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entomancy · 3 years

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(Fic) One thing we can agree on

Title: One thing we can agree on (Wattpad)

Setting: The vampire nonsense / Vegas Masquerade

Warnings: Gore. I am having fun with my crayons.

Words: 1401

Summary: Flashback into the 'Moonlight Flush' part of the timeline. Which is the framing of the events of ~twenty years ago in the Vegas Masq. setting (which set up the current ‘rules’) as an urban fantasy police procedural; where Joplin would have been the secondary main / intro to the supernatural world and Belton the Season One antagonist who ended up Sort Of Befriended(ish).

This would have been in approx. Season Three, when bits from Joplin's past come back to bite him (er, again, I guess), and involves the first time he'd actually had to team up with Belton against a larger problem.

The larger problem being: more werebears, but asshole ones.

Indulgent, but I enjoy Belton being a dramatic irritation, and ~27yr old Joplin's permanent state of exasperation. And I wanted to explore an important (?) difference in the way the vampires and were(s) of this setting work.

(Also neither tumblr nor Wattpad has any sensible way to use footnotes, so there's one just... there, in the middle. Like this is FFN cira 2003 or something.)

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The real difference between vampires and werewolves is how they bleed.

Clearly it isn't the only difference. There are the big, obvious - hairy - ones; and you could spend lifetimes comparing technicalities of characteristic amongst the supernatural set, searching for links or diversions or even a root cause. How magic plays in. How inheritances work, or the fundamental incompatibility of cross-siring. How sunlight, direct or orbitally reflected, could possibly trigger the different effects that it does.

But for Denis Joplin, as he'd scrambled to make sense of the extraordinary left turn his last decade had careened into, somehow the thing that really seemed to underline it all was the way they bled. Maybe because he'd always had such a damn knack for getting into situations that showcased it.

That last round of gunfire had really screwed up his right arm. He'd wedged himself in place against the thick struts of a heavy-duty shipping container - splattered almost as much now with crimson as it was with spraypainted Cyrillic – and tried to breathe quietly. The enormous bastard wielding a goddamn helicopter canon had fucked off to yell 'roided nonsense into a different part of the warehouse, so they probably had a few minutes pause before he realised his targets had dodged.

Not dodged as well as Joplin'd have liked, but there y'go. You worked with what you got.

Most of the bullets had gone straight through – since he wasn't an armour-plated van – but he could feel a few wedged points of pain even within the jellied miasma of broken flesh that hung unpleasantly from his torn shirt.

"Jesustapdancing-" he bit down on the mismatched curse as he grabbed his messed-up limb with his other hand and twisted, pushing it up against himself and the steel wall behind, and tried not to go blind.

It squelched.

"Don't like that," he muttered, then glanced up at the wet snort of amusement from just down the container row. "Hey, he nailed you to the fuckin' wall about as well as I've seen; don't get lippy."

Not that his extremely temporary partner was in much shape to be more actively sarcastic. The brunt of the recent salvo had hit taken Belton pointy-ear to hip, ripping the big grey fuck open like a side character in chainsaw splatter, which – somehow – made the look of dazed amusement on the bits of his face that weren't hanging off even more aggravating than usual. He shifted position, bringing his torn-up arms out in front of him as if holding something narrow and invisible in both hands, and –

Joplin blinked.

Pull... yourself...

"Oh fuck off," he growled – and it was a growl, a sound that started deeper than his chest actually went and brought the pull along with it; a bestial reverb that went beneath his bones. Joplin gritted his teeth – which felt about ready to start moving in his jaw as it was, aching with something beyond nerves – and had another unpleasant feel around where his elbow used to be. It helped if everything was in the right place. Last thing he needed right now was having to rebreak a limb because he'd managed to shift over all wonky.

That'd have to do. Very pointedly not making eye contact with Belton as he did so, Joplin Changed.

There have been a lot of renditions of a lycanthropic* transformations over the years, and there have even been some that have come close to the actual reality of seeing it happen. The exact visuals tend to vary person to person, but however it looks, the world bends – just a little, at the seams – as something that was only ever the thickness of breath away steps forward. Joplin always thought it felt like stretching should do – an all-over, unfurling release of physicality, like every fibre of you stopped hunching its shoulders all at once.

________________________________________________________________

* There's an argument that 'ursanthropic' might be a more technically correct term when the reader is considering Denis Joplin himself – or even the bellowing figure currently firing 30mm rounds into what will turn out to be a container of tinned garlic pallets – but the linguistic side of paraphylogeny isn't a popular field. 'Actually, it's wereBEAR' is only a helpful correction under certain circumstances, and this isn't one of them.**

** Yet. ________________________________________________________________

The arm took a bit more effort. A transformation that added several feet in height, width, and summed-up hair length didn't exactly have a problem fixing a half-mulched limb, but there was clearly an additional process going on. He wondered how people had explained what it looked like before timelapse film had been developed.

It... healed. Torn vessels sealed over; bone shards scraped and swelled together within muscles that bulged crimson-purple as they knitted close. Tissue bloomed, bruise-blossom hues racing through tattered skin and dragging raw pallor behind them; black-bloody tears welled up pink and grey and pink again, threaded with ribbons of tendon herded into place by a lightning flash of sudden scars, gone as fast as they appeared. Then the fur broke surface like desert flowering, and a heartbeat later there was nothing to show for the damage that a slight extra paleness in the iron-grey pelt, as Joplin flexed his bulked-out fingers carefully.

Belton clapped. Just once, with a softness that hands tipped with inch-long claws shouldn't be able to achieve, and it was the most sarcastic fucking sound Joplin had ever heard. He bared his considerable teeth in a silent snarl and waved his own padded hands towards the old bat.

Hurry. Up.

Belton's black eyes crinkled at the edges, and then he pulled himself back together.

The real difference between vampires and werewolves is how they bleed.

Belton's blood was dark, with a strangeness to its consistency that would have baffled splatter analysts on a fundamental level, but it also didn't tend to stay where it landed. None of him did. Metal gleamed naked against the pitted concrete as pools of inky crimson pulled away from the bullets that had torn them loose, flowing back along their own path like a retreating tide - rivulets of reversing gore that snaked and whipped back up their origin form, trailing back into ruptures that folded seamlessly shut around them. Belton stood up, even as his chest cavity was still closing, and gently pushed his hanging jaw back into place, smoothed like fresh clay.

Vampires don't heal – you see – so much as 'rewind'.

He held Joplin's gaze, half a heartbeat longer than he needed to, and grinned.

There was a spotless bullet held between his rows of teeth.

"Oh, fuck off," Joplin repeated – before he was drowned out by a guttural roaring, and the sound of a minigun barrel being smashed through something unfortune enough to be inside its turning circle.

"Little pigs, little pigs! I hear you!"

Both men visibly winced.

"See, someone with that little self-awareness just shouldn't be this much of a problem," Belton muttered, flicking the bullet aside like a cigarette butt. "It's genuinely a bit embarrassing."

"Yeah, well," Joplin whispered back, as he scanned the roof, taking in the environment with an eye to traversal options he hadn't had five minutes ago. "I won't tell if you don't."

Another roar burst the air, and Belton started edging down the row again, clearly doing his own version of the calculations.

"Pity he doesn't take after your side of the family, really."

"This isn't a family situation," Joplin snapped back, readying himself to move when the oncoming footsteps got a bit closer. If he could get around, then maybe he could deke out the...

He glanced back, about to signal a go, and realised the old vampire was still looking at him, one of those impossible-to-read expressions on his weird bat face for a second, before he spoke softly.

"See, that's the thing with monsters. It's always going to come back to blood, one way or another."

A shiver danced down Joplin's extended spine, strong enough to stir the fur. That was a bit close for comfort – and from sodding Belton? He shrugged dismissively, only partly to himself.

"Yeah, well, this ain't gonna be the worst it gets. Try not t'get cut in half again."

Then the shipping container exploded in a nightmare of burning metal. Belton went right; Joplin went up; and everything else went on from there.

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#Entofic #urban fantasy #The Vegas Masquerade #Knockoff Manbat lookin' bastard #first team up is a bitch #Denis Joplin

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entomancy · 4 years

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(Fic) Daywalkin’ in Vegas

...let’s be honest, this ‘short backstory fics’ thing has done what my writing tends to do, and Escalted. So let’s escalate.

Title: Daywalkin’ in Vegas (Wattpad) Setting: Increasingly not even serial-numbers-off-VTM. VTM infact exists in-world as a gaming system, which really annoys Fancy Vampires. Warnings: Gore; depictions of violence/ death against a child. Words: 6537 Summary: A failed siring gets the attention of two very different parts of Vegas Below; and a young blooded nosferatu puts herself in the centre of a dangerous balance.

Beep.

Twenty-eight forty.

Beep.

Thirty-one seventy.

Beep.

Nox watched the till display tick up, comparing the total to her mental tally. She had enough; she knew she did. It might have been in tattered bills, tarnished coin rolls and bits of change so old they were chipped like gears around the edges, but she was always real careful to plan these trips down to the grubby dime. In and out, as unobtrusive as possible.

Beep.

A final bag passed, the green-yellow numbers flickering one final time. The cashier smiled in customer service plastic as she read out the total, then followed it with a look of awkward concern.

“That’s all for you? We - er – we have some good specials,” she said hesitantly, nodding towards the little stack of brightly-labelled packages beside the register. It was mostly sweets and tampons, and Nox bit back on a grin at the sight. Nice thought, but that hadn’t been her ‘bloody’ problem for a while now.

“That’s it,” she replied, adding: “Thanks, though.” Sure, it was an upsell, but a kind one. The girl even managed to keep back any disgust at the state of some of the cash; it had been cleaned up, but people didn’t tend to drop crisp ones into a cup on the sidewalk.

Nox carried everything out to the repurposed shopping cart that she’d left just inside the little bodega’s doors. The thing was unbalanced and took corners like a drunk, but it was better than playing pack mule herself. The new bags settled down on top of the day’s earlier buys: bulk discount batches of toilet roll, bleach and superglue, along with cheap fabric for bandages. Plus, now, thirty-eight dollars and eighty-six cents’ worth of the cheapest mince and frozen shrimp available within a four-mile radius.

There had been a time when she’d had to worry about dietary fibre. Or vitamins.

The cart’s wheels creaked and rasped on sidewalk dirt as she headed it away, hunching down over the handle as she pushed; partly for more control, mostly to keep her face in shade. Her battered baseball cap and hoodie did a pretty good job – accompanied by garish plastic sunglasses and a stained bike mask – but every little helped. It also added to the overall ‘bag lady out on an afternoon shuffle’ aesthetic she was going for. The trick was to inspire just enough awkward pity to be invisible, but not enough to be a target.

Apparently, her act was off today. She’d just turned a laborious corner, distracted by trying to keep the bags all stacked, when she felt a hand clamp down onto the top of her head and yank hard. She didn’t move, but the hood pulled away and she heard a yelp of disgust even before she swivelled around. Two young men stood behind her, gawking in revulsion at the revealed state of Nox’s scalp, in all its piebald, peeling, erratically-thickened glory. A thin braid slithered down her face, torn too-easily free along with the hood.

She gave the scene one more heartbeat to really settle in, before grinning widely. Faced with a mouthful of teeth like broken ivory, the youths managed to look even more horrified.

“Aye, that’s how I caught it too!” Nox cackled theatrically, before snatching the hat back from now-unresisting fingers and jamming it back into place. “Don’t go scratching yerself anywhere pretty fer a bit, eh?”

The lad – and his already-retreating backup – hesitated, then let out a string of bravado-born obscenities. Freak – gross – blah blah blah I-have-a-tiny-dick blah. He kicked at the cart as he started follow his friend, and Nox let just enough spill out to sate the petty spite.

Once they had gone, she picked up the packets again and began to fix her hood. The exposed skin was stinging and smarting already, a poison-ivy prickle that calamine wouldn’t touch. At least it was late enough in the afternoon that she probably wouldn’t blister from the exposure. More annoying was the missing chunk of hair, and she probed at it gingerly. No deep wound, thankfully; which probably meant that the straggly braid had been almost ready to fall out anyway. She tended to keep about half a head of hair going, on average; so it’d grow back.

The lads were long gone by the time she was ready to set off again. With any luck she’d be nothing more than an awkward moment in a day of shoving their weight around; quickly forgotten. Being gross in the eyes of idiots wasn’t a Breech, after all.

The rest of the trip back was uneventful. Streets gave way to alleys, sidewalks to cracked paving, to rotting asphalt, and even the graffiti began to wane as she got closer to home. The main occupants of this ass-end of nowhere – a ghetto’s dumpster of a place – didn’t exactly make it their business to advertise where they were. Those that needed to know; knew. Those that knew, generally didn’t care – which was honestly a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Nox had heard the stories of what it had been like only twenty years ago. It was strange to feel that there was any sort of luck to her history, but six years wasn’t twenty.

Reaching a gap in an otherwise unremarkable wall, she glanced around quickly, making sure that no one was watching. Then she straightened up, gripped either side of the overloaded cart, and hefted it up through the broken brickwork in one smooth movement. She vaulted in after it, dropping down into cool shade, and let out a sigh of relief as the accepting touch of Karloff’s Invitation washed across her. The sense was like a door opening in welcome; like taking the first familiar turn towards home after a long day’s drive. It also meant no more unwanted attention – without that explicit permission, you’d never be able to recognise the entrance, or even keep your attention on what you were looking for. She was as invisible now to all other turned-aside eyes as everything else within the Invitation’s borders.

A few more rattling corners later, Nox finally turned into the Homestead grounds. The whole area had once been a crammed-in mess of squat apartment blocks, copy-paste civic solutions built without charm to fill the need for cheap rooms. The Homestead was the only one of its kin still standing, now surrounded by an opened-out area of recent amateur demolition and scrap-built fencing. Bright splashes of street art cut across sagging concrete and the blacked-out eyes of the windows, although the tags and themes chosen indicated the difference between these creators and the more standard ones of the world outside. Most of this had been painted at night, for example, with rather more variety on the theme of ‘hands’ grasping the tins.

There was a lot more inside, and below, but she felt a particular warmth at these murals. Out here, on the surface. Bright in sunshine that most of them could never see. The Nosferatu might be Vegas Below’s crusty little secret, but they were damn well there.

Bits of cracked paving clicked and skittered beneath the cart’s wheels as Nox made her way through the fences and to the big, bolted main doors. There was a rough porch built around the frame, mostly to give extra shadows, and she looked up at the tiny glints of watchful glass sunk into the surrounding wall. She waved.

“Dimestore-Blade’s grocery delivery,” she announced, and listened to the familiar rattle of bolts start on the other side of the door. A few moments later it swung open and a hunched figure peered out, wincing back from even the thick porch shade. This was Max; an older woman than Nox in both kinds of age, who managed her marks via a combination of extensive bandaging and even more extensive needlepoint. Watery black eyes looked past her, squinting through a gap in the heavily-embroidered scarf wrapped around her head.

“All okay?”

Nox nodded and lifted the trolley over the threshold.

“Fine.” She didn’t mention the youths. Didn’t seem a lot of point. “Let’s get this lot into the freezer before it can walk on its own, yeah?”

Safely inside the slightly-fetid gloom of the entrance, Nox took the opportunity shed her bag-lady layers. True, she couldn’t actually overheat, even on a Nevada afternoon, but being swathed in that many layers was still claustrophobic. Beneath the mismatched fabric strata was an increasingly-threadbare pair of yoga pants and a dark vest, and Nox gave a small sigh of relief as she folded up the rest of her daylight-drag, shoving it onto a shelf nearby.

“Right,” she muttered, as much to fill the air as anything else, and turned back to the trolley. Max had already transferred much of it into precarious piles in her own arms. Her scarf had slipped down, revealing a hairless head webbed with splitting skin; much of it made whole again with patterned patches of colourful thread. The fabric discoloured over time, of course, but it reduced the leaking.

Balancing their burdens, the pair made their way further into the Homestead. Closest to the entrance was the most decrepit part, occupied mostly by shelves and old furniture crammed full of clothes and patched umbrellas for venturing out, and with years of dumped debris building up in corners. Rooms with windows – even those as thoroughly blacked out or bricked up as these were – mostly housed the rat runs or storage, because no one wanted to spend a lot of time somewhere where crap mortar could result in dayburns. Similarly, the roof and most of the top floor was given over to pigeon roosts and No avoided them whenever possible. She’d never much liked pigeons before this, and she still held that even their vitae tasted of garbage, somehow. Still, they were much dumber than rats, and they did lay eggs, so that helped.

The really lived-in part of the Homestead was underground. Everybody knew Nosferatu lived in the sewers, right? Okay, so Nox would admit she hadn’t much understood the difference between ‘sewer’ and ‘storm drain’ before her life had taken its scabby turn, but she sure did now. Vegas had extensive storm drains – large concrete tunnels that lay under much of the city, designed to quickly shift heavy rain away from the tarmacked surface above – and they were ideal: underground, dark, not monitored.

And not actually full of shit.

The arrangement used to be… messier, Karloff had told her. When they hadn’t been so organised; when they’d lived closer together with others who had slipped through the cracks Above. Some of the Family had started off as those same ‘unfortunates’ after all; those who were aftermath-sired in a broken frenzy, or from the bloody jaunt of some fuckfang cutting through the ranks of those who wouldn’t be missed. Splitting their claimed tunnels off from the main circuit and establishing the Homestead proper had happened later, after the Vegas Accord had given the Nosferatu a Clan-status, and hunting them for sport stopped being an acceptable weekend activity.

Six years sure ain’t twenty.

Max chatted away as they walked; an idle litany of gossip, social media tidbits and reports from watchers all over the city, woven together into what Nox tended to think of as ‘Radio Max’. Spying on people was apparently another nos stereotype; but honestly when you didn’t really sleep, were functionally invisible to large portions of society, and had worked out how to divert half-decent broadband from badly-secured leisure networks overhead, it wasn’t difficult to get ahead on current events.

Plus the rats, of course.

Information was power, and they had precious little of any other. Although Nox sometimes wondered how much of those scant threads of power that Karloff put such value on would diminish if Clanpires in general figured out how to just Google things.

They had reached what she thought of as ‘mainstreet’ of the Homestead tunnels – a long space with concrete pillars linking floor to ceiling every thirty feet or so, quite cheerfully lit by a mishmash web of light fittings rigged up overhead – when yelling broke out further down. Nox and Max shared a look of alarm at the commotion, but it was when her name became suddenly clear in the shouts that Nox’s stomach dropped.

“Get this stuff away, will you?” she muttered, carefully setting her packages down beside Max, and turned to meet the oncoming figures. Even wrapped in a heavy coat and thick gloves, she knew the loping form of Skaad instantly.

With features which sagged so violently that his bruise-yellow skin frequently tore at the edges, and a mouth like a lipless sharps bucket, Skaad was nonetheless gifted with some of the keenest senses in the clan, plus a damn-near eidetic memory. Which meant he spent most of his time skulking in hidden places, listening to things he shouldn’t, and following people who thought they were alone in their secret business. Having him sprinting towards you, so fast his eyelids were visibly flapping, wasn’t a great sign.

Back in the world Above – before her life had gone to hell in a weirdly specific way – Nox had been a paramedic. It was useful in the day-to-day, being the closest thing this bunch of ragged immortals had to a resident doctor, but there was only really one sort of actual emergency left down here.

Skaad skidded to a halt, and grabbed her arm with a worrying urgency.

“Got a phresh one. Get yer kit!”

Fuck. A fresh one meant one thing: someone had found a dumped fledgeling, one who’d been showing signs of the Change going wrong and been tossed aside by their disgusted sire. Intervening quickly could help, particularly getting a pigeon smoothie down them fast, but the panic on Skaad’s drooping face didn’t line up with -

“What’s so – ?” she started, but he shook his head, steering her towards the plastic-covered tunnel they used as a makeshift clinic. He leaned in to shove her again, but lowered his voice and muttered just before he did – and the words sent ice down her spine.

“It’sh a kid.”

Oh no.

Oh fuck.

You didn’t turn kids.

When your working knowledge of vampires had been a general pop-culture miasma and some blurry memories of teenage Buffy marathons, finding yourself on the other side of the supernatural coin came as a shock in various ways. One of which was the weird sensation that you should have studied it all harder, somehow. Nox had certainly felt stupid, in her early days, as a man with a face like a charred wasps’ nest listened to her stutter her way through half-remembered fiction and worse-remembered reality. But she’d apparently got a few things right, and somewhere in that muddle had been the idea that you shouldn’t turn kids.

There were all kinds of theories as to why – from the debauched to the practical – but she found that in many ways it didn’t matter. Whatever fucked-up intention you had, it wouldn’t work. Too young just… didn’t take. And when a siring didn’t work, there was every chance the result would end up on her table.

She scrabbled through the assortment of old drawers and boxes that stored her gear, pulling out anything she thought might work. Bandages, thread, craft superglue, repurposed bottles of hard spirits that would do in a pinch for sterilising. The best-case scenario things. And the rest. Old herb pots of fine powders; thrift-store silver cutlery hammered and polished and changed into a very different set of tools. Sharpie-labelled bottles of liquids that moved weirdly in the light, and a range of refillable lighters that definitely didn’t contain hydrocarbons anymore. All the things she’d picked up in the last six years that fitted in with other sort of medicine.

The plastic curtain behind her was yanked back and a sound she had been trying not to hear finally demanded her attention. It wasn’t even a scream, and Nox hated, hated hated hated that she recognised the cadence there perfectly: raw, animal agony of sound torn from a throat that was violently reforming around it. She turned to see Skaad forcing flailing limbs down, looping thick restraints around rippling flesh, and finally allowed her full attention to turn down to the spasming form.

Gore looked different through vampire eyes. It was hard to describe exactly how – partly because wordsmithery had never been one of her strong points, but more because trying to compare feelings from now and then was always going to have a huge fucking hurdle of shifted species in the way. She’d still probably seen more human blood in nine years on the ambulances than during the half-dozen in and out of Vegas’ shadows, and but everything afterwards had been… different. Displaced. Detached. Just didn’t seem as visceral as it used to do.

But this did.

Acid tightened in Nox’s throat as she stared down at the shuddering mess in front of her. Blanched skin bubbled and writhed, tearing as it pulled away from the muscles beneath; themselves little more than contorting ropes of livid tissue that pulsed under dying heartbeats and spilled black fluid from ever-widening rents. The throat was gone, now a bubbling pit of desperate breaths, sucked past exposed tendons that wriggled like furious worms. Half-clotted ichor was pooling from gashes along the arms, down the stomach and further: the marks of peri-sire wounds, those that had been still fresh as the invading blood forced itself into collapsing veins. The eyes were side-to-side a sickly crimson-yellow, bloating out from a face that was collapsing in on itself, and throughout it all, the kid screamed.

It was revolting. Nox had to bite down on the vicious spikes of fight-flight that were going off in her mind, so violently she could feel her hands trembling from the horror and her disgust at her own reaction. It was an instinct, an unbidden response to a failing siring – she knew that – but understanding it didn’t make it easier. Everyone down here had ‘gone nozz’ during their own Turn. Hell, a few of those brought to her were walking around now, not seeming any weirder than any of them, but she’d still felt that awful surge of fundamental wrongness about them before they stabilised.

Nox gritted – all of – her teeth, and slammed her kit down on the table.

Instincts can fucking blow me.

“Let’s see what we can do.”

It turned out what they could do, wasn’t much. Cleaning, sewing, cutting, sealing – nothing held. Stitches fell from uncertain skin, or tore great new holes as fresh spasms pulled at the edges. Wet rags soon littered the floor, sodden with black and yellow fluids that turned the rough concrete into a slippery, stinking mess. The bleeding wasn’t slowing, even as the body seemed to be crumpling in on itself, gradually liquefying around the bones.

The sound had gone quieter, if not softer, and Nox didn’t have much hope it would stop soon. It might be days yet, before the final sparks of vitae or life or cruel continuation finally went out.

Too young. The kid – the girl, most likely, going by anatomy – had been just… too young.

They had to have known that.

“I’m outa tricks,” she said, although the words felt thick and sharp in her mouth. She wanted to keep going. She wanted to, so fucking much. But somebody had done this. Somebody who knew this would happen.

“I’m gonna make her comfy,” she continued, then hesitated even as she pulled out the frankly-horrific cocktail of morphine and street drugs that might make a dent in a system caught somewhere between undead and alive. Skaad looked at her, and held out a clawed hand.

“Want me…?”

“Nah.” Nox shook her head, and swallowed. “You can get the others outta upstairs, though. I need to – to make a call.”

Skaad stiffened, his jaundiced eyes flicking between her and the table for a moment, before he let out a low hiss and ducked away through the curtain. Nox administered the mix and tried to convince herself it would have any sort of palliative effect. Then she went back to the drawers and rummaged again, right at the back, until her fingers closed on the ridged plastic of an old nokia.

There weren’t many numbers in the phone, but it was the first one she selected, under B.

- SUMFCK SIRED KID. ITS BAD -

She threw the phone back into the drawer and hurried out, past the plastic sheet and into the tunnels, leaving sticky footprints in her wake. Not a great look, but everyone would already know what was happening. Nosferatu gossiped like – well, like a society of insomniac, semi-immortal shut-ins.

Overhead, an erratic cluster of repurposed pipes trailed down through the domed roof, emanating from the rat runs above. Drainpipes, corrugated plastic, bits of plumbing, and all of them shaking slightly with the constant pass of tiny feet within. They opened out onto tiny highways of shelving that lined the walls, all heading in the same direction as she was. Pairs of black-beady eyes glanced at her as they passed, and with so many concentrated here, she could feel the faintest flick of Attention in each one. They were all headed to a squat metal door at the end of an offshoot passageway. The rats passed freely back and forth narrow holes punched in either side of the door; but Nox knocked. She knew she was already expected and entered after a respectful moment.

Karloff’s chamber was bigger than it looked like it would be from the doorway. Nox wasn’t sure what the space had originally been – some kind of maintenance room? – but it was now dark, and warm, and smelled less of rats than might be expected given the constant rodent tide. Shelves lined the walls, full of books and occasional pieces of recycled pet furniture. One floor-ceiling tower was filled entirely with old radios, police scanners, walkie talkies and the like.

The old man himself lay where he usually did, propped up in a nest of pillows and blankets in a box-like bed in the centre of the room. He presented an impossibly gaunt figure: papery-brown skin layered like peeling paint across sharp bones, with eyes so thickly clouded they sat like grey-milk marbles in unclosing sockets. His face looked scorched, blackened at the edges of the old dry wounds that had taken his nose, torn away most of his lips, and presumably shattered the broken fangs that jutted from his mouth. There was – as usual – a huge white rat lazing across his chest, nearly the size of a terrier and wearing a dark silken ribbon, and its sharp crimson eyes fixed on Nox as she entered.

She bowed her head, and tried not to leave bloody footprints on the rug.

“I need a temporary Invitation,” she said. It was blunt, but there was no point in dancing around it. He’d already know anyway. As she spoke, the huge rat sat up. It’s pale paws were clasped in front of it, folded in a strangely human-like gesture, but Karloff himself turned his head only slightly.

“’Belton,” he said softly, in the throat-based hush of his voice, and Nox nodded. Her fingers twitched into fists, and she felt the sticky remnants of gore slide between them.

“I… I’m running out of options, and she – ” the words were sticker than her fingers, getting caught on her lips “ – she’s real bad.”

The rat cocked its head and Karloff drew a slow breath.

“You will not do it?” he asked. Nox’ throat tightened.

“If I gotta. But I want him to see her, cos I – I could do this, but I ain’t got a snowball’s chance of doing anything about it.”

Karloff’s head turned further, and the clouded eyes passed over her with an intensity that Nox could feel, as if they skipped sight entirely and went right into her heart instead. There was another stretched moment of silence, then the pressure dropped and the rat turned away, curling itself neatly under its master’s chin.

“It is done,” Karloff said. The long fingers on one hand twitched slightly, and the faintest hint of a frown dug into his face. “...take care with the old death. You have seen little of him.”

“Yeah, I know. Thank you,” Nox added before she headed out again; first to check that the cocktail of drugs had at least calmed the kid’s screams, then back into the upper house. A few rats followed her as she slid into the squeaking, busy dimness of the runs to use the sink that still stood in one corner, using brownish water to at least scrub some of the stains from her hands. Then she set to wait, pacing with nervous energy.

No one joined her. By now, everybody would know what was happening, and no one wanted to be around when he came calling.

The problem – okay, so one of the problems, in a dreadful, tangled ball of ever-more layered problems – was that it was very, very difficult to kill a fledgeling in any way that could be considered humane. A body already in the process of tearing itself apart was resistant to most damage for the same reasons that you couldn’t punch a fog. Getting any kind of drug to land in an even-partly vampiric system was difficult enough at the best of times, and this…

Well, there was sunlight, but everything about Nox’s very being baulked at the idea of using that method. She knew with personal, hellish intimacy that the agony from that would get through even a Change. Torturing someone to death with one of the few things worse than what they were going through was really not the point.

Plus, there was a tiny, tiny part of her mind that hoped she was wrong. She’d only been dealing with this stuff for a handful of years, and while rumours varied widely about how old Belton actually was, he’d seen a lot of shit. Maybe she’d missed something. Just maybe…

It seemed to take an eternity before the roar of an engine outside broke through Nox’ whirling thoughts. She hurried to the door, took a careful breath, and peered out through the little viewing slot. Not that anyone else would have been able to ride a motorcycle up to the Homestead without the permission of Karloff’s Invitation, but it never hurt to keep caution.

A huge bike was settled just beside the front steps. It was black, but in the way a magpie’s wings were black, with oil-slick iridescence hinting around the edges. The rider – dressed to match, in that seamless continuity of clothing that Nox had started to think of as ‘vampire sunscreen’ – had already dismounted and was stood beside his bike, the raven-sheen of his helmet turned towards the door. There was no visible gaze to meet, but the weight of his attention was like ice down her spine, and she opened the door as deliberately as she could.

“She’s downstairs,” she said, as the figure came up the steps. The sun was already going down, barely spilling dying light over the surrounding wall of buildings, and the porch shadow was very deep there. It only got deeper as the big man stepped into it – and then paused, right on the edge of the frame.

“May I enter?” His voice was never as heavy as she expected, with a melodic edge that absolutely did not match what she knew lay under that helmet. Nox rolled her eyes.

“I texted you, and you’re here, right?”

He was always so… old fashioned about this. It wasn’t like it was a general requirement. Nox stepped back, gesturing inwards.

“Come in already,” she added. The man might have been big – although ‘fucking enormous’ would be a better description, needing to visibly turn and duck to get through the doorframe – but he moved deceptively fast, and was well inside the hallway, starting to remove his helmet before she had had time to shut the door. She turned to look, not even pretending not to stare as he unclipped all the security bits and lifted it smoothly free. The dramatic effect was only slightly spoiled by the oddly-bulging balaclava he had on underneath – but Nox supposed that if her ears could meet at the back, she’d want to keep them restrained inside a helmet too.

Belton looked… well, he looked like Belton. There just plain wasn’t anyone else like that. The best description she had ever been able to come up with was that he looked like someone had tried very hard to make a bat in the character creation screen of a pro-wrestling computer game. It was as if the underlying architecture that should have made a human skull had been stretched and tweaked and twisted into something approaching Chiroptera from the other side.

It probably said something worrying about her own psyche that – somewhere in the mess of emotions that Belton inspired – a part of her really, really wanted to see an xray of his head.

No time for this.

“C’mon,” she nodded him to follow her back down the Homestead’s passageways. The rats watched them from every surface; their skittering highways unusually still as the majority of glinting little eyes were fixed on the visitor. They were the only visible watchers, and Nox tried not to notice how empty every space they passed through was. It added another level of eeriness, with the just-abandoned debris of life seeming like some extremely localised Rapture. Even Nox’ rapid explanation of the situation fell muted around them; for his part, Belton just listened and nodded every now and then. He didn’t look around.

How familiar was he, with this place? He’d come a few times since she’d been here – and of course, that first time meant he’d sure known where it was. Nox’ gaze slid sideways. Belton had removed his gloves by now, and the hands revealed couldn’t even remotely be thought of as human; the fingers were too long, bone and tendons standing stark beneath mottled grey skin; capped by black claws that curled from the nailbeds, polished to an obsidian gleam.

How many times had those hands run across the outer walls of the Homestead; at Karloff’s limits; searching for a way in? How many times had those claws torn into sagging flesh, or crushed furry watchers into broken blindness?

How many times had he come before he had brought her here; a crispy mess of fledgeling coated in sand and gravel and gore, spat out by the desert and into hands that immortals feared…?

The plastic curtain seemed to rise up like an exclamation, a cold shot of right now breaking her thoughts, and Nox came to a sharp halt. There was still sound from inside: a bubbling, slurred collage of moans that had made it past the drugs, and her hand froze halfway to the curtain. The swell of renewed, visceral revulsion felt like she’d choke on her own fucking hypocrisy, and she couldn’t suppress a slight hiss.

“It’s – ” she started, through gritted teeth, but cut out as Belton gently touched her shoulder.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Nox’ fingers twitched, then she turned away, moving until she could lean heavily against the nearest concrete pillar and rested her forehead against the pitted surface. The groan might as well have been coming out of the air. It pressed down around her and her skin crawled.

She hated this, and she hated that she hated it like this. Some depraved motherfucker had dragged a fucking child into very literal hell and she’d tried, she’d tried with every stupid, macguivered bullshit tool she’d put together out of garbage; she’d tried everything and it was never going to have meant a damn thing and all she could focus on, really really focus on right now was how fundamentally disgusting that fucking sound was –

And then it stopped.

Nox physically sagged against the pillar, relief and nausea chasing each other through a stomach that was dropping into her boots. There was only one reason for the sudden silence, and she let her eyes slide closed, muttering the same half-wordless prayer she’d always used when a case went bad, or a patient flatlined in the ambulance. Whatever that meant now, she’d never been sure, but it still sort of fit.

She’d known. She’d known when she picked up that damn phone.

But fuck me if hope isn’t a bitch.

It wasn’t long before there was the faint brush of plastic again and Nox opened her eyes to see Belton smoothing the curtain back behind him, covering the sudden stillness. There was a long moment of silence before he turned to her. His eyes were the most human-looking part of his face, and the grey gaze sought hers.

“I’ll be on my way, then.”

Nox nodded numbly. They went out the way they came; still alone, still watched at every step by a hundred rodent stares. Back up, back to the door and out into the thickening dusk of the evening – and it wasn’t until the porch steps were creaking under his boots that Nox’s nerve rose again.

“Hey – Belton?” she managed, and the big figure paused. He looked back at her and one curled brow raised, moving an ear with it. Nox pulled the Homestead door shut behind her as she sought the right words. “This… ain’t your job, right?”

“I don’t have a real tight specification,” he replied, then shrugged. “But broadly? No. To be honest with you, my boss couldn’t give a rat’s twat what happens with the Nosferatu.”

“So why’d you come?” Those words came fast, but Nox didn’t try to stop them. Belton paused again, then hung his helmet and balaclava over the big bike’s handlebars. He sat down on the steps, hunching a little in that strange shape his back took when he wasn’t standing, and Nox slid down beside him at the unspoken invitation.

Belton shook his head, what might have been a wry smile tugging at the edges of his too-wide lips. Glints of needle teeth flashed in the dusk.

“It’s a question of perspective, see,” he said quietly. “For someone like you? This’ll ruin your whole year. Getting all Lady Macbeth with the inevitable. But for me?” He held up a hand and slowly flexed the clawed fingers. Once; twice; and Nox couldn’t draw her gaze away from the mottled skin as it shifted over his bones. Belton sighed. It was an old sound, so old that any hint of what it might contain had worn away like stone under rain.

“What’s one drop in an ocean? Don’t get me wrong – ” he added, with the edge of smile falling away again “ – I’ll feel bad about it; but I’m not losing myself any sleep.”

She should have been angry. She wanted to be angry, at the casual way this bat-faced bastard just said it; as the so-recent feel of the kid’s crumbling flesh slammed against her thoughts and ghosted under her fingers, and bile she wasn’t even sure she had anymore swirled at the back of her throat. She should be angry.

“...thank you.”

“No need for that,” he replied – but Nox shook her head.

“Nah; there is. Things need saying.” She fidgeted with the hem of her pants for a silent moment, before continuing. “Don’t believe you actually sleep, though.”

This time there was no mistaking that Belton grinned; and the resulting expression was exactly as unpleasant as it sounded.

“No? Not even if I say I’ve got little bats on my pyjamas?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Now that there’s uncalled for.”

Nox grinned, and even as she did she could almost hear Karloff’s voice in her head. Be wary of the old death.

And yet…

There was another long silence, although this one felt less tense.

…fuck it. When am I gonna get this chance again?

“They found her in the desert,” she said carefully, scuffing dust across the steps with one toe as she spoke; an idle motion to distract herself from the nerves inside. Belton nodded.

“Aye. Letting lady sun do the dirty work. It’s an almost foolproof method, really.”

Nox looked down at her own hands; where the patchwork of thickened tissue traced patterns like dry riverbeds over her pallid brown skin. The sun burned bits went blistered red, then dark and crackly, then sickly pale when that peeled; slowly edging back to her default. It sure as hell wasn’t pleasant; but it wasn’t the chemical-melting collapse of flesh that she’d seen on others.

“So, that make me a fool or an outlier?”

“I said almost.” Belton leaned back a little, looking up into the dark expanse of sky. “Always going to take a risk when you don’t stay to watch. Although I’ll admit it takes some big balls to stick around for that sort of disposal. What with the deeply ingrained phytophobia of your classic vampire, and everything.”

Nox raised her most intact eyebrow.

“This is more about your junk than I want to know.”

Belton laughed. Really laughed; the kind of melodic tone that bordered on a snatch of song and that was so very out of place coming from within that face.

“Oh, I’m not claiming that kind of testicular fortitude. Sunlight scares the piss out of me as much as it ever did. Don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can get over. Built-in, you know?”

“You ride about in the day,” Nox pointed out, and Belton waved a hand back towards his helmet.

“I’ve got some really bespoke protective gear, see. Amazing what’s been done with polymers in the last thirty years.”

Nox blinked.

“…you’ve got bike pleathers?”

“Technically I’ve got an integrated neo-polymer baselayer,” Belton stopped and his nose crinkled – which was quite an extensive expression. “…ah fuck, that sounds like I’ve got plastic pants, doesn’t it? Keep that one to yourself, will you?”

“Sure.” Nox’s shoulders sagged again as reality dropped back suddenly. She decided to just go for blunt. “With… the kid. Someone did that, and before that they – ” her words choked again, at the thought of where some of those peri-sire wounds had been.

“I know.” The amusement had gone from Belton’s voice as he stood up, heading back to his bike rather abruptly. The engine roared into life as he swung himself astride it, folding his ears into their cover, and Nox had to shout to be heard above the rumble.

“Do they… just get away with this?”

“There’s plenty that think they should,” he replied calmly; oddly easy to hear over the din, as he slid the helmet into place. “It was like that for a long time.”

Nox’s lips drew back, almost of their own accord, working to some defiant instinct she only had partial control over.

“And you?”

“Me? I’m a monster on a chain that I put there.” Belton looked up, and just before the visor snapped closed, there was a flicker of crimson in his eyes.

“But I’ll see what I can do.”

#Entofic #Vampire Nonsense #urban fantasy #The Vegas Masqerade #Nosferatu grocery shopping #terrible daywalkers #this WWE-manbat-looking mofo #I'm not warning for 'blood' on a vampire setting #help the plot keeps happening

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entomancy · 5 years

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(Fic) Domesticated

“You want chupacabras? Because this is how you get chupacabras.”

Title: Domesticated Setting: VTM-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off. Also, Vegas. Warnings: Mentions of animal death Summary: Supernatural set shenanigans aren’t always dramatic, but Sheriff Joplin hates dealing with this kind of nonsense the most.

It wasn’t the fanciest suburb of Las Vegas, but Centennial Hills was pretty popular with some folks. No playground of the uber-rich, yet the ever-expanding tasteful sprawl of sand-coloured buildings offered a variety of homes, and a decent set of amenities; assuming that neatly aligned desert ornamentals and mathematically planned-out parks were your thing. Personally, Dennis Joplin liked houses with some actual lived-in character – and it would be a few decades yet before any of these box-fresh homesteads showed any real personality. If the Residents Associations could be distracted for long enough to form any, of course.

Not that they’d do anything about this sort of problem, either way.

The satnav beeped, pulling him out of his grumbling revere, at the same moment as Mitch jabbed a narrow elbow into his arm and pointed down the block.

“Third left, Sheriff,” the younger man piped up cheerfully, before craning back around to look out of the squad car’s passenger window. “You sure you don’t want any backup?”

“Nah,” Joplin rumbled as he brought the car into park by the curb, a little way away from Number Thirty-two’s drive. “If anyone’s asking, we’re responding to a domestic.”

Mitch grinned again – with that slightly-too open smile of his, which always made him look like he was just holding in a bark of laughter – and wobbled a hand from side to side in an exaggerated ‘so-so’ gesture.

“Well, technically…”

“I ain’t thinking in technicalities tonight,” Joplin snorted, pulling a face. “I hate this sorta shit.”

Read more (Wattpad link)

#Statesman #Smoke and Ashes #Cesar Castel #The Crag #Entofic #D_N no #I should name the Warden really

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entomancy · 6 years

Audio

Trying something a bit new, because ~dramatic~. Wrote a little introduction to my Abhain setting, with more purple style than ‘the land of the periodically-demonic pseudo-Irish’.

This is Abhain.

There are a great many stories about this place; this geologically-improbable island nation, shrouded as closely in peculiar weather systems as it is in its own mythos. Some say it formed late, an alien interloper to the play of more mundane tectonics, and yet others will claim a lithographic lineage far more ancient, and far stranger still. It is certainly a land of magic, with innate etharics and worked wonders entwined thickly throughout, at a sheer scale seen nowhere else, but details of its sigilcraft and sciences have traditionally remained as mysterious as the island itself.

The word ‘Abhani’ is, in many places, a synonym for the casual arrogance of purpose often displayed by its travellers; an elevated esteem endowed by wealth and the power that underlies it - personally, in many cases, with the talent for thaumics found as much in the people as the land, and also as a result of the heavy-hanging shadows of all those stories. Abhain rarely goes to war, but when they have done it is decisive. Ferocious. Uniquely undefeated, and yet they have never conquered. They’ve never needed to.

There are a great many stories told about Abhain. How the world is unpicked and woven anew within its ivory towers, plucking terrible secrets from the threads of existence itself. How the ocean - and sky - around its borders are bound in service of the Throne, turning back every form of intrusion except of those granted boon of transit. How fae and feral the lands beyond the veils must be, to cast so many tales out into the winds and yet keep the secrets of them, in a world ever-more closely scrutinised by a hundred different means.

Still, the march of history is not easily shrugged aside. While the unique thaumic phylogeny of Abhani endeavours tends to integrate poorly with more-standard sorceries, there has been considerably more direct - even reciprocal - engagement in recent decades; and that itself has born more stories, as fact and fiction whirl again, adding new steps to their ever-changing dance.

There are a great many stories told about Abhain.

The one about the giants is probably untrue.

The one about the starlight is… unlikely.

But the one about the monsters? The strange twist that runs through the royal line, deep in the blood and the bone and the bedrock of soul, which bleeds out into the endless darkness between moments and draws something back…

That?

That has a truth in it.

#Let's see if I hate this tomorrow #Entofic #Abhain #my voice #trying to dislike the sound of recorded me a bit less

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entomancy · 7 years

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(Fic) Diolain: Part 3

Right. Trying to knock the rust off my writing abilities after Thesis Hell. So, some more of Samie-does-his-best-under-Escalating-Circumstances. I’ve also polished the previous parts somewhat.

Part 1. Part 2. Wattpad.

Title: International relations Setting: The State history: end- ‘Golden Age’ (about 40 years ago). Warnings: Blood. Summary: . Characters: Samúiel Daly; Fergal Callaghan; Najwa Farouk. Words: 3544

No alarms. That was fuckin’ telling. Samie took the stairs two at a time with Fergal slung bodily over his shoulder, either resigned to the action or too stunned to complain about it. The faint ringing in his ears was fading already, replaced by a strangely-empty chaos. He could hear the sound of bits of upstairs collapsing, half-muffled cries and screams from elsewhere in the building, and vehicles outside. No alarms, though, and he’d seen sensors.

So either no one was watchin’, or...

Samie’s ears twitched - rising slightly underneath the hat and staying there, accompanied by the odd crackle-pop of cartilage shifting beneath his skin - as a door opened somewhere below. Soft boot-treads pattered against the stairs; too quiet, too deliberate than anything should be in this chaos, and he gritted his teeth. The feckers were fast; he’d give ‘em that.

The door on the next landing was locked. Nice try, lads. He dropped Fergal and swivelled, driving a newly-plated elbow into the pale woodwork. The crunch ran up his arm, the door buckling under enhanced impact, and he shouldered it open past the now-bent lock. New danger flared in his blended senses and he jerked back again, a heartbeat before a rattle of small arms fire punctured the wall by the broken frame.

“We’re Abhani, ye trigger-happy bastards!” he barked before stepping back through, arms raised this time. The air was sharp, threaded with a peppery variation on gunsmoke, and another shot skimmed past his shoulder as he emerged - but no more followed it. Samie caught a brief image of raised weapons and golden cloth, before he hauled Fergal in and slammed the damaged door them, searching around for anything to block it off again. Damn Statey decoration was a sparse as it was boring, but there was a long metal display case full of framed (boring) paperwork a little further down, bolted to the floor.

Not bolted enough. The screech of rending metal seemed shockingly loud, and Samie ignored the commenting mutters that followed as he hefted the case on-end and wedged it across the door. Not a moment too soon: there was a crash from the other side and the injured woodwork shook violently. Samie bared his teeth in a humourless grin and threw an obscene gesture towards the door, before grabbing the bags and hurrying back to where Fergal had vanished after the already-retreating group. He vaguely remembered seeing them at the soiree, which seemed like a fuckin’ lifetime ago. A fancily-dressed bunch with hair in loops, heraldin’ from someplace he’d never heard of.

They sure weren’t State though, and that’d do for now.

He followed into their room and came up short against the array of elegant weapons he’d seen earlier. Their wielders were clad in gold-and-bronze, the kind of efficiently simple body armour that tended to lie hidden under much more elaborate detailing, right up until it needed not to. Samie rolled his eyes.

“Ah, c’mon! We ain’t got bigger problems?”

“Samúiel is with me,” Fergal said quickly, from somewhere off to one side. His tone was steadier now, more business-like. Got an audience. “My bodyguard, and my brother.”

Samie could feel the wash of suspicious attention, back and forth between them. Comparing Fergal’s slim, dark figure, and Samie’s own ginger-topped bulk. He grinned again.

“I take after ma.”

There was another stretched moment of wariness and then the weapons tilted down. It was just in time for another sound of impact to rattle down the corridor, so Samie stopped paying attention to people who weren’t his concern. One of the armed figures had moved first, and something in their stance suggested leadership, so he focused there.

“Said no t’the wine then?” he asked, more to fill the silence than anything else, adding: “Mostly, anyhow.”

Across the room, Fergal was stooped over in front of a slumped woman - unarmoured and still dressed in her party frock. She was blinking rapidly, eyes half-focused, and an attendant fidgeted with a sleek-looking syringe as they ran assessing fingers down her arm, checking and re-checking vitals.

Good to know they weren’t the only ones who’d brought along In Case Of Fuckery emergency kits.

“You have an exit?” The probable-leader stepped in front of Samie, pulling up the headgear’s eyepiece to reveal a strip of deep copper skin and black-brown eyes, narrowed towards him in suspicion. He shrugged.

“Couple, though they involve not bein’ stuck in this feckin’ rat-trap. Other’n that, it’s kinda at ‘not via the stairs we came down, because they either exploded or are full of bastards’.”

The commander snorted and flipped her mask closed again. He was guessing at ‘her’, mostly from the lashes and the height.

“Try not to die. Do not get in our way, or you will be shot through.”

Samie swung one enlarged hand upward in as sarcastic a salute as he could manage.

“Aye, I’m well aware that ‘bullet sponge’ is in my job description.”

“Samie,” Fergal didn’t look up from where he was muttering softly to the other presumed-Ambassador, and the commander had already turned away, motioning at the rest of her squad, so Samie’s replying shrug was mostly for his own benefit.

“Well it is,” he muttered. He dropped back as the golden guards began to move out again, staying near Fergal and eying their new friends. They were, he’d admit, very slick about all this. Each gilt figure moved like liquid, smoothly taking positions and covering each other as they started back out into the corridors. Hardly ever a step outa place - and Samie couldn’t help feeling a little bit lumbering in comparison. Being a good head taller than everyone around you, and at least twice as broad, would do that to a body.

His makeshift barricade was shaking noisily as the mismatched group made their way along the main corridor of this floor. There was another similar door at the far end, which seemed to have a gold-weave scarf nailed across it, and Samie glanced back at Fergal. He saw his brother find the incongruity, squint a little in that way he had when he was Looking with his less-standard senses, and nod towards Samie in silent confirmation.

UnGated Diolain were still Abhani, after all, and the mageblood ran as thick in them as anyone else. Samie was about as magically-inclined as a dishcloth - barring the huge otherworldy-technicality that mingled through the fabric of him - but Ferg had always been good at seeing what was really there. Couldn’t actually do much active, but he’d got Sight on him enough to make professionals take note - and what he was notin’ now, was that there was something altogether thaumic going on with that “scarf”.

“Someone else lied on their border forms,” Samie muttered, and Fergal grinned back.

The elevator on these floors sat off the middle of the corridor, flanked by panels of metal inset with stern State geometry. It was disabled - because of course it was - but two of the golden guards had already forced the doors, and were aiming small torches up and down the shaft. When they seemed satisfied, the commander turned back towards Samie.

“You can climb also?”

“Well, yeah - ” Samie followed her gesture, towards where another guard was gently wrapping a fine fabric webbing around the drugged Ambassador. The cradle was attached to what looked like a lacework harness, and he started to object as realisation kicked in. “Hey now, I got Ferg t’ - ”

“I’m fine,” Fergal interjected, tapping the smears of drying blood still clinging to his chest. “Shaky, but I’m set. I can climb; she can’t.”

“...right,” Samie sighed as he turned around to present his back. Path of least resistance. He was very aware of the feel of unfamiliar fingers deftly hooking straps around his chest, around his shoulders, and tried not to react when the pressure halted - just for a second - on an unexpected outcrop of solid tissue along his spine.

“It ain’t tender,” he said gruffly, and was relieved when the hands continued without voiced question. There were a few extra grazes across some of the other manifestations hidden beneath his shirt, but no more reaction, and the weight of the barely-conscious woman was soon nestled in against his back. The commander scooted in, tugging on a few parts of the harness - which was a hell of a lot sturdier than something that looked like it was made of lingerie had any right to be - then stepped back, giving a curt order in her own tongue as the group began to move into the open lift shaft. There was a narrow maintenance ladder set back into a groove in the wall, flanked by cable bundles, and the guards began to climb down it.

The actual elevator carriage was in there as well. Above them, in fact, and Samie eyed the base of it warily as bobbing torchlight patterns wove in and out of the gears beneath. This’d be the third time he’d climbed an elevator shaft in the line of one duty or other, but generally the big metal box of potential-crushing had been below him. He was suddenly very aware of how thin the ladder rungs - only big enough for three of his current fingers - seemed to be, and of the translated shiver of movement running back up towards him.

He’d survive a fall, of course. It would hurt like a motherfucker (appropriately enough) but if there was one thing that’d bring Scout through all-guns it was that horrible moment of plunging when you became so suddenly aware of all your internal organs. Still, he doubted he’d make a good crash-mat; and just because something wouldn’t kill you, didn’t make for good reason to let it happen.

So when the witchlight came rolling up the walls, Samie managed to restrain his shock to nearly biting through his tongue, rather than yanking any rungs out of their sockets.

“ - th-uck!”

Traceries of blue-white crackled as they rose, sharply-angular fractals that made your brain ache if you tried to focus on the patterns too hard, and Samie could feel a shiver in his skin as the waves passed over him. Like static, with a bizarre sense of upended vertigo trailing behind it, but it was gone as fast as it had come, and the eerie wisp glow swept past. An awful moment later the bottom of the elevator jerked violently, something above it going ping, and the cage began to move.

Upwards.

Samie swallowed hard, trying to get his heartrate back where it was meant to be. He leaned over and looked down, to where Fergal’s upturned face was dimly visible below his feet.

“The hell was that?” From the muttering that was happening from their new friends, he wasn’t the only one wondering, even as the group began to climb again. A little faster this time. After all, what went up…

“Isuanai mechis-pulse,” Fergal said, loudly enough that his voice bounced echoes from the walls. “Broad spectrum with visual bleed - someone’s hacked something together real fast. My guess is ‘up’, for anything that can.”

Isuanai. Now, that one Samie did know; he’d even been there a few times. Nice country. Lot of plastic. Full of people who’d start waxing lyrical about ‘techno-thaumic integration’ at the drop of a hat. Yeah, he couldn’t see any of them being all that keen on toeing a ‘no magic’ line either.

It seemed to take an excruciatingly long time before there was a new sound from below, a shifting hiss followed by the screech of forced metal, and new light burst into the shaft. Craning around, Samie saw the lead guards dart out of the newly-opened door, quick as you like. A tense few moments followed, his ears pricking at the sound of rapid footfalls in whatever space lay beyond, before a gold-masked face appeared at the doorway again and beckoned them to continue.

They came out into… some sort of service area? Sure wasn’t another corridor of fancy rooms, and Samie looked around while the drugged Ambassador was detached from his back. There were a lot of shelves, stacked with piles of towels, bottles of presumably-cleaning stuff, and other general maintenance paraphernalia.

There was something almost offensively mundane about the space, considering what was happening mere floors above them, and Samie’s teeth gritted together.

“Where now, Najwa?” Fergal asked quietly as he brushed himself down, making an attempt to tidy up his bloodied shirt. The commander’s head snapped around, surprise running through her body language for a second, and Samie pushed away a grin. Of course Ferg had picked up her name from somewhere. He wasn’t sure if it was a subtle ‘I can understand you, you know’ dig - since he didn’t put it past his brother to have managed to have a bit of fluency in whatever they were chattering in, on the off-chance - or just emphasising situational-camaraderie.

“...sewers,” she replied, finally. “Lead under walls. After that; our business.”

“Oh good,” Samie muttered, even though his attention was only half-on what was going on inside the room. His extended senses were twanging again - up, up, rapid feet with a panic in their urgency - quick quick - and he tilted his head, frowning. “This day just gets better, doesn’t it?”

The commander - Najwa - rounded on him.

“What do you do, Abhain?” she snapped. “Walk out door? How many bullets do you sponge?”

Samie grinned. It wasn’t a diplomatic expression.

“Plenty enough, love. I - ”

“Samie - ” Fergal’s warning was cut off by a curt bark from one of the other guards, and Najwa dropped her interest, falling into instant formation with the rest of her squad. Samie knew why, could hear the sound of approaching bootfall, and he shoved Ferg firmly back towards the other Ambassador, behind a metal cart that was the closest the room had to cover. He hunched down beside it, tensing, and drew a slow breath.

Focus, Samúiel.

He was staring so hard at the door that he missed the start of it, as Najwa’s team began to shimmer. The harsh white lights overhead seemed to lose their grip, illumination and shadow alike going grainy across each figure; breaking apart like falling sand to leave a shape in the world that blurred and slid away from clear vision. It wasn’t invisibility, not exactly, but it was going to be interesting to see how the Statey fuckers handled it.

The answer turned out to be ‘badly’.

Clearly, the squad that entered hadn’t been expecting much resistance; or likely, anyone at all. The sight of Samie’s hulking figure brought them up short, rifles rising - and then Najwa’s group struck hard. It wasn’t perfect: a few rounds loosed, skimming through the air whistle-close to Samie’s right ear, and the guttural crack of gunfire bounced violently around the tiled space, but soon the three intruders figures were face-down on the floor. One was deathly still, the second with some residual twitching, and the third wriggling furiously under two restraining feet.

The Abhani exchanged an impressed look.

Najwa hunched down on her heels in front of the surviving State solider and reached out, wrenching his mirror-sheen helmet away. She stood up again quickly, nodding as the restraining guards yanked the man onto his knees.

Well, ‘man’. Boy, really, and Samie felt a different twinge in his gut as he stared at the State-kid. He was pale, without even the burnt-in scatter of freckles that seasoned Samie’s own natural pallor, and his mousey blond hair was buzzed into near-transparency, but the most obvious thing about him was the stark tattoos stamped harshly across his face. Samie didn’t recognise many of the symbols - they were mostly geometric, sharp black angles that didn’t follow the line of his bones - but there was something particularly unsettling about the silvered, stylised eye that took up about half his forehead.

That, and the look of disgusted rage distorting his features.

“Sonofafuck,” Fergal muttered, peering around Samie’s shoulder. “We’re being hunted by guys who don’t even shave yet.” There was a shake to his voice, a tightness in his expression that reminded Samie that, worldly that his brother might be in some ways, he didn’t get shot at very much.

“That’s diplomatic-speak, is it?” he muttered back, as Najwa brought her own weapon up, resting it against the boy’s clavicle.

“How many are you?” she asked, and the pale figure bared his teeth in reply. It would have looked comical if it wasn’t for the pure hate in his eyes.

“Aberrant scum,” he hissed. “You are poison.”

There was a soft sound, metal on metal, from somewhere within Najwa’s weapon as she raised it higher, hovering over the bobbing bulge of the boy’s adam’s apple.

“Wait - ” Fergal ducked out around from behind Samie, slipping past the wary hand he swung to halt him, and took a few careful steps forward. He held his own hands out, placatingly, and looked between Najwa and the captive. “Please. Let me talk to him.”

“You waste your breath, Abhain,” Najwa replied, not even looking back. “They do not know mercy.”

“But we do.” Fergal came a bit closer again, edging himself into her vision. “Please.” He followed with something that Samie didn’t understand, a few words with surprisingly-smooth similarity to the guards’ earlier chatter, and Najwa’s shoulders tightened.

“Talk swift,” she said, finally, and moved her gun back. The State boy didn’t relax, still near-vibrating with anger and poorly-hidden nerves, but his washed-out gaze did flick between her and Fergal a few times. His lips moved, silently; breathed words that didn’t catch in his throat, as Fergal turned to the boy and smiled, opening his hands carefully.

“I don’t know what you’ve been told about us,” he said gently, and it was probably only Samie’s practised ears that caught the slight shiver under his voice. “But we - ”

“...binds... the Chain…” The boy was looking at Fergal, but didn’t seem to be focusing on him as he kept muttering. Frankly, it was creepy, and Samie shifted uncomfortably as he watched his brother try and make contact. These Statey bastards had always been a weird lot, but they seemed damn-near alien now - the irony of which wasn’t lost on him. Fergal tried again.

“I didn’t catch that,” he encouraged, leaning in a little further. The boy’s shoulders had slumped, some of the shivering tension dropping out of his stance, and his eyelids fluttered half-closed.

“The Chain,” he mumbled, “the Chain is - only as strong as it’s - weakest link.”

He said it like a mantra. Fergal blinked.

“Er… I suppose?”

The boy looked up, and all of Samie’s senses went off at once.

“I am not weak!”

He lunged forward violently, tearing himself free from the restraining grips of the guards behind him, who had relaxed a little when Najwa moved out of range. Metal flashed, Fergal jerking back fast enough to avoid the blade that cut air a hairsbreadth from his face, but the Stateboy didn’t stop, taking both their balances as the first shot from Najwa’s guards swished past above the falling pair. Metal came again, a wide, wild arc that just missed Samie as he dived towards Fergal, who was struggling arms-locked with the shaking youth - then the second round of fire hit home and the Stateboy crumpled forwards, the curved knife clattering away across the floor. Samie grabbed him, feeling bone creak under his grip and yanked upwards, blood and spittle and worse raining from the bullet-torn mess of the boy’s neck. Shock and anger sent strength into Samie’s movement, as he swivelled and hurled the body into the wall with a heavy, wet crack - then dropped down, swinging himself over Fergal in a guarding crouch.

Blood was pumping in his ears - his blood, and then some - and he could feel the plates along his back pressing up, spreading out over each other as he tried to hold them back.

“Enough!”

Samie hadn’t shouted, but the booming growl that broke his lips went bouncing from the walls anyway. The golden guns raised again - wary, again - but as Samie blinked himself back to focus, he realise Najwa’s wasn’t among them. It wasn’t possible see her expression under her mask, but she was clearly looking at him, nonetheless.

“...what are you, Abhain?” she asked, after a few moments of tension, and Samie forced his lips to slide back down, over the jutting angles of tooth that she couldn’t have failed to see. His muscles were twitching, his clothes were too fucking tight, and the sharp-iron scent of blood and spicy gunsmoke seemed to be swirling like a hurricane through his head.

The blood didn’t smell like Fergal’s, though. The knife had missed. The bullets had missed him. If the boy had been just a fraction closer…

Too close. That was too fucking close.

Samie rolled his shoulders as he stood up - a few inches further up than before - and met Najwa’s hidden gaze.

“I’m getting the fuck outa here.”

#Entofic #Abhain #OCs #Smoke & Ashes #Oh Fergal you try #Adventures of the periodically-demonic pseudo-Irish #Grumpy monster boys

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entomancy · 7 years

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Hi Entomancy. Your The End series, to me, is the one of the best fan works to pull together the semi-coherent plot line that is the Yogscast story driven Minecraft series's. What with what with Blackrock finally giving up the ghost, and Rythian releasing the rest of the plot, I was wondering if you plan to to put it to the quality written word it deserves.

Hey there, and thank you! I’m still extremely proud of The End series, and I had a blast writing them. Having a story to weave, and being part of the community that was active at the time really got me back into writing, so I remain very fond of the Blackrock series in particular.

It’s nice that Rythian and Zoey (and the others) have released the rest of the plot as was intended. Sad in a way that it’s a definite ending to the series, but if you’ve lost drive for a project and know it’s over, it’s best to draw a line under it. Giving people closure and answers is cool, since they’ve always acknowledged how much the fan reaction was important to Blackrock. Good move, guys :)

I really enjoyed working with that world - but no, I won’t be writing anything involving the plot outlined there. It’s been years since I was in a Blackrock headspace for writing, and I have so much on my plate at the moment that honestly if I tried I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t get finished. And that seems... odd, somehow? Like, I loved Blackrock, and filling in fan theory, expanding on my fan-EU of everything that came out of it, and that came from a place of storytelling passion for the story, the fandom and everything else.

But I’m not involved in that world like I was, anymore. Pleased it has closure, yes, and I hope Rythian feels this is a release of pressure rather than a failure in any way - he and Zoey created something that brought huge amounts of pleasure to a lot of people, and I honestly believe I’m a better writer now because of the fanwork that Blackrock inspired from me.

There’s also an element of... hmm... it seeming disingenuous, I suppose, for me to snap up the bones of a story that someone else was really trying to tell, putting all the effort and love into that work that they did; now that it’s ended, to grab onto it and... seem like I’m trying to ‘do better’ with it? If I was still in the fandom it’d be different, because it would be creating fan work, and come from that place of passion and inspiration that fandom is - but right now, it’d just feel weird for me.

Sorry, that was quite a long response. A few bits of this have been mulling in my head since the reveal; hopefully it was clear enough what I’m getting at!

#Yogstuff #Rythian #Blackrock #Entofic #overly-wordy replies #Anonymous

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entomancy · 7 years

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(Fic) An Enterprising Endeavour

Trying to get out of the utter creativity hole that this writeup has wrought. So, having a little play with my lovely ladies. This will go well >:)

(Statesman ‘verse; no warnings)

Part 1: Setting the scene

The city itself was quite typical of State architectural design. Walled, girded by several storeys of Y-shaped concrete slabs, its angular buildings in civic centuriation along a grid of streets. The raised, dark midlines of vehicle roads cut down the centre of the footways, radiating outward from the squared spire of the central militia hub and linked in to the fenced-in space that hugged the outer walls. Everything was planned. Efficient. Deliberate.

Or at least, it had been.

A lot of things had ended with Mother’s Fall. The broken dome of the central power plant was testament to that: metal and plastic and artificial stone alike, torn open from within like a ruptured boil. Shards the size of hanger doorways still jutted from the buckled skin of nearby buildings, and the force of the detonation had ripped into the structures themselves, cracking them open to reveal the blank, unfinished interiors. Roads had buckled, cheap tarmac warping when the embedded power lines overloaded, and every window was a gaping, glassless gaze, ringed in fragments.

In truth, it had never been completed. Mass-manufactured shells, just another link in a failing Chain, funded by frontier-hope and the desperate desire for renewal from something already dying. Perhaps if the end had been less sudden, if the murder and fury in the City – the real City; the metal toothed monster that all these far-flung spores were but hollow copies of – had not ignited when it did, this place might have been somewhere more to lose. But the shot had been taken, and the world had turned on an aching heartbeat.

And this city died, before it lived.

Devh Trask knew none of this. Oh, sure, she could see it was a Statey build. There was a look to everything them Motherfuckers shat out; couldn’t deny that. But the whys and the wheres, and the rest of it, didn’t worry her so much. What did – what did – and why she was sitting here, lurking in a Chargesdamn bush like a chokin’ peeper, in the rain – was that while this city might be dead, the little encampment of Bluelight wasn’t the only scavenger gettin’ settled on its outers.

She shifted position again, swearing under her breath as she wiped greasy rain off her monocular lens, and peered out again at the humps of construction tents, lights and movement visible within even in this weather. The place was almost directly on the other side of the walls, compared to where Jangles had set his first vans down, and was about as far out this side too. Didn’t look like anyone wanted to get too close to the half-finished husk, and Devh had her theories on that, but right now she was wondering exactly who it was that was getting comfy out here. The Bluelight broadcast sure got this far, so they knew that the fledgling trade post was there.

Hadn’t even said hello. So she was getting’ real curious –

- and, as the meaty hand slammed down abrupt onto her shoulder, its heralding footsteps masked by the hammer of the rain, Devh realised she wasn’t the only one.

“Ehy, Trask. Fancy seein’ you out ‘ere.”

…ah shit.

#Entofic #OCs #Hairy-legged ladies of the post-apocalypse #not a 100% accurate tag but I want to use it #I don't think I even want to count how many of my stories have '...shit' or similar as the final line of the first part #Possibly more than have the first line as just 'Blood' or 'Pain'#I am Garth Marenghi #we all know this

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entomancy · 7 years

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Diolain - part 4: The State of play

I’m sure I’ve used that title before... ANYWAY. I have - possibly foolishly - signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year, so while that will hopefully start up my writing better, it means I will be very much in Not Allowed To Edit mode for a month. So allowed myself a final fling with editing and polished up chapter 4 of this.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Wattpad.

Title: The State of play Setting: The State history: end- ‘Golden Age’ (about 40 years ago). Warnings: Blood. Summary: The team learn a bit more about what is going on, and find another familiar face. Characters: Samúiel Daly; Fergal Callaghan; Najwa Farouk. Words: 2975

Fergal seemed dazed, hardly responding as Samie hauled him back upright and made an attempt to wipe away some of the gory splatter. He recruited his hat to help, since there wasn't much point now in even trying to disguise the curving ridges of scale that had run a new geography down his skull. Even his jaw was deeper, longer, giving him the underbite from hell, and layers of faintly-oval scales had spilled out of his split sleeves and along his wrists, refracting dully as he ran an assessing hand across Fergal’s shoulders, feeling the shiver set in there.

“Still with me, Ferg?” he asked, quietly, and after a few long breaths he got a shaking nod in reply.

“Still with you, Sam.” Fergal reached up to fold his fingers down over the contact. Slim, dark, human digits, atop ones now like knotted bananas that ended in blunt claws.

The claws were always a bit of a pain, if Samie were honest. He still had fingertips - or at least soft, gripping pads set underneath each one - but actually touching anything without raking the claws across it first was a task. It was kind of like wearing gloves made of your own living fingernails (a description that tended to make folk stop askin’ about it).

But the emphasis now wasn't just about the demon through him. It was more… uncomfortable. Samie had been in situations that had gone south before; hell, had been on assignments that started there and just got worse, but that was just it. What he did. The sort of life he’d been set for before his balls had dropped. Fergal wasn't the kind of person you dragged up off the floor, spackled bloody with a dead man’s gore. He was a talker; highborn without either the arrogance of family or the chipped shoulder common to unGated. He did words, and smiling, and people liked him. He shouldn't fucking be here. Probably none of them should, but this was more’n that.

Samie was angry, so the Scout was angry too. She didn’t know Ferg, but the feel of - the importance of - kin was always there within the sense of her. Whether it was just that “synaesthetic transference” or a deeper empathy (the kind of distinction that had gotten Samie sternly Talked To in his younger days, before he’d learned to keep those musing to himself), it didn't matter.

They were getting him out.

Najwa’s guards were visibly keeping their distance as Samie herded Fergal into his shadow once again. Only Najwa herself was still looking directly at him, her head tilted slightly to one side.

“So, it is true.” She sounded more intrigued than worried. “The monster-kings of a cursed country.”

“Never the Rig, love,” Samie replied, only half paying attention as he tried to get his bearings against his mental map of this place. “Even Abhain ain’t crownin’ a demon.”

Not that a couple hadn’t tried. The Cineál’s history was… interesting, when no one was forcing you to read it. What it boiled down to, when you went to the core, was that you just couldn't be the boss and a Gate. Didn't work. Wouldn’t fly. Honestly, Samie couldn’t see why anyone would want the other option, even if there were any kinda choice to it. Whole lot of politics and shades-of-bullshit.

Najwa watched him for another heartbeat then turned back to the State bodies, business-like again. One of her guards had pulled the corpses’ helmets off, rapidly searching, and reached up to hand her something. Some muttered conversation was exchanged before she pushed it through the fabric of her helm, at ear-height. Radio link, maybe? The other guard did the same.

“We go now,” she announced, and again the group fell into their smooth formation. Samie seemed to have been left with both Ambassadors; Fergal sticking close, and the golden woman moving to lean heavily against his other side as they moved.

The room let out into the kind of dull corridor that said “maintenance” in several languages of functionally-cheap decor. The only additions to the walls, besides printouts of fire safety instructions, were a selection of stencilled designs in black. A ring of more rings interlocked, with ‘Unity’ printed in joyless font in the centre; angular flames below clasped hands; and other designs Samie couldn’t quite work out more than to decide he didn’t like them. There was some weird shit on the walls back home, in places - particularly on old buildings, slathered in deliberately-dramatic renderings of hybrid forms, designed by fevered imaginations of people who had mistaken Gatehood for God-touched and gotten way too involved in the idea - but that was a familiar kind of odd. Plus it was all relic, abandoned delusion that no-one sensible believed in anymore. This stuff was fresh.

He didn’t like it at all.

The distant sounds of fighting became considerably less distant as they made their way further through the building’s back-room veins. How many international groups were here, anyway? Samie hadn’t been keeping track, since knowing how many flags to recognise had seemed to be a Fergal-problem. Ambassadors, immediate entourage, guards, domestic staff… there’d certainly be a damn sight more than had been at that party. What were these eyeballed-up bastards planning to do - kill everyone?

“Ain’t this all gonna look a bit feckin’ suspicious?” he muttered, as they crept across a large, utterly-empty kitchen. “Invite a whole lot of folks over, then knock them all off at once? What’re they after? Thinkin’ no one’s gonna notice?”

“There’s… something strange going on alright,” Fergal replied, his voice lowered. “I mean, getting Intel out of here is a task, sure, but all indicators were that the regime was stabilising.” He wiped a hand down his face again, distractedly, and shivered. “Why else hold this? They’re not grand hosts but I sure as shite wouldn’t have pushed for attending if - if I’d thought - ” he trailed off, staring down at the smears of still-drying scarlet on the back of his hand. Little muscles in his throat twitched, his lips tightening unevenly.

“...I shouldn’t’ve - should’ve seen - ”

The purging sigil’s earlier evacuations meant the heave that cut his words this time was dry, little more than spit and acid, half-choked as Fergal tried to silence himself as he retched. Samie laid one huge hand on his brother’s shoulder, fingers splayed enough to keep the claws out of play, and squeezed awkwardly with his palm.

“Hey now,” he said, a little gruffly. “None ‘o that searchin’ about for blame in your head. They’re a bunch of fucking loony bastards. End of. And whatever they were thinkin’ of? Well, now they’ve got Isuanai in the walls, this lot of scary ladies - ” he jerked a free thumb towards the golden guards, since he was fairly sure now that they were tagging along with a lioness situation “ - going all spec-ops on their arses, as well as our shenanigans. I’ll be bettin’ we are royally fucking up the plan.”

“You’d know,” Fergal muttered as he wiped his mouth, following with a wisp of a smile, and Samie rolled his eyes.

“If you’re so-delicately alluding t’your twenty-seventh, I’ll point out again that it’s real far from my fault that Murray can’t hold his soma.” He stopped, frowning. “...okay, so the pond bit was my idea, but - ”

“Be quiet,” Najwa hissed over her shoulder, exuding a glare even through the fabric. Samie stuck out his tongue. It wasn’t exactly a mature response, but right now he didn’t care.

“Craic in survival situations is - ”

“Speak. Less.”

He might have thought of a wittier comeback, given time, but the rattle of gunfire from up ahead took everyone’s attention. There was shouting, too, and Samie felt Fergal press in closer behind him, the golden Ambassador tightening her grip on his arm, and -

- and -

There’s something off about this.

Samie’s extended senses prickled and he sought around in the enhanced input, searching for the oddity. Gunfire in the current state of chaos wasn’t exactly strange. The sound had a replying pattern - one set of shots and another in retort - and he frowned, carefully swinging the gold lady around into Fergal’s surprised arms.

“Gimme a sec,” he said, and started off down the corridor again at a soft jog. The backstairs-space curved here, a discreet doorway set ajar into the public area beyond, and Samie caught a glimpse of movement through the crack - a black-clad shape shifting position, crouching down behind the cover provided by the edge of a wide staircase. He remembered that staircase, guiding Fergal’s presumed-tipsy footsteps up boring-patterned plush. Now it was a shooting gallery.

He could smell blood, and the acrid edge of State gunsmoke. The figure behind the door hadn’t noticed him, but that black-sheen helmet was familiar enough that the remaining hair on Samie’s neck rose. He didn't much like creepin’ up on a guy unannounced, particularly as he doubted the trooper was going to be any older than the youths back there, but he wasn’t going to give up surprise out of plain pride.

The Stateboy tensed, bobbing up to fire again, and this time no answering gunshots followed. There was a cry of alarm - and Samie’s eyes widened as he realised that he knew that reedy voice; cut short with pain and fear, but familiar nonetheless.

“I beg you - this is madness - you must -!”

...the actual fuck is goin’ on here?

The Stateboy clearly hadn’t been expecting any more resistance, as he fair-swaggered forwards with his weapon swinging widely. He certainly hadn’t been expecting anyone to appear from behind him, and there was no way in hell he would have thought to see anything like Samie’s scale-strewn hulk baring down. The hybrid fist slammed into his helmet with shattering force, plastic bursting open like crushed eggshell and the dark figure went down hard, skidding bonelessly as he hit the tile.

Samie slowly lowered his arm, looking down the length of it at the second figure, slumped against the wall behind a makeshift barricade of tables. There were other bodies, strewn here and there, all peppered with bloody punctures, but this was the only one still breathing. And staring at Samie, goggle-eyed, as if the devil himself was tryin’ to crawl up his arse.

“How’s shit, Crawford?” Samie broke out a humourless, extremely toothy smile. “Y’look fuckin’ terrible.”

Crawfig’s mouth flapped uselessly beneath his rodent face, his Adam's apple bouncing like a ball on elastic. It took him a few moments to manage words - and by then, Samie had already confirmed his own suspicion. The body next to Crawdie - the one with a hole in their chest so fresh that the blood was still running, brightly crimson - was State too. The firefight had sounded odd because the fucking guns were the same.

Hells’ fuckin’ teeth; they’re even shootin’ each other now.

“Y-you... this - th-this isn't…” Crawford’s voice was shaky, but it was a lot more coherent than Samie might have expected, given how much of the wine he’d downed. Then again there were yellowish stains down the front of his suit and he smelled of vomit beneath the fear. Maybe the knockout didn’t kick in if the damn stuff hadn’t touched the sides coming back up, either.

“Now - ” Samie shoved the remains of the barricade aside, wood splintering around his fingerclaws. “I know y’like to chat on, but it has been a fuck of an evening, and I am runnin’ very low on patience.” He crouched down beside the skinny man - who was propped up against the fallen shape of some ornamental black vase - and leaned in further. Crawboy flinched at the proximity, but to his credit he didn’t look away.

“What the fuck is goin’ on?”

“Betrayal.” It was a tight word, halted in pain, and Samie realised as he spoke that Crawford had one hand clasped tightly against his ribs, with a darker kind of stain creeping around the edges of his fingers. Crawford’s gaze flicked towards the crumpled figure at his side. He licked his cracked lips and squeezed his eyes closed as he continued.

“There - have always been - factions. Dis-disagreements in the - p-p-plan - but this… this…” His other hand jerked up, grasping at something around his neck, and pulled a small metal shape out from its shrouding fabric. Samie found himself staring at a small version of the same eye-symbol that the boy had had tattooed on his face, this one threaded on a length of polished chain. Crawford clutched at it, white-knuckle tight, and his lip trembled.

“I am loyal. I - I have always been - a Party man.”

“The life an’ soul, I’d say,” Samie muttered, apparently unheard, as Crawford opened his eyes again, squinting towards the broken figures beyond Samie’s bulk.

“They called - us traitors. Courting corruption, with - aberrants! As if we - as if I - ” Crawford stopped, suddenly focusing on Samie’s hybrid features, and a wide, mad smile broke onto his own face. It didn’t look healthy, in all honestly.

“Perhaps... I did not do my - homework on you after all, Abhain.”

“I’m an advanced subject.” Samie carefully reached out, brushing as gently as he could against Crawford’s bloody hand. “Let’s have a look at’cha.”

He didn’t like the snivelly Stateboy, but he was talking, and seemed to be on the bad side of the armoured gobshites who’d been shooting at them. Although he didn't miss the shudder as he eased Crawford’s fingers aside, peeling back wet fabric with careful clawtips. The wound beneath was dark, and raw, an ugly gouge that hadn't breached the muscle. It looked painful, sure, and bloody, but on Samie’s judgement it wasn’t a lethal hit.

“Startin’ to wonder if your military delinquents can see outa them helmets,” he said, pushing Crawdidle’s hand back into place. “I’m pretty much the proverbial barnside, and I’ve barely been shot at all.”

Crawford looked at him, a whirl of strange expressions riding his features, all too fast to stick.

“When they see you - Abhain - I can promise that they will.”

“Still got that silver tongue in his head, has he?” Fergal’s voice broke the weird moment and Samie realised he had company again a second before Najwa appeared from the other side of the smashed vase. She barely looked at Crawford, but flicked a gesture between the two sets of dead Stateys.

“You have seen?”

“Yeah. Guess we hope they're too busy shooting at eachother t’bother with us?”

It sounded unlikely, even as he said it, and Najwa didn't respond. Instead she hoisted herself up onto the lip of the large, artistically-barred window that ran in sections around the room edge, and peered out. There was a courtyard outside, if memory served - all wide paths in polished concrete and some kinda ugly focal art in the centre - and the path that led back to the central events-building, or whatever it was. The railway they’d arrived by was on the other side of that, and Samie was a lot less sure where Najwa’s sewer entrance was.

One of the other gold guards had begun once again unmasking the dead State troops and searching for earpieces; she came to the one nearest to Samie, fiddled for a bit, then looked up and said something sharply. At Najwa’s equally-incomprehsible reply, the guard snapped her fingers at Samie until she got his attention, then tossed a small shape at him. Which he entirely and unsurprisingly failed to catch.

Fergal retrieved the little device and raised an eyebrow at Samie.

“You want it?”

“Not sure it’d stay in right now - ears keep moving,” Samie grunted, glancing over to where Najwa had slid back down and was already in another low, animated conversation. Fergal shrugged as he pushed the earpiece into place and tilted his head, listening.

“There’s chatter but it's all code, I don't - ow!” he cut off abruptly, clutching at his ear as there was a burst of witchlight and Samie heard the volume spike dramatically.

“- finally one of you has an half-decent signature!”

“Loud.” Fergal yelped, cringing as he yanked the earpiece out again, holding it away from himself. The tiny radio gave a tinny sigh.

“Oh pardon; oh yes, because I do not have a thousand other worries over your delicate ears. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hack together a scrying circuit from this backwards-ass system? No? No, you do not, and I - ”

“Merci, Isuanai.” Fergal’s composure settled again. “This is Fergal Callaghan, Abha- ”

“Yes. I know,” the voice continued irritably. “Who else would you be? Every other idiot in this country dégénéré is hardly above background. You finally connect yourself and you light up like a firework. How many are you? I am trying to get an eye, but the connards have killed their own cameras.”

Fergal hesitated - just for a second - and his gaze flicked back to Crawford before he answered.

“Nine. I’ve… made some friends.”

“Is that not your job?” The voice retorted, then audibly clicked their teeth. “I have the courtyard; cannot see inside. You are clear now, but there are more enroute.”

“Thank you,” Fergal replied, then frowned. “Where are you, Isuanai? We can - ”

“I am… safe,” the voice cut him off sharply, irritation clear again even in the tinny tones. “Go, and go now.”

“Never argue with a ‘Swan,” Samie muttered, mostly to himself, as Fergal hurriedly explained the situation to the others. After a quick, very gesture-heavy discussion between the golden guards, they started for the wide doors at the room’s other end; the Ambassadors supporting each other, Crawford slung over Samie’s wide shoulder like a whimpering backpack.

We’re gettin’ on better than at that fuckin’ party, anyway.

They had eyes, and comms, and almost the outline of an entire plan. Now here was just hoping their luck held out.

And it did - for a whole ten minutes.

Then the shooting started.

#Entofic #Historical adventures of the periodically-demonic pseudo-Irish #not 100% sure about pacing but ehh #This is all going so well #Poor Fergal - he's a nice boy #French iWizard hipsters #Abhain

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entomancy · 6 years

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Diolain (part 5): Taking a shot

Finally writing a bit more, of my self-indulgent backstory fics. Samie, you grumpy bastard <3

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Wattpad.

Title: Taking a shot Setting: The State history: end- ‘Golden Age’ (about 40 years ago). Warnings: Blood. Gunshot injuries. Summary: In which a blockade is handled, some poorly-hidden secrets are let go, and Fergal tries so hard to be diplomatic. Characters: Samúiel Daly; Fergal Callaghan; Najwa Farouk. Words: 2800

“Bit much t’hope they’ll actually take each other out, is it?” Samie muttered as he pressed himself to the wall, listening to the gunfire argument happening around the next corner. He didn’t dare get much closer to the edge – given he wasn’t exactly diminutive right now – so watched Najwa inch forwards instead. The strange shimmer was running across her clothes again, displacing the sight of her as she assessed the situation. She padded back, and to Samie’s surprise she turned immediately to him.

“One fortification; two vehicles,” she said, throwing a few small gestures behind her. “Two fire lines. Vehicles, we can take. Fortification we cannot.” Her dark eyes flicked up and down Samie’s body, fixing attention on the visible lumps and bumps of the Scout’s manifestations, and she tilted her head.

“You said ‘plenty’ for bullets to sponge, Abhain. Was this bravado?”

That curiosity was back in her voice, clear even in the low whisper she was using. Samie hesitated, but the cat was well out of the proverbial now, and getting the fuck out of here quickly seemed more important than faffing with particulars.

“Nah, I can get their attention.”

“No.” Fergal’s sudden whisper startled them both. He grabbed onto Samie’s arm. “I know how you think, Sam, and for fucksake – ”

“The boat’s well sailed on the whole ‘secret monster’ thing,” Samie replied, reaching up to tap the horn-like nodules strung along his rapidly-vanishing hairline. “Might as well use it.”

“That’s not – ” The hand on Samie’s arm tightened. Still shaking. “What I – mean – I don’t need you to risk – ”

“Ferg, you are shite at having a bodyguard.” Samie shook his head. “It’s the point of it, right? Why we got this whole Diolain thing going on in the first place – ”

He didn’t get chance to finish because Fergal interrupted, muscles in his throat tensing visibly as he spoke:

“You know damn well I don’t support the droit.”

Samie stopped. Time might as well have stopped. Even the background sound of State gunfire seemed to hesitate, off-footed by the shock of those words piercing the air.

Fergal Callaghan. Diolian. Ambassador. Close enough to legitimate that the circumstances which could put his fancy arse on the throne weren’t totally impossible. Saying, out loud, where representatives of three other nations could hear clearly – even if Crawdibs was only half-awake – that he opposed the reason that either of them existed at all.

Of course Samie knew. You didn’t spend this much time around someone without getting at least an inkling of their bugbears, and he was one of the few people Ferg’d drop his political guard around. He’d almost said as much, half a dozen times.

Wasn’t sure he’d actually said-said it, though.

“We do not have time for this,” Najwa hissed, breaking the frozen moment. “They find us, or we find them. Decide now, Abhain.”

Samie stared down into Fergal’s frozen expression, and shook his head.

“Sorry Ferg; it’s been too close already. You aren’t allowed t’die on my watch.”

Without waiting for a response, he strode out into the open and glanced around. The space was a wide diamond of paved ground, with low planters in those geometric arrangements Statey architects had such a hardon for. Two hulking armoured cars were parked across the main routes in, metal shields deployed from their sides to block the roads, and the tops of State helmets were visible crouched behind them. An ornate two-storey tower rose out of the plaza’s centre, its narrow windows overlooking each entry road and Samie caught a brief muzzleflash from inside, followed by the spark of ricochet from one of the vehicles.

Alright lads.

He started to run. About halfway across the surprise of his appearance seemed to wear off, and the first splinters of shot-out paving burst around him. Gritting all his teeth, Samie ignored the misses and managed not to stumble when the first bullet hit home, gouging a line of hot pressure across his back, followed by a bulging shiver as his plates rose in response and finally shredded his shirt. He swung his arms up, shielding the sides of his face as more shots whizzed past; one catching him in the leg, sending his gait into a loping stumble until the flesh pulsed back out; another pair punching quick-succession impacts into his side. He reached the tower wall still upright; there wasn’t really cover here, but he lurched around the base until he was at least out of direct sight from the trucks.

One of the hits on his side had gone deep. Spasms of wet pain spilled through his chest as he dug a claw into the bloody puncture, which didn’t help in the slightest. Definitely didn’t have time for that. Tensing, Samie reached back, opening himself further to the feel of the Scout’s infinitely-close attention. Pain died abruptly, washed aside in the warm pulse of strength that came through with Her, and he felt bullet fragments scrape bone the other way as his tissue swelled – shivered – and pushed the invasive shrapnel back out again; accompanied by a sensation he could only describe as like a meaty sneeze.

Through his ribs.

…there was probably a reason the Cineal had never had any famed poets in their ranks.

More gunfire rattled, this time above him, and Samie blinked reality back into place as he peered upwards at the window above. Shapes were visible inside, moving rapidly back and forth between cover, and shouting – which he couldn’t exactly blame them for. Now he was closer, he could see the oddly-ornate design of the metal shutters that covered the openings. If they were closed, and no one was shooting out of it, the little building probably just looked like another piece of architectural artwork.

Seriously. Who hid a gun post in the middle of a diplomatic-themed town square?

Samie took a few steps backward before starting to run again, willing as much speed as he could from legs that were increasingly built more for bracing than sprinting; then leapt. His hybrid wasn’t one that leaned heavily into agility, but he wasn’t fully through yet, and even an unreasonably bulky eight-foot tall man can clear a fair height from personal altitude alone. Samie’s claws slammed against the metal, bone screaming against steel for an uncertain moment before he got purchase. His limbs tensed, bracing with his feet – his shoes were lying in sad tatters below, but it was easier now to grip with the pads of his fused toes – and he pulled.

Half a dozen bolts resisted for a moment and then sheared at once, the decorated gunnery slats crumpling under the alien strength of his hands, and Samie let out a grunt as he ripped half of the shutter free. A frantic spray of bullets tore through his shoulder in reply – burning, electric beestrings that sent odd echoes running down his arm – but he just growled and lunged further in. The dark mouth of the mounted machinegun greeted him, and he bent the hot metal back against itself.

“Lay off,” he rumbled, looking around at the handful of figures inside, all staring at him with unconcealed horror. They looked a more varied age group than the trigger-happy youths in full armour, and it smelled like half of them had already pissed themselves.

Damn. It was a lot easier to stay angry when your opponents were a bit less pathetic.

“You party guys?” he hazarded, trying to remember the terms Crawfog had used. “Not – warded? Wards, I mean?”

Gunfire rattled again from outside but it cut short this time; the interruption accompanied by a strange whoosh sound and a thin scream. Najwa must’ve got started. The nearest Statey – a crow-haired fella who could’ve given Crawfek a run in the chinless race – managed a small nod, even if he looked like he was about to swallow his own Adam’s apple in panic. Samie let out a long breath, which apparently was enough to make the man wince.

“Okay. Now you keep your fuckin’ heads down, don’t shoot anyone, and I’ll be returnin’ the favour. Right?”

There was a general terrified shuffle, and a couple of the figures started inching towards the floor. Samie nodded, in what he hoped was a vaguely encouraging fashion.

“Right. And don’t any of you try shootin’ me in the back; I feckin’ hate that.”

He slung himself back out, dropping back onto the plaza slabs and looked over in the direction of the new commotion. The eastern vehicle now had a dead dark figure hanging down over its barricade. He couldn’t spot any more helmets upright there either, so it seemed that –

“Surrender, Aberrant scum!”

Samie swung around towards the bellow, and ice pulsed down his spine. A State figure was stood atop the other vehicle with one arm wrapped around the chest of one of Najwa’s team. The woman had been unmasked, freeing a wave of thin black braids, and blood was already running down her face from a gash at her forehead. Yet what drew attention the strongest was the rifle pressed into the side of her face.

Another golden figure lay on the floor a few metres away, unmoving; a dark stain spreading out over the plaza slabs beneath. The soldier who had spoken was in cover at the side of the vehicle, holding a megaphone.

“You are in violation of Mother’s generous terms, monsters!” they shouted again, the boosted tones bouncing off the nearby walls. “Submit now to her mercy!”

“The fuck, ‘violated terms’? Aren’t you the ones shootin’ your own mates?” Samie shouted back as he took a few steps out of the shadow of the tower. He couldn’t cover that distance fast enough, but he could try and hold the fucker’s attention...

“Stop! No further!” the amplified voice cracked a little as its owner ducked back even more at Samie’s movement. “I swear on the Chain, Aberrant, this cur dies if you take one more step.”

Samie stopped, fingers flexing, and bared his teeth.

“And then? You gotta a plan fer stop me rippin’ your murderin’ head clean off after?”

“Samúiel, you stay put!” Fergal’s shout was soft in comparison, but it caught attention, and Samie’s heart leapt into his throat.

Ferg, this ain’t time for your diplomacy bollocks.

Yet there he was, walking slowly into the open space; hands raised, face set in a constipatedly-calm expression. He focused on the vehicle, speaking gently.

“Please. There must be a peaceful way. We do not want to harm you.”

Speak fer yourself. Samie bit back the comment as his gaze strayed to the unmoving golden shape on the ground. He suspected Najwa wasn’t exactly going to be on board with any –

-something is wrong-

It wasn’t exactly the same instinct as before, but still something flared violently in Samie’s extended awareness. A glint, a corner vision flicker – the ghost-echoes from corners not yet manifest – and a sense of sudden danger pulsed like a scream in his mind. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who noticed – Fergal had opened his mouth to speak again when he let out a yelp, clutching at his ear and wincing so physically that the first shot went through his shoulder rather than his throat.

“Sniper!” Samie roared; and it was a roar, a guttural rattle that rolled up his throat like distilled thunder as he broke into a sprint, lunging for Fergal out of instinct more than planning. Another shot came, passing through Samie’s leg again and this time the limb buckled under him, tendons snapping and wavering beneath his ruptured flesh. He kept his momentum, arms taking the weight as he pounced the next few steps. A third shot missed his changed posture by inches, burying harmlessly into a planter, and he finally noticed the new commotion happening on top of the armoured vehicle. The unmasked woman had clearly taken a moment of distraction to her advantage and was now straddling her captor, her hands clamped either side of theirs along the rifle’s length, wrestling for control.

Fergal was flat on the ground, half-curled and clutching his shoulder, his face set in a rictus of agony. Open. Exposed – at least until Samie’s armoured bulk skidded to a halt over him. His back plates flared out, spreading and flattening, and he felt another shot shatter one, embedding into the muscle underneath. He didn’t care.

“You fucking eejit,” he snarled down at his brother, trying not to panic. “Let me be your fuckin’ bodyguard!”

The bullet had gone through clean enough, but the wound was still a gory rose against Fergal’s tattered dress shirt, and that arm was kinked at a strange angle, barely even shaking compared to the rest of him. Samie wasn’t a medic – he really wasn’t a medic – but this didn’t look good even to amateur eyes. Was there anything in the diplomatic bag for this size of hurt? There had to be something, but his memory was skipping, caught between fear and fury and that this shouldn’t have happened, he was supposed to… he was supposed…

Something shattered high above them and Samie whipped around, blinking at the rain of falling glass from near the top of one of the surrounding buildings. He was in time to see a flash of gold, hear a distant choked-out scream, before a figure came tumbling out of the broken window and hit the ground hard. Gold flashed again, zigzagging like gilden lightning across the paving – and then Najwa was suddenly beside him, a long coil of strangely-animate fabric twisting back up around her arm.

“No further sniper.”

“Thanks,” Samie replied absently, hesitating as he reached towards Fergal, who just groaned. “Fuck… fuck fuck fuck…”

Najwa gestured towards her troops – including the unmasked woman, who now had a lot more blood on her clothes, and the State rifle slung over her shoulder – snapping instructions that Samie couldn’t understand. He wasn’t paying attention. He needed to do something, but his thoughts were going through treacle.

Snap out of it.

One shot did this. Just one. Everything about Fergal suddenly seemed impossibly fragile, as if he would just shatter into dust as soon as something like Samie touched him. One shot. There were at least two of those same bullets rising up through Samie’s back right now, being rejected by his unquiet flesh like metallic time-lapse pimples.

They’re supposed to shoot me. I’m the one with fucking horns. They’re supposed to shoot me.

If he breathed too hard he might just blow away. Break something else. A weird giddy horror danced through Samie’s thoughts, dragging paralysis with it. This brittle creature. He shouldn’t be here.

Snap out of it, Samúiel.

He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding so much.

Do something. Do something-!

“We must move.”

Najwa’s voice was like a blade cutting through the mess of Samie’s thoughts, and reality slammed back hard along with it. What the fuck was he doing? He needed to -

He blinked as he finally registered what was happening. One of the golden guards – the one who had been working on their Ambassador – had ducked in under the shadow of him and knelt down next to Fergal. An array of strange tools were laid out on a cloth to one side, and her quick fingers were already dancing across the injury, leaving glistening silver sutures like cobwebs behind them. She uncapped a small vial of something colourless, revealing a fine needle, then stopped and looked up at Samie questioningly.

“Trust, Abhain,” Najwa said softly and Samie just nodded, mesmerised. Fergal’s expression relaxed as the needle bit in, the whole of him going limp moments afterwards. The medic worked rapidly, doing some other complicated things to the wound – which had stopped bleeding now, like a paused film – before she pulled out a silken wrap and quickly covered the site. She nodded, and helped Najwa lift the still, slender figure into Samie’s huge arms.

He was so light. So fucking light.

The women stood back, and both immediately stared down at Samie’s leg. There wasn’t a lot left of his trousers by this point – from bulk and bullets – and already-knitted flesh could be seen clearly through the tatters, reduced to a cracked, coppery scar that was already fading. The medic stared, muttering something unintelligible, then slid her kit back into a pocket and she turned towards the rest of the group.

Najwa waited until she had moved off before looking back at Fergal.

“He is not like you, Abhain?” she asked, quietly, although it wasn’t really a question now. Fergal was barely larger than the arms that cradled him – arms that were thickly layered in bronze scales, with a demon’s thick heartbeat pulsing through the blended blood beneath.

Samie took a long, slow breath, and shook his head.

“No. He isn’t.”

Najwa held his gaze for another moment, then nodded towards the others.

“We must go.”

---

#Entofic #Abhain #This is still going Very Well lads #Good try #Najwa is 145% Done with State bollocks right now

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entomancy · 7 years

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(Fic) Diolain: Part 2

At home for the start of the xmas times / writeup ‘holiday’, and I’ve tidied up the second part of Diolain. Who’s ready for blood-magic meditech and consideration of whether your demon matches your beard?

Title: Scout and about Setting: The State history: end- ‘Golden Age’ (about 40 years ago). Warnings: Blood, vomiting (mentions) Summary: The evening goes from awkward to Worse, at some speed. Fortunately, there is an element to Samie that their hosts have overlooked. Characters: Samúiel Daly; Fergal Callaghan. Words: 2900

For such a joyless bunch of bastards, Samie would have to give these Stateys some grudging credit for making drink with impact. The actual flavour of the wine hadn’t been anything to write home for – especially to a fella used to Abhani soma, which tasted of smoke and ice and early death if you got the good stuff – but hell, it’d been a while since he had felt uncertainty in his knees after few glasses. Possibly he should’ve kept more of an eye on how much he was draining, but after he’d made excuse to get away from Crawlish and his genetic twaddle, breaking into any of the other settled conversations proved… tricky.

He clearly wasn’t the only one feeling the haze: there was a notable steady increase in the number of raised, slightly-slurred voices amidst the groups; more moments when the diplomatic masks slipped and jolts of real-feeling cut ugly across polite manoeuvrings. There were changes in the movements of his fellows in suited-bulk as well, carefully positioning themselves closer to their increasingly pink-cheeked charges. Wary, like.

An undertone was building here, something metaphorically sour in the air that set Samie’s hackles up. Nothing concrete, nothing he could set his finger on, so he had to settle for shifting back and forth at the sidelines, trying to push aside the fuzzy edge to his thoughts.

Had he really drunk that much?

The end of the evening came as a relief. A couple more short, simpering speeches from the State hosts – the words sliding past Samie’s attention like they’d been greased, leaving no sense of what was actually said – followed by the general winding-down of conversation as guests began to filter away. Wobbling, in many cases.

When he finally caught back up with Fergal again, it was clear he was no exception.

“Gotta admit, Sam, m’impressed y’managed not t’deck that Ministry wanker,” Fergal’s voice was lowered, features set into a concentrated expression as he very deliberately didn’t lurch forwards. Samie shrugged, discreetly taking his half-brother’s elbow to steady him in sight of other party guests. Didn’t do for the Ambassador to seem unbalanced, even if everyone else was looking equally worse for wear.

“Hadn’t the foggiest what he was goin’ on about, t’be honest,” he replied quietly as he steered them through the sprawling building towards their designated suite.

Embassies were weird in general, in Samie’s opinion – all pomp and posturing; part museum, part national peacocking – but this place took it to a new level. The State apparently kept all its embassies in a walled offshoot town, stuck on the end of an umbilical train line north of what was otherwise the capital City. If the political village hadn’t been built exclusively for the purpose, it had sure been refitted for it. Everything was all very Ambassadorial, sure, and with heavy-handed heaps of Glorious State reminders emblazoned everywhere they would fit, but there was… something false about it all. Like if you went around the wrong wall you’d find yourself surrounded by sawdust and sandbags and spare lighting rigs.

“S’all staged.”

It wasn’t until Fergal gave a distinctly undignified snort that Samie realised he’d spoken out loud.

“Y’not that green, Ss’me - ” he started, but the jibe blurred out as he slumped sideways, Samie’s supporting arm only just preventing him crumpling to the floor.

This wasn’t right.

“Ferg?” Samie hefted the smaller man back upright, feeling another jolt of worry as he realised how unstable he was as well. Fergal was barely upright now, head lolling, and that sure as shit wasn’t right. His brother might have been on the slender side, but he could hold his drink with the best of them, and he didn’t lose track of glasses.

Which meant – which meant –

Samie grunted, shaking his head as if that would dislodge the thickening fuzz. Get back to the room, first. He could deal with this, just not – not in public. Not this public.

Try not t’be an Incident.

I’m trying, Ferg.

It seemed to take a ridiculously long time to get back to the allocated rooms. The State guards who had been installed at intervals along the corridors were missing now, which was worrying, but made the fact that Samie had to do the last hundred metres or so with Fergal pretty much bridal-style marginally less embarrassing.

In. Vision swimming, he lurched through the reception space, accompanied by a few muted crashing sounds as he bounced off decorative tat, and deposited Fergal’s slumped form down on the first bit of long-enough soft furniture. Think. Diplomatic bag in the safe.

Other bag was – was in the...

Samie sank into the chair beside Fergal and breathed out hard. Had to focus. Had to –

-wake up-

It wasn’t a voice. It was never a voice, not really – how could it be? More a shape – an echo of intent – bleeding up from the impossible depth – distance – that lay behind Samie’s own awareness. The faintest trace, the lightest brush of attention across the back of his blurring mind. Utterly alien, and yet more familiar to part of him than even breathing –

Gate of Abhain. Voidwalker. Worldweaver.

-wake up-

Consciousness broke like a wave and Samie gasped as he jolted back awake. A rumbling spasm ran down his body, fresh heat rising in his blood, as she came to the fore in instinctive answer to his fading thoughts and he felt himself shift. Just a little, just a bit – he hadn’t Called completely, after all – but the sense of alien familiarity folding open beneath his bones was enough to haul him back to conscious awareness. If nothing else, the momentary ache and give as his shirt cuffs popped, his collar rupturing like burst paper when the flesh underneath bulked out abruptly, was enough to draw a small curse from his cracked lips.

He usually managed to take off the expensive tailoring before he went and sprouted several extra inches of torso. Siobhain was going to be really terse when he explained this one.

No time to worry about that. Samie stood up again, sending the chair crashing back, and looked around. There was nothing immediately obvious in the room that he should have noticed already, even if an angry litany of things he should have clocked on the way up was already running through his re-sharpened mind. Starting with all those weird looks between some of the State bastards – not all of them, but there had been a good chunk looking more and more nervous as the evening progressed – plus the missing guards and domestic staff. Someone had a plan for this, and he got the definite feel that they did not want to be here to see it out.

First thing first. Fergal was still slumped out on the long sofa, drooling and unresponsive, and Samie’s heart lurched in his thickened chest. He really should have picked up on the drugged wine.

“Really dropped the ball on this one,” he muttered as he hurried towards one of the far wardrobes, where his own bug-out pack was concealed within the camouflage of general luggage debris. Plus a level three distraction glamour, set to deflect attention from the black rucksack nestled amidst suit cover cases. Samie could feel the press of it as he grabbed the bag. It was a dumb spell, and it was keyed to his base state, but there was a mismatch now. Thankfully he knew it was there – and even if he hadn’t, there was enough demon mojo through in him at this point to render narcotics ineffective, so a glamour wasn’t much different. Everything set up to act on a fully-human system was gonna be a bit confused.

A lot more confused, later; if he had to.

Sorting quickly through the pack’s contents, he found what he was looking for: a sterile dressing package, plain white except for a serial code and the B-ZoR label. Its crinkling plastic paper was sealed at the edges, with a capped silver needle taped alongside.

And he felt her move.

-Samúiel-

His connection was open now, even if only slightly, and he could feel the press of the Scout’s presence across the back of his mind. Like a wall – no, like a doorway – Gateway – through the heart of him, opened out into somewhere else and instantly filled again with a sense of size, of overlapping gold-sand scales and strong flesh beneath. Samie knew that technically that sense was all a matter of ‘synaesthesic transference’ – or as anyone who hadn’t spent half their lives swallowing library tomes’d call it: ‘your brain making up the best lie it can about what the dithering fuck is going on’ – but honestly, he’d never had much time for descriptions of his nature by folks who’d only ever be looking in from outside.

Who had never heard the whispering echoes of another place entirely twisting in through the cracks around their thoughts; things that weren’t sound, or words, or even close to those, but that there were no better ways to describe. Who had never been on the inside of the Binding circle – a very simple name for that cavernous space, with its impossible mandala of interwoven sigilwork runes carved and etched and bled into every surface – as it searched, and filtered, finding the familiar “voices” within the maelstrom clamour that opening yourself brought forth.

Who had discussed, and lawyered, and obsessed over infinite minutiae of a Deal-bind, but had never – could never – actually make one.

Some things, you just gotta be.

-‘I’m okay, Scout.’-

Sense. Feeling. Reassurance. And a surge of images, moments of his own recent life flickering away across the Gate of him, to be translated – hallucinated – ‘synesthetically transferred’ – into the Scout, as she made her sense of him as well as he did of her.

-Concern. Danger? Hurt?-

-‘Not yet. Might need you more soon. You safe?’-

-Safe: Yes. Kin: Secure-

It didn’t make anything about this clustering fuck of a situation better, but the Scout had never let him down before. From the sense of sheer size that he felt from her connection, he was pretty sure that he wasn’t diverting all that much of her even in dire straits. But still, it was reassuring to know she was safe, if he needed more.

Whatever safe meant there.

He hurried back to Fergal, rather unceremoniously flipping his brother over, and tore his shirt open. Buttons pinged away violently into corners, but no way was he going to try fiddling with fastenings with these fingers. Picking up the sterile packet again, Samie bit it open and peeled it apart, scrutinising the shiny yellow sigil he uncovered. A jagged circle of overlapping runework, with eight small satellite points around the edges and a line of rust-red down the centre of the main pattern. He hesitated, taking another moment to check the small sticker in the top corner of the paper, which confirmed Fergal’s name and the date of haemothaumic snapshot.

Seemed right. You didn’t want to mix these up.

“This is gonna be shite, Ferg, but we need to move,” he apologised as he slapped the sigil down against Fergal’s chest and peeled the backing paper away; its yellow lines bright against brown-tan skin and sweat-coiled hair. The needle uncapped easily, fragile in his grip, and Samie carefully stabbed the tip into all eight activation points. He waited, trying not to fidget, as dark spots spread out under the paper – and then the sigil caught. Witchlight bloomed as its lines lit up, fresh crimson racing out along the pattern, and Fergal jerked violently, an all-over spasm like a broken doze. His eyes bulged open and -

Impressively, he actually made it into the bathroom before he started throwing up.

Right. Second thing’s second, then. With Fergal occupied, Samie quickly retrieved the diplomatic bag – without trying to open the innermost lining, because he really didn’t want to have to deal with the levels of Locked that thing was – and spread out as much as he could between it and his pack They had come into this bloody city on a special-arranged train and were supposed to be going back that way, in two days’ time, but he wasn’t holding out much hope for that being an option now.

He had co-ordinates, memorised names, and emergency codes. He was callin’ this. Let the black-and-white bastards make their own excuses.

Bags finished, Samie was in the process of stripping off his busted posh clothes, replacing the tatters with his more active gear, when Fergal lurched back into the room. A sickly flush was still spread across his cheeks but while his eyes were watering, they were mostly focusing in the same direction. Right now, his attention was due-Samie.

“Al-right there – Sam?” he managed before being cut off by a belch and dry heave, and pressed his hand over his mouth, grimacing. The sigil was still bright against his chest, paper cover fallen away, and its bloody lines pulsed along with his heartbeat.

Samie had never personally needed to experience that sort of blood-magery. As he understood it, the sigilwork kind of reset your whole system to the condition you’d been in when the blood in it had been drawn. Rapidly, forcibly, and powered with the kind of thaumic kick that emergency meds tended to pack. He’d seen it in action a couple of times, though. Looked like going through the mother of all hangovers, compressed and accelerated into five minutes of fuckin’ awful existence.

Fergal swallowed a few times, settled, then reached around and pulled the bathroom door primly shut behind him. “Don’t – be going in there. Bit grim.”

“Had t’make the call on the bloodwork,” Samie said, part by apology, as he continued to dress. “Y’look like hot shite – how you feeling?”

“Like hot shite.” Fergal ran a hand through his hair, shoving the black locks into a more deliberate disarray, and squinted at Samie. “Y’got a bit of – demon – on you, there,” he added, gesturing, and Samie automatically reached up to the side of his face. His fingers encountered ridged, raised scaling: curves of plated flesh that had spread up his cheeks, reaching all the way into his hairline. He tilted around until he could get a look at his reflection in one of the fancy mirrors. The ridges had pushed his expression into a set scowl – or that might just have been an effect of the situation, since no hybrid form was exactly the same twice – and, as ever, the bronze-gold hue of the Scout’s features were already clashing with his base ginger. Particularly the beard.

“Ah, it’s not that much yet,” he said dismissively, even as he jigged back and forth, trying to work out what else had changed. Now he was concentrating, deliberately focusing on his body, he could feel more manifestations down his back, his replacement shirt pulling slightly against the plated skin there now. His shoes were pinching too, but not enough to worry about them. Still. Enough to mark him out…

Samie fished around in the spare clothing until he found a dark knit cap and tugged it on, as far down as it would go. The result left him looking like he was having a particularly lumpy eczema outbreak, but that was better than nothing.

“Right, I’m subtle again.” He gestured to the smaller pack and the clean, more mobile clothes he’d laid out for Fergal. “I dunno what these bastards are playing at, and I’m not keen on findin’ out.”

Fergal hesitated. He was still blinking rapidly.

“I should –”

-Something is very wrong-

Instincts flared so hard that they hurt, a strange combination of snapping senses and the fact that Samie’s nerves were already twanging like musical strings. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was – a flicker perhaps, somewhere outside the long windows of the room; half-heard, distant sound; or something far less clear – but suddenly his heart was in his throat. A moment later and both packs were slung around one thickened arm, Fergal was yelping a protest at being physically hauled off his feet with the other, and the door of the suite stood no chance against a headlong charge. Woodwork splintered back against the wall outside but Samie was already through, diving towards the spiraling staircase a few doors further down. Heartbeat and panic sang duet in his ears, moments before the whistle and smash of breaking glass from somewhere behind them burst into a concussive whump of detonation.

He just had time to swing Fergal around, hunching down over the increasingly-smaller man, as he felt hot air roar past over his back, peppering him with splinters and chunks of dislodged masonry. The stairs underneath lurched violently and Samie gave it a few more breaths after the initial impact before he turned around, staring back up at the billowing smoke and smouldering wreckage just visible through the now-wonky doorway.

Had big windows. Lights were on. Lotsa places to shoot from out there.

Fuck me.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Fergal muttered, and Samie could feel his brother shaking beneath his arms. “Fuck – Sam – I didn’t even – I didn’t – fuck!”

Samie eased back a bit, wincing as he shrugged off debris. He could feel the Scout too, pressing closer again as his own pain echoed back through their bind – insistent, urgent, worried – and he tried to take a breath without choking on brick dust.

“Bonds of international friendship, my arse,” he growled, as they began to scramble down the creaking stairs.

#Entofic #Abhain #Smoke & Ashes #OCs #Adventures of the periodically-demonic pseduo-Irish #This is not diplomatic

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entomancy · 7 years

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(Fic) Diolain: Part 1

More history-fic, this time considering exactly why the State has such a... poor relationship with the country of Abhain. Also because I haven’t done much from the PoV of a Gate yet, and I do like my Impending Body Horror ;)

Title: Part 1: Diplomacy, in the bag Setting: The State history: end- ‘Golden Age’ (about 40 years ago). Warnings: Discussion of eugenics. Summary: Being ambassador to the State isn’t the easiest of tasks, and being bodyguard to that position is... interesting. Samie is trying very, very hard not to be an Incident, even if it is starting to seem like even their hosts have different ideas. Characters: Samúiel Daly; Fergal Callaghan. Words: 1145

…the hell kinda fucked up country calls itself ‘The State’, anyways?

Samúiel had never been much of a man for diplomatic parties. He’d attended quite a few – when he couldn’t avoid them – but a bunch of suited-up fellas filtering international gossip through the buffet wasn’t his ideal for an engaging evening.

A peal of brittle laughter rang out from one of the larger mingles nearby, drawing a little of the room’s wandering attention, and Samie took the opportunity to run a finger around his shirt collar for the dozenth time, grimacing slightly. The palace tailor had tried her best, bless her, but even on only his base merits Samie was a big man, and he couldn’t shake the sensation he was being gently throttled by his own clothes. He’d already spotted a few other figures around the crowd with similar expressions of constricted concentration, and had offered them companionably-weary glances. Some experiences were probably universal for bodyguard-work.

He let his gaze wander again until he found the slender, frock-coated figure whose safety was the pertinent point of Samie’s uncomfortable attendance. The Abhani Ambassador looked typically relaxed, and it was only familiarity with the subtleties of his half-brother Fergal’s expressions that suggested the current conversational partner was being hard work – although not dangerously so.

Not a huge surprise. Hadn’t met one of these State-y bastards yet who could hold a half-decent chat. Case in point: the simpering streak o’piss who was still trying to drag Samie’s attention back to his explanations about… something or other. The word ‘ward’ had come up a few times, but since one thing Samie knew for certain about this damn country was they were balls-clenchingly terrified of even a lick of magic, he was getting a bit lost. Possibly he should’ve paid more attention to the social bits of the brief.

“...has always been a matter of genetics – bloodlines, you see – heck, it’s all in the breeding. With a bit of planning, bit of foresight in the pairings, and you can whittle out unwanted traits in a few generations.” The man paused to deposit his empty glass onto a passing tray, then selected two fresh ones and proffered one towards Samie, accompanied by the raise of a narrow eyebrow. “Don’t you think?”

Samie took the drink and tried to cover his hesitation with a long first sip. ‘Samúiel, if you could manage not to be or cause an Incident for a whole week, it’d be grand. Just talk polite shite, and don’t have opinions.’ Fergal’s voice echoed in memory, side-spoken in privacy, but no less pointed for it. Diplomatic. Right. He tilted his glass towards the ferret-faced State boy.

“Oh, sure. Had a dog myself, when I was a lad,” he hazarded. “Proper pedigree – it’s amazin’ what’s bred in. Tricks, and all that.”

The man – name, the fella must’ve had a name. Crawford? Something like that – blinked and then followed it up with a not-quite-right smile. Looked like he’d learned to do it from a book.

“That’s… certainly the principle.” One skinny hand flapped at the air, like he was trying to sweep something invisible together. Sense, maybe. “Of course there’s a fine old history in the canine work; domestication, breed standards, and it has legacy value – but really more like a – a prototype than anything else.” About half of maybe-Crawford’s drink vanished in another enthusiastic swig, and a wash of wine fumes rolled into Samie’s face as the man suddenly leaned forward. A weirdly conspiratorial expression settled onto his thin features as he spoke again.

“But you’d know all about the importance of breeding, of course? I did my homework on your Abhain, you see – ” he tapped his nose, seeming oddly proud of the statement. “Such quaint old traditions. The idea of nobility. A backwards way of approaching the principle, I suppose, but as long as it’s been strictly applied…”

Same was trying to listen, he really was, but the reedy gobshite had a voice like a strangled fart and he kept finding his attention sliding away towards… well, pretty much anything else in the room. Threads of nearby chatter. Curtains. The backless dress of the tall, olive-skinned lady who Fergal had moved onto talking to…

And the warning eyebrow that arched above his brother’s deep-emerald gaze.

Damn.

Samie blinked himself back to some semblance of focus, seeing Craw-fish starting to look affronted, and struck out for the nearest point he had recognised.

“I can’t put claim for nobility,” he tried. “Now m’boy Ferg over there? His ma’s got successional line in her own right. Legit. We’re both Diolan, yeah, but I’m a rivers’side lad - so graces come with the tux, not much else.”

It was Crawfolk’s turn to look puzzled as he glanced between Samie’s bulky figure, and Fergal’s elegant back.

“Dear-o-lion?” he mangled the word; Abhani tongue sitting awkwardly on State lips.

“Diolain.” Samie corrected, if only for the novelty of being at the front of the conversation for once.

“Ah, yes. I’m afraid I’m not… familiar? With the term?”

Didn't do that homework so well, then.

“Close enough’d be ‘King’s bastard’.” At the man’s raising eyebrow, Samie shrugged. “There’s an… arrangement, y’know? Family means a lot.”

That wasn’t exactly the truth, but he sure as shit wasn’t going into the details of why Abhain had that particular tradition.

Crawdad blustered, his social gyroscope wobbling in the face of the unexpected, and Samie’s thoughts slid sideways in the gap again. King’s bastard. Not the current King, mind; there might’ve been going on for 20 years between Samie and Ríg-Brayden, but his more regal half-brother had only been under the big hat for a few years, after the utter fuckstorm that had set unexpected succession in motion. The less said about the previous incumbent, frankly, the better, and Samie hadn’t ever had much feeling towards their father. A fair enough man, by all accounts, but of grand-age to him.

“So, you any more up on what this party is for?” The question jolted out before Samie was really aware that he’d said it, and Crawfeed rallied The skinny man plucked yet another glass from a passing tray and waved it expansively.

“Oh, the usual, I’d expect! Cementing of the bonds of international friendship.”

Samie was abruptly treated to a painfully wide version of that waxy, practised smile.

“It’s about time our fine State was properly positioned on the world’s stage, don’t you think? Legit – and all that.”

There was something in the way he said it. A sudden, slick-sharp edge that send a shiver down Samie’s spine. Nothing he could put his finger on, just…

Something.

You gotta trust your instincts, right?

His own. And the rest.

#Entofic #Abhain #Smoke and Ashes #Oh Samie #You're trying #OCs

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entomancy · 8 years

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(Fic) Witness Statement

Fic backstory for @thefalloficarus and his RP character Cassius. Which doesn’t actually have Cassius himself in it at all, and is instead Morrigan and Vachan having a dinner date and being sarcastic about State eugenics programmes. Because of course. (Also thank you @aj-hateley and @maxilius for borrowing some bits from their Ministry stuff!)

Title: Witness Statement

Setting: Fairco backstory.

Warnings: Discussion of executions (hanging, burning); discussion of eugenics.

Summary: Vachan and Morrigan discuss failures and scapegoats.

Characters: Dr Vachan; Morrigan Stewart (’The Auditor’)

Words: 1824

_____

Curls of sickly black smoke rise into the midday sky, thinning and spreading until lost against the trailing clouds overhead, leaving nothing but a half-imagined fevered pallor to the air. I watch them spiral up from behind the grey-and-glass angles of the City, from the square where the Trees stand, and I shiver.

Today’s burnings are brought to you by the Ministry of Blood.

Perhaps I have been listening to the wireless too much in recent weeks, because the replicated saccharine-cheer of Approved Advertising is a little too quick to frame my thoughts. I cover my discomfort with a glance away from the window.

“Something amiss, Doctor?”

Morrigan hasn’t even looked up, but I know very well that there is no point in lying to my dining companion.

We are seated in a half-enclosed booth, one of a dozen identical here, each roofed and lined with black. Carefully-positioned overhead lights cast abyssal shadows into the depths of the chairs. The angles of the furniture have been subtly crafted, fixtures and even the fabric a work more of engineering than of mere upholstery. It all serves to dampen sound, wrapping the occupants of the booths in their own silent cloak, even to those passing within mere feet.

No one knows the value of privacy quite like an Auditor, and the Harpocrates Club – which occupies this part of the Office’s upper floor – is testament to that. The first time I came here, I admit I was a little confused by the point of this place. Being able to speak in concealed confidence, of course, but I have little doubt that other Auditors’ personal offices are as secured as Morrigan’s is, so this seems…strange. An oddly public kind of solitude. If you want to avoid being overheard, why leave the worksday world at all?

But now, I think I understand. Here, it is both possible for Auditors not to be overheard, and not to overhear. Privacy that works in all directions.

It has been some time since my Auditor and I have had to keep our acquaintance purely private. The ghosts of my fingerprints are inside her throat, where I have cut away tumour and wedded new metal beneath her skin, and the shadow of her has lain heavy across my shoulders for years. In many ways, it is simply easier to conceal our exact nature within a cloak of careful visibility.

So today we sit in the black embrace of her favoured table, and watch the smoke rising above the City’s line.

“The short answer, or the long one?” I reply, as I place my fork down onto the streaked emptiness of my plate. Morrigan gives a faint snort of amusement.

“That depends, does it not?” She looks up, towards the view rather than directly to me, and tilts her head slightly. “On the verbosity of your concerns. With precedent, I’d think the latter.”

I drum my fingertips on the table surface, metal nails raising a sharp click, and wonder how to frame the spiralling trails of my thoughts.

“This is an unusual time for the Trees to burn,” I begin, and Morrigan shrugs.

“The paperwork is in order.”

“I’m sure it it. I just…” hesitate, again, trying to phrase this. “I saw the Information feeds. ‘Gross misconduct’ and ‘Appropriation of State resource’.”

“Correct.” My Auditor takes a sip from her glass – water, free of the often-acrid burn of heavy City chlorination – but does not otherwise react.

It is time to be more direct.

“More an offence for the noose…?” I hazard.

“Would that be your judgement, Doctor?” She looks at me now, and the edges of her mouth twitch slightly. “The gallows?”

“That depends, does it not –?” I echo, matching the tilted head. “– on the nature of it. That business with the K-Line. The rumours of Aberrancy testing. The Ministry has been… highlighted, of late. Hard to ignore.”

My gaze flicks back to the window, and I swallow a knot in my throat.

“But it’s even harder to ignore the Trees in bloom.”

Morrigan’s lips thin, ever so slightly, as she follows my attention towards the smoke trail. She is silent for long enough that I wonder if I have miss-stepped, but just as I consider changing the subject, she continues.

“It is – was – a… private endeavour.” There is no tone to her synthetic voice, but I am versed enough in the pattern of pauses to hear the distaste that lies behind her words. “A twenty year squandering of resource and effort, to pander to the delusional self-comfort of those who least require it. Brought to a close.”

She stops; taking another drink. I contemplate my plate, as my mind whirls rapidly behind my calm projection. It is unusual, to say the least, to find Morrigan in a gossiping mood, and I cannot deny a moment of strange thrill at the realisation.

“Twenty years?” I ask, carefully. “If you were aware of this –?”

“Outside my remit, Doctor.” Morrigan’s reply is short, but there is no sharpness to her eyes. “Officially, and practically. The Auditor of Blood is territorial, even by the standards you are used to, and she has some very… fixed ideas. You are aware of that Ministry’s overall functionality.”

I nod, although it was not a question. The Ministry of Blood – so-called because, let’s be honest, ‘the Ministry of Population Control and Distinctly Dubious Eugenics’ does not exactly roll off the tongue – has oversight of many things, but is primarily involved with the pedigree of Wards. With family bonds as many might understand them all but absent amongst the underscored, the need to keep track of who bore whom, or how closely related two Beds from one Block might be, has become increasingly vital. Inbreeding is clearly to be avoided, medical records and tissue typing are always important; yet for certain mindsets it is not a significant leap between that, and the weeding out of less desirable characteristics, or the encouragement of others. The application of domestication theories, to human beings…

Distasteful does not go far enough.

“I know about the Lineage projects,” I reply, after a moment of thought. Controlling all Ward pairings would be beyond even a Ministry effort, either by accident or design, so for the most part Blood has concerned its focused efforts on a few Lines. C-Line for docility, and the pallid blonde beauty preferred by certain sectors; and those recent shadows of the K-Line rumours. There are likely others but I have paid them little attention.

Outside my remit, indeed.

Morrigan places her glass back down, and nods slowly.

“Yes. Breeding Wards like dogs.” Her nostrils twitch, muscles tightening either side of her face. “I cannot say I have ever had much faith in the work. Brilliance, Doctor, in my experience, is not easily produced to order. Perfection is a poisonous ideal.”

“You said this was private, though…?” I push, gently, and am met by a new knife of a smile.

“Indeed.” She flicks one gloved hand back towards the window, encompassing the smoke trails again. “Once the idea is there, once it seems possible, there will always be those who think they can do better. And have the capital to sink into such absurd pursuits.”

A few seconds of silence roll back and forth between us, before she continues.

“Pandora’s Witnesses.” She meets my gaze, accompanied by a raised eyebrow of her own. “Citizen-sponsored, if by some chance you could not guess from the name. I understand there were a raft of characteristics required in the specification; a good number little more than pandering to the sexual desires of the project’s presumed customer base.” At that, I note that slight, slight tick in her expression that I recognise. The one we have never discussed, because how in the Chain’s links would you start that sort of conversation? A distance there, bordering a moment on confusion, for a section of life of utter personal distinterest, and yet…

But I am not here to wonder on my Auditor’s preferences, or lack of them. If she notices that I notice, and I find it difficult to imagine that she does not, then she makes no sign of it as she continues.

“They are, bluntly, Secret Keepers. Bred-for-purpose dolls, made to listen and soothe smarting conscience in a… great variety of ways. Primarily their apparent, intrinsic inability to recount anything told in confidence.”

I frown, examining the description. No matter what angle I approach it from… in merely twenty years…

“That… can’t work,” I say at last, and Morrigan gives a snort of amusement.

“Correct. The pivotal element is a specific form of conditioning. Inelegant, from all reports I have seen, but so wrapped up in pseudo-genetic hearsay it seems otherwise.” She picks up her knife, twisting the blade in the air idly. “Regardless. The project was a failure, Doctor. A handful of resultant scions, traded on like expensive cattle, leaving a trail of broken failures and squandered investment that far exceeds their price. I believe Blood’s intention in allowing this farce to continue was in wait for a situation such as today. Keeping secrets from your squeamish relatives is one thing. But from the Office – and thus, from Mother?”

A cold smile bleeds across my Auditor’s face, and her grey eyes are like windows into hades’ storms.

“That is quite another.”

Hairs prickle across the back of my neck.

“A scapegoat, then,” I say, flatly, and Morrigan laughs. That same repeated ripple of recorded sound, captured long ago, like fossilised amusement.

“In a view. Quite possibly Blood could no longer pacify Education with placeholders and assurances. If nothing else, regardless of stock, an individual outside of the PRIFAC system cannot technically be considered to be a Ward. Education is very… particular, about that.”

I look back towards the smoke.

“A distraction, then.”

“More than likely.”

“From what?” As soon as I ask, as soon as the short words leave my lips, I know them a mistake. Morrigan’s eyes narrow, slightly, and I recognise the warning in her expression as she leans forward.

“Now that – is outside your remit, Doctor,” she says, her voice dropping to its lower setting. “Officially, and practically. Keep your concerns where they lie now. These fires will not last long.”

She sits back and, despite the controlled climate of our surroundings, I feel another shiver run the length of my neck. It might be best to put these thoughts aside – to sit alongside other times my sentimentality has clashed with practical concerns – but I will not be able to dismiss it as easily as I might wish.

A handful of resultant scions.

I will wonder what happened to them, for some time.

#Entofic #Fairco #I have missed writing Morrigan #you are awful #Bluelight Bazaar #I Can't Believe It's Not PRI-FAC

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