Renaissance Smith: 11/25/96 (11/1/96)

 (Beth Miller)

Events of Nov. 1, 1996

Well, everyone else had had enough sense to run by that point, so it was just KC, Eric, John, and I, along with three dead bodies. Then Daedalus reappeared, and told us Ogre was on his way to the mall with the Weather Machine to sell to his buyer. He said he could build some kind of gate that would let us all step through to there. So we went. We appeared on the upper level just outside Babbages. The place was of course closed and deserted. Well, almost deserted; we got caught by a security guard. John took care of him though. He went up to the guard, said hello, and transformed himself into Krinos form. Needless to say, the guard went scrambling away gibbering in terror. Werewolves have that affect on Unawakened humans for some reason. Anyway, our trip to the mall proved completely pointless. Cab arrived, but Ogre and Betsy were both nowhere to be found.

John did one of his spells using one of the stones he always carries around and got the impression that Betsy was south of us. Daedalus gated us back to Pullen Park. Further application of John's spell said Betsy was still in the center of the circle, right where she had disappeared. I tried talking to her, but it didn't do any good. Someone came up with the bright idea of hiding the bodies of the cops. Then let's see, Cab talked to a Dryad, who said the tree-girl wasn't one of her kind, and the tree kept appearing and disappearing, but only to KC. I would have said she was playing a trick on us, only, one of the times it appeared to her, she climbed it. Watching someone climb up air is pretty weird. Of course, everything that happened that evening was pretty weird. We all stood around for a while waiting for something to happen. Of course, something did.

More cops showed up. Cab, John and I were just on are way to the car, to go back to the Chantry and get some sleep, and we sensibly decided to keep going. Shortly after we arrived at the Chantry, KC called to say that the police had found the bodies of their fallen comrades, and had taken Eric and Daedalus down to the police station to take their statements. KC, of course, had had no trouble being left behind. She is so good at being invisible. I went back out to pick everyone up. Then I went to bed. By this point it was about 5 o'clock in the morning. I went to sleep with a large wolf curled up beside me on the bed.

At about 7:15 I heard a knock on my door. It was Daedalus. He said he had just gotten a page from Mary, and that she was down at the NC State campus, by the bell tower. John woke up to hear this, of course, so the three of us went to fetch Mary.

As we arrived near the bell tower, we noticed a large commotion. It took hardly a moment to see why. About midway up the bell tower there was a large lamppost stuck right into the stone. It was pinning Ogre to the tower. He was on fire. Any one of these things would have been sufficient to cause a commotion, I think. We also saw Mary, staring up at his sight. We pulled around a corner quickly to park. When we came back into view of the bell tower, Ogre's body was gone, leaving just the post, scorch marks and some bloodstains.

Mary was crying. John comforted her. Mary was also talking. She said her friend needed help and had asked her to come here. We tried, very gently, to question her and get sensible answers. Daedalus was a little heavy-handed about it; Mary responded by shocking him. I mean that literally. She used magic and knocked him over. Precocious kid. John and I took Mary back to the Chantry. We left Daedalus (who was still fuming about Mary's treatment of him) to come back later, on his motorcycle.

At this point, I decided I was just going to have to deal with operating for the day on two and a half hours of sleep. That may have had something to do with the way paradox decided to hit me over the head that morning. For the rest of the day, everything tasted and smelled like coffee. I would have almost said that the paradox spirits were being kind to me, helping me stay awake, except for one thing: I hate the taste of coffee. So I was doomed to a day of no sleep and no food. I headed down to the node to meditate for a while. My store of Quintessence was very low, and I had a bad feeling I might need some.

Have I explained quintessence to you yet, Mr. Diary? It's the magical energy that's stored in nodes like the little one under the Chantry. It's useful for giving an extra bit of kick to difficult spells, and it makes healing major wounds possible.

I came out of my trance to find a note sitting beside me from John, saying that he was going with Mary to try to help this mysterious friend of hers. The note took me a moment to puzzle out, because while John had gotten pretty good at reading, his spelling wasn't very good. I went back upstairs, and I heard Johns voice, so I knew he hadn't left yet. The I heard the voice he was talking with. It was a complete stranger. I walked in on the discussion. Our visitor was a mage named Maxwell Blake. He said he was with Internal Affairs. Internal Affairs of what, I had no idea. His intention was to take Mary somewhere, where she would be trained. I asked him what tradition he represented, and he said they were above all that. That disturbed me even more that the fact that he knew my name. (I didn't think there was anyone in the state of North Carolina who knew my given name is Renaissance. John gave me a funny look when he called me that, so I had to explain the whole names are power thing to him later, too.)

We introduced Mary to the man, to get her impression of the situation. Then John told the man he'd think about it, and to come back tomorrow. The first thing Mary said about him was that she'd go if he could help her help her friend. Later she commented that she didn't think he was a very nice man. That was enough for me to determine that we weren't letting him take her anywhere.

I had promised Reuben that I'd go out to take a look at Mr. Forteau, so I did. Mary and John came with me. John and I spent most of the drive there rehashing the events of the previous night. It didn't help to make things any clearer.

What we should have done was spent the drive discussing our relationship. We might have come up with something useful conclusions out of that conversation. Well, maybe not; we did have Mary in the car with us. But we're going to have to talk about it sometime, if we can ever find a few spare moments. But with Mr. Forteau caught in the Umbra, and this guy wanting to take Mary, and Ogre being impaled, and . . . well, I'll get to all the new complications in a few pages. At any rate, the Goddess only knows when we'll have some time to ourselves. I know the next free hour I have is going to be spent at the node under the Chantry replenishing my store of Quintessence. (Yes, Mr. Diary, I know I just did that

just a page ago, but I used that already. I'm just getting to that.)

Our conversation stopped when we came upon an accident on 40. A tractor trailer was jack-knifed across the road, and traffic was completely blocked. I was just thinking that there had been an awful lot of strange accidents along here when our party was going by, when the werewolf appeared. (And I don't mean John.) It was in Krinos form, and charging straight for us. John told me to get away, and then went Umbral. I responded by proving what a rotten driver I am. I put the car in reverse, and slammed my foot down towards the gas pedal. Somehow, I missed it.

The werewolf leapt onto the hood of the car and proceeded to claw his way through the windshield. I used up almost my entire store of Quintessence in two attempts to stop his heart. I'd never tried to do anything like that before. It was hard to get a hold on his heartbeat like that. I could feel him weakening, but I couldn't quite manage to finish it. John pulled the attacking werewolf off the car, and then suddenly, it disappeared. Mary, huddled in the back seat, cried out that she couldn't see.

As near as we could figure, Mary got rid of him by teleporting him away from us. She didn't attach a destination to the spell, however. If she did send the werewolf straight to nowhere, it's no wonder the paradox spirits dumped on her for it. It took us a while to calm her down and convince her the blindness wasn't permanent. I did take a look at her to make sure it wasn't anything biological.

The occasion of two werewolves in Krinos form fighting a battle was quite sufficient to drive everyone away, so we didn't have any witnesses to deal with. John moved the cab of the trailer out of our way, and we headed on to Mr. Forteau's house, minus one windshield. That was our last intact vehicle, too, except for Daedalus's motorcycle. I decided that on the way back I was going to stop somewhere and rent us a minivan with lots of damage insurance.

Upon arriving at Forteau's place, I filled in Reuben on the events of the previous night, as well as I understood them. I took a look at Mr. Forteau's body. He seemed perfectly healthy. He was showing all the symptoms of a coma, except that his brain activity was extremely high. He wasn't wasting away, or anything; as a Life Master, it's entirely possible that he doesn't need to eat.

I learned that Dog was Reuben's familiar. I wanted to kick myself for not figuring that out before; I'm a witch. Familiars are something I'm supposed to think of. Anyway, we asked Dog to see if he could get some clear answers from Mary about this mysterious friend of hers. What we came up with was that he was somewhere to the west, he had a present for her, and lots of people would be good when we went looking for him. Something she said also led Reuben to the conclusion that this friend of hers was Ogre. I think she said her friend had been up there on the bell tower, but I don't remember for sure.

We returned to the Chantry, bringing Reuben with us. I did stop and rent a van, as planned. When we arrived Cab was at work (I am soo glad I took this week of vacation time), and KC was gone. She called to tell us that she had gone to Pullen Park, and had found Betsy and the tree-girl laying unconscious where the middle of the circle had been. Would I please come pick her and Betsy up? I'm starting to feel like a chauffeur. Anyway, I went and got them. The tree-girl was gone; KC said she'd gone down a storm drain. Betsy said that she and those others were properly called swamprats. She also said that one was her sister.

We got Daedalus up, and went on our quest for Ogre, using Mary's feelings about where her friend was for a guide. We picked Cab up from work before heading out, so we were actually all together for once. It was a tight fit in the van, since we had Betsy, too. While we were driving, Daedalus did some sort of search for Ogre, and learned he was underneath the NC State campus. That wasn't where Mary was taking us.

Mary took us to the flea market on Capital Boulevard. Cab and Reuben waited in the van to watch the doors, and the rest of us broke in. Mary guided us straight to where her friend was. There, sitting amidst all the stalls of junk, was the Weather Machine. Mary pointed to it. "He's in there."

If I were a wolf, I would have been tempted to howl. Why didn't we just ask Mary where the thing was weeks ago? She's an even better source of information than Raoul. Anyway, Eric called Master Porthos to figure out the best way to get the thing to him, and then Daedalus prepared to build a gate to the selected location. They never did tell me just where it was, just some college library someplace. We were, of course, interrupted by a security guard, so John knocked him out. I went back out to the van to fill in Cab and Reuben, and tell them that if they wanted to come along, they should get moving. Cab came; Reuben stayed. KC had pulled one of her famous disappearing acts when the guard showed up, and didn't choose to show back up and come, either. (It occurred to me in passing that neither Reuben nor KC drives, so they were stuck there.)

Okay, as I said, we stepped through Daedalus's portal into a library. John and Eric were lugging the Weather Machine. After a run in with an annoying librarian, Daedalus teleported out. Eric went off to find his contact, and reappeared with a librarian and a handcart in tow. We went down the freight elevator to the basement. Well, we started to go down, but the elevator stopped very suddenly, and the lights went out. It wasn't a natural power outage, either. Eric and the librarian guy, Remus, managed to get the elevator to resume it's descent. Unfortunately, the elevator was then in free-fall. We hit the basement kind of hard, but no one was hurt. John was nice enough to shift into Krinos and open the doors for us. We stepped out of the elevator and when I looked back, I saw at that the elevator was on fire. No one else seemed to think anything of it, so I pulled the fire alarm. Then we all ran. Remus led us to a room with a vortex covering one wall. Eric called Daedalus to see where he'd gotten to, and Daedalus rejoined us. Then we all went through the vortex.

We found ourselves in an arched stone hallway. As we walked along, we noticed side hallways built in different styles branching off from the main one. We eventually came to a big door which opened into a huge library. The walls were covered with books from floor to ceiling, and the place had very high ceilings. At a table there we saw an old guy with thinning hair wearing round glasses. That was Master Porthos. We followed him through a maze of hallways to an internal courtyard.

For the next three hours, we all sat around while Master Porthos drew circles and symbols around the Weather Machine. We passed the time by asking Betsy about the swamp rats. She told us something about vampires making them, and I stopped listening. My life had gotten complicated enough. I didn't want to deal with vampires, too. Stupid me, like I'd be given much of a choice in the matter.

I think it was around 8 o'clock when everything was finally ready and Master Porthos started chanting. Cab seemed to be hearing something else, as well. The sides of the box fell away. On the inside was an ancient-looking stone. The stone began to crack and crumble. Light poured out of the cracks. Betsy, who'd been getting increasingly nervous all evening, turned and ran. gradually, a figure resolved itself out of the light. John identified it as Coyote, and then shifted into lupus form to go grovel at his feet.

Coyote moved toward Mary, who was quite literally glowing. He was probably speaking with her, but I didn't hear anything. Then he nodded in the direction of Master Porthos, and ascended to, well to somewhere. I just stood there, staring. I've never been in the presence of a god before.

Master Porthos wasn't inclined to give us all time to wander around staring dazedly at each other. He sent us back out the way we'd come, and Daedalus transported us all to the Chantry from the basement of the library. The first thing I noticed when we got back was that it was raining, hard. The second thing was that paradox had bit me again, and my hair had green stripes running through it. I hate looking like a punk. Reuben had left the van in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant next to the flea market. 9I was glad he'd managed to drive it that far safely), so I got to go pick it up. When I got back to the Chantry, I was pleased to noticed that things had started tasting like themselves again, instead of coffee. I ate a huge dinner and went to bed. For about an hour.

After that hour I got another knock on my door. Everyone was heading down to the steam tunnels under NC State to try to find Ogre. Reuben had volunteered to stay at the Chantry with Mary. I sighed, tried to convince myself that three and a half hours of sleep in the last two days was plenty, and went with them. Luckily, Daedalus had been down in the steam tunnels before, so he knew where we were going. KC, I learned, had been made the victim of a lovely bit of paradox, which had caused her eyes to read light and dark in reverse. To the rest of us, the steam tunnels were dark and damp and smelly; to her, they were bright and damp and smelly. The rain wasn't helping conditions any, either.

I brought my flashlight, but left the medical kit in the car. I need to remember to buy a backpack to put all that stuff in, so I can carry it with me all the time. In this party, having it around is an awfully good idea. Anyway, we broke into the steam tunnels, and wandered for a while until we came across a trail fresh of blood. We knew it was fresh, because it hadn't yet been completely washed away by the rain. We followed the trail to a dead end, with a ladder leading up out of the tunnels. Upon inspection, we discovered that we were right by Pullen Park. We decided to see where the other end of the trail was.

We followed the blood trail a ways into the tunnels, until we came upon a room of sorts, created by the meeting of two pipes. I was walking right behind John, carrying the flashlight. He stopped abruptly at the entrance to the room, and I crept forward to see what was there. In the center of the room was a man standing over a battered table, with an emaciated-looking figure on it. The figure appeared to be female. I wondered if it was the girl who'd been with the cops the previous evening, the one who'd been carried off by the ugly man who'd appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared the same way. Anyway, the guy had a lantern lit, so it seemed safe to leave the flashlight on. I didn't think the guy knew we were there, but suddenly he picked up the lantern, turned, and threw it right at us. I ducked to the side of the tunnel. Daedalus (at least I'm assuming it was his doing) decided to teleport the thing to behind us. He didn't send it back quite far enough, though; it nearly hit Eric.

Anyway, everyone went racing after the guy, or rather after KC, who was the only one who saw the guy take off. Cab and I stayed behind to check on the girl on the table. She was dead. It had happened very recently. There were two holes in the side of her neck, right at her jugular vein, and there was almost no blood left in her body. So much for not dealing with vampires. Cab and I were discussing what you have to do to a body to keep it from rising from the dead, when we heard a terrible voice shout, "Back off," from down the passage where our friends had gone. We decided we had a more immediate problem than a possible vampire-to-be, and headed that way.

We got there in time to see the vampire grab Eric by the throat and start to drag him down the passageway towards us. As he came up to us, I said, "Let go of him." Needless to say, the vampire ignored me. I'm getting really good at saying stupid things at inappropriate moments. He ran right through us, and disappeared. John raced after him. I stepped out of his way; I think maybe he knocked Cab down on the way by. KC and I followed. John caught up with him and hit him from behind. The vampire stopped. Eric hit him with an electric bolt. There was a lovely explosion. The vamp dropped Eric, who began to crawl back towards us. Actually, he passed us and kept going.

I drew my gun, but I was somewhat less than certain that it would have any effect against a vampire. (I was even less certain that my aim was good enough that I'd hit it and not John.) John and the vamp were really going at it. KC turned and ran. Smart girl. I would have done the same, but I didn't want to leave John alone with that thing.

About then I discovered that there are some things I hate even more than getting shot. Like watching someone I love get his throat torn out by a vampire. At that point I ran. If John was still alive, he'd expect me to, and if not, well, he'd probably come back and haunt me if I didn't. I was hoping that without anyone else to fight, the vamp would leave, preferably without finishing off his first opponent.

We all met up back in the room where we'd first seen the vampire. The dead girl on the table was sitting up, or at least trying to. I decided she had enough watchers for the moment, so I ignored her and headed for Eric. I managed to heal the worst of his damage. He was still hurt, but he was no longer bleeding, and he could walk. While I was doing that, Daedalus determined that the vampire had left John and kept going down the tunnel, so he went and dragged John back to be my next patient. He was in wolf form; not surprising, he does that whenever he's asleep or unconscious. He was a mess. I know that werewolves heal incredibly quickly, but his throat was torn open and he was still losing blood. I wasn't sure if this was beyond even a Garou's ability to survive. Unfortunately, I was really low on Quintessence by that point. I drained myself completely dry of it, and managed a bit of healing. Mostly, I got the bleeding stopped and the wound more or less closed. It wasn't much, but I was pretty sure it was enough that he'd survive. He regained consciousness and shifted back to human form. He voice was weak, but he confirmed my diagnosis that he'd live.

I looked up to discover that Betsy and three others had just arrived and surrounded the moving dead girl where she lay on the floor. Cab told Betsy that the girl wasn't alive. One of Betsy's companions (they were all swamp rats) tried to claw the one on the ground, but the other two pulled her off. Betsy and Cab were having some sort of discussion. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, and I wasn't feeling inclined to leave my patients.

Betsy walked over to the dead girl, cut her arm and held it out to the girl. the dead girl grabbed it convulsively. Betsy hit her to make her let go. Betsy then got into an argument with the other three about what to do with her. Finally, two of them picked the girl up off the floor and walked off.

Betsy turned to us and told us we should get out of there. We asked why and she looked at us like we were ignorant fools. "You don't know, do you?" she said. Anyway, since she seemed to know more about what was going on than we did, we decided to take her advice. We mentioned to her that Ogre was still down here somewhere, and she responded that she didn't think he needed any help. I found that a little ominous.

Anyway, we left. Back at the Chantry, John took a shower to get rid of the scent of blood, and I did a quick load of laundry to wash the blood out of his clothes. I wasn't sure what the best way to get blood out of the leather jacket would be; I figured I'd ask Daedalus if he could do anything about it in the morning. Then I made John go to bed. I refused to believe that Garou were so different from every other animal that sleep didn't promote healing. He paused just long enough to remind everybody that that Maxwell Blake character would be showing up the next morning to try to take Mary. Then he curled up in my bed, turned into a wolf, and went to sleep.

Tom Brady <tabrady@mindspring.com>

Last modified: Wed Jan 15 17:10:00 1997 by tabrady