Bonnie was well aware that Goldie happened to be an ostentatious person. It was impossible to miss, from her name to her garb, that the woman liked wealth and to be seen as wealthy.
Bonnie should have expected then that her reward for aiding Goldie would be, perhaps, more costly than she would have preferred.
Her wolfsbane rifle was intact and mostly needed some cleaning and maintenance to make it ready again. Her knife needed to be cleaned and sharpened, but that was easy enough for her to do on her own. It was the beastbane revolver that was the problem, and that problem resulted in Goldie’s decision to buy Bonnie an entirely new gun.
The demonbane revolver was not like Goldie’s pair of gilded and pearl-gripped peacemakers. Its barrel, frame, and cylinder were all a bloody red and its grip was ebony. It felt weighty in Bonnie’s hand, and when she fired it, it left burns in the targets.
Guns were meant for killing. They were weapons. And the demonbane carried that drive to kill with it.
Goldie also decided to buy Bonnie a giantsbane rifle, and that cemented the feeling in the black-coated hunter that she would gladly kill anyone her colleague pointed her at. With some restrictions, of course.
She wasn’t a maniac.
The job, in this circumstance, was a simple one. Goldie had a particular beast she wanted to hunt down, one called Hound. This beat could walk and talk as a human did, but was no mere varc.
As the name implied, The Hound was domesticated. Or, at the very least, had a master.
Goldie wanted him dead, but more than that, she wanted the master’s head. It was a complicated story, one that didn’t bear repeating, or so she explained while sitting in a cafe that she seemed perfectly at home in.
Bonnie, on the other hand, stood out immensely. Not that it mattered.
What mattered was what leads she could find. And that brought the pair of hunters to a curious place out near one of the larger cities around, placed outside the city walls and out in its own spot above and away from the surrounding plains, atop a cliff overlooking the sea.
The Hemlock University was a place of learning and research known for its studies into demonology and the studies of monsters of all types. It held untold knowledge and unlearned secrets, and Goldie assured Bonnie that it would be a good place to look now that her previous lead had his brains scattered across a boat.
Her confidence did take something of a plunge when she saw the college was covered by a gigantic meat spider. Not to say the standard spider was not made of meat, but there was something of a chitin type thing keeping most of them covered so they weren’t like gigantic conglomerations of exposed muscle and sinews shaped into an arachnid form.
The flesh spider paid no heed to the standard conventions of what a spider should be though, and stood large and proud atop pointed legs with stretches of sinew connected its enormous limbs. Even its eyes looked wrong, more like massive human eyes than the natural eyes of a spider, though there were still many of them. Perhaps a hundred, scattered across its face as its chelicerae flared in the open air.
It was difficult to tell, but Bonnie was also fairly certain the back of its body, the abdomen, was shaped like a human skull, with the rest of its body spilling out of the skull’s jaws.
Bonnie gave her friend a pat on the shoulder. Goldie sighed, then nodded.
“Right. That’s gonna be a pain to kill…”
Tales of Flawed Heroes 