RP:The Little Mistress
Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc
Vailkrin City Road
Shishi , Orange and Yellow are on their way out of the somehow intact Hanging Corpse. Blue and the children are used to the site of the state of the city. Entire buildings have been completely leveled, there are several holes and craters in the streets, some leaving the sewers of the dark town revealed. Dried blood and bile that hasn't been washed away by whatever weather Vailkrin has seen since the 'invasion' from the sky cakes the stone walkways and what's left of the buildings as well. One finds the family how they most often would, with a pair of pets following the trio; a small fox-like thing that tails the boy Arius, the bottom half of the blonde child's face obscured behind a rather unique Blue scarf. Traveling with Leralynn is a newer addition of her own creation; an undead mouse fresh enough to not be rotting yet and small enough that it might be missed if you weren't looking for it... Or didn't have eyes or something like that.
Maladroit had refuelled itself – best the details of that event be left to obscurity - and thence returned to its place of origin, both past and present. For the very rift that so recently spat horrors from dimensions beyond into the blackstone city had, upon being forced to closure, caused a ripple in time and space, a kind of vacuum that demanded to be filled. Equal and opposite reactions, as it were. So Maladroit, from where it had been sitting at the side of the Queen of Shadows in some far-flung universe being berated for leaving footprints on her nice new parquet floor, would abruptly avoid that particular tongue-lashing via being sucked into a spatial and temporal vortex created by all the rift-meddling. Swiftly thereafter, following a horrendous and vastly disorienting moment or two spent in transit, it had plopped into Vailkrin’s Blood Fountain. Presently, the familiar was headed back there in the vague hope some other rift might appear and draw it back to the Shadow Realm, its mistress and her legendary temper. Ripples of discord shimmered from the broken stone, the very air, echoes of battle and terror and general mayhem. Tenebrae, it noted, would have an epic fit if she knew...
Maladroit's pondering of this non-event was soundly interrupted by ripples of a different kind. Jolly ones, In vivid colours. Loping along on its knuckles, blind head swaying this way and that as if to taste the rankled breeze, the gaunt would remember where it had sensed these impressions before -- and if such a creature could be said to own an emotion passingly similar to joy, Maladroit was filled with it. The gaunt drew to a halt, squatted on its haunches with its wings tucked tightly about it, and wibbled its fingers toward the approaching family.
Shishi has been on edge while inside the city limits with the twins given that not too long ago this place they had called home was more dangerous than The Blue Demon would care to expose Orange and Yellow to. So it should come as no surprise that the assassin father's eyes go through their accursed transformation and he adopts a ready stance at the mere sight of the gaunt. Yellow slips behind his father, peeking out around the vampire at what Maladroit has become. Leralynn shows less caution than her brother, standing beside the two males and glancing at Blue curiously. The children hadn't been here for the invasion so they know not the nature of the creatures that fell from the sky other than from Shishi's vague tales of his own bravery. Maladroit was less tentacley than the monsters that cause the majority of the damage to the city (the rest being done mostly by Kasyr.) and that thing the gaunt was doing with it's fingers made the creature look just a bit less threatening than something like that should.
"What is that, Blue?" Yellow asks while Orange seems lost in some daydream about having no eyes.
"I don't..." The Blue Demon starts to answer before just repeating the question to the gaunt, "What the hell are you?"
Maladroit had no mouth, nor vocal chords, nor any ready answer to the question even if it had possessed these things. So it only sat, and wibbled a moment longer whilst enjoying the multi-hued sparks and ripples emanating from the children, all which were perceived in the same arcane and sense-devoid manner in which it perceived anything else, these days. There was, however, the flavour of alarm seeping in through its rubbery pores and Maladroit had no wish to savour the fear of children this day, let alone children dear to the Mistress of Epic Temper-fits. It hunkered down, resembling some sort of hellishly tame amalgam of greyhound, pony, bat and bull, and a few other critters thrown in besides, and did its best to emanate an aura of harmlessness while its manyjointed fingers wove a cat's-cradle of phantasmal filaments from the air - hence all the wibbling. Gathering between its hands a tapestry of time and space relevant to the beings before it, the familiar opened its palms wide, suddenly, in the manner of a magician flourishing a bunch of previously unapparent flowers - except that what appeared was not any silken floral bouquet, but an image - very lifelike indeed - of a very small, very pale, and very angry woman with black hair and green eyes, wielding a huge sharp-ended sceptre, which she was waving at the gaunt in a most threatening way. Studying this memory, Maladroit then pointed its featureless head toward Blue, and shrugged, as if to say: I miss her. And that was the best reply it could presently manage.
Shishi eases up a bit and the shadows inhabiting his immediate proximity in the Dark City seem to do so as well when Maladroit adopts a nonthreatening stance. His eyes remain that accursed shade of red, but it seems for the moment he has no intent of using the strength the curse grants him. The image the gaunt conjures earns strong reactions from all three members of the assassin family.
Yellow, perhaps startled by the other two's abrupt single step advance towards scepter wielding woman, stares at Orange and Blue.
Shishi himself might have a guess as to what the creature showing this image is now, but he'll remain silent on the matter, simply blinking and nodding to Maladroit, he and the twins missed her as well, apparently.
Orange doesn't stop at one step, passing her father by as she approaches the gaunt and more specifically the image of her role-model that he has summoned. The girl speaks, almost choked up, "You know her? Miss Te-... Where is she? What are you doing here?" Each question sounds a bit angrier than the next. Why must this monster tease her so?
Maladroit visibly flinched from her pointy questions, remembering that it had evoked friendlier sounds from her once upon a time. It lifted a forefinger and pointed toward the sky, to the illusion of its Mistress and back to the sky. Then made the finger fall, as it had fallen, the hand landing palm-up on the stone, twitching, leaping up again and finger-scrambling away. Then it pointed to itself. The creatures craggy shoulders rose and dropped again in mute resignation. Peering facelessly toward Shishi first, it beckoned the girl toward itself with that same finger. The illusion of the necromancer, still stomping its boot-clad foot and making silent threat of defenestration over the floor smirching incident, vanished in a fizzle of temporal threads.
Shishi and Leralynn exchange glances. An outside observer might note the nod from the father and think the silent exchange between him and his daughter was of the girl asking his permission to approach the creature Maladroit, but Blue knew better.
Orange, more than anything through that look, was telling The Blue Demon not to worry. The blonde girl takes steps towards the illusion and its caster. As the image of the clan leader disappears emotion gets the better of her and forces the activation of her unique form of the family's curse. Blue eyes shift in hue to match the green shade of the necromancer's that had just vanished. That changed gaze is taken off the faceless monster and directed upward to where the woman was claimed to be. Leralynn shakes her head, she doesn't understand. Neither does Blue really so he asks something like, "How?" of the gaunt.
Maladroit could only shrug again. Its very literal bent of mind did not have answer to that question, or rather none which could be communicated via mime any time within the next century or two. But it -could- show them... Wings snapped open, the familiar drawing itself upright, gathering itself to shake off apathy, and began once more weaving threads stolen from memory, from the stone surrounding, from time and the ether, until before the colourful family appeared a sort of miniature scenario encapsulated by the ruined street.
In this vision, the Lady could be seen walking an endless, dark plain in which pages of a book flipped around in a nonexistent breeze, flattening to the earth and rocks and withered trees. She looked thin and unhappy, her features smirched with grief and anger, her shoulders set as if she bore the weight of a world upon them. Then the vision changed: she's come to the edge of the plain, where it met with a fathomless void. Then again: the woman, throwing herself off that edge. Another change: a great, dark shadow swooping upon her, catching up her slight frame and swooping away... Visions of stars wheeling, worlds wheeling around those, and then... Tenebrae, seated on a vastly over-wrought black throne, with a lanky and imperious sort of fellow seated on a similar object beside her. Gone was her misery and burden, in place of those a serene kind of joy.
Maladroit pointed to the sky again. Then reached for Leralynn's ear, and pulled from it a coin. This was presented to her with much gravity.
Shishi , Arius, and Leralynn watch silently the magical cinema that plays out before them. The family takes in the imagery at face value and the three of them seem at the very least reassured by the outcome shown.
"She's happy." Blue is the first of them to speak (omitting any 'yips' from Sunny during the show) after the illusions have gone. Mostly it is said to Orange to comfort the girl.
The blonde mimic nods and rubs at her eyes a bit, seemingly pushing away the family's curse and returning her irises to their usual shade of blue. The appearance of the coin and its presentation to Leralynn has the girl cracking a small smile finally. "Thank you." She says with a nod towards Maladroit before glancing at the sky again. Her gratitude more in response to what the gaunt has shown the family than to the gift he bestows.
Maladroit nodded its ponderous, blank head at the girl and lifted itself to a four-limbed stand. Ambling in the manner of a terribly thin gorilla toward Yellow and Blue, the creature halted to peer in its eyeless manner at Arius. One rubbery hand raised, it made a fist. Waved the fist, and opened it, whence from the familiar's palm sprang a tiny frog, scarlet-skinned and quite obviously terrified to judge by the way the little amphibian leapt wildly away, startled by suddenly not-being on its own little tropical begonia leaf under the canopies of a distant island forest. Maladroit turned from them then, gaining sufficient distance from the trio that opening its batlike wings to the fullest caused no-one harm. It was clearly preparing to depart..
Shishi turned crimson eyes up towards the sky as well, squinting up at the perpetual night that covered Vailkrin as if trying to spot Tenebrae among the stars. 'How' he doesn't say it out loud but the question is still bouncing around his head along with the shadowy voices that accompanied the family's curse. Sure The Blue Demon himself could fly with the help of darkness shaped into wings, but how does one get a throne up there? With a shake of his head he dismisses the questions he's thinking of and watches as Maladroit approaches he and Yellow.
The boy grins suddenly and bounces after the frog calling out, "Wait!" The gift the Black Pool let Arius leave with allows the command to be understood by any beast that heard it and as such the amphibian stops hopping and kind of turns towards the blonde child offering a questioning 'ribbit' that Yellow is able to flawlessly understand the meaning of, "Aye. It's a little cold here but don't worry. Comm'ere." A brow is raised at the creature before Arius adds the question of, "Are you poisonous." Bright red skin usually a sign to take caution, the 'animal expert' knew that much.
Meanwhile Shishi's crimson eyes are finally allowed to return to their original Blue shade easing the tension that seemed to fill every shadow in the immediate area. Nothing more than a raised hand in a wave is offered for the departing Maladroit from the vampire.
Maladroit paid no heed to farewells, but took to wing with a heave of its knuckles against the broken stone of its former 'home'. It had no sense of any rift here, no rush of vertigo nor clamour of dimensions tearing. There wasn't much to do, really, beside re-visit a few old haunts and it was toward one of those that it now set wing, blacking out the stars overhead momentarily.
The arrow-frog, terribly poisonous, hopped obligingly toward the boy, while in Leralynn’s hand the coin grew warm and turned a funny shade of amber, in which a tiny portrait of the Queen of Shadows might be glimpsed. The likeness, were Orange to stare at it long enough, would blink.