PSL - On a stormy sea of moving emotion...

[beyondthisillusion]

More often than not, Danielle spent most of her days sitting on a moldering motel bedspread, a rifle across her lap, with one eye on the door to the light-tight bathroom, the other on some crappy soap opera or another. Sometimes she would drift a little. And on very rare occasions, she would dream, seeing watery images of the life she should have known, the shapes running together like water colors.

That morning, her attention wasn't quite so split.

From sunrise until the last lingering rays of sunlight vanished beneath the jagged silhouette of the city, she sat by the motel window and stared up at the sky. Why was it she'd never appreciated how beautiful it was? She could still see a sliver of the moon throughout the day, like a pale, white toenail clipping in the sky. Clouds rolled by, shaped like whipped cream on top of sundaes. And then there was the sun. The big, beautiful, perfect sun.

This...this was what she was being asked to give up. How could she? How could anyone?

But people did. It happened all the time. More often than anyone realized and decidedly more often in her family than was normal.

As the sunlight faded in the west...Danielle wondered if she would ever see it again.

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[beyondthisillusion]

She wondered why the waitress hadn't come back. Probably thought they were having some kind of intimate lovers' quarrel or something. Danielle looked up, trying to spot the woman, but didn't see her.

Didn't see any of the wait staff, in fact.

"Huh," she said, a small line forming between her eyes as she brought her brows closer together.

[soaringeverhigher]

"Hey, doll—" Shawn called out, turning in his chair to look for the waitress, just before noticing exactly what Danielle was noticing.

"What the hell?"

[beyondthisillusion]

Danielle turned back to Shawn. But her eyes strayed. "Old man in a booth by himself. Been here since we arrived." And he hadn't moved. "Couple of frat boy dicks in the corner by the head. Been working on the same pitcher of beer for ten minutes."

Not really viable suspects of...anything.

"What do you have?"

[soaringeverhigher]

See, this was exactly the sort of situation where those heightened senses would come in handy. But hey. They'd done this loads of times even when they were both still warm and breathing.

"All quiet on the western front," he added, eyes toward the kitchen. Weird. And hard to notice for the average person, since the air was still full of conversation (from the frat boys, mainly) and the sound of buzzing florescent lights.

"I'll check it out." He rapped his knuckles once on the table and stood, heading for the counter and the kitchen doors behind it. Chances were, whatever creepy thing was going on would be found back there — but if it turned out to be one of their fellow patrons, this could draw them out.

[beyondthisillusion]

Like hell she was letting him go alone.

Danielle slid along her bench, following after him with a light tread. She reached behind her back, feeling the handle of her gun. She knew better than to draw it outright, especially with a lot of squishy and slightly drunk witnesses. But she felt a little vulnerable.

She strained, trying to hear voices in the kitchen. But all she could pick up on was the ambient noise of the lights, the revolving display case of pies, and the grill.

"I don't hear anything."

[soaringeverhigher]

That was the weirdest part of all. He couldn't recall hearing so much as a scream or a smashing plate, and it was unthinkable that he could've missed it. But the damn things weren't usually so quiet.

He paused outside the kitchen, gave a quick sniff. Now that they were close... you didn't need any special senses to tell something was burning. He pushed open the door.

The kitchen was still lit, the grill still going. There were a couple of burgers on it, sizzling away... but also the slumped-over body of the line cook, whose face was definitely reaching the range of medium-rare. The two waitresses, including their own, were back there, too: one corpse laid out on the counter, and the other...

The other was in the cryptid's arms. The cryptid looked like a woman — almost. Really, she looked more like a statue, her ragged clothes wrapped around grey, pebbly skin. She was as still as a statue, too, her arms around the body of the second waitress as if she'd been in the process of lowering her to the floor and just... stopped.

Shawn's eyes narrowed. This was a new one.

[beyondthisillusion]

It somehow figured that her 'last meal' would be ruined by crytids. Every other event of her life had been. From her first birthday all the way to senior prom.

But Danielle knew there was a time and a place for wallowing. This? Not it.

Her gun was out in a flash, but she didn't fire. Guns so rarely did more than piss off most cryptids anyway. And this one was looking strangely serene for a critter that had just been caught in the act. "Put her down," she commanded, her voice going a good octave lower, as it often did in the heat of the moment. Meanwhile, in her mind, a card catalog was flipping frantically as she tried to ID the monster.

There was something in the lore about skin like that...

What was it?

[soaringeverhigher]

The cryptid didn't move. Didn't give any indication that it'd heard. It just... stayed.

The kitchen lights hummed up in the ceiling. For a second, they flickered, dimmed to a grey-brown. Old electrics.

Shawn stepped forward, further into the kitchen until he could glance around the shelving immediately behind the door. He looked to the left, wanting to check if this cryptid had any friends.

He didn't see it, but he felt something change. Sudden, instinctive. He stopped, snapping back to look ahead again.

The cryptid had moved. It was standing now, and its back was to them, though its head was turned as though it had started glancing over its shoulder. That was fast — faster than a living thing had any right to be.

"Jesus," Shawn muttered.

[beyondthisillusion]

Danielle couldn't believe her eyes. She'd only just...blinked. And whammo. "That was..."

What? Unexpected? For some reason, that was the first word to pop into her mind and she wondered why. It kinda made sense for a cryptid to want to get out of dodge. It was just that the damn thing looked so much like some kind of statue...

"Wait a minute," she said slowly, lowering her gun. "There's something familiar about this. I think I read something about these statues in that codex we grabbed in Santa Fe. What was it?"

And she closed her eyes, trying to think.

[soaringeverhigher]

Santa Fe? Christ. Shawn had a dim recollection of some sort of research going on around that time, but he couldn't remember ever having seen —

The lights flickered again, dimming darker this time. When they came back up, the cryptid had turned around on the spot, was looking right at them.

Shawn drew his gun, though he couldn't help wishing he had a wrecking ball instead. The damn thing looked so stony.

"Better think fast."

[beyondthisillusion]

She was thinking as fast as she could. But she hadn't had as much time alone with the codex as she would have liked. Words and phrases flashed across the inside of her eyelids. Things that didn't quite add up to a coherent whole.

Weeping.

Time paradoxes.

Energy.

Blink?

"Shawn, I think they're--"

The lights flickered again. And the next thing Danielle knew, she felt stone fingers closed around her throat and she was six inches above the floor, her sneakers dangling.

[soaringeverhigher]

He was moving as soon as the lights started to go. Observation was telling him as much as he needed to know in the moment: the cryptid only moved when no one was looking, and it was fast. Shawn couldn't be much faster, but he could do something.

That something, as it happened, was reaching into a pocket with his free hand for his mini flashlight. Not the most powerful little thing, but reliable, better than these shitty fluorescents.

If it couldn't hide, it couldn't move. Shawn balanced the flashlight on top of the gun's barrel, pointed at the cryptid like a spotlight.

"Wanna see who blinks first, bitch?"

[beyondthisillusion]

Being choked to death by an extra-dimensional angel was decidedly not the way that Danielle wanted to go. She let out a few strangled noises, trying to breathe. But the flashlight helped. She grabbed hold of the statue's wrist and pulled herself up. All those chin-ups Dad made her do paid off. She couldn't escape the statue's grasp, but at least she could breathe again.

You know, for as long as her upper body arm-strength could hold out, anyway.

"It's a Weeping Angel," she gasped. "Bullets aren't going to do anything. Won't even make it mad."

[soaringeverhigher]

Right. So the stony exterior wasn't just a Look. Maybe if he had an AK-47 instead of a handgun, or a few sticks of dynamite...

Couldn't think about that right now. Gotta work with what's around.

"Gotta be something around here that can break it." Industrial appliances and all. Shawn turned his head, but not so far that he couldn't spot the cryptid out of the corner of his eye.

[beyondthisillusion]

For the first time, Danielle thought of a reason why it would be super useful to be a vampire. Then she wouldn't have to blink. As it was,s he came up with some sort of strange system, trying to blink one eye and then the other, so the creature couldn't come back to life and crush her windpipe.

"Extreme cold can crack stone," she wheezed. "If they have a sub-zero walk-in...or something."

Her kingdom for liquid nitrogen.

[soaringeverhigher]

No dice, not in a dive like this. Shit. Cold, cold... Shawn looked in the other direction, and saw a flash of red in the corner of his vision.

Fire extinguisher. Would it be cold enough? Fuck knows. But it was their best shot for now.

"Stay right there!" As if she'd move. "Or — y'know!" Shut up. He was focused on backing away, not taking his eyes off the thing any more than he had to. On the way, he glimpsed a big, cast-iron skillet. Good to know.

Once he had a hand on the extinguisher, things went a lot faster. Shawn raced back as he pulled the pin out, then stuck the end of the nozzle right on the thing's throat — one of its thinnest points — and opened fire.

[beyondthisillusion]

Danielle didn't so much as see herself drop--her eyes were definitely open and she definitely wasn't blinking--so much as feel it. In the thick chemical cloud from the nozzle of the fire extinguisher, her stomach fell out from under her and the next thing she knew, she hit the floor hard.

But, considering the fact her windpipe was intact...she couldn't complain.

She pulled out her revolver and started shooting at the damn thing, hoping it would be cold enough to shatter.

...probably not, but who cared?

What alarmed her was that the cloud was making it hard to see. Not as much of a problem, she realized, if she had super awesome vampire senses.