RP:It's Hidin' Time

Part of the For All Time. Always. Arc

Summary: Juuuuuust when they thought the situation had maybe passed, a door opens and kidnaps Khitti and Brand.

The Tranquility, Cenril Wharf

Khitti || It’d been days--weeks even!--since The Incident™. That is, the incident with the door. And then the other doors. And the various other versions of Khitti and Brand, besides Khitt and Annette. Like that really hot vampire-Brand and--. Anyway. -That- incident. And not all of the other incidents that typically happen to the two of them. Ignore those. -This- incident, however, was driving Khitti positively batty. Totally unlike all those other things that happened that also totally didn’t drive her nuts. Nope. This one, however? Well, for a while there, she was waking up at three in the goddamn morning, much to Brand’s dismay, and went to check literally ALL the doors in the apartment now. Of which there was more thanks to the new addition of the third floor. Open, check the room, shut. Open, check the room, shut. It went on like that until Khitti was satisfied. She was satisfied, but was she Khatisfied? Nope. It had started to frustrate her, that this doorway to other doors didn’t open again. When it was clear that it wasn’t happening at three in the morning anymore, she started checking other times of the day. Khitti checked the apartment when she was there. The Tranquility during the days they spent there as well. She even went so far as to check all the guild halls that she frequented. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Well, today was no different, as she opened doors and shut them. Closets. Bedrooms. Washrooms. The kitchen and dining room. -Nowhere was safe-.

Brand was hiding behind one of the doors, waiting. It was a wonder he hadn't pulled this crap sooner, really, given how long Khitti's paranoia had been going on. His plan would either startle Khitti into stopping or earn him one of Khitti's infamous right hooks. Maybe both, actually. Maybe a shadowflame strike through the ribcage. Wait... why had he thought this was a good idea again? Welp, too late now. Khitti was opening the door he'd spent the last several minutes lurking behind. There was nothing else for it now but to light himself aflame and give his mightiest "GRAAAAAAAAAAWR!" with his fiery arms waggling spookily in the air above him. Gotta commit to the bit.

Khitti || That morning, Khitti had drawn her daily tarot card, something that she’d started a while back after finding that tarot deck in Fog Forest with the planisphere. The card she got? The Fool, reversed. Which meant ‘Thoughtlessness, foolish choices, reckless actions’, etc. She should’ve seen this coming. We may never know who the fool really was here as Brand got what he wanted. Khitti opened up the door saw a flaming Brand-monster, screamed bloody murder, then promptly punched him right in the face. Yes, he got one of those right hooks. RIP her vows, I guess. And then she slammed the door in his face and just stood there, trying to process everything. Wait… was that? No. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be that stupid. No, wait, sometimes he was that stupid. Ugh. Well, whenever Brand opened up the door, he’d find Khitti with her arms crossed and that Mom Look™ on her face. The irritation wouldn’t last long though before she’d sigh and summon up a bit of shadow-ice to put on his cheek.

Brand 's mighty roar was cut short as Khitti's fist connected with his face. Summoning a string of curses, Brand snuffed out his flames and cradled his injured face in his hands. Ow. Ow ow ow ow owowowow. Damn, those right hooks still ... packed a punch. Wait, was he really punning at a time like this? Yes, yes he was -- if only in his inner monologue. Anyway, he'd open the door back up soon enough, allow Khitti to Mom Look(tm) him, and accepted her shadow-ice. "Well, I won't say I deserved that, but I will say I probably should've seen it coming. Are you gonna keep doing this door-checking thing for the rest of forever?"

Khitti sighed again. “No…?” There was definite hesitation there, but eventually followed it up with a somewhat firmer ‘no’. “Look, you can’t blame me for being paranoid. That was nuts with a capital N.” She pulled the ice away, letting it melt away into nothingness, and eyed his cheek. Pulling him forward lightly by the chin, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, putting a bit of that healing magic of hers into it to take care of whatever bruising it would’ve left, leaving a bit of warmth behind. “Can’t do anything about your bruised ego though,” she said with a smirk. “What -should- I do then? If not keep an eye out for… whatever the hell it is that’s coming now?”

Brand shook his head. "I don't blame you. But I don't think this is actually helping, either." He pulled Khitti into the room he'd been lurking in -- an unoccupied crew cabin -- and shut the door behind them both. The room was sparsely furnished, but there were chairs enough for both of them, a table, a bed, and a dresser. Brand threw himself into one of the chairs with a sigh. "If or when this stuff actually comes... we'll be ready, you and I. I don't think we've ever not been -- fighting like our lives depend on it is just in our nature. It's the others I'm worried about... Annette. The kids. They don't need this chaos that's coming. And I don't know how to keep it from them any more than you do."

Khitti || “Well, for starters, I don’t think Dominic’s gonna be all that concerned. The kid got kidnapped and set his captors on fire, as well as the Shadow Plane itself, so. I don’t think we have much to worry about there,” Khitti said with a shrug. “But I am concerned about Annette… and Khitt is too.” She finally sank down into the other chair, moved it closer to Brand, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I guess it’s a good thing got a hold of some of Viera’s magic. We might need it for more than shapeshifting and turning Dominic into a chicken. I don’t want her to have to fight though, but… we might not have a choice.”

Brand looked up and away, a sign that he was internally conversing with Annette. "She's still a part of me," he said after a while. "I think, if it really came down to it, Annette would be more than capable of surprising us all. But I'd like to prevent that from becoming necessary in the first place." He paused a while longer, lost in thought. "You've got your portal magic. Shadowstepping and takin' us to the Shadow Plane and all that. These doors we found that opened to -- what do we even call them? Other dimensions? -- well, maybe they work on a similar logic. You think maybe you could create a spell that blocked that kind of magic from working in certain areas? We could at least create safe places at the apartment and here on the ship? Maybe collaborate with your enchantress friend again, if you need to?" It had been a while, but Rachelle was probably still in her same old house doing her same old, same old. Probably. Maybe.

Khitti put a hand to her face and rubbed at her eyes. “I’ve got access to books on the divine, the arcane, -and- the natural. I’ll find something. I don’t know if I should bother Rachelle or not though… She was not really the same after Larket. Last time I saw her, for Dominic’s bracelet, she told me she quit. I don’t want to push her into magic again. That wasn’t fair of me last time. It’s why I never went back to her for adjustments.” She sighed. “At what point do we ask for help? I don’t want Meri to worry again, like she had before. I know she’s got a lot going on now--she’s engaged now. And then there’s the Adventurer’s Guild. The clan. Her gallery. And whatever else she does. But, I don’t want to do that again. It wasn’t under our control before, but it should be moreso now. Hopefully.”

Brand || "Well, I guess that depends. How much do you think this is a 'just us' problem? I mean, we should probably at least confirm with others that no one else has seen anything similar, aye? Who knows, this problem could turn out to be much, much bigger than us. And if it -is- another 'just us' problem, well... at least we'll know."

Khitti shrugged. “Well, it’s a ‘just us’ problem in that all those doors led to ‘just us’, and either ‘just us’ trying to kill people or people trying to kill ‘just us’,” she said with a smirk. “So, who knows, really. The only problem with telling Meri is how does one say ‘hey there might be some trouble coming soon via a bunch of doors opening to a bunch of alternate universes containing a multitude of me and Brand in various forms and not all of them are great like Annette and Khitt’ without making her head spin so much that she needs an exorcist? Because that’s what explaining Onyx and the situation with Viera, and Annette and Khitt did to her.” Khitti side-eyed the floor. “I suppose we could hope for the best, in that a door will open when she’s around and she can actually experience it herself this time and I can just be like ‘Tada!’.” She waved her hands around a bit, like one would when they yell ‘tada’ or ‘surprise’.

Brand grinned. "I like that plan. Tadaaa!" He waved his hands around, too. "And then one of them tries to literally rip her head off, we burn it to toast, and go, 'hey, see, we warned you they were bad!' Great plan. Love it." Despite the dry tone of his voice, this was actually -not- sarcasm. "That still leaves the question, though, of what we do if we don't get lucky. If it happens again and she's not around, or maybe it never happens again but we're watching our backs waiting for it for the next eternity. 'Cause, I dunno about you, but I'm really tired of this. The whole... waiting part. Was never good at it. Would prefer to face things head on, deal with it on -our- terms." He frowned and rubbed a thumb against his stubble, lost in thought for a moment. "Dunno if we'll get any choice in that, though."

Khitti fingergunned at Brand when it was obvious he liked her plan. But the hilarity of it all didn’t last long when he voiced his dislike of waiting around for things to happen to them. “So, we just keep doing what we’re doing. Khitt finally opens his restaurant. The four of us take care of the kids. You do your captain-y stuff. Annette continues making the best braids I’ve ever seen.” She shrugged then got up off of her chair and wandered to the door, “I mean, honestly, what -is- the chance these doors will actually open? I’m sure it’s fine. See?” Opening the door again, she’d find herself staring at a blue horse and several extremely weird types of centaur, instead of, you know, the inside of the ship. The blue horse seemed to be singing about frustration tears and Khitti couldn’t help but understand exactly how the horse felt. After a moment of nodding along with the horse’s song, she slammed the door shut and stared at Brand. “You saw nothing. That didn’t happen. That wasn’t a singing horse that completely understood my feelings.”

Brand immediately lunged to open the door Khitti had just closed. There was nothing, just the ship. He closed and then opened it again. Ship. Again. Ship. Again. "What in the frak?" Brand murmured, and shut the door once more. "Okay. It's fine. This is fine. It only happened once. Maybe it won't happen again. This is fine, right? It's fine." He opened the door again. Beyond it, he found nothing but shadow -- shadow and an elk's skull, with emerald light glowing in each of its eye sockets. The skull arced forward towards the opening, and Brand shut the door once again with just enough time to hear the crunch of bone shattering on the other side. "Okay. That's -quite- enough of that. I'll unhinge all the doors in this gorram boat if I have to, but I am -not- dealing with this nonsense on my frakkin' ship."

Khitti || A gross inky blackness began to seep through the cracks around the door, the stuff similar to the death ooze she had to help several others put back into Kasyr’s body, so he could resume being a revenant vampire (much to his dismay). The necromantic magic that radiated from the ooze was stifling and Khitti had not been eager to deal with something of its sort again any time soon. She was quick to freeze it, as well as the door itself, to keep more from pouring through. “It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren't a billion doorways on this damn thing,” she said, pulling Brand back away from it. “Come on.” She grabbed his hand and shadowstepped them until they were on the top deck of the ship. “We need to find a place where we can deal with this. Someplace safe. For everyone else -and- us.”

Brand was dragged along before he'd even fully registered what was happening. This was nightmare stuff, right? Not something that happened in real life? For all his experience with magic and shadowy entities (and Khitti's shadowy magic, and shadowy entities tied in some way to Khitti, and...), -this- was something quite new to him. "What do you think would happen if you shadow-ported that whole door and the goop around it off its hinges and into the inky depths of the ocean? Theoretically, the water pressure should keep whatever's in there... down there, right?" He wished he felt more confident in that hypothesis. But it would have to do.

Khitti || “I can’t do that. It’d take the whole ship and everyone on it with it. You want to be captain of a ghost ship?” Khitti sighed and led Brand down the gangplank, stopping once they were on the wharf. “I don’t even know where to go. There are people -everywhere-,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders and shaking him a little. “What if… what if we went into one of the doors? And dealt with whatever was there? That’d be fine right? Right?” She was trying to ignore the fact that several of those doors had possibly even more bad things than that nightmare-ish skeleton thing they’d just seen.

Brand felt -- rather than saw -- a shadow descend over the both of them as Khitti was talking. Slowly, and with increasing dread, he looked up. Some sort of abyss had opened up above them; it was not quite a door, not quite a portal, and not quite... anything Brand could put a word to, actually. He looked at Khitti and then back at the abyss, directing her gaze to follow his with a single pointed finger. "I think we're about to not have a choice."

Brand || Barely had he gotten the words out before the descending shadow swallowed them, and all turned to darkness.

[Category:RP Logs]]