Return to Earth (Open)

"If that thing is what you consider a friend..." the Popsicle started to say but was cut off by the gnashing teeth of the shorter woman.
"I can't explain it for you, Deary, but I can direct you to someone who might be able to help, as Jack so intuitively supposed. I expect you would rather not take him with you, so wait for me to get you the map," with that, she retreated into another room, barely visible in the shadows of the hut, deprived of light. her voice, however, crept back out in its abrasive way. "Tell me about this friend of yours, this 'guy you know'," she called out, "Is he a lover, a travelling companion? Why is it that a young lady like you would be here with someone like... him?"
Jack snorted, a breath into the hot air, it evaporated like steam, visible. It was interesting, since he had stepped into the hutch in which they now stood, nothing had frozen at all. It was true, the air about him was still frigid as was evidenced by the condensed cloud which spewed forth from his mouth, but that was all. "You really think the little b**** could attract a mate?" He snarled at her, giving her a raking glance with his eyes, "I suppose she doesn't look so bad."
A cast iron pan came whirling out of the darkness at Jack's head with incredible speed. He held up a hand in defense, a vicious look came into his eyes as it reached him. The iron froze in the matter of a moment, growing brittle and shattering to pieces which spattered his face.
"Jack! You will keep your vile tongue in check while you remain under this roof, or the next one will hit home," the sharp words shot forth in a volatile manner that could have matched the aggression of the projectile itself.
He seemed to take the threat to heart, backing down, and backing slightly towards the door. "My apologies," his bow was as false as his tone, and he delivered one each to the unseen creature still digging for her map, and to Shadow.

Something outside exploded at the same time as Shadow's eyes flashed red. Her shoulders hunched slightly, not unlike a wolf when raising its hackles. Deliberately, she didn't look at Jack, lifting her head in pride.
"He is a friend I know from my childhood, nothing more. He is a librarian in a library I used to frequent. He was told to come to the lake in order to stop me from drowning." She quietly watched Jack from the worner of her eye, her disgust for him growing while her appreciation for the woman growing.

The small, green head with its greasy black locks of tangled hair were very close. A sickly sweet smell, like medicinal herbs created a pungent aura which forcefully assaulted the nostrils. That sharp nose pointed almost into Shadow's face. "Was told? Who commands this creature?" she seemed intensely attentive to Shadow's eyes in particular, as if she were searching out to read the answer instead of hear it.
"Better question," Jack actually seemed to mean it this time, "Why you?" He wasn't mocking, it was an honest question. "Why a demon lord's daughter? Why would that bring him back?" he continued to himself in a low tone.
"Shut up, Fool, listen instead of running your jaw and you might get an answer," the frightening woman vanished like a rat into her dilapidated abode and the sounds of rustling about could be heard once more.

Shadow took a step back from the woman, between the smell to her wolf nose and the proximity of someone she didn't trust, it seemed to be the safer option.
"I don't know, I didn't ask him," She replied, shaking her head, keeping her violet gaze level with the woman's until she disappeared back into the shadows of the room. The demoness ran a hand through her hair, sighing. It was definitely going to be a long day.

"Very good," the woman in her tattered garments swished forward like a leaf blown in stiff breeze, "Just one more question then, what is his name?" Clutched in her hand, long, unkempt fingernails curled around the roll of parchment, was the map that the woman had promised. But the vice of her grip was not about to loose itself from the paper until she had her answer.
It was at the same moment that from where he had casually leaned against the door that Jack's composure, the glorious facade of a narcissistic b****** lifted from him like a cold fog evaporating under the heat of the sun to reveal what was underneath, the cunning, angular, almost bird-like motions of a predator looking down upon the prey it very much desired.

Shadow hesitated before answering the woman. She could feel something off, something telling her not to trust them.
"Shaeman," She answered, looking the woman in the eye.

"Shaeman," the elderly female repeated the words to herself in a voice far from the feebleness that her age would have demanded. She seemed to savor the word as another person might savor a glass of wine, but despite her enamored appearance, she kept her promise. The withered old hand held up the paper, with its ink stained messages. "This will take you to the next level. I cannot guarantee that you will find there that which you seek, only that it will bring you closer," the wrinkled woman narrowed her sharp gaze once more to a fine point, "I wish you luck, if such a thing exists down in this skulking realm." She cast a scathing sort of glare at the world around her, gave a final bow of the head, and vanished once more into the grime and mire of her rotted hut.
Jack had already stepped outside. In fact, had one been paying attention, they would have noticed that he had stepped out with a knowing half-smile upon hearing Shadow's final answer.

Shadow took the map, giving the woman a respectful bow, one hand fisted over her heart. Stepping out of the shack, she unfurled the map, her violet eyes scanning over it. She took no notice of Jack, stowing the map under her cloak, stepping towards the edge of the bayou, preparing herself ot take the plunge to the next level of what she was beginning to see as a game.

The water before her froze solid, the air around was blasted by a wind that could have been ice in essence. Frost solidified all life nearby and the muddy ground became like rock. "That dirty rotten lie may have been enough to coddle the Witch, but I'm afraid that you are going to have to answer the question in a more satisfactory way before you go anywhere, my dear," Jack's voice was like the wind itself, cold and hard and deadly. He was no longer the jocular foolish fellow that had led her here. Now there was a gleam in his eye that hadn't been before, as if some feral creature deep down had been awoken. The very air itself was charged with magical energy, crackling like ice freezing until it shattered.

Shadow hit the ice with a dull thud, ending up sprawled over it. She picked herself up, shivering violently and glaring daggers at Jack. She had to try to speak several times because of her teeth chattering.
"Are you t-t-t-trying to k-k-k-k-kill me?! Fire demons and ice d-d-d-don't mix!" She snapped, avoiding his question.

'As though I'd let you die. No, but you will feel pain unless you give me what I wish," he crouched at the edge of what had been a swampy bog moments before. The sky above appeared to be freezing, fracturing, with spidery lines crisscrossing it. The effect was reflected in the face of the frozen water below Shadow which shuddered strangely as he touched it delicately with the fingertips of his right hand. "Tell me the name and you shall be on your way to finding the words which mean so much to you. Withhold from me what I wish to know, Princess, and I will learn just how much cold a fire demon can tolerate before they lose their mind," his voice hadn't changed, but the way he used it was different than before. Before he had clipped his words, and his accent had been higher, shorter. Now he spoke softly, with a fierce edge which slid instead of cutting. It was smooth, in that it was not harsh, but nonetheless lethal. The words flowed from one to another and the somberness in his tone drew them into the depths of the soul. He wasn't threatening anything. He was informing her of the natural course of things.

"I t-t-t-told you and that w-w-w-woman. His n-n-n-name is Sh-sh-sh-Shaeman!" Shadow managed to say, her shivers becoming even more pronounced. "If you d-d-d-don't let me g-g-g-go, then I'll never b-b-b-be able t-t-t-to get this prophecy over with!" She added, wrapping ehr cloak tightly around her in an attempt to warm herself. The demoness could feel herself weakening, her body becoming tired as the ice began to wreak havoc with her system.

"Wrong," he stood once more, "And I don't appreciate your lies. Perhaps the Witch doesn't mind, but I would much like to know the real name of this friend of yours, and I wouldn't worry too much about your prophecy. Everyone dies in the end anyway." He took a step closer to her, and as he did, the air temperature dropped by about ten degrees for every footfall. The look in his eyes was hard and dead. "Now, I will know," as he spoke, his hand extended towards her, but in that moment the whole world lurched and he was sent reeling over her. The ice beneath her shattered into a million pieces and she was cast downwards into the blackness by something barreling into her, hard. One might have caught a glance of tattered cloth, a mess of limbs, and a terrifying mask with a horrifying grin upon it, but then the creature disentangled itself, launching off and into the black abyss. It was as if gravity's power had increased, sucking Shadow down with incredible speed into an ever brighter light, and then, quite suddenly, she was sitting in a small pool, cobbles rested underneath the water which was only about as deep as the width of her hand. The frosted devil was nowhere to be seen, although a few very surprised and frightened children stood at the edge of the pool. One had lost a grip on their little paper boat which drifted to plow into Shadow's side. A little girl ran away screaming for her mother while the others just stood and gawked at the beautiful woman who had simply appeared in their playing place.

For a moment, Shadow just sat in the shallow pool, trying to make sense of what had just happened. She eventually got ot her feet, making ehr way over to a patch of sunlight grass. Sitting down, she wrung out her hair for what seemed to be the umpteenth time, revelling in the warmth of the day about the ice in the bayou. In her minds's eye, she was going over what had just happened. Jack had dropped the temperature even further, until something had knoked him away. The ice had broken, sending her plunging down into the water. The demoness grappled with the details, anything she could remember about the figure that had attacked Jack. The clothes? The mask... the grin...
"Weaver? I'm ready to play again," She murmured to the empty air.

A disembodied chuckle rippled through the air. It was hardly loud enough to be heard, but it was there nonetheless. One may have even imagined with their mind's eye the phantasmal impression of a smile imprinted upon the air itself. But it wasn't a smile at all. It was a shred of parchment that lilted through the small breeze to whip past Shadow's head, carrying her hair delicately in its gust. The cloth had been delicately painted upon with some kind of ink, ink laid down in the pattern of a map. Marie's cartographic symbol cast thus, and carried down through the grass which slowly began to fade into cobbles, as if they were growing at that very moment, populating the earth with stone. Around, the empty field took on the character of a city street down which the fragment of directional documentation blew.
"Catch it!" it was the voice of one of the children who had been beside the pool, and the whole gaggle of them responded by hurrying after the piece of paper. One of them, a little girl with a hauntingly familiar feel about her stopped by Shadow.
"Come on, Shad, or they'll leave us behind," she tugged very gently upon the shoulder of Shadow's clothing.

The ghostly grin unsettled Shadow slightly, even more since it was accompanied by the laugh. She had to ask herself whether or not she was in fact, going insane. The little girl calling her by her nickname certainly did little to put her mind at ease. She pulled herself to her feet, siging heavily. Springing nimbly forwards, she morphed into her wolf form in mid-stride, loping after the paper. The black-furred creature flowed into a leap, snagging the cloth gently in her teeth. Landing back on four paws and morphing back into her humanoid form, she cast her violet eyes down to the map

"Come on!"
"That's no fair!"
"Yeah, you can't cheat!"
The little girl who had spurred her on now caught up with the others who were displaying childish outrage at their playmate having utilized powers not so universally possessed to win what had evidently been a game. She was breathing hard but wearing a massive smile. "Shadow," she gasped at large gulps of air, "That's hardly good sport!"
It wasn't more than a few more moments of verbal abasements before the young boy who appeared to be the ringleader had declared the group's next objective, some fruit cart from which they planned to remove some produce in a covert manner. The little girl turned to the demoness. "You coming, Shad,?" she asked in such an innocent and plaintive voice.

Shadow looked up at the children, one eyebrow raised.
"I can't come and play now, I've got a lot of work to do," She explained patiently but firmly. 'Play' had never really been a word that existed in her childhood. It was more often than not replaced by 'study'. Once again she lowered her gaze to study the map. She was trying to make head or tail of it, so that she would know where her next objective was.

"Is it a treasure map?" the little girl was stretching onto her tippy toes just to be able to see what she could of the parchment clutched in Shadow's grasp, "Are you looking for hidden gold?" Her eyes sparkled in an almost unnaturally brilliant way. She bounced on the balls of her feet, a conspiratorial look in her eyes as she threw a quick glance at the others. "Come on, we can find the hidden treasure without the others, and then won't they be surprised!?" She seemed so excited in her quiet way, cute little dimples creasing her cheeks as she smiled and giggled with fervor. "Come on, Shad, what does the map say!?" she tried to pull at the edge so she could catch a more defined picture of the image impressed upon the parchment.

Shadow had to take a deep breath to calm herself before she did something she might later regret to the hyperactive child in front of her. Crouching down to be at the little girl's height, her familiarity still bugging Shadow slightly since she couldn't place her origins in her memory, she spoke in serious tones.
"This isn't a treasure map, nor is this a game. So go back to your friends and play with them." With that said, the demoness started to study the map closer, trying to work out where she had to go now to get to the next level.

The girl stopped bouncing, her face rendered immobile in a placid state. Slowly, eerily, her head cocked to the side. "You're my friend, Shadow," she said slowly as if she were reminding a person of something that they had long forgotten, "You know that." Her eyes narrowed, as if she were wondering what was wrong with Shadow. "Fine, but I'll find the treasure first!" She dashed off, but not in the direction of the other children, and just before she launched off, a smile had passed across her face, a haunting sort of smile despite its innocence, as if the expression, though not the girl, were the memory evoked. Her dress frilled out behind her as she ran down the crowded street. Her dark haired flared out into the air and streamed back. She ran in the direction of a a loudly blowing whistle. It sounded strangely like a train, which might have fit with the Victorian surroundings of this old city.

Shadow gritted her teeth, trying not to let her temper get the better of her. She may have had kids herself, but that didn't mean that she liked them. After all, Archangel and Onyx had been... 'special' kids. Bringing her mind away from the little girl, she glanced at the ma, still trying to make head or tail of it. In the end, she merely sighed, stowing the map under her cloak and looking around the field that had suddenly turned into a city. Strangely enough, the demoness wasn't all that surprised. Perhaps she was just getting used to the dreamscape.
"You know, Weaver, this would be a whole lot easier and faster if you would stop being so cryptic and just help me out here." She murmured to thin air.

"What's the fun of a treasure hunt if you know where the what that you're looking for is? How do you play a game of hide and seek if the hiding place is known," the voice was that of the little girl, only it came not from the direction that she had run, but from behind Shadow, "And what happens when the one being helped doesn't realize it?" It sat there, atop a cart that was selling something or other, or it would have been if it wasn't closed down, rotted out, and covered in cobwebs. Had one the memory, moments before the cart had been open and making a livelihood. Now, it stood a dilapidated semblance of what only moments before had been alive, a dead thing. It housed that frightening creature, all of its arms were employed in the manipulation of a sort of marionette. The doll attached to the strings bore a sickening resemblance to the little girl who had dashed off. What was sickening about the similarity was that the doll was some kind of corpse that looked sewed and bandaged together in a hideously distorted mirror of vitality. The most morbid smile was stretched across the toy's face by a series of sutures which caused her to grin upon Shadow. Still in the girl's voice, it spoke again, "What if everything isn't as it seems, Shad?" It tweaked one of the strings so that the head of the puppet cocked over. Had it been alive, it would have been the cute, coy action of a young girl. As it was, the loll of the dead head was more horrifying than anything else.

Shadow spun around on her heel, using her hand to throw her hair out of her face as it wrapped itself around her. She adopted a hip-shot pose, folding her arms.
"Weaver," She said in acknowledgement. "I'm starting to get very annoyed with these games you seem to be playing on me. You said there was something I had to do, which I therefore intend to do, but preferably without having to go through these tiresome games to do so."

- Sorry about the tardiness of my reply, I've not been well -

"Silly Shad," the girls voice was like pins and needles, slowly shifting, changing, sharpening, "The devil is in the details. You know, like the little things... little games and... things." A small tinkling laugh of a young girl slowly distorted, very slowly so that it almost seemed natural, almost, as it escalated into madness and a furious pitch. The Weaver's form shook as he released the strings of the marionette to watch his stitched corpse fall onto the pavement below. It fell, and caught itself. With languid, smooth movements, the less than dead and certainly unliving thing rose to its fully diminutive height.

"No, I agree with the demoness. Enough of your games!" The voice hissed a chill sound through the air.
The Weaver's head shot up. "Icecube?" the eight armed monstrosity's voice sounded completely quizzical as the mask cocked to the side, as a dog does when it is trying to look extra special cute.
In answer, the front of one of the nice old buildings behind Shadow froze solid, becoming white with the icy frost that covered the previously warm clay bricks. Less than a second later, the whole patch shattered into a thousand shards, and in the midst of the miniature blizzard that they had created, a figure launched out into the space above the street. It was nothing more than a blur, almost painful to behold. It stopped midway across the street's space, where a chunk of air froze into a solid block of ice, off of which the blur was deflected. The block was sent flying into another building, leaving a crater in the masonry. It's creator hurtled instead towards the Weaver.
A bark of laughter left the morbid thing resting on top of the cart. "Come, Shadow, time to play!" he rocketed into the air towards the icicle that was driving for its body. From underneath its cloak, it pulled an unbelievably large needle, bigger almost than its entire leg, that is... its longest leg. The needle did a merry dance as it lunged towards the freezing opponent. However, one of the Weaver's strings had gotten quite caught up on the cart, and he was suddenly yanked downwards so that the icy missile flew clear past him, landing down the street in a blast of stone and and dust. The cloud was flash-frozen and with the added weight, thudded down to the cobbles below, making a clattering noise, and leaving a glowing figure in their wake. He stood there at his full height, in blue robes trimmed with silver and white. His eyes were shining like the evening stars that burn bright even in the dying sun's light. His hair blown back into icicles, those features frozen into hard lines, that pasty skin which framed the thin, elegant form... all nearly exploding with power. Jack didn't look happy.

(ooc// Hey, don't worry about it. I feel that it is slightly more important that you become well again than reply to me and my craziness...)