Xaviers!

"If she went down there, she's probably still inside," she says as she feels the area out with her mind.

Sam couldn't immediately detect Will, or Mel, or whatever she was calling herself now.

However, what might be more interesting is that she couldn't detect anything from inside. Not 'no one's in there'; more like the shop...didn't exist, as far as her telepathy was concerned.

"Miriam, has this... presence you found ever blocked you?"

"No. This makes no sense." she says, putting a hand on the door as if that would somehow help her push through whatever strangeness is going on behind it with her mind.

It didn't. There was a slight...mental buzz? A hum? ...behind the door, but nothing else that she could detect.

"Somebody break down this door. I'd do it myself, but I have a limit for how much I'm willing to embarrass myself in a day."

"That's...probably me then. For the sake of safety. Give me some room, aye?" She says as she approaches the door.

“We could also try to force the lock,” Tereza quietly muses, stepping to Sam with ice playing around the fingers of her right hand. “It doesn’t always have to be kicking in the door.”

"I don't care if you gnaw your way through. Just get it open!"

Miriam's snap makes Tereza's eyes go briefly yellow and she starts to spin on the other woman before she reigns herself in and focuses on the door. Her eyes start to glow as the ice coats her hand and she presses it against the doorknob, sliding the into the locking mechanism and trying to skeleton key the door open.

It's a tattoo parlor, not a secret government base. After a little bit of fidgeting and wiggling, Tereza is able to pop open the door, though there's a line between "picking the lock" and "breaking the lock" that we won't get into here.

It is not the most up-and-up looking tattoo parlor in the world, even with the lights on. It has sort of a grungy feeling to it -- certainly not the sort of sterile feel you would expect from a more modern shop, although it's probably still perfectly safe. The walls were covered with sample designs of various degrees of tastefulness, and various workstations, fancy chairs and whatnot surrounded the room. There was a mirror on one end, reflecting two of the three inhabitants of the room.

The 'fuzz' was strong in here, though it didn't dampen the outside world. Sam and Miriam could still sense the outside just fine. What was interesting, however, was that they would begin to have trouble mentally feeling each other and Tereza as they walked into the shop. That feeling got stronger towards the door to the back room, where a red glow was pooling out. The closer any of the three got to the back room, the harder it would be to pick them up telepathically (though not impossible).

Focusing on the area with their powers would give Sam and Miriam a bit of a headache. Not a crippling migraine, but, like, trying to read something in way too small a font. Mindstrain, as it were.


No immediate sign of Will, though with her powerset, that didn't necessarily mean anything.

"What is this? Some sort of machine?"

"It doesn't feel like a psi-dampener." Miriam decides, stalking towards the door and trying to yank it open, throwing any kind of caution tot he wind.

The back room was...a storeroom!

...OK, that's not particularly dramatic, but whatchagondo.


Most of the stuff back here is what you would expect. Lots of ink, some needles, things like that.

There was also a cardboard box, filled with...something. Balls, about the size of a softball, which were glowing red. These seemed to be at the centerpoint of the mental fuzz.

"...I'm going out on a limb and saying those aren't essential to the day to day business of a tattoo parlor."

"Doubtful."

Miriam reaches into the box to pick up one of the orbs to get a better look at it.

The ball was slightly warm to the touch, and had some wires and technical doo-dads on it. Not being a techy herself, Miriam couldn't quite figure out what everything was supposed to be. It did look homemade, as opposed to something professionally made and mass produced -- bespoke, artisanal glowing red balls, perhaps?

________________

As Sam and Miriam poked around in the backroom, Tereza stayed in the front. The trail of Will definitely went through here, but...it hadn't seemed to come back out. At least, it didn't come back out the front door...and there didn't appear to be a back exit, from her current vantage point...

Miriam frowns, no idea what to make of any of this, and starts yanking the wires out of the thing.

"What are you doing?"

Tereza looks around, looking at some of the tattoo images on the wall, looking at the equipment, trying to get a feel of whether 'Will' was hiding out here.

Tereza's instincts were spot on!

However, with hundreds of potential things to search through, finding Will was, shall we say, a challenge.

So it's while she's studying some of the awesome tattoo images on the wall that she's grabbed from behind.

__________

The floor slid up, pooling together and forming into...well, a green-haired pallet swap of Miriam. One arm wrapped itself around Tereza's midsection. The other elongated into spikes, piercing the side of Tereza's neck -- not deep enough to actually do any permanent damage, but close enough to make it clear that permanent damage could be done, if she so desired.


"Well, well. Isn't this a cozy ménage à trois?"

Tereza stands perfectly still, her eyes trying to go yellow, but knowing losing it right now is only going to get her killed. Instead, she just growls.

Miriam spins around, the partially disassembled orb still in hand.

"Bloody hell..."

Sam's expression hardens as she turns around and sees what has happened.

"If you harm her, you're going to wish you'd stayed hidden."

"In that case, why don't we all stay in our respective corners, before this dog is put down, yes? Sounds good to you, Sammy?"

"What do you want?" Miriam asks, knuckles turning white from clutching the orb as she tries to push through the mental fuzz and into Willpomene's head.

If anything, the fuzz seemed just as strong in Willpomene's head as it did in the box, oddly.

"What does everyone want, darling? A little fun, a little excitement...a little freedom."

"I've seen what passes as fun for you and even I'm not on board with that." she growls.

Somewhere to the north a small figure is silhouetted against the clouds as she flies through the air. Occasionally she wobbles a bit in the air, the weight of the cast on one of her legs throwing her off balance a bit and forcing her to right herself, tail whipping behind her to try and help the weight-differential. Her eyes are glued to her phone and the tracking app on it, following the coordinates of Sam's phone. She doesn't know why, only that it's important. So she keeps going until the signal leads her all the way to Brighton, the sun beginning to peek over the horizon and splaying her shadow across the bottom of the clouds.

"If you wanted to just disappear, you wouldn't have done what you did in the station."

"You can't blame a girl for stretching her legs a little bit after being cooped up for so long," Willpomene smiled. "It's been ages."

"If you think we're just going to let you walk away..."

Miriam seems to genuinely consider the trade-off of risking Tereza getting hurt. She might not even die and letting Melpomene out into the world inhabiting Will's body would definitely be worse. She takes a step forward, out of the backroom...

Flashes of blood, fangs, friends tearing into each other... She doesn't quite understand the why or how, all Nailah knows is that something bad is going to happen. Or could. The tracker brought her close enough to the general vicinity that she spots the forced door into a basement and Nailah dives. Catching herself at the last moment she's carried forward, trying not to think how close the very solid looking steps are to her as she folds her wings around herself to fly through the open door. With pretty much no time to react to what is happening inside she simply crashes into Willpomene's back with her shoulder and goes tumbling across the floor until she hits one of the bolted-down tattooing seats with her back, the impact driving the air from her lungs.

Presumably cursing her lack of telepathy, Willpomene went tumbling to the floor, losing her grip on Tereza as she did so.

As she slammed into the the ground, she shifted around, back-to-front, and sprung to her feet again, making a dash for the exit.

Tereza collapses forward from the impact, rolling to her shoulder as she sees her attacker making a break for the door. Her eyes glow bright white and her hair fades to the same color as she gestures, trying to close off the open doorway with ice before Willpomene can escape.

Will's hands shifted to drills, a mechnical whine filling the room as she drilled and punched through the ice.

She didn't need to make a huge crack, because as soon as there was any passage through, she smashed herself against the surface, melding and shifting her way until she shot through, towards the streets of Brighton.

"Damn it, she's getting away! Tereza, can you clear the ice?"

Running from the hopped up predator is probably not the best move. The wolf in Tereza's head growls, Enough. Mine. And Tereza actually lets go of the reins. Shrugging out of her jacket, she leaps at the ice, form changing in mid-leap as she crashes through the ice. But the ice is hers and gives way before her, clinging to her four-legged form like bits of armor as she clambers up the steps and takes off at top speed after Willpomene.

Nailah groans and rolls onto her back before sitting up and seeing a giant wolf barrel through the iced up door, only to scoot backwards to narrowly avoid Miriam sprinting past her.

It turns out, in the global hierarchy of things, that werewolves run faster than shifters.

Tereza caught up to Will pretty quickly, and leapt at her, jaws clamping down hard on the trailing arm. The crunch of bone and the snapping of tendons isn't the most pleasant sound to most people. Maybe it's music to a werewolf's ears?

Most people would go down in a heap if their elbow had just been crushed by a werewolf. However, this was not most people. It was both a) a shifter and b) a psychopath tasting her first bit of freedom in...well, fill in the blank here.

The arm came off at the shoulder, sending Tereza staggering backwards a bit as it came loose. Will spun around and swung her other arm at Tereza, shifting to heavy-duty steel as it connected. Without waiting to see if it did serious damage, she dashed to the left, spawning other legs and arms as she went. Each one grabbed onto purchase points on the wall as Will started crawling up it, headed towards the rooftops.