(This is a continuation of a previous post: A peaceful moment in Heaven)
Krof had been with her up until the finale, concern in his blue eyes as they blinked steadily during her outburst. But when she mentioned the reactor, he flinched, lips peeling back to bare his teeth at the mere mention of the concept.
"This is not possible," he stated flatly, pronouncing the words carefully around his teeth as he always did when he felt his message urgent. "Has never been done. Last time crew was on reactor level..."He stopped speaking, the thought cutting off. Made hypervigilant by the memories of whatever did happen that day, his eyes began flicking around the room, roving from wall to wall and then up to the ceiling.
"You are crazy if you try, demon or not."Krof rolled his eyes, an oddly human gesture. He didn't react to the accusation of fearfulness with anything like wounded pride...more like the familiar tediousness of a question he'd fielded several times in the past and was growing weary of.
Wrath replied with exasperation. "Why? What are you so afraid of?" She quickly abandoned the idea of trying to think with reason, overtaken by a sentiment of urgency, anger and despair. Her wings flapped almost imperceptibly as she pursued. "Besides emptiness and severe disrepair of this ship, I have not seen, nor felt, any danger. Besides, if it is really demons that you are mentioning, they owe me respect in any case." Her tone was firm. It was the tone of a queen, a character of high rank, someone who had dealt with disrespectful subordinates in the past and was not afraid of hurting people's feeling when she had to. "I am sure we can manage. And I will make sure no one hurts us." She didn't mention she didn't have control over all demons, though.
"Has nothing to do with fear. Everything to do with common sense. Afraid of dying? No. But will not die without selling life for high price. Last uprising...took all crew, every weapon. Most still died." He considered her, tilting his head and looking at her sideways as he though. "You hope to find what there, exactly?"Although he had said nothing on the matter, it seems he didn't consider her assertion of dominance to be very likely.
Wrath raised an eyebrow, disgust in her eyes."Why are you comparing me with these weaklings?"
She didn't know who she was talking about, but everything was telling her that they couldn't be otherwise. She also didn't seem to care about the Skoll's feelings at all.
"Do you doubt of my ability to handle demons?" Or maybe he did not trust her? "It is my only ticket back to where I belong. I do not belong here. Not in a future where no demon exist anymore anyway."She was still persuaded that no demonic entity was inhabiting the ship. She didn't see any, she didn't feel any, and who knows how much time the Skoll had been wandering here alone. Maybe he had started to loose his reason. Krof snorted through one nostril.
"Are plenty of demons existing here, trust me."He gestured at the walls with his paws, indicating the ship in general. He turned his gaze back to her, and the conflict was very evident in his eyes. His nostrils flared again, drinking in her scent, his ears flicking when she said "I do not belong here." It seemed to catch his attention, focus him in some way.
"Why not? Why can you not belong here, now?" He turned to his shed armor and began the long process of donning it again, first stepping into the form-fitting plugsuit that the autosurgeon had cut through, and he'd since stitched back together. Almost inaudibly, he added: "...With me."Wrath didn't react to his last two words, either not sensible to it or because she didn't hear the Skoll murmuring. But she definitely looked moved by what the Skoll had said in his approximate English. She had not considered it this way. Staying on this ship? She shaked her head in disagreement almost immediately after considering the idea. She could not put her very own lair behind her. She could NOT forgive Moloch. She COULD NOT FORGIVE THE LOSS OF HER TREASURES. THAT SKUNK! She was boiling inside, her mind protected by a wall of wrath.
"I don't care about them. They will bend to my will as every other one did." It was not entirely true that every one of them did, but she was deeply convinced no entity on this ship could do her harm. "Let's go when you're ready."She watched the wolf looking creature put on his armor, a strange sensation floating in her heart as she was staring at his muscles bend while he was putting on his gear. She had a strange urge to palp them, to push her nails into his fur, to... She realized she'd lost her focus. She looked somewhere else, avoiding the Skoll's eyes until he put on his last piece of equipment.
On the way there...
Krof armored himself with the methodical motions of long practice, slipping segments onto his limbs, strapping the plastron around his chest, staring off into the middle distance as each new piece performed a function check on itself and sent a report to his entoptics. The process illustrated that either Skolls were designed to mesh with their armor, or vice versa. He seemed more at ease, more complete with it in place. Several minutes later he clamped his helmet down over his ears and engaged the neck seals.
"First, back to Deck Three. I will need weapon."His voice resonated slightly through his helmet speakers, and then he paused. Did he just agree to go? How did that happen? He grounded his fangs together with dull anger. He did not seem to notice, or correctly interpret, her appreciation for his form while he had been unarmored.
Wrath: "Hum..." She seemed hesitant for a while, lost in her thoughts. She shrugged. "I guess it won't harm if we are armed indeed." She raised her hand to her left shoulder, grabbing an invisible weapon a first time, then a second time, until she realized she didn't have it anymore. "Darn. Seems I'll have to go without a way to defend myself." She looked around, trying to find something, but failed at it. She pointed at the door leading to the exit with resignation. "Shall we? I don't remember the way."She could finally put back her eyes on the Skoll, a little embarrassed by what just happened. What had been this sudden sensation she had? Especially at that moment? She followed the armored creature out, a little bit confused.
Krof led the minor expedition with another weapon drawn - some serrated blade of black metal sized for his bulk. Technology had placed some sort of enhanced cutting edge of it. Leave it to humans and their pets to always fall back on the old standbys of their primitive, bloodletting past. The trip was uneventful until the moment the Skoll, dropping into the four-legged stance he had used in their first encounter, rounded the corner in the confines of the tunnel where he had met the demoness. And stopped in his tracks. Seated on the cold, freezing metal of the ship's arteries was a small, human-seeming girl, wearing a tattered and smudged white dress, seated crosslegged as she toyed with the Skoll's abandoned weapon. Its considerable weight sat across her lap. She hummed to herself as she scratched writings into the rifle's scope housing with a long and rusty nail, long shavings of paint corkscrewing off the metal.
Encounter
Wrath saw the little girl from afar, her vision obstructed by the Skoll's gigantic body; she could only see the head of the creature. Curious, but also suspicious, she careful approached Zhukov's back and slowly put her hand on his shoulder. She could now see the whole picture. A creepy situation, most would say. Not a weird one for the demoness, just a little more than unusual.
"An Archeri. But how...?"She could not understand why she had not felt it way before entering the ventilation shaft. Did her feelings abandoned her for some reason? She focused on her senses for a moment. No. Nothing around her. But she could see the little girl straight in front of her and she could tell it was a demon. A sneaky one moreover. And due to its abilities, its distance of detection was covering probably the whole ship. So why couldn't the demoness feel its presence? And why in hell was an Archeri holding a weapon that could contain iron? Wrath assumed it was made in another futuristic material.
Wrath: "I'm surprised such a being is haunting these confined spaces", she whispered. "Maybe I can try to get rid of it." She didn't move though, waiting for the Skoll's answer.The girl let the pair sit there motionless for an uneasily long time before she finished her work on the Skoll's weapon and tossed the nail aside. A whisp of smoke trailed from her hand to the flung piece of iron as it rattled away, and she looked curiously at her own hand, a charred black weal slashing across her palm where the nail had rested. Abruptly, her eyes flicked upward to the Skoll, and she smiled brightly at him. Her expression widened...and split. Lips went rubbery and peeled back impossibly wide from a circular mass of needle-fangs, pointing inward like a lamprey's maw. Her teeth flexed in a yawn, settled to point back down her throat once again, and her mouth closed. A little girl again, the sawtooth horror of her throat no longer visible.
"The Exile and the Survivor," she gurbles wetly, her voice tinged like a small child's, but as if that small child was swallowing a gulletful of raw meat. "What an entertaining little Tarot deck you're putting together for yourselves."
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| The Archeri, by Maldoror2112 |
Krof did not take his eyes off the 'child' to look back at the demon at his back, but he replied.
"Yes. I think you had better." The fingers of his gauntleted paw flexed around the hilt of his frac-knife, the rest of him remaining still.Wrath tightened her grasp, holding Zhukov's shoulder firmly. This Archeri didn't look like the ones she used to know. And they surely didn't speak to a duchess this way. What was even more odd was that self-inflicted wound the demon just had made to itself. What kind of craziness was going through its head at the moment?
"Move along, Archeri. You are blocking our path."She didn't attack the demon, trying to avoid a fight if she could; especially without a weapon. How the little thing knew she was exiled was another problem, but she didn't want to tackle it now. Her goal: the reactor. The Archeri cackled in an atrocious way.
"You have no power here, demon."As it said that, it suddenly disappeared. Half a second later, it reappeared on Wrath's side, violently biting on her hip. The demoness yelled in pain, both surprised and horrified, as she grabbed the demon with both hands, pushing her away with an extraordinary force. It bounced on the wall, then used it to propel itself back on the black winged creature.
The whole thing happened in less than 2 seconds. Wrath had been caught on the wrong foot; she was defenseless as the Archeri attacked again.
Krof abandoned his decision to let Wrath handle the situation as soon as the child-thing reappeared in their midst. As soon as the Archeri slamed itself free from the wall to hurl itself at the off-balance demoness, he planted one paw on the floor for stability and lashed out with one foot, intercepting the not-girl with an armored deck boot. The snarling form flied backward yet again, and he lunged after it. His armored forearm crashed down to pin the Archeri's throat to the hull, keeping its fangs at bay, while his other paw arched high to bring the blade down...there was a sickening, gory belch as the pinned Archeri vomited a fountain of black blood onto his faceplate.
The child's neck contorted to the side, vertebrae snapping with the effort, and the point of the knife slammed into the metal where her head was, throwing sparks. Countering, Krof pitched his soiled helmet forward and slammed his visor into the small demon's face, eliciting a crunch of broken teeth and facial bone.
Wrath did a step backwards, hardly recovering her balance, but when she did, her eyes were no more of that faded gray-ich color. They were of an intense dark blue. The tattoos on her body were glowing slightly, as if they had mythical powers. But she didn't use them or they didn't grant her anything. Rather, she plunged forward at an inhuman speed, her arm passing above the Skoll's own, her nails ripping the Archeri's body apart. Her hand penetrated the demon's body where the heart was and the demoness closed the fist on it, ruthlessly and fatally crushing the entrails. The body squirted black blood all over her face and body, and the Archeri soon stopped moving with a fainted moaning. An instant passed, and the demoness pulled her arm out of the dead body. She rested her head on the Skoll's arm, her right hand on the hip.
"I.... I knew this demon..."She was breathing heavily, trying to absorb everything that had just happened. She had felt a connection when she had slain the demon; it was formerly part of her own army, back in Hell.
"What happened here?" She felt helplessness. "Did everyone go crazy? ....aaaaaarrr...." Red blood was pouring out of her wound. She didn't know if it was serious. But it did hurt.
Heal
Krof kicked the savaged body away after Wrath removed its heart, the corpse rolling to a halt in the corner in its gauzy white dress, left to leak inhuman organs onto the deck. There was a hiss of vented oxygen as Krof broke the seals on his helmet and lifted it off, dropping it on the ground to fume and sizzle, attacked by the archeri's caustic blood. He subconsciously leaned into her touch, reaching out to cradle her in the crook of his arm, his free paw digging through his harness for his trauma kit. He had one for himself and one he carried for humans - he hoped, in this case, that the latter would work for her as well. As he teared open a sterilization packet and sprinkled antibacterials onto her wound, he hooked his boot under his discarded weapon and pulled it in close, propping it up against the wall.
"Let me see."He reached down with his claws to pull aside her ornate loincloth, exposing her hip, gently probing through the blood and Archeri spittle looking for the extent of the wound. As he did so, he glanced to the side, noting that his ammunition counter was flashing '000'. The significance was stored for later. For now, he moved quickly, wiping away blood with sterile pads and applying wound glue to her hip. He worked quickly, trained in primary battelfield medicine, but also sped by an underlying urgency. His own blood surged with the desire to keep her safe, with a primal alarm that she had been wounded. His own hip burnt with a sympathetic mirror of her injury, a pain that was not entirely in his imagination.
Wrath let out a sigh of relief as Zhukov cleaned the wound and bandaged it. She surprisingly felt reassured by the presence of the Skoll. Her mind was hurt, her body was hurt, even if the latter was less concerning. She was slowly realizing her loneliness on this ship, suddenly put apart from her "beloved" ones. She had a strong mind, but it had been affected by the environment a lot quicker than she had expected. Or was it by something else than that? She didn't have an answer. What she knew though, was that she felt awkwardly safe in the Skoll's arms... She winced in pain as Zhukov was finishing the first aid process.
"Did you get your weapon back?"She was confused by the mix of feelings that was bouncing in her heart at that moment. Hate. Anger. Relief. Comfort. Despair. Sadness of loosing one of her kind. Lo... No, the word that came in her mind couldn't be right. She discarded it and looked for Zhukov's weapon, and found it.
"We should head down to the reactor." She realized she had only been talking about the reactor, and the weapon, and had a sad and confused laugh. "I'm sorry. Thank you, Zhukov. I'm fine."She looked at the wall on her left, staring at some uninteresting metal plate detail. The Skoll could not see it in the darkness of the corridor, but she was blushing.
