Bazmund

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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Goodnight

The Chapel with Dr. Cassar

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"Goodness." Cassar uttered as Ellen mentioned her sister. "I'm so sorry. I can understand why you moved, and especially when things weren't so good with your parents, there must not have been very much support. The travelling too - it can be very nerve-wracking to go to a new country where you don't speak the language natively, and then try to find work and new friends. I'm glad you made it through this eventful life of yours unharmed, and that you have some good memories with your sister to look back on when times are hard. My brother and I don't speak very much any more, and we haven't for a long time now, but I think about the time we spent together very often."

There was a moment after that, as Zephyr spoke, and Dr Cassar listened.

“Thank you, Zephyr.” Dr. Cassar nodded thoughtfully as the younger man finished telling his story.

“I’m sorry about your father. I’m very lucky that my father is still with us, although - understandably - I don’t get to speak with him very much right now. It’s very hard, dealing with the loss of a loved one - I think it’s good that you’ve found something both of you had a shared joy in, and that you’ve dedicated yourself to it in his memory.” Cassar paused for a moment. “It’s good to hear that meditating helped you with your anger. I’ve always found that anger can be a great obstacle to, well, to thinking straight, do you know what I mean? Of course, there are some things it is right to be angry about, but it’s also important to not let anger rule us.”

Dr. Cassar’s eyes lit up for a moment, his face lifted upwards with a great and momentous realisation.

“Oh! I think I’ve just remembered something.” He stood up, and went behind the desk-altar, opening one drawer and then the other, rifling through them until he eventually found what he was looking for.

“Aha!” he exclaimed, producing a burgundy tin of biscuits and cookies, holding it aloft like a trophy. “I knew there was something I was forgetting. Would anybody like a biscuit? There aren’t very many left, but they exist to be eaten, you know? I actually have been meaning to ask, as well, what is the ‘Awakening’ like?” He posited the question generally, as he headed back towards his seat and started passing biscuits out.

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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Goodnight

The Chapel with Dr. Cassar

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With the general nods and murmurs of agreement, Dr. Cassar inclined his head in acknowledgement, and started to tell his story.

“I left my home in Malta to study in England when I was 17, and then I spent six years at medical school in London. I worked very hard here, and after I graduated and spent a couple more years doing my foundation training, I decided to follow my heart and in 1989 I joined Medecins Sans Fronteires - which you might know as Doctors without Borders - to do charitable work around the world. I had always believed that everybody in the world deserves to be healthy and happy, and I wanted to help with that.”

He cleared his throat for a moment, sitting back in his chair and reaching for a small water bottle he’d tucked underneath it. After a quick drink, he smiled and looked around the room again.

“Did you know that Doctors without Borders have an inflatable hospital? It’s a huge set of tents with inflatable structures in them, and it is always ready to be deployed anywhere in the world, all within twenty four hours of any disaster or crisis.”

The smile faded a bit.

“My first posting was not in this hospital, but I have seen it set up before - it even has a theatre for surgeries, it’s really very impressive. No, I actually went to work in Iraq, performing general medical duties, giving vaccines and helping with community health along with another group of volunteers. I was only a very junior doctor at the time, but performing eye care there was what made me want to become an eye doctor later. Eyes are very beautiful, especially under a slit lamp. Before I went out there, and while I was there, I was very nervous. I was worried that I would make mistakes, or that I would not be allowed to care for some people, because I was a man and Iraq was an increasingly conservative Muslim country at the time. I didn’t want to make people uncomfortable, but it’s also very important that pregnant women get medical care, and if my boss made me responsible for that sort of thing, I didn’t want to disappoint him.”

He took a deep breath in.

“I arrived in february. Five months into my duty there, I had gotten past most of these problems, and I was beginning to feel more at home. On the first day of August, we were having an clinic for expecting mothers, teaching them the benefits of breastfeeding, explaining what things to look out for if their babies became unwell, and telling them how they could expect labour to go - it was an evening class, so everybody was tired, a lot of the women there had been working hard during the day either at home, or at a job, but my colleague Joseph and I had worked a night shift just before and were expecting another one, so we had both woken up late and were feeling awake and alert. I…”

He paused for a moment, closing his mouth after a second when the words didn’t come.

“A small group of young men came in to the classroom, carrying AK-47s. They were furious with us, and believed that we were teaching their sisters and wives some sort of propaganda. Joseph saw them first, but I was closest to the door at the time, and I also had the best Arabic, so I turned and tried to tell them that they could not bring weapons into the hospital, and that they could not be here without permission. I knew that some of our students had very bad home lives, as well, so I was very scared that they might be hurt.”

He swallowed, keeping his composure with all the grace of a man who’d spoken about this before - probably in therapy.

“The leader of the group pointed his rifle at my head, and he told me that his country did not need our help, and that we were not welcome there. I told him that we weren’t doing anything wrong, and that medical care was very important for a baby, and then one of his friends shot me twice in the stomach, and I fell over.”

“I remember that there was a lot of noise, and that I kept praying that I wouldn’t die. ‘Please God, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, don’t let me die,’ I kept saying to myself in my head. We were only volunteers, there was no official MSF mission in Iraq at the time, so we had very limited resources, and I wasn’t sure if I would survive at all. Everybody was shouting and screaming, and I remember that the men who shot me kept looking down at me and yelling at my colleagues. Eventually, I fell unconscious, and I thought I had been killed. When I woke up it was in an Iraqi hospital, and on the news I saw that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The first Gulf War had begun.”

He ran a hand through his hair, and relaxed at last, giving a heavy sigh as he looked at the assembled party.

“We left the country after that, and I spent more time in a hospital in London - the same one I had studied at, actually. I saw a therapist about what had happened to me, I eventually recovered from my injury, and I went into specialist training as an ophthalmology registrar after that.” He gave everyone a little smile. “Happily ever after.”

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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Goodnight

The Chapel

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The chapel at Goodnight was a frequently overlooked space, being a fairly obscure and out of the way room that you could only get to through the disused and often-overgrown employee corridors hidden behind the wall panels of the commercial space - and the depression that the new mages were sinking into wasn’t exactly helping their motivation with regards to any religious obligations they might’ve had; if it wasn’t something they could do without climbing three flights of stairs and nearly getting lost in the maze behind Goodnight’s broken facade, it wasn’t something they were easily gonna do.

Of course, there were exceptions - indeed, now you were one of them.

Whether it was your idea or just something you got roped into, you found yourselves headed up towards the old manager’s office, replete with rotten blinds and greyed, decaying wood flooring, a dozen or so plastic chairs that were normally arranged like makeshift church pews, now rearranged in a small circle, crowding up the space of the room. The far side of the room - which was surprisingly big for a simple middle manager - held a great oaken desk, brought low by the ravages of time and finally repurposed as an altar, candles and all. A few prayer mats, rolled up and tucked away in the corner, completed the image.

A place for everyone to pray, left empty to gather dust in the face of the ultimate crisis of the faith.

When you got there, though, there were a couple of people already there.

Immediately visible because he took the back seat closest to the door was Brooks, arms folded and staring ahead. The glint of his pistol in its holster was a jarring contrast to the place of worship. Sat next to him was the military-esque woman from earlier. She looked over her shoulder at your approach - to have made it to the chapel before you she must have made a beeline from dealing with the unruly mage straight to the chapel. On the far side of the room sat Billy, talking quietly to a tall, skinny, darkly tanned bearded man holding what looked like a pocket Bible resting on his knee.

As you entered, the man with the copper skin laid a gentle hand on Billy's shoulder to shush him, and stood up to greet you.

"Hey hey, come in, take a seat. My name is Dr Chris Cassar. Don't worry, I'm not a psychiatrist." He added, with a soft smile and a faint accent. Spanish or Italian, maybe.

As he stood up, Billy stood up alongside him, looking between the Doctor and the newcomers with clear admiration for the former.

"I may have met some of you before, please forgive me if I've forgotten your names," he continued, taking a step forward to start shaking people's hands as they came through the door, "I'm one of the doctors here, so I see quite a lot of faces every day. We were very grateful for your work a fortnight ago, and I just wanted to thank you again, in person this time."

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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The Outback Camp

10:46AM

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As everything fell into place and the bandits broke earth with their shovels - right next to the campfire, no less - an unspoken tension in the party finally broke and as Brooks gave the nod, Matthew raised his hand to focus on the embers below. Fog as thick as a forest began to flow from the embers of the firepit, slowly at first but steadily growing to a rapid and unnatural billow, fanning itself out and covering a gradually growing area of the camp.

After just a moment the bandits noticed it and froze in place. The would-be ambushers froze too, the tension building as it seemed more and more like their prey would see through the plan, realise what was going on, and rush for their weapons any moment now…

“Rodney, you fuckin mug! What the fuck did I tell you?” One of them bellowed, turning to face their colleague - who dropped his shovel in shock.

“I- I- what?”

“It doesn’t fuckin matter how much you use, it is funda-fucking-mentally impossible to hotbox the fuckin outback, you stupid goddamn motherfucking degenerate!” The smaller man continued, before throwing his still full can of beer at the other guy, who yelped almost exactly like a dog and failed tragically to dodge it, landing flat on his ass after it hit him in the head.

After breathing a sigh of relief, the shooters in the group retook their aim, and waited just a moment more for the fog to reach its critical point - the point at which the enemy was almost engulfed by it, but still visible enough to be shot at, so that in the very next moment they would be unable to react and return fire if they survived.

The smaller of the pair that were screaming at eachother took a step towards the other man, who had more or less fallen into the mist and was no longer visible, and then-

The staccato chorus of gunfire tore through the fog like knives through cloth, and the aggressor’s head jerked backwards violently as his body was perforated, and he spasmed reflexively away from wherever it was he thought the pain was coming from, before collapsing limply to the ground in the same movement.

Two others were hit in the opening salvo, one of them simply dropping dead as their head was abruptly opened, the other giving a low, guttural cry as she was hit in the stomach and doubled over instantly. The final man had vanished into the fog and couldn’t be seen.

It was over in less than half a minute. As the gunfire died down and the air was filled instead by the plastic-metal clacks of weapons being handled and reloaded, the camp itself fell deathly silent, and the fog started to lift even quicker than it’d come, pulling away from the bodies like a sheet being pulled back in a morgue. One of them was still moving, but not much - and it was rapidly fading, slipping away as quickly as the great stain on her stomach grew, with all the certainty of an absolutely mortal wound.

After a moment of pause, a silhouette emerged at a sprint from the fading remnants of the fog - the man who’d disappeared into it to begin with - and headed, panting like a terrified dog, towards Ellen. He was a big man, lanky and inelegant as he ran, hair blonde but streaked with blood, eyes wild; and he held one arm with the other as he ran, blood oozing between his fingers. When he locked eyes with Ellen, his face twisted into a confused complex of rage, fear, and hesitation, and he let go of his wounded arm to form a fist with his one functional hand.

“No!” He screamed at her as he charged, voice rich with agony and not knowing what else to say, straight at her.

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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The Billy Bus

10:37AM

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The journey was long and arduous - although there were some pretty obvious tire tracks heading down the road, they departed notably from it after only a few miles, and the rest of the path they led was over dusty rolling hills; the going was slow and occasionally dangerous, with some portions of the journey requiring that the heavier and less mobile van either make departures from the obvious tracks where the trucks had gone up an incline that the kombi couldn’t, and with other parts requiring that the passengers disembark and walk alongside it.

Before long, the sun came up, and the heat of the desert woke up with it. Between the sweet smell of the cooking oil engine and the growing heat of the Aussie sun, rising fast against the stark blue of the outback sky, it was becoming increasingly clear that time was not on their side.

As the team got further and further into the journey, the question of just how the bootleggers had been spotted all the way out here started to grow in its importance. They travelled for hours, and since leaving the dirt road there hadn’t even been a hint of civilisation - no other roads, no other buildings, nothing apart from some old electrical pylons carrying thin wires across the desert, stretched out like black strings pulled over the amber-orange dirt.

Five hours of slow work, five hours of painstaking tracking, five hours until they found anything.

There was a small plume of smoke - around the size you might expect from a poorly maintained campfire or barbecue or something - just over the next hill. Hans pointed it out, and Billy stopped the van. With a little more investigation, it quickly became evident that this was indeed the hideout of whoever it was that had hit the ‘leggers - or at least that the tracks left by those people led here, and that both the trucks involved were parked out front.

The base itself was a simple affair, composed of two beat up old caravans that had clearly been there for a long time, and a large red van with its hood open and engine very conspicuously missing. All three of these were arranged in a semicircle - or at least as much of one as could be achieved with only three components - around a firepit, which was the source of the smoke by which the place had been identified.

Most pertinently, there were four people outside, all huddled around a fifth person - who was lying on the floor.

Second most pertinently, the coolbox was nowhere to be seen.

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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By the Billy Bus

Abigail and Billy

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As Siobhan appeared practically out of nowhere, and began having a go at Abi, Billy’s eyes widened in shock. He stuttered for a moment as she threatened Abi, standing sharply and holding out his hand to tell her to stop - as she vanished.

“I- I, what the fuck? Shit, Abigail, you alright?”

Abigail stared at the space where Siobhan used to be, open-mouthed and silent. She turned to gawp at Billy, then at her hand, then she sank back into the seats with a low hiss. "My hand hurts," she croaked.

“I-” he stuttered again, looking between Abi’s hand and the void Siobhan had left behind. After a moment he started to look all around, too, as if Siobhan would still be there, just watching.

“Fuck.” Billy swore, fists clenching for a moment as he tried to decide what to do. “Shit, Abi, what- no, what the fuck, Siobhan?!”

"What. What?" Abigail watched Billy as a frown started to creep onto her features.

“Well, I- I- Look, Abi, I don’t know what all this is about her race or ethnicity, but she ain’t allowed to just go round threatenin’ you. Are you alright?”

"S'fine bud, I kinda had it comin' to me," Abigail slurred as she continued her gradual melt into the vehicle's furniture, twisting her body so she was lying on her back, hand in the air. "Hand still hurts though," she reminded him with a twinge of cheeriness. Her expression was clouded by thought.

“No, that ain’t fine. Ain’t no part of that fine. I don’t care what you said or did, you didn’t visit violence upon ‘er and ought not have had it threatened against you. An’ I didn’t ask if it were justified, Abigail,” he added, his voice softening a bit as he handed her the little tube of anaesthetic cream, “I asked you if you were alright.”

"Peachy, chief, I'm fuckin' peachy." Abigail grabbed the edge of the dressing and tugged - once, twice - with grunts of discomfort. She muttered under her breath. She gingerly tried to peel back the swabs of material. "AwyagoddabefugginkiddinmeeeeRRRRARGH-!" she groaned, growled then yelled out as she tore off the wound dressing like a cheap bikini line wax strip. Her back curled with the pain, launching her back into a sitting position. Clumps of her hair stuck to her face with the residual sweat of her wound treatment and she squeezed half the tube in one hefty blob, smearing it into her hand and down her arm.

As she tore off the dressing and a part of her own hand Billy paled a little.

“Holy shit. Hey, ya might wanna keep that on.”

"I'm gonna fuckin' 'visit violence' on your ass in a minute if you don'-...fffuck it, man! It's FINE! Now ain't the time for this shit!" Her voice was shrill and her breathing ragged. "We got bigger shit to deal with," she wheezed, regaining some composure. "Forget about the-...the lady. There's corpses everywhere! Priorities!"

At the comment of visiting violence upon him, Billy’s eyebrow quirked upwards.

“Somehow, I doubt I’ll have to worry about you beatin’ the shit outta me, Abigail. Alright, you have a point, we can talk about this later - but Abigail, we are gon’ talk about it later. As for that crazy bitch…” Billy’s fist clenched again as he turned and looked towards the house, where he could only imagine she’d gone.

“She won’t try anything, Abi. I ain’t gonna let her make good on any threats, alright? If she does try something then I hope she brought water, because she’ll be walkin’ home.” He spat into the dust. “An’ I very much mean that.”

"Good. Yeah. I…" she was staring at her hand again, watching it shake and ooze. "I shouldn't have done that."

With Billy's assistance, Abigail redressed her wound and mumbled something about lightheadedness. She was lying back on the seats when Ellen came in, and waved her bandaged hand around like a prize. "Hand's fucked!" She chirped. Her other hand pulled down the brim of her greasy baseball cap over her brow as she tuned out for the rest of the discussion, half-turning towards the backs of the seats as everyone crowded back into the bus.

Billy turned to face Ellen as she asked for the phone.

“Well shit, it’s good to know someone made it, even if they are in bad shape.” He replied, handing the phone over as Brooks approached. “Yeah, no, I reckon we prob’ly got a bit more than we bargained for with this one. Let’s just see what the folks at Goodnight think of it.”

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The House

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As the wounded bootlegger was heaved up, he gave a weak, agonised groan.

“Shit.” He muttered. “Fuck, wait, if you- if you need weapons, I had my gun with me in the kitchen, Alex- Alex dropped his in the living room when he got hit. You gotta, you…” he trailed off into mumbled grunts of pain as he was moved to the basement.

Just as they approached the basement, the door down to it opened, and Hans and Mark stepped out into the house, dressed in light clothes and carrying weapons; Hans was the more heavily armed of the two, carrying his rifle and wearing a body armour vest, magazines for the rifle tucked into pouches on its front, whereas Mark was holding an uzi uncomfortably in one hand, and had a baseball bat in the other. Which he awkwardly dropped about as soon as he saw all the blood in the house.

“Hallo.” Hans held up a hand in greeting as he approached the group. “Get him into the basement, they’re going to perform the transport to bring him back to Goodnight in two minutes.”

After that was done, and the wounded man no longer an issue, Mark and Hans organised everyone. The injured bootlegger was right, and there were two pistols to be found in the house - a browning hi-power in the kitchen, and a 1911 that had been dropped under the sofa in the living room, handle bloodied and stained, but perfectly functional.

Once they were all by the van, they broke the bad news.

“We have orders from Goodnight.” Hans began.

“Yep.” Mark agreed, before continuing. “You ain’t gonna like this, but it turns out this delivery was needed a lot more badly than we thought. Unless it turns out we’re somehow going straight up against the fuckin army or the FOE or some shit, we’ve been told to come help you track down and retrieve the supplies, a cool box in particular.”

“Yes. By any means we deem necessary.” Hans nodded grimly, patting the side of his weapon.

“So uh… what do you think, guys?”

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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The House

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“Not an offer? Fuck me, that’s a shame.” He chuckled weakly, forcing little pulses of blood up through the padding around his stomach wound. “Real shame.”

As Siobhan entered the room he looked up, and gave her a foul grimace and a grunt of pain - the closest thing to a grin he could muster.

“I… uh, Niki, Niki an’ I were in the army together for about ten, fifteen years. She was always a pistol. Pretty intense woman, honestly, but like, my best mate. Very moral. This operation wasn’t exactly her idea, but I couldn’t just let ‘er do it alone.”

“I always wondered if things would’a worked out between us, but I don’t think she was made for marriage, you know what I mean?” He coughed weakly, and then gave a little chuckle, laughing at something he’d thought of. “I mean,” he closed his eyes for a moment, before forcing them back open, “she tried it about three times. Bless her, three weddings, two divorces, one bloke just disappearin’.”

“Michael. Me an’ Niki knew Michael from the pub. Bit of a strange guy honestly, but that’s the sort of person Niki just seems to attract. Eccentric is a better word for Michael actually. It was always like, if you- if you need somethin’, maybe don’t know where to get it? You can ask Michael, he’ll probably know where to get it.”

He went silent for a moment, still and quiet.

“He, uh, it was his idea, all this. I dunno if he knew someone who was a mage, or anything like that, but he seemed to know people, and when he pitched it to Niki she liked the sound of it.

“Well, are ya here to join the threesome, beautifu-[i][b]uuuuuuck![/i][/b]” He gave a tortured scream, stifled by clenched teeth, as he tried and failed to raise himself to a sitting position to get a better look at Siobhan.

He gave up on sitting, and eased himself back down to lie flat on the floor, letting his head roll to the side. He stared at the other body numbly, and swallowed hard.

“Alex… Alex was Niki’s son. Good kid. Good fuckin’ kid. Real eager. Cool head on his shoulders. I- I don’t think smuggling was enough for him. He was plannin’ to ask if he could go back with you guys. To join in proper, be more direct about things. He…” he trailed off, mouth open, words caught up in his throat.
“Fuck. It’s all gone to shit. Look, I don’t care what happens to me now, you gotta get the coolbox if nothing else. There’s- there’s shit in there, needs to be kept chill, and it won’t last once the sun comes up proper and it starts gettin’ hot. You understand?”

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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The House

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"Shit." He muttered as he drew his hand away from the gut wound, and saw that the blood was still fresh, red, and running. He shook his head in what might well have been disappointment.

"They hit us about two hours ago. I'd say maybe six guys? Two of 'em came in over the westward hill, had a rifle, killed Michael where he stood. We fought back, but the guys on the hill managed to get Niki before they-" He gave a grimace and a loud, agonised grunt, as he tried to shift himself into more of an upright position. "- oh, fuck. Fuck. Before they pulled back. Alex and I came out when we heard gunshots, but we took gunfire from down the road. Didn't get much of a look at em. Hit Alex in the chest, me in the guts. Alex ain't- he wasn't moving, wasn't breathing."

He stopped, staring at the body of his fallen comrade.

Meanwhile, Brooks was stalking about the house, taking note of the details of the fight. The most immediate thing he noticed was the distribution of the structural damage - the bullet holes where more or less exclusively on the front facing side of the house, and scattered all over, forming three general clusters. The individual shots weren't terribly close together, and did not form obvious patterns of fire like an automatic weapon would - so it was at least three separate people, from three separate angles, firing non-automatics.

One of the patchwork clusters had fewer, but larger, holes - the one that went through the door, in particular. Brooks could recognise that this, at least, was rifle-caliber. Probably a bolt action rifle, firing hunting rounds.

The other two were harder to discern, mostly because one of them had gone mostly through a wooden-shuttered window. The sheet glass on the inside of the shutter had been completely shattered, and there were about twelve holes in the shutters on the other side - but Brooks couldn't see any specific, well-bordered holes on the other side of the living room that would match up to these ones, just some areas of patchy damage to the wall, not unlike buckshot or birdshot. The third source of fire hadn't penetrated very much, but had left lots and lots of much smaller pellet holes where it had - so the third weapon was probably a shotgun.

Overall? Three specific sources of gunfire. One probably a hunting rifle, one most likely a handgun loaded with hollowpoint ammunition, and one a shotgun loaded with buckshot.

The spatter of blood on the floor seemed consistent with a major injury at gunpoint, but at the point where it had happened the blood was too smeared to be easily readable. Enough was on the walls to be sure that they'd been shot and not stabbed, but nothing further could be told. When he took a closer look at the blood though, something else became apparent.

Off to the side, stuck to the floor by the congealing blood, were shell casings.

9mm Parabellum rounds, six of them. Plus one larger, .45 ACP casing.

It didn't seem like very much fighting had happened inside the house, if any. Whoever had hit the bootleggers had been satisfied with killing two of them, suppressing the others, and presumably stealing their cargo.

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The Witcher: Under the Shadow

I am also in. There was a *lot* going on at the time of our first shot, and there still is, but I've honestly been missing the game a lot. I'd be down to play Alan again too.

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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The Outback at Dawn

05:40 - Local Time

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Angeline

The first thought in Angie's head when she made contact with the skin of the casualty was that although they were very cold - for a person, at least - they weren't as cold as she thought they would be if they were dead; there was a noticeable chill against her hand when she touched them, but it wasn't quite as bad as the chill of the morning, or the cold of the earth underfoot. Were they still alive?

The answer came with the absence of pulse or breath. The woman by the shed had been shot in the chest at least twice, and had either been killed then and there by the trauma, or bled to death at some point quickly after - just not quite long enough ago that she'd gone completely cold.

The man who'd fallen in the road was a simpler, and more gruesome, story. He wasn't moving, he had no pulse, and the sheer extent of trauma to his skull made it all but impossible for him to have not been killed instantly when the bullet struck him, probably in the back of the head. Angie didn't want to look at the exit wound.

No point giving these people first aid. Not any more.

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The House

As the four of you approach the front door, you get the benefit of a closer look at it. There is blood spattered over the wooden frame, and bullet holes dot its body - just the same as they dot the front of the entire right hand front of the house, cracking windows and wall panel alike. When the door creaks open it becomes obvious that the blood staining the door had been from more than a flesh wound, as much the same lies in a congealed pool of even greater volume on the floorboards of the hallway too, smeared and scraped around by what seems to have been the movement of the injured person. A bloody bootprint on the back of the front door suggests that whoever got shot must have kicked it closed behind them when they fell.

The blood forms a trail, and it leads across a sparse but homely enough living room - still stocked with dusty furniture and a television - to what seems likely to be the kitchen.

Further up the hallway, unmarred by gore, two other doors seem to be ajar; the one on the left leads to a room you can barely see into, but which has tiled walls at the very least, the other of which leads down a set of stairs, presumably to the basement.

The air is still stale in here, bearing the faded scent of ancient, forgotten residents, barely detectable underneath the iron, cloying smell of the blood and the gunsmoke. It smells of beer, cigarettes, and tinned foods.

Brooks in particular is able to recognise the current state of the blood on the floor - congealed and clotted, but still wet, this blood is no longer fresh but certainly no more than half a day old, if that; combined with the strength of the smell of burnt ballistic propellant lingering in the air, this combat must have been no more than two, maybe three hours ago.

As Zephyr takes his own first step over the threshold, he invokes another of his gifts, and immediately he sees things a little differently to the others. His senses both sharper and better guided, he re-evaluates the environment, re-processes the sights, smells, and tactile sensations of it all, and comes quickly to a stark conclusion; the fight was recent, yes, but not all of the blood stinks so equally of the beginnings of decay, and not every room in the house is so quiet.

Through the gap between the door to the kitchen and the walls surrounding it, Zephyr can smell fresher blood, and Zephyr can hear shallow, faint breathing.

Somebody is still alive in here.

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