Session 43 - My Head Is An Animal

Previously, Across the Horizon...
Our heroes continue to explore the Viesen-Croyle Factory in Kuganepo, and while they haven't found anything quite so horrifying since the bloody scarf that represented all that remained of Cirri Idraen, what they have found has not been much better.
An office revealed two active Monodrives, strange plantlike creations that resisted Isa's best talents and threw fire at all intruders, and before the party had arrived, they had used that fire to kill AZYS Vice Director of Crystal Development, Weiss Glassman.
They found a way into the central chamber, though after observing the sheer amount of mayhem wrought there by whatever caused the evacuation, the idea of leaping down into the center without a way to retreat felt ill-advised.
They found that most rare and treasured of things, the Bathroom Ether, but elected not to disturb its holy slumber.
And then they found evidence that the Factory, and the projects contained within, were being financed in part by the Osler family, with their name appearing on an invoice in the other office.
We join our heroes as they continue to explore the facility for another way into the basement that doesn't take them into the heart of the unknown...
**
"So, Isa." Bast gestures to the invoice in her hand. "Thoughts?"
Isa takes the invoice, folds it into quarters, and pockets it. "I'll think about it when we're done here," she says with finality. "Looks like we're done with this level."
"Should we get systematic and hit all this rooms in a row on the floor below?" Orrey asks, eyeing the map.
"It does open up some questions on how we go about this, though. And how we might get more information. Or are we not talking about particularly close family, here?" Bast presses.
"Bast, if any of that means we leave and come back here later, you can count me out of it," Linnet says. "Let's finish this and then never, ever set foot in this creepy cursed place again."
Isa shrugs. "We do the job we're here to do. If we end up with unanswered questions, I know where to get those answers."
"I don't anticipate this getting easier if we wait longer," Yves says.
"Job's to resolve a worker's dispute, to start with. No one mentioned monsters the size of buildings or people getting vaporized, and we haven't even set foot in the lab yet," Bast says.
"We were warned about environmental hazards and uncontained samples. Seems within that boundary still," Isa says.
"For a lawyer's definition of 'hazards,' anyway," Linnet mutters darkly.
Bast acknowledges both with a half-shrug, looking back at Isa. "Any chance of your relations putting out a large bounty on our heads if, say, this lab and everything in it goes up in flames? Not a plan, just checking our risks here."
Isa shakes her head. "Minimal. And if they did, I'd take care of it. Worst case scenario is that they tell me to mind my own business and clam up, but that's not my uncle's style."
Orrey walks over to the stairwell door and looks longingly down the stairs, then back up at Isa and Bast. Full on puppy dog eyes.
"Excellent. But let's leave the fire part until after we at least know what we're burning, ok?" Linnet says. "I don't think we get paid either way if we resolve the employment dispute by leaving no place to be employed."
"It's not a huge investment," Isa adds, which might seem incongruous to the numbers on the invoice.
"Alright. Let's go see the other side of the first floor, then," Bast says.
"YES!" Orrey bounds down the stairs with that implicit permission.
"...or, you know, listen for Orrey screaming."
Orrey pulls up in front of room C1 to wait for everyone else. Orrey thinks to himself, Am I actually energized by this horrible investigation?
Isa gives Orrey a solid nod to acknowledge his suitable caution, and opens the door.
"One thing I kind of want to go back and shake out of whoever might have answers, though. What got Idraen?" Bast looks both ways down the hallway before crossing from the stairs to the door.
This room is full of three rows of desks, packed tightly together, all facing the reinforced glass window pointing into the center of the factory. There are papers strewn about, giving the impression that this room was evacuated in a hurry. Coffee stains mark the floor, ruining the papers that slipped from the desks. The reinforced glass is shattered, spiderwebs running its full length, obscuring the details of what lies on the other side. The back wall has a piece of machinery with a large port in it for holding some sort of cylinder, along with a large-handled switch with OFF and OVERRIDE. The switch has flipped to OFF.
There are still papers, undamaged by dried coffee, strewn about the desks themselves.
The port for the cylinder is empty.
Orrey wanders around looking at the papers and checking out the switch to see if it's obvious what it does.
Linnet squints at the machine's port, trying to measure with her hands. "Anyone want to try that cylinder from the procedure room in here? I might need a hand bringing it over, it looked bulky."
Yves goes to peer at the machinery, on principle. It looks sciencey!
Bast examines the glass carefully, trying to gauge the force and impact points that left it this way.
The cylinder from the medical procedure room would be far too large for this.
"...wait, what am I doing, there's no way that would fit in here. Drat. There goes that useful idea." Sighing, Linnet drops her hands and leans against a relatively un-cracked wall, scanning the room for any sign of injury or death to its inhabitants.
Isa shrugs. "Good memory, at least. Putting what happened here together is going to take a lot of work."
The glass crack is from small single points -- as if a great deal of pressure was applied repeatedly by small impacts, not one massive single slam. Stabs, not slams, to sort of sum that up.
The machinery looks like a power amplifier, designed to overcharge a system for a brief stretch. It would likely send enough of a surge to activate the door, if maybe not for very long.
Orrey's hand slides along the top of the desk and just so happens to toss aside three pages of doodling and one page of half-finished love letter to reveal a medical document for Vale, J.
Again Orrey nails it.
"Check this out!" Orrey holds the document up for everyone to see, then sets it down on a desk in the middle of everyone.
Bast walks over to Linnet as she contemplates the machine, and addresses her quietly: "If we end up in a fight, stay back as much as you can. Let's not find out the hard way if this thing's claws infect sylphs with...whatever that vile shit is." He walks over to see what Orrey found without waiting for a reply.
Linnet nods uneasily at Bast's retreating back and peeks over Orrey's shoulder. "Okay, I recognize the name, but none of the rest of this. Even if doctors weren't notorious for bad handwriting, the jargon is strong with this one." "Recognize it from where?" Isa asks.
"The entry log. J. Vale signed in but not out."
"...but I think we can safely assume it wasn't a social visit," Linnet says.
"Why would you even /want/ to overcharge a system," Yves is muttering, looking over the machinery.
"Yves, with all the other irresponsible scientific decisions we've seen around here, that's what puzzles you?" Linnet asks.
Isa tilts her head. "Something has replaced Yves."
(Linnet gives a tired snort of laughter at Isa's response.)
"...you didn't hit your head on the Reaper, did you?"
"Something nefarious," Isa continues.
"--I mean, I can't see why you'd want to in /this/ case," Yves says indignantly. He walks over to look at the paper people are staring at. "It's one thing to overcharge engines, but another to just... overcharge."
The document is Jacaranda Vale's test logs. Vale has "elevated allagan enzymes" and her (human, 29, she/her, asthma, nearsightedness) blood test returned an aetherical resonance of 1700% greater than expected. Fortunately, the document contains notes on why that's important, seemingly as a new researcher was making sure they understood the significance of that fact.
Vale's biological data, especially blood work and test results from the specialized equipment here, did not return the expected results for an airship technician in her late twenties.
The data is that of a remarkable warrior, someone who has a full lifetime of experience and talent.
That talent is hidden somehow. Sealed. Inhibited. The word "inhibited" is the one that is underlined.
There's an arrow pointing to the margin, where a note has been jotted.
look up YM037
Yves has been explaining as he goes along, for the benefit of people who were looking at the paper, but his explanation gets slower, and trails off.
He sets the paper down.
"Everything ok?" Orrey asks, concerned.
"Well, that makes even less sense than most biomagitech nonsense. Yves, let's stash those papers and make a quick search for anything else worrying. Nobody needs to know those weren't the coffee-flooded pages." Linnet bustles briskly around the desks, trying to channel all her remaining good humor into breaking the molasses-thick awkward silence.
"...what is aetherical resonance anyway..." Bast mutters, waiting to see if Yves will continue with the explanation.
"I was thinking about--" Yves stops abruptly. He hands the papers to Linnet. "We might as well keep looking for the, uh, monster. Or victim. Whatever it is."
"Wait, what," Bast says flatly.
"And if it turns out to be both?" Isa asks.
"Then I guess the people who are better at making good ethical decisions in hard circumstances will tell me what to do," Yves says tonelessly.
"Then we try talking to it, most likely fail, and put it out of its confused misery, ideally before it does so to us," Linnet says. "The more rooms full of scary weird shit we poke our noses into, the less any one of them will have its full terrifying impact. Anyone else ready to move on with me?"
"I am," Yves says immediately.
Bast looks back and forth between people who apparently have a better grasp of the biomedical side of the horrors in here. "So is the idea that whatever tore up this place is Jacaranda Vale post-treatment, or what?"
"That'd be the most horrible option, so it's probably what happened," Isa says.
Yves just nods grimly to what Isa said.
Orrey takes off for the next room!
"Ah hell," Isa says, and follows to make sure Orrey doesn't get in too much trouble.
Orrey’s hand is on the handle when Isa catches up.
"I haven't wanted to smack you on the head so far, Orrey. Let's keep it that way." She nods to him to open the next room up.
Bast hurries along after. "So was Serj feeding us chocobo shit about their test material?"
There is a treadmill on the northern wall, along with multiple wires hooked to medical equipment. The east wall is a window stretching the length of the room, showing the same room on the other side. There are no cabinets or document storage in this room, and there is no power to the treadmill or the equipment.
"C'mon, there's only so honest you can expect him to be about company secrets that would cost him his job," Linnet says.
"They're walking a fine line," Isa says. "Too little information and we can't solve their problem, too much information and we won't solve it."
Linnet peeks in. "This is almost comfortingly mundane. No cracks, no bloodied clothes, no fiery plants."
"The closest research material to people is actual people," Yves says, his voice suddenly vicious. "It's so much /simpler/ that way."
"And hell, much cheaper, I would assume," Linnet says.
Isa decides, rather than answering, to move to the next room.
“Nothing here, then? Next room!” Orrey glances at Isa. “After you!”
"I was thinking that'd be the simplest explanation, when he was spinning that out for us, but didn't know what to make of his insistence that the 'stuff' is not humanoid. I suppose conversion might cover that," Bast says.
Isa bows graciously to Orrey, and opens D2.
“Maybe they compare what they use to actual people. Instead of feeding people to the devices or whatever.” Orrey offers up.
The next room is the mirror image of the previous room in D1; a treadmill, no other interesting information.
Linnet skips D2 entirely and pauses before F1.
“Same same?” Orrey asks.
The door to the next room, F1, is locked. Standard deadbolt lock.
"Bast?"
Bast barely needs to stop before the door is unlocked.
The room is full of crates. Unmarked, wooden, securely fastened crates.
"Well, that's not ominous at all," Linnet remarks.
"We going to mess with them?" Isa asks. It seems a sincere question.
Orrey checks out a crate and tests his knife in the gap between the top and the sides. He quickly realizes that won't work and tests his muscles instead.
"We've got to mess with at least a few, right? I mean, after everything else we've seen in here," Linnet says. "With apologies to your uncles, Isa."
The crates are about two and a half feet, square. There are two near the door here, the rest stacked two to three high.
"Not easy to open..." Orrey wheezes after his futile attempt.
Isa rolls her shoulders. "I'll apologize to them later," she says. She leans her spear against the door jamb, and digs armored fingers into the seams of the boards.
(Recognizing that she's about as likely to smash a crate open as Yves is to fly, Linnet slips out the door and tries to keep watch on both Operation Cratesmash and the rest of the hall.)
"Fascinating." Bast's voice is practically dripping with sarcasm, as he approaches one of the crates and tests several joins, without much success, before stepping back to make room for Isa.
The lid of the crate comes free with a crack and a kchtunk, and then it takes a solid shard of the side of the crate with it, spilling the contents onto the floor. Scarabs.
Lifeless metal scarabs.
Spreading out onto the floor, scraping along the tile.
Orrey picks one up to get a closer look.
"...what even /are/ those," Yves demands.
Isa yelps, and looks like she is about to start stomping before she realizes they are inanimate. "The fuck?"
"Good question." Bast looks at the pile of scarabs from farther back towards the door. "Anyone have any idea what's with these? Or what AZYS might want with them?"
"Are those the same bugs the Dragoon was turning in for the bounty in the Triad?" Isa asks.
"What were the scarabs doing that required them to be cleaned up by a bounty hunter?" Orrey asks idly while he examines the scarab.
"The Azure Dragoon isn't a bounty hunter, Orrey. Which just makes it weirder," Isa says.
The scarab design looks... natural, in that it doesn't have that telltale sign of joined seams or imperfections that would be noticeable in a mass-produced system. But they're all identical.
"I assume it would be a bad idea to take some of these to throw at whatever clawed the facility to bits, right?" Linnet asks.
"Yves? Did you find out anything useful about the one you grabbed at the bounty office?" Bast asks.
Orrey stows a total of 3 of them in his satchel.
Yves shakes his head. "I grabbed one to take a look at, but that's because I thought they were just... proof of having taken out a pest, not something useful themselves. I was going to get around to it, but there was this book, and..." Yves waves vaguely.
"Think we should open another one to see if they have the same thing in them?" Orrey asks. "And by we, I mean Isa." Orrey sighs. "One more, but then let's keep going. I have no idea what these are for, but they're not helping make the facility any safer to work in," Linnet says. That said, Linnet scoops up a half-dozen scarabs and stashes them in with the paperwork she's been collecting. Maybe they'll eat it.
"You pick the crate then, Linnet. I'll try to be more delicate." She points to one at the top of a stack further from the door.
"Um." They all look exactly the bloody same. She points to one at the top of a stack further from the door. Isa climbs up the stacks handily, braces herself, and now that she knows how strong the wood is, tries to open the crate less destructively. This time, the level of force is calibrated much better, and with a creak of nails the lid of the crate is pushed up and off.
Scarabs all the way down.
"Yup," Isa calls down, "more bugs."
"Right, that's probably enough destruction for one room. Thanks, Isa. No way I would have gotten those open short of setting 'em on fire." Linnet half-smiles and leaves to check out room G1.
"How many per crate, do you think?" Bast seems to be trying to calculate things.
"Several thousand? If we stay here counting them we'll lose Orrey. Let's keep moving."
Isa does make a point of peeking into E1/2 as they make their way down the hall.
The two rooms Isa checks are bathrooms, each with medicine cabinets on the walls.
Isa does not check for bathroom ether, because she is a classy lady.
Orrey opens the cabinets.
The cabinets are full of, as one would expect, medicine! A lot of types of medicine.
Bast has no compunctions about checking the bathrooms along with Orrey, looking less tense than before now that all of the known missing people are tentatively accounted for. He's muttering under his breath as he does: "...several thousand was the bounty, there's got to be upwards of ten thousand in each crate, why..."
The medicines in the bathrooms are almost all either painkillers and blood clotters.
However, Orrey does manage to find five Potions, two High Potions, two Ethers, and something called Cactpot that looks dodgy as anything and probably should be shown to Yves later.
Orrey stashes the bottles somewhat organized and contemplates a bandolier for all of this instead of the satchel for easier access...
The muttering intensifies as he works on the lock of the door down the hall, and ends in a sharp expletive-sounding something at a loud ping noise from the lock. He steps back with an obviously broken piece of curiously curved metal in his hand that he palms after a moment, and looks over at Isa. "Care to do the honors?"
Isa nods, and plants her foot in the door hard enough to shatter the lock plate and the door latch in one go.
"I really wish I could do that..." Orrey says.
In the heartbeat that follows, Isa counts, with that clarity that comes from the sudden threat of interesting times, sixteen Monodrives.
"...fuck."
...none of which are spinning up and promising fiery death at this moment.
"Hey Orrey? What did you do to wake up those killer eggplants?" Isa asks. "Whatever it was...don't do that."
"Is it bad that I don't know the answer to that?" Orrey asks, eyeing the fruit bombs.
"It's not great," Isa admits, backing away from the door.
There are also, on shelves above them, cylinders with copper ends and glass tubing. Each holds a purple crystal roughly the size of Orrey's hand.
"And now we can't close the door..." Orrey helpfully adds.
"The problem might have just been touching them last time. So let's not do that," Linnet says, jaw set.
"Wait," Yves says, peering inside, "you were all fighting /those/?"
"Two, and they were throwing fire. ...not sixteen."
"You've seen these before?" Bast asks.
"That said, if we can get in there enough to get a look at the cylinders, I would really like to see those up close."
"If you think you can tiptoe through them, have at," Isa says.
"Probably best if I handle that, if we really want that look." Bast breathes out slowly.
Orrey was just about to go in, but defers to Bast's skills.
Isa absolutely defers, as this is the eggplant equivalent of a china shop and she, the metaphorical bull.
The Monodrives are all resting on the ground, in four rows, four across, nearly four feet tall, their leaves curving up toward the top of the fruit.
"For the love of your own intact skin, Orrey, stop that." Linnet grabs him by the back of his shirt and hauls him away from the door. "You had that look." Briefly, she places both hands on Orrey's shoulders and presses her forehead to his. "I understand you want to know everything about everything here, but if I have anything to say about it, you are not rushing into a field of barbecue eggplants and leaving us one magnificent brain short. Okay?"
"But they're not even activated..." Orrey sighs.
"And we don't know what activated them last time, because all I had the chance to do before they spun up was poke one. We are not taking that chance. Let Bast do his super sneaky thing, and save your bravery for whatever's on the bottom floor."
Bast lowers the hand that was on the stock of the crossbow slung across his back, walks around to the roomwards side of Orrey and then slowly but insistently pushes him back to the other side of the hall. "Stay."
"We got it, Cap'n, now go do some science." Linnet doesn't turn her face away, but her voice is smiling. A bit.
Bast looks in through the doorway. "Figure one will be enough?"
"I mean, if you have the chance, more data points make for a better model. But start with one. If there's a label on them, and that label is different for each one, maybe a couple."
"And if the eggplants look angry, run," Isa adds.
The eggplants don't look notably angrier as Bast silently makes his way around them.
The crystal containment cylinders aren't too large -- Bast can fit one in each hand, but carrying more than that would be dangerous. There are no labels or other identifying characteristics on them.
Two seems like a perfectly fine number. Bast grabs one in each hand and makes his way back.
Upon Bast's return to the group, one thing is clear about these crystals -- they contain some level of lightning energy, and they should fit that machinery Yves was inspecting in C1.
"Science," Yves says, dubiously.
"SCIENCE," Linnet echoes, less dubiously. "Yves, would you do the honors of the science? Once we're done with this hallway, of course."
"Uh-huh. Let's all back away slowly before we science too hard, alright?" Isa says.
"...do we want to try and clear these out so they don't surprise us later?" Bast gives the room of quiescent murder vegetables a dubious glance.
"Are YOU up for fighting sixteen of them at once?" Linnet says.
Yves grimaces. "Judging from the noises I heard, /I'm/ not."
"Is there anything we can shove in front of the door? Like those scarab crates, maybe?" Orrey asks.
"I mean, for now we've managed not to anger them; let's just not get too close," Linnet says. "Right, Orrey?" Linnet has still not let go of Orrey's shoulders, not until they have another destination to steer him toward.
"Next room?" Orrey asks the persistent Linnet.
"We'd probably need tools to move one of those crates. ...between grenades and Yves we might put a solid dent in them, but I don't think that's how I want to find out how these crystals react to explosions. Yeah, let's move on for now," Bast says.
Gently, Linnet turns Orrey around and pushes him in the direction of the rooms at the end of the hall. "Next room."
The rooms at the end of the hall continue the trend from the beginning of the hall; treadmill rooms for collecting fitness data for purposes yet unknown.
"This place is a little too symmetrical for my tastes. At least it makes it predictable," Orrey says. "Oh, here, everybody take one of these, just in case." Orrey hands everyone a Potion.
"Thank you, Orrey. This looks more reliable than bathroom ether," Linnet says.
Bast nods appreciatively as he pockets his. "So - that large room by the entrance?"
"And Isa, you'll probably need one of these..." Orrey hands her a Hi Potion in addition to the regular Potion. "And Yves and Linnet, you'll probably find these helpful." Orrey hands them each an Ether.
"Oh, thanks," Isa says, and slips them under her jacket and onto her belt, where a pair of other bottles sit in leather loops.
Bast sets off down the west passage to get back to the foyer once everyone's got their potions put away.
Yves takes the ether, but does check to make sure it's still sealed before putting it in a coat pocket.
This is a small room set aside for some level of testing. There is a green bed with a white sheet over it in the corner, plus three cabinets on the opposite wall. A stainless steel industrial sink is set next to a tall standing desk with a three-foot-wide pale yellow cylinder that runs down into the floor.
With the comparison data fresh in her mind, it takes Linnet just a few minutes to confirm that the equipment in here is set up solely for humans.
"Sylphs and humans. Sylphs and humans," Linnet mutters.
"So, Humans and Sylphs...but not Tonberries and Moogles?" Orrey asks.
"Well, I suppose if there's something downstairs looking to capture us and turn us into its next subjects, Yves and Bast are safe. Or maybe their testing rooms are downstairs." Linnet looks disgusted. "Let's go do some science. Maybe the overload will blow up some part of this place."
"Shouldn't we try the slide card next?" Orrey asks, heading off in that direction walking backwards.
"Hand me the key card. I'll wait by the door, in case there's only a moment's power when you plug that cylinder in," Isa says.
"Oh, right. Forgot we had the card. Two-part science, then."
"Actually, I was thinking. This thing didn't get through the doors," Bast says. "What if we try to lure it out, from above?"
"I've got the card, you get the door, Isa!" Orrey says.
"Orrey, hang on. Bast...I think that might be a plan for after we try our current science," Linnet says. "I mean, your two choices are that or having me hover."
"From the catwalk?" Isa asks Bast.
"Would that work? Just yell out over the balcony?" Orrey asks, hesitating now that he's not sure which path would be better.
Bast nods to Isa. "Yeah. The doors might keep it contained on the main floor, instead of us dealing with it in the hallways."
"One way or another I'm going to end up down on that floor; if you think everyone else would be safer above it, that's fine."
Orrey is continuing on towards the stairwell with the locked door.
"Rather keep everyone out of reach as long as we can. Or at least until we have a better idea of what it can do. Orrey, get back here!" Bast shouts.
"Up or down, let me know!" Orrey bounds away. Orrey stops with the card and stares back for about 3 seconds before trying to swipe it.
Linnet probably shouldn't have let go of him, but, too late now.
"Only reason to go down is a chance for more information. Orrey, there's no power yet," Isa says.
Orrey nods impatiently. "Figured it was worth a swipe."
"Hey, Orrey. You want to do something dangerous and exciting?" Bast walks over unhurriedly.
"I think I'd rather see what's downstairs first. Which could be dangerous and exciting in and of itself." Orrey says.
"Yeah, that's part of it. How about you give me that card, and we'll go upstairs to figure out what you can do to attract the attention of our basement dweller that hits like a tree trunk? Figure it couldn't have gone any way but down that hole in the floor. I bet it can come back up the same way."
Linnet drops back and puts an arm around Yves' shoulders. "When we get out of here, we're having an all-night brownies and booze session in the Starfall's galley. Sound good?"
"Shout from the balcony?" Orrey asks as he tosses the card to Bast. "Or something more drastic?" Orrey taps his watch.
"Tie you to a rope and dangle you?" Isa offers.
"Good start." Bast doesn't make it particularly clear who he's replying to as he pockets the card.
"Again? As much as I'm a fan of being dangled on the end of a rope, I think I'd rather have my own two feet under me when this goes down." Orrey shakes his head.
"Fair enough."
"So much booze," Yves mutters.
"Alright. Let's go set this up," Bast says. After checking to make sure no one has wandered off to start some research, Bast starts climbing the stairs.
Orrey waves with a grin and heads up the stairs ahead of Bast.
Once at the balcony, Orrey leans over the edge and stares down the hole. "HEY! HELLOOOOOOO!!!! Anybody DOWN there?"
There is a long, long silence.
"Nothing?" Orrey sighs.
then
"...hello?"
A woman's voice. Frail. Worried.
"Yinha's bountiful ass." Bast swears as Orrey charges up past him. "Yves and Linnet on this side, Isa with me." He takes off for the far side of the building at a run.
"...who's there?"
"HI! I'm Orrey! Um...Who are you?" Orrey thinks to himself, isn't this usually Yves' job?
Yves moves to the indicated side, because it's only his job to talk to people if they're not, like, people.
Isa follows Bast close, one hand holding her spear tucked up along her arm and the other ready to vault over the balcony railing at the slightest provocation.
A slight figure creeps up out of the shadows, out of the crumbled walkway that was the massive elevator leading down into the basement level. The figure is wrapped in a tattered lab coat, pulled up around their head. Their right arm is exposed, bare, dangling and useless.
"Are you OK? Do you need any help? We have a healer with us." Orrey asks, concerned.
"I-I'm..." the voice is shaky and unsteady, and they lean against a bit of the cracked railing around the broken elevator, balance weak and uneven. "I'm not well. Nothing has gone well. ...a healer..."
Linnet peeks uncertainly over the balcony railing, trying to discern who the hell this might be.
"What's your name?" Orrey asks.
"Jacaranda Vale." A bit of strength returns to her voice.
"Nice to meet you. How can we help?"
"This might be beyond me, Orrey," Linnet whispers out of the side of her mouth.
"And..."
She takes a step forward.
"I..."
The good hand goes to the edges of the tattered coat. The fingers look too long, too red.
"Have..."
The coat pulls, catching, then tears, the sleeve separating, threads snapping.
Orrey is holding onto his watch, knowing what's going to happen next isn't going to be pretty.
"Had..."
"Enough..."
"HEALING."
The coat falls away.
Jacaranda Vale. 29. Human. She/her. Airship technician. Asthma. Moderate physical health.
Nowhere in the documents Orrey saw did it mention the long white barbed whisker extending from her left cheek and coiling back around her knees, twitching as one bloodshot human eye and one sparkling golden cat's eye bore holes in him.
Matted blonde hair gives way to thick orange fur with spots, protected by a bony growth stretching from her jaw down to her shoulder, one ear with two holes for earrings removed before an appointment, one ear tufted for long distance hearing.
As Orrey watches, she snarls, in fury and in agony as her body shifts to grant this other existence more room inside of what makes her her, a second whisker snapping into existence and then stretching to twenty feet in length, before vanishing just as quickly as it appeared.
Yves has seen couerls before. The big cats are native to the wooded areas below Kuganepo. They're quiet and they keep to themselves.
This one isn't going to do that.
End session.