A Devil of a Job

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IamLEAM1983
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A Devil of a Job

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They'd saved the day once already. Gawain Machae had seen his Mantle removed - albeit at an immense cost. The Quigley Road Massacre, as the press called it, had cost Hope just over a hundred lives. They'd been forced to gun for Charles' garage and his modified car and to somehow come back in time to funnel the emerging Abominations into a straight line. Like animals, they'd chased after the fastest and loudest element they'd first locked eyes on. Where Jenkins could half-weave and half-barrel through traffic, the creatures hadn't been so thoughtful. Cars were trampled or gouged open with monstrous horns, fuel reservoirs were punctured and exploded. For some four blocks, Hope's main thoroughfare turned into a bloodbath. Once they'd gone far enough, the rest of the group had been able to shore up the rear end and close the rift, which left Bucky and the two implantees to play Chicken with things that still made both of them turn green around the edges.

Thankfully, being pelted with chucks of concrete enchanted with explosive force as well as roasted from the rear had forced the creatures forward, where a motor-powered odachi band saw-like blade and high-power game rifles had waited. Barely one mile past the Tree, something too black and oily to be called blood had begun to spill. The pincer strategy paid off, the last Abomination being forced to suffer underneath selkie wards, a professional wizard's dispensed fire, or steel and depleted uranium rounds. While this unfolded, the spy took care of the loose ends, preventing their culprit from simply making off with his tail between his legs.

It hadn't been easy, but the still-unnamed group was vindicated and officially endorsed by the city's administration. Financiers were still shy, but everyone they spoke to seemed to think they were patching up the mistakes made by the olden days' superhero teams. No aliases, no convoluted contact methods, no smoke signals or special floodlights. They were all cops in all but the uniform and rank designations, now; Archie essentially serving as an honorary Deputy Chief. He didn't so much oversee an area or a borough as whatever the other chiefs told him they needed help with. His boys and girls did a bit of everything, now - from expert analysis to investigation, along with the expected field work they'd trained for. For some people, like Aidan, it had been a return to form. Keeping a few sets of plastic handcuffs on call was new to him, as was the custom of reciting Miranda rights - but he was back to what he felt he was made to do. He kept an eye out for clues and another one for sightlines. It made him remember distant compliments made by Carrie about how she'd thought he would've made a good Army investigator.

For Bucky, it was an odd and amusing experience. Being called Officer by overly formal citizens was something he'd never foreseen happening, but he'd done his best out of his new lot. Finding new reasons to dig into Gorobei Iwata's fossilized remains of martial expertise as well as incentives to deepen his own, he'd turned into the group's Fencing and Mettalurgy consultant, something about being a kitaiteki giving him a good yen for guesstimating iron contents in bladed weapons or inferring the course of a knife fight out of blood spatters or little bits of chipped concrete.

Surprisingly, being able to contribute to the group's maiden casefile had emboldened Zebediah Buck, turning him into something like Amazo's research assistant. He didn't do much field work and still occasionally came to work smelling of sherry or cognac, but putting his mind on things other than cheating the Afterlife of his dead wife and son had awakened his analytical skills. He was still a fair bit of a misanthrope, but this was largely due to his strong acquaintance with misery than anything else. He worked well with others - he simply didn't see much point in playing well with them, though.

Archie, however, proved he did. The first week following the case had seen the team single-file into a psychotherapist's office and made Archie begin the search for a qualified therapist they could keep on call. Even if nobody seemed immensely taxed by the ordeal of what had happened on Quigley Road, getting the what-ifs and the could-have-beens off their chests had done them all some good. They'd come out of it certifiably sane - just a little emotionally banged up; as anyone else would have.

Then, of course, to try and shatter the doldrums away, Holden had opened his coffers and offered them all the gift of Paintball. Another week was spent in daily matches in which the office was divided into two teams. Paint grenades stood in for spells, and the last few decades had seen immense progress in the field of replicating gun types for recreational use. Archie had found a dugout and turned himself into a yellow paint-splattering sniper, while Aidan and Charles had taken to the green pellets and more conventional footsoldier tactics. Once the week was over, even the two Clanks were sore from digging through Absalom's woods, Bucky's size forcing him into the role of a grenade-chucking juggernaut. The white jumpsuits had turned into a parti-coloured mess, nearly everyone had small welts all over their arms and chest from where Archie's fairly smarting projectiles had found their mark. Meagre little bits of pain, yes, but all wrapped up in friendly exertion that got any lasting frustrations out of their respective systems and strenghtened their fledgeling bonds.

They weren't exactly fire-forged friends as of yet, but they were a little closer to that. Occasionally, you'd catch jokes flying in the old kitchens or the break areas, the sound of video game team-ups cursing at one another on the occasional in-house weekend. Thomas Ephesian had joined with Katherine Starr in terms of frequent external contributors and visitors, introducing the concept of the much-dreaded Office Wars... In a display that now seemed indelible, Friday afternoons typically devolved into at least one or two of Holden Hall's residents trying to pull pranks on the others, or to pelt Lord Holden with Nerf darts...

What they ignored was that Archie had seen this develop and reacted accordingly, carefully detaching his spring-loaded blades when nobody was looking and replacing them with spring-loaded dart shooters he'd DIY'ed together in the wee hours... All things told, the team had found ways to work in a productive fashion and to blow off steam sufficiently. To anyone who couldn't take part in their after or before-hours shenanigans, their pre-existing jobs remained. They all worked in shifts, seeing as Amazo and Zeb could conceivably sub in for Aislinn while the selkie retreated to the familiarity of her tattoo parlor. Those who were still indispensable were still being promised they'd all find a way to rotate everyone's shifts. That meant redundant recruits on the long haul, or compatible teams in the immediate.

The biggest surprise, however, had been the blue darts in the paintball jousts... The initially quiet Drifter delivery girl had turned into quite the mechanic. She wasn't Clank-approved but would do in a pinch, and they'd all had to pitch in with a small flotilla of a friend or a relative's second car, or their own jalopy. For now and until such time as someone pitched in with a killer design for a superhero team's battle van or hover-truck, they worked with dome lights stuck on top of their own vehicles.

Routine had begun to settle in and the comfort of May's early days gave way to July's scorching heat waves. Summer was at the height of its power, the May-time memories of Sir Percival and the present day's midsummer glow feeling like one of these exxagerated Before-After composite shots. This meant the Fae were easier to spot than at any other time in the year: the Summer ones were aglow with preternatural health, while the Winter types had an ashen and even sullen cast. Even Bill Spector's veil didn't look all that great, the Wisp guzzling on water like a desperate man in the desert, his one visit to the office having ended with the Eldritch creature more or less melting into his seat, arms and legs sprawled far ahead of his seat, his tie undone and shirt laid almost entirely open. Where that would have looked moderately sexy on any other guy, it looked miserable on him. The former White King was obviously not built for extremes in heat - even with Holden Hall's hermetically sealed air conditioning systems.

The kids were at the height of the No School daze, the cafés and terraces were making quite a few bucks on the insolently beautiful weather - and the Krampus was hitting the Fae grapevine.

It had started innocently enough. The group had no jurisdiction outside of Hope and could do precious little as Leeds, UK, began to chalk up cases of race-oriented murders. Dead Fae didn't tend to stay Faelike for long, the magic of their species abandoning them along with their last breath. Take a saliva sample from a live Summer subject and you'd find plenty of odd genetic markers, the boons of a long lifespan and of an iron-clad immune system. Sample a dead Fae and you'd find a dead human or anthro, no matter how atavistic or just plain weird the corpse on the slab happens to look. Spotting dead Fae was obvious, considering this. Someone shows up without a pulse and a fully mundane genetic structure despite what looks like body mods galore? You had yourself a Fae. Coincidentally, freak weather patterns hit Leeds a few days following the murder spree, hurricane-force winds, rain and even summertime snow pelting the coastal area mercilessly for twenty-four hours.

The social networks were fairly clear on what was going on: King Oberon was pissed and trying to stage a Wild Hunt for the culprit. It hadn't panned out. If it was just one man and that man had gone into hiding, there was no way any of his full-time or honorary Hounds would find anything. Rare were those Hunts that didn't bear their fruits. When one didn't, the Olfather had a few tricks up his sleeves.

First, he'd tapped Spector. That had led to the Wisp's visit of Holden Hall and a frenetic, if unproductive four days of intensive beat-walking for the entire team. Other corners of the world had seen their civilian watch and general cop activities quadruple in size, even as the culprit began to kill other Fae and to sign his kills. Bible exerpts denoting the victims as "witches" or "spawn of Satan" being used, all signed as Michael, began to surface.

Then, something happened.

Changelings started to disappear and Spector more or less faded outside of the group's radar, possibly in order to be chewed out by Oberon, back in London. Kids - Fae kids - were being poisoned. London and Paris stood as the immediate hits, but then the spate of suspect deaths jumped to New York. Then Chicago. Then, Montreal.

Two days ago, Three was called in to look at a little body in Hope General's morgue. As they didn't and still don't have medical or forensics experts on call, he was forced to let this little angel - no more than four or five years old as death took him in his sleep - go to the HPD's hands. It was only a matter of time before Archie got the call from one of the other Deputy Chiefs, if not from the Chief of Police himself. The green light they were all waiting for.

Yesterday, the local span of Twitter and Facebook exploded with bulletins from prominent Fae in the area. Eirean was staying and so was Percy, but a lot of Commoners were packing their bags for the nonce. The city was looking at a mass exodus.

A few messages, however, didn't strike notes of despair or worry for loved ones. LadyofShallott85 wrote 'Just you wait. The Boss knows his WH didn't work. He knows WK is stretched thin. Christmas Devil's gonna be in town for sure.'

Researching for mentions of Krampus outside of Archie's heaps of available folklore, Three found nothing good. If they had to follow the Criminal Code to some extent, Krampus was Oberon's Batman surrogate. People would pay the price for the Winter King's desire to avenge these little lives.

How would they be forced to handle this? Would they even have to? Three kept looking to his door apprehensively, biting his lower lip and hoping beyond hope that Archie wouldn't show up with fresh folders in hand, as chipper as Basil of Baker Street chasing a promising lead. In a sense, it was an odd role reversal. They'd been the vigilantes chasing after someone the cops wanted - now they were the cops being stonewalled by someone who wouldn't care about due process.

Aidan left his desk and office, rubbernecking around the second floor's main corridor and unconsciously crossing his fingers.
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TennyoCeres84
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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Given that Aidan's aquatic-aligned coworkers all had jobs that called them away, he might or might not see them all at the same time. Neasa and Ciaran's respective schedules depended on when their bosses requested that they come in, while Aislinn's tended to be whenever a client set up an appointment to see the tattoo artist. At that point in the day, Aislinn happened to be his only peer around, while her two siblings might show up later in the day.

She had apparently left her office to fetch some water when she saw the young human. "Hey Three," she greeted somberly, picking up on his body language. The roane could see he looked expectant and slightly tense.
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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"Hey," replied Drake with just as much restraint, even if he did part with a small smile. "I'm just, uh, kind of dreading what's bound to be our second assignment. I haven't heard anything from Archie yet, but he's been on the phone with Tala and Alderan for about twenty minutes. Based on what's going on in the news, I'm almost tempted to call in sick," he explained, scoffing a little to show he wasn't that desperate for good news.

"I can understand wanting to gun after the son of a bitch who killed those kids, but Oberon's really pulling his Black Ops guy out of the cards? In our turf? It's not like we can just rush him and expect him to stop and collaborate."

He briefly looked away. "Plus - I have no idea what we can expect if this is how it turns out. Percival told me Kramp usually doesn't kill his targets, but wouldn't murder fit as punishment for more of the same? Especially kids? What about us? What happens if our paths cross and he treats us like he would any other obstruction? We could take him if we planned things out and put everything on our side, but Percy makes him sound like a bad cross between the Grinch and Jason Freaking Bourne."

The human couldn't keep himself from letting out an incredulous snort. "Plus - it's Krampus we're talking about. German folklore is pretty big in some parts of the US - but that big? As in more than a basket and some switches and broken chains big? We're in freaking July, on top of it! How come Old Man Winter gets to throw that curveball?"

Aidan calmed himself down with a sigh. "I just don't like the look of things. I never had to see kids in a morgue, before. I know you haven't either, but I could rationalize a soldier. I could rationalize Gawain being in a freezer or us hearing that Rendell's croaked for good and we need to take a look. Kids - I just can't."
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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With her shoulders slumped slightly, Aislinn shot him a look. "Listen, I'm not looking forward to the thought of seeing some Fae kid laid out on a morgue table either, but it's likely that we'll have to. We all unfortunately signed up for it when we formed our group. Crime doesn't just stop at a certain age, and someone has to stop the sick fuck that's doing this! The mundane cops have to do this all the time; why are we an exception?"

She then shrugged at the other half of their problem. "As for Krampus, well, we're just gonna have to give it our best shot. We've been given a chance to contribute, so we gotta shove past our discomfort and get the job done. That includes working with him."

The mage-in-training then scoffed. "Obligatory pep talk out of the way, can you act just a little less daunted at the prospect of teaming up with a figure straight out of myth?" she asked, giving him a hopeful smile.
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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Three shrugged in admittance. "Yeah, I know I have this whole I'm four years old and what is this attitude in front of stuff that should be normal. I've been trying not to worry about the details, but everything I know tells me it's kind of normal to be impressed by stuff that challenges the mundane average. It's not like therios announce themselves in the street, right? As much as I would've liked to get the straight dope on the Bucks back in middle school, my teacher spun Zebediah out to us so he'd look like a sad Jack Skellington!"

As luck would have it, the man in question started up the stairs, cup of coffee in one hand and some old-fashioned ivory pipe in the other. Considering his general attire, there was one reference Three couldn't pass up.

"Hey, looks like Hugh Hefner's up and able," he noted conversationally, which earned him one of the skeleton's signature slow and aristocratic moues of sheer disdain. Still, he didn't look particularly hung-over and had more than likely spent a few productive days, thus far.

"Hugh Hefner has been sharing samples with the Special Investigations service's team of forensic analysts," he said. "Their findings are pedestrian at best - toxicology levels, prior medical histories and previously known associates - as if children could form cabals of their own - but Francis and I agree on one detail. Faith magic is involved."

He took a drag on his pipe. "Our culprit is no Meris of the Orcades and neither is he some sort of valorous errant knight, obviously, but he or she most certainly channels via through a righteous manifestation of deeply expressed beliefs."

The lich canted his head to the side. "Well. Self-righteous would be a more appropriate denomination."

Three frowned. "Cantors leave traces?"

Zeb let out an annoyed tsk. "Go back to the basics, boy. Crosses and garlic, silver bullets, iron in all its general forms, four-leaf clovers... Gospel singers are a modern incarnation of something that is as old as time. Before speech was devised, faith could only be imprinted into objects, much in the same way Dennis Wyndham has enchanted your toys. The short of it is that potassium cyanide used by one of the faithful would most certainly leave an ethereal trace."
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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"I'm just curious as to what spurred the zealot to start on this now," wondered Aislinn. "Self-righteous idiot had some glorious vision that conveniently coincided with their nutcase beliefs and gave him or her the urge to start poisoning Fae? Why stop there? Why haven't other supernaturals been affected? Unless the culprit has special ties to the Fae, that's the only motive I can think of as of now."
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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"It's the only thing that works," agreed the soldier. "I'll need some sort of professional's opinion, but everything I know tells me you don't kill children if you don't have intensely personal motives or some serious derangements. The very idea that Oberon deployed his triggerman means part of the intended goal was already reached: the Winter King got the message and now he's pissed. Probably distraught, too."

That made Zeb grimace. "Hmph. You're both welcome to pull my own tragedies on me in order to refute my arguments, but I've lived long enough to know that getting attached to little lives is unwise for anyone who possesses a smidgen of power.
- I don't agree, but I can see why you'd think that," soberly noted Drake. "Losing Evangeline and little Nicholas felt like a betrayal.
- That it did," admitted the lich, in the kind of conversational ease that was as much the result of centuries-old bitterness on this particular issue as it was a coping mechanism. Schoolyard legends said that Old Zeb cried for his wife and child every Halloween, howling his despair into the night air; but the truth was much less Gothic. He drank alot, acted like a wealthy layabout and generally pretended as though nothing mattered. That is, until the latest crisis had proved that he needed something other than the miseries of the Buck clan to focus on. He still drank on the job and still occasionally leafed through poetry books rather than Amazo's grimoires, but he was focused, at the very least.

Not wanting to beat a dead horse, Three returned to the matters at hand. "So what rings as intensely personal, to either of you? What could drive an average guy on an infanticide spree?"
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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"Jealousy? A jaded partner, progeny or other relative?" Aislinn suggested. "The murders all seem to stem from someone trying to get Oberon's attention. What's the best place to attack anyone? His heart. The perp could be hitting at Oberon's weakness to wrest power from him. We need more info; there's too many variables otherwise."
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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Three looked down the stairs. "So briefing aside, we'll have to confirm there's a personal stake for Oberon in all this. We barely know the guy as it is!"

Zeb didn't seem particularly bothered. "The King and Queen did make an appearance during your official commendation, however," he precised, which made Three scoff in amusement.

"Yeah, I guess. It's not everyday Santa Claus makes you Lieutenant Commander of the City's Supernatural Guard. I just don't think you fit the bill for a Central Officer of Thaumaturgy, though, Zeb," he said, parroting Oberon's largely empty title back at the skeleton. Aislinn's own moniker had been even more ostentatious, Titania having declared her the group's Spellmaiden, whatever the Hell that was.

Officially, however, they weren't the supernatural guard of anything. They still had to find a name and only Archie had had enough ego to consider adopting Oberon's granted title for their group. A pool was still ongoing for this very matter, a little box on Three's desk filling up with bits of paper covered in names both serious and incredibly stupid.
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Re: A Devil of a Job

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"Fancy titles or not, I wish Archie would get his ass over here already," Aislinn replied with a sigh. "As hot as it's been, I'm ready to get to work. Maybe he'll have something we can go on besides just theories."
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