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solivar · 5 years

Text

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

In which Zen and Hanzo have an unexpected experience.

“So, you remember when I told you the fabric of reality around here is usually a schmancy high thread count thingamabobber?” Jaime asked, as they clustered around him in the tiny oasis of normality beneath the streetlights. “Well. About two, three o’clock this afternoon, the monitors started pingin’ like mad and, uh, yeah, now the local area immediately inside your house is all dia -- diaphra -- diaphragmous? See-through like?”

“Diaphanous,” Hana replied tersely. “The word you’re looking for is diaphanous.”

“That’s the word! Thanks, chippie -- ow, ow, hey, ow, okay okay okay, I’m sorry!” He held up hands and tablet in self-defense. “Thank you, Hana. Anyway, we gathered up all the extra stabilizer stakes we had charged and called Rein and booked it up here as quick as we could. The stakes and the wards Rein rigged up are keepin’ it isolated for now but, uh, we dunno for how long. We’ve definitely got interference bleedin’ into local communications already.”

“Yeah, we noticed.” Jesse budged over to let Reinhardt join their huddle, taking the opportunity to slide his arm around Hanzo’s shoulders as he did so. “So I’m guessing it’s not going t’be safe for anyone to go in there?”

“We have been working on that,” Reinhardt rumbled. “Mako and I have tested a solution -- a ward that stabilizes the local area around its wearers, preferably two or three to create a large area of usable space.”

“And by ‘tested’ he means ‘they went inside wearin’ a pair and made me monitor the situation from outside so I could start screamin’ if they disappeared,’” Jaime clarified, still obviously aggrieved.

“He,” Roadie rumbled, gesturing a complicated gesture at Hanzo, “shouldn’t. Too close to the cause. Wards might not be strong enough.”

“His bedroom wall was where all this got started,” Genji added thoughtfully. “Hanzo, is there anything up there you absolutely couldn’t live without? Is there some way we could, like, seal it shut extra strongly?”

Hanzo leaned into the comfortingly solid warmth of Jesse’s side, and considered -- the computer and art pad he used for digital and holographic designs were expensive pieces of equipment but replaceable. So were the majority of the physical supplies, inks and watercolors and paper, that he kept on hand at home. Santa Fe contained enough thrift stores to replace his entire wardrobe if necessary. “My bow and quiver are downstairs in the sports equipment closet -- so is my gym bag. Just those. If we can ward my bedroom shut, we should.”

“And by we, we mean absolutely not you.” Genji replied sweetly. “Zen, can you do that thing you did back at the Student Union again?”

“That depends entirely upon the availability of duct tape and Sharpies but, yes, I can.” Zen offered him a faintly apologetic smile. “And I should go in first to perform the binding, just to be safe.”

“D’you honestly think we go anywhere without enough duct tape to fasten our truck’s entire frame and undercarriage back together?” Jaime asked, moderately affronted, and it was clearly a rhetorical question because a moment later a caseful was hitting the sidewalk with an emphatic thud.

Hana wordlessly dug at least six different colors and opacities of markers out of her bag and offered them up as a sacrifice. “What? I hit the bookstore when I was done with class. I had a bad feeling, okay?”

“No judgment.” Genji replied with an easy soothing grin as Zen made his selection, armed himself with three full rolls of tape, and marched toward the condo with Roadie in tow. “Wards? Wearable kind?”

“Yes! Come, we’ll get you fitted up.” Reinhardt, it seemed, approached literally everything with boundless good humor and radiant competence; Hanzo rather suspected if someone told him an asteroid capable of sterilizing the biosphere was about to hit the Earth, he’d respond with a cheerful grin and a plan that just might work.

He led them to one of the three trucks taking up approximately four hundred percent of their allotted curbside parking: a flatbed pickup truck obviously cobbled together from the frames of at least two pre-modern-technology vehicles, sun-faded and rust-speckled, mounted to a hover rig by means that probably wouldn’t stand up to close inspection and might not survive actual aerodynamic hover forces, flanked by not one but two trucks that looked for all the world like home repair/landscaping contractor vehicles, which he supposed was a reasonable enough approach for itinerant craftworkers in disguise. Reinhardt opened the side-panel of the truck he had clearly arrived in, internal lights flickering on as it folded out to reveal a collection of bog standard tools and tool boxes firmly mounted to internal magnetic brackets.

“I actually am a mechanical engineer,” Reinhardt grinned at them, flipped a few more switches, and the side panel continued unfolding in a way that emphatically denied the reality of physical space restrictions, containing rank upon rank of drawers and shelves labeled in neatly precise script, holding components and finished pieces alike, some enormous and obviously meant to be hung on mounts even larger yet, some exquisitely tiny and delicate, an entire worktable, its surface etched in complex diagrams, drafting tools and equipment clipped to the edges, storage caskets racked together beneath the drawers.

The wearable wards were on the smaller end, emerging from one of the caskets, Reinhardt handing each of them one as they clustered around him. “They are more durable than they look but I would not suggest hitting one with a hammer if you could avoid it. They produce a more individual focused variation of Jaime’s reality stabilization matrix and draw some of their strength from their wearers and more from proximity to others of their same kind. Stay close to one another when you go inside.”

Hanzo tapped one of the wards -- a small disk, its surface inscribed with a complex sequence of curves and lines and angles, exterior edge an unbroken line of letters? Runes? Something vaguely literary in a language he absolutely did not recognize. “Is this...fast curing craft clay?”

“It is, my friend! Good eye.” Reinhardt clapped him hard enough on the shoulder to shift the entire group sideways six inches. “Some particularly bloody-minded purists argue against using such materials but, between us, in situations where time is of the essence, the results are just as good as spending six days scribing on disks of bone or metal, especially if the wards need only last so long.”

“I can believe that,” Hanzo agreed, having witnessed first hand what Zen could accomplish on the fly, and clipped the band around his wrist. The throbbing spiky pain in his chest dulled, almost immediately, to a fretful ache, and he drew his first unobstructed breath in a solid ten minutes. “It -- my chest hurts less.”

Reinhardt and Roadie exchanged a glance and Roadie took him gently be the elbow, guided him out of the group and to the cab of Reinhardt’s truck. “Sit. Truck’s warded, too. Don’t look when we open the door.”

Hanzo took a shivery breath. “Okay.” He pulled out his tablet, reflexively checked email and messages, looked anywhere but at the house as his family quietly discussed among themselves who was going first and how long they’d be allowed to stay inside. They had, perhaps unsurprisingly, attracted more than a little attention and he murmured, sotto voce, “Neighbors are filming.”

“Of course they are, because our neighbors are relentless busybodies with nothing better to do with their lives!” Genji raised his voice enough for most audio pickups to catch it, and then dropped back down to normal. “You want me to get your hamper out of the laundry room? I’m pretty sure you’ve got some unwashed clothes in there yet.”

“Please.” He offered his best attempt at a reassuring smile. “Be careful. That sounds so...stupid? Inadequate? Both?”

“Heartfelt. The word you’re looking for is heartfelt.” Genji grinned and closed the cab door, mouthed stay here, and made his way up the sidewalk to the front steps, where the door was beginning to open.

Hanzo forced himself to look away, thumbed open his library and picked a book at random, spent the next interminable period of nerve-wracking eternity reading the same page approximately a hundred and forty thousand times. He didn’t have to look because, despite the wards, a thread of ice dripped down his spine every time someone opened the condo door and he sat, tense with dread, until he heard their voices again, the sounds of suitcases and storage trunks and gear carriers thumping into place in the back of the pickup, Hana arguing for or against something with clearly audible vigor, Lucio’s husky laughter, Genji’s very best lazily unconcerned drawl that in absolutely no way successfully concealed the depths of his unease, Zenyatta calm and even and serene as only he could be, no matter the circumstances.

“Hanzo!” Hana yanked the door cab door open and only twenty years of finely honed reflexes that he hadn’t entirely allowed to go to pot in the last few saved him from hitting the ground with a total absence of grace. “Jeez, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were leaning on it.”

“That’s okay,” Hanzo accepted the hand Jesse, materializing at his side, offered to boost himself back to his feet. “It’s dark. What’s the problem?”

“Tell them I don’t have to put Tokki in the back of that...that...thing.” Hana gesticulated one-handed and just short of frantically at the truck.

“Tokki? Who’s --” It took a moment for the reality of what he was seeing to filter all the way into his mind but, gradually, he realized that Hana’s entire other hand, in fact her whole arm, was wrapped around an enormous pink something, something a solid four inches taller than she was, something that probably out-weighed her, too, something that looked like the unholy offspring of a torrid affair between a fuzzy pink fairground toy and a Gundam dakimakura. “What. What is that. How do you wash it. How.”

“You really need to do that little rising-falling thing with your voice when you’re trying to ask a real question, Hanzo.” Hana replied tartly. “This is Tokki, he’s very old, I brought him from home, and he is absolutely not riding in the truck.”

“There won’t be enough seats for everybody in the van if he doesn’t ride in the truck.” Genji pointed out in tones of sweet reason as he hefted the last of his own luggage into place. “Back me up here, aniki.”

“I’ll ride back in the truck with Jaime and Mako if you like, Hana.” Hanzo replied gravely. “You’re right, something so venerable and well-loved should not be subject to such an indignity.”

“I don’t know if I should punch you for making fun of me or hug you for agreeing with me.” Hana admitted and then settled for doing both. “Best big brother.”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” Hanzo agreed and waved her off. “Go on before I regret my munificence.”

“That was not the backup I expected.” Genji threw his hands in the air and walked away, muttering under his breath, to help Hana get her giant pink monstrosity aboard.

“I’d’ve offered to put him in the van’s storage but, uh, I don’t think he’d fit.” Jesse admitted and smiled down at him. “That was good of you -- she was actually pretty upset about it.”

“Given the expense and effort it must have taken to transport it from Korea, it must be very dear to her.” Hanzo replied quietly. “I trust everything went well?”

“Better than I thought they would, honestly.” For the first time, Hanzo realized he was wearing his weapons, gun-belt slung around his hips clipped with extra ammunition and less immediately identifiable objects of a potentially violent nature. “Wards worked like a charm and Doc Tekhartha’s got your bedroom door bound up like a frat house prank with extra magic just for giggles. And I have your things stashed in the van.”

“Thank you. It would be a genuine pain in the ass to have to replace my bow.” Hanzo smiled crookedly. “I may have some experience when it comes to the expense and effort of keeping beloved things close.”

“Archery, hmm? I admit, I’d wondered.” Jesse grinned, dark eyes glinting. “Strong hands and shoulders, lots of well-kept muscle, and you don’t strike me like the type to spend a lot of hours a week liftin’ weights.”

“And you’d be right because that’s the most boring form of exercise known to man.” Hanzo found a grin lurking at the corners of his own mouth and let it stay. “Great-Uncle Toshiro taught an entirely different regimen and Genji graciously assists me in maintaining it, though I do most of my target shooting at this little sporting goods place just at the city limits. The only place I’ve found with indoor and outdoor ranges for archery as well as firearms.”

“Navarro’s? Oh, yeah. Know ‘em well. They’re my supplier for some of the more normal stuff I keep on hand for survival caches -- not a craftworker among them, but they’re good people.” Oh so casually Jesse reached for his hand. “Maybe we could make a night of, uh, going there sometime.”

“If you two idiots could stop flirting for five whole seconds and help we might be able to get out of here sometime tonight.” Genji suggested, entirely loud enough for everyone up and down the street on both sides as far as the eye could see to overhear.

Hanzo, just barely, managed not to melt into a puddle of liquid humiliation as at least a few of the neighbors sent up a cheer in response to this intelligence. “We should probably help.”

“I’ll help you find a place to bury him where no one will ever find him later, if you want?” Jesse suggested but nonetheless immediately moved to help sort out the increasingly elaborate Jenga puzzle of everyone’s belongings, at least some of which were delicately electronic and quite probably highly experimental.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hanzo murmured in reply and took up station on the periphery of the increasingly contentious gathering, inserting suggestions as seemed appropriate, and as he stood became aware of a slow icy drip sliding down his spine and a sharp, cold pulse beneath his breastbone.

When had he taken the ward off? He couldn’t remember -- his wrist still felt its comforting embrace but when he looked down it simply wasn’t there, gone as if it had never been.

And when had he started walking towards the house? He had no conscious recollection of that, either, of when he’d begun obeying the relentless cold tension in his chest, like a line drawn taut, pulling at him like a fish well on the hook.

Behind him, he heard Jaime say, rather distinctly, “Uh, gang? You might wanna look at this.” And, beneath his voice, a frantic low-toned beeping.

He wanted to speak -- he wanted to say something, anything, but his tongue was pinned flat to the inside of his mouth and his teeth were welded together and his legs would not stop moving as he took the steps in two strides. Before him, the condo’s security access pad flicked from red to green, the locks slotted back into their mounts, and the door slowly, slowly cracked open, a thin slit of unrelieved darkness.

No. It took all his strength to articulate that thought, as his hand reached for the door handle, to open it further, to step inside.

Behind him, the steady monotone beepbeepbeepbeep of Jaime’s machinery sped up and grew louder BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP and through it heard a voice, more than one voice, raised in alarm, calling his name. But the metal of the door handle was cold -- burning cold, cold beyond anything nature could claim -- against the palm of his hand, throbbing against his breastbone, forcing the breath out of his lungs in heavy streams of frost.

And, again, he said, “no” only aloud this time, soft, thin, and it took what was left of his strength to yank the door shut, slamming it hard into its frame and his free palm against the lock plate. He felt the tension holding him, the relentless pull, snap like an over-stressed line and he staggered backwards, scrambled on the edge of the steps, caught himself on the railing as several pairs of arms tried to catch him from behind, and mostly succeeded.

“Hanzo --” Genji, that was Genji, arm wrapped tight across his chest, his chest which was no longer filled with an icy throbbing ache.

“Darlin’ --” And that was Jesse, catching hold of his arm, gently cradling the hook-fingered claw of his hand. “Easy, l’il brother, he’s hurt.”

“Get him away from the door.” And that was Zenyatta, and received immediate obedience from all three of them as through their combined efforts they got him turned away and back down to the sidewalk.

He was only mildly surprised to find he needed it -- his legs felt like rubber bands twisted and stretched nearly to breaking and his insides like freshly melted ice water and his head spun with exhaustion, as enervated as if he’d just run a marathon. Between them, Genji and Jesse settled him in the shotgun seat of Reinhardt’s truck, cab lights turned on as Zen examined his hand. “Where is your ward?”

“I’m...not certain?” Hanzo admitted, light-headedly. “I don’t remember taking it off. I --”

“Here,” Hana elbowed her way past his brother and his ranger, holding the band out for Zen’s perusal.

The ward was cracked cleanly across, only the wad of epoxy underneath it holding its pieces together, the magnetic clasp corroded to crumbling bits, the band itself dry and cracked. As Zen took it, it finished falling entirely to pieces, striking the sidewalk in rapidly decomposing bits.

“Too close,” Zen muttered. “We should have sent you back to the hacienda.” He snapped open the first aid case Rein set at his feet, pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves, and began applying something wonderfully soothing to the reddened, blistered skin striping his palm.

“Maybe, Doc, but maybe not.” Jaime interjected. “‘Cause whatever he just did? It caused the anomaly to go pop. Shut down just as it was cyclin’ to its widest aperture.”

“Did you do something?” Genji asked, flicking a glance holding distinctly murderous intent over his shoulder at the house. “Did it do something to you?”

“I felt...called. Pulled.” Hanzo reached up with his free hand and scrubbed his aching, weary eyes. “Not a voice just...an impulse I couldn’t resist, like when I --” He stopped, breathed peace, continued. “Exactly like when I tore Zen’s wards off in the Student Union. I couldn’t stop myself, until I came to the door -- it wanted me to open it, to go inside but I...made myself not do that.”

“I’ll send you the data the sensors picked up.” Jaime flicked open a few screens, started a download. “‘Cause I’d like all your thoughts. But it looks to me like the anomaly was drawin’ power from him and when he cut it off, it couldn’t sustain itself any longer.”

“Too close,” Zen reiterated, as he finished taping bandages in place. “Reinhardt, if you would be so good as to take him back to the hacienda, right now, we will be directly behind you.”

“Of course, Doctor. Seatbelt, my young friend, and sit back. We will be home before you know it.”

***

Hanzo drowsed most of the way back to Cerrillos and woke much the better for it, enough so that he insisted on helping where he could, schlepping lighter items that wouldn’t tear the bandages off his hand before Terrifying Smoke Gabe insisted they stop for dinner. “It’s not going anywhere, the truck can sit overnight in the service garage, you’ve all done enough for one day. Come inside.”

Significantly more than just dinner that greeted them: it was the hacienda’s actual dining room, opened up for the first time since their arrival, a table to sit twenty laid out with exquisitely painted plates and gleaming silver and glasses of something pale yellow and fizzy, two enormous pans of enchiladas montadas, platters of tamales and flautas and chile rellenos, a crock of tortilla soup gently steaming next to a stack of earthenware bowls, a chafing dish of fruit salad sitting on ice, bowls of guacamole and salsa and extra cheese. At the far end, Hot Vampire Jack and Badass Granny Ana leaned against one another, half-dozing, bestirring themselves only when the noise of everyone trooping inside became too much to ignore.

Hot Vampire Jack cracked open one eye and muttered, “Frankly, I blame the lot of you for reactivating all his maternal instincts. On the other hand, I almost have to thank you because his empty nesting was about to result in a murder.”

“I made the prickly pear lemonade spritzer,” Ana added, not even bothering to open her eye. “You’re welcome.”

“We really have been adopted by supernatural entities living in a ghost town in the desert,” Hana observed, struck by what appeared to be fairly legitimate awe.

“Yes,” Hanzo agreed, pulling out a chair for her.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Amari? You look beat.” Lucio touched her shoulder gently. “Can I get you a plate?”

“That unholy fiend worked us like dogs,” Mrs. Amari replied, quavery and exhausted, reaching up to pat Lucio’s hand. “Such a good boy you are. I only wish I had a grandson like you before I go to meet my ancestors.”

“Are you trying to guilt trip my kid with that?” Terrifying Smoke Gabe misted in through the kitchen door carrying an armful of crocks and a condiment caddy. “Also: don’t listen to her, she was in charge of juicing lemons.”

“Juicing lemons is a very strenuous task for a woman of my advanced years,” Mrs. Amari replied loftily and accepted the bowl that Lucio handed to her. “Thank you, young man.”

Multiple sets of searing crimson eyes opened for the sole and express purpose of rolling at her. “Make yourselves comfortable, there’s plenty for everybody and -- what happened to your hand?”

An inky misty tentacle wrapped around Hanzo’s wrist, quite a bit warmer than he’d imagined it would be the first time he saw them, and reeled him over for examination, the bandages a bit roughened from hauling things but bearing no signs of seepage or blood. “Uhm. I’m not entirely sure myself,” Hanzo replied in what he hoped was a soothing tone of mildly alarmed squeak.

“An energy discharge of some sort at the condo -- his palm was burnt.” Zen mercifully interceded on his behalf.

“And by ‘energy discharge’ he means our boy here might have closed the spatial anomaly at the house just by tellin’ it to go away and layin’ hands on it.” Jamie added helpfully. “I’ll dump the readings I took after supper.”

“It wasn’t that exciting,” Hanzo demurred and earned himself a multi-eyed roll of his very own as Terrifying Smoke Gabe waved him off to his seat, where a plate filled by both Jesse and Genji awaited him.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Jack replied, dryly. “What happened?”

Hanzo heroically stuffed a flauta in his mouth to avoid having to go first but, as it happened, Jaime was more than happy to tell the tale and his body, now reminded by his taste buds that food was good and that he hadn’t actually had any since breakfast, insisted that he address that deficiency immediately and in mass quantities. He was midway through his third fully stuffed plate when he began hearing the words “....and then we all saw Hanzo walkin’ up to the house and the door startin’ to open…” and realized that he was going to have to stop inhaling calories long enough to speak and that quite literally everyone at the table was watching said inhalation with varying levels of knowledgeable amusement and borderline alarm.

“Uhm.” Hanzo said, setting his silverware down and dabbing the corners of his mouth with what had to be someone’s grandmother’s linen napkin, “I...wasn’t entirely operating under my own recognizance at that point -- moving without wanting to move, reaching for the door without wanting to reach for it. Something wanted me to touch it, to open it and I --” He took a breath, closed his eyes, as the memory washed over him, Jesse’s arms sliding comfortingly across his shoulders. “I refused. I said that I would not and closed it and --” He held up his injured hand, “This happened but the compulsion ceased at once.”

“And the anomaly collapsed pretty much immediately, too.” Jaime finished.

“And now he’s eating like he’s got two empty legs,” Jack observed meditatively.

“Interesting development,” Ana agreed, sipping her drink with a twinkle in her eyes.

“What these two tricksters are pucking around about is the use of some gifts can really take it out of the craftworker, physiologically speaking, and after particularly grueling spellwork you can feel like eating a horse. And, depending on your capabilities and needs, you might try.” Gabe shook his head at them. “You spent some power tonight, kid, and your body is demanding that you put it back in.”

“Spoilsport.” Ana literally, actually stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s why we usually have a hearty brunch before we try anything too enthusiastic these days. Reinhardt and I are not getting any younger -- our ability to draw on our physical resources for extra strength is not what it once was. Jack and Gabriel have their own hungers to feed when they are forced to exceed even their much greater limits. I strongly suspect that you are experiencing that need.”

“If the anomaly was caused by the Serpent-Wolf,” Zen murmured in the tone of one speculating aloud, “it may be using its connection to the magatama we found to circumvent the defenses we built around the condo -- we did bring Hanzo dangerously too close if that is the case.”

Hanzo swallowed the mouthful of soup he’d taken. “That wasn’t your fault. None of you could have known.”

Zen acknowledged the point with a graceful inclination of his head. “And you being strong enough to break its attempt to dominate you was not something it could have known. Now it does, and that increases the risk to you.” A fractional pause. “In Dr. Saddind-Maas’ absence, do you have reason to go back to campus right now? If not, you should probably stay here, where the defenses are more consistent and robust.”

Genji choked, swallowed, croaked, “Wait, wait, what?”

“Dr. Saddind-Maas appears to be missing,” Hanzo admitted reluctantly, around the remains of a fifth tamale. “I was, uh, questioned about the last time I saw her this afternoon --”

“Questioned?” Genji asked, and flicked a look at Zen. “You were, too, weren’t you?”

“I believe I said as much,” Zen replied, displaying such deft rhetorical evasion skills that Hanzo was briefly envious.

“You said that campus security had asked you about the Student Union --” Genji stopped, exchanged glances with Lucio and Hana. “The MiBs? Are they involved here somehow? Trying to make connections? Because we all know the campus rent-a-cops don’t have enough between their ears to fire up a light bulb much less the imagination necessary to put what’s actually going on here together.”

“One of the people who spoke to Hanzo was the head of security for TALON -- gave her name as Amelie Lacroix.” Jesse replied, hesitated fractionally. “The other one was Chase Whitehawk, acting in his capacity as an agent of the TSS.”

Across the table, Jack, Ana, and Reinhardt all went totally still in three completely separate and disturbing ways. Very deliberately, Jack took a sip of his soup, set it down, and said, “I’m still working on digging out more details about TALON -- my usual resources are markedly reluctant to share intel on them, which in and of itself says something. The Lacroix thing, though? That’s...not good.”

“The Lacroix are a family of vessenjaegers,” Reinhardt added, his tone freighted with a concern all the more disturbing coming as it was from him. “Monster hunters, witch hunters, greatly feared for centuries and with good reason. They are killers without peer.”

“The Whitehawks are much the same -- they’re a clan whose purpose has always been to protect the people from the naayéé, and they take that duty seriously.” The corner of Jesse’s mouth quirked back, the expression there and gone again, and Hanzo took his hand beneath the table, squeezed it gently. “Those forces making common cause, at the direction of unknown parties...well. I’m not sure that bodes well for anybody.”

“Not likely, no.” Jack replied flatly. “I’ll lean a bit harder where I can, open some other lines of inquiry. Otherwise, I tend to agree with the good doctor on the issue of Hanzo staying here in town for the time being.”

“I do have other classes, you know,” Hanzo said, aggrieved.

“Yes, but you can’t pass any of them if you die or have your soul eaten or your body stolen,” Terrifying Smoke Gabe pointed out sweetly. “And there are things you can do here to minimize the possibility of that outcome in the meantime.”

“...Point.” Hanzo was forced by native honesty to admit. “I can do most of my Instructor Aesthetics in Art Education work from here, too.”

The initial expression on Genji’s face, as he opened his mouth, suggested he was going to say one thing only to have his train of thought unexpectedly derailed, explosively, and sent plunging over the edge of a potentially bottomless ravine. “...I didn’t know you were taking education track courses.”

“It seemed a reasonable alternative to starving artistry,” Hanzo replied wryly. “Though I’m finishing that approach first -- Dr. Saddind-Maas thought it would be detrimental to studio program to fully commit to a second degree while one was already in progress.”

“You are a fucking masochist.” Genji informed him. “But, for the record, I think you’d make a good teacher -- I mean, you were a thousand orders of magnitude more patient with everybody back home and I’d have been. They’d still be looking for all the body parts if I had to teach Goro’s kids how to do anything.”

“Thank you,” Hanzo replied, absurdly touched.

“You’re welcome.” Genji smiled sweetly. “How long has your flaky thesis advisor been missing?”

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” And at Genji’s flat look, “I don’t know for certain -- the two that interrogated me didn’t allow that information to slip. She has not, however, responded to the text I sent her this morning and the last communications I have from her were all sent on Saturday. She was...considering going to the condo.”

“So she might be actually, legitimately missing.” Genji said into the thoughtful silence around the table. “Or she could be shacked up somewhere with that Bob Ross clone who’s always telling the CS students they need to go outside and make a pot or something with her phone turned off.”

“Yes, exactly.” Hanzo looked down to discover his plate empty again and his stomach not immediately agitating for more and settled for sipping his lemonade.

“So we’re not going to panic yet.” Genji leaned back in his chair and glanced at Lucio and Hana. “I’ve got my usability testing practical tomorrow afternoon and lectures in the morning. You two?”

“Composition and rhetoric paper presentation in the morning, digital research seminar in the afternoon -- I’m not going to be out of class until close to seven.” Hana pulled out her tablet. “I might be able to ditch the seminar, the paper’s already been submitted, and my presentation on that one isn’t until Thursday at the earliest.”

“Lectures all day for me and for the next several -- my next presentation isn’t until Friday. That’d be the advanced sound design for digital media project I was working on with Cora before she actually disappeared.” Lucio glanced around the table. “D’you...think it might be risky for us to go to school with these MiBs lurking around?”

“Maybe?” Hot Vampire Jack answered. “It’d definitely look suspicious if you all dropped off the face of the Earth simultaneously.”

“True.” Genji sighed. “Look, the best we can do is hang close together, stay in contact with the hacienda, and call for help if we need it. If any of us get cornered alone, we answer their questions to the best of our ability, but we legit don’t know anything.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Lucio agreed and Hana nodded, frowning at her tablet.

Hanzo was excused that evening from after dinner chores by virtue of his wounded hand (“It’s not that badly wounded!”) and instead set to the task of sorting his own admittedly somewhat neglected laundry hamper and putting on a load to wash. It would, he admitted without shame, be nice to wear clothes that weren’t some variation of sweats and a tee-shirt again, even if the variation was only cargo pants, and to have his own pyjamas and underwear for bed. He set the machine, a high efficiency water recycling model, then wandered into the sitting room with the idle thought of restarting his book again, only to be ambushed by Zenyatta, carrying a much larger and more comprehensively supplied first aid kit.

“Sit,” Zen said in a tone close enough to a command that Hanzo, trained from the cradle to obey reasonable authority figures, immediately planted himself on the couch. “Let me see your hand -- the field dressing I used probably won’t stay put through the night.”

“Really, it’s not that bad,” Hanzo insisted, as Terrifying Smoke Gabe materialized to observe the proceedings.

“It was visibly blistering,” Zen countered, exasperated, as he carefully peeled off the last layer of bandaging and reached for a packet of delicately fragrant, likely exceedingly magical wet wipes. “It has to be -- oh. Oh my.”

The messy blistered blotch that had marred his right palm was significantly less of both -- the skin still reddened, as though he’d set his hand against something hot, and raised slightly, but not as if it were blistered. Instead it was a visible pattern: a near-perfect circle on the pad below the right index finger, a curving series of ridges across the palm below that resembled nothing so much as roiling stormclouds, jagged lightning crawling among their swirls.

Hanzo spoke for all of them when he said, “What fresh Hell is this?”

“Doesn’t look that Hellish to me, kid,” Terrifying Smoke Gabe observed from his perch on the back of the couch. “And, trust me, I speak with a certain quantity of direct personal experience on that score. Does it hurt?”

“Not...really?” He flexed his fingers and while the skin on his palm pulled a bit with the motion there wasn’t even much of a sting left. “We’re all seeing this as a pattern, right?”

“Yes,” Zen confirmed as he took gentle possession of Hanzo’s wrist and carefully applied a cool, damp wipe to it, then looked again.

The patterning didn’t wipe away but the red visibly faded and the swelling went down almost at once, clarifying the details so nicely that, when Genji strolled in squabbling good naturedly with Lucio and Hana, she could stop, lean over the arm of the couch, and say, “Hey! I’ve seen that somewhere before.”

His hand immediately became the central point of focus of the entire cluster as his brother and Lucio joined them, Genji giving him a narrow-eyed look containing a massive sibling concern storm and Lucio adding, “I’ve seen it too but I can’t remember where.”

“The genealogy chart.” Genji added, concern doing a little dance with realization on his face. “It was on the genealogy chart -- I remember it, too.”

“Really? I don’t --” And then he did, or thought he did, and dug around in his bag with his free hand, pulling out his tablet and pulling up the relevant files, poking through them until he came up with the mon of unknown origin/function list. “I’ll be damned.”

“Please don’t say that,” Genji replied not at all serenely. “Fifteen instances across both halves of the clan, over a thousand years -- including our missing warrior-woman.” He pulled up the list of holders. “And of course there’s no detailed information about how they came to be awarded it or possess it or why.” He paused, traced his fingers over the list. “Kazutaka had it, too.”

“That’s more often than not the truth of many of the older aspects of the clan’s history -- before we settled permanently in Hanamura, we carried our history on our backs.” Hanzo smiled wryly. “Bits and pieces got lost along the way.”

“Inconvenient that this was one of them.” Genji traced his fingertips over the mark. “There’s, like, a zero percent chance that this isn’t significant in some way, right?”

“It is extremely unlikely.” Zen replied, closing up the case, and taking Hanzo’s hand in both his own. “I thought it looked like ward-burn back at the condo -- that can happen when warding energies ground themselves through a physical conduit. But it may be more than that.”

“The spatial anomaly collapsed when he closed the door -- apparently to the second, from what you were saying, and Jaime’s data pretty much supports the conclusion.” Gabe replied thoughtfully. “You sense any residuals, Dr. Tekhartha?”

Three of Zenyatta’s orbs curled themselves into existence around them, glowing gently and chiming as they were wont to do, as he closed his eyes, a little concentration mark forming between his brows. Hanzo forced himself to relax, to breathe normally, to let his hand rest lightly in Zen’s and he was not entirely sure where the lightning-stroke-bright flash came from, his palm or Zen’s orbs, or the flare of purple, deeper and more vivid than any natural light, but the shockwave definitely forced their hands apart, and then the rest of them, and the next time Hanzo was aware enough to realize what was going on around him he was laying sprawled on his back between Genji and Terrifying Smoke Gabe on the sitting room’s exquisite hardwood floor, staring up at the definitely supernatural plasterwork of the ceiling, itself crackling with lightning-silver-eye wateringly-painful-violet threads of energy, rapidly dispersing. His skull was ringing like a selection of Lucio’s tuning forks, each set to a slightly different pitch, he was pretty sure a portion of his brain was trying to ooze out of his ears, and his hand ached from the tips of his fingers all the way to the elbow.

Next to him, Terrifying Smoke Gabe pushed himself up on his elbows, surveyed the wreckage of the living room and asked, “What the fuck just happened?”

“I...don’t know. Genji?” Hanzo reached over and gave his brother, dazed and blinking rapidly as he came back to his senses, a careful shake. “Are you okay?”

“What -- that was -- I’ve only seen that --” Genji bit down on what he’d been about to say, started scrambling to his feet, couldn’t quite manage it and sat down hard again. “Where’s Zen?”

The heavy couch they’d all been sitting on was laying on its back, throw pillows thrown, cushions askew. The end tables were likewise located far afield from their previous positions, at least one lamp smashed, the other tipped over but still alight, casting bizarre and vaguely threatening shadows across the wall and ceiling, along with the weirdly flickering violet light still emanating from beyond the tipped-over furniture.

“Zen?” Hanzo heaved himself to his feet one-armed, his skull slowly ceasing its suture-threatening vibrations, offering his good hand to Gabe as, in the near distance, dogs began barking and footsteps thumped across the floor and voices raised in alarm became clearly audible.

“Here,” For the first time in ever, or at least as long as Hanzo could remember, Zenyatta did not sound some species of serenely in control of himself, “I am here.”

He was, in fact, planted against the far wall next to the fireplace, folded around himself, his head in his hands. Scintillating filaments of purple flickered under his skin, girdling his fingers and wrists in patterns that pressed themselves into the backs of Hanzo’s eyes, stomach-churning with their intensity, as he made his way around the couch toward him. “Are you okay? What --”

“Wait.” He flug out a hand, palm up, and Hanzo froze where he stood. “Just...just a moment.”

The filaments marking his palm with a pattern not unlike an open, slit-pupiled eye flared and faded from the outside in, peeled away from his fingers and flowed up his arm and away and by the time Hot Vampire Jack burst in with Lucio and Hana and the pack in tow, he was mostly himself again, weary and slightly dazed and unnaturally out of sorts, a little ashy from the fireplace tools he’d slammed into, his eyes a washed-out dull gray. Jesse paused in the doorway and immediately crossed to his side, offering him a steadying hand as Genji helped Zen up, unsteadily, to his feet.

“I take this to mean,” Terrifying Smoke Gabe asked dryly, as he and Lucio and Hana righted the couch and got Zen settled on it, “that there were some remnant energies?”

“Yes,” Zenyatta replied, slightly brittle around the edges, and accepted the cup of tea Jack handed to him. “I am...not entirely certain why they reacted as strongly as they did but…” Zen looked up and caught his eyes, smiled with such ridiculously warm reassurance that Hanzo felt himself responding completely, comfort mingled with relief and gratitude. “Hanzo, I believe that you did close the door attempting to open there, in every possible and literal sense.”

Hanzo clutched Jesse’s hand, forced himself to reply calmly and evenly, “My gifts...do you think they are…?”

“I think,” Zenyatta replied carefully, “that you still possess an abundance of will, and of knowledge, and that you may finally be healing from the injury done you all those years ago. How this is tied to the Serpent-Wolf, or the magatama within you, or your bond with Ranger McCree, are questions we will have to answer sooner rather than later. But, for now, I think we should all rest and approach them with fresh eyes and minds, tomorrow. I, for one, have a wretched headache.”

#WIP Ghost Stories On Route 66 #I'll fix the italics tomorrow

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deansmyapplepie · 5 years

Text

There’s Something About Y/N

Pairing: None

Tags: possession, possessed!reader, demons, protective!Dean, protective!Sam, little bit of comedy

Word Count: 2,262

A/N: This was a request made by alexwinchester23! Just a reminder to everyone, my requests are open! It might take me a hot minute to get it out for you, but please feel free to request something! The link to my inbox is on my page or in my bio! <3

(Gif not mine)

Tendrils of cold air reached out to you, cutting through the thick jacket you were wearing to protect yourself from the chill of night. Why demons couldn't choose to reside in buildings with a decent central heating system, you would never understand. You readjusted your grip on your blade, flexing your fingers around the familiar leather handle. By now, you had done this a few hundred times at least. Work a case, kill the monster, work a case, kill the monster. It was a somewhat repetitive life, but a gratifying one at that. For years now you had devoted your life to saving people from creatures they didn't know they even needed to worry about in the first place.

At this point, the life-saving came as easy as breathing. Or, the process that led up to the life-saving, at least. Dean, your best friend, lightly bumped your shoulder with his own, causing you to look up at him, eyebrows raised. He motioned for you to go down one hallway and Sam to go down another. Giving a small nod in return, you crept deeper into the warehouse, on your own now. If you were honest, you hated being on your own during a hunt. It was pretty ironic, actually. You had hunted on your own for a good five or six years before you had even heard of the Winchesters, and now you preferred not to work a case without them. It could be perceived as a sort of weakness, you supposed. That had always been one of the main reasons you had chosen to hunt alone for so long. Having others around meant more people to take care of. Although, you had to admit that having the Winchesters around didn't feel like that at all. They had intuition and reflexes as sharp as your own, making the three of you a damn near unstoppable team. A loud rustle of movement to your left startled you a bit more than it would typically have, and you scolded yourself. This was not the time to lose focus. You had a job to do, and you intended to do it.

"So you're the Winchesters' pet." you whirled on your heel at the unfamiliar voice, adrenaline instantly pumping through your veins. The demon was a woman or possessing a woman's body at least. "I was expecting more" she mused, appraising you as if you were a piece of furniture she was contemplating buying. "The other demons made you out to be a merciless hunter. How disappointing." You could feel your lip curl back slightly.

"Sorry to be rude," you sneered back, "but I don't have time for small talk right now." She gave a small laugh that sent chills running down your spine. "What a coincidence." She looked up at you, all traces of her half-smile replaced with malice as her eyes flitted to the inky blackness you had come to know so well. "Nor do I." With an effortless wave of her hand, an unseen force pushed you down to your knees, and you were frozen in place. You groaned in pain as you fought to get up again, blade clattering to the floor at your knees. The demon's eyes lit up with interest as she took a few steps closer to you. "What's this?" she asked, eyeing the anti-possession talisman hanging around your neck. Shit. In one swift movement, she yanked it off of you, giving a slight shudder as she did. "That was the only thing protecting you, wasn't it? I can feel it. You're really not as smart as I thought you were." Without your necklace, you felt naked. You were completely defenseless now.

"Sam!" you yelled into the empty space. "Dean!" The demon grabbed a fistful of your hair, yanking it painfully, so you were forced to look her in the eye. "Don't worry, Y/N," she said. "I'm one hell of an actor. Your boys won't even know you're gone." Her head whipped back unnaturally as black smoke began to pour from her mouth. You struggled futilely as it moved over to you choking you and making your eyes water. Then, there was nothing but darkness.

"Y/N!" Dean's voice reverberated throughout the warehouse as he rejoined his brother in the room where they had initially separated. The two of them didn't even have to exchange a look to know what their next course of action was. With their weapons drawn, they hastily moved in the direction Y/N less than five minutes ago.

"Y/N?" Sam echoed his brother as they approached the only room at the end of the hallway. They watched as Y/N heaved a limp form off of herself with a strained grunt.

"Got her," she panted, tucking her knife away as she stood.

"You okay?" Dean asked as he eyed her. She grinned back at the boys and nodded.

"Yeah. She just got the drop on me," Y/N replied, gesturing to the lifeless body on the ground. "Thought I was toast there for a second." She looked around at the dark room and clutched her arms around herself. "Now let's get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps." The boys exchanged a grin as she stomped out of the room in total Y/N fashion.

Several days later, Dean walked into the bunker's library, his regular beer in hand. Y/N sat at the long, wooden table, flipping through a book absent-mindedly.

"Hey," Dean greeted, scanning the room. "Where's Sam?" Y/N looked up at him.

"In his room, I think." Her eyes landed on his drink, and she smirked. "It's a little early to be drinking already, isn't it?" Dean let out a grunt as he seated himself across the table from her.

"Hey, it's five o' clock somewhere. Watcha readin'?" Y/N sighed, closing the book and leaning back in her chair.

"I honestly have no idea." Dean started to chuckle but then froze. His beer bottle was halfway up to his lips when he noticed it. Y/N was wearing one of her lower-cut tank tops. Had she been wearing something different, Dean wasn't sure he would have even noticed it at all. She didn't have her necklace on. Despite the boys' nagging, Y/N had never gotten the anti-possession tattoo Dean and his brother had. Instead, she made her own makeshift talisman to protect herself from demons. Dean set his drink back on the table calmly as his mouth went dry. She noticed his sudden change in demeanor and raised her eyebrows in question. "What?" Dean swallowed hard.

"Where's your necklace?" he questioned, trying to sound as nonchalant as he could manage. Y/N looked down at herself where her necklace should have been.

"Oh!" The surprise was audible in her tone, although Dean suspected it wasn't genuine. "I must've forgotten to put it back on after I got out of the shower this morning." Something Y/N once said to Dean replayed in his mind. I never take this necklace off. Not for anything. If I don’t have it on, something’s wrong "You're not Y/N," he pointed out. The corners of her lips sunk down as she looked at him in confusion.

"What? Dean-" The oldest Winchester stood up quickly, causing his chair to topple backward with force.

"What did you do to her?" he glowered, his voice low and dangerous. Her eyes went wide, panicked, as she stood from her chair.

"Dean, take a breath." She raised her hands defensively and took a few steps away from the table. Dean hesitated for a split second. He was almost positive this wasn't really Y/N, but whatever it was it was one hell of an actor. But still, he knew that at this point the real Y/N probably would have called him an idiot and doused herself with holy water. Dean practically launched himself at her, pinning her against one of the columns.

"Where. Is. Y/N?" Her eyes flitted back and forth as she shook her head. "I ain't askin' again."

"Dean?" Sam quickly approached his brother, obviously confused. "What the hell?"

"Sam, thank God. Tell your brother he's being crazy!" Dean took two fistfuls of her shirt, slamming her back into the column again.

"Shut up!" he ordered. "I think she's possessed," Dean explained to his younger brother.

"Dean, please!" Y/N, or whatever the hell it was, begged. "I'm the only thing in here!" Dean sneered into her face, his lip curling back into a threatening snarl.

"Oh, there's something in there, but it sure as hell ain't our Y/N." Sam took a few steps toward the two of them.

"How do you know?" he asked.

"Her necklace," Dean responded. That was all the answer Sam needed. His eyes narrowed.

"What are you?" he asked. "A demon?" She sighed, seeming to know she was beaten, and her eyes flashed black.

"Not bad," she smirked. "First try, too. Although, I will say I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get to be Y/N for longer. She was such a fun character to play." Dean's knuckles went white as he clenched his fists even tighter, his face darkening.

"She's not just some 'character' for you to toy around with," Sam snapped.

"Yeah, now get the hell out of her!" Dean gave her another shake as the demon gave a malice-filled smile, which was unsettling for the boys to see on Y/N's face.

"Not a chance, boys." The demon slammed her forehead into Dean's, making him clutch his head in pain as he involuntarily released her.

"Dean!" Sam exclaimed. He lunged for the demon, but she was faster. With nothing holding her back anymore, she pushed her hands down, straining against some unseen force, and the boys were forced to their knees. The demon chuckled mercilessly, a sound immensely unlike Y/N's real laugh.

"You know what would've been really fun, though? To see the look in both of your eyes if you still thought I was Y/N when I killed you." Dean made a sort of growling noise deep in the back of his throat.

"You bi-" Before he could get the rest of the word out, the demon made a tight fist, cutting off both boys' air supply. She watched gleefully as they suffered, Dean clawing at his throat, trying to breathe.

"Exorcizamus te omnis immundus spiritus." The demon's head snapped over to Sam, who was holding his phone, an audio recording of him reciting an exorcism on speaker. "Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii." She gritted her teeth, willing herself to stay attached to Y/N's body. "Omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica." The demon began to tremble, losing her hold on the boys, who toppled over weakly, gasping at the air like fish out of water. "Ergo draco maledicte. Eccleisiam tuam securi tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus." Shaking violently, the demon held out her hand, and Sam's phone went flying over to her. Without hesitation, she crushed the small device in her fist, rendering the rest of the room quiet. As she caught her breath, she didn't notice Dean get up behind her. He grabbed her shoulder roughly, causing her to whirl around. "Sorry, Y/N," Dean apologized. Before the demon could react, he delivered a brutal right hook to her cheek, and she landed on her hands and knees. "Audi nos, bitch." Y/N jerked back onto her knees. Her head snapped back as if her neck had been broken, and a bloodcurdling scream erupted from her mouth, black smoke pouring out. And when it was over, she crumpled to her side, lying horrifyingly still.

You pulled into the bunker's garage, honking the horn to let the boys know you were home. After you had woken up, they had strong-armed you into getting a more permanent form of protection from possession. Getting the tattoo wasn't something you were necessarily thrilled about, but it needed to be done. Especially now that the boys were benching you until you had been inked. Today had been a kitsune hunt that you were dying to work. Cases that involved a monster that you rarely got to deal with were your favorites. It kept things interesting. Even though there was no chance of you getting possessed this time around, Sam and Dean still refused to let you go with them. You understood that they were just being protective, but it was still annoying as hell. So, when you got Sam's text that they were on their way home, you had grabbed your credit card and headed out to the tattoo place the boys recommended. They both came up the garage's stairs right as you got out of the car, shooting them a triumphant grin.

"Hey, there she is!" Sam greeted, giving you a warm smile. "How'd it go?" You tossed him your keys and shrugged out of your jacket.

"Took it like a champ," you answered. Dean chuckled as he crossed his arms comfortably across his chest.

"Well, let's see it." You undid the top button of your shirt, pulling the left side away to show off your tattoo. Sam stepped closer, scrutinizing the design. After a few moments, he gave a satisfied nod.

"Good," he appraised. "Really good." You did a little bow.

"There you have it, boys. I am now 100% possession-proof!" Dean slung an arm around your shoulder and gave you a peck on the side of the head.

"Atta girl. Now we just need to have Cas etch Enochian into your ribs, and you'll be good to go." You looked up at him in alarm.

"Wait, what?"

Thanks so much for reading, guys! Like I said, this was a request, and my inbox is always open if you have some idea that you’d like me to take a swing at!

As always, links to my inbox, masterlist, and taglist are in my bio or on my page!

#supernatural #fanfiction #supernatural fanfiction #one shot #one shot fanfiction #Dean Winchester #Sam Winchester #original female character #female reader #reader #demon #possession #possessed!reader #protective!Sam #protective!Dean #bad attempt at comedy #:)

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yrpspiritsintheshadows · 5 years

Text

The Dark Man

"Timmy?"

The boy looked up, his grey eyes widening at the sight of the investigators with his mother.

Carly knelt to his level.

"Mr. Miyamoto and Ms. Nicks want to talk to you about your drawings." She told him with a gentle look. The boy's eyes grew wide, grinning.

"Really?"

Eiji knelt to the boy's level, giving a warm smile.

"Really. I'm super impressed. They're really cool."

Tim giggled, picking up another notebook sitting on the floor with them.

"I got lots more!"

Carly stood back against the wall, trying to hide her worry.

Eiji narrowed his eyes as the boy started to flip through them.

"So, who's this?" He asked, pointing to an image of what he assumed was Tim, standing beside a large being with spindly limbs.

Tim froze up, shifting.

"Um…" He mumbled something.

Skyler frowned.

"We won't be mad, promise."

Tim fumbled with his hands, looking up at the two.

"He said if I told anyone, he'd hurt Mommy again." He whimpered.

Carly let out an audible gasp, covering her mouth.

Oh, doesn't that sound familiar…

"I can't tell you, Mama. It said it'd hurt you."

Eiji squeezed his shoulder gently.

"I promise you, while me and my friends are here, no one's gonna hurt your mommy."

"You mean it?"

Skyler smiled.

"He's right. Eiji never breaks his promises either. He's helped a lot of kids who had mean friends like yours."

Tim fumbled with the notebook page, uncertainty in his eyes before he took a deep breath.

"He's the Dark Man. He likes living in the basement… A-And in my closet." Tim pushed away his sketchbook, getting up, spreading his arms wide. "He's got arms, just like this. A-And he walks like his legs are broken."

Skyler wrote down what he said as Eiji nodded along.

"What does he do?"

"He said he has… somethin to do. Somethin, he doesn't wanna stop doing." The boy's lip quivered. "He's a bad man."

"He's not a friend, is he kiddo?"

Tim shook his head furiously.

"Do you want us to take him with us when we leave?" Eiji asked seriously. Skyler paused, giving him a warning look.

"Yes, please."

"I'm gonna do my best to take him with us, when we leave. But if I can't, I'll teach your mom how to protect you from him."

Tim perked up before something crossed his eyes. He ran over to his toy box, pulling something out.

"He doesn't like this." He held up a small plastic mirror. "He freaks out."

Eiji took it gingerly into his hands as an idea crossed his mind, a smirk coming to his face.

"The Dark Man hates mirrors, huh? That's great to know. Now, get packed up, okay?"

"Okay!"

Carly took him aside as Skyler stayed back to keep Tim busy.

"What if it does try to follow us?"

Eiji looked back before digging into his coat pocket. He handed her a paper tag, written on it was Japanese kanji with a strange symbol in a wax seal.

"What's this?"

"It's a protection tag, straight from the Memoria Coven. It'll enable you to leave virtually invisible to HIS eyes. He won't even know where you go. He has no choice but to stay and deal with us instead."

Her eyes welled up in tears of relief.

"What if you can't take him with?" She asked softly.

"If it's worst case scenario, we'll attempt to cleanse the house and if it's not working… then I'm gonna recommend you move as a last resort." he gave her a gentle look, "but I'm gonna try my best."

"Thank you… Thank you."

oooooo

After Carly had left with her son, the team set up their cameras and equipment all through the house.

"Alright, nerve center is in the back guest room. Let's finish setting up."

Chase groaned, setting a monitor on the table, bringing a hand to his back.

"Eiji, can't we just get fancy tablets for this?"

"I told you to lift with your knees, not your back." He said simply, hiding a smirk.

"With your knees, not with your back, meh." Chase muttered under his breath.

At the look Eiji gave him, Chase swallowed hard.

"I mean… If you wanna be like that, I guess you could just… go into the basement."

"HEY!"

"Kidding." Eiji looked around. "Alright, we got the night vision cams set up around the house. You got the full spectrum going in Tim's room and the parents room?"

"Yup. We can't see it with our own eyes but the cameras will." Chase grinned, leaning on the desk. "I also got full spectrum's going in the kitchen, the basement AND the front porch.

"Great. What're Lucian and Skyler doing?"

CRASH!

Their eyes went to the floor before looking to the camera in the basement. Lucian was rubbing his head while Skyler picked up the bag he had dropped.

"Ah, hit his head on a low hanging pipe." Eiji winced. "He's… fine, right?"

Chase rolled his eyes.

"This is Lucian we're talking about. NOTHING ever takes him out."

"True." He grabbed his radio. "Hey, what's going on down there you two?"

"We're just finishing setting up the REM pod in the basement too. Anything crosses here, we'll know."

"Great. Who's staying there?"

"Sky."

"Yup. Pendulum session!"

Eiji nodded to himself.

The REM pod, to detect when a spirit crossed its field, the full spectrum cameras, to see what the mortal eye could not.

They all carried their EVP recorders on them at all times during the investigation.

Let's see… Oh!

"Chase? Ghost box?"

"Already got it. I also brought um... that thing." Chase rubbed the back of his neck, not quite sure if what they had brought in was going to work. "You sure you want the freakin box of mirrors? We haven't had much luck with it..."

Eiji waved him off.

"The Dark Man apparently doesn't like mirrors." He smirked. "The Devil's Toy box will be perfect."

Most spirits won't fall for a box of mirrors, that's supposedly meant to trap them. But, if a spirit doesn't like mirrors and is trapped within it, it might let us take it out of here.

From that point on, the investigation had officially begun.

Alright, shift starts with Lucian in nerve center, then I'll be in Tim's room. Chase will be in the parents room and Sky's already in position.

Eiji grabbed up a bag, heading out as Lucian got into position at the monitors.

"Good luck."

"You too." He smirked before heading to Tim's room.

The house was dark now, the equipment working its best in the dark.

He first took out his EMF meter out, running it along the wall to get a reading. After a moment, the device beeped as Eiji pulled it away.

The reading wasn't too high to be dangerous but enough to let him know... he was not alone in Tim's room.

He snapped several pictures with his full spectrum camera, setting up a thermal camera as well.

Later on, they would take different readings but this was the start. The thermal camera would show him if anything unusually cold was in the room with him.

He kept it focused on him as he stood in the center of the room.

He closed his eyes, touching the necklace around his neck.

Please... light my path so I can help this family.

He opened his eyes, pulling out his EVP recorder, deciding it would be time for some questions. The device was able to let him speak to the dead and have them heard back without much energy use.

"Hello, is anyone here?"

He stayed silent, counting down from one hundred in his mind slowly, to allow whatever was in here with him, to speak.

Five... Four...Three...Two...

ONE!

He paused the recording, playing it back.

"Hello, is anyone there?" His voice echoed. There was interference in the background... until something hissed back.

"I am." A warped voice responded.

He turned the recorder back on.

"What's your name?"

He counted down once more... just as the EMF meter went off by itself, the number higher than before. The heck?

He played back the recording.

"Death... I AM DEATH!" The warped voice snarled through the recorder.

Eiji swallowed hard. Great, something's calling itself death.

I don't think it's a Lady or Sir Death either.

Eiji kept his composure, letting out a slow breath.

He wanted to mock it… but he instead, held his tongue.

"Why are you tormenting this family?" He asked.

There was something sliding across the floor, he couldn't see… right before a few of the toys on the floor started to go off.

A toy ambulance drove between his legs.

An animatronic teddy bear started to read off an audio book as a remote controlled helicopter lifted off the floor.

All around him, the room seemed to come alive suddenly as he watched where he stepped.

All of these run on batteries.

Ghosts will sometimes drain devices of their battery life to boost their strength.

Eiji slowly inched for the door, leaning against it. He cussed under his breath as a toy plane buzzed by his head.

One minute, the room was loud, full of energy the next, silent. The toys in the air, dropped to the floor, the toys on the shelves or moving across the floor halted.

Utterly. Silent.

A hand clamped down on his left shoulder.

"I can touch you." The warped voice hissed in his ear, clear as day.

oooooo

Lucian narrowed his eyes, focusing on the monitors.

Eiji was backed up against the door, shaking his head as he tried swatting at something the man couldn't make out.

He took a look over at Chase's monitor, the history teacher talking to something, trying to get his device to respond only for a frustrated look to come to his eyes.

It's only focused on one of us. It doesn't want you, Chase.

He looked over to the basement monitor. Skyler was sitting cross legged on the floor, her eyes closed. Meditating.

Her pendulum was dangling from her hand, the pendant utterly still.

So, it hasn't visited her yet either.

It really only wants Eiji currently-

He narrowed his eyes, focusing on one of the cameras. Eiji had stopped flailing around.

Lucian looked up, eyes widening as a shadow darted across the wall. He jumped up, snapping pictures around the room immediately.

"Eiji, getting shadow figures in Nerve Center. I think your buddy found me." He called into the radio.

"On my way. Looks like we're gonna have a seance on our hands at this rate."

"Maybe we can chase it down to Sky-"

An ice cold hand ran down his arm as he froze up. The man looked around before focusing on his limb, snapping pictures frantically.

"EIJI, ANY DAY NOW-"

Eiji slammed a protection tag onto the wall just inside the doorway.

There was a shriek as a rush of energy blindsided Eiji, sending him against the doorframe. He panted, looking over to Lucian, concern in his eyes.

"You okay?"

"Fine. It didn't get a chance to do what it likes best. What happened in there?"

Eiji merely held up the EVP, playing the recordings. Lucian's eyes widened as the spirit's voice echoed in the room.

There was a crash in the kitchen as something was thrown against the wall.

"Okay, this is getting nuts for the first go." Lucian shuddered, grabbing his radio. "Skyler, Chase, be careful, this thing's stronger than we thought."

"Should Eiji get the toybox ready?"

"Not yet." Eiji cut in. "We don't know what it wants yet."

Lucian stared him down before shrugging, giving a smirk.

"So mote it be, Boss." His eyes narrowed. "C'mon."

oooooo

Chase sighed, drumming his fingers on the nightstand.

"Is there anyone who'd like to come forth?" He asked, glancing at the ghost box beside him. It had been pretty quiet on his end. Nothing to make note of besides how many floorboards the room had… that he could see at least.

He picked up his thermal imaging camera, looking around the room…

Just as something very large and black appeared on the camera. Chase let out a gulp.

"Oh god and goddess." He whispered.

The figure was, judging from the camera feedback, directly in front of him, looking down at him.

It had to be at least seven feet tall, maybe larger if he had to guess, entirely cold.

Cause only living crap shows up warm on this sucker.

He took a deep breath.

Alright, property history.

It was owned in the 1920's by Orson Falkner. He didn't die on the property though and was not involved in anything strange that would make him come back like this.

Not to mention, reports claimed he was a beloved figure in the community and would never hurt a fly.

Alright, narrow it down, narrow it down.

He loved this job. It was exciting, it was terrifying.

He never felt more alive than when faced with death head on.

The man backed up on the bed he had been sitting on as the figure moved with him. Chase's hands shook as the figure crawled on all fours.

"Hey, easy now. Don't need to get so excited! What's your name?"

One second, Chase was looking down at the figure… The next, his face was cold as a hand pressed against it.

In a millisecond, white hot pain flashed through him as he screamed, dropping the camera.

"GET OFF OF ME!"

He fell off the bed, taking off running for the door. The entity was faster though, grabbing his leg as he pried the door open.

"GUYS! I NEED HELP-AAAUGH!"

More pain bloomed through his leg as he was pulled to the floor, back into the room, thrown against the back wall.

He was dazed as a shadowy figure stopped in front of the door. Long spindly limbs, a dark body…

Red eyes stared back at him before disappearing through the floor… to the basement.

Chase grabbed up his camera, bolting out of the room.

"LUCIAN! EIJI-"

WHAM!

He slammed right into Eiji as the two stumbled back.

"Ow! Chase-Oh good goddess…" Eiji's eyes widened.

Chase had a long cut down the right side of his face, a small trickle of blood on his chin from it. His face was bruised as well.

Lucian cursed, taking his face into his hands.

"Scale of one to ten?"

"I don't have time to play patient right now." He shook Lucian off, running for the basement stairs, the others in hot pursuit. "It's down in the basement! I saw it!"

Lucian and Eiji exchanged a look. Eiji grabbed one of their equipment bags off of the kitchen table.

"It's time."

Let's end this.

He had hoped they could run as many experiments as they wanted. Use as much equipment as they needed but this was getting too dangerous.

Chase is bleeding from his face and who knows where else… and if it's down there with Sky…

The basement was pitch black, their only source of light was their full spectrum cameras.

Skyler was still calm, sitting in the center of the room.

"Skyler?! You okay!?"

She jumped as Chase ran to her side, looking around.

"I-I'm fine. What was with all that crap up there?"

Eiji ignited a match as a candle was lit.

"We got a spirit to trap in the toy box is all."

Skyler pocketed her pendulum, taking the candle from him, Lucian and Chase grabbing their own out of the equipment bag.

When things got as rough as fast as it had, it was always good to have some insurance.

Illuminated by the candles light, they placed them in the four corners of the room. Eiji looked around as his eyes adjusted. He made note of something covered up by a tarp, going to it.

His reflection stared back as he tugged it off, a full sized mirror in front of him. He smirked, pulling it into place.

"Alright, we went over the plan during set up. Get those mirrors we found out and get ready." Eiji told them, as he retrieved the most important item in this plan.

The Devil's Toy Box. It was small, not very impressive in appearance. This particular one, was set up like a maze on the inside, designed to confuse entities trapped within.

They usually didn't have much luck with it because spirits were smarter than they appeared. But, if a spirit hated mirrors and had no choice but to bounce around them…

Eiji set the item on the ground before going around the room. He pulled out a vial of salt from his pocket, going around each member of the team, drawing a circle around their feet with it as each stood in the four corners of the room.

Eiji was the past to get into position as a shadow darted across the wall.

This isn't a proper cleansing…

But who said it is?

"Hey! You think you're big and tough just because you call yourself Death!?" He called out, holding his own mirror up - the small one Tim had given to him. "If you're really that strong, go ahead, try to get all four of us!"

The candles flickered as the entity screamed, causing the team to flinch but they didn't waver.

The shadow on the wall grew as the spindly limbs of the entity were shown to them.

It charged Skyler first as she swung her mirror in its direction, causing it to bounce off of it, the circle keeping her safe from harm.

The spirit changed its direction, rushing Lucian next, only to be met with the same result.

Chase, swung his mirror as hard as he could as the entity slammed into it dead on… sending it right to Eiji.

Eiji braced himself as the surge of energy rushed him, the tiny mirror being his only means of deflection.

I infuse my intent, to shine light in this area, in this home. For this object to help me defend Tim, to defend Carly, to defend my friends.

To defend anyone from being harmed by this entity again.

LIGHT MY PATH!

The entity slammed against the mirror… ricocheting across the room towards the full sized mirror. It was positioned, facing the Devil's Toy Box.

The entity shrieked as it was slammed against the mirror… as the Devil's Toybox began to shake, until the lid clamped shut on its own. The candles went out, bathing the area in darkness once more.

They held their breath, waiting in case it didn't work… only for the box to stay still. Eiji rushed forward, salting the area around the box as he lit a flashlight this time.

"That, I believe, concludes the investigation." He grinned up at his teammates, relieved.

The entity wasn't going to be getting out any time soon. The air seemed clearer as well. Like a heavy fog had been lifted.

He looked to the little plastic mirror in his hands, seeing a large scratch across its surface, marring his reflection.

"Thanks, Tim." He whispered.

Lucian stepped out of his circle, lighting his own flashlight. He put it under his face, sneering at Chase.

"And since, we're done… You have five seconds."

"... Ahhh frick." He grinned sheepishly. "Lucy, c'mon! We just had a victory a-and you heard what the lady said, it'll just disappear-"

Skyler poked his cheek as he hissed.

"Ow! SKY!"

"Go with the Emperor of the Underworld. Now."

He grumbled, but did as told.

"Eiji, you owe me."

"I'll cook you all a good dinner. Just glad it's all over now." He sighed in relief.

Now to get home.

oooooo

The house was dark when they got back. Everyone was exhausted, just glad to head to their own cars and head home.

"Hey, Chase, you want me to drive ya home?" Skyler offered. The man stammered a little, giving her a surprised look.

Eiji looped an arm around his shoulders.

"Boy, he sure would, he's just speechless!" He exclaimed. "Ain't that right, Chase?"

Chase nodded mutely, giving him a grateful look as he followed Skyler to her car.

Lucian chuckled.

"He's gonna need more help with that."

"Oh, majorly. Thanks for tonight."

"You know I love what we do. Take care now." Lucian gave a wave before driving off as well.

Soon enough, all was quiet again, Eiji making his way inside, keeping quiet.

The living room was lit by the light of the television, a DVD menu on the screen.

Carmen and Ken were curled up together on the couch, both fast asleep. Carmen's dark hair splayed around her like a curtain, Ken's head tucked under his mother's.

Awww…

He shook his head, grabbing an afghan out of the linen closet, laying it over them, trying not to jostle them.

Okami perked up from her place laying next to the couch.

"Rrf?"

"Shhh…"

He supposed he hadn't been quiet enough since Carmen stirred, a green eye opening.

"Mm…? Eiji?"

He kissed her head.

"Go back to sleep. I'm home."

She shook her head, motioning for him to grab Ken.

It was a silent exchange as Eiji carefully lifted his son into his arms. Ken didn't shift, thankfully just huddling closer to his father, sighing happily.

Carmen rose up, the afghan draped around her shoulders. She leaned up, kissing his cheek.

"Love you." She whispered.

"Love you too." He kissed her head as they made their way upstairs.

Soon enough, they had Ken tucked into bed, Okami making herself comfortable at the foot of his bed once more.

Carmen smiled softly, turning to head into their room… letting out a small squeak, as she was lifted up.

"Eiji!" She hissed.

Eiji gave her a silly grin, carrying her to their room.

"Oh, let me spoil my lovely bride."

She rolled her eyes, smiling.

"Nerd."

"Your nerd." He dropped her unceremoniously on their bed before heading to get changed. "Oh man, I had a heck of a night."

"That bad huh?"

"It was trying to imitate a Sir Death." Eiji rolled his eyes. "One of the times I wish I could've seen it dead on and smacked it."

She made room as he laid beside her, bringing her into his arms. Carmen kissed his head, huddling closer.

"You don't need special eyes to do what you do best."

He smiled, burying his face in her hair.

"You always know what to say." He yawned. "I love you."

"Love you more."

He tightened his arms around her.

"Love you for eternity."

Safe and sound.

Where I'm meant to be.

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rolcomictranscriptions · 7 years

Text

Rivers of London Audio Only Short Stories - A Rare Book of Cunning Device

Thank you so much to the guest contributor who transcribed this.

A Rare Book of Cunning Device

By Ben Aaronovitch

Available from Audible.

Audible Studios presents "A Rare Book of Cunning Device," written by Ben Aaronovitch. Read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

***

"Aha!" said the librarian. "You must be Mamusu's boy." The librarian was a tiny, round-faced white woman, who appeared to be dressed in several layers of brightly-colored cardigans.

I confirmed that I was that Peter Grant, and she beamed at me.

"I knew your mum back in Freetown when she was just a wee slip of a girl," she said.

"Did you?" I asked, stupidly, because I was having trouble code-shifting from job to family acquaintance. Especially one who used my mum's Sierra Leonean name. Most white people that know her call her Rose, even my Dad.

"I came to your christening," she said. "Enormous party. Food was brilliant."

"I'll tell her we met," I said.

"I wonder if she'll remember me," she said.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"I haven't said, have I?"

"No."

"Ah. Yes." She held out her hand for me to shake.

"Elsie Winstanley. I'm the specialist collection manager, thank you for coming."

"My pleasure," I said. "What seems to be the problem?"

"We appear to have acquired a poltergeist," she said.

This seemed unlikely. According to the massed wisdom of the practitioners who came before me, which was corroborated at least in part by my own research, ghosts, poltergeists, and other incorporeal phenomena fed off the vestigia that accumulates in the fabric of the material world. This buildup takes time, and while stone, brick, and even concrete retain vestigia well, a building generally had to be at least thirty years old before acquiring any ghosts. More than a hundred years for a poltergeist, or something more exotic. The British Library had been built in 1997, and was less than seventeen years old.

It was an odd building, too, a sort of collision between the monumental brick-built bulk of a 1930's power station, and the strange, postmodernist desire to recreate that famous Escher interior. You know—the one with all the perspective-defying staircases.

Ms. Winstanley and me had met in the foyer, where I was issued with a security pass, because not even a warrant card gets you backstage at the second-largest book collection in the world.

Behind the reception desk rose the King's Library, a six-story glass tower containing 65,000 books, donated by King George the Third during a rare fit of sanity. There are theories that he feared, in his madness, that they were possessed of unquiet spirits and felt he could not sleep soundly under the same roof.

Or, more likely to my mind, he felt the palace needed the shelf space.

Still, that was a lot of historical material, so I wasn't about to dismiss the claim out of hand. "What makes you think you've got a poltergeist?" I asked.

"Things have been moved around during the night," she said. "Doors that should be closed have been left open. And some books have been found on the wrong shelf."

"You sure it isn't just—"

"Yes, we're sure," she said. "We're librarians. We notice that sort of thing. And in any case, while books may occasionally mislay themselves, priceless sixteenth century globes do not."

"It was stolen?"

"It was moved, from one end of the basement to the other," she said.

"Well, perhaps somebody needed the space," I said.

"This—" began Ms. Winstanley, and then changed her mind. "I think it will be easier to just show you the basement. Which she did.

All four sodding floors.

All with very tight security. Particularly the top-secret sections, where they keep the classified maps from the Ministry of Defense.

"Things don't move of their own accord," said Ms. Winstanley. "Not in this library."

So I did a preliminary IVA, or Initial Vestigia Assessment, and because it was a sodding big building with four floors of basements, it took me most of the afternoon.

"It mostly manifests itself at night," said Ms. Winstanley when we stopped for coffee.

It certainly wasn't manifesting itself to me. I noted down all the details, thanked Ms. Winstanley for the tour, and headed back to the Folly. There, I planned to fill in one of our brand-spanking-new Falcon Incident report forms, and file it until Nightingale came back from hunting big cats in Norfolk.

Only, I got back to find our archivist, Professor Harold Postmartin, D.Phil, F.R.S., enjoying tea in the atrium. I made the mistake of telling him about the alleged poltergeist in the library, because he might find it of interest, and his face lit up. I know that look of enthusiasm, and the last time I saw it, I ended up covered in pesticide and wrestling with a tree.

"Not Hatbox Winstanley?" said Postmartin.

I described her as best as I could, and Postmartin confirmed that it was the woman he was thinking of. So-called, because she was said to have travelled down the Amazon in a hatbox, swum the English Channel wearing nothing but goose fat, and run a library in Kolwezi until she was forcibly evacuated by the French Foreign Legion.

"I'm almost certain that the last two are true," said Postmartin. "And if old Hatbox says there's something supernatural in her stacks, then I for one would take her very seriously indeed."

So back we went to the British Library, where Ms. Winstanley, upon hearing that Postmartin was staying the night, insisted that she join us in our ghost-hunting exploits.

"Not only am I intensely curious to see what you boys actually get up to," she said, "but you also cannot leave these university types unsupervised amongst your stacks. They're famously light-fingered, and they don't call Harold 'Postmartin the Pirate' for nothing.

When I asked who called Postmartin a pirate and why, she merely winked and said that, while she'd love to tell me, it was still subject to the thirty-year rule.

"Official secrets act, and all that," she said.

As revenge, I popped back and fetched Toby.

When Ms. Winstanley objected, I told her that Toby was a highly-trained police dog.

She gave Toby a skeptical look. "Trained in what?" she asked.

"Many strange things," I said, "of which the uninitiated is not meant to know."

"Are," said Ms. Winstanley. "Are not meant to know, not is."

And that is why I don't normally argue with librarians.

So me and one of the security staff carried gear down to the basement while Ms. Winstanley and Postmartin compared ninja librarian notes.

We were making camp in one of the central work rooms on basement Two. Underground, the workspace and stacks were as generously proportioned as a billionaire's basement, with high ceilings and wide corridors. Everything that wasn't painted 1970s sci-fi white was a brilliant red or blue, causing me to have an almost irresistible urge to tattoo my eyeball and parkour my way up the walls.

The ceilings had to be high because not only did the bookshelves go up over two meters, but above them ran the Paternoster Book Delivery System. Essentially the same as the baggage-handling system in a major airport, only designed not to destroy the packages they were carrying.

Ms. Winstanley explained how it worked on the first tour. Readers upstairs, in one of the many reading rooms, order a book on the computer. The book got pulled off one of the 625 kilometers of shelf, put in a box, the box goes on the patented Paternoster Book Delivery System, and is carried upstairs, where … you can guess the rest.

By law, the British Library gets two copies of every book published in the UK and Ireland, which adds up to a lot of books, over fourteen million so far, "Although the vast majority of the Mills & Boone collection is kept at Boston Spa," said Ms. Winstanley.

And that wasn't counting the 260,000 journals, 4 million maps, and 60 million patents.

"Sixty million?"

"Oh yes," said Ms. Winstanley. "People are extraordinarily inventive."

"Obviously," I said.

"Most of them are complete tosh, of course," she said.

There were specialist bookcases for old, rare, and strangely shaped books, but most of the stock was kept in huge ranks of mechanical bookcases, the kind that closed together to minimize floor space. When you wanted a book, you found the right section and turned a handle which drove a series of gears that pried two of the shelves apart to form a temporary aisle. The gearing was high, and the shelves were heavy. Ms. Winstanley must have spotted me testing the weight with my shoulder.

"Oh, you have to make sure people know you're in there," she said. "Otherwise, somebody might close it and you'd be squished."

"Whoever knew this job was so dangerous?" I said.

"Ah, yes, librarianship," said Ms. Winstanley. "It's not for the faint-hearted."

***

By 11 o'clock that evening, we were all set up, so we cracked open one of the industrial-sized thermoses I'd brought from the Folly while we waited for the last of the staff to vacate the basement. Even the security staff were leaving, so we wouldn't mistake them for a marauding poltergeist.

Since neither our phones or my airwave or my now patent-pending magic detectors would work in the basement, our strategy was to leave at least one person at the base camp while the others went out as a single group and didn't split up under any circumstances. Team Folly was not at home for Mr. Scooby-Doo.

"Particularly since I am, in fact, the only one of us who knows their way around," said Ms. Winstanley.

So, a little bit before twelve, me, Toby, and Ms. Winstanley went for our first patrol. Now, what with the sloppy procedure, the size of the basement, the lack of any detection equipment, and the newness of the building, I thought it was pretty unlikely that we were going to discover anything during this or any subsequent night's searching. So of course, less than half an hour later, we practically tripped over the bloody thing.

There's a particular kind of spookiness about being brightly lit underground. The constant fluorescent light pushes at your peripheral vision, and the absence of shadows flattens out your perspective. It also doesn't help that the climate control system is prone to random ticks and hums.

We started with the closest of the caged-in areas set aside for holding rare, valuable, or classified parts of the collection.

"Or, more likely, because these are the last empty shelves available," said Ms. Winstanley as she unlocked the gate and let us into the first one.

The stacks inside have large shelves holding big, leather-bound books that look like props for a fantasy film. The tan and brown of the covers were brilliant against the sterile gray-white of the shelves. I wanted to reach out and run my fingers along their spines, to see if some of the history would rub off. But I'm better trained than that.

I caught Toby eyeing up a corner of the stack, so I tugged on his lead to make him behave.

"This is mainly—" started Ms. Winstanley, but before she could finish her sentence something shot past our feet and skulled out into the open gate.

I didn't get much more than an impression that it was bigger than Toby, angular, brown, and had lots of legs. By the time I had activated enough neurons to run to the cage door, the thing had gone.

"Tell me that wasn't a spider," said Ms. Winstanley in a deceptively calm tone.

"Can't have been," I said.

"Thank God for that," she said. "Can't stand spiders."

"It was too big," I said. "You can't scale an exoskeleton up that far." The inverse square law can be such a comfort sometimes. Plus, I definitely remembered something about gas diffusion and box lungs or something like that.

"So, magic can't make things bigger?" asked Ms. Winstanley, and I really wished she hadn't.

"It definitely wasn't a poltergeist," I said. "That much is certain." I looked at Toby who hadn't reacted until the thing, whatever it was, ran past him, and I hadn't registered a hint of vestigia either. Perhaps it wasn't magical at all. Could it be mechanical, electronic, a machine? The spider configuration was considered a good shape for autonomous robots.

"I brought the wrong gear," I said. We should have had cameras, motion detectors, and infrared sensors. Isn't that always the way? You set out to hunt a ghost, and you trip over a robot instead.

"Shouldn't we go after it?" asked Ms. Winstanley.

"Let's see if we can find out what it was doing in here," I said.

I found marks on the side of the stacks, and more on one of the posts that supported one of the metal wire cages on the opposite side. The shelves were full of exactly the books Ms. Winstanley said she expected to be there, some hugely valuable, some historically significant. "All of them priceless," she said.

"Anything missing?"

Ms. Winstanley said she couldn't tell without checking the catalog on a terminal back at base camp, so we trooped back and I briefed Postmartin and suggested we call it a night.

"Nonsense," said Postmartin. "Where is your sense of adventure?"

I said it was back at the Folly with my forensic collection kit, motion sensors, and taser. He literally said "Pish," which I never heard a real person say in my life.

"We should at least give deduction a chance," he said. "Is it possible it was a book?"

"It had legs," I said.

"There is a long history of extraordinary things being hidden in books," said Postmartin. "Alcohol, keys, letters, very small heirs to a throne …"

"Hand grenades," said Ms. Winstanley without looking up from her terminal.

"Where was that?" asked Postmartin.

"Bulawayo," she said, "in '75."

"Hand grenades, pistols, radios," said Postmartin. "Why not a robot?"

A book robot seemed a bit Despicable Me, to me, but why not?

Once Ms. Winstanley had a list, it took us less than five minutes to locate the place on the shelves, above head-height of course, where a book was missing.

"A Book of Cunning Device," said Ms Winstanley, reading the details off her tablet. "Attributed to Salman ibn Jabir al-Rashid. A tenth century scholar from Baghdad."

"Why attributed?" I asked.

There was a theory, explained Ms. Winstanley, that the book didn't originate in the Islamic Near East at all. That it had been manufactured in the west, probably Venice, in imitation of the works that were being brought home from the Holy Land by pilgrims and crusaders. "Like a cargo cult object," she said. "Because if you look at the so-called writing, and you have any Arabic or Farsi at all, it's clear that it's nothing like real Arabic, not even close."

She showed me pictures. Lines of squiggly text running across a page. The images were poor, and judging by the color saturation derived from mid-twentieth-century photography, but it looked to me like the writing had been done in gold ink.

"Last catalogued in 1972," said Ms. Winstanley. "And poorly done, at that. We were waiting for our Persian specialist to get back from holiday and have a look."

Another image showed what looked like a musical instrument built into the body of the book, like a horizontal harp with pegs to adjust tension, a horizontal dulcimer, what they called a santur in Iran and Iraq. I recognized it from an album my Dad had by the bloke from Deep Forest.

"Or perhaps a musical instrument disguised as a book," said Ms. Winstanley. "Intriguing, no?"

I asked why, if it was so intriguing, it hadn't been catalogued yet, which caused Ms. Winstanley to snort.

"There's never enough people to get through your backlog," said Postmartin. "That's the curse of librarianship. If your library is of any quality at all, then its collection is going to outpace your manpower."

I spotted Toby sniffing around another corner of the stack, and moved smartly to stop him marking his territory. But I saw he was sniffing at something at his head height. It looked like a sort of scuff mark left behind by the foot of a tripod, or the stud of a football boot. There was a second further up the stack, and a third, and a fourth, making a trail to an empty shelf far up enough for me to need to use a kick-stool to reach it.

"And that's where the book was kept," said Ms. Winstanley.

I put my gloves on just in case, and reached gingerly into the empty shelf. And there it was. A vibration, like the wind breaking through the strings of a harp, in a cascade of notes like running water.

It was magical, then. Which was a bit of a relief, given that the alternative was super-science, and I didn't really want to have to explain that to Nightingale. "That globe that was moved," I said. "Where exactly did you find it?"

The uppermost basement was much larger than the ones below, and most of the space was taken up with the kind of heavy engineering required to keep 165 kilometers of shelving at just the right temperature and humidity. Plus the humans using the building above, of course, but that was pretty much an afterthought. Unlike the book storage areas below, which had been mainly gray and white with red trimming, the plant rooms were silver, with huge cylinders painted blue connected with yellow pipes. Definitely the boss-level, I thought, as we crept through it.

Both Ms. Winstanley and Postmartin followed me in because neither wanted to be left behind. Ms. Winstanley was carrying Toby, because he most definitely had wanted to be left behind. But fortunately I had a stash of Molly's home-cooked sausages on hand to bribe him with.

The misplaced globe had been found close to the central air conditioning unit that served the six-story tower which housed the King's Collection. The unit itself was a huge blue metal box, capped with silver, and vanishing upwards into a web of silver struts and pipes at roof level. A row of chunky green boxes, like the lockers at a gym, festooned with yellow and black warning markers, housed the power regulators.

"I don't want to cramp your style," shouted Postmartin over the roar of the air conditioners, "but I'd be rather careful about using magic just here. A moment of over-enthusiasm and it's good-bye priceless national treasure."

"Great," I said. "I'll ask it to come quietly, then."

"Might be worth a try," he said.

Toby growled softly and belched. I followed his gaze and saw movement just behind a pillar of silver metal pipes and bracing struts. Judging by the yellow and black hazard flashes, tampering with them could result in electrocution, suffocation, and/or freezing. Or, more seriously, should you allow books to be damaged, death by librarian.

I told the librarians to stay where they were and advanced, cautiously. I stopped when I had a good view.

It was hanging off a junction box. By, I estimated, eight of its ten legs. These, I saw, were cables made from thinner strands twisted together. Perhaps a deployment of the dulcimer strings. The book part was open like a pair of wings or a carapace, and hid how the cables connected to the main body. It was trembling as it clutched the junction box, and occasionally a twitch would ripple along the gripping legs. I had the strange impression it was feeding, but off what? Electricity? That would be pretty bloody unprecedented, magically speaking, not to mention astonishing in something crafted in Ninth Century Baghdad. But obviously not impossible.

It had been the leathery book cover that had put me in mind of a huge insect. But now that it was staying still, I found it a lot less frightening.

Right up to the point where it leapt off the box and went for my face.

I don't like insects. Never have.

I jumped backwards so hard that I practically landed on my bum, and looked up just in time to see the Cunning Device skittering over the concrete floor towards me.

I ran, and I'm still impressed with the way I managed to flip over and get my legs under me, before the bloody thing reached me. I went haring down a corridor of silver pipes and blue tanks, towards a chunky-looking fire door. I didn't dare risk looking behind me, and I doubted I'd hear the pitter-patter of legs over the noise of the industrial air conditioning.

Do you know that moment in a film, when someone on foot is being chased by a car, and instead of veering onto the pavement and hiding in a doorway, or behind a bollard, they keep running straight ahead until they get run down? I like to learn from the mistakes of fictional characters, so at the next opportunity, I veered left down a corridor formed by rows of storage lockers. There, freed from the risk of committing treasonable levels of property damage, I turned, took a deep breath, and prepared an impello. I figured my best bet was to flip it on its back and then pin it down.

I stood ready, keeping my mind clear, and waiting. And waiting.

Now, the thing is, you need a clear mind to do magic properly. And the thing about a clear mind is that it allows you to think rationally about your actions. So when the cunning device walked past my position—quite slowly, I noticed—and blithely continued on its way, I was slightly insulted, to be honest.

So I stepped out after it had gone past to see what it did next. Which turned out to be 'bang into the door.' It stepped back, and tried again, harder this time, but the door was designed as serious firebreak and was too heavy. The Cunning Device skipped half a meter to the left and banged against the wall on that side, and then repeated the maneuver a meter to the right. Then, it rotated slowly in place, as if having a good look around, before returning up the corridor towards me.

Now that it wasn't chasing me I could see that the Cunning Device didn't move that fast. The tips of its long, spindly legs skittered on the smooth concrete floors.

What it needed, I decided, was a set of tiny slippers, or, more practically, friction pads, on the ends of its legs. I considered jumping on it, and snapping its covers shut, the way you're supposed to with an alligator's jaws, but I was getting a handle on its behavior. So I stepped smartly out of its way and followed behind.

Salman ibn Jabir al-Rashid, I thought. You must have been well chuffed with yourself when you built this. And we may only know you through your work, but what a piece of work it is!

"What can you tell me about this Salman al-Rashid?" I asked Ms. Winstanley when she and Postmartin joined the parade.

Almost nothing, as it turned out. He was mentioned in a text from Tenth Century Baghdad, as having been a worthy successor to the Banū Mūsā, the famous trio of inventive brothers. And as the author of the Book of Cunning Device. And that was it.

"It's not that unusual," said Postmartin. "There are many people we only really know from their work."

"Shakespeare, for example," said Ms. Winstanley. "Came from Stratford, went to London, wrote plays, was a genius, retired back to Stratford with the fruits of his pen. His will, his grave, the house he used to live in, is just about all we have. And the plays, of course, the glorious plays."

"You don't think they might have been …?"

"No," said both librarians simultaneously.

"Our Salman is seven hundred years older still," said Ms. Winstanley. "He could have been the toast of Baghdad in his day, but there's no guarantee we would have heard of him."

I wondered how close we'd come to having a magic-robot-based industrial Revolution in the Tenth Century, and what had happened to prevent it. I decided that, for the moment, I was going to add that question to the long list of what my cousin Abigail has taken to calling The Big Bumper Fun Book of Unanswered Questions.

So, we trooped after the Cunning Device as best we could, as it worked its way back down to Basement Two, via the paternoster book delivery system, I noticed, and returned itself to its assigned shelf in the book cage.

"What now?" asked Ms. Winstanley.

I didn't think it was a good idea to let an unclassified magical device run around inside the nation's rare book collection, so I asked Postmartin whether the Folly, under one if its many agreements, had the authority to confiscate dangerous magical artifacts.

"As a matter of fact, I think we do," said Postmartin.

"Now see here, Harold," said Ms. Winstanley, but Postmartin held up a placating hand.

"We'll call it a loan, and craft a nice tailor-made storage facility," he said.

Inside a Faraday cage, I thought, inside a room paneled with greenwood and cork boards and other non-magically conducting stuff.

"You can research under controlled conditions, and partake of Molly's growing range of afternoon teas," he said.

I think afternoon tea might have clinched it, because Ms. Winstanley deflated, but only a little.

"I told you he was a pirate, didn't I?" she said.

***

You have been listening to an Audible Studios production of "A Rare Book of Cunning Device," written by Ben Aaronovitch and read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

#Rivers of London #Rivers of London Audio Only Short Stories #A Rare Book of Cunning Device #Peter Grant #Professor Postmartin

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minimalist-banjo · 5 years

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Books:

I love to read, but I like buying books, more the reading side of it. I lost count on how many books I have and lost count on how many I had given to me. I also subscribe to 3 book subscription boxes, so I was getting 3 books each month, on top of the book I was buying.

I watch Maire Kondo, with her ideas that you only allow to keep 30 books. And like every book lover out there said the same thing, “Phffff..... Fuck That!” It wasn’t until I realise I have way too many books when I couldn’t find spot for them and I was ready to buy another bookshelf for the tiny apartment we have. To me, I didn't think I had a problem, as I was going to read them...... one day. But that one day turn one month, turn to one year, and then I had a kid, which meant I was time-poor and couldn’t find time to sit down and actually read.

Then I discovered Audible and the world of audiobooks. Fell in love with reading all over again. But Audiobooks get a bad rep; it's not the same as reading, you don’t learn from listening to books, it will make you dumb. In a study, Chirp.com shows that Audiobooks can have a lot of health benefits as well as stimulates the same part of the brain as if you were reading the physical book. Of course, people argue with me on this, so, my anxious self though I better play safe than sorry, and end buy the audio and the physical copy of the book.

It wasn’t until the other half, sat me down and, why do I have an audio copy, as we both share the same audible account and a hard copy of the book? “Because.....” was the only answer I could give him. “you know, Michelle... you listen to audiobooks more than you read them, why don’t you just keep the audio version than the hard copy, after all, you are hanging on to books that you don’t even like!” he continued to tell me. He had a point, why am I paying for 2 copies of a book? I sat down went through all my books I have and had to make a decision, what stays and goes.

I look at every single book I have and thought about each one, some book had some meaning attachment to, like I bought them from talks, conventions, family and friends, and general interests I have. And some books I bought because I really want to read it but couldn’t find it on audible. The rest of the books I had were book that I got in the subscription boxes and found them quite boring, or book friends and family gave to me and I didn’t find them that interesting.

Once I remove the books I didn't want, I found I had a spare bookshelf! It was hard trying to go through them, and I found it hard to give them away:

I want to give them a good home, somewhere people will appreciate them. But here?????

One thing I do love about Melbourne is the opportunities to book lover can do and find free books, Melbourne Central has a little library where you can drop off your unwanted books, and other can borrow or keep a book from there.

I love these libraries, and I know there’s a kid version around the corner from me.

NOW, as for my audible..... I still love a stroll through the book store and see what's there, but this time instead of buying the book, I read the back of the book and take a photo of it. So when I have time to myself, I can sit down and try and find it on Audible to listen to...

I save tons of money and space at the same time!

#audiobooks #books #melbourne #melbourne central #melbourne central library #saving money #saving space #miniamlism #miniamlist #miniamlist home #audible

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thenightling · 7 years

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What is the best vampire movie you have ever seen? I am in desperate need of some good ones to quench my thirst. Lol I apologize for that joke XD

Hehe. I love the pun. I like cheesy things.

1. Dracula (1979 version). This version of Dracula is one of the few romantic incarnations of Dracula that still seems to enjoy what he is and isn’t suicidal. I chose to believe he faked his death at the end. Also the Mina character (renamed Lucy) is delightfully aggressive and Laurence Olivier plays a fantastic Abraham Van Helsing.

2. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though this version is more faithful to The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen than it follows Bram Stoker’s novel it’s the only version to leave Quincey Morris in tact and still the most faithful film adaptation to date despite the added love story between Mina and Dracula. And that odd origin story they gave for Dracula’s vampirism.

3. Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula. This film can be found on Youtube for free. It stars Rudolf Martin, who also played Dracula in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode Buffy vs. Dracula. It’s surprisingly respectful to the history while also implying Vlad the Impaler became the famous vampire after death and actually works as a very good prequel to most recent (within the last thirty years) adaptations of Dracula.

4. Fright Night (original 1985 version). If you love eighties music, traditional vampires, and loving homages to classic Hammer Horror and Dark Shadows I strongly recommend this movie. You don’t see too many serious modern vampires able to turn into a bat, wolf, or mist anymore and it’s just a fun movie. Also Roddy Mcdowell played Peter Vincent (a sweet homage to both Peter Cushing and Vincent Price) masterfully. You see excellent and well portrayed character growth and I highly recommend it and even it’s 1988 sequel, Fright Night: Part 2. I miss the traditional vampire powers to summon storms and change form into a bat, wolf, or mist and age and de-age at will and most of those lost powers make an appearance in this movie but not in the 2011 remake which lacks heart and passion on the part of the film makers behind it.

5. Lost Boys. Much like Fright Night this is a fun eighties movie. Like Fright Night it has an excellent soundtrack and humor with the horror. The sequel’s not very good but the third one is decent. Not as good as the first but decent.

6. Interview with the vampire. Despite what Anne Rice hopes I doubt she will ever be able to make a better film adaptation of the original source material than this movie and it’s a shame that a version of The Vampire Lestat was never made by the same people. If you can find it the San Francisco (NOT the New York) adaptation of the Lestat musical actually works pretty well as a direct sequel. The San Francisco version of the Lestat musical was never officially released to video but there is a good quality bootleg out there.

7. Let the Right One In. An eerie and beautiful platonic love story between a boy and a vampire. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name. Also it’s far better than it’s awful American remake.

9. The vampire Lovers. Despite deviations from the novel and two character name changes this is still a far better adaptation of Carmilla than many other film versions and it does capture the atmosphere and ambiance of the original novel, something few adaptations seem to manage.

10. Demon Under Glass. This one is extremely low budget. It’s so low budget it might as well have been filmed in someone’s basement however it has a very clever premise and a tie-in novel (with twice the plot) by the woman who wrote the script. It deals with what happens when a kindly doctor is roped into working with the government in regard to studying a captured vampire.

11. Scars of Dracula. This was Christopher Lee’s favorite Hammer Dracula movie to work on and you can tell.

12. Nightbreed. Not specifically dealing with vampires the main character does rise from the dead as a vampire who craves blood. Seek the director’s cut or “Cabal Cut” if possible. It’s based on the novel Cabal by Clive Barker. And it has a haunting score by Danny Elfman.

13. Monster Squad. This is a mulltimonster movie but Dracula is the ring leader and it’s fun. Another 80s gem.

Bonus mentions: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Though I hate that people now think the word means a bald and bucked toothed vampire when it just means vampire. Vampire The masquerade helped popularize that idea and this movie popularized the idea of vampires burning in the sun, which didn’t exist until the movie. However, as terrifying as Count Orlock might be, I like Murnau’s Faust better than his Nosferatu. His adaptation of Goethe’s Faust is very underated and I highly recommend it even if it’s not a vampire movie.

And of course the 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and the Spanish film also made at the same time using the same sets. Who can forget those? And Dracula’s Daughter. Son of Dracula. House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. (those require watching the other Universal Monster movies first).

The Subspecies movies. Cult classics and very under-rated. Radu (named after the real life Dracula’s brother) is not a sexy vampire but an intriguing one.

The Hunger starring David Bowie, based on the novel by Whitley Streiber.

Hammer’s Dracula movies: Dracula (1958) AKA Horror of Dracula. Brides of Dracula. Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Dracula has risen from the grave. Taste the blood of Dracula. Scars of Dracula. Dracula 1972 AD. Satanic Rites of Dracula (AKA Dracula and his vampire Bride).

Innocent Blood. This one deals with vampire mobsters after a female vampire bungles a feeding and has to team up with a cop.

For vampire comedies I recommend Love at First Bite, What we do in the Shadows and Dracula: Dead and Loving it.

TV shows: Castlevania (new animated series), Dracula: the Series (not the awful NBC series, but the 1990s kid friendly one, it’s weirdly respectful to the novel despite giving Dracula blond hair). Forever Knight. And Buffy The Vamprire Slayer. True Blood’s first few seasons were good but around the Lilith / Billith storyline it went down hill and never recovered. The “Hep V” storyline was God-awful. Midnight Texas is pretty good but not strictly vampire related. And for anime Hellsing and Hellsing: OVA.

For “So bad it’s good” I recommend Dracula 2 (sequel to Dracula 2000) and Dario Argento’s Dracula or as my friends and I have nicknamed it “Mantis Drac.” It’s like the Plan 9 from Outer Space of Dracula movies. And the badly dubbed anime Dracula: Sovereign of the damned (which can be found on Youtube). It’s meant to be an adaptation of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula but they couldn’t get the rights to Blade and had to work around him. They also tried to condense years worth of comics into an hour and twenty minute animated movie.

For comic books I recommend Tomb of Dracula from Marvel. Morbius The Living Vampire, also from Marvel. Legion Of Monsters (2010 version). And Dracula: The Company of Monsters (independent and very good graphic novel series).

For plays I recommend the musical Dracula by composer Frank Wildhorn. It’s pretty much a musical adaptation of the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula movie.

For novels I recommend the sorely under-rated Dracula books by Fred Saberhagen. There are ten in all and three short stories. The first book is The Dracula Tape. The audio books are available on Amazon and Audible (but sadly not the printed versions except used or digital) and the audio books are brilliantly read by Roblin Bloodworth (I kid you not. That’s really the reader’s name.). I strongly feel Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula novels deserve more positive attention than what they get.

And of course other books: Dracula, Carmilla, Let the Right One In. The first three Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice (and possibly Tale of the Body Thief for comic relief), All the obvious staples. But also try Quincey Morris: Vampire by P. N. Elrod.

For short stories try Box Number 50 by Fred Saberhagen which can be found in the Saberhagen vampire Tales and the Dracula in London short story collection edited by P. N. Elrod.

I’ll probably think of some better ones later. My mood about these things changes on a whim.

#Vampire #Vampires #Dracula

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danithebookaholic-blog · 7 years

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Audio Book Extra

Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion

by Janet Reitman, Narrated by Stephen Hoye

I bought Inside Scientology from Audible for a couple different reasons.

1) I’ve always been a little curious about what exactly Scientology is. I’ve always played along with most people and kind of made fun of it, looked down a little on people who believe it, and thought it was this new cult that was sweeping the country. I knew none of this was good of me to do. I was raised to never judge a book based on its cover and to do the same with people, so why was I doing that all of a sudden with this religion? What made me superior to a Scientologist? And how could I answer any of these questions without doing the research to be able to form a valid opinion?

2) I know myself well enough that if I had I gotten the physical book for me to sit and read it I probably would have gotten bored with it, and set it down for it to be years before I returned to finish it. And I would have been correct with this hypothesis because even just listening to it I got bored and it would take days for me to get back to it. Not saying that this wasn’t a good book. Inside Scientology gave me a lot of information, and what I believe to be rather unbiased information, considering the drama that is currently going on around this religion. But there was a lot of background information and history, all pertinent information, but when you’re not really into that kind of thing, it becomes very monotonous. So, I did have some difficulty getting through this book.

So, putting all biased opinions aside, I listened to Inside Scientology to free my mind of a stereotype and to learn something new.

Some History:

Janet Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a journalist for multiple publications. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Inside Scientology is the outcome of her National Magazine Award-nominated story for Rolling Stone that she spent almost a year working on.

Scientology is a religious system based on the seeking of self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through graded courses of study and training. It was founded by American science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1955. (Google Dictionary)

The Synopsis:

*The following synopsis is a direct quote from goodreads.com. I thought it was a perfect description of this book and didn’t think I could do any better.

Scientology, created in 1954 by pulp science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, claims to be the world’s fastest growing religion, with millions of members, and huge financial holdings. Celebrity believers keep its profile high. Teams of volunteer ministers offer aid at disaster sites like Haiti and the World Trade Center. But Scientology is also a very closed faith, harassing journalist and others through litigation and intimidation, even infiltrating high levels of the government to further its goals. Its attacks on psychiatry and its requirement that believers pay as much as tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for salvation have drawn scrutiny and skepticism. Ex-members use the internet to share stories of harassment and abuse. Reitman offers the first full journalistic history of the Church of Scientology, in an evenhanded account that establishes the truth about the controversial religion. She traces Scientology’s development from the birth of Dianetics to today, following its metamorphosis from pseudoscientific self-help group to a global spiritual corporation with profound control over its followers and ex-followers. Based on five years of research, unprecedented and extensive interviews with current and former members, this is a defining book about a little-known world. (Goodreads, August 24, 2017)

The Review & Wrap-Up:x

First, I don’t believe that anyone can really call Scientology a religion. There isn’t a set dogma that Scientologists are worshiping (unless you count Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, which there are definitely some people out there who do worship him.) The “god”, Xenu—the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who 75 million years ago brought billions of his people to Earth on spaceships—, was a creation of L. Ron Hubbard’s own mind which Scientologists are only told about once they make it to the Eighth Dynamic. I know that most Scientologist could say the same about Christianity and any other religion out there, and I give them that, however Scientologists do not outright pray to a deity. This “story” is kept from them until they reach the Eighth Dynamic and officials of the Church of Scientology will widely deny or try to hide the Xenu story. How can you call yourself a religion if those in the religion don’t even know the history of their religion or pray to anyone? While I don’t personally call it a religion, based on the dictionary’s definition of “religion”, I can see how it is classified as one.

re-li-gion: noun the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods -a particular system of faith and worship -a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance (Google Dictionary)

Second, I am happy that I listened to this book. It made me understand the Religion of Scientology a lot better. And even though I personally don’t believe that it is actually a religion, I do agree with some of their beliefs. To always strive to be a better person and to be spiritually intelligent are things that I think all people, no matter your religious beliefs, should be doing. It’s a struggle that a lot of people, especially Americans, have, and I’ll admit that I’m one of them. That’s one of the beautiful things of the Muslim faith (and Scientology) that I admire and even envy. To have the devout discipline that the Muslim faith has is awe-inspiring. I don’t think Scientology is quite as devout as the Muslim faith, but I could be wrong on that. I’m curious to know Scientology’s secrets and what I think of as “self-help” tips. I’m so curious that, who knows, I may pick up L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health to see if I can get any clues.

Last, I think Janet Reitman did a great job of not putting too must bias on the subject matter that she was writing about. Inside Scientology was exactly what I was looking for: informant, unbiased information about a topic I knew nothing. Not being a Scientologist herself, she did spend some time in the community (and therefore, according to Scientology is a Scientologist, but then again, so am I?) going through some auditing sessions of her own to get an inside scoop. She also interviewed as many people as she could who were a part of Scientology and no longer believe and/or were exiled from the religion, or were a part of Scientology and still do believe, but don’t believe the rules of the current leader of Scientology, David Miscavige. She did a great job researching her topic and did an even better job of telling the truth and history without putting the religion down or putting it high on a pedestal. You, the reader, get to decide for yourself how to think and feel about this religion.

From one wine-loving bookaholic to another, I hope I’ve helped you find your next fix. —Dani

Love this book? I don’t have a book to suggest here because this is the first book that I have read like this. However, if that ever changes I will make sure to post an update. If you have a book to suggest for those who loved this book, please comment down below!

Pair it with: Summer Water Rosé. This wine is a light crisp dry wine, with hints of peach, strawberry and grapefruit. Served chilled, this is the perfect drink for a hot summer day.

I chose this Rosé for two reasons:

I think Rosés are misjudged just like Scientologists are. Most people think that Rosé isn’t real wine and that real wine-lovers don’t drink it. That’s a total misconception. Rosés are great wines, especially during the summer time, and a lot of wine sommeliers do drink them.

I picked this one in particular because of its name. Scientologists don’t believe in drinking (even though many of them do, including the founder, L. Ron Hubbard) and so to call this wine “water” made me giggle a little.

Start a conversation: What have you been judgmental about before getting the facts? Once you did the research, did it change your opinion?

Have a book you’d like to suggest or one you’d like me to review? Please feel free to leave your comments down below.

#religion #scientology #janet reitman #l. ron hubbard #dianetics #rolling stone #columbia university #goodreads #tom cruise #xenu #christianity #david miscavige #summer water rose

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dailyaudiobible · 7 years

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07/20/2017 DAB Transcript

2 Chronicles 1:1-3:17 ~ Romans 6:1-23 ~ Psalm 16:1-11 ~ Proverbs 19:20-21

Today is the 20th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you today as we take the next step forward in this week in the scriptures and in our lives. In the Old Testament we're beginning the book of second Chronicles today and there isn't really an overview to give about second chronicles that isn't the same as when we talked about first Chronicles. We're just kind of moving forward. First and second Chronicles were all one text and they we're just broken apart for the ease of locating things at a time where we didn't have word processors and search engines and stuff like that when we needed to go to the right scroll to locate what we were looking for. But, generally speaking, first Chronicles ends with the end of David's reign and second Chronicles begins with the beginning of Solomon's reign. We saw this same kind of pattern in the books of the Kings and so we begin. Second Chronicles chapter 1 verse 1 through 3 verse 17 today.

Commentary:

Okay, so, Paul is laying out his argument and his argument is reframing their understanding of their faith as they’ve traditionally known it. Paul is bringing Jesus into the mix and saying, look, this revelation, what Jesus did, that God came here in the flesh and dwelt among us, this is a big deal. And, so, we have to reframe what we think we know because we know more now and here's how this works. And that's basically what Romans is doing. And it can get tedious. Paul is packing, like, every sentence with theological understandings and it’s like, wow, slow down a second. I need to process this. So, a few days ago, Paul begins with Abraham. He's like, let's go back to the beginning and work our way forward. And let's remember, because this was his first reframe, let’s remember that it was Abraham's belief that was counted as righteousness in God's eyes, not his following of a recipe, because there was no recipe. It was his belief. Let's start there. It was his belief in what God said that was counted as righteousness to him. All the other stuff that we've been kind of stuck in under this law came later.

And then, yesterday, he talks about the law and he talks about mercy. Right? He talks about Grace that overcomes the deficiencies that we find in the law because the law shows, it reveals, our hopelessness and powerlessness to achieve righteousness in our own strength. We cannot get there on our own but God is merciful. He is a Father. He has grace that He extends to us through Jesus and that changes everything.

And, so, what Paul is going into today, and you can sort of see this build. It's the entire faith that we ascribe to. What he is saying today is, so, now that we know this that we have a merciful kind graceful God that would come and, while we were still enemies, while we were still sinners, He would die to offer freedom to us. Now that we know that he's that kind and now that we know that that kind of Grace exists and is extended toward us, does that mean we can just do whatever we want? Because every time we do something wrong there is grace and it multiplies and multiplies. So, should we intentionally just do what we know isn’t right so that we can receive this grace even more and more? Absolutely not, he says. Because when you become a slave to something you are obeying it and you have died to who you were. The waters of baptism are a representation of this. You go into the water declaring that who you were without Christ is dead, is going to be left behind in those waters, and you will come back out a new creature.

But the whole thing that we've come to this far is beautifully summarized today at the end of our reading. And the very last verse that we read is one of the very famous verses in the Bible, right? For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Absolutely astounding, the truth in that verse. But it's even more powerful when we just go back a couple verses and understand the entire paragraph, the narrative that he was saying that led to that statement, because it applies to us all. So, what fruit was produced from the things that you are now ashamed of? Right? So, you can look back over your life and go like, man, college was not so good of a season for me, or man, you know, some of those things that I did to and against my spouse, or some of those things that I did to against my parents and my friends, or the way I betrayed, the way I did those things that I knew were wrong, I'm ashamed of those things. So, Paul’s just simply saying, where was the fruit in that, did you get what you were looking for, was there a bunch of fruit produced from the things that you are now ashamed of? Right! Because the end of those things leads to death. But that's not you anymore. You've been liberated from those things. You can let them go. That was an earlier version of you. That was the version of you separated from God. That's not your story anymore. You are intertwined with God now. You are a new creation. Those things that you were enslaved to before that we're leading you toward death. That's gone. You've now changed yourself. You are now slaves to God and as you obey your master that will only lead to fruit, which will result in your sanctification. And the end of that story is eternal life because the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Prayer:

So, Father, we thank You for the book of Romans. We thank You for your word. We thank You for this truth washing into our lives. We thank You for this opportunity to remember what it was like without You. It's nothing we really want to relish in but it's good to remember that that old person is gone now and it was leading nowhere and You intervened and came and rescued us. And now every day, we march forward deeper into sanctification. Every day we are being made set apart and holy. Every day we are being transformed into Your likeness. We are looking more and more like You, Jesus, every day. And the end of this story is the beginning of forever and ever and ever and ever with You, Eternal Life. So, we thank You, God, for the gift of mercy and grace and, like Abraham, we believe. That's what we bring to the table because that's all we have to bring to the table. And You supply us with everything we need. You indwell us and fill us. It's no longer us. The person that we were without You is gone. Now it's a new creature intertwined with You. It's a collaboration in life, moving us deeper into restoration and wholeness and sanctification and eternal life. What do we even say to that? Thank You…is…is…it’s flat…it's not enough. This is the point where our vocabulary fails us. This is too good to articulate. And, so, we just simply worship You, walk with You, enjoy this life with You, and share the light and good news of it everywhere we can in every way we know how. So, come Holy Spirit, show us what that looks like as we walk with You today. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the web site. It's home base. It’s where you find out what's going on around here.

Couple things are going on around here.

Tonight at 7 p.m. we’re going to do a Facebook Live inside the Sneezing Jesus discussion group and I'm just going to share some thoughts. And it's great forum for us to get together, like, to be together, all in one place at one time when we can kind of fellowship. Even though we are all over the place and maybe even spread out in all kinds of different time zones, we can be together in the same place at the same time, a little bit. So, that's going to happen at 7 p.m. tonight. That's Central Standard Time, which is the time zone for the rolling hills of Tennessee. And you'll just have to, maybe, look up wherever you are in the world, the difference. I know what it's like here in the United States. I know that that's 8 p.m. on the east coast and I know that's 5 p.m. on the west coast and I know that it's 6 p.m. mountain time. But I don't know where it is all over the world. So, you can just Google that. I hope to see you there. You'll need to be in the Sneezing Jesus group, discussion group, to see that. So, you can find a pretty easily facebook.com/groups/sneezingjesus. So, we'll see you there tonight.

Other thing that I've been telling you about this week is that all the formats of Sneezing Jesus have been released, including the audio addition, so, you can get it at Audible or iTunes or wherever else you get audiobooks. So, it's out there. It's out there in all kinds of formats. And if you haven't had a chance, be we sure to check that out.

We’ll be doing the Sneezing Jesus tour beginning this autumn and into the new year. If you would like to see that come to your area, there's a form you can fill out - small one, just a couple things, just a way to get in touch. Go to sneezingjesus.com, scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find it. Boom! Piece of cake. You’ll find it in 1 minute. And we’ll see if that can happen.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, in the common mission that we share - to bring the spoken word of God fresh every day to anyone who will listen to it, anywhere on this planet, anytime of day or night and to continue to build community around that rhythm that we share each day - so that we know, that no matter what, we're not alone. There's somebody, no matter what, we’re not alone. If that has brought light and life and good news into your life, then thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage of dailyaudiobible.com. If you are using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the More button in the lower right-hand corner or if you prefer the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And as always, if you have a prayer request for comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian, I love you, and I'll certainly be waiting for you here tomorrow. But I'll also be waiting for you here, tonight, at the Sneezing Jesus page. So, I'll see you there or I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayers and Praise Reports:

Hello. Good morning Daily Audio Bible family. This is Jay calling from New Jersey. It has been a little while since I’ve called in. Well, allot has happened this while that I haven’t called in. I am now married and I'm enjoying the honeymoon phase of life. So, let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much God for life. We thank you for health. We thank you for strength to call in to the DAB and listen to our brothers and sisters and to pray with them. God, we love You so much, there's no possible way that I could even begin to fathom. You're awesome. So, we praise You now. We lift You up. We glorify Your mighty name. In that God, thank You for the many blessings that we’ve been able to experience the last month, getting married. Many people have had children, others are getting engaged, some are even having birthdays, and celebrating anniversaries, so, God, we thank You for that. Father, we thank You for the new jobs, and we thank You for the new cars, and we thank You for our homes. God, we thank You for being able to satisfied with what we have, because I know it's so easy sometimes to get caught up in what others have and what we don't have and where we want to be and how we want to get there and then we can forget to be satisfied with what we have. So, thank You Father. In the mighty name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible. This is Lauralee and I have received my 10 Sneezing Jesus books and that was Saturday, and its Monday and oh boy…I had...anyway…I'm just going to lift up the names of the people to our heavenly Father with this community. Thank you, Brian and Jill and the Hardin family for your faithfulness. Lord Jesus, your word says draw near to you and you will draw near to us. So, I pray for pastor Dwayne, Joanne, Robert, Cheryl, and Matthew, that those small little books will draw their eyes to you, draw them by your spirit to you, and open new days and new ways to live your life out in and through you. We come to you in Jesus’s name Lord, God, our Father and mention His righteousness only to call on Your obedience and Your sufferings. You magnify the law in its construction and its cost and made it faithful. May we be secured by your blood, saved by your light, joined by your spirit. Let us pick up your cross and follow you. May your grace prepare us for your appointment and make us willing that we should choose your inheritance for us and a point that we will keep or loose, suffer or enjoy. If blessed by prosperity, let us be free from its snares and use, not abuse, its advantages. And may we cheerfully and patiently submit to those afflictions, which are necessary…

Hello DAB family this is Marsha from Colorado. I'm a member of the Sneezing Jesus Facebook group and I feel so compelled to share a post I made this morning, July 17th, for those of you who are not on Facebook. So, here's my post. Something very powerful is happening deep within me today. I have power read Brian Hardin's new book, Sneezing Jesus, and now I am going back through, slowly listening on audio and taking notes. It is obvious to me that God has placed a powerful anointing on this book and I feel God's presence as I listen and read. It's deep, it's wide and it's having the effect the author desired and prayed for. Thank you, Brian. All the sudden I find myself navigating through some very troubled waters that God brought to my attention just yesterday. If I handle this through the knowledge of good and evil without God's guidance, it has the potential for great destruction. Had I not received this book last week and devoured it, and made the decision to wake up and see what's it’s like to be fully human, intertwined with God, I know I would not be sharing this post today. God's timing is impeccable. I was literally on my knees in prayer last night about this and awake all night in turmoil, but today God specifically showed me how to proceed, which was opposite of how I was going to handle it. I am tremendously thankful for His intervention. I went from turmoil to peace in a short amount of time and I can't wait to see the restoration God has in mind for this. I am almost giddy in anticipation. Now that's powerful, and I think this is the stuff that sneezes are made of.

Hi, this is Nadene from Michigan and I want to say first of all, that I have never been much of a reader of the Bible or even very spiritual. And, so, I was trying to get rid of some fears that I have of death and a lot of…I have panic attacks. And I asked my dad and he suggested this. And on my breaks, at work, because I work at a factory, I've been listening to it. And now, for at least 2 weeks, they're letting us listen to music at the factory and I've just been listening to this on my own personal speakers. And I've become quite addicted to listening and it’s changed my life a lot, in the fact that I actually feel like I want to learn more and I'm asking questions. And I wanted a prayer request because my husband is not a believer because of a church we went to. And I want to be firm in my faith so he can see what Christianity is supposed to look like. And I'm not feeling like I'm doing a very good job. With two young kids, two full-time jobs, and college split between the both of us, it’s pretty hectic to even get out the door to go to church. But I wanted to thank you all for being such a wonderful community. Thank you very much. Bye.

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solivar · 5 years

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WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

In which Jesse tells some stories, albeit not about ghosts.