[closed] → you were falling like the leaves.

[agrat]

Who: Wolfgang & Lea
What: Two members of the same cohort spot a man staggering down the street, toward a cliffside...
When: Veerdi, mid-late afternoon.
Where: Flag Hill
Notes: :)
Warnings: SEVERE BODY HORROR, creepiness.

There's really no reason she needs to be in Flag Hill, looking at that property. It's a steep price, even if her finances have been augmented by her savvy decision to sell off every piece of gold jewelry she'd worn upon arrival (sans that antique ring she's so attached to), and she doesn't need that much space.

She just wants it. So she bought it today, and is feeling--something, about the decision. Not happy, as there is no swing in her booted step while she walks toward the train stop, but she's not having buyer's remorse, either. It's just that purchasing property is a way of acknowledging that she is here, that this isn't some wishful-thinking elaborate hallucination she's dreamed up while in captivity, and she's not going anywhere. She is putting down roots, and a house is a way of putting them fairly deep in soil, to stretch the metaphor, she doesn't trust; this risks letting them get ripped out again, and that was a painful enough experience the first few times.

Lea swings her bag at her hip, appearing, for all the world, like she's paying very little mind to fellow pedestrians. This is inaccurate: she has the make and measure of every approaching person, guessing their species if at all possible, their height, their weight, how competent they are in a fight. She judges their walk and their clothes and whether they look at her, and some do more appreciatively than others, which adds incentive to her decision to ignore them, steadily. If someone approaches her or decides to get pushy, she is entirely on her own here, and she'll have to pick her fights with care. There's no sense in being overtly solicitous or nosy when she's so new here, particularly since she needs to establish her own reputation for not taking any attitude from anybody, and yet--

When she spots a red-haired young man staggering down the street a ways away, seemingly moving with purpose despite his haphazard steps, she's immediately concerned. The stranger has come from a tall, teetering Flag Hill house not far away, which Lea realizes only because he's left the front door open--not a sound mind's act in a city like this, or any city anywhere. She discreetly glances around to see if anyone else has noticed--or, more likely, to see if she's the only one who cares.

Comments

[agrat]

Lea aims another wary look at the cliff. It's more than slightly eerie to realize that the man they saw is somewhere beneath their feet, walking through--is he walking?--layers of sediment below them, toward some destination, with some goal they can't understand. She worries her teeth against her lower lip, turning to look up at Wolfgang (in proximity like this she better recognizes how damn tall he is, as she's not exactly short herself).

"I do," she says, starting them off in that direction. Her tendency toward hyper-vigilance pays off here--she memorizes most of her locations, but anything that's unusual particularly so. Right now, she's so unsettled that she's clinging to that good memory more than ever.

"I'm Lea, by the way. Lea bit Eshtazin." At home in Montreal, she didn't use the modifier, but since arriving in Baedal, she is more inclined--there's nothing to assimilate to here, and she pushes her background on others more fiercely and pridefully than ever. (She intends to buy a Kurdish flag for her new house she can't yet call a 'home'.)

[gramarye]

"Wolfgang -- Einhorn." The pause there is because he always feels really weird giving a last name, particularly since a) he learned what it means (whoops), and b) it's not actually his name. Neither is Wolfgang, really, but it's too late to use his real name in Baedal, he started using the pseudonym before he realised where he really is. (Which is "not Earth.")

And his accent is nowhere near German, which makes it less surprising when he says, "That's -- Assyrian?"

Nothing about what they're getting into is going to be good, and for now he would prefer to focus on something less likely to horrify him, like he's sure this is going to. A man just disappeared into a human-shaped hole in the side of a cliff, a cliff that feels like evil given physical shape, and at this point he's not putting anything past this fucking city when it comes to creative new ways to be awful.

Unfortunately it's not too terribly long a walk back to the neighbourhood they started in, with the house that started it, the door still left wide open. He does not want to go inside.

[agrat]

Her surprise is muted, if only because they do have this great unsettling mystery to unravel at their feet--she wishes she could get excited about this kind of thing like she used to, and maybe it'll come back, but now all she feels is trepidation. Most people don't recognize her surname. Turkish Assyrians are sort of a minority in a minority, and although she's only one fourth, it's enough to make her feel some loyalty, even if her predominant identification is with her Kurdish ancestors.

"That's right. Hardly anyone recognizes it," she says, seeming a bit pleased he did. "I'm mostly Kurdish, though. You don't sound German."

That's not a direct calling-out, precisely, but she figures she ought to note for the record she can tell he's from somewhere in the vicinity of her people, because who outside of it would even know that? Maybe some anthropologists, that's it. She climbs up the steps to the house they're heading toward, hesitating at the door.

"Here goes nothing," she says, and steps inside.

What she finds is not exactly heartening new evidence.

Every square inch of the foyer's walls has been decorated, painstakingly, with what looks like pencil, then charcoal, then something flaking and red, possibly now-dried blood. The decoration is repetitive and constant, comprised of dozens of intricate spirals, each one a disturbingly perfect replica of the other. Most of the furniture in the narrow, already-sparse student's house has been pushed to one corner to make room for accessing the walls. Lea turns to look at Wolfgang over her shoulder, stopped at the end of the slender foyer, just before it leads into the living room.

The entire first floor is like this.

[gramarye]

"Israeli," he offers absently, which -- just looking at him with that information is enough to come to some informed assumptions about his background. "But I was in Izmir before here."

His feet feel leaden when he makes the short trip up the stairs to the front door, and he stops up short just inside the threshold. He swallows, feeling vaguely sick. This is by far not the worst thing he's ever seen, it's just -- the uniformity of those spirals is so unnatural it makes his skin crawl. Nothing that perfect should be able to come out of a human hand, and he finds himself drifting towards one of the walls, staring at them with a sort of horrified fascination.

He doesn't touch anything, although he figures nothing on the walls is harmful -- he just doesn't want to disturb anything. But he does get fairly close, looking at those brown-red stains, wondering... but he can't remember if he saw if that man had any injuries, is this his? Or did it come from someone else?

"Did he look... hurt, to you?" he asks, his voice tight. "Any cuts?"

Now his response focuses, like something in him sharpens, because whatever went down here is a giant unknown and neither of them actually know whether this house is now unoccupied. Something about the way he moves is distinctly out of place with the rest of him -- he moves through the room with a trained cautiousness, checking every potential hiding place as if he expects there to be something dangerous there, securing the room before he moves on. He's adult and Israeli, it makes sense that he's ex-military; he looks just old enough to have completed his compulsory service.

For the thousandth time this week alone, he wishes he had a gun. Even a pistol.

There's nothing downstairs except those spirals all over the walls, which -- he's not sure if that's a relief or not. "I can pull whatever happened here out of the walls," he says in a low voice, but he's looking at the stairs leading to the second floor. He wants to secure the entire house before he starts attempting any magic; there are too many unknown factors here.

[agrat]

She might talk more later, or some other time, about their backgrounds...but right now she's too deeply unnerved by the persistent spiral pattern of this house. There's something about it that's got to be vaguely hypnotic to a baseline human, and she wonders if all of it really was that man's handiwork--if something was controlling him, maybe. At Wolfgang's question, she takes a moment to think back on what she saw, and shakes her head, mutely.

Lea hesitantly climbs the first step to the second of the three stories to the house. By now, she can tell that they are alone in the house, at least as far as she can read, but maybe she shouldn't disregard the possibility of something somehow cloaking itself from her senses.

"If you think it's a good idea," she says, "but psychometry can be physically damaging. It might hurt you."

When she reaches the second step, a sudden dark feeling rises up in her. It's not a compulsion, exactly, but it is an awareness that something is up at the top of the house.

"Do you feel that?"

It bothers her too much, not being able to know and see whatever that is. She starts up the stairs at a brisk pace that turns eventually into a run, disregarding the second story entirely. Incidentally, at the second story, a trail of blood appears, leading to the third level of the house. On the third floor, there is a bedroom at the very center of the building, with a photo hanging up of the red-headed man who entered the cliff earlier, accompanied by an older man who looks like he is probably his father.

Lea slows once she reaches the doorway, but only for a second. She pushes the door open, but doesn't enter the room.

The bed has been pushed to one side. There is a large, clear glass circular basin at the center, and inside, she can see a body, twisted into an impossible, circular angle, thick ropes of flesh layered atop one another. Said flesh is pale enough to suggest complete exsanguination, with a dryness to it. He is (or was) naked, and she can see the back of his head, but not his face.

So that's where the blood came from.

Her heart feels like it's in her throat, but she's not shaking.

[gramarye]

"Wait --" he calls after her, then curses under his breath, turning to follow because he's not sure what her abilities are, exactly, and he's not going to let her just run into a potentially dangerous situation alone. He is careful not to step in any of the blood on the floor because he has a pretty good idea of what will happen if he does. He stops just outside the doorway and that's close enough to see what's left of the man that used to be.

He has to wonder what happened to the bones, to get the body in a position like that.

Wolfgang stands there for a few long moments before he turns his head away. "I'm going to go see what happened here." His voice wavers, but he feels curiously calm as he steps carefully back downstairs to the defiled living room, then as near as he can find to the center of the house, where he can pull as much as he can.

Blood is memory's river. Someone told him that, once. He stares at those perfect shapes on the wall for a long time before he can bring himself to reach out and touch it, and with his mind, he pulls --

-- door slamming shut behind him and sighing, throwing his bag down. "I'm home, Dad, sorry I'm late. I got you a new clock, though --" An old-fashioned, spring-driven alarm clock with an interesting pattern on the face: a spiral.

-- "Are you all right?" waving his hand in front of his face, taking him gently by the shoulders to look into his eyes but they're not seeing anything anymore, just staring into space, refusing to come into focus, only looking dazedly around, left, down, right, up, left, down, right up, left, down, right...

-- "worried about him, he's stopped eating. I think he's depressed or something. Would you just call him, at least? I think that would cheer him up. I know, I love you too, sweetie, I'll call you tomorrow."

-- opening the door, frowning, staring at the back of his head, shaggy red hair, the hand holding the pencil wavering and creating the slightest wobble in an otherwise perfect spiral. Eyes widening, then -- "You broke it." Saying, "Adam, you're scaring me, what's wrong?" but there's nothing there, just a hollow voice: "You broke it."

-- screaming broken glass knife in his lung blood in his throat and it feels like drowning. Gurgling: "Adam." Knife slamming into him over and over, cutting the flesh and pulling out the muscle and twisting into rope, tying him over the basin. Still conscious. The last thing he sees are his son's pupils: twin spirals, empty.

-- he jerks his hand away and stumbles back, his back hitting the opposite wall. It's several seconds after he sees the present again before he realises the vision has released him, but he can still feel it burned into the back of his mind.

"Clock," he says, his voice a hoarse croak so low it's nearly inaudible. Then, louder, so she can hear him: "The clock."

[agrat]

It takes her a moment to follow. First she ventures a little closer to that awful glass basin. Wolfgang is downstairs, back turned to her, and she swears, she swears she sees the body twitch--

No, she's imagining it. (She never just is 'imagining' it.)

Lea closes her eyes for a second, reminding herself of a few things:

She is not in New York.

The Pale Man is not here.

His beasts are not here. Her eyes are not silver with his power. She's far away.

No matter what this is, it's not him, and after him, she can handle anything, or this is what she has been telling herself since her arrival. The bar has been set. Lea turns on her heel and heads down the stairs, just in time to see Wolfgang go reeling. This hastens her pace, brow furrowed in concern.

"Okay," she says, her accent shaping the word strangely, "you know what, fuck this house. Come with me, we're going to sit on the steps outside for a minute."

Then they'll discuss this mysterious clock and its origins.

[gramarye]

"Okay," Wolfgang says, sounding dazed, but he doesn't immediately move -- does not, in fact, move for a good minute or so, like he heard the words but didn't actually process them. Or like he's on a delay of some kind. With effort he pushes himself upright and makes his way towards the front door, looking disoriented. He's not strong enough for this on top of still recovering from last month, but who else is there?

He sits down on the porch, his knees drawn up to his chest, which does not actually make him look any less gigantic. It's only a second before he thinks to take off his jacket, since some of the dried blood flaked off on it. He's probably never going to be able to wear it again without remembering what it's touched; he'll have to burn it. He still folds it neatly before he sets it next to him.

What bothers him most, he figures out while he waits to sort through the cacophony of things he is feeling right then, is that there is no smell. Dead bodies stink, especially ones that must have been rotting for probably at least a day or two, especially ones with their intestines tampered with like the one in the basin on the second floor here -- and congealing blood has a unique scent he's become very familiar with after the monster invasion. At the very least, the walls should have stunk, should have attracted flies.

There is no smell in that house.

"So," he says after a few long moments -- a couple minutes both of them really needed. "Something -- or someone -- is compelling people towards the holes it put in the cliffs here. Using some kind of objects to hook their minds." He looks at his hands. He hates how steady they are. "This can't be the first one."

There were so many of them, he thinks, dismayed, and they don't have time to track down who has gone missing over the past week or so since the odds are good the next one is going to happen very soon. If it's not already, while they sit here.

[agrat]

Lea is opening her CiD as she settles down next to Wolfgang, heels hooking on the front steps in an absent-minded fashion. She inclines her head at what he says--sounds about like what she'd figured, with the new element being the use of objects--and turns the CiD over in her hands, registering the city map on the screen.

"We can expedite the process by going straight to the source," she says, "of course, that requires finding the source, but I have a plan for that."

Plans are her thing, you see, as impulsively concocted as they may be.

Lea gives Wolfgang an appraising look, a little concern echoing in her expression.

"First things first...are you sure you're up for this? We don't know what we'll find, but this has sin screaming from it, and that is never simple." Her tone indicates she wouldn't judge him if he weren't. Sanity honestly dictates she sit her ass down and hand this off to Hellsing or someone, but she doesn't trust anyone else's own two hands, and she also believes herself as capable as anyone else, if rather rattled due to her own recent events.

Maybe she wants this to be a distraction.

"Psychometry is something we should use sparingly, if so."

Because she's not sure how many more knocks like that anyone needs to take, much less someone whose health isn't the greatest. It would be more sensitive to just not bring this up, but sensitivity and practicality are difficult to marry, and she tries, but when it comes down to something shaping up to be this dangerous, the former tends to be edged out by the latter, where Lea's concerned.

(And she can't get that twisted, circular body out of her mind. Later she'll draw it, just to put the image out of her head and onto paper.)

[gramarye]

"It's not as bad as it looks," he says, voice distant, which is true because actually it is worse than it looks. Never quite sure how he appears to other people, he is at least aware that he tends to inspire a lot of concerned looks. Those aren't thoughts and feelings and visions he's going to get out of his head anytime soon and for a moment he is actually grateful that he only dreams about things that were once true -- there's no room for embellishment in his nightmares.

The truth is bad enough.

"I'm fine. I've seen worse, anyway." And Wolfgang is aware that this is only going to get worse -- that whatever is responsible for this is capable of much more than they've already seen, and that this is just a warm-up. What other choice is there, though? He doesn't trust the establishment and something being awful and hard is not going to deter him anymore, and when he glances at her there's a certain steeliness in his sad, tired eyes.

If he's not fine, he will make himself be fine as long as he needs to be.

"What's the plan, then?"

[agrat]

She does not believe 'as bad as it looks' for a second, judging by the way her eyebrows raise momentarily, but she also understands that sometimes you have to go beyond your physical limitations. Some faqra have rituals for that kind of thing, things she's engaged in. "Tamam," she says. A few Turkish words enter her daily parlance on a casual basis, and okay is one of them.

Lea points at the steps themselves. "One of the things I do at home...or I used to do...was hunt. Certain things make themselves available with the right stimuli."

Something she applies to much more than hunting. She stands up, facing the house itself, pushing her hair out of her face when the wind, now to her back, decides to interfere with the way it falls. She can't quite see the top window, the one to that bedroom, but she knows what's there, and winds her fingertips through the extra-long sleeves of her saffron-yellow sweater, betraying her anxiety.

"Now," Lea says, very very quietly, more to herself and to her magic than anything else, "show me."

She closes her eyes.

Footprints seem to raise up all around them on the steps themselves and then the ground, leading down the street, all in shining metallic gold, faint and only visible to Lea and Wolfgang. There are quite a few, since Adam had gone to and fro a little in the couple of days before his inevitable breakdown, but that's why she got out her CiD.

When she opens her eyes, she seems a touch surprised it even worked, but she hasn't been doing a lot of magic since she got free of Lucas.

"Next, we need to look on the CiD maps to see where the closest shops that might sell clocks are in the area. Pawn shops, I think, antique stores. We look at the tracks facing the house--" She finds a pair of tracks that meet that description, and stands just behind them, demonstrating. "--and we follow them backwards. There are only four lines of tracks in the past week, so we only have four directions for places he's gone."

[gramarye]

"That's clever," he says, peering at the footprints with professional interest. He could do that, maybe -- or he would have been able to ten years ago but he knows he's missing something now. Maybe something similar, though. He'll ask her later how she did it, now is not the time to be swapping spells and comparing magic.

Tucking his blazer under his arm, Wolfgang hauls himself to his feet and considers in which direction the footprints are leading. Mostly the same way, towards the train stop -- which makes sense, he would have taken it to get anywhere. They won't split off significantly until they get to another El stop, likely.

"Do we split up," the look he gives her there is significant, like yes I know that's pretty much a horror movie cliche, "or go together?" They can do this twice as fast if they split up but if one of them runs into trouble, that means they're completely on their own in dealing with it -- and they have no idea how powerful whatever is behind this is, but either way, two witches are better than one. He would rather err on the side of caution, but he's also thinking that they have no idea if someone else is, as they speak, making that same staccato walk towards that cliff, those holes, and it kills him to know that someone might be getting hurt because they're not fast enough.

Too many variables.

[agrat]

Lea is trusting her instincts more than ever right now, the ones that are as earthy and supposedly natural as the ground beneath their feet. Witchcraft will only go so far if you've no common sense, no ingenuity or resourcefulness. While she is still capable of feats of magic, and she may have escaped Lucas's influence over her mind, she still worries it will effect her abilities. As a result, she is disinclined to split up not just for the sake of avoiding horror movie cliches, but because she's in no state to play cowgirl.

Sometimes she can admit her own limitations, in her head. It's saying them out loud that's harder.

"No," she says, firmly, "If this is an entity of some kind...it probably already knows we are looking for answers. Splitting up would just isolate the other."

So towards the El it is. It's also that slightly quiet, odd hour where there will be few others on the train itself, a fact that privately makes her even more apprehensive. Trains are a good place to play awful little mind games, and Lea knows from experience.

"According to the CiD, there are two shops that might meet the description, both in the same direction. So we'll take the El in that direction and pay attention to the foot prints...we can even find the exact car he used."

[gramarye]

"Which area are they in?" Wolfgang asks. While not exhaustively familiar with Baedal -- he's only been here about six months -- Wolfgang does tend to get around, particularly in the rougher areas like Griss Twist, Aspic and Badside, considering he works a lot of under-the-table, transient jobs.

Turns out he actually is pretty familiar with the part of Aspic they wind up in eventually -- the last of the trails they have to follow, of course. 'It's always the last place you look,' and all that.

"I've been here," he says as they're closing in on it. What's left of the setting sun is blocked by buildings to the west of them, making the street they're walking down darker than it would otherwise be at this hour. "There was an antique store here. It was out of my price range so I didn't go in, but --"

He stops up short in front of the building the golden footsteps lead to. "It looked different."

Because the windows of the store they're looking at now are empty. There is no sign. It's too dark to see inside it, but there's dust built up on the windows like they haven't been cleaned in years, and there is no hours of operation sign or, in fact, any other indication that anyone has been leasing this building in a long time. When he tries the door, it's unlocked. His eyebrows go up and he glances at her, feeling the hair on the back of his neck raise. Adam can't have bought that clock more than a few days ago.

All his senses are on high alert, but none so much as his mind. He has a psychic presence that he's not very good at containing when he's doing something with it, like now -- keeping his mind open for any sign of life that shouldn't be there, any feelings of danger or violence. A little forewarning is better than none at all, and if whatever they're chasing can feel that, it would have been able to sense him coming anyway. His aura's a little bit on fire.

Inside the shop, it's the same way -- empty displays still set up but mostly broken and covered in ancient dust and cobwebs, made more unusual by the fact that this store is not exactly out of the way. This is, in fact, a pretty well-populated street and the businesses around it seem to be doing fairly well for themselves. That this place could have sat here long enough to acquire years' worth of neglect without anyone having tried to lease it is... unlikely.

It is also way too dark to be looking for clues. The one good thing about his brand is that it's magicked to glow so it can't be hidden; it's not much trouble for him to enhance that and light up his entire left hand, making a kind of flashlight out of it and bathing the inside of the store in an eerie silver light.

[agrat]

Lea, for her part, can see in the dark. Faqra's physiological advantages tend to vary--for example, she doesn't have much in the way of super-strength, though she's a little bit stronger than the average woman of her build, but the sight and the balance and the reflexes, those she's got covered. That's why she carefully withdraws the little pink gun from her bag, holding it at her side as they make their way through the dusty, dilapidated shop.

"I don't think this is a glamour," she says, slowly, "I'd feel that. I think you would, too."

Their shared inclination toward terrifying magic was one of the first things that Lea noticed, after all, and she's only had more evidence as time goes on. Her footsteps are, on that note, unnaturally soundless as she makes her way toward the back of the shop.

"May I ask you a question? It's all right if you don't want to answer, but...what is that mark on your hand for?"

She might as well ask while they're committing what she is increasingly concerned may be legally considered trespassing.

[gramarye]

"Mm," Wolfgang says noncommittally. He's doing the same thing here he did in the other house -- checking the corners, clearing the building. (For the thousandth time, he grumpily wonders why everyone else has a gun but him. Someday he'll remember to go looking for one before he gets tangled in something like this again.) When he's certain they're alone, he starts examining the rest of it in earnest, looking for -- a sign that someone was here. Obvious traps. Anything.

He doesn't answer for a while, but the silence has a weight to it. He heard the question, he's just debating how much he wants to say. Finally: "It's a criminal's brand."

There is a stigma attached to being branded in Baedal -- even though people can look at him and deduce he's probably not a threat, not everything is what it seems to be and he is actually a lot more dangerous than he looks. In terms of ability, just not temperament. He doesn't blame people for being wary of him when they see it; they don't know what he did to earn it. Anyway, the impression he gets of her is that that's probably not going to scare her off, considering they're here, chasing after some kind of supernatural being that is clearly both dangerous and malevolent.

"I'm not seeing anything," he says after they've checked out the front of the shop. He's not surprised. He definitely remembers this shop when he was last here -- looking for cheap furniture, he'd stopped and window browsed a bit and it had definitely been occupied. At the time, he hadn't felt anything off about it, which is what really concerns him. If it were an illusion, he should have felt that... maybe the problem is with him.

His hesitation here is because their next step is probably going to require the use of magic -- and he's reluctant to engage the building with spells when it has obviously been tampered with by something they don't know anything about, but which feels evil.

There's a back room attached to this building, but the door leading there is locked. That doesn't mean there's nothing there.

[agrat]

She doesn't push or look askance during that silence. When he does answer, she glances over her shoulder, briefly assessing; maybe, Lea suspects, most people will look at Wolfgang and not see the soldier, not see the person who could be deemed a criminal, but she knows what it's like to be underestimated. To be seen as limited in the perception of others, as they project their own limitations onto you.

She nods, understanding a little. The Militia, most likely. Later she will probably privately investigate to learn more, but now is not the time.

What is more at hand is that door, and whatever is waiting behind it.

"I suppose a thorough inspection is the best plan."

Lea hovers her palm over the lock, and then steps carefully to one side, pressing herself against the side of the tall armoire framing the door. Undoing said lock doesn't necessitate a lot of power, psychokinetically, and the door creaks open--a truly horror movie creak, too, slow and keening--to reveal a thin crack of darkness. At this angle, she can't quite see inside, so she looks to Wolfgang a second time.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang is vaguely aware that he's holding his breath as the door opens, waiting for something to happen. When it doesn't, he looks back at her, shrugs, and nods. He doesn't sense anything inside and if there's anything in it, it surely will have heard the door open. It will know they're coming.

He goes in with her, her first because she's armed. It's a small storage room full of dusty old cardboard boxes that no longer have anything but metal scraps in them. What catches his attention is what's sitting in the center of the room: one of those old-fashioned fortune telling machines, but this one dilapidated with great age and neglect. The animatronic puppet inside it, rather than being a cartoonish fortune teller or racist caricature, is instead a circus clown that probably never looked anything but terrifying even when its entire face was intact.

He's frowning at it, his hand raised to illuminate it -- for his own benefit mostly, he can't see in the dark without casting a spell to alter the frequency of the wavelengths in the room -- and he's considering, because this is such an obvious clue. There is nothing else in this entire shop but this; they are obviously being led somewhere.

Before he can actually interact with it, it comes to life with a sudden rusty jerk, the lights on the side flashing and bathing the room in a dusty rainbow light as the clown inside the machine waves its arms and turns its horribly grinning face, chipped paint and all, directly at them. Tinny, recorded laughter floods the room, staccato in sound like a record skipping. It only has one eye; the other is filled with a brass coin, stamped with a pattern of a spiral.

The machine lurches and shudders violently, reminding him of an off-balance washing machine. He is afraid for a moment it's going to explode or at least fall over, but instead the clown's mouth opens and a small paper card ejects from it, falling into a slot at the bottom of the machine for them to take.

"Th-thank you-ou! C-c-come back soon!" it says as the machine slowly stills again, the animatronic eye fixated somewhere just beyond them. A blue light inside it slowly pulses before fading to a stop, like the thing just died.

Wolfgang looks at Lea, reluctant to put his hand anywhere near that, but he doesn't sense danger still. Tentatively he reaches into the prize slot and pulls out the card, holding it up so that both of them can see it.

Printed on it is the silhouette of a roller coaster.

[agrat]

Later, Lea will find her instinctive response to the machine's surge into activity a little funny: she points her gun at it, and then...doesn't do that, what is it about guns that make one do that, anyway, her telekinesis is about a hundred times more powerful but the gun is a more obvious sign of do not fuck with me which a machine wouldn't respond to in the first place--

It startles her.

To say the least.

A second later, she exhales, watching the blue light fade to nothing. When Wolfgang shows her the card, she arches both brows, none too enamored of the sight in front of her.

"Hint, hint," she says, with a certain resignation.

She gives the machine a little bit of a shove, telekinetically, as though out of frustration. Though it's not a particularly strong push, this has the effect of causing the clown's entire face to slough off as though it's been split in two from the side, culminating in a sound that is much too reminiscent of a splat than she thinks the ceramic its face is made of ought to do.

Underneath the face, there is, indeed, ceramic, covered in many many spirals, carved meticulously into its "flesh". They're very pink, almost reddish, and pulsing just slightly.

"...okay, and. Don't do what I just did, I guess, let's get out of this fucking shop first--"

Even a girl who can see in the dark, dusty shop feels a touch more comfortable trying to puzzle this out in daylight.

[gramarye]

He takes one look at those pulsing spirals and he's already walking out the door. No. It feels evil the same way those holes felt evil, and he's not going to touch it at all, the thought alone makes him feel sick.

Outside, Wolfgang leans against the wall of the adjacent building, which closed an hour ago. He won't touch the one they just exited. Later, he thinks, they'll have to come back and make sure it gets cleansed or something, any lingering spirits or presence removed from it, but that can wait; it is not, in itself, dangerous unless it lures another person in to take an object.

He is not sure how long they were in there, but he suspects it was much longer than it felt to them; the streetlamps have been lit. His hand stops glowing. He rubs it against his forehead as he looks down at the card.

"Well, that's easy. There's only one of these the city, and it's in Howl Barrow. Joyland." He's not sure if she'll have heard of it -- it is not actually a huge attraction (Baedal has no tourists and nobody here really goes on holiday in the usual sense, there's nowhere to go) because as far as theme parks go, it kind of sucks, and it's not something most people think to bring up. He's never been, but he knows people in the area, and... it's come up, yes.

"Hellsing usually takes care of that." The implication there is not that they should turn this over, because... if they weren't before they aren't going to now, it's that yes, there are dangerous things there, especially if the fog has rolled in.

So they're not looking at Disneyland, here.

"It's not long by train." But -- maybe taking a moment before plunging into what is likely to be the main event (these things come in threes; he'd know) is best. His hands are shaking, although the rest of him looks -- and sounds -- curiously calm. He is not calm. He's going to do this anyway because it's the right thing to do, but that doesn't make it easy.

It never does.

He tells himself he's seen worse, and he has, and he was younger too when it happened. But then -- there was always an escape. At any moment in the Deep Umbra, he could get away. In Baedal, he can't run; there's nowhere else to go except another part of the city, and he can be followed there. If he engages something he can't handle, he's just going to... not die, because he is nearly certain that day is not today, but death is not the worst thing that can happen. Not by far.

[agrat]

'Joyland' strikes Lea as a deceptive name. Her expression twists just slightly, subtly, and she inclines her head. They will take their moment, and then they will take this train to the amusement park, and she will fucking confront whatever is playing all of these games. It clearly wants them there, so they may as well bring this to its conclusion with full force. She has been delicate so far, but she's feeling a lot less inclined to play it cautious.

Still smarting from her startle earlier, no doubt. She doesn't like anyone getting the jump on her, even in a small way.

First, though, she wants to address this shop. Turning on her heel, she frowns up at the building, arms folded over her chest. "This thing is a time suck," she informs Wolfgang, "I don't know how or why, but it's just--subtly outside time. Still in reality, at least. I don't want anyone else getting in or out."

She crouches down in front of the door, which...attracts some attention from smirking passerby (maybe it's her skirt hemline), and she waits until they've gone before slowly rising, sliding her hands upward along the door's frame and the door itself. Concurrently, the metal and wood begin to knit together. When she reaches the top, the door is sealed at both sides, leaving the thin cracks at the top and bottom still open.

Lea rises, smoothing down the aforementioned skirt.

"Let's go," she says.

The train to Joyland is, as Wolfgang says, not a long one, as Howl Barrow's edge is not terribly far away. At the gate to Joyland, they can behold the empty ticket booths, the chained gate. Not that Lea is inclined to let a simple concept like 'trespassing' slow her down now, but she's a little bit surprised.

"Is it supposed to be closed...?" She looks at Wolfgang, uncertain.

[gramarye]

"The hours are a little erratic," he says. "I don't know if they were planning on being open tonight."

Were planning on, because if so, whatever they're chasing clearly had different plans. He's glad, though; no people around means no bystanders, and hopefully no deaths. (In his head, he thinks of it as "civilian casualties," as if he isn't also a civilian here.)

Wolfgang touches the padlock on the chain and it pops open. He is naturally inclined towards breaking locks, it's one of the more annoying side effects of his magic and is going to be a problem when his house is done and he keeps fucking up the front door, but for now it's useful. Unwrapping the chain from the gate, he leaves it -- with the lock, which he hopes he didn't break -- on the ground, pushing the gates open for them so they can enter.

Joyland at night in the dark is only marginally better than Joyland during the day. At night, the darkness clouds everything in dramatic shadow, giving even the most benign decorations a sinister edge -- but the darkness also mercifully hides much of the park's grunge, the little details like dead mice and questionable stains. That doesn't make it any easier to pass a giant clown's face, its gaping mouth the threshold to a ride, grinning down at them with manic soulless eyes, the paint on its face mostly chipped away enough to give it the appearance of melting.

"I don't feel anything," he says after a bit of initial exploring, keeping his voice down although he's certain whatever they're chasing already knows they're here. He starts to say that, anyway, because a few meters ahead of them there's the unmistakable sensation of movement out of the corner of his eye -- but he only feels it in his head, there's nothing really there, no figure darting away, just the feeling as if something just disappeared into a hall of mirrors.

Mirrors are dangerous in Baedal. How they've gotten away with having that many in one place for so long is anyone's guess.

"There." He takes a breath and heads in that direction, his left hand glowing again, this time not with a steady light but with the crackle of electricity, pulsing through his arteries and giving off just enough light that he can see by. Weaponless, all he has is magic, so he's improvising; if anything comes at them, he is going to punch it in the face with a fistful of lightning. That kind of consequence-free vulgar magic is possible in Baedal, which he's glad for. No one is taking any chances here.

He stops inside, startled at seeing themselves reflected dozens of times. But there's nobody else in any of the reflections -- not yet, at least. But something is in here with them, he knows that much, but...

It doesn't feel the same. It feels like what he sees every time he passes a graveyard here -- or lets his mind drift on the train home, opens his eyes to see someone sitting across from him that nobody else notices -- or watches as they pace in circles around one spot on a street ruined from the invasion, still ignored weeks later because no one really cares about Badside.

Frowning, he heads further inside, towards that presence, mindful of getting too close to the mirrors, but. Well, it's hard to tell reflection from reality. It's wrecking havoc on his nerves, because Wolfgang's ability to tell what is real is already...

A polite word would be "shaky."

[agrat]

Somewhat problematically, at least in Baedal, one of Lea's primary magical tools are mirrors. Call it a play on vanity (not actually one of her primary sins, but an easy mistake to make given her hyper-feminine presentation). As they progress through what seems to be an increasingly narrow mirrored corridor, she pauses at one of the mirrors, sensing something slightly awry with its face. With her reflection.

Lea leans forward just minutely and breathes on the surface of the mirror. Instead of momentarily fogging her reflection, its face ripples, as though it is water disrupted. While that is not, in and of itself, overtly ominous, it tells her that there is indeed some kind of magic here, perhaps old, perhaps new, and that it has been worked on these reflective surfaces.

She turns to call to Wolfgang, to warn him.

Unfortunately, before she can get a word out, something reaches out from the bottom of the mirror next and grasps her ankle.

"--Criss!" Lea fortunately twists away from its touch, but it's too late. Slowly each surface is disrupted as dozens and dozens of hands begin to extend from the mirrors, each filled with an identical fist attached to an identical arm, and the engineer's brain notices a symmetry to these hands' placement that is near-identical to the format of the many holes embedded on the cliff-side they saw earlier. There is a mathematic principle to this, and maths are of interest to her.

She backs up toward Wolfgang, wide-eyed, as the arms extend past the wrist in their reach, opening and closing, endlessly grasping.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang lets out a yelp, stepping back and then immediately forward again to prevent himself from just falling right into their grasp. They're in a pattern of some kind, that's all he notes before the more pressing problem captures his attention -- namely that the more they emerge from the mirrors, the more reach they have and the less room the two of them have to maneuver.

And the presence of those hundreds of hands, emerging more and more, makes it harder to tell which way is out, because they're obscuring the mirrors, reflecting themselves hundreds of times more. He looks around, starting to panic. They have to stand in the very center of the corridor to stay out of their grasp and he knows without having to touch them that if they drag them inside the mirrors with them, it is very unlikely either of them will come out again. He's just about to do something stupid like, say, shatter every mirror in here when he sees her.

He knows she's dead before he looks at her, like he knows she's the presence he's been looking for. She's about nine years old, blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned. She doesn't look a thing like Safiya, if anything she looks more like him, but looking at her barely corporeal shape is enough to bring back a surge of painful memories. She's standing about three meters ahead of them.

"This way!" she says, and turns and runs. He doesn't think before following her; she's not part of this game. And she's easy to follow in spite of the nature of this house, because she has no reflection in the mirrors. Unfortunately the two of them have the problem of being both much larger and much more corporeal than her, and he finds himself having to sidle sideways through those grasping hands, feeling fingers that are so hot they burn brushing against his shoulders, touching and yanking his hair.

She leads them through a winding path that is not the most direct route through the house of mirrors -- and also seems too long to be contained within the building, and he gets the sense that more time has passed than they are aware of, again -- until she stops at the room before the exit, a tiny plush room with a single antique mirror above an old-fashioned couch, and a door leading outside.

Wolfgang, who is well over six feet tall, crouches partially to steady himself but mostly to be on her eye level. "Thank you," he says, and... desperately hopes Lea can see her too and he doesn't look like a crazy person, talking to air.

"You shouldn't have come here," she says, gazing at her shoes -- one is untied. "The bad man will get you."

[agrat]

Lea has always liked kids. Even though her heart is pounding, adrenaline making her fingers twitch (she has a much stronger 'fight' reflex than a 'flight' one, she wanted to wreck that place, in her heart of hearts), she crouches down to the little ghost-girl's eye level too, tucking sweater sleeves over her fingertips. The memory of those--it must have been thousands, really--grasping hands won't leave her any time soon, and it's hard to resist glancing back.

"Not if we get him first," Lea says. "We've come to find him. What is your name?"

There is a hesitation. "Sabrina," she says, finally.

"I'm Lea, and this is Wolfgang," Lea tells her, indicating Wolfgang with a tip of her head. Seeing ghosts is always many things, often sad, but a little child ghost is the worst. She can guess, vaguely, how long this girl has been trapped here, but not whether her death precedes the activity they're following here. For all she knows, it could have been nesting in this city for centuries, waiting to make its move.

"I followed you," Sabrina admits. "Are you really looking for the bad man? He'll hurt you. He makes people hurt themselves and they--they get ugly. Like monsters."

[gramarye]

"What did he do to the other people?" Wolfgang asks. Ordinarily he would ease into this slower because he can tell she doesn't want to talk about it, but -- he can't shake the feeling that they don't have much time, especially now that they're in 'the bad man's' territory.

The little girl toes the ground, although nothing she appears to touch is disturbed. "He put the holes in and makes them go inside, and when they come back up, they look..." She looks away from them and shrugs. "And he put the people in the mirrors."

Wolfgang half-turns in the direction they just came from, reaching mentally -- but nothing's there. Either they're too far out of his range (he doubts it; he hasn't pushed his limits, but Baedal is not that big, even metaphysically speaking) or there's nothing left of their minds to hear.

"He came to the city a long time ago, but he wasn't nice like most people are. I don't know how come the gods brought him."

They might not have. He keeps that thought to himself. "They probably didn't know," he says instead, thinking she might rather believe that her gods made a mistake out of ignorance than out of malice or apathy, or that something trapped in here with them is cleverer or more powerful than they are.

Sabrina twists her braid around her hand. "He came to the park a long time ago and he made all the rides go bad. Everyone got scared and ran away. I couldn't find..." She trails off again, her hand pressing into her side like something there hurts her -- looking at it, he sees that it's a hole, as if something pierced her abdomen. He made all the rides go bad. Wolfgang can guess how she must have died.

"Now he's hiding and no one believes he's here anymore. No one listened to me." She turns her eyes towards them, like but you believe me, right?

Wolfgang glances at Lea. "We're listening."

[agrat]

Lea nods, her voice as reassuring as she can make it without dipping into 'patronizing' (being little doesn't mean Sabrina won't notice). She doesn't talk to her like a baby, and even though this place is worlds apart from home, it's hard to forget the faces of the children who stayed on the estate.

The ones no one knows about, the ones that could still be in the facility on Baffin Island. Or dead. Or worse.

"We saw someone he was hurting, but we didn't know it at the time, so we came here. We're going to do what we can to try to change something here. I promise."

Lea pauses.

"But we might need your help. Will you do that?"

Sabrina doesn't waste a lot of time in agreeing. "Yes." Something causes her to hesitate, though, as though she is remembering. "But I don't want to get into trouble..."

"In trouble with the bad man?"

"Uh-huh. This place is his house. He wants to make it bigger and I'm not supposed to get in the way, or else."

[gramarye]

He closes his eyes, listening again, but this time pushing his range outward. "There are people here," he says, slowly. "West of us, by... the ferris wheel. But something's... wrong with their minds. It feels twisted, like --"

He doesn't need to finish that. Furthermore, he knows there's nothing left there to rescue, that whatever this entity has done to them is permanent. That makes it simpler in a way, although not actually any easier. Mercy kills are never easy.

Or else. Something in him shifts -- sharpens. It's hard to tell outwardly, his demeanor is generally the same no matter what, but inwardly, there is cold anger. He's reining it in as best he can, but there's something a little unhinged in his voice.

"Do you know where the bad man is now?" he asks Sabrina.

"I can show you," she volunteers.

Wolfgang does not want to involve her that directly, he would rather have her stay somewhere they could throw a ward around to keep her safe, but the feeling he gets just from being here is that there is nowhere in the park safe from the entity. If they keep her with them, at least they'll be there to defend her if whatever this is decides to attack her.

He gets up and moves towards the exit door, looking outside, but there's nothing there but darkness and abandoned attractions, so he turns back to look at Lea again. "Can you shield her?" He sounds a little frustrated, because that's something he used to be able to do -- it's how he got his friends through the Gauntlet with him -- but he can't anymore.

[agrat]

Lea hesitates. It isn't that she doubts her ability, but she'd rather make a tower out of a cyclone of magic and put Sabrina in it, frankly, until they can resolve what is keeping her on this plane and not allowing her to pass on. Still, she can feel the range of this thing's crawling reach, the taste of sin still in her mouth, and she knows that Sabrina's means of death would still make her susceptible. It is a familiar principle among her people, her magical kind, indicating their shared ancient history with demons like the one they are chasing: you own what you kill. Death doesn't necessarily save you from the reach of faqra--that's just your body, a shell hiding what's really important.

"Tamam," she says, "Sabrina, I'm making a wall around you. Can you feel it?"

Sabrina squints for a second, and then her eyes widen. She's startled; she's dead, so it's been a long time since she's felt any physical sensation, but she raises her small hands and presses them against an invisible force (more visible astrally, but they're on one layer of the Other right now). "Uh huh. What is that...? Is it magic?"

"Yes. But it's very important you stay inside it." Sometimes little girls don't listen (Lea knows better than anyone, because she was exactly that kind of little girl, in some ways still is), so she makes sure Sabrina is looking at her when she says it. "Only you and I can step through that door."

Sabrina considers those words, and then nods, slowly.

"Good. Now, can you show us the way?"

[gramarye]

Sabrina nods and starts out the door.

Wolfgang hesitates only very briefly before following her. He stays close, not so close as to touch Lea's wall, but close enough that should something happen, he could physically block her. He stops once to pick up a pipe. He doubts whatever they're going up against has much in the way of a physical body to fight against, but its minions clearly do, if those hands were any indication.

It's quiet where Sabrina leads them, but no less eerie, all long shadows and lurking darkness. Joyside is not very inviting during the light of day; it's worse at night.

She leads them towards the ferris wheel, then stops near it. She points upwards, at the Joyland sign; the top of the ferris wheel is as close as anyone can get to it, there is no ladder. "He lives up there."

Wolfgang cranes his head upwards, but he sees nothing. That doesn't mean he's not there, just that Sabrina sees something neither of them can. He can feel it, anyway, a churning in his gut, like the closer he gets, the more nauseated, as well. He glances at the ferris wheel, the rickety old metal thing, with an incredibly dubious look on his face before glancing back at Lea. "Climb or ride?"

Gravity is a force. But tonight is not going to be his night to experiment with levitation.