Mia's step only faltered for a second, understandably put off by the nature of the old woman's muttering. It was an old woman, of this she was now quite certain, hair whitened with age and adorned in a way that seemed to have taken a great deal of care - which lead Mia to briefly wonder if the elderly woman had been the one to do it or if it had been a moment she had shared with a child, or perhaps grandchild in a moment of normalcy before whatever it was that had befallen the area had happened - which gave her a sense of nobility. The implications of the very much human skull upon her staff was not something that the woman really wanted to entertain for any longer than she absolutely had to.
"Are you alright? You weren't hurt, were you?" the younger of the two asked, and then, for good measure also added, "It can't be safe here, would you like me to take you to somewhere safer?"
The elder turned her total and complete attention to the other, and the sheer intensity of the slightly hazy gaze was more than enough to cause the mother to stiffen a little. If Mia was to be honest, she wasn't entirely sure what the emotion was that that played across old woman's face, but she was sure that she did not want it directed at her for all that much longer than it needed to be.
"You!" declared she, reacting out to the other woman, who instinctively took a step away, "The child's mother!"
"The child?" echoed Mia, eyes wide, "Do you mean Rose? She really is here, then? Where?"
"Yes, yes. Little Rose! The little one is in grave danger, we all are. Ever since Mother Miranda brought her here, we've fallen into darkness!" This was a warning, nobody could deny this, but there was precisely nothing in her voice that suggested she was particularly worried about this, beginning to meander off again as she said this. In fact, she almost seemed to be delighted by the macabre idea, not quite giggling but there was certainly something of a glee twinkling in her eyes.
"Miranda?" offered she, almost letting an idea form in her mind before she brushed it off as an impossibility, or a strange coincidence at the very least, stubbornly determined to leave the past in the past, especially when the present was already giving her more than enough grief, "What is putting my daughter in danger?"
While the elderly figure's meanders had seemed slightly aimless, she passed through the threshold of a gateway, Mia following behind her as close as she dared. This was the closest to getting anything in the ways of an answer, and even that was not all that successful. But really, considering the only other people she had come across since she had arrived, she had hardly been given the chance to have standards.
Before she had any real chance to ask anymore questions, the sound of a bell rang out through the icy air with the efficiency of a knife in butter on a warm summer's day. While Mia was not particularly bothered by it, beyond the mild irritation that came from it shaking up her thoughts for a moment, the same could not be said of her companion. A strange frenzy seemed to take her, the frailty of her frame giving this a strangely inhuman quality.
"The bell tolls for us all for we are all dead!" came the screech, a manic glee only managing to add to the unsettlingly macabre nature of this, "They're coming! They're coming again!"
Now, the mother could have sworn that she was only distracted for a moment, one of which had been spent taking a step or two away from the other on the off chance she chose to lash out, but that was more than long enough. Before she even had the chance to realise what was happening in time to intervene, the old woman locked the gate the pair had passed through behind her, having doubled back with remarkable swiftness and steadiness on her feet. If they were under attack again, as the claim had been, she did not want to be trapped with no way to get out, nowhere to run.
She had already found herself in more situations like that for a lifetime, and she did not want to add yet another instance to this list, a list she really did not want to have been ever-growing.
"Wait! What are you doing?" Mia called, the urgency of this only just managing to be curbed in time to smoothen the intensity of this, "Ma'am wait!"
But she did not wait. Far from it, in fact. It did not take all that long at all for the clattering of her movements - a combinations of her adornments and the staff - getting quieter and quieter until Mia was tragically left with nothing in the way of direction and a growing sense of urgency that came from knowing her daughter was in danger and she had no idea how to help her.
She let out a loud sigh, then a second for good measure, and with added intensity as she set about stamping her foot before, after a cluster of moments, she turned and stomped off. It wasn't the most dignified response, but there was nobody around to who would see her and she was frustrated. More than frustrated even, and so she was allowed to have something in the way of a release, and even if this did not achieve much in the wider scheme of things, she felt a little bit better about things. Or at least tricked herself into thinking she was feeling better, which was about as good as she could hope for that that moment.
With precisely no other options presented to her now that the way she had come was locked, she had no real option other than to explore the area. Fortunately - comparatively - it seemed that she had actually found herself somewhere that was a little bit more helpful than where she had been. If she was not mistaken, she had found herself right in the village square, which, if nothing else, could serve as a place to double back to if she needed to since the statue in the centre, a noble looking warrior woman with her sword raised, was more than prominent enough to serve as a landmark.
For all the buildings and signs of inhabitation, she did not see a single actually living person there. Admittedly she wasn't entirely sure if she would have found it better or worse to have stumbled upon others considering there was a chance the creatures would return.
Even still, she made a point to poke around a little, recalling the message that the radio sent out.
She did not need to knock on the door of the building that she approached, as the door had clearly been removed and otherwise located before she had arrived. Hopefully the damage being older was a sign that it was less likely to draw unwanted attention. Even still, she approached with caution, peeking in and taking a moment to look around before she dared to enter the building properly.
There was not all that much to be actually found in the house, beyond the basics that one would assume a place formerly lived in would have, however, as she was leaving, she happened upon a note which read 'Should disaster fall upon the village, seek out the crests. One is in the care of the church. The other is at Luiza's house.'
The mention of the crests confused her a little, though she presumed it to be contextual for the person the note was intended for, but what she found more important was the mention of the name Luiza. This was not the first time that this name had come up, and so she could only take this as a sign that she needed to find the place. Thankfully the homeowner had thought to include a crude map that lead from the Maiden of War to the house in question, and so she quickly pocketed both scraps of paper and pushed on.
If there was any reliability to the map, she needed to first cross the church grounds, which was thankfully only a short jog away. If nobody else had heeded the advice from the note, she decided that she would investigate the church when she went past next. At that moment, however, she ducked around the side and made her way into the fields beyond.
The wheat, she noted with slightly misplaced attention, seemed to be getting a little too close to being passed use, and Mia could not help but assume the neglect had come from the premature deaths of those who had previously harvested it.
Pushing through the wheat field, she kept a hand high to keep the plants from hitting her in the face, which only went so far in the way of keeping her vision clear enough to not get stuck walking in circles. With the combined sounds of the stalks rustling and her own movements through them, it took her far too long to realise that some of the sounds she was hearing was snarling. Snarling that was far too close to her.
She had barely enough time to register where the sound had actually come from before her arm was set ablaze. Not in a literal sense, she briefly had the time to determine as she stumbled away from the blow, but the marks of the flaming arrows were still fresh in her mind and she was quite sure she did not want to learn what that might feel like. Any chance for relief was short lived, however, as a second swing got far too close to her for any sort of comfort.
It did not take much in the way of thought to come to the conclusion that the time for any sort of delicacy or care had run its course and so, as the hand she had been using to protect her eyes from the plants dropped down to try and protect her new injury as she moved, she broke into a full sprint, her path having to be diverted more than once at the far from reassuring sounds she heard from further into the wheat. Honestly, she was just glad she was not the sort of person who was too terribly affected by allergies, or at least wasn't anymore, which was not a discovery she particularly wanted to consider at that moment, even if there was the time for something like that.
Even after she burst through the wheat into a clearing, she did not slow until she practically threw herself through the doorway to the little, worse for wear building that looked a great deal more hospitable than the heavily locked gate seemed to be. She did not want to risk looking back to confirm whether she really was being chased, assuming that this was the most likely outcome, not able to see a reason for the creatures to simply give up on the hunt.
"Stay back!" was not the exclamation she had been expecting to be welcomed with, but it was the exclamation that the old man in the building exclaimed the moment she had shut the door. An injured old man that was, worryingly, wielding a machete.
"I didn't mean to intrude," Mia replied, letting a pacifying tone creep into her voice, one that she had practiced in the past, "I'm just glad there's other people here that are still, well," she paused and changed her statement process entirely, "Are you hurt badly?"
"Why'd I tell you?" the man replied stubbornly.
"One of the monsters cut him, I think it hit him somewhere vital too since he's losing a lot of blood," the woman by his side, his daughter, explained more helpfully, "We came here to try and get to Luiza's house but everything is locked up and she isn't answering me."
"Hush, girl, she's an outsider, don't be telling her more than what needs to be said."
"I can help you, if you would have me try?" Mia began, making sure she did not metaphorically step on any toes in the process, secretly a little glad her own injury was nowhere near as severe as the man's seemed to be, "I'm sure I'll be able to find a way to get the gate open, just wait for me here, alright? Just don't move around any more than you absolutely have to and I'm sure you're going to be okay."
"Don't," the old man began, but quickly fell into a fit of coughs, "Don't talk like that, keep your pity for those who need it."
"Father!" scolded the woman before turning to Mia, "Be careful, please."
She nodded and moved to the doorway, which was thwarted almost immediately as the creatures on the other side made their presence known, suggesting they had not disbursed after she escaped them. Gritting her teeth, she turned and strode over to the broken window instead, taking her exit through the glassless hole in the wall, landing neatly in closed off space.
The little jolt that came from this wasn't the most pleasant sensation for the gash in her arm, which she dared to take a moment to assess. Honestly, she decided as she examined the injury, it seemed to have bled in a way that made it look far more serious than it really was.
The answer of how to get past the gate was actually given to her faster than her little investigation of her wellbeing was. There had been some past damage to the wall, leaving it lower in some places, and there had been several supply crates left there, there having been far more pressing matters taking place than whatever it was they had been brought there for.
Careful to not risk injuring herself or anything equally detrimental, she managed to nudge the crate over to line it up with the hole in the wall, which was a great deal easier once she managed to get it out of the little divot that had been made by it sinking into the earth beneath it. With the harder part of the task completed, all she needed to do was hop over the wall and hope that it would be more straightforward from then on.
Much to her surprise, it even was. There was nothing she needed to worry about landing on when she went over the wall, and even the lock for the gate was a simple, albeit heavy one and so she didn't need to worry about a key. She'd almost gotten used to things being harder for her than they necessarily needed to be, so this was a pleasant surprise.
The woman she had met in the house had taken a post in the significantly less broken window that looked out in a way that meant she'd be able to see the gate and so Mia hadn't really needed to wave her as she quickly ducked back over to where her father was. It was only a matter of moments before they emerged from the building. It seemed to take an eternity and a half, but the pair made their way inside the gate, which she hurried to close and lock again behind them.
"Stop to sniff the flowers, didja?" the man commented in a particularly scathing way.
"Sorry," Elena said, then leaned a little into the other woman's space to whisper, "He's a proud man, not used to having to rely on other people, don't take it personally," then returning to her normal volume, "We will be safe here, won't we?"
"Anything would be better than out there." This wasn't the most reassuring thing in the world, but it didn't feel right to lie and claim it was anything better than it was. Lies, even the ones said for the sake of the other person, always seemed to come back to bite her in one way or another so she didn't want yet another weighing on her. "What happened here? In this village, I mean, I've never seen anything like this before, how did this happen?"
"I don't know," admitted the other woman, her attention mostly on her father as he stumbled his way to the door, "It doesn't make sense, Mother Miranda has always protected us until-"
Whatever it was she was going to say was cut off when her father's knocking practically thundered about them. Considering the danger they were still in, Mia could not help but cringe a little at this. Did he not understand the severity of their predicament? Surely he did, he had been wounded from it, and yet he was approaching things with such little regard to this that, and perhaps this observation was just because she was approaching with an outsider's perspective, it was almost as if he was still holding to the belief that they were going to be protected.
"Nobody's coming!" wailed he, dropping down to the ground in despair, and possibly because he had lost so much blood his body wasn't willing to keep itself upright any longer, "Nobody's going to come and help!"
Leaving the other to her task of dropping down to check on the man, Mia took over the roll of trying to draw the correct attention to them, her own knocks a great deal more quiet and cautious.
"Is there anyone there? There is an injured man here, please, let us in." She did her best to listen for even the slightest noises coming from the other side of the door.
"Luiza, can you hear me? It's me, Elena! Open up."
Well, it seemed their pleading had worked in the end. The door did, in fact, open with a little click. Unfortunately this was not the only click, as the business end of a shotgun found itself far too close to Mia's face.