2020-04-24 - Welcome to Gray Harbor Vic

It was late evening when Vic decided to go for a run. She's in black jogging shorts and a torso-bearing sports top under a light running jacket in the same shade of blue. She has her phone in her jacket pocket, and a switch blade in the opposite one. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and the sounds of classic rock filter through the earbuds trailing by wires to her phone. Her running shoes are high quality. Running is something she's done since high school track and, while the gun range is her place to not think, her runs are where she thinks clearest.

Clarity has been tough to come by in the last five years. Not since things all went to shit back in Portland. The cocaine helps sometimes, but the side effects can make things even worse. Sleep doesn't ever come easily, and when it does come, it's filled with terrors. Her footfalls thud against the earth of Addington park fall in a regular rhythm in time with the music. Her attention isn't on the path, it's inward, considering things she needs to get done while getting established in Gray Harbor. She has to speak to the rest of Felix's reports in town, find out who is good at what, and find her place in the pecking order of the small town. She also needs to check in on the Hoquiam crew and make sure things she'd started were going to be properly finished.

Her preoccupation is why she doesn't immediately realize things around her have changed. The music is why she doesn't hear the difference in the sound of her footfalls, from the cobblestone paths of Addington Park, to the duller thudding of packed dirt beneath her Asics. But the change in the give of the path does filter through her thoughts a moment later and she slows to a stop. She is not in the park anymore. She's in a forest. A very dense, very dark, very confusing forest. There are giant, prehistoric-looking ferns growing around dandelions, and Spanish moss dripping from the boughs of aspen trees. These things do not grow together anywhere. Anywhere in the real world at least.

She pulls her earbuds out and turns off her music. The sounds of Gray Harbor are gone, replaced by the primordial sounds of the Veil Woods. "Fuck," she mutters under her breath. She hasn't been on the other side of reality more than a few times, and it was always in her sleep. That's the difference in Gray Harbor, sometimes you can literally walk through the Veil. Blue eyes sweep the area and move down to her feet. There is something of a trail, vague and narrow, likely made by animals, but without a machete to cut through the foliage, she has no other way through. She begins walking down the trail with slow, deliberate paces, trying to be quiet, trying to find any sign of a good spot to open a door back to the real world.

She's always been able to sense them, those thin points, since shortly after her first undercover narcotics op where she had to snort coke to prove she wasn't a cop. The blow woke her up, and her Glimmer, and nothing had been quite the same after that. She closes her eyes and looks for it behind her eyes, in the ether, that thin strand of the weave that she is on, and where it connects with the rest of this tapestry of strange. There. Near a cluster of trees and thick underbrush.

She opens her eyes and moves down the game trail a few more yards. It's like she can see the woven fiber of the Veil between worlds, and she can see where it is slightly tangled there, leaving a gap over here. She can pry that open. She sets herself into a stance in front of the thin point and pulls her knife out, using it as a conduit for her telekinetic power. She slashes down through the fabric of un-reality and a line forms in the air, a faint glow of the brighter nighttime of Gray Harbor making it visible to her. She is about to pull it open with her hands when there is a horrible sound behind her.

From the undergrowth bursts something her brain can only parse as an undead bear. It has no fur on it's head, the bone white skull glinting bright against the darkness of the woods. Its fur is mottled, dark brown with whitish patches, and open sores all over its body. Its teeth and claws are snaggled and those alone are horrifying, but the black burning eyes are the worst of it. Like there is some sort of unholy fire lit behind that gaze. She wheels and begins scaling a nearby tree. The bear-things's claws rake across her back and hip, even as she hauls herself up higher, out of it's immediate reach. The pain is swift and overwhelming. She feels her blood flowing down her legs, even as she skitters upwards, trying to get onto a branch. She can't stop to look at her wounds, she has to get out of reach.

The monster doesn't seem willing to give up on its meal. It begins slamming its body against the trunk of the tree, which isn't nearly as hearty as Vic had hoped. It sways, creaking hard and nearly dumping her off the branch she's standing precariously on, her arms wrapped around the trunk. Every slam makes her teeth jangle, even as her vision begins to blur a bit from blood loss and pain.

SLAM! The tree shudders and creaks ominously as the creature throws itself against it. SLAM! She realizes it makes no noises, no growls or howls or roars like you'd expect from a bear. Maybe it is dead, but don't zombies make sounds too? That's a weird thought to have, and she realizes she's starting to lose her grip on consciousness. SLAM!

CRAAAAAACK! The tree snaps near the base, and it begins to fall, tipping away from the bear-thing and towards...the rip she made in the veil. With the last ounce of her strength, Vic uses her power to rip the door open, and the upper portion of the tree crashes through the hole in the moments before her entryway snaps shut, cutting the red alder in half. The remaining tree, with Vic in it, slams to the ground, beside a pickup truck, in front of a log cabin. It doesn't hit the vehicle, but it shakes the ground enough to set off it's alarm if it has one.

Vic is thrown from the branches at impact, near the steps to the cabin, and she pulls herself to the porch on her stomach, reaching to slam a bloodied fist against the door in a knock, before she loses consciousness for a moment.