Jo Harvelle runs on 100 proof attitude power (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tobeclosetohim) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sixthiterationlogs2016-11-13 07:11 pm
tobeclosetohim) wrote in sixthiterationlogs2016-11-13 07:11 pm
{ raining blood, from a lacerated sky
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.
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
Even if Jo doesn't say a word of that as she's working on the opposite side of the porch.
"It doesn't make sense--" She starts, before she rolls her eyes at herself. "Not that it's supposed to, obviously." An interjection. Even if she goes right back, worked hard on a spot that had started coagulating and drying already. "The broken limbs and antlers. Chunks of muscle just left hanging. No one here would do anything like that."
"None of us could bring down an elk, no less would, without specific plans for how to get it down and how to use every bit of it to help us get through this winter." The winter that she couldn't really even feel in her fingers, even though she should have. Wet and in the light night wind. But she didn't feel anything but watched and fucked with, every hair standing, wanting to run to whatever it was, to fight, to take this feeling to them.
no subject
She starts to shiver, fury and fear and cold, but she keeps at her work. It has to be done.
And she feels Miss Jo won't coddle her away like a child or a delicate lady, that Miss Jo knows precisely what it is like to have to work at messy, crude work like this. Cleaning up the blood and dirt for others.
"So. Not an animal behavin' anyway an animal should. Not us. Our captors messin' with us?"
It wouldn't be the first time, as the ache in her ankle reminds her. As that flickering weeks of Jo going in and out like a candle.
no subject
They'll come back soon enough. Enough of the larger, taller, stronger men to drag it off. But it sat there ominous in the dark and Jo hated this place fiercely as she made herself go back to the railing, and a step. Hated wondering how long it had sat there like that and they hadn't known. Or whether it just appeared shortly before she did. The impossibility that was possibility.
Jo hated it, but she grit her teeth and worked at the mess, as it, too, worked into her skin.
Looking over occasionally as planned over her fingers cleaning what she'd write down about this one, too.
no subject
And it feels appropriate.
She scrubs, shuffles over on her knees, scrubs some more. Hopes it does good, or at least does something. There doesn't seem to be enough sun here to bleach anything.
"I just," Kate says, biting at the words, "I don't get how they'd be gettin' off on this. Makin' us jump for months of this horseshit."
no subject
Being right didn't mean she had the answer. It just meant more people didn't have the answer with her.
She hates that she actually says, "I don't either. It keeps everyone on edge. Anywhere else it might polarize people.
no subject
"I know," is what she says. "We've been workin' at that, haven't we."
It's not really a question. She's not, exactly, either including or excluding Jo.
But Kate's set out to try and keep the paranoia from tear scratches into everyone. Some, is useful. She of all people will never say it isn't. But aside from Miss Margaery's screaming at Jon's redhaired woman, there's not been shouting accusations, pointed fingers.
She'll do everything she can to keep it that way.
"In your, um. Travels. Been somewhere like this? This kind of set-up?"
no subject
They were different, but they meant the same at the end of the night and road.
They didn't want people dying, or completely divided, lost, forgotten, dead.
Claimed by the insanity of this place, and if Jo is scrubbing harder for those thoughts, and some of the anger finally shuddering harder through her veins as her vestiges or surprise or shock give way, at least it helps the mess. She hates that they aren't winning, and this is getting worse, and the feeling of how knowledge versus helplessness doesn't lighten. Not even for all they do manage and can do, have done, refused to falter in the face of.
Jo is certain she might have missed something in the way Kate phrases the last bit, and she looks over. "The cage of this village?"