Before they can reply, another voice sounds from the roof of the dilapidated structure,

"A {bleep] indeed."

The clipped, half-spat lockjaw of a posh accent marred by "purity" of bloodline catches on the wind, snarls out of stoplight-red lips from the rooftop. The mousey, yet razor-cut pageboy hair atop Miho's head drifts against pale cheeks, her frown pushing out her chin and drawing her nose into a raw sneer. One hand stretches out, delicate as a willow's branch, as the other comes from beneath to cut along her arteries, sending ribbons of blood down upon the graves below.

Tina's head snaps up at the voice, mooneyes wide. "This is not your fight if you don't make it so, Miho. It is the doll I want."

For her part, Abby merely peers down at her fingers, swipes something from beneath her pinky nail with the help of her thumb's. After examining it, she flicks the bit of ick over her shoulder. There's a snort, a laugh culled before its escape, and suddenly any thought of pretty hellos is quashed. Her eyes roll upward, and oh. Blood. In a graveyard. That rarely ends well. "Well. Bugger this for a game of soldiers."

The older dirt seems to stir first, sinew and bone and rotted old clothing piercing the soil. At least two, however, clatter up with boggy blue skin draped in odd patches, swift to grab tree limbs in clammy, long-dead hands. It is the worst, least-fashionable interpretation of Thriller ever.

Miho's answer given in deed if not in word, Tina flicks her eyes to the other two, puts a tentative hand on the door, and the knob twists. "Take them all. I'm going in looking for the dollie."

It is as simple as that, when the words came from Tina and she seemed to go off to do....well, something else (Stat wasn't much on the why, more of the how...)...the man just nods and rises from the spot. A single hand comes up to unsnap the quick releases to his MOLLE pack, letting it drop to the ground behind him with a rather heavy sound. Not much respect to be honest. But Stat grew up in a land where most everywhere you stepped was a graveyard, this new one on a new planet does not make much of a difference in the mind of the man. To everything else, he seems a bit out of place. Like he's preparing a nice picnic, or readying to enjoy the morning jog. Then, his hand balls into a fist. And that is it.

As the battle outside develops, Tina closes the door behind herself. The interior of the building stinks, mold and corruption, the light is poor and shifting with the developments outside. Tina takes a step in, another, and hears the tiny rattle of footsteps on the stairs.

Outside, things continue to go from bad to worse. The unfortunate thing is just how much blood managed to land on the fresher, larger grave, saturating the daisies and soaking through the soil. With a slow lick, Miho seals the seam she had torn into her forearm, hopping down like a cricket to begin her catwalk stamp towards Abby. Her face still holds that bit of disgust as she flips the knife to an underhand grip mid-stride.

With the funk for forty thousand *******ing years filling Abby's nostrils and a glee better left unquestioned suddenly brightening her eyes, she salutes Stat and calmly retreats from grasping, rotting fingers to the top of a tombstone. Her mind is fixed on Miho, and her mind is a terribly beautiful thing filled with broken mirrors all reflecting faces so similar to Abby's but just..off somehow.

Abby looks up at Miho and grins from ear to ear. All she has to do is grab one of those shards and share it; a snip here, a slice there and all of the bugs in her lovely brain can spill out into the hole she makes, if Miho is so careless, and reshape her into something infantile, something scared and cold. She doesn't flinch as Miho creeps closer, doesn't even seem that rooted in reality.

Never mind Miho's noticeable twitch and the shift from a slinky gait to a petulant stalk, her voice is firm. "Look at you. Letting that glorified cotton-swab issue orders as if she's a right."

Meanwhile the small granfaloon of corpses and skeletons turn in unison towards Staten. They are not graceful, but they are not exactly slow, either. Of course, the ones still bearing genuine muscle in their legs close in first, readying their clubs to swing at the man.

Staten had spent ten years of his life alone in the company of Zombies, and worse. And even with that, his intelligence is such that he knows exactly what he is at this moment. He is meant to be to the ladies' much more specialized and hard to use weaponry. So when the necromancy took place and the dead rose to meet him, he didn't even slow down. In fact, that idle scent in the background....much weaker than the smell of blood, or death, or gravedirt, is growing stronger. It is the smell of sweat and hard loss. That is the smell of mortality, and as Staten joins in with the undead it suddenly rises up like a wave that coincides with the first punch he throws at the first bone white jaw of the lurching skeleton nearest to him.

What lands is a sound that would make Indiana Jones' punches jealous....as the skeleton and a few around him explode in a shattering white light of pure Chi. The attack, combined with the scent and the sudden appearance is meant to distract.

Miho hasn't made it even halfway to Abby before her knees sink inward and her face shifts from upper-class sneer to a pitiful, lip-curled tremble, the knife dropping from her hand and her body curling into a fetal position.

Staten moves like water. His punches are like iron. Nothing stands after. That is a Haiku about Staten and what he does to those poor undead that really had no clue about what they were getting into. Staten isn't fast, he's fast -enough-. Just a step quicker than the entire group of shambling dead. That's more than enough. But what is worse is what happens when his bare knuckle fists land on old bones and decayed flesh.

An explosion is when something gets larger in a very small amount of time. These are not explosions that are shattering the dead and sending them to their final sleep.

It's something else.

Somewhere behind the din of Stat's exploding chi-strike, the disturbance from that shallow pile of dirt and daisies remains unnoticed. The smell, the decaying fat, rot, and diseased pus scent closes in around Abby, as a stream of maggots spill onto her shoulder. The enormous, canine jaws of the recently-interred Hound of Caine envelope Abby's head, jerking up, aiming to fling her high into the air.

Back inside of the crumbling house, tings take a turn for the worse as well.

Tina's reaction time is splendid, honed by hours on the courts and turbocharged by blood, but she is not fast enough to catch the little mannequin before it wraps itself around her face, and as the resin hands dig into her cheeks she can feel Alma's will shrieking through them. It is enough to drive all thought from her mind.

Resin fingers bathe themselves in Tina's blood, resin legs wrap around her neck, and the voice seems to come from within her own mind, but it is clearly Alma's. "You were mine. You still are mine. Welcome home little girl."

Unaware of the beast closing in on her, Abby places her face a mere few inches from Miho's.

"I don't think you get to die. That's too easy." It feels as electricity is surging beneath Miss Valk's skin, and with it the promise that if she'll just give in, just let Malkav's gift blanket her, everything will be okay. She hides the bayonet away once again and grips the girl by the lapels of her trench coat.

Only a glance Abby's way at the right time, in the right moment. The nod shared, but it is just the reaffirmation of knowledge. Staten is tied to her in his own way, the distance between them never going above fifty or so feet.

"You should think about what you've done," Abby hisses between clenched teeth to the unfortunate Miho, "letting Alma get into you like you have."

She swipes her tongue once again across her lips, is rewarded with the copper tang of her own blood. Crawling backwards and dragging the girl with her, seldom seen muscles rippling beneath the flesh of her arms, she peers sidelong towards Staten. There's a nod there but she too keeps moving right up until her filthy bare toes push against a small mound of newly turned soil. Sitting up, she pulls Miho close, wraps one arm around her to brace her against her side, and begins digging the soft soil from the grave with her free hand.

Abby's snagging of the catatonic Miho exploits one of the classic flaws of summoned minions as the once-living Hound barrels towards her. The under-written law of 'thou may not cause harm to thy animator' screams through its beetle-ravaged brain, causing it to bellow once more and veer off-course as Abby sits to her rather bleak utilization of her gardening expertise.

Instead, all quarter-ton of teeth and claw set its sights on Staten, crushing and sweeping aside the ineffective chaff of skeletons and corpses to swipe its claw downward, towards his ribs, while the slavering, stinking, half-gnawed maw opens in the hopes of pinning him and taking his head.

The chain that binds him to Abby is a lot of space to have a man such as Staten running around though. As he so aptly demonstrates as he follows Abby's path on the parallel again, then cuts sharply over in responses to the coming abomination of undeath that rises suddenly in defiance.

Staten leads the creature along the line to tear up its own allies in its path to catch the man. That scent rises with this swelling crescendo. It still is centered on Staten but now it is the smell of mud after a heavy rain and decaying leaves.

It matches the man's odd fuzziness about him. And it seems to hit the peek when Staten leaps over a gravestone and lands right by his pack. The G36C assault rifle almost bounces in his hands as he brings it to his shoulder and levels it at the coming abomination without an ounce of anything else but calm. And then the chaos of all of this is added to with the torn fabric sound of thunder as the assault rifle begins to send rounds right at the coming giant of bone.

Fire?

The doll head swivels terribly, more frightening than anything else it's done, as it studies the growing conflagration with a slow-blooming horror, the dry-rotted walls drawing the flames as eager as any lover.

Abby's head snaps up, but it is not so much Tina's urgency that catches her attention but the sudden presence of the flames. Her eyes grow wide, and there is fear there for the first time tonight. The images of fire tearing her away from the world, burning every trace of her to ashes, are not appealing but they are persistent. As if running across a bed of hot coals, Abby highsteps to the tip top of one of the valley's highest hills.

The heat is instantly terrible, but the doll-thing is panicked, and slowly Tina is able to pull its arms free of her head, as a nightcrawler can be drawn from the ground with steady pressure. Her own panic scratches at her, but she wills it down, and walks to the burning wall, forcing the doll into the very blue heart of the flame.

The doll is a scream, a scream without end, a scream that would destroy any throat of flesh. Tina's clothing ignites, the doll's tweed long gone, and the sweet smell of burning flesh is everywhere. Still she holds the doll in the flame, her fingers blistered and burst like overcooked hotdogs, until she can pull the resin head free, the elastic strings that held it together gone rotten with the heat. It is only then that the girl, naked and blistered and hairless, walks, with exaggerated slowness towards the collapsed door and into the smoke-stained night.

Tina makes it beyond the corona of heat, collapses there, doll head in one hand and limp resin body, shapeless with heat, in the other.