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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"Fuck the sun . . ." she mutters under her breath. She'd be fleeing and finding something else to eat right now if it weren't for that. And she would just go to sleep and realign her schedule with night after yesterday, but . . . she can't sleep when she's hungry. She feels the usual white-hot flash of pure rage at this, and as usual stamps it down.
She looks at Katie pleadingly, feeling like a tragic heroine, in a very low-status way.
The rationalization her brain constructs to give to Mabel later is a cross-hurricane of Katie's not that important and probably wouldn't have survived and stood a significant chance of damaging the mission and it's fine we'll reverse everything anyway [ ?? ] and I instrumentally needed to, right just then, if nothing else to show them what happens when they don't feed me
. . . even though that last is objectively insane.
She sidles up to Teg. "If I die, there's no better way to do it than in the arms of a beautiful woman. I'd prefer not to, though. Would be a shame to never get to see your face again."
well, I guess this is going the bad way, then
She leans slowly, fear stalling her desperate need. Will anyone object?
She pulls Katie against her, her left arm firmly around Katie's waist. She loosens it judderingly, apologetically. But it's still there as a barrier to Katie's escape.
With her right, she grips Katie's right forearm and brings its wrist up to her mouth. Her mind is nearly half gone now to the wall, the haze, of acutely painful need, punishing her stomach, throat, and teeth, always present, but almost never directly acknowledged, lest she slip to this.
Blinking quickly, she finds the lucidity to swallow drool.
Her body is a marauding beast and her soul heaves back the reins with all its strength, slowing her teeth to merely destroy skin and not flesh, as she bites.
The way she's holding on to Katie is promising. Her hunger . . . Tiar only pays attention because it's strategically vital, Teg's hunger is enough to make even Tiar feel pity
-- her hunger levels seem promising as well.
Sweet blood, sweet nourishment, sweet analgesic, against violent effort to slow down, for some vague and ill-combined set of precommitments and convictions.
Three long pulls and swallows in, the voice that always fights on the side of abstaining breaks through and flashes her a white-hot image of Tazich charging in and wrenching her off. It's not exactly a greater pain than the hunger, but the thought unties something within her, and she slackens enough for Katie to escape, jerking her head in a half-willed command to that effect.
She is, in general, very proud that she can do this, even when dinner has some recourse.
Katie cries out in a mix of pleasure and pain. She clings tightly to Teg's soft, plush body with her free arm. When her wrist is released from the grip of the vampire's fangs, she collapses to the floor and gurgles weakly. "Cuddles..."
"Mmmgghhh." It's the noise a cerberus makes, not a human being. But she doesn't twitch, stays frozen in place and slightly slumped over.
She was talking to Teg, but she eagerly accepts the cuddles nonetheless. "There's gonna be more where that came from, y'know. More flesh means more blood. I hope soon I can sate you properly."
<Message@(Katie+Tazich)>"stop talking about food"</Message>
especially like that, what the fuck?
Her credence that Katie is a plant increases marginally, and her credence that if she is a plant she was sent to the Moth to torture Teg increases by a lot.
Looking at Teg once more, she wishes fervently that there was something she could do. She wishes she could immunize her from the sun somehow, right now so she could go out and get something to eat. They really thought last night would be enough?
It doesn't occur to Somayyeh that Katie's intrusion was a surprise wildly outside their range of expectation and thus constitutes an excuse.
On Golarion, the saying isn't "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong", it's "Things will go worse than they could possibly go."
Her brain tries to make the motion to increase their Teg-food budget, and aborts in the middle, crashing against the same futility of scarcity that was the reason she wasn't feeding Teg more already. This is too much . . . something in her cried. There must be some way, how can I . . .
She wants to go over to Teg and say some soft words of comfort. She'd be safe. She's a third-circle druid, ten times over Teg's ability in combat.
She stays where she is.
<Message@(Ran+Tazich)>"oh fuck, sorry. I just want to help her. She's so cute and round and I don't want her to go hungry. I guess when you're that hungry any talk of food when you're not allowed to have more is torture."</Message>
<Message@(Katie+Ran)>"You haven't been around vampires before, have you."</Message> She sends it to Ran but murmurs it into Katie's ear.
<Message@(Ran+Tazich)>"I have not. Only read books. They weren't this cute in the books."</Message>