[Aurora] Dawn.
It's a cool enough morning, but the humidity in the air is reminiscent of summertime. The air feels thick, heavy - not oppressive, not yet, not this early in the day, when the cool of the night lingers everywhere. There's a drifting fog rolling off the Chicago River this early in the morning, not enough to obscure the streets, but enough to give the waterway a certain atmospheric quality in the early hours of the morning.
Few enough people are up at this hour. Delivery trucks make their rounds downtown, tossing out bundles of newspapers, delivering freshly baked bagels, bread, or croissants to downtown eateries. Otherwise, though, the commercial heart of the city is sleeping, the commuters are still snug in their beds, or just stumbling out of them, flailing at the alarm clock, talking themselves into the morning run.
There are two jogging paths flanking the Chicago River, where it cuts through Grant Park. One is higher on the bank; the other is 10 or fifteen feet lower, cut into the slope of the steep river bank, reachable by stairs set into the slope at odd intervals up and down the riverfront. The grass between the two paths is kept groomed well-enough. Here are there, more naturalistic plantings have been attempted. Below the lower path, though, the slope is often choked with bramble, a tangle of self-planted seedlings, weeds - survival of the fittest, Darwinism at its finest - whatever can and will grow grows.
[Imogen] Imogen, ironically enough, does not take many traditional steps to protect the environment. She does not invest in cloth bags, she does not worry much about litter.
She is of the opinion that the environment has much bigger things to worry about.
Still, today, she carries a cloth bag, much more for its silence than for its lower impact on the city's dumps, weighted with its contents. She walks along the path closest to the water, the fingers of her free hand lightly tapping her thigh.
Her eyes scan the bank, the weeds the choked bramble. The cold water. Mornings are still cool these days, spring is still upon the city, slow to let loose its grip and give way to summer. She cannot see her breath, but still, she finds the air a little too cool for her blood.
She's chosen this section of the river for a reason - it is near, but not exactly at an earlier site. Her gaze flicks over the flora for signs of breakage, flattened and trampled sections.
If she finds none, she will pick a site anyway. But she looks first.
[Imogen] (perception+alertness.
HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Aurora] The light is low; indirect. The sun has risen somewhere to the east, across the lake, behind a bank of drifting clouds that leaves the city drenched in a sort of watery gray light. Insects hum over the surface of the lake, in the nooks and eddies, the bogs and the still pools, the backwaters and the brackish bottoms, a low, constant drone of life. Dusk and dawn are the best hours for hunting at the water's edge.
There is a certain stench at the water's edge. A certain vegetative rot, the drenched scent of green things soaked with wet, of duckweed and algae, of rotting, tender roots and mud. There is a certain stench to the Chicago River, too, a chemical undertone that leaves a film in the back of one's throat, it tastes like rancid gasoline sometimes, and sometimes it tastes like bad salmon and sometimes it -
- but that rot, that chemical scent, that's not a human rot, not a flesh-gone-wrong rot, not the too-familiar scent of putrefaction. Imogen is searching the bank for signs of movement, for broken limbs, for scraps of trash that looks more deliberate than the garbage that wallows in the eddies, but it is the scent that draws her first - the scent that stops her here, where the lower path dips closer to the water, bows outward to accommodate a bench and a railing for a mini-overlook. There is a little hollow worn into the vegetation below the overlook, the suggestion of a hole wormed into the bank beneath. A strip of cloth, pale pink, stuck to one of the brambles.
And the scent of flesh, rotting. Larger than a cat, and smaller than a human.
[Imogen] She moves, slowly, toward the smell, not through the overhang but along the edge of the bank, approaching it cautiously, leaving her weighted bag behind her near the path.
She does not enter the water but looks at the scrap of cloth, the dug hole from a visible angle, before turning away, casting about for a stick of good size. She finds one, likely one tossed for a dog and then abandoned at the edge of the water, picking it up gingerly with one hand as she reaches behind her for her weapon with the other.
She tests the length of the stick before gingerly, sticking it into the hole, carefully tracing the wood around the perimeter before digging deep.
[Imogen] (dex + athletics!
HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 8 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Aurora] The slope is steep and mudslick, damp from the constant rise and fall of the river. The tangled plants are treacherous and forbidding, nameless things, green-green-green, thorny and waterlogged, choked with virginia creeper and poison ivy and sumac and morning glory and noxious fireweed and eunonymous, briar roses and thistle and - and - and -
- Imogen navigates it all with astonishing aplomb, neatly keeping her balance where the slope wants to crumble, avoiding the tangle of three-leaved vines something in the back of her mind identifies as poison ivy. She pulls a stick from the muck, circles the dug hole, leaving a narrow traced circle in the soft mud, then pushes.
The hole is half-filled back in with mud, she pushes it over the infilled mud, deeper into the narrow hole - which is not big enough for a human to crawl into. Instead, it looks to be just slightly larger in diameter than a human arm - or leg. Six inches in, perhaps less, there is something on the other side, the hint of resistence. If she pushes harder, it gives way all-of-a-sudden, a soft, squelching sort of tear. The scent of putrefaction is blooms brighter in the air.
The hole is perhaps two feet deep, wider inside than it seems to be from without. She digs easily, neatly, not dislodging too much mud, and finds the meat-stash, soft and rotten, the cuts nearly unidentifiable. Close up, the impressions of (in)human hands and feet in the mud are faint around the exterior of the hole, but all too obvious to her trained eye.
[Aurora] [Do we smell you!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 6, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Imogen] Her nostrils flatten in an expression of distaste, well-bred and subtle. It is not a stench with which she is unfamiliar. She can imagine the water-logged feel of the flesh beneath her hands, death and life separated only by a thin membrane of latex as she probes orifices and skin for signs of damage. She knows the way that kind of flesh gives. She knows the smell, after it has been in the water for some time.
She digs the stick into the fetid matter and pulls it out, roughly spooning out a portion of the hoarded meal.
Then she glances over her shoulder, stepping back carefully from the waterbed toward more solid ground, her gun by her side, her finger on the trigger guard.
[Imogen]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 2
[Imogen]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 10
[Aurora] There is the suggestion of something slick underneath the water. She sees it like a silverfish under the surface of the brown waters, churned up with spring runoff, full of trash. Sees the disturbance in the placid surface of the river's current, ten feet out as the shreds of deliquesced flesh drop like chum into the water. The stick follows, flung out into the shallows, a soft plop as it breaks the surface of the water. Imogen then scrambles up the bank, putting a good 10 feet between herself and the water's gray surface, finding a solid perch a handful of feet below the level of the lower jogging path.
It is quiet here, in the morning. There is the distant hum of traffic, the rattle of the El, though not close. The electric hum of a breathing city - always - but quiet, quiet enough that she can hear the riverwater slapping the shore, quiet enough that she can hear the liquid echo of that sound where the river flowers under one of the city's many bridges, not far distant. Quiet enough that she can hear her thoughts, can almost hear the water parting as the shimmer on the surface breaks and a deadwhite hand reaches up for one of the bits of flesh floating admidst the detritus in the river shallows. Grabs the flesh unerringly, hungry. Grabs another mouthful; grabs, sudden, the stick that smells of it - and -
[Imogen] Her thoughts are precise, sharp edged. Her jaw is tight, as if she does not like what she thinks, or perhaps, does not like what she does.
She has no perfect sense of the culmination of duty, here.
It is, in fact, just the opposite.
She can feel her breathing, feel her pulse beat its points. She can nearly hear the water as it parts to reveal a dead-white, pulseless hand. And she can surely hear the way her heartbeat changes.
What is silent: lifting the weapon, and taking aim. Moving her finger from the trigger guard to the trigger.
She aims for where the body would be, if it were attached to the hand. And she waits, a little longer.
[Aurora] stills.
Goes still. There are ripples in the shallows, the impression of something pale beneath the surface of the water turning slowly somewhere beneath the visible. The trash collected in the shallow quivers as the body glides beneath it. Another scrap of flesh disappears. Behind the first, then - the impression of another, come too late for the meager bounty. The stick, floating on the river's surface, is seized by a pale hand further out in the current, where the shallows fall away and the channel sinks, deep and dark and filth-strewn. It is lifted and then discarded, cast aside.
- closer, hand on the sedge at the waterline, grips and pulls, beginning to lever itself out of the water.
[Imogen] (three round burst, preemptive strike)
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Imogen] init: +9
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8
[Aurora] soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 3, 10 (Success x 1 at target 8)
[Aurora] Init + 5
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6
[Aurora] Thing 2. +4
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1
[Aurora] [Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 11
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. swimswimswim into the shallows!]
[Thing 1: 1. crawl onto the bank! 2. Stink!]
[Imogen] (1.a 3 round burst
1.b. shoot!)
[Imogen] (HAIL KAHSEENO!)
3rb!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 3, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 7 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Imogen] Damage
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 6 (Botch x 1 at target 8)
[Imogen] shot 2! HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Imogen] Damage!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 6, 7 (Failure at target 8)
[Aurora] Two sharp bursts of gunfire are followed by another single shot. The bullets pepper the deadflesh of the crawling thing, so foul it cannot be considered human, not anymore. There's something scaly about the dead white skin, something wrong about the way the clothing is rotting around that solid white flesh, more waxen than animal.
The first burst barely grazes the thing's hide. The second, though, catches it firmly in the chest, while the third slams home though the shoulder, the damage enough to nearly severe the limb.
The thing spasms, lifts it grotesque visage up, following the path of the bullets, and stares at Imogen with bloodshot eyes. The irises seem filmed over with black. When it opens its mouth in a soundless scream, it displays a mouthful of broken, sharpened teeth.
Stink! -5 wound penalty
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 5, 6 (Failure at target 6)
[Aurora] [Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 11
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. eats some breakfasts in the shallows! 2. oh, hai! guys, crawl onto bank.]
[Thing 1: 1. stink! 2. charge up slope! RAWR.]
[Imogen] She knows her weapon by now. She knows the rhythm of it, the recoil of it in her hand. She knows its sound and the sound of the ringing in her ears that follows.
She knows how to time each tap of the trigger perfectly between each kick of the gun.
The way the thing looks at her is wrong. The way its skin and flesh and bone reacts to the path of the bullet is wrong. She finds a small corner of her mind, briefly, momentarily occupied with the potential science behind it.
What fuels the animation after the life is gone? Is it merely the same energy that had existed in life, firing neurons and sparking nerves which power the animal mind, and the animal instinct?
The gun kicks in her hand, and she is forced back thoroughly into this moment.
(declaration:
three round burst.
fire.)
[Imogen] 3rb
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 3, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 10 (Failure at target 8)
[Imogen] second shot. HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Aurora] Thing 2 - soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 4, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 8)
[Aurora] This time, the inhuman thing falls. There are no death throes - not now, not yet. Instead, there is a sort of twitching spasm that crawls over the dead flesh. The empty hands open and close over the greenery on the bank. Neurons - that? Electrical impulses over long dead nerves? Some animated spasm, the last gasp of the bleak, terrible spirit that has chosen to infest the flesh of the dead -
- she has no time to consider. The thing falls, unmoving, and she turns her sights on the second one, crawling through the shallows, snagging bits of chum with which she had salted the water earlier before crawling onto the bank, grasping some trailing vine to pull its deadweight out of the water onto the embankment and - is hit solidly in the cheekbone, the impact shatters bone, sends fragments flying, but there is no blood. Just water, and the scent of death in the air.
[Aurora] Round 3!
[Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 7L
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. stink! 2. grab thing 1! he looks YUMMY.]
[Thing 1: be incapacitated. 2. be grabbed. is dinner nao. :( ]
[Imogen] (split action 4 ways
shoot
shoot
shoot
shoot + wp)
[Imogen] first shot!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 3, 4 (Botch x 1 at target 8)
[Aurora] The second thing goes down - spasming and jerking like the first, falls hard against the muddy slope and cannot move, the impact a soft, dull thud. The face - what was the face - is a ruin, the flesh broken, shards of checkbone evident, the skin open, everything beneath white, white, and white, like the flesh of a coldwater fish, some bottomfeeder thing churned up from the deepwater murk. They do not breathe, they do not blink, they do not bleed.
They live, though. Both, still. Imogen can see that in their oleaginous black eyes, the oilslick gleam of them, like bathing in ink when they look at her.
[Imogen] She closes the distance slowly, stepping forward with caution. One foot in front of the other, her weight balanced on her toes. Her finger on the trigger.
The first one, she steps up to and levels the muzzle of the gun at its temple. Fires, once.
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9 (Success x 6 at target 4)
[Imogen] damage! HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 5, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 8)
[Imogen] Once the creature is dead, she moves to the next. Closes the distance and points the barrel of her gun down toward the abomination's head.
She speaks, however, rather than firing.
"Can you speak? Do you understand me?" And: "Are there anymore of you?"
[Aurora] There's no clear indication that she has been understood. The thing stares back with dead black eyes, the ruined face gaping open. There is no suggestion of pain in the face, just that vague and hungry stare.
There, like smoke, the skim disappears from the irises. They are not black, they are a pale blue, bloodshot, rotten. Whatever was holding the corpse together uncoheres. The face goes slack, the eyes go dead, some liquid smoke drifts out of the nostril - a formless form that slips out of the things noses, drifts - not like smoke, then, but like an organism, some loose association of plasma bound by a common cell wall, testing the air the way a snake tests it with its tongue.
The face of the corpse - eases - somehow, too.
[Imogen] She is not surprised, not really. Not by the lack of response, and not entirely by the death. The damage to the body is already what would kill a human in minutes. Why not an unnatural creature such as this?
She stays near the water for some time - waiting to see if any more appear.
Eventually, she returns to where she's left her cloth bag, digging inside. She sets a packet of raw meat on the pavement, retrieving several heavy black body bags. She sets about the removal of them, wrestling heavy, flaccid bodies into the bags, then dragging the bodies just out of sight from the path.
She moves her car before moving the bodies into the truck. She works swiftly - the sun is continuing its inexorable rise, and soon the park will not be as deserted as it has been. Soon, there will be eyes.
The drive to her disposal site is one of the more unpleasant ones. The smell of the bodies permeates the cheap volvo. The smell of fetid water.
Burning them is, in short, disgusting.
Soon after, she is at work, drinking coffee and starting her day, as if the morning hasn't happened. It is almost as if it hadn't, but for the ringing in her ears.
It's a cool enough morning, but the humidity in the air is reminiscent of summertime. The air feels thick, heavy - not oppressive, not yet, not this early in the day, when the cool of the night lingers everywhere. There's a drifting fog rolling off the Chicago River this early in the morning, not enough to obscure the streets, but enough to give the waterway a certain atmospheric quality in the early hours of the morning.
Few enough people are up at this hour. Delivery trucks make their rounds downtown, tossing out bundles of newspapers, delivering freshly baked bagels, bread, or croissants to downtown eateries. Otherwise, though, the commercial heart of the city is sleeping, the commuters are still snug in their beds, or just stumbling out of them, flailing at the alarm clock, talking themselves into the morning run.
There are two jogging paths flanking the Chicago River, where it cuts through Grant Park. One is higher on the bank; the other is 10 or fifteen feet lower, cut into the slope of the steep river bank, reachable by stairs set into the slope at odd intervals up and down the riverfront. The grass between the two paths is kept groomed well-enough. Here are there, more naturalistic plantings have been attempted. Below the lower path, though, the slope is often choked with bramble, a tangle of self-planted seedlings, weeds - survival of the fittest, Darwinism at its finest - whatever can and will grow grows.
[Imogen] Imogen, ironically enough, does not take many traditional steps to protect the environment. She does not invest in cloth bags, she does not worry much about litter.
She is of the opinion that the environment has much bigger things to worry about.
Still, today, she carries a cloth bag, much more for its silence than for its lower impact on the city's dumps, weighted with its contents. She walks along the path closest to the water, the fingers of her free hand lightly tapping her thigh.
Her eyes scan the bank, the weeds the choked bramble. The cold water. Mornings are still cool these days, spring is still upon the city, slow to let loose its grip and give way to summer. She cannot see her breath, but still, she finds the air a little too cool for her blood.
She's chosen this section of the river for a reason - it is near, but not exactly at an earlier site. Her gaze flicks over the flora for signs of breakage, flattened and trampled sections.
If she finds none, she will pick a site anyway. But she looks first.
[Imogen] (perception+alertness.
HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Aurora] The light is low; indirect. The sun has risen somewhere to the east, across the lake, behind a bank of drifting clouds that leaves the city drenched in a sort of watery gray light. Insects hum over the surface of the lake, in the nooks and eddies, the bogs and the still pools, the backwaters and the brackish bottoms, a low, constant drone of life. Dusk and dawn are the best hours for hunting at the water's edge.
There is a certain stench at the water's edge. A certain vegetative rot, the drenched scent of green things soaked with wet, of duckweed and algae, of rotting, tender roots and mud. There is a certain stench to the Chicago River, too, a chemical undertone that leaves a film in the back of one's throat, it tastes like rancid gasoline sometimes, and sometimes it tastes like bad salmon and sometimes it -
- but that rot, that chemical scent, that's not a human rot, not a flesh-gone-wrong rot, not the too-familiar scent of putrefaction. Imogen is searching the bank for signs of movement, for broken limbs, for scraps of trash that looks more deliberate than the garbage that wallows in the eddies, but it is the scent that draws her first - the scent that stops her here, where the lower path dips closer to the water, bows outward to accommodate a bench and a railing for a mini-overlook. There is a little hollow worn into the vegetation below the overlook, the suggestion of a hole wormed into the bank beneath. A strip of cloth, pale pink, stuck to one of the brambles.
And the scent of flesh, rotting. Larger than a cat, and smaller than a human.
[Imogen] She moves, slowly, toward the smell, not through the overhang but along the edge of the bank, approaching it cautiously, leaving her weighted bag behind her near the path.
She does not enter the water but looks at the scrap of cloth, the dug hole from a visible angle, before turning away, casting about for a stick of good size. She finds one, likely one tossed for a dog and then abandoned at the edge of the water, picking it up gingerly with one hand as she reaches behind her for her weapon with the other.
She tests the length of the stick before gingerly, sticking it into the hole, carefully tracing the wood around the perimeter before digging deep.
[Imogen] (dex + athletics!
HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 8 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Aurora] The slope is steep and mudslick, damp from the constant rise and fall of the river. The tangled plants are treacherous and forbidding, nameless things, green-green-green, thorny and waterlogged, choked with virginia creeper and poison ivy and sumac and morning glory and noxious fireweed and eunonymous, briar roses and thistle and - and - and -
- Imogen navigates it all with astonishing aplomb, neatly keeping her balance where the slope wants to crumble, avoiding the tangle of three-leaved vines something in the back of her mind identifies as poison ivy. She pulls a stick from the muck, circles the dug hole, leaving a narrow traced circle in the soft mud, then pushes.
The hole is half-filled back in with mud, she pushes it over the infilled mud, deeper into the narrow hole - which is not big enough for a human to crawl into. Instead, it looks to be just slightly larger in diameter than a human arm - or leg. Six inches in, perhaps less, there is something on the other side, the hint of resistence. If she pushes harder, it gives way all-of-a-sudden, a soft, squelching sort of tear. The scent of putrefaction is blooms brighter in the air.
The hole is perhaps two feet deep, wider inside than it seems to be from without. She digs easily, neatly, not dislodging too much mud, and finds the meat-stash, soft and rotten, the cuts nearly unidentifiable. Close up, the impressions of (in)human hands and feet in the mud are faint around the exterior of the hole, but all too obvious to her trained eye.
[Aurora] [Do we smell you!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 6, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Imogen] Her nostrils flatten in an expression of distaste, well-bred and subtle. It is not a stench with which she is unfamiliar. She can imagine the water-logged feel of the flesh beneath her hands, death and life separated only by a thin membrane of latex as she probes orifices and skin for signs of damage. She knows the way that kind of flesh gives. She knows the smell, after it has been in the water for some time.
She digs the stick into the fetid matter and pulls it out, roughly spooning out a portion of the hoarded meal.
Then she glances over her shoulder, stepping back carefully from the waterbed toward more solid ground, her gun by her side, her finger on the trigger guard.
[Imogen]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 2
[Imogen]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 10
[Aurora] There is the suggestion of something slick underneath the water. She sees it like a silverfish under the surface of the brown waters, churned up with spring runoff, full of trash. Sees the disturbance in the placid surface of the river's current, ten feet out as the shreds of deliquesced flesh drop like chum into the water. The stick follows, flung out into the shallows, a soft plop as it breaks the surface of the water. Imogen then scrambles up the bank, putting a good 10 feet between herself and the water's gray surface, finding a solid perch a handful of feet below the level of the lower jogging path.
It is quiet here, in the morning. There is the distant hum of traffic, the rattle of the El, though not close. The electric hum of a breathing city - always - but quiet, quiet enough that she can hear the riverwater slapping the shore, quiet enough that she can hear the liquid echo of that sound where the river flowers under one of the city's many bridges, not far distant. Quiet enough that she can hear her thoughts, can almost hear the water parting as the shimmer on the surface breaks and a deadwhite hand reaches up for one of the bits of flesh floating admidst the detritus in the river shallows. Grabs the flesh unerringly, hungry. Grabs another mouthful; grabs, sudden, the stick that smells of it - and -
[Imogen] Her thoughts are precise, sharp edged. Her jaw is tight, as if she does not like what she thinks, or perhaps, does not like what she does.
She has no perfect sense of the culmination of duty, here.
It is, in fact, just the opposite.
She can feel her breathing, feel her pulse beat its points. She can nearly hear the water as it parts to reveal a dead-white, pulseless hand. And she can surely hear the way her heartbeat changes.
What is silent: lifting the weapon, and taking aim. Moving her finger from the trigger guard to the trigger.
She aims for where the body would be, if it were attached to the hand. And she waits, a little longer.
[Aurora] stills.
Goes still. There are ripples in the shallows, the impression of something pale beneath the surface of the water turning slowly somewhere beneath the visible. The trash collected in the shallow quivers as the body glides beneath it. Another scrap of flesh disappears. Behind the first, then - the impression of another, come too late for the meager bounty. The stick, floating on the river's surface, is seized by a pale hand further out in the current, where the shallows fall away and the channel sinks, deep and dark and filth-strewn. It is lifted and then discarded, cast aside.
- closer, hand on the sedge at the waterline, grips and pulls, beginning to lever itself out of the water.
[Imogen] (three round burst, preemptive strike)
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Imogen] init: +9
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8
[Aurora] soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 3, 10 (Success x 1 at target 8)
[Aurora] Init + 5
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6
[Aurora] Thing 2. +4
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1
[Aurora] [Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 11
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. swimswimswim into the shallows!]
[Thing 1: 1. crawl onto the bank! 2. Stink!]
[Imogen] (1.a 3 round burst
1.b. shoot!)
[Imogen] (HAIL KAHSEENO!)
3rb!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 3, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 7 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Imogen] Damage
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 6 (Botch x 1 at target 8)
[Imogen] shot 2! HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Imogen] Damage!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 6, 7 (Failure at target 8)
[Aurora] Two sharp bursts of gunfire are followed by another single shot. The bullets pepper the deadflesh of the crawling thing, so foul it cannot be considered human, not anymore. There's something scaly about the dead white skin, something wrong about the way the clothing is rotting around that solid white flesh, more waxen than animal.
The first burst barely grazes the thing's hide. The second, though, catches it firmly in the chest, while the third slams home though the shoulder, the damage enough to nearly severe the limb.
The thing spasms, lifts it grotesque visage up, following the path of the bullets, and stares at Imogen with bloodshot eyes. The irises seem filmed over with black. When it opens its mouth in a soundless scream, it displays a mouthful of broken, sharpened teeth.
Stink! -5 wound penalty
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 5, 6 (Failure at target 6)
[Aurora] [Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 11
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. eats some breakfasts in the shallows! 2. oh, hai! guys, crawl onto bank.]
[Thing 1: 1. stink! 2. charge up slope! RAWR.]
[Imogen] She knows her weapon by now. She knows the rhythm of it, the recoil of it in her hand. She knows its sound and the sound of the ringing in her ears that follows.
She knows how to time each tap of the trigger perfectly between each kick of the gun.
The way the thing looks at her is wrong. The way its skin and flesh and bone reacts to the path of the bullet is wrong. She finds a small corner of her mind, briefly, momentarily occupied with the potential science behind it.
What fuels the animation after the life is gone? Is it merely the same energy that had existed in life, firing neurons and sparking nerves which power the animal mind, and the animal instinct?
The gun kicks in her hand, and she is forced back thoroughly into this moment.
(declaration:
three round burst.
fire.)
[Imogen] 3rb
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 3, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 10 (Failure at target 8)
[Imogen] second shot. HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Aurora] Thing 2 - soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 4, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 8)
[Aurora] This time, the inhuman thing falls. There are no death throes - not now, not yet. Instead, there is a sort of twitching spasm that crawls over the dead flesh. The empty hands open and close over the greenery on the bank. Neurons - that? Electrical impulses over long dead nerves? Some animated spasm, the last gasp of the bleak, terrible spirit that has chosen to infest the flesh of the dead -
- she has no time to consider. The thing falls, unmoving, and she turns her sights on the second one, crawling through the shallows, snagging bits of chum with which she had salted the water earlier before crawling onto the bank, grasping some trailing vine to pull its deadweight out of the water onto the embankment and - is hit solidly in the cheekbone, the impact shatters bone, sends fragments flying, but there is no blood. Just water, and the scent of death in the air.
[Aurora] Round 3!
[Order: Imogen - 17
Thing 1: 7L
Thing 2: 5
Declarations:
[Thing 2: 1. stink! 2. grab thing 1! he looks YUMMY.]
[Thing 1: be incapacitated. 2. be grabbed. is dinner nao. :( ]
[Imogen] (split action 4 ways
shoot
shoot
shoot
shoot + wp)
[Imogen] first shot!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Imogen] damage!
HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 1, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 3, 4 (Botch x 1 at target 8)
[Aurora] The second thing goes down - spasming and jerking like the first, falls hard against the muddy slope and cannot move, the impact a soft, dull thud. The face - what was the face - is a ruin, the flesh broken, shards of checkbone evident, the skin open, everything beneath white, white, and white, like the flesh of a coldwater fish, some bottomfeeder thing churned up from the deepwater murk. They do not breathe, they do not blink, they do not bleed.
They live, though. Both, still. Imogen can see that in their oleaginous black eyes, the oilslick gleam of them, like bathing in ink when they look at her.
[Imogen] She closes the distance slowly, stepping forward with caution. One foot in front of the other, her weight balanced on her toes. Her finger on the trigger.
The first one, she steps up to and levels the muzzle of the gun at its temple. Fires, once.
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9 (Success x 6 at target 4)
[Imogen] damage! HAIL KAHSEENO!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 5, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Aurora] Soak!
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 8)
[Imogen] Once the creature is dead, she moves to the next. Closes the distance and points the barrel of her gun down toward the abomination's head.
She speaks, however, rather than firing.
"Can you speak? Do you understand me?" And: "Are there anymore of you?"
[Aurora] There's no clear indication that she has been understood. The thing stares back with dead black eyes, the ruined face gaping open. There is no suggestion of pain in the face, just that vague and hungry stare.
There, like smoke, the skim disappears from the irises. They are not black, they are a pale blue, bloodshot, rotten. Whatever was holding the corpse together uncoheres. The face goes slack, the eyes go dead, some liquid smoke drifts out of the nostril - a formless form that slips out of the things noses, drifts - not like smoke, then, but like an organism, some loose association of plasma bound by a common cell wall, testing the air the way a snake tests it with its tongue.
The face of the corpse - eases - somehow, too.
[Imogen] She is not surprised, not really. Not by the lack of response, and not entirely by the death. The damage to the body is already what would kill a human in minutes. Why not an unnatural creature such as this?
She stays near the water for some time - waiting to see if any more appear.
Eventually, she returns to where she's left her cloth bag, digging inside. She sets a packet of raw meat on the pavement, retrieving several heavy black body bags. She sets about the removal of them, wrestling heavy, flaccid bodies into the bags, then dragging the bodies just out of sight from the path.
She moves her car before moving the bodies into the truck. She works swiftly - the sun is continuing its inexorable rise, and soon the park will not be as deserted as it has been. Soon, there will be eyes.
The drive to her disposal site is one of the more unpleasant ones. The smell of the bodies permeates the cheap volvo. The smell of fetid water.
Burning them is, in short, disgusting.
Soon after, she is at work, drinking coffee and starting her day, as if the morning hasn't happened. It is almost as if it hadn't, but for the ringing in her ears.
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