Knock on Wood, Pilot, Episode 0

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Marrok charges through the path left by Winnie as he makes his way toward the ACME. He has been running on all fours for years, but it still feels weird to the human side of his brain.

He comes up on the front of the store, where he sees a moving carpet of bugs all trying to make their way inside. He looks around, not seeing the van anywhere, and he figures the people he needs to find must have hidden inside. He pulls out his lighter and Lolli's hair spray and begins to torch the bugs blocking his way inside. The locusts that were not burned took off, sending a backdraft of flames directly at Marrok. He ducked as he dropped his makeshift flamethrower and his hair and clothes got a bit singed.

"Fuck, these people better be worth it!" he shouts as he rushes forward, bursting through the front door and shoving a nearby broom through the handle to block it from being opened again. He turned around and sniffed the air as he looked around for any other signs of life.
 
After he apologizes profusely Sal bends over with a racking cough trying to clear his lungs of the noxious fumes. Bending over he notices the bugs all around his feet. They are getting in through the dock door where the van is parked.

"You let them in!" Sal exclaims as he heads over to the door to try to spray them with the raid. The bug killer has little effect on the swarm of insects crawling through the door, not because the poison isn't strong enough, but the number of bugs crawling in the cracks of the dock is overwhelming. "Look what you did! What were you thinking? You need to get in this van and get the hell out of here. Jeebus Christopher I am going to get shut down by the health inspector!"

The insects are streaming in rippling waves toward the swing doors and out into the grocery store. They are making a crackling sound like a giant bowl of Rice Krispies. If you move you can't help but crush them under your feet. The crunching is akin to walking on very greasy popcorn. The smell is like the sweet tar smell of a freshly paved road.
 
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The view from the door of the ACME is normal save for the complete stillness. Nothing seems out of place from this angle. There are registers to your left and the first aisle extends out in front of you. Red, white and blue cardboard signs advertise July 4th sales that should have been taken down a week ago. There is soft, generic shopping music playing from some unseen speaker. The bouncy bass guitar track plays underneath a back and forth conversation between a flute and guitar with a xylophone poking it's nose in from time just to make it all the more cheery. Below that you can hear a building crackle like a million tiny marbles being dropped on the colorful tile floor. It's a sound that crawls up your back like a winter chill. The smell of yeasty bread soon turns to the reak of sweet molasses-like sap from an old rotted tree.
 
Erin's loaded the last item (a second tin of Folger's Breakfast Blend) from her cart, frowning as the teen cashier pointedly price-checked an item.

"Yeah, Sal? Could I get a price for the BIG tube of vadge jelly?" she spoke extra-clearly into the PA system.

"Karen, you know you're kind of an ass sometimes," Erin sighed.

"Oh no, you don't understand. I'm just glad you're taking precautions from spawning more like yourself!" the cashier responded mock-cheerfully.

"Look, the price is on the side, just ring the damn thing up so I can leav-"

"What the hell?" the younger girl interrupted, the gum dropping out of her mouth. A finger was pointing out of the plate glass window at what looked like smoke.

Sighing, Erin grabbed her purchase-laden canvas backpack and the extra bags and dropped a twenty on the register, taking the jelly out of Karen's hands. "If I'm short, it's your fault for screwing around. I should turn you in to corporate for the price check crap."

Then she turned around. The haze wasn't smoke.

It occurred to Erin that she forgot to pay for the thermos full of coffee.
 
A few things are about to happen all at once. Let's look at the store from the main office which up a set of stairs is in the back right of the store with a large mirrored security window. You can see the entire store. Out front at the registers, Erin is having a confrontation with Karen that abruptly ends when the sky grows dark outside. She walks to the window and watches as people outside are overrun by a mass of writhing insects. Some fall where they are and others run to their vehicles. Only Erik and Selene make it to their vehicles safely. The van starts to roll but runs off course and stops, then starts again and rolls around the back of the store, the wipers flinging bugs all over the place. Erin watches all of this. Afte a few minutes the insects all start landing on the ground around the ACME. Then in unison the turn toward the store and start crawling in every crack and crevice they can find. The onslaught slow and unstoppable. From the field explodes a beast of a man. He is running at top speed toward the door of the store. Erin can help but take a step back when she sees him pull out a can of hairspray and a lighter and spray the insects off the door. There was a ball of fire and then she was too far back from the door to see what happened. Marrok rushes through the door then bars it with a broom. From the back of the store erupts a volley of shouted instructions. The store patrons and employees all look back in that direction but then look at each other. They are now even more scared than they were before.

Karen screams as she raises both hands to her face, "What the fuck is going on!? What the fuck is going on!?" over and over until the bugs start crawling across the grocery conveyor and it kicks into action moving the insects toward her like a dozen eggs. She faints.
 
Marrok looks around frantically and decides that these workers and customers are in the most danger right here, so he needs to get them to go to the back of the store. He growls loudly begins chasing them, herding them down one of the aisles toward the back. They seem to mostly end up rushing down aisle 13...
 
Selene is frantically running around the store looking for anything that will burn and cause smoke. She is forced to stop when she sees her way is blocked. There is a large mound of insects forming in front of her. They are swarming and seem to be devouring themselves and forming a bug mash that writhes and coalesces into a single shape. That shape grows into the shape of a man, well not exactly a man. The muck monster grows arms and legs and a head and... It opens it's eyes and stares directly at the small group of people that just rushed down the aisle towards the back of the store. Selene stands behind the creature arms laden with stuff. The people are trapped between a wolfman and a muck creature.
 
"hoo. hoo. hooooooo. Okay Selene, you have this, it's no problem, just have to... JUST HAVE TO STAY CALM. JUST BUGS. JUST A LOT OF BUGS. JUST BUGS. JUST. BUGS. We step on bugs all the time, there are little pieces of bugs in your peanut butter. or your chocolate... one or the other. BUGS. THEY'RE JUST BU-"
This went on for at least 3 minutes. Long enough for Erik to head inside, and look around, but not find boss Sal and get gassed.Then she looks through her bag, pulls out the dagger with the scratched up blade and the engraved handle, and runs to the loading dock, and jogs right on over to the back doors of the store. Now he got gassed. Selene knew there was at least a cashier in here, so she shouted for everyone inside, all unseen to leave the store, "HEAD TO THE LOADING DOCK, OUR VAN IS OUT THERE, READY TO GO, JUST RUN."
Then she rushed through the aisles, trying to remember where she saw everything earlier. Oil, lighting fluid, more oil, some cheap booze, and even more oil, dropped it off at the end of the aisle, then went to find some lighters. She's all ready to roll, lighters in her hands, picking up the fuel, when she stops. There's a wriggling mass of bugs, forming some kind of a mass, right in her way, almost humanoid, people rushing up in the direction of it.
"oh no."
 
Hearing the screaming coming from the front of the store, Erik rushes toward Aisle 13. He comes up behind a weird writhing mound of insect muck that has trapped a group of people in the aisle, and watches, horrified, as it starts to coalesce into a vaguely humanoid shape.

Erik fumbles around in his pockets for a second before drawing a small gun and shooting at the monstrous insectoid thing.
 
The situation in Aisle 13 is not anything these store patrons could have imagined in their darkest nightmares. The small group of employees and patrons stop dead and fall all over each other as the front of the group tries to turn around and barrel into the back of the group. As the creature moves toward the group of people a gunshot tears through its side. About a gallon of much sloops off and spreads out along the floor. A second later the whole in the monster fills up with more black tar.

The impact of the bullet did nothing to slow or harm the monster. It seems to grow stronger as more bugs join the forming monster. The eyes that were fixed on the patrons sink into the thick goo of the monster's head and reappear out of the back of the head now eyeing the two individuals behind it. A long tendril of tar reaches out as Selene tries to flee and it trips her up and she falls on the hard tiles. The tendril retracts with a slurp back into the creature as it slowly advances on Selene and Erik.
 
Erin glimpsed down the aisle past Karen, who was busily hyperventilating on the ground, and saw two monstrosities: There's a large furry guy, but Erin has run into a werewolf once before and this one doesn't appear to be attacking humans, and there's a guy made out of bugs that seems to be source of the panic.

Hell, maybe she could knock it out first? No point in having the Magic Cosmo if she's not going to use it.

"I cast... Magic Missile!" she declares loudly, forefinger pointing at bug-guy's chin.

Erin's practiced with the spell before, but has never actually tried to hurt a living creature with it so the kickback was more than she expected. Unfortunately, it was enough to make her flats slip in bug juice and sent her and her backpack crashing to the slimy floor, along with the contents of her coffee thermos.

"DAMMIT!"
 
A shot rings out behind her. She drops to the ground, instinctively, but is sure that her hearing is definitely not going to be nearly as good as it was. Damn, she took such good care of her ears, too. And she slips, the things she's holding thunk and clatter to the ground, the bottle of cheap, quality-so-low-it's-almost-bootleg whiskey twirling like a car, spinning out of control. Then lying on her stomach and looking up, Selene sees that the creature seems to have reversed its joints, like the way that some weird kids in school with really loose joints would do. Its elbows flip the other way, it's back seems to arch in the other direction, and its knees un-buckle, until they start buckling again towards her.
This should all frighten her, but the liquid courage has her back, in a different way. That and the adrenaline. This is the second biggest bit of danger she's gotten into in her 20 years of life, so, far as she knows, she could rip a car in half right now.
 
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Marrok stared in disbeleif as a young girl stood her ground while he was scaring people away from the front doors. He snapped out of it when he heard a gunshot, which he immediately ran towards. To his surprise, the girl walked over closer to him and appeared to punch a mud man in the face from 30 feet away. What the hell have I gotten myself into, now?

Marrok took a second to smell the air, and immediately was brought back to a job he worked paving roads. One of the other workers, a union guy on his break, flicked a ciggarette into a bucket of tar, and it lit up like crazy. Tar, this thing smells like tar.

He looked around, spotting the lighters by the register. He took off in a sprint to grab a handfull of them as he shouted, in a somewhat growling and animalistic voice, "We need to burn it, set that son of a bitch on fire!"
 
Seeing how useless the gun shot was, Erik hastily stashes it and helps Selene up.

He grabs the scattered bottles of alcohol and oil, ripping pieces from his shirt to make makeshift Molotov cocktails to throw at the bug monster.
 
Selene didn't have to look behind her to see who it was that shot the gun anymore, she just seemed to know. "Yeah, that's Erik. Must have had the gun in his pocket. Sure." She didn't need for the creature being uppercut by nothing to be explained, "must have been a ghost or guardian angel or something." And the voice talking about lighting the thing up? It's like she always knew. All her life, she knew it. "Yeah. I'll do that."
Next thing she knew, Erik was planting a bottle in her hand with a piece of his shirt sticking out of it, "That's his. Huh. Must not mind losing it. Good thing I can sew."
So she flicks the lighter, moves it on over to the wick, gives it a nice bounce to know the kinda weight it had. It was nice. Comfy. "Cool."

"Buzz off, you tosser."
It flies, right into its head. And bursts.
"Beautiful."
 
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When the flaming improvised firebomb hits the monster in the head it bursts into blue hissing flames. The surface of the creature bubbles and boils. Insects fly from the form in streaks of flaming sparks as the not yet consumed bugs fly away from the heat. A mixing bowl shape opens in the top of the putrid golem and a great guttural wail fills the space and releases smoke into the air of the ACME. The beast turns and crashes through the shelving heading toward the other side of the store leaving a path of wrecked inventory and shelving on the floor behind it as it flees Aisle 13.
 
Erin pulls herself up from the ground slowly, wincing at the pain from her bruised tailbone and the psychological pain of lost fresh coffee.

"I just freaking outed myself as a mutant or whatever to the wannabe participation trophy wife. Crap, crap, crap. Guess I'm no-showing in to work tonight. Maybe there's a real Professor Xavier that'll take me in?" Erin gripes to herself, then yells back, "So, uh, Teen Wolf? I'm out, can't do fire stuff. I can fit two besides me in the car."

She limps out to the car as fast as her kicked ass will let her, only pausing to casually shoplift a couple health potions (Cherry 7up) and take the twenty that Karen never bothered to put into the till.

Waste not, want not, after all.
 
Marrok got into his own head for a moment, so obsessed with his own plan, that he missed what everyone else was doing. Ok, so I pour this vodka on my arm, then I light it before punching that thing as hard as I can.

He was snapped out of his thoughts by the crashing of the creature as it pushed over shelves and appeared to be trying to escape. I can't let it get out of here, who knows what it could do?

He noticed that it looked like it was on fire already, the people must have been listening to him, that confirmed that he could speak in his wolf-man form. He dropped everything and charged at the creature. He jumped in the air and slammed down on top of it, slashing wildly, wanting to take it apart completely. He growled and slashed until he was scraping the ground, and he began to slow his breathing. Don't want to lose control, calm the fuck down, Marrok.

He stopped attacking and sat down, assuming that he had ended the creature, but he looked up to see it slowly forming again. "Why wont you just die?!"
 
With a clear path to the store exit now open, Erik calls out to the terrified group in Aisle 13. "Follow me! My van's parked out back, we're gonna get you out of here!" He starts directing the group toward the back room and the loading dock where he parked.

He turns to Selene. "Are you coming with us or staying to fight?" he asks her.
 
The monster, now reduced to a puddle of sludge begins to mound itself up and crawl toward a crushed shelf. The shelf once contained Crisco, lard and other oils. It seems to be reaching for the mess on the floor with tendrils of black slime.
 
Marrok looks up to the girl who he recognises, but hopes she doesn't recognise him. He gives her a look that clearly conveys, "What... do... I... do...?"
 
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Erik helps her up and he starts flailing at the people like an air traffic controller and asks Selene about her plans.
"Not much left to fight, it looks like. Mostly just a pile of sludge now, but I want to make sure that girl is okay, she doesn't look fit to take on a swarm alone, not without something to scare all the bugs off.
Here." And she hands him 3 cassettes she pulled off a shelf. "Don't listen to all three of them without me. I've already heard Magical Mystery Tour, so put that one on first. Something tells me the RV didn't leave us behind, that... furry thing's familiar to me, so go meet up with them. Stay safe."
Directing everyone riding the van to grab some flammables and means of ignition before they leave, Selene walks away, towards the beast. The fuzzy one. It seems to be dropping different powders on the buzzy one and looking confused.
"Cornstarch is especially flammable. The small surface area and tendency to not clump allows it to ignite easily. Circus performers use it to spit fire."
He can see the "Well, what the hell else am I supposed to do?" look in his eyes and answers.
"In most kitchen environments, baking soda is used to extinguish class B fires. It's a couple rows down from the cooking oil, right next to the sugar and baking powder. I spent a few minutes there just moments ago.
It's been a few years since I saw you last, isn't it? What was it, 4? 5? I didn't recognize you at first, but I do now. I wouldn't be able to forget you even if I was forced to."
Taking advantage of the stunned look in his eyes, she bends down to pick up a container of lighter fluid and a lighter to go with it.
"I'll be right back, I'm going to go make sure that other girl doesn't get herself eaten alive, you have fun in the meantime." and she walks away.

"Excuse, me! Madam? You appear to be having some difficulties unbarring that door with your full hands and possible internal hemorrhaging. Not to mention, you don't look terribly prepared to potentially fight another one of these, would you like to join me and my old friend in here before we split the fare on a taxi?" She says, with a smile, a few slight lacerations on her face, all thanks to that exploding bottle of booze.
 
Marrok stares at the girl, completely in shock. She remembers me that well? Well, shit.

He snaps himself out of it and dives for the baking soda, slicing the tops off of an armfull of boxes before dumping them all out on top of the slowly moving blob. He watched as it began to dry up and crack. Marrok doesn't want to give it any chance to come back and hurt anyone else. He retracts his claws and sweeps his hands through the dryed up creature, sending a cloud of dust into the air. As he frantically dismantles the creature, his thoughts return to the night he last saw the girl who had helped him.

He thought of the college professor who he had seen a member of The Pack stalking home from the University. He followed him as he hid in the trees, preparing to attack, but Marrok silently choked him out from the shadows. Unfortunately, he didn't see the other members who closed in and killed that professor in the middle of the park. He came up on the body and was beside himself. He couldn't beleive that he had allowed this to happen.

He lost a bit of control that night, but he kept his cool enough to see the other Pack member follow that young girl as she walked home. He tackled the other werewolf as he was charging just feet from the girl, and he nearly tore off his arms as he slashed at him. When he was sure the wolf wasn't going to get back up, he breathed deeply and looked around, only to see the girl standing there, staring at him. He paniced and ran off into the night.

He snapped back to the present and he realised that he was still scraping his hands on the floor, hard enough that his hands were bleeding. He stopped and sat on the ground, surrounded by a cloud of baking power and monster dust. He breathed deeply and nearly collapsed onto the ground. His eyes filled up with tears as the image of that professor's body came back to his mind again and he layed down in the middle of the floor as his body shifted back to it's fully human form.

Once he felt like himself again, he decided that he was just going to lay there for a while, as his arms continued to throb from the burns he had recived.
 
Marrok kipped up from the ground when his wolf hearing picked up the distant sirens. Time to get outta dodge.

He walked over to the girl who he had seen using magic and noticed her limping a bit. He held out his arm and said, "Are you hurt? Let me help you out." He used his left shoulder to help her walk, carrying her bags in in right hand. He led her over to the jerky, where he shoveled as much of it as possible onto his pockets and her grocery bag before turning his face to her.

"I think we could use your help, if you would join us, otherwise, I can help you out to your car." He kicked a lighter off the ground and caught it in front of him, placing it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he smiled and said, "My name is Marrok, and I think we've met before, your smell is familiar." His eyes sparkle, though he occasionally winces in pain.
 
Erin frowned at the umbral formation out the front of the store. If that was just a bunch of regular bugs, she wouldn't worry much: She could probably get to the car before they do and use her "force wall" effect to deflect them while driving like a big snow-plow.

The problem was, chances were they weren't ordinary bugs, not after the weird monster she quite ineffectually attempted to assault. Well, battery, in this state.

She jumped slightly at the voice behind her.

"Excuse, me! Madam? You appear to be having some difficulties unbarring that door with your full hands and possible internal hemorrhaging. Not to mention, you don't look terribly prepared to potentially fight another one of these, would you like to join me and my old friend in here before we split the fare on a taxi?"

Erin turned around, confused, "Oh, I was just looking at... no, I don't think I'm bleeding internally, I just fell on my tailbone and it hurts a ton. Also, um, do you really figure we're going to get a taxi to stop with all the bugs out there looking like Moses is visiting for the summer?"

"Are you hurt? Let me help you out," the young man who took her arm added.

'Oh my dear lord,' she thought, 'I know him...how do I know him? It can't be the same guy, right?'

Erin looks over the two people talking to her, noting how they're covered in small cuts, and yet she's standing there with a bruised arse acting as if she's a trauma victim. She winced internally, 'Oh, mama would so not be proud of me right now.'

The shaggy man continued, "I think we could use your help, if you would join us, otherwise, I can help you out to your car. My name is Marrok, and I think we've met before, your smell is familiar."

"Nice to meet you... nice to meet you both, I'm Erin. Er, Erin Rose. And... I'd like to help. Can we stop by the pharmacy for bandages and stuff? I'll be fine, my ego's hurt more than my bu-, er, behind, but you two look like you need a medic. I did lifeguarding last year, so I could help with your first aid at least. Is that okay?"

"Marrok, right? And, I'm sorry ma'am, but I didn't catch your name?"

Maybe she could be useful to someone, to be really needed instead of just being useless, for once. That'd be nice.
 
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