Equinox - The Grave

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Consciousness returns, alertness a moment behind it. You taste the air and realise that someone has taken your mask.

You smell dirt, old stone, and something else, faint. Solvent of some kind, possibly furniture polish. The third element seems awry until you open your eyes.

At first, you believed you were in a graveyard, but you are walled into a small compartment inside what must be a building. The floor is spongy with soil, but a thin shaft of artificial light shines from the room above.

Ahead, standing out from the gloom is a tombstone. What appears to be your gas mask is hanging from its corner, blue eyepieces reflecting the tomb’s dim light. On the grave marker is carved a single word: “HUNK”.

A card rests at the foot of the tombstone. It reads: “Survive.”

[R.E.S.]

She tasted her strange new environment as much as she smelled it: moisture, damp earth, mold and stone—cool, dank, like a cellar or a tomb. It only took her half a moment to assess that meant that her face was missing; the air in her mouth was unfiltered. Fresh. Rich. Unpleasant. She didn’t like it.

She liked the fact that she didn’t recall falling asleep even less. Mealtime in the cantina of the USF barracks. She’d felt drowsy and decided to retire to her bunker early for the evening. She didn’t remember making it there. Drugged? Potentially. That should have been a stirring notion—why and by whom? But it wasn’t. Both the answers and the questions themselves were irrelevant; she was here now and that was all that mattered.

There was no immediate danger to her person that she could sense. The room was dark, but there was light from above her. Artificial, she noted. The low-lit chandelier told her that much. Perhaps it really was a basement or a cellar.

The operative known as Equinox stood. Her balance hadn’t been impaired; no concussion, no obvious injuries or ailments, her swift reflexes seemed perfectly unhindered. Interesting. If she’d have bothered to drug and relocate a top USF operative, she would have seen to it that they were left without the ability to hunt her down at a later point and exact their revenge. He was audacious, whoever he was. And she did have to infer that her captor was male. There was a certain flare to the situation which said, and rather loudly, that he was a man: taking her from the midst of her own home (Umbrella – a company that wasn’t worth crossing), lying her out prone in a basement, stripping her of her weapons, taking away her mask—her face—in order to look at the features which lie beneath. He was definitely male, calculated and predatory. Formidable. Dangerous. Her analysis said he was probably a control freak. Possibly impotent. If he was with Umbrella, he was definitely top brass. Somebody with enough power and influence to orchestrate her kidnapping. If he wasn’t, he was well-backed. Had to be in order to capture her like he had. Either way, he had just made himself a target. Equinox’s targets didn't live for long.

It was easy enough to tell that she had been disarmed. The heft of her body didn’t feel right; what should have been the usual weight of mercenary gear, her equipment weighing her down, now felt about five times too light. No grenades, no ammunition, none of her usual special toys. A quick check of her boots also said that her concealed weaponry was missing too. Lastly, whoever had brought her here had seen fit to take her gun away as well. The only item that she had been left with was a small survival knife on the utility belt around her waist. While all of the rest she could forgive—she wouldn’t make for any caliber of operative if being stranded and without the usual tools meant that she was defenseless—but nobody touched Agro. That was her personal firearm, and if her captor wanted to keep his balls before she killed him, he’d give him back to her.

Investigating the yawning mouth of the opening immediately above her—a hole in the flooring of the upper-level which was perfectly circular in shape—she made the guess that it was a manhole of some variety. There were no stairs or an exit latter, which made her question the purpose of the strange room that she had been placed within to begin with. It couldn’t have been but 3.5 meters to the top, and if she had to gauge the room was less than 2 meters wide. Scaling the walls and maneuvering herself out of the room would be an easy achievement even without the blades at the toes of her boots. But before she did that, she wanted to inspect her immediate surroundings. Secure the area. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could clearly see the shape of a tombstone cutting through the darkness, and the reflective blue of thick plastic lenses catching what little light was to be had.

Her face.

She approached the tombstone with an unhurried gait, plucking the gas mask off of the corner only to study it for signs of tampering. Filtering system, voce projection unit, lenses, helmet. When she was content to find that everything appeared to be in satisfactory working order, uncompromised, she slid the black ghouls-mask on over delicate pale features and short ashen blonde hair. Now she was truly herself.

Thumbing the toggle for night vision she felt at ease, the world immediately enveloped in a field of electric blue. She was just as alone as she had initially assessed; in the dank cellar it was just her, and the grave – but at least now she could see the environment around her with striking clarity.

The name on the grave made Equinox smirk from beneath the impassive stare of her usual features: clearly someone thought that they knew her, but she didn’t understand: was this supposed to elicit an emotional response? If so, her captor was sure to be disappointed. Nox merely plucked up the card in front of the tomb and examined it impartially. “Survive”. That much she could do; it was in her blood.

“死 生存者” she muttered; shi seizonsya. Not that she spoke fucking Japanese, but it was what another operative in her unit persisted on calling her—Rising Sun was his call sign. She only liked the nickname because it suited her so well: Death Survivor.
As she turned to walk away however, Equinox took note of what appeared to be a small button on the faceplate of the grave itself. She pressed the button, a switch clicking from beneath the finger of her tactical gloves, and the gravestone slid away in order to reveal a rung of stairs which led down and into another lower-level below. Well now, this certainly changed the way that things stood, now didn’t it?

Glancing back over her shoulder at the shaft of light gleaming from behind her for only the barest of an instant, she quickly made her decision and began her decent.


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[[OOC: FFF. So I’m going to apologize to anyone who reads this thread/post for that very weaboo moment right there. In case you don’t understand the reference: there’s a bit of a pun that becomes ‘lost in translation’ when it comes to the name of HUNK’s scenario in RE2; “The Fourth Survivor” [四生存者] – the word for four in Japanese (shi - 四) is pronounced the same as the word for death (shi - 死), so HUNK’s scenario can also be translated as “The Death Survivor”, which is ironic, considering his nickname; “Mr. Death”. K, done fantarding now. Gonna work on more posts. Promise. :B]]

[R.E.S.]

Hand over hand she descended the rung of stairs, stepping lightly, soundlessly, until she hit the bottom of the stairwell. Once there, she noted that though her surroundings consisted of the same gray crag work—mold and cement—the lighting had sufficiently changed. Easily she thumbed the toggle back to ambient and observed the narrow corridor.

There was a spider straddling the far wall, looming menacingly about 3.6 meters in front of her; a web-spinner, judging by the make, and when she rounded the corner there was another skittering about on the floor. They both ignored her, and so she ignored them, stepping easily past both bloated, impossibly-proportioned arachnids. If some of Umbrella’s low-class B.O.W. were the best that her captor had to offer her, she wondered vaguely to herself, as she marched down the hall; why he had gone through the effort of capturing her instead of some other peon, and then it occurred to her that perhaps he had not done his homework quite as well as she had originally thought. But as she reached out for the handle of the only adjoining door in the twisted Y-shaped hall, the lights suddenly plunged black. It enveloped her so suddenly and so completely that she scarcely had time to thumb for night-vision before they were back again.

The fire of an automatic in the distance told her that she was not alone. And that was more dangerous than the spinners who were still idly creeping around, minding themselves in the dank passageway behind her.

Quietly, Equinox slipped through the door in front of her, leaving it ajar rather than risking closing it behind her; if she did, she might have drawn unwanted attention to herself with its creaking on rusted hinges. Her footfall was careful, and practiced; she didn’t need to get herself shot—even if it were a fellow officer from the agency, she didn’t need to get caught in friendly fire. And besides; Night-and-Day preferred to work alone.

Hugging the wall, and minding the puddles which pooled together in the centre of the floor, Equinox strained in the dimly-lit stillness to listen;

“Hello, my name is Penny, and this is... He saved my life. What’s your name? Are you okay? And, if it isn’t too painful for you, could you tell me how you got here?”