awashlogs | Event Six.

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Event Six.

If you see this hairy creature
Your first choice should always be to run
Otherwise you had better hope
You have silver bullets in a gun.

he full moon hangs brightly over the Town, hovering so low that it almost feels as though you could reach out and touch it. It should be comforting.

But as the howl of wolves fills the air, it's anything but.

There are werewolves on the prowl, and their target is very clear -- the Town won't be able to last without your help.

Welcome to Awash's sixth event log, everyone! Further information on this event can be found here at the OOC post.

You are welcome to start your own posts or logs for this event as well. If there are any questions, please ask them here. Thank you!

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[Being reactionary to surroundings at least gives Damian a decent first impression of her.

The way she brings up her hands, though, he can tell that she doesn't fight the same way he does. She's holding her hands wrong--for melee fighting. She isn't holding them wrong to be a metahuman, and he keeps that in mind. Naturally, he dodges the question because... he's a Bat.]

Are you looking for the wolves, or are you looking for something else? You're going to find the former if you keep walking through the forest like that.

[She's already found one? Sorta. It's not night, but he doesn't at all trust this place not to send the real wolves out whenever the need arises.]

I'm pretty sure that if they want to find me, they're going to whether I like it or not.

[Interesting. She definitely knows a dodge when she hears one — mostly because she does it so often herself that she's just naturally attuned to when she experiences it in other people.

So it seems like Literature Kid here is both smart and possessing of a healthy dose of paranoia. That's interesting. Those are two qualities she always likes to see in a person. They're also two qualities she's always wary of, in a person.]

And from what I've seen of them so far, they don't exactly strike me as subtle.

[Well, she isn't wrong. Self-aware. That's good.

Slowly, Damian rises to a stand. The medieval-ish clothes altered by him into something more Eastern have been straightened and fix again with an almost military-like precision. Everything is pulled up to cover as much of him as possible.

But they're dirty and frayed and torn. He looks like he's been in a scuffle except for the fact his face and hair and hands are clean. He must have washed. Just not the clothes yet.] They can be. They're intelligent.

But they're also hungry.

[You can learn a lot about someone by the way they stand. Not that she's any sort of expert in it; her experience with it has been less about training and more about repeated trials by fire, but you learn things when you watch people.

She doesn't miss the way he's got his clothes arranged, tattered though they may be. She lives the vast majority of her life letting her too-large cloak swallow her up; seems as though he's letting his clothes do the same thing. And he's taken the time to wash his face, to clean up, so evidently that's something he cares about and will put time into. Not the sign of someone who's accepted an existence in the same dirt and scuffle that his clothes would reflect.

There's a lot about this encounter that has warning bells sounding off in the back of her head. Too many juxtapositions of things that shouldn't be going together, but are.]

Sounds like you're speaking from firsthand experience.

[She's yet to put her hands down.]

[Even though he stood up, Damian doesn't make any movement toward or away from her. He doesn't raise his own arms, but his stance is vigilant, shoulders square. It seems as if he's waiting to see whether or not he's going to have to defend himself from her instead.]

You're fine in the day. The wolves only come at night.

[He doesn't have the Robin cloak, the one that would aid with its high collar and consuming length. At the edge of the shirt fold, a dark, raw bruise is peeking out and up toward his neck. He can't hide it completely. The wolf was too big, and he was too small under its large mouth.]

Aren't you supposed to ask me what big eyes I have?

Aren't you supposed to be wearing my grandma's dress?

[So. Looks like they're both starting to lay their cards out on the table, then, huh. Silently, she mentally runs through her course of action if all this goes south in a hurry — fire first, then flight; drive him back and then run. It's not the greatest of plans, but then, it never is. She doesn't need brilliance; it just has to get the job done and keep her alive another day.]

...That looks like it hurts.

[Which is also her way of making it known that yeah, she sees that bruise.]

It didn't fit me. [If the call-out bothers him, he doesn't show any indication other than the set of his jaw. His eyes keep watching her, but he again makes no motion to go after her or run away from her. She's perceptive, but he can't hide the curse forever. Sooner or later, he's going to be seen.] I've had worse.

[Apparently, he's cleaner than his clothes because he didn't want it to get infected, not that it necessarily would. He washed because he was bitten. Because in the mornings, he wakes up in the woods covered in blood and dirt and fur.]

I assume you're searching for ingredients for a cure.

...Maybe.

[She flicks a glance over her shoulder, relaxing just a fraction; she's willing to take her eyes off of him momentarily, at least, which is progress.]

I don't really know what it is I'm looking for. It's like I just know there's something out here I've got to find. ...Which means something's definitely fucking with me, but since I don't know what it is, I figure I might as well just play along with it until I do.

[Hmm.]

Is that why you're out here, too? Or just sequestering yourself until someone else comes up with something?

[Now that all that shuffling and skeptical dancing is out of the way, they return right around to where they began, and Damian is less dodgy and wary this time. A miracle.] The wolves don't come in the day, and the change doesn't happen in the day.

But I'd rather not take any chances. [He's still pretty sore about not being able to help with the cure because he's too busy being worried.] So I'm staying in the woods until the rest of you find a cure. [It at least gives him the chance to explore said woods some.]

The town could be sentient. I think everything is, forest included. I don't think you're being lied to about feeling something here.

Does it get stronger the further in you go?

All right, well. If you start feeling the urge to howl and need a time-out, let me know and you can cool off in here.

[And now, at last, her hands move; she makes a practiced, sweeping sort of motion that incorporates a particular twitch of her fingers, and in the air to her left, a door-shaped portal opens up. It looks somewhat less like a swirling vortex of cosmic energy and more just like an open passage that leads into a darkened corridor to nowhere.]

That's where I've been putting the wolves I've been catching. It's empty right now, so you won't get any nasty surprises if you decide you have to take a breather inside.

[He's posing an interesting theory, though — that everything here is, in some capacity, aware of what's going on. And so she reflects on the weird anxiety she's been feeling, trying to catalogue the way it tugs at her.]

...Not "further in", exactly, but I think it's leading me somewhere. But it's not like following a beacon. More like...every so often I get a blip on the radar, but a lot of the time I'm stuck just wandering until I do.

[Everything else is thrown by the wayside for now.

Damian's face just barely ignites with an intense curiosity. His eyes quickly search the portal, the length of it, what's inside, how she pulled it about. Holy shit, why are there so many people here with incredible powers, but the town won't budge an inch when it comes to escape?

But her portals aren't like Elizabeth's. This one is dark, a void. He's reminded of Raven.] You can make pocket dimensions.

What do you mean, "it's empty right now"? The things you put inside of it--what happens to them? [The whole town and surrounding woods smell an awful lot like magic, but Damian hates magic, and he refuses to believe there isn't some kind of logical explanation.

The same is true with this: why call it magic when it's just metahuman powers?]

[Interesting. So not only did that get his attention, but he immediately identified what it was she cast — so it's not the fact that she can use magic to begin with that's piqued his curiosity, but what it was she decided to do with it. Hmmm.]

Not dimensions, plural. Just one, and it's always the same. It's finite, too, even though I'm not positive how far it actually goes. Just that there are walls, eventually.

[To assist in indulging his curiosity, she walks over and sticks her arm in, then pulls it back out again.]

It's like...there's a space there, and I open up the door to it. I've been shoving the wolves inside. Helps keep them off my back.

[She shrugs a little.]

As far as I know, things that go in are still conscious and everything, they can move around within the confines of it. They just can't get back out until I open up the door again. Pretty good for holding things I want to carry around with me. Not bad as a temporary time-out, either.

[Just one is better than many, but not by much. Being stuck in a pocket dimension is awful, honestly. Like being in a giant, dark ziplock bag.] Eventually. [He doesn't sound very pleased with magical theoretical physics.]

You can't talk about it so casually when it sounds like you don't know the full extent of what it can do. [If he were more self-aware, he'd apologize for being such a Batman about it.] Even if things going in are conscious and can breathe, you don't know what the repercussions of time are with being in there and being out here.

[It's a good place to hold wolves, though. Will he admit this outloud? Maybe in a minute.]

Have you ever been inside yourself?

[This is probably a bad time to point out that she does know what some of the long-term ramifications of going inside the thing are — namely that if you throw something in there, wait two weeks, and pull it back out again, the time that didn't pass inside will catch up with it the instant it comes back outside. Namely, if she were to leave a wolf in there for a few weeks before letting it back out, it'd leap out and probably instantly die of dehydration.

But fun and interesting ways to kill people with portals isn't really a great topic for water-cooler talk with a new acquaintance, so she's going to maybe just not mention that. Yeah.]

I'll talk about it as casually as I want to, because it's not like somebody bothered to sit me down and teach me how to do this shit. Or like I asked to be able to do it to begin with.

[She shrugs.]

Sure, I've been inside. It's a good hiding place. Kind of creepy to seal yourself up inside it, but creepy's better than dead.

[SUMMER NO THAT'S WHAT HE'S WORRIED ABOUT WHAT THE HECK!!!!]

That isn't an excuse. You should know what you're capable of doing.

The wolves are one thing. It's an easy way to subdue them so they don't hurt anyone. But they're wolves. You're altering space-time.

If you start putting people in there, time could pass more slowly or more quickly. When they come back out, years could have passed on either side. So don't put any of us in there, even if we're bitten.

[FUN AND INTERESTING WAYS TO KILL PEOPLE!!!]

I think you're making it sound a lot cooler than it actually is.

[Hmmm.]

If you want to experiment with it, though, I'm not really opposed. I wouldn't mind knowing more about how it even works, myself. Figuring that kind of thing out just...hasn't exactly been a priority before.

[Suddenly, his face sets into a mixture of skepticism and interested caution. Testing the limits would be satisfactory, and he's well acquainted with thinking he's a great (obviously) candidate for testing.

But he's also thinking about what happened with Elizabeth. It isn't exactly the same necessarily, he knows. Does he want to take that chance? Having the portal collapse and the town spit him and his father back out isn't half as bad as the terrible visions. The punishment.] Fine.

Not currently. My... situation is an unstable variable in testing. It could skew the results. Are you sure you've never sent anyone into it for a long time? Someone human.

What are we defining as "a long time", here? A day? A week? A year?

[She shrugs slightly.]

I sure hope I haven't kept somebody jammed in there for a year. Though I guess if I did the werewolves probably got him when I threw them in there. Anyway, I'm screwing with you, the answer is somewhere on the spectrum of "probably no to no". Depending on what we're calling a long time, obviously.

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Event Six.

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