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Inhibit Senses
 Inhibit Senses: standard (rank 1)
He spotted Karla coming from far away and stood up to meet her. His cigarette dropped to the concrete before being ground under his boot. Karla shook the man’s mammoth hand. She was about to speak but the man cut her off.
“I’m Rick Diamond. We spoke on the phone earlier.” Karla nodded. “At first we thought it was a werewolf, but we pumped like eleven silver bullets into that thing. It’s still going strong.”
Karla waited a second to make sure he was quite done. “Well, I can’t tell what it is from out here. Guess I have to go inside.”
“We have it holed up in a small locked room. I’ll escort you there.”
“Thank you very much,” Karla said sarcastically. She stepped onto the porch and the man standing there pulled the door open from her. As the door opened, Karla shuddered involuntarily. The staircase leading up was rotten. The smell of mold lining the walls poured out and almost made Karla gag. She paused for a second just after crossing the threshold. The wooden floor creaked under her feet. She stood still, hoping that the floor wouldn’t give way under her. Rick had already walked down the hallway into the kitchen. He turned around to see Karla standing still in the doorway.
“You coming?”
Karla carefully followed him into a kitchen where three hunters, fully decked out with ballistic armor and helmets all had their rifles pointed at a door. The door wasn’t threatening from the outside; Karla would have walked past it if everyone else wasn’t paying so much attention. As it were, she walked over to the door and placed her ear up against the wood to try to hear something.
From inside she could hear the faint sound of wind rushing through trees. “It sounds like wind,” she reported. None of the men in the room responded. They all held a solemn countenance. Their jaws were tight with fear.
“Well, judging by the sound, I think it is some kind of air elemental.”
“That’s no elemental, lass,” replied a hunter. He pulled up his sleeve, showing a blood-stained bandage wrapped around his upper arm. “You’re going to have to open the door.”
Karla took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was afraid it would come to this. At least with the door, she had a couple inches of wood between her and the monster. Rick Diamond said it hadn’t even flinched after a couple silver bullets. Once she opened that door, it was just her and the monster.
She put her hand on the cold, metal doorknob and looked over her shoulder. “This is extremely dangerous, isn’t it?” Everyone else in the room, nodded silently. Rick Diamond pulled out his pistol and trained it on the door.
“Don’t worry, we’ll cover you.”
Karla pulled the door open and fast as she could, like ripping off a bandage. It was pitch black inside. The light from the kitchen didn’t enter the room.
“Does anyone have a flashlight? I can’t see anything in here.” She held her hand out backwards and felt a flashlight being handed to her. The light shined through the doorframe but then stopped as it crossed the threshold. It was as though the darkness wasn’t the absence of light but an entity all on its own. Whatever it was, it was making sure no one could see into that room.
Karla turned the flashlight back off when a claw reached out from inside, grabbed her by the throat, and hauled her into the darkness. Karla’s legs swung back and forth as she struggled. Her feet impacted something solid a couple times. With every impact, the grip on her throat grew tighter. Two bulbous, yellow eyes appeared in the dark, staring up at Karla. Just below the eyes, a mouth full of glowing teeth opened. The facial features of the monster were the only things in the darkness. The mouth unhinged and opened unimaginably wide like a snake’s. Karla was being lowered down into the gaping, glowing mouth. Her wings were free though, she flapped as hard as she could and a cloud of fairy dust shot into the beast’s large eyes.
The monster howled with pain and dropped her. Karla turned and ran for what she hoped was the exit. The door was still open. She couldn’t see at all until suddenly, she broke through the wall separating the monster’s room and the kitchen and ran, full tilt, into the refrigerator. Someone pushed the door closed behind her.
She could barely hear over the pounding in her head, incredulous voices. They hadn’t expected her to come back. Karla sat on the floor, taking painfully deep and trembling breaths.
Detective (Monsters)
 Detective: standard (rank 1)
Karla excused herself for some fresh air and walked outside. The sun was starting to set and the temperature was starting to drop. Karla chose to believe she was shivering so hard because of the cold. She could barely hold her cellphone still enough to dial the number she wanted. The phone rang three times before Dr. Absalom picked up.
He answered the phone with the word “Distraction.”
“Hello? Doctor? I need your help.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know what this thing is. It’s big and it just almost killed me.” Her words were coming out too fast. Karla tried to slow down. “I think this monster is too big for me.”
“Of course it is.”
“What?”
“It’s a monster. That’s part of the definition of course it’s too big for you. Your job is to destroy it anyway.”
Karla took a deep breath. “How can I destroy it if I don’t know what it is?”
Dr. Absalom sighed. Karla could hear him growing more annoyed by the second. “You are a fairy, right?” he asked.
Karla’s jaw dropped. “Yeah, but I didn’t tell you that. How did you know?”
Dr. Absalom didn’t respond immediately and let the silence on the phone line underscore the stupidity of Karla’s question. In her mind’s eye, Karla could see him sitting behind his desk and massaging his temples as though engaging such idiotic thoughts was causing him physical distress.
After some time, Dr. Absalom said. “Fairies are known for their prodigious memories. You can remember back leagues better than I can and you’ve spent all day cataloguing through my list of creatures. Now there’s only two possibilities for this situation here. Either, that thing you’re fighting is something that I haven’t encountered in which case, I won’t be helpful anyway or you’re well enough prepared that you can take care of it on your own.”
There was a click and the phone went dead. Karla nearly threw her phone across the road. She had put so much work into making that old curmudgeon comfortable and happy so that he could write his book and he repays her by almost getting her killed and refusing to help out.
She started to flap her wings to take off. Just as her foot left the ground, the door to the abandoned house opened and Rick Diamond walked out, breathing hard, forehead glistening with sweat.
“Whatever that thing is, you got it good and mad. Did you get a good look at it?”
Karla landed. She couldn’t leave. They needed her help. “No, whatever it was, it was making the room it was in dark. No light could get in or out.”
“So he’s some kind of darkness werewolf?”
Ideas started to come together in Karla’s head. She remembered the exact notecard with the details and started repeating it out loud. “The beast of winter – The monster of the night – The Wendigo”
Rick Diamond raised an eyebrow, confused. “Excuse me?”
“That’s a Wendigo in there and putting it in a dark room was the worst thing you could do. The darkness makes it grow bigger and stronger. It’s a beast of the Winter. Silver won’t defeat it. Heat will. We need to get it somewhere hot.”
“That’s not too hard.”
A loud roar ripped through the air followed by the splintering of wood. A blur slammed through the walls of the abandoned house and continued running away in that direction. The house creaked loudly, like a living being in great pain. Rick Diamond whipped his walkie-talkie to his ear.
“GET OUT OF THERE.”
The house started to fall down. Supports failed. Wood snapped in half. The house’s groans grew worrying. Karla and Rick watched the door intensely to see if anyone would come out. With a final, loud crack, the house fell down with all of Rick’s men in it.
Flight
 Flight: standard (rank 1)
“Tracking,” began Rick, “is an art.” He walked slowly, incredibly focused, looking for scraps of hair along the ground. Karla followed, thoroughly unimpressed.
“Let’s walk more quickly,” she complained. “Let’s just follow the damage.”
“Shh” Rick held up a hand. Karla groaned, annoyed, and took to the skies. Rick’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. She hadn’t thought about how he’d react to a non-human. Monster Hunter: it was pretty obvious
From her vantage position in the sky, Karla could see everything so clearly. There was a trail of destruction leading away from the house that had just collapsed. Some walls had been torn through: parts of buildings that had been in the Wendigo’s path. Karla followed the path ahead of the monster hunters. Soon, she came to where the destruction stopped.
Illusion Control
 Illusion Control: superior (rank 2)
- Ranged Attack
- Area Affect
“There’s a school up ahead. That’s where the trail of destruction ends.” Karla reported calmly.
“Oh My God, we’ve got to get the children out!” Rick grabbed at his gun
Karla rolled her eyes. “This is the abandoned district. There aren’t any children.”
“God, this mission’s gonna be the one that kills me.” He exhaled hard regaining his composure. “All right, let’s go.”
The building was a one story with what obviously used to be bright yellow paint on the side. The colour had dulled from years of exposure without upkeep where it hadn’t chipped off onto the floor. The building looked like it used to be pretty. Karla would have liked to go to school there. The front door had been ripped off its hinges and thrown out onto the school’s lawn. Karla stepped over the mangled wood and inside. As expected, it was dark. Rick walked in behind Karla. As they walked deeper into the building, the rectangle of light that was the doorway got smaller. Eventually it receded to the point of total darkness with a tiny pinpoint of light guiding their way back.
Karla turned to where she expected Rick was in the darkness. “So, tracking genius, where do we go now?”
There was no response. The darkness became more terrifying as Karla realized she was completely alone. She started to walk towards the pinpoint of light that was the door. Maybe she could call the doctor and tell him that the Wendigo was too much for her. As she walked out, the light suddenly disappeared. While Karla tried to figure out what was blocking the light, she heard a deep, rattling growl that shook the room and knew exactly what it was. The Wendigo’s spell was complete.
Karla felt an impact across her chest as the beast charged in with a diving tackle. She fell to the floor with the whole weight of the monster on top of her. Its knees dug into her stomach. Breathing was difficult. Her wings were pinned under her so she couldn’t fight back. A drop of saliva splashed on her nose. Glowing fangs came into view between slowly separating lips above her. Karla searched anywhere for something that she could use to help her.
The rotting floor gave way under the combined weight of Karla and the beast, she landed roughly on the floor below and for a second she there was light. It was a very short time before the monster refocused its spell, shrouding itself in darkness again. In that time, Karla was able to get a look around. They were in an old boiler room. Pipes extended around the ceiling all connecting to an old drum in the center of the room.
Karla set her plan into action immediately and then the darkness became total again. The Wendigo, astute predator that it was, locked in on its prey in the darkness. Karla climbed up on top of a pipe running near the ceiling, squishing herself up against the top of the room. The Wendigo jumped. Its jaws fit easily around Karla who immediately faded away. It was an illusion, a falsehood. The real Karla stood nearby with a smirk on her face as she heard the metal pipe splinter in the monster’s powerful jaws. Burning water poured out of the boiler. The Wendigo squealed and recoiled away from the heat.
“Begone, Beast of Winter!” shouted Karla. It didn’t do anything; the shouting was just for effect. The Wendigo died as the hot water poured over it. Light returned back to the room, shining through holes in the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. Karla found the basement stairs and went to leave. On her way out she found Rick, strewn out around the living room floor.
Karla walked outside into the sun and pulled out her cellphone. “It was a Wendigo.”
“Did you kill it?” asked Dr. Absalom.
“Yeah.”
“Good, because I need you back here immediately.”
“What’s wrong now?” Karla grumbled.
“I want more coffee.”
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