A Devil of a Job
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 5:41 am
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.
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.