Shadow Extraction [solo]

[Dracula]

The heat from a roaring bonfire licked at his back. Its wondrous light was the only one on this evening. It shadowed out his face and left a very distinct shadow cast upon the tree line. Marius Ardeleanu stood in the forests of Romania and he was sweating. He reached out a single finger. His talon like nail raked at the air in front of him and somehow began to drag at the very fabric of space. He grunted and strained against some unseen force but the flick of his finger came to completion regardless. A jagged maw opened in the air that lead to a dark gate way. With a sneer and a curse he closed the portal for what seemed like the hundredth time. He sat on a log and held his own forehead in frustration.

"I'm hungry" The hollow within spoke up from within. Its own body wriggled about in Marius's veins in a way that was once unsettling. The only thing that unsettled Marius these days was how little unsettled him.

"Later. We need this technique." The Bount was tired and unable to truly resist his Doll. He truly was hungry and had used up too much of their reiatsu.

"Not later! Now! I AM HUNGRY!" Like bubbles of a river, the Doll squirmed around beneath the flesh. It was taking control of the muscles and bones, forcing Marius to his feet and reaching out with a finger. "We don't need your Quincy transportation. You still want to use Shadow when you have the Garganta right in front of you." With casual ease, the Doll forced open the jagged and broken portal through space/time and walked the two of them inside. A turbulent flow of reishi rushed over their body as they stepped into the infinite dungeon of corridors.

The walls of the dangai were a deep blackish purple. They looked flesh like on the outside but when pressured they acted like stone. When struck or punctured they acted like flesh once more. There was an always present ambient light in the area but you were never able to see much further than thirty feet in front of you. It was a convenient place to travel through but equally as perilous. Outside these walls was an endless abyss of interdimensional void-space. It was easy enough for one to state but most couldn't even comprehend the words, let alone what they meant. The simplest thing to know was that falling outside the Dangai didn't mean death. It meant an eternity in nothingness. A second danger is known as the Koryuu, the flow inside the Dangai. It permeates the walls and flows like a river of reishi. Coming into contact with the Koryu means being swept into the current, swallowed by it, and eliminated. A third threat existed within the Dangai; a sort of antibody for the corridor. It was known as Kototsu. It's not alive and doesn't have a will that one can discern. It is made of the dangai its self with a single glowing yellow light at the front. Its body took up the entire opening of a given dangai corridor. It rushes through the maze "cleaning" the areas it passes through of all disruptions. Usually identified as an immortal and unstoppable beast, no race has ever been able to subdue or manipulate the Kototsu. It is colloquially refereed to as "the cleaner." Touching the beast in anyway results in wildly random consequences that can vary from, but are not limited to, complete obliteration and time displacement of hundreds of years. So, falling results in a living oblivion and staying too long results in complete oblivion. This place represented one of the few true deaths to a soul. For these reasons and more, no single race has ever maintained control over the Dangai.

"This is your weakness Marius. You're always looking at how things were. You never look at how things are." This wasn't Marius's first time in this space. It was the first time he could act so casually though. Forced to watch his own body move, Marius had the time to explore the Dangai with clearer senses. Usually he was so rushed in here that there wasn't much time for exploring. The Doll took things much more casually in here. He explored mindfully and used little windows to look into the human world for proper food. It came to a school room, twenty five children and a teacher, yum. Children were deceptively great nourishment. Their innocence left them still tied gently to the spiritual world. It went to push Marius through but he Bount held his ground.

"Not children." Marius commanded as he kept his feet rooted.

"I hunger Marius. Don't interfere." Marius didn't have the strength at the moment to control the whole body but he made a decent struggle of one limb. Just as the Doll was claiming the legs, Marius took an arm and reached for a wall; a wall that had the Koryu follow over it. "MARIUS! We can not self terminate!"

"Not children!" All of the Bount programming kept Marius from doing it but he wanted out of this life if possible. If protecting children finally gave him the strength to overcome this Doll and get out, he'd make that choice. The doll recognized that strength of this conviction and closed the window so as to remove the stimulation.

"Fine Marius, you win. The children are all safe. Now put the arm down."

[/b] The doll used the right arm to hold onto and push down the left. "Put it down and we'll find something you do want to eat. You are hungry, aren't you?" Marius's strength faded and he had to admit, they were hungry. "There you go Marius. You did a good job. You protected those kids."[/color] A new window opened to a husband and wife. They were mildly spiritually sensitive and had always thought their house haunted by the ghost of a little girl. They were right. There was a melancholy to her though. She had to act out to get them to talk to her. "Look Marius, they're divided. Let's help them be together."[/div]

"A "dead" child." Against his better judgement Marius entered the house. As a physical being, the man and woman were able to see him materialize from thin air. This looming man of nine feet tall with snarling fangs, sinister claws, and blood red eyes. They don't make it a foot step before he set upon them. The Bount gouged out the man's calf muscle and sunk his teeth into the woman's throat at the same time. While he screamed in agony and she began the process of drowning in her own blood. He stalked over the ghost girl with a sinister grin. They couldn't see it, let alone be bothered to pay attention with their own problems set upon them, but he gobbled her soul up whole in a newly acquired tasted for the already departed. It was like getting all of your food without any of the prep time. Not what he'd do every day but something new and convenient to say the least. The wife came next; the last of her life was like a pallet cleanser as he moved on to something with some more sustenance to it. The man struggled a bit more but there was nothing to be done. Marius leaned down slowly and sunk his teeth in just as slow. He let the man scream until there was no life left. And no one would ever know as the freshly filled monster left the way it came.

"You were right, I can't keep trying to enter the Dangai as a Quincy. That's not what I am anymore and the way you enter isn't the point anyway. It's the knowledge of where to go and how you chose to leave that matters." Marius, the Bount, the man, in control of his body once more, walks a different path and takes a different route through the Dangai. At a seemingly arbitrary but all too important location, he presented his long held Quincy cross and opened a different portal to a place neither shinigami, mortal, or hollow.

"Where have you brought us Marius?" A vast walled city left in ruin. Covered in ice from top to bottom and desolate from war and atrocity. An abandoned fortress full of potential.

"It's a Quincy place that exists in Shadows. I didn't bring us here 400 years ago because I had hoped whatever was left of my Quincy brethern had made it here. Now, I know they didn't and I suspect this place has been forgotten by them. I have a plan-"

"I have a plan too. A plan to eat."

"This is a good place to hide inbetween meals. The shinigami probably don't have common knowledge of it. And, more importantly, it can house an army."

"What would we need an army for?"

"To eat..."