Fit

[Jenica Sabiny]

The dirt and grit fell into her eyes when she opened them; caked along her throat as she inhaled to scream and cry; pushed down, down on her from above, pounds and pounds of weight holding her in place and preventing anything beyond the smallest jerks and twitches. She was buried and alone and terrified, but her mind remained inside the corpse, unable to break free, unable to leave the body behind. She'd died but she wasn't dead enough to satisfy her soul. It stayed inside and just...kept...living...

She'd frozen where she stood, a statue with fangs just starting to press into the delicate skin of the male's throat. A tremble started along her spine, rolling up and down in waves until her entire body followed the pattern. Her head drifted backwards as her lips fell back over her teeth, though her lips remained parted, jaw unhinged enough that small gasping pants could force themselves in and out of lungs which didn't need the air. The red had died completely from her eyes, and she was left with a dulled, lifeless gaze. She blinked, and tears spilled down both cheeks.

It was a calm, silent moment, and she could no longer see him before her.

LetmeoutletmeoutLETMEOUTLETMEOUT

Both hands slammed upwards against her eyes as she stumbled back, hitting the wall behind her hard enough to rap her own head against the marble. It bounced once, and she grimaced and slammed it back again, trying to use the pain to pull away from the onslaught of memories.

It didn't work. She couldn't see beyond the humans in her mind screaming, couldn't feel beyond the layers of dirt and the lust in his eyes...

STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP

The mantra began as a build, rising from the pain and desperation of her past to beg whatever was causing this to make it end. It didn't start out voiced, but as the visions continued she began mouthing and finally screaming the word, over and over. She begged and pleaded through the dirt clogging her throat, squinting her eyes shut as she slammed her head back against the marble in time with each syllable. Physical enunciation of the pain coursing through her being.

[Nichatus]

Nic watched in morbid glory as the beast fell back away from him. He could still feel her teeth on his neck, despite the distance that was now between them. His breathing was heavy and his head began to throb as he strained to keep the illusions as strong as possible without the skin to skin contact.

He watched as her chest heaved a bit, as if her lungs were trying to force out screams without the cooperation of her vocal chords. She backed closer and closer to the opposite wall. Part of him knew what would come next, but he still jerked with mild shock as she slammed her skull into the wall.

Again and again her head pounded into the marble. He stared into her glazed eyes which held so many weak emotions; pain, fear, and panic amongst others. Part of him snapped and began to formulate another kind of weakness, pity.

He moved out of the hall, and took a few steps away from the vampire. He slowly released the illusion, a little at a time, dragging the pain out as long as possible without the creature bashing her head in on the wall. As the illusion completely fell away he stood there stareing at her. He was slightly hunched and heaving after every breath as if he'd just been in a very close brawl.

[Jenica Sabiny]

It felt as though the images began leaking from her ears and pouring from her mouth and nostrils. As they seeped away, her motions stilled and she stood propped against the wall. The grimace did not leave until the memories called up also began trickling away. She stood panting as her eyelids fluttered, and turned her head enough to see him where he stood.

The hands on her forehead dropped at a deliberate pace until they, too, were braced against the wall as her back. The unnecessary panting stopped abruptly and her eyes widened in confusion and terror. She didn't understand where the sudden barrage had come from; she didn't connect how tired the male looked to the memories that had been forced from the pits of her consciousness. But the memories stayed known, unhidden as they wafted about. She flinched and raised one hand again to splay across one side of her face, her index finger holding her eye shut. A spasm rocked through her as a memory took hold, tension knotting her muscles tightly enough that their definition showed in her arms...the memory faded, and the body relaxed. She'd have gasped if she breathed.

A small trickle of blood slid from one nostril. She didn't notice it, despite the blood gliding over her top lip and staining her upper teeth. She stared without focus or clear understanding at the male where he stood, her eyelids drooping low enough to give her a drowsy gaze. Her head lolled forward and she came close to blacking out...

A light scrape of her tongue against the glass now wedged between her two front teeth brought enough sting to help her focus again. Her eyelids fluttered and when she looked at him, she processed his presence.

"What?"

The word broke against her strained vocal chords, the end of it sloping upwards to indicate a question. She wasn't asking what he wanted or what he was looking at; she was asking what he'd said...though he hadn't spoken.

[Nichatus]

Nic stood there, continuing to pant from the exertion. He watched as Jenica seemed to come close to fainting. The fluttering eye lids, the slow deliberate movements. That weak and ignorantly childish part of him pitied her again, making him take a step closer to her before he snapped to his senses.

He hated the influence this animal had already had over him. She'd managed to make him look a fool, she managed to pull him towards giving in to base desires, and she was making him show human emotion now. He loathed the creature, and looked at her with eyes to match that feeling.

Jaws clinched as the first signs of a headache struck him. The first minutes were always worse than the rest of the time. His teeth hurt a little, but it focused the pain elsewhere for now. A low, quiet growl of irritation rolled up out of his chest.

"What?"

He walked over to her, keeping a few feet between her. "Come on, Moryldar and that bitch Ryxa are waiting," he said through clenched teeth. He stepped a little closer and slowly raised his hand, placing his thumb on her lip and wiping away the blood. Part of him was tempted to mock what shed done to him, but he ended up going with the sane choice and smearing it on her clothes.

He turned and took a few steps towards the judge's office, then stopped to look back at her, silently asking her to follow.

[Jenica Sabiny]

He approached and she pressed back against the wall, unsure of what he intended to do. The finger swiped underneath her nose and she winced, expecting another onslaught of memories to come forth...but nothing happened. It wasn't his touch, then. Or it was but he controlled it. Or she'd done it to herself...as she was again.

Her eyes rolled up as another memory gripped her. Her body became rigid under the weight of it, the pain of being disemboweled again washing through her limbs to make them seize up against the agony. A few droplets of blood appeared against the front of her shirt, absorbing into the cloth as the memory faded and she slumped under the sudden drop in pain.

She looked at him when he spoke, her eyes again distant and hazy. He was moving away. He'd asked her to follow. She did. She had nothing better to do.

He entered first as she staggered a few steps, pausing to wait for something like dizziness to pass before starting forward again. She stepped into the office doorway with one hand planted against the door frame and stared distantly at the humans within.

The vampire was covered in filth, grime and old gore. Her hair hung in scraggly, somewhat matted clumps around her head which showed no clear signs of any particular style beyond choppy. The shirt covering her torso was only a shirt in the strictest sense of the word: it was a layer of cloth which kept some degree of modesty. But it was torn and ragged, with large tears and bloodstains along the fabric, and the sleeves were jagged where she had torn them from her arms.

The arms, though dirty, betrayed the human body underneath. Once, this female had been a fighter, and she had trained herself well. Her muscles sat defined and sloping in her bared upper arms and shoulders. Her hands had been calloused from weapons use as a human, and this hadn't changed as a vampire for they had become part of her static being. The body was that of a warrior, though many of the skills lay dormant for use. Except for the memories now reopened and swirling around her head.

She fought off another when it tried to overwhelm her, her eyelids squinting near-closed as she exerted considerable mental energies to ward it away. When she refocused, she was staring at the female where she sat. The vampire tilted her head and bared her teeth in a sneering smile. Her voiced rasped out.

"Pretty."

[Nichatus]

Nichatus took a few more steps, not seeing that she was still suffering from something. He walked slowly, giving him time to compose himself before entering the office. He stopped at the door, giving Jenica a moment to catch up. "He knows you are entering now," that disembodied voice whispered to him. With a nod he opened the door and stepped inside.

"Good evening Your Honor," he said with a curt bow to the graying man behind the desk. He then turned to the female in the room. "Ryxa," he said as a greeting, with no more than a sneer.

He knew he'd be commanded to work with the damned woman, and he couldn't do anything about it. He wasn't going to tempt fate and refuse an order or scream in protest as the foolish hag beside him had done. He laughed quietly to himself as he came across the reason most likely to make the woman accept this assignment.

He waited a respectful moment for the judge to motion towards an unoccupied chair before sitting. He sat quietly, waiting for words to pour forth from someone's mouth. Every time his eyes crossed Ryxa another insult bubbled to the top of his mind, but he knew better than to speak them here and now.

[Blood Ravenous]

Ryxa’s eyebrows were raised as they entered. Her peeved mood made it hard to resist teasing. “Have fun, you two?” she asked, her voice dripping with mocking lasciviousness. In reality, she didn’t know what had been going on out there. All the thumping made her think they were having a fight, probably over Nic's neck, though the snippets of whispers she could hear through the open door were...puzzling. Despite the pleasing mental vision of finding him dead in a pool of blood with his neck ripped out, waiting for them to get done fooling around had made her impatient. One gloved finger was tapping on the high-grain wood that was the back of her chair.

She completely ignored Jenica’s spoken observation--which rather creeped her out--and chose instead to stare down Nichatus. She said nothing to his stiff greeting, and noted how tired he seemed. It seemed fairly obvious to her, despite any attempt on his part to hide it. The corner of her lip twitched and she glared harder as he laughed quietly. What was funny?

After she was done analyzing the other battlemage fiercely, sizing him up, she turned her attention to the vampire. It still stunk, and it was still as disgusting a creature as before, but now, in this light, she noticed the woman underneath all the grime and torn cloth. Maybe she would wash up into something decent, and wouldn’t be such a horrid thing to deal with. Ryxa wouldn’t bet money on those odds, but one could hope.

Ryxa was not going to bare her back to her, so she had stayed in her twisted position. Knowing there were only two chairs and that she would have to face her superior when he spoke, she moved. Using the back of her chair as leverage, she pushed herself up and planted her boots firmly on the marble. From there she moved to stand beside Moryldar’s desk, never putting her back to the doorway. Back straight, she then pointed at the chair. Looking Jenica straight in the eye, she said, in a voice reserved for a very stupid animal, “Sit.” If they were going to work together, it had better follow orders.

[Moryldar]

Moryldar could smell Jenica long before he could see her. No matter how many corpses he smelled in his long life, the pungent odour never ceased to bother him. Gruesome things, on the other hand, no longer bothered him in the slightest. Pulling a man's fingernails off or his intestines out while he screamed in pain had a way of numbing a man, so that when Jenica walked into the room looking and smelling like a reanimated corpse, he kept his composure with ease.

He indicated for Nichatus to have a seat in the spartan office, and took more of an interest in Jenica than in the infighting between the two battlemages that was more like sibling rivalry than anything else. Deranged siblings who would see eachother dead in a heartbeat, but nothing out of the ordinary to worry about. Healthy, even.

Jenica was not doing well. How could such a miserable thing be the creation of such a powerful vampire like Belatucadrus? His research on their kind told him that they were often considered infants after they were created; spat into the world in the fully grown body of their former selves, complete with memories and emotions, but traumatically thrust into such a different reality than their old one that the adjustment often reduced them to severe depression or, as in Jenica's case, insanity. She was either going to deteriorate more and eventually die, or become something resembling a human again.

It made Moryldar wonder what kind of man Bela must have been when he was younger. It was impossible to imagine.

When he heard Ryxa's 'sit' he snapped at her in a firm tone.

"Ryxa. Mind your tongue. I won't go out of my way to defend you if you provoke her." He then motioned to Jenica and managed to smile - barely. He looked surprisingly honest. "Forgive her Jenica. My name is Judge Moryldar. I'm the one who sent for you."

[Jenica Sabiny]

The non-verbal posturing and vague snipes rolled right past the vampire as she tilted her head and flared her nostrils to sniff at the old man. This one had called her, which meant he had more of the serum she'd been gifted earlier. Or claimed to. The difference was not something she focused on for more than a few moments, since if it were a lie she could do nothing to change that. Though she was willing to kill this man if it truly were a lie, so that some good could come of this expedition.

She was tempted to ask the old man why. What did he want? What was the point of guiding her here at all, and why did they pull her into this place so full of humans? But the memories still swirled, and another took hold of her where she stood, bringing another flinch as she ducked her head down and rode the waves of pain until it released her. Being beaten, and very badly. At the end of the visions she could taste blood in her mouth.

She swallowed it to conserve what she already had within her body and focused her gaze on the back of the younger male's head. The female's useless command and the old man's call for forgiveness lay forgotten in the face of rage which bubbled from her belly and spouted from her mouth in the form of a loud, broken snarl. She stepped forward and twisted a bit, swept one hand down and spread her thumb wide from her palm. She jabbed the resulting gap into the younger man's throat and hefted, lifting him from the chair. As it toppled back from the sudden shift in balance, she followed the momentum she'd created until she had him slammed against the wall once more, her fingers clenching around his throat hard enough to break his skin with her nails.

There was nothing human in the creature which held the man against the wall. Her arm remained straight out and angled up so that his feet did not reach the ground. She bared her fangs and hissed, eyes burning red with fury. She knew it was his fault. Entirely his fault. Her memories spilled and sloshed at random about her brain, forcing her to struggle to push them away and down. Pain reawakened with each visit. And she remembered now - she hadn't been like this before.

He'd broken her. He would make it right.

"Fix me."

[Nichatus]

Nic heard the snarl, but before he could even turn to see what was going on she had him. The air in his lungs burst forth, hammering hard against the area tightened by the creature's hand. With a low growl, and a look common in the eyes of cornered predators, he swung his feet up and planted them against her ribcage and pushed. The only movement he managed caused her nails to dig short, but deep furrows in his flesh. He let his feet fall, but grabbed her wrist and pulled up so that all his weight wasn't supported by his neck and jaw alone.

With an almost whimpering sigh he pushed the tendrils out again. Anyone that saw only his face now, not the vampire holding him up or the room around him, might have thought him mortally wounded. The furrowed brow, the pained look in his eyes, and the clenched jaw. All common on the faces of the dying.

Slowly he found the things, the memories, that refused to cease plaguing the vampire after his mental assault. What he was going to attempt required just as much, if not more, energy than a full on illusory attack, and he knew he would fail miserably in his attempt. However, he was the type of man that would prefer to live or at least die trying to save his own skin, so he pushed on.

In his already weakened condition he struggled to even gather up the memories and move them all to one area. The muscles in his extremities twitched from the physical strain of using his powers in this way, and his mind was covered by a black cloud of pain, a pain so strong that he could barely manage enough focus to maintain the tendrils. He admitted defeat and retreated back into his own mind.

"Can't..." he gurgled past her viselike grip, "I'm...too weak.....need..rest." His hands fell to his sides, body all but going limp. His eyes swam around in their sockets, and the lids fluttered atop their glassy surfaces. He could survive this meeting, but he would have to seek out his bed soon after. If he could even get to his bed. No, the cold marble floor of the hallway might do just fine.

[Moryldar]

The vampire didn't appear to process anything the judge was saying. She made no outward signs that what he said matter to her, at any rate, which was not a good sign as far as he was concerned. In fact, her terrible condition was beginning to lead him to believe that Bela had pushed his problem child onto the judges. Humans who were ill equipped to deal with what might well be the second most powerful being in Thar Shaddin.

Killing her was not entirely off the table if she-

Moryldar sat up straight in his chair when she snarled. He knew she could kill him or anyone else in the room before anything could be done to stop her. There were others ready to come and restrain her if he called for them, but he'd have to be alive to call.

She made a move for Nichatus. The old man barely saw it, didn't even have time to flinch before she had the battlemage by his neck against the wall. Moryldar's slow reflexes saved him from a heart attack - it was all a blur that ended with Nichatus in trouble, which was not a problem.

"He can't fix you Jenica. The only person who can do that is you."

[Blood Ravenous]

Ryxa slowly folded her arms when the vampire snarled at the back of Nic’s head. She watched the action rather calmly, barely flinching at the loud thud as he hit the wall, and her face remained stone-cold as Nichatus was choked by the creature. It wasn’t her own neck so she didn’t care, though she knew what it felt like to have fingers clamping down on that same vulnerable area. Chrishton really didn’t have anything on the monster, though; its strength was brutal. She continued the vigil, but as he steadily weakened in its clutches, her eyes gained a predator’s hawk-like gleam.

Into the silence right after the judge’s words, she said to Moryldar as an aside, "And you want me to work with him?"

After she said that she lifted her head high in a snobbish fashion and fixed her gaze back on the ill-fated pair.

[Jenica Sabiny]

Was this all these mortals had to offer? Short bursts of magical power with nowhere else to go but down? The vial before - the woman's speed - and now this male's mental energies. She now understood this was an ability he had. She could see the memories shift and bunch together, moved to one side and gathered with a sort of weak flailing. He had tried. He had failed.

He was dying under her palm. She could feel the blood rushing through his throat, pressured and desperate under the strength of her own grip. The air rattled directly underneath the heel of her palm. A slight twist of the wrist, an increase in pressure, and his throat would be crushed against the wall. Another corpse for the guard to sweep up and hide away. Or perhaps the old man would do it, or the prissy female. Both images amused her enough that the rage seeped away, and her eyes melted back to a healthy brown.

If he were looking, he would see the moment she decided to let him live. A twitch of one eyelid, and she loosened her grip and lowered him, letting his back slide along the wall until his feet touched the ground. She pulled her hand back and shuttered her eyes, dropping it by her side again. If he fell she would not catch him.

The memories remained pushed to the side in a twitching bundle, and although she knew it could still overwhelm her, it was easier to ignore at the moment. She did so.

She angled her body enough to be able to see the older man after he'd spoken, narrowing her eyes as she took what he'd said and dissected it. What could he mean? She hadn't broken herself; this male had, and admitting that he was too weak to fix it was even further proof that it was beyond the vampire's control.

This older man was stupid. He had his preconceived notions and ideas and was working with those as his basis. She couldn't stop the derisive snort that made her nostrils huff. She was amused.

[Nichatus]

Nichatus watched the world flow by with swimming eyes. The old man, he couldn't remember who the old man was, and he couldn't recognize his face. It was moving too much. Like the room. And Jenica was shaking too much...or was it him. Oh, it didn't matter, he wouldn't have to deal with it much longer.

The first fool breath of cool air hit his lungs in what seemed like days. The room was still moving a bit much for his liking, but at least he was on his feet and not being strangled now. He slowly slid down the wall to sit on the floor. Much better. Now that he wasn't having to hold himself up he could concentrate on breathing and sorting out his head.

The room returned to normal in a few moments, but the pressure inside his skull was still there to plague him. The headache made every sound doubly loud, his own heartbeat becoming the pounding of a hundred hammers on stone.

With a pained look on his face he slowly drug himself back up off the ground. Once he was back up to full height he remained in place, staring at Jenica's turned head. Part of his mind was positively screaming for him to slap her and release the power held in the rune on his glove. He didn't though. He was still lucid enough not to do foolish things.

[Moryldar]

"And you want me to work with him?"

Moryldar's response to Ryxa's question was to wink at her. He actually winked in the way a knowing old man might do for a young boy who was being given a gift he didn't know how to accept. It was very unbecoming of him. Very out of character for a man who had not a funny bone in his body and who knew only machiavellian pleasures.

Another reminder that he did not make it to where he was by being simple. What was happening made sense to him and some things, in his mind at least, were falling into place.

The look was gone by the time Jenica turned and saw him, and before Nic was even started to recover. His face was full of concern about Nichatus' state when she looked at him. It was as if he had been worried for Nichatus the whole time, and only when Jenica's cold eyes landed on him did he snap out of his paternal distress.

He looked back at her, calm once again, and sat back in his seat. It was all very subtle, a collection of human gestures, but he played the game well. He looked like a weak old man that she had frightened into sensibility.

"You want more blood..." his eyes scanned hers. He wasn't quite that stupid. "But I need you to work for it."