Ghosts of the Past
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:23 pm
September 28, 2026
Silas had never been one to consider himself a wizard, despite his obvious abilities. Ask Aspasia and you would've heard about a displaced man of the range, someone who had an uncanny knack for making the most out of unenviable situations. He'd picked up the skills, had discovered his own leanings, had charted rune and ward systems and found out how to equally heal and harm others – all on his own. A big trunk had been stowed away in their shared residence, containing old personal effects from his living days, as well as his long, long years of self-discovery. All of it had been committed to paper, in a display of thoroughness even most classically trained practitioners tended to neglect. Robertson had left nothing to chance. He'd studied the ins and outs of being a lich, of being suddenly entrusted with immense reserves of power and of managing to wrangle them – to use them responsibly. He'd isolated himself for a few hours each day, ensuring that nobody would suffer from the fallout of his first blundering attempts or his later experiments. If Meris or Merlin or anyone else were to find these papers without being properly told of his story, they couldn't have been faulted for thinking that Silas Robertson had always been some sort of via-focusing horse-wrangler and coach guard.
They also couldn't have known how much everything else had followed along with his decaying – and later disappearing – flesh. Learning how to work with the World's Breath required reading. It required research, and the Missouri native had only ever learned to read out of his mother's Bible. He'd started out with an antiquated and limited lexicon, only for magic and time to expand his horizons. Now, Silas skirted the fields of research that bordered on classical quantum physics, dipping a toe in the sort of books that archmages considered as primers to exceedingly complex notions: complex alchemy, spacetime manipulation, permanent Veils or the secrets needed to confer deathlessness to fellow mortals... Compared to Meris, Silas was still only just a student.
Compared to Zebediah Buck, he might as well have been Paracelsus or Cornelius Agrippa. It didn't change the fact that he didn't exactly feel like an ideal teacher.
The cold had started to inch out of the sea and had managed to spread along the now frozen grass behind the Buck mansion. Like all liches, he and Zeb didn't seem inconvenienced by it, even if Silas did welcome the presence of his old suede duster.
“Alright, Buck. What you want to do is melt the frost off the grass – not burn the grass. What you need is a fire spell, but you need to shelve those notions I showed you about making fireballs. They're too much for us right now. Focus on your basic fireball spell. Bring your mnemonic pattern up to bear – but only focus on heat as a notion.”
Skilled practitioners didn't need a tactile connection to the flow of via, and neither did they need stereotypical chants or calls. Silas always thought of his old campfires by cold and dark Texas or Louisiana nights. If he wanted to cast a fireball, he only had to remember gingerly reaching into the low flames to pick out a piece of meat before it charred. If he only needed heat, he recalled the penetrating sensation of the campfire's warmth. Blazing buildings reminded him of the destructive nature of fire, and he turned to their thought if he needed to harm someone. For now, however, he thought of the stove he and Aspasia had, back home, and of the tea she sometimes set to steep on a gently heating element.
Zebediah, however, was nowhere near being able to focus on something so familiar. He'd shucked his slippers off and had buried his phalanges and metatarsuses in the cold soil with a slight moue of disgust.
Coach's result was as stable as could be expected. The air shimmered in front of his outstretched right hand, a slowly expanding lance of heated air creeping over the grass. If you listened intently, you could hear the frost layers crackle, the blades of grass gently snapping as their prison of ice was opened. A sparrow jumped from a nearby tree and passed through the shimmering pale of air with no apparent effect. The heat was enough to melt that fine layer of ice but only registered as warmth to anything else that passed through it.
Eye sockets narrowed in a picture of intense concentration, Buck brought all of his timidly recovered willpower, his months of slowly and patiently climbing the hill of his self-esteem. He reached inward and outward, coaxing himself to work past his reflex of denying via an easy access to his provided vessel, his continued certitude that he'd find a way to bungle something this simple, that he was doomed to be a lich who couldn't even wield the energies that had brought him forth...
Looking at him, you'd have sworn the local eccentric undead had some serious clout. His dressing gown billowed away as power surged into him like an unseen and otherwise unfelt gust of wind, the outline of his wispy crown of hair shimmering in the receding daylight. He had the kind of posture you'd have associated to modern-day Gandalfs – and Coach knew it didn't bode well. He tried to raise his voice in objection, but knew better than to disturb someone who was still on the level of power-focusing schoolyard rhymes:
“Solar forces, hear my plea,
Make your light shine forth through me!
Winter's fires, come to me,
Make this frost cease to be!”
Tension rose in the air, the dandy's eyelights shimmering for a moment -
Sparks crackled in front of Zeb's hand, the air's humidity being superheated to the point of a faint wail of escaping steam rising, and a single flame lashed forth, recoiling into nothingness as soon as it had appeared, only leaving behind a limp-sounding fwoosh.
However, that wasn't what Silas was afraid of. Zeb had leeched too much energy and had never really learned to control his intake of via. Cracks of blue light began to spread along the dandy's skull, but he hadn't yet realized what was happening. Dejection lined his cheekbones, and he seemed about to land some sort of whinging and self-deprecating comment, but Silas didn't let him. A hard shove sent him on all fours, the excess potential surging down through his arms and legs, safely grounded in the earth.
Silas had tried discipline in the past few weeks, but it hadn't worked out too well. Empathy seemed to be the best course of action. Sighing, Robertson let his spurs clink as he left the porch to help his murderer-turned-pupil to his feet.
“What was your focus, Zeb?
- I – I thought about the fireplace in the living room, but she just – popped forth – and I couldn't stop it. I just felt I had to-”
Silas pursed his ghostly lips. “Zeb, you're only just starting out. Drawing on something as powerful as your wife's memory isn't advisable, in this case. You aren't going to save Evvie with fireballs and heat lances, my friend – and you aren't ready to take a dive in the Shadowlands. That place, in the mental state you're in? Not worth it.”
Buck protested. “But I've been doing good for myself for the past year! I've stopped drinking, I'm focused on my work with Shield, I've never been so happy, on average, in the past hundred years!
- Yeah, but she's not letting you go, is she? She's all you ever think about – when little Nicky doesn't take some space.”
Zeb felt a core of indignation slip into his initial dejection. “What would you rather I do, then?! Set aside my wife and child when they've motivated everything I've done even long before I became this pathetic sack of bones?!”
Another pair of shoes produced delicate footsteps as they stepped on the porch. Russian cigarettes wafted in the air for a moment, followed by the sound of a teaspoon clinking in a cup. A slightly indulgent slurp was heard, which made the dressing gown-wearing lich look over his shoulder. Tom Magnus hadn't changed much, proving that financial independence didn't change one's life significantly. With a Renton loft and a cash deposit for his club's early architectural submissions, he only seemed a little more free to work on a freelance basis.
“Obviously,” he said, “Evangeline and Nicholas aren't bringing you much comfort. Foci need to be comfortable, to reflect your power as being something you're comfortable wielding. If family matters that much, I'd focus on your brother and his great-granddaughter.
- Eliphas?” the lich replied incredulously, “I thought my disdain for my brother's ambitions was obvious! He's free to gallivant around town intimidating low-tier Commission goons and parading our dwindling checkbook around for the local store owners to gawp at, and people act as though this were somehow worthy of praise! The Werewolf Financier of the East Coast, Forbes called him! In the meantime, I'm here trying to transcend my nature as a worthless arcane fuse, and there's pools going on around town on the odds of me losing it again!”
“It's Halloween season,” supplied Coach with a sigh, “of course there's going to be insensitive tavern betting rounds about Evangeline taking you for a ride! It's the same reason why Archibald and the kids are out trying to corral the Kilkennys; someone always tries to burst Old Jack's gourd!”
At that thought, Zeb's plaintive dispositions seemed to lessen. He instead became contemplative for an instant. At least someone had it harder than he did...
* * *
Pumpkins only came in plastic this early in the season, but Old Hope's produce market was an exception to the rule. Thanks to Jack Greene's nature, pumpkin pies or gourd-based meals and treats came early to the coastal parts of the city. Greene thought it too early to decorate his stall in the usual oranges and blacks, seeing as only kids tended to really get jazzed up this early in the season.
Well. Kids, Arthur Holden's Freaks – and the Kilkenny boys. Oh, and the local Fox and MSNBC broadcast stations, too. Especially on the weekends.
In any case, he wasn't exactly willing to barter with anyone just yet – not with a trio of prematurely soused Elves doing their usual number on his best pieces of the season... All he could do for now was cower behind his stand, clutching his cell phone and hoping he'd actually brought his shotgun along. Cowardice wasn't making him stay low, so much as the desire to keep his current head in one piece.
“Get outta here, you pathetic excuses for Tir Na Nog folk; you're scaring the normals!” was all he could add, frustration taking the place you'd normally have associated to fear in his voice. “You're all lucky I didn't bring my shotgun, or else it'd be rock salt for the three of you!”
Unfortunately, Elves didn't have much in common with Tolkien's regal beings. A few managed to pack some restraint and snobbery, but these were usually of German descent. American Svartalves tended to look like African Americans with deep-seated Teutonic ancestry, packing an attitude that was too restrained and self-serious to fit with the usual Tyler Perry demographics. The Scottish ones tended to be tempered down by their own tendency towards grumpiness – but the Irish?
Tir Na Nog was one of the most distinct locales in Faerie, the Summer Isles providing for so much of these pint-sized creatures' needs that hardships had never entered their culture. The Irish Elves were lifelong party-goers and generally carefree creatures that only matured under the most grievous of circumstances. It took trans-planar repercussions of the Potato Famine for a few generations of Irish Elves to have some vague sense of personal responsibilities, something that interbreeding with the Svartalves occasionally solidified into a racially alien but socially responsible mindset. Feargus O'Sullivan was one such example, with family across all three racial subsets. The end result was a humanoid figure that was about one head shorter than a Ken doll, and that was still able to command precincts of mixed human and anthro officers with aplomb.
Jacob, Harry and Reese Kilkenny were in their three hundreds on average, but you'd be hard-pressed to believe any of that time had meant anything. Jacob was built like an ox despite his small size and still dressed like and acted like a classic Irish hooligan – flat cap and suspenders included. Harry was half a head shorter than his brother, but had somehow taken ahold of the eighties' Punk aesthetic. To Jacob's classic late-1800s-thug fashion sense, he opposed the leathers and bold colors of someone for whom the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious had never fallen out of style. Reese, on the other hand, looked like a modern-day Oxford sycophant, polos and tweed jackets and popped collars included. Three thematic variations on the idea of the Moron, various precursors of the idea of the Douchebag. Reese carried the most obvious academic credit, and it only served to make him the leader of the trio.
Perched on the edge of the stall, his tiny fists on his hips, Reese looked down on Jack's round and orange head with a smirk.
“Come on, Greene! It's not like we're asking for much, isn't it? We'd like to buy those gourds of yours!” he said, a chuckle on his lips. “Failing that, though, we're just gonna take what we're owed on our own, and leave. Why isn't that reasonable?
- You failed Economics on Daddy's money, Reese!” spat back the dryad. “You spent three years sleeping with doxies and boozing it up on the oldest campus in Great Britain, so you tell me!”
Reese laughed. “Economics have nothing to do with this, you overgrown turnip – you know what we do on Samhain.”
The cap on Jack's head rattled with barely-contained anger. “Sham payphone Wiccans have more credibility than you, you numbskull!
- How else will my brothers get any practice for the big day?”
Archie's gloved hand slipped around Reese's midsection at this precise moment, grasping him the way King Kong had Faye Wray.
“Really, Rhys, I'd have expected you to have understood the value of pumpkins as delicacies, by now. A proud Celt such as yourself wouldn't squander Nature's gifts, after all...”
The younger Kilkenny yelped. “Ack – Come on, Holden! It's not like it matters to Greene, his head'll just grow back!
- I could survive my armature being crushed, dear boy, and you certainly won't see me slipping in the city's junkyards to sample their hydraulic presses...”
Reese squirmed. “Boys-!”
Archie was typically used to feeling the person who managed to lock him into a throw. He was used to martial arts as displayed by people of similar heights and proportions – and had never gotten used to the idea that Jacob could grab hold of a sock's fold and pull the rest of him to the ground... This is exactly what happened, instinct forcing him to let go of Reese so he'd be able to receive himself on the ground with both hands. His chin slamming against the asphalt enough to make his porcelain teeth wiggle, he groaned as Harry kicked his top hat off.
“Gentlemen, if you please...?”
Three had spent a few weeks getting used to the Hall's newly acquired Space Compression suits – or as Preston and Travis referred to them, the Not-Antman suits. He'd spent the last few minutes standing only a few inches tall and had been secreted away in one of Archie's frock coat pockets. Climbing out with the fabric providing no easy handholds proved to be no easy task. Knowing he could close the gap between himself and Jacob fairly quickly thanks to the suit, he tried for a controlled leap. Archie's back briefly looked like a distant shore, the Clank's usually fluid gestures looking slow and sluggish to him, now that he saw the world from an Elf's perspective.
“Jenkins-” he yelled, “take care of Harry! Neasa, you're on Reese!”
The older soldier had ended up in the opposite frock coat pocket, while the superpowered selkie had been hidden away in the Clank's little fob watch pocket. Three could only hope she'd had been able to use her strength to avoid ending crushed between the ground and the Clank's proportionately larger and – for now, at least – heavier mass.
Silas had never been one to consider himself a wizard, despite his obvious abilities. Ask Aspasia and you would've heard about a displaced man of the range, someone who had an uncanny knack for making the most out of unenviable situations. He'd picked up the skills, had discovered his own leanings, had charted rune and ward systems and found out how to equally heal and harm others – all on his own. A big trunk had been stowed away in their shared residence, containing old personal effects from his living days, as well as his long, long years of self-discovery. All of it had been committed to paper, in a display of thoroughness even most classically trained practitioners tended to neglect. Robertson had left nothing to chance. He'd studied the ins and outs of being a lich, of being suddenly entrusted with immense reserves of power and of managing to wrangle them – to use them responsibly. He'd isolated himself for a few hours each day, ensuring that nobody would suffer from the fallout of his first blundering attempts or his later experiments. If Meris or Merlin or anyone else were to find these papers without being properly told of his story, they couldn't have been faulted for thinking that Silas Robertson had always been some sort of via-focusing horse-wrangler and coach guard.
They also couldn't have known how much everything else had followed along with his decaying – and later disappearing – flesh. Learning how to work with the World's Breath required reading. It required research, and the Missouri native had only ever learned to read out of his mother's Bible. He'd started out with an antiquated and limited lexicon, only for magic and time to expand his horizons. Now, Silas skirted the fields of research that bordered on classical quantum physics, dipping a toe in the sort of books that archmages considered as primers to exceedingly complex notions: complex alchemy, spacetime manipulation, permanent Veils or the secrets needed to confer deathlessness to fellow mortals... Compared to Meris, Silas was still only just a student.
Compared to Zebediah Buck, he might as well have been Paracelsus or Cornelius Agrippa. It didn't change the fact that he didn't exactly feel like an ideal teacher.
The cold had started to inch out of the sea and had managed to spread along the now frozen grass behind the Buck mansion. Like all liches, he and Zeb didn't seem inconvenienced by it, even if Silas did welcome the presence of his old suede duster.
“Alright, Buck. What you want to do is melt the frost off the grass – not burn the grass. What you need is a fire spell, but you need to shelve those notions I showed you about making fireballs. They're too much for us right now. Focus on your basic fireball spell. Bring your mnemonic pattern up to bear – but only focus on heat as a notion.”
Skilled practitioners didn't need a tactile connection to the flow of via, and neither did they need stereotypical chants or calls. Silas always thought of his old campfires by cold and dark Texas or Louisiana nights. If he wanted to cast a fireball, he only had to remember gingerly reaching into the low flames to pick out a piece of meat before it charred. If he only needed heat, he recalled the penetrating sensation of the campfire's warmth. Blazing buildings reminded him of the destructive nature of fire, and he turned to their thought if he needed to harm someone. For now, however, he thought of the stove he and Aspasia had, back home, and of the tea she sometimes set to steep on a gently heating element.
Zebediah, however, was nowhere near being able to focus on something so familiar. He'd shucked his slippers off and had buried his phalanges and metatarsuses in the cold soil with a slight moue of disgust.
Coach's result was as stable as could be expected. The air shimmered in front of his outstretched right hand, a slowly expanding lance of heated air creeping over the grass. If you listened intently, you could hear the frost layers crackle, the blades of grass gently snapping as their prison of ice was opened. A sparrow jumped from a nearby tree and passed through the shimmering pale of air with no apparent effect. The heat was enough to melt that fine layer of ice but only registered as warmth to anything else that passed through it.
Eye sockets narrowed in a picture of intense concentration, Buck brought all of his timidly recovered willpower, his months of slowly and patiently climbing the hill of his self-esteem. He reached inward and outward, coaxing himself to work past his reflex of denying via an easy access to his provided vessel, his continued certitude that he'd find a way to bungle something this simple, that he was doomed to be a lich who couldn't even wield the energies that had brought him forth...
Looking at him, you'd have sworn the local eccentric undead had some serious clout. His dressing gown billowed away as power surged into him like an unseen and otherwise unfelt gust of wind, the outline of his wispy crown of hair shimmering in the receding daylight. He had the kind of posture you'd have associated to modern-day Gandalfs – and Coach knew it didn't bode well. He tried to raise his voice in objection, but knew better than to disturb someone who was still on the level of power-focusing schoolyard rhymes:
“Solar forces, hear my plea,
Make your light shine forth through me!
Winter's fires, come to me,
Make this frost cease to be!”
Tension rose in the air, the dandy's eyelights shimmering for a moment -
Sparks crackled in front of Zeb's hand, the air's humidity being superheated to the point of a faint wail of escaping steam rising, and a single flame lashed forth, recoiling into nothingness as soon as it had appeared, only leaving behind a limp-sounding fwoosh.
However, that wasn't what Silas was afraid of. Zeb had leeched too much energy and had never really learned to control his intake of via. Cracks of blue light began to spread along the dandy's skull, but he hadn't yet realized what was happening. Dejection lined his cheekbones, and he seemed about to land some sort of whinging and self-deprecating comment, but Silas didn't let him. A hard shove sent him on all fours, the excess potential surging down through his arms and legs, safely grounded in the earth.
Silas had tried discipline in the past few weeks, but it hadn't worked out too well. Empathy seemed to be the best course of action. Sighing, Robertson let his spurs clink as he left the porch to help his murderer-turned-pupil to his feet.
“What was your focus, Zeb?
- I – I thought about the fireplace in the living room, but she just – popped forth – and I couldn't stop it. I just felt I had to-”
Silas pursed his ghostly lips. “Zeb, you're only just starting out. Drawing on something as powerful as your wife's memory isn't advisable, in this case. You aren't going to save Evvie with fireballs and heat lances, my friend – and you aren't ready to take a dive in the Shadowlands. That place, in the mental state you're in? Not worth it.”
Buck protested. “But I've been doing good for myself for the past year! I've stopped drinking, I'm focused on my work with Shield, I've never been so happy, on average, in the past hundred years!
- Yeah, but she's not letting you go, is she? She's all you ever think about – when little Nicky doesn't take some space.”
Zeb felt a core of indignation slip into his initial dejection. “What would you rather I do, then?! Set aside my wife and child when they've motivated everything I've done even long before I became this pathetic sack of bones?!”
Another pair of shoes produced delicate footsteps as they stepped on the porch. Russian cigarettes wafted in the air for a moment, followed by the sound of a teaspoon clinking in a cup. A slightly indulgent slurp was heard, which made the dressing gown-wearing lich look over his shoulder. Tom Magnus hadn't changed much, proving that financial independence didn't change one's life significantly. With a Renton loft and a cash deposit for his club's early architectural submissions, he only seemed a little more free to work on a freelance basis.
“Obviously,” he said, “Evangeline and Nicholas aren't bringing you much comfort. Foci need to be comfortable, to reflect your power as being something you're comfortable wielding. If family matters that much, I'd focus on your brother and his great-granddaughter.
- Eliphas?” the lich replied incredulously, “I thought my disdain for my brother's ambitions was obvious! He's free to gallivant around town intimidating low-tier Commission goons and parading our dwindling checkbook around for the local store owners to gawp at, and people act as though this were somehow worthy of praise! The Werewolf Financier of the East Coast, Forbes called him! In the meantime, I'm here trying to transcend my nature as a worthless arcane fuse, and there's pools going on around town on the odds of me losing it again!”
“It's Halloween season,” supplied Coach with a sigh, “of course there's going to be insensitive tavern betting rounds about Evangeline taking you for a ride! It's the same reason why Archibald and the kids are out trying to corral the Kilkennys; someone always tries to burst Old Jack's gourd!”
At that thought, Zeb's plaintive dispositions seemed to lessen. He instead became contemplative for an instant. At least someone had it harder than he did...
* * *
Pumpkins only came in plastic this early in the season, but Old Hope's produce market was an exception to the rule. Thanks to Jack Greene's nature, pumpkin pies or gourd-based meals and treats came early to the coastal parts of the city. Greene thought it too early to decorate his stall in the usual oranges and blacks, seeing as only kids tended to really get jazzed up this early in the season.
Well. Kids, Arthur Holden's Freaks – and the Kilkenny boys. Oh, and the local Fox and MSNBC broadcast stations, too. Especially on the weekends.
In any case, he wasn't exactly willing to barter with anyone just yet – not with a trio of prematurely soused Elves doing their usual number on his best pieces of the season... All he could do for now was cower behind his stand, clutching his cell phone and hoping he'd actually brought his shotgun along. Cowardice wasn't making him stay low, so much as the desire to keep his current head in one piece.
“Get outta here, you pathetic excuses for Tir Na Nog folk; you're scaring the normals!” was all he could add, frustration taking the place you'd normally have associated to fear in his voice. “You're all lucky I didn't bring my shotgun, or else it'd be rock salt for the three of you!”
Unfortunately, Elves didn't have much in common with Tolkien's regal beings. A few managed to pack some restraint and snobbery, but these were usually of German descent. American Svartalves tended to look like African Americans with deep-seated Teutonic ancestry, packing an attitude that was too restrained and self-serious to fit with the usual Tyler Perry demographics. The Scottish ones tended to be tempered down by their own tendency towards grumpiness – but the Irish?
Tir Na Nog was one of the most distinct locales in Faerie, the Summer Isles providing for so much of these pint-sized creatures' needs that hardships had never entered their culture. The Irish Elves were lifelong party-goers and generally carefree creatures that only matured under the most grievous of circumstances. It took trans-planar repercussions of the Potato Famine for a few generations of Irish Elves to have some vague sense of personal responsibilities, something that interbreeding with the Svartalves occasionally solidified into a racially alien but socially responsible mindset. Feargus O'Sullivan was one such example, with family across all three racial subsets. The end result was a humanoid figure that was about one head shorter than a Ken doll, and that was still able to command precincts of mixed human and anthro officers with aplomb.
Jacob, Harry and Reese Kilkenny were in their three hundreds on average, but you'd be hard-pressed to believe any of that time had meant anything. Jacob was built like an ox despite his small size and still dressed like and acted like a classic Irish hooligan – flat cap and suspenders included. Harry was half a head shorter than his brother, but had somehow taken ahold of the eighties' Punk aesthetic. To Jacob's classic late-1800s-thug fashion sense, he opposed the leathers and bold colors of someone for whom the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious had never fallen out of style. Reese, on the other hand, looked like a modern-day Oxford sycophant, polos and tweed jackets and popped collars included. Three thematic variations on the idea of the Moron, various precursors of the idea of the Douchebag. Reese carried the most obvious academic credit, and it only served to make him the leader of the trio.
Perched on the edge of the stall, his tiny fists on his hips, Reese looked down on Jack's round and orange head with a smirk.
“Come on, Greene! It's not like we're asking for much, isn't it? We'd like to buy those gourds of yours!” he said, a chuckle on his lips. “Failing that, though, we're just gonna take what we're owed on our own, and leave. Why isn't that reasonable?
- You failed Economics on Daddy's money, Reese!” spat back the dryad. “You spent three years sleeping with doxies and boozing it up on the oldest campus in Great Britain, so you tell me!”
Reese laughed. “Economics have nothing to do with this, you overgrown turnip – you know what we do on Samhain.”
The cap on Jack's head rattled with barely-contained anger. “Sham payphone Wiccans have more credibility than you, you numbskull!
- How else will my brothers get any practice for the big day?”
Archie's gloved hand slipped around Reese's midsection at this precise moment, grasping him the way King Kong had Faye Wray.
“Really, Rhys, I'd have expected you to have understood the value of pumpkins as delicacies, by now. A proud Celt such as yourself wouldn't squander Nature's gifts, after all...”
The younger Kilkenny yelped. “Ack – Come on, Holden! It's not like it matters to Greene, his head'll just grow back!
- I could survive my armature being crushed, dear boy, and you certainly won't see me slipping in the city's junkyards to sample their hydraulic presses...”
Reese squirmed. “Boys-!”
Archie was typically used to feeling the person who managed to lock him into a throw. He was used to martial arts as displayed by people of similar heights and proportions – and had never gotten used to the idea that Jacob could grab hold of a sock's fold and pull the rest of him to the ground... This is exactly what happened, instinct forcing him to let go of Reese so he'd be able to receive himself on the ground with both hands. His chin slamming against the asphalt enough to make his porcelain teeth wiggle, he groaned as Harry kicked his top hat off.
“Gentlemen, if you please...?”
Three had spent a few weeks getting used to the Hall's newly acquired Space Compression suits – or as Preston and Travis referred to them, the Not-Antman suits. He'd spent the last few minutes standing only a few inches tall and had been secreted away in one of Archie's frock coat pockets. Climbing out with the fabric providing no easy handholds proved to be no easy task. Knowing he could close the gap between himself and Jacob fairly quickly thanks to the suit, he tried for a controlled leap. Archie's back briefly looked like a distant shore, the Clank's usually fluid gestures looking slow and sluggish to him, now that he saw the world from an Elf's perspective.
“Jenkins-” he yelled, “take care of Harry! Neasa, you're on Reese!”
The older soldier had ended up in the opposite frock coat pocket, while the superpowered selkie had been hidden away in the Clank's little fob watch pocket. Three could only hope she'd had been able to use her strength to avoid ending crushed between the ground and the Clank's proportionately larger and – for now, at least – heavier mass.