He had yet to ask either the Instruction Manual or the devils whether undead were a real thing, but why the hell wouldn’t they be? If Infernals and Celestials consumed FearFaithResolveFleshLifere-animated.
Well, at least for today there did not appear to be a loose zombie shambling through the neighborhood. The noisy little brats must have been playing make-believe. Robin went back indoors and found StinkPew stretched out on the couch in skunk-hybrid form. The smell she exuded was pungent so he concentrated on breathing through his mouth. She had Betty’s cell phone in hand and scrolled through family pics and muttering “nibble”, “fuck” or “eat” at each one.
Robin cleared his throat.“Hey, S.P., are undead a thing in this world?”
StinkPew snorted. “Yeah, they’re real, but not really on anyone’s radar except my pack’s… my former pack, I mean. We only had dealings with them because they took over a library like half a mile away from our firehouse Home BaseMystic
“What brought you out here to the burbs, then?” Robin was genuinely curious. It was probably time he started getting a better grasp on the bigger picture if he hoped to become more useful in Zebryl’s cabal. “Was it just to hunt us?”
“Yeah, I guess, but not necessarily to kill you at first. The crew that went to the was supposed to recruit the Infernals to our Pack
With a tinge of bitterness he noted she had used dozens of Betty’s safety pins to shore up the rips in her now red track suit. Robin had briefly considered offering to sew it up for her, but he didn’t want to touch it for fear of getting skunk-stank soaked into his hands. He also didn’t want to get to know her any better than he had to, as she had been perfectly willing to kill him just a couple days ago.
“Was that everybody in your clan with you during the angel fight?”
“Naw, dude, we were just a kill squad. If I’m being honest, I was pretty low on the totem pole in the PackWarrenHome Base
Did that mean that one group could wipe out another’s HomeBasePack
“Yeah. Duh.” StinkPew looked at him like he was a moron.
Robin stared right back at her for an awkward minute before requesting clarification. “So, what kind of bonus did you get?”
StinkPew laughed lightly. “Despite the devil club only being run by those two—” she pointed toward the bedrooms were the siblings were in conference “—they had a surprising amount of power invested into the building itself. Even though Kurtman and the doggos failed to recruit the devils, they did demolish the club and got game credit for it. Our boss had a new watch tower built on the firehouse and imbued it with some sort of death repellent spray cannon.”
“Like a holy water squirt gun?”
StinkPew looked confused. “I don’t know what ‘holy water’ is. Naw, the cannon sprays jets of gold potion we buy from somewhere. It’s supposed to be effective against ghosts and ghouls and shit like that. It hadn’t been tested, so I don’t know if it actually works.”
Golden shower analogies aside, magic potions sounded like the kind of stuff Monika might concoct. Robin figured she was too much of an isolationist to have dealings with anyone in the city proper, but he could be wrong.
StinkPew let out a slow whistle. “Well, willya lookit’ that? The parents in the neighborhood are all making fun of their own pups. Sounds like their rugrats had a ‘dead body experience’ yesterday and haven’t stopped yammering about it.”
“You mean in a way or a way?”
StinkPew spat in exasperation. “I swear you speak in tongues, dude. What the fuck are you talking about?”
Okay, so this reality’s entertainment options were not analogous to Earth’s or at least StinkPew had not been exposed to the same movies and TV shows Robin knew. “Never mind. Do you mean the kids actually think they saw a dead body?”
She sat up and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Take a look.”
She handed him Betty’s phone which still had a soft knitted case covering it featuring a bouquet of roses. Robin pushed welling sadness over the old lady’s death back into the deep drawers of his mind. Sure enough, a messaging app shared by all the neighbors did, indeed, have a long-scrolling discussion between at least four different households. They commented on how silly their kids were and that dead bodies didn’t just sit on park benches. The consensus seemed to be that the kids had encountered a smelly, sleeping, homeless person in the nearby park and had run away thinking it was a corpse. A couple of the parents declared they were going to tell the H.O.A. to start enforcing a camping ban in the neighborhood.
“Delightful that you two should bring the subject up,” Zebryl’s debonair voice said as he casually sauntered into the living room in nothing but tight boxer briefs. “Yarya and I were just discussing this very thing.”
Robin looked to the incubus. “What? The existence of undead creatures?”
“No, not the undead specifically, but the need to recruit more members to our Cabal
StinkPew snatched the phone from Robin. “You can’t be serious. Even if there is a zombie or something here ‘bouts, you can’t really want to have a rotting undead as part of this Pack
“We have stinky ass,” Robin snarked, feeling partial to Zebryl’s way of thinking. Gawd, did he ever put a shirt on or was topless the devil’s natural condition?
Zebryl tipped his head to one side implying a warning. “Our
“Fine, whatever,” she huffed, flopping back onto the couch.
“Don’t get overly comfortable, Feral,” Zebryl intoned. “You and Robin need to head out and see if there is any truth to undead lurking in the vicinity.”
StinkPew snarled under her breath in a tone that implied the simultaneous rolling of eyes. “Uhhgg. Alriiiiiight.’
Robin let out his own sigh. The skunk girl certainly behaved like a put-upon teenager, but he had no idea how shape-shifters aged so she could be 100 years old for all he knew. “And exactly how do we Recruit
“I should think you’d be somewhat effective at it, human.” Yarya’s voice dripped condescension as she walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. “You simply start by asking. You could always try your little Charm
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
She too, was topless. Robin supposed they came from a hot world where clothing might be culturally minimized. Neither of them appeared to flaunt their perfect bodies in a sexual way, at least not until a situation sexual. Not that Robin was complaining, but big tits were tiresome to look at and he’d seen actual fire exude from hers, so maybe they should be capped like a Bic lighter. Just for safety’s sake.
StinkPew grabbed Robin by the hand. Her sharp claws felt awfully close to piercing his palm. She pulled him toward the front door. “Don’t worry, dude. I can show you how it’s done. This ain’t my first yahoo, you know.”
He did not know what a ‘yahoo’ was, at least not to a Feral. He glanced back over his shoulder as he snagged his Santa Sack
StinkPew knew the way to the park a couple blocks away, the one the children claimed to have see a dead man in. Maybe she was nervous or maybe she was just feeling chatty, but she blathered incessantly as they walked in the bright afternoon sun.
“You know what I miss most about home?”
Robin did not know nor did he care, though he did wonder if she meant the Warren
“It’s the flying.” She continued on unabated. “It super sucks being stuck shifting between only three forms. Back on my world, most of us can learn to change into tons of different animals. Birds, fish, mammals, even bugs if you wanna be a yetch. Me? I loved flying, like as a falcon an’ shit. You know, raptors. They’re so cool with sharp claws, long wings and great eyesight.”
Interesting that her home world had animals that sounded like they were straight off the National Geographic channel. He was too curious not to ask. “Are you from Earth? From my world? Are shapeShifters actually a real thing back there?”
The skunk girl stopped with hands on her hips. She slowly changed her form; black and white fur shortened to disappear entirely, her face flattened as her cute button-nosed snout shrank and her bushy tail dwindled to nothing. Her features took on those that could pass for any sassy Latina college kid working a mall job in Albuquerque. “This. This weak ass human body that has senses as dull as an empty can of hairspray, no meaningful defense mechanisms and no natural weapons sharper than a butter knife. How the fuck am I supposed to survive the game looking like this?”
“At least it helps you blend in,’ Robin pointed out.
“Pfaw! That hardly matters,’ StinkPew retorted. “The plainFolk don’t see us for what we really are unless we become like in-your-face threatening. And even then, they forget all about it like five minutes later. And I don’t mean cuz’ they're dead or nothin’, but because the world makes them forget.”
“Huh.” That was a lot to think about. She was probably right. If beige NPCs retained active memory of the horrid shit that happened all around them there’d be an army of gunned-up rednecks truckin’ around town shooting everything that didn’t look perfectly human. This world would be an apocalypse zone. Instead, there was this placid veneer shellacking a metropolis riddled with supernatural cancer. Cancer that was literally consuming its residents.
Another thing popped to mind. “You said ‘three’ forms a minute ago. I’ve only seen you take two shapes; your human one and the human-skunk hybrid one. What’s the third?”
StinkPew smirked. “Duh, full skunk. What else didya’ think?”
“Like, a giant skunk? On four legs?”
StinkPew looked slightly puzzled. “Four legs, yeah. But just normal skunk size. Ya know… like, a foot and a half long, about 20 pounds. Normal skunk size.”
“Where does all the rest of your mass go?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Never thought about it.”
When they reached the park, they found it mostly unoccupied. It was not very big, maybe a couple acres in total and only had a small copse of trees just starting to leaf out, a sand pit with a curved slide and a two-seater swing set. There were only two other people present: a woman doing yoga under the trees and a mother with a stroller sitting at a built-in picnic bench.
“Whelp, no dead people mosey-ing round here,” StinkPew declared.
“Did you really think they’d still be here if the kids were telling the truth?”
“Dude, if you’d seen the notDead like I have, a lot of ‘em are pretty rickety and are barley holding themselves together.”
Robin snorted. “Hardly sounds like they’re much of a threat, then.”
StinkPew shaded her eyes with one hand, the multiple piercings about her head gleaming brightly in the midday sun. “It’s not the shambling mummy minions and graveyard ghasts that you need to worry about. It’s the vampires and liches and ghosts that are the real problem. But seriously, I doubt there’s any undead out in these parts, there’s so few of them to begin with.”
“Hallo? Excuse me? Don’t want to be a bother, but could you spare a Life
Both Robin and StinkPew let out high-pitched yelps of surprise. Standing behind them, in a ragged silvery hijab, was a Middle Eastern woman in relatively putrid condition. A couple small chunks of her face were missing, exposing skull bone. She had outstretched one arm revealing flesh that looked like skinned-over pudding. Fortunately the rest of her was pretty much covered by the dirty grey fabric.
“Damn, bitch! Make some noise if you’re gonna walk around being all creepy,” Robin spouted. He immediately regretted the harshness of his tone as the zombie woman flinched back and jammed her arm inside her clothing.
“Oh yeah, the dead are fucking quiet,” StinkPew pointed out, pointlessly. She was already shifting back into her hybrid form, claws brandished openly.
Robin managed to stay mostly collected. “Alright, everyone just take a breath. We’re not here to start a fight, StinkPew?”
All skunked out, the goth girl looked prepared to scrap but did hold her ground.
Before things escalated or got out of hand, Robin decided to cast CharmAmountTinyAttributed6 Essenced12 Bohdi
ROBIN’s RESULTS: QUALITY = 17; ESN d6 = 2 ? Charm d10 = 8 ? Charm d8 = 5 ? Charm d8 = 2
STINKPEW’s RESULTS: QUALITY = 7; WLP d10 = 7
Zombie’s RESULTS: QUALITY = 2; WLP d2 = 2
Turned out the Bohdi
“But I’m so hungry,” the zombie woman proclaimed piteously.
Suddenly acting super friendly, probably as a result of Robin’s spell, StinkPew made an adorable series of squeaky chirping sounds and clapped her clawed paws together like an anime school girl. “Ooo, ooo! I can get you something right now!” She looked meaningful at the two women in the park. “I’ll bring you… wait. What’s your name?”
“Ashalina,” the zombie said, eyes dropping sheepishly to the ground, one almost literally. She casually stuffed it back into its socket.
“Okayokayokay, Ashalina. Which looks yummier to you? Yoga Becky or Mom Becky? Just sayin’, but I’ll take whatev’s in the stroller — hopefully sweet baby back ribs — and Robin can have the one you don’t take.”
“Hold on, one gawd-damned second,” Robin almost shouted. “No one’s killing anyone you twisted twits.”
StinkPew turned big, eager eyes to him. “But we don’t have any LifeFlesh
Desperate, and not wanting to start an actual fight, Robin reached into his Santa SackCharm
Without thinking much about it, Robin expended a d6BrawnAttributeSanta SackNaughty & NiceTalk
What emerged instead was a bolas — three metal balls, each the size of a small peach attached together by three cords. It was a South American entangling weapon Robin and his friends had made as kids. They had, quite inexpertly, thrown them at each other while running around the yard in the hopes of wrapping them around someone’s ankles and watching them tumble to the lawn. No one had ever landed a hit.
But Robin tried right now. The mother NPC looked up and issued a piercing scream at seeing StinkPew dashing toward her with claws splayed wide, fluffy tail poised stiffly over her red-suited back. The mother wildly yanked her baby out of its stroller as Robin recklessly spent all three of his Agility
ROBIN’s RESULTS: QUALITY = 22; AGL d10 = 3 ? AGL d8 = 7 ? AGL d6 = 1 ? Throw d4 = 3 ? Throw d4 = 4 ? Throw d4 = 4
He was aiming for her back feet as her sprint alternated between all four legs and just two. Sadly, his aim was only good enough to hit her but not he wanted. Two of the balls wrapped around her neck like a collar and the third one whacked her in the temple. Shockingly, all three balls exploded a second after impact. StinkPew’s head blew apart like a watermelon filled with firecrackers.
Robin skidded to a halt, horrified. Purple Flesh
Ashalina shuffled up next to Robin looking disappointed, or maybe horrified too, it was hard to tell by her desiccated demeanor. “I am sad. Our food is gone.”