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"Huh?" Bronze followed the strangers gaze and immediately found what she was so scared at. A huge insect-like thingy. Something he definitely haven't seen before. Its staring directly right at them, as if it was monitoring them. Is this.. thing have the same ability to reason and lie? Its only some kind of an overgrown insect, wasn't it? He is confused of why it was something to be scared of.

Truth is, since it was taboo to eat meat in his homeworld, his main source of protein is plants, worms, and bugs. Of course there are some who completely disobeys that, but he never tried any meat anyway. Bronze liked the taste of some worms and bugs. He decided that he has to get a closer look to that thing.

As he focuses more on the Burster, the second one moves further forward on the rooftop, staring at Bronze while the other keeps watching what they so far think is just another random, irrelevant person, their sense of smell inhibited enough by the stench of the perfume that their low intelligence and simple instincts leave them indifferent.

Victi stops just behind Helynah, pearing past her and into the room.

"Well, that's.... disturbing," she obverves, "And opens up a large realm of possibilities of what may happen if this place gets bored or annoyed. Good to know. I..... assume we don't let anyone else other than maybe the dragon see this? Something about not destroying morale? Especially since it seems to be intentionally placed to be the first thing you see if you open the door.... clever. Anyway! Taking apart those hinges? Something about not getting locked in and having to make crappy tension wrenches out of paperclips after setting ourselves on fire?"

Helynah nods, knowing exactly how frustrating it is to have to improvise your own lockpick. She backs out of the doorway, not taking her chances when it comes to closely investigating the room. She closes the door and peers at the hinges.

"We might need a couple of tools." She means a hammer and nail, or at least something improvised to act as a hammer and nail. She doesn't explain this any further, figuring Victi knows how to undo door hinges.

"Know of any nearby toolboxes, or should I throw something together?"

"Normally I'd just stick a breaching charge on it and just blast it open, or hit it with a kinetic ram, but if you just want to pop the pin.... the chair at the desk with the yellow picture frame has a loose screw, I think, hopefully that will fit, and worst case we use something as a fulcrum and use that polearm of yours as a lever-hammer to tap it in," she says, "simple and crude, but should work. Either that or the stem of the chair to tap."

Vincent notes the lack of fear in Bronze's response and decides to ham up its act, just a little. It lunges forward and grabs Bronze's hairy arm. "What are you doing?" it hisses. "It's them! W-we should run." This kind of behavior will likely scare him, irritate him, or inspire him to draw the attention of the others. Vincent has its heart set on either the first or the last response, although it wouldn't mind a surprise either. This cat seems good at those if the weaponized water-gun is any indication.

"If it were me, I'd normally try kicking the door in or asking Z- a friend of mine to break it down for me." Helynah checks out this chair, and sure enough, it has a loose screw she quickly crouches and undoes. Clutching the screw in one calloused palm, she pauses to look at the picture frame. A wooden frame painted a bright, cheerful yellow. What's left of a broken glass pane does its best to shield a photograph (or a perfectly rendered painting, Helynah thinks; she knows nothing about cameras.) of a man in a police uniform, a woman, and a little girl sitting on the grass in a warm embrace. All of them smile at the viewer; it's a snapshot of the ideal nuclear family.

All three of these people are almost certainly dead. The photo holds memories for people who can't them anymore.

The woman heaves a sigh, grabs a stapler off the desk and returns to the door. She tries to slide it into the topmost door hinge, and to her relief, the screw fits. Using the stapler like a hammer, she knocks the nail in by tapping it with the object's broad front end and pops the hinge out easily. Rinse. Repeat. Turn the handle, back up and let the door fall over.

Raven and Lisa sit together in silence longer than both of them feel they should before Raven thinks she hears something around the corner. Bronze had wandered off that way, and now she hears a painfully familiar voice over. Female. She sniffs, hoping to catch that familiar scene, but Bronze had gone downwind and besides, he carries that stupid scent-gun everywhere. The cat can't smell anything of note, but her hackles rise with suspicion.

Lisa notices that her familiar has tensed and gone silent. She narrows her eyes and whispers, "What is it?"

"Well, okay..... that's far worse than I expected," Victi says, blinking a few times at the scene in front of her.

She stepped in slowly, making sure to keep her feet clear of anything other than bare floor on the ground, her tails helping her balance.

Helynah covers her mouth to hide a gasp, then slowly lowering her hand, she sneers with disgust at the absolutely barbaric display.

The worst of the gore has long since decayed, leaving bare-boned corpses and dry, crusted guts spattered all over the floor and ceiling. The man in the wall grins at an overturned table, where the eyeless sockets of a person skewered through the ribs on a table leg stare lifelessly at a ceiling stained brown with old blood. Only one word pops into her head. How?

She steps on something that crumbles with a sickening crunch beneath her feet. She totally loses her composure and stumbles backward. "Eep!" She realizes she'd just stepped on an ancient paper cup. Oh. Flustered, her eyes dart from wall to wall, studying the old stains where some officer's innards may have once been arranged in an intricate pattern, perhaps a message. Perhaps fortunately, whatever note the lunatic had left is no longer legible.

This room also explains why there aren't many bodies outside the police station. Corpses line the wall, all of them in a sitting position with their hands in their laps and their heads bowed. Most of them are likewise old and bare, but a few have enough flesh on them that she wonders if they're newer. As she draws nearer to those such bodies, the stench confirms that, yes, they are a little fresher. Makes sense that they didn't all die at once; otherwise, no one would have been able to write the initial report.

"You know, honestly, it might be gross, horrible, and monstrous, but top marks for setting this up so carefully, Monster or Genius Loci of the town," she says, almost genuinely impressed, only tempered by being very disturbed, "I'd clap, but would just hurt a lot right now."

"Looks like the exhibit isn't done yet either, huh? still decaying.... Seems like that last interrogation didn't go too well.... I guess time to figure out what we can learn fro-- Oooo, what do you think the odds are that the propellant in those firearms still works is?" She picks up one of the dead officer's pistols, and checks the magazine loaded before counting the number of rounds in one of the full spare mags, to see if any firing had happened before his death.

Helynah makes a mental note of the way Victi goes through these coping motions. More gallows humor, sarcasm, then she shifts into distraction mode with an exclamation that throws Helynah for a bit of a loop.

"Fire...arms?" She turns to comment on the weirdness of that phrase and sees Victi studying a small metal item. A tool she's only seen recently on the person of that unconscious soldier lying on the floor outside. She has no idea what it does but she shrugs and says with mock indifference, "I suppose you could try and find out."

She thinks for a moment before saying, "screw it, magic doesn't work here, curses shouldn't work here," re-inserting the magazine, flicking the safety off, choosing a spot on the wall, and squeezing the trigger twice.

Once the noise fades, she makes a small happy sound before quipping, "Hey, my guess was rig--....EEP!" and tossing the gun.

While still in the air, the rest of the magazine suddenly all cooks off at once in defiance of all logic, spraying bullets into the wall and completely mangling the weapon.

"Or..... completely not," she finishes, chuckling nervously, "curses still work, if you happen to have any. Oh, unless it's just bloodline curses. Might just be that."

There's more of them.. One I could probably handle, but I don't think I could deal with a group. Bronze sensed that he's about to be surrounded or something, but he has to know if they intended to cause harm. From what he know, insects are very unpredictable. What caught him off-guard is the stranger suddenly clutching his arm. Is she panicking? Did she know what these are?

"What do you mean them? What are they?" The feline demanded, and wanted the answers quick. Not to mention he doesn't like being touched— it annoyed him.

Not hated. Fur-thing confused. Random-thing strange. Neither hostile. Neither running. In way. Interfering with task! Make out of way! Go away! Go away!

[The bursters become obviously agitated, and don't really know what is going on other than that the two creatures are being odd, and that this is not helpful and is very confusing. They open their beak-like mouths wide, and make a loud "HLRK!" sound, like someone about to spit or vomit. As they do, the membranes over the bloated sacs on their bellies go into tension. It might be a good time to move....]

Vincent smiles. Although its grin usually goes literally ear-to-ear, this one is only slightly too wide. It seems that they'd annoyed the idiot insects so it makes good on the instinct to move the hell out of the way, but not before wrapping toes that were not long and prehensile a few seconds ago around Bronze's ankle and pulling.

The first two gunshots have Helynah clapping her hands over her ears and pulling a face. "OW."

The later, unintentional gunshots have her duck, throwing her cloak over her head. Something she'd done many times when faced with inescapable danger: fire, arrows, swords...the fabric was magic and has protected her from many things, so the move became an instinct. Nevermind the fact that she knows magic means absolutely nothing here, as evidenced by the little rips in the cloth from her earlier fight; it's the only shield she has.

She waits for the ringing in her ears to dim a little bit before ever-so-slowly standing and letting her cloak drape around her feet. She gapes at the ruined weapon, then at the bullet holes in the wall, then at Victi. She doesn't know whether she should be terrified, angry, or impressed. Her response comes across as a mangled combination of the three feelings.

"What. The hell. Was that?" And can I learn to use one?

"It's a type of firearm called a pistol, or handgun. Gun is the more commonly used, less formal word, and hand is there because it can be used in one hand and is easy to carry, I think. Think explosion-powered crossbow that shoots dense metal pellets and can be fired quickly and repeatedly with one hand," she explains, "Oh, and apparently I can't shoot things. Any weapon that launches a projectile in a flatish arc? doesn't work. Slings, bows, that... something goes wrong. It's apparently some REAL old curse, like, generations old. Can't use it offensively, either, before you ask. I've tried. Anyway, if you want to learn how to use the fancy weapon, talk to the dragon when he gets back, or the soldier boy if he.... wakes up. Or if the data-born gets chatty again. For now, lets see what we can learn."

There's too many mysteries in the world and Bronze wishes that he wouldn't discover some of those. The last time he was terrified by a grin was when Wilfang brandished his ax and slowly approached Bronze after torturing a victim- the feline isn't enjoying whatever his amber eyes are witnessing right now.

Too fixated at the stranger's features, he was surprised by the sudden pull of his ankle, causing him to lose balance and fall on the ground. He hit his left elbow on the concrete and lost grip of the toy gun he was clutching.

Change! Change! Shifter! Shifter! Hate! Hate! KILL! KILL! leap forward! Kill it for mother!

[The bursters notice Vincent's change, and their over-riding directive kicks in again. With a hiss, both arthropods leap at Vincent, their hindmost and foremost limbs outstretched to grab onto it, and their middle two pairs of limbs are drawn back, ominously almost pointed at their swollen undersides]