"It is...heavy here, very heavy to me...it feels very bad." He shot a weak grin to Whateley.

"Some of your fairies, they are very fat! I think that last one had been eating its cousins...and the avakhi was so powerful I had to ask a favour of the great spirit Raven to help me bind it. More pressing! So, bleeding," Sky Dog explained philosophically, flicking blood at the ground and keeping his head down.

"You sure you gonna be okay?" Gabby asks. "Mebbe we should get out of here. I don't like the idea o' you gettin' hurt by heavy air."

"Well, it's good that you have the Raven's spirit to help you. That was quite impressive, I must say," he said to Sky Dog, sounding sincere.

"It would perhaps be best to leave this place. I don't see what more can be done. As for people that may bear relation to these corpses, I doubt it would give them much cheer to see them here with their heads blown off," he said.

"We should set fire to this whole place, if you ask me."
This message was last edited by the player at 18:40, Thu 02 Apr 2015.

"While I'm with you on the burnin'," Gabby says, "I still think we should do right by these poor folk. There'd be a lot o' closed casket funerals, sure, but better the townsfolk know their dead are at rest rather than ashes that can't be identified."

The shaman tilted his head at the portal. "I will wait until the avakhi is back and goes again, or the door closes itself. It is my buisness, to keep the worlds from harming each other," he winced a little at the crushing sensation at his temples, distantly aware of the god's laughter.

"It would not be well, for me to turn my back and go away, and something from the Lower World to come where it is not supposed to be...but perhaps it would be well, Uncle, if you would fetch down the salt from the kitchen here."

Whateley's suggestion of burning the dead without any attempt to put names to them got a slight shrug. "I do not know your custom for this."
This message was last edited by the player at 19:05, Thu 02 Apr 2015.

"To the townsfolk, these people will already have been buried. They may not know these even exist. We may reopen old wounds for them to tell them that their loved ones have been unearthed, and create a second grieving process for new funerals. Still, if they suspect their dead are about and unearthed, which they very well may given the attacks they've had so far...it may be well to set them at ease," he said.

"I leave it to you. I can retrieve the salt for you," he said, stepping away towards the entrance of the room.

Gabby sighs. "I suppose you're right. I'll get the salt. Need to get this thing out o' here anyhow." he says, and then lugs the device with him as he heads upstairs.

"It is my thought the peasants would have noticed, if these were taken from their burying-place," Sky Dog said, experimentally moving his hand away to see if the flow were truly lessening.

"My thanks for ending the last one here," the shaman addressed Whateley as the man went out in search of fresh air, then settled his shoulders back against the wall, waiting.

Pressure and nausea rendered the youth's vision hazier than ususal, but once his nosebleed had slowed to a trickle he left it to crust and hauled up, pacing carefully amongst the dead to squint up at the strange glowing-wire lanterns and then at the portal again. He re-adjusted his grip on the knife, blinked hard and tried not to sway, a sickened heat rolling up his body.

"Hello down there!" he called as he came down the stairs. He looked uncertain at the sight of the strange looking savage, but even more taken aback at the strange portal.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what the fuck is that?" he asked. Despite the profanity, he didn't seem to be in shock or losing his cool, but still quite surprised.

"Portal to the spirit world, near as we can figure." Gabby says nonchalantly as he comes up behind Price. "It's where Grint and her shadow buddy ran off to when we attacked 'em." He slides past Price and holds out a bag and several salt shakers to Sky Dog. "This was what I found. Reckon it'll be enough?"

"Well, shit."

"I am Sky Dog," the shaman replied, turning slightly, unsure if the stranger was referring to him.

He scrubbed at the drying blood under his nose and came to investigate the salt. "Ah...yes, I think." He took the bag and weighed it in his hand pensively, casting a quick glance at the corners of the room. "Do you know which way is North, Uncle? There is something in this country...I do not know, but I am always some degrees - yes? - off, in my thinking."

Sky Dog tried to parse the grammar a moment then shook his head slightly. "This will heal to itself soon. I could make it hard for a thing from the Lower World to pass, if I bound it with the name of my cousin who is from the Upper, but I sent the demon the other shamán pulled here to fetch that one and the doctor Grint. So I am waiting."

He backed off a bit with the salt, casting a handful into the room with the iron door as he did so, then crouching to attend to the nearest deadder, murmuring in Evenki as he did so.

"Pretty nasty work here," he said, surveying the scene and the number of corpses, some of them which appeared to be dried out husks and others of which had their heads severed.

"Looks like you folks know how to deal with deaders."

The portal continued to fade, now a barely visible aberration that even a passing glance might miss.

"Reckon so." Gabby says. "Enough to help folks, at least."

"It was worse, what was in the barn," Sky Dog remarked, giving the almost-gone portal a troubled glance, then trying to correct for his high-lattitude instincts in finding the cardinal directions, taking up a soft chant as he sealed the room with salt.

Abruptly, the shaman flinched back, salt flung like snow spray as his hand jerked up to press against his breastbone. "Aah!"

Sky Dog looked up, pale and wide-eyed though unfocused. "Uncle...I would take it well if you would go to see where is my sister," he said, the words a little jumbled with rough urgency.

"Korpi?" Gabby asks, then nods. "Right." He heads out of the basement.

"You alright?" he asked, sounding genuinely intrigued.

Sky Dog rubbed at his chest a moment, straightening. "I am...alarmed...but there is no more injury." He raised his head as though listening to something far off for several moments, then seemed to notice the stranger's intrigued attention and expanded a little:

"My sister and myself, we took some of each others' feathers, a time we were in the shadows of the world," he explained, returning to his duties though not without anxiety in the set of his posture. "It was necessary then."

He nodded, showing that he understood. "Tribal magic," he pronounced. It wasn't a judgment, just a statement.

Sky Dog's brow twitched at the repetition, but the Americans' tendency to talk simply to mark their thoughts seemed to be a common habit and not expectant of reply. The shaman laid out containment curves in the lit room, salting and straightening corpses as he came across them.

"Are you far from your family in this place, Price?" Sky Dog asked, working. He cast a glance back at the thin man, then to the portal.

"Pretty far, but not as far as yours, I reckon," he said, observing the strange ritual.

Sky Dog quirked a smile, as though challenged. "I was given to a wandering shamán when I was very young; it is ordinary to me, to be many months away from my clan...but strange that the months are distance, here. Sometimes I think I am outside Time in America, because I am not migrating."

He scrubbed the reddish crust from under his nose and re-crossed the room to stab overhand at the air where the portal had been. Since the knife did not vanish into the Lower World he waved over the spot, eyes half-closed, then nodded. "It has healed itself." He frowned slightly at the blank spot, then laid the remaining salt on the workbench.

"I suppose it has at that. Good thing, too," he said.

"Well, now we can get outta here and back to town." With that said, he turned on his heel and left the basement heading back up.
This message was last edited by the player at 19:59, Tue 14 Apr 2015.