En Pointe

**Shrike** · Mar 1st, 2018 12:27 PM

Shrike moves, purposeful to the bed, Crane feels the spells the Murder Bird wraps around herself fray and fizzle into nothing. A golden glyph tries to form but fails to keep its shape, gasping as it dies.

Talons reach for the dull matte Makarov pistol, easily replacing the clip and getting the engine of death ready for use. She hands it, grip facing the vigilant watcher.

"Shoot me." Shrike says, a dull parody of what happened only moments before.

"Kill me. Here's the excuse. You saw me at the diner, something unexpected had me flinging vulgars. You seen my nimbus. It's not right. I'm not right." eyes fierce and deadly serious. "For all either of us know I'm a scelesti. Bound by pact to some fucking Acamoth. Kill me." she repeats. "Do it. My shields are down. And with what happened earlier you have cause. Do us both this kindness. Free my soul from my flesh and let us both be free."

fail

Do it! 1 Suxx

Don't know where this came from but it happened! Also -1WP to add to roll, for reasons...

Mar 3rd, 2018 08:58 PM

Crane stared at Shrike, lips parted, shock plainly written across her face. This was more than Shrike simply throwing Crane's own gesture back at her, more than just a clever use of rhetoric. There was something in Shrike that wanted to die. Or, perhaps, there was something in her that recognized what she was. Some part of her that knew, deep down, there truly was a taint upon her soul.

When Shrike had Awoken, freed from the grasp of the Abyss with her soul blazing bright as one of the Wise, it had thrown the Consilium into a panic. Or, at least the Guardians. There were so many that had demanded she be put down, just in case. Many others that argued that there was no apparent taint and that, perhaps, there was something else at work that needed to be understood. And so she had earned a watch dog: Crane. Or perhaps it was more like a ticking time bomb. No matter what Crane felt for the girl, no matter how much her heart bled for the cracked doll that had been forged by the very community that Crane protected, she knew that Shrike was a danger. She knew that, eventually, she would have to accept the fact that this was her sacrifice to make.

Her Soul for the Awakened Nation.

And...if this was what Shrike truly wanted, would it be so bad?

With a face like stone, Crane simply said: "Calm down and go wait for me in the bathroom."

Then, she walked back over to the dresser where the waiting magazine for her pistol sat, copper seeds of death glinting within a black embrace. She picked it up, drew her gun, and slid it home. Then she turned to see that Shrike had followed her directions and had disappeared into the bathroom as she'd asked.

Good. It would make it easier to clean up the blood.

Crane drew her tool from her pocket: the dead shell of a smartphone with the screen shining like a polished black mirror. Upon the surface of that mirror, Crane saw all sound within the bathroom, and spilling out into most of the room, creeping up and up and up until it was so far beyond human hearing that it might as well have been

dead

silent.

Then she strode to the bathroom with silent feet and raised her pistol at the fractured young woman waiting inside. Crane's hands were steady, leveling the barrel with a determination so cold that all thoughts of who Shrike had been, or would be, were frozen like sculptures of ice within the Guardians mind.

She pulled the trigger.

A burst of flame erupted from the barrel of the gun and death seed spun through the air toward Shrike's heart.

Unthinking, Crane pulled the trigger again.

And again.

And again.

All in complete silence.

dox failure

Date	Action	Roll	Result
2018-03-03 20:45:02	dox! rolls 1 to base 2-1rote (10 Again)	6	failure

1 success

Date	Action	Roll	Result
2018-03-03 20:46:16	Crane rolls 7 to Sound Mastery (res3+sci2+force3-4area) (10 Again, WillPower)	2, 6, 10, 5, 3, 5, 2, 1	1 success

**Shrike** · Mar 3rd, 2018 09:42 PM

Resolute is Shrike, calm is the usually manic. Watchful are her eyes.

Three facets-faces she watches her watcher take on.

Shock. Understanding. Stone.

A command given is heeded without a thought. Tile was far easier to clean then carpet.

Shrike waits to be killed and wonders if she should take off her cloths. Would that make it easier? As she debates magic coats and clings to the walls.

Good. Now no one will be drawn by gunshots.

Crane enters and finds Shrike waiting in the tub, placidly awaiting this merchant of death.

There is something Shrike wants to do, but hesitates.

Crane takes aim and fires before her thoughts can make reality.

Again, and again and again she's shot in the heart. It hurts tears and spit and blood are flying, but under it all Shrike has will enough for this.

Her will sharpens, the blood of her pathetic physical shell meets and melds with the blood of her psychic wounds given form. Glyphs dance between her fingers, the shadows that aren't, nightmares made real. Reach and tear, choke and rend, her mind reaches out-!

'Thank you' is all the strength she has left.

Crane feels the spark of her charges mind dim, flicker, sputter and die.

A shock for anyone, compounded with the paradox the Talon failed to contain as she breathed her last...

Perhaps this is why the vigilant women missed the fact that the nimbus called by one last vulgar hasn't dissolved into nothingness when the clip was spent and the Murder Bird was most certainly dead.

Perhaps this is why the Vigilant Women in Black misses the Verdant Glyphs spilling from a dead women's fingers....

dox 1 suxx

Mind Goodby!

Mar 3rd, 2018 10:03 PM

The white tiled room was a void of sound, swallowing what would have been booming thunder, just as Crane's gun swallowed her friend's life. Yet, no matter how silent it was, Crane could feel the gun kicking in her hand, could feel the force of each bullet rocketing into the young woman's body, copper hitting flesh with such force that it parted like wet paper. Bright bursts of blood splattered across the pristine tile, and Shrike's pained face burned itself into Crane's brain, the tears, the snot, the blood erupting from her lips...

Crane could bear to watch any longer. As soon as Shrike's body collapsed into the tub the Guardian turned from the room and walked away, weeping in the sonic desolation that she'd wrought. She walked until her shoulder hit the wall, and then she collapsed, sliding down to the floor, her legs unable to carry the weight of what she'd just done. No matter how volatile Shrike had been, no matter how angry or vulgar, there had been an innocence, too. A sense of joy and wonder that would appear almost when Crane least expected it, and it had made something in Crane's heart flutter, just as it had in that desert glade years ago.

And she had killed it. Murdered it. Snuffed it, extinguished something that could have shown with such brilliance in the world.

Her superiors would be happy. Another threat neutralized.

For the moment, though, none of that mattered. Nothing mattered. All that existed was Crane and her grief, the sound of her sobs being eaten by the same void she'd birthed to kill a girl...

**Shrike** · Mar 3rd, 2018 11:12 PM

Lines of possibility become reality as shoulders hit the wooden door.

Grief a gag, tears the blindfold. Deaf by ones own will...

Shadows that aren't shadows thicken, writhing, twisting, exuberant as the once seed blossoms, under the torrent of blood. Sprouting, first with slight twitches of the fingers, the batterer remains of will, growing as the gulf is kept open, inviting more inside. The lines of the Murdered Bird's shadow can't quiet contain then all any more.

Slipping to and fro only ever seen a flicker out of the corner of the eye, and yet there are no eyes upon them.

Swiftly they move. A myriad of legs and teeth and tongues, first they try the shadows of the tub, the toilet, the cabinet and sink, but they are shallow things that can barely contain the spiders of reality let alone something more.

So quickly, swiftly. Born of thought and nightmares both they step into Crane's shadow, dissolving into everything and nothing and quietly, insidiously make a home away from home.

A broken bloody doll sits first, then stands. Reality says she is dead. But reality is a lie.

Her cloths are bloody and ripped, copper teeth have mushroomed upon contact, even if rhythmically they press outward, dropping soundlessly upon the once pristine tile.

On steady feet a women propelled by shadows that aren't and never were, makes the scant steps so she might press a hand to the shaking shoulder of the women who killed her.

When Crane looks up she sees that Shrike's eyes are her own.

Shrike speaks, "I'm okay." assuring her murderer, "Thank you for helping me,"

Crane reads her lips, deafened as she is, fails to hear the change in her victim's voice, an awful resonance, vibrating subharmonically.

The nightmares hidden and those who will never again allow themselves thus, hear it and cheer.

Mar 3rd, 2018 11:40 PM

It was that last moment that was the worst, when the girls mind had touched hers, when Crane had felt the relief, and the acceptance of Shrike's dying mind. That made it infinitely worse. If there had been hate, or anger, or fear, if there had been a flaw in that last glimpse Crane had gotten of Shrike's soul, then maybe she could have invented some reason to have felt justified. But there, in that soundless hotel room, was only the memory of one last glimpse of purity before Crane had extinguished it, and her own self loathing had risen like a tsunami's tide.

Crane's mind was storm of psychic torment, of her soul itself crying out in pain, and it drew the shadowed spiders, with teeth instead of legs, and mouths instead of eyes, as if she were a blazing beacon. They wormed and squirmed into her shadow, and by the time Crane felt the touch upon her shoulder they had already begun to eat away at her, to burrow deeper and deeper into her mind.

As Crane met the risen Shrike's eyes, those twin black mirrors, as she saw herself reflected in them, her true self, the mangled, horribly twisting thing her Soul had become, that that vulnerable line within her finally fractured.

There, in the Will muffled desolation of the Hotel room, there was no one who could hear Crane scream...

En Pointe

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