The little temporary place in the Hedge that Alonso has hacked out to keep the captive in is ... not particularly thrilling. It's the equivalent of a 'room with a bucket,' except when you keep a dude magically asleep? He doesn't need a bucket to piss in.
It is not, however, a pleasant place to be. A week on, the General is... not well. At all.
He's a metallic manikin like an artist's poseable dummy, with ball bearing eyes set in an otherwise featureless face, painted blue with his stars of rank painted on his head and his arm. A two-star General, this one.
His joints are leaking blood and oil slowly, puddles of viscous fluid gathering under his body, and pus has started to leak actively from those joints as well, especially around the arms and legs. There's pink, unhealthy, infected-looking flesh visible in the joints, and the little hollow stinks of sickness and death. His limbs look... loose.
Alonso draws back the door to the ersatz hollow and recoils from the reak of the place. He coughs once, then holds the tail of his head scarf over his face in an effort to ward off the smell. "They're all like this. Suffering from this same wasting sickness. It's led to my hypothesis that the mother they all speak of was either a true fae or an otherwise enormously powerful changeling which had been sustaining them somehow. I suggest directing your questioning along those lines. Motivations. The nature of their leader. What happened. Possibly even how we can help them reverse their affliction. It may be this alone that is causing them to attack like this. In any case." Alonso gestures forward, "After you."
-> >> Alonso to Here << <-============================================
Rolled 3 Successes
< 1 1 1 2 4 5 9 10 10 >
==============================-> >> Wyrd + Subterfuge No Flags << <-
-> >> Gisa to Here << <-==============================================
Rolled 4 Successes
< 1 1 2 3 5 8 9 9 10 >
==============================================-> >> 8 No Flags << <-
-> >> Alonso to Here << <-============================================
Rolled 2 Successes
< 3 4 4 5 6 6 7 8 8 >
=====================================-> >> Wits + Wyrd 9-Again << <-
-> >> Gisa to Here << <-==============================================
Rolled 1 Success
< 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 10 >
==============================================-> >> 8 No Flags << <-
-> >> Alonso to Here << <-============================================
Rolled 4 Successes
< 1 1 1 3 4 5 6 6 8 9 9 10 >
=====================================-> >> Wits + Wyrd 9-Again << <-
GAME: Alonso spends 2 Glamour
Rolling through the hedge with Rorschach was definitively a very different experience. His Wyrd was utterly oppressive in its muchitude. The shadows thickened and the low water table seemed to leave the ground seeping blood. The vegetation even withered as if suffering from radiation death; wilting in deference to the rad roach as he passed as if bowing to him as it languished in its suffering. All colour was choked out in the wake of his mantle save for the heavy shadows that desaturated and the dark, arterial red that persevered in spite of his best efforts. He was the herald of the Blood Moon. He'd come to visit a hob.
Beyond that there were things that seemed to innately just seek to flee from him to avoid being anywhere near him at all costs.
Interrogations would be fun.
The shadowed Sluagh listened and nodded, dipping head and antennae in understanding. He stepped in rolling like thunder. The smell? The state? For him was almost home. He blinked and looked around and went over to the hob and sat. He didn't come with knives and hate. Instead he came with glamour and with a rag that he pulled to help wipe clean the most visible of the hob's wounds.
GAME: Rorschach spends 1 Glamour
Alonso, tired of trying to stave off the urge to yak, murmurs a quiet pledge under his breath. Whatever he swore upon, and whatever it was about, the payoff seems to be a more iron stomach. He still turns his head to spit at the ground, but the scarf is lowered from his face as he ducks through the doorway and into the room. He observes Rorschach's treatment of the creature and nods approvingly. "I though it prudent we approach this as officers. He's a general and due the respect accorded his rank. If we can't reason with him or make him speak for the sake of his unit, then we can explore other avenues." Alonso positions himself off to the side of Rorschach and a step or two back. Close enough to advise and potentially protect, but distant enough for his participation not to be mandatory. Which is a good place to be when obligated to speak the truth.
The wounds are... awful. Suppurating, pouring sickness out over the roteater's fingers. Poor Alonso saw this many times as a mortal soldier and on the fields of Dread Commander Sof. It's gonna be Nightmare City for him for a little while, most certainly.
Rorschach wipes away sickness and blood and oil, and more pours forth. It's like there's just no end to how much awful there is inside this thing.
Rorschach was friend to rot and death. He was disease. He was radiation death. He was...compassionate to the suffering. He signed to Alonso, <<You offer pain and they will only offer you what you want to hear. You offer bread? It's amazing at how helpful someone will become; human or hob. After that? >> A faint grin came to his face and he pulled something small and round... an eggshell? from his pocket. <<After that his nightmares are mine.>> Yeah. That sounded friendly.
He licked his fingers, which might be more vile than helping, but he was a bug. These things didn't bother him and failed to greet him with lasting malady. The voice was haunting like a wraith and a hollow echo of what a whisper once was when he spoke? Spoke! In just under audible tones, words came, "Wake up friend. You have had... an ordeal."
Alonso nods his head once in silent agreement with Rorschach's appraisal of torture and its rewards. He doesn't frame any sort of response beyond that. The licking of the fingers sees Alonso looking elsewhere for a time. Even with a tolerance for this sort of thing, there are some things you just don't watch. He glances back over once he thinks he hears speaking. What's spoken, he probably can't tell. But he releases the contract keeping the creature asleep, for what it's worth.
The General awakens with a horrible creaking sound: "Mmmmmmother." It's a sad, weary sound, a creaking, begging word wrenched out of the depths of a consciousness kept subdued for over a week, pushed into sleep by Darkness. Its head rises, and it tries to move its limbs before collapsing back onto the ground, weak, in pain, exhausted.
It sighs.
Resigned.
Rorschach sat and was glad to tend to the wounded creature for now. A nod was given to Alonso to let up on the sedation. A cold compress was made and applied. And on a good note? He still had just a bit of the bark from the leather tree that made for a fair hallucinogen that could help alleviate some of the pain. "No, not your mother. Here to help. You are hurt. You need help finding her, friend?" The words were haunting, but not unkind in nature. His antennae swayed a bit as he regarded the hob. He knew hurt, he knew suffering, and he knew it sucked feeling abandoned as well. Unfun all around.
-> >> Rorschach to Here << <-=========================================
Rolled 1 Success
< 4 5 5 8 >
======================-> >> Presence + Persuasion + 2 No Flags << <-
The General just sort of ... lays there. It's dying, and it knows it. The resignation is as palpable as the stench, and that, too, is something both of the men have seen before, too many times to count. "Gone," it creaks, low in the back of its throat, the sound extending like a door slowly opening. "We follow Her to glory."
Alonso gives Rorschach a glance and then nods his head once in the affirmative. Apparently that much was true. He gives a quick bit of sign language towards the bug as well. <<They've been raiding for parts. Ask them what they are for. I suspect they're creating more of each other-- but if they're just trying to die out, that doesn't make sense.>>
Rorschach looked to Allonso as if making sure he was getting his information too. Dying was a hard thing. He caught the sign and nodded so that Allonso knew he'd heard him. He took the Hob's hand and gave it a bit of a supportive gesture though he asked curiously, "Your Mother's glories, in conquest to and wonder. Who are her enemies you have so boldly sought victory over?" The assassin appealed to teh martial prowess and pride of the lil dude and wondered if this might get him talking. "Tell me of the deeds of your greatness that they might be remembered." He was the embodiment of SOrrow, and that embrace of peace before death. He found the role too easy to fall into these days but the punk rolled with it. It was a sacred rite to the Moon and he seemed to take this seriously.
GAME: Rorschach spends 1 Willpower
-> >> Rorschach to Here << <-=========================================
Rolled 4 Successes
< 1 2 5 6 8 8 8 10 >
==================-> >> Presence + Persuasion + 2 + 3 No Flags << <-
"The Maker," answers the General, gasping for breath. Pain sends crackles through the ball bearings that are its eyes, and the pus and blood and oil from its joins flows more freely now. Whatever passes for its lungs burbles with liquid. "The Maker, the Carving Thorn." It shakes its head wearily, a little back and forth that seems like it's gonna make that head come right off. "Not ... not initiated... I'm not... to know more." He is, after all, only a two star General. "The Maker's armies," it burbles again, fighting for breath.
New Activity ---------
Its right arm just comes right out of the joint and clatters to the floor. It won't be long now. "I kept them together. I kept ... them... together. For Her. Through the madness-pain-madness. Mine. I kept them together."
Of all its deeds, that is what it chooses to tell Rorchach. That is what really matters to it, apparently. "I increased our number. I kept... them. Together."
The blood, the oil, the entropy resonated to him. It wasn't rage that kept Rorschach going, but a macabre compassion and in that tasting the demise of the small atrocity, carefully picked him up and held him heedless of the disease and pus and ichor that got onto him. Insects didn't sweat this stuff.
He was warm to the touch though, from his radiation burns and not at all cold like the moon. Contrary to assumption, and the bug man held the decaying creature to share his final moments. He promised in that odd, haunting tone of his, "You will be returned to glory. Who will lead them after you?" He looked from the Hob to Alonso. An army was a hell of a thing. And one they should know more about.
"So many," coughs the General, as his left leg comes apart at the knee and hip. "Promot--"
There is no glory in this death, even if it's possible that the hob felt some sort of reassurance from Rorschach's strangely-reassuring soothing, the whispering of the Sluagh easing the path to oblivion. The hob struggles for one more breath, for one more --
And collapses in a mess of metal parts, suppurating flesh, blood, oil, and pus. The ball-bearing eyes crack and splinter. It is a terrible sight with worse smells, but at least it's over.
-> >> Alonso to Here << <-============================================
Rolled 5 Successes for an exceptional success.
< 2 2 3 4 4 4 5 6 6 7 7 9 9 9 9 10 >
===============================-> >> Wits + Occult + 3 9-Again << <-
GAME: Alonso spends 1 Willpower
Alonso has been aloof this entire time, save for brief intercessions to verify truth or falsehood or relay a morself of information that might better direct Rorschach's questioning. But when his prisoner expires right there before him, literally falling to pieces and oozing out the last of his life, Alonso steps forward and takes a good hard look at the newly formed corpse. He stares into the dribbling pus and the oozing of oil and blood, stares at the imperfections in the creature's uniform and in the doubly lifeless ball bearings pressed into its oozing eye sockets. Dull. He seems to gain a bit of axious energy the longer he stares, worrying at his lip with his teeth. "Promitions." Alonso completes the hob's dying word once, and then again. "He was saying promotions. They're promoting the lesser hobs that we've been facing to these briarwolf-like creatures. Which means they are actually going out and collecting briarwolves-- they have the stregth and ability to hunt and capture briarwolves. That's why they've been going out on scavening missions, in part. To collect parts and equipment for these... promotions. If we do nothing, they'll eventually die out. Just like the general did. But not before they do untold damage to the hedge." How Alonso got all of that information out of the interrogation is anyone's guess, really. Still. "That octopus machine I saw. It's the processing center for these promotions. Sort of. It's important to the process, anyway. It needs to be destroyed."
Rorschach didn't flinch, or try to stop the process. All things had a cycle and the Dusk court would tell you fighting it was futile. Witnessing it? For the bug? That was beautiful. His head hung and he curled the mess of what was once the Hob's head to his chest. He was taking the moment to mourn teh hob out of respect it placed in him to be the custodian of its last moment.
THe Roach looked up to Alonso and nodded once sharply. There was agreement there and he signed, <<Maybe we take him and see what happens to teh rest of them? I don't think that sounded perhaps like there was a successor and if there is we need to find them. If there is not? We may need you and a Hedge Warden.>>
"There will be a successor," Alonso assures Rorschach, "even if this one did not know who it would be, there will be one. They'll just promote one of their own into the role. If they are able to replenish their numbers and produce more of these creatures? And if we cannot find a way to steer them to a more peaceful end? The destruction of that machine is the only solution I have yet found that can at least buy us some time to respond. If you need me for a mission, you have me. But unless ordered otherwise, I am going to resume my work on mortars capable of engaging that structure at range and eliminating it. When the time comes, I'll need a large force of lost to accompany me and defend the mortars. I've already got Allen working on developing a tonic that can provide some measure of resistance to the darkness contracts they use. And enough brumebulb for such a group to escape quickly if needed." Alonso opens the door to the hollow again, both to air it out and to let Rorschach step out if he likes. "As to his body, I don't imagine it will retain its form for much longer. Best to let the hollow go and the hedge reclaim him."
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