Zombies? I'd like some of that, yeah. [YAKSHA]

Yaksha was on the trail. His tongue flickered back and forth constantly, and he could be heard idly humming to himself as he hopped from rooftop to rooftop, his eyes closed, his feet tracing the pathways of the skyline almost perfectly. His brain had very nearly imprinted the blueprints of this spot into his head, and he had to open his eyes perhaps once every four or five leaps, just to confirm nothing had changed since the last glance. He narrowly missed several birds that had altered their course just a touch too drastically, and trod on a rat at one point, spewing the contents of its intestines onto the faint pebbles of the roof it had been on. Not some residential place, then; those stones were almost always for the roofs of businesses, places where people came and went regularly.

He couldn't track her by the reaitsu, that was for certain; there was something unfathomably alien about the energy clinging to that corpse. Yaksha almost could've persuaded himself this was another sort of alien, that there was something from a land he had never entered, a place he could barely even fathom even with his countless lifetimes of experience. And why not, honestly? There were zombies running through the streets of Chicago, man had colonized other planets, and everything had gone completely insane when Yaksha wasn't looking. What was to stop the world from being overcome with alien ghosts?


Occam's Razor; it was more likely this was some new kind of mortal, something Yaksha hadn't interacted with yet. No creature able to cover its tracks and its presence so effectively could've made it onto this planet. Especially not with the incredible leaps and bounds in surveillance the mortals had made. No, whatever this was, it was something that had modified an otherwise unremarkable person. And that meant that there could be no eldritch hand in this matter. None overt, at the very least.

And if he was wrong? Well, the humans would handle it in short order, no doubt.

He continued to hop from spot to spot, periodically even stopping in thin air, just to survey the nearby area. It had taken him the better part of an hour, even moving at the highest speeds he could, but he had found several more suspect deaths. This one, a homeless man, slumped over; vomit caked his mouth and blood ringed his nostrils. Probably not one of his target's, then. The others had been...clean. Almost eerily so. As if their hearts had simply stopped without warning, without explanation.

He took back to the sky, and heard it almost immediately; a suspiciously organic sound, something that was almost unsettling to hear. It sounded like someone going rummaging through a swamp, or some other place that was just slightly too wet, too flooded. And the sounds of breathing, of exertion, told him the other details all too well; someone was taking apart a body. In the open, so boldly?

There weren't many explanations for that. Not even a spirit being could hope to hide behind the veil of ignorance any longer. No, this was something else. Something stranger. Yaksha approached slowly, carefully, watching the events unfold carefully. Almost curiously. His head rested in his palms, chin jutting out slightly as he saw her withdraw an organ from within, as if pulling a diamond out from a pan full of muddy water. And then, with a faint sound of dismissal, she threw it aside. Yaksha rose a brow slightly; this wasn't quite right. No, this body was far too messy. These methods didn't fit his target. Could it be two entities, working in-

ah.

Yaksha couldn't quite disguise a gasp of delighted surprise as he watched the events unfold. Or rather...fold. Refold. Defold. It would take Yaksha quite some time to determine the appropriate phrasing for what happened when something done was undone. The heart rose back into the air, hovering in place as if being held by a pair of invisible hands, then slid back into the chest cavity. There were various more soft, wet sounds; to Yaksha's trained ears, he couldn't be certain, but what were the chances these sounds were just the reverse of what had been happening a moment ago? He would've bet a pretty tidy sum on it.

And then, just like that, the body was unmarred. The man's eyes didn't flutter open, his heart didn't begin beating, his facial features didn't change, save to flatten out into a look of supreme boredom. Not true resurrection, then. Yaksha mused in silence, his brain working at incredible, almost whiplash-inducing speeds, as he finally spoke. They were just two words, ever so soft. They drifted over from the rooftops, barely more than a breath on the wind by the time it reached Ophelia's ears.

"I see."