Welcome to Gaia! ::

((Sorry. I kept it as minimal as I could. Do you have AIM? It'd make it easier if all those present could give me AIM SNs for me to contact you by.))

"I've never met her before, like she said," Linda agreed, voice shaking. "I learned of Legion when a letter appeared on my bed a couple of nights ago."

"How many?" Glasses Guy demanded.

"I think it was two nights ago. No, three. No, two. Uh..." Linda was too panicked to remember.

"It's not gonna help much to keep insisting on an interrogation at a literal swordpoint minutes after swiping 'em off the street. They're too busy hoping we don't execute 'em on the spot, I'd guess," commented Knife Guy. He began to move on to another point. He almost managed to say "Besides" when he was interrupted by the man who had returned to their reconfigured radar.

"Oh, s**t! Josh, we have one almost on top of us!"

Glasses Guy's face snapped towards him. "What?! Weren't you watching it? We should've had way more warning!"

"Uh..." was the only reply. He knew it was his fault they were in this situation.

"All right. I'll take care of this," Glasses Guy Josh groaned, walking towards the door already. Taylor visibly relaxed not to have the steel-crushing hands at her head. "Alan, you're with me." Knife Guy Alan fell in behind him. "Gag both again. Quickly." Someone who had been otherwise silent promptly pulled duct tape across each of their mouths, silencing them one at a time..

~~

Erik was silenced by the feeling of Legion's presence. He sat in the entryway on a chair that did not exist. Takeshi kneeled, and gestured for Erik to do the same. Erik did so.

"Welcome," Legion said with the body of an obese gentleman. He shifted into the clothing and body of a restaurant hostess and, in a deceptively sweet voice, gestured as... it... stood. Takeshi and Erik rose to follow Legion. "Let me show you to your table." He shifted to a generic form of unmemorable features and led them through a door to his left. A large table was surrounded by some fresh-looking undead carrying plates. "Don't worry. I don't let them contaminate the food."

He reached to one plate and picked off what appeared to be a human left hand, and began gnawing its nails.

"Oh, dear. Do control that, won't you?" he veritably spat at Takeshi, who had gotten an erection from viewing a female corpse. Takeshi's face glowed red. "Go on. Get out. This is for our friend Erik, anyway."

Legion took the seat at the head of the wooden table as Takeshi scrambled out of the room.

"Necrophilia is always entertaining, but Haru was much smarter, much wiser, and much more talented than Takeshi. He had better self-control as well," Legion commented, biting off two joints of the hand's pinky, shortening it to approximate Takeshi's left hand. "Now. Tell me. What do you think of this? Of me? I want your first impressions. And let me assure you... you will not be punished for it. I'm a little rusty from all the time off, I expect."

Erik stared incredulously, before gathering his wits to answer.

screamed Siber in his brain as he sprinted the directions Keldan gave him. knew that woman would be able to tell the guy had been murdered and hadn't just had a stroke.>
boy,> Keldan said, leaning into the word as if it were a curse,
He cooled his temper and searched for pursuers. They were scattered throughout the crowd, people with furrowed brows and bright eyes, trying very hard not to look at him. Siber eyed their poor acting attempts disdainfully.
Siber found himself near a large intersection, about two city blocks away from where Keldan claimed their final destination lay. He leaned casually against a convenient pole, actually mentally calm for the first time in longer than he wished to compute, however short a time it may have been. Pulling out a fake cigarette he had brought for just this purpose and puffing fake smoke that smelled faintly of strawberries (a suggestion Keldan had made, to toy with people's olfactory sense later on), he waited as a veritable wall of hunters very slowly surrounded him. Keldan had begun chanting quietly a few minutes ago and stopped to say,



Suddenly, there was a picture in Siber's mind of a music score. Incantati Infernis. Most demoniacs don't use them, I don't think, but I find them extremely useful in times like these. Acts as a kind of war dance.>
He began sight-reading the music around his cigarette. One or two hunters noticed his lips moving and tried to warn the others, but it was far too late.

Siber ran from the shredded bodies with slightly more than a modicum of haste, fitting in rather well with the crowd of shrieking refugees from the maelstrom moments ago. His actions differed from theirs, though, when he slipped inside a wholly unremarkable, but good-sized mansion house.

Joe shivered. "Roland, I want to find out what that is."

"But it feels like something was...I dunno...like, released. I'm getting a feeling of relief and escape..."

"Should I head towards it?"

"Gotcha. Where to then?"

"So. Let's go there then."
A few minutes later, they were climbing the steps of a normal-looking mansion. Joe stopped and knocked on the door, waiting nervously for someone to answer.

I am a very, very patient man, Legion had begun explaining to Siber, while gnawing the last knuckles of his food. That, he elaborated, was the only reason that he hadn't begun to flay him alive for drawing every warlock and hunter to his gods-damned hideout that he had spent half a week cloaking, with a number of massive fluctuations of energy shattering his best defense, not being noticed.

Legion, to be fair, could not entirely blame them. He himself had been raising enormous numbers of undead, sending out letters to newly awakened warlocks, and setting Takeshi and a couple of other fresh recruits to training.

This did not stop him from being intensely irritated.

After sending Joe to the room Siber was in, Legion had managed to divert a large portion of the energy emitted from his magic into the street where the demons were, then sinking the excess energy into himself, leaving the Warlock Hunters to think they had dealt with everything of consequence. However, they still had two of his potential allies. Once he repaired his current magical concealment and checked all his emergency bases, he would have a couple of his new agents head over as a test.

This was rapidly growing aggravating. If only Takeshi had been more careful of the Warlock Hunters...

The car Melissa was busy driving pulled up in front of the Holiday Inn. At Paul's request, he'd convinced Robert to allow him to stop and buy ammunition for his Glock before he got to the hotel. Now as he pulled up, he slid one last round into the last magazine, tucking it into one of the pockets of his pants. "I suppose we should go in and get a room," Paul said.

"What else would we do?"

"Run over pedestrians and make a General Lee horn sound?"

"Interesting, but let's just go in and get a room."

"Probably for the best."

They climbed out, grabbed their luggage, and placed it on one of those luggage carts (the ones at the hotels that are really fun to ride, disturbingly) and hefted it through the front door.

Superb. Hopefully I won't need to. Duh. Security would be horrific.

Joe smiled nervously, still feeling the aftereffects of Legion's presence. "Great. I just found out that life as I know it is gonna be pretty interesting from now on." He sat down next to Siber. "I'm Joe. You are....?"
He thought to himself, "Roland?"

"Is he...um...one of us?"

"Yeah."

Paul groaned. If it had only been just him. He would've gone for his gun, shaken his opponent off for the split second he needed to plant a round point-blank.


It's better than sitting around and doing nothing.

Whatever.