Elbow Grease (Ash City Alts)

Dzara stood completely still after the disappearance of Jacob, partially because she was still processing the information that Jacob had revealed about Mr. Pinstripe, but mostly because of the shock of angering Jacob without being punished for it. A little voice inside her whispered that she hadn't gotten off as lightly as all that and her punishment would be far worse for Jacob having to wait to give it. Her hands clenched each other so tightly that her knuckles were a shade paler than her normally pale skin. Her dark eyes stared at the place where Jacob had last stood, slightly numb from the torrent of emotions running through her mind.

Somewhere in the smoke, a figure was stirring, his tall, lean frame slashing violently into the darkness and anything that penetrated it. The sudden, uncharacteristically sloppy attacks were accompanied by tortured screams that rang of inconsolable frustration and pent-up hurt for a haunted past now cryptically hanging like a whisper promising secrets best left forgotten.



At length, Mr. Pinstripe collapsed to his knees, shaking violently as if in a seizure, his blade crashing to the ground beside him with a clang that resounded blasphemously off the walls around preceding a final, broken cry of rage.

She watched Mr. Pinstripe's breakdown with oddly compassionate eyes. Jacob had obviously hurt him somehow. She thought it might be the taunts, but it might have been the smoke. A poison to make whoever breathed it shake? She didn't think Jacob would risk poisoning himself, but how mad was he at Mr. Pinstripe? When Mr. Pinstripe fell to his knees and was silent, she only hesitated a moment before beginning to cross cautiously to his side, ready to stop at any moment should he notice her and not want her closer.

"I see her," the voice of a man came from another time as Pinstripe remained knelt on the ground with shallow breaths, "She's everywhere... her blood is everywhere, and I'll never collect it all..."

"I'm too late," the tears fell, "Too late, too late... better luck next time."

Dzara froze when the words broke the silence, terrified for a moment that it was one of the guards trespassing on the grounds, so unfamiliar was the voice. When she realized that it was Mr. Pinstripe, her worry grew. She had grown used to his seemingly random bits of conversation. They were even starting to make a little sense to her. But his words now made no sense and his voice sounded so...broken, so lost.

She continued to edge closer to the assassin until she was right behind him. She knelt down, close enough that she could feel the heat seeping off of him. She reached out with her left hand and lightly touched his back. She tensed, bracing for a violent reaction.

"Injustice, this wash in innocent blood!," the assassin stood abruptly at the touch, walking forward into the still dissipating smoke before turning to look right at Dzara with a cross between a warning glower and a concerned gaze, "Value your life."

Pinstripe faded from sight even as the words echoed where he had been.

As the smoke clears form Zanth's gamble with electricity, he can clearly see that not only the Cogs are no longer present, but neither is the building they stood on. Zanth thinks to himself, 'Clearly, that was effiective, but the law of odds says that I shouldn't rely on that much.' As he drops the wires from his arm, and see that Himura down with an arrow in him, he goes over to him, with a quick gesture of his hands, and his golems dissapear in a puff of smoke, and says, "Do you need any help with that?"

Watching him come over to him and the golems vanishing one by one, he reaches for the arrow. Once grabbing it he slowly removes it, still reeling from the impact of the hit.

As the blood seeps from the open wound, he shoves the arrow into the hunk of metal that would have been the cogs head, 'Hows that feel you damn cog...' giving off a grin as he does that.

Looking to Zanth, "Well im not really a doctor, but i dont think this will heal enough in time before the adrenalin rush wears out... so we might need to find someone who can try to help heal this. Though with the way i look... i might run alot more off because of what i am."

Zanth says, "Hmm, that would pose a problem.......Wait! Dzara could heal you, she healed me. Only the problem is, where did she go?" Zanth looks around, and then says, "Well, best plan now is to get you back to Sal's, Can you make it till then?"

Holding his hand to his chest to help seal the wound and stop some amount of blood loss, "Well it might be close... but i think it is the only option we have to us right now..."

Trying to remember the way back to Sal's building, but with the blood loss the memory a little fuzzy. Looking to Zanth, "Well you will need to lead the way back there, its already starting to wear down a little."

Zanth says, "Alright." Walking infront of Himura, Zanth starts to navagate their way back to Sal's, hoping that Dzara would be there.

~@~

Dzara let her hand fall and brought it to meet the other one on her lap. She bowed her head, listening to the echo of Mr. Pinstripe's advice for a moment. She pursed her lips, not liking the commanding tone of it. Then she rose to her feet.

"I do," she whispered to the empty room before crossing the few steps to Jacob's desk and pulled open the drawer in which she knew he kept his files. 'But we have to know...'

Inside the desk was a sealed folder appearing to be of some importance and bearing the Kendell signet. Surely this was it; what they had come to find.

She pulled it from its place and opened it to glance through it, more to see what it was than any hope of speed reading it.

At first glance, there appeared to be a small stack of papers inside, clearly with some manner of writing on them in a language she was only vaguely familiar with.

'Well, I didn't think it would be easy,' she thought, setting them aside to take with her. Deciphering the writing would take longer than she had time for now. She'd need at least an hour of undisturbed time to complete the ritual necessary to translate the script. She ignored the nagging question of how Jacob knew how to encode his papers with it in favor of doing another quick look through his other files just to make sure she didn't miss anything else. Her nerves tightened every moment she spent alone in the office. Her scarred shoulder began to twitch with her racing heartbeat.

No other files of importance appeared to be among the various, small trinkets inside the desk drawers, though there was curiously a set of cuffs she had once given her husband as a gift, as if to confirm he really had returned seemingly from the grave.

She stared at the small jewelry glittering in the faint light filtering in from outside for a long moment before she forced herself into action. Grabbing the file with the concealed documents, she began to carefully, but quickly, make her way back to Sal's.

~@~



"Yeesh! Those cogs really did a number on you," Sal pressed another cloth to Himura's gaping wound, which the blood immediately soaked through as it had several others, "Can ya still feel your arms and legs?"

Staring blankly as the sight began to fade little by little,
"Well it is starting to go a little numb... but i can still move them however slight so i still have feeling."

Pacing back and forth, Zanth thinks to himself, 'How is it possible the Chruch are still tracking me? Logic dicates that in order to track something, something unique must be isolated to label it as such.' After a few minutes of pacing, Zanth stops and thinks, ' Hmm, the only assumption I can make is that they aren't tracking me, they are tracking my energy, from when....' Like a switch being flipped, he puts two and two together.

Dzara stopped just outside the door and took a moment to collect herself. Clad once again in her icy facade, she knocked. Although Sal was expecting her, he's probably had enough of people barging into his home for one night.

"Who is it?," Sal shouted to the door a bit more gruffly than he meant to. It had been a rough night.

"Dzara Kendell, Mr. Sal," she called back, unaffected by his gruff tone. "We met earlier this evening."

"Come on in," the gnome techie yawned as he sat back in his chair, "You've got some buddies in here. One of 'em don't look too good."