CHAPTER ONE: Walter and Emily's Journey: Entrapment

[Kadael]

"Basically, a person gets trapped inside a haunted hotel room, then burns the room down along with himself so that none would ever face the same hardship that he went through."

"Walter! You don't have to do this!" Emily chases him across the burning (are they burning? it all smells like charred wood) floorboards, but his desire to find this memory of a dead girl is stronger than her desire to stop him.

"I know people say things about Silent Hill, but they're not true!"

That should be harder to say when it's all confirming itself right in front of her.

[Laraqua]

The door knob is hot to the touch though the heat is mostly absorbed by the cloth wrapped around his hand. The knob jiggles, then sticks. Locked. Yet he can hear a little girl's whimpering from behind the warped and blackened door. The heat is insufferable here and it batters against his face. The lock looks to be intact. If he could find some sort of a key, he could get in here. The hotel kept their keys behind the counter on the ground floor. Perhaps the keys are still down there?

[Seon]

"Somebody's in here!" Walter hissed at Emily. "Go! Go! There's probably a key to this room at the counter. I'll see if there's anything around that I can bust this door open with."

Spoiler:

What's the STR resistance for the burning door?

[Laraqua]

Show,The Strength Resistance is Silent Hill reinforced. You'll need to either get some door breaking fire fighting equipment or a key.

[Seon]

Walter rushed out of the halls again. Didn't this hotel nearly burn down years ago or something? Surely they had to have stockpiled some firefighting equipment...

He would have given everything that he owned right now for a bloody fire axe or a sledge hammer.

Spoiler:

Even my school has a fire axe behind a safety glass in every floor!

[Kadael]

Unsure of what to do, Emily just nods and runs out into the hallway, quickly scanning the corridor for any way to the front desk.

OOC,Do you live in an area with a high fire risk? Then again, I've never gone to a school that had more than one floor...

[Seon]

Spoiler:

No, but the school nearly did burn down once.

[Laraqua]

Emily rushes down the corridor and heads down the first stairs she finds, wincing at every creak of the damaged and failing wooden steps as she goes, ending up in one of the rear corridors. It's warm down here. Very warm. It's darker, too. There's no ambient light from any of the wall cracks and all she can see are little motes of darkness. She could try to feel her way along to the reception desk office or staff rooms that she's sure are down here or she could head back upstairs and look for some light source.

Walter searches through the corridors on this floor, rushing from one to the other, but there doesn't seem to be any firefighting equipment up here, at least not in any of the corridors. On this, the 2nd floor, there is a Reading Room, Lounge, Cloak Room, Hall Store Room, Hall, and another Store Room, he remembers seeing but hasn't had the time to visit yet. Perhaps there might be some firefighting equipment within one of those rooms.

[Seon]

Walter made his way to the Hall Store Room. It had to be in one of the store rooms, right? Or maybe they put it in the Hall? It had to be in one of those three places.

He hoped that his particularly bad luck would hold out. Damn it, he couldn't be so unlucky all the damn time.

[Laraqua]

The door opened part of the way and then stuck. There was no heat nor wisps of smoke escaping from it, and the handle wasn't warm to the touch, so there likely was no active fire behind it. A good shouldering would whack it open but if the floorboards were unstable, he might fall through them into the floor beneath. Still, it was one of his best shots.

[Seon]

Walter took a deep breath, backed up a few steps, and then charged the door.

[Kadael]

Emily pulls out her phone and presses a button to light the screen. Maybe she'll be able to see her hand, at least.

[Laraqua]

The door slams open beneath Walter's shoulder and he stumbles into the Hall (the Hall Storeroom door is within it). The ambient light is weaker here due to the soot and ash particulate stirred up by his charge. The twin chandeleirs that normally decked out this room were gone, replaced by two spasmodic, burning men, a hook protruding from their ankles as they dangled upside down from a chair, twisting their torsos around, their arms fused to their rib cages by char, the heat of their flames slapping his face, the stench of it near roiling his stomach, but from the light of their bodies, he can see a fireaxe stuck into the back of the head of a charred man that lays face down on the floor. Note paper has been scattered around the corpse.

----------

Amelia carefully turns on her mobile phone and, as she does so, it chirrups at her, as though about to call her, then falls silent, then chirrups again. The wan light barely reveals her hand and the small space in front of her but at least it vaguely reveals the walls and doors that she passes. It chirrups again, then again, the chirrups coming closer together with each step, the spaces in between dying away.

[Kadael]

"Ssh!" Emily hisses at her phone, more out of irritation than anything else. What's going on? Is somebody calling her? Travis isn't even on her mind at this point.

She looks at the screen, just to check.

[Seon]

"...what..." Walter muttered out as he recoiled away from the sight, stumbling onto the floor. He was about to leave when he caught sight of the fireaxe.

That's what he had been looking for, right? Except that it was used as a...murder weapon...

He cautiously stepped towards the face-down man... as if he could do anything with an axe stuck to his head, and then reached out towards the fireaxe.

[Laraqua]

The chirps are coming together closely now but she can hear over the chirps the sound of something cracking, similar to wood yet somehow more organic sounding. Perhaps cracking bone? It seems to be coming from right in front of her though [url=tp://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3406455]she can hardly[/url] make out anything at all in the darkness, especially since she's spoiled her growing night vision by trying to make out the details on her phone screen.

------

Walter reaches forward and grasps the shaft of the axe, but it's lodged in tightly and the body moves when he tries to pull the axe, its head tilting back with a horrible cracking sound as charred flesh flakes from its neck. He'll need to get some leverage on the body to keep it from lifting up with him when he tries to pull the axe free. Perhaps if he put his foot on the dead man's neck?

[Kadael]

Emily slowly turns around, still keeping her phone in front of her, and tries to make a run up the stairs. Screw this - she's not wandering around in the dark with no protection.

She should get back to Walter. He's all she's got.

[Seon]

There. He bleeding touched it. He touched a bleeding axe stuck on the back of a bloody dead guy's head.

WOULD THE GUY'S HEAD COME OFF IF HE PULLED AT THE AXE?!?!?!

Maybe.

Well, he kind of looked like a murderer right now. Shirtless. Sweaty. Tugging at an axe stuck in a dead guy's cranium. He put his foot on the chest of the dead man.

All he needed was a few blood splatter. He pulled at the axe again.

[Laraqua]

Emily can hear a cough and then the ragged, panting of someone's breath as a heavy figure lumbers after her. She easily makes the stairs, running up, grabbing hold of the sooty walls for stability as she goes.

------

The axe pulls loose with a jerk, spattering char against his pants, and he nearly overbalances and falls on his ass. The two burning man-chandeleirs let loose an agonising shriek that shakes the very room, reverberating up and down his spine.

------

The stairs shake beneath her feet as a terrible, keening shriek tears through the air, stinging her ears, and it's all she can do is try to hold her balance as the stairs almost seem to buck under her feet like a living thing. She senses, rather than sees, the man reach for her, and it's all she can do to try and dodge away (roll and hope for the best).

------

The charred figure's fingers flex, and it shakes its cracked skull this way and that in a spasmodic twitch that makes his guts roil and threaten to heave. The muscles in its arms bunch up as it tries to struggle up onto all fours.

[Seon]

Walter gasped and swung the axe in the zombie's... that's what he was, right? The zombie's general direction to no avail.

"Oh fuck this," Walter cried out, running out of the Hall. He didn't have time to deal with those things right now.