Tracking noise in the sewers is no easy task.. Sometimes sound echoes for miles, other times you could be 50 feet from the source and not hear a thing...

Luckily, as far as tracking goes; this thing or person never shuts up. The screaming is constant, tortured, and as you near its plain to hear it pounding on the walls and pipes as it trudges along in the blackness and sludge...

As Hyde begins to close in on the sound, he begins to doubt more and more that it is Beauty. He wonders if someone, or some thing, made it past him before he could collapse the tunnels. Perhaps an infiltrator caught in the blast, or wounded by one of the traps?

Suddenly he grows more cautious, his pace slowing, his footsteps become deathly silent. He is about to will himself from the mind's eye of any who might look upon him when a rat skittering away from the hideous cries and thuds just ahead freezes suddenly as it spots him. As their eyes lock, Hyde quickly envelops the creature with his own Beast, seeking the source of its fear. {dicepool 7, difficulty 7}

In its feral little mind, Hyde is asking it: *What makes you scurry so, my clever little neighbor?*  

--Last edited by mourningstaar on 2008-04-25 14:11:38 --

The little rat stops and stares up at Hyde, communicating in simple emotions and images... Fear, noise, pain. The tunnel collapse seperated a large nest of rats from their family. Consusion. And, last, most important... what looked like men, only shredded and bloody rampaging through the dark...

The rat begins to repeat itself over and over, obviously still in a panic and wanting to get away from the noise...

Further down the tunnel the thing bellows again, pounding on an ancient rusty pipe that runs past Hyde attached to the wall. The sound carrying far and wide, dust falling from the rock wall from the force of the blows...

Noting the visual cues of where the separation occurred as it will prevent a retreat in that direction, with the confirmation that the bellowing is not coming from his Elder, Hyde plucks a small stone from the ground and concentrates on becoming unseen and silent, moving to intercept and get a better look.

As Hyde draws near the tunnel widens a bit... What he sees is a large man with deformed looking muscles and obvious injuries. Half of his face is crushed and one of his arms hangs limp. He slouches and pounds his bloodied right fist aganst the pipes.

His inhuman bellowing comes from obvious busted jaw. He is bleeding from the torso and looks hastily bandaged with his clothing...

His blood has a distinct smell of Vampiric vitae mixed with mortal blood...

The image sparks a memory, Hyde recalls when the Nos used to rely on the pipes to exchange messages. Before the advent of cellular phones, most of the Nos still used Morse code to transmit messages. Whether that is what this poor bastard is up to or not, he needs to be silenced before he draws any more attention.

Hyde flings the stone in his hand well past this hobbled wretch, into the flowing sewage on the other side of it with a splash.

Moving into position behind it while scanning for others, he readies himself to put his grappling skills to the test, calling upon the might of his blood to swell his already bulging muscles.  

--Last edited by mourningstaar on 2008-04-26 17:00:05 --

The thing jumps, obviously startled and turns fully in the direction of the splash... It waves its one good arm in front of it a bit, as if its ability to see down here is either really terrible or entirely nonexistant...

In the silence that develops Hyde can hear the things labored breathing, and far off... or perhaps close. You can never really tell down here... Someone is echoing the banging on the pipes...Whoever or whatever it is, they are not in the immediate area...

As the trespasser turns toward the noise, Hyde descends upon him with a quickness his frame should not allow, expertly guiding his hands under the thing’s arms from behind, doubling them back and knitting gargantuan fingers together on the back of its neck before it even knows he is there. Expecting a superior foe and fearing its retaliation, he seeks to break its neck, hoping to pound the blood from its body before it can heal.

With the force of a car-crusher, Hyde simply squeezes downward, tearing both the already wounded arm and the things head off in the process. It doesn’t even have time to scream.  

--Last edited by mourningstaar on 2008-04-26 13:45:31 --

The ghoul taken care of all Hyde will hear is the slowly moving water, the occasional swish of a twitching leg from the torn ghoul, and a steady bang coming through the pipes.

This one quieter, not as panicked as the first he found..

Three hits, repeated... clearly a morse code SOS in the darkness...

'Damn it, I guess I won't be asking him any questions. Tsk. All that trouble for a bloody half-breed' Hyde thinks to himself. I'll worry about it later, right now I need to shut that other one up.'

Moving as quickly as stealth allows and removing himself from view again he does his best to follow the sound to its source. When he thinks he is within range, he will seek out the nearest booby trap, quickly checking to see if it is unsprung, and place himself on the other side of it from his opponent.

Doing his best to imitate the tone and inflection of the fallen ghoul's caterwauling and appearance, he positions himself in a crumpled heap in the darkness and banging on the pipes, hoping that its "friend" will fall for his little possum ruse.

The other ghoul snaps to attention from where he was tapping on the pipe... He faired much better than his companion.. with blood running down his right leg, a slight limp to his walk and mostly just covered in dust.

He quits his tapping when Hyde starts yowling and calls out in the darkness..

'Bobby?.. Bobby that you? can ya hear me?..'

He is obviously southern, with inbred traits reflecting he is most likely also a Revenant...

He picks himself out of the filth he was sitting in and picks up an ancient looking double barrel shotgun before he proceeds down the hallway...

And right into whatever booby trap Hyde is hiding behind...

Hyde continues to mumble through an imitation broken jaw about bleeding out, waiting for the right moment. As the hillbilly comes within a few feet, there is a faint 'click' just before an array of spring-loaded spikes jettison from cleverly hidden holes.  

--Last edited by mourningstaar on 2008-04-26 13:50:11 --

The trap strikes true. Spikes shoot from the walls and three of them stab into the ghouls chest at different angles. He screeches and groans through a sucking chest wound, the shotgun in his hand going off more from the pain than anything else...

Very little of the shot hits Hyde, but his armor will be annoyingly peppered with recoil and little bits of rock from the close blast...  

--Last edited by Radiationjunkie on 2008-04-26 13:57:06 --

Hyde comes swiftly to his feet wresting the gun from the inbred's hand. From the gurgling sounds that he is making, Hyde surmises that he is not only still alive, but that breathing is a requirement for his continued existence. There isn't much time.

"Looks like you picked the wrong place to go fer a stroll chum." Hyde enjoyed using the word with such friendly inflection, the Americans naturally assumed that it meant something like 'buddy' or 'pal' because of his accent. Hyde had stopped using it that way decades ago. To him, it meant a pail full of ground up, worthless fishguts about to be put to better use.

"I know you ain't gonna talk" Hyde languidly tells the man suspended on the spikes as he reaches down into the filthy sludge flowing into a nearby grate, plucking a single steel bar from the stone around it. "So I won't waste our precious time together asking you any questions."

Twisting the man's arms around behind him, Hyde contorts the steel bar like a twist-tie on a bag of bread around the mans wrists. "All the same, I bet I know a couple of people that might wanna pick your brain." Holding the man's chin, Hyde will force his Beast into the man's will, and crush it.

Hyde quickly pats the man down before 'tenderly' sliding him off of the skewers, laying him on the ground and resetting the trap. Hyde will use some of the man's clothing to gag him if he has nothing especially productive to say before slinging him over his shoulder and going to retrieve the first intruder.

The Revenant seems to be trying to speak.. but really only succeeds in spitting up some blood and looking truly pathetic impaled on the spikes... his breathing gets noticably worse once he is removed, bound and carried...

His broken spirit leaves him a whimpering bloody mess slung over Hydes shoulder... leaving a dripping trail of warm blood behind them...

When he makes it back to the first body, knowing that Beauty doesn't care for modern anything, much less cell-phones, he will call the one with his finger on the electric pulse of the city. As Mr. Grey picks up, he hears "Intercepted a couple of na'erdowells from the other team mucking about in the underbelly. One of em's still kicking. I need to speak to carter a-sap. Can you patch me through?"  

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Knowing that Grey is multitasking, running multiple screens while multiple computers hum away around him in the darkened room, Hyde busies himself while awaiting his response.

Removing the sleeve from the detached arm and stuffing it down the shirt of the headless corpse, he proceeds to tear the sleeve into strips of cloth and tie them together to make a rope. He binds this around the head and ties it to the hand now protruding from the neck of the deadman's shirt so that all of the parts are in one not-so-neat package.

Plunging waist-deep into the foul water and dragging the somewhat buoyant corpse behind him he begins to double back, continuing on to the hovel where he will not leave a trail for any other stragglers.

Knowing nothing of medicine, he hopes that leaving the wounded man draped over his shoulder will allow enough of the blood filling his lungs to drain out to keep from drowning him.

(Arts and crafts with corpses... You should hang out with Rose. )

Grey will try and patch Hyde through but to no avail... Noone has seen the prince since sunset at any of his usual contact numbers...

This may not be a good sign...

The man over Hydes shoulder breathes weaker and weaker and gets paler and paler as he reaches the Hovel... he may not be drowning in his own blood, but leaving all your blood on the floor isnt all that healthy for him either...

Grey is waiting for Hyde when he gets there.

'No go on the prince Hyde.. Noones seen the crazy fuck since sundown. Beauty has been missing since the explosion too...'

Bad news all around it seems...

"Crap." Hyde says decisively. Hyde frowns, trying to make up his mind. "If Beauty is MIA that leaves me making executive decisions... Crap. We're in trouble. I need to get a mind-bender on this punk before he bleeds out, I was willing to give him up to Carter but the other kooks are too unstable."

"As sorry a place as that'll put us in, it looks as though we're left with the Tremere. You know how ta get a'hold of them?"

Grey doesnt look like hes too thrilled with the idea... But they arent left with too many options.

'Yeah, i can do it... but we arent bringing one of the warlocks down here.. no fucking way..'