{ raining blood, from a lacerated sky

[tobeclosetohim]

WHO: Jo Harvelle, a dead elk, and you!
WHERE: In front of The Inn
WHEN: November 13
OPEN TO: Everyone (Especially those in the inn or close enough to hear!)
WARNINGS: Animal Death's w/ Mutilation, Manipulation, Gore, Blood
STATUS: Open


People have been sticking close to the buildings, to each other, to not being out late after dark if they can help it, and even then, almost never alone. There's a charged air to everything, like a shot about to crack, or like they are strung up and held in a never ending loop on that second of shock the moment after the crack sounds, before the body can relax again.

Mapping has slowed to nothing this week, and Jo's among the many who remind people to be more careful when hunting right now. The Village seeming less and less safe with the animals that had appeared in the wide open of the buildings and fountain, with no one seeing anything, which made the dark, closed in shadows of the forest seems even darker and even more closed in.

She's as much not expecting it as expecting it, whens she opens the door, intending to head to the house she's sharing with Kol and Thorfinn, and there's a huge hulking animal form mountained right in front of the path into and out of the Inn. The same path people walked all day to get food, and everything else.

"Fuck," is revulsion for the smell, black and bloody and something else, the sheer size of the body, the still towering form, with its cracked and somehow dangling antlers, before her hand is tightening on the door still in it and she's calling back inside. "We've got another one!"

Jo goes for the knife in her boot even though there hasn't been an attacked attached to one yet, before she's headed down to the huge beast. It looks like the others have all reported in, and gotten written down by her. Ripped apart by teeth and claws, chunks of flesh hanging here and there, but nothing taken, nothing missing. Limbs twisted and contort in impossible ways, pointing toward the door.

The blood everywhere all around it. On the steps. On porch. On the door.

More like it was thrown than like it sprayed in an attack.

The same as the animal that looks like it was dropped -- no, placed -- so far from where it ever might be found in this place. Leaving Jo looking quickly all around there. The whole wide space of the creeping, settling early night dark of this place.

Comments

[lastofthekellys]

Miss Jo yells and Kate comes running, except no, she doesn't even have time to finish throwing on her coat because as soon as she steps outside the front door, she can see it.

She can smell it.

Blood and shit from the careless, violent slaughter, and other things that come from splitting stomach and intestines. It's a smell to make one gag, swear, and Kate does just that. Low, angry and frightened, eloquent: she's got a mouth on her, when she lets loose.

"I..."

What to say, beyond more curses that would have made her ma wash her mouth out? What to do? The meat's spoiled this time and she can read signs. She can read a clear attack on sanctity and sanctuary. This body is a slap in the face and a taunt, all rolled into one.

Here's what we, the captors, think of your attempts at community and safety. Here's what we can do whenever and wherever we choose.

Kate tries to breathe through her mouth and finishes slipping her arms into her coat.

"I'm gonna get a bucket. Before the blood dries."

There's blood on her hand, when she'd swayed and gagged at the smell, touched the door in support.

[warriorborn]

Cleaning up the blood and the carcass itself was an arduous task. Benedict isn't exactly a stranger to the smell and sight of blood, having been in multiple battles before, but he's still struggling to see an animal slaughtered like that; livestock is very rare up in the Spires, and even seeing them alive is still a novelty for him.

It takes the better part of the day for the animal to be disposed of and the blood to be cleared, but eventually the deed is done and Benedict winds up upstairs in the bathroom, washing the blood out of his black shirt, grateful for the dark fabric that hides the stains he's sure he won't be able to get rid of.

[lastofthekellys]

There's a knock on the open door, and Kate peers in. Her blue skirt, the one she'd been wearing downstairs when Miss Jo yelled, is gone. It's downstairs, soaking in the kitchen because she couldn't bring herself to walk across to the laundry, get the bloodstains out that way. Which means that she's wearing petticoats, except... Well. She's the one who puts such emphasis on her clothing. If she doesn't mention that the plain white garment isn't meant to be seen, few here would know.

Her hands, reddened from the wet work in cold weather, twist a little. Nervously. It's not just fear, although she's afraid. She's so afraid.

"Hey," is what she winds up saying.

She's not unaware that he's without his shirt, but it registers somewhere unconnected with lust and affection and butterflies in her stomach. A suggestion of one way to warm up and feel safe, which she tries to dismiss. She's being rash, but she's trying not to be that rash.

[warriorborn]

It's true, he doesn't realize that the white skirt she wears isn't meant to be seen. Granted, he hasn't seen it very much, but that hardly means anything. Miss Kate has always been very resourceful when it came to dressing herself. And it's not his place to comment on her clothing, regardless.

"Miss Kate," he replies, looking up when he hears the knock on the door and her voice greeting him.

He's aware that he's shirtless, and that it's not very proper for her to see him in this manor of dishabille, but he's equally rattled by the dead animals left for them to find, and he's honestly too tired to feel the need to maintain such a strict sense of propriety.

Looking at her, he can tell from her face that she's more than just rattled. "Are you alright?" he asks, his hands still submerged in the water in the sink.

[lastofthekellys]

"...No. Not really." Her voice is quiet, small, and turns her words into the confession they are rather than a ploy of meekness. She's not all right. She's frightened and she's exhausted and she feels sick to her stomach.

She and Miss Jo, she and all the other residents at this inn, they've worked. Fix what needs to be fix, what's in their power to fix. Make it welcoming. Make it somewhere to gather.

And now there's blood soaked into the entrance.

"I was, um."

No, that's rude, to launch straight in.

"Are you? All right?"

[warriorborn]

Benedict straightens and looks around for something to wipe his hands on, realizing only after the fact that all the towels had been taken to mop up the blood staining the wood on the porch, and there's nothing for him but his trousers. Grimacing, he wipes his hands on them as he shakes his head in response to her question.

"Not particularly." He's a good soldier. He does what he's told and he doesn't shy away from his duties, but he's never been fond of blood, and the smell is stuck to the inside of his nostrils. He'll be smelling it for days. It makes him feel vaguely ill.

"Are you—?" He can't just ask her if she's alright again, she already said she wasn't and he literally just asked. Her answer will not have changed in the past twenty seconds.

"Can I do anything to help?" Maybe focusing on Kate will help him keep his mind off his own disquiet.

[tobeclosetohim]

It's going to take people bigger than either of them to move a carcass that big. They could try, but Jo is pretty sure the whole of it, and those antlers, even broken, is bigger than both of them just standing next to it. It makes the cold chill into her blood, while the scent of the blood thrown everywhere is just do deep in her nose it's like the chill winter air doesn't even have room.

It's all crawling down her spine as she watches that darkness when Kate goes. There's nothing out there, and it's absolutely a fucking lie, too. Something is out there. Up there. Down there. Somewhere that there is a there, it's or they or something, is there. Toying with them. Throwing dead animals at them, like a message that none of them can quite read the reasons for and no one is safe from stumbling on.

Jo's made it back up the stairs by the time Kate returns.

"I can help if you got more than one rag." With a glance off her shoulder, toward the yard. "Some of the guys said they'd work on moving it away into the forest as quick as they could."

[lastofthekellys]

She leaves the front door open. Yes, it lets the heat out, but she doesn't want Miss Jo out there, in the cold and growing dark, alone. Not without a route to run to for safety and warmth and light from the fires in pub/dining room and kitchen. When she arrives, she's carrying two buckets, some towels over one shoulder.

"I have one for you," she says, setting one bucket down and tossing the towels to Miss Jo. "Step out of the way for me?"

Despite the questioning lilt she finishes with, it's not a question. Instead, once Miss Jo moves, Kate swings the bucket, tossing the water out over the bloody porch and bloody stairs with the expert smoothness of someone who is used to the weight of water.

It washes off some of the excess, sending a bloody surge off the porch and onto the steps, the ground.

Walking forward, Kate pours the rest of the water over the steps, and turns back to Miss Jo.

"What is it?"

She doesn't clarify what 'it' is, either the monster or the beast. She's not sure herself.

[tobeclosetohim]

They both know it's going to stain, and even if Jo could say they know it because of the back porch and the earlier animal found, she doesn't think it's that either. Or at least not only that. Somehow nowhere near it. The answer is too meticulous and exacting. What needs to be done. What you do first, where. Trying to mitigate what you can't stop. There are going to bloodstains in the morning, that's not the question. Only how much they can try to make it fainter.

She steps aside for Kate and she hates that watching the water splash into it and going rolling everywhere. Dying the water and making it look like the blood is rolling in some places, while Jo knots the towel between her hands. She really does hate being fucked with, like she, and all of them, are tiny mice in a cage, to do this to, and watch for whatever they do now.

Jo took her towel and took the first step into the water, dipping her towel into part of the clear water of the bucket closest to her. "It's not another animal." She's not sure she's said that to anyone, but she hasn't been standing right next to one of the corpses before since the first one either. When she thought it might really have been. Fluke. Which it as obvious it wasn't now.

"I can't think of any animal we've brought down for game, or even recorded as just being spotted out there--" Like the elk. Something too big to be taken down with snares and simple bows, unless there were dozens of them, and there were barely even enough of those damned weapons to keep people fed. Less the more people kept appearing, winter set in, and game grew scarcer. "--that could do this. Would. Not for a kill, and definitely not to drag it here and just leave it."

[lastofthekellys]

"No drag marks," Kate says, her voice neutral. Flat. Terrified. "And we didn't hear anythin', and we would've. This ain't clean. Even if the throat had gone first, we'd have heard things."

The trashing of death-throes, the sheer weight of the body hitting the ground. Attempts by the - what even is it, a giant deer? - to scream or bellow. The growling of whatever did this.

They'd have heard something. Like they would have with the bear four days ago, at the back of the Inn. The back of the Inn, where she'd planned on building a chicken coop.

But, somehow, the front of the Inn is worse. More pointed.

She wants to scrub the door, but the Inn is safe and the world outside is not, and she can't bring herself to turn her back on the outside.

"Animals don't kill like this, either. Not unless they been scared off, and beggin' your pardon, Miss Jo, but I'm not thinkin' the sight of you would scare off anythin' that could do this."

A brush would be easier to scrub with. She could make wood clean as anything with a brush. Instead, it's a towel, and blood is getting on her skin and under her nails as she scrubs down the planks.

[thekittenqueen]

She isn't surprised anymore. Once is an accident, twice is unfortunate, but now a third time means that this is intentional. Is it a warning or a threat? She can't be certain, but Margaery finds herself looking down at the creature as she approached the path, following the others that seemed to be migrating to the area. All wishing to get a better look.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Were they being watched? Were the same people who were leaving them gifts now depositing carcasses for them to find? What was this?

"That's three now," Margaery said softly, glancing at Jo.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo and Kate had taken to trying to wash down the porch as much as possible. The place was nothing glorief, but it was theirs and now it's got shadowed spots. Not red, but dingier than it had been. Jo wiped her hands on her pants, once more, oddly grateful for the fact everything she'd gotten was black. Black was a good color for soaking up and hiding blood. Hers, or anything else's.

"Four." Jo said, looking back at the beast on the ground. There was no real correction, or even tone, to the correction itself. Just a number, a symbol in a ledger she kept too well for all of these people. "They keep putting them in places we'll have no reason not to find them. What's next? Inside a house? The police station? The butchery?"

She hated being fucked with. She hated the lack of a pattern. She hated not having something specific to find and kill to make it stop.

[thekittenqueen]

"Four?" Margaery said in surprise, trying to remember the list in her head. Apparently she missed one. "Who else has found one of these...warnings?" That was the only word that she could think to apply to any of this, aside from 'horror.'

"I don't know. Have they only been left outside? No one has found them inside their homes." As far as she knew. She'd taken to leaving her dog at her bungalow, afraid to let him run about and herd the sheep as he normally did. Since Bushy's death, she felt paranoid and vigilant now.

"There are no sounds in the night. Nothing to let us know that a predator is lurking about. How can that happen? Wouldn't we hear screams?"

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo doesn't list them, because being right or wrong isn't important right now, and because somewhere there's a book with it written, and she'll write this, too, but she feels cold all over right now. It's not the weather and she knows it. Her fingers balled into her hands, nails against the palms of her hand. She wants to strike back, it's the only thing in her blood and her mind, but there's nowhere to hit whatever is hitting them. That keeps coming.

"If it was an animal," Jo said. Uncurling one of her hands to make a gesture at the ground.

Trying to make herself talk, even through the smell and the look of the whole thing has her on the verge and fighting the urge to throw up. Even after all she's seen before this. In that place. It feels like that place again. Horror, and bile, mingled in the back of her throat. "But there are no tracks, and it's torn apart, but none of it looks eaten. Nothing taken."

[thekittenqueen]

It had been the thought in her head when she first spied her ram dead on the ground a week before. It had seemed strange that pen holding her sheep hadn't been disturb. Her livestock left where they were, save for Bushy. It was impossible that some animal had removed him specifically and then left him slaughtered, the choicest pieces of his body left behind. What did it mean?

"What could have done this then?" She didn't want to return to her earlier suspicions that someone from the village was behind this. That didn't seem possible anymore.

"There is something strange about this place. The forests change, these dead animals that defy logic, the mysterious gifts. There has to be some answer somewhere."

[seekingvinland]

Thorfinn had been splitting logs in the backyard of their house, being close enough that he heard Jo's yell. He swung the axe down hard into the bigger log he used to split the logs on. He moved away leaving the axe that and heading for the inn. 'By Odin's ravens, what was going on now?'

He knew life here wouldn't be easy. Jo and Kol had made that both as known as the world itself had. Even the woods no longer had the same solice they once held for him, even with the eerie feeling of being watched, it had felt like something he could relax about... not anymore, not since Bushy, not since accusations flew and he even canceled his sacrifice for the winter. He figured it was for the best.

Stepping up around the back of the inn, having cut across the yard he stopped in his tracks.

What the fuck was that?

Oh fuck.

"That's a Älg!" He called out more shocked to see it than the fact it was slaughtered. Moving forward the look on his face was pure confusion. He decided not to mention they taste pretty good just yet but he looked to Jo. "..." he didn't speak just stared between the animal and her.

After a second or so.

"I don't think I can lift that myself."

[tobeclosetohim]

Kate had run inside for water, when Kol came sprinting up, while she was looking into the darkness. Her jaw set and her eyes hard. One nearly in the fountain, one nearly at the backdoor, once right on the front steps basically. Continually telling them, this is what they thought of all the work their ants and mice had put into these places. This was what they made of any inkling of survivors safety, thin and watery as it already was.

"We're going to need a handful of the larger guys, and even then it's going to be a chore."

[seekingvinland]

Thorfinn moved closer kneeling down as he looked over the animal. "I never saw a Älg this close before." He admitted, pulling the knife from his boot. A trick he picked up watching Jo. A way to not worry the others around him who seemed so squemish about such things, using the knife to part at one of the wounds.

"I don't think the meat was taken again..." He's been paying attention to that. "I will get Thor and some of the others." He knew most of the strong men of the village. "I want it's pelt before it's taken away." After being the one to voice they should eat Bushy when Margeary wasn't around he was worried about voicing such a thought about... but that was a lot of meat.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo didn't stop him, watching her from a few feet back. Wanting to do something.

Something more than stare at another, larger carcass, just laying here, looking like it'd been someone's tortured toy, used and then thrown at them. She watches him, but just as much she's looking at the rest of the body, too. Muscles tense and skin crawling. The smell is putrid, blood and shit, the things that come with death, and her stomach is trying to turn what feels like both in her throat and three states away.

She gives him an odd look at the last part though. "You take them from the others, too?"

[seekingvinland]

The smell of the blood and the clear viciousness of the kill, these things didn't even really raise a brow to him. What bothered him was that he had not seen a beast like this before in the village, only far off on a shore long ago as the boat floated on by. One of those rare times when Askeladd explained things and he listened without fight.

The shifted the knife about looking for anything within missing easily seen from one of the wounds before shaking his head and wiping the blood on the ground. "Just the same, nothing seems gone." Not that he knew the animals organs all that well. "No, I wanted to, but. It did not seem right. "This is big enough. No hard work with this to have a good cloak." He wasn't thinking for him, he was already in debt for a cloak not yet done. But the woman who found the beast.

[zomboligist]

"No! No, don't touch it!" Ravi's running as soon as he sees the woman and the blood and the animal. This is the third one he's seen, but this is also one with an actual pattern that makes him want to preserve it. He probably looks like a madman, running from a distance, but it's also not hard to see the mess of the thing from the path where he'd been walking. Heaving his breath, he collects himself and tries to keep her slightly aside from the mess before he realizes that he's about to forcibly move someone and that doesn't go very well.

"Sorry," he apologizes. "It's just that I want to analyze it before it gets moved, just in case there's something we're missing."

[tobeclosetohim]

Not that Jo was about to touch it, but okay, new science dude. Ravi. Not that she'd met him. She wasn't always social, which could have been the hunter in her, or the fact she'd been in rat traps like this for nine years now. But she kept the books, including the list of names, and colors, for everyone who came into this place.

"Okay." Jo doesn't touch it, but she doesn't move away from the dead beast either. "Read it off."

[zomboligist]

Ravi gives her an appreciative look and a nod, turning to the animal and trying to figure out how best to approach this. It's difficult, trying to preserve the meat while also getting a clear picture of what's happened, but as always, he starts with the important thing. Crouching down, he investigates the cranium to ensure the brains are intact, he lets out a sigh of relief to find that they are, standing in order to investigate the blood spatter. "Do you have anything I could use to poke around?"

He fears he's about to get incredibly disgusting otherwise, but he needs to figure out the temperature and consistency of the blood spatter if he wants to even get close to a TOD.

[tobeclosetohim]

"Yeah. I got something." Jo shifted a second, considering and leaned down to pulled out the longest, and slenderest, of the four knives she currently had on herself. This one from the inside of her left boot. She flipped it dexterously in her hand, as she stood back straight. The blade ending up between her thumb, and forefinger, laying back against her palm, as she held out the handle to him. "Try not to get it stuck in him. I only have so many here."

And she'd rather Kate's knives not need to go missing again.

She'd already replaced them once, without know Jo had cleared out the Inn before she moved in.

[zomboligist]

Ravi looks up in time to see her pull the knife from her boot, his forehead crumpling in worry at how armed the people around here seem to be, because as a lowly medical examiner, he definitely doesn't think that he's got even half the skills needed to take them on. This is why he needs to make sure to befriend them all and employ their ass-kicking skills for himself.

He takes the knife with an appreciative mumble of, "thanks," before he turns to the animal, drawing some blood on the blade, tipping to let it drip. From there, he uses his pinky to investigate the one on the wall, his gaze turning out to the immediate area. "This was a very violent act," he says. "The spatter alone means it was quick and brutal and done with something very lethal." His best guess is a set of claws, but honestly, this place keeps throwing him off.