What Passes in the Dark
28th of January 2007 A.D.
As Nergui pulls you through the curtain torn in the air you find yourself not in the spectral fire, an echo of when the mansion and indeed Bianca's Velvet Room, met their end, but flooding. The waters of the lake, tainted grey with soot and ash flow among half ruined rooms open to an ever-darkening, never-pitch-black sky. The dead are silent here, silhouettes greyer still, Pompey on Lake Michigan save once in a while out of the corner of your eyes you can see one fleeing from a fire they can't escape.
They aren't really here of course, just memories barely enough to leave a cold spot on the other side. It seems a poor place to look for an entrance into hell... at least until Nergui forces a door open to what must have been the staff quarters, the wood groaning like a man in pain, only to leave behind a portal of pitch darkness and the sound of labored breathing.
Of course the worst of the predation wouldn't have happened in the mistress' chambers or her office. No matter the true nature of the Red Court most of them still think of themselves as human, they have favorites kept around for their skills or even just for their company and then there's the rest...
What must initially have been cheap pine beds barely long and wide enough for an adult their sheets oft stained red in hurried feeding now pulse like fleshy sacks contained by the box of the bed frame in a grotesque caricature of living, human hearts pulled from their chests. Yet it is not these mementos of atrocity you are here to find, instead Nergui carefully lowers himself into the water and shimmies under one of the nearest bed.
To all the place you enter dark would be like calling Arctis Tor cold, the blackness is all encompassing, suffocating not with claustrophobia as the mind might is primed to expect, but sheer emptiness. The sound of breathing, which above had only been the backdrop to the horror done in that house now grows comforting. Lydia and Tiffany are both right behind you. Alas your guide has no breath. He makes do with slow rhythmic clapping that seamlessly transitions into the sound of hooves on hard-packed barren soil, the sound itself seeming to lend texture to the substrate.
No sooner had you gotten used to walking on it that the found starts sloaping sharply upwards only to open into pits at least as deep as you are tall though every time the sound of the horse hooves breaking off warn you of what's about to happen. At one point you do have to go all the way around the rim of the pit and find that it is circular, a crater.
"Ooh..." Lydia breaks the silence, voice faint even over the communicator. "What's...?" Anoyance shifts to pity. "Careful not to disturb them, it probably won't do anything, but you never know."
Before you can ask what 'they' are your own foot hits something rounded and smooth about as five or six inches. A skull you realize at once and a few moments that it is not just one or two of them, but thousands, tens of thousands. For the first time since the four of you entered the layer you clearly are not alone. Things scurry in the dark, the sound of bone grating on stone.
"Scavengers, leave them," Nergui's voice floats back between the hoof-beats.
So for a while you walk, one hand on the pummel of your sword. Then the sounds stop, not slowly fading as they might if you simply walked away from the group of necrophages, but cut off sharply, like a wall of lead had fallen between them and you.
"We have arrived," there is something all too portentous about that voice, though not near as much as the soft screech as equine skates make contact with something at least pretending to be metal. "Do not trust the Road. Do not discount the Road. Accept that it
is but do not accept it within you."
As you take flight you hear the whisper of wings unfurling, feathered you think, crow's wings then. Shikome often take some part of the carrion bird within them, deluding themselves that they are not merely tormenting the damned, but in some way assuring the spiritual hygiene of the world. The illusion passes of course, but the marks upon the inner demon remain, mocking their previous naivete for eternity.
Lost 2 Essence -> Now at 13/15 (By Rage Recast and Hellscry Chakra)
Along the seemingly endless descent, whose sharp and unexpected turns do not seem to do more than add to the blur of the straight paths you consider what you had learned of the target of your raid. Perdition's Edge is clings to a spit of stone overlooking one of the Rifts like a enormous spider of iron and steel. Construction had begun when steam was still king and the telegraph the height of speedy communication. While the latter had been retrofired with broadband and communication lasers the power source had remained the same coal powered behemoth that swallowed vast amounts of Yin-touched rock into furnaces alight with the stolen passions of the damned, its oily smoke the perfect commingling of essence to mark the Wicked City and thus pumped throughout the Hell by the complex array of ducts and vents that had long ago replaced any semblance of natural wind.
It had seemed like Providence to find both Joe Magarac's prison and a perfect vector for the Hope Plague in the same place, and you are certainly not withdrawing your thanks to God over it, but it
does make sense, the Rifts hold the most potent Essence in all of Yomi so any Yama King would want to dig their stamp as deeply as they can into them and then make sure that power flows far and wide. And if one is in the possession of a spirit of industry and productivity, what better place than that to make productive?
Alas the eyes in your Crown do not linger upon faces enough to simply pluck the identities of researchers who work at Perdition's Edge out of the ether. But you
do know the name of one who would fit your purposes: Hunger-Weighing-Harbinger who is in London for a symposium. He likes keep up on the latest mortal research in pediatric nutrition. Somehow even the life-sucking presence of the Road still beneath you is not as chilling as that remembered implication. Putting that aside far,
far aside, there's a job to do, if you can pull his face out of one of the networks in the Wicked City without being detected it would give you unparalleled access.
Ahead you hear Nergui swerve though you do not feel the energies of the Road shift that way drawing your attention to a shape seemingly carved of the same black ice as the Road itself and thus you are able to make out his contours with some effort. He had apparently had the same idea with the skates as Nergui, but he had fallen, or more likely something had pushed him over.
Morbidly curious you reach out to touch the back of his head.
Metal/Bone/Ice. You snatch back your hand before it can claim any of your Essence in the process touching the familiar fabric of a ballistic jacket. He's only been here years not decades or centuries. The cutting winds of the Deadlands eventually grind all those so lost to dust, less than memory.
What had driven him to try to reach Yomi alone you wonder? A search for answers only the dead know? A loved one still suffering under the whip of the Yama Kings?
If you but ask it would be revealed.
Behind you Lydia too stops, her own question half whispered. "If I called you would you rise?"
"Only if you were to mighty as the move the Road entire to our will," you answer, the knowledge just now coming to you. "All whom it consumed are stretched out along it like piano wire, unresting, blind agony."
"No," she answers almost as if in a daze. "Not blind, there is something there whispering to itself in the dark, never quiet, never still, if I called something would answer, it knows me as I know it. Thief it is and I the guardian." The weight of those words is more than anger, it is
essence, a dangerous truth.
Lydia loses 1 Essence -> Talisman now at 1/2 (Intelligence Excellency)
You Regain 2 Essence > Now at 15/15 (Urge of the Forbidden)
"Thief it may have been once," Tiffany corrects drawing close. "Here and now it is more harvester of the lost. You are not strong enough, all of us together are not strong enough!"
"To pull away one soul?" Lydia challenges sharply and in a way you are glad to hear it. The Road is not something to be communed with.
"If we are found we could fail, we could die, we could lose the
package all so you could be said to have rescued one soul already twice damned."
That... that had been the wrong thing for Tiffany to say. You can hear Lydia's breathing quicken with anger and then settle in resolve. "It's not just about one soul, I want to know what this is, why does it sound like chalk on a blackboard, like ants under my skin. I need to know. If something... something bad happens you can just go ahead..."
"Sure, we'll just let you deal with the cosmic abomination that eats souls, which you just informed us is
sentient," you say with the kind of casual peppiness one would use when dropping someone off at the mall. "Look if you want to figure out what this thing is and how it works I'm hardly one to argue against it, given some of the things I've pocked, but do you know one thing that constantly went through my head as I was flying by the seat of my pants: 'Man, I wish I had something other than my pants to hang on to right now!' "
"I..." you hear her deflate. "You're right, we can deal with this later, once our quest is..." She never gets to finish her sentence as a howl rends the air, mournful-cruel, then another and another.
You lose 1 Essence -> Now at 14/15 (Empathy Excellency)
"Unfaced!" Nergui cries wheeling in place to look back along the road.
What do you do?
[] Try to outrun them
Nergui's 'horse' is three times faster than any mortal equine and you can more than match it, pick up Lydia and Tiffany and go
[] Stand and fight
The last thing you need is to be caught between these things and the servants of the Yama kings
-[] Try to keep up the pretense of being Shikome
The last thing you need is news of your coming to preceded you into Yomi
-[] Destroy them as fast as you can
If you do not leave any witnesses there is no one to report
OOC: Welp that was a long one. Hope you guys enjoy. 
