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One of the most delightful things in the world for Fox right now is the discovery that when she sings, there are colors. Psychedelic-induced synesthesia is absolutely amazing. She took her peyote, turned into a fox for a little bit, ate some ham and pineapple pizza (which she loves, actually, despite it being possibly the least kosher food on the planet, the Sages can come argue with her personally over what rules she has to follow when she's a fox), turned back into a person, took off her shirt because it was itching her, and then ended up wandering off barefoot into the woods, wearing a pair of shorts and her necklace, her phone in her pocket.
Fox is going off into the woods to sing to the trees. Maybe the drugs make her a better singer than usual, because she's not doing badly for herself!
One of the most delightful things in the world for Leta is the discovery that, unlike on the ride up, Fox's singing is... not bad, actually! Tragically, she was unable to break away from work entirely before the trip, and had to bring some of it with her. She has completely forgotten about the world she left back in Philadelphia, and is wandering after Fox - carefree, happy, and filled with pizza - while the woods ebb, flow, and churn around her like an ocean of sensation. Her feet aren't as used to barefoot escapades, so she's still wearing her boots - though (an extreme oddity) she's wearing cuttoff denim shorts, and a purple and black checkered flannel that's half open so she can fully bask in the sunset as it peeks through the trees and tickles her skin. She's clutching tightly to a 10' iron rod in her right hand - because how better to explore the depths of one's mind than with peyote, and Mind?
What could go wrong?
A notification on Fox's phone: a party!
A warehouse affair, a rave, replete with all the attendant visual and aural stimulation one could hope for, promising spine-bumping bass and kaleidoscopic color, with images of young people embodying the PLUR ethos, the thumping purr of drums laced with synthesizers, and swaying neon in the dark.
It's pretty close by. Close enough to even walk.
It interrupts her singing, but then Fox sings along with her notification tone, a little bit of sitar from Jason Mraz's Shine today. (She changes it constantly, because new things are fun.) Fox pauses, pulling out her phone and switching to singing that song instead. "We ain't that different, we huddle underneath the same stars," he sings, while trying to remember how to unlock his phone. It takes him a minute.
But then she gasps, and pap pap pap back to Leta, holding up her phone. "Look!" The phone is thrust up toward the Mastigos. "Let's GO!" For all she knows, her brain is making up this notification, but she doesn't care.
Leta stops and peers at the phone - it takes her a few moments to convince her eyes to focus on it amidst the descent down the rabbit hole, but she gets there in the end. "Oooooh," Leta tiiiilts her head to the side slowly. "That might be fun?" There's a moment's pause as she bites her lip in thought. "Yeah, and I guess Megaman kinda was a cop if you think about it, huh." She reaches behind her back, tucking the rod into her back pocket and underneath her shirt - shivering a bit as the metal touches her skin. What an interesting sensation.
"Where is it? Nearby?"
Despite a few obstacles, some from nature, more from their psychedelic disposition, they can find their way to the warehouse after a short time walking. It's free to get in! How fortunate and normal.
That's very fortunate and normal, as is the fact that Fox is just walking in to a rave barefoot and topless. (That part honestly isn't that unusual, as a former raver, just saying.) "Yeah, I guess. I missed MegaMan as a cultural touchstone, but I trust you." Fox's hand reaches out to grab Leta's, hanging on to her so that when the colors of the music rise up like a wave, they don't carry her away from her partner in psychedelic crime.
"I can hear the voices of nerds crying out in the distance," can she really? Those probably aren't there, right? "They're saying 'Megaman isn't a Cop,' but I would argue that vigilantism is generally... Uhh. Hrrm," Leta loses the train of thought when Fox grabs her hand, and they step inside the Very Fortunate And Normal warehouse rave. She can see the bass coming out of the subwoofers, and distorting the air - almost as clearly as if the sound was a physical thing. This is going to be an exciting event, to be sure...
Inside is dark, but at the same time, strangely bright. Explosively bright. Dazzlingly bright! And all the moreso to minds firing on more cylinders than usual. The bodies undulate like the rolling crest of a wave, breathing at the same time, and far from the untz-untz-untz sometimes expected from such raves, the music is euphorically transcendent, rapturous, mesmerizing, a lullaby on a speedball. The crowd is certainly under a spell, but it's a perfectly mundane one. https://i.imgur.com/B5sexSq.jpg
The music pulses like the beat of a single shared heart, and Fox just ... rolls with it. Not literally rolls with it, or even figuratively in the drug-taking sense -- MDMA is for another weekend -- but she allows herself to get swept away by the sound, which in his mind right now is not just sound but jagged and smooth planes and lines of color intersecting. Rolling and rising, she slides through the crowd, hanging on to Leta's hand tightly, pulling her toward the crowd's center. This is -- in many ways -- the heart of what it means to be an Orphan of Proteus. A rapturous tribal experience, in which it doesn't matter if you're bad at dancing, as long as you do.
Leta steps into the wall of light, and sound, and people -- practically being pulled along by Fox, 'cause she's moving so slowly but -- definitely leaning into it head-first like an old hippie at a Grateful Dead concert who's just here to have a good time and enjoy the vibe. Her skull thrums with each untz, and she enjoys the impressive visual waves as her brain gently sinks down into the vibrations - delightfully melty - like sore muscles to a hot bath.
Leta, clearly, is too entranced by either the sound, the crowd, or Fox's butt to sense anything else. Possibly all three.
It happens at the same time. Their peripheral mage sight detects the application of some supernatural power, flickering for a the breadth of a hummingbird's heartbeat, and there's a boom that is not accounted for by the music, or certainly would have been a strange compositional choice. But no one seems to notice it but Fox.
"... what the fuck was that?" Fox gasps, and turns toward the source of the flash, immediately pushing toward the upstairs office, and -- assuming there are stairs leading toward it -- the foot of the stairs that will get her there. It does not occur to her to straighten out her brain, but she does still hold on to Leta's hand. During her push through the crowd, she hones her form -- or attempts to do so. It's still subtle at this level, but takes her up past the human norms. Time to be Tough. Just... you know. In case.
Leta, still distracted, lets Fox yank her through the crowd. Instinctively, she reaches behind her to ensure that her rod, and phone are still tucked into the back pockets where she left them. She might've been cool with a sojourn through a sea of bodies, but that chill would end very quickly if she discovered that either of her posessions had disappeared. "... the fuck was what?" Leta drags her eyes upwards - to where she can see the sound of Fox's voice eminating. "Why are we running?" Yeah, because walking any faster than a slow crawl feels like running right now.
So enraptured is everyone, bar none, that security just isn't around to stop them. At the top of the stairs, though, the door is locked.
Leta doesn't exactly have the proper tools to pick a lock, but when you're a crafty nerd, anything is possible! She reaches up and yoinks the hairpin from her hair - doing her absolute best to smooth it out into a passable tool for picking a lock. She shifts, holding the iron bar between her legs something something Mastigos + iron rod = phalic symbol something something and instructs Fox to stand between her and the crowd's line of sight before crouching down, and setting to work.
Honestly, it's like she was destined to succeed (she was, apparently) and despite the fact that her world is still roiling, Leta manges to open the lock - letting the door swing wide for Fox. "Ta da!" Oops, maybe that was a little loud.
The lock practically melts underneath Leta's touch and the door slides open. There's an incandescent desk lamp lighting the room from, well, a desk. The room is small, cramped, dim. Exactly what you'd expect to serve as a box away from the crowd for management and production types. But... there's nothing in the room, aside from furniture and papers, a briefcase on the floor with no body to go along with it. It's empty. Right?
She creeps into the room after Leta, frowning. "I ... " she pauses, just inside the door. "I saw something from up here. Something of Time. It was big and strong. Just on the peripheral." The Orphan, drawn onward by the revelation that there's something Weird here, lets go of Leta, dropping to all fours and creeping forward. Her black hair hangs around his face raggedly, scent pulled in sharply through her nose as she creeps toward the briefcase on the floor. This is all very normal behavior that people do all the time.
Mind you, of course, as she does this, Fox's Nimbus flares, bringing with it the scent of petrichor, that feeling like looking into a dog's eyes, the scent of cut grass. It isn't a subtle nimbus, either.
There was a struggle in here, but a short one, and someone very clearly overpowered the other. There's a smudge in the dust where a piece of furniture, a desk, was pushed across the floor, wrinkles on the pages on the desk where someone gripped hard before getting upset.
"There is a temporal warp," Leta offers in a steady voice. It's difficult to piece together exactly which of the hallucinations before her are the ones she should be seeing -- and which ones are just fucked up relics of the cactus she nommed earlier -- but she gets there in the end, managing to corral her thought-chickens back into the coop. "Umm. There." She points towars the offending spot. Thankfully she can perfectly judge both distance and time, otherwise the shifting reality might really have fucked with those directions.
Just then, a body appears out of fucking nowhere and flops onto the floor, right in the indicated spot. He's in his late fourties. Leta's Time Mage Sight can assess that he has apparently been Temporally Stuttered forward from the moment he died. His final breaths have only just drained out of him, but he is most certainly dead. No injuries are visible.
Fox was going to say something, but then she shrieks and shoves backwards from the space. Good... thing ... there's a very loud rave going on just outside? The scent of death is an unmistakable one, and not just because people tend to shit themselves when they die. Fox lands on his ass, staring at the body, and a low, angry whine rolls out of her throat, an animal sound that runs a line under the fact that people are just another kind of animal. "... Fuck." Hands shaking, she shifts her sight toward the ... composition of the body.
Fox doesn't detect the presence of a bullet; but what she does detect is strange. This man was perfectly healthy. There's no sign of so much as a blocked artery. He was in perfect health. He seems to have dropped dead from the will to live.
"Ahh," Leta says - entirely too calmly for someone that just had a fucking body appear out of thin air in front of her. "That answers the question as to whether or not that happened in meatspace or just inside my head." She creeps a few steps closer - leaning over and peering even harder at the corpse. "Now just how did you get here, my friend? Tell me your secrets..."
Leta can very clearly see the events running back like a movie with the Rewind button :rewind: jammed down. He was in this room, surrounded by other employees, staff, and then suddenly, as if compelled by some strange force, they all left. Every single one, until he was alone, and then another person entered, a man with a face-in-the-crowd visage and don't-look-at-me clothes, though smart and well-kempt.
Their conversation was brief, and then Don't-Look-At-Me had his hand around the now-dead man's throat, dragging him around from the other side of the table and threatening him. But due to the volume of the music, the exact words aren't audible. Only growing sounds of frustration, and then fear, and then a final, snapping moment of rage, the flare of a powerful nimbus, a pop like the sound barrier being broken, and the victim hit the floor.
While this is happening, Fox -- hands still shaking -- digs out her phone from her pocket. There's a single instinct in her with all of this going on, and it's bring the cadre. Specifically, it's Vasha please, right now. Opening her phone, she swallows, unlocks her phone, presses the speed-dial marked 'My Heart.' Puts her other hand over her ear. It's still loud here.
Hopefully the luck-wrapped Acanthus has some reason to be very near to Doylestown right now, for the convenience of all and the player who has been waiting two hours to come play.
He DOES. He's at the Ukrainian American Sports Center down on County Line and Lower State Road, as it happens. Not particularly far from Doylestown, as it happens. Watching a soccer game, drinking, and smoking. The time honored tradition of his people. He checks the phone before poking the answer button and speaking in Ukrainian, because he's completely forgotten himself, "Hello, Krasnaya. I thought you were with what's her face." Because he doesn't know Anthelion's other forms of address.
It winds back again, replays, the audio distorted, deepened, weirdly warped, but the sounds in the background duller; magic is apparently a very intelligent audio separator.
Don't Look At Me: "You bold, bold, arrogant, duplicitous bastard."
[Some of the audio still garbled.]
Don't Look At Me: "Where is it? Did you really think you could possibly get away with this? You eat our crumbs, you do our bidding. You do not steal from us."
[Garbled.]
Dead man: "Go to hell."
At this time, any electrical devices in the room start flashing on. Watches, phones, FitBits, anything electrical, it's turning on and acting out. No fucking reason. Just is.
The background noise is very loud, and Fox doesn't know Forces to filter it out. "I am," she offers, loud over the loudness, though it's somewhat muffled by being in the office. Her voice is shaky, because she went from 'happy fun drugs time' to 'magic murder' real fast. "I'm with Leta. We're at a warehouse party near Doylestown, and... we found... a body. There was a time murder. I need you." Sharp, shaking breaths pulled in. "I can send you our location. Please be lucky. Please be close." Her phone crackles, acting out in time with the other electronic devices.
"So," she begins, (unaware that Fox was just on the phone, because her perception is shot full of holes at the moment) recounting the events as they play for a second time in slow motion. This time, when she reaches the part where the deal goes south, she makes some motions with her hands -- the doofiest hacker on TV's 'CSI: Tripping Balls' -- manipulating the scene so she can hear the words properly. She feels the phone in her back pocket go haywire, and she pats down her butt to fetch the thing. She repeats the words aloud for Fox - exactly as spoken - noting the garbled bits where they would normally be in the conversation.
This is interrupting his soccer with Ukrainians. But he mutters and tosses back the last of his vodka, setting the glass down on the bleachers beside himself. He muffles the phone and says to the gaggle of old heads that took him in, "My friends, I must go. Someone is dead and it might be Putin. I'll let you all know." They all laugh and wish him well, and he puts the phone back to his ear as he plods down the steps to the gravel and heads for the parking lot. "Send me the address, I am always lucky. I am in Horsham. Won't be long." He hangs up and flinkers his car. Which is, of course, a luscious sports car. Because he can. He slides in, buckles in, checks his mirrors, adjusts his shades, presses the ignition, and brings KAZKA blaring over the speakers. He kisses two fingers, taps the icon of a crucified Christ on his dashboard, and peels out heading east for 611.
"I love you, I'll send it right now," Fox offers, because of course she does, before she hangs up the phone. She stays with her back against the wall, struggling with her phone to send the location in a text message, because she's fucking blasted out of her mind and it hasn't occurred to her to not be blasted out of her mind even though she's a fucking Life Master. These are the loops you can into on drugs, kids. Once she sends the text with the Google Maps pin, Fox closes her eyes, and starts taking a few deep breaths to let the music sink down through her body and let her nerves return to something approximating chill. Mind, her composure is normally pretty great... but this is pretty out there, even for the Firebird's Very Farseeker.
It's uncanny how fast Vasha got here. Fate and Time even at low levels make things like stop lights and traffic patterns your absolute bitch. A little Incognito Presence lets you do 120 through red lights right past cop cars without so much as a squint. When he arrives far earlier than anyone has any business arriving anywhere, his car doesn't so much pull up as suddenly become perceived parked in the lot with Vasha himself standing beside it. When some of the partygoers come drifting by screaming 'woo' and offering him a candy necklace, he accepts the necklace and slides it over his head. Might come in handy later. He texts back, "I am here. Surrounded by shrieking college students. Where are you?" Only it's all in cyrillic, because of course. Another passing gaggle offers him more candy, and he winds up with a blow pop. Which he begins sucking on.
A message appears on the screen of Vasha's phone, writing over it like it's being drawn on with a finger. It says Leave. Your Peripheral Mage Sight pings something supernatural being used. At the same time, Leta and Fox are aware of the same in the room they're in. Spirit again.
Leta, oddly enough, seems more at home in the room with the fucking corpse than she did at any point in the crowded club below them. She sneaks a patch of wall next to Fox while they recollect themselves - providing whatever level of physical presence that's requested - but otherwise remaining quiet, taking in the details of the scene when not actively assisting in Chill Out time. Sure, the dancing lights and sounds are probably helping, but she's oddly cogent at the moment, isn't she? "Hmm," her attention snaps back at the ping. "Don't like that."
Oh, hello, there is like, a pretty big boy spirit just chilling in the room in Twilight, watching Leta and Fox like a goddamn meal. Practically vibrating with energy, with electricity, sparks fly off of him(?), the undulating, somewhat shapeless figure of gnashing, whirling lights.
Fox's phone pings, and she opens her eyes, looking down at the screen. Switching her keyboard over to Cyrillic characters, she answers: I'm upstairs in the office. Go inside and across the crowd and up the stairs. There's some sort of Spirit acting here.
She takes a deep breath, tipping her head back, and snarls, the sound resolving into a sharp, high-pitched gekkering, thankfully lost in the noise of the club. One hopes. The snarl resolves into the strange, extra-human language that is the fractional, lost words of High Speech, and if Vasha wasn't sure where Fox was, well, her Nimbus just flared, and it's not a subtle thing, all petrichor and greenery from the office above the warehouse floor. Her green-gold eyes flash in the darkness, catching the lights just so. Human tapetum lucidum do not flash green like that, but right now, Fox's do.
"Oh, shit."
Vasha encounters no obstacles, except for a couple of bold sorors.
If the spirit had a face, it would smile, maw of black and teeth like Christmas tree lights. The Terrible Spark's entire presence seemed to thrum with energy, like a power grid, and the lights flickered as it rose up higher into the air towards the ceiling, aware now that Fox was looking at it.
Vasha ignites another cigarette and loiters beside the entrance to the warehouse, waiting for the crowd to clear and slash or stop staring at him. Once he's beneath their notice, he once more pulls incognito presence over himself using his attainment and heads inside. The crowd parts for him, even though they don't know why, and he has little difficulty weaving his way to the door to the upstairs office. He opens it and slips through, letting it shut behind him and begins heading up to the second floor where all the fun is taking place. It's hard to look cool with a sucker and a cigarette hanging from opposite sides of your mouth, but Vasha manages it somehow. "Hello. Where is dead guy."
"This fuckin' guy," the Mastigos gestures vaguely to the last place she remembered seeing the body before she began manipulating the parameters of her Postcognition. "Somebody must not have been satisfied with the results of his performance review - glad you could join us, by the way, Vasha." Leta sounds way too excited about getting the opprotunity to make a cheesy one-liner - unaware of the actual danger. Her eyes go wide with shock, and she ends the vision immediately. "Holy shit - I have even more bad news. Our killer's-" She's cut off as - rejoining reality - Fox's snarling causes her to nearly leap out of her skin. Y'know, because magic and drugs or whatever.
The thing with predators is that you can't back down when they realize you're looking at them. So... when Vasha comes in, and there's a body in the middle of the floor, Leta doing whatever she's doing, and Fox, wearing only a pair of cut-off shorts and her necklace, holding her phone in one hand and her necklace in the other, rising from the floor and puffing up her chest. Looking at something just over the body, something in the space in the office. Either it's a spirit or Fox is unspeakably high.
She doesn't answer him directly, though, on account of the snarling, the snapping her teeth, and the muttering in High Speech. Puffed up. "There's something here." And then Fox's eyes flash brightly. "Oh, really?" The Spirit Is Known.
The spirit just regards the group for now, but it is terrible to behold there, on the other side of the Gauntlet, a technicolor acid-trip from hell.
Vasha looks down at the body and steps forward to look down at it with a small frown. "Yes. He is dead. Why is this our problem?" He plucks his cigarette from his mouth and leans back and away to tap some ash well clear of the corpse. Another puff is taken of his cancer stick. "What do you need me to do?" He missed everything prior to his arrival, of course. And the presence of a spirit isn't unusual in a place used for drug addled parties. "People keep saying oh shit and not finishing sentences. You are both very bad at exposition." He exhales out his nose, curling smoke up in two billowing plumes.
Leta -- with the speed of an already-excitable person that has done some bigtime fuckin' drugs -- exposits for Vasha, because she is GOOD at exposition, ACTUALLY. "... and what I was trying to say is that Mr. Don't Look at Me," a snarky nickname for their killer. "Was a fucking Seer - and this unlucky fucker wasn't a sleeper." She points to the symbol on the necklace. "First it was just a curiosity, but now it is explicitly our business, I think." There's a momentary pause as she looks up at Fox. Fox can probably handle Fox, right? Fox is a badass, and Leta doesn't fuck with that Spirit shit, so. Hopefully. Then she moves over to the briefcase - immediately thumbing through it. Without gloves. Because drugs.
"Okay, okay." Fox doesn't take her eyes off of the spirit for a minute, but then she straightens up. "It was a time murder. A magic murder of some sort. We came up here because I saw it out of the corner of my eye, that there was Time fuckery." Fox's eyes have always been particularly adroit at seeing when fuckery is afoot, after all. Her pupils are the size of saucers, so she's still high as fuck, mind, but she's trying very hard to explain things. "So we came in here and there wasn't a body, but then there was a body, like, all of a sudden, it fell out of nowhere, and then I felt the Spirit magic happening and so I looked, and what is here is actually fucking huge, it's not just a little baby spirit it's like 'oh ho ho I have a chainsaw now' big, and it likes to fuck with electronics, so, I know how to drain that fucker if I need to, but uh... yeah, it's a magic murder. I don't know what to do. I'm very high. Also this isn't my job. This is actually I think it's your job. To tell me what you need me to do."
This man was killed with a Spirit spell; he was thrown forward with Temporal Stutter at the moment that Fox noticed the flicker; Shield of Chronos was cast on the body as well. He dropped out of the Stutter due to some sort of disruption in the holding of the spell.
"Anthelion. Did you wind back time on the room or on the body? Be specific." Vasha pushes his shades back up his nose and rises from his crouch, reaching behind his back to free his silver plated pistol and ride the slide with a click-clack.
They didn't really think about that whole 'sober yourself up' thing, but when she's handed off the scene to the Guardians, or rather, told Vasha 'tell me what you need,' and he says 'be sober,' that's what Fox does. She doesn't ever turn her back on where that Big Fucking Spirit is, just sort of edges sideways to Leta. It may be rather strange for the Mastigos to be sniffed at by Fox in this particular setting, but that's what happens next: Fox leans to brush his nose against her face, keening familiarly and sounding uncannily foxy in that moment as their Nimbus flares once more, painting the room in petrichor as their bodies attempt to purge the cactus.
Leta looks up from the briefcase and phone she's fussing with just in time to see Fox... be Weird Fox. Fortunately, in her newly sobered state, she resists being equally weird in return - though she does look down at herself, fucking with evidence without gloves, and balk at her own failure to obey basic protocol. "I wound back time on the body - and yes, we butted heads over it. He is aware that we are aware." She delicately places the man's phone down to her left, and begins to button her flannel. Sorry you had to see the tiddies, Vasha. Leta was too high to remember to dress herself properly. "Which is... bad."
"I was a staff officer for the Russian Army and in FSB Intelligence. I have seen tiddies. So. So many tiddies." Vasha says it with his usual dispassionate gravely grumble. Not even tiddies can crack his cool exterior. "Then we must act quickly before our quarry goes to ground. Find something to cover the body with. A blanket, a tarp, anything really. We'll put an incognito presence on it which will take care of safekeeping the body until we can secure the scene and make it secure." Redact it, he means. But one doesn't say such things around the kids. "If you like I can see if the spirit is connected to this in some way. I'll need your help to see through the gauntlet for that, however. But this is a capital violation of the Lex Magica, and I have reason to suspect the individual responsible is a servant of the Lie. If he makes it back to his pylon, we're fucked. So buff yourselves quickly and put some tape over your nipples if you think it matters." He crunches down on his sucker, pulls put the stick, and sticks it behind his ear like a slobbery cigarette and commences chewing his crunchy gum. "There is work to do tonight."
The intense scrutiny on the body has provoked the Terrible Spark, who now no longer seems content to watch. Fox can see him drawing himself up, as if he's taking a breath, prepared to roar.
A feeling of total euphoria washes over all three of them, giving them ecstatic visions, a feeling of communion with the universe, and sensations of total bliss. There is no reason in the world to do anything at all. Everything is so, so beautiful.
It's not like Fox doesn't know what Vasha does with inconvenient bodies. They've been together for over a decade and Fox isn't stupid. Even if she doesn't know the special verbs that the Guardians use for it. "Make it disappear," Fox answers, drily. "Uhh. I don't... think there's a blanket, anywhere, really. Maybe a tarp." She adds, "I'm ... pretty buffed already. And I don't give a shit if that shithead sees my tits. Maybe they'll get distracted." They will probably not. Fox has very small tits. It doesn't matter. "I can help you see across -- " And then there's a wash of ecstacy, and Fox answers, aloud, pointing a finger at where the spirit is, "NO!"
Vasha's empty hand makes a subtle gesture. Guardian mudras are hard to spot. Blink and you'll miss them. He begins a wheeling walk away from Fox and bringing him into a clear line of sight on the spirit. "Krasnaya. If you cannot make my bullets hit this thing, just open the gauntlet and let me unload on the piece of shit. And I still can't see the thing." Despite the situation, he seems generally calm and just sort of waiting matters out.
The gesture of his hand brings about a flare of his nimbus, time warbling and distending around him in a manner that makes most trained mages need a moment to collect their nausea. (-1 wits, composure, and resolve.)
The Thyrsus begins to act -- and then doesn't. It isn't the nausea of Pavlichenko's Nimbus, but a fear that twists her face into something briefly unrecognizable. She shakes, visibly, in a way that Fox normally doesn't, and staggers a half-step back. "Leta. It's coming at our brains," she manages, in a tight, unhappy little voice. It's a sort of prompting thing. A please help.
Sobriety is overrated, right? Why should Leta want to go back to painful, dull reality? Especially when floating, insensate at the edge of pleasure is such an attractive - and viable - alternative? She can't see the spirit, but she can hear Vasha grumbling in his thick accent - Fox's plea for assistance - and there she finds her drive to leave Cloud Nine. With no small exertion, Leta shakes the haze from her brain, dumping the briefcase full of documents, and reaching to grip the iron rod in her back pocket. A gesture, a few words in high speech, and then a flare of indescribable... something radiates outwards from Anthelion's silhouette, leaving those who see it simultaneously awed and overwhelmed -- begging them to seek understanding from the strange reality-warping sensation where there is no understanding to be found.
... but all that weird nimbus shit aside, hey it's easier to think now. Vasha, Fox, and Leta all get Mental Shield and now the Spirit has to clash with Leta every time it targets our minds.(edited)
Her hand closes once more around her necklace, and she snarls, snapping her teeth, spinning around the room and stomping on the ground, reaching to touch both Leta and Vasha as she does. For a moment, she takes her eyes off of the Spirit, but she never turns her back on it, as the High Speech pours out of her mouth and she grants them both the ability to see past the Gauntlet.
The Terrible Spark wound around the room, rising higher towards the vaulted ceiling in this dingy office, above a warehouse rave, while the music still thumped, close and distant at the same time. The lights in the room flickered, any electronic devices on them started to react and misbehave, chirping random sounds, lighting up, vibrating. An arc of electricity crackled from an outlet towards Vasha, melting against his Mage Armor.
With the electricity coursing over and around his mage armor, Vasha slowly walks towards the spirit he can now plainly see, reigning over Twilight like an uncrowned king. The Acanthus lifts his empty hand, making the mudra for Patterning, then Fate, his voice chanting boldly in High Speech. He swings his pistol over his head, crackling it through the electric halo surrounding him, causing a corona of mana to suffuse his pattern. There is a violent flare of temporality that stutters and jerks, showing Vasha taking a hundred actions he has discarded in favor of this one. His empty hand finishes the forms and reaches out into the center of the spirit's form-- were it manifested --and grabs hold of its destiny, the accumulated fabric of a thousand potential threads and reels them back towards himself like a rider bringing a bronco to heel.
"I am Pavlichenko, Second Degree Adept of the Red Guards. It is your will to serve me. Cease your petulant flailing and submit. Do so and I will free you from your binds and let you serve me. Do not and I shall leave you here, remove every device with current from within a mile of this place, and watch you wither and die from the comfort of my sanctum. Choose, spirit."
The chin of the Acanthus juts up proudly as the sparks crackle and fade around him.
The Terrible Spark opens its maw and heaves a bark from its formless chest at Vasily's order, but the magic is good on a spirit's mind as a mortal's, and the flickering of the lights seems to cease its frantic shudders. The big thing almost seems... relieved. It settles back down at head level. But it occasionally wavers, as if it were pulled in two different directions by compulsion, and geas.
The skinny little Thyrsus stares at Pavlichenko as his work is done, and a sort of swooning, delighted look plays over her face. "... fantastic," she sighs. "... I can take care of the body, unless you want it for something," comes her next offer. Her green-gold eyes glitter. It's always nice to watch her cadremates at work. At play. At something.
Anthelion fixes Vasha with a long, very particular look -- probably trying to catch fleeting glimpses of his possible actions in the brief flare of his nimbus. Probably. She breaks her gaze, turning her attention towards The Terrible Spark as she finishes buttoning up her flannel. Top button included. "Yeeeessssh," her face scrunches up as she peers at the spirit, and then the twiggy Mastigos turns back to gatherting up the scattered documents, the discarded phone, and the briefcase. "Seers. Spirits. Corpses." Beat. "I knew I couldn't take a weekend without work following me out of town."
She, of course, doesn't actually sound bitter, or disappointed about this...(edited)
"Communicate to me who bound you to this place. Show me." Vasha taps his head meaningfully with his free hand. "Tell me what you know of this man and this murder." He gestures to the corpse with his pistol. "And tell me what your instructions were when we came upon you." He already knows the nimbus of the one responsible. Having a name or a description to put to it would be even better. Vasha, presumptive in his conquest, begins to unscrew the silencer from his pistol. Sparky wouldn't dare harm him now.
The Terrible Spark expands and contracts in what could be a sigh, had it breath to breathe, lungs to fill and empty. Vasha's phone will light up, a text field opens. The "From" is garbled nonsense. A message comes in.
I know him not. He used his magic to summon me, and to bind me to his will, and commanded me to guard this place. I saw no murder. I was with the revelers until I was fettered. I learned of it only when I arrived. The willworker profaned my form, and has made me unlike myself. My umia will never have me now.
This realization seemed to make the spirit shudder.
Vasha reaches for his phone when it beeps. It makes sense the creature would communicate through it. "I am very sorry, Spirit. But I do not believe the changes that were made to your form are permanent. They will fade away. For now, I can release you from your fetters. You may feed on essence from among the party goers so long as you do not harm them. I will give you coordinates to a safe place to go from here if you cannot find sustenance or safety. You may stay there until these changes pass. I will check on you periodically and make certain you have the essence you need to survive. What rank are you when you are as you are meant to be?" Vasha slides his silencer back into his suit jacket, but keeps hold of the pistol. Once more his hands begin to form Mudras. He asides to Fox, "The body should remain. It is both evidence and, I believe, a Proximus. The Silver Ladder will know more, no doubt." This time, Vasha's magic severs the binding of the spirit's fetters. Freeing it, as promised.
Fox carefully shifts her weight from one foot to the other, waiting for the word from Vasha, listening to the spirit speak and frowning mildly. She absently tugs on the waistband of her jean shorts, and still hasn't seemed to either notice or care that she's topless -- it's pretty much Just Another Day where Fox is concerned. "Hmm," Fox agrees quietly. "Well. Then how do we get it out of here? And if you say 'Weekend at Bernie's' I will make a face at you."
Another message.
As I am when I am myself, I am a Greater Gaffling.
Another sigh-like affectation rolls through the Terrible Spark's form. Its relief at being free from the geas is still met with the disappointment of being in a form it did not identify with, but it seems compliant with the fetters now broken, and it buzzes like a power grid.
"We could just carry it out with us," Leta mutters as she continues to ruffle with the victim's belongings. She scans the room one last time. "No need to pretend he's alive if no one can remember seeing him." Satisfied, she tucks the iron rod back into her back pocket. "... but there is a window we could exit though if you'd like to avoid having to carry a corpse."
She only looks a little bit ridiculous with her messed up hair, flannel buttoned all the way up, denim cuttoff shorts, and a brief case.
"... and I, for one, would be delighted if we put sunglasses on him anyway."
"I will not ask you to expend further essence. There is a house at these coordinates. No doubt you can read technology and find your way there." Vasha zooms in on the city's GIS for property records and shows the GPS coordinates for a home in West Philadelphia. Where the Guardians have many of their safe houses. "Go here. If you choose not to, very well. We part ways, and your transgressions against us are forgiven. It was not your will in action, here. But if you choose to do so, I will keep my promise to you."
The conversation regarding the body has Vasha slowly turning his head towards Leta, his head slowly canting to the side like a cat that's found a mouse. He points his pistol down at the body and says with uncharacteristic vehemence, "That man is a casualty of war. He died defying the Iron Pyramid. We will not debase his sacrifice with jokes." The last word is hissed, and loudly. Mind you Vasha was joking when he first arrived. So there is no small amount of hypocrisy at play, here. But that was before he knew the story.
The Terrible Spark meditates a moment on the coordinates, and then it disappears beyond the reaches of the room.
There's a very soft scoff, and Anthelion turns to look up at Vasha - quirking an eyebrow at his comment. "An interesting place to draw the line, I suppose. One would think that how this man died shouldn't have bearing on whether or not we crack jokes about puppeting his corpse through a crowded rave, but." Beat. "If these documents are to believed, he was a bastard - and I hope that people won't feel the need to curb their humor if -- and when -- I die." Then she shrugs, fetching her casting tool. Again. Who knows why she even put it away in the first place.
Rather than joining in the discussion, Fox's potentia expends from their fingers, and they wrap the room in Matter magic -- or rather -- they wrap themself, the body, their compatriots -- with a side dish of High Speech and another of animalistic snarling, then comment, as though the other conversations are not going on at all: "So we're invisible to electronics for the rest of the scene. Sorry about your touch screens hating you until I drop this effect. Can we get out of here now?"
With a few gestures, some muttered words in High Speech, and another stomach-turning flare of the Mastigos's odd, reality-warping nimbus, Leta wraps the party and their new -- and very unfortunate -- friend in a mental cloak that ought to last for... however the fuck long they need to get it out of this scene. Stealth mode activated.
"Wipe your friends off your face a few times and we'll see if you remain so cavalier," is Vasha's response to Leta. Whatever that means. He doublechecks the scene for a moment, making sure his memory gets all the angles, then stoops down to hoist the body up into his arms. "Gather the rest of the evidence. The brief case, the files, whatever else there may be. We'll take the body to the Consilium. It is now our duty to report the crime to the Sentinels and ask the Cryptovoskoi if they know this one."
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