ArchivedLogs:The Cat and The Roach

The Cat and The Roach
A fated meeting, perhaps?
Dramatis Personae Noah Ringe, Rasputin	2013-11-17 As Rasputin leads hir cats to safety, ze chats up a strange mutant. (Part of Infected TP.)
Location <NYC> Upper East Side
One of the most affluent neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Upper East Side is home to the rich and... rich. Swanky apartments, upscale shopping, posh restaurants, this is the place to go if you have money and need somewhere to spend it. Well, one of the places to go. New York does not really have a shortage of them. Before anyone sees the monsterous mutuant visually, the sound of him always foreshadows it. It's a very high pitched shriek; it enters well up into a range that humans can't hear, and makes dogs react and bark and howl at the upper register. A shriek that has no emotion to it, just a thin eerie release into the city that bounces off buildings as it echoes. Indeed, it's quite appropriate for the horrific, apocalyptic setting that the zombies have created. Noah is active on the street, climbing over a car, ignoring several zombies that mill near him. There's about two-dozen walking dead in this area, wandering about, hunting. Noah's covered in a mix of filth, entrails and the sewage of the disarray left by the zombies, from crawling over and through corpses, several twisting pieces of the dead stuck to his mutated, spined back and long tail. It is a crawling behemoth. A few zombies trail along after him, confused by climbing the car, but he does have a bit of an entourage of the dead, though some ignore him. A sharp eye or ear will notice a plastic trash bag in his taloned grip that bangs on things with a tinny noise of canned food. Maybe one or two cans. Very meager pickings, but suggestive that he's not a zombie abomination: they usually don't get their food to-go. In the midst of all of this, a group of cats are making their way through the street, seven in total. They're all running, being lead by a fluffy white cat in the front of the group. As Rasputin and hir band of merry cats keep running, they hear the shriek, all of them raising their head and stopping. And then the zombies spot the cats, and the cats are making speed again, trying not to get caught in the mob. Noticing the huge influx of zombies, Rasputin looks back at the others, and makes some sort of expression, before flexing hir tail to the left of hir, causing two of the cats to run to the left. Rasputin then does this to the other side, with two cats going that way, as Rasputin leads the last two hirself, dodging around through the streets and avoiding the shambling monsters. And then Rasputin spots Noah, both noticing and hearing the bag, and heads towards his way with hir cats, as the other groups of cats hide temporarily. The cats aren't the only ones interested. The noisy Noah is very attractive: he's a bright (noisy) light to these zombies. Ones that might have been looking at the cats are quite interested in his next shriek as he squats and lunges over a truck's back, part of his tail slamming hard with a loud thud into the back of it. He's acting a bit... heavy, or tired. There's a zombie on the opposite side of the truck that Noah turns away from in a half-circle, using his momentum, heavy tail thrown out, and clubs the zombie heavily into an alley and garbage bin pile. He pauses, the bag making crinkling sounds, as Noah kind of jiggles it: listening to the bag's contents rattle for a few moments, and mostly unconcerned with the zombie groupies. And thus far, hasn't reacted to the cats. It just so, unfortunately happens, that the alley that the zombie flew into was hiding one of the pairings of cats, and the zombie nearly crushed them. Rasputin notices this, but the two are able to escape before the zombie gets up. Using the sounds from all the zombies, Rasputin changes them into a loud, shouting sentence, directed at Noah, but not bringing attention to the cats as it doesn't actually come from Rasputin. "Hey, watch where you're tossing those things, you almost hit two of my cats! Are you alright, need any assistance?". The voice out of nowhere clearly startles Noah. He drops his head lower and breathes in heavily and deeply, trying to orient to what spoke. "Cats?" Noah demands, a little loudly, as if he wasn't sure how loud to be to reach the ears of whomever he's talking to. His voice is thick like a heavy smoker's, but is very pitchy on top, much like his raspy scream's register. If there was any question the screams came from him, that'd clear that up right away. "Oh, I see you," Noah says, towards a zombie that's working it's way over a car kind of slowly. "I thought you were a zombie," he tells the zombie in annoyance. "Are you stuck--? Why aren't they attacking you?" Noah asks quickly, with sudden interest. Again, focused on the zombie, that was the most logical one that must be the voice source. Noah talks but his jaw doesn't fully move. Low slung and thickly fanged and barbed, Noah's kind of half-shouting through the teeth: like as if talking through gritted teeth. "You're talking to a zombie, actually.". Another sound wave off Rasputin's comes off the zombie. "Before you get too confused, this is actually the cat over there talking. Don't think about it too hard.". If Noah looks over towards Rasputin, ze waves hir tail at him, before sending hir two charges into hiding, being alone now. "But, eh, us mutants come in many batches, it'd seem. I'm a talking cat. Or, sound manipulating cat. I don't really know.". Rasputin shrugs hir head a bit, before approaching Noah in the most zombie-free path. Noah stays relatively still, as if taking in all of the sound waves or commentary from the talkative Rasputin. "...Sounds funny, this zombie," Noah says, without much reaction to the rest of it at first, and does a quick breath, a sharp little burst of screech. A sneeze, really. It seems that whatever he got from that, though, relaxes him a good deal, because he orients almost immediately towards the cat, as if suddenly noticing it. But he doesn't fully turn to face the cat, just kind of half-turns, since, well, there's no eyes to be of use here. "Sound manipulating... uh. I guess. Well, whoever. Your echoes look bizarre," Noah informs him, matter-of-factly. Well, informs the whole street; Noah's loud. The zombie at the car that he had been addressing works his way over it, and two others reach Noah's flank and tail around that same time, and directly latch on and kind of bite at Noah's dark slimy spines. Noah doesn't even move, as if it was no big deal; he adds to Rasputin: "....Why a cat?" "Uh, are you alright? They're kind of. attacking you. I'd help but I don't have any abilities other than the ones I mentioned and the best I could do is irritate them.". Hopefully, Rasputin isn't irritating Noah with these sound waves ze is sending. When Noah asks Rasputin why ze's a cat, Rasputin sighs. "Short version or long version? Well, I'll do medium version since I don't know how much time I have to evacuate my cats. Human body is six feet under, don't even remember anything from that life except what I've picked up, but that has nothing to do with why I'm a cat so. I'm an animal possessor, you see, so I chose the body that would last me the longest and have the most use to it. Cats are fast, smart, and well..that's it.". Rasputin continues to watch the zombies attacking Noah. "That looks painful..for them, atleast?". "They can't harm me," Noah says, offhandedly about the zombies, as if he wasn't interested at the moment in discussing why the zombies are not a problem, and is more focused on the cat-sonic-manipulator. "So you left your body and entered a cat," Noah says, a little bit skeptically, but it doesn't sound like he's going to challenge it. He seems to consider, and then starts directly towards Rasputin, closing the distance some -- which means the zombies get dragged bodily along closer, too. "You could teach me to switch bodies?" Noah wonders, in a tone that is probably painfully hopeful. It reeks of hope: much like a dying person asks a healer mutant to help them. If the sound misdirection is annoying, Noah isn't particularly showing it. Then again, with no face, facial expressions are out. "...oh. But I'd still have my ability anyway. Nevermind." Frustrated, grumpy, moody in tone. One of those mutants that isn't terribly emotionally stable, maybe. Rasputin makes a 'phew' sound when Noah confirms his safety. And then Noah asks about body-swapping teaching, to which Rasputin awkwardly responds. "Well, uh..it's my mutation, so I don't /think/ I could teach it to you? Also, being an animal isn't too fun, especially when Animal Control is called.". Rasputin does notice Noah's desperation though. "If I could though, I'd totally teach you. I'm Rasputin, by the way.". Rasputin looks towards hir cats, still hiding. "Right, well, uh, scaled person, I need to get my band of cats to safety. It was..nice meeting you, I guess.". And then Rasputin heads out, gathering his cats, using Noah as a distraction to slip past the zombies. Noah is very, very still when told that he can't be taught how to leave his current body behind. He doesn't freak out, or yell, or do /anything/ at all, just sits there, while the zombies make noises trying to claw and bite at his armored back. "I go by..." there's a pause as if deciding what to say. "Roach," he ends up with. He sounds a little withdrawn, or deadpan, perhaps aware that he sounded hopeful or desperate. He just kind of stands there on the pavement, and draws his sad little baggie of canned goods in a little closer as Rasputin gets his cats and moves on; his remaining company only the zombies in the otherwise desolate street.