gooseberryhigh | FINAL FAREWELL

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FINAL FAREWELL

FINAL FAREWELL

LILYWHITE v. GRIMSHAW
FINAL MOMENTS
LAST MESSAGE
REVIVAL

HOW THIS WORKS

Thanks to Anon, all sacrifices have been reversed. All items taken by mimics have been returned. Students who got into fights may still feel banged up, and the blood on their clothing will still be present, but serious/debilitating injuries will have been healed.

Azurcrest cliff has been fixed, and stands as tall and hard partying as ever.

All adults in the lodge will start to wake up after Anon lifts his protection.

Once she has a grasp of the situation, Mrs. Bloom gets the help of MACUSA agents to release the Anti-Apparition Zone, in order to allow emergency personnel on campus ASAP. Within 15 minutes, the school is swarmed by hitwizards, healers, mediwitches... and the press. Outside the school, the fate of Gooseberry has been a major media incident.

Whether or not it feels like it, the school has been inaccessible for about a day and a half, leading to international concern for the safety of those inside.

Students are encouraged not to talk to the media yet. They're quickly counted, identified and evacuated on buses.

Students are taken to a modest Marriott Hotel in Logan and all arrive at about 10:30 PM on Sat, Jun 23. Here, Healers and mediwitches check on all students, and Aurors ask for statements on the incident.

It's confirmed that despite Brother's magic, Mr. Merrill and Director Grimshaw remain dead.

Parents/guardians can come pick up their children when they're ready, but students are able to stay the night at the hotel if immediate transportation can't be arranged.

Students have access to wifi and wizarding news, and can read the reports on the incident from the moment the school became inaccessible at around 11 AM (on Fri, Jun 22), to the confirmed rescue of the students on Saturday evening. Magical news agencies report with great relief that although a staff member and two Aurors are confirmed dead, all students have been found alive. Mr. Merrill is portrayed heroically, mentioned as a teacher who died protecting the students. Several celebrities are quoted as hoping for the safe return of the nearly 150 missing teenagers. It's clear, however, that details are still vague.

You may continue backtagging scenes in thedeepwoods for as long as you want! You do not need mod permission or to fulfill any prerequisites before waking up any of your victims. (But you can also assume they woke up when their mimic was killed by Anon.)

» REVIVAL: Those who were dead are not, that which was lost is returned. Around campus, the fog melts away and the forest returns to normal, but you all know how much it's changed.

» EVACUATION: The school is swarmed with government officials, the media, medical support and more as the Anti-Apparition Zone is taken down after the emergency. It turns out North American wizards and witches were all holding their breath, waiting to find out what happened to the young students at Gooseberry. As you're hurried onto the buses, do you try to give a statement to the media? Or do you just cling to your friends, eager to put the forest behind you?

» THE HOTEL: Finally, a moment of peace. Healers check on students, and everyone get the chance to contact their families. Students without accommodations are given rooms at a modest hotel (two twin beds and a pullout couch in each). Although your movements are closely monitored for safety, the hitwizards watching you don't have the heart to assign rooms.

» Home: Someone came to take you home eventually. Did you miss it?

» OOC - Discussion

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Chris hugs Avery back. She even prompts a genuine smile out of him. “Just a normal end of the year for Gooseberry. Wanted to make sure everybody survived,” Chris answers. “The paper made it sound like shit hit the fan worse than last year.” Mostly because there was an actual paper to read this time. Mostly because it sounded like the actual school was fucking done this year. And now he heard Merrill was fucking dead? Nobody died last year.

"I wasn't awake last year but... It was bad." Her face falls. Like everyone else, she looks haunted by what happened. "It's... hard to wrap my mind around everything that went down." She sighs, resting her forehead against his for a moment. "I'm sorry. I'm sure you have other people you're worried about to see..."

"Yeah, loads of other people." The way Chris had always spoken, always made it hard to tell if he was being serious or just sarcastic. Now was no real difference to that. "You wanna talk about it?" He asks, like he didn't just randomly show up at an evacuation for a school he doesn't attend, looking unusually well dressed for exactly who he is; like he has all the time in the world to sit down and talk about this.

"I missed you." She said, an awkward half cry, half laugh escaping her. When he asked if she wanted to talk, Avery's face fell a little. Did she? She hadn't even processed it herself, it felt too soon... But maybe getting it all out now, in the open would help. Holding on to these things, pretending they never happened didn't help. "Yeah, yeah I think so." Her voice was quiet, eyes darting around for somewhere quieter. "Can we sit?"

"Yeah, of course," Chris says easily, and takes Avery by the hand and leads her over to the food area, the area designed for a continental breakfast that had ended over twelve hours ago. He sits her down at one of the deserted tables, and takes a seat across from her. "A lot of fucked up shit happened," he surmises. The outside news couldn't keep up with any of the fucked up shit, obviously. Chris hadn't been surprised by that. He knows what had happened last year, with the forever night.

She follows him easily, letting herself be sat down. It was nice to just follow - to not have to think, make any decisions. Taking a minute to just sit, she nods along to what Chris is saying, agreeing. "Everything was... fucked up, yeah." Chris knew just as well as anyone that Avery didn't frequently curse. In fact, she almost never did. "I died." She finally says after several minutes of starting and stopping, unsure of where to begin. Tears roll slowly down her cheeks, and she looks away. "I watched my best friend die, too. I couldn't... do anything to save her. I watched as she lost all her hair, twenty years of her life, and then die." So yeah, maybe fucked up shit was a bit of an understatement.

Edited 2018-07-18 06:06 (UTC)

Okay, that's fucked up. It kind of made him feel bad for how not seriously he and Robin took last year's grand finale. They didn't really lose anything important or permanent sounding. They pissed off a ghost by arguing with each other once. But even the hearing loss was temporary.

He also feels bad for slightly feeling like that isn't fair. This is the grand finale they all deserved. They could've fucked some real shit up.

"That's fucked up," he says. And then he pauses. "The deaths weren't permanent?" It sounds like a question that he's genuinely asking someone who just said she died. "Dude, are you okay?" He asks - finally - an important question. Avery definitely does not look okay. Avery kind of makes it obvious that 'so long as it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger', might just be a fictional slogan written by somebody who definitely has not survived death.

"Do you want ... water or - or a napkin?" Or something. Chris has gone out of his way to befriend prickly people and has no idea how to comfort someone crying.

"No." Whether that was in response to being ok or if she wants anything is unclear. Lifting her hands to her face, Avery tries to wipe away the tears. Chris had comforted her in the past, but she knew he wasn't the best with full blown emotions. Containing them at this moment was proving to be difficult.

"All year this stuff has happened. The ghosts and Anom and Brother got all... tame, or whatever." She starts, trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong. "People started seeing other people do things - whole those people claimed they didn't. Eventually we found out there were these things - mimics, they were everywhere. Just messing things up, upsetting people. Aurors and Director Grimshaw showed up. There were a few mimic incidents, some stuff with aurors but then... Friday Grimshaw killed Brother. Mimics took his heart and became so much stronger. Grimshaw killed Mr. Merrill, and we started evacuating. Only one bus made it out before Anon trapped us all, putting all the adults and us to sleep. When we woke up, he told us we needed to get all these pieces of Brother and he'd fix everything. I woke up with Gwen, found -"

This is where she stumbled, hesitant to say the name. "What we thought was Clem. We tried to search for the parts but these new things - grotesque things taking the shape of people we knew, deformed and just wrong. Told us we had to roll the dice and accept sacrifices if we wanted to keep going. Gwen rolled and had to give up all her hair. I rolled bad luck. I didn't know what that meant at the time." Her face crumples, and she buried it into her hands. "We kept going, made it to the docks. We wanted to get to the Grotto, it sounded like one of the pieces was there. Another thing showed up. Asked Gwen for twenty years of her life. She accepted and aged right then and there. I rolled a vortex and it took us to the secret path to the Grotto - the one at Ribbonfin. But Gwen couldn't go in you know? She was like, almost forty. None of us wanted to split, I told Clem to stay with Gwen but then she attacked me, tried to choke me. I got her back - I used the pushback jinx but it flew her into Gwen and they fought. Gwen stabbed her in the eye with a screwdriver. Clem had scratched my face, I couldn't see with blood in my eyes... she turned around and just - slit Gwen's throat and disappeared."

She has to take a break, her throat closing up - her eyes welling again. She holds her hand up, not wanting Chris to interrupt. "I held her as she died and she told me to keep going so I did. I found the piece and tried to take the path to Ebonhide to get to the Oak, where Anon told us to take the pieces. Then... Bad luck." She laughed bitterly, a little hysterical. "A tree branch fell and trapped me. I lost my wand and another mimic - with my own face, my own memories - took the heart. Taunted me as - as -" It was so immensely disgusting and embarrassing, she couldn't say it. "Then I was dead."

She let it all sink in for a minute, for both their sakes. "I guess they got it back, though. I woke up at the oak with Gwen."

Edited 2018-07-18 06:45 (UTC)

Chris doesn't interrupt. He listens to her complete story. Which sounds a lot more fucked up than what they all had to deal with at the end of last year. He knew mimics existed. Fern, baby Youngblood and Evercreech had all been in some kind of communication with him, Robin, Tess and Dimi. They'd all gotten pieces of the overarching story through multiple sources, and they all still talked pretty frequently. But obviously none of them had gotten insider information when shit really hit the fan.

Chris was mad at the school, mostly. You got supernatural fucks running around wearing your students' faces and you just sit there, cooling? As if shit is not obviously gonna hit the fan? This wasn't like last year, where the students tried to work the anonymous writer mystery themselves. This was blatant. And it had... well, it's fucked up.

Even though it seemed like a reverse button had been hit. Avery is obviously not dead. Chris hasn't seen Gwen yet, but he assumes she's also not dead. But even he knows that shit that truly fucks you up isn't the physical shit that you can learn to live with; it's the shit that gets into your head and takes up residence there, and starts paying rent there, and never truly goes away.

"Fuck," Chris finally says, succinctly.

"I have..." he pats his pockets, before pulling out half a candy bar. "A half eaten snickers bars and like thirty bucks in my bank account, but holy shit, let me give you something, fuck, man. Can I hug you again?"

Edited 2018-07-18 07:00 (UTC)

She's glad to get it all out - or at least, most of it. Avery isn't sure if she'll ever tell anyone exactly how she died. Although dying alone had been awful, she was a little relieved. No one had to know how badly she had failed. Only Gwen and now Chris even knew that she'd gotten the piece at all, and had it stolen from her. She was pretty sure, anyway.

Chris started offering up all his money and the half eaten candy bar, and through the tears she started to laugh again, shaking her head. "You don't have to give me anything." She replies, trying to wipe away the tears again even though she was quite positive they were not going to stop for a while. "I'll take the hug, though."

She still felt sore, but the brief, minor pain from a hug on her once-trampled body would feel like nothing in comparison. Avery was quite sure there wasn't any kind of physical pain she could possibly think of that would compare to being trampled to death. "Although, I don't deserve the hug. I messed up so badly, I lost the piece and just died and - I let Gwen die, and I let her lose so much. I should have taken all the sacrifices for her, I shouldn't have tried to leave her alone. I should have known it wasn't really Clem." The guilt she felt was overwhelming.

"Hey, whoa, no," Chris says quickly, rising back to his feet. He rounded the table to hug her. It's a long, not entirely comfortable hug. Chris hadn't ever really been much of a hugger, or an emotional person. Not a whole lot has changed in the year since he graduated.

"You shouldn't have taken any of the sacrifices - or like - had to, I mean. You didn't mess up, you died and survived. You got shoved into an endless night, where the only end was doing some fucked up shit, and you still tried to do that, dude. You failed. It fucks with you, but let me tell you a secret, Davenport. Last year, when we were wandering around with the ghosts, I almost let a big scary ghost with an axe adopt me and suck me back into the endless sleep that half the school was under, or kill me, I dunno, I dunno what actually happens if you wander off with him. But I was gonna let him. We all fuck up when we're forced into situations we didn't plan to be. But you're alive, and she's alive, and the mimics are gone, I assume, I'm not entirely sure, I'm not an auror, nobody will tell me shit."

Chris squeezes her shoulders. "You're alive, Avery. You decide everything that follows that." He puts his half eaten snickers bar on the table behind him and then slides it across the table, back toward her - and himself. "And you should eat something with sugar. You guys have been MIA for a fucking while."

Edited 2018-07-18 07:14 (UTC)

It's not like she doesn't know he's right. There's just no space in her head to accept that yet. It's filled with pain and grief. The still too strong feeling of terror. It's full of regrets and guilt. It's all so big, it spreads out and eats away at every dark corner of her mind, shutting out the rational, leaving no room for logic or letting herself off the hook.

Chris hugs her anyway, and she leans her head into him - the top of her head just hitting the bottom of his chin. The awkward positioning isn't helpful but she doesn't care. The hug is comforting, even if it wasn't comfortable. Chris's arms, somehow, made her feel safe or whole or like she wasn't going to fall apart any second.

The movement of his one arm caused her to open her eyes, and she watched as he sort of dragged the half-eaten candy bar towards her, and she sniffled a little and nodded. "Okay, yeah. I have no idea how long it's been since I last ate." She admitted, finally dropping her hands from their tight grip on Chris's arm, picking up the candy to dispose of the rest of the wrapper. She took a bite, and found that it helped despite how sick to her stomach she had felt since Friday morning.

As she chewed, the thoughts continued to flow through her head, replaying her own death over and over. How long would that last? Talking at least gave her some focus, something to move through. Her quiet chewing just gave her more time to think. Finally, she swallowed the first bite. "Why are you dressed up like you just left a wedding or something?" She asked, hoping for distraction.

Instead of returning to his chair while she eats the candy bar, he hops up onto the table, and sits in front of her. The hotel's full of traumatized kids, he's almost positive they won't actually care. "Oh no, Levi and Cecil are the only ones dumb enough to get married this fast so far. I came from a press conference back in the real world. I got signed to the Finches."

She's not at all thrown off by his movements. The candy bar is gone in seconds - apparently she was much hungrier than she thought she was. With nothing left to eat, she sets her head on his leg, listening to him talk. His being signed with the Finches takes her by surprise, though, and she quickly rights herself.

"Hey - me too! I was offered a starting spot on another team but, the Finches told me their Keeper was about to retire in a year, two tops. I just like that team so much better so... I decided to sign with them, like, right before this all happened." She tries a smile but it feels (and looks) all wrong on her face. "That'll be weird. Playing together, and not against each other."

Chris grins broadly at her. His signing was less precarious, and he'd already ruffled feathers before he even got his foot through the door. The Finches had reserves, but Chris had been offered a starting position. Ahead of the reserves. They hadn't seemed too happy about it, but Chris had a lovely time at the press conference.

"It'll be weird playing on a new team at all," Chris admits. He'd played quidditch since graduation, but nothing as cemented as the coppertale team. "But hey, good for you. I didn't get shit while here. And now I get to block your bad ass from bludgers. High-five?" He lifted his hand, because clearly this is a high-five moment.

The Finches technically had a reserve keeper, and she wasn't... entirely sure what was going on there. There were rumors flying that they were being released. Whether that was in favor of her or not didn't really matter. She wanted to be on the Finches, and she'd pay her reserve dues if she had to just to get there. It wasn't worth it being locked into another team in another town she didn't care for just to start. Avery knew she wouldn't be a reserve forever. She happily returns the high-five.

"You know, my whole team was different this year, for Ribbonfin. I only retained Ramon. It felt like playing for a different team, so I can't relate there. Never played against a former enemy though." She teased, reveling in the brief respite she was getting from her thoughts, from what ha just happened. It wouldn't last, she knew, but she was going to try and hang on to it as long as she could.

"Guess that means you'll be seeing a lot more of me. Can you handle it, Park?"

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FINAL FAREWELL

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