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| Bad Air; [OTA] | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Wed Dec 26, 2012 4:23 pm (201 Views) | |
| Lady Eko | Wed Dec 26, 2012 4:23 pm Post #1 |
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To a lot of Balefirens, the worst places in the city weren't gambling dens or brothels: they were hospitals. Since all the best magically gifted healers that lived in the city for whatever reason were eventually -- whether they liked it or not -- brought in to personally attend to Lords of Balefire and their ilk, common hospitals had to resort to second-rate methods of patient treatment. Eko could smell the miasma practically a block away, and instinctively tightened her scarf around her nose and mouth. The Aguilar Infirmary was a run-down old building, once a schoolhouse, with a flat roof that was dipping from the weight of the snow on it. The girl entered, the movement of the door causing an attached bell to ring. The inside was worse than the out. Eko breathed deliberately through her thick scarf to keep out the musty smell. Patients were lined in beds along the walls of the cramped building, and their sheer number made Eko wonder how extensive this epidemic was becoming. She stared at a point above the bodies while patiently waiting to be received. A thin woman in full-length black robes emerged from a neighboring room, her greying brown hair pulled into a thin ponytail against her neck. She wore the beaked mask of a plague doktor with a wide, black brimmed hat. "Good night, Doctor Ochoa." Ochoa bowed. "Greetings, Eko. Are you here to see Arden?" Eko nodded, and she was led a short distance to a neighboring room. Being a recent victim of the sickness, he wasn't deeper into the building where she would have to wade through all the miasmatic air. The teen-aged boy was lucky enough to have a cot to lay on -- several in this room were on the floor -- but he clearly wasn't doing well. His exposed arms, neck and face were covered in black sores. Sweat rolled down his red cheeks. "Hoy there, Eko--" "You were down in the underground again, weren't you. Running errands for that stupid Orphan Prince. Right?" "It's best you not agitate the boy..." Doctor Ochoa slipped in edgewise. Arden chuckled. "It's nice to see you too, Eko." "The rats have been acting strangely down there. I've heard stories." Eko tried to imagine what had been described to her several times: a sea of black and brown rats carpeting the floor of the tunnels when they moved from place to place. Lots of people lived or made their living down there, and now they had to come to the surface after being exposed to so many illness-carrying animals. And now her friend was dragged into it, too. "I know. So what do you want, then? You're clearly not here just to wish me well. You hate hospitals." "Tell me where you were and what you saw. I need to get to the bottom of this. It's not normal." This made Arden grin, although Eko's face remained completely blank. "I should've figured. You got a weird way of showing you care. I climbed down through the manhole in Charbon Street and I could already hear them chittering..." Ansha was happy to see Eko after waiting outside the hospital. The big blue-black dog lumbered after the girl without a care in the world. Eko herself was far from calm as she walked briskly through Balefire's streets. She wasn't looking forward to going underground. Nothing good ever came of the underground -- the sewers or the catacombs. There were warped beasts and crazed demons and cults and all sorts of things that conducted business down there with little or no control. The recent surge of rats in and from the underground certainly had a cause of some kind, but that cause could be any number of distasteful things. Eko really had given herself a lofty task. The girl muscled her way through the thick crowds of Charbon Street, a busy market street with a lot of shops. Arden said he'd entered the sewers through the manhole access on this street, likely since it gave a pretty direct route to one of the Orphan Prince's sanctuaries. Probably a good place to start investigating. In plain view of the crowds, Eko reached down and pried off the metal manhole cover, gritting her teeth and straining her arms from the weight of it. It probably looked a bit strange to onlookers, especially with the stories going around about the epidemic down there, but she cared very little about that. |
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| Sagira | Thu Dec 27, 2012 7:34 pm Post #2 |
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The city of Balefire was infested. It was infested with smells, noise, litter, and perhaps worst of all, people. The streets were cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder in the busiest areas, the stink of bodies and filth all but overpowering to anyone unaccustomed to the big city. Sagira wrinkled her nose, and then pinched it shut and breathed through her mouth. It didn’t help. She tasted the foulness in the air, grime hanging in the air, almost visible, prickling her taste buds. She pressed her lips together and glowered, choosing the stink over the polluted taste. Senka the cat curled between the jungle of legs, hooves and wheels before finally resigning herself. She leapt onto Sagira’s hip and scrambled her way onto the woman’s shoulder, perching herself there perilously. Her matte black fur seemed to absorb all the light it touched. Her eyes darted back and forth, her claws dug in tight, to Sagira’s chagrin. She winced but otherwise ignored the pain. Senka’s company was worth more than a few cuts. Sagira unfolded a scrap of parchment and read the words again, reminding herself of the street’s name for what felt like the hundredth time. Charbon Street, she mouthed, the words completely foreign. She’d never been inside the city before, and finding this road among the chaos of the mobs had been a taxing ordeal. She was certain her legs would be covered in bruises come morning, and her arms had been jerked and forced in so many different directions she was surprised they were still in their sockets. "Charbon Street," she called out, though not to anyone nearby. A few people flicked their gazes her way, but only for an instant. The cat, Senka, mewed despondently, gazing toward a nearby street sign. It wasn’t Charbon. It wasn’t even one of the roads Sagira had been directed to follow. Her scowl darkened as she searched blindly in her pouch until her hand closed around something cold, hairy and limp. Senka had killed the rat two days ago, stalking outside the city. It wasn’t the rat that was so unusual, but Senka’s reluctance to eat it that caught Sagira’s attention. A few questions toward the stream of people leaving the city, their numbers strangely large, and Sagira had learned of the plague of rodents rumored to be skittering about in the bowels of the city. A sudden outbreak of blight had accompanied the rats. Hardy extraordinary, considering the number of rodents that had been reported, but the disease itself was acting unlike any Sagira had encountered before. The vermin, coupled with the sickness, drove Sagira from the wilderness and into the city. Something, or someone, was to blame for the outbreak. The situation stunk of witchcraft. If there was a witch hiding beneath Balefire, Sagira intended to find her. She hoped they would be alone. A coven would be much more difficult to deal with. “Where are these coming from?” she demanded of the closest passer-by. She shoved the rat’s carcass toward him. The man recoiled, hastily pointed down another nearby street, and hurried on his way. Sagira followed the road until it intersected with Charbon. In the middle of the street, a young girl was prying open a narrow entrance to the sewers below. A dog paced beside her, sniffing at the air. When Sagira stepped close, Senka pressed her ears back against her head but made not a sound. "It almost smells better down there than up here," Sagira quipped, one eye squinted, the other wide. She looked down at the girl and her dog and offered a wane smile. "Maybe you can tell me where these rats are coming from?" she held out the carcass, this time more gingerly, pinching it by the tail. |
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| Lady Eko | Mon Dec 31, 2012 5:44 pm Post #3 |
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Eko's pale eyes flashed up to the new arrival. She finished pushing the heavy manhole cover aside so that the tunnel down was fully exposed. While Eko took a moment to catch her breath, Ansha bound up to the woman with a newfound enthusiasm. The monster of a dog wagged her tail in big lazy strokes while she greeted the woman, often trying to shove her nose and head into Sagira's hand in an attempt to get petted. Eko only glanced at the rat in her hand. "Down here." The teen-aged girl's voice was very soft, a bit hard to hear in such a loud street, but she pointed down the manhole to indicate her point. It was only then that Eko took the time to actually look at the woman. She didn't look like she was from around here. Ansha bounced on her front paws a couple times, ears perked. Her gold eyes were set on the cat sitting at the outsider's shoulder; it looked like she was trying to goad it into playing with her. "Rats moving in droves down there," Eko said, putting a hand on her hip while she studied the hole in the road. Her eyes met Sagira's. "If you're just offended by the city's wildlife, you're free to leave. If you're looking to investigate the plague, though, I could use some help." The girl called her overly friendly dog back over with a few clicks of her tongue, bending her knees so that she could hug the canine around her thick neck. The dog's shaggy fur was so thick that Eko's arms almost disappeared from view. "Sorry, girl. I'll be back soon." Ansha licked her face, clearly not understanding anything. Rising to her feet and wiping dog drool off her face, Eko gave Sagira one last look. Then, expecting the woman to follow, she swung her leg over the edge and started climbing down the ladder lining the edge of the manhole. It was a cramped, vertical shaft. At first there was barely enough light coming from lanterns on the surface for Eko to see clearly, but she soon found herself feeling her way to each rung of the ladder with her hands and feet. There was no way of telling how far down she would need to climb, either. The girl quickly gave up on this way of climbing and reached out behind her with one hand. Eko dragged her fingers down the opposite wall of the shaft quickly, gritting her teeth. The wall lit up with bioluminescence wherever her fingers touched, the fungi giving off a dim purple glow that was just enough for her to see. Arden had been the one to tell her that trick, but she hated touching the wall of... mold or whatever it was that lined pretty much every wall in the underground. Eko wiped her hand on her trousers before continuing her climb all the way down. |
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| Sagira | Mon Dec 31, 2012 11:17 pm Post #4 |
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Neither the dog or the girl had been introduced, but Sagira was hardly offended. The darkness constantly threatened to consume this city, and keeping oneself safe was never far from the minds of its citizens. Sagira, hair tangled with twigs and foreign accent on her tongue, was clearly a stranger to Balefire. Had she been from the city, in the girl’s place, she’d not have introduced herself, either. She looked toward the dog, its tongue dangling from its open mouth, staring upward expectantly at Senka. The cat tensed, her tail flicking back and forth. “Don’t worry,” Sagira said, stroking Senka’s silky fur. “The hound is waiting here. But I fear I may need your eyes, and your nose, below. You’ll come with me, won’t you?” Senka gave a sorrowful mew. Her front paws pushed into Sagira’s hair and clung for all their worth. The witch smiled and gave the dog a solitary pat atop her head. “I’ll try to bring your friend back safely,” she said, careful to keep the word ‘promise’ off her tongue. ‘Never make a promise you aren’t certain to keep.’ One of many lessons her coven had taught her, each accompanied by one cruel punishment or another. Sagira bore the scars to prove it. Without caring for the stares of those nearby, Sagira slid her staff into a loop on her pack, dropped the rat carcass onto the street, and descended the ladder behind the young woman. The girl had the good sense to stimulate the mould lining the walls, its faint purple glow lighting Sagira’s way as she climbed down. Senka’s eyes continued to dart this way and that, but her tail ahd stilled and her claws weren’t dug in quite so tight anymore. Despite the smell, the cat preferred the dark and the calm of the sewer to the bustle of the street above. Sagira cared for neither, wanting to return to the wilderness more with each breath of air. Her suspicions about the plague, however, pressed her forward, or rather, downward, until she stood beside the girl once again. “What drives you into the bowels of Balefire?” she asked as she slipped her staff free. There was a wet click as its end struck the brickwork at her feet. “I suppose that’s none of my business.” Her eyes darted, much like her cat’s, adjusting to the darkness slowly. “Do you know more, beyond from where these rats have come? All I have heard comes from the mouths of those too craven to stay in the city while the vermin run free.” |
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8:20 AM Jul 11

