Of Models and Madmen

(Here there be missing stuff)

[Dylan Willis]
The news that Jarod receives on the other end of the cellular telephone connection only confirms the fears that cropped up when he read the emotions of the wild-eyed man in the trees: he is a Marauder. He is at odds with the world around him, believes himself to be walking through a labyrinth and everyone around him to be somehow related to this Hell. Whoever he was, whoever he used to be, is dead, is gone, is not coming back. There is no redemption for his kind. There have been stories of Nephandi being brought back from the other side, being rehabilitated and returned to the light, but no one has ever successfully brought a Marauder out of his Quiet.

It just doesn't happen. Some of them are lucid, some of them are able to acknowledge that there is a universe outside of their own comprehension and function just as well as normal human beings, but they will never be the same again. Dylan Willis is gone, is not coming back, and Jarod decides not to take the chance that the man will allow his Mindscape to bleed out into the world around them.

He puts his hands on either side of the madman's neck, and rather than giving a harsh jerk to snap his neck, he reaches out into the Tellurian to rip at his Pattern. He calls upon his own reserves of Quintessence to make sure that the damage cuts to his spirit, yet he is not able to go beyond what unseen damage he does do: Dylan's eyes fly open, and he thrusts himself upright, launching himself at Jarod without hesitation.

Jarod has seen this man calmly and unblinkingly mow down undead horrors with a handgun. He can only hope that he is not as deadly with his bare hands as he is with a pistol.

[Dylan Willis]
The madman throws himself at Jarod, the very intent of his launch being to tackle the other man to the ground while he threw fists at him, but that isn't what happens. He can't get a grip on the other man, and so he gives up and hurls his left fist at his chest. It glances off of Jarod's body with a hollow thump, and Enid, recognizing that she has a very small window of opportunity, dashes away from the two men to look for something to help with the fight.

Something like, say, a rock.

Jarod, meanwhile, wraps his slim yet powerful hand around the madman's throat, gripping hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to stun him into inaction. What used to be Dylan thrusts his hands up, breaking Jarod's hold, and whips his head forward to try and bash the model's nose in with his forehead. His neck is still hurting from when Jarod rent his Pattern, however, and it hinders his ability to do anything more than what he does next.

As Enid picks up a large rock buried under several inches of snow, Dylan thrusts himself to his feet and takes off at a slow trot back towards the path. Enid easily catches up to him, but when she sticks out a foot to drop the much larger man to the ground, it's she who winds up tripping and going down instead. Jarod flies past her, and then inexplicably, as soon as Dylan's boots hit the path, he stops dead.

They can feel him Working when the air around them seems to flare up with an unseen fire, and they can both feel the hammer of Paradox cocking and discharging. It isn't aimed at Dylan, though. Jarod's punishment for his attempt to rip apart the Marauder's Pattern barely avoids hitting the Verbena, and a moment later he just narrowly escapes taking the brunt of Dylan's punishment, too.

Enid reaches out with her mind, attempts to read the weaknesses and injuries currently housed within the former soldier's body, and she comes up with the scant injuries remaining: the lacerations from the Avatar Storm, the bruising from Jarod's attempts at strangling him. His vertebrae, which had cracked with the power exerted by the Verbena, are no longer broken.

Jarod attempts to bring down physical malady on Dylan's head, tries to induce an asthma attack in a man who has smoked half of his life but has never suffered from respiratory ailments, and the effect fizzles out. Nothing happens. It's for the better, given that anyone driving past could see that the Marauder had just healed himself in the middle of Grant Park.

The young Apprentice takes off running after she has her information, takes off running and throws herself towards the Marauder; her arms find his body warm, hot even through his clothing, despite the temperature, and then he's gone, sprinting away as though the devil himself were on his heels. Jarod races after him, but it's clear that the madman wants to get away worse than Jarod wants to capture him: he races right out into traffic, tearing across the street as though there are no cars, and horns blare and tires squeal, but he makes it across Lakeshore Drive without being hit.

God watches out for drunks, little children, and madmen, apparently. He's gone.

[Jarod Nightingale]
Once upon a time, he'd had the upper hand in this particular scenario. Naturally, had he known what was going to happen when he'd gone out for a walk in Grant Park, Jarod probably would have arrived better prepared. Significantly better prepared. But very seldom was one alerted in advance of potentially lethal encounters. (At least, not for people who weren't tuned in to the ebb and flow of fate and time.)

When it came down to things... he'd simply underestimated Dylan's abilities. Or overestimated his own. It happened now and then, and he wasn't some kind of mad soldier, blindly intent upon murdering someone to the exclusion of all else. So Dylan outran him, out into the street where cars and pedestrians could witness everything that the three of them did, and that was when Jarod made an extremely logical and extremely selfish decision. He stopped.

Footsteps came to a sudden halt, and he hissed ferociously under his breath. "Fuck!" Frustration evident in his features before he took a deep breath and forced the emotion to slide away from his face.

Then he glanced over at Enid, sighed and shook his head. "You know he could have killed you. You're lucky. We both are." And then, after a beat. "Go home."

And he did likewise, jogging towards the underground parking garage across the street where his car was located. At least, he would go home, once he'd paid the chantry a visit to alert them to the fact that a madman was running around Chicago.

[Enid Geraint]
Enid . . . is wiped. She's not sure what just happened, but . . . well. She can't imagine that Jarod would have gone to all that without advice that way from the other end of the phone, and asshole or not, it hadn't seemed right to leave him alone.

Even though he is a decade (more than) older than she and significantly more . . . talented? Learned? Both? Whatever, it hardly matters at the moment . . . than she.

So she'd stayed, found a rock that hadn't been used, and when Dylan gets away, she watches. That . . . can't be a good thing, she thinks, but she doesn't have the will left to continue the chase even if she did have the first idea what to do if she caught up.

You know he could have killed you, Jarod says, and her breath catches in her chest; for a moment, she's forgotten what to do. Now there's hesitation, now there's fear - now that the adrenaline is gone and there's nothing to study, there's just a teenaged girl. Go home.

"Okay," she says, strangely meek, and does. If she's shaking, Jarod doesn't see.