First night in a new home

(Hishu)

Bodycount wakes up with a gasp on the floor, breathing the cool night air in big, heaving gulps. His body, as well as the blanket around him and the mattress he just rolled off, is drenched with sweat. Scrambling up into a crouching position, he looks frantically around him, his heart beating a little more calmly in his chest as he counts the forms of Breaker, Johnny and Wukong around him in the room (presumably still asleep on their mattresses), and confirms by the movements of their chests and the sound of their breathing that they are alive, all of them, alive.

Steadying his breathing and only now realizing that he's shivering, Bodycount quickly pulls on his t-shirt and khaki shorts as quietly as possible, resisting the urge to reach out and touch each of his packmates to reassure himself further that they are alive and real. While trying in vain to restart the flow of saliva in his ash-dry mouth, he slips out of the room as quietly as he can, trying not to wake the others as he makes his way towards the room where Snow and Keys are sleeping.

Spoiler

Just for fun, a Stealth roll:

04-21 22:43:46 Bodycount rolls 2 dice to sneaking out of the bedroom 1 success: 9,7

Breaker lays on the ground with a blanket over his body. He is fully awake and turning over the recent events in his mind... over and over... The journey to Sacramento, the shitty state of the spirit world, the run in with Rifle-Breaker, the new guy, his missing packmates, his sister's stupid outburst in the midst of battle, the chase towards the river...

He plays events over and over as is his way. Nothing is perfect but he never stops to wonder how things could have been better. A true warrior learns and never stops learning.

He doesn't notice Bodycount sneaking out of the room. Even if he did he didn't care. Bodycount understood his mindset and was most likely dealing with such thoughts himself. Blood Talons, the good ones at least, never liked to lose and Breaker was sure that letting the spirits escape did not sit well with Bodycount or Johnny.

Breaker turned onto his side. The morning would bring chores and duties. He should get a good rest. Luna help the first creature that offered up a real fight...

The lack of doors inside the building make it easy for Bodycount to slip from the room Keys crudely christened the Pointers dorm (as opposed to the Setters dorm for the girls). An expanded steel walkway ends to the left at a stairwell going down and stretching to the right along the length of the partial second story. At the end of the space that was once a series of offices overlooking the shop floor below, the walkway turns to the sharply to the right, paralleling another bank of offices that have been commandeered for the girls' dorm and ending in another set of stairs to the first floor. Large linoleum squares line the floor of the office/dorms, and here and there remnants of the cubicle farm walls lie stacked in various corners, too damaged to have been worth selling.

At the corner junction between the two dorms is a small bathroom with three stalls and two sinks, but no running water. Keys had found the shutoff and turned it on for a quick plumbing check and clean up, but the broken pipe at the eye wash station in the shop meant it needed to stay off until the pipe was repaired. On the other hand, it had at least provided enough water to give to the dogs and get the toilets working again.

As he nears the girls' dorm, the most striking anomaly is the lack of music coming from the area claimed by Keys. Whether its her laptop, her iPhone, her iPod, or just her own voice, Keys usually has music around her even when she's sleeping. It's a familiar sign of her unease that she felt the need to sleep in silence tonight.

That, or Snow accidentally erased her MP3 collection again.

Regardless of the reason behind the silence, Bodycount can see where Keys has abandoned her mattress and is instead curled up against her duffel bag of clothes, dozing on the floor near the door of the room.

{Just in case you I didn't send out the updated version of the Den, here it is:}

Bodycount pauses for a second as he spots Keys, just long enough to make sure she's breathing like she should be. Then he slips into the room and heads straight for Snow's sleeping form, crouching down and placing his hand carefully on her shoulder.

The girls only have a single matress in their room, and while Keys had abandoned it Snow is still curled up on top. Her hand shoots up aggressively to his wrist when Bodycount rouses her, but a moment later she realizes who it is and she relaxes. Her emerald eyes peer up at him sympathetically in the gloom, and she slowly sits up.

"You had a dream?" she whispers, knowing the answer already.

{Realized that I forgot to mention, Keys is sleeping in urhan. From the twitching of her feet she's clearly having a dream about chasing something.}

Wukong is also in urhan form curled up in one corner of the room rather then sleeping on a mattress. His duffle bag is to one side of him, his bamboo staff is propped up against the wall over it. He draws comfort from the two solid walls and his lupine senses. Sleeping in a strange place among strangers whom he calls brother and sister he needs all the comfort he can get.

To say the day's events had troubled him would be an understatement. Wukong wondered if this was his punishment. Maybe if he triumphed here, against such odds he would find redemption. Still, that seemed a long way off and at that moment he felt more alone and cut off from the world then he had ever felt before. It was like the night of his First Change. Things only made half sense. In his dreams he stalked the shadows trying to find that which was hidden and growled at ghosts.

Breaker felt the pent up energy within him... frustration, uncertainty... it was like a tightening coil that needed to be unleashed. He knew that the others felt the same way and could feel the unrest in them.

Hissing with disgust he threw back his blanket and made his way down to the van in the main bay. He flexed his arms and legs for a few minutes and then began to do some knuckle push ups next to the van. Perhaps a couple hundred push ups and some lifting would clear his mind...

Some of the tension leaves Bodycount as Snow's fingers close around his wrist. He nods and whispers back: "Outside. I'll show you." Then he straightens up, slipping back out of the room.

---

(Assuming that Snow follows)

Goosebumps form on his still moist skin as he steps outside in the chilly morning air. It's still dark outside, but the eastern horizon is getting brighter, signaling the approach of dawn. He waits right outside the door for Snow to catch up, before leading her over to a spot some twenty yards away from the house.

He crouches down, looking out across the desolate grounds and begins to speak, slipping into the somewhat-more-flowery-than-usual language he tended to adopt whenever telling a story, without really reralizing it.

"I dreamed about this place. I was walking through the grounds, and they were green and lush. There was grass all over, and the tree was full of flowers.

"Then, at this spot here, something suddenly crunched under my foot. When I looked down, it was a broken skull that looked up at me. It looked like whoever it was had been buried here, just below the soil, and that it was his rotten flesh that had made the grass grow so green.

"But when I looked out cross the quarry again, I could suddenly see that it wasn't just one who was lying here. Time seemed to pass backwards - the grass and flowers disappeared, and then I could see what was lying just under the ground. There were hundreds of bodies, piled at least two deep everywhere, too many and too close for it to be an old battleground. It was a mass grave.

"As I looked at all the bones, they suddenly began to grow flesh again, and muscles, skin and hair, back to how they had looked when they were alive. But they didn't come back to life. They were still dead."

Bodycount pauses slightly before continuing, still not at ease.

"All of us were there, Snow. The whole pack, dead and forgotten without so much as a marker. All of us. The skull that had broken under my foot turned out to be my own.

"Then suddenly, I heard a laugh behind me - hard, almost a bark - and a sharp pain. Everything went dark. And that's when I woke up."

Johnny stirred in his sleep at the sounds made by Breaker's departure. He rolled over on his mattress and onto NightBird, reflexively clutching her, his hand slipping down toward the trigger. But then his hand relaxed. Like the rest of his pack, he was ill at ease. The strange smells and unfamiliar quiet of their new home added to the anxieties brought on by all they had learned today, and these revelations blurred into the spirit chase, confusing his dreams.

He dreamt he was chasing the spirits and, blessed with claws that rend the incorporeal flesh of spirits and made superior by Father Wolf's speed, he was gaining on them. But then they were on a Tur line that ran through his territory, and he couldn't touch them – he followed, but couldn't touch them! And then they were all in Fremont Park: Johnny, the spirits, and the Pure. The spirits poured out Los Sangrientos' secrets. They told the Pure of the pack's numbers, all about the den, each individual's strengths and weaknesses, their lack of a Locus. John cried out at the spirits, trying to silence them, but his claws were tied by the Tur – Breaker and Bodycount were holding him back.

"Forget the Tur.", Johnny shouted into the silence of dormitory, but it was muffled by his mattress. "The pack comes first!" His arms flailed a little, and NightBird clattered to the floor. Johnny rolled over again, and fell silent, but his sleep remained restless.