(Under Control) Broken In Half

[West]

The woods are alive. Some would call it quiet. They don't hear the birds, the cicadas, rustling of trees, furtive movements of small things in the grass. The don't smell the sharp scent of life blooming, musk of animals passed by, or cloying sweet stench of decay. Learned men would call it an ecosystem. It's more.

Here, it's even more than elsewhere.

Ahead, a Tur. Neutral ground.

A bellow rolls through the night. Loud and anguished, and then silence.

Leaves rustle as the trees shiver.

At the locus, something large and still in the darkness.

[Matamune]

Daniel's been alternating between patrolling the land around the Tur and training these last few weeks. Unlike some other Forsaken he didn't really need to work: the money his previous Pack left him was enough to keep him clothed and fed and that was plenty enough for the state of war they find themselves in.

He's in Urhan: a lean and muscular dark form darting through the woods, making sure they aren't ambushed. When he hears the sound, Daniel's first instinct is to howl but the bellow is a pretty obvious clue by itself. Everyone who can, will come. Cautiously, the Rahu starts to trot in the direction of the Locus. Whatever it is it sounds busy. Probably busy enough not to pay attention to one Rahu.

[Firebringer]

Firebringer darts through his pack's territory in Urhan, just one more shadow against the darkness. At the sound of the bellow, he darts toward Tur, heart pounding and anger burning. Cursed Anshega. We have so little left. Have they come to defile even this?

Putting on a last burst of speed, he nearly plows into Daniel. But there's no pause, nor even a glance spared for the other wolf. Rage boils just beneath the surface, and it will have its due.

[West]

The shape resolves itself into a naked man. He's huge. If he were standing, he'd be nearly 7 feet tall, and his frame is powerfully built and broad-shouldered. A man of European Spanish descent, he has thick curly hair full of rapidly advancing grey and light olive skin. There's a look of primal savagery frozen on his face in the rictus of death.

Well, he would be nearly 7 foot tall, standing... if all of him were there. From his lower left rib on a diagonal down to his right thigh is... gone. An unnaturally clean severance. The ground is soaked in blood. The coppery tang of stinks so thickly it can be tasted. Grey tufts of fur stick to the blood and wet grass. Here and there, horizontal burn marks stripe the man like a tiger. Fresh burns, but not raw. Cauterized.

A hand is outstretched. Moving closer, a paw steps on something small, and hard. A cell phone. There's another. And another. They're fanned out from the hand, at least a half dozen, dully reflecting the moon overhead.

[Lesingnon]

She was still learning these lands; up here, in this corner of Sacramento's outskirts. In the old days this would have been one of the last places she'd have been found. It may have been outside of Anshega territory then, just as it was now, but then it had also been on the far side of it from the lands held by Urdaga packs. Spending any amount of time here would have been all but suicide, an open invitation to be collapsed upon while allies were far too far away to help.

How times had changed.

The territories her people had once held in downtown Sacramento were no more. And these lands were now the heart of what remained of their power. So it behooved her to learn them as well as she could.

Since she didn't yet have any territory to call her own that meant her priority was to familiarize herself with Tur. She'd been doing so in her lupine form, finding the landscape here to be perhaps the only upside to their current situation. The landscape may not have been as wild as what she'd known in Idaho, but it was far more so than the cityscape of downtown Sacramento had been. And the forest certainly suited the Mennina.

Then her ears swivel as the bellow shatters the peaceful woodland sounds. Muscles tense, and the Elodoth springs forward through the night. Weak moonlight glistens occasionally off ebon fur, but the darkness isn't even the slightest bit oppressive to Slick. Her gaze, enhanced b the gifts of the Lunes, sees through it with ease.

She reaches the Locus before too long, from the opposite direction of Firebringer and Daniel. Her head dips briefly, in acknowledgement, as she spots them. But her focus is on the half-corpse and the phones that were scattered around him. It was, possibly, an odd a sight as she'd ever seen. Had a spirit, perhaps, cut the man in twain and crossed back across the gauntlet with his lower half? It was hard to say. So she settles for sniffing carefully around the phones for now, checking to see if there's anything up on the screens.

Night Sight

Slick rolls 8 to Int + Survival + Honor: 4, 7, 5, 2, 9, 6, 6, 2; 1 success

[Matamune]

Daniel picks up speed when Firebringer passes him, determined not to fall behind. When the man comes fully in the view, though, he slows down. Stopping some ten feet from the corpse the first thing he does is look around and sniff on the air, to know i they are alone.

  Perception, 2xx

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2014-05-01 23:06:26		Daniel Turner rolls 8 to perception (Wits + Comp + Urhan) (10 Again)		9, 2, 4, 3, 7, 9, 5, 7		2 successes

The scattered phones can wait.

[Firebringer]

Firebringer sniffs at the body, snarling angrily. Blood. On Tur. Intruders. And either they had already made a clean break, or ...

A moment's concentration as he forces his gaze across the Gauntlet. With a locus on hand, many things were possible. None of which would do much to lighten his mood.

  peeking across the gauntlet

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2014-05-01 23:29:56		Firebringer rolls 11 to Wits + Emp + PU + 1 (10 Again)		5, 6, 5, 3, 9, 6, 9, 3, 4, 8, 1		3 successes

[West]

@Chantay Jones notices immediately that all the phones are dead. On closer inspection, she moves to another, then another. Some are face up, some are nestled sideways between grass, some are face down. The one that are face down have the batteries removed. It's easy to infer that they most likely all do.


@Daniel Turner listens and smells, tuning out the soft rush of wind through his fur, the sounds the others make, their scents. The smell of blood is nearly overwhelming, and difficult to filter through. Faintly, he hears something*. Far. A crunch, and a whine: a vehicle stopping.


@Firebringer looks into the Hisil.

A slender Asian man stands there, with an angry look. He's covered in blood, and looks half dead. Flayed skin hangs from slashes like chiffon from a party dress. At his feet is the other half of the body. Motes that may one day become gafflings float and flicker. A long, indistinct tendril makes a line to the phones, splintering to each as a vein becomes capillaries; each capillary, a hazy wisp.

*

Even with a -5 Penalty, dropping dice from the right yields a success.

[Matamune]

Non-combat situation. Shifting to Urshul without a roll as the dice-pool is 8.

Daniel looks in the direction of the distand sound, baring his teeth. As he does that, his body changes: muscle and sinew flow as Father Wolf's heritage changes what was a normal wolf before into a lupine machine of destruction. Now having somewhat better ability to communicate he growls:

<<"Man-chariot coming", - he points with his paw, - "Stopped. Danger possible. Prepare ambush?">>, - the First tongue doesn't have many words like 'car' and doesn't really make you eloquent but it gets the job done. The wolf turns to his Alpha, waiting for instructions. He's even prepared to shift into Hishu if Firebringer wants to talk to whoever decided to show up seconds after they discover a dead body. Because, you know, talking helps.

[Lesingnon]

Also shifting in a non-combat situation, her pool for it is 7.

And that just made things seem even...more strange. She had no idea why someone would be carrying around so many phones, or why the batteries would be removed from them. And, similarly to Daniel, she quickly decides that she needed to be better able to communicate as well. So her own body swelled in size much as his had as she takes on the mantle of the near wolf. Slick's form lacked the raw bulk his had, her profile more sleek and streamlined, but only a fool would consider it any less deadly.

<<The talk-boxes are all dead, power packs are removed.>>

Her ear flick's slightly as she hears Daniel's news. It wasn't of the welcome sort. While people arriving here at this particular moment could merely be coincidence...she wasn't inclined to believe it was. So the arrivals were likely a complication, especially since this was Tur. <<How far away are they?>>