11-28-2015, 02:09 PM
The overpowering dreariness of the Moors is as heady as ever. While Kanaya has more or less become accustomed to it with the passage of time, she still feels a sympathetic weight settle over her when she happens to chance a glance at her new human compatriot’s expression. She can only hope that it will not overpower him and drive his mind and soul into the marshy ground like so many who have come before him.
As the deluge from above causes their shoes to slip and slide in the waterlogged mud, the pair continues along down the path. More well-rounded sounds, like trickling streams of water or perhaps saliva gurgling in the many throats of some immense and unfathomable beast, are swallowed assuredly up by the droplets of rain that slick the uneven plain of mud and stones which shift easily underfoot.
They have been treading ground for far too short of a time before something displeasingly unexpected happens. Sighing quietly through her nose, Kanaya observes two shifting figures in the middle distance, dimly lit vegetation and greyish moon-smoothed soil conflicting starkly against their dark shapes. Whatever is taking place over there likely does not involve undead— she would know, by way of smell and the taste of the air alone,— but it is difficult to say under these wet conditions.
Just as Kanaya is about to turn to Brother Devon and suggest taking a slightly longer and potentially more treacherous route, he brushes past her and makes his way towards the possibly hostile strangers in the distance, white leather jacket shifting almost like a mirage through the torrential flood of rain. The jade-blooded troll visibly stiffens, caught between several urges that grapple stubbornly against one another in her mind.
One orders her to snatch his arm, the silly vulnerable human, and drag him as far away as conceivably possible. This thought is stalled by the obvious fact that Devon is grown, an adult, and certainly capable of taking care of himself with his supernatural capabilities. He is outside of her jurisdiction. Still, Kanaya’s body tenses as he walks past, muscles drawn taut with the barely-repressed and all too maternal compulsion.
Another is far less defensive— in fact, it borders on almost reprehensible. She could leave him now, the fool. Obviously she has made some horrendous mistake in believing he could be of use to her. If this is the way he behaves when faced with the cunning trickery of the foe they are eventually going to face, then he will be dooming her to the same dire end if she chooses to travel with him for any longer.
The last notion that spurs Kanaya into action is the one which ultimately wins out. It is a safe middle ground between the more drastic thoughts rampaging through her thoughts, and so she settles easily into it with a notable relaxation of her posture and with her senses on high alert.
Brother Devon knows what he is doing, Kanaya knows that he is no fool, and while his choice of action might seem unwise to her as of right now, the troll understands that he only wants to help, much in the same way that she wishes she could. The horrors of the Moors might have taken this compulsory willingness to provide aid from Kanaya, but she will certainly do her damned best to keep it from doing the same to this kindhearted mage.
This middle ground that Kanaya finds is to follow behind him from a safe distance and leap into action if necessary. Her clawed thumb slides against the tube of lipstick in the pocket of her skirt as they approach. Kanaya mentally wills this entire situation to pass over without bloodshed, but that same foolhardy prayer has gone unanswered many times before. Her weapon of choice is a slender and familiar weight against her palm.
Shockingly enough, this small blip in their travels is hardly detrimental to their cause, almost to the point where Kanaya believes that the universe must once again be smiling favorably upon her. Devon’s tattoos glow with a reassuring white phosphorescence once more; the elderly and wrinkled humans are startled but not overly vicious; and there is hardly any incident to be spoken of in which any one member of their collective group has their face eaten off.
As the pair of old people hobble off into the unbroken rain shower, Kanaya is hardly surprised by the fact that they pointedly avoid her yellow gaze. It’s hard, living this way. It’s hard, and no one seems to understand.
She is, however, pleasantly surprised by how Devon handled that brief situation. It is peculiar to her how, after interacting with this person for hardly a few hours, she has already begun to feel proud of him. Almost like how she used to feel when one of her old friends did something even remotely sensible or sane for a change of pace.
This thought sobers up her pleased attitude rather quickly, but she is still sure to acknowledge the good deed with an, albeit a touch subdued, fanged smile in Devon’s direction. She even loosens her hold on her lipstick for a moment, reaching up to brush a stand of humidity frazzled hair behind her ear, and this is where Kanaya inevitably screws up.
Without warning, Kanaya’s ankle is seized upon by an unnaturally strong grip that tugs her off balance and sends her pitching forward onto the gravelly dirt. She lands heavily upon the sliding and bitterly cold rocks with such speed that she barely has time to react to the minute cuts appearing on her elbow and shoulder before there are foul teeth sinking into the skin of her lower calf. They are gummy, stale, and small rotten bits slither through the congealed mess.
A sharply aimed kick removes the creature’s lower jaw in a sluice of fleshy matter, brackish blood dribbling languidly out of the wound. Even without Kanaya’s enhanced strength it would have been easy to do away with, but it only causes the thing to lean more heavily upon her knees, scrabbling its way towards where it believes warm flesh might be found.
There are hundreds of scratches covering the undead person’s eyes, yellow and coated in microscopic cuts from uncleared dust particles, and they stare blearily at her when she whirls around to snarl at the culprit who would dare bite her. Black-painted lips pulled back taut across her gums, Kanaya hisses furiously at the mostly brainless undead clambering across her legs.
Its head cranes to the side in a clumsy spasm-like movement to look at the human behind her, an odd fixation in its gaze that is not normally present in the mind of one of the resurrected.
Surveillance, Kanaya realizes with dawning clarity. Hordes of watching eyes alongside clacking teeth.
It also becomes readily apparent that she was not this crawler’s original target, as it soon devolves into a sluggish tossing of its limbs to climb over her to get at her warm-bodied friend. As if she is only an unfortunate obstacle in its path, for it has realized that she is far too similar to itself to make for a hearty meal.
Despite all this speculation, the thing only has a few stringy strands of fair hair hanging out from the top of its pock-marked head, with the rancid skin there pulled close across its skull until it is of an almost transparent, ghostly consistency. The deathly pale being is clammy and slathered with cold mud from dragging itself across the squelchy soil. There is an honestly horrible odor of decaying flesh seeping out from where its ragged clothing mixes almost seamlessly with loose yellowed skin and jutting bone.
In several swift and successive movements, Kanaya seizes the creature under its shoulders and tosses it over her shoulder and back into the boggy marshland with little care for decorum. It lands with an audible splash somewhere, a few wriggling squelches starting up afterwards as it attempts to gain its bearings. As it is, Kanaya’s clothes are quite damp and she thinks that there is a loosened flap of skin stuck to the front of her shirt. When she looks at Devon again, her earlier cheery mood has gone sour.
“I am sorry you had to see that,” she tells him, carefully extracting a thin slimy piece of skin from her shirt and flinging it away soon after with a derisive sniff. “It isn’t a good idea to stand in one place for long while traveling, as it becomes even easier for them to sneak up on you like that. Those two senior citizens might not have been able to fend off that… creature of indeterminable everything, if you had not decided to stay awhile and help them. So.”
She hesitates, shifts a little, and then shrugs, eyes resting once again on the clustered shadow of Darkshire in the distance. With an admiring smile and a sweep of her cape, she turns to Devon. “Well done, I suppose.”
They continue on towards Darkshire after that, mostly silent with the downpour’s voice rising and falling in cacophonous whispers around them. When they finally arrive at the settlement’s outskirts, Kanaya notes with little fanfare that all of the windows and doors facing inwards as well as outwards are fastened soundly shut to the dark night. She does not question this, instead pausing for a moment to speak with Devon about what kind of an operation they are about to undertake.
”This will likely not go very well if we dally for too long. Our course through Darkshire must be quick and with as little interruptions as possible. Refrain from using sarcasm or excessive manners unless you know someone; they don’t like that here.”
With that last cautionary statement, Kanaya strides resolutely towards where one of the nearest watchtowers is located. She had hardly passed through its shadow when the rickety sound of heavy footfalls across wood accosts her.
“Hey!”
Kanaya turns, shoulder hunched defensively until she sees who it is. A young citizen in a hunting cap frowns down at her from where they are at the tower’s edge, their freckled face dirtied from the usual grime and lack of sleep.
The jade-blood recognizes this person, but only distantly. She hasn’t spent much time in Darkshire, although she mildly approves of the occasional undead militiaman she sees stationed at the city walls, but the face is somewhat familiar to her.
“What are you playing at coming back around here, vamp?”
Kanaya grimaces at the female guardsman. Oh yes, she remembers now. They all suspect her to be in league with Count Dracula, don’t they? Surely this cape isn’t helping matters. She will have to do her best to clear this misunderstanding up right quick.
Focusing once again on the narrow here and now, Kanaya goes through the motions of telling this guard that no, she is not going to suck anyone dry while she is here, and that blood would actually be the furthest thing from her mind at the moment. Say, that is some nice armor, would it be possible for her to acquire some while she is here?
The young woman’s face scrunches at her, still rife with suspicion, before she sighs and sets her reservations aside. Her eyes briefly slide to curiously peer at Brother Devon before she adjusts her stance so the metal plating she is wearing is more evenly distributed over her midsection. “Yeah, okay, I’ll believe you for now miss vamp. You don’t look much like Drac anyways, I don’t get why my old da’s so worried about it.”
She jerks her head in the general direction of one of the buildings along the street. “Smithy’s there. Don’t give anyone any trouble and we won’t have a problem.”
With a nod and a brief smile of thanks, the two travelers are granted entry to Darkshire.
”Well,” Kanaya remarks to Devon as they walk down the street in broad…. Well, not daylight, per se, as the Pale Moors haven’t exactly seen the light of a true day in a long time, but in some kind of light. ”That was easier than I expected.”
As the deluge from above causes their shoes to slip and slide in the waterlogged mud, the pair continues along down the path. More well-rounded sounds, like trickling streams of water or perhaps saliva gurgling in the many throats of some immense and unfathomable beast, are swallowed assuredly up by the droplets of rain that slick the uneven plain of mud and stones which shift easily underfoot.
They have been treading ground for far too short of a time before something displeasingly unexpected happens. Sighing quietly through her nose, Kanaya observes two shifting figures in the middle distance, dimly lit vegetation and greyish moon-smoothed soil conflicting starkly against their dark shapes. Whatever is taking place over there likely does not involve undead— she would know, by way of smell and the taste of the air alone,— but it is difficult to say under these wet conditions.
Just as Kanaya is about to turn to Brother Devon and suggest taking a slightly longer and potentially more treacherous route, he brushes past her and makes his way towards the possibly hostile strangers in the distance, white leather jacket shifting almost like a mirage through the torrential flood of rain. The jade-blooded troll visibly stiffens, caught between several urges that grapple stubbornly against one another in her mind.
One orders her to snatch his arm, the silly vulnerable human, and drag him as far away as conceivably possible. This thought is stalled by the obvious fact that Devon is grown, an adult, and certainly capable of taking care of himself with his supernatural capabilities. He is outside of her jurisdiction. Still, Kanaya’s body tenses as he walks past, muscles drawn taut with the barely-repressed and all too maternal compulsion.
Another is far less defensive— in fact, it borders on almost reprehensible. She could leave him now, the fool. Obviously she has made some horrendous mistake in believing he could be of use to her. If this is the way he behaves when faced with the cunning trickery of the foe they are eventually going to face, then he will be dooming her to the same dire end if she chooses to travel with him for any longer.
The last notion that spurs Kanaya into action is the one which ultimately wins out. It is a safe middle ground between the more drastic thoughts rampaging through her thoughts, and so she settles easily into it with a notable relaxation of her posture and with her senses on high alert.
Brother Devon knows what he is doing, Kanaya knows that he is no fool, and while his choice of action might seem unwise to her as of right now, the troll understands that he only wants to help, much in the same way that she wishes she could. The horrors of the Moors might have taken this compulsory willingness to provide aid from Kanaya, but she will certainly do her damned best to keep it from doing the same to this kindhearted mage.
This middle ground that Kanaya finds is to follow behind him from a safe distance and leap into action if necessary. Her clawed thumb slides against the tube of lipstick in the pocket of her skirt as they approach. Kanaya mentally wills this entire situation to pass over without bloodshed, but that same foolhardy prayer has gone unanswered many times before. Her weapon of choice is a slender and familiar weight against her palm.
Shockingly enough, this small blip in their travels is hardly detrimental to their cause, almost to the point where Kanaya believes that the universe must once again be smiling favorably upon her. Devon’s tattoos glow with a reassuring white phosphorescence once more; the elderly and wrinkled humans are startled but not overly vicious; and there is hardly any incident to be spoken of in which any one member of their collective group has their face eaten off.
As the pair of old people hobble off into the unbroken rain shower, Kanaya is hardly surprised by the fact that they pointedly avoid her yellow gaze. It’s hard, living this way. It’s hard, and no one seems to understand.
She is, however, pleasantly surprised by how Devon handled that brief situation. It is peculiar to her how, after interacting with this person for hardly a few hours, she has already begun to feel proud of him. Almost like how she used to feel when one of her old friends did something even remotely sensible or sane for a change of pace.
This thought sobers up her pleased attitude rather quickly, but she is still sure to acknowledge the good deed with an, albeit a touch subdued, fanged smile in Devon’s direction. She even loosens her hold on her lipstick for a moment, reaching up to brush a stand of humidity frazzled hair behind her ear, and this is where Kanaya inevitably screws up.
Without warning, Kanaya’s ankle is seized upon by an unnaturally strong grip that tugs her off balance and sends her pitching forward onto the gravelly dirt. She lands heavily upon the sliding and bitterly cold rocks with such speed that she barely has time to react to the minute cuts appearing on her elbow and shoulder before there are foul teeth sinking into the skin of her lower calf. They are gummy, stale, and small rotten bits slither through the congealed mess.
A sharply aimed kick removes the creature’s lower jaw in a sluice of fleshy matter, brackish blood dribbling languidly out of the wound. Even without Kanaya’s enhanced strength it would have been easy to do away with, but it only causes the thing to lean more heavily upon her knees, scrabbling its way towards where it believes warm flesh might be found.
There are hundreds of scratches covering the undead person’s eyes, yellow and coated in microscopic cuts from uncleared dust particles, and they stare blearily at her when she whirls around to snarl at the culprit who would dare bite her. Black-painted lips pulled back taut across her gums, Kanaya hisses furiously at the mostly brainless undead clambering across her legs.
Its head cranes to the side in a clumsy spasm-like movement to look at the human behind her, an odd fixation in its gaze that is not normally present in the mind of one of the resurrected.
Surveillance, Kanaya realizes with dawning clarity. Hordes of watching eyes alongside clacking teeth.
It also becomes readily apparent that she was not this crawler’s original target, as it soon devolves into a sluggish tossing of its limbs to climb over her to get at her warm-bodied friend. As if she is only an unfortunate obstacle in its path, for it has realized that she is far too similar to itself to make for a hearty meal.
Despite all this speculation, the thing only has a few stringy strands of fair hair hanging out from the top of its pock-marked head, with the rancid skin there pulled close across its skull until it is of an almost transparent, ghostly consistency. The deathly pale being is clammy and slathered with cold mud from dragging itself across the squelchy soil. There is an honestly horrible odor of decaying flesh seeping out from where its ragged clothing mixes almost seamlessly with loose yellowed skin and jutting bone.
In several swift and successive movements, Kanaya seizes the creature under its shoulders and tosses it over her shoulder and back into the boggy marshland with little care for decorum. It lands with an audible splash somewhere, a few wriggling squelches starting up afterwards as it attempts to gain its bearings. As it is, Kanaya’s clothes are quite damp and she thinks that there is a loosened flap of skin stuck to the front of her shirt. When she looks at Devon again, her earlier cheery mood has gone sour.
“I am sorry you had to see that,” she tells him, carefully extracting a thin slimy piece of skin from her shirt and flinging it away soon after with a derisive sniff. “It isn’t a good idea to stand in one place for long while traveling, as it becomes even easier for them to sneak up on you like that. Those two senior citizens might not have been able to fend off that… creature of indeterminable everything, if you had not decided to stay awhile and help them. So.”
She hesitates, shifts a little, and then shrugs, eyes resting once again on the clustered shadow of Darkshire in the distance. With an admiring smile and a sweep of her cape, she turns to Devon. “Well done, I suppose.”
They continue on towards Darkshire after that, mostly silent with the downpour’s voice rising and falling in cacophonous whispers around them. When they finally arrive at the settlement’s outskirts, Kanaya notes with little fanfare that all of the windows and doors facing inwards as well as outwards are fastened soundly shut to the dark night. She does not question this, instead pausing for a moment to speak with Devon about what kind of an operation they are about to undertake.
”This will likely not go very well if we dally for too long. Our course through Darkshire must be quick and with as little interruptions as possible. Refrain from using sarcasm or excessive manners unless you know someone; they don’t like that here.”
With that last cautionary statement, Kanaya strides resolutely towards where one of the nearest watchtowers is located. She had hardly passed through its shadow when the rickety sound of heavy footfalls across wood accosts her.
“Hey!”
Kanaya turns, shoulder hunched defensively until she sees who it is. A young citizen in a hunting cap frowns down at her from where they are at the tower’s edge, their freckled face dirtied from the usual grime and lack of sleep.
The jade-blood recognizes this person, but only distantly. She hasn’t spent much time in Darkshire, although she mildly approves of the occasional undead militiaman she sees stationed at the city walls, but the face is somewhat familiar to her.
“What are you playing at coming back around here, vamp?”
Kanaya grimaces at the female guardsman. Oh yes, she remembers now. They all suspect her to be in league with Count Dracula, don’t they? Surely this cape isn’t helping matters. She will have to do her best to clear this misunderstanding up right quick.
Focusing once again on the narrow here and now, Kanaya goes through the motions of telling this guard that no, she is not going to suck anyone dry while she is here, and that blood would actually be the furthest thing from her mind at the moment. Say, that is some nice armor, would it be possible for her to acquire some while she is here?
The young woman’s face scrunches at her, still rife with suspicion, before she sighs and sets her reservations aside. Her eyes briefly slide to curiously peer at Brother Devon before she adjusts her stance so the metal plating she is wearing is more evenly distributed over her midsection. “Yeah, okay, I’ll believe you for now miss vamp. You don’t look much like Drac anyways, I don’t get why my old da’s so worried about it.”
She jerks her head in the general direction of one of the buildings along the street. “Smithy’s there. Don’t give anyone any trouble and we won’t have a problem.”
With a nod and a brief smile of thanks, the two travelers are granted entry to Darkshire.
”Well,” Kanaya remarks to Devon as they walk down the street in broad…. Well, not daylight, per se, as the Pale Moors haven’t exactly seen the light of a true day in a long time, but in some kind of light. ”That was easier than I expected.”
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Gamzee Makara Wrote:S’aight. After all, dogs have a tendency to motherfuckin’ bite.