"Just k-kinda tired."
She hadn't totally hidden the shake in her voice.
Helena followed along with the group as they started walking, her eyes downcast and generally making little effort to pay attention to what was going on. That was until the group of people crossed their path. The young woman hadn't been paying sufficient attention to the halt, an nearly walked right into the back of Jojo who's been a little way ahead.
Something was...off...wrong. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.
While on some level, Helena was pretty sure that there was something not right, the moment one of the men's arms began twisting themselves out of their sockets was something she couldn't expect-
Helena was stood in a dark expanse. She could see nothing at all within it, and yet she was somehow certain the darkness spread in front of her a great distance.
She began to walk forwards, compelled by some unseen force. In her peripheral vision, Helena could pick up the fuzzed edges of buildings and walls in the gloom, all devoid of light and life.
It seemed she was walking for hours when she began to become aware of colour, somewhere in the distance. A red light far on the horizon. A last, something other than this oppressive darkness!
And then, without warning, Helena was elsewhere. Looking through a small gap out into some...indistinct room... as if she were somehow trapped in the space between walls. Through the small crack she could make out..a man in a well-pressed suit, adjusting his tie.
Somewhere else again. A dark room. And a blade..a scythe in greenish gold, the feeble light reflecting a strange hue off its edge.
Back in the dark street. Helena found herself stood below the red object, that towered over her and bathed the patch of ground in crimson light. A cross? From here it seemed to be a cross. As she watched however, the light that issued from it was dimming. Dark mist was crawling around the cross's base and snaking its way up to the top, consuming whatever light it did once give out. Helena, unsettled, began to back away from the corrupted thing, preferring to some degree the passive darkness of the lifeless city over whatever was devouring this object.
She turned away and jogged back into the shadow. It was..less oppressive than before. Less threatening. Now that she was used to it.
Crack!
An arc of electricity burst across the air over her head, spreading out and disappearing, searing white against the fuzzy black.
Crack!
Another blinding fork of light.
Then...a splatter. A repulsive feeling of warmth across one side of her body and around her feet. In the illumination cast from the bolts of energy, she could see the blood pooling around her feet, sliding down her face-
Sunlight.
She was outside the WDL base.
Why wouldn't she be?
In the few moments it took Helena to get here bearings one again, she gradually realised that she was facing the opposite way to where she had been before. When had that happened? Why had that happened?
Her concerns about that were diminished however when the girl became aware of something else. The warm, liquid sensation of something sliding down her face...had not gone away. Reaching up gingerly she felt for it, something thicker than water and warmer than anything had the right to be...and pulled away to find blood spattering her cheek and hair.
"Oh god!" Helena yelped in horror and alarm, swinging round to be met with the carnage of the courtyard where the man had been stood seemingly moments before. The memories came flooding back of the man snapping his own shoulders out.
"OH GOD!"
If she'd actually eaten anything in the past thirty-six hours, she might've joined Jojo in throwing up.
She hadn't much idea what had happened, but Helena was already pretty certain that it was considerably more than she could handle. The fact that Rick, whom she took to be the leader of this group, was utterly unconcerned with this carnage, and citing it as 'fairly standard' pretty much made Helena's stomach drop through the floor. More than a few people there seemed...totally unfazed by this. And..if anything that was more acutely disturbing than the pieces of corpse littering the area.
"This is...insane!" she exclaimed, as she swung round for something to try and get the spattering of blood out of her hair.
"I don't know about the rest of you, but I wasn't even good at being a NORMAL PERSON! You can't just expect us to handle this! It's not fair! "
Tears stung at the corner of her vision but the sheer horrifying absurdity of it all expressed itself in anger over despair.
"Someone just died! Doesn't that even bother people!? I don't want you to turn me into someone who isn't horrified by that! I don't ever want to be like that!"
----
Meanwhile, the intercom over the yard crackled suddenly into life and the rather familiar noise of the defence system gave voice.
"Would you like me to say 'I told you so' now, Angel? Or would you like that communicated to you through official channels?" ORIN asked.
Down in her control room ORIN sat sideways across the chair, legs hooked over one arm and cup of coffee sat between her hands.
She was pretty certain she should be worried about some demon killing a prisoner in the middle of the compound, regardless of what Illusion thought on the matter..
But Angel being humiliated made it hard not to take some satisfaction out of it.