The walk back was tense. I mean FUCKING TENSE.
Paying attention to the red-gray flickering as myself, Ron, Jon, Tracey, and Mark walked back was incredibly taxing. I really wanted a nap, thankfully my MiniMap took literally zero Fortitude to do its work.
We were closer than we thought. Apparently the super-bambi attack was more important to report than bothering to finish the patrol.
By the time we finally emerged from the thicket I was feeling a bit cagey. Ron started a desperate search for Morrigan around the patios. We had to settle with Vivi, found sitting on the edge of the patio area, not much worse for wear. Did she even go on patrol?
Wait, where was Meredith? I looked around and didn’t see her. My gut twisted, then redoubled as Vivi saw me looking around. Her smile twisted… evilly. I mean, I don’t know how else to describe the faint, nasty smile that crept onto one side of her face.
Ron stomped up, “Vivi, where’s Jeremy?”
“Why Ron?” She said his name weird. I mean, weirder than she was acting now, “What’s up?”
“It’s getting worse out there, the animals are getting stronger. I gotta talk to him.”
“Where’s Meredith? Weren’t you her partner?” It seemed like a good time to ask, with Ron right here.
Vivi looked stricken, too affected, this new high-strangeness and Pookie’s warning had me on the edgest of edges around her.
“She ran off during the patrol. Let’s go get Morrigan, Ron.”
Ron froze. Vivi grabbed his arm and he looked torn between the two options. I guess Meredith had been right, he did kind of have a thing for her. I peered through Evil Eye and couldn’t really make out anything funky going on. Somewhat conversely, bright daylight made Dark Affinity more difficult to make out.
He was frozen there in indecision, I slapped a hand on his shoulder and he nearly jumped as he turned to me.
“I’ll find her and bring her back.”
I needed to get some distance between myself and whatever the hell was going on with these people. He searched my eyes and I nodded.
Shit. Meredith, the only salty person here, was gone. I don't trust Vivi at all now. Not that I ever had overly much to begin with, but my trust with anyone and everyone was sub-zero at this point. Except maybe Ron, he was alright.
We nodded to each other and Vivi started to lead him away before I grabbed her arm in a tight grip and said in a faint breath, “Have Morrigan set up dinner.”
She wasn’t jumping at my instruction, “Tonight.” I stared and tightened my grip until she smirked and nodded.
A smirk, “Where’s your knife?”
A bit stunned, my hand instinctively released and she pulled free and was off. I had no idea what to think about that girl. A stinging burn brought my attention to my hand, the one that had been holding her arm. I noticed some smokey slime and I used Will to brush it away.
I quickly made my way back toward my room. Thankfully, no one followed me. I was going toward my room, not to my room.
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The door… was impossible to open. I should have taken a skeleton key from Morrigan, that, or the, what I was pretty sure, skeleton key from suspender Jon. I formed my Will Sword and pushed it into the lock of the door then pushed a bit more into the part of the blade that sat inside the lock before it dissipated. It popped and burst the metal of the lock apart along with its internal mechanisms. I forced myself to back up as the door slowly drifted open before it slammed fully open. A hulking shape appeared in the doorway and I continued to back up.
“Hey Pookie.”
A growl, I felt the bond of our Oath and I… I don’t know how to describe the color purple because I wasn’t on acid and nor could I describe this properly, but I mentally grabbed the Oath and tossed my last bag of jerky at Pookie. At the last second his head snapped and he took it all in a few crushing bites. He fucking ate the plastic too.
The pitbull was massive, probably going halfway up my torso and overly thin, his ribs poked out and, most jarring of all, was the tutu wrapped around his waist. Wait, what?
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“Want me to take off the tutu?”
He snapped at me and I withdrew my hand,
“Alright, alright chill. I need your help.”
It took a force of will to travel the short distance back to my room with the giant-headed, massive pitty following only a couple of paces BEHIND ME, but I did it. I entered and went to Meredith’s bed and grabbed the pillow she had slept on.
“Come on.” I peered outside and didn’t see anyone or anything and sprinted into the grapevines.
I held up the pillow she had used, “Do you know where this woman is?”
He sniffed, then buried his face deeper in it and looked toward where I was pointing, outside. Then he looked back at the winery. Well, obviously her scent was inside, she had been living here..
“I don’t want to follow the scent that way, apparently she got kidnapped out here, can you pick it up?”
“Just keep an ey- nose out. It’s this way.”
I moved through the underbrush with him and once we were in I followed the vine wall around until we got near the area where I had seen her enter with Vivi. Pookie stopped and picked up the trail. I followed close behind, keeping eyes and ears open.
Dedicated huffing and sniffing picked up as Pookie circled and then started away from the winery building at a low jog. Damn, I was beat.
We paced out and a light rain started up. It barely made it through the overhang as we paced. There were bits of sliced forest critters here and there. Odds and ends mostly. It didn’t bother me and thanks to the wonders of modern overly violent media, I think people adapted pretty quickly to the new horrors of daily life. What was the hardest to adjust to was the smell. It was always the worst because smell-o-vision wasn’t a thing and corpse is a pretty distinct, horrible scent. Blood is also pretty jarring. The Affinities had smells too, in a kind of weird, indistinct way. Like Pooks said, describe the color blue. Though he could probably get a whole mass spectrometer reading from Affinities I just had vague impressions.
We followed and nothing jumped out to kill us. I like to think that it’s because I’m an animal slaying badass but more than likely it was the recent mass patrol as well as the fact that I had yet another mini-horse sized dog accompanying me. I swear to God, if I ever see godzilla kaiju-sized animals I’m going to lose my shit.
He circled a bit and then took off another direction.
I thought about why I actually cared that much to help Meredith get to Ontiveros. Was it a bit selfish? Maybe, but even if there weren’t Feat points attached to it, I still wanted to do it.
It felt kind of shitty to have your girlfriend Raptured because she was ‘so good’, and to be fair Duck actually was that good, but that I was left down here because I’m apparently a piece of shit.
Even when I had come across Ontiveros, I had been planning on dipping out and Gabriel had to bully me into helping them. If I was being honest with myself, though I wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to do so at the moment, I should have helped them from the start. They weren’t bad people, just scared and clueless. Like I had been. Like I was. I rubbed the threatening moisture from my eyes.
I wanted to help Meredith because I wanted to do something good and do it by my own choice… Yeah okay, maybe it was still selfish if it was to prove to myself I wasn’t a bad person, but a good deed is a good deed, right?
Maybe, I don’t know.
Pookie shifted course in a lurch then took an expanding circle then closed the circle to come back to my side. He sat down and looked up, only slightly since he was stupid big.
“What?”
“She’s dead?” I couldn’t believe it.
He shook his giant head,
“My knife.”
I reached out and Pookie snapped at my arm to attack me! No, actually he just snagged my sleeve and dragged my arm away from it.
I took a breath to relax, “What’s up?”
I studied my k-bar on the ground, it didn’t look trapped or anything of the sort even through Evil Eye. Though apparently that skill was upgradeable and level 1 didn’t provide a lot of use beyond being deeply unsettling when I looked at people, transferring curses, and making it slightly easier to see Dark Affinity at work. Well, actually that seemed pretty damn useful now that I was listing it out like that.
The upgrade, Eviler Eye, had helped me see others with Dark Affinity, clearly see even the tiniest threads of Dark Affinity, and probably had some other advantages I hadn’t managed to figure out. It had also clearly been a temporary thing to complete the dog’s breakfast of my Advancement Quests.
I mean, the Mortician’s words when he called me a ‘vile slave of light’ were kind of hurtful. I wasn’t all about the heavenly agenda, not by a long shot, but I also wasn’t down with the ridiculous satanic fuckery that seemingly everyone with a Dark Affinity was obsessed with bringing to the absolute most extreme conclusion.
I dug deep and burst some will through the blade and felt… something dissipate. Pookie growled and we both scattered back. A much reduced plume of greasy smoke shot out and dissipated into the air.
I had no idea, nor did I want to know what exactly would have happened if I had touched it. I poked the knife with my bat, and reasonably sure it wasn’t going to kill me now, slid it back into the sheath at my waist.
“Thanks for that-” Pooks huffed, “Can you follow her scent back?”
He paused as if he was going to say something, but decided otherwise as he brought his nose lower to the ground and started threading back the way we had come. I didn’t really trust my sense of direction.
“Fuck.”
We reached the thick hedge, the border of the vineyard itself and stopped.
“Dude, you’re definitely coming with me.”
Pookie growled,
“Shit.”
That was definitely not a part of my plan. It’s not like I couldn’t go back in there.
“Well, just hang out here and pay attention. If there is an opportunity for you to come inside… then find me and help.” I had a feeling that I was going to need it.
Pookie grunted then circled and laid down. I took a deep breath and went in.