AN: Yes, I've decided to go ahead and rate the story "R". Along with this, any readers that've never had a "Silent Hill" gaming experience might be shocked and even disturbed by the amount of graphic violence and detail in this chapter and some following this. All I can tell you is, most of what I used here was already in the games, it's only new to Daria. Full swearing comes into play, too, and if anyone pulls a "Daria wouldn't swear like that!" on me, well, I'd like to see you stare down Pyramid Head and not think one little curse. Thanks for reviews and still reading.
"Hotel Silent Hill isn't known for its comforts."
Daria slowly opened her eyes after her little quip. Everything was blurry until she picked up her glasses from the ground and put them on.
Standing in front of her, several feet away, was a woman. More specifically, it was a woman wearing only big black boots, and she had on her back a huge tattoo of a triangle in a circle with a bunch of various little things added to it. Her skin was extraordinarily pale aside from the black work of art grafted into her flesh. The common theme of black extended into her hair, which appeared almost butchered from her head, leaving only a thin layer that perked up in a spiked manner.
I would run like hell if I wasn't already here.
The peculiar woman that Derek had mentioned before didn't bother to turn around for Daria, instead leaving that blatant tattoo in clear view while turning her head just enough to make eye contact. An eerie smile resided on her face, the kind one would expect on a mad serial killer before the grand act.
"You. Why are you here?" The nude lady's voice was harsh, like a scolding mother. Maybe she was the underworld security guard, Daria thought to herself.
"Silent Hill has all the comforts of home, just less family and more darkness."
"Hmph." Not the nicest response. The woman turned her head back down the hallway, into the darkness. "You came for the child, didn't you?"
That left Daria thinking. "If you're the mother, I'm calling social services."
"The child shall be mine, and no one, especially some smart-talking mortal, will stand in my way."
Even Daria had to curse inwardly at a statement like that; this could be bad. She glanced to the side; the lead pipe was just an arm's length away, and the freaky woman wasn't looking. A quick lunge, but she recoiled the moment she felt an electric jolt pass between her hand and the weapon. What the hell?
The weird lady finally turned around to face Daria. Yes, she was completely nude except for those boots, and now her fingers were growing like knives, the nails glinting in the glow from Daria's flashlight.
Oh shit.
And now she was floating a few inches off the ground and spreading her arms wide, preparing to attack. "I am Alita, Angel of Retribution, and I shall slay all who interfere in the rebirth of God!"
Oh shit.
Her eyes turned a shade of red, but quickly returned to green the moment the sound of metal scraping metal traveled down from the darkness. Alita cursed softly and murmured to herself, "Damn, the Sin Slayer has come again." She stared hard at Daria and shouted, "I'll leave you to a worse fate, worm! You had better pray your heart is free of sin, for the Order of the Crimson Sacrifice has come!"
And with that, she simply vanished, as if she had merely been a product of Daria's imagination. Replacing the threat of her was, instead, something… almost indescribable. Dragging a giant, bloody sword almost as big as Daria, was, at its base, a man-shaped creature, man except for the huge, red, pyramid-like helmet completely covering its head and being about the height and area of half the tall creature's body. It wore over its skin-tight off-white suit two long lengths of cloth, almost like ceremonial robes except for the horrible stains of blood and likely other less known bodily fluids. If she had met James Sunderland, she would have known this creature by the name he "affectionately" dubbed it: Pyramid Head.
Oh shit.
After a moment's shock, Daria leapt away and pressed her back to the cold wall. Her eyes were as wide as they could possibly be, cold chills of fear like she had never felt before raced up and down her body, as if she were about to drop into a seizure.
The writer's mind raced with numerous, conflicting and overlapping thoughts consumed and driven by fear: Oh god, oh hell, I'm gonna die, no--
--don't wanna die, gotta be a way--
--what do I do, can't run, I'll die--
--Sin Slayer, kill me for my sins--
--I have no sin, never did anything wrong or horrible, never killed anyone--
--cutting myself once isn't a sin, no, it isn't, I made a mistake, I'm sorry--
--oh god, oh hell--
--I have no sin, damn it!
The Pyramid Head continued to "stare" at her, unmoving, silent. Maybe it was evaluating whether she was a sinner or not, however it was done, however the merits were based. In a place like this, who knew what the definition of "sin" could be?
The harsh noise of the sword scrapping against the ground caused her to jump, yet Daria stayed in place as the monster appeared to continue walking past her, moving to the door opposite her and opening it. Right at the doorway stood… a nurse, Daria wondered? If it was a nurse, she happened to be missing her face, not to mention she had various splashes of blood on her uniform and that was way too much cleavage for a nurse to be showing. The nurse monster only looked like this for a moment, the sound of crunching bones in the air, before the Pyramid Head slowly swung its giant sword through the air and through the nurse. Blood--or a reasonable facsimile--sprayed out like a showerhead--or, of course, a Kill Bill movie--and managed to cover most of Daria's front side from the fair distance.
No amount of therapy will ever make this moment okay.
The nurse dropped, "dead," and the Pyramid head grabbed it by the leg, dragging it back down the hallway. Daria watched from where she was, unmoving, while the mysterious pyramid creature brought his prey into another room containing a huge hole, threw it into the darkness, and walked off somewhere else within that room, disappearing from sight and sound. The moment she stopped hearing anything, Daria rushed to that door and slammed it shut; better than taking any chances of that red pyramid thing coming back unannounced.
A long sigh escaped her lips as she dropped down to her knees and started to cry. There was no exact reason for it in her head, but the tears came anyway. Maybe she was just tired, tired of this entire situation, everything that was going on. Maybe she didn't want to be alone anymore, the strain of dealing with all this was too much for one person to bear. Well, no one ever said she was an adventurer; not like anyone would play a "Daria" video game.
The blood that had sprayed from the nurse dripped into her eyes and across her mouth after a few moments, causing her to vomit violently. Her body shuddered and shook from the horrendous force behind the retching, almost waiting to see her shoes come flying out of her mouth. After numerous waves of nausea and an acidic aftertaste burning on her taste buds, Daria finally managed to climb to her feet, wipe her face clean with her sleeve, and decide it was time to go, anything to find Jane and leave this place.
Daria ran back to the lead pipe, poking it cautiously before being satisfied it wasn't electrified anymore, then ran towards the opposite end of the hallway, hoping at least there was an exit, since her previous one had turned into a solid wall. Six doors total, three on each side, and nothing on the back wall; one of these doors had to lead out. She opened the door to her right--then slammed it shut the next instant; more nurses, three of them, each holding a sort of giant knife like a machete. Daria backed away just before the blades started piercing and hacking through that flimsy, wooden door. Damn, where to now? The writer turned around and opened the opposite door, running inside as soon as she noticed no apparent danger. That bone-crunching sound was ear-splitting until Daria slammed the door shut, and everything turned to silence.
Blood and dust and ashes: that was the smell that invaded her nostrils before she even looked at the rest of the room. Surprise etched onto her face as her eyes grazed over her new surroundings: a hospital bed burnt to cinders and yet still standing; a charred desk with a few saved scraps of paper and photographs; and thin trails of blood dripping down through invisible holes in the ceiling. A child-sized blood stain was splattered directly underneath the bed, and at Daria's feet were maybe four different kinds of shoe prints having imprinted themselves within the dust; she wasn't the first person to stumble upon this room, but she wasn't about to stick around to discover its significance.
Daria grabbed the adjacent handle--which was already dripping with blood--and flung the door open, revealing the inside of a rusted elevator. Despite the situation around her, she had to monotone, "Yeah, the elevator to Hell looks promising, what could possibly be stopping me?"
With the blood collecting on the floor already obscuring the tiles and old bloodstain, Daria forced herself into this weird displacement of reality and shut the door behind herself. A metal grate slammed behind her and the elevator started moving down without prompt.
"Damn it, now I have an interview with Satan set up. I wonder what my eternal soul would go for on the black market."
The nerve-wracking sounds of continuous metal scrappings accompanied her as far as she dropped, which lasted a solid three minutes, complete with the shadows of creatures behind their own metal bars and red flashes of that mark of Samael upon the walls and floor. By the time the elevator came to a complete stop, Daria was wielding that lead pipe like a baseball bat, ready to kill anything that came at her--well, that was what she told herself, anyway.
The door opened, and Daria was forced to cover her mouth in horror and disgust: every wall was of the same rusted and blood-coated metal, the floor was replaced by iron cross-stitching, and new blood was still running down the walls, almost making them appear alive and breathing, at least making them glow with a unique illumination. The writer choked back new vomit before forcing herself out of the elevator and down the new hallway--back in the first basement level from before. Those horrible sounds of crunching bone came from everywhere, intermingling with inhuman screams and scraping noises and other various high pitches that she could barely identify.
"To hell with all of this!" Daria screamed aloud before making a mad run to the stairs. Her vision appeared almost blurred as she reached the first floor, dashed to the exit door she and Jane had come in through, and found it locked shut, or just broken. Look to the left; nurses down the hall, slowly making their way towards her with those machetes. She was left with no other option: Letting thoughtless rage take over, Daria charged at the closest one and tactlessly brought the lead pipe down onto the monster's head. It dropped to the ground after splashing blood over Daria's face and jacket, but continued to convulse, just like the previous one she had seen "killed." Her body tried to force her to retch, but she fought against it while checking every door she could and charging the next nurse, this time messing up and striking the shoulder from an angle. The nurse swung her knife forward and cut open Daria's right sleeve before the writer could get a successful hit in.
Madness was starting to claim her; running, checking every door, turn right and run through, up the stairs to the left while avoiding the demons, up and up, another attack, up, past the third floor and to the roof, not even thinking, just acting, acting on instinct, acting on the directions of some unseen force maybe, who knew.
And she opened the door. The darkness of the night was diffused by the glare of the child, who stood on the very edge of the roof and seemed ready to fall against her will. Beside her was Alita, that bitch with the claws and the fashion rebellion, with a smile, as one would say, "like the cat that caught the canary." Lastly stood Jane, her back to Daria as she stood and aimed her gun at the nude woman; the way her posture looked, one would think she'd been a police officer all her life. The relief of seeing Jane alive swelled inside of her and was comforting beyond words.
Daria rushed up beside Jane and held her pipe in an attack stance once more. The artist cried out in surprise, "Daria! Where were you!? What happened?"
To put it simply, the writer quipped, "It's not my blood, Hell had no vacancies."
The so-called angel wiped a finger across her forehead and stated, "If the family reunion is over, I suggest you go now and leave me to my business."
Rage burst on Jane's face like Daria had never seen before. "Not a chance, bitch! Get away from the kid!" Her grip on the handgun tightened, if that was possible.
Alita pulled her levitation trick again and murmured, "Let's just get this over with."
Boom: the nude woman lunged forward with incredible speed, but not fast enough that Jane couldn't shoot at her. Alita dodged one shot, two, three, with her teleportation trick until she reached Jane and landed a punch hard into the solar plexus, ramming so strongly that it felt, to Jane, as if the woman intended for her fist to come out the artist's back. Good thing she wasn't much for foresight; Daria swung the pipe hard right into Alita's evil face. That wretched grin of hers was gone immediately as she held her face and screamed in a voice not unlike the other monsters. Alita stumbled about, blood pouring from the wound beneath her hand, until she reached the unmoving child. A huge gust of air followed the forward motion of her arm, sending the child off the ledge and just slightly into the air before gravity obviously started to reaffirm its hold.
Neither girl had the time to gasp before Daria's feet took her running. Time and sanity disappeared as the writer dashed to the edge of the roof and jumped off. Alita's gust had let the child go so she was just underneath Daria before their hands met in the semi-darkness of the fall. In one blinding moment, the ground did not rush up the great them. Daria's mind glazed over, the same feeling from laughing gas or Novocain, and she witnessed… angel wings? From the child's back?
"Thank you," the little girl whispered, her eyes meeting Daria's.
Within a blink, they were laying on the thin layer of snow just in front of the hospital. They hadn't died. They were alive. Daria wished she had some confetti and streamers to celebrate. Everything that had happened just after the jump finally met Daria's ears: "--Daria!" Bang! "Shit!" The desperate gallop of footsteps to the side of the roof.
The writer looked up and saw Jane leaning over the edge all alone and calling down to her, but she was rather hard to miss in the blinding light enveloping the child still, even though those wings had already disappeared; maybe she was just losing her mind, which wasn't entirely out of the question considering everything else that was going on.
"Daria!? You okay!?"
"Except for the desperate need for new clothes, I'd say I'm doing swell."
"I'll be down in a minute!"
As Jane rushed off to meet them outside, the child looked into Daria's eyes and said, "Please, you have to protect me, or else this world will end."
Post-AN: No, don't worry, the story's not done yet, I just felt it would be important to bring up some afterword notes on this chapter and for later ones, since we're halfway to the end. Anyway, I apologize if any of the writing or storyline has gotten iffy; any suggestions for improvement (not slander) are appreciated. Kill Bill doesn't belong to me. The quote "No amount of therapy will ever make this moment okay" was taken from Fairly Odd Parents, because I think it's funny as hell. Finally, there were some scenes and ideas cut from this chapter that just didn't fit into the flow and everything, so once the whole story is done, I'm planning on doing a deleted scenes and outtakes thing, as well as alternate endings (because what Silent Hill game would be complete without the token bad ending, token weird ending, and token UFO ending? heh heh). Basically, fun for the whole family. So, yes, the story is halfway done, and hopefully I'm not boring or grossing out anyone. Ciao.
