Chapter III: The Fall

Completed chapters of the serial storyline are stored here after completion.
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IamLEAM1983
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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"I'm a demon, honey," retorted Tom, giving Aislinn a slightly sultry, if mostly amused look. "Saying I'm plotting something is like saying water's wet. The day I'll stop plotting is the day you'll have every reason to consider me defeated. I might've been able to kick the Killer Sex habit, staying one step ahead of my own friends still is a special joy of mine."

He eyed Mary. "I obviously don't mean that in the Paranoid Bruce Wayne sense. I like to come across as a more refined take on Santa Claus, rather, when it comes to friendships or pleasant business partnerships. What's still going through my mind, right now, is a bunch of conjectures concerning what you look like after being surprised... Don't be too shocked if you find out I eventually started using back channels to reach the Sin Seven or H&J's board; I can't fortuitously come to the rescue if I don't keep an ace up my sleeve."

The warlock sighed happily. "And now, well... I'm within a few short weeks of having many aces up my sleeve. Quint thought power could be measured in terms of demons summoned or fireballs tossed, I'd much rather think of power as being a measure of one's ability to influence or tease. The use of gentle, loving coercion, or the ability to engender peace. On that particular level, I'd say we need to teach an object lesson to our Alexandrian friend."

He shrugged at Jameson. "I mean, I assume I'm preaching to the choir. Peace through attrition isn't peace at all. A people decimated through genocide aren't reduced to peacefulness, they've just been made deathly quiet. Real peace is kicking it poolside with a margarita and a Rocky Patel in the ashtray - and preferably in good company."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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Charles cocked an eyebrow at Marko. What kind of Jenkins refused to raise up arms? Oh sure, most of them weren't all psycho-Vikings like he was, but none of them would shirk from an emergency. But he shrugged and told himself there was always room for new ideas.

-------------------------------

"Just don't do it like Kushner and we'll be fine," Mary retorted, rolling her eyes.
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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Xavier seemed like he could sense Charles' skepticism. "New blood's always unpredictable, Charles," he said. "Traditions tend to be more mutable than those who dictate them tend to think. There's different ways to fight, as well. A wheelchair-bound Jenkins might not take up arms, for instance, but they might focus on coordination or tactics."

Three frowned slightly. "Shit, now that I think about it, didn't you have a younger relative in 'Stan? I think I remember a Jenkins running I.T. for Camp Performance. Dude didn't carry a rifle, but everyone knew not to piss off someone who has the Morale Officer's ear. Fuck up enough, and he'd throttle your barracks' Wi-Fi."

He chuckled. "That's a minor modern tragedy, right there."

* * * 

Tom laughed. "Jared Kushner's a child playing a game he doesn't understand, Mary. I've played that game for nearly as long as our Grecian or Alexandrian friend. Plus, I'm a White Hat schemer. I might tick off a few boxes from the Evil Overlord List, but I'm a mushy teddy bear at my core."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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Aislinn chuckled and poked the warthog in his chest. "Should I call your teddy bear core Fluffy?" she joked.

Ciaran simply grinned. "A Machiavellian teddy bear named Fluffy...Cute."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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Tom winked. "You can call my softer side anything you'd like, Aislinn. I've been called a spawn of Satan and a corrupting shade before, so anything saccharine would be a nice change of pace."

He shrugged. "Although, I'm sure Marius Somebody has some choice words for me by now. Ten to one he plays the card of my only being a measly Infernalist or a pathetic waste of talent," he said, bringing up finger-quotes.

"That aside, how's the pie? The sooner you're ready, Mary, the sooner you'll be back here introducing a few gleeful newcomers to the joys of Brooklyn's finest refined carbs."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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"Sounds like somethin' we'd do," Charles replied with a chuckle. He had to remind himself, not everybody grew up the way he did, in the Great Depression. Almost everybody who survived that was hardened in some way. Well, everybody mortal, at least; the immortals probably managed to ignore or sleep through most of it.

------------------------------------

"Vlastos," Mary insisted, checking her notes not for the first time. How much longer would they have to put up with that? "And gimme a second, yeah? I've been busy for days thanks to you, surely you can afford a few moments more so I can settle down a bit."

But she did eat and drink with a bit more haste, despite her words. Soon enough she was ready, and made sure to wash her hands and face. "I'll just get my sword, and we can proceed." And she stepped outside again!
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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"Yeah, I thought so too," concurred Three, who grinned. "Ken Jenkins could go from being the casual nerdy type to a real hardass in a heartbeat. He made it out okay, from what I heard. He'd received rifle training and everything, but he really was the I.T. corps' main goon for Camp Perf. Word is he led cyberwarfare platoons some twenty years out. Your type of damage, spread out over server blades instead of physical battlefields. World War Three à la Y2K. He toasted servers, didn't just shut them down."

* * *

"While we wait until she comes back," noted Tom as he looked back to Aislinn, "there's something a little less confidential I'd like to ask you..."

He shook his left cuff loose and gestured down the length of his forearm. "How comfortable are you with sleeving jobs? I might have to process a lot of arcane potential in the coming years, and I'd really prefer it if I had prepared channels inked in, something to help me ground any excess via before it grills me."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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Aislinn shrugged. "I've done sleeves before. They can obviously take a while depending on the amount of detail," she explained, then grasping his forearm and gently squeezing it. "Yeah, tattooing the arms can be more painful for some more than others. Even if you've lost some weight, your arms have enough padding on them, so speak, what with the warthog physique. During my training, I saw this stick of a girl nearly faint when she as having a rose vine inked on her right arm. Everybody has different pain thresholds, but you should be okay."
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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All this family talk was nice and all, but they did have things to do. "It sounds like he would get along with Whitman and Connor," Abraham replied. "Anyway, we should report on what happened here."

---------------------------------

Less than a minute later, Mary reappeared, sword in scabbard at her back. "Ready for action!" she declared, throwing Tom a mock salute.
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Re: Chapter III: The Fall

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"This wouldn't be my first tattoo job," noted Tom, "I'm used to the pinpricks. Well, this body's nerves aren't, but that's nothing a little demonic cheating can't fix. You'll either find me nodding off in your chair or just using my other arm to keep a tablet or newspaper on hand."

He chuckled. "I'll be the most cooperative and chilled-out customer you've ever had, Aislinn. No jitters, no this is my first time anxiety, no wincing or pulling away."

Then Mary returned. "Great!" he said, briefly rubbing his hands together energetically as he stood up. "If you'll follow me..."

He took out a set of keys from his pockets and called the elevator back up. One twist of a key later, they were headed down to the club and penthouse's shared utilities space - a floor very few people would ever have access to. As could be expected, its corresponding number was missing on the normal touchpad for the cabin. Even the elevator had been redesigned, Frost's basic panel replaced with a touchscreen in tones of dark purple and white, a little bar allowing for a scrolling motion in order to access more than the six buttons the screen could display.

"Remember, folks," added Magnus. "deep breaths. You'll want to hightail it out of here, especially once you see the summoning circle and the cryopods. I didn't make this place oppressive, Frost did. I'm only capitalizing on that. Later on, I'll seal off a part of the utilities floor and turn it into a decent lobby for our friends in Hell. Pandemonium's dignitaries and Solomon's Court deserve something a bit swankier than our water heater and power use counters..."

The cabin's double doors opened on a space as wide as the tower itself, the far windows obscured with a tinted finish. With concrete walls, bare dividers and hanging halogen strips and squares, it offered a cold and harsh light. To step out the doors meant stepping into what almost felt like a barrier of thicker air, as if the room existed in a different state of gaseous pressure. Frost's created bodies and blood stains had long since been removed and washed away, but something in the air still seemed to hold on to the smell of blood, to carry its coppery taste. That thick pale also seemed to support the silent aftershocks of panicked and horrified screams, tension riding deep along the large space's sparse divisions.

At the risk of seeming cliché, something terrible had happened here. Even the most dim of all mundanes would have sensed as such. The room's sense of sterility and its sawdust-tinted transitory state felt like carefully-crafted lies that would never succeed in smothering out the scar left in the Shadowlands. Somewhere in limbo, Frost's sacrificial victims were still screaming, still gurgling as their throats were slit open.

Tom walked right through that noxious pale as if it hadn't been there, and entered the floor's single largest and undivided space. At about thirty feet by forty, you could've stuck a series of cubicles there, or perhaps another generous dance floor. The far wall consisted of those smoked-out ceiling-to-floor glass panes, the settling twilight of Hope faintly gleaming through. From the outside in, the windows would've appeared opaque.

A table propped up along the far left wall supported a few items: a stack of towels and folded clothes, sealed Ziploc bags containing daily essentials such as a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush and various forms of deodorant, as well as a number of books and pamphlets. The thicker volumes dealt with Hope and Rhode Island's past and distinguishing features, while the leaflets had probably been cadged off of a tourism counter and dispensed information only newcomers would've found interesting.

To the right of these essentials, however, was a Coleman portable cooler. Inside waited several empty and stained blood bags marked as manufactured by Goliath Pharmaceuticals. Cloned blood, then, produced in a lab instead of drawn from a living host. Each of the blood bags was marked as being based off of Leonard Ephesian's DNA.

As to where the blood proper was, the answer would soon hit the group's collective nostrils: deactivated seismic runes had been set into the floor's concrete in a wide and precise pattern, and then activated in order to create deep, recessed grooves in the floor. Tom had then possibly used a jackhammer or an electric file to painstakingly smooth out the pentacle-shaped cracks into something workable. The end result involved a set of deep channels for the blood to be spilled into, while still allowing for the pentacle's surface to remain clean and dry. Their shoes and boots were too wide to hit a snag or so much as end up stained by the liquid, and they would've needed to wiggle a finger in one of the grooves for quite a while before being able to stain it with blood. The all-purpose summoning basis Tom had used involved some Sumerian, some Greek and some Cuneiform characters, their combined meaning hinging on the idea of safe passage paid for by misfortune. As to who would receive said misfortune, the only tangible answer had to be the current pilot for Ephesian's body.

For five points, five pods. For now, the thick and bulky chambers Mary and Aislinn had helped Tom purchase from the Russian mob laid still, their interior compartments foggy with nitrogen, tiny icy wisps escaping the seals every now and then. A panel below each windowed aperture showed the occupant's vitals, slowed down to the near-perfect stasis only Karthian suspension technology could engineer. Each pod was connected to two tanks - one to discharge more nitrogen if needed, and another to vacuum the compartment free of the freezing agent with the push of a button. The pods were designed to gradually transfer the living beings inside them from a state of partially cryogenic stasis to one of deep sleep, microtubules along the spine being positioned in order to release nanomachines into the subject's bloodstream. The microscopic robots would track down and repair all forms of frostbite and other forms of damage caused by constant exposure to cold, in the event of the suspension having lasted too long.

Of the subjects themselves, they wouldn't see much. Aislinn and Mary had seen their pictures before, in the associated folders. They still hung from their hooks on the side of each pod. Four Russian nationals, one odd case of a Russia-born Black male among them, and one recognizable American anthro. Apart from the man who had once been only known as "Mister Volker", they were all the product of Russia's drug and sex trades, either unwitting victims or helpless accomplices. Even the smallest of them all, a given Katya Ionovna, dead at fifteen years old, had been the undesired daughter of a high-ranking Bratva colonel. From prostitution to political assassinations, her young age hadn't prevented her from leaving behind a body tainted by many, many sins. A sadly perfect shell for a demon.

Tom stopped in the pentagram's center after inspecting each pod. 

"So," he asked, "not too frazzled? Are we ready?"

* * *

They'd left after thanking Father Curran, Marko laying an uncertain glance on the world for the first time. Being no incubus or otherwise having ties to a particular sin or theme, he felt strangely normal in his quiet bewilderment, looking more like a mortal seeing a particular city for the first time, and less like a demon seeing a city - the first of any metropolis he would hear of - for the first time.

"The sun is setting," he quietly observed. "I can see why your practitioners enjoy this time of day, the air feels thick with destiny.
- The old day," agreed Three, "pregnant with the new. Or so my sister tells me about some Wiccan circles."
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