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It takes you quite some time to make up your mind, but in the end, your curiosity wins out. After checking to make sure that no one is coming, and that there is no one at any of the windows, you look around at your feet for something to throw at the bird. Blessedly, there is quite a selection of pebbles available, and several of them look to be in a decent shape for throwing. You pick a thumbnail-sized one up at random, and once you have made one last quick check around the area and over your shoulder for any witnesses, you take a single deep breath, followed by a single step back from your cart, and then you hurl the stone at the ailing gul, which at this moment is in the middle of a particularly pained sounding scream.
You are no whobody when it comes to stone-throwing. For years now, you have been pelting small animals with projectiles, either to collect them as specimens or for food, so you are not surprised at all when you hit your target perfectly, on your first try – though you do note that the bird did not attempt to fly away, dodge or recoil from the rock, even though the gull appears to be looking straight at you. The impact throttles out the scream, and bird and pebble both fall to the earth like a stone, though the bird has the more dramatic impact of the two, landing on it’s side with a dusty sounding thump, one wing fully extended up in the air, the other folded underneath the beast trembling and twitching, possibly broken. You feel a pang of guilt at the sight, but you force it down, telling yourself that you are dealing with the bird as cleanly as you can under the circumstances.
As you might have expected, once you are in range of the gull, Strange-Staining activates. The bird is absolutely Strange – and as you can see the Strangeness spreading slowly spreading on the ground underneath it, it appears to be Strange in the Second Degree … though not as bad as it could be, as the pebble that you pelted it with, which is laying beside it, well with the range of Strange-Staining shows no signs of contagion. You beat a hasty retreat to your cart, and after digging through it a bit, you get to the pound of salt that you bought from the hardware.
At the moment, you know you are still Strange in the First Degree as you were not able to take any of your attempts at Self-Remediation earlier today to completion. In theory, this means that touching the gull – or anything else that is Strange in the Second Degree for that matter – will not be able to make you any Stranger than you already are right now. But with a whole pound of salt right here, it just doesn’t make any sense to risk it. After you untie the sack, you thrust your hands inside, and then thoroughly rub them through the salt. It is not exactly a pleasant sensation, and you cannot be too forceful, for the fear of cutting yourself on the coarse grains, but in quick order you manage to get yourself as protected as you can be.
