Mountain(s) of Madness

[Graybeard]

EDIT: Oops, misattribution...

Interesting, Grope thought. That actually did approximate the way trolls bade each other farewell. Respect was implied, so might as well reply in kind. "Safe voyage to you as well." That was how Small Ones did it, right? He waited until Marcus had gone back to the camp (honestly, the man made more noise than a bull elk in rut), then continued on to his own camp to start packing up.

-----------

Faye's crystal ball rang as she and Layla were writing up notes of the trip to Mountain of Madness -- it allowed them to procrastinate on arrangements for Arty's funeral, which neither really wanted to undertake, so to speak. Plato was calling from the mortuary. "I've learned something. Want to come over here?"

When Layla and Faye arrived, they saw that the man had already closed the coffin back up. "I can't do much here," he said. "The Kiyokans put some kind of stabilization spell on the -- man --" remember, this was Layla's husband, not just a corpse -- "before he was shipped. It interferes with some of the thaumatic systems I could use, so no point in trying."

Faye looked alternately puzzled and suspicious, but Layla thought, Ohta. He's been trying to help here. I owe him one. She was ready to start crying again, but she didn't want to, so she seized on this bit of information to clear her head. "Actually, that's good news," she said. "I'll explain later, Mom. Please go on."

"Not a lot more to say," Plato said. "There are no signs of any magical involvement other than the stabilization spell, although I'm not sure I could detect anything subtle under the circumstances. As for the cause of death, he had penetrating trauma --"

Faye snorted. "Yes, we'd figured that out."

"Let me finish, please." It might not be wise to glare at a fairly senior member of the Gewehr brain trust, but he did anyway. "Things aren't entirely as they appear. The trauma itself should not have been sufficient to cause death. He was hit in the arm by an arrow or dagger or some such. The initial penetration didn't cut anything life-threatening, although he was going to have some nerve damage until he got healed. The fatal injury, however, occurred when somebody pulled the sharp thing out of his body. They didn't think about the damage they might be doing, and severed an artery. That was fatal very rapidly."

Now that information left Layla reeling...

[Sareth]

At first I was confused about what Marcus was doing. Was he flipping her on her back for some sort of "Is she alive or dead" spell? Was he worried she'd fall over again and hurt herself, so he was laying her down before he started casting? Was he daft?

Then I realized what he was doing. He was starting to poke around the one bit of her none of us (well, maybe Lucas, but who was going to ask?) had gotten anything resembling a look at.

"MARCUS!" I shrieked, murderous intent forgotten in a rush of shock, embarrassment, and outrage. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Looking for an access panel."

"Well, STOP!" I yelped. "Exactly what are you trying to access? An off switch? There's no way there'd be an off switch in there!" I could feel my face heating up. "I mean, if they designed her to be correct then put a switch in... Well... I mean, she'd turn off and on and off and on and off a... Uh..." Okay, dangerous territory. "I mean, no one would put a fuckin swi..." Okay, poor choice of words. "Er... No one would put a bloody swi..." Okay, even worse choice of words. "No one wo... No... I mean it's..."

I flopped to a seat on the ground, totally, completely, and utterly tongue tied and sure I was redder than a Northerner after three days on the beach in South Farrel. This was way beyond anything I was prepared to deal with. "A SPELL, YOU PERVERT! CAST A LIFE DETECT SPELL ON HER!"

[Graybeard]

"Now wait a minute," Layla said, not quite believing what she'd just heard. "You're trying to tell me it was his own people that killed him? I --" She sputtered into silence, but her brain was still working.

Some things were starting to fall into place for Layla, never mind that she had the story, and her conclusions, completely wrong. The women's deaths at a Kiyokan bordello that the Gewehr nominally controlled ... one death in the dockyards where the only outfit doing business was their own, and another near miss there (her own) ... her mother's unwillingness to talk about that near miss ... being ordered to kill three Gewehr members, and getting chewed out because she'd hesitated over it ... and now this.

I'm not sure I want to be Gewehr any more.

The man had been saying something while her head spun, but she'd missed it. She tried to tune him back in ...

"-- nothing useful on his clothing. I might still be able to get something off of some of the small particles from the wound, but I doubt it. There's too much post-mortem contamination, and the Kiyokan stabilization spell had the unfortunate side effect of wiping out the aura from those particles. I can try if you want me to, but I'm not optimistic."

Now what has gotten into my daughter? Faye wondered, seeing the look on Layla's face. "Please try," she said. "But if I understand you right, you don't think you can figure out who inflicted the initial wound?"

"That's right," the man said. "I've heard of some weird mages from up north, they call them 'deathmages,' who can deduce astounding things from talking to the dead. In this case, though, I'm not even sure that --"

Marcus, Layla thought as she tuned Plato back out. The young man she'd seen up at the pass, and again at the park, carried a skeleton around -- normal people didn't do that. And he had said something at one point about not eating with dead people because they talked too much.

That guy is a deathmage. And I want to find him.

[AdamZero]

I looked at Jamie like she was the stupidest person in the world. "You want me to cast magic." I stated allowed, doing this slow so she'd figure it out on her on. "Magic that makes a direct contact with life energy." She blinked like I was a total ass, I admit I was. "You want me to cast that sort of spell... near HIM?" I pointed at Lucas like he was the convict of a horrible series of atrocities. "Do you WANT to turn purple and sprout tentacles out of your naughty bits? Because at the rate things go around him, that's just what might happen!"

I admit my face was almost as red as Jamies, but more out of frustration. "And that's just if I don't totally screw up the damn spell."


----
Somewhere, hidden in a copse of trees hundreds of years old, surrounded by armed guards on both the material and spiritual planes, in a tent woven of dark black fibers. a circle of women and men sat in a death like trance, their minds open to the universe. There were skeletons moving about at a slow pace, rubbing gongs gently with padded sticks, drawing out soft moans from the metal. The atmosphere was serene, holy,....

Then someone picked up a tag.

"We got a job." One girl snapped out of her trance, she snatched a quill and paper from a table in the middle of her circle and dabbed the raven feather with silver ink, scratching out the details to what she saw and heard.

The Seer division of the Nine had three tasks. Find Jobs. Keep ahead of possible external threats. Keep tabs on trouble makers in the Nine.
As a runner was given the paper with the contract papers, he made off for a morgue in a far off town, moving beyond space and faster than physics would allow in the material plane.

-----

[Sareth]

"What does he have to do with anything?" I replied, surprised at Marcus' response. "I've never noticed Lucas to do anything magical. I mean, he had to use some sort of cigar to make us appear different than we are. So just what is the big deal? You don't seriously think that Lucas would try to throw off your spell just to turn me purple and make me grow tentacles out of my..." I blinked. "I really do not want to know what part of your brain came up with that image, do I?"

[AdamZero]

I twitched a bit, facially, but I realized she couldn't tell. "RIght, you're not a mage. You deal with most magick so well I forgot, sorry." I coughed. "I'll start from scratch then. For whatever reason, he's got some kinda magick vortex coming out his guts, you can't see it, but I can feel it. It makes everything wonky. That's why those spells went crazy in the inn, that's why they went crazy with the wabbits, it's not so bad now, but it could get really worse really quick!"

I really needed something to eat.

"It's not his fault, and I'm not saying it is, I'm not that kinda jerk.... I'm a slightly less judgmental sort of jerk." I admitted, poking Aiyee in the tummy a bit more. She giggled, but only between her status dictations.

[Sareth]

"He what?" I shook my head. "Never mind. I doubt I'd get it if you really tried to explain any of it. I get enough of the picture anyway. At least, enough to get that casting a spell on her with him standing right here would cause things to go blewie. Fine. Don't cast a spell." I sighed. "STOP POKING HER ANYWAY! It's lude."

I sniffed. Something smelled..."

"AH! THE BUNNY!" I snatched the smoking rabbit off the fire and waved the stick it was on around. Stopping, I peered at it, and concluded that while some of it was slightly scorched, it was still good.

"Here." I thrust the rabbit at Marcus. "You eat, and explain just what you need an access panel, and maybe the GIRL will check for you."

[AdamZero]

I started tearing into the rabbit, shearing off the fur and skin layer with my front teeth and shaking my head so it fell into the fire. I was feeling angry and not in the mood to search Boris's head for tools to dine like 'civil' peoples. I figured Jamie wouldn't give a hoot. I dug my teeth into the meat and did my best to think on how to explain.

"Sorry, I never took a class on golems, I wouldn't know what I was looking at even I did look inside her torso. I WOULD know the flow of energy and weither or not it's a stagnate pulse, a self perpetuating cycle or a created decaying full life." I tore into the rabbit a bit more. "That means I'd be able to tell if she were a puppet with voice, an artificial immortal, like an elf, or a man made mortal." I eyed Aiyee's structure. "Again, my golem knowledge is.... scarce. I burn things and blow things up most times. I erase the bodies... I don't create the bodies... as Lincoln told me once... no, wait, he doesn't erase the bodies, ... some bad boy yardie he turned out to be."

[Sareth]

"So what you're saying is that Lucas blows up your ability to cast life detecting magic over distance. But if you stick your hand in her guts so you're not casting over a distance, you can safely sense if she's a machine, alive like an elf, or alive like a human?" I thought about that. "And to do that, you want to find some sort of hatch that lets you get inside?" I suppose that makes sense. Direct contact means less risk of things going wrong enroute. Still, I hadn't noticed any access on the parts I had seen. And I really didn't want to find out if Ayiee was anatomically correct by having Marcus play doctor on her. Still...

"Lucas! You said you started assembling her, and she did the rest of the work, right? So that means she has access and seams, right? Willing to tell us where they are before someone sticks something somewhere they shouldn't?"

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Gritting my teeth here until my jaw hurts...]

The thought passed quickly as Faye said, "Layla, are you all right?"

"Huh? Oh, I was woolgathering," Layla lied. "Thinking of the good times. Now what was going on?"

Plato nodded sympathetically, even though Layla's facial expression didn't suggest that it was "good times" that she'd been thinking about. "I'm sorry, let me put this in lay terms. The Kiyokans put a kind of magical preservative on the body so that it would remain ... uncorrupted ... for long enough to get it here. That preservative interferes with learning anything about the residual life force, what some people call the 'Gray,' of the body. There's simply not much to be done here."

Layla deflated. "I see. So there's just no chance of learning what happened in Kiyoka?"

"I'm sorry, Layla," Plato said gently.

"Well, thanks for trying. Let's get on with the funeral, then." And she left the mortuary without another word.