#declan 01

who: @declanofruin

Finding spells! Fie and FOLLY if half of what she'd done since entering this God-Forsaken century was not finding spells! The book. The Ironwood women. Finding, finding, FINDING.

But now, a different sort of search, as for some days now Briar has not known proper rest - the seedling of the deathroot quivers and its brambled roots twist and wrench in her insides. It senses a scion is near - something that should, functionally, be impossible.

The door of the car opens, unlocked, and she slips in, pulling an Athame dagger from inside her shirt and holding it to the boyish churl in the driver's seat. Black, veiny strings creep up her jawling, along her wrist, and he eyes grow inky and pitch-dark until the iris glow with single, red pricks of light.

"TELL ME WHY THE DEATHROOT HARKENS TO YOU, CUR. SEEST THOU THIS KNIFE? TELL ME NOW OR SO HELP ME I WILL BRING TO YOU SO POINTY A RECKONING THAT THY MOTHER WILL WEEP RIVERS WHEN SHE SEES THE RUDDY WORK I'VE DONE."

who: @declanofruin

The Cliffsides isn't exactly the bastion of charm or service. Raf and Theo had come into it in the middle of a renovation that simply hadn't really taken, and while he's been up and down the line of rooms, first floor and second, in a desperate attempt to make it at least an acceptable level of dingy, it's almost like there's a miasma over the place that just puts a hard cap on how nice it will let itself get before something else breaks down.

It's like Sisyphus if Sisyphus had the option to just leave. But, for now, it fills the days between full moons.

Weird measuring your life like that.

Tonight though, he's kind of miffed, because somebody said they saw somebody out behind the hotel and it is interrupting his Assassin's Creed time. It's not a full moon, so, at least, initially, he's not worried about that. And he's got his little fancy pepper spray that is supposed to annoy vampires for long enough to get away. But really he kind of wishes he'd gone and gotten Theo first, but maybe he just wants to be the big brave dog for a change, yeah?

When he's about a hundred feet into those woods, the light of the Cliffside vanishing over the top of the hill he's been descending into the underbrush, he's not really expecting to see what he sees.

A white man in the bushes.

"Oh shit, that's blood!"

who: @declanofruin

Autumn feels kind of weird still, coming into Retrocity, because it has all these weird memories attached to it from the chaos of the past year, but none of them have because so stark or so etched into her mind as chasing Morgan Moss around on all fours with nothing her mind but the intent to rip her apart into more manageably edible pieces. She'd managed to avoid doing that, even just barely, but it still makes this place a particularly haunting spot on the map of her life.

She was coming in to drop CDs off that she'd borrowed to copy, but when she sees through the window just who is helping somebody turn cash into coin, her sneaker misses the step up onto the curb and she finds the ground rushing up to meet her, a fan of vintage nineties lilith fair and riot girl onto the sidewalk in front of the Arcade and Autumn into a line of parked bicycles that, at the least, cushion her fall.

"God!"

She scrambles off of the overturned pile of bicycles and starts gathering CDs up. "Shit, shit shit." She mutters as she picks them up, looking between them and the man inside the arcade. Does she go in? What is with the Clark Kent get-up? Why is he in there?!