cityofhex | WEEK 01

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WEEK 01

Somewhere, a gear slips.

It's sunset on Halloween night; a night of celebration for the dead and the once-dead, a night of wariness for those bound closely to the spirits. Everything seems to move more freely on this night; the sensation of boundaries crossed is almost palpable.

A handful of those native to the city will certainly feel such. Between one step and the next, there's a feeling of pushing against something, something you didn't know was there before - and it gives. Physically, nothing changes, but you now know something is wrong, as though waking from a dream. Something has slipped, and you remember. Hajime will feel the sensation most keenly, as the things he recalls lack the sharp details of a demon's memory.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Sixth, the New Arrivals all also find themselves taking steps - the first thing the group will become aware of in the city is being shoved out the door of what seems to be some kind of broken down factory. The alley they step into is wide enough to get a truck through, but shows little sign of human habitation; only a cardboard box, half-dissolved by rain, and a few bits of stray glass from broken bottles can be seen. Their phones and any other communication devices they possess all beep loudly, once, after the door slams shut.

Except... What door? When they next blink, while there's still a vaguely door-like outline, the concrete wall has changed; where the door was, there's a metal sheet, machined with faint circular patterns, seamlessly integrated with the concrete. Banging a fist on it produces a solid sound, as though the metal was at least an inch thick. Though there is a feeling of being watched in the alleyway, no one will approach until they leave it, not even a passerby walking the not-quite-yet-dark street at either end. Until they step out of the alley, it's as though they don't exist.

And there's a good amount of foot traffic passing the alleyway by. Though it tends towards people in a college student age bracket and people in a vaguely street punk sort of fashion with odd accessories, neither is an absolute rule by any rule. Following the flow of traffic leads to a run-down park that's mostly skatepark with a few picnic tables and a small greenspace that's been taken over for a dancefloor. The tables are covered in odd junk and there seems to be some trading going on.

Haseo and Ryoji will both have better knowledge of what the place is, and have standing invitations to the party that's starting up as the Sin-Eater trading post winds down.

Elsewhere: On a beach bordering the bay, a group of changelings holds a bonfire. Periodically, someone throws a papercraft skull into it with extreme prejudice; almost all the skulls are inhuman in some way, though the craftmanship of the paper-mache makes it difficult to tell at times. Those in the know have to be aware that such an overt display won't pass unnoticed by the Autumn King... But the tall and built woman who seems to be the center of the festivities shows no fear in the season of fear.

In the Residential District and even a few places in the Sixth, trick-or-treaters are as much a feature as they are every year. Children in costume run about with little concern for who they approach, while their parents maintain appropriate wariness from sidewalks or cars. A small group of children, however, galivants with no supervision - and there is something uncanny about the trio. It's best to give them a treat if they approach you, else you might find yourself the recipient of a cruel trick in return. Unlike the other trick-or-treaters, they're out and about well past midnight; nearly to dawn, in fact. When the sky begins to lighten, however, all three stop immediately in the middle of what they're doing and - with the sound of mad, fey giggling - bolt off in the direction of the farming district.

The prompts from the Test Drive also remain available for interaction.

The rest of the week:

Weather forecast: Though Halloween is a clear night, clouds steadily roll in for most of the rest of the week, hanging overcast in the sky with occasional breaks and sprinkles of rain slotted in. Mornings are foggy and chill, warming slightly in the afternoons but not varying all too much in temperature. Frost has yet to set in, though, making it possible to sleep outside if you have adequate cover, but it won't be very fun.

Moon Phase: The 30th was a New Moon, so Halloween's sky is decorated by a fingernail crescent that grows to almost a half moon throughout the week.

The Clean-Up: After Halloween, of course, everything must slowly go back to normal. Most folks clean up their own messes throughout the first morning of November, but shards of gutted and thrown pumpkins can be found most everywhere, and at the park where the Sin-Eaters partied, a lone Security Officer inspects the aftermath for signs of unusual activity. Aside from the remains of pumpkins, which are mostly left to rot, decorations vanish over the course of the week and all but a few are gone by Thursday morning.

The College: Though enrollment for the fall semester is over, the deadlines for winter are fast approaching, and there are a number of tables set up in a large area to entice prospective students. Most of them are manned by undergraduates, but the English program's table is staffed most of the time by a single Tired Professor with mousy brown hair. Occasionally, the Tech Student at the next table over takes pity on the man, bringing him a hot-chocolate to help warm his fingers.

[Feel free to use this post as a jumping-off point for logs and interactions! You are also welcome to post your own logs to the community as needed. Mods will be available on plurk and discord to answer questions, and can be hailed for exploration logs off this post.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

At some point during the week Tobias will find an odd bundle in one of the abandoned buildings in the 6th. Someone (a child, going by the size) seems to have left a complete set of replacement clothes behind - a coat, street clothes, underwear - wrapped neatly around a gun in a plastic bag.

If he pokes around the room more, he might find other small piles of things left behind, but they're much smaller and thus better hidden. There seems to be nobody around.

He pauses at the small bundle. He almost doesn't take anything - who the hell takes a kid's clothes? - but he notices the shape that it's wrapped around. Curiously, he unwraps them from the bag.

"... Why would a kid have..." Not that it's never happened - kids get their hands on guns sometimes - but a homeless kid having a gun is pretty unusual. Maybe he should just... carefully unload it and sell it. He at least manages to not point it at himself as he tries to find how to take the bullets out without actually firing it.

She thought this spot would safe. Hidden in a far up, far off corner of the building, a building that was truly empty and smelled like nobody had been on the upper floors in a while... well, it seems that she was wrong.

Her first impulse is fury. How dare he touch her things. Her second is the realization that he's currently fiddling with the only non-magical weapon that she had on her when coming here. She can't let him have it. And the third is...

Well. She could try to just knock him out. Or she could try to spook him instead.

Soundlessly, she moves into a position where she will hopefully be as good as invisible to him - a shadow at the door, hidden between two crates - but where she has a perfect view of most of the room so she won't lose eye contact with what she is going to do. And then she picks up one of the crates on the other side of the room, levitating it up into the air and hauling it at him.

Tobias catches sight of the crate flying at him, quickly puts the gun down, and dives to the side. He immediately recovers, tensing and looking around for what caused that. Some kind of ghost or something? He's not sure. He races for his bag, aiming to snatch it up and get near one of the walls so that nothing can hit him from behind.

She laughs in delight, soundlessly, and her ears twitch again as she picks up the bag before he can grab it and focuses on the straps so she can swing it around like a loaded sling before letting go.

The bag just barely misses him, going over his right shoulder - if he reaches out for it, he can probably catch it, though it does have significant momentum from the spinning throw.

He does reach out for it and grabs it, though the force of it carries him into a wall. He tries to recover, but can't manage it - he's smacked into the wall hard, stunning him for a moment.

... All right. Whatever he's dealing with isn't human. He pulls himself to his feet, letting out a long breath. "Come on out. I'm not going to hurt you."

Not unless he sees a reason to, at least.

But she is having fun.

She picks up another crate to toss it, but then focuses. No. No, she needs him to leave rather than run around the room and get angry.

She should just let him go. It's disappointing, and she almost doesn't go through with it, but... she really should.

Tobias will see the crate hover in the air for a bit longer before it is abruptly dropped, crashing down in the middle of the room.

Then there is silence.

Kitty is watching the teenager for his next move.

He hesitates. He really should leave, but... he can't help but be curious as to whatever it is that's causing this. Maybe that's trouble, but possibly...

Tobias walks over to the crate, putting a hand on it as he shoulders his bag. "That's a pretty neat trick. Do you want to come out and talk?"

...Does she?

She looks around her for a moment. If she moves back a bit, the space should be big enough, and... let's see.

She soundlessly retreats until she is in the bigger space behind the two crates and then curls up before shifting, which will be equally soundless but take a moment. And then take another moment to apply mask to herself... good.

The girl that stands up behind the crates, little more than her head and a bit of her shoulders visible, looks like her - just with regular eyes and dressed, in this case a t-shirt, colourful trousers and ballerinas. There is a risk in using her own face, but she didn't think about that in time and now it is too late.

"It's not a trick.

Why did you try to steal my clothes?"

... Okay. He's pretty sure that girl wasn't there when he first came in. Still, better to treat her as a human until he learns otherwise... if that's what she's appearing as, that's her choice.

"Well, it seemed like a trick to me... and I wasn't going to take your clothes. If you're living in a place like this, you probably need them."

"But you were trying to steal my gun."

That's about as bad, though in a different way. She needs her clothes more, but she will be able to replace them more easily, too.

At least he doesn't seem to contest that she lives here. She'll probably have to move a bit, now, but it still makes this conversation easier.

"... That's true. But guns are valuable. And... I don't exactly have a job." Not a permanent one, at least. Sometimes he sells drawings, but that's not really steady work.

It's kind of hard to have any sort of real skills that aren't criminal when you haven't been to school in three years.

Considering that Kitty has never been to school and is kind of a professional criminal at this point, they could hi5 here. If it was a topic to talk about among strangers. Or ever.

"And that is why I have to keep it. It's harder to replace than most other things, and I'm too young for people to give me work directly, so I couldn't buy a new one even if I knew the right people for it." And she doesn't have her team to accept jobs on her behalf here. Nor... do the kind of jobs that she tends to do to exist, at least not nearly as close to the surface as what she's used to.

"... Most people your age don't have a gun. So I kind of wonder how you got it in the first place." Sure, people may be kind of permissive around here, but he's not sure he's ever heard of someone selling a gun to a kid. Sure, it could inspire fear that others like him could feed on, but there's a limit. He's not that much of a monster.

Not yet, at least.

"If it's hard for children to get guns here, that means that I can afford to lose this one even less."

Duh.

Also very clearly not actually answering either of the questions wrapped up in his words. She'll come around the boxes now, stepping into better view of Tobias - just a nine year old child in a t-shirt, colourful trousers and ballerinas, nothing fancy or unusual or even fear-inspiring to see here, nope - and then walking over to where he dropped her gun, keeping a very close eye on him, ready to fight again at a moment's notice.

"If you don't try to take my things, I won't try to hurt you."

He doesn't move. Not yet, at least. There's no need to start a fight - he's pretty sure he could win, but even if this little girl isn't actually a little girl, he still doesn't really want to fight someone who looks like a little girl.

(He's never liked it when his Horror fed on the dreams of children.)

"Okay." Just calm and gentle, that's how he'll handle this. That's probably the best way... "I'm kind of curious how you moved those boxes, though. You don't have to tell me if you don't want." He's not getting any kind of reading off of her. No scent of blood, no crackle of electricity, nothing. It's as if she's totally human, but he's never met a human who can do something like that. Maybe a demon, but he knows what happens when he tries to pick up on those.

"I picked them up and threw them. You could've seen that if you paid attention."

She won't give more of an explanation - not necessarily because she's being evasive, though that is there too, but mostly because she can't really explain it much better. In the end, you just reach out and grab something.

She picks up the gun and continues on to the pile of clothes, placing the gun on it and settling down on top. As full-sensory as her mask is, it doesn't come with actual loops, pockets, holsters or whatever to actually place things in. The illusion also very minorly overlaps with the fabric that she's seated on now, too little to really see it unless you know that you're looking for it.

"They're kind of heavy, and I didn't see you do it with your hands... can you do that with your brain?"

It's cool. Weird, but cool. He watches her with sharp eyes, rubbing his shoulder from where he impacted the wall. "I won't try to take your stuff, I promise." As much as he can, at least. Until his Horror decides that it's hungry again, and chases into her dreams with sharp talons and high winds.

"Do you live here all alone? It can be kind of dangerous out here..."

"...Kind of. Yeah."

She assumes that that must be it, in a way. It doesn't work with just her brain - there are reasons why she is very cautious about keeping her ears warm in the winter - but it comes pretty close.

"I'll move now." Because he was here. But her answer indicates at the same time that yes, she considered this the place where she lived. Only for a few days, since she arrived here, but without anywhere else to go it was an important anchor point. "Why where you here?"

"... Okay." He can't blame her for being paranoid. Even those people who don't know what's out there would be twitchy in a place like this. "... I was looking for stuff I could sell. I don't really have a job, so I try to find stuff no one is using and sell it to make money."

Sure, he could get a 'real' job, but that would make it easier for someone to find him. No thanks.

...That explanation actually hinted to him having some very valuable information.

"Whom would you sell it to?"

If this is someone buying stolen goods, they likely are some kind of fixer, maybe they can point her to a Johnson or at least give her some idea of where to find a fixer who can, or something that will at least point her in the right direction...

Which would of course require finances that she doesn't have, but usually you can also trade in services. Even if they think that they can only send you on courier runs.

"... There's some pawn shops. And some of the electronics stores in the Sixth will take wires if you find ones that work. Aside from that... sometimes you can get money for selling the metal bits." Granted, not all of the pawn shops have a legal license to sell guns... but that hasn't stopped some of them.

Maybe he shouldn't be telling her this. It would be competition, after all. But he can't help but feel bad for a little girl who looks like she has no one.

... As long as she's not a Strix. But there's nothing to indicate that... yet, at least. There's a little light in the room, and she hasn't flinched back from it, so she's... probably fine.

"They only buy and sell things?"

That would be disappointing.

....It's uncomfortably chilly to sit here like this, and she's picked up enough from metahuman society to actually feel slightly awkward when naked in this body. So she gets up again and grabs the coat to put it on. Everything else would look weird - you don't put trousers on when you're already dressed - but she's wearing little enough to justify putting a coat on.

He doesn't move away while she dresses, though he does look at her carefully. He kind of wants to offer her one of his hiding places... but then he couldn't use them, and she seems suspicious enough that she might not accept help.

"Yeah? I mean, that's what pawn shops do." The people who frequent them sometimes do other things, but he's not explaining that to a kid.

"Back home, places that you can sell and buy things from that aren't really legal also know people and can put you in touch with about everyone or everything that you need, and if not the know where you can look."

Or at least that was her observation. She's never actually needed to initiate a contact with someone that she hadn't already had contact with prior to that, though...

She buttons her coat up and sits back down, pulling her legs under the coat. That might mean a disadvantage should there be a fight, but she doesn't get the impression that that is where they're headed.

B

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