[Crysallis] The dead man was homeless, found by children playing in a weedy stretch of the old engine yards, near a long-abandoned wheelhouse in a long-forgotten old trainyard hard against the city's once-famous stockyards, separated from a high-rise housing project by a deep gully that once houses a small canal, long-since damned back up. There are too many environmental issues to redevelop the old trainyards, and so they remain, abandoned, grotesque - brown and gray and overgrown, not wild, not really - something else - under a gray-cast sky.
It wasn't the deadman that caught Imogen's attention. He was sprawled underneath the eves of an old engine house, eyes open, staring, but rather something close by, a little caern of stones that struck her as almost ritualistic, that hit a chord, that opened something up inside her. So she toed the structure - two inches high if that - over and found, underneath, a single gold tooth.
And something beneath it, slashed in blood, formed with the tip of claw. Like a Garou glyph -
- gone wrong.
[Imogen] She had confiscated the gold tooth subtly, quietly her back turned to the others on the crime scene. She is never alone in such things; there are forensic investigators, police officers, sometimes a resident along for the learning experience.
She keeps her back to them all as she carefully places a few rocks over the glyph again, the gold tooth sealed in a baggy and pocketed, getting to her feet.
"Nothing but a small pile o' rocks," she says as she returns to the body. "Poor kids legos, maybe."
The body is zipped into a black bag and placed on a stretcher by the body removal team - Imogen does no souch things once she's cleared the corpse for transport. She watches them as they put the body into the back of the van and then turns her attention to the police officer, removing her gloves carefully, the fingers tipped with rouge from where her examination had brought her into contact with congealing blood.
"I'll do the autopsy in the morning," she says, "shall I? Doesn't seem that important."
"Naw," snorts the officer, a man whom she intensely dislikes. "It's NHI. Take all the time you need."
No Human Involved.
Alright, then.
Hours later, Imogen calls Kora. "It's me," she says, allowing her accent and voice to do her introductions. She is in her office with a closed door, with office hours starting in minutes. "I found somethin' rather similar t'what we've seen before." Circumspect, is the message, though one images that Kora gets it.
"I ha' some time tonight after six, should yeh like to see it."
[Imogen] Perception Alertness! HAIL KAHSEENO!
to Crysallis
[Crysallis] "I'd like to see it," Kora returns, quiet. Sometime after six, she has to consult her phone, because she thinks of the world in terms of day and night and sunrise and sunset, of moon rise and fall, and the movement of the stars rather than hours. Still: for things like this, she makes the effort, consults the cheap tracphone, keeps an eye on the sun in the sky.
Sometime after six, Kora summons Roman. Doc found something is what she tells him. you and me are gonna check it out.
The sun is low, but not yet set when they arrive at the edge of the old railyards. The place is flat, half the rails have been pried up by enterprising junkies hoping to recycle some metal for drug money.
[Fate] He was more than happy to go with Kora, especially if it meant he could see Imogen. Who cared if she were older? She had one hell of a figure on her; he especially liked the view from behind, she had great assets. So when the time came, even though it was an odd place, he was eager to see the taciturn Kinswoman.
[Imogen] Imogen has them meet her at her car; when they arrive, she is standing there, her back against the door, a cigarette between her fingers, her expression taut. She'd been approached once during the wait to enquire about her fees.
The experience has put her in a bad mood.
She takes a deep suck of the cigarette as the Garou approach before dropping the fag to crush it out beneath the flat sole of her nondescript shoe.
"Do you see that SUV o'er there?" she says once they are close enough for her to speak quietly. She indicates several blocks away - the car still visible. "It was 'ere when I came t'retrieve the body. S'moved, but I'd swear it was the same car."
A pause before she adds, "I recognize the dents."
[Crysallis] The SUV is empty at the moment. It's big and black and boxy, circa 1992 model yeah, something American, with a handful of dents, of varying sizes and disfigurements. Kora glances up the street, her features set into a frown, her gaze lingering over it. The shadow of the housing projects is long, but the concrete basin of the drained canal is a long, deep barrier between the two. No one would park here to go there. Only the kids slide back and forth between the neighborhood and its next-door netherworld, under the fences, through the underbrush.
"So someone's coming and going." Kora says, restating the obvious. Then, a glane between Roman and Imogen. "What was it you found?"
[Fate] He forced his attention away from Imogen long enough to look in the direction she indicated. An SUV or the Angel before him? SUV normally wouldn't stand a chance. Though this was weird enough to have Imogen calling them, so he forced his brain to business.
"I can go take a look at it, see if I can pick up a trail, smell anything to follow."
As he was the smell of death lingered too close to this place, it was a sickening sweet smell his sensitive nose could pick up even in homid.
[Imogen] "A glyph," she says, "or at least what looks like one, done in blood. I don't recognize the shape." Which, truly, only means that it is none of the tribes with which Imogen is familiar, nor wyrm, nor kinfolk nor the auspices.
Then again, she seems to have been finding unfamiliar glyphs throughout the city, so it may very well mean more.
"Show you, shall I?"
[Crysallis] "Please," Kora returns, low voiced, looking from Imogen to Roman and back again. The lights are low, the shadows long here. There's a persistent scent of car exhaust and old diesel fuel in the air. They are close enough to downtown that the background lights of the city are bright, brilliant against the horizon, but the streets here are dark and mostly still.
" - show us."
[Fate] How long had he waited to hear those words?
"Show you, shall I?"
It took a lot of thought processes to calm down the eager teen hormones that had just jumped up and did the happy two-step dance. He forced himself to nod, hoarsely croaking out.
"Yessum, show us."
Who invented jeans anyway? The danged things suddenly felt like they had shrunk in the crotch last washing.
[Imogen] Roman's voice cracks when he speaks - Imogen casts him an odd glance, her eyebrow arching before she decides she is better off not knowing. She does not say anything else, merely tilts her head in a particular direction and walks toward it.
She's parked a few blocks away. Close enough to be in sight but not so close as to be obvious. They walk into the old train yards with their relics and dead engines, the rusting box cars, the carelessly strewn iron tracks. The foliage rustles as she highsteps through some of the worst of it and hisses as she walks through the rest.
"I found the body there," she says, pointing to the engine house, a small area haphazardly cordoned off, ribbon that will likely stay there until children tear it away, "Doesn't look like he died o' violence. From th'colour of his sclera - that's the white o' the eyes - and his skin, I'd imagine he died o' liver failure, but I won't know that until I cut him open.
"But what I did find was 'ere," she says, sinking to a crouch and picking up a few small stones and tossing them aside.
She lifts her chin now, not bothering to expand, merely gesturing at the glyph, slashed in blood, the colour of it uneven and brown.
[Crysallis] Fall, now - and a lean, dry fall at that. The tenderest shoots, the clustered grasses that had been going brown from drought were revived two nights past by a passing stormfront. Still, the growth underfoot is crabbed, tainted by the toxins left behind by the old rainroad companies and by the opportunistic fly-by-nights that came in after. The whole railyard is a superfund site that will never be cleaned up. Too expensive, and maybe too dangerous. Too many unknowns. Too much blame to be spread around for the cancer rates in the neighborhood, the birth defects, the subtle ways in which people go wrong.
Here and now, though, in the shadow of the old engine house, Kora sinks to a crouch, nudging away one of the stones with her long index finger. She goes still, this sour sense in the back of her throat. "Offering," she says, quiet, low, a certain hint of queasiness in her voice. " - that's what it says. offering.."
Then, glancing up at Roman, " - you want to try to get a scent?"
[Fate] He leaned in for a good look when the rocks were moved. It probably looked like one of those scenes where a group of kids gathered to examine a bug one found, only they weren't kids and it wasn't a bug. His nostrils flared just before a look of disgust touched his young face.
"Guess he couldn't find no paint?"
[Imogen] Imogen casts Kora a briefly wry glance. "There was a gold tooth left behind as well."
A beat. "Rather poor offering, I'd think." These words are almost to herself. It is a rather disturbingly sharp contrast to Kora's queasiness, to Roman's disgust. She casts a glance between the two and quietly clears her throat, a hand lifting to her hair, pushing it back as she glances about them, taking in their surroundings once more, this time without the busyness of a crime scene.
[Fate] "Gold is a solid offering. It's valuable, been the trade of choice throughout history and add to it, it's a tooth. Teeth mean a lot to a wolf, without 'em, we don't last long."
He crouched down to make a smaller target in the dark, using the women for a shield as he began the shift from Human to Wolf. Once there after all the wonderfully disgusting sounds and sights of the shift, he started sniffing the hole, rocks and area, letting his sharper senses pick up what his eyes couldn't.
[Fate]
[Crysallis] "Maybe," Kora says quietly, a flicker of a look at Imogen's features, the wry look on her fine mouth, lingering in her dark blue eyes. " - but I don't think that that is going to be the only one."
Her smile is sifting, lingering, fleeting. Abruptly, she pushes herself to stand, frowning, casting the railyards - what is visible of them, in a long, sweeping glanc. Then Roman shifts to his lupus form, and Kora takes up a watchful position, looking for strangers who might stumble into the windy, abandoned stretch of broken real estate.
[Imogen] Imogen only makes a brief sound of acknowledgement to them both. Roman begins to change and Imogen turns her head slightly to watch him over the shoulder, her expression intent, a line forming between her eyebrows.
It fades and like Kora, Imogen moves to take a watchful position, allowing her and Kora to cover the entirety of the area with relative certainty.
[Crysallis] Roman finds the scent, recent enough, a hint of blood and darkness, some memory of pain, diesel and stagnant waters and dank, rotting earth. It takes him two circuits of the engine house to tease this one out from all the others, sharper, all the human scents from the police officers and forensic investigators and morque workers who attended to the corpse of the nameless man found with a grimace on his face and his eyes open - staring - at the sun a dozen feet away or more, but he teases it out soon enough, pads out among the broken rails into the weedy darkness.
Imogen and Kora watch until the wolf is a shadow against shadows, turning in a wide circuit around the wheelhouse. It takes him ten minutes, maybe 15, to make the full circuit of the place, but when he returns he has found four more tiny caerns, hidden amongst the weeds and detritus, each so small as to be easily overlooked.
A handful of stones.
Gold, underneath, and a blood-painted glyph.
Tooth and the top joint of a finger.
The root of a tongue.
The lense of an eye, tiny, perfectly worked as if it had been pulled from life, the iris and dilated pupil staring, gold on gold. A handful of bones worked in gold - the distinctive stapes, the malleus.
Together, the five little caerns form five points of a star, five cardinal directions (weren't there just four?), defining a wide ranging circle with the derelict wheelhouse at the heart of it.
[Fate] He was sniffing around like any dog or wolf would. Letting everything filter through instinctively. Trying to filter out the smell of stray cats, the occasional dog, children, cops, metal, rotting wood, a mouse, and death to find what he wanted. Something solid to connect to the tooth and pile of rocks.
When he returned, he shifted back up and lead them to his finds.
"More of them, five like the points in a pentagram and when ya think about it, depending on which way ya want to look at it, it could be horns up or not."
[Imogen] Imogen pauses, turning briefly to look at Roman.
"Did yeh check what was in the centre o' the pentagram?"
[Fate] Blur...man+stealth
[Fate] dex+stealth
[Crysallis] Rrrragrash:
I TOTALLY SEE YOU.
[Crysallis] (or not!)
[Fate] "No ma'am, but I intend to."
[Imogen] (perception+alertness!)
HAIL KAHSEENO!
[Crysallis] Kora: Per + Alertness!
[Imogen] da Mei promises da Kahseeno pretty things!
HAIL!
[Crysallis] ARGH. PER PLUS ALERTNESS KAHSEENO!
[Imogen] (u no promiss kahseeno purty things.)
[Crysallis] Imogen notices movement on the periphery, a trio of figures in the shadows carrying a heavy object between them, something dark and saclike, the fabric matte, the shape and the way it slumps reminds the kinswoman of the dead weight of a human body lifted from a guerney, still flexible, not yet stiff with rigor mortis, the weight of the body defining a long, drooping arc between the two larger figures carrying it.
Notices the movement in time for Kora and Imogen to take shelter, hidden inside the engine house, the scent of rust and old fuel heavy in the air, spiders spinning webs so complex they seem to be arguments or poetry in the weaver's world.
There are windows, many-paned, rusted over through which they can watch the trio, who are keen and careful, but not worried about detection, talking so that their voices carry in the air in drifting snatches of intelligible speech.
From within the shelter, Kora traces the feel of her packmate more than the site of him; it would take the keenest of eyes to pick him out of the shadows of the railyard now. Holding her breath, now, as the trio gets close to the Ragabash, releasing it in a sharp and silent sigh as they disappear into the roundhouse.
Then Roman returns, abruptly, twenty tense minutes later, bearing news.
It wasn't the deadman that caught Imogen's attention. He was sprawled underneath the eves of an old engine house, eyes open, staring, but rather something close by, a little caern of stones that struck her as almost ritualistic, that hit a chord, that opened something up inside her. So she toed the structure - two inches high if that - over and found, underneath, a single gold tooth.
And something beneath it, slashed in blood, formed with the tip of claw. Like a Garou glyph -
- gone wrong.
[Imogen] She had confiscated the gold tooth subtly, quietly her back turned to the others on the crime scene. She is never alone in such things; there are forensic investigators, police officers, sometimes a resident along for the learning experience.
She keeps her back to them all as she carefully places a few rocks over the glyph again, the gold tooth sealed in a baggy and pocketed, getting to her feet.
"Nothing but a small pile o' rocks," she says as she returns to the body. "Poor kids legos, maybe."
The body is zipped into a black bag and placed on a stretcher by the body removal team - Imogen does no souch things once she's cleared the corpse for transport. She watches them as they put the body into the back of the van and then turns her attention to the police officer, removing her gloves carefully, the fingers tipped with rouge from where her examination had brought her into contact with congealing blood.
"I'll do the autopsy in the morning," she says, "shall I? Doesn't seem that important."
"Naw," snorts the officer, a man whom she intensely dislikes. "It's NHI. Take all the time you need."
No Human Involved.
Alright, then.
Hours later, Imogen calls Kora. "It's me," she says, allowing her accent and voice to do her introductions. She is in her office with a closed door, with office hours starting in minutes. "I found somethin' rather similar t'what we've seen before." Circumspect, is the message, though one images that Kora gets it.
"I ha' some time tonight after six, should yeh like to see it."
[Imogen] Perception Alertness! HAIL KAHSEENO!
to Crysallis
[Crysallis] "I'd like to see it," Kora returns, quiet. Sometime after six, she has to consult her phone, because she thinks of the world in terms of day and night and sunrise and sunset, of moon rise and fall, and the movement of the stars rather than hours. Still: for things like this, she makes the effort, consults the cheap tracphone, keeps an eye on the sun in the sky.
Sometime after six, Kora summons Roman. Doc found something is what she tells him. you and me are gonna check it out.
The sun is low, but not yet set when they arrive at the edge of the old railyards. The place is flat, half the rails have been pried up by enterprising junkies hoping to recycle some metal for drug money.
[Fate] He was more than happy to go with Kora, especially if it meant he could see Imogen. Who cared if she were older? She had one hell of a figure on her; he especially liked the view from behind, she had great assets. So when the time came, even though it was an odd place, he was eager to see the taciturn Kinswoman.
[Imogen] Imogen has them meet her at her car; when they arrive, she is standing there, her back against the door, a cigarette between her fingers, her expression taut. She'd been approached once during the wait to enquire about her fees.
The experience has put her in a bad mood.
She takes a deep suck of the cigarette as the Garou approach before dropping the fag to crush it out beneath the flat sole of her nondescript shoe.
"Do you see that SUV o'er there?" she says once they are close enough for her to speak quietly. She indicates several blocks away - the car still visible. "It was 'ere when I came t'retrieve the body. S'moved, but I'd swear it was the same car."
A pause before she adds, "I recognize the dents."
[Crysallis] The SUV is empty at the moment. It's big and black and boxy, circa 1992 model yeah, something American, with a handful of dents, of varying sizes and disfigurements. Kora glances up the street, her features set into a frown, her gaze lingering over it. The shadow of the housing projects is long, but the concrete basin of the drained canal is a long, deep barrier between the two. No one would park here to go there. Only the kids slide back and forth between the neighborhood and its next-door netherworld, under the fences, through the underbrush.
"So someone's coming and going." Kora says, restating the obvious. Then, a glane between Roman and Imogen. "What was it you found?"
[Fate] He forced his attention away from Imogen long enough to look in the direction she indicated. An SUV or the Angel before him? SUV normally wouldn't stand a chance. Though this was weird enough to have Imogen calling them, so he forced his brain to business.
"I can go take a look at it, see if I can pick up a trail, smell anything to follow."
As he was the smell of death lingered too close to this place, it was a sickening sweet smell his sensitive nose could pick up even in homid.
[Imogen] "A glyph," she says, "or at least what looks like one, done in blood. I don't recognize the shape." Which, truly, only means that it is none of the tribes with which Imogen is familiar, nor wyrm, nor kinfolk nor the auspices.
Then again, she seems to have been finding unfamiliar glyphs throughout the city, so it may very well mean more.
"Show you, shall I?"
[Crysallis] "Please," Kora returns, low voiced, looking from Imogen to Roman and back again. The lights are low, the shadows long here. There's a persistent scent of car exhaust and old diesel fuel in the air. They are close enough to downtown that the background lights of the city are bright, brilliant against the horizon, but the streets here are dark and mostly still.
" - show us."
[Fate] How long had he waited to hear those words?
"Show you, shall I?"
It took a lot of thought processes to calm down the eager teen hormones that had just jumped up and did the happy two-step dance. He forced himself to nod, hoarsely croaking out.
"Yessum, show us."
Who invented jeans anyway? The danged things suddenly felt like they had shrunk in the crotch last washing.
[Imogen] Roman's voice cracks when he speaks - Imogen casts him an odd glance, her eyebrow arching before she decides she is better off not knowing. She does not say anything else, merely tilts her head in a particular direction and walks toward it.
She's parked a few blocks away. Close enough to be in sight but not so close as to be obvious. They walk into the old train yards with their relics and dead engines, the rusting box cars, the carelessly strewn iron tracks. The foliage rustles as she highsteps through some of the worst of it and hisses as she walks through the rest.
"I found the body there," she says, pointing to the engine house, a small area haphazardly cordoned off, ribbon that will likely stay there until children tear it away, "Doesn't look like he died o' violence. From th'colour of his sclera - that's the white o' the eyes - and his skin, I'd imagine he died o' liver failure, but I won't know that until I cut him open.
"But what I did find was 'ere," she says, sinking to a crouch and picking up a few small stones and tossing them aside.
She lifts her chin now, not bothering to expand, merely gesturing at the glyph, slashed in blood, the colour of it uneven and brown.
[Crysallis] Fall, now - and a lean, dry fall at that. The tenderest shoots, the clustered grasses that had been going brown from drought were revived two nights past by a passing stormfront. Still, the growth underfoot is crabbed, tainted by the toxins left behind by the old rainroad companies and by the opportunistic fly-by-nights that came in after. The whole railyard is a superfund site that will never be cleaned up. Too expensive, and maybe too dangerous. Too many unknowns. Too much blame to be spread around for the cancer rates in the neighborhood, the birth defects, the subtle ways in which people go wrong.
Here and now, though, in the shadow of the old engine house, Kora sinks to a crouch, nudging away one of the stones with her long index finger. She goes still, this sour sense in the back of her throat. "Offering," she says, quiet, low, a certain hint of queasiness in her voice. " - that's what it says. offering.."
Then, glancing up at Roman, " - you want to try to get a scent?"
[Fate] He leaned in for a good look when the rocks were moved. It probably looked like one of those scenes where a group of kids gathered to examine a bug one found, only they weren't kids and it wasn't a bug. His nostrils flared just before a look of disgust touched his young face.
"Guess he couldn't find no paint?"
[Imogen] Imogen casts Kora a briefly wry glance. "There was a gold tooth left behind as well."
A beat. "Rather poor offering, I'd think." These words are almost to herself. It is a rather disturbingly sharp contrast to Kora's queasiness, to Roman's disgust. She casts a glance between the two and quietly clears her throat, a hand lifting to her hair, pushing it back as she glances about them, taking in their surroundings once more, this time without the busyness of a crime scene.
[Fate] "Gold is a solid offering. It's valuable, been the trade of choice throughout history and add to it, it's a tooth. Teeth mean a lot to a wolf, without 'em, we don't last long."
He crouched down to make a smaller target in the dark, using the women for a shield as he began the shift from Human to Wolf. Once there after all the wonderfully disgusting sounds and sights of the shift, he started sniffing the hole, rocks and area, letting his sharper senses pick up what his eyes couldn't.
[Fate]
[Crysallis] "Maybe," Kora says quietly, a flicker of a look at Imogen's features, the wry look on her fine mouth, lingering in her dark blue eyes. " - but I don't think that that is going to be the only one."
Her smile is sifting, lingering, fleeting. Abruptly, she pushes herself to stand, frowning, casting the railyards - what is visible of them, in a long, sweeping glanc. Then Roman shifts to his lupus form, and Kora takes up a watchful position, looking for strangers who might stumble into the windy, abandoned stretch of broken real estate.
[Imogen] Imogen only makes a brief sound of acknowledgement to them both. Roman begins to change and Imogen turns her head slightly to watch him over the shoulder, her expression intent, a line forming between her eyebrows.
It fades and like Kora, Imogen moves to take a watchful position, allowing her and Kora to cover the entirety of the area with relative certainty.
[Crysallis] Roman finds the scent, recent enough, a hint of blood and darkness, some memory of pain, diesel and stagnant waters and dank, rotting earth. It takes him two circuits of the engine house to tease this one out from all the others, sharper, all the human scents from the police officers and forensic investigators and morque workers who attended to the corpse of the nameless man found with a grimace on his face and his eyes open - staring - at the sun a dozen feet away or more, but he teases it out soon enough, pads out among the broken rails into the weedy darkness.
Imogen and Kora watch until the wolf is a shadow against shadows, turning in a wide circuit around the wheelhouse. It takes him ten minutes, maybe 15, to make the full circuit of the place, but when he returns he has found four more tiny caerns, hidden amongst the weeds and detritus, each so small as to be easily overlooked.
A handful of stones.
Gold, underneath, and a blood-painted glyph.
Tooth and the top joint of a finger.
The root of a tongue.
The lense of an eye, tiny, perfectly worked as if it had been pulled from life, the iris and dilated pupil staring, gold on gold. A handful of bones worked in gold - the distinctive stapes, the malleus.
Together, the five little caerns form five points of a star, five cardinal directions (weren't there just four?), defining a wide ranging circle with the derelict wheelhouse at the heart of it.
[Fate] He was sniffing around like any dog or wolf would. Letting everything filter through instinctively. Trying to filter out the smell of stray cats, the occasional dog, children, cops, metal, rotting wood, a mouse, and death to find what he wanted. Something solid to connect to the tooth and pile of rocks.
When he returned, he shifted back up and lead them to his finds.
"More of them, five like the points in a pentagram and when ya think about it, depending on which way ya want to look at it, it could be horns up or not."
[Imogen] Imogen pauses, turning briefly to look at Roman.
"Did yeh check what was in the centre o' the pentagram?"
[Fate] Blur...man+stealth
[Fate] dex+stealth
[Crysallis] Rrrragrash:
I TOTALLY SEE YOU.
[Crysallis] (or not!)
[Fate] "No ma'am, but I intend to."
[Imogen] (perception+alertness!)
HAIL KAHSEENO!
[Crysallis] Kora: Per + Alertness!
[Imogen] da Mei promises da Kahseeno pretty things!
HAIL!
[Crysallis] ARGH. PER PLUS ALERTNESS KAHSEENO!
[Imogen] (u no promiss kahseeno purty things.)
[Crysallis] Imogen notices movement on the periphery, a trio of figures in the shadows carrying a heavy object between them, something dark and saclike, the fabric matte, the shape and the way it slumps reminds the kinswoman of the dead weight of a human body lifted from a guerney, still flexible, not yet stiff with rigor mortis, the weight of the body defining a long, drooping arc between the two larger figures carrying it.
Notices the movement in time for Kora and Imogen to take shelter, hidden inside the engine house, the scent of rust and old fuel heavy in the air, spiders spinning webs so complex they seem to be arguments or poetry in the weaver's world.
There are windows, many-paned, rusted over through which they can watch the trio, who are keen and careful, but not worried about detection, talking so that their voices carry in the air in drifting snatches of intelligible speech.
From within the shelter, Kora traces the feel of her packmate more than the site of him; it would take the keenest of eyes to pick him out of the shadows of the railyard now. Holding her breath, now, as the trio gets close to the Ragabash, releasing it in a sharp and silent sigh as they disappear into the roundhouse.
Then Roman returns, abruptly, twenty tense minutes later, bearing news.
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