2019-12-22 - Beneath the surface

Cole hasn't been skating since he left Massachusetts for Washington, and so on this, the day in which we test the pond's structural integrity, he has arrived with a pair of skates and a desire to take a spin across the ice. He sits on a fallen log in his jeans and sweater with a warm jacket. A dark red scarf is wrapped around his neck as he laces up one skate, and then the other.

Graham knows better than this. You don't live in this city your whole life and think 'o i know, i will go ice skating' and not at least have a moment where you also have to think 'like all those other ppl who are dead now,' but Graham has impulse control issues, so here he is! His skates have a seldom-used look to them, as does all the winter gear he's piled on. Right now, he's on a log not far from where Cole is parked, shoving his feet into those skates and looking across the pond at a couple of high school kids that SAY they're sounding the ice, but really they're just out there, daring it to crack beneath them.

It hasn't. "Yet," mumbles Graham around a smirk, leaning back on his log a little when one of them heads straight out to the center of the pond. "Guarantee you, paramedics're getting called." He might be talking to Cole. Or to himself.

"I'm actually surprised that it's frozen enough this fast at all. Usually takes cold weather for a lot longer for things to freeze up," Cole says to Graham, since he is nearby and commenting on the paramedics. "But then, everything that happens around here is pretty off, so I'm not /that/ surprised." With his skates secured, he grins over at him and says, "May as well give it a shot." And with that, he begins the awkward walking-through-snow-on-skates hobble down to the edge of the ice.

It probably hasn't been cold for long enough to freeze real deep but that's not what is on Lyric's mind. It's almost Christmas! Time for skating and sledding and snow and ice! There was a pair of skates though, she had a used pair she'd gotten from a thrift store a few winters ago. Dressed in jeans with a pair of leggings underneath them, a sweater, yes one of those Christmas ones that had tiny jingle bells all over it and announced her presence before she even arrived. Step jingle, step jingle, step jingle. Her coat is a parka and she has on earmuffs and a scarf and moon boots because hey, thrift store! "Hi Cole! Hi Graham!" She has a seat on the same log as Cole and starts changing too. "Only if we fall down and get hurt or something, the ice'll hold." She hopes. She's optimistic at least.

Graham makes some air-quotes while he repeats the term, "Usually," with a snicker at Cole, easing into a nod when he gets to the bit about things being pretty off. "Only live once, right?" He takes longer than necessary to lace up those skates, especially since - once they're all set - he stops to fish out a cigarette. Okay, so he might be having some second thoughts about this ice situation and is willing to let someone else take the literal fall first. "Hey, kid," he adds Lyric-wards, chin-tossing while he cups a hand around the cigarette to get the thing lit.

So, this is snow. Well, it's more than she got back home, and so Juniper is out wrapped up in layers, with a cheap plastic sled under one arm. Might as well make the most of it! She takes a look around the park, eyeing the skaters enviously, then looking for a slope to use.

Cole grins as Lyric joins them and gets on her skates. He waits down by the edge of the ice for her and says, "Well, if we're going down -- we'll go down together, eh?" He holds out one hand to her to pull her out with him onto the ice, or to certain doom. Maybe both. But he notices nothing, nothing at all. Everything's totally fine.

With her skates on, Lyric leaves her prized moonboots there at the log and teeters down with Cole, taking his hand when he offers it. "Oh good, how long can you tread water?" A giggle follows the question as they get down to the edge. For a moment, she just stands there, as if disbelieving what she is hearing. Then it registers what the sound is! "There's something under the ice and it's knocking. How?" Peering over at it, she looks at Cole, then back to Graham, the high school students and then to Juniper and back to Cole. She had been here enough to weird things she says, "There's something under there. Maybe the tadpole? The twin fishes? The musicians?" So many options, but she never thinks it's people!

About to head over to a slope she can try out, a small one anyway, Juniper pauses when she hears the thumping, and Lyric's comment. Pause. Glance over. Eyes Lyric, eyes Cole. Ponders a bit. "I.. have never heard any kind of fish knocking on ice," she offers thoughtfully. "But I figure if it was a person, we'd have seen them go under?"

"I promise if there's a door we need to float on, that I won't push you off into the water to drown," Cole promises Lyric with a grin. He pauses though, when she does, and turns around to look back behind him at the ice. "What's knocking?" He didn't hear it at first, so he has no idea what she's talking about. "I didn't hear anything." But then she starts listing off possibilities and he raises a brow, "Wait.. musicians under the water?" Because okay, tadpoles and twin fish aren't that far out of the question, though that'd have to be one /big/ tadpole to hear it knocking.

Graham happily blows out massive plumes of smoke that look even bigger 'cause it's cold, so he's just really proud of himself for a second at the volume he's outputting. He watches it blow away among the flurries of snowflakes, ignores the WASPy woman that cough-coughs pointedly at him, and starts hobbling toward the edge of the pond. "My money's on a shitton of corpses," he suggests to Lyric of whatever's under the ice. Of which he's now even warier, stopping at the edge of the pond to side-eye Juniper. "Could be the ice cracking?" He stomps quite hard on the edge of the ice at that point. It doesn't crack.

"Promise you'll never let go Cole." Lyric grins. She'd seen the movie! Though Graham and Juniper come over and she looks at both of them questioningly. "I would say should we follow the noise, but I have a feeling it's trying to lead us to a thin part. But what if it's a person?" She looks at Cole a little sheepishly. "I fell in the water once. There were musicians that pointed the way to Tree Octopi who helped me get out of the veil at the old sawmill. And that tadpole was huge! Man eating size."

"How would a person get down there?" is Juniper's ever-so reasonable question. "There are no holes in the ice, and we'd have seen someone go under, surely?" She's pretty confident nobody would go scuba diving in this itty bitty pond, but then again, this is Grey Harbor, and the folks are a bit odd.

Cole grins over at Lyric as she gets the reference, and then he steps out onto the ice, since it's easier to move on it than off of it in skates. He remains toward the edge though, listening to the sound of the tap tap tapping as whatever is under the ice seems to head toward the center. "I doubt it's a person. There isn't even a hole that anything could have fallen through that I can see." He nods at Juniper when she comes to the same conclusion. "Whatever it is, it's probably been under there and wants to get out which could be uh, a good or a bad thing depending on what exactly it is. The smart thing to do would be to probably get the hell out of here and watch from the safety of the bridge or something." And yet, that's not what he's doing at all. Instead, he's looking out over the surface of the pond toward the middle, to see if anything breaks through the ice.

"Unless someone went into the veil and came out there, it's possible." Lyric went into the veil here and came out somewhere else. Going with Cole, she looks down at the ice, then gets down to her knees and wipes frost away to try and look through. "Hello?" That's her attempt to make contact. She tries Morse code even, tapping it out on the ice. "Who are you?" she voices as she taps it out before looking back at Juniper. "I don't think it's a person really, but what do you think it is?" It's cold on her knees, but she doesn't get up quite yet.

There's a slight roll of one shoulder as Juniper is asked for her opinion on what it might be, hesitant to say even after Lyric has mentioned the veil. She gives the other woman a slightly bemused sidelong look, but doesn't move away from the pond just yet either. Her plastic sled is held in front of her, like a shield.

"I guess that's possible," Cole says when Lyric suggests that someone could have come out under the pond, and that's kind of an alarming thought. "It seems to be moving awfully fast and all around though." He really doesn't want to contemplate it possibly being a person stuck under there trying to get out. Even so, he skates around a little bit, to look and see if he can see anything beneath the ice, despite the fact that others not hearing it seems to indicate it's not something strictly normal.

That boom is enough to get Graham to fall backward away from the edge of the pond, too unsteady on his skates to stay upright. He lands on his ass in a shallow drift of snow, scrabbling away from the edge of the iced-over water. "You guys're fucking nuts," he tells the shiny trio still pond-adjacent. Captain Courage, right here.

"Yikes!" Lyric hurriedly gets to her feet and glances around at the ice. "I really don't think we should be ice skating right now. What if whatever it is breaks through?" This time the question was to Cole since Juniper had said nothing. She notices no one else seems affected. "If we're the only ones that hear it, maybe if we're safe it won't bother the others?" Sort of heading back towards the edge, not wanting to get pulled under.

Startling backwards, Juniper holds up her plastic sled a little higher, eyeing the ice-covered water and the dark shape moving under the ice. "..I like that idea, maybe we move away and it'll stop?" she opines towards Lyric, beginning to back away slowly, though keeping an eye on the hockey-attempting kids too.

Okay, that boom was a little more than Cole was expecting, and it actually makes him windmill a bit, his arms going out to try and keep his balance. "Yeah, I.. yeah," he agrees with Lyric on the whole -- let's not be out on the ice right now, thing. He quickly returns to where they first ventured onto the ice and climbs off of it again, onto more solid ground. "There's definitely something out there in the middle under the ice, but I don't know what it is, or even how big it is. There's just a shadow." He starts to head back up to the log to get out of his skates and back into his boots. "I'm not sure us being the only ones who know it's there means that it can't affect anything else.."

"Sure, sounds like a safe bet. Let's just stay off the ice and..." Graham lets the dot-dot-dot speak for itself. He does manage to sound like he agrees with Lyric, but he keeps eyes darting between the hockey kids and the couple with their toddler. All oblivious.

Lyric has almost backed completely off the ice in agreement with Cole and Juniper both, and when Graham pipes in, she looks back at him. The knocking fades so she gives her attention back to the pond in time to see the crack forming and the kid and, oh God she's going to sound crazy if no one else sees it. Like the dude in Jaws! But she calls anyway. "STRANGER DANGER!" Sue her, it's the first thing she thinks of. "GET YOUR KID!"

When the crack opens up out on the ice, Cole watches as it begins to move toward the kid playing on the surface of the ice. Lyric's shout toward the parents pre-empts his own reaction, and so he doesn't add to it. Instead, he quickly pulls off his skates and pulls his boots back on, lacing them up as he watches the parents and the kid, watching to see if more or larger cracks emerge.

The noise of breaking ice hits his ears, and Graham sits up in time to watch that little pink parka splash into the broken ice, disappearing under the surface. "Holy shit!" he pronounces profoundly, scrabbling up to his knees. The ice is too ruined for his skates now, so he's more chopping his way along the edge, trying to reach where the little girl - annnnnd now her mom and dad - just went under-water. Ice breaks while he runs, and he gets to the edge on their side... then the ice crunches beneath him, and he's in it up to his knees immediately, slipping into deeper water with every effort to pull himself back up onto the unbroken ice. "Fuck fuck fuck."

Cole takes off after Graham, headed for the little girl and her parents who have gone under, leaving the kid who is still clinging to the ice for the moment. He sloshes through the breaking ice and ends up slipping into the water as well, splashing around and not managing to get ahold of anyone, just barely stopping from sliding beneath the surface himself. A stream of cussing and teeth chattering is about all that comes out of him as he struggles to remain upright and find the people beneath the water.

Lyric removes her skates and just runs in her socks, hopefully getting traction better as she runs around the edge. There was too much broken and cracked ice and the little girl would surely die within moments only! "No no no!" On the other side, when she gets there, she reaches in to try and help but slips in too, at least to her waist through the edge ice, but she catches hold of someone and hangs on. Which is unfortunate, because the hand that took hers is trying to pull her in to save himself! Or herself? The mom or dad? After her yelling the last time, the reaction was bad, so she doesn't this time. But she tries and tries to climb out.

Having successfully flailed his way back to the edge of the water... Graham almost immediately wades back in up to his knees, throwing the end of his scarf toward Lyric. "Grab!" is the simple direction; the implication is that he'll help drag her back onto the shore. Probably with Cole's help, since he's throwing his other hand toward Cole at the same time. A human-chain, yay! (He hasn't processed that four people just drowned, gotta live in the now.)

Human chain! This is something Juniper can help with, the would-be-sledder having been frozen with indecision. Then she's heading to the dry end of the line, to help Graham with pulling people, and forming an anchor for him in case he wades back out there.

In the deep chill of the water, Cole struggles to catch his breath, shuddering as he tries in vain to find something, someone to grab onto and comes up empty. When Graham has the presence of mind to try and get out, and for them all to get out, he reluctantly nods and, shivering, grabs on to the others. "Thanks," he says to Graham and to Juniper when she comes over to help get them all up and out of the water. Once on shore, he reaches for his phone to dial 911, hoping that someone else thought to do that while others were wading in, but.. just in case. Still with adrenaline coursing through him, he shivers with a mixture of that and the cold.

Lyric reaches for the scarf, for the moment she's hurting so much she's kinda numb except that right arm of hers! Her left reaches for the scarf and she wraps her hand then wrist and forearm until she can be dragged out. Shivering cold, well beyond cold, in the frostbite range and once on shore, she rolls in a ball. "It burns." She's going for stoic, but she's just not quite managing it. "Th..thank you." Comes out on what sounds like a sob.

Zen according to a career criminal: "Don't think about it till you gotta." Graham says this with a grim smile at Lyric to answer for the fact that it burns, heaving on the scarf and letting Juniper and Cole help haul the whole mess of him-and-Lyric to the shore. There, puffing and teeth chattering, he looks across the now surprisingly still pond; were it not for the wrecked sheets and spikes of ice, it'd almost be hard to tell anything even happened here. There's no bubble in the middle of it, no bloody mess, just cold stillness with a flurry of softly falling snow landing on the surface, which already starts to sheet over with a new skin of ice. "You calling the cops?" he guesses at Cole, already bracing his hand into the snow where he's sitting to push to his feet on that.

Helping with all the hauling, Juniper looks around as if expecting to see towels or warm blankets on hand, but.. no, this is a pond, not a swimming pool or lido. "We've got to get you guys warm," she voices quietly. "Anywhere around here gonna have clothes and blankets or a fire or something?" She still doesn't know the area too well, it seems.

Lyric sits up and tries to shed the jeans at least since she's wearing leggings. Her socks remain on, "I am going to go get my boots on they are dry at least." Like Graham, she gets to her feet but she sure is babying her right arm. "Are you okay?" Asked of the others. She doesn't look at the pond, she knows there are some beneath, those they had tried to save. "Thewlis is going to have another little kid in there." That Lyric will forever be taking flowers to.

"Yeah," Cole says through chattering teeth to Graham, "Gotta call 911." Which he does, and he's quiet for a moment or two explaining that four people went under the ice, that they'd tried to get to them but couldn't reach them, and that they'd been under for however long they'd been under for. He gives all the information that he can, despite being blue and shivering. He doesn't say how many of them there were going in after the kid or anything, and eventually he hangs up. Then he looks back toward Lyric and Juniper. "Nowhere in the immediate area. It's just the park. We can warm up the car though, and there's blankets in the back."

Slightly less Zen according to a career criminal: "Fuck that, I'm out." Graham teeth-chatters his way through this assertion on the heels of Cole's confirmation about the cops, waving away Juniper's idea of blankets. "I mean, you guys do you, but - " He gets his feet mostly under him, stumbling a couple times on his way over toward where he left his own (blissfully dry) sneakers.

People are safe - well, apart from the dead ones obviously - and Juniper is rethinking the notion of going skating or sledding. No, she's feeling a sudden urge to get somewhere warm, maybe with a bevvie or two in hand. So, mind made up, she heads off out of the park area to do just that, figuring folk can take care of their own cold and wet selves.

Lyric just wants her feet warm. She's shivering with chattery teeth and she makes her way back around and has a seat on the log. Soaking wet socks are removed and just left there on the ground and she pulls on blisfully dry boots. Her jeans are soaked, but she has them with her. She watches the others, Graham and Cole as Juniper leaves. "Go ahead, we'll leave your name out of it," she reassures him. Except the words aren't so fluid, there's all that stuttering and stuff. "I will give a statement."

"Thanks, kid." And Graham really means that, his smile coming shakily and still with chattering teeth, but it's a smile nonetheless. "Here." He peels some mittens out of the pocket of his coat; they're new, knitted pink-and-purple stripes and very femme, but he rips the little plastic tabby thing off them and passes them off to Lyric. "Not my color anyway." Then, shoving his feet in his shoes, he bundles up his skates and, shoulders hunched, head down, trudges off across the snow toward his car.