TIME August 15th (continuing) LOCATION The Scrapshell, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Raven was alone in a dark, locked curio shop with something invisible and hostile taunting her from two directions at once.
And Ash and Krusha were still outside, trying to get in.
WHAT HAPPENED
The Scrapshell turned out to be an odd little business even by Chuza’s standards.
Haberdashery, pawnshop, and folk-art gallery crammed into one dim room, including a rack of knobbled clubs with nails driven through them that nobody had bothered to explain. Raven got as far as demanding the shopkeeper drop the bloodied cloth in his hand before the shop stopped being ordinary.
Something with blades for fingers caught her across the neck in the dark before she even saw the shape of it, clinging to the ceiling above the doorway.
A thrown alchemist’s fire mostly missed, catching only the edge of both the creature and the shopkeeper – still perched 15′ up the wall, delighted rather than afraid, already narrating his own ‘magnum opus’ out loud as if narrating a gallery opening.
Caught by another opportunistic slash as she fell back, Raven answered with a thunderstone lobbed into the dark rather than a blade.
The detonation that rattled the whole shopfront was the first solid proof Krusha and Ash had, from outside, that she was still alive in there at all.
Outside, Krusha finally broke the door down, Ash lighting the way in behind him.
What they found on the far side was worse than the fight itself suggested – a green-skinned, iron-toothed horror clinging to the ceiling alongside the shopkeeper.
Both of them working in concert.
Both of them delighted by every wound they inflicted – muttering, in a thick, wet accent, that she was hungry, that she had to eat, that she would have their bones before this was done.
Manyard seemed to be enjoying himself more than either of his victims – cooing encouragement at Jaraba between volleys of magic missiles, delighted whenever a fresh angle of violence topped the last.
Those same missiles tore through Ash’s conjured doubles one by one until she lost sight of him entirely in the smoke and dark.
She answered blind, hosing the ceiling and corridor with burning hands until a singed, invisible scream told her she’d guessed right.
Raven, Kemer-Lexi Cannon drawn for once, put a shot at the shopkeeper’s voice and missed outright – he simply wouldn’t stop moving.
Krusha’s attempts to turn the creature back with KemerLexi’s power failed outright.
Your god can’t help you now
it rasped.
So he tried something older instead, walking up an invocation of air itself to reach it on the ceiling directly.
Ash’s shocking grasp finally drew a genuine scream of pain, crisping flesh and driving both attackers into retreat down toward the cellar.
They found the shopkeeper – Manyard, by his own dying words – cornered in a basement workshop, still trying to salvage something from a locked chest as Ash’s second shocking grasp set him alight for good.
“Run, Jaraba, my love! We made fantastic art together. My final piece, my magnum opus… it should certainly be called… Police brutality… it was a good naaammmmeee…”
Manyard, dying
The strange camera device he’d been clutching clattered to the floor with him, still strung on what Ash would later identify, with some discomfort, as a long braided rope of human hair.
Raven, working her way out through the shop front, put a boot through the wrong door on the way and found herself in the middle of an illicit gambling den instead – hastily abandoned mid-hand, cards and coin still on the table.
She backed out and kept looking.
Down a side passage, a stone-lidded well and three bound, gagged victims.
A Blue Thumb elf, the boy from the apartment, and a young woman of unclear gang affiliation, all alive but drained nearly to nothing.
The art studio beyond told its own story.
Canvases full of ‘feeding’ scenes rendered with disturbing, photographic precision.
Human victims, and, unmistakably, several of the same pug-nosed, cloak-wearing beasts the Agents had fought before, on Pine Street and beneath a Borthanza temple thousands of miles from here.
A locked chest held jars of preserved eyes, kidneys, and tongues – reference material, by the looks of the knives and cleavers laid out beside them, rather than trophies.
A bell on the shop door brought backup rather than trouble – Agents Fuchs and Peterson, badges first and questions after, visibly thrown by the state of Krusha until he got his own ID out to settle them.
They helped secure the scene with the fascinated unease of people who’d expected a routine callout, Fuchs eventually heading off to arrange a wagon for the dead while the rest turned the building over properly.
Upstairs, the shopkeeper’s private rooms were almost domestic by comparison – until the details caught up with everyone.
Every door lock in the flat had been fashioned into a tiny human face.
Sunlight through the drapes fell across the floor in rows of sharp triangles, like teeth.
An oversized copper bath, deep enough for four, sat in one corner; Krusha used it anyway, on the theory that whatever else this place was, the water at least was just water.
Manyard’s camera still held its last few pictures when Ash prised it open.
None of them were of anyone else’s suffering.
There was Krusha and Ash frozen mid-flinch under the deluge of blood in the Northside tenement.
Raven mid-lunge at the balcony shooter, Carak’s bloodied face caught in the same frame.
The Blue Thumb elf clawing at the floor as invisible hands lifted him by the legs.
And, worst of the set, Raven and then Krusha both photographed from above and behind in the instant the masked creature lunged for them out of the wall of this very shop.
Their own fear, framed and lit like something meant to hang on the wall.
Whatever Manyard and Jaraba had actually been – hunter and artist, in some twisted partnership – their work had been documenting something real, something already loose in Chuza’s streets long before this shop ever opened.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Manyard’s ‘art’ depicts real attacks by the pug-nosed cloaked beasts – the same creatures encountered on Pine Street and at Borthanza.
- Three victims recovered alive from the Scrapshell’s well, badly weakened but breathing.
