Dark Jack

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eastern Yharnam, Hunter's clinic, reception

When Nigel turned his attention towards the lantern after reading the message, Torquil grew restless over by the door, weighing the warning he had received from Marcus when Torquil had looked into the lantern himself against his curiosity as to what this mysterious device could be, as well as an explanation for the messages being delivered to them by the Messengers. He did not say anything, however, and Victor – his back still turned – did not seem to notice.

Looking directly into the lantern from up close, the blue light flowing from the lantern seemed to gradually expand from it, filling more and more of his field of vision as if it was rapidly erasing the world around him. At the same time Nigel would feel an unusual calm settling over him, all of his pain and worries fading into the background. He also felt drowsy.
Nigel would likely have little doubt from these feelings that looking into the lantern for even just a couple of seconds would almost certainly make him fall asleep. He could probably tear his gaze from the lantern if he wanted, but it had to be now; another second, and the hypnotic glow would envelop him completely.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eastern Yharnam, Hunter's clinic, reception

Torquil closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath to control his emotions, though his reason for doing so surprised him. It was not that he was embarrassed by the distress or humiliation of not being able to communicate properly, even though he could form sentences just fine in his mind, but rather that he felt an unexpected and – he thought, as far as his limited retained memories allowed him to surmise – foreign sense of smoldering murderous rage building within him. Something inside him was not how it used to be; though Torquil was fairly certain that the beast-man in the back room had been the first human, or human-adjacent, thing he had ever killed, this nebulous something in him wanted him to attack and kill this man, too.
Luckily Torquil was (and assumed he had always been) a very patient person who was well-versed in showing restraint, so doing so was not all that difficult. It was still concerning, but at least it was controllable. Probably a consequence of becoming a Hunter.

“Don't remember,*” Torquil slurred, sighing to himself as he tried to carefully formulate himself in a way that could actually be expressed despite hims limited ability to speak. “Jaw... wrong. Long ago. Don't speak well.**”
Glancing over at Victor, who was apparently still rummaging through the rubble over there, albeit more hurriedly than before, Torquil decided that it was probably a good idea to change the topic to something potentially more productive. He halfway extended his right arm, using the hatchet in his right hand to point at the other message from the little men, over by the strange blue lantern.
“Read.”

(What Torquil actually sounded like:
*“Dohn 'member.”
**“Hiaw... ruhg. Lohg ahgo. Dohn speech well.”)

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eastern Yharnam, Hunter's clinic, reception

Though a snarky comment such as the one the big man had just uttered, sarcastically suggesting to say “please” when asking for something, might have annoyed others or filled them with indignation, all it served to do with Torquil was to fill him with regret and resentment for the condition he found himself in. He had excluded the word “please” specifically because he had predicted that it would be hard for him to say intelligibly, and he had wanted this particular message to be conveyed as quickly and clearly as possible given how important it had seemed.
His jaw clenched in frustration at this, ironically making it even more visibly obvious that the right hinge of his jaw was not where it was supposed to be. How had he managed to live any kind of normal life before this, not being able to speak properly? Though in hindsight, maybe that could explain the obscure sense of loneliness he felt whenever he tried to remember his time before today, before he became a Hunter; that he actually had not been able to live a normal life, but had secluded himself somehow to avoid exposing his disability? Though with his memories the way they were, all he could ultimately do was guess.

Nevertheless the big man turned his attention to the little creatures' message. Torquil had no idea what to call him besides “the big man” since he had yet to introduce himself, though to be fair, no one had introduced themselves since the awakening of these last two Hunters. Torquil kept hoping that Victor or Arcturus, who could speak normally, would take the initiative and share his name, too, but so far they had not.
Over where he had crouched down, Torquil noticed that Victor had retrieved something from the debris over there: a sturdy, reinforced-looking box of somewhat ornate design, maybe a little under a meter long (2' 7”) and some thirty centimeters wide (one foot). Victor set it down next to him while he kept searching the debris around him. It did not seem that he had realized that the big man and Torquil were doing anything yet.

A moment later the big man finished reading the note and did exactly the thing Torquil had hoped to the gods he would not do: asked him a question. Gritting his teeth in frustration, finding it humiliating to have to communicate like an imbecile like this, he nodded toward Adelicia across the room and said, very slowly and with great effort to pronounce the word in a way that would be understandable:
“Saint.”
He wanted to convey more, like how Victor earlier had offered them Adelicia's blood and had left that offer open, but he wanted to keep it brief both for the sake of him not inevitably managing to mess up his speech again, and for them to keep the exchange subtle enough that Victor did not notice.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

@DrabberRogue How is it going? Do you still intend to post, or have your plans changed since declaring that you would do so?

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Due to how integral she currently is to Victor's motivations, and how important Victor is to the characters for the moment, with them essentially seeming to have pinned their hopes on him showing them the ropes, I don't think I have much choice but to puppet her for the time being. Luckily her entire character up until Ashgan disappeared was mostly "stand back and wait for everyone else to figure things out", and such a passive character will hopefully not be as jarring to have stay in the background and mostly act as baggage for Victor until he can unload her.
That should hopefully not be too long, either, since he (as stated in this post a while back) intends to drop her at the first even remotely safe place they get to. From there, assuming Ashgan doesn't return, she will simply act as a behind-the-scenes continuous supply of particularly potent blood.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I'd say go ahead.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I'm going to once more take absence of objection as permission and post to keep things moving.

If one of your characters is actually going to read the Messengers' letter, you can just say so here and I can tell you its contents rather than "waste" a back and forth in IC for them to get it.

EDIT: You know what, that's stupid. It's incredibly unlikely that none of the characters will read the note. I'll just put it in a Hider; if your character doesn't read the message and you want to preserve believable ignorance, don't open the Hider.

The Messengers' letter

Written in the same exquisite calligraphy as the other note:
"Hunters will always want blood, need blood.
From it comes your power, but to others it brings the scourge."

Below this is a second message, however, written in recognizably the same handwriting, but much more hurried and messily than the first couple of lines:
"Beware the blood saint. She is even more addictive."

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eastern Yharnam, Hunter's clinic, reception

While Nigel, Ludolf and Arcturus finished up their business in the back room, Victor marched ahead through the broken door into the room that, though smaller than the other, functionally made up the other half of this clinic of blood ministration, back into the reception area. Stepping across the threshold was enough to trigger a tic in Victor, forcing his eyes to shift and focus off to the severely blood-splattered left side of the room, the sight of which give him a sinking feeling in his stomach and a clenching feeling in his chest. The copious amounts of blood did not bother him in the slightest, nor did the two corpses sprawled over there: a normal-looking Yharnamite carved diagonally almost halfway through the torso from clavicle towards his hip, and a Phumerian that had been bisected at the waist, the two halves several feet apart. Rather than any kind of conscientious struggle with what he had done or the brutality that had transpired, Victor's only reservation was with being reminded of how close he had been to being killed himself. Would he have survived without these other Hunters' intervention? Who knew... but whether he would have wanted to was another matter entirely; being so close to death could do terrible things to a Hunter.
Without even realizing he was doing it, the Hunter once again ran his tongue over his canines, feeling how long and sharp they were. It was strangely comforting, somehow... but also reminded him how hungry he was still feeling.

He quickly tore his gaze from the spot where he had fallen, quickly scanning the rest of the room to confirm that nothing of note had transpired in his absence. It remained in a genuinely terrible state, with overturned cabinets and smashed furniture scattered about the place, wooden splinters, shards of glass and scattered metal and ceramic implements littering the floor in the wake of the ravaging ruffians that had come here intending to target the still-turning Hunters. Adelicia remained by the door to the outside, so pretty, so fragile, so precious, the blood saint... so very defenseless...
Shaking his head as if to physically cast off these distracting inclinations, Victor instead refocused on a particular pile of debris (E2) that he had been rummaging through when Ludolf and Nigel had awakened. He went there directly, intent on further examining the box he had uncovered earlier.

Behind him, shuffling along with less confidence and more general curiosity, was Torquil, who also scanned the reception as he entered, to a quite different sight than had met Victor. Granted, Torquil did see the same things Victor had, but also things beyond Victor's sight. Messengers were scattered about the room, less numerous than in the back room – where they still crowded around each sleeping and dead Hunter – but still a fairly widespread presence, curiously examining everything and anything in the room for a few seconds before retracting back into the floor, only to reemerge somewhere else an instant later.
The only constant presences among these were three groups of Messengers, two of which had already been examined to some degree. The skeletal arm was still irrationally sticking out of the floor directly in front of the door at the center of the room, its bony fingers clutching the handle of the now-lit lantern giving off its otherworldly blue light, though the large crowd of Messengers that had originally clumped at its base had now dwindled to a mere four, who seemed much more intent on Torquil than they did the lantern.
A bit off to the left from the lantern was another duo of Messengers, holding a rolled-up piece of parchment between them. Torquil recalled that they had already read what had been written there:

“Glance calmly upon the lanterns pale gleam,
and find safe haven within the Hunter's Dream.”

The third and last constant among the Messengers, then, was another pair holding another letter between them, a mere couple of steps from the doorway Torquil had just traversed. Hesitating for a second, Torquil eventually went to them and crouched down so that they could show him their message. He frowned.
Standing back up, Torquil turned back toward the door to the back room and, once the first of his three fellow “special” Hunters joined him in the reception, he would point at those two Messengers and greet them with his first comparatively intelligible articulation:
“Read.”

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Yes? No? Maybe?

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

So, what's next? Anything else you guys want to post about in the back room, or should I assume that Ludolf and Arcturus accept the blood vials offered to them and progress to the reception?