multiversallogs | plot } the creatures descend.

plot } the creatures descend.

Who: Everyone!
What: Creatures descend!
Where: All across the city, although attacks will be most fervent at its heart.
When: Friday/Veerdi evening and into the week.
Notes: Slow and back-tagging is, as always, permitted. If you are confused, look at these two posts for more information.
Warnings: Violence, creepiness, swearing knowing these characters.

On Veerdi, the presence of the creatures reaches a fever pitch. Something has provoked them into launching an all-out assault, though it is one that begins slowly. The pipe-crawlers, generally harmless though they may be, are seen across homes in Baedal, sneaking up through the pipes and into bathtub drains or sinks. They come by the dozens, and their keening makes most homeowners nauseated--but it's their appearance that leads to a number of distressed Network calls.

This is just the distraction for the rest.

The call of the crawlers draws in the armored, sickly creatures with the tiny primates carried inside of it. They are inelegantly lumbering, but much faster than one might expect, and certainly hostile. They trudge across the city, barreling over anyone who gets in their path and leaving them half-crushed in the street. They're certainly unsettling in their obvious unhealthiness, and the disease-ridden animals they carry are downright vicious, especially once they escape (messily, bloodily) from their fleshy cage.

It's the birds that are the worst, though; the cleverest, and the cruelest.

These strange black birds are resistant to typical attacks and flying in large groups. They descend on pedestrians, picking at their eyes and faces, ready to rapidly tear flesh from bone until there's nothing left but skeletal remains. They fly out of range when they can, only to divebomb anyone who might think they've escaped.

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If Ilde's sense of smell is strong enough, she may be able to smell the blood on her breath, which would be at least a hint if not a dead giveaway. But with the attacks, there's plenty of injuries and possibly fatalities, so it may not mean as much as it typically would.

"As safe as I ever am," she replies, which, here, is a considerable amount safer than she is at home even when she's not trapped and starving in a tomb. "What about you?"

Ilde lifts up and arches back in the water - flexible little thing - to display the healing wound they'd discussed when Katherine first saw her on the network. It's better than it was, and getting better every day (the river does her a world of good), but it's not gone yet and after she's done a full circuit and come back up to break the surface again, she shrugs her hair back over her shoulders and says, "If I stay in the water. I'm going north, near the falls."

Her head tilts. "Behind you." Fucking monkeys.

Katherine looks at the wound, which looks like it would have been pretty nasty to endure, but also like it's getting much better. What draws her attention more is the scent of blood that still comes from it - it's not human, obviously, but there's something about it that smells delicious, irresistible, and suddenly there's a flash of red in her vision that, to Ilde, may make it look as if her eyes have gone black. She's about to say something when Ilde tells her to look behind her, and then she sees it - a monkey-like creature, one of the parasitic clingers to the larger, clumsier thing that's been lumbering through the city.

She doesn't hesitate, grabbing a nearby rock and heading straight for it - it's a primitive weapon, but she's had to use worse. The worry of infection doesn't bother her, she'll heal from nearly any wound inflicted on her (aside from a werewolf's bite, but this thing isn't a werewolf) and so she's able to get close, killing the hideous thing with one well-aimed blow to the skull.

Then she turns back to Ilde, and if it wasn't obvious what she is before it's crystal clear now - her face is fully turned, eyes gone nearly black, fangs extended, and veins protruding from the skin of her face. She doesn't need to turn her face to exhibit her full strength, it's more of a warning - this is what I can do, I'm capable of much worse, and I won't hesitate to show you how much worse if you cross me.

It's also a trade-off, an eye-for-an-eye - Ilde's displayed what she is, Katherine feels it only fair to do the same. Also, she hasn't survived for over five centuries by closing herself off to people, preventing herself from making contacts. Ilde is someone who could prove to be very valuable to know, and aside from that, she genuinely likes her, based on the things she knows.

Vampires are a subject of some curiosity to Ilde - her knowledge of them comes largely from fiction and pop culture (though the world started ending before Twilight could really take a hold of public consciousness, thus proving there's a silver lining around every storm cloud), and having that long-standing curiosity about the concept has meant that the awareness of a reality is...well, interesting. That interest is apparent in her expression, though she's clever enough to have sunk lower in the water again, her wound and intoxicating blood hidden by the river.

There's an odd hint of satisfaction to the way she looks up at Katherine; she felt something, and now she knows what it was. (Ilde is very, very attached to her own cleverness. The ability to grasp the world around her, even if she's frequently not quite a part of it - by choice or otherwise - is what she prizes most about herself, and jealously guards.)

"If you herd them to the water-" she suggests, letting it hang in the air. It is one of the more violent ways of offering the hand of friendship, but maybe she's just following Sonja's lead!

Katherine's face shifts back to normal, and she's pleased to hear Ilde's suggestion. She smiles and accepts her offer with a single nod, then turns back to face the street, where she spots a small heard of them coming on fast.

"They're on their way."

"Don't be startled if you don't see me," is all the warning Ilde gives before she pushes herself further back in the water and seems to vanish; she isn't truly invisible (and the movement of the water is a tell, if Katherine's looking) but she cloaks herself in the illusion of being water, wide intelligent eyes and bloody knife hidden equally well by her mastery of glamours.

The little monkeys won't be able to see her coming for them, but they will feel it.

"I can hear," she says before Ilde disappears into the water. As they approach, she screams, just to draw their attention towards her. It works, and they're soon headed her way, screeching and snarling. She doesn't let her face slip to show her fangs and veins this time, just goes to town attacking them, hitting them with a blow to the head or twisting their necks around until she hears them snap.

After a few kills, she glances behind her to see how Ilde's faring. She saw a few run past her and into the river.

The blood in the water isn't Ilde's, let's put it that way - at least it's mostly not hers, and she's going to have to practically bathe in antiseptic when this is over, she knows, she refuses to be taken out by the diseases of dead vermin. She delivers a blow with her tail that flings one of the little bastards out of the water, into the air, and even if Ilde herself isn't clear to be seen, Katherine can presumably draw her own conclusions from the beast being skewered mid-air.

Katherine looks subtly impressed at the way Ilde's handling the beasts, and she finishes the last one of hers off with a final twist of its neck before joining her at the edge of the water. She's quite displeased at the state of her clothing and hair, now, but she feels good after indulging her urge to kill; invigorated. She nods to Ilde, a satisfied smile on her lips.

"Nice trick."

The illusion dissipates and leaves Ilde behind, bloody but successful and taking this opportunity to examine the claw-marks left behind on her tail. (There'd been a reason she'd felt obliged to punt it out of the water.) Other marks of interest include the fact that the uniform white of her body (with its blue-green sheen) is broken a ways below her backside in an indistinct black mark curving around half of said tail and dragging down a little one side of her.

"I have my uses," she says, though, looking up once before she does a little roll in the water to clean herself.

"You certainly do," she replies, mostly to herself, as she makes her way over to the water to rinse some of the blood away (she won't be able to get properly clean until she's able to shower, but this will have to do for now).

"Were you intending to stay out here?"

"In the river, not here." She's headed north, upriver back to Raven's Gate, and she tips her head that way to indicate as much.

Katherine glances in that direction, then back at Ilde.

"Would you like company on your way?"

Ilde only thinks for a moment - impulse decisions are a bad habit of hers and she knows that, but it's the way she is and she directs herself more than she tries to fight it. "Yes," she decides. "You can follow the river."

"Deal," Katherine agrees with a nod, then straightens and begins walking. She's less clean than she's like to be, her clothing and hair are still stained with blood, but she's sure she's not the only one with battle scars out on the streets right now, and better to blend in than be comfortable. Though she can't help but feel put out, anyway; she liked this top.

"Do you spend most of your time in water?" She's asking out of curiosity, mostly; their first conversation had taken place through CiD and she'd seen that she wasn't in the river then, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.

Diving would make this faster, but conversation keeps her near the surface - she can't hear Katherine if she can't see her, after all, and she can't answer if Katherine can't hear her - but for some dips and rolls that speed her along. "I'm better that way."

She has a life outside of it, though, and she doesn't think she'd leave that entirely behind if she had the choice, if the choice were divorced from things like 'getting the hell out of Baedal' or 'fighting a war on New York'. She doesn't need things like houses, clothes, cellos; she could dive deep and never come up if she wanted to, be the river-child that Ælfræd had wanted her great-grandfather to be, but she likes those things she doesn't need any more. She's still invested in them, she still knows them better.

Ilde doesn't think of herself as the type to want everything, to have her cake and eat it too, but she is. If she can't have everything just the way she wants it, it's just not good enough.

Katherine would understand what Ilde meant if she voiced any of this out loud - she's been on the run for over five centuries, can and often has had to adapt to living situations that were less than clean or desirable, but were safe, however temporary that safety turned out to be. As she became better at honing her skills and made more connections, she was able live however she wanted wherever she happened to move. These days, it's very important to her that she be comfortable and safe.

"Of course, it's your element," she says with a nod. It's why she tends to feel more comfortable in the nighttime, though she wouldn't give up the option to stay in the day for anything. It's too valuable for the cover she keeps up.

"I don't live here," Ilde adds, the movement of her tail driving her along through the water, close enough to the surface like this that it's visible - she's swimming on her back to watch Katherine, though there'll be times inevitably along the way they'll separate. "But still."

"I assumed not," she says, nodding again, because while Ilde's freely displaying what she is here and now, that doesn't mean that she necessarily wants it to be known by everyone, and she knows she'd want to come out of the water sometime.

"I don't really live anywhere," she says, out of nowhere, and that's something that's true. She hasn't had a place to call home since being exiled from her home country after delivering her baby.

On dry land, day to day, Ilde looks the way Katherine might expect a younger Isobel to look - it's a form of control. People see her the way she was, most of the time, and they only see her the way she is on her terms, or in her territory. Where she's comfortable, when she feels she has the upper hand if she needs it.

Most of Ilde's coping mechanisms, funnily enough, are based in illusions.

"Do you want to?"

"Sometimes," she answers honestly after a long moment. "But I can't afford to, at least not back where I'm from. It's too risky."

She doesn't add the part about having somewhere permanent to stay back at home, because that place was somewhere she was glad to have left. It's why she's not terribly eager to get back home, if anyone ever happens to find a way. Here, there's no Originals or Klaus, she's not trapped alone in a tomb, she doesn't have to see Stefan with her doppelgänger and realize how much it hurts that he's forgotten her for someone who looks just like her. She doesn't quite like it here, but it's preferable to the alternative.

Baedal is somewhere that Ilde could be comfortable - could be happy, maybe, one day - but she has commitments to honour with Sonja, and they have unfinished business in New York. It's hard to say whether it's a virtue or a flaw (maybe it just depends on the moment and what she's doing), but she finishes everything she starts, for better or worse.

"I understand," she says, shrugging, just before she dives backwards to push herself through the water, soaking her injuries again.

She nods again, walking in silence as Ilde dives through the water, and she notices the injury again. The scent of her blood tickles her nose, but she reigns in her body's instinct to turn - it's just reflexes, she's already fed today.

"Where'd you pick that up?" she asks, mainly out of curiosity, to confirm her suspicions. "From when you tried to escape?"

"My gun malfunctioned on the boat," she confirms, touching her fingertips to the edge of where the wound is, lightly. (She's not really encountered anyone interested in her blood enough to be particularly aware of its effects, as yet. Probably that's going to change.) "At least I didn't shoot myself in the face."

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plot } the creatures descend.

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