multiversallogs | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."

plot } the creatures descend.

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