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Poultrygeist (10) : As Destiny City is a bustling metropolis, it’s not unexpected that there should be some strange animals running the streets. Sometimes it’s a tiger, sometimes a monkey, sometimes a chicken. Sometimes it’s something worse. Strange egg clusters have appeared in Destiny City’s parks and officials aren’t really sure what they are; these eggs have nothing inside of them. Though it’s an anomaly, they are chalking it up to teenaged pranks.
However, they have advised to just leave the eggs as they are. Nobody wants to say why, but if you’re out late at night, you’ll find out.
In the darkness, whispered between the sounds of the city: a guttural, rasping cluck. The creature stands on stilt-like legs, rooted to the ground with razor-sharp talons. It wears a cloak of long, oily feathers that drag on the ground with a sinister scraping. If you stare into the darkness, piercing red eyes stare back at you. That’s all it takes for a confrontation: a mangled bird, maybe a chicken in another life, comes barreling out at you. It stands easily as tall as a person, but the proportions are all wrong.
The smell of sulfur follows it as it lunges, pecking and screaming and scratching as it attempts to chase you away. Maybe, from the nests full of empty eggs. The battles are fierce, but fleeting; it will viciously try to chase you away but the effects are always the same: at some point, the eggs are crushed. As always, there’s nothing inside of them, but with one final wail, the bird will vanish into a plume of foul smoke.
However, they have advised to just leave the eggs as they are. Nobody wants to say why, but if you’re out late at night, you’ll find out.
In the darkness, whispered between the sounds of the city: a guttural, rasping cluck. The creature stands on stilt-like legs, rooted to the ground with razor-sharp talons. It wears a cloak of long, oily feathers that drag on the ground with a sinister scraping. If you stare into the darkness, piercing red eyes stare back at you. That’s all it takes for a confrontation: a mangled bird, maybe a chicken in another life, comes barreling out at you. It stands easily as tall as a person, but the proportions are all wrong.
The smell of sulfur follows it as it lunges, pecking and screaming and scratching as it attempts to chase you away. Maybe, from the nests full of empty eggs. The battles are fierce, but fleeting; it will viciously try to chase you away but the effects are always the same: at some point, the eggs are crushed. As always, there’s nothing inside of them, but with one final wail, the bird will vanish into a plume of foul smoke.
Not that Dunwich objected in any way to having more Knight friends in town, because he didn’t. Obviously he didn’t. You’d need to be crazy to think that more friends was any kind of bad thing in Destiny City. Having the gang meant having more guys that he could count on, meant that they could have each other’s backs as necessary (which it often felt like it was for Dunwich, since he was the only one in the group still stuck at the Page stage, trying to find the exact correct balance of things where he could do enough magical stuff to unlock a better weapon and some Squire magic, but also, like, didn’t need to completely derail his mundane life as Francis to do that).
(He especially didn’t want to derail his mundane life as Francis now that he actually enjoyed more of it. Plenty of things had always sparked joy for him, true, but there was still such a sense of something having shifted, since he’d started living as Francis, of something clicking right into place, where it always should have been. With that happening, different things in his life all started realigning themselves to accommodate and, as they’d shifted, Francis had noticed a new kind of happiness that stood out so much because he hadn’t realized he’d been missing it that whole time while he’d felt like living as Eva was his only option. Very much a situation where he hadn’t really twigged that he’d even been in pain until suddenly, he was confronted with the absence of it.)
Still, friends were great, but patrolling with d’If was a special treat. Something akin to a date night for them, really. Getting to work together against any threats they found, and enjoy each other’s company in a special context that even involved getting dressed up fancy and doing things that they normally didn’t do as Jacob and Francis.
If Dunwich seemed tense tonight, though, he was ready to blame it on one thing: the smell of sulfur cropping up all over the park where he and d’If had let the patrol lead them. The first couple of times, Dunwich pulled a face over the smell but tried to move on and ignore it. Big deal, weird smells happened sometimes, and it wasn’t as though a stench like rotten eggs was that uncommon. For all Dunwich knew, the culprit was dipshit teenagers being awful to each other, not anything serious.
But twelve different occurrences—if Dunwich also counted the handful of stinky spots he’d noticed elsewhere in town, before they’d made it to Southside Park specifically—was far too many for all of them to be coincidences, much less the work of dumb teenagers doing dumb teenager things.
“We should be careful,” he whispered, tugging on d’If’s sleeve to make sure his Extremely Tall Husband would hear him, “more so than we were already doing. That smell cropping up so much probably doesn’t mean anything good. If we find any weird nests? We need to be ready for a fight.”
Dunwich had already learned this the hard way, fighting the demon chicken with that cute Dark Mirror senshi the other night. And part of him hoped beyond hope that he would be wrong, and they’d soon encounter an idiot teenager who thought they were being very clever right whatever head-a** prank or Tiktok stunt they needed the rotten eggs to pull. But………Dunwich doubted it. Mundane explanations, in Destiny City, were usually not the Occam’s Razor answer that they might have otherwise appeared to be.
Noir Songbird
