towerofanimus | Hellhounds and the beginnings of malnourishment, oh my.

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Hellhounds and the beginnings of malnourishment, oh my.

Characters: Enoch and anyone
Setting: Morning, dormitory floors (with a start in 3-18, roomies can talk to him there if they want!)
Format: I'm starting with prose but I'll match you
Summary: After a week of, frankly, sub-par survivalism, Enoch has a dream that gets him to get his ass in gear - and then he gets attacked by hellhounds.
Warnings: Um. None yet, but there are hellhounds here so possibly violence.

Room 3-18

"Enoch. Enoch, what are you doing?"

Somehow, Lucifel was sitting on the edge of the bed. Enoch tried to reach out to his guardian, relieved, but he seemed to have fallen victim to a bout of sleep paralysis.

"Whatever happened to 'The Earth can sustain me'? It worked for a couple years, didn't it? You're not looking hard enough, your mind's back in Meridian while your body starves. C'mon, Enoch. You're God's chosen one, aren't you? Don't let Him down."

Enoch opened his eyes as he reached out, his hand closing on empty space. He blinked at the ceiling of the darkened room, eyes wide. It had been a dream.

He raised a hand to his head as he stood and summoned his armor. Though he hoped it was a vision and not merely a dream, either way he knew it was true. He'd been lost in despair, he hadn't had the motivation to explore, to properly learn about his surroundings. He'd been putting in the bare minimum for this first week.

Well. He had to live. Besides, if they were rescuing people, surely someone else from Meridian was bound to show up anyway. Time could be weird, he'd learned that much in that city. And maybe, just maybe, it meant that people rescued at the same time in Meridian could show up at different times in the tower - if Meridian was truly gone. If he was captured, he knew it meant Armaros was doing everything in his power to save him.

So he had to keep living, no matter what.

Dorm Hallways

He intended to go as far down as he could starting from the top, but the smell and wafting curls of smoke coming from around the corner brought him up short.

When a dog made of fire charged up the stairwell, Enoch thought to jump over it and attack - but his Arch went right through the flames as if they were...well, flames rather than something that could be cut.

He cried out in pain as the hellhound retaliated, leaping at him with its fiery claws. A sound like shattering porcelain echoed in the hallways as the left side of his neck guard and a portion of the armor covering his chest on that side broke free. His armor may have protected his skin, but he felt the burn of the flames all the same. He heard another one approach him from behind, and he leapt over it, hitting the ground running in the other direction. Two more followed, and in a split second he realized he couldn't jump over them both.

His eyes flicked to the wall at his side and he leapt up, jumping off the air sideways to hit the wall, hoping with every fiber of his being that it counted as solid ground...

He leapt off the air again - it did! - and hit the opposite wall. This is how someone may find him - leaping from wall to wall as a pack of four hellhounds jumps along, trying to catch him. Or maybe you're running from hellhounds too - despite his predicament he'll help anyone else in danger.

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Suzaku nodded, it was a good idea. Rain was sure to do something against dogs made of fire. "Can you make it?"

He didn't worry too much about himself, his Geass would keep him alive- he assumed it was still active though he knew it could be switched off here.

"I can!" Enoch leapt off the stairs rather than run off them into the lounge, with an extra leap in midair to give himself some more distance. He rolled as he hit the ground to take the momentum and keep running, but his equilibrium wasn't quite working with him today; he stumbled as he came out of the roll, pushing himself off a chair to keep himself upright as he glanced back over his shoulder to ensure his acquaintance was following and keeping ahead of the hellhounds.

Suzaku was running, he couldn't jump like Enoch but he was fast and nimble and could avoid the hounds quite well. "Keep looking forward!" He continued running as he shouted. "Keep going."

The next floor was one where he didn't dare leave the stairs - he didn't trust those noises in the dark, and he didn't trust the darkness itself, not illuminated even by the flames of their pursuers.

His armor vanished as he hit the floor below it, the tower nullifying the power binding it to him, and he ran towards the winding staircase around the tower's edge, coming to a halt and bracing himself against the side of the tower as he waited for Suzaku, backing away slowly and carefully on the rain-slick steps.

The hellhounds wouldn't venture too far into the rain. It wouldn't be long before they turned back.

Suzaku followed closely behind, he was used to strange rooms and dangerous noises but was cautious always. Except when he wasn't, but he had no reason to be reckless at the moment, if they ran fast enough they would both survive this unscathed.

He ran out into the rain, watching as the hounds slowly turned back. He hoped that no one else encountered them. "Are you injured?"

Enoch gave a sigh, allowing himself to relax and slump against the tower's side.

"I'm fine. But I didn't intend to lead them to you..."

"Don't worry about it, no harm was done." He nodded, "Those dogs seem to have converged on the bedroom floors for some reason." It wasn't the first pack he had seen, though he had managed to avoid the others.

After a moment, he straightened up again. "They must realize we will be weak from hunger...it's common for beasts to avoid hunting prey unless they're weakened."

"You're right," he nodded, "I wonder if there is some way to draw them out, to a floor that isn't so crowded."

He assumed the monsters had to eat too, if they relied on the forest on the sky island for hunting and yet couldn't be outside in the rain...

Enoch thought about the floors he'd seen. Their best bet would be to lure them into the elevator somehow, but then that would only leave them waiting for anyone else who'd use it - provided the elevator worked.

"I can't say an idea comes to mind. We can't lead them down from here, and luring them to the elevator is certain death for the bait."

"I could lure them." Death meant very little to him, and furthermore his geass worked when their captors wanted it to, concentrated as they were on the event it probably worked at the moment, so it would find a way for him to live.

"I am not sure if the elevator is working though."

"To where, if the elevator won't work? They'll be turned back by this rain."

Enoch began to move down the stairway, carefully, since he seemed to have a dizzy spell coming on.

Suzaku followed him, "I'm not sure... we could trap them in an empty room but I wouldn't want people to arrive in a room of fire dogs..."

They could try to lure them off the bottomless pit room, but they probably wouldn't follow....

"I wonder how they managed to arrive on the floor in the first place. Did they use the elevator while it worked?"

The problem with that idea would be that the bottomless pit floor was below this floor - they would have to wait until the rain stopped for that to work, and even then, the ground was wet.

"I'm not sure... the elevator hasn't been working all month and there has been a storm all month..." How had they got there? Had they just appeared... That unfortunately was a possibility here...

"The storm has abated sometimes, but then the ground here would have been wet...I suppose that might not deter them as much as rain."

He'd never encountered a being that he couldn't defeat. Sure, he'd been unable to touch Sariel's Nether form until he received Uriel's blessing, but that was different. It hadn't taken long for his guides to notice he couldn't damage Sariel and to set Uriel to remedying that.

Here, there was no help from above to notice. No solution save what little he could gather from their forms.

"Perhaps..." It seemed like the most likely answer and Suzaku couldn't think of another way they could have reached those floors. "Perhaps if we waited until the rain abated again and tried to draw them away..." They might not go alone but if they had something to chase...

"What would the safest place to draw them to be?"

No matter where they went, after all, they'd have to leave them somewhere, and Enoch had only been in the tower about a week.

"I'm not sure... Perhaps one of the islands, but once the rain began again they would just go back inside, perhaps the forest... the indoors one. At least then they would be spread out and it is a floor most avoid." He thought, the other floors were too often used, or too small. After all you had to go through each floor to go from one to the other...

"That's a long way to draw them...we would need to prevent them from breaking off to go after others."

He doesn't give a thought to his own stamina, thinking he could keep it up despite his own lack of substantial eating for the week.

"Perhaps if there were more of us, if a group of people who were fast enough to lead them, we could surround them..." The issue was that they would need people who were fast enough not to die...

"There are few of us here that I've seen to begin with..."

Too many were taken away...how many of who was left were fit for this?

"Yes... most people suited for a task such of this are in the other place I told you about..."

It was a difficult situation.

After some more thought, Enoch looked up at the cloudy sky, and the stretch of tower above.

"The least that we could do is warn everyone else..."

"Yes, and even that is not the easiest task, as the tower is large. Perhaps we could make signs..." Since even if they asked people to spread the word, with new people arriving all the time there would be people missed.

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