boxofmatches | THIS IS A COOL THING

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the picture prompt meme

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A few days ago, Klara decided she no longer enjoyed being in places that were too full of the living. Crowds made her antsy; though for exactly whose sake it was, she couldn't quite say.

And in these places where the living had fled, and the disease had burnt itself away to naught, she could safely slip to and fro. It was nearly like being in the midst of other people; the houses that had been forsaken when their owners had been in the middle of some mindless, human routine were innumerable. She did not feel lonely. Klara liked recreating the scenes in her head, from what miscellany people had left behind to the rot and the robbers. She also liked pocketing the useful bits. Re-appropriation of resources, you could call it.

She was of the opinion that if someone didn't want their abandoned debris to be picked through, they should have gotten locks that could guard from her picklocks better.

It would probably have been incorrect to say that the young Burakh was squatting; after all, he wasn't claiming any of these abandoned homes for his own, he had his own little place he could call home... Well, as much as his father's old lab could serve as a home. It had four walls, a roof, a door, and a bed... as good a home as any, he supposed.

This house, however, was providing temporary shelter for the Haruspex, in a district rather far from the factories, somewhere north in the Knots. Low on coin, he'd been desperate to rifle through the abandoned belongings of the Sand Plague victims, much like the Impostress, swallowing antibiotics whenever he could find them and taking food whenever it was available. This didn't do much for his system, unfortunately; the liver, he knew, was going to be in bad shape after the whole epidemic. And yet, Artemiy knew that he'd be one of the luckier ones to survive this plague.

Klara can find the disheveled surgeon trying to rest and sleep off some of the damage, sitting in a chair shoved into a corner of the wrecked house, half-hidden by debris. His arms are folded across his chest protectively, and in his hand, a flashing knife, already stained with blood and ready for more.

When she registers that there's a human form slumped in that corner chair, Klara first revises her mental simulation of how the living occupants here must have spent their last minutes - she thought it must have been a corpse, and the low visibility supported that thought. The glimmer of metal is curious. Perhaps they had chosen a swifter death than of Sand Plague, and the tool still rested in their grip. But she draws closer - one step, a second - and learns two things at once.

The first is that this is not a corpse. That sound, the repetitive movement of the chest - there is breath in them yet.

The second is that this is in fact not a common resident of one of many indistinct houses, but someone with which she is readily familiar. Klara has to quickly cup her hands to her lips to keep the reflexive mutter of "Ripper" from coming out, turning the sound into an indeterminate gasp. The Ripper - rather, the Haruspex. Why was he here, of all the spots in the town...? What pitiful coincidence.