as written by Ronin and Sentry
The woman neared Savien, panicked. Her eyes watered, wet lines streaming down her rosy cheeks, lines at the sides of her mouth in a silent cry. "You're all going to kill me," she wailed. "Aren't you?"
Savien poised his blade, lining the tip towards the advancing woman.
"No closer," he warned. She could be an illusion, the culprit, an innocent person. He didn't know. "Who are you? Why are you crying?"
It was a defensive tactic. Psychically-induced illusions were often hastily constructed - bare skeletons of reality, devoid of any real depth or detail. Deconstructing them by focusing on specifics was often an effective way of escaping them altogether.
The girl's hands flew up to her head, bunching her hair in her hands. "All those people are dead because of me! Why else would I be crying!" she furiously roared, gesturing behind her, though there was nothing at all there. "I was an apprentice! I didn't do anything! I didn't... I didn't do[/i[ anything. I didn't mean to hurt anyone."
A girl. That's all she was. Just some teenager in distress, like a drunk driver who'd gotten into an accident.
Savien lips quirked into a frown. That was... oddly detailed.
"Who's dead?" he asked, but immediately regretted the question. Stupid. Even if they couldn't see them, it was obvious who she was reffering to.
"Alright, take it easy," his sword lowered slightly. He did his best to appear non-aggressive while not letting his guard down. "You're an apprentice of whom? Are you a necromancer?"
More details, but it was more than just psychic defense at this point. Perhaps whatever this was could give him some genuine insight into the massacre.
She opened her mouth to speak, but seemed to think better of it. "You're going to kill her, too, aren't you? It's not her fault. It's not!" The girl withdrew like a mouse, but no matter how much she backed away, she never got any farther.
"I'm not going to kill anyone if I can help it," Savien growled, his voice steeling. She was just repeating herself. "I'm a paladin." Something close to a wolf's snarl loosed from the back of his throat, his body tensing under the weight of his anger. He didn't have time for this hysterical bullshit. People were dying - cops were dying - and he couldn't do a thing about it. He needed to get out of this goddamn-
He heard her crying. The soft, hopeless whimpers of a girl beyond the point of despair. He focused on it, watching the tears line her cheeks, drinking in her pain, her need, until his jaw had uknotted itself and his teeth were no longer grinding in his mouth. She was suffering. From the jagged edges of his wrath, Savien's duty called him back to his senses.
A slow exhale. When he spoke next, his voice had softened considerably. "I'm a paladin." He reached beneath his breastplate and retrieved a silver necklace, a glittering pendant of a wingspread raven.
He held it out for her to look at. "You see this? I serve the Light." He nodded. "Now I can help you, but you've got to help me. Whatever happened to you, to your master... you've got to tell me." He gestured with his swords towards the cobblestone streets behind her, the streets that he knew were littered with the dead. "We've got to keep this from happening again, you understand?"
Though still hesitant, she seemed to believe some part of what the paladin told her.
She reached for the pendant. "I won't tell you her name, but I'll get you to her."
He held it out for her touch, flattening the sword against his torso. He was letting her closer than he would have liked, but she clearly needed some sort of confirmation.
Assuming the same physical laws applied to this world, the girl would immediately feel a flush of lightning warmth spark from the necklace the moment she touched it. It was sacred silver, metal consecrated with the energy of the Pleur de'Eleue. Only those attuned to its energy field could stand it.
"Can you tell me where I am?" he asked, hoping to at least get a bearing on his location - whether he was psychically trapped or had been teleported to same strange instance of the past or future.
The girl didn't touch the pendant, but kept her fingers a hair's width from it. Her eyes closed, she spoke a language that was familiar to Lutetia, but famously to its magic folk. When she opened her eyes, she looked up into the paladin's eyes. "I made it up. I have a knack for fabricating realities or something like that. I don't really get it, either."
It all began to fade when she admitted it. The sky darkened. The summer breeze chilled. Every part of her that had been a normal teenager slipped away like a shedding skin. "Dad was super, super proud, you know? This all really sucks."
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"No, no, no," the voice demanded again. This time, Roger would feel an invisible presence forcefully spin him around. The swarm of possessed bodies were quickly approaching. "I don't think you understand, officer. I need you."
It felt like a needle went right through Roger's heart and dropped ice cubes right into his fragile little soul. Bursting from his chest was a coil of frost, springing to the ground and reaching upward like vines to grasp the feet of the undead.
Cold set into the officer's fingers, too. A knife formed there, the steel like a block of ice. "If it can't be shot, what's the next best thing?"
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Those that had left Savien when the ghastly woman had seized him in a trance had moved on to seek out officer John. The skin had split all the way down their centers and left the bodies agape, hungry to consume.
As for the newly arriving paladins, well. They weren't going to get a clear line to Savien. Even if body parts were splattered apart by bullets, they still grasped and scratched and tore for them, levitating just off the ground, disembodied or not.