Port Lorrel

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Gotta tidy up a loose end here...]

Carlos didn't wait for the people at breakfast to get their act together; he hurdled the reception desk with a remarkably dextrous bound and went pounding up the stair, to where the maid was looking in the door of the inn's one "luxury suite" in a state of pure hysteria. A weird, sibilant sound was coming from inside the room.

This was no time for subtlety. Carlos pulled his gun and sidled up to the door ...

... beyond which he could see the mutilated body of the now-dead bell boy who'd been on duty the night before.

Crouching behind it, in an impossibly feral pose that no inanimate object should ever have been able to achieve, was the room's large conference table. It was leaning forward toward the boy, with something that looked like blood on its front surface, close to the body's torn head and neck.

And the table was hissing.

The maid ran shrieking down the hall in one direction, as one of the guests from the breakfast table, Carlos wasn't sure which one, came up the stairs from the other. The guest, whichever one it was, stopped at the door, saw the sight within, and screamed:

"LUCAS!!"

[Viking-Sensei]

Were it possible to have a magically fueled hang-over, Lucas had one. Every time he started using magic, he cursed mentally, this is always where it ended up. One spell leads to another leads to another, and before you know it, things go "wacky". And not the fun sort of wacky, like an amusing hat wacky or that hot girl who decided to die a strip of her hair green wacky... no, the bad wacky, where undead police officers go wandering off into the night and office furnature rises up to smite those who would dare dust it.

Once he managed to get the hotel room to stop spinning, he'd managed to get most of his clothes on in, hopefully, the right body parts and the right general order. He'd only just managed to get one of his shoes on and was very, very interested in the smells of foodly type fixings that were rising up from underneath when he heard "LUCAS!!" from further down the hall.

"Oh, bloody hell... c'mon, Bob."

As Lucas rounded the corner, he saw the source of the commotion... directly above the office from last night was another office, this time a rentable conference room... and while they'd bothered to check the room immediately adjacent to ground zero last night, it had failed to occur to anyone (Lucas included) that the magic went up as well as to the sides... the table in the center of the room had already apparently claimed one victim, and was stalking a second... the man made a move to pick up a chair to defend himself.

"Don't!" Lucas called out. "If the table was lying in wait, the chairs might be too!"

[Sareth]

[OOC: The man? I'm going to presume that you're referring to Carlos? I hadn't thought he'd made it quite that far, but... Also, welcome back]

"Well, bloody hell, Lucas," I called out, pleased my shout had gotten him up here. "What are we supposed to do? Kill it with fire?" I gestured into the room with the pistol I was holding in one hand (the other was covering a divan just in case.) "I sure don't expect that thing has a heart I can shoot..."

[Graybeard]

"Don't!" Lucas called out. "If the table was lying in wait, the chairs might be too!"

Carlos realized that the chair he'd picked up was squirming in his hand, and that meant he had seen enough to know that it was time to execute Eisenfaust Standard Maneuver Number 6, aka "Get The Hell Out Of There." However, first he had a brainstorm.

By now it was quite clear that the people in the inn, whatever they were, weren't Gewehr, which meant that he'd done his job. However, it was also clear that many or most of them were simply not well screwed on. It was also probable, although not certain, that several of them were on the lam -- from whom or what he did not know, but it really didn't matter. This meant that they'd probably clear out of the place if there was any indication that the "authorities" were on the way.

So: He dropped the chair and fired a token round at a table leg, achieving nothing at all, as far as could be told, except to make the table hiss louder. Backing out of the doorway and dodging Lucas, he noticed that the chairs were moving too, which added a certain authenticity to his next step:

As he turned to run, he yelled, "Run for it! I'll call the cops -- the REAL ones this time!"

And he tore down the far stairwell, in the same direction as the rapidly disappearing maid.

[Tiamat]

Jonathan, having head a shout about a table lying in wait, had rushed over to the stairs in order to see what the hell was going on. Halfway there, he heard a gunshot. Three quarters of the way, there was a shout - Run for it! I'll call the cops -- the REAL ones this time!" Upon arrival at the base of the stairs, he looked up just in time to see a man barreling down the stairs with a gun in his hand. At this point, Jonathan immediately reached behind his head, snatched Winston out of the air, and hurled him straight into the man's feet. Since the man had taken just that moment to look behind him, he was totally unprepared to step on a hissing, screaming ball of fur instead of a flat wooden stair.

Jonathan stepped smartly aside as the man landed face first at the foot of the staircase, then shouted up the stairs, "Who the fuck is this?" over Winston's protests of being used as a projectile.

[Graybeard]

"Who the fuck is this?"

Carlos got groggily to his feet, wondering exactly the same thing, as the sound of another gunshot filled the room, accompanied by yet another shout and a crash of china breaking. He'd made the careless mistake of not safetying his pistol before starting to flee. When the short man's cat tripped him, the gun went flying, and when it hit the ground, it went off -- launching a bullet through the thin wall into the kitchen and into a stack of dirty dishes from breakfast. That had caused some consternation among the people left in the room, reasonably enough...

Carlos thought to himself, screw this; I can always buy another gun. He didn't hang around to collect his piece, but used the moment of stunned silence following all the noise to bolt out the front door, not looking back.

[Sareth]

Turning about, I bolted for the doorway myself, shot downstairs not withstanding. If that fellow really was intending to call the cops, it was not to my taste to stick around. They always asked the most probing and uncomfortable questions, like what I did for a living. That tended to get awkward.

My feet pounded down the hallway and I threw myself down the stairs four at a time. "Time to go!" I called to the room as I headed for the door, only to have my foot land on something that scooted out from under it. I did what I can only assume (and hope) was a marvelously graceful backflip midair before coming to a less graceful faceplant on the ground, the whatever it was I had stepped on digging painfully into my chest. My hand slipped under me to grab at it, encountering a cold chunk of familiar feeling steel.

"Well, that explains the gunshots..."

[AdamZero]

As the gun slinging clerk fled the scene, Marcus was already fully dressed, staff in hand. There was really nothing left for him here, but that Lucas. That magick field... he groaned. "Why do I do this to myself?" he asked, expecting an answer from someone, maybe Boris. None came, and he simply waited for Lucas to come down the stairs.

Then the person whom he'd insulted eariler, strangely enough it was hard for him to determine their gender tripped and fell onto the not-clerk's gun.

"Well, that explains the gunshots..."

He walked over and leaned down and offered a hand to help him? her? the individual up, "You alright?" He cast a glance upstairs. "Is this sorta thing typical around that Lucas fellow?" He asked, genuinely curious.

[Graybeard]

"Well, the good news is, they're not Gewehr," Carlos gasped to Elke and her confidants. He'd run the whole distance from the World Traveler to the warehouse, and even though he was highly fit, the distance was enough to leave him winded.

Elke listened to the whole improbable story, a frown growing in intensity as the facts unfolded. It sounded like every completely whacko mage in the entire country of Farrel had been rounded up, shepherded into the inn, given an infinite supply of mana to work with, and told, "have fun." Worse, there was now yet another corpse in the inn to be dealt with -- and she'd have to break the news to the kid's mother, a mildly important person in Lorrel politics. That was going to be unpleasant. And finally, there was the concern about Jamie and Marcus...

She said, "I'm not really happy that you disobeyed my instructions not to go into the building --" Carlos paled -- "but as it turns out, you probably did the right thing. Now I'm particularly interested in two of the characters that were in that place. One is an oddly dressed, sexually ambivalent little nut case named Jamie Porter. Gunslinger, dresses like a burlap sack. The other is a young kid named Marcus who travels with a folded-up skeleton and does weird magic involving death. We have orders from on high to keep them safe at all costs." She emphasized each of the last three words individually. "Did you see them, and were they all right?" Carlos cringed and nodded, and was dismissed with an admonition to stick around in case she thought of more questions.

Turning to Annabelle and Titus, she said, "I think those people need something to do, to get them out of town before somebody blows a fuse and kills someone we don't want killed. Do either of you remember anything about the Legend of the Lost Veracian Mine?" Annabelle looked blank, but the man nodded. "Good. Why don't you see if you can, shall we say, 'recruit' them for a little adventure up that way. They need some entertainment until we're ready to talk to Jamie and Marcus." The meeting broke up as Titus went off to do some research.

[Sareth]

"I have no idea..." I said as I accepted the hand and got to my feet, quickly grabbing the gun and slipping it into a spare spot in my clothes. "I only just started traveling with him the other day, and I have to say, so far that is the weirdest thing I have seen. When you consider that blue skinned girl-thing he has with him, that's saying something to." I shook my head, dusting myself off. "At the rate we're going, you could almost expect a friendly magic using troll to show up or something." I glanced about. "Now, if you'll excuse me, that clerk fellow said something about co..."

I could feel my eyes narrow as an almost audible click sounded in my ear. Clerks did not normally carry guns. I pulled it out, eying it. "Waaaaaaaaaaait."

[OOC: Feel like giving a description of Carlos' gun, Graybeard? You can even write it from Jamie's perspective if you like, or you can PM me...]