Thread: DoctorRed, looking for Patients! (M/F) (UrbanFantasy)

The Warlock was a man of considerable power. He'd transcended his humanity a little bit every few years since he began to dabble and trifle with arts that were 'beyond his power'. He was growing as a mage, and found himself...relieved. Even if he felt like he was probably shrinking as a human. That was natural, right? Every Warlock he'd ever encountered had been a creature who'd shed the manacles of humanity and discarded it, becoming other things. A race unto themselves. Although, he supposed they were all unique in their way. Maybe what his parents had thought had been right. Maybe he was just an abomination, a mutation. He certainly felt like one sometimes. He'd sworn away his sex drive, and compartmentalized it, shutting his body down carefully to become a better caster and warrior. He woke from his meditation and blinked away the feeling he'd replaced sleep with. Trancing had always seemed so attractive before he'd started it. Sleep and Dreams were major portals for mortals, where all manner of dark things could slip in. He'd been doing this years, meditating and forming a mental cocoon for a few hours a night, rather than open himself to that. He stretched and bare feet reached the rug of the floor, and he frowned down at the book where he'd left it, sitting open. The glittering runes glared at him, as if annoyed to have been set aside so hastily. He supposed he'd earned it. He snapped the book shut and set it on a shelf in his room, where black and seemingly inky walls held shelves with no backing. Some held strange objects behind shimmering glass, where other racks would come and go in view, dissolving as he cast about. Weapons, and books. Books books books. He wondered sometimes if maybe he would have been a librarian if he hadn't become a monster. Probably not, his room was more like a fetish collection than any sort of library organization. He supposed he would not be accepted in appearance, either. On the outside, even, he'd become the avatar of his inner being. Pursuing various types of magic, he'd imbued himself with magic, at his own expense. He supposed some of the scars he could have removed, or even had glamoured. He could have gotten a real eye to replace his lost one, but the artifact that he'd had installed and covered with an eye patch had been something amazing to him. What sense would it make to cast off something so full of power? Tattoos adorned his upper arms and body, crossing him with runes and markings, like a modge-podge of insane ramblings from an occult fanatic. On his left palm bore the Warlocks Trust, his oathmark, and identifier. His right hand was decorated instead with rings and bracelets of varying design and metals. The man himself was large and tall, not the usual sizes for a warlock, which often ended up being a diminutive man, old and graying. This warlock was large and cut from the same block of meat a lot of men his age were. Well, his 'age'. He was strong and meaty. His body cut from hard work, and not a gym, he'd been built by effort and not repetition. It made him a bit stronger, if a little less attractive than some. He had scars to help him with that anyways. His eye had been torn violently out, and left a spattering scar across his right side, where he'd covered the 'gap' with a patch. The other eye of the man was grey, and plain. His head was shaved bald, but beard allowed to grow scruffy and thick, in dark curls. He scratched at it with a jingling of his hand as he stood in the center of his tiny 'room'. He felt the familiar chill enter his body as he looked around, eyes darkening. He stretched and dressed himself, tugging on slacks and a button-down, muted and dull colors, the fedora he'd kept from his previous life resting upon his bald crown. He carefully slid on the button-down and tie, then the jacket that had been such a treat when he'd purchased it. He adjusted it once or twice as he crossed the threshold and stepped out onto the floor where he always did, frowning down at the space around him as the quivering reality he kept his room in disappeared. Sometimes, Detective R. Dolores wished he had a 'real' room, not some make-shift magic that he kept with him. He wondered sometimes what sleep felt like, and if he missed it. Being Normal, that is. Would he ever go back? Could he? He doubted it. Normal people weren't almost forty-year old warlocks Virgins who looked like they were only thirty, covered in runes where they didn't show below his elbows. He did have a few who peeked above the collar of his shirts. He stood in his office, stepping out of the tiny space that he'd created and stood behind his desk, passing a careful eye over the room, slowly taking it all in, before deciding everything looked undisturbed to him and seating himself to listen to the messages on his machine. Click to expand... The dark wreathed the man who stood for a moment, where he felt the night pressing in. It was like terror, seeping into the room, the small closet where he'd taken up refuge for a little while. Well, not a little while. Time just seemed to stretch on and on for him when he couldn't see. Maybe it was a 'people' thing. He supposed there was some truth to that, somewhere. Some message. Some universal one-ness, that he just hadn't puzzled out. Or maybe the dark was just his anti-thesis, and he'd spent his whole life bathed in the sunlight of life and the land. That's a thing, right? The detective grunted at his musings and wondered idly how many people went insane after a short period of time in a small room with the dark and their thoughts. The closet he'd crept into only ten minutes ago seemed to shrink when he pondered on it, but he didn't turn on the light or do anything to lighten the area. It wasn't as if he couldn't see, or couldn't tell that the musty coats surrounding them were old and needed tossed, or put into storage. Maybe museums. It was the darkness as a presence. The thought of darkness plagued him, and he wondered to himself what it was that made his life so complicated when involved in the darkness. In deception. He supposed it was simply, as they say, 'what it was'. The man was one of what his people had called a Touched, and it meant a different thing pending on where you went. Some of his people were tribesmen who revered the Touched as Holy, or Champions. Hunters, sometimes. Some considered them a bad omen, and burned those who wouldn't settle, and become medicine men. He dragged his tongue across his teeth in irritation at the thought before trying to come back to himself. It was close, now. Movement outside the closet caught his eye and he watched the shadows flicker across the gap at the door and he tensed, his body coiling and preparing, waiting for the rest to come. A loud noise came next, a skittering that seemed to echo and shudder. Almost like a soundtrack that just wasn't quite in tune with the video of a movie. The detective snarled and flung the door open wide, his hands moving quickly into action. Bathed in the dim light, now he faced what he'd been waiting for for all of the ten minutes he'd had to actually hide. Darts flew from his fingertips before nimble hands plunged into his coat to retrieve more and make coloful blurs of the metal bolts flying from his fingertips as he snarled, his dark eyes glittering in the low light as he latched on to his target. The Spider. The spider made a loud noise, and raised up a pair of it's too-long legs and faced down the Detective, but it was already half-collapsing against itself, half-raised legs already sagging and deflating as it wheezed. Iron and Silver punctured the body and what looked like steaming tar oozed from its wounds. Mandibles flexed and the remaining sets of too-human eyes fixed on the man who had burst from a closet at the very start of it's hunt. It screeched its fury again, and tried to scuttle forward, flicking bristles from limbs erratically. The eyes fixed on the man who stood tall for a human and slender. He'd worn the same thing he usually wore, the suit and tie with his matching hat. He'd pulled the brim low to shield his face ab it from he bristles, though it was not much help. Now in the dim light from the street, he stood in his full height, no longer hindered by the old clothes of the discarded. His fingers slowed and he felt heat seep into his wrists where the bristles had sunk into him. Grunting, he drew back and slammed the closet door shut, bathing again in darkness. A few moments passed as the scrabbling grew frantic, and weaker. Thumping noises were heard, and a few more of the barbed hairs slapped against the door and fell away. He grunted as he jerked the fine hairs from his body, his tanned flesh crying out in protest as he cleaned himself, waiting for a few more minutes. It had taken a lot of tracking to hunt this thing down and stop it, and it was worth too much money for him to screw it up now by letting himself get carried away. He checked his darts carefully and adjusted his vest, and hung his coat up. After pushing the old clothes aside, of course. As an afterthought, he pulled off the fedora and brushed bristles off of that and hung it in the closet. A low moaning had begun to spill from the hall, where the Spider-demon lay dying. It had changed back into it's human shape, but it meant little to the Detective. Attractive, all and all, she had a shapely body and the red tattoo that looked almost like an hourglass on her hip was hard not to like. But it had the same meaning in the occult world as it did in the animal kingdom. Standing over it while she died, the light seemed to pour back into the world while the inky tar steamed and boiled on the hard wooden floors. The figure that had erupted from the closet and rained death down in Iron and Silver stood above the pathetic creature now. Black hair mixed with the inky blood among shadows, and the woman who lay there, gurgled up at him. He narrowed dark eyes at her from where he stood, and drew back his hand, revealing the final blow before ending the creature that had been on his streets for a few days already and claimed a few more lives than he had wanted it to. A final noise erupted before the weeping and groaning subsided, noises that he had almost not heard at all while stalking closer. He lifted the motionless head and tucked it neatly into a sack and then into a rectangular case, before straightening. He'd rolled up his sleeves carefully and moved to the sink of the desolate apartment to wash up. He'd had to step gingerly over dried-up husks and torn up webbing where he'd arrived earlier. He turned all of the lights on in the apartment, the case safely nearby. Hours would have to be spent here, cleaning up the eggs that were planted in the dried-up husks nearby, where the victims lay, safely encased in sealed cocoons. He looked at them dispassionately as he dried his hands on a towel and laid it what little clean counter he could. The man stood tall, at around six-five, a tower of a man, but he was more slender than stout. He found his body to be lanky and long. He stood carefully in his well-manicured clothes and stepped gingerly to keep from dirtying nice boots where he didn't have to as he moved through the apartment. The monster had killed seven or eight in the time it'd been loose, seducing men and bringing them to her nest. He wondered idly how many heads she'd really eaten, in her long life. Too many. At that, he finally shuddered and shook his head before setting about the work. Hours later he would leave with the case and retrieve his coat and hat, return to the van and leave the rest of the mess behind. So long as the eggs were gone, it wasn't a big deal, though the barbs had begun to really cause a bit of a rash on his arms and wrists, where he'd been struck the most. The Touched man was the detective here in the city, but not the police-kind. He didn't have the same.. resume as a police officer might want to submit to any sort of official. For one, he was from the reservation, here near the capitol. And for two, not a lot of the supernatural got dealt with in a 'by-the-books' way. Besides, when you were an 'Indian' , and talked like an cowboy, people seemed to accept that you were either wiser or crazier than they were. Too many cowboy movies, probably. That made the detective grin a little, baring his teeth at the moonlight. Click to expand... I'm really craving some kind of occult grimdark modern role-play, Urban Fantasy, with some action and violence, some undertones of sex, maybe sex later, but a lot of Noir-styled detective biznuss. Someone liberate me? 3