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The buildings, at once modern and decrepit, crumbled around them. Bodies littered the street, cars collided with each other, fire fell from the sky. Mike and Kaiser were nowhere to be seen, lost in the dust and smoke and screams.
(just to clarify, can everybody see this?)
(Pluto and Asura can see slightly personalized versions of this, but the others are out of the loop atm)
(I think it's just Pluto) Pluto fell to her knees, tears drawing themselves from her eyes. Her brother ambled towards her on broken, flaming crutches. His leg was missing, and half his face was a burnt mess covered in radiation damage. He stared at Pluto with a single pitch black eye, uniform tattered and partially on fire
(Mind if I take over her brother for a sec?)
(go for it)
Asura stepped back, looking at the sky. A giant creature that looked like a falcon with the legs of a lion hovered above the city. Its black void eyes stood directly into Asura's gold ones. Fire rained from the sky, and buildings near him exploded. He looked around frantically. The others were gone. Instead, he saw his friend Amber running from a pawn shop, dragging Milo behind her. He looked away. "This isn't real," he said. Screams filled the air around him, and tears fell from his eyes.
Pluto started to sob, ugly and loud. "Not real, not-not real," she kept trying to tell herself
Pluto's brother reached down and brushed her shoulder with his dry, dirty fingers. As he did, everything changed. The fires went out, the buildings disappeared, and all noise ceased. The monster shrank, becoming little more than a swirling cloud of darkness in the distance.
Pluto's brother stared at her curiously. He didn't look like her brother anymore. His hair was faded red, his clothes were shabby, and he wore wire-framed glasses over his misty green eyes. He was painfully thin.
"Are you all right?" He asked softly.
Pluto looked up at him through tear-blurred glasses. "W-Who are you?"
The boy smiled. He might have been fourteen or fifteen. "I'm Perry. Who are you guys? Why are you crying?"
"I…I…" She sniffled, trying to rub her eyes behind her glasses. "I'm nobody. We're nobody."
"Nobody?" Perry rocked back on his heels. "But you seem different from the others somehow. You're….breathing. Most people here don't breathe like me."
"Breathing?" Pluto asked, moving off her knees to sit like a normal person on the ground. She took her glasses off, trying to clean the splotches off with shaky hands
"Yeah." He sat down next to her, hugging himself. His face was covered in tiny scars and scratches, especially around his mouth. "At least, it looks like you're breathing. But I guess I could be seeing things again."
"N-No. I'm real. I think," Pluto said, putting her glasses back on. Oh jeez. Another kid. "Are you real?"
"Yes," he said reassuringly. "I was sent to ask you what you came here for."
By now the darkness was fading, revealing that they were in an abandoned shopping mall. The ground was cracked and covered in weeds, and ivy hung from the windows. Bright white light shafted down from a hole in the roof far above. All was quiet.
Pluto wiped at her eyes again. She was still trying to rid the images of her town from her mind, and she wasn't doing too good of a job at it. "We're-We just wanna go through. We aren't here for trouble or anything."
"That's good," Perry said, and coughed. It was a bad cough that made him lean forward, his bony shoulders shaking. When he straightened back up, there was a bit of blood coming from his mouth. He smiled weakly. "I don't get to talk to strangers a lot. Usually it's just Kitty and me."
Pluto gave him a concerned look. "A-Are you ok?"
"Hm?" He looked down at his hand, which was slightly bloodstained. "Oh. I'm fine. It doesn't hurt. I don't feel pain, or hunger, or tiredness, or anything. Kitty makes sure of that."
"Who…Who's Kitty?" she asked, now a little worried. She didn't really want to fight anything after PTSD turning her into an emotional trainwreck
"He's my friend," Perry said. "He's the one who sent me to talk to you. He's really nice! And he knows just about everything. I'd be all alone if it wasn't for him." He rubbed his eyes, which had deep shadows under them. "He said he'd be along in a minute, he wants to talk to you himself."
Pluto froze up. Coming to talk to them? That definitely didn't sound good. And if he was the one who made her see all that stuff, she most certainly wanted nothing to do with him. "Alright. Okay," she said, unsure of what she planned to do once this guy got here
"I think you'll like him," Perry was saying. "He's very smart, we talk all the time. He might look a little strange, but that's okay. At least he's always real, even when nothing else is."