hellburger | Revenge on the 'Fat Doctor'

Nekomata's doing her best to keep her ear to the ground figuratively speaking as they've been wandering. T'Yer is expecting a shipment from his homeworld any day now. Where did Susan's Menagerie of Mithril relocate to? Did Tantalus ever schedule their next tour?

Nothing about creepy doctors and their creepy magic. Still, worthwhile information to hold onto for later. It's mildly easier to gather information in this body. Her senses may be duller, but she doesn't stand out quite so much in many of the circles here.

Of course this is made somewhat more difficult because of the fact she is freezing. Neko's got her hands shoved into her pockets and her shoulders stiff in an attempt to block the worst of the chill wind.

"Oh, you knyow, the usual. Dying of the cold." Her teeth are chattering and she can't stop shivering. "This sucks, by the way."

Addresses in the Nexus are sometimes not the most reliable things. You have a better time getting directions based on landmarks, and even then, they have a habit of shifting. The Commercial District might be a little more concrete than the rest of the place, but there's still an inherent chaos like all things Nexus.

But repeat business depends on people being able to find your shop, booth or office again! So maybe once street signs have been puzzled out and a few wrong turns are taken, the unlikely pair should most certainly find themselves at last on the right track. The address indicated on the card is a quiet side street, populated by small shops lined up neatly. However, walking from one end of the street to the other doesn't reveal anything resembling a psychiatric practice. Every shop is clearly labelled with their names and specialties. There's the glassware shop that he'd mentioned to Kaz once back in the Forum.

And if numbers are to be followed? His business card states his office is addressed 808. But going down the line of businesses, it's numbered 805, 806, 807...809?

"Tell me if anything starts to go numb," Kaz mutters as he scrutinizes passing address numbers.

"Wait... this doesn't make any sense! The numbers skip! It should be right here!" He stabs a clawed finger at the margin of brick between the glass shop and the next business. "Of course he'd give a fake address, that piece of shit."

He flicks the card into the street and twitches his tails in irritation.

"Wait. Hold on."

Nekomata bends over and snatches the card up and brushes the snow off of it. Stupid magic blind body. It wouldn't be hard for a seasoned spellsmith to vanish a shop to where the mortal eye could not see.

She makes herself focus on the brickwork between the glass shop and beyond. But no matter how hard she tries, her eyes slide past what should be number 808.

She feels like her head is going to split open if she focuses this hard for much longer, so Nekomata relaxes and exhales. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.

"Ugh, this is so much harder in this body. Does anything feel off?"

"Even in that body I knew shit was off with that guy."

Kaz stands next to her, props his aviators up on his forehead, and squints at the place where Dr. Hill's practice should be. "It seemed like he legitimately wanted me to visit his practice -- at least before I was pissed -- why the hell would he hide it?"

He says, idly checking his body's hands for blood flow. He rubs one of them between his palms -- hopefully they figure out this riddle soon, or he's gonna have to steer them into a warm venue.

"What am I feeling for, exactly?"

"It's a common demon trick. You hide something in plain sight, and then make it so people don't pay attention to it. They walk right by." Whoa she feels a bit dizzy. Maybe that was a bit too much effort on trying to sense the magic there, Neko.

"Really look at where it should be. You have to make yourself stop going by. It's not as easy as it sounds. We can't go in until we can 'see' it." She's rubbing at her eyes now with the hand not being held by Kaz.

The slits of his pupils have gone wide, tail twitching, ears forward. Kaz paces back and forth a few times. For all this apparent concentration, he's still getting stymied by this magic concept.

He exhales, then begins to reframe it in his mind in terms that are more logical. The conversation with Samus comes to mind; "magic" is just science you don't understand, right?

This is a psychologist they're dealing with, so he must be exploiting perception. Minds can be lazy and susceptible to suggestion. He increases his pacing into large circles as he clears away the barriers of thought and focuses purely and exclusively on his senses.

One more lap past the glassware shop and he catches something in his peripheral vision. A door? Plain as day! How did he not see it before?

"I think I've got it. And one hell of a headache." He flips his sunglasses back down and lays a paw on the door before he loses it again.

Well done! There it is indeed, like it'd never been missing, a handsome door with 808 hung on it in brass numbers. Nestled between the pharmacy (807) and the glassware shop (809). It's hard to say how it was missed so easily before; it's sitting right there, plain as day. Like when you tear apart a room looking for a single object, only to find it sitting in the open in a spot you checked a thousand times before.

And just to make absolutely sure, the brass plate affixed next to the door does indeed say: DR. ALAN J. HILL: THERAPIST & PSYCHOANALYST.

"Good job Kazkaz! You just saw through your first illusion magic." Neko is quick to clap him on the shoulder, grin spread across her face as she peers at the door.

"Can't say I blame him for trying to hide from us though. He had to expect someone was going to try to hunt him down for pulling that kind of stunt."

Now that the door has been 'seen' Nekomata doesn't have any trouble picking out where Kaz has grabbed hold of the doorknob. The human must have pretty extraordinary powers indeed to pull that kind of trick on a place as magic heavy as the Nexus.

"So there's a non-violence field in the Nexus that stops folks from hurting each other, guess we'll find out if that includes property damage."

Miller glances down at the pistol holstered on his human body and after a moment decides he wants the comfort of firepower, even if it may be ineffective. He unsnaps the strap and draws the gun, awkwardly holding it in his demon paws.

"Let's see if the doctor is in," Kaz quips, turning the knob. He's startled to find that the door is actually unlocked after all the effort of locating it. Gun trained, he kicks the door the rest of the way open with a foot.

BOOM! The door kicks inwards easily, banging onto the wall next to it from the force. And it opens immediately into the office; no waiting room.

At a glance, there doesn't appear to be anyone present. Should they step further in, the office is a cozy, warm place. The window which should face a brick wall instead has soft midday sunlight streaming through it. Muted sounds of traffic, motors, horn honks, sometimes a passing police siren, filter upwards. Upwards? Correct. Because should either of them peer out the window, the office appears to be on a second story despite the storefront clearly being ground floor.

Floor to ceiling bookshelves, dark-stained wooden filing cabinets, a grandfather clock ticking serenely, a victrola with a record on the spindle but not set to play. (Should anyone inspect the record or even set the needle to it, it will begin softly playing Bach.) Near the window is a fine chair upholstered in red, another near the bookshelves with a lamp for reading.

And there's the desk. Kaz should recognize it from their meeting last time. It's exactly the same as the one Dr. Hill had been sitting behind in the Nexus. The banker's light, the metronome, the nameplate. Though there's also a sleek black statuette of a panther carved from stone. That's new. A chair is pushed in at the desk. All the drawers, if checked, are locked.

There is no sign of the doctor.

"Pff, you don't need that Kazkaz, you're in my awesome kickass body mya. You got claws and teeth and magic to kick ten kinds of ass. If anyone needs that it's me."

She's not trying to grab for the weapon, however, and that's probably for the best.

"Looks like he's not here." Nekomata wastes no time in going to Dr. Hill's desk and trying to rifle through things. She grumbles in frustration when the drawers are locked, and begins fishing around for a hidden latch, a button, or any number if hi-tech security devices she can disable.

She did say she worked in information. She did not say legally.

"Now's not the time to teach you proper gun handling, Neko-chan," Kaz says, still brandishing the gun and casing the place, checking for exits and hiding places, even pressing himself up against the wall by the window before peering out.

Satisfied that there are no traps to spring, nor hidden means of egress, Kaz joins Nekomata at the desk.

If he were pressed to say something nice about Dr. Hill, he certainly has excellent, expensive taste in decor. He flicks out a set of claws and runs them along the flawless hardwood tabletop. If he's frustrated by the dead end, this would certainly be a clue.

"Locked? I've got it." He cocks the pistol and fires at the hardware. At this point he doesn't even care about the neighboring businesses. He's trapped in a goddamned cat demon body.

Edited 2016-01-21 05:14 (UTC)

The exact same moment the gun fires...

...the door slams shut.

In the same instant, the light drifting in through the window deepens and darkens to a stormy blue. The sky of a late moonlit night. The sound of traffic stops immediately, replaced instead by rolling thunder.

The lock on the drawers is broken, bits of wood splintered off along with it. Something that sounds like the rattle of a snake's tail emanates from inside.

"You....don't do a lot of stealth work, do you." It's the first thing Neko has said In Kaz's body that sounds like he actually said it, considering the sarcasm in her tone. She's not impressed with his lockpicking skills.

"Well, he knows we're here to wreck up the place now, so have your fun and get ready to take a hostage when he shows up mya." Neko grabs a polished letter opener off of Dr. hill's desk and yanks open the drawer the noise was coming from. Anything in there is getting stabbed profusely.

She doesn't need her demon's body to get rid of some stupid stinklizard.

Edited 2016-01-22 01:03 (UTC)

"I leave the actual stealth work to other people," Kaz says distractedly, his focus divided by the sudden change of tone in the room.

She is not going to use his body for this. He presses the gun into her free hand as he shoulders his body out of harm's way.

The reptilian motion is seriously pinging those feline instincts -- instincts that are more than happy to switch into auto pilot. He pounces in a blur of motion, sinking his claws into the snake.

There certainly seemed to be a snake-like shape somewhere in that drawer, the rattle only growing louder when the attack closes in. But that dark serpentine shape dissipates when claws strike and sink in, the shape losing form, spreading outward, the rattle replaced by chittering...

A swarm of spiders and cockroaches seethe and scurry from the drawer, up onto the desk, onto the floor, up Kaz's feline arms. And they just keep coming, pouring from that shattered drawer in waves.

"...Oh, I get to take a hostage? Awesome nya!" She will take that gun and give you room to work, Kazuhira. She's busy pointing her newly acquired firearm at the window, the door.

....Totally humming the Mission Impossible music while she does so, too. The snake thing and change to insects doesn't seem to phase her in the least. If she catches one she's gonna try to eat it.

Being a demon comes with a pretty high sanity stat. Drawer full of bugs might as well be Taco Tuesday to her.

As luck and a beetle/spider tidal waves would have it, Kaz doesn't have time to worry about whatever trouble Nekomata might be getting herself into. An ungodly noise fills the office and he launches himself reflexively backwards smashing into a bookshelf. A few decorative pieces are knocked to the floor by the impact, and the loud sound sets him scrambling again.

Cats, man.

If Nekomata bothers to check, Kaz has upended the upholstered chair by the window and is hiding, both tails fully puffed.

Edited 2016-01-22 02:32 (UTC)

The creepy crawlies show no sign of stopping, pooling out in a black and teeming mass under the drawer and practically overtaking the desk itself.

Their surroundings seem to be changing subtly every time eyes are averted. Chains are looped from the ceiling, clinking softly in an unseen, cold breeze. Boards are now covering the window.

Nekomata does stop humming at the noise, jumping about a foot and scrambling to keep hold of the gun in her hands. She doesn't fire it at least?

"What the hell? It's just bugs! And...chains and boards and shit. OhmyBeldr he can't hurt us so he's trying to scare us. That's cute." Nekomata sighs before holstering the gun and getting to work. If Kazkaz was too scared to help out, she will wreck this place up mightily.

"You got a light on you? Fire solves all problems if used in copious enough amounts."

All of this is way scarier with heightened cat senses. Too much movement all at once! He gets to his feet and runs his fluffed tails through a paw. She's right. It's just more psychological bullshit.

"Should be a lighter in my pants pocket," he says, brushing away more insects with his paws and stomping on others with his feet. The lighter is a nice, silver zippo.

He's gonna let Neko do what she will while he tries to combat what (he hopes) is an illusion similar to the one that hid the office.

Nekomata will fish around her her newfound military fatigues until she finds the prophesied lighter.

"Oh hey, Paradox boy had one of these too." Shk-click! Now if she was only skinny and suffering from enough angst to fill two worlds. With the lighter in hand, Nekomata goes about pulling books down off the shelves at random, until he realizes she's looking for older books with thin paper.

RRRRRRRRRIPPPP!

A handful of pages are now missing from what was once an extensive book on hallucinations. What a pity. Nekomata gets to balling up the papers loosely before poking them just under things like the couch, the desk and anything else that looks like it needs ignition. Too bad the curtains rotted away in all the mood shift, she'd have preferred to light those on fire first.

"Anything actually useful we can use as leverage on the doctor, or is this place just full of nightmare fuel? Cuz if it is, I'm about to fill it with arson~"

The bugs haven't stopped still. But bugs burn just as well as anything else, so fire it up.

Once Nekomata steps away from the wall containing the bookshelves she's pulled burning material from, several more books tumble to the floor in loud thumps. Revealing a soft glow on the wall behind them. TV screens stacked in a grid, each flicking on one by one. The images behind the wrinkles and static depicting gruesome, pulsing gore and blood, like they were security camera feeds to whole rooms made of bleeding meat and organs.

There's a new sound coming from the open drawer; choked, female sobs. A voice crying pitifully as if deathly afraid. Slowly growing in volume.

Kaz's attention is grabbed by the light of the TVs, but the moving images on the older tube screens are difficult for his cat's eyes to process. It's more aggravating than anything, and he keeps his eyes on Nekomata's arson in progress.

The crying is harder to ignore. He flattens back his ears and grimaces, keeping close to his partner in crime.

"Neko-chan. Before you go lighting this place up, we should have an exit strategy." He tries the obvious solution -- the door. Locked tight, naturally, but it didn't hurt to try, right?

The window is next. He yanks at the boards, trying to free up enough space to bust out the panes and climb through.

"That! Is a good point." Shk-Click! Nekomata closes the lighter and takes a look around the grotesque turning room. "Holy titties mya, this guy's off his rocker. Look at this. Most demons aren't this sadistic. And who's the chick? Some lady he pined over forever and then locked in his murder basement?"

She moves to help Kaz with the boards on the windows. Despite appearances, Kaz will find her body stronger than even his own at brute forcing things. Something Neko seems to be finding out as she strains with the boards.

"Come onnnnnn boards work with me! Kazkaz and I have to bond over the crazy psychiatrist's just desserts. Fire!"

The boards come loose with enough pulling, though you might want to be careful of the rusty nails that held them in place. The windows are free!

But should anyone bother to break or open them and peer down? The street is gone. The park it was overlooking is gone. It's just a sheer drop down into roiling fog after an impossibly high series of floors. At least seventy of them. Some of the windows lining the lower levels flicker with faulty lights from the inside. Bars are sometimes visible.

Looking up will reveal the exact same. Floors and floors and floors of a decrepit brick building before the top vanishes into more dense fog.

The crying woman voice is begging now. Pitifully choking out pleas for mercy, for deliverance.

"Well, shit," he spits upon looking out the window.

Kaz dusts more insects off of his person as he takes another sweeping look around the room. His eyes light on that panther statue and he beelines for it, ears flattened tightly back to ward against the heightened wailing.

He easily hefts the statue in his arms, hustles it over to the window and heaves it out -- both to shatter the glass and to test out the boundaries of this potent illusion.

"Don't look at it, it's only gonna make you more sure he's right." Neko warns, lighting the papers she's scattered about the office. and then, for good measure, lighting one of the books on fire too.

She stands there looking pretty proud of herself for a moment before the fire really takes hold and she nods in satisfaction.

A couch cushion gets shoved out the window to brush aside any remaining jagged pieces of glass before Nekomata starts climbing through the window and holding a hand out for Kaz to take.

"C'mon Kazkaz. Trust me, okay? We're gonna be fine and this place is gonna burn~"

"Alright. Let's fucking get this over with."

Now that the fire is lit, his options are suddenly limited. He takes her strong, manly hand and quips -- albeit a little nervously, "Cats always land on their feet right?"

He doesn't wait for her to answer, just closes his eyes to block the hallucination and jumps. He'll find out here shortly.

And.

Thump.

The expected several-story drop is not even a few feet. The pair land in a back alleyway, populated by a few trash and recycling bins and back doors to various businesses. The hustle of Nexus foot traffic can be heard from the entrance way of the alley, the sound very benign and maybe jarring after all the noise and chaos that had surrounded them moments before.

There is no window behind them. Just a solid brick wall.

"..." Nekomata opens her eyes and looks around. Back alley, just where they should be. She grins and turns around and scoops Kaz up into a big hug. "You trusted me!" She sounds so thrilled.

There's tears at the corners of her eyes, but she's still grinning like an idiot.

"Humans...they don't normally trust me about anything." Nekomata explains. And while the fire might have been motivation for him she still is beaming. "We coulda been caught in his illusions for a long time if you hadn't believed in me Kazkaz. That's how they getcha. Fear."

Kaz barely has time to register what's happened before the hug is administered. He grunts in surprise, but manages to return the gesture with a triumphant, toothy smile.

"Yeah ... good job, Neko-chan. Never thought I'd have to trust a yōkai with my life, but here we are." He wipes the tears away in a gesture that might be affectionate, but is probably more to save face. Or both? Maybe he's learned something from this trying ordeal. (Are you still watching, Dr. Hill?)

Once released from the hug he glances around the alley. While the office window is most certainly gone, the panther statue is definitely lying on the ground. Kaz lifts it and gives it an appraising look. Spoils of war.

"I'd kiss ya but that'd be real weird for both of us mya." Neko grins huge before she lets Kaz go and looks around. She laughs at the ridiculous pair they make.

"Guess he learned not to mess with us, eh?" Or maybe he's just sighing at yet another pair of patients who get their therapy through destruction and violence. Still, he's had worse patients.

"So, there's only one thing left to do, now." Nekomata gives Kazuhira a serious look. "Can I keep those shades when we switch back?"

"Sorry, Neko-chan. These stay with me," he says, adjusting said eyewear.

He adjusts his grip on the panther statue. It really is too nice (and surprisingly unscathed) to leave lying around in an alley. One last spider is startled out of hiding on Dr. Hill's decor. It rappels down on a bit of web and scuttles away.

"I tell you what, though. After all the shit we've been through, I'll find you a pair of your own. Deal?"

"Really? Yay! You know, I still don't like this whole body swap nonsense, but I"m glad that I got swapped with you Kazkaz. You're pretty great for a humie. The best humie a girl could ask for, really."

A very decisive nod.

"I was kind of hoping it would draw him out so we could get him to change us back though....."

Revenge on the 'Fat Doctor'

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Secret Agent Cat

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