Snails and Tails told Jack that the Sept had little interest in pursuing the House of the Covenant. That he and his pack should keep the Guardians updated, though. That they should inform them of any new developments, and any feints or strikes they intended to make. When Jack or Hector or Tamsin (or all three) found the Ragabash one day last week and told her that they were going scouting, she tucked her mouth closed, gave a little frown, then nodded her dark head to something unseen.
"Okay. Come see me before you go."
--
Friday evening, they find her before they head out, somewhere in the warren of dorm rooms in 1999 Broadway. She flashed a quick, gap-toothed grin and said she'd meet them down in the parking garage before they left.
So she met them: she was already there, hanging an insouciant hip on the frame of Jack's motorcycle with a pair of leather pouches in her hand. Perhaps even a trio: there's a foul smell coming from the leather, the faintest hint of withered flesh, and when Tamsin and Jack open the pouches, they see what looks to be a wrinkled ball of shriveled, desiccated flesh giving off that faint hint of corruption with every breath.
"Baneskin talens," Snails and Tails explains, gap-toothed grin going wider as she straightens from the motorcycle. Something vicious beneath the smile, and for good reason. The moon's getting fat and fatter. Full's coming soon. "'case you wanna hide in plain sight on the other side. "Won't full Dancers and won't fool the read bad-asses, but it'll get you through the rest of you can keep your temper in check and keep yourselves collected. Start thinking you're Rambo, though, the magic wears off and you turn back into pumpkins.
"Tasty-ass pumpkins."
A lift of her chin, a little two-fingered salute.
"Good luck, yeah?" Then she's pushing off, heading back toward the elevator bank to return to the Sept.
JackSnails and Tails gets her grin returned, nice and genuine-like once he's fought down that snarl of disgust at the rot-stuffed leather pouches. He takes one with a grunt of gratitude, "Thanks," once you skim off the layer of gruff on top. And again, it's genuine, returning the two-finger salute to his tribemate for her help.
The gruff is more a byproduct of that vivid picture she'd painted, of both turning into rot-smeared gourds to be feasted upon.
A moment later he throws his leg over his motorcycle, pulling on his own black dome of a helmet and holding a twin of it out to Tamsin for her to take. He looks hopeful this will go as well as the last time he gave one of his packmates a ride on the back of that matte-green blood-smeared Harley.
TamsinTamsin's lip curls like she's Veruca Salt being presented with something she already had when Snails and Tails first dangles out those withered corruption-leathered pouches, and, "Shit," she says, with that legendary Fianna eloquence. "Looks like a baby Wyrm-scrotum for each of us, Jack." But the lip-curl diminishes and she smiles, with only a glimpse of teeth, eyes going grave to touch Snails and Tails' brief-like, say, "Thanks. It'll be remembered."
Which is Tamsin's way of saying, I will remember you in song. Jack offers her a helmet to his motorcycle and Tamsin bites the inside of her mouth, then grins, just simmering with energy tonight, with Rage-spiking vitality, like if she doesn't move or react wholly to things snap-quick it'll all be too much, y'know, 'cause it's her moon isn't it, and there's a distinct yay! bounce to her step when she puts the helmet on and climbs up behind Jack. It's clearly the first time she's been on a motorcycle, or at least maybe the second.
"Let's go faster than you went with Hector," she says. Priorities.
TwilightThe House of the Covenant has been a fixture in East Colfax for a dozen years or more. Just another storefront church: red and black, these bleak black crosses carved into the red-painted plywood front. A fixture but hardly a noticeable fixture for most of those years. Just one storefront, red and black, plywood affixed over crumbling brick, the dusty windows of an apartment where the preacher (used to) live(d) with his wife. Another storefront beside that served as thrift store / emergency food pantry / semi-routine collective garage sale venue for years and years. That one was just a corrugated metal garage door set into the dusty of old mortar and crumbling brick.
Not even a name painted on the facade, though everyone local knew what it was. Painted in rough red paint over the pitted metal door, their motto:
Working While It's Day.
The place has metasticized, though. Grown like a cancer, and now the complex of church, meeting rooms, study rooms, thrift store, soup kitchen, and equipment storage takes up most of the city block surrounding the original single storefront.
The congregation has cannibalized the check cashing place and the cheap, seedy laundromat on the corner. The dull, easy-to-overlook glass door leading to the second-floor reception area for rEEntry is on the next block, but the lights are off. Signs around the neighborhood advertise something called The Healing Place - a drug treatment and sober living facility the church has been working to build over the past year, just catty-corner from the rambling block of original storefronts. That facility is clearly well underway, more retrofitting and renovation than new-build, but the construction site is quiet and still and dark on a Friday night, too.
If they make a quick pass up and down the street, Tamsin and Jack will drive past those storefronts churches, the soup kitchen and the thrift store that's been added on as the place grows and grows and grows.
Lights are visible in the main storefront for the church, as well as in a few of the apartments on the second storeys up and down the block. A handful of young men, primarily, at least one in an ill-fitting suit, are loitering outside, smoking cigarettes, shooting the shit.
It's a church so one presumes that that shit involves Jesus but it is also a pit of Wyrmspawn so: maybe not. Maybe not Jesus after all.
JackJack doesn't pull his bike to a stop until they're a good turn or two away from the building, even taking it down what looks like an uninhabited alley. He'd been kind enough to skip a few that looked like they were serving as shelter for homeless hovels of cardboard and tented canvas or blankets, leaving a few of Rat's more removed children undisturbed.
This little tucked away stretch of asphalt and dumpsters will certainly do for a place to hide his baby. The engine dies and he backs it away behind the large trash receptacle, climbing off and straightening himself as he looks into the pouch he'd hidden away inside his leather vest.
Jack looks a bit surprised when the expanse of rot he pulls out happens to be a face, but a moment later he's more interested, sniffing it, getting to know it, before his other hand drops the leather pouch away and stretches it out to fully examine it. It gives off another extra-potent waft of that smell at being handled, and he looks very now or never, gulping down a big breath of fresh air before finally pulling it on his face.
[ Resist Toxin on. Dropping a WP for Resist Pain. And, sadly, one Gnosis for Heightened Senses on. Yuck. ]
Jack[ Gnosis to activate the talen. ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Jack[ Re-rolling. His Gnosis is actually 5. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )
TamsinMaybe it is because Tamsin has run with more than one Uktena in her time. But now that they've passed the redfront of the first Church, then the second expansion, now that they've driven by the loitering men, and who knows what brought them there, what keeps them there, what fixes them in place but it can't be good, it's gotta be something lonely, something unsolaced (that's what Tamsin thinks, anyway, about religion, as hypocritically as anything, given her own pragmatic faith in Gaia and the myths she's been told ever since she got Found), now that Jack pulls the bike into a stop and it's go-time, she isn't all lip-curly about the baneskin. No; she wads it in her hand, rolling it like a stressball, and stares broodily and moodily at the street. Then she flicks Jack a generous, solemn look, catching that now or never gulp of air, and unrolls her own bit of tainted flesh to mask herself as well. Before she does, she says, "I wanna just walk right in. But I think we should probably go across, look around that way first. What advise you?"
And it occurs to her, saying these words, that she has never not had a No Moon before to call back to, even if it was only the connection Fog granted. She has never been without a sneak, someone who was born when the moon turned away, so they would be better at it. Tamsin has a brief misgiving, and then she squashes it, stretches out the gruesome flesh-mask and puts it to her face.
[Resist Toxin also on. Sure, we'll roll Gnosis to activate the Thingy.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (4, 10) ( success x 1 )
TwilightThe skin adheres to Jack's skin with a slick and hungry ease. The sense of rot sends roots into his face, shivering with a kind of oleaginous corruption and he can feel it skimming his skin, the projected illusion of a skeletal face, noise and eyes burned down to the sockets and nearly unseeing, the clattering articulation of a spiked and broken skin. The skein-shadow of the bane-face wrapped over and around and in and of his own.
The memory of its death a floating like a cloud above his mind, the sudden, terrible rending of tooth and claw. And the death before that one, the last one it sucked marrow from, the woman's cheek exploding beneath the crack of the butt of a flat black gun.
It is the same for Tamsin, though her skin has more flesh and less bone, and what she feels, what she senses is instead a kind of suppuration, a certain ooze through her body, this sense of bubbling rather than rotting corruption, harsh and wet and phlegmy.
The alley is quiet, still. The echo of a radio floating through an open window. Jack looks rather gross to Tamsin and Tamsin looks rather gross to Jack, because they are wearing desiccated skin over their own skin. But: neither looks like a bane to the other.
They just feel like them, crawlingly, on the inside.
Tamsin" - egh, wait, gross." The word is like spitting a salmon bone gets caught in your throat out; it's sharp and it hurts.
Tamsin[Take-me-over-to-the-other-side. WP, 'cause she don't know it's gonna be maybe easy.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
JackWhat advise you?
And he as well can feel the void of a trailblazer where Luna darkened should be, a Ragabash to lead them in their scouting, a sneak-thief and knife-skulking-in-the-dark to bring them there.
An Ahroun to bring them home would also be nice. A Theurge to tell them it's fine to wear the face of a bane would also be nice.
But Tamsin is there, and even through the rictus grimacing grin he makes with that Gaia-awful face he has on, she can tell he takes some respite in her presence as he nods that they should go across. And he's glad for a totem to bond him to her, and for a moment she can hear his thoughts, "Let's go," as he opens that tie that joins them.
A better way to speak once they're moving on the otherside as banes.
See what's worth seeing, maybe fighting, hopefully, if so, killing over there. And he too begins pushing through the Gauntlet to the other side.
[ Gnosis to cross over. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
TwilightThe gauntlet distends and then expands and they move through it molasses-slow, slow enough that one or the other may start wondering whether or not this time, this time they'll become stuck in the web, trapped like a fly awaiting calcification, digestion, trapped somehow between spirit and flesh.
But no - after an agonizing crossing they erupt into the alley on the otherside. The buildings are ghostly suggestions here, their presence variable - some have stronger, more solid impressions than others, but the newer builds - the White Castle they passed, the McDonald's down the street - are sometimes no more than buildings of bright weaver-energy.
This part of town is dark and darker, though. Even in the shadowy suggestion of the alley, which is lit by a few filaments of webbing, they can see a pair of banes in the through the ghostly shadow of the walls of the apartment block beside them. One is crouched close to the ground, a rotting pig-face with broken tusks and a smear of a mouth, snuffling through the rot as if for truffles. The other is skeletal, wrapped in winding clothes, with a mummified face, stark eyes and no mouth whatsover. For all that it has nomouth, it is clearly crouched beside someone, whispering across the Gauntlet.
They can hear it, the wrongness of its crawling voice, but cannot catch the meaning of any of the words.
Even from a few blocks away, they can see the... solid mass of church buildings, which look as if they were made of dark shadowed brick. Otherwise, the impressions are so close to the storefronts visible from the street in the physical world as to be remarkable. Dark shapes drift in and out - they see scrags with needle-fingers and dagger-mouths, they see skinny little screamers with pinheads and noeyes and all-mouths. They see a few bloated elementals drifting fat with corruption over the dark still street.
The church buildings are not transparent. They are solid. Seem solid from a distance, and they cannot see through.
Thus far, the banes seem to pay them no mind.
Jack[ Perception + Enigmas at -1 difficulty for Fog's boon. Specialty: Uncanny Instincts. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 4, 4) ( fail )
Tamsin[Percept + Enigmas -1 diff doo-dee-doo.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (4, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
TwilightThere appears to be a - woman - a very very white sort of drifting / banshee / ghostly woman visible in one of the windows corresponding to the apartment above the original storefront church. She also has a strange sense of something... thrumming or pulsing beneath the ground, maybe basement level, as they approach the complex.
Jack[ Intelligence + Enigmas. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Tamsin[Do I know these things?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
JackJack falls forward into his breed form a moment later, fur mottling from beneath the man-clothing that melts away, all the muddiest shades of brown and black even auburn sprouting in the darkness. Fangs and claws and paws, the lupus trudges forward, getting into character - probably nowhere near as well as the Galliard, but he rolls around in the penumbral muck, letting the strands of rot and pools of oily puddles muddle into his fur and leave it matted and unsavory.
Only then does he continue from out of the mouth of the alley they'd been taking in their surroundings from, taking to the street without much shame, no more than he'd expect a Wyrm-reveling bane to have, deciding that for him, it's more about...
It's more about rage. Dominance. That's the twisted spirit he'll become, though he's careful not to aim it at any of his 'fellow Wyrmlings', instead snapping and snarling at the Weaver-spiders that do manage to make a foray into the wrong side of the tracks, the Wyld spirits struggling to survive, though even then...
Well, there's only so far he can go, staying his claws, instead rationalizing that it is a necessary evil, but one he refuses to indulge in fully.
Eyes on the prize, Jack, eyes on the prize. He looks over his shoulder to make sure that Tamsin, his fellow 'bane', is with him.
What you see? This place... This is a fuckin' cesspool. Like he's too overwhelmed, the wolf part of him, to even be able to make sense of it.
Should we call up a fog? Anythin' more than a pea-brain spots us, might make us fer sure.
TamsinThere is a second when Furious Lament feels as if sheer willpower is all that will (sheer willpower, and her pack-brother) get her from one side to the other. The Gaunlet distends, but doesn't it cling; doesn't it feel like string, like gum in the hair? But then that second is over, and she can … Rejoice? They're on the otherside. They're looking at a street running rife with corruption, a spiritual scape that is bloating up with dark, filling like a blister with pus. Her breathing shallows when she sees it all; shallows, so that all she can hear is the thrumming of her heart, sloshing moon-bright in her bones, singing a war-song, a kill-it-all song, a song of action and of glory, but -- and her breathing deepens -- Tamsin calls herself back to this story.
This is sneaking into Mordor. She supposes Jack could be Sam. She guesses she can be Frodo. The galliard's scowls upward [Bane-flesh crackles, grimaces, grins and leers], some high-thing catching her attention and narrowing it.
It's Fog brings Furious Lament's spiritual voice to Jack's ears. It's Fog lets him hear her thoughts, the shape and weight of them, more solemn yet than he has heard her sound when speaking aloud, but also with more of Fianna to it. Tamsin, yeah, but Tamsin who is one of stag's singers, Tamsin who is present:
I see a woman whiter than the white stag, like a wailing woman, like an omen or a ghost or a vision, up there, see, up in that window right over the church, and I feel -- do you feel that? -- something pulsing under the ground like a fucking heart or a bruise.
Tamsin doesn't take little-wolf shape; it isn't her own; she doesn't want it. Tamsin, glowering thoughtfully at that window, peering over toward the Healing Place, the hints of shadows just-beginning-to-thicken, looks pointedly away from the thing whispering to someone through the Gauntlet, can't look at that right now, no oh no, this is Mordor, and she shifts into a bestial woman-thing, features thickening and distending, musculature hulking, hair Virago-snarling, and she grins -- a flash of angry teeth -- when Jack gets into character.
I wonder if it's Opal. If it'll talk to us.
Jack can see that that's where his pack-sister wants to get: right into the church, right to the upper level, right to whatever she sees near the top.
Fuck yes it's a cesspool. And nah, let's get closer before we call up Fog. Clean Fog comin' up from nowhere in a place like this might tip something off, yeah. Look, why don't we split a little, I'll come at the Church from there, you come at it from here, and we'll see if anything spots us before Fogging up their perspective and getting in.
TwilightThey're standing at the edge of the block in the looming shadow of the joined series of commercial buildings that make up the church of its affiliates. Across the way, the old block of storefronts and tenements that is being rehabilitated into the Healing Place is also becoming more darkly solid here. Something ebon-boned beginning to become as set-in a stain as the darkness around the church buildings.
The air tastes of an oily sort of corruption; it oozes over their senses and whispers through the skins stretched across their features. The constant hissing of the other banes is a crawling sensation up the spine, and occasionally this serpentine chorus is interrupted by a bone-chilling scream of rage or shriek of outrage. This shuffling hominid hunchback with three months and no eyes feeding on - something - some lingering bit of pollution staining in the storm sewers turns and snaps at Jack as he brushes too close, this gilded warning, but Jack recognizes it merely as the hungry snap of a predator warning others away from its food, rather than a true warning-threat, rather than recognition.
JackJack again acts as his answer, darting out under one of the bloated elementals floating above, sticking to the shadows cast by the buildings like a stalking predator at the edge of existence.
He circles. No just once. Not just twice. He circles three times before finally approaching, as if acclimating himself to his environment as much as acclimating it to his own hulking and grotesque form, wondering - if there were Black Spiral Dancers watching, might they welcome him like an errant brother?
And he takes the route laid out by Tamsin, finally vaulting to try and find a path to that upper level to meet her there.
Jack[ Manipulation + Stealth + Fog. Dropping a WP. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Tamsin[Manipulation! + Specialty. + Stealth! + Fog.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 3
Jack[ For real this time. Perception + Enigmas at -1 for Fog and -3 for Heightened Senses in Lupus. Specialty: Heightened Senses. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN2 (4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 9 ) Re-rolls: 2
TwilightJack also catches a glimpse of the watching-woman in white in one of the few non-boarded over windows above the church proper. More than that, he hears something like a heartbeat; hears it in his heart, hears it in his blood. It is coming from below the ground and is a pounding drum, it is a sweet dark summons, it is a clarion call that sings beneath the skin of the earth. Closer and closer and he can hear the whispers, knows it is not merely corruption inherent drawing the banes to this place, but this pied piper song that beats someplace below the ground level, in the bones of the place, and the closer he gets the louder and more certain and more tempting it is, and once he is inside the beat is everywhere, and is accompanied by the constant whisper of voices, sibilant and inhuman, all-too-human too, crawling grotesqueries of voices, praying, praying, praying, both as-one, in-concert, and individually for: The End of Things.
TamsinFurious Lament was born when the galliard's moon was waning, diminishing down into the judgment and seer-sight and sneakery rather than waxing into a warrior's full-blown spotlight. Maybe that is why, when she moves through the banes, the spirits that were corrupted and the spirits of corruption, she seems so perfectly at home, so capable of being one of those monstrous-things, monster-woman with some other monster's dead face clinging to her skin like a lamprey, like a leech, her own eyes behind it but you know she's not even Tamsin right now. Tamsin took the longer route, but she didn't circle like Jack did, didn't circle again and again, she just waded through the filth, felt it tack-tack-tack to her own clean skin, trying to keep an eye on Jack but mostly keeping her eyes on the prize.
The House of the Convenant. The entrance, and now that she's near, near enough to flash another look seeking her packmate, it's all about a way up.
Though it's also about the ways in. Weaknesses.
For later.
TwilightSo, they circle. One and one. They approach from different directions and feel the clack of eyes following them, the snuffling shuffle of errant and jealous regard. Feel the minemine mine mine minemine of their fellow monsters. Violence erupts right in front of Tamsin as a slug-like beast slaps a haggard, bent-kneed quadruped-bane out of its way, but then the slug cowers in her presence and offers a puddle of offal to her by way of tribute, nudging it along blindly with its tentacles.
--
Both make it in. Different paths, slinking through the dark shadow of the church buildings. Both make it through the front doors and find themselves inside where the beat of that deep subsonic pulse continues, grows stronger, reverbates through the building in a way that sets itself into the depths of the ear, beneath and behind the jaw, under the skin.
A glimpse of the sanctuary proper, more banes gathered and slumped in the folding chairs like addicts at an NA meeting, watching dully a constantly changing display on the stage: an inverted cross oozing black sludge from each of the four points of its frame.
But they have a goal: up and up and up.
Up the dark stairwell, the pulse of that beat receding somewhat. Down a dark hall, past sealed black door after sealed black door until they come to one that is glowing white.
Glowing white and covered in bloodied handprints and insubstantial for all that. Gleaming gossamer: dare they run through?
Jack[ Intelligence + Enigmas ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
Tamsin[I will also roll this.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
TwilightWhite does not necessarily mean pure; it could be merely energy. - but in this case it seems to be light-infused, the gossamer light is a reflection / manifestation of the woman in the window. He thinks they could get through unharmed. He does not know if that would harm whatever is beyond the door.
TwilightWhite does not necessarily mean pure; it could be merely energy. - but in this case it seems to be light-infused, the gossamer light is a reflection / manifestation of the woman in the window. Tamsin is sure that this is where she saw the woman, and she feels strongly that Opal is in there in some form: a ghost, an echo, a memory, a sub-realm. She doesn't know.
JackWhat it keeps in? What is keeps out?
Again the pluck of words in gruff cords along Fog's brume and obscuring tendrils between the two, sentiment carried from mind to mind, spirit to spirit, soul to soul.
He walks up, still sniffing, though the thick and bulging knot of muscles that bunch on the brow at the end of that lupine muzzle say he's more contemplating the door. Its secrets. Its construction. Searching for more out of it than its simple appearance, and those secrets' scents wretch out of his memories and own insight.
She's on the other side. White doesn't mean pure. Grubs rot white. Mold eats white. Puss stinks white.
Should we wait for Hector? Take what he have back?
JackWe can get through. But we might hurt what's on the other side, he finally finishes, his end of that totem-borne connection finally growing quiet.
TamsinTamsin looks at that door, all lambent-snow, and it looks as if she's going to touch it. At least, it looks as if she's going to touch it, until -- and of course, nothing else hears this; it's just the wolf-pack, just Fog's wolves in a Fog story they're making-up as they go -- Jack speaks. There is a flicker of uncertainty, Tamsin suddenly remembering that she's just a Cliath, that she's still got a long way to go and a lot of things to learn, and she looks back at the door. Then takes a deliberate step away from it.
He does know more about this kind of thing. I -- [maybe] yes. Let's leave it. I think we've got a lot to work with now, but [perhaps (want so badly to feel clean again)] we should scope out the lower level. Where the bruise-heart-beating thing is.
Jack
Jack chuffs and it comes out as more of a snarl, giving those bloody hand prints a final sniff before turning back down those solid-but-blackened-spirit-stuff stairs. Down the stairwell. And past that congregation below, dark and brooding in their vile-fatigued stupor.
Past it and below, and this time, Jack stalks even more carefully, letting his senses float out into the darkness, even...
Yes, the tank of Garou flesh shoulders around Tamsin, like a shield of muscle, bones, and sharp ends putting himself between her and whatever might see past their ruse. Whatever might rear it's ugly head out of that darkness to lash out at them, making sure it's not actually them, but himself that will take the brunt of its roused wrath.
Jack[ Intelligence + Enigmas ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
TamsinTamsin gives the door one last look. The handprints. She counts them, you see, she counts them and the placement of their thumbs, she holds her own too-large hand up again, as if gauging size, and then she stalks behind Jack, down, down
and down again.
[Ditto, that roll!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
TwilightJack is leading the pair of them past the congregation. Here the reflection is so-very-real that the murder-spirits and thieving spirits and spirits of grief and spirits of corruption and spirits of envy and spirits of wrongs-been-done and spirits of death-as-release and spirits of hate-as-lust are not merely milling, but are seated in folding chairs.
Fucking metal folding chairs.
The pulsing in the air, whispering beneath his skin, well: he can read how directly that comes from the inverted cross. Or something tied to the inverted cross, tucked beneath the level of the street into the dark hollows beneath the ground. Like a pipe, or a chimney.
Tamsin, Tamsin trails behind. Tamsin counts the handprints on the wall and measures their measure and finds them small enough to be human, small enough to be womanly, small enough to be -
But then she is moving, down and down and down again, trailing Jack past the congregation gathered in front of the inverted cross oozing corruption at each of its four points, and this too is such a physical immediacy of a thing, not a spirit, that it arrests her and she lingers as Jack starts looking for a way below ground level - watching watching watching, and sees:
the twisted maw of a melted-faced murder-spirit as the spirit bends down, kneels at the foot of the inverted cross, kisses the base and sups at the dark liquid oozing from the wood in a terrible mimic of the ritual of communion. Rasps a sharply pointed broken tongue along the grain and straightens and unfurls its razor fingers with a shhhsiiihishhs shhhihisissshih of metal-sharpening-metal.
When Tamsin stops, Jack does too. Looks back and is struck by the awareness that that cross is not a spirit itself, but a structure-in-reflection. Or perhaps a structure-with-reflection.
TwilightBoth Jack and Tamsin wonder if the cross has a counterpart in the physical world.
TwilightAnd something about the ooze, something about the pulse beneath the ground makes Tamsin imagine that there is something larger and something darker and something whispering down there. Something, perhaps, large enough to see through their guises. Tied in / wrapped up with some sort of physical real-world anchor?
But: perhaps, basement is Not a Good Idea.
JackThe thing draws his eyes in the way carnage and corruption often does. He cannot help but notice it. It raises up some deeply ingrained part inside him, the build of his very Gaian soul, and stirs it to defend its Mother. An urge to destroy the corruption and Wyrm-taint, a rage that yearns to be put to that end, all desires (instincts) that he cannot ignore.
But that he must control.
Pushing them down for the greater good and a clearer picture.
Stand watch, is all he says next, as his eyes begin to glaze, cloud over, as he strains to see past the Gauntlet and to the material world. To see what this cross is a reflection of.
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
TamsinFurious Lament's gaze lingers on the cross, or rather more specifically the dark liquid that oozes from the wood, and her gaze lingers there for a long time. Stand watch, Jack says, and she looks sharply at him, but he's just Looking Across The Gauntlet, looking into what she still sometimes catches herself thinking of as the real world, even if it doesn't feel as real to her, hasn't not since the beginning of it all, and whatever warning'd actually started to come to her lips dies away. Tamsin does stand watch.
But Tamsin also says:
When you're done. We've seen what we can see, just us two. Let's go. [Don't waltz in front of the Eye of Sauron, that's Tookishness, but I think the kind of Tookishness that'll get you fucking fucked.] What's down there won't be fooled by our masks.
Twilight
On the other side: a church. A stage, a pulpit. A cross: not inverted, upright, with the corpse of a man's body pierced and bleeding and torn to pieces. It is lit up with fluorescents and outlined in neon tubing so that it glows and pulses crimson against the shadows of the room. Late enough that there are few people there, but he can see several in the folding metal chairs - ordinary, neighborhood types - and another pair, one in a suit, the other in a dress.
But yes: the cross, a cross, an ordinary thing. Except for the way it is twinned so distinctly and so ominously on this side.
JackHe shakes himself out of it and nods, describing what he'd see.
A cross. Just a cross. So much more, and with that he looks to her and nods, turning with a swish of his tail and toward the door, taking her advise and joining her in leaving this wretched place.
