Ornature

Keisha can be found on a college campus as a rule. She can even be found on this particular campus; she was here earlier today, hitting up the library for one of her classes. But she's not here for study tonight. Tonight she has a mission, and she's here with two members of the Baklava Republic as well one of Celduin's Galliards. She's dressed more for function than anything else, in little more than a T-Shirt and jeans with a jacket to handle any cold issues (snow be damned). Her backpack is slung over a shoulder with her ritual tools, dreads pulled back and bound together as she walks into the building alongside the others.

Her eyes look around the inside of the place, frowning lightly. As if it's standard operating procedure, she looks to the others.

"Gonna look across." She slips a pocket mirror out of her jacket pocket to do just that.

[[Look across Gauntlet! Using mirror, spending WP 'cause that's one I hate botching..]]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Someone who is not Charlotte drives or maybe there are two someones or three. However they get there includes: Charlotte with Erich, quiet is his shadow. With their shocks of blond hair and pale blue eyes, their long limbs and open, attractive features, and perhaps even just the way they move, together, as if they know how to move, together, through some sixth sense (which they do), strangers often assume that the pair are siblings. So,

like siblings, rolling out of the cab of the truck, weaving through the campus to meet the others at Tivoli, then ducking inside to the auditorium.

The air smells like snow. Doesn't it? Feels like snow; tastes like that - bright and cold and metallic, the sensation of it in the back of the throat. Charlotte has a small messenger bag slung across her body. With her pink hair, it makes her look more like a student who actually belongs here, rather than the interloper she is. Charlotte is shivering in little more than a heavy hoodie, a t-shirt and jeans, but her winter coat would probably get destroyed so.

Here she is, watching the shadow of the building against the sky until it swallows them, then allowing her attention to drift over the interior lines with a kind of thoughtlessness that nevertheless feels rather present as they arrive and look around.

Sense Wyrm

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3) ( fail )

"So." Her hands are in her pockets. They're on their way or they're there and Tamsin's got her eyes open looking around yes looking around but also thinking this looks like a good place to do that green club thing maybe and what is weird anyway. Maybe they all rode together in somebody's car or maybe they carpooled but there they are.

Tamsin: she likes to have a plan, of some sort. A plan, when it comes to poking her nose into things. Of course, Tamsin also likes poking her nose into things. Of course she would, Fog's Fianna galliard-darling, moon on the wane, falling towards and through justice and spiritual mysteries and secrets but too simmering for any of those wasn't there yet. She has positioned herself, or tried to position herself, so that the theurge girls are somewhat perteckted by Erich and herself, even though they're just a sneaky standing around bunch of loiterers right now, one loiterer checking her makeup in a compact, the other one looking around and shivering.

The 'So,' it turns out, is directed toward Erich, though her gaze skims over Charlotte and Keisha. He's Fostern; she defers to him automatically. It is in the somewhat graceful dip of her posture, the cant of her head. She's got on some kind of silly warm hippy hat. Gonna look across, Keisha says,

"So... Weird. Anybody, um, feel the Wyrmd? Uh, weird." Tamsin says, followed by, "How're you thinking we do this, Erich? Maybe, um, two of us should go otherside and two of us should stay thisside? Split up you guys, uh, Baklava, since I guess you can talk across, well you know. What'cha thinking?"

The two of them are certainly of the right age to be students here. Perhaps Erich's the older brother, a fifth-year senior cruising his way to graduation on the tail end of an athletic scholarship. Perhaps Charlotte is the quirky, eccentric younger sister, surely an artist or a poet or something of the sort with that quiet, quirky demeanor and that pink-streaked hair.

Erich is talking as he strolls up with Charlotte. The conversation is entirely unimportant. It has something to do with meatburgers, which are of course burgers composed entirely of meat, and the subtle distinctions, benefits and drawbacks to meatburgers with meat-buns vs meatburgers that are just meat-patties. When Tamsin Cinder-Song so's him, Erich looks -- startled, if anything. He's so new to this Fostern business. It feels weird, like wearing a coat still a little too big for him.

"Uhh...."

He thinks for a minute, brow beetling the way it does. Then he glances at Charlotte; a little uneasy at, or at least just unused to, the idea of separating from her. Still; it's a sound strategy.

"What do you think, Charlotte? You and Tamsin on one side, me and Keisha on the other?"

Back at Cold Crescent, Shieldwind's pack is recruiting. They are the new Guardians. It's not an easy task; everyone knows what happened to the last pack of Guardians. Everyone saw what was stripped of their Alpha at the punishment rites. Cold Crescent still relies heavily, and may always rely heavily, on every Garou in the sept doing regular patrols, serving regular duty. At many septs in many places, that's the norm; coming from before, where Forgotten Questions is so self-sustaining that it hardly needs help outside of the official Guardian packs, it takes some wolves some getting used to.

No matter: Shieldwind pulled from multiple corners tonight. A Fostern Ahroun, a couple of Theurges, throw in a Galliard, and no matter if they're from three different packs. If they have the skills he needs and they're on duty, they're who he sends.

Something weird is going on at Tivoli. A recent rash of attacks. Fights and sneak assaults, mostly; campus police on high alert. But last night someone actually went missing. And now campus police is on high alert and everyone else is trying to keep it quiet and the Warder is interested.

--

Charlotte smells the cold. Keisha flips out a mirror. Tamsin asks Erich dubya-tee-eff we gonna do. And yes: they all are taken for students by the campus police car that drives slowly by. Four kids together, one of them a big guy. They all look like they go together, weirdly: hoodie dude, braids, pink hair, hippy hat. Oh yeah. They're just like every other student at the three schools that use this campus, where plenty of the matriculating students are coming back to school or dropped out once or are just taking a few classes while they work.

While Charlotte's nose takes in nothing, Keisha feels the cold air become as thick and soft as cobwebs that she can brush away with her hand, like walking through a haunted house. It's dark on the other side, dark from winter and cold and a new moon. It takes a while for the lights on buildings and corners to flicker into view in the penumbra for her, crawling with spiders who, themelves, seem to throb gently in time with the buzzing of the lights. They are quiet. On the other side, it is already snowing softly, silently, though the flakes never seem to touch the ground.

There is darkness in that building. Where the other buildings seem to hum with a golden inner warmth, a curiosity and energy that mingles with sleepiness and boredom and is broken here and there by spikes of anxiety, Tivoli is black inside. Particularly in one arm of it, where they hold lectures and even wedding receptions.

She hasn't shivered despite the chill in the air; she's used to chilly weather and she's adapted to the chillier weather here. But once she looks across, the frigid feel there and the feeiling that something is just wrong sends that tremor up her spine, back to reverberate throughout her body.

"Yeah, there's something wrong here." She says it perhaps a little too loud, the problem that comes inherent with peeking across and losing access to all your senses on this side of the Gauntlet. She shakes her head, reorienting her attention to this side, and points off toward the arm where the darkness is. "Along with the usual pattern spiders and such, it's exceedingly dark. Particularly over there."

She looks around to each of them, tightening her grip on her staff. "Seems like a good place to start, if you ask me."

Charlotte gives a sharp-shouldered little shrug. It is elegant and a bit spare, the gesture. She has one hand tucked into the front pocket of her jacket; the other wrapped around the shoulder-strap of her bag. As they walk, she considers Erich's speculation, her mouth drawn to one side. She's inhaling too, but she doesn't smell anything out of the ordinary and she gives Erich a silent look and a little shake of her head to communicate that she hasn't detected anything.

Still; Tamsin asks if they should split up, and Erich considers it, and Charlotte glances at Tamsin and then Keisha, then the building proper.

Then shakes her pink head: a silent no.

"The Gauntlet's thick, here. Maybe you could get over quckly if we needed you, or vice-versa. Maybe not. I don't think we should split up. Let's we check out inside, then go over to the otherside together."

"'kay, you have a point. Especially since last time we split up it was kind of a shitstorm. Let's go inside," he nods toward the rather grand-looking hall, "and have a quick peek around. Then we'll duck into a bathroom and cross over together."

The campus police car drives by: slow-ly, and Keisha's voice is as loud (to Tamsin [near]) as the plink of a stone on a frost-rimned lake: plink, crack. Tamsin pulls the brim of her floppy hippy hat down over her ears, earringless because it's too much of a pain to find earrings again after a shift and dedicating them seems wasteful (and too hard, anyway). They still get lost.

"So it's just like, dark on the other side if you look? Thick dark that's beating all sinister-as-fuck heartbeat-style dark, or just sketchy suspect dark?"

Charlotte: shakes her pink head; Tamsin looks alert, and slopes a glance toward Erich, but doesn't argue, though she shifts restively. The Gauntlet is thick. So at his word --

-- a grin. "Let's just hope it's unlocked, man."

[Tamsin: just in case talking people into ignoring us sneaking into dark building is necessary, Persuasion On?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 5, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

[Per + Alert or PU, same!]

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

[[Per+Alert, Spec: Uncanny Instincts]]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 10) ( success x 1 ) Re-rolls: 1

"Oh!" Erich thinks of something else. "I actually have a new Gift now. I can talk to Earth for a while and see what's going on. It takes me like... ten minutes though. So when we get in I can maybe do that while you guys look around? Just stay close enough that if you yell I can get to you pronto."

Per + Primal Urge

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

[percep+pu!]

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

[That building is creepy and dark. Charlotte has the feeling they're being watched, and then she begins to smell something like blood and decay. Some cold, and it's a dim scent.]

Tamsin asks Keisha if the darkness is sketchy-suspect dark or a more sinister one. She shakes her head, her attention shifting as the hair on the back of her neck stands up. "Not just sketchy-suspect. Like, full-on blackness. Garden-variety dark doesn't get a 'something's wrong' assessment.

Erich suggests that they go inside first and he talk to the earth, and she shakes her head. "Do you think that's wise if it turns into a fight? We're talking about something that plays and hides in the darkness. I don't figure if one of us gets attacked, it's going to give us enough time to yell to you, Erich."

A pause. "Also, splitting up in the darkness, when I'm getting a feeling like we're being watched? That's that what white girl victim number two in a horror film does."

Erich looks a bit impatient now. "Okay, good points. But we're getting to the point where we need to quit talking and start doing.

"So, here are the options as I see them. A: we sit out here being watched while I talk to Earth and see if I can figure out what's going on in there in detail. Then we can hopefully go in and take care of shit. In the meantime, we run the risk that whatever's in there -- and I think it's a goddamn vampire, and not the sparkly kind -- is preparing to mow us down with a silver gatling gun.

"B: we just charge the fuck in as a group and kill whatever we find, and fuck finesse and planning-ahead and all that. We'll do a sweep of realmside and then check umbral to make sure we don't miss anything. We run the risk of barreling headfirst into a boobytrap, of course, but honestly that's kinda always been my MO so I'm cool with it.

"Any thoughts before I pick one?"

Charlotte inhales and she does this the way a cat does it, mouth-open, pale eyes flicking over the facade of Tivoli building; the dark windows of one particular wing. Her expression is twisted, after. Pulled to the side, her mouth a moue of distaste. The faintest of shudders rattles gently down her spine, but only her packmate is likely to sense it.

A glance at Erich, the sweep of her gaze quiet and gleaming.

"If you want to talk to the Earth, do it here. We can wait now. Maybe earth'll have some idea where to slip in or what to expect. Except it'll think like earth, see. Slow and solidly, and it might not know what is inside because inside the earth is all smothered with the stuff that makes up the building, and suffocated and it can't breath so it might be a little bit mad too.

"But out here it might know what comes and goes and where it goes and what stays and when it stays.

"So I guess I say you talk to the earth, then we go in."

Tamsin, Fianna-woman, waning-moon, looks at the darkness. Looks at it good. Or maybe it just begins to act on her -- to tickle her senses: to sharp them up, hone them, whettstone, knifeknifeknife oh and Tamsin's eyes narrow and her muscles tense-tense like they're remembering how easy it is to switch-blade out a war-monster because that blooddeadsmell that no it's in the back of her throat and she says:

"Do you guys fe - it's because we are; gotta be a leech; it's all grave-clot yuck; it's all like, scabby shadow lightlessness; it's - " - she spits on the ground.

Looks at the building. Looks at Erich. Ready to rar. "Let's just go the fu -- hmm, uh, a silver gatling gun you say?" A beat, because she is deeply suspicious of Erich's just-run-right-in plans, specifically. "Yeah okay. Talk to Earth and maybe we can get a bead on its location because it never hurts to try to get more info. Well, actually, I dunno Theurges, don't suppose while Erich's talking to earth, one of you can talk to Fire or something Sunlight-y or Garlic-y?"

The Garlic-y is a joke. Tamsin is restless, sort of bouncing in place.

"I have some fire tooth talens," says Charlotte. "I can start waking them up."

Tamsin: >:]

Another one of those beetle-browed moments. Arms folded, lips pressed flat together and all. Then a nod.

"Okay. Lemme talk to Earth then. Meanwhile, Charlotte can wake up her talens and Keisha can maybe prepare too. And Tamsin -- keep your elf eyes sharp. Or something. You know what I mean."

And on that note: Erich sits on the ground, crosslegged, and. Uh. Communes. It's his first time doing this. He isn't actually sure what he's doing.

[oh god i have 2 dice. +WP! 100yd-radius of info per succ.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (6, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Aw. Elf! Tamsin half-smiles, but all she does is - oh, fiddle with a phone, something, so they don't look too strange, all in a clump snow in the air night falling and something bad going on, should somebody else come. Maybe she hums, or sings something, unless that'd break any concentration.

Tamsin, she's ready for the signal, for ending something old and dead and a long time ago ended anyway, time goes on.

So, Erichs sits and Charlotte flicks her gaze up at Keisha and then Tamsin and then back to beetle-browed Erich, considering all options for approach. Back to the building, a frown deepening, pulling the corners of her mouth down into a quietly solemn expression. Charlotte hunkers down to her haunches and rummages through her messenger bag, sorting through the contents until she finds: her slingshot and a small leather pouch. She takes out the slingshot and tucks it into the back waistband of her jeans, then pulls out the leather pouch, opens it, and starts working to activate a small handful of... well, teeth. Human teeth. Girl-teeth, roots and all, quietly ivory in her hands.

Fire tooth talen the first!

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 3, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )

Fire tooth talen the second!

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (4, 4, 5, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

So...

Erich doesn't move for about ten minutes. Or well. He moves. Obviously: he breathes so they know he's not dead. Or petrified. He breathes slowly and deeply and regularly, almost like he's asleep, and in a way he is. His body relaxes. His shoulders slump. After a while his head falls forward, and at this point, honestly, if Charlotte doesn't kinda re-right him, he just kinda topples over and sprawls for a while.

Not too long though. After five, ten minutes, Erich's blueblueblue eyes pop open. He takes a quick inhale, like someone waking from an unexpected nap, and sits up.

"I think it's just the one vampire," he says. "A... former college kid, I think? And now it's nomming on its classmates." He frowns. "It's kinda sad actually. I wonder who turned it in the first place. Maybe we can ask it. I mean I think we still have to kill it, but... maybe if we ask it and at least tell it that it'll be avenged, in a way?

"Unless of course it wanted to be a vampire. Then, I have no sympathy. Anyway." He climbs to his feet. "Let's go kick some ass."

Fire tooth talen the third.

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )

Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

She narrows her eyes when she hears "vampire," and a sound not unlike a growl comes from the Child of Gaia. In Homid form. (Yes, the one who is all peace and love and doesn't ever kill.) Because that...well, that's something different. One or two have seen how she reacts to the undead before. And, it may be noted, she takes her backpack off, and sets her staff aside.

"Say the word."

[His name is actually Mike but he introduces himself as Jedediah, smirking when he says that you can call him 'Jed' for short.]

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

[[Init +6]]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

+6

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )

[forgot: that's Jed + 7]

+8

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )

[for Erich: +17]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

[Erich

Jed

Keisha

Charlotte

Tamsin.

Declare in reverse!]

[Uh. Go... inside building.]

[Note: this actually should have come before inits.]

While they're talking, suddenly there's a howling sound. A shriek, almost, and then the sound of footfalls racing across concrete. Thin-soled shoes, very stylish, skinny black jeans, skinny black t-shirt, big black spacers in his earlobes and sharp, yellowing teeth. He's running at them, wild-eyed,

blood already dripping out of his mouth.

[1a. BITE the monster!!! while staying between it and the theurges.

1b. Bite it again!

-1 Rage: Snap-shift to Hispo.]

[1a/b slingshot previously activated talens at the monster hopefully while he's far enough away that she won't kill her friends.]

[[Snap-Shift: Hispo.

1a: Bite

1b: Bite

R1: Bite.

R2: Bite]]

[Strike R2 for Keisha.]

[PREPARATION? WHAT PREPARATION? FUCK IT WE'LL DO IT LIVE.

-1WP Resist Pain, -1R snapshift hispo as well SINCE MY CLAWS ARE DULL AS FUCK RIGHT NOW.

1. Spur Claws -1R!

R1-3. Bitings! Unless Liz deems other actions more appropriate!]

[1: zip behind Erich! effectively: dodge

2: grab Charlotte!

3: BITE CHARLOTTE AND DRINK HER SHINY BEAUTIFUL BLOOD

4: still drinking]

[Spur Claws. DODGE THIS, MOTHERFUCKER. >:|]

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

[dodge!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5) ( fail )

[dam +6]

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

[[Dex Brawl for Bite 1, -2 dice for split.]]

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

[[Damage Str + 4 (Crinos) + 1 (Bite) + 1 (Succ)]]

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

[note to self: move those rolls down a bit, it's Jed's action(s)]

[2: grabbing charlotte! st + brawl]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Strength + brawl

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2) ( fail )

[3: delicious.

difficulty lowered due to hold.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

The vampire moves fast. Wickedly fast, rushing at them, zipping behind Erich as Erich lunges at him; Erich catches flesh, cold and clammy, in his teeth. But he doesn't hurt it enough to keep it from latching hold of the still-homid Charlotte, arm around her upper body and hand grabbing her hair, yanking her head to the side before he sinks oversized, yellowing fangs deep into her jugular.

The thing makes a noise like a groan, eyes rolling back as it starts suck, sucking deep and hungrily at that glorious, shining, silver-pure blood. He's moaning, shaking from it.

[[Dex+Brawl #2. -3 for split, WP spent.]]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

[[Damage]]

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

(Changing Charlotte's action. Snapshift to Crinos. 1. Boom.. Dropping talen.)

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

[Jed: Willpower]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

[1a. bite of oh fuck no you do NOT bite cotton candy hair girl. :< Dex + Brawl -2 for split.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Charlotte soak!

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

[damage! 5+1 bite+1hispobite+3suxx? i think?]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

[1b. bite again, no! bad! wp 'coz NYET. -3.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

[damageagain!]

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

Erich's frenzy roll

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

[diff 7 (8 for New Moon -1 for IC reasons) = 2 suxx]

[?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4) ( fail )

[Per/Alert - for Erich]

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

Per+Alert

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

Per + Alert (Charlotte)

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

Seeing that thing, that dead gray douchebaggy thing, sinking its teeth into his sister and drinking deep, Erich feels the edges of his vision go white. It's not like when he chooses it, when he pulls the blankets of his rage up over his head and snaps his own mind in two. It's more animal than that. And everyone around him should be glad, in that moment, that the moon overhead is dark. There is not enough of the vampire left to slake the enraged bloodlust of a frenzied Ahroun,

only allies.

Allies who are, like Erich, turning towards Charlotte in the grasp of that hungry, deliriously happy leech to rip it the fuck off of her. And rip and tear they do, biting and snarling, leaving giant bloodless tears in his body and clothing. Hell: Tamsin the Faerie-Lights-slinging crooner rips off his arm before opening a hole in his belly that lets his leathery but blood-engorged intestine start to slip out.

Which she then has to drop very quickly, because it is on fire.

--

You see, Erich knows better than anyone what Charlotte really is. She may seem a sparrow, but sometimes she remembers she was a velociraptor. She remembers she has fangs and claws and violence. They all see that she remembers, even as Erich's vision is clearing, because she shrugs the vampire off as her body bursts into a gleaming white crinos, blood drenching the ruff of fur around her throat, dropping a fire-tooth to the ground.

The vision then is horrifying and glorious: Charlotte, so white that even without the moonlight she is nearly translucent, blood on her throat, teeth bared, fire at her feet reaching upwards, trying to eat her flesh, barely licking the ends of her fur. The thing that dared to make her its prey is engulfed, fire consuming those slipping intestines, that stump of an arm, saturating the air with the smell of burning skin, sizzling blood. Charlotte's blood, and the blood of whatever it ate last.

The vampire is still standing, barely. His eyes are sparkling with hunger, with awe, with feverish glee that borders on frenzy. Even the fire could not keep him from trying to get back to Charlotte's blood. But, frankly: Keisha, Tamsin, and Erich can. There isn't much left of him. There is even less, after they pile on. After Charlotte leaves the fire she created and helps. After his head comes off. After he is soaked clothing, well-shredded pulp on the ground.

Or rather: there is the same amount of him. It's just more spread out.

--

When the fire is out, stamped into the cold ground, and for reasons he won't be able to explain to himself later the campus policeman gave only a cursory glance toward the Tivoli building before driving quickly onward,

that is when they hear the crying. The soft help. help me. please, someone...

Tamsin doesn't hear it. Tamsin may or may not be harvesting that left arm, complete with shitty mustache finger-tattoo, as a trophy. Maybe. Who knows what Tamsin is doing, when the rest of them feel their ears flick towards the tears coming from just inside the doors to Tivoli.

Tamsin is: gleefully ruminating on whether or not 'fire' and 'vampire' is too obvious a rhyme, while frisking about the gore.

She shifts down to Homid the second she hears the crying, thoughts of sending the twisted mockery of life to the rest it deserves gone. And she's moving with purpose and speed toward the building, snatching up her staff on the way.

Keisha Ballard: vicious when confronted with the undead, but if gentle in all other situations.

Not-Charlotte - oh some of them know her Garou-name but she does not speak it unless it is asked of her so - not-Charlotte remains gloriously Crinos. None of them want their faces associated by anyone within their viewshed with the crime scene before them. So: not-Charlotte flicks an ear at Tamsin as Erich lopes off to shadow Keisha. Some mental communication assuring him that Charlotte is fine, fine, fine. Will be fine, too.

To Tamsin, a rumble to draw her attention. Then a flicker: which sayshear that? and come on - while she herself gives the air another sniff.

STOP.

They are somewhat bloody. Just from the digestive tract of the vampire, still full from feeding, but it is less gore than they usually get covered in when battling the Wyrm. Keisha is up and moving as soon as she hears the crying, leaving the others behind for a moment while Charlotte reassures Erich and tells Tamsin that something is up, even if that's a flick of ears, a signal of body language.

Erich makes some low sounds, growls and whuffs, effectively telling Keisha to hold up: that he totally doesn't really think it is, but it could be a trap so they should go together. Like what he said before about how splitting up equals shitstorm equals ugh.

At which point he nods Tamsin on ahead: Tamsin the arm-ripper-offer, to go alongside Keisha to the doors, Erich and Charlotte close behind them. Partly because, when all is said and done, he's still going to lean over and lick at the already-healed spot on Charlotte's neck where the bad thing bit her, leaning into her side protectively in hispo.

The frisking ceases, Tamsin-monster's bright-bright eyes flicking soulful-ly thought-ful-ly toward everywhere everywhere because she doesn't know until after Charlotte there is Erich or no maybe there is Keisha's purposeful stride because she is a Child of Gaia and somebody is crying for surcease and and and the point is my friends

that the frisking ceases

and her ears prick upupupupup like I was always alert wary hearing things and and then though she prowls forward

to go alongside Keisha, staff-warrioress,

and see what there is to see

(and maybe scare what there is to scare)

wary wary

Charlotte leans into Erich as he comes alongside her, makes some noise in the back of her throat; a wuff, or a low-growl, or something that has weight and presence and purpose because Charlotte has weight and presence and purpose beyond her rank and beyond her years and beyond most anything because she is a goddamned silver fang, and likely mad as a hatter.

Alert; wary. Tail low and sweeping, shadowing Tamsin and Keisha to the door.

She's singed and hacking a little bit from the fire that scorched her and Charlotte along with the leech, but she is paying it absolutely no mind. If not for Erich, she would have charged headlong into that building by herself...and she gives a sound of frustration when she's told to hold up. There's someone in there in need, and as much as Keisha acts like she's wise and reasonable most of the time--and really, she is reasonable (wise, we'll leave up to debate)--she's still a nineteen (no, twenty this week) year-old girl who acts more like a human than a Garou. And twenty year-old humans are the impulsive types.

So she frowns, and she makes her sound, but she waits for Tamsin. "It might be a human in trouble, guys." She looks at the others as she rests her hand on the door handle. "Maybe Homid would be best. We can always shift back otherwise"

That's as far as she'll push it--the suggestion--and she'll give them enough time if they so desire before moving to open the door and head inside.

Keisha is frustrated, but Keisha stops, and the others catch up. No one has indicated that they aren't going to check it out. Her hand is on the door handle, though, and Erich tells her again to just wait a second while he turns to Charlotte, asking her if she can sense if something on the other side is Wyrm-tainted.

None of them, just yet, smell another vampire.

Erich asks and Charlotte stops and Charlotte studies the door and Charlotte settles herself and pulls on sometime deep inside of herself and just - inhales. Quiet.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

[nope!]

The communications are gruff and quiet. Charlotte and Erich can manage this without speaking, so even Melantha hears the echo of it over their totemic connection. Now, however, here and now the beast wuffs her impression aloud.

No wyrm.

Swinging back around, checking their sight lines to assure herself that everyone who might observe them has been chased away by the Delirium.

Tamsin, restless, restless, still simmering from the recent joy of killing something that is blasphemy to Gaia, does pause; waits for No wyrm, also looks around, edgily, and then - unless Erich indicates otherwise (see how deliberately she keeps his signals in mind? Looks to him? Welcome to being a Fostern) - if no one seems to be around (although with Tamsin, who's to say she'd notice?) - she shifts to homid, too. Girl-Tamsin, who whispers, "Does it still look fucked up across the Gauntlet?"

Charlotte says there's no Wyrm, and Keisha relaxes a bit and moves to go inside, when Tamsin asks if it still looks, as she herself had previously said, wrong across the Gauntlet. And the Gaian's urge to move in, to help, makes her tense again. She's not used to letting go like she just did against the undead thing. It's a very different kind of fighting than you usually see from her. But there was a time that she was once that wild and unrestrained. Pushed down for so long, having let it rise to the surface means that it's difficult to push back down.

"I don't know, but it could take time to look across, and someone could be bleeding to death from a leech bit in there for all we know. If there's no Wyrm, I'm going in."

Which is what she's moving to do now, unless she's stopped. The sanctity of whoever's life is in there is paramount to her right now.

Erich remains in hispo, perhaps a bit stubbornly; it is dark. The door will shield him from view, a bit. And if anything jumps out or runs out at them if anything tries to BITE CHARLOTTE or attack Keisha or Tamsin he's half a foot away and can tear it to tiny tiny pieces and this is how he deals with the fact that really, if you get down to it, he's not okay at all with allowing Keisha and Tamsin to take point at all, it seems like a really bad idea even if Charlotte says there's no Wyrm.

But here you have it: there's no Wyrm. Someone is crying in there, gasping, begging quietly for help, asking is someone there? and sobbing, begging please, please,

and the last person or thing she wants to see right now is Erich, no matter what form he's in. Keisha isn't even reiterating, again, what she thinks they need to do before he's giving a nod at the door. After all: no one, at any point, has been about stopping Keisha. Just getting her to wait. To not rush in blindly, or on her own, no matter what her heart is telling her. She's wiser than that.

--

The door opens outward, unlocked right now. It's dark inside, but for some emergency lights and an EXIT sign they can see on the other side of the building that matches the EXIT sign above the door they're opening. It's hard to see the woman at first, young woman, student-aged, because she is slumped over on her side, panting softly, her begging getting weaker, and though her hand is clutched over the wound on her neck, there is still a pool of blood under her, blood soaking her clothing.

She's not crying anymore. She's passing out.

--

When she comes to, it's because someone has healed her, and because her body is starting to do the rest. That someone isn't there anymore. She's woozy as hell. Vague memories of someone jumping her from behind, stabbing her with something, like maybe a pen. Hearing some 'screaming' and something like growling or something outside, then normal human voices but she didn't see who it was. It won't make a lot of sense to them, with the charred ground outside that is already being dusted with snow. A lot of what she says will be chalked up to blood loss, delirious hallucinations, and she'll buy that, too. She'll talk, months and years from now, about how she lost so much blood she though she heard and saw dogs or something in Tivoli while she was trying to regain consciousness.

Her name is Holly. She'll have a scar. She'll have PTSD and won't walk anywhere alone, even in daylight, for a long time. She will also write about the experience, the random attack the likes of which they say don't happen that often and how much time she spent torturing herself trying to understand the 'why' of it all, and that essay is going to help her get into grad school for social work and repeat that lesson for many, many other people: stop asking yourself why you. Stop trying to figure out what you did or what you could have done.

The truth is, Holly won't even know that she was on the verge of death when the werewolves found her. She will never know how much blood she really lost, because most of it was torn up and burnt up with the vampire. She will not know that she was saved.

--

Just one vampire lurking around Auraria, they'll tell the new Warder of Cold Crescent. There was an unconscious victim, they healed her and let security find her. He'll nod, and for a while, he'll increase patrols to the area to make sure there's not a nest or a sire vampire nearby.

It seems like it should be a bigger deal. Holly should know the magnitude of what happened to her,

but she can't. She would go mad.

The Garou should be able to sit back and relish the magnitude of what they did, measure it against the endless-seeming war and all the bigger battles against greater foes with more extreme outcomes, feel the true weight of a single life's course being altered so dramatically, rest on that for the rest of their lives because how many people can say they saved someone's life,

but they can't.

They move on to the next area on their patrol. It's not that they have to do it all again tomorrow.

It's that they aren't even done tonight.

It was sometime after dusk when Erich arrived at Cold Crescent with Charlotte and Melantha in tow. Not long after, and after a lot of hugs, he parted ways with them -- leaving them down on the dormitory level while he climbed on up to 43.

It's been hours since then. All night, in fact. It's seven am now, and the sun is up, and Melantha is asleep in one of the bunk beds and Charlotte is maybe-just-waking, maybe crunching a bowl of cereal or something in the common area when

Erich

bursts into the room, all pale and scratched up and knocked about and mud-faced, wide-eyed, yelling not about the results of his challenge or even what his challenge was but, instead:

"I MET GAIA TONIGHT."

There is something in Charlotte that does not love the cityscape. The wrapping certainty of the Weaver's webs, the heaviness of the concrete, the flat certainty of glass, which shines all smug, both reflective and transparent, all at once.

Well, maybe she likes glass. How it is two-things-at-once, but not how impermeable it is. How fused.

Charlotte's hours though are not human hours and the Sept has a life that is hard to see or know. When Erich finds Charlotte first thing that morning she is indeed crunching a bowl of cereal (a combination of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Pebbles, and Reese's Peanut Butter Buffs) soaked in chocolate milk and also strawberry milk (which is a thing: FYI) but she is not just waking. She spent the better part of the past hour in the umbra, studying the Veteran on his plinth in the plaza.

Just studying.

So Erich bursts in yelling about meeting Gaia Charlotte is first EXCITED to see him: scratched up yeah and mud-faced yeah but whole, whole and alive, and is second eager for news he's not telling her yet, studying him with her usual strange combination of startlement and alertness as if she might see the sigils of his rank sunk into his skin, and maybe she can, and is third: well,

a little bit doubtful, and a little bit reluctant to be so doubtful but here is a small secret, Erich. Sometimes spirits are secretive. Some of them are even liars. Some of them are spirits of liars and made to liar and wrap you up in -

Her mouth skews sidelong as she considers him, Charlotte, over her bowl of cereal. She was aware enough of his presence in the building that she has not upset her meal.

So she just sets it aside and leaves the matter of meeting Gaia tonight for later and asks him pale eyes sharp, thin body stark with a sublimated tension,

"Did you pass?"

She will ask him details about actually meeting Gaia later.

"Yeah! I did! BUT CHARLOTTE. I MET GAIA."

Because obviously: this is way more important. And it is. It actually, really is.

"Or like. Well. A piece of her. An... aspect? An avatar of an aspect. I met the ... angry pregnant part of Gaia. Oh man that makes it sound like some sort of sitcom, but no, it was amazing. And awesome. And like. Awe-some, literally, you know? It was just, wow."

So it is well and good that Charlotte has set aside her messy concoction of sugar-laden cereals and sugar-laden milks because Erich says Yeah! I did! and Charlotte jumps down from the counter (she was sitting on the counter) and takes the remaining 2.4 feet across the kitchenette and jumps up and throws her arms around Erich and hugs him tight.

Gaia, once more, will have to wait her turn.

STOPPIT.

Well he's still talking about Gaia when Charlotte fairly flies across the room and throws her arms around him. Impact into Erich is sort of like impact into a side of beef, or maybe a brick wall: a lot of oof and not much budge. Still, he doesn't hesitate, not even for a beat, to throw his arms around her in return and squeeeeze.

Strange; he can't actually remember the last time Charlotte hugged him. Like, without Melantha hugging both of them. Or him hugging her first. She's not as physical as her two packmates, Charlotte isn't.

And: she's growing taller too. Or is that his imagination? He's pretty sure she's taller: bird-delicate and thin-limbed, sort of heron-graceful in this way that's almost almost almost gawky. But not quite because, well: she is Of Falcon.

"I know!" he says, like she'd said something to express her joy. "I'm surprised and happy and stuff too! But: GAIA, CHARLOTTE."

Charlotte said nothing to express her joy, so Erich's I know! would surprise her if she were thinking with anything but her animal heart. Her feral, primal, animal heart. There is a bright, fierce joy, a sharply settled pride for Erich's accomplishment that is still shining in her eyes when she pulls back, lifting her delicate jaw, watching him with her pale, wideset eyes that make her seem so very young to ordinary humans.

A little bit awkward in the aftermath of that hug; perhaps even a little bit shy. See the way she looks more at his profile than his eyes, and looks at him more from her own profile, not precisely sidelong but close to it.

"An actual aspect of Gaia?" Charlotte is asking him then; because he has gone back to it and because she has a moment to breathe and she asks him rather gently but with some native suspicion, yes, but that seems to incredible and honestly Erich is an Ahroun.

Uh, so he might be easily fooled?

- but beneath her reluctance is a native instinct to indulge Erich's rather uncomplicated joy; to bask in the reflection of his enthusiasm, as in the framing heat of a fire, so - " - what did she say?"

"Um," and now, suddenly and for the first time, Erich is uncertain too, "I... I think so? I didn't call her, Silhouette -- she's the Fostern that I challenged -- asked a Silent Strider Theurge to call her. Or well, I asked to call her. And the Theurge, I think his name was Hungry Road or something?, he was like WELL THERE ARE A LOT OF ASPECTS OF GAIA and I was like, well, call the one who made me what I am, who needs me most?

"And so he called her, and she showed up looking like... well, actually she just looked like a pregnant girl, except then she looked at me and her eyes were like ... the universe. Anyway -- my challenge, that part of it, was to ask for one spirit and ask it one question.

"So I asked for Gaia and I asked her ... how I could help her. Like, what I could do to help her best, you know? And she told me..."

Erich's wild glee has banked some. It has become a quieter thing, thoughtful, poignant. His eyes sting at the very memory of it:

"She told me to be good. Like the way any mom would, I guess? But I think she also meant good like... righteous, pure, true. And she told me to fight. And to die. I guess she just told me to keep doing what I'm doing. Which is kinda nice. 'Cause that means I'm doing something right."

Charlotte tells every story she tells with the disjointed circularity one expects from someone born beneath her moon; Erich, when he takes a deep breath and steps back and starts from something like the beginning is rather her superior when it comes to this. He gets out the how and when and why and Charlotte's sidling attention - the piece that is spare and not surreptitious but careful somehow - is steadied as Erich's brief story unfolds.

She turns her head, the fine strands of her pink hair sliding against her cheek, until she's facing him fully. Somehow Charlotte finds Erich's quieter pleasure all the more compelling.

And she watches him, quiet now, listens to him, quiet now, no longer questioning the identity of the spirit whom he met; and certaintly not its instructions to him, even if a certain piece of them draws a faint shadow across her eyes.

"That was a good question to ask her," Charlotte tells him, with a supple, narrowing little shrug. "I don't think I would've thought to ask her that."

"Really?" That actually surprises Erich a bit; he can't imagine asking anything but that. But then, he was born under the full. "What would you have asked?

"I dunno," Charlotte returns, with a one-shouldered shrug that looks like the incipient phase of some adolescent rebellion, bony and stark beneath her t-shirt. Left hand finding its way to her hip pocket, left elbow out all akimbo. "What went wrong?"

A brief pause, a sharp, filtering exhale. "I mean, you know. To start with."

"Oh." Erich looks briefly crestfallen. "I didn't even think of that. That's a really good question too. I sort of wanted to ask Her stuff like... why am I a Shadow Lord and why was I born to Fenrir and stuff? But that just kinda seemed like selfish snitty baby questions to ask and I was only allowed to ask one.

"Plus, seriously, that's like almost insulting I think. It's like asking your mom why she raised you the way she did."

He bounces back to the previous subject: "What do you think went wrong?"

Of the three of them, Melantha has the most structured schedule, even though she's not the most structured of persons. She has to get up early sometimes to work, and since she traded shifts with someone so she could have tonight off, she got up early. She opened the restaurant and worked a full shift and then they all drove down to Denver and got some food and then Erich went off and it's been hours and she ended up falling asleep on one of the dorm beds, the hood of her hoodie up and curled up under one of the not-exactly-cozy blankets they pulled from storage.

And now Erich is back and they're talking and no one has thought to wake her up, which is why when their voices start to interfere with her dreams and she realizes Erich is back, her first groggy words are not to say his name in a cute and sleepy way but to go:

"--ythefu didn't you wameup?"

Charlotte is watching Erich and the light is strange and soft and shadowed and it makes her pale blue eyes look eerily silver and those eerily silver eyes remain fixed and close and intimate on his face; unblinking. She absorbs his fallen crest and wants to say something about freedom and will but she does not have the words or precisely the concept except that she knows, somewhere down in the strange hollows of her body, that they are all strangely, terribly free.

Maybe that's what went wrong.

--

Her nostrils flare; she abjures, "I dunno," quietly, with another sharp and reluctant little shrug. "That's why I'd ask."

This is true.

--

Then Charlotte peels away from Erich but catches his hand and sort of walks/leads her fostern packmate back to her other packmate, curled up and half-sleeping, just-waking from half-broken dreams.

"We were coming to do that next."

This is also true.

"And we kinda DID wake you up," Erich points out. He's still holding Charlotte's hand, and this is inexpressibly but entirely different from how he sometimes holds Melantha's hands. This: you think of Hansel and Gretel, children in a forest, orphaned, abandoned, growing up and learning to kill.

He flops down on Melantha's bunk, then. He sort of just... invites himself in, crowding her over and stretching out and letting out this big long sigh. "Ohhhh it's nice to get off my feet. I was just telling Charlotte I passed. And I got to talk to Gaia. And I asked her how to help her and she was kinda like, keep doing what you're doing.

"And then we were talking about what Charlotte would ask. And she'd ask how things went wrong. And I was asking what she thought went wrong, but she was like I dunno, that's why I'd ask. And now I'm like oh durr.

"What would you ask Gaia? If you could ask anything."

She has so much hair. It's thick and tumbling out of her hoodie's hood, and her eyes are sleepy and her eyelids heavy and she thumps around on the narrow dorm bed until she gets over beside Erich, glomping onto his side, her chest on his shoulder, her arms around his neck, her face against his not-very-long hair. She leans into him heavily, because she's tired, and she doesn't get in the way of any hand-holding or anything. He doesn't get the chance to lay out next to her because of this, which is a shame, but he does get to sit, at least.

She sniffs.

"You passed?" she says, happily, lifting her head up and smiling at him. Her eyes close and open; her smile fades naturally. "You talked to Gaia?"

He tells her more. He asks her what she'd ask, and Melantha is still and quiet a moment, then shakes her head. "I don't know. I guess I'll find out if I ever get to talk to her."

Learning to kill.

--

Erich stretches out over Melantha and they glomp together and in the interim Charlotte - whose fingertips were lightly interlaced with Erich's - has let go of his hand and found herself a few spare inches of space at the foot of the bed. She sits all cross-legged and knock-kneed and smiling and and sort of nods confirmation doubtlessly along with Erich when Melantha says you passed and Charlotte says,

"I told him he would."

She also told him it would be okay if he didn't.

Didn't she?

"You didn't tell me about the rest of it, Erich. What else did you hafta do? Who'd you challenge, anyway?"

Well -- Erich didn't really stretch out. He's sort of sitting on the side of the bed, and Melantha is sort of sleepy-glomped onto him, and Charlotte is tucked small-neat on his other side and it would not be an exaggeration, not at all, to say that right now Erich is an 11 on the 1-10 scale of happy.

"I did," he says, and, "I did." And, "You did!" And, "I didn't."

Tell her about the rest of it, anyway. So he does: tells her that he challenged a really cool Ahroun Shadow Lord called Silhouette-of-Clouds, and how first they went to go kick some ass and he totally thought he failed 'cause there were seven of them and he couldn't take them all and then Silhouette had to help him. But all she said was hey maybe next time PLAN AHEAD A LITTLE and then they were off to the next thing,

which was telling a story of their people. So he Told A Story Of His People, and it was a sad story but one that always stuck with him, because it was about doing what was right because it was right, and not because it was glorious or fun or cool or anything like that.

Then there was a discussion about what was fair vs. what was right, and how sometimes what was right was not fair at all. And then -- he's so proud when he says this -- he learned how to make Bloody Bandages. Mid-challenge!

"And then I talked to Gaia," he finishes. "Or well. I was told to pick a spirit, any spirit, to ask one question of. And... I picked Gaia? And the Theurge that was helping me was like, okay, you gotta be more specific. So I was like I wanna talk to the Gaia that needs my help. And then I got like, angry-preggo-desperate-Gaia-Mom. And that's when I asked her how I can help. And. Yeah.

"Then I passed," he finishes. "I don't have a new name yet. I was gonna maybe ask Reverence-rhya to name me. Or maybe you two can think of something?"

Melantha stays glomped. Melantha is tired. Melantha likes hugging Erich, and she knows he's strong enough for her to just lean on for a good long while, so she does so unapologetically, yawning a couple of times... just as unapologetically.

He tells them about the fight, and the story, and by then Melantha has already figured this one out. She guesses at the number of tests silently, and what they all were about. She does speak up to ask him what a bloody bandage is.

She smiles that the Theurge had to tell Erich to be more specific about which Gaia. That he wanted the one who needs him. That it turned out to be 'angry-preggo-desperate-Gaia-Mom'.

"You should be Storm's Teeth, Duckface the Magnificent," she tells him, still slurring a bit, snuggling under his arm and turning her back to his side and drowsing against his pectoral, his arm crossing over her chest. "That should be your name."

She's teasing him. Of course she is. Her hand is up, though, covering his where it wraps around her. "I'm real happy for you, Erich. I knew you'd pass," she says, and

yawns again.

"That's not a very good name," Charlotte is a bit reluctant to correct or contradict Melantha and that reluctance is written into the frame of her body and the twist of her brow and the fine and narrow little frown stitched between her brows and there's an underlying suspicion written into her awkward-but-graceful or something close-to-it teenager's frame that Melantha is teasing but she doesn't actually know that -

"Erich doesn't look like a duck. Ducks have beaks."

"Well, bills. I mean. They are basically beaks."

Erich bursts into laughter, which redoubles as Charlotte points out his lack of a beak. Or a bill.

"Yeah, I am like, NOT a duck. And I don't duckface either. I don't have a bill or a beak and I don't do that thing with my lips." He duckfaces. But just to demonstrate.

"C'mere," he adds -- holding an arm out to Charlotte. Hugging her, too, glomping all three of them together. "I should be Storm's Teeth, Who Has A Lot Of Awesome Friends," he says. It's a little quieter. Heartfelt and poignant under a thin little layer of humor. "Storm's Teeth, Who's Totally Lucky To Have A Lot Of Awesome Friends And Also A Tinyhouse Where They All Live Together."

Melantha laughs when Charlotte points out that Duckface the Magnificent isn't a good name. She twists around, grinning at her Best Friend Forever. "No," she agrees. "It's an awful name. But 'duckface' is like... all those selfies and stuff on the internet, where people hold their phones out like this,"

she sticks her arm way up,

"and they make this pouty-sexy face but their lips are all pursed waaay out, like this,"

and she does so, giving her quite the duck-bill,

"and a while ago Erich and I were making fun of each other and making duckfaces like that. See, now he's doing it." Which he is. So for a second there, both he and Melantha are looking at Charlotte, duckfacing, which is ridiculous.

Melantha smiles gently as she's hugged all the closer. "Storm's Teeth, Earth's... something. It should be about Earth, whatever your name is."

Charlotte takes rather alot of selfies or at least strange pictures of passing fancies but may not have ever heard the term selfie until now and looks a bit like an old lady whose granddaughter is teaching her to text - that faint note of alarum between her pale brows - as Melantha starts to explain and then they are both making faces at her and that faint note of alarum increases to something like panick and maybe Charlotte is afraid that their faces are going to freeze like that and then Erich is laughing and no longer duckfacing and hugging her and there is a moment's sharp and honest resistance to the hug all stiff and lancing through her and then the moment is past though perhaps not Past and there is glomping and whatnot and Melantha and Charlotte curls up around her kinswoman and tells Erich that he should be named,

"Storm's Teeth, Mother's Heart."

Or something, what the heck does she know. She's not a Galliard.

It had not occurred to him until Melantha said it -- though now in retrospect it seems obvious -- that his new name should reflect that last, and most remarkable part of his challenge. Earth's, she says,

though what she really means is Gaia's.

Which Charlotte understands, too, though she doesn't use the word either. Mother's, she says. Mother's Heart, which Erich suspects is something Melantha was looking for too. That symmetry; that mirroring. Storm's Teeth. Earth's ... something. Gaia's .... something. Mother's Heart.

"I really like that," he says, looking sort of amazed, the way he does when Melantha or Charlotte say something amazing. Which is pretty often. Then, looking vaguely worried: "It's not girly though, is it?"

Earth. Mother. Gaia. When faced with one spirit to call on, one spirit to question, he chose her. When given leave to ask one thing, he only wanted to know what he could do for her. It says more about him than the name given to him in passing, a name mentioning the tribe of his spirit and the nature of his rage, but not who he is. What really matters to him. What he fights for.

Melantha stirs at the mention of Mother's Heart, but she doesn't say anything. She remains a bit twisted around, looking between them, thoughtful.

He asks if it's girly and she sits up straight, out of his arm, her brow furrowing like a sudden summer storm flashing from the horizon across the entire sky. "I don't know," she says, her voice too hard to be called 'terse' or even 'sharp', "when you saw Gaia in front of you, literally pregnant with rage itself, were you thinking about how girly she is?"

She seethes a moment, her nostrils flaring on the exhale. "I'd call you Mother's Rage. Or Earth's Heart. If those aren't too girly."

There are a solid half-dozen strange things happening all at once. That moment of taut resistance to such close contact from Charlotte, which seems to dissolve like salt into the ocean a few heartbeats later, not even strong enough or strange enough for Charlotte to be wholly concious of it because then there is Melantha and Erich looking amazed, by which we mean shining and Charlotte remembers when he was a stranger and a strange wolf and she was climbing a fountain and daring the police to come.

Charlotte can see the movement in Melantha's mind, thinking and then Erich asks if the name is girly and Melantha is seething and that reflected fire of her rage itself makes Charlotte feel strangely hot and her cheeks and suddenly bright and she doesn't know what to do and she sits up a little bit on the bed and cants her head, all animal, and the names -

"Storm's Teeth, Mother's Rage." Charlotte murmurs. Reiterates, glancing at Melantha's profile and then past her, at Erich. Iterates, really, like a mantra, like a prayer, like a goddamned name. "Storm's Teeth, Earth's Heart."

A deep breath, drawn in and exhaled out.

"I like them both, but they taste different. They'll feel different when you put them on. I guess you need to decide - who do you wanna be?"

Erich's shoulders hunch up a little as Melantha flashes lightning and fire at him. In lieu of a verbal reply, he sort of leans over and bumps the top of his head against her arm; an appeasing sort of gesture. No mad, it says. No be mad, friend.

Then he rocks back to center, crossing his legs atop the bed. And he's quiet a while, thinking, mulling over one name and then the other and back again until --

-- until, cautiously, he says, "I like the names. But... y'know, I don't really... feel like either. I don't really want to just be Rage. Even the Gaia's Rage. And I don't think I deserve to be called Gaia's Heart.

"I guess if someone who didn't know me heard my name, I'd want them to know ... I'd want them to know that I won my challenge because I wanted to always do what was right. Even if it wasn't easy or fair. And I wanted to always try very hard and do the best I can, bravely and for the sake of what was good and right and pure.

"Is there a name that could get that across? Or some of it? Even if it wasn't like... in the Spirit's Noun format."

When Charlotte tenses up and doesn't want to be hugged, Melantha glances at her, wondering, but the flinch doesn't last long enough for her to see any deeper. A few seconds later Charlotte is talking about Erich's names, and Melantha is frowning, and Erich is bumping his brow against her arm. Melantha's frown deepens, her arm pulling back away from that headbutt.

Again her eyes go to Charlotte, brows tight, but they don't linger. She sits back from where she was previously glomped half on top of Erich, drawing her knees up, putting her arms on top of them. He talks, and truth be told she hears about half of it, and she just shrugs at the end.

"I don't know. Those were my only ideas."

[let's see what he gets this time]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (4, 4) ( fail )

[why did i only roll two?]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (5, 5) ( fail )

[WELL IT WAS 2 SUCC ON EMPATHY.]

"I don't - " Charlotte's eyes dart like minnows from Melantha to Erich and back again. She is aware of the currents between them, but does not dive beneath the surface of those moving waters. There is something careful and almost deliberate about this choice, which is a choice even though Our Charlotte is not wholly conscious that she is making a choice. Not to look. Not to delve. Not even to dwell.

See, light. Melantha's frown deepens and her dark brows go tight over her liquid eyes and Charlotte inhales and remembers and glances at Erich and thinks and is quiet and is holding herself lightly and carefully above the moving waters.

"I don't think a name will ever tell someone all about who you are. It's also just a name; who you are is right here. Maybe you should tell the story to Tamsin, though. She's a Galliard and she knows how to put words together. I bet she'd be able to find a name that would fit so neatly over your skin you wouldn't know you'd ever been called anything else."

Charlotte straightens, then. Sort of straightens, shifts to a knee and leans over toward Melantha who has pulled back and is frowning and has settled her arms on her knees and Charlotte braces her weight on a hand planted on the cot and sort of nuzzles Melantha, nose against the kinswoman's temple. Inhales.

Melantha smells like sleep and also like fresh turned earth. Melantha smells like seeds and furrows and pith and arils and ripening fruit.

Charlotte likes the way Melantha smells.It settles her.

It makes her wise, she thinks.

"I think you guys should talk. I'm gonna go get us dinner."

And Charlotte straightens and pulls herself upright and slides from the bed and she smiles like a wolf going hunting for her pack even if she is doing no more than stalking either the dorm fridges or at best the nightscape of the city of Denver in search of delicious and 24-hour meat-based takeout. It is still a kind of hunt.

"Charlotte," Erich straightens too, reaching after Charlotte and snagging her by a belt-loop, "waiiiit. What the hell. Melantha and I probably do have to talk, but ... okay, why are you leaving? It's not like it's a talk you can't listen to or something."

If there are currents between Melantha and Erich, it is in part because Melantha is herself (at times) a maelstrom. They do not ever question Volcano's acceptance of Melantha when she is bound to it through them; anyone who has ever met her would not. She calls things out. She is constantly, constantly thinking, thinking complex and difficult thoughts, thinking about herself thinking those things, an inner storm of cognition and emotion that see no reason to separate. At times, she erupts. Sometimes it is rain and lightning, sometimes molten, fiery earth.

"Charlotte's right," Melantha starts to say, of Charlotte pointing out that a mere name -- two or three or four words -- can never really tell anyone everything, even if it's a perfect fit of a name. She doesn't know who the hell Tamsin is though, not really, and just as potently as she feels anything else there is a stab of resentment because this is a pack thing and this Tamsin person isn't pack what right does she have to give Erich a name,

even if Erich doesn't quite like the names that Charlotte and Melantha have mentioned, never mind that.

Charlotte nuzzles her, and Melantha frowns a little, but doesn't flinch away. She never flinches away from Charlotte. But of course she doesn't. Charlotte is like crystal, fine and singing and clear and pure. Melantha is earth. And Erich is like stone, like thunder, and these things cannot be hurt, cannot be cracked the way that crystal can.

She is getting ready to go, and Melantha can tell, so Melantha frowns, and when Charlotte up and says they should talk and she'll go get dinner:

Erich snags her belt loop. Melantha holds her hand. Her frown is a deep thing, like it's carved into her face. It's thoughtful and intense and if Melantha had a deed name, maybe that's all it would be: Thoughtful and Intense, blah blah rank blah blah auspice blah blah of the Black Furies blah blah.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," she says, blunt as anything. "I don't think this is an Erich-and-Melantha thing. The three of us are talking. And every time I pick a fight with Erich or something you don't need to run off."

Charlotte goes still when Erich reaches for her belt loop and she's not really gettinganywhere because Melantha is holding on to her hand so she hasn't really gotten far. Just off the bed, snagged in two locations, right? Pinned to the hear and now.

She is quite remarkably still at first, Charlotte, and a stranger who does not see the animal in her might read this stillness as a prey-thing; a rabbit shivering against the snow; a mouse remembering the shadow of a hawk soaring over the meadow. Except there are no strangers here, just Erich and Melantha and they are her pack, and as breakable and crystalline as Charlotte is, she is also a wolf, a wolf-girl, a girl-and-wolf, who collects fingerbones and brainpans and unconventional, nobby, gnarled teeth of fallen foes with which to make a necklace, a circlet, a halo.

There is violence vivid beneath her skin and her stillness is as much the alert alarum of a pack-creature brought to the Alpha's attention prematurely; wary and sharp and still.

Charlotte glances at Erich's face and pulls herself up quiet and short, but settled enough that he can feel confident she's not about to bolt. Not immediately about to bolt, at any rate.

"I don't - " Charlotte frowns; she lets go of Melantha's hand and brings her arms in close and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans and pulls her shoulders in tight, this slouching incurve defining her shoulders-and-neck that makes her look entirely adolescent. "I don't like it when you fight. Sometimes it makes my head hurt and I don't know what to say. And you - "

Her brows knit, "I don't want you to fight. I don't like it when you feel bad, either." Her breathing's a bit sharper, faster. "Maybe you can talk better when I'm not here."

Erich slips his finger out of Charlotte's belt-loop when it becomes apparent she won't be bolting. He sort of settles back on the bed, propping his shoulders against the wall. What Charlotte says makes him frown, makes him feel quite bad, actually. He wants to get up and headbutt her now, all gently and no-be-mad-ly.

He doesn't, though. At least -- not right now. He sort of frowns for a little longer and then glances sideways at Melantha. Back at Charlotte.

"It's not a bad thing when Melantha and I fight," he says. "We just do it 'cause she's got opinions and I've got a big mouth. It doesn't mean we don't love each other anymore or anything. Sometimes we just have to fight and maybe even feel bad before we figure anything out."

Another glance at Melantha. "Right?"

Grabbed by the hip and by the hand, Charlotte really has no choice but to remain.

No, that's a lie: she's a beast, a monster, and with fang and claw she could cast at least one of them off completely in an instant. She could make the Ahroun think twice; she is not as frail as she seems. But with Erich and Melantha she is not just a Silver Fang, nor even just a werewolf. She is their Charlotte, dear and precious and beloved in very different ways by two very different (and somehow intrinsically the same) people.

Melantha is the first to let go. She senses that: she knows the difference between a shivering animal of prey caught in terror and a predator about to open maw and tear with claw. She withdraws her hand from Charlotte's, apologetic because --

especially because Charlotte is a woman, and girl-seeming, and fragile-seeming,

-- to try and keep her when she wanted to move was grotesquely not-okay. She feels a pang of it, aching and stabbing at her, and it's guilt as much as it is sadness.

"It's not a bad thing," she says, echoing Erich, her brows drawn together in that ache, that pain. "It's like... weirdly important to both of us that we stand up to each other the way we do, Charlotte." She glances at Erich; she's not wrong, is she? She doesn't think she's wrong. He asks her Right? and she gives a soft nod. Her eyes go back to Charlotte; of all the differences in their appearances, they all share these pale, bright blue eyes.

"I don't want you to be sad or your head hurt when we fight, but... I think both of us would be lying to you and each other if we didn't argue sometimes. And I think one of the reasons we argue even if you're there isn't because we don't think about you there, but because... we care what you might say, too."

She holds out her hand, the one that grabbed, but now it's an offering. "Charlotte, I want you to stay. Even if we fight and feel bad and it makes your head hurt. And I really don't think Erich or I, of all people, are going to hesitate to tell you that we need to talk by ourselves if that's really the case. But please don't go. We're only butting heads because we both care."

They both let go and Charlotte has her hands back and they are in her pockets now. Arms cut forward against the acute incurve of her spine that makes her look rather spare and strange and young as they all are young; awkward except beneath that angular absurdity of a body there is a wolf's rather primal grace just written into her skin. Charlotte has Things in her pockets; more than lint, less than bones, and her hands cup the bits and pieces left behind from her last gathering expedition. The remnants and tailings that got stuck with the lint and seams in the frame of the pockets of her jeans.

She listens to both of them. A framing glance at Erich; and then steady on Melantha as the kinswoman walks her throughl echoes Erich; frames and references the things he said; confirms them with a quiet and steady exchange does not feel fractured or broken, but whole.

There's that hand, in offering.

Charlotte cannot help it when her head hurts. She cannot make it stop and sometimes when she tries it just gets noisier and noisier until everything - absolutely everything - else is drowned by a thundering surf of white noise.

And Charlotte does not really want to stay; that is between her teeth, her molars, the reluctance over which she is chewing, but there's a sharp line drawn from Melantha to Erich and Erich to Melantha with her pale gaze and there is Melantha's hand, open, and Charlotte cannot resist Melantha's open hand so she reaches out and takes it.

She does not say anything right now, Charlotte, because words are the strangest, hardest things sometimes, but the trust implicit in her decision - despite the tension in her frame - is evident on the surface and written into every pore.

Erich, whose instinctive understandings of such things is not so sharp as Melantha's -- and perhaps, in truth, not so sharp as a kinfolk's would be, nor a woman's must be in this day and age and society -- does not quite register that it is not-okay to hold on to Charlotte when she wants to go. It is only in retrospect, later, as he reads the tension in Charlotte's spare, awkward-elegant frame, that he feels regret for that as well.

He waits, though. Waits until Charlotte relents. Waits until she -- working against her own instinct, and her own desire to go go go flee be away -- takes Melantha's hand.

Then he scoots forward. And over. And does, in fact, head-bump Charlotte as well before sitting next to her, thighs and hips and elbows and arms all-aligned. There is something in that thoughtless comfortable nearness that recalls that long trip they took across the country,

just the two of them, sleeping curled-up in wolfskin in the back of his Mustang until the Mustang became a bumblebee-yellow truck and a tinyhouse, chasing a phantom of the girl they both love very deeply and -- this is important -- as pack, as dear, dear friend, first and foremost.

"I'm sorry I made you feel bad," he says quietly, rocking to the side so his shoulder bumps Charlotte's. "I'm not sorry for arguing with Melantha all the time 'cause sometimes we gotta argue just to like. Keep the pipelines open between us. Or something. But I am sorry when that arguing makes you feel bad."

He reaches an arm behind Charlotte, then, and -- mature, upstanding, thoughtful young man that he is -- pokes Melantha. "Hey," he says. "I'm sorry for saying the names you guys were thinking up might be girly. I didn't really mean that. Or think it's bad to be girly."

Her hand smooths under Charlotte's, and she draws her back down, closer, scooting back and wrapping her arms and yes even her legs around her best friend, sister, many things that Charlotte is. She envelopes her, and briefly closes her eyes, but opens them as she hugs her. Erich head-bumps, nonverbal and animalistic.

"Me too," she echoes, when Erich says he's not sorry for arguing, but he's sorry when she feels bad. Neither of them want her to feel bad. Or headachey.

Melantha kisses Charlotte's bicep. Looks up at her. She frowns at Erich when he pokes. "Then don't say it," she says, when a nicer or gentler person might just forgive with open-arms, when someone else might tell him not to worry about it. She just... pushes. She challenges. "You're not dumb, Erich. You know better."

But she sighs, then, and presses her forehead to her sister's arm, eyes closing. "I'm just... I'm upset that you got to see Gaia. And you saw her in the sort of pain that you are never, ever going to understand. And that you would be so dismissive, so immature about a name that might reference Her, and Her pain, and the meaning of that. It made me so angry, Erich, like you didn't even realize how blessed you were. How... fucking indoctrinated you are by this-fucked up world that worrying about seeming 'girly' could even fit inside of you amidst the awe. I don't understand it, and it bothers me, and it offends me on this like... core level."

She swallows. "And it bothered me that when I got pissed off you both kind of just... smoothed over it and kept talking like I wasn't angry, like I hadn't talked." This isn't just to Erich now. This is for Charlotte. This is picking a fight with Charlotte, too, almost; no wonder she didn't want her to leave. "It made me feel really dismissed and... kinda patronized, weirdly? Like you are both so used to me being angry about stuff that you just chose not to address it or respond to it at all. I mean... Charlotte, you didn't say anything at all. Erich, you just headbumped me, like that was going to make it all better. It really made me feel kinda crappy, like what I had to say just wasn't worth a verbal acknowledgement or answer."

And here, instead of swallowing, she just sniffs, opening her eyes again, rubbing her head on Charlotte's arm, then pulling back, looking at them both. "And I'm sorry, too, because I know I kneejerked. I know Erich's not a douchebag," she says, to Charlotte, even though Erich is sitting right there. She looks at him, more sad than angry now. "I was so frustrated to hear you disdaining the feminine when I know you're not some smarmy dick-waving douchebag, Erich, especially after an experience that I would die to have. I was..."

she hesitates here.

"I was disappointed in you," Melantha says quietly. "And then I felt bad, on top of it, for making this awesome thing for you about me and my anger, and it circled into frustration because I can't think of many men who ever gave a damn if they rained on my parade when they were upset about something, and it just... "

She doesn't have words for it. To understand recursion you have to understand recursion to understand recursion you have to understand recursion to understand recursion...

so she sighs. "I'm sorry, Erich. And I'm sorry to you, too, Charlotte, for giving you a headache."

"You didn't give me a headache." Charlotte doesn't talk-about-things so. So. All of this talking is rather difficult for her. Still, the first thing she says is near the end: Melantha didn't give her a headache. Charlotte is wrapped up and present and surrounded by Melantha's scent and neither Melantha nor Erich gave her a headache. "My head gives me headaches."

Her head; the madness. The noise that always seems to be rising, on the verge of the audible, in times of emotional stress and strain. Charlotte knows that others function differently than she does, but she doesn't know how. Doesn't know how they bear the whelming crush of the waves, and the shock of with the sand, the undertows and riptides that are always there, too, winnowing beneath the waves. She does not know what it means to be sane, because she's never been anything but what she is - brilliant and half-broken and fragile and glorious and fine and fragile as moonlight on water,

which is really not very fragile at all.

Charlotte takes in another deep breath, the way someone does before diving down deep below the surface if the sea.

"I'm sorry," she says to Melantha. "I didn't know what to say."

"I'm not indoctrinated," Erich butts in at one point, his own quicksnap kneejerk flaring up in response to Melantha's,

which does seem to be how things work between the two of them. Sometimes, anyway. He doesn't prevent her from finishing, though, and as she goes on her anger seems to beat lower and lower, abates, shifts.

There is an apology at the end. Erich is still frowning a bit. He folds one leg up on the bed, picking at the hem of his jeans. "Yeah, I'm sorry too for saying the name was girly. But I don't think it's bad to be girly. I just meant... Mother's Heart kinda sounds like maybe I have a mother's heart? And that's like. Not possible. 'Cause I can't be a mother.

"That's kinda why I didn't think the name fit me. Not 'cause I think I'm too manly or whatever. I'm not like that. I'm not indoctrinated. That's why I said I didn't mean to say 'girly'."

Pause. He stops picking at his pants, puts his foot back on the floor.

"I wasn't being whatever-who-cares about meeting Gaia either. I really, really wasn't. I mean I met Gaia, I know how special that is. Even if it was just a little piece of her so I could understand and not like. Explode from overload or something. I mean even if I'd failed my challenge, even if I never ever made it to Fostern, meeting Gaia would've made it all worthwhile. I asked to meet her," he sounds a little defensive now, "and I asked her what I asked her. I mean, doesn't that tell you I know how amazing that was?"

Quiet again. Sort of a restless shifting, his shoulder brushing against Charlotte's again.

"I didn't really feel like you were raining on my parade," he says, "until just now. When you said you were disappointed in me. I mean come on. I know I said something dumb, but I don't think I did something so bad that I deserve to be called indoctrinated, and that you deserve to be disappointed in me. Give me a little benefit of the doubt, y'know?"

Erich

"Well," Erich says after a long quiet, "if it means anything... I wasn't really like. Rejecting the Mother's Heart name 'cause it was, I dunno, feminine or girly or something? It was more 'cause ... we know what it references, but it just kinda ends up sounding like I have a mother's heart or something. Which obviously, I can't.

"It makes me sad that you were disappointed in me. Especially 'cause I wanted you both to be proud of me. I know it's not about the same thing? But. Yeah.

"It's okay though. Or well. It will be okay? I mean. You know I'm not actually douchey indoctrinated smarmy. And ... you know that's not how I meant it now, right? And I'm sorry if I came off like that's how I meant it, and if I made you feel like I was just ignoring you. 'Cause I wasn't. I just headbumped you 'cause, like.

"Well. I didn't really know what to say either, I guess.

"And also," this is possibly one of the more jumbled-convoluted things Erich has said in recent memory, and that's saying something, "you know I know that was a really, really, really special thing. Seeing Gaia. And it'd be special for any one of us. Not just... the girls, or the Garou, or whatever. You know I wasn't blowing that off as unimportant, don't you? And I really hope maybe someday Charlotte can take you to see Her too. 'Cause that'd be kinda awesome."

Melantha

It's not Melantha and Erich who hurt Charlotte's head. It's Charlotte's head. And that stabs right through Melantha, makes her ache, even though she is already pretty achey. "It's okay," she tells Charlotte, regarding not knowing what to say. She takes a breath. "To tell you the truth, I think I -- and maybe Erich, too --" she cheats a glance at him there, not wanting to speak for him but she's pretty sure she's right about this, "don't know what to say a lot of the time, either." She shrugs. "We talk anyway, and that's part of why we end up fighting."

That just hangs there for a moment, and then she turns to Erich. She does something then, turning to him physically, reaching over and offering him her hand. Well: first she almost just reaches over and takes his, but she's not really sure right now if he wants to be touched. So she offers, palm up, and if he gives her his hand, she wraps their fingers together. Laces them, if he lets her.

"I am proud of you," she tells him. "I was frustrated with and disappointed by what you said. I didn't mean to make you think I'm not proud of you. And I said it weird and I'm sorry, but I am really, really proud of you, Erich." She sniffs, because her nose and her eyes feel wet, even though she's not crying. Yet. It's always 'yet' with Melantha.

"Like I said, I felt... bad. For even being angry and frustrated to begin with. I really am sorry." There's a pause. "It's just me being cluttered."

Not a mess. Erich was pretty adamant, that one time, that she's not a mess. She can be clutter.

Her hand squeezes his, if he is indeed letting her hold it. "And I want to figure out a name with you and me and Charlotte that is as awesome as you getting to meet Gaia and doesn't make anyone think something of you that isn't true and shows you how proud we are of you and how much we love you." She furrows her brows. "Okay? Since we both tripped over our own words and feel bad about it, can we just... be okay again, now? And forgive me for getting caught in a funk?"

Charlotte

Charlotte does not know how they get to this place where everything is hard and strange and noisy and how they get to the place that comes after it that is not noisy at all. Erich talks through his thoughts and then Melantha talks through hers and they say things imperfectly and butt heads and sometimes more-than-heads, sometimes they are like mountain sheep, locking their curling horns and then they are un-locked and finding the places in between where the everything is laid out and zipped open again, but not in the Wrong way that makes Charlotte go rather still and frowning and makes her head fill up with she-does-not-even-know what, which makes her heart race and her breath come all sharp and sometimes makes her hands and feet tingle and sometimes makes the world recede and sometimes makes it come into a focus that is sharp as a rapier's edge.

She has to cross her arms to get through it. Pulls a bit away in there from both of them and crosses her arms low over her abdomen as if she had eaten too much ice cream and developed a tummy ache or - no. That forward, hunch-shouldered posture is not tummy-ache posture, but see.

Charlotte stays and Charlotte endures it. Closes her eyes at one point - during a string of words-she-does-not-like - and holds herself in one place and in one piece both by will and their anchoring presence.

They talk.

Charlotte listens.

Charlotte breathes.

Charlotte stays,

but she has nothing really to say.

Erich

Of course Erich lets Melantha hold his hand. Of course; he's an Erich, what else would he do? He even squeezes her hand back, looking sad because she looks so sad, looking achy because she seems so achy.

Between them Charlotte is not saying anything at all. Between them Charlotte looks sort of miserable herself, looks like she's folding herself quiet and still and just hoping to find her way, all their way, back to things that are not noisy-hard-strange-bad. And so, when Melantha offers that sad little apology, that poignant little wish, Erich nods. He's so quick to nod, his strong bigboned hand tightening on Melantha's.

"Yeah," he says. "We're okay now. You don't need to be forgiven for being in a funk. We're all in a funk sometimes. I'm sorry I kinda put you in a funk. It's okay, Melantha. It really is. I'm okay too, and ... we're okay."

He nudges Charlotte again. Hopeful. "Right? We're okay."

Melantha

[perception + empathy: what string of words?]
Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 5 ) VALID

Charlotte

Empathy Read: Charlotte is taut and tense because Charlotte is mad and the tension between them is hard for her to bear. She closes her eyes tightly as Erich says douchey/smarmy/indoctrinated and she does not like any of them. Does not like them particularly in conjunction with the conversation between her packmates, does not want to think about them on Erich's tongue, in Erich's mouth, from Erich's self.

Melantha is so keyed in to Charlotte's emotional state that she can almost hear the sort of white noise that Charlotte does. Fuzzy in the background in a way that drones and hums and blots out the background noise and makes everything around her seem close and hot and panicky and strange and broken and sharding and - and - and -

that is why Charlotte's head hurts when Charlotte's head hurts and Charlotte sits there with her broken mind as if she expects something deeply terrible to happen at any moment and she does expect something deeply terrible to happen at any moment, but she also trusts them, entirely, so she holds herself still and grits her teeth even through the worst of the words, only half-hearing the back and forth as some of it is a smear, and just. gets. through.

Melantha

They get through it, and there's a meadow on the other side where they can be sleepy and calm. Melantha squeezes his hand, leaning over, softly kissing his cheek, but then

she is letting go of him, wrapping her arms around Charlotte, and pulling the Fang to tuck her head close to Melantha's. "We're okay," she says, to Erich but also for Charlotte. She presses her nose to Charlotte's temple, breathing her in, making such full-body contact that it is hard not to feel enveloped by the Fury. Her hand comes up, pushes messily into Charlotte's pink hair. "We're totally okay. And next time Charlotte needs to go away when we fight we'll let her, okay?"

Her eyes find Erich's past that floud of downy white-pink blonde hair as she smooths it down. "Because it's not because she thinks we need privacy or because she doesn't know she's a full total complete amazing part of this pack." Those eyes are intent, as though to say DUDE BACK ME UP. "And she knows when she comes back we'll be okay because we love each other very, very, very much and nothing bad is really going to happen."

She almost rocks her friend, holding her tight. "Nothing bad is going to happen. We'll always be okay," she is talking quieter now, softer, right against Charlotte's hair, "because we love each other."

Charlotte

There's no reassurance for Erich from Charlotte, not at first. She hasn't the energy to nod at him and favor him with a sharp, spare smile that says yes, okay, okay, things are unpleasant now but okay. We get through them. We're getting through them. But she is there. He can feel her presence, strong in the totem. He may perhaps remember her madness; the way she rode through the City of Los Angeles with her hands over her ears, virtually catatonic. Denver does not hurt her the way LA did, and perhaps she is more comfortable in the city now. Better able to understand the places where wild things undercut the concrete. Better able to understand the dreams that concrete dreams, which are like the dreams the earth dreams, except both fractured and framed and aggregate.

So here, for a moment Charlotte is overcome or overwhelmed. Overstimulated, over-something and she is not entirely capable of reassure her pack that she's there, she's there, she'll get through it, and then Melantha is wrapping her arm, filling Charlotte's nostrils with the heady promise of her scent, holding her and holding her tightly and holding her close and holding her through the worst of the noise.

Melantha can feel Charlotte start to relent. Or no: it is not relent. She merely begins to ease into Melantha's arms, though it is hard to gauge how long it takes for her to do it.

One beat of her heart or two or twenty or a hundred or a thousand.

The noise fades. It always does. It always has, so far. But every time it seems as if it might never end.

--

After what seems like a very long time, though in truth is not so long, Charlotte starts to unbend, minutely, into Melantha's embrace.

"I know that. I do."

Erich

Of course Erich backs Melantha up. Just as he'll back Charlotte up. He is, after all, an Erich. "Yeah," he chimes in. "We just fight 'cause that's how we work stuff out. And it's okay if you have to go away. But when you come back, it's not like one of us will have Left Forever or something. I mean -- like Melantha said. We love each other. And you. And the tinyhouse. And stuff."

He stops talking. Melantha has hugged Charlotte, is almost rocking her a little. There's something sisterly and motherly about that and just for a little while Erich thinks aww, I should've asked to talk to the Gaia that made me. But that's silly because he already has a mom,

even if she doesn't talk to him anymore,

and anyway he has a tinypack and they glomp each other all the time and everything feels safe and good and nice when he's with them. Like now.

Charlotte eases, little by little. Erich reaches over as she does, wrapping his arm around the both of them for a tight squeeze.

"You guys wanna go home?" he asks. "We can stop for ice cream on the way back."

Melantha

Among the Furies, Melantha is a Maiden, all wildness and curiosity and sensation. But she also has in her the blood and wisdom of Crones, the warmth and ferocity of Mothers. She will become each in her time, whether she ever creates life in her womb or not; Melantha has known the arc and destiny of her life since was a little girl. One of the reasons she is so close to Charlotte is that all three faces of the goddess are welcomed by the Silver Fang, all three seem understood on some bone-deep and wordless level. Charlotte is sometimes sister to her Maiden, daughter to her Mother, ghost to her Crone, and Melantha loves her for it.

And Charlotte loves Melantha. Relents even her madness, easing into Melantha's arms because she can trust Melantha's arms, and Melantha's arms are not demanding she be human or even be sane. Just believe, even if she can't reflect that belief or prophecy its effect, that it's going to be okay. The truth is, even if Charlotte went truly catatonic in Melantha's arms, Melantha would... well. She would not be 'okay' with it. She would deal with it, and wait, and stay, so that Charlotte would remember she had a reason to come back.

She would do the same, if it were Erich. They are her pack. And just as Charlotte can be a sister, a daughter, and a ghost, Erich can be a brother, a lover, and sometimes the young warrior sent to her for wisdom. Their lines of love and family. Their mythologies, permitting their shapechanging.

Daughter of Spring,

Queen of Hell.

--

Melantha is quiet and dark as a grave for a while, holding Charlotte. Erich, like Melantha, falls quiet, but it's important that they both spoke: it's okay if she has to Go Away. They will not Leave Forever. He waits with them, and Melantha strokes Charlotte's hair very slowly, and when Charlotte's eyes begin to refocus, when she seems more in her body, Erich senses it like an animal sensing a storm; he wraps his not-inconsiderable arms around them both like he's been waiting to do that since forever.

Gently, Melantha turns her head and kisses his temple over Charlotte's crown, then lays her cheek on that white-blonde softness, holding and held and feeling all put back into her own box, too, even if that box is a bit disorganized and cluttered at times.

She does. She lifts her head to look at Charlotte to see if she wants to go home, too. Kisses her temple, too, when they all stir, when they rise. Melantha keeps her arm around Charlotte's shoulders as they walk out, her other hand holding Erich's. Erich Storm's Teeth Someone's Something, even if they haven't figured that part out yet. They haven't figured a lot of parts out.

But it's okay.

The building is flat and strange and glaring, with scrawling neon signs that flash and hum in a language Charlotte is not sure meets the definition of a language, and which she surely cannot read. Once upon a time it was the outpost of a long-vanished fast food chain (DAIRY DUKE, HOME OF THE MASHBURGER). Since then it has been home to, variously, a vaccuum-cleaner repair shop, a strip club, a head shop, and now this combination market / restaurant.

It is not as cold as you might imagine in Denver today and Charlotte stands outside the building with her thumbs hooked through the belt loops of her jeans frowning thoughtfully up at the strange sign, breathing in the peculiar mix of cast exhaust, fast food fumes, and the rather exotic melange of Central and South American and Southeast Asian cuisines to be found in the various mom-and-pop places up and down the Federal corridor.

Charlotte is dressed as she usually is, dedicated jeans, and a new Denver Broncos t-shirt since her Mexican Sprite one was ruined a handful of weeks ago, her winter coat open, her ubiquitous messenger bag, with all her tools and all her talens and all her treasures, slung rather negligently across her body.

"You've been here before?" Charlotte asks Erich, with a mixture of interest and skepticism, her pale blue eyes skimming his profile.

Erich was pretty sad when Mexican Sprite shirt got ruined. That might've been the night she came back healed up but still smelling of blood, which was also the night Erich just would not leave her alone. He kept finding reasons to come down from his loft, to visit her in her room, to bring her a mug of hot chocolate just 'cause he was making some for himself or poking his head in to see if she wanted to go get ice cream tomorrow or or or -- until finally Charlotte, in all her naivete and wisdom, understood that he just wanted to stay near his injured packmate the way all wolves do.

So he slept in her room that night, curled up at the foot of her bed in his wolf-shape. Which is rather large, all things considered -- way bigger than a pet dog, for one -- and pretty much ended up taking up half the bed. So it wasn't like she got very good rest. But still.

He felt better the next day, because she smelled better, and then they got ice cream and soon enough he sort-of-but-not-quite-forgot. Days went by; then this.

Ex-Dairy Duke. Now a buzzing neon-signed generic all-you-can-eat. The food isn't terribly good, but it's plentiful and it's cheap, and Erich seems to have a knack for sussing places like this out. He's locking up his car as Charlotte inspects the building. Bounding up on the curb beside her, he nudges her with a shoulder -- the impact softened through his heavy winter jacket -- and grins.

"Yeah. Once. It's good. C'mon." And he pulls the door open for her.

Charlotte eats the strangest things, sometimes. She also likes caviar and steak tartar and sweetbreads and champagne in teacups and there is no separating her strange and haunting purity from her spare and stark frame, at least not for the wolves, who know her blood and know her lunacy and know her promise and know the legacy of her ancestors as soon as they catch a glimpse of her: a nimbus of as yet untouched promise and divine, dividing madness. So, the lilting glance she sends winging upward in Erich's direction as he bumps her shoulder so familiarly could well seem tinged with a rather arch hauteur to any strange beasts who might happen upon the pair.

There are no strange beasts, however, just these two, and Erich of all people can see the quietly supple bend of light in her her eyes.

"It's weird," Charlotte is saying as she ducks in past Erich tonguing her cheek musingly as they walk into the little foyer and turn to slowly take in the setting. The gumball machines and half-broken crane game, full of dusty stuffed animals and cheap, gold-painted watches. ALL U CAN ATE EAT is written in four different languages on a posterboard sign.

"'Cos it feels all narrow and tangled and stifling but also different too," she continues, with a surprising degree of maturity, waiting for Erich the knower-of-things to show her the way. "Mutable.

"I like it."

"Really?" Erich perks at that. He hadn't really expected her to say that. Maybe she'd like the food or the fact that you could eat until your stomach burst after paying only $9.99, or maybe she'd like being here with him. But he didn't really think she'd like ... it. Whatever it is. This place. Its narrow tangled stifling mutability. "Aw, yay. I'm glad. I like it too. Don't use the bathroom though, if you really gotta go just ask the waitress if you can use the staff toilet. Anyway,"

there are two doors. To keep out the cold, and all. He pushes open the second one and they are inside that strange, flat building. The layout is simple: a bunch of tables and booths, and then -- near the double-swinging double-doors to the kitchen -- a setup of several buffet counters where entrees and sides and soups hang out under heat lamps, bolstered by wilted-looking salads and a softserve machine, which is in turn accompanied by toppings and poundcake and bite-sized cheesecake noms.

"We pay up front," he says. "I got it, don't worry. Then we grab some plates and just load up. And you can go back for seconds as many times as you want."

There are two doors. There were two doors in the Dairy Duke and two doors in Maeir's Sweeper Service and two doors leading into the strip club and everything else that has lived here before Main Home Buffet and Lounge. Where the lounge proper might be located is not precisely clear but -

Really? And, "Yeah," she assures him, an odd solidity in her tone. "It's like one of those lizards that changes its tongue depending on what it eats."

Charlotte ducks and she ducks again. Erich assures her that she needn't worry about paying and Charlotte was not ever worried about paying so she gives him a humming, spinning sort of look and allows him to pay. Even in the near-a-year since the creature ran away with him, she does not and has not worried about money. She receives an allowance. Sometimes she spends it all on caviar and pottery glazes and does not worry about when she will get more because she has never worried about that. And perhaps because there is that magic credit card that her brother gave her and which he pays, month after month, religiously. No matter what the charges, or where they are from.

So, "Okay," she tells him with equanimity, studying the buffet with her alien sort of interest while Erich takes care of the bill. Ahead of time. The clerk behind the counter hands Erich two plates still warm from the dishwasher and unleashes them on the steam tables. There are stranges in the room, but somehow even the hungriest of them find ways to stay at their tables or shift themselves away from the pressure of Erich's rage.

She wrinkles her nose when Erich warns her away from the bathrooms and is still sort-of-wrinkling her nose about that and says nothing more but: Charlotte will take the admonishment to heart.

--

Erich is the Ahroun. So Charlotte cedes pole position to him and follows him into battle, haunting his flank and watching as he fills and then overfills his place and maybe picks up an auxliary plate to go along with the primary plate. She's quiet, a flame of affection kindled in her eyes, animal and close. Pack. If he insists that she try the meatloaf Charlotte tries the meatloaf, but otherwise her choices are chaotic as strangely delicate as one might expect.

"I have never," Erich declares, "heard of lizards that change their tongues. I've heard of lizards that change their colors."

And so they descend on the spread. And Erich indeed fills and then overfills his plate with nothing but meat, meat, meat, meat and more meat. Roast turkey and bbq chicken and something stringy and tough that passes for beef steak. Sausages and bacon and kielbasa and ham. Meatloaf. Buffalo wings. Fried chicken. Fried catfish. Tiny, overcooked shrimp in a casserole, which he spends almost five minutes picking at because he doesn't want any cheese or pasta. There's one table where they serve each guest exactly one so-called lobster mornay, which looks more like large crawfish mornay. By the time Erich swings by, he has two plates already, and he is given his lobster on a third.

Which he then promptly overfills with more meat.

--

He is as laden as a bumblebee returning from the flower-fields by the time he comes back to their table. Three plates thunk down, and then he goes back to get himself a big cup of Sprite. American Sprite, not Mexican Sprite. When he comes back again, he's brought napkins and utensils and also straws, one of which he gives to Charlotte. Her plate, with its strange, chaotic, delicate choices, gets a stink-eye from him. Though in the grand scheme of things -- it's people like her, eating like birds, that make it possible for people like Erich to come here and chow down without bankrupting Main Home Buffet and Lounge.

(He hasn't figured the Lounge part out yet.)

"I heard broccoli is really bad for you," he says. "Like it'll constipate you for sure, 'cause it's too much fiber or something."

Charlotte's plate proper is arranged more for aesthetics than for any other reasons. There was no particular reason she chose one small teaspoonful of meatload and arranged it like an island sheltered by an umbrella-of-a-broccoli stalk and ringed by reefs of shrimp-casserole pasta gilded with its strangely orange cheese sauce. Erich did not scoop out all of the shrimp, two or three are sort of swimming in the little lagoon of barbecue sauce between the reef and the beach, and when Erich comes back with his Sprite, Charlotte trades him a straw for those handful of barbequed shrimp. And if her main plate resembles some sort of strange, outsider art diorama, by the time Erich returns with his Sprite Charlotte has returned with her Sundae. Which was created with a capital S. Soft serve fills a large bowl usually reserved for pasta, and is laden with a towering assortment of mismatched toppings, from skittles to candied peanuts, strawberry and peanut butter, hot fudge and pretzels and ever manner of sprinkles.

"Did you hear that from your stomach?" Charlotte is asking him, as she accepts a straw, tears the paper off with her teeth and blows the rest of the wrapper off the other end. "Or a real live person?"

Erich shoots Charlotte a pretend-scowl, which is pretend because, well, he can't really scowl at anyone who'll fish every last tiny shrimp out of a casserole for him. Plus: she is his packmate.

"Maybe," he says, which isn't an answer at all because he doesn't clarify which of the options he's maybe-ing. "Also, that ice cream looks AMAZING. I'm gonna make one after I eat. But I'm gonna do more fudge and no pretzels."

His mouth is already full. He is already eating. A lot.

"Hey," this is so casually casual that Charlotte, having spent near-a-year with him, likely knows at once that he's actually about to break some major news that he doesn't want to make deal about, just pretend it's not a big deal, "so I'm like, about to go challenge. For Fostern."

How do you FEEEEEEL about this Erich? (I can has empathy! WP because this is important.)

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

[he is excited! and nervous! he's excited because after a very long time of being on the fringes and never quite feeling like he fit in, having a pack has really helped him feel like he has a place where he belongs. and having that grounding has enabled him to go out and commit to things like a city, a sept, etc. and that, in turn! has allowed him to gain the sort of acceptance and respect that he never really thought he'd have. and THAT, in turn, has empowered him to go and try to level up after SEVEN PLUS YEARS as a cliath.

but also: nervous. 'cause he's not sure he'll succeed. and he's not sure he's ready! and he's afraid he'll fail, and if he does fail, he's afraid that'll mean he actually does suck and doesn't belong and doesn't deserve to be respected etc etc etc.]

Charlotte is watching Erich over her meal nd wriggling about in her seat to check out the rest of the dining room. The people tucked away in their corners and the like, before she returns back to him. There is a sort of wary watchfulness written into her face and brow as she eyes the buffet attendants who drift out of the swinging-doors to the kitchen with steaming, stainless steel dishes of something to settle over the buffet.

All that wriggling stops when Erich is so casually casual and the teenager's sharp, pale eyes alight on him once more.

And stay there.

And sharpen.

Something about the intensity of the look feels lupine, wholly animal - the keenness, the committment to discovery - but Charlotte is not studying him with her strangely feral surety, but something else altogether. Human and selfish and selfless and strange.

Her generous little mouth is sealed a bit, the spreading curve of her strange expression pressed together.

Charlotte has a spoonful of sundae scooped out of the bowl but not yet lifted to her mouth and that spoonful lingers and starts to drip, melting from silverware back into the bowl.

"Good. You oughtta." This oddly sane, buoying surety in her eyes and in her voice, a maturity of spirit from which she absents herself so often. "If you don't wanna do it here in Denver I'm gonna go with you wherever you want to go. And I'll be there whether or not you make it.

"Losing a challenge isn't dishonorable, you know.

"Refusing one might be."

Something like relief, subtle but visible, settles over Erich when Charlotte assures him -- before he even asks! -- that she'll go with him. And be there. "Thanks," he says, sincerely and maybe just a bit shyly. "I asked Melantha if she could come along too. And she said yes. So like, I'll have you guys in the bleachers. Which is nice."

He hasn't stopped eating. Even talking about Serious Stuff like this, stuff that is clearly quite important to him even if he'd like very much to pretend it's not, hasn't averted him from his singular goal of stuffing himself like a turkey tonight. He eats turkey, he eats beef, he gnaws on a chicken wing and then he eats those hard-won shrimp by the spoonful.

A furrow-browed glance at her, though, when she points out that losing a challenge isn't dishonorable, but refusing one might be. "I can't tell if you're hinting at something?" he says, a statement that up-curves into a query. "I mean, with the refusing-might-be-dishonorable thing."

"I mean you're ready." Charlotte responds to him, quietly and seriously, with a mild stitch between her own brows. It does not correspondence to the furrow in his. Like the many iterations of All You Can Ate Eat, it is written in an entirely different language.

Charlotte's breath feels strange in her throat but she takes the breath and drops the sundae. The spoonful of sundae, back into its rapidly melting Lake Sundae bowl.

She is Very Serious but there's an alert, wolfish cant to her head as she studies him. "And now you know it. So if you make Fostern it'll be awesome. And if you don't make Fostern it'll be better than you think. It won't mean that you're a failure. Because you challenged and you'll challenge again. You've earned the right, and the only way you could really fail now would be to never try in the first place.

"See?"

"I do see," Erich says, all earnest: because he does. He does see that, he does get it, all that makes sense to him when someone says it to him or when he thinks it to himself. "But. Well. I'm still glad you're coming along. And Melantha. 'Cause if I don't make Fostern, I think maybe I'm gonna need you to tell me that again. Like five hundred times. Okay?"

And he reaches across the table, nudges her sundae at her. "It's melting," he reminds her.

"That's cool," Charlotte returns, with a rather bracketed little grin and a half-shrug of her spare shoulders. Aping someone else's language: perhaps his, perhaps someone long-since dead. "What I really wanted was ice cream soup."

Then, a spare flash of her eyes from behind pale lashes. "And of course we will. We're pack. We'll do it five hundred times plus one."

That flash of her eyes: caught, met, returned with a lopsided grin and, a moment later, a bump of his foot against hers. That's all the acknowledgment he gives, though, and perhaps all the acknowledgment he can give right now. In public. At a cheap buffet, where they've loaded ridiculous heaps of food onto their plates-and-bowls.

"Ice cream soup is totally gross," he says instead, or in lieu of whatever a more eloquent or mature creature might have said. "I bet your sprinkles are gonna get soggy. You should go get one of those lobster thingies. They're pretty good."

Charlotte rolls her eyes a bit. There's nothing gross about ice cream soup. It's the same stuff just no longer frozen. It's like saying that ice is amazing but water is gross. So: a roll of her eyes probably for Erich's denouncement of ice cream soup, of which she slurps a whole giant spoonful just to tell him that she is a rebel or something and does not care whether or not her sprinkles get soggy. They're still sprinkles.

They're still delicious.

But lobster-things, her sharp little chin rises and she glances over Erich's shoulder, following the drift of one of those workers past the steam tables to the lobster-thing-station, where they hand out the lobsters in their sad little glory,

"Maybe I will."

And maybe she does. No: actually she does, slip out of the booth and walk across the cheap little restaurant to take her single-allowed-lobster-plate. Brings it back and sets it down on the table, where she returns to consuming her melting ice cream.

It will not be long until Charlotte will be full, nudging that lobster back toward Erich, sharing the choice part of their odd, all-too-human kill.

Erich is out patrolling or something. Erich is out fighting or something. Erich is somewhere, and it is too cold for Charlotte and Melantha to be lazing out on a rock near a creek; they are closer to town now, even though Melantha can drive herself to work and they don't strictly have to be within walking distance of the saloon. It's winter. You stay near other living creatures. You stay where help can hear you if you howl, even if those helpers may also be terrified of you in the middle of the night.

And Melantha isn't working today, at least not yet, so she's doing chores. She bagged up all the laundry, for all of them, loaded it into her truck, and spent some time at the laundromat in town reading a book and chewing a granola bar. The beds all have freshened sheets and pillowcases and blankets now, which is not a weekly or even bi-weekly occurrence. Everyone has clean underwear and jeans and t-shirts and hoodies. She washed the plastic dishes in their little sink and dried them with a towel and put them away in their little latching cupboards. She even dusted here and there. She wiped out her shrine-bowl. She shook out the black furs that Charlotte brought her back from kills. She tidied and rearranged and spent some time sitting cross-legged on the couch, mending some holes in various items of clothing with needle and thread.

Melantha knows how to darn a sock. Melantha knows how to make things last, and use them again and again, just like how she knows how to build a fire and scavenge for food in the wilderness.

Charlotte is there, sometime later in the day, and Melantha has been ever so productive and the tinyhouse still smells like all of them but it's missing the sour tang of not-clean smells. Melantha is pretty picky about how she cleans; there's no reason for most of those chemicals, and it irritates her nose and her packmates' noses, so she uses things with witch hazel and tea tree oil and so forth; she scrubs the shower with half a grapefruit and some kosher salt because really, she doesn't think you even need baking soda. The bathroom smells clean and the beds all smell clean and some t-shirts with armpit holes have been restored to their spots in the rotation and occasionally, there is a quiet drip of the still-damp dish sponge in its holder by the sink.

"Hey."

Says Melantha, seeing Charlotte, smiling gently at her.

"I was just about to have some lunch. You want a sandwich?"

Charlotte is there, later. Charlotte, like Erich, like Melantha, comes and goes. Unlike Erich and Melantha, she usually comes and goes through those secondary doors known as mirrors, finding her reflection and slipping through it, easy as water through a sieve. Perhaps these passings leave behind the subtlest and strangest of scents, which is impossible to character or compare because it is not precisely physical, because it is not physical at all, because it is made of a substance that is begins to change as soon as it hits the fractured and structured immediacy of the world they inhabit, all these physical things.

So here is Charlotte in the freshly cleaned tinyhouse, with the scent of grapefruit and salt bright as summer in the air, while outside the sun shines, or it does not, and the wind blows cold, and the temperature drifts as it does, and the evergreens around Evergreen shiver in the passing winds.

In from the other side, Charlotte always seems both bright-eyed and far away, as if she has only just awoken, and brought part of her dream-world with her. She crawls out of her bunk and strips off her worn and rather ubiquitous dedicated messenger bag, full of tidbits and tchotkes, wattle and clay and bone, feathers and carcases and found things and formed things, and then her hoodie, leaving her in her dedicated t-shirt and jeans. A week ago she came home wounded. Not badly - Charlotte needed a day or two of furious sleep to recover, really, and ot much more, but her things were ruined and Mexican Sprite has given way to the Denver Broncos. Charlotte does not know what the Denver Broncos are, though. She liked Mexican Sprite better.

"It smells good," Charlotte says, inhaling deeply. "Like breakfast." With a smile. "I would like a sandwich. Do we have peanut butter and bananas? And Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs?"

Melantha uses natural products, no chemicals, when she clean. Charlotte, for all her dedication to Cold Crescent, feels sometimes screamingly ill at ease in cities. But she still eats garbage like whoa, and there's always some sort of childish cereal in the little latching cabinets of the tinyhouse.

When Charlotte came in wounded but not bad, Melantha still was worried. She still came and slept inside Charlotte's bed that night as though simply being nearby would finish off the healing, help it somehow, and maybe it did. Maybe the ancestors that sing their memories so powerfully in her blood watched over the Silver Fang as she slept, as she recovered, and this meant as much as the closeness of a friend nearby. People do better when they're at home. People do better when they're with the ones they love.

"Citric acid and salt are better than scouring powder," is Melantha's answer to things smelling like breakfast. She smiles. "We have some roast beef, and I think we have peanut butter. We have one banana left but it's pretty brown. No cereal. Well, some Fruity Pebbles."

She sniffs. "We need groceries." Which is true. She leans back a bit, tipping her head. "Now that you're better and all... could you tell me what happened the other night?"

"I like brown bananas," says Our Charlotte with a supple curve of her narrow shoulders. She does like brown bananas. Sometimes it is astonishing how brown she likes them. They turn to mush and taste like banana candy, though since the weather has turned there is always the option of freezing bananas that have hung around the tiny kitchen too long, then mashing them up like soft serve ice cream. "I'll have a brown banana and Frooty Pebbles sandwich. But no peanut butter."

And Charlotte makes a face.

Brown banana and Frooty Pebbles sandwich sounds delicous.

Brown banana and Frooty Pebbles and peanut butter sandwich sounds awful, apparently.

Charlotte pads through the tinyhouse and settles down on the couch, bending over to unlace and then toe off her boots before curling up with her legs beneath her. Her hair is getting longer and blonder and just the ragged tips are pink right now, and the static electricity from the dry heat in the tinyhouse makes it stand out like a vaguely startled halo all around her head. She watches Melantha with that wolfish look she always seems to have when they see each other after some time - any time - apart, which is keen and intent and perhaps a bit mesmerized, then gives another one of her rather shy half-shrugs by way of response.

Which is not a dismissal of the question. Charlotte never dismisses anything Melantha says to her. "Uhm, I don't know," is how Charlotte begins the little story. Erich is better at this sort of thing, and Charlotte's cheeks tinge a bit uncomfortably pink as if she had more eyes than just Melantha's on her. "I was in the city and on the other side and all these things were running from this spot and I went and looked and Looked and looked and there was a bit ugly Thing on the other side and that Uktena kin who argued with Erich - and these other two wolves fighting it. So I went through to help them.

"And we killed it but it exploded and I saw it was gonna explode and that girl was there so I jumped in front of her and it exploded and I got hurt and that other girl healed me and I healed her and that's what happen."

There's really no telling with Charlotte: what will sound good. Bubblegum ice cream with M&Ms may be fine, but peanut butter and Fruity Pebbles is a no-go. Okay. Melantha rolls with it. She rolls with a lot that Charlotte does or says, odd as it may be. Which is strange, since she argues constantly with Erich, even fondly, even while they're hugging or saying nice things about each other. They disagree and it more often than not makes the other smile. But with Charlotte, Melantha just accepts.

She smiles, too.

Reaching over, she touches her fingertips to the pink ends of Charlotte's hair, like stroking her fingers over the strings of a harp. It's an idle gesture, a thoughtless one, and intimate in that thoughtlessness. She is watching her fingertips in Charlotte's hair when she notices the way Charlotte is looking at her. For a moment, her pupils constrict a tiny bit, but it passes. She listens, her hand returning to herself as Charlotte tumbles out The Story, which isn't much of a tale but then Charlotte isn't a Galliard.

"Lola," she feeds Charlotte, being the Uktena kin that argued with Erich. And it exploded and Charlotte jumped in front of Lola and Melantha takes a measured breath. Her eyes flicker with something uncanny and savage, but it doesn't find expression in words.

She's quiet a moment. She can't exactly tell Charlotte she did the wrong thing by protecting a kinswoman. And she isn't quite sure how to tell Charlotte how Not Really Okay she is with close calls, with her two closest friends and some of the only people who still matter to her coming home still wounded and maybe dying and all of that. She swallows, and leans over to press her forehead to Charlotte's temple, and sighs. Then, after a very long moment, she gets up, swings her legs under her, and proceeds two steps to the kitchen to start making her friend a sandwich.

And then she changes the subject like a motherfucking hero.

"I was thinking about us building another tinyhouse," she says. It is out of the blue.

Charlotte looks so terribly young. Those wide and widely set eyes, the lie that is their strange and startling clarity, the tapered jaw, the finely jointed, nimble little fingers. Those eyes stay fixed on Melantha when they are in the room together, when Melantha is farther away and when Melantha comes closer and when Melantha begins to stroke the pink tips of Charlotte's fine hair, Charlotte leans thoughtlessly closer, her pale eyes half-closed, her expression briefly and finely drawn.

Lola, Melantha supplies, and Lola, Charlotte agrees wordlessly. Nodding her head all, yes, her. That girl. That one. Charlotte is still watching Melantha even as the kinswoman leans over to press her forehead to Charlotte's temple, but with the closeness of that contact, the wolf-girl closes her eyes - screws them shut - and leans so damn firmly into the contact. Human, with all the heaviness of a lupine greeting. She wants to say I'm sorry but she does not know why. The words curl in the back of her throat so present she can taste them, but cannot begin to fathom their origin. They all live with the promise of their death, bright beneath their skins, shadowing each breath they take. Even their priests are made for war.

--

So. That moment: quiet, fierce, to all too many different reasons, and then it is over, and Melantha changes the subject like a motherfucking hero.

Melantha is thinking about building us another tinyhouse. Charlotte looks a bit startled though Melantha is making a Frooty Pebbles and brown banana sandwich so she might miss the way that startlement chases across the young theurge's features, before ending in a quiet oh, which turns into a beetle-browed and thoroughly thoughtful look, before it at last resolves itself into a question:

"Do you think your Jeep is sad that Erich's truck has a tinyhouse to pull and it doesn't?"

[OH MY GOD. DENVER STOP BAKING ME. holy shit. i have seriously gotten that same hello msg like 3000x now.]

[I didn't tell you that Errin coded that in and attached it to your user account? yeesh, sorry, I guess I forgot!]

They all look young. They all are young. Erich is so fair haired, so pale eyed, so much like a farmboy that he used to be. Charlotte is elfin, ethereal, ageless in her purity. Melantha can so easily look the coquette; her cheeks are round when she grins a certain way, giving her a childlike seeming.

And Erich is a savage berserker, and Charlotte sees things no one else can comprehend, and Melantha is a priestess of dark, ancient rites. They are all young. They are all from another, older world, too.

--

There is nothing to hold the sandwich together. No mayo, no peanut butter, no jelly, nothing. So she mushes the bananas quite a bit so the Pebbles will stick. She puts it on a plate when she's done, licking a bit of banana from her thumb as she carries it over to her friend and sits back down next to her. Charlotte's question makes her smile.

"No. It's just a truck, unless you woke it up when I wasn't looking. I don't think it knows enough to feel sad or jealous." She leans back against a pillow, watching the Theurge, hands on her knees. She takes a breath. "I was thinking... then I could kind of have... my own house, sort of. And obviously you guys could come and go and sleep there and eat there and go back and forth and stuff. But we'd have more room. And... I'd..."

Her voice is getting a little smaller, which is not usual for her. She shrugs tightly. "I'd have a place of my own."

Which, one may not realize til just now, she's never really had. She takes a breath and holds it, waiting for a reaction.

Charlotte: exercise that empathy you are trying to develop. or just developing.

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

[She's nervous about this making Charlotte (immediately) and Erich (indirectly, at the moment) feel rejected. She doesn't want them to think she does not love them! Also she's never had a place that was just hers. And under the surface there's also this motivation of being able to be with Erich sometimes without messing with Charlotte, but she doesn't want Charlotte to feel pushed out or pushed away or anything.]

The plate rests on one knee. If they bought that cheap and mushy white bread the sandwich would stick together better just by smashing up the slices with the banana but they don't. They buy bread from a bakery in Evergreen. Sometimes sliced and sometimes not-sliced. It has seeds in it. It looks like it was made from something that grew out of the ground, and flowered and went to seed and shed those seeds and started all over again. That germinated. That woke up fighting in the cold dark earth, long before the sun had reached its zenith.

Charlotte balances the plate on her left knee. She balances it there but not for long when Melantha brings it back, and takes up one of the triangles of sandwich (Charlotte likes them to be diagonally cut. There are reasons. She does not know why.) and lifts it to her mouth. Some Pebbles fall out. Three red ones and one half-smushed grape one. That's okay. There are more inside.

So one bite and it is a rather big bite because Charlotte is a wolf and wolves are hungry animals and her blood burns bright and her body needs fuel. And Charlotte is chewing while Melantha explains that no she does not think the Jeep is sad unless it has been awakened (Charlotte disagrees; just because something is asleep does not mean it cannot be sad. Sometimes sleep is the saddest piece of her life) and does that smiling then she takes a breath and another breath and her voice is getting smaller and Charlotte, our Charlotte, does not notice many things, at least not many human things because she is deeply and markedly and remarkably in human but she notices these, the very first tells.

Notices them and her eyes sharpen on Melantha and her mad little head is cocked thoughtfully and she is watching Melantha and listening to her with a bright and sharpened attention and then Melantha finishes, and she's holding her breath now, waiting for a reaction and this is the reaction she receives:

Charlotte half-rises quite abruptly, upending the plastic plate with its new made sandwich and its quarter of stray Frooty Pebbles and shifts to one knee on the little couch, half-rising, and wraps her arms firmly and quite fiercely around her kinswoman. Face buried in Melantha's lustrous dark hair, her pale eyes half-closed, breathing in all that mystery, exhaling sense. In this moment Charlotte, on her knee, is a bit taller than Melantha and her mouth is near the kinswoman's temple and her breath is warm and her cheek is cool and her eyes are closed.

"If you want a place of your own I think you should have it. I know you'll never be far from me."

Charlotte and Melantha get to pick the bread, because Erich can't digest it. And they both like this kind, with the seeds and the feeling of growth and a bit of crunch to it, a bit of life even after it has come from the oven. In summer they tore pieces off of an unsliced loaf, eating it with a hunk of mozzarella while they sat in the sunlight on the grass. They fell asleep in the grass, stomachs full. It's winter now, and winter seems to ignite hunger even deeper than war during the warm months. Melantha puts on a few pounds; Charlotte and Erich eat even more voraciously. They buy the same bread.

She feels herself being looked at intently. She is used to this, and the difference between Erich glance-staring at her through his rearview mirror and then turning just to Look At Her and the way the Charlotte sometimes just arrests on her, lost for a moment. She is used to the difference between the way Erich and Charlotte watch her and the way that humans watch her, male or female. She is not upset at being looked at so closely, because Charlotte is her best friend, and if anyone can look deeply at her and still love her without reservation or hesitation or judgement or even concern, it is probably Charlotte.

The sandwich goes. Melantha frowns a little, hey, she made that, she cleaned up, but she doesn't want to yell at Charlotte, especially when Charlotte is just hugging her, very tight, all bony arms and surprising strength.

Her shoulders relax at what Charlotte says. She exhales softly, slowly, and a lot. She tips her head toward Charlotte, and into that embrace, silent for a little while. She won't ever be far, and Charlotte is not upset at all. Charlotte does not feel stung. Charlotte does not feel hurt. So Melantha mumbles into her arm, quietlike:

"So I should tell Erich, too?"

Erich. Who they both know will probably be more twisted up over the idea of the three of them not being all smooshed together anymore. But Charlotte tells Melantha what she already knows: yes. Yes she should tell him that she wants this, that she's thinking about this. Even if he's stung and hurt and howling and worried. But at least now she'll know that Charlotte won't be. She will only have to face one sad face. And maybe, to be fair, not even that.

She closes her eyes. Until Charlotte feels her relax. Until she can slip her arms away, and maybe pick up the sandwich, cuz the floor is pretty clean right now, and if not then well. Well. They can make something else that Charlotte will eat. Eat bowls of Fruity Pebbles on the couch, talking about, perhaps, what kind of house Melantha might like.