Post by Chandre on Jul 24, 2015 20:28:45 GMT
This is a counterpart to the thread found here: Dark Hospital
Chandre was enjoying the rather out of the way place she had found a month prior, using it as her home, work shop and gallery. She sat upon a stone in the dark, the four candle lights atop her horned brow caste flickering shadows about her in the otherwise unmoving room. She had chosen to stay in what she referred to as her ‘working form’ which was simple and easy to maintain. She wore no bangles or finery, bothered with no intricate colours or patterns in her clothes or body. She was as simple as she would allow herself to be, her body hidden behind a formless, fluid like cloak of perpetually flowing and cascading wax. Her collar was lit like a blaze of orange fire that seemed not to bother her in the least, dancing and licking at her straight orange-red hair with no effect. In her slender pale hands was a lump of white wax that she caressed and pushed, taking the formless block and twisting it as she saw fit into something beautiful.
Tu seras ma dernière pièce de mon enfant , alors je vais afficher ma première galerie dans cette ville! She said to the quickly shaping piece of wax, a cheer in her voice that echoed through the dark catacombs as her mind started wandering back to how she had come to this place. She had travelled to Japan drawn by the siren song of advanced technology, wondrous art, colourful people and interesting sights. She had come to Karakura town specifically because a friend of hers (A term used loosely in her species) had suggested it; a town chalk full of spiritually powerful souls with a wide variety of origins, abilities and flavours. She was really very curious to see what the cause of such spiritual density was, and much, much more importantly, what sort of art she could make with it. It was for this reason that she was humming a little tune as she molded a wax sculpture in the old underground tunnels beneath one of the hospitals she had come across when touring the city. She dearly loved hospitals; they always had such a rich supply of materials for her to shape and mold, each blank canvas unique in its own right and always yielding an original piece. She also loved to wander the halls and see what sort of advances the humans had made, for she loved the way their minds worked (even seeing it up close and personal in a few instances). This particular place seemed to take particular care of its children and those with the disease known as ‘cancer’ which suited Chandre well enough. She didn’t overtly care that the above hospital catered to the young; the large part of her experiments and artistic works didn’t involve them too often. She had done a brief amount of research and found that they didn’t tend toward becoming terribly unique art work because they aren’t terribly unique people until later years. Similarly, they didn’t seem to manifest any sort of spiritual maturity until the later years either, so there wasn’t much point in using them. That and they were just so adorable. One of her experiments involved preserving the youthful appearance of toddlers, but it ended… interestingly. She was just glad she didn’t generally have to worry about cleaning up after herself when she did her experiments. The cancer ward was by far more interesting to her and caught her eye the instant she had meandered by it. It was exceptionally advanced, and the biological cultures in the labs were wonderfully exquisite specimens that she had lost quite a few hours in examining. When she finally managed to pull herself away from the lab for a moment, she headed straight for the Headmasters’ office! She was thinking of setting up in a few other hospitals in the area, but she found everything she wanted (plentiful patients, advanced cancer ward, winding underground tunnels, what’s not to love?) here, so why bother continuing her house hunting? She made it to the petit office that bore the label of Headmaster and she wandered in, smelling the familiar aroma of an administrative human soul. They always smelled like stale paper. She had learned many, many years ago that her art tended to draw unwanted attention if she just went ahead and did as she pleased. Unveilings were supposed to be sudden and dramatic after all. So, she had gotten into the habit of notifying the proper channels of her activities ahead of time so she could work undisturbed for however long she intended. The headmaster was a fairly small man, large nose and balding though she thought he was sort of cute in his own way. He was working away when Chandre entered, and he looked up briefly as if he had heard her come in, which tickled Chandre a bit. Usually she had to leave letters of some kind to let her ‘host’ know that she was about and to ignore the missing bodies suddenly riddled with cancerous tumors. It was a process usually, finding some blank paper, drawing some blood from somebody to write with (blood writing had so much more drama she found) and then she had to write it out in front of them for effect, which made spelling errors very embarrassing. But, when they could see or hear her, she could skip all the red tape and just flat out tell them what’s going on. Since this fellow didn’t seem too worried about her being in his office, she figured he could only hear her, maybe make out an outline. He certainly didn’t feel particularly strong in any sense of the word so she decided with a certain amount of glee to exercise her often underused ‘art’ of stage performance. She changed her vocal chords up and widened her chest a bit, giving her a naturally deeper, gravellier voice, honestly trying to mimic the sand tiger from the Disney movie Aladin though keeping a feminine twinge to her. She had avoided working on anybody from that company in fear of delaying or stopping future releases of what she considered some of the finest animated art in this century.
Greetings mortal, I bring to you a warning. She said, and it certainly got the man’s attention as he looked up towards her, but he didn’t seem too perturbed. He just went to his desk and pulled out a small bottle of pills. Chandre was a little curious about this, taking a close look at the tiny bottle as the pudgy fellow wrestled with the lid. Risperdal? C’est pour schitzophrenia si je ne me trompe pas . Est-ce qu'il pense que je suis une illusio?[/i] She had wondered, figuring she may as well set him straight. I am a powerful spirit little man, and I am here to make wonderful art. Each day from now on I shall create something beautiful from the diseased masses in this place and take it to my gallery. If you try to warn anyone, or let this news reach the ears of others, I will return to devour you. Chandre said, trying not to giggle at the melodramatic scene. She found that this sort of over the top stuff made for pretty scared administrators, even though the little guy seemed dedicated to ignoring her. It didn’t really bother her, he’d get the message soon enough when she started working that night. After the first few, she had decided to drive home the idea that this was an event well and truly out of his control, really something that was better to just cooperate. A little push from her and a helpful reminder that she was heartlessly psychopathic was all it took when she threatened to kill everybody in the hospital and left a handprint on his shoulder. She would never kill anybody in the hospital if news got out of course, that was hardly practical and could very well damage future test subjects, but she felt comfortable her bluff wouldn’t be called. Thus, she was left to her own devices, picking out subjects for her art, crafting little infections to pollute their bodies, all the fun stuff for her experiment.
The original piece she crafted at this moment was a simple thing, something she made in the likeness of a centipede but she gave it a single human eye with which to guide it along, and menacing pincers to give it a bit of edge. She held the little fellow up and admired her work for a moment before a candle flame vanished from the crown on her head and began burning in the hole halfway down the sectioned body of the little creature. The previously stoic wax began to move, the many legs of the creature twitching as they took their first steps, the eye looking up at its creator as a baby would to its mother. Allez, regardez autour de la salle de cancer pendant un certain temps , je veux une personne forte cette fois. She held up her hand, a golf ball sized sphere of writhing tendrils and pulsing veins popping up from her palm. The little creature picked up the thing before Chandre lowered her hand to the floor so the two foot long creature could go about its business at her request. It skittered off into the darkness as Chandre stood and dusted herself off before she wandered over to the ‘gallery’ she had been so busy making this past month. She was up to twenty eight pieces of art in her gallery, with one in the hospital above waiting to be collected, and the little fellow she had just let skitter away to cling to the thirtieth. Still, while she did need to go grab up the second last one, she had her rounds to make first, art of this sort needed to be maintained.
This room had once been a culvert of some sort, but she had taken the round room and carved thirty little rooms into the walls each with thick bars made from sturdy wax. In each cell was one of her sculptures which she made out of a human patient and one of her little wax works. The little white creature she crafted would latch onto the patient and start to invade their body, killing them in short order at which point they would become a simple human soul. From there the soul would more or less naturally mutate and become a grand and unique hollow, a true work of art in Chandre’s opinion, especially when standing next to its former body in a sort of morbid ‘before and after’ photo. However, Chandre was presently trying to prolong this process in a mixture of experimentation and curiosity. The hollows were always so… basic when she allowed this process to flow naturally, infected, killed and mutated in a matter of days where a fully formed hollow would sprout from the little soul. In this instance, she was trying to see if the difference of time would yield a different, more beautiful result. She had grabbed one patient at the first of the month, and proceeded to get one a day with her final one coming in tomorrow for the grand unveiling! She kept them alive for as long as she could, and when they finally did die, she held her little babies back as best she could so the soul wouldn’t fester too quickly. She walked up to the first soul she had taken; he had died five days ago when he could no longer digest food or water because his stomach was riddled with holes and his blood was thick with the cancer like cells her wax works produced. He had breathed his last, and it was taking Chandre everything she had to stop him from transforming into a hollow outright. He already had most of a hole formed in his chest, the little chain dangling from a thread as it were, his body bulky with tumors and his skin turning a pale white. His mind had long since been rendered useless from the mixture of pain and the roaming tendrils that racked his body, he just slumped in the corner drooling a thick black tar. Chandre reached through the bars, her arm elongating as it grew extra elbows and her fingers became thinner and more spindly. She caressed the slowly changing face of the man, feeding her creation her own energy to stem its feast on the soul of the man it grew on. She had found this an effective way of slowing its growth, but her earlier estimates proved accurate in that she doubted she could slow it any further than a month. She was furiously curious as to what this man would become and could hardly wait for her final pieces to arrive. Still, she was also happy to see the end of this experiment because it was very taxing on her to feed these creatures her energy, each one growing hungrier by the day in order to keep the growth a slow crawl. She had to wonder if she would repeat the experiment if she found a stronger hollow resulted from this procedure, though she dismissed the question for after the gallery opened. She would have thirty hollows of hopefully varying strengths to look at, and such questions were fit for pondering after the grand event was finished with. For now she had quite a bit of work to accomplish in a fairly short amount of time, making sure that these souls didn’t expire in the next couple of days.
Je veux ton amour et Je veux ta revanche Je veux ton amour Chandre sang as she worked on her last patient/work of art for the evening. This was a young lady who had come in to the hospital for a twisted ankle, and her wax work infection had already turned her leg into an elephantine stump that Chandre was busy pruning to slow its advance even as she administered chemo drugs in a slow IV drip. She didn’t worry too much at this point about slowing the progress of the infection, she could easily keep the girl alive for another two weeks at this rate, and she needed but a couple of days. She let out a little sigh as she finished, fatigue plaguing her from ‘feeding’ her little pets to keep their growth in check. She slipped through the bars of her final patient when she felt the return of her candle flame flicker to life on her mask. Qu’est-ce que la? She wondered, walking over to the entrance to her gallery, content that everybody would still be roughly human by the time she came back. Her candle flame returning to her crown meant that the little guy had died, which was very unlikely, or managed to infect somebody. There were no mortals around save the Headmaster that could see them, and even he wouldn’t be able to stop one from infecting him, but she had told the little creature to find somebody, not attach yet.
She was heading upstairs to collect the second last patient anyway, figuring she could investigate what happened to the little centipede creature along the way. Her next patient was an elderly fellow with a bad kidney that she had infected earlier that morning. Her initial treatment would prevent anything further than a simple tumour from forming, and despite her exhaustion, she needed to get to him soon. He needed immediate treatment to prevent him from turning too soon so she hustled down the maze like tunnels of the underground sewer to get to the hospital. She stopped about half way between her gallery and the hospital though as she caught the unmistakable scent of a shinigami. If she had a heart, she would have felt it sink at the idea that her new home and gallery would be shut down by the black robed art haters right before her unveiling. What are you doing here mon ami? She whispered to herself as she stalked closer to the shinigami she could feel wandering the tunnels above her. She couldn’t sense any other shinigami, just this lone fellow, and she wondered if she would be able to take him out before he became too much of an issue. Stealth wasn’t really her finest suit when it came to her rietsu unless she had something else to disguise herself as, which in this instance she really didn’t. Instead she decided to keep her distance and at least one tunnel wall between them just to be safe. The shinigami didn’t seem terribly strong, fairly on par with her when she was at her best if she was to guess (again, rietsu wasn’t something she paid much attention to). However, she was fairly drained after feeding her art, not really up to a full scale fight if she could help it. I will have to play this smart then. She thought, trying to remember the layout of the tunnels she had roamed this past month, and thought of the perfect place to draw the shinigami in. She moved below him as closely as possible, drawing him to a small sewer grate that separated the tunnels. She used this grate to move up to the next tunnel when she went to fetch her new pieces instead of going the long way around which she had to do when bringing them back down. It took her a moment to focus on the shinigami, try and confirm where it stood and get a decent feel for where the head may be. With her best guess in mind, she thrust her hand up through the grate and formed a wickedly talonned claw with which she meant to grab him around the skull. Her hand grasped on fairly well, which was a pleasant surprise for her (usually it was a one in four attempt sort of deal with her third eye), and she pulled down hard. She heard the clunk of the shinigami’s skull ramming against the metal grate, could feel the metal buckling under the force of the strike as her arm was flowing around it. Still, she felt another good thump should do it and pulled again, this time as hard as she could with as much mass as she could put into her arm. The shinigami came crashing through the floor, and Chandre had to side step quickly to avoid being hit by the debris. She got ready to fight, forming a blade of sorts in her other arm, but the white haired shinigami fell unconscious soon after she got ready to stab him. Hmm. That went well. Chandre chirped happily, growing a few extra arms to help carry the large man along with her, though technically one was a lobster clawed tentacle and the other was something similar to a wing if birds were furry instead of feathery.
The walk back was slow going unfortunately, and very tiring to the candle work hollow. This shinigami was really, really heavy, and depleted as she was she couldn’t summon help to cart him along. Still, she did eventually make it back to the gallery where she had a cozy cell ready and waiting that she dumped his body into. The little room was meant for the man who was in all likeliness dead now because she hadn’t been able to get up there and slow the progress of her growth on the man’s body. Still, she felt she had a net gain as she deposited the shinigami into the cell with a heave, glad to have that weight off her shoulders. She knew the effects of her growths on shinigamis for the most part, they degraded at the same rate as humans if they were weak enough, though some managed to reject her gifts in short order. She couldn’t tell if this shinigami was weak or not, but figured she would test her luck with him seeing as she managed to knock him out with a couple of well timed lumps to the head. She scooped up a little ball of wax from her cloak, playing with it and molding it with her fingers until it resembled a grape-fruit sized eyeball with squirming tendrils all about it. It was a quick little work, fairly derivative, but the shinigami had sped her timetable along a touch, so she couldn’t put as much love into this little critter as she would have liked. She did, however, leave the candle alight in the center of the thing just in case the Shinigami had the strength to remove it, the little tumour could come and find her. She gingerly placed the growth onto the shinigami’s leg and watched as the tendrils wove themselves into the man’s skin, sinking in like hungry roots taking their first taste of earth. It was well and solidly attached within a few moments, the ‘eyeball’ fusing seamlessly with the shinigami’s skin with only a change in colour to show where one began and the other ended. Chandre put her hand on the growth, infusing it with a healthy stock of rietsu to feed on so it didn’t progress too quickly. Chandre felt the drop in her power, though it was necessary if she wanted her experiment to continue on track. She left the cell and raised the bars to keep her latest acquisition from running off on her before she headed back to her workshop. She needed to rest, recoup some of her lost energy, maybe find something to eat if she had time.
Oh, some food sounds delightful. When was the last time I ate? She wondered as she took a seat at her work bench, happy to get off her feet for a moment. She thought back to earlier the day before when she had meandered the hospital and consumed a few wondering souls from the recently deceased. It was a bit annoying eating the already dead, but it was handy in maintaining her anonymity, as well she didn’t run the risk of killing an interesting living subject. In this day and age it was hard to identify which humans were ‘normal’ and boring, and which ones could hurl cars about like softballs, or were going to come up with the next Tesla Coil. I suppose I should go then, wander around and get something to snack on. Maybe I can still save that last man as well, that would be a pleasant bonus. She would have liked that honestly, it would mean she was done collecting and only needed to keep up maintenance until the unveiling. She was about to head out when she heard some grumbling from her gallery, figuring her latest patient was conscious again. She considered just leaving, letting him sit until she came back, but that would hardly be polite, not to mention she had so few opportunities for good conversation. She walked in front of the cell, taking stock of the shinigami for a moment as he looked up at her, no doubt admiring her lovely body.
I'm so lucky. I get to add a shinigami to my gallery. Oh, you will be beautiful when I'm done with you, just stay in there and let my baby fester a while. She said, looking at her little baby on the man’s rather muscular leg. She briefly wondered if the little guy would survive long now that the shinigami was awake. It wasn’t impossible to remove the thing, though doing so took more strength of will than most had, or a medical knowledge even fewer boasted. She waited a moment for the shinigami to say something, actually have a back and forth of some kind. She didn’t even care if all he did was berate her or say something cliché like ‘you’ll never get away with this’ but the heavy built man didn’t say a peep. She sighed a bit mentally, but tried to stay in an upbeat mood for the shinigami’s sake. I'll be back soon, after I collect my next work the gallery will be complete. Then you can all be marvelled at as a proper collection before I devour you. Ah I always love when a gallery is unveiled for the first time! She said, giving him a wave before trotting back out to the sewer tunnels hoping to grab something quick to eat before coming back. She has a touch upset that the shinigami was so tight lipped, and also a little unhappy that the large fellow had little enough value to her present experiment, but catching a shinigami was too rare for her to ignore.
She made her way into the sewer tunnels, over to where she had pulled the shinigami through the floor. She hopped on up and made her way over to an air duct, taking the quicker route than she did when she came down with cargo. When it was just her, she could slither into the pipes and vents, traveling the empty channels like a tight and solitary highway. She found that pipes around three centimeters or larger were easy enough to ‘flow’ through, and there were a number of larger pipes that allowed her such freedom of movement. On her way back down she generally had to take more conventional routes due to hauling a human along for the ride. They usually didn’t survive being squeezed into a foot wide pipe and dragged through the various twists and turns that she took with indifference. What took a good twenty minutes on foot was a matter of minutes via her unique mode of motion, coming out from her trip in a janitor’s closet from an unused sewer drain. She took a moment to dust herself off before heading out into the halls of the hospital, where she looked around to see if there were any wandering souls meandering about. Unfortunately, she was surrounded by the living, nurses scurrying about in their colourful uniforms, rushing to and from a room down the hall. Curious despite her rather hurried schedule, Chandre walked over to the window where she saw two people on beds, blood smeared clothes and doctors swarming around like piranha around a slab of meat.
Oooh, this I have to see. Chandre chirped to herself, slithering into the operating room where the emergency crew were doing what they could to save lives. Chandre considered medicine an artful science, taking steady hands and delicate touches even the savviest painter would cherish. Watching an artist work was always inspiring to her, and she could hardly ignore such an opportune display. It was a man and a woman, a lovely couple really, fairly young as well. The man was just shy of six feet tall with distinctive blond hair, nice physique and what looked like a collapsed trachea judging by the bruising on his neck. He’ll be breathing through a tube for a bit, but should be just fine… She was unimpressed, it didn’t take much effort to fix that sort of thing and she was a little grumpy that she wasn’t going to get to eat him. Chandre moved to take a closer look at the woman, a lovely little thing about five and half feet tall, short brown hair and petite frame. Her chest was opened up and doctors hurried to pull glass and debris from the open wound while others tried to bandage up her torn face. She was much, much more interesting to watch, the steady hands wielding tweezers like a mindful clock maker. Her attention was dragged away by a pair of nurses talking by the door.
It was a car crash, they’ve rushed the little girl to OR 3, make sure Dr. Matsuada is paged. Chandre heard as the senior nurse directed her subordinate upstairs. While children weren’t of particular interest to her, her curiosity had taken hold well and proper. Besides, OR 3 was on the way to where she was going anyway, and she may as well see if there were any souls to snack on.
She walked the halls quickly, slithering and slinking past the staff and patients who were busily making their way through their daily routine. OR 3 was on the next floor up, and so was the cancer ward, so she decided to stop by and see the little one first before looking for her little creature. Through the window she could see a flurry of doctors busily trying to save the life of the little girl that had been in the accident with her parents. She felt a little sad for the doctors and nurses, it was always frustrating when you did your work and it came to no fruition. Chandre knew that they weren’t going to get anywhere with this little girl because her soul was sitting in the corner crying, the chain on her chest severed and dangling. Chandre took a moment before entering the room to change, shifting her form to be a little shorter, put on some nicer clothes (a pink shawl, white lace dress, even giving her skin a pink fleshy tone instead of the usual pale white. She walked over to the little girl in the corner, trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.
Hello mon enfant, you must be so scared. Here, come with me, you don’t need to see this. Chandre said, holding out a slender hand for the girl. The crying girl seemed nervous at first, but took the outstretched hand. Chandre very gently picked the girl up into her arms and wiped her tears away as they walked into the hall. What is your name petit? She asked, making her way back to the stairs.
Ts-Tsuki… there wasa –sniff- a car acciment. The little girl said, clearly not quite grasping the situation.
Oh my dear, yes there was, I’m going to take you to see your parents right now though. Chandre said, the little girl seeming to perk up at the news.
Really? Is mommy an’ daddy okay? She asked, trying to clear her eyes.
The doctors and nurses are doing their best little one, we’ll have to wait and see. Chandre said as they went down the stairs and rounded the corner. Chandre was a little surprised to see the mother standing in the hallway, bleeding from the head and chest, but otherwise seeming find. She realized that the doctors had failed when she saw the little chain in the woman’s chest, which was a bit disappointing.
Mommy! The girl exclaimed, Chandre putting the girl down so she could run to her newly deceased parent. The mother seemed similarly pleased to see her little girl, also apparently not grasping what had happened her. The mother and daughter embraced and cried as Chandre made her way over to them.
Hello Ms, I found your daughter upstairs. Now, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but you didn’t survive the car crash. You’re both little angels now, and you’re new lives are about to begin. She said, the woman and little girl looking both concerned at the news and elated at at least being together for this next step in their ‘lives’ so to speak. That all switched to abject horror when Chandre opened her mouth (which ran down the length of her body like a zipper opening up), and swallowed the mother and child whole. She warped and twisted as a mass of liquid wax for a moment or two before standing back up in her normal white cloak covered body. Mmm, they seemed like good people. Really hit the spot too. She said to herself as she pondered eating the husband too, letting them all be together in her roiling body. She dismissed the thought, she didn’t want to be a little piggy, and she had work to do. She meandered back upstairs to the cancer wards to see if she could find a suitable final piece for her gallery as well as recover the older gentleman who may or may not be dead at this point. She managed to find him in more or less an alive state, giving him another quick shot of rietsu to keep him kicking. It was probably the only time she’d have to do that before the unveiling since he would take the next two days to degenerate into a hollow, right on schedule for the rest of the gallery. She left him in his bed and began to look around some more, see if she could get one more person into the gallery. They’d have to share a cell with the Shinigami, but that wasn’t too bad really. She was looking around for maybe thirty minutes when she felt something odd. She say it rolling down the hall, a little splash of blood on the otherwise pale white body of the tendril covered tumour she had planted in the Shinigami not even an hour prior. This meant the Shinigami was strong enough to remove it, and that meant he was possibly strong enough to escape or damage her gallery! She let out a roar in frustration, running down the hall, scooping up her little tumour baby and subsuming it into her body. She quickly jumped into the nearest vent, squirming through the pipes down to the lower levels where she could take the sewer drains and plumbing back to her gallery in a fairly quick manner. She exited as close as she could, not sensing the Shinigami anywhere nearby. She rushed to her gallery entrance, finding a massive jut of rock blocking her path! Written on the stone wedged in the entrance of her gallery was written:
I’ve removed your disgusting ‘art’ from my body beast. I’ll see you in the hospital if you wish to try me again.
Chandre roared again in anger and frustration, smashing through the rock in her true form, multiple legs and arms of various types sloshing together in an ever changing amalgamation. She stopped to find her pieces of art intact and safe, letting out a sigh of relief as she returned to her composed form.
This insult will not stand! I’m going to enjoy devouring him slowly! She screamed, rushing off to the pipes again to follow her prey. She could feel him, surging his energy, beckoning to her, goading her into a fight that she was happy to oblige. She ran through the walls, coalescing in a pipe just over the shinigami’s head before plunging to the ground. She had hoped to envelope him quickly and have this battle done with before it began, but the large man was faster than he looked. She flung to the assault, the ring of the fire alarm blaring in her ears only serving to echo her own anger. She attacked as she normally did, furiously and with the chaos that was born of her unique body. She struck at him with lizard a lizard like tail, wracked at him with talons, struck at him with ram like horns, but she was met at each turn with his blade or a strange metal shield he had lashed to his arm. She felt some fingers go every now and again as well, and she knew that this man was much more skilled than she had originally given him credit for. Still, he didn’t get a strike in for most of the fight up to this point, seemingly kept on his toes with the constant onslaught of attacks Chandre was buffeting him with. They slowly moved from the utilities room to the halls of the hospital, evacuated due to the fire alarm that the Shinigami had likely pulled. It didn’t matter to her though, he was her soul focus at this exact moment. When they were fully in the hall, she could see the Shinigami come in with a stab of his sword, finally making a truly offensive attack. Chandre had to act quickly, separating her right arm from her body just as his sword bin into her shoulder. She used one of the candle lights on her mask to light a life in the arm, turning the little half arm half blade into a Madonna Litta. With a flick and a well-acted roar, the Shinigami thought it had successfully loped off one of her arms. He came in with a large chop, hoping to take advantage of the situation only for Chandre to catch his blade in her left hand. His blade ripped through her hand and a bit of her forearm before coming to a stop near her wrist. It was thoroughly painful, but she healed quickly and otherwise had a firm grip on his sword. She held him steady as she commanded her little Madonna Litta to latch onto the large man. Chandre hoped that she could use it to strangle the Shinigami, but he wrenched his sword free and proceeded to lop the creature off from his back, killing the poor thing. Chandre would have considered the motion beautifully surgical if she wasn’t fully intent on hating this man. She came in with a punch, a thickened skull like hand sporting dagger like horns rammed into the man’s side, sending him flying before he could bring up an appropriate defense. She saw him go flying down the hall, sliding to a stop against the wall as his blood decorated the floor. Chandre thought she was victorious, but the Shinigami got to his feet, using his sword like a cane as he staggered around the corner and down the hall. Chandre hurried after him, staying cautious in case he tried any weird tricks that she knew Shinigami were fond of pulling. She came around the corner, seeing that his blade had changed like the shinigami’s blades were apt to do. It was a tarnished silver sword, looking old and well-worn with similarly tarnished chains wrapping around his arms. She didn’t really care though, the wound she had given him would kill him regardless of how his sword had changed shape. Or so she thought. She was a little surprised when one of the chains came to life like a snake and plunged right through her like a bullet. She was almost too shocked to notice the pain, but then she received a real shock when the chain met the socket of the fluorescent light just above her and she felt the full wattage of a major metropolitan hospital surge through her body. It was very uncomfortable to say the least. She bellowed in agony as she Shinigami hurried up the stairs, moving much better than a man injured as he was should. She slithered as quickly as she could off of the chain, the smell of her own burnt waxen flesh filling the hall. She pulled the chain from the light socket, wondering if she could use it to strangle the Shinigami in an ironic death, subsuming it into her body before running up the stairs to chase the man.
She launched from the top of the stair well and tackled the Shinigami to the ground, pinning his arms down, one with a massive gorilla like hand and the other with a blade similar to a pair of scissors jutting through his forearm.
You will be my ART! She bellowed in his face, planning to perforate his body with a good hundred or so spikes forming on her underside.
Actually, you will be my patient! He shouted back, which confused Chandre quite a bit. That’s when one of the other silver chains this man had wrapped around her neck and pulled her off of him. She went flying through a window into the kemo treatment room she had spent a considerable amount of time admiring when she had first arrived at the hospital. She morphed around back to her feet (of which she was currently sporting five, though one was more of a shelf with cutlery on it and another was a hybrid PC and potato) in time to see the Shinigami rush in and toss some IV bags at her. She sliced through them with a talloned hand and without a second thought. The medicine in the bags splashed all over her and she realized what was going just as the Shinigami hit the start button on the radiation machine. She could feel the power of the radiation blistering her body, targeting the radiation tags in the medicine and burning her to her core. She tried to shield herself from the onslaught, but to no avail as the radiation was powerful enough to light the bed and paper in the room on fire! She had almost given up hope when she spotted a drain in the floor, and slithered into it as quickly as she could. To the Shinigami it must have looked like she had melted into nothing but a pool of goo on the floor, but she had managed to escape into the pipes. She was, however, hurt very, very badly.
You… will be… my art one day, Shinigami… She said weakly, her voice echoing through the pipes as she slithered away. She finally came to a stop in an unused sewer tunnel she didn’t recognize, slumping against the wall in a heap. She was breathing heavily, her cloak thin and dripping around her, even her candles only a dull glow atop her crown. She could feel her body trying to stitch itself back together, but it was slow, her energy nearly depleted and her lazily shifting body in shambles. I am… I am going to be alright… right? She wondered before she fell unconscious.
She awoke next in a start, her body feeling much better as her high speed regeneration did its job and put her back in working order. She was very hungry though, and she had no idea how much time had passed since she had done battle with that blasted Shinigami. She rushed through the pipes to get back to the hospital, knowing that if she didn’t eat soon she may devolve! She burst through the pipes in the headmaster’s office, unfortunate for him that he was the closest stop for her and the most powerful soul in the hospital. She ate him, full body and all, hoping that she was quick enough to beat the clock. She looked at the time on the wall, seeing that it had been only eight or so hours from when she last ate. She had been out for nearly all of that time, but she could sense the Shinigami had moved on. She was both relieved and angered that he was gone, knowing that she didn’t want to have to fight him, but also that he was likely in as poor condition as she had been.
I, I shouldn’t dwell. I need to check on my gallery, maybe he left it alone… She wondered, making her way back into the pipes. She returned to find that each of the souls and bodies she had infected were gone, stolen by the Shinigami and their profane ‘burial’ that they forced on all they found. Her anger was only quieted by her weariness, she was still exhausted as she made her way to her lab in the adjoining culvert. It was still whole and in one piece, thank goodness. With that checked on, she made her way back up to the surface, she had to find a new place to call home as that Shinigami would likely send more of his kind to see if they could find her. She walked on the lawn of the hospital, trying to remember which way was the next hospital she had liked when she saw something that surprised her. Sitting on the lawn crying was the Shinigami! His muscular frame, silver hair, though he was in a suit, not Shinigami robes, and he didn’t have any rietsu to speak of.
Did boss forget me? It lamented, which made Chandre guess that it was one of those soul candies in an artificial body! She had always wanted to get her hands on one of those! She slithered up next to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.
Don’t cry my sweet, you and I are going to make wonderful art together! she said with a grin, feeling much better already.
Item Materials Collected:
Portion of a shinigami’s zanpactou
Standard Soul Pill
Standard Gigai
Word Count: 7415
Chandre © All rights reserved, 2015-2016.
Chandre was enjoying the rather out of the way place she had found a month prior, using it as her home, work shop and gallery. She sat upon a stone in the dark, the four candle lights atop her horned brow caste flickering shadows about her in the otherwise unmoving room. She had chosen to stay in what she referred to as her ‘working form’ which was simple and easy to maintain. She wore no bangles or finery, bothered with no intricate colours or patterns in her clothes or body. She was as simple as she would allow herself to be, her body hidden behind a formless, fluid like cloak of perpetually flowing and cascading wax. Her collar was lit like a blaze of orange fire that seemed not to bother her in the least, dancing and licking at her straight orange-red hair with no effect. In her slender pale hands was a lump of white wax that she caressed and pushed, taking the formless block and twisting it as she saw fit into something beautiful.
Tu seras ma dernière pièce de mon enfant , alors je vais afficher ma première galerie dans cette ville! She said to the quickly shaping piece of wax, a cheer in her voice that echoed through the dark catacombs as her mind started wandering back to how she had come to this place. She had travelled to Japan drawn by the siren song of advanced technology, wondrous art, colourful people and interesting sights. She had come to Karakura town specifically because a friend of hers (A term used loosely in her species) had suggested it; a town chalk full of spiritually powerful souls with a wide variety of origins, abilities and flavours. She was really very curious to see what the cause of such spiritual density was, and much, much more importantly, what sort of art she could make with it. It was for this reason that she was humming a little tune as she molded a wax sculpture in the old underground tunnels beneath one of the hospitals she had come across when touring the city. She dearly loved hospitals; they always had such a rich supply of materials for her to shape and mold, each blank canvas unique in its own right and always yielding an original piece. She also loved to wander the halls and see what sort of advances the humans had made, for she loved the way their minds worked (even seeing it up close and personal in a few instances). This particular place seemed to take particular care of its children and those with the disease known as ‘cancer’ which suited Chandre well enough. She didn’t overtly care that the above hospital catered to the young; the large part of her experiments and artistic works didn’t involve them too often. She had done a brief amount of research and found that they didn’t tend toward becoming terribly unique art work because they aren’t terribly unique people until later years. Similarly, they didn’t seem to manifest any sort of spiritual maturity until the later years either, so there wasn’t much point in using them. That and they were just so adorable. One of her experiments involved preserving the youthful appearance of toddlers, but it ended… interestingly. She was just glad she didn’t generally have to worry about cleaning up after herself when she did her experiments. The cancer ward was by far more interesting to her and caught her eye the instant she had meandered by it. It was exceptionally advanced, and the biological cultures in the labs were wonderfully exquisite specimens that she had lost quite a few hours in examining. When she finally managed to pull herself away from the lab for a moment, she headed straight for the Headmasters’ office! She was thinking of setting up in a few other hospitals in the area, but she found everything she wanted (plentiful patients, advanced cancer ward, winding underground tunnels, what’s not to love?) here, so why bother continuing her house hunting? She made it to the petit office that bore the label of Headmaster and she wandered in, smelling the familiar aroma of an administrative human soul. They always smelled like stale paper. She had learned many, many years ago that her art tended to draw unwanted attention if she just went ahead and did as she pleased. Unveilings were supposed to be sudden and dramatic after all. So, she had gotten into the habit of notifying the proper channels of her activities ahead of time so she could work undisturbed for however long she intended. The headmaster was a fairly small man, large nose and balding though she thought he was sort of cute in his own way. He was working away when Chandre entered, and he looked up briefly as if he had heard her come in, which tickled Chandre a bit. Usually she had to leave letters of some kind to let her ‘host’ know that she was about and to ignore the missing bodies suddenly riddled with cancerous tumors. It was a process usually, finding some blank paper, drawing some blood from somebody to write with (blood writing had so much more drama she found) and then she had to write it out in front of them for effect, which made spelling errors very embarrassing. But, when they could see or hear her, she could skip all the red tape and just flat out tell them what’s going on. Since this fellow didn’t seem too worried about her being in his office, she figured he could only hear her, maybe make out an outline. He certainly didn’t feel particularly strong in any sense of the word so she decided with a certain amount of glee to exercise her often underused ‘art’ of stage performance. She changed her vocal chords up and widened her chest a bit, giving her a naturally deeper, gravellier voice, honestly trying to mimic the sand tiger from the Disney movie Aladin though keeping a feminine twinge to her. She had avoided working on anybody from that company in fear of delaying or stopping future releases of what she considered some of the finest animated art in this century.
Greetings mortal, I bring to you a warning. She said, and it certainly got the man’s attention as he looked up towards her, but he didn’t seem too perturbed. He just went to his desk and pulled out a small bottle of pills. Chandre was a little curious about this, taking a close look at the tiny bottle as the pudgy fellow wrestled with the lid. Risperdal? C’est pour schitzophrenia si je ne me trompe pas . Est-ce qu'il pense que je suis une illusio?[/i] She had wondered, figuring she may as well set him straight. I am a powerful spirit little man, and I am here to make wonderful art. Each day from now on I shall create something beautiful from the diseased masses in this place and take it to my gallery. If you try to warn anyone, or let this news reach the ears of others, I will return to devour you. Chandre said, trying not to giggle at the melodramatic scene. She found that this sort of over the top stuff made for pretty scared administrators, even though the little guy seemed dedicated to ignoring her. It didn’t really bother her, he’d get the message soon enough when she started working that night. After the first few, she had decided to drive home the idea that this was an event well and truly out of his control, really something that was better to just cooperate. A little push from her and a helpful reminder that she was heartlessly psychopathic was all it took when she threatened to kill everybody in the hospital and left a handprint on his shoulder. She would never kill anybody in the hospital if news got out of course, that was hardly practical and could very well damage future test subjects, but she felt comfortable her bluff wouldn’t be called. Thus, she was left to her own devices, picking out subjects for her art, crafting little infections to pollute their bodies, all the fun stuff for her experiment.
The original piece she crafted at this moment was a simple thing, something she made in the likeness of a centipede but she gave it a single human eye with which to guide it along, and menacing pincers to give it a bit of edge. She held the little fellow up and admired her work for a moment before a candle flame vanished from the crown on her head and began burning in the hole halfway down the sectioned body of the little creature. The previously stoic wax began to move, the many legs of the creature twitching as they took their first steps, the eye looking up at its creator as a baby would to its mother. Allez, regardez autour de la salle de cancer pendant un certain temps , je veux une personne forte cette fois. She held up her hand, a golf ball sized sphere of writhing tendrils and pulsing veins popping up from her palm. The little creature picked up the thing before Chandre lowered her hand to the floor so the two foot long creature could go about its business at her request. It skittered off into the darkness as Chandre stood and dusted herself off before she wandered over to the ‘gallery’ she had been so busy making this past month. She was up to twenty eight pieces of art in her gallery, with one in the hospital above waiting to be collected, and the little fellow she had just let skitter away to cling to the thirtieth. Still, while she did need to go grab up the second last one, she had her rounds to make first, art of this sort needed to be maintained.
This room had once been a culvert of some sort, but she had taken the round room and carved thirty little rooms into the walls each with thick bars made from sturdy wax. In each cell was one of her sculptures which she made out of a human patient and one of her little wax works. The little white creature she crafted would latch onto the patient and start to invade their body, killing them in short order at which point they would become a simple human soul. From there the soul would more or less naturally mutate and become a grand and unique hollow, a true work of art in Chandre’s opinion, especially when standing next to its former body in a sort of morbid ‘before and after’ photo. However, Chandre was presently trying to prolong this process in a mixture of experimentation and curiosity. The hollows were always so… basic when she allowed this process to flow naturally, infected, killed and mutated in a matter of days where a fully formed hollow would sprout from the little soul. In this instance, she was trying to see if the difference of time would yield a different, more beautiful result. She had grabbed one patient at the first of the month, and proceeded to get one a day with her final one coming in tomorrow for the grand unveiling! She kept them alive for as long as she could, and when they finally did die, she held her little babies back as best she could so the soul wouldn’t fester too quickly. She walked up to the first soul she had taken; he had died five days ago when he could no longer digest food or water because his stomach was riddled with holes and his blood was thick with the cancer like cells her wax works produced. He had breathed his last, and it was taking Chandre everything she had to stop him from transforming into a hollow outright. He already had most of a hole formed in his chest, the little chain dangling from a thread as it were, his body bulky with tumors and his skin turning a pale white. His mind had long since been rendered useless from the mixture of pain and the roaming tendrils that racked his body, he just slumped in the corner drooling a thick black tar. Chandre reached through the bars, her arm elongating as it grew extra elbows and her fingers became thinner and more spindly. She caressed the slowly changing face of the man, feeding her creation her own energy to stem its feast on the soul of the man it grew on. She had found this an effective way of slowing its growth, but her earlier estimates proved accurate in that she doubted she could slow it any further than a month. She was furiously curious as to what this man would become and could hardly wait for her final pieces to arrive. Still, she was also happy to see the end of this experiment because it was very taxing on her to feed these creatures her energy, each one growing hungrier by the day in order to keep the growth a slow crawl. She had to wonder if she would repeat the experiment if she found a stronger hollow resulted from this procedure, though she dismissed the question for after the gallery opened. She would have thirty hollows of hopefully varying strengths to look at, and such questions were fit for pondering after the grand event was finished with. For now she had quite a bit of work to accomplish in a fairly short amount of time, making sure that these souls didn’t expire in the next couple of days.
Je veux ton amour et Je veux ta revanche Je veux ton amour Chandre sang as she worked on her last patient/work of art for the evening. This was a young lady who had come in to the hospital for a twisted ankle, and her wax work infection had already turned her leg into an elephantine stump that Chandre was busy pruning to slow its advance even as she administered chemo drugs in a slow IV drip. She didn’t worry too much at this point about slowing the progress of the infection, she could easily keep the girl alive for another two weeks at this rate, and she needed but a couple of days. She let out a little sigh as she finished, fatigue plaguing her from ‘feeding’ her little pets to keep their growth in check. She slipped through the bars of her final patient when she felt the return of her candle flame flicker to life on her mask. Qu’est-ce que la? She wondered, walking over to the entrance to her gallery, content that everybody would still be roughly human by the time she came back. Her candle flame returning to her crown meant that the little guy had died, which was very unlikely, or managed to infect somebody. There were no mortals around save the Headmaster that could see them, and even he wouldn’t be able to stop one from infecting him, but she had told the little creature to find somebody, not attach yet.
She was heading upstairs to collect the second last patient anyway, figuring she could investigate what happened to the little centipede creature along the way. Her next patient was an elderly fellow with a bad kidney that she had infected earlier that morning. Her initial treatment would prevent anything further than a simple tumour from forming, and despite her exhaustion, she needed to get to him soon. He needed immediate treatment to prevent him from turning too soon so she hustled down the maze like tunnels of the underground sewer to get to the hospital. She stopped about half way between her gallery and the hospital though as she caught the unmistakable scent of a shinigami. If she had a heart, she would have felt it sink at the idea that her new home and gallery would be shut down by the black robed art haters right before her unveiling. What are you doing here mon ami? She whispered to herself as she stalked closer to the shinigami she could feel wandering the tunnels above her. She couldn’t sense any other shinigami, just this lone fellow, and she wondered if she would be able to take him out before he became too much of an issue. Stealth wasn’t really her finest suit when it came to her rietsu unless she had something else to disguise herself as, which in this instance she really didn’t. Instead she decided to keep her distance and at least one tunnel wall between them just to be safe. The shinigami didn’t seem terribly strong, fairly on par with her when she was at her best if she was to guess (again, rietsu wasn’t something she paid much attention to). However, she was fairly drained after feeding her art, not really up to a full scale fight if she could help it. I will have to play this smart then. She thought, trying to remember the layout of the tunnels she had roamed this past month, and thought of the perfect place to draw the shinigami in. She moved below him as closely as possible, drawing him to a small sewer grate that separated the tunnels. She used this grate to move up to the next tunnel when she went to fetch her new pieces instead of going the long way around which she had to do when bringing them back down. It took her a moment to focus on the shinigami, try and confirm where it stood and get a decent feel for where the head may be. With her best guess in mind, she thrust her hand up through the grate and formed a wickedly talonned claw with which she meant to grab him around the skull. Her hand grasped on fairly well, which was a pleasant surprise for her (usually it was a one in four attempt sort of deal with her third eye), and she pulled down hard. She heard the clunk of the shinigami’s skull ramming against the metal grate, could feel the metal buckling under the force of the strike as her arm was flowing around it. Still, she felt another good thump should do it and pulled again, this time as hard as she could with as much mass as she could put into her arm. The shinigami came crashing through the floor, and Chandre had to side step quickly to avoid being hit by the debris. She got ready to fight, forming a blade of sorts in her other arm, but the white haired shinigami fell unconscious soon after she got ready to stab him. Hmm. That went well. Chandre chirped happily, growing a few extra arms to help carry the large man along with her, though technically one was a lobster clawed tentacle and the other was something similar to a wing if birds were furry instead of feathery.
The walk back was slow going unfortunately, and very tiring to the candle work hollow. This shinigami was really, really heavy, and depleted as she was she couldn’t summon help to cart him along. Still, she did eventually make it back to the gallery where she had a cozy cell ready and waiting that she dumped his body into. The little room was meant for the man who was in all likeliness dead now because she hadn’t been able to get up there and slow the progress of her growth on the man’s body. Still, she felt she had a net gain as she deposited the shinigami into the cell with a heave, glad to have that weight off her shoulders. She knew the effects of her growths on shinigamis for the most part, they degraded at the same rate as humans if they were weak enough, though some managed to reject her gifts in short order. She couldn’t tell if this shinigami was weak or not, but figured she would test her luck with him seeing as she managed to knock him out with a couple of well timed lumps to the head. She scooped up a little ball of wax from her cloak, playing with it and molding it with her fingers until it resembled a grape-fruit sized eyeball with squirming tendrils all about it. It was a quick little work, fairly derivative, but the shinigami had sped her timetable along a touch, so she couldn’t put as much love into this little critter as she would have liked. She did, however, leave the candle alight in the center of the thing just in case the Shinigami had the strength to remove it, the little tumour could come and find her. She gingerly placed the growth onto the shinigami’s leg and watched as the tendrils wove themselves into the man’s skin, sinking in like hungry roots taking their first taste of earth. It was well and solidly attached within a few moments, the ‘eyeball’ fusing seamlessly with the shinigami’s skin with only a change in colour to show where one began and the other ended. Chandre put her hand on the growth, infusing it with a healthy stock of rietsu to feed on so it didn’t progress too quickly. Chandre felt the drop in her power, though it was necessary if she wanted her experiment to continue on track. She left the cell and raised the bars to keep her latest acquisition from running off on her before she headed back to her workshop. She needed to rest, recoup some of her lost energy, maybe find something to eat if she had time.
Oh, some food sounds delightful. When was the last time I ate? She wondered as she took a seat at her work bench, happy to get off her feet for a moment. She thought back to earlier the day before when she had meandered the hospital and consumed a few wondering souls from the recently deceased. It was a bit annoying eating the already dead, but it was handy in maintaining her anonymity, as well she didn’t run the risk of killing an interesting living subject. In this day and age it was hard to identify which humans were ‘normal’ and boring, and which ones could hurl cars about like softballs, or were going to come up with the next Tesla Coil. I suppose I should go then, wander around and get something to snack on. Maybe I can still save that last man as well, that would be a pleasant bonus. She would have liked that honestly, it would mean she was done collecting and only needed to keep up maintenance until the unveiling. She was about to head out when she heard some grumbling from her gallery, figuring her latest patient was conscious again. She considered just leaving, letting him sit until she came back, but that would hardly be polite, not to mention she had so few opportunities for good conversation. She walked in front of the cell, taking stock of the shinigami for a moment as he looked up at her, no doubt admiring her lovely body.
I'm so lucky. I get to add a shinigami to my gallery. Oh, you will be beautiful when I'm done with you, just stay in there and let my baby fester a while. She said, looking at her little baby on the man’s rather muscular leg. She briefly wondered if the little guy would survive long now that the shinigami was awake. It wasn’t impossible to remove the thing, though doing so took more strength of will than most had, or a medical knowledge even fewer boasted. She waited a moment for the shinigami to say something, actually have a back and forth of some kind. She didn’t even care if all he did was berate her or say something cliché like ‘you’ll never get away with this’ but the heavy built man didn’t say a peep. She sighed a bit mentally, but tried to stay in an upbeat mood for the shinigami’s sake. I'll be back soon, after I collect my next work the gallery will be complete. Then you can all be marvelled at as a proper collection before I devour you. Ah I always love when a gallery is unveiled for the first time! She said, giving him a wave before trotting back out to the sewer tunnels hoping to grab something quick to eat before coming back. She has a touch upset that the shinigami was so tight lipped, and also a little unhappy that the large fellow had little enough value to her present experiment, but catching a shinigami was too rare for her to ignore.
She made her way into the sewer tunnels, over to where she had pulled the shinigami through the floor. She hopped on up and made her way over to an air duct, taking the quicker route than she did when she came down with cargo. When it was just her, she could slither into the pipes and vents, traveling the empty channels like a tight and solitary highway. She found that pipes around three centimeters or larger were easy enough to ‘flow’ through, and there were a number of larger pipes that allowed her such freedom of movement. On her way back down she generally had to take more conventional routes due to hauling a human along for the ride. They usually didn’t survive being squeezed into a foot wide pipe and dragged through the various twists and turns that she took with indifference. What took a good twenty minutes on foot was a matter of minutes via her unique mode of motion, coming out from her trip in a janitor’s closet from an unused sewer drain. She took a moment to dust herself off before heading out into the halls of the hospital, where she looked around to see if there were any wandering souls meandering about. Unfortunately, she was surrounded by the living, nurses scurrying about in their colourful uniforms, rushing to and from a room down the hall. Curious despite her rather hurried schedule, Chandre walked over to the window where she saw two people on beds, blood smeared clothes and doctors swarming around like piranha around a slab of meat.
Oooh, this I have to see. Chandre chirped to herself, slithering into the operating room where the emergency crew were doing what they could to save lives. Chandre considered medicine an artful science, taking steady hands and delicate touches even the savviest painter would cherish. Watching an artist work was always inspiring to her, and she could hardly ignore such an opportune display. It was a man and a woman, a lovely couple really, fairly young as well. The man was just shy of six feet tall with distinctive blond hair, nice physique and what looked like a collapsed trachea judging by the bruising on his neck. He’ll be breathing through a tube for a bit, but should be just fine… She was unimpressed, it didn’t take much effort to fix that sort of thing and she was a little grumpy that she wasn’t going to get to eat him. Chandre moved to take a closer look at the woman, a lovely little thing about five and half feet tall, short brown hair and petite frame. Her chest was opened up and doctors hurried to pull glass and debris from the open wound while others tried to bandage up her torn face. She was much, much more interesting to watch, the steady hands wielding tweezers like a mindful clock maker. Her attention was dragged away by a pair of nurses talking by the door.
It was a car crash, they’ve rushed the little girl to OR 3, make sure Dr. Matsuada is paged. Chandre heard as the senior nurse directed her subordinate upstairs. While children weren’t of particular interest to her, her curiosity had taken hold well and proper. Besides, OR 3 was on the way to where she was going anyway, and she may as well see if there were any souls to snack on.
She walked the halls quickly, slithering and slinking past the staff and patients who were busily making their way through their daily routine. OR 3 was on the next floor up, and so was the cancer ward, so she decided to stop by and see the little one first before looking for her little creature. Through the window she could see a flurry of doctors busily trying to save the life of the little girl that had been in the accident with her parents. She felt a little sad for the doctors and nurses, it was always frustrating when you did your work and it came to no fruition. Chandre knew that they weren’t going to get anywhere with this little girl because her soul was sitting in the corner crying, the chain on her chest severed and dangling. Chandre took a moment before entering the room to change, shifting her form to be a little shorter, put on some nicer clothes (a pink shawl, white lace dress, even giving her skin a pink fleshy tone instead of the usual pale white. She walked over to the little girl in the corner, trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.
Hello mon enfant, you must be so scared. Here, come with me, you don’t need to see this. Chandre said, holding out a slender hand for the girl. The crying girl seemed nervous at first, but took the outstretched hand. Chandre very gently picked the girl up into her arms and wiped her tears away as they walked into the hall. What is your name petit? She asked, making her way back to the stairs.
Ts-Tsuki… there wasa –sniff- a car acciment. The little girl said, clearly not quite grasping the situation.
Oh my dear, yes there was, I’m going to take you to see your parents right now though. Chandre said, the little girl seeming to perk up at the news.
Really? Is mommy an’ daddy okay? She asked, trying to clear her eyes.
The doctors and nurses are doing their best little one, we’ll have to wait and see. Chandre said as they went down the stairs and rounded the corner. Chandre was a little surprised to see the mother standing in the hallway, bleeding from the head and chest, but otherwise seeming find. She realized that the doctors had failed when she saw the little chain in the woman’s chest, which was a bit disappointing.
Mommy! The girl exclaimed, Chandre putting the girl down so she could run to her newly deceased parent. The mother seemed similarly pleased to see her little girl, also apparently not grasping what had happened her. The mother and daughter embraced and cried as Chandre made her way over to them.
Hello Ms, I found your daughter upstairs. Now, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but you didn’t survive the car crash. You’re both little angels now, and you’re new lives are about to begin. She said, the woman and little girl looking both concerned at the news and elated at at least being together for this next step in their ‘lives’ so to speak. That all switched to abject horror when Chandre opened her mouth (which ran down the length of her body like a zipper opening up), and swallowed the mother and child whole. She warped and twisted as a mass of liquid wax for a moment or two before standing back up in her normal white cloak covered body. Mmm, they seemed like good people. Really hit the spot too. She said to herself as she pondered eating the husband too, letting them all be together in her roiling body. She dismissed the thought, she didn’t want to be a little piggy, and she had work to do. She meandered back upstairs to the cancer wards to see if she could find a suitable final piece for her gallery as well as recover the older gentleman who may or may not be dead at this point. She managed to find him in more or less an alive state, giving him another quick shot of rietsu to keep him kicking. It was probably the only time she’d have to do that before the unveiling since he would take the next two days to degenerate into a hollow, right on schedule for the rest of the gallery. She left him in his bed and began to look around some more, see if she could get one more person into the gallery. They’d have to share a cell with the Shinigami, but that wasn’t too bad really. She was looking around for maybe thirty minutes when she felt something odd. She say it rolling down the hall, a little splash of blood on the otherwise pale white body of the tendril covered tumour she had planted in the Shinigami not even an hour prior. This meant the Shinigami was strong enough to remove it, and that meant he was possibly strong enough to escape or damage her gallery! She let out a roar in frustration, running down the hall, scooping up her little tumour baby and subsuming it into her body. She quickly jumped into the nearest vent, squirming through the pipes down to the lower levels where she could take the sewer drains and plumbing back to her gallery in a fairly quick manner. She exited as close as she could, not sensing the Shinigami anywhere nearby. She rushed to her gallery entrance, finding a massive jut of rock blocking her path! Written on the stone wedged in the entrance of her gallery was written:
I’ve removed your disgusting ‘art’ from my body beast. I’ll see you in the hospital if you wish to try me again.
Chandre roared again in anger and frustration, smashing through the rock in her true form, multiple legs and arms of various types sloshing together in an ever changing amalgamation. She stopped to find her pieces of art intact and safe, letting out a sigh of relief as she returned to her composed form.
This insult will not stand! I’m going to enjoy devouring him slowly! She screamed, rushing off to the pipes again to follow her prey. She could feel him, surging his energy, beckoning to her, goading her into a fight that she was happy to oblige. She ran through the walls, coalescing in a pipe just over the shinigami’s head before plunging to the ground. She had hoped to envelope him quickly and have this battle done with before it began, but the large man was faster than he looked. She flung to the assault, the ring of the fire alarm blaring in her ears only serving to echo her own anger. She attacked as she normally did, furiously and with the chaos that was born of her unique body. She struck at him with lizard a lizard like tail, wracked at him with talons, struck at him with ram like horns, but she was met at each turn with his blade or a strange metal shield he had lashed to his arm. She felt some fingers go every now and again as well, and she knew that this man was much more skilled than she had originally given him credit for. Still, he didn’t get a strike in for most of the fight up to this point, seemingly kept on his toes with the constant onslaught of attacks Chandre was buffeting him with. They slowly moved from the utilities room to the halls of the hospital, evacuated due to the fire alarm that the Shinigami had likely pulled. It didn’t matter to her though, he was her soul focus at this exact moment. When they were fully in the hall, she could see the Shinigami come in with a stab of his sword, finally making a truly offensive attack. Chandre had to act quickly, separating her right arm from her body just as his sword bin into her shoulder. She used one of the candle lights on her mask to light a life in the arm, turning the little half arm half blade into a Madonna Litta. With a flick and a well-acted roar, the Shinigami thought it had successfully loped off one of her arms. He came in with a large chop, hoping to take advantage of the situation only for Chandre to catch his blade in her left hand. His blade ripped through her hand and a bit of her forearm before coming to a stop near her wrist. It was thoroughly painful, but she healed quickly and otherwise had a firm grip on his sword. She held him steady as she commanded her little Madonna Litta to latch onto the large man. Chandre hoped that she could use it to strangle the Shinigami, but he wrenched his sword free and proceeded to lop the creature off from his back, killing the poor thing. Chandre would have considered the motion beautifully surgical if she wasn’t fully intent on hating this man. She came in with a punch, a thickened skull like hand sporting dagger like horns rammed into the man’s side, sending him flying before he could bring up an appropriate defense. She saw him go flying down the hall, sliding to a stop against the wall as his blood decorated the floor. Chandre thought she was victorious, but the Shinigami got to his feet, using his sword like a cane as he staggered around the corner and down the hall. Chandre hurried after him, staying cautious in case he tried any weird tricks that she knew Shinigami were fond of pulling. She came around the corner, seeing that his blade had changed like the shinigami’s blades were apt to do. It was a tarnished silver sword, looking old and well-worn with similarly tarnished chains wrapping around his arms. She didn’t really care though, the wound she had given him would kill him regardless of how his sword had changed shape. Or so she thought. She was a little surprised when one of the chains came to life like a snake and plunged right through her like a bullet. She was almost too shocked to notice the pain, but then she received a real shock when the chain met the socket of the fluorescent light just above her and she felt the full wattage of a major metropolitan hospital surge through her body. It was very uncomfortable to say the least. She bellowed in agony as she Shinigami hurried up the stairs, moving much better than a man injured as he was should. She slithered as quickly as she could off of the chain, the smell of her own burnt waxen flesh filling the hall. She pulled the chain from the light socket, wondering if she could use it to strangle the Shinigami in an ironic death, subsuming it into her body before running up the stairs to chase the man.
She launched from the top of the stair well and tackled the Shinigami to the ground, pinning his arms down, one with a massive gorilla like hand and the other with a blade similar to a pair of scissors jutting through his forearm.
You will be my ART! She bellowed in his face, planning to perforate his body with a good hundred or so spikes forming on her underside.
Actually, you will be my patient! He shouted back, which confused Chandre quite a bit. That’s when one of the other silver chains this man had wrapped around her neck and pulled her off of him. She went flying through a window into the kemo treatment room she had spent a considerable amount of time admiring when she had first arrived at the hospital. She morphed around back to her feet (of which she was currently sporting five, though one was more of a shelf with cutlery on it and another was a hybrid PC and potato) in time to see the Shinigami rush in and toss some IV bags at her. She sliced through them with a talloned hand and without a second thought. The medicine in the bags splashed all over her and she realized what was going just as the Shinigami hit the start button on the radiation machine. She could feel the power of the radiation blistering her body, targeting the radiation tags in the medicine and burning her to her core. She tried to shield herself from the onslaught, but to no avail as the radiation was powerful enough to light the bed and paper in the room on fire! She had almost given up hope when she spotted a drain in the floor, and slithered into it as quickly as she could. To the Shinigami it must have looked like she had melted into nothing but a pool of goo on the floor, but she had managed to escape into the pipes. She was, however, hurt very, very badly.
You… will be… my art one day, Shinigami… She said weakly, her voice echoing through the pipes as she slithered away. She finally came to a stop in an unused sewer tunnel she didn’t recognize, slumping against the wall in a heap. She was breathing heavily, her cloak thin and dripping around her, even her candles only a dull glow atop her crown. She could feel her body trying to stitch itself back together, but it was slow, her energy nearly depleted and her lazily shifting body in shambles. I am… I am going to be alright… right? She wondered before she fell unconscious.
She awoke next in a start, her body feeling much better as her high speed regeneration did its job and put her back in working order. She was very hungry though, and she had no idea how much time had passed since she had done battle with that blasted Shinigami. She rushed through the pipes to get back to the hospital, knowing that if she didn’t eat soon she may devolve! She burst through the pipes in the headmaster’s office, unfortunate for him that he was the closest stop for her and the most powerful soul in the hospital. She ate him, full body and all, hoping that she was quick enough to beat the clock. She looked at the time on the wall, seeing that it had been only eight or so hours from when she last ate. She had been out for nearly all of that time, but she could sense the Shinigami had moved on. She was both relieved and angered that he was gone, knowing that she didn’t want to have to fight him, but also that he was likely in as poor condition as she had been.
I, I shouldn’t dwell. I need to check on my gallery, maybe he left it alone… She wondered, making her way back into the pipes. She returned to find that each of the souls and bodies she had infected were gone, stolen by the Shinigami and their profane ‘burial’ that they forced on all they found. Her anger was only quieted by her weariness, she was still exhausted as she made her way to her lab in the adjoining culvert. It was still whole and in one piece, thank goodness. With that checked on, she made her way back up to the surface, she had to find a new place to call home as that Shinigami would likely send more of his kind to see if they could find her. She walked on the lawn of the hospital, trying to remember which way was the next hospital she had liked when she saw something that surprised her. Sitting on the lawn crying was the Shinigami! His muscular frame, silver hair, though he was in a suit, not Shinigami robes, and he didn’t have any rietsu to speak of.
Did boss forget me? It lamented, which made Chandre guess that it was one of those soul candies in an artificial body! She had always wanted to get her hands on one of those! She slithered up next to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.
Don’t cry my sweet, you and I are going to make wonderful art together! she said with a grin, feeling much better already.
Item Materials Collected:
Portion of a shinigami’s zanpactou
Standard Soul Pill
Standard Gigai
Word Count: 7415
