Moar Snowwww

[theextras]

The snow has gone from a winter storm to something truly impressive. Ground-level doors are nearly buried in it; windows reveal walls of solid white pressing against the glass. Chimneys have iced over, and cars are buried in deep drifts.

The trams stopped running two days ago, with polite notes reading Temporarily Out of Service - We Apologize for Any Inconvenience affixed to the frozen doors.

Taxon is very quiet.

The Extras huddle indoors, and the streets are long white swathes of virgin snow. No car horns, no hum of traffic. The river is iced as well, and the edges of the shore boast chunks of white ice floating in the black water.

Near the Sanctuary, a water main has burst in the night, and the day's slight increase in temperature thawed it enough to erupt and flood a street. The buildings of that street are hung with sheets of icicles, gleaming like someone's idea of a Christmas decoration taken beyond all reason.

The wind blows from the north, and skirls the snow into further drifts and piles. If you listen-- if you listen very carefully-- you can hear the sound of voices on the wind, and howls that cut as keenly as the Arctic wind.

If you must go outside, Taxonians, breathe slowly and carefully-- for an incautious breath can freeze the very lining of your throat.

And at night...? Well, tonight the howls become more than distantly-imagined sounds: tonight, white shapes stalk Taxon's white streets-- wolves the size of ponies, whose eyes flicker with blue fire and who are hungry for warm meat.

Comments

[location: the Cabal House]

[trojanhorst]

There are more than four feet of snow on the ground. By most human beings' standards, that's an unpleasant preponderance of snow.

Accordingly, it takes Horst several minutes to clear all the snow off of the upper staircase and the widow's walk, sending it tumbling off the roof and down into the side yard. Snow's still falling, silent and gentle and balletic, but it's good to be able to get outside at least a small way, after a few days cooped up indoors. Being shut in tends to put Horst in a poor mood. And he's been meanining to have a better look at what's going on outside.

When he's satisfied that the deck and railings are cleared off sufficiently, Horst picks his way back down the stairs and into the top floor of their peculiar house, shaking some of the snow out of his hair and the ice out of his fingertips. It's a cold night indeed.

"Johannes," he calls, loudly enough to carry a few floors to wherever his brother might be at the moment. "Come up here a moment and have a look at this."

[location: the Cabal House]

[somelittleinfamy]

The house is quiet, save the distant hum of the washing machine (Johannes's favorite innovation of the modern world so far, by far) and the whistle of the winter wind. Horst receives no immediate sign that Johannes heard him at all, but that doesn't mean anything, of course; Johannes comes when called only at his own leisure, when he feels like it, if he feels like it, and damned if he's going to drop what he's doing and come running unless he hears an explosion.

He does turn up a few minutes later with a cup of coffee, looking skeptical. The skepticism vanishes when he looks Horst over and glances out the window, replaced with the sort of even sobriety that tends to characterize him in any mildly worrisome situation.

"You look cold," he remarks.

[trojanhorst]

"Well, I am cold," Horst answers him, shrugging. "It won't kill me." And it won't, at that; Horst can feel heat and cold, can even register them -- generally -- as pleasant or unpleasant, but they won't cause him much harm until they become extreme, and rarely the kind of harm that he can't heal from. Such are the perks of being undead.

"Come on up to the roof," Horst tells him again, more clearly this time. "It's a good view out onto the neighborhood." He holds up a heavy cotton-stuffed comforter from one of the guest beds, and wraps it around his brother's shoulders for extra warmth as he steers him outside and up onto the stairs that lead up to the widow's walk. It's best, he's learned, to get moving on things before Johannes can notice anything undignified might be going on, and definitely never to mention anything undignified aloud.

"I saw something moving out there."

[somelittleinfamy]

"By something, I take it you don't mean something human," Johannes muses. True to prediction, he ignores the comforter, treating it like an extra-heavy coat that has somehow materialized on his person. The night air is extremely cold: his tolerance for the cold has always been stiffer than his tolerance for heat, which is highly inconvenient for a person who prefers to be as clothed as possible at nearly all times, but this is biting and uncomfortable.

He bundles his left hand up in the heavy material and uses his right to tilt his spectacles up over his forehead and squint into the darkness. "By 'something,'" he asks, "are we talking something approximately closer to, say, polar bears, or frost giants?"

[trojanhorst]

Horst stands shoulder to shoulder with Johannes, putting himself between his brother and the winter wind. "Small polar bears. Or very small frost giants." He points to a moving shadow in the pale, diffuse glow of the cloud-blocked moon. "See there, atop that snow, by the Scheaffers' house? You can see one of them poking around the windows. Wolves, I think. And there are more of them."

[somelittleinfamy]

Johannes follows Horst's gesture and narrows his blue eyes for a moment. Then he scowls. "Those are wolves, all right," he affirms, but chooses not to elaborate on what makes him so certain. The irritated familiarity in his voice, however, seems to indicate that this is not the first time in his life he's encountered such. This is true. He's a well-traveled man for his age and he travels frequently alone. The occasional unwanted encounter with local fauna is an inevitability.

"Much larger than the usual stock," he observes with folded arms and squints up at the moon to check that it's not in phase. It's a half-moon, waning. "Not werewolves. At least there's that."

He stares at the large shadows a bit longer from the rooftop. His thoughts have taken him away from his unhappiness with the temperature, and soon enough his unpleasant memories of unfriendly animals are fading, too, replaced by another thought process. In fact, the smile that crosses his face is positively canine itself. Horst should know his brother well enough that that expression likely bodes ill for someone, somewhere--or something.

"Horst," he addresses him by name, tilting his head to one side. "How long has it been since you've been out hunting?"

[trojanhorst]

Horst blinks, slightly disbelieving. He doesn't quite understand, for a moment, what Johannes means by hunting, because he can't quite figure out the relationship he's trying to draw between anything Horst might've done by that name (which involved guns and deer) and anything Johannes might be thinking of (involving no guns, as neither of them possess any at the moment, and involving one or more wolves). Horst isn't stupid, of course. He understands that Johannes means to go after the wolves in some way. What he just can't seem to make sense of is why in the world Johannes thinks Horst would agree.

"Flattered though I am by your belief that I've dabbled in everything under the sun, I regret to inform you that I've never hunted a wolf, and I have no intention of changing that now. If the snow doesn't break and you have to travel, you can go by day."

It's the first time they've mentioned it. If the snow doesn't break. Thus far, they've been capable of hunkering down and counting on what they had at hand of heat, shelter, and food to last them. But they don't know, yet, what to expect of Taxon's weather, and they've each had to begin thinking about what they'll do if this lasts longer than Johannes's food supply, or if the power fails them.

Damn it all to Hell, wolves are the last thing they needed on top of it all.

"You don't even know if these things can be killed."

[somelittleinfamy]

"It comes down to Carnot's thermodynamics, Horst," says Johannes with that same chilly, predatory smile. "If it goes up, it comes down. I assure you," he turns back to the door that leads inside, having made up his mind, "anything that lives can be killed. And very many things that don't."

His spirits have lifted, against all logic. He's aware it's irrational. The presence of huge, possibly man-eating wolves should not cheer him up. But honestly, being trapped in this cushy facsimile of a city without so much as a captor at whom to glare his defiance has been taking its restless toll on him. The weather has not been helping either. You can't do anything about weather. It just sort of happens, like decay, like Carnot's heat loss, like all manner of things that Johannes Cabal hates. Wolves, on the other hand. He likes a problem he can stab--and repurpose.

"You're strong enough to restrain one," he states as a matter of plain fact, standing next to his brother with his back to the rooftop's edge. "Actually, you're more than strong enough to kill one without my help, but that could get dangerous. And messy. I'd like one intact." He doesn't bother to explain why. Horst is not an idiot. "I'll owe you one," he adds and nudges Horst in the ribcage with his elbow as he walks back inside. He's looking for his coat; he does not look back to see if Horst is following him. He already knows he will.

[trojanhorst]

"Killing one without your help, oh, that could be dangerous, could it?" Horst shakes his head, dusting the air with snow as he follows Johannes back inside. As usual, Johannes has gotten a notion in his head to do something, and with typical Johannes Cabal stubbornness, he immediately wants to follow that notion through. Horst has spent days, months, and at times, years of his life trying to talk Johannes out of things. It rarely works.

The much more reliable way to get Johannes not to do something is to physically prevent him from doing it. It doesn't make him happy, of course, so it's not Horst's preferred method, but unlike the other, it always gets immediate results. That's really what Johannes is bargaining against, here, when he makes Horst the offer of an open-ended favor: Horst not stopping Johannes from going out in the snow to kill a giant snow-wolf. Horst helping him do the deed.

In the grand scheme of things Johannes has asked Horst to help him with before, on a scale of benign to nefarious (because Horst isn't sure he can recall anything that would start the scale any higher than 'benign'), this is probably not one of the worst things Johannes has ever asked him to do. This is helping him kill a wild animal that could possibly hurt them, and Horst has killed animals before. He's even killed a man before, or tried.

And Johannes is, if nothing else, a man of his word in many respects. And there are quite a few favors Horst could ask for.

"You really are a madman, Johannes," Horst says to his brother's back as they go down a flight of stairs to the third floor. "Are you sure you want to do this now? We don't know that enough of the snow's frozen through for us to walk on top of. We could wait a day."

[somelittleinfamy]

"We could," agrees Johannes, as this is, after all, factually true. They could wait a day.

***

The slim blade Johannes Cabal keeps stowed in his hollow swordstick is ill-suited to hunting wolves. It's ill-suited to hunting at all, in fact--it's a rapier, an urban gentleman's weapon designed for skewering other urban gentlemen. It has a point, but not much of a slashing edge. But as someone decided to rudely drop him here with it and not what would be his preferred weapon against a direwolf-like monster, his dearly departed firearm, Johannes is just going to have to make do.

Given this, he's brought along a contingency plan. He does not really care for his contingency plan. Normally the swordstick would be the contingency plan, but as Johannes and the Webley have parted ways, possibly forever, it's received a battlefield promotion.

He tests the heft of the fire axe against his shoulder and, experimentally, his range of motion in his goosedown ski coat. He's aware of how stupid he looks right now. Actually, he's more aware of how stupid he looks than how cold it is--and it is bitterly cold, at that, but not cold enough to distract him from how impossible it is to look intimidating in a puffy ski coat belted with a leather belt that has a fire axe stuffed into it by the handle.

Thankfully he's not going to be fighting anything that's going to care. Probably. "You remember the plan?" he says for about the second time in fifteen minutes as they trudge away from the house.

[trojanhorst]

Horst, testing each step carefully before he eases his weight down, looks over with raised eyebrows. "Gosh, no, I think it might've slipped my mind! It was terribly complicated trying to hold all those steps in my pretty little head." He bites his lower lip and tilts his chin down so he can look up at his brother through his eyelashes. "You know how fluff-headed I am."

A sound up ahead of them draws him back to sobriety, though; Horst clears his face of his silly gamine expression and cracks his neck, Head oscillating left and right as he shakes his hands out in the air like he used to when he boxed with his friends for a little while back in his university days. Where Johannes is bundled up tight, Horst is only wearing long sleeves and gloves, and those only to keep him from skin contact with the wolf if he can avoid it. He can't afford to wear any of their winter clothes and risk them getting torn -- Johannes may need them later.

Whistling quietly to himself, Horst reaches over to chuck Johannes lightly beneath the chin, then fades into silence as he disappears into thin air. Johannes can still track him here and there where the snow's disturbed by his walking, but otherwise he might as well be alone. They cross the snow slowly, Horst not willing to risk cracking the frozen top of the deep snow they're walking on by moving at higher speed.

Eventually Horst reaches the Scheaffers' front garden soon enough, the wolf still milling about hungrily. He reaches over to shove loose a large pile of snow out of a drift, to signal Johannes that he's arrived. The sound draws the wolf's attention, and it looks up, confused -- Horst has to remind himself that the wolf can't see him -- and a wolf's just a dog, after all, just a dog.

Stick to the plan, Horst. If you don't stick to the plan, Johannes could get hurt.