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airmidtheawakened · 6 years

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The Hunger, Part 1

Here we are, darlings, at the beginning of a truly new tale of adventure and discovery! I hope you’re ready because hooooo boy does it get gross. We’re talking Doctor Moreau-style shenanigans. If you’re squeamish about that feel free to back out now. You have been warned.

The night started like many other nights in our new home: with the decision to be lazy and not cook. Normally I like cooking. I do big, family-style meals for the cabal most nights. Gotta make sure they stay healthy and well fed, ya know? I make sure everyone eats well and eats smart. But SiSi was out training with her master and it would have felt weird eating without her. Apollonia had set up a infiltration/combat drill with paintball guns. It sounded totally sick when SiSi told me about it later. She learned how to change the trajectory of bullets mid-air, which is a pretty cool trick if you’re not on the receiving end of it.

Oh, and I’d had a theater audition that day that went really, really fucking well and I wanted to celebrate. I hadn’t found a proper job yet (not for lack of trying) and my bank account was starting to look pretty bleak. The prospect of a paying show was really awesome. It was a musical, and while carrying a tune isn’t my specialty, they were looking for people with dance experience for the background characters. The choreography was pretty complicated and they wanted to make sure the actors could handle it.

Needless to say I blew the competition out of the water. Because I’m just that awesome.

So Saki, Lipsy, and I found this nice little Korean place just a couple blocks from our house. It was a nice spring night, so we walked over and gorged ourselves on delicious kimchi, japchae, and bulgogi. Well Lipsy and I gorged ourselves. Saki is a little more reserved when it comes to mealtimes. I’m surprised we don’t embarrass him with the amount of food we shovel into our mouths.

That said, he should really eat more himself. I try to pack as much nutrition as I can into the meals I make for him, but it doesn’t really work when he doesn’t ever eat full portions of things. I worry about him sometimes. It’s not like he’s starving himself, but he’s not getting as much as he should either.

Don’t tell him I told you all that. He’s kinda sensitive about the whole deal.

But I digress. The food was amazing and we left the restaurant feeling pretty damn good. But it was not to last. Oh no, darlings, it was not to last…

We’d barely walked a block when Saki and Lipsy saw something sprint from across the street into an alley just ahead of us. We’d gone out pretty late, and it was super dark out, so they really didn’t get a good look at it, but a few seconds later the sounds of a metal trash can falling over and a woman screaming smashed the night’s quiet to pieces.

We ran to the alley, me leading the charge, to see what was up. I used a really cool spell to give me cat eyes o I’d have better night vision. The others aren’t so fond of it. They say it makes me look creepy. Well let me tell you, having big ol’ reflective peepers is *nothing* compared to what we found in that alley.

Even with my cat-o-vision I could just barely make out the scene at the far end of the alley. There was a male figure hunched over the limp form a of a woman, laid out on the ground. I ran to her defense but it was too late. Her chest was ripped open, her heart missing, and her skull was cracked like an egg. The man was picking bits of her brain out and *eating them.*

He turned to me as I approached, and I could see for the first time that he wasn’t truly human. His mouth reach all the way from ear to ear and his gums were lined with multiple rows of shark-like teeth. Bony ridges that looked almost like gills ran down either side of his neck. “Ugly” doesn’t even begin to describe this guy. His eyes were human, but feral and unfocused.

He needed to be put down.

I ran in for a punch, clocking him across his elongated jaw. It didn’t do much more than make Shark Boy angry, though, and he swung at me with sharpened claws - because of *course* he had claws! - that left a nasty gash in my cheek. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t heal up later, but it hurt like a bitch. Saki tried to throw one of his tarot cards at it. They were kinda like ninja stars, with razor edges. He missed. But that’s okay because Lipsy sent Edgar in for the attack, and boy did Edgar attack. If I had a dollar for every killsteal Edgar has pulled on us through the years I’d have a hell of a lot more dollars than I do now. He tore Shark Boy’s jugular straight out of that ridged neck. Shark Boy expired mere moments later.

Lipsy raised some shadows over the alley so we could investigate without anyone seeing what was up. I took pictures of the scene before we messed with anything, just to be safe. Lipsy then used a spell called Death Mask to make the dead lady’s injuries look less horrific. They were still bad, but said “rabid dog” more that “cannibalistic animal-human hybrid.”

While that was up, I started looking over Shark Boy’s corpse. Now I’m thinking this must be some sort of life magic at work. I looked like a much more advanced version of the spell I used to give myself cat eyes earlier. But when I gave the body a once over with my mage sight there was no trace of life magic on him. Not a one. It made no sense! Creating a creature like that shouldn’t have been possible without it.

Even creepier, Lipsy said neither the woman nor Shark Boy left lingering souls behind. Maybe they passed on immediately, but it still struck us as kind of sinister.

Saki tried to see if there were any strange ripples in the time-fate continuum in regards to either corpse. He didn’t see anything to suggest the two of them were connected, but he did manage to find Shark Boy’s wallet in the trash. At least we thought it was his. The license photo inside was a pretty solid match for everything on Shark Boy that was still human, but we really couldn’t be 100% sure at the time.

Now you’re probably thinking “Wow Airmid, that seems like a really crazy hard problem for newbie mages to deal with!” And I will tell you that we were thinking the exact same thing. Which is why Saki called Fisher to come help us. I politely excused myself from the alley to call Sinopa to come pick us up when she got a minute. Which was the smart thing to do because I would have just gotten angry at how monumentally unhelpful Fisher was.

He took Shark Boy’s corpse away for the Consilium to study, but he said since Quincey is our turf now that we had to get to the bottom of the mystery on our own. Can you believe that? I mean, I understand that it was our responsibility, but to not offer any help or guidance whatsoever? Ugh he’s such a douche.

SiSi showed up not long after Fisher left. She was all sorts of freaking out, thinking we started some sort of trouble. But wasn’t our fault! We just happened to walk into it that time. She still wasn’t happy with us, but oh well.

Before we left for good, Lipsy finally found a ghost lingering around who could tell us what happened. It was the soul of a janitor in the building the dead lady worked at. Apparently she’d been leaving work through the back when Shark Boy attacked her. Lipsy helped the janitor pass on fully as a reward for helping us. Our Lipsy is such a sweetie.

Fast forward to the next morning.

Lipsy was totally out of it. He’d had super terrible nightmares because of what we found. SiSi and I skipped our morning workout to sit with him until Saki got up. I offered to make him breakfast but he just wanted coffee. He probably should have eaten something but I didn’t push the matter. We try to be gentle with him when he’s super stressed out like that.

Eventually Saki came down for him and they went upstair together. SiSi went to turn on the TV while I called my master. Cuz see, if we were gonna be investigating strange monster people, then I would probably need to miss my lessons. Papa Bear had me on a very, very rigorous schedule and didn’t take kindly to me showing up late or playing hooky.

So I call his house phone - because God forbid he give me a cell number - and Arathnos picks up. Because God forbid The Nemean answer his own phone. I asked to speak to my master and Arathnos handed the phone off. Papa Bear asked if I was calling about what was on the morning news. I hadn’t watched the news yet, so he told me to and I motioned for Sinopa to turn on the TV.

The morning report was, obviously, about the attack last night. Apparently there had been a second one in another area of town. Papa Bear said my cabal was to treat the attacks as our number one priority. I mentioned possibly having to skip lessons and he said that was fine (thank God!), then told me to make sure to write up a full report when we figured out what was going on. And then he hung up on me. Because God forbid the Nemean say a proper goodbye to his apprentice.

I mostly kid. I’m not nearly as ungrateful now I was then. You’ll find out why next time, though, because right now I think I need a break. The next bit is gonna get heavy and I need to be prepared for it.

See you next time, darlings!

#IC #Session recap #Mage the Awakening #Mage: the Awakening #Onyx Path #World of Darkness #NWoD

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