5 star but all rooms are vacant - roommates vs c-cats day 2

[rook]

izzy rodríguez

It took several hours for my breathing to return to normal and the aching to fade. My bones are sore, but are no longer bent in an unnatural way - whatever disease they put inside me has been purged, and for maybe the first time since my name was picked out of that bowl and spoken aloud, I feel myself again.

The torment I endured seemed to last an age, but I am slowly beginning to recover now, getting stronger by the minute as I navigate the rest of the abandoned castle.

My first priority is acquiring something that I can use as a weapon. Currently I'm without anything to defend myself with, and running into other tributes or muttations is a near certainty in the games. Hell, it's practically engineered.

The first room I enter is bare, spare for a large half-broken bedframe, the mattress missing and the planks snapped or rotting away. A curtain hangs lazily from a skew railing. The next few doors are not too different, some full of empty boxes, others damaged furniture.

I keep going, in search of something that I can put to use. Persistence in the face of insurmountable odds is how you survive. One room at a time.

I luck out.

In the very next room I find a steel gauntlet, decorated with ceremonial gold leaf, and clutching in its grasp a great shimmering sword. Jackpot. I slip the armoured glove over my dominant hand and wield the blade with it, slicing at the air a few times to get a feel for the balance. I think I can work with it.

Feeling more together, I move on. I wrap my hand around the handle of the next door and open it slowly to the point where something feels off, and I freeze.

A cloaked figure slumps in the corner of the room, unmoving. His flesh is pale and bloated, eyes bulging open, unblinking it stares straight forward. The smell it emits is deeply unpleasant, quickly moving a hand over my nostrils does little to repel it's pungent stench even from this distance.

I don't recognise the face, looks like it could be the boy from Nine, hard to tell with the drooping flesh now hanging loosely off his skull, and the dead eyes. Poor bastard. He must have been one of the three cannons that fired earlier, or it could be that there were more that sounded while I was unconscious.

I move into the room slowly, looking for other danger before I sheath my sword at my waist and approach the dead boy. The corpse won't care if I relieve him from his possessions, now will he? A bladed shield lies angled at his side, unable to protect it's owner from whatever disease or ailment took his life. I'll have far more use for it.

I've dealt with bodies before and never had a problem. The corpses I'm used to dragging are usually half-warm and full of bullet holes, with half their blood spilled into the dirt first. This one looks to have died of other causes, and it's blood has curdled, leaving a swollen, fish-fleshed mass of stomach-turning rot and stink.

I take the shield in both hands and try to lift it. The corpses eyes move, and a hand grips my wrist.

"Jesus, fuck! You're alive?" I try to pull back, but the grip is too tight.

A black blur of motion pulls me from the not-dead person, as a pack of feral creatures pour into the room around us baring their teeth and claws.

"Let go, idiot!" I try to pry the shield from the not-corpse's cold unrelenting fingers.

The dead should not be this determined, but it's with one final yank that it comes free. I scramble on the floor, slipping the shield over my arm and using it to bat away one of the cats flying towards me.



[izzy attacks mutts, bladed shield]
YVKg26u2f1knife
[Stabbed in Hand -- 8.0 damage]

knife

[gamemaker kelsier]

There's someone watching him.

He knows that, can feel a prickle on the back of his neck from it, but it doesn't slow him. Akira keeps on slowly, eyes trained on the castle looming in the distance in front of him, a crumbling monument to an elder god. Fire licks down his limbs, blooming out from his core in a steady beat, eating him alive. The pain is unmanageable, to the point that his brain has given up on trying to understand it. It's merely become part of him.

He has always been like this.

Things start to slip out of his control in the castle courtyard. The stake falls from his hand as he moves, fingers raw from holding it so tightly for so long. It rolls across uneven stone with a hollow sound. His breath comes haggard, air running ragged in and out, catching in his lungs and burning him to ash from the inside out.

He leans against the castle doors and they open with a gentle creak. The hall that Akira stumbles into is well lit with torchlight and lined with paintings of strangers wearing guilded crowns with eyes that seem to follow his every step. He tracks dirt on the red carpet, lets the night in with him. That old familiar feeling settles down in the cavity where his heart is promised to be; dread.

He isn't welcome here, but the feeling is too familiar to really trigger flight in him. It's the same way he's always felt walking in his own front door.

Maybe that's why Akira keeps moving forward or maybe it's just that he simply can't stop. There's little thought left in him, just the idea that he needs to find somewhere to rest, somewhere no one else will think to look for him.

There's a set of statues in his path to the stairs at the end of the hall, they tower over him and he pauses for a moment, gazing up to the rafters of the hall to see where they end.

One head held high, the other, covers her face to hide her pain, shoulders caved in, making herself small. Somehow he feels like both forms at once. A contorted grimace cuts across his face and Akira holds himself for a moment, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt as a wave of pain pushes through him. He falls to his knees on the carpet, and bends forward, forehead hitting the ground as he tries not to pass out.

For a moment, Akira just kneels there, trying to breathe. Pathetic, he knows that even without his father's voice echoing through his head. He's really going to die before taking a single hit.

Nah.

Akira raises his head, gaze running over the portraits to his left. Ginger hair and a flat, stern expression. There are goggles held loosely in one hand, a torch in the other, reflecting light off of a black background. The painting is too far away for him to read the plaque underneath it but Akira doesn't need to.

Patricia Valfierno is a household name.

He gets to his feet, one hand grabbing onto the edge of the large pedestal the statues stand on to help him. The marble base is cold to the touch, but his thumb hits metal. Akira turns his gaze to a plaque at the base of the statues, flat on the marble and not something he might have noticed in this state unless he'd touched it.

There are lines of poetry on the plaque that Akira has to read once or twice before realizing that it isn't a poem at all, but a riddle. He stands there silent for too long, running his fingers over the raised lettering. His hand, there's something wrong with it. It isn't lifting properly. It's hard to feel his fingers, he's lost feeling. His veins seem too dark, he can follow their paths with his eyes, see where they've gone, where they're going.

"I am the language spoken by the powerful to the powerless," he mumbles softly, "You'll find a knife in your back...."

Akira closes his hand into a fist over the letters and rests his knuckles against the words.

"What am I?" he says, and smiles, too wide and wrong for it to be a pleasant one. He looks back up at the statues, and the feeling of dread that he felt when he entered makes perfect sense. "You think so too, huh?" he asks them.

And he thinks about that afternoon a year ago, when he stood in the front hall of the house that he'd grown up in and told his mother about his father and his secretary.

And what she'd called him in response.

"Liar," he says ruefully, "The answer is a lie."

Heavy stone suddenly shifts with an awful grating noise. Two objects fall from the statues, landing heavily on the pedestal in front of him. He cringes backwards, arm raised in case of more debris but after a moment, when nothing else falls, Akira opens his eyes again.

There in front of him rests a gleaming shield, edged with sharp blades and a curved, double-bladed knife with a handle inset with a single red jewel.

He lowers his arm shakily and glances upwards again, to confirm that nothing else is going to rain down before picking the treasures up with shaking hands.

"Thanks," he says with a nod up at the statues.

He looks over his shoulder suddenly, eyes on the castle door that still sits open. That feeling of being watched is back again. He has to find somewhere to rest.

If a castle follows the same rules of a home, then it's likely a bed will be up the stairs, it's also where someone might expect someone to go. Akira continues down the hall instead, passing by portraits of victors from the last ninety-two years. Their eyes seem to follow his every step, gazes waiting for his approach, refusing to let go until he's gone too far from them.

But they can't be actually looking at him, he knows that. Paintings can't do that, he's just losing it.

Near the back of the hall he finds a small wooden door. He pushes it open, and finds a small stone hallway, thankfully empty of decor other than the metal brackets holding torches on the wall. Akira enters and pulls the door shut behind him, shoulders falling in relief as he twists the lock behind him.

There are a few rooms in the hallway but other than some wooden tables and a chair on it's own in one, there's nothing. At the end of the hall is a small staircase that spirals up and Akira takes it, landing on the floor above in another small hallway. The rooms in this one are all the same, shoeboxes with a wooden chest and a narrow bed.

He collapses on one and drops the shield and knife beside him, curling up with his back to the wall, eyes on the door just in case. Letting his guard down would be a mistake, it'd be stupid to even shut his eyes with so many tributes still alive, but laying there in the dark, pain moving through him in dull waves, he's beginning to wonder why he's even trying this hard.

Akira isn't like Storm or Avriel. There's no one he's fighting to get back home to, no one to prove himself to. There's only ever just been himself and if this fever takes him, if he doesn't wake up in the morning, no one's going to mourn him.

And that's all he's ever wanted, it's why he's never let anyone get too close, why he's burned every bridge he's built.

But it suddenly seems so sad, laying there, heart beat irregular, body too heavy to move. His eyes slide shut. A tear slips slowly down his cheek. Maybe he'd been wrong.

His heart stops.





"Jesus, fuck! You're alive?"

Akira comes to slowly, in bits and pieces. First there's sound, then vision, blurry, a little bit useless. There's a girl over him, dark hair hanging loose over his face, tickling his cheek, she smells like wildfire.

She's holding the shield that the statues gave him in her hands and he's holding her by the wrist, hand wrapped tight around her skin. He doesn't remember grabbing her. He can feel her heartbeat beneath his hand, hear blood pumping under her skin. It sounds like the river in Nine and it sounds like nothing at all.

"Let go, idiot!"

The girl is tugging on the shield. Akira blinks, gaze on his hand on her wrist, on his pale skin against hers, alive, pumping with blood, his still, silent.

He lets go of her as she yanks away and turns his hand over to look at his palm. He's been hungover before, looked like hell, bags under his eyes and so pale he was almost green. This is different, this is wrong, he knows that without knowing it.

You're alive?

The girl is scrambling around in front of him with some sort of animal but Akira hardly seems to notice. He rests two fingers on the inside of his wrist and waits.

Nothing.

He shuts his eyes, then opens them again a moment later. The pain is gone, the fever lifted, actually, he doesn't feel anything at all. Even the muted feeling that's blanketed him for as long as he can remember is gone.

The shield cuts into the mutt's skin and Akira looks up, the sudden scent of blood rousing him from deep thought. His pupils dilate as the smell travels through him, taking every thought with it. He forgets everything that isn't that thin red line on the mutt's skin, the girl, the shield, the games, all of it. None of it matters.

Akira launches himself at the mutt, a blur as he moves past Izzy.

[akira attacks mutts, teefs]
J2LK2b7FiVknife
[miss]

accuracy
[akira attacks mutts, teefs]
knife
[block LMAOOOO]

knife·knife

[Python]

They guard the castle like it is their own. A pack of copy cats, its leader a heftier feline named 'Tumble' by their human creators. Tumble leads his charge like they are family. When they have dust in their fur, he grooms them. When they are hungry, he hunts. It is all he can do as a leader running on instinct.

There have not in been intruders for a long while. The halls are supposed to be silent, save for the occasional scampering of tasty rats. Humans in the halls would not do, and if they died, what a feast that would be! Tumble would not have to hunt for weeks.

With hisses and bristled tails, Tumble leads his pack into a pounce. Overwhelm them with numbers!

[copy cats attack isabella - claws]
CUjIFqOv7Fknife
Shallow Cut on Cheek -- 3.5 damage

[copy cats attack akira - teeth]
knife
Miss -- 0.0 damage

knife·knife

[rook]

izzy rodríguez

The razor-sharp domed edge of the shield parries away the oncoming beast, sending it flying across the room with force, until it collides with the upright wooden beams of the open doorframe. I reinforce the straps on my arm, tightening the leather around my arm and drawing my sword with the gauntlet, ready for war.

Another comes at me, I raise my arm again to block a flash of black and white and red, but from a side-angle I am caught off-guard, a second creature lashing out and clawing at my cheek, which blossoms red in a ripe sting.

There is an unearthly presence that sends a ripple of shivers through me, and a massive hole opens up in my stomach as the pale spectre of the not-dead boy practically floats past me, teeth bared, and like a nightmare flies into the pack of mutts, a great abomination.

I freeze, unsure whether to continue fighting back the strange demonic cats, attack the undead boy, or up and leave the room altogether.

"Hey, man. Are you like, dead or what?" I stare at his pale, gaunt form as my stomach churns as the discolouring of his skin and the lifelessness in his eyes.

I bat away another creature with the rear of my shield.



[izzy attacks mutts, bladed shield]
LwpieSqXH1knife
[Shallow Cut on Right Forearm -- 3.5 damage]

knife

[gamemaker kelsier]

He's pure instinct, no finesse as he launches himself at the catlike mutts. His fingers, hooked into claws, catch at the fur of the mutts but he can't get a good grasp on them. He's like a newborn, overwhelmed and scrambling for everything at once but too clumsy on fresh legs. The cats slip out of his hands like water through a sieve.

Akira slips below a wayward claw, pulls himself back out of the reach of gnashing canines, weaving through the mutts with precision he's never had before. His back hits the wall of the small room and a snarl of annoyance escapes his throat. There's a new scent, intoxicating on another level from the one that sent him into a craze only moments ago.

It comes from the girl.

A crimson line across her cheek, blood beading sluggishly from the wound, tipping out the corner, down her jawline to pool at her chin and then fall to the ground with a splat. Wasteful. He thinks about cupping her chin in his hand and running his tongue up her cheekbone, then sinking his teeth int–

"Hey, man. Are you like, dead or what?"

Akira blinks, hand raising to brush over his lips, to a sore spot on the lower one where something sharp digs into them. A realization is dawning, albeit slow. He runs his tongue over his top row of teeth, assessing. All the while the cats pace back and forth, keeping their eyes on him. The one he launched himself at bares its teeth at him, hissing on eye contact.

"Think I'm 'Or what'," he says, "Yeah, let's go with that, you sticky fingered fuck." Akira nods towards the shield that she took from him and then smiles good-naturedly, revealing two inhumanly long, sharp canines. He keeps his eyes carefully away from the cut on her cheek but he's still so acutely aware of it all the same.

The wounded cat turns back towards him and he turns his head away sharply, gaze caught on the blood seeping from its front paw, thick, leaving stains on the stone floor between them. The girl is forgotten again, Akira rushes the cat head on.

[akira attacks mutts, teefs]
Xd0qkoG6xvknife
[Shallow Cut on Neck -- 4.0 ]

knife

[Python]

Big prey takes longer to kill. Tumble must remember that as a leader, and encourage his pack with confident meows that they will have to be stubborn to win. A few may fall in battle, but Tumble cannot think of such consequences. They will deal with the fallen later; for now, they hunt.

And then they will feast.

[copy cats attack isabella - claws]
fzICJMYMYFknife
Shallow Cut on Neck -- 4.0 damage

[copy cats attack akira - teeth]
knife
Deep Gash on Forehead -- 9.0 damage

knife·knife

[rook]

izzy rodríguez

The boy glares at me with his empty eyes and gaunt features, and starts to give me grief. I wave a hand lazily at him, and pull a face as I try to ward off another of the small muttations trying to claw at my skin. As I bat away another with my shield, I see the grotesque flower of tentacles wriggling on the back of their heads.

"What the fuck."

Whoever designed these things must have had some fucked up childhood, to have created eldritch horrors beyond our comprehension.

The violent creatures give us no respite, coming again and again in numbers. If we don't start picking them off and give them cause to retreat, they'll wear us down - war of attrition. That's how animals fight.

It's how people fight too, the smart ones at least. A muttation pack isn't an underworld gang but pack mentality isn't too dissimilar, and I know enough about group behaviour to know we just need to take out a few of these things.

"Listen dude, if you don’t want to get looted, try looking less like a corpse!" I shout at the boy from Nine.

Pasty ass motherfucker.



[izzy attacks mutts, bladed shield]
0Qrtym3gldknife
[Shallow Cut on Left Shoulder -- 3.5 damage]

knife

[gamemaker kelsier]

The cat leaps at Akira, long, hooked claws extended. He slides his left foot out in an effort to duck and slip beneath it's paw but he's never been good at this kind of thing. A claw scrapes across his forehead, drawing a deep cut across his skin. He throws his arms up to cover his face and rolls across the floor to his left.

His shield swings out beside him, catching the other mutt in the shoulder. Akira grumbles a little, and presses a hand to his forehead where the cat just cut him. His fingers come away coated in a rusted red substance, closer in colour to dried blood than fresh.

He squeezes his eyes shut and curls his hand into a fist in front of him. That's not normal. Blood doesn't look like that, his blood doesn't look like that. Feels like he's going to be sick.

Akira pushes himself up and moves away from the cats and the thieving girl. He knows she has a name but thoughts have been coming through filtered, everything feels too sharp, too all-at-once. Izzy maybe? Probably?

"Do I fucking look dead to you?" he snaps, "Might want to book an eye test, Six."

He grabs the bladed boomerang off of the bed and throws it as hard as he can at the cats.

[akira attacks mutts, boomerang (throwing knife)]
jdhVlA9MrTthrowing knife
[Shallow Cut on Bicep -- 3.5]

throwing knife

[Python]

Tumble hisses as another one of his brethren fall. He watches the movement of his prey, and the tentacles on his back follow suit. This is how he was designed, and why he always wins; he can mirror his opponents and fight fire with fire. They never expect to be hit with their own strategy.

As the boomerang flies, so does he.


[copy cats attack isabella - claws]
eJXbmH1UG6knife
3.5 damage

[copy cats attack akira - tentacle blade]
throwing knife
8.5 damage

knife·throwing knife

[rook]

izzy rodríguez

An eye test? Yeah good one. He might want to check for a god damn pulse. I've seen dead bodies before, you don't have eyes that milky and a stench that foul if you've not kicked the bucket. The guy is a walking corpse.

"Yeah, have you looked in a mirror lately?" I call out, batting away another mutt.

I glance over to the large darkened glass across the room, the huge ornate frame, faded gold but intricate in detail, is the perimeter of a great mirror hung proudly on the wall. But as I look into it - through it - only one figure stands on the other side.

"Holy shit."

I stop joking around, now looking at the boy from Nine almost in horror.

What the hell is going on?


[izzy attacks mutts, bladed shield]
LPbe5qajFsknife
[Stabbed in Stomach -- 9.5 damage]

knife

[gamemaker kelsier]

The boomerang slices into one of the cat's arms and curves back towards Akira. He hadn't really thought about this part, where the sharp thing comes back and he's supposed to what, catch it?

Like hell.

He dives out of the way as the knife comes flying back and hits the wall behind him with a loud crack. His shoulder hits the stone floor hard and he grunts in pain. "Fuck," he mutters, cradling his elbow. There's a sudden, sharp pain then that starts at the base of his wrist and travels up his arm. One of the cats pulls a long tentacle back quickly, hissing at him in the process.

"Fuck?!" he asks. What business does a cat have having tentacles anyway.

Six is still standing. Must be really nice having a shield and sword to push back the mutts with. “Yeah, have you looked in a mirror lately?” she snaps back.

Akira props himself up on his elbows and give her the most disdainful look he can muster. "Been sort of busy, actually,"

“Holy shit.”

Six staring at a mirror hung beside the door to the room, eyes trained on him in her reflection. There she is, short dark hair, too many ruffles and a piercing gaze, there's just one issue, there's only wall and stone floor where Akira should be.

"Holy shit," Akira echoes.

Then the cats charge again.

He scrambles for the boomerang and wraps his hand around the sharp end. It doesn't matter, none of this matters, the mirror probably has a trick to it. The knife hardly even hurts.

Akira throws it, letting out a small shout of annoyance.

[akira attacks mutts, boomerang (throwing knife)]
kwEgOVKd9qthrowing knife
[Shallow Cut on Back -- 4.0 ]

throwing knife