Topic: What Lies Beneath feat. Geiseric Valk

Hrong

Date: 2014-07-09 15:08 EST
Saffron had seen far better days. She had been scratching at the base of her tail for days, with no regard to decorum whatsoever, while her skin seemed loose, slick. The thicket of filaments that composed its fur had all flaked off, save for an oily, bushy brown spray at the very tip. If anything, the loss of fuzz revealed just how thick the limb was, almost as big around as her arm and twice as long as her waist's circumference. The skin beneath was soft and, as far as she could tell, simply pale from lack of sunlight. Of course, it'd been overcast, and the majority of her week was spent in her ill-lit office and a series of warehouses converted into hellish factories and bizarre workshops made for tiny, rodent-sized hands. She ran her fingers through the matted, greasy line of her mohawk as the other hand rapped on the door to a very particular lakeside mortuary-turned-home, surrounded at its edges with a tangle of viciously cultivated rugosa meant for chewing up tank treads. Perhaps even more unusual was her visit during daytime hours, as her coworker whom resided within quite pointedly held hours best considered the "graveyard shift."

Though hardly audible from the outside, Rivers the bull terrier's sleepy, yet steady bark rattled through the house, awakening the tubby ball of tuxedo cat who stretched over the kitchen floor. A very different ball of fur, copper, with insectile eyes and an array of serrated bear-trap teeth hopped up next to the dog, emitting its own combination of whirrs and yip-beeps at the door. The pair parted around a steady stride of combat boot on hardwood floor, boards creaking still from the size of the approaching person, yet distributed extraordinarily well across them. With one hand, Geist took the door's handle, drawing it open with a careful, backwards tilt, while his leg blocked the terrier's excitement-driven dreams of escape. His brow creased as he sent hid attention down to the bedraggled-looking detective, along with a smaller, less luminous pair of eyes peeping googly-eyed from beneath a thin mop of bright red hair and fussy, dimple-knuckled hands spastically splatting and thumping against the Revenant's chest. "Erh... good day, Miss Jensen-Lefevre." He glanced behind to check on Rivers, whom had started his nigh-interminable spin clockwise in place. "Do come in."

"Uh..." Saffron immediately ceased scratching as the door creaked open, her lower lip and ears dropping nervously as at least three extra sets of eyes than what she had anticipated peered at her approach. Her toes scrunched in her Converse low-tops while her fingers curled at her sides, newly-brittle nails digging into the sturdy, elbow-length wrist guards that she tended to wear for more aggressive security details. She stepped around the door and nudged it closed with her heel, blinking in the partial light of the house. "So... yah, hey..." The odd lighting, the odder furniture, and Rivers twirling in circles gave out a strong Lynchian vibe during her glance around, drawing her shoulders nervously up as she looked to the enormous man cradling his tiny baby son in his arm. "Well--" Saffron reached up to scratch her cheek, yet stopped before letting nail reach skin, fingers hooking on air before folding in to rest against her shoulder. "I uhm... I think I'm molting, or something, and I'm not like... 100% sure if that's supposed to happen." Her lips drew flat as her moon-white tail coiled stiffly behind her, the little indents in her brow betraying her apprehension.

Geist seemed transfixed by some far-off point as he listened to Saffron, rocking his little baby back and forth, back and forth, until the infant's own violet eyes eased shut. "Do pardon me for a moment. I've to put Godric to bed." He offered her a glance over a broad, bare shoulder as he trudged down the hall, secreting away into one of the rooms for a spell, then returned, stretching tree-trunk arms as he passed the stairwell, and arrived in the living room once more, hands at his hips and blacklight eyes still indirect. "To answer your inquiry, yes; this is a natural progression, if a bit belated. You might recall that the conditions of your arrival had as much to do with favors owed, as well as the notion that you carried a.. 'spiritual sickness,' I think we had called it?"

Saffron finally did indulge in a scratch to the rubbery scar tissue that ran across the bridge of her nose as she listened to Geist, an arm crossing over her solar plexus while her heels turned out. Her tail swayed behind her, making all pieces of her apprehension clear. "Yeah... but I had my head turned around like... six ways to Sunday. F***." The LCD flash in the back of her pupils had dimmed to a dull, cataract-like gleam, occasionally flickering either green or gold in the low light. "I'm not radioactive or anything, right?" Saffron winced as her ears pinned back, her slim brows steepled in a silent plead to the white-haired mass of muscle before her.

Geist burst into a slow, rumbling laugh, stifling it behind his lips after a few bars and a glance back to his son's room, and another to the startled look that the fat Scottish Fold cat sent him from the kitchen. Clearing his throat, he shook his head, taking a step back to angle himself towards the stairwell. "Erh, forgive me. No, you pose no undue or unseen danger to your constituents." As he started his stride towards the basement, he raised a hand to beckon to Saffron behind him. "Come. I've quite a bit to show you, in regards to this."

She set both her arms crossed at the peal of laughter, sighing through her nose with a rumble in her sinuses. It seemed to rattle just a bit more than she had expected, like a coffee pot firing up. She blinked hard before starting in her stroll behind Geist, her lower jaw jutting forward ponderously. "I suspect one: that you've been waiting to do something like this for ages; two: you're gonna make me a captive audience to this s***; three: I'm gonna need a bath when I get home."

"Precisely." Geist drew open the door to the basement and disappeared through the ink-black threshold, to the bizarre zone he so flippantly called his laboratory.

Hrong

Date: 2014-07-10 22:27 EST
Saffron lost track of Geist the moment that she crossed the threshold into the basement. Her ears turned and tilted, catching only the faintest hint of his footfalls deep, deep down and far, far away as she trotted down the slate, spiral-set stairs. Her vision remained a vaguely greenish outline of the very same, the deep dark cut through hazily from her eyeshine, though bit by bit, it started to dim, either from a lack of illumination, or that shimmering layer detaching and dissolving within her eye to leave her as helpless in the dark as she was before her fateful intersection with the supernatural.

Not too far down, the stairwell flattened into a landing, stretching to a short hall at her right, with a few odd little areas; one contained a large tub and a smattering of plants, the other a host of laundry facilities, set at opposite ends of the hall. However, the Revenant's footfalls continued much further away. It sounded, for all intents and purposes, as if he were striding through underbrush.

Saffron stopped at the landing, staring exhaustedly at the hallway, and its lack of Geist at its other end. "... Really, Geist?" She tossed her hands up, ears tilting back in frustration as she sighed out of her nose. A slight frown slipped over her features as the rumbling sigh turned into a choked, stuffy snort, a sputter, and finally a splatter as all manner of liquefied scar tissue poured out her nose and onto the landing, hands still out in incredulity. "F***ing fantastic..." Her next inhale stuck a little, yet the outward breath came clear, along with a vague purse to her lips. The damp hit her, first. Next, the vague hint of fabric softener from the nearby laundry room. It wasn't until after she started her descent once more that the bloom of the plants at the end of the hallway struck her mind. She dared a slight smile as she wiped up the flotsam from her nose and upper lip with the back of her hand, ears lifting and tail swaying in anticipation.

The stairwell terminated in an archway, spilling out onto mossy ground lit up in bright blues and oranges from the bioluminescent flare of the creaking, bone-like trees and squirming tendrils of underbrush. A simple path had been cleared, marked intermittently by tall standing stones made of glittering black rock. The 'ceiling' remained dark, yet lit at the edged in an acidic shade of yellow. The more one looked at it, the more shades seemed to swim within it. Geist stood with his shoulder aimed at the archway, his arms crossed over his abdomen nervously as he waited for Saffron. Eventually, he cleared his throat, piping up for the lass in his low, rumbling rasp. "This... may end up a bit jarring. The knowledge is, perhaps, not the worst of it. However, this convergence of our predicaments is a bit fortuitous. Do forgive me for belatedly conscripting you for it."

Saffron took her next, deep breath as she emerged from the archway, her eyeshine flickering as she looked over the moss, trees, and underbrush with an approving nod and a stroll that, in spite of her persistent itch, seemed to relax. Geist's words could never have hit her at a 'good' time, yet the growing ease she felt let her take it in a 'less bad' manner. Her head shook in miniature as she strolled up, lips setting tight and eyelids low, as her short-legged stride soon past him. "Seriously, dude, f*** you. Just... f*** you and your cryptic bulls*** forever."

Almost on cue, Geist rumbled in laughter, strolling behind her as they set off on the next leg of their journey.

Mlem

Date: 2014-07-24 15:16 EST
The landscape started to change drastically as they set forth. From the calm idyll of their beginning, the path pitched starkly downward, the horizon creeping up to swallow the faint flicker of sick gold that offered the pair genuine light. Only by dint of the blacklight glare of the Revenant's eyes and Saffron's flicker of eyeshine did they manage to see any of their surroundings.

"Alright, so..." Saffron's ears tilted and twitched in the darkness, drinking up the echoes of their footfalls and the slow, undulating pulse that ran deep within the strange land. She sighed, deeply in spite of herself, with a freshly unencumbered sinus beneath the leathery line of scar tissue. "... I just came here with a question abewt... I dunno, this case of mange I seem to have, and you're taking me into... the sub-basement of your club hewse?" With a few bounds, she caught up to Geist's side, her breath measured, and slow. It smelled like rainwater, ozone and rust, not unlike Geist. "I'm gonna need some exposition, guy. Just... like, a little bit?"

The hulking, prehistoric man with snappy trousers nodded, the faint blue swirls that climbed his skin lighting up to a faint flicker of blue as he directed their passage down through a ravine, just wide enough for them to walk astride. "I'll... endeavor to keep it brief." He ran thick fingers through the short mess of bone-white hair in a single swipe as his thoughts collected, accreting like dust into stars, before speaking once more. "Our Earth, eons ago, had been touched by the edge of a civilization that neared what, we can assume, to be Type VI on the Kardashev scale..."

"Oh... well..." Saffron raised up both her hands and waggled them, along with the limp, aching tail that creaked behind her. "... excuuuse us, then." She hesitated in that moment, slipping a fang over her bottom lip and snapping her fingers, as if starting a lighter to ignite her recognition. "Waitwaitwait, you said a Type-Whatever civilization. You mean like... Type 0 is kinda like most Earths we come across, like Abby's, and Type I is a bit more like where our world is now, Type II's kinda like Star Trek..."

Geist simply grunted, albeit a slow, calm grunt, in reply as he flicked his wrist towards the left-hand branch of an upcoming fork. The vague, metallic tinkle of running liquid bounced off the walls, deceptively calm.

Saffron's ears twitched backwards twice as she caught the familiar noise, her fingers curling in to touch the tops of her palms. She continued to breathe through each step, each one bringing a silent prayer of thanks, and each step closer a soundless petition to the powers that be. "... So what the hell's a Type VI, dude?"

"A Type VI..." Geist's voice softened as they slipped through the passage, now compressed to single file. "... and mind you, it's mere conjecture on the part of our scientists, is that the civilization has transcended out of their Universe, and in fact both cultivates and harnesses entire realities for their resources." The metallic chiming became louder... and that much more evident of a strong, deep current as they strode further down the path. "They would be the flesh-and-blood Rupert Murdoch to our animated Simpsons, to use a familiar analogy. However, where Moe Szyslak has a 'life' as dictated by the zeitgeist of outside viewership and dictated by the rigors of the narrative... ours is not so neatly cultivated."

"Well... I mean, okay. I'm not sure how that's any different than just abewt everyone we've run into, here. I mean, the both of us hung ewt with Audrey Horne... Not Sherilyn Fenn; goddamn Audrey Horne." Saffron's eyes narrowed in the darkness as they drew closer to the rushing river of fluid, lifting a hand to scrape her nails against the matte black of the rock. The motion caused her nails to crack, albeit without pain, and fall away, while her shoulders raised in a shudder. "Ugh. Mmfph... Anyhow, yah. Big super mamma-jammas. I kiiinda wanna get back on topic for like... why I'm down here, yo."

"I... yes, you're quite correct." He flicked his hand up and turned his head aside, wordlessly apologizing before turning that sharp, ultra-violet glow ahead. The river before them spanned further than any terrestrial animal could jump, each crest of a wave and swirl of an eddy flashing in a heavy, glittering spray. The droplets, however, folded back into the arresting flow, rather than stick to the walls and to the skin of the arriving pair. "At any rate, our Earth touched the edge of their processes, which seem, as far as scale goes, to be autonomous. What this did, in turn, was stretch a bit of their machines into the bodies of recently dead animals, to animate them for observation of our world's properties, from the Carboniferous Period onward." He settled his arms crossed as he stepped aside, looking over the rush of liquid with a thoughtful stare, with intermittent glances to his tailed companion. "Sapience and widespread tool use amongst humanity seemed both to beckon the introduction of more elements, and to warp the functions of the surveillance technology."

"So... I guess that explains you, huh?" Saffron drew up a wry little smile and tapped the back of her hand against Geist's elbow as she stared across the rushing estuary, her lower lip dropping in a wince. "... I uh... I can't make my little ball-things any more, so... I don't think I can cross this."

By the time Saffron had finished her sentence, Geist was already a quarter of the way across the river. The liquid reached up beneath his feet, curling into solid disks off of which he could vault in a long, leaping stride. The low rasp bellowed to carry over the clanking, chime-like din that surounded him. "Your step shall never be wont for a foothold, Frau Jensen! Leap!"

Saffron almost reached up to pick at her mohawk with the hand that still had nails... but stopped, scrunching her nose and pressing her lower lip into the upper with a frustrated grunt. "Hmrrph." One leg slid back, taking her weight as she sank down... and with a hearty push, sent herself leaping forward, above the weighty crack of the current. Gravity took hold as easily as ever, drawing her back down to the arresting flow... and her limbs scrambled for a purchase as it closed in upon her. Pressure built beneath her palms and her soles, forming squat bubbles that glowed faintly, at first. With a hearty push with all four limbs, the bubbles popped in a bright splash of light, enough to cast a bright, reflective echo in the fluid beneath her, and forceful enough to send her tumbling forward, hurdling haphazardly like a bullet to meet Geist mid-stride. "Faaaaahahaaaack!" As she descended once again, she inhaled, senting her palms down in earnest to push off against the air once more, and popped yet again, causing her to tumble in a high arc, and land with an unceremonious skid on the opposite bank.

Geist's face lit up as she outpaced his comparatively casual stride across the tops of the waves, showing every last one of those frightfully straight teeth set in a sturdy jaw. He hopped the last couple yards of his journey, landing with a forward stumble that closed with a kneel next to the collapsed Imp, extending his hand to her. Their path remained as spongy, black dirt, yet much of the landscape seemed composed of jagged blue stone, clear as fluorite and remarkably solid. "Excellent work. Now you know a bit of what my problem entails."

Saffron's legs curled in beneath her as she pushed herself up... only to see large chunks of her skin remained embedded in the dirt. Where those patches once sat, pale, almost lavender skin glowed, hot as a sunburn before slowly fading to a dull paper-white. "Oh... well, that's just... hunky f***in' dory..." She raised both of her eyebrows as she uttered her response to Geist, reaching up to accept his aid to her feet.

Geist looked to the leavings of Saffron's skin, to the patches that lied beneath... and in particular, the leathery strip of her scar left plastered in the dirt. He raised his eyes to meet hers, shifting the bright lights of his eyes down to a glowing indigo, while the brightness seemed to shift into his close-lipped smile. "Excellent. Now, let us continue. You have much to know, and this experience is, in spite of your hardship, singular."

Hrong

Date: 2014-07-28 13:09 EST
Saffron's ears pinned back as she looked to the ditch left on the ground, then behind her, to the whipping, metallic current rushing along and separating them from Geist's Domain. "Y'know..." with a hard, tingle-inducing scowl that crinkled the bridge of her nose, she twisted her hand up and out of Geist's grip, swinging one leg back to put space between her and the Revenant. "How abewt no, dude? Huh? We could have just had a nice conversation in your living room, and I could've gone back home, ya know? To my wife and my kid and my pet pig? I mean, I get that you've been around since the wheel and you've got a f***ton to share, but..." Her brows steepled up through the peeling skin as she brought her hands out at her sides, plaintive in her agitation. "... I've got a lot of now-stuff to deal with, yo."

Geist's hand remained out and wide after Saffron withdrew her hand. Bit by bit as she spoke, it withdrew, closing in on his side in tiny increments before dangling limply, with his head soon to follow, chin dropping toward his collar bone. "... I apologize." He brought the opposite hand to rub at the back of his neck while the other closed loosely. "I feel... a bit alone, on occasion. My Beloved... while we share interests, I still bear a mote of apprehension in bringing her down here. It can prove unpredictable, and I still have no idea how it may affect her." He crossed his arms over his chest and turned his own gaze towards the rushing river, slim lips pulling tight. "I had already put her with child due to mine indiscretions. I love the boy, yet--"

Saffron had slumped against a wall as Geist unloaded, her ears pointing straight out at the sides. One leg rested against the ground while the other propped up with knee raised, supporting her wrist atop it. She listened patiently, for a while, yet a sigh hissed from the back of her throat after a while, right at that moment of pause. "... Dude, just talk to your f***ing wife, eh? If there's something down here worth seeing, she's probably gonna wanna see it." She closed her eyes and shook her head, pushing off against the ground and facing the torrent ahead of her. "Alright. I'm gonna head back, dude. It was fun patting your a** and letting you lead me into some secret adventure s***, but I've got a lot of work to do and a long, nasty shower to take."

"I'm..." Geist rubbed his eyes between his fingers as his shoulders hunched, drawing him further inward out of shame and embarrassment. "... I had no clue..."

Saffron glanced over her shoulder, quirking up her lips into a sympathetic smirk for the ancient, caveman-esque being. "Look... You got excited, and it just got away from you. Not everyone likes surprises, and especially not ones that take 'em away from their lives. I'll catch up with you later, yo." With a deep inhale through her nose and a shaking out of her hands and feet, she pedaled back, then took two steps forward, launching haphazardly with an exploding pop! that launched her back towards the opposite bank.

With his face half-hidden in his palm and a languorous stumble, Geist began his own turn, away from Saffron's exit, and into the bluish, craggy expanse ahead. He climbed up the incline from the bank... and with a loud, thundering crack, a large black paw swiped from the darkness, sending the Revenant hurdling with a high-pitched whistle above the Goblin crossing the river.

Hrong

Date: 2014-08-05 18:32 EST
"Whoaf***!!!" Saffron's limbs scrambled in the air as she watched the Revenant sail overhead and slam into the stone face of the cliffs across the river, spheres of dull turquoise light growing, popping, and bopping her around like a pinball in her panic. The clear, silvery torrent below churned, rushing up to meet her... until a deep breath, a raise of her arms, and a downward swing of her palms towards it set down a bright, hot golden bubble that sent her spinning skyward, enough to get a view of what had smacked the daylights out of Geist.

In the faint light from the glassy blue crags around the beast, its color read as black. In the shadows, however, the hues constantly changed, reading the same as the phantom colors left in the eye from a camera flash or an optical illusion. Its shape stretched and flattened as it crawled towards the river, protoplasmic and thick, while hooked edges crystallized where it met dirt to hold fast as temporary talons. Tendrils swayed all around its 'back' like the polarized pulse of a cuttlefish, each tip growing into some eldritch sense organ at the crest of the wave, and retreating into nascence at its nadir. The only indication of a front to the bulky, squamous mass was a large set of pointed teeth, shifting intermittently between a leech's ring-like mouth and a shark's broad rictus. The Beast poured down from its alcove, the blue stone around it melting into its sides to leave rippled trails in its wake. The wave of tendrils at its front raised, turning its maw-head towards the crater in the cliffs where Geist had landed, and waited with a silent, intelligent patience.

Saffron's tail whipped in the air, turning her over to face the cliffs in her descent. She stretched out her limbs like a dart, falling in a javelin's arc towards the sheer face with fingers curled and nails brittle. "Oh god..." With her cheeks puffed out, she steeled herself for the descent, pushing the ache that ran through her bones from her mind as he closed in on the precipice. The ache seemed to swell, to push on her fingertips and coil through her tail. "Ow.. ow-ow--Augh!" Tearing through the skin, pushing through her cuticles, ten red talons dug into the black earth of the cliff, fixing her to its side as she slid down towards the crater, tears streaking down her cheeks, shoulders quaking, and her breath deliberate, deep and slow. With a hard, unlabored sniffle, she dipped in toward the opening, angling an ear to listen in. "Nnnf... huugh... fh... Geist? ... You okay?"

The silence from the crater had its own presence, moisture collecting around the pulverized dent that had formed over Geist on his impact as the temperature dropped sharply. With a sudden burst of heat, the stone exploded outward, jagged fragments hurdling towards the monstrosity across the riverbed. "I thank you for your concern, Saffron. However, it seems that the problem has decided to come to us." A large, bronzed hand reached out from the hole as more rubble fell free and tumbled downward only to follow the invisible slipstream that rocketed them toward the Beast below, heralding Geist's emergence, even if only his torso's worth, from the cliffside. Only the vaugest strobe of deepest purple emerged from his eyes as he looked to the creature, sneering with a full, vicious backward peel from his lips. "The f***ing entitled little s***."

The Beast's sensory tendrils drew back, save for three, as the barrage of stone shot towards it. Each and every fragment, as they rocketed towards its face, exploded in flashes of vibrant magenta into harmless black powder, dusting across the river below and churned into the waves. It rolled and shifted, forming an urchin-like sphere, with but four limbs angling around its mouth to target. Gradually, the magenta hue started to grow on the cliff, around the two formerly human beings that clung to its side, and the pressure in the air raised... and raised...

Saffron inhaled deeply as she brought down her palm, smashing the remaining rock that kept Geist lodged in the mountainside with a bright blue crackle and pop. "Okaywegottago!" The remnants of her skin flew off of her tail and fingers as she pushed off, revealing more of the strange purple-white flesh beneath. The remaining tuft at the end of her tail burst free, thick and long, and that same horrific red that capped her fingers still, only to coil around Geist's waist as she jumped free... and rocketed back toward the creature across the stream. "So who and what the hell is this thing?"

Geist remained only so rigid as to follow Saffron's trajectory, his face still set into a vicious sneer to the Beast below. He set two of his fingers at the small of her back and tapped twice, signaling for her to release him as they passed over the horrible, squirming monstrosity. "I shall have answers in a few moments. For now, drop me next to the thing and return to the shore."

"YahOkayGotcha." Saffron's tail unwound from Geist, letting the solid, man-shaped ancient drop like a bomb to lodge in the blue rock below while the rest of her tucked in, coiling up for a deep breath and a full, arms-and-legs push against the air before her. A thunderous BANG! sent her sailing backwards, landing with a skid and a tumble on the opposite side of the river.

The Beast pulled back at the side where Geist dropped, all but ignoring the patchy, ragged little Imp that set out her own explosive exit from the scene. However, its body responded to both the Revenant and the Goblin's impacts by flattening out, raising up high and rolling down, hardened black spikes of crystal aiming for Geist's softer parts.

Geiseric Valk had only so much patience for the Beast and its silly little game. He went straight from the impact to tumble forward, into the roll of faux-black flesh, towards the solidifying spikes. As the spike closed in, still soft at its base, Geist set his fingers against the calcified portion and exhaled, bringing the pencil-thin spirals that branched across his skin to glow. "That's quite enough."

The Beast, of all things, seemed to panic, attempting to pull away, rolling and folding as that same hardness it brought to a handful of tendrils sped its way through its body faster than it could respond. Its maw gnashed at the air as the hardening portions tore at its still soft parts, causing thick violet ichor to spill free and catch ablaze in the open air while it tore itself to rubbery, hard ribbons. Eventually, it stopped thrashing, breaking apart into a pile of fire and spikes.

Geist lurched in a seamless parabola to stand, a few dribbles of the flammable blood sizzling against his skin uselessly. He pressed his palms together as his eyes closed sinking into a deep stance while drawing in a long, slow breath. The air, the earth, the very atmosphere around him seemed to still... until he pushed off against the crystal shore, cracks running in spiderweb patterns filled in with the slick, silvery waters from the river. His own leap seemed more of a languid glide through the air, landing not far from the ditch that Saffron had left in the ground beneath her. "... So, care for some tea and meat in the den as I offer that information, Miss Jensen-Lefevre?"

Saffron sat in an unceremonious lump, pulling bits and pieces of old skin out from under her clothing and leaving it in a pile by her side. Her hair had gone wild, a similar red to her tail's tip and her now-rounded nails, before the sides calmed and sank in for her familiar, long flop of a mohawk to resume atop her head. Her ears hadn't a bit of fur left on them, and the inner shells showed a dull purple, not dissimilar to that bled out by the Beast not long ago. She tossed a toenail aside with an exasperated huff and slipped her shoes back on, flexing them back and forth over her new, strangely-textured skin and rolling up to stand and trudge back up the path. "Yeah... may as well."

Hrong

Date: 2014-08-10 16:21 EST
"Hey, Honeybucket..." Saffron was still a bit damp from her shower, and all the more renewed, if transformed, for it. Her new skin, beneath, was an aggressively pale tone, if tinged slightly with lavender. The thick violet arteries, however, were most evident in her ears, now void of fur, yet still standing in bat-like points at the sides of her head. Her hair seemed to bunch and spiral into soft spines, even the velvety shaved portions at the sides of her head, while her sidelocks spiraled into cones, squeezing out the water trapped between the strands. She still dared to hold her phone up, if a bit away, from her ear as she called her ladylove, tugging a little at the tank top and shorts she 'reclaimed' from Abby and her former wayward borrowing ways.

"... Yah, I'm good. Just... kinda pale, kinda lost a ton of fur, kinda got red-a** nails... I dunno, sure, I guess it's cute... D'aww, muf-fiiin, shuuucks! Anyhow, just wanted to let you know I was okay, and--no, he--Cuyler, come on. Why would he show me his d--Well, why don't you ask him, yo? Seriously!!" She couldn't help breaking out into a fangy little grin as the lengthy explanation sputtered through the phone, soon cut short from her interruption. "Cuyler? Y'know I love the hell ewtta you, right? ... Cool. Good. Well, I'm gonna get back to the Big G and see what the deal is. See you soon, eh? Laaahf yooo! Bai!"

Saffron hung up with a little happy bobble of her head and a quirk of her lips before squeezing out the 'fronds' of her hair and padding into the living room, scratching the deep violet, lightning-strike streak that crossed the bridge of her nose, where her scar once sat. "So... yah, Cuyler still wants to see your uh..." She gestured with her fingers splayed, wincing from her bottom lip before clapping her palms together. "Anyway, we're all good to go."

"Fantastic!" Geist turned from his spot in the kitchen, one hand putting the last of the pile of meat skewers on the serving tray, while the other balanced a second tray, a piping hot pot of tea and two clay mugs settled atop it. Without breaking stride, he scooped up the meat and glided over to the couch and coffee table, with Rivers pacified with a slow-cooked yak femur that his enormous jaws cracked through readily. Geist flipped over both teacups, pouring each one with an aerating flourish. He set one closer to the low, solid seat at the table's end, in anticipation of his guest's inevitable half-lotus curl into it. "So... we left off discussing that a Type VI civilization skirted the edge of our Earth, and that it became embroiled in one of its technological manufacturing programs, correct?"

"Oo snazzy!" Saffron did, without fail, drop into the short, firm seat, complete with her now mostly hairless tail coiling around the stack of her strong little legs, with one hand pulling up a skewer while the other cupped her tea into its palm, tipping in a sip as her ears turned to Geist. She swallowed with a slow nod before tearing off a bite of meat, and followed it with a second sip and a much more enthusiastic bob of her head. The tea seemed more of a hot broth, just as much full of spice herb as rich, fatty bubbles. "Damn, dude. For people who don't eat, you and Abby sure know kitchens... but anyhow, yah. And uh... I think you mentioned something that your guys, like... you and Bianca, are kinda like secret survey tech? So... I can get the why of it, cuz a dead body has all of these home grown receptors and it provides context, but have we figured ewt a how, yet?"

Geist brought his own legs to cross from his seat on the couch, with both hands cradling his tea at his lap. He flashed an appreciative smile to Saffron on her compliment, yet her follow-up question earned her raised brows, a half-smirk, and a shrug that barely lifted his shoulders, the vapor from the tea brushing across his cheeks. "It's magnitudes beyond mine understanding. Those who have claim to have answers inevitably have them only for those stupid enough to believe Creation to be an uncomplicated place created only for humanity, if not their own arbitrary fraction of it." He raised the tea up, closed his eyes, and brought in his first sip before guiding it back down, his diaphragm rising and falling to the internal pulse that replaced his pulmonary and respiratory systems. "We have, at least, come to understand some of the purpose behind the different sorts of... I'm not sure what the jargon is for it. Parasites, permutations..." He shook his head with a slow, hissing sigh. "At any rate, whereas the animating factor in mine own sorts stems from observation, yours and your kind in the initial stages, out of which you had shed, are means for demolition. In other cases, the... I'll call it infection, for the sake of brevity, causes the host to become an unwitting suicide bomber, both for the benefit of extermination and terraforming. That is, if they don't defuse the operating system that comes with it. I'm certain you remember the dark-haired woman and the fox-spirit that availed themselves to you repeatedly."

"Oh ghod... Teumessa..." Saffron screwed up her lips as she polished off her first skewer, setting the empty stick down before pluckin up another. "She popped by like..." She shook the fresh skewer emphatically, looking at Geist from under her slender red brows. "... just before I heard my dad died. So, if I get this right, she was, at least, like a targeting mechanism for the Saffbomb." She took a quick bite of meat and chased it with some tea before swallowing both, getting her eating-and-talking rhythm down. "So why did she seem to feel so like... lost and hurt? What was all that abewt?"

"Hah, insidious, isn't it?" Geist had finished his first cup of tea, yet soon, he set the cup down, pushed the meat from a skewer into it, and poured the tea atop it, making a small bowl of soup that he sipped and nibbled at intermittently. "The Goblin technology operates at a Type II level. It's aware of empathy, and uses it to bring your sorts--I think the common parlance labels you as Imp, correct?--At any rate, it creates a full personality with the operating system to manipulate the host into working with it, and eventually succumbing. In some cases, the host destroys the operating system... in others, such as your own, they set them free, in the greatest irony of ironies."

"Well..." Saffron splayed he toes and pursed her lips as the little creases formed over her brows, ears drifting down at the sides of her head in thought. "Okay, but... Like, what does that have to do with me shedding like this?"

"You see... Teumessa's presence had set the components for the explosives to the proper proportions, while also holding the catalyst for their meeting and your demise. With her out of the equation, those elements instead combine inside the er... hardware of your affliction. I do hope that mine language isn't... too daunting or hard to follow." Geist's brows pitched as he looked to Saffron, only for her to wave off his anxiety with a half-eaten skewer.

As he settled, he took a hearty gulp of his makeshift soup, chewing in between pauses and storing the food in his cheek while speaking. "In essence, rather than being at the beck and call of forces that could rightly be labeled totemic, your body now holds those components for you to control and apportion the explosives on its own. The reason that you haven't noticed many others is that, once you set foot back home, you likely won't register in the minds of onlookers as anything but the average Imp. A lot of work throughout history has gone into minimizing the mental impact that Goblins create, both by keeping programs like Teumessa dormant, by keeping tabs on activated Imps, and by generating passive, psychic filters in those who have become as you. Think of it as an initiation, whence you shall now see elements that otherwise would have gone unnoticed."

"So it's kinda like Abby's 'Don't Notice Me' thing she does when she's uh... looking all a mess. I sorta stumbled on a little bit of that recently, but... I guess it left with all the other fuzz..." She tilted up the end of her tail for emphasis, before sneaking a quiet, if forlorn, scratch at the front of her shorts, while Geist stole a moment to watch Rivers the Dog bicycling his back paws in the air. "So that leaves the whole skin thing.. and maybe the purple blood thing? The hell is that? I mean, I kinda remember you having something like that going on when I first met you and you still had that rock in your chest. You sorta... moved on from that, a few times, before you became the living embodiment of a laser show."

"Ahhh yesyesyes." Geist reeled back with a throaty, yet quiet chuckle before polishing off the last of his soup. "Like mine own self, your body has now moved on from a strictly human template, to adjust to this newer phase. With that said, your blood is now... something a bit different than what naturally delivers nutrients and distributes oxygen in a carbon-based process, and almost exactly the flammable dreck you saw spilling from that Beast that intruded upon mine domain. I can't rightly declare the means by which all of your new functions work, yet from what I've gathered, you can regenerate rather swiftly, on top of having a measure of resilience when face with blunt trauma. This does, however, have its limits, and you'll likely need time to recuperate, and to avoid strenuous activity for a while."

"Uh... So... fire-blood, huh? Should I just invest in maxi pads made from asbestos?" Her toes curled in as her lips flattened, nervously turning her teacup in her hands. "Or... what?"

Geist muffled his guffaw against a balled-up hand, bright blacklight flashing in his eyes before settling to an ambient chuckle. "Haheh... ahahahh... oh... I can understand your concern. Nevertheless, I've come across nothing that seems to show that Imps have any reproductive issues. You'll be fine."

"Mmkay... Well..." She bit one half of her lip before slipping over to the other, both her ears and her mohawk rising up nervously, with the latter clumped and swaying like a rooster's comb. "... I think that's as good a point as any for me to start heading ewt."

Geist's hand began to raise, as if to deny any discomfort, yet the hic-hic-auwaagh from his son's room brought it to close. He unfolded his legs and scooped up the trays of food, gliding right back to the kitchen before sliding towards the hallway, his front angled towards the nursery room. "Erh... yes. For the both of us, it seems." His smile crawled up faintly as his eyes dropped towards the floor, sheepish for but a moment. "Thank you, Saffron."

Saffron had already cleared up her cleaned-off skewers and mug, setting all of them within the sink before hustling out towards the door. Her toes clawed a bit on the doormat as she peeked over her shoulder to Geist, her nose crinkling across her scar as she offered a fangy grin. "Hey, thank you, dude. Uhm... I'll see you 'round, eh?" She scrunch-fingered him a wave before frolicking back out... and gave her sportbike a hard wince. "Aw geez, now I gotta ride you home. F***."