[Kora] Except for the city's array of lights, the sky would be a desolate iron gray, the color of the north sea in winter, reflecting a storm drenched sky. Instead, a sickly bank of orange clouds clots the strip of sky visible between the listing brick buildings. Fat snowflakes drift down in spiraling patterns, melting whereever they hit the wet ground.
The street is mostly empty on the chilly gray night. Pedestrians hurry between their destinations with their heads down, hands tucked firmly in the pockets of their winter coats, moving briskly to conserve whatever warmth lingers from wherever they've been to whereever they're going. The El rattles over squat brick buildings, gleaming reflections of neon signs running like moving water over the darkly reflective windows of the half-empty cars.
A few hopeful shopkeepers stay open later now, even here in Chinatown, imagining that holiday shopping might drive a few more dollars their way. Most of the ordinary shops are closed, now, shut tight. The "Oriental Massage" parlor on the corner and a pair of take out restaurants on the block are enough to keep foot traffic brisk here, and a specialty tea merchant is illuminated in his picture window, measuring our Darjeeling for a hipster in black trenchcoat and heavy, black-framed glasses.
In the shadow of a filthy and overlowing dumpster behind a cheap dim sum restaurant closed by the health department for violations so repeated and egregious that even the usual bribes could not sway the health inspector - blood gleams against the asphalt, dark against the wet black. There is a wet snap back as the unnatural thing collapses inward, brought down somehow by its own weight, all the way to the ground.
The alley is quiet now, except for the short, harsh sounds of someone breathing. Someone trying to catch their breath after a burst of all-consuming exertion - so brief and furious as to be practically anaerobic, like the 100 yard dash.
[Imogen] Imogen's breath is harsh in her lungs, but she can barely hear it over the sound of Sorrow's breath, which softens, if the Garou returns to her human form. She is further down the alleyway, the thing's body between her and the Garou. Her gun is in her hand, and she can feel the heat of the metal as she presses it against her knee, as she lay her other hand on her knee, bending forward briefly. Several strands of vibrant hair slip forward, hanging from the temple in a twist of unruliness.
Her eyes touch the ground, slick with grime and detritus, and now, a slow moving stream of blood. There is a drain behind her. Imogen straightens abruptly, stepping out of the way, reaching beneath her open coat to slide her gun into its holster.
Her ears are ringing, but she cocks her head just the same, listening for sirens.
They are in a part of town where people prefer to assume the sound of gunfire is backfire. Or perhaps, where people have stopped calling at all. Chinatown, like most of Chicago has a lovely veneer but a seedy underbelly. She lifts her hand and pushes back her hair, bringing with it, the smell of gunsmoke, as the kinwoman flicks her gaze toward the Garou.
"Alright?" she asks.
[Linus] (Skip me, I will come in once a bit of time has passed)
[Kora] Sorrow fights with her hands now; fights in her greatest warform - looming so massive that she could easily pulling down the rusting ladder of the listing fire escape with a singular swipe of a huge handpaw. There is a moment of disorientation as she snaps back to her human skin and the laws of physics - conservation of matter and all that rot - are turned on their head by the darker, seedier, wilder truths of the broken universe.
Human now, all that mass displaced in an instant by a rush of vaccuuming-abhoring air, she leans back against the rough brick of the closed restaurant, hands braced on her thighs, looking up at the sky. Her breath comes out in short, sharp little puffs of air. The jacket she was wearing earlier is gone, shredded. What's left is a t-shirt and a blood-stained thermal that is fitted to her frame, loose at the shoulders, tighter now at the waist.
There's no moon visible in the sky, just that oppressive bank of orange-stained clouds. She's looking up all the same, as if she might find some grace there, some relief from the concrete, from the brick and the asphalt, from the constriction of it all. As if she might find it anyone: that moon, sense it through the haze of light pollution and the scrim of winter clouds.
Snowflakes spiral down, melt against her skin. She tongues her mouth, experimentally, then straightens, putting her full weight on her left leg, experimenting with the right, where a dark stain, wet stain spreads against her worn jeans.
"Yeah,thanks," she says, with a grimace not for the pain but for the fucking dysfunction of it, the unnatural way her muscles pull against each other. "I will be." Dropping her dark eyes from the sky to the alley, with no more than a glancing look at the thing now empty in the middle of the alley, she meets the kinswoman's gaze, flickers a look up and down the woman's slight frame.
"You?"
[Imogen] Blood has sprayed along her throat and that blood is not hers and there is a tear in her blouse, a fine line of blood beginning to darken the edges and that blood is hers. It's barely a flesh wound, a long scratch that goes from navel to hip and could have eviscerated her had -
she doesn't remember, actually. She remembers the stark clarity of feeling her clothing tear and the claw that touches flesh, she remembers every single bullet she fired (nine), the frustration of the one that missed entirely. But she does not recall, precisely how it was that she was not disembowelled. Sorrow had attacked in time, or she had jumped back or the beast had just missed or -
it doesn't matter.
She parts the tear in her shirt to regard the wound, her jaw tightening, though her eyes appear almost clinical in their regard, then lifts her gaze, her hand wiping at the blood she can feel drying just beneath her jaw.
"Brilliant," she says, infusing the word with wryness in a way that very few can.
[Kora] The dumpster that half-conceals them from the street has not been emptied in weeks. The contract is up, the bill remains unpaid. Neighbors sneak their own trash in, and now the ugly metal box is quiet literally overflowing with odds and ends - a stiff roll of carpet juts out like a cigar, and a sagging recliner lists in the shadows, the stuffing torn out, peeled away by those strange birds that migrate to Chicago for the winter, from some great vast north, nesting in the leeside of highrises, in the soffits of crumbling old frame homes, in the forgotten attics of murdered men.
Stranger than all that is the corpse collapsed between them.
Impossible now to say if it ever was human, just a twisted mass of flesh, with the long arms and foreshortened legs of a proto-human and deformities so egregious one wonders that they could ever have been concealed by the flimsy, makeshift cape settled over the dead flesh, now.
"Yeah?" - this is quiet, too. Her breath is back in her lungs, back in her throat and it sweetens her voice, makes it human, makes it ordinary. Just a hint of thickening remains - the cold, the wind, the co-mingled scents of deep fried eggrolls and the dead-thing's own moist scent of organic rot - the shredded flesh underneath its ragged claws.
There's something sharpened about the look Kora gives Imogen, though - a glint of light across discs of her eyes, a sort of moving surface tension that has her both still and aware.
The moment pulls out, then breaks. Kora wipes her bloodied hands on the thighs of her jeans and crosses to the corpse on the ground, sinking slowly to her haunches, jaw set against the malfunction of her quariceps, the way it pulls wrongly against the set of its insertion, limiting her body's movement.
[Imogen] Imogen does not answer immediately, merely meets the eyes of the Garou without flinching. A muscle in her jaw moves, but it is the only expression of her tension. There is a sort of restrained challenge in her regard - as if daring the Skald's sharpened look to find fault or flaw.
The moment tightens, then snaps. Kora wipes her hands on her jeans, and Imogen turns away slightly, her eyes scanning the foetid ground. After a moment, she finds it. A dark blue scarf where it had fallen free - no, she had torn it off when it threatened to become even the slightest hindrance. She can smell the warmed leather of her gun holster and feel it faintly at the small of her back. This has a strange nostalgia - reminding her of winter, the way a certain smell might or a particular sight.
She leans forward, her body slightly turned to accommodate the slice in her skin, plucking the scarf from the ground. She turns it over between her hands, her nostrils pinching in distaste before she finds a relatively clean bit to wipe at her throat and just beneath her jaw. She then crosses the alleyway to near where Kora is crouched, her profile slightly awkward for her damaged muscle.
She studies the body for several seconds, one hand absently pressing against her side, deliberately staunching the seepage against her blouse - the only bandage she has for the moment. Then, wiping her hands clean on the soiled scarf, she says, "I'll go get my car."
Her hands lift to her jacket and begin to do it up.
[Jesmond Krutova] Chinatown at this time of night on a freezing Tuesday evening is not where you'd expect to find someone like Jesmond Krutova.
This was not to say that the diminutive brunette was inept at defending herself against any such beasts (like that which Imogen and Kora had just felled in an alleyway) that might cross her path but rather that she seemed well out of her usual routine to be emerging from one of the few stores still open at this hour; though judging by the tiny Asian man hastening after her to flip the sign in his door around that was about to change. She was carrying, pressed to her chest as she re-wound a scarf around her neck, a bag of Chinese herbs with the insignia of the store stamped to the front.
The Shadow Lord Kinswoman's coat was black, and the collar and sleeves were worn out, ragged. The hem needed attending to at the base; peeking out from beneath its folds were her work blouse; the simple uniform given to Nurses at Mercy Hospital. Her pathway would lead her toward the alley where the Fenrir and the Fianna stood conversing post battle, but her breeding would alert them to her far before she noticed the pair of them.
[Kora] Ahead in the alley - there some musk of danger, and a pair of moving figures. Not the usual darkness - not the Vietnam vet who reclaimed that abandoned barcolounger beside the dumpster as his own, and plays out - nightly - some long forgotten battle against some long dead men while drinking himself to oblivion, not the pair of leggy girls, too young to be so old, too old to be so young who normally haunt the entrance.
"Thanks doc - " Kora says to Imogen, directly and simply as she reaches for what seem to be the - well, ankles, of whatever the broken thing was. "I'll get it out of line of sight and get started."
Sorrow's hair has come loose, spills down her narrow back like a pale flag. Whatever she used to hold it back snapped with her shift, and now it catches the light as she moves, makes her almost human, almost ordinary. From a distance, Jesmond could pretend that she was just some girl on her haunches on an alley, that the sheen of wet on her hands was from the drifting snowflakes, the dirty water pooling in the broken asphalt after the afternoon's pounding winter rains.
Then she looks up, sharply over her shoulder as Jesmond's footsteps ring out on the pavement. Some new alertness enters her body language, and the illusion of girlishness is banished before it could be fully formed. The look is shrewd; she senses pure breed in a physical way, nostrils flaring as if she could literally smell whoever owned Jesmond's blood in the air around her.
A smear of blood mars the pale skin of her cheek, darker stains are shadows against her strong thighs. She is crouched on her haunches, shoulders forward, thighs drawn up, one hand against the pavement for balance, the other on her knee.
"That woman," To Imogen, quiet. " - know her?"
[Linus] The air ruptures somewhere in the darkness of the alleyway, where eyes and light make themselves known only when absolutely necessary and only within certain occupations. People like to forget about the dark spots and for those living in the city of the True kind and nature, it pays to know most general locations and their B.C.S. For instance, a dark alley was less conspicuous than the kitchen or closet of a diner as Superman entrances were very 60's but rooftop Batman methods made themselves popular everytime you looked down over the city with a scowl and some brooding.
The air ruptured, as was being said and the thinned out Godi is staring around with a vague sense of exhaustion under his eyes. Exhaustion and irritability. His clothes are a mesh of hoodies, one under a smaller other, with a black half-coat who's sleeves had been permanently rolled up. One hood is up while the other above it is down and over one shoulder. The cargo pants and sneakers are new, dark and relatively unremarkable.
"You two are hard to-"
He skids slightly in the muck of the fallen thing, hand roaming out to plant on the wall and catch himself from plummeting into the mess with a growl and flutter of Rage. The alley stinks and he snorts loudly. Wetly.
"...Hard to find." He wipes beneath his nose with the back of a gray felt and fingerless glove, flicking the excess onto the nearby wall. His eyes flick to Imogen (reflex and breeding) than on toward Kora (Concern and Instinct) with swift abandon.
"Immediate needs?"
[Imogen] Jesmond's footsteps ring out and Imogen's hand slides beneath her jacket again, hitching the hem of it up to give her clear access to her weapon. This is more than preparation, more than security. The tension of the muscles of her arms, the cock of her shoulder are all clear indicators of her intention.
Had Jesmond been human or unknown to her, Imogen's weapon would have been drawn. She might even have fired. She's done it before.
But Jesmond is not human and she is not unknown to her and Imogen's hand slips away from the butt of her gun. "Yes," she says.
"Kinfolk, though I don't recall the tribe. Not Fenrir." She has more details than that, but they are hardly pertinent; Jesmond's former sept, Jesmond's former mate.
Linus skids through the gauntlet, coming to a stop with a remonstration that becomes immediate duty. Imogen's body tightens like a bow - though she does not reach for her weapon, casting the Fenrir Godi a restrained glance.
"It's a bloody way-station," she observes, resigned.
"I'll go get my car." Let Kora prioritize. The body disposal over the Skald's own injuries (and Imogen's too, perhaps, though her silence on the subject is telling).
She starts out of the alleyway - a path that will put her directly in front of Jesmond. "Bit o' a mess out there," she says. She recalls that the other is a nurse, and therefore does not bother warning her away from it. "If yeh'd like t'pitch in, I ha' gloves in my car."
[Imogen] (err. bit of a mess in there.)
[Kora] Immediate needs? asks Linus, and Kora shoots him a look. The gleam in her eyes is animal, but the familiar shape of her generous mouth could only be considered - well, wry under that starched shadow of wary alertness demanded by the strange place and the equally strange company.
Her hair is loose, her own hoodie - undedicated - is shredded, in pieces scattered around the alley. A dark t-shirt and stained thermal, the old jeans and familiar goddamned Doc Marten's are all that remain of whatever she wore before. The air is brisk, cold enough that that her cheeks and nose are red, and only the afterburn of her rage, the spike of blood through her dilated arteries keeps her warm.
"We need to get rid of Junior, here. The doc's bringing around her car. Give me a hand, would you - " and then a glance back at Jesmond, as Imogen confirms that the woman is known, if not her tribe. "Shadow Lord - " Kora supplies, when Imogen qualifies the woman's identity as simply not Fenrir. Then she's turned back again to the corpse, grabbing one of the thing's nameless limbs with a gesture toward Linus. "Doc's bringing the car around. I want him a bit more concealed before we start disarticulating the joints."
[Linus] Linus first reaction to the figure is something akin to disgust. Nothing of refusal there though, more just a healthy consideration for the Wyrm's various ministrations on humanity. Gnostic sensibilities kicking in with that soulful cringe at the centre mass, obscure, abstract and vaguely metallic over the solar plexus. He crouches low to the ground and circles either wrist of the thing, eyes lifting back up to Kora, waiting for her signal to begin to heft.
"You people-" Grunt. Lift. Heave. "-really like getting everyone's hands dirty, I see."
He huffs, nose crinkling slightly even as they shift the body in the direction Kora wants to go. Linus is careful to take a wide stance, so as not to slip in the constant leak of fluids from the frame in question. His eyes remain thin, as if to open them to too much light might hurt or cause discomfort.
"Where's your disposal site anyway?" More grunting and sliding about. He isn't exactly the largest of fellows, mind you.
[Jesmond Krutova] Jesmond's footsteps slow as she registers the fact that there is activity ahead of her, and that the woman emerging from the alleyway is someone she knows, by name and by virtue of having worked beside her on at least one prior occasion. The paper bag in her arms is shifted, and the dark-haired Kinswoman peers at Imogen in the manner people did, when they were confirming identity.
"Doctor Slaughter," she greets as if it were the most amiable meeting imaginable, and then her eyes chart to the alleyway at mention of the mess. "Of course, is anyone hurt?" By anyone, it seems fair to imagine she includes Imogen in that cluster, her eyes lingering on the traces of blood on the redhead. When she is what she approximates as near enough, Jesmond leans over and sets her bag of groceries down.
Her figure, amongst all the muck and grime is that of a tall female with pale skin and dark, dark hair. She looks at what the Fenrir are wrestling with; and wordlessly rolls the sleeves of her coat upward. "Jesmond," she informs them then and carefully navigates her way around the wet ground. "How may I assist?"
The gore apparently did not deter her; but then, her own figure faintly housed the scent of antiseptic and old blood, worn into her shoes; her blouse. This was not the first scene of bloody chaos she had borne witness to.
[Kora] "All hands on deck - " returns Kora, with that quiet hint of irony that has matured since she was a teenager. The direct look she gives her brother across the corpse is open and surprisingly good-natured. A lingering hint of dark eyes framed by her familiar pale features, the straight nose and generous mouth that must have made her (nameless) modi father look bruisingly sweet when he smiled. " - and all that rot."
Then with the heaving. The dead thing has some impossible sort of specific gravity that seems heavier than lead, some investment of metal into flesh, some concealed weight admist that bulbous flesh. Beneath the make-shift cloak - made from a pair of black flannel blankets stapled together, it wears a vintage wrestling t-shirt and misshapen sweats with a high school logo on the thigh.
These are the only human things left of the corpse. Vestigal memories of what-it-was that disappear as the pair of Fenrir thud it down in the deeper shadows of the overflowing dumpster.
"The doc has a few," says Kora, quietly, to Linus' question. "One in these old freight railroad tunnels, out in Bronzeville. I don't know if there are any closer." She straightens then, dark eyes tracing Jesmond's path as she picks her way down the wet alley and sets her groceries aside. "Kora," says the Fenrir, by way of introduction. Cursory tonight, as there is work to be done and Jesmond is, in the end, still a stranger. Lifting her chin toward her brother, she offers, " - and Linus. Keep a watch out, would you? Make show no one lingers, watching. And no one interrupts us while we take care of this."
There's blood on her hands, on her cheek, dark stains on her thighs.
[Imogen] She has not cleaned herself perfectly of blood. Traces linger between her fingers, a smear of it along her jawline, a shadow of it at her throat. Still, she stands straight, her body unbowed by pain, and if she favours one side, it is not debilitating.
Imogen arches an eyebrow at the question, "Something was killed," she said, "Fortunately it was the other side. I don't believe anyone needs human medical attention."
With that, they part ways, Imogen toward her car, and Jesmond, deeper into the alleyway.
[Linus] Linus is listening as Kora speaks but his eyes seem to be registering Jesmond's hands to her sleeves, rolling them up with some sort of intention. It's only as she stares down at the body with something akin to frankness that Linus' features seem to twist with...well something indelicate. He might well have said something had Kora's orders/suggestion not crept in. Linus is not the sort of keep quiet, expressively or vocally but in this he seems satisfied and returns his attention to the body without responding to Kora's introduction of him.
"Should probably burn it." A pause, glancing at Kora again, a systematic scrutiny of the blood and places. The boy's knowledge of medicine was mediocre to pathetic but then, that was for Healers. That was for doctors and nurses.
"Looks like a War aspect." He nudges at the body, distended, engorged muscle and metallic endurance. "Any projection? Fluids or mental? Suggestions? Get at your goat or the Doc's at all?" A pause. "Angry? He make either of you angry?" A glance past Kora and Jesmond, toward the distancing Doctor Slaughter and back again.
[Linus] (annnddd I'll be back soon. Gotta go grab some food.)
[Kora] "The blood was hot," returns Kora, quietly, glancing out over her shoulder at the mouth of the alley. She's in shadow now, brighter only where the light glazes her hand, her pale hands as she holds them out, turning the long fingers over, and under, examining tips the way a human woman might inspect a recent manicure. An angry flush of red - a first degree burn - is the only legacy of that hot blood except for the drying stains. " - burned a bit, but I think it was just the body's internal temperature, not acid, not some caustic. Otherwise - "
Here she glances up, catches the edge of her brother's attention, meeting his eyes in the shadows. She is conscious of her body, standing straight through the spine, shoulders leveled - not as lithe, perhaps, as she was - but otherwise nearly ordinary. "no. Nothing mental. More like a boiling kettle, that one - " Then she nods vague agreement to his suggestion. "Cleanse what we can, then we'll burn it. Help me with the shoulders, will you? We need it in manageable pieces, small enough to fit in a garbage bag."
[Jesmond Krutova] Jesmond weathers the Godi's stare the way she did all; that was, she pretended that it was not occurring, and raised her face to examine the Garou's twisted expression with a semblance of something politely inquisitive, as if she were awaiting more commands to come from the young man. A pretty woman, the widowed Kinswoman did indeed possess a frankness to her scrutiny of the corpse at their feet.
It was not to say she was devoid of feeling about who or what it might have once been but that she was capable of setting any very human reactions to one side and get the business done of whatever needing doing. The Jarl requests that she keep watch, and Jesmond, her hands at her sides, nods once and turns to move and stand poised at the end of the alleyway; looking out and sliding a phone from her pocket as if she were merely waylaid by the necessity of making a phone call.
[Kora] (I gots to sleep. :) I've got a few minutes and I'm going to go pay my bills online but then I'm going to ask y'all to... write me out or just assume kora's hanging around in the background!)
to Imogen, Jesmond Krutova, Linus
[Jesmond Krutova] (No worries, hun! :) )
to Imogen, Kora, Linus
[Imogen] (I, uh, am pretty much in the same boat. Maybe Imogen and Kora go off to burn the body? it doesn't really require everyone. *grin* which will let you guys keep playing!)
to Jesmond Krutova, Kora, Linus
The street is mostly empty on the chilly gray night. Pedestrians hurry between their destinations with their heads down, hands tucked firmly in the pockets of their winter coats, moving briskly to conserve whatever warmth lingers from wherever they've been to whereever they're going. The El rattles over squat brick buildings, gleaming reflections of neon signs running like moving water over the darkly reflective windows of the half-empty cars.
A few hopeful shopkeepers stay open later now, even here in Chinatown, imagining that holiday shopping might drive a few more dollars their way. Most of the ordinary shops are closed, now, shut tight. The "Oriental Massage" parlor on the corner and a pair of take out restaurants on the block are enough to keep foot traffic brisk here, and a specialty tea merchant is illuminated in his picture window, measuring our Darjeeling for a hipster in black trenchcoat and heavy, black-framed glasses.
In the shadow of a filthy and overlowing dumpster behind a cheap dim sum restaurant closed by the health department for violations so repeated and egregious that even the usual bribes could not sway the health inspector - blood gleams against the asphalt, dark against the wet black. There is a wet snap back as the unnatural thing collapses inward, brought down somehow by its own weight, all the way to the ground.
The alley is quiet now, except for the short, harsh sounds of someone breathing. Someone trying to catch their breath after a burst of all-consuming exertion - so brief and furious as to be practically anaerobic, like the 100 yard dash.
[Imogen] Imogen's breath is harsh in her lungs, but she can barely hear it over the sound of Sorrow's breath, which softens, if the Garou returns to her human form. She is further down the alleyway, the thing's body between her and the Garou. Her gun is in her hand, and she can feel the heat of the metal as she presses it against her knee, as she lay her other hand on her knee, bending forward briefly. Several strands of vibrant hair slip forward, hanging from the temple in a twist of unruliness.
Her eyes touch the ground, slick with grime and detritus, and now, a slow moving stream of blood. There is a drain behind her. Imogen straightens abruptly, stepping out of the way, reaching beneath her open coat to slide her gun into its holster.
Her ears are ringing, but she cocks her head just the same, listening for sirens.
They are in a part of town where people prefer to assume the sound of gunfire is backfire. Or perhaps, where people have stopped calling at all. Chinatown, like most of Chicago has a lovely veneer but a seedy underbelly. She lifts her hand and pushes back her hair, bringing with it, the smell of gunsmoke, as the kinwoman flicks her gaze toward the Garou.
"Alright?" she asks.
[Linus] (Skip me, I will come in once a bit of time has passed)
[Kora] Sorrow fights with her hands now; fights in her greatest warform - looming so massive that she could easily pulling down the rusting ladder of the listing fire escape with a singular swipe of a huge handpaw. There is a moment of disorientation as she snaps back to her human skin and the laws of physics - conservation of matter and all that rot - are turned on their head by the darker, seedier, wilder truths of the broken universe.
Human now, all that mass displaced in an instant by a rush of vaccuuming-abhoring air, she leans back against the rough brick of the closed restaurant, hands braced on her thighs, looking up at the sky. Her breath comes out in short, sharp little puffs of air. The jacket she was wearing earlier is gone, shredded. What's left is a t-shirt and a blood-stained thermal that is fitted to her frame, loose at the shoulders, tighter now at the waist.
There's no moon visible in the sky, just that oppressive bank of orange-stained clouds. She's looking up all the same, as if she might find some grace there, some relief from the concrete, from the brick and the asphalt, from the constriction of it all. As if she might find it anyone: that moon, sense it through the haze of light pollution and the scrim of winter clouds.
Snowflakes spiral down, melt against her skin. She tongues her mouth, experimentally, then straightens, putting her full weight on her left leg, experimenting with the right, where a dark stain, wet stain spreads against her worn jeans.
"Yeah,thanks," she says, with a grimace not for the pain but for the fucking dysfunction of it, the unnatural way her muscles pull against each other. "I will be." Dropping her dark eyes from the sky to the alley, with no more than a glancing look at the thing now empty in the middle of the alley, she meets the kinswoman's gaze, flickers a look up and down the woman's slight frame.
"You?"
[Imogen] Blood has sprayed along her throat and that blood is not hers and there is a tear in her blouse, a fine line of blood beginning to darken the edges and that blood is hers. It's barely a flesh wound, a long scratch that goes from navel to hip and could have eviscerated her had -
she doesn't remember, actually. She remembers the stark clarity of feeling her clothing tear and the claw that touches flesh, she remembers every single bullet she fired (nine), the frustration of the one that missed entirely. But she does not recall, precisely how it was that she was not disembowelled. Sorrow had attacked in time, or she had jumped back or the beast had just missed or -
it doesn't matter.
She parts the tear in her shirt to regard the wound, her jaw tightening, though her eyes appear almost clinical in their regard, then lifts her gaze, her hand wiping at the blood she can feel drying just beneath her jaw.
"Brilliant," she says, infusing the word with wryness in a way that very few can.
[Kora] The dumpster that half-conceals them from the street has not been emptied in weeks. The contract is up, the bill remains unpaid. Neighbors sneak their own trash in, and now the ugly metal box is quiet literally overflowing with odds and ends - a stiff roll of carpet juts out like a cigar, and a sagging recliner lists in the shadows, the stuffing torn out, peeled away by those strange birds that migrate to Chicago for the winter, from some great vast north, nesting in the leeside of highrises, in the soffits of crumbling old frame homes, in the forgotten attics of murdered men.
Stranger than all that is the corpse collapsed between them.
Impossible now to say if it ever was human, just a twisted mass of flesh, with the long arms and foreshortened legs of a proto-human and deformities so egregious one wonders that they could ever have been concealed by the flimsy, makeshift cape settled over the dead flesh, now.
"Yeah?" - this is quiet, too. Her breath is back in her lungs, back in her throat and it sweetens her voice, makes it human, makes it ordinary. Just a hint of thickening remains - the cold, the wind, the co-mingled scents of deep fried eggrolls and the dead-thing's own moist scent of organic rot - the shredded flesh underneath its ragged claws.
There's something sharpened about the look Kora gives Imogen, though - a glint of light across discs of her eyes, a sort of moving surface tension that has her both still and aware.
The moment pulls out, then breaks. Kora wipes her bloodied hands on the thighs of her jeans and crosses to the corpse on the ground, sinking slowly to her haunches, jaw set against the malfunction of her quariceps, the way it pulls wrongly against the set of its insertion, limiting her body's movement.
[Imogen] Imogen does not answer immediately, merely meets the eyes of the Garou without flinching. A muscle in her jaw moves, but it is the only expression of her tension. There is a sort of restrained challenge in her regard - as if daring the Skald's sharpened look to find fault or flaw.
The moment tightens, then snaps. Kora wipes her hands on her jeans, and Imogen turns away slightly, her eyes scanning the foetid ground. After a moment, she finds it. A dark blue scarf where it had fallen free - no, she had torn it off when it threatened to become even the slightest hindrance. She can smell the warmed leather of her gun holster and feel it faintly at the small of her back. This has a strange nostalgia - reminding her of winter, the way a certain smell might or a particular sight.
She leans forward, her body slightly turned to accommodate the slice in her skin, plucking the scarf from the ground. She turns it over between her hands, her nostrils pinching in distaste before she finds a relatively clean bit to wipe at her throat and just beneath her jaw. She then crosses the alleyway to near where Kora is crouched, her profile slightly awkward for her damaged muscle.
She studies the body for several seconds, one hand absently pressing against her side, deliberately staunching the seepage against her blouse - the only bandage she has for the moment. Then, wiping her hands clean on the soiled scarf, she says, "I'll go get my car."
Her hands lift to her jacket and begin to do it up.
[Jesmond Krutova] Chinatown at this time of night on a freezing Tuesday evening is not where you'd expect to find someone like Jesmond Krutova.
This was not to say that the diminutive brunette was inept at defending herself against any such beasts (like that which Imogen and Kora had just felled in an alleyway) that might cross her path but rather that she seemed well out of her usual routine to be emerging from one of the few stores still open at this hour; though judging by the tiny Asian man hastening after her to flip the sign in his door around that was about to change. She was carrying, pressed to her chest as she re-wound a scarf around her neck, a bag of Chinese herbs with the insignia of the store stamped to the front.
The Shadow Lord Kinswoman's coat was black, and the collar and sleeves were worn out, ragged. The hem needed attending to at the base; peeking out from beneath its folds were her work blouse; the simple uniform given to Nurses at Mercy Hospital. Her pathway would lead her toward the alley where the Fenrir and the Fianna stood conversing post battle, but her breeding would alert them to her far before she noticed the pair of them.
[Kora] Ahead in the alley - there some musk of danger, and a pair of moving figures. Not the usual darkness - not the Vietnam vet who reclaimed that abandoned barcolounger beside the dumpster as his own, and plays out - nightly - some long forgotten battle against some long dead men while drinking himself to oblivion, not the pair of leggy girls, too young to be so old, too old to be so young who normally haunt the entrance.
"Thanks doc - " Kora says to Imogen, directly and simply as she reaches for what seem to be the - well, ankles, of whatever the broken thing was. "I'll get it out of line of sight and get started."
Sorrow's hair has come loose, spills down her narrow back like a pale flag. Whatever she used to hold it back snapped with her shift, and now it catches the light as she moves, makes her almost human, almost ordinary. From a distance, Jesmond could pretend that she was just some girl on her haunches on an alley, that the sheen of wet on her hands was from the drifting snowflakes, the dirty water pooling in the broken asphalt after the afternoon's pounding winter rains.
Then she looks up, sharply over her shoulder as Jesmond's footsteps ring out on the pavement. Some new alertness enters her body language, and the illusion of girlishness is banished before it could be fully formed. The look is shrewd; she senses pure breed in a physical way, nostrils flaring as if she could literally smell whoever owned Jesmond's blood in the air around her.
A smear of blood mars the pale skin of her cheek, darker stains are shadows against her strong thighs. She is crouched on her haunches, shoulders forward, thighs drawn up, one hand against the pavement for balance, the other on her knee.
"That woman," To Imogen, quiet. " - know her?"
[Linus] The air ruptures somewhere in the darkness of the alleyway, where eyes and light make themselves known only when absolutely necessary and only within certain occupations. People like to forget about the dark spots and for those living in the city of the True kind and nature, it pays to know most general locations and their B.C.S. For instance, a dark alley was less conspicuous than the kitchen or closet of a diner as Superman entrances were very 60's but rooftop Batman methods made themselves popular everytime you looked down over the city with a scowl and some brooding.
The air ruptured, as was being said and the thinned out Godi is staring around with a vague sense of exhaustion under his eyes. Exhaustion and irritability. His clothes are a mesh of hoodies, one under a smaller other, with a black half-coat who's sleeves had been permanently rolled up. One hood is up while the other above it is down and over one shoulder. The cargo pants and sneakers are new, dark and relatively unremarkable.
"You two are hard to-"
He skids slightly in the muck of the fallen thing, hand roaming out to plant on the wall and catch himself from plummeting into the mess with a growl and flutter of Rage. The alley stinks and he snorts loudly. Wetly.
"...Hard to find." He wipes beneath his nose with the back of a gray felt and fingerless glove, flicking the excess onto the nearby wall. His eyes flick to Imogen (reflex and breeding) than on toward Kora (Concern and Instinct) with swift abandon.
"Immediate needs?"
[Imogen] Jesmond's footsteps ring out and Imogen's hand slides beneath her jacket again, hitching the hem of it up to give her clear access to her weapon. This is more than preparation, more than security. The tension of the muscles of her arms, the cock of her shoulder are all clear indicators of her intention.
Had Jesmond been human or unknown to her, Imogen's weapon would have been drawn. She might even have fired. She's done it before.
But Jesmond is not human and she is not unknown to her and Imogen's hand slips away from the butt of her gun. "Yes," she says.
"Kinfolk, though I don't recall the tribe. Not Fenrir." She has more details than that, but they are hardly pertinent; Jesmond's former sept, Jesmond's former mate.
Linus skids through the gauntlet, coming to a stop with a remonstration that becomes immediate duty. Imogen's body tightens like a bow - though she does not reach for her weapon, casting the Fenrir Godi a restrained glance.
"It's a bloody way-station," she observes, resigned.
"I'll go get my car." Let Kora prioritize. The body disposal over the Skald's own injuries (and Imogen's too, perhaps, though her silence on the subject is telling).
She starts out of the alleyway - a path that will put her directly in front of Jesmond. "Bit o' a mess out there," she says. She recalls that the other is a nurse, and therefore does not bother warning her away from it. "If yeh'd like t'pitch in, I ha' gloves in my car."
[Imogen] (err. bit of a mess in there.)
[Kora] Immediate needs? asks Linus, and Kora shoots him a look. The gleam in her eyes is animal, but the familiar shape of her generous mouth could only be considered - well, wry under that starched shadow of wary alertness demanded by the strange place and the equally strange company.
Her hair is loose, her own hoodie - undedicated - is shredded, in pieces scattered around the alley. A dark t-shirt and stained thermal, the old jeans and familiar goddamned Doc Marten's are all that remain of whatever she wore before. The air is brisk, cold enough that that her cheeks and nose are red, and only the afterburn of her rage, the spike of blood through her dilated arteries keeps her warm.
"We need to get rid of Junior, here. The doc's bringing around her car. Give me a hand, would you - " and then a glance back at Jesmond, as Imogen confirms that the woman is known, if not her tribe. "Shadow Lord - " Kora supplies, when Imogen qualifies the woman's identity as simply not Fenrir. Then she's turned back again to the corpse, grabbing one of the thing's nameless limbs with a gesture toward Linus. "Doc's bringing the car around. I want him a bit more concealed before we start disarticulating the joints."
[Linus] Linus first reaction to the figure is something akin to disgust. Nothing of refusal there though, more just a healthy consideration for the Wyrm's various ministrations on humanity. Gnostic sensibilities kicking in with that soulful cringe at the centre mass, obscure, abstract and vaguely metallic over the solar plexus. He crouches low to the ground and circles either wrist of the thing, eyes lifting back up to Kora, waiting for her signal to begin to heft.
"You people-" Grunt. Lift. Heave. "-really like getting everyone's hands dirty, I see."
He huffs, nose crinkling slightly even as they shift the body in the direction Kora wants to go. Linus is careful to take a wide stance, so as not to slip in the constant leak of fluids from the frame in question. His eyes remain thin, as if to open them to too much light might hurt or cause discomfort.
"Where's your disposal site anyway?" More grunting and sliding about. He isn't exactly the largest of fellows, mind you.
[Jesmond Krutova] Jesmond's footsteps slow as she registers the fact that there is activity ahead of her, and that the woman emerging from the alleyway is someone she knows, by name and by virtue of having worked beside her on at least one prior occasion. The paper bag in her arms is shifted, and the dark-haired Kinswoman peers at Imogen in the manner people did, when they were confirming identity.
"Doctor Slaughter," she greets as if it were the most amiable meeting imaginable, and then her eyes chart to the alleyway at mention of the mess. "Of course, is anyone hurt?" By anyone, it seems fair to imagine she includes Imogen in that cluster, her eyes lingering on the traces of blood on the redhead. When she is what she approximates as near enough, Jesmond leans over and sets her bag of groceries down.
Her figure, amongst all the muck and grime is that of a tall female with pale skin and dark, dark hair. She looks at what the Fenrir are wrestling with; and wordlessly rolls the sleeves of her coat upward. "Jesmond," she informs them then and carefully navigates her way around the wet ground. "How may I assist?"
The gore apparently did not deter her; but then, her own figure faintly housed the scent of antiseptic and old blood, worn into her shoes; her blouse. This was not the first scene of bloody chaos she had borne witness to.
[Kora] "All hands on deck - " returns Kora, with that quiet hint of irony that has matured since she was a teenager. The direct look she gives her brother across the corpse is open and surprisingly good-natured. A lingering hint of dark eyes framed by her familiar pale features, the straight nose and generous mouth that must have made her (nameless) modi father look bruisingly sweet when he smiled. " - and all that rot."
Then with the heaving. The dead thing has some impossible sort of specific gravity that seems heavier than lead, some investment of metal into flesh, some concealed weight admist that bulbous flesh. Beneath the make-shift cloak - made from a pair of black flannel blankets stapled together, it wears a vintage wrestling t-shirt and misshapen sweats with a high school logo on the thigh.
These are the only human things left of the corpse. Vestigal memories of what-it-was that disappear as the pair of Fenrir thud it down in the deeper shadows of the overflowing dumpster.
"The doc has a few," says Kora, quietly, to Linus' question. "One in these old freight railroad tunnels, out in Bronzeville. I don't know if there are any closer." She straightens then, dark eyes tracing Jesmond's path as she picks her way down the wet alley and sets her groceries aside. "Kora," says the Fenrir, by way of introduction. Cursory tonight, as there is work to be done and Jesmond is, in the end, still a stranger. Lifting her chin toward her brother, she offers, " - and Linus. Keep a watch out, would you? Make show no one lingers, watching. And no one interrupts us while we take care of this."
There's blood on her hands, on her cheek, dark stains on her thighs.
[Imogen] She has not cleaned herself perfectly of blood. Traces linger between her fingers, a smear of it along her jawline, a shadow of it at her throat. Still, she stands straight, her body unbowed by pain, and if she favours one side, it is not debilitating.
Imogen arches an eyebrow at the question, "Something was killed," she said, "Fortunately it was the other side. I don't believe anyone needs human medical attention."
With that, they part ways, Imogen toward her car, and Jesmond, deeper into the alleyway.
[Linus] Linus is listening as Kora speaks but his eyes seem to be registering Jesmond's hands to her sleeves, rolling them up with some sort of intention. It's only as she stares down at the body with something akin to frankness that Linus' features seem to twist with...well something indelicate. He might well have said something had Kora's orders/suggestion not crept in. Linus is not the sort of keep quiet, expressively or vocally but in this he seems satisfied and returns his attention to the body without responding to Kora's introduction of him.
"Should probably burn it." A pause, glancing at Kora again, a systematic scrutiny of the blood and places. The boy's knowledge of medicine was mediocre to pathetic but then, that was for Healers. That was for doctors and nurses.
"Looks like a War aspect." He nudges at the body, distended, engorged muscle and metallic endurance. "Any projection? Fluids or mental? Suggestions? Get at your goat or the Doc's at all?" A pause. "Angry? He make either of you angry?" A glance past Kora and Jesmond, toward the distancing Doctor Slaughter and back again.
[Linus] (annnddd I'll be back soon. Gotta go grab some food.)
[Kora] "The blood was hot," returns Kora, quietly, glancing out over her shoulder at the mouth of the alley. She's in shadow now, brighter only where the light glazes her hand, her pale hands as she holds them out, turning the long fingers over, and under, examining tips the way a human woman might inspect a recent manicure. An angry flush of red - a first degree burn - is the only legacy of that hot blood except for the drying stains. " - burned a bit, but I think it was just the body's internal temperature, not acid, not some caustic. Otherwise - "
Here she glances up, catches the edge of her brother's attention, meeting his eyes in the shadows. She is conscious of her body, standing straight through the spine, shoulders leveled - not as lithe, perhaps, as she was - but otherwise nearly ordinary. "no. Nothing mental. More like a boiling kettle, that one - " Then she nods vague agreement to his suggestion. "Cleanse what we can, then we'll burn it. Help me with the shoulders, will you? We need it in manageable pieces, small enough to fit in a garbage bag."
[Jesmond Krutova] Jesmond weathers the Godi's stare the way she did all; that was, she pretended that it was not occurring, and raised her face to examine the Garou's twisted expression with a semblance of something politely inquisitive, as if she were awaiting more commands to come from the young man. A pretty woman, the widowed Kinswoman did indeed possess a frankness to her scrutiny of the corpse at their feet.
It was not to say she was devoid of feeling about who or what it might have once been but that she was capable of setting any very human reactions to one side and get the business done of whatever needing doing. The Jarl requests that she keep watch, and Jesmond, her hands at her sides, nods once and turns to move and stand poised at the end of the alleyway; looking out and sliding a phone from her pocket as if she were merely waylaid by the necessity of making a phone call.
[Kora] (I gots to sleep. :) I've got a few minutes and I'm going to go pay my bills online but then I'm going to ask y'all to... write me out or just assume kora's hanging around in the background!)
to Imogen, Jesmond Krutova, Linus
[Jesmond Krutova] (No worries, hun! :) )
to Imogen, Kora, Linus
[Imogen] (I, uh, am pretty much in the same boat. Maybe Imogen and Kora go off to burn the body? it doesn't really require everyone. *grin* which will let you guys keep playing!)
to Jesmond Krutova, Kora, Linus
