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

[personaldemon]

....aaaand now the thing is pressed against his leg like an undead cat, except there is rather too much of it to be a 'cat'.

Right.

Jason wipes at the tiny bit of his face that is quasi-exposed before any of the steaming, stinking gunk on his face can start to freeze to his skin. Because it's the sort of thing he does, he mentally catalogs whether or not this has ever happened to him before.

Drenched in blood? Yes. Many times. Brain meat: only once that he can recall (the less said about what happens when a zombie vomits, the better). Having an entire lupine corpse explode over him, everything from liver to sinews? He thinks that's a new one, but then again, his memory is missing a few decades.

No. If he'd ever been splattered head to toe with the pureed bits of organs, hide, fur, and flesh, he is almost certain that it's a memory Etrigan would want him to keep. So, probably, this is simply a new experience.

The stench is intense; Jason feels distantly nauseous but the cold helps. Already some of the... mess... is congealing. His clothes are a lost cause and then some. Also, his arm hurts.

--and the little abattoir of bones-- the not-so-little abattoir of bones-- is trembling against his leg like a frightened animal.

"I don't believe I can say 'there, there' with a straight face," he informs the entity, after several blank seconds of trying to think of an appropriate response.

[skinandbone]

Jason, you are a poor mother substitute. Metody tilts to point her fore end at him, as if looking at him, then wrenches up and helpfully pincers a bit of muck off of his front.

Metody slowly looks down at the mess. She has lost a good bit of her substance to the cold and shattering. She reaches down and gathers up the shards of wolf bone, consolidating them into a replacement for one of her limbs.

[personaldemon]

"...yes. Thank you." Looked like a bit of a hamstring, there.

He watches the creature absorb bone back into itself. Even he might normally find that a bit disconcerting, but after the last five minutes it's just another thing to numbly observe happening.

Numb. Numb and cold. And he really should get somewhere inside. Yes.

i spy with my little eye
a suiting place for a bloody knave
your faithful steed
(if your lead it heeds)
can join you in yonder cave

Jason's head lifts to scan the nearby snow at Etrigan's words. Ah. Yes. There. Etrigan drags his eyes over to the nearly-invisible blackness of a crevice in the black rocks, hidden by a tree's snow-burdened branches.

"...come?" Jason says, not quite an order because he certainly isn't about to try giving commands to something that just Cuisinarted a wolf, but with a bit of nudge to the words since the creature seems rather at a loss, inasmuch as he can tell anything of what it feels.

He crouches to take his sword back from the snow it has toppled into, then starts a slow, stomping-trudge through the snow for the entrance into the rock, glancing to see if his strange ally is following.

[skinandbone]

It takes a long moment before she responds, but she lifts herself out of the snow and faithfully follows him, tapping along. When she closes the short gap between them, she even taps at the back of his knees, then crouches down so he can get on.

Here and there, her surface is pitted where gore froze to her, then chipped off. It's the very first time she's ever had a problem like that. Poor Jason must be half frozen.

[personaldemon]

Convenience trumps pride; he gets back on the creature's ... back, and from there it's a fairly short trip into the cave.

It's fractionally, fractionally warmer inside-- no more than a little drifted snow on the floor, and out of the wind, at least-- and Jason says another scrupulously polite 'thank you' to the entity as he dismounts. Much better to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to unknown creatures and their lethal capabilities.

He is quite cold, although not as frozen as he should be, as a strictly-human person would be. Etrigan rages like a furnace inside him, and that is not merely metaphor.

Jason digs inside the many pockets of his outermost parka until his fumbling, numb fingers find what they're looking for: the pack of chemical hand warmers he'd grabbed before trekking out into the snow.

It takes a few tries with his hands stiff and trembling in the gloves but at last he gets a pack open.

"I d-don't suppose one of these will do-- you any good."

[skinandbone]

What are they? She touches one, curious, then delicately pokes it a few times. The little spot of warmth is not enough to register with her, and the bright color of the packaging is invisible to her.

A little packet of sand? Why on earth would he be carrying something like that? Is it some kind of ceremonial item? Maybe like a crack and go blessing?

Weird. She shakes her head, confused. No, no good to her.

Look, Jason, they're inside. They did it! She taps his shoulder and gestures around them, then does a little dance that ends when one of her legs break off.

[personaldemon]

If he were conscious of Metody's thoughts on the matter, Jason would smile despite himself at the thought of a crack-and-go blessing.

He snaps a few more of the packets open and jams them down inside his parka and boots and gloves. Core first, extremities next, and... his arm is still injured, there is that small detail.

He watches the bones dance-- there is no other word for it-- vaguely bemused, then slings off his leather satchel for more rummaging.

(An extra scarf. Not exactly a sterile bandage, but infection isn't an issue for him anyway and it's better than nothing.)

"Yes, that's quite-- quite enthusiastic," he observes to Cheerful Dancing Bone Cuisinart. "You were most... helpful. Thank you."

[skinandbone]

Metody lifts her coiling spines to knot together another head, which she ducks a little in acknowledgement. She reaches out, and gently touches Jason's shoulder; thank you to him, too. Without eyes, who knows how long she would have wandered, searching for the cave?

...not at all, actually. She would have stayed at the bridge, waiting for wolves. But now she knows where the cave is, and now her path is strewn with splinters of bone that froze off, and while those parts of her aren't going to be getting up any time soon, they are an excellent trail of pebbles for other parts of her.

Which...she could really need. She can't sigh, but there's a sense of it as she settles down on the cave floor, tired.

[personaldemon]

It's extraordinarily hard to get a sense of intent off the bone-collection; Jason cannot truthfully say he understands the full gist of the bones touching his shoulder other than the gesture is not hostile, which is good enough for him under the circumstances.

Still, the bones do seem... tired, if that's not overly anthropomorphizing them; they certainly look battered, chipped and scrapped and pitted. He knows nothing of how the entity reconstructs itself other than what he has witnessed; presumably it needs time, right now, or else it would be fixing itself as they sit here.

He finishes binding his arm as best he can.

"If you can wait here to guard against further intrusions from the wolves," he says with a nod at the open mouth of the cave, "I can investigate the tunnel beyond, and get a sense of how far it extends."

[skinandbone]

Metody tilts her knotted head, then nods and lowers it. It spreads on the floor like puddled string, and already, little ice crystals are forming on her flanks.

Yeah. She'll just...wait here and guard. Exactly. She'll stand watch.

Yeah.

[personaldemon]

Jason nods wordlessly (he thinks he's talked about twice as much in this conversation as he normally does, and that was only because at least one of them had to do so) as he pushes himself back to his feet and retrieves a flashlight from his pack.

"If I am gone overly long, there is no need to concern yourself," he says as a more-or-less goodbye before heading down into the cave.

Much better to deal with whatever lurks beyond on his own, after all, even if the bones had been-- quite helpful, really.

Better, because alone never really is, for him, and if something comes up where he needs to release Etrigan, well.... he'd much rather nobody else was around at all.