User:Najawin/Sandbox 4

January 1854 Strines
James Braddock stood on a freezing January night at Strines station, as a train came in. Mrs Howkins departs the train, and Braddock, desperately in need of money, assists her with her bags. Howkins quickly tells him to keep the bags, that she intends to use him as a distraction, climbs aboard a horse, and departs. Inspecting the bags, Braddock finds no money at all, feeling cheated, he decides to follow her, before being stopped by a girl in the uniform of a British Army sergeant with dark black hair. When questioned he admits he wasn’t paid. The girl then calls around for her Captain and new orders, as a pistol shot rings out.

Elizabeth Hawkins continues her trip onwards after departing from James Braddock, before coming across the corpse of a small bird. Consuming one of its eyes and saying a prayer, she casts it up into the wind, and it takes flight, her watching the world through its eyes, Braddock following behind her and clusters of uniforms moving through the white landscape. Not too far off a location where the Loa will break through the world.

She used her spy to avoid the soldiers, sneaking around a factory, as lightning flashed and the wind rippled, Major Webber barks orders at his men. Guard dogs at the building tear into the dead bird, depriving her of her spy. Hawkins scratches a vevé into the floor, and a bullet was fired at the vevé, but deflected by some invisible energy.

Major Webber calls on her to surrender, and she pays him no heed. She throws down the last components of her ritual, and asks for an audience with Madam Jenny. Gigantic, monstrous shapes appeared above them, fighting, and Webber became terrified, as Elizabeth announces her intent to kill them.

Sergeant Brierly and her men crept through the factory, the printworks, with Braddock, as it warped around them, soldiers dying as the world came to life in the ever shifting location. They expressed trepidation, as Howkins had never been able to do something on this scale before. A soldier tells James that Howkins was a witch who scarified her own husband to the Loa for power, and they’ve been chasing her across the world to stop her. Brierly continued further in, seeing snow on the ground, looking up into the purple sky and the dark, massive shapes moving above. Previously skeptical that this was supernatural, skeptical of the Loa, waiting for a rational explanation? Now Brierly believed.

The weapons of her and her soldiers were trained on Howkins, but the sight above had rattled her. She asks the Major for orders. None come. A soldier shoots, the bullet flies into the sky. Howkins throws a doll at the ground and dogs devour it, tearing into the flesh of the soldiers, but not Braddock as he turned and ran. As he ran from the factory, a woman in black wearing goggles barged past him. He glanced back and saw that a piece of rubble from the hells cape above had fallen on her. Before he knew what he was doing he ran towards her as if to help her out, the wind driving him towards her and the factory, as the roof collapses on them both.

Time passes, as things have calmed down somewhat. Webber decides that he needs to prove to his superiors that Howkins is dead, so begins to sift through the rubble piles with careful hold of his revolver. James slowly begins to wake, his arm pinned by the rubble as he realized both that the woman was being held in his arms and that she was alive. A voice from above called out to him, asking if he had Howkins. Upon denying it, the voice left, only coming back after it had searched every pile. Webber pulls out three survivors to assist with the search, Hawkins, Brierly, and the stranger. Brierly’s arm is pinned, and Hawkins and Webber debate going back into town to get a doctor, before being attacked by a living shadow.

Webber goes out to face the creatures and hold them off, and Hawkins begins to figure out how to deal with the unconscious stranger. Brierly asks him to cut her arm off. Hawkins can’t bear the thought until Brierly tells him that she’s not a person like Braddock, but a parliament, six thousand years old, moving from body to body, and this arm is not the arm of Brierly but of Helen Copley, the most recent body. James cuts off the arm, and she cauterizes the flesh.

Webber chases the shadow to an ice wall, before firing at it with bullets, lightning frightening it off as it slashes reality and vanishes through the gap it makes, and lightning strikes Webber himself.