[MINGLE] Wendi-go-go to the inn

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Village and Inn
WHEN: 27-31 July
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
NOTES: The Wendigo threatening the village will be killed mid 28 July, with a Blue Lily, per these threads. Plot details here. Note: The final fight is close enough to be seen from the upstairs inn windows.
WARNINGS: Wendigo attack mingle, please warn in comment headers if discussing violence, gore, or related trauma. Possible mentions of character death.

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The urgent warnings come from villagers returning south from the lake: a creature twice the size of a man, antlered and voracious. Larger than any they've seen on the plains, stalking its way to the main village. Some might have their own names for this hunger in a skin of shadow; others might remember that it was the first to claim a life, in their village's short history.

Whatever context one has for it, best to secure all pets and loved ones before it arrives. With weapons and food stores at the inn, the call goes out to gather — And to bring back any tools, because there's no telling what doors and windows can do to stop such a creature.

Comments

[underpinnings]

This might be why he spends so much of his time out on the plains, watching wild alien horses run their own patterns through the sea of grass. People aren't unpredictable so much as--incongruous, sometimes in ugly ways. He's never found a group of them, in any context, in any condition, where enough of them knew that when you see a man covered in blood taking stock of his own reflection, it was best to walk away.

His fault, he supposes. Left the door open.

The man addressing him takes up most of said doorway; old buildings, built in a kind of miniature compared to most homes in the states. Owen himself finds most of the beds a bit short, but it's at the end of a very long list of complaints--then dismissed further for just being complaints.

A muscle in the side of his face twitches; he blinks; his mouth doesn't quite complete a frown. It's already frowning, in its flat way. He forces his hands onto the tap and pulls them both in, needing force of water more than a specific temperature. "It was always a possibility," he says, looking back down at his hands, the water pooling pink in and around them. "Job still got done."

[borneinblood]

Humanity is always at its best and worst in moments like these. In the aftermath of tragedy, when the natural responses are either to help or to ask what's happened, even when the situation might be better suited by the very opposite. Still, he doesn't seem in the least bit offended at Owen's reaction. He might be more steeped in death than most, but the same is hardly likely to hold true of the rest of the people present in the village.

Not that he makes any attempt to either address that point or move away from where he's standing. He's still curious, but he's not about to get more involved than he already is by virtue of engaging Owen in conversation.

"It might have been," he agrees, with a shrug that suggests that he doesn't have enough information on the creature to say otherwise. He knows what he's seen, yes. But his interests having never been in the shifting calculations of necessity. Just the more immediate call to violence and all that comes with it.

"But I can't imagine that makes it easier."