Ornature

They began building the second house in the first week of June.

Melantha bought a trailer bed to tow at the back of the Jeep. She and Erich started going to Home Depot a lot. Granted, they also started running off into the woods more, by themselves and all. It's summer. They do what animals do when it's warm and verdant outside.

The frame is up, the house is being built, the second tinyhouse that is just for Melantha, that will sometimes fold down a railing and share a porch with the other tinyhouse but will be her territory, her own. She and Erich work hard on it. They work a lot, early in the morning or into the night when the heat isn't quite as oppressive. At least in the mountains it's a little easier to cope with; it's cooler.

Right now, Melantha is not working on the house or working at the saloon. She's down by a creek, washing out some clothes with this nifty bio-degradable soap she gets from REI. Her thick hair is tied up in a kerchief like some 1940s factory girl. Her sweats are elastic at the calves, and though there are sneakers on the shore, her feet are currently bare. She's standing in the water in a THROWED ROLLS t-shirt she definitely borrowed from Charlotte or Erich because Melantha does this all the time, stealing hoodies or boxer shorts or whatever else, as though everything is communal, which

in some ways, it is.

She is humming to herself as she washes.

Charlotte comes and goes. She does what other sorts of animals do, in the summer, when it is verdant and green. Which is to say: she ranges, higher and higher and farther and farther, seeking whatever strange things, small or great, that she seeks. Following the memory of a cloud or the promise of a rill or the flight of a something over a ridge. Honoring a promise or folding it into a quiet, riddling sort of bribe or meditating at the edge of a high clear lake that has not seen the reflection of a human face in half-a-year.

Charlotte also helps with the construction: when she can, as she will. She hasn't got Erich's brute strength or Melantha's determination but she helped construct the first tinyhouse and she has small, clever hands, and she can use any of the manual tools they employ, thhough she is still suspicious of the power tools they might rent they way some cats are suspicious of their reflections and,

it is summer. It is a certain day and a certain hour and a certain slant of light and Melantha is washing clothes in the creek when there is a noise in the woods and the noise is deliberate in its way but also minute, you see: animal.

And the underbrush at the creek's edge is thickthickthick, all that water, all that abundent growth, but the animal threads through all of that growth, prowls down the embankment, as silver-white as moonlight on virgin, just-fallen snow.

The spell of its majesty is broken only by the sweep of its tail: low. Wagging.

Melantha grew up first among boys. Her father, and four brothers. Then two brothers, when a pair of them ran away because Black Fury-born sons could never be Black Furies. But then came Damaris. Then came the nights when it stopped being her father who came to her in the middle of the night to comfort her while she cried over her lost mother and lost brothers and started being Damaris. Then came the sort-of sister she sort-of grew up with. Then came the fires, and the betrayal, and the horrors. Then came Oregon, and the caernless sept in the wilderness. Swimming in bathing in that endlessly deep reservoir, learning not to be afraid of such abyssal darkness. Then came all the sisters, lithe dark things with broad shoulders and heavy brows and steely eyes and soft fur, warm palms. Then came the teachings of ancient things, of goddesses before gods were ever considered, of the fear and awe that humankind once had for birth, and all the glory and terror that brought with it. Then came the Black Furies, and her life among them, for a very long time.

She grew up, in truth, among wolves. When they leave for days, even weeks, she fears and she worries and she reaches out in her mind to her sweetest sister of all, a caress without words, asking for an answer: are you there?

are you well?

will you come back?

And yes, and yes, and yes.

She still fears and worries and reaches out, but she doesn't panic. She goes on building her new tinyhouse. She smiles when Charlotte shows up and helps with this or that. They talk little. Melantha talks a lot. She has an active, engaging mind, eager and full-throttle, but when she is with Charlotte, she tends to talk less. More comes through body language. Granted: plenty comes via body language with Erich, too, but they argue a lot. They talk about everything. He gets so many things wrong. Melantha suspects him of things he would never dream of because she is not used to being able to trust a man, any man, when so many men got so very close and made such a mess of her and she tolerated it because, well

the same reason Erich and Charlotte tolerate it when they get hurt, don't they? It's war. It's not meant to be gentle.

She has been doing so well, though. For all her summery absences Charlotte can tell that: Melantha is getting stronger of heart and mind and soul. Her spirit is coming back, the brightness and resilience that was there when Charlotte first laid eyes on her. She is building a house with her own two hands and the hands of her two best friends. She lives in the wild, washing in the river and eating on the grass. She is within herself again. She is healing.

Melantha is humming a song from Mary Poppins. About birds. And she is glancing up, hearing a noise, and watching the pale white silver thing that comes from the shadows. She smiles, knowing the form and the eyes. She thinks that if she could change, she'd be black the way that Erich is gray and Charlotte is white. They'd be such a team. They are such a team. She keeps washing, and humming, and when the wolf comes near the bank,

she cups her hand and sends a wave of water flying towards her bestie.

There is a certain way that puppies wrestle with water, see - which is not a thing with which you can wrestle, right? which is liquid and which is ever-yielding and which is movement and formless and yet: puppies, so splashed, but at the wave that engulfs them, lower they heads and raise their butts and slash, this way, that way, nipping in every direction, barking at the waves, chasing the tide,

and this is a creek, isn't it, not an ocean, not even a river. There's a current, hard to see except where it runs all bright rills over smooth-stones, but it has no pull, it has no hidden undertow, no tidal movement, and that wolf is an adult, a young adult but an adult. Charlotte is twenty. She is no longer a puppy and yet, that spectacular, lovely creature, bearing the purity and madness of a ridiculous number of inbred generations, is splashed,

and pounces,

and nips at the wave, splashing against the rocks, leaning into it, hurtling through it, glorious, glorious, until she crests it and rises through it, all dripping wet, and lolls her mouth open, see -

almost like a grin,

before she starts to shake herself dry, sending droplets raining EVERYwhere.

--

(Of course she sees, of course she knows, of course she feels, that beneath her skin and behind her eyes, Melantha is healing. Is finding her balance and her place, is filling in the places left hollow, is sleeker, is more sure, is more solid and gleaming in her way, than she was this summer-last, when they came without stopping from Baja to Denver, dragging their house behind them, to find her again. Healthier, more solid, more immediate, more real than she was, too, before all that, when she wore a strange, false face painted over her own face,

for the hunt.

Charlotte's stronger too, isn't she? And yet, still somehow - always? broken. So easily broken, shattered. Some things were never made to heal, or never meant to. Madness is the curse of her tribe.)

Charlotte looks too graceful and too majestic by half. Melantha splashes her and grins as her friend nips and jumps at the water like it's something she can wrestle down and pin and win, YAY. She bounds into the creek and Melantha is grinning. It rained earlier, the air is cooler than it used to be, the creek full of water. She doesn't mind the shaken-off water hitting her face and everywhere else, since she's already standing in a creek.

She just waits for Charlotte to stop, then leans down, pressing a little kiss between Charlotte's eyes, on her narrow brow. "Hello, bestie."

This is what Charlotte is, after all.

The wolf threads herself heavily against Melantha's thighs, the push of her head a physical caress, a scent-mingling, a ritual greeting, a marking-of-pack and a mark-of-pack. Human words seem so strange to the wolf-mind, the practice of kissing too, right? But Charlotte is not merely Charlotte-wolf, she is Charlotte-the-girl wrapped up in Charlotte-wolf, all alien and familiar and her tail thumps affectionately against Melantha's thighs as Melantha greets her, this heavy, brushing beat, and then there is no more beat because she is stepping away, because she is changing, because she is sloughing one skin for another and another and another until she is a girl-again, a young woman, lithe and remarkably spare and lovely in a strange and fae and hollow-boned sort of way, and taller than Melantha now, by an inch - no, by two inches.

"Hi." Says Charlotte, and then looks around, and blinks at the wash Melantha is doing, and says, "I can help with the laundry." Because she can: this girl who had never cooked for herself and had no idea how to run a washing machine before Erich showed her, because everything, everything necessary, was done for her, before she can here.

Then she blinks at the shirt - Melantha can see her reading it - and her smile sort of sharpens and deepens. "They really throw the rolls there, you know? You hafta catch them if you wanna eat them.

"Erich caught his and gave them all to me."

Of course he did.

Now Melantha is all wet. Her sweatpants are wet and her end of her shirt is wet and her arms and legs are wet. She doesn't mind much; she was sweaty anyway. She scritches Charlotte a bit, behind the ears and along the scalp, her hand all wet, but it was wet anyway. It smells faintly of honeysuckle and soap, but soap made of things like beeswax. It's not bad.

Charlote moves, and Charlotte changes, and Melantha leans over to pick up the shirt she draped over a rock to rinse it again, squeezing and rinsing it out. She likes summer; you can dry your clothes on lines strung between the eaves of the tinyhouse and the branches of trees.

"You don't have to," she mentions. "I'm almost done," which she is, tossing the wrung-out shirt into a basket of clean, wet, rinsed clothes to be hung. "But you can help me carry them back and hang them, if you want. They're heavier, on the way back,"

because of water. Duh.

She smiles, tromping over to the basket of 'dirty' for the last thing, a pair of boxers that Erich hasn't even worn for like three weeks because Melantha stole them because they were baggy and soft and comfortable. She doesn't do Erich's laundry. Erich does Erich's laundry, and usually just does it at Cold Crescent, which is why he totally smells bad most of the time. Some of the time.

Melantha doesn't mind his smell, most of the time.

"Didn't you catch any yourself?" she asks, instead of that was sweet or of course, since he can't eat the damn things or he was just showing off or... anything else.

"'Course," says Charlotte, and she says 'course to two or three things: of course she will help carry the laundry and hang it on the line like prayerflags that fly in the himalayas, where Melantha's clothing will get infused with some faint edge of the spirit of whatever wind is moving that day; or perhaps the husk of sunlight falling through a spare, warm, dusty day, or maybe the fickle play of moonlight through the pattern of the oak leaves, or -

Also: of course she caught some rolls. Charlotte is not strong and she is not hearty and she was not made for war, except in the manner that they are all made for war, because war is necessary, because war binds their nerves and claims their eyes and burns all bright in their hearts: but she is swift, see, and graceful, and light-footed, and she has very clever hands.

"I caught more than Erich, and I ate some and saved the rest for the sparrows outside. They can go anywhere, you know. Sparrow. Just like us.

And she inhales - hmm, delicious, the scent of beeswax and honeysuckle, which also makes her think of beeds, which makes her remember -

"I found a beehive in the woods. If we figured it out we could get some honey from it. I don't know how to do that though, without hurting the bees. I guess we could ask nicely."

Erich asked her what color sheets she wanted to get for the bed that will be built into her new home. Melantha, sharp as she is, was intuiting much more: he wanted to try and visualize what it would be like, could he tolerate it, would it hurt, what would it look like, what would it feel like, where would she be sleeping if not in the alcove across from his loft. If he could picture her sleeping soundly among her sheets, maybe he would feel less anxious about the whole thing. And Melantha knew it didn't matter what color her sheets were, to him. She said the honest truth: white. To wash, to bleach in the sun, to go with whatever, to feel clean and cool in summer and soft and familiar in winter.

Melantha doesn't have sheets yet. She doesn't have a mattress yet. The bed isn't done.

But she'll snap those sheets out after washing them in the snow-fed creek here, dry them in the sunlight or -- in colder weather -- take them to Cold Crescent. She can do that. She has a Jeep. She can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants, by herself or with Erich or Charlotte riding shotgun. And she's building a house she can tow.

She could run off into the sunset and never look back, if she wanted.

She would have to want that.

--

Melantha smiles. She's crouching, washing the last pair of boxers, scrubbing them with some soap in the creek, which dissipates the suds so rapidly it's as though they never were. She does it twice. She does it as efficiently and quickly as she skins rabbits, which she does with startling speed sometimes.

"You could," she says, thoughtfully, of bees. She looks up at Charlotte, as she's scrubbing the second time. "Erich and I were talking the other day, about some stuff. I decided I want to drive out to Oregon when my house is done, and visit the sisters." Glancing down, she licks her lips, thinking. "I... started to think about some things, and... how I felt, and whether or not they really abandoned me when they sent me out into the world."

Quietly, then, shaking the boxers into the water. "I sort of think maybe they didn't. That... maybe they thought they were giving me a gift. Letting me go. I don't think they really knew what all I wanted from them."

To be one of them. To be with them. To be beloved, and to belong.

Melatha exhales slowly. "So I want to go back, and see them. And talk. I told Erich I want to go by myself, but... maybe you two could follow, a few days behind." She looks up at Charlotte again, rinsing and rinsing, making sure all the soap gets out of the fabric. "We could go to Baja from Oregon. A caravan."

Charlotte doesn't know what the sisters did or why the sisters did it. The only sisters she has ever had - other than Melantha - were the little girls raised by a too-strict mother who hated the modern world and all its technology to the point of phobia, in their starched crinolines and impossibly fine little clothes. Sometimes one inherits the right sort of madness for one's world - a tendency towards exacting precision, a fastidious nature that approaches the otherworldly. Sometimes one does not.

But, Charlotte, she sort-of thinks that Melantha is right and she also sort-of knew that Melantha would want to go alone and some part of her is at once ready to let go for as long as necessary and sort-of frightened that Melantha will simply: go away.

As people do, for the reasons they do.

And some part of Charlotte is even at peace with that idea,

but this is not the human-part. Not the girl-part. It is the part that waxes and wanes with the moon.

"Okay." Charlotte says, quietly, as she does, not precisely diffidently, but close to it. "When do you want to go?"

Melantha watches.

Erich is not the only one who loves her.

Or the only one who might fear losing her.

Melantha aches.

--

"When the house is done," she says simply, shaking out the boxers, wringing them out tightly, squeezing water back into the creek from the fabric. Shaking them out again. Rinsing them out again, again, because you have to be sure there's no more soap left. Triple sure.

She watches Charlotte. "You got quiet."

"I want to say, What if you go back and you want to stay?"

There's just one more piece of clothing. Charlotte doesn't help with that last bit. It's a one-person job, so she stands back, up to her ankles in the water, up to her mid-calf, the jeans dedicated to her spirit and soul darker for the water.

She's not precisely looking at Melantha because it is hard, it is so very hard, for Charlotte to talk about her feelings and her fears. Thinking about them makes them real, makes them powerful, makes them difficult, makes them loud. When she thinks them - when she feels them - there are times when she knows that they will never ever stop. Just get louder and louder and louder until everything else she might hear gets all drowned out.

But: see, this diffident little shrug, after, mildly dismissive.

"I want to ask that, but I don't think I should. It's not a fair thing to ask. Because if you want to stay, and they want you to stay, then you probably should. Or at least, you shouldn't not stay just because it might make me sad.

"So that's why I'm quiet. Because I shouldn't ask that. It's not fair. Just 'cos you're far away doesn't mean you stop loving someone. Just 'cos they're dead doesn't mean you stop. They're still inside you."

Melantha watches her, holding the boxers lest they be tugged away by the soft current. They'd be easy to catch, but still: wasted energy.

What if she goes back and wants to stay.

Her brow furrows. She aches, oh, she aches. That Charlotte wonders that at all, and that Charlotte is so scared to even vocalize it because it will be too big and too overwhelming for her.

"I think there will be a part of me that wants to stay there," she says quietly, because she's thought of that. But she rinses, and she wrings, and she talks. She sighs. "Except that... I left. They gave me my old identity back and sent me off and I didn't beg to stay then. I was so hurt, and angry, and confused, and I missed you and Erich so much. Then when I was with you, I missed the sisters so much, and I was still so hurt and angry. It was really, really confusing.

"The more I think about it now, the stranger it seems that I even grew up that way. That it was my life. That I did everything I did." She frowns, and is quiet a moment, then shakes her head. "I know it's cliche, but I'm a different person than I was a year ago. "

Melantha looks up. "Beyond that... I love you more than so many of the sisters I was ever with, Charlotte. You're not a sister. You're my sister. That's different." She hesitates. "And... I'm in love with Erich. They might -- might -- let you stay with me, if I went back. But never Erich. He'd never be allowed into the sept. Then I'd be with them, and I'd just rever to who I was a year or two ago, and be separated from you, and apart from Erich, and... I don't want that. Even if a part of me feels, and aches, and whatever. I know it's not really where I belong anymore. At least not right now."

"You're - " a deep breath; the sharpest sort of pause, which feels arrested, see. Charlotte has made her way over to the bank and found a rock on which to perch and she's watching Melantha now with her distinctively pale eyes and - " you're in love with Erich?"

[perception + primal urge + volcano, functioning similar to empathy]

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

Empathy reading: There is a remarkable complexity to Charlotte's feelings on the matter, layers wrapped up in her body and mind that even she is not entirely accessing. Prime among them is a genuine happiness for.. Erich as much as Melantha. Charlotte knows that Erich has been in love with Melantha for a very long time. She made the pigeon beads, after all, so that they could stay together. That happiness has a bitter-sweetness that could be misread as loneliness - and there is a degree of that wrapped up in there, but it is more complex and pedigreed than you could expect. There is also a strange, scissoring tinge of jealousy that she does not understand and cannot admin. Hasn't Charlotte been half-in-love with Melantha for a very, very long time.

From all of that, Charlotte does not pick out that some part of Melantha may very well want to stay with the Black Furies, turn away from whatever life she's built outside of that sept and just go back to what is familiar. She doesn't hold onto that part.

She also doesn't try to analyze Melantha's confusion, or explain it. See: Erich sometimes does. He doesn't think he's very smart, but he likes figuring this stuff out, and explaining it, and he likes it because sometimes it lets him help more, but he'd hear about her confusion and her sundering longing, and he'd probably talk about that, or at very least: tell her it's okay to be confused, and want two different things. Charlotte doesn't do that. For Charlotte, confusion can just be confusion.

Charlotte does not glow with pleasure to hear that Melantha loves her more. She does not blush with tenderness at the call of sisterhood, or ache with reciprocal love to hear that Melantha doesn't want to be separated from her.

She hears:

I'm in love with Erich

and repeats back:

you're in love with Erich?

but some of her breath is held, like if she lets it out it will take a secret along for the ride.

Charlotte, perhaps too concentrated on her breath to secure the other outlets, tells secrets with her eyes instead. They all have such pale eyes, this ragtag band of wild children. Pale, bright, secret-keeping and secret-telling and vividly intelligent and starvingly rageful eyes. And Charlotte's are conflicted, more often than not, because Charlotte's madness walks in stride with her purity: beautiful and intense and terrible and sometimes, a little overpowering.

Melantha-in-the-water looks at Charlotte for a while after she asks that question, requests that repetition or clarification or confirmation. She looks at her, sensing her joy, her compassionate pleasure. Sensing the sense of an outsider, though maybe not just an outsider to Erich-and-Melantha, because she isn't not at all not even a little bit, but a bit of an outsider to the world. Maybe.

She is quiet for a few seconds then. She finishes whatever bit of laundry she's doing, then wades through the creek to her friend, lifting cold, wet hands to either side of Charlotte's cheeks. Melantha looks in her eyes for a heartbeat, then for three more.

She kisses Charlotte's brow, right above her third eye. And she kisses each of Charlotte's cheeks if she's allowed, high on the arch of those art nouveau cheekbones. One, two. She draws back then, finding Charlotte's eyes again, droplets of creek-water finding Charlotte's neck as they roll from Melantha's fingers.

"I love you, too," she says quietly.

I love you also.

I love you back.

Charlotte is so, so still when Melantha comes close to her. Closer. She does not feel like a wolf but a deer in the dappled shadows beneath the denser canopy that frames the life-giving waters of the stream in which Melantha does her laundry, except of course that delicate alertness one associates with prey is always an illusion with Charlotte, entirely human in its signification: the slender jaw, the two-wide eyes, the elegant arc of startlement in her brows that asks without asking -

who

- when the answer is -

me.

So, still, chin lifted, mouth slightly parted as Melantha comes close, her alertness fine and strange and alien and pure enough that she hardly belongs in the fallen world she inhabits, does she? Except that's all a fucking lie: we all belong here. Everything is soiled, was made to be soiled.

Melantha's fingers are cool on Charlotte's temples, on her skin, the hushed and faintly mineral scent of the mountain stream. The tannins of the pine needles through which the water has run. Charlotte's family is so far out of human understanding that she is not familiar with the rituals of baptism - the Judeo-Christian rituals - but she understands water, doesn't she - and the water feels like a rite, some sacred ritual that she cannot quite name.

--

Charlotte gives Melantha a short, tight little nod by way of response. I know, even if she cannot verbalize it, and her eyes are shining, and she is taken by a wild little urge that she swallows down even before it emerges, some mad, self-protective little reflex that has her smiling tight around the edges of her own mouth and nodding again, see?

she knows.

she knows.

Some things cannot be spoken and some things cannot be dreamed and for Charlotte, so many things cannot be spoken and cannot be dreamed and like a puppy she bumps her brow against Melantha's then, somewhere mid-nod and pulls herself upright and pulls herself back and pulls herself scrabbling up the muddy bank and takes her share of the laundry, more than her share if she can, if Melantha - who smells like wild places and dark secret things and spring water against cool, hidden stones and the first turning of the earth warming beneath the sun after a long, dark winter - will allow her to take more than her share.

Later, see? On the walk back, or even at the tinyhouse, hanging the laundry out on the lines stretched from the frame of one tinyhouse to another. Charlotte will say, "I think you can go and run with them, even, want to be there and still come back to us. I don't think you just have to have one place. The moon doesn't. She goes away and comes back.

"I could make you something so you'd remember.

"Maybe not a pigeon. Maybe something out of earth. Igneous rock."

Charlotte gave Melantha water. First thing, when she could not open that disgusting senator's chest and make art from his rib-bones, when she could not get Melantha to say that she would never, ever let him touch her again. She did not judge, at least not out loud, but she gave Melantha pure, pure water, so that Melantha could get clean again. Charlotte understands baptism, even if she doesn't understand baptism. Charlotte baptized Melantha, even if she wasn't there when Melantha stood under moonlight and poured the water over her brow, onto her face and into her hair, even drinking the last few drops. Charlotte was not there but Charlotte was there, and Melantha was clean, and things happened out in those woods that night, the next morning, that mattered then and still matter now, which might not have happened if Charlotte had not given Melantha water.

Melantha, in response, doesn't know what she gives Charlotte. What she can give Charlotte, except loving her and trusting her and sharing secrets with her. Melantha doesn't even know that it was a year or more or something before Charlotte could ever talk to Erich about what she went through, even though she told Melantha so early on that Melantha was still living at the Hay-Adams. They tell each other secrets and they trust each other with truths and Melantha believes in Charlotte's ability to intuitively understand and accept her just like she believes in Erich's ability to argue and meet her, match her even at her most vicious pace. It was Charlotte who explained things to her with a bowl and some water, and Charlotte who understands Melantha's shrine of black fur and metal and fire and tiny, small things she finds that make her feel anchored or make her feel happy or make her feel simply more like herself.

Her hands stay on Charlotte for a moment, even through that suppressed urge that Melantha has the mercy not to pull from its hiding place, but then

Charlotte slips through her hands like so many droplets, away, away, because

she can't.

Whatever it is, she can't, and that is why Melantha has never asked.

--

They pick up the basket of wet clothes and carry it between them, sharing a load that was only for one person when it was dry. They carry it into the sun and open air and the lines that Melantha already strung up, pull clothespins from a mesh bag of them, continue the work. Melantha is very quiet, and Charlotte is quiet, and the water dries on their skin til it may as well have never been there.

But it was.

When Charlotte speaks, Melantha has grown so used to the silence that she almost startles. She looks over, sudden, and what Charlotte says makes her entire heart fold in on itself, aching.

"Charlotte," she says, leaving a shirt hanging by one sleeve, letting it dangle. "Charlotte, I don't need anything to remember you. I would never forget you." She leaves it dangling, moving to Charlotte right then and wrapping both her arms around the other woman, pulling her close.

The moon goes away and comes back.

Melantha has tears in her eyes, and tears against Charlotte's shoulder. Very, very quiet ones. They don't shudder as they drip, and there are only two of them after all, but they are there. She squeezes Charlotte, fiercely.

Charlotte can't.

She can't.

She doesn't know what or why and she doesn't think about it because if she throught about it there would be things inside of her head that go frighteningly wrong and terrible and she doesn't - she doesn't - she can't -

--

Melantha loves her. She has the mercy not to seek, and sometimes not to see, and never to ask.

Charlotte, for her part, does not know the gift she has been given, the gentleness with which she has been blessed.

--

There is something reflexive about a squeeze that tight. Charlotte returns it without reflection and without consideration, holds on to Melantha just as tightly as Melantha holds onto her.

Moreso.

Skinny arms wrapped around Melantha's shoulders, face presses firmly into the jointure of Melantha's neck and shoulder. The dark tangle of Melantha's gleaming hair all around, so full of her scent that Charlotte swells with adoration, love, and a fierce, fierce protectiveness.

"I know."

Charlotte says, and this is firm, this is solid, this is unthinking.

"I meant, something that would spark in the darkness. Something to light your way home."

Let's stop dancing for a moment. Let's pretend the music stopped.

Let's admit that Charlotte has been half-in-love with Melantha for a long, long time. Let's admit that Melantha has loved her back. And let's own up to the fact that at the brook, when Melantha said that she's in love with Erich, it hurt Charlotte's feelings. Let's face the fact of how much it hurts to love, and be unable to love, to want to touch and be unable to touch, to be watching your own feelings and your own longings exist separately from you, as though they're through some kind of cloudy, impermeable membrane, and to know that if only you weren't so fucking crazy you could pass through. You could love, and touch, and you could say stuff and ask for stuff and it wouldn't make you snap in half.

Let us confess, in all purity, that maybe what Charlotte wanted to do and very much did not want to do at all and was very afraid of and very much hoping for were all the same thing: to kiss Melantha not on her eyes or brow or cheeks or shoulder but just kiss her.

--

They are Volcano's children. They aren't supposed to attack without giving warning. It doesn't mean that they can't be ambushed. It doesn't mean they can't get blindsided. They're honesty itself, a pack of equal voices because the earth's voice is one voice all fire and stone and movement, and it costs them something to hold all these things back. To keep them under the surface, under the water, to keep them cooled off and slowed down, so they don't wreak a cataclysm.

But let's admit these truths to ourselves, because we know, and they know, that nothing stays silent -- nothing stays dormant -- forever. Unless it dies.

--

Skinny arms hold tight. Melantha's not skinny. She's slender, but she's athletic. There's muscles in her arms, there's all the solidity of earth there. As always, she is sniffed a little, inhaled quietly. This she is used to, and does not mind. She succumbs to it, comforted by the familiarity.

Charlotte tells her what she means. Melantha smiles into Charlotte's shoulder. "You don't have to make me anything," she says, lifting her head but staying close, looking into Charlotte's eyes because they are rather close to the same height. She smiles, even though it aches. "I'd be able to find you guys."

The air smells light sunlight and fresh turned earth and the light is changing now and the sun is moving across the sky, as it does, shifting the shadows in which they are cast, lengthening them. The year is already starting to fail, isn't it? Each day shorter than the one that preceded it but it is still summer and summer will simmer across the peaks and the slopes and the high planes for a long, long time,

until the earth turns again, and goes to sleep.

There's some resistance in Charlotte, when Melantha pulls back to find and meet her eyes, because Charlotte - animal thing - wants to bury herself in Melantha's scent, fold herself into the sunlit warmth of Melantha's hair. It feels to her both wholly indulgent and somehow safe and it doesn't make her head hurt and since Melantha stopped wearing another face over her face there is so much honesty sometimes, so much clarity in Melantha's gaze that Charlotte is -

Charlotte is -

Charlotte does not think about such things.

Their eyes meet, pale and clear and Charlotte can taste the ache in the edges of Melantha's sundering smile and it brings tears to her eyes and she does not know and does not ask why.

Just swallows back the swollen little lump in her throat, swallows hard against it and holds the look and says,

"Promise?"

And she asks not because she doubts, you see, but because this has somehow become to her a ritual exchange, a compact, a ritual, a rite. She believes. She believes, there's no doubt in her eyes, just an aching sort of implicit trust.

This past winter they sheltered all together in the tinyhouse that Erich and Charlotte built. Little fireplace, little house, a bedroom and two lofts. When winter comes this time, Melantha will be on the other side of two walls. She will not have a fireplace, and yes Erich was aghast, though. There's a reason. A good reason. She wants an excuse. Always, but especially in winter, she wants to make sure she has a really good excuse to come back. And sharing a fire with her packmates is a very good reason. Especially in winter.

This may be the first time she sees tears in Charlotte's eyes, may be the first time ever. Melantha doesn't know what to do, only she does, because tears don't frighten her, tears don't hurt her. She wraps Charlotte up again and holds her, doesn't try to say anything about it at all.

"Yes, promise," she says quietly.

Charlotte is wrapped up and buries herself once again in Melantha's hair. Her pale eyes screw shut and her nose is pressed against Melantha's neck, just at the hairline, and her mouth is against Melantha's pulse, soft enough and present enough that she can feel the doubled beat of Melantha's heart through her skin.

It is not a kiss, but there is a whisper of movement as Charlotte lifts her chin and resettles herself in Melantha's embrace, her own body humming with a ferociousness that borders on certainty,

that they will all be together until they die.

That, somehow, this is where she was always meant to be.

"I'll still make you something." Charlotte, quiet. "Because I want to."

So of course Charlotte just dives back in. Melantha has so much hair, and she doesn't always shower every day and it's summer so she sweats when she's outside in the sun or working or walking. She smells like creek water, which isn't super-pleasant but at least it's earthy. And she smells like heat and sunlight right now, and sweat, and all of that is living in her hair, pulled down from the kerchief it was in at the water.

She laughs a little into Charlotte's hair, because she's very sad and hurting and she's also inexplicably happy and comforted. She doesn't know what truths are living in Charlotte's heart or whispering in her mind, but they are truths; Theurges know things. She knows that. Erich knows that. Theurges just know, sometimes, and you have to close your eyes and trust it and respect it even though it can be scary, just like you close your eyes and trust Erich's strength or Melantha's honesty.

They will be together until they die. All of them, together. Strong and wise and true.

--

"I know you will," Melantha says, which perhaps isn't the most gracious thing she could say right now, but is the truth. She smiles, hugging Charlotte,

for a very long time, in fact.

They cannot stand there forever. That may be the way movies end and every story that ever came with a lesson attached to it by way of finale, but that is not the way Real Things work, and for all that they are monstrous and mythic and strange and golden and warm and terrifying and broken and fiction and non-fiction all at once, they are assuredly: Real Things.

Someone breaks that hug apart. Maybe it gets to the point where it is strange and awkward and Charlotte does not precisely understand the awkwardness because she is more animal than she is girl and belongs more to the moon than the earth, but even she can sense it sometimes, now. Someone loosens her arms, someone turns her head. Someone inhales a breath that is not comforted and beloved but is on its on, very much what next?

There's still laundry to be hung up. They don't really talk while they hang it, the click of the clothes pins all wood on wood, the tension of the line and the slack of it. The weight of the wet clothes.

They twist more water out of the heaviest pieces and maybe - maybe - there is a bit of a water war that starts the way a dog's shake does - all accidental - and then gets married with laughter and turns deliberate.

While the laundry dries, they go hunting.

Together, of course.

Today, tonight, Charlotte can hardly bear to be apart.

Shorty Lu's, up in Golden, CO. From Yelp:

Shorty Lu's is, on one hand, a super awesome true greasy spoon, where the waitress will call you Hon and have your home address by the time you pay the bill so she can send you a hand-knitted scarf. It's a dream come true for a hangover breakfast, when really you just need grease in some form in your system, STAT. On the other hand... it's pretty questionable food, and I don't think cleanliness is high up on the priority list.

So that is the setting.

This is the scene: nine thirty a.m. on a Saturday, sort of straddling the line between the hangover crowd and the brunch crowd. Not that the brunch crowd, fashionistas that they are, would haul themselves all the way up here. Still. There's a mixed crowd in here. A couple truckers up at the breakfast bar chowing down on 3x3x3s. A small crowd of twenty-somethings over in the corner booth, raccoon-eyed after a night out, almost certainly hung over. And a retiree over in his usual booth, getting his usual breakfast and coffee.

Two waitresses. A fry cook. A dishwasher boy.

Enter one Lola Hawkes.

Well, she's been there for about twenty minutes, at least. Passing back through after a wee-hours-of-the-morning hunt. She didn't get much, no large game at least. Nothing she wasn't afraid to leave in the back of the Forester in the parking lot out front, with the windows cracked just enough to ventilate.

She was set up at a two-person table against a wall, alone, no Hector Ghosh across the way to put on-edge the locals and cause nervous silence and fork-clatter serenades while she ate. She looked... oddly, not very surly for once. Neutral. Content. At peace, perhaps. Taking some small happiness in a quiet plate of waffles and strawberries and a mug of coffee that nobody was telling her not to drink.

You see, she was quite visibly pregnant. The waitress had clucked disapprovingly but Lola impatiently told her that the baby would find a way to survive the trauma of eight ounces of coffee and went back to looking out the window.

Melantha is not here for hangover food. She is here because she has her own Jeep now, see, it's easy to get places without disturbing her two besties. Not that she isn't disturbing one of her besties. This one tends to stay inside and tinker with bones or gourds so sometimes, just sometimes, Melantha takes her on field trips that aren't to patrols or killing stuff. Like going back to Golden, scene of one of the worst nights of Melantha's life, to go to a candy store.

And buy candy. But they end up at Shorty Lu's somehow anyway, sitting up at the diner bar on barstools. Melantha is eating something without gravy that normally comes with gravy and after seeing the food she's wishing she'd gotten the gravy. There is also a chocolate-strawberry shake between them.

There is no reason whatsoever that Alexis Theron Lambros would stop here as a rule. He isn't a trucker, he lives in the city, he doesn't eat this kind of food and...yeah, it's just not his thing, at all. In any way. That being said, he is here because of one reason: the mofo jogs like nobody's business. He enjoys a nice, long run and I don't know how far this is from the city but it doesn't matter because he came out this way for the air.

And so he has been on a nice, long run and his water bottle is empty. So covered in a light sheen and dressed in a T-Shirt, shorts and tennis shoes, his car parked in the driveway where it's been for a few hours, he comes back into the parking lot and makes his way for the door.

10:30am and Samantha Evans is about to pull a Ron Swanson. At least, such is the hope as she walks up to the diner. She wants, no needs to eat all the bacon and all the eggs to restore some of the energy expended on an early morning hike. They better have bacon and they better have eggs, that is the thought chief in her mind.

The Glass Walker kinswoman does not cut the most impressive figure. She stands at a little over five feet, and that little over is entirely due to the soles of her hiking boots. Yoga pants (yes, yoga pants for a hike), a t-shirt, and a light jacket complete the bulk of her outfit. There's also a pack slung over her shoulders and a hat pulled low over her eyes.

"Alexis!" she calls, recognizing the kinsman immediately. "Hey, wait up!" Then she trots a little forward to catch up, just as he reaches the door.

Charlotte has several clear bags of candy on the table in front of her. One of banana-runts and one of grape-cluster-runts and one of bing-cherry-runts. They are small bags, the sort that a heroin dealer might use to package his product. She also has several more small-bags of jelly beans. These are mixed not by flavor but by color: coconut and buttered popcorn and cream soda, for example, fill the white bag. And so on.

Inside Shorty Lu's the creature - who is somehow both taller and more slight than one might expect, from a distance - counts out the green Jellie Bellies and tries to guess which ones are the watermelon and which are the Harry Potter themed snot flavor. Fortunately for Melantha, Charlotte does not ask her to guess.

Melantha has her food, not covered in gravy. Charlotte sent back (!!) her waffles.

There was not enough whipped cream.

They will come up shortly, waaaaay better than they were before.

"I think the watermelon ones looked reddish inside?" Charlotte asks Melantha.

Charlotte has three fingerbones inside the right front pocket of her jeans, and a crumpled up twenty dollar bill in the left front pocket of her jeans, and an iphone in the back pocket of her jeans and a messenger bag tucked beneath the table, just FYI.

None of the kinfolk can smell her breeding, but isn't there, still, something about her.

[make that 9:30 where in the world did I get 10?]

He's about to open the door when he hears Sam call out. His attention jerks over his shoulder and he smiles, wiping at his forehead with a forearm before he raises his hand to wave at her. Alexis is the kind of guy who's always happy to see other members of the Nation, and of course it always seems to happen at the most random times (or is it random hoo hoo hah hah...). But random or planned, any such meeting puts a smile on his face.

"Hey, Samantha." He nods to her as she comes up. "Long time, no see. I hear you've been busy though. How are you?"

This is what he says as he opens the door, holding it for her and intending to follow her inside the place.

Melantha prefers gumball-sized sours, chews, but she has at least one speckled jawbreaker in her bags. She also has chocolate-covered nuts and jelly beans of her own and she does not sort by color or by any pattern at all. She is trying to help Charlotte decide on the green. It is her opinion that the darker-green ones are the watermelon and the sort of yellowish-green ones are, clearly, snot. Charlotte didn't ask her to guess but she is guessing anyway.

"You should bite one," she says, regarding the watermelon one, "to see if you're right." She picks up a pink one that is cocktail flavored, this one cosmopolitan, and pops it in her mouth. She is not touching her biscuits and sausage. Well: maybe the biscuits, in a while. She has her backpack, which is a dusky blue smattered with flowers, a retro-themed pattern on canvas from Target's clearance aisle once upon a month ago or so. And in that backpack there is stuff you might need when you go to Golden.

She looks over her shoulder, sees Sam outside the glass and peers. She has seen Lola but the last time she saw Lola was in City Park and there was yelling and she never made a point of talking to the woman about the yelling and apparently she's pregnant. And Melantha has no idea how to begin a conversation that old, so she is avoiding it. For now. Plus: jelly beans.

[whoops, nightmares!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

And all the same, Lola had spied Melantha and Charlotte on the other side of the establishment. She was sitting when they came in, waiting for her coffee with her hands folded together over the top of her stomach and leaned back in her chair. She didn't approach not because she was worried about old conversations or conflicts-- truthfully, most of what had occurred in the park that day was gone from Lola's mind, one scuffling conflict among many in her history. She didn't get along with many.

That right there was more her reason for staying at her table rather than smiling, waving, joining, conversing, connecting... Socializing wasn't her strong suit, and proactively reaching out to a pair of near-strangers to try just wasn't up her alley.

This is is why she's sitting alone, eating almost the same thing as what Charlotte had ordered (sans whipped cream, though), when the other two Kinfolk come through the door. She glanced up at them, then did a double-take upon recognizing both of the faces. Two more Kinfolk. Her eyes narrowed, just a little suspicious. She didn't believe in serendipity.

But, with that said, there were no immediate threats. Was no reason to believe there would be aside from the unsettled old borderline superstitions that the rural Kinfolk harbored. So, she simply went back to eating for now. May as well while she had the time.

"Not bad," she says, which is pretty true. She is actually a wee bit bushed and would like to eat all the carbs and maybe, despite the sizeable Nalgene bottles (yes, plural) in her pack she would still like two pitchers of water made available to her for hydration.

Truth is, she is actually not bad at all. It's a Saturday morning and she had George come over to watch Jake so she could get away for a little bit. It's a new arrangement that they're going to be trying out for the next few months because as she told a certain Ahroun, sometimes she has to get away, and only sometimes does her son come with. Because, you know. Break.

She does not recognize the other people in the diner. She's seen Lola and Melantha mostly - no, only in passing. Melantha was with Erich in Cold Crescent but Samantha was pretty out of it from a night of very restless sleep.

Point is, she doesn't recognize them. So her attention is all on Alexis. "What about you? Are you still teaching at the dojo?"

And this is when the door explodes.

Well; no. It doesn't explode. But it seems to. There's a single, terrifically loud noise that makes every last person in the diner reflexively jerk: hands flying to head, shoulders hunching. There are suddenly several new holes bleeding sunlight onto the floor.

For a couple seconds, at least. Then someone's booted foot kicks that door right in. It splinters: half of it yawing open on the hinges, the other half spinning off sideways, clipping a table before slamming to the floor. People scream. People cower. One of the truckers, big guy with a big belly and big arms, lumbers off his stool and wants to know what the fuck-- but that's as far as he gets before his face blanches white and his hands come up in surrender because

three men are rushing in that door, tactical gear and armor vests, helmets, goggles, masks, guns. No visible identification. No S.W.A.T. on the backs of their vests, no POLICE, no MP, nothing.

Just three men. One of them discharging his shotgun into the roof, raining plaster and dust down.

"EVERYONE DOWN. GET DOWN ON THE GROUND."

"I'm gonna try the other one I think," says Charlotte, daring-Charlotte, gross-Charlotte, the girl with the finger-bones in her pockets. They are not human finger-bones. They are smaller than human finger-bones. The nails are old and yellowing; were old and yellowing even when the thing was new. The world is very full of very strange things.

Like the group gathering here, of whom Charlotte - for the moment - remains rather oblivious, though she does glance up, catch a glimpse of Lola's profile. Which she recognizes. Beneath the table, she nudges Melantha's foot with her own. Whispers, or stage-whispers, that she knows that girl, and from context she could mean Sam or Lola or either or both. Recognizes, she means. Charlotte knows - very few. People terrify her.

In ways she can hardly begin to measure, except when she forgets to remember how opaque and strange and everything else they can be.

The other one.

The snot one.

Charlotte bites it in half, all delicate teeth.

"EWW." The girl says, delighted. "That one is definitely snot."

---

The shotgun blast makes her seize, for a moment, catatonic; makes her snarl. Charlotte ducks down onto the seat of the booth and reaches for her messenger bag. Loops her hand around the straps and starts pulling it close to her. Gives Melantha a wide-eyed look.

Stay down. Behind me.

Keeps her body between the men and Melantha, no matter what.

Lola is a hero for her people. Her People.

There are a number of her people here, granted, she knew that, but for the most part there were humans here. Just regular, plain old people that she didn't know, didn't care about, wasn't invested in saving.

So, when the door seemed to explode all of a sudden, then was kicked in by a team of three people in tactical gear, Lola did not play the hero (not yet). Instead, she slowly (calmly, too calmly, she doesn't look scared she just looks pissed, inconvenienced, Lola what is wrong with you) pushed her chair back from the table so that she had enough room to maneuver herself down onto the floor.

One hand on her stomach, the underside of it, tucking up the fabric of her calf-length pink dress so her knees could be bare, so her skirt wouldn't be caught under them and hinder movement if she had to move. Her other hand was in the air, fingers splayed, palm forward.

But watching. Watching like a junkyard dog when people get near to the fence.

All of a sudden there are people charging in right behind him and Sam, and firing a shotguns within a few feet of him. His first action, without thinking about it, is to maneuver himself in between the attackers and Samantha. It's an automatic motion, turning to face the armed men as they run inside.

He doesn't resist though. Because that would just be stupid right now. He just makes a quick look around, getting the quick layout. He notices Lola, who he's met. Charlotte and Melentha he has never met and doesn't know immediately and doesn't have time to act further. Then he's moving to the ground, matching Samantha's speed in doing so (meaning if she doesn't for some reason neither does he, but he's assuming she will) as he watches the three culprits quietly. Watches and waits to see how this is going to go, when he'll get his opportunity.

The sound of a sudden shotgun blast is startling. Samantha whirls around, dark blue eyes wide to see just what the hell. The sound of a shotgun blast is a familiar one, but why here? Light filters in through the new holes in the door. That's not good. She starts to take a step back, but then someone is striding forward and the booted foot that was lifting to move back changes direction. Alexis goes to the ground, but he doesn't go down with her. She goes forward instead, is just a step or two in the massive shadow of the trucker when the door gets kicked open.

And when the trucker throws his hands up he nearly steps back on her. She sidesteps, rests her hand on his forearm. People are yelling, screaming, terrified, and Samantha Evans who looks so tiny next to the blanched trucker, she does not do these things. She puts her hand on his arm to get his attention, that trucker, lifts her chin to give him a slight nod and then tilt her head, Come on. And she nudges him over to the side.

"We're going," she says to the three men, mostly calm but hey man, they have shotguns and tactical gear and all she has is a light jacket and yoga pants and moxy. And she does go, nudges the trucker off to the side and stays near him and whoever else is over thataway. Drops to her knees at least.

Melantha remembers Samantha from one very specific moment, almost a year ago. She remembers her in conjunction with another woman who kept calling her chica, over and over, getting huffy when Melantha told her to cut it out and storming off -- after informing Melantha tersely that they would work this out!!! -- never to be seen or heard from again. She remembers her being level-headed, listening more than she spoke, and she remembers appreciating it.

She remembers, and she is eating Jelly Belly candies with her best friend, licking her lips as Charlotte eats snot. Not literally, but close enough. And then the world flips upside down and Melantha's eyes fly wide. The noise of a gunshot is powerful when it's far away; up close it leaves the ears ringing, the head pounding. No one in here came to breakfast with ear plugs unless they left them in from a concert last night, maybe the Kongos down at the Marquis. Melantha has a solid case of those ringing ears for a few seconds, enough to vibrate her skull. This is why experienced shooters wear earmuffs.

No one be confused about why Melantha's first instinct is to hunch over and cover her ears, as though to hold her head together. Because shotguns. Are. Loud.

She slinks to the ground from her barstool, toes curled under and knees on the ground, hands over her ears, eyes on Charlotte, who she can see snarling but not hear. She is staring at the men, and there are beautiful tears in her beautiful eyes.

The diner isn't large. There's a kitchen in the back, but the area up front where the guests are -- it's basically a breakfast counter in the middle, booths off the to wings. Seven on each side, six of them in three rows of two and then a big semicircular one at the corner.

The waitresses are down on the ground. One is behind the bar, peeking over the edge, big terrified eyes. One is just down down down in the middle of the floor, between two rows of small booths. The twenty-somethings are all as down as they can get, squashed and huddled together under their big corner booth like rabbits in a warren. One of the truckers is gripping the edge of the breakfast bar, his eyes darting from gunman to gunman to gunman. The other whips his head around when Samantha touches him, letting out a startled and strangled yelp.

The old fella: he's still at his table, too stiffjointed to get under it easily. Just cowering, trembling hands covering his head, head down on the tabletop.

And then our heroes. Or our hapless bystanders, at least: Melantha on the ground. Lola on the ground. Charlotte and Sam and Alexis ... not really. There's not given much time to rectify that. The gunman that fired into the ceiling, the one that yelled at them: he swings that shotgun around, that matte-black, high-tech, tactical shotgun of his, points it right at Alexis.

His partners take aim too. At Sam. At Charlotte.

"I SAID. EVERYONE DOWN ON THE GROUND. NOW."

From the kitchen: the fry cook peering out between omelettes, pancakes, breakfast platters. Cautious-eyed.

[willpower]

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

[i ain't afraid of no ghost shotgun: WP]

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

Is he scared? Of course he's scared. Deep down, Alexis is scared because for Pegasus' sake, THERE'S A SHOTGUN POINTED AT HIM. At point blank range, nonetheless. But he doesn't seem it outwardly. He learned a long, long time ago: fear does not mean "freak out." In fact, fear is the absolute worst possible time to freak out, because then people die.

He's stuck close to Sid and he looks at the man pointing the gun at him, speaking under a tight calm. "Easy man, relax. I'm going down." And he is, slipping slowly to the ground before the words even come out. He gets to his knees, watching the three as he goes to his knees and then puts his hands on the ground in clear view of the trio.

He spares a glance at Sam, imagining (and hoping) she's following suit, but the vast majority of his attention is on our villains of this piece, to see what they're up to. Why would someone rob THIS place of all places in riot gear? Why not hit a bank or something more?

Something isn't right.

Melantha is down on the ground, next to the backpack she stowed beside her stool, but it's zipped and she's in full view. She has lowered her hands, at least off her ears, but holds them open. She tenses when they point a gun at Charlotte, partly out of sheer rage, partly because she wonders what Charlotte will do. She's not Erich. If she were Erich, she'd be in crinos in an eyeblink, she'd tear those gunmen to pieces in another, she'd roar into the morning -- if she was able not to frenzy.

But Charlotte isn't Erich, and no one is pointing a gun at Melantha, which she's pretty sure would make Charlotte on even her most docile day frenzy. She swallows hard, holding very still, staring at the only man who has spoken so far. Staring. watching.

There is a shotgun leveled right at her. Samantha swallows hard, but she doesn't look at it. She's looking at the face, masked or otherwise, of the person holding it. There is a tension between her brows that it hidden by the bill of her hat, but it's there in her eyes. There's a tightness in her shoulders. In her spine. There was never, ever a time in Samantha's life where she decided to play the hero. It's never a conscious decision, really. It's only that there is a right thing to do, and nothing else. The right thing to do was soothe Fern and the right thing to do was try to talk a Cliath out of fighting a monster and the right thing to do was save an innocent child's life.

Right now, Samantha doesn't lower herself to the ground because she is afraid, or she's afraid of her son losing another mother. She does it because it's the right thing to do to keep herself and these people with her safe for a little longer.

Slowly, she rolls her shoulders back so that her pack drops against her calves and then to the floor, and then she leans forward. Her face upturned to watch them, these men. Try to figure out what in the world they're doing here without having to speak and risk having that shotgun's barrel shoved into her face.

[percept (not sure if it counts, but "insightful" is the spec) + alertness? trying to notice if there's anything out of the ordinary about these guys other than being three yahoos in tactical gear apparently holding up a diner]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Here is Charlotte, pale-skinned and pale-eyed and platinum-haired, wide-eyed, all the signifiers of youth. Sylph like, really, startled and startling and never-quite-here and entirely-mad.

She breathes out, sharp and fast, and lips her too-dry lips and tastes there salt and artificial snot-flavored jelly-something and the strange, errant flame of her own rage and the beat of her heart. Back of her throat. The world is still and it is noisy and she wraps the palm of her hand once and then twice around the strap of her messenger bag and

inhales

then eases herself off the seat, onto the floor. The hand that is not wound around the strap of the messenger bag slips inside one of the smaller, outer pockets.

She is talking a bit beneath her breath.

Doubtful that anything on this side of the gauntlet can understand what she's saying.

Perception + Occult: Sense Wyrm

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

[There's Wyrm here. It stinks of the Wyrm.

It's not the three gunmen.]

Something come to her through Volcano. It sounds like the earth rumbling and the world splitting in her mind, even though the voice is Charlotte's. Melantha gives a sharp intake of breath, her eyes flicking around the room suddenly, not on any of the gunmen.

She's not sure what she's looking for. She's just trying to feel something. Anything.

[perception + primal urge + volcano!]

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

[seriously, jove?]

[OKAY SINCE YOU'RE BOTH TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT:

It's not the gunmen. Everything here feels faintly off now that they're paying attention. It's like something's been rotting in a cabinet, forgotten -- left there so long that the smell pervades everything. But it seems to be concentrated in the back of the diner.]

No one tries anything. No one makes any sudden moves. No one attempts anything heroic, not with those three men watching them. Those three index fingers on those three triggers.

There's no protracted wait here. No long delay to make sure everyone was compliant. Alexis gets on the ground, Sam gets on the ground, Charlotte gets on the ground and the three men: they're moving. They're moving smooth and sure and well-oiled, a warmachine, pivoting as they move through the room, backs to each other, turning, always turning, gyring like a whirlwind in slow-motion. Every angle and every approach covered. To the counter, to the truckers, one of them staring straight ahead, the other still watching, watching, some wild light in his eyes that almost turns into action

but then he sees the way the morning light sheens off the dull black barrels of the shotguns and he thinks better of it. Smart man.

To the counter, then. The gunmen move to the counter and down the aisle, past the first whimpering waitress on the floor. Behind the counter. The second waitress flinches backwards, wants to run, isn't sure what to do and then one of the gunmen grabs her and shoves her forcefully out of the way, up and over the counter. Plates go crashing to the floor. She goes crashing to the floor with a yelp; there's a gun in her face when she pushes up.

"STAY DOWN."

She stays there. She lowers herself back to the none-too-clean floor, eyes squeezed shut, hands over her head. And then gunmen, guns leveled to their shoulders, grips sure, movements so exact and precise:

they pause a second, just a second to get in sync.

Then they burst into the kitchen. It's called shock and awe. The shouting, the slamming, the doors flying open, the shotgun blast into the air. The ones out in the diner can hear the dishwasher boy in there screaming, screaming, he sounds like terror itself. And they can hear

something in the kitchen

growling.

[Guys seriously stop. WP]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Samantha is watching them, confused. Their movements, what she can see of their expressions, they're not here for money. They're here for something else entirely but what? Are they on a mission from God? Are they part of a cult that is just that insanely crazy?

She watches them move until they're past her and she can't watch them move anymore. Then she just listens to their feet on the tiled floor, listens for where they go, where they go, they're behind the counter. Pause.

Burst.

She pops up onto her feet in an instant. "Alexis, c'mon," she says quietly, and she runs to get behind the counter, to see if there's some way they can just...lock the men back there (sorrysorrysorrysorry dishwasher boy and fry cook and whoever else!). Nothing would be a permanent solution, but if they can at least get the people inside the diner out of the diner...

She doesn't think beyond that. It's one step at a time.

[dex+stealth to be quiet not like it matters but it matters, y'know?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Melantha watches the men, the way they move. There's calculation in those eyes, which sparkle and gleam like little blue-white stars only because it is hard to look at her without descending into poetry. There's something about her, something about her and Charlotte both, that captivates.

When the gunman grabs the waitress and shoves her down, Melantha's teeth are bared. As if she were an animal. She stays where she is and does not throw herself flailing and clawing at the men with guns. She flinches a bit when they burst into the kitchen, but then she's reaching into her backpack, unzipping, grabbing the small but useful firearm inside, shoving in a clip.

She looks across the room at Lola, then at Sam, and guy-with-Sam who she doesn't know. "They're not dirty," she whispers, mouths, hoping they hear, can understand, something. She jerks her head back at the kitchen,

where something is growling, and someone is screaming, and Melantha is hunching her shoulders up and rising to her feet.

People get pushed around and yelled at, including some of her people. Some of Her People include one person she knows to be a fully fledged gnosis-dizzied example of a Spirit Walker, and they all end up with guns in their faces when they don't find their knees on the floor. Lola's brow hardened, flexed into a heavy scowl. Not a protective one, but a disapproving one. Something of: Why didn't you guys just get down? I got down and I never take a knee but even I knew that's what you should do.

But not one sound uttered. Not a one.

Very soon enough, her eyes were back on the three men as they progressed through the diner, putting guns in the faces of others and in one instance even bodily throwing a woman over a counter and hollering for her to stay down. Lola, even still, didn't budge a goddamn muscle. Just scowled along after with eyes that only manage to be brown because of how much light the windows let in (they're black in most other settings, flat and challenging as the matte finish on those guns).

There's screaming, then. Screaming and gunblasts. Lola had flinched a little at the sounds for how sharp and loud they were, shifted her hand for the adrenaline and the noise and the stress were causing the baby to stir protestingly.

But, before the sounds had finished completely, Lola started to stand. Hand moved from her dress, arms at her sides. Eyes hopped quickly to Samantha when she began to move. Lola stood, upright and tall, perhaps the highest point in the establishment in this current moment. She does this, she points with a big obvious gesture of her arm, and then she swings the other to wrap the motion.

Everyone to the door.

Following that, a finger to her mouth and another hand pressing downward, palm to the floor: Quietly.

[Charisma 2 + Leadership 3]

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

Once they're in the kitchen--once that growl sounds--Alexis is on the move. He and Sam have the same idea and whatever it is that's going on in there, they should probably know for the safety of everyone out here. And so he starts to move quickly, crouched as far to the ground as he can possibly be. He's used to this, although it's been a while. He practices martial arts and keeps in shape, but he doesn't practical tactical movement. It's been a while but you never forgot those precise motions.

It's idiocy. He's unarmed. There are some of his practice weapons out in the trunk of the car, but there's no time to get to them. So he just keeps moving, heading with Sam to where they can get a vantage point at what's going on in there.

He does pause along the way, to look back at the others. His head tilts at what Melantha says and then nods. Okay. He looks to Lola and gestures to wave, as if to indicate the people inside here with them, and then points at the door. He's betting that growl isn't something they need to see.

[[Dex+Stealth also!]]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

The gunmen burst through the swinging doors into the kitchen; Charlotte is on her knees in a heartbeat and on her feet a second later, though see - she ducks a bit, slight creature that she is, shoulders narrowed, heart racing, her nostrils filled with the sick scent of -

- yeah, that.

Growling

From the outer pocket of her messenger bag she pulls out a small leather pounch. It is full-of-teeth. Or rather, not full-of-teeth but there are teeth in it. Slender and white, root and crown and all. They explode when you through them.

Charlotte and Melantha act in concert, without speaking. Charlotte glances back, and she's still muttering beneath her breath and has settled the messenger-bag cross-wise over her body and look, and see, there is even in her something animal in the way she moves, toward the kitchen rather than away from it. Prey-stalking. Shadowing the gunmen toward the Thing in the kitchen,

whatever that may be.

(So, piercing the gauntlet. Dif -1 b/c natural channel.)

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Wits + Rituals?

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Melantha, with that mouth that so easily pouts and those long-lashed eyes that twinkle and the nice legs and the nice everything and the Oh My God That Hair, is armed. Yup! Look at her, refusing to go to Golden without a gun because last time...

Alexis catches her eyes, acknowledges. Lola is basically yo, humans, GTFO and Melantha hopes in her heart of hearts that the swell of Lola's belly has the Gaia-given effect of making those humans listen up, because Mother is speaking. Everyone has a Mother, after all. And Gaia is Mother of All, and blesses all Mothers.

Charlotte is up, reaching, and she knows that Melantha is going toward the kitchen because ...well, in part because Charlotte isn't Erich. Erich, Melantha thinks, would be wanting her to run away, hide, something, and maybe there's a reason why they're a 3 and not a 2 in any division. Maybe there's lots of reasons, and this is one. Charlotte with her fingerbones, Melantha with her gun, going towards the screams.

Three out of five Garou Nation-ers agree: getting out of here is the thing to do. Almost as one, Sam and Alexis and Lola are getting up, are motioning for the mundanes to get out of dodge. The twenty-somethings don't have to be told twice. They scramble out of hiding, some of them in tears. They run for the door, bent double, going as quietly as they can. Feet shuffling, jeans scuffing. They're the first ones out.

Then the waitresses. Last the truckers, the one with the fire in his eyes hesitating a second, lingering, looking at the wimminfolk in there, the pretty dark-haired girl that looks just a little bit familiar to him, isn't she a celebrity or something?, and the pregnant lady and the frail-looking blonde and the cute brunette

who is all but pushing him out.

"I'm gonna call the cops," he promises Sam. "I'm gonna call the cops and get 'em to come right now. Get whoever you can out and -- "

Hell breaks loose in the back. Shotgun blasts. The crash of dishes. The stink of gunpowder and singed hair, and roars, roaring, like a ten-foot bear got in the kitchen somehow. The dishwasher boy is still screaming, but his screaming has hit a whole new level, shrieking, mindness. Those doublehinged doors suddenly burst open and the boy comes running out, slips and falls, is running again before he's even on his feet again.

The trucker runs too. He beats the boy to the door. So much for chivalry.

The boy -- he sounds like a boy -- is screaming and there's a nightmare child in her head screaming I HATE YOU I HATE YOU and it's hard to tell the difference for a second so, so

Melantha thinks fuck it and Charlotte hears it,

and she kicks in the door, weapon up.

Samantha and Sam rush to the kitchen, one to bar the door, the other to see what the hell is going on. But then Charlotte and Melantha get ahead of them or between them, hey isn't that woman sort of familiar?

Jesus, Sam, now is not the time. Because the woman is kicking through the door to see what's going on in the back and Samantha is thinking of her 9mm that's in her bag which is way over there, and hey didn't those guys have shotguns?

She slips back a little, let those who are - that one who is rather - armed go before those who would just make nice little meatshields. She'll bring up the rear and she'll look for any discarded weapons that she can use, well, in case she needs to use them.

Charlotte hears that; not the boy in Melantha's head but the fuck it and Charlotte is reaching see but she also is holding something in her hand. She does not closer her eyes but expends something like water and Melantha kicks in the door and Charlotte, for god's sake, is getting in

front

of her kin.

[-1 Gnosis to activate her firetooth talen.]

Garou in there? Yeah, he's not going to be able to help. He doesn't have a weapon and guess who doesn't get in the middle of fights where there are fullblooded Garou involved? His parents raised him right.

So he moves to help Lola instead, moving to help get any stragglers who are not currently moving out get out.

[Samantha and ALEXIS what the eff, self]

"Shut the fuck up and go."

Lola cut the trucker off, spoke over him at and get 'em. She wasn't particularly loud, no, but she was very sharp and very firm. But still, in a face that's hard and firm by default but made softer just by nature doing what nature does at this point in this cycle, it's easy to see that it comes from a place of concern. Of worry. Of urgency. She needed him to get the fuck out of there along with the rest.

Thankfully, more gunshots and crashing and the man is moving. She didn't have to worry about him much more. But it wasn't just the shotgun blasts that moved him. It was the primal, scraping squeal in the boy's scream (prey caught in the claws), and it was the feel-it-in-your-deep-gut roar that had him moving even more. Lola's eyebrows flew up-- she knew that sound. Knew it because she loved it because it was an anthem for her cause and her War.

"Jesus fucking christ," she uttered under her breath with the realization, then cast an eye about the joint to make sure it was cleared out. No, there was still the old man shaking like a leaf in the corner of his booth. Lola's nose wrinkled, she was impatient with him already (her mother would have cut a tooth on her for such disrespect for the elderly, this isn't her parent's fault really), and she was brisk but light on her sneakered feet when she walked over to his booth and said: "Get up." Voice quiet, but again firm.

When he looked up, he'd find her hand out waiting to help. If he didn't, if he just kept quivering, then she would simply take hold of him by arms and shoulders and get him moving manually. Needless to say, she isn't slow or particularly gentle about it.

There's a hard look in Melantha's eyes that no one here has ever seen, because no one here has ever bound her or hurt her in ways she never talks about nor describes, no one here has ever broken through some wall in here to make her hollow and howling and no one here has ever done it again and seen her sending fiery fury through her gaze at them, refusing to cry again, refusing everything again. There's a reason she was able to do, for most of her adolescence, what she has done,

but none of them know what she has done, either. She, for reasons somewhat obvious, hasn't ever really talked to Charlotte about it.

But yes: pretty young thing, emphasis on all three words to everyone she ever destroyed, aiming a firearm into a kitchen after kicking in a door, looking upon someone -- not something -- who can only be a werewolf. Charlotte gets in front of her and Melantha gives a brief scowl, snaps a hey at Charlotte in her mind, moving to stand beside her, because sisters, another word she sends, context-free, into her packmate's brain For Reasons.

She has a hardness to her she had almost forgotten. An anger.

A Fury.

[dlp, will recycle most of it though probably]

Through the pass-through,

and through the swinging doors,

and in the room with her because Melantha made a Good Decision there,

they can see it. They can see the rampant chaos in the kitchen, the abattoir that room has become. Amidst the tubs of beaten-eggs and the sizzling deep fryers and the cutting surfaces and the megafridges and the industrial sinks and that enormous dishwashing machine in the corner:

three gunmen. An enormous, roaring monster, moving too fast to resolve. Shotguns going off, muzzle-flashes, deafening noise. They can't hear anything at all. It's all muffled and cotton-stuffed. They can see, though. They can see the monster recoiling from the impact of the shots. They can see its blood, brilliant red, splattering the walls. They can see its enormous handpaw come swiping out, unbelievably fast, and then suddenly there are only two gunmen; the third goes flying, slams into the wall just to the right of the double-hinged door, knocks a small avalanche of plates and bowls down.

His chest is caved in, clawed open. Eyes staring through ballistic goggles. The other two gunmen close ranks. They don't even look at him. They're trained for this. It's life or it's death, and the blink of an eye could be the line between.

--

The cry of a falcon on the air. Though they can barely hear anything else at all, this cuts through clear and fine and pure. And suddenly the gathered find themselves stronger, faster. Their resolve strengthened to iron.

--

And out in the dining room. Out in the almost-deserted diner, where that one regular, that one retiree, widower, old-feller who's been coming here the last twenty years but will probably never come here again,

is still cowering at this table. He doesn't get up. He doesn't move. He yells in terror and shrinks as Lola touches him. She can feel his joints popping as she hauls him to his feet, and he's cringing. He's trying to sink down and away from her. There's nothing but animal terror in his mind.

[Charlotte has summoned Merlin! All present receive Merlin totem benefits for the next 4 rounds: +3brawl, +2dodge, +3WP against opponents larger than themselves.]

Merlin, no Merlin, whatever's going on in the kitchen. He's still helping get people out, and moves to help Lola with the old man.

[willpower vs. phobia]

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

[are my empathy senses tingling? percept (insightful) + empathy (emotional states), she's toward the back so hopefully no diff modifier?]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 2

[Dexterity + Athletics, WP because Hector will never shut up if I kill a man while trying to save him]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) [WP]

[[Dex+Athletics, Spec Fluidly Moving]]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1

[OW ALEXIS MY ARM. rolling vs 1 bashing.]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

Samantha is toward the back, because she is thinking, well. If there is going to be fighting then she may need to wait for a weapon to appear. Or maybe she'll grab one of those vats of frying oil, or maybe she'll grab a cleaver, or, oh. She feels a twinge when the man slams into the wall, obviously dead. The cool, calm, collected part of her head that tries to stay rational in times of crisis says Hey Samantha, there's a gun for you right there.

But there's something else in this diner. Toward the back, she's able to...to hear, to sense, to notice the terror of that last person. That old man who will probably never come back again. And then there's Lola, draggin him upward and before Samantha even consciously thinks about it, she is bolting back across the room toward him. Toward them. Lola's got him and probably he's still freaking out, Alexis has him, and he's probably still freaking out, and then Samantha is there. Because someone needs to keep this man from having an aneurysm in the middle of the diner. Glancing back at the chaos a moment, then back to this, them, where she should be rather than where a part of her, the warrior part of her, wants to be.

"Shhh," she says. "It's okay, it's okay," she says, and her tone is the same as she would use for Jake when he's crying and crying because he's sick and miserable and all he can do is wail.

[charisma+empathy]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

"STAY BEHIND ME." CHARLOTTE to Melantha amidst-that echoing cotton-wool ring and maybe Melantha cannot hear her but that's fine. Charlotte can talk in her brain and does, so somewhere Erich hears little interstitial pieces of their conversation.

STAY BEHIND ME. and in the kitchen the girl-thing takes that single tooth and throws it at the beast and then for fuck's sake she's shifting; changing; erupting into motion and

launching herself at the Crinos across the kitchen. A direwolf; with silverwhite fur.

In the kitchen, more noise. More gunblasts that are still loud and sudden and still make Lola's shoulders jump a little each time they pop off. Another crash. When the old man didn't answer she touched his shoulder. He yelled and tried to shrink into his seat. He was terrified, quivering. Old and ancient and just about ready for his heart to give up for the sheer fear of what's going on around him.

This, she's pretty sure, is why ancients put people on ice floats when they hit this point.

Alexis was moving in to help, but Lola was more or less blocking the booth's bench by standing with just barely enough room for the old man to stand up in, between the table and her stomach. So, when the man refused to move, Lola decided that she was going to move him and that was going to be the end of it. She was strong-bodied, she ran miles upon miles without tiring and kept up with packs of wolves moving an old man would be nothing.

And, sure enough, it was nothing. His attempts to fight her off were the playful bats of friendly kitten paws. He was light as a feather. She took him by his upper arms and lifted him bodily out of his seat, arms stuck to his sides so that he couldn't use his arms very effectively to fight her. His legs were slipped smoothly from under the table without catching on anything, until Alexis put hands on him to try and help.

The man flinched under Alexis's fingers at his forearm when he tried to help relieve Lola of some of the burden, and the Uktena Kinfolk just looked flatly at the Fury and told him: "Pretty sure I got this." Clearly she did. She was holding the man up against her side, having adjusted her grip on him as though he were some sort of a very large sock monkey, except impossibly gentle about it. Proving a point, perhaps, about her ability to care for something small and frail and helpless and infuriating.

She jerked her head back toward the kitchen, though, back toward the mayhem.

"Put on your big boy pants and go help the ladies out."

And with that, old man tucked into her side with one arm around his torso and the other supporting his hips and thighs now, Lola Hawkes turned to be shepherd to the last stragglers of this flock.

There's a hard look in Melantha's eyes that no one here has ever seen, because no one here has ever bound her or hurt her in ways she never talks about nor describes, no one here has ever broken through some wall in here to make her hollow and howling and no one here has ever done it again and seen her sending fiery fury through her gaze at them, refusing to cry again, refusing everything again. There's a reason she was able to do, for most of her adolescence, what she has done,

but none of them know what she has done, either. She, for reasons somewhat obvious, hasn't ever really talked to Charlotte about it.

But yes: pretty young thing, emphasis on all three words to everyone she ever destroyed, aiming a firearm into a kitchen after kicking in a door, looking upon someone -- not something -- who can only be a werewolf. Charlotte gets in front of her and Melantha gives a brief scowl, snaps a hey at Charlotte in her mind, moving to stand beside her, because sisters, another word she sends, context-free, into her packmate's brain For Reasons.

She has a hardness to her she had almost forgotten. An anger.

A Fury.

--

Blood splatters. She can smell it and she imagines she can feel it -- hitting her, seeping over her, but it isn't, it isn't, she repeats to herself until she believes it. It's not her blood, it's okay, even if for a moment her vision fuzzes black and white and bright and dark. She swallows again, trying not to breathe in the coppery-tang smell because it makes her want to throw up. It makes her want to faint.

Something comes over her, then. She breathes it in. She feels stronger. She feels her mind clear. She opens her eyes, breathing in, awful smell and all.

The screaming dishwasher was not the Enemy. The gunmen are not of the Wyrm. She's not sure if the werewolf is. The werewolf might be frenzied. All the same:

Melantha lowers her gun. She takes a breath. "Hey, YOU," she calls, directly to the monster.

Charlotte is yelling at her to stay behind. Melantha doesn't say it out loud, or in her mind, but Charlotte's not her boss. The Baklava Republik does not have an Alpha. And if they do, it's just as much Melantha as it is Charlotte, so there. Granted: she is reasonably sure that she'd be outvoted if Erich were also here, but Erich's not here, so NYEH.

Still, it doesn't matter. Whatever she was thinking of doing when she called to that monster is pretty well undone as soon as her best friend changes into warform and launches herself at him. Yup. That is happening.

[people in the kitchen, init up! people outside the kitchen: take 1 turn to move to the kitchen if you're so inclined.]

[dex + wits + volcano = 7]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

[[Not moving into kitchen]]

dex (hispo) + wits = 10.

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( fail )

[dicers, to Foothills Night!]

Before Lola has the chance to roll out with the old man, though, a petite brunette of a Kinfolk shows up. Lola recognized her but vaguely-- she wasn't very social on any outward level but she was a creature studied of war and tactic. Armies were a very important part of a war, and armies were only so good as their soldiers. She got to know names and faces and identities as well as she could, even if she didn't interact with them directly.

She didn't have a name for this one yet, but she knew she was a Glass Walker, or a Child of Gaia, or something like that. Knew she was a Kin and that she kept her head and that she was worth her weight, though, and that was important. She was gentle to the man's mind and terror where Lola was gentle to his body, and the man was all but lulled to compliance. Mothers really are comforting, what do you know?

The second roar joining the fray had Lola reconsidering, pausing at Alexis, and then deciding: "Yeah, maybe you both should come too."

Then she'd head for the door.

In the kitchen, Melantha HEY YOUs the Crinos. The Crinos -- bloody-pawed, fresh from tearing a guy open -- wheels about. Its ears perk. Its head tilts. It starts to make this questioning noise, and then

Charlotte-wolf barrels into it. And it snarls, tearing at the Silver Fang with claw and tooth.

Outside: Lola gets the retiree out. It's not hard, actually. Just had to pry him out of the booth. After that he goes all-but-catatonic, dangling limp, eyes staring. Alexis helps: grabs the guy's feet. Bangs a knee into the doorframe. No problem. Nothing permanent.

Then they're outside. They're outside and the sun is shining and the birds are singing and it's a beautiful spring day and

a monster roars. Off in the trees, people -- those poor frantic humans out of their minds with terror -- scream and run just a little faster.

If Lola had considered that she would get his goat by suggesting he go "Put on your big boy pants and go help the ladies out," she has another thing coming. Alexis may have his flaws--and make no mistake, he does. He makes mistakes, he has an ego about things, just like anyone. But snarking that he needs to man up and go help the women? Yeah, that's not getting him at all.

But then she reconsiders, and tells him he should come. He frowns a little, as if he's not sure what Lola plans, and moves to go with her for now.

The last time Samantha saw Lola the encounter was very brief. Names were not exchanged out in the parking lot of a building downtown, where they all convened to meet the sender of weird anonymous letters. Samantha took off, figuring the woman - the letter-sender that is - to be a crazy person just trying to cause a ruckus. Or something. It's been a while and her player has a terrible memory sometimes.

Anyway, the time before that was one of the war moots, or for Sam the only one she attended. She didn't stay long, because two werewolves started bearing down on each other, as their kind are wont to do, and the kinswoman grabbed her brother and got the hell out of the way.

She recognizes the woman a bit, but she doesn't have a name, either. If she did, if she sat and spoke with Lola, maybe they'd find they have more in common than they realize. Lola was raised to fight, to prepare for a Change that would never come. Samantha was raised to be prepared for anything, to be ready and flexible and most importantly to survive. Not quite the same situations, but similar.

And those backgrounds have brought them to this moment, with Lola carrying a frail old man out of a diner while Samantha tries to sooth him while thinking, Well at least this place isn't on fire. Don't jinx it, Sam.

Then they're outside and they're getting the man settled on something. Samantha lingers, hand on his shoulder, still murmuring to him words of comfort and compassion when Lola says the two other kinfolk should go with her. Samantha looks at the old man first, but really they've gotten him out and there's not much else they can do. Fine then. They're going back inside, to help or to fight or whatever needs to be done. Squaring her shoulders, 'Roach's kinswoman starts for the door, perhaps to see just how difficult that totem's children are to squash.

Once outside, out through the doorframe and into the parking lot, Lola lets the man down. Alexis has to cooperate, but of course he does because he already knows Lola does what she has her mind set to, and if he doesn't follow her flow then the old man would run the risk of hitting the pavement and shattering a pelvis. He gets back to the ground, Samantha puts her hand on his shoulder to comfort him, and Lola looks around for thoughts, options.

There was no guarantee that the battle didn't bring itself outside. She couldn't just leave the old man quivering, trembling out here with no place to be, no cover to take. Her brow furrowed, and she reached into the pocket of the army-green jacket she was wearing over her dress (unbuttoned, of course, she couldn't button that thing if she dreamed of it now) and pulled out her car keys. Hit a button on the remote, and the locks on a used blue Subaru clicked and the lights blinked.

With help from one another and access to Lola's car, the old man was guided to the back bench seat of the vehicle. Told to just stay put, lay down if he wants to, comforted and soothed and convinced that it was the safest vehicle in the world to be in (nevermind the dead animals in the back). He listened, and the Kinfolk straightened up to get back to brass tacks.

Samantha was already headed inside. Lola should have been going to the driver's side door of her car. She should be driving this old man out of here, to safety. Instead, though, she reaches over the back seat into the storage space in the back of the vehicle. Shifts a blanket, and when she straightens back up from that lean and reach (and jesus did she need to brace her hand on the frame of the car door and grunt to get herself back upright like that) there is a shotgun in her hand.

The door smacks closed on the car. Hopefully the old guy has the sense to stay put. Lola apparently didn't.

He has no problem of course with helping get the old man out to the car. He squints a little in his T-Shirt and shorts as they come out into the sun but is perfectly gentle in his own right (a slight mismovement aside) and guides him with Lola, letting her help him into the car. Maybe this is fine, maybe he had nothing to be worried about. He's seen Lola in crisis situations and he genuinely likes and respects her, but he had a baaaad feeling that something would go wro--

Wump goes the car door. Alexis turns around to see Lola and the shotgun, and he looks incredulous.

"No. Hell no." He's already between her and the door by the simple fact of the situation but he moves more specifically to interpose himself. "You're not going in there with a shotgun for more reasons than I can possibly say in the amount of time it's going to take for it to be over."

DICE

[okay, i know this will make things very confusing, but! if you post IC, please post in the other room so we have one consolidated log :D

monstar init! +8]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( fail )

[melantha-charlotte-monstar]

[Monster:

Reflexive -- ERNGH? at Melantha

1. BITE CHARLOTTE

R1. CLAWSWAT HER ACROSS THE ROOM. or at least claw her.

R2. ONE MORE TIME.]

[Charlotte: 1a. THROW TALEN. 2b. Er, Bite!. Rage 1: BITE.]

[1a. LIKE HELL YOU DO. 3rb.]

[talen will be last round. soaking fire!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Dex + Ath

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

FIRE.

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

[1a. 3RB. dex + firearms +3 // diff +1 (w/in 2 yards, diff is 4) (WP)]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

[base 4 + 5]

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

[soak!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

1a is now a BITE. er. Dex + Brawl + Hispo + MERLIN :DDDD -2

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Damage Strength + Hispo + 2 + 1

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

[soak!]

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

Bite the Second. -3 + WP

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Damage: Str + Hispo + 2 + 4

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

[soak!]

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

[CHOMPITY.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

[base crinos bite dam+2]

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

OUCH.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

[Charlotte is stunned. Spend rage to recover?]

(Spend rage to recover!)

Rage action! -5

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Damage!

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

[ACK]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

[x_x]

[we can adjourn to the other room, i think! i shall take a TS.]

Charlotte

This happens in the diner; two young women burst through the swinging kitchen doors. There is a dead man in his body armor, and two more firing with precision. Charlotte hears fuck it and sees Melantha kick the door down and there is a Crinos tearing open a man-in-armor with the high tech shotgun Charlotte not long ago wanted to ruin and she can feel the nipping background presence of one of Falcon's smallest children and fuck it see -

- they break through the doors and there's an explosion but it fizzles, just blackens the doors to the walk-in freezer and does nothing to the hide of the snarling beast in the back. Melantha shoots and the thing that was going EERGHH? goes SNARL instead and Charlotte is not-Charlotte she's a direwolf, launching herself, changing in mid-air, landing and tearing into the other Crinos.

Once,

twice,

and then he turns, and tears into her, and tears her open, and tears her apart and sends her, staggered, hide torn open, ribs-and-lung exposed, viscera on the verge-of-unraveling, reeling backward.

Only rage keeps her on her feet.

Only rage keeps her moving somehow moving and how do you move after than; the pain is an inferno, but somehow she keeps her feet and somehow she throws herself at the Crinos again and somehow,

she

eviscerates

him.

Panting and reeling in the aftermath, she wheels to face the gunmen and -

[wp]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

Three bullets fire off. Melantha shoots them but they barely make a dent. She thinks: I'm gonna get yelled at.

She thinks at Erich: don't be mad at me and right that second, he might have no idea what she's talking about, or he might be feeling his pack-sisters pulling on the strength of their totem and be freaking the fuck out, she doesn't know right then. She just doesn't want him to be mad at her, or Charlotte. She doesn't want anyone to be mad at her, that's the truth. It's a vulnerable and raw thing, but it's real.

Melantha tries to remember the last time she saw Charlotte fight like this, and finds that she can't. Has she ever seen Charlotte fight? She trembles a little.

Blood goes everywhere. Melantha sways but stays upright, her hand still on her gun and her finger on the trigger and the safety off, off, off, ready to go, go, go. She does not fire again. Charlotte destroys the thing that is a werewolf but not one of theirs, not good, and then Charlotte wheels on the gunmen and

Melantha wheels on the gunmen, firearm up, eyes hard even if they sparkle, even if she looks like a perpetual 'girl', even if she's so pretty and soft and delicate.

"If you fire on her, I'm shooting your dicks off first."

Samantha heads back once she's certain that the old man is okay. That means not hanging around to see if Lola gets into her car and drives off. A car door closes and isn't followed by an engine starting. Sam keeps walking toward the door but then

No.

She looks over her shoulder, and then she stops. Turns back to look at Alexis and Lola, but her attention really is on Alexis. Really? Looking at Lola Hawkes and looking at Samantha Evans, there's only one major difference between them. Physically, anyway, and what other reasons would Alexis have to keep one back and not the other?

"Wow, seriously?" Yes, that is a bit of annoyance in the Glass Walker's tone. "Alexis you can't force your philosophies on other people. If she wants to come, she should come, and I for one would prefer her with a weapon than without one. Now come on, we need to see if they need any kind of help."

[I can be a leader-type, maybe? charisma+leadership]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

- and those gunmen have hardly had the time to blink. They were leveling their weapons. They were taking aim. They were preparing to fire and everything happens and now

the Crinos is eviscerated. Is staggering back. Knees giving way. Eyes rolling back. Falling, a mountain of deadweight, sending one last pile of dishes crashing to the floor.

A silence.

An unadulterated threat. From Melantha.

And then the gunmen glance at each other. They draw their weapons up short. One of them goes to his fallen compatriot, kneeling amidst the muck and the debris. He puts his fingers to the dead man's carotid, but it's more habit than anything. A fool could see he's dead.

The other gunman pulls his goggles up atop his helmet. Tugs his mask down,

and suddenly is not a man at all but a woman, large-boned, long-limbed, hard-faced.

"Our apologies," she says. "Especially to you, wolf-born. Didn't realize you were on our side. Would've exercised a little more tact, maybe.

Her partner, meanwhile, has unfastened the dead man's vest and shirt; removed the dog tags. They're blank, at least to mundane observation. Charlotte can feel the faintest glimmer of spirit-energy there, though. He pockets the tags, slings his combat shotgun over his shoulder, and takes his place at the gunwoman's side.

To look at this realistically, Alexis should have the upper hand in this situation. He was bigger-- taller, broader, all of that. He wasn't in his third trimester of pregnancy either. Lola was holding the shotgun in this confrontation, true, but for as mad-dog crazy as she has the reputation for being --

yeah, cut a Garou clean open and then Lola went and killed it with her knife

-- Alexis still knew she wouldn't shoot him. Samantha knew it too. There was no danger of that.

All the same, when the man blocks her path from going back in, Lola's grip on the weapon adjusted and she bared her teeth at him. Samantha came to her cause-- let the woman fight! She knows what she's doing, I'd rather have her at my back with a weapon than not have her.

"Or," Lola suggested to begin, and adjusted her grip again, this time to loosen it and hold it out in front of her. Presenting the shotgun to Alexis, giving him the opportunity to take it. "You can go in my stead." A beat a moment to watch his expression, his eyes mostly, before she snapped and told him in a rush:

"Those are our people in there, including a Kinfolk just like you or me and you're just going to turn your back and let them fight for their lives? Walk away from them and say it's not your problem? Why, because you don't have claws?" She mimicked spitting on the ground in disgust.

"Grow a goddamn spine. You go in or I am."

The gun(wo)men lower their weapons. They're not a threat.

That's all the direwolf genuinely comprehends in that moment. She remains alert (SOME TRICK AFOOT?) for another spine twisting, gut-wrenching second or two, then melts into her humanskin.

She's torn apart. There's blood everywhere and it is dark, dark red and it is still oozing. The shredded bits of her t-shirt stuck in the deepest wounds.

I'm gonna heal myself. Charlotte tells Melantha; reassures her really: she is whole and intact and entire. She remembers how Melantha feels about blood. Will you check the diner to see if everyone left?"

He looks back at Sam, looks forward at Lola. His jaw sets. "Okay fine, give it here." He reaches out and takes the shotgun from her.

And, assuming she does, he starts ejecting the shells, one at a time.

"Reason 1. That's an enclosed kitchen, and you're looking to spray shotgun pellets in there in the hopes that you'll get close enough to hit them and not people." CHK-CHK.

"Reason 2. If you do get close enough in that enclosed kitchen, you or I'll be in the Garou's way." CHK-CHK.

"Reason 3. Yes, because you're pregnant. There's no nice way to say it, but you shouldn't be handling the recoil of a shotgun, much less going into life or death combat, at what I'm assuming is your current stage of pregnancy." CHK-CHK.

"Reason 4. I'd go in, but I'm shit with guns and useless otherwise." And that's when he rapidly pump-ejects all the rest of the shells.

"You want to get yourself or someone else killed? Do it when I'm not around. You can hate me all you want, I don't give a shit. I guarantee you it has nothing to do with spinelessness. I'd go in there and die with pleasure to save them if I didn't know I was endangering her by going in there."

(I DIDN'T BREAK IT!)

OOOOPS close tags liz.

[[WOW all the missing words.

"you'll get close enough to hit them and not OUR people."

"I'm shit with guns and useless in a Garou fight otherwise"]]

Yeah, she'll shoot the woman's dick off, too. Try her. She doesn't lower her weapon when she sees the woman's face behind the goggles, the helm. Gender has (almost) no influence here for her. She'll shoot the crotch first, she doen't give a shit.

Charlotte will heal herself. Melantha nods, absently, a strange gesture to anyone who can't hear the Theurge's thoughts. She then shakes her head.

Not leaving. She doesn't need to add the 'you' to the end of that for it to be clear. She just holds her aim. "My packmate," she says, firm and clear as the daylight outside, "is injured and in no mood at the moment to accept or reject your apologies. I will accept it on her behalf."

There's a pause. She exhales. "I'm sorry about the one who fell." The one who died. And she means that; her sorrow is real. "I wish we'd realized what was happening in here earlier."

Samantha remains quiet, listening. Not exactly ready to step in and mediate, just. Listening.

Because Alexis didn't say anything about not having claws.

But Lola's choices, how they affect her and her child, how they could possibly affect the others, they're her choices to make. They are all Kin here, and all of them (relatively) young still.

"Except there's no telling that by going inside she'll even make it a fight. Maybe she hands off her gun or maybe she finds someone was hiding in the bathroom or whatever. Maybe it's over by the time we get in." There's a werewolf in there, after all. And Charlotte-wolf can shift into forms that are stronger and faster and better equipped to fight another like herself than any of them.

"What Lola does is her choice, Alexis, and what you do is yours. That doesn't make either right or wrong, you know. It makes them different." A pause. They probably aren't going to kill each other.

"I'm going inside."

And so she does. She turns and heads back to the door.

Alexis took the shotgun, and Lola let him. When she did, her arms folded stubbornly across her chest to rest right above her stomach. The sleeves of her coat pushed up to her forearms this way. She was wearing some hemp-looking bracelet around her wrist these days, perhaps something she stole away from her much-traveled Galliard mate.

He started ejecting the shells onto the ground, and she furled forward. Something like an animal ready to snarl, ready to lunge and put teeth in a face and show what force they really have. For what Rage she lacked, the spirit of the moon she was born under still rattled hollow in her bones.

But she is quiet. Her eyes are bright, not-quite hateful, perhaps resentful instead. But attentive.

When he finished, she was still and quiet for a few long thumps of adrenaline-saturated hearts behind the ribs of the Men of Wolves. Then she unfolded one arm and held out her left hand, asking for the gun back. All she said was:

"I am not bending over to pick those back up."

The woman's eyes are hard and clear. She shrugs, a terse motion. "There's no way you could have realized. So there's no point regretting it. As for Wendel; he knew what he was signing on for and he got what he signed on for. A Good Death.

"You should clear out of here. You and your ... packmate, and anyone else you guys are allied to. We're going to have to torch this place, and I don't like waiting around."

The gunman, still masked and goggled, nods to Melantha. "Was a good shot there. I saw. You want to do something with that talent, you let me know."

Charlotte would tell them that Melantha is already doing something with that talent and that something involves being in a goddamned pack with her and with Erich and she would tell him that if she was really conscious at this point of very much in the world aside from her own pain. Homid she's a teenaged-twenty-something woman whose chest and abdomen have been torn open and the pain is so intense that she can hardly think and she thinks about many things and strangely but this is like the intensity of the noise except it all opens up from her body and she cannot law hands on herself but she does have gourds in her messenger bag and retrieves one and crushes it in her right hand and mixes the dust - poof! - with her own blood.

The worst of the pain eases. Melantha and Erich can feel that in the back of their minds.

She finds an apron, perhaps, with which to cover the remaining evidence of her wounds, and most of the blood and glances at the gunwoman and the gunman and the Melantha, and starts, shaily, heading toward the door.

There's no point regretting it.

But there doesn't have to be a purpose to feelings like regret, like sorrow, like loss. And those are the feelings that Melantha, whose eyes are sparkly and whose eyes are hard, can feel in equal measure. There may not be a point, but that doesn't mean they don't matter. What purpose, for example, do so many things serve? None but pleasure, and joy, and liveliness. These things are blessed, and matter, though they do not have a 'point'.

She slowly, slowly, lowers her firearm to her side. She really doesn't want to shoot anything else tonight. There's already so much blood, and she clicks the safety back on.

"Who are you?" she asks, ignoring the compliment, her shoulders tight, because you want to do something with that talent reminds her of something else entirely. She exhales, keeping her eyes on the leader. "Before you set everything on fire."

This is, quite literally, the best response in the wide spectrum of responses he could have received from Lola. He expected to have to try and avoid being beaten unconscious with the shotgun, or kicked in the crotch, or chased around the parking lot in her car so she could run him over and pin him, then kick him in the head repeatedly.

He actually envisioned that possibility. As a 1970s Schoolhouse Rock-style cartoon, for some reason. Don't ask how the brain works.

But instead, she gives a gruff response and he nods slightly. "Wasn't expecting you to. I've got it."