[ismilealot]

@ Feathers  Eagle is battling the creature. Using beak and talons to protect it's charge. Lance is right next to her. The young troll took a beating from that thing this morning. But he's still here, the ghostly edges of mana armor & sword shimmering around him. He stands back up, a true defender, once again in the fray.

[Triskavanski]

The pain.. she could feel it shooting through her body as the beast tears into her. Taking a moment, she lets out a breath, her eyes going dead as the wounds she suffered just don't really matter much anymore to her. The fear of them the terror.. She's erased them all from her mind temporally.

In one motion, her fist clenches and a mini flare was fired straight at the ground exploding in a bright flash of light.

[SgtBoomCloud]

@ Arc & Yelena  The bugs are tenacious in their biting frenzy and Arc prepares to throw the grenade. The comm message is almost lost.  It's from E3, one of the Howler groups, >>We've spotted her! We're going to kill this mother-fraggin' slitch!<<   

Arc heard the message just as she was running out of the alley, dragging Yelena by one arm to help her along.  The human could see the myriad of bitemarks all over the elf's exposed body parts, blood trickling from the more serious injuries.  Gritting her teeth, she was almost shouting into the microtransceiver.

<<Channel Bravo>>
"Hold up, do not engage alone, keep her spotted!  All teams, converge.  E group, you're now the vanguard, so hop to it, and hold her at the very least.  You will have reinforcements"

She spoke quickly, moving almost just as fast despite her short stature, making a 10-meter jaunt like it was walking.  Rounding on one heel, she kept her forward momentum going and gave a nod to Yelena, tugging the Russian behind herself.  She hoped that Yelena had the sense to command her bike to move it, but wasn't gonna check before the football shaped object was away, it's motion sensor pin pulled just as it was leaving the human's hand, arcing in a spiral before landing squarely upon the swarm, erupting in a roar and inferno of explosion in the alley.

[ismilealot]

@ Feathers, Johnny & Masquerade  You see the tentacles recede a bit from the microflare, almost as if they were fleeing back into the shadows.

@ Arc  You hear no reply from E3. And the bug are smeared across the walls of the buildings like so much paint.

[Imveros]

PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE YOU PIECE OF DREK. YOU GOTTA GO THROUGH ME BEFORE YOU GET HER! Johnny takes a few steps towards the creature, lets out a deafining roar accented by the sound of high velocity lead heading towards the monster once more

[Mercy Merchant]

Yelena feels the heat of the exploding grenade and spares a momentary thought for her beloved bike.  Shaking her head, she says, "Thanks, Arc.  You saved life of Yelena Petrovna.  I not forget.  Do we have time for medkit or do we need move now?"

[ismilealot]

@ Feathers  The ritual is almost complete. You need only one last reagent and the last incantation as it's added. And your bait is hanging upside down in the air in the grip of that monster.

@ Johnny  You know that thing is at least partly in this plane. I t couldn't hit this hard if it wasn't. At least you hope. Still, you've got to try. Frag! There goes your charge dangling in one of those thrice damned tentacles.

[SgtBoomCloud]

Yelena feels the heat of the exploding grenade and spares a momentary thought for her beloved bike.  Shaking her head, she says, "Thanks, Arc.  You saved life of Yelena Petrovna.  I not forget.  Do we have time for medkit or do we need move now?"

Arc gritted her teeth, waiting for a response from the E3 group and getting only static.  "Drek...something is up.  E group, where you at on converging?  E3 is silent, assume worst.  Rest of you, start heading that way, but be wary.  She could be on the move.  Center team took a hit from local wildlife. Gonna be back in a sec"

Turning to yelena, she gave a little nod, pulling out her Ingram and activating the smartlink.  " Yeah go ahead and patch yourself up.  Never could get to fixing up people myself, just machines.  Speaking of, the Scorp's on me...ah...". She noted the bike's condition as the dust settled: lying on its side, but very intact.  She gave a grin of relief.  " We gon' join the hunt after, and quickly too..."

[Csjarrat]

Feathers did his best to put the distraction out of his mind, focussing as best he could on following the ritual to the letter, but the mojo and bullets tearing through the air didn't make it any easier.
The adrenaline kicked in, and his heart raced as his vision narrowed. All that mattered now was doing his part of the job in hand, without him, without this ritual complete, it would all be for nothing...

[ismilealot]

@ Arc & Yelena  E3 still does not reply. Not even the lag can explain the silence. At least the nearly empty streets don't slow you down getting there. But you're not the first on the scene. The howl of pain and anguish, committing the souls to the moon cuts through the night. As you drive up they turn to you and point. The bodies of the three Howlers that were assigned to this spot are in various positions around the street. Their bodies like rag dolls that some careless child had thrown away.

[Mercy Merchant]

Yelena kneels and pulls her small med kit from the pocket of her coat and flips it open.  The mechanical directions tell her what to do and this time she listens instead of trying to do things her way.  The results are amazing and she resolves to listen all the time.  She puts the kit away and looks to Arc.  "Wow!  Feel much better.  This thing really worked."

She moves quickly with Arc.  Seeing the bodies, she kneels near one to see if there is anything she can do for the fallen troll.  She looks at Arc and shakes her head.  "Mage girl do this to trolls?"  She looks  down at the body to see if she can determine how the troll died.  She pulls the rifle off her back and clicks everything on, waiting.

[ismilealot]

@ Arc & Yelena  When Yelena touches the troll, the skin feels . . . . . . . . wrong. The bodies are cold, with an almost sunken appearance, and it could only have happened within the last 10-15 minutes. It didn't take them that long to respond to their call.  And then she smells it, a mixture of blood and stool. Turning the body slightly she sees the great gashing wounds on the body. They were hidden by it's position. Now, the little bit of light from one of the few working streetlights reveals a crater in it's gut. But, that big a wound in the abdomen should have a massive pool of blood around this body. There's not, it's maybe half a meter at best. And then she sees something that she hasn't seen in a long, long time. Not since her first containment camp. They'd starved them there, and more than once when one of the children had died in the night, a few of the children had fed on them. The bite and chew marks on the arms were the same. Made by a small keeb mouth. The arms were the easiest places to really chew, something that had really mattered to children painfully weak with the privation.

[Mercy Merchant]

Yelena froze.  There was no better way to describe it.  She froze as everything she had tried to forget about those years came back.  Her mind went back to the seven years she had spent in Containment Camp 14.  The experiments, the over crowding, the starvation, and the death.  So much death.  And they were all so small.  Even the Dwarves were small.  Just children that the state wanted to control and experiment on.  Freaks and unwanted.  It all flooded back.  She remembered the hunger, how it bit into you and kept you awake, never letting go.  The crumbs they fed them were barely enough to prevent death and frequently did not even do that.  She remembered the little Elf who shared her cot.  She had been nice, but then she died.  And then she helped the rest of the cottage stay alive another night.  When the camp was destroyed by the trolls the state tried to put there she saw the tapes from the security cameras.  The humans had watched.  They had seen the children eat each other and had done nothing to prevent it.  In that instant Yelena Petrovna remembered all the hate and anger she had ever felt at what humans had done to her come roiling back on her.  This was all the fault of humans!  So much rage!  Then a small corner of her mind remembered that Keebs had created this monster.  Humans did not have a monopoly on evil; they did not own it.

Something snapped back.  Whatever had threatened to break had repaired itself.  She looks up at her HUMAN FRIEND, the woman who could have left her to die but had saved her life, and shakes her head.  "Small Keeb teeth ate on troll.  She kill then eat some.  Maybe leave trail of blood or body parts?  Not think she care to hide."

[SgtBoomCloud]

Arc gave a grin as she saw Yelena administer to herself, the myriad of bandages, clotting agents, and painkillers bringing the elf back into fighting shape. Giving a nod, she had already picked up the Scorpion, rolling it out onto the street and wiping off as much bug juice as she could.  "sweet.  Alright, no fragging time to lose..". With a kickz the engine roared to life as the human tore through the streets, not bothering with speed limits and such to get to the destination, dread filling her as the sensor didn't ping the witch.

Upon arrival, Arc balanced the bike against a wall before stopping by the bodies: two twin ork males Tik and Tak, and the troll girl Mountain.  The human's jaw was set hard as she saw the damage.  While no stranger to injury and death, this was...beyond gruesome.  "has to be her.... Mountain wouldn't go down that easily...". She bit her lip, turning to the elf, unsure of how to proceed.  The witch was out of sight, three done in like tissue paper, and Feathers was already underway in binding the spirit.

"...OH DREK THE RITUAL!"

[Mercy Merchant]

Yelena looks at her friend.  "What about ritual, Arc?"