Pacal perched on a branch, looking down at Arayana's body, examining the patterns and trails of the magical energy that had killed him. He turned his radio on again; still nothing but static. He sighed and turned it off. It had been an easy job tracking them until a few hours ago, and by all reports they were no threat, but now over half of his team was dead, the grunts were nowhere to be found, and he didn't have a single confirmed kill to show for it. Worse yet, their spellcaster—the woman, was it? No matter—was apparently able to wield a great deal of power even here. Pacal sighed; even the weak flying charm he was using sapped his strength. He could only hope that she would collapse from it all soon. Reluctantly he rose again into the air to resume his search.

Malinali gasped for breath, leaning against a tree. Behind her she could hear it pursuing her, that demon the woman had called from the ground to consume her. It loped through the vegetation, smashing aside the underbrush as it hurtled towards her. She cursed Pacal—he'd told her there would be none of this, that any spirits called in this land would sooner turn on their master than follow orders. She tore another grenade off the bandolier she wore and hurled it at the creature heaving into view, then turned and sprinted on. Her arm never failed her; the grenade struck the monster squarely in the face scant moments before exploding. It howled with pain and rage, rearing high before toppling backwards into the brush with a thud. Malinali risked a backwards glance, laughing with relief as she saw it flail and slide down into the mud; she turned and continued running.

Avengers, Hoooooooooo! <<raises fist triumphantly>>

Great story!

I can't wait to find out what Tabby has done.. Going from weak to wengeful killer must have cost a sacrifice.

Tabby, the toxic?

I'm scared.

it would put a nice wrench into the team dynamics.

The team finally meets up, everyone hugs and kisses and cries at their loss. Tabby comes out of the closet confessing that she is now a Toxic, Tiger reveals his past as a former companyman, someone reveals their dark secret as a spirit, and Mama Cat makes a surprise return! All this and more when next we meet on 'As the World Runs'.

Nah, the true twist is that Tabby was secretly in love with the Aztechnology exec and used her magic to have him switch places with Puma, who died in the car in the first installment

~J

*gasps*

Darn those shamans, always being lead by their emotions...

Never trust a Dragon, Elf, Shaman, Johnson, or... On second thought, trust no one.

Come on Kage, you keep us hanging.

It's coming, I've just got a huge stack of things in front of it (including finishing cleaning up this SR podcast to post… I need to learn what is and is not worth spending the time to try to edit).

~J

Ooh, SR podcast? Where's the feed?

Will be on Dumpshock, but I'm holding up the first 'cast by being slower than molasses at 2 Kelvin. Expect it in the next few days.

~J

Tiger woke again to find the clearing empty, his gear neatly stacked nearby; a layer of fresh bandage covered his torso, and the pain in his chest had vanished. the tattered remains of a black Jaguar uniform lay nearby. He got to his feet slowly; the blood rushed to his head threateningly, but he stayed upright.
"Feeling better?"
"Better than I should. I never knew you could do that."
Tabby grinned, stepping out from behind a tree. "Neither did I. It feels good, let me tell you."
"What happened? Did you find the others?"
"Nah, just cleaned up most of the Jaguars."
He whistled. "You know they come in fives, right?"
"You said something about that. One got away from me, but I never did find the other one."
"Jesus Christ and the entire road crew of Concrete Dreams, you took three of them out? They're good."
"The land didn't like them. It liked me. That's all it takes."
"Didn't think this land liked anybody."
"Just need to know how to talk to it. Right?" She patted a half-rotten tree.
"Whatever you say…"

Sounds toxic to me.

Nah, you can't read too much into the healthy green glow. Lots of people develop it ...

The background count might be aspected towards killing Azzies... corruption taking place over time.

Especially after the creative description of powerbolt I´d say the jury is still out. Get to writing. Please?

Light.

Lynx sat upright with a start. Where…

Memory trickled back. The woman running through the trees, legs flashing with the grace of metal nerves. Puma giving chase. The small object landing near his feet… it must have been a concussion grenade, anything else would have killed him for sure. The others, though—where were they?

Lynx shook his head to clear the haze, and immediately regretted it. He slipped sideways onto one elbow, vision swimming; his free hand hunted for the stimpatches in his pouch, but came up empty. He swore quietly as consciousness fled once more.

Right, well, it's time for me to properly own up to what's going on with this.

As some of you have probably figured out, I've written myself into a corner. It's a corner I fully intend to write myself back out of, given time, but it's slow going due to exactly the writer's block that the whole experiment is meant to address. That said, I'm hoping to make decent headway this month.

Also, however, I'll be putting this story on (probably near-total) hiatus for next month for NaNoWriMo. I'll be starting a thread on it soon, but suffice it to say that I'm going to be putting up an extended piece over the course of the month of November, and that the fact that I'll be working on that doesn't mean that this story is forgotten.

Thank you for your patience, and I apologize for the way these breaks destroy the pacing.

~J

Not a prob Kage, I got this thread on notify so when you do update I find out - so take your time so you can do it the right way for you.

I've been enjoying it so far, can't wait for a new installment.

Same here. Although I must say that I almost leaped out of my chair with joy at the thought that a continuation had been posted. However, knowing that the story has not been forgotten is enough.

She ran. The ground here was slick; she must be near the spill, the processing plant that had malfunctioned and poisoned the entire area. Only demons lived here now.

Another demon pursued her now—a demon not of magic, but of flesh and metal. She had downed his companion with a grenade, but he was too fast for her. It was all her augmented legs could do to keep ahead of him. Still, she told herself, even demons could be killed…

The bullet grazed her side, turned aside by her heavy jacket. She cut sharply to one side, vaulting a wide pool. She landed short, polluted water splashing a chemical-bright rainbow across her lower legs. She gritted her teeth, kept running, forced herself not to think about what might be seeping through clothes and into skin. She heard two more shots, risked a glance back. The demon stood on the far side of the pool, firing into some slick-skinned terror that had boiled out in the wake of her passing. Quickly, too quickly it sank back in and he leaped across, but it gave her precious seconds. She should be close now…

The stench hit him before he even made it through the door. Acrid and harsh, it made his head spin; he'd never smelled anything like it. Puma ducked the crudely-placed tripwire on the door and walked into the main body of the plant.

A short ramp lead down into a lower area that held dozens, maybe hundreds of tanks. At least half of them had broken… no, been torn open, leaving large pools and flows of sludge. What it was or why it was here he couldn't begin to guess. If his quarry had fallen in, he might never know…

A noise. He hurried along the concrete walkway around the tanks, looking for the source. There, above, on the catwalks. He drew a bead, fired; the figure staggered, kept running. A small object flew out, a grenade, but aimed to land short. He kept firing.

The grenade landed in a partly-breached tank with a wet slapping sound. Shit. Puma dove away as the tank ripped apart, spraying its contents across the wall and floor. Pulling himself to his feet, he sprinted for the ladder.

*bump*

This going to continue?

Yep. All in due time (where by "due time" I mean "when my paper isn't past due").

~J

Yay!

And there was much rejoicing.

Thread dead?

Depends on whether you believe me or not I'll grant that my credibility re: this thread has been rather stretched, but it's still on my list. Likewise SR3R.

~J

"Game over."

The woman hunched in a corner, clutching the remains of her wrist. She screamed at him in a language he didn't understand, then abruptly found her English.

"You will die here, foreigner. You killed us, but there will be more. If the forest does not take you, we will."

"Maybe. Not you."

An unfamiliar voice spoke. "No. Me."

He dove to the floor of the catwalk, a crushing exhaustion settling onto him. The newcomer floated in the air, wearing an expression of immense disdain. Puma tried to turn his gun on the man, to shoot him, but his nerveless fingers slipped from the pistol; it discharged once when it hit the ground below and then was silent.

The man floated several feet away from the catwalk, a gun aimed at Puma's left eye. "Tell me where the others are."

"Dead. In the van."

The man calmly shot Puma in the arm. "Where are the others?"

"Motherfucking bastard you fucking slitch you shot me you fragging motherfucking—"
the man shot again, the bullet grazing the catwalk in front of Puma's nose. "Where are they? Your coconspirators?"

"I fucking told you, you fucker! That's all I know! I got spooked and ran, none of them followed! What, did they go afterwards?"

The next bullet took Puma just over the right knee. He made very little sound, only a slight moan. His vision swam. "I told you you fucking lunatic you fucker I told you they were in the oh fuck you fucking bastard my fucking leg my leg…"

The man sighed, aimed his pistol at Puma's head, squeezed the trigger.

Below him, the sludge in one of the vats rose, sending out tendrils of itself. One of them wrapped itself around his leg. He glanced down, a look of incomprehension on his face. Another tendril wrapped itself around his face just as he began to scream, and a third latched onto an arm. The stench in the room worsened; Puma lost consciousness. The man's skin bubbled, burned, melted.

The tendrils began to tug. Slowly, the man's arm first dislocated, then detached. Malinali watched, frozen.

"He was a bad man, wasn't he?"

She tried to turn, to face the new voice, but someone held her head tightly. They twisted sharply, and then let go.

Huzzah! It's back!

Kudos as usual - had to go back in the archives to get caught up, but you seem to have escaped that corner you were in.

Can't wait for another installment...however long it takes - and take yer time if you need it!

"Holy shit, what happened?"
"Hermy snuck up on him."
"Shit… can you do anything for him?"
"I think so. Give me that canteen. Any sign of Lynx?"
"Null-con."
Her expression soured. She swabbed Puma's wounds clear, then closed her eyes, letting her palms rest on the worst injuries. Puma groaned, started to writhe as his flesh began to bubble and twist, reaching in tendrils across the gaps, blood vessels extending across empty space, muscle flowing in to fill the cracks. Tiger's stomach lurched and he looked away.
"Not pretty, is it?"
"Does it always hurt that much?"
"When they're this far gone. You should have heard it when I healed you, sounded like a cat dying."
The better part of a minute passed in silence. Finally the tendrils of flesh stopped moving, and a few seconds later the tension left Puma's body. Tabby scooted away, exhaled slowly.
"He gonna make it?"
"Yeah. Yeah, he'll be ok. I did something for the pain."
"You ok?"
"Antsy. Tell you what, I'm gonna look for Lynx. You stay here, keep an eye on him."
"If you say so…"

keep it coming !!

Long time, no see. I was starting to miss this chars

"Well, fuck."

Lynx closed and reopened his eyes a third time, but the trees stubbornly continued to exist. He staggered to his feet, dislodging several unpleasantly large centipedes in the process. It wasn't dark yet, but it couldn't be long… at least the light on his pistol still worked. The first thing to do was to find someplace to rest and hide, the Jaguars were sure to be back.

"Anything?"

"Not a sign. It was getting dark, so I came back."

"Well, fan-fucking-tastic. Christ, if he doesn't show up first thing tomorrow morning, we're gonna have to leave his ass behind."

"Nothing we can do about it. Anyway, we're not going anywhere with Puma like this. He should be walking in the morning, but if anything's still wrong… we might have to leave him too."

"We can't do that."

"We have to. Azzies don't lose jags and just not follow up on it."

"Fuck…" Tiger kicked at the ground. "We need to find a place to sleep, at least."

"What's wrong with right here?"

"Here? Didn't you notice the giant vats of toxic sludge? Or the smell?"

"Keeps animals away."

"You've completely lost it."