RP: On the way home

[Stix]

Wraith makes her across the ditch one evening, after her business at the Mortuary has come to a close. As she turns onto her street, she spies a curious sight through the oily rain and green haze of Sigil's twilight: a team of men walking into her home and carting out her belongings, loading them up onto two pony carts waiting outside.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith stopped for a moment in the shadow of an overhanging balcony only a few doors away from the case she'd lived in all her life, and watched the men breaking into her home, and stealing her belongings. She considered for only a brief moment whether or not to scan these men for faction insignia, when thoughts of Aerin asleep in her bedroom upstairs chased away the idle considerations.
Clenching her hands into tight fists at her sides, Wraith strode the last few yards to her home until she stood near one of the pony carts, angrilly demanded on the man obviously in charge of the break-in:
"Now see here, berk: What in the sodding Abyss do you think you're doing? Get out of my case! You have no sodding right to take my things! I pay my taxes, forking out more jink than I could possibly afford. What more do you berks want from me?
Now get out, before I call for the Harmonium!"

[Stix]

One of the men toting a chest-of-drawers cranes his head around to try to spot the angry tiefling, heaving a strained sigh before he sets the piece of furniture down in the back of the cart. "Rain's pickin' up," he calls to the man on the far side of the cart, "better put up 'a canopy, I'll deal wi' her."

He turns around, drawing his thin brown leather cloak around himself a bit further, the symbol of the Fated on prominent display on the chest of his red tunic. "'is ain't no break-in," he starts through gapped teeth, leaning back against the cart. "Maybe YOU pay yer taxes, but 'a last owner was still payin' off 'a house when he got writ'nna dead-book. Now, if you can spot up four thousan' gold ladies right now, we'll be right happy to put everythin' back right where we foun' it." He watches her, smacking his lips absently as he wipes rainwater from his face with the back of his wrist.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith's face suddenly paled with shock and alarm as the Taker's words smacked into her like a modron's work hammer, before the bright red flush of a half-fiend's fury crept into her ashen cheeks. The faint sulphurous sanguine stink perpetually clinging to her body drifted about her in a vile, nauseating cloud, and her purple eyes flashed quicksilver in the dim Sigillian twilight.
"What!" She shrieked, bordering on panic and hysteria, and began spluttering curses in Tanar'ri. "But-but how? My father was a Mercykiller! I-I can't afford that kind of garnish! The Mortuary don't pay us namers much, you know, even though we work and slave all sodding day long, dragging in the Cage's deaders, for only a pitiful amount of jink!" She threw her hands up in frustration, trying her best to maintain at least some measure of repose, and glanced about through the haze and rain as more of her family's possessions were towed out of her home by the Fated.
She was devastated. She'd lived here all her life, and now... now she discovered that her sodding addle-cove of a father had left behind a debt for her to pick up the slack on. The reality of the situation fell down upon her shoulders like the gears of Mechanus; she was going to lose her home, and all of her possessions, unless she could find some way to pay the music.
The Mortuary couldn't take her in. She was just a namer, so the most the high-ups could provide was a bed for a night or two... after that, she'd be out on the street.
Panic overwhealmed her, as she wondered how she was going scrounge up the jink she needed to support herself, and the child she cared for.
All of a sudden, turning him over to the Gatehouse became a very real possibility.
"I-I have to go find Aerin..." She whispered, choking back her tears of frustration and denial, and strode toward the front door...

[Stix]

The Taker quickly forgets about the near-hysterical tiefling, screwing up his face as he looks up to the storm clouds overhead, shielding his eyes with one hand to keep out the rain for a moment before turning around to help put the wagon's canopy over the repossessed goods.

Wraith passes by a pair of men toting Aerin's bedframe down the stairs -- the bulky porters do their best to press themselves against the wall, a little wary of the agitated fiendling, having heard more than their fair share of stories of what they're capable of doing in a rage.

The second floor, only one open room to begin with, is stripped completely bare, nothing more than dusty floorboards under a steepled roof. The half-elf boy is nowhere to be found.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

If Wraith was hysterical before, now she began to feel the last shreds of her rationality and reason begin to slip and fray at the edges. Her temples throbbed with the thick Tanar'ri ichor pulsing through her veins, the heat within rising to near boiling point, and pale amber tears spilled down her cheeks uncheked.
With a cry of agony and denial, she dashes into the small, bare room in a mad panic, shouting Aerin's name, as though invoking it outloud might bring him back to her.
But alas she realises that the boy is gone, stolen from her, and whisked away to the Powers knew where.
Soon, red-hot fiendling rage consumed even her anguish, and driven by fear for the safety of the adopted child she'd grown to love as her own, she fled from the bare room, dashing down the stairs, roughly pushing past the Takers carting the bed out of the door, and stormed on to the street to confront the Taker whomspoke to her before.
"Where's Aerin, berk? Where in the name of the Powers of the Abyss is my son!" She shrieked. It took all of her natuarl reserves of will-power and better judgement not to tear the man's throat out with her teeth.
After all, as much as she didn't agree with the Takers, this man was just trying to do his job... And violence wasn't always the answer...

[Stix]

"Whoa, whoa, what?" he starts, reacting more out of surprise than an attempt to console her, wide-eyed and looking like he's about to jump out of his skin. "There wasn't nobody 'ere when we arrived! We wouldn'a' done nothin' ta nobody, that ain't parta th' job!" Calming down from his sudden shock, he straightens his clothing for lack of something to do with his hands while he speaks.

"We got 'ere, knocked onna door, and 'ere waddn't no answer. So we got i' open," he says, glancing to the door, "and we wen' ta work, hey? Weren't nothin' we did otherwise, I swear it on Odin's right eye." He eyes the tiefling woman with some trepidation, wondering how she's going to take his words.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith stares at the Taker in a numb silence, shocked speachless. Her mouth flapped open and closed uselessly as she struggled to contain the fury of her blood, screaming at her to tear his throat out anyway. At last, she squashed the anger beneath the heel of strained respose, and fought to suck in mouthfuls of mordant Lower Ward air.
The Takers might've been abhorent in her eyes, but at least they weren't known for any amount of dishonesty in their dealings... After all, what reason would they have to lie, when the Courts could disregard any false claims?
Still struggling to breathe deeply and steadily, she scanned the Taker's face.
"There-there was no one here? But-but there should've been! I hired a nursemaid - paid good jink for the poor sod's services - to care for Aerin while I'm working at the Mortuary. She should've been here minding him!" Gasping as a panicked tightness squeezed her throat and chest, Wraith ran her hands over her face, and raked her fingers through her hair, only obsently wiping away Sigil's oily brown rain, as she struggled to grasp the enormity of the situation.
After a long, painful moment of quiet deliberation, the hysterical tiefling finally came to the conclusion that the seemingly trustworthy nursemaid had bobbed her, before abandoning the child.
Breathing heavily, Wraith mutters. " I have to go back inside, to-to scan for any clues she might've left behind..."

[Stix]

"Wasn't, nobody, I..." the Taker spouts, trailing off into futility. "It ain't -that- close to the Hive...."

Wraith leaves his words behind as she hurries into the house, glancing at the displaced cupboard -- it never filled up, anyway -- left propped against a wall by the stairs. It's the only piece of furniture that the Heartless thugs haven't yet stripped from the place. Her heart in her throat, beginning to become dizzy, she delicately opens the doors... no note within. She paces the house, searching corners again and again in confusion... no closets to check, no beds to look under.

She sits helplessly on the staircase as the Takers remove the last cabinet, talking to themselves in hushed tones. She barely notices as they close the doors behind them, the sinking in the pit of her stomach riveting her to her seat, her limbs too heavy to move.

She periodically searches the house over the next few hours -- she might have missed one corner. What if he'd moved, thinking she'd been some spiv breaking in? She wanders around the block, lantern lit, in a haze of exhaustion, until at last, near dawn, her slender frame can take no more, and she loses herself to unconsciousness.

The Peak bells from the Foundry rouse her from her sleep with a start, as it occurs to her -- under the window, there had been a rope escape ladder! Aerin had brought it home one day, a gift from a neighbor wanting to make sure that they'd have escape in the event of a fire... had she looked for it? She scrambles up the steps, hoping to see that the window had been left open a crack, to spy the ladder trailing out... no. Still rolled up, tucked safely under the sill, it had been kept safe from the covetous Takers.

(We're gonna wrap this thread up and fast-forward a bit... consider this a "three months later" lead-in. Feel free to give a closing statement. : P)

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith touches the rope-ladder for a moment with gentle reverence, and before she can control herself, a flood of poignant memories, both joyous and sorrowful suddenly overwhelms her, and she weeps helplessly, covering her face with her hands.
She slides to the dusty floorboards beneath the window, the Peak hour bustle of the Lower Ward outside forgotten, as she is caught up in a vortex of emotion.
She sits there for awhile, weeping and clutching her hands tight around knees drawn up to her chest, and when there are no more tears left to shed - replaced instead by a numb, bitter emptiness - she rises to her feet, and wipes her teary eyes with trembling fingers.
One last time, Wraith touches the bundled rope ladder, and glances out the window.
Her purple eyes rake the Lower Ward's hazy, smog-choked panorama, sweeping over the hulking form of the Sinker's Armory and the distant sprawl of the smoke-belching Foundary... But she can't see the Ditch nor the Mortuary from here, as the air is thick with the haze and smog of countless workshops, steel-smelters and tanneries.
Choking back a final sob, Wraith turns her back on the window, gives the bare room a last, longing, cursory scan, and shuffles down the strairs, out the door in a numb daze, pausing only once to pull the front door shut behind her.
She hesitates, stifling an exhausted yawn behind her fist, glances at the house she'd called kip for as long as she could remember, and trudges slowly back to the Mortuary...


[Stix, I've made my last post, and I'm ready to move on from here whenever you are. : )]