Mox Goes Scouting

[hazlogs]

It's taken Mox some time to prepare (and, admittedly, the young Corax is something of a slacker and easily distracted in her own way) but today she's finally ready. Backpack dedicated to homid form with protein bars, bottled water, extra batteries, and some extra SD cards for the small lightweight mobile camera that's attached to a rig and dedicated to her raven form. All this took some doing, but fortunately Hitch was able to help out -- her, and Corax kindude who was kinda into all this GoPro daredevil stuff. Kindude being the kind of guy who engages in stupid dangerous stunts for fun, usually with a camera strapped to himself to get the footage. Mox's kinda guy, in other words. Too bad he's kind of a skinny nerd and a head shorter than she is, otherwise she might go for him. But anyway! In the end, here's Mox, a raven with a camera attached, just now arriving in the Hanford area and angling toward the old power plant -- which she made sure to look up the location of in Google Maps beforehand.

Despite its relative proximity to St. Claire and her environs, being only two hours away by car at most (and certainly shorter by air, even if that's under one's own wing power), scrubland and dry grasses reign supreme, with only a small scattering of trees here and there that grows less and less common the closer she gets to her destination. Once she hits the bend in the river and turns fully south, she can see plumes of steam rising up from the ground long before the buildings themselves come into view. The Columbia Generating Station, the still-active nuclear power plant, has a far more benign and boring name than its actual purpose, much like its appearance. As Mox draws nearer, she can start to make out the shape of things. The plant lacks the ominous reactor towers one thinks of when they hear 'nuclear power plant'. Instead, the huge plumes of steam pour up from at least five squat, black, round structures clustered next to a much taller series of normal, rectangularly shaped buildings. If it weren't for the remote location and the obvious ground security, it'd be easy to mistake the place for just another industrial plant, generally unremarkable.

Dirty Deeds circles the place a few times, checking out the buildings and the way the security people move about. She tries to land above near wherever two or more seem gathered to talk, even if only briefly, and get a look at their uniforms and gear. And she inwardly says a little prayer to Grunkle Thunder (as she thinks of Grandfather Thunder, kinda picturing him like Grunkle Stan from _Gravity Falls_) to get some more information about nearby hostiles.

The two she locates that seem to be idly chatting might as well be two coworkers hanging around a water cooler; their talk is bored and boring, going on about the game last night, financial woes, and general workplace gossip. They don't seem to notice Mox any more than they'd pay attention to a fly. They certainly don't seem to be a threat, or at least, not to a raven taking a rest on a concrete building ledge. Beyond, she can see more security personnel patrolling, often with dogs, and further than that, back up the river itself and sitting pretty along the southern bank, clusters of distant buildings that mark out where the original nine reactors once were. There's an unpleasant sensation from that direction, a prickle at the base of her feathers that suggests nothing good waits that way, but where she perches seems to be mostly benign. Certainly none of the security personnel or workers seem to have ill intent, though she gets a clear, and probably not unexpected, sensation of danger from inside the structure. The other side of the Gauntlet is likely to be far less accommodating.

Dirty Deeds still has some time to kill before sunset -- and, truth to tell, that fucked up Silent Hill magpie that Val summoned up is still in her noggin and she isn't really looking forward to checking out the local umbra -- so she flies over to those other buildings, the ones where the reactors used to be.

If the active power plant seemed deceptively benign, one would think these, where buildings have been almost entirely demolished and reactors either destroyed or encased, would be moreso, but that's not the case. Security is significantly heavier the closer she gets to the original Hanford site. Dogs, vehicle patrols. Wildlife seems sparse here, but not non-existent; she spots the occasional small bird, and once a hawk, as well as a few rabbits. Power lines criss-cross brown fields and barren steppe. Now and then, an ominous sign has been posted: 'United States Department of Energy: HANFORD SITE. NOTICE: All Persons/Vehicles are subject to search for prohibited articles'. A much older sign posted along the road, almost entirely faded and riddled with bullet holes, seems to say much the same thing, but adds 'Restricted Government Area' to the warning.

Dirty Deeds makes sure that the GoPro gets a camera-lensful of all of these details (she did do some practice with it before going on this fieldtrip; she ain't a genius but she ain't dumb). She's warier of getting close to the guards around here, since they seem more alert, but again she tries to catch any interesting snippets of conversation.

The personnel here seem far less open to idle chatter. Mox has little success as she works her way closer to old reactor sites, where chainlink fences with barbed wire tops start appearing with relative frequency, and the simple, familiar, but in context entirely unsettling symbol for radiation starts appearing on yellow warning signs along the fences themselves. CAUTION, one declares. RADIOLOGICAL BUFFER AREA. Another, closer in, states CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS around a fence enclosing what seems to be little more than dirt and pebbles. Plant life has given way to dust apart from a few hard, scrubby, eternally stubborn weeds, and no animals seem inclined to venture this far in aside from the odd sparrow. The workers themselves are easy to spot: they wear neon yellow suits with full gas masks that Mox has likely only seen in movies until now. Words from them are entirely rare. They communicate in gestures or not at all, for the most part. She finally manages to get lucky with three security guards near one of the lesser used entry gates. They look drawn and unhealthy, and speak in low voices, but she manages to catch a few snatches of conversation, among which the words 'another gone missing' instantly stands out. "Are you sure?" asks one that's kneeling, idly stroking the fur of a German Shepard that's eyeing Mox hungrily. "Definitely," says the one that originally spoke. "We've done a full sweep, he's nowhere to be found." "Fuckin' hell," the guard with the dog mutters. "Like we need to catch more shit. Fine, I'll report it. You keep your trap shut." The third guard is silent, and when Mox gets a decent enough look at him she can see that he looks a little dazed, his eyes faintly cloudy and not entirely focused. Of the three, he looks the thinnest and palest. There's almost a gray cast to his skin.

Yes, this is creepy. Mox is creeped out. Mox is hella creeped out. She takes back to the sky, gets some more footage of this nasty little area, then heads away to find a place to hunker down until nightfall. Also a place to hide, do some shifting to switch out the SD card in the camera, check the battery, down some protein bar and water. She goes a fair distance, not wanting to be right on Ground Zero when she crosses over the Gauntlet.

The best place to hunker down without going far, far out of her way seems to be across the Columbia river, where the northern bank, with its scrubland and occasional copse of trees, seems to be fairly humming with life in comparison to the southern shores. Mox finds a decent, private place amid one of these clusters of trees where she's able to go to ground, so to speak, without harassment, far enough from the road that patrols are a non-issue, even if they stretch this far; and Mox sees no evidence that they do.

Dirty Deeds mutters a little profanity-laced prayer to Raven and Helios, mostly making some not-serious-but-kinda threats about fucking their shit up and dropping ghostturds all over their shit if she gets ganked here, then crosses over.

The crossing is shockingly easy. As remote as Hanford is, one might have expected all the Weavery activity to have thickened the gauntlet a little, even on this side of the river. Not so. Mox crosses more easily than she would in most mundane wooded areas, and the first thing that strikes her is the silence. The trees around her are far fewer, much more sickly than their Realm counterparts. There's no sign of any awakened spirits, animal or otherwise, in the direction of the Hanford Site, though things become greener fairly quickly further north, if no less barren of movement. All she can really hear is her own breathing and a soft, chilly wind that stirs the dust when it passes. Even the river seems quiet and muted, and entirely abandoned. No fish. No birds. Not even insect spirits.

Dirty Deeds lingers in the area for a bit, flying around, taking in the eerie silence and letting the little camera she dedicated to herself (hopefully) take in the images as well. Then she arcs back toward the power plant, aiming for the less-creepy part of it first. And keeping an eye out for fucked up Silent Hill nightmare fuel magpie-things. Or similar.

The silence and emptiness remain for several minutes as she crosses the river again. Eventually there's a faint, rusty 'creak' 'creak' from below, near where one of the few roads to have worn an umbral reflection for itself curves in the direction of the new(er) and still active power plant. In the distance, she can spot the occasional sinkhole, but they seem to be the only things that breaks up the gray wasteland beyond the skeletal outline of black buildings that pepper the Columbia's southern bank. Their earthly counterparts may have been torn down, but the nine nuclear reactors of Hanford still stand squat and ominous in the Umbra's memory. The active plant, however, seems to be the only one still releasing huge plumes of steam.

Dirty Deeds flies down to get a closer look at the active plant, partly to be nice and thorough, partly because she's kind of delaying going over to check out the other part.
As she gets closer, she spies actual movement. Banes dance and swirl in the steam, sucking greedily or crawling deeper into the facility itself. Sickly green fire elementals can be spied through gaps in the various buildings; despite their relative newness, here they seem to be a crumbling ruin, caved in in places and barely standing in others. Other spirits, strange and alien but undeniably Wyrmish, hover and swirl about the balefire banes, and somehow, despite their near translucence and wispy appearance, they seem far more ominous than the more familiar balefire.

But this revelry is weaker than one might expect for an active nuclear power plant. The Weaver webbing that might be expected to wrap the place up tight is tattered and neglected, with only a few fat, ugly spiders lurking in the ruined plant's crevasses remaining. They seem ill inclined to fix the mess. And finally, on the northern outskirts of the plant's campus, three figures don't seem to belong to this pageantry at all. Two are on all fours; strange, massive black dogs--or wolves?--with goopy glistening fur that stands up like a crest along their spines. Their muzzles are slightly too long for wolves and most canine candidates, their tails are long and almost reptilian, and rather than paws, their front legs sport clawed hands that are a little too human-like for comfort. They have no eyes, but they prowl along the edges of the plant snuffling and growling. The third figure can almost be mistaken for a third hound, albeit one standing on his hind legs; but no, no, his (its?) shape is undeniably crinos, with arms folded over his chest. Like the hounds, his fur is an inky black, but it seems to be alive. Mox gets the initial impression of thousands of tiny, wriggling worms in place of hair.
Dirty Deeds takes a risk and does a closer flyby of those three, swooping down and arcing around, staying just high enough to be out of jumping reach (she hopes).
The two hounds ignore her, instead focusing on their investigation of the power plant's invisible border. But as she passes right over head, the crinos figure slowly looks up. He has eyes, or at least, something that mimics the vague shape and position of eyes. They look hollow and reddened, practically glowing against the writhing black worm.../things/ that seem to function as his fur. He makes no other gesture, says nothing, utters no noise.
Dirty Deeds lets loose a nice wet bird-turd while overhead, not bothering to aim, the avian equivalent of thrusting your middle finger back at someone without looking. She climbs back up higher into the sky and heads for the creepy ghosts of nuclear power past.
She can't see whether it hits or not, but nothing bites at her tail or comes screaming after her into the sky, so there is that.

The sound of the active plant seems to drop away far too quickly for the distance it happens at. Silence and desolation reign. She hears the 'creak' 'creak' again, and this time it's obvious that it's coming from a rusted old sign posted along the road. 'Welcome to Hanford' it proclaims in cheery green lettering as it sways slowly back and forth on rusted hinges. At the bottom, still legible despite the black, oily tendrils spread across it, the sign reads: 'Where safety comes first'. Beyond, there's nothing but wind, dust, and distant skeletal buildings.
Stephen King ain't got nothin' on this. Mox continues to fly toward the Umbral reactors, keeping a wary eyeball out for incoming danger.

She spies no active spirits. No movement. As she draws closer to the first of the reactors, however, it becomes clear that they aren't just blackened due to the moon's lighting or burn damage. Inky black, oozing tendrils encase the reactor as tightly as any Weaver web, except that in several notable places the tendrils have simply eaten through the reactor's walls and casing and slithered inside. The larger tendrils seem to pulse with grotesque life, some of them as fat as Mox's body, and here and there at the corners of her peripheral vision the smaller tendrils occasionally spasm and flail at the air before settling. Tendrils wind their way toward the river from here, but also toward the other decommissioned reactors, and, curiously, away from the site entirely, toward the nearest, squatty crest of mountains. The air is cold.

Dirty Deeds circles a few times to get footage, then goes for a quick dive, swooping dangerously close to a patch of tendrils, tense as a bowstring and tapping into her rage to move more speedily.

There's no change from them, not until she's started to pull out of her dive, until she's no longer looking directly at them, when she catches sudden black movement and impossible numbers of thread-thin tendrils grasping and surrounding and-- she's still in the air, untouched, and a glance back shows no change in the tendril patch at all, nothing on her feathers or curling in the air behind her.

Dirty Deeds shudders and keeps climbing, wings clawing at the sky, going up, up, up and /away/ from all that NOPE.

Nothing but the threat of Something seems to chase after her. She's still alone in the skies, and the sensation fades, if not entirely.

Dirty Deeds eventually levels off and points herself in the direction of St. Claire. First thing shes does upon getting back (and finding a place to shift and remove the camera and stow it and etc etc etc) is have a fucking awesome burger someplace brightly lit and mundane, like McDonalds. The next thing is to see if any of the footage came out. Corax kin dude hooked her up with the iPhone app that goes with the GoPro camera, and she plugs in some earbuds as well. Yes, a brightly-lit booth in a McDonalds is the /perfect/ place to go over some creepypasta.

And creepypasta it is. There's immediate success; she has footage, and /lots of it/, from both her Realm trip and the Umbral. Most of it is fairly mundane, or simply a clear, smoother version of what she saw with her own eyes. Not...all of it. From the footage around the southernmost deactivated reactor, the place where she found the three security guards and the neon suited workers, the then-noon shadows seem to be doing something strange. They don't really correspond well to the people or buildings casting them. Some of them are larger than they should be at that time of day. Some of them are pointing in the opposite direction of all the others. In a few frames, namely one of the ones the camera took of the three security guards, there seem to be a few very blurry, shadowy figures mingling among the ordinary humans. With the security guards, it's a decidedly human shape, if slightly hunched, and seems to be facing directly toward her, just behind the sickly, silent guard. She almost misses it, as it only shows up in one frame out of several dozen. Of the umbral footage, two moments stand out. The first is when the black worm furred crinos looked up at her; it looks directly at the camera, at least insofar as red inconclusively actual eyes go. The second is less of something seen so much as something unseen. There's no footage of the sudden grasping tendrils from when she swooped close, only the steady rhythmic pulse that reminds one uncomfortably of a gorged earthworm crawling into a hole.

"Fuuuuuuuuuuck." Mox chews a thumbnail, then uses the app to copy the footage to her phone and email it to Val with a note about how the weird shadows and blurry shapes. There. Duty done. She spends the rest of the night looking for some big burly asshole to fight or fuck (or maybe both) just to get that shit out of her mind. Ugh.