The Open Door (Open)

Participants: Illyana Rasputina / Open
Open/Closed: Open
Location(s): An unknown pocket dimension, possibly part of Limbo
Time of Day: Changeable
Weather: Changeable
Summary: Illyana finds herself in a strange Otherplace- a pocket dimension where things aren't quite what they seem. She has no memory of how she got there, nor any idea why she's there. In a shifting reality where surroundings and people are warped and changed, who knows what or who she'll encounter. Please feel free to throw any character you'd like into this thread - it's meant to be very 'Strange Tales' inspired, with one constant theme throughout: each area has a strange door, set into whatever you'd like, that when open, leads to an entirely different setting.

She stepped slowly down a long, straight hallway; aged and warped floorboards creaking underfoot despite her gentle step. A heavy midnight hung about her, but she saw as if it were day, her eyes accustomed to the gloom of much darker places. Beyond her own movement, a sense of stillness prevailed – not peaceful serenity, but an eerie lifelessness, the sort that might have accompanied a sudden and unforeseen tragedy. Time, an expected constant, seemed to hold no sway over her surroundings, for she could not tell how long she had been walking; she could hazard a guess at minutes, but would not have been surprised had she found out that she had been meandering for decades toward the door ahead of her – a shadowy portal, cracked ajar, through which a sliver of silver light peeked. She knew not what lay beyond it, nor what lay behind her. Illyana Rasputina found the place she was in totally alien, for she knew not where she was, nor how long she had been there.

But she was not afraid.

Very little caused Illyana to feel fear’s grip. Once, perhaps, as a child, she had cowered from shadows and woken in cold-sweats, suffering, as many children do, the claws and fangs of night terrors. But such habits had long passed. The shadow that had once inspired such dread had become a part of her, and she had lived through terrors far worse than those plaguing dreaming babes. Her soul, what was left of it, was immune to the cold, cloying grasp of terror, instead exuding a chill and resolute calm that could, at times, be as disturbing as the horrors she had faced in Limbo.

With each step she took, her sharp eyes remained focused on her destination, and she grew ever closer. Hours could have passed, or seconds, or millennia, but soon the portal filled her vision, and carefully, she raised a gloved hand toward it, reaching her fingers out toward the door and the moon-silver light beyond. Still too far away to touch, she instead brushed her covered palm against nothingness – a nothingness that hummed with arcane energy, a nothingness that was most certainly not nothing. Her brow furrowed as she carefully and inquisitively probed at the crowded emptiness that blocked her path - a palpable wall of desolation. To some, perhaps, it would have been an off-putting barrier, a ward to turn one away from the enticing openness that inched wider beyond.

But Illyana was not so easily deterred.

Raising her searching hand into the air, she reached into the void of the Otherplace and felt for the hilt of her sword. Clasping her fingers firmly about it, she drew it into being from nihility, the weapon raised, poised above her blonde head. Then, in one swift guillotine, she let it drop before her, the soul-infused blade severing protective enchantments in two as if they were silk, cutting through the magic that had opposed her with ease.

Free to reach toward the door, it yawned open, the light behind the darkness intensifying.

Then, the world about her fell away…

Marc had a hangover. He should've been in bed still, dead to the world, or at least somewhere hunched over a vat of coffee nursing said hangover. Instead, Marc found himself laying on a cold floor surrounded by an absence of everything. And he was wet. Where on Earth was he? Was it even Earth? The masked man got up from the floor with a groan, his swirling mind trying desperately to recall any details from the night beforehand. Before he took a step and moved anywhere or really got into the task of inspecting the place where he was currently located, Marc checked himself out. He was in his full Moon Knight gear and he seemed to be uninjured, physically he seemed fine. Even if he was wet from the barely foot deep water he had been lying in.

The question of "why" lingered in his mind. And there was no suitable answer that Marc could come up with on his own. So, he guessed he was hoofing it. Darkness swelled everywhere around the man in his stark white spandex and cape. Each step he took echoed in the empty expanse that stretched for miles in all directions around him. It was like being a a gigantic deprivation tank, a notion that Marc Spector did not immediately enjoy. Deprivation tanks left Marc alone with his thoughts and things were almost never good when the man with the fractured mind was alone with his thoughts. Yet oddly there was yet to be any sign of the god who was riding passenger in Moon Knight's brain. Not that he was complaining, like at all.

He walked for what felt like miles, or hours, or something. Either way, he was going nowhere fast. Moon Knight had changed directions a number of times but nothing ever seemed to come into his line of view. No horizon to reach, no corners to turn, no walls to climb. Only...

A door?

Moon Knight stopped in his tracks. He stared at the white door that couldn't have been any more than ten feet ahead of him. It also couldn't have been there just a second ago. Marc was positive because he was reluctant to blink unless his eyes were as dry as sand. There was a fear that if he took his eyes off of his surroundings for even a second (ie blinking) then Khonshu would rear his ugly head. But it wasn't the deity that haunted him that appeared. It was a door. A colorless door. And it was starting to open.

Illyana Rasputina

She was blinded by the glare from beyond the door as she fell toward it, tumbling through the portal while the world behind her warped, twisted and became nothingness – as if it had never truly existed, little more than intricate illusion. With her sight stolen from her, she closed her eyes and tried to focus her other senses, seeking any knowledge about where, when, or how she was, but they were similarly useless. Silence deafened her, and her body felt little but emptiness, as if she were floating through a void.

Not floating, but falling.

Though she had been rendered unable to process her surroundings, there was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, the sort that came at the apex of sudden and unexpected drop, and her head spun. The speed of her descent and the destination she plummeted toward remained a mystery, but Illyana could ascertain that she most certainly was not stationary. Still, though, fear did not claw at her: there was something serene about her fall, something calming about not fighting against whatever pulled upon her.

She had chosen this, after all. She had opened the door. She had looked beyond.

Whether she had fallen for minutes or hours, Illyana was unable to tell, but her descent ended as suddenly as it had begun. Without warning, nothingness was gone and the void become a cloying, frozen ocean, in which Magik found herself submerged and sinking. Trying to catch her breath, she found her lungs filled with liquid frost, and her nose and eyes burned at the water’s chill touch. Her immediate reaction was to claw at the fathomless depths above her, as if pulling herself toward the surface – one she wasn’t sure existed. About her, there was only darkness, no flicker of light to show the water’s end.

After a few more moments of letting natural instinct guide her, she ceased her fight, her cold logic asserting itself over her human sub-conscious. She knew she was drowning, and swimming would not save her. But she was far more than human, and had survived far worse trials. Relaxing her body, going almost limp, she let herself drift deeper into the depths. As she did so, a pale glow emanated from her eyes, and below her, a circular light blossomed in the darkness. Shards of white pierced the gloom, catching the looming shadows of ancient dwellers; unnameable and unspeakable horrors of the dreamscape that coiled slowly and insidiously toward Illyana, awoken by her presence. Invisible in the black, the light shone upon the nightmares gave them pause, and they kept their distance from their prey.

But two heartbeats later, the natural drift of her body brought her into contact with the summoned stepping disc, and a familiar feeling engulfed her, one of sudden displacement. But that was all that was familiar. Illyana was quick to realise she had no control over her destination, for she could not picture any familiar place. Expecting to be deposited in her Limbo, she instead found herself spat out of a glowing, open door, drenched and spluttering, into an eerie, echoing nightscape – one through which spectres roamed.

Marc Spector

The doorway rolled itself open slowly as if purposely trying to implant as many wonders and worries into Marc's mind as possible. Tension was mounting and the man on the other side of the door was unsure if he should be bearing witness to what seemed like looking into the face of a god, or if he should turn away and seek refuge elsewhere. But he was much too entranced already, that much the man could admit, there was no turning away from whatever this wonderment was. Being unable to turn away and unable to act were two very different things however.

Marc still possessed his motor function and he could feel his limbs as light as feathers, he could use them if he so wished. Instinct drove his right hand into one of the pouches where he found and gripped a throwing star. Marc may not have known where he was, how he got there, or what the infinitely bright doorway was about, but he knew he was still the Moon Knight and that meant he was far from defenseless. Not only that, he knew something was approaching.

A shape. A figure. A woman.

She flew from the celestial maw of the doorway in such a way that it conveyed she had little choice in the matter. She tumbled out of the glow straight for Marc, and he quickly sidestepped her.

Moon Knight avoided her and put some space between them, the sounds of splashing water at his ankles echoing in the dark expanse. He had withdrawn the projectile from his pouch now but had yet to loose it. From behind his cowl he glared at the other person. Marc isn't know why but she felt dangerous. Maybe it was just instinct that had built up from years of dealing with dangerous foes. Maybe it was because he was bat$#^! insane. Either way, Marc trusted that feeling. 

"Prisoner or Warden?"

He barked at the blond haired woman. He felt very much trapped in whatever the hell the place was, Marc just needed to know if she was also trapped or the one doing the trapping. Her answer and level of believability were going to determine if he threw his shuriken, which there was a high potential could be completely ineffective anyway, but Marc was crazy and frustrated enough that he wouldn't even mind as long as he got to burn off some of that annoyance.

Illyana Rasputina
((OOC: That post was amazing btw! I loved everything about it))

Illyana tumbled through the shallows of the Otherplace, the momentum of her sudden displacement carrying her through cold, black waters until she finally collapsed into a crumpled heap, gasping for air and coughing the ice chill from her lungs. There she lay, for a moment appearing little more than a bedraggled child, lost and alone in the greater darkness. Her thin form convulsed, muscles twitching and spasming as she choked and hacked, trying to purge the depths from her body, before falling still.

‘Prisoner or Warden?’

A voice, deep and demanding, drew her blue gaze. It echoed about the damp expanse, reverberating within the nothingness, louder even than the wild beating of her pulse against her eardrums. Her eyes found what looked to be a ghost, a pale apparition that stood over her, clutching a crescent sigil between thick fingers.
“Khvatit govorit,” she murmured in her native tongue, the sudden assault on her senses requiring a moment of acclimatisation. Throughout what she’d assumed a dream, there had be no noise, her existence silent, every action muted. The ghast’s address had been like the shattering of glass, reminding her what it meant to hear.

Slowly, she pushed herself to her knees, the movement causing further spluttering, doubling her over. For a few moments, she spat salt water dredged up from where it had pooled in her innards. When she eventually regained control of her body, she wiped her mouth with the back of her leather-gloved arm, and regarded the spectre with a half-lidded stare, eyes almost lost below the sharp edge of her blonde fringe.
“Does it look like I'm a warden here?” Her tone was flat, as ever, taking some of the sarcastic bite from her words, replacing it with an air of abject disinterest.

Finally feeling strong enough, she rose to her feet, and with a shake of her head, loosing droplets of water about her, she looked past the pale other, at the endless shadow at his back. “Am I dead?” There was no fear in her words – she had died before, after all, and she could think of much worse ways to spend her afterlife than in silence and darkness.

Marc Spector
_{(OOC: Thank you so much! That means an awful lot! I'm really enjoying this thread already!)}

Marc stared at her sideways. She spat some sort of curse(?) at him but the language was not familiar so he couldn't really be sure what was being said. Marc tried not to be the sort of person who heard a foreign dialect and run for the hills but in this instance he was almost sure the words mumbled did not mean anything positive. He didn't act just yet though, there was a great degree of trepidation still mounting between the presence of the two of them and Marc did not want to be the party that was responsible for jump starting any conflict prematurely. He would not act until he was absolutely sure it was necessary, though it bugged him to no end that Khonshu was uncharacteristically silent in the moment.

“Does it look like I'm a warden here?”

The tone was snappy and short, and for a moment the woman sounded no different than a teenage Earth brat. Moon Knight's shoulders relaxed a bit - was he dealing with a kid? He wasn't sure, it didn't really matter though because he had seen some pretty powerful kids back home. So whatever age bracket she fell under it would be absolutely no reason to write her off. _{"Honestly? I've seen stranger."} Hell, he was stranger.

Marc clenched his jaws as the girl moved, sloshing about in the water that rippled at their heels. His muscles lost more and more tension as the seconds passed, she seemed to be no immediate threat to him and just as quickly Marc was now inwardly scolding himself for letting his paranoia run away with him; even if he could still justify not trusting someone in whatever shunt dimension they were trapped in together. The blond seemed to be just as lost as he was and that brought an odd sensation of comfort to Marc, it made him feel much less alone.

He relaxed is stance and returned his throwing weapon to its holster. His masked face turned to look over the expanse of black as she asked her question, it had been one he'd asked himself as well.

^{"I hope not."} But truly there was no way of telling. Of course he had convinced himself he was still alive, he still had all his senses and he felt alive, but could that really be used as concrete proof that they were not in the afterlife.

"Is there anything specific you can recall before showing up here?" 

Moon Knight finally looked back to the other and just as he did he was suddenly struck with remembrance of the field of light she had suddenly emerged through. "And what was that doorway of light? Who are you?" Maybe that wasn't fair, she had only asked him one question and he was asking her three. Well, he supposed he was the adult there, thus it was only right that he assemble a concise idea of what they were dealing with.
Illyana Rasputina

It was only after scanning the dark emptiness that Illyana finally turned her gaze back to the other; the pale spectre who haunted this cold, damp plane of existence. His responses to her had been quiet, almost whispered, and he too seemed unsure of where they were or if they lived. The bladed crescent that had been clasped in his hand upon her arrival had been returned to his belt, signifying, to her at least, that he believed her a fellow prisoner in whatever realm they’d come to inhabit – an ally, perhaps.

Or a hindrance. Only time would tell.

"Is there anything specific you can recall before showing up here?"

It was a logical question, but one that caused Illyana’s brow to furrow beneath her fringe. For a long moment, she stood silent, before finally shaking her head. “I was dreaming…” Dreaming of a door – a locked door that seemed somewhat familiar. The more she pictured it, the more familiar it seemed, though it struck no chords of recognition, constantly eluding her attempts to place it. “Then I was drowning.” When she’d removed the lock, she’d been plunged into an ocean that seemed lost to both space and time, a vast sea with impossible depths, depths in which eldritch horrors lurked. “And now...” She paused for a moment, gesturing about herself lazily for effect. “It’s been a long night.”

A question of her identity, and mention of a door of light, caused her to look about herself – she saw no portal, though she knew she had emerged from one. It had vanished, just as if it had been one of her stepping discs, though her transports had never formerly taken on the appearance of a door. Her brow remained creased in mild confusion and slight annoyance. “Illyana Rasputina…some call me Magik.” She paused, wading back through the shallows, toward the area from which she believed she’d emerged. “I didn’t mean to come here…”

Her stepping discs, after all, took her to a location of her choosing, via her own, personal Limbo. She had, most certainly, not chosen to end up in the Nightscape she’d found herself in. “You?” A one word question, but it was enough – her way of obtaining all the information from the ghast that he’d obtained from her.

Marc Spector