Ancient Greed
Jun. 6th, 2024 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerMain Points:
Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond is wet and miserable. It might have been worth it, but he still hates every second of this.
Word Count: 715
Rating: Teen
At least his phone’s okay. He’d taken it out, pretty sure that the impact or the water or both would have done something, but—there’s not even a dent. He squints at it. It sits innocently in his palm. He’s pretty sure the Dragon hadn’t started stalking him until after the little girl found him, so it’s not like this is their doing, the Illuminati definitely weren’t behind it, if it’d been a black market magic phone somebody surely would have tried to gouge him on price, so...he’d done that. Probably. Accidentally. It’d be less freaky if he realized when he was using the Calculations. Guess that’s something he’ll just have to work on. In the meantime, no matter how hard he thinks about being warm and dry, he just isn’t. And he can’t just wish away all the Draug here, and not from lack of trying.
But he’s working on a theory, having seen the zombies stagger up to the beach, some kind of pod-thing on their backs, fall over, and get consumed, only for new Draug to hatch. Maybe the Draug are behind this. And he’s not just blaming them because he hates what they have that passes for guts, right about now. The abundance of zombies is certainly working in their favor, if they’re using them as parasites in their life cycle, and he’s actually seen them yell things to each other in a language that almost sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. Given what Shaun tells him about the Draug, though, it might be a human language.
Apparently, Draug are of Norse origin. (And have magic, and can affect dreams, which after everything Desmond’s been through is a big red waving flag. They’ve gotta be involved in something somehow.) And Shaun had mentioned Loki was ‘somewhere on the New England coast’, which Maine definitely is, though Desmond doesn’t know enough Norse mythology to know if dragging ancient zombies out to terrorize an island is the kind of thing Loki would do. It’s incomplete, as theories go. He’s not sure why here and why now. Sure, if it’s just reproduction and preying on people, that’s one thing, but they’re talking and just based on their behavior, they clearly have a pretty strict hierarchy (usually, the less human they look, the more likely they’re the bigger fish) and are pretty intelligent. There’s probably a point to this. Maybe even like there’s a point to the digging, if they’re talking with the cultist zombies somehow.
Once he actually gets to that damn ship (and after that shower), he might see about taking out a few of their leaders, see if that doesn’t help at least slow the situation down.
Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond is wet and miserable. It might have been worth it, but he still hates every second of this.
Word Count: 715
Rating: Teen
Desmond is sick of these Draug things. He grits his teeth as he finishes off another one, wanting to brush away the sweat but knowing it’s absolutely useless because he’s pretty much drenched, at this point. Between the fog and the rain and having fallen into the water to avoid getting smacked by one of the club-Draug and flying backward anyway, complete with possibly broken ribs or whatever, he’s wet and cold and absolutely miserable. (And that’s not even counting the time the one female Draug started singing and he’d fallen in, again. The sudden jolt did help him wake up, though. But he hates them even more now. Maybe that’s where the stories of sirens came from, but also, anything that uses mind control can die. He tries to ignore the part of his brain that’s happy to remind him he’s done that too, with the Apple.) Wet jeans suck to wear, yeah, but they also make it a hell of a lot harder to just stealth around. Not that that’s been working on these guys, either, which sucks, because that’s a big part of an Assassin’s primary skillset. He’s absolutely sure they’re tracking him using something other than the normal five senses, now, and it’s not Eagle Vision either because he’s pretty sure he could work out how to block that, too. He is absolutely breaking into a house and seeing if someone has a working shower, and if not, he’s heading straight back to London after this. It’s marginally better than the feeling of that anti-reality goop, but not by much.
At least his phone’s okay. He’d taken it out, pretty sure that the impact or the water or both would have done something, but—there’s not even a dent. He squints at it. It sits innocently in his palm. He’s pretty sure the Dragon hadn’t started stalking him until after the little girl found him, so it’s not like this is their doing, the Illuminati definitely weren’t behind it, if it’d been a black market magic phone somebody surely would have tried to gouge him on price, so...he’d done that. Probably. Accidentally. It’d be less freaky if he realized when he was using the Calculations. Guess that’s something he’ll just have to work on. In the meantime, no matter how hard he thinks about being warm and dry, he just isn’t. And he can’t just wish away all the Draug here, and not from lack of trying.
But he’s working on a theory, having seen the zombies stagger up to the beach, some kind of pod-thing on their backs, fall over, and get consumed, only for new Draug to hatch. Maybe the Draug are behind this. And he’s not just blaming them because he hates what they have that passes for guts, right about now. The abundance of zombies is certainly working in their favor, if they’re using them as parasites in their life cycle, and he’s actually seen them yell things to each other in a language that almost sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. Given what Shaun tells him about the Draug, though, it might be a human language.
Apparently, Draug are of Norse origin. (And have magic, and can affect dreams, which after everything Desmond’s been through is a big red waving flag. They’ve gotta be involved in something somehow.) And Shaun had mentioned Loki was ‘somewhere on the New England coast’, which Maine definitely is, though Desmond doesn’t know enough Norse mythology to know if dragging ancient zombies out to terrorize an island is the kind of thing Loki would do. It’s incomplete, as theories go. He’s not sure why here and why now. Sure, if it’s just reproduction and preying on people, that’s one thing, but they’re talking and just based on their behavior, they clearly have a pretty strict hierarchy (usually, the less human they look, the more likely they’re the bigger fish) and are pretty intelligent. There’s probably a point to this. Maybe even like there’s a point to the digging, if they’re talking with the cultist zombies somehow.
Once he actually gets to that damn ship (and after that shower), he might see about taking out a few of their leaders, see if that doesn’t help at least slow the situation down.
