27.04.2019: Uninvited Guests Pt. 2
| Uninvited Guests Pt. 2 | |
|---|---|
| A quiet evening is rudely interrupted by a young woman and her pursuers. | |
| Players | Evaline Saskia Teagan |
| Location | Canyon Park, Prospect CA |
| Spheres | Mage |
Part 1 of this plot can be found here.
Transcript
Somewhere in the outer suburbs a flash of sparkling obsidian careens through evening traffic with the wild abandon of a leaderless chariot chained to a thousand meth-fuelled horses from hell. Cars swerve as sets of traffic lights switch from red to green to allow this mysterious motor-on-a-mission to blaze through on its mission.
There's a grunt from Detrevni, her eyes clamped shut, as she clamps her hand around the handle of the knife in her ribs and pulls with all her might. The blade, sticky with blood, eventually slips free of her flesh and gore runs freely from the open wound. She drops it to the floor with a clatter and puts her hand on the arm of the couch to push herself to a stand. Her other hand presses on the wound. "Well done, Teagan... you had it in you, all along..." Her voice is a ragged whisper, and she limps forward, glass from the broken window crunching underfoot. She looks in awful shape, and the hungering ghouls seem to know it. They clamber through the window with wild abandon, blood lust in their eyes, ready to feast. Detrevni puts a bloodied hand on Teagan's shoulder and gently moves her aside. "Take it easy. Don't over extend yourself." Ignoring her own advice, she goes into a low stance, then brings up her right leg in a winding, deadly kick. It hits the head of the first ghoul, still halfway through the window, square in the jaw. His eyes bulge and electricity crackles through his head as it slams into the jagged spines of broken glass protruding from the window frame. He starts choking helplessly as what's happening settles in: sharp knives of glass are stuck in his right eye, and his neck. Then Detrevni slams her fist into his head, then again, and again, until he's no longer gargling.
She stumbles backward from this sudden burst of violence, gasping for air desperately, then collapses backwards near the coffee table. But it's now clear what she's done: the other ghouls are having difficulty climbing over their dead friend, buying them precious seconds from the onslaught.
"Idiot! Do you want to die?!" Saskia screams at at Evaline as she leaks all over the apartment like a human faucet. The German is still standing in the center of the apartment, her sword bared and blazing with fire, it's scorching the ceiling a little bit though no flames seem to catch on anything. "Teagan! Keep her on the gott dammed sofa before she passes out!" Her voice loud, and clearly angry. Her fingers tighten around the hilt of her sword, knuckles white. She glances back towards the front door, the protective ward keeping it closed and secure slowly fading away - the lines and sigils pealing away as those behind it try to kick it in. It should hold for a few minutes longer, at least, unless they have any explosives or battering rams.
She turns her attention back towards the windows, and the fire escape - that one ghoul hanging by a thread, beaten to a pulp and blocking the gangway for a moment. She charges forwards, her sword flaring at her side, she skids to a halt about a foot or two away from the window. She comes to her knees, and plunges the flaming sword into the floor about an inch. A hand thrusts forwards towards the windows, eyes sharpening on the fire escape beyond them. "Te Rogamus, Audi NOS!" She calls out, her fingers twisting in the air just before the flaming sword as she manipulates the forces. As she finishes incanting, the nuts and bolts securing the fire escape PING off with a loud crash, causing the whole thing to shudder and start sliding off the side of the building to the ground below. It lands on someones car, woops.
Teagan stands in silence, staring into thin air before she's interrupted. She jumps as the hand is placed on her shoulder and turns to Evaline with a look of horror on her face. Shaking, she looks down at her hands in disbelief, barely registering the battered ghoul in front of her. It's only when Saskia yells at her that Teagan finally takes some initiative. She shifts her attention back to the situation at hand and her consciousness slowly fades back into reality. She follows Saskia's orders, gritting her teeth before taking a few slow steps backwards towards Evaline. Turning around, she runs a hand through her hair and grimaces at the state of the woman. "Uh, hang on..." She mutters in a calm a tone she can muster, before slowly helping Evaline back on the couch.
With Evaline now on the couch, Teagan hurries over to the bathroom to get a bandage roll. Briefly returning to the living room, she rushes off into the kitchen to grab a pair of scissors. Finally back, she kneels down next to Evaline and applies the bandages over her wounds haphazardly, with a mortified expression on her face as she tries to ignore all the blood. After she's done, she looks back down at her hands and wipes them off as best she can with whatever's left of the bandages. "Sorry..." She says to Evaline, "This- this is all I can do..." And then, there's a loud banging at the door and Teagan instinctively crawls towards the back wall, eyes wide open and firmly fixed on the front door.
Evaline coughs through clenched teeth as blood pours from the side of her mouth. She struggles weakly on her feet as Teagan helps her to the couch, where she slumps back, arms falling to her side. She barely has the strength to raise them. As Teagan disappears to the bathroom for a moment, the sounds of Saskia's evocation and the crashing of a fire exit sending a handful of doomed souls to the distant ground floor seems a thousand miles away. Everything is muffled and distant, and her eyes fall on the mask of Detrevni sitting on the coffee table. It's staring back at her. Flickering, damaged lenses staring into her soul. "You went too far into it this time," it says, as the room starts to spin and grow dark. A thousand tiny lines, glinting like fishing wire, extends from the mask to herself, and to everything in the room. It's all connected, like a web of coincidence, the numbers behind the universe, pulling everything together. "They were right all along, of course. There are no winners in this game, and you knew it all along. Every one before you has fallen the same way: in pointless violence to an unwinnable cause. Utter foolishness." The voice is cold and without emotion, but the content of its speech drips with venom. Of course, no one else can hear all of this. She has lost a lot of blood, after all.
Evaline uses some of the last of her strength to look away when Teagan returns from the bathroom. She doesn't want the girl to see her weep silently. Then, from just down the street, a noise snaps her out of it. The screeching of tyres as they turn down an alley, then, a sharp POMF! as something is fired from the streets below. A couple of seconds later, a black canister about the size of a trash can careens through the window and slams into the carpet. It unfurls itself and reveals an amalgamation of hundreds of confusing devices, all centered around some focusing lens. A whir of life from within the machine causes it to shudder as hundreds of tiny pistons begin firing up. Eventually, a beam of red light, then yellow, then pink and purple and orange and every other colour you can think of are shot out of emitters into this lens. This combined beam of pure light fires right at the fresh bandages applied to Detrevni's abdomen, and she gasps in agony as the warmth overtakes her. Then she feels renewed, like some great weight lifted from her shoulders, renewed vigor and the pall of death shoved from her like a demon exorcised. She staggers to her feet, wobbling, still unsure of herself as the machine begins to power down, spent of all the mystical fuel within.
"Saskia." Detrevni approaches the woman, "I hope you brought a gun. With only one point of entry, a few monsters are nothing against us. The entryway will funnel them in, and we can gun them down before they reach us. I'm sure more are on their way, but we now have a means of escape. Once we've killed the ones at the door, we take Teagan down to my car." Detrevni then approaches Teagan, and offers a hand to help her up. "Thank you Teagan. You bought me enough time to survive. Now let me repay the favour. I'll make sure they can't hurt you."
Saskia looks about ready to smack that tech gadget back through the window like a ball, using her sword as a bat. Could be a bomb, or anything. Who knows. It sails past her, "What fresh hell!" She calls out, and it does its thing. She turns back to the window and kicks that flayed ghoul from the window shards, sending it smacking into the ground outside. "Bring a gun?!" She calls out to Evaline, her eyes flaring with anger. "YOU- Came here, you bloody woman- You brought this heck to her door. You could've gone anywhere-" Clearly, not happy about the situation at all. She moves past Evaline and towards the door, checking on the fading wards as the men outside try to bash it down. The wards flash with each impact, ever-so slowly pealing away. Her sword still burns, the flames licking off it steadily. The heat is almost radiating off her in her resonance, faint fiery symbols begin to glow on her bare arms in a certain light.
She snaps out a hand, pointing towards the center of the room. "You, stand there. You have that colt with you still, YES?" She calls to Evaline, "I open door, you take out the first few- I run into corridor and strike. No time for anything else, wards almost broken." She stacks up beside the door, one hand on the knob ready to dispel her magic- the other holding her blade aloft.
Teagan's eyes dart over to Evaline as she approaches her. She's still shaking but Evaline's confidence paired with her improved physical state, makes Teagan ease up, if only a little. Doing her best to ignore the pounding at the door, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. As she opens them again, they're filled with determination. Wiping a bit of blood off of her face, she takes Evaline's hand and stands back up. Her eyes immediately shift over to the bedroom door and she looks down at her hands again. "H-hang on!" She calls out, and runs off towards the bedroom, nearly slipping on a pool of blood in the process.
Teagan narrowly avoids falling over by catching herself on the door frame. Straightening herself, she begins drawing a line of blood over the frame, chanting, slowly at first.
Space there is and space there be Between between my foe and me By waning moon this space shall grow Until she no longer causes woe For anyone, for mine, for me As I will, so mote it be
As she repeats the chant, there's a slight glow emanating from the center of the door, which is expanding ever so slowly. After finishing a verse, she looks over at Saskia and Evaline to judge the situation, and quickly realizes it's best if she stays focused on her chanting. Turning back to face the door again, she continues chanting, speaking faster and faster for each repetition.
"I understand your frustration, Saskia," Detrevni says as Saskia moves past her. She retrieves the gun from the coffee table, "But this is the only course of action where I would have survived. No one other than me has sustained injury during this encounter." She ejects the magazine and inspects its contents: 6 and 1 in the chamber. It goes back in with a satisfying ker-chink. "This is a time to fight, not to squabble over who to blame. Teagan is no child. She is a mage of great potential and immeasurable power. Your protectiveness is understood, but unnecessary. No one is going to die here."
In perfect dramatic timing, the door finally gives away and a dozen snarling ghouls, their face contorted in a mixture of rage and obsessive hunger, begin to pour into the entryway of the apartment. The first ones head explodes with a pop and gore paints the walls as Detrevni aims true. His corpse slumps to the ground, then another and another as flashes of loud gunfire fill the room.
She smiles as she sees Teagan take action. "Excellent work, Teagan. We now have an escape. Be assured that once we are free of here, you will be compensated above and beyond for saving my life today." She holsters the empty gun once it's spent, then runs and leaps over the couch, sending a flying kick into the chest of another rampaging ghoul, joining the melee fray with Saskia. Together they carve and punch their way through the small crowd.
"Don't talk to me like I'm a god damned idiot, Girl." Saskia almost spits out, "Get a -safe- house next time, and not an indefensible apartment." Her sword blazes away, as does her temper. "If anyone is going to die here- It will be you, and not her." through gritted teeth, "Or me, as is tradition for us Flambeau." As Evaline shoots a few, Saskia charges into the breach and starts to cut a fiery swath through the ghouls. Her sword ripping and tearing.
Teagan ignores the two as they bicker, and keeps her attention focused on the doorway in front of her, staring into the light that's now enveloped the entire frame. She reaches the last word of her chant and as she exclaims it the light grows almost unbearably bright and she's forced to cover her eyes with her arm. There's a gentle breeze coming from the doorway, and Teagan's hair ripples slowly, as she looks back over to Evaline and Saskia. "Uh, guys!" She says, raising her eyebrows and tilts her head towards the light as they turn around. "I don't know if this is safe... But, we gotta go, like right now!" With that, she gives a quick wave and steps through the portal.
As Teagan steps through the door, she's immediately transported outside, a foot or so away from Evaline's vehicle, and a few feet off the ground. Not quite upright as she appears in thin air, Teagan falls to the ground with a soft thud, and has just barely enough time to get back on her feet as Evaline and Saskia appear. Rubbing her shoulder, she looks desperately to Evaline, and then over to the car.
"I'd never consider you an 'idiot,' Saskia." Her boot pulps the whining skull of a ghoul on the floor. "Your temper flares like your magic. It's very interesting. Does it ever get in the way of combat?" A low sweep of her leg brings another snarling beast down to the ground, and she stabs it in the temple with the knife stuck in her very ribs just moments ago. She leaves it there and turns to Teagan and her magical portal. "Incredible. Well done, Teagan." And with that, she steps through into the light, and out into the cold, foggy street. The rumbling of the Countach warms her heart. "I'll take you to the estate, where we can discuss your compensation for saving me." The door opens of its own accord at her approach, and she slides into the drivers seat, though doesn't touch the wheel. If Teagan were to get into the passenger side, and perhaps Saskia too, if she accepted the invitation, the doors would close and the car would speed out into the street, leaving a scene of carnage and violence in their wake.
Another night in Prospect.
