oasismods | March Test Drive Meme

March Test Drive Meme

Test Drive Meme #2

Fire and Ice

Days. Four of them, to be exact. Those four days--four days and four nights--have been nothing but rain of varying intensities, but it hasn't stopped. It pours down in heavy torrents, sweeping away the grime and decay of the crumbling city. It floods the banks of the oasis and it drowns all nearby plants. To the point; it's a right pain to anyone hunting for game. Everything has taken refuge to higher grounds. Well, everything except the infected. They seem confused by this phenomenon. It rouses them from their dormant states and pushes them to be more active. If you find yourself out and about in the rain, you may want to bring a decent weapon with you and a friend to watch your back. ~~Or to trip should you find yourself in trouble.~~

What's worse than all that precipitation, you ask? Why would you even ask that? Haven't you seen a single horror movie? Well, since you asked; what's worse than rain is hail. How could that possibly make the situation more dire? You aren't worried about the insurance on your car, so who cares? You're sure full of dangerous questions, aren't you?

Hail impacts the ground, the buildings, the cars, and the wall with a mighty raucous. The sound as it hits the pavement is deafeningly louder than the sound it makes when it impacts the waterlogged earth, slowed by the trees blocking its descent. It won't take long at all before the group of survivors holed up in the city will notice a mass of shambling Iraites beginning to congregate against the walls and gates, attracted by the noise. They're toppling over each other and pressing against the boundaries. The gate looks like it might buckle under all that weight like a dam about to burst. You might wanna do something about reinforcing that gate, or maybe even start taking out the horde if you can. There are still hunters and gatherers out in the forest. If they come back to this mess, they'll never make it into the city alive.

If that's not enough trouble, you suddenly have another problem. Between the rain and the hail and the infected, a loud crack of lightning hits a tree near one of the crash sites. You can see the smoke all the way from the city and it lights up the edge of the forest. But that's so far away, how could it pose any trouble? You ask, because you obviously have a death wish. Well friend, you may recall a certain crashed shuttle in about that very direction. Such a thing is leaking some rather potent accelerant. Find a way to contain that fire or you won't have to worry about the infected anymore. You won't have to worry about much when the blaze takes out the forest and creeps through the city with a lazy hunger that cannot be sated.

[Mod Note: Pick any scenario, mix and match, or combine them all into one chaotic mess of death and mayhem. Feel free to do a crash scenario from the first TDM. Enjoy~]

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Daryl is not expecting the next encounter with a walker to be a stray runner. Those walkers that are faster, more aware, and generally louder than walkers have ever been tended to roam around with a few of their slower follows as back up. Daryl wasn't sure, but he was getting the impression they liked to hide among the slower ones to surprise their victims. Which was probably attributing way too much intelligence to the dead, but better paranoid and safe than lazy and dead.

When it came crashing out of the surrounding trees and into his side, pushing at him, Daryl reacted on instinct and put his modified nerf bow between himself and his attacker. A hard push would send what he assumed was a walker sprawling and in the next moment he had the bow up and aimed squarely at-

"...Beth?"

Her name escaped him like the whine of a puppy that had just been kicked: tiny, sad, desperate, and confused.

She cried out in pain as she hit the ground roughly, having hurt her wrist and her backside. She felt mud seeping through her clothes and wanted to move to her feet, but the second she realized this actually was Daryl she became tense and froze up completely. Her eyes were wide as she looked him over, making sure it really was him. His voice matched, his face did too, but she hadn't ever heard his voice like that before.

Her wrist was stinging and causing her all kinds of discomfort, which led to her taking a moment to pull it in close to her chest. She didn't take her eyes off of him, knowing that Daryl with a weapon pointed wasn't something to take lightly. He was the best hunter and fighter she knew, and right now he was looking at her like she was a walker that broke his heart to see. Like she was that little girl of Carol's in the barn back on the farm. Only difference was, she wasn't a little girl any more and she wasn't dead. She was alive enough to feel her heart racing in her chest and see that bow pointed right at her.

Her breathing became heavy and she focused her eyes on that weapon, until she realized what it was. And then she laughed, loud and clear and out of place with their surroundings. That laughter quickly turned to a look of confusion, and she turned her eyes back up on his face. She looked completely serious no matter how confused about all this she was. "Daryl, are you really gonna shoot me with a girl's toy?"

He was seeing things. Hallucinating. He hadn't done that since Merle's death. And he hadn't ever had it happen with anyone but Merle, besides. But sure enough, here he was and there she was and she was talking to him.

Daryl's eyes swept from one side to the other, looking for walkers. Not that he expected he'd be able to see them when he was like this. That usually came after he had the heart to heart with his personal demons. Ghosts. Whatever.

He gulped hard, but didn't lower his bow, eyes narrowing through the obvious pain the sight of her brought, "Yeah. I might."

She could tell real quick that something was wrong with this. He was looking at her like he used to a long time ago, in a way that made her furious. "Daryl." His name came out a gentle command, insisting he look at her instead of through her.

"Stop looking at me like that. Like I'm a living dead girl. I ain't, I'm right here!"

The fact that he didn't lower that silly weapon of his made her afraid, but she sure as heck wasn't going to show it. Hunters fed on fear, and she wasn't going to let herself be afraid anymore. She was a Greene, and she was only half as strong as Maggie, but she could be just as stubborn as her Daddy when she put her mind to it. And right now, she had put her mind to being stubborn, refusing to cower or run away.

Wrong thing to say. His eyes hardened and he lifted the bow a little higher from where it had been drooping. The four inch metal spikes jutting out of the foam at the tips of the arrows visible with the flash of a lightning.

"No you ain't," he growled, jaw tightening. Hatred for the sight of her, for the way his mind was playing tricks on him when he had people to watch out for, visible in his eyes.

She wasn't real. She wasn't there. He knew that. She was probably a walker. Stuck in the mud where she'd fallen and trying to get up. One with blond hair and a frame still meaty enough to pass for living. Maybe he'd been getting pelted too hard by the hail and just hadn't realized how much they'd been addling him. And this, this vision of her, this ghost, was his punishment for foolishness.

But as much as he wanted to release the string, set one of those arrows right into her eyes, he couldn't bring himself to. The only good walker was a dead walker, right? Except his head was playing with him and he knew he couldn't really bring himself to fire. She'd been dead in his arms once already, he didn't want to see it again. He had to wait until he saw the walker underneath. Had to wait it out.

Bow at the ready. Eyes hard.

She didn't understand why he was acting like this. The confusion about his behavior and the situation she had found herself in brought tears to her eyes and she glared right back up at him. If he wanted to look at her like she was some kind of monster or someone he didn't trust, that was on him. He was someone she had come to rely on, someone she cared for deeply. He wasn't on the same level as her daddy or Rick, wasn't quite like Carl, but he wasn't like Zach either. He was just Daryl, the man who had made her stronger and taught her so much, the one who was there for her when the last shred of innocence and childhood had been ripped away witnessing her daddy's death. He was there when she broke apart and watched her put herself back together again. She had been so weak at the prison, but came into her own at the hospital. Here and now, she wasn't weak anymore. She was a grown woman who knew her strength lied in keeping the peace, and that was exactly what she was trying to do.

"Put that thing down." Her voice trembled as she ordered him to put the weapon down, and she wanted nothing more than to go over and rip it out of his hands and throw it to the ground. She didn't think he'd react very well to her doing that so she kept her distance and tried talking reason into him instead.

"Please, Daryl. Just see me. It's Beth, right here in front of you. You don't wanna shoot me."

"Shut up," he snapped, lip curling. Body trembling. He could feel himself shaking from the effort not to turn tail and run. Not that it would do him any good. If he was seeing her, then he would probably continue to see her. At least until he could shake the mental fog off. And since he didn't know what had happened to cause this - had he actually been knocked to the ground when that walker ran into him? Was it crawling toward him even now? Was it really the hail? - he didn't know what he needed to do, to say, to drive it away. To drive her away.

"Stay where you are and shut the hell up."

Beth Greene had been given a strict Christian upbringing. She had been raised to respect others and to never be defiant but that little girl had died along with her daddy. So she stood up taller, looked him right in the eye, and looked at him with as much care and compassion as she could muster.

"No," she softly told him, shaking her head. "I ain't going anywhere, Daryl. Whatever's going on here, you need me. And I'm gonna help you, just like you helped me."

She brought her hands up to show him she meant no harm, and took a moment to bring her hands to her shirt and raise it up enough that he saw she didn't have a weapon hidden in her waistband either. She was unarmed, and he was acting like she meant him all the damn harm in the world. How could he ever get to the point of thinking that?

"Last thing I remember, I was at the hospital. Dawn, she - "

She stopped there, confusion showing. Her mouth suddenly felt dry, despite the never ending rain, and she licked at her lips. "Then I woke up here, just now, in some kind of pod. Felt more like a coffin, if you ask me. Busted my chin on it and everything. There's walkers out there, fast moving ones, and that's why I ran into you like I did. I don't have anything to fight them with. Not like you with your -" Toy. "You know."

Daryl's face broke at those words. Collapsed in on itself with an ugly choked-off sob. He was past this. He was supposed to be past this. Why the hell had his head decided to fuck with him now? And why her? Why not Merle? He could have dealt with Merle. Shook it off. But Beth...

"Shut up," this time it wasn't an order. It was a plea. He was begging her to stop. To go away.

He couldn't even shoot the damn walker that was obviously advancing on him. He knew it was there. It had to be. But it was wearing her face. And he'd already seen that face blown open by a gun he'd been too slow to stop. He couldn't see it again. He couldn't be the one to cause it.

Seeing him like that caused her to break too. She didn't understand why he was talking to her like this, and it hurt. She trusted him so much that she wanted to comfort him, but wasn't sure how to go about doing it when she was the one hurting him like this. She had never heard a sound close to a sob come out of him before, and now he was giving them off and begging her to stop talking.

She stared over at him, eyes burning with tears as heartbreak slowly crossed over her features. She wasn't sure how to fix him, how to make whatever was wrong better. That was what her job was, what she prided herself in being able to do. She'd never be one of the fighters, like Daryl or Rick was. She was the nurturer, the one who took care of everyone else. And right now, she had been rendered useless.

"Daryl, please." She pleaded with him in return, voice cracking.

"Don't make me go away. I don't have anywhere else to go."

And before she had time to deliberate with herself over whether or not it was a good idea, she was rushing forward. She tried to wrap her arms around him in a hug, something tight and a silent plea for him to not turn her out after she had found him again.

The walker rushed him. He'd given it too much time and it was rushing at him. Beth's face plastered onto it's body, making him hesitate. In the end, Daryl didn't fire the bow, but he did push her back with a hard, one-handed shove to the chest. He pushed her hard enough to knock her down on her ass. And with with another, horrified sob he couldn't hold back on, he turned and ran. He couldn't do this. He couldn't handle whatever this was his head was doing.

He knew she'd probably just show up again. Follow after. It wasn't like he could run from the ghosts of his own mind. But he couldn't just stay there with a walker he couldn't bring himself to kill, either.

Beth hit the ground hard and didn't try to pick herself up. She was lost in a place she didn't know, she had just been cast aside by the man she trusted just as much as her own blood, and she was emotionally drained. She had no idea how to proceed from here, and didn't bother coming up with a plan. She sat in the mud, with the rain falling down on her, and curled up and cried. She would pick herself up eventually, but she had to give herself time to fall completely apart before she could put herself back together again.

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March Test Drive Meme

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