T - Lauryn, Bee, Xenon - Complete

[carcinoGeneticist]

More people. That was certainly a good plan. Sergei gave a small nod, then looked around them in silence. The smell in the air made his hair stand up on the back of his neck and along his forearms. This was just... wrong. "Yeah, sure," he answered Bristol, sounding... distracted. There had been significantly more people out on the streets before they'd rushed into the shack, hadn't there?

But then, everything was wrong tonight. His ears twitched slightly, catching the sound of what seemed to be people talking, and his expression lightened significantly. If they could find someone, maybe they could get help in finding the pub! He pointed to the end of the street, to a restaurant. It looked dark, but he could hear voices... "It sounds like there are people there! Maybe we can stop in and ask for directions?"

To the Pub, to the police, to anything but here. He turned to look at Bristol, a small frown on his face. He wanted to trust the Card, he really did, but he just.... Every time he looked at him, his mind went back to the terrible image of a Tiger who's distended belly was writhing in a most unnatural way. "The air smells wrong," he answered softly, nose twitching. "And... Normally there are people here."

For her part, Catastrophe was distracted. She stood a few steps away from the boys, scraping her claws through the dirt. A pub...? It was hard to get involved, when she didn't know what anything they were saying really meant. But the air smelled nice. Some words fell into place. "Food-place? Mr. Tiger told me about food-place. Said need money." She glanced at the restaurant. "...Anyway, Cat not hungry anymore."

[Bee]

Things had worsened out in the streets. It was like some kind of storm front of weird was moving in, and it was only going to get weirder. Strange dark shapes of dubious corporeality and form were writhing near the surface of the streets, skittering like rats.

He didn't like coming to the intersection. He felt that their perfectly good plan was ruined. And all the options seemed bad. The dark street likely had something terrible lurking, and even his newly hampered sense of smell could detect some awful odor. The bright street was--too bright. Unnatural. Exactly as eerie in the exact opposite way. And more importantly, these kinds of stories didn't happen in places that bright. Plays on shadow and light were allowed. That sort of thing wasn't. It was wrong. And what if the restaurant was precisely like the place they had just managed to quit themselves of? What if they went in there and another one of them exploded?

He turned his ear toward the noises down the dark alley. Funny. Even he couldn't place exactly what they were. He didn't like that at all.

"Cat doesn't need money to talk to people," he said. He didn't look directly at her. "Sergei's right." He chewed on his lower lip. "Maybe someone can point us to a pub. We should see if anyone's in there."

[Lauryn de Vampyre]

Bristol had been keeping close to the three children, noticing how they eyed the empty streets with suspect. All six of his eyes kept roaming from one side of the street to the other and always, just in the corner of his eyes, he thought he saw a shadow moving. Whenever he'd focus his attention on the spot he thought he'd seen something, the shadow would be gone.

He'd been so caught up in shadow chasing it took the Mix a few moments to realize everyone before him had come to a stop. Looking around he realized they had three choices. Before he could even consider the ones to the left or right, he too heard the voices coming from the end of the street they were on. It seemed dark down that way, but no darker than one of the other options. Two of the children seemed in favor of going towards the sound of voices, but something nagged at the back of Bristol's mind.

"I guess we could go straight, towards the voices, but if what you all are saying is true then... let's not let our guards down. Just in case. For all we know the reason behind all the people disappearing could be up there." His words trailed off slightly as he caught sight of another dark shape low to the ground, but this time he had seen it directly - from one of his side's eyes. Probably just a rat, he thought to himself. I hope.

His Mother's last words and instructions echoed softly through his head. Be strong. Be brave. Though he'd never met them before tonight, these three younglings were the very first Cards he had ever met, and he felt a need to protect them slowly form. Due to this, Bristol placed himself in front of the others, taking point on their journey to the restaurant at the end of the road in front of them.

As the four of them drew closer to the building, they could still hear voices but Bristol noticed that all the lights in the building were off. The place was dark as pitch inside, just like all the other buildings around. Stepping forward, the Mix knocked his taloned paws against the door. No lights came on and he heard no movement from inside.

"Hello?" he called, stepping back and putting a paw over his nose. Drawing in a breath to shout had brought a nasty odor to his olfactory sense. What the heck was that smell? Maybe someone had left some meat out inside and it had begun to rot.

Bristol looked at Sergei. "I can't see anything from inside. It'll have to be you that tries to open the door if you guys really want to continue this." he suggested. Having a BiPedal form certainly had it's advantages. He looked from Sergei's face, down at his hands, and back up to his face. Of course, he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary with one of those hands.

[Nathalia]

((At Bristol's knock the door creaked slowly open, light from the outside spilling in to show everyone what lay within.
The door opened onto a scene of utmost horror.



Bodies strewn everywhere, at least six of them.
Slumped over tables, one hanging awkwardly from the rafters, a Bird...looks almost as though it tried to fly out through the ceiling and fell back to swing, half-suspended, from the ceiling.
All of the bodies appear to be either partly or entirely people from the Selkie Lakes...though there's something odd about their coats...

Their beautiful blues and seafoam colors have dulled and are streaked with odd, brown-tints. Their eyes all seem to have leaked a dull brown color in tear marks onto their fur.
Flies are buzzing everywhere and there is no movement...
From anything...))


~Nathalia

[carcinoGeneticist]

Taking the cue from Bristol, Sergei gave a small nod and stepped forward to open the door. As things turned out, he never got the chance. Instead, the door swung open on its own. For a long minute, the boy just stared at it, as if expecting it to jump up and greet them. When nothing of the sort happened, he glanced at the others in his group, shrugged lightly, and stepped inside.

The smell was terrible in here. It took a moment for his eyes to actually tell him what he was seeing, but when he did, he froze. He stared. He choked on his own vomit and collapsed in a limp heap, completely unconscious.

Sergei had been through a lot today. First, there was getting lost in a part of the Capital even her memories could not prepare him for. Then, there was the exploding Tiger and the full-grown child. There was Catastrophe's gory appearance, the smell, and now -- now there were dead people. So many dead people. It was just too much to take all at once. After a few minutes, he would stir again, slowly coming back to wakefulness.

The glassy-eyed girl hardly even flinched. She looked into the room, looked at Sergei's body. She clacked her beak once, then stepped over his limp form and into the middle of the room. Slowly, she made her way around it, investigating each corpse in turn. This one, she poked with a claw. This one, she turned over with the point of her beak. That one she simply glanced at. She said nothing while she made her way around, then finally turned back to look at the others. By this point, Sergei was starting to wake up again.

"Not food-kills," she said in a calm voice, ears perking up. "Cat has seen. Cat-prey - ripped up. Also Jub-prey. Blood, insides on outsides, all things funny. This... sick-kills. Or magic-kills. Cat sees both, sometimes. Sick-kills not for eating." That was okay. She was full, anyway, and everyone else kept throwing up. They probably shouldn't eat anything until they stopped doing that.

[Bee]

Zhenya didn't lose the contents of his stomach solely because there was nothing left to lose after the first time. Bile rose in his throat but he swallowed it, painfully. His new curse was having a sudden and unexpected beneficial side-effect: the smell was somewhat muted. But the carnage still reeked wretchedly, and flies droned around their heads. He stared at them, Selkies and Selkie-mixes to a man, and couldn't stop himself from imagining his own papa amid the bodies. Some of them were probably someone's papa. Not anymore.

They didn't look right, either. The colors had gone a little strange. This was all so terribly wrong. It was supposed to be hinted at, teased with, never shown. The imagined picture of it was always worse than the real thing. It was supposed to be. This had been the worst idea. Maybe he should be more like Cat. Casually inspect the bodies. But he couldn't make himself move.

He was vaguely aware of Sergei dropping. He had dropped too, in his own way. Something inside him stepped completely out to lunch.

"Cold-blooded murder," he said, distantly, not so much talking to Cat as himself. His brain ran through a million likely scenarios and reasons, each one a more far-fetched plot twist than the last. "Organized crime, maybe. Bunch of Selkies set up a circuit in the capital, get in a bad way with the locals, get bumped off."

[Lauryn de Vampyre]

Bristol watched as the others piled in the restaurant, not entirely wanting to follow because if the smell was so bad on the outside, how much worse would it be in there?

Taking a moderate breath of the freshest air he guessed he'd get in awhile, the Mix followed the others in... and immediately stopped. There were so many bodies, everywhere! It took quite a few minutes for Bristol to take it all in and he turned in alarm when Sergei dropped to the floor. He wanted to go to the boy to make sure he was alright, but he couldn't seem to get his body to work right. He watched as Cat made her way around the room, inspecting the bodies on by one and agreed when she announced her assessment.

What was the brown looking stuff on those Selkie coats? "Why are they all Selkies? Did someone kill them because of their realm?" he asked, not really realizing that he'd spoken aloud.

There was that brown looking stuff on their fur and leaking from their eyes. Could it be dried blood? Were they poisoned by something they ate here? Was there something in the air? The last thought didn't particularly frighten him, since if there was an airborne pathogen flying around they were already exposed to it and running away now wouldn't help.

Taking a hint from Cat's lead, and bravery (though she didn't seem to see it that way), Bristol walked forward until he came to stand next to the hanging Bird. "I'm going to take this one down," he explained, giving someone the opportunity to object. "We know the bodies weren't mutilated, but we should try and find out how they died. Check the brown stuff on their coats. See if you can find out what that is, and if it's the same stuff coming from their eyes."

Bristol looked around the restaurant dining room. "Maybe, if you want, you could find some gloves to use if you don't want to touch the bodies with your bare paws or claws."

The Mix raised up on his hind legs, stretching his long neck, and grabbed hold of the Bird's foot in is sharp teeth and began pulling and tugging.

((Awww, my little boy is already growing up! I had no idea until this post that he's pretty okay at leading a group!

THANK YOU GUYS FOR WAITING! The broken Internet has now been fixed, though it took longer than I thought. They were still at the house when I had to leave for work. I LOVE YOUUUUUUS!))

[carcinoGeneticist]

Something was still odd about the bodies to Cat, and she sniffed at another one. Then she nosed it, rolling the head to better observe the fluid leaking from their eyes. It was like they were crying, but the fluid didn't seem to be like anything she'd ever encountered coming out of a body that was dead. Her eyebrows furrowed. "Weird-stuff. Wrong-stuff. Sick-stuff, maybe," her ears perked forward. "No... Not killed. Died, but not killed..."

She hesitated, then returned her attention to the corpse that she was currently standing on. She leaned in, took a deep breath. But she didn't taste. She knew better than to taste - she'd eaten something sick-dead before, and she'd suffered for days because of it. That was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

It was while Zhenya was speaking that Sergei began to regain consciousness, the world spinning into place around the other boy's words. Justification for their deaths. It sat well with him. It was much easier to face all this death, this pain, believing that somehow these people had been bad. "Tainted drugs, maybe," he said, to himself and anyone else who would listen. He pulled himself up onto his feet slowly, unsteadily. "Like a... a Selkie drug cartel. They tested their own merchandise. At least they didn't let it get to the streets."

A strange story, but it helped him. He stepped forward, wrinkled his nose, and paused. No. He couldn't bring himself to touch the corpses.

[Nathalia]

((The Bird's body fell with a heavy thud and lay flopped in its crumpled feathers.
The odd, sickly ooze running from the corpse's eyes smells a little like...like ink? How strange.

Wait!
What's that sound?
Is there someone on the roof?
There's a small amount of noise, almost as thought someone is trying to walk as lightly, yet quickly as possible across the roof...maybe you can catch them?))


~Nathalia

[Bee]

For a moment Zhenya could not process the fact that Bristol was putting his mouth on a corpse--but of course someone's sinister double would have a warped view of how to function in the ordinary world, rather than the darkest reaches of the soul. He did not want to find gloves. He did not want to touch them. Bristol was doing it all wrong.

The bird hit the floor with a dull thud, plumage in disarray, eyes leaking something terrible. Maybe a result of the tainted drugs Sergei was talking about, maybe laced with something and used as a murder weapon. Or--or some kind of airborne toxin, released into the room to kill them. What if it was still active? Were they being infected as they stood there, from the air or from the Selkies themselves?

He was about to suggest leaving when he heard something, clear and definite--footsteps. Someone moving across the roof above them, quickly. He pointed up.

"The murderer!" he exclaimed. "The murderer is trying to get away!"