Season 12

This season is incomplete, due to issues of the host, and was decided inconclusive.

Host

 * Due to Neko13 not being able to respond to the call of host in time, Kattata took her place as host.

Players
''Some information is incorrect. However, those who are indicated dead did indeed die.''
 * 1) Ktanaqui
 * 2) kingpiedorah
 * 3) AgentGibbs
 * 4) DanerSpyre
 * 5) Mew101
 * 6) Nemo
 * 7) whiteouthorizon
 * 8) ellajoan
 * 9) Pokemonmaster345
 * 10) Scrios
 * 11) fantasmicdragon (Eaten)
 * 12) Spectrospecs
 * 13) jadecloud (Lynched)
 * 14) Moonpool
 * 15) HiccupNinja
 * 16) Lyla313
 * 17) starlightneko
 * 18) Dragonslayer
 * 19) Tigergal2012
 * 20) ilasandra
 * 21) ay4u
 * 22) Duragi
 * 23) NekoKyu
 * 24) Wolfpack5554
 * 25) TimeWarper
 * 26) winterkitten
 * 27) audi67
 * 28) Umbreon241 (Eaten)
 * 29) Aerrow
 * 30) Ayakashi
 * 31) kirstconroy
 * Pet
 * 1) askalka
 * 2) Crazyflight
 * 3) NativeWolf

Starting Round
running away from it all “I’ll be safe in the cornfield,” he thinks hunted by his own

Night has fallen in the small village of Stadton, and with it comes the plague.

Surrounded on three sides by impenetrable woodland, the fourth border of the village is dense cornfield, equally foreboding: to stand but three paces within the tall, rustling stalks is to utterly lose your bearings, becoming as disoriented as a drunken fool. All that is visible from the silent, oppressive field is the sky—a stark contrast to the furrowed, wormy earth—and the moon sailing high overhead.

The moon is nearly full, and he feels its rise in his veins, slamming with his blood.

He has changed—he has changed, as he has changed every night for the past... God above, has it been eight days already? The nights run together, and the days and the nights and the days—but he isn’t thinking of that anymore, he isn’t thinking at all, he is only loping clumsily, apelike, his body breaking down and then surging up again, reformed: now he is running gracefully, on all fours, on long, muscular legs, his fur as matted and lousy as his hair had been when he was still a man. He is running, and he is no longer thinking, except in simple terms and images: safe, safe in the cornfield, safe...

There is perfect silence, but for the rustling of his passage, the soft thudding of his footfalls across the loose-packed earth; the air is still with the last, lingering days of summer. He is burning up, in his heavy, shaggy coat—his immense jaws sag open, his tongue flopping over sharp, canid teeth. He dares to slow his wild flight, and that’s when he hears it—

Pursuit.

He freezes, and still he hears it, the rustling of the corn although there is no wind; the furtive shuffling of animals trying to be stealthy, and he knows, he knows they are coming for him, he knows, but what can he do?

He can run, he thinks. And he does. again he feels the moon rising in the sky find a barn in which to sleep, but can he hide anymore someone’s at the door, understanding, too demanding

The moon has reached its apex before he stops running, and looks around him.

He is deeper in the village now, the buildings looming around him as silently as the cornstalks had, but with more menace—for there are men in these buildings (men like he was once, and will be again, with the dawn), men with bows and arrows and hatchets, men with their succulent flesh and sweet, bubbling blood... his tongue lolls once more from slack, fanged jaws, and he runs, runs, for an outbuilding at the edge of the village, that smells dark and musky with disuse. He smells old hay, old man, old chickens, and old shit: a barn, and one that has not been used—or cleaned—for some time.

It is perfect, like a den. He noses the door open and slips inside, leaning his haunches back against it to close it carefully behind him. Is he still being followed? He cocks his head back toward the latched door, ears flicking, laying against the wood; he hears nothing but, distantly, the drowsy barking of a dog.

Good. Good, he is free, he escaped—he trots across the worm-eaten wooden floorboards, his nails clicking, and tips back his head to consider the shadowed loft high above. In a single leap, as beautiful as a perfect, parabolic arc, he has gained the rickety platform; there is hay up here, still, rotten and rustling with insects. He climbs into it, turning once, twice, and then lying down, resting his great, broad muzzle on his paws.

The bloodlust will overtake him soon, forcing him to kill one of those men—the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘neighbor’ are manmade thoughts, and he is only nominally a man now; he will not remember this with the dawn, when he awakes once more in his human form—but for now, he can rest...

There is a thump at the door. His head shoots up as there comes another, and another, and then a scrabbling near the latch, and he presses himself further back away from the edge of the loft, deeper into the moldy hay, suppressing the whine that rises in his throat—if he is found now, he will have to kill, and he is so tired, he wants to rest while he still can, before the moon begins to burn in his veins and his heart and forces him to rip and tear and eat—

The barn door slams open, banging against the far wall, but before it can close again, a slender fox steps up and shoulders it aside. It is a fine-boned creature, with a thin, tapering muzzle and eyes that glow, faintly, as though starlit; the wolf snarls, deep in his chest, and the fox’s long ears swivel to pinpoint the faint, guttural sound, but that’s all right, because it’s only a fox, so much smaller than him, something he can bite and shake and break apart, fragile ribs splintering in his teeth—

And then he notices the multitude of bushy tails, the small cat by its side, sneezing delicately in the dust, and still he is not afraid, because they are so much smaller than he is—

Up there, the fox says, in a strange singsong that echoes oddly in his mind; the little white cat’s emerald eyes flash up to his hiding place and she smiles, something awful and fanged, her ears flattening and her fur beginning to bristle, and he realizes that she is glowing, too, fringed in a faint, moonlit halo—

He has leapt down before his mind acknowledges his body’s decisions, only to find that the little white cat and her fox mate are not the only animals crowding now inside the barn. There is another animal, half-wolf and half-fox, leggy and red and black, and his nose wrinkles at the scent of her; there are wolves, smaller than himself and without the opposable, thumblike dewclaws, one black and one white, their lips writhing back on matching snarls; there is another fox, smaller and shorter than the first, with only a single tail—he roars, in challenge and murderous hunger, and Stadton’s guardians lunge to meet him. a blackout approaching, here it comes now, wish me luck it’s all over, it’s all over, it’s all over in a flash I can’t remember what have I done now?

The sun, when it finally dawns, is already hot, and there is a thick, uncomfortable moisture in the air that promises boglike humidity later on. A rooster crows, somewhere nearer the village than the furthest outbuildings—once, twice, its strident cry shattering the dank air like porcelain—and the inhabitants of Stadton rouse themselves with vigor, taking up axe and pitchfork, taking up torches to burn through the muggy mist; they meet briefly in the village square, counting their number, and then move out toward the town’s borders to search for their furry guardians.

It is not a difficult search.

Past the lumbermill, past the milk bar, behind old man McCracken’s abandoned farm, they find the barn door slightly open, when they are all certain it had been locked fast against bandits until the old man’s estate was settled and the property was sold, or inherited, or whatever would become of it. ay4u, the proprietor of the milk bar, leads them; he tucks the shaft of his makeshift spear—in reality a laundry pole—beneath one arm and pushes the door, creaking, the rest of the way open.

Inside, it is a slaughterhouse. Mew, one of the village’s youngest sisters and widely renown as ‘everyone’s little sister,’ must stumble back from the door to vomit; her sister, TimeWarper, follows her hurriedly, rubbing her back. The rest of the villages swallow their collective gorge and attempt to pick out details of the butchery—an arm here, torn asunder, lying divorced of any shoulder; blood streaked on the walls and soaking the floorboards, certainly ruining the property value of the barn...

“Kat!” ay4u cries, running to the little white cat sitting near the middle of it all, covered from head to toe in blood, licking a wound on her shoulder. She looks up at him and smiles, sadly, her green eyes bright; she suffers him to pick her up, to probe her with careful fingers all over, finding every cut and contusion, mumbling worriedly.

Banker Calhoun was a wolf, she mews, looking over his shoulder to deliver this news to the rest of the villagers. They accept it, braced as though to endure a blow—which, in a very real way, it is. We killed him, I think before he was able to kill anyone else. I don’t know if there are any others, he was the only one we found last night...

The silvery, striped kitsune, sitting patiently at ay4u’s feet, pipes up in his echoing singsong, We tracked him from the cornfield. He came here to hide, and we found him. He gestures, with his slender muzzle, around to the rest of the guardians—they are in varying states of repair, but they are all alive, if all covered in blood, only some of which is theirs. The other villagers move to help them, and together, the inhabitants of Stadton—and their guardians—move out of the barn, leaving the twisted, bloodied remains of the werewolf for later cleanup. go, go, faster, wider more, more, get it down you dance, dance ...take me over, glittering clouds

The next night, only a small cadre of guardians are sent out on patrol—Daner, Jace, Snowdrift, and Kyoka, being the four least wounded; sitting in a semicircle in ay4u’s living room, they are given fretful instructions by their weary leader, presently curled in her owner’s lap, to do no more than patrol the circuit of Stadton’s outskirts and, should they locate any werewolves, refrain from engaging them, leaving two of their members to keep tabs on the wolf and sending two back to fetch Kat and Seiryu; they voice solemn agreement, and stand, shaking their coats each by turn, taking polite leave of ay4u’s home.

He locks his doors tight, and they three—he and Kat and Seiryu—retire to bed, the latter two curling up together on the feather mattress at ay4u’s feet. He watches them cuddle for a moment, thinking with a frown of the bloody dove carcass Seiryu left on his doorstep that afternoon, before he turns down the lamp and falls quickly to sleep.

It is Seiryu that rouses, a few hours before dawn—he senses the hour through the chill lying like a blanket across the little bedroom. A chill that should not be; he lifts his narrow head, eyes flashing, looking up at ay4u to see if Kat has crawled up to snuggle on his chest or head—and then he leaps down, silently, to nose beneath the bedframe, snuffling worriedly.

While it would be untrue to say that Kat never creeps out at night, it is utterly unlike her to do so without taking him. The thought makes him shiver; he sneezes, shakes out his fur, and trots to the window, gaining the sill and then the ground in what would appear to any onlookers as a single, graceful leap.

Outside, he casts around for her scent—he smells milk, and doves, and the herbs planted in ay4u’s backyard, and the soft-furred, swift creatures that inhabit the cellar... and... there—the warm, aromatic smell of the little cat’s fur. It brings a smile to his narrow vulpine face even as he trots off after it, angling toward the village square. don’t blame me, don’t maim me I can’t help what I am oh, Lord knows I’ve tried...

The rest of the village wakes with a start, many townsfolk tumbling from their beds entirely, to the sound of Seiryu’s sharp, rapid, heartbroken keening.

ay4u is there first, as always; he only narrowly beats the rest of the guardians, recognizing their friend’s cries and abandoning their patrol to run and investigate. The animals and the people skid into the village square at roughly the same time, to find the silvery, striped kitsune standing, bloodstained, in the cobblestones, his mouth gaping on an incessant, broken crying—over and over and over, shrilly, like the screaming of an animal eviscerated.

It is an apt description. Not yet dawn, the square is nevertheless lit with a pale, faded light as silvery as Seiryu’s pelt; the false predawn touches, delicately, the blood pooled on the cobblestones and trickling between them, shining like gilt on the white hairs scattered like ash across everything. Kat’s head, severed, lies across the square, on its side, revealing the stump of her spinal cord and the red, glistening mess that had been her throat; her eyes are wide, glazed and empty as glass orbs, her tiny jaws open on a silent cry, revealing small, sharp fangs and the tacky, half-dried pool of blood in her mouth where her tongue had once been. Blood trickles from the small, pink nostrils and from the corners of her eyes, tracking down either side of her muzzle like tears, and her ears are gone—

ay4u falls to his knees with a sharp, sudden cry of his own, his hands trembling around the small, white-furred body, not quite touching it; the limbs are curled spasmodically inward, like a dying insect’s, her small claws removed and leaving bloody stumps where her toes had once been. Her tail is hung gaily from the noticeboard, a fluffed length of white fur that no one recognizes, at first. As soon as the discovery is made, Mew and Timewarper burst into tears, the only sound in the half-lit square but Seiryu’s shrill, shrieking cries and ay4u’s dry, hacking sobs.

The village guardians look at one another helplessly, too startled to yet feel grief.

Kattata is dead, and there are werewolves obviously still at large.

What can they do, with their leader torn from them?

What can anyone do in the face of this plague?

Round Two
she should have locked the open door (run away, run away, run away)

Tonight is different.

Or so it feels. They are all aware of it—all of them, every one of them, from Pokemon and her sister Spectrospecs, to Kyoka and Daner, to Jace and Snowdrift. They have been, all of them, hunting down the wolves for ten days now; they are aware, although perhaps no one with such agonizing clarity of revelation as poor ay4u, that Kat’s life was taken on the ninth morning, a cruel twist of irony considering the widespread belief regarding cats and multiple lives.

A superstition, ay4u thinks bitterly to himself, as he stares with glazed eyes out over his little herb garden, determinedly avoiding looking at the little thatch of freshly turned dirt that marks his best friend’s grave. A superstition—unless that had been Kat’s ninth life… but that is a painful thought, one that makes him clench his hands and grit his teeth, his eyes stinging.

And then, in a sight that would be strangely disturbing if anyone were nearby and watching him, his face suddenly loosens into a silly grin, and his head lifts as he looks toward the village square. The heart of the village, he thinks—there are people passing by his house, now, their faces grim, although one or two lift their hands to him in greeting. The heart of the village, and everyone is going toward it. Must be something going to happen! I want in on that!

So he goes.

There are a few people who look at him oddly as he arrives, but not many; most are concentrating on the young girl currently standing beside the noticeboard, her narrow chin lifted in the air and one hand lowered to tangle in the thick mane of the pegasus Derpy Hooves. They are all arriving, one by one—or, almost all of them; there are a few absent, those notably without love for such harsh proceedings: Mew and her sister TimeWarper; the cleaning man, Duragi, and Nemo, both of whom were loudly proclaiming their disinclination to be involved in the death of an innocent—not a popular opinion, given how equally loudly the girl standing before them now, Jadecloud by name, had shouted her grief in a voice all but bereft of emotion, and just as expressionlessly denied her guilt…

Moonpool, after a covert glance around at his fellow villagers, clears his throat and begins. “Jadecloud, you are accused of harboring a lycanthropic infection. Your sentence is dea—“

“You are making a mistake,” Jade interrupts, still in that flat monotone. “I am not the wolf. My mother worked herself to her death to save you, each and every one of you, and this is how you repay her.”

“Be that as it may,” Moonpool says, dryly, “your mother’s sacrifice was not your own. And she, after all, was not suspected of being a werewolf. As I was saying, your sentence is death, for death you dealt our guardi—“

“Kat taught me everything I know. How to hunt and gather. How to feed myself. You are making a mistake. Aren’t any of you grateful for how my mother saved you all from death by the plague only to die herself. I cannot believe you all are doing this.”

“—our guardian, Kat,” Moonpool cuts across the deadpan.

“You say Kat taught you everything you know,” someone pipes up in the crowd. “And that w, we’re doing you wrong, buh—by l-lynching you, when you killed her for helping you—“ Moonpool recognizes the speaker with surprise—it is Winterkitten, a girl younger even than Jade, usually too shy to speak. She must have loved Kat, too, he thinks sadly. “You’re the one that’s ungrateful,” Winter continues, her little hands balling into fists. “You’re—“

“I am not a wolf,” Jade repeats; she might sound stubborn, if she had any inflection to her voice at all. “You are all making a mistake. I hunt and gather and trade with you all. What are you going to do when winter comes and you don’t have my clocks to keep you warm.”

“Your clocks?” someone murmurs, bewildered.

“Don’t be mean!” the pegasus huffs, rolling her vacant eyes at the speaker as she stamps her hooves. She leans close to Jade, comfortingly, and Jade tightens her fingers in the animal’s thick, coarse mane.

“Hey,” another girl says, suddenly—Moonpool recognizes the speaker as Umbreon, her eyes flashing with sudden anger. “How do you know there’s more than one wolf? The guardians killed Banker Calhoun for us last night, and Kat was the only casualty this morning. Everything points to only one wolf—but you just said you weren’t a wolf…”

“That’s right,” Specs murmurs, with quiet, intense revelation. Pokemon, standing beside her with her arms around herself, gasps; the sisters exchange a significant look. “She did say that…”

The murmurs rise suddenly, as the realization spreads.

“I mean to say that I am not a werewolf like you say. I don’t know if there is one wolf or six wolfs. I am just not one,” Jade clarifies, with a suggestion in her flat, dry voice of something that might, in another villager, have been fear. “Remember that I am innocent,” she adds. “I want to be on the town guard. I love the town with my whole heart. A wolf would not.”

They might ripples through the collective mind of the congregation. A few of the newer villagers stumble, clapping their hands to their ears, not anticipating the telepathic voice; the rest simply look toward its source. Seiryu stands there, his ears flicked forward, glittering eyes trained on Jade’s face as his nine tails ripple eerily in an unfelt wind; he bares his teeth in something that bears as much resemblance to a smile as broken glass. Prithee, how do you know?

“I—“ Jade begins, but she never gets to finish.

Something must have spread through all the guardians’ minds, all at once, although the humans—even those sensitive to the creatures’ telepathic speech—cannot sense it; for they all, each and every one, leap as a single entity: Daner the fox, and Kyoka the maned wolf; Seiryu, his lips writhing back on teeth that glitter almost as much as his eyes, the glow of his fur and his tails intensifying to an almost-blinding glare; Snowdrift and Jace, black and white together—they leap as one, and they strike as one, predatory fangs burying to the gums in Jade’s flesh. A gifted hunter she is, perhaps—preternaturally gifted with hunting, and everything else—but she is not, Moonpool notes with some surprise, invulnerable; she screams, and the pegasus at her side kicks off into the air, her small wings fluttering as she divebombs the guardians, in a frenzy of grief—there is a flash of light and kitsune flame, and she tumbles away again, shrieking.

All of them that had loved Kat, all of them that are grieving hardest, surge forward too—Moonpool stumbles back, fumbling for the knife at his belt, and for a moment Jade is lost altogether beneath the snarling animals and sobbing villagers, although she is still screaming, with more life in her voice now than ever was before—and then Moonpool, too, lunges forward to bury his knife into her throat, one arm flying up to protect his face as the girl’s hot, bright arterial blood fountains from the wound; the guardians are still growling, and he is dimly aware that Seiryu is crying again, in short, staccato jerks of sound, from silver jaws gaping and dripping with gore—

And then Jadecloud’s screams begin first to weaken and then to ebb like her blood into silence, allowing him to pick out the sound of ay4u’s brokenhearted sobbing, and a thick, curdled whimpering that he realizes belatedly is coming from his own throat. He has sunk to his knees, his bloodied hands over his face; ay4u has wrenched Moonpool’s knife free from Jade’s gaping throat, and he has begun to stab her, over and over again; someone ripped open her belly, and Seiryu’s entire head is covered like a vulture’s in slippery ropes of intestine…

Moonpool turns his head and vomits, only contributing to the hideous mess of blood and worse once more coating the cobblestones of the square.

It is finally, blessedly over.

it has no name there’s one for every season

No one is woken by screaming; ay4u does wake briefly in the night, to find Seiryu burrowed in the blankets beside his leg. He was surprised that the kitsune had chosen to sleep with him again—he had been under the assumption that Seiryu did not particularly care for him, and that they were linked only by Kat’s love… but perhaps, he thinks, it was too lonely in that burrow, all by himself.

ay4u certainly understands that.

In fact, the following morning dawns largely without event, except in that there is no event; some of the villagers even begin to think that perhaps it was just that easy, and that the werewolf plague is over, that they will be permitted to live out the rest of their lives with only this comparatively, blessedly brief period of heartache and violence.

And then one of the wolves, Snowdrift or Jace, begins to howl, and the villagers’ hearts plummet as they hurry toward the eerie, ululating sound.

As they meet each other on the road, the villagers breathe silent sighs of relief: ay4u is not gone, nor Mew, nor her sister TimeWarper, nor Spectrospecs or Pokemon, and there are Daner and Kyoka and NativeWolf all sprinting to catch up—Specs gasps on sight of the husky, and pants out, “Aren’t you suppuh—posed to be with Derpy? She was suh—supposed to be w-watching th… the kids, Krist and h-her pup, an… an…”

Specs realizes, with a sick lurch in her gut, that they are hurrying toward the crèche now.

There is blood on the ground, and it has begun to curdle in the hot morning sun; the stench reaches them before they draw level with the scene, Mew predictably enough recoiling to retch—emptily, this early in the day; she could not even stand the butchery of farm animals, when their lives were normal, unharried—and ay4u stumbles after a sudden crunch beneath his boot, his feet slipping out from under him in the slippery mess…

A wing has been torn off, and lies stiffening in the sun, the pale, glistening bone of the joint clearly visible. A few feet further on is its mate; and further still, Jace and Snowdrift stand nuzzling their human child as she sobs into their shoulders, her hands curled into each of their ruffs. The wolves’ eyes, one pair amber and the other a bright, piercing blue, lift to look sadly at the villagers as they each come slowly to a stop, beholding the scene before them.

Derpy Hooves (FantasmicDragon) lies dead in the crèche, butchered exactly like an animal: her guts lie in one neat, slithery pile, steaming faintly in the open air; the folds of her lavender hide lie in another, and her skeleton is visible beneath the tautly stretched musculature of her carcass, the bones pale and the blood smeared like bright paint everywhere, over the ribs and sinews, the smooth, stretched muscles…

That is not all.

Seiryu pauses midstride, one delicate paw lifted; he is still covered in blood from last night’s lynching (murder, the girl Avis whispers), and he is chewing thoughtfully on something even as he stares down at the small, clinking object at his feet, nearly as bloodstained as he is. He lowers his lifted paw to turn it over, trying to identify it—and then his eyes narrow. Sil-ver, he announces, swallowing his morsel; and the other villagers realize that it is not one corpse they are looking at, but two.

The second is larger, human—Pokemon grimaces as she picks out the long leg bones, the domed skull—but that is not all: there are a multitude of objects scattered around, every single one smeared with blood, some dangling from delicate chains smashed and broken.

They are all silver, the villagers realize, as one or two crouch down to pick up this or that trinket. Silver baubles, amulets, necklaces and bracelets and bangles—and they all recognize the possessions as belonging to Umbreon241, for hadn’t she just been talking of them the day before…? TimeWarper says, tearily, “She brought them out to sh-show me, I n-nev-ver thought… I thought… silver w-would besa-afe, I th—” The rest of her words break as she dissolves into tears.

Look, Daner says, quietly enough to draw every head in her direction. There’s written...

And there is a message, writ in blood, plain on the stones, arranged artfully between Umbry’s corpse and the stiff-haired, furry folds of Derpy’s drying hide: Nice try....

Roles (Spoiler)
The werewolves were ilasandra and Wolfpack5554. The Seers were kristconroy and nemo. The Healer was Aerrow and the Ranger DanerSpyre.

The Points
Points were not counted as the Season was not completed.

Trivia

 * This is possibly the only season to have never been finished.
 * This is the first Season to implement the Ranger role.