Bogged Down (Tether, Beretta, and Kitty)

[lance]

TYLER WESTBROOK

Tyler wasn't sure how it happened.

The day had been winding down, and Tyler's alliance-somehow still mostly intact after two vicious fights-had been slowly wandering away from the dreaded bog, towards the northernmost section of the arena.

Even though everyone had survived the fight, Tyler seemed to have been the only one to escape unscathed. Daria had suffered the worst, having suffered several gashes and the loss of her foot. The small girl was stubbornly trudging forward, but it was clear that if it wasn't for Rodrick she would have collapsed long ago.

The big guy himself had escaped the fight mostly unharmed, simply taking a couple of slices along his body. But there was a strange glint in his eyes, and from the way he nervously clutched Leo's arm and the fact that there had been a cannon boom shortly after the fight had broken up, it wasn't difficult to put two and two together.

Heather? Heather had simply been unlucky. Once again, she had slipped her opponent's notice, even though she was the one who had first wielded the severed arm. It wasn't until she brought out the strange enchanted stick of hers that she had suffered. It had caught us all by surprise, really; the worst it had done before was summon a small raincloud.

Yet somehow, there was something about the bog that had disagreed with her stick, and a bubble of gas had erupted out of seemingly nowhere, hitting her right in the face.

The blonde girl had sort of lost it, and her clothes, afterwords.

The strangest yet, however, was what took place afterwords. As the group put more distance between themselves and the mud, a dense fog had blanketed the area. So dense, in fact, that it was almost like wading through a gigantic sheep's wool instead of air and water vapor.

Tyler had wandered through the strange fog for a while, all the while making sure that one hand was wrapped in Heather's, before giving up. He had yelled out into the fog that he and Heather were stopping, hoping that the other two would hear, before plopping down in a seemingly random location. The blond boy had quickly set up a makeshift camp for the two of them before crashing, the events and exhaustion of the day finally catching up with him.

Now, here he was, raising his arms up in exasperation as he woke up....in almost the exact same place he had the previous night, with Heather being the only other person in sight.

A quick search had revealed that Daria and Rodrick were nowhere in sight, nor was there any sign that they had even been around the area in the last twelve hours.

Tyler let out a huff of air, a cynical smile plastered on his face. "Well, this is just fucking great." he said aloud. "Just Heather and I all alone in this stinking bog. Fan-fucking-tastic."

There was once a time when Tyler would have payed a lot more attention to what he said on live television. But that time had long since gone and passed, and the situation wasn't helping any.

The blond boy picked up his tea kettle full of water, having been purified earlier by one of his two remaining iodine tablets, and thirstily drunk the entire thing down in a matter of minutes.

His throat refreshed by the water and his mood calmer with time, a sudden realization went off in Tyler's mind, like an imaginary lightbulb had gone off in his head.

"Wait a minute." he muttered. "It is just myself and Heather that's camped here.

He turned his head toward his ally's sleeping form. "From what I've been able to tell, we're the only people in the entire goddamn bog, let alone this little area.

Ahooga the word fluttered down from her perch in a nearby tree, landing on Tyler's head and letting out a soft honk.

Tyler himself turned his head back to the front, facing the horizon, a lopsided smile covering his face and his outlook on the current situation somewhat improved.

table coding (c) ghosty

[tyler uses one iodine tablet on unpurified tea kettle]
[tyler drinks one tea kettle of purified water]

[L△LIA]

Even as a young child, you liked everything to be just so. Sunday dresses were crisp with starch as you smoothed tiny hands across the fabric, as if dusting off the mere thought of filth surrounding you. You never made your own bed, but were very particular when telling the maid exactly how it ought to be done. Everything from the way you alternated between bites of food and sips of water at dinner (three bites, one sip, repeat) to the way you would practice smiling in the mirror every morning (insistent that there was a correct teeth-to-face ratio) needed to be exactly so. Control is important. You were born knowing this, well before your parents began reinforcing the idea.

In those days you preferred pain to be a clean affair, untraceable — holding the dog's muzzle shut to trap its howl of misery in its throat, force-feeding the other children on the playground bugs or sand as you wiped the salty evidence of their tears away before their parents could see, and psychologically tormenting your father's mafia underlings with how easy it would be for you to tell daddy the kind of fibs that would get them killed... or worse. No one ever dared snitch on you. It was as if everyone was holding their breath, knowing that you were madness itself, but praying that if no one ever spoke this truth aloud that you would never discover it. You were a horrible brat, however, they all knew you could be something so much worse.

When you crushed the skull of an annoying neighborhood cat with a hammer and fell in love with death for the first time, the world thought oh god, this is it. You killed small animals and then you killed people and surely that was as terrible as you could get. The sadistic torture, the joy in it, the fascination with ending life... what could be worse? Nothing, they thought. You seem to have taken this as a challenge.

Leticia Tibideaux's hands armor your own now — the bones of her fingers overlaid upon your own, her skeleton hands synchronized to your movements. Each time your fingertips skim your bottom lip, so do hers. When you make fist, she joins you like an ally even closer than the three fighting at your side. She matches the enthusiasm with which you hold your weapons and the greed with which you reach out for blood, sharing your life now that she has lost her own. This is a blessing of immortality, you think while pressing your lips to her naked ivory knuckles, arrogantly convinced you have done her a favor. Surely she should be thankful to you for this.

Your fingers shudder involuntarily, a fleeting twitch through your left hand as you pick up your whip — braided leather, banshee bones, and silver claws. It is not with gentle insistence that you put the handle between Kitty's jaws, telling him to bite down. "For the pain," you whisper in a giddy hush, an undeniable smile hooked into your lips. Harbinger and Chloe have been lost to the fog and so you are diligently preparing to heal the single human shield you have left, promising him that you can bring his leg back to life. "Don't worry. Putting someone back together is just taking them apart in reverse. We don't need all the king's horses or any of his men, the Queen will put you back together again." Half of his limb was hacked away, as misplaced as your other allies, but you have something better to replace it with.

The right leg of the banshee's corpse is laid out on the ground where Kitty's phantom limb would be, flesh to flesh as you prepare to stitch them together. Girl above God, you have not only deemed yourself worthy of taking life, but of restoring it. With a needle carved of bone and thread of twisted gut, you will make him a little less human and far more formidable.

A shriek of suffering is caged within his throat, just like every other pet you've had before. You do not ease the push of the needle into his flesh. Both sets of your hands revel in his pain, enjoying the way he seizes and sweats with misery. The way he moves like a marionette for you is more beautiful than any dress you've ever owned or the comfort of sleeping in a bed of feather pillows with clean sheets and the bones you wear seem no less enthusiastic. It is right that he should hurt. All three of you are getting exactly what you want — Kitty, a new leg; Leticia, revenge for her own pain; you, ultimate control as you establish a new world order in which the living become the dead as the dead become the living. All of this is at your personal discretion.

He moans. You smile. You have always liked everything to be just so.

[frankensteins a banshee corpse leg onto Kitty]

[drinks bog water and refills her waterskin]

[amoebic dysentery]

ACrp9_kI1-3

[delivery word]

1-4

[dowsing rod]

1-3

1-3�1-4�1-3

[cameron]

[presto] [/presto]

[googlefont="Satisfy:400"] Heather Tenley It was a quiet night, but everything screamed. Footsteps in the muck, the buzzing of mosquitoes, items in a bag clinking together all were overly apparent and barreling through my ear canal. I could see nothing but I could hear shit I'd never wanted to. It was one of those 'lose one sense, gain another' things you hear about but never really believe, because why on earth would being blind affect your sense of hearing at all, right? Well, I was a living testament that it did, in fact, affect it. Because when Rowdy exhaled I could literally hear grains of food shifting in his esophagus. Even though I was a living testament, I wasn't sure how much longer I wanted to be living if I had to hear that again. Fastforward a few hours, and I can't hear Rowdy at all. I'm not sure if he was blessing me with the lack of his presence or if I was just purely lucky, but either way I hadn't heard him leave, and that worried me. I could hear blood pulsing through Spreadsheets' tiny bird veins but I couldn't hear clunky Rowdy walking away with a hobbling Daria? Something was wrong. This Arena, it played tricks on you. That was for certain. But what else was for certain was that I was now alone with Tyler. And although I may have been unable to see and marvel in his natural beauty or his perfectly clear skin despite the fact that we had been stabbed at and drenched in blood and hadn't showered in days... despite all that, I could feel him. And I could feel him better than ever before. And I wanted him to know what that felt like.

ooc: wraps length of bandage from day 2 mummy sleeping bag thign around tylers eyes so he cant see, and sucks his long meat wand with him blindfolded
speaking of wands, uses elder wand
uses iodine tablet to purify water/drinks purified water

[анзие (Anz)]

His shuddering breath tastes stale, and the bone handle of Beretta's whip doesn't taste like anything close to human, but the knowledge of both keeps Kitty from passing out, or throwing up, or both. The even in-out of the needle makes him tremble, makes his hands curl and release in spastic repetition - but Kitty holds as still as he can, focusing only on the staleness of his breath and the taste of monster on his tongue.

Beretta is insane. Kitty's known that for a while now, maybe even chose her because of it - that part is distant, incoherent, blurred like the unfamiliar sky over his head - but the extent of her crazy only surfaced when she offered to stitch a leg back on him with the lower half of a banshee limb in her arm. Her steady, stoic hands don't betray the giddy excitement he saw in her cat eyes; he thinks, "Putting someone back together is just taking them apart in reverse," as Beretta becomes his recreator, his puppeteer.

"You," Kitty rasps, lips barely moving. "You would be... one of them." The words make sense in his overwhelmed brain: if she were surrounded by monsters, she would be their queen. Like terror cloaked in flesh, the very sight of her eyes would send her subjects cowering and pleading for her favor.

Kitty's head droops. His eyes slide in and out of focus as he sees the needle making the banshee an extended part of him: in, out, in, out, in, out. Bile claws its way to his throat, and, with a low moan of disgust-wrongness-pain, Kitty lifts his head back up to the sky, eyes involuntarily rolling to the back of his head as he struggles to keep his stomach down.

His eyes stop working, along with the rest of his senses - waking up is to a parched tongue and a deep ache in his right leg. Beretta presses his waterskin into his hand, sitting him up against her. Kitty sips quietly, trying not to look down at himself for fear of throwing up the rest of the water, for fear of what he'll find. Beretta's false fingers card through his hair soothingly, lulling him back to a dreamless rest.

When he opens his eyes again, he's been pulled into Beretta's lap, chin tucked against her collar. The pain has dimmed. Kitty looks hazily up at her - and at her smile, down at his unfamiliar leg.

Kitty tears his gaze away immediately, finding Beretta's eyes instead.

Part human, part creature. Just the way he's meant to be.

Kitty drinks water from purified kettle
-- gets a badass new leg
-- gets stuff from sponsorship
-- finds the elder wand

delivery word
Gcg8P3k81-4
dowsing rod
1-3

1-4�1-3