Under New Management Part 5[ Land Claim, Iskra]

A cackle broke through the general cacophony of brimstone and chaos that was Barathrum Regnum. The creature it came from, a hyena of unusual size, that is, taller at the shoulder than your average tiger and more than twice as heavy, had a white, spotted coat. It provided poor camouflage against the red darkness of the atmosphere, but she felt no need to hide. To her left was the open air and to her right as well. Indeed, many demons who might have had a chance against her had they swarmed her were simply absent and unaccounted for.

Her timing was strange in that she appeared when she was needed and no earlier. Often she simply dropped by to say hello to her ally, Jack, at his strange and interesting home, but his departure from that spot to go conquer more distant areas eventually made her get up to go find him.

And find him she did. Tracking was a bit harder here, but it was certainly possible. The baked stone left very few tracks and the warm, unwelcoming ground held few scents for any length of time. Indeed, she was learning to track people and things through something more permanent than a finger print and far more persistent: a spiritual presence. Indeed, hell itself of all places tended to hold a memory and impression of those who passed through it, and she wanted to learn to replicate her ability to sense it on Terra.

But she found her friend at length and, with another cackle of greeting, drew near him. "You're... usually not out this far..." she tilted her head to the side and sat. "Did something happen?"

[ EXP: 311 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

So Jack wished to claim some land for himself. It made sense. After all, she had the domain of the thunder rats under her basic control and had his help with that. It only made sense for her to assist him in getting into a similarly desirable position over an array of lesser spirits.

She lowered her head for the moment, opting to remain in her more bestial form for the task ahead.

"Well, I think we should at least offer them subservience," she began, with her natural biases for a rank-oriented clan. "If they're all weak and you're strong, then they will understand that their best option is to follow you and to please you. It will make conquering a larger area more convenient."

As the beast spoke, she began pacing in a small circle that soon became a spiral. Nothing about her trot was swift. She carefully scrutinized each patch of dirt, once even stopping to eat some dark thing she'd happened across with a few short jerks of her head: a disembodied head of a lava toad.

A few more paces and she stopped, suddenly, her entire frame stiff as she inhaled slowly. Once. Twice. Three times... and smiled.

Cautiously, she scraped at the arid dirt with a single forepaw. A few of the sweeping strokes revealed some ashen, burnt thing.

"Scales." The hyena tilted her head to the side. "Some belly-crawling creature... a snake maybe?"

She sniffed and walked in a shorter spiral around the thing until she happened upon a similar patch of skin. "It was shedding..." she murmured, her head moving to and fro as she walked a straight line from the second patch. "There should be another around... here!"

Her search was rewarded with more discarded carapace fragments.

[ EXP: 342 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

The large beast needed no encouragement. Tracking wasn't really something she'd ever practiced much prior, despite her bestial form and nature. She never really had to practice it. Stumbling on some unwary herd or dead carcass really only required quiet walking and a keen eye. There were creatures in the desert who used tracking, and she knew that the humans had tame wolves, dogs, that could find things solely by scent. It seemed like a useful ability in scarce times.

The trail wound on, a sidewinding thing that didn't take her very far. Rather, the scales had scraped off in a zig-zag pattern.

Iskra found it fascinating. It was like reading a book with her nose... an ancient text with fading pages, if in fact she knew what ancient literacy was like.

Every time she thought she lost her way, a simple spiral around fixed it. Indeed, the trail was rather fresh, despite the dead, dusty markers that traced it. The scales had a pleasant body smell as most living things were. There was another smell... a sort of musky, wafting odor that she attributed to maleness, though since it was a lizard entity that meant that either she was ascribing a mammalian scent to it or its true form was humanoid. He wasn't old. Age had its own smell, and he lacked it, but he wasn't an adolescent either.

So involved did she get with this guessing and sorting of scents that she fell directly into the darkness of a moat.

There were spikes at the bottom, but fortunately, she managed to catch herself on her icy vulture's wings before it was too late.

[ EXP: 315 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Iskra was embarrassed. If she had been in humanoid form and her skin was as far as Jack's, she might have been openly and involuntarily blushing. As things were, however, her facial expressions were concealed by a layer of fur and a deathtrap for a mouth. When she landed, shedding feathers of ice that melted off and reformed themselves on her wings as soon as they were lost, her mannerisms held only dignity, a dignity undiminished by the warning words of the pride demon.

"It'll take a little more than a hole and a few sticks," she commented, shaking herself off and allowing her wings to dissolve. Outside of the passive threat of the spikes, she couldn't perceive anything harmful in the area, so she cautiously made her way back to the lip of the profoundly deep moat, studying the large gaps between the sharpened logs. "If he is hiding down there, it's pretty smart. No large demons would be able to make it down in there unless they were able to assume a smaller form. If here were some... large, stupid person chasing him down into that, they wouldn't be accustomed to the dark and would probably impale themselves in their hunger." She squinted. "A lot of the onis who live down here are dumb, tactically speaking. You're smart, but they aren't. If we went down there carefully, we could probably search around at the base of those sticks. They're really far apart."

[ EXP: 282 || +1 TEXP (2nd post) ]

The hyena grinned confidently, or at least as close an expression to a confident grin as could come across the face of an animal, and gathered her feet below her.

The spikes were sufficiently large that, now that she knew where they were, when she jumped, she was able to land with her claws in one at an angle. From there it was the simple matter of edging down backwards into the darkness.

For what appeared to be simple sticks stuck into the ground, they were surprisingly long. That would at least explain how they disappeared into absolute darkness. She must've been edging down for at least two minutes before her foot hit something other than more wood.

Unfortunately, that thing she hit was scales. Several of them from different sources.

Apparently this was a snake pit.

Not that she was particularly afraid of snakes outside of the immediate and instinctive concerns about venom and the fact that this was a snake pit in hell as opposed to a relatively benign snake pit in the surface world, but she was compelled to scoot rather quickly back up the log.

[ EXP: 219 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

Iskra remained where she clung until the literal bloodbath had finished. "Are they dead?" she asked rather redundantly before realizing the pointlessness of the question.

The demonic snakes couldn't be alive, or so it seemed. They were like raisins... snake raisins... delicious ones, she decided after she'd flipped one up into her mouth and swallowed it with a brief tilt of her head. Indeed, she consumed several dozen of them in this manner without the slight bit of mastication before she realized that there was something under the mass.

She nosed aside a couple more corpses to reveal what looked like a half-scaled person below the once-writhing mass. Person, for the effects of the spell made the gender pretty difficult to discern. Its pithy skeleton and sparse skin were draped protectively over a small clutch of eggs that, bloodless, had been unaffected by the manifestation of magic.

The hyena leaned back and sat atop the bones after uncovering the little discovery, her brows furrowed and her coat covered in largely ignored blood. In all of her days, she'd never heard of a demon of any description laying an egg, though she supposed it must have been possible. It was likely something she missed from paucity of experience.

"It was a mother?"

The mysteries of the snake pit maintained far more priority in her mind than the simple, immediate questions of, "What in the hells was that spell? By Paike, did he just drain everything in the area but one or two targets of all of their blood? How do you even do that?" that might have occurred to her in the absence of any other interference.

[ EXP: 329 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Iskra continued to sit, petrified on the spot. Perhaps these snakes were the woman's previous young. Perhaps this creature had the same goal as her, but was struck down in the process of accomplishing it, drowned in the blood of her own offspring. After all, spiked pits didn't just make themselves. Someone must have erected them. Perhaps when she first conceived her demonic brood, she created this nest to defend them. Perhaps she went to Yavlos herself and gathered these logs, determined to protect her weak and helpless legacy so that it might have time to grow. Perhaps she caught wind of this pride demon's path of destruction, or maybe she was simply afraid in general. Perhaps she had only been in the middle of fortifying the area before death came to claim her.

It was all so sad, this scenario in the hyena spirit's mind as the blood began to crust on her fur. She felt such a kinship with the creature simply because of what this thing had managed to do on its own that she felt the need to give it the same sort of burial rights that she'd give one of her own.

The hyena turned to Jack and nodded. Perhaps it was for the best that she missed his trembling and his bloodthirsty licking. After all, she still considered him a predator because she'd never questioned their relationship. "Yes. I..." Words escaped her. These feelings proved hard to articulate, and after a moment she simply changed her mind. "You know what? I'm going to... eat her. She sort of reminds me of myself, so I think I should send her off right. It'll only take a moment."

Without really waiting for a response, Iskra fell upon the corpse of the creature, ravenously swallowing its dry husk... swallowing, for she only stopped to use her teeth when a bone or a talon or some difficult tendon was involved, which was rather infrequently. The creature had eight legs like a spider and a long tail that stretched out behind it. Where a spider's head and fangs might have been, she was confronted with a pelvis, and from there up the skeleton of a woman with dehydrated leather for a face, stretched open in horror with missing eyes. There wasn't much hair. Only a few occasional snaps marked the progress of her teeth, and it was amazing that she could eat that much at all.

[ EXP: 460 ]

Iskra turned her head, slurping down the last bit of galvanized tissue. "The eggs?"

She turned back around and looked at them. Yes, they did look sort of forlorn sitting there. No doubt some demonic creature would have a marvelous, easy meal of the little spirit eggs without her intervention.

It wasn't out of any obligation to the dead snake-spider-thing, but a sort of curiosity and a bit of concern. After all, the monster had worked so hard to protect her legacy. It would be a shame if nobody helped it to continue at all.

So in the normal way, she shifted up to her human form, her skeleton forcing itself upright and her flesh and fur conforming to the shape and attire of a human, save her hair that openly displayed her hyena heritage.

When she stood stable, she stooped down on the little depression in the baked dirt and carefully scooped up the eggs. There were four. She held them close to her chest for a moment, and they felt strangely... warm.

"I'll keep them from dying, then."

[ EXP: 207 ]

There were two more half-hidden by a snake corpse that she dug up as well. Six little eggs. They were... cute in a way. The infant form of most animals were cute. Even these had an absolutely adorable splotched pattern to them, ostensibly to help them blend in with the hellrock that they were laid upon. They weren't really pets in her mind. She didn't have a completely clear concept of the idea, but she did know what a clan was, and she decided that if the eggs ever hatched, the resultant creature would be a clanmate, albeit one subordinate to her.

But looking up Iskra grimaced. The pride demon always appeared to get around so easily with that speed thing of his. Perhaps it might be nice to invest in a similar technique in the future.

But for now, she didn't have one. She simply had to place the eggs carefully in the hip-bag that she had in this form and climb back up the way she came with a series of leaps that may as well have been flaps for how far an fast they took her to the lip of the abyss.

He had an interesting manner about him that made her wonder if he was up to something, but the wild spirit landed in the open with an unsteadiness as she checked the bag. Her movements couldn't be too violent, lest they crack her new friends.

[ EXP: 255 ]