FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: The Squirrel From Hell

Somewhere On Exmoor, August, 1983

The first of the Hounds steps forward suddenly, as though she has been unfrozen, or time has been restarted in her wake. She draws two daggers, each with a strange bulbed flare, knot-like, at the base of the blade. The weapons trail a thin shadow of black smoke behind them as she dashes toward the Dragon.

Her garb is nothing but boots and a ridiculously short dress, black to match the shadows, with matte silver bands around the calves, a small equipment belt at her waist and what looks like a lions fang dangling from a choker about her neck. There's something glazed, almost stoned, about her eyes.

Cleo, trying not to look, recognizes the weapons out of the corner of her eye as being genuine Azatlani special forces daggers, with a reservoir in the hilts that generates a continuous stream of coercive nanotech when the button is depressed. The amount that is being aerosolized alone is enough to take down any target that doesn't match the wielder, as it aggressively rides the air currents like powdered spun sugar, seeking skin contact. It's a terror weapon, designed to create a cloud of fear, and if you get cut with it - well, even for her, that would be bad. Impossible to know how fast the weapon has evolved over the last few millenia. They're one of the few things she's glad she thought were gone.

The Dragon strides forward to engage the Hound female, phasing out of sync with the reality around it in a way that makes it look as though it is determinedly making headway against the weight of aeons. Around it and underfoot, the stones of the floor crunch and then suddenly collapse into unseen depths, leaving a trail of destruction across the floor. Gravity seems to be stepped up all around its body like the flow of an unseen flame.

The Hound does not even hesitate, in the face of forces that could tear her apart, and the glimmer in her green eyes becomes even more drawn as she frantically lashes at the Dragon with her blades, trying to halt its remorseless advance. Cleo keeps her gaze locked and trusts in faith that the Dragon can destroy Her escorts. The Hound is like a psychotic on black angel dust as the Dragon sprouts blades of dark bone from its wrists, the stained colour of ancient peat and sickly polished, and counters every sweep and lash.

First-level warnings start to spring up in Cleo's field of vision. The shadow-dust from the blades is trying to get in through her skin, making an especial effort on the surface of her eyes and at the site of other soft membranes. She grimly closes her mouth and nostrils and keeps going. Her own internal mechanica is holds the substance in check, when what it really wants to do is eat her.

The Hound keeps hacking, but her psychotic or perhaps even drug-fuelled rage is failing. First her wrists snap, then the bones of her arms shatter, then finally gravity takes over and she is driven down into the dirt and flattened, breaking another flagstone or two as her muzzle hits the ground. The daggers break her fingers and fall through them, are crushed on the ground and then consume themselves in brief surges of light as their destruct protocols activate and they consume themselves instead. The swirling shadows become clouds of harmless dust and drift away. Cleo takes a deep breath and resists the urge to blink.

The remaining Hounds all come on line at once and the Dragon races toward them as they sprint against her, dropping the gravity manifold it has improvised as a shield. There are at least three that she can see and she wouldn't put it past Her to have several more stashed behind the shelves to either side in some sort of flanking maneuver outside her field of view.

It can't possibly stop all of them at once. Any combination of outcomes that will stop most of them still won't stop them all. The gravity trick may have gotten around them limits on what the Dragon can safely do around Her, but she can't think of anything good enough to stop all of them without cheating somehow, which at this moment is something they dare not do.

The Dragon gestures, arrogantly, and the pieces of the shattered stones rise up and then hurtle in all directions at the onrushing Hounds, only to somehow impossibly not quite reach all of them before exploding into a shower of finely powdered rock. It seems that She has lost her nerve and acted first, using what remains of her time-lining powers to find an outcome in which her personal bodyguard unexpectedly survive. This is either a tactical advantage for the Dragon, having forced her to act first, or maybe some vindictively clever stratagem on her part.

The Dragon pursues its advantage, drawing optimum-possibility weapons out of nowhere and blazing away at the Hounds with what looks like a pair of FN FAL assault rifles loaded with sniper rounds but set to full auto, the same weapons that the soldiers were using to hunt the Beast earlier across the moors. The distant plausibility of being thus armed lets it slip this single transition in just under the timeline of sight, rather like drawing a hidden dagger, but the firing path of the guns is still authentically random. Reaching wide enough to direct the course of every bullet would leave Her a devastating opening he cannot allow, even though she is weakening with every second that Cleo looks directly at her, being pared down to only a single possible version of Herself.

He is astonished when, in desperation, she uses all of her remaining alternatives in one go to shift the Hounds into altered timelines where they miraculously avoid the bullets. Low rounds sail past one of the Hounds as he trips and slides almost flat to the floor. Another does the Hound equivalent of sneezing on the pulverized stone dust still expanding in front of his muzzle, and the fragment of hot lead destined for his eye socket punches a neat hole through his ear instead. Others are suddenly no longer where they were, even as the Dragon drops the guns and they flicker briefly back into never having been.

The Hounds bound, and snarl, and throw themselves at Cleo with most unlikely speed. As the jaws open and slavering fangs hurl themselves at her throat, the Dragon slows time to a crawl, then stretches out into multiple instances of itself, one for each remaining Hound, and attacks each and every one of them bodily at the same instant. The one in the lead catches a fist backed by a blade of bone directly in the throat, no way it could ever have dodged that, and its neck snaps and its body is curled around the impact as the Dragon hurls it backward, the spray of slavered drool continuing on its way past Cleos right shoulder as it is hurled aside.

The other Hounds meet similarly terrible yet entirely different fates, all of an instant, as each and every one of them meets the full and absolute personal rage of being the primary target. They are driven face-first through the flagstones, have their spines snapped with knees hooked around their necks, are eviscerated by ripclaw talons and torn to pieces by grasping tentacles that shatter their every joint, as the Dragon opens itself up to every unimaginable horrific act of destruction-

-and then collapses back into a single version of itself, as the inevitable retaliation for opening itself so widely across the timelines strikes and it is blasted backward, but this is surely the last of Her-

-the impact, if it can called that, the translation of variant motions across all of local space and time to create a single disruption, sends the Dragon sliding on its back through the dust and cobwebs and pieces of shattered flagstones, but Cleo is safe, she is there, she is right on top of Her and She no longer has any choice about how and where She is, She is here and now and can be killed like anything else in this grubby little physical world.

The Dragon gets up, ears weaving incoherently about behind its head as they try to line up and recreate its temporal array, and fail. It clutches at the sigmoidal golden sensor pits below its eyes, head swaying back and forth like a serpent. "You can blink now," it rasps, staggering back and forth. "I am losing local containment. You must come and find me, at the place where the stones are. At the place where the silos are. Do you understand me?"

Able to look away at last, Cleo looks around to check on the Dragon where it stands behind her and is both surprised and disturbed. She has never seen it to look so very alien before. Its jaws gape open and an infinity of teeth flicker randomly in and out of existence within the space like a jagged chainsaw.

"I must go now. Or you will not be safe. Do you understand me?" it speaks, voice ascending through a multitude of simultaneous harmonics until they all blend and merge into a scream like burning static. Like a choir of insane female angels grinding themselves against steel.

She just looks at it for a second, as it clutches at its head and flickers briefly into a multiphasic blur of angular limbs. Then it draws itself up and dashes straight through one of the free standing bookshelves with such brutal force that it punches straight through instead of knocking it over, tearing apart the ancient volumes in its path in a blizzard of yellowed paper and shredded parchments. Presumably it is heading for the stairs that must lead in and out of the underground library, trying to get as much distance as possible between itself and Her, to create as many new timelines as possible in the hope that at least one will enable its return to what passes for sanity.

Unable to follow the Dragons path, she turns around and glares at what rests in the heart of the cluster of tentacles. "You hurt my boyfriend,bitch," she informs it with the sadistic cheerfulness of a cat about to toy with its latest blood-stained capture. "Come out and play."

The tentacles unwind in a spiral around their hidden payload, to reveal Cleo's ironic vision of the most dangerous thing on the planet she isn't actively in a relationship with. Somehow she's managed to perceive Her into what can only be described as a very large and vicious female anthropomorphic squirrel or raccoon, with short and stubby paw-pads and fingers, large firm breasts and a regularly alternating fur pattern that is somehow reminiscent of the colors and patterns that shift inside the tentacles that hold her. "I eat squirrels, bitch," she adds. "Now you're just another type of prey for me."

The tentacles open like a flower, and She slides down them, upside down and arms wide as though she was abseiling, only the tentacles slither around her breasts and out of her widely stretched cunt and anus in a juicy slather of white slime until, several feet later, they are free of her body at last. Just before she is about to reach the floor, they flex independently of one another and in accordance with Her will, grasping her wrists and turn her rightside-up, allowing her to descend forward and gracefully onto the tips of her blunt but over-clawed toes like a gymnast.

As the tentacles retract back into the main mass in which She was hidden, She raises Her hands and inspects them, then briefly looks over her own body to decide how best it could be used as a linear weapon. Speech comes last, as she tries to draw upon memories she's never had.

"You will eat my cunt, cat!_And then my tentacles will fuck you forever and ever and _ever.....!"

Cleo punches her.

It's rather nicely calculated, as punches go. With careful aim, Cleo has plotted the precise trajectory required to intersect Her muzzle where the occipital curve runs under the eye, and then applied the maximum possible force to shatter it. Her target goes over sideways and nearly hits the floor before the tentacles catch her and lift her back up straight. Her knuckles barely sting.

"You know it's very sweet of you to offer and all," Cleo responds, targeting whatever She might have in place of a liver with a brutal undercut, "but I already have a boyfriend for that."

It seems that of all things, this is going to be settled by what is essentially a boxing match. The reek of sundered Hounds in the dust crosses her nostrils and the ancient stones are warm underfoot as she dances, laying on the hurt with an entire range of half-remembered techniques as she tries to stay out of range of the grasping tentacles and cause as much damage as possible. Every time She gets close, Cleo punches Her again, but getting close enough to hit Her means that the tentacles get to have their shot at it as well. Whenever one of them starts to get tired and needs to regenerate a bit, it's entirely possible for them to retreat back into their own corner and take a short breather.

This particular fight, however, is escalating rapidly. The killer squirrel of damnation seems to be getting steadily bigger and stronger with every moment Cleo looks away, and She is absorbing hits like Her flesh was made of some sort of rubber or latex, the same sort of leathery substance the tentacles themselves consist of. If She wasn't a parasitic monster from the outside, Cleo might actually find some respect in her heart for Her, but as it is, she raises flame from her clenched fists and hits even harder, trying to burn into Her flesh with each strike.

Soon Cleo has a black eye and blood is dribbling from one of her nostrils, and she's grinning fierce and having more fun than she can remember having in ages. The eye will fix itself after all, given a few minutes. She's trying to take the most hits where she has the most padding, namely letting the tentacles smack her around the tits like something out of a B-movie, but then one of them collects her on the side of the head and knocks her flat.

It only takes Cleo a second to spring back up, but She's completely out of her field of vision for a second, which is long enough to confirm all of her speculations. The generally anthropomorphic squirrel thing, her roadkill, her prey, is diverging steadily from its original appearance the more and more often she looks away. Tiny spikes which are gradually growing into major spurs are sliding forth all over its skin, especially down along the scalp and spine, with clusters on the shoulders and along the arms. The end of the tail seems to be extending a cock-shaped barbed spine which would be distinctly unpleasant to fuck with. The creatures whole body is becoming increasingly beefy and quadrupedal, and one set of clumsily bulging breasts is rapidly becoming an array of twenty or more smaller ones, layered all the way down to its abdomen as it copies her own cheap tactic.

Really scary things are happening down near its private parts, so much so that Cleo almost forgets to duck and then goes low for a second to try and see just what the hell is going on. The creatures massive anus seems mostly unchanged, but the vagina is becoming a ferocious hooked and barbed maw, with crab-like bladed arms sliding slowly out from the inside, forcibly gaping the flesh open wide. The engorged clit is growing into something she can't even describe, like a cock in the form of a carnivorous flower, with another stinging barb at the end ready to violate her cervix.

Cleo desperately slaps aside the meaty length and rolls out of the way as the cunt clenches at her, hungry to draw something in. Stray tentacles service the open holes and the creature leans back with a stretch and a groan, apparently drawing strength from the weird intercourse. It's getting steadily bigger, still female but definitely an it, and as she watches its mouth opens to reveal multiple rows of teeth, with two pincer-arms just like the pussy-maw sliding out from the corners of its wide-spread jaws and multiple tongues like miniature tentacles drooling forth.

Cleo keeps fighting. She doesn't care how big and scary this fucking thing manages to get, it is just a damned squirrel on speed and there is no way it is beating her. She grabs one of its lesser tongues and yanks downward, grinding it sideways against its teeth and dragging the creature down into punching range until the tongue finally tears away and is immediately replaced by another. The creatures muzzle has become narrow, almost bony with a pointed nose, and it's starting to grow a second set of eyes. But being punched repeatedly in the face with fire seems to slow down the process.

Having bought a couple of seconds as the creature tries to scream obscenities around multiple tongues and ends up coming out with an enraged roar, Cleo tries to plan how to kill it.

static interrupt

Something like a scream of black static erases her vision, overloading her already strained visual system and ringing like a scream in her ears. Pixels flicker with the shimmer of the light-that-is-seen-in-darkness, and as her visual field fades back in, she is still fighting on reflex and instinct, but the creature is getting huge. Somewhere the Dragon is surely but steadily still losing containment, unable to distance itself enough to free itself from the entanglement net.

This must be what She was hoping for all along, Cleo realizes, as she parries an entire enormous clawed and gnarled limb stomping down on her by pushing herself away from it with both flattened and flaming palms. If the Dragon cannot constrain its local instance, Cleo's ability to perceive Her down to vulnerability will be entirely lost amidst the quantal noise and She will be loose to manifest Herself as She sees fit.

The situation, in short, is deeply fucked up, she concludes as the creatures cock snaps at her and its mouth tries to beat her down with a lash of stray tongues. Which is what gives her the idea she's looking for at long last.

To get it to work will require excellent timing, but it has the advantage of being completely outside the bounds of sanity, which makes it exactly right for the situation. She deflects a tentacle,wait for it, judges the motion of all the creatures ever more numerous limbs and extremities until the distribution of its weight is such that it cannot go back on its own motion, not here in the real world bitch, and then sprints forward directly between its hind legs. The creature may well have grown itself some extra eyes by now, but it's used to being locally omniscient and certainly doesn't grasp the concept of line-of-sight as well as it should.

Tentacles flail blindly in the right general direction, but she's already hit the floor sliding feet-first and rolled sideways as she did so, so that as she comes to rest, her knee is already up under her and her elbows braced to spring. The snaking extremities sweep overhead, almost slowly, and then when they sweep back again to go low, she leaps over them, diving straight at the creatures single most intimidating vulnerability, the gaping maw right between its back legs.

The hook-bladed spider-arms that hold it wide flex randomly, unable to see what they're biting at. She deflects one with the back of her wrist as it sweeps inward, suffering minor cuts from the layers of fractal barbs on the surface, then grabs the next and uses it to yank herself forward even more forcefully before the rest can close around her on flinch-reflex. Her muzzle ploughs into the viscous unidentifiable slime of the creatures inner folds, where it quite simply can't fit any more spiky bits because it would puncture itself. She hooks the nail-claws of one foot into the soft, yielding, slimy pink tissue of the creatures inner labia, like hot raw meat, and thrusts herself deeper in. Just as she is starting to lose traction anyway, the arms close behind her and she pushes off them, inadvertently given an assist by the creature itself.

The smell is virtually indescribable, featuring chemical overtones that were never meant to exist in nature with all the worst points of poor pussy hygiene. The slime is being driven into her clenched closed nostrils, she has no idea how she's ever going to get her hair clean after this unless she gets lucky and the stuff sublimes later, and she has to keep her eyes open or just about anything could happen. The only light is stray orange and red illumination that has made it through the creatures quivering flesh from the outside, and from her firey fingers as she claws her way forward, like putting a high-powered torch behind your hand.

Distantly heard from somewhere in the distance are terrible howls and snarls of rage as the creature finds itself unexpectedly on the receiving end of its planned violation. Its cunt clenches around her, briefly compressing her ribcage into its interlocking stress-resistant configuration, and driving out a little of the relatively limited amount of breath she has left. It's not like there's very much air in here, after all, and what there might be, she really doesn't want to breathe. For a moment she's afraid that it will crush her, then the grip loosens and the creature starts to move about, surely planning to try and get her out of there somehow.

A combination of the quadrupedal configuration the creature has been trying to adopt and the high level of general confusion buys her a little more time. It seems to be trying to shove its own hand up between its legs to grab her, but it can't really reach properly and is being thwarted by the grabbing claws which clench on its own fingers and wrist every time Cleo claws at the slippery lining of its vagina, keeping it off balance. The smart thing to do would be to pull its hand out and just shove a bunch of the smaller tentacles up there, but the new and exciting experience of being stuck in an actual physical body seems to have it thinking less than clearly and with a one track mind.

Everything suddenly spins itself around and sideways as the creature tries to get a better angle for its sudden and unwanted experience in self-exploration. It seems to be rolling onto its back and side to try and reach her, scrabbling with its claws dangerously deep inside itself, but Cleo has already made it past the choke point and into the creatures fleshy interior. If there's anything Cleo knows for certain it's just how her favourite personal parts work, both in herself and others, and so everything is exactly where it should be.

She rams her clawed toe-tips into that special nerve cluster, like giving some sort of perverse foot-massage, then feels around in the darkness with her eyes open until her fingers slip into the ultimate source of the stinking slime that surrounds her, a tight opening only slightly larger than her own widespread cunt. It's like watching a locksmith go to work on a mechanism made of flesh, elbows up against the door, trying for just the right angle to get in.

"This is my cat's lockpick, bitch," she mutters, if only for her own satisfaction, then rams her fist all the way up inside the creatures cervix to the shoulder, focuses all her power on the one point surrounding her clenched fingers, and for a few moments she can see gloriously clear as day, as everything is lit up from the inside. Then something catches and the white light of flame propagates suddenly all around her with a terrible roaring that is not from the fire at all.

static interrupt

She seems to have blanked out, but only for a little while, maybe a minute or two, nothing like the first few times she had to push her power to its limits. Lying on her back, stunned, she tries to sort out what she is seeing and then realizes that she's lying inside a giant ribcage, in a thick drift of black ash. The ends of the ribs are just as pointy as any of the other protrusions the creature boasted, and have been burned just as black as the surrounding ash at the tips, with progressively more damage as the flames raged upward. Reason dictates that somewhere under her, there is therefore a mostly intact spine of some kind.

She spits out some ash and notices that her right arm is still trailing all the way out behind her in its previous extended position. She should be feeling icy cold at this stage, from all the power she's used up, but being buried in the warm ash seems to have helped, and she seems to have stayed completely fireproof even during the momentary lapse of consciousness.

She manages to roll over, and watches the outer edges of the tentacles still burning, a most peculiar process like rolled paper being consumed from the inside, to turn into blackened flakes that rise a short distance before becoming too small to support themselves in the convection currents and then adding themselves to the general slew. Presumably they weren't actually immune to bright light, just far more resistant than usual, and once she reached some sort of critical temperature, they must have ignited just like anything else, and then fuelled their own burn.

The curious effect of distance and shadowiness that surrounded the tentacle outgrowth has gone completely, and there are plain stone walls nearby just like the rest of the room. Experimentally, she looks around and notices that the books and parchments on the shelves seem to have completely resisted catching fire, as, unfortunately, have the slain and fragrant carcasses of the Hounds. There's a certain amount of stray paper drifting around from where the Dragon made his exit, lots of arcane geometric diagrams and baroque script. Some of it is lying next to her in the ash quite undamaged, and so she picks it up and looks at it just out of habit.

The Dragon! Yes, the Dragon! She has to go find it and calm it down somehow before Bad Things happen, with capital letters!

She jerks her head up, regrets it, then scrabbles out of the ashes and manages to stand up. At least the fire seems to have consumed all of the nasty and horribly organic substances that were pretty much covering her entire body. She's still not quite sure how that works precisely, come to think of it. All her hair is still attached and seems to have been burnt clean, so she isn't left looking like the bald Sphynx Cat that Terrowne joked about, but all the clothing and armour she had on has been completely consumed, leaving her stark naked. When she's fully conscious and in control of her powers she can choose exactly what burns, retaining or discarding clothes at will, but the overboost seems to destroy anything that isn't actually part of her. The effect even seems to have extended to the inside of her mouth and other personal places.

A quick self-assessment shows that her blacked eye is almost fully healed, most of the other minor bruises are gone and any dried blood has been scorched off her by one means or another. Her arms and hands are still a little cut up from parrying the hooked surface of the grabbing claws, but the cuts are closing up practically as she watches. It unnerves her, in fact, just how well she's feeling, because after all that she should be a wreck, but it's like the flames have triggered a reset. They've burned all the weakness right out of her.

Best not to tell anyone about this, perhaps.

The scorched remains of the Thing From The Outside are magnificent, but unfortunately there's no time to collect anything suitable for a trophy. The narrow muzzle leers from the ash heap and there are random bladed jagged spiked bits everywhere in various stages of articulation.

The ribcage towers over her head when standing and makes for a series of convenient handholds as she gets back into the habit of walking by stretching just about everything in order to shake it off. If anything she feels like she's experiencing the mythical burn, radiating heat from within as she cools down after some form of particularly intense exercise, able to keep going even when she shouldn't be with no discomfort. Feel the flow and do it anyway and all sorts of other inspirational athletic slogans are practically bubbling into her head. When she feels its safe she sprints a few steps, with no resistance.

Now, time to find her Dragon.

She follows the shockwave of blasted papers that starts wide on one side of the bookshelves and exits narrow to the other, heading towards a flight of stairs that, several minutes earlier, was less than her top priority. The Dragon being typically itself, some of the paper fragments have, by sheer coincidence, been folded into a string of origami animals, paper cranes, lace doilies and other more improbable snap-toys of various kinds, in order of increasing geometric complexity. At the end of the row, a miniature of the Dragon itself is pointing up the stairs.

Cleo slaps on her best grim snarl, in case any remaining cultists are even_thinking_ about fucking with her, and ascends the staircase.

The good thing about the manor house is that the deeper basements seem to have been the center of the cults devotional activities, and as she climbs upward from the underground library, the building becomes progressively more normal. There also seems to have been an effort to confound anyone coming inwards with confusing paths and locked doors, which works to her benefit on the way out because it makes leaving the easiest possible option.

The main building, above the library, is built almost entirely out of red brick and timber rather than solid stone and seems to hold nothing other than what you'd probably expect. She passes a number of dirty bedrooms, a lesser library with a shrine to the electric snake beings and a mystic worktable, several surprisingly clean bathrooms, some very boring storage areas and one quite interesting room with artificial lighting that is split equally between growing hydroponic cannabis and nurturing all manner of obscure witchcraft herbs in giant ceramic planters full of purified soil.

The Dragons progress can be tracked by the trail of critical and bizarre destruction which it has left behind. She keeps expecting to be charged by crazed, flat-eyed maniacs with kitchen knives or their lesser Hounds snarling and baying, but most of them seem to have been attracted by the commotion made by the Dragons exit, with unfortunate results.

One cultist is sitting against a wall with a small potted plant sitting broken on his head, grinning a vacant unconscious grin. A little further along, two have been thrown through a brick wall, leaving neatly cultist-shaped outlines. Another has been stuffed with reckless disregard for safety into the vacuum tube of a big-screen television in the rec room. Fear the irony!

She trips over a hound that has been smacked to the floor with great precision, all its legs perfectly and symmetrically arranged to be pointing straight outwards like a bearskin rug. Its lolling tongue seems to be indicating that she should go left, so she does. This is so much more exciting than his usual trails of chalk arrows and occasional tagging!

She knows that she's approaching the exit when she passes through a large kitchen that, although mostly underground, has a row of high narrow windows on one of the walls that seem to give on to the outside, showing the last hints of sunset in the form of an orange light with hints of deepening darkness. There is lots and lots of meat in the kitchen from less than readily identifiable sources, and based on contextual evidence it appears that at least two Hounds were in here making dinner when they were caught badly by surprise, innocently failing to expect a deranged Dragon.

The larger one is wearing an actual chefs outfit and has, inevitably, been hit with a frypan, leaving a muzzle-shaped imprint in the metal. The smaller one, dressed as a waiter, has been decked out neatly across a row of burger buns recently prepared, whereupon ketchup and mustard have fallen on him from the shelf above, presumably in reference to the common hotdog.

That, thinks Cleo, is distinctly weak. The Dragon must have been getting bored by this point, which is, as with most things relating to it, a bad sign.

She grabs the only completed burger from the bench, looks at it, decides she doesn't really care what it's made of and dips it in the ketchup pooled on the waiter's shirt before taking a bite. It's actually quite good. "My congratulations to the chef," she tells them, nodding her head as she exits.

Directly upstairs of the kitchen, it's a straight shot to the main hallway leading in and out of the building, which is actually quite narrow and not very long, probably dating from the original house before it was expanded and they added wings and additional levels. No-one wants to carry heavy kitchen supplies further than they have to, so kitchens are always near an entrance or loading bay.

She double-checks the hallway, but she can see all of it and it doesn't really convey any sort of significant advantage to an attacker. What really worries her is the prospect of emerging through the front door into some sort of spectacular ambush of laser-targeted rifles, as hastily slapped together from weapons caches deeper in the building just after the Dragon left, but slightly before she finished fighting the thing with the tentacles.

What awaits her, however, is a pleasant surprise. Not only is the front door completely unlocked, but her Jump Bike is right there, down two or three marble steps just beyond the white pillars of the portico. The cultists must have found out where it was parked and carried it up the hill by way of the access road, probably to show it to their immediate superior and ask him exactly what it was and what the hell they should do about it. It must have involved a great deal of effort, and it looked like they'd made it almost to the door when the Dragon had smacked their heads together, eschewing the subtlety of cartoon violence for the cliches of heroic action movies.

There was a definite progression of increasing anger. Down the hill, the gate to the main road had been blasted apart and was all scorched around the edges. The only real question was just how high the exponential increase would go before she found him.

The bikes' panniers are there too, and although they're not capacious enough to hold another set of full armour, they have her spare clothes and motorcycle gear, which is almost as good. On the way out, she was in far too much of a hurry to loot anything, mainly because finding anything much tougher than cloth would have involved a dangerous detour deeper into the building for very limited gain. Half of the cultists were wearing those ridiculous robes and vestments, which she hated, and the Hounds were obsessed with keeping to their native form as much as possible and so it was all ludicrously baggy pants and elaborate patterned loincloths. Finding something that fit would have taken forever and made only a negligible improvement to her survivability.

In the saddlebags, however, she has a pair of individual thigh-high leather leggings, five spare pairs of panties (one of them is even clean!) and no bra, a sort of matching leather vest that cups under her breasts and laces up down the front, and a pair of big angry stomping boots with lots of metal on them, one to each side so the weight balances. It's her biker bitch special and its great for mix-and-match with whatever else she might have to hand, but today it works out nicely because there's just enough to make up one entire outfit that nominally covers her and might make a difference.

Hastily, she rummages through the packs, pulls the leggings up good and high and tight, pulls on the least smelly pair of panties after giving them a sniff, drags the vest down past her shoulders and yanks the strings firmly up into a quick shoelace bow. The boots will have to wait for now, because they're too damn hard to get on and take ages to lace up securely. Maybe she can throw them at someone or something. At least she won't get arrested for indecent exposure, or end up riding naked, because that is really cold and suitable only for warmer climates during the summer.

Hell, at least this lot fits.