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zahneundklauen-retired · 4 years

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Something Fishy || Alcher and Dave

TIMING: A few weeks ago, during the sleepwalking potw PARTIES: @seizethecarpe and @zahneundklauen SUMMARY: Alcher and Dave wake up in the middle of the forest surrounded by lights and a fishy smell. CONTENT: Nudity mentions (non nsfw)

The first thing Dave noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t in his van. The autumn wind buffeted his skin where he lay on the ground. A beetle was crawling over his hand, tickling as it crossed from uninjured skin to hyper sensitive scars. As he shifted, the ground did too, layers upon layers upon layers of leaves shifting underneath him. The second thing he noticed was that he’d been swimming. There was a thin layer of slime still covering his skin, and his hair was wet. Dave suddenly felt himself go tense - he had no fucking clue where he’d left his pelt, where he’d gone swimming before passing out, but he clearly had. He swallowed, looking around. Which brought him to observations three and four - the third was that he was surrounded with old lights. Looked like some were regular old lanterns knocked from a boat - covered in algae and whatnot too. One looked at old as electricity itself, and there were at least two that were tail lights Observation 4, he wasn’t alone. There was someone else here, amongst his pile of broken lights. “The hell are you?” Oh, and 5? He wasn’t altogether that dressed.

Control was something that Alcher cherished. She was confident in it, steeped herself in it, had been practiced in it since the day she was able to walk on two feet. But waking up in a place she did not recognize, through sight or smell, meant she had lost the thing she cherished so much. The ache in her bones was clear enough to let her know that she had shifted, too, and when she moved, her hands collided with glass and wet wood. Leaves squished beneath her hands as she pushed herself up, glancing around, shaking her head to clear the fuzziness from her vision. It took longer than she would’ve liked, and through the haze of metal and damp forest floor, she could smell another. Human, with the lingering smell of the ocean. Blubber. Alcher blinked, his voice breaking her thoughts. She looked over at him through hazy eyes. “I could ask you the same question, stranger,” she muttered, feeling around them. “Where are we? I do not recognize this place.”

“Can you speak up?” Dave asked, pushing himself up to his knees, and then onto his feet as his joints creaked from the cold. In the night, it was damn hard to read lips. He could guess the general gist from what he did hear, so he built an answer around what he thought she said, regardless of whether she repeated herself herself. “I’m Dave. Don’t know where the hell all these lights came from.” He didn’t like it one bit. The ground was dry, there were no real reverberations travelling through the ground that he could see. He could still smell the ocean, so they couldn’t be too far inland. “Your turn.”

“I asked who you were, and if you knew where we are,” Alcher said a bit more loudly. Though her tone was still curt, it was not for having to repeat herself. Her mind was on edge and her muscles were still taught, as if preparing for an attack. She went to struggle to her feet, only to realize her prosthetic was not attached. She looked back up at the man, squinting through the haze and darkness at him. “I am Ada. And I need you to help me find a stick for support,” she said, shifting in her spot to try and use a tree to lean against as she pulled herself up to stand. “And then we should figure out where we are.”

“Ah, right, no, I don’t know where we are. Forest, maybe?” Dave replied, rubbing his head. He couldn’t see much further than the trees. Careful not to trip over any of the lanterns, he looked around for a nearby tree with low branches. When he saw one thick enough, Dave lumbered over to it, groaning as he dragged at the branch until it bent and then snapped with a crack that echoed through the forest. He walked back over to Ada, ripping twigs off the branch until it was smooth. He tested his own weight against it before handing it to the woman. “Here. That work for you?” He breathed in deeply, and looked up to the stars. “East’s thattaway,” he said, pointing to her left. It was the smell of the ocean, and while he couldn’t see the north star through the tree tops, he’d spotted the three stars of Orion’s belt, which would have to do enough for now.

Alcher watched as the older man made his way over to a tree and secured her a branch. The noise was louder in her ears than she would’ve liked, but she wasn’t about to complain. She took the support gratefully and leaned her weight on it, now at ease enough to take a better look around them. She gathered some of the rags that had laid around her and tied them around her waist for at least a small amount of covering. “Obviously it’s a forest,” she said back, recognizing the smell of it. “And what if the town is to the West? Or North? Which way do we try first?” she asked, wondering if her nose would be enough to guide her home when everything here smelled strange and new.

“Good thing there aren’t all that many forests in Maine,” Dave replied drily. “Town is coastal, so once we hit the coast, it’ll only be north or south. Unless you reckon we can find a way to the nearest river, I haven’t got any better ideas.” He breathed in deeply. He smelled of sweat, thick and heavy musk and salt. Thing was, Dave knew he’d showered before going to bed last night. He’d been swimming and working hard, whatever this was. No one had just dragged him out here while he was asleep. “Hey, have you been sleepwalking recently?”

Her companion seemed just as tense about the situation as her. Alcher’s brows furrowed as she looked over at him, trying to place the scent he gave off. He smelled of dirt and ocean and sweat. It was familiar, but again, she found herself unable to place it. Just like with Zinnia. Wrinkling her nose, she looked around them. “Normally I would follow the scent of the town, but it seems...blocked. Or perhaps too far away,” she noted, perturbed by this revelation. They would have to rely on his method for finding their way back, then, wouldn’t they? Alcher glanced over at him, narrowing her eyes. “I may have. Why? Have you?”

“Likewise,” Dave replied, looking her up and down appraisingly. No human would ever say anything about smelling their way back to town. Intentionally or not, she’d given something crucial away, and had been fortunate (or cunning) that he had heard it. “Might as well get on our way then,” he said. He couldn’t walk all the way to town naked, but if they stayed by the ocean it would be fine. “Yeah. This ain’t the first time I’ve woken up in weird places. It’s like I’ve been getting all these lights out of the lake and the depths. Most nights, now.”

“Might as well,” Alcher echoed, hobbling after him as they began the trek back. Out towards the ocean, which, when she concentrated, she could hear the waves crashing against rock far, far off. She glanced over at him. “Lights? That seems to be what I’ve been collecting as well,” she muttered, “strange…” She reached up to remove some leaves and twigs from her hair, giving her arm a moment’s rest. She wasn’t used to carrying her full weight on it and a branch. “From the lake? You do smell like saltwater and seaweed. You are a good swimmer, then?”

“Hmmm. Here I was, thinking it was some long forgotten childhood trauma coming back in my nightmares. Worse that it’s two of us,” Dave spat on the ground in disgust. “I don’t like shit that fucks with my head.” He was becoming more keenly aware of her movements as they moved, initially driven by interest, but the more he thought about it, the more he realised that he could literally feel more of her. He could feel her makeshift cloth rustling in the breeze, each crack of her branch crunching through dry leaves. A fog was setting in around them, threatening to take out what vision he had. “Sure am. You might as well as whatever it is you’re asking.”

Alcher furrowed her brow. He was a strange man, but perhaps his strangeness was part of his non-humanness. She could tell that he was no regular human, but it was always hard to decipher just what others were when her father had not cared to teach her. She’d had to learn that one on her own. “Well, trauma or something else, it’s certainly not something I want to keep happening,” she said after a long moment. She looked back behind where they’d come from and found it was now completely covered in fog. She shivered, wishing for her fur. Turned a sharp eye back towards him. “You are not human. What are you?”

“Preaching to the choir here, ma’am,” Dave agreed as the trees around them began to thin. “Nor’re you. Humans don’t smell their way back to towns,” Dave replied with a shrug. “I’m a selkie. Doesn’t bode well that the two of us are doing the same shit and both of us are something other than human.” He squinted, as the fog around them thickened. The cold didn’t bother him much, but there was something unnatural about the thickness of this fog, like swimming in water. “Something strange is happenin’, watch out.”

“No,” Alcher agreed, “I don’t suppose they do.” She wasn’t entirely sure she liked the way the older man approached the topics. She couldn’t quite place it. But her concern with that could be put away until later. “Werewolf,” she said, glancing around. The thickening fog made her nose itch, and her throat scratch. She hunched over, glancing around. “It smells-- do you smell that? It’s fish. We’re not near enough the ocean, though. Where…” and then she saw it, the two glowing eyes staring out of the fog at them. “What...what is that?”

“I’m not sure.” Dave didn’t have to wait long to find out, as the fog became thicker than pea soup, ramming him off his feet and into a nearby tree. His back clicked as his shoulders jerked around in their joints. His grunted, but the creature in front of him did not bite, it twisted with unfettered grace, and swam to Alcher, leaving Dave damp from the humid air. The creature was unlike anything Dave had ever seen in his life, distinctively in the shape of tuna, but made solely of gas. “What the hell. Get out the way!”

Alcher watched, bewildered, as the fog lifted the man from his feet and slammed him backwards. She stumbled, trying to move away, but it was too fast for her, hobbling on one leg and a tree stump. She swung the stump at it, but it simply went through the figure, spreading its form like a wisp before it reconstituted itself. It reared and raised Alcher off her foot, into the air, before tossing her aside. Her back hit the ground roughly and she groaned with the effort. Angry teeth grew in her mouth, claws sprouting over fingernails as the floating foggy fish turned its lantern eyes back towards them. She tried, hard, to hold her anger back, but it washed through her like an ocean wave and before she could help it, fur sprouted along her arms. “Get out of here,” she growled, her voice mixed with a snarl, “before it’s too late.”

It was undeniably a tuna. A ghost tuna? What kind of unfinished business did a tuna have anyway? Why would a tuna haunt them? Dave rubbed the sore spot on the back of his head as he found his landlegs, trying to spot some way to help Alcher when the damn thing was made of fog. He didn’t exactly have any salt lying about. At first, Dave didn’t make out what Alcher said, her voice too deep and growled, but when he smelled fur, Dave didn’t hesitate. He did not fuck with wolves, not like that. Trusting her word, Dave turned and ran, until he could practically taste the sea, and when he plunged into the icy water, he knew the currents well enough to guide him home.

As soon as the seal turned and ran, Alcher let go of the control she’d been trying to hang onto. Something primal inside of her clawed its way out and tore through her body. Fists turning to claws, mouth turning to muzzle. Fur sprouted along arms, back, legs. The fish charged her again, and Alcher charged right back. She went straight through this time, paws clawing the ground, as the wolf took over fully and she raced off into the forest. The only evidence left behind of her the stick Dave had so kindly found for her to use as a crutch.

#chatzy #chatzy: dave #wickedswriting #something fishy #dave

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nelllraiser · 3 years

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adventures in guilt | dave & nell

TIMING: shortly after nell summoned a shark-jellyfish demon. PARTIES: @seizethecarpe and @nelllraiser. SUMMARY: dave returns the jacket nell forgot on the boat, and the two try to navigate a life with guilt. CONTENT: sibling death mentions.

Dave carefully folded down the coat over his arm, smoothing out the material idly. That wasn’t the full reason, the texture of the scales under his fingers was captivating, more interesting than anything else nearby. But this was the college campus, Dave wasn’t sure he would want to touch anything else, the risk of beer stickiness on everything was too damn high. It was drizzling, cool gusts biting the needles off of nearby trees and blowing them around the park bench. As unbothered as he was by the cold, Dave hated icy winds. The sooner the ‘caster showed up, the better. He waved at her when he spotted her, standing up from the bench. This’d be interesting.

Generally Nell didn’t come to campus this early. Her visits to the university mostly consisted of visits to her friends, and the occasional sleuthing for a bounty, but classes hadn’t even begun yet for the day. Thankfully she hadn’t overslept, because the witch hadn’t slumbered in the first place. With Bea gone to New York, the house was just herself and Luce, and far too much like it had been when their third sister had been struck down, existing only as a ghost. It made for restless nights that came more often than they already had, though Nell had managed to fill a good amount of them with work. As Dave came into sight, Nell felt the familiar sensation of guilt flooding her stomach, a feeling that hadn’t left her since the accidental deaths she’d caused— but one she’d learned how to manage in a way that allowed her to function rather than wallow. Unfortunately the sight of the selkie brought all the regrets of that day back the instant she set eyes on him, though she squared her shoulders in sheer refusal of letting them overwhelm her. Finally getting within speaking distance, she gave the man a nod before speaking. “Hey.” Shit, what else was she supposed to say? There had to be something else, right? “Thanks for keeping my jacket.”

“Wasn’t about to do anything else with it,” Dave said, handing it over, scrutinising her with a trademark scowl, that did little to show what he was really thinking. Somehow, she looked older now than the last time they’d met, and he knew how that kind of guilt could eat at someone’s youth in the worst possible ways. But he also knew that the younger you were, the more important it was to be able to hide that kind of shit, and he had no doubt that plenty of her younger friends didn’t see it at all. “You holding up alright?”

Under any other circumstance Nell might have jokingly asked about whether or not the jacket was his color, or if he’d sneaked one single try on. Nevermind the fact that she was fairly certain he wouldn’t even be able to get his arm into the sleeves of the tiny jacket. Instead, she just accepted the jacket wordlessly before layering it over the sweater she was already wearing. Yet another thing she hadn’t inherited along with her lack of fire abilities was the heightened body temperature that went along with it, and Nell was almost endlessly cold in the winters of Maine. His question caught her wholly off-guard, rather convinced that he still thought her some idiotic, and guitless spellcaster who didn’t know what she was doing, and didn’t care to think beyond that. Surprise flickered ever so briefly over her features before it was quickly replaced with a frown, and suspiciously drawn eyebrows. “I’m not the one who got eaten by a demon shark.” She wasn’t about to admit the truth to a man who’d witnessed one of her greatest mistakes when she barely admitted it to herself.

“No. But I know a thing or two about being eaten by guilt,” Dave replied slowly, like the words were being dragged out of him. That he knew he could offer her the comfort that people who hadn’t been there couldn’t. He still wasn’t convinced she deserved it. He wasn’t convinced power like that, the kind that was at once a tempest and could summon a tempest, ought to be allowed to live. But that sorta shit wasn’t his call to make, not unless she was deliberately slaughtering people. Hell, in a town like this, there was probably some sort of person who specialised in ‘casters.

Nell watched the man with a guarded gaze, as if trying to see below his exterior to see what secrets or well-hidden intentions were hidden underneath the apparent concern he was now exhibiting. Though even calling it concern might be a bit of a stretch. His words seemed reluctant— almost as unwillingly spoken as her reply was. “And you think that’s what’s happening to me?” Nevermind that it was the truth. Beyond her inability to properly express herself was the question of why he was bothering with her in the first place. WIth the way he’d reacted on the boat paired with his attempts to pin her against the railing- she’d thought he’d want to get in and out of this situation as quickly as possible.

“Don’t know. It’s why I’m asking. Doesn’t mean you gotta answer.” Dave replied with an off handed shrug tracing his fingers over the grain of the bench. The arm of the bench had been smashed off once or twice before, the wood was a different age to the age of the sea, but even still there was an unnerving stain deep inside the grain of the wood, that couldn’t quite be washed out no matter how hard the college tried. Dave knew a thing or two about that sort of stain, too. “Well,” he said after a moment, “If that’s all,” He eyed her, just the hint of softness buried in all his wrinkles. “I know how busy you young folk are. Wouldn’t want to keep you.”

“But...why do you care to ask?” Nell replied with another question, still not entirely willing to answer his question. There was still a wariness to her gaze, as if she were waiting for him to turn around and start yelling like he had on the boat. Why did he care whether the guilt was eating her alive or not? She couldn’t help shake the feeling that Dave was simply waiting to turn the tables once again, that he’d change his mind and cast her out just as easily as the coven and her parents had. He was right about her being busy, though. Between the demon cult, her bounty hunting, and potential new jobs she’d been kept running. Still...there was something making her want to linger despite her anxious certainty that nothing good would come of it. Perhaps it was the smallest hint of softness beneath his words, and the fact that she found so little of it these days. “What about you? You said you know about being eaten by guilt.”

“I can take the question back if it bothers you so,” Dave replied with a nonplussed lookin on his face, because the answer to her question was complicated as hell. “Sure do. Life as long and messy as mine, I got plenty to feel guilty for. Not summonin’ demon sharks, I’ll give you that, but enough messes with a body count, that’s for sure.” Dave rubbed the bridge of his nose. Grey clouds overhead were beginning to promise rain. He wasn’t about to share the nature and brunt of his messes, whether they were the sinking boat variety, victims of a monster Dave had failed to stop, or drowning someone who… it was probably not right to have drowned. “Just saying, storing that emotional stuff like a Molotov’s just gonna have it blow in your face. I’d know.”

“It doesn't bother me,” Nell commented defensively, even though the opposite was true. She just didn’t want to admit such a thing. Not to herself and certainly not to the man who’d already see too much of things she wanted to hide or forget. “Does my question bother you?” She posed the rebuttal as a means of trying to get the burden of explanation off herself, shifting it in Dave’s direction instead. The mention of a body count wasn’t something she’d expected from the selkie, and it was plain to see her curiosity had been piqued. Fortunately, she knew better than to ask for details at a time like this, but that didn’t stop her from asking another question. “Well then...what do you do with it?” Her tone was uncomfortable, arms folded defensively over her chest. She wasn’t fond of appearing weak in front of people she barely knew, or asking for help at all, but desperation was starting to get the better of her. Besides- maybe he would just think she was asking for someone else’s sake.

“No,” Dave replied honestly, eyebrows raised at her defensive demeanor, quietly letting her know that he could see just how reticent she was to talk about it. But he didn’t push again, getting ready to leave her to her coat and her guilt when she pried another question out of herself. Dave’s look was probably more understanding than she’d like, but he still sighed.

“Agh, hell,” Dave ran his hand through his hair, turning so he was side on to her when he leant against a nearby fence, his brows dipped deep in thought. For all his gentle cajoling, he wasn’t quite ready to open up to a stranger either. “Different things for different guilts. Some folks act like they never did anything wrong, bottle it up and continue on like nothing ever happened. Some folks spend a lifetime chasing a type of redemption that doesn’t exist, so they can do enough good to outbalance the bad, like it’s some cosmic scale they just gotta weigh up right. Hard to say which way leaves you more fucked up. Guess I deal with it with something in the middle. ‘M not a good person, but I can ensure I don’t make the same fuck ups as before. Focus on what keeps me going. If I face judgement after, I’ll have earned it.” He looked at her sidelong, trying to parse her reaction. “That answer your question?” As vague an answer as it was. There was no talking about the nights with angry outbursts, darker shades that he saw the world in, how quickly his mind twisted to the thought of solving issues by killing. He barely knew this girl, after all.

Nell still didn’t understand why he’d taken the time to answer her questions to begin with, constantly surprised when he continued to linger with her as they spoke. She was silent as she mulled over Dave’s words, trying to fit them into cracks that lived in her as a result of her own guilt. She knew redemption wasn’t an option, one good thing didn’t magically replace one bad. And ignoring her guilt had never been an option for her, not when she was much better at wallowing in it. “So what you’re saying is it doesn’t get any better,” Nell snorted somewhat derisively, but it was meant as a comment at her own expense rather than Dave’s. She was thankful for his words, even if they hadn’t necessarily filled her with hope. Her foot scuffed at the ground, still uncomfortable despite letting the clam shell of her emotional state open in the slightest. “I mean- thanks for answering. I guess it makes sense that you just gotta learn from it and then deal with it.” After all that had been her experience so far, hadn’t it? Something about not being a good person struck a nerve in her, and she couldn’t help but think of how close Adam’s guilt had gotten him to making a lifelong mistake. “I think trying to be better is at least...the mark of a decent person.” That was the closest she managed to get when it came to offering Dave an opinion on his judgement day.

"Wouldn’t say it doesn’t get easier with time,” Dave replied, tilting his head until his neck cracked, easing some of the tension this conversation was giving him. “More manageable, less raw. Easier to put these things in perspective. You’re still young, you’ve got time to figure out how you want to deal.” Even if it didn’t, Dave was always aware that when he talked to young adults about shit, they had so little framework for how much they still had time to change and grow that he didn’t want to say shit to stifle that. The surest way to keep someone the same was to tell them they had no chance of changing. He looked at her sidelong, the tiniest corner of a smile on his face. “I like to think so,” he replied, in a distant, hypothetical way. It wasn’t something he was interested in applying to himself.

He was right, technically. Nell was still young. But it felt like she’d been aged some fifteen years in that last twelve months alone. Being raised in White Crest meant she was more than familiar with its oddities and quirks, but she hadn’t remembered the little town being quite so emotionally destructive. Or maybe she’d just been too wrapped up in the swaddle of youth to experience it herself before she’d left, only to return after seeing how gruesome the rest of the world could be. For some naive reason she hadn’t expected it to follow her back home, but here she was with the literal scars along her arms and neck to prove otherwise. Her lips pursed as Dave refused to take part in her little charade of ‘asking for a friend’, feeling set off kilter when he addressed her and the guilt she held directly. “I never said I was talking about me,” she replied stubbornly as her face took on a somewhat petulant expression despite it being obvious that she’d been doing just that.

The beginning of his smile also caught Nell off-guard, and parts of why she’d found it so hard to believe that he could turn his anger from the boat around so quickly fell into place. She’d wanted him to be the persecutor, to tell her that she’d fucked up and confirm her as deserving of the guilt that lived in her chest like an iron set of chains. To give her the punishment she felt she deserved like her mother had done. The realization had her looking away from him, not wanting to give away any more emotion than she already had. “So you...what? Don’t have time to figure it out anymore?” For once her words weren’t meant as an old person joke at the expense of who she was asking. “Or have you just been letting it ‘get easier’ and put into perspective? And that’s the thing you’ve figured out?”

“Hmmm,” Came Dave’s noncommittal response, just looking at her sidelong. When she pouted like that, it was damn hard to remember that the girl was an adult who had gotten folk killed, not just a lost kid finding her way through the world. Which was what made her more dangerous.

“No. Just got bigger fish to fry.” It was a pact he’d made with himself a long damn time ago, as unhealthy as anything else on his list. He’d face his penance, whether that came at the end of a hunter’s knife or an Aipaloovik’s embrace. Dave knew damn well there were consequences to the choices he’d made over the past couple years, but that didn’t slow him down. He’d face it all, but only once the fury was dead, and he had his family’s pelts once more. He could carry the other, less important deaths he’d caused by choice or negligence or malice until that day. He was, in fact, doing just what he’d told Nell not to, letting a guilt define every part of him. “When it came down to it, I learned to carry what I needed to so that I could do what I had to. That’s all.”

“Yeah...yeah I get what you mean,” Nell mused as she thought back to the other times guilt had threatened to consume her. She’d gotten Bea killed. Watched her sister die because she’d been reckless and selfish, and hadn’t taken care of her problems properly. But even as that sickening knowledge had clawed away at her gut, she’d learned how to stomach it well enough to focus on bringing Bea back. Done what she needed to do...just like Dave had. Or at least it sounded that way. At this point she wasn’t sure what else there was to say, already feeling as if she’d said perhaps a little too much. “Anyway...thanks for the jacket.” Nell shrugged her shoulders to help it sit better on her shoulders as she stood and waited to see if Dave had anything else to say on the subject of guilt and otherwise.

“Sure,” Dave replied, noting the quick shut down of conversation with a wry smile. He straightened, shaking his head to work out any cricks as he began to turn to leave. “I know when I’ve been dismissed.” He began to walk away, before turning back to give her a stern look. “Don’t summon any more demon sharks, kid. I won’t be so nice next time.” Dave said, tapping the top of his head like he was tipping his cap to her. This time when he turned, he did not look back. Hell, he even whistled a tune he hadn’t been able to hear for 30 years.

#// don't look at me im emo and love dave #wickedswriting #ch:dave #adventures in guilt #sibling death tw #chatzy

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walker-journal · 3 years

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Blood on the Beach (Adam+ Dave)

Characters: David Herring (Selkie- Immo), Adam Walker (Hunter - Tapir)

Summary: Adam encounters a hongrey seal. Dave is fighting for keeps but Adam disobeys protocol.

Content Warning: Head Trauma, Vomit

The spellcaster’s blood was still thick and heavy in his mouth, but no matter how rich a delicacy it was, there was an even better prize on the table. Where before Dave had barely had the tiniest threads of self control, strained to the edge after so many days of resisting a hunger he still refused to seek help for, with the smell of selkie in the air, all bets were off. His focus was pinpoint thin, as he cut through the water, following the scent without realising it was so close to the docks he’d been trying to avoid for the past several days. Reaching shore, Dave strode out in soaking wet clothes that were stained in varying ages in blood.

A man in his early thirties was chilling on the shore, in shorts despite the chilly wind whipping around them as he read a well worn. Ollie George was skinny and sinewy, inclined to spending his time on the beach regardless of which skin he was wearing. As Dave approached, he sat up, squinted at Dave through the bright sunlight and smiled toothily as he waved. “Hey Dave! You look rough, have you- woah!” He yelped as Dave grabbed him to the throat, and dragged him backward. Scratching at Dave’s bloody arms, Ollie managed to get onto his feet, only to have the air knocked out of him as Dave slammed him against the seawall. Dave panted heavily, his teeth bared. But a tiny voice kept him from lunging just yet.

“Yo Dave I talked to Sebastian and…”

Adam strode down the ramp at the far edge of a nearby pier, jogging into the low tide zone toward where he’d caught sight of his noodling partner. The crunch of Adam’s shoes on the sand and shells paused as the Hunter took in Dave pressing another guy up against the cement sea wall. From the way the lean dude was struggling and Dave’s teeth were barred, Adam doubted he’d walked in on a mlm remake of the Shape of Water.

Hesitation costs lives. Adam sprinted across the remaining stretch of beach to barrel into Dave with a footballer’s full-bodied tackle.

Dave was aware of Adam in the way a horse might be aware of a gnat, some hind brain motor processing that he could smell the hunter nearby and opting not to care. A vein bulged in his forehead, pressing his forearm against Ollie’s throat as he opened his maw ever wider. Inch by treacherous inch. A lifetime of protecting selkies was slowly overridden with a hunger Dave did not know how to explain.

The hair was knocked out of him as Adam sent them both careening into the sand and rocky dirt. Ollie slumped against the seawall, clutching at his chest as he gasped for air. Dave swung his head round to look at him as Ollie began staggering towards the water and his escape. Normally, Dave would have kept his eye on Adam, the skilled youthful hunter who appeared the obvious threat. Dave barely even acknowledged him other than to slam a fistful of rocks and sand into his face. He rolled onto his knees and sprinted after Ollie, towards the waterfront.

Adam drew both legs anterior to his chest and kicked himself back to his feet and with an economy of motion born from a lifetime of drills. The Hunter had already drawn two tactical knives from their sheathes before he was even fully standing.

The next step was simple, practiced countless times, and Adam was already using the momentum from the kick-up to bring his arm forward and pitch a knife straight into Dave’s back. The impalement would stagger the Selkie for a moment, and that’d be all the Hunter would need to end this.

Yet, the knife never left Adam’s hand. A flicker of indecision turned lethal grace into a baseball newbie’s first stumping on the pitcher’s mound, blinking sand from his eyes.

Could he really do this all over again? …What about this other guy running from Dave? Was it right to jeopardize his life for the sake of sentiment? ...Dave would never do this in his right mind...But Adam had already needed to put down plenty of people who couldn’t control themselves to save other lives...He no more right to spare Dave’s life then he had the right to take it.

Adam’s head was filled with contradictions, but silver and iron blades dropped to the sand as he sprinted headlong after Dave.

Sprinting under the pier, Ollie vaulted abandoned netting rigs, ripped up tarps, and something that might later be identified as a mummified hand, yelling as he tried to gain distance from Dave through the obstacles, but Dave ran with the same precision that he swam with, a predator nearly in his element even with saliva slobbering down his mouth. Making a last ditch effort, Ollie veered right toward the see, but the tide barely lapped at the soles of his feet before Dave tackled him, slamming both bodies into the floor. Veins bulging, Dave pinned Ollie’s arms under him, grappling with himself too, and the hunger that felt as wrong as it felt demanding.

Ollie bared his own seal teeth, eyes filled with terror as he tried to snap at Dave’s face, but he was pinned down by Dave’s forearm. He begged, voice creeping up in pitch with every frantic word.

“Dave, Dave, stop stop stop! Is this about the lobsters? Because I swear I didn’t know they were Karkinoids, I would never- please, Dave c’mon it was only one finger it was a- hey help! HELP!”

Dave’s head whipped to where Ollie was looking, and he growled deep in the back of his throat. “Stay back, hunter.”

“No, Dave man this isn’t you,” insisted Adam.

Looking at Dave now, teeth barred and feral in the eyes, Adam experienced an unwelcome memory of himself at the Hunter’s Moon. A twinge of self-loathing nausea came with recollections of the intoxicating power that’d bled into him from the red moonlight. Had he seemed just like this to poor Rio and Nell, hopped up to the crazy eyeballs on some paranormal bullshit till one barely resembled the original person?

A small pain in the Hunter wondered whether the true Adam underneath was really so different the then moon-drugged killer his friends had confronted on the glass lake, but Adam pushed such thoughts aside.

All that mattered was that whatever had gotten into Dave, literally, he shouldn’t have to wake with a stomach full of fellow selkie.

“Sorry dude, gonna have to eat me to get rid me. Noodler-bro unity.”

Adam sprinted towards where the two paranormals were grappling and shifted his center of gravity and thrust forward his right leg while keeping the left leg slightly behind it. The Hunter hit the last stretch of sand into a rough slide tackle that’d have earned an immediate red card on any soccer field. Adam’s low hooking kick slammed into Ollie as if he were the soccer ball, directly hitting him a combination with mutant strength and accelerated leverage, wrenching him from the other Selkie’s grasp by blunt impact. The rest of Adam’s momentum carried him bodily into Dave in a unguarded full-on collision, a price to pay for getting the hostage outta there.

Dave lunged for Ollie as he was knocked out of Dave’s grip, but Ollie grunted, rolling out of Dave’s reach, clutching his side. He didn’t even get to his feet, scrabbling into the water without a second glance at his assailant or his rescuer. He slipped into the waves as easily as if it was his second skin, gone, while Adam slammed into Dave. With a growl of bared teeth, Dave salivated over the fresh meat trapped underneath him, even though he was furious at the loss of the tastier prize. “No.”

When it came to killing hunters, the easiest thing was to ambush them, pull them out of their element and into the water. Even the weakest of them was stronger than he was on any day of the week, with the training and energy to go along with it. Take out the limbs, get the throat, don’t let them find their balance. Kill before they could land a single blow, because if a hunter wanted you dead, that was all the hope chance you had. Dave couldn’t separate his training from Adam any more than he could separate the hunger from his rationality. He took as little note of his own desire not to kill and eat Adam as he did Adam’s desire not to kill him.

With a quick shift of his weight, he trapped on of Adam’s arms under his body weight, and opened his mouth wide, but it wasn’t Adam’s throat or head that he aimed for, but the meat of Adam’s shoulder on his other side.

For a moment Adam’s whole world was just flares of veined red in a black tunnel as pain lanced though his shoulder into the bone. His body begged to pass out. Adam’s back arched as he spasmed with in agony. Dave’s teeth closed like an aspiration straight into the marrow. Warm blood broke like a wave down over Adam’s back to stain the sunbright sand. Shock threatened at the threshold of his guts like an approaching wave of cold.

The Hunter willed himself to stop spasming as training ran his mind through the next steps of getting out of this hold. If Dave wrestled him to the water and got his neck exposed, Adam’d be arguing about today’s Black Bears game with Dad in under a minute.

But although his reflexes were primed to end this now, Adam fought back against that lifetime of muscle memory as a higher purpose than just survival gave his mind clarity through pain.

Adam let out a ragged rap of pain as he twisted in Dave’s grasp, tearing his own flesh further with the movement. He swung up his free arm toward the side of Dave’s head. While survival instincts screamed to cave Dave’s head in, enough of Adam’s reason remained to hold back.

Instead Adam used the flat of his palm to try to daze the Selkie enough to break his hold, even though ever bit of training dictated that a puncturing blow to the jugular with mutated strength would be the “correct” move.

There was a moment when Dave’s teeth met the resistance of bone, that only lasted the length of two heartbeats, where he could have bitten right through the socket and leave Adam without an arm he could ever use again. Or he could twist his head and tear away the flesh already between his teeth, so that Adam’s blood would spurt over the sand rather than in his mouth while Dave could finally, finally eat.

He did neither, frozen in an internal battle as ferocious as the external, slowly increasing the pressure on the bones between his teeth as muscle and sinew popped to get the bone out of his way. Coppery blood coated his tongue, lips and chin, tantalisingly close to what he wanted and so far from what he wanted it might have been on another planet.

Stars exploded from Dave’s temple, the force of Adam’s blow knocking his jaw loose and body off balance, giving Adam all the time to get out from under him, leaving a bloody mess in the sand and granite. It wasn’t the first time Adam had bled on a beach in front of Dave, leaving a mess in his wake as he’d bargained with a monster for his and Dave’s life. Dave blinked away the stars and sentimentality as he bounced to his feet.

Like the bloody mess of his arms and the deep gash in his face, Dave shook his head to shake off the growing headache, bared his bloodied teeth, and slammed Adam into one of the pier’s wooden pillars.

Everything flared white. The high pitched ringing in Adam’s ears made the foamy surf sound like it was screaming onto the beach.

Adam had never been trained to merely subdue or fend someone in a fight. Adam wasn’t a police officer, bouncer, or street tough who roughed up squishy humans to assert authority. Adam had been conditioned as a soldier to fight ravenous immortals, giant beasts, and eldritch things from beyond this universe. These adversaries were so preternaturally lethal anything less then the most brutally efficient kill meant you were dead a second later. Even a lowly Spawn could tear a human in half. The common forest Carach could wade straight through small arms fire and pop open your ribcage like a candy orange. The mission had always been simple: kill this thing before it kills you and everyone else.

Except today apparently, where Adam’s mission was to put a cease and desist on roid-rage Captain Ahab here.

Shit shit shit

Pain splintered into Adam’s back as the pier barnacles sliced his back open. Dark red stained the white clusters clinging to the pier as their razor edges tore into Adam’s flesh. The Hunter felt the bitter salt sting of the barnacle cysts grinding deep into the wound as Dave slammed him against the sodden wood pillar, probably looking for an opening to sink those teeth into Adam’s throat.

The muscle memory of training immediately pulled Adam towards the lethal solution. A glance at Dave told the mutant where he could aim blows that’d punch through ribs with enough momentum to rupture organs.

Adam let out a shuddering breath, gagging on the bloody bile and trying to fight past the concussed fog in his brain. With another rasping exhale, Adam pushed away the deadly conditioning that’d served him so well for so long. That wasn’t why he was here.

Adam reached his arms up and behind his head to grab the opposite side of the pier pillar. The tired muscles of the Hunter’s biceps knotted as Adam hoisted himself into a dead hang up through leverage and brought his knees up to slam a quick two-legged kick into Dave’s gut. Adam pulled his weight off from the kick a bit just before impact, not wanting to break anything internal.

----

Crashing backwards into the sand, Dave grimaced as his distended, overful stomach pushed acid up his throat. Days and days of overeating while still famished were taking a toll, but he couldn’t afford to let the pain breath. Dave pushed himself back onto his feet, eyes fixed on the bloodied mess of Adam’s shoulder.

He should have torn that arm right out of its socket. The thought turned his stomach too. There were a couple dozen humans in the surrounding hundred feet. All Dave would have to do would be climb on the docks. No one up there would fight back, not enough to be a problem. A stranger wouldn’t create such a strong internal struggle. Dave glanced up at the pier, then back down at Adam, hands curled into fists so tight the skin of his knuckles might split.

“Get out of here.” Dave warned through grit teeth. Or begged.

Adam’s eyes followed Dave’s gaze up past the rock seawall towards where passerby in the harbor were blissfully going about their business. Understanding passed from killer to killer.

Adam shook his head. “Don’t do it.”

The effort of the deadlift moments before has taken its toll. One arm hung limp at Adam’s side as the exacerbated injury in his shoulder sent ripples of cold numbness that made it hard to even his finger. Adam’s clothes were a mess, torn by lacerations, barnacles, and sodden with spreading scarlet from one shoulder, all across his shredded back and the blunt-impact head wound now bleeding down his neck.

But Adam lifted his remaining functional arm in a boxing guard. He squared up to face Dave, feet angled parallel with the right slightly ahead of the left, chin up, eyes forward.

Dave blurred in out of focus in Adam’s vision, seeming to merely be a distortion of light from the crystalline blue surf and pale sand. The athlete knew more than enough about bloodloss and concussions to realize the danger he was in, but running was a non-option.

“I’m not gunna kill you man,” Adam assured, moving slowly to the side and around as he looked for an opening in Dave’s guard. “Come back with me, we’ll find an antidote. I’ll keep you from hurting anybody while we figure out to get this out of you.”

Adam’s words only barely made it through Dave’s skull as he stared at Adam, mouth open and closing like it was longing for something to chew. An antidote? Dave didn’t need one of those. The only fix to starvation was consumption. But he’d known something had been wrong for a while, since that day on the beach with Griffin, since before.

Dave forced himself to look at Adam as more than meal and enemy. His eyes didn’t quite focus on Dave’s, his guard was one handed, and his expression resolute. His stance was as sturdy as could be, but on shifting sands that were quickly getting wet with his blood, Dave didn’t see much strength in him.

Maybe the hunter would be an easy meal after all. If Adam took half a step forward, he’d step on a seaweed coated net, that if Dave pulled on just right could knock the boy off his feet, maybe even hauled into the water. It was tempting. One more bite and even a hunter’s healing likely wouldn’t be enough to pull Adam back from the brink. Or, the steps up onto the pier weren’t that far either, a dozen satiating meals chatting idly about the May sun, just waiting for his bite.

“No.” Dave trembled, taking a slow, uncertain step back.

The hunger inside him wasn’t just poisonous, but monstrous too. The kind people like Adam were needed for. Dave swallowed, Adam’s blood still mixed in with the saliva dripping out of the corner of his mouth. This sliver of control, paid for in Adam’s injuries, wasn’t going to last. The hunger was clawing its way up his throat, down his gullet, like it might consume him from the inside out.

“No.”

Like if he didn’t eat someone else, his hunger might eat him. Dave took another step back, grimacing at the ache of a bruise forming under his ribs. A wave rushed water up to his ankles. The only advantage of Adam bleeding so profusely is that Dave could no longer smell the enticing scent of selkie. He opened his mouth to speak again, but couldn’t find any words.

Dave plunged into the waves, speeding away from shore, putting as much distance between him and Adam as he could before his hunger eclipsed his conscience once more.

Adam tried to sprint at the departing Selkie but his steps became sluggish in the sand. Dave was a black spot vanishing into foam as refractions from the surf were burning lances across his vision. Everything spun, the sky and sea switched places in a rush of blue. Light went out.

#head trauma tw #vomit tw #Adam #dave #Hongrey Seal Omens #chatzy #seizethecarpe #walkerjournal

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juniperrivers · 3 years

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I Can Swem || Juniper & Dave

TIMING: Current. LOCATION: A cove outlet. PARTIES: @juniperrivers @seizethecarpe SUMMARY: Juniper runs into Dave while going out for a swim. She’s ecstatic at there being another selkie in White Crest that’s not her aunt. They decide to go for a little swim.

Juniper’s aunt’s words are static, scattered and worried, ringing in the back of her head as she made her way towards the beach. ‘Not without me,’ the older woman had said. It was less of an instruction, more of a demand. Still, the call of the ocean was loud, loud enough to drown out any worries that might have crept into her underbelly. Her skin laid neatly in her backpack, perhaps the only thing she treated with care. She navigated the uneven terrain as she made her way to a separate part of the beach that was less frequented by humans, and offered her a sense of security more than a cove would, especially these days. The rocks underneath her feet gave way with her weight as she struggled to keep upright, the palms of her hands slapping against the surfaces as she skidded down the small slope. Out of breath as she finally reached the private beach, small hill facings on either side, she began to take off her backpack. Not before she caught sight of somebody. How could that be? She had gone so far. She watched them curiously before she let out a loud shriek. Her legs carried her forward without much thought, up until she realized she had dropped her backpack onto the ground. She spun around quickly to scoop it up, holding it to her chest as she ran over the rocky surface to the man who was doing just as she had come to do; swim. “Hey! Hey!” Juniper screamed excitedly as she approached him, one hand above her head waving, “Omigosh, I’ve never seen anyone other than me, and well, my aunt! And my parents, but they’re gone--” Juniper stared wide-eyed at the stranger, her grin only growing wilder by the second.

Dave’s stomach rumbled as he peeled off the layers of his clothes, carefully folding them into his bag before tucked it out of sight under the mini dock, pinned in place by some of the larger rocks he’d found over the past few months and brought over here for this purpose. Wind whipped around him as Dave’s skin became more and more slimy. He lowered himself down into the water before it became too slippy to stand, sliding his fingers over his skin to check that nothing was stuck on the inside before slowly beginning to pull it over his legs, seamlessly beginning the transition to seal as he slid the skin further and further up his body. Which was when he heard a human voice. Dave cursed, about to submerge himself fully to hide as she waved, when he made out a word or two of what she was yelling. Dave squinted, trying to made out her words, but still sank a little lower in the turbid water to conceal the skin all the same. “Gonna need you to speak up. I don’t hear so good,” he replied gruffly. This entire beach smelled like seal, fish, and a hell of a lot of it. He was upwind of her, unable to catch her scent. “Do I know you?”

“What did you say?” Juniper called back, eyebrows knit together as she watched him sink further into the water. She definitely hadn’t mistaken, he was like her! Juniper stepped closer to the water, her index finger outstretched to indicate towards his lower half that was submerged underneath the water. “I don’t know you, you don’t know me!” Juniper spoke loudly, taking a step further towards the water so that her shoe became wet. “I’m like you though, I saw you--” She looked over her shoulder to make sure nobody followed her. She tightened her grip on her backpack and looked down. Whether or not her next action was a mistake, she couldn’t be sure. She unzipped her backpack and grabbed her skin, pulling it up just enough for him to see. “I’m like you!” Juniper said again, the excitement rising back in her voice. “Isn’t that cool?” She watched the man in wonderment. “Like I said, I only know about my aunt, which--” She shrugged, “she doesn’t like it when I go swimming by myself, but that's not my problem.” Juniper shook her head with a sigh before she pointed back towards her skin, shoving it back into her bag. “I won’t tell anyone, I swear!”

Dave glared at her as she came closer, moving deeper into the water. He understood her this time, as she insisted they were alike. He shifted slightly, peeling the skin off his legs so he could stand, dressed in nothing but a thick layer of slime. She pulled her skin - a skin - out of her backpack, holding it up clearly for him to look it over. He breathed in deeply through his nose. He could smell the salty, seaweed, fishy seal scent on her, but without getting closer, it wasn’t possible to tell whether that was just the seal pelt she carried with her, perhaps freshly stolen or freshly cut from someone. Dave opened his mouth, baring his 1.5 inch canines and jagged teeth in a threat display, warning her not to come closer just yet. “Prove it. Show me your teeth or your slime.”

The man’s expression and stance were lost on Juniper. She was still excited, and naively so about somebody like her out in the open, despite the frigid temperatures. She had heard about humans stealing skins, but they couldn’t wear them, not according to her aunt. Juniper blinked at him as he bared his teeth, the canines clipping over his lips. She pointed at them, her excitement only growing. The excitement that came over her did just what he had wanted. A smear of slime dripped from her underarm and she quickly took off her jacket, tossing it to the ground. Juniper wiped her hand alongside her arm and held it up for his examination. “See! I’m not lying! And I would loo-o-o-ve to show you my teeth, but my aunt has this weird thing on them, so I can’t show you, mostly because those things she made me put in my mouth, the sort of hurt so I didn’t like them and I kept forgetting to put them in,” without taking a breath, Juniper continues as loud as she can bare, rapidly signing as she speaks, “and so one time I saw this boy and he saw them and he went crying to his mom and then my aunt had to explain I was wearing my Halloween costume early, but it was like MARCH!” Juniper let out a breath and sighed, wiping her hand onto her jeans.

Dave looked at the slime, his shoulders dropped, and he stopped baring his teeth as much. He opened his mouth to apologise for his rapid response when Juniper’s words began to flood out of her like a dam had broken. He blinked, curiously. She was talking about something that could either be a full glamour, or a tooth guard with a small amount glamour like his. Or hell, something else entirely. But almost as fast as he’d had the damn thought she was rattling about some crying child and halloween and Dave needed to pause to understand what the hell she was saying. Some kid has seen her teeth, maybe? “Got it. Hell, sorry kid. You can never be too careful about this shit.” He scooped down to pick up his skin out of the water, idly picking seaweed out from between the folds. “I’ve Dave,” He said, looking back up at her. “Were you about to go for a swim?”

Juniper had a fairly significant fight or flight response, and though the human world was far different in understanding when one should run, manipulation was entirely unheard of for her. Sea creatures weren’t the type to master such a feat. Her aunt had warned her about speaking to strangers, but the very fact that this man, now called Dave, was like her? It wiped the slate clean of any worry that Juniper should feel. She blinked at him, her smile only growing in size as he gave her his name. “Dave? I’m Juniper. Like the berry!” She looked out towards the water, then back to her skin which was visible from her bag. “Yes, actually!” She hadn’t gotten to go for a lengthy swim in quite some time, her aunt always worried, always rushing her back in when the waves got too rough, when there was the threat of somebody seeing. “Do you want to swim together?” She asked, her eyes lighting up at the prospect of having a buddy other than her aunt.

“Juniper,” Dave repeated back, to make sure he heard it right. When she asked him to swim together, he paused. Even in the water, he had no where near the energy of a young pup, and his hunts for food were careful and methodical… On the other hand, when the hell was the last time he’d swum with a person rather than a regular seal? The corner of his lips turned up. “Sure,” he said, pointing out where he’d hidden his bag under the dock so she could hide hers there as well. Dave breathed in carefully, looking around, but this time he was certain no one was around. Sinking back into the water, he wrapped the pelt around his legs and waist, the slime fusing his body into something different and familiar as anything else. He pulled the head of his pelt over his own head, his body stretching to accommodate it like a cat stretching into a ray of sunlight. All at once, he was long and agile, wriggling into the water until he was no longer on the rocks. After a couple of loops, he stuck his head above the water, looking around for Juniper.

Juniper blinked at him, waiting for a response. When he finally gave her his answer, she let out a shriek of joy and dropped her backpack to the ground. Juniper kicked off her shoes, pulling her sweater over her head. She struggled for a moment to get it from over her ears, but once it was off, she noticed that Dave was no longer on the shore. After completely undressing, she moved towards the water, her backpack now securely tucked in the same area where Dave’s belongings were. She pulled her skin over her, easing into the way her anxieties faded into the background-- this was where she was at her most familiar, at her safest. She knew that wasn’t absolutely true, but to her, it was. After the skin had fused to her skin, she slipped underneath the water, finding Dave a few feet from the shore. She ducked back underneath, gliding beneath Dave and deeper into the water.

Dave circled in the shallows until Juniper was ready. For all the sharpness and clarity the land had, it was nothing compared to the vivacious world underwater. Without gravity holding the world down, there was freedom for there to be colour and movement in every direction. Colours he could hardly see in his human form. Small schools of fish darted around him, safe in the knowledge that they were far too small to be targeted by him. He didn’t have to wait long for the vibrations in the water that told him Juniper was sliding into the water. He turned in a wide arc as she swam underneath him, surfacing for a quick breath before chasing her deeper into waters, racing up alongside her to head her to where he’d been about to find his meal. The ocean melted every human concern away, until it was just him, the water, and the absurdly playful ringed seal swimming with him.

Every time Juniper slipped back into the water, she felt at home. She had spent so many years of her life as a seal, and when she had been forced to assume the human life-- though, for her own good her aunt had assured her, it felt foreign, unreal. Assimilating into a culture she knew nothing about was still proving to be difficult-- but despite her rambunctious nature, she was a quick learner. Though, it only seemed to be in things that she cared about getting to know. Juniper swam alongside Dave, his form much longer and agile than her own, but she had no issue in keeping up. The way the water felt-- almost as if it were her skin instead of the one she protected so heavily. The school of fish darted away from them as they swam deeper, deeper into the water.

The small seal breached only in the moments in which she was in need of oxygen, and it was possibly hours later that they came to the shore, the brightness of the swim evident in the apples of her cheeks as she began to slip out of her skin, assuming her identity as the 18 year old Juniper Rivers. It wasn’t until she was fully clothed, tucking her skin back into her bag that she noticed the time blinking up at her from her phone. “Oh, oh no!” Juniper exclaimed to her companion, pulling her backpack to her chest, “I’m going to be in so much trouble! Thanks for the swim!” She turned back around just before leaving, “we’re friends now by the way!”

#chatzy #para: dave #para: i can swem #//this title is for olivia bc i know she'll get it

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themidnightfarmer · 4 years

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Dave, meet smaller Dave || Dave & Jared

Timing: Before the end of the party.

Location: Jareds farm

Tagging: @seizethecarpe & themidnightfarmer

Description: Dave comes to meet his reward for helping Jared out.

Triggers: mind alteration tw, three eyed zombie goat tw

Jared was enthused by the idea that another person was going to be adding to the already large group of people on the farm enjoying the party. A party that had been running for three days at this point. Anyone coming in that wasn’t fae became addled, walking over stray sod patches that had cropped up at the gates. While no one was being forced to stay, many kept running into those patches of sod and ending up staying for longer. And anyone who had made it out the other side, found the whole party experience a haze, something most who had made it home had so far attributed to the alcohol and other substances circulating the place. The nymph was waiting for his VIP guest by the fences, swinging on the post holding it up idly until he thought he could see Dave. He raised a hand and waved vigorously, almost dislodging himself from the fence. “Welcome to the party!” he cheered.

Dave had to admit, having a little kiddy goat gruff named after him was a whole different thing than what he’d understood from Jared when he’d looked after the guy at that whole fiasco. This was kind of an honour, he guessed, although it was still a little weird. The second thing was, he was pretty sure Jared was tripping balls from the messages he’d seen. All the same, he was honour bound to show up. Say hi to the guy and the kid, and be on his merry way. Dave pulled up his van near the farm and hopped out, frowning at the number of people he heard. He waved back at Jared, his frown growing. “Think I missed the memo. Didn’t know you were throwing a party.”

“Did I not say the party would be going on?” Jared asked, but didn’t really give Dave much opportunity to answer that. “I could have been so sure I did. You don’t have to stay but I really wanted you to meet Dave!” The tall nymph bounded over to the man and gestured him through the gates. “Tiny Dave is having the time of his life, wouldn’t be fair not to invite his namesake to witness his first time jumping. Besides, I have to repay you for keeping me awake during all that stuff at Pats. We have food and drink, and I told a few folk that you were going to swing on by, they’re excited to meet bigger Dave!” The humans attending the party that had been within earshot of Jared typing (and reading aloud) his texts to Dave had all cheered when Jared had told them he was coming. Whether they remembered this or not was a mystery.

“No, you just, uh, mentioned your goat,” Dave replied with a rough laugh, mostly because he was concerned. Real concerned. There sure were a group of people here, but for a party, the vibe seemed… hell, he had no idea. As he joined Jared through the gate, he wasn’t feeling as sure of things as when he’d started. It’d been a while since he’d been to a real party, maybe this was how they do, as the kids said. “Right, uh, alright. What sort of food?” Dave asked, looking around. Or at least, trying to look around, instead, he was looking up at the sky and down at the grass, and then up again, as if that’d help anything. “Now, hold on a minute, son, where the hell am I?”

It hadn’t been his intention to walk Dave through the gate with the stray sod in it. But the expression change on the man's face was unmistakable. In the headspace he was in Jared couldn’t feel sorry, he could only begin to get excited at what that could mean. Did this mean Dave would stay and party? His grin grew and he took the man's arm and started to tow him into the farmland further. “You came to the party to meet your nephew.” Jared cheered. “You’ll stay a while right? We have good food and everyone is really chilled out.” Although even as he asked this he started walking away from the crowds. Despite his addled mind, Jared was still being conscious that his kids shouldn’t be seen by the partygoers as well as the other way around. The animals had been fenced into the furthest pasture this past week for safety. But if Dave was going to meet tiny Dave it was time to breach the fence for a moment.

Dave couldn’t make heads nor tails of where he was going, nor did he have a goddamn idea where he had been. It didn’t look all the same, he could see the fences and barn and the farmhouse. Problems started when he was actively looking at them. They’d just slide right out of his vision, and the harder he looked, the faster he lost sight of them. “My nephew? Jared, I don’t got a nephew, he’s dead. Uh,” he looked around again, not that it helped in the slightest. “Well, if there’s food…” He trailed off, unable to remember his objections just seconds ago. “Do you know where we’re going? It’s not like me at all, but my sense of direction is all out of wack. Not sure I could tell you which way the sky was right about now.”

In any other mindset Jared would be incredibly upset that he’d made Dave admit to something as tragic as the death of a family member. But he was just as addled as the selkie was, just in a slightly different way. The nymph threw an arm over Dave's shoulders and continued to lead him towards a small barn further away from the commotion of the party. “I’m going to introduce you to tiny Dave, I named him after you and he’s cute as fuck but you gotta promise not to tell anyone about him. NO, don’t promise just like…...please say you won’t, no promises allowed.” Jared tugged on the latch and pushed the barn door open to be greeted by some pretty horrific cries. The little goats that surrounded them weren’t quite normal, but Jared still stooped down to coo at them. “Dave, meet the kids!” Scooping one up into his arms he dropped the kidd into the mans arms. “Dave meet smaller Dave!”

“Uh, we’re already acquainted, thanks, and I haven’t heard anyone call it tiny before,” Dave bristled at the mention of his tiny Dave. Oh, wait, shit, Jared was talking about the goat. How’d he already forgotten that? How had he assumed- ugh. Ugh. Something real weird was happening, but whenever Dave remembered that it slid right out of his head as if it was greased with Selkie slime. “Right, right, no promises, got it.” That should have rung some alarm bells, but instead… “I promise I won’t tell anyone about tiny Dave,” Dave said solemnly, following Jared into the barn. Where else was he supposed to go? When Jared stooped, Dave felt sharp vertigo, even more confused now the guy wasn’t standing next to him, down to one less point of reference to where he was. Dave looked up, and frowned at the complete absence of stars. Suddenly his arms were full of baby goat. Despite the whole world not making a lick of sense, Dave grinned at smaller Dave, holding him close. “You’re right, he is cute as fuck. Do all goats have three eyes? Have I just been looking at goats wrong my entire life?”

Jared was lost as to what Dave was speaking about, but in his mild confusion he laughed. Humans loved when people laughed at what they said. He was also too focused on his task of getting Dave into the second barn that he completely missed the man binding himself in a promise. The nymph was incredibly proud as Dave agreed that smaller goat Dave was cute. “Only the best goats have three eyes, but you can’t tell anyone that either. It’s a secret, people aren’t very nice to three eyes kids. But three eyed kids are great, they jump and play dead like the fainting goats people love, only when they play dead they actually play zombie!”

“Don’t worry, I get it. Not everyone is nice to people with teeth and pelts like mine, neither. But you’re a cute one, tiny Dave,” Dave announced, cooing at the goat in his arms in a very unDave way. “Oh, yes you are, yes you are. Oh, you wanna get down?” He asked as tiny Dave began to kick and twist in his arms a little. “Wait, hold up a minute now. What do you mean there’s goats that faint and play dead?” He tilted his head, wondering if he’d heard wrong. “Do you mean they eat brains? Jared, you’re getting more confusin’ by the minute.”

The wording once again went right over Jareds head, he was instead stuck smiling proudly as Dave cooed at the little demon in his arms. “I mean there’s goats that people like to film, you see tons of them on tiktok, when they hear a loud noise they go all stiff-” Jared demonstrated this by locking all of his limbs and tipping over. Not his smartest idea, as he let out a small pained ‘oof’ from the ground, but he bounced back up quickly enough. “They like brains, do you not? I hear people eat cooked brains sometimes and not just zombie like. But the kids don’t do cooked, only sun-warmed at best I’d say.” Confusing as it may be it was the truth. “Back to the party? You ready to get your dance on?”

“What the hell is a tikto- Oh shit, Jared-” Dave tried to catch him, missing by a mile. He stared in wide eyed confusion at the young man, and shared a look with tiny Dave. Tiny Dave got it. “What’cha do that for?” He asked, as Jared popped back up with a spring in his legs. “Uh, jesus, no, I don’t like brains. I like my meat and fish raw, but I don’t usually go for the brains. What?” He looked around, but the stray sod was everything, twisting his gaze every which way. Everything here was confusing. He needed to get back in the water, where it’d all make sense again. No, he prepared to tell Jared. “Sure.”

“Impression of a fainting goat...obviously Dave come on.” Jared clapped the man on the back with a laugh as if it was Dave that was the worse off for not grasping his actions, and not himself for the decision to topple over. “Great! There’s good music and we have food and it’ll be awesome!” The nymph linked arms with Dave once again, this time leading him away from the small hoard of three eyed goats and towards the doors to the barn again. “You can’t tell anyone you saw the kidds, they’re top secret hush hush. I don’t want anyone looking for them if they decide they want to be released into the wild rather than stay on the farm. Can’t have anyone looking for them you know? You get it right Dave?”

“How the hell is that obvious?” Dave replied, chuckling back although he didn’t know why. There was something in the air, had to be, this guy was nothing like what he’d seen before at Pat’s opening, but as Jared grabbed Dave’s arm and led him back out into the field, the stray sod clouded his mind like cotton candy all over again. Concepts like personal secrecy were all but gone. “Trust me kid, I get it. I swear on my wife’s grave, I ain’t ever telling anyone about your three eyes brain-eating goats. ‘Ere,” Dave reached into his mouth and pulled off his teeth caps, revealing long canines and teeth as sharp as any other seal’s. Sharper, even.

The two hadn’t quite made it all the way back to the party when Dave took his tooth caps off. Jared fully stopped to look, his personal space boundaries completely shot due to his state of mind, so the nymph practically had his nose in the mans mouth looking at his teeth. “That’s mad cool!” He exclaimed excitedly. “I’ve only ever seen one other person with teeth like that and they’re wild cool too!” Thoughts of Skylar filled the nymphs mind and he smiled to himself, he should really find her and invite her to the party. Jareds focus however was brought back in when he blinked and caught sight of Daves teeth again. “How sharp?? Fang sharp? Shark sharp?”

The kid peered right up at Dave’s mouth, until Dave thought he was about to be kissed or something, which this place did not seem the right place for. But no, the guy was just peering at his mouth, and it took Dave a moment to realise why - because he was holding his teeth guards in his hands. How had he already forgotten that. “Seal sharp. Mind yourself kid, or I’ll bite your nose off.” The world seemed to spin again. “Hey, kid, I really gotta get back to my van.”

Jared slapped a hand over his nose and he recoiled from Dave with alarm before that action ended up relaxed into a laugh moments later. “Funny, funny.” His goal was to have as many people stay at the party as possible, but even in the state he was in he couldn’t bring himself to trap Dave more than he already had. His face crumpled into a pout but he looped his arm with Daves to take him back to the front gates. “I guess if you have to go, just come back soon okay?”

#C: Dave #P: Chatzy #mind alteration tw #seizethecarpe

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seizethecarpe · 4 years

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Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery || Winston and Dave

Timing: Immediately after Murder They Wrote and Murder He Thought Parties: @danetobelieve & @seizethecarpe Summary: When Winston hears a murder, they come to investigate, leaving both of them a little worse for the wear.

Winston scanned the surface of the water, their thoughts frantic. They didn’t know how they knew. They weren’t really sure what these thoughts in their head were. But they felt foreign. They felt different. They definitely didn’t belong to Winston that much was sure. It was almost as if they were oil on the surface of the water, similar but not enough to be indistinguishable. “Hello?” honestly, they weren’t sure what they were doing but they knew that they had to look for something, they got up the flashlight app before immediately closing it. It was the middle of the day. Sighing, they kicked off their shoes and socks, and rolled up their jeans before gingerly stepping into the muddy lake that was Dark Score. Cringing as the dirt oozed between their toes, Winston shuddered, this had better be worth it.

Gorged on Ahuixotl flesh, Dave was pretty happy and unself aware as he swam through bloodsoaked water. They’d finished their fight in an unobtrusive part of the lake, nowhere Dave expected to run into people. He just couldn’t stand to stay in the water much longer - fresh water itched at skin that was built to be surrounded by salt, and while being in the water was glorious, Dave had other things to do. Slowly, he exhaled, his body rearranging as his skin split open. He was sure for some it hurt, but for him it was as natural as stretching. Dave stood up in the fortunately waist high, bloody water. He didn’t hear the other person at first, nor see them as his eyes adjusted to the sunny light, but he felt them step in the water, clear as anything. Shit. “Who’s there?”

Honestly. Winston wasn’t expecting to see Dave. Topless. For a man his age he was in pretty good shape. That wasn’t the reason for Winston’s slack jaw but honestly they couldn’t really help but try and look anywhere but at Dave. “Oh…” Winston’s mind was racing. What was Dave doing here and why was he topless. Winston guesses he could just be swimming. But swimming through water that was bloody was a weird coincidence when Winston had thought those things. Felt them in their mind. Here he was stood in water. “It’s just me, uh Winston, we met the other day at the … station.” Winston swallowed trying to decide how to play this. They really hoped Dave wasn’t a dangerous criminal or just dangerous. He seemed chill.

Dave rubbed his hand over his eyes, knowing full well that wouldn’t help them adjust. But yeah, shit, it was Winston. They were standing at the edge of the lake, jeans rolled up, their shoes abandoned on the rocky shore. In truth, they were a little far away for Dave to hear them all too great nor lipread as easily, but the kid looked slack jawed and deeply uncomfortable, for whatever reason, and Dave would try to be real respectful of that, so he was staying right where he was. In bloody water. Without even thinking about it, he scratched at his scarred up chest. “Yeah, uh, kid, why’re you here? Recreational side’a the lake’s that way.”

Frowning. Winston was vividly aware of the fact that they didn’t have a god reason to be here. They could always pull the police business card but they didn’t have their ID or any justifiable reason to be here. But it also seemed somewhat ironic that they were the one who was being questioned at this moment. Taking a deep breath. Winston took a step forward before immediately regretting it. Bloody water wasn’t going to do their jeans any good and Winston wasn’t sure what getting wet would do for them right now. “I … I was walking and I saw all this blood,” Winston replied in a half shout, “... kind of couldn’t help but wonder what went on. You don’t know why there is like … a LOT of blood… do you?”

“Really? You were walking through that thicket over there with all the trash that’s washed up for the hell of it?” Dave eyed them shrewdly. They were lying, clear as day, but Dave was about to do just the same. He wasn’t about to tell some cop associate that he’d killed an ancient species that pretended to sound like crying babies and used their hand shaped tail to drag all sortsa people to a watery grave? That he still had a bit of said species stuck between his teeth? “I’m fishing, Dane. S’all. Nothin’ for you to worry about.”

Still unable to hear Dave all that well, Winston made the executive decision to press onwards into the lake, rolling their jeans up as far as they would go. “Sure let’s go with that,” Winston replied in agreement with a squint of their eyes, was there something weird about Dave’s teeth. Taking a few steps forward, they couldn’t help but frown. Swallowing their apprehension at the situation, Winston was about to say something when they spotted what were unmistakably not human teeth. Oh! He’s a selkie. Winston thought, it made sense really.

Dave frowned even more deeply, stopping his idle scratch to warn Winston away with his hands. That was too late, though, as he heard them speak, calling him a selkie. His calm, if annoyed demeanor dissipated as he surged through the water up to Winston, faster than he was sure most expected of him these days. He grabbed the front of their shirt and twisted it in his fist as he growled deeply. “What did you just call me?” He asked, his sharp canines only inches away from Winston’s face.

Winston was pretty sure that they hadn’t said anything. In fact, they were certain that they hadn’t even moved their lips. Yet within an astoundingly short amount of time, Winston was being grabbed by the collar of their shirt and dragged forward. “Hey, I didn’t say … I didn’t call you anything,” Winston did their best to protest. But Dave was clearly strong. Why was it that all Selkie’s that Winston had met could kick their ass up and down the sidewalk? Aside from Skye of course. But it would be nice to just have someone who wasn’t so much more … physical then them. It was instinctive, Winston couldn’t help it. It was like the first time they’d used magic against that Hell Hound, there was the pull in their stomach, the heat in the palm, a flash of blinding light and the smouldering smell of skin and hair burning. Winston wasn’t sure exactly what they had done.

“Like hell you didn’t. You sai-“ Dave couldn't finished that thought, as hot air burst from Winston's hand, throwing Dave back. Kid shoulda thought that one through, Dave didn't let go in time, so as he fell in the water, so did the Spellcaster. Because of fucking course the kid's a Spellcaster. Plunging in the water was a relief for the burnt skin and chest hair, gave him a chance to let go and get some distance between them, and think. Like how he hadn't seen Winston's lips move a moment ago. Like how the last few days all he'd heard was these random thoughts about computers he knew nothing about. Dave came up from the water with his hands up - neither way was he up for fighting a Spellcaster without an ambush. "Alright, alright. You didn't say anything, but you thought it, right? Like you been thinking about rams and computers and stuff. You play with mental magic, Winston?"

“Fuck no,” Winston replied with a frown, “I mean, I have played with mental magic before, but only because this lake had a giant squid demon in it and a cult trying to end the world, but I ended up with a third eye from it,” Winston wasn’t sure why they showed Dave their third eye in their hand, they hoped that it would be enough to impress upon Dave how unwilling to fuck around with this shit they were. “I don’t know what’s going on but I’m pretty sure I’ve been hearing your thoughts too, like the fact that you just killed someone or … I guess something as a seal? I don’t know, but I promise I don’t want to hurt you and I really don’t like sharing your thoughts, it’s fucking deafening and I can’t focus on my ram and computers and stuff when you’re constantly making that hmm noise. Like I get that you’re stoic but jesus dude you don’t have to be so gruff ALL the time.” Winston hoped that they didn’t have to blast Dave again. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I know you just killed something and I’m really hoping it wasn’t something that you shouldn’t of killed.”

“Giant squid demon? Nearly sorry I missed it,” Dave said gruffly, touching at his reddened, slightly singed chest, trying to see how bad it was. Nothing he couldn’t handle, nothing needing a doctor. “You pack one hell of a punch, kid.” He almost felt bad for pulling them into the water with him. He narrowed his eyes as Dane ranted. “Alright, alright, I get your point. I ain’t that gruff. Although why you’re always thinking about goats is beyond me.” Hmmmm. “Shit, kid, I killed exactly what I needed to. She was a feisty one. Hold on now,” He rummaged around in the water, until he felt the limb, and lifted the ahuixotl outta the water. Bloody water ran from his flesh where he’d been eaten at its muscles. “I hunt ‘em. That’s all you thought you heard. Real noble of you to run out here to try to save her, although kinda ill advised.”

“Yeah, giant squid demon from the underdark that we lovingly named Squidward, had to carry out a big magic ritual to get everything in the town to a point where we could actually deal with it. Not terrifying in anyway.” Winston bit their lip and looked at the wound on Dave’s chest. “Hey, I’m …. I’m sorry I blasted you, I guess this was just one weird coincidence marred by supernatural involvement.” Pursing their lips, Winston swallowed away the guilt that they were feeling. After all if you were going to grab people by the scruff of their neck then you had to consider that this might happen. “Oh, damn, fuck, now I feel dumb… I guess thanks for killing something else that would’ve liked to hold my head under the water and … well probably eat my bones or some shit afterwards.” Winston felt better, at least Dave was cool, but they guessed that meant that there were other things for them to contend with now. “I can keep a secret, about … the whole selkie thing, if you want. I mean, like, I won’t tell anyone and actually, I know a few selkies in town already that are pretty cool so you’re in good company.”

“Wait, Squidward was the demon? Why were people grieve- Oh” Dave smacked his hand against his head. He’d totally been had by them girls online when he came to town. Right. Good to know. “Sounds like that was one hell of an experience.” He waved away Winston’s apology entirely, unconcerned. “I’ve had worse,” Which was a statement he could rather extensively back up, considering the long, lacerating scars running across his whole body. This’d peel like a sunburn and get it all over with. “They cry like babies so you come to the water thinking you’re about to discover Moses in a wicker basket, and drag you under. Lot’sa things like this in this town, I’m learning.” Winston would keep Dave’s secret if he wanted? Dave huffed, standing up properly in the water now he didn’t need to worry about a spellcaster sizzling half the lake before he could get away. “Shouldn’t need to ask, kid. Keeping secrets should be the default, same as I wouldn’t tell nobody that you’re a spell caster.”

“Oh, yeah, that was probably ironic grieving, or they were part of the angry cult that was trying to let Squidward consume all of White Crest or whatever it’s nefarious plan actually was.” Winston was glad that there weren’t any creepy eye cultists left, they were a real buzz kill. Looking Dave over, Winston was sure that they probably had had worse. There was a gruffness to him that suggested that he had plenty of experience dealing with some of the more terrifying aspects of the supernatural. “Oh, well that would’ve absolutely worked on me, I’ll remember to take any crying noises with a pinch of salt with the recognition that it is probably some awful supernatural creature that is intent on turning me into their dinner. But yeah, this town is a literal hell hole in terms of terrible creatures that want to kill you. Don’t even get me started on the mime problem because honestly fuck mimes. Though I am glad that we didn’t have a carnival that was a murder carnival, I was kind of waiting for that one to specifically break bad to be honest.” Winston nodded, that was a dumb move on their part. “Sorry, sorry, I know, I’m kind of new to all of this and sometimes forget the ‘etiquette’ and the rules that everyone else seems to know about.”

“Mime problem?” Dave repeated, looking at Winston skeptically, wondering if they were yanking his chain. If they weren’t, he wasn’t too sure he wanted to know, either. “Not a carnival guy, but I heard some shit went down there too.” Some weird mirrors, the drowning tea cup ride, the rollercoaster that left people petrified. “That’s the big one. So, Dane, how do we get outta each other’s heads? I’m figuring it ain’t as easy as trying to be quiet. Because I really don’t need to hear all your goat and I-eight-six-b-three or whatever now.” Leaving his pelt underwater for now, not wanting to reveal it to the spellcaster, Dave walked out of the lake, to where he’d left his clothes hidden in the undergrowth, forgetting all sorts of human decency conventions as he did.

“You probably wouldn’t believe me even if I told you, but my honest advice would just be to leave if you see a mime, or kill it. I’m not convinced that they’re actually people.” Winston had the image of themselves dressed in mime gear burned into their retinas. It was a sight that they doubted they would ever get rid of. “I mean, it certainly wasn’t the most mundane of carnivals, but I don’t think that anyone died.” At least no one that Winston had heard of. But they could not help but remember the hall of mirrors. Winston was about to start suggesting various ideas that they had to potentially cure this and all of the research that they were planning to do and all of the things that they could try when Dave just walked over to the lake shore entirely naked. “Uh………” Winston wasn’t sure that they would have blushed that hard ever again if they tried to, “I’ll just look the other way I guess.”

“Right, escape the mimes, watch out for giant squidward demons and ladies making fun of it online, and be careful at the carnivals.” Dave nodded, taking it all in. “I think I got it.” He was waiting for Winston’s reply when they panicked, and Dave remembered that not everyone needed to see his own dangly bits. “I thought you said you knew other selkies. How do you think we get into our seal skin, kid? With jorts on?” Dave rolled his eyes, entirely unashamed at he pulled his boxers and shorts on, where the fabric struggled against his damp skin. He only wore clothes nowadays that would dry fast, and considering he was hot no matter the weather, they’d dry fast too. Once he had his shirt on, he emerged from the thicket to look at Winston again. Even if they’d looked away, their skin was still flushed deeply. Dave chortled. “So the brain untangling thing. Thoughts?”

“Dude, White Crest really is fucked, hearing you say it out loud like that. I don’t know how we’re not all dead.” Winston wasn’t sure what it was. Was it the shock of everything? Maybe. It was the fact that there was an older man that was naked from head to toe in front of their very eyes. Maybe it was the fact that this naked man was actually a shape shifter that could slip into their seal skin at will and change form. Surreal didn’t seem to cover it. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting you to do it in such a blase manner, but you know your confidence is really impressive. So you’ve got that going for you.” Winston needed to disconnect their mind from this person so that they could curl up and die. Swallowing their embarrassment at their sheer awkwardness, Winston sighed. “Uh, well, mental magic is really … finicky and I don’t really know enough to be confident in using it, but I have access to a really big library of magical knowledge and then there’s also the internet, and there are tonnes of people that might be able to help. I guess we should probably try by working out what is actually causing this and then we can work out how we stop it. Did you have a weird dream a few nights ago?”

“Confidence? Kid, I’m just too old to give a fuck,” Dave replied with a bemused snort. At least he was kind enough to not comment on their embarrassment. He looked out to the lake, where we water had grown clearer. Or rather, the blood had diluted so much it weren’t so noticeable anymore, at least not to him. The fish’d had a grand time with the remains of the ahuixiotl. “Right, right. You hit the google and I’ll hit good old fashioned paper. Not that I’d have the foggiest where to start.” He looked up at them. “I have a whole bunch’a weird dreams, constantly. Had one about them hungry sands recently, and woke up with bloody knees. Now I think about it, you were in it. That what you mean?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Winston replied somewhat glibly. “God I really wish we could just google a fix to this, that would be ideal.” Unfortunately something told Winston that wasn’t the way that this was going to work. It was fine. Coffee would help them through it. “Yeah, exactly. The incredibly terrifying dream where my parents were devoured by the … what did you call it … hungry sands?” Winston had to admit that as phrases for names and places went that was pretty good. “Well, yeah, that was what I meant. I remember you were in it and I also woke up with fairly bloody fingers, like they’d been rubbed raw by something even though I was just in my bed. It was incredibly disconcerting.” Winston swallowed and frowned.

Hmmmmm. “Wonder if it’s the same shit.” Dave rubbed the back of his head, shaking the water out of his hair. That dream had held nightmares of his too. “Anyhow, Dane, I got shit to do. This spellcaster stuff is way above my paygrade. Not looking to play Nancy Drew when I got to get paid for my real job. Why don’t you head off now, and we’ll talk about this some other time.” There was something else behind his words too. No way was he showing a near stranger his pelt, but he couldn’t leave it in the water either.

Raising an eyebrow, Winston swallowed and nodded gently. “I got it, you’ve not got time to extricate me from your head right now, gotta make that bread or whatever.” Why did Winston always have to do everything themselves? Sighing, they turned and waded to the edge of the lake. The cuffs off their jeans soaking wet despite the fact that they had been rolled up, obviously hadn’t made much of a difference.

“If neither of us’s got an answer as to the how, then I don’t see how we can get our brains untangled right now,” Dave replied with a shrug. “And I ain’t signing up to having my head messed with until we know more.” What did Winston expect, a buddy cop movie? Dave sighed, internally and externally. Realising there was a whole chance they would hear that. He crossed his arms, looking back out to the lake as he learnt against a tree. The sooner they were gone, the better.

As Winston turned to walk away, they couldn’t help but think that a buddy cop movie would’ve been nice, Dave might not know it yet, but Winston was now determined to make it happen.

#wickedswriting #para #chatzy #winston #feat one grumpy old man #it's dave #dave's the grumpy old man

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danetobelieve · 4 years

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Tech-tonic Shift || Dave and Winston

When: week beginning 12/07 or so Who: @seizethecarpe & @danetobelieve Where: the station and etc. Summary: Dave brings Winston some technology that they found at the beach. Warnings: content warnings for death discussion, some slight description of gore and the like

Winston was actually starting to be able to do their job again. They’d taken the week off after Bea’s resurrection, mainly because all the tech around them had immediately gone haywire. After a week it hadn’t really been that workable but Winston had barely been in the job a week and taking an extended period of time off was hardly ideal. Things had improved vastly since then. A knock at the door however dragged them from their thoughts and Winston looked up from the array of monitors they’d been given as part of their new role. Honestly, one of the reasons that Winston enjoyed their work so much was the cool stuff they got to work with. Obviously this wasn’t all top of the line, but then again it was a ‘sleepy’ backwater town in Maine. Looking up, Winston spotted officer Redwood. “Hey Winston, there’s a guy here to see you, found some tech on the beach or something … seems more your area then ours?” Winston honestly wasn’t sure that it was, but when it came to anything with anymore then a six inch screen they were usually the one who ended up doing it. Apparently things hadn’t changed with the new job. Which was fine. “Sure, I’m happy to take a look at it.” Winston held the door open and spotted someone almost exactly there height. “Hi, my names Winston Dane, I’m a forensic technician here, you had something you’d brought in?”

Sometimes the end of the hunt wasn’t a successful kill, but the hope of closure. Dave knew a thing or two about that. Some days he woke up with nothing but the desire to feel the fury’s neck tear under his teeth, and sometimes he was too worn to want anything but the chance to say goodbye. Figured it was the same for everyone else, so when he’d heard rumbles of a beach that was the site of a number of disappearances he’d had to explore it. When he saw some seals hauled up and untouched, it looked all kinds of friendly to him, even with the broken down warning signs. But when he’d had a real walk, he’d begun finding them. Bits of sunglasses here, phones there. After an hour's walk on the beach, he’d found some things worth salvaging. Things that had been spit back out after. Some of it was beyond rescue, some of it wasn’t, but hell, maybe there was someone who would want them back. And hell, Dave had no idea what people could do with tech these days. So he’d brought the whole batch over to the WCPD. When he was finally directed to the person who could help, he offered them a wide hand to shake. “Dave Herring. I was having a walk on one of them beaches that no one sunbathes on, and found all of these ipods and kindles and I don’t know what kinda gizmos. I was told you might be able to help me get them to the right persons.”

Honestly, when Winston had started their day today (with coffee as usual) they hadn’t expected this. But it was certainly an interesting problem. Winston paused for a moment as they considered what this guy was saying. “Okay Dave, cool to meet you…” Winston glanced at the man opposite them before pulling up a chair and taking another one for themselves. “I don’t know if you’ve got all of that stuff with you, but the best way to do it would probably to see if we can work out who they belong to and then I can try and get in contact with them and let them know that you found them and returned them. I’m sure they’ll be really grateful, it’s really nice of you to bring these up.” Winston found that it was less nerve wracking talking to people in a professional capacity then it was when they were in a social environment. “Which beach did you find these at?” Winston asked, curious as to why there was such a great variety of items just being abandoned on a beach.

“As a matter’o fact, I do,” Dave replied, swinging a rough looking tackle bag from his back, that he hadn’t updated since at least the eighties. Why replace what you could stitch and fix back together? ‘Specially when things these days weren’t made to last. Piece by piece, he picked out the salvaged tech, sand grains sticking to each piece. No matter how battered each individual thing was, he set it down on this young Dane’s desk with careful reverence. Some of these things likely had photos of the people that had lost them, and maybe answers too. “Uh, the one just south of Vicker’s beach.”

“Oh, wow, cool.” Winston was pretty sure that the bag that Dave had used to bring the proverbial goodies into Winston was older then they were. However, they weren’t going to complain. At least he had thought to have the good sense to bring them in at all, which was more then most people. Apparently that fact was more true on the one just south of Vicker’s beach. Winston was pretty sure that there was a veritable plethora of iPods (there was an old nano, an iPod classic, two iPod shuffles and four iPod touches), several phones, a couple of kindles and a few other versions of e-readers, an iPad and what looked like the very battered remains of a Alienware laptop. Winston pulled on a set of gloves and glanced at the tech. “You weren’t kidding, this is really a lot of stuff. Weird that people would just leave this all behind, I guess the first thing to do is clean them all up as best I can, then get them charged and see if I can access them.” Winston looked up at Dave. “This is gonna take me a while Dave, can you come back in like a few days or something and I can let you know what sort of progress I’ve made?”

“Sure thing,” Dave said, slinging the worn canvas bag back onto his back, looking at the random assortments he’d left on the technician’s desk. Hoped this Dane person would be able to find their homes, even if their owners were long gone. Plucking his sunglasses from his shirt pocked, Dave nodded his head, and headed out. No point in lingering to waste anyone here’s time.

-------

Several days’d passed, and Dave’d eventually made the trip back to the station to see where the electronic detective had gotten with all them gizmos. He’d done another pass of the beach in the mean time, running his fingers through the sand, but nothing new had surfaced. But sand beaches could swallow and unearth their secrets at any time and maybe he’d found all the big things on his first round. Maybe he wasn’t the only one patrolling the beach for little treasure treats. All the same, he was quickly directed back to Dane’s office, and knocked politely, summer hat clasped in his hands.

Winston had been working on the lost items as much as possible. Finding all the various charging cables had been challenging in itself. Of the gizmos that had been brought into Winston, a good proportion of them would need repairs to hardware before they could be recharged. A few had broken screens which made accessing them difficult. The rest worked to varying degrees. Spotting Dave knocking at the door to their office, Winston pulled it open and ushered him in. “Hey, welcome back Dave, you want a drink or anything …” they weren’t sure if Police Station Coffee would be to Dave’s taste but it was polite to offer, “You didn’t find anymore tech did you?” Winston asked, a little concerned about the amount of it that was apparently turning up.

“Nah, I’m alright, thanks all the same,” Dave replied, waving away any such coffee request as he stepped inside. He set his bag down, and pulled out a quarter of some old kindle, and what had once been the motherboard of some kind of smart phone. “Ain’t too sure you’ll get any use out of these. It’s just that one shore, though. You’ll find trash anywhere, but just whole things abandoned on this one.”

“Sure, it’s cool, the coffee here sucks,” Winston raised an eyebrow at the scraps that Dave had brought in. “I’ll take a look at them if it’s all the same to you, I don’t really know what I might be able to do with it. You never know what you might be able to pull off of something, even if there’s no way to access any of the data that was once there forensics can get a lot. I’m always … surprised by it.” Winston paused for a second. “Anyway, I’ve managed to get into one of the phones, it’s one of the newer models actually and the lady who owned it had a pretty good case on it. It was just scratched up really.” Winston pulled a evidence bag towards them and turned it over so Dave could see the phone inside. “It’s belongs to a lady called Elaine Thompson, she lived here in town, is a retired lawyer apparently. When I matched the phone to her I realised that there is a missing persons report attached to it. Elaine went missing in February of this year.”

“Ha, noted,” Dave replied with a laugh. “Not much of a coffee guy myself, but I’ll keep that in mind.” The caffeine gave him headaches as often as not these days, heavy pounding ones not worth the kickstart to the morning he promised. Besides, sleep was the one thing in his life he had complete control of. He slid the little pieces onto Winston’s desk. “Yeah, you;d know better’n me.” When Dane said they’d found something, he perked right up, clasping his hand behind his back and leaning over the phone. “Shit. That aint good. This here uh beach I found this all on, it had a couple broken signs, saying it wasn’t all that safe to stay there too long. Wonder if maybe all this has somethin’ to do with that.”

Winston was not convinced that there was such a thing as someone who wasn’t a coffee guy. They themselves lived off of the stuff. Sometimes to an unhealthy level. However, that was hardly important compared to the other problem at hand. Dave seemed concerned by the news, however it was nothing compared to the concern that Winston themselves felt at the fact that they had been found in an area with broken signs warning about a hazard. “Okay, that sounds like bad news,” Winston wondered whether this was a coincidence. Maybe Elaine had simply wandered onto the beach and something terrible had happened. They were almost praying that this wasn’t supernaturally related. “I’ve got a map of White Crest’s coastline, can you show me where on the map this area is?” Winston pulled up the map on an iPad and handed Dave a stylus, “You can just draw onto the screen, if you use your fingers to like drag the map to where you want, then you can you know … draw with the pen thing.” Why would they call it a pen thing? “Anyway, if there were signs here we should definitely get someone to check it out properly.”

“Yeah, sure thing,” Dave agreed, sitting in the seat opposite Winston’s desk. He’d expected them to pick up a physical map, but instead he was handed an iPad and a stylus. Hell, Dave had only made the switch to a touchscreen phone three years ago, and was constantly typing the wrong buttons, clicking on things that he oughtn’t and getting lost through ads that looked like links on the website and dragged him some place else. The moment he took the iPad, he accidentally clicked the homescreen button. “Uh,” he said, gesturing for Winston to refind all of it. Once they had, Dave was more cautious, poking the screen in short bursts until he got to the area south of Vicker’s, using the pen, he cautiously drew a bubble around the beach in question.

“Awesome,” Winston dropped slowly into the seat next to Dave’s, watching them carefully pick up the iPad. There were some set backs but that was to be expected and Winston had seen much worse. Some of the older members of staff in the station didn’t know the difference between a fax machine and a printer, many of them were convinced that faxes were the optimum method of transferring information too. “Don’t worry, happens to the best of us.” Winston watched Dave mark out the area before taking several screenshots and sending them off to the relevant people within the station. “Some officers are going to meet us down there, but you’ve actually … you know been out to this beach and gotten there relatively unscatched, do you think you could show us the areas you found everything and we can set up some method of monitoring it so we can work out why this is happening…?”

“Hmmm,” Was all Dave had to say to that. He was happy just fine with his laptop from 2010 and a phone with a case thick enough it could be mistaken for a brick. This was not his expertise. At Dane’s suggestion, he nodded, although he had a bad feeling about it right deep in his gut. “Ain’t too hard to get to, it just seems dangerous to stay on.” With plenty of signs of danger on all ends. It wasn’t even one of the beaches with the more dangerous waves nor riptides. “Anyhow, I’m here to help, however that might be. Just letting you know I’m new to town. Don’t know much of anything about the beaches yet.”

“Well, welcome to White Crest, I’m sorry that this was one of your first experiences of the town, it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.” Winston being one of the key culprits for that particular crime. “If you’re free now we might as well go check it out now, officer Redwood has volunteered to drive us down to the beach,” which was good because Winston didn’t think that they should be having anyone in their terrible piece of shit car within any sort of work capacity, “so if you’re happy to join us then we can get going straight away. Hopefully this won’t take too much of your time.”

“Sure am,” Dave replied, dropping his hands to his thighs and pushing against his knees to stand up again. “No time like the present.” Not long after, there was officer Redwood, whose hand Dave shook too, and they were lead to the car. Dave gave directions to the beach, and they were soon on their way. As Officer Redwood pulled up, Dave scanned the waters. Shrinking tides, and with the sunny sky, the water wasn’t that violent either. In all things, it seemed a perfect beach day, but the beach was near empty of people. Everyone either avoided it or somethin’ worse was causing the gap. “See here. Sign’s barely even legible, completely rotted through.” He pointed it out, nudging it with his boot

The sea wind swept through Winston’s hair and slowly dried out their lips. Winston squinted into the sun through their glasses and couldn’t help but wish that they had brought their sunglasses with them. Looking down at what was a truly rotten sign, Winston couldn’t help but wonder what was up with this place. “That’s really weird,” Winston crouched down and pulled the remains of a large red sign that had once given a warning of some kind from the wet sand. “Did you see other signs like this … ?” Winston had to admit that it was weird to them, they weren’t sure what it was, but there was something off about this that didn’t quite add up, Winston took a step towards the beach.

“Yeah, one down on the south end. Doesn’t seem to matter that you can’t seem them though, for a sand beach it sure is empty,” Dave said, looking out along the beach. He’d been wrong. There was one man, lying on a striped blue beach towel, flicking on his phone. David frowned, looking around the rest of the beach. Instinctively, he raised his hand in front of Winston, because while he knew he’d walked it fine, people didn’t avoid such a pretty place for nothing. “Careful now. Sure those signs are there for a reason.”

Spotting the man lying on the beach towel Winston was about to say something to them and was making their way over when Dave’s hand rose in front of them. “Broken signs and an empty beach,” Winston wasn’t sure whether or not this was really true, but they were almost certain that there was something going on here that was supernatural, it didn’t make sense for this to be something … mundane, and yet there was definitely something weird going on here, “that doesn’t seem weird at all.” Swallowing, Winston looked at the man on the beach, was he beginning to sink a little or were they seeing things? “Is he getting lower…?”

“I don’t have the faintest-” Dave turned back to the beach with a frown. Winston was right, the man was sinking, slowly at first. He didn’t seem to realise, but as Dave began to move, the man began to yell. Dave dropped his things and sprinted across the beach. Ignoring the police altogether, he grabbed the man’s arm, and tried to yank him back out. He came far too easily, so much so that Dave fell back from how hard he yanked. Only, the only thing he’d rescued was an arm dripping blood. “What the fuck.” He began to dig through the sand where the man had been, frantically throwing sand behind him as he dug his hands deeper and deeper, but as most when he reached the water logged sand, it smelled like iron, but he couldn’t quite see how blood soaked and red it truly was.

What happened next would’ve been perfectly placed within a horror movie, Winston saw the man sinking, they tried to move with Dave as he went to help the sunbather but they weren’t nearly as quick or spry as their older companion. Darting after Dave, Winston was gasping for breath and had half a mind to reach for their inhaler and then they saw the hand that was in Dave’s possession. “Okay, fuck, off the sand now.” Winston wasn’t giving an option here, they could look for the man all that they wanted but from the arm that had been left behind and the red splodge of blood soaking into the water and dirt around them, Winston doubted there was anything left to look for. “I think he’s gone Dave,” they swallowed as the Officers that they had come here with looked at one another as if they should be doing something but weren’t sure what, “we need to get back to the station and cordon this place off but first we need to get out of the sand.”

After a long pause, Dave nodded, pressing his bloodied hands against his knees to push himself standing upright. He was breathing heavily, his lungs protesting the exertion. “Think you’re right, Dane. Alright, let’s go.” Pressing a hand to his side, he followed them off the sands, still holding the arm in his hand, it dripping blood onto the sand as they returned back to the embankment. “Don’t understand a thing. I walked that beach for hours last week. Ain’t seen nothing like this.”

Pursing their lips at the scene that they had just witnessed, Winston couldn’t help but worry about all of the people who could’ve been hurt like this. They weren’t sure what they had just seen. Honestly, it didn't really make any sense to them. They had seen things that could do this, but they were always physical things. Not entire pieces of land. Apparently previous signs hadn’t been successful but they had to do something. “I don’t get it either, but I’m going to look into it, I don’t think it was entirely natural and whatever it is that can do something like that is beyond me.” Winston paused for a second longer and frowned. What was different about Dave if he had been able to comb the beach without getting harmed. “We’re missing something and as soon as we find out what we can actually do something about it.”

#wickedswriting #para #p: dave #chatzy para #chatzy #tech-tonic shift

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cohentoplaywithmagic · 5 years

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[You recieve a package from David. (1) chocolate bunny. When eaten, it boosts your health, healing you +4 HP, one use only. It expires on September 1st, 2019. It can be used in 1v1 duels and can be used in group skirmishes, as well as personal chatzies and paras.]

Opening the package, she notices it is from Dave with a note with instructions. She plummits herself onto her bed, starting down at the chocolate bunny, her fingers drumming against the box. Tina bites down on her lip debating whether or not to keep it or trade it. The tech witch didn’t have much to give, unless she was desperate, diving in deep into pictures and videos she has or is she got creative. Aether, she is the one who knows who uses the Black Market being the delievery girl for most items around campus. Would other’s be ready no, would witches be ready to use their magic beyond the boundaries it the time calls it too?

Rereading the instruction of the health item, Tina places it on her side. Maybe she should keep it to heal for other’s and herself.

<<Open Grimoire. >> Tina whispers as her blue circle appears under her phone. In front of her glows a menu screen showing the inventory from her e-grimoire. Tina looks through knowing she has to sort her values out for hastiness for Saturday.

With two fingers she scrolls down to the folders, opening up to her familair bouncing around as little pixels.

<<Summon.>> is cast on the screen, her familiar jumping around her in excitment.

“Help me out Kir?” One of the few times she ever asks for it.

Kira leaps into her lap,”Sure thing Tee! Let’s sort out these outdated items! Maybe you should work on a deletion system?”

“Maybe after Project Digimon and Protect Causation,” Tina looks over to her wall of plants ranging from the wilting and fraying leaves, to ones that bloomed greatly. She groans at all the plants that all remain all inact. Failures, “Still a few flaws before I’m gonna try it.”

#tag:action post #//ooc: THANK YOU TIM #//ooc:TRADE STUFF BLACK MARKET IS FUN #submission

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miss-sue-sylvester · 6 years

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Listen up Losers! Presentation 11 is May 1st. Try not to suck so much this time, huh? Try to use those mushy things between your ears and be a little creative? If I have to sit through one more obstacle course or awkward couple smacking each other for no real reason, I will vomit repeatedly. There’s literally every toy, machine and apparatus that’s ever existed just waiting for you to use there is no reason to bore me.

Frankie and Cal

Jackson and Jamie

Jeff and Marco

Steven and Melody

Caelan and Silas

Wilder and Jeremy

Mateo and Evan

Devyn and Davina

Deacon an Xavier

Evander and Jesse

Sam and Annabeth

Spencer and Lennon

Quinn and Sugar

Ryder and Hailey

Billie and Jeremiah

Emerson and Monica

Carson and Santana

Dave and Mike

Nate and Cat

Pepper and Hunter

Lyric and Cady

Zoe and Robin

Daniel and Nick

Sebastian and Marley

Charlie and Kolbe

Jace and Elle

Molly and Teddy

Kurt and Axel

Gabe and Harlow

Keenan and Emrys

Ainsley and Sawyer

Jezabel and Blaine

Partners will present a scene in front of the headmasters in the performing arts center at their allotted times. Please do not go longer than 25 minutes. New students, please make sure you know your limits and have plans for aftercare. Partners are non-negotiable. Presentations are mandatory. Name listed first is Dominant, second is submissive.

OOC Information:

Please post your chatzy/para with the tag presentation11.

Basically, you’re doing a scene in front of Sue and Will, who will be grading you and awarding up to 100 points. Please keep them short and focus more on what can be seen and heard rather than on inner thoughts. If you have a gif or picture that sums up the set up, feel free to use that instead of writing out all the set up. Grades/points are based on creativity, communication, degree of difficulty (also depends on individuals experience level), demonstration of D/s skills and safety.

Please remember!!!!

Sue and Will grade the interaction between the two students, not the scene’s concept. So, while giving us the head cannon of what the scene entails is important, it’s much more important to tell us how the student did, what they said and how they were acting.

NEW RULE: For all headcannons, please include at least four lines of dialog during the “meat” of the scene. We need to see how they are communicating and interacting. This is especially important when there is an NPC involved. Remember the slaves have all been trained and are rented that week, so they can practice with them in the dungeons if they’d like.

Options:

1. For up to 100 points, you and your partner can chatzy/para out the scene.

2. If, for whatever reason you two cannot get together to write the whole thing out in detail, one person can write the framework of the scene and the other can fill in their characters reactions etc. DO NOT godmod you partner. Communicate.

3. If one writer cannot or doesn’t want to write things out, the other writer may write a scene with an NPC. The NPC would be a slave rented by the school for doing exams. Both writers can take this option, but your max score will be lower. Please keep in mind, we’d like to use this option sparingly, so please do the best you can at communicating with your paired partner first. This option is for ooc problems like hiatus or too busy or the like. This option is not to be used because one character doesn’t like the other character.

4. If the character does NOT show up for presentations, please message the main and let us know. There will be repercussions IC.

5. If you want your character to get points, it needs to be either written out in some way. There is the option that the writer does not have to write something out and nothing will happen IC to your character, however, they also will not receive points.

If you have any questions about presentations or your options for turning them in, please message the main.

-Admin J-

#gleedsmstarter #presentation11 #pairings

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thebigteenpromrpg · 7 years

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BIGTEENPROM EVENT #1!

We’re so excited to announce our first group event! The event will be this weekend where Azimio will be holding a house party while his parents are out of town. While it was just supposed to be a party in which a group of his friends and some hot chicks from the other schools near were supposed to attend, it looks like word got around and just about any person who’s anyone will be there.

The party will take place in-universe on Friday, March 2nd, 2017 for our characters, but you can post interactions through the weekend. We will make an announcement Friday, 6:00 AM CST to remind you that the event that has started. During this time we ask that you pause all dashboard interactions and try to have your characters interact and participate in the event until Sunday 11:59 PM CST. You may, of course, continue whatever para’s or important dash interactions past this but please don’t write another event starter after the event closes.

For convenience, we will be keeping a timeline of events throughout the night so players can be aware of a general timeline. This timeline will be located under a read more on the event starter announcement post. So we ask that you please remember to include a date and time in any paras/face to face interactions so we can easily understand the timeline of the night. (I.E. Azimo and Dave drunkenly fighting at around 12:30 PM in a F2F interaction written on Friday while JBI tried to put a move on Rachel at 10:00 PM after the 7 Minutes in Heaven game in a para written on Sunday night.)

We will have a few group activities like spin the bottle, truth or dare, 7 Minutes in Heaven, et cetera that all characters can participate in. We will post a chatzy in the OOC during the afternoons.

That being said, please tag your starters/paras with the tag #promevent . We’re so excited to see what shenanigans the characters get up to and hope you all have a lot of fun!

#promevent #glee rp #glee rpg

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jesstasticvoyage · 7 years

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I keep thinking I’m always behind but I think having a 24 hour turn around on replies is actually pretty good considering I have about 30 active threads right now.

All I have on me are chatzys and dash chats. Which I’ll get to soon after Dave gets to sleep.

#jess speaks

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nelllraiser · 4 years

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best served cold | group chatzy

LOCATION: pat’s place. SUMMARY: revenge is a dish, and pat’s is serving it up. PARTIES: @nelllraiser, @beatrice-blaze, @divineluce, @whatsin-yourhead, @humanmoodring, @themidnightfarmer, @seizethecarpe, @faecurious, @detective-keen, @sgtrolandhills, @normallee, @detectivedreameater, @chasseurdeloup, @theskyeandsea, @mor-beck-more-problems, @theshadowandvalleyaremine CONTENTS: mass poisoning, food poisoning vomit (brief description)

Nell wasn't entirely sure why she'd been chosen to receive a VIP invite to the grand re-opening of Pat's Place, but she certainly wasn't complaining. After all, it meant she got an entirely free meal instead of only getting 20 percent off like the flyers around town were advertising, and she'd never say no to free food. Perhaps she should have been a little more suspicious about the invitation, but only hindsight is 20/20. And she was hungry. With Bea by her side, she presented her special invitation to the host at the door, who promptly showed Nell and her sister to the long row of food laid out on a table. But not before being presented with two free drink tickets. "Oh, hell ya." As others filtered in with the regular flyers, they were also shown to the large spread of Americana style food, tall tables meant for standing and eating scattered around the dining area after paying at the door with their discounted price. "Where should we even start?” Maybe she should have waited a bit with the truth serum still working its way through her system, but it would be fine...right?

Remmy was excited to be going out tonight. It'd been a while since they'd done something just for fun, and even better, they were there with someone who they'd recently made friends with. Nadia was nice, and fun to talk to. And she made Remmy stutter and ramble, like some other people could make them-- and though they felt a little guilty, still, Luce had made her position clear. They stepped up and pulled the door open for Nadia. "Ladies first," they said with a big grin, trying to push away the nerves and anxiety that trembled their fingers each time they left the house. But this would be fine, right? They were out with someone they trusted, and it was a big public place. Nothing bad would happen here. "Thanks again for inviting me," they said as they headed inside with her. "You'll have to introduce me to your friend so I can thank them sometime."

When she first got the invitation, Bea had assumed she had been given a VIP ticket because she was also a business owner. Turned out that she wasn't quite so special and her sister got one too. "Well, I want a free drink to start the night," The eldest Vural answered, finding herself moving to the bar without seeing if her sister was following. She placed her free drink ticket down and the bartender smirked at her before making her drink and sliding it to her. She turned to her sister, "That guy was weird."

Dave wandered in curiously. Hell, he was always down for a cheap meal. Circumstances of their reopening sounded fishy (seriously, a whale shark had crushed the place?) But with two free drink tickets he wasn't about to complain. Food smelled good too, although he was only hankering for the meat section. Not knowing anyone yet, he went right for the table, picking up a plate and starting to serve himself with the tongs by each option.

Skylar blinked at the flyer she'd found around town-- it seemed a little too good to be true, but a part of her was curious about Pat's Place. She'd heard about it, but never got a chance to go before the fish rain incident had taken out the roofing. She wondered if Shiloh had helped fix the restaurant and idly wondered what the other woman was doing. Maybe she'd bring her back something? As she entered, she saw the long buffet set up and shrugged. Ah. Maybe not. Oh well. As she took a plate from one end of the line, she glanced at the drink tickets that had been handed to her. "Oh-- I don't..." But she was left with the drink tickets all the same. Looking to the person next to her, she offered a slight smile. "Um... I'm not really a drinker. Do you want these?"

Jared was already inside. He wasn't adverse to cheap food and definitely wasn't deterred by the thought of eating alone. He was too busy loading up a plate with as much as he could get his hands on from the table to notice others filing in behind him. He only had eyes for the food. Jared only glanced over when someone else came close. "Great spread huh?" He commented to the bloke with a grin.

Morgan couldn't believe she'd let Remmy talk her into visiting a restaurant of all places. They were zombies. They didn't need to eat, there was nothing here for either of them but--oh. Morgan arched a brow as she saw her friend playing chivalrous with a pretty girl. Well, maybe there was something here for one of them, and she supposed she could play wingwoman if Remmy felt a little awkward. And maybe give them a tinsy bit of a hard time if they weren't. "Wow, and here I thought I was your date," she teased. "You guys really know how to pick a place. It's so packed, I think half the town is here." She scanned the room, looking for someone familiar, or at least unaccompanied in case the maybe lovebirds needed some privacy later.

Dave nodded at the guy talking to him. "Better taste as good as it looks. Did you go to this place before it had shut down?" He carefully balanced his plate on one hand to offer Jared his to shake. "I'm Dave."

With an easy grin on her face, Nadia let Remmy hold the door open for her as she walked into Pat's Place. "Why, thank you," she said with a wink. The place was pretty nice in kind of an old school kind of way. Nadia could definitely see a crime boss of some sort owning a joint like this. Definitely the kind of person that Tommy would work for. Speaking of... "I'd love to introduce you to him, some time. Don't see him around at the mo, though." Truthfully, she didn't expect to. Probably for the best. She didn't want him to get distracted. She looked over at the other woman that came up to her and Remmy, giving her a smile. "I wasn't expecting it to be this packed. Really hoping it lives up to the hype."

Nell followed her sister over to the bar, all too ready to get that started. After getting her own drink and taking the first sips, she made a mocking face at her sister before saying, "You think tons of people are weird. But now it's time for food, come on! I wanna be rolled out of here." Somehow...the truth serum had allowed her to say such a thing which meant it was, in fact...true?

Norma saw the flyers for a gathering. It was not taking place at the best restaurant in town, the Bottomless Booty, but she would hardly hold that against this Pat's Place place. And if she was lucky, perhaps a fight would break out and she would get some delicious chaos energy to feed on. For now she hopped inside and saw a bar and many tables full of food. None of it was necessary for her but where there was lots of human food, there was usually lots of humans to feed from. She took a plate and picked up many of the green leafy things on the platters to put on her plate on the way down. "Oh, you don't need water to survive?" she asked the woman in front of her who was brandishing her drink tickets. "That's rather unusual. I'm perfectly fine with my two tickets, however. Thank you! I'm Norma! Norma Lee," she said holding out her hand.

Luce had found a flyer hanging outside of Ink Inc after a particularly long shift and you know what? Fuck it. Why not. Pat's Place had been decent enough before it had been taken out by that fucked up fish rain bullshit. And if they were trying to get more people in the door, she couldn't blame them too much. Pushing open the door, she raised an eyebrow as she noticed that her sisters were already here, with Nell eyeing the buffet spread and Bea leaning against the bar. "Bitches." She muttered under her breath before freezing when she saw who else was inside. Remmy. They were here too? Why the fuck-- they didn't even need to eat. Catching sight of the woman next to them, Luce felt the color drain from her face. Fuck. Shit, fuck, fuck. Taking her drink tickets, Luce made a bee-line to the bar and glared at her sisters. "Whiskey. What are you guys doing here?"

Jared grinned and nodded. "Yeah, lived in town all my life. It's real tragic about Pat, but I'm glad the place could re-open." Shuffling his two plates into one hand he offered the other a free one to shake. "I'm Jared."

"Luce!" Nell exclaimed at the sight of her sister, before brandishing her VIP invitation by waving it in the elder girl's face. "I was invited. You weren't?" she teased the fire caster. "So was Bea."

Agatha was a big fan of the place before it shut down, but after having heard that the staff had died crushed under a whale (which sounded like bullshit, by the way), she was no longer sure that the restaurant would ever be worth it ever again. But none of this mattered anymore, Agatha had spotted the buffet spread, and all she could think about right now was food. Some people were more interested in the bar? Their loss. Her plate full, she made her way to an empty table. She did not come with company, but it was fine. Nothing unusual for her.

"Tons of people are weird. Do I have to remind you of the man at the Stacked Deck or that lady in the grocery store? They were all weird." Bea frowned at her sister before taking a drink. She raised an eyebrow at the middle Vural. "We're VIPs." She said with a little smirk. "Did your VIP ticket get lost in the mail?"

Q was a bit over his head here, but he had promised his dad that he'd try to get out more and not lock himself away in the laboratory until he had a white beard. Everyone seemed friendly enough, even if that familiar feeling crawled under his skin. He moved with a small plate towards the woman sitting alone. "Hey, I didn't realize this would be so busy. Can I sit with you?"

Luce raised an eyebrow at her sisters, waving at them with the drink that was slid her way. "Bitches. Both of you. And yeah, I guess it did. Worked out for me, though, I found a flier next to work so I decided to pop by cuz it's apparently pretty popular." She said, bending her head to hide behind Bea's taller form. "Knowing Nell, she probably tossed my invite in the trash." She replied.

"Jared, nice to meet ya," Dave said with a grin, taking the kid's hand. Working hands, at that - this wasn't a guy with some office job. Then again, considering the long narrow scars that stretched along Dave's face and hands, nor did he. "Yeah, I heard. Sounds real shitty, what happened here. Did you know the staff at all?"

Skylar was a little confused by the woman's response and her head cocked slightly. Had she misheard her? There was a lot of noise happening around her, but... "Um, I mean, I do need water. But these are for beer or alcohol or other things?" She said, looking at the little tickets closer. Mhm, yeah, that's what they were for. At the woman's introduction, Skylar awkwardly shifted her empty plate from one hand to the other and smiled. "Nice to meet you, Norma. I'm Skylar. McKay." She said and nodded. "Did you find a flyer too?"

Tilting her head at her sister, Bea looked over to Nell, "Nellie, does it seem like Lulu is hiding from something or is it just me?" Over the last few weeks, it had gotten easier to be outside and in crowds. She was growing more confident every day, finally feeling like maybe her paranoia could ease up a bit.

Morgan snorted. "Aww, you're Nadia? That's so amazing, we talked so much when we first moved here! I didn't realize you knew Remmy. They are, I gotta say, one of the best people in town I've ever met. I'm sure they've got an amazing night planned out for you." She side-eyed Remmy and lowered her voice. "Does she know you don't need to...you know?" This might be more awkward than she wanted in her night. The loner tables in the back were starting to look a lot more cozy.

Agatha, her cheeks filled with food, raised her eyebrows as a young man approached her to get a seat. She glanced around her. Yeah, he was talking to her. "Mmmh," she nodded, wiping her mouth clean. "You know, you could have gotten more food?"

"I probably will, I was feeling indecisive at all the choices and didn't want to seem greedy," Q shrugged, but he did notice her plate. "Not saying that you were greedy-- maybe you have the appropriate amount. I’ll know for next time." He grinned and sat down. "I was at this place before, why is it so popular?"

"Oh definitely, Bibi. Poor Lulu, looks too upset to not be hiding anything." Nell knew it was only a matter of time now until Luce decided to take a swipe at either one of her sisters, so Nell took another gulp of her drink while she still could. "Sure you found a flyer, but did you get in free?"

Jared began to say, "Likewise bud." Taking both his plates back in a more steady grip the nymph shrugged one shoulder. "Knew of them, Pat was the knowable one if you get me? Always happy to chat to the customers. Wasn't here for the funeral or I woulda gone, he was a cool guy."

Norma's brow furrowed. Had she said something incorrect once more? "Oh, why would they call them drink tickets if they were meant for alcohol? That's odd," she said as she tossed one of the garnishes back over her shoulder. She had seen that's how children ""ate"" their broccoli, she assumed it would work here, too. "Nice to meet you too, Skylar! And yes, I did find the flyer. I work at Bottomless Booty, you know. I needed to check out the competition." Her eyes scanned the food table. 'Tell me, is any of this worth consuming?"

"That's me!" Nadia said, though mentally she was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Fuck Nadia for talking to people. "Yeah, Remmy and I are new friends. I took a bit of a fall, and they were there to help me out. Totally agree with you, though. They're the fucking best." She gave them a smirk. It was strange, that both of the people around her were complete emotional and literal dead zones. She looked over to the bar, watching as people took their drinks. Huh. Well, there was one familiar face, and she didn't look too happy.

Bea took another long sip of her drink before half choking as her sister called her Bibi. God, she hadn't been called that in a long time. "Do you think you got in for free because they know you're broke, Nellie?"

Remmy couldn't help but blush. "Morgan," they muttered, "shut up." But then Nadia was agreeing and they sort of wished they could sink into the floor. Clearing their throat, they pointed towards the bar, not even noticing the familiar faces by it yet. "Anyone want a drink? I'm gonna go get us drinks," they said with a squeak, getting ready to head off.

Dave walked them over to a standing table, mouthing back Jared's words to make sure internally he'd gotten them all right. "Right, that sorta guy. I hear it was some sorta freak weather event. Anyhow, you probably don't want to dredge all this back up." Dave picked a chicken drumstick, and took a big bite. He hated eating with his teeth caps on, but needs must and all. "So, Jared, what do you do? You a student, working?"

Luce clenched her hand around the whiskey, the glass heating slightly in her fingers. "Yarrağımı ye, both of you." She gestured to the two of them. "You can both fuck off. I'm not hiding from anyone. You're hiding from someone." She growled. Leave it to Nell and Bea to make shit even worse. Christ. As she glanced around the restaurant, Luce froze as she caught sight of Nadia staring at her. And fuck. Remmy was coming up to the bar. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me." She mumbled, leaning against the bar, head ducked low.

Nell's shit-eating grin she'd been wearing for the roasting of Luce quickly disappeared at Bea's words. Hold on. That wasn't fair. They were supposed to be going after Luce right now. "If I'm broke, so are you!" Apparently hospital bills did that to a person when they didn’t have insurance. So caught up was she with Bea's betrayal, that she didn't realize Luce slipping even further down. "Your’s is probably just a pity invite, anyway."

"I was invited because business owners support business owners," Bea sniffed. "I am not broke. I just have less money than I did before." She patted Luce's back. "Do you need me to distract someone if they notice you?"

Morgan pulled Remmy back. "No, I'm good. I don't really drink much these days, you know? I'm on this great all protein diet and don't really wanna mess up my insides. I'm gonna check out who else is here but--" she kissed her fingers and reached to smush them into Remmy's cheek. "You two kids have fun. I'm sure we'll circle back after the line gets less long. I definitely want to spend more time with you, Nadia, when I get back." Pleased to have thoroughly embarrassed her friend, she slid away from the entrance and sidled up to the back by the more empty tables. There was a woman and what looked to be a college kid sitting together, plates piled high. "I gotta respect people who have their priorities in line. Does it taste any good?"

Jared nodded. He'd heard the same, despite not being in town. Fish rain had been a particularly interesting story to hear. Stuffing a whole wing in his mouth Jared nodded. "Farmer. Own a farm just in town. So not devoted enough to be a student or anything like that. Sounds like too much school to me." he laughed. "What do you do, bud?"

Skylar shook her head apologetically. "It's a little weird, right? I've never really worked in food service, but I think it's because of the cost of alcohol?" She offered helpfully. But, she was only more confused when Norma tossed one of the lettuce garnishes onto the ground. "Um, I don't think--" She said, but was too caught off guard by the woman's words to do anything other than flounder. "Ah-- I mean, I think the ribs look nice? And the fried chicken smells nice too." Skylar said as she put a few pieces of each on her plate. "Bottomless Booty? I've heard of them, that's the pirate restaurant, right?" She asked, a little confused how Pat's would have any kind of competition from the kitschy themed restaurant.

"...Dude, people are going to get food, and you'll be left with the stuff no one likes," she eyed at the vegetables, then back at Quintin. "I'm Agatha by the way," she didn't take notice of his comments. She did not mind being called greedy if it was about food. Being greedy about good things was not a sin. Or maybe the exact definition of a sin. Sin sucked. "I don't know, maybe because for one, there's no mimes here?"

"Oh I'm with ya. Just about scraped my GED, and that was enough for me," Dave replied with a rough laugh. "You got animals or crops on your farm? Oh, I'm a fisher, deep sea angling. Keeps me busy and fed, and the van working."

Norma nodded and then grabbed some of everything Skylar pointed out. That was perfectly normal, she was sure of it, asking for recommendations and then taking them with no questions asked. "Oh yes, it is perfectly pirate themed. I wear a hat when working there. Where do you work?"

Skylar nodded at Norma's words. She didn't really understand what she meant about the hat thing-- did she mean a pirate hat? She couldn't really imagine that Norma meant she showed up wearing a ball cap or something. Wandering down the line, Skylar picked out a few more meat based items before adding a couple vegetables just for appearances sake. She didn't really want anyone to ask any questions about what she was eating. "I work for the school district. I'm not a teacher," She added quickly, trying to avoid that particular rabbit hole. "I do interpretation."

Jared "Got one up on me there, I didn't manage to graduate." He laughed heartily. Looking up at the other man and spotting a congregation of people at the bar he knew. He smiled and then refocused. "Animals. A small greenhouse for flowers though. Oh a sea dog huh? Sounds pretty rad. Got a boat and everything of your own?"

Norma could not imagine working with children. Normal mortals were far too young to have anything in common with as it was. "You do interpretation? Of what? Ancient languages?" She didn't quite understand why small children would need to know demonic languages but that did make some sort of sense given their nature as tiny agents of chaos. "I'm going to go get an alcoholic beverage with my drink ticket, would you like some water of which you need to survive?"

"Q, or Quintin--" Q responded, happily munching on his plate as he never enjoyed enough good food. "So you are on team 'no mimes'." He air quoted, glancing up towards a few other people. All, he didn't know. "Do you know anyone else here?"

Luce rolled her eyes at Nell and Bea. "Broke. Both of you. At least I own my cabin outright." She muttered, head still bent low. For the first time in her life, she wished that her tattoos didn't make her stand out so much. She'd probably be able to blend into the background and just slip out the door if it wasn't for them. But, Nadia had already seen her. "I really don't think that will work. But thanks for everything, Bibi." She shook her head.

Jared took a water from a passing waiter.

It was kind of amusing to watch Luce sink away from the way Nadia watched, but she wasn't super focused on the witch. When Morgan left, Nadia gave a slight wave. "Looking forward to it." She watched Remmy walk away as well, enjoying the blush on their cheeks while she could. Then, she opened her phone and checked the time. She made eye contact with one of the bartenders.

"Cool, what sorta animals? Not at the moment," Dave replied, polishing off the last of the meat on his plate. He eyed the buffet table, that was beginning to look somewhat crowded. Eh, he was a grown man, he could wait for a bit. "Used to have a pretty little ship, but I had to move inland for a while, so now I'm boatless. If I end up staying here long enough I'll get a new one, but for now I'm renting."

The thing Bea had started to notice about herself was sometimes she didn't need anything to make her feel unsafe for her body to begin to react. Tonight, apparently, was one of those nights. Her heart had begun to pound. She put her drink down, the sharp click of it against the bar ringing in her ears. She took a deep breath, far too aware of how fast she was breathing now. "I'm... I'm just going to go to the bathroom for a second okay?" She slipped away from her sisters then and only made it so far before bumping into someone as she tried to walk fast to the bathroom. She wasn't going to freak out in front of all these people. "Excuse me. I didn't mean to hit you." She swallowed hard, trying to control her breathing, but couldn't seem to make it regulate. "I'm just- I have to... I'm just running to the bathroom."

Nell wasn't entirely sure what to make of Bea's quick departure, but she knew that her sister didn't seem quite as social as she'd once been in situations like these ever since she’d been resurrected. Maybe she just needed some air? Still, she wanted to make sure that the eldest Vural was doing alright, and took a quick step after her. One step in, and her head was spinning. What the hell? She'd barely had half her drink at this point. Dizziness wasn't something she should be feeling this early on in the night. Another step forwards, and she had to clutch the end of the bar to steady herself.

For what felt like the third time in as many minutes, Skylar blinked in confusion. "Ancient languages? Like... Latin?" She guessed, not sure what the other woman was talking about. She didn't think that ancient languages were part of the White Crest curriculum. "I-- No, I'm a sign language interpreter." She said before shaking her head. "Oh, no, I'm good. Thank you for the offer, really. I'm okay." She said before wandering away from the buffet. As she wandered through the crowd, her face went slightly pale as she saw Jared and Dave talking to one another. Two people who knew what she was? Mmmmmm, nope, nope nope. Hurrying away, she settled into a booth at the back, sighing as she relaxed into the seat.

"Q? That's funny, my other name is 007," Agatha deadpanned, although a smile soon followed. As much as she liked chit-chat, she was no longer eating. When he asked about mimes, her mouth was, thank God, full again. The food was alright, but there were really too many people in here. Another person had approached the table, and Agatha glanced at her with her eyebrows raised. Nice. "I really think you should hurry to get a plate if you ever want to find that out by yourself," she replied with a smile. "But to answer your question, it's pretty good, yeah."

Remmy swatted at Morgan. "I hate you," they mumbled at her before she left and they headed to the bar to get a drink for Nadia. On their way over, they felt a slight pang in their stomach. That was weird, they shouldn't be hungry? They'd eaten before Nadia came over. "Two whiskeys," they said to the bartender when they arrive, ignoring the feeling. They glanced idly around, noticing just down the bar were two familiar faces. "Luce?" they said. Two drinks were set down in front of them and it echoed loudly in their ears, glass clinking. Remmy shook their head, went to grab a glass. "Nell, are yo--" they started, but the glass suddenly fell from their grip and shattered on the floor. Remmy blinked, looking down. The world swayed under their feet. "S-sorry..." they mumbled as someone came around to clean up the mess. They looked at Luce again, went to say words, and found their throat too dry.

Jared blinked rapidly. His heart sped up and his head started to spin a little. It was faint at first but was building rapidly. He leaned his elbows on the table, taking a larger drink of the water he'd gotten, finishing the glass in the hopes it'd help. "Some cattle mostly." He lied in answer to Dave. He thought he spotted Skylar whiz past behind Dave but couldn't be sure as he got more dizzy. "Renting hah right..."

Norma thought that Skylar girl was rather odd, but nice. Once she got her drink, a tea from a long island, though she was unaware of which one, and took a sip. As she did, she felt a familiar sensation. It was like a pit dropped into her stomach and churned and turned it. The room started spinning and she gripped to the edge of the bar to try and hold herself up. "Fucking bounty hunters, not again!" she growled as she felt herself falling and tumbled to the floor, her heart pounding in her chest and the world starting to go black around the edges of her vision. Why these idiot hunters thought this could take down a fury, she'd never understand.

Quintin laughed. "That's awesome, do you have the scars to prove it?" The question didn't need an answer, clearly he was also playing along. "Hello," he said to the person who plopped at their table. "You alright?"

Jared's face grew a little slack, his eyes unfocusing as he leant heavily against the table. Dave's brow creased, leaning in concern. "You alright, kid?"

Morgan was bumped not once but twice on her way to the booths. One couple rose, spilling their drinks, and as she sidled down the aisle, one more person ran into her so hard she slipped and had to brace herself on the nearest table. There was something...off about all this. "Uh, I am, but I'm not sure if everyone else here is," she said to the young man. "Are you?"

Jared shook his head before realizing that made everything worse. His legs grew wobbly and he closed his eyes firmly hoping the feeling would pass. That was until his attention caught someone to his left falling to the floor. "Something is wrong."

The second Remmy dropped the glasses, Nadia moved over to where they were at the bar. Some poor fuck dropped their glass and stumbled in front of her, but she side stepped them, eyes on her target and concern in her eyes. "Remmy?" she asked as soon as she approached. "Hey, are you alright?" She completely ignored Luce, not seeing any sort of reason to pay attention to her. She wasn't getting paid to watch over Luce.

There was a tightness in her chest that seemed like it was set to stay, and no amount of air that Nell drew seemed to be enough. He hand slipped off the end of the bar as weakness gripped her, and she didn't even notice the floor coming up to meet her as her knees gave way. One second she was standing, and the next she was simply...not standing, trying to scramble to all fours on the ground. "Remmy? Luce? Bea?" Where did her sister go? Was she still here? Her brain was trying to connect dots, but the fuzziness around its edges was making it hard to understand.

Luce stared in confusion as Bea wandered away from the bar, her face pale. And then Nell-- she seemed to be holding tightly onto the bar. "Are you--" Before she could finish her words, Remmy was next to her, equally startled and just as out of sorts as Nell. Looking from her sister to Remmy, Luce slid her untouched whiskey away from her, glaring at the bartender for a moment before reaching out to steady Nell. "Nellie, are you okay?" She asked. In a moment, Nadia was there. Glancing over to the other woman, her eyes narrowed for a moment at the way she seemed to ignore her. "Are they okay?" She asked.

"Yeah, no shit," Dave replied, putting his hand on Jared's back. He looked around, eyes narrowing, as people staggered, looking green in the gills and falling over. Food poisoning usually took a whole lot longer, but... this was a lotta sick people. Could be a spell, could be, well, real poison. Shit. He smacked Jared's drink away. "Don't drink anymore of that. Don't eat. Hold tight kid. Think there's something in the food."

Bea pushed her way through the crowd, trying to get out of the thick of it. She found herself leaning close to the entrance, head beginning to pound as she slid down to the ground. This wasn't just a panic attack. No something was really wrong. "My sisters," She called out. "I need help finding my sisters."

Skylar quietly ate at her table, idly looking around as she ate. The dining room was quite crowded and, now that she was out of the fray, she could see that there were quite a few people that she recognized. Besides Jared and Dave, she could see that Nadia was there-- she hadn't seen her in ages, Skylar idly wondered if the woman had been keeping up on her ASL-- and then, Morgan. That was a little surprising, given.... Morgan's new situation. She didn't think that zombies could eat normal foods. But, the more she looked, the more she realized that things weren't quite right. People seemed to be stumbling around, people were rushing away from the bar? Glancing down at her plate of food, Skylar pushed it away before wandering towards where Morgan was standing, "I, um, hi Morgan." She said before dropping her voice slightly, "I-- Are things off to you too?"

The world was getting sluggish, fuzzy. So were Remmy's arms. And legs. And mouth and tongue. They blinked, heavy lead eyelids, and looked over at Nadia. Nell had collapsed, Luce was on the floor with her, asking if she was okay. If they were okay. Remmy stumbled backwards a little. A jarring pain ripped through their stomach and they jerked, keeling over a little. Wide eyes looked up at Nadia. "S-somethings wrong," they muttered, barely able to get the words out. "I'm not-- supposed to feel--" but another jolt of pain made them jerk wildly again, this time lower down in their stomach. They collapsed to the ground, hands digging so hard into the counter the wood gave way under their fingers.

Morgan tried to wave the woman’s attention away. “No, I’m good. I’m good, really.” But then she was off, darting into an increasingly unstable crowd. Then she saw another familiar face. “Skylar! No, I’m okay, just knocked around. Are you—?” She looked between her and the other kid at the table. “Are either of you okay? Are y’all seeing this?”

Jared was shaking, his knees knocking together like he was some sort of scared cartoon character, but there was nothing he could do. But he could hear voices he knew and he forced himself to move. "In the food? Pats would never." he whisper yelled stumbling towards a nearby table and almost toppling over someone on the floor, crashing to his knees next to the woman. "Fu-dge."

"Hey, I've got you," Nadia told Remmy soothingly. She slipped herself under their arm and wrapped her own arm around their waist, supporting their weight against her. "I've got you." She looked at Luce long enough to shoot her a look that said Not now. Then she pulled Remmy away from the bar. "Gotta be a fuckin' bathroom around here somewhere."

Things had gone to shit real fucking quick. Luce gently patted Nell's face, resting her hand on her sister's head for a moment before glancing over at Remmy, who seemed to be in an equally bad state. What the fuck? How could something be affecting them? They were a zombie this-- Watching as Nadia held onto Remmy, Luce felt a wave of emotion-- jealousy? Relief? Confusion? She couldn't fucking tell-- wash over her. Whatever was going on... it didn't matter. She needed to make sure Nell was okay. "Nellie? Nell, hey, what's going on. Talk to me."

"What the fuck is happening," Q frowned, standing up to catch a guy falling down to their knees. Was someone killing these people? Could he really not have a normal time anywhere? "I'm okay," he said to the woman asking. He didn't know how to help them.

"Pats ain't here kid, and new management don't seem too friendly," Dave said, and tried to catch Jared as he stumbled to the ground, the kid just slipping out his grip. "Shit!" He yelled, pulling out his phone to dial emergency service. "Got a whole lot of people suddenly sick at Pat's Place. Haven't been going long enough for it to be alcohol." He frowned as the call operator said there were already people on route, but was grateful someone had made the call before him. Putting his phone away, he knelt beside Jared. "Keep talking to me, kid."

Skylar's eyes darted around the room as she tried to make sense of what was going on. All around her, people were doubling over, some of them stumbling into tables, others of them just dropping where they stood. What was going on? She swallowed and nodded. "I-- I'm okay. This, there's--" She struggled with words as she caught sight of a familiar form falling to the ground. Remmy. And Nadia, she was carrying them away. "Remmy-- they're here too? They don't, I don't think they're doing alright." She said, her fingers instinctively signing the words as she spoke.

“Good! Okay is good!” Morgan said. “Maybe don’t touch anything on your plate to make sure it stays that way huh? I mean it’s gotta be the food, right?”

Roland rushed out of the station as quickly as the police had received the tip. On the way over to Pat's Place, he radioed paramedics and a good deal of the officers who worked under him to make sure they could get to the bottom of this. His team was still tracing the tip, but they'd been told a special strain of cyanide was planned to be used at this event. Worry was evident in his features as he rushed over. He didn't bother with parking in an actual space and sirens were still blaring when he arrived with a slew of cop caps and ambulances behind him. He ran into the restaurant and it seemed people were already starting to feel the effects of the poison. "Everyone, remain calm and don't eat or drink anything else." Medics were already rushing over to those obviously affected.

Norma tried to talk but her words were slurred. "H-hey, wa-watch it!" she said as someone tumbled over her. The world went black. She fucking hated poison. Why poison? It was so slow. A stab to the heart was so much easier. She could simply pull out the knife and walk away then, but poison. What a trip. Ugh she would have to wait a bit until she could wake up again.

Back with a glass of water, Agatha felt like this was not going to be much of a help. What a mess. The sound of sirens stopped her in her tracks and she put the glass of water down on the table, heading toward the Sergeant hurriedly. "Hey, do you have any idea of what is going on?"

Jared mumbled an apology to the woman he'd fallen over, looking back at Dave as he reminded Jared that Pat was gone and something was definitely in the food. He squinted up at the new face as well. "Who're you, soft landing." he mumbled incoherently before looking back to Dave. "What if I stop? Will I die? This is far too early for that right?"

Roland looked to Agatha with a worried look on her face and immediately asked, "Do you feel okay?" He examined her for any sign of illness before he finally explained, "We received an anonymous tip that a special strain of cyanide was supplied for the reopening. Paramedics are on the scene and ready to treat anyone affected. Police are looking for whoever is in charge of this shindig."

Morgan barely heard Skylar over the noise of panic and sickness. But she caught her signing out of the corner of her eye and followed her gaze. “That...shouldn’t be happening,” she said. “C’mon. We gotta go.” She took the girl by the hand so they wouldn’t get separated but turned quickly back to the boy. “Hey, I mean it about not eating anything else weird. I’ll check on you later if I can.”

Kaden had planned to stay at home until the stripes were gone completely, he would use up all his sick days at work and then some if he had to. But when he got the call, the tip of a mass poisoning, all hands on deck, he couldn't let his vanity outweigh the risk of human lives lost. Putain. He grabbed gloves and made sure to wear long sleeves. His face and neck were harder to cover, but Regan could be mad about his attempts at using her makeup later. It wasn't great, but a least it hid most of the fucking face paint as he ran out the door and sped directly to Pat's Place, bursting in right behind Sarge and the rest of the crew from the station. The place was pure chaos. Fuck, he didn't even know where to start. Then his eyes landed on a familiar face by the door. "Bea!" No, no, no, she looked bad. But she couldn't die again. She couldn't. No. He ripped an antidote kit out of someone's hand, he didn't see whose. "Bea, talk to me!"

Nell was only slightly aware of Luce, only able to focus on her breathing and the fact that she felt like the world was quickly fading. Was there someone yelling about poison? Who the fuck would poison an entire restaurant? Whoever the hell thought they could get away with poisoning was in for a rude awakening when she was done with them. Luce was hard to make out, the edge of everything blurring. But wait. What about Bea? Was Bea poisoned? she wanted to ask. But instead when she parted her lips, there was nothing. Only the sound of her gasping for air and coughing.

Marley had gotten the call while she was out on patrol. It was an emergency broadcast, which meant Jane had gotten the call, too. By the time Marley arrived, the place was in disarray. She had her kit in hand and rushed in, ignoring the swells of fear she felt as she waded through the crowd to the closest person passed out on the ground. Sarge was talking to Agatha, Kaden was with Bea-- Kaden knew Bea? Ugh, small towns-- and other officers were filling in behind her. She came to a man, collapsed on a table, an older gentleman helping him. "Is he sick?" she asked the man who didn't look like he was about to collapse.

Q's skin crawled in that familiar, warning way from the weight of the other. "Just listen to him," Q said to the one in his arms, talking wasn't the worst thing to keep doing when the threat of closing your eyes forever was the other option. "The cops are here, it will be fine." Though the words were stale on his tongue if this was supernatural related and not human.

"Medical's here," Dave replied, ignoring Jared's question about death entirely as he looked up as police and paramedics came up. A woman approached her, holding a kit, and Dave couldn't help breathe a sigh of relief. "Yeah, he is. Started about five minutes ago. What is this, you know?"

Remmy watched the floor slide by them as Nadia carried them off somewhere. Where were they going? Why couldn't they move? At some point, they'd stopped moving. Remmy slid to the floor, barely able to keep themself upright. "Nadia...what's..." they muttered, looking around for her, reaching out to try and grasp her as the world went fuzzy, dark, then sprung back to life again. They gripped their stomach in agony, trembling. "What's happening?"

Norma couldn't tell how long she had been asleep, or dead, it was hard to say, she never really knew, but her eyes flew open and she sat up and then turned to her side, the contents of her stomach spilling out on the floor beside her. Disgusting. She looked around and saw there was a man halfway fallen on top of her and another man helping him. And what she presumed was a medic. Oh no. Should she have played dead? "Wow, I must have eaten something horrible. Oh no, so tragic. How is it going here?"

Skylar let Morgan slip her hand into hers before offering an apologetic grimace to the two people the other woman had been talking to. "I'm sorry-- I--" She managed before hurrying away with Morgan towards where she'd last seen Remmy. They'd been by the bar, she'd seen them with Nadia. Where had they gone? And then, she saw that the two of them, Remmy's arm flung over Nadia's shoulder. "Morgan, over there." She said, tilting her head towards where she'd seen the two hurry off.

Bea looked up at Kaden's face, dizziness making it hard to focus on him. "Why do you look like that?" She asked, voice a bit choked. She coughed and the reality of what was happening began to hit her. She couldn't control the tears that started to leak from her. "I don't want to die again, Kaden, I can't die again," She told him, not even able to attempt to control how panicked she sounded. She grabbed his arm suddenly, looking back into the crowd. "My sisters are here," She wheezed out to him. She didn't want to die again, the thought terrified her in ways she couldn't even begin to understand, but her sisters couldn't experience what she had. She had told the truth when she said that she was willing to die for them again. She tried to push him toward the crowd. "Please."

Luce glanced around her as police began to flood the room, paramedics following close behind them. As Nell began to gasp and cough, Luce scooped her younger sister up in her arms. No. Not today. She'd resurrected Bea, summoned lightning for Nell, blown up a building and murdered countless people for her sisters. She wasn't going to let fucking Pat's Place hurt her family. Not today. Hurrying towards the entrance, she noticed Kaden kneeling over Bea, her sister saying words she couldn't quite hear, "Grab her and get her out of here." She growled at the man before pushing past him out of the building. She needed to get Nell to the ambulances outside, needed to make sure she was safe.

Jared's vision swam as yet another person arrived. He tried to raise his hand to show a peace sign but all he managed was a weird sort of wave at the newcomer, his arm falling heavily back into the guy holding him up. "Dave the fisherperson is a hero, I'm naming my next kid after you Dave." he decided his mind full of cotton.

There weren't supposed to be cops here. That was all Nadia could think about as she dragged Remmy away from the chaos. She flinched as they reached out to her, though she tried not to let it show. "It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine," she kept muttering over and over, though it was more for her benefit than Remmy's. When she got somewhere less crowded, she set them against the wall and leaned down in front of them. "I don't know what's going on," she said, glancing worriedly back as the cops all filed in, "but it's going to be okay, alright? I'm gonna get you some help."

Agatha 's eyes grew wide. She knew that her belly was more than full and her nervous smile, that probably looked like a freaky grimace told exactly that. "Never better, Sarge, never better," either way, she would have to do her job, anyway. "I'll go gather the staff in the kitchen." And with those words, she turned her back on the sergeant and crossed the restaurant countless times, each and every time with the same strict directions.

Marley took the dizzy man by the arm and shuffled around him. "I need you to open your mouth for me," she said, that firmness to her voice. When he obliged, she popped in the breathalyzer antidote before motioning over to a paramedic to administer the IV. "He'll be okay," she said to the older man, "we've been told it was cyanide. The EMTs will know more. Are you okay, sir? Not feeling any symptoms?"

Nell's heartbeat was growing weaker by the second, her head lolling uselessly as Luce carried her to...to...where were they going? Was she floating? Something felt wrong. Where were they going? There were so many people yelling. There were people in danger. She wanted to stay and help, but the thought was faint as her body continued to shut down, and finally the world faded away as a whole.

Morgan followed Skylar’s lead, all the way up to Remmy, not fleeing the place so much as being dragged away by Nadia. "This is not supposed to be happening, this is definitely not supposed to be happening, flipping universe, this just not..." Chaos was erupting around her. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw the Vural sisters in similar distress, but she couldn't split her attention right now. She grimaced, pulled Skylar along until they were outside with Nadia and Remmy. "What happened?" She asked Nadia, voice shrill. "How long have they been like this?" She dropped to her knees to examine Remmy, though for what, she wasn't sure. "What happened to Remmy?"

Roland was relieved to hear Agatha hadn't been poisoned though he did notice Luce rushing outside with someone in her arms. He'd have to check in on her later. Right now, it was imperative to find whoever was behind this before they got away. Agatha made her way toward the kitchen and he decided to check out the bar first. Not everyone was sick and this was a buffet. There was a chance the beverages were behind this. He walked up to the bar and demanded, "I need to see whoever is in charge of your bar immediately."

Kaden scrambled to get the antidote kit open. This wasn't going to happen, she wasn't going to fucking die again. Once was more than enough. "Open your mouth, you're not fucking dying, Bea, you're--" Her sisters? And then she was up and trying to move. Fuck, he grabbed her and pulled her back, maybe harder than he had to. Just then Luce brushed past cradling Nell. "They're okay, they're fine." He pushed the breathalyzer antidote towards her and called for a medic. "You're not dying. Nell's not dying. Neither is Luce. Now sit still and where the fuck is a medic?" One finally ran over to administer an IV at his second shout.

Dave shifted backward on his knees as Marley leant over Jared, giving him the antidote. "I feel right as rain. Guessing whatever it was wasn't in the meat, that's all I'd eaten so far, and hadn't got to drinking yet." He eyed Jared in concern, rubbing his jaw in concern. "Don't name no one after me, kid. Just keep talking. You already got kids?"

Remmy wanted to cry out, it hurt so bad. Pain torn through the stomach, like swallowed lava. A burning so deep inside they wanted to tear their chest open and rip it out. "Get it out," they muttered, clawing at their chest, "g-get it out. Morgan, get..." they could barely see now, the world spinning around them so fast it made them fall over, even as they were sitting up. Someone's hands caught them. They couldn't see who it was, only hear familiar voices. "Make it stop," they gurgled, feeling something rising in their stomach, their chest, their throat, "make it stop."

Luce made her way out of the building and blocked the path of a passing paramedic, her eyes burning with enough anger and fear to stop them in their tracks. "You're going to save my sister, right fucking now." She snarled as she lay Nell down on the ground. Without a word, the paramedic bent over her sister and opened up the antidote kit. She gripped her sister's hand, holding it tightly as she looked around. So many people were in the same state as her sister, so many people were hurting. "You better fucking save her." She said. "You better fucking save her."

Q let the medic help the person near him, and after setting them down, stood up to aid anyone else to get over towards the medics so there wasn't delay in their care.

Marley patted the younger man on the shoulder. "You're gonna be okay," she said, as the EMT arrived to take over her spot. She gave a glance to the older man, nodding. "We're not sure yet. Count yourself lucky, though," she said, turning to head off to the next person, but-- finding that she was already up and alright. Marley eyed her warily, and the pool of wet next to her. "Everything okay, ma'am?"

Bea fall against Kaden, looking at him with wide, panicked eyes. She finally opened her mouth at Kaden's instruction. He said that her sisters will be okay. She had to believe him. He'd take care of them or make sure they were being taken care of. She knew he would. Her friends took care of her family, she had to trust that. As the medic administered her IV, she realized how hard she was shaking. Through gasping breaths, she asked Kaden and the medic, "What's happening?"

"Get what? Get what out, Remmy! I don't know what you mean!" Morgan shrieked, hands fluttering everywhere and nowhere at once. "Did you actually eat something, Remmy?" She looked helplessly over at Nadia. "I don't understand! Did you see anything?”

Agatha stood in the kitchen with the restaurant's staff. "Everyone here?" She watched them look at each other else before nodding. "Alright. I'm going to need whoever was in charge of food to go over here, and whoever works at the bar to go over here." She had not had anything to drink, so clearly, there was something in the water.

Jared "Got tons of kids. Farm full of 'em." he told Dave. "Don't have a Dave yet so it's perfect." He winced at the IV going into his arm and make a face at Dave. "Feels like a movie, no one gets poisoned in real life do they?"

"I don't know," Nadia said, her tone matching Morgan's. She began to back away, her hands shaking as she watched the two undead. "I--" she needed to get out of there and fast. But there were too many fucking people around. She couldn't be suspicious. Inwardly, she willed herself to calm down, while outwardly she put all of her effort into looking concerned and panicked and horribly inept at handling this situation. "I'm going to get help," she said, backing into the main room. On the way, she saw a discarded drink tray. Fuck, she didn't sign up for this. As slyly as she could, she downed the drink and headed back into the main room, hoping the effects hit quickly. In the mean time, she pretended to look for someone to help Remmy. Not that they could. Zombie poison really was a real bitch.

Skylar followed behind Morgan, doing her best to dodge the people who were between them and Remmy. Before she knew it, Skylar was staring at Remmy, their hands pulling at their chest, their body wracked with pain. Her eyes widened, memories of the last time she'd seen them in pain coming rushing back to her. The way they'd been ripped in half, the way their insides-- "No, no, no, no, no." She mumbled, frozen in fear. She shook her head, trying to force away the memories. She didn't-- they didn't-- she couldn't handle seeing them like this. "Help! Someone, someone help!" Skylar yelled, not knowing what else she could do. She just knew she needed to get Remmy help, and fast. They were in so much pain.

Dave nodded as the officer walked away, turning back to Jared with a bemused smile that didn't quite mask his worry. "Right, your cows're your kids," he agreed, looking around. "Pretty shitty movie, if you ask me. Whoever made that first call saved a fuckload of lives."

Roland gave the timid looking assistant bar manager a harsh look. "Are you the one in charge here?" His words had a bite to them and he was frustrated. A mass poisoning was horrific and he couldn't even begin to wrap his mind around it. The younger man stuttered, "Oh, I-I- I don't know what happened. I was walking a-around seeing if everyone enjoyed their meals. I'm nn-not sure where the bartenders ran off too or what's making everyone sick." Roland narrowed his eyes. It was hard to tell if the nerves were because he was lying or because of the utter chaos ensuring around them. "I'm going to need you to come back to the station with me and answer some questions."

Kaden could feel Bea shaking, closer to death than she had any right to be right after just coming back to life. "Got a call about a poisoning. Breathe, I need you to breathe." Because if she stopped fucking breathing, it would all be for nothing. He couldn't handle that, not again. And he knew Luce and Nell couldn't even begin to handle that. "Luce looked okay. She had Nell. There are medics everywhere, I'm sure she's okay." God fucking help him if he was lying to her right now. He'd never live it down. But he couldn't leave her to go check. He had to trust that Luce would kill someone to keep Nell safe. Had to admit, that wasn't a stretch to believe.

"Get it out, it burns!" Remmy nearly screamed, tearing at their clothes. Sweat was beading on their head, pooling under their shirt. Their arms felt stiff, slow. Their entire body heavy. They sank to the floor, curling up. Exhaustion rushing into them. "It burns, everything burns, it--" they choked on their words, shaking. Wished that the darkness would just take them over, wish they could slip into that release, too. "Please, please," they begged.

"Ma'am-- I need you to--- Ma'am! Get out of here!" The medic yelled and Luce found herself being pulled away from her sister. "Alright! Alright! But, you better fucking, you better save her!" She swore as she stumbled down the pavement. Breathing hard, Luce stared up at the restaurant again, saw Kaden next to Bea, watching over her while the medic administered the treatment. Hurrying back towards them, she glanced around and stopped dead in her tracks. Through the doorway, she caught sight of Nadia... Saw the glass in her hand. What the fuck? What the fuck? Her eyes widened in horror as she watched Nadia drain the glass dry.

Morgan tried to reach out for Nadia before she backed away. "NO, no, you have to tell me what they did! Fucking--Nadia!" But the girl was gone. Yeah, she definitely didn't know that much about her date if she thought the paramedics were going to have anything to help a zombie in distress. Skylar, nearby, was feeling some distress too. "Hey," she said, her voice firm with determination. "We're gonna figure this out, okay? Just not here, and not with the help of human cops. I'm going to take Remmy back to my place. Can you cover for us, Skylar?" She heaved her arms under Remmy's body and picked them up. It was awkward with their difference in size, but she was going to make it work. "If Nadia comes back, tell her we're okay, make sure she doesn't ask any questions?" She tried to lock eyes with the young selkie. Tried to sound as confident as she wished she was. "We're gonna handle this, and we're gonna be fine."

"That's right." Jared’s head still felt wrong, but the cotton was clearing a little as the medic monitoring the IV in his arm gave a nod to someone to help Jared to his feet. "The worst movie I've ever seen bud." he agreed, being hauled into a chair to be moved. "Coming for the ride in the ambulance? A cyanide come down is a great way to meet new friends."

Norma tried to stand up, but still felt weak. The poison was no longer killing her, but the effects always lasted far longer than she would like. It was unfortunate that someone had noticed her fall. She glanced around her, every other mortal who had fallen was being given intense medical care. Gods, how could she explain this one? Hopefully this human approaching her was very stupid. "Oh, yes, I'm fine. I think the poison just didn't stick. It's a miracle! Praise your deity of choice!"

Instead of looking for someone to help Remmy, Nadia immediately went over to the EMTs, stumbling by the time she got to one of them. "I think-- Fuck." Fucking cyanide. Fucking cops. She wasn't getting paid enough to poison herself. She groaned and allowed the EMT to help her out. Tommy was going to be getting some choice words after all of this.

Poison. Some fucking bastard poisoned her and her sisters. Bea was going to fucking kill them. She was going to burn... No, not burn anymore, but she was going destroy whoever fucking did this. Her tears started to clear as she was worked on and she looked up at Kaden, face set in rage, "I'm going to kill them." She looked to the side, trying to find her sisters and saw Luce. Reaching out to her, she called to Luce, voice rough. "Luce!"

Skylar focused on Morgan's words, doing her best to hold herself together, though her shoulders were shaking violently. "Mhm, mhm,. I can-- I can do that. Just, make sure they're okay. Please, please make sure they're safe." Skylar glanced down at Remmy, watched as they screamed and cried, and curled on the ground. Tears burned in the corners of her eyes as she nodded. "It's all going to be okay, it's gonna be okay." She said, more to herself than to Morgan. It had to be okay.

With the sergeant handling this, Agatha left the kitchen, passing a woman who was thanking God instead of medicine with a judgemental look on her face. Yeah, no, no time to argue. Besides it looked like someone was taking care of her. It seemed things were getting slowly under control. But time would tell how bad this truly was.

Marley eyed the woman carefully. "Didn't stick, huh?" she said with a low voice, glancing around them before leaning in, "sounds pretty...supernatural to me." Before leaning away. She didn't exactly have time for this, there were more people who needed poison kits. She backed away from the strange woman, smiling, gave a wave, before heading off to another sick person. This town sure was strange sometimes.

Roy Chambers couldn’t wipe the grin off of his face if he tried. What was there to be upset about? The day had been good to him. Another day with the sun warming his skin was a good one, in his book. Coupled with the sound of ambulance sirens cutting through the air? Oh, that tickled him in more ways than most people could properly understand. What did it mean? What was going on? That was probably what most people were thinking. Roy, however, knew exactly what it meant. It meant success. It meant his plan had gone off without a hitch. As he neared the restaurant—Pat’s Place—he watched the chaos from the sidewalk. No way this place was going to pick back up after a catastrophe like this. Shame. They had the best cheesesteaks in the area. With the mess unfolding, everyone was far too consumed with the sick and dying to notice him. He halted at the sight of a familiar face. Remmington McAllister. 30. One of the parties to blame for the Ring explosion. He was sure Penelope Vural was around here somewhere. Preferably dead. Remmington didn’t look too far from it themself. He caught their gaze, lowering his sunglasses to fully take in the picture. Phew, boy. Looked like that hurt. He winked, his grin spreading wider across his features. Tucked his hands into his pockets and carried on down the road, a melodic whistle on his lips and a pep in his step. The day had been very good to him indeed.

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walker-journal · 3 years

Text

Extreme Noodling (Dave+Adam)

Timing: Near Winter’s end, before Dave got bit

Summary: Dave and Adam wrassle some giant catfish (the google searches for this chatzy changed us as people I’m pretty sure. I know too much)

Content Warning: lots of fish gore

The frost-flecked marsh water sloshed around Adam’s boots as he waded through the mire. Feathery moss hung in pale sheets from old maples and gnarled gum trees. Vertical clumps of reeds and cattails marked where the sparse islands of solid ground gave way to sluggish swamp water. This particularly frigid winter had touched the murk with thin sheets of ice, the fragile pristine white breaking under the slightest pressure for brackish mulch to pour through the cracks.

Adam was out in the frigid marshland today at the behest of David Herring, a sailor whom Nell has possibly summoned from hell as a birthday stunt. Adam was trying to take his return to Hunting gradually. His powers were slowly returning day by day, although resurgent strength and sharpening senses hadn’t brought any answers along with them.

Even more grueling training and keeping busy at work would have to suffice now, resolved Adam as he held his rifle dry across his shoulders and waded towards where Herring was waiting.

Dave had braced himself against a nearby tree, his bag hooked over some higher up branches. Despite the frigid early spring weather, he stood in shorts and watershoes, already water and mud logged, but like this he could feel everyone and everything coming, no matter how big or small.

It was always a smart idea to have your back braced against something when you weren’t sure exactly where you stood with the person you’d called for back up. Dave wasn’t the type to calculate who owed who after surviving something together, and you never knew exactly what flavour of hunter you were getting until they had their knife against your throat. Most of the time, it had been alright, but considering the blood that stained Dave’s hands, he wasn’t surprised when things went the other direction fast. But the water in the marshes was even more still than the lakes, so he felt the ripples of Adam wading through the water long before he saw the young hunter approaching, so he was ready and waiting by the time Adam had slogged close by.

“Walker,” he greeted, raising a hand in greeting. “You gone up against a prodigium catfish before?”

Adam had to give mad props to the titanium viking balls this dude must have to go all beachwear in an ice swamp. However, as Adam might still want to have kids someday, these waders were staying on. Manly bayou bonding would have to wait.

“Read about them, never hunted them before,” the young Hunter admitted, the hot hills of California and the holy land having been more alghoul country then noodling holes.

Dave nodded, watching Adam intently - mostly to be able to read his lips to make sense of what he could hear. At least the swamp was quiet, in the harsh way that winters often were. He didn’t have any kind of teeth guards on this time, his long canines exposed as he talked.

“This’ll be my fourth,” he replied, “but most of the others were juveniles. Feels about… fifteen feet, at a guess. Right now it’s about sixty feet that way.” He pointed deeper into the marsh land. “Fortunately, they ain’t agile creatures at that size, but they’ll crush you if they can. If you’ve read about them, I'm figuring you know about the barbs and arms.” He shifted, unstrapping a machete from the bag he’d hung from some tree branches. “If you think you can land the perfect shot, take it. Otherwise I’m thinking it’ll be better to get it in shallow water and incapacitate its arms for an easier kill.”

“Gothya, watch out for the barbs and baby Kermit arms, we gotta beach it in the the shallows unless there's an opening,” Adam reiterated, looking out at the hushed landscape of frost and brackish silt.

“But before we start I gotta ask,” the Hunter insisted as he knelt on the soggy crust the snowy embankment. He leaned the nonessential gear against the grey trunk of a willow.

“So...are you like sensing the fish right now? Do aquaman powers come with the whole wereseal thing?”

“Selkie. Something like that,” Dave replied, with just one eyebrow raised at Adam, unsure if he was missing out on some youthful slang or that Adam was not as informed as some of the other hunters around. Wereseal. The damn nerve. Not that there was anything wrong with being a werewolf, but Dave didn’t lose control like he’d gotten rabies once a month. It was all this damn tv, now everyone thought that just because you could change forms you’d have to be some cheap knock off were-

Dave hmmphed. Tiny pulses of water against his skin warned him of the large, slow being stirring in its tunnel, its mouth resting nearby the surface, waiting for prey to come nearby. “Any other questions? Ain’t exactly your college classroom.”

Ok, wait...so like, could Dave sense fish? If he could, was that a Dave-Selkie thing or a Dave-Dave thing? A tinge of frigid heat flickered in the back of Adam’s skull as something grew near, farther and larger than the palpable “otherness” that radiated from Dave. The Hunter tensed, but wasn’t going to pass up his last chance here.

“One more question….did uh….a hot Turkish motorcycle chick call you from a Hell Dimension for her sister’s birthday?”

The frosty mire stirred with an upwelling of bubbles that brought the brackish scent of rotting things with them. The dirty ice cracked upwards as an enormous bulk briefly surfaced fifty feet away.

“Its like..ok if its yes, just been bothering me.”

Dave just… stared at Adam. Had he heard that right? The words were distinct on the lips, but the sentence made no sense, not even when Dave happened to know there was a Turkish spellcaster who summoned things from hell dimensions. He wasn’t sure if he should be offended or complimented by the idea. “A hell dimension?” Dave repeated, just to make sure he’d heard right.

“The fuck are they teaching hunters these days? No, Walker, unless you consider Texas a hell dimension.” He cocked his head, considering. “Guess that wouldn’t be too far from the truth.”

The turbulence of water under the surface against his ankle had Dave looking around suspiciously, but the giant catfish was just reasserting itself in the water bed much, much to the starting of many smaller fish nearby, that darted away, including in their direction. Whether or not Texas was a hell dimension would have to be debated another day, preferably over a chilled beer. “If we steer it a little to the left, the water there’s pretty shallow, and lots of land for you to use.” Not sure he was prepared for whatever other questions Adam might have, Dave began to wade deeper into the water, looking to get much closer before he caught the catfish’s attention.

“Not gonna lie,” Adam began with cheerful candor as he parkored his way between the more solid clumps of sodden shallows. “Texas sounds like a rough time for anybody who likes water.”

Dark hazel eyes glanced again towards the breach of a large slick mass against the ice, glimpsing what might’ve been a piscine whisker, before they focused back to Dave, crinkling with suppressed mirth around the edges.

“Waaaaaait,” came the dire moment of revelation. “If you have magic skin...in Texas, did you like accessorize it?”

“Dave, my dude...did you wear sealskin chaps?”

Adam was just in the start of pantomiming the Dave sauntering around Huston in this deviant form of cowpoke asswear when bulky shape burst from the icy murk.

“Hell yeah!”

Dave’s eyebrows raised right into his hairline as he looked over at Adam, deeply unimpressed at his realisation. For a brief second, he almost knocked Adam into the water to quiet the kid, before remembering what they were here for. Maybe later.

“You’re lucky that thing works better dry,” Dave retorted, looking down pointedly at Adam’s rifle, but the tiny quirk at the corners of his lips belied his grumpy demeanor.

It was one thing feeling it stirring in the muck, and another for the large form to crash through the crackly thin layer of ice. Dave grinned, his canine teeth bared as the form surged through the water, its wide mouth gaping for prey, not realising that it was no longer the predator. In the water, Dave was the more obvious target, so he started backing into the shallower waters, letting it think it was hunting him.

Considering how big the damn thing was, Dave hadn’t really expected it to be able to grab a nearby tree and use that to propell itself at Dave, barely diving out of the way before its jaw shut around him. When it’s body crashed through the water again, it sent waves of water and mud flying, but in missing it had given Dave an opening to drive the machete into its back, hoping to slice through the spine. The catfish flailed in protest, grabbing Dave with an arm like a tree trunk and dragging him under water.

----

“Aw shit,” Adam laughed as he tried to get a hold on the slick flailing creature that was driving Dave down into the murk, “it's trying to send you back to Texas!”

The icey bog water stung Adam’s bare arms with a cold burn that was soon replaced with an oiliness that seeped between his fingers. Adam gritted his teeth and lips shut to try to to get any of the frigid brackishness in his mouth as the catfish bucked and flailed beneath him.

Adam plunged his combat knife into the creature’s side, grime mixing with pale blue blood and the sudden reek of raw damp chicken. Trying to keep hold, Adam yanked out the blade and brought it down again and again, attempting to get the catfish to favor its wounded side and hopefully roll Dave out of the water.

----

It was fortunate that Dave was both hard of hearing and currently being wrestled by an enormous catfish underwater, because if he had heard Adam’s comment, there might have been a sea creature versus hunter alliance. The heavy set slime on his skin kept the catfish’s hands sliding off him, but as he was knocked deeper and deeper into the dirt, the chance of dying from being crushed by catfish was increasingly looming.

Dave bared his teeth and bit into the scaled underside of the catfish with little success, unable to open his mouth enough to get any kind of hold, but the overhead action above the water seemed to have more of an effect. Dave kicked himself out from underneath the catfish as the catfish trashed and tried to reach for the human above it, more interested in a prey that it could actually drown.

It curled its other arm around Dave as it reached for Adam, distracted by the dagger slashing deeper and deeper into its side. It wasn’t watching as Dave opened his own maw and bit down on its arm, bone snapping under his canines.

When Dave emerged from the water, it was with one of the arms firmly between his teeth, torn off the body and dripping blood into the water, he grimaced, dropping it onto the roots of a nearby tree that had started to sink into the water as the soil beneath it had given way to watery mud.

----

“Holy shit,” Adam effused in admiration of such unmitigated badassery, a grin brightening the Hunter’s grime-covered face as he climbed up the side of the flailing catfish. He hoisted himself up with each deep stab of the knife into the catfish’s spongy flesh as if it were a rock-climber’s spike. “That was fucking ace….hey what’s it taste like? Bet you got like Marsh-Mono now or something…”

Adam’s preliminary diagnosis on what disease Dave had doubtless contracted was cut short as the Hunter accidentally stabbed too deeply and pierced an organ. Greenish black fluid hemorrhaged from the wound and Adam let out a stream of gagging curses as the slimy knife slipped from his fingers into the acrid effluvium.

That momentary loss of purchase was all the catfish needed. Adam plunged into the marshwater as the fish spun into a deathroll and opened its toothless maw wide.

Adam’s world became warm and damply dark.

----

“Ah, fucking hell,” Dave groaned, wading deeper into the water. He couldn’t see where Adam had gone, but he couldn’t feel anything human sized with flailing limbs moving around in the water. If he’d been knocked out, it was a matter of moments before the human risked drowning. You couldn’t heal an absence of oxygen in your lungs. Thick blue blood pumped out of the catfish’s side, murking up the water, but it was still kicking, moving towards him with its still remaining arm. This was going to be tough just by himself, and without Adam moving around in the water, Dave had no fucking idea how to find him.

The catfish swiped, and Dave dodged out of the way with a slash at its side, seeing where Adam had been hacking deep into it, where it was also bleeding and oozing viscous pus into the water, stinking up a storm. Still no sign of the wayward hunter. Shit, shit. Hoping that with its movement he might get a better feel of where Adam was. “WALKER!” He barked, watching the catfish and staying well away from its brutish arms.

Which was when he realised there was something else moving inside the catfish and he realised exactly where Walker was.

“Jesus Christ.” He drove his hand into the deep gash in the catfish’s side, causing it to spasm in pain, hoping he could distract the catfish long enough for one of them to think of a plan to get Adam out of the monsters without… risking killing him while fighting the catfish.

Adam’s silver knife appeared from the catfish’s belly, a brief protrusion of metal followed by an upwelling of dark blue ichor. The enormous fish thrashed as Dave’s hand in its wound exacerbated this new pain burrowing out from the inside. The catfish bucked in spine-twisting arcs on the frosty mire as it instinctively tried to get free of whatever invisible thing was tearing at it.

The knife blade surfaced again when the panicked flailing no had briefly subsided, the incision growing into a long fleshly tear that spewed gummy stomach lining. Long strips of blue-tinged mucosa and yellowish subcutaneous tissue spurted from the wound each time the blade retreated, staining the marsh ice in a splots of organic dyes.

Adam’s gore-caked right arm snaked through the widened opening, trying to find some kind of grip outside as the fish’s frenzied motions turned his world into a dark barrel-roll hell of sloshing fluids and pythonic stomach muscles. It was a dicey business as the fish’s jostling and this cramped space made accidentally stabbing himself a real possibility. The Hunter had nearly opened up a vein when he’d had to fold into the fetal position to retrieve the spare silver knife.

It was times like these where being trained to abandon thought and focus only on each incremental steps of survival came in handy. The horrid smell, the acrid taste of bloody filth in his mouth, the vertigo of the fish’s thrashing, the burn on stomach acid in his skin and eyes, and the rip-popping compression of the catfish’s spasming stomach messes would’ve made it easy to just panic.

Luckily, Adam had spent enough time being taking doses of ever-higher concentrations demonic Terevi venom as a teenager that being digested was no longer an excuse to slack off. It’s really those salt of the earth family values that build character y’know?

Adam stuck out one leg through the widened opening and placed it again one fleshy end of the wound for leverage as he pressed the knife’s blade upward, sawing his way through sinews and fat as frigid marsh water poured in through the opening.

Something suddenly gave and the world spun. Adam hit the squishy sod with a groggy oof but convulsing to hack up catfish blood.

The first time the catfish tried to roll, Dave punched it in the eye. The second, he sliced off one of its barbs and it knocked him into the water with its remained arm. Dave’s head smacked into a tree branch and he briefly saw stars. He got out from under it, and saw a shape tearing through the scaled belly. A leg. Walker. He almost wanted to surge forward and grab him, but the bleeding hole wasn’t enough to fit a whole man through, and yanking Adam out of place might trap him and make him suffocate. Dave couldn’t let the catfish roll again, or Adam’s leg would snap like a matchstick. Dave hacked at its back with the machete again, blood spewing his body with every swing, now he knew where the hunter was cutting his way out from, keeping the catfish from grabbing at Adam or rolling again. With a final hack and a burst of bloody flesh, its intestines spilled out into the water in large ropes and bobbing in the water like grotesque pool floats. Adam along with it. The catfish spasmed, and twitched, its gills trembling, before at last it became still.

“Jesus fuck,” Dave said, rushing over to Adam’s side. He paused, waiting for the worst of the convulsions to pass before bending down, picking up Adam’s arm and swinging it over his shoulder. If the kid passed out, Dave was worried he’d faceplant into the swamp and breathe water. “Easy does it. Easy does it now,” He muttered, lowering Adam to sit on some firmer ground. “Keep your eyes shut, I’m gonna get this crap off your off your face so you can breathe,” Dave said, not being precious as he wiped the acidic gunk from Adam’s face, pulling a flask of water out of his belt and using it to rinse Adam’s face. He held his hand so that the water wouldn’t go into Adam’s nose nor mouth. Wasn’t looking to waterboard the guy afterall, just make sure that the acid didn’t cause permanent injury to his eyes or anything.

Pressing the half-filled flask into Adam’s hand so that he could drink or wash himself as need be, Dave stepped back, giving Adam space to catch his breath and assess his own wounds. He leant against a worn out tree, feigning a casual demeanor so Adam didn’t feel as intensely scrutinised as he was being. The thick sludge of blood and grime covering Adam from head to toe was mixed with stomach acid, and the little skin that Dave could see was turning pink where it wasn’t battered blue. “Always thought hunters had a flair for the dramatic, but you really take the cake,” he joked with the hint of a smile on his features, but the worry was there. Adam’s injuries would heal faster, but Dave wasn’t the one who’d just been eaten. He just remembered the feeling. “When you’re ready, you’re gonna need to get back in the water to wash the rest of it off.”

He didn’t ask, are you alright. He didn’t ask whether it hurt. He didn’t need to. He knew how trauma was what each hunter collected by the armful, this just another harrowing near death experience out of dozens that Adam had walked away from. This one might not even leave a scar, just a story to tell over a beer. Tomorrow, Dave would feel like he’d been hit by a truck, and in a week his muscles would still give him hell. In a week, Walker would likely be right as rain. But healing hurt, both the mental and physical sort, so he waited for Adam’s cue before coming in to help him get on his feet again. His own legs began to protest under both their weights, his ribs creaking. For right now, the adrenaline rushing in his weathered veins made this just about bearable, but they needed to make a move before the tides turned against them.

“I’ll tell you what, Walker. Once we’re both patched up, I’ll buy you dinner and a beer just to celebrate you not being dinner.”

#extreme noodling #dave #adam #seizethecarpe

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