CoR Germinate

illirica

illirica

Well-Known Member
Location
Warehouse
Ethan was awake.

He was not entirely certain if he'd been sleeping or not. He hadn't really felt like he had woken up, just like he had noticed, rather suddenly, that he happened to be awake. Maybe he had been for an hour. Maybe he had been for a week. Maybe he'd just woken up. He couldn't remember. It seemed like there were a lot of things recently that he couldn't remember.

He sat up, cautiously. He was in a room. There was a mop bucket in one corner, which suggested that this room wasn't originally meant to have him in it. He had been in a different room, and then... his memory was fuzzy on what had gone next, but he'd been moved here, for some reason. Someone had told him why, but he didn't know who it had been, or if it had been someone real.

That's right, he'd been talking to-

ugh - no, that couldn't be right. He couldn't remember enough that made sense, and he remembered an awful lot that didn't. He supposed it was too much to hope that it had all been a nightmare - but no, there were definitely still staples in his shoulder, and there were a lot of things that... that he couldn't forget.

Cautiously, he sat up. It seemed to go well enough. He was sitting on a bench. It seemed... sturdy. Built for function, not form, sort of shoved into the room haphazardly, much like everything else in this room. Ethan could put together the ubiquitous storage room synopsis well enough, or supply closet or whatever it was they called it in this place - there was one like it pretty much everywhere.

Ethan did not, particularly, want to be in a supply closet. He'd been put in there for... protection. Not his own. He'd understood that. Jesse had been very clear about that.

Jesse. He'd been... about one of the few people in here who'd made sense, and who hadn't made Ethan want to murder him. It was possible that the wanting to murder people was because of the whole Thing that was going on - Ethan shied away from naming it, even in his mind - but it was also possible that the wanting to murder people was because some of them deserved it.

Generally speaking, Ethan had always tried not to murder people. That was important, in security. It was what made you different from whoever you were, theoretically, being secure against. Ethan had not actually performed any security against murderers. He'd been security in an office building. Largely, he had dealt with people who might potentially be smuggling too many paperclips out in their briefcase.

No, that was an oversimplification. He'd dealt with a few things. Not really murder, though.

He tested himself, and found that, actually, there were still a few people he would like to murder very much - but he didn't know who they were, and none of them were here. The people here - some of them were jerks, certainly. He did not find himself particularly enamored of the idea of murdering them. He doubted he could, anyway.

Well. He wasn't getting anywhere sitting here in the utility room, and he'd run out of spiders to ask questions. There was one hiding in the corner, behind a rather impressive dust bunny, but it seemed to be the normal sort and not the hallucinogenic sort. Ethan left it alone. He didn't particularly want to murder any spiders. They'd been about as good company as anything, for a while.

He stood up, counted to five, and sat back down, just to see if he was still dizzy, but his head remained clear, the room remained empty save for himself and the spider, and he was thirsty. There was a sort-of spigot above the basin that held the mop bucket, but Ethan decided he was not that thirsty, which also spoke well for mental clarity.

He stood up again, crossing the room - this was a matter of only a couple steps - and tried the door handle. It didn't want to move at first, so he tried it more emphatically, because storage closets were usually fifty-fifty on whether the door actually worked properly. A solid ka-CHUNK later, and the door was open. Ethan figured it had just needed a little convincing. He pulled it mostly closed behind him, because he didn't want to be rude about it, and figured he would go off to find Jesse and figure out what, exactly, was going on.

At least the infirmary was easy to find. It had that particular antiseptic smell to it, and Ethan could just follow that and the half-remembered paces. It helped that either this place wasn't too big, or he was just somewhat close. Down the hall, through a door - one that wasn't stubborn, but Ethan still closed it politely behind himself.

Jesse wasn't immediately visible, which was probably not a surprise, or at least it shouldn't be, especially when Ethan thought about it for half a moment. He'd probably been busy - for all Ethan knew, he'd gone home. Wherever home was, for him. Ethan-

-No, he wasn't going home. He took a steadying breath, and tried to let it go, focusing on the room, the little details. That was how you grounded yourself, when things were bad. It looked much like any other hospital he'd ever been in, which was fair. Not huge, plenty of occupied beds. One of them had the asshole Pack leader - Ragenard, that was his name. Completely passed out.

Ethan could probably murder him, if he were passed out.

He contemplated this for a moment, then shook his head. He'd said he was going to kill that guy last, after all.

Still, he wasn't exactly going to get a better opportunity... His hand twitched at his side, maybe seeking out a gun he didn't have, maybe just wondering if he could just rip the guy's throat out. Not likely. People didn't do that.

Then again, as they kept telling him, Ethan wasn't really a person any more. His hand twitched once more, into a fist, nails biting into his palm.

Stop that.

You're not a monster.

Not yet.

His gaze lingered, the reckless clarity of his thoughts whispering, in the voices of a thousand tiny spiders: Soon.
 
Her father wasn't her real father, and her real father was possessed by a will carried upon magic so ancient and twisted she couldn't even determine if the ambiguity in its intent was borne from benign magic twisted by malice, or if was a case of malice being tempered by goodness.

Deirdre took a deep breath, and released it slowly before making her selection at the vending machine on the railyard grounds, keeping a tight lid on her composure. Just as she'd been trained by her grandfather to do since childhood. She'd been having to do that a lot this day.

From her arrival unto chaos at the yard earlier with the exposure to It, the malevolent force that had stood at cross purposes against her family—at least the half of it that she'd been able to know—for so long to when things started to get dicey and the field started to sway and undulate with a wave of the rising undead, forcing her to nearly extinguish her own life to summon the magical force to help keep it at bay.

She'd kept her composure pretty well, but it had begun to crack around the time that the man she thought might be her father arrived on the wings of a devil, named her daughter, and proceeded to save them all whilst laughing the most sickening laughter she'd ever heard. Her composure had nearly cracked, because she could hear the screams trapped in the laughter, and had seen the glimmer of hatred that hid behind Ragenard's gaze.

It was an evil as noxious as that of their adversary, but thankfully only in notion and not in practice or scope.

For the moment.

Deirdre had vociferously argued for Ragenard to be securely contained within the armored cart they kept out back—in truth, the back of her mind screamed that they should then cover it in wards and bury it—until he awoke and they could determine if he was him...

But while she was met mostly with frustrating confusion—teaching Deirdre an important lesson in taking her day to day amongst magic users for granted—by most of the senior pack members that she tried to get her side it was her newly uncovered uncle who had chimed in with the unfortunate truth.

If it was as bad she said, it didn't matter where they placed him because they thoroughly lacked the means to contain him, so might as well keep him comfortable in the main infirmary. Either he would be a problem, or he wouldn't.

Deirdre wished it was that simple, and as if fate had an ironic bent, her reverie was startled by a loud crowing overhead. She carefully set down the soda she'd just bent down to retrieve and placed it to the side whilst taking a position of supplicant reverence.

"Morríghen banait de dhúath a chensir, uildir nuan thar-luach na lín," she intoned with the proper reverence upon her tone as she beseeched the Chooser for guidance.

Because that was also a thing that was happening around here, apparently. She'd been raised to offer all the proper deference to the powerful Lutetian witch, as her Grove was beloved by her kin. She'd even caught glimpses of the bizarrely temporally challenged woman herself as she conversed in private with her grandfather once.

She didn't have to ask why such a being was hovering around here, not after the events of such a dark morning. But she was startled to feel the gentle—but impossibly cold and inexorable—brushing of the ancient witch's awareness upon her mind:

Go to him now, my fate-kissed child, not for him but for the foil which mirrors his tragedies oh so well and oh so blindly. It is in the forging of the new in the face of the old that renewal springs, and I would have you be my agent of example.

Well, there wasn't much to it if you were so directly called. Deirdre had no intention of not doing what her childhood pseudo-deity commanded, even if it wasn't already what she—

The Phantom Queen's meaning suddenly struck, at least in part, causing Deirdre to suck in a harsh breath of self-admonition.

Deirdre had taken a short break to get refreshments after ensuring all the patients she'd been watching while Jesse rested were asleep. Especially the one that was in the throes of acute prodromal lycanthropic reformation—as Jesse had formally termed for her the process behind a first shift—and the flickering lucidity that tended to precede a lycanthrope's transformation.

She dashed back inside the warehouse, soda forgotten, as she took the stairs up to the second level two at a time. She passed by the open broom closet, and into the infirmary, just as her would-be-patient seemed to calmly—she hoped—assess Ragenard coolly.

She took a deep breath, and released it slowly. She did her best to ignore the magical waves of malice that wafted from—

My father. The waves of inviting evil and malice wafting from my father who wasn't dead like I'd been told until I was old enough to do my own divination which I did nothing with for another 15 years out of fear and duty, Deirdre thought to herself, as she managed to find her composure once more.

"Hey there, Ethan right? I'm Deirdre, the...nurse on duty, I'm very glad to see you walking," she lied adroitly. "Would you like to stretch your legs on the grounds outside? I bet you're feeling cooped up, huh?"

Her lie was flawless enough, but her voice was as saccharine sweet as a caricature of platitude. She didn't know the guy, so she hoped he had enough clarity to be led but not enough to detect and be offended by subterfuge.

She used the plastered smile she held as a crutch to clear her mind, letting it guide her towards the mental lightness needed for conjuring, should it suddenly be needed.
 
Ethan turned slightly at the new presence - a woman, on the small side, but who carried herself in the sort of way of women who knew they were always going to be on the small side, and had taken steps to make sure they had mitigated the disadvantage. Assessing people at a glance was important, in security.

"You're lying." He had assessed that, too, but his tone wasn't accusatory. Rather, he was acknowledging that she was lying, and wondering why, because sometimes it was necessary to lie to people. Her words had the same ring as come on, buddy, let's just step over to the side here, it'll all work out, the way you delayed someone when the cops were on the way.

Well, he doubted the cops were on the way, here, but he did wonder why she was treating him that way. She saw him as... not a threat, no. If she had seen him as a threat, she would have been treating him differently. Rather, she saw him as someone who might become a threat, and was trying to subtly turn that all aside, before it manifested.

He held her gaze a moment more, keeping his eyes on hers. It wasn't just because he was intrigued by the lie; it was also an internal acknowledgement that, right now, he shouldn't look back. She wasn't a threat - or, not the sort of threat he was worried about right now.

"Hm." Ethan stepped towards her, or away from whatever else he'd been doing - it did not particularly matter at this moment, he didn't think. "I was looking for Jesse."

It wasn't a defense, only an explanation. Outside, she'd said - she was trying to get him out of here, away from the wounded. His head nodded, understanding the subtext, steps following along with her.

"You should get out of here." It was all to easy to envision her, torn up, bleeding, dying. Alison. Ethan knew - he... he knew. "It isn't safe." Softly. "Not for someone like you."

She wasn't one of them. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew, and she - he didn't want to see her die. Not like that. "Alison, I don't want to hurt her."
 
Full clarity of mind, enough to display logical rhetoric or cause and effect thinking. Exactly _what Jesse warned me was the imminent sign, great. I sure hope aunt Glenna was wrong about the Guiscard's being cursed people..._Deirdre thought to herself ruefully before shaking her head gently. She had bigger concerns, and if they included assuming a mantle of bad luck, worrying about it wouldn't help her.

"You're right, I am lying," Deirdre said alongside her head shaking, as she splayed her left hand open wide. The air several inches around her hand took upon it an unnaturally verdant green hue as Deirdre primed to unleash rapid plant growth. Many Druids would be hamstrung from being on the second floor of a man made structure, but not Deirdre. She was the Grove's prodigy, the gleam in Grandfather's eye and the next presumptive Arch-Druid in another four or so decades.

She was....As she let the events of the day play out, her anger at herself for being unable to do more in the face of their adversaries' greater magical acumen grew. No, many of the Druids back at the grove wouldn't have been able to counter such a foul pall to even cast, let alone what Deirdre had accomplished, regardless of how much more she might have expected out of herself.

Deirdre tightened her grip on her stray thoughts, feeling both the deep wells of life beneath the ground from which she could have pulled great structure destroying vines and the subtler motes of possibility that were her specialty and set her apart from the other Druids. Any self-respecting natural magic user could cajole nature's bounty out of the earth to varying degrees, but that wasn't the only place where life lay dormant.

According to her Grandfather, fungi were capricious and hard to connect to. An animal that pretended to be a plant when you wanted it to bite, and a plant that insisted it was a roaming beast when you wanted it to hold fast, and always the Druid had to combat the fungi's dual forms of expansionist desires. Some of his most spirited debates had been with Fungal colonies, he insisted.

Maybe that was why it was so easy for her, being a being of dual worlds herself. Ever since a child, forced to float around questing for the truth that was hidden from her, like a spore seeking fertile ground to sprout. It was those spores she now sensed out, and found—as she expected and was the case for 99% of everywhere—the air pregnant with their possibility. Most were lowly molds, but even from these, she was fairly certain she could fashion mycelium bonds hardy enough to restrain a werewolf.

Her gaze briefly turned towards Ragenard—my father, she thought incredulously once again—and she re-framed her assessment to probably could hold off Ethan the easy way, as long as he wasn't a particularly mutant expression of LHV.

"Jesse should be resting but may be checking on other patients at the moment," her tone no longer brooked any saccharine subterfuge, only a deep well of weariness.

"I am not the nurse, I am the orderly," she added with a sardonic smile while looking Ethan straight in the eyes. She did nothing to soften her gaze or hide the weariness of the day either, lending her statement an air of no-nonsense finality.

"As you will soon be, you could be a danger to Jesse perhaps," she said with a shrug while pointing at Ragenard. "But I'm the one who got the big galoot up here to begin with, and he started out ornery before his nap took him, I reckon I'll be fine," she added with a tired wink as she gestured towards the door.

Trailing bands of fungal matter sprouted seemingly out of thin air at her gesture, pulling the door open ahead of them. "After you, patient. I don't think you need leading just yet, but I'll make sure you don't hurt anyone. I promise."
 
Last edited:
"I-" Ethan wasn't sure what he'd been about to say there. Maybe something about Ragenard. Ornery. It was such a weird way to describe him... and yet it fit.

The man I said I'd kill some day. He hadn't forgotten. Ethan looked back, one more time, and then shook his head. Not now. Not here, not now. He was going to kill him last, wasn't he? It was too early. Besides, he didn't know what the hell he was doing.

He followed along with the orderly instead. He wasn't really sure what to do about the fact that her hand had been glowing green for a bit there. Was that even real? It probably wasn't - a lot of the things he'd been seeing lately hadn't been real.

Some of them had, though, and those were the ones he had to worry about.

Mushrooms popped up. Ethan stopped, briefly, and blinked at them. Jesse had been helpful about sorting out what was real and what wasn't. The spiders weren't real. He knew that. There wasn't one sitting on a mushroom waving a foreleg at him.

The nonexistent spider hopped down off the questionably existent mushroom and scuttled outside. Ethan followed after it, murmuring a "Thanks," to the girl as he passed her. He felt like he should have been holding the door for her - it was the polite thing to do, after all - but she seemed pretty insistent, and maybe so did the spider.

"Ah... should I tell you that I think I'm hallucinating mushrooms now? Jesse knows about the spiders, but the mushrooms are new." He'd thought he was done with all of this. The air outside seemed... better. Less stifling. Ethan breathed it in, wanting it to smell good. It didn't, really - too close to the river, and too many lingering smells of... he didn't know. Not pleasant things, anyway. He took a few steps away from the building anyway, heading towards the big cement wall by the river. It ought to be out of the way, anyway, right? And if he did turn into a murder monster, maybe the girl could just boot him into the river or something. Could werewolves swim? He had no idea. He didn't want to find out. He was definitely going to find out, whether he wanted to or not.

"What's your name?"
 
Deirdre giggled lightly at Ethan's non-sequitur about illusory arachnids, whilst she debated if she ought to explain the magic or not. It wasn't a particularly salient point at the moment, and would become very much less so shortly, anyways.

"The mushrooms are friends, its okay," she reassured with a straight face before nodding Ethan's thanks away and following him through the door and the warehouse corridors until they reached the grounds outside.

"The mushrooms and the spiders will make sense eventually, I'm sure, you just listen to your body now," she said as he turned towards the Yard's rear, thankfully. The patch job the pack had been able to do on the ghoul's entry point was serviceable enough, and with the warehouse and river bend shielding them from view from the nearby roads or from the industrial lot across the river, it was perhaps the best option for an out of control newly turned wolf, she reckoned.

A butterfly slowly fluttered its way onto her uncovered auburn hair, where it rested calmly, fluttering its wings in place slowly.

"I'm Deirdre," she said, dropping the flawless Lutetian accent she affected within its borders. "Deirdre Mac Dathúil, a' yer service..." she said then laughed. "Nay, technically it be the Bloodstones what should be at mine, but I reckon ye don't think o' yerself such as them, do ye?"
 
Oh, good, she was humoring him. No one said the mushrooms are friends and the mushrooms and the spiders will make sense unless they were fairly sure you were crazy and just didn't want you to be crazy in their direction.

Fair enough, Ethan supposed, fair enough. There was a butterfly in her hair, and he wasn't sure if that was real or not. If it flapped its wings, would it cause chaos on the other side of the world? Or were things already plenty chaotic and it didn't need to do anything? He wondered if he should point it out, but he figured it wasn't hurting anything. He supposed the mushrooms weren't hurting anything either, unless maybe someone tried to eat them. He wasn't actually sure how to tell a poisonous mushroom from another sort of mushroom; he'd always just defaulted to don't eat wild mushrooms. Not that he planned on eating these. Were hallucinated mushrooms bad for you? Were they better or worse than hallucinogenic mushrooms?

He thought maybe his thoughts were getting away from him. He'd been so fuzzy inside his head for the past few weeks, and now it felt like all the fluff was gone and everything was in overdrive trying to catch up with everything he hadn't been thinking.

Dierdre. It was a fairly normal name. Belatedly, it occurred to him to wonder if she existed, but it seemed like hallucinating medical orderlies might be a step too far even for him.

Oh. She was a foreigner. That explained a lot.

"I... don't think I'm up for any service projects, right now." Even Boy Scouts needed a day off sometimes, right? Besides, he wasn't going to touch the issue of who was at whose service. Even the spiders weren't going to touch that one.

Ethan reached out a hand and touched the wall. It'd been patched up, not expertly. He wasn't an expert either, but he could still tell a hack job when he saw one. It probably had to do with all the things that had been going on lately. Werewolf things. Something or someone - Ethan wasn't exactly clear - had been trying to murder them, he thought. It hadn't been him. He sort of wondered if he should find out who it was and send them a thank you note, but... it didn't seem right. The spiders didn't like the idea, anyway. No, they definitely thought that was a bad one.

His fingers twitched, scoring rents in the cement wall with his-

-Nope, not thinking about that-

"Hey." He had to stay on top of this. He wasn't going to hurt anyone. He was not going to hurt anyone. "You should... stay back."

God, everything hurt.

Hold it down. Hold it down.

Make sure she's safe.
 
Deirdre giggled at the incongruity in his response once again. It wasn't that it was particularly funny, although part of it was. Nor was it the provincial sort of ignorance towards magic either. It was sheer nervousness. Although not for herself, she'd too much experience amidst shifters of various ilk to be overly worried for herself.

She was nervous for Ethan, because Deirdre recognized that she lacked the proper words to make up for her lack of experience with the sort of agonizing change this represented for him. It wasn't like with a druid's first reshaping, or even like the Iverian lycanthropes whose more holistic acceptance of themselves led to painless shifts and raucous celebrations.

She could see the titanic struggle this signified for him, it was clearly etched in the frantic lines surrounding his worried grimace but his struggle for self-control was already lost. The shift was already upon him.

She lightly wondered what it looked or felt like from his point of view, as the rippling began. His hands shifted first, and Deirdre was treated to the sight of gore flecked fur she couldn't yet determine the color of exploding from beneath his wrists. Each of his fingers was capped by a thick and powerful claw. Deirdre saw their points glint in the sun briefly before he left the cement wall scored as if had been made of papier-mâché.

"Shhh, now. It's okay. You got room to be," Deirdre assured him, effortlessly slipping back into unaccented Lutetian with the hopes the cadence and sounds of her voice if not the content would help. She slipped her left hand behind her surreptitiously and flexed her fingers, beseeching and cajoling nature to her whims.

Slowly, the ground a few hundred feet away where the edge of the warehouse and the path to the front yard laid began to rise upwards, unobtrusively blocking both a bystander's path to chance upon them...and Ethan's path out towards the others, leaving them in an eloganted sort of tunnel with grassy earthen walls and open sky.

"Let it go, it's ok. The grass is a neighbor-friend of the mushrooms and the spiders both, you know this. They'll work together to let you be." She was careful to ensure that the terrain hadn't shifted any faster than molasses, hoping her idea of the logic of a man on the brink was at least halfway towards making the sort of sense she hoped he took.

Just the same, a small reassuring pressure beneath her feet reassured her that escape from Ethan's could-be cage was prepared.
 
The earth moved, and Ethan wasn't sure if it was real or not. Probably not, but that was fine. If his mind was putting up a barrier, it didn't matter if it actually existed, as long as he pretended it did.

Probably.

He was a little uncertain about how all of this worked. The spiders had tried to explain, but they weren't particularly coherent some of the time. Sometimes they were, and Ethan wasn't sure if that was better or worse.

Regardless of arachnine exposition, there was something happening to him that he couldn't hold back any longer. The spiders had kept it at bay for as long as they could, but even they stayed back now, as the force of whatever had built up inside tore through him, cracking through bones and body, turning the man he'd been into something that was a man no longer - monstrous, hulking, though not so much as some of the others. His claws were like steel, his body a mass of fur and muscle and power.

He could feel it, built up, an energy that begged to be released. He couldn't keep it pent up any longer; couldn't keep it down.

Run. Maybe he should have said that earlier, weeks ago. He couldn't remember if he'd said it, if he'd tried - if Alison had run, when the monster had torn her apart -

Run. If the children had run to safety, gotten away, if his little boy had been somewhere else, far away, somewhere that hadn't been dangerous, if he'd been safe -

Run. If Ethan hadn't tried to get in the way, if he'd been able to move, if he hadn't been bitten and cast aside and left for dead; if he hadn't become this thing, this image of the thing that made him want to -

Run.

And so, he ran. Between the concrete and the earth, the long way, down the chasm until he reached the end and the tiny, insignificant form of a spider sat on a blade of grass and waved two of its arms at him, not this way, not this way - run-

He turned, a skid to a stop and then back in the other direction, until he found another spider, waving him back to the first, no more, not this way. He wasn't sure if they were herding him or guarding him, but he didn't find that he cared, because the motion was the only thing that could fight the emotion, and if he just kept moving, maybe none of it would catch up with him, or maybe when it did he would be himself again.

He didn't know how long it lasted, that back-and-forth, but it seemed to go on for an eternity and yet take no time at all, and so he was surprised after whatever time had passed to find himself stopping, slowing, half-sitting and half-collapsing on grass that he was pretty sure hadn't been here before. There'd been only concrete and gravel and weeds, hadn't there? Or maybe the grass had always been there and none of that was real, or maybe it wasn't real.

The spider sat on his shoulder, which was - skin. Normal, healthy skin, the way it should be, but marred by the pale scarred half-moon where he'd been bitten - healed, and the staples had come out at some point, but the mark was still there; undoubtedly it always would be. The spider prodded at the scar, but Ethan knew only one of those things could be real.

He wondered if it was him.

His breath left him, as if realizing he'd been running, a short and struggling thing, and he drew it back, inaccurately, releasing it with an altogether too constrained:

"Crud."
 
It quickly became evident to Deirdre, that what Ethan needed wasn't a chaperone, but just some space. She knew secondhand from the Iverian packs that roamed through the Grove in their winding seasonal travails, that a first shift was a thing of little thought and pure exuberant energy.
She also knew secondhand from those Lutetian shifters she'd known, that a first shift was a thing of anxiety ridden fear, and confusing body cues.

To Deirdre, turning into something else was a thing of magic—not quite effortless, but a thing whose dues she paid with her will, and not her body. Or her mind.

So to her, it didn't matter that she didn't know how come the same infection presented itself so differently in the afflicted, only that it did. Whether it was environmental or mental was purely academic, and one she didn't even bother to file away as she noticed the anguished look in Ethan's face as the shift took him at last.

For a moment, Deirdre was sure he wanted to say something, but by then his throat was no longer in the correct configuration to give shape to the words. The pained yips that escaped him seemed almost confused, and Deirdre's heart nearly broke.

Then he started moving, and matters of practicality re-asserted themselves. It took Ethan practically no time at all to bound across the hundred or so yards she'd secured for him going that direction. She was still watching him with trepidation, wondering if he would keep to the suggestive grassy carpet she'd summoned, before he turned around as if on a dime, and started back the way he had come.

So fast, Deirdre thought with mild-shock as she realized the amount of ground the wolf had eaten up within a single eye-blink. She decided not to put whatever self-control he had to the test, and pulled tightly upon her reserves once again, just in case.

A feeling like being doused in frozen kerosene came over her as she re-attuned herself to the half-formed construction beneath her feet. A welcome, calculating coldness fell upon the world, and for a moment even Ethan's motion appeared stalled.

Her thoughts moved quickly as ever, but she had to overcome a deep well of resistance in order to get them moving in the first place. Much of the resistance came in the form of abject terror spun from her lizard brain; If you stand here, you will die.

As always, the years spent falling off a tight beam while her Grandfather repeatedly commanded 'Again!' briefly came back in a bout of poisonous poignancy, as Deirdre masterfully tightened her core and stood her ground just a few paces beyond where Ethan would come crashing over her grassy threshold, rending claws like—

And back he goes? she thought with some amusement as she breathed out some relief and watched Ethan turn back the way he had come. She shivered, partially due to an errant breeze, and partially due to her expenditure, as she watched him loop back and forth at a prodigious pace.

The butterfly which had nestled deeper within her hair for safety fluttered out and landed on her nose. With a suffering sigh, Deirdre did her best to reign in the cold front that spun within her, so that she could control her voice better.

The spell binding a familiar with a practioner's consciousness could be finicky and sensorial perception never came through fully clear at the best of times.

"Ragenard is comatose," she reported to the butterfly. "There is some sort of enchantment upon him that I am unable to dispel."

The insect flapped its wings once, twice, thrice.

"Yes, I agree, the entity isn't likely to attempt again soon," she added with the same sort of conversational nod one may do while on the phone even though the other party couldn't see, but one which continued on to her shoulders which set to shivering despite herself.

The insect departed her nose for the tip of her finger, and beat its wings once more.

"No, tell Grandfather I've got it. They need time to regroup, not a calling of past debts come due, right now."

A nearly hesitant wingbeat in response.

"Yes, I assume responsibility, I'm a big girl now, now go or you're fired!" she exclaimed with some pique as Ethan finally collapsed, his body having shifted back while she was preoccupied. And back on two legs he goes, she thought as another shuddering chill threatened to overcome her. His gaze seemed somewhat less than clear, but Deirdre's limited first aid training told him he appeared hale, if not whole.

"Hello again Ethan, feeling any better after some...stretching?" she asked delicately.
 
The girl was still there.

Ethan hadn't been sure if she was going to disappear or not. She'd seemed real, but then again, so did a lot of things. The spiders were still around, though, or at least they had been a minute ago. He didn't know what was going on with that. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what was going on with that.

She asked him a question. It was... polite. She'd been polite earlier. This was definitely the sort of polite that was trying to determine if he was a threat right now. That probably wasn't a bad idea. Ethan didn't feel like a threat, but then again, what did he know?

The spiders didn't think he was a threat right now either, but he wasn't actually sure if that helped his case. The place seemed... greener than it had been. He wasn't sure if that was just him remembering things poorly, or if something had happened. He didn't think it had been him. The girl had had a green... thingy... earlier, he remembered, or thought he remembered.

Dierdre. Her name is Dierdre. He still wasn't sure what was going on with him. Hallucinating Iverian girls didn't seem like something he would do, though. Maybe when he was fifteen, sure, but not recently. Not since he'd met... Alison.

He wished he were hallucinating her again, but that seemed to be over. Ethan realized that Dierdre had asked him a question, and that he'd realized that a few moments earlier already, and that he'd been sitting here not answering.

"Sorry. I... spaced out a bit there. I think so. Yes? Maybe. Sorry. You are a real person?"

Would she tell him, though, if she weren't? He didn't know. He'd have to ask Jesse. Jesse was real. If Jesse wasn't real -

No. Jesse was real.
 
Being questioned by her supposed "support" team rankled, but Deirdre quickly compartmentalized her feelings. She was still helping Ethan. If she was going to observe as she'd promised while the Bloodstones regrouped, then it wouldn't pay to get distracted by what might or could happen.

She made an assessment and reached a decision—exactly as her Grandfather had taught her. The fact that he might be among those who disagreed, forcing her to defend her choices…well, he had been training her for that too, hadn't he?

Deirdre pondered Ethan's question absentmindedly for perhaps a few beats too long. It likely wouldn't help his opinion of her reality, but frankly, she was having a hard time accepting it herself. In light of the question, she did a brief—and factual, she ruefully added—review of her own reality as she reckoned it:

She was a foreign, magic-casting scout for an international ecological conservation foundation that genuinely did care for the environment, as they were descendants of druidic caretakers who had protected a secret grove for thousands of years. But their mission also happened to be complemented by arms smuggling, because people tended to think twice about harassing the tree-huggers armed with fully automatic shotguns and rocket-propelled grenades.

On top of what she was, there was also what she'd been led to believe. That her mother was dead was something she'd known deeply, if loosely, even before living with her Grandfather. This same looseness of knowledge stemmed from the recently rediscovered fact that she'd spent her formative years—from age two until about six—in another world, under the care of an ancient witch-goddess.

Said ancient witch-goddess had since confirmed that Deirdre wasn't actually an orphan at all; her father was the First of a criminally-inclined pack of lycanthropes, and one whom said witch-goddess clearly carried a lit torch for. The ancient creature also occasionally wore her dead mother's face, and while usually terrifying, she was very apologetic about this particular habit.

Deirdre couldn't begin to unravel her complicated family history or offer her father dating advice like some sitcom character. Because while the coma her father was currently under was a sitcom hallmark, the spell that maintained it certainly wasn't. She couldn't dispel it; there wasn't anyone in the entire city she could confide in about it—and worst of all, she was certain there were things about her father's condition her erstwhile adoptive mother wasn't telling her.

And those were just the personal troubles.

Professionally, she'd been sent to recruit this pack back into the fold, part of which included preventing her organization's weapon caches from becoming vulnerable to what the layman might call 'magical zombies'—itself a non-sequitur to Deirdre, since in her experience all zombies were magical. These zombies were composed of humanity’s remains, twisted and arranged by a Djinn.

This Djinn wasn't a cartoonish genie living in a lamp granting cheerful wishes, but rather an extra-dimensional evil that despised the world and its natural order—according to her clan's histories, which purported to have been recounted to the first Archdruid by another Djinn whose immortal soul had, for reasons unclear, really loved nature and merged ages ago with their sacred tree, gifting her people with uncommonly strong magic.

Deirdre rubbed her temples distractedly before smiling at Ethan and finally replying, unconcerned by having left him in silence for an extended beat.

"Ditto on the spacing out!" she exclaimed with a laugh. "Glad to hear you're feeling better—that's probably good. Can't be sure I'm any more real than the average person, though I sure wonder some days…I digress, though."

She made a show of scrunching her face thoughtfully as she looked Ethan over. "Doctor's orders were to get you moving after the, um…" She trailed off uncertainly.

Did she really want to confront him with reality? Hadn't she just been bemoaning how harshly reality had been slapping her lately? No, she wouldn't intervene where she didn't know better—not just for the dubious satisfaction of being objectively correct.

"Jesse's orders were to make sure you got your needed exercise," she amended lightly, "but he warned me you'd probably be very hungry afterward, since you couldn't be fed properly the last couple of days. Are you? Hungry, I mean. I think I saw that the…group has a small kitchen going inside the old cafeteria."

What are you going to do, Deirdre—avoid any mention of lycanthropes or magic? Why yes, me, yes I will, until asked. Let him have his comfort.
 
Weirdly, the spacing out made Ethan feel better about the reality situation. He felt like if she were someone he was hallucinating, she wouldn't be off in her own world. She'd be stuck in his. Maybe that was thinking too much into it... but also, he was going to go insane if he questioned every person he ever met as to whether or not they were real, and he was just going to have to accept things at some point. He also thought she'd insist a little harder about being real, if she weren't.

Ethan shrugged, and looked over at one of the spiders, which gave a vague gesture of its foreleg, which Ethan interpreted as an opinion that Dierdre was as real as anything else here was.

He probably should have been more worried about that, but then she mentioned food, and he realized that he was starving. There was a brief moment of concern about how that was going to work, except, no, he did not actually have any desire to eat her or anyone else. A steak would have been nice. Or a burger. Or a pizza. Or - anything with a lot of calories, actually.

"Yes." Emphatically. "Yes to hungry, that is. I think I'm hungry enough to eat one of those gross protein bars. Maybe two? That's... not a good sign. Do they have... um, real food?" He'd sort of meant not innocent townspeople, but maybe it just came across as not cardboard protein bars. He didn't really want to eat one of those either, but... like he'd told the possibly imaginary girl, he'd take it if that was what there was.

The spider wiggled its back legs, evidently thinking Ethan was being overdramatic, and he was tempted to tell it to shut up and that it didn't get an opinion because it ate bugs.

Also, he'd expected it to go away, once the fever was gone. Ethan inhaled, reminded himself that Jesse said the spiders were not real, and exhaled again, looking away from it, deliberately.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top