’s screaming hadn’t stopped, but it seemed she couldn’t find her quarry. Tam could hear her furiously ripping open door after door of red lockers that he had seen inside the barn.
Perhaps the lockers were something provided for the humans to hide in. Tamarak had been disinclined to open any, figuring there would be more rotting meat waiting for him. Feeling the heartbeat in his ears fade, Tam ripped the veil that was attached to the mask before looping it around his back and over one shoulder. Tying the split veil to his chest, allowing it to sit in a diagonal over one shoulder so that it wouldn’t fall off, Tamarak grinned once more as the mask settled on his back. His hands started to glow that lovely chaotic mix of green and purple.
It wasn’t his shotgun, but it was a helluva lot better than nothing.
Suddenly another clink resounded through the arena and Tamarak turned in confusion when a howl rang out. It could have been a wolf, but it was strangely mechanical. Two boxes lit up in his vision on different sides of the world, apparently he could briefly see them through physical objects as he looked at one while knowing he was facing a wall. He stood and made his way towards the closer of the two. These must be the gates that Dwight had mentioned. Which meant escape, which meant he would likely have some answering to do once they got back. He doubted he could hide the mask, nor would he be able to explain the change in the woman. Her singing had been pretty consistent before he took her mask, maybe it was something she always did?
As he approached what was now definitely one of the exit gates, Tamarak saw Dwight standing by it, holding down some kind of lever. More waiting, Tam guessed. More opportunities to get attacked. From where he was approaching he could see Claudette and the other girl hiding by a wall.
Tam could also see the killer, hatchet raised, moving towards them. She was quiet now, but the others didn’t seem aware of her. Possibly too used to hearing her song as a warning, they seemed to be relaxing with relief.
He couldn’t call out. He couldn’t warn them. Tamarak started to run forward, determination starting to set his face into an angry frown.
Nobody else should get hurt. He was the tank.
The gate mechanism made an atrociously loud buzzer noise and the gate started to open. Dwight and the red head had slipped through and were running away but Claudette had stopped. She had turned around and, seeing him running towards her had waved her hands in a ‘come here’ motion.
Too late. He was too late. The hatchet flew through the air and hit the young woman. The shriek of pain and shock was loud and Tamarak flung out a desperate hand as he saw the killer approach a now crouching Claudette with her larger axe preparing to swing.
The satisfaction he felt as a green chain flew from his hand, latching itself to the axe wielding bitch, was beyond anything he could imagine. He stopped, digging his feet in and PULLED.
Scratch that, the satisfaction of the woman’s cry of disbelief as she flew through the air to smack into a tree by him was substantially better. Tamarak ran by, pulling Claudette up as quickly as he could and moving them both towards the forest ahead. They didn’t stop running until Tamarak stopped hearing the angry shrieks behind him.
Claudette, bless her, had been jubilant when they paused. She had thrown her arms around him and started to laugh. Laughter quickly turned to sobbing, but Tamarak had held her close before pushing her away to check her wounds.
Only to find the gash to be completely gone. Her clothes weren’t even torn.
“Oh no, you cannot look that confused that I am fine after the shit you just pulled. Literally pulled! How did you do that?”, the woman sniffed, rubbing her tear stained face against a filthy sleeve. He sighed before motioning to the ground and spelling out a word in the dirt:
MAGIC
“Well yes, blue boy, I figured that out. What did you pick up that let you do magic?”
Frowning at her easy acceptance of the answer, Tam untied the mask on his back and showed it to her.
Claudette scrambled backwards, her eyes bugging out of her skull as she stared at the mask.
“That’s why… that’s why she wasn’t wearing it… How the fuck did you pull that off blue boy? Why aren’t you talking?”
CAN’T
“Can’t talk? Or can’t tell me how you pulled it off?”, she huffed in annoyance before shaking her head, “It doesn’t matter. Maybe both are true”
She eyes him warily now and the look of suspicion was like meeting an old friend. He saw that look everywhere he went. The sheriff's eyes in Kingsmouth, the bartender in Al-Maraya, the vampire hunter in Transylvania. It was the look of someone who needed his help but did not trust where his power came from.
It would be pointless to try and explain it all, but he wrote something more informative:
LOST SPEECH, GOT MAGIC. BEFORE HERE.
Nodding wordlessly, Claudette rose and held out her hand.
“Well magic boy, you might just be our way out of here, if the entity doesn’t kill you for fucking up one of his killers”
Tam grabbed her hand and allowed her to help him stand. Their arms stayed locked as they started to move again, and soon the glow of the communal fire shone before them.
“Do you want me to tell them? I don’t know how long it’ll take them to notice”, her words were quiet in his ear and Tamarak smiled at her in gratitude.
This one was good. Or perhaps just loyal, but regardless he wanted to try and keep her safe.
Stupid tank tendencies, part of him cursed. As they sat by the fire he wrote in the dirt once more:
GO AHEAD
The reactions around the fire were a mix of fear and wary hope. The oldest among them, a grizzled old man who wore the clothing of a soldier, said and did nothing at the news. Tam wondered if the man, Bill, had brushed with the Secret World before.
It was unlikely, but who knew.
Everyone had taken turns introducing themselves, talking a bit about who they had been before the entity had taken them. They were all substantially more friendly now that he had saved one of their own. Or maybe because now he was something to be afraid of. Claudette recounted how he had sent the ghostly chain whipping around the Huntress, which was apparently what they called the woman, before pulling her away from Claudette. How the two of them had had enough time to flee while the Huntress lay stunned.
Finally Tamarak left the edge of the fire to lie down. He didn’t sleep often, but the strangeness of this place was tiring. Maybe here John would leave him alone.