Oneironaut Zero: Dreamwalker Chronicles

08/26/2011
"Battle at Death Bus"

I was on a bus - like an old school bus - but I'm not sure where we were headed. It was night out, and we were driving down some lonely, back road with nothing but trees around us. After some time, the bus had broken down, and we were now stranded in the middle of nowhere. A group of people on this bus, rather randomly, turned out to be self-proclaimed 'paranormal investigators, and after we had been sitting on the bus for some time, they told us that they were beginning to get 'readings' of paranormal activity, surrounding the bus. Most of us were skeptical of their work, but we allowed them to go about their investigation of our surroundings.

I, and a few of the other passengers, had followed two of the investigators outside. Looking over one of their shoulders, I could see into the screen of one of his gadgets as he scanned the darkened woods around us. The screen showed small blips of small figures scurrying through the brush. At first, I thought it was just infrared images of the local wildlife, but the P.I. said that they were actually the images of the ghosts of dead animals, and that this area was - for some reason - a hot spot for them. I wasn't really prepared to believe him, until I tracked some of the images right up to the roadside and - when looking off-screen - saw that there were no animals visible to my naked eye. That's when I started to get a little nervous. Soon, we were back in the bus. We'd come to find out that these invisible creatures were not confined to the outside, and were finding their way onto the bus with us. I was still sneaking a peek at the monitor, and could see the white silhouettes on the screen; little animals that might have been rats, moving around about our feet and over the backs of our seats. I was still a bit skeptical about the whole thing, though, and wondered if the readings were being falsified. Apparently, that wasn't the case...

The people on the bus suddenly began to get restless. There was some kind of commotion going on, but I couldn't see anything as being the cause of it. First, it seemed like some force was simply pushing people about, as if they were being shouldered out of the way as they stood milling about. Quickly, though, things turned much more violent. Unrest turned to terrified screams. I could see blood spraying about the aisle, and people began trying to hurry off of the bus. There was something definitely wrong, but I could see no threat whatsoever. Another one of the P.I.'s had a different kind of gadget, one which showed everything through a lens that looked just like a regular pane of glass. However, it was also able to detect these ghostly entities,and actually show them, as they would look to the naked eye, if we could see them without equipment. I caught a flash of a translucent figure. The tattered image of an apparition appeared through the glass. This thing was going absolutely nuts at the front of the bus, and ripping and slashing at all of the horrified passengers. Everyone was panicked, and we all streamed off the bus as quickly as possible. (The tech reminded me of the glasses in the movie 13 Ghosts.)

Over the next few moments, even more of these vengeful spirits began to 'show up,' and join in on the attack. That's when all Hell really broke loose. These invisible forces began swarming us around the bus. People were getting maimed, by seemingly nothing at all, and it was absolute chaos. Many of us were trying to scramble to get our hands on whatever technology we could, so that we could at least see these things. Before too long, though, this turned out to prove unnecessary.

We'd come to realize that these ghostly entities were actually becoming stronger, with each passing minute of their attack. The stronger they got, the more tangible they became, onto our plane. Soon, we were actually able to see them, without the equipment. They went from completely invisible, to translucent apparitions of zombie-like men and women, and after even more time, became about as solid as all of the rest of us. The major downside to this was that their strength continued to increase as well. Whereas they were once only able to scratch and claw at us, they were now dismembering people with their bare hands. The stronger these things got, the more they would start to mutate, physically, until we could hardly even recognize them as former humans. They were becoming ugly(er) monstrosities.

This was an all out war, and it waged on into the morning. The scenery had seemed to change, now that it was daytime, and it actually looked like the bus was parked in the dead center of an arena or stadium. Somehow, we had gotten hold of fire axes - as if they were placed on the bus for safety - and were using them to fight back as best we could. We were able to take some of these ghouls down, once they became tangible enough for us to actually hurt them. After hacking away at most of them, there were only about 3 of them left, in total. By this time, the action had just gotten completely insane. It was almost like a live action anime. The last remaining ghouls were now extremely fast an agile, due to their continuing 'evolution', and we survivors were now practically fighting like ninjas as well. Eventually, we wore the opposition down to one final ghoul. It had mutated so many times that it was stronger than all the others had been. Part of the battle, here, had switched to 3rd person perspective, and it almost seemed like I was playing a game, where I could move the camera around to where I wanted. There were a lot of slow-motion attacks and dodges, while I positioned the camera about the action. Things had a very Zack Snyder-ish feel. At one point, I was on the roof of the bus and had done a back-flip off of it, while moving the 'camera' around the slow-mo acrobatics.

This thing just kept evolving, though, the more I thought I 'killed' it. In the end, it was beginning to turn into some weird, fleshy being with an emerging head made of metal and glass. The top half was actually starting to kind of look like Canti, from FLCL. I'd still had my regular fire axe, but this thing had a huge battle axe that looked like it was made of gold. He used it as a throwing axe, and when it flew through the air it had this distinct, almost mechanical whistling sound to it. I vaguely remember it coming back to him whenever he threw it (I had watched Thor again, last night), but I'm not entire sure about that.

I don't remember the outcome of the fight, though.