Wildest

Counting Down

"Do you really think they're here?" Theme pulls her chin back in confusion. The sketchy alleys of the Lupita headquarters always found their way under the blanket of shadows; even in broad daylight. Rox steps out of her car and eyes it suspiciously.

"We're not gonna find it by the time we get back."

"Yeah..." Theme sets foot out herself, looking around for wandering pairs of eyes and their lust for any luxurious contrast to their source. "Which is why I asked. I wanna help Jenny and all that. Not so sure about getting my car stolen."

"Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. This is where they brought you, you just don't remember, because I reckon they had blindfolded you or somethin'. " Rox shrugs. There were four of them lurking at the door, holding it open like some sort of lucky doorstep. They all had their masks on, unafraid of sharing their ranks with the world. Theme walks closely behind Rox. The man in the purple wolf mask kicks himself from the wall he was leaning against, and expands his body to greet them.

"Can we help you?" The immediately stopped talking as soon as they saw them approach. They didn't even require their enhanced hearing to focus on the conversation, as all that stood between them were the sounds of the wind failing to dodge the forgotten buildings and the polite, humble crackling of the survival fires set up by the homeless to combat said wind. Rox squinted at him, trying to find his eyes behind his mask. Velvet green with golden freckles of lost. She smirks, raising her eyebrows.

"You can help me by making this less painful." she raises her fist and upper cuts his groin into a firework. The scene played slowly in Theme's vision. She had time to focus on the weapons the other four were ready to pull on Rox. Petrified, she gawks at them. Her eyes turning to beacons, in turn trading her petrification for theirs. And they froze. Blades midway from skinning Rox alive. The lack of reaction in her target's face made her turn herself slowly, almost slicing her nose off on one of the knives. She looked at Theme's reached out hand, which had a glowing haze around it. Theme nodded into a shrug.

"Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do?" She squeaked. Rox turns around in defeat, slinking her way through the knives into the warehouse. And Theme pours herself in like light through a window. Rox paced the rotting interior with her eyes just as warily. There was a certain level of transparency the conspiracy took as standard; from its putrid location to the morbid acts occurring inside. She recalls the staircase she lead the hungry pack of subcultures up to, installing the impromptu doggie pile. She points in the upward direction to Theme, who nods curtly. She races after Rox up, skipping as many steps as possible in the process.

"It's no fucking use." Jenny grumbles through her fangs, who stopped themselves from retracting. She was electrons close from snapping the wand in half.

"Jenny. We have to keep trying." Ashton buries her head in her hat, leaving Jenny the leather bound book to have as a pillow. She was exhausted. They both were. Exhausted with being sick of being frustrated. Rox unnecessarily barges through the opened doorway, dragging Theme along with her by her wrist. Their entrance changed the atmosphere in the room to the point where it tasted like bitter caffeine.

"Jenny! Theme has a lead!" Rox lunges herself around Jenny eagerly, gathering her into a wobbly hug. She is brushed off of her like dust.

"Rox, what the hell!" Jenny stands up from the chair, watching a meek Theme cup her hands behind her back, "I told you guys to stay at the hospital! Ashton and I have a plan! Do you realize how much danger you put everyone in? Janine could be right there right now, ripping off their heads!"

"Calm down, Jenny. Do you realize how loud you can be?" Ashton growls, massaging her temples. She picks up her stair along with her hat, adjusting it. She gestures to Theme to step forward. "What's your lead?" Jenny frowned at Ashton's ability to hold the ropes of the situation better than she was. There was a luscious red button erected like some memorial inside her brain ever since she ravished Brock, and she couldn't stand not pushing it for some comforting closure.

"Well, I figured out why I got sent the Hamlet book." Theme stammers. Ashton rummages around for the copy she ripped off of her.

"Go on?"

"I kept getting these visions...these...dream like sequences where this out of body voice came and talked to me... about Hamlet, and how he loves theatre and his universality. When I went home from the hospital I found out that the voice was Janine Cide, your mom." Ashton rolled her eyes.

"Right. Good call. Wouldn't have been able to figure that out with her initials bolded out in all of Hamlet's lines or anything."

"I don't think she's finished." Rox sticks her arm out in front of Theme protectively.

"Thanks Rox," Theme grins, "well Janine mentioned something about there being method to the madness. All her out-of-the-blue posessions...Ashton you think she went crazy didn't you?" Ashton nods curtly, "well that's what Hamlet wanted everyone to believe! He was only putting on a show in the end; it was counterfeit! Janine is--"

"Isn't exactly demented, but just a narcissistic bitch?" Ashton pipes in. Jenny hits her arm across the desk.

"Well... she is faking it."

"Because Odessia is controlling her." Jenny corrects Ashton. "Odessia is, in fact, controlling her."

"What?" She laughs in disbelief, "that doesn't prove me wrong, you know. Why would she pretend Odessia is controlling her? Does she need some sort of reason, if she can always get away with anything?"

"To give Odessia the impression that she is." frost fell upon the hard to swallow lead, solidifying it to the case with an icy flower of string on Jenny's memory of Jones' tracking board.

"Are we still gonna die?" Rox crosses her hands on her chest squinting at both of them.

"I don't know."
"I am." Ashton and Jenny replied in unison.

"We need to get back to the hospital." Jenny decides, feeling the cartilage of her nose and ears start to tingle with the sting of the static.

"The hospital? We're right here. Odessia would know where to find us." Ashton barks.

"We'd all be in one place." Theme agreed, "we'd be able to keep eachother safe."

"Damn it!" Ashton bangs the spell book to the desk, wishing it would shatter before her along with the dead-end of the maze they were stuck in. "This would be very quick and easy; we'd perform the stupid spell and we'd obliterate their souls forever."

"I'm willing to give it another go." Jenny twirls her ambition on her lifeless stick, fastening the wand into one of her pigtails to Ashton's spiritless discontent. "We'll take the Harley and you'll take...Theme's car, yeah?"

"Uh, no?" Rox protests, "I'm driving the Harley. You go in the car, you filthy hijacker. This is like, the second time you steal it to team up with Ashton on some ploy."

"You stole a car to get here." Ashton winks at Rox, pushing past her shoulder on her way out, leaving her flabbergasted.

"Sometimes you just do what you gotta do." She replies finally, joining Jenny and Theme down the stairs. "How did she know I stole a car...?" She asks Theme who provides her with a shrug.

"Um, hello?" Ashton refuses the slalom through the gate of knives Theme produced at the door. "Move?"

"Theme froze them." Rox says matter of factly. Ashton looks at Theme.

"Huh?"

"They were going to annihilate Rox, what else was I supposed to do?" she defends herself, "this way out." and gracefully slithers through the blades. Ashton snaps at one of them, only to accidentally ignite his face mask in flames.

"Are you coming or not?" Jenny taps her foot impatiently on the other side of the door. She was never truly outside because as one would face it, there would not be a change in the temperature, atmosphere, or pressure. Let alone setting. Ashton agrees, making her forget to contemplate what to do with the fate of the four petrified members. They were all beads on a slippery string, wound together into some unwanted bracelet that tangled in on itself with every fold or turn they thought they were taking. And yet their paths managed to cross ever so perfectly, paving their unraveling with yellow bricks adhered to a walkway of uncertainty.