Logs:Chill Shadows

Chill Shadows
Scary Cold Shadows
Dramatis Personae Akhlut, Healani, Keha, Nala. GM: Healani	12 October, 2007 Something causes Hawaii to chill
Location Mililani, Central Oahu	Plot(s) Plot:Beyond Zebra
The moon is ghostly galleon floating on a seemingly endless starry night sky. A wind carrying the breath of autumn move through the area. Lights turn off at the 18 hole of the Mililani Golf Club. Cars pull away from the parking lot and the street lights flicker. Two cars still sit in the parking lot. One is running and the other is off. One man near the car that is off is a heavy set red faced man wearing suit. He is leaning against the open driver side door of his vehicle as he talks to slimmer man next to the driver side of the vehicle that is running. The heavy set man, "Con, I will get the deal! Do not worry about it. I got our ace in the hole." "Rick you know he is on the fence. This is a multi-million dollar deal. I need to get back to the investors with something more concrete, that we have an ace in the hole." The heavyset man's voice raises. "I told you it will happen, Con. Have I ever let you or them down? I always pull through. I just need a little bit more time." The larger man shivers. Around the two talking men the it seems to grow darker. Shadows get longer as if they are leaning forward. The sickly light from the vehicles headlights make the growing shadows look more menacing. Walking slowly over the green of the golf course is dark shadow. The shadow move carefully and there is an odd human like shape to it. (repose) On one of the farthest holes, it sounds like someone is chopping wood. No, scratch that, chopping sod. And apparently, the sod said something about this person's mother, because some very unkind words are being thrown around under the bright, eerie moon. Keha drops to her belly, hissing venom at the tiny white ball. "It's you or me, and it isn't going to be me! I am not leaving here until you go in your hole." The small-framed yogi is somewhat dressed for a golf day - or what might pass for a golf attire to a native-born Hawaiian. She's in a coral colored polo shirt knotted in the front to bare her midriff and a pair of cutoff shorts with ragged edges. And tall argyle socks in loud shades of orange and teal, and no shoes. Wait, the shoes are located over by a capsized golf bag with scattered clubs. "I can do this all night, you pockmarked excuse for a sphere!" The little woman warns, hopping lithely to her feet and brandishing her putter high in silhouette against the bright white moon. Coming out of the Golf Club, Nala seemed to be in good spirits as her hand rested over her belly as if she expected it to be bulging. "You can't be too upset with not having caught that ourselves, Ak. It was delicious. And Makuahine loves feeding you whenever you let her. She always says you eat like kids should." She nudged the rather imposing man walking alongside her with her elbow, then flashed a wink up to him. Nala's hair was down in a tumble of gentle, brown waves that stopped at about her mid-back and it was currently pushed back behind her shoulders. She had on a long, light beige dress that looked like it might have been some sort of linen and she didn't care much about the wrinkles it had taken on while she sat. The spaghetti straps of the dress looked almost strained over her obviously muscled shoulders. In the hand opposite the side Akhlut was standing to, she carried a pair of silvery sandals that had obviously grown abrasive and needed to be removed so her bare feet could traipse along the world. Akhlut's t-shirt had managed to maintain its wrinkles throughout the course of dinner, it was a tourist print of 'Welcome to Honolulu' with the city skyline that the man looked ready that he was going to hulk his way out of at any moment. His shorts were threadbare cut-off and his thongs made a snapping sound sound with each step. The man was still eating out of togo box as he walked. "Delicious," he offered up in return with a gravelly voice in reply before stuffing his mouth with another handful of breadfruit. "Rick just make it happen" The thinner man says he gets into his running car. He backs out and takes off. Leaving the heavyset man muttering to himself, "Fucking asshole, just need to get past the fucking superstitions, damn natives.", he gets into his car and slams the door. Once in his car he tries to start it, but engine sputters. He tries again. He can be seen slamming his meaty hands against the steering wheel. He is most likely cussing up a blue streak that would make a Merchant Marine blush. The streetlights begin to sputter. Then they go out leaving the parking lot dark. The shadows just before the lights go out look almost menacing. Trees loom forward. The sound of an owl can be heard. The temperature begins to drop frost seems to creep across the green lawn and over the club Keha is holding. An icy wind moves around Nala and Akhlut. There is the faint sent of blood in the air. A soft throb of a distant faint drum vibrates through the night. Not far behind Keha comes a warm laugh. It is Healani! She is a Hawanian woman dressed bright blue golf pants a and white polo shirt. She is walking carefully with a forearm crutch towards Keha. In her other hand, she carries a driver. "Really, I think the ball is winning. Remember it has feelings. I think it is crying on the inside and raging on the outside." The woman teases. "Instead of keeping score of how many times it takes you to hit the ball across the green we should be keep scores of how many times it lands in the sand trap and the water. The winner does not have to buy dinner and drinks." Keha shudders and lowers her putter, bringing it in front of her and squinting at the thing thoughtfully. "Hmm. If revenge is a dish best served cold, I think I'm feeling the ball's icy displeasure." She scrubs a hand back through her brown and blonde locks and stretches the putter out horizontally for Healani to see, the ire replaced by a academic curiosity. "It feels like it's been in cold water all of a sudden. Strange, right? The night is pretty temperate." Content footfalls and happily satiated voices call Keha's attention to Nala and Akhlut, and she switches the putter to her non-dominant hand so she can wave over her head and holler out, "Aloha! How's the kitchen tonight?" "Aloha to you, beautiful night for hitting a ball with some metal sticks!" Nala called the greeting back to Keha even as she slipped a little closer to Akhlut with a slight shudder. "The kitchen was as good as always, perfect everything, plenty of food. Well, for most of us." She grinned with a lopsided turn of her lips and looked up at Akhlut, who was feasting on a to-go box that was large enough to carry at least one full dinner's worth of food like it was a snack pack. The chill caused her skin to break out in goose-flesh and she rubbed along her arm with the hand holding her sandals, slapping them into Akhlut's arm as she did so. "It's definitely getting to be close to winter, with the mountains breathing on us like that." She looked over at Healani and offered her a warm smile and a nod. "Aloha to you on this beautiful night." Glancing up, Nala peered at the stars for a moment and then seemed to look around for clouds, as if trying to gauge how fast the wind really was moving up there in the sky. Akhlut pauses mid-chew as he was hit by the cold wind, a big old grin appearing as he swallowed the handful of food. "See, there should be more pattangayok nights around here." Closing up the togo box, his focus drifted between the ball to the club. As he was hit with the sandal, the man let out a belly laugh. "There's no point in letting food going to waste, especially when its done swimming." Looking to the two women, Akhlut grinned at them, "Ahola. Nice night." Gesturing with his togo box, he offered, "Breadfruit with coconut if you want some." Glancing back to Nala, the grin remained, "At this point, I'm just tossing food into the void, it'll never be filled." "Not cold enough for that." Healani points out as she reaches her. Her dark eyes are on the moonlight kissed club. "I would agree." She takes a step closer to Keha. "Did you hear that?" She frowns a little before her attention is drawn to Nala and Akhlut. "It is a nice night but there is a chill in the air. Looks like you are having a good night. Thank you for the offer, but I have to lose this round of golf first. Good dinner?" The drumming gets louder. In the parking lot, the darkness grows deeper until the light of the moon seems to disappear. It is now cold enough that frost is starting to form on the grass before them. A new sound adds it voice to the drum, it is a distant chant. The driver in the car. Tries again to get it to turn over. Keha throws a shaka to Nala and Akhlut as she eagerly steps forward to take advantage of that offer of breadfruit. "Breadfruit sounds amazing, Mahalo! I'm Keha," she introduces to the barefoot girl and the walking mountain. "The kitchen here is awesome," she agrees with Nala, tipping a wink. "I used to come here on fancy dates back before I realized shaved ice and a cold chi chi does the job for less scratch. I wouldn't mind winter coming on us a little early. The big waves never really come until November anyway." She grins lopsidedly and helps herself to a piece of fruit, saying through a half-stuffed mouth, "Did you guys know that the phytochemicals in breadfruit are an excellent insect repellent?" Chewing her shared treat, she turns back to Healani and nods thoughtfully. "Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Not quite cold enough to counteract the heat of my hands." Her ears perk and the small woman tilts her head. "Drums. A steady rhythm. Voices? Think it's a band or a party?" Her dark, long-fringed eyes narrow out at the darkness as she shoulders her club. "I didn't know about the phytochemicals." Nala grinned and brought her attention back down from the sky, blinking slightly out-of-focus eyes as her grin broadened to a wide smile. "Lovely to meet you Keha, I'm Nala, this is Akhlut." She nodded in agreement in Keha's statement about the waves. "Yeah, I like the colder weather a bit when I'm out on the water, too, makes things more interesting. And we get some visitors in this area of the world that you usually have to swim up to Alaska to see otherwise." Looking between Keha and Healani, she blinked again and cocked her head to the side, Nala's eyes promptly losing their focus all over again. "Huh, 'ae, I hear something. Drumming maybe. If it's a party they better have something else fun going on other than that beat though, or they're doing shrooms and payote and only want a trance." She bit her lip for a moment and reached over almost blindly to grab some of Akhlut's breadfruit from his to-go box, biting into the grilled coconut and meaty fruit concoction with a happy humming sound before she blinked back to full awareness of where they were. "It looks like you two have had as much fun out here as we had being treated to dinner by my makuahine." She chuckled and polished off the last of the food she'd sniped. Akhlut's eyebrow rose as if he was confused, gesture to the togo box. "Good? It's food, bro. Of course it's good!" The question of being food being good seemed beyond all the man's experience and therefore attempted short-circuit his brain. The frost spread over the grass didn't even course a muscle to twitch as his attention moved back to Nala and her betrayal, exhaling his breath to gather rather evidence. "I'm starting to rethink a place on the beach if this is the weather, because this... This is quickly becoming ideal." His wide grin returned as Nala took food from the togo box. "It's about building that layer. Eat." He nodded to the woman as he took another bite for himself to pop into his mouth. The drumming throbs through the landscape the voices create a chant that rises and falls. It is silent from the dark parking lot. Across the green, shadows begin to move towards the darkness. They move through and around them the four of them. Healani look between the three. "I am Healani, I am thinking that we may need to call it an evening. It is getting too cold and I can feel it in my bones. Winter is coming that is for certain." Her dark eyes watch the three of them. Keha squints at the looming shadows. And then gently nudges the wayward golf ball across the frosted grass and into the hole with her sock-clad foot. Beaming, she tells Healani, "Okay, I'm ready to go now. Who wants shaved ice?" She licks her lips and then licks the breadfruit off her fingers before she slides on her aggressively neon athletic shoes. "Definitely peyote," she nods to Nala as the drum beat maintains its steady tattoo. "They're trippin' balls," Keha sighs, fishing her own ball back out of the hole and considering it as if it her a crystal ball with peyote-vision. "Mmm, or some macaroni salad. All this talk of food being good is making me hungry. Or maybe whatever they're smoking over there in the dark is wafting over and it's the munchies." Nala chuckled brightly and shook her head. "It's not like this often. This is really weird actually." She flexed her toes and looked down at the grass, frowning as it broke sharply with the frost against her skin. "That was unintentional." Taking a step to the side a little, she looked at the footprints of warmth she'd left behind, watching to see if they, too, filled in with frost. "This seems very off to me, actually. I wonder if we're all high already and we didn't know it was happening? I didn't smell anything like pot or mushrooms, though." Idly, Nala licked her fingers while she stared at the grass, willing it to either fill in with frost.. or not. "Oh! It's a pleasure to meet you Healani! Nala and Akhlut." She motioned to herself and Akhlut before tearing her eyes away from the grass, the fiercely bright blue of them locking onto Healani for a moment and crinkling softly at the sides with her smile. Akhlut continues staring at the breadfruit thoughtfully and grunted. "Is breadfruit or hitting a ball with a club an offense to the spirits? You'll see them snowblinds sometimes." His attention was drawn down to Nala's foot prints as he clicked his tongue a few times before scratching his ear. "Sound just doesn't feel right with this skull." Looking to the darkness, he unleashed a loud whisper to listen to the reverb and echo. "Healani, Keha... Nice to meet you..." His words distracted. Healani meets Nala's gaze and offers a bow of her head. She turns her head towards Keha. "Shaved ice and hot green tea?" she asks. "My treat if we get it." Her gaze moves from the frost covered grass towards the shadows. She is quietly watching for a moment lost in thought. She looks then over to Akhlut. "Thank you, pleasure to meet you too." The shadows move across the green and pass them towards the darkness. With each one that enters that chanting gets louder like it is about to reach a crescendo. Keha shoulders the bag of clubs and lays the putter horizontally over her shoulders like a yoke, draping her forearms lazily across it. "You got it, Healani, that sounds like magic. Nice cold shaved ice, to..." she wrinkles her nose and drags the toe of her shoe across the lawn, "keep in theme, I guess!" She grins broadly. "Then hot tea to warm up. Plus, I could use the caffeine. I still have to review grant paperwork tonight. UGH. Just give us the money, it's your reef too!" The little brunette shakes a fist lazily at "The Man." Then she turns that lazily warm grin to Nala and Akhlut again. "If you're up for dessert, you guys should join us. The more the merrier. And...the more we stay here, the creepier," she adds with a sideways quirk of her mouth and a nod to Nala's assessment, shuddering but then laughing it off. "Seriously, though, it's getting weird creepy. And religious? Is that Church chanting? That would be...wow. Cults are not my scene, man." She quirks a brow at the darkness, and the other at Akhlut's loud whisper. Nala's body froze slightly as she watched shadows move without bodies past the four warm bodies on the green. "Oooooh, someone must have pissed off kahiko akua, if they're sending bodiless out to get them." She shuddered and took a deep breath, forcibly restarting her breathing process as if she might have forgotten to do it for a moment or two. A strangled, hollow clicking sound was made at the back of her throat as she stepped closer to Akhlut, moving into the shadow cast by the large, mountain of a man from the star and moonlight. Her eyes followed the gloomy figures as they departed to the deeper darkness, not bothering to hide her curiosity but making sure she wasn't far from something protective while she stared. "I love shaved ice and hot tea, it's the best of both hot and cold, especially if you get a really sweet coconut milk and papaya shaved ice and don't put sugar in the tea." All this said while she stared at the formations of darkness that had passed them by. "I wouldn't mind joining you, whatever they wanted, I don't want to be it." Akhlut grinned as he glanced over his shoulder to the retreating Nala. "Six months and you learn to hear where they are, but high and low ocean forbid you could carry on conversation with my family." There was a rumbling laughter from the man as his attention moved to the moving shadows, his grin becoming wicked and not completely unlike a shark. "This will get as far as slapping wave and wind." Reaching back, he picked to Keha with a ham of hand, "You mean ice and food, I like you." The rumbling laughter came as he raised the togo box into the air with one arm, his voice booming towards the shadows. "Wind versus rock, it's your call, bro!" "I think we should high-tail it in the opposite direction and I second the motion to go and get the tea and shaved ice. Nala I like how you think. My mouth is watering at the thought of the hot tea. I can almost smell it. Keha we need to go." Healani says softly, her eyes are on the shadows as they move pass them. Leaning on her crutch she moves back a few steps but she waits for the others to join her. Her crutch and feet crunch on the newly formed frost. The chanting becomes clearer, it is a war chant. One of the shadow figures pauses when it nears Akhlut and hears the question. There is a hissing sound like waves. The air is near them becomes freezing, then it move on seeing it is not the prey. Ice crystals are starting to form in Nala's foot prints. "Guys, I think I'm having reverse-menopause. Can you have cold-flashes?" Keha wonders aloud as she ambles jauntily along beside Healani, apparently not having noticed the shadows have no sources. "Or maybe O'ahu is having reverse menopause. You do it, Baby! You grow young, we believe in you!" Armed with her putter, Keha is clearly invincible. Even if her teeth chatter. She glances to Nala and clucks her tongue. "You have a click in your throat - the tea will help soothe that, don't worry. A couple cups will get your voice right as rain. Or frost, which is our thing now apparently." The little brunette hollers back over her shoulder, "Come on, Akhlut, dessert isn't going to eat itself!" Nala blinked and looked up at Akhlut, before quite purposefully rolling her eyes at him. "You are such an ass. I will learn, you know I will. And one day I'll make sure you know all the lovely words I can't call you in the right language yet." Her voice was honeyed and filled with so much dripping sweetness that it was obvious she was being either threatening or sarcastic... perhaps threateningly sarcastic. She looked back over at the shadows and blinked. "Hemolele. The dead come back to wander." Clearing her throat, she looked over at Healani and Keha, not by turning her head, but by spinning herself on her heel to face them, with a wide, intense smile that matched an odd burning eagerness in her vivid eyes. "Well then, let's go get some shaved ice and tea before we lose our new friends." She hooked an arm through Akhluts, rubbing her hand along his side surely, and nodded after them. "Let's go get more food before we find a fight with something we probably can't hit." Nala chuckled. "Take us to the best place, Keha, and we'll see if I know one better we can hit up next time. We can play this game along the entire Island." And then she attempted to move forward, though it's impossible for her to move Akhlut as he's the size of a small car, she does at least make it known she's trying to follow the two women, to food! As the shadow nears, Akhlut takes a deep breath that hisses through his lips like he was huffing gasoline. One of god's own mutants, freezing cold was the last in the world that was going to brother the apex predator born in cold and darkness. He offered an upnod to the shadow, a gesture of respect or agreement to call the situation as it is and threw a shaka to the shadow before turning his back to face the others. "The winds not calling us tonight, so..." His eyebrows arched as his eyes moved from woman to woman, "We're going for food, right?" Getting ushered, Akhlut's brow stayed up as if the promise of food require confirmation. As they move away the shadows continue to come. The throbbing of the drum surrounds them but the shadows have no interest in them. "Funny! I am not certain but I think with every eruption she gets younger. I keeps the rose in her cheeks." Healani responds back to Keha. She is keeping her eyes open and in front of them. Making sure they do not get in the path of the moving shadows. "She is looking good. So when would we all like to meet up again for tea and shaved ice? After this round of course?" She looks relieved that they are all moving away from the shadows. Keha tosses back her head and laughs, her two-toned tresses spilling over the bag of clubs with the boisterous sound. "I love that, Healani! I think you're right - it's the blood in Auntie O'ahu's cheeks keeping her fresh. And hey, we all get cold spots every now and then, that's when we go lay in the sun. Tell you what, let's pick up our game tomorrow. Since you're getting the tea, I'll get brunch. And mimosas!" She shakes her hips with each syllable, then whirls around face Nala and Akhlut and declares, "You guys are way fun. I'm totally stoked we ran into you, even if it was in the middle of menopausal trip. Now let's go eat frozen stuff out of pineapples!" She thrusts her putter into the air to point the way, leading the charge to sweets and tea, the creepiness already a fading memory in Keha's mind. "I can't think of a time that we're ever not in the mood for food. So any time, really. Though it can be a little hard to get ahold of us sometimes, since we only have the phone on when we're not out in the water." Nala grinned and continued walking. "More food, especially dessert and hot tea to help the stomach be pleased with life is definitely something that we're always interested in." She spoke with surety, as if she knew without a doubt Akhlut would agree that food was always something on the table. Nala hadn't bothered to pull her shoes back on and just kept walking, seeming to relax a little once they got away from the more frosted grass chutes and back into the warmer greenery. "Brunch is good, we'll have to decide where and what time." Nala chuckled and nodded to Keha. "I'm always glad to make new friends, Hawaii is filled with them, all waiting to be greeted. It never stops making me happy." She turned her head back and called out softly to the shadows, or maybe to the golf course... "Aloha, e pakele." Then she was following the flow of the stride towards delicious frozen treats, her arm still comfortably tucked around Akhlut's. Akhlut raised the togo box to his mouth, taking a hunk of food between his lips to bring it into his mouth with Nala on his other arm. Chewing it thoughtfully as he looked at the others. "The dead were circling like sharks. We didn't warrant the attention or they didn't see us as prey." He groaned at the thought, "I know food so I can sympathize." Glancing at Nala, the man grabbed her around the waist to toss her over her shoulder without the slightest hint of effort or breaking his stride. Grinning, he nodded to Keha, "It's nice to meet you as well. So... You were out here hitting balls with a club... Were you keeping it from someone or just chasing it?" His grin turned more devilish, "Keeping it away is so much fun."