OOC: Use your normal character for this scene

Delilah woke up feeling sore all over her body. There was a wall of heat coming from the left side of her body. Sparks showered along the floor as she lifted her head.

Delilah groaned and winced. Everything burned and ached. She moved to raise her hand against the shower of sparks raining around her.

Hand!

Her hands were back! And her legs! And everything! Her body was back. The Bird was right. Or at least, she hoped so. But it all hurt so much to move. Delilah's hand mopped over her face to feel her nose and jaw. She looked around to find the source of the heat and the fiery sparks.

"You're back." A voice that sounded oddly child-like confirmed.

Delilah looked around. There were sparks showering everywhere. She was in some kind of industrial steel plant. Deep, hot pits of molten steel moved with an orange glow, the heat intense.

"... Yeah, so."

Delilah didn't really answer the sketchy girl. She didn't want anyone to judge her for a failed escape. Instead, she huddled on her knees and tried to ward off the sparks with both arms.

"Where are we? What is this place?"

She cast around worried glances. The pig or the clown might show up any moment.

The heat was like a slap in the face after the cool, summer air outside. Acrid smoke stung at Delilah's eyes, nipped at her throat. The din in the narrow space was frightening. Bellows creaked and wheezed, hammers clanged on anvils sending up showers
of angry sparks, red hot metal hissed furiously in water barrels. There were children
everywhere, packed in tight together, sweating, and groaning, and coughing, hollow faces half lit by the orange glow from the forges all around.

The sketchy-girl's form was almost cartoon-like. Delilah had never seen anything like it. But then, it had been an awfully strange turn of events.

Her face was like paper. Almost two-dimensional. Around her, the air around the girl whirred in some kind of disturbed, aura.

"You're going to be in a lot of trouble." The girl said, leaning against a large pair of metallic pliers, and resting her two-dimensional paper arm on one of the handles. It flopped over and folded, the way paper might.

"You ran away. Master Hogwash is not going to be happy." She said, face unmoving, like a pencil sketch on paper. "Maybe if you'll go see him, he might take it hard on you in just the beginning. He's a hard master. I should know. I've been here the longest."

It was hard not to stare at Esther. The girl wasn't scary, but the way her arms bent and folded like crinkled paper was bizzare. Everything about her was angular and colorless. Like she was a stick person who popped off the page.

"What's he do to kids that run off?" Delilah asked slowly. Her voice was low and her eyes wide as saucers.

"He takes a piece." Esther leaned in and whispered, the words coming out and barely audible amid the din of metallic clanging. "I've seen it happen before." She nodded, head bobbing awkwardly and flopping around like she had no neck at all.

"People ask me why I stay here so long when I know the longer you stay, the more likely that it will go wrong. You change, you see?" She lifted one cartoon hand up and pointed to her face and body, the outlines of a dull drawing sketched on white paper.

Two-dimensional.

"This happened because I stayed and survived. If you don't get worked to death and you don't kill yourself, then you start to change. It takes time, but it happens. If you think I'm ugly or weird looking, there's a few working in the hearth that are worse off than me. Their minds have changed too."

"But you left and ran away. That means he's going to take a piece of you. He'll bite it or cut it off--if he let's you live."

Delilah listened to Esther with a breathless dread. Without realizing it, she gripped her braids and tugged repeatedly. Flattened? Worked to death? Kill yourself? Eaten?

"No. No. I gotta get outta here. For real this time. I can't--" Her breathing grew shallow and rapid. She was stuck for a moment just shaking her head. It wasn't often that Delilah said I can't and it had her hung up.

There had to be a way out, but she just couldn't see it. Couldn't figure it out. "Where do I go to find...Master Hogwash?" She was afraid of saying the name too loudly. Like Bloody Mary, he might appear.

Esther leaned forward.

"He'll be making the rounds probably after he eats the last of his acorns." She said, not explaining when or where or really much of anything.

Then there was a crook of a smile on Esther's drawn face.

OOC: Geraldine Rolls Wits + Empathy

08:19, Today: Delilah Gray failed (no successes) using 3d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s ((1,4,2)).

Delilah's face scrunched up as she thought. Her brow crinkled in confusion.

"Wait...you can eat acorns?"

Changed my question.
This message was last edited by the player at 13:26, Tue 31 Oct 2017.

"Oh no." Esther said. "He eats the acorns. We just collect them. We get them for him."

"But I'll tell you more about that later."

She looked to both sides. It seemed that the conversation had gained a sudden attention as more and more kids began to gather around both Delilah and Esther.

The clanging on anvils and the angry hissing of hot metal in water had all stopped, as more kids--dirty faces and grease-smeared clothing--stopped what they were doing.