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Go Fish Scene: Jenny’s Old Clinic Elbridge awoke to a start in his chair to the sound of electronic beeping, one hand still on Rick’s sword. Gingerly, he sheathed it, and shuffled over to the laboratory workbench to inspect his results. Elbridge rolls base Lore to analyse the samples of grody fish bits! --/+ +3 = 2, yuck. FP on “I Know You Know” to do magic science right for a final result of +4. First off, the slimy residue from Carl’s corpse was not poisonous. It was of a similar consistency (and smell) to that of octopus mucus, making the culprit of that particular murder slightly more obvious (especially given the sucker marks and its means of watery escape.) How it had managed to get on Carl’s face for long enough to suffocate him was an unanswered question, as was where his two accomplices had gone but one mystery was at least solved. “If it’s smart enough to cast a counterspell it’s probably smart enough to do a lot of other nasty things,” Rick noted, once he returned from tidying up the cabin. He was a bit annoyed he hadn’t heard about that particular beastie before they went off looking for Carl, but it had been a rather hectic night. “It wasn’t on the body, nor the captive,” Elbridge observed. “And I didn’t see it leave its host. Rick, I have a bad feeling about this one.” The shark’s tissue was a bit more interesting. The tentacle was more squid-like than octopus, with a wide paw-like sucker on the end instead of tapering down. It also appeared that injuries inflicted when the creature was alive showed definite signs of mutation, but the ones made after it had died did not. Not all of them were tentacle-based, the skin around the bilateral tear Rick had torn down its side had started to grow a barnacle-armored coating, and the broken teeth had grown into sharper, hook-like teeth that reminded Elbridge of an anglerfish. He distinctly recalled the previous time they’d fought a landshark under the shell of the Great Turtle it had not done anything like this. “Hrm…” Elbridge furrowed his brow. “If these changes were strictly-mundane in nature, I’d expect to see some reaction from the revivified tissue. Between this and our disappearing cephalopod, we may be dealing with some sort of…possession.” “I take it you don’t mean by the octopus,” Rick said, grimacing at the samples. “On the contrary,” Elbridge said. “I think that the octopus may be merely a vessel, or a proxy, for something else. Perhaps the same ‘something’ that manifested through the shark’s flesh. Malign spirits have been known to transform their hosts and work magic through them.” “Well we’ve known how much the Fomor love messing with nature for a while but not the method. Maybe that’s how they’re getting these alterations to manifest.” “It would explain a fair amount, including their ability to use magic unimpeded by running water, but...hrmph,” Elbridge muttered. “A theory to keep in mind - but look see? The legs as well!” The lobster-like appendages, though grossly-mismatched to the creature’s form, seemed nonetheless grown from its own flesh. “No surgical scars, no splices, matching vascular tissue on both sides...this is no Frankenstein’s monster, Rick. I think it may have been born with those mutations.” Rick sighed. “Great. That means there’s more of them. Probably a lot more. The servitor you kept captive didn’t have any scars either, did she? Did you ever find out the extent of what they did to her?” “Gills, of course, lining her toro. Shrunken lungs, I believe, although it didn’t seem to impede her breathing at all - I suspect their elasticity and compressibility both are greater than human norms. Or perhaps she can store oxygen in her muscle fibres, like a cetacean...bah, I’m only speculating by now.” Elbridge shook his head. “But her neck was fairly-broad, and she didn’t seem to swallow her food so much as inhale it - I think that her trachea was enlarged, to allow her to eat with her ossified hyoid. Nictitating membranes over her eyes, naturally, and webbing between her digits - not her thumb, though.” “No natural weapons then. It’s all just stuff to make humans capable of living underwater. That tracks with what the others who’ve been recovered have been dealing with. I’d wondered if there was a difference since her case was more advanced. But that makes sense, I guess, if they’re meant to be ‘sheep’. The thing is, this is all way too controlled. The mutations aren’t random, like we saw with the Outsiders. They’re not chimeras, more like hybrids. There’s a purpose behind them.” “Perhaps they’re possessed by the ghost of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck?” Elbridge said, smirking so that Rick could tell that he wasn’t being serious. Rick snorted at the joke. “An exorcism would be a lot easier to deal with. That song they’re always talking about has to be connected to this. Low level exposure over a length of time so the changes are more gradual maybe? We still have no idea what it’s doing to their heads.” “Strips away their names, for one thing,” Elbridge said dejectedly. “Maybe it’s some kind of hive mind?” Rick shrugged. Now he was just speculating too. “Not…entirely,” Elbridge said. “Whatever will binds them together - this song, as they say - seems external to individual servitors. I don’t believe it can reach them if they’re too far-removed from its source - otherwise, they surely would have found my previous captive before she escaped on her own.” “But if proximity matters, how was it able to reach the shark to make it grow tentacles? Was the octopus acting as a transmitter?” “For all we know, it might have been,” Elbridge said, shrugging himself. “A signal relay. That would also explain how it could muster enough power for a counterspell....but there’s simply too much that we don’t know.” He put on a new pair of gloves and began to sort the treated samples, preserving some in formaldehyde for specimen jars and putting the rest in biohazard waste bags. “I’ll go incinerate these, and then we can see what Mr. Ivarson has found.” “Sounds good,” Rick said, nodding. “Oh, I almost forgot with everything that happened, but… what about the reading that was interrupted last night?” “Ah...er...yes, we should finish that,” Elbridge said, mildly-alarmed. “Something wrong?” “The spell is bound into the cards, but also woven through every participant,” Elbridge said. “It only discharges when the final reading is pronounced, otherwise...well, the cards won’t work properly until it’s finished. Or our fates, for that matter…” “Man, I hope you have a punch card at the Gato,” Rick said, now mildly alarmed himself. Mild alarm had a habit of being contagious. “Time for lunch?” “Lunch, cards, and a rescue operation.” “Just your average workday,” Rick said, vanishing into the sword so El could take them outside.
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Sep 13, 2019 03:04
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A Guest in the House of DuSang Scene: Chateau duSang Ada’s friend had dropped them off at El Gato Negro, and Gorden had driven them to Ada’s...he wanted to say “house”, but this was not a house. Too big, too fancy, too old, too...oppressive, like someone in Hollywood wanted to make a Southern Gothic horror movie and built the set to cliche spec. Or maybe he was just jealous that even one the guest rooms (Rooms! Multiple guest rooms!) was bigger than his entire dorm room, kitchenette and bathroom included. After he’d pulled up to the front door and a valet (a valet?!) had insisted on taking his car out back, he’d escorted Ada inside and politely waited in the foyer for her return, so they could discuss the long and exhausting past she’d hinted at catching her breath at Long John Blackbeard. But after an hour another servant (how many serving staff did she have?!) had informed him that Ada was “indisposed”, and that, per instructions sent ahead by Elbridge, he couldn’t go back to his dorm for the night (for fear of watchers...okay, maybe that mental woman had other friends on campus, but still!). So now here he was sitting in a bed too big and too plush to be familiar, between faded wallpaper and tarnished brass fixtures, recounting the events of… His discovery in Lancaster’s office, the fight with the mentalist woman, ditching her in the library, driving to El Gato Negro, getting flashbanged in the parking lot, rescued at the docks, fighting for his life against his kidnappers, seeing the shark-chimera thing, figuring out how to track previous sound, finding Carl’s body, comforting Ada… ...did all of that truly happen in one night? With a heavy sigh he let himself fall back against one of the pillows. What little Ada had said in the parking lot made it sound like she and Elbridge and everyone else in this...coterie had been through this sort of things several times before. Small wonder she’d seemed so tired. He wanted to relax, but the names of the students suddenly cropped up in his head. Nguyen, Bakersfield, and Indra. They had to save them by tomorrow. If not...he shuddered involuntarily. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to them if they didn’t. And Lancaster would get away, and Shirley wouldn’t be able to follow her dreams… ...didn’t Shirley ask him to do something as well? A buzzing from Gorden’s pocket made him feel around for his cell phone. He’d missed a few calls and messages, mostly from...Scotty. “Oy, ya daft bastard!” said the last voice mail. “Pick up the drat phone! Bio’s in a right nit about their faculty offices gettin’ trashed, and yer name keeps comin’ up! What the hell happened, man?! Stop avoidin’ meh an’ pick up!” With another heavy sigh, Gorden sat up and pressed “redial.” “Gorden, ya fecking arse!” answered Scotty’s voice. “About bloody time! Where’ve ya been all evenin’, ya nutter?! I’ve been gettin’ questions left an’ right about why one o’ tha physics grad students ‘as ben sneakin’ around on enemy territoreh!” “Sorry, Scott, it’s been a...long night,” said Gorden placatingly. He wasn’t wrong, but… “What’s the Bio program saying about the higher science now?” “Now’s not the time fer jokes, Gorden!” Scotty countered. “Professor Lancaster’s been tellin’ everyone who’ll listen that yer a right bastard who tried ta blow up ‘is office over some stupid shite! I’ve denied everythin’, o’ course, and the whole Physics department vouches for ya, but the Deans are gettin’ antsy, an’ the rumor mill says CampSec has yer name on the buildin’ access list, so d’ya wanna tell me what the fook happened?” Wait, if Lancaster knew he’d been poking around in his office...oh poo poo. “Scotty, I promise you there’s a perfectly valid explanation for anything, but for now it’s going to have to wait. When you listened to Lancaster did he mention anything about a Shirley? You know, the former student with the ‘creepy boyfriend’ you mentioned the other day? This is really loving important...” “Cannae say he did. Why? Ya go pokin’ ‘round ‘er place too then?” “...what do you mean, ‘too’?” “I meant in addition ta breakin’ into the Biology department, ya daft idjit, what d’ya think I meant? Did she put ya up to it? I know how ‘tis, pretty lassie askin’ ya fer favors...” Gorden cradled his head in his hands and sighed in relief. So Lancaster hadn’t tracked back Shirley or even Sharene through him. He could take him. Them…? “I...it’s not quite like that. Scotty, I know this is going to sound weird, but you’ve gotta believe me.” Another deep breath. How to explain it in a way he would understand, without freaking him out? “You’re right, I did go to her place. And when I was there...she mentioned that she dropped out…” You’ve gotta sell, this, Gorden! If Scotty doesn’t buy this, it’s only a matter of time before Lancaster figures out who put him up to it. “She dropped out because Lancaster had been harassing her.” “...’e always did seem a mite shady, that’n. But why wouldn’t I believe ya? It’s not like handsy professors are a new development, laddie.” “Yeah, well...she freaked out at first because she thought I was working for Lancaster when I dropped by. She didn’t know anybody at Tulane had her address…” “An’ just what’re ya accusin’ me of, then?” Scotty said, a little miffed. “Maybe I watch out for all o’ ye, lower science or no.” (Rapport roll, diff 4: Davin_Valkri: 4dF +3 = (b++-) +3 = 4) “And I believe you, I believe you!” Gorden exclaimed, waving his hand placatingly despite Scotty not being there to see it. “I trust you, which is why I didn’t tell her that you gave me her address. But she was absolutely terrified of Lancaster finding her again, and can you blame her?” “Aye, aye, alright. Truth o’ the matter is I saw ‘er and ‘er boyfriend at the hospital. Back when I had that bad flu, a few months back, ye recall? I recognized the lassie, missin’ as she was from the lab, so I decided to follow ‘er home. He was in a bad way, the young man. Asked one o’ the nurses and she said ‘e was shot.” “drat...is that why you called him ‘creepy’ when I asked about Shirley? Because you’d heard he’d been shot?” “Well… did ya meet ‘im?” “He seemed nice enough.” Gorden answered noncommittally. He’s also magic and wore my face for a little while but that’s neither here nor there, he thought. “If ya say so. All I know is, all tha hairs on tha back o’ me neck stand up whenever I’m in the same room with ta man. Sixth sense, me maw called it.” “Well, Shirley feels safe around him. And it’s not like your hairs stand up around Lancaster, do they?” “‘Course they do. Why’s ‘e always smell like ladies’ handsoap? S’not right.” “I can think of a few reasons,” answered Gorden with a shudder as he imagined Lancaster’s dealings with fish people, selling them students for his own ends. He got to the slimy post deal “handshake” before he blinked and shook his head to clear the vision. “Shirley said that Lancaster might have tried to snare more students into his web. Do the names Indra, Bakersfield, and Nguyen ring a bell?” “Hm, not from tha Science department, or at least not as a group. Indra… Indra… Maybe I seen it on one o’ them playbills from Drama? Sounds familiar.” Drama?! Lancaster, you jackass, would you turn over the entire student body to these Fomors?! Gorden grit his teeth, though he knew Scotty wouldn’t see it. “Wonder what his interest is in theater kids,” he said aloud. “Scotty, I’m gonna ask you for a favor, and if you go through with it, I’ll buy you dinner for, like, a month. I think Lancaster’s up to something even worse than just harassing students, and that he’s going to be doing something at four o’clock tomorrow. Can you keep an eye on him and give me a call if he leaves the campus? Don’t, like, confront him or anything, just watch him and call me.” Scotty went uncharacteristically quiet for a moment, weighing the free lunches against the challenge being posed as any good scientist would do. Finally, he grunted. “Gorden ah’m workin’ all day tomorrow; if one o’ the samples needs tendin’... and besides that, ‘e’s already got his gander up about what ya did t’is office…” (Roll Rapport vs. +3 to convince: @Davin_Valkri: 4dF +3 = (b+b-) +3 = 3 and invoke New Age Anti-Retro Millennial for a +5 “Can’t you lean on someone in the Biology department, then? Surely somebody owes you money…?” Gorden took a deep breath, and then the words all came tumbling out. “Scott. Lancaster has already ruined Shirley’s life. She’s in hiding, and he’s back to teaching like nothing ever happened. Now I think he’s going to ruin the lives of three more students. And if he gets away with this he’ll hurt so many more of them...tell me that’s not something you’re okay with, Scotty.” “Course not, but what’s ‘e doin’ ta ‘em then? Ya aren’t givin’ me anythin’ to go on!” “I think he’s kidnapped them, Scott,” said Gorden, with an unflinching voice. “I think he’s holding them somewhere and I think he’s going to sell them to someone who will make sure they never see New Orleans again.” He wasn’t sure about the last part, but given what Elbridge had said about the Fomor in Florida...hell, it might well have been possible. “That’s what I found in his office. That’s why he’s so angry at being discovered.” “Tha’s human traffickin’, Gorden! ‘Ave ya tried callin’ tha police?” Scotty sputtered. “We’ve tried--Sharene tried, Shirley tried--and they didn’t believe them!” Gorden continued. “I’ve found...allies... who can help on my side, but on campus, you’ve seen what he can stir up. Please, Scotty, for the lives of three students, help me!” “Fine! Fine ya daft bugger, ah’ll do wha’ ah can. Jus’ promise me ya aren’t bitin’ off more than ya can chew with this! Allies, ‘e says. Who? Neighbor’ood watch? If ‘e’s as mad as you claim ‘e’ll have allies of ‘is own and weapons to boot!” “So do mine, Scotty. Good luck and stay safe.” “Keep in touch, laddie,” Scotty said. “Ah don’t want to hear anythin’ ‘appened to ya… Ya been a bit off ya’self tha past few months.” “Just...stress, I guess.” Gorden stammered in reply. “And don’t worry, I’ll be fine. See you tomorrow.” “Aye, see ya.” Gorden hung up the phone with a *beep* and threw himself backwards onto the sheets again. That was one matter done. He hoped he wouldn’t regret bring Scotty into this, but at least he had a friend on campus. And Shirley would be relieved that the man who’d given him her address had her interests at heart too. He rolled his phone in his hands, staring up at the gilded ceiling, pondering the next step.
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Sep 29, 2019 16:09
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Alisa In Chains A sigh escaped Ada’s lips. “Man. What a night.” Even to her ears, her voice that she’d hoped would sound relieved to be home merely sounded tired and distant. Exhaustion clung to her like the flecks of dried blood adorning her face -- no matter how much she scrubbed, they refused to come off. The piping-hot shower water helped, but it could only go so far. Closing her eyes, she sat down against the edge of the bathtub and let the steam envelop her body, half-ready to drift off then and there. “I can’t run away from this, can I?” she asked the one person who was always there for her, the only one who knew just how deep the rot really went. “If I follow my path, it’s gonna keep happening. Over and over and over again…” “Yeah,” Alisa said, appearing through the mist on the opposite side of the tub’s edge. “Are you going to be able to handle it?” “No,” Ada said, bowing her head. Admitting it was liberating, and yet, it filled her with so much shame. “If it keeps happening, I’m gonna end up losing control when I can actually hurt someone. Sooner or later, my luck’s gonna run out.” She looked up, and her eyes were haunted. “Lise, if you see me about to tip over the edge...can you kick me off the controls like you did back in Old New Orleans?” “I can try, but if you’re too far gone I don’t know how it’ll go. What if I step in and the blood lust doesn’t go away? I don’t have the practice you do with fighting it. I’d probably just snap. There has to be some way I can help though...” She looked frustrated, like she’d been trying to think of one all night and come up with nothing. Abruptly her frown turned vicious. “This always happens. I say I’m going to support you and then I end up being completely useless. I’m so tired of it!” "It's not your fault," Ada said, as a fresh wave of exhaustion and anger washed over her. Maybe it was. She'd promised to be there for her at the maze, but then… ...She shook her head. It didn't matter now. Looking back was only good for crying. Keeping their eyes fixed forward was the only way they could stay sane. "We've never set aside time to make sure you could train and learn what you're truly capable of. We need to look into doing that before it's too late for us both." “We’ve never set aside time because you never take a break!” Alisa chided her. “You should be going to bed, not hosting a tea party at this hour so you can drag up a bunch of old scars. You’re not going to enjoy this as much as you think you are.” “It’s not for my sake,” Ada countered, slowly getting back up to continue rinsing herself. “The last time we got involved with time magic, we almost got a front row seat to Ruby committing suicide by temporal paradox. It’s dangerous even when you know what you’re doing and aren’t willing to cross the line, and I don’t know if he’s aware of how badly toying with the laws of magic can screw you up. Telling him what it’s like to live with it will get the message across better than a hundred lectures from El will.” “You don’t have time for me,” Alisa said, sulking. “But you’ll make it for some college student you barely know. Why? What’s so special about Gorden Maxwell?” Ada bit her lip. It hurt, and it hurt all the more because it was true. How could she even begin to answer? “...It’s not about him,” she said at length, quietly. “It’s about us. I’m selfish. If I get what I want, I don’t care what happens to me, how much I get hurt, how little I sleep. I know you’re always there, and it’s so easy to act like it’s a given, like you’re a part of me.” Turning around, she stared into Alisa’s eyes. “But it’s not true. We’re bound together, but as equals. This isn’t just my body anymore, Lise,” she said, pressing her hand against her chest. “It’s yours too. It has to be. Otherwise, it’ll be as if we’d never rescued you from the basement mirror.” She drew a deep breath, preparing herself to accept whatever Alisa said next. “Do you want to call it off? Wait until tomorrow, or another day to tell him the truth?” Alisa sighed. “I just want you to take better care of yourself. You got stabbed tonight, if you didn’t notice. Sure the other guy got stabbed harder and then disintegrated, but still.” She floated over to press a translucent hand over the still-knitting wound. “I know, getting cut up doesn’t mean much to you but talking about Jenny and Hugues and Rick… That’s going to hurt. A lot.” A little smile crossed Ada’s lips. “Look on the bright side, though. I get to talk about how I got my sister back too.” “Oh sure, tell him that you’re haunted, that’ll convince him to trust you,” Alisa laughed quietly. It was good to hear Alisa laugh for once. Seeing her spirits lifted, Ada couldn’t help but laugh with her. “Honestly, the fact I’ve got someone sensible watching over my shoulder’s probably a point in my favor. Means at least some of my worst ideas get tossed aside.” “Does it though? I don’t remember you asking me if it was okay for you to go play bait at the docks.” “Point.” Still smiling, Ada pulled Alisa’s spectral form into a hug. “If it ever looks like I’m about to do something that dumb again, yell at me with my own voice, OK?” “Ada…” Alisa didn’t pull away but she didn’t return the hug either. “I feel what you feel, remember? When you’re so sure you’re right about something, it’s hard for me to disagree. When it’s quiet, and we’re talking like this it’s easy to think for myself but when we’re in the moment… Maybe that’s why it’s so hard. You want me to be someone who can check you or help you, and I’m not. I’m sorry.” She buried her face in Ada’s shoulder, the distance from just a moment ago forgotten as she clutched her tightly. “I want to make friends or go shopping, not spend every waking moment trying to save the city! But you care. You care so much it hurts, and that means I do too." The words were pouring out of her as though a dam had finally cracked. "It's not fair. Even when I only take away a few hours I feel so selfish! I just think about what you could be doing with that time, and what a waste of it I am. Don’t tell me I’m not!” Had she always had a knack for disarming her of things to say, or was it a side-effect of the two of them becoming entwined souls? For a moment, Ada wished she could say the city wasn’t as important as having her back and mean it. That spending time with her was as precious as her crusade. She couldn’t. In that moment, she hated herself for it so much she would’ve taken up the knife to add a couple scars if it had been within arms reach. How could she help her sister when her very existence was enough to warp her into someone who could only accept her whims? “I wish I could give you your life back.” The only words she knew she could speak true. “This is wrong. It has to end. I don’t know how, but somehow, we’ve got to find a way.” Alisa reared back and looked her straight in the eyes. “No, Ada. You already broke the laws twice to save someone else. Don’t do it for me. I couldn’t live with that, even if it didn’t turn me into something terrible. You can’t raise the dead.” Her eyes squeezed shut in horror. “I should have just gone with Zophiel.” The worst part was Ada couldn’t be sure if this was how Alisa really felt or if it was just her own emotions, washing over her, canceling out her true feelings. What kind of cruel mercy was this, to bring her back, but only as a helpless slave? It’s my fault. I’m a monster. I should’ve just let her go. A thousand thoughts ran through her head, each worse than the last, each as fleeting as the precious moments her sister’s had been given to live again. They stabbed her chest over and over with icy despair, and yet, none of them endured as a single vow did. I’m going to fix this. No matter what it takes. As the promise crystallized in Ada’s heart, Alisa cursed herself for being so weak. Preventing this was the reason she’d suffered in silence for so long, and now it was too late. She could only pray she hadn’t just doomed them both. Slowly, Ada broke away and turned off the water. Without its warmth to heat up her body, it wasn’t long before she began to shiver, the night’s chill seeping through the veil of steam. Quickly, she dried herself with a towel and sheathed herself in a bathroom gown. And only then, as she stepped out of the room, water still dripping from her glinting hairtips, did she speak up again. “We’re gonna go talk to Mom. Maybe she can fix you. Maybe she can fix us both.”
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Sep 29, 2019 19:22
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Mama, Just Killed a Man Scene: Chateau duSang Claudia duSang was sitting alone in her private study, going over the latest printouts Roy had brought her from the Switzerland branch. The business world didn’t wait for one to deal with one’s family troubles, magical or no. The grandfather clock ticking in the corner opposite to the door served as a constant reminder of that, its steady rhythm both helpful at focusing on the task at hand and harrying at the same time. A massive stack of papers filled the ebony desk, growing larger still as she finished reading each page and added it to the pile of never-ending work to be done and efficiently wrote down instructions on how to handle each issue with the Montblanc fountain pen Julian had gotten her for their anniversary. Still, it was getting late and she was just standing up to turn in when she heard the sound of wet footsteps coming in -- footsteps that, judging from the forcefulness of each step, could only belong to one person. “Mom? It’s Ada,” came her voice through the oak door. “Can I come in? We need to talk.” “Yes,” Claudia said, wondering when her daughter had managed to sneak in without her noticing. She glanced at the clock, wondering at how quickly the hour had gone by since she last checked, and sighed. “What’s the matter?” she asked, when she saw the look on Ada’s face. “It’s about Alisa.” For a moment, Ada’s eyes flickered with hesitation, but then she clenched her fists and continued. “Being bound to me’s been warping her will and she never told me. She feels what I feel, and it makes her want what I want even when she really doesn’t want to. It’s…” She stopped for a moment, unable to find the right words. “...It’s wrong. She deserves to live her own life, not just be a piece of mine.” “Ada…” Claudia said, caught off guard for the first time since, well, since the night she returned and Ada finally opened up to her after years of silence. Small wonder Alisa had followed suit. “Of course she does, but...” Ada’s face changed abruptly, eyes widening into a mask of fear. “Mom! She’s going to do something stupid, don’t let her! Please! I shouldn’t have said anything, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-” “Alisa?” Claudia stood and crossed the plush carpet to put her hands on her daughters’ shoulders. “Stop, both of you. I’ll have a mirror brought and we’ll discuss this properly.” Ada’s features hardened once again. “Yeah. Probably a good idea. I’m not leaving before this is done.” --- While Roy brought up a mirror, Ada headed back to her room to change into real clothes. Her mother had made clear in no uncertain terms that they would not be discussing important matters while underdressed, and though she found the demand silly, she grit her teeth and obliged her. Alisa was totally quiet, in spite of her attempts to reach out to her. Maybe she was scared of making things worse by speaking up again, or maybe she wanted to save her strength for what was still to come. And soon enough, the moment to begin the conversation in earnest came. Claudia had Roy bring a plain, platter-sized oval mirror to the parlor and rest it on the seat of one of the high-backed chairs so the duSang women could see each other as equals. She sat back in her own chair, hands folded over one knee, as Ada sat down and Alisa appeared in the glass. “There,” she said at last, as Selina left a small pot of coffee and two cups on a tray and vanished out the side door. “I’ve been giving thought to this problem since I first found out that Alisa was still with us. It’s a simple enough problem, but the potential solutions walk a thin line between victory and disaster. If you have any thoughts or plans beyond grim determination, I would hear them.” “Let’s get one thing straight,” Alisa said forcefully. “I won’t let anyone I love do necromancy, no matter what.” "Necromancy's for bringing back the dead," Ada said, leaning back into the chair and nodding in agreement. "Someone who can still learn and grow isn't truly dead. There's got to be another method of giving you back your body." “The original is unsuitable for several reasons,” Claudia said clinically. "So she needs a new one then," Ada said, her brow furrowing in concentration. "Can we make one somehow? Even if it was just ectoplasm, it'd make a huge difference." “Say we do,” Claudia said. “Leaving aside all the particulars of that task, what anchors her to that body? For that matter, how do we separate the two of you without destroying one or the other? Your souls have been growing together for your entire lives like entwined trees.” “...I don’t know.” Ada admitted after a moment. “I never had a chance to look at how summoned spirits are anchored to the bodies they employ. And as for separating us both...” It was a difficult problem to solve. With effort and patience, a tree could be uprooted, allowed to grow somewhere far away from its twin. But souls were different. Even if the process of extracting Alisa from her body didn’t risk her life, there was no telling what pieces of her would or wouldn’t come along for the ride. Unless… “...Maybe we don’t have to. When we were little, we shared a room, but we both had our own beds. Mom, if we can’t separate our souls, do you think we could share bodies instead?” Claudia turned her head to her other daughter. “Alisa, this sounds like something you would have tried.” “It didn’t work,” Alisa said. “I’ve tried everything. Toys, books, people… Even my very favorite things. Even Roy. It’s like there’s something in the way.” “There is,” Claudia said. “It’s the reason that demons have to bargain for your soul and can’t just take it. It’s a layer of protection that every human has, a shield of sorts. You’re born with it, and it fades only when you die, or when you choose, deliberately, to let something in.” She looked back at Ada. “That night, you took Alisa into yourself, and your shield protects her. If you let her back out again, that protection will be gone.” “Free lunch,” Alisa said, echoing Hugues’ words from a long time ago. Instinctively, Ada’s hand reached out from the armrest towards the mirror. “No. That’s not gonna happen.” Then, it fell back down, tired. “So what can we do? We need to find some way to separate us safely. The way things are right now isn’t right.” “I agree, but I haven’t had enough time to research this yet. Soul transference is a tetchy subject, given the Council’s predilections. And while things aren’t right, they are stable, so we shouldn’t do anything to disrupt the miracle you two pulled off without a very sound plan.” “Yeah.” The first thing they needed was more information then. But where to find it? “We need someone who knows about souls. Live ones, not a necromancer. Alisa, did you ever read any stories about anyone that fit the bill?” “When I was eight?” Alisa asked, giving her a ‘come on’ look. “Everything since then I’ve only been able to read over your shoulder. But… What about that skinny guy, Rick’s new roommate? He said something about looking into vessels for him.” “Nicky? Hmm. Maybe he knows something. I’ll have to find some time to ask him. Even if it’s not the same situation, it’s close enough that it might help.” “...I was under the impression that Richter Cole was dead,” Claudia said. “What’s this about vessels?” “His soul went into his Warden’s sword when he died. It’s still him, just in a different body.” A light flush coloured Ada’s face as she realized she’d never gotten around to telling her mother about that. “We went hunting Fomor together tonight.” “I see,” Claudia said, and there was a slight chill in the air. “I had dismissed the idea of a soul vessel out of hand because that sort of magic tends to be tied up in immortality research- a bunch of old foolish men who cut their souls to pieces in a bid for more time. There’s a reason such objects are generally referred to as cursed.” “It’s not like that,” she said defensively. “It was a reflex, like it happened to Alisa.” Maybe one day she’d find out why souls rent from their bodies flocked to her like fireflies. “He’s inside that sword. All of him, not just his sense of justice or his anger or anything else.” If it wasn’t, why else would he have gotten so flustered when she rubbed the blade? “Then perhaps my dismissal was too hasty,” Claudia said. She didn’t sound as though she truly believed it. “I should like to speak to this ‘roommate’ myself then.” “He’s a Council Wizard,” Alisa said. “Kind of cringey though. You’ll probably scare him off if you use that face.” Her mother’s eyebrow raised ominously. “Oh yeah, he’s gonna run for the hills.” Part of Ada wanted to come to Nicky’s defense. He’d seemed more confident the last time she’d seen him, more self-assured. Maybe, just maybe, he could handle her mother. And then, her most idealistic side gave up and faced reality. “Don’t scar him too badly, please,” she said, sighing. “If you leave him traumatized, I’m never gonna hear the end of it.” Claudia snorted dismissively. “I can apply a light touch, when needed. But what’s this about hunting Fomor together?” “Some bad guys kidnapped a college student and Ada helped get him back,” Alisa filled in helpfully. “There was a giant land shark and everything! Well, Ada was too busy knife-fighting one of the Fomor to fight the shark.” She sounded almost disappointed about it. In that moment, the weight of her mother’s stare upon Ada’s skin was as heavy as the world. The silent interrogation was deeply uncomfortable, and gave Ada yet another reason to get what had really happened off her chest. “It wasn’t just fighting,” she said, slowly, her grip on the armrests tightening ever so slightly. “I got the upper hand on one of them at one point. Got past his guard and caught him vulnerable.” She took a deep breath. “And I did more than just take advantage of it. I killed again.” Claudia nodded once. “Did you use the knife this time?” “Yeah.” The memories of it tearing through the flesh came flooding back, and with it, echoes of the hunger she’d yet to sate. “Didn’t make much difference,” she said quietly, lowering her eyes, afraid that her mother would see what lurked beneath the guilt and concern. Claudia looked directly at her daughter. “What you’ve done to yourself is not going to go away just because your magic is sealed, Ada. It’s something you will carry for the rest of your life.” A long, dejected sigh escaped Ada’s lips as she slid down the chair’s back like a dead weight.“I know. But it wouldn’t have been like this without it.” Her nails dug into the armrest. “I thought if I worked hard enough to not be like that, I’d be fine. I bit back so hard on the urges to keep control. On everything. And now it doesn’t mean anything, and I didn’t even kill because I wanted to,” she muttered, bitterness dripping from her voice. “What’s the point of trying to save anyone if you go crazy trying? Why bother if all you get to do is choose who lives and who dies?” “Why indeed.” Claudia stood, looming over Ada as though she were examining a scientific specimen. “Why did you kill, if you didn’t want to? What excuse do you hide behind? It isn’t possible to accidentally break the First Law.” “Because it was one life against two. I would’ve lost Rick for sure, and maybe ended up as Circe’s plaything as well.” She let out a frustrated snort. She’d gone over this situation many times in the dead of the night, when everyone else was sleeping. There hadn’t been a solution, based on what she’d known back then. Maybe there hadn’t been any way to save the day, period. “Maybe you can’t break the law by accident, but you sure as hell can be made to choose between principles and death. And if I’d chosen the former, on top of not really managing to save anyone, an old monster would’ve walked away.” Her teeth clenched, remembering the look on Olivia Raith’s face as she came out of the maze. “It wasn’t a real choice. I just had the option to lose something or lost everything and picked the former.” “No.” Claudia shook her head. “You’re looking at the finish line of a race you started a long time ago and wondering why you stumbled. Think, girl! What steps took you to that point? Why did you place yourself in a position where you had to lose something or lose everything? Your hand wasn’t forced from the first moment. You made decisions, and they had consequences.” She turned her iron gaze on Alisa, who bowed her head guiltily. Then she started walking towards the mantle, where portraits of duSangs long past stood in gilded glass frames. Some were old enough to be painted, but most were black and white photographs. “Going back further still, to the gang leader, you killed him to save another child, but why were you there to begin with? Because you made the choice to leave your family behind and sought comfort from a monster instead. I still don’t understand why, Ada, but you have to stop looking at these mistakes in a vacuum. If you can’t do that, then you will go mad. You won’t be the first of our line to fall down that particular well, though you will certainly be the last.” Ada’s eyes blazed. “You wanna know why I left? Why...” she began, but the flames of anger her mother’s words had lit flickered out, as quickly as they’d roared to life. She’d thought about it so much and never found a way out. What if her mother’s words had some merit to them? Maybe the solution really had been a few steps back, or many. What was she thinking when it all began? Why had she run away…? … … …
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Sep 29, 2019 19:22
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How You Remind Me “It was the memories.” It was a whisper, so small and delicate disrupting the silence it was balanced on might scatter it to the winds. “When Alisa died, it all hurt so much. She was gone, but she was there, in every toy that had belonged to her, every book. When I slept in our room, it was like she was sleeping with me.” Her eyes looked down upon oldest scars in her arms, the only ones that didn’t mesh with its patterns. Even now, the months following the sudden visit to the hospital were nothing but a blur. The only thing she truly remembered was looking back at the manor and running away. “...I ran away because I couldn’t take it. Because I was weak. Because giving up on existing was easier to face than knowing I’d killed her.” The room was quiet for a moment, and it was Alisa who finally broke the silence. “Did you think that was what I wanted?” She pounded on the glass with both fists. “Do you think I pushed you out of the way of that car so you could find an alley to curl up and die instead?! I gave up everything, and you wasted it! I had to watch you, wondering the whole time if- if-” “If I was going to finish what I’d started and just throw myself in front of another car some day?” she asked, hollowly. She didn’t look up to face her sister, her body having gone deathly still. “Yeah. But you didn’t. You found something else to throw yourself into instead. The Midnight Carnival.” Ada blinked. Deep inside her chest, something stirred to life, a strange kind of yearning, laced with dread. “I don’t remember what happened back then very well. All I remember...” she furrowed her brow. “...All I remember is that nothing meant anything at all, until—” “That’s where you were?” Claudia whispered, shock turning to fury. “Among thieves and madmen who’d bet their lives for a bottle of faerie tears? Behind the veil of a barker’s tent?” “I remember it,” Alisa said, making the statement into an accusation. “The games, the rides, the music! The risks you took to get them to let you stay another day, just so you could feel something, anything at all. It went on for years, Ada, until you were one of them. You weren’t the Ada I knew, the Ada I loved-” Her voice broke. “You’re still not. I didn’t save her at all.” A wave of déja vú struck her at Alisa’s words. Bits and pieces of a life that didn’t feel like hers danced before her eyes at the frayed edges of her memories, begging for her attention as so many tricky spirits had done a long time ago. But beyond those flashes of recollection, there was something more. She’d felt something similar months ago, back in the old New Orleans when they’d gone to church. It’d been too long for this to be an echo of that -- which meant these were Alisa’s own thoughts, her own grief and regrets. “Then what am I? Who am I, really?” she asked, her voice shaky, dreading the answer yet desperately focusing on Alisa’s words, afraid that paying any attention to the memories would bring them back to the surface. “Rose Red,” Alisa said. “The girl who danced on the edge of a knife just to feel her feet bleeding. You thought you left her behind when you traded the carnival for the gang, that you changed, but you didn’t, Ada. It’s who you are, and everything you’ve done since then is just the lie you tell because you’re scared no one could love a monster like you.” “That’s not true,” she shot back, baring her teeth. “I know I’m losing my grip on the hunger, but that doesn’t mean—” “It’s not about the murders!” Alisa exploded. “They’re not what really matters, you’re just using them as an excuse to let out the feelings you keep holding in. Remember when you danced with the ghosts and lost yourself? When you got drunk at the bar and played with your scars? When you let that vampire feed on you so you could sort out what your true feelings really were?” With every word her voice went up in volume, until by the end she was shouting, letting out what she too had been holding in. “You can lie to yourself, Ada, but you can’t lie to me! I feel the peace beneath the rushes every time you cut loose! I know who you really are!” “But...I…” “Tell me I’m wrong,” Alisa said, leaning against the mirror, exhausted. All the fire had gone out of her, spent in that one raging burst. “Tell me you feel nothing. Can you, sis? Can you really?” I have to. I have to. It’s not real. It can’t be me. I didn’t wanna be like that. I can’t let her see me like this! Perched upon her chair, her legs curled up in front of her like coiled springs, Ada seethed. Her nails dug into her calves, threatening to burst the skin… Not like this. Not like this… ...Why? Why am I like this…? ...But then, her arms moved up to shield her from her sister’s words and tears began streaming down her face. It hurt to cry and let them see just how pathetic she really was, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was the exhilaration underneath the sorrow, the bright laugh trying to force its way past her sobs. Alisa was right. Whatever she was now, it wasn’t human. Somewhere beyond her body, Alisa heaved a tired sigh. “Oh, Ada…” Ada didn’t know how long it went on before her mother’s hands cupped her shoulders, pulling her into a warm embrace. Claudia stroked her hair silently, letting her cry. Where her fingers touched, calm and warmth radiated out in little ripples, slowing Ada’s pulse and relaxing her muscles, almost like drifting off to sleep. She clung to it, wrapping her arms around her mother until the shaking stopped. "Mom...I-I'm sorry I don't deserve this love," she whispered, too scared to raise her head and see the look on her face. "I never should've come back at all…" “Nonsense. My love is mine to give away. You don’t need to earn it.” She gave Ada a little squeeze. “We all carry regrets, but the self-pity I will not stand to hear. You came back because you found something you wanted more than empty pleasures and shiny distractions. That isn’t a journey made alone. Who drew you back into the world of the real?” “The Rookies. My old gang. Two of them got lost at the Carnival when their boss came to visit and got pulled into a game. There was supposed to be only one winner…” Ada swallowed. She’d never told anyone how she’d gotten out, not even Rick and Ruby. “..But they didn’t stop helping each other, even though they knew only one could walk away. It didn’t make sense...I got curious and helped them out to learn more about them. And when I heard they were all like one big family, I followed them home. They helped me remember what it was like to care for someone. To want something more than just feeling alive.” “I thought you didn’t remember,” Alisa said, with a very tired smile. “I didn’t want to. I stalked them like a hunting cat as they tried to hustle through the Riverfront Expressway’s tunnels. They never would’ve known I was there if I hadn’t shown myself. Never seen the hounds coming.” She shivered, trying to imagine where she’d be now if she hadn’t taken an interest in Dizzy and Blaise back then. Probably playing with new visitors at the Carnival still, drowning them in its sea of pleasures. She squeezed her mother back, finally calm enough to look up. “Mom, what are we going to do with me? I can’t let myself cut loose like I did back then. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But if I don’t...” Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten anything in hours, but the loud, angry noise was much more than a mere warning sign for her lack of meals. “This isn’t a hunger that can be ever be sated,” Claudia said. “Breaking the first law means you’ll always enjoy killing, and you’re drawn to those passionate feelings like a moth to a flame. Two vices, spiralling out of control as each makes the other worse. It’s a wonder you’ve lasted this long.” Ada grit her teeth. She'd known ever since she'd gotten out of the maze, ever since she'd received the candle burning on both ends, but knowing didn't make hearing it any easier. And yet, her mother's voice was pensive, not bitter. "But…?" “But there is a way to… lessen… the first problem,” Claudiea said hesitantly. “Not a cure, Ada. There is no cure. It’s a ritual. A last resort, dangerous and potentially fatal if not performed perfectly.” She pressed a finger over Ada’s mouth. “Do not say anything tonight. You’ve spent too many years throwing yourself into these situations without looking ahead, without thinking about the consequences. It’s part of that second vice, isn’t it? Risk doesn’t matter when all you want is to feel something. What I propose cannot be rushed into. It’s a purging, an offering of the life that matters most to the lawbreaker.” The life that matters most…? For a moment she was tempted to ask who it could be, but then she shifted her weight slightly, brushing her scars against her mother’s clothes and she understood perfectly. “You mean I have to give my own life up again...?” “No, you have to take it, with all the fervor of taking another’s. Only at the peak of self-violation can you reject the essence of the lawbreak, weakening its hold by putting your own desire to live above your desire to kill.” She sighed, pulling Ada in tighter until her daughter could barely breathe. “Or you won’t be able to, and then you’ll have at least stopped yourself from harming anyone else ever again.” She doesn’t know which one will win out and she still told me. Even though it means facing the chance of losing us both again. Is it because you trust me, Mom? Or because you know there’s no other way? It wasn’t something she knew the answer to. It wasn’t something she could ask, either. All Ada could do was hold on tight and wonder which urge would turn out to be stronger: the one that had kept her alive all these years, or the one it had spawned while she’d let it drive her life.
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Sep 29, 2019 19:23
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**Note: This is from the previous evening, got posted a bit out of order! Apologies.** Car Talk Scene: Blaise’s Camaro The Camaro was quiet save for the low rumble of the engine as Blaise drove out of the Gato’s parking lot- where he’d dropped Ada and Gorden- towards the Stitch in Time- where he’d agreed to drop Rick. The large man drummed his fingers on the wheel, pensive, and he kept glancing down through his blue-tinged glasses at the longsword tucked safely next to the center console. “So, you’re the boyfriend,” Blaise muttered to himself. At the next red-light he leaned back and casually laid one hand on the sheath. He barely raised an eyebrow when Rick appeared in the passenger seat, leaning on the door’s armrest with one elbow and looking out the window as the world went by. “Ex-boyfriend,” Rick corrected without looking at him. Blaise’s touch was distant through the protective leather. It felt like being forced to lean on someone in the subway, impersonal and only because there wasn’t any other option. “And you’re one of the Rookies?” “S’right.” Rick used to think the reason Ada didn’t talk about her old gang was that she’d cut ties after her first lawbreak, but after seeing them all together at the hospital when Zia was rescued, he’d realized that wasn’t the case. They were still a family, and that was a part of her life he’d never been invited to. Had she told them much about him? The broken street lamps they drove past as they entered a residential area seemed to be his answer. “You brought Zia to the hospital, right? Don’t think I ever thanked you for that,” Blaise said, breaking the silence. “It was nothing,” Rick said. “Ada did the hard part, the least I could do was give her a ride.” Blaise chuckled. “Doin’ the hard part… That’s our girl. Can’t help but help when a shorty like that makes you feel like you ain’t done nothin’ unless you pitch in.” “Ain’t that the truth,” Rick shook his head, smiling. “Rick Cole, by the way.” “Blaise Vercher. Nice to finally meet ya. If a little late in the game.” He quirked an eyebrow and when Rick nodded, he gripped the hilt of the sword and gave it a firm handshake. Rick laughed. “Late’s better than never.” He looked at the way Blaise was holding the weapon thoughtfully. “You swing one of these before?” “Naw, nothin’ so fancy. Give me a baseball bat or a sledge and I know what to do with ‘em.” He smiled crookedly and moved his hand back to the sheath. “Thing this pretty belongs in a museum.” Rick snorted. His sword was a lot of things, but pretty wasn’t one of them. “Hey, when you’ve gotta go monster hunting the classics are classic for a reason.” “I’m sure you know your business,” Blaise said, using a stop sign as an excuse to look his transparent passenger up and down. “Course, there’s always a bigger monster.” Rick sighed and turned back towards the window. They were getting close to home, and he was suddenly very tired. Tired and still raw from Ada’s… well, whatever that was. “You alright?” Blaise asked. “Cuz I gotta be honest, you look like poo poo, and you smell like a dead fish.” “I’m…” ‘fine’ just wouldn’t come out of his mouth no matter how hard he tried. “You’re hosed,” Blaise finished for him. “And it ain’t got a thing to do with being dead.” Rick’s shoulders slumped. “Is it that obvious?” Blaise nodded sagely as he pulled up in front of Nicky’s shop. He left the engine idling as he slid the stick into park. “I don’t know you from Adam, man. But I know Ada, and Ada doesn’t know how to let go of people, even if it’s the right thing to do. Look at her sister.” “That was an accident,” Rick muttered. “About as accidental as you ending up in that sword, I reckon. My point is that I ain’t never seen Ada look at someone the way she looks at you. You got your hooks in as deep as she did, and you don’t even know it.” “Then why’d she dump me?” He thought he knew the answer but an entire evening of mixed signals had thrown it all into doubt again. “Hell if I know!” Blaise laughed. “Why’d she latch onto you in the first place? That’s the real mystery from where I’m standin’.” Rick sank into the back of his seat. Literally, now that he was having a hard time focusing. “I gave her my coat,” he said quietly. That wasn’t the reason, but it was where everything between them had started. “Nobody trusts the Warden.” She’d challenged him, there in the back of Jenny’s car, and he’d done his best to rise to it. He’d been making progress too, all the way until the night of the Ripple. Then he’d lost her, and lost his way. Fallen back on old patterns, old grudges, until his past mistakes finally caught up to him. Blaise watched him struggle with it all for a few moments before popping the lock on the door and leaning over to push it open for him. It felt like being given a reprieve. Rick picked up the sword, careful not to dislodge Blaise’s hand. “Thanks for the ride… and the talk.” “Sure. Take care of yourself, Rick.” “Yeah, you too.”
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Sep 29, 2019 19:25
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Teatime for the Soul Scene: Nicky and Rick’s place “Ada doesn’t know how to let go of people…” Rick’s cheeks flushed, remembering the feel of her hands on the blade. Of her arms around his body in the Nevernever. Intimate and warm and possessive. He ached to feel it again. To feel loved. To feel safe. For a second, something like hope twisted in his chest, dark and desperate. Maybe Blaise was right and if he asked her to take him back she wouldn’t be able to say no to him. He could have her again. Things could go back to the way they’d been before... He clenched a fist and crushed the thought before it could infect him any further. He’d been hers forever, but she’d only been his for a little while. He hadn’t dared to ask for more, and that was the whole problem. It wasn’t equal. It never had been. Unless that changed, he had no future with Ada. He glanced down at the sword in his hand. It was all he would ever be, if he stayed with her. Hell, if he stayed here in New Orleans, for that matter. Ada might let him go but… He sighed, thinking of the never-ending mess he’d left behind for Elbridge. It wasn’t the obligation of the job. He didn’t owe the Council or the Wardens another minute. But Elbridge was his best friend, and that was a much harder thing to ignore. If El needed him, he would be there, no questions asked. One crisis after another, forever. A little voice gnawed at the back of his thoughts. Would there ever be time for Richter Cole? A light came on inside the shop, and the store bells jangled jarringly as Nicholas, dressed in matching blue striped pajamas, cap and all, ripped the door open. “Where have you been?” he asked, breathless with worry. Rick blinked at him. It was nearly three in the morning and Nicky usually got up at six. “Sorry, I thought you’d be in bed,” he stammered. “I was! But then Hardley called and said you were out with her…” He trailed off, looking Rick up and down as though he expected to see lipstick on his collar. “Not like that!” Rick protested. “We were trying to… There was… I mean we had Gorden with us, too!” Not that that had mattered to Ada any. “Gorden-from-Anna’s-meetup-Gorden?” Nicky asked. “What was he doing out there?” “Getting kidnapped by the Fomor,” Rick said. “It was a rescue mission. After we got him back Ada and I were trying to track down the thugs who nabbed him.” Nicky seemed a bit mollified by that. He opened the door wider and motioned Rick inside. “Be that as it may, it’s still not a good idea to brood out on the porch where the neighbors can see.” “I wasn’t brooding,” Rick grumbled, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment as he ducked inside. He was so used to not being seen by now that he kept forgetting that the sword didn’t carry any such powers of invisibility, and to anyone without Elbridge’s glasses-enchantment, (which he had helpfully shared with Nicholas,) it would appear to be hanging in the air with nothing holding it up. --- The threshold settled over him like a warm blanket as he crossed it, no invitation needed. It had never been very strong, given that he was a bachelor and the building was both a workplace and a home, but until he’d moved back in with Nicholas it still would have kept him out. The fact that he was still human enough to count as living there had been one of the few happy surprises lately. Nicky headed for the kitchen, (where a teakettle was whistling,) and Rick floated over to the lacquered wooden stand Rupert had made for him and set the sword in its cradle before flopping sideways onto the high-backed paisley chair next to it. He was exhausted but if he fell asleep he didn’t know when he’d wake up again, and since no one had figured out how to shake him awake yet, he couldn’t risk it. It was shocking how little he knew about himself, physically. Metaphysically? Whatever. Idly, he wondered if Nicky had turned up anything new while he was out. His roommate had procured several dusty tomes on the nature of souls and enchanted items that seemed promising but hadn’t had time to pore through them all, and Rick hadn’t been any less busy. From the floor, Marmalade mrrow’d a welcome, then rubbed up against the sword and started sniffing at it appreciatively. “Do I really smell like a dead fish?” Rick asked the cat, grimacing. He had no way of knowing. He’d completely lost his sense of smell when he died, and he’d never possessed someone fully enough to take control of their senses, not even Marcine. A moment later, Nicholas came back carrying a cup of tea in one hand and a cup of hot water in the other, and sat down with a tired sigh in the patched velvet chair next to Rick’s. The mismatched sitting area had replaced the spinning wheel in front of the back picture window and was roped off so that customers couldn’t use it during the day. The chairs were secondhand, but Rick loved his dearly. It was the first thing he’d bought since he died, and that meant something. Just like the cup that Nicky placed carefully on the small table in front of him, even though he couldn’t drink it. He picked it up, the ghost dust tingling against his fingertips, and sat up a little straighter. For a moment, they were just two flatmates taking tea, and he found himself getting something of a second wind. “What did El say on the phone?” Rick inquired. “Only that you were on Warden business with Ada and would be home late, and to let him know if you weren’t in before dawn,” Nicky said. “He’s always frightfully vague on the phone. You’d think he was worried there was someone listening.” That’s exactly what he was worried about, Rick thought. Elbridge had never come back from the war in some ways, though he supposed El had seen so many wars at this point they all blended together. “Warden business,” he muttered. “I guess you could call it that.” He went over the events of the evening in brief, though only glossing over his talk with Ada in the Nevernever. Nicky was mostly quiet, outside a few requests for clarification. When Rick had finished he pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged on the chair. “How did it feel, when you fought the shark?” he asked, a look of deep concern on his pointed face. Rick was a bit surprised by the question. “Thinking of picking up the blade yourself?” he asked with a half-smile. “Heavens no,” Nicholas shuddered. “Just answer the question please, I’ll explain why in a moment.” “Alright, be mysterious,” Rick set the teacup down and laced his hands behind his head. “I was so focused,” he said, calling the memory up, fresh and clear. “It was like… Nothing else mattered except me and the shark. Every time I drew blood it felt right, like that was what I was meant to do. What I was born for. Made for.” He struggled to come up with a comparison, and his mouth tightened into a frown. “Like it used to feel when I did magic.” “Was it just the cutting and the, er… stabbing?” Nicky was putting on a brave front but the topic was hard for him. Rick shook his head. “No. I mean… Afterwards, I let Ada use me to hack off a few bits for Elbridge to throw in test tubes and just the cutting was okay, but it wasn’t anything special. It was just something that needed doing.” “Hmm. Purpose matters,” Nicky said, giving the weapon in the cradle a thoughtful look. “That’s good news actually, Rick. The more I’ve learned about these sorts of soul-binding spells, the more worried I was getting at your choice of a vessel. Being bound to an assassin’s knife, for example, can make one er, rather...” “Murdery?” Rick supplied. “Just so,” Nicky nodded. “There are some who would say the Wardens are no less, er, murderous, I suppose, but your sword specifically… has it ever been used for its intended purpose?” “I never chopped off anyone’s head, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rick said grumpily. “If Bellworth knew half of what went on around here she’d stain the Mississippi red. It just… It never seemed right to me, the Council’s one-strike policy.” “That’s not terribly relevant,” Nicholas said, waving a hand. “The point is you bound your soul to that sword, which has for its entire existence been used to kill vampires, monsters, and the like. It’s no surprise that you find yourself feeling whole when you fulfill that purpose.” Rick let out a heavy breath and picked up his cup again. “So that’s it? I’m a Warden’s sword and that means I’m a Warden, for the rest of however long I last?” “Not exactly,” Nicholas said. “You’re not a very common sort of Warden, Richter.” Rick knew he meant it as a compliment, but somehow it didn’t feel like one. He’d wanted to be more like the others, to fit in and be one of them, but he’d never managed it. After Rachel died, Bellworth was the only one who’d seen potential in him. “I did alright,” he said, looking into the steaming cup to the mask the gloss on his eyes. “You did something none of them ever managed in two hundred years of trying,” Nicky said. “I know what it’s like not to be wanted around. But we showed them, didn’t we? Routed those red bastards and saved the whole drat city.” Rick wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He couldn’t help laughing softly to hear the pride in Nicholas’ voice. He barely ever swore. “Yeah. We sure did.” “If you want to know what I think,” Nicky continued. “It’s that the whole fighting monsters and saving people part of the job was the only bit you ever liked, and you don’t need to be a Warden to keep doing that. I’m still working out the how of it all, but after tonight I don’t think there’s any doubt as to why you were able to imprint yourself on your sword.” Rick sat the teacup down and reached for the blade, drawing it and laying it naked across the arms of the chair. The silver gleamed in the moonlight streaming through the window, and examining it felt oddly like looking at himself in a mirror. ‘Why’ hadn’t even crossed his mind before. It seemed obvious, superficial. The sword was the only thing in the pocket dimension he could have chosen as a vessel. But had he chosen it? His memories of his last few moments were so fragmentary. He recalled sinking… his hand closing on the hilt… But by that point the water was solid ice, so how...? He exhaled a long, visible breath. Ada’s efforts were going to be for nothing if he kept thinking about the cold. He glanced up and noticed that Nicky’s eyes were sliding closed of their own accord. “Get some rest, Cantor,” he said. “We’ll figure it out eventually.” “Yes,” Nicky said sleepily. “Are you going to-” he yawned mid-sentence “-want to see Elbridge tomorrow?” Rick nodded. “Probably. The Lancaster case is almost cracked.” Nicky stood and collected the cups to take to the sink. “Promise me you’ll tell him. You’ll never do it otherwise.” “I’ll tell him,” Rick said, more confidently than he felt. Nicky smiled. “G‘night Cole.” “Night, Cantor.” As Nicky shuffled up the stairs to bed, Rick vanished into the sword’s interior. He was still lying across the arms of the chair, soaking in the moonlight, and it felt as though he were floating on his back in a bright, cool sea. Despite his earlier worries the day’s toll had finally caught up to him and without further protest he slipped into a dreamless unconsciousness that was something like sleep.
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Sep 29, 2019 19:25
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The Less Glamourous Side of Espionage (Milestone notes: James Focuses Hacking and Will, each costing 1 SP.) James slumped down into his desk chair later than usual that morning - between helping Elbridge secure the prisoner and then dumping the (now disarmed) jeep in front of a known chop shop, it had been closer to the morning than the evening by the time he'd gotten home, and so he'd had to make do with what sleep he could. Breathing deep, he let the aroma of the cup sitting on the desk before him waft into his waiting nose, the scent of the strongest black coffee he could order on the way providing an eager partner in the fight against drowsiness. He lifted the disposable cup and sipped at its piping hot contents, letting the bitter liquid wash down his throat. Store-bought coffee wasn't the best, but it was a drat sight better than some of the stuff he'd drunk over the years. The perils of observation post brew were infamous in some circles. Hitting the power button on the laptop nestled in amongst the papers and books on the desk, he waited, sipping his coffee as the machine booted up, contemplating his next step - beyond Ada possibly being crazy bloodthirsty in addition to just plain crazy, there were two questions nagging at him: who was the prisoner, and where had Frisk gone? And since finding Frisk would involve trawling through a pile of puff pieces and soft interviews to find out where he might have been grabbed - because it wasn't his office, and it was unlikely to be his home without a massive media circus there - he decided to focus on the prisoner first. After hitting up Amazon for a quick order for several books on Cult Deprogramming (couldn't hurt to brush up, after all), he sat back, deep in thought - if the Fomor were transforming normal people into these… grunts? Then he supposed that the key to getting through to the man was to find out who he had been before they got him. Maybe he could ask Elbridge to get his friend on the force to run some DNA samples against the missing persons database, see if that turned anything up. Something for later - for now, at least, he could give the Venatori a call, see if they'd had any luck with similar prisoners. Sliding his cellphone out of his pocket, he weighed it in his hand - just a prisoner wasn't worth bothering Gina about, not unless he actually started talking. Someone else then - and he just happened to know the number for a college professor who moonlighted in supernatural research for the Venatori (moonlighting which had gotten him in trouble with a pair of hungry ghouls - something Mateusz had sniffed out within about five minutes of meeting the man. The old monster hunter had tracked them back to their lair and the pair of them had dealt with the creatures with crack precision worthy of a special forces team.) Scrolling through the contents on his phone, he stopped at the man's entry - Stan Pitsky, and hit dial. “Hello? This is Dr. Pitsky,” said the man on the other end of the line. There was some background noise behind him, mechanical echoes and the hiss of compressed air, as though he were inside of an auto body shop. "Hey, Prof, it's James. Mateusz' apprentice, from that thing a few years back. How's life treating you?" replied James, trying to ignore the background noise. (James, Contacts: ++-- +3 = +3.) “Oh! Yes, I remember, you got me out of a bind back then, yes!” CLANG! “I say, be careful with that- Ahem! Yes. James… er, Ivarson was it? What can I do for you, son?” "Ivarson, yep. I had a few questions, Prof. See, I'm down in New Orleans now and we've been dealing with the modified humans the Fomor use as grunts, and I was wondering if we'd ever managed to capture any." “Bit fond of attempting suicide to hold them for very long,” Pitsky said woefully. “But yes. The Servitors, I believe they call themselves? Nasty business, those. Hunting their own. What do you need to know about them?” "I was wondering if you'd heard of anyone actually managing to get through to one of them and get them to talk? Curious to know if there's any way to do it." “Hm, I mean there’s been recoveries, if not very many. Usually people who weren’t so far gone, right? Prisoners and such. The actual enforcers… I’m trying to think. There might have been one? They found his family, I believe. Not an easy task given how removed from society they usually are. The Fomor don’t let them work in the area they were taken, we’ve noticed. Too much familiarity, too great of a chance they’ll be recognized. If you’re trying to finger him, look in the national databases.” "Maybe international," mused James, typing up a few notes on his laptop, the cell phone balanced between his ear and his shoulder, "They could be grabbing people from the Carribbean or Mexico and then moving them in the Gulf. Still, good to know I'm on the right trail, so thanks, Prof - even a small hope is something." “Good luck with it, son. Oh! I almost forgot. We also found out that they really, really don’t like elevator music. Not sure why yet! But it drives them absolutely up the wall. So if you need one to talk that might do it.” There was a great hiss of steam behind him. “Sorry, need to run, if you have any other questions email me!” The call cut off with a blip. Elevator music… The concept sounded preposterous, but then so did many other weaknesses various supernatural critters had. Adding it to his notes, he resolved to at least ask the Warden's apprentice - that Sterling lady - about it. She'd seemed like a musician. Maybe it was something to do with pitch or harmonics? James shrugged - maybe the idea was as preposterous as it sounded and maybe it wasn't, but it wasn't something he was going to figure out sitting here. Before he started his internet trawl into Frisk's life, he checked his email inbox, if only in the faint hope that Mike had resolved to suddenly trust him and spill the beans. He hadn't, of course, but there was another email waiting for him. Gina’s response to his question about gold stocks had a lot of spreadsheets attached to a small note. Gina posted:TLDR is that there’s been a few spikes on gold trading out of New Orleans, but it’s inconsistent. Like someone’s flooding the market and then waiting for it to die down and flooding it again. Starts a couple years ago. Hasn’t been a major push in a couple months but there will be one soonish if the pattern holds. Good ol’ pump ‘n dump if you ask me. James fired off a quick reply thanking her for the data and sat back - if he had to bet money on anyone being responsible, he'd bet everything on it being Goldman or one of his agents. Probably how he was funding his mayoral campaign, too - no need for donors when you could turn anything you wanted to gold, after all. Which, of course, made it all the more important to find out what had happened to the one candidate who had a chance to beat him in the race - Benjamin Frisk. Which, sadly, meant trawling through every puff piece, easy interview or fawning bio until he had at least one clue as to where the hell he'd been grabbed. With a sigh and a glance at the - still silent - door, he dove in. (James, Hacking: -/-+ +3 = +2, invokes on A Smile in the Shadows (FP: 5->4) for +2 to succeed.) - James blinked and sat back - it had taken hours, and he had a dossier on the irrelevant minute of Frisk's life a mile long (<insert silly minute here>), but he'd finally found something useful in amongst everything else. Krazy Karl’s Cajun Cuisine. He went there at least every other day, sometimes every day. Not for the same meal- sometimes it was lunch, or dinner, or even the occasional late night snack, but there it was in half the itineraries. The place didn’t really count as a restaurant. It was a food stand, you ordered at the window. It was also in one of the more destitute communities and did not look to have any security whatsoever. There was no website or menu for him to peruse online, just a few pictures of a blue painted cinder block building with a peeling sign and a smiling, poorly-shaven Cajun man wearing one of those old fashioned diner hats waving from the window. Oh, and a bunch of Yelp reviews saying to run screaming rather than eat there. Now, maybe Frisk just had a daily hankering for bad gumbo, but something seemed very odd about the slick looking mayoral candidate spending so much time at a run down dump like that. Even if he hadn't been grabbed there, James mused in his head, there was something that sounded off about the whole thing - and it wasn't just the fish tacos. He glanced at the clock at the corner of the laptop's screen - if he closed early for lunch, he could probably make it over there. (James is compelled on Venatori's Loose Cannon to pursue the lead solo. FP: 4->5.) And then his phone rang. “Warden”, read the caller ID. James picked up the cell phone and hit answer, "Please tell me you're not just waking up and calling to make sure I ditched that SUV, Warden." “Of course not,” Elbridge crackled over the receiver. “You would have been done with that hours ago. Have you learned anything about our guest?” "We need to take some DNA samples and run them against missing persons databases. I asked about and it sounds like finding who he was is the key," replied James, leaving the fact about elevator music unmentioned, "Any chance you could ask your friend on the force to sort that?" “I’ll pass it along,” Elbridge said. “How soon can you join me for lunch? We never finished that business we were discussing yesterday, and it’s…time-sensitive.” James glanced down at the clock again - there was no chance he could swing by his own place to pick up some things, meet Elbridge and check out the lead in his lunch hour. As much as he hated the idea of it, he'd probably have to skip work for the afternoon. "Alright, I should be able to make it." “Good. See you there.” *click!*
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Sep 30, 2019 00:11
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Breakfast at Ada’s Scene: Chateau duSang Gorden woke to the gentle but insistent tapping on the door, and the Butler’s muffled voice saying, “Mister Maxwell, breakfast is being served in the dining room, if you’d care to partake?” At the sound of the knocking, Gorden rolled out of bed with a heavy *whump*, missing crushing his phone by centimeters. He had no idea when he’d fallen asleep--he’d been staring up at the ceiling in worry and must have drifted off. His phone spat a low battery warning as he lifted himself up. “Yeah, yeah...I’m comin’, just...just a minute,” he mumbled towards the door. A chance look around showed an outlet hidden behind one of the many nightstand tables in the room, so Gorden plugged in his phone, took a moment to tug down his jacket (he was still a goddamn mess from getting bundled up and thrown in the back of a van, but he doubted Ada would care), and cracked the door. “So, uh, which way to the dining room, then?” he asked the butler. --- The dining room was dominated by a massive table that could easily sit twenty-four people, perhaps more with some cramping together. Seating near the end of the table, her eyes glued to an enormous mass of papers, faded old books and medical reports was Ada. She didn’t look up as he came in, immersed in the documents as she was. What kind of parties does Ada have in here? Gorden thought as he walked down the aisle towards Ada. This table could seat everybody at the Paranet pizza party and one of his lab groups at once. Which would be one hell of a gathering… Without waiting for an invitation, he walked to the chair on Ada’s left and sat himself down. “Morning, Ada. Long night?” he greeted her. “Gorden…?” she said, blinking repeatedly as she looked up at him. There were bags underneath her eyes, and her lips pursed as she took stock of him. “...Yeah. Like you wouldn’t believe. What about you? Guest rooms alright?” “The rooms are fine!” Gorden shrugged. “Just a little weird when you’re used to a foam mattress in a dorm room, I guess. And I, uh...made a couple of calls last night. Some friends to help with our case. Looks like you’ve had the worse of it, though.” “It’s not just uni students that can pull all-nighters,” she said, offering him a sheepish smile. “Got caught up in trawling through ancient history. I didn’t feel like sleeping and I figured if I’m going to explain how this all started, I might as well catch up on the past.” Pushing the documents aside, she shook her head and stared at him once again, now more attentively. “What do you want for breakfast? Coffee? Tea? Eggs, toast, croissants...?” “Lots of coffee and whatever you suggest; I’m easy,” Gorden said without hesitation. “That’s...quite a bit of past you have there. Is that the kind of stuff you were talking about yesterday?” There was a noticeable moment of hesitation before she answered. “Sort of. It’s all connected, but not always in obvious ways. You could say one thing led to another. Take out one link in the chain, and no one knows where things might have ended up.” She remembered another conversation like that, so long ago. Suddenly, Ada perked up. “One second. Roy?” she said, raising her voice. “Tell Selene we want coffee, eggs, brownies, buttered toast and a chocolate submarine.” “Of course, Mistress Ada. To be shared between the both of you?” Roy asked, shooting Gorden a meaningful look. “One portion for me and one guest serving for him, please,” she said, shaking her head. “My stomach’s kind of rumbling.” “At once,” he said, taking a bow and departing. “So,” she said, once he was gone, leaning forward to listen attentively to Gorden’s response.. “That makes me wonder. You can look into the past, but can you look into other presents? The what-ifs and might-have-beens?” Gorden drummed his fingers against the silverware in thought at the question. “Hmmm...other presents…” The drumming became more intense, until it was an audible “tink tink tink” as the butter knife went into the teaspoon. “That’s an interesting question. I suppose it isn’t impossible, just in a generic predictive sense--” Suddenly he scrunched up his face. “--ah, crud, I just had a morbid thought.” He stopped drumming and looked Ada in the eye. “What-ifs and might-have-beens can be broad as hell, but they’re still probabilistic. There’s only a few ways to have, say, you, like I know you, except you dye your hair on a regular basis. There’s an awful lot of ways for you to be dead. Disease, accidents, sudden infections...any sort of probability continuum of Adas is gonna include a bunch of ‘here lies Ada, your birthday to date X’, just because there’s a lot of ways for that end state to happen.” He winced a bit. “Sorry, but that’s just how things break down.” “Because life’s rare to begin with and our continued survival is even more of a miracle?” she ventured. “That’s...yeah, that’s a pretty good way of putting it.” Gorden nodded. “One of my pre-med colleagues would put it more bluntly--something about all the bits of you working in every different direction, somehow producing a working human on the other side, and if one of those bits gets out of order you have shock, diabetic comas, hyper immune responses, fevers, cancers…and that’s just internal stuff; if she were going into trauma medicine you could add everything from nasty bumps to external hemorrhaging.” He shrugged his shoulders. “A little snarkier, but the same principle. Lots of ways to die, not a lot of ways to live.” “You’d be surprised,” Ada murmured, thinking back on all the paths she’d walked. From child born in the lap of luxury, to street urchin, to mindless reveler in an underground realm of endless hedonism, to gang leader, to unexpected vigilante, all the way to whatever she was becoming now, it was hard to believe she’d had the chance to experience so many possible ways to live. And there were so many others yet unexplored… ...She shook her head. Not a good way to think about it. Trying to experience everything was what had broken her to begin with. Better to leave well enough alone. “If you’d seen the group that stopped Hurricane Nicole, you wouldn’t be so sure. Remember how the city didn’t get the worst of it last year?” “I remember that. We had to lock down and board up everything we had, and I still got my room flooded. Branch or desk or something went into the window and the rain ruined the floor...wait, were you doing something then?” “Banishing the archdemon that nearly brought God’s wrath down upon New Orleans to steal away one of his angels, yeah,” she said, nodding. It felt like a distant dream that had happened eons ago. Ever since that day, life had never really stopped moving at full blast. “It all started when New Orleans got called up by the White Council for a meeting. Representatives of all its major factions and several minor ones came together at the House of the Rising Sun, a bar on Port Street just off St. Claude’s. That’s where Warden Captain Laura Bellworth broke the news that the vampires of the Red Court had been genocided.” Slowly, Ada drew a deep breath. If she closed her eyes, she could still see her on the stage, dropping one bombshell after another. “All of them dead, wiped out by the Council. And she also told us New Orleans was Council protected territory now. She also instated a Warden, and introduced him to us. His name was Richter Cole.” “Archdemons, vampires, drat, I thought it was just wizards and rear end in a top hat wizards,” Gorden murmured. His eyes widened at the name at the end. “Richter...Rick? El’s sword ghost friend Rick?” “The one and only,” Ada said, nodding gravely. “He was human then. As human as you...” ‘Or me’, she tried to say, but the words caught in her throat. “I went there with a couple friends of my own. Their names were Jenny Hirsch and Hugues Turner. Both of them are long gone now. Skipped town without a word. But that comes later. We didn’t get much of a chance to mingle or meet the new Warden that night. Not too long after introductions, two people died. One was murdered, killed seemingly by a fat ghoul looking for a quick meal. The other was executed by Bellworth for turning dozens of people into broken puppets...” And so she unfolded the tale. The trying circumstances in which they’d all met. Their investigation into the death of Pamela Nazarene. The first real conversation she’d ever had with Rick, after the battle at the church. The chain of murders, and the demons’ attacks, including Jenny’s possession and the blast of hellfire she herself had taken on the chin during the battle against the monster who’d taken control of her, and somehow survived. Her bargain with Ruby, and the lives the Deathstone had helped to save. The disastrous meeting at Diamond Skies, the pointless murder they’d committed for the sake of information, and the vampire she’d saved and who had paid her back by breaking her. Elbridge’s arrival, their discovery of the grand plan and their first encounter with Mel’karshok. The fate of Antoine Skavis, the ritual they’d conducted to raise an improvised lance against the archdemoness, and their final battle at the Superdome. The angel Zophiel’s blessing, and his confirmation that Alisa, her departed sister, was still with her. She was winding down the tale of their first adventure when Selene arrived, bringing with her a tray packed with a dozen plates, carrying what felt like enough food to feed a regiment. Though most of the portions were quickly laid down on Ada’s side of the table, she didn’t reach out to grasp any of them, instead closing her eyes. “There were six of us at the House when it all began. Six of us, and now I’m the last one standing. Everyone else is dead or gone, and I didn’t get to say goodbye to even one of them. There’s only me now. Only me…” Exhaustion crept into her voice as she mumbled the words out. In that moment, the limitless confidence that had driven her every action since Gorden had first met her had totally disappeared. Without it, she looked tiny and lost at sea. As revelation after tragedy after crisis followed out of Ada’s mouth, Gorden’s face fell lower and lower. He didn’t even register the food and coffee pot put down in front of them. As she concluded her saga (“story” seemed...insufficient), he looked at her face. Without the confidence and bravado he’d seen at the dock, he suddenly realized--gently caress, she’s younger than Sharene! In the back of his mind, he knew that he was totally unequipped to help her with her traumas. She needed an experienced counselor and a whole lot of time, and maybe a retreat to a happier place with sun and pina coladas on tap. He wasn’t licensed for the first, and too poor for the last, and his powers would give her time, but probably at the cost of obliterating her brain entirely. So he did the only thing he could think to do. He got out of his chair, walked two steps around the table corner, knelt down, and held out his hands in the universal gesture of “do you need a hug”. She’d stood up and raised her arms before her brain caught up to her instincts, and then she froze. Always chasing a new thrill. Even sadness and soreness feels nice when all you want is to feel. What if it’s wrong to take this? Everyone I pull into my web gets hurt. Maybe I should just leave him alone... He watched her prepare to hug him and then stop. Gorden looked at the expression on her face. He’d seen something like it before, in his office--not often, but enough to tell. Usually with underprivileged students or those struggling with the material. The “I don’t deserve to have nice things” look. gently caress. That. He leaned forward and wrapped his arms over her shoulders. When he did so, she squeezed back, tight. “It doesn’t end,” she whispered, breathing heavily, trying not to lose what little control she had left. “It never does. It never does!” “It’s okay, it’s allllright,” Gorden tried to reassure her, reciprocating her squeeze. “It always feels like it never ends until it does.” Somehow, that felt totally insufficient. “We only remember the past, and we think that pain defines what has to happen next.” A little better. “We can’t remember the future, so we can’t remember the end until it’s actually happened, and it becomes the past.” He closed his eyes and leaned back a bit, to let her weight fall a little more towards him. “And then we have a different future we don’t remember to look forward to.” She sniffled. “That’s the dorkiest attempt to cheer someone up I’ve ever heard,” she said, with a voice that didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Do you always use science facts when someone needs comforting?” “Not always,” and Gorden couldn’t help but smile just a bit at Ada’s judgement. “Did it help any?” “A bit.” She didn’t let go until several moments more had gone by. “But you haven’t heard the worst yet.” She sniffled again. “I need to eat something. If I try to tell you the story of how I broke the laws of magic on an empty stomach, I think I’ll just fall down. Food break?” Gorden felt his stomach gurgle at the mention. “Food break.”
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Sep 30, 2019 05:59
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I’ll Show You Mine... What followed was a one-woman act of culinary savagery that gave the worst lunch rushes Gorden had ever seen some stiff competition. It started out innocently enough, with Ada taking little bites out of her scrambled eggs...but it did not last. Spurred on by hunger, her motions quickened, her bites grew bigger, and pretty soon she was tearing through plate after plate of food like they were appetizers. She ate like she was positively famished, and by the time she was done with her ninth croissant after erasing a dozen brownies and three plates’ worth of eggs, the question of where she was even putting all the victuals she’d devoured couldn’t help but arise. It was only after there was nothing left to eat on her side of the table that Ada slowed down, and daintily reached out to stir the Submarine she’d asked for with a satisfied sigh. “Can’t believe how much of a difference a decent breakfast makes,” she said, placing the glass cup on her lap. “I needed that. Do you need a second helping?” Ada may have been eating away her troubles, but Gorden matched her in pace as he attacked his plate with the natural instinct any university student has when met with free food: eat it quickly, and eat a lot. After the last bit of toast had run over the last bit of egg, he took some of the leftover butter and jam and mixed them into his coffee with a butter knife. “If you’re offering, sure.” Gorden affirmed between sips, drinking the butter-jam coffee with every sign of enjoyment. “We’ll need it for later.” One gesture from Ada was all it took. At once, one of the maids moved in to pick up the plates, then hurried away towards the kitchen to deliver the request. “We definitely will. What comes next begins with an invitation to a ball hosted by John Goldman, my neighbour, better known as King Midas,” Ada said raising the Submarine up to take a sip. “It’s the story of how I broke the laws of magic for the second time.” “King Midas, the guy who turned everything he touched to gold and was left with nothing but a hamburger?” Gorden said between coffee slurps. Then his brain remembered some of the signs posted in protest on Tulane. Protesting… “He’s John Goldman, the guy running for mayor?!” “The one and only,” Ada said, nodding gravely. “His wife, Medusa, keeps a garden full of statues made from people that fell into their hands. One of them might even be...” She began, but caught herself in time. Instead, she smiled a little. “The rabbit hole to Wonderland goes deep, Gorden. Real deep.” “You make it sound like their son is the Minotaur, and his grandfather is King Herod or something,” Gorden murmured. “You said he invited you to a ball? Was he going to show off his gold, like that fat guy from James Bond?” “You’re not that far off. There’s an annual ball held to celebrate Mardi Gras, and Midas won the right to host it. He invited a who’s who of people to show off just how great his wealth and power was. I got invited by Ruby to accompany her to it, just barely beating Rick to the punch. Somehow, all of us who were there at the Superdome managed to attend...and that’s where we met her.” Instantly, Ada’s eyes narrowed, her voice hardened. “Circe, the Witch of Aeaea, from whom Mitsuo and Rick had stolen a chalice back during the murder investigation. She found out who did it, and she cast a spell on Rick to make sure what they took would be returned.” “Is that why Rick is...a sword ghost now?” asked Gorden, dancing around the word “dead”. “No, that came later. Circe cast a much more destructive curse upon him. One that threatened to unravel the very fabric of his being,” Ada said, gravely. She let her words linger in there, letting the gravity of the situation sink in, and then continued. “She turned him into a girl.” Gorden had taken a chance sip of coffee when Ada had said “fabric”, so when she said what exactly the “curse entailed”, he promptly spit-taked into the mug, spilling butter-jam coffee onto the tablecloth and his jacket. “Sorry, sorry!” he gasped as he dabbed at the spreading stains with the napkin from the service set the next chair over. “How did that...excuse me...I guess he didn’t take that well?” “He still gets traumatized by jokes about the butterfly jeans he had to wear. Unless you wanna make him sad, don’t bring it up in front of him,” Ada said, letting the outburst pass without comment. Reactions to Rick’s glamour had been just as extreme back then. “Circe gave him a hard deadline. Seven sunsets to find her chalice and return it, and then the transformation spell that was only an illusion would be come true. Hell of a deadline to find something that had ended up getting lost in the shuffle. In the end, we all decided to lend a hand with the search. We owed him that much. At the same time, us and Rupert Singh, a newly arrived ex-Council veteran, got embroiled in a search for the missing children of a man called Peter Evans, a Warlock who’d taken up one of the thirty silver coins Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ for. Each of them’s an incredibly powerful magical artifact, mostly because of the fallen angel that dwells within. They specialize in tempting mortals, offering them power in exchange for mortal bodies with which to carry out their agenda in this world. You still with me?” “If you weren’t so drat po-faced about this I’d say you were pulling my leg,” Gorden admitted. “But, yeah, sure, Jesus and Judas were real and the thirty pieces of silver have magic powers. Maybe we can find Esau’s mess of pottage and sell it to Goldman for his gold, or go visit Japan and steal the Grass Cutter Sword so we can use it against these Fomors. But I get the feeling that that isn’t the important part of the story. What happened next?” It took a while to tell that story too. How they'd embarked on a search for leads and had their first encounter with the Fomor. The way Alisa had ended up trapped in the mirror, and the soul prison they had found in the basement, along with its terrifying denizens. Their daring raid of the dragon Cuprionax's fortress and their escaped with her newly born hatchling Factorax, better known as Tor. Her first date with Rick, their visit to the Audubon Aquarium and her encounter with Circe that had set the two of them on a collision course. Rick's kidnapping, the wedding proclamation and the insulting challenge she'd thrown at the witch's face in return. The reappearance of Olivia Raith and her foolish decision to accept her as the duel's arbiter. And then it was time to talk about the maze. "There were trials inside. Illusions, tests meant to challenge the will, to see who gave up first. But the last trial wasn't an illusion." She grit her teeth."What awaited me was one of Olivia's goons, one of the men on duty when we went to Diamond Skies to talk with Niall Raith. She'd tortured him until he was a wreck and left him there, teetering on the brink of death, with the key to Rick's cage sewn inside his body, right where his heart was. The only way to get it out in time was to kill him." Lowering her eyes, she stared at the black-and-white contents of the Submarine, blurring into grey. Then, she raised the cup and took a long sip without another word. “Did you…” Gorden began, not quite sure how to suggest his host had killed someone out of sheer desperation and love. “Did...was this when Rick…?” “No. He survived,” she answered, knowing how clearly the words would expose the truth of who she really was. But he deserved to know the story -- the whole story. And, with a creeping sense of dread, Ada realized it felt good to tell the tale. “I had no weapons on me. The only way to get the key out was to tear his chest open with my own two hands or to use magic. Couldn’t have made it in time with the former. I...I made my blood into blades and plunged them into that man’s chest and broke the First Law of Magic for the second time in my life. I killed again.” “Olivia sounds like an rear end in a top hat,” Gorden answered after a long, pregnant pause. What the hell else could he say? “...and for what it’s worth, I blame her, not you.” “No,” Ada said, firmly. “It was my fault. There wasn’t another way out in that moment, but I could’ve refused to accept her as the duel’s arbiter earlier. Could’ve looked for someone else. The same goes for the first time I killed.” She heaved a long sigh and then continued speaking in a flat monotone. “Magic’s the embodiment of your will given shape. If you use it to take a life, it means you decided you had the right to do it. That you’re alright with murdering other human beings to get what you want. And that means it becomes a part of who you are.” Reaching into one of her pockets, she took out the obsidian knife and put it between them. “Doing something by sheer force of will changes how you look at it. Since you have to want it to do it, it stops being a last resort. It becomes more acceptable, more alluring...and the more you do it, the more you strip out every last shred of remorse.” She ran her fingers over the flat of the blade, careful not to cut herself on it. “You saw the look on my face when I stabbed that servitor to death back at the docks, didn’t you? And that wasn’t even a magical murder.” Her eyes were haunted as she looked up to stare at him, as though seeing right through him. “It’s eating at me even now, you know. A little voice in the back of my head wondering when I’ll get to do it again. I didn’t just lose people in the line of duty. I lost myself too, and there’s no cure for what I’ve done to myself.” She gripped the knife suddenly, her knuckles turning white around the grip, the monotone cracking. “There’s no cure!” “Ada…” Gorden started to say as she pulled her knife out and put it on the table. “I can’t claim to truly understand everything you’ve suffered, but--” And then he noticed her reaching for the knife. “Ada, wait!” he yelled, throwing himself across the table to wrest it from her grasp. For a moment, her instincts kicked in as she struggled against him, her strength much greater than could be expected from such a petite frame. But then, she abruptly let go and pulled back with a sharp inhalation. “...I shouldn’t have brought it out like that,” she said, her breath ragged as if she’d just ran a marathon. “...Sorry.” She should say more, clear the air, but...how? Where was she even supposed to start? “It’s okay, it’s…” Gorden started, before suddenly, involuntarily shuddering at the touch of the knife. He shivered and pulled his hand back, and realized when he’d reached to get the knife out of Ada’s hand he’d thrust his hand right at the edge of the blade, and a shallow but wide cut slashed across the scar tissue on his hand. “It’s...it’s fine, really. Doesn’t even hurt, see?” he said with a nervous laugh as he grabbed one of the free napkins to tie around his hand. “Maybe we should, uh...put it away for now.” Transient People fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2019 06:01
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...If You Show Me Yours Wordlessly, Ada reached out to the knife and put it back inside the pocket it’d come from. Once that was done, she motioned to take Gorden’s hand, but held back at the last second. He’s wounded. Vulnerable. Can’t touch unless I want the hunger to stir. “...Is it as dangerous for you as it is for me?” she asked, quietly. “Having broken one of the Laws, I mean. How did you end up swimming against time?” Gorden’s eyes suddenly snapped up from his injured hand, looking at Ada with the distinct wide-eyedness of a deer in the headlights. “I...who said anything about swimming against time? I didn’t...it was accidental, I wasn’t trying to…” His murmurs ended with a heavy sigh. “You told me everything, so maybe...promise not to tell El?” “I think he already suspects it,” Ada said, but nodded slowly. “If he wants the whole truth, though, he won’t get it from me.” It’d been just a hunch, but she wasn’t surprised to find out it was true. Gorden was too young and too curious to already know how to handle time magic responsibly, the way Junior did. No one’s born perfect, she thought as she waited for him to begin. We all make mistakes when we’re starting out, even if we don’t know just how much they’ll cost us. “Well, he hasn’t asked Rick to cut my head off,” Gorden noted. “I guess that’s a plus.” He took another deep breath and relaxed into his chair. “The first time I used this power...it was really trivial. I had a late night, knocked a coffee cup off a table, ended up using it to unbreak the coffee cup. Let’s just say that was the start of a really long string of late nights. I hadn’t learned anything about hexing yet, so I thought I could try to measure the effects of my magic, using, you know, high speed cameras, oscilloscopes, all those cool things. But whenever I used anything more complex than a cheapo bulb thermometer I just got...zero. Nothing. Well, a bunch blurred to heck images, shorted wires, and released magic smoke--I...might have taken the battery out of the smoke detector more than once--but they didn’t do anything to help me figure out what was going on. It was...really frustrating. Maybe it was the same for you when you first discovered your powers. Or...maybe you had someone who could help out.” “Kind of. My mother’s a practitioner too, but...” she hadn’t learned magic at her side. The learning had come at the Carnival and with Rook. She shivered violently, using the motion to shake off the memories trying to rise to the surface. “...Let’s just say I wasn’t on the nice side of town when I started practicing. The projects don’t have too many lights you can blow out when you cut loose. I learned as I went until recently. After we finished dealing with Mel and Nicole, Rick took me in for an apprenticeship. It was touch and go, but I still learned enough to protect myself from the worst downsides of blood magic.” She fell silent for a moment, thinking about his situation. “I know a time mage who might be able to help. Father of a close friend of mine. You wanna meet up with him and see if he can point you in the right direction?” Gorden nodded at the offer. “That might be helpful. Especially since, well...I really had no idea about what ‘the right direction’ was. I thought I was alone, and I wasn’t about to pipe up and say ‘hey, I can break the second law of thermodynamics like--’” he snapped his fingers to emphasize, and a portion of the tablecloth crumpled by their brief struggle over Ada’s knife straightened itself. “I’d get ejected from Tulane faster than you can say ‘fraud’. So I had to come up with some way to show that what was happening wasn’t just some Penn and Teller act, and I thought, hey, the labs have a bunch of obsolete equipment and some EM isolation foil that they aren’t using, let’s throw all of THAT at the problem and see if anything sticks. Cause, you know, it’s causing these electronics to go crazy, maybe we can protect them. Tried all day to get a publishable result, and it didn’t work. I got really frustrated and threw everything at the problem around midnight, there was a power surge from a lightning strike and…” Gorden took another deep breath, and flexed the fingers on his scarred hands. “...I ended up nowhere. And I know that sounds like I woke up in a cornfield or something, but this was literally void. Vacuum. Nothingness. There was only one other thing there, and that might have been a voice in my head that I made up because my stupid brain decided remembering video games was important when I was going to die. My arrival moved some particles, the particles made a star…” he tugged the clasp on his iron pendant free and tossed it onto the table. “...and the star brought me back here.” He sighed one more time, and looked above and through Ada. “The voice said that the void wasn’t nothing. It was ‘many things evenly distributed’. And when the many things were disturbed they made...well. I think I saw the heat death of the universe.” “Wait,” Ada interjected, eyes narrowing. “You’re saying you traveled eons forward in time? But how? I got sent back a hundred years through time and it required a solstice, a special location and an unwilling caster to act as fuel. There’s no way you could go that far all alone.” “I’d like to know myself,” Gorden offered sympathetically, “and how I got back with nothing but a burnt hand and white hair to show for it. Maybe the many worlds theory is true, and I went not forwards, but sideways, to a universe where the Big Bang...petered out. That’d make sense with what Danny was talking about. Or maybe I lost control of my powers for a second and--” he suddenly shuddered. “--aged everyone and everything into a fine hydrogen dust. I...really hope that’s not true.” “Nobody’s that good. Take it from someone who found a way to prevent a suicide by time paradox.” Ada smiled warmly, and for the first time in a while, she truly looked like herself once again. “How it happened doesn’t really matter though. What matters is how you feel. You haven’t felt tempted to start jumping through time just to solve your problems yet, have you? To set right what went wrong or find out what could?” “Uhm...I dunno about ‘what could have been’,” Gorden answered with a headscratch, “but when we were following those guys to the Long John Blackbeard’s with their long lost voices? Honestly? I wanted to try.” He looked to Ada’s side again, avoiding her eyes. “For the sake of those three students, I was willing to try. I stopped when you showed me the dead body, and I lost my focus. But between crossing the street and finding that truck, I was willing to try.” “Even if it meant treading all over every decision they’d ever make about their lives?” Ada asked, a distant look in her eyes. “I wouldn’t need to look at their whole lives,” Gorden answered, a bit more forcefully. “The relevant parts would have happened in the last few weeks. And we’re talking about an enemy that was so dangerous El’s friends were willing to poison large parts of Florida’s water to stop them. Could you live with yourself if you couldn’t say ‘yes, I did everything I could to try and protect their victims’?” Ada shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. Think about it. Imagine you found out where they were being kept, snuck in and guided them to safety. Imagine saving them from a life as servitors to the fomor. Their entire future would change, and a person’s future isn’t just a series of events that haven’t happened yet -- it’s the sum of their decisions, of the life experiences that determine who they are. Changing the future means deleting an entire person that might have been, or even many people depending on what you do”. She tapped the pocket where the knife rested. “If you had to kill them with a knife instead of a spell, could you? Could you look into their eyes?” “And then they end up like the two men at the docks,” Gorden responded. “And they also die, but even more painfully, and with more regrets behind them. Or maybe the Fomor decide they don’t need them and set them up to drown. I’m not going to automatically save their lives by holding back.” “It’s not about saving their lives,” Ada countered. “It’s about deciding you get to dictate their course beyond what anyone else could. The Laws of Magic aren’t the laws of physics. Breaking them doesn’t hollow us out like removing gravity makes things float. It breaks us because you need to want something badly to be able to do magic. What does it say about you if you want to determine a person’s future so badly time bends to make it happen?” “You say that like they’ve been ordained to turned into the Fomor’s playthings,” said Gorden through gritted teeth. “Like it’s already happened, and all we can do is make sure it does so the timey wimey ball doesn’t disintegrate. But you wouldn’t have fought to rescue me so hard if you really believed that.” “And I don’t,” Ada said, nodding in agreement. “The future isn’t set in stone. Things are supposed to go one way, but if you push hard enough, you can break that fate. Rick was supposed to die back at the Superdome, but we didn’t let it happen. Ruby was supposed to lose her family, but we found a way to save them. But when you play with time, you have to be careful. There’s an experiment about what happens when you try to determine something uncertain, isn’t it? Something about a cat in a box?” “First off,” Gorden started, his determined expression not changing with his now professorial voice. “Schroedinger’s Cat was a thought experiment intended to explain why the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics was naive and incomplete, a statement more forcefully pushed by the EPR paradox. Second, and a lot more important, the driver of the force that might or might not kill the cat in that experiment is a radioactive decay breaking open a bottle of gas, a force that is both statistical and non-sentient. To translate it to what we’re facing now, you’d have to replace that with a light that might or might not turn on, and a man who is ordered ‘if you see the light turn on, shoot the cat’. I don’t know about you, but the way you’ve described these Fomor, they don’t sound like a statistical phenomenon, they sound like a man with a gun that you can slide tackle if the light turns on.” “You better not go on tangents like that when lecturing your students,” Ada said, pointing at him warningly. “They’re gonna end up hopelessly lost. But what I was trying to say is the future isn’t set in stone, just like the fate of Schröedinger’s cat. You can’t know what’s going to happen until you interact with it, and when you do, you make it more real. Picking out a future where the worst thing happens and reacting to it gives it more power over the present. Who’s to say your actions don’t generate an equal reaction as the thing you tried to prevent struggles to come true?” “Like what, slide tackling the man with the gun, it goes off, and the ricochet headshots the cat?” Gorden scoffed. “That just sounds like an excuse to let it happen.” “Too many analogies, not enough facing the problem,” Ada said, now dead serious. “You know what happens to those who change the past so they never could’ve existed? They get shaded. The world doesn’t recognize they’re there anymore, and they can’t even remember themselves. You can’t learn about the future while still remaining here, can’t you? You’ve got to get there. Which means that when you go back to the present and try to make things different...” “You break the time law and the information entropy goes haywire,” Gorden sighed. “El talked about that at the pizza party. And yet somehow…I just...letting Lancaster and the students and the Fomor just...ugh!” he pounded his injured hand on the table. “Freaking magic laws...Should we take the extra helpings to go? We should be getting ready for the four o’clock meet.” “Yeah. Wouldn’t want to let them go to waste. I’ll call Ruby and ask if her dad is up for giving you some pointers after we’re done with the meeting,” she said, reaching for her cell-phone. She dialed the number, but didn’t punch it in. Maybe she was already lost, but that didn’t mean he had to be. “...There’s gonna be a point where breaking the laws might be the only way to save someone. Gorden...if it comes down to that, I don’t think you should hesitate to save a life, even if there’s a price to pay. But it doesn’t have to end up like that. You don’t need to look into the future if you’re visionary enough.” Gorden nodded, but inside he thought to himself, how visionary is enough?
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Sep 30, 2019 06:05
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Heart of the Cards Scene: Chateau duSang After calling Elbridge, it was arranged that the reading should take place at the Château. To that end, Ada requisitioned one of the smaller living rooms for more privacy. Warmed by an old-timey heater, the room remained cozy, even in the face of the harsh weather outside and the strong winds making the draped windows rattle. Plush wooden chairs surrounded a small circular table, giving the room an atmosphere not unlike a private booth at an expensive restaurant. There, she and Gorden waited for the others to arrive. “Swanky place,” remarked James as he entered the room - gone was his usual business casual attire, replaced by dirty boots, an old pair of jeans and a battered leather jacket, an outfit that made him look more like a labourer than anything else. “It’s kind of barebones for this house, honestly,” Ada said, raising a hand in greeting. Dressed casually as she was, she looked just a little out of place on the high-backed chair at the top of the table. “Wanted someplace intimate for this.” “Our dorm could use some ‘barebones’ like this,” Gorden murmured in between greetings. “Hello, Ada.” Elbridge announced himself as he entered the room, attended by Roy. “You’ll be happy to hear that I managed not to short out your doorbell this time.” A smile crossed her lips. “That’s progress. You manage to get any sleep last night? Kinda feeling like death over here.” And indeed, the bags underneath her eyes attested to that. “Such as it was,” he replied, his own bags obscured by the rims of his glasses. “Personally, I spent the morning thanking whatever deity would listen for the invention of coffee,” remarked James as he pulled up a chair. “I slept pretty good, oddly enough,” Rick said, appearing in one of the shadier corners of the room and waiting for someone to pull out a seat for him. He gave Alisa a small wave. (Rick spends a FP to fully manifest for the scene. +2 rapport while active.) “What’s that saying?” said James, “You can sleep when you’re dead?” Rick laughed. “Oh I like him, can we keep him?” Ada’s smile broadened to a grin. “Not sure about that. We’ve got two ghosts already, do we have room for a spook?” It was James’ turn to laugh at that one, “I must have missed the sign outside that said ‘duSang School for Gifted Youngsters’.” “It’s nice to know there’s room for me,” Alisa whispered in Ada’s ear from the armrest she was sitting on, at the same time as James spoke. “Thanks, Sis.” At those words, Ada’s expression turned serious. Her hand reflexively tightened around Alisa’s, which to everyone else looked like her grasping at thin air. “Funny you mention that. After the reading’s over, there’s something I need to discuss with you guys. But that comes later. Elbridge, do you need anything before we get started?” “Before? No,” he said. “After, some aspirin wouldn’t go amiss.” “I’ll have a couple packs wheeled in as soon as it’s over,” she promised, tapping lightly at the electric bell resting on the wall beside her. “Ready when you are then.” “Sorry for interrupting your seance last night,” Gorden commented lamely from behind a small stack of tupperware boxes. “We can discuss your understanding of the word ’discreetly’ at another time,” Elbridge said, opening his box of cards and upending it. There was no careful shuffling this time, no meditation or careful spellcraft, but most of the cards fell into a neat stack anyhow, and the ones that spilled out were exactly the cards he’d drawn at the Gato the day before. They were ordered but not tidy; they practically flew into place, and the lights dimmed ominously for a moment. “Ah...yes,” he said softly. “I do think we should discharge this spell’s energies sooner rather than later. So! Card number eight: support from without. Where might we find allies in our endeavours?” Elbridge overturned the card, and there it was. “Seven of staves. That’s...well, it comports with prior information.” “Hold on,” Rick said, raising a hand. “Can we get a quick recap of the rest of it, for Gorden’s sake?” Yes, definitely Gorden’s sake. “...very well,” Elbridge said grudgingly. “We, this motley collection of fools -” he pointed to the Wheel of Fortune “- are trying to make sense of this nonsense, principally the zealots of the Fomor -” he tapped the Hierophant “- who cannot be reasoned with, owing to fundamental ideological differences -” the inverted Two of Swords “- and while Mlle. duSang has her own ideas about how to address this, I have reservations -” the Hermit “- but our common, immediate goal is still to initiate diplomatic proceedings.” Two of Cups. “Nevertheless, Ada’s personal issues threaten to complicate the matter -” the Devil “- but even so, this is a time for action more than planning.” The Chariot. “So far so good,” Rick said. “Seven of staves?” “Stuff is going to get harder, and we’ll just have to stick with it,” Gorden said, head lowered behind the tupperware. “Unless it’s upside down, then it’s saying ‘life’s too hard, so you should flip me around.’” “Mr. Maxwell, that’s…” Elbridge paused, blinking. “...fairly-accurate, actually. It’s a card of stoicism, endurance, and humility; in the eighth draw of the reading, it refers to difficult allies, or powers beyond one’s control.” He gave a meaningful look at Ada. “Powers such as…” Briefly, Ada shot Gorden a look. Then, she nodded, slowly, her face stony and controlled. Too controlled, compared to the casual humor and tiredness from before. Only the soft tinkling of her golden hair tips betrayed the stillness of the motion. “Yeah. I think I know what it’s talking about,” she murmured, drilling holes into the card with her eyes. Midas still hadn’t cashed in the favor he was due. What was he waiting for, anyway…? “In any event, it’s a warning,” Elbridge said. “You seek leverage with others who may not share your principles, but leverage is a tricky thing. It isn’t Strength, so it’s not counseling you to push for dominance, but to hold fast to your own goals. Taken in conjunction with the Chariot, it suggests that you should seek allies, not vassals, and take care that you gain more ground than you lose.” “So I shouldn’t rush in and pick fights, but I shouldn’t just twiddle my thumbs and wait for the perfect opportunity to arrive either. Something like that?” she asked. “Gotta love ambiguous readings,” Gorden sighed. “Try to make friends faster than you do enemies, and accept that they won’t always take direction well,” Elbridge summarised with a stern look at Gorden. A lesson that could just as easily have been directed at himself, now that he thought about it. His cards always gave answers, but they weren’t always answers to the questions that were asked. In the face of adversity, seek help from a higher power - so the card could be read as well. When he looked at the crossed staves just so, they rather resembled the barbules of a feather. Elbridge coughed. “Ninth card. A rogue influence, weal or woe.” He flipped it. “Six of Swords. It could mean discovery or knowledge, but in this specific context…” He frowned. “It can also refer to another sort of progress - from a turbulent state to a calmer one. Or simply…passage.” He didn’t look at Rick when he said it. He looked at anyone and everyone not Rick. “I don’t think this one’s ambiguous at all,” Rick said quietly, focusing on the graven image of an old woman and child in a boat full of swords as it sailed towards calmer seas. I guess I have my answer. “Like… passing on?” asked James, equally as quiet, not really wanting to break the tension. “Not quite that final,” Rick said, wincing. “I’ve been wanting to kinda… take a sabbatical, work on my old thesis.” He gave Elbridge a sideways glance. “Cards seem to think it’s the right idea.” “The pen is mightier than the sword holds true even for you, then?” mused James with a grin. Rick blinked at him and then shook his head, smiling. “James, I’ve known you for about two days and I’m already going to miss you.” James laughed, “You’re stuck with me until my Uncle decides that he’s sick of sailing the Carribbean in a yacht, I’m afraid.” “As long as the Fomor don’t get him first,” Elbridge added, to remind them all of the stakes. “Now, the outcome of these events, should we follow the course laid out by the other nine...” He revealed the final card, and every light in the room went dark. There was a deep, rumbling tremor that shook the chateau to its foundations; dust fell from the ancient rafters, nesting birds took flight, and for an instant, all of the plumbing flowed in reverse. “...The Empress.” Gorden nearly dropped out of his seat under the table before the trembling suddenly stopped “...was that an earthquake?!” he asked no one in particular. Without thinking, Ada leaned forward to place a finger on the card...and only caught herself at the last second. "Is that what it represents? Lots of people coming together?" There was a note of anxiety in her voice that spoke volumes, leaking through the calm facade. Sensing it, Alisa squeezed her hand once again. There was no way the card meant the obvious. ...Or was there? Rick looked at El sharply and gave a single headshake. “...I don’t believe so,” Elbridge said at length. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t even what the average practitioner would read from that card, but El was not an average practitioner. His gift was real, and the cards were a language through which he expressed it, just like his use of Sanskrit for evocation. Languages could layer many different meanings behind a single word, and Elbridge had a rare knack for knowing which meaning went with any particular usage of a given word, even without context. “Ada...this isn’t your card.” “Then whose? And what does it mean?” she said, even more nervous than before. A lot of the pieces beforehand had pointed her way. Why had the reading shifted gears when the time had come to show the destination? “I...don’t know,” Elbridge said, gritting his teeth as though the admission had cost him something. “Someone else. Someone entirely outside of the context as we understand it. It’s a victory for them, for…someone. Not Midas, but neither you.” He steepled his fingers and scowled at the card as if willing it to give a more-satisfactory answer. “Someone we’ve overlooked.” “Ask and you shall receive,” muttered James under his breath - he’d asked about third parties, he just hadn’t expected the answer to be so vague. Musing aloud, he said, “So who stands to gain if both the people here and Midas are distracted, then? “It’s probably not the gators,” Ada murmured, her thoughts skipping from one possibility to the next in the span of instants. “Nothing says they’re planning a move, and I was thinking of getting them involved anyway. Probably not the Fomor either, we’ve got each other in the crosshairs. But then who’s left? Everyone else’s been taken care of. Unless...” And then her eyes widened. “There’s a new player in town we haven’t had much of a chance to look into yet. El, what about Winter?” “I don’t think that any of their Queens are so benevolent as to warrant this card,” Elbridge sighed. “Benevolence didn’t exactly apply to Titania either,” Rick noted. “And the last time the Empress came up…” “Her actions were rooted in a…kind of altruism,” Elbridge said grimly. “Someone who wants the best for others, somehow,” Ada whispered, leaning in to stare the card as if proximity would coax it into giving up its secrets. “Someone who wins if us and the Fomor play into their hands...” She didn’t say anything for a few moments, but then she sat back up, stiff and ramrod straight. “It’s not a supernatural being,” she said, with absolute confidence she wished she didn’t have. “Any of them who care enough are happy with things the way they are. It’s got to be a human. Someone who’s got a different vision of how things should be than us.” “Maybe that’s who’s pulling the strings with this whole Rotana Group thing?” guessed James, “They’ve got money, they’ve got some powerful non-human mage on the payroll, and we still have no idea why they’re involved.” “Or maybe Lancaster and his friends know someone who isn’t the Fomor?” Gorden offered. “He knows at least one other mage; maybe they both work for another person?” “Too many ‘maybe’s for my taste,” Elbridge said, disgruntled. “Well, Ada, you asked me to read the cards. It appears that your answer is that you don’t yet have an answer. Not if you want to achieve your goals.” “Which means everything we talked about before is in doubt now.” She drew in a deep breath. “No path to follow. No way to know if the calls I’m making are wrong or right until we reach the end.” “Not just yours,” Rick said quietly. The boat was waiting, but if he left… The Empress cast a long shadow over all the cards that had come before it.
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Oct 18, 2019 20:04
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“There’s a crucial piece missing from this puzzle,” Elbridge added. “We should be alert for it.” “And try to break the script while we’re at it,” Ada said, nodding slowly. “Unless we want to bet it all on the wrong number and find out how much we truly can lose.” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her cell. “But before we get started on that, there’s something else we need to do while all of us are present.” After a few moments of frenzied typing, she pressed the send button and stood up. “I think it’s time you all met my old gang.” James raised an eyebrow, “You were in a gang?” Pausing just long enough to remember Ada’s knife fighting from the night before, he added, “Actually, I can sorta see it.” “We’ve worked together to make the worst parts of New Orleans a better place for a very long time,” she said, nodding slowly. “Call ourselves the Rookies. They’re as much a part of the movement we’re trying to create as anyone else. We’re gonna have to learn to start working together if we’re ever gonna fix the city. And to do that, we’re gonna have to get to know each other first.” “Old gang?” Gorden noted with concern. “Did you have a falling out?” “No. Just changed operations. Went respectable. We didn’t exactly keep the peace back when I first joined,” she said, flashing back to the days of playing pawns for Rook. “That’s putting it mildly,” Alisa murmured, tapping her lightly on the shoulder. “It started with petty thefts but escalated a lot from there. He wanted child soldiers. We’re lucky he never had a chance to get all the way there.” “Not luck,” Rick muttered, giving Alisa a sideways glance. He was the only one who could see and hear her other than Ada. Then, to her sister, he added: “If they’re coming over they’d better do it quick, we’ve only got a couple hours until Lancaster and pals make their move. Though, after everything that happened yesterday that whole thing might have been called off.” “Never a safe assumption,” Elbridge sighed. “They might have called it off, yes...or, realising that their plan was compromised, they may have chosen other targets.” “Depends how rigorous their selection and prep work is when it comes to targets,” observed James, “They might be too invested to just switch targets. It may be that they just try and grab them at a different time and place using a plan B. Or maybe they go with plan A, but bring more firepower along. Or, if they’re clever, they might just set a trap and try and grab anyone who comes snooping.” With a shrug, he added, “But that’s just hypotheticals, I don’t know this Lancaster, or what kind of man he is.” “Sounds like we need a briefing then,” Ada intervened. “Gorden, can you give us some pointers?” “Uh...I don’t have a lot, but I’ll give you what I have,” Gorden said, as he pushed the Tupperware to one side. He looked around for a moment for a cue, then slowly pulled himself up. “Right. Reuben Lancaster, professor of Biology at Tulane University.” He pulled his phone, now with a happy green battery reading, from his pocket, and with a murmured “please don’t hex”, called up his bookmarked faculty page and set the screen on the table to reveal the man’s deceptively calm picture. “Specialist in wetland ecology. Also an rear end in a top hat. One of my colleagues says he smells like women’s soap a lot.” “Unsurprising,” Elbridge remarked. “He appears to be squatting at Chesterfield’s home.” “He’s renting a place?” Gorden responded. “News to me. I thought he had a place near campus. Who’s Chesterfield?” “Doctor Katherine Chesterfield, professor of Art History at Tulane,” Elbridge explained. “Lancaster’s accomplice and, I believe, your assailant.” “Wait, she actually works there?!” Gorden reached up to thumb at his phone, searching the arts section of the public faculty register. He set it back down again to reveal the familiar face, albeit one with a much more appropriate smile. “Son of a...right. Known accomplices. The Fomor, and Professor Chesterfield, a magician who can...make things that look and feel like blank walls, or stretch space so that it looks like it goes on forever.” He scratched his head. “Huh, come to think of it, her being in Visual Arts makes her powers a lot more cohesive. She’s like an Escher mage, playing with perspective and stuff.” He suddenly tapped a closed fist against the table. “But optics beats perspective tricks, lady. Uh, anyway, known victims, Shirley Quinn, hydrology student, Amanda, another Tulane student, and three more potential victims in Indra, Bakersfield, and Nguyen. Possibly more unknown victims if Sharene was right. He should be on Tulane campus right now, and I have a colleague who will tell us when he makes his move before 4 today.” He glanced at Ada and James. “Was that alright?” “B+,” Ada said after a moment., her frown cracking into a slight smile for a moment. “Needs some polish, but we’ll talk about it after class. So we’re dealing with an illusionist, an rear end in a top hat and maybe some fishmen. Do we want to capture them, or just dispose of them? Feels like they’re a security risk waiting to happen if we let them walk.” Her tone was even, but her right hand twitch, moving towards her knife pocket. "Always with the murder with you," replied James, rolling his eyes, "I'm wondering how much Lancaster has been promising his Fomor buddies, because if we already made him look like a screw up last night, he might need to get back in their good books - meaning he may well need to go ahead with his plan today." He leaned back and ran his hand through his hair, scratching his head, "As I understand it, holding mages prisoner isn't exactly an easy thing to do, right?" “If they’re alive, they can curse you,” Ada said, more curtly than she meant to. James’ words had touched a nerve. “You need to go through a whole laundry list of protections to cover your rear end, and even then it’s no guarantee they won’t find a way through them. I don’t want anyone getting hit by a death curse if we can help it,” she said, shooting Rick a meaningful look. "Mateusz once told me that if he had to get round one of those, he'd work out a way to do it without being noticed until it was too late for the mage," James replied, "But then he also said anyone willing to try it would have to be either desperate or mad." “Curses take time and sympathetic links to set up properly, which Lancaster doesn’t have,” Rick said. He gave a frustrated sigh. “Will you guys stop treating this asshat like he’s going to kill you all in your sleep? He’s amateur hour. We don’t have any proof that he’s done anything worthy of an execution. Up until last night the worst him and his gal pal had pulled was buying way too many hamburger steaks and scaring the crap out of some college students.” He pointed a finger at Gorden. “You kicked the hornets’ nest right out in the open and what happened? You got sold up the river. You were unconscious in that guy’s truck for nearly an hour. He could have dropped your body in the canal in pieces if he’d had orders to, but he didn’t. To me, that says that as of this moment, Lancaster and Chesterfield aren’t to the point where they’re willing to kill to cover up their mistakes. Which means they aren’t the kinds of mistakes you can’t come back from. Yet.” He turned to Elbridge. “I’m not making excuses, El. If he has broken the Laws do what you need to do, but at least give them the benefit of the doubt before we go in fireballs blazing. We don’t know if what happened to Shirley Quinn was Lancaster’s fault or if she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We do know that Chesterfield, if she’s the art teacher, convinced some of her kids to do ‘extra credit’ in a ship’s bottle in St. Louis’ No.2, which was pretty screwed up, especially because I doubt it was the first or only time she’s abused the student body like that. But it was not the same thing as what happened to Gorden last night, which probably only happened because she thought he was a threat to her operation.” He gave Ada a cold, hard stare. “We are not going in there with the intention of killing anyone or I’m not involved. Oh, and here’s a thought, has anyone, anyone at all, tried talking to this man?” He looked around the room, patiently waiting. “...For what it’s worth I had zero intention of killing him,” Gorden filled the dead air. “But he and Chesterfield both betrayed the trust of their students and they need to answer for that. I don’t plan to stop until they have.” Rick glared at him. “Yeah, because you’ve done a great job of it so far.” "Lay off, this is real personal, alright?" Gorden countered. "How'd you feel if, I dunno, El or some other Warden or something started abusing their titles? Maybe siccing their apprentices on people they didn't like personally?" “It’s not about feelings, that’s the point!” Rick snapped, standing up. “That’s the whole reason we have Wardens to begin with, so that when people start doing bad magic someone has the authority to make them stop it who’s impartial. You know what happens when it’s personal? You make mistakes, you bite off more than you can chew, and if no one is there to pull your rear end out of the fire-” With a smooth motion he drew his sword and tossed it. It clanged onto the table, scattering El’s delicate card pattern and sliding to a stop hilt first in front of the younger man, as though daring him to take it up. “-you end up like me.” Gorden looked down at the sword, then back up to Rick, with a quiet glare. Then he lifted up the sword and tossed it back with a sudden, inelegant jerk, sending it clattering over the table and skittering to the floor. He punctuated the point by slapping his grimoire on the abused table. A little less badass than a sword, perhaps. "Even if I didn't go to Tulane, even if Sharene and Shirley didn't ask me to help out, professional pride alone would make me want to see this abuse of the teacher student trust brought down. Maybe I get hurt, fine. Someone else doesn't have to live in fear, someone else doesn't have to deal with a fate worse than death. Fair trade. So don't talk to me about--!" “People, people,” Elbridge said in his most-conciliatory tone (which was still somewhat-abrasive). “None of us, I hope, condone their various misdeeds, but still - wouldn’t it be grand if we had investigations, charges, and trials before we decided upon sentencing? Or if bringing them to justice didn’t get any of us abducted, again?” Rick sighed, leaving the sword on the floor where it’d fallen. He’d said his piece, for all the good it would do.
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Oct 18, 2019 20:04
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As Rick sat back down dejectedly, Ada had to fight hard to keep herself from grinning ear to ear. It’s cute seeing you get mad at Gorden like this, she thought. If you could turn back time, you’d choose to be a happy-go-lucky explorer like him in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you? “You’re right, Warden,” said James, leaning back in his chair, “For all you’ve told me about Lancaster and Chesterfield, you’ve neglected to mention any motive as to why they’re doing this. It might be that they’re as much victims as anyone else, forced to do the Fomor’s bidding. If you’re going to stop them, send someone into talk first - ideally someone who isn’t going to immediately pick a fight or scare them off with a grey cloak.” “Careful, Mr. Ivarson,” Elbridge warned. “That sounds perilously-close to volunteering.” James looked at each other person at the table in turn, the fact that he'd managed to rule everyone else out due to their attire, their temperament or their lack of corporality dawning on him. With a sigh, he said, "I really need to think more before I propose plans when it comes to you people, don't I?" “It’s always like that for all of us, if it helps any,” Ada said, nodding thoughtfully. “Every time we get together, it’s like a kind of energy circulates through us, leaping from one person to the next faster and faster until it’s like a hurricane. The only thing you can do is hold on and not let go.” “Good point. We need to figure out if anybody else on campus is betraying the trust of their mentees,” Gorden nodded. Before anyone could say anything further, Gorden’s cell phone rang. It was Scotty. "Whoops, that's mine, sorry," Gorden said as he switched on the speaker phone option. "Hi, Scotty, Lancaster's on the move?" “In a manner of speakin’. First off, tha names ya asked me to look into? I was right, all three of them are in performin’ arts. Second off, Lancaster’s not in today. No one’s seen hide nor hair of 'em.” Gorden looked noticeably taken aback at the revelation. "He didn't come in?! Did anybody say he left an excuse about why he wasn't teaching today?" He looked back across the table with a pronounced worried frown. “No idea,” Scotty grumbled. “But one of tha TA’s has all 'is classes. Burtch, ya know 'em?” "TAs know TAs, Scotty. What'd he say?" “Dean’s orders, s’posedly. Sounds like he made more of a fuss than he should have after the break-in an’ all. He won’t be back for a week.” "Out for a week?" Gorden moaned. He wanted to say "he's got lots of time to sell students to the Fomor now," but Scotty wouldn't understand. "He deserves to be fired," he finally said. "Nothing about where he'd be spending his…'sabbatical'?" “Sorry, no. There’s a ‘Gone Fishin’ sign hangin’ on his office door, for whatever tha’s worth.” "He's mocking us," Gorden mouthed to the table as he facepalmed. "...thanks, Scotty. Anything else you know?" He looked at the rest of the table and mouthed "anything I should ask him?" James mimed holding a cellphone to his ear - he would have done checking a pager too, but he wasn’t sure if Gorden even knew what a pager was. Elbridge, for his part, held up three fingers - one for each of the names on the list - and looked to either side. Where are they now? What the heck...oh! “Did Lancaster leave a forwarding number?” said Gorden. “And...those three students...any word from the grapevine where they are?” “No personal number, though there’s a note to leave any messages on his office answerin’ machine. He could maybe check that from home. As for the students I’d imagine they’re in class. I can’t exactly lurk around the performin’ arts buildin’ myself without drawin’ suspicions and I haven’t got anyone over there who owes me a favor.” He sounded apologetic. “Sorry Gorden, do you want me to go look for ‘em anyways? That’s what I called to ask ya.” At “without drawin’ suspicions,” Elbridge started to pantomime, but then gave up and just reached for a pencil and paper. Any other suspicious characters? he wrote. Strange vehicles? “Dang...uh, do we have a choice? Performing Arts…” Gorden stammered, and changed to stalling for time. “And, uh, have you seen anybody on campus who shouldn’t be there? Any odd vans in the parking lot?” Elbridge made a severe, cutting gesture before Gorden could dig Scotty any deeper. DON’T SEND HIM IN, he wrote furiously. “Are you sure?” mouthed Gorden to Elbridge. He pouted before turning back to the phone. “I wish I could say ‘go and check’, but word might get back to Lancaster that you’re snooping around. Just keep your ears open for now,” Gorden sighed. “It’s a college, there’s always weird vans in the parking lot,” Scotty said, somewhat exasperated. “Has whoever’s been feedin’ ya lines been ta one in the last century?” “I mean weirder than usual, not a rock band with an open cooler of booze and weed in the back!” Gorden spat. “Oh, aye, ‘cause that’s what I’m lookin’ out for when you’ve asked me ta find a pack of kidnappers for ya. Rock bands.” Scotty said sarcastically. “And just when were ya plannin’ to show up to stop this supposed crime? It’s almost three already. Get down here or I’m callin’ campus police. Ah shoulda already done it.” Rick gave Gorden a seething glare that said ‘Who the hell is this guy and why does he know so much?’ with a side of ‘Just how many people did you tell?’ Gorden rolled his eyes at the shade with an expression of “at least I’m trying here!” as he turned back to the phone. “I was hoping to stop Lancaster on the way to wherever he was going, but I guess that’s been overtaken by events. You’ve been really helpful, Scott. Sorry for snapping at you, I just... I’ll be down as soon as I can. We still have time to put a stop to this.” “Alright. Call me if ya need me.” The phone clicked. It was at that juncture that Elbridge ceased scribbling, rolled up the paper, and smacked Gorden on the head with it. “OW!” Gorden recoiled. “What was that for?!” “In the future,” Elbridge said, “in addition to magic, you will also be learning tradecraft. ‘Discreet Observation’ means passive observation, not breaking into an office. You will learn to respect, and keep a healthy distance from, things which could very well kill you, and to set priorities.” “Also try not to involve members of the general public who have no idea what kind of danger they’re walking into,” Rick added. “That’s part of good tradecraft,” Elbridge said, adding to the addendum. “Bad tradecraft treats contacts as expendable resources, and is typically the prerogative of agencies with undisclosed budgets and no oversight.” “So all the ones anyone’s actually heard of, then,” observed James. “Nngh...fair enough,” Gorden mumbled. “But it’s too late to fix that now. We need to get down to the university.” “Yes,” Elbridge said, checking the time on his pocketwatch. It was almost three, and with traffic as it was… “Let’s begin our lesson.”
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Oct 18, 2019 20:06
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Is This Your Card? Rick knelt to pick himself up off the floor, when he noticed that one of Elbridge’s lacquered cards had been knocked from the table in the scuffle and landed directly in front of the sword. He reached for it without thinking and his hand passed straight through. There was a warmth there at his fingertips though, similar to when he ‘petted’ Marmalade. A quick glance at the table told him it wasn’t any of the cards that had been played previously, and the way the sword was pointing at it… Well, he’d seen Elbridge do enough readings to know that coincidences just didn’t happen around that deck. Curious, he called El over. “Hm?” Elbridge glanced at what Rick was indicating. “Ah! Yes, thank you. Wouldn’t want that going astray.” “Let me guess, lucky number 13?” Rick said miserably. “Death?” Elbridge asked. “Ahhh...you think that this might be your card. Well, if you’re not afraid to see…” He picked it up off of the floor and overturned it. “...intriguing.” It wasn’t Death. It was, however, the very next card in the sequence. XIV: Temperance “...huh.” Rick said, puzzling over the card himself. “Isn’t this the card of like… having your poo poo together? Since when...” “It’s the card of harmony,” Elbridge clarified. “The Chariot represents two opposing forces lashed to a single will; Justice, stability and truce between forces still in conflict. Temperance is synthesis. By combination, disparate elements become...something more.” He eyed Rick’s spectral form appraisingly. “It is also a process of reconciliation, and of adjustment - what is new must be born through the sacrifice of the old.” Rick nodded thoughtfully. “You know, that might have scared me before… but it doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Thanks, El.” He broke into an embarrassed smile. “Change is inevitable,” Elbridge said. “It’s what you make of it that counts.” El’s gaze was distant and unfocused, and Rick got the impression that El wasn’t strictly talking about him. “Careful, you’re starting to sound like a fortune cookie,” Rick nudged his shoulder playfully with the pommel of his sword. Seeing the card had lifted a weight off him that he hadn’t known he was carrying. “Let’s go.” “Just because it’s a fortune cookie saying it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong,” Elbridge huffed, and off they went. --- Rick glanced up at the paintings as he walked past them. (It always seemed rude to float too much in live company.) This was the first time he’d been to Ada’s home since the night they broke up and while he’d pretended that it didn’t bother him the fact was that he had a lot of memories tied up in this place, and each time he thought of another one it was like being pricked by a sharp pin. He wondered idly if she had ever packed up his stuff. He’d never come back for it, told himself nothing was important enough to bother with. But really, he’d just wanted to leave something here. Some proof that it had been real. Even if it was just a half-empty bottle of hair gel. --- The others were already outside getting into their cars by the time Rick and El got to the foyer, but there was someone waiting for them, standing with her arms crossed in front of the dark wooden doors. A tall, elegant woman in a light grey pantsuit, with Ada’s piercing green eyes. “Wardens,” said the Lady of the house, with the dull recognition one might use when noticing mold on their bathroom wall. She appraised them ruthlessly, taking in Rick’s translucence and Elbridge’s eggplant-patterned shirt with equal amounts of disdain. Rick froze on the spot. The last time he’d seen Ada’s mother was when Hecate wore her face in the wolf-dream, and he couldn’t shake the feeling this might degenerate into the same sort of violence if he said the wrong thing. “Warden Commanders Hardley and Cole,” Elbridge replied, with the faintest of stresses on Commanders. “We’ve not been introduced, but you would be...Claudia duSang?” he surmised. “I would,” she said. “I apologize that we haven’t met sooner. Business has kept me out of the country for some time.” “And now it brings you home,” Elbridge said. “Yours has been an eventful absence - but surely young Ada has already told you of that.” If Claudia was a wolf, then Elbridge was a badger: quiet, persistent, unobtrusive, and every bit as dangerous when crossed. He wouldn’t impose upon her, but nor would he allow her to impose upon him. “Not business,” Claudia said flatly. “Family. If my daughters are turning to the White Council for guidance, then I have clearly left them alone for too long.” “Criticise our methods if you will,” Elbridge said. He’d certainly criticised them often enough. “But the city still stands, for our efforts. It was not washed into the sea, nor swallowed up by the Void. Your daughter’s co-operation was instrumental in those matters, and since New Orleans is never short on existential threats, it may behoove us to try to remain on speaking terms.” She nodded once, a grudging acknowledgement. Then her gaze shifted to Rick. “We need to talk.” “Er, I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Rick said, as someone, probably Gorden, honked their car horn impatiently. “It’s about Alisa,” Claudia said, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “Her situation is untenable, and as we are on speaking terms, I’m requesting your assistance in remedying that.” “Alisa?” Rick gulped, turning his hand to partially block sight of his sword, though it didn’t do much good. “We’ve been working on that for months now without much luck. I mean, there are ways to separate them but none that leave them better off than they are right now.” “Is that so?” Her eyes flicked down to the weapon and then back to his face. “I don’t have the answer you’re looking for,” Rick said firmly. “We haven’t figured out what happened to me, and even if we did I don’t think it’s possible to recreate the situation even if we wanted to. And Alisa deserves better than this.” Claudia’s expression darkened. “All the same, you might know something that saves them both. Are you saying that you aren’t willing to talk? I thought...” She trailed off. Rick flushed. What had she thought? Had Ada even told her about him? About them? Except there wasn’t a ‘them’ anymore, and suddenly he couldn’t stand to be in this house full of memories any longer. “I have a job to do,” Rick said, answering her confusion with a glare that brooked no argument. “When it’s done, we’ll talk.” Claudia smiled. “Excellent. Bring Wizard Cantor with you. How does 8 PM tomorrow sound?” He’d wondered where Ada got it from. Now it was all becoming clear. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said noncommittally. It was time to leave, but it felt wrong to end things like this, and even though he felt like screaming he forced himself to smile just enough to sound sincere. “It was nice to finally meet you, Mrs. duSang. You have a lovely home.” “Oh… Thank you,” she said, clearly not expecting that. “I’ll see you tomorrow night then, Warden-Commander Cole.” The name rang like a sour note in his ears. “Just Richter is fine, really. I’m retired anyways.” The car horn outside beeped again, more insistently this time, and Rick reluctantly handed the sheathed blade to Elbridge. The sunlight streaming through the windows meant he could only go along as a passenger. Not how he’d prefer things, but better than being left behind. “I’d tell you to take care of my girls,” Claudia said, as she opened the door for Elbridge. “But I suppose you’ve already been doing that.” “Protection is our duty,” Elbridge said solemnly. From everything except herself.
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Oct 18, 2019 20:06
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Back to School Scene: Tulane College Arriving via several vehicles the first thing the group notices is that there are flyers posted for the upcoming fall play, a black-box production of The Odyssey, with the tryouts taking place in the Performing Arts building at the suspicious timing of 4pm. There’s also a big notice about the women’s volleyball game later that night and the men’s football game on Sunday. Elbridge was on-site and clutching a fistful of brochures, for Tulane and a number of other universities in the tri-state area. If anyone asked, he was just looking for a good school for a favourite niece, who was either about to graduate high school or just had. One of the advantages of his visible age was that no-one would question it if he was fuzzy on the details. “And you can see the Physics building right over there,” said Gorden with a bit too much eagerness, slotting into a tour guide role to make sure Elbridge’s wizardly wanderings didn’t accidentally short out some poor group’s LAN session. “Beautiful views of the night sky, much better than the Biology building, and I’m not just saying that because…” Being on a college campus again reminded James of better times - sure, the climate was more than a touch warmer, and the sports posters were for a football team instead of hockey - but the whole college atmosphere was still similar enough. A shift in his posture from the heavy shoulders of a labourer to that of a more hopeful student standing tall, an easy grin on his face - and he looked plenty in place. He did wonder if people would think he was a visiting alumnus or a current student, though, even if he hoped it was the latter. “So this is what a university campus is like...” Ada murmured as she walked beside him, a case slung over her shoulders within which Rick’s sword lay. She’d never had the chance to get into academia, what with how busy her life had been. It was hard to believe they were looking for info on a possible case of human trafficking in such a peaceful-looking place. Covering her scars in armwraps had turned out to be a great idea, in hindsight. With them covered up, she’d had no trouble blending in with the sports crowd. “...and if your niece wants to major in more artsy specialties, we have a full humanities and audiovisual arts suite on campus,” Gorden continued, maintaining the “spiel” tone of voice. “If you want to take a look for yourself, they’ve got a bunch of theater students doing auditions for The Odyssey in a half hour; I’m sure you won’t want to miss that!” “Oh, of course not!” Elbridge said. “Always good to see children taking an interest in the classics.” Not that the classics were remotely-suited for children, in all honesty, especially not where Circe was involved. And so, the gang split up.
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Oct 27, 2019 21:07
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The Play’s the Thing Scene: Circling the Auditorium “I always wanted to go to a place like this,” Alisa whispered, staring at everything and everyone with wide eyes. “Universities are called temples of learning, you know? Maybe we can find out if it’s true while we’re looking for leads.” “What’s it look like?” Rick asked, his voice muffled through the case. He could still see while sheathed, probably because the hilt of the sword remained uncovered, but no such luck through the case. “It’s like a church.” Alisa said, looking up to stare at the central building, her eyes unfocusing slightly as she took it all in and began crafting a picture made of words. “It’s got the same little windows that monk cells have, and it splits into two wide wings, each with its own stairway leading up to open doors. It’s got lots of steeples stationed between the windows like guardsmen, looking over the people as they come and go. It’s...old. Not like the building itself’s old, more like its style’s got a lineage of a thousand years, maybe more. And nobody’s looking at it,” she said, glancing at the students. “Nobody’s aware of how many disciplines were combined together to bring such a piece of history alive just for them.” “I bet they looked at it the first time,” Rick muttered. Memories of the first time he saw the castle at Edinburgh drifted through his mind. It was so big, so full of promise and knowledge… But the grandeur had quickly faded into everyday mundanity. “I didn’t know you were such a poet, Lise,” Ada whispered, shooting her a look. Usually, Alisa struggled to find the right words to express her feelings, but this time the words had flown freely from her mouth. And she herself didn’t feel so impressed by the building before her, either...which meant these were Alisa’s own feelings finding a way to make themselves known. Hers, and hers alone. A light blush lit up Alisa’s cheeks at the compliment. “It’s not like that. It’s just...there’s a hope in here. You know what I mean, right?” she asked Rick. “Like you could find out the truth about anything if you spent a long enough time inside these walls.” “Yeah, I do,” he said, though there was a difference between knowledge and truth. One of them was easy to find in books, the other… well, you had to go out into the world to find truth. At least, that had always been his experience. “Is this where you want to go, once you’re free?” “I think so,” she said, nodding. “Somewhere like this, anyway. I wanna see everything I missed. Ada’s taken me on all kinds of rides, but they’re not the places I would’ve gone if I had the chance to choose.” It wasn’t an accusation, though Ada still felt her stomach tighten in response. Leaning over, James said quietly to Ada, “You probably shouldn’t talk to… yourself…” Trailing off, he tilted his head, as if he was trying to hear something in the distance. He almost thought he could hear Wind Chimes. Which was, of course, entirely preposterous, because it was a delightfully clear Saturday. And there were no wind chimes hanging anywhere he could see. And… they almost sounded like those wind chimes, the ones hanging on the porch of an old abandoned farmhouse outside his hometown. Turning to look over her shoulder, Ada flashed him a little cryptic smile. “Who says I am?” Shaking his head clear, James looked back at her and nodded, “I thought I felt something. I can’t always tell, sometimes it’s just something with a strange aura, like a janitor’s keyring with a key for a really old door or what have you.” She gave him a nod of acknowledgement. “Good instincts. I was talking to Rick and my sister. They’re pretty happy we’re here. Where are we headed for then? The auditorium?” she asked. Glancing around, James said, “Probably better to take the long way and circle the building first, see if we can pick out anyone suspicious. Keep an eye out for turtlenecks on anyone who doesn’t look like a poet, that kinda thing.” “Alright. Want me to take point so you can keep an eye out or go on ahead to look for trouble? We don’t want to get caught out roaming together. Makes us stick out.” “You go ahead,” replied James, grinning as he added, “Odds are, any attention you attract will be better than anything I get.” The compliment did a lot to dispel any lingering guilt she was feeling. “Let’s hope so,” she said, crossing her fingers. “I don’t exactly look like a dime-a-dozen student myself.” With one last nod of acknowledgement, she quickened her pace, establishing a distance of fifteen feet between them. Time to see if there was anything more to this place than the temple of knowledge Alisa had spoken of so highly. Unfortunately for James, he’d gotten just a touch too deep into his college athlete persona and had fallen back into his own bad habits from college - the ones that didn’t involve kegs or impromptu field hockey games, at any rate - and had let himself get distracted spotting pretty much anything except the unusual. But hey, he made sure he kept one eye watching Ada’s back. (James, Notice: /--/ +4 = +2) While Rick and Alisa continued to chatter amicably about school and what they’d done or would like to do at one, Ada kept her eyes open. The buildings might not have interested her much but the people… that was another thing entirely. Even though it was a Saturday there were still lots of students around, some reading or eating out in the common courtyard and others just out walking (or running, in the case of a group wearing track jackets and jogging pants.) As they neared the auditorium, she noticed that there were several small clusters of students with playbooks, practicing their lines together before the big audition. One group of three caught her eye in particular. A willowy blonde girl who was loudly reciting Circe’s lines, a dark haired girl with asian features who was clutching her book to her chest like she was afraid to let the light touch it, and a chubby boy with round glasses who looked like this was extremely not his thing but he was being put up to it by the other two whether he liked it or not. He responded with Odysseus’ lines in a sort of dull monotone when the willowy girl glared at him hard enough. It was a gathering like any other, but their words lingered in Ada’s ears. Circe had always been reluctant to speak about her past. What could be gleaned of it from an apocryphal account…? Curious, she leaned against the wall of the auditorium and let out a tired sigh (which wasn’t so difficult, given her lack of sleep), listening closely to what they were saying. ((Ada tries her luck at Noticing things too. In spite of having a difficulty of 4, she succeeds with a 6! Very good at ignoring distractions, this one is.)) CIRCE: “Who are you? And from what place and people have you come? How can it be that my potion has no power to charm you? Never yet was any man able to stand so much as a taste of the concentrated lotus juice I gave you; you must be spell-proof. Surely you can be none other than the bold hero Odysseus, who Mercury always said would come here some day with his ship while on his way home from war. So be it then; sheathe your sword that we may make friends, so I may bathe you, feed you and take you to my bed.” They were not the words Circe would have used, nor the way she’d have used them. The skinny blonde girl was too frail and too fawning. Where Circe would have quaked with rage she simpered and placated. It was almost offensive to watch her gardener be reduced so. ODYSSEUS: “Circe, how can you expect me to be friendly with you when you have just been turning all my crew into pigs? And I shall certainly not consent to go to bed with you unless you will first take your solemn oath to plot no further harm against me.” The boy just sounded bored, words running together as if he didn’t care much about them. “Ugh, they suck;” Alisa said, turning up her nose as if she’d just caught wind of some ghastly stench. “Why are you wasting your time listening to them?” “It’s not just them. It’s the material too. I’ve heard more impassioned speeches from Elbridge when he’s trying to look impartial.” She let out a quiet snort. “This play’s gonna be a trainwreck if they continue like this. I’m gonna lend them a hand.” “Wait, what are you—” She didn’t have time to say more. In a single motion, Ada kicked off the wall and approached the trio, her jaw set with determination. “You can’t do Circe like that,” she said, cutting in before Blondie could reply. “She’s not Odysseus’ side chick, she’s the greatest witch of Greece that all others were measured by. She’s supposed to want him, not submit to him. He has to earn the privilege of her affections. Toss me the script for a second, I’ll show you what I mean.” “Um,” said the quiet girl, shrinking into her Tulane sweater. The boy just gaped at her. Blondie scowled. “And just how should you know, weirdo?” her eyes flicked to the sword case and back to Ada’s face. “Aren’t you late for some... sports thing?” It was clear she didn’t have any respect for such ‘sports things’. “Nah, I make my own time, and right now, I figure the best thing I can do is demonstrate the kind of person you’re supposed to be portraying,” she countered, not missing a beat as she crossed her bandaged arms above her chest. “Best case, you get some inspiration for your performance. Worst case, you get to laugh at me for looking like an idiot. What do you have to lose from letting me try?” “Oh, here we go,” Rick said. She could practically hear his facepalm. Abruptly, the dark haired girl stood up and thrusted her script into Ada’s hands, her eyes firmly on the ground as she bowed her head. “Please! We never get picked as anything but extras so if you could share anything that might help! Anything at all!” She was… a lot louder than she looked, with a very faint accent. Some of the other students in the area looked up. Ada now had a small audience. James had taken her spot against the wall, seeming nonchalant even as he watched and listened to what seemed like it would be quite the show rather intently. “April, goddamnit!” said blondie, crossing her arms and glaring at her. “Fine, whatever, show us how it’s done, weirdo.” “Don’t worry,” Ada whispered to April as she leaned forward to take the script. “That’s about to change.” Pulling back, she took a glance at the script, looking for a good insertion point...there. “Let’s take it from the top. Start us off here,” she said, lifting the script up so the boy could see it and pointing at the line where Odysseus first began to narrate his encounter with Circe. Once she was sure they were both on the same page, she turned around and waited, her eyes fixed on the script, not to read it, but to have something to focus on as she called upon the memories of her gardener at her most terrible and fierce. ((That’s a rapport roll to persuade the kids to play ball. Ada gets a 7 and smashes it, obtaining a Success with Style and a consequent Boost. We’ll call it “Practically Experienced”.)) The boy frowned at all this but seemed to rise a bit to the challenge. He cleared his voice and adjusted his glasses before intoning… in an only slightly nasal voice: ODYSSEUS: “And I fared onward to the house of Circe, and my heart was clouded with care as I walked along. When I got to the gates I stood there and called the goddess, and as soon as she heard me she came down, opened the door, and asked me to come in; so I followed her- much troubled in my mind. She set me on a richly decorated seat inlaid with silver and she mixed a mess in a golden goblet for me to drink.” CIRCE: But ...Said Ada, turning around to look at him, a contemptuous glare in her eyes. It was all too easy -- all she had to do was recall their encounter at the aquarium to nail the burning contempt. CIRCE: ..For I meant Rick groaned. “Stop being good at that.” The boy stood up, answering Ada’s contempt with a haughty glare of his own. ODYSSEUS: “When she had given it me, and I had drunk it without its charming me, she struck me with her wand.” Taking the cue, she took a step forward, and tapped him on the forehead, with the casual disregard of one who’d done this task so many times it had lost all meaning. CIRCE: The boy raised a hand as though he held a sword, now totally into character. He was almost a different kid altogether, putting on an air of regality that had been completely lacking just a moment ago. He was starting to enjoy this. ODYSSEUS: “But I rushed at her with my sword drawn as though I would kill her, whereon she fell with a loud scream, to her knees, and spoke piteously.” cough”Bullshit.”cough said Rick. Alisa giggled. For her part, Ada fell down on her back with a surprised gasp. “She’s changing the words!” Blondie complained loudly. “You’re not allowed to change the words!” But Ada wasn’t looking at her. Her attention was focused entirely on the boy, on Odysseus. Though the details were different, to her this was a familiar scene -- beaten down, on the backfoot, but not defeated yet. And always, always defiant. She glared at him, and spoke. CIRCE: ‘Piteously’? Pah! Who are you? And from what place and people have you come? She stood into a crouch, and poised herself to leap, like a great hunting cat. The hatred in her eyes shifted. Replacing it was excitement...and hunger. CIRCE: So be it then; sheathe your sword that we may make friends, beloved of the gods, and give yourself to me. Do it, so I may bathe you, feed you… ...And then she broke into a wide, wild grin. CIRCE: ...and take you to my bed. ((Time to put on a show! This time, Ada rolls Rapport to Create Advantage. She gets a 6, and using Practically Experienced’s invoke, gets a massive result of 8, more than enough for a Success with Style. This triggers her Pulse of the City stunt for the first time, allowing her to adjust the scene’s mood to be more favorable towards the play and her portrayal. We’ll call this Aspect…”A Glimpse Behind The Curtain”.)) For a moment the entire courtyard seems to fall silent except for the whispering of the wind. Ada’s counterpart gulped, too captivated to even read his next line. Then someone dog-whistled and the spell was broken, and there were laughs and even a few cheers. “WOW!” April bounced up and down and grabbed Ada’s hands, which were still holding her book. “THAT. WAS. AWESOME!” “Tch,” said blondie. But there was something like fear in her eyes. Not fear of Ada, personally, but the fear that the role she’d practiced hard for was way out of reach now. She flipped through the playbook, frowning at her second choices. “Are you going to try out? You HAVE to! Omg omg omg,” April said, grabbing Ada’s wrist and dragging her bodily towards the auditorium. “Come on! We don’t want to be late. Ms. Chesterfield is such a hardass she won’t let you walk on if you’re even one minute late to the stage. Even thirty seconds! Hurryyyyyy!” Chesterfield? There was barely any time for the realization to sink in before Ada realized, to her chagrin, that she couldn’t back out now. Everyone had seen her, and if she tried, reports of what she’d done would trickle in fast. Better to confront Chesterfield on her own terms, or at least as close to them as she could manage, than hope her little performance didn’t tip her off to who she was. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked around for James, hoping he’d heard April’s words and was ready to act on them. James had, of course, been listening, and she could see him in amongst the trickling procession of newly inspired students that were already heading to the auditorium. Impressive performance, he mused to himself as he slid his way through the crowd - and given he’d spent a large portion of his adult life pretending to be someone else, he knew more than a bit about acting (plus there was that one time he’d actually managed to fit in some acting in between his studies and hockey back in college…) He’d just need to borrow a script if he’d have any hope of fitting in backstage. ((Aaaaaand Ada takes a compel on [b]Life is a Fairytale[b] to get thrust right in the middle of this mess. So much for practicing tradecraft!)) Alisa sighed. “She can’t stay off the spotlight for one minute, can she?” she mused. “She really should know better than to go high-profile for funsies by now. What are we gonna do now, Richter?” There was no response. “Richter?” she asked, turning to look at the case. Rick sighed. It had gotten too real, somehow, and all he could feel was the sand under his back and her hands on his chest as he looked up into a pair of golden, feral eyes. “It’s all fun and games until you’re the one trapped on the island with her,” he said softly. “Then it isn’t very fun at all.” With the two of them hovering close by, Ada couldn’t help but overhear that. Closing her eyes, she fought back the urge to sigh. She and Circe weren’t the only ones with a shared history. She should’ve remembered that, too, before jumping in. “But it was just an act,” Alisa pointed out. “Circe isn’t here.” “Not for you, maybe,” Rick said, then he shook it off. “Anyways, I’m not complaining. Backstage is the best place we can be if we want to protect the students.” “We better let Ada in on that plan,” Alisa said, as Ada was dragged into the auditorium and the two of them with her. “It’s gonna be a pain in the neck if she’s still carrying you with her when she gets called up.”
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Oct 27, 2019 22:13
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Discreet; Adjective Scene: Performing Arts Building Elbridge toured the halls of Tulane’s Center for the Performing Arts, taking in the ambience and the culture while wandering ever closer to what was listed as Dr. Katherine Chesterfield’s office. He paid particular attention to anything labeled as Pictish or Celtic - the wards on her home had been old, druidic magic, and he wouldn’t have put it beyond her to weave some spellwork into the exhibits themselves. Because this was the Performing Arts Building, that mostly meant old costumes and stage props on display in the corridors and lobby. There were numerous cabinets built into the walls with exactly the sort of “Class of ‘95” style displays you see in any such building, and a few caught his eye. Not for what was there, but what wasn’t. A missing mask on a mannequin where the sun fading showed one had clearly been, and the prickle on the back of his neck when he looked at the spot for too long, for instance. There were others, too. Irregular but notable, as though… “Odd,” he said during a convenient pause in Gorden’s ‘tour’. “Some of these displays were enchanted...but the magickal elements have been removed.” “So what’s left?” Gorden whispered, not quite understanding. “I don’t get it. If the magic bits are gone, how can you tell they were enchanted, or can you…” he shrugged. “Follow where the magic bits went?” “I can sense the residual energies of the spells, but all of the focal items are gone - visibly-so. No, don’t stare,” Elbridge warned him, keeping up the act as far as he could. “That mannequin was wearing a mask, there are circles in the dust where two awards used to be, and Yorick’s new skull still has the price tag from the costume store.” Now it was more obvious that something had been moved, and Gorden wanted to facepalm, but he had to keep up the act. “Why would she move them?” he asked quietly as he motioned for him to continue down the hall and keep the “tour” going. “Why not leave them here as, like, warning signs? If you could sense them she could set them up to say ‘keep out’.” “She’s afraid. She’s trying to hide.” Elbridge furrowed his brow. “...which means that we’re expected.” “She didn’t seem like the type to be ‘afraid’ of someone like me.” Gorden said. “Do you think she knows you’re a Warden?” “I think she knows that the Wardens have taken an interest in Lancaster’s affairs before, and that any scrutiny might risk our attention.” Elbridge’s expression soured somewhat. “When Miss Quinn contacted him after her rescue, and mentioned our involvement, he hung up and set his own lab afire before skipping town. I’d say that it’s reasonable to suspect that Lancaster might have warned her about us.” “Yeah, I think you mentioned that.” Gorden answered. “Hopefully it’s a good thing that’s she’s scared of you. Maybe she’ll give up or not fight rather than, I dunno, try to trap the three students in Falling Water or something.” “I wish that I could share your optimism,” Elbridge grumbled. “Mr. Maxwell?” said a voice behind the pair of them. When they turned around, they quickly realized that it did not belong to Katherine Chesterfield, but to a girl that, somehow, both of them knew. “And… W-er… Mr. Hardley…? Wow you really did go to the bookshop!” Sharene Leavau grinned ear to ear at Gorden, and then at Elbridge, and then at Gorden again. “What are you doing here? Oh! Is this part of the investigation?!” “If anyone asks, I’m helping an out-of-state relative to decide on a university,” Elbridge said, putting on a thin smile. “Hello again, Miss Laveau. Er…” A distinctly-unpleasant possibility struck him, given Chesterfield’s apparent penchant for flouting the Laws. “Apologies, but I’d very much like to be sure of something. Just one moment.” He narrowed his gaze to shut out as much as possible other than Sharene herself, and then opened his eyes to the world behind the world.
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Oct 27, 2019 23:27
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Auditions Begin! Scene: Tulane Auditorium The auditorium was mostly dark, with a few dimmed house lights to make getting around the room easier for spectators. It also wasn’t terribly large, with two blocks of seats on either side of a central aisle in the middle leading to a raised stage area, similar to a cinema theater. There was a table set up in front of the stage where three teachers were sitting, with notepads and pens. One of them was Professor Chesterfield. She looked bored. Elbridge surreptitiously took an available seat in the front, one with a clear view of Chesterfield. He didn’t plan on making a scene yet; nevertheless, he nodded for James to cover the exit, in case Chesterfield decided to make one anyhow. James’ face flickered with a momentary scowl at Elbridge’s signal - the room was brimming with exits, and the old man had set up so Chesterfield would spot him as soon as she turned around for any reason - and in that shirt, she was bound to know who he was. Such a thinly veiled provocation was bound to blow up somehow, and so he slumped against the wall next to one of the fire doors near the stage, staring up at the stage as if watching his competition - at least here, he’d be able to jump in when things inevitably went sideways. --- Backstage, students were patiently waiting for their names to be called, at which point they walked out and did a reading of their preferred part, with comments by the teachers. “There’ll be an open call after everyone who signed up,” April explained to Ada. “So you can still try out. Are you going to do Circe or did you want a different part? Oh wait, I didn’t even ask your name! I’m April.” “Tommy,” said the boy who’d played Odysseus. “And that’s Megan,” he pointed to the willowy blonde girl who was clearly annoyed but trying to pretend she didn’t care. “Ada. It’s a pleasure,” she said, trying to relax the tension in her shoulders as much as possible. She still didn’t have a decent plan for what was going to happen after tryouts were over. Maybe making herself a target was the best call. “There any important roles you’re still missing?” she asked. Megan looked around theatrically. There were definitely more students backstage than there were roles, and a lot more girls than boys which made competition for the female roles even tougher. “Yeah, I’m sure no one here wants the lead roles. They all just want bit parts.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Kimmy Adams,” called one of the teachers, and a girl in a red tracksuit jumped up and ran out on stage. "Was thinking more in terms of just you guys," Ada replied, wagging a single finger to chase away the thought of competition. "Which parts are you gunning for? And what else would you like to have for practice?" “It’s not like we’ll get anything anyways,” Tommy said, shrugging. “Teach’s got her favorites and we’re not it. Maybe you can stun her with your crazy acting or something but we’re doomed.” “We’re not,” April said, scrunching up her face and crossing her arms. “We’ve just been overlooked a little, that’s all. And there’s lots of roles in this one, even if we don’t get speaking parts so...” “God, listen to yourself, April. You really like begging for scraps like this?” Megan said. She was angry now. “Well I’m sick of it. I’m sick of Chesterfield and her lovely productions and how Kimmy gets whatever part she wants every single time-” “Megan Bakersfield,” called a teacher. “UGH!” Megan said, throwing up her hands and stomping off towards the stage. April looked at Tommy, and then both of them looked at Ada. But it was too late now.
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Nov 18, 2019 23:19
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Everyone’s a Critic Scene: Tulane Auditorium Elbridge and James got to listen to three other students perform before ‘Megan Bakersfield’ was called up. She was a thin blonde girl who looked positively annoyed to be there and by the time she got done spitting her lines out it was clear she was either destined for extra or nothing at all. “Yes, thank you Megan,” said Chesterfield, after the atrocious performance. She didn’t seem particularly interested and the other two teachers were keeping carefully blank faces. Afterwards she turned her head to look out at the audience, scanning slowly through the few faces that were out there. Some parents, a few kids who were there to support a friend… Her eyes lingered on Elbridge as though he didn’t quite fit the profile of who she thought should be there… before sliding off again in dismissal. Surely no one who was trying to hide would sit right up front by the teacher’s table. Surely. Elbridge kept his eyes on his programme leaflet until he pretended to notice Chesterfield’s attention, then gave a thin smile and nodded affably, as if to convey Hello, random stranger who has elected to make eye contact at this awkward moment. In his experience, the best way to seem as if one belonged was to behave as if one absolutely did, and would be astounded to learn otherwise. As an elderly white man, society had made this costume for him, but damned if he didn’t wear it well. Elbridge rolls Deceive with a +2 bonus to appear innocuous (a situational bonus because let’s be real, he was BORN to loiter around campus). --/+ +5 = 4, exactly the difficulty. Chesterfield will remember him for later, but hasn’t made him...yet. James didn’t get so much as a second glance. Amazing intelligence work or just looking exactly like a big dumb jock? You decide. In any case it took a good while before the next name on the list. “Thomas Indra,” called the teacher. A chubby boy with mussed black hair and glasses came out and read his lines. He wasn’t awful, but he wasn’t impressive either. There was something about the way he spoke that said he could do better if he was actually trying. Chesterfield didn’t seem to notice him much, but she didn’t make a note on her paper. Several students later, “April Nguyen” was up. She was a tiny thing, the same height as Ada, wearing a Tulane sweater that was two sizes too big for her and trying not to hide behind her playbook. Her audition was… a disaster. She wasn’t listening to the teachers’ directions, just hammering through her chosen lines as quickly as possible, and it was clear she had a bad case of stage fright even though there wasn’t a real audience. When she’d finished she sighed with relief and looked up with all the innocence of a puppy, but in that moment you could see her heart break as she realized that no one had liked her performance. She rubbed at her eyes and slinked back behind the curtains without another word. “If only she could do that on command,” Chesterfield muttered. But again, she made no notes about April. In fact, Megan, Thomas, and April were the only three NOT to get any movement out of her pen. Curious. It was as if she didn’t want any record that they’d been present at all. The students in the ship-in-a-bottle in the graveyard had said they were there for “extra credit” - was she leaning on the ones who risked failing to do her dirty work? Or, Elbridge wondered, was she simply sacrificing anyone who didn’t make the cut? Warlocks and art professors alike were prone to such astonishing pettiness. None of the trio’s performances had been particularly good, at least in James’ opinion - probably down to nerves, he’d guess. But at least they knew who to watch. And Elbridge’s John Wayne act hadn’t even got him rumbled, which was an added bonus - apparently Chesterfield wasn’t plugged into the local magic community to have heard about the Warden’s eclectic wardrobe. All that was left now was to wait and watch - it was like he’d never left the CIA. ———— Backstage, Megan came back in a huff and sat down on a crate, still furious. April kept looking at her shoes. Tommy stood a little closer to April but didn’t say anything. It was Ada who broke the silence. “So? Did it feel good?” she asked, approaching her with arms crossed, her jaw set in disapproval. “Sure did,” Megan snapped, not backing down an inch. “Then what are you gonna do now that you’ve got it out of your system?” Ada fired back, her tone as cool as Megan’s was hot as she stared her down. “I thought this meant something to you. Why’d you give up at the starting line after all that bitching about how you’re not allowed to change the words?” “gently caress you. You don’t know anything.” Megan said calmly, looking Ada right in the eyes. Two small hands fell on her shoulders, heavy like iron weights, and Ada leaned in until their noses were almost touching, zeroing in on the bridge between Megan’s eyes. “drat right I don’t,” she whispered, quiet enough that no one else could hear. ”I don’t know who you are or why you’re here. All I know is you quit, and all that effort you put into trying to get into the play’s gone out the window, like yesterday’s trash, just like that.” Taking one hand off Megan’s shoulder, she snapped her fingers in the distance that separated them both. “Is that how you wanna go out?” “Yeah, maybe it is,” Megan said, turning her head to look past the corner of the curtain at the teachers before giving a nasty smile. “Maybe that’s exactly how I want to go out.” That didn’t make any sense. It was clear Megan didn’t think she was getting a fair shake, but that was no reason for her to want to be chased away like this. Unless… “Why? So Chesterfield will stop putting pressure on you?” she asked on a hunch. “Thomas Indra,” called one of the teachers, and Tommy sighed and stood up. “Good luck!” April said, beaming at him. “Yeah, yeah,” Tommy said, shuffling out onto the stage. “gently caress Chesterfield,” Megan said sullenly. She clearly agreed with Tommy that the game was rigged, but Ada got the impression that she had always played it before. Always at least tried to do her best out there, even if she never got picked. So what was different about today? ...Of course. When the crowd out there had gathered to watch, they hadn't been looking at Megan. Pulling away, Ada sat down on the ground beside the crate and let out an angry huff. "There's no point trying to win against a stacked deck," She murmured, lacing her words with a hint of tiredness and vulnerability she wasn't really feeling. "Even if you do your best, there's always someone better, waiting to snatch away the one prize that you can win. She's not exactly an equal opportunity teach, is she?" “Not like it’ll be any different after school,” Megan said bitterly. “I’d have quit a long time ago but that means she wins.” “Words to live by,” Ada murmured, this time with genuine feeling. That’d been the reason that had driven her to sleep four hours a day for years to make more of her days. Sometimes, it felt like every time she blinked, some monster or other would take an innocent away, never to be seen again. Sighing, she looked up to glance at her. “How’s she tried to get you down? Low marks, insults, no roles?” “Oh she’s ‘professional’ about it,” Megan said, making the quotes with her fingers. “But anyone she doesn’t think has ‘it’? She makes sure they know they shouldn’t be dumb enough to take one of her classes again. Which means dropping your major because there’s no way to avoid her if you want to major in theater.” “What about working the circuit instead to get practical experience?” Ada asked after thinking about it for a moment. “No go?” Megan shrugged as Tommy came back. April met him at the curtain and started heaping praise but Megan shook her head. She lowered her voice. “He’s better than us, but he won’t take a role when she can’t get one. Dumbass.” “Not keen on chasing career over love, huh. He’s probably gonna regret it down the line.” Or maybe he wouldn’t, but as far as Ada was concerned, she’d already made her decision when presented with that choice. Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to Megan. “If you could play any part, what would you choose? Not just for this play, I mean for any.” Megan looked down at Ada and grinned. “Mary-fuckin-Poppins. I’ve been singing that song since I was six.” Ada’s eyebrows rose. “No poo poo? I didn’t know your scene was musicals. Mind giving me a demonstration? I know some people who might be interested in that.” The Lily’s closure still loomed large upon its usual crew, but once upon a time, Ginger had distinguished it from all the other dining spots in New Orleans by putting on a show. Maybe diversifying its portfolio might help attract the crowds Maksim and the others needed to raise enough money to win it back. “No I’m not giving you a demonstration! People are auditioning,” Megan gave Ada a glare as if she’d broken some kind of actor’s code. “April Nguyen,” called the teacher. April clutched her book nervously. “R-right. My turn.” “Oh here we go,” Megan muttered, after April was out of earshot. She closed her eyes. “I can’t watch this.” At first, Ada thought she might be exaggerating, but it didn’t take long for the truth to out. As April crashed through her lines, Ada couldn’t help but wince. “She’s gonna need hugs after this trainwreck,” she said, biting her lip as instructions went ignored for the fifth time. “...A lot of them. I didn’t know she couldn’t handle the pressure of being on stage.” Megan sighed. “God, you put her alone with a script and she’s so good, she just can’t get over the audience. Especially when it’s graded. Just gets right into her head. It’s been getting worse the more she tries, too.” “Shut up,” Tommy said. “Just shut up Megan. You’re such a bitch, sometimes.” Megan shut up, guilt painted on her face, as April came back with silent tears on her cheeks. There was an awkward moment where no one said anything, as the next student was called. “W-well it’s over,” April said, putting on a smile as she wiped her eyes again. “At least you’ll do well, right Ada?” Ada’s hand rose up, fingers crossed. “Let’s hope so. I can’t see myself in a speaking role, but anything’s possible.“ It was less false modesty than it was an incomplete truth. Fun as it was to pretend to be a student, this was not meant to last. If the others had managed to set up properly though, maybe she’d be able to end it all with a bang. Before that, though, there was one more thing she needed to do besides looking over the script. Taking off Rick’s case, she placed it against the wall, unlatching it, making sure it was pointed outward so the top would conceal its contents from prying eyes. “Rise and shine, Rick. It’s almost time,” she murmured. “Chesterfield’s targets are right here. Keep an eye on them.” “I have been,” Rick grumbled, appearing next to her as she touched the hilt. “This is a terrible idea, by the way. You’re going to tip our hand.” “Would you rather I duck out and leave everyone talking about how I bailed? People will talk about it, and you know how fast word travels these days,” she pointed out. Rick frowned. “You could make a good excuse and just hang out here with them. If something happens you’re not going to be able to back me up, and people are going to talk a lot more about the magic flying sword than they are about a potential actress with cold feet.” “If anything happens, make a noise. That’ll give me an excuse to come back in. It’s only a few feet, shouldn’t be too much of a risk. And this way, we get to cut Chesterfield off no matter where she goes if she tries to make a run for it.” She squeezed the hilt tightly. “I’ve never missed being there for you. I’m not gonna start now. Trust me.” “Ada! It’s the open call!” April suddenly grabbed her arm. “Hurry!” “Break a leg,” Rick said. It wasn’t an answer, and for a moment Ada felt a twinge of guilt. He was right. It would’ve been easier to stick to the sidelines, make excuses, soak in everyone else’s disappointment. But that’s not what I do, or what I want to do, she thought, as she walked into the light. Not now, not ever. And if it means making things a little harder on myself, so be it.
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Nov 18, 2019 23:23
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Making a Scene Scene: Tulane Auditorium “Anyone else? Last call,” said the male teacher sitting on the end of the table. He didn’t look like he expected any more students. “Just me,” was the response as Ada came on stage, not too slowly and not too quickly. “Ada Châtelaine. I’m here for the part of Odysseus.” She bowed as she spoke, briefly, her eyes fixed upon Chesterfield, looking for signs of recognition. There was none, just a bemused smile. “Aren’t you a bit… short, for that role?” she asked, leaning back slightly and crossing her legs. Ada shrugged, keeping her expression determinedly neutral. It’d been a while since someone had last thought less of her just because she was short. A very long while. Were college professors naturally inclined to disrespect their students, or was that just Chesterfield’s charming personality at work? “They called Odysseus Polytropos, the man of many ways. Who’s to say I don’t have one to fit the part?” she answered, keeping herself at ease. “Oh, by all means then. Show us what you’ve got.” Yes, Ada. Show them what you’ve got. Elbridge’s expression didn’t change at her debut. Nor did it change for nearly a full minute thereafter. He just kept it fixed in the same, vague smile he’d worn before she’d been called, which looked fine as a momentary expression but after that long it more resembled rigour mortis. Breathing in deeply, Ada closed her eyes. As she stood still upon the spotlight, a subtle transformation occurred. She leaned forward, slouching as though under a great weight, and her brow creased. Her knees buckled, ever so slightly, and her shoulders lost firmness, slumping down. Then, her hands snapped forward to grasp an invisible hand and her eyes flew open, burning with a quiet flame as she stared at her mark. “Listen to me now,” she began, her voice hoarse, and urgent, and full of barely-contained anger. “I am no prophet, and know nothing about omens, yet of this I’m sure: He will not be away much longer. A man of many resources such as him will always find his way home, even if clapped in irons and taken away as a slave. But tell me, and tell me true: what is the meaning of this disreputable gathering? Is there a banquet or a wedding in the family, that no one brings provisions of their own, content to seek their feast at another’s table? Is this the reason behind the misbehavior of your guests, of their actions that make a mockery of this house and disgust all respectable persons?” She opened her mouth as if to say more, but fell quiet for a moment, thinking better of whatever incendiary words she meant to say. Then, at last, she continued, her attention shifting to the other teachers. "Take my advice and think it over well. Consider by which means, fair or foul, you may rid yourself of these bringers of shame." At this, she stole a glance at Chesterfield, before continuing. "You are fine, and clever, and well-meaning. Show your mettle, and make for yourself a name in history. When the time comes, remember these words." She turned and straightened up and took a step towards the curtains, and when she turned again the mask was off, and there was Ada once again, expectantly awaiting the results of her performance. Chesterfield tapped her lips with her pen. “Chatelaine was it? What grade are you in, and what major?” Elbridge alone was close enough to hear her mutter, “If those STEM bastards have stolen another one…” “Social studies,” she answered, letting a grin appear on her face. She wouldn’t be asking if there was no interest. “First year doing this. Is that a problem?” ((This is a deceit check vs Chesterfield’s mind-magic-as-empathy! Ada gets a...2, ouch. Chesterfield also gets a 2 but rerolls to a 5, forcing her to spend an FP on On Top of the World Or Buried to raise her result a little and prevent Chesterfield from snatching the whole truth out of her head.)) “Oh no, no problem at all,” Chesterfield said, making several notes in her book. There was a hardness to her expression that said she didn’t buy it for a minute, but she wasn’t contradicting Ada publically. “Have you considered changing majors?” the male teacher who’d been calling all the student’s names asked, with a laugh. “I’ve heard dual-majors are all the rage these days.” “I’m sure she has her reasons,” Chesterfield said cooly. “Of course, my classroom is always open for talented young people in need of an elective or two.” “Stop scooping all the talent, Katherine,” grumbled the third teacher, an older woman. “Was there anyone else waiting, young lady?” “No, just me,” Ada replied. Chesterfield’s reaction (or rather, lack thereof) was concerning, but there was no going back now. “When will we know the results of the audition?” “They’ll be posted on Monday morning in the Performing Arts building, where they usually are. I’m sure someone can show you if you ask,” Chesterfield said, waving a hand. “And with that I suppose we’re done? Thank you everyone for participating, and even if you aren’t chosen we will always have need of able hands for scenery building and the like, so do stay involved.” She stood up, as did the other teachers, and made to leave. Most of the students who finished their auditions had moved to the audience seats to watch the others and they too began to file out the back doors. The three marks however, were still backstage. Presumably. Letting out a deep breath, Ada turned around and made for backstage. The fun was over. Now came the hard part. At least Rick hadn’t called out, which probably meant everything was OK...for now, anyway.
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Nov 18, 2019 23:25
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Phantom of the Auditorium Scene: Backstage Rick sighed watching Ada go through her performance. He’d never liked being up in front of an audience. Too many people watching him had made him nervous even before the whole vampire thing gave him a permanent case of… which phobia was it? Large-crowds-phobia. Yeah, that was it. Well, it wasn’t really fear of them, more fear of himself being around them. Like being trapped in an endless sushi bar and not being allowed to touch any of the plates. Thinking about it brought back the hunger pangs from his vampire days, and he had to focus hard to dispel them. Memories were dangerous things for a soul to get too caught up in. In a flesh and blood body they faded with time, but he didn’t have that filter anymore, and whatever memories had survived the transfer from meat to metal were as vivid as they day they’d been made. It wasn’t quite what he’d imagined it would be like to have a photographic memory… more like a Sight he couldn’t turn off. But maybe that was the same thing? Hmm. His musings were interrupted by April, who was standing beside him without knowing it. She’d started to copy Ada’s lines as she said them, mimicking her motions. She wasn’t half bad now that no one was looking at her, but what kind of actress couldn’t play to a crowd? He glanced back at the other two just to be safe. They were the only three people backstage now, since everyone else had either moved to the audience seating or left when they’d finished auditioning. He still didn’t think anything was going to happen here. Chesterfield was too smart to drop bags over their heads where she worked. She’d probably lure them out first, someplace discreet and not connected to the school so even if she failed it wouldn’t blow back on her. Probably. It was possible Gorden had spooked her enough to get stupid. (Rick accepts a compel on ‘Growing Urban Legend’, FP 6/5!  )--- “So what was that Sophie Turner Wannabe carting around anyhow?” Megan asked, standing up from the crate where she’d been checking her phone and heading for the sword case. “Oh, great,” said Rick. He moved to block so that she walked straight through him. Some people were sensitive enough to get warned off by a spectral touch. But Megan Bakersfield clearly wasn’t one of them. “Probably kendo crap,” Tommy said, turning to look as curiosity got the better of him. “Not big enough for golf clubs and too skinny for anything else. Eh, I guess it could be billiards cues.” “Billiards?” Megan laughed. “Careful Tommy, your silver spoon is showing.” Tommy gave her an exasperated sigh. “Look, just because we had a housekeeper doesn’t mean-” Megan reached for the case, which was propped up against the black-painted cinder block wall, but Rick gave it a quick nudge and it fell to the side with a whump. “Creepy,” she said, giving it a sideways look. “Yes, very creepy. Leave it alone. Shoo,” said Rick, motioning her away. “Tch, nice going, Megs.” Tommy knelt down to pick up the case before Rick could do anything to stop him. He was probably just trying to set it up against the wall like Ada had earlier, but since she’d left the clasps undone the contents were clearly visible when he turned it over. “Whoa… Cool sword!” “Not kendo sticks?” Megan asked, leaning over to look. She shrugged. “Whatever. It’s totally fake anyways.” “Hey!” said Rick. “Nuh uh,” Tommy said. “It weighs a ton. You think it’s sharp?” As Tommy tested his finger on the edge of the blade he was half tempted to show just how sharp he could be, but Tommy had stuck up for him, so he dulled the edge. A little. “Man this thing is so cool! Maybe it’s a replica or something? Look there’s even a maker’s mark here- see the T?” For Turner… Rick thought, and the loss of his friend hit him all over again. Where are you now? “Who cares!” Megan sighed, snapping him back to reality. “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t bothered with it. Now you think she’s cool too.” Tommy set the case down and rocked back on his heels. “Megs... what’s going on? Level with me.” Megan crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “It’s just been a really bad week okay!” “Is it Justin again?” “No! Okay... yes. I asked if he had someone to go to homecoming with...” Tommy groaned. “...and now everyone on the basketball team is calling me Baker’s Dozen!” Tommy facepalmed. “I don’t even want to know why. Look, stop taking it out on Ada okay? April really seems to like her and it’s not like we have a lot of other friends. Besides, she hasn’t got anything to do with your jock damage.” He reached for the case lid to close it, and presumably, put it back where he’d found it. Rick let out a sigh of relief. That had been too close. He really didn’t want to have to- “Hey April, check it out! Ada’s got a sword!” Rick yelped as Tommy’s sweaty palm closed around the hilt and lifted him up into the air. He hadn’t been expecting it and it felt like a bucket of ice water had just been dumped directly down his shirt. Tommy froze and his head whipped around. For a second the two of them stared at each other. “I know how this looks-” Rick tried. “Gahh!” Tommy gave a short, strangled yell. Rick glanced towards the stage but Ada was still out there talking to Chesterfield. When he looked back, Tommy was brandishing the sword at him with both hands. Rick blinked at him, momentarily unable to process the absurdity of being threatened with his own vessel. “Uh, what the gently caress?” Megan asked. “Tommy?” “There’s a ghost!” Tommy said through his teeth. “A freaking ghost! It’s right there! You can’t see it?” “What are you talking about?” Megan said. “There’s nothing there!” “Tommy?” April turned back towards them, concerned at the noise. “What’s wrong?” “April! Run!” April looked confused. “Why?” “Oh for gently caress’s sake!” Rick took two steps forward and yanked the sword out of Tommy’s hands. Which left all three students staring at it. As it floated there. In mid air. “I FREAKING TOLD YOU!” Tommy shouted, stumbling backwards and pointing. Rick dropped the sword, and it clanged off the wooden floorboards, but the damage was done. All he could do was watch helplessly as the backstage door burst open in a blaze of sunlight, and all three kids vanished into the afternoon glare. He threw his hands up. “Well, poo poo!”
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Nov 18, 2019 23:25
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A Matter of Perspective Scene: Costume closet It took a little time for Gorden to find the Costume closet upstairs. Well, it wasn’t a “closet” in the usual sense. It was a large room with a wall length open closet and hundreds of costumes for everything from Romeo and Juliet to Hamilton to Phantom of the Opera to Gone With the Wind. It was in a bit of disarray, which was pretty normal for this sort of collection, and it would probably take hours to dig through all the stuff here, even if he knew what he was looking for. For the first time ever, Gorden wished he was a theater student. How many performances were kept in the dust back here, how many memories? And how was he supposed to figure out which ones were magic or not?! Elbridge had mentioned four separate items that he’d noticed had been moved from the hall he’d just been in. What had he said…? Elbridge posted:“That mannequin was wearing a mask, there are circles in the dust where two awards used to be, and Yorick’s new skull still has the price tag from the costume store.” A mask, two awards, and Yorick’s skull from Hamlet. Well, at least one of them was easy. He’d just have to figure out which of these sets of costumes corresponded with that one. Two awards...trophies or plaques would hopefully stick out from the rest of the clutter. And the mask...well, if a skull was one of the enchanted items, maybe the mask was something equally mystically significant? But the easiest one would hopefully be the skull. Gorden began to slide into the colorful array of costumes, Googling for Tulane University’s previous playbills as he went. The older the play the further back he could expect to go...he hoped. If the items were recently moved in then they’d look a lot shinier than the items that’d been here a while, Gorden reasoned. Closer to the top of the pile, less dust and fading. And if Chesterfield had been in performing arts for a while, some of them might have some really notable geometric patterns right out of Crowley… Before making the actual roll, Gorden is establishing two advantages, one with Notice +5, one with Lore (Mortal Folklore) +3. Notice +5, Lore (mortal folklore) +3. /r 4dF+5: @Davin_Valkri: 4dF+5 = (--b-)+5 = 2, ...rerolling that with a spend on Impossible Means I Get to Name It, for a +3. /r 4dF +3 @Davin_Valkri: 4dF +3 = (+bb+) +3 = 5 The last Tulane production of Hamlet was directed by one K. Chesterfield, so that checked out. It was also about three years ago, which put it pretty far back in the closet… though if the skull wasn’t with the other Hamlet things originally, would it be there now? He quickly stumbled upon a slew of dusty doublets and dresses... But there was no skull, plastic or otherwise. As far as shiny things, well, there were a lot of them. Fake jewelry, fake weapons, stuffed animals and props of every kind. Most of them looked undisturbed though there were a few medium sized boxes that had been moved recently, if the dust squares on the floor were any indication. But moved where? No sign of them. Of course she’d throw the chronology completely off to hide her tracks, Gorden thought to himself as he carefully shifted one pile of cloth from atop another pile of cloth. He could re-order the room with a wave of his hands, but he wasn’t here to clean the place up, and without harder evidence of which item precisely he wanted, getting the room tidied up was a full stop bogosort, as likely to put the items he needed in his hands as to press them neatly against the back wall hidden behind a hundred groaning shelves of props. How had El figured out which items were magic during the “tour”? There must have been some waste heat, some residual trace that had let him see where the items had been moved. And hadn’t Gorden felt just that, those months ago when he didn’t know the first thing about magic and resorted to enchanting wind-up cats and coffee mugs? How had those enchanted toys and cups felt in his hand? He wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept. He just had to figure out what Chesterfield’s magic would feel like...preferably when it wasn’t dedicated to giving him nosebleeds. He opened his grimoire, closed his eyes, tried to remember how her Escher magic had felt in his mind, wondered if she hid them in a pocket of space or a trick of perspective, and reached out… Rolling against a +9 notice challenge, rolling Notice +5: /r 4dF +5, @Davin_Valkri: 4dF +5 = (bbbb) +5 = 5, A perfectly ordinary roll, using my prior 2 CAs to get it to +9. And an FP on Magic from First Principles (as he's remembering his earliest experiments) to make it a clean success at +11 There was something he remembered about her magic besides the taste of copper. The feel of it in his mind had been like a tone of voice that brooked no argument. If it said the sky was pink then you had better agree, even if it wasn’t and never had been. Prickly, rigid, demanding of authority. The world itself didn’t change, only how you saw it, because she made you see it that way by blinding you, by rubbing your nose in it, by badgering and gaslighting until truth held no more meaning and you just nodded along. Which meant the box hadn’t been moved. Only his perception of it was distorted, his senses lying to him the same way they had in the infinite hallway. But that meant… He turned in place, and noticed right away that the large wooden door, with its red EXIT sign, was missing from the wall. “The same trick as last time?” Gorden said with a notable grimace as he looked at where the exit should have been. This had to be a good thing--she wouldn’t have set up these forced perspective traps if she’d taken her magic items off campus. He was getting closer. “I still see four lights, by the way,” he laughed as he counted the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Changing the lights was probably too much work for her. Collapsing the wall out of spite had a certain appeal, but he didn’t come here just to flip her off again. He turned back from the blank wall and reassessed the room. Shifted perspectives cut both ways. He could see where a box should have been but wasn’t. Just like he could see where a door definitely was, but now wasn’t. But if it was just his perception of the thing that was gone, and not the thing itself, then what would happen if he let something else do the perceiving? With a sudden burst of experimental inspiration, Gorden walked to the back of the room, grabbed the oldest, dustiest, shedding-ist thing he could find, held it over where the missing box should have been, and shook aggressively. Shabby, rainbow colored feathers floated down through the air and landed on the floor where the box should have been. ...okay, he was seeing the feathers, he should have expected that. Gorden snorted and tossed the costume aside. This was a trick of perspective, Gorden reminded himself as he began to pace a circle around where the box should have been. The box and the door weren’t gone, they were just in a bit of a blind spot. One that also included its apparent effects on other objects like feathers. Weren’t there a bunch of exotic matter types that acted similarly? Neutrinos, black holes, dark matter, strings and superstrings...none of those could be directly detected, not in the same way ordinary stuff could. Okay, the jury was still out on those last two, but the point remained. He pulled out his phone and idly turned on the camera. Suppose this box and that door were all of a sudden a bunch of neutrinos, Gorden thought to himself. What changes about how they interact with the world? What doesn’t? Do they still cast a “shadow”...? This is me trying to justify getting out Science to try to overcome, or at least create an advantage to leverage against this. Rolling to Create an Advantage with Theoretical Physics gives a @Davin_Valkri: 3dF+5 = (b--)+5 = 3 +3, which I think gives a boost, right? Rolling Will to Overcome gives a @Davin_Valkri: 4dF +5 = (++b+) +5 = 8, and I want to spend the boost to make it +10! Somewhere in between the 4th and 5th page of his grimoire covered in scrawled notes about the possibility of faster-than-light detection systems he must have realized he’d gotten off track. Gorden knew, intellectually, that time was very much of the essence and that he couldn’t waste time if he wanted to get out of Chesterfield’s trick. And yet the problem before him was simply too fascinating, too tantalizing to drop. The room itself seemed to agree with him--the harsh buzz of the lights had faded and the dust kicked up by his movement no longer danced in the air. So he continued his meditations on the relationship between neutrinos and magic perspective in peace. And suddenly, somewhere on the 12th page of scribbled notes, everything snapped into place. Of course! He’d been thinking about it all wrong; this was not neutrinos, but gravitational mirages. That was how it could be corrected. How had he missed that?! Written in the scribbles it was there, in black and white. Okay, it wasn’t all there, but it was definitely a strong enough hypothesis to proceed. He looked up from his grimoire and noticed that little time had passed at all--what seemed like hours could not have been more than a few minutes. The perspective correction stared up at him, and his hurried script blurred the variables and symbols into something rather more arcane looking. Chesterfield’s magic bent perspective. But it couldn’t make the source object go away, only change where it apparently was from where it actually was. Gorden nodded at his equation, closed his eyes, and dragged his hand from where the box seemingly had been to where it had to be. His knuckles rapped against cardboard. When he opened his eyes, the box and the door were right where they should have been, obviously, as if they were never gone. Gorden smirked a bit. He got up to examine the now very visible box, and hopefully the contents inside. Rolled a +2 Notice to figure out which item is relevant; spent my last FP to turn it to a +5 The box was big enough that he’d need two hands to carry it, and it was stuffed to the brim with… well, mostly useless junk as far as he could tell. Fur hats and feather boas and old trophies. Dreamcatchers, fake jewelry and dusty purses… At the very bottom of the clutter was an old ceramic skull with a missing jaw. One of the dream catchers caught his eye as well. There was a symbol woven into it that didn’t seem to match any Native American design he knew. The trophies were anyone’s guess. None of them felt particularly more magical than the others, and there were six of them altogether, which would be impossible to stuff into his coat. He’d have to make some choices. Or attempt to abscond with the box. “drat your cluttered ways, Chesterfield!” Gorden swore, ignoring that several boxes in his own office were just this messy. The skull was obvious, and one of the dreamcatchers looked funny, but why did she keep six different trophies in this box? And more importantly, where was the mask Elbridge mentioned?! He snatched up the skull and stuffed it into his coat, then regarded the suspicious dreamcatcher. Frankly even if it wasn’t magical, her taste (and disrespect for the Chitimacha) was horrible, so he picked that up too. Then he moved for the door. It was about then that Elbridge called him on his Warden pin…
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Nov 19, 2019 00:44
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A Quick Bit of Catching Up “I FREAKING TOLD YOU!” Nothing was OK. The panicked screams followed by a door slam were all the confirmation Ada needed about that. She leapt into the room, obsidian knife at the ready, only to find Rick floating in midair looking like a child caught trying to sneak his hand into the cookie jar, the sword buried in one of the floor’s wooden planks. It was all she needed to know to get an idea of what had happened. “Lemme guess. They opened the case?” She said, grabbing the sword and yanking it out of the floor forcefully before pulling the case up onto one of the crates. “Yes.” Rick said. He couldn’t exactly deny it. “I tried to… Never mind. What do we do now?” “Go after them,” Ada said, dropping the sword inside the case and slamming the lid shut. “Keep your head down.” Without another word, she ran for the door and stepped into the campus beyond, blinking as the light burnt black spots into her vision. --- As Ada walked off the stage Chesterfield looked at the exiting students. “Did you see Indra or Nguyen leave? I had a potential side role in mind for one of them,” she asked the male teacher. He shrugged. “They’ll be in class on Monday. Did you catch that mouse you saw in the costume closet?” She gave a smug little smile. “Not yet but I should check the traps. See you.” There was some muffled noise from backstage but the heavy curtain blocked almost all of it as Chesterfield gave the room one last scan. Elbridge shuffled out alongside the crowd. Chesterfield was suspicious, on-edge. It wouldn’t do to alert her here and now. Not in public, where bystanders would certainly get caught in the crossfire if a fight should break out. Instead, he felt for the pin under his overcoat and reached out to Gorden. “Audition’s over. Learn anything?” he asked. “She tried to trap me,” Gorden’s answer buzzed from the pin as he began his next observation. “Another Escher trick. But it’s gone now. I can pull out. I think I found her skull and stuff, too.” “Good. Take what you can and go; she mentioned plans to check a ‘mouse-trap’ in the costume closet.” She’d notice the theft, certainly, but with Ada’s debut, genuine subtlety had gone out the window. They could study her work someplace private, with a circle in place to keep her from tracking her props. “There’s no mask, and she mixed the trophies up with a bunch of others. I got a skull and a dreamcatcher that looks like she fell for a tourist trap, but she couldn’t be that stupid, could she?” As Gorden approached the door he saw something hanging from the knob. Another dreamcatcher, with the same odd pattern. “There’s another one on the door...oh! These dreamcatchers might be how she uses her Escher things!” Gorden hissed through the pin. “Aha! If I had one, I might be able to devise a counter-spell!” “She had one in the box, too, but more couldn’t hurt,” Gorden answered as he picked up the second dreamcatcher. ”Not so long as they’re contained properly…” “...Is there something I should know? These things don’t come with hazard labels.” He’d already stuffed it in his coat. “Please hurry,” Elbridge said.
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Nov 19, 2019 01:18
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Truth and Lies Scene: Behind the Auditorium Ada burst out the door, April screamed, and Tommy let out an “Oof!” as she immediately tripped right over him and went sprawling. Taken by surprise, it took her eyes a moment to adjust. “What...are you...even doing here?” she muttered, as she scrambled to get up. “I thought you’d run away screaming.” “We did!” Megan said. “You crazy- there was a-” “Everybody just c-calm down,” Tommy said, sitting up and trying to put his glasses back on. He looked at the door distrustingly. “I don’t think it followed us.” The stage door let out towards one of the visitor parking lots and there was a steady stream of football fans in school colors passing by them to get to the field. It wasn’t the parking lot where Ada had left her car though, that was way across campus. “It’s right there!” April shouted, pointing at the case across Ada’s back. She was loud enough that others in the area were starting to look worried, especially after the earlier screaming. “Shh,” Ada said, raising a finger to her mouth. “It’s OK. I can explain why I’ve got a ghost in a sword, but not here. Let’s go sit by that tree first where we won’t cause a scene.” ((This is sort of a Situation, so a Rapport roll is needed to persuade the trio to play along and not flip out. Ada rolls Rapport vs a difficult of 7...and gets a 2. Ouch. Rerolling with Never Alone, Always Apart brings it up to 5, and an assist from Rick takes it to +7.)) “Oh right in an out of the way spot so you can... I don’t even know what!” Megan said, shaking her head. “No way.” “Wait, you know about it?” Tommy demanded. “And you just… left it all alone where anyone might get murdered by it?!” April didn’t say anything else she just looked betrayed. “You think I walk around with a murderous ghost on my back? Come on now,” Ada said, folding her arms. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Casper before.” “Maybe they haven’t,” Alisa chimed in. “It’s kind of an old cartoon.” “Can I talk to them?” Rick asked sheepishly. “This is my mess. I can at least help clean it up.” “...Fine,” Ada said, interrupting the others before they could reply. “Rick says he wants to talk to you,” she said, resting a hand on the case. “He’s gonna borrow my body for a minute. Hold on a sec.” As the trio of students stared at her, wide-eyed, Ada’s body slumped. Rick caught her before she could fall, tightening her back muscles and shifting her body weight forwards automatically in a way he hadn’t done since he’d died. His breath caught in her throat and his heart fluttered in her chest. This was a much deeper dive than he’d done with Elbridge, who’d barely given him an arm, and even beyond what Marcine had allowed. He looked down at her hands through her eyes and shivered. “Don’t freak out over it. Just breathe. I know how overwhelming getting a body again is,” Alisa said, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder -- his shoulder, right now. Rick nodded to her, knowing they had an audience, and finally looked up at them. He’d wanted to say something but now that he was on the spot the words wouldn’t come. “Hey... Um, this is Rick, the floating sword guy. Sorry about that.” It was incredibly weird to hear his words in Ada’s voice. Partially because Ada had never said anything that awkward in her life. Her cheeks flushed in embarrassment and he wasn’t sure if that was just his reaction or a collective response. “We already know you can act, dumbass,” Megan snapped. “What do you think this is accomplishing?” “More than asking Justin to homecoming did,” Rick said, rallying himself. He gestured to Ada’s chest and turned to Tommy. “You know she couldn’t have heard that. Or how you had a housekeeper and say ‘billiards’ instead of ‘pool’.” “What the hell?” Tommy sputtered. Ghosts he could believe in but full on possession was something else. “Th-this is a joke right? Microphones in the case, invisible wires, nothing we saw is unexplainable,” Megan said. “You’re probably filming us for some sick Youtube prank show.” April hugged her knees and didn’t say anything. She looked nervously from Megan to Tommy. Rick shook his head. “Someone would have shouted ‘gotcha’ by now. Look, I don’t like doing this to Ada so I’ll keep it short. Listen to her. If you need proof that I’m real get out of the sun and we can talk without me having to do this. And again I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to freak anybody out. You kinda grabbed me by surprise.” “You were surprised?” said Tommy. “How do you think I felt!” “Like you’d just seen a ghost?” Rick offered, as straight faced as he could. He reached for Ada, pulling her back in and letting go of everything he’d borrowed. It was harder than he wanted to admit, but as he sank back into the sword he quickly realized that it was far more comfortable there. Blinking, breathing, having a pulse… it was nostalgic, not necessary. Was he adjusting to life as a sword, or losing touch with what it meant to be human? He didn’t know, and it didn’t bother him as much as he wanted it to. Ada’s return to her body was plainly obvious, even to onlookers. She took a deep breath, straightened out, and when she looked at the trio, there was a familiar quiet glint in her eyes that said more about who was riding her body than a thousand words. “So?” she asked. “What do you think? Still sure this is all a hoax?” Tommy shrugged. “Hoax? Naw. Crazy body-possessing murder ghost? Jury’s still out.” Megan looked around as if she was absolutely sure there was a hidden cameraman in the bushes somewhere, but eventually she gave up. “Fine, whatever, I guess we’re talking to dead people now. I should have brought my Ouija board to college.” April finally looked at Ada. Her voice shook when she spoke. “Who are you? Why did you come here? Why us?” “Because you’re being targeted. There’s someone in this place who wants to make you all disappear;” Ada said, cracking her neck as she glanced around, just to make sure no one was still watching. “I don’t feel like letting that happen.” “Who the heck would target us?” Megan demanded. “We’re not important. We don’t even have good grades.” “I have good grades,” said Tommy. “But yeah, what she said.” “Someone who knows that. Someone who’s looking to get rid of a bunch of nuisances while holding up her end of a nasty bargain. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?” The three of them just stared blankly at her with the confused innocence of people who’d never had to look over their shoulders in fear before. “I think you might,” Rick said. “Jeeze, you guys are clueless. No wonder she’s coming after you…” With a sigh, Ada squared her shoulders and shot them an intense stare. “I’m talking about-” The stage door opened right on cue. “Ah, there you are,” said Chesterfield. Dammit! I was so close! Of course, outwardly, Ada didn’t let the annoyance show on her face. But even so, she couldn’t keep her nails from digging into the palms of her hands. “Professor Chesterfield,” she said, giving her a small nod. “Is everything OK?” “Why wouldn’t it be?” the teacher asked coolly. “Bakersfield, that was a tantrum, not an audition. Why waste everyone’s time if you aren’t going to take this seriously?” Megan stared at her knees, her hands were balled into fists but she didn’t say anything. “And you, Indra. Lazy, as usual. If you put as much effort into acting as you did into eating you might actually make something of yourself.” Tommy shrugged as if he didn’t care, but he was as tense as Megan. “Nguyen, why don’t you just major in set design, already. You’re actually good at that.” “I want to be an actress,” April said, gritting her teeth. “I’m going to be one.” Chesterfield sighed. “You need talent for that. And talent is something you’re born with, like this one.” She gestured to Ada. “You’d be very successful if you just listened to me. All of you would. But if you’re determined to walk yourselves off a cliff...” She turned to go back inside and then paused. “I’m running a workshop off campus in a few days, for extra credit. Method acting, overcoming stage fright, that sort of thing. If you want to drag your grades up then feel free to attend. I’ll send an email with the details.” So this was how she was planning to ensnare them. Now everything was starting to make sense. Simple plan, and clean too, with a good excuse for an absence, at least for a while. There was just one little hitch to it — and that was that Ada knew of it now. “Professor, before you go, can I have a word with you in private?” she asked, seizing her chance. “It’s important.” “Careful,” Rick cautioned. Chesterfield chuckled. “My dear, you’ll just have to wait for the results to be posted like everyone else.” “It’s not about the results,” Ada began, with a hint of hesitance. “I...there’s something I need to confess first. Please, can we talk?” It wasn’t quite pleading, but it was close. “I have to be somewhere shortly. If it’s that important you can talk while we walk,” she said, her heels clicking as she strode past the group of them. When she hit the sidewalk she turned and started heading back towards the performing arts building. “I’ll be right back. Wait for me,” Ada said, before scurrying off after her. As soon as she was on the level with her, she began speaking hurriedly, as if she just had to get the truth off her chest. “Professor, I’m not a student here. I know you probably already noticed, but I just came here to see a friend and got pulled into the audition, but I like acting and want to get better at it. I was just wondering if I could come along for the workshop, help the others, learn something and...sorry, I know this is silly, I shouldn’t even be asking, but…” Chesterfield stopped and looked at her seriously. “Miss Chatelaine… that is a bit disappointing I must admit but I’m glad you told me. I can’t cast non-students in a student production, after all. We do have open casting for our Christmas play but… in any case I don’t think this workshop is going to teach you anything you don’t already know. It’s more of a beginner’s class.” “But that’s what I am,” Ada countered, her shoulders visibly relaxing as she wasn’t dismissed on the spot. Almost there. Just a little more now. “Everything I know is just self-taught. It’s like how musicians can play without knowing how to read sheet music, but it gets easier for them if they do. Shouldn’t I make sure to learn all the fundamentals before I try to do something more complex?” ((Of course, Chesterfield doesn’t want interlopers to the workshop, but passing up the chance to mentor a star pupil is pretty much unconscionable...rolling Rapport to CA, a result of 8 creates the Aspect A Teacher’s Pride with two free invokes.)) “Hmm,” she started walking again at a brisk enough pace that Ada had to jog to keep up with. “Maybe. I’d hoped to use the time with those three specifically, since they’re in need of extra one-on-one you see…” She stopped again, giving Ada a very curious look. “Forgive me if this sounds forward but do you have a significant other?” Rick made a choking sound. “Um.” She didn’t have to fake her surprise at the question very hard. “Not right now. Me and my boyfriend broke up a little while ago. Why?” “Ah, I see.” She didn’t bother masking her disappointment. “Well, it’s quite important to have the experience if you want to be a real actress. Even better if you’ve loved and lost, you see. You can be the most imposing figure in film or on stage, but you do need to be able to portray love. And no one can who hasn’t felt it.” She glanced back at auditorium. The trio was out of sight by now but her sigh was clearly for them. “Would you be interested in attending classes, in the future? Spring Semester starts in January. If you’re planning to attend, then I might be able to allow certain things...” For a moment, Ada looked down, pretending to think. An immediate answer wouldn’t be as convincing as one with a slight delay. Like a good cake, good manipulation needed to be allowed a bit of time to simmer before being taken out of the oven. “My work’s crazy busy,” she said, thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I can commit to a set schedule like that. But professor, I really do want to do this,” she added quickly, forestalling the inevitable negative response. “There’s so much I know I could learn if you’d teach me. Can’t you make an exception?” All that was left was the killshot. A word that, if Chesterfield had known Ada a little better, would have instantly set off alarm bells. “Please?” ((One more Rapport roll to persuade Chesterfield to allow this. Ada’s up against difficulty 6 with two invokes. How hard can it be? Well...with Sidekick dropping a result of -3, pretty hard! Thankfully a reroll brings it up to 5, and then the second invoke takes the roll to 7. That’ll do it!)) “Oh alright, as long as you’re just there to listen. I’ll have to spend most of my time working with the students.” Chesterfield said. “Can you get the date and time from one of the others? I don’t have a student email for you, obviously.” “Yeah, I’ll get it right now,” Ada said, nodding vigorously as she broke into a wide grin. “Thanks so much professor! I promise you won’t regret it!” Without another word, she ran back towards the students, fairly skipping as she went by. “Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?” she said to her ghostly companions, smugly. “And those kids thought I was scary,” Rick muttered. “Good work though. Now we know where it’s going to go down.” “Just try not to get too deep in character while we’re there, OK?” Alisa cautioned, clinging protectively (and weightlessly) to Ada’s neck. “We want to stage a sting, not a therapy intervention.” “Don’t worry,” Ada began, then caught herself. “OK, yeah, maybe worry a little, but I’ve had my fun already. Next time I have to put on a mask, I’ll be all business.”
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Nov 19, 2019 01:26
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Double Or Nothing Scene: Performing Arts Building Gorden hadn’t been...successful in getting out from under Chesterfield’s nose last time, but this was a whole new independent trial. He grabbed one of the cleaner looking hats off of one of the mannequins--he could switch it back for his baseball cap soon enough--and cracked open the door to look for her, before heading back into the hall. Chesterfield wasn’t there, though there were a few other people in the hall, talking or just passing through. No one seemed overly concerned with the Costume Closet. Hey, wait a minute, Gorden thought to himself, suddenly pulling out the two dreamcatchers. Chesterfield used this to bend space in such a way that the things they were attached to couldn’t be seen. Why couldn’t he use that trick?! If she put the magic in the dreamcatchers and put them on the things she wanted to disappear, could he just...put the magic back in and blind-spot his way all the way back to Elbridge? Seemed a lot easier than peeking around every corner for her face. He’d just have to figure out how to turn them back on again. Maybe rewinding local time on them so they’d be charged with whatever Chesterfield put in them… (Gorden accepts a compel on Magic From First Principles!) Tweaking time around the objects didn’t seem to do anything, or at least not anything visible. Huh, that didn’t seem to...oh, wait! Gorden remembered. These things weren’t just hanging out in the middle of nowhere, they were on the things that got perspective shifted. He took one and hung it on the door behind him, keeping his hand on it to see if the door suddenly disappeared. It didn’t. Oh come on, did Chesterfield need to coax them personally into working, Gorden thought with a frown. Did she use bags of salty snacks like Taiwanese astronomers putting chip bags on million dollar telescopes? He wanted to get an external confirmation, but asking a passerby “hey, did that door just disappear” didn’t seem...appropriate. Maybe he could gauge their reaction some other way? He looked down the hall for someone walking in his direction, then threaded one of the dreamcatchers onto his wrist. Their reaction was immediate. “Gah!” said the student, backing against the wall with a look of utter shock on his face. “What the-” This caused several other people to look up and make similar stunned noises and expressions. They were sure seeing something. One of them pointed to a spot on the ceiling, two doors down from him. “Over there too!” That...was not the reaction Gorden was expecting. His gaze followed the pointing student to the ceiling. He wasn’t Pepper’s Ghosting up there, was he? Well, if he was he couldn’t see it. There was nothing there from his perspective. “Senior prank?” One of the school janitors asked, looking confusedly at Gorden and then the spot on the ceiling. It was Mr. Fitzgerald, who would definitely recognize him if he got a good look at Gorden’s face. A couple people had their phones out and were taking pictures now. Oh nuts, when did Mr. Fitzgerald get assigned to the performing arts buildings?! And he’d acted like he could still see him, too! This was not working at all. He pulled down his cap over his head and moved down the hall, struggling to get the dreamcatcher off on the run. There were a number of confused noises and a dozen camera clicks as he ran off, but people seemed more amused than afraid. “El, where are you?!” Gorden hissed into the pin as soon as he was in an empty area. He continued to struggle with the dreamcatcher like an angry tiny latex glove. “Dammit, why won’t this thing come off?!” “I’m headed for the chemistry building,” Elbridge replied. “Shouldn’t be too difficult to find a vacant laboratory on a Saturday. Perfect for some otherwise, ah, hazardous experiments.” “Right, I know...ngh...where that is,” Gorden answered as he pulled into the building’s foyer. “Just need...gah!...a second to...agh...cross the courtyard...” He ditched the newsie hat on one of the lamps, pulled on his baseball cap, and shoved open the exit with his hip, still wrestling in vain with the dreamcatcher. Eventually he pulled it off, then, breathing a sigh of relief, put it back under his coat and walked across the courtyard. It didn’t take long before people started to notice… something. A girl eating lunch while sitting on one of the fountain benches saw him first. She stared so hard she dropped half her sandwich. Then someone else called out, and someone laughed, and suddenly he had three times as many eyes on… something… as he had back by the closet! Most of them were pointing up in the air behind him, too. Oh for the love of...Gorden grimaced again, pulled his cap down tighter, and walked faster until he reached the chemistry building. “Have you found a place, Elbridge? I’m getting some weird looks…” *CLNK!* “Yes, find me in Room 122, please.” “Got it. Just, uh, don’t look out the window,” Gorden said as he approached the chemistry building door. Elbridge immediately looked out the window. A pair of pants ran by, attached to a pair of shoes but no visible torso. A few seconds later a torso floated by, upside down, arms pumping, with no visible head on. “Oh. Oh dear,” Elbridge mumbled. “That won’t do at all…” He waited for the head, the missing piece of the puzzle, to follow, and when it didn’t, that was when Elbridge began to grow truly-concerned. “Did you look out the window?!” “Lectures are for the classroom. Now, hurry up and get here so that we can put you back together.” “I am together! Just gimme a second, I’m at the door now.” Thankfully Chemistry had a different security scheme than the physics labs, so he didn’t need to fumble around for his ID to get in...probably how Elbridge got in too. Tempting as it was to just ditch the drat dreamcatchers, El wanted one, and he was curious too, so funny looks be damned, he was doing this live! He counted the doors to room 122 and walked on in, tossing the dreamcatchers on the nearest lab counter. As soon as the talismans left his person, Gorden’s free-floating body parts flew back together as if they’d been tethered with elastic bands. It was quite disorienting to observe from an outside perspective, but at least he was back in one piece. Elbridge wasted no time in drawing a circle around the charms, and in completing the ward on the laboratory door. No accidents, no interruptions. ...not that this ward would help with that any. The door’s latent threshold was nonexistent, and the wood must have been chemically-treated because none of Elbridge’s runes seemed willing to stay put on its surface. He pulled a sour expression at his shoddy handiwork, but there was nothing else for it. They’d just have to work swiftly. Elbridge rolls Lore: Wards to CA and get some preventative measures up before we begin: /--- +4 = 1, ick. FP on “Neither Wealth Nor Taste” to reroll work with sub-par materials: +--- +4 = 2. Botspite is real tonight. El cuts his losses at one FP and just takes the failure. Elbridge FP 5->4. Gorden gently set the skull down beside the dreamcatchers before leaning back against the counter opposite. “That was...an interesting experiment,” Gorden finally said after a moment. “Uh, what did I look like just now? I couldn’t see what everybody else was seeing.” “Much as you did before,” Elbridge said, “save that you were in three separate pieces, none of which moved with any relation to the others.” Gorden sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. That’s...not how they affect the box and the door at all; they just looked...not there, not scattered around the costume storage.” He set his grimoire on the table and flipped to his correction equation. “Had to do some mirage correction to find the real things.” “It’s uncanny,” remarked James as he slid through the opposite door, opening it as little as he had to before shutting it behind him, “Everyone out there’s talking about some separated body parts running about as if by some unseen force. Had to tell a pair of campus security guards and a trio of students that looked suspiciously like ghostbusters rejects that I’d seen them head straight through this building and out the back door. Should get everyone looking everywhere but here, at least for a bit.” “Thanks, James,” Gorden nodded. “Maybe they’re only supposed to work on boxes, not people…” Elbridge winced. “Let’s not linger, then. I expect that the refraction effect occurred from the talismans acting too close to one another, but to learn more than that...hrmph. We simply don’t have enough time-” And then he paused and looked at Gorden with one of his trademark, Elbridge-has-a-terrifying-idea looks. “...perhaps we should make this a bit of a field trip. Mr. Maxwell, you know that attempting to undo the past is rightly-forbidden, but...have you ever accelerated time?” “Hmm…” Gorden drummed his fingers on the table. “I can’t say I’ve done it…consciously? When I was still feeling out what this magic could do, time seemed to go by in a blur for me, but I could never tell whether that was the magic or the coffee. Maybe it was both?” He gave a confused shrug that said he genuinely didn’t know. “If...you want me to try it on you, I think I’m gonna need some coffee.” “We have ten minutes at best. It’ll have to be instant.” “If there isn’t a machine in the hall, I’ll eat a page out of my book.” Was going to roll CEK to help El get more actions to study the dreamcatchers, but… @Davin_Valkri: 4dF+4 = (---b)+4 = 1 Two minutes later Gorden had returned to the room with an empty paper cup. “I’ve only ever done this with a caffeine buzz...What self respecting science building has a broken coffee machine?!” He swallowed dry. “Here goes nothing…” He flipped his grimoire to another page covered in notes and focused on Elbridge’s head. Rerolling with @Davin_Valkri: 4dF+4 = (b+-b)+4 = 4 vs a difficulty of 3, which earns Elbridge one bonus action before they need to get out of dodge. “Er...perhaps we’d better not, then,” Elbridge said, hastily tucking his own flask back into his pocket. “Too late! Tell me if you feel like you’re head’s going to explode,” Gorden said with full seriousness. The last syllable of ‘explode’ dragged out into a lengthy, hollow echo as everything in the room slowed to a crawl. James turned his head and blinked at Elbridge in slow-motion. ”wellthisisafinemessyouvelandedusinbutwecansavetherecriminationsforanothertime” It took James a few more blinks, a glance down at his watch and a few seconds - to him, at any rate - to work out what was going on, but when he finally realised Elbridge had, well, super-speed, he whistled, impressed. Glancing over to Gorden, he said, "Remind me you can do this when tax season rolls around, man." “I think if I did this to a computer it’d overclock and fry,” answered Gorden. “At least El’s taking it alright. El, if you’re not taking it alright, signal, alright?” "Won't we just sound like an audio file played at some god awful slow speed to him?" questioned James as he raised an eyebrow at Gorden. Gorden glanced at James with a tweaked eyebrow. “Iiiif yooooou’re haaaaaving aaah heaaaart attaaaaack, waaaave.” Elbridge scoffed (which sounded more like a hiccup, in his present state). ”yourconcernsareappreciatedbutiknowmylimitsandasimplethresholdshouldbreakthisspell” And so Elbridge set about testing, poking, prodding, and analysing, paying careful attention to the building’s clocks. First, he moved a heavy, wheeled cabinet of glassware to the centre of the room and drew another circle around it, exhausting the lab’s supply of sodium chloride in the bargain (he marked a cell on a laminated supply manifest on the wall so that they’d know to order more). When one of the dreamcatchers was placed on the handle, the towering cabinet vanished; when Elbridge closed the circle around the empty space, it reappeared. A mental illusion, then - not an optical one. Dangerous. He made a note and moved on. The next test involved the other two, and some failed attempts at communication before Elbridge managed to slow himself down enough for them to understand. He was beginning to feel lightheaded - three of his estimated five minutes (normal time) had elapsed. There wouldn’t be time for a third test. Once Elbridge had made his meaning clear, Gorden took one of the dreamcatchers and disappeared from sight. Invisible, he moved from the front of the lab, near the door, to the back, near the window. At no point did he reappear. Elbridge motioned for him to step into the hall and stand at one end, then zipped to the other like an eggplant-patterned hummingbird. Gorden was still nowhere to be seen - either the talismans had an incredible effective range, or worked through some means as to disregard it altogether. That was worrisome. So were the spots swimming in front of his eyes and the tightness in his chest. He went back into the lab and stepped into his own circle to cut off Gorden’s spell before his heart could give out. James turned away from his spot staring out the window - they didn’t know when Chesterfield might come snooping, and he’d have felt uncomfortable not watching out for her arrival - as the rapid patter of El’s sped up footsteps finally came to an end. Raising an eyebrow, he stared at the Warden - El’s cheeks were flushed, and his chest seemed to be heaving - the man looked like he’d run a marathon. “You OK?” he asked, concerned. “A bit winded,” Elbridge confessed, conjuring a cloud of cold mist to cool himself down. “That worked well enough, but perhaps we oughtn’t make a habit of it.” “Probably a good idea, because you look like your heart’s about ready to explode,” he replied, turning back around and lowering the blind with his hand to resume his watch, “Are those things safe to move offsite, then?” “They shouldn’t be a problem, so long as they’re properly-stored,” Elbridge said. “Just don’t hang them over the dash like an air-freshener. Automobiles are dangerous enough without-” “She’s not tracking them, is she?” asked James, interrupting El’s explanation. Peering out the gap in the blinds, he could see the professor on the quad below moving with purpose, right towards the building they were hiding in, “Because she’s coming right for us.” Elbridge closed his eyes, and his glasses briefly vanished from his face, reappearing when he opened them again. “You know, I do believe that she is. Well, that tears it.” Gorden looked out the window in the same direction James looked. “Oh nuts. You want me to grab one of these and run, El? She knows me, but she still doesn’t know you two yet.” "No offense intended, Gorden," said James, "But if we were going with the 'split up and mess with her tracking' plan, you wouldn't be my choice for one of the runners, man." With a glance back to El, he added, "But I'm guessing that's not the plan, is it?" “You want me to just hide in the glassware closet, then?” “No.” Elbridge pulled up a swiveling chair and took a seat at the teacher’s desk, steepling his fingers. “I think that we’ve seen enough for now. I believe that some introductions are in order. Let’s have a talk with our Ms. Chesterfield.”
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Dec 20, 2019 02:47
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Civilized People Scene: Borrowed Chemistry Lab James watched Chesterfield enter the building, at which point he couldn’t see her any more. But about a minute later a shadow crossed the smoked glass in the door. There was a knock. “May I come in? I’d prefer to discuss this like civilized people rather than cost the college thousands more in repairs. They tend to pull that money out of my department, and we’re cut to the bone already.” “Of course,” Elbridge said, and opened the door with a quick gesture. He remained seated at the teacher’s desk, her dreamcatcher-wards laid within the containment circle like contraband pulled from an elementary school locker. His yellowed notepad was out, opened to a fresh page. There was a seat ready for her in front of the desk. “Professor Katherine Chesterfield,” he said. It didn’t have the tone of a question. “Well, well. You’re not the thief I was expecting. But I believe you have me at a disadvantage,” she said, calmly entering the room. She stayed near the door, crossing her arms. “I take it you weren’t in my auditorium to watch the students.” “Only a few of them,” Elbridge admitted. “Three in particular.” “It’s a bit late in the semester for scouting,” Chesterfield said coyly. “Kellog and Warwinski I could potentially look the other way but if you’re after Adams I’ll duel you for her.” Elbridge didn’t let his concern reach his face. If she’d overheard even the brief snippet of conversation they’d had with Sharene before he’d noticed the listening spell, then she knew that he was the Warden. Either she was feigning ignorance...or someone else had been eavesdropping. Elbridge thinks she’s jerking him around, so he rolls Notice (instead of Empathy, thanks to his “Just The Facts, Please” stunt) to see what’s up. /+-- +5 = 4. Chesterfield opposes with Deceit: +//- +4 = 4, a tie! But Elbridge invokes “I Know You Know” so that he can know if she knows, bringing his total to +6. Victory goes to him, Elbridge FP 4->3. Of course, there was her vocation to consider. “Professor Chesterfield, I’m afraid this is a cold read, not a recital,” he said. “There are no lines to rehearse.” He narrowed his eyes. “You already know who I am.” She reached up to adjust her glasses, peering at him. “Hm, strong British accent, abominable sense of fashion, an unfortunate tendency to poke into other people’s business… Why, you must be from the White Council!” Her feigned surprise dripped with sarcasm. “The infamous Warden Hardley, I presume?” “Infamous, you say?” He arched an eyebrow. “I am moving up in the world. Infamy beats ignominy.” “That it does. My question then, is why such an important person as yourself is using the local riffraff to do your dirty work.” At ‘riffraff,’ she turned and glared pointedly at the shock of Gorden’s white hair sticking up over the edge of one of the lab tables. “Please stand up, Mr. Maxwell. You are a representative of this school, for good or ill, so at least try to act like it in public.” “Yeah, well...so are you,” Gorden returned as he stood up and dusted himself off. “And I don’t see taking advantage of students reflecting well on Tulane.” “That’s quite an accusation from a burglar,” Chesterfield said, narrowing her eyes. “I suppose you don’t think digging around in Reuben’s office was a horrible breach of privacy or policy or general decency for that matter, but it really was all three.” She turned back to Elbridge. “Was that his own idea or did you put him up to it?” “An unexpected interpretation of my instructions,” Elbridge said, beginning to scratch on his notepad. “I shall attempt to make my meaning clearer in the future.” It sounded like a standard, bureaucratic evasion of responsibility, except that it really was what had happened. Elbridge hadn’t at all expected Gorden to take Discreetly observe Professor Lancaster and report back to me as Break into his office. “That doesn’t sound like an apology.” “It isn’t.” “No offense, but can the pair of you not just sit around bickering with one another?” asked James from his spot leaning against the wall near the other door, “Professor, we’re here so we can work out what exactly is going on - we were going to ask Lancaster directly, but since he’s not here, you’ll have to do - so maybe we could actually act like adults here and get to the point?” After a second, he added, “Oh, and I at least qualify as muscle, not riffraff, thanks.” “Well get on with it then, what am I accused of?” she said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” “Assault, kidnapping, and breach of the Third Law of Magic, for a start,” Elbridge said coolly, still writing. “Need it be said, my own judgment is the only one that counts here, so kindly do not waste my time with denials, deflections, or courtroom theatrics. You do not have the right to remain silent. You do not have the right to a jury of your peers. You may plead your case to me, or else we’ve nothing to discuss.” “I have broken no Law of Magic,” she said, calmly walking forward and sitting down in the seat prepared for her. She folded her hands carefully on the desktop in front of her and looked up at Elbridge without a hint of contrition. “If I had the rest would have been wholly unnecessary, as I’m sure you’re aware. I also find it extremely doubtful that you would have let an unknown magician rifle through your office, lie about his reasons for doing so, and walk away without answering a single question. What recourse did I have?” “Physical restraint. Tracking spells. Referral of your complaint to the proper authorities.” Elbridge tilted his head. “Really, just about any course of action save for the one that you actually took. What is the nature of your entanglement with the Fomor?” he asked, cutting off any further posturing. Chesterfield chuckled at that. “My attempt at physical restraint was labeled assault, and I did in fact refer my complaint to an authority. Just not you. Because you were the one who broke into my friend’s office. I’m sorry, but if this is how you mean to exert it, why should anyone in this city trust your authority?” “You knew nothing of our connection at the time, and Lancaster fled town at the mere mention of the Wardens earlier this year. I told you not to waste my time, Professor.” She seemed under the impression that she could play for sympathy, which worried Elbridge that he might have an unknown audience, but he was not the one under interrogation here. He repeated his question. “What is the nature of your entanglement with the Fomor?” The smile faded from her bird-like face. “I simply recognize that sometime over the next year or so they will be here and you will be gone. I don’t work for them, I don’t even like them. But the reality of the political situation compels me to remain on their good side. The Council has thrown New Orleans to the wolves before, you are not reliable and I do not trust you.” “Ah.” He tapped his brow. “Now we’re making progress.” What she’d said was true enough, except… “The shifting political landscape. Yes. You cannot be certain of which authority will hold legitimacy, and so you must rely on best guesses. It should, however, inform your calculus to know that we have outlasted two courts of vampires within the city, and wrenched it back from more than one apocalypse.” He peered over the rims of his spectacles at Chesterfield. “Meanwhile, the Fomor so antagonised Florida that its mundane residents drove them out.” “I would prefer to avoid a senseless slaughter,” Chesterfield said quietly. “From what I gather there have been disagreements within the ranks of the Fomor on certain matters of doctrine. Miami was being colonized by one of the more aggressive sects. The one here is more… amenable to cooperation.” “Assuming you pay them a fitting tribute?” asked James, “After all, what do those other people matter, as long as it keeps you safe, right?” Chesterfield glared at him and said nothing. “Or is that, perhaps, a deal that Lancaster made, not you?” he asked, ignoring her glare - he’d had far worse people (and things) than her try and stare him down over the years to crack that easily, “One you’re now stuck finding victims for while he hides?” “Reuben…?” She trailed off, and her expression turned troubled. “Is that what you think is going on? That I’m feeding children to monsters at the behest of Reuben Lancaster? Have you ever met the man?” “He’s already ruined lives,” Gorden interjected suddenly. “He strung them along and then he sold them out to other powers. I know at least one of them had to leave Tulane entirely because of him, and her absence ripples across the campus.” He drummed a hand across the lab bench. “Don’t pretend he’s innocent here, or that you are, either!” “I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.” “I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t told me everything,” spat Gorden. “Why do you think I broke into his office and not yours?!” “I don’t know, and you refuse to tell me!” she shouted back. “Because you already know and you’re just trying to get your dirty hands on them so you can finish the job!” Gorden charged. James was moving as soon within seconds of Gorden, intercepting right after he vaulted the second row of lab tables. As much as he wished he could just impose himself in the young man’s way, the rows between tables were too narrow - and Gorden was too drat quick on his feet - so he was forced to improvise, snatching his hand out to grab the younger man by the collar. “Get off me, she deserves this!” babbled Gorden, flailing for James’ grip. James dragged him back by the collar, pushing him against the lab table. "We're here to find the answer to that very question, properly," he said in a menacing tone, keeping his voice low, "Now, calm down or… well, you don't want to know what happens if you don't." Chesterfield seemed unperturbed by the sudden outburst but her lip curled in distaste. “Well, there you have it. I deserve to be threatened with violence, apparently, based on unsubstantiated claims of malfeasance I cannot very well defend myself from because I still haven’t the faintest clue who I’m supposed to have harmed.” She turned to Elbridge. “This is a witch hunt.” “And you are a witch. You placed an eavesdropping spell on a student on the mere suspicion that she was part of Mr. Maxwell’s social circle. You placed several more students in a ship in a bottle, luring them with the promise of ‘extra credit’. You intended to send three more to Professor Lancaster for a purpose as-yet unknown to me, but which he felt was sufficiently-suspect to shred the evidence.” Elbridge steepled his fingers again. “I very strongly suspect that you already know the name of his accuser, but if not, he has the right to face them at trial and not a moment before. Suffice it to say that should anything befall them, or any other witness, you will hear from me again.” “Hah! I thought I was supposed to use tracking spells and the like? Which is it, Witchfinder Hardley? I see you’ve helped yourself to my security system as well, no doubt after pillaging the contents of my closet. Your hired burglar at it again?” She shot Gorden a withering glare. “The bottle incident was a mistake, but no one was harmed and both students involved are still attending school. They got their extra credit, I assure you, so neither of them are this wounded party he’s referring to...” She thought about it for a moment, wheels turning in her mind, but eventually she just sighed. “Reuben shreds everything. He shreds funny emails and christmas cards. He’s been paranoid for as long as I’ve known him. That doesn’t mean there is anything nefarious going on. Your case is heavy on accusation, light on evidence. I won’t confess to anything I haven’t done, and I certainly haven’t been tracking down ‘witnesses’ to ‘finish them off’.” Her face twisted like a lemon. “Witnesses to what? I haven’t committed any crime for there to be a witness to!” “I must have imagined getting flashbanged and bundled in an SUV, then,” Gorden simmered. “Then, surely, my investigation will bear that out.” Elbridge flipped to a new sheet. “Do you frequently recruit students for magical projects?” “Define frequently,” she said, ignoring Gorden. “More than once per semester.” “Not usually, no.” “‘Usually’,” Elbridge noted, making a mark on his pad. “What is the particular nature of the work that necessitates their involvement?” “It varies, but usually the requirements come down to age, gender, talent, or some such. Rituals can be particular. Or sometimes it’s just boring work that still needs doing. They’re basically being hired on as temps.” “I see, I see.” Another mark. “Are they informed of the nature of their work, and of the risks involved?” She shrugged. “Only as necessary. Ignorance is safer when dealing with certain powers. I’m sure you’re going to contest that but what’s better, a fae prince making a deal with me to return his erstwhile date from the midsummer night’s ball or him kidnapping her off the street and her never coming back because he didn’t care either way? I consider preventing harm to be among my highest priorities.” Elbridge stopped writing with an audible scratching noise and arched an eyebrow. “You are correct - I will contest that. Ignorance in dealings with the fae can be lethal. To involve the uninformed is to invite disaster. I must ask that you elaborate upon that incident in detail.”
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Dec 20, 2019 02:53
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Civilized People, Part 2 Scene: Borrowed Chemistry Lab “Gladly,” she said. “Narcissus had a courtier, I never learned the name, who was using Tulane as a hunting ground for dance partners. I intervened on a girl’s behalf and struck a deal with him that the girl be required to wear a name tag for the evening which was not to be removed or touched. It would make the girl feel sick at the thought of food or drink and she was convinced her name was Alice for the evening so she couldn’t give that away. She was fine, a little tired from all the dancing of course, and the next year Narcissus approached me again for a new partner. No one’s been harmed in the decade since.” She huffed to herself. “Sending someone who knows of the fae would be considered an act of aggression. They want it to all be a fading memory, and for the girl to have fun. Neither of which would happen if I sent someone who knew enough to be afraid. It also prevents revisits, which would have the potential to be much more dangerous.” “First off, I’d love to see what harm you were mitigating by calling a hit squad right out of Counterstrike on me,” Gorden interrupted. “And second, what you just described...just...does the art department not have to take “Ethics in Experimental Design” classes? You thought lying to a student about the dangers she was facing and giving her something that made her nauseous was the ethical option?!” “If I hadn’t she’d be dead or lost in the Nevernever having been stupid enough to eat faerie food when it was offered, so yes. And you are not a student Mr. Maxwell. You are a burglar. If you want to keep your head on your shoulders don’t attempt to steal from magical folk. Most aren’t as kind as I am. Even he will agree with that.[/i]” She gestured towards Elbridge. “It’s true,” Elbridge said, nodding along and smiling affably. “We are notoriously-unforgiving. So I know that you will all understand that I mean it when I tell you that, should you take issue with the conduct of my apprentice, Deputy Warden Maxwell in the future, you will refer the matter to me for appropriate remedy, or else I will pursue you, not as a Warden, but as a Wizard under right of vendetta.” “Oh, well in that case I would like to report that your apprentice, Deputy Warden Maxwell, is in possession of several magical items he stole from me and I would like them returned immediately.” “Retrieved for inspection under official remit,” Elbridge corrected. “Your security system,” he said, removing the talismans from the salt circle and passing them to her by the string. “And…” he motioned to the skull, but didn’t speak any further. He didn’t know what it was, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. She nodded, not moving to touch the items. “Was this all that was taken?” she asked Gorden. “We know you still have more,” said Gorden with a sigh. “But...yes.” “And did you find anything untoward, dangerous, or contraband?” she looked back to Elbridge. “Not at present,” he said. He’d found a lot more that was untoward and quite-probably dangerous at her home, but she didn’t yet know he’d been there, and he intended to keep it that way. “Hmph. You see? I’m perfectly innocent. If you want to know why I hid them, well, there was a thief on campus so I moved everything to what I hoped was a safe location. They’re only sentimental things…” She ran a hand over the back of the skull. “But that’s why I don’t want to lose them.” (James, Notice: -/+/ +4 = +4. In order to succeed, he invokes on “A Smile in the Shadows” to succeed. FP: 5->4) There was something off about Ms. Chesterfield. Not her attitude, though that was part of it. But the way she moved, the way she interacted with the desk and the table. She hadn’t touched the dreamcatchers when Elbridge offered them to her. And now, her hand wasn’t actually touching the skull. Maybe it was hard keeping an illusion like this going for three people. Maybe she just hadn’t been expecting James, where she’d been prepared to face Elbridge and Gorden. But whatever it was, James was almost certain that Katherine Chesterfield was not and never had been in the lab with them. ...or was she? The dreamcatchers made things disappear, but they needed line of sight. Was Chesterfield here, just not where she appeared to be? It seemed likely she had to be close by. His first thought was to sniff the air - if he’d wanted to deal with someone in a chemistry lab and didn’t care about collateral damage, he’d have accidentally spilled something toxic, or left the gas taps for the burners on until the room was a powder keg - but he couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, and so he had to assume she was up to something else. Grabbing Gorden’s collar even tightly, he dragged the younger man closer, so he could whisper in his ear, “That’s not her, it’s an illusion. She’s somewhere close by, hidden from sight. If we stage a fight, we should be able to move around enough to work out where she is, so take a swing at me.” Gorden swallowed, nodded, and braced his feet against the ground. He suddenly grimaced and started shouting. “Bullshit! Let go of me!” He twisted in James’ grip and swung for his face, in a wide, long arc that was aimed as much for Elbridge’s salt as for James. Elbridge let out a long, exaggerated groan and massaged his temples. “Oh, for the love of...I was just talking about restraint!” It struck him as peculiar - Gorden might show such impulsivity, but James? There was something afoot. He’d play along...for now. James darted away from the blow - it was pretty easy when you knew a swing was coming, after all - but, rather than closing in for the counter, he went against every ounce of training and dodged backwards, stepping back several steps more than he’d have any real reason to, his arms raised in an exaggerated guard. It was all utterly terrible form, and he was sure at least some of his teachers over the years would grimace at the sight, but it let him cover even more space - all the better to help find the cloaked intruder. (James, Athletics: 4dF+5 = +++/ +5 = +8) Gorden’s sleeve swished through the remains of one of El’s salt circles, knocking the crystals flying through the air. They spattered all over the desk El was sitting at. Chesterfield’s eyes went wide, but she remained composed and several crystals ‘bounced’ visibly off her… though they vanished as soon as they hit the desk if one was looking very closely. It was an impressively-responsive illusion, and to sustain it must have required Chesterfield’s full concentration. To combine it with scrying would have been immensely-taxing; it seemed more-likely that she was simply nearby, observing them directly, and if she could react to facial expressions and other, nonverbal cues... “And as for you, Professor, will you be joining us, or do you intend to lurk outside?” She scowled. “I’d prefer to keep at least one layer of brick between myself and your deputies, given their proclivities.” An eyebrow raised in grudging respect. “You have a keen eye for your age.” “And you’ve a fine attention to detail,” Elbridge acknowledged. “Thank you. Were there any other questions? I have a stack of essays waiting for me in dire need of a red pen.” “Not at this time,” Elbridge said, standing from his chair. Gorden looked at Elbridge standing up, realized he wasn’t about to arrest her, and sighed. Then he suddenly looked Chesterfield’s illusion in the eye. “This isn’t over,” he chipped in. “I’ve seen through your lies once already. I’ll do it again.” “Yes, yes, all the required threats and promises.” She waved a hand, unimpressed. “I don’t envy you having to teach that one self-preservation,” she added to Elbridge. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again, Warden. It was… interesting to meet you.” “And it will be interesting to meet you,” Elbridge said, smiling in a way that didn’t reach his eyes. “If you’ll indulge me for a moment longer: Just what were you planning to do with Indra, Nguyen, and Bakersfield?” She chuckled. “Have a frank discussion with them about switching majors. You did watch the audition, didn’t you?” Elbridge spared a glance at Gorden. “Acting lessons all around, it would seem.” “Some things can’t be taught,” she said, and then she simply wasn’t there anymore.
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Dec 20, 2019 02:56
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Mook-Hunt Scene: New Orleans Police Department, French Quarter “This is a bad idea,” Drou said. “I know,” Elbridge said. “Please tell me there’s a payoff.” “I wish that I could be so certain.” “Can’t you just wait ‘til Monday and go to the OMV?” Drou asked. “I’d still need an official signature,” Elbridge sighed. “And I’d prefer not to wait. You know how these cases go…” “...the longer they run, the less chance the vic’s ever seen alive again. gently caress,” Drou swore. “Let’s get this over with before I change my mind.” He pushed open the old colonial double doors to his place of work, and they stepped inside. It was busy, as these places usually were. People sat in worn plastic chairs waiting to tell their stories to officers behind desks stacked with paperwork. Some of them were handcuffed, all of them looked tired and unhappy to be there. “Since when is Orlando in our district?” One of the uniforms gave Drou an elbow nudge, nodding to El’s eggplant festooned shirt. “Grandpa got lost on his way to the store?” Another laughed. “Naw, naw man, Abel’s Homicide now. Who’d he run over with an expired license?” Drou started to open his mouth, trying to think of something both witty enough to maintain his credibility with his coworkers and convincing enough to avoid suspicion, but Elbridge beat him to it. “Not me!” Elbridge snapped. “That c*** who nearly ran me over! I know they were aiming for me, I have their license information right here-” “Yeah, yeah, Mr. Dursley.” Drou gave him an exasperated look, catching onto the act immediately. “If you’ll just come with me, I can take your complaint and see if they have any priors-” “They’re a bloody menace!” Elbridge said, raising his voice. “You...you believe me, don’t you?” He’d just witnessed a master-class in I-want-to-see-your-manager from Katherine Chesterfield, and did his level best to channel that same energy. “Of course I believe you,” Drou said patronizingly, ushering Elbridge along. He glanced back at his coworkers and mimed holding a phone to his ear before giving an exaggerated shrug. Yeah, he’s a crank, but he drops a lot of good tips. That was enough for most of Drou’s fellow badges to lose interest and go back to their tasks, but one in particular looked at Elbridge as if he recognized him from somewhere else. Abel’s old partner, Officer Carl Parrish, who had shown a bit less courage than might have been desired back when Narcissus’ ripple was inviting supernatural nasties across the boundary between worlds. He opened his mouth as though he might say something and then closed it again, but he watched Elbridge closely as they made their way back to Drou’s new desk. “Who’s Mr. Dursley?” Elbridge asked once the others were out of earshot. “The last man you’d ever call a wizard.” “Hm?” “...never mind. Give me the plate and keep back so you don’t melt my desktop.” Drou took the paper from Elbridge’s hands and headed into his cubicle. Contacts to see how much intel Drou is able (or is that Abel) to glean: /-/- +5 = 3. A terrible roll, but El’s high modifier pulls through. “Well, how ‘bout that?” Drou double-clicked and the office printer whirred to life. He hurried over to pull his documents out of the queue before anyone else started snooping. “Say hello to Tobin Brahms, 22, son of Carl Brahms, 43, and their lovely family of assault, vandalism, drunk-and-disorderlies, and weapons offenses.” He held up the mugshots with a smirk. “Copperheads.” “Copperheads?” “Militia. Real ‘Heritage’ types, if you catch my drift. Led by one Bernard Marchand.” Drou showed him Marchand’s own picture and Elbridge did a brief double-take. He’d seen that face before, somewhere. “Currently missing.” “...’Copperheads’.” Elbridge had to laugh at that. “Oh, I get it now. So that’s what they call themselves on this side of the Veil.” Someone in Cuprionax’s Dragonarmy had a decent sense of wordplay. “Because of the Northern Democrats in 1860, and also their benefactress.” “Their who?” “A dragon. Bloody great serpent, with copper scales.” Elbridge chuckled darkly. A failure like Marchand’s wouldn’t be taken lightly by either Cuprionax or her vampiric allies. “Would you like to know what really happened to Marchand?” “No.” Drou put his hand up for emphasis. “I mean it. No. I don’t wanna have to explain how I know things I got no earthly way of knowing.” “Suit yourself.” Elbridge shrugged. “Do the Brahms have a listed address?” “That they do.” Drou scribbled it down on yellow sticky note. “Here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta clear my search history and burn these sheets so I don’t gotta explain if these guys go missing, too.” He held it up but didn’t hand it over just yet. “You know you owe me for this one, right?” “Noted,” Elbridge said. He was far too accustomed to supernatural politics for a simple ‘yes’ - not when an answer in the affirmative might magically become a binding oath. “Stay safe, Drou.” “Ha.” Drou gave a mirthless chuckle. “‘Safe’. That’s funny. You’re funny.”
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Jan 3, 2020 07:40
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Gumbo Surprise Scene: Krazy Karl’s Cajun Cuisine The peeling paint on the light blue cinderblock building looked like a health hazard in itself when James pulled up to Krazy Karl’s. It was past lunchtime but too soon for dinner, and there weren’t any customers in line. Just a few ancient, empty picnic tables and a bored looking teenager playing with her phone behind the window. At a first glance, the taco stand offered absolutely no clues as to why someone would ever be a frequent visitor - unless that someone were a health inspector for the city, at any rate. Climbing out of his car, he adjusted the woolen beanie covering his hair - at first glance, he just looked like any other labourer, taking a late lunch - and sniffed the air. You could tell a great deal about an eating establishment by how it smelt, and this one smelt dingy, stale, like a health code violation waiting to happen. Walking up to the counter, he glanced up at the bored looking teenager and asked, curious, "So is Krazy Karl like, a real dude, or is he like Uncle Ben?" “You talkin’ poo poo about my dad?” asked the girl, giving him a death glare through the screen. "Nah, just wonderin' is all," he replied, shrugging off her stare - it took more than a teenager's ire to scare him off. "Just saw this place mentioned in passing in a newspaper a while back, wondered what it was like." “Uh huh.” She shrugged. “Whatever man, just let me know if you want like, food or something.” He'd set his mind on avoiding that exact thing - sure, there was always a chance that despite the health code violations and the iffy smell, this place might be one of those hidden local wonders, but he'd rather not be the one to risk that. Pressing on, he kept an eye on the girl's face as he said, "Yeah, it was in an article about one of the guys running for mayor. Said he loved the place." “Oh yeah? Cool, Dad loves free advertising.” She set her phone down and smiled at him. “Look man, you wanna get nosy I’ll tell you whatever. But you gotta buy something or I’m gonna get yelled at.” She pointed to the menu printed on the side of the wall. “Pick your poison. Crawfish just came in this morning.” The Cracklin’ Crawfish Bucket was the most expensive item on the menu… but it still wasn’t very much money. For just a second, he missed the days when he had an expense budget - it never felt quite as bad to be ordering dodgy seafood when Uncle Sam was picking up the bill. Slipping some money out of his own wallet, he put it down on the counter and, with a barely hidden wince, said, "I'll take one of those, then." At least it'd be fresh? “Sure thing,” she shoved the money in the till and moved out of sight. He heard her conversing in French with whoever was in the kitchen portion behind the wall and then she was back. “Okay, you got like, five minutes till that’s done.” He nodded - he knew the drill. "You heard about a guy named Frisk? He's running for mayor. It was him that the newspaper said had been coming here." She nodded. “Yeah I seen him. Well, not the last few days but before that he was here a lot. Dad calls him Gumbo Ben. He really loves that poo poo.” That Frisk had been here for something so simple surprised James, but it didn't mean this was a dead end, and so he asked, "You remember anything strange happening the last time he was here? Weird noises, odd people around, that kind of thing?" “I think I was at school,” she said. “Oi, Lafayette!” she called back to the kitchen and spat a string of sentences in quick French. ‘Frisk’ was one of the words but James didn’t know any more than that. A moment later a very thin Cajun man walked into view, wiping his hands on a stained apron. He answered the girl in the same language, then pointed out the window towards one of the tables. “He says it was… kinda late, later than usual. They sat at that picnic table and had lunch, then got in a black car and left. Wasn’t the normal car. Must have been hers.” He raised an eyebrow. They? Slipping his phone out of his pocket, he quickly pulled up a picture of Frisk's wife and showed it to the man, "Was this the woman he was with?" “No, no,” Lafayette said, waving his arms. He said some more things and the teenager translated. “Older than that, but not like old-looking? Heavy sunglasses, even though it was overcast. Shawl over her hair. Very pretty, but dangerous looking. Bad feelings. Frisk seemed… nervous? Not happy, no joking. Didn’t say hello. Said goodbye though.” The man looked disturbed, as if he had thought about it since and didn’t like the memory. “He wants to know if something’s happened, since he hasn’t come back.” “My friend. Where is he?” The cook asked in very broken English. “You are finding?” Stowing the phone away, he replied, "I'm not sure what's happened to him, not yet. But yeah, I'm trying to find him. Hope I can get him back home safe, too." Something stunk here - and for once, it wasn't the fish. Something about the sunglasses bothered him, though. She was obviously hiding something behind them, but what? Unless it wasn't to hide her eyes, but stop anyone from looking into them? "Her sunglasses, were they mirrored?" he asked. This required some explanation from the girl but eventually Lafayette shrugged. “Too far to see through the screen,” she said for him. “Maybe? He’s not sure.” "Thank you, merci beaucoup," he said, trying some half remembered tourist level French, "I'll try and find your friend, get him home safe, so he can come back here for his lunch again." The cook looked a little relieved, then shouted something that sounded a lot like a curse and ran back to the kitchen. The girl snorted. “Er… woops. Might need to make a new pot. Why don’t you sit down for a minute? I can bring it out to you.” He grinned, "Of course." It would give him time for one last idea, anyway. Walking over, he sat at the same old picnic table they'd said Frisk and the woman had been sat at. It was unlikely that there was anything in the table's aura from the meeting, but it couldn't hurt to check. (James, Psychometry: ///- +3 = +2) The table was old and wobbly but had clearly been sat at often enough to stay clean and spider-free, which was saying something. Numerous people had carved their initials or more into the grey wood, but none of them were recent. It seemed a dead end… When the teenager appeared, carrying a small metal bucket full of hot fried crayfish and a miniature bowl of gumbo on a red plastic tray, “On the house,” she added. “Tray and such goes over there,” she pointed to a stack of dishes next to the trash bin. She skipped off without another word but James found himself staring at the gumbo bowl. It seemed well used, sure, and Frisk apparently loved the stuff but… well, how often did anyone really order the gumbo here? (James, Psychometry: +/-+ +3 = +4. He invokes on “Venatori’s Loose Cannon” for a +2 to SwS. FP: 4->3) He was surprised at how appetizing the food smelled once it was there on the table - everything he’d seen (and the fact that it was a cajun taco stand near the docks) had given him red flags, but he supposed there must have been some reason why Frisk kept coming here. He could feel himself being drawn to the bowl, though - and he’d long since learned to trust the little feelings his meagre powers gave him when they were drawn to something. Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, he closed his eyes and loosened up his shoulders, falling into a simple breathing exercise - one of the people at the first Paranet group he’d attended had been a yoga instructor, and she’d taught him to use that to control his psychometry, rather than just triggering it off every drat thing. Resting his hand on the tray, he placed the tips of his fingers on the outside of the bowl. The bowl had a story to tell. Many stories in fact, most of them involving slurping, but as these small vignettes flickered through James’ mind, one character seemed to play the lead in the vast majority of them. A familiar face, one Benjamin Frisk. He saw smiles, laughter, the enjoyment of delicious food. Lafayette would come and sit with him if it wasn’t busy and they’d talk animatedly in French, clearly relishing each other’s company. There was a strong resemblance between the two men that James hadn’t noticed through the screen. Brothers? Half-brothers? Cousins? Hard to tell, but they were around the same age. As the short moments flickered past, Lafayette vanished and Frisk sat stonily next to a severe looking woman with a leopard print shawl over her dark hair. She had large sunglasses on, the kind you wore when you wanted to hide your face. “This is your last warning,” she said, hands folded on the table. “You know what will happen if you don’t listen to me.” “Ma’am I can’t,” Frisk said, shutting his eyes and sighing. He had hardly touched his meal. “Too many people are counting on me. He’s just going to have to-” “You’re a good man, Benjamin. But there are forces in motion… It simply won’t be allowed. The future is set.” Frisk shook his head. “I don’t believe that.” The woman seemed to shrink in on herself. “Fates be kind,” she muttered. “Fate is what we make of it,” Frisk said. “Let me walk you to your car, ma’am.” He left the bowl then, and never returned. James breathed out as the vision ended, the movie reel playing through his head flickering to a close. He usually enjoyed the glimpses of the past his psychometry gave him - it was like peering back into history. The fact that they weren't accompanied by a near-seizure, unlike his other visions helped, too. That said, that particular one was rather less enjoyable, as insightful as it had been - he could spot when someone was being threatened a mile away, and that woman had definitely been threatening Frisk. Slipping a notepad and pen out of his jacket pocket, he started to sketch out the woman while she was still fresh in his head - given how well she was hiding her face, it wouldn't be much use, but it was still better than nothing. Digging into the food as he sketched - it tasted as good as it smelled - he pondered if Elbridge took texts, or if he'd need to call the old wizard. He was still thinking that as his brain started to fog over and his balance failed him, and then he wasn’t thinking much anymore as he went face-first into the table. James’ compel from a while back to investigate the food stand comes due!
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Jan 3, 2020 22:45
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A Clandestine Chat Scene: ??? When James came to it was dark, but that was because there was a bag over his head. His head was ringing - he wasn't sure if he'd been concussed, but somewhat blessedly, his nose didn't seem broken at least. Drugged, probably in the gumbo. What a fine mess. Testing his limbs, he felt coarse rope binding him to what felt like a heavy wooden chair. Well, he wouldn't have to break a thumb, at least. Taking a gruff tone, he said, "Alright, who wanted to talk to me? Because there's easier ways to get a quiet meeting than sedatives and a headbag, y'know." “Good morning, Mr. Ivarson,” said a vaguely familiar male voice. “I apologize for the circumstances but these are dangerous times. I’m sure you know the drill, given your background. Just answer a few questions for me and you can go on your merry way.” Well, that proved he wasn't getting beaten down, at least. If he could only place that damned voice… he'd have to keep the guy talking, see if he could place it. "Ask away, and I'll answer what I can," he replied, "But I won't betray anyone, of course." “Of course. I hope the knots aren’t too tight? Well, anyhow, I guess I mostly need to know whatever it is you’ve found out about Benjamin Frisk. Let’s start with who hired you to look for him.” Hired - as if he was getting paid for this, hah. "This isn't a job, I'm just a… concerned citizen, looking into something weird going on. What can I say, I love a good mystery," he said, keeping cryptic without actually lying. Just on the off chance it was faeries. But he had a pretty good idea who it was. (James, Notice: +/-- +4 = +3. Invokes on "A Smile in the Shadows" to succeed. FP: 3->2) “A concerned citizen, out doing his civic duty. Right. How’d you find out he was missing then? That’s not on the news.” "People campaigning for office generally get seen in public, or get reported as being sick. The absence of news is news itself, if you keep an eye out," observed James. "Look… Mike. I know you believe in your boss, I could tell as much when you were giving your pitch. But I'm not your enemy, never was. Just like I told Lafayette - who I assume is related to Frisk - I'm just trying to get him back." Something in the room hissed quiet and low, and it wasn’t Mike. “Easy,” Mike said, presumably to whatever had made the sound. He sighed. “I know you’re not my enemy. But you aren’t going anywhere until you tell me what you’ve found. If Frisk doesn’t surface in the next week or so this campaign is done and Goldman wins by default. Any scrap, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant… ” "I don't want Goldman winning any more than you do, man. Let's make a trade - take this bag off and we'll both share what we know. Better to pool our resources if we ever want to find him, after all," replied James - he'd tensed up at the hiss. It wasn't human, whatever it was, and he was suddenly very aware of how vulnerable he was until he got free of the chair. “No can do, buddy,” Mike said sadly. “You might have noticed that I'm not alone. Well, my friends are the shy types. If you’re good enough to guess me out by voice, you’re too drat good for them to feel comfortable that you know their faces. Now I’ve been real patient and you’ve been real tight lipped. I’m about the only reason this is staying civil and if you don’t start answering questions right NOW, I’m leaving for an hour and when I get back we’ll see if you feel like talking.” James didn't much like the threat, but since he couldn't break free of the chair fast enough to stop Mike and his non-human friends - he'd used the plurals, so James had to assume there were at least two around - from beating him down. "Alright, alright, I'll talk. I'll spare you the boring bits - as best I can tell, Frisk got taken at the Cajun taco place you grabbed me at. Since I assume you're not amateurs, you must have grabbed my notepad - the top page is a sketch of the woman I think did it, but I don't know who she is yet." “Yeah we got it. When did you see her?” He sniffed at the air - just because he couldn’t see anything, didn’t mean there weren’t any clues as to who was backing Frisk’s man. There was a distinct smell of damp mud on the air, and he could feel a slight breeze. “Going by what I can hear of your associates, I have to assume you’re clued in enough that you’re not going to freak out over this, so here goes - I saw her in a vision, approaching Frisk, giving some veiled threats. Then he walked her to her car. Probably got grabbed there.” “Did you see him get grabbed? Or are you guessing?” Mike asked. There was a strained tone to his voice. “Guessing, but I’m mostly sure it was the last time he went for gumbo. You’ve got his schedule, presumably - was he seen after that?” “No-” Mike started but whatever was in the room with him cut him off with another hiss. “Let me talk, drat it. We’re trying to find Ben!” A moment’s pause. “His car was left there, so yes, whatever happened it was around then… But I can tell you right now that it wasn’t this woman.” “Who is she? Someone important to your associates, I’m guessing, but I haven’t had chance to track her down yet.” “She’s not involved in this. I’m sure they talked but that’s it.” “She wasn’t talking, she was warning him not to defy fate,” replied James, “Look, you said you wanted to get him back - well, so do I, and I’m going to be more productive if you tell me as much as you’re able to. And if I had to take a guess, I’m the most qualified one looking, so you should want me working on it as best I can.” (James, Rapport: -/++ +5 = +6) It was quiet for a solid few minutes, but James could guess that a lot of non verbal communication was going on between Mike and his ‘friends.’ The next voice that spoke was human also, rough, male, he hadn’t heard them before. “We don’t know you, outsider. We don’t know why you’re hunting Ben Frisk. Say you find him, say you bring him back, but then he owes you. Not acceptable.” A second voice, female, husky. “We saw the old Warden’s picture in your notebook. You are working for the Council? Are you a Warden? Or do you hunt him too? Not enough information.” Something thumped against the back of James’ chair. Not intended to hurt him, just scare him a little. She kept talking. “I don’t like this. I don’t like you. I don’t like Goldman’s pet trying to frighten Ben Frisk an hour before he vanishes. Into where? Can’t track, can’t scry, can’t GPS his phone, all the ends… as they say... are dead.” Well, he’d got them talking at least - either there was a bigger crowd than he’d thought for the interrogation, or Mike’s associates were at least part human. He cursed himself for his distracted doodles, though - he’d drawn one of Elbridge with Dirty Harry’s Magnum while scoping out the taco stand. After that stunt the Warden had pulled in the theatre, it had seemed rather apt. That the woman was Goldman’s seer, though - that was helpful to know. “I’ll tell you why I’m hunting Frisk - because I don’t want Goldman as mayor. And Frisk’s the only one with a chance of beating him. And heck no, I’m no Warden. There’s no way those guys would let someone like me into their club. But I like to keep the local sheriff in a good mood, as it were, so I help out occasionally.” He paused, thinking, “Look, if your leads are really dead, it does you no harm to set me on the trail and see if I can dig up something you haven’t thought of. Worst case, I wander about and waste a bunch of my own time. Best case, I find Frisk. Either way, you lose nothing.” “I don’t think you care who ends up mayor of a city that isn’t yours,” said the woman. “There’s something he’s not saying. If he isn’t with the Council or the government he’s with someone else.” “Who else is there?” Mike asked, genuinely sounding confused. “I don’t know, but it isn’t some shadowy cabal of antique dealers,” said the woman. Someone tugged the bag and snuffled the side of his neck. “Doesn’t smell like faerie,” said the gruff man. “You find anything, you call Mike at the campaign office. Don’t do anything that might put Ben in danger. He has friends. Lots of friends. We just need to know where to show up.” He thought about pointing out that even if he’d only just moved into town, it was as much his city now as anyone else’s, but he doubted it would convince them of anything. “Call Mike with the location and you’ll bring a hit squad to siege it, gotcha.” Someone spat on the ground next to him, and the unknown man growled. “Your oath on it, stranger. If you want the name of the woman you drew.” James knew what oaths meant in the supernatural world - Mateusz has made certain to drill that particular fact into his head the first week. With a tone that suggested he would have shrugged, had he been free, he replied, “I prefer a challenge, thanks. No oath. You’ll just have to trust me.” “I’d rather eat you,” the woman grumbled. “Easy,” Mike said again. “No oath, no name. He wants to figure it out himself.” “We don’t have time for this poo poo,” the grim man said and then his arm was around James’ throat, squeezing. Hot breath hit his ear through the bag. “Shhh, don’t fight. Just go to sleep. No oath means we’ll be watching you stranger. Ain’t got no choice now.” Ah, the sleeper hold - he’d forgotten just how… irritating... it was to end a meeting with some burly thug driving you into unconsciousness. But he relaxed anyway, because picking a fight seemed entirely not worth it. Within a moment, he was unconscious. --- He awoke, head pounding, on the same bench they'd grabbed him from - except it was almost pitch black, with only a flickering light hanging nearby for lumination. Blinking, he dragged his head up and checked his watch. After midnight, great. Pulling himself off the bench, he checked his pockets - everything seemed to be there except his notepad. Great, now he had the Swamp Mafia watching him. Just what he needed. Stalking off to his car, he decided he needed to call Elbridge, see if the Warden had any clues about his new… associates.
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Jan 4, 2020 00:08
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The First Lesson of Time Travel Scene: The Lytle’s safehouse Lago was still standing near the fence when Ada and Gorden approached the dark blue safehouse where Ruby’s family was currently hiding out. He tugged his plaid cabbie cap down and scowled at Ada. “Tch, y’came back. Now I owe sleeping beauty two bits. Of all the rotten luck.” “It’s not bad luck when you take a losing bet,” she replied as she knocked on the door. “Just poor life decisions.” She wanted to ask about sleeping beauty, but thought better of it. Given the person she was talking to, odds were good he’d just tell her to piss off. Emma answered the door again. “Ada! Come in, come in. And this must be…” She paused, looking at Gorden. For a moment she didn’t seem quite sure to make of him. “What happened to your hair?” she asked bluntly. Gorden considered her question for a moment before answering. “Gorden, yes. Mad science issue,” he said, which was true. If not...complete. Emma glanced at Ada. “Okay, well, Gorden… You stay right here and I’ll get my daddy. I think he wanted to talk to you outside.” She left the door open and vanished into the house, leaving Ada with her invitation, and Gorden without one. “Does she have that thing like with Shirley’s place?” Gorden whispered to Ada. “You mean a threshold?” Ada asked. “Yeah. Every house does. Call this a bit of safety protocol, you’ll come in soon enough if Junior thinks you’re on the level.” Giving him a light boop on the shoulder for good luck, she made her way in. There was no need to tell Gorden why exactly this kind of safety was needed. Not yet, anyway. --- A few minutes later a large man in a plaid shirt and canvas pants opened the door. He was maybe in his forties, a little grey in his beard and moustache, and not much hair left on his head. “Nice to meet’cha,” he said, offering a meaty hand to Gorden. “Call me Junior, everyone does.” “Okay...hi, Junior,” Gorden said as he reached forward to returned the handshake, careful not to let his hand cross the doorframe. “I’m Gorden, Ada’s friend.” He suddenly wondered what the heck “Senior” looked like. “May I come in?” “I reckon not,” he said, closing the door behind him and putting his hands into his coat pockets as he joined Gorden on the porch. “There’s four women in that house that could eat the both of us for breakfast and half of ‘em are in a foul mood. Let’s enjoy the fresh air instead, ya ken?” Distantly they could both hear someone shouting and a door being slammed somewhere in the house. Junior pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of his pocket and lit it by snapping his fingers. “Smoke?” Gorden remembered seeing Ada angry from his rescue and shuddered involuntarily. “Yeah...yeah, I think I ken.” He took a deep breath as he turned to follow Junior, and watched the demonstration of pyrokinesis...or maybe just thermokinesis? Paper flash-fired pretty fast, after all. “I’d be a hit at parties with that...jazz cigarette or normal one?” “Jest tobacco, ain’t knowing anyone these days with better leaf.” “Eh, alright, thanks, I’ll take one.” Gorden said with a nod. Ada’s talk suggested he wanted to get on their good sides, plus it couldn’t be any worse than what the Biology department grad students could cook up. Junior reached for his pocket and produced a second cigarette, handing it to Gorden unlit. He was clearly waiting for him to handle the rest himself. “Right, thanks,” Gorden nodded as he took the cigarette. He took a moment to examine the unlit thing, wondering whether he could make the paper open up, before mentally slapping himself. Of course. He had a little miniature sun right here around his neck. Duh. He held the cigarette out horizontally and pulled his pendant out directly above. A moment’s concentration, and--he got the cigarette alight, but quickly scampered forward to stomp out the dry leaves underneath he’d accidentally ignited too. Junior watched this with a completely straight face, waiting patiently. When things seemed settled he took a long drag on the cigarette and smiled. “So, all Ada said was that you were a youngin’ out lookin’ for some advice as pertaining to time magic. Anything in particular you want to know about?” Gorden took a breath from his cigarette to fill the time, and resisted the urge to cough. He had to consider that anything he said might make its way back to El in short order, and while he was pretty sure he wouldn’t try to cut off his head if he brought up how he got his fancy pendant...why give him a reason? “...how does your particular style of time magic work?” he began, neutrally. “Oh, like anyone’s I figure,” Junior said. He tapped his cigarette against his fingers and it unburned itself, precisely to the moment it’d been lit. “Handy for small things, like fixing what’s been broke or finding out how it got that way… I don’t dabble much in the bigger workings. Suppose that’s how I got missed when Narcissus rounded us all up a while back. Only for so long o’course.” He spoke slowly and very deliberately. “If you’re runnin’ with Ada you must have met with the Council fellas by now. Good folks, mostly, but they don’t know much about time magic. Same as with the mentalists. Too risky, they say. Tar us all with that ‘black magic’ brush.” He smiled. “Could be they’re right, but it is what it is, and those of us with that sort’a gift have to find our own ways of doing things.” He nodded at the unburning cigarette, recognizing the familiar transformation. "Yeah… El's nice but it's hard to be excited about people looking for a reason to go all Highlander...what was that about Narcissus?" Gorden suddenly swallowed. "I heard some crazy time stuff went down but details haven't been... complete. Is that the flower guy? Was he in on that?" “Fancy fella who liked his own looks too much, aye. If people have been giving you guff over your powers he’s likely to blame. He used to run the Summer Court around here. Thought he could keep time in a bottle, measure out bits here and there to keep himself in power. It was upsetting the natural order of things, but only a little, up until last June. Reckon I can’t go into details on account of who else was involved, but we almost had one o’ them apocalypses over it. Them Council fellas, Hardley and Cole, and a few others, managed to piece it back together on the future end, and my family and Ada patched it in the past. Things still got a mite too close for anybody’s comfort.” “I...I see,” acknowledged Gorden, throat suddenly dry. Hardley was Elbridge, and Cole was...the sword ghost. Right. Okay. “That makes...sense?” Maybe Narcissus was a time mage, Gorden thought to himself, but going by all of that he must have been first and foremost an asshat. That would have to be reassurance enough....hey wait. “You went to the past? El went to the future? How…?” “Half-right. I’m from the past. On our end it all went down in 1929. You’d have to ask the wizard what happened on his end, though I’m told it involves time branches and when Yggdrasil starts branching off things tend to grow sideways. Hah.” He laughed a bit at his own joke. “City was ground zero for a full temporal rewrite, but some bit of it got stuck, and the bit that was supposed to replace it got dumped outside of reality. You probably slept through the whole thing, it took less than six hours on the inside, and very few the wiser.” Gorden bit down a bit on his cigarette at the mention of 1929, but caught it before he bit the filter off. “Hm. I dunno. I wasn’t sleeping a lot around that time.” He took another drag. Well, if he’d already come from 80 years ago, he probably was safe to ask. “So...let’s say, just...hypothetically, you mentioned a sort of tree of time, keeping with that metaphor...how could someone happen to go all the way to the tips of one of the branches and spring back?” Junior chuckled. “So remember, you’re allowed to go as far forward as you want. Swimming against the currents of time, that’s the taboo. Which mostly means once you go out there you’re not allowed to come back. Going all the way to the end… The tree of time isn’t exactly metaphorical, son. If you get out where the branches are thin you might snap one off and there’s nothing out there but darkness and the things that came Before. It’s not a good way to go.” He paused and gave Gorden’s necklace a bit of a look. “Course, this is all hypothetical, like you said, but I’d imagine two things. One, you’d need to be stronger than most to even try something that touched in the head. Two, if you got that far out, you probably wouldn’t make it back on your own. Far as I’m concerned, the first rule of time travel is: Don’t.” “Yeah...hypothetically,” Gorden nodded. “I mean, unless the Big Chill is true, but that’s just theoretical.” Things that came Before did not sound good...but Gaspar didn’t exactly sound bad, was he? Then again, all he’d seen when he got...that far out was “darkness” and Gaspar. He knew what “things evenly distributed throughout” was, but it sure looked pretty dark before the star came about. “So if someone, I dunno, went down into the university library and read something that sent him back to Issac Newton’s time by accident, would El be obliged to do the full Highlander thing on him?” “You don’t break the Laws of Magic by accident,” Junior said. “If you touched a cursed book and got sent back in time it wasn’t your magic that did it, so it’s not on you. If you travel through time on your own then it was because you wanted to. Magic is an expression of your will as a magician, there are no ‘accidents,’ by definition.” “Well, I didn’t plan to--” Gorden started, then thought better of it. “Well, if God is allowed to play dice, then--” he began again, before realizing that Junior was contemporary with Einstein and thus would have no idea what he was talking about. He sighed again. “These ‘things that came Before’...what are they supposed to be like?” “You’re not supposed to ask,” Junior said. “Thou shalt not open the Outer Gates, seventh law.” “I’m aware,” answered Gorden. “But there must have been someone who decided to try anyway and was arrogant enough to write everything down.” “Oh there have been, like that idiot Lovecraft. They’re theoretical entities, Gorden. The more you look at them the more real they become, the more purchase they have, the more influence, and the closer they get to turning out the stars. Reality is… anathema to the unreal. They’ve been trying to stomp it out since the big bang. Knowing about Outsiders is dangerous, naming them is reckless, and trying to buy power from them is downright foolhardy. Course, the game they’re playing is on the scale of eons, they’re… they’re like entropy. They won’t be satisfied till everything is dust.” “Lovecraft didn’t know the first thing about mathematics,” Gorden stated affirmatively, as if that explained everything. “If his stuff is about Outsiders, then normal people use Outsider magic every time they use a GPS...or just...freaking navigate between two points on the planet. And if they’re like entropy--” Gorden repeated Junior’s demonstration with a bit of cigarette ash, but suddenly choked on the smoke coming out of his lungs. “Hack...cough...well, you know what I mean. If they want everything to be dust, we could...undust it.” Junior stared at him for a long moment. “I’m startin’ to think that telling you how things work is a mite irresponsible.” “I think I annoyed Elbridge too,” Gorden acknowledged sheepishly. “If this is about the Lovecraft thing...well, one, he was super racist, and two, a lot of things he wrote about scaring him could be...really mundane. Like, oooh, that thing is so scary he’s ‘non-Euclidian’! He thinks in terms of geometry that’s not a flat plane! Like...the planet Earth! Going from here to Los Angeles requires thinking about the Earth as a ball, and that’s scaaaaary.” He punctuated the last word with a bit of in-air jazz hands, spreading the reconstituted cigarette ash over the ground. “I believe you and Elbridge when you say Outsiders are dangerous, but I wouldn’t believe Lovecraft about it, that’s all.” Junior sighed. “It doesn’t matter if anything he wrote was true, it’s the fact that he published the Names of a bunch of nasty critters and now any fool can open up a door to let one of them run around causing chaos. And really that’s about all I know- or want to know- on that subject.” “He actually named--” Gorden started. “Ugh. Moron.” He would have left it at that, but… Forces have been set in motion. A new possibility has arisen. And I can realize that possibility. The Outsiders wanted everything to be done and dusted, right? ...you have facilitated the formation of something. And that will allow the formation of more things. That...did not sound like an Outsider talking. “...there isn’t something like an Anti-Outsider, is there?” “Never heard of one,” Junior said, shrugging. He was starting to sound annoyed. “You want to talk about something I know something about?” “Sorry, sorry!” said Gorden, waving his arms in apology. “I’m just...thinking about a lot of things right now.” His experience with time magic was centered solely on himself. Narcissus was a jerk. Junior, though, had other magical people to consult for his training. “How does your family like your…” he waved at the cigarette in Junior’s hand. “...talents?” “Just fine I suppose? It ain’t like I gotta hide it from ‘em. But my skills came down through my mother, and such. Always been a part of the Lytle clan.” “And how do other wizards see the Lytles?” Gorden continued. “The first time I met another wizard and told him what I could do, he wasn’t the most...enthusiastic about it.” “You ain’t a wizard,” Junior corrected. “Wizard is a title, means you’re part of the White Council of wizards. If you’re talking about magical folks- human ones- in general then use practitioner. People like us tend to avoid the wizards to stay on the safe side, but other practitioners don’t usually see time magic as anything more or less special than what they can do themselves.” He smirked. “Honestly we’re a bigger threat to ourselves than others most of the time. Fire mage messes up he can cause a heap of trouble for everyone. Time mage messes up, well, no one remembers he ever existed.” “Well, there’s one particular Wizard I can’t avoid now,” Gorden answered, mentally filing away the correct lexicon. “Is it just time travel to the past, or are there other ways for a time mage to ‘mess up’? You aren’t going to disappear in front of me if you restore that cigarette enough, are you?” “Naw, little things like this ain’t going to hurt ya,” he thought that was amusing. “Maybe if you tried to restore a whole tobacco field. You’re only limited by your strength of will. That said, using a lot of magic at once can exhaust you to the point where you can’t defend yourself… And using all of your magic, every last bit, will kill you. Which makes it very dangerous to put a practitioner in a corner he knows he can’t get out of.” “Like...what, turning everyone threatening him into little babies?” “Hmm… Usually more like aging everything in a twenty foot circle to dust, though really it’s whatever strikes your fancy in your last moments on earth. There’s been songs and stories written about some of the more poetic death curses.” “It’s not possible to use a sudden burst of power like that to save yourself? Do you need to spray blood everywhere into a transmutation circle or something?” Gorden scratched his head. “What the… No it’s not possible to save yourself with a death curse!” Junior just stared openly at him. “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying? If you use up all your magic at once, you die. It’s like burning down the whole tree instead of taking a branch or two for firewood. There’s no time for it to grow back. It’s commiting soul-suicide in return for enough power to make a miracle. Whatever miracle you like, but that’s the end for you.” “I kinda went into this stuff blind, alright?!” Gorden suddenly shouted. Then he suddenly grimaced and squeezed his cigarette, the lit end rapidly consuming itself. “Sorry, sorry, I...that was rude. I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll ask Ada for more of the details. Let’s just...time magic. Let’s get back to time magic. I...there’s so much research on LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE but when it came to what I could do, I had to just keep playing with some broken toys and lab equipment that didn’t work. And there’s a whole subset of it that El goes ‘if you do this we kill you’ and ‘if you gently caress up you’ll disappear’ and…” he sighed again, much more heavily. “...why does this power exist?” Junior let out a long, weary sigh. “You didn’t grow up with it, did you? For me it’s like breathing. I could do things, small things, from when I was young. My mama taught me what to do and what not to before I was strong enough to do myself any lasting harm. Same as using a knife, or a hunting rifle. Magic is a tool, not a toy, and such-like...” He paused a moment, deep in thought. “What’s it for? Why does it exist? Well, it’s something that’s always existed, long before any of us. Magic’s as much a part of the world as the rain. Might as well ask why that happens. If you mean why time magic, well, I don’t know that neither, but I wonder if you’re frustrated because people keep telling you what you can’t do instead of what you can.” “I grew up thinking ‘magic’ was that toy star field projector I got for my 5th birthday,” answered Gorden. “When I first discovered it, I thought this was something everybody figured out on their own. Nobody’d believe me if I said I could do stuff like unbreak a cup. And then someone came into my life, and through a long chain of people Elbridge came in and he came in with all these extra things…” He sighed again. “What did your mom teach you?” “I think the first thing was how to un-spill milk,” Junior said thoughtfully. “But it sounds like you’ve had time to figure that much out on your own. Hm. Before we get to any lessons, I think we need to discuss payment. Knowledge isn’t free, you know.” “I’m a grad student. I don’t have much money,” Gorden grimaced. “Good thing I don’t need your money then.” The older man stood a little straighter. “Seeing as how I happen to find myself a bit… behind the times nowadays, I’d propose a trade. An hour of magic lessons for an hour of… modern lessons. Then we can both sound just as foolish to the other and it’ll all be square.” “Sounds good to me too,” said Gorden. He switched the hand of his cigarette, now burnt down to the filter, and held it out. Junior took it and shook it hard. His hands were rough, he’d clearly been the working outdoors type his whole life. “So, before we get started, tell me what’s the most difficult thing you’ve managed to do is so I have a baseline for where you’re at now, then I can think up some kind of exercises...”
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Jan 6, 2020 03:07
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Ruby's Dilemma Scene: Winter Safehouse Ruby’s home was, in a word, a huge mess. Laundry was piled up on the floor, plates and cups sat on every spare table, newspapers stacked on the chairs. There was nowhere to sit down in the front room, and as she followed Emma to the kitchen she saw it was even worse. “Mama’s been fighting with Ruby.” Emma said, as if that explained it all. “Sorry you’re seeing everything in such a state. I wanted to at least do some of the washing but I don’t understand how the machine works...” “Remind me about it once I’m done with her. I’ll teach you how it works.” Ada’d never worked with a washing machine before, but she was pretty sure with the advantage of a modern background, it couldn’t be too hard to make it do what she wanted. “Where’s Ruby at? She hiding in her room?” “I think she’s up in the attic,” Emma said. She pushed a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “I uh, haven’t been spending a lot of time at home. But that’s where she usually is.” Junior chose that moment to walk into the kitchen. “Afternoon, Ada. Your friend outside?” He looked rougher than she remembered, like he hadn’t been sleeping much. “Yeah. He doesn’t know much yet, but he knows how to be polite and wait when asked.” A flicker of doubt crossed her face, but then she continued. “Please don’t scare him too much. He’s very curious, but he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. I’m just worried without a guiding hand, he’s gonna end up deleting himself.” Junior shook his head. “All I can do is point out the rocks, if he wants to run his boat over ‘em that’s his business. But don’t you worry too much. It’s pretty hard to get yourself into that much trouble unless you go lookin’ for it on purpose.” Something thumped above them and two female voices started shouting at each other unintelligibly. Junior sighed and looked at the ceiling. “It’d be nice if someone listened to what I had to say for a change,” he growled, then he touched his brow and moved past Ada towards the front door. “Think that’s my song they’re singing,” Ada said, glancing up. Moving closer to Emma, she pulled her in for a reassuring parting hug. “I can’t promise they’ll listen, but I’ll see if can get them to break it up.” “Just don’t stand in between them,” Emma warned. “I’ve still got bruises.” At that, Ada’s lips tightened into a line of displeasure. “We’ll see about that,” was all she said before breaking the hug and heading for the attic. --- Halfway up the stairs a door slammed and the sounds abruptly ended. By the time Ada arrived at the top, only Isabel was waiting for her. She looked… different than Ada remembered. Her cheekbones were sharper and she’d lost weight. Her arms seemed to be longer too, she was not in her spider form but she resembled one even so. “Ah, so you did come,” she said, flicking a lock of hair behind her ear in the exact motion as Emma. The frown slipped from her face, though the smile that replaced it didn’t reach her eyes.“How have you been?” “Busy, tired, and worried,” Ada recited, as if from memory. “So business as usual these days. Sounds like it’s been that way for you two, from what Emma told me.” “Ruby is refusing to transition to Winter, and that puts us in a difficult position,” Isabel said. “I have not been able to reason with her, she is too…” “Headstrong? Scared? Or both?” Ada suggested, thinking back to their last talk. It couldn’t be easy, being forced to become someone else, so soon after finally becoming more accepting of who she was. “Something like that,” Isabel said darkly. “I have Ru-” she caught herself- “Emma to think of, and Junior as well, I can’t just let this-” She broke off with a frustrated huff. “I apologize. That is Winter talking. She is not the only one having to adjust.” The shadows on the wall behind Isabel loomed up and over her, making her look much larger than she was. “If there’s anything you can do, please. She listens to you.” “I’ll try. Where’d she go? Emma said she’d be here...and that last time you talked, she got caught in the crossfire.” Her tone was soft and reassuring -- but her words carried an admonishing edge. Isabel pointed to the ceiling down the hall. There was a thin cord there, which would pull down the ladder to the attic. Apparently that was what had slammed shut as she made her way upstairs. The banshee’s eyes were inky pools. “Have a care, Ada. I cannot let challenges lie as I used to. Not as Winter. The rules have changed.” The part of her that had grown and learned since her trip to the past wanted to apologize, nod and move on. It was sensible, to accept the ways of the world, to respect that some boundaries were not meant to be crossed. It was wise, and she’d been seeking wisdom lately. But right now, she didn’t feel like being wise. “No,” she said firmly as she walked past her, deliberately exposing her back to Isabel as she reached for the cord that’d open the attic. “ I’m not going to stay far away and try not to care just because you can hurt me. Even if it means paying a price for it, I’ve never played by anyone else’s rules.” The lights all went out and a chill wind ruffled her hair. For a moment everything was perfectly quiet. Then the ladder slammed down abruptly and something at the top of it hissed. When Ada looked back there was no one in the hall with her at all. “Hurry,” Ruby said from above. “Before she changes her mind.” The attic was tiny and unfinished, a series of beams with wood planking across them over the top of the pink insulation. The roof slanted both ways, making it only possibly to stand up if you stood in the very center. Ruby pointed to a pair of crates with a third between where a candle burned idly. It was very warm here, stuffy enough to make her sweat. Her friend was in her full human form, her hair a shimmering platinum blonde, with pale skin and rosy cheeks. She wore layers of clothing as if weren’t already stifling, and shivered as she sat down, motioning for Ada to do so as well. “Nice of you to visit,” she said, with a sad little smile. “Mother is… not who she used to be. I apologize.” Ada shook her head, the gilded tips of her hair jingling with her motions. “She doesn’t need to apologize to me. It’s OK.” For a moment, she stared at Ruby, and then followed her. “You’re not, though. Transition still giving you grief?” “I’ve been drinking a lot of cocoa,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “And giving thought to what you said before, about who I want to be. Winter’s law is so cold and calculating, but if I cannot accept it then I will never be at peace with myself. It’s frustrating enough that I have been considering... alternatives.” “Yeah?” Ada asked, curiously, leaning forward a little to listen. “And what are those?” Ruby’s eyes fell. “If Summer will not have me and I cannot stand to join Winter, then there is only one choice remaining. My mother will not hear of it, of course. She fears for my life if I were to become an exile… Especially now, before Titania is found. I’m not sure if I am brave enough to do it, yet. Wyldfae are becoming rarer and rarer as the courts consolidate power. For a courtier of standing, even a disgraced one like myself, to reject politics utterly would cause quite a stir.” “Because a maverick’s a challenge to their authority,” Ada reasoned. “Both of the courts would want to make an example of you. And you’re not planning on just living on the run once you make your rejection public, are you?” “I don’t mean to throw away the life you returned to me,” she said dejectedly. “But yes, Summer would hunt me down without defenders and Winter would seek revenge for scorning their protection. I’d be without allies of any power within Faerie, and a prize for both sides… I can’t promise I’ll be able to stay, dear one. Circumstances may change very quickly, and while I’ll attempt to defend myself… All of Faerie is a daunting foe.” Slowly, Ada nodded, trying to make sense of the enormity of the decision. Part of her approved of the approach Ruby had suggested. What was the point of living bound by ancient, outdated rules you didn’t believe in? Better to be free to make your own mistakes and your own decisions. Another part, however, was not so sure. Ruby had a brave heart, and she was very clever, but she was not a fighter. It was one thing to try to live life in defiance of the powers that be. It was another to consign oneself to violence without being practiced in it. And then there was another matter… “It is. What’s gonna happen to you beyond their meddling, though? Belonging to a Court changes you to better suit its standards. So what would you change into, if you went it alone?” “I don’t know,” Ruby said, but she smiled. “I’ve never been unbound before. It’s something I would have to find out for myself. What I do know is that from the beginning Summer was only my captor, not my choice. I wore the shackles long enough that they became a part of me, so perhaps I won’t change very much, at first.” She tugged on a curl of her hair. “You must think me mad to even consider it.” “Not for wanting to be free,” Ada said, smiling. “Just for wanting to go off half-cocked. You’d think seeing me try it so many times before would be all the encouragement one would need to plan everything out.” Ruby flushed. “I have not gone off yet. I admit to hoping that if your mad plans disrupted the River King’s court enough I might be able to slip away unnoticed.” “So that’s why your mother was so pissed off…” Ada murmured, looking down towards her lap. “It’s only been a couple of months since you got them back. Is giving them up so soon really your first option?” And me?, she wanted to add, but didn’t. This wasn’t about what she wanted. It was about what Ruby wanted to do with her life instead. “It may not come to that,” Ruby said. “Winter may be placatable, though I haven’t the fainted clue how yet. Summer will be harder…” She sighed and pulled her coat closer. “If I must suffer this damned chill until I can figure a way out, and reap the deaths of those who suffer and struggle… Well, hope is a warm thing, if I can hold onto it.” It was a hope, alright, and that was the problem. Lives couldn’t be bet on hopes, not unless there was nothing else left to count on. As far as she could tell, it hadn’t come to that...yet. Mentally, she assigned herself the task of helping Ruby find a way out of her predicament. She hadn’t gone to the past to rescue her just to see her die at the hands of a fairy assassin in some forgotten back-alley.
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Jan 7, 2020 02:27
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The Confessional Scene: Safehouse’s Attic For a moment, Ada didn’t say anything, lips pursed. She wanted to ask questions, but with the way things were right now, there was no way Ruby would give her straightforward answers. What I need to do first is what I came here for, she mused, and then her mind was set. “...Yeah. Hold on to it and we’ll see what we can do.” She waited a moment, and then… “...Ruby, can you show me your true form? There’s something important I have to tell you.” She breathed deeply, and gathered her courage. Every part of her was screaming not to do this, but ever since talking to her mother and uncovering the truth behind her connection to Alisa, she couldn’t think of anything else. If she didn’t let someone know about this, then she’d never have closure. “...I think it’s gonna be easier if I’m looking at your true face.” Ruby’s head tilted in curiosity, but she closed her eyes and when she opened them again they were much larger, and multifaceted. Her antennae unfolded, peeking through her curly hair like untended flowers. “May I leave off the wings? I’d have to undress and it’s hard enough to stay warm with layers.” “Yeah. It’s fine,” Ada answered, her mouth dry. “I wanted to ask you something. The last time we talked, I told you I wasn’t as good a person as people think I am. When I said that, did you believe me?” “You said something inside you awoke when you killed an innocent, and it was a part of you that you didn’t want others to see,” Ruby said. “I believed you.” She couldn’t be pleased that she remembered her confession, but even so, Ada nodded, glad she wouldn’t have to retell such a painful tale. “That thing inside me...it didn’t come to be when I killed for the first time. By then, it was already there. A piece of myself I created after my sister’s death, back at the Midnight Carnival.” Ruby’s eyebrows went up. “The Midnight Carnival?” “Yeah. The one beneath Canal Street. I stayed there for years trying to forget Alisa’s death…” Ada’s gaze became unfocused, as dim flashes of long-repressed memories flickered through her mind. Images she’d never wanted to see again, that she still couldn’t bring herself to fully accept. Glimpses of the formative moments of the person she’d become. “Children don’t often survive long in dark places like that,” Ruby said. “How did you?” “The only way anyone can,” Ada murmured, her eyes glazed with remembrance. “By learning to play the rules of the game. At the Carnival, little lost souls like me had lots of roles they could play.” Yes...so many. She could remember them, if she tried. “We could serve as pets to its greatest patrons, cared for and protected from the games of the lesser revelers in exchange for our free will.” She could see her face in the mirror as the spirit of a dollmaker who’d died childless of old age did her hair up into ringlets so she could proudly present her as the daughter she’d never had. A perfect little princess, trapped in an obsessive routine that was repeated with inhuman precision, up until she set her house ablaze, tired of being reminded of the duSang estate’s riches. “We could gamble on surviving the Party Games, where the winner was granted a wish, and the losers were never heard from again.” She remembered the first game she’d won. It was tag, and “It” had chased down two dozen children and safely stuffed them into its gullet, until the last one remaining had ran enough circles around it to tire it out. She’d celebrated from atop a rusty podium, flanked by a pair of empty spaces, basking in the wild cheers of the gathered crowd. “We could serve as scouts. Taking in the new lost souls and teaching them the ropes, guiding them towards the Carnival’s thrills...and expectant patrons.” It’d been so easy. All it took was playing the part of a mysterious ally, or sometimes a brave heroine, looking to find the truth. Rose Red had been particularly fond of that disguise. Even then, she knew how to make those who were lost and vulnerable believe in her. “...There’s a million ways to survive at the Midnight Carnival, if you’re willing to explore them. All it takes is giving up on your humanity, your kindness, your soul,” she said, looking up at Ruby, waiting for the judgement she knew was to come next. But the faerie showed only keen interest, leaning forward on her crate. “If only you had known you still carried your sister with you, so much suffering could have been avoided… But the tale is half-finished. If you gave up on being human, how did you find your way out?” “I met Blaise and Dizzy, two of the Rookies. God knows how they ended up there, they never told me about it. The Carnival is a free for all, but when they came in together, they survived by relying on each other and not just themselves.” She remembered...Dizzy with a sprained ankle, and Blaise picking him up and putting him on his back so he could rest. Their quiet chatter, thinking no one could hear them. Their determined, aimless rambling, lost in the dark. “At the Carnival, newness and freshness are what gives things and people value. In the five years I’d been there, I’d never seen a pair like them. So I spoke with them and they told me about their gang, how it was like a family to them.” She remembered the smile she’d worn that day, broad and curious and mysterious like the Cheshire Cat, the way she’d stalked after them, unseen and unexpected, the look on their faces as they’d finally emerged into the light. “I showed them a way out I’d found a long time ago and followed them back home. I didn’t mean anything by it -- there was no plan, no rhyme nor reason. I just wanted to see what kind of place such interesting people had come from.” It all felt so unreal, like a watercolor stained with oil, and yet it’d happened, as certain as if she’d spent all those years looking at the world through the Sight. “Did you stay with them?” Ruby asked, eyes wide. “What happened?” “They took me to meet the Rookies. Said I’d saved their lives. The others were so relieved to have them back, they never really bothered to ask why I was always smiling, why I was never scared when Rook laid down the law and punished kids at random to make sure we all stayed in line. They just...accepted me.” The Carnival’s episodes receded like a sudden drizzle, giving way to her first few memories of the sunlit world after living so long underground. To her first few memories of confusion, friendship, and guilt. “They shared their food with me, and let me into their plans. They talked to me when they thought I was lonely, and listened when I told them what to do like my words meant something. They taught me how to act human again.” Her voice was shaking now, thick with emotions just barely held in check. Ruby nodded. “This girl who carelessly let others use her, who beat them in games of chance with the highest stakes, who led them to their deaths with a smile… Is that what you meant when you told me you carry a monster within you?” Ada sniffled, nodding slowly as she did so. “Yeah,” she said, too ashamed to speak further. “Yeah.” “So you left the Carnival, but it didn’t leave you. Not entirely,” Ruby said, reaching for her hand. The faerie’s fingers were chilly, but strong. “Keep going, we’re getting to the heart of things now.” It took several deep breaths before Ada could keep going. When she did, she spoke quietly, scared that raising her voice would let the monster out. “Rook crossed a line. He tried to kill Fly for loving up an important delivery during a gang war and I killed him. And when I drove my blood through his heart, I cracked. I felt so powerful...so entertained. It was like no game I’d ever played before. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was what the Carnival’s patrons felt, day in and day out. I could be like them- no, I already was like them, and it scared me. There was no room to pretend I was human if I went down that path. So I fought back against it. I wrapped myself in lies of perfection, tried to embody all the ideals the others had taught me about. And for a while, it worked. I chained myself down.” “Why?” Ruby interrupted the story for the first time, her eyes narrowing in confusion. “If all that came out of the carnival was a monster, who put the chains on her?” “I don’t know,” Ada said, shaking her head. She’d never really thought about it. “Someone who didn’t like what she was selling, maybe. That feeling of power, coupled to that savagery, the debasement...it felt wrong, somehow.“ “So you put the monster aside, and became someone else, again?” Ruby asked. “Yeah, I did. The Ada you saw when we first met. Somebody who was kind and gentle and brave and perfect. A heroine. The loving Maid of New Orleans,” she said, laughing quietly, but then she grew serious again. “Someone who didn’t care if she got hurt to protect others, didn’t care how much of her life she gave up if it meant not facing the truth of what I’d become. A martyr looking for a cause, kind of.” “A martyr who didn’t really care who got hurt so long as she got her glorious death,” Alisa murmured, just as quietly as her. “Even after you knew I was there, you still kept going down that dangerous road with the weakest excuses I ever heard.” Ruby nodded. “This is the part that’s familiar to me. But lately you haven’t been satisfied with that either. What changed, Ada?” Ada’s eyes turned distant. “I woke up from my first night having made love to Rick to find out while I was giving myself a moment of peace, my friends had all gone out to take on a fallen angel or die trying.” She huffed. “Bullshit. That was what I thought then, and I still do. I wasn’t even out for more than a couple hours, and it was still too loving much for them. I took a moment to stop being an idol, and they respected it so much they went off half-cocked to go and get themselves killed by a foe outside their paygrade, the same way I usually did. I had to rush out the manor in a Chanel LBD and high heels to reach them in time. If I’d waited even one moment, at least one of them would’ve died and they’d all be child killers.” She clenched her fist, so tightly that the knuckles went white. “I couldn’t take it anymore. After that, I was done. I wanted to stop living in a world where trying to do the things I did was even possible, where it wasn’t roundly stupid. And I realized I never would if I kept playing the hero. Heroes are like cops. They just guard the world, they don’t fix it. If you want to make things better, you have to reach out to grasp the world and seize it with both hands.” “So now you want to fix the world?” Alisa snapped. “Is that what all the stuff about restoring the family name is about? You’re just making up a new face, since the others weren’t good enough! When does it stop, Ada?” “You think I loving know?” She shot back, turning around to glare at her, not caring that Ruby couldn’t see her. “I don’t, and I don’t think about it. If I did, I’d never stop asking myself that question every day, until I was a wreck.” Her eyes were blazing now, with a kind of determination both Alisa and Ruby were very familiar with. “And that’s not how this ends. I don’t mind being a saint, a queen or a murderer, Alisa, but I’M NOT A loving WRECK!” Why was she shouting? Why was she standing up now? She didn’t know, and that had always been the problem. She tried to calm herself down, but it went slowly. Very slowly. She sat back down again in slow motion, glaring so intensely at the floor it seemed that it might burst into flame. “Perhaps not yet,” Ruby said quietly. “But each time you remold yourself, something of the old remains. The child, the monster, the martyr, these faces will always be a part of you, even if they fight like cats in a sack. Adding more cats will not make the sack more pleasant to live in-” she held a hand up to ward off interruption. “-and before you object, consider which facet of yourself would rather be a thousand cats if she could get what she wants. If you continue this way, you are lost, dear one. There will be nothing in the world that can please all the warring parts of you. It is a path that ends in madness and destruction, both for you and anyone who follows you.” Ada snorted, but didn’t fire back against it. “So then what?” she asked after a couple long minutes, still belligerently. “If you’re saying pick one and stick with it, the answer’s no. None of these faces are who I wanna be.” “Who you want to be doesn’t matter,” Ruby said forcefully. “Who are you, Ada duSang? Not any of these, but all of them, and someone else too. The one deep inside who made them, used them, chained them, and tried unsuccessfully to discard them. That is the person you need to find. I’ve seen glimpses of her, now and then. So have others. Let her out, and she might surprise you.” “You think there’s something inside me I still haven’t unchained?” There was an edge to the question, but it wasn’t blazing hot like before. It was defensive, the distance of someone who couldn’t fully lower her guard. “I can’t believe it. If there was something there I’d know. I always know what I want, and I’ve wanted to find myself so badly I’ve cracked myself in ways most people can’t even imagine.” Another long silence fell between them. “What do you even think she’s like?” It wasn’t a guarded query anymore. Just confused. Ruby’s antennae twitched as she thought. With others she might fall back on faerie vagaries but Ada deserved what truths she could offer. “I don’t believe she’s chained, Ada. She is the one holding the chains. The source of all desires. Remember times when the mask broke and left you naked, angry, or afraid. Who were you then?” Ada rested her chin against her hand. She looked thoughtful now, like she was wrestling with a grand enigma she could just barely begin to grasp. “...I don’t know. It’s like there’s nothing there. I just felt something and knew it was time for a change. I’d say I was no one, but...that’s not possible, is it?” She asked, glancing up at Ruby. “Everything has to come from somewhere, even the masks I use to lie to people.” “I don’t expect you to have the answer now,” Ruby said. “Just to think about it, huh?” There wasn’t much else to do. Not much wrong with it, either. But it just seemed pointless, somehow. She was on borrowed time. What comfort could knowledge possibly bring? ...No. That was an excuse. She knew herself well enough to know this much. It was just frightening, in a way that ran bone-deep, to ponder who Ada duSang really was. Even accepting she was nothing more than a hollow meat suit seemed better than facing the truth, for some reason she couldn’t understand. “gently caress,” she murmured softly. “I’m scared of myself and I don’t even know why. What’s honesty going to cost me, Ruby?” “I don’t know,” Ruby said, reaching over to brush a hand against her friend’s cheek. “I wish I could be of more help, but I find myself in much the same position as you.” “Trapped with no way out, caught between a rock and a hard place…” Slowly, Ada’s hand rose up to her face to clasp Ruby’s. “Why don’t you throw away the courts and stand by me instead?” she asked. “I couldn’t bear to see you walk away from me, from everyone you love.” “You are not in a position to make such an offer,” Ruby said sadly. “And I would be a fool to accept it.” Ada’s thoughts flashed back to Elbridge’s warnings. Amass a power base, form alliances, entice people to work for you before you try to make them believe in what you’re trying to say. But something inside her told her it didn’t work that way. “More of a fool than if you abandoned things you spent a century fighting for?” she asked her, peering deeply into her inky black eyes. Ruby’s hand slipped from Ada’s and she crossed her arms, sitting back further on the crate. “I will not bring my troubles to your door when you already have a pile of your own. It will only encourage you to hide deeper behind your masks when you start fearing you’ve made promises you can’t keep.” She sighed and looked away, flushing. “At some point I have to take responsibility for my own problems.” “It’s not about not wanting to make trouble, is it," Ada mused, struck by a sudden hunch. “We’d both pick up the other’s burden if we could. It’s about finding your own strength, finding out what it takes to live free of the courts, from all bindings. Even from me,” she added, shooting her an inquiring look. “Even from you,” Ruby said with a heavy sigh. “Is that ungrateful of me?” “It’s not,” said Ada, with a little sheepish smile. “I’m just scared to lose you.” “And I you. Which is why we are not going to throw ourselves into the fire, hand in hand.” “No,” Ada said, shaking her head. “Instead, we get to walk out into the freezing cold, all alone.” She took a step forward, and pulled Ruby into a tight embrace. “I don’t know how to live without a mask,” she admitted guiltily as she held her close. “I’ve been hiding behind them for so long they’re my lifelines. If I step out of this house without them, I think I’ll just drown.” “There’s only one way to find out,” Ruby said. “You aren’t alone anymore Ada. Don’t be afraid.” She nodded, slowly and hesitantly. “The only way to learn how to swim is to take the plunge.” As she thought about it, she realized it wasn’t just the fear of vulnerability that scared her, or even being scared of what her true self might be like. The most paralyzing thing was the sheer aimlessness of it all, the feeling of chasing after something that only seemed like nothing to her. “I don’t have an answer to who I really am yet,” she began, her voice quiet, uncertain, but laced with iron still. “Which means I need to find one, one that isn’t just a gaping void. Do you think the real me was already there when I fell in with the Midnight Carnival, Ruby?” “She was, but only as a child. She’s grown with you since then.” “Then she felt the pain of losing Alisa.” A shiver coursed through her, strong enough for Ruby to feel her shifting against her arms. “That empty, hollow feeling...that dull ache like I had a knife lodged deep within my gut I couldn’t take out.” “She’s felt everything, all along the way,” Ruby said, leaning her head on Ada’s shoulder. “No more questions, dear one. This is something you need to work out on your own.” “No more questions,” Ada said, nodding in agreement as she clutched her tightly. “There’ll be enough to think about in the morning.” “Mmhm...” Ruby exhaled, happy to let such difficult topics rest. But there was one thing still bothering her. “I understand why you came to me with this, dear one. But why now?” A sigh escaped Ada’s lips as her fears came rushing back to her. “It’s a long story,” she said, resting her head against Ruby’s shoulder for support. She waited for a few moments, marshaling her thoughts, and then continued. “Last night, I killed again. I let the monster run free, and afterward, I realized I’m running out of time. My mother knows of a family ritual that might help me purge some of the accumulated bloodlust, but…” “It’s dangerous, isn’t it?” “Like swallowing fire,” she said, nodding slowly. “The only way to abate the bloodlust for a while is to kill someone. And since I’m done letting the monster run rampant, that means I have to take my own life.” Ruby hissed at that. “Yeah,” Ada said, raising a hand to soothe Ruby by stroking her cheek. “It’s not supposed to be fatal if I do it correctly, but it’ll be the next best thing. I wanted to come clean with someone, in case I didn’t make it. And besides...if I went through with it, you’d know, wouldn’t you.” “Of course I would,” she snapped, posessively. “I will attend this ritual. Promise me you’ll tell me where you’ll be before you go through with it.” “I promise,” she said, nodding. “When it happens, though, it’ll be at my home, in the bowels of the duSang estate. Are you sure you want to be there? I know how unnerving you think the house is.” Ruby pulled back far enough to press her forehead against Ada’s. “I will be there.” For the first time that evening, warmth filled Ada’s chest, and a real smile bloomed on her face. “You spoil me,” she said, not moving even an inch for fear of breaking contact. “You spoil me way more than I deserve. I’m still scared of dying...but if you’re there for me, Ruby, I don’t think I will. I can’t let you down and make you cry.” Despite it all, Ruby smiled. “Then I have nothing to be afraid of. Now come, let us speak of kinder things. I can bear no more heartache this day.” “I’m right with you,” she said, sitting down on the floor, gently nudging Ruby to join her. “What sorts of things do you have in mind?” “Emma learned to bake ginger cookies while I was still sulking about them,” Ruby said, folding her legs delicately as she sat down. “She told me her friend from school ‘got the recipe off the internets’. Then she asked me what the internets were.” Ada grinned. “So what did you do? Did you corrupt her with that secret knowledge?” “Even better,” Ruby said mischievously. “I told her to ask you about it.” Transient People fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 02:30
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Mook Hunt Continues Scene: Copperhead Compound The 101st Dragonarmy, also known as the “Copperheads” on this side of the Veil, had made their home base at an abandoned public recreation centre a half-hour’s drive from downtown New Orleans. They were, in all likelihood, the reason for its abandonment, having occupied the buildings and fortified them with sandbags and gun emplacements. The erstwhile ranger station was surrounded by a ring of smaller edifices - dining areas, an administrative building, and a wildlife centre that had been converted into a shooting range if the bullet holes were any indication. Wooden scaffolding ran around the perimeter, with a fan-boat launch at the water’s edge next to an oversized gondola. All in all, it reminded Elbridge of a motte-and-bailey from his homeland - an old-fashioned castle, but instead of stables full of horses, it had a carport full of Humvees, pickup trucks, and rusted-out sedans. All of which were apparently registered to the compound itself, as Tobin’s had been. “No fear of the law, plainly,” Elbridge observed. “Robin of Locksly and his Merry Men, these are not.” “Seems to be a lot of them out, merry or otherwise,” Rick noted, parking Bigsby’s truck in amongst the others. It stood out anywhere else, here it was like a zebra, invisible due to being surrounded by others of its kind. “So what’s the plan here? The two boys didn’t seem to know anything about the supernatural, and their uncle’s dead- most likely to some fomor creation after they messed up the handoff. You didn’t find out what Chesterfield’s connection to them is, but if they’re Cuprionax’s lackeys it might just be a guns-for-hire thing. Chesterfield seems like the type to make sure the right people owe her favors.” “So they’re a concierge service for monsters,” Elbridge said, shaking out the stiffness as Rick ceded control of his body back to him. “Perhaps they’ve done work for Midas as well.” “Seems like a bit of a long shot,” Rick said worriedly. “Even if they have... how are you going to find out about it?” “He always pays in gold.” Elbridge sighed. “They might not have been involved with Frisk’s disappearance, but you said it yourself: Guns-for-hire. Favors for favors. It’s an entire, festering ecosystem of supernatural, organised crime. Work will be easier once we can rule them out as suspects…” He smiled grimly. “...for this case, and all future ones.” “Is the New Orleans arsonist about to strike again, because that sounded ominous.” “No, it’s too wet for that, and a sinkhole would destroy evidence. And probably violate the First Law.” Elbridge squinted at the central building, the former ranger station. The sun was setting, and lights began to shine through the windows as another generator rumbled to life. “Once we’ve found what we need, I’m sure there’ll be something juicy enough for a federal investigator. An open-and-shut case, wrapped up in a bow.” Rick nodded appreciatively. “You did say you wanted to be more proactive.” He smiled. “But just so you know, a sword case won’t look out of place here, but I don’t think ‘vacationing tourist grandpa’ is going to fly as well as it did on campus.” “A problem, to be sure.” Elbridge frowned. “Mobile veils are tricky, even without running water everywhere. Hrm…” He blinked. “Didn’t you say that Turner used a version of his adulthood-in-a-bottle potion to disguise Lytle once?” “Yeah, it was basically ectoplasmic play-dough. Hugues made him a face mask and we dressed him up in Lauden’s clothes and shoved a pillow down his shirt. It was also dark and only meant to fool some demons but if you took your time it could be a good enough disguise to work on people.” He paused. “Why, you got some handy?” “Not at present, but I should be able to approximate Turner’s recipe with a little foraging in the bayou and a few hours to brew. Still...two against a hundred. Not the best odds, even if they are idiots. Perhaps we ought to return with backup and proper equipment - oh!” Elbridge exclaimed softly. “But while we’re here, I CAN do this.” Putting on a pair of waders for protection, he shuffled off into the dense foliage, heading toward the carport. He scraped off his boots thoroughly before stepping onto the buckled concrete, searching for a promising candidate. Cracked, bullet-holed, missing altogether...there! A rusted-out clunker of a Pinto, dented on the front, back, and all four doors - yet its side mirror was miraculously-intact. Elbridge produced a pen-knife and began to work the glass from its setting. Almost...almost… The car’s alarm went off, wailing and honking as the remaining headlight flashed, and Elbridge almost dropped the glass as he startled. Inside the building, a figure began to move behind the frosted glass, raising something in its hand. Something bulky and dark. The figure’s hand squeezed… ...and the alarm stopped. “FUCKIN’ POSSUMS!” the figure shouted, muffled through the glass and the roar of the generators. “Oughta fetch my varmint gun.” Elbridge let out a soft sigh of relief, then selected a different vehicle to burglarise, this time strangling its alarm with a hex before it could cry out. Elbridge rolls Burglary at Diff 4 to steal a good mirror! +-/+ +2 = 3, one short. He invokes “Neither Wealth Nor Taste” to scrounge efficiently, bringing his total to 5 - hurray for false positives! “For all the times you scolded Hugues about mirrors, you’ve gotten awfully fond of that one,” Rick noted as El looked for a place to set up his makeshift spy camera. “You even speak in rhyme to it. You sure it’s safe to keep using that thing?” “...no,” Elbridge said candidly, wedging the mirror in a sheltered spot with a good view of the compound. “I’ve scrutinised it thoroughly, and found nothing untoward, but faerie enchantments can be fiendishly-subtle. All the same - what about this entire job is safe?” “Fair point,” Rick said, keeping a close watch on the window where the guard had shown himself while Elbridge worked. “Suppose I shouldn’t throw rocks, living in cursed objects and all.” “Or not-living, as it were.” Satisfied that the mirror was hidden someplace useful, Elbridge made his way back through the glades, covering his tracks as he went. “I’ll be vigilant for any nasty surprises, but at times one can merely pick one’s poison.” Rick grunted assent. “Makes me wonder when Cuprionax is going to move again, though. She can’t have taken the loss of her son very well. Or uh, that cup we- I- stole back from her. Remind me not to let the dragons know I’ve become a collectible.” Elbridge slid back into the driver’s seat and let Rick take control again - and there was another risk they’d been taking of late. “Let’s dispense with her repo men before the thought occurs to her, then.”
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Jan 7, 2020 03:17
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Interlude - The Curious Case of the Missing Hound, Part 1 (set pre-Book 4) James leaned back in his chair and sipped at the styrofoam cup of weak coffee. Out of sheer habit, he’d chosen a seat near the back of the community centre hall where the Paranet meeting was being held, with a clear line of sight to the doors at the front. Stood before the assembled group, elderly Japanese-American man had just finished explaining the use of traditional Ofuda talismans in placing temporary wards - an interesting subject, but one James doubted he could use with his meagre talents - and the room was soon enough filled with the sounds shuffling and scraping of chairs on the floor that signaled the meeting had come to an end. Paranet meetings were a useful way to keep an eye on a town’s magical community, and James often found himself drawn to them - though, perhaps it simply because the people there understood what it was like to possess strange magical powers - even if he did attend in the guise of James Ivarson, ex-PI, new businessman and amateur Psychometrist. There was, after all, no need to scare people with secret orders, monster hunting or war stories from Langley. He looked up from his cup at the sound of a walking stick rapping on the floor, approaching closer and closer. An elderly woman was making her way towards, the very image of someone’s great aunt who owned more than her fair share of cats. Sitting down in the empty chair next to him, she leaned over, speaking quietly in a surprisingly clear voice, “You’re the PI, right, dearie?” Glancing over, James took another sip of the weak coffee - he was still regretting bothering with it - before he replied, ”Used to be. Not so much anymore. What’s the problem?” “Did you ever find lost people? What about lost pets?” asked the old lady, peering at James through horn-rimmed half moon glasses, “I live at the edge of the Bayou, you see, dearie. And the day before last, my dear dog Rex wandered off into the swamps, chasing after a set of flickering lights. Poor Rex reached thirty last month, I’d hate to think he got stuck in a bog or something, but I can't go looking myself, you see.” “I don't know much about-” started James, getting his excuse ready early, before he paused and asked, “Wait, did you say your dog turned thirty?” “Yes, dearie. Rex is part fae hound, see,” replied the lady, as if a thirty year old dog were perfectly normal to her. James ran his hand through his hair - alright, so trudging through swamps sounded like it would suck, but hey, it wasn’t every day you met a faerie dog, and she had come to him for help. “Alright, I’ll take a look tomorrow morning. What do I call you?” “Arabella Whillwind, dearie. I knew I had a good feeling about you.” - As it turned out, Arabella hadn't been kidding when she lived at the edge of the Bayou - though a more accurate description would have been that she lived about half a block into it. Dressed in a ratty pair of old jeans and a pair of army surplus boots, James stepped out of his car and checked the knife at his hip - another purchase at the army surplus store, an old k-bar. Bringing his old hunting rifle would have been too conspicuous, and, so he’d left it at home with Mateusz’ old Colt - worst come to worst, he’d have to test out just how well he'd trained for a knife fight, though he doubted the trudge through the swamps would get that dangerous. Grabbing a small rucksack of supplies, he swung the car door shut and looked up to see Arabella waving at him through the front window of her clearly well cared for - and surprisingly cat-less - home. - About the only thing Grace appreciated about this new ‘gig economy’ is she didn’t have to call out sick. Don’t need to get paid that day? Don’t go to work. She had gotten up early that day and biked out to one of her favorite bayous. Really, most of the swamp was the same, but this place wasn’t too far from civilization. There were houses right up to the edge of the water, and more importantly, some minimarts only a few blocks away. She had locked up her bike at one and took her camo knapsack and hiked in a little bit. On one of her first visits out, Grace had discovered an old access road that lead to the remains of a shack and an abandoned airboat dock, the perfect place to hide her clothes and go for a long swim. Hadn’t seen too many snakes in this part, but there were plenty of fish and she’d caught and eaten a raccoon last time she was here. There were also a couple of groupings of little folk she’d spotted in this area. Grace wasn’t exactly running low on moonshine, but they’d be able to tell her where to find the local distillers. For a price. Maybe next time she’ll feel like bargaining with them, but half the reason she came out today was to get away from people and their petty problems. As she floated away, lazily spinning to stretch out her newly formed muscles and flicking her tail, yesterday's argument replayed in her head for the 27th time. “No, Mr. Petescu, you do not get a discount because you wanted your package delivered by 12:30. The dispatch notice says it was requested at 12:31, Mr. Petescu.. While I have many talents, I am not a time traveller, Mr. Petescu. I am not in billing, you’ll have to discuss that with them, Mr. Petescu. I don’t know when you called, Mr. Petescu. Thank you for using A-1 Delivery, Mr. Petescu.” - James had been to worse places to hike through than the swampy Bayou near Arabella’s house - he just couldn't think of any at that particular moment. After what felt like hours of trudging through mud and brackish water, he was no closer to finding any sign of the elderly woman’s part-faerie dog, Rex. His jeans were soaked and heavy with mud, his hair was dripping with sweat and the near-constant flies were a menace. He'd been taught to track back when he was a young lad by his Uncles, but the woods of Minnesota were a far different place to this swamp - the long stretches of shallow water hid tracks too well for him to follow. He had all but given up hope, almost ready to hike back again and give Arabella the bad news when he heard the barking in the distance, from amongst a grove of gnarled, twisted trees. His spirit buoyed, he trudged forward with renewed vigour, half hiking, half wading through the swamp. - A couple of fish and a sunny nap floating in the little lake here did wonders for Grace’s spirits. She swam lazily in a couple of circles, just idly watching the other critters. First she noticed a handful of birds started making some noise, moving further in, before seeing the real cause of the ruckus. A… tourist? Maybe? He wasn’t dressed like one, but, he also sure as hell wasn’t wearing waders and swamp boots. Jeans will soak right through and a t-shirt doesn’t do poo poo to protect from the mosquitos. He looked like an ill prepared man on a mission. He was gonna get his boots stuck in a sinkhole. Watching him struggle for a bit, Grace had decided to follow him. Either this idiot will need help to get out alive… or he’s up to something and will feed her for the better part of a month. - The grove was the site of the strangest standoff James had ever seen. In the centre of the grove standing on a small island, stood what he assumed was Rex - the part faerie dog was the largest Labrador he had ever seen, his pale fur all but hidden beneath a thick coating of swamp muck, eyes set watching his foe as it circled the island. Above him, clustered in another of the gnarled trees, on the platform of what looked like a miniature treehouse - albeit one made by someone with only the loosest sense of what carpentry was - stood a group of six inch tall people in strange attire, clutching tiny spears in shaking hands as they cowered behind their protector. Circling the island was a truly massive alligator, a fifteen foot long monster of a creature that would have given even Steve Irwin cause to pause and think again before he got closer, poking above the water with malice in its eyes. Spotting James as he ducked under a low tree branch and entered the clearing, the crowd of tiny swamp folk started “shouting” to him, squeaky cries for help - but Rex’s eyes never moved from the monstrous creature before the hound. Well, this explains where Rex wandered off to - he was stuck in a stalemate with this monster, thought James as he considered his arsenal - a knife and a survival kit. Slim odds against a fifteen foot 'gator - but at least it hadn’t spotted him. Yet. First job was to arm himself, at least a little bit better, and so he started checking the branches - most of them were flimsy and damp, but he soon found a sturdy one long enough for his purposes. After some hacking with the knife, he managed to snap the length of wood, and after a liberal application of duct tape, he had himself a makeshift spear. Some of the fairy folk - the ones that weren't cowering in fear, anyway - had gathered to watch him work, confused looks on their faces. Next, he took the flare gun - along with the two flares - out of his survival kit, loaded one and then slipped them into his belt. A makeshift spear and a flare gun with two shots against a monster of a 'gator. Well, he'd fought worse odds. - It wasn’t hard to follow the stranger through the swamp, she kept 30 or 40 feet away, not really stalking him but just keeping him in view. He seemed to know how to track, despite his lack of gear, and got a little closer when he stopped. He’d been following the occasional barks coming from this area. Maybe he’s not a total idiot, he just lost his dog. She could appreciate someone going to these lengths for his companion. Except… he was making a weapon? Now, her curiosity was piqued. She circled around, trying to see what he was arming himself against.
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Jan 8, 2020 19:38
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Interlude - The Curious Case of the Missing Hound, Part 2 (set pre-Book 4) Clutching his makeshift spear in one hand and the flare gun in the other, James stepped off the tiny mound and back into muddy swamp water. Keeping the flare gun barrel raised and pointed at the alligator, he trudged forward, making slow but steady progress through the thick mud hidden under the stagnant water. About halfway to the centre of the clearing, James finally got a good look at the circling predator - save for a tiny glint of metal in one ear, the creature’s green scaled body all but blended into the water as it glided along with remarkable speed for something so big. One loud bark from Rex was all the warning he got as the beast surged forward, through the water, straight at him. With a click, he fired the flare gun, a burning projectile soaring at the 'gator, only to glance off the beast’s thick hide, tumbling into the water, the fire snuffed out. “Oh, gently caress off,” grumbled an exasperated James as he half stumbled, half dived sideways, scrambling away from the beast’s path, the flare gun slipping from his grasp as rows of pointed teeth snapped shut, inches from his back. He wasn't going to escape from the thing, so he turned on the spot, clutching the spear in both hands, spinning it to batter the beast on the about a few times as he backed away, creating some distance. Unless he made the luckiest strike imaginable, he sure as hell wasn't beating it with a spear, and he wasn't going to be able to wrestle the thing to the ground any time soon. This wasn't going well, not at all. He saw the 'gator lunge this time, and he was ready for it, darting sideways and lashing out with the blunt end of the spear, keeping his distance. Glancing back at the audience of small folk, he yelled, "You guys could help, y'know!" - Nevermind, he’s an idiot. He may be trying to save his dog, and some fae folk, but that is a MONSTER of a gator. Grace freezes for a second, taking the scene in. If he was smart, he’d come back with a shotgun and a proper spear, and a team. The man in the wet jeans is not smart. The dog barked, and Grace watched the flare bounce off the gator’s hide. If alligators could grimace, she would have. That MIGHT hurt if he’d shot the beast in its open mouth, but instead it’s barely an annoyance. The man in the wet jeans may suicidally stupid, but his dog and the fae didn’t deserve to be eaten. Fortunately, it’s distracted chasing after the man. Grace isn’t quite as large as it, only 12 feet, but without human intelligence behind it, she knew exactly how to bait it, and win the fight. A nip at the tail, and then a full bite around its neck or face. Followed by half an hour of wrestling until it gives up and goes submissive. That would give everyone plenty of time to get away from the overgrown lizard who thinks it can eat fae folk in her new swamp. - Once they were spurred to speech, the small folk didn't stop giving him ideas - unfortunately they mostly ranged from the wildly impractical ("Behead it!") to the downright impossible ("Make it your new battle mount!") and he was about to tune them out so he could focus on the fight until one of them, an elderly fae, chimed in with, "He used to be peaceful until someone gave him that tag, so get rid of that!" Spinning the spear in his hands so he had the blade forwards, he stared the animal down. All he needed to hook the thing and he should have enough leverage to tear it free. Which was all well and good, except the 'gator's rows of teeth were distinctly in the way. He through a few probing stabs, but it was ready for him. - He might not know what he’s doing in the swamp, but the man in the wet jeans does know how to fight. Grace dove under the water, singularly focused on her prey. It was completely distracted trying to get past the poking spear as she nipped at its tail. It predictably whipped around, to its left. Grace surged forward in the water, catching the alligator over its neck in her jaws. It has probably 150 pounds on her, but she knows all she has to do is hold on. It took the first turn, spinning clockwise, throwing her up in the air, and slamming her down into the water on the other side of it. Towards the man. She just hoped her tail missed him. But that wasn’t really her concern. Both she and the alligator were upside down, thrashing in the water. Grace found purchase against the shore with her tail, and pushed towards the beast, going underneath him this time. Both of them stopped, rising to the surface for a moment. This was a battle of will as much as strength. It will try something again in a moment, as will she, but until then, both of them just sit in the water. It’s skin and skeleton are too tough for her jaws to crush, but in the water it can’t do much but tire itself out spinning her around. She has the upper hand, and it knows it. - The arrival of the other alligator, while extremely fortunate, came as something of a shock to James - and he soon had to all but throw himself sideways, struggling to keep his footing as he narrowly avoided having his head taken off by a soaring 'gator. He had to scramble to stop himself falling under the water, and by the time he'd righted himself, they were locked in battle. The smart thing to do would have been to back away, join the fairies on their isle - but if what the elder had said had been true, this was an innocent creature forced into this, and he didn't particularly want to sit back and watch it die in battle if that were true. Staring at the animal, the tag was a great deal clearer from this angle, and he knew he could make the stab if it stayed distracted. And so he started to circle around, edging slightly closer, ready to dart in for the lunge at the right moment. - Grace watched the man in the wet jeans as he came closer. He should have run, but clearly he didn’t know the first thing about the swamp. One of the faerie folks kept yelling, it was hard to hear, half submerged, but something about a tag near the ear. She didn’t have a great view from where she was holding onto it, but she could at least angle this beast’s jaws away from the man. She gently swam a little to her right with her tail, angling so she’s pushed the giant alligator towards the shore, and the man, sideways. If he didn’t know what he was doing, it would gain it’s footing on the shore and possibly take the upper hand. She hoped he wasn’t an idiot. - He wasn't sure if this new alligator was listening, or if he was just the luckiest man alive (but he as definitely going to invest in a scratchcard if he survived this, just to be sure), but it had given him an angle. Circling to the side, so he wouldn't get crushed underfoot, he waited, tense. At the last possible moment, he lashed out with the spear - for a second he thought it had glanced off the scales, but then he felt the weight of the tag on the tip. After a tiny wiggle to make sure it was hooked, using the spear as leverage, he tore the thing free and sent it flying into the swamp water. Hoping it was enough, he scrambled out of the path of the two fighting animals. - Like, well, magic, the larger gator stopped struggling. Grace saw just a glint of metal sail over her, and the beast relaxed. She held onto it for another minute just to make sure it wasn’t trying to be tricky, gave an extra squeeze with her jaws and released. It dove under the water and swam away from her as fast as it could. It felt right to Grace, defending some little folk, a dog and an idiot. Knowing that she was still the top of the food chain. She floated for a while, watching them all. When he didn’t ignore or freak out over the faerie folk, she realized this was a golden opportunity. She had saved the day, so now she was going to try to get paid for it. She dove under the murky water, churning it up a bit, and then re-emerged, just her human head above the water. “Hey, wet jeans! Come here often?”
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Jan 8, 2020 19:39
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Interlude - The Curious Case of the Missing Hound, Part 3 (set pre-Book 4) The elder faerie had, thankfully, been right. He watched the massive alligator slink off into the distance, and, after a quick glance at the other one - far from being aggressive, it just seemed to stare at him - he started to trudge over to the faeries. The settlement was in celebration, the small folk flitting around with glee now they were safe from the blighted creature. Rex was having the time of his life, receiving all manner of scratches, strokes and pets. James was about to take a seat on the edge of the island when he heard a voice behind him. Turning about, he spotted her, right where that other alligator had been lurking. He blinked a few times, as he tried to work out what she might be. She didn't look regal enough to be a sidhe, and she wasn't trying to eat him like a monster would, so odds were she was some kind of skinchanging local mage. Raising an eyebrow, he replied dryly, "Oh, sure, I often spend my afternoons hiking through miserable swamps, looking for lost dogs." With a bemused smile, he added, "Cheers for the save though, Miss…?" Grace submerged herself and popped her head up a few feet closer. “Wagner.” The word came out odd, compared to the rest of her accent. It had a strong german V sound, but everything else had a touch of the local creole Yat. “And you’re welcome. But next time you lose your dog, you should invest in some waders, Mr...?” “Mr. Ivarson, but everyone just calls me James,” he replied, raising an eyebrow as he contemplated just why she was moving underwater - though it was promptly replaced by a smirk when he reconsidered everything. “He’s not my dog, an old lady asked me to see if I could find him for her. As for the gear… well, this used to work for hunting, back home. I’m new in town, and I’m not quite used to the local terrain yet.” A loud, cracking laugh cut through the silence as James admitted he’s new, and not equipped for the swamp. “Well, next time you’ll know. Use vinegar on your clothes to get the fish smell out.” Glancing around, he looked in the murky water for the tag he’d ripped free of the alligator, “You see where that tag went? I’d rather like to track down whoever’s turning the local wildlife feral.” Grace gave him a nod before dropping back underwater. Her gator form bobbed to the surface a moment later, gave him a snort, and then disappeared again. A few minutes later, she reappeared with several PBR cans, a length of barbed wire, about 2 feet of tree root and several other bits of metal between her teeth. Grace swam towards shore, crawled onto land in front of him, and opened her jaw, presenting her findings to him. He grimaced as soon as he realized what she wanted him to do - there was something primal in his head that was screaming at him that sticking his hand inside a predator’s mouth was a terrible idea - not that he needed any primal instincts to tell him that, mind. Raising an eyebrow, he quipped, “Can you not spit this stuff out? I mean, we just met, and I like to save sticking my hand in a girl’s mouth to at least the third date, y’know?” The gator’s jaw gently closed and opened, twice. She pushed up on her side, but out of the water, she couldn’t easily roll over. She stuck her tongue out a little bit, but it didn’t really have the lift to push anything out of her mouth. Sighing, James glanced around, thinking up other options - for a fraction of a second he even considered asking one of the faeries if they'd do it, but then his sense of morality kicked in and discarded the idea. Setting his makeshift spear down, he grabbed a long stick from the ground and edged closer. "Gonna sweep it out with this then, OK?" Grace just snorted at James. If she had wanted to bite him, she already would have. While, logically, she could understand his hesitation, rusted aluminum and mud didn’t exactly taste great. She’d scooped up as many metal bits from the bottom as she could, hoping that tag was included. Using the stick, he carefully scraped out all of the scrap metal out into a pile onto the muddy island - he'd have to take the excess with him, because there were more than a few bits of scrap iron mixed in, and, well, that wasn't the sort of thing one left where faeries lived. Sorting through the like, he finally spotted the tag, a piece of alligator flesh still attached, and lifted it. Even to his fairly untrained magical senses, the thing felt malevolent, but the only marking on the thing was a faintly engraved symbol, and he needed more than that. With a sigh, he centered himself and tried to read its aura. It was but a brief clip show, but every clip was like the worst parts of the most hosed up Eastern European horror movie. Whoever made this thing was messed up. Grimacing - he wished he didn't have that particular vision inside his head - he looked at Grace. Voice strained, he said, "Got it." Grace flipped around and walked back into the water, before her human head popped up out of the water again. And promptly hocked a loogie before speaking. “Jeez. I wasn’t gonna bite you. And that stuff tastes terrible.” She dunked herself again before continuing, much more serious this time. “So, you said you could use that to find whoever pissed off Big Green?” “Thought I could, but this thing’s aura’s all messed up,” he explained, still trying to blink away the vision. It was starting to bring on a headache, like everything had seemed to when he’d been first discovering his powers. “There’s probably a way to do it, but it’s beyond me,” he added, shrugging. “Worst comes to worst, I’ll find a way to dispose of it safely.” She sighed. “Ugh. Well, at least you saved some lady’s dog! That ain’t nothin.” Grace dove again, and again, not waiting for a response before going back down. She was clearly thinking about something. She’d found a place to live and a job, but she wasn’t fully settled in New Orleans yet. She hadn’t put down roots, or really made many friends here yet. She was here because there was no where else to go. She was still working through what happened in Florida. It wasn’t that she was thinking of moving on, but her first attempt at making a friend being a guy who would wander into a swamp to help an old lady felt… almost disrespectful to Javier. But she also knew what he would say. That he trusted her. That he wasn’t going to keep her caged. That if there’s someone in need of help, just help them. We all reap what we sow, so sow happy things. She was pretty sure he just liked saying “so so so”, but it made her happy to remember him. And sad. And angry. Really, all the feelings. Grace finally stopped bobbing up and down and swam closer to James. “No pressure, but there’s a little cafe up Pritchard street I like to stop by after a swim, if you’d like to talk somewhere less damp.” Her question made him think for a moment - it'd only been a few months since Anne had taken off, and the wound still stung. Her decision had been entirely reasonable, he knew that - but it didn't stop him missing waking up next to her. But that seemed to be what happened when someone saw you go full Van Helsing and kill monsters. Would he be betraying her if he went for coffee with this strange woman? Did it even matter at this point, given what her sister had yelled at him the last time he'd tried to call? As naked as she presumably was under the murky water, it was still just a work thing, right? Plus, she had saved his life. "Y'know what, sure, why not," he said, checking his watch - he had to wipe away a layer of muck to be able to read it - before he added, "Gimme two hours to hike back, get Rex handed over and go shower, and I'll meet you there."
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Jan 8, 2020 19:40
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Interlude - The Curious Case of the Missing Hound, Epilogue (set pre-Book 4) Grace showed up at the Bella not quite two hours later. She got in a quick nap in the sun, scared some birds for fun. Didn’t see any more of the big guy, but she felt comfortably on top of the food chain, in this area at least. Her hair was still drying, straight and dark, and though she’d run a comb through it, it was still a bit frizzy. She was dressed in her usual jeans and zip up hoodie, a beaten up System Of A Down tour shirt underneath. Her gator tooth necklace sat above it. A couple of her teeth were set in the middle, flanked by two from Javier, and one each from some of the clan members she’d become close to. It held a couple of enchantments, mostly small stuff she’d put together with the help of Shayna, the clan’s resident shaman. If she’d been wearing it, it would have merged her clothing into her shapeshifted form, but that would have defeated the purpose of going full gator for an afternoon. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but it did sort of itch. In her human form, it held a protective charm, making her as tough as gator hide. She got her tea, and found a sunny spot by the window to wait for James. She had a few minutes to herself, watching the cars go by. Sipping the tea helped calm her nerves. Not that she was afraid, but she didn’t have a ton of experience making new friends recently. Between hiking back, handing Rex back over to Arabella - both of whom seemed rather pleased with the reunion, at least until talk turned to dog baths, at which point Rex had shot him a dirty look and he'd promptly excused himself - and driving back to his new place, he'd only had time for a quick shower. Taking advantage of the nice weather, he'd donned a polo shirt and jeans, letting his arms get some sun for once. It was probably too casual for what was supposed to be a work meeting, but then, not having to wear suits all the time was one of the perks of not working for Langley anymore. He stopped briefly at the counter to order a black coffee, before joining her, taking the seat opposite. With a grin, he said, "Honestly, sorta expected you to show up wearing a leather jacket." Grace shrugged. “It’s nice enough out I didn’t really need it today.” She stopped awkwardly, not quite knowing how this conversation should go. “So, uh… how did you get into the lost dog business?” “It was a favour,” he replied, rolling his eyes, “I run an antiques firm, but Rex’s owner had heard about how I used to be a PI, and she asked me to take a look for him. You ever hear about the Paranet? That’s how we met.” Grace leaned back in her chair. “No? But I’m guessing that’s why the-”. She stopped, looking around to see if anyone could overhear. There was a couple nearby, but they were distracted by each other, and one young man on a laptop who would be able to hear, if his earbuds weren’t turned up so loud she could almost make out what band he was listening to. “The natives didn’t bother you?” “You mean the little guys? Nah, I have to assume they saw me trying to help and didn’t object. The Paranet’s like a support group for people like us, people with…” he hushed his voice, leaning forwards, “...special powers. Though, I’ll admit, I’ve never met a shapechanger there before.” She blushed a little at that. “Well, to be honest, I haven’t met many that aren’t… I didn’t think it was anything but fairy tales until I moved to Florida in ‘02. Fell in love with a boy, moved a couple states away, joined spirits with an alligator. That old story.” She hesitated again. “Does the name LeBlanc mean anything to you?” “Assuming you don’t mean the guy who was in Friends, no, but then, I’m not from around here,” replied James, shrugging, “Sounds like you’ve done some stuff along the way, though. What brings you back to New Orleans?” James’ joke goes over her head. “Oh. We weren’t local either. The clan… the LeBlanc clan, that is. We protected the Everglades. But something happened. Some weird fish people, they… they attacked my clan.” Grace shrinks back and tears begin to appear in the corners of her eyes as she starts to ramble. “They killed a lot of us. They killed Javier… Shayna… at least 3 of the elders. That’s all I saw before… before I ran. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I came home.” She sniffs and starts dabbing her eyes with a napkin. “Not that I know anybody here anymore.” Another victim of the Fomor attacks all along the coast - such stories were getting far too common, at least in James' opinion. A sympathetic look on his face, he said quietly, "That sounds awful, I'm sorry you had to go through something like that." He awkwardly ran his hand through his shaggy blonde hair, unsure of how to really comfort someone he'd just met, "Kinda makes the reason I moved here sound mundane, really. I had a messy breakup, family got worried and it was either come here and work with my uncle or go back home. And since the latter would involve my mom interrogating me without end, New Orleans it was." Grace starts softly laughing through her tears halfway through his explanation. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry but... “. She laughs again, louder. “Messy breakup. I’m stealing that. That’s too perfect. The messiest breakup!” Her skin has started to turn rough and scaly, and her now clawed hand is digging into the armrest of her chair, pulling away the fabric and showing the cheap foam underneath as she giggle-cries. "Uh, the chair, Miss Wagner," he said, flicking his eyes down to where she was clearly losing control. "And honestly, I'm probably understating it a bit there. She… saw me rescue her from vampires who'd kidnapped her to get to me. Didn't like seeing that violent side of me. So she left." With a defeated sigh, he added, "As much as the whole thing was my fault, it still stings, y'know?" It takes her a little bit to regain control, several deep breaths, and a couple more napkins before her skin returns to its previous smooth paleness. She studied him for a second before launching into a lecture. “That’s bullshit. That’s not your fault, at all. You were supposed to let her get eaten? Not fight for her? THAT would make you an unworthy mate. If she’s not willing to accept all of you, then she doesn’t deserve you.” Grace takes another breath to keep ranting before stopping herself. “Sorry again. That’s probably not what you wanted to hear. It’s… Hm. Do you know any other were-s?” "No, it really was my fault she got kidnapped. Something spooked me, I panicked, blew up a plan and that's why it even got to that stage. But it's pretty moot at this point, anyway," he said, with a tone that suggested he'd gone over it a whole bunch in his head. "Other were-s… can't say I have, but then, new in town. I can ask around though, if you want. I might not actually be a PI anymore, but I can sleuth for information still." “Sorry, just the way you said it was the violent side of you… I don’t actually know any other local were-s. I’m not exactly an expert on the subject, but the LeBlancs referred to themselves as ‘true’ were-s.” Her speech slows, as she’s picking each word carefully. “It’s not a magic trinket, or some magic suit we wear over ourselves, or an infection. The ritual involves finding a spirit that matches your own soul. It’s a partnership, but part of that is that you can’t hide from yourself anymore. Everyone has a violent side, a scared side, a brave side, a jealous side. You can accept it, or hide from it. Anybody who tries to hide doesn’t make it as a were.” She stares out the window, not talking directly to James. “Live like a snake, die as a snake...” She lets that hang in the air for a moment before shaking her head, trying to forget a bad memory. “Anyway. Let me know if you find out anything about that tag. It’s not exactly my swamp out there, but I’d still like to help keep the peace.” Her tribe's philosophy on people's sides didn't seem too wrong in his opinion, though he'd seen some people who got a bit too in touch with their violent sides over the years. Personally, he accepted his violent side - he knew he was very, very good in a fight - but he didn't like letting it out unless he had to. "I'll poke around, but I have an inkling it might be a dead end, especially since whoever's using it is probably hiding in the swamps," he mused. Taking a bit of paper out of a notepad in his pocket, he scribbled down his name and cell number - he really had to get round to getting new business cards made - and slid it towards her, "Gimme a call if you ever need help… or just to talk, honestly. I kinda owe you my life, it's the least I can do." Grace pulls out her flip phone and immediately adds him, before flipping his paper over, borrowing his pen, and writing her own down contact info before passing the pen and paper back. “I work as I bike courier most days, so I’m around. Especially if you need something moved from point A to point B. And, no offense, I think you definitely owe me your life after you tried to tangle with that big boy.” She settles back down, finishing her tea. “But seriously, thanks for listening, it’s been rough lately. And even if I could afford it, I can’t exactly explain this to any therapist without getting thrown in the loony bin.” He winced at her last comment - it brought back some rather painful memories he'd rather not dwell upon. Coughing, he said quietly, "Yeah, I wouldn't mention it to a therapist." Shaking his head clear, he sipped at his coffee, slipping the paper back into his pocket, "As for the listening, don't mention it. Between all my siblings and cousins, I got really good at listening to people talk about their problems."
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Jan 8, 2020 19:41
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Relentless fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 8, 2020 |
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Jan 8, 2020 19:44
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