stormaktstiden | Some time ago, in a jamjar far, far away....

The last person she heard speak was the voice in the telephone telling her to come to the counselor's office--a trap. ...No, that wasn't even a person, as near as she can tell, and the experience of a voice crackling through a phone is different than seeing and hearing words come out of a living face.

The last person she heard speak was Wei, right before he died.

As her fearful eyes scan this new face, she supposes that he might not be a person either. But he's a speaking, flesh-and-blood face--and so she finds that she's more fascinated than alarmed. For now. It says something too that he hasn't clawed or strangled her yet, like the lingered would do.

"You can see me? And you can talk... You're not a lingered?"

He's not a ...ghost?

What the hell is a 'lingered' supposed to be? People use a lot of words for a lot of things, but he doesn't think he has ever heard that one used like it's supposed to be a clear name, without context.

"What are you doing here?" He still hopes that that will clear up all the other questions, too, or at least give him enough of a lead to work with.

What is she doing here? Ray's eyes flick from side to side as she tries to see what's going on around her. It's a little hard from this vantage point.

"I don't know... I was at school and there was a typhoon. I--Wei and I--I mean, I was trying to get out.

"Can you tell me where we are, Mr..?"

It's only polite for him to introduce himself, right?

...She doesn't look like she's lying. But it also makes no sense. And going by what he has packed up, she's trying to politely get a name out of him.

What.

Is she crazy or ....but she seems to be nothing but a regular human. Nothing unnatural going on here. Maybe she's just crazy?

And he's going to pointedly ignore that question. Because what even.

"How did you get here?," he demands instead. How did he get here? He really has no idea. He didn't do anything that should have brought him somewhere else, and as far as he can tell there should have been no outside force around who would have done it... Though, to be fair, he had been focused on something else right before finding himself in this cave.

That he's still in.

The way he barks questions reminds her of Instructor Bai, and she flinches both at his tone and at that thought. "I don't know!" She breathes in to try to calm herself. "I'd just been in the Red House. I went through a door, and when I woke up I was here."

She's leaving out some stuff in the middle, but it's mostly the truth. What really matters is that she has no idea what's going on.

"...Do you not know why you're here either?"

She hasn't had anyone on her side since Wei died--having someone to figure out this place with her might be nice. Not that winning this guy over seems like it'll be easy. Is it ever?

He has no idea. "That's what I'm trying to figure out." A necessary intermediate task to get to his primary goal, which is to figure out where his pack is and get back to th-

...His pack. Wolke. Last he remembers, Tuuli had him on the ground well and for good and he still refused to surrender. What if he had, what was the phrase that he liked so much? An ace up his sleeve. After all the very reason for the challenge had been Colin's suspicion of him...

His head comes up abruptly and he looks around, changing into Crinos - the obvious advantages aside, it also means that he doesn't feel quite as blind to scent and sound, and he still can bark some human words at the bitch below him.

Congrats, Ray, the guy on you just didn't only got a whole lot hairier but also a lot heavier and bigger. And he has a wolf-like head now. At least most of his weight is off Ray and on his hind legs now that he's sitting up, paying acute attention to their surroundings and comparatively little to her. One of his paws is still on her chest, and he pays enough attention to her that he'll smack her back down if she tries to get up, but the way in which he slowly turns his head makes it clear that their surroundings are far more interesting to him right now than she is.

What's a crazy human when, whatever happened, it starts to feel more and more like you must have ended up in some major Wyrm cesspit, or ...miraculously only very close to it? Something like that? He tries to not think about what that might mean for the rest of the pack.

One step after the other. Thinking too much won't help him right now.

But the human might be useful later. He stares back down at her and then his second paw-hand comes down to cover her nose and mouth to choke her into unconsciousness.

This is not going in the direction she'd hoped--Ray watches with wide eyes as he becomes less human and more wolfy. Having seen the change already, it's not so alarming by itself... What she wonders is why he's changing. She hopes it doesn't mean anything too bad for her.

She needs to prove her usefulness, she thinks. If he's lost too, then maybe working together would appeal to him. "What're you looking for? Maybe if you--" If he gets off, maybe she could help.

But no, it seems that he has other plans, and she almost shrieks when she sees that paw coming down.

In her panic, she drops the book list (gun) and grasps at his paw with both hands.

Unfortunately, being just your normal human 17-year-old, she's not very strong. Unless he's feeling particularly charitable, her efforts likely won't do much.

Nope, sorry, he isn't feeling particularly charitable. He'll hold her down like this until she is passed out.

She'll come to again on top of one of the higher ruins - there are higher buildings, even higher ruins, but this is the highest that has an open top, and he's feeling locked up enough in this big cave, he doesn't need to be in a weird house on top of it. If she looks around, she'll be able to spot ...someone, relatively easy. This someone wears the same kind of hood that the wolf-thing from before did, but at least from behind (he's crouching at the side of the building, looking down at the street and out over the area) this one looks like an entirely normal human.

He's calmed down some by now. None of this makes sense. It's bad, but he can't make heads nor tails of it. So he's watching.

Ray's eyelids flutter as she comes to, but she doesn't get up at first. It feels like it's been ages since she had any rest, and her head hurts from this whole ordeal. To be fair, it probably also hurts from her ordeal before it.

"What..." Her hands are empty. She pushes herself into a sitting position and whips her head around, but it's not there. "The book list!"

In the wrong hands (or is it in the right hands?) that thing is dangerous. But she can't worry too much now--in her search, she spots that familiar hoodie. That's right--she was attacked. Ray pushes herself to her feet as quietly as she can.

"Is that you?" She can't keep her voice from rising in nervousness and more than a little fear. "What'd you do to me?!"

"Quiet." His voice sounds more human now - not completely, but close enough to not tip someone off too hard who hasn't heard or seen him in another capacity.

He could just have left her down there as a bait. See what would come to get her. But the problem is that it would probably have been more of those wolf-mockeries, and he already knew about those. So he took her somewhere safe and then started to observe, hoping to get a better clue of where to put her ...but all he sees are people that, if they don't look human, at least act human. And no sign from his pack.

"They'll hear you."

He seems focused on something else, and Ray realizes that that might be a good thing for her. Not that she's too optimistic about her chances of slinking away--she saw how fast he was when he pounced on her.

Besides, what other leads does she have but him? Instead of running, Ray tiptoes over to where he's looking out over the town.

As far as she's concerned, this place is more normal looking than where she's been recently--the humans look simply human, not stretched out or rotten-skinned. What could he be so concerned about?

She crouches down a little over an armslength from his side. She glances over at him and whispers, "'They'? The people?"

"They too."

He gives her a sidelong glance and then points to what he thinks he identified as a centre of the place of some sort (he found the clinic, so he's not super wrong). On the one hand, he can throw her further than he trusts her. On the other hand she's the only person around to talk to about this right now, and he's run into a roadblock with figuring this out without speaking to someone here.

"But also those who control this place. I don't think the humans do, strictly. Nor the people who walk around among the humans. He's seen one or two that clearly weren't human, but that he can't place otherwise, either. ~~What is Glacius even.~~ "But some of them might be controlled by them, or tell them."

"Control it?"

Her mouth tightens as she thinks of Ms. Yin. When she'd appeared back in the school, Ray had assumed that she was in charge. It makes more sense to think that all these things could be happened because of someone rather than the cruel hand of fate. Now as in the school, Ray latches onto the idea that someone could be causing this situation. Someone who maybe could be stopped or escaped.

"So what do we do? There must be some way out. A key or a--" Not a phone to call for help with--she's done with those.

"What do they want with us?"

Us.

He hadn't even thought about that, but now that she mentions it... It's a weird mix, isn't it? He didn't actually pay any attention to the other people that were around in the place where he found himself first. But with what the general population here looks like... And looking at her...

"You think it's the same thing?"

Maybe that would explain why he got out of that place so easily. It was meant for humans...

But then why was he there? And whatever brought them there, did it notice? And, more crucially, how can he track that being down and take it down? And get out of it how to get out of here, if he's lucky, though he doubts that it will be that easy.

She hesitates, then ducks her head. "I don't know. Sorry, I guess it doesn't matter."

Getting out is what matters, much as she'd like to know what's going on.

"...Where I was before, I got out of the school by following clues. Maybe that's what led me here."

She suddenly remembers Wei's journal tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She grabs it and starts flipping through the pages. Past the leaflets about the lingered, past the sketch of the teeth-dice, and past the blood print of the I-Ching. But no, she can't find anything specific to this new place. She lands on a fresh sheet of paper.

"Maybe if we find more, we can get out of here. Did you see any paper anywhere? Or keys?"

"No."

He's pretty sure at this point that she's crazy in some capacity. Maybe something about this or where she was before broke something in her brain, or she's always been that way. Maybe that's even the reason why she seems to be immune to Delirium, and not that she is Kinfolk.

But sometimes there's a system to craziness that holds some truth or use. Climbs-Under in the end almost always turned up with something useful, no matter how out there her words or actions seemed at first...

"What kind of paper or keys?"

The question is of course if whatever she considers a favourable outcome will be favourable for him.

This is encouraging; he seems to be listening. "I don't have the key anymore, but--"

She spreads the journal out on her lap and turns the pages back to the beginning. Her hand hesitates above a woodblock print of a green demon cutting into a child's throat, but then she pages past it to stop on another print of a sallow-skinned, stringy-hair woman digging into a bowl of rice.

"...Papers like these. I'd find them scattered around the place, and sometimes they'd point me to where I could go next. See, this one shows how you can get past the lingered. You leave them an offering."

...Okay that sounds... vaguely like she's a mage, one of the really bad kind. But she's not. He's certain of that, at least. Perhaps she's a - what did Kaisa call it? Hedge witch? Whatever that entailed, but if he understood the explanation correctly, it's like mages that don't have actual abilities but still can do something.

It made no more or less sense to him than when she explained how the stove-top worked, so he just rolled with it then.

Now he wishes he had asked what specifically they could do.

"What are lingered?"

"I'm... not sure. I'd never seen them before today--they just appeared in my school. They must be spirits of the dead, because they like the offerings so much."

She looks down at the people below. None of them are making the gurgling cries of the lingered, so that's good, right? "If you get near them, they'll attack you. Unless you hold your breath. That's another thing I read in the notes."

...That's not how ghosts work.

He knows ghosts. They happen every once in a while, and then you need to find an elder Theurge who can make it go away for you. Sure, he's heard of ghosts that can take a physical form and tear you apart, but he's pretty sure that that is a misunderstanding of some other happenstance.

"Nothing will stop attacking you just because you hold your breath." No ghost, and nothing else. "Maybe unless you do it so well that they believe you dead." He has no idea, most creatures seem to blind to a lot of things. They might check nothing but breath to determine if someone is alive.

Ray's back stiffens. She knows she's no expert in the supernatural, but this is something she knows. Does he think she's some helpless idiot? "Hey now, do you think I'm making this up? It worked with them!

"You hold your breath before they attack you. And if you do, you can walk right by them."

"Okay, assuming that really happened, did they look like anything that you've seen here?"

Different perceptions or different worlds wouldn't occur to him, but there's a much easier concept at hand here: She might have encountered that in another place, or she might be crazy, but if nothing here resembles what she thinks of, it's not relevant.

In other words, a dead end.

"Not yet."

She just out her chin and gives him a pointed look. "I'm listening if you have any good ideas."

Aside from shooting down mine is the implied finish to that sentence.

Well, all his ideas right now are catching someone who came out of what seems to be a gathering house of sorts and make them give up some information. But he doesn't need her for that.

He looks around the place. There's nothing that he could tie her up with to perhaps use her later, and if he disables her from walking she might start shouting for the people below. It might be best to just kill her and leave her up here - the place looks like nobody has been here in ages so she should take a while to be found, and he has the gifts to make it look like someone stabbed her instead.

"Maybe."

He's turning towards her now, still crouching down, his left hand crossing over his feet to in a few moments be placed on the ground on their other side. The look that he is giving her is definitely not pleasant - there is no malice in it, only the look of a predator about to go in for a kill.

"They don't include you, though."

She simply is of not enough use to him to let her run around any more, and even if he didn't figure that killing her would be a good option to begin with, he couldn't let her leave with the knowledge of him being around, and what he looks like. Even if anyone else also witnessed him to remember back in that arrival place, they only saw his Crinos form, after all. She's seen almost all of them, now. And besides, he's hungry, and there's prey right before him. Why would he not?

Ray scrambles to her feet and stumbles backwards a few paces, holding the journal up in front of her as if it could be a shield.

"W-wait, why? I didn't do anything to you!"

She didn't, did she? Even when he attacked her she didn't try to hurt him in return.

(Not like she did before, though the thought vanishes from her head nearly as soon as she thinks it.)

"I tried to help you!"

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for reference, they're sitting near Spire 3

Thanks!

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