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[Tsaba]

"Castor!" Tsaba headed over as soon as she saw the young man. "Come on, I found what we need." Heading to the docks seemed more... sinister at night. It didn't help that other sinister-seeming people were out. Tsaba was well aware that t\her plan was lacking several details. She was sort of banking on the hope that the building would be poorly guarded; that the town would see no point in protecting a warehouse full of corpses. But it was in fairly close proximity to warehouses that stored food, which was extremely valuable; they'd need to be careful. When they reached the warehouse, Tsaba pulled djed into her sight once more, priming her eyes to detect the first thing she had ever learned to detect, the easiest thing in the wirld for her to detect... a human pulse. She waited until Castor's somewhat raced heartbeat behind her was the only one in the immediate area, then made the dash. She rattled the locked warehouse door for a minute, then hissed under her breath in frustration. Her plan did have some rather large holes in it. The major one being that she hadn't brought anything to open the door with.

[Castor Riley]

Having met up with Tsaba, the two had departed from the comforting, if raucous vicinity of the Kelp Bar. Every step they took towards the docks felt heavy and guilty to Castor; they had no business being there so late, and he felt certain some guard would be appearing soon enough to tell them just that. What if it was Ricky? What would he say then? Oh, just taking a midnight stroll, stealing a corpse, as you do. He almost snorted out loud. Perhaps, he thought, it would have been a good idea to have let Ricky in on the whole escapade. He might have even known of a more... legal way of obtaining a corpse. His thoughts were interrupted as Tsaba suddenly stopped in front of a warehouse. It looked just like any of the many, many other warehouses around them, so Castor could only trust that Tsaba had some better way to distinguish them than he did. He was about to ask if she was certain of which warehouse they needed access to, but fell silent when he saw the serious set of concentration in her eyes. When she ran across, he quickly followed suit, trying to be as silent and swift as possible. The plan had been going smoothly so far, but it could not last; the pair of aspiring corpse-stealers had reached their first snag -- a locked door. The way Tsaba was jerking the door back and forth, and her evident frustration told Castor she didn't have some way to open it. He took his dagger out of his backpack. He didn't know if it would be any help, but it was either try or give up and go home, and they couldn't do that at the very first sign of difficulty. "What about this?" he said, his voice barely a whisper in the warm summer night.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba cast about once more with her Auristic sight before shutting it off and taking the dagger. Once she started levering the padlock, knowing that they were alone was fairly pointless -- there's no non-guilty way to actually break into a warehouse. And she'd need her magical strength once they got inside, unless they wanted to be opening crates full of bodies all night. "Thank you," she said, slipping the knife into the lock and applying her full strength. Nuits, as a whole, were not as strong as humans. They lacked the ability to heal and their nerves didn't work right. But they did have one major advantage. Humans almost never used their full strength, because doing so resulted in extreme damage to their body. In theory, a muscle could contract with enough force to break its bone; the human body had ways of preventing that from actually happening unless the situation was incredibly dire. A mother might be able to lift a large boulder off her child, a warrior might be able to cleave right through steel armour with a dagger, when there were lives on the line, but using that sort of strength in everyday tasks just got people killed. Nuits, of course, could take a new body if their old one was damaged enough. That was the point of the whole exercise. So it didn't matter one bit to Tsaba whether she damaged her current body by applying too much strength to the lock. So long as it held up long enough to make the transfer, it didn't make one bit of difference. What would make a difference was getting caught, so she busted the lock as quickly as she could, handed the knife back, flexed her arms experimentally to determine how much motion she had left, and crept into the warehouse. The room was fairly dark, so she took Castor's hand so that they wouldn't lose each other and headed for the crates. Once her free hand hit wood, she once again closed her eyes, chanted, and brought djed forth. Using so much magic directly before a transfer was probably unwise, but Tsaba had never heard of magical fatigue, or even overgiving, preventing a transfer. Of course, that might be because people who tried such a thing didn't survive to talk about it. She pressed her hand against the nearest crate -- well, coffin -- and concentrated. Dead human, taller than her, pudgy, no major wounds on skin. Could be difficult to carry about. Next crate; dead human, pox sores. She dismissed it out of hand. No use oozing ichor everywhere and looking like she was about to infect everyone with a plague. She moved her way down the row of crated corpses, moving as quickly as she could and only pausing long enough to pick up surface details so as to limit her energy expenditure. Too old and frail. Not-quite-healed childhood spine injury. Dead too long. Finally, she paused. Fresh corpse, spine and skin intact. She knew it was the right one. It was small enough to carry back to the university, provided they could remove it from the crate. It was already thin, so the adaptation to being a Nuit shouldn't affect it overmuch. It was also already clothed; humans had a thing about being naked, even when they were dead. It was perfect. It was the body of a little girl. Tsaba shut off her Auristic sight and tapped the crate. "This one," she said, her breath catching in her throat. "It'll be the easiest to get out of here quickly, if we can get it out of the crate. Can I borrow that knife again?"

[Castor Riley]

Castor's eyes widened in surprise at the relative ease with which Tsaba busted the warehouse door's lock. He had not thought the frail-seeming Nuit would have had the strength for such a feat. He took the knife back when it was handed to him wordlessly and followed her into the darkness of the warehouse, leaving the door as slightly ajar as possible without closing it; he had no desire to be stuck in a warehouse full of bodies overnight. In the darkness, he suddenly felt a cold hand grab his. His nerves already on edge, he almost yelped aloud when he felt it, before realising it was Tsaba. After the initial shock, he was thankful for the guiding hand. He wondered how the Nuit was navigating the darkness; she even seemed to know the contents of each crate without even opening them. Auristics? That was probably it, and a warning against overgiving arose in his mind, but it quickly died away. If there was ever a time to risk a bit of overgiving, while stealing a corpse was probably one of them. Finally, they arrived at a crate containing a suitable body and Castor handed Tsaba his dagger once more, on her request. He wondered how they would get the body out. They could hardly roam the streets with a dead body slung over their shoulders. Again nervous laughter almost got the best of him, but he reined it in. Castor waited with baited breath as Tsaba prepared to open the crate, and he felt very much like he was breaking some sacred taboo about the sanctity of the dead. Hopefully, no god of the dead would take offence and smite them for it.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba used her fingertips to navigate the edges of the crate, looking for joins. "Thank you," she said, taking the knife. "It's a good thing you're here; I wasn't nearly as prepared for this as I should have been." The crates weren't designed with security as a priority; corpses weren't exactly a high target for thieves. Tsaba quickly found a join, forced the knife between wood, and began levering it open, wincing at the screech of nails deforming. It sounded loud in the dark, although the chances of it being heard outside the warehouse were low. Her goal was to pull off the end of the crate, where the body's head rested. It didn't require much strength to pull the crate open, but the leverage was tricky to get right. Tsaba had damaged a muscle in her right shoulder opening the lock and she couldn't lift her arm all the way up any more. She didn't feel ichor oozing out over her skin, so the injury was only a minor inconvenience. She adapted her stance to compensate. Once the end was off, she slid the body out as gently as possible, then wedged the crate end back in place. It would probably fall off when somebody tried to pick up the crate, but to the eye, it should look normal while it remained undisturbed. She handed Castor's knife back once more and laid her cloak on the floor. She carefully laid the body in a ball -- knees pulled under the chin, arms wrapped around the legs -- and wrapped the cloak around it. She would have to be careful carrying it, but the cloak could contain a bundle of pretty much anything, and people were more likely to think 'bag of grain' than 'corpse of child'. Once they got away from the warehouse, all they'd have to do was not look like thieves, and they should be able to get back to the dorms with no incident. Probably. She tied the ends of the cloak together, encompassing the body, and carefully placed her hands. "Could you help me carry this, please?" she asked Castor. "I don't want to drop her. It."

[Castor Riley]

Castor gave an awkward half-smile; he wasn't nearly as prepared as he thought he was now that the time had actually come to see the body. The darkness, which his eyes had been slowly accustoming themselves to, was filled with the screeching of the coffin being pried open. When Tsaba had finally got it done, Castor was able to make out shapes clearly in the dark. And what he saw chilled him. Tsaba had lain her cloak on the ground and had placed the body - one too small to be anything but a child's - on it. She then proceeded to push the slightly stiff joints in such a way that the child seemed to be resting on its knees. When he was asked to help lift her, Castor fought against his rising stomach contents. He tasted bile as he spoke in an urgent whisper. "Tsaba... That's just a little girl! We can't... Wouldn't you rather have a grown body anyway...?" He felt a bit whoozy. "Tsaba, if people see you in a child's body... It would make prejudice against you increase to a truly alarming degree, I'm sure. Are you sure about this?" He asked, hoping she would change her mind, though even he could see at least part of the reasoning behind her choice; it would be nigh on impossible to escape back to their dorm with an adult's body, while a child's would be relatively easy to conceal.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba paused and considered Castor's concern. She hadn't really considered the amount of prejudice that pulsers were likely to show an undead child, as opposed to an adult. Public perception was, after all, the reason she'd chosen a middle-aged body to come to the mainland; people were less likely to look askance at somebody with slow reactions and stiff joints if they could blame their age. But it was hard to find a usable older body, at least one usable before an expert embalmer had had a look. And unless he wanted her to perform the ritual in the warehouse... "If you can find another body in usable condition that we can carry home without suspicion and won't take all night to find, I'll take that one," she said, trying and failing to sound firm. She made to lift the body, and her arm that didn't work right immediately slipped; she caught the cloak in time to let it down gently. She reminded herself that Castor was a Zeltivan human. She liked and trusted him, but that didn't necessarily mean that he was entirely content with what she was. If she wanted to get along with humans, she couldn't let herself behave as if she was doing them a favour by tolerating their weaknesses and they were somehow being unreasonable when they protested hers. "This child's soul is free; it no longer needs a body," she said, more gently. "It takes care and attention to grow a body, and nothing is sadder than one abandoned before its time. It's a shame when such a body cannot be appreciated by a new inhabitant, and is simply left to rot. But if it bothers you that much and you have a method of getting an adult out of here, then we can leave this one for a Sahovan and pick again."

[Castor Riley]

Castor remained silent as Tsaba made the point he had already known was irrefutable; there was simply no way for them to escape with an adult body undetected. And he really had no intention of spending an extended amount of time in this warehouse of the dead. The novelty had very much worn off. As Tsaba almost dropped the child - corpse, he silently reminded himself - when attempting to lift it, Castor finally realized that there was something wrong with her arm. And suddenly it was like a puzzle came together in his own mind and he understood for the first time how serious Tsaba's predicament was. As she began to explain her perspective of making use of the body, rather than letting it rot, Castor began to feel a flush of shame fill his cheeks; here she was, in dire need of a body and he'd let her do all the heavy lifting on this job without lifting a finger. And now, he was having her justify her needs - ones that needed to be met for her very survival - as though she had any other choice in the matter. "Yes, you're right," he said, very warmly, "I'm sorry I've been so difficult. Come on lets get you in this thing," and with that he smiled, and hefted the bag - surprisingly light - over his shoulder, without thinking too much on its contents. "Anything sticking out back there?" He asked, with some only slightly forced mirth. He waited, anxious to get away from the scene of the scene of the crime, to wherever it was that Tsaba wanted the next part of the process to unfold. They still had a long night ahead of them, and Castor dearly hoped that there wouldn't be any more obstacles along the way.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba ran a quick hand over the back of the makeshift sack -- Castor's question was important even if it was lighthearted. "Everything seems intact. Let's go. We should probably do this in my room, where we won't be disturbed." Hand laid gently on Castor's elbow so that she didn't lose him, Tsaba made her way back to the faint glow of the warehouse door. She felt blind without her Auristic sight on, and was half-tempted to simply read auras the whole way home. It would be safer... in terms of getting caught. But addiction was one of the major dangers of magic, even 'safe' magic like Auristics, and overgiving in her current situation would be even more dangerous. So she used the minimal light present as they made their way back to the university. Remain calm. Don't look guilty. Tsaba forced herself to walk at a calm pace and avoid jumping at every sound. She didn't want to look like a criminal or a good target for crime. Of course, having Castor there helped. "The next part of this process is time-consuming, and you probably won't like it," Tsaba told Castor as they entered the university. "I need to... teat the body a bit before the transfer ritual. If you want to sit that part out, maybe get some sleep, I'll understand. It could take several hours."

[Castor Riley]

The weight of the sack on his back was much lighter than he had expected, and that was a small comfort; after a while Castor was almost able to convince himself that it really wasn't more than a sack of grain. When they got back to the university district without incident, Castor was really relieved. "No," he replied, rather solemnly to Tsaba's suggestion, "I want to help you through this. You can't really move that arm properly, can you? I'll do anything that I can... Though it might take me a bit to get mentally prepared." He smiled at her, a weary smile, but genuine all the same. "Now let's get to your dorm. This way right?" he asked, pointing in the direction he felt certain her room was in. It would be the first time he'd be going to her room... and they'd have a recently deceased child for company. And it was the middle of the night. There was a first time for everything, it seemed.