Occams Razor

As Madrigus walks around to the other side of the diner, his eyes sweep the area for clues and wondering why the chipmunks were still infesting his robe. If they didn't skedaddle soon he would start snacking.

Finally his eyes traced a strange set of boot tracks. Following them he found the picnic bench that had moved and looked off in the direction the tracks had been going. She had just been there.

His ears picked out the loud conversion Sally was having. Someone running near chicken coops? Plausible.

Finally Kelsey showed up and handed him a blue B post-it note. "She can get her own damn tea," he muttered, tossing the note to the wind. "Oi, Sally! Quit buggering with the locals and hop to it." Quieter he said, "she was just here ahead of us. We'll follow her tracks this way and keep our eyes and ears sharp. Fan out, someone who can follow footsteps do so, the rest of us in a line following across, alright?" He pointed in the direction they needed to go in, eyeballing Kelsey and Victor at the mention of tracking.

with kelsey and madrigus obviously engrossed in some kinda boring conversation and oblivious to her sneaky grand entrance, victor begins to skitter around the back of the diner, bent over in delight as she finds that lone footprint near the table - gotta be her. you could almost see the ghostly outline of the little magnifying glass and sherlock-holmes hat vic envisions herself with in that moment. when she comes to the picnic table, she practically shrieks with joy, but holds herself together enough to hiss in a stage-whisper, "guyssss - she jumped up over here!! ohmygodshe'sontheroof!!!" without waiting to see if the others were coming, victor nimbly leaps up on that picnic table, searching out a way to swing her body up onto that roof (oh man, why'd i quit gymnastics again? i LOVE this), gives it her best, most enthusiastic shot.. and catches herself midair, swinging on the edge, as she realizes that madrigus is looking at her and gesturing. oh. oops.

vic hops down and stands at attention with a little salute, "yup, sir, we'll check it out." she then proceeds to search in the direction madrigus is pointing, resolving to keep her cool a little better. gotta stop acting like a gorramn kid, you want them to take you seriously, girl..

Sally bolts over towards the group- if Liberty had come by the coops, it might have been coming up from either the lake shore or industrial area...back towards the diner. Either way, he'll need Kelsey & Victor's eyes to scope out whatever bit of blue rodentry might be there. He just about puts a boot on the picnic table and hops up toward the roof, as Victor'd done, but instead asks,

"OKay, which way we goin'?"

:: Up on the roof of the AAA, just beyond the eaves, sits a small blue fluffy stuffed hippo. Stuck to the lower portion of its face is a blue B post-it. On the post-it is written in black sharpie "T?"

A scan of the roof beyond shows some leaves, a partially deflated beach ball, a badminton racquet, some empties, what might be a dead balloon or... Uh... You know those things that are a little like balloons (?), a few small rocks - you know, the usual rooftop stuff. But, no sign of a person, no matter how one strains their eyes and tracks, double tracks, or triple-tracks over the span of shingles ::

"Toward the coops," he said, gesturing. "If any of you can track then you take point. The rest of us should fan out and look for anything that'll tell us either that this is a false trail or if we're gaining on her. Footsteps light, and if we spread out enough the wings should be able to close and net if we do find her."

Finally he had enough of the chipmunks and pulled one out of his robe, eyeing it greedily as it squirmed. "I'm getting a bit tired of these shenanigans. Once we get to the coops and we don't find her, we'll take a moment to look at map and see if there's a potential pattern to her wandering and then get ahead of her. Otherwise we step up the pace and keep on her heels. Let's move." He finished his statement by biting the head off of the chipmunk with morbid, crunching finality. Leo wasn't doing his job; now it was his turn to catch a fox.

victor's eyes widen as madrigus just chomps that rodent's head off - like somethin' her idol, lady graves of the obscure, obscene teen-angst horror rock band "zombie nurse", would do on stage! but in real life! face cracking into a slightly mad half-grin, victor darts off to take point, keeping close to the ground to search for clues. is she giggling a little bit? must just be the adrenaline..

:: Madrigus' decimation of their chipmunk brother cleared the crazy Madrigus pheromone haze from the remaining 'munks. They scattered with a speed that whipped his robes around his frame, like a chipmunk-wind. For a moment one got tangled in the hem but it wrenched itself free with a tiny little squeak and fled after its brethren.

Stories thereabouts would speak of a pack of chipmunks fleeing for the border like a small, furry tide; sorrow heavy in their tiny eyes. Their God had failed them. Forthwith they would worship cheese.
(Cheese did not bite your head off. And... It was Cheese. What more need be explained?)

Somewhere in the woods a tiny statue of Madrigus burns - a silent memoriam to a fallen friend and a shattered Faith.

As the group travels from the AAA to the farm area of town it's pretty much same old, same old.

Any attempt to track in a town is kind of an exercise in frustration - but, hey, try if you want to. The results will be something like this: 25+ people passed this way. Some wore boots. Some wore shoes. One intrepid soul wore flip-flops. A lot of dogs came through. Some cats. WAY too many squirrels to count. Grass is bent. Dirt is scuffed. Small rocks are overturned. If it was only a quiet glade in the woods these details might be important, but in a town...?

The group peels into the field, their gazes taking in the bucolic scenery. Which is to say… grass. Lots of grass. One might expect a sheep or three to be cropping on the grass, that’s how bucolic the scene is.

Butterflies flit about, flirting with bees that skim the air looking for flowers to pollinate. A bird pecks at the ground, taking flight as the group breaks the golden late-day, the kids all went home for snacks or naps or making-their-moms-pull-their-hair-out silence.

In case it isn’t clear enough, ain’t no one been through here for some time.

Chickens peck at the ground behind the fencing around the chicken coop. Several look a little ruffled. Here and there on the ground are loose feathers - not the standard stray down, but actual feathers. Like, maybe, there's been a ruckus sometime recently.
(Visual - you know how in Fable sometimes you just HAD to kick a chicken? For distance? Yeah... Picture that)

Stuck to the side of a coop is a blue B post-it. On the post-it is:
I fear nothing. Except chickens. I have seen the face of evil. It has a beak.

The post-it is grubby, like maybe it got dropped into the dirt then picked up again before being stuck to the wall. If the group hovers there too long they will see the wisdom of these words, for the chickens are unquestionably eyeballing them. ::

Kelsey looked a bit green about the gills as Madrigus ended the little creature in the most disturbing way possible. At a loss for words, she fell towards the back of the group, trying to process that.

Sure, she'd seen demons, both literal and the metaphorical kind that kidnapped and tortured little girls. She'd been beat up and chanted over on a stone table. She'd watched the dead get up again, and she'd felt for a pulse on some of her moving, thinking, talking companions...and found none. She'd heard Blind Molly scream.

And she found none of it quite so disturbing as watching one of her companions bite the head off a living, breathing chipmunk.

So if anyone needed Kelsey, they'd find her at the back of the group, looking down at her shoes. By the time they'd reached the chicken coop, she'd won the battle not to be sick, but was still preoccupied trying to regain her composure. It was not a particularly observant state - if someone told her there were chickens nearby, she might say she'd expected as much from the feathers at her feet, but it would've been news to her.