The Hook Hand Hunts!
| The Hook Hand Hunts! | |
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"Remember... the girl lives. The rest is our prey." | |
| Players | Pullman Griff introduces Silvia into what the Lodge of the Hook Hand is really all about. |
Griffiths rubs her hands together in the cold night air, the two Uratha stood as lonesome, shadowy sentinels atop the battered, rusty old fire escape. The pair sit with their feet dangling over the rooftop's southern edge - a murky old window stained with algae, dirt and time supporting them as a sort of recliner. "So... from the south point, we'll see their headlights. Two SUV lookin' truck things, all comfort, no substance. Blacked out windows, dry clean seats. You know the kind. Our Final Girl tonight is gonna be in the trunk of one, money in the other." She checks a small blinking window on her cellphone, flickering white text over black giving the telltale signs of some sort of patch into a network. "Cameras are all green. Pushing CCTV onto my laptop's spare drive. You bringin' weapons? Now's the time to rack, tap an' bang, yeah?" The larger werewolf sniffs the wind, golden eyes fixed furiously on the night. In this manner, she resembles an enormous pointer hound, eager to flush out her prey for the hunters. Sitting there on the fire escape, Silvia has claimed her rifle. It's a bolt-action thing, a hunting rifle more than anything else, and she's had it slung over her shoulder. No scope. She's staring down the way where Griff is suggesting the cards will come from, towards the south. "No way to tell which car will have which, right?" The Ithaeur wonders casually, glancing aside at the blinking cellphone curiously. She's sitting with her weapon, waiting for her moment. "How many are you fuckin' expecting, anyway?" She asks, a question that occurs to her as something she should have asked sooner. Griffiths laughs quietly - a throaty, growling chuckle that rattles in her chest. "What, a handful of humans with their stupid little toy guns is gonna give you pause? We're off the chain, innit! As soon as they both park up. When you hear car doors start to slam, you shift. They bring their biggest, meanest muscle to these meets, to look tough. To posture. We'll break them in size order, understand? Teach them fear. Remind them, at the back of their tiny fuckin' hind brains, what it means to be prey. I... already know you're gonna wow me, yeah?" Her expression is... one of a dog sticking their head out of the car window, enjoying the breeze. She's living her best life, moments before the big pounce. "Fuck no, I'm not giving fucking pause, sister," Silvia retorts with a grin, "Just curious is all." She laughs, shaking her head as Griff builds up the pressure of her upcoming performance. But what is a Storm Lord if she can't rise to the challenge? "Well, I'll open up the proceedings with a shot here, and then we'll unleash the fucking fury, alright? Alright." For her part, Silvia is all eager tension and anticipation. There's nothing like reveling in one's true nature, after all. Griffiths turns her ear downwind, and taps Silvia on the arm lightly with the back of her hand. "Hey, hey. Showtime. Remember... the girl lives. The rest is our prey." She unzips her overalls down to her navel with a terrible purpose - a little ritual to put her in the space, no matter how much her clothes melt into her for what is to come. She hunkers over, down onto all fours - broad, stubby fingertips digging into concrete. Below, in the ominous gloom of the long-abandoned warehouse, two unmarked, shiny black trucks pull up - their headlights cutting through the night like a knife through butter. There's the electronic beep of two sets of doors being unlocked - before the doors on each burst open, spilling humans out into the dark. One group seems to be bickering amongst themselves, discussing an itinerary. The others simply... stand, enormous steel briefcase of money clutched in the gorilla like paw of their largest member. It does not take long before a bound, tapped, squealing human girl is dragged from the trunk. The Uratha can likely smell her distress from here. Griff flashes Silvia a cheeky wink - a profound enjoyment in her work oozing through those crooked teeth. Then, the Hishu fades. The Gauru overtakes. Rage, and power, and primal ferocity. She flaps like a ragdoll, sleek, greasy blonde fur bursting from her in a tidal wave down her spine. - Her body twist and thrashes into uncomfortable, painful shapes until all that remains before Silvia is... a frighteningly large Uratha, even for the hulking, imposing Gauru that all of their kind can adopt. The giantism seems to go all the way, and a furry, angry tank waits for her signal to leap into the tenebrous battlefield. Silvia is waiting. Watching. Looking for her moment. One shot is all she's going to take before she too will shed her human form. It's there, when the gall, bound and taped is dragged from the trunk that she tenses. A glance aside at Griff, and she nods. The moment is upon them. The shot rings out, glass shatters through the skylight. The man that was holding the girl is down in an instant, she falls roughly, but Silvia's aim is dead on as the blood blooms from the side of his skull. That's the signal, and the Uratha have one moment. That single moment, where the humans can't really comprehend what just happened. This was always going to be a tense moment, but suddenly -- Silvia is shouldering her rifle, and then she too joins Griff. It's like exhaling a long held breath. Flesh shifts and changes, her weapon, her clothing melts away. Problems melt away. Human concerns melt away. The Gauru is here, anger and teeth and terrible, terrible rage. The hunt has truly begun. Griffiths crashes through the murky, half-opaque glass like a bowling ball hurled through a pile of cups. The glass does not even stop her momentum, a falling angel of blonde fur and drooling, snapping jaws. She lands like a heavy, crushing fist itself onto one of the bodyguards on the opposite gang to the girl - an A for effort being awarded as the experienced muscle pulls his pistol. Griff picks up the broken, spine-snapped body of her crashpad up in her jaws by the throat, and viciously shakes from side to side with her teeth. This now /VERY/ dead victim bursts like a macabre pinata, showering a fleshy halo of intestines all around the concrete floor of the warehouse. Griff, smelling the chain reaction of fear light up like a fireworks display, throws her head back. From the bottom of her little Cahalith heart, she howls into the night sky. Low, loud, mournful. A noise that signals to all present but a single thing - you are fucked. Panic is the answer. A moment of confusion, silence after the gunshot, and then panic rises as the humans realize this is not their night. They are the prey and nothing more. Most of them almost immediately shift. Two of them run for the fire exit that's been blocked. One crawls underneath the car. Another just cowers on the spot. Logical thinking is not a skill they possess. They only know that they must run. They must run or they'll die. They'll probably die anyway. Two of them however, seem to be made of sterner stuff. Maybe it's a lifetime of reacting to trouble, maybe they just have what it takes to stand up to the realities of the world, but tonight they're turning their attention to the monster in their midst. One has a pistol, the other a shotgun. They were almost sure they'd be shooting each other, but now they work together, and unload hot metal into the Griff's Gauru form. Flesh yields to the blast, and pain floods her senses. The action on the shotgun is worked, and he's about to fire again when -- The smaller and yet still huge form of Silver is there. She lands on the guy with the shot gun, barreling him to the ground under her weight, claws in his back, the longarm sent scattering across the floor of the warehouse. The grey furred monstrosity picks him up like a child's town, and then she bites into his shoulder. Hard. With a sudden twitch, he's very unneatly bifurcated, tossing half of him to slam into the wall with a wet -thunk- while she drops the rest. Griffiths looms over the pistolero as a behemoth, twice this weedy mobster's height, when drawn back to her full height. She raises her tree-trunk like arm high into the air, bathing in their panicked screams like a hot spring of warmth. Silvia might well pick out through the gloom that Griff's tail wags away, the Uratha blissed out of her gourd. She goes to rake the revolver toting human in half with her massive right claw - her every intent to unzip his chest like a teddy bear to let the stuffing out. By... luck, or plucky cool in the face of fear, or perhaps raw professionalism, this mobster hits the deck. Griff's hand only grazes his shoulder, a far smaller prize than expected. He hits the deck with a grunt, a grunt that becomes a scream of fear. He doesn't even realize he's the one screaming in the face of his own demise, feeling those claws rake his shoulder, his back. A shaky hand points the pistol //up//, and he squeezes the trigger again and again. More bullets for Griff, but now it's like being tickled by a handful of gravel. Silvia, for her part, leaves Griff to deal with this one insolent one, springing off to create a bloody mess of the pair that are scrambling at the blocked up fire escape. Rip and tear, the warehouse is being painted red tonight. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the bound and gagged woman is screaming her lungs out. Griffiths has her head snap back as the bullet connects with the bottom of her jaw. Mere seconds later, her gaze levels - two yellowgold discs that look down on this mortal creature with disdain. She cranes her ears back, letting them fall flat to her skull as she snarls a guttural growl directly into the subconscious of the mobster. Her hearing picks up the shrieking of their Final Girl, and she snarls out to Sylvia in a broken, garbled, stilted version of the first tongue. <<The Final Girl must see us work! Good Hunt, Sister! Good Blood!>> She curls a massive handpaw around each of her would-be assailant's arms, and starts to... pull. Slowly, surely, agonizing screams fill the air. The pistol-toting ganger wails and howls into the echoing, cavernous gloom of the warehouse - mere metres from their bound captive. His screams turn wet, gurgling out his last spattering drops of fear. The human body can only take so much, and the poor creature is torn in half like a sheet of paper. There's more to be done, as Silvia is sniffing out the one gangster that's huddled himself beneath the car. Cars. What silly things, the strength of the Gauru easily able to shove the car aside to get to the sniveling man-thing underneath. He's soon impaled on Slivia's claws, lifted into the air and shaken, a mixture of sobbing and screaming, fear and pain are his final moments as the blood showers over Silvia, before he's finally dropped to the ground. She lets out a howl, not on the same level of enthusiasm and sheer volume as the Cahalith, but on the other side of the gauntlet, in the Hisil, the spirits know that an Ithaeur is at work tonight. Griffiths watches with an almost innocent tilt of her head as the last remaining combatant - in heroism, defiance, or sheer desperation, makes a bee-line for the bound and squealing captive. Nothing to show as much as weapons go except a bent tire-iron palmed in a panic from the gouged concrete floor, their last opponent raises his weapon in a proud, mad bid to bludgeon their quarry to death. Griff wraps her enormous jaws around this brave foe's head, engulfing him down to the shoulders entirely. There is a crunching chomp, like a boot treading on autumn leaves - and the hunt is done. Done, at least, for the most part. Their spirit patron must be honored. Griff drags the headless body along with her in her jaws like a spaniel proudly toting a duck - leaving a red smear across the way. She throws wide the warehouse gates with the groaning, creaking protest of over-burdened metal, the night air rushing in like a long-lost lover. The moonlight illuminates the scene in full - Mother Luna's full face casting the horrific scene of death and fear in new, silvery contrasts. Griff does not run towards their captive so much as she slowly, methodically, purposefully walks - each step of her paw pads like a terrified heartbeat. The captive screws her eyes shut, expecting the end - only to find her ropes loosened. When she opens her eyes, the horrible beasts have fled. | |