Walking Off the Beaten Path [Finished]

[Kari Muffin]

Rosemary didn't notice that Rhiannon was carrying a rock. She would have complimented her. The wolf was locked onto the woman in red, and wasn't about to lose the target.

The woman stopped. Rosemary stopped, her fur stood on end as she watched the woman turn around. "I said go away, you pests."

"What are you going to do about it?" Rosemary asked. No trees. That really made things difficult. That and if something went wrong she couldn't grab Rhi and transport to some place else. Maybe she should have thought things through. She glanced back at the girl.

Oh rock. Good idea.

The woman hissed and took a step forward.

"Hold it right there!" Rosemary said with as much authority as she could. "If you want to get pegged in the face feel free to take another step forward. If you don't you could just tell us what you're doing in such a shady place."

[carcinoGeneticist]

Rhiannon growled a warning around the rock she held, taking a step forward to match the woman's own approach, spreading her wings in a way that put her directly in front of Rosemary, almost guarding her. What did the shady cat think she was pulling?! She might have had a biped form, but Rhiannon was a fighter and Rosemary... Well, Rhiannon didn't know much about the wolf other than the fact that she was a King and very intelligent. As a team, however, there was little doubt in the girl's mind: They'd have no trouble taking the woman down if it came down to it.

The hybrid didn't wait for the woman to reply, merely sent the stone she'd been clutching flying. Her grin widened as it struck the feline with an audible "crack" directly in the forehead.

Beautiful. Just beautiful. Rhiannon let out a short, barking laugh, grinning broadly. "Maybe that'll teach you not to be such a bitch, hmm?" the girl barked, eyes shining with perverse delight. "You should always answer a question when you're asked. It's unbelievably rude to ignore someone who just wants to find out what your story is." She scraped another rock toward her, almost a threat in itself.

[Kari Muffin]

The woman was not happy about being hit with a rock. Then again, she fell to the ground unconscious so she didn't have much to complain about.

Rosemary rolled her eyes. Well, apparently it was one rock too many. "Nice shot Rhi," Rosemary commented as she trotted forward. She slipped her paw under the hand that was holding the original wound. It was nothing all that bad, she wouldn't die of being smacked by a pebble.

Well.... Rosemary smiled as she slipped her pay into the woman's dress. She pulled out a bit of coinage, and a scrap of paper. She raised an eyebrow as she unrolled the piece of paper. "Oh, it looks like she was into some shady stuff. Shady Corvie stuff no less!" The wolf's tail wagged a bit. "How do you feel about checking up on some grave robbers? It looks like she was going there... or came from there. It's a pretty close address either way."

[carcinoGeneticist]

Rhiannon was quick to join Rosemary at the side of the fallen woman, leaf-shaped nose quivering with excitement. Oh yes, her father would be so proud of her. She hadn't even needed to activate her ability to get such accurate strikes in! It was almost certainly just luck that had allowed her to do so, but that didn't dampen her mood in the slightest.

"Grave robbers?" Rhiannon's head tilted to the side, wide and fascinated yellow eyes blinking thoughtfully. Her mother had taught her about Corvies, and something shady involving them was almost certain to be even more interesting than what she would have expected to find here. She probed at the woman's other pocket, and finding nothing, raised her head to grin at Rosemary.

"If you know where it is, then I don't have any problem with following you there." she replied, taking a step away from the fallen woman, standing tall with pride and excitement. "Who knows what we'll find, eh?"

[Kari Muffin]

"Well, let's just say it's a damn good thing that I can't get lost if I know where I want to go." Rosemary said with a small nod as she read all the instructions on the paper. Tearing it in half she placed it back in the woman's pocket, along with the money. Someone else could mug her for all Rosemary cared.

The wolf hummed, "It's not that far off, just have to make a lot of twists and turns and then... sneak in the back of a building." With that said she began trotting forward.

Rosemary navigated her way through the various alleyways. It was a twenty minute walk before they came to a rather normal dreary looking building. Circling around she looked for a low to ground window.

Aha! Right there! Nothing would stop her now. "Okay," Rosemary began as she stood on her back legs, she slipped her nose under the broken windowsill and flipped it open. Being careful of glass she quickly jumped onto the windowsill before it slammed down. Thankfully she put her front paws up in time so she wasn't smacked by the windowsill. "Think you can slip past me?"

[carcinoGeneticist]

Sneaking. That was something Rhiannon considered herself to be quite good at, and her tail began to wag a bit harder. She knew that her father had spent a lot of his time in the capital, and from what she knew of him it was easy to assume that he had spent at least some of his time walking these same dingy streets, just looking for trouble in whatever form he could find it in. She was an odd child, and these thoughts made her feel proud of him somehow - and the feeling that she was here, carrying on in his footsteps, only made her mood better.

If only she'd known what he'd been before he'd met her mother. That would really open the girl's eyes to a new light and meaning. It probably wouldn't be a positive one, however.

She spent the time that they walked considering Seth's life and how little of it she really knew. Maybe he was a drug runner before he became a bodyguard, and brought little bags of checkmate to whoever was itching for a fix in these dirty streets. Maybe he was a hitman who worked for a drug runner (that was, actually, closest to the truth). Either way, she was sure his time here had changed these streets in some way.

She watched Rosemary enter the building, legs tensing before she leapt up, wiggling through the entrance and glancing around the dingy room. It was a horribly dark place, but her tail continued to wag. "Where to now, I wonder?" she asked once the other girl was fully inside the building and standing beside her.

[Kari Muffin]

Rosemary, after a bit of juggling, slipped into the room. She took in the surrounding area. Dusty walls and floor boards, pealing paint. It looked like just another run down house. Studying the ground she found a floor board that had been tampered with--well several.

She smirked as she slammed down on the boards. They all popped rather loudly with protest. Throwing the boards off the hole the best she could, a set of stairs was revealed.

"We go down!" Rosemary said cheerfully. Shady business and dead people were below. And from the looks of it, no one was around to stop them. She could only wonder what Corvies did with dead bodies. Her brother and father (though he was half Corvie) were the sorts to build things out of metal and wood... not flesh.

Morbid curiosity got the better of her though. She went down the stairs first, leading the way.

[carcinoGeneticist]

Down. The word itself carried a heavy sense of foreboding, and when combined with the dingy scent and dust that rose into the air when the stairway was uncovered the mixture was decadent to Rhiannon's senses. This place was just so divinely forboding, it was the perfect setting for whatever they were going to find here.

Her fur bristled as the younger girl stood beside Rosemary, watching the other canine descend into the thick darkness. She glanced once more around the room, checking for any signs that they might have company, and seeing no one, stepped down onto the stairway.

Oversized ears lifted as they walked down the stairway, Rhiannon standing just a step behind Rosemary. "Wonder what's going on down here... It's definitely shady, though." she murmured, glancing around, searching out any detail she could find. Her nose wrinkled slightly. "...And it freaking stinks."

[Kari Muffin]

Rosemary shrugged as her nose wrinkled. "The smell of Death isn't something pretty." And it only got worse as they made their way down the stairs. It didn't take long to come to a basement. It was a wide open place, with tables along the walls. Tables that had white sheets with lumps under them.

Well yes. Those seemed to be the dead bodies then. Without a moment of hesitation, Rosemary walked forward and tore one of the sheets off the table.

And there was very much a dead body under it. It also seemed to be rather mangled and cut up. Rosemary raised an eyebrow. She had seen dead bodies before, but none that had been hacked to pieces with surgical tools. "Medical Corvies are weird...." she muttered as she looked at the body up and down. "These have to be illegal but... I wonder why they don't have some sort of cooler...?" It didn't smell exactly like it was petrifying.... maybe they had a cooler further in the basement.

[carcinoGeneticist]

And the smell of death it most certainly was. Rhiannon's ears stood tall, yellow eyes wide with what could only be fascination, as there was no evidence of fear in her posture, only curiosity. She leapt up onto the table, leaf-shaped nose twitching as she looked over the corpse. Yes, very much dead. This was actually the first corpse the girl had ever seen, and she was completely at a loss for words. The skin under the fur was ghostly pale, and the body was cold... Almost icey, she thought to herself.

It was a beautiful sight.

"I wonder what they're doing down here, exactly?" the girl asked, struggling to keep the wonder out of her voice. She turned back to the corpse next to her, prodding it lightly. "...beyond cutting up dead people. Duh." she glanced around the room, looking for some sort of cabinet, anything that might give her some clue of the goings-on.

She let out a short and soft bark when her eyes fell onto a pile of papers, and trotted over to it, nosing through them.