longestnight_old | Better Late Than Never

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Better Late Than Never

The yetis and elves had been extremely welcoming when they arrived back at the Pole. As soon as they shook themselves out of their shock at how battered they'd looked, they'd immediately brought out the blankets, spare clothes, first aid kits, food and drinks. Cocoa was pressed into people's hands whether they wanted it or not.

"Blughbloghughblug?"

"Out of nowhere. In broad daylight, no less," Katherine said to one of the yetis, holding her half-finished cup of hot cocoa in her hands. "It goes without saying that this is very, very bad."

"Ooghughaugh. Blughooghablorgblurgh?"

"Oh, well, that may be because they're still tethered to their worlds to a degree." She looked to the others. "He said someone named Wonder Woman, a Mr. Stark, and some undead fellow that had stayed behind at the Pole disappeared while you were meeting with me. I suppose that supports my hypothesis about the trans-dimensional tethering."

It had been a little while now since they'd returned and there was still no sign of Jack and Bunny. It was obviously bothering Katherine. In between her idle chatter with the yetis, who seemed to regard with her great fondness, she was pacing back and forth through the area that had been made into a "common area" while they'd been away. It was comfortable, full of plush red couches and cushions and tables for them to sit at to eat. Board games in many varieties had been stacked around.

The yetis were on standby, ready to get anything they needed, or show those who hadn't seen the Pole yet around.

"They should be back by now. I don't know why they're not back by now. Maybe the lindworms gave them trouble. Perhaps they had to take shelter in the Warren."

She chugged down her cocoa like someone else might nervously down a shot of whisky and then went for a refill.

[ooc: This is just for a few minutes of post-fight mingling and then the return of Jack and Bunny, then it'll be free-threading after this.]

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The crystal ball around Zac had evaporated the moment they touched down. Nico wiped her cheeks, which only made more streaks of her make-up -- she'd found herself inexplicably crying after that burst of light from the abandoned amusement park.

The spellform of Karolina hovered at her elbow, unmoving and blank now that there wasn't anything to fight. It made Nico's heart clench.

"I wish you were really here," she muttered. The spellform didn't even twitch, and Nico dismissed it like a soap bubble. She accepted the blanket and the cocoa and a plate of cookies from the Yeti without fuss.

Katherine held out an embroidered handkerchief. Oddly, instead of her initials, the initials N.S.N. were what was embroidered on it.

Her hand was trembling just slightly, but she seemed to be trying to hide it.

Nico hesitated, but took the handkerchief.

"Thanks," she said, subdued. "I'll wash it and get it back to you."

She wasn't going to say anything about the way Katherine's hand was shaking. Instead, she stuffed another couple of cookies in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed them down with another swig of cocoa.

"Do we...what do we do while we wait? For them to get back?"

"We wait, we hope, and we - we try desperately to not think about how badly we need them to come back. There's not much else we can do. If they're using Bunny's tunnels to return, we have no way of searching for them."

They hoped because if they didn't come back, who was left? Katherine dealt in information. She studied musty old books in dangerous places, like hidden cities, long abandoned, she gathered information from dangerous beings in dangerous places, she even spied on the enemy at times.

It was all dangerous, potentially deadly, and she was terrified every moment she did it. She'd learned a very long time ago, from very brave friend, that it was okay to be terrified while doing brave things - that was what made them brave.

But that friend was gone now, and bravery wasn't the only thing necessary to win a war. If it was down to them now, just one scholar and a group of people ripped unceremoniously from their worlds, new to their powers - with no Guardians to guide them - they didn't stand a chance.

"Do you play checkers?" Katherine said, sitting down across from Nico and looking at the board games stacked on the table next to her. The goose fluttered up next to Katherine and curled up under her one arm, more like a cat than a bird.

Edited 2013-07-20 07:10 (UTC)

"Not well," Nico answered in response to the question about checkers. "But yeah, I play."

She devoured another cookie. "I could cast a spell," she said. Whatever spiritual mojo she had now was good with healing, but it wasn't like she couldn't break the skin again. "I could teleport them here, without grabbing anything else along with them either, so it wouldn't compromise this place as a base."

Katherine shook her head as she got out the board and pieces and started setting up.

"Bunny's tunnels are magically...complex, is the word, I suppose. They exist only in potentiality when he's not using them - as something that isn't truly physical unless he wants it to be. They're more of an idea of tunnels, you see, imprinted into the earth, and his will is what opens them up, lets himself, anyone he might have with him - lets the outside world - access them. So, in a way, they're his idea. Right now, because the belief of the children is at an all-time high, he's vastly powerful by our world's metaphysical standards and that means his control over them is currently absolute. His idea of his tunnels is that they are impenetrable by anyone but him. Since they're not physical, that means they require magic to access them and open them up - and that makes them impenetrable by nearly all other magics but his own."

The board was set up. "White or black?"

"Ugh," Nico grunted in acknowledgement. "We're asking the Yeti for a radio for his hard-to-pin-down furry butt, right? I'll enchant that."

She picked black, naturally.

"That's a possibility but we're not going to be able to do it until we talk to Bunny about it. He'd still have to adjust his concept of the tunnels."

She went on, "So much is tied to ideas and concepts and belief - there are rules to our world just like there are rules to checkers. One of which is that black goes first."

"I can be very persuasive," Nico said. Of course, most her experience in that involved screaming at other teenagers, not at centuries-old six-foot rabbits. "It's stupid not to have a way to contact each other. We didn't, but we didn't have a workshop full of toys either." And Karolina had sent them messages when she was in another freaking galaxy, so semi-imaginary tunnels in the Earth? They'd deal.

"There are always rules," she replied, moving her first piece. "But I'm a witch. Even if they can't be broken, they can be manipulated."

"As soon as Bunny gets back, we can have the yetis provide something. He'd know what would work best at bypassing the magic of his tunnels. At the very least, it would be good for anyone here that wants to get out there to have a way of communicating with the others."

Katherine's eyes kept straying over to one of the many clocks, to see how much time had passed.

"Probably not as soon," Nico mused. "After we stuff him and Jack full of restorative cookies or whatever. But I'd bet that they wouldn't let any of us go out without an escort, and there's more of us than there are of them, so they might just have to suck it up and deal."

Nico wasn't watching the clock, for pretty much the same reason Katherine was. She didn't want to know how much time had passed.

"So. What are fearlings? And lindworms? Or, more specifically, what hurts them? Blunt-force trauma and light seem to do okay for the fearlings, is there anything else I should know about?"

Howard's having a panic attack.

He doesn't know that that's what's happening, but he does know that with the way he feels right now, he can't be around a group of people casually decompressing from the fight and drinking cocoa. His vision is blurry, dizzy, his chest is tight, he feels like he can't drag breath any further in than the back of his mouth. So as soon as Katherine finishes translating for the yeti, Howard gets up to discreetly leave - and gets as far as behind a chair before he decides that he'd better sit down before he falls over.

He sits behind the chair, hoping no one's noticed him, breathing into his hands and trying not to pass out.

They could go back at any moment. It's happening already. Any second now he could open his eyes and be back in the FAYZ, feeling hunger gnawing away from inside his very bones again, back to looting corpses and brewing moonshine in a bathtub to get him and Orc enough 'food' - a generous term for whatever mayonaise packets, cat food, roots and fish skins they can take off the market - to get to the next day. Back to breaking open cars to finding dead bodies, to burying children, to the smell of smoke and shit and vomit and the inability to chase away the dark, because all the candles have been used, all the flashlights have been confiscated.

He knows he has to go back and find Orc, but he can't will himself to do anything more than dread, and the conundrum leaves him wishing his brain would just turn into dead sludge rather than trying to split in two directions.

Opening his eyes and seeing the board games and the nice floor of the North Pole doesn't help him.

"Fearlings are... spirits, in a sense. Shadow-creatures. Weak against light, damaged by physical force. They have no other obvious weaknesses. They're mostly mindless, although some of them tend towards more intelligence, they're mindlessly obedient to Kuk, and while they'll kill adults, they mostly target children."

Moving a checker piece, she sucked in a deep breath. " - Which they don't kill. Instead, they try to make them become consumed by their fear so that they can convert them into more fearlings. There is no way to turn them back again after, and they don't even manage to...retain individual form. They become part of the collective shadow-mass, constantly ripped apart and shaped into many more fearlings. That's why they targeted the other younger members of the group so fiercely and why they were trying to scratch through the shell of ice Jack put over his skin to fight. They need physical contact and he's still got something of the spirit of a child."

Edited 2013-07-23 05:29 (UTC)

"Do you know where they draw the line between child and adult?" Nico moved one of her pieces, lips pressed together in a thin line. "I mean, I'm going to light them on fire anyway, or teleport them into the center of the sun, or gather them up into a bag and make Kuk choke on them, but it'd be nice to know which side of the kill-or-corrupt line I'm on."

She pushed the image of Molly getting torn apart into little shadowy pieces to the deep dark hole in the back of her mind where she kept the thoughts she never wanted to think about.

"It's less a clean break in age and more something spiritual, from what we've gathered. There have only been a few accounts that we heard of, and they've raged from age four to nineteen. In Jack's case, he's seventeen physically and over three hundred chronologically and they've still gone after him. I suppose it all comes down to a sense of innocence, of wonder."

Was there a difference between a sense of innocence and an innocent? A few weeks ago, the Gibborim had counted her as one of the latter (or so she'd gathered after she woke up), but that was before the Witchbreaker. Nico chewed her lip and tried not to wonder what could happen to a four year old for them to lose that status.

"Okay. Lindworms?"

The noisy footsteps began moving toward his hiding place -- not stomping, but definitely someone who was deliberately making noise, someone trying not to be sneaky. Nico gave the chair a wide berth, coming to a stop once she's probably in Howard's visual range. Probably, because she's not looking at him. She knew he was freaking out, no one wobbled off to hide behind a chair to hide because they felt okay, but she has no idea how to deal with it. She and her friends hadn't set out to become super heroes, but they'd had super-villain attack drills along with earthquake- and fire-drills. And, you know, if she went back, she wasn't going back to someplace horrifically awful.

She crouches down, still not looking at him, and shoves a plate of cookies in his direction. It's the only thing she can think of.

Howard hears Nico's footsteps and glances to see her shoes - he recognizes her by the boots. At this moment, he just wants the chair to swallow him whole. He kept his head totally cool during the actual fight, but now he's floundering in the aftermath - it's embarrassing. And scary. He knows Jack told him he's more resilient as a guardian, but it doesn't offer much comfort when he feels like his chest's caving in.

After a moment, he reaches over and pulls the cookies closer. His voice is weak and wispy. "Thanks, My Chemical Badass."

"Shouldn't we watch for them?" Mami worried aloud. She'd taken the offers of healing and food, recovering her energy as best as she could, but this was no time to be playing games. If the two elder Guardians really should have returned a while ago, they were likely to be severely injured when they returned.

If they returned, she thought with a sick twist to her stomach.

She swiped a blanket and took to any window she could find. Any place to look. Anywhere to listen. A telescope? A door? She'd do it. From here, watching and waiting, she could be better equipped to help.

And she could think as well. Mami thought of the worlds beyond the stars. Of the young magical girls in training who were waiting for her. Of the citizens in so much danger. So many other heroines thought only of themselves, of their own benefit.

She never could. She carried far too many sins to be able to afford avoiding a chance at penance. And this world, these children? They were her next chance.

Edited 2013-07-23 22:47 (UTC)

"Wingless dragons. Very serpentlike, with a poisonous bite. They're intelligent and quite malicious. There aren't many of them left but they're dangerous when they're willing to work together and right now they've allied themselves with Kuk, foolishly believing It will follow through on granting them the power Its offered them. They tunnel under the earth and while they can't breach Bunny's magical tunnels, they do make it so that their own magical tunnels can block the way. They've used that tactic more than once to force him to surface somewhere where they and the fearlings have set up a trap."

Katherine moved a checker piece, hopping over one of Nico's.

"Unfortunately, while there aren't many benevolent myths still free to help the Guardians, there are plenty of malicious ones free to ally themselves with Kuk or otherwise cause harm. It has been...discreet in Its true aims to many myths, and to the more malicious myths It's trying to ally Itself with, It has made it seem as if our warnings are just propaganda."

Edited 2013-07-24 03:24 (UTC)

Jack and Bunny returned with no more warning than the floor opening up and a shout for help.

Bunny had to lean on Jack, clinging to him for help getting out of the hole. He'd powered across the world, around lindworm blockades to get them back, and it was as if the last of his strength had finally checked out at safety's threshhold. He barely had the presence of mind to close the tunnel behind them - not so much because he was winded, but because the pain was making it hard to think.

A huge, black thing, half like a tick, half like a bulging, oozing tumor, dug tooth after tooth into his flank as it grew on his blood - and something of him less material than blood.

Dimly, he was aware that the new myths were nearby, and that if he voiced the pain he was in, it would only scare them worse.

"Fire," he choked out, too agonized to spare the breath to shout. "Somebody - "

As he called for help, the parasite erupted a long, spindly leg tipped with a jagged, barbed sting. Bunny caught sight of the sting whipping out to strike, and he pushed Jack away harshly, rather than let the thing gnawing him to death strike. The sting, robbed of Jack, bit into Bunny's shoulder instead, the shoulder he landed on as he fell to the ground without Jack's support. The pop as he landed was definitely the sound of a dislocation.

It was hard to see beneath his thick fur, but things were spreading underneath his skin from the many-toothed parasite's mouth, popping his skin from the muscles beneath them, bursting his veins. But when he looked up again to search for help, one of his bright green eyes was suddenly red with blood, and a warm red trickle dripped from one of his ears.

The noises coming from him were no longer words - just the strangled sounds of someone accustomed to enduring pain, but beset with an agony nobody - not even an immortal myth - could survive for long.

Edited 2013-07-25 05:26 (UTC)

Jack was injured as well, though not as badly. The cloth of his hoodie was marred with jagged cuts and it was soaked with blood that had seeped from them - as well as some that might have been Bunny's. One sleeve looked like it had been ripped off entirely, and where the ice coated his skin, there were gouges and cracks stained with red, frozen over, where their enemies had managed to scratch through the protective ice over his skin and cut the skin underneath. His face was just as much of a scratched up mess.

Jack did not have the self control Bunny had, he couldn't contain his fear over seeing something so horrible, and they could hear his terror and anguish as he screamed:

"KATHERINE!"

He was practically hysterical.

"I think it's a type of fearling, what do we do?!"

Katherine's eyes bulged wide.

"My God."

She raced over, jumping right over one of the couches as she did it, waving over the yetis, who bustled around like their furry butts were on fire, getting medical supplies out of - seemingly - nowhere.

They didn't have much, given that the Guardians all healed so quickly, but it was good to have things for the more serious injuries to hold them over until they'd healed enough to be okay. They'd learned early on - the hard way - that they should be bettered prepared.

"Do as Bunny said and get a torch!" she called to one of the yetis nearest the fireplace. "Quickly!"

Once the bubble popped, Zac kind of just...fell into a pile/puddle and oozed out of the sleigh slowly. It took him about a minute to get himself back together, and once he did, he shook his head a bit before turning toward Nico.

"...thanks for the, uh. Container. Sorry if I caused any undue stress in the process," Zac says in a quiet tone - he'd jerked around a fair bit at first before he finally settled down.

Molly was already worried, since Bunny and Jack had taken so long to get back. Oh, she was actually pretty good at not showing it, because back home, if she was worried and nervous, everyone else would be trying to make her feel better and just reiterating to her how worried and nervous they were, so she tends to feign indifference or distraction or whatever.

But the moment she heard the sounds of Bunny's rabbit hole opening and he and Jack emerging, she was on her feet and straining to see if they were okay. It didn't take more than a couple seconds to verify that no, they were not okay. Bunny's being eaten by something, Jack's panicking, and Katherine's shouting for fire... and Molly does the only thing she can think to do in such a situation.

"Nico!" she shouts at the top of her lungs, turning to spot her friend and sounding pretty near terrified. "Do a fire spell!"

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Better Late Than Never

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