1. A Game of Turning White to Black

_{Prompt: "5 times Heather found something weird in Silent Hill and 1 time Heather actually finds something that makes sense." (CANON)}

1. The walnut's shell cracked and splintered into little pieces that pattered down onto the floor as she scraped the remaining fragments of it away with her fingernails.
It was safe to say that she was already expecting something out of the ordinary to be inside-- considering where she'd found it, and the fact that nothing here seemed to ever friggin' be normal-- but she hadn't really expected to see whatever was inside sparkle.
Frowning thoughtfully, Heather held the smooth, cool object aloft to get a better look at it.
Pale, translucent, and strikingly beautiful and lustrous against the rot and rust that covered everything else, the moonstone glittered faintly in the beam of Heather's flashlight, specks of the nut's shell from which it had just been pried still littering its surface.
".... Huh."

2. Heather's flesh crawled.
Everything about this was disgusting.
Everything.
The reek of decomposing food and flesh was so intense that it was almost a taste rather than a smell, coating her throat and making her skin prickle like a gulp of sour milk. It washed over her in waves like nausea and she held her breath desperately, even though it was so powerful it almost seemed to seep into her skin.
That was how bad it was from all the way across the room.
And now that she was standing next to it?
It was a thousand times worse.
Fighting back a hardcore case of the dry heaves, Heather shut her eyes as shudders of revulsion ran up and down her entire body.
"Oh, god..."
On the table in front of her, the dog's corpse lay on a bed of withered lettuce and rotting fruits and vegetables, happily unaware in its thorough deadness that it was being given an impromptu autopsy by a gloveless, cringing high-school girl with no medical training to her name.
Somehow the fact that it was not some fresh body that had simply been laid there and left to decay, but a cooked one that had been left to spoil-- made everything all the worse. Gagging, Heather tried not to think about which baked organs her fingers were touching, tried not to think about how the decaying, hairless skin crumbled and parted as easily as wet tissue paper, as she plunged her hands wrist-deep into the sickeningly-moist, ripe corpse.
Something burst gently as her hand encountered it and a small flood of something white that Heather thought might be pus came gushing out of an open sore in the reeking meat-- it wasn't until it pooled on the table and then separated into dozens of tiny squiggling parts that she realized what it really was.
"Oh my god oh my god _{ohmygodohmygodohmygod...!!}
Voice trailing off into a high-pitched, near-tears squeak, Heather did a little dance on the spot reminiscent of the universal 'gotta pee' dance, only in this case, it was 'gotta get my hands out of this DEAD DOG before I friggin' HURL' dance and tried to ignore the gentle squelches that were accompanying her deep-cavity exploration of Cooked Fido here.
There are maggots that I am probably touching right now I can't even DO this--
Finally, her fingertips encountered something hard and ornate and she yanked her dripping hands from the oozing corpse so fast that the flesh sucked against them in protest as she did so. Holding the gore-covered key in her equally gore-covered fingers, Heather let out a horrified whine and scrambled away from the decay-teeming table to find a working faucet.
She didn't even want to think about who could be sick enough to think of hiding a key by making a dog swallow it and then cooking it whole.

3. Heather was, quite understandably, not too crazy about the idea of eating and drinking stuff from some freaky alternate reality.
But everything she'd been through... Climbing, fighting, digging through rubble, running for her frigging life...
It was thirsty work, to say the least.
And the further she got into this strange and smoky underworld, the more the thirst started to get to her. She wasn't in danger of dying or anything, but she could feel the fuzzy edges of dehydration, like the static of the radio she had tucked into her breast-pocket, beginning to creep into the gaps in her thoughts. It was harder to stay focused when all she could seem to think about was how much she wanted to wash that horrible, sour dryness out of her mouth...
Eventually, desperation got the better of her. She started trying faucets where she could find them. Most didn't give a drop, or were rusted tight. One gushed forth with a promising gurgle, but the water was dark, smelled coppery, and held a sinister red glint under the beam of her flashlight, so she had wisely decided to refrain from trying any.
But finally, when she stumbled across what appeared to be (or have once been...) some kind of staff lounge area in the Hilltop Center, it seemed like she'd found what she was looking for at last. Lo and fucking behold, a vending machine.
After looking around thoroughly to make sure there was nothing unpleasant lurking in the corners, Heather shoved her gun back into her pocket and approached the machine. The glass was speckled with god-knows-what, but there was still a light on inside, so it had to still be working. Heather still didn't trust anything in this place as far as she could throw it, but if she didn't have something to drink soon...
If the soda tasted nasty, she could always just spit it out, right?
Planting a hand against the glass, Heather fished one of the silver coins she'd picked up earlier out of her pocket and slipped it into the slot. She was reaching for the number pad when the machine whirred to life and sent a most-definitely-unchosen soda can tumbling into the dip at the bottom.
"What the-- ..."
When she bent to pick it up, two things occurred to her.
One? It was incredibly light. Whatever was in there, it sure wasn't soda, and that sure pissed her off.
Two? She was pretty sure soda cans weren't supposed to... er... jangle.
With a bewildered frown, she popped the tab off and shook the can's contents out into her waiting palm--
.... A key.
"... Fan-fuckin'-tastic."

4. Heather could be called many things, some of them not so respectable.
And all things considered, she was relatively okay with that.
She'd done plenty of things she wasn't proud of, after all, and she didn't lie about them.
But one thing she had never quite foreseen herself doing was looting corpses. Possibly because before tonight, she'd never thought she'd be running INTO any corpses.
Especially not ones hidden behind a thick crust of wall-plaster.
A shiver wormed its way up and down Heather's back as she made herself step closer to see better to see those grisly hanging legs better in the gloom, letting the steel pipe she'd used to bash that section of the wall open drop to the floor. Whoever it was, they'd been dead for a good long while... practically mummified, all enclosed up in there...
She shuddered again, thinking back to the time they'd covered Poe in English class.
'I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious....'
"Poor ol' sucker..."
Out of morbid fascination, she crept a bit closer, and then spotted something that caught her eye. Something clutched in the dangling hand of whoever the unfortunate body had once belonged to. With some trepidation, and half-expecting it to suddenly lash out and grab at her, Heather inched forward and plucked the object from its owner's dead fingers.
... A silencer.
A silencer, for a gun.
... She could think of no logical reason for it to be there, but you know what?
She didn't even care anymore.
She sure as heck didn't know WHY a piece of treasure like this would be found plastered up inside a half-constructed wall, but she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"Sorry, buddy," she told the body as she fit the silencer to her handgun with a click. "Finders keepers."

5. Of all the skin-crawling, unsettling things she had encountered in this hell-town, the one that filled her with the most revulsion was the dollmaker.
Not because she could actually see his pale face peeking out at her from behind the dark corners and curtains...
Not because she could actually smell the rank body-odor of someone who allowed sweat and crumbs and body lint to accumulate stickily in every flabby fold of flesh without bothering to wash away the filth, terrified that doing so would somehow be letting the higher-ups take away his freedom...
Not because she could actually feel his hot breath on the back of her neck or his clammy hands reverently but still hungrily caressing her skin and creeping places where they shouldn't ...
Not because she could actually hear him moaning her name from the darkness in a soft, fluttering gasp ...
... But because he told her all those things in his letters, each one lovingly left for her to find, and her imagination was more than willing to fill in the blanks where he did not stand. ... Or maybe he did.
She would never know for sure, and that was the most disturbing part.

+1. She had found two cards in her trip through Nowhere.
One, the High Priestess, had been in the bedroom of Claudia-- the little girl who she'd once considered a younger sister, now both taller and older than she was. The reason she had come back here at all. Her father's murderer.
The other, she'd found in her own room-- the old one that had belonged to her back before she was Heather-- before her second go-around.
The Fool.
She rested for a moment, leaning back against the rusty grating that walled this pitch-black pocket of the Otherworld and let her tired muscles relax as she looked down at the two cards.
She couldn't remember the meanings of either of them, but somehow she knew they fit perfectly. ... Made perfect sense.

But .... why did they both have to have turned out this way...?