@cervidemon || 𝔏𝔦𝔨𝔢𝔡 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔞 ℌ𝔞𝔷𝔟𝔦𝔫 𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔢𝔯
There came an abrupt sizzle, the sound of eyes frying in their own skulls, the air itself seeming to hiss, as Miranda froze, just as much a deer in the headlights as the stag-demon in front of her. She was not so foolish to think that she was caught for any reason other than trespassing, not this time, especially not in a place so keenly aware that she did not belong.
Thankfully, despite the open window she had come in through, Miranda was not a thief. Even if she had seen this place only in the numbers that denoted it as significant to the consistency of the element of time here, she really did not worry about taking anything of note here that might not count as her own. Nor was she here to break things, and quite to the contrary she had been sneaking about with all the intention of going wholly unseen. This was a landmark for her to hide her own treasure, the cache from her living self to make sure she would not be without options - and wholly she had no urge to strike a hornets’ nest.
But, well... She was still a trespasser.
Still clad in the blue sundress that she had died in, she stepped back, the hesitant pace of a frightened animal worried that sudden moves would only agitate this other. The demon, red and tall. As sure as her own body rang of that which Should Not, writhing around her like a stain onto the senses, creeping decay and befouling poison, the ravenous maws of eternity that all creatures knew as the Undoing - she could read it, the reflection of it, on him. As much as her body distorted, one moment standing there as innocent, and yet as the eye shifted even slightly across her body, she contorted, at once with four limbs, and then with none, and then dozens, and then hundreds, she could tell this other, this other who belonged to this territory, to this Happy Hotel, tasted of power, of that with weight that pulled others along.
In place of a heartbeat, of maybe alongside the many thousands, her form, her given shape, grew blurrier, the edges hard to tell where they ended worse than normal, worse than given. Her instability reacted with the fear, the wariness, the boundaries of her body’s dimensions impossible to know, eyes of a shifting number, impossible to tell, all staring across. Miri didn’t know the limitations of her body yet, the full power of this new, misshapen form that contorted with the ritual of the power she had poisoned herself upon until her soul no longer resisted - and she most certainly did not know how powerful this demon, who stood there in front of her, was. If there was a worse time to pick a fight - then she could not think of it.
Only barely did she resist running. Turning to flee immediately. Under skin and scales her body warped like it was about to break open, to spill forth whatever lay beneath, what little control she had in keeping herself together starting to slip. Her voice, that voice that she used to speak with using living vocal cords, was almost drowned out by the growls, the hissing voices of hunger and temptation and consumption and waste and corruption that shared her words, at once the multitude her and then not, just as impossible to perceive as her body itself and similarly made all the worse by that trickle of fear. “I shall be... departing.”
