Ornature

Shops and boutiques are still open up and down King Street, lights gleaming through the historic windows of the historic homes turned chic little emporiums or bistros, but the usually crowded parking lots and metered parking slots are half to three-quarters empty. It is cold and dark, rain slants down from a bleak gray sky made starkly orange by the reflected lights of the DC metroplex, bleeds like ozone back into the charmingly cobblestoned and bricked streets and walkways of Old Town Alexandria.

There's an old chalkboard outside the Majestic Cafe, but the cold rain has washed the evening's specials into an imperfect smear of multicolored chalk on the gray slate. The bartender keeps checking Weather.com, watching the endless loop of storm warnings, all the precursor coverage, the mid-Atlantic panic squeezed in between discussions of the sequester and the impact on the local economic.

Down the street at Current Boutique, the store clerk lingers by the door, counting down the minutes until she can close. Frantically texting her boyfriend instructions about the supplies necessary to survive in case that big red blob predicting power outages all over the DC area comes true.

For now, though: it is just rain, cold and driving. The smear of headlights halo'd with refracted light, in chilly succession across the dark, reflective streets as someone else escapes into the private haven of their car and pulls out, headed toward one of the rings of ever-expanding suburbs and hopefully home before the snow begins to fall.

The roads are somewhat quiet tonight, the cold and the rain driving all the sane folks indoors. They stay in their homes with the heat cranked, watching movies or playing on computers or cooking family meals for family types.

Ingrid steps out from one of the quint little boutiques, no extra bags in hand, much to the shopowner's delight. It is never comfortable for the mortals to have one like Ingrid in among them. Her rage is noticeable, but it's more than that. On some level they all feel a shiver of fear when the woman enters the room, as though at any moment she would shed her mortal skin and lunge for their throats.

She pauses in the doorway, peering out into the rainy night before pushing an umbrella before her, opening it before leaving the shelter of the shop. The smells of what she's left behind cling to her skin and hair and long, black wool coat briefly before they melt away, leaving nothing in their wake.

In autumn a hurricane swept through this area. It didn't do to D.C. nearly what it did to Jersey and the like, but it was bad enough. Jake had never been in a storm like that before. He boarded up his windows and put sandbags down and over-prepared the way that any newcomer would, but the difference between Jake and most newcomers is that next time, he'll still over-prepare. He'll still do everything he can to make sure that his home could withstand any version of the apocalypse, whether fire or ice or zombies or what-have-you.

When that storm was coming their way, the gusts of wind and smatterings of rain that were its scouts came through Browntown and Jake sat out in front of his bakery, arms stretched out to either side on the back of a bench, head tilted back, accepting the cold and the wet and the thunder of it.

He looks like a goddamn Shadow Lord. He smells like one. In the subtlest of ways, lurking just beneath the opinions many have of his tribe, he acts like one. To his core all the way up to the most surface behaviors, Jake is every inch a grandson of Thunder. He does this -- is this -- without thinking. Without really even knowing what is common or what is expected. It's just who he is.

Which is why, on a night like tonight, instead of retreating indoors or even into his car, he sits on the hood of that car in the same suit he came to town in, and sips a paper cup of coffee. He is drenched.

[per + alert]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 5 )

This is the way it begins. For Ingrid, this is the way it begins. A coil of scent, familiar and scarlet. The tickle of it against the back of her red and animal mind. Memorable but not discernable, not immediately, not sunk as it is beneath the cold, driving remnants of the rain that is getting colder by the minute, coalescing in the clouds above as the driving northern chill meets the swampish southern storm in some great convection billowing above the DC sprawl.

Rain sheets down over her umbrella, cold and driving. Not enough to cut the scent, though, which is no more than niggling at first, as if that girl down the block now struggling with the bulk of the blackboard in front of her near-empty bar had cut her finger on the metal teeth holding the A-frame open.

So she follows it; that curl in the air, like the faint and lingering residue of a woman's perfume an hour after she left the room, down the block until suddenly it blooms against her senses, with all the humid rot of a dying hothouse flower. Blood: viscous and copper and cloying waste, organ-deep. Down the long, dark walk / alley that is Muirs' Court, where it bisects the block and opens (eventually) onto a metered parking lot.

---

There's a streetlight above Jake. The light it casts is vaguely amber, but mostly a sickly white. Nevermind the gentrification. The winds, the scattering storms, these little prequel rain squalls (he can taste the storm, taste the layers of ice above, and snow to come, the electric, near kinetic potential swirling in the troposphere well above him) are violent enough to rattle the bulb in its cage. And, in one sudden arc of electricity, to blow it out. The streetlight explodes in an arc of reflective energy, a tracery of fire like the tail of a comet gleaming in the sky.

That's when he senses it, too. Not the thick curl of blood that wraps itself around Ingrid's lupine senses, but the shuffling of something that does not belong in the Muir's Court ahead. The back of the throat struggle of someone trying not to cry, and very very quietly. The wet, snuffling rip of someone tearing into a raw piece of meat. And the low hum of the radio playing storm warning after storm warning between snippets of Mexican hiphop, in what can only be the familiar tin-can rattle of a commerical kitchen.

He might also hear someone saying, "Let go, let go, let go," in a weak and rather sing-songy voice. And if he looks down the alley searchingly enough see what appears to be two homeless people crouching over the splayed body of a third in the shadow of a recycling bin, at the back door of a neighboring restaurant. Backs hunched against the rain, deep shadows cutting across them.

Roundabouts now, a slightly oddly-paintjobed Mustang comes rolling down the street. It's white. It has black racing stripes. It has a blond-and-blue Fenrir Modi in the driver's seat, except he's neither Fenrir nor Modi. He is leaning forward in his seat, the wipers going full-blast, which might be the only reason he sees his two friends on the street.

And seeing them! He pulls quickly to the side of the road. Parks. Hits the emergency blinkers, because he really has no idea if he's parked in front of a fire hydrant or a loading dock or what. It's pouring out there; visibility is shit. The driver's side door flies open. Erich tugs his hood up over his head as he jogs up on the sidewalk, under a friendly awning.

"HEY!" Both arms wave for attention. He has yet to register anything odd about the alley both his friends are headed toward, or into. He hasn't even stopped to think that maybe they're going in together because they want some privacy, though that would be totally awesome because they're his friends and he wants them to now-kiss. "INGRID! JAKE!"

Jake looks up. Not jumps, but he does lift his chin sharply to look up and over. His hand comes up as well, ready to shield his gaze against glass, a flash, whatever there might be. His attention was on the storm before, but that shattering light draws him out, opens his senses up. His nostrils flare.

Everyone who has skinned their knee or cut their thumb and stuck it instantly into their mouth knows the smell of blood, how even if it doesn't land on your tongue you can almost taste it in the air. That scent hasn't hit Jake yet. The sound does. A cold snake as thin as a rat's tail winds itself up his spine, slow and cruel, biting down with icy fangs into the nape of his neck.

He lifts his paper cup and takes another swig of the hot coffee. Glances around and over his shoulder as though looking for a place to toss it, which he is. But it's also to see where the sound it coming from, which is right over there. Jake's eyes narrow, and he looks away, sliding off the hood of the BMW to dump the cup into a nearby wastebin.

Thing is, if it weren't for what else he hears through the rain, he would just go home.

Jake comes around to the trunk of his car, popping it open. He hasn't seen Ingrid yet, or maybe he just hasn't recognized her from the all of two minutes he met her in a dark, crowded club. He shrugs out of his sodden suit jacket, unfolds a tarp in the back, and dumps the jacket onto the tarp. There's a duffel bag in there, but he yanks that aside as well.

There's a flap of carpet over the spare tire. He opens that.

There's another bag wedged in there. Not very long. He unzips it, shielding it from rain with the trunk hood and his own body, and slides the clip beside the pistol right in. Smooth as silk, solid as knives. He replaces everything, minus the pistol. He puts that in the inside pocket of his overcoat, which is still mostly dry, the wool wicking away the new rain that falls. Jake turns his collar up and closes the car. It beeps when he locks it from the key fob in his other pocket.

And with that, he walks up to the disposessed, the lonely, the cold and hungry.

"Let them go," he says, quite flatly, when he gets to about four feet from their backs.

[str + intimidation]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Even in her weakened birth form, Ingrid's sense of smell is strong. Even on two legs, she is a hunter, a tracker, a finder of things. She catches the scent, though faint, despite the rain and the smell of the cold and scents of the city at large. Her chin lifts and she sniffs the air, eyes closing slowly to block out the distractions of sight. When she opens them, her head tilts in an animal way. Adjusting her hold on her umbrella so that it rests on her shoulder, allowing the rain to travel a little further up her coat, she starts off in search of the source.

The scent draws her down the street. Leads her in the direction of the alley. Just before she reaches the entrance another scent meets her, fainter than the blood smell. She turns her head toward the black BMW, eyes narrowing at the sight of a man who looks and smells vaguely familiar, and not simply because the blood of her tribe flows through him.

She's close enough now to hear the shuffling. Reluctantly, she turns away from the man, her head turning, her eyes the last to leave his direction. Slowly, she lowers her umbrella, welcoming the rain on her face and hair as she carefully folds away her umbrella, slowly wrapping the strap around it to keep it tied down.

The man heads for the alley, and she stops, watching his progress. Behind her, a familiar white Mustang parks, but of course she can't see it. Ingrid is perceptive, but she doesn't have eyes in the back of her head. Once Jake has entered the alley, once she's heard his commanding tone, she follows.

And is all but struck a physical blow by the stench. She pauses in the opening, head rocking back. If she were human, the dainty, elegant, above-everyone woman she appears to be, she might pull out a handkerchief or bring her gloved hand to her nose, protecting it. She's not those things, though.

HEY! Turning, she sees Erich. And as though it hasn't been an age since they last saw each other, she tips her chin up in greeting, and jerks it once toward the alley.

Hey. Come on.

This is what Erich sees: the familiar BMW, and Jake's broad back as the kinsman tucks his weapon into the (relatively) dry shelter of his suit jacket, light streaming in odd rippling curtains down his back as the rain continues to fall, and the new onset of an odd, tinkling chorus as the rain begins to hit the ground as glazing bits of ice like tiny balls of hail, instead of just cold rain.

This is what Erich sees: the first skim of ice glazing the windshields of the few other parked cars on the street. The first few flakes of snow, falling from an acid sky.

Muir's Court is narrow enough, bricklined. Not open for anything but foot traffic and the occasional delivery truck. Plastic trash and recycleing bins are tucked beside the back doors of various cafes and shops.

This is what Ingrid sees: Jake, the broad bulk of his torso, four-feet, perhaps less, cast in shapely, oblique shadows by the dull glow of imperfect light from the half-opened door of the (nameless) cafe. The radio drones school closings, storm warnings, then cuts back through a haze of static to a low-beating bass line, hurried spoken word a nearly incomprehensible mix of English and Spanish almost sublingual in its gutteral complexities. More about the heart and fucking spleen than the mind.

This is what Jake sees:

Two young, rather slender homeless people. Kids - sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that sort - the sort who haunt the edges of the city, with dreadlocks, beating makeshift drums in circles outside the Metro stations, playing their plastic buckets as if they were born to it. High or hoping to be as soon as the quarters acumulating in the guitarist's case measure up, hunched forward over the splayed body of a third.

A hurried glimpse of a startled face, round as the moon, just visible inside the kitchen, dusky cheeks drained pale, but smeared with blood, muttering the echoing beat of his instructions like a prayer. Like a decade of the rosary. Let them go, let them go.

Something slithering up behind her.

This is what Jake sees: a spleen, in the clawed hand of one of the kids, inert and glistening with fluid. The beat of fluorescent light behind the kids makes it pulse like a heart in the hand, or maybe it's the way the kid squeezes it, knuckling into a sort of bone-worming confusion as the authority in Jake's voice makes it stop and look up and back. There's something animal, or even vegetable in the cant of its head, nothing human remaining.

The eyes, the bridge of its nose are no more than a smooth expanse of new-grown skin, soft as a baby's ass. The mouth is double-hung, a deep-set and powerful underbite, the lower jaw dominated by two burgeoning tusks.

[b]Let them go[/b], says Jake.

And so the first one does. Dropping the spleen of its eviscerated victim with a sick, wet plop. Right at his feet, while the other one shrinks back into the shadows, snuffling tentatively at the air in front of him as if -

- as if - maybe the right of tribute belonged to him, after all.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

I was homeless for a while as a kid

That's what he said to Erich, who he has also met only once but who he spent considerably more time with. He doesn't know that the woman Erich talked about was Ingrid. He doesn't know that Ingrid is 'Ingrid'. He does hear his name, dimly, at the end of Erich's shouting. He does notice the woman, or someone, pausing by the alleyway.

He remembers hunger. And loneliness. And fear.

You learn what you need to.

Jake notices the interior of the kitchen but he sees the face of the 'kid' in front of him more immediately. One skitters off. Jake just stares. It isn't that he isn't reacting: his stomach is overturning, the need to retch is rising up, and that ice-cold whip-thin snake wrapped around his spine is making him want to shudder. He reacts. He just has other things on his mind that matter more at the moment.

With an exhale, and knowing that whoever is behind him will see but will have also seen the tusks and the lack-of-eyes and the cannibalism on this creature, Jake reaches into his interior pocket, takes out the .45, and goes to fire.

Jake -- ignores him. Or well; Jake is so focused on something else that he doesn't notice the large, enthusiastic Ahroun waving his arms at him. And Ingrid. Well, Ingrid looks at him, registers him, and gives him that sort of this way jerk of her head that might offend a more sensitive Garou. Set him to yelling about how he's not a lapdog, not her pet, she doesn't get to just jerk his chain and get him to follow.

Erich is not particularly sensitive. And frankly, he's not much of a leader either. He knows their roles. She's the sniffer, the scout, the finder-of-things-that-need-to-be-bashed. He's the muscle. He's the hammer. He's the basher-of-things-that-need-to-be-bashed. His head tilts; he knows that look she just gave him, the focus in her eyes, the tilt of her chin. He thinks briefly about getting the tire iron out of his car, but then

Ingrid usually finds trouble that a tire iron wouldn't put a dent in.

So he follows. And he takes his hands out of his pockets, folds his hood down after all. It's okay if he gets a little wet. At least he'll be able to see. He's several steps behind the others. When he moves, when he joins the fight in earnest, he will be the most savage beast in this zoo. But he won't be joining it for a handful of seconds yet, and seconds -- in situations like these -- are precious and few.

This is unfortunately not the first time Ingrid has seen a group of homeless acting outside the norm. Not so long ago, she was sent to find a lost Theurge and returned to Awakening with reports of something else instead. She agreed to help again if she's in the area, and a part of her hopes she won't be. She will, but that tale will come another night.

She enters the alley behind Jake, not going in fully but hanging back, just enough that she can snag Erich by the shoulder to keep him from wild exclamations as soon as he enters. The Ahroun's exuberance is usually good for distracting enemies. It's part of the appeal of hunting with him. But it doesn't work so well when he's bringing up the rear.

Oh, and with the pure bred kinsman in front of the pair of that is definitely a concern of Ingrid's, right at the top of the list.

Of course, once Ingrid has Erich, she holds him only so long as it takes for him to see what's in store before pushing him ahead of her. If she were in the mood to speak, to draw more attention to herself, she might say Ladies first.

She doesn't. With the men in the lead, she steps to the side. Jake fights the urge to retch, and sets her umbrella against the wall and begins to shift. Mucles shift, bones snap, and clothing tears. So, the usual for one of Ingrid's strolls through the city. At the rear of the group, she takes to her mottled dark Crinos form, trusting in the Delirium to keep gawkers and witnesses at bay. Tapping her chest with her huge handpaw, she withdraws a sword from her sternum.

[When?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

Thing 1 +5

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Thing 2 +4

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )

Thing 3 +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )

[+7]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

"Oh my god what is that sm--"

Midsentence, Erich sees what is in that alleyway and bursts into his direwolf form.

[+8!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )

[+9]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

Charlotte +8!

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

Erich: 17
Jake: 13
Ingrid: 10
Charlotte: should be 10! I forgot form modifier.
Thing 3 9
Thing 2 9
Thing 1 8

Thing 1: tackle Jake!

Thing 2: charge Ingrid!

Thing 3: Shout: reflexive: KILL IT to other two things

1. charge the crying bloodied girl in the kitchen

2. Bite her to bits!

Charlotte: uh, emerges from the gauntlet, bites thing 3.

[1a. Sidestep Thing 2 (dodge)
1b. Sword slice it from side/behind/whatever it would be then]

Jake raises the gun right at the thing in front of him. He's aware now: wolves, both of them. It doesn't matter if he recognizes them, heard the voice, knows them, trusts them. They are changing and coming at those things and the air is rippling nearby. For all he knows this is a pack and they've been hunting these creatures. Welp:

"Get the one in the kitchen!" he shouts, to whichever one of them is listening. The girl in there is alive. Out here there's only rot.

[3RB to Thing 1, should be within point blank range]

[-1R: poof! hispo.

1. barrel into kitchen!

R1. chomp thing 3.

R2. some more.

R3. one more time!]

[3RB to Thing 1. dex + firearms + 3 // diff 4 +1]

Dice: 10 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

[damage: 5 + suxx -1]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 9, 10) ( success x 1 )

inside the darkened kitchen: chaos as the gauntlet hazes and a silver-white direwolf pops into reality, shearing space and time, displacing a powerful gust of are. Claws scrabbling against pots and pans, smearing in the blood spattered on the tiled floor as she charges: the slithering interior shape lurching toward the crying girl.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 5 )

Dmg

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Thing 3 Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 1 )

Thing 3: changing actions: Charge Charlotte!

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 1 )

Damage

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Thing 2: charge Ingrid!

Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Damage!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Thing 1: bite Jake!

-1 owies.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 2 )

Damage!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

[Shit! Soak!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5) ( botch x 1 )

[1b. Slice!: dex+melee -3, diff -1]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

[dam: 3+2+6][L]

Dice: 11 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Thing 2: soak

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

[CHOMP!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

[dmg]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 8, 9) ( success x 1 )

[CHOMP x2]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 1 )

[dmg]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Thing 3: incap.

[I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE INCAP, I'M TUNNELVISIONED DPS HERE.]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 4

[dmg]

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )

Thing 1: BITE JAKE MORE, HE IS TASTY.

Thing 2: WP roll

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Thing 2: I am feeling CONFIDENT. BITE INGRID.

Charlotte: Uh, split action. 1a. run toward jake/thing. 1b. shoulder in between them and take the blow in lieu of the still-homid person.

[1. Slice
R1. Slice
R2. Slice, all on Thing 2, moving to 1 if it goes down.]

Hard to tell if Storm's Teeth goes lunging into that bloodspattered kitchen because he's surging to the defense of the innocent, or if he's just responding to the only semblance of leadership there is in this brawl. Either way: he goes lunging into that bloodspattered kitchen. He barrels through the door, his shoulders shattering the jamb and cracking the wall. The soon-to-be-chewed girl is screaming, screaming.

There's a flash of white, something's in the Ahroun's way but he doesn't even slow. He closes: there's a flash of hot blood. Then his teeth doing what they do best, crashing shut once, breaking bone, glancing the next time, tearing skin open, the thing goes limp, he doesn't even notice. He tears into it again, all planted paws and bristling ruff, terrible gnashing jaws that rip and shake and rend and tear. They can hear him in there: the savage, joyful noise of his butchery.

[another 3RB, -2 for wtf ow, before someone gets in his way I won't say who but her hair is pink]

[That's to Thing 1 btw]

[1. Oh hey, it's dead. Move!

R1. BITE WHATEVER'S CLOSEST. PREFERABLY ONE OF THE THINGS.

R2. SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST.

R3. HOW ABOUT ONE MORE.]

Can he honestly say he's had worse than tusk-like teeth digging into his side? He's certainly felt punctures and slashes, he's felt far too much blood all welling up at once and pouring out of him like this. He's felt the near-instantaneous lightheadedness from pain and from blood loss before. Figuring out if he's been chewed on before, bitten quite like this before, takes too much thought when there isn't much left in him but a sudden

and overpowering

and familiar

desire to destroy something.

[dex + firearms + 3 -2 (ow) // diff 4 +1]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 4 [WP]

[damage: 5 + suxx -1]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5) ( botch x 1 )

Thing 1: x.x

[I have no words -_-: SLICIN' UP 2]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

[dam: 3+2+6][L]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

Thing 2: Bite Ingrid!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Damage

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

[SOAK]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )

What Charlotte sees is the wavering haze of the gauntlet, the sudden explosion of violence on the other side of the wormy (and wyrm-riddled) darkness, the gloss of blood on well-polished stainless steel. This kaleidescope whirl of sensation that merges with half-a-hundred memories of blood in the throat and beneath the paws. Most of them not her own. The singe of gunpowder as she churns through the kitchen, blood and slaver dripping from her jaw, barrelling through to intercept a blow that never falls because the creature falls in a sprawl like am empty marionette over the corpse of its victim / evening meal and she is still moving and there is one left and she remembers this (remembers this and remembers this) in an overwhelming echo that pushes through her senses, extrudes through the structures of her mind and there is one more and she is opening her jaws and -

Charlotte: changing action to bite Thing 2 @ +1 difficulty / -1 penalty

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( fail )

[CHOMP! THIS IS FUN.]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 5 )

[dmg]

Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

Thing 2: x.x

With identical savagery and speed, Storm's Teeth puts down a second -- and last -- creature. Not by himself, of course. His friends helped. He knows they did. But right now he's in a near-wolf form, his mind is near-wolf, he's feral and vicious and hair-triggered and happy, happy, he did good, yes he did.

It's a far cry from the first time he and Ingrid hunted together. That time he struck again and again, futilely, furiously, finally giving in to his overwhelming shame and frustration. He lost his grip on who he was, where he was, all of it; came out of it with no memory of the event, only a decimated corpse he'd nearly chewed all the way through. He was exhausted. Emptied out. He barely wanted to move.

Different, this time. This time he brings that second thing down -- it's not a clean kill, not some crisp snap of the neck but a great bloody sinking of teeth into the shoulder, a rip, bones and tendons coming loose from their moorings, a lung torn almost out of the chest cavity. Blood everywhere. But he's in control of himself. He has agency over the moment, the situation. He whips around, flings the mess against the wall, and then

he fairly dances a circle around Ingrid, bounding, his huge paws splattering pools of rainwater and blood and god knows what else onto the alley walls. When he comes to a standstill, blood drips slowly from the fur around his jaws, which loll open. His tongue drops out; he grins.

"That Jake. Kin. Jake-kin. You be take care of. Go." And he dips his head, bumps the flat of it against Ingrid, heavily, shoving her in the direction of the injured kinsman. Nevermind her own injuries: she's a grown-ass woman.

He shoots, he scores.

And the eyeless, tusked thing that used jaws soaked in someone else's blood to dig into Jake's own flesh thuds wetly to the asphalt. There's a flurry of activity around him and Jake steels himself, realigns his grip on his weapon, and starts to turn toward the last location of the next-nearest...thing.

Which is in pieces hanging from the maw of a black direwolf.

Jake looks over at the kitchen door and there's no monsters in there anymore -- none living, at least. Normally he would approach things, lay one last bullet in the skull of each, but he only has the two bullets left in this clip anyway and he's vaguely aware of the sensation of air moving over torn muscle, open wounds. He lets his right arm hang at his side, hand firm but thoughtless on the grip. He grabs his coat and hugs it tight to the wound, his left arm clamped down on it. He tries not to move too much, while he attempts to figure out just how bad it is. Hard to tell, right this moment. There's a lot of distractions.

He sighs, which sounds like a rattle. "Ah, fuck," he mutters, and decides to go ahead and move. He starts walking over to the kitchen door. At least the black wool overcoat mostly shields him. He does have blood splattered elsewhere -- god, his hands are a mess -- but at least he doesn't look like that bothers him.

Jake, all six-and-change of him, holding a black matte gun that is nearly as long as that woman's forearm, a gun still smoking from its last discharge, walks over to the terrified, wounded woman, and clenches his jaw. Lowers himself to one knee, so that he's very close. So that she can see the whites of his warm brown eyes. If he didn't smell like smoke and blood right now, he might smell like freshly baked bread and rain.

"Get up and run," he says, his voice as leaden and dull as the bullet casings on the ground. Everything he says after that falls just as heavy, just as flat. He never takes his eyes off of hers. "If you look back, I will shoot you in the head.

"If you scream, I will shoot you in your throat.

"If you breathe a word of this to anyone," he finishes, "I will find out. I'll kill them. And then I'll kill you."

There's a moment, and then a jerk of his head. "Get the fuck out of here."

[correction: grey, not black direwolf]

Outside, in the space of these three or four wretched heartbeats, he driving rain has changed to drifting snow. Great, fat flakes of it that drift like ash from a dying mountain, churning in lazy spirals toward the cold ground.

The radio is still humming, another warning. Snow accumulations, office closings, school cancellations. Church services and basketball games. The girl in the kitchen is still crying, crawling slowly through the gore left in the wake of the battle, head tucked down stiff with paralyzing fear, working and working and working to make herself small and small and smaller still.

Her fingers move in worrying, tactile motions. That rosary rhythm again, cycling through the sparking angles of her paralyzed subconcious.

Let them go. Let them go. Let them go.

The subvocal chant that underpinned Jake's first awareness of the gory scene.

--

The creature in the kitchen is so utterly eviscerated by Storm's Teeth's charge that it exists as nothing more than red pulp, bone fragments, a glistening stew of strewn, half-recognizeable viscera, with strange growths, membraces, carapaces shattered amidst the more usual and familiar organs of the human body.

The creatures in the alley, which were Smaller and Lesser and less destroyed are more human. Somehow, in death than they were in the last few minutes, hours, memories of their lives. Deflated, empty now. Like hollow suits of skin and bone, that were animated only by animus rather than viable physical structures. As if they had been shrugged on and worn out and ripped open and [b]abandoned[/b] all in the space of three lives and four deaths.

--

The girl stops her crawling, crawling, awkwardly crabbed movement backward when Jake comes close; human, that much she can tell, and she gives him a pained side-glance, the dark wetness of her gaze is stark with a rigid sort of terror, brittle as untempered iron. But she smiles, see - this aching edge of hope to it, as if he might scoop her up and pull her out of the swirling nightmare of the last few hours, days, nights, years, and back into the semblance of a world that is knitted together at the seems, where dark dreams do not come to terrifying, blood-red life. And he -

Get up and run.

- and she. She - there is a moment of heightened terror, the recursive shock that whips down her spine as he enumerates his threats, saring, his voice flat and heavy and absolutely assured. She just sits there, half-praying to a god she has not believed in since she was four years old and her father beat her mother to death in Tijuana at the side of the road.

Then, abruptly, she does move. Follows his instructions with a stiff awareness of the consequences of not following them. Gets up, a lurching, unsteady gait - and runs - back through the kitchen, head down and forward, scrabbling for the door handle and shaking with absolute fear, refusing, refusing, refusing to turn around.

Jake can hear her in the cafe proper, the clatter of the chairs as she runs into them. The crystal chime of the bell as she stumbles into the door, managed to undo the lock with shaking hands. Runs, keeps running.

And never looks back.

One of the creatures had the audacity to bite Ingrid in the side. Her lip curled in a snalr, but before she could lift her sword for one final strike, before she could even give voice to a growl, first an unfamiliar wolf, silvery grey white, rose up behind it, teeth snapping to no effect. Then beside that one a more familiar shape, snapping and snarling, and the thing goes down, dropping at Ingrid's feet like an offering.

She looks down to the corpse, then lifts her muzzle to face her friend, and her head tips to the side. If she were in her small puny homid form, Ingrid would give Erich one of her infamous sly, secretive smiles. It's the same for almost everyone, except it would maybe spark in her dark eyes a little more. In her other forms, of course, this isn't possible. Her golden eyes all but twinkle. Her tail swooshes back and forth. Her ears flick back briefly, then face forward. Before she can do anything, he's dancing all around her, knocking rain water and ice crystals and the first falls of flakes along with blood all over the place, splashing up to mingle with the blood that oozes down her own side.

When he finally comes to a stop in front of her, Ingrid tilts her head down at him. Reaching out with her free hand, she places that massive paw atop his head. No scritching, of course, no patting, no humanly ruffling of his fur. It just sits there atop his head until he ducks down, barking out the kin's name. In all this time, Ingrid hasn't spoken a word.

Erich urges her to go be help the kinman. Ingrid looks up, watching through the door as Jake-kin walks over to the terrifed girl who had very nearly been someone's dinner tonight. She is terrified at the horrors she's seen, but mostly, she's terrified of Ingrid. Standing there in Crinos, bloodied sword in hand. Ingrid cocks her head to the side at the girl. She can't much hear with the kinsman is saying, but she can guess. Her lip curls back in a snarl at the girl, emphasizing the threat of her. It's brief. Just as the kinsman has things to do, so does Ingrid.

Despite her friend's insistence, Ingrid takes her sword and swipes it once, twice, thrice over her fur. Fur can be cleaned. The metal could be rusted, a particularly horrifying fate considering the sword's sheath is Ingrid herself. While she works slowly, meticulously at cleaning her weapon, she looks over the newcomer. She lifts her chin once in casual greeting; they've fought together, have the aftermath and the clean up still to consider, the stranger, despite all of her intense breeding of kings, can wait.

As though he means very well to keep his promises to her, Jake watches the girl run until she's out of sight. It's just that he does so from his crouch. He waits til she's gone before he rises, and that's because he grabs a hold of the stainless steel counter to help himself up, clenching his jaw again on the groan that is trying to work itsef up out of him. It comes out like a grunt, and he feels quite dizzy indeed once he's on his feet, but

it's important that he's on his feet again.

Jake checks his weapon, then safeties it. He keeps the coat clamped against his side under his arm and looks over at the three wolves in their various shapes and varying degrees of sociopathy, though he doesn't exactly give himself a pass on the latter.

He remembers when a wound like this never lasted this long. She would never let it. She couldn't bear it.

It takes energy to do this, and not the sort of energy that is seeping out of him and soaking his coat. It's a whole other kind, deeper and more ingrained, just as hard -- harder -- to restore. Somehow easier to reach, when he digs his hand down in to pull it up. But all the same: Jake nods at the mouth of the alleyway and tells them: "Tarp's in the trunk. There's probably bleach and a few other things in the kitchen."

And with that, he pushes off the counter he's half leaning on, half clinging to, and starts to head out toward his car.

...not that Jake-kin seems to need much help.

As the kinsman goes to his grim business, Storm's Teeth pauses briefly to lift his head, turn it. The schism in the moment runs deep. He's so gleeful, so pleased with himself, so playful. He's also utterly monstrous. A huge, hulking creature ripped from some primitive nightmare. His teeth are several inches long. Ancient man might have wanted to use them for daggers, but woe to the foes who tried to hunt a beast like this. There's fresh blood on his jaws; blood on his chin and dripping down his throat. Even the swing of his head is brutish, a heavy gesture the riffles the thick fur on his neck, shifts the muscles in his shoulders. He sniffs in Jake's direction. His ears swivel, come upright, angle again.

He whuffs. He turns back to Ingrid. She's not smiling that sphinx's smile of hers, but that's all right. He knows she means it. She puts her hand on his head. He headbutts her again, right in the stomach, a heavy and affectionate gesture.

And then he's pushing forward, sliding past her and against her as he turns. Jake is coming back out of the kitchen. Storm's Teeth stands there, his tail wagging slow and low, forepaws planted apart. Tarp, Jake says. Bleach. The words ping dully on his animal mind. Tark? Bleek? His ears move again, and then his ice-pale eyes blink, move unhurriedly away. He inspects the third wolf in the alley. A small bitch, small and silvery-white. Silver Fang, yes, there's something familiar about her. He lolls his tongue at her, too.

In the alley, the Silver Fang (all the bearing, all that weight of expectation, all the centuries of heros half-remembered, the surety of kings in the height of her withers and the sweep of her bloodied muzzle and the lazy curl of her tongue as she laps away the blood) has gone from war-formed to girl-formed in something close to an eyeblink as Storm's Teeth approaches her. Lolls his tongue at her.

In a loose hoodie, her brother's oversized DARTMOUTH LACROSSE t-shirt, worn jeans and old, mismatched, doodled-on Converse sneakers, she looks maybe fifteen. Pale saucer eyes and a heart-shaped face, her hair layers of pink and platinum and dark, chopped in an asymmetrical and haphazard and mismatched fall. There's a strap cutting across her body, a canvas bag slung across her back that she readjusts to her hip. Fingers curling out from the ragged cuff of the dedicated jacket. (YALE CREW, it says on the back. She is probably related to Ezra Stiles or Jonathan Edwards, but if so she is a rather sorry little wide-eyed speciman.)

Blood of kings indeed.

She is stiff with a sort of sudden and simmering self-awareness, awkward and out-of-place. Not part of the familiarity the other Garou share, acutely conscious that she is not part of it.

A jerk of her head toward the kinsman. The gesture faint, her eyes remain on Storm's Teeth, and his compatriot. The Crinos. Ever so slightly downcast. Not a hint of challenge there.

"I could uhm. Heal him?" A darkling look toward Jake as he shoulders past them. "If you guys - " and back to the pair of Garou, strangers, " - wanted or whatever?"

"Who cares what they want?" Jake tosses over his shoulder, more offhand than annoyed.

By the time the girl takes off running, Ingrid is very nearly done with her work. By the time Jake pulls himself upright, she's sliding the blade home into her sternum, where it sinks into her fur and disappears. If she shifts they'll see it again, a dark tattoo that runs down her chest.

Jake makes his way outside, and Ingrid watches him a moment. Jake. Kin. Jake the baker, with a job and everything, ooooo. That was months ago and Ingrid had been less than interested in the affairs of a kin, even one of her own tribe. She watches him now, though, golden eyes narrowed on him, on the stiff movement. Blood scent fills Ingrid's lungs, hers, his, that of the creatures she had a small hand in killing.

The Silver Fang shifts suddenly, girl-shaped. Ingrid looks sharply at her, considering. She has a single Gaia's Breath, given to her by the Warder to aid in a hunt some time ago. In the end, it's just logic. She shakes her head once in Crinos, then snaps suddenly to her birth form. She is of average height, smeared with blood, her dark hair wild and loose over her shoulders. It's fairly obvious that she's wearing her coat and nothing else, her legs bare, what skin they can see of her chest also bare. This she doesn't mind. The lack of shoes she minds a little. The ground is cold and wet.

She winces, more aware of her own injury in this form. But that will heal, given time and rest, which she will have aplenty when they've finished. It's no concern of hers if he scars, but he does have a business to run, even if it is in Browntown.

Her eyes narrow slightly at the kinsman's back as he tosses that little bit over his shoulder, but she shrugs an elegant shoulder. "We take care of our own."

And with that she pads silently after the man, fishing the talen from her pocket. "Wait," she snaps from behind him.

And in an eyeblink the great hulking beast is a man again. Man-like, anyway. It's Erich! -- a very bloodstained, madcap Erich, red all over the bottom half of his face, red soaking through that beloved hoodie of his. Which is not the same hoodie he lost that night with Ingrid at the club. He just likes hoodies. This one's thicker: lined with faux shearling, fit for winter on the Potomac.

"Silver Fangs are supposed to give orders, not ask instructions," he says, teasing, a twinkle in his eye. And then to Jake: "Jeez, aren't you nice when you're hurt."

Poof! Ingrid's the next to shift. They make a rather handsome pair, Erich and Ingrid. Like mismatched but complementary twins. Neither of them are the picture of a Lord of Thunder. He's so big, so fair, so blue-eyed, so blond. She's -- well; in truth, racism aside, she actually is the picture of a Shadow Lord Ragabash. She's sleek and sly and abrupt, impatient; she talks like she expects to get what she wants.

And there she goes: talking like she expects to get what she wants. They only stand next to each other, juxtaposed and contrasted, for a moment. Erich turns as she stalks off; calls after her: "Just ask him if he wants to get healed, or you two are just gonna argue."

He turns back to Charlotte.

"Want a ride back to your place?"

It's in him to just keep walking. To tighten his shoulders and spit that he didn't ask them a damn thing, he doesn't need their charity, what do they think he is, weak? It's in him to keep walking just so he's not heeling as soon as he's called. But the truth of the matter is, it has been a very long time since Jake was fourteen years old, defensive to the point of savage, spitting in the face of anyone who dared look at him.

Ingrid snaps at him, and Jake goes ahead and turns around, eyebrows lifted in question.

Woman from the club wearing nothing but a coat. He wishes for a moment he'd just kept walking. And there's Erich, who is bloody and delighted and teasing the girl and teasing Jake and advising Ingrid on how to deal with Jake and Jake just takes his eyes off the guy, looking back at Ingrid,

because she's the one holding the gourd. Jake seems to know what's coming, and instead of saying anything, he just unclamps his arm, opens his coat, and shows her the wound. It's not as bad as the bite a Garou's jaws would leave, because of the pure, rage-fueled strength there. It's bad, though. Those tusks were long enough to dig in, slash him open like daggers. His eyes close a moment when he peels the coat back, then open. His pupils are, despite the darkness, constricted. At least his breathing isn't labored, shallow, uneven. Just controlled.

A sharp breath outward, the lilting cut of her gaze catches the ambient light, pale as the drifting snow swirling down around them. The edge of the look like the glint of blade, just glimpsed in the darkness, is briefly matched by the curl of her mouth. At the corner.

"Or if you - " the question is embedded, embroidered into the tone, but is never finished. Ingrid takes care of her own, so says she, and Charlotte just kind of shrugs, this narrow little gesture, ceding all to the strange Shadow Lord and the strange Shadow Lord kin. They are the Second and Third Shadows Lords she has ever met in her entire life, and seem much more properly Shadow-like than Erich Storm's Teeth.

All madcap and bloodstained and offering her a ride back to her place. Her eyes snap back to him as he shifts, pops back into human existence. She does not really respond to his needling about Silver Fangs and instructions, not with strangers about, but she does curl a little shrug at him when he offers her a ride home.

"Sure, okay." With a little grin at the end, "It's somewhere across the river I think?"

"We should help clean up, though," with a wary glance back at Ingrid, who is Scary and Naked. And Jake, all looming and gritty. " - don't you think?" Now rocking up to her toes, and back down to her heels. "Maybe I could get a water elemental to come help cleanse the residual - " and she just shivers, smelling it all over again, the inky blackness of it, the throat-sucking darkness. " - uhm, stuff."

"Ahrouns don't clean up," is Erich's oh-so-enlightened opinion. He doesn't seem to care about all the residual -- ... -- the residue. He's quite cavalier about it, really. "They make the mess."

Asshole comment or not, he does stick around. He kind of picks up a few pieces and tries to pile them together. If given proper direction, he's rather good at chopping things to manageable bits. Tearing them up. Breaking them down. But all things considered: he's pretty bad at cleanup.

Behind her, Erich tells her to ask first or they'll argue. They can only argue if they speak to each other. Which they might, eventually.

She snaps at Jake to wait, not sure if he will or not. If he doesn't, she'll catch him at the car. If he does -- well, what do you know, he does stop. Up close the familiarity finally locks in, and she remembers where she saw him. Her brow quirks as she looks up at him, looming and annoyed.

The last time Ingrid used a healing gourd in a kinsman, she had been less than civil about it. He had, after all, just shot her in the face, and she had taught him that that sort of behavior was Not Okay. He'd blacked out from pain before she'd even gotten the dust sprinkled over him.

She's not so rough with this one, though that doesn't mean she's gentle, not by a long shot. Jake unclamps his arm and exposes his side to Ingrid, who takes a moment to examine it, the blood seeping dark and wet through his clothes. She cracks the gourd a little in her hand, reaches forward, the dust sprinkling through her fingers, and rests it against his side, infusing it with a touch of her spiritual essence. It probably would have been better to accept the Silver Fang's offer of healing.

She watches Jake's face, her head tilted curiously as she waits for the telltale signs of ceased pain to relax his pupils and ease some of the tension in his face. When it happens, she removes her hand and stares at it, at the blood that's seeped onto her palm, before wiping it casually on her rather expensive coat.

"You were getting the tarp?" she asks, actually asks.

"Lauren did." Is Charlotte's counter argument to Erich's statement about Ahroun-ly duties. It will ever be her counter argument to any statement about Ahroun-ly duties, though it is not entirely sincerely. Usually, for such things, there were People One Called. Here, she does not have any such numbers and is not precisely clear on the next steps. But more than the corpses and bodies, what she does is poke through the contents of the kitchen, and pull out all the meat in the icebox and walk-in freezer, pile these up into the tarp with whatever dismembered body parts they eventually assemble.

When THAT is finished, she insists either that they wait for her to try summoning something that might cleanse the blight, or that they go someplace for a proper right of cleansing on all this stuff before it is ultimately disposed of.

Just for laffs: ancestors

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Rite o' summoning:

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Gnosis!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Ahrouns, Erich says, do not clean up.

Jake, it appears, does not pass out from pain or blood loss or otherwise. Whether that's because he's a Shadow Lord kinsman or a baker or just himself, he doesn't slump to the ground or swoon. And Ingrid, for whatever reason, doesn't just slap the gourd on his side and call it a day. She crushes it, holds it, and presses it to his side. He is cold and hot in the snow, soaked through to the skin, but for a moment there is a flare of heat at his side, spreading through his torso.

He can't help but sigh. His chest moves with it, and his abdomen against her palm. "Jesus," he mutters, like he's rolling onto his back in bed and staring at the ceiling and not standing in a bloodied alleyway. He closes his eyes, and opens them again, looking down at the newly reformed skin. It happens so quickly. It's like it never was, except

there's a scar there. Right above her hand. It was hard to see with the flesh torn apart, but the gourd doesn't heal it: it was there long before tonight's wound, and it will be there til the day he dies. Just a discolored shadow: not clean, not surgical, no signs of stitching. Nor was it ever a puncture. It was a slash and burn, the mottled look that really only comes from one kind of injury. No telling if Ingrid recognizes it. It's pale, though, flattened out against his side a bit. Kinfolk do heal easier than human beings, though not with the perfect regeneration of Garou. It was probably worse than it looks now.

It also could have killed him. Just a couple of inches over. Whoever shot him barely missed his heart.

Jake lets the tatters of his shirt fall, and she asks about the tarp. He nods. "Body parts go in my trunk," he says, the 'if' statement followed by 'then': "body parts go in a tarp."

And so they do. Piled in pieces. Jake helps, considerably strong now he's healed, and tireless about it. With the four of them, it's short work, even if Erich lacks Jake's... efficiency in this area. Charlotte adds all the meat in the freezer, which Jake doesn't argue with. His BMW is going to be heavy after this. Charlotte insists they wait, just as Jake is about to ask Ingrid if she needs a ride somewhere.

So Jake waits.

So they wait: body parts and frozen meat in the middle of the tarp in the middle of the alley that is slowly filling with snow. Swirling in melting arches from a leaden sky, orange-gray. The city falling silent and filling up; the radio playing in the background still, the quiet drumbeat of its urgent and insistent rhythms.

The ritual seems like nothing to the kinsman; less than nothing. They are in the city; they cannot howl their lungs out to luna to frighten away with wyrm without breaking the spirit and fact of the litany fifteen times over; and so it is this: Charlotte cross-legged, seated in the muck, snow melting from her body heat, snowflakes curling on her cheeks like paper caught by a lick of flame, pushing through the gauntlet. A handful of offers from her bag, at the corners of the tarp. The sense of something opening and closing; of something taken in hand and performed sotto voce. The push push push of appeal. The Garou can sense the ritual; the truth beneath its full shape, ages-old but folded back into itself under the circumstances. The dynamic connection it facilitates between that world and this. Then the alien sense of communication with an entirely Other entity on the other side.

And, in the crisp, cold air, the ice crystals dancing in their hair and eyelashes, the hauntingly sudden wash of something warm and cool and sweet and clear. A taste left behind in the back of the throat, behind the eyelids, down the spine: nothing more than fresh and clean, the taste of a spring rain lingering in the air in the midst of a winter's storm.

There is an inch of snow on the ground by the time they finish. It is falling fast enough that their tracks are filling up again once they've made them. Charlotte and Erich help Ingrid and Jake wrangle the tarp-o-cleansed taint into the back of Jake's BMW. The girl is probably the weak link in these muscled jobs, but she shoulders and tugs and pants away at it, blood be damned. And in the end she takes the Ahroun up on his offer of a rid home, leaving Ingrid and Jake and a trunk full of body parts in the middle of the winter's night.

She watches the lok that passes over Jake's face, seeing it, knowing it, though she doesn't really understand it. People are all such strange creatures to her. People being kinfolk, of course. Aside from Garou they're the only ones that matter, the only ones that are worth bothering with. The corner of her mouth quirks slightly at his statement, but she says nothing more. And she doesn't stay in this form, either, but shifts up just a little, just enough that her skin toughens against the cold and her metabolism spikes, her body going to work to heal the bite in her own side as quickly as it possibly can. If she stays like this, in a few days her body will be perfectly unmarred once more.

Well. Almost perfect. The Ragabash is not without her scars.

They do the clean up, Ingrid directing the other two Garou when it seems like they need direction, and only then. She's, perhaps surprisingly, good at this work that Garou usually have someone like Jake do for them.

At some point Ingrid makes her introduction with the Silver Fang girl, human and deed and rank and all the rest sounding so formal even from her more gutteral Glabro throat while they load pieces onto the tarp. When they've finished, Charlotte tells them to wait, so she waits with the others for the cleansing to be completed. The air lightens, freshens around them. Closing her eyes, Ingrid breathes deep the scent she can almost taste.

When it's over, Ingrid offers further assistance only if it seems necessary to the kinsman.

Jake Novak

When it's over, Erich taking Charlotte in the Mustang, Jake glance at Ingrid. Gives a nod. He hasn't asked them where they're going to put the body parts, or what they expect him to do. He hasn't explained it, either. He's just closing the trunk, wiping his hands with a towel, looking at the Ragabash who has a name in his head now. "Want a ride someplace?"

Ingrid Kim

For Ingrid, she doesn't ask because she doesn't feel the need. Jake seems more than capable in the area of disposal. Details are hardly necessary.

He asks if she wants a ride, and she shakes her head once, no. She could say more, could explain something, maybe offer a word of thanks.

Instead, she turns on her heel and moves carefully through the snow. In a matter of minutes her tracks disappear beneath fresh snowfall, and she disappears as though she was never there.