Rendezvous

[Dianelopa]

Seeing the stranger following her, Dianelopa was a little peeved. "You want a drink," she said. "I told you I'd get you one, so sit down at this nice table and I'll get you a drink." She noticed out of the corner of her eye that Thad had disappeared and she figured he was doing what had to be done. Best to keep this man away from Thad she thought. "You never did say why you were here," she added in a pleasant tone. "I suppose you came to get a drink. It would be easier in an inn. But I guess if you don't have any bishani, this is as good a place as any to try to find one."

Dianelopa took one of the dragon cups out of the cupboard and set it on the table. "Sit here," she said to Morry. "You can drink out of this. I bet you never drank out of a gold cup with dragons before." There was no liquor cabinet in the dining room, so Dianelopa went back into the kitchen, at the same time keeping attuned to Morry's whereabouts.

[Morry]

Ah, what service! Morry gladly sat his bony bum down on a chair that Lovely Dame gestured to subtly at the fancy shmancy table out here. She set a gold cup thing in front of him and spoke to him in a tone that made him feel stupid, but all he could do was stare vaguely at her torn skirt, thinking about how easy it would be to take the rest off and sneak a peak.

Morry had not come here for a drink. Nor had he come for bishani; rather, Morry had come to raid the food storage and dresser drawers for some new clothing. Once more, whatshisface who had sort of taken claim to this cute chick was off rattling about somewhere else, probably taking the expensive shit out of everything but Morry didn't care. Money, actually, was not his goal in life and he rarely used it. It was easier to steal the necessities than actually go out and earn money. He also wasn't sneaky enough to be a pickpocket.

Ignoring pretty much everything that Lovely Dame had said, he got up, holding the cup in a pale hand and wobbled steadily over to the kitchen. "'Ey baby, wa's your name again, eh?" He asked with a smirk, his posture crooked and his body reeking of foul, putrid stink. However, he did have a nice smile. Which really wasn't much of a consolation but oh well.

[Dianelopa]

Dianelopa had experienced men like Morry before in the pub when she'd worked there. The preferred reaction was to ignore them as long as possible and try to avoid their groping hands. Morry wasn't groping though, so Dianelopa decided the best thing to do was ignore him. All she did was mutter under her breathe, "something to drink, where is it?" The bad smell emanating from Morry was also disturbing her nostrils. "Where?" she muttered a bit louder as she opened and closed cabinet doors, more energetically each time, as one after another, they revealed nothing the least bit liquidy.

In a pantry off the kitchen she found food. Some of it was rotten and the smell there almost overpowered the odor drifting her way from Morry. But there were also barrels with flour, salt, nuts, and other dry foods that seemed to be in good condition. "Look here," she said to the man who was still following her. "There's lots of food here. Just nothing to drink. I don't know where they kept their drinks. Probably down in the basement." A crooked grin swept over her face. "You could go down there and look if you need something to drink that bad." Dianelopa wasn't used to being ironic or making fun of people and with this little comment she surprised herself. "Ah," she said, "I don't really mean that."

[Anja]

"Sure you do," came the oddly muffled voice of Thad out of the partition wall separating the dining room and the living room. "Even a delightful girl such as yourself wishes death upon someone now and again, I'm sure of it."

But, were one to pace around and peer into the living room, one wouldn't find Thad. One might, however, hear him again, seemingly in the dining room, saying "but on to more important matters... Does either of you see anything resembling a hammer or a saw?"

Now, at this point, one might think him terribly sneaky, being places he's not and slinging about pleasant chatter hither nither: The reality of the situation was that, while looting upstairs, he had fallen through the floorboards and into the partition wall, which was hollow and quite wide. Unnaturally wide, in fact, and Thad would soon find out why.

[Morry]

He followed her closely despite her not answering his obvious fails at flirting. "Where?" he asked the air, though really he was just mocking her and teasing her, becoming rather uninterested in finding a drink and much more interested in her nicely shaped bum. He watched her with a glazed stare, and when she spoke in a less respective tone and then apologized afterward, all he could do was just continue to stare like he had not heard her.

He didn't get the chance, however, as the thief's voice came from the living room. Morry finally broke his stare and looked into the living room, but didn't see anybody. With a raised brow, he listened to the voice again, but failed to realize where he was located. He didn't care much anyway, and stepped toward Lovely Dame again, following her like a stray dog hoping for some scraps.

"Eh?" he questioned in a weird sort of stupor. He looked around briefly and saw neither hammer nor saw, but didn't understand why one would need such a thing. So, he followed the girl instead.

[Dianelopa]

Dianelopa was a bit confused about the words she was hearing from Thad while at the same time feeling Morry's breathe puffing softly at her neck, smelling the vile smell emanating from his dirty clothes, along with another smell that reminded her of something which she stupidly was trying to define. Thad wants a hammer and saw she thought. Why? Where would I find that? I've smelt that smell before. Where? Why does this man follow me that way? What is wrong with him? Where is Thad? She had wandered into the dining room where his voice seemed to be coming from, but he wasn't there. Usually she could use her good sense of smell to locate something as close as Thad had to be, but Morry's smell was overpowering her senses. A hammer she thought, maybe in the kitchen. No we've gone through everything there looking for that drink. Of course, it's in the basement. That must be where it is.

"Ugh," she said out loud. She stopped walking abruptly, turned around to face Morry directly. He was staring at her with glassy eyes. She stared back at him and the unformed thought semi-consciously went through her head that he was awful, but somehow fascinating anyway. "Bah," she said to him. "You. You are going back down in that basement to get a hammer or a saw and bring it here. That is what you will do. And you can bring your drinks along too when you find them."

To make sure he got the point she put her hands on his shoulders, turned him around and pushed him toward the basement stairs. "Don't worry about that thing down there," she said. "It's half dead anyway. Just hit it over the head with the hammer when you find it. And if..." she took a breathe. "If it does come after you before you find the hammer, just call and I will come and take care of it. "Now do that, because if you don't I will bite you. I have big teeth," she added. "And when I bite something I eat it."

After saying that, she once again felt some kind of remorse. She knew it sounded strange and not very nice, but it just came out. Not only that, she was feeling so uneasy, that she was sure, if Morry didn't go down into that basement, she really would simply take a bite out of him, and not a little knick either.

[Anja]

Thad held his sides in silent laughter as Dianelopa began to boss around their unwanted companion. But, as his eyes adjusted to the near-pitch that surrounded him, his laughter fell away as water from the body. He now recognized the smell, though diluted and overpowered with camphor, and he backed up against the wall involuntarily, scrambling to rise above his gruesome foothold. He was standing on corpses. Dozens of them, no less. Ye gods, that's disgustin'.

He turned to face the planks, breathing in their dusty rot in an effort to force out the sights and smells at his feet. It took him a moment of breathing slowly in order to calm himself, after which he began tapping on planks, looking for a way out. His resourceful and collected mind had regained control, and the bodies upon which he stood no longer existed for him. At least, until he was a good few feet away from them.

The wall was hard and thick, probably designed that way to keep the smell masked from house-guests. The other interesting thing was that, though the Lord and Lady of the house had passed away a good month previous, the camphor scent was still strong. This meant that there was some unknown party still dumping bodies there, or at least still trying to keep the place smelling nice.

"Definitely gonna need a big hammer," he shouted.

[Morry]

When she stopped, he nearly ran right into her and when she turned around she was so close to his face that he leaned backward out of mere instinct. Her sudden shift in tone startled him, but it did finally manage to bring the whole severity of the situation home for him. The only problem was that he really didn't give two rat shits about the guy, and didn't realize that the area he was in was filled with corpses. Hell, he was still trying to figure out how his voice was coming out of two places at the same time.

"But baby, why you gotta be so--AGH!" he sputtered, suddenly being pushed toward the stairs so hard that he nearly fell down them anyway. How the hell was he supposed to fight off that shit down there, and why the hell was he getting a hammer again? Had that been explained??

He wanted to protest, and started to with a, "Hey, I don't need to do nothin'," but stopped abruptly again. She would... bite him? What? Why?

He wanted to laugh, but only stared at her looking very alarmed. The seriousness of her face was what made him half-walk, half-stumble down the stairs again until he fell into the water again. There was no sign of the giant frog, and it was eerily quiet. He would've preferred that he could see the frog.

Finding his was through the water and the muck lying at the bottom of it, he searched with the little light from the open door and the window with the skirt hanging on it for a hammer. Where the hell was a hammer supposed to be? Quickly, he shuffled through the water, forgetting that he didn't give a flying fuck about either of those nutters upstairs while he searched. Finally, he found a set of chests and a large piece of furniture with many drawers. Morry began pulling all of them out frantically, dumping their contents into the water and tossing each wood drawer out as he went.

The frog croaked somewhere nearby.

He sorted through the drawers as quick as he could, but found nothing except nuts, bolts, fabric, nails, rope, string, wood chips, chisels, a wrench, a few iron scraps, a hammer, a drawer full of mouse droppings--
Wait..

"FUCK," he cursed, and realized angrily that he had dumped a hammer into the water. He could hear the frog's movements closer, and growing nearer with every passing moment. It seemed to take an eternity before his hand finally swept over a hammer-like object under the water's black surface. He pulled it up and revealed a hammer, much to his own crazed astonishment.

When he made his way back to the stairs, he ran at a weird, open-legged, awkward pace until finally he reached them. He crawled on all fours up the stairs as the frog ribbitted at the foot, making its own way up the stairs angrily.

Morry flung himself through the open doorway, through the hammer at the opposite wall, and slammed the door shut behind him. Croaks and splashing were heard behind him. He caught his breath for a moment, but screamed,

"Don't---ever---make---me---go---down---there---AGAIN."

[Dianelopa]

Dianelopa breathed a sigh of relief when Morry actually began moving on his own down the stairs. She went back into the dining room to try to solve the mystery of Thad's whereabouts. With Morry's overpowering odor waning, other smells wafted toward her quivering nostrils. Odd smells. Something vaguely resembling camphor, something her mother had rubbed on her skin when she was sick. How strange, she thought. But she also caught a slight whiff of something even stranger, rotting flesh. Maybe that's still a trace of Morry she thought. And then, the one she wanted most to smell, Thad. It was coming from the wall as were the other smells. A shiver went down her spine as the thought flashed by connecting the corpse smell with Thad. No, no she thought he can't be dead, he just talked, he wouldn't rot that fast.

She banged with her fist against the wall. It was like cement, hard and seemingly impenetrable. "Ow', she said aloud. "Thad are you there?" But her fist banging on the cement hardly made a sound. "Thad." She slapped the wall. "Are you behind this wall?" She moved along the wall, slapping, shouting Thad's name.

At that point Morry's yell, the hammer crashing against the wall and the slamming door interrupted her. She ran into the kitchen, saw a sopping wet, muddy and terrified looking Morry and then the hammer laying on the floor next to a piece of plaster which it had knocked out of the wall.

"You got it!" Dianelopa said in amazement picking up the hammer and then looking closer at Morry. She really was surprised. He seemed so helpless and yet he consistently seemed to do the needed and most useful thing. "You're OK," she added. "You don't have to go down there again."

With that, she went back into the dining room. She knew that hammering a hole in that wall was not going to be easy. She hadn't discovered weak place to start. So she just placed herself in an arbitrary spot and swung the hammer against the wall. It bounced back having accomplished nothing more than making a dent in the wallpaper. "It will take a couple days to make a hole through this," she shouted, hoping Thad would hear.

[Anja]

The muffled yell of Lopa came through, and he was surprised that she had heard him at all when he only half-shouted. He made note of her good hearing before moving on to the context of her reply, which elicited a heaving sigh and an aw, hell...

He raised his voice. "Look, Lopa, dear... I don't think I can hold out for two days surrounded by corpses, I'll end up munchin' on 'em. Get up to the second floor and rope me out. The walls are all rotten wood, they won't hold my weight. Then it feels like... sheer concrete behind that."

Reaching into one of his many little pockets, he twisted up a plug of chewing tobacco and stuffed it under his upper lip. Then, with little better to do, he lit a match and started kicking and nudging through the corpses, looking to see if he recognized anybody.

[Morry]

Morry had fallen into a collapsed heap on the floor while Lovely Dame praised him for his ability to somehow get the hammer when an evil giant frog was sitting down there, waiting to eat him alive and capture him with its big, sticky tongue thing. She went and grabbed the hammer while the werewolf tried to catch his breath, holding his chest and heaving in and out as if he had been caught in a suffocation chamber for over an hour or so.

The hammer was attempted against the wall that apparently whatshisface was trapped inside of or something. Morry had never really put that together, that whatshisface was behind the wall and not just in a room or something. Anyway, he watched the girl with the hammer, which seemed to do very little damage to the wall. She said something about a couple days and then whatshisface (who called her Lopa) said something about corpses.

Corpses? What? What the hell was going on here?!

Morry stood up, stared at the talking wall, ran toward it, and ran into it.
He was knocked backward. He held his head, feeling pain pulsing through it, and then mumbled, "Mm, yeah, sheer concrete sounds right."

After a moment, he stood again, stumbling to and fro but staying upright. He found a stairwell and ran up them quickly, looking for where this guy had apparently fallen through the floor into a wall. He took a few healthy steps one way, then a few the other way, rounded a corner, and then-
"WAGH!"
-fell through an abrupt hole in the floor.

Excellent.
Morry laid there, unconscious and simply another body on top of Thad, though he was still alive. He had just lost one too many brain cells today.

[Dianelopa]

Dianelopa watched Morry's bizarre behavior with a mixture of astonishment and horror. It made her think of the time she'd once peeled a piece of a butterfly's wing off to see what would happen. The butterfly flattered and bounced helplessly and aimlessly around until it finally collapsed. As for Morry, she expected him to collapse like the butterfly had, but instead he suddenly seemed to lob himself up a staircase. Dianelopa followed him, drawn perhaps more by curiosity than anything else, the way she'd watched the butterfly until it went down.

Just like Morry. He simply disappeared down through the floor. The rotten wood made only a slight squishy noise, so that Dianelopa at first didn't fathom what had happened to him. She stopped, took another step forward, felt the floor soften under her foot, drew back. Because of the darkness and her own now garbled sense of reality she hadn't noticed the holes in the floor. Now, however, looking again she saw a very faint glow coming from a number of jagged circles in the floor which she gradually realized were holes. She could now see that the holes opened into a space below and that the irritating smell of corpses and camphor was emanating strongly from those holes.

Thad had said something about rotten wood, she hadn't been able to hear his words clearly enough to make sense of them, but now she understood that both Thad and Morry had fallen through the rotten wood into a crevice that was filled with corpses. A trap, she thought, so people fall in and never get out.

She wasn't the kind of person who would leave a friend, much less a boyfriend to turn into a corpse. Obviously, she had to try to rescue them. But how could she do that without falling through the rotten wood herself? In fact, the spot where she was standing did not seem terribly stable. She moved a step backwards in the direction she'd come from. Even there the floor now seemed to waver. She turned slowly so she could see where the staircase was that she'd come up. It was about 5 big steps away. She placed one foot carefully in that direction. The floor at that spot bent under the slightest pressure. "Oh my oij", she whispered. "How did I even get this far? I can't move. Thad," she shouted. "What are we going to do?"

[Anja]

As Morry's weight crashed down on Thad, his match snuffed out, and he thrashed instinctively, taking swipe after swipe at what he reckoned must have been the newcomer's head. It took him a moment to realize that it was Morry in the darkness, at which point he stopped, grunted in what might have been construed as an apology, and lit another match.

"Welcome to the party, son. By the looks of ye, this is prolly the best meal you've had in years, if you've got the stomach for it." He said it with a laugh as he spread his arms and indicated their grisly floor. Thad's badly shaven neck was showing the gleam of sweat as he conjured up a gob of snot and released it onto a wide-eyed stiff's tanned-leather cap. The only thing that helped with death-sickness, he found, was a plug of chew, and a good pinch of irreverence. In following with the former, he offered his satchel to Morry. The last thing he needed was this tool getting sick all over the place, and the powerful stench of chewing tobacco overwhelmed the senses so that the smell of death was all but lost.

It was then that Lopa's voice came from above. He hadn't heard her coming, just like he hadn't heard Morry coming. I must be proper fucked, he thought. Absorbed with studying the horrors at his feet.

"How did I even get this far? I can't move. Thad," she shouted. "What are we going to do?"

Awww, hellshits. "Well, if ye can't move, I don't see many options, love."

He thought it was just typical. This was a classic trust scenario. He didn't want to heave Morry up first, because he didn't want the guy alone with Lopa while he was powerless down here. The fact that he was dumb enough to dash in here like a blind animal while he was already alone with her only reinforced his mistrust. A smart man could be predicted and accounted for. A dumbass was capable of anything.

Similarly, he was pretty sure Morry, dumb as he might be, would never hoist him up so that they could bugger off without him. That left only... Thad snapped his fingers, again putting out his match. "Fuck. BUT, I've got it! We pile up the corpses against a wall, make a staircase outta them!"

[Morry]

Through an unconscious state, Morry thought very little of anything. He wasn't hungry or thirsty anymore, and he had stopped feeling those special 'feelings' for Lovely Dame/Lopa up there in the blackness of what had become empty space. Rather, the werewolf could only hear soft, muffled voices from beyond. It felt as if he was stuck between planes, and as he was shifted, the voices became louder. Apparently, he had not really passed out.

it was just that his ears were ringing so badly and it was so damn dark that that was exactly what it felt like. There was movement, and then the ringing began to clear and something about making a staircase was said.

"Hmwha?" he mumbled, attempting to stand in vain and managing only a sad little flop.
If he had been wolf, he would have been perfectly content to stay in this pit. As a human, he had no appetite for human flesh. He was too loopy to reply with much else.

[Dianelopa]

Dianelopa could hear what Thad was saying as well as Morry's grunted reactions since they were just a few yards away.

Although it was completely dark after Thad had put out the match, her eyes were getting used to the dark, and her brain instead of whirring like a spinning top about to crash, was now trying to put the pieces of this odd experience together. So she listened. She couldn't see into the crevice because of her position, but she could hear. The sounds, however, other than Thad's spoken words, were odd and she couldn't quite interpret them, a couple light thuds. It didn't sound like Thad and Morry were fighting or anything. But it also didn't sound like they were piling the corpses as Thad had suggested.

She understood the idea. Drag the corpses into a big pile so they could climb up them and get to the top. But, she thought in a moment of clarity, the floor is rotten and if they do get up they'll just fall down again because there's nothing here to hold them up. Or?

She could now discern the room she was in. There was a bed on the opposite wall. It had a comforter on it and looked like someone may actually have been using it. To the right was a wardrobe. The door was slightly ajar and in front of it a pair of boots lay in a disorderly fashion. OK, she thought, the whole room cannot have a rotten floor, otherwise that furniture would fall down, wouldn't it? And besides, when Thad had had the match lit, she'd seen clearly that it was crevice they'd fallen into. That meant there must be a solid floor beyond. The corpses had to be piled in such a way that they could crawl out onto the solid part. The thought occurred to her that maybe she could just jump beyond the rotten area and land on the good floor, she could then look down and see what was happening down there and maybe help them out. Beside, standing in the awkward position she was in was beginning to make her muscles ache.

Dianelopa crouched slightly in order to make the spring. But her slight movement was enough to shake the rotten boards she was standing on so they collapsed and she went down instead of across. She made a fairly soft landing on the corpses. "EEE Yuk," she said as a powerful whiff of corpse gas burst out of her landing pad.

She got up onto her feet, feeling dizzy, and was aiming to take the few steps over to where Thad stood. But two things were impinging themselves on her reeling senses.

Morry! It was dark, so there wasn't much to see, but he seemed to have morphed into one of the many corpses piled on the floor. At the same time she heard footsteps tramping up the stairs toward the room above. "I'm imagining this," she whispered. "Thad. I'm dizzy."