Standing under a small and blackened patch of sky with his hands clasped loosely together behind his back and a bubble of quiet comforting his ears, Shadrach did nothing, watched intensely, and saw no humans. Not in the way that he had perceived humans before. There were definitely two kinds of [i]people[/i] wandering the wreckage in human bodies, but his perception had changed, and now he could see a difference.

Most were the people he'd expect to see in an event like this. Police, paramedics, firefighters. Victims. Casualties. The dead. One of them approached him in a uniform and asked if Shadrach was alright, waited for a response and received none; Asked for him to stay out of the way if he was a bystander; Then finally, having gained only silence, asking if Shadrach could hear him. He couldn't, but he could perceive the vibrations of his voice outside the bubble, and Shadrach bent the streams of light around his body long enough to walk out of the nurse's view while he was invisible. These people- If he looked closely enough- were puppets. Fleshy vehicles, driven by something that flickered and flowed inside them like a mute pilot, that bubbled around the skulls of the dead, residue of an extinguished life. There were so many of them nearby. Were these the inhabitants of Avernale? The world? 

He beckoned to one of the translucent globules of puppeteer that drifted in fragility between the ashes of the dead. It flew to him, and he inhaled it; It smelled of tears, of smiles, of wisdom and regret and money and sex. Of life. He let it sink into his lungs like a sick goldfish, and cradled it there. [i]...It doesn't actually matter. I think I realise that now.[/i] They looked like humans, spoke like humans, feared and rejoiced like humans. [i]I guess I'm just not a practical man, to be wasting my time looking at souls,[/i] thought Shadrach, with a laugh. Ironic, to admit something he'd known since he was a toddler.

And then... Then there were the [i]other[/i] people. Very few of those. They looked like him- Acted like the human he'd once been, a body without a pilot. They felt normal. Companions on a small world. So why was it that they were doing such strange things?

One of them, a woman in a segmented costume painted in metallic greys and violets, was airborne, inhaling the tenacious petroleum flame into her hand; Another, a fragile-looking young man with a placid expression, was lighting them again, striding out among the corpses in a clean-blasted path. Shadrach had an idea the two opposites would soon see each other and collide, and gave them both a wide berth, sinking into and out of invisibility as he liked it. One was close among the people with souls, putting back together the broken ones where even a doctor would struggle to stop that bubble of spirit from detaching. One of them was alone, spinning a die and kneeling beside a destroyed human with a face that might be panic. And yet others. Shadrach didn't make the realisation until he saw the thin girl with the dyed hair, who, like himself, was playing with glass.

The young man laughed softly, hand in front of mouth. [i]Ah, hell... Isn't it always oneself that's the hardest to read? No wonder I can't see the puppeteers. These people are liquid! Just people with a big imagination. Doing nothing stranger than I am, even. Shit, that means I can't trick them out of my visibility, either. Well.[/i] "Catch," he announced to the girl in the dress, lightly tossing his own halo of glass into her shifting cube of it, his hands unmoving. "Have fun."

It was surprisingly peaceful, between the flames and the smoke and the charred flesh and puddles of human spirit. Shadrach was coming to see that, so long as he kept his body safe from the heat and the worst of the noise, the only thing he was really afraid of was a crowd. "Hey," he opened to the tall, snow-haired young man with the dice, ignoring his distress. About his age, though the two looked nothing alike. "This yours?" He reached into one of the bodies, melting the burnt meat and lifting up the skull. This one didn't have a soul nearby, and Shadrach had a feeling that the teenager-entity was why, though he still didn't chance on the thought that his death was the reason he looked so stressed. "Yeah, yours for sure. The one you're using still has skin on it an all, but the bone's the same. So you're dead, huh?"

[@The Ghost in Black] [@Vocab]