Goldie
[Wits 4 (Cunning + Investigation 3]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 2
Mary
[Wits + Investigation + Specialty (Cunning). No Moon Sleuth Agency Is Operational?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1
Goldie
After
a night of garlic fries and delicious pizza and a couple of cocktails, a
pair of Ragbash made a pact. This is not to be confused with a pack,
and if any curious Cliaths sniffed around asking questions Goldie would
insist that firmly-- this is not a Pack. Not yet.
But, a
pact. An agreement to go on the prowl for something out of the
ordinary, something that stank of Wyrm and Suspicion. That way they
could drag it out into the light to set some other sets of teeth on as
well. Goldie in particular took that to heart. After her third (and
final) drink, she had insisted with some buzz of alcohol in her bones
and voice that this place had to be rife with things to find. She'd been sprung upon twice before already, and she'd only just arrived
a month ago. Hadn't gone hunting, but happened upon shit lurking in daylight.
"Someone
was going to be eaten up by a fungal pod, just right there on the
street. This place needs all the help it can get." Somehow, said like a
profiteer suspecting oil fields on the horizon.
So they would hunt. They even clinked glasses and said cheers to it.
----------------------
"There
he is," a Glass Walker Kinfolk, a man in his early thirtied who worked
at a vinyl record store (one of the few floating alive these days
still), pointed at a picture that he'd flipped to on his phone. It was a
picture of another man, this one probably in his mid-twenties himself,
wearing a hiking backpack and sitting on a rock out on a mountainside
somewhere-- probably outside of Boulder.
"I saw him last at a
get-together some of us were having around the end of August. He said
he was planning a trip out camping in the mountains with some friends. I
hadn't seen him since." He'd handed the phone over to her so she could
see the picture, but now held a fuzzy-knuckled hand back out to accept
it back. He knew she was a Garou, maybe even that she was a Silver
Fang, but he was unaffected by the presence of Purity. He would have a
least offered to email or text the picture to her if she asked.
----------------------------
Further
snooping into the case of a Kinfolk gone missing led Mary to find that
there was a missing persons report filed about him, as well as three
other men around the same age group (all employees at the same
workplace, she may notice, is how they were associated), but that report
was quietly tucked away and not under any active kind of
investigation. News had cycled around the beginning of September that
some campers had gone missing, but names weren't released and the story
was left to be forgotten by the media machine.
It could have been intentional that the missing persons report had gone to grave prematurely, but there were no leads on that.
-----------------------------
"Have I got a story for you," Goldie started the phone call over the weekend before the Moot.
"Can we go get coffee and have a walk-and-talk park date like they do in West Wing?"
Mary
Mary.
Mary is an architect. Mary is a leader. Mary is who she is by blood by
right by virtue of birth by pain and by salt. Mary is an architect Mary
is an architect of this pact. Pack? Mary is clear, too, as clear as
water and oil, anointing the hands of those who've gone before, Mary is
anointed, see, Mary wanted to be clear with Goldie, too, back when they
made their pink swear promise, back when the plot was cooked:
They're
not promised. But they're working in tandem, pack-like, temporary
(perhaps), and that's how things should go. We'll see what happens. If
it works, it works. If one day it seems like a good idea to get some
help from a spirit who recognizes their deeds, so be it. If one day they
go their merry way, but the Sleuthing Sleuthiness of No Moons on the
Prowl continues, so be that too. We'll see.
Pacts
and Promises. Mary is a builder, born when the Moon was just thinking
about shining so bright and so silver, but was still dark and occulted:
Mary is noble and isn't it noble to be of use?
--
This
is Mary talking to a Glass Walker Kinfolk. Urrah Kin. Barely kin.
Useful kin. Mary is noblesse oblige even without the coruscating
reminder of her lineage, of her potential heroism, flavoring every
gesture; some of it has worked its way into her marrow. Noblesse oblige
means that she doesn't care who she's talking to; they're all to be
protected by the Silver Fangs, aren't they? They're all duty.
Mary
takes the phone and looks at the picture. "I'm going to text it to
myself," she tells him. "That way if anything turns up, I've got your
number, and you've got mine. Thanks."
--
This is Mary in
the morning, Henry kissing her on the forehead as she pours over her
laptop and a couple of old taken-from-a-library newspapers.
Campers
going missing, but nothing much else. Maybe Mary turns to facebook and
twitter, looking for impromptu online shrines, gathering places for
prayer.
This is Mary in the mornin, curling her tongue against the
back of her teeth, Juliet running screaming around the table, Mary
twisted up like a pretzel ew gross how do you twist like that. Mary
reaching out to tell Juliet, no running.
---
"Of course. I'll be there wearing my most grumpy looking pants suit and shades.
"Maybe we can shop for music, too."
--
Mary
doesn't have a job and Henry would never just let Mary be the only one
responsible for Juliet. Mary has family. Mary has a lot of family.
And
now Mary is at a park, ready for a walk-and-talk, and she is wearing
shades, even if whatever pants suit she may have scrounged up to go over
her curves is hidden by a raincoat, drizzly gray day that it is.
Maybe they meet at a coffee cart, and this time Mary buys.
Goldie
A
coffee cart was perfectly sufficient, and there were two to choose
from. People were recognizing that the chill and drizzley weather was
worth capitalizing on, so someone had set up an actual coffee cart and a
local hot dog and sausage salesman got a better coffee machine and a
new sign to say so.
Today was gray and rain came and went in
patches along with the density of clouds-- ever present and ranging from
a sheet of white up above to a blanket of rolling gray when the rain
came about. Goldie was dressed in a pair of leggings and boots, with
her brown bombadeer jacket and a wool cap on. She happily let Mary pay
for the coffee, added an unsurprising amount of sugar to it, and started
them West Winging their way along a path through the park.
"I
love the pants part of your pant suit, so far." To begin. And then,
after a sip of very-hot coffee that clearly burned her mouth a little,
based on what she did with her face and tongue right after the drink,
she continued.
"I've been chasing ghost stories and caught a big fat one. What have you been up to?"
Mary
Mary
grins. The grin doesn't come complete with a lolling tongue, but
shouldn't it, when Mary grins? Mary who is a wolf-girl. Mary who is the
wolf at the door. Mary, the wolf, the monster; but no tongue lolls. She
grins and her cheeks get more squeezable and her coppery hair is in
curls that have been teased and combed into a respectable half-do thing,
one curl slick at her arrogant Silver Fang chin, and her eyes sparkle
like illicit treasure, like energy can't quite be contained, like her
attention is ready to spring at any thing that happens to move too
quickly.
The coffee steams.
"I've been thinking about
vinyl, vinyl, vinyl," her head hops to the side at each word, "I've been
thinking I should get myself a record player, I've been thinking about
broken records, I've been thinking about," and she is talking a little
fast, with a languid drawl behind it, "Okay, I've been chasing around
this missing kinfolk story, something seriously skinny and toothy and
leechy and squiggly about it, but it looks like it's more than just the
one kin, it's some walks on two legs can't take the rar," the fingers of
her hand not wrapped around her coffee cup curl like she's a
Werewolf-monster, "pressure too. Or that's what it seems like so far.
More to look into before we, like, bring it up to more people, for sure.
And a couple places to start."
"Now you! What's the ghost story? The weather's ... the weather's perfect for it."
Goldie
"It's Trevor Hanson, isn't it?"
It was. That was the Kinfolk that Mary was looking into, the missing person. Goldie grinned with the affirmation.
"You
see, I started looking for him too." Kinfolk didn't just go missing
through the cracks all the time. They vastly outnumbered the Garou, so
statistically there were plenty of them to be found dappled throughout
the population of Denver, but tribes tended to do a good job of keeping
track of their Kinfolk-- the ones that they were aware of to begin with,
at least. The case of Trevor Hanson hadn't caught the attention of the
Nation yet on account of those missing records (and his terrible
communication habits with his family).
The two began on the same
lead, but Goldie was about to explain after the next sip of coffee how
they'd branched off in different directions, and how hers could
constitute a 'ghost story'.
"I went asking his friends and found
that he'd been on a kick of finding haunted houses and old mining towns
and stuff. And this time Trevor went out to look for some haunted house
out to the West, in the mountains." Mary knew that he'd gone out to
the mountains-- she'd found that in the stashed report she pulled free
from red tape and neglect. A vehicle belonging to one of the friends,
with some camping gear still stowed in the back, was found abandoned off
one of the state highways that led up through the Western towns and
into the mountains.
"So I looked into this house, and it's got a legitimate urban legend
associated with it! Like, a ghost story that some of the people in the
area like to tell people who ask. There's some 'lady in white' that
flags people down asking for help, I guess, and when she leads them back
to the house she reveals she's a ghost. You know, standard ghost story
bullshit." Goldie sounded unimpressed with the story itself, and who
could blame her? It was uninspired and told a million times before.
Stories like that didn't even give five year olds the creeps these days.
"Turns out, though, that some dude actually did
kill his wife in that house like seventy years ago. It was a real
gruesome scene-- he tucked the body away into the walls in parts and the
police never found all the missing pieces. So maybe it is a real
ghost?" Goldie's eyes went wide and she lifted her eyebrows, and she
grinned and wriggled the fingers of her free hand in a gesture for 'ooh,
spooky'. Another sip of the coffee, and she carried on.
"I looked further and that place has always
had a nasty history. The guy that built it back in the mid-eighteen
hundreds? His whole family went missing, wife and a couple kids. He
was spooky for another twenty years before going missing himself. And
another family that lived there died of 'mysterious circumstances'."
Goldie
grinned a nigh-feral and very toothy grin at her Ragabash counterpart--
the story was too perfect for the weather and season, and Goldie was
having fun telling it to be sure. She was all bright and alight in the
eyes when she looked to Mary to conclude.
"I got some coordinates to where the place should be. Should we fire up the Mystery Machine?"
Mary
("It's Trevor Hanson, isn't it?"
"It totally is!" Mary says, excited laughing.
This is no laughing matter, Mary.)
They're
walking like they're on West Wing, having a coffee date, a tete-a-tete,
and Mary lets a pair of sunglasses rest low on the bridge of her nose,
concealing her perfectly made up eyes darkly limned in liner. Goldie can
see herself ghostly on the lenses, behind which the shape of Mary's
eyes can still be made out- they're not mirror glasses.
She clutches her heart at that ooo spooky expression. Takes another judicious sip of her coffee.
"Yes."
A pause; and, "You know, we might be poking into more of a Scooby Doo
episode than you'd think. The report on those poor suckers who
disappeared got ignored pretty hardcore."
"Do you have a map of
the area these coordinates might be found on? If you do, don't tell me
what they are and let's do the stone test for Trevor."
Mary means
the Rite of Questing Stone, use it to try and get a general location;
they've got a picture on a phone after all, and an idea of where he
might've disappeared: maybe it will confirm that yes this way lies
darkness.
"If you don't, I'm sure we've got something in the glove compartment. Some people are so worried about being lost!"
And
there are indeed a number of maps of Colorado and the surrounding areas
in Mary's car, which is not the expensive sleek piece of car one might
expect from a Silver Fang, but is a rather sedate and silvery (oh, of
course silvery, like a drop of mercury) safety vehicle.
Goldie
"So
someone's helping people go missing even easier," Goldie mused,
sip-sip-sipping from that paper cup. She had arrived looking red-rimmed
around the eyes, even if she was wearing mascara and even if it was the
middle of the afternoon. Garou pulled odd hours, and Goldie probably
would have even if she didn't have the excuse of being True Born to back
it up. She wasn't wearing sunglasses, so Mary got to see how Goldie
looked when she was still a little tiny bit hungover and praising a cup
of coffee.
Agreement came in the form of a head nod. "There's
maps online that I saved. I can print them out, and we can pick up an
atlas from a truck stop on our way there."
So the plan was hatched
and another date was made; the two would meet up again on Monday
(Goldie had work, was helping Matthew pay rent and utilities, they
hadn't hit their stride enough for Goldie to abandon income just yet).
Goldie would gather up the maps and everything that was needed, Mary
could look further into the reason the report went missing if she would
like.
Conversation may have turned to other things while they
finished coffee, but eventually Goldie would break way from her Silver
Fang partner-in-crime and be gobbled back up by the city.
---------------
It's
afternoon on that Monday by the time that Mary and Goldie pull off on
the side of a gravel road that cut through the landscape some fifty
miles northwest of Boulder. Goldie had led them off along Highway 122
through the national reserve until they'd located a gravel road, which
Goldie indicated they should take (based on the maps and directions and
coordinates she'd all managed to find and put in an order that made
sense).
With mountains in the west, and the peaks climbing up high
since they were much closer to the Rocky Mountain ranges, where the
land started to take drastic slopes upward, where peaks would stretch to
reach the sky. Even though it was still the afternoon, even though the
sun had only just begun its descent toward setting, shadows were
already beginning to creep over the land. Peaks blocked the sunset from
view here, all they would see is the colors the sky turned when dusk
started to spread further into civilization to the east.
"There,"
Goldie pointed out the window once they'd parked, gesturing to a small
marker sign off the road's shoulder with a faded milemarker number on
it. "That's the mark-- it's supposed to be like a mile or so up the
ridge."
Mary
[Questing Stone Advance Test. Wits +
Ritual Diff 7. Unless Mary could get some sort of physical item-y thing
owned by Trev from that Glasswalker dude, in which case Diff 6.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 7, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )
Mary
Mary's
car has cheetohs crunched into the backseat. Mary's car has a couple of
toys and some LeapFrog games under one seat. Mary's car has a juice
stain, spreading across the back. Mary's car seems used, second-hand,
anything but spotless; Mary's car gets only one radio station when she
uses it and Mary lets Goldie sift through her ipod to find appropriate
music. Mary pulls off the road, those maps stretched out across the
back, Mary shifts in place and she is remarkably agile and flexible for
someody so voluptuous, for anybody in any shape, the way she squirms,
and they do their control, their test, their Trevor Hanson, are you
here? And Mary flashes this dark-eyed, testing glance at Goldie, to see
if they nailed it before she lets the stone and thread drop into her
palm; there is casual, offhand reverence in these things, power made
mundane.
And then they're
There.
Goldie, pointing.
Mary, both hands on the wheel, chin lofted as she looks. She's wearing
shoes for hiking today, dark jeans, a brown sweater button-up still kind
of cute still kind of retro, blend-in things.
"Let's do this.
That urban legend didn't say anything about a certain time, now, did it?
I sure hope we're not too late or too early to poke around this house."
"What do you think, take this from the otherside or not?"
Mary opens the door to her car.
Goldie
Maps and snacks and juice stains and Mary
herself were poured all over the backseat to ensure that their target,
their lure, their missing Kinfolk, was where Goldie had suspected he
would be. She had leaned out the window to gesture at the mile marker
initially, and waited patient-as-can-be outside the car having a
cigarette while Mary utilized a handy ritual that hunters like
themselves picked up on. When the Silver Fang finished and climbed out
of the car, Goldie leaned down to snub out the cigarette butt on the
heel of her shoe.
"Nah," said Goldie, answering first to the
question about how they approach the situation. "I don't like going
over there without scoping the situation out from this side first." The
cigarette butt got flicked off into the road. Next, the Fianna girl
stooped down to scoop up her knapsack by its straps and sling it across
her shoulders. "I had a nasty surprise when I was a Cub still, sneaking
around in the Reflection. Haven't quite gotten past the emotional
scarring from it yet."
Goldie looked at Mary and beamed a big wide Cheshire smile at her. Clearly, she was emotionally damaged for life.
"C'mon,"
she said, gathering her sandy hair into a bunch on top of her head so
she could work it into a topknot. "That legend says 'midnight' and '3
a.m.' both, but I wanted to stake the place out and see if this Lady in
White slinks around at other times of the day too."
And with that, she turned and stepped off the shoulder of the road to begin their trek into the woods.
---------------------
Up
here it is cold, and it makes the girls grateful for their sweaters as
they continue going. The hike started off down a bit of a slope, but
the rest of the way it's been a gradual uphill climb, with the
occasional twist or turn around a ridge that's too steep to keep going.
There's an area map that Goldie had printed out at home and marked up
in a way that made sense enough to help them find where this house was
marked on the records.
"We gotta be getting close," said Goldie
from where she was crouched down beside a tree. The printed map was
propped up on her legs and she was trailing their path with an orange
fingernail. She did shit like check where moss was growing and peer at
the beginning buds of stars in the sky to orient-- even if she did show
up with lilac-colored lipstick and heavy eyeliner today, the small-town
wolf learned her way around out in The Sticks.
That didn't make
her accurate with guessing distances, though. She's guessed 'a mile or
so', and the hike actually turned out to be three and a half miles. For
that she'd shrugged apologetically, but onward they went.
Light
from the phone was extinguished and the device itself tucked away, then
Goldie stood and folded the map back up to stick in her back pocket as
well.
"Right over that hill."
She said that last time.
"Really this time, though."
Mary
"If
it's not, you're buying dinner," Mary says, not quite breathless. Mary
is a Silver Fang, Mary is a climber of mountains, Mary is from a place
where hills roll and fields stretch and vinyards tangle with wild
cypress over rocky promontories and everything is gold, gold rippling
against a breeze, everything is gold and lucent as a crown except by
moonlight when it silvers; Mary is a Silver Fang, and she bears herself
well, even after hiking further than expected. How far does one expect
to hike when one is scouting?
"And I'm taking the map,
wait, wait, hold on hold on, I can say that gruffer." Pause; her eyes go
a little dead. "And I'm taking the map."
There has to be a
serious cop and then the rambunctious rookie, and they both are
hilarious: that's the score. Mary takes a deep deep lungful of air, and
it is not a fact that one's wolf-shape is any less exhausted than say
one's girl-shape if one is to switch skins: but Mary considers being a
little faster.
Covert glance around before becoming a
radiant-as-a-ghost dappled-by-milk-and-shadow into the scrubland wolf,
bright-eyed, massive (the female of the species are the most dangerous,
queenly), in order to get a bit ahead pushing forward find it find it.
Cheating, maybe.
Goldie
Mary could play 'tough
cop'. Goldie liked that better, it was more convincing when coming from
a Queen of Wolves than when coming from a wiry little thing like her
anyways. Plus, 'rambunctious rookie' was practically on her name tag up
through to her Rite of Passage. So Goldie just grinned when threatened
in the pocket book and navigator's pride.
When the Silver Fang
became a ghost-white wolf, Goldie watched her scoot on ahead as though
she was temporarily starstruck (just a little-- breeding had a different
impact from skin to skin), like she wasn't accustomed to seeing those
bright white wolves of the northern empires.
Keeping to her own
girl-skin, for her legs were able enough, even if she did have to pause
and catch her breath more often, Goldie adjusted the straps of her
knapsack, leaned into the incline, and kept on moving.
-----------------------
Up
ahead, the Mary-Wolf climbed and pushed, sniff-sniffing like wolves
do. The hillside grew a bit more steap near the very top, but Mary can
see a top and when she reaches it she finds that it flattens out for
perhaps 500 yards or so before angling into another incline much as
before.
She also finds that Goldie no longer owes her dinner and
gets to keep her map. There, tucked into the crook of the next
hillside, was their target. A grand old in thing in its time, perhaps a
welcome escape that one man dreamed of and built once upon a time ago,
out here in the wild and away from everything. Now, though.
Now
the three-stories that the building rose from the ground seemed
intimidating instead of exquisite. Wood that once glowed with health
was now gray and dead and weathered, standing out like a piece of death
from the backdrop of green-yellow shrub on the ground and the dappled
orange-brown-yellow-green of the trees growing sparsely around and
behind the property. There were many windows, half of which were
broken, the other half of which so aged with dust and weather that
they'd gone opaque.
There were double doors at the front of the
house, on the second story from where Mary had come upon the house
from. To reach them, a cement staircase stretched like a dying man's
hand away from the front door, as though some giant were trying to
escape its shell and just didn't quite make it.
The area around?
Dead and still.
Mary
[Sense
Wyrm! Perception + Occult. + 1 die (Helios, thanks bro!) -2 diff (Gaia,
thanks ma!). +WP. New day on the job, feelin' that pressure.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Goldie
A
deep breath in, and wolfish nostrils blessed by Helios himself, for
that wolf was a faithful wolf who said her prayers and performed her
rites and minded the Gods that many neglected, smelled the utter decay surrounding the place.
There
was some natural decay, the smell of leaves dying and fallen to the
ground, old ones kicked up from their first thaw still trying to turn to
proper mulch on the ground. But then there was something different not
just over top of it all, but under it, laced within, a very part of the
scenery that she was taking in. It was a stink of decay that was thick
and sweet and cloying. Like something deeper than bodies alone had
figured out how to rot and was holed up in that house, rotting and
seeping and oozing into the landscape around it.
Twisting through
the air like steam that hangs instead of evaporating, through the
atmosphere and squiggling-squirming its way into whatever walked into
its path. Mary was pretty sure she could feel that taint combing through her fur like a breeze, catching and worming under her pelt.
Ah,
but that smell. It was enough to make one's mouth water and their
stomach turn all at once. For Mary, for just a moment, she could have
sworn that the watering mouth was for some sick, uncomfortable want for whatever it was that was decaying in there.
Just a bite.
Just the one.
"Hey,"
said Goldie quietly about a dozen yards behind her. Footsteps were
slowing as she recognized herself reaching the top of the hill she had
been climbing. "See anything?
Mary
Up there on
the ridge, by the dessicated twist of wood, the golem-carved solemn
lifelessness, the royal-wolf is bristling, bristling, fur on end,
shaking her head once twice as if something's caught on her mouth an
almost gag and a soft chuff huff teeth clicking back together tongue
like peanut butter is stuck curling except it is not, snout wrinkled,
wrinkling, too, low rumble of an almost-growl - subliminal how it wavers
in the air; an almost palpable expression of curiousity and rage, and
then, in the language wolves use to communicate, Mary tells Goldie,
Here
it is. Rank. Rank decay rot Wyrm everywhere everywhere sticking in my
mouth like caramel apple candy but rot fester disgusting. This is
totally the place. We've done good so far.
- almost smug,
that last; a surfacing gleam of it. Warriors have to joke or else
they'll stop being warriors they'll just stop. That's what wars like the
war against (Destruction) the Wyrm do.
Goldie
"Delicious,"
Goldie commented with a bit of a sympathetic wrinkle to her nose. She
didn't smell anything herself, just the smell of trees and leaves and
cool mountain air. In looking at poor Mary, she opted to keep her human
skin just a little longer after all. Maybe the Wyrm stink here was
actually bad enough for her to smell it without the spirits having
taught her how to.
Goldie had dressed appropriately for laying low
and going unnoticed, after all. She wore a pair of dark gray jeans and
a very faded, many-times-washed black tank-top underneath her brown
bombadeer jacket. All muted tones, all intended specifically to break
up and blend into the landscape (outright black made you stick out as a
shape in the shadows, Goldie learned from a wise Ragabash once when she
was young). So, instead, she stayed crouched low nearby Mary and
gestured to the right of the house, where the incline picked up to wrap
toward the mountains as well. There was a particularly nice growth of
shrubby bushes that would make for great cover.
"Plus," Goldie added quietly in argument for the shrubs, "higher ground."
And
so, leaned forward and siddling her way through the sparse foliage on
those lean and bendy limbs, Goldie started over that way. It looked
like as good a place to set up and watch and see what happens as any.
Goldie
[Perception 3 + Alertness 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )
Mary
Good
spot, wolf-Mary agrees, though she drifts further from it at first,
poking around a little off the beaten track, straying, straying, before
Goldie reaches the good hiding spot all sparse foliage and spinding
shadows and dry skeletan rushing and then she joins the Fianna there
hunkering down that-a-way or that is the plan that is always the plan:
watch and wait and watch and wait and listen and listen and listen and
Mary, Mary can curl into a tight knot can't she, can wiggle into small
corners tiny places one wouldn't expect a wolf to hunker, and so: that
is what she does.
That is the plan that's always the plan. What do the No Moons see?
[Perc + Alert]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Mary
[2 suxx because of the -2 diff, whoops!]
Goldie
Premature
dusk on the mountainside, when the peaks are to the West, was a chill
and dim thing to begin with. Once the pair of Ragabashes had found a
place to stake out comfortably, out of sight but able to see the house
from the side themselves, so they can see both the front entrance and
the back one alike, the night only grew darker and colder.
At
first, nothing happened. They would wait, anxious and eager to see what
happens. After the first hour or so passed, maybe one or the other
suggested that they go investigate. That would leave the other or the
one to balance that, because going into a place that stank so badly of
such rotting Wyrm as just a pair of scouts was a death wish. Maybe
because of that neither suggested a thing.
Ultimately, though, they would wait.
And wait.
Though
they knew how to be quiet and patient, boredom would still sneak in
through the cracks. It always did, that's why soldiers brought decks of
cards to trenches. It was somewhere around ten in the evening, when
the sun had long since set but the witching hour was still a good wait
away, that something finally picked up on the edge of the girls'
attention.
"Hang on, I think...," Goldie said, and twisted about
from where she'd been laying on her side to crouch instead, so she could
peer just over the top of the foliage that kept them hidden. She
peered, squinted, scrubbed a heel to her eye and squinted again. Not
quite sure what she was seeing, but seeing something. "You see that?
On the stairs."
She meant the ones on the front of the house, and yes, Mary did
see what Goldie was pointing to. Matter of fact, she saw it first, but
Goldie was the loudmouth wasn't she? Motormouth, anyways, she at least
knew not to be loud when stalking the enemy. But there, sliding out
from under the door was a mist. Nothing that was naturally occurring by
the woods and rot of the earth beneath the house, no, but something
distinct and different seeping and pushing out from under the stairs.
Then
down, down, pouring down the steps and into the air. What came pouring
out of the door came to an end, and that pale white mist puddled at the
bottom of the stairs before arranging itself into a pillar
approximately four feet tall.
Yes, Mary saw that very much.
Mary
I
see it, the wolf-Mary says, in the way that wolves say such things, and
her demeanor is calm in spite of the live-wire tension the anger moving
through her pelt moving her pelt, her eyes flint-spark chips in the -- is it dark now? Is it glooming?
Wait. Watch. (Steady. Steady.) Mary-wolf says, pressing briefly against Goldie, to hold her and still her if necessary- but perhaps it isn't.
The veteran keeping a level head a cool heart.
Mary
[Int + Occult!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (2, 4, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Goldie
To
the little Fianna's credit, she wasn't itching to go barreling down the
hill and start trying to pull apart a cloud of mist. That was
something a Get of Fenris that has never been slapped by a Theurge might
do, but Goldie Lennox new better. Still, when Mary pressed into the
lean girl body (twang where Mary was bass), she could feel the hum of
energy, of excitement at seeing some activity at last.
But, steady
steady, Goldie watched and waited. The most she did was situate where
her feet and knees and hands were so she could rest her weight more
comfortably, lean just a little bit further forward to try and better
see what was going on with that cloud.
That cloud, that mist, that seemed to behave as though it had a purpose, Mary would note. That was a thing,
not a side-effect. Not an extension of, either. Mary was a smart
thing, she's read up on the things that bump in the dark and gnash teeth
at the Wyrm's underbelly hoping for a chance to suckle. From this
distance, she couldn't see precisely what the cloud was. But she did
know that there were several options:
A wraith. It could actually
be a ghost, a shade, a human spirit gone lost and manifested in the
wrong plane, and the ghost stories may be true. In which case, bring on
the Theurges.
A wyrm-minion. A fomori of some kind; a freak.
She's heard tale that some of them have burst into clouds of vapor when
attacked and managed to slither-slip-escape through windows and chimneys
or just blown away on the breeze. But then, the Wyrm could do just
about anything it put its twisted mind to, couldn't it?
A
vampire. Some of them could alter their physical forms, and haven't
there been tales and stories and whispers and old, old recordings of
vampires descending upon prey and trespassers as a hanging mist? It
could also explain why this thing only came out at the witching hours,
too.
Whatever it was, it would need closer investigation, perhaps
some actual interaction before Mary would be able to confirm what it was
for certain. It seemed that chance would not come, though, because
within a minute the dense and stationary pillar of mist stretched
taller, grew thinner as it did, taller and thinner until it had simply--
--disappeared.
Mary
Gone.
The
Mary-wolf doesn't make a sound and doesn't twitch a muscle at first.
The Mary-wolf stays brace-legged curled-tight waiting, a moment another
and another. Boredom has lifted at long last, monotony chased away by
the thrill of discovery; or is it a thrill? Be matter of fact.
The Mary-wolf says, Time?
To check against the urban legend's time.
Goldie
"The
fuck...?" Goldie whispered this quietly, very quietly, breathed it
really as the mist began to stretch and grow dim and thin and fade,
become less visible the more it stretched. Once it had vanished,
apparently stretching itself thin enough to be dispersed through the
air--
(but Mary knew better, she knew it didn't actually
disperse-- it had to stay together because it was an entity, a being of
some kind, and it couldn't be all places at once, no it had simply
stretched and faded and gone intentionally invisible, wherever it was
that it had gone off to)
-- Goldie was silent to the point that
she was even holding her breath. At no point had there been any
indication that they had been spied, but without a line of sight with
that vapor it was impossible to tell where it had gone. The chance was
there, slim but present, that it was about to try and get the drop on
them.
But no drop came. A flick of ears and low 'whuff' from the
side wouldn't be understood by any that wasn't born of Wolf People, but
Goldie reached into her hoodie pocket and managed to peek at the screen
without having to pull the phone out and let the light of it be a beacon
to the enemy of where they were.
"Almost quarter after ten," she
said softly, and watched the rotting hollow house simply sit in its
mountainside for a little while longer. Perhaps several minutes would
need to pass before she felt comfortable enough in their security to
lean back and eyeball the sleek white wolf at her side questioningly.
"Should we watch and see if it comes back...?"
Mary
No
drop came. The Mary-wolf takes a step (drifts a step, soundless) nearer
the house, derelict, decrepit, creaking in its rot, in its wrongness;
can't she just feel it still, between her teeth? Doesn't the rise and
fall of her ribs call out to go into it and rend? The Mary-wolf takes a
silent step, waiting, waiting, tense with waiting, and then the Silver
Fang shifts from wolf-Mary to girl-Mary, Mary-in-red-hair, Mary-in-curls
and her makeup is still impeccable, because Silver Fangs are neat a
veneer over their wildness. Her voice is pitched low.
"I want us
to take a look at the other side. Then we'll wait another hour, and if
it doesn't show, we'll go. If it does," she grins, a sharp wolf's grin,
something that isn't quite manic but is full of bright energy, "we'll
watch it do the reverse of what we just saw, I bet."
Goldie
[Peeking! Gnosis 2, diff 8]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Mary
[Peeking! Oh man, don't botch, we're gonna WP this too.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (6, 6, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Goldie
I want us to take a look at the other side. Then we'll wait.
Goldie
thought about the suggestion for a moment, then grinned right back at
the woman who replaced the wolf but still smiled like one. "Like a film
in rewind?" But the question was, obviously, rhetorical. Soon the
Fianna's big brown eyes were turned back upon the house, finding a
balance between pinprick-sharp and loosely unfocused so that she could
peer through the invisible binds and webs that separate the Spirit World
from the Physical Earth.
It took her some time of sitting
concentrated like this. At least a minute before there was a shift in
her shoulders and a prickling tension in the air around her (for Goldie,
along her spine and neck and arms). She was at last seeing. Seeing
not the same exact lines and details as Mary, but the same thing all the
same. Mary saw, too, she saw--
-- that house standing far more
solid than any manmade structure had right to in the spirit world,
outside of a church or some other place of strong strong faith like
that. It had been there for time, long enough to impress upon the
Reflection Realm, but it still seemed very solid. Solid and black and
the windows were sickly yellow-orange instead with no holes in them.
The shingles shimmered like scales, almost, black beetle carapices
stacked atop one another, and when the wind cut just right they would
shiver their way to start standing before calming once again.
The
cement stairs did not crumble, but they were slick with black-red gore
that oozed from the front door, that also leaked from the foundation and
the windows just at their edges. Around the house itself, the ground
was gray and dead as ash, dried and withered and sucked free and sapped
dry long ago, dead and decayed long past the point of rotting any more.
This gray circle stretched a good thirty feet away from the house's
foundation before the trees and rocks and earth and shrubs could call
themselves out of range. At that point everything even seemed to curl
back just a little bit, as though recoiling from whatever toxic touch
that establishment had been pressing into the land.
"Jesus fucking
Christ," Goldie breathed in quiet, disgusted awe. The way that she
scrubbed her fingertips into her eyelids (hard enough that she smeared
her eyeliner about) told that she couldn't be more happy to get the
image out of her eyes when she pulled her full consciousness back to the
physical plane.
"That's.... just awful."
It was an easy understatement to agree with.
------------------------
An
hour was the agreed amount of time to keep waiting, and when that had
passed (plus an extra thirty minutes that Goldie had talked Mary into
hold up, just wait a little longer just to see) there were no other
changes or fluxes of activity to report. The mist never reappeared, no
other noises or movements could be detected around the place.
Since
they sure as hell weren't about to go inside, and since there was no
telling if/when that mist would be reappearing, the girls would finally
call it a night.
After all, this was plenty of information to bring back to a Sept, wasn't it?
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