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Spooktacular Extravaganza: When Chipmunks Attack!

As the party carries on, the storm outside has worked into a frenzy. The wind howls and bellows and the water at lasts breaches the top deck. Beneath the waves, the shadows move, converging upon one single point and suddenly...

BAM!

The Black Tide shudders at the impact, water spilling through the cracks made in its hull. A leathery appendage pushes against the damage, seeking entry before it is finally swatted away in favor of something a little more dramatic.

Another BOOM rocks the boat and finally its hull is breached. The tentacle slithers in and begins to crush whatever it can wrap itself around.

As passengers right themselves, and food is quickly cleaned from the floor and walls, Rowe turns to Iseul and Mica, her face red and eyes wild, pointing sharply at the door. "Well? What are you waiting for, you bastards? FIX THIS!"

When they are gone, Rowe snatches up her goblet and drains it dry until the very last drop. When she sets it down, the chipmunks attack.

((The chipmunks are enormous! As they swarm into the Pourhouse, passengers will be scooped up and packed into their cheeks or stuffed into their fannypacks! Have fun with that. IMPORTANT MOD EDIT!!! We totally forgot to mention that any passenger successfully nabbed and taken away by a chipmunk will be automatically dropped. Where are they going? Nobody knows! If you would like to drop your character, here's your chance!))

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This is fucking preposterous.

Lily yelps, grabbing for the chipmunk's paw and ripping it away from her face. Cute or not, this is getting annoying, and she's sick of it--so the next thing she does is grab the chipmunk by the elbow and pull.

The chipmunk's arm pops out of the socket audibly, and it topples with another pained squeak.

The rodent lies on the floor, staring up at Lily with one wide, moist, tearful eye. It is in so much pain, Lily. Unfathomable amounts of pain, inflicted by the little girl's own two hands.

Won't you be its mercy angel, Lily? Will you end its suffering?

This chipmunk has a shattered jaw, two broken wrists, a few broken fingers, and a dislocated arm. It's not healing, and it doesn't look like there are any chipmunk doctors in the area. Lily frowns, brows knitted together pensively. She can't listen to the chipmunk's pained squeaking anymore, so she rips the leg off of a table, returns to the chipmunk, mutters a quick "Sorry," then bashes its face in.

It is not a quick death. The chipmunk remains conscious for the vast majority of the beating, before it is finally able to succumb and is enveloped in death's sweet embrace.

Thank you, Lily, sweet child.

A few years ago, Lily might have cried. Now, she just heaves a heavy sigh, raising a hand to wipe blood splatter off her face. Does she feel absolutely fucking terrible? Yes. Is she gonna stop beating the shit out of chipmunks? Probably not. Not until they're all dead or gone, at least. She takes a breather for just a few seconds, then raises her table-leg weapon to take on another chipmunk.

"Lily!" The voice is clear and loud over the chaos. Oddly un-stammering, when the source turns out to be none other than a disgustingly blood-and-spit-splattered Bennett Marrow, running over, tripping over gore and viscera and various puddles of saliva. "Lily, are-- are you all right?"

Well, if the giant rodent at her feet isn't a clue....

Many pairs of eyes watch the exchange between them.

Holy fuck! At a glance, Lily thought all that blood was Ben's, and that he was seriously injured--but it looks like all of that blood and spit is from a chipmunk. Truth be told, Lily doesn't look much better. Bloodied all over, clumps of viscera clinging to her hair.

The chipmunk lying dead beside her no longer has a face, and its arm lays at a disgustingly unnatural angle.

"Are you?"

Ben glances at the corpse and swallows, but doesn't flinch.

"If it's any-- any consolation, mine, uh-- mine ended up looking about the same." Suffice to say, no, no, he's really not all right, but he's here and he's going to keep smashing things with furniture until he and Lily and Geralt and anyone else nearby are safe.

There's an attempt at a smile, but it never quite makes it to the full expression.

Geralt approaches soon after Ben, and unlike the two others he seems relatively settled and calm, though he definitely had more than he'd like to drink before fighting monsters. He won't puke now, anyways, he's a stronger stomach than that. Geralt casually wipes the blood from his butcher's knife on his pantleg and looks between the two of them.

"I didn't expect to see either of you on the field of battle," he says, though it's without malice. A young girl and a scholar. Strange companions. "But it's good to be surprised."

Well, ~~cat's~~ dog's out of the bag now. Lily shoulders her weapon and looks from Geralt to Ben and back again. Maybe this is a bad time for her to tell them that she's kinda-sorta used to do shit like this for a living. Literally five minutes after she became conscious for the first time, she was fighting giant monsters.

... Except they weren't cute chipmunks.

"We can talk later."

Ben tries to think of something witty to say, something dashing. He's drenched to his elbows in gore and has a vague urge to cry.

The words aren't coming.

He hefts his chair over his shoulder, takes a deep breath through the nose. He was intending to wait, but... well, a Chipmunk had taken the stillness to mean compliance, and Bennett lurched forward to close the distance and swung the bar furniture all in one move, striking hard.

He's half here to protect Lily, though it's pretty obvious that she can take care of herself.

Geralt is less upset. He's tipsy, actually, and he finds a beer someone set on a table and has remained, miraculously, upright. He holds it in his left hand and boots the closest chipmunk in the face before stabbing the meat carving knife into the thing's skull. He pauses and hops a few steps backwards so he has time to chug down half the beer, because the world has gone mad, and another beer won't matter either way. He may as well have fun with this, because there's either an end to the chipmunks or there isn't, and he'd rather go drunk because why the fuck not, death is coming and maybe via chipmunks.He looks at Ben and flashes the werewolf a sozzled grin.

"You're nippier than you look. Lily! Watch my back and I'll take yours!" he calls, and does her the battlefield honour of turning his back on her. It's how soldiers say 'we're friends'. In fact, he tests it by letting a chipmunk run at him from behind. Will she bother? Or is she only concerned with herself? Maybe Geralt's testing for humanity and if he needs to slay a monster, even now.

In the Deep Underground, nobody worked together. Nobody was supposed to work together. They were trained to be self-sufficient, so that's what Lily became. Still, she would try to save whoever she could that was lagging behind, though her success depended solely on her state of mind. Was she Lily, or was she so far gone she could hardly tell friend from foe?

But Master Oogway taught her to control her inner demons. She can ignore its whispers and think for herself.

She sees that chipmunk charge towards Geralt, and she springs into action, leaping up to swing her club at the chipmunk's head. The sickening crack! as the chipmunk falls is all she needs to tell that this thing is done for. She checks its cheeks and fannypack for passengers (none!), then turns to take on the next chipmunk.

... These things have pretty flimsy bones, but that skull was hard enough to crack her weapon in half. Shit. Lily looks around frantically, but there's nothing close to her.

Ben is nearby, though, and it looks like he's close to a ton of potential weapons.

"Ben!" she shouts over the cacophony. "Throw me something! Anything!"

Anything. Anything! You would think that "anything" would actually constitute ANYTHING, but Ben's not exactly immediately optimistic about his ability to throw something that would be a suitable weapon. To his immediate left is a tall bar table with a bowl of punch, some cups and other cutlery. The ladle from the punch bowl isn't going to help anybody kill anything. He could throw her a knife, but what if she missed the catch, and--

"F-fuck it!" He kicks over the table to knock all of its contents to the floor, grabs it by the feet of the pedestal, spins in a wide arc and heaves it in Lily's direction. It actually closes the distance, and Ben's able to turn back to grab for another weapon of his own.

The bad news: his chair had been moved.

Worse news: it had been moved by a giant chipmunk that was now not more than a foot away from grabbing him.

Rodent fingers latch onto one of Ben's skinny wrists, and he tries to pull free of the grip with his free hand. He adds a foot to get some leverage, kicking at the beast's chest. This could have worked, had he been fighting a one-armed chipmunk. Considering the fact that the beast had two arms, though, it grabs Ben's foot, throwing him off balance with a canine yelp of surprise.

He slams into the ground, his head hitting with a resounding whack against the floorboards. The world goes white, and Bennett Marrow falls still.

Edited 2014-10-28 16:50 (UTC)

Lily covers his back, and that lets Geralt know a lot of things about her. It lets him know she's not a total berserker and she has some control over her powers. It also lets him know that she won't let someone she doesn't really care about (him) die with witnesses watching. So she's at least rational and capable of human-seeming decisions. He still has to decide what to do about Lily, and he hopes she turns out to be okay, like Ben. Killing a monster in the shape of a little girl would be painful, and she seems perfectly fine, monstrous powers notwithstanding.

Geralt looks over in time to see Ben slam to the ground and the Witcher curses. He drops the empty beer bottle and wades over to the unconscious werewolf's side. A chipmunk attempts to drag Ben away by the feet, but Geralt stabs it in the chest and the thing screeches as it expires. The Witcher rolls Ben over and it looks like the werewolf isn't dead, just unconscious. Good that it wasn't worse.

"We should get out of here!" he calls to Lily, and he looks up at her. "Ben's down, and I'm worried. He took a crack to the head. He needs water and to lay still."

That was all the medieval medicine that Geralt could offer a comrade with a headwound: laying still, darkness and water. Medieval medical technology was relatively crude when it comes to head injuries.

Lily catches the table Ben tossed her and uses the momentum from the throw to smash it into a chipmunk. The chipmunks are huge, but not huge enough that Lily can't send one staggering. She finishes it off by bashing it over the head with the table, and once she's sure it's dead, she looks to Geralt.

Ben's down. Fuck.

The chipmunks are pouring in, and it doesn't seem like they're ever going to stop. Lily doesn't tire easily, but a constant stream of giant rodents will exhaust her eventually. Still, she's certain that she could fight long enough to cover Geralt while he hauls Ben to safety.

"Get him out!" she shouts. "I'll cover you!"

Bennett winces a little when he hears Geralt shouting above him, but he's a little confused as to why the man isn't speaking French. Most of the people in that hospital had been Francophones, right? 'Cause. Montreal. Lots of French. He remembers getting knocked out when that big dog-thing tackled him to the ground, and it bit him, right...?

Wait. Ben's eyelids flutter as he struggles to sit up at all, the din of chipmunks and passengers and sliding tentacles coming back around. He can't quite get a handle on what's going on around him, but he's at least aware of where he is, for the most part. It sure as hell isn't Canada.

"Montreal was ten years ago," he says to himself in a quiet voice, lost in the chaos.

Ben was babbling, which was both a good and a bad sign. The good part was that he had wits enough to talk. The bad part was that he lacked the wits to know when and where he was. Geralt grunted, bent at the waist and slung the werewolf over his shoulder. Being a mutant (and used to hard labour besides), Geralt found Ben's skinny weight easy enough to handle. Even tipsy.

"Let's get you out of here," Geralt muttered and stepped over chipmunk corpses and the scattered wreckage of the party towards the door. Once there, he turned back and made a sharp whistle with his teeth.

"Lily!" He called. "Ben's safe! Come guard us while I examine him!"

And Geralt stepped through the wreckage of the doors as the ship began to stabilise. The frown didn't leave his face, though. Ben was hurt.

"Fucking shit," Geralt swore. "Let's hope your lycanthropy is the type with healing, my friend."

Lily takes down one last chipmunk with a table leg in the eye, then turns and rushes towards Geralt and Ben. She stays alert, ready to combat a swarm of chipmunks--But as the ship stops shuddering, the chipmunks run. Lily stands in the hall among the debris, a fragment of wood raised like a weapon, tensed and ready to fight as she watches the chipmunks flee one by one.

When they're all gone, she lowers her weapon and drags her feet all the way back to Geralt and Ben.

She hasn't had to fight for her life in a long, long time.

"Is Ben okay?"

This isn't Montreal, this is that place. The... the Black Tide. He cracks open an eye right as Geralt heaves him over his shoulder and he groans a little.

"S-supposed to heal. Shitty time to, t-to get hurt. Faster at the moon." He's speaking slowly, trying to make sure he's understood. He feels like he's talking with marbles in his mouth, and his sinuses feel like someone shoved cotton up his nose and threaded it into his brain.

It doesn't hurt anymore, at least.

Oh. Oh, that's Lily. He gives a thumbs up, though he's not sure if she can see him or not. Wherever he is. He's not even entirely sure if he's upside-down.

"He's a werewolf, so he should heal up fine," Geralt says, but without any malice in his voice. Ben is a monster (since he's a werewolf), but he's not a malicious one, and while Ben has killed... he's either very, very good at pretending to be harmless or he's just genuine and scared. Geralt leans towards the latter at this point. He's seen no evil in Ben, and less in Lily--though his Witcher suspicion tell him he shouldn't let anything that's possibly a threat get near the peasants, the non-fighters.

But is she a threat?

Lily reaches out a hand to touch Ben's face. The look in her eyes isn't monstrous. She defended Geralt. She's perhaps a mutant like him, and mutants aren't necessarily evil. Again, Geralt hopes that he won't be compelled to fight Lily. He likes her, too.

Geralt adjusts Ben's head and passes a finger back and forth to test the other man's tracking reflex. The head tilts back, then forward and--yup, Ben's eyes stay fixed on an object when tilted. Geralt can't possibly know why that's such an important sign, but all he knows is that men whose eyes roll around in their heads after a headwound almost always die. Geralt breathes a sigh of relief.

"He'll be okay. He just got knocked dizzy. Didn't you, Ben?" Geralt says, patting Ben's shoulder. "Proved himself a real man today. And you, Lily, the worth of any warrior, man or woman."

Edited 2014-10-29 02:24 (UTC)

"Thanks."

Lily sits down cross-legged and leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees so she can take a breather. She finally gets to sit down for the first time in--How long were they fighting? How long was she beating the shit out of chipmunks? She doesn't even want to know. Lily just wants to go back to her room and take a Zeshat-damned nap.

"D'you know why those things were so huge?" she wonders. She props her chin up on her hand and watches over Ben as he remembers how to think. "And what did they even want?" She pauses then, rubbing at her face with both hands. She is absolutely covered in chipmunk blood. They all are. Fucking gross. "And why were they grabbing passengers?"

"Pro'bly f-fucked up something again, but I'll be fine," he mutters to Geralt, trying to pat the man's hand on his shoulder and just hitting his shoulder instead. Well, that probably looked stupid.

He listens to Lily's concerns and pushes his glasses up into his hair. He can't see through them, anyway, and they leave a near-perfect ring of clean skin around his eyes. "We... could maybe. Maybe ask Chase."

Chase, you know. You know, the guy? He winces and tries to think again. Why can they ask him? Oh! Crew. He's crew.

"Wait, shit." Ben tries to sit up, and actually gets pretty close to vertical, though his arms are shaking under his slight weight. He looks around, very obviously unfocused. Not having his glasses on doesn't help, either. "What-- wh-what about the others? Anyone... anyone else like me?" What was he? Oh! "Anyone hurt?"

"They were enchanted rat-creatures," says Geralt, like that explains everything. To Geralt, it kinda does. Why is something screwed up? Magic. That's the usual explanation for everything unpleasant or dreadful in his world. "They were kidnapping them, as far as I could tell. I don't know if they actually escaped with anyone..."

Geralt squints down at Ben, who is muttering like an amnesiac. Hopefully there's no brain damage. Geralt helps Ben to sit up, one arm behind his back.

"Easy. Who's Chase? And the others are fine."

Spooktacular Extravaganza: When Chipmunks Attack!

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...the keywords for this icon are "and these cracking bones make noise" and CHIPMUNK BONES

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