Experimentation [FINISHED]

[seraaches]

Shinrai’s ears flattened as Mnem’s voice and its dripping sarcasm wore away at his haze. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, his size, or sheer resilience, but he was, indeed, coming back despite the haziness and drugs. He blinked and looked around him again, slowly trying to understand wot his eyes were sending to his brain. He kept catching the sense of piles of stuff, but he couldn’t quite understand wot he was seeing.

His ear flicked behind him as footsteps padded back towards him. His head turned slightly as the Yarrow Gardens canine stepped back into view. He was slowly catching the sense that this was not a good place to be, peppered heavily with a sense of déjà vu on that count. He was going to tell her he needed to go home, but she took advantage of the motion by ‘encouraging’ him to drink the tea she had in paw. It was a mixture of bitter and sweet and not entirely complimentary. The stallion tried to pull his head away from the woman and get up, but his body was a mass of pain and not responding very well.

[Bee]

She could understand why the stallion did not want to drink: chamomile tea tended to taste like dirty weeds on the whole (even when it was spiked with something pleasant, as it was now), no matter how well it soothed stomach aches and helped one sleep. It was a tea that was on a need-to-drink basis, and as far as Mnem was concerned, she never needed to drink it. Unless she was suffering debilitating stomach cramps, in which case she usually just gave up and drank something stronger and slightly less foul, like the poppy tea. Chamomile tea was usually something she just inflicted on others.

Like Shinrai, for instance. He was trying to avoiding taking it down, but he was still exceedingly weak, and Mnem was quite determined. She made soothing noises as she pressed the cup to his mouth again.

"It's quite all right, darling. Just a bit of chamomile. I'm sure it tastes vile, but it will help you relax. Your injures are never going to start healing if you don't relax, honey. There we go."

[Dark]

After making the tea, Minh left coercing Shinrai to drink the vile stuff to Mnem. She’d had enough of being crafty to last her through the next decade, and she didn’t particularly feel like overtaxing herself. She would probably be the one to haul Shinrai off the premise anyway—why do more work that she absolutely had to?

Kicking bits of debris left over from the battle out of her way as she traversed across the utterly wrecked remains of her lab, muttering the entire time under her breath. Between their attempts at survival and the rabid rage of the banders, everything had been completely toppled and shifted. It would take weeks to sort out the mess and she really wasn’t looking forward to it. And the gods only knew what they’d find when they finished unearthing it—who knows what mutations could be occurring as chemical met chemical, buried beneath a fallen bookshelf. The dust mites could become sentient, or a fungus could grow that would leech the life out of anyone who came into contact with it. No—really not looking forward to cleaning; the battle wasn’t over yet.

She hunched down besides the metal prison of Monty, rapping on it with an extended claw, “Monty, dear—I don’t suppose you would consider a truce?”

[Bee]

The stallion, with no real alternative, took the spiked tea, and Mnem hummed cheerily for a moment, victory sweet on her mind, before it settled fully on her that she would not be able to perform further experimentation on Shinrai. And with so many more poisons and antidotes to try out, too. Damn every last one of those banders straight to hell. She and Minh were going to need to let him go--but where? Not out on the streets, surely. Perhaps back at the bar. An alley. An alley by the bar. Something. Somewhere he could regain control of his mental faculties and stumble home, and they could begin watching for the results of Minh's injection.

She turned around and looked for Minh. She would need the feline to help with the heavy lifting.

She had vanished again. Typical. Mnem heaved a very long-suffering sigh. Then she yelled, "MINH, IT IS TIME TO SAY FAREWELL TO SHINRAI. COME."

[Dark]

Minh, who was in the middle of an extremely fragile and potentially volatile peace negotiation with Monty, gave an annoyed growl and stomped off to see what Mnem wanted. She was in an extremely delicate position, and if Mnemosyne had just completely blown her chances of coming to an agreement with Monty she would be so unbelievably not happy.

She turned up her glare a few notches so it was completely venomous, and hiked Shinrai up over her shoulders without a word. Did Mnem even realize what she could have so unwittingly destroyed? Monty was either with them or against them, and after today’s fiasco Minh was leaning very heavily towards getting the demonic little vermin on their side—whatever means necessary.

And—gods, Shinrai was heavy. She considered the staircase for a brief moment before slipping him off her shoulder, and settled for dragging him down. He could deal with the bruises.

[Bee]

Being quite unsure as to what exactly Minh appeared to be so cross about, considering Mnem had given her very little time to actually sneak off and accomplish anything before summoning her back, Mnem chose to ignore Minh's little fit.

She had actually intended on helping the feline carry Shinrai out of the apartment, but if Minh volunteered to do the whole thing by herself, Mnem certainly wasn't going to object. Not with her leg, and not when Minh was perfectly fit for the task. She merely followed Minh and the stallion down the stairs as she dragged him, and contemplated giving him a few sharp shoves to help him along, but decided against it. He had suffered enough wounds. Hopefully Minh's rough treatment wouldn't injure him beyond repair.

Getting him out of the apartment would be one thing. Getting him all the way back to the bar would be another thing entirely, especially if they wanted to be inconspicuous.

She had an idea. One of their neighbors had a brat with a wagon, a little red one that she liked to stuff dolls into and pull around, and she usually left it lying about in the halls or out front or back. They'd get Shinrai outside and...stuff him in a wagon. It wouldn't help for inconspicuous, but then again pulling a nearly-unconscious horse down the streets in the wee hours of morning was going to look strange no matter how one chooses to cut it.

It would be so terribly undignified it almost made her laugh. She wished she could take pictures.

"Minh!" she said. "Idea!"

[Dark]

It had been a horrible idea—it would have been easier to carry the damn bastard after all the fuss that was made with making sure all his ungainly limbs were tucked relatively well into the too-small, cherry-red wagon. It’d been easier dragging him bonelessly down the four flights of stairs to ground level. Hauling the wagon wasn’t strenuous, really—the problem was stopping every five feet or so to reposition an unruly limb that had decided to flop over the edge of the wagon and drag along the ground making it even harder to navigate the garbage-choked back alleys they’d chosen for their route. At one point they’d had to unstuck his tail from where it had gotten caught turning a corner. (Minh still wasn’t exactly sure how he’d managed that; maybe it was some sort of unconscious protest).

Finally, however, they made it back to the bar without—to Minh’s knowledge—passing anyone by with the exception of an impoverished ferret that didn’t look to be in the habit of asking questions and a customer too wrapped up in his hired fun to notice as they slunk quietly by—you could barely hear the squeak of the one bad tire over their moans, anyway.

She turned to Mnem, a question in her eyes.

[Bee]

Mnem considered the area around the bar for a moment. They were at the mouth of another alley, one that ran along the back of the pub and seemingly on into a dark, dank eternity. Like most of the nearby property, it was littered with trash (from small tumbleweeds of wadded paper to large boxes of who knew what origin) and covered in grime. After making this brief survey, she turned to Minh, who was looking at her inquiringly.

"Not much to do but leave him here," Mnem said. They could always try to shake Rai to consciousness and direct him to his own home--wherever that might be--but he was under the influence of a few too many drugs to make that task an easy enough one for their time constraints. Also, she had the nagging suspicion that if they were to wake him, the stallion would probably have a fit of drug-addled lunacy and kill them both.

Yes, leaving him there was the only viable option. Mnem doubted he would be the first person to have staggered out of the bar and passed out cold in that alley.

She got Minh to help her shake Shinrai out of the wagon. They would rid themselves of that little red monstrosity on the way home. Mnem hated that damned thing.

"Time to go home, Minh darling," she announced. "We'll clean up and I'll make you some lovely berry tart."

They took their leave.

[seraaches]

The stallion was vaguely aware as the ground greeted him in a cold, hard clash of distinctly uncomfortable proportions. The knock on the ground did him little good, especially on top of the myriad of other wounds and injuries that had been inflicted upon his personage. He tried to swim back to consciousness, but, unfortunately, he was unable to overcome the drugs lingering in his system now. The large green form wasn’t completely still, however; he twitched slightly at times, and occasionally another low groan or moan would issue forth into the night’s quiet. The bar’s customers, saw no reason to impose upon his supposedly self-inflicted state; few ventured close enough to see the cuts and bites that had reopened with his rough treatment during his relocation to his new position. The stallion was left in a heap at the opening of the alley, supposedly to fend for himself to the best of his abilities. He would lay there for some time on his own.

(( Aaannnddd... done! <3 We shall miss thee, dear thread! xD; ))

[The Jenn]

Bee, Dark, and Sera receive 14 tokens each, to be redeemed in Ashwin's Shoppe. This will automatically be added to your recorded totals in the shoppe. Congratulations, and keep up the good RP!