Re: Peiquok Town Hall
(

X Maybe I can segue us between last night and this morning?))
Cara didn't seem any happier with the situation than Buster did! Sliding back down the wall to sit with him, she began picking nervously at threads that still lingered around a hole in her jeans. "It was just..." she paused again as the lights went out, and then on again, "a sort of keening noise, the kind that makes all the hairs stand out on the back of your neck and freezes you to the spot," she eventually managed, though she paused a few times to try to get to the meat of what she'd heard. "I guess... like a mixture between a coyote or a wolf and maybe an owl? Just... it's pretty awful."
She clasped her hands together, watching as people began to make themselves ready for sleep. Frankly, sleep was the last thing on her mind. She felt hyper-alert; even the languidness that had washed over her earlier had been redirected. She wasn't
hyper, just unable to even think of dropping off to sleep.
If Buster was willing to talk for a while, she indulged him, as it helped to keep her mind awake. However, when the lights went out for good, she eventually began to speak more quietly, and finally drifted into silence, herself.
It was sometime around midnight when, head lolling forward in near sleep, a great crack of lightning woke her, and just for a split second, she spotted those venous shapes crawling across the windows. She barely suppressed a scream, though her heart felt as though it had rocketed up into her mouth and was trying to escape. With the brief flash of light gone, she had no way to tell that the shapes were still there, and soon after she felt herself being
tugged into sleep, for all that she was in a cold sweat already.
The next morning, she woke only slowly... not quite processing where she was or what was wrong with the picture. Furthermore she realized that she was staring at someone's foot ((assuming that Buster didn't pick up and leave! XD)) and, thinking about it, realized that she had managed to rest her head on someone's lap in the middle of the night. Pushing herself up and off of the convenient (for her, at least) pillow, she turned her attention first to Buster, then to the rest of the town hall. Somehow, seeing the vastly reduced numbers of people here, she felt an ashen kind of acceptance that things were going to get a lot worse before they were better. Her heart plummeted meekly back into her chest as the realization came over her.
"Well, shit," she murmured. At least other people were also waking up and beginning to move around.