Trance manual…(WoD)
"Come to me now, you are warming weather, come to me now, the kind that comes with sandbags along the river…"
He couldn’t cry.
The damage had been done, on a multitude of levels; the Hand was broken, the Lady fallen and near death, her greatest ally and advising voice, Silvergrin, killed by an unknown assailant. And ‘Taka’s own eyes lost to the oozing claws of a Black Spiral Dancer in a fight that the pewter-haired philodox never thought he could have survived. His life had been gifted to him by a strange little man with some very strange characteristics, and those were characteristics ‘Taka was going to have to think on, at great depth, sometime later.
Not now.
He listens to the flat, electronic sounds of a life sustained. Machines beeping and whirring, the smells of plastic and sterile cotton; smells he hadn’t dreamed still existed in this blasted world of death and poison. His tattered hand drifts over the soft blanket draping his Lady. He sighs as it finds one of her tiny hands, pierced with IV needles and resting limply next to her.
‘Taka takes her hand in his own, gently, and turns his disfigured face away. He had failed her, her prophet. He had failed to sufficiently guide her, aid her, save her. Frustration gnaws at him, digs sharp teeth into his guts as he waits, waits for her to awaken and absolve him of his failure. He wants to weep, wants to scream, but his scarred cheeks remain dry.
The machines click and beep and whir. The smells of cleaning fluids tinged with the last few traces of blood, clean cotton and disinfectant, the feel of soft fabric and, finally, the knowledge of his terrible mistakes, all of these bombard him as he sits beside his Lady, his shoulders shaking.
With a forlorn wail, he buries his lean, battered face into the edge of the hospital bed, hiding him from view.
"Dressed like that, you are a flag of a dangerous nation. Oh, dressed like that, you are some kind of decoration…."
It hadn’t been hard to infiltrate the chaos atop the hill.
This fact still hadn’t made it any easier for her to find the man she was seeking. With the number of refugees here, getting in and among them had been the easy part; finding one person in the milling crowd as it ebbed and flowed was proving to be much more problematic than she had anticipated.
She pulls her hood up further, masking her wealth of flame-gold hair. For the millionth time she curses genetics. That mane of hair of hers was more noticable than she cared to be, but there was little she could do about it, shy of shaving her head. Even dyes had proven ineffectual. The one who’d sent her had laughed at their failed attempts and had finally told her to just wear a hood or hat and hope for the best. And by best she’d meant ‘hope for unobservant security and few Garou’.
The tall woman smiles to herself. She’d definitely gotten the best, all right. But now she had to find one person amongst all these people and this was more trouble than she’d planned on. She drifts though the crowd, helping briefly in a trench for a little while, then wandering over to the barn to help with serving food and supplies. Then she slowly makes her way to the manor house, her feet carrying her lightly over the brown and withered grass that had once been a lush lawn, now blasted by radiation and trampled by hundreds of feet. The thought saddens her.
She enters the house with no interference and glides quietly though the plethora of nurses and medical staff, her feet making no sound on the tiled floors. She glances briefly into a couple of rooms before the familiar sight of an unruly thatch of pewter hair catches her attention. Pewter hair attached to a head resting on shoulders that shook as her her brother, her twin, the other half of her soul, wept for the tiny girl in the hospital bed next to him, and for himself.
As she turns the corner into the room, he raises his ruined face and, incredulous, he speaks.
"Althea?"
Her relieved laughter fills the room with light as she closes the door behind her.
"Here cowboy bars and dance clubs don’t exist, the trance manual says, just stand alone and then shift. And shift."
-John Vanderslice, "Trance Manual", Pixel Revolt