smash_logs | Fictitious Forces

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Fictitious Forces

Who: Gordon Freeman, classgoers, random passerby
What: Food poisoning and hallucinations
When: Friday evening after the food poising outbreak
Where: Hallways and classrooms of Smash Academy
Warnings: Violence in schools.

The headache had been getting worse.

He wasn't sure what was causing it, but what started as a tiny throb in the back of his head had grown over the last few days (and cups of coffee from the cafeteria) into a throbbing, relentless beast that had refused to go away. Gordon wasn't the kind to get caffeine headaches, so he never once suspected it was the coffee. In fact the dry mouth that went along with it only meant he'd gotten more than usual over the past three days.

Class that night had been almost unbearable; He was barely able to focus on the lesson plan.

"kinetic energy is in direct proportion to the mass of the projectile, but it's dependent on the square of the velocity. How massive the object is, isn't as important as how fast it's moving. This is how a bullet fired from a gun like this one..." He pulls his pistol from under his labcoat and shows the class, being sure to keep it aimed at the floor. "Can cause so much damage, even though they're so small. Now muzzle velocity is a measure of the kinetic energy of--"

He stops. What was that noise? He thought he heard something groaning out in the hallway... he tries to shake it off and continues.

"...The... kinetic energy of a bullet the moment it leaves the muzzle of the gun. Similar measurements using laser weapons are dependent on the frequency of--"

There it is again. Loud breathing, muffled moaning. GodDAMN, his head hurts.

"The--the frequency of the photons and..."

Strange chittering sounds, but all too familiar to him. Louder now. The specular slither of something slimy moving in the dark corners of the classroom. Black ichor, like pooling blood in a dark room. Viscera exposed to florescent photons in a long, grimy corridor. The smell of decay and cordite.

Meanwhile in the classroom and the here and now, Gordon reels, rakes his hand over the equations on the board while he tries to keep his balance. The room throbs and bleeds around him. The groaning is loud in his ear now, and he lurches and aims his gun at the shadow-turned-shambler in his mind.

"DON'T THINK I DON'T SEE YOU THERE, ASSHOLE!"

BANG! BANG! BANG! The bullets pock-mark against the concrete, puncture the door to the classroom, impart their shock and kinetic violence through the room and only miss everyone in the room through sheer luck.

So the teacher just shot up the classroom, and judging by the hazy snarl on his face it looks like he isn't finished yet.

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Ziio has, characteristically, been keeping an eye on things, especially considering the nature of the illness that appears to have been scraping across the academy grounds. She hasn't been sick herself, but she's under the impression that having practically lived in the dirt, getting sick is probably one of the things least on her mind. Given that her living partner is Gordon, however, that makes things hit a little closer to home. They share a bed, they share personal space, and they're far closer than Ziio would normally be to someone. It's inevitable that at some point in time, he may very well pass whatever it is he has along to her.

But hopefully not for some time. And she'll be proverbially crossing her fingers as the days progress. And maybe he'll eventually be put back together and normal.

She questions her confidence in just such a situation, however, just by hearing him. It's routine for her to stop by his classroom on a regular basis. She lurks. She listens. She learns. And then he usually offers her some intelligent banter, which she meets with some kind of affectionate sarcasm.

"There's no one there." It's the most obvious thing she can think to say to him considering what he's trying to get himself into. Guns aren't completely unfamiliar to her. "Are you touched in the head??" Sick is one thing. Crazy is another, and sometimes Ziio likes to think she's a good judge of character.

"Ziio?!"

By this time, he's left the panicked classroom and left for the hallways of the science building. He doesn't completely see her at first, even though she is clearly within line of sight. She's hazy, indeterminate, hidden behind the clawed, guts-spilling coat-racks around it. He aims his gun, sight wavering, reeling, trying to determine his aim.

"I can't-- what the hell is going on? I can't really see. They're all over the place! Damn zombies! The kids; are the kids okay?" His tone is desperate, confused. Maybe a little scared.

The gun is a problem. Mostly in the event that he shoots her. Ziio's quick to lift her hands in some form of surrender. If it were any other situation, she'd make for the quickest tree, scale it, and immediately begin hopping from branch to branch.

She tries to follow his gaze to where she sees nothing. "There's nothing here," she tries to reassure him. "I promise you, you're seeing things. Your students are fine. I'm fine. You are not. What's going on?"

How does she fight something she can't even see...?

"You can't tell me you don't see them!" He retorts hotly. "They're right--Right THERE!"

He frantically waves his gun as one of the bloodied, vicious things swipes right though the shadow of his partner. He aims at it and fires, and thank god his aim is true even though his target is false.

"Get out of here! Save yourself, dammit! I... I can't take the chance if I'm wrong! If I'd doubted my own eyes back home I'd be dead! Me and everyone else! What if I did that now and one of these damn things got a hold of these students? Turned them into oe of them?? I can't let that happen!"

The moment he starts waving his gun around rapidly, Ziio's scouting around for some place to hide. As she dodges past him and away from the direction of his firearm, she's cycling through the possibilities. Has anyone else been reacting the same way? Not that she's been aware of... People have been a little under the weather, but beyond that...? No. None of this makes any sense.

"Are you not hearing me?!" She strafes across the floor as carefully as she can manage. "Why would I say something that wasn't true?" She's going to have to edge in on him. If he's losing it, whatever the reason may be, she'll have to use force to get him to see things her way. She just hopes she can do something about his gun by the time she gets to that.

He pauses. She's right. What she's said to him has never been untrue; that's one of the things that amazes him so damn much about her. But he CAN'T abandon his own senses. He can't. He just--

"How can they not be here? They always show up eventually. Monsters with and without masks. They FOLLOW me, Ziio. They teleport. Dimensions mean nothing to them. It, it was only a matter of time..."

The gun is shaking in his hand, but he's not pointing it at her.

"I don't know what's happening," she insists. Careful and cautious, she begins to approach him, probably walking through his series of hallucinations. After all, she can't see them and has no idea where they even are.

She takes the opportunity while she's got him distracted to practically jump at him in an effort to knock his gun from his hold. Just in case. Even if he's beginning to see reason, she can't risk him losing 'it' again, or instantaneously. "Nothing is here. Absolutely nothing. Just you, me, the floor, the walls. Nothing that doesn't belong isn't here."

Gordon staggers forward with a grunt when she leaps at them and the gun clatters to the ground as she says what she has to say. Then all that training of hers kicks in viciously as he attempts to throw her.

The gun goes. It's one less thing to worry about. His reaction quickly replaces her other concerns and as he struggles, she snakes an arm about him tightly. "Stop it, stop it! Damn it, Gordon, it's me!" Which objectively, this whole scenario probably looks absolutely ridiculous. Basically a leather and feather clad woman hanging off of a normally lab coat-wearing, glasses wielding man.

~~Hey, did you hear the one about the indian woman that got in the wrestling match with the nerd?~~ Gordon struggles and grunts, disoriented as the room still swims with slithering horrors.

"Gordon, it's me!"

The words hit him, but it's one of those glancing blows that weaken armor but don't fully make an impact. That gun is still his saving grace, and he tries one more time to break the hold she has on him by backing against the wall, hopefully hard enough to dislodge her.

~~The nerd got his ass kicked by the indian woman.~~ She can't tell if he hears her or not. All she knows is that it's still a war, and the kind she's never wanted to fight with him on. It's one thing if blood gets pumping and leads to her pushing him onto the ground. It's another when he's not in full control of his mental faculties.

She meets the wall a little more intimately than she wants to. Her teeth grit together, and she tightens the hook of her arm around his neck. She's not going to choke him, but she's got to somehow take him down. Or at least she'll try not to choke him. Doesn't mean she's against pulling on his shorter hair in an attempt to get his attention.

Words aren't working anymore. Actions only.

Gordon's head jerks back when she grabs his hair, and his hands go to her arm around his neck. Then it hits him; the scent of leather and earth. Ziio's scent. His higher processes grind to a halt as the paradigm shifts and that unknown attacker is no longer unknown.

"Ziio? What's going on...?" He says at a near whisper, still staring ahead into the grotesque dirty corridors of his memories. His mind reels with cognitive dissidence, the imperative of danger struggling against the trust and security he shared with her.

"Goddammit, tell me you're not one of them..."

"I'm not."

All she wants to do is calm him down. All she wants is for him to go back to being the Gordon that she knows. But in hearing him, she has some odd kind of hope. Vain hope, perhaps. Who the hell even knows what's going on anymore, because she certainly doesn't.

"Have you come back to your senses, now?" she asks him. She's curious but still suspicious.

"I don't know." He replies. "I can still see those zombie bastards from back home. That and everything else. If they're not there, then what the hell am I shooting--Oh SHIT."

Gordon sort of collapses down the wall with her still clinging to him, unable to support himself in light of things.

"Where am I, actually? I was in the classroom..." It sounds less like an exercise in logic and more like a plea. For god's sake, don't tell him he shot somebody. He can't tell. He literally can't see what he's done.

About the time that his knees willfully give out beneath him, she pries herself off of him. Mostly because she doesn't want to wind up somehow injured during the process. He can still see things that don't actually exist, but at least he doesn't sound completely mad. She sits beside him, surprisingly casual and she looks around.

"Hallway. Corridor. Not too far from your classroom, actually."

She shakes her head, "I wanted to catch you before you did any irreparable damage."

"...Thank you. Keep talking to me. I can't--"

He seizes up as something unseen lunges for his throat, and pants as his brain deals with the anticlimactic lack of pain with a shot of adrenaline anyway, just in case.

"I can't tell what's real right now... What the hell could have happened to me to--AGH, JEEZUS--to do this?!"

"There's nothing there." She's got the impression that she'll be saying it a few times more, at least.

"And I... can't say I would know," Ziio begins with some thought. "My people have many stories of gods, goddesses, and spirits. True, that sometimes in our dreams we would see things we could not so easily see out of them. Yet usually we know they are dreams. It is not the same." She shakes her head slowly. "I wish I could say more."

"This would be a bad time to ask whether your people practiced spirit quests, wouldn't it?" He chuckles darkly, quieted by her closeness for a moment but still staring at absolutely nothing.

"Not a damn lot I'd learn from one anyway. It'd just be more of this. More monsters."

She heaves a sigh, "When this all passes, I will speak with you more on such things." Because she's under the impression Connor hasn't really said much about their culture and traditions. And to be fair, Ziio hasn't either. If she ever talks about her people, it's normally regarding the colonial expansion.

"I'd hope it would be better than this going on," she continues. "I suppose I will not be finding out. Likely for the best." Who will watch Gordon if she doesn't? No one; that's who.

It's true. She's only really talked about her culture in relation to how white men stamped it out. He'd wondered if she'd expand on it herself once she got more comfortable, but not yet. But she's right, this is a better topic for when he's not on this bad trip of his.

"I'm going to need to get to the nurse's station." He determines, vacantly.

It's a good idea and one she can't disagree with. After a curt nod, she makes her way to her feet because like Hell is she letting him go alone. And once Ziio gets an idea into her head, she's too bull-headed to let it go. Her history is sprinkled with a plethora of stubborn behaviour that makes her seem like an animal fighting for dominance.

She lowers a hand down for him right by his face, "Lift your hand, so I can take it. We will go together." In Ziio's mind, there is no such thing as asking permission.

Mac had no idea what was going on, he sat on the teacher's desk, grading some papers and looking over some reports. He was doing his job.

But it was so strange, Gordon was acting weird when he got in the room. He was acting obviously off. It took a few side eyed faces and probably after a word from his, erm, girlfriend? Girlfriend, yeah he thought, must be his girlfriend. They sure hung out enough for Mac to get the basic idea.

Anyway, unimportant, the fact that his mentor was all loopy was too scary to ignore any further. He tried to signal him to come down peacefully, but he hadn't stopped and Ziio would've known that.

---

Soon after, Mac would have pulled him away, by force if he had to. He had no idea what to make of this, but he was at square one.

"Sir, what the flippin' heck gotten into ya!?"

Gordon had been disarmed by Ziio, but that didn't mean he wasn't still dangerous. He's never without his crowbar, which he brandishes and turns on Mac.

"My god... Where the hell are you, Mac?!"

He would punch Gordon, if he needed to. But he was trying not to. He did not want to have to punch people he liked, this was not a friendly spar either.

"Right...here, sir. Put the crowbar down, okay?"

He didn't want to put his fists up, he didn't want his defense mechanism to kick in. He truly tried. But he was worried.

Gordon stops and stares right through Mac. The classroom he sees isn't the same one Mac sees, and the very shadows are ghastly and menacing. He jerks and whips his crowbar around, away from Mac but towards a fictitious shambling zombie, the human host still muffled and screaming by the headcrab enveloping it.

"You want me to... what?!"

"Put down the crowbar!! Sir!" He literally made himself add "sir" because Mac had to get a better grip on himself. Because honestly, he wasn't sure how he was doing in this situation.

He was trying to not panic but he truly was confused. Confusion was more prominent than anything, and he really wanted to just take some form of control. Calm him down, and hope this really didn't get bad.

Stay positive.

Pay no attention to the swinging crowbar.

Of course Kiyotaka's always been an ace student. He's there in the front, diligently taking notes, and barely registers that anything's wrong. He is curious when the stammering starts though, but figures there was something distracting outside the window-- come on, Gordon, you're a professional, stay focused on the lesson. Kiyotaka sure is!

Even when the gun is presented for the demonstration. He still can't believe a weapon is being so casually toted around outside the stadium. But he's infinitely more used to Japan's laws. You know, a place with any laws, unlike this hellhole of a city. At least he can trust Gordon not to do anything wild and crazy with it like start--

BANG! BANG! BANG!

--shooting...

"W-what--!"

Oh god, the teacher just snapped. Kiyotaka doesn't know what to do - his mind blanks in a panic, the echoes of the shots fired rippling into the past, to Vivian shooting down thugs in the city more than a year ago...

He has just enough presence of mind to glance back and make sure none of his classmates have been shot. Everyone looks fine, but his mind is a frantic swirl of terror and confusion. Ah, he had to choose the desk closest to the teacher... probably for the better. He wouldn't put anyone else in his place right now.

"P-professor, stop this!"

"GET OUT OF HERE, PEOPLE! Find someplace safe! Ishimaru, lead 'em out! I'll take care of these bastards!"

He's giving orders like he's in a war zone, but there's nothing but a panicked classroom around them.

Falcon was not necessarily a stranger to friends going rogue--both at the school and elsewhere, so when he heard the sound of gunfire and found the source, his first thoughts were of what he might have to do if the situation proved unsalvageable. He did, of course, want to believe it's hallucinations, or something similar caused by the normal strange happenings if the school, but he didn't know enough about the situation to be certain.

He stepped out into the hall calmly, coolly, gun raised, with the air of someone who'd dealt with this kind of situation many times before.

"Put down the gun, Gordon."

"Falcon?!"

The air around him seemed toxic and shadowed and rife with gaunt limbs and bloated sacs, but he hears the shop-teacher's voice clearly enough.

"That's suicide! I'm not disarming myself, not with these monsters around!"

"Gordon, listen to me--"

Falcon certainly didn't lower his gun, even though Gordon had more-or-less confirmed the problem, which he wasted no time in voicing.

"You're hallucinating. Put it down."

"With all the weird shit that goes on around here, you're trying to tell me that THIS is a hallucination?!"

...Well, it's a reasonable question. Sort of.

"These things are from my world! Headcrab latches onto the host, severing their somatic nerves and taking control of their motor function. Damn things rip you open from the inside out because they're built to infest creatures that have a mouth where our sternum would be! The host is left ALIVE and walking around, screaming and unable to do anything but try to feed a hole in their ribcage for several weeks. THESE THINGS EXIST, DAMMIT, and I didn't survive by pretending they didn't like everyone else in Black Mesa."

"Yeah, actually."

Because from where he's standing, there is no immediate danger except the hallucinating physics teacher with the gun.

"I get it. I know they exist. I'm telling you that you're hallucinating, and if you don't put down the gun I'm going to non-fatally shoot you before you hurt somebody."

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Fictitious Forces

REALLY, GORDON? REALLY.

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AFTER CLASS

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It's just a steady stream back in time here. DURING CLASS.

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