How cruelly burns the flame

[letthemburn]

Who| Iskierka and Shepard; possibly also The Initiate and Iskierka
What| An unexpected meeting goes less than well
Where| Fifth floor
When| Week 6
Warnings/Notes| Character death for sure, maybe others

For all that Iskierka had set up what it would not have been uncharitable to call a lair up on the higher levels of the museum, there was a certain amount of things that she could find there. Food, for one, and that alone had been enough to drvie her out of the relative comfort of her own lair. True, there wasn't much of a guarantee than anyone else would have something suitable, but that didn't matter. There were still people alive, and she saw very little reason to not do her part to eliminate as many people as she could.

But first, she had to actually find someone. But that wasn't going to be too hard, or so she figured.

Comments

[earthborn]

Shepard had been hungry before. She'd stumbled around the world with a face made of bones, eight years old and dying on food that would have sustained a very thin cat, but a burgeoning biotic not at all. It had been a long time since then, but much less since the last time she felt the hunger-cramps. You never forgot death, once you'd shaken hands with him. You never let go of that bleeding edge of blackness, not really; maybe you didn't remember, but you knew him when you saw his face in the corners of your vision.

This was getting a little too familiar.

She was thin inside her much-tattered onsie, belly tight and painful, joints swollen and knobby as the biotics pulled mercilessly on her metabolism. Every day, now, she made a kill. She'd have to keep up that pace, if she was going to survive.

Hell, at this rate, it would have been smarter to resort to cannibalism.

It would have been hard to miss a creature like Iskierka under good conditions. Shepard was, at current, not at her best.

[letthemburn]

Hunger makes for quite an enemy. One that can be neither argued with nor avoided. Iskierka is not quite so implacable an enemy. But neither is she terribly inclined to be swayed from her path. Not this time, and certainly not for even anyone as terribly emaciated as Shepard is.

It does, regrettably mean that the fight is going to be less interesting than it could be, but no matter. It was something to do, and she saw absolutely no reason to hold back. If they couldn't even manage something as basic as bringing her captain there was no need to not make her way through the arenas as fast as she possibly could.

There's no hiss of warning this time. Just the clatter of claws against the floor and the flash of something large, quadripedal, and predominantly red approaching at a surprising turn of speed.

[earthborn]

It was such an unexpected thing that at first her mind said Klixen and then revised it down to Varren. She looked like something caught between a crocodile, a ferret, and an impossibly small Harvester. It felt dreamy, impossible, like a hallucination or worse.

It was something of a fatal hesitation; she froze, instead of reaching for a mask.

[letthemburn]

She's larger than any Varren has the right to be - she's very nearly horse-sized, if all the wrong shape - but the details are unimportant. She's moving fast, and with Shepard's freezing up she's on her very nearly before there's time to do anything else, all claws and sharp spines and the hiss of escaping steam.

Given that she doesn't really stop moving either it's quite entirely possible that she'll end up knocking Shepard over entirely (and certainly doesn't care if she does.)