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It wasn't all that hard to convince Ignatius to do something heroic, even if it was for the humans. They weren't so bad anyway, as he had told Piper. Sure, they were weird, but after becoming a knight for some reason he felt like he could understand them just that much better.

Honestly, the blackmailing wasn't even necessary. Ignatius shrugged, because why not save some helpless humans, and walked over to the fountain to listen to whatever they were saying. (Honestly, he wasn't sure he cared.)

"Mrrr that's fuh?" muttered Ignatius to himself. What kind of name was Mrr that's fuh? Wouldn't it just be easier to say the full name at that point? He was fairly sure most residents of Halloween did not have vocal chords to handle that, perhaps unless they were demons. Demons said some weird s**t sometimes--

A manual? Eh. Ignatius never read the manual! He'd wing it. Well, that was until someone came over and threatened him with double volunteering. Ignatius wasn't sure what that would entail, but he wasn't sure he wanted to find out, especially if it involved more people hitting him in the back of the head.

"Alright, alright..."

Find a human, hug it, bring it to the portal. Alright. Easy. Not sure why he had to read this...

Really? Portals in the middle of Town? Unusual, but it probably meant this was serious. That would mean Ignatius would get to be seriously heroic. Without really questioning it, he strolled over to the portal, though before walking in something caught his eye. Why was that minipet dressed like--

They've given you a very small opening!

Whoa, a talking minipet!

Use the time well. You might not be able to try again!

Alright, so he had to be quick. Cool. Ignatius could do that. He was good at being fast. He jumped into the portal without another thought and hit the ground running once he got there. Or, well, he did for a few moments until he realized this place was so... Desolate.

Well, they definitely needed his help now, though he wasn't sure what he was expected to do with half-formed shadowlings and human-things that felt like they were assaulting his very fear. There had to be someone to save somewhere, he assumed, but where were they?

Ignatius wandered the desolate landscape, batting away at fog as if it would help, for what felt like eons. Thankfully, Ignatius never gave up, and he eventually stumbled upon a rather scrawny looking human that was curled in upon himself and... Sleeping?

Well, alright then. Ignatius bent down, heaved them off the ground, and headed back towards the portal. Or at least, where he thought the portal was...

Davyne had not needed much roping or guilting at all to volunteer to save a human; really, all anyone had needed to do was mention the words and she was there.

Finally, a chance for her to be more hands-on in her ideals - not something she was about to turn down. She'd stuck to her DETH teachings so far and a chance to get more involved was not something she'd shy away from - that would hardly be practical after all, to coward away when an opportunity had finally presented itself.

So she'd nodded stoically to the request and had gracefully accepted the instruction book; Davyne was, at heart, a great lover of clear instructions and goals. Handbooks or instruction books in particular - they were sensible things, after all, not prone to emotional outbursts when asked a question, like some creeple.

So she immediately set to scanning the pages of [ HOW TO SAVE YOUR HUMAN ]. It was... rather a quicker venture than she'd anticipated. Find a human, hug it and carry it safely back to, well, safety - it seemed rather simple, in fact.

She'd hardly lament that, though.

Done with her reading she moved on, following the gnome's instructions and entering the line, taking her volunteer passport. It was not the time to be excited, and yet she vaguely was; never before had she been in the human world, and she was very curious as to what it was really like - she'd read the books, certainly, but it all seemed so fantastical and far-fetched. She was pleased to get a chance to see it with her own eyes, even if the situation was otherwise quite dire - butterflies of anticipation were swirling in her stomach, and mentally Davyne gave herself a stern talking to to settle down. This was neither the time nor the place for excitement; a human needed her help and she needed to keep focused to best render aid.

Right. She nodded firmly to herself and then noticed that the line had moved on enough for her to be near the portals, now; there were several creeple standing there, apparently taking questions from the look of it. She drifted towards her fellow Reaper, stopping before him to ask, "hello. Is there anything of particular note I should know before going in?"

To which she got the reply of a skeptical look and "if you can save a Human with that amount of Fear, then I'm the reincarnation of the Lord of the Underworld." He paused. "That was a joke. You know, because you can't."

Well, that was... Well! The blonde slightly pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at the grey Reaper before moving forward to the portals, consciously snubbing him. She had every faith in her own abilities, confident that she would rise to the challenge; and certainly no-one was going to convince her otherwise, fellow Reaper or not!

As she made her way through the portal, she was struck instantly by how very different the human world was. For one, it was quite dreary, well-fitting to a Halloween denizen; she'd rather been led to believe that the human world was absurdly colourful and obnoxiously cheery, but that did not seem the case.

Other than that it was... hm. She couldn't quite find the words to describe it, to be honest.

Davyne navigated the grey, harsh surroundings, stopping occasionally to look at the grey metal cars or the unformed shadowlings - not the humans, for she'd quickly figured out that they hurt to look at. If they were even humans, at that. The general shape was there, but...

She moved onwards, unheeding of the thickening fog around her. She was here with a purpose, and so her purpose she would fulfill; still, the search was long, and it took her a long time to finally find an actual human.

But eventually she did. A blonde ghoul, older than herself by some years and slightly tan - all in all, rather remarkably human-like. And looking at her did not hurt, so she probably was an actual human.

"Hello?" Kneeling down to softly shake the ghoul didn't seem to wake her, nor did her calls. A few tries and then she had to re-evaluate the situation here; quite clearly, the human was not waking up. It was, however, breathing and looked healthy enough (for as well as she was able to judge, anyhow).

And yet, they needed to get to the portal. Frowning slightly, she recalled the words of the instruction book - hugging the human was step two, and she had failed in fulfilling it. Was that perhaps the problem here?

Making up her mind, Davyne leaned over the collapsed human and gave it an awkward hug. She was not a great hugger at the best of times, and certainly this situation did not make it any easier.

Perhaps the lackluster hug was the reason, but whatever it was, the human was still not waking up. She contemplated a second hug but knew that she'd already hit her peak performance in the hugging department; it was now time for alternate measures.

Pokerus had no qualms about coming to the rescue of humans, counting a few of them as allies and even experiencing being a human herself. Plus she also had a hero complex so, she was more then willing to volunteer for this mission. Wordlessly she took the booklet, glanced at it and just stared at the few lines it contained. Did they think she was that stupid? Really??

Retrieving her passport, she listened quietly to the gnome, making a mental note about the 'humans couldn't see her' part, then ventured towards some of the volunteers to get some extra information.

The reaper was promptly given the bird for his retort. "I'd like to see you do better." She growled, before listening to Red. Her growling increased; oh jacking great there was insanity there. ********.

Arel received a roll of the eyes, before she went to the minipet, nodding to his telepathic words, before she hopped into the portal.

Of course the first thing she saw when she hopped out was grey and fog. Her growling increased, but softened when she heard none of the telltale whispers of home, and soon focused on the area itself. Pokerus was surprised at the amount of ruin she saw; the buildings were broken and in disrepair, covered in a strange sort of vine. Shadowlings were everywhere, but what caught her eye were the human like things, some so decayed she thought they were zombies, but more...stereotypical ones. They barely moved, making it easy for her to move around them.

The dragon walked down the street, keeping a look out for any signs of humans about, before the fog suddenly became thicker. "s**t!" She cursed, now unable to see much of anything. When nothing immediate happened she continued searching for survivors.

It took a while, but eventually she stumbled across a unconscious man, lying sprawled on the ground. "Hey...you okay?" She poked him a few times, but got no response. He didn't look dead, so she was...pretty sure he was alive.

Sammy wasn't unsure of how she got roped into the situation, no she had gladly volunteered for it when the option was given. The heavy pendant hanging off her hip tucked inside her jacket was all the proof she needed that stoping by the main Town Hall was either luck, or something more. Maybe Shun was right, maybe Protection was pulling her strings by having her here...

... Or maybe she had just been wanting to get more information on getting her own full Passport once she graduated. Either way she was more then willing to sign up for a job outside Halloween that would involve saving humans. A 'World Wide' catastrophe sounded very much Horsemen or Legacy inspired, without a doubt whatever was happening it was bad if they where calling on Halloween to aid, and it would mean hunters. Assuming this was a serious thing, the idea of 'world ending' might be exaggerated by the little elf. Still she grabbed her pamphlet and flipped it open browsing- well that was rather brisk. Find human, grab human, get to the portal.

For a moment she hopped that Hunters had more solid instructions and wished they had something better as well. This was the blind leading the blind now. Following instructions she got into line snatching her passport with a bit more force then needed from the "House Elf" AKA Gnome with more annoying appearance. Finally she was lead to the portals themselves, the conversation she had with Jordan drifting back into her mind. Halloween did have the same powers, but how they harnessed the fear to make the portals, well, she didn't know she wasn't given a chance to look at them as she was guided through with the rest.

Even as she walked by her purple flames flickered to the side. Red was standing their, a twin echo of a growl a mention of we don't trust this. It put Sammy on edge, not because of the voices or the growl, but the fact that Red seemed concerned, not aloft and annoyed at Students talking to her, but that sense of worry. It latched on even as Sammy was sent on her way.

At last she was there, dropped into the human world, the tell-tale signs of fog scattering around them as they each appeared. Thinner shadows of others still phasing in, and the strange twisted figures, humans that weren't human. Looking too long caused a pain, somewhere behind her eyes deeper in the socket, yet not her brain, it was just so glaringly wrong that even the pain felt from viewing it felt wrong.

Even as she weaved between half formed figures, and twisted disturbances she found herself limited climbing over strange metal beasts. They looked like Halloween cars but far more boring, why hadn't the Humans used those to escape? Onward she went, climbing atop the nearest car to get a better view, the large yellow box of metal gave her a good view, enough for her to watch as the fog rolled back in swarming around the truck like a small island that slowly reached up to tangle around her.


Insanity? That could explain the twisted things lingering about...

Jumping down into the thick of the fog she continued her hunt for easily an hour talking through the fog, shadows, and cars, till she finally found the collapsed form of a human boil. Well, an older boil, more like plain old Creeple, sunken face and looking kind of dried out, he didn't even smell that appealing and this was to a zombie who was very keen to what a fresh tasty human would smell like. "

Kenta had not wanted to volunteer.. he wanted to focus on studying and lounging around (mostly lounging) but nooooo. His guardian stalked into his dorm room and hauled him off to this gathering. MRTHATSFH, however you pronounced that, was holding a massive rescue effort since apparently the humans were in danger.

"You must help them, Kenta," Loran, the skeleton guardian, told him seriously. "Without humans there is no fear. And without fear we cease to exist."

And with that Kenta was left no option. Loran, his current Alpha (in his wolf mind) had given him an order and he would follow it. Unhappily of course but also slightly eagerly. It would be his first time in the human world after all! Wonder what it looks like over there, his tail wagged happily at the thoguht of scaring some humans... though apparently they had to save them. Why not scare them and then save them? More fun that way!

He picked up the pamphlet they were handing out and read it; maybe it'd have helpful ideas? He snickered as he read it. Pick them up and save them? With hugs? Seriously?! He stashed it in his pocket since he couldn't find a nearby trashcan and walked towards the portals for his passport. Wonder if I can keep it? He thought, though he doubted it. It was probably a one time only thing....


He, of course, went to the portal where the werewolf lady wearing red was standing by.

"What can I expect?" He asked as he got his passport.

"We do not t͏r̕us̵ţ this," she growled. Her growl reverberated with the sound of more than one being. "There is something about the fog that sets my teeth on edge. Keep your Fear close and strike swiftly."

His ears twitched at the sound of dual voices but otherwise he didn't react. "Gotcha." If it made her feel odd then something had to be up right? Well.. tht was obvious since the humans were apparently dying off but maybe it was a bit more serious than that.


Beyond the portal lay a loose and faded fog. Thin tendrils of pale fog reached out for him the instant he entered; it made him feel lethargic. He growled at the odd scent among it; this was not an ordinary fog at all! It had the moist smell.. but it also had strange scents mixed in with it; things not familiar to him... and some all too familiar. Metallic scents, strange chemical smells... and blood.


Strange almost car shapes loomed in the mist. They could have been cars... but they were so inefficient and not car-like that maybe they weren't. But humans don't make things exactly like we have, he thought, so maybe these kinda wimpy things are their cars? Odd shadows wander the mists, not quite there and vaguely human shaped but painful to look at. It wasn't Fear either, that made them.. they were.. different.

He walked through the fog as it thickened, looking for these humans that needed saving. I don't think I'll be able to scare them, he thought in amusement, they must have already been scared by all of this! But maybe he could steal that fear and use it himself....

Eventually he found a human, a smaller slightly chubby girl who's clothes looked like they'd seen better days.. and either she'd lost a lot of weight or she was wearing bigger clothes than she needed. He picked her up and tossed her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, careless of the fact his bone side was digging into her stomach and leaving a bruise.

Right... so he had to take her back to the portal right?
OOC:

The mission wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary - in fact, Gale considered it to be almost lacking, since there was no three in the morning text from a certain Division Leader. He gathered his things together and then made his way over to Caelius, giving him a suspicious look before he turned to Mark instead.

Mark was, as usual, completely useless. Gale sighed as he slipped through the portal, emerging out into the fog on the other side.

For months, Ever's life was subsumed in the act of code breaking: compiling bits and pieces of what he could find of something that looked like a horseman language and applying various linguistic rules to it in an attempt to come up with a guide book, with enough understanding to actually read it and translate what it said. The results, so far, had been spotty at best. A word here, a sentence there; half of a poem about death, and Ever couldn't decide if it was metaphoric or if it was talking about actual death. Meals had been skipped, sleep had been a rare occurrence, and some of the people had been pushing him to take a break -- really take a break.

He hadn't wanted to, but when orders came, he couldn't exactly argue. He had no excuse to stay locked up in a basement room in the Life building when there was actual work to be done, he had been informed, and it was hard to put together an explanation of why what he was doing was actual work, when he had so few results to offer up.

So he came blinking in the light. A trip to Canada, which should have been exciting because Ever'd never been to Canada, but also wasn't, because he had a feeling he was weirdly close to home. He sat in the rain, wincing at even the faint haze of sunlight, possibly even starting to burn all things considered, and waited for a debriefing that never seemed to come. Five minutes. Ten. This place was a wreck, and it started to grate at his nerves a little, because he had better places to be, when he remembered the message sent to his phone and only briefly skimmed earlier.

To keep himself from flipping out, already resenting this break from his task, he fumbled with his cell until he got the briefing up to read it in full, and by the time he was finished [and unsatisfied, really] they were ready to go, people lining up to ask the leads questions. He had plenty, but Ever surveyed the row of faces in front of him and noticed that Dr. H. was conspicuously absent. He kept his thoughts to himself.

He should have brought his notebooks, his notes. Maybe he wasn't even all that needed and he could settle somewhere out of the way to work on the three little symbols he'd managed to string together, the snippet of translation he'd managed to get out of an otherwise incomprehensible string of characters. But he hadn't. So he just heaved a sigh, and headed through the portal to see what disaster they had stepped into this time.

[Read the entire text]

The mission text had been the usual combination of specific and completely uninformative, of course. It wasn't something Jordan could have ignored, even if he'd wanted to, which meant that he was now here, in a grey, drizzling day, grateful that he'd had enough sense to determine that autumn in Canada meant that he should probably wear something with a hood under the uniform coat. Four hours, he said to Ferros, and they noted the time window, and checked their SPECTRE watch for the area map.

[Ask the Sun lead a question]

Asking Allan whether to expect any unusual creatures in the area got a predictably vague answer, but the Sun lead also clapped Jordan on the shoulder, shoved some snacks into his mission bag, and made sure his runic daggers were charged, so it hadn't been a total waste of time.

Stepping through the portal, they found themselves in the ruins of a city. It looked like a post-apocalyptic wasteland from some kind of disaster movie, Jordan thought bemusedly. There were half-formed shadowlings lurking here and there, and slow-moving zombies in ones and twos. He kept an eye out for the dots on his map and avoided them. This was a rescue mission, not an area clearing.

As he walked, keeping his footsteps light and quiet, the fog thickened, swirling around him and obscuring his vision. It made him distinctly uneasy. He'd been around Insanity fog too often to be at all comfortable with fog appearing on a mission.

It felt like they'd been moving through the ruins for far too long. Was anyone actually alive and human here still? As Jordan thought that, he spotted a booted foot sticking out from under the shelter of a half-collapsed bus station. Warily, he checked, and found, with some surprise, that the person the foot belonged to was alive and still human.