Rinkaiel: Temple of the Divine Dwarf

[Graybeard]

OOC: Whoops, possible misunderstanding here...

Leo stared at the scene of carnage and fought back the nausea that was trying to climb up his throat. He forced himself to look at the body, the cause of death was as obvious as the pool of blood that was draining into a crimson circle by the body of the unfortunate man. The more important question at that moment was what had triggered the lethal device. The timing of the investigation and the scene before him were too well timed to be a coincidence. Paranoia settled on the mercenaries shoulders as he pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed at the door.

"Is the crime scene through there? Is anyone else around?"

The "door" beyond the messily dead body is just the one leading back into Joli's office, which the late acolyte had entered looking for Joli to tell her about the convert. He'd then run through the open door (the one normally concealed at the rear of Joli's office, not the one he'd entered through) and past the no-admittance sign, into the kill zone. Leo would presumably recognize this. The "crime scene," if he means the fire, is now back behind him, where Joli was taking him before she did an about-face to deal with the blades. Retcon may be needed.

[Jack Rothwell]

OOC Done, and done./OOC

[Graybeard]

[OOC: OK, so with that resolved...]

Sister Joli had never seen a dead man before, and she wasn't taking this one well at all. Her body was wracked by sobs, and her stomach continued to try to empty itself long after there was nothing left to empty. "It's all my fault," she finally managed to get out. "I should never have taken you back here, never tried to investigate this damned place..."

-----------

The man on the ground swore in a most un-priestly manner (and in a language that Eve didn't recognize). Then he did something else un-priestly (or at least un-Divine-Dwarf-priestly), and quite un-Farrelian in the bargain.

A magical glow formed at his fingertips and hurtled toward the fleeing woman.

----------

"Uh, oh," Layla said to Galina as they approached the Temple of the Divine Dwarf. "That's my boyfriend ... and he doesn't look happy."

He wasn't. "Something bad has happened in there," Ace said as he fell in step with the two women.

[Jack Rothwell]

Leo looked back at the woman with sympathy in his heart. It was easy to forget that most people were in fields of work that didn't entail being confronted with death on a regular basis, let alone the macabre scene that painted the corridor behind him. He look his hand off the door handle and walked back to her.

"Don't blame yourself, you're not a fortune teller." He extended a helping hand to the woman. "But now's not the time to have a breakdown. We might have a chance to catch the bastard responsible for this mess and, besides, would you rather stay here with our friend?"

................

Eve was having some trouble with a friend of her own at that exact moment. Her trailing leg disapeared through the window a fraction of a second too late to avoid the spell completely. Something hot and painful grazed the woman's leg, accompanied by the distinctive smell of burning. Eve rolled forwards inside, yelping, patting frantically at her smoking trousers.

With the risk of burning to death narrowly avoided, she staggered painfully to the door she'd entered the room by, trying to ignore to raw feeling that had settled into her lower extremity. A moment later she was in the corridor with her gun in her hand.

'There goes the stealth option...'

The mage would doubtlessly be on her soon but there was still something to do to avoid compounding the mess she was in. Eve reached into her pocket and pulled out a thick strip of black cloth which she hurredly tied across the lower half of her face. One witness was bad; half a dozen would be disasterous.

[Graybeard]

The man down in the courtyard swore again: he'd botched the spell. He'd been going for an Entanglement, to envelop Eve in a mass of sticky goo that would prevent her from going anywhere at faster than a snail's pace. Maybe it was lack of practice, maybe some weird dwarven influence, but for whatever reason, the mass that roared up at the intruder wasn't sticky; it was just hot.

Guess I'll have to do this the old-fashioned way. He drew a certain dwarven artifact out of his belt and dashed back through the door out of the courtyard.

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

"What was it?" Layla and Galina chorused.

"I don't know," Ace said. "A sound of something heavy falling, then the kind of choked-off scream that sounds like somebody just got dead."

The two young mothers looked at each other. Layla was the first to break the silence. "Yeah, that sounds bad all right..."

-----------

"We might have a chance to catch the bastard responsible for this mess and, besides, would you rather stay here with our friend?"

Sister Joli's sobs continued, but they diminished as she got control of herself. "I -- no, I don't want to stay here. But we're responsible. This is our security system -- or at least, my father's."

Leo looked flummoxed at this statement, and the look on his face gave Joli something to focus on so she could get the story out. "See, I -- when I went to get help from the laboratory, I was just doing it on my own. My father hadn't asked me to get an investigation going, he just left town. I thought it would be a good idea, so I went and talked to that Galina woman by myself. I didn't know that -- I'd make it so that -- poor Brother Roscoe --"

And then she was sobbing hysterically again.

[Jack Rothwell]

Eve pounded down the corridor with a snarl of pain etched into her features, she'd have to get back out through the service entrance and pray to whichever Gods might be listening that there wasn't anyone guarding it if she wanted to be free of this place. She skidded to a temporary halt and stole a glance down the flight of stairs leading to the ground floor; it was clear.

To save further time and strain she pulled herself on the bannister and slid down, managing despite herself to feel a little piece of childish exilaration at her method of transport.

..............

Leo pulled opened Joli's office door and swung his weapon in an arch which picked out the most likely hiding spots for an ambush. The room was empty at a glance. He turned back to the sobbing woman, and tried a different approach.

"Come on, pull yourself together. After we've made sure the building is safe I'll gladly lend you a shoulder to cry on; but if you want to do justice to your friend I need your help right now."

[Graybeard]

The dwarven artifact in the "priest's" hand started to beep. As he turned right, the frequency of the beeping increased; left, and it slowed.

She's going that way, he thought, and turned right at the next hallway, drawing another, considerably more lethal artifact as he went.

----------

"Do we get involved?" Ace asked Layla. "Not really our problem, is it?"

Layla grimaced. "I think we're involved whether we like it or not. Stay here." She sauntered up to the Temple of the Divine Dwarf, looking like nothing more menacing than a tourist checking out an interesting sight ... but as she slipped through the door, Wraith training took over, and she all but vanished, as if by magic.

----------

"No, no, you don't understand," Sister Joli said between sobs. "We did this to poor Roscoe. It's our security system. At least the temple's; I didn't have anything to do with it. I just screwed up. And if I hadn't left that hidden door open..."

A horrified look crossed her face. "What are we going to tell his father?"

Judging by the way she looked, the dead man's father must be even scarier than the body that lay in front of her. A lot scarier.

[Jack Rothwell]

Eve hit the corridor leading into the kitchen at a dead run, the door exploded open and she found herself facing an astonished looking woman with a meat cleaver in one hand and leg of ham in the other. She took one look at the young woman now dressed like an assassin and screamed.

...............

Leo's head snapped in the direction of the noise which cut through the walls like a demolition ball.

"I think explanations can wait for later." He supplied, and took off at full speed towards the source of the sound.

[Graybeard]

The man with the direction finder stopped, shook himself, cursed yet again. He'd been working on insinuating himself among the dwarf-worshiping crazies for so long that he'd started to act like them. There were other ways of dealing with this annoying intruder ... ways more in keeping with his own kind.

He stuffed the dwarven pistol back into his waist band; it wouldn't be needed here. Instead, he pulled a small figurine out of a well-concealed pocket in the ridiculous outfit. A few words of magic, and it grew into a glowing figure in the general shape of a dog -- a very large dog.

"Fetch," he said, and the magical dog-shape bounded off in the general direction of where Eve was last seen.

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

Layla hadn't heard the first scream, but the second one was loud and clear. However, one thing she'd learned very well during her years as a practicing Wraith was that "fools rush in." She moved furtively toward the door that Ace had described, not sure what she was hoping to accomplish there, but extracting a lock pick from her purse-like bag. She also made sure that a well-concealed small gun was close at hand.

Galina might have been horrified to see that her student was so tooled up, but Layla didn't care at that particular moment. She might have been thinking of abandoning the Gewehr for the mommy track, but it never hurt to be prepared...

[Jack Rothwell]

"Shut up and drop it."

The chef shut her mouth abruptly in the face of the barrel pointed squarely at her chest; a moment later a wet thud sounded.

"I meant the cleaver, dumbass."

The sharp metal struck the ground next to the meat it'd been slicing a moment before. Eve ran forward and seized the woman by her arm, pulling her large frame to one side so she was blocking the path to the exit.

"I'm going out that door now. If I look back in ten seconds and see you've moved an inch, I'll put one in your kidneys, clear?"

The woman made a strangled noise, nodding mutely as a tear rolled down her cheek.

"Good." With that, the young woman ran to the service entrance and grabbed the handle.

The second scream coupled with the door she'd come in by breaking was so loud that the first thing the mercenary thought was that a bomb had gone off inside the building. Eve looked back against her will at the splintered remains of the portal, and then at the monstrous-looking canine which had made its presense felt so clearly. The chef, willingness to comply or not, was already in the limp falling motion that signalled a dead faint.

"Fuck." Eve stared for an instant longer at the magical creation, then turned the handle and fled.

OOC Leo's playing catch up. Nothing of interest to report atm.OOC/