PSL: If you could bring one person with you on a desert island... (Rose & John)

[overthroen]

Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep...

Rose was woken by the potent combination of a siren buzzing in her ear and her heart falling into her stomach. She was strapped upright in some kind of metal room that was dropping at an alarming pace. A high window opposite her showed only blue sky.

She worked her way loose of the straps, unvelcroing and untying where necessary. She was in a round chamber filled with several of these, but they were all empty.

The falling was the only thing keeping her from dwelling on what had just happened, but even as she stumbled out of the room, she felt her chest. There was no wound, no blood, not even a hint of pain. All hint of her fight with Jack was gone.

The floor sloped steeply to one side, drawing Rose to a heavy door. She pushed against it, grunting, and within a minute it fell in. Rose held tight to the doorknob to keep from falling into the new room herself.

This room turned out to be the bridge of the ship she was on. The view out the front window was enlightening in two ways. One, its lack of obstruction by such mundane substances as glass told her that much of the crew might have been sucked outside. Two, it told her that impact would come in a matter of seconds, and it would come with sand.

Rose braced herself, grasping her Thorns, and when the ship's momentum came to a sudden stop, she launched herself back up the corridor with her magicks, slowly bringing her speed to zero. Being a wizard had its advantages.

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[prankstersgambit]

As she moves upward, there's a very undignified yelling sound somewhere above her, and a blue blur goes shooting past her.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Thankfully, it comes to a stop just before impacting with anything hard and injury-causing. Like the ground.

"Jegus Christ!"

Rose probably would recognize that blue-clad, dark haired dork anywhere, right? John flails around a little bit before getting his feet under him and looking around. Metal, sand, obviously crashed vessel of some kind. And also very much not where he was moments ago.

"Jade? Jade, where are you?"

[overthroen]

"John?" She rushes after him, but stops herself from actually embracing him, landing on the wreckage of the ship's windshield. Clouds of sand surround them both, and are slowly coming to rest.

"What are you doing here?" she starts to say, but then she notices. He's healed, or he was never wounded. The gaping orifice Jack left is gone.

But a closer look revealed something else: this wasn't John. Not quite. The John she knew, the John lying facedown on the battlefield, didn't have hair quite this long, a voice quite this high, or curves quite this pronounced. But most everything else - his teeth, his clothes, his demeanor - is the same.

So she changes her original question, in the middle of asking it, to instead say: "Who are you?"

[prankstersgambit]

"Rose!" John yelps and barely restrains himself from throwing his arms around her, though he's grinning at first. It's Rose, it's Rose, he's so glad she's all right even if he saw her with the trolls and Dave in her god hoodie and everything, and--

And then she asks that question, and he's taken aback. She'd already called his name for fuck's sake. The possibilities race through his head - trauma-induced amnesia, alien-induced amnesia, SBURB-induced amnesia... okay, that's about all he's got.

"Uh..." his face goes from giddy to concerned in about half a second. "Rose, it's me. John? Um, you just... said my name?"

[overthroen]

She looks at him for a minute, then nods. "I believe you," she says. "But you're not quite the John I know, if that makes any sense. You're alive, for one thing. And, well..."

But she can't quite get it out without smiling a little. "Well, I do believe my John has greater need for his father's shaving cream."

[prankstersgambit]

"Huh? Oh, I mean, I died a couple times, sure, but there's this thing with God Tier that makes you basically immor--"

Wait. Wait. Oh shit.

This is John turning bright red and trying to hide in his hood.

"Dunno what you mean," he mumbles. SHUT UP, he hasn't had a chance to tell his Rose yet. Not that it isn't likely she'd already figured it out on her own, but COME ON!

[overthroen]

Rose examines the skin of her wrist. That's back to normal, too, though there's a faint dark glow if you look closely. Then she whips out a Thorn and mumbles something, testing the universe fabric.

"My connection to the Horrorterrors is weaker," she says. "This isn't my universe. I guess it might or might not be yours."

She looks him straight in the eye. "I don't really care, you know. But it's good to know if the person you're with isn't quite who you think they are."

And oh look, John gets Rose's trademark small smile. "And I truly am glad to see you."

[prankstersgambit]

"Oh. Um... that's... weird." This is a lot to process. They're in a crashed spaceship thing. In a different universe. Rose isn't his Rose. Rose knows he was not born with the boy bits in his pants. AUUUUUGH.

Still, she smiles a little, he grins back, and... well, it's Rose, he hasn't seen her or talked to her for a year and a half. He hugs her tightly.

"I've missed you! It's been ages and ages."

[overthroen]

She hugs him back. It's good to see him alive again, with all his blood stored safely away within his body.

"It's only been a few minutes for me," she says as she pulls away. "But like I said, you died, and..." She looks away. "I guess I might have misunderstood the full implications of godhood." Oh she overreacted a little didn't she. Yep. She totally did.

She shakes this off. "We should figure out where we are."

[prankstersgambit]

John grimaces a bit. He can imagine how she felt. You know, since he woke up to her being dead...

MOVING ON, because that's depressing to think about.

"Um... somewhere with sand?"

[overthroen]

"Remarkably observant of you, John." Rose peers outside the wreckage of the vessel. No one in immediate sight, she steps over twisted metal and burning plastic to reach land.

Then she hears the water. She's heard it so much on her home planet that it's become basically background noise by now. Until it's taken away, that is, and then brought back. And yes - there's the shore. It's as if she never left.

"It looks like we've been given an impromptu vacation."

[prankstersgambit]

John scrambles out behind her, with some soft cursing - he's had a bit of a growth spurt recently, and though he's not towering over Rose or anything, he still hasn't quite gotten used to his limbs yet. Still, he makes it out, and looks around wide-eyed.

"So... we were appearified into a spaceship that was about to crash into a beach?"

He pauses.

"Oh man. Oh shit, this is a desert island. This is going to turn into some demented, two-person Lord of the Flies shit, isn't it?"

Ever since he had to read that book for school the fall before he turned 13, he's been haunted by that pig head...

[overthroen]

She watches John silently as he makes his way out of the ship, and nods at his first inquiry. Then, the Smirk.

"Yes, John, you've figured it out. Unfortunately there aren't any boulders lying around that I could kill you with, or dead pigs that we could hallucinate about, but otherwise it's pretty much the same thing."

She looks out at the sea and spots a speck. "Possibly the wrong literary genre?" she says, half to herself, as she tries to get a better look. "There's something on the horizon."