And Halloween...
Nov. 15th, 2008 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynHere is the Halloween recap, days late and dollars short, but hell, it's been busy over here.
In this one though I get entirely too full of myself. I think Charity will cut me down a notch or two sooner or later.
We got twenty-two pylons before Halloween kicked off.
The problem was that we knew there were at least twenty-five of them, maybe more. And a pylon is notoriously difficult to find when the people building it do not want to be found. There is some sort of superstition that an altar of high magic has to be built in a magnificent temple, or a particularly gothic one, but a talented sorcerer can inscribe the hundred and twenty summoning spells of the greater Ark Phantasms on a coffee table. With a magic marker. This does bad things to the coffee table, of course, but that is hardly as difficult as building a giant stone pyramid to show off the size of your-
You know what? Never mind.
The pylons that had been smart just sat there, and even though we tumbled on to a few, we could not find all of them. Not before Halloween; not before the explosion of general occultic activity turned the world into a literal sea of magical energies, one with a bad habit of lapping at your ankles just before the tidal wave breaks somewhere high over your head. And, once they were filled with power, they began to activate.
Normally reality is a fairly stable place. Here is here, there is there, and never the twain shall get confused. Even a talented sorcerer, working at a point in space where reality is fragile enough that you can open a worldgate, can have a hard time controlling the end result. This is why the Tokyo Tower worldgate complex is probably the most valuable piece of real estate on Earth. But a pylon just soaks in power until you push the magic button, and then it opens, for a brief moment, a simple hole through space and time, a hole large enough for anything to come in.
There were nineteen pylons left, probably a higher casualty rate on gate points then was expected. Immediately, nineteen things came through.
A planetary invasion is basically never good for the defending side, which gets the honor of fighting for survival in their own home terrain, but this one did not start out so well for the offense either. One of the things that came out of the hole in space and time over San Francisco. It was big and it flew.
That, unfortunately, is all we really know about it, because when things first come through the transition between universes, they tend to be a bit disoriented and defenseless. And Americans make fun of Texans from time to time for being trigger happy, but the truth is that nobody is quite as trigger happy as an experienced SF magician. Maybe it's the fact that stupid morons are always bringing something through while trying to channel the spirit of an ancient oracle, or sometimes JFK, or engage in the wonders of tantric sex, or basically anything else that stupid people do when blessed with ancient occult knowledge. Maybe it's the downright miserable weather. But the only reason the San Francisco Bay Area is not continually shooting at people is because they have to pause every once in a while to reload.
Anyway, whatever it was materialized in a shower of magical energy over the San Francisco bay, and immediately got hit by every single witch, wizard, sorcerer, thaumaturge, priest, monk, warlock, necromancer, elf, pixie, leprechaun, vampire wizard, magical werewolf, djinni, and ancient Native American ghost in a sixty mile radius (except for Forrest, who reliable intelligence reveals was already passed out drunk on Manfred's couch). Pieces of whatever it was were later found as far away as Santa Barbara.
One thing ended up directly over the North Pole, thus breaking Vanguard Commandment 77: Thou shalt not attempt to steal toys from Santa Claus, because he can kick your ass. And he could. And apparently he did, because the only thing we could find left of that particular one was a chunk of strange metal embedded in a giant lump of coal and riddled with bullet holes.
One ended up over Tokyo. That was probably the biggest mistake of all. Tokyo has the most powerful air and land defense system in the world, but whatever it was did not even find out about that, because it materialized directly above the heart, right over Tokyo Tower. And nothing works right once it gets into the aether currents over the Tokyo Tower. It changed form several times, existing briefly as a rain of orangutans before evaporating into a mistimed sunset, a pink rainbow, and three season passes to the Raiders.
Which left sixteen of them flying around. Which was the state by the time I clambered the four sets of stairs from the balcony near my office to the penthouse suite we sometimes use as the command center, and sometimes use as the lounge.
“Multiple penetrations in progress,” Sam reported. She is probably the only person in the world who can say that with a straight face. And absolutely no idea why nobody else can keep one.
There were, by now, only fifteen blips remaining on the map. The Europeans had gotten a potshot off at something over Ireland. But they were big blips, and already stabilized. No more easy pickings.
“Please tell me that we're dealing with demons here,” I said, stopping in front of the pair of folding tables that now held the magically updated map, our direct connection to New York, the central headquarters of North American Combat Command.
“No such luck,” Charity said grimly. Well, it had been a good hope.
Pixies fear goblins, werewolves hate vampires, everybody stays the hell away from the elves, and even the demons stay away from the gods, but there is only one race that is universally feared, hated, and envied for the sheer power and destructive ability they bring to battle. All living things, human, divine, or otherwise, fear mortals.
We like to be afraid of werewolves and vampires, but to be honest, what are they really? Half mystical bat, half mystical wolf, and half human. If we were just afraid of wolves, then we would be afraid of a full wolf, not a half wolf. But we aren't afraid of werewolves because they are wolves that can appear as men, we fear them because they are men who have the strength of wolves. It is not the wolf that we fear. It is the cruelty, the terrible, cold, hard, cutting grandeur of human imagination that we fear, that little spark of darkness that we fear to nurse, fear to acknowledge, and yet that we cannot deny that lurks in all of us.
Demons invade the Earth all the time, djinni are always causing trouble, werewolf and vampire clans surge out of their strongholds to seize the world, and monsters beyond human imagining boil out of the festering network of the Tokyo Tower worldgate complex every day, but none of those attract more then casual note. But humans are inventive, humans are cautious, they are clever, and they are more dangerous then all those other races put together. An invasion by humans is a cause for alarm, and the only thing we really fear.
It's why we exist. For centuries, humans were enough to take care of vampires and fairies and tribes of various spirits living on the edges of Creation. But then humans showed up and started mucking around with things they did not understand, and building armies and overthrowing countries, and writing sitcoms, and pretty soon you had more trouble then a few self-appointed guardians could deal with. Vampires, werewolves, demons, and other monsters of the unknown may take up a good deal of our time, but humans are the reason there is a European Central Authority, or a North American Combat Command.
“It's the Domina?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Charity said. Stupid question. Of all the nearby powers, only the Domina would be trying to take advantage of Earth's relative defenselessness right now. Apparently her thirst for conquest had not been sated by the last hundred and fifty years of indulgence. We must just have been next on the list. Other nations might have invaded; the crystal towers of Gallowglass, the insidious banes of Kumaire, even the Fallen spearheading an invasion of the Forgotten Lands, but only the Domina would have come in this scattered array of raw power. She was here to conquer, not by strategy or tactics but by sheer overwhelming force that would paralyze and destroy at all places simultaneously.
“What arrogance,” I murmured. Time to get down to work.
“There are currently five targets within our sector of operations,” Charity continued, starting her instructions as Daren and Alice spilled into the room. Five blips glowed on the map. One was far out in the Pacific, another far out in the Atlantic. One was over Canada, another somewhere in Colorado, and the last swarming over Cuba. Red arrows arced over the map from each blip, reflecting the beginning of the invasion.
“All of them appear to be Flying Fortresses, each serving as an invasion transport,” Charity pointed again. So that meant that each blip was one of those giant monstrosities, probably carrying thousands of troops, summoned demons, bound constructs and massive golems, an army capable of conquering the world by itself. Well, if anybody was going to give them a break.
“New York is already under attack by a heavy sea-land force, but they seem to be holding their own,” at this Charity gave me an absolutely dirty look, “apparently someone equipped the Statue of Liberty with laser eyes.”
“Don't look at me. I wasn't even close to Gate when he did it,” I raised my hands in what I hoped was a placating gesture.
“But you knew Gate did it,” she continued, still suspicious.
“C'mon. Laser eyes? Who else would do that?” I asked.
“I would,” Alice raised a hand.
“No, you would probably give it a plasma chainsaw attachment.”
“Ohh! That's an even better idea.”
“Anyway,” Charity coughed. Even Alice knew enough to shut up when that happened.
“Our responsibility will be to assist with the defense of the western US, while at the same time handling the target that is currently far out to sea,” Charity continued.
I looked at the image, “Why can't the San Fran boys take care of that?”
“Because judging by the shields erected on it, that one is commanded by High Mage Denadired of the inner order.”
“Oh joy,” I muttered. I knew where this was going.
“How do we handle a Flying Fortress?” Amanda asked.
“Generally by a direct attack, inserting a counter-invasion force onto the fortress itself. For the most part we lack anything that can hurt it through its internal shielding, so we make a small breach in the shield and insert an invasion force and fight it out on the Fortress instead of on the land around it.”
“Except Denadired specializes in long-range magical projections that cause everyone in a target area to get lost in illusions forever. Or at least until the guards catch them,” I filled in, “It proves very effective at preventing boarders.”
“So then what do we do?” Amanda asked.
“We find someone immune to illusions and send him in alone to take care of things,” Charity said.
“Like who?” Amanda asked.
“Like him,” Charity pointed at me.
“And how am I getting up onto a Flying Fortress? It is, as I recall, flying,” I pointed out.
“We've got a ship for you. A flying ship,” Charity frowned, “A flying pirate ship.”
“Not that thing,” I groaned, “Why am I doing this?”
“Because you're best suited to the job,” Charity pointed at me.
I pointed right back. “Using logic is cheating.”
“Cheaters win. That's why they cheat.”
“I thought cheaters always lost.”
“That's just what the media wants you to believe.”
I gave up. “I'll right. I'll do it. But I'm going to need some things.”
“What?”
“A piece of paper on which to write my will. And I need to know the time when the Peanuts Halloween Special starts. And then we're going to need to borrow some people from the Japanese.”
It is difficult to describe a Flying Fortress adequately without resorting to the sort of descriptive adjectives normally used only in association with the artwork of ancient peoples (or at least that which was of sufficient hardness to survive centuries of exposure to the elements), or to the appetites of politicians. The one that was hovering over the Pacific Ocean, almost a kilometer from the dark surface of the water, was only about three kilometers long, but it looked bigger then that, a mountain uprooted from the Earth and sent to careen about the skies in uncoordinated fashion. It was slow, immensely so, going at about the same speed as a car can go on the highway.
Millennium ago, or so they tell me, the Flying Fortress approach was seen as the optimal method of bringing war to various people who did not really want war to be brought to them. It was essentially a flying castle, except that instead of simply uprooting a castle, they uprooted an entire mountain (castles, by themselves, lack the internal structure needed to stay intact while flying). When confronting some armored knight locked up in his land-based castle, a Flying Fortress was nearly invincible, hundreds of meters of rock shielding the dwellings from the occasional catapult boulder and magic missile equivalent that broke through the tremendous magical defenses. Unfortunately, they were big, and slow. So, about a thousand years, the dark overlord floating around in his flying citadel, oppressing the masses by his very appearance, fell out of favor.
Part of that, I'm fairly sure, is due to the fact that the warring mages at that point (this was during the height of the Second Age) finally began pushing into territory claimed by the others. Like the elves. Elves are smug, uptight, and all around holier-then-thou nature-loving hippie freaks, who spend most of their time in trees contemplating the beauty of nature. Elves never appear particularly dangerous, and if they were not more uptight then a posse of Jehovah's Witnesses, you might think you were witnessing a gathering of Berkeley hippies. Think of it as Berkeley hippies turned lawyers. All this just goes to show you that if your magicians have already tamed the secrets of the atom, you don't need diplomacy. After the first few times you introduce people to the “Nuke 'em 'til they glow” school of philosophy, they tend not to come around anymore. Part of it was also probably due to the dwarves, whose languages include over a hundred terms for different types of dark, but absolutely no philosophical conception of what we call “overkill”.
Anyway, there used to be a lot of overlords zipping around on these things, wreaking havoc here and there, and then I think the elves happened. Or possibly the Legion happened. The Legion enjoys wrecking things. Often their own things, of course, but I don't think they keep count that carefully. These days, interworld warfare is carried forth by massive flying ships that look more like spaceships (and can, in fact, withstand vacuum), move a lot faster, and are actually built to deliver firepower. The Flying Fortress depends on the troops it carries (and whatever it can put on its various towers), and it just doesn't go that well when someone with a kilometer long floating cannon decides to put a long-range penetration shot through your battlements.
But that means that there were a heck of a lot of Flying Fortresses floating around. And what are you going to do with the thing anyway? Despite their military flaws against a modern magocracy, they were built to last. It is a giant floating block of thousands of tons of stone after all. Oh, sometimes they do fail, rather spectacularly at that, but in the meantime it remains a giant floating island, hanging above your head, so what can you do with them? Well, they do make shipping rates cheap – in fact, the infusion of Flying Fortresses after the second Isochron war caused a massive drop in shipping prices.
But I digress.
This particular Flying Fortress was barely visible. For one thing, it was wrapped in a spherical bubble of magical shields that obscured all attempts at sight. For a second thing, it was wreathed in explosions as it got hit by about everything that North American Combat Command could throw at it. Which appeared to be about two regiments worth of long-range penetrators at the moment. A steady stream of heavy explosions seemed to be impacting all over the sphere, steadily searching for weak points.
The Fortress was not sitting on its laurels either. Whoever was doing the boil, boil, toil and trouble routine inside was sending back enough streamers to start its own fireworks factory. That was probably what was keeping most of NACC busy. Well, that and the constant stream of dark shapes that seemed to lift out of the Fortress. This was the beachhead of their invasion, and it could move.
"It's shielded," Amanda noted.
"Yeah. That doesn't work on me either," I was beginning to feel a bit queasy.
“How are you feeling?” Amanda asked.
I looked down. That was probably a mistake. “I'm about to bungee jump off of a flying pirate ship onto a giant flying castle at about two hundred miles and hour in a bid to launch a frontal assault on a heavily armored enemy fortress. How do you think I'm feeling?”
There was a pause.
“You're worried that Daren's going to eat that bag of Skittles in your desk,” Amanda said.
“Damn right I'm worried,” I grumbled, “Wait, you know about that bag of Skittles?”
“Everyone knows about that bag of Skittles,” Amanda rolled her eyes.
“Avast mateys!” Captain Blood-Eye was pointing skywards with his hook, “We be about to be boarded. Arrrr.”
“Oh gods, I don't think I can handle that accent much longer,” I said.
“Well, that's good, because you don't have to. I think we're just about-”
Three semi-formless black shadows suddenly dropped on the deck, like big, polluted raindrops, and then began to form into the shape of human beings. They were featureless, slowly solidifying from abstract nightmare into concrete monster. They were also within leg's reach of Amanda.
“-at the drop point,” Amanda said, as the last figure crashed through the side of the boat. More of them were coming now, and the entire ship sounded of multiple “Arrrrs” and “You'll be walking the plank when I'm done with you” comments.
“Good,” I tried not to look down as I leaned over the edge of the ship. “By the way, if I get killed doing this, you cannot have my Skittles.”
“If you get killed and leave me to fill out the goddamn paperwork, I will kick your ass myself.”
“I'll be dead.”
“I'll desecrate your corpse.”
“Thanks. I really needed that image in my head before doing this.”
“Think of it as a distraction from the ground.”
“It looks like we're a bit far off,” I said.
“We're too far to the north. You're going to need more starting velocity,” Amanda said, backing a step away from me.
“How are you going to do thaaaaaaaa-”
All right, everyone who saw that one coming before I did, congratulations. You can pat yourself on the back at my expense.
Bungee jumping is supposed to be a pleasurable experience, if you're an adrenaline junky. I am most definitely not an adrenaline junky. In fact, I'm allergic to adrenaline. Bungee jumping is also supposed to be relatively short. I was dropping about two kilometers at the end of a very long cable, toward a very uncertain ground. I was also suffering from the problem that a real bungee jumper goes up and down for a while before eventually coming to a halt at some point partway between where they started and the lowest point they hit.
This was a problem for me because I wanted to end up at the ground. This meant that I would have to wait until I was at my lowest point before hitting the release. If I was about fifty meters short, that meant I would have to hit the release at fifty meters and hope I survived the ground. I did not want to think about what would have happened if I was fifty meters long.
In retrospect a parachute would have been easier – except that I had never parachuted in my life. Besides, a parachute is a big, vulnerable target when dropping through people who were trying to kill you. Bungee jumping out of a flying pirate ship flown by drunk stereotypes, on the other hand, violated every OSHA compliance regulation that I knew of. At least when you screwed up the parachute jump it was over before you knew it.
I thought about all of this on the way down. I also thought about the impending General Motors meltdown, and what I was going to do with the Tri-Tip roast in my fridge, and much wood a woodchuck could chuck after they got unionized.
It takes a long time to fall two kilometers. Skydivers, of course, love the sensation. To them, time probably passes too fast. The world is full of interesting things to look at that you can only see with your own eyes at that height, and this so engrosses some of them that they go back to repeat the experience again and again.
Well, the sky was filled with interesting things. Most of it involved people trying to kill me. Or not, explicitly speaking, kill me. They were trying to kill each other, and I just happened to be the poor sorry sod standing between point A and point B. This is not a reassuring thought to have while the magical equivalent of long-range artillery is pounding in both directions all around you. Professionals take the opportunity of dropping into a combat zone to familiarize themselves with the terrain rushing up at them, but in my case the terrain was only a blank, featureless shield.
Then I was through the shield. Six layers, all of which tingled, and all of which left an unpleasant feeling on my skin. Besides that, they did nothing to me. And that was bad, really bad, because as the battlements and towers became visible below, as the castle itself appeared out of darkness in an array of torches hanging from dark, gothic towers and expanses of dark ground from which the occasional bolt of green magic leapt forth to do distant battle, it quickly became apparent that we had overestimated the length of the drop by about ten meters.
Actually, it was eleven meters or so, but I had the fortune to land in what appeared to be a garden, and they had been doing some transplanting work, so I landed, not on the ground, but in a hole that had been dug in preparation for a young fruit tree. That hurt. Soft dirt and everything, it still felt like you would if you have jumped off the top of a second story building. Especially since it's hard to roll with a goddamn rubber band attached to your waist. It hurt, and it drove the breath, and the sense, temporarily out of me.
By the time I recovered some semblance of my wits, I realized that there was a tugging sensation at my waist. It was, of course, the cord, because in the process of hitting the ground I had managed to completely fail at hitting the release, and hence was about to be catapulted back into a slightly stratospheric orbit that would put me right back where I started from.
Hastily scrambling at the switch I managed to hit the release, but by the time I did I was already about five meters back up in the air, so I hit the dirt a second time, this time face downward.
If any of you wonder why I hate my life, this is it.
Of course, Denadired was hardly an idiot. He knew that sooner or later someone was going to punch through his fancy shield. In normal warfare that would mean that he would shortly be getting a large quantity of high explosives coming in his direction. In the case of magical warfare, that usually meant an infiltrator. After all, there are few explosives as dangerous as a single mage who knows their stuff. So he had guards, and they were there a second later, appearing out of the darkness, black armored and heavily armed with all manner of sharp objects. Or so it looked. The only light under the shield was the diffuse light of various torches, and that was too dim to see much by.
“Stop right there,” the leader of the response squad looked like someone had created their armor without the faintest idea of how it was supposed to be, covering it with decorative spikes and other implements of chaos and mayhem that would never have allowed freedom of movement, had it been a human body in there. Seeing that he was walking backwards with his helmet twisted all the way around, I was fairly sure it was no such thing inside.
“I'm pretty stopped,” I admitted. I was still winded.
“Who are you?” he demanded, “and what is that?”
With that he pointed to my side, but I did not even need to look to know what was there. I had just called it after all. Where else would it be? It was amazing to me how little belief it took to actually empower an object, to turn it from something normal into something divine. The hard part was usually getting all that belief at the same time. After all, few people actively go around continuously believing. It's hard work and takes far too much time out of people's busy schedules. At best they believe when they remember and spend the rest of their time in a state where their faith is, although still there, somewhat more abstract.
But kids can believe. And you have no idea how much you can get with synchronized viewing schedules.
“It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I would normally have termed it just a regular pumpkin. It was large, but not so large that I could not have encircled it with both arms. In color it was a bright orange, in such a way that it looked almost artificial, and it had a triangular nose and two triangular eyes carved in its side over a jagged smile. The lid was now open.
“It's the Great Pumpkin,” I repeated. None of the mobile suits of armor seemed too interested in that.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. The wind was murmuring behind me. Or something was murmuring behind me. I did not turn to look, “How many clowns could you fit in that pumpkin?”
“None,” the lead suit of armor turned its head back towards me. The helmet grated as it scraped along the edge of his armor. “No human could fit inside such a space.”
“Wrong,” I waved a finger at him, “Second question. How many ninjas could you fit inside that pumpkin?”
“None again. No one could fit inside that space,” his statement was punctuated by a ringing, metallic noise.
“That's odd,” I said, “because it took at least one of them to cut your head off like that.”
The head bounced down the armored chest, and was then crushed as the body collapsed on top of it. It did not reply. None of its companions did either. All of them were lying unmoving in a heap on the ground.
“All right then,” I said to myself, heading off toward the nearest tower. In the opposite direction I could hear a lot of chaos breaking out. Mostly after the fact. Despite cries indicating the sudden presence of bodies, there was no sound that I could associate with actual fighting.
There was nothing of interest in the tower, which was hardly surprising. Evil overlords like to have their big castles and their looming, forbidding dungeons, but they soon realized that there are only so many coat closets that a man can have. After all, what would you do with a sixty room mansion? Now wonder what you would do with a ten thousand room mansion. You could have a kitchen devoted to every single flavor of ice cream that you knew of and still have ones left over. Well, evil overlords don't have much better luck then you do. Especially ones that use the kind of henchmen that do not require rooms. There was a rather impressive collection of Beatles memorabilia in one of the rooms.
On the top floor, there was a huge chunk of black obsidian carved with hundreds of spiraling occult symbols, surrounded by guards. The guards in this case were humans – for all their weaknesses humans have more adaptability in the face of almost any enemy I can name. Magic, mayhem, even boredom, there is nothing that a human cannot adapt to. These guards however were not adapting very well to anything. Instead they were all staring very intently at the shuriken that were stuck in their face, right above the bridge of their nose.
“Show-offs,” I muttered. Then I touched the obsidian.
Above me the shield flared once and then got a bit brighter – you could actually see some of the fireworks that were taking place out there. I could feel the static discharge through me too. Something big had just died at my touch.
“I thought it would be you,” a specter materialized at the edge of the room, seeming to flow together from the shadows that, for some reason, lurked at the edge.
“Oh hi De-natured,” I said.
“Denadired,” he corrected.
“Toh-MAY-To, Toh-MAH-To,” I shrugged, “What brings you out here?”
“You. What do you think you're doing?”
“What does it look like De-natured? I'm disabling your shield.”
The specter was only a projection, which I could tell because it was, to me, mostly transparent. In fact, I could see almost all the way through it – the only reason I could see it at all was that he was expending a lot of effort to actually manipulate the light so that there was actually something real there, and not just illusion. Denadired was actually a relatively mild looking man. His hair, not conforming to evil overlord standards, was brown, his beard was bristling, and he wore black more like a fashion statement then a way to disguise the fact that he was probably in as bad a shape as I was physically.
“Part of my shield,” he said.
I nodded. “Oh yes. I noticed. Six layers. One that prevents all non-organics, one that stops all organic things, and four elemental shields in between. I could tell by the sizzle. Very nice work by the way. How much did you pay for it?”
“Entirely too much. You really don't think I'll let you get away with that, do you?”
“Oh don't bluster,” I waved a hand. He frowned.
“But that still leaves me with a question. What exactly do you hope to accomplish. You've just deactivated one layer of my defenses, the organic shield. This, by both our counts, leaves me with five more. And right now you have to know that my guards are on their way here. How, exactly did you hope to survive?”
I struck my forehead with my hand, “Oy vey. I forgot about that completely. Well, it's a good thing for you that those shields still prevent me from getting any help.”
Denadired now had a faintly worried look about him. I was enjoying watching it.
“After all, no non-organic could break through here. Any projectile big enough to cause serious damage would be intercepted by your own mages. And any creature we tried to drop in here would be doomed by those other four shields, frozen by the air shield, shattered against the strength of the earth shield, drowned in the water shield, and set afire by the flame shield. They would have to be dead at the end.”
Now he looked really worried.
“Of course, they might also be dead at the beginning. Then they would be like zombies.”
The shield above began vibrating.
“Mind you, since the flame shield is last, they would be like flaming zombies. And I'm not speaking in the San Francisco sense of the word.”
Bright pinpricks of flame were appearing in the sky. Lots of pinpricks of flame. And they were getting closer.
“I would duck if I were you,” I added from a substantially lower altitude.
Even a ghostly specter can wince if he is struck head on by a zombie. In this case, the fact that the zombie was on fire was really not helping things. The projection actually evaporate, while the zombie in question rolled off the edge of the tower and, by the sound of it, landed on some people. Who were really unhappy with being landed on. And getting unhappier by the moment.
Now it was really getting unpleasant out there. If there was something that the guards were not prepared for, it seemed to be zombies. Flaming zombies. Lots of flaming zombies. The entire grounds of the Fortress were now a massed battle between a horde of flaming corpses brought back from the grave, and mobile suits of armor. The suits of armor did not seem to be winning. For one thing, it seemed that whatever lived inside of them was also flammable.
Denadired did not catch up to me until the next tower.
“You are really beginning to annoy me,” he said.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And I don't like the cut of your jib.”
“Yours doesn't look so bad.”
I was climbing past the window now. Outside a dozen guards fell down. There was a ninja with them, who appeared to be beating them to death with a flaming zombie. That was a new one to me.
“You do know that I have an entire army on this thing with me, don't you?” he asked. “I'm summoning it back even now. Surprises or no, you can't hold out until you disable all the towers. You have to know it.”
“Oh, I know it.”
“Then what in the Gods's name do you think you're doing?”
“Winning,” I said.
“How?” now he sounded really suspicious.
“By disabling this shield. Which, if my knowledge of runic is correct, is the shield against non-organics.”
This stone was also made of obsidian. It sputtered when I touched it. Above, the shield died again.
“I don't know what you hope to accomplish this time,” Denadired stared at me. In the distance, beyond the now faded shield I could see more explosions, farther off. This time it was his hosts returning from their invasion to save their base.
“Are you familiar with the old phrase 'good things come in threes, bad things come in fours'?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, so far I've hit you with a flying pirate ship, a pumpkin full of ninjas, and a rain of flaming zombies. Care to guess what number four is?”
He did not answer, but the way he glanced around answered for him.
“The British are going to do it. They're going to shoot you. With a gun.”
He stopped, like he had suddenly been struck in the face. “That's it? All this lead-up to try and shoot me. With a gun? That's it?”
Suspicion came back. “Wait, what kind of gun?”
“I don't know,” I said, “but it had the word 'orbital' in the name.”
The specter looked up. I knew in that moment that it was not because he was looking up here, but because wherever his real body was, it was now looking upward. Somewhere up there, a twinkle glowed in the sky.
“Oh shit,” he said.
“I think that's my cue to leave,” I said, and started to run.
Unfortunately, I run relatively slowly. And when it comes to things that make a big bang when you fire them, the Brits are relatively trigger-happy. Actually, I think it's just Emily and James, but they have the trigger on their control panel. I was only about half a floor down the tower when the moon glowed just briefly.
The moon has been long the source of magical power. In the western tradition, mages, witches, sorcerers and others have spent years figuring out how to encapsulate and store that power in rods, wands, and other elements of magical lore. Werewolves can spend their entire life meditating on the power of the moon, drinking in its rays until they can transform into something similar to the Hulk. But only the Japanese would think of storing the moon's power in elaborate scrollwork, wrapped around the two kilometer long barrel of a space station in high earth orbit. And only the British would be insane enough, and drunk enough, to actually build the damn thing.
The light of the moon is usually referred to as silver in poetry, but it's really a kind of white. So was the beam that stabbed out of the sky. The light of the moon is often diffused by fog or cloud cover or smoke, bathing the world in that indistinct glow that it has become famous for. No fog could have dispersed this beam. Certainly the remaining elemental shields did not, and neither did the heavy enchanted stone battlements of the inner castle, nor the stone beneath it, nor did two kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, or the Earth's crust for that matter. With a dreadful sound, the stone pedestal upon which the Flying Fortress rested cracked into two pieces.
Unfortunately, the half I was on immediately bucked up like a drowning bull, and hurtled me, tower and all, through the air. Or rather, it hurtled the tower. I myself, being in the tower, rolled out the end and fell into the sky.
There was a moment when I was just hanging there, watching the disintegration of the Fortress under my feet, and the massive sucking sound as the whirlpool beneath it as the ocean attempted to recover from having just had about ten million gallons of water abruptly vaporized, and then I was falling. It was a long way down, amidst a rain of debris that fell around me like snowflakes.
In superhero comics, the heroine or the unlucky sidekick is often falling in this situation, when the hero swoops in and grabs them, saving them from certain doom. There are two different traditional methods, the diving hero grabbing the victim by the arm, or swooping under them and catching them in both arms.
Alice caught up with me in terminal dive about five hundred meters after I had begun falling. She tried option one first, which of course immediately dislocated my shoulder and ripped half of my tendons out of place. She discontinued the moment she noticed that my arm was beginning to rip off of my body, but at least she had reduced my downward velocity. That meant that when she switched to option two, she only bruised three of my ribs and gave me a bump on the kidney.
“I admit, that didn't work quite the way it was supposed to,” Alice said.
When I didn't reply, she prodded me, “Are you all right?”
I made the normal noises that you make after you dislocate your arm and bruise three of your ribs. Apparently that satisfied her, and she swooped up into the heights of the sky until we had come level with the masts of the flying pirate ship again. Carefully this time she set me down in the crow's nest.
“There, now I've got to-”
Magical chains spun out of nothing wrapped around her, and then suddenly she was plunging down to the ocean below, chained to a rather large weight that dragged her despite her struggles.
“She's going to be pissed when she gets out of that,” I said, trying to ignore the pain in my shoulder.
“You're going to be dead before she can get out of there,” Denadiered roared. He was here for real this time, his robes singed, his hair half gone, but his arms coated in burning flame that I could feel even here. Floating in midair he was about ten meters away, too far for me to actually do something about him, given that I was basically stuck at the top of a mast of a very unstable, swaying pirate ship.
“You know what they say,” I shook my finger at him.
“Not this time,” he roared, bringing up the fire around him.
“Don't take your eyes off the pumpkin.”
He glanced upwards. If I were to guess what he were seeing, it would be orange. Then it must have been squishy, pulpy, and full of seeds as the legend of the Great Pumpkin met its abrupt and somewhat violent end.
“You bastard!” he spat out a mouthful of pumpkin remains. A slim, feminine hand closed around his wrist. In the moment of pumpkin-related distraction, Amanda had leapt up, bounced off one of the masts, and reached the apex of her arc, right next to the frothing mage.
“Bye,” I waved with my good arm.
“Oh sh-” was all he had time for.
Which left me at the top of the mast of a flying pirate ship, with a dislocated shoulder, bruised ribs, having fallen half a kilometer or so through the sky after being hurtled off a destroyed fortress, and absolutely covered in pumpkin guts. Then a ninja landed on me. If I had to guess, I would say that it was about there that I lost it.
Of course, that's not the point of this story. The point of this story is to explain and give rationale why, two hours later, when a snot-nosed teen who we busted trying to summon the Fathomless Forces of the Ghostly Ensemble to TP his neighbor's house told me that I stank like a rotten pumpkin, I promptly lost my temper and smacked him. I blame it on the pumpkin.
In this one though I get entirely too full of myself. I think Charity will cut me down a notch or two sooner or later.
We got twenty-two pylons before Halloween kicked off.
The problem was that we knew there were at least twenty-five of them, maybe more. And a pylon is notoriously difficult to find when the people building it do not want to be found. There is some sort of superstition that an altar of high magic has to be built in a magnificent temple, or a particularly gothic one, but a talented sorcerer can inscribe the hundred and twenty summoning spells of the greater Ark Phantasms on a coffee table. With a magic marker. This does bad things to the coffee table, of course, but that is hardly as difficult as building a giant stone pyramid to show off the size of your-
You know what? Never mind.
The pylons that had been smart just sat there, and even though we tumbled on to a few, we could not find all of them. Not before Halloween; not before the explosion of general occultic activity turned the world into a literal sea of magical energies, one with a bad habit of lapping at your ankles just before the tidal wave breaks somewhere high over your head. And, once they were filled with power, they began to activate.
Normally reality is a fairly stable place. Here is here, there is there, and never the twain shall get confused. Even a talented sorcerer, working at a point in space where reality is fragile enough that you can open a worldgate, can have a hard time controlling the end result. This is why the Tokyo Tower worldgate complex is probably the most valuable piece of real estate on Earth. But a pylon just soaks in power until you push the magic button, and then it opens, for a brief moment, a simple hole through space and time, a hole large enough for anything to come in.
There were nineteen pylons left, probably a higher casualty rate on gate points then was expected. Immediately, nineteen things came through.
A planetary invasion is basically never good for the defending side, which gets the honor of fighting for survival in their own home terrain, but this one did not start out so well for the offense either. One of the things that came out of the hole in space and time over San Francisco. It was big and it flew.
That, unfortunately, is all we really know about it, because when things first come through the transition between universes, they tend to be a bit disoriented and defenseless. And Americans make fun of Texans from time to time for being trigger happy, but the truth is that nobody is quite as trigger happy as an experienced SF magician. Maybe it's the fact that stupid morons are always bringing something through while trying to channel the spirit of an ancient oracle, or sometimes JFK, or engage in the wonders of tantric sex, or basically anything else that stupid people do when blessed with ancient occult knowledge. Maybe it's the downright miserable weather. But the only reason the San Francisco Bay Area is not continually shooting at people is because they have to pause every once in a while to reload.
Anyway, whatever it was materialized in a shower of magical energy over the San Francisco bay, and immediately got hit by every single witch, wizard, sorcerer, thaumaturge, priest, monk, warlock, necromancer, elf, pixie, leprechaun, vampire wizard, magical werewolf, djinni, and ancient Native American ghost in a sixty mile radius (except for Forrest, who reliable intelligence reveals was already passed out drunk on Manfred's couch). Pieces of whatever it was were later found as far away as Santa Barbara.
One thing ended up directly over the North Pole, thus breaking Vanguard Commandment 77: Thou shalt not attempt to steal toys from Santa Claus, because he can kick your ass. And he could. And apparently he did, because the only thing we could find left of that particular one was a chunk of strange metal embedded in a giant lump of coal and riddled with bullet holes.
One ended up over Tokyo. That was probably the biggest mistake of all. Tokyo has the most powerful air and land defense system in the world, but whatever it was did not even find out about that, because it materialized directly above the heart, right over Tokyo Tower. And nothing works right once it gets into the aether currents over the Tokyo Tower. It changed form several times, existing briefly as a rain of orangutans before evaporating into a mistimed sunset, a pink rainbow, and three season passes to the Raiders.
Which left sixteen of them flying around. Which was the state by the time I clambered the four sets of stairs from the balcony near my office to the penthouse suite we sometimes use as the command center, and sometimes use as the lounge.
“Multiple penetrations in progress,” Sam reported. She is probably the only person in the world who can say that with a straight face. And absolutely no idea why nobody else can keep one.
There were, by now, only fifteen blips remaining on the map. The Europeans had gotten a potshot off at something over Ireland. But they were big blips, and already stabilized. No more easy pickings.
“Please tell me that we're dealing with demons here,” I said, stopping in front of the pair of folding tables that now held the magically updated map, our direct connection to New York, the central headquarters of North American Combat Command.
“No such luck,” Charity said grimly. Well, it had been a good hope.
Pixies fear goblins, werewolves hate vampires, everybody stays the hell away from the elves, and even the demons stay away from the gods, but there is only one race that is universally feared, hated, and envied for the sheer power and destructive ability they bring to battle. All living things, human, divine, or otherwise, fear mortals.
We like to be afraid of werewolves and vampires, but to be honest, what are they really? Half mystical bat, half mystical wolf, and half human. If we were just afraid of wolves, then we would be afraid of a full wolf, not a half wolf. But we aren't afraid of werewolves because they are wolves that can appear as men, we fear them because they are men who have the strength of wolves. It is not the wolf that we fear. It is the cruelty, the terrible, cold, hard, cutting grandeur of human imagination that we fear, that little spark of darkness that we fear to nurse, fear to acknowledge, and yet that we cannot deny that lurks in all of us.
Demons invade the Earth all the time, djinni are always causing trouble, werewolf and vampire clans surge out of their strongholds to seize the world, and monsters beyond human imagining boil out of the festering network of the Tokyo Tower worldgate complex every day, but none of those attract more then casual note. But humans are inventive, humans are cautious, they are clever, and they are more dangerous then all those other races put together. An invasion by humans is a cause for alarm, and the only thing we really fear.
It's why we exist. For centuries, humans were enough to take care of vampires and fairies and tribes of various spirits living on the edges of Creation. But then humans showed up and started mucking around with things they did not understand, and building armies and overthrowing countries, and writing sitcoms, and pretty soon you had more trouble then a few self-appointed guardians could deal with. Vampires, werewolves, demons, and other monsters of the unknown may take up a good deal of our time, but humans are the reason there is a European Central Authority, or a North American Combat Command.
“It's the Domina?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Charity said. Stupid question. Of all the nearby powers, only the Domina would be trying to take advantage of Earth's relative defenselessness right now. Apparently her thirst for conquest had not been sated by the last hundred and fifty years of indulgence. We must just have been next on the list. Other nations might have invaded; the crystal towers of Gallowglass, the insidious banes of Kumaire, even the Fallen spearheading an invasion of the Forgotten Lands, but only the Domina would have come in this scattered array of raw power. She was here to conquer, not by strategy or tactics but by sheer overwhelming force that would paralyze and destroy at all places simultaneously.
“What arrogance,” I murmured. Time to get down to work.
“There are currently five targets within our sector of operations,” Charity continued, starting her instructions as Daren and Alice spilled into the room. Five blips glowed on the map. One was far out in the Pacific, another far out in the Atlantic. One was over Canada, another somewhere in Colorado, and the last swarming over Cuba. Red arrows arced over the map from each blip, reflecting the beginning of the invasion.
“All of them appear to be Flying Fortresses, each serving as an invasion transport,” Charity pointed again. So that meant that each blip was one of those giant monstrosities, probably carrying thousands of troops, summoned demons, bound constructs and massive golems, an army capable of conquering the world by itself. Well, if anybody was going to give them a break.
“New York is already under attack by a heavy sea-land force, but they seem to be holding their own,” at this Charity gave me an absolutely dirty look, “apparently someone equipped the Statue of Liberty with laser eyes.”
“Don't look at me. I wasn't even close to Gate when he did it,” I raised my hands in what I hoped was a placating gesture.
“But you knew Gate did it,” she continued, still suspicious.
“C'mon. Laser eyes? Who else would do that?” I asked.
“I would,” Alice raised a hand.
“No, you would probably give it a plasma chainsaw attachment.”
“Ohh! That's an even better idea.”
“Anyway,” Charity coughed. Even Alice knew enough to shut up when that happened.
“Our responsibility will be to assist with the defense of the western US, while at the same time handling the target that is currently far out to sea,” Charity continued.
I looked at the image, “Why can't the San Fran boys take care of that?”
“Because judging by the shields erected on it, that one is commanded by High Mage Denadired of the inner order.”
“Oh joy,” I muttered. I knew where this was going.
“How do we handle a Flying Fortress?” Amanda asked.
“Generally by a direct attack, inserting a counter-invasion force onto the fortress itself. For the most part we lack anything that can hurt it through its internal shielding, so we make a small breach in the shield and insert an invasion force and fight it out on the Fortress instead of on the land around it.”
“Except Denadired specializes in long-range magical projections that cause everyone in a target area to get lost in illusions forever. Or at least until the guards catch them,” I filled in, “It proves very effective at preventing boarders.”
“So then what do we do?” Amanda asked.
“We find someone immune to illusions and send him in alone to take care of things,” Charity said.
“Like who?” Amanda asked.
“Like him,” Charity pointed at me.
“And how am I getting up onto a Flying Fortress? It is, as I recall, flying,” I pointed out.
“We've got a ship for you. A flying ship,” Charity frowned, “A flying pirate ship.”
“Not that thing,” I groaned, “Why am I doing this?”
“Because you're best suited to the job,” Charity pointed at me.
I pointed right back. “Using logic is cheating.”
“Cheaters win. That's why they cheat.”
“I thought cheaters always lost.”
“That's just what the media wants you to believe.”
I gave up. “I'll right. I'll do it. But I'm going to need some things.”
“What?”
“A piece of paper on which to write my will. And I need to know the time when the Peanuts Halloween Special starts. And then we're going to need to borrow some people from the Japanese.”
It is difficult to describe a Flying Fortress adequately without resorting to the sort of descriptive adjectives normally used only in association with the artwork of ancient peoples (or at least that which was of sufficient hardness to survive centuries of exposure to the elements), or to the appetites of politicians. The one that was hovering over the Pacific Ocean, almost a kilometer from the dark surface of the water, was only about three kilometers long, but it looked bigger then that, a mountain uprooted from the Earth and sent to careen about the skies in uncoordinated fashion. It was slow, immensely so, going at about the same speed as a car can go on the highway.
Millennium ago, or so they tell me, the Flying Fortress approach was seen as the optimal method of bringing war to various people who did not really want war to be brought to them. It was essentially a flying castle, except that instead of simply uprooting a castle, they uprooted an entire mountain (castles, by themselves, lack the internal structure needed to stay intact while flying). When confronting some armored knight locked up in his land-based castle, a Flying Fortress was nearly invincible, hundreds of meters of rock shielding the dwellings from the occasional catapult boulder and magic missile equivalent that broke through the tremendous magical defenses. Unfortunately, they were big, and slow. So, about a thousand years, the dark overlord floating around in his flying citadel, oppressing the masses by his very appearance, fell out of favor.
Part of that, I'm fairly sure, is due to the fact that the warring mages at that point (this was during the height of the Second Age) finally began pushing into territory claimed by the others. Like the elves. Elves are smug, uptight, and all around holier-then-thou nature-loving hippie freaks, who spend most of their time in trees contemplating the beauty of nature. Elves never appear particularly dangerous, and if they were not more uptight then a posse of Jehovah's Witnesses, you might think you were witnessing a gathering of Berkeley hippies. Think of it as Berkeley hippies turned lawyers. All this just goes to show you that if your magicians have already tamed the secrets of the atom, you don't need diplomacy. After the first few times you introduce people to the “Nuke 'em 'til they glow” school of philosophy, they tend not to come around anymore. Part of it was also probably due to the dwarves, whose languages include over a hundred terms for different types of dark, but absolutely no philosophical conception of what we call “overkill”.
Anyway, there used to be a lot of overlords zipping around on these things, wreaking havoc here and there, and then I think the elves happened. Or possibly the Legion happened. The Legion enjoys wrecking things. Often their own things, of course, but I don't think they keep count that carefully. These days, interworld warfare is carried forth by massive flying ships that look more like spaceships (and can, in fact, withstand vacuum), move a lot faster, and are actually built to deliver firepower. The Flying Fortress depends on the troops it carries (and whatever it can put on its various towers), and it just doesn't go that well when someone with a kilometer long floating cannon decides to put a long-range penetration shot through your battlements.
But that means that there were a heck of a lot of Flying Fortresses floating around. And what are you going to do with the thing anyway? Despite their military flaws against a modern magocracy, they were built to last. It is a giant floating block of thousands of tons of stone after all. Oh, sometimes they do fail, rather spectacularly at that, but in the meantime it remains a giant floating island, hanging above your head, so what can you do with them? Well, they do make shipping rates cheap – in fact, the infusion of Flying Fortresses after the second Isochron war caused a massive drop in shipping prices.
But I digress.
This particular Flying Fortress was barely visible. For one thing, it was wrapped in a spherical bubble of magical shields that obscured all attempts at sight. For a second thing, it was wreathed in explosions as it got hit by about everything that North American Combat Command could throw at it. Which appeared to be about two regiments worth of long-range penetrators at the moment. A steady stream of heavy explosions seemed to be impacting all over the sphere, steadily searching for weak points.
The Fortress was not sitting on its laurels either. Whoever was doing the boil, boil, toil and trouble routine inside was sending back enough streamers to start its own fireworks factory. That was probably what was keeping most of NACC busy. Well, that and the constant stream of dark shapes that seemed to lift out of the Fortress. This was the beachhead of their invasion, and it could move.
"It's shielded," Amanda noted.
"Yeah. That doesn't work on me either," I was beginning to feel a bit queasy.
“How are you feeling?” Amanda asked.
I looked down. That was probably a mistake. “I'm about to bungee jump off of a flying pirate ship onto a giant flying castle at about two hundred miles and hour in a bid to launch a frontal assault on a heavily armored enemy fortress. How do you think I'm feeling?”
There was a pause.
“You're worried that Daren's going to eat that bag of Skittles in your desk,” Amanda said.
“Damn right I'm worried,” I grumbled, “Wait, you know about that bag of Skittles?”
“Everyone knows about that bag of Skittles,” Amanda rolled her eyes.
“Avast mateys!” Captain Blood-Eye was pointing skywards with his hook, “We be about to be boarded. Arrrr.”
“Oh gods, I don't think I can handle that accent much longer,” I said.
“Well, that's good, because you don't have to. I think we're just about-”
Three semi-formless black shadows suddenly dropped on the deck, like big, polluted raindrops, and then began to form into the shape of human beings. They were featureless, slowly solidifying from abstract nightmare into concrete monster. They were also within leg's reach of Amanda.
“-at the drop point,” Amanda said, as the last figure crashed through the side of the boat. More of them were coming now, and the entire ship sounded of multiple “Arrrrs” and “You'll be walking the plank when I'm done with you” comments.
“Good,” I tried not to look down as I leaned over the edge of the ship. “By the way, if I get killed doing this, you cannot have my Skittles.”
“If you get killed and leave me to fill out the goddamn paperwork, I will kick your ass myself.”
“I'll be dead.”
“I'll desecrate your corpse.”
“Thanks. I really needed that image in my head before doing this.”
“Think of it as a distraction from the ground.”
“It looks like we're a bit far off,” I said.
“We're too far to the north. You're going to need more starting velocity,” Amanda said, backing a step away from me.
“How are you going to do thaaaaaaaa-”
All right, everyone who saw that one coming before I did, congratulations. You can pat yourself on the back at my expense.
Bungee jumping is supposed to be a pleasurable experience, if you're an adrenaline junky. I am most definitely not an adrenaline junky. In fact, I'm allergic to adrenaline. Bungee jumping is also supposed to be relatively short. I was dropping about two kilometers at the end of a very long cable, toward a very uncertain ground. I was also suffering from the problem that a real bungee jumper goes up and down for a while before eventually coming to a halt at some point partway between where they started and the lowest point they hit.
This was a problem for me because I wanted to end up at the ground. This meant that I would have to wait until I was at my lowest point before hitting the release. If I was about fifty meters short, that meant I would have to hit the release at fifty meters and hope I survived the ground. I did not want to think about what would have happened if I was fifty meters long.
In retrospect a parachute would have been easier – except that I had never parachuted in my life. Besides, a parachute is a big, vulnerable target when dropping through people who were trying to kill you. Bungee jumping out of a flying pirate ship flown by drunk stereotypes, on the other hand, violated every OSHA compliance regulation that I knew of. At least when you screwed up the parachute jump it was over before you knew it.
I thought about all of this on the way down. I also thought about the impending General Motors meltdown, and what I was going to do with the Tri-Tip roast in my fridge, and much wood a woodchuck could chuck after they got unionized.
It takes a long time to fall two kilometers. Skydivers, of course, love the sensation. To them, time probably passes too fast. The world is full of interesting things to look at that you can only see with your own eyes at that height, and this so engrosses some of them that they go back to repeat the experience again and again.
Well, the sky was filled with interesting things. Most of it involved people trying to kill me. Or not, explicitly speaking, kill me. They were trying to kill each other, and I just happened to be the poor sorry sod standing between point A and point B. This is not a reassuring thought to have while the magical equivalent of long-range artillery is pounding in both directions all around you. Professionals take the opportunity of dropping into a combat zone to familiarize themselves with the terrain rushing up at them, but in my case the terrain was only a blank, featureless shield.
Then I was through the shield. Six layers, all of which tingled, and all of which left an unpleasant feeling on my skin. Besides that, they did nothing to me. And that was bad, really bad, because as the battlements and towers became visible below, as the castle itself appeared out of darkness in an array of torches hanging from dark, gothic towers and expanses of dark ground from which the occasional bolt of green magic leapt forth to do distant battle, it quickly became apparent that we had overestimated the length of the drop by about ten meters.
Actually, it was eleven meters or so, but I had the fortune to land in what appeared to be a garden, and they had been doing some transplanting work, so I landed, not on the ground, but in a hole that had been dug in preparation for a young fruit tree. That hurt. Soft dirt and everything, it still felt like you would if you have jumped off the top of a second story building. Especially since it's hard to roll with a goddamn rubber band attached to your waist. It hurt, and it drove the breath, and the sense, temporarily out of me.
By the time I recovered some semblance of my wits, I realized that there was a tugging sensation at my waist. It was, of course, the cord, because in the process of hitting the ground I had managed to completely fail at hitting the release, and hence was about to be catapulted back into a slightly stratospheric orbit that would put me right back where I started from.
Hastily scrambling at the switch I managed to hit the release, but by the time I did I was already about five meters back up in the air, so I hit the dirt a second time, this time face downward.
If any of you wonder why I hate my life, this is it.
Of course, Denadired was hardly an idiot. He knew that sooner or later someone was going to punch through his fancy shield. In normal warfare that would mean that he would shortly be getting a large quantity of high explosives coming in his direction. In the case of magical warfare, that usually meant an infiltrator. After all, there are few explosives as dangerous as a single mage who knows their stuff. So he had guards, and they were there a second later, appearing out of the darkness, black armored and heavily armed with all manner of sharp objects. Or so it looked. The only light under the shield was the diffuse light of various torches, and that was too dim to see much by.
“Stop right there,” the leader of the response squad looked like someone had created their armor without the faintest idea of how it was supposed to be, covering it with decorative spikes and other implements of chaos and mayhem that would never have allowed freedom of movement, had it been a human body in there. Seeing that he was walking backwards with his helmet twisted all the way around, I was fairly sure it was no such thing inside.
“I'm pretty stopped,” I admitted. I was still winded.
“Who are you?” he demanded, “and what is that?”
With that he pointed to my side, but I did not even need to look to know what was there. I had just called it after all. Where else would it be? It was amazing to me how little belief it took to actually empower an object, to turn it from something normal into something divine. The hard part was usually getting all that belief at the same time. After all, few people actively go around continuously believing. It's hard work and takes far too much time out of people's busy schedules. At best they believe when they remember and spend the rest of their time in a state where their faith is, although still there, somewhat more abstract.
But kids can believe. And you have no idea how much you can get with synchronized viewing schedules.
“It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I would normally have termed it just a regular pumpkin. It was large, but not so large that I could not have encircled it with both arms. In color it was a bright orange, in such a way that it looked almost artificial, and it had a triangular nose and two triangular eyes carved in its side over a jagged smile. The lid was now open.
“It's the Great Pumpkin,” I repeated. None of the mobile suits of armor seemed too interested in that.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. The wind was murmuring behind me. Or something was murmuring behind me. I did not turn to look, “How many clowns could you fit in that pumpkin?”
“None,” the lead suit of armor turned its head back towards me. The helmet grated as it scraped along the edge of his armor. “No human could fit inside such a space.”
“Wrong,” I waved a finger at him, “Second question. How many ninjas could you fit inside that pumpkin?”
“None again. No one could fit inside that space,” his statement was punctuated by a ringing, metallic noise.
“That's odd,” I said, “because it took at least one of them to cut your head off like that.”
The head bounced down the armored chest, and was then crushed as the body collapsed on top of it. It did not reply. None of its companions did either. All of them were lying unmoving in a heap on the ground.
“All right then,” I said to myself, heading off toward the nearest tower. In the opposite direction I could hear a lot of chaos breaking out. Mostly after the fact. Despite cries indicating the sudden presence of bodies, there was no sound that I could associate with actual fighting.
There was nothing of interest in the tower, which was hardly surprising. Evil overlords like to have their big castles and their looming, forbidding dungeons, but they soon realized that there are only so many coat closets that a man can have. After all, what would you do with a sixty room mansion? Now wonder what you would do with a ten thousand room mansion. You could have a kitchen devoted to every single flavor of ice cream that you knew of and still have ones left over. Well, evil overlords don't have much better luck then you do. Especially ones that use the kind of henchmen that do not require rooms. There was a rather impressive collection of Beatles memorabilia in one of the rooms.
On the top floor, there was a huge chunk of black obsidian carved with hundreds of spiraling occult symbols, surrounded by guards. The guards in this case were humans – for all their weaknesses humans have more adaptability in the face of almost any enemy I can name. Magic, mayhem, even boredom, there is nothing that a human cannot adapt to. These guards however were not adapting very well to anything. Instead they were all staring very intently at the shuriken that were stuck in their face, right above the bridge of their nose.
“Show-offs,” I muttered. Then I touched the obsidian.
Above me the shield flared once and then got a bit brighter – you could actually see some of the fireworks that were taking place out there. I could feel the static discharge through me too. Something big had just died at my touch.
“I thought it would be you,” a specter materialized at the edge of the room, seeming to flow together from the shadows that, for some reason, lurked at the edge.
“Oh hi De-natured,” I said.
“Denadired,” he corrected.
“Toh-MAY-To, Toh-MAH-To,” I shrugged, “What brings you out here?”
“You. What do you think you're doing?”
“What does it look like De-natured? I'm disabling your shield.”
The specter was only a projection, which I could tell because it was, to me, mostly transparent. In fact, I could see almost all the way through it – the only reason I could see it at all was that he was expending a lot of effort to actually manipulate the light so that there was actually something real there, and not just illusion. Denadired was actually a relatively mild looking man. His hair, not conforming to evil overlord standards, was brown, his beard was bristling, and he wore black more like a fashion statement then a way to disguise the fact that he was probably in as bad a shape as I was physically.
“Part of my shield,” he said.
I nodded. “Oh yes. I noticed. Six layers. One that prevents all non-organics, one that stops all organic things, and four elemental shields in between. I could tell by the sizzle. Very nice work by the way. How much did you pay for it?”
“Entirely too much. You really don't think I'll let you get away with that, do you?”
“Oh don't bluster,” I waved a hand. He frowned.
“But that still leaves me with a question. What exactly do you hope to accomplish. You've just deactivated one layer of my defenses, the organic shield. This, by both our counts, leaves me with five more. And right now you have to know that my guards are on their way here. How, exactly did you hope to survive?”
I struck my forehead with my hand, “Oy vey. I forgot about that completely. Well, it's a good thing for you that those shields still prevent me from getting any help.”
Denadired now had a faintly worried look about him. I was enjoying watching it.
“After all, no non-organic could break through here. Any projectile big enough to cause serious damage would be intercepted by your own mages. And any creature we tried to drop in here would be doomed by those other four shields, frozen by the air shield, shattered against the strength of the earth shield, drowned in the water shield, and set afire by the flame shield. They would have to be dead at the end.”
Now he looked really worried.
“Of course, they might also be dead at the beginning. Then they would be like zombies.”
The shield above began vibrating.
“Mind you, since the flame shield is last, they would be like flaming zombies. And I'm not speaking in the San Francisco sense of the word.”
Bright pinpricks of flame were appearing in the sky. Lots of pinpricks of flame. And they were getting closer.
“I would duck if I were you,” I added from a substantially lower altitude.
Even a ghostly specter can wince if he is struck head on by a zombie. In this case, the fact that the zombie was on fire was really not helping things. The projection actually evaporate, while the zombie in question rolled off the edge of the tower and, by the sound of it, landed on some people. Who were really unhappy with being landed on. And getting unhappier by the moment.
Now it was really getting unpleasant out there. If there was something that the guards were not prepared for, it seemed to be zombies. Flaming zombies. Lots of flaming zombies. The entire grounds of the Fortress were now a massed battle between a horde of flaming corpses brought back from the grave, and mobile suits of armor. The suits of armor did not seem to be winning. For one thing, it seemed that whatever lived inside of them was also flammable.
Denadired did not catch up to me until the next tower.
“You are really beginning to annoy me,” he said.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And I don't like the cut of your jib.”
“Yours doesn't look so bad.”
I was climbing past the window now. Outside a dozen guards fell down. There was a ninja with them, who appeared to be beating them to death with a flaming zombie. That was a new one to me.
“You do know that I have an entire army on this thing with me, don't you?” he asked. “I'm summoning it back even now. Surprises or no, you can't hold out until you disable all the towers. You have to know it.”
“Oh, I know it.”
“Then what in the Gods's name do you think you're doing?”
“Winning,” I said.
“How?” now he sounded really suspicious.
“By disabling this shield. Which, if my knowledge of runic is correct, is the shield against non-organics.”
This stone was also made of obsidian. It sputtered when I touched it. Above, the shield died again.
“I don't know what you hope to accomplish this time,” Denadired stared at me. In the distance, beyond the now faded shield I could see more explosions, farther off. This time it was his hosts returning from their invasion to save their base.
“Are you familiar with the old phrase 'good things come in threes, bad things come in fours'?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, so far I've hit you with a flying pirate ship, a pumpkin full of ninjas, and a rain of flaming zombies. Care to guess what number four is?”
He did not answer, but the way he glanced around answered for him.
“The British are going to do it. They're going to shoot you. With a gun.”
He stopped, like he had suddenly been struck in the face. “That's it? All this lead-up to try and shoot me. With a gun? That's it?”
Suspicion came back. “Wait, what kind of gun?”
“I don't know,” I said, “but it had the word 'orbital' in the name.”
The specter looked up. I knew in that moment that it was not because he was looking up here, but because wherever his real body was, it was now looking upward. Somewhere up there, a twinkle glowed in the sky.
“Oh shit,” he said.
“I think that's my cue to leave,” I said, and started to run.
Unfortunately, I run relatively slowly. And when it comes to things that make a big bang when you fire them, the Brits are relatively trigger-happy. Actually, I think it's just Emily and James, but they have the trigger on their control panel. I was only about half a floor down the tower when the moon glowed just briefly.
The moon has been long the source of magical power. In the western tradition, mages, witches, sorcerers and others have spent years figuring out how to encapsulate and store that power in rods, wands, and other elements of magical lore. Werewolves can spend their entire life meditating on the power of the moon, drinking in its rays until they can transform into something similar to the Hulk. But only the Japanese would think of storing the moon's power in elaborate scrollwork, wrapped around the two kilometer long barrel of a space station in high earth orbit. And only the British would be insane enough, and drunk enough, to actually build the damn thing.
The light of the moon is usually referred to as silver in poetry, but it's really a kind of white. So was the beam that stabbed out of the sky. The light of the moon is often diffused by fog or cloud cover or smoke, bathing the world in that indistinct glow that it has become famous for. No fog could have dispersed this beam. Certainly the remaining elemental shields did not, and neither did the heavy enchanted stone battlements of the inner castle, nor the stone beneath it, nor did two kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, or the Earth's crust for that matter. With a dreadful sound, the stone pedestal upon which the Flying Fortress rested cracked into two pieces.
Unfortunately, the half I was on immediately bucked up like a drowning bull, and hurtled me, tower and all, through the air. Or rather, it hurtled the tower. I myself, being in the tower, rolled out the end and fell into the sky.
There was a moment when I was just hanging there, watching the disintegration of the Fortress under my feet, and the massive sucking sound as the whirlpool beneath it as the ocean attempted to recover from having just had about ten million gallons of water abruptly vaporized, and then I was falling. It was a long way down, amidst a rain of debris that fell around me like snowflakes.
In superhero comics, the heroine or the unlucky sidekick is often falling in this situation, when the hero swoops in and grabs them, saving them from certain doom. There are two different traditional methods, the diving hero grabbing the victim by the arm, or swooping under them and catching them in both arms.
Alice caught up with me in terminal dive about five hundred meters after I had begun falling. She tried option one first, which of course immediately dislocated my shoulder and ripped half of my tendons out of place. She discontinued the moment she noticed that my arm was beginning to rip off of my body, but at least she had reduced my downward velocity. That meant that when she switched to option two, she only bruised three of my ribs and gave me a bump on the kidney.
“I admit, that didn't work quite the way it was supposed to,” Alice said.
When I didn't reply, she prodded me, “Are you all right?”
I made the normal noises that you make after you dislocate your arm and bruise three of your ribs. Apparently that satisfied her, and she swooped up into the heights of the sky until we had come level with the masts of the flying pirate ship again. Carefully this time she set me down in the crow's nest.
“There, now I've got to-”
Magical chains spun out of nothing wrapped around her, and then suddenly she was plunging down to the ocean below, chained to a rather large weight that dragged her despite her struggles.
“She's going to be pissed when she gets out of that,” I said, trying to ignore the pain in my shoulder.
“You're going to be dead before she can get out of there,” Denadiered roared. He was here for real this time, his robes singed, his hair half gone, but his arms coated in burning flame that I could feel even here. Floating in midair he was about ten meters away, too far for me to actually do something about him, given that I was basically stuck at the top of a mast of a very unstable, swaying pirate ship.
“You know what they say,” I shook my finger at him.
“Not this time,” he roared, bringing up the fire around him.
“Don't take your eyes off the pumpkin.”
He glanced upwards. If I were to guess what he were seeing, it would be orange. Then it must have been squishy, pulpy, and full of seeds as the legend of the Great Pumpkin met its abrupt and somewhat violent end.
“You bastard!” he spat out a mouthful of pumpkin remains. A slim, feminine hand closed around his wrist. In the moment of pumpkin-related distraction, Amanda had leapt up, bounced off one of the masts, and reached the apex of her arc, right next to the frothing mage.
“Bye,” I waved with my good arm.
“Oh sh-” was all he had time for.
Which left me at the top of the mast of a flying pirate ship, with a dislocated shoulder, bruised ribs, having fallen half a kilometer or so through the sky after being hurtled off a destroyed fortress, and absolutely covered in pumpkin guts. Then a ninja landed on me. If I had to guess, I would say that it was about there that I lost it.
Of course, that's not the point of this story. The point of this story is to explain and give rationale why, two hours later, when a snot-nosed teen who we busted trying to summon the Fathomless Forces of the Ghostly Ensemble to TP his neighbor's house told me that I stank like a rotten pumpkin, I promptly lost my temper and smacked him. I blame it on the pumpkin.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 03:15 am (UTC)Damn pumpkins...though that would explain the unusually high number of smashed gourds around these parts...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 06:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 04:11 am (UTC)He stopped, like he had suddenly been struck in the face. “That's it? All this lead-up to tr and shoot me. With a gun? That's it?”
Suspicion came back. “Wait, what kind of gun?”
“I don't know,” I said, “but it had the word 'orbital' in the name.”
Bloody good show, man. I really did laugh aloud when the Great Pumpkin arrived. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 06:23 am (UTC)I see I left a typo in. I'll fix that now.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 04:27 am (UTC)Great story. I mean...the Great Pumpkin. How do you get cooler than that?
By filling it with ninjas, that's how.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-16 06:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-17 06:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 07:32 pm (UTC)