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Streets of Scorch Norton, ~7:40pm Sunday May 5th, 1771


The Reverend had excused himself to his companions and made his way out of the inn, clearing his throat a few times to make startled paritioners aware of him and get out of the way. Outside, the air smells of drying road, hay and horses, and many green growing things in the blue twilight. A robin sings from some nearby garden and through the dusk the squabbling of other hedgerow birds sounds like tiny bells.

It is a fine evening for a walk, past the houses and in amongst the lanes to quickly pass by the church, heading home. The top of St. Giles' little hat of a steeple catches the last of the gilded sunset light and every flower by the roadside seems luminous as the rooks' settling chatter comes to his ears, much like the "Arr - Oh? - Ahh" of idle back-and-forth at the inn.


[[a Spot Hidden available, if you like.]]

Cecil pauses a moment, cocks his head, and smiles broadly. "Ah, Motacilla rubecula... so named by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. Tenth edition, if I'm not mistaken," he observes, rather pleased at his recollection of this tidbit of natural philosophy. He prepares to continue on his way...

[[15:28, Today: Reverend Palmer rolled 29 using 1d100.  Spot Hidden 50]]

...and notes the shape and shadows of the bushes near the left-hand wall of the church grounds look subtly different, somehow. It's as though someone or something considerably bigger than the expected child or cat pushed through to the wall behind and either clambered over or otherwise failed to come back on themselves, leaving the branches tangled in their wake.

Unsure of how recently the bushes might have been disturbed, Cecil approaches the lychgate, opens it, and enters the grounds. He closes the gate behind him and feigns as much an unhurried pace as he can manage, as if nothing were at all amiss, and sings to himself in Latin. "Non nobis Domine, Domine! Non nobis Domine! Sed nomine, sed nomine, tuo da gloriam!" He raises his small lantern high to maximize the radius of its shed light.

[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmYcpUtvR9U]]
This message was last edited by the player at 23:03, Sat 25 Feb 2023.

The eyes of some night animal catch Cecil's light away amongst the old tombstones like two small candles. It subsequently stands up to perhaps a toddler's height to watch him awhile: either a bold hare or an extremely bold member of the Good Folk, or perhaps some tiny ghost. In any case, the apparition turns away from his song and flees the place, leaving Cecil to marvel at the spectral sweep of a barn owl passing overhead, the rooks' vehement following curses the only sound of its passage.

The bushes do not respond to being lit, even with the small rustling of mice. Whatever went through here must have been taller than him to leave the tops of the shrubbery so disturbed. To shove through the bushes and over the wall to follow it directly would be no great effort, if a little undignified. He might equally leave the lantern on the wall and walk around, presuming the wandering thing was not simply crouched down on the other side, awaiting.

Cecil pauses and looks upward at the passage of the barn-owl. "Strix alba, Scopoli's Anni Historico-Naturales. First... or was it the second volume? Must write the Bodleian to enquire." He holds the lantern higher and cocks his head whilst looking toward the suspect bushes. "One of those mazy animals must have come crashing through here! A very strong hart could mayhap clear that wall in such a state, gracious!" He stood there for a time, hoping to seem as if scanning the upper reaches of the wall and the bushes rather than alert for anything else.

The bushes continue to ignore the vicar's lecture on ornithological citation, or possibly listen with rapt attention. Cecil stands, listening to the rooks in the deep dark of the rookery beyond the wall and the dusk-songs of small virile feather-puffs too wrapped up in the concerns of spring to care for the threat of gliding owls.

Out of the corner of his eye and largely out of the light, he spies a movement - no, a hare: the gait can be nothing else as she hop-circles in close, at length getting so near she stretches herself right out for stealth, arriving somewhere behind his right calf to see what he's doing.

The landscape ahead doesn't change, but on genuinely fixing his gaze on what can be seen over the wall through the shrubbery the Reverend comes to think there might be a peculiar excavation somewhere out in the rookery. There's no particular movement behind him, though it's hard not to think of the last time he was so close to a hare: when the beast had pulled the carrot from his hand and laughed like a woman at the blessing of the Lord.

Cecil furrows his brow, troubled by the implications. What in the names of all the saints is going on here? Come to feed the poor pigeon before giving it its morning sendoff and find evidence of... what? Something amiss in the rookery? How could anything amiss with the rooks be the subject of concern, the noisome things.

Since whatever attracted the man's attention doesn't seem to be inciting him to move or do anything at present, the hare behind him sits back and starts making little movements, probably cleaning her ears and face.

Cecil clandestinely glances sideward at the hare. ”What do you think, madame? Am I jumping at shadows?” he says barely above a whisper before returning his gaze to the bushes and rookery.

Seemingly feeling safe enough behind him where grabbing hands can't reach, the hare pauses: Cecil catches the movement of her ears turning forwards and then the sudden brush of her small body against his calves, like a cat suggesting it's time for home and hearth and a saucer of milk. Save, of course, that this is either a wild animal acting in a manner no hale beast should, or else the new shape of a girl dead and with the heart torn out of her some two thousand years before.

She's sitting right by his heels now, he thinks, warm and solid and not quite right in the world. Woman or witch or worse, she does him no harm, unlike a badger might if it had taken to making holes out under the trees for some reason. It seemed a very precise hole, however, and the hare certainly couldn't see it from here to have an opinion anyway.

Cecil murmurs further to the hare, wondering aloud. "Have you a form there beneath the rookery, old girl? Hares don't burrow, so the only other thing it might be is..." A startling thought occurs to him and, eyes wide, he turns his gaze to look directly at the hare. "Saints preserve! Are you... the old you... buried there?"

The hare startles away from him a few paces at his turning, a streak of speed and then a stop. Her eyes glow like tiny moons until he lowers the lamp just slightly and turns them to burning amber. She watches, one ear towards him, ribs moving with the quick breath of small things, so convincingly alive that flowers might grow at her feet.

The disturbance over the wall is too hearty for a hare's form - perhaps the size a fox might dig, going after a snug of tasty mice - but the thought of graves causes Cecil to recall the thoughts of the leper hospital or whatever it had been. There might well be people under there, though the bodies of those offered to the Wyzenwood likely lay up in that shunned place, a foundation to the present drifts of wild beast bones.

The hare cautiously folds back down, two golden embers and a slightly different texture in the grass marking her eerie stillness as the presence of something other than a tuft of weeds. Martin had told him something of what wild Maggie Yendale had said after seemingly manifesting the 'obby 'oss character from the village morris troupe, and a fragment of his own dreams...graves. A tower. Maggie had said Trugred knew - or had helped - steal Polly's soul away from the Wood and buried it in the village bounds. The Doctor thought there had been trees, and the shadow of a tower. A tower indeed lay close at hand, and here were trees...if it were possible to bury a snared soul, perhaps one of his paritioners had come and dug it up again.

Cecil mutters mostly to himself. "Investigating this matter alone is impractical at best and unwise at worst," he reminds himself. "Where angels fear to tread, a fool veers not from his path."

His sole and ambiguous companion remains a quiet hunch of hare, like a loaf dropped in a field. Somewhere a blackbird shouts a sonnet over the rooks' low conversation as rusty Mars and a few bright stars appear. He might just as easily tell his companions after his mission to feed and write a note for his pigeon guest was completed, of course.

Cecil sighs in resignation. "Yes, practical course of action for a practical man dealing with a practical matter." He pauses briefly to say farewell to his lapine companion, wondering if talking to hares is a sign that he in fact has become mazy. "Thank you for your company, good lady. No worries, shan't let it go to my head." He steps toward the vicarage with exaggerated slowness.

The hare raises an ear when Cecil seems mostly past, then the other, rising enough to mirror his gesture when he gives her a little goodnight bow. Fiend or maiden from before a time when Christ was born or thought of, it's still rather charming to interact with something come freely from the fields.

The Reverend passes out of the lychgate and wanders down the lane, the last few daffodils outside the vicarage bright in the gloom then lit by his light like little lanterns. A lack of suspicous scufflings suggests the garden adders are at their duty as the birdsong starts to wind down in the still dusk.

As soon as he shuts the door he knows something is badly wrong. It's the smell: not the thick green rot as found on the mazy men, but the deep woodland scent of what he'd read were innumerable and infinitessimal fungus rather than the dead leaves themselves, a writhing vitality in decay. There's something of copper, salt and ash to it, too, and although Widow Sawyer has lit the hall lamp and at least one in the kitchen to see to his supper she has not responded or called out at his entrance.


[[a rather more important Listen, please.]]

There's a quiet noise from the kitchen, like someone shifting a chair in rising, but still no-one calls out.

[[14:33, Today: Reverend Palmer rolled 16 using 1d100. Listen (50)]]

GM edit: pouncing upon empty post to devour it
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:31, Fri 03 Mar 2023.

"Good evening, Widow Sawyer! Whatever it is you're making, I don't recognize the the smell." Cecil pauses to remove his hat and coat, hanging them on the pegs just inside the door. "I shall endeavour to stay out of your way, just recalled that I neglected to feed that pigeon I found." He crossed to and enters the kitchen.

The Vicar notes a few dark flecks on the hall floor as he turns into the kitchen doorway. A panicked fluttering in the top corner to his right turns into a blur of wings escaping over his head, but what catches and holds his gaze after that is the young man caught rising from the table.

The youth looks very much like Master Fox, but at least three years younger, the paleness of his skin brought out by being clad in what looks like Cecil's own rainment of clergy black, bands and all, and the bright blood smeared over his lower face and hands. His eyes, perhaps a shade lighter than Master Fox's, perhaps not, gleam golden as he shakes out of the last of whatever introspection he'd been absorbed in and continues to rise, attention fixed on Cecil with the gaze of an experienced if youthful predator. Only now does the Vicar note the smears of blood on the table, the long spatters over wall and ceiling, the dark pool on the floor in which he can just see a limp hand and crumpled heap of what was Widow Sawyer lying, the red ruin of what was her face and neck thankfully turned away towards the kitchen door. The fire burns happily in the hearth, oblivious.

"I'll make you a deal, sir," the youth or devil offers as he stands, no knife on him, blood on his teeth. "Help me rid of this body with nothing said to my nephew and I'll let you live."

Cecil's jaw tightened at this devil's gall. "I have made my peace with the Almighty. I suggest you leave now before I do something very unchristian."

The redheaded youth breaks into a grin and tilts his head like a puzzled fox as he comes on, genuinely amused by the defiance and the expectation he might be commanded by the owner's rights, like some fairy. "What, you'll stamp your foot and say 'damn your eyes and bugger ye'?" he asks, his accent hard to place.

He steps up, beautiful, merry, murderous, and Cecil can see not all his teeth are human teeth: there's been patching-up of this skeleton with fox, maybe badger, maybe ancient bear, the sharps going too far back in the mouth. The grin gets a new edge that's hard to interpret as he comes close enough to reach and seize the Vicar's shirt. "Or-?"


[[He got a normal success to grapple: if you roll a successful Dodge or Hard Brawl Cecil can avoid being caught at all.

 If not it's Brawl or STR to try and break away next 'round'. I try to keep 7e's mess of a combat system streamlined and fair on here, but feel free to query anything.]]

Cecil does not flinch when his shirt is seized, instead spreading his arms as if welcoming Edmond into an embrace. He closes his eyes, a beatific expression on his face, and smiles. Almighty God, Blessed Virgin, the saints, and all the hosts of Heaven, forgive me for this violence I am about to inflict.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:02, Sun 05 Mar 2023.

[[ XD XD ]]

Perplexed by this behaviour or simply excited by the prospect of more slaughter, the Fox-thing hauls the Vicar to him and kisses him on the mouth.

The smell of dead leaves hits first, overwhelming, then the feel of the other, unchristian, too close. Part-dried blood shares sticky-slick between them with an unavoidable coppery tang of salt. Though it's clear that any hint of a response will be followed through with terrible enthusiasm, as yet the teeth merely touch as the youth lingers and does not bite. Dead some two hundred years and more, the youth's breath is warm, perhaps warmer then mortals': the decay at the heart of the heap, the new-grave warmth.

Although repelled by the smells and tastes assaulting him, Cecil keeps his wits about him and waits for Edmond to withdraw just enough for Cecil violently plant his forehead squarely in the center of the other's face.

[[07:59, Today: Reverend Palmer rolled 1 using 1d100.  Brawl 45 (25 + 20 modifier).]]
[[08:07, Today: Reverend Palmer rolled 7 using 2d3+2.  Headbutt Damage (Critical Success).]]
This message was last edited by the player at 13:09, Sun 05 Mar 2023.