Inside 67: Shadow over Innside

[UncleWolf]

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Spoiler: Orphanage Spoils

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[Golden Flock Orphanage]

~Ithuriel~

There is resistance, as the angel tries to push the girl through her portal.
Some from the girl herself, who really doesn't want to go, but most of it is from those chains springing back into existence and fighting pretty hard to keep her here.
Applying some divine oomph of her own, however, is enough for Ithuriel to win the little pushing match and shove the girl through.

The chains around the girl, rather than snapping, seem to fade a bit and pass through the girl.
Wrapped up in the chains instead, as they are pulled away from the girl is a mass of twitching gray energy in a sort of vaguely human shape, though that is rapidly collapsing to a more general shapelessness.

This moment of peculiar separation lasts in peaceful stasis just long enough for Ithuriel to see the difference, before the yelling starts.
Yelling from the girl, as she grows pale and drained in time for the portal to close.
Yelling from the energy mass, as the chains snap off to some distant portion of the orphanage, in a monstrous howling noise.

In its wake, terrible cold and purity. There is no haze in its wake, even the snow vanishes, leaving a clear trail to mark its progress into the building. It flies in a straight line from where the girl was, towards that hole to the basement, then off through that doorless wall next to Mo.

~Mo~

There's quite a bit of piping and ventilation running around the ceiling above, along the edges of the walls. A good portion of the ventilation seems to be going over that doorless wall, in the general direction of the building's rear.

Doesn't seem to be a door leading straight there, but it's probably not those ones on the opposite wall. Perhaps one of the metal doors on the other ends of the hallway?
Around the time she'll have confirmed that there doesn't appear to be anything living in this particular area, that howling mass of enchained gray energy will come flying down from the ceiling and off through that empty wall.

As before, it leaves clear air in its wake. It even seems to remove a patch or two of that rainbow goop.

~Red~

She'll get to see the howling wave too, before she jumps upstairs.
Though, really, she gets to see a lot of things, doesn't she?

Gets to see that terrified woman fleeing from a room just above her, down the hall. Gets to see a young boy cowering under a bed in a far third floor room, while something that looks like a cross between a clown and a crocodile stalks mere feet away through the room.
A giant scorpion the size of a horse rummaging around through a patch of bloody snow two rooms behind. A zombie quietly pawing on the other side of a door at the end of the second floor. Some thing not unlike a bat with entirely too many crab-like legs lurking flat on the ceiling at the far end of the first floor.

A ring of children, a very short distance away from Mo, tendrils of living flesh wrapped around their heads and looping them together, surrounding another little boy floating in the air before a tall man in a crisp suit.
Several amorphous things, mounds of trembling flesh, scattered through the basement, lurking in dark corners of the rooms around Mo.

For a moment, every single of these things, save the children, focuses directly towards Red's location.

And then that central child jerks and screams.
The man steps back, the tendrils around the various children blackens and falls from their heads, and every monster in the building except for the flesh mounds abruptly disappears.

~The Orphanage~

Everyone near the orphanage can hear a young boy's cry of anguish, feel a pulse of necromantic cold, and then watch as all the snow and visual distortions abruptly disappears.

[Golden Flock Orphanage]

Well, Ithuriel was probably going to exchange some choice words with Mo before following Red's directions, but...oops. Looks like she did a pretty bad thing by trying to shuffle the child out of the way like that! Good going, officer!

Speaking of officers, there's a burst of chatter over the comms from the rest of Ithuriel's team as they all feel that pulse of cold (the one mage on the team even commenting that it's necromancy) and hear the boy's cry, all talking over each other as they clamour for a sitrep from Ithuriel until she silences them with a bark of "QUIET! Alright Red, I'm on it. Probably." She hasn't got time to deal with them now. She hasn't got time to deal with Mo. She needs to get after the weird grey howling energy immediately. And it just went through a wall. Hopefully that's the same direction Red was telling her to go.

Ithuriel backs up as best she can in the confined space to give herself a bit of a run up, then with a roar (with the comms off to spare Red's ears), she charges, putting her full angelic strength to work to bash straight through the walls, pipes, anything that gets in her way in pursuit of the howling energy, leaving a neatly angel-sized hole for Mo to follow if she so wishes. She'll probably be due a severe dressing down for the damage this is doing to her expensive Intersection equipment in the process, but something very bad just happened and she's got to fix it now. Caution's being thrown to the wind in favour of trying to make sure she doesn't miss the chance to undo whatever she just screwed up.

[Golden Flock Orphanage]

"Whatever that dark magic is," Red calls over the coms. "It snapped back to a fellow in a tailored suit looming over the children. I suspect he may be our perpetrator. Be decisive, he will likely attack the little ones out of spite."

Up to the second floor she goes! Red will go galloping right past the fleeing woman, calling out a brief, "The way is clear, darling, Intersection will see to the children," without breaking her stride. She's heading straight toward the cowering child up on the third floor. Which... considering that the child will feel something awful and wrong rapidly getting closer to him this may not be comforting.

A fact she's well aware of.

By the time she's nearing the room on the third floor, assuming nothing pounces on her, she'll pull her magic inward again and the tugging sensation of nausea will abruptly cease. A quick application of telekinesis will open the door and in she strides. "Hello there, little one, my name is Red Velvet, I'm an Intersection office," she calls out in the best comforting voice she can manage. "We need to get you to safety, alright? There aren't anymore monsters between us and the front door."

Golden Flock Orphanage

Luckily for Ithuriel, Mo's already on the job of sizing up the wall and punching a hole through it by the time the angel gets inside and down into the basement where she was. Mo takes just a few moments to look over the wall itself, making sure that a hole wouldn't destroy anything load bearing before punching right through. She doesn't say anything to Ithuriel when she arrives, though the angel will probably not a very angry look in her eyes. So angry that her eyes actually glow red-hot.

It had been the officer's job to protect the girl, and if the grey energy mass was what Mo really hoped it wasn't, then that officer had failed.

Either way, Mo will step inside the room, her night vision flickering to life.