Taste of Death

<table><tbody><tr><td><div style="padding:15px;"><div><div><div style="border:8px solid #ffffff;width:125px;height:125px;margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;float:left;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/9YAmCla.png" style="height:125px;"></div></div><div style="text-align:justify;">He could always tell when someone was dying. He could never have explained why he knew, or how he knew, but he knew just the same. He supposed it was something like a sixth sense, like when parents say they just knew their child was in danger.

He could always tell when it was too late. There was a point - a point where that feeling went from a faint bit of background noise to an actual feeling. Sometimes he was there in time, and they could be saved. He could fight against the feeling, and feel it fade to nothing. Sometimes it was already too late.

It was already too late by the time he followed the sense to an alley in the underground. The body was lying against one wall, but there was no blood. No sign of any struggle. The man was obvious old, and from the look of him, Angelo had to guess he was probably homeless. There was no sign of any trauma, and Angelo would have had to guess that the man had died of more natural causes - a heart attack or a stroke or something like that.

He couldn't even tell if he was alive or dead. The feeling didn't go away when they died - not right away. Not until he did whatever it was he did.

He couldn't have said what it was he did as he moved over to the body, crouching down beside it. He didn't think, he simply felt - reaching out to feel the thing there, the essence of the thing. The essence of the man he supposed, because he hadn't been a thing for very long.

It was so easy to push it along, to... to clear the air. To make the feeling go away, just as the essence did. He didn't even have to move - he just stayed where he was, crouched beside the body.
</div>[/thoth] @"Saryn" </div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table>​

<table><tbody><tr><td><div style="padding:15px;"><div><div><div style="border:8px solid #ffffff;width:125px;height:125px;margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;float:left;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/9YAmCla.png" style="height:125px;"></div></div><div style="text-align:justify;">Angelo wasn't scared squatting down beside the man. Everything was just... easy. Comforting, to know that the feeling had stopped. Things were right, even if he didn't quite know what that meant.

Or at least he wasn't scared until he heard a noise behind him, turned, and saw some kind of skeleton monster leering at him.

That was certainly scary, and he jerked backwards, nearly tripping over the body before he caught himself on the wall, standing upright. His hand immediately went to his gun, but he didn't pull it despite his instincts screaming. He had decent trigger control, and his rule was he didn't pull the gun unless he was in immediate danger.

Giant armored skeleton monster or not, it didn't have a weapon.

"Angelo Genovese, Manta Carlos PD, and who the hell are you?" Not the politest answer, but he was more than a little spooked. There were a lot of creepy things on the islands, but most of those things were at least polite enough to show up looking mostly human.
</div>[/thoth] @"Saryn" </div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table>​

<table><tbody><tr><td><div style="padding:15px;"><div><div><div style="border:8px solid #ffffff;width:125px;height:125px;margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;float:left;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/9YAmCla.png" style="height:125px;"></div></div><div style="text-align:justify;">Whatever answer he was expecting, it sure as fuck wasn't 'I am the grimm reaper'. That was so far from his mind that it actually took him a second to wrap his head around it, to process what had just been said. He was a grim reaper. Or the one. A big one, either way, although it seemed suddenly possible that there was more than one, the same way the island had like two dozen different kinds of demons from different hells.

Not that it made the whole thing any easier to swallow, and he took a moment to process the rest of it. Soul. He was here for the guys soul? Only someone else had already spirited it off.

Angelo would have been lying if he had said he didn't have suspicions about just what his powers were doing. It was hard not to make a connection with some kind of soul when he felt a need to do something any time someone died.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable. "Yeah, I guess that would probably be me." He admitted. He supposed guiding was as good a term for it as anything.
</div>[/thoth] @"Saryn" </div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table>​

<table><tbody><tr><td><div style="padding:15px;"><div><div><div style="border:8px solid #ffffff;width:125px;height:125px;margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;float:left;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/9YAmCla.png" style="height:125px;"></div></div><div style="text-align:justify;">Watching someone's skin grow back was, for lack of a better term, fucking gross. Angelo certainly knew how the human body worked, having seen more than one dead body in between his two jobs, but this was like something out of Bodyworks. The man lost a few inches, gained some hair, and gained, of course, glowing red eyes.

Why had he expected anything different.

He shifted to face the man a bit more, standing up properly. Angelo was not a short man by any means, but even without the extra height of being some kind of skeleton monster, the red eyed man still had at least three inches on him.

"I have no idea, no idea, and yeah, one or two questions, as I'm sure you can guess by my answer." The fact that he couldn't answer was probably question enough, but he did try and elaborate at least a bit. "Until now I wasn't even entirely clear what I was doing." So that made him... what, a grim reaper? How could he even be that without knowing? He sure as hell had never turned into a skeleton and pulled a scythe out of the air or anything. No black robes, either.
</div>[/thoth] @"Saryn" </div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table>​

<table><tbody><tr><td><div style="padding:15px;"><div><div><div style="border:8px solid #ffffff;width:125px;height:125px;margin:0px 10px 0px 0px;float:left;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/9YAmCla.png" style="height:125px;"></div></div><div style="text-align:justify;">Angelo was relaxing in bits and pieces, not because of anything the man was saying, but because he hadn't yet made an attempt to attack him. It was certainly possible that the whole point of the conversation was to get him to let his guard down, but it all lined up a bit too closely with what he already knew for him to decide the man was tricking him. He didn't know about being a grim reaper, but... well, it certainly lined up.

"Not long. I mean... I could always sort of... tell if someone was dying? But I kind of always assumed everyone could just tell, and I didn't do anything like... well, that -" He paused to gesture behind him to the body before continuing. "- Until last year. I've been doing the whole now-you-see-me now-you-don't thing since I was a kid." He had no reason to suspect that the reaper wouldn't know exactly what he was talking about.
</div>[/thoth] @"Saryn" </div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table>​