Culluket

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka walked sullenly with her arms wrapped around her body, following where the Inquisitor lead.

She had needed it. Of course he couldn't understand. But she had been right. She knew when she needed things. The little silver blessing had saved her life. She had done the right thing.

The werewolf's head bounced sickeningly against Gregor's thigh as he marched. They would stay in Oaksheart, he said. Did you notice how wild and mad it was, he said.

"Yes, I noticed," she said, bitterly. "It was as if the world was screaming at me. I could hear its blood, inside my head. Taste it."

She looked back miserably at the fading fires, and the charnel pit that the man-beast had made its home.

"The village is this way." She pointed at an oblique angle through the impenetrable thicket of shadows. "I can still smell the..."

The bottom dropped out of her mind.

Loka trailed off, slow realization creeping up her gut. Her head turned sharply from the direction of the road to look back at the distant shadow of the lair. To regard the loathsome severed head, thick with male pheromones, gripped in the dark shape of the Inquisitor's gloved hand. She craned her neck to stare straight up at the pallid, drifting northern moon.

The moon. That odd and yet familiar scent to the blood. So that was it. The answer had been right in front of her all the time.

"There is another," she said, bleakly, as the moon disappeared behind the heavy bank of cloud. "It's a female."

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

The Koptic woman had the decency to look ashamed as Gregor produced the glittering silver fork. But when he pronounced his judgement, she flinched as though slapped. Her lips twisted downward, helplessly. For a moment, her beautiful face was a raw canvas of pain, her voice weak and miserable in the emberlit darkness.

"I needed it." she whimpered, pitifully. "They had so many. They had hundreds! They did not need this one. I thought that it would be alright--" She pushed the palm of her hand into her eye and turned away, apparently busying herself with tightening her belt.

It was a moment before the belt was satisfactory.

"...Yes, I understand." She told him, in a strained voice. She turned back to face him, her eyes still downcast, her voice bitter. "I understand a lot of things."

She held out her hand for the fork, her gaze still lowered, and fixed on the dark trickle of blood spreading between their feet.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka could see the Inquisitor's hand extended to her, from her position slumped at his feet. Her jailor. Her savior. She kept her eyes on the headless, mountainous carcass of the wolf, and pretended not to see.

She stood quickly with a heavy creak of leather, her coat sliding backward up the trunk of the shattered birch, pulling back her hands.

"I am alright." she said, tightly. She filled her lungs, drawing in the river of midnight scents, letting it out in a slow, shaking breath. The wolf stank of corruption and sweat and fresh, hot blood. Like the blood of the victims it had taken, smeared across the surface of its lair. The moon bore down on her relentlessly, and she felt very, very far from home.

"I am alright." she said again.

She stepped around the pooling blood as though repelled and bent low, searching, not finding her bread -- as if she would spit upon it now even if she had been starving -- but eventually spotting the glint of her cosmetics tin and plucking it up before looking carefully around for the other item. She turned and looked back to Nykerius.

"Must you bring that with us?" she eyed the enormous, shaggy head sidelong, still dripping darkly onto the forest floor. "Will the Inquisitor's word not suffice that... that the creature is dead?"

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG (Closed)

BUCKLE UP, THE WHEEL TURNS. Here is my to-do list for Babel season 2 so far:

• It's a surprise. But you'll see. Ahoo hoo hoo.
• Cat says a thing.
• Yell at Riley (also, get yelled at by Riley)
• Beat up Lisa (also, get beaten up by Lisa)
• Get strongarmed into moonlighting for The Cowl somehow so that she, Odette and Silence can be forced to work together, because just thinking about what a personality circus that would turn into already has me in virtual tears.
• Make bad decisions and an enemy of just about everyone.
• Receive a $$ SELL YOUR SOUL FOR FUN AND PROFIT $$ letter from Broker at some point and stop by to discuss an evil three-step plan.

God Neon

I can wait as long as needed, so take your time making sick-ass posts. I'm just happy to see the OOC buzzing again.

Mass Effect: Brink

Zik stepped forward, into the line of fire. At last. The anarchic interference. The scam netmails. The insufferable jokes. It would be so easy. So easy to end them all.

But he hesitated.

The Sur-Clan was smiling.

Why was he smiling? He shouldn't be smiling. He was outmatched! This was Omus Vol's domain. He held all the cards! He owned the entire deck!

"What?--" Short spoke up in protest as Zik's performance went on.

Vol was paralyzed. Snared in a labyrinth of second guesses. He had lost this game too many times to simply brush this off. Zik knew something. The Sur-Clan knew something he didn't. Paranoia overtook him. The pressure suit's lenses stared straight ahead in blank, silent terror.

"No, that's--"

What was it? Had the guns been reprogrammed? Were they training themselves on Vol's back even now, their ammunition replaced with cream pies?

"Oh, for--"

He was setting up Vol's secretary. But why? What was his grand gambit, his endgame? What nefarious and circuitous plot was he hatching? This had to be only the first step. Where was the pitfall?

"Listen, pal--"

Fool! one half of his mind asserted, it was a bluff! He has to be bluffing!

"I don't even--"

But what if he wasn't? shrieked the other half in borderline panic. It was just possible that Zik was playing some hideous game of reverse psychology. Anything Vol did might be the wrong move!

"You can't possibly think--"

She was cut off again and again as the assault leader delivered his next line, prancing and pirouetting like an exotic dancer made of LIES. As her protests became more vigorous and Vol's Zik-induced paranoia reached a fever pitch, the arms dealer rallied, laying his hands down on the desk and leaning forward. This charade had gone on long enough. The eyes of the Dashers and his own people were upon him. It was time to fold, or to call. And Omus Vol did not fold.

"*sssssssst* ...I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, Sur-Clan, but--"

The doors slammed open again, packed with T'Loak's personal guard, bristling with heavy weaponry.

"VOL!" bellowed the leader.

"It was her!" Omus blurted, pointing both stubby claws at his (former) secretary.

The woman threw up her hands. "AW, COMEON!"

The armored mercenaries took up positions along the walls, crouching and leveling their weapons. "It's over, kid! We know everything! Aria wants to talk to you. Slowly."

"You fat, backstabbing piece of Elcor crap!" Short pointed a skinny, accusing finger at Vol before rounding on the Salarian, "And you! Don't think I don't know you were behind this! You two think you can just set me up and hang me out to dry? You'll be sorry. You'll both be very sorry!"

There was a thunderous biotic detonation, an explosion of reinforced metal, and a fleeing secretary, pursued by Aria's hounds. Vol stood rigid as the dust slowly settled. And then he gradually stepped out from behind the desk, simmering. He spread his arms, forcing a glacially cheery tone.

"*hsssst* ...My dear friends," he wheezed, "How... good it is to see you again. *hffshhh* ...If you will just give me a moment to... *hffff* ...call my number two secretary and... transfer some assets... Whilst I prepare for your..."

Omus glared murderously at Zik. His teeth grit so hard behind the sculpted respirator it made the speakers vibrate.

"...Adventures."

The crooked portrait fell from the wall with a weak thump.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

It was over.

She didn't need to have seen it to know. The unbearable pounding in her head subsided, the buzzing of the creature's madness drained away with the terrible red sun and the suffocating blood-taste of its mindless rage. The maelstrom had passed. There was only the dark, quiet forest, the distant crackle of smoldering wood, and the baleful full moon glowing silver through the black canopy above.

She stayed down on the damp, invisible carpet of leaves, sitting up against the splintered birch. The scattered little fires still burned in a glowing red and orange haze through the trees, and Gregor's silhouette stood dark against it, his sword radiating a pale light like Koptic opal. The beast lay like a foetid hill at his feet. He seemed to slump, when it was finally over. As though the exhaustion of the ordeal had finally caught up with him. Like a loyal, rigid old guardsman when the Queen has passed and he can again allow himself to suffer. He took a weary breath, his aspect like bitter spice on her tongue, and called her name.

She sat in the darkness and stared silently at the fallen beast a long time before answering.

"I am here," she said at last. Her voice broke, just a little.

Mass Effect: Brink

My puss pulled through today, and I'm more or less back in action. I'll have something up tomorrow as well.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Well, she thought to herself as the ravening monstrosity stormed through the smoke and flames as though they weren't there; It worked.

The beast trampled the burning wood, steaming with its own sick inferno. Everything was red, now, shot through with black lines of pain. Something hot trickled from her nose. She tasted mouthfuls of blood she knew weren't there and nearly choked. She had been braced to call up the flame, show it the mandala, blind it or force it back, but she was still weak, and the power of the warped creature hurtling toward her was too much.

Her concentration shattered with her courage. She panicked.

She fled back into the nightmarish darkness, not caring that she might never find her way out, but the crack and splinter of treetrunks being shattered behind her was closing too quickly to bear. She tripped and fell, her hand closing on a heavy stone, rolled over and threw it at the gigantic silhouette, harmlessly. She groped in her pockets and threw half a bread roll, the little makeup tin. She threw something thin and glittering that bounced off one mad, bulging eye, and at that the beast drew up short, shaking its massive head and bellowing in a deafening, tortured squeal that was almost human. She flung herself away as one thick-hewed limb tore blindly through a young birch less than a foot from her head. The beast was reeling. It was the one and only chance they had waited for. She filled her burning lungs and let out one last, tripartite shriek, holding the final note at a piercing, unbearable fever-pitch.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

"Get back!"

There was no need for a second warning. Loka was scrambling from the stinging explosion of sparks and burning charcoal before the Inquisitor had begun to open his mouth. The creature was huge. Nykerius had said it was hulking, but the Deva had gleaned no real concept of its actual size, nor of the overwhelming power of its presence. The wolf-thing radiated madness. Blind, burning red rage pulsed from it like a dark sun, a lake-sized aura of violence and hate that she was stunned she hadn't been able to see before now, dwarfing the Inquisitors grey, stony determination. She put her hands to her ears and screamed along with it as it roared in pain from the touch of the silver blade, seeming to shake the trees to their very roots with the force of it. She smelled animal fear in every direction at the sound, even through the smoke and the stench of the abomination's hide and its sickening breath. She smelled her own.

Gregor's eyes were locked on those of the slavering shadow, his feet moving defensively, blade held firmly between them. One huge, dark paw swung like a brutal pendulum and he backstepped, briefly, quickly, angling the blade but holding back the return strike. Conserving himself. Tensed. Patient.

Loka skirted the edges, dragging up the larger chunks of flaming wood in her gloved hands and throwing them back toward the pile, trying to keep the stricken bonfire alive. Her heart pounded and her senses threatened to give way. There was a drumbeat in her head, thrumming in time with the pulse of the lycanthrope's tainted blood. She struggled against it, fought to find her god, the power in the beauty of the fire, of the sliver of moonlight, of her earrings and her painted eyes.

As if sensing it, the beast turned in an eyeblink and snapped at her, the jaws clashing, showering the earth with foul ropes of spittle. She fell backward and scrambled away from it in naked terror as the Inquisitor's blade arced in for another strike. But the great wolf was ready, smashing its tremendous limb backward, barely missing, its claws cracking hard into the trunk of a dead tree, splintering the wood like dried clay.

Loka fought through her panic and the white noise of her overloaded senses. She had to do something. She had to help.

She pulled herself to her feet and darted around to one side over the sea of embers, keeping the broken little fire between herself and the beast. She braced herself on her rear leg, bending the other to rest on the tip of her boot, forced herself to take in a deep lungful of cold, tainted, smoke-fouled air, and screamed again; a high-pitched peacock's call that pealed through the black wood like a bell and vibrated cleanly through the dark wolf's bones.

It flinched and clenched its slavering jaw, keeping its mad eyes on Gregor and his hateful, burning sword. She drew her power and called again, and the echo inside the chaos of its thrashing mind rang twice as loud. The beast's rage redoubled. It swung down at Gregor with both paws, roaring, the blow thundering into the damp earth and showering the clearing with mud and stones.

The third scream was three times as loud. Madness overtook it. It whirled on her, keening like a shrieking gale in agony, hunger and hate.