The Dogs of War
Apr. 10th, 2005 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianTurned out ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nadriel got out of his tournament early and was able to turn up for Mage after all, just a little late. That worked out perfectly for what I had in mind, though I wish I'd known before I left the house, so I could bring more books and stats. Oh well, never mind.
It was late, and they were tired, but the SBB had to head from the little town (probably in the area of Wolverhampton and I know the pun is ridiculous but it's the right sort of area) to Manchester to try to stop the impending war between House Thig and House Flambeau. Kuo-Li took a pit stop in the Gallery, as did Skank -- Skank saw Beep, sober and serious-looking, talking to a bunch of people. Kuo-Li, on the other hand, went to check on Llandeilo and saw that it was looking kind of out of focus. Then he went to check on Sarah and saw something being mauled by what looked like a mountain lion. So Kuo-Li just took off, running out of the Gallery and to the nearest farmhouse door. He painted some Chinese characters on the door frame, told Lucius that he was going to "take care of things" and left without another word.
He arrived in Llandeilo and the first place he went was the spot where the mountain lion was mauling the something. He didn't see Sarah or a mountain lion, but he did see the corpse of a hellhound, its throat torn out. So he went into town, checked the King's Nose for Sarah -- she wasn't on bar duty that day, and the town felt just plain wrong somehow; sad. So he went to talk to the mayor and found out that Sarah had been on bar duty the day before, and that there had been a funeral recently; Alice Farrell had passed away during the time the group had been gone. This was not good news, particularly considering he was pretty sure how Alice had died. So he just sucked it up and went back to the group.
The group, at that point, had its own things to do. Skank was waking up the spirit of his new sniper rifle -- it turned out to be a spitting cobra in the umbra. Lucius, meanwhile, was considering talking to the boys, but in the end he couldn't bring himself to pull them out of their sulk. Then they both conked out through sheer exhaustion. Michelle woke Lucius up enough to use Life on himself to wake him up a little, then worked her own brand of mojo on Skank to set him right. He then set about sending messenger spirits to Lucille, to ask where House Flambeau might be hanging out (Liverpool or Burkina Faso were the two main choices), and to Beep, to request that the dumb fuck wait before he did anything. The first two went to Lucille, passed a few messages back and forth between Lucille and Skank. The latter two, however, came back meeping and hid in Skank's shirt, where they tickled like mad. Rae, the apparently mute Correspondence/Life mage who worked with them on the Black Spiral Dancer problem, handed them something that turned out to be her own special interpretation of lambas bread. And then Kuo-Li came back, broke all the news, twitched about the Sarah thing and Skank, who needed to drive, shoved the stupid little furballs at Kuo-Li, who was also tickled insanely but had enough Concentration to ignore it. They decided to take Kim along with them because she's the one who actually saw the Technocrat meeting where they talked about their plans to take down the Traditions one by one, which was fun because Kim, between the Convivium and the BSDs, was kind of insane. They did eventually bundle her into the bus and off they went, the Battle Bus leading and Lucius's Mercedes behind.
At which point, Lucius realised that Skank was going the wrong way. He tried to call up little spirit messenger fuzzballs to tell Skank this, botched and drove Five-Spice insane -- the rat-spirit just went all ballistic and attacked Lucius' head ("I'm going to claw your head off! Because I don't like your head!"). At which point he crashed the car into a lamp post, and Skank stopped to find out what was going on. Lucius delivered his message and then asked Michelle to fix the bodywork on the Mercedes. Michelle got a little bit pissed off at being called in for auto repair work and then turned Lucius into a cat for the duration of the long, gruelling Matter magic casting. Lucius, now a Yuki-like (small grey cat with white feet and bib), sucked up to Skank abysmally until Loofah attacked him and baffed him around lots. Skank eventually had to call Molly in to disengage Loofah from Lucius-kitty. At which point Lucius crawled into Skank's shirt and started tickling the tickly-Thig with his tail ... so when Michelle came back, she turned Lucius back into a human at about this point, and Lucius wound up grinding his very human butt against Skank's groin. It was altogether embarrassing, compounded when Lucius went to see the bodywork on the Mercedes and found out that she had indeed fixed all the dents but had turned the car bright pink in the bargain. All in all, it was amusement in the extreme.
When they got nearer to Manchester, it was an evident war zone. Fires, corpses, looting, the works. Evidently they had come too late and the fight had come to Thig. In the end, they got to a certain point and hit a roadblock manned by someone who turned out to be a teenaged Chorister with a gun -- the Celestial Chorus was trying to do damage control by barricading the area to keep the war zone contained. Lucius did a very good bit of Entropy and the next time the kid shot at Skank, the gun fell apart. Between the shotgun that came out after that, the confusion that took place when the Chorister mentioned Tytalans and the massive Prime/Forces ward on the place, they weren't going anywhere until Marco Tratelli found someone in authority to sort it all out. At which point, Skank went to kick the crap out of cars for awhile and Kuo-Li and Lucius got into one of their typical discussions. Molly, meanwhile, just decided to drain the Prime out of the ward to take it down. She managed after a prolonged ritual and a little help from friends, and wound up with a shitload of Quintessence to show for it. At around that point, Marco turned up with some powerful Chorister and the gang just walked on by. Spirit scouts were sent out and they discovered that Merrick "Mr Touchy Man" Archbold was around somewhere that smelled of fermented fruit and grain -- a pub sort of place. Apparently, he'd holed up in the Student Union.
The Student Union was a total bloodbath. The downstairs bar was a whole lot of yick, and they found actual corpses in the shop -- one of them wore a small diamond around his neck and, since it wasn't a typical male item of jewellery, Skank pegged it (correctly, as it turned out) as a mark of his being one of the Diamond Children, a subsect of House Thig. Another they recognised as someone who sat next to Molly at the first Convivium banquet, and since one of them was a female of House Shaea, they reasoned that he was the House Flambeau representative. So the Flambeau people were fighting there, but they had no idea where Tytalus fit in, unless they were the ones who'd stirred up that particular hornet's nest. They started heading upstairs and then a very powerful Mind command hit them, telling them to go downstairs and walk straight out; none of them could resist but Molly, who used Forces to make Skank put her down and let them leave without her. Then the doors shut behind them and it took a lot of work in both door-kicking and Prime-siphoning to get the doors and wards down -- while they were doing that, there was foom from upstairs and they figured Molly had engaged somebody in combat. Once they got the doors down, Lucius and Kuo-Li did a shared Mind rote to turn the Mind tagging in the stairwell around to hurt the one who'd cast it. Then they barrelled up the stairs to beat the living hell out of Merrick Archbold.
They found a scorched Archbold and an equally scorched Molly battling it out; he got distracted and damaged, and Molly hit him in the head with the foom-stick. At which point, a bunch of Flambeau representatives came in, pegged Skank as Thig and threw a fireball at him, getting him in the shoulder. Molly, with Quintessence to burn, threw up a barrier to deflect the rest. Kuo-Li used the window of time to send a Mind-cast to the lead Flambeau guy, who apparently thought Kuo-Li was having him on or trying to confuse him, so kept throwing fireballs -- typical Flambeau behaviour. So they grabbed Molly, grabbed Archbold and booked, going out the back way because Molly's shield closed off the main exit. When they got out, they had to fight a homunculus who was attacking Michelle, Romulus, Remus and Kim, but they took it down in short order despite the fact that it cracked a few of Lucius' ribs. Then they healed him up, piled into the bus and left. They eventually had to stop and get some sleep, but from then they headed pretty much straight for Llandeilo and Bokugo -- home sweet home at last.
They stopped in Dolgellau to eat something (Five-Spice had had most of the lambas bread, and learned a new word -- "keki") and walked into an all-out bar brawl -- just normal thugs duking it out with normal patrons. Skank bullied his way to the bar and Kuo-Li used a Mind/Entropy rote to dodge his way through. When Skank was talking to one of the barmaids, one of the thugs accidentally hit him in the head with a bar stool and he decided to have a ... discussion with the thug, who didn't seem to like newcomers very much. When conversation didn't work, Skank spat whiskey in the man's face and pulled a lighter -- I thought he was going to light the thug's face on fire but instead used a Forces rote to try to push him away. Didn't take, and the thug punched Skank. He and Kuo-Li made short work of two of the thugs, Molly sicced a jinx goblin on a third (first he fell through a 'weak spot' in the floor, then ran out of the cellar being chased by what were probably wall wasps but screaming "Bees! Bees! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!") and Kuo-Li dropped the fourth. Turned out that the owners of this bar were a couple of mages (at least one of them was a Euthanatos) -- Laurel and Willow -- and that bunch of yahoos came in about once a month, kicked a little patron arse and then behaved for another month. They had a good lunch and when Molly asked for sushi, she started waving calamari in Skan's face and asking what it was. Lucius called it "Cthulu" and got Molly curious about the Great Old Ones, so she went to do research. Thankfully, she got derailed and instead of summoning Cthulu, Nyarlahotep or Azazoth, she summoned the Endless instead. Lucius and Kuo-Li got another view of past lives (WWII, Pacific Theatre, Lucius as torturer of a Japanese POW Kuo-Li who Awakened under the stress and administered the Kick of the Four Winds, taking that Lucius' head clean off), Lucius had a conversation with Death, they all met Delirium and Molly tried to cheer up Despair. It was fun.
Someone's building and renovating the old Technocracy watch factory, and there are tents set up on the borders of Bokugo territory. They didn't have the energy to deal with it until morning, though; after nearly three days awake, they were all wiped. Next morning, they gratefully went back to their old routines -- Lucius on the roof doing his sword kata (and Remus doing acrobatics on the roof; real show-off, that kid), Skank doing his howl-a-thon Prime-raise and Molly doing experiments -- this time she's trying to raise war-gods to ask one to make the Order of Hermes knock it off already. It didn't quite work out so we got the first of many utterances of "I think I know what I did wrong!" Skank then did some levitation to get an aerial view of Bokugo, stopping on the way to visit Kim on the roof (she cannot fly, she should take note). He noted that, despite the tents that had been set up for days, there was no campfire to speak of. He tried X-ray vision but botched and had "magic naked mojo vision" for awhile. So he went down to the tents to check it more closely, but didn't get to do anything of the kind because Kuo-Li and Lucius went down at the same time and the whole magic naked mojo vision thing got him giggling uncontrollably for awhile. Eventually, he calmed down and they noted that there was gear in the tents but none of it was unpacked. A little nonplussed, they searched for Prime signatures but only found vague ones way out in the forest. Instead of investigating further, they decided to go about their day. So they gathered the trade goods and went into town.
When they got in, they all felt the nasty sadness weighing down on them. Spirit sight revealed Alice's spirit hanging about; they tried talking to her but all she could do was pantomine. When they asked how she died, she rubbed her neck; she nodded when asked if it was her stepmother. Then she gestured to Molly, who stepped forward and watched Alice look at her and tick off her fingers. Then Molly sent her off "someplace nice" and went down into the cellar of the King's Nose. Skank went to talk to her and Molly told him that Alice was saying that she wasn't the only one -- that a lot of children in Llandeilo were being fed on. Lucius, deciding that he'd probably only say something stupid to the obviously upset Molly, took the boys on a tour of the town, did the trading and got some new clothes both for himself and the boys. Kuo-Li talked to Sarah, who told him nothing was wrong, evaded all his questions, seemed to have a minor injury somewhere on her back and asked him on a date, which he accepted. They stopped for lunch, exchanged bits of info and Kuo-Li snuck Chloe's little button box thing that Fliss gave her back at the Convivium -- the spy-trinket. Then they did the rest of the shopping -- chew-toys for Five-Spice and catnip ferrets for Loofah, meat from the new butcher in town and other sundries -- before Skank, Lucius, Molly and the twins went home and left Kuo-Li to go on his date.
They had a good dinner, a very good bottle of wine and then Sarah asked Kuo-Li if he wanted to go for a walk. He said yes, they went for a walk in the forested region holding hands. Then Kuo-Li heard a noise in the bushes and out came a hellhound -- a warg. Kuo-Li told Sarah to run and she did, but the warg got the jump on Kuo-Li and bit him hard on the shoulder. Kuo-Li was about to strike but the warg got bowled off him by a large mountain lion, who rolled the warg off into the bushes and bit its throat out, getting a good scratch to the shoulder in the bargain. Kuo-Li needed a minute to get up and collect himself, then searched for Sarah's mind. It faded in like a radio signal and he followed it, but when he got to where he'd found it, he didn't find Sarah; just some blood, some candles, a sigil on the ground and symbols carved into the trees. He kept looking but she found him, missing a shoe, bleeding from one shoulder and carrying a large tree branch as a potential bludgeon. She said it was probably thorn bushes that had done her shoulder in, then called him an idiot for doing the whole hero thing and letting himself be attacked that way. Then she kissed him, and a whole lot more. So now he's had his first shag in a millennium. Wow.
Meanwhile, Skank and Lucius were having visitors -- the house identified them as a mage, a lupine and an "unidentified non-standard spirit signature". The mage was a Japanese woman who identified herself as "Miyamoto Kaede"; there was a burly blond guy who identified himself as "Fett" and growled at the mention of Black Spiral Dancers, so obviously the lupine; the unidentified spirit signature was apparently attached to a Native American-looking guy who gave no name. They were there because of the box, and there to eliminate "Sabine Cardona" -- but there had to be pain and torture for the vampire. Given Alice's death and half the kids in town being 'ill', they had no problem with that. So they arranged a breakfast meeting with Miyamoto-san, Fett, the silent one and the rest of their band (as yet not arrived) and the new arrivals went to their tents -- Correspondence and Time enough ensured that they got their stuff there with minimal fuss and in good time.
Kuo-Li eventually came back and told them the situation with the warg, the mountain lion and the occult sigils etc, showing them a drawing he did. It came out that these were symbols linked to static magic, commonly used for shape-changing. Turns out Sarah's secret is that she's a sorceror ... and there's only one other 'person' who can use static magic in town that they know of. That would be Sabine, who scryed out Susanna that one time. So they don't know if Sarah taught Sabine or the other way around, but either way there's a possible connection between the two that's going to make things a little bit more interesting. So Kuo-Li gets on the angst-wagon after all.
Tired, but not sleepy really. Going to dick around with the Sims some before bed, I think. Then tomorrow, packing. Less than a week before I move. Agh!
nadriel got out of his tournament early and was able to turn up for Mage after all, just a little late. That worked out perfectly for what I had in mind, though I wish I'd known before I left the house, so I could bring more books and stats. Oh well, never mind. It was late, and they were tired, but the SBB had to head from the little town (probably in the area of Wolverhampton and I know the pun is ridiculous but it's the right sort of area) to Manchester to try to stop the impending war between House Thig and House Flambeau. Kuo-Li took a pit stop in the Gallery, as did Skank -- Skank saw Beep, sober and serious-looking, talking to a bunch of people. Kuo-Li, on the other hand, went to check on Llandeilo and saw that it was looking kind of out of focus. Then he went to check on Sarah and saw something being mauled by what looked like a mountain lion. So Kuo-Li just took off, running out of the Gallery and to the nearest farmhouse door. He painted some Chinese characters on the door frame, told Lucius that he was going to "take care of things" and left without another word.
He arrived in Llandeilo and the first place he went was the spot where the mountain lion was mauling the something. He didn't see Sarah or a mountain lion, but he did see the corpse of a hellhound, its throat torn out. So he went into town, checked the King's Nose for Sarah -- she wasn't on bar duty that day, and the town felt just plain wrong somehow; sad. So he went to talk to the mayor and found out that Sarah had been on bar duty the day before, and that there had been a funeral recently; Alice Farrell had passed away during the time the group had been gone. This was not good news, particularly considering he was pretty sure how Alice had died. So he just sucked it up and went back to the group.
The group, at that point, had its own things to do. Skank was waking up the spirit of his new sniper rifle -- it turned out to be a spitting cobra in the umbra. Lucius, meanwhile, was considering talking to the boys, but in the end he couldn't bring himself to pull them out of their sulk. Then they both conked out through sheer exhaustion. Michelle woke Lucius up enough to use Life on himself to wake him up a little, then worked her own brand of mojo on Skank to set him right. He then set about sending messenger spirits to Lucille, to ask where House Flambeau might be hanging out (Liverpool or Burkina Faso were the two main choices), and to Beep, to request that the dumb fuck wait before he did anything. The first two went to Lucille, passed a few messages back and forth between Lucille and Skank. The latter two, however, came back meeping and hid in Skank's shirt, where they tickled like mad. Rae, the apparently mute Correspondence/Life mage who worked with them on the Black Spiral Dancer problem, handed them something that turned out to be her own special interpretation of lambas bread. And then Kuo-Li came back, broke all the news, twitched about the Sarah thing and Skank, who needed to drive, shoved the stupid little furballs at Kuo-Li, who was also tickled insanely but had enough Concentration to ignore it. They decided to take Kim along with them because she's the one who actually saw the Technocrat meeting where they talked about their plans to take down the Traditions one by one, which was fun because Kim, between the Convivium and the BSDs, was kind of insane. They did eventually bundle her into the bus and off they went, the Battle Bus leading and Lucius's Mercedes behind.
At which point, Lucius realised that Skank was going the wrong way. He tried to call up little spirit messenger fuzzballs to tell Skank this, botched and drove Five-Spice insane -- the rat-spirit just went all ballistic and attacked Lucius' head ("I'm going to claw your head off! Because I don't like your head!"). At which point he crashed the car into a lamp post, and Skank stopped to find out what was going on. Lucius delivered his message and then asked Michelle to fix the bodywork on the Mercedes. Michelle got a little bit pissed off at being called in for auto repair work and then turned Lucius into a cat for the duration of the long, gruelling Matter magic casting. Lucius, now a Yuki-like (small grey cat with white feet and bib), sucked up to Skank abysmally until Loofah attacked him and baffed him around lots. Skank eventually had to call Molly in to disengage Loofah from Lucius-kitty. At which point Lucius crawled into Skank's shirt and started tickling the tickly-Thig with his tail ... so when Michelle came back, she turned Lucius back into a human at about this point, and Lucius wound up grinding his very human butt against Skank's groin. It was altogether embarrassing, compounded when Lucius went to see the bodywork on the Mercedes and found out that she had indeed fixed all the dents but had turned the car bright pink in the bargain. All in all, it was amusement in the extreme.
When they got nearer to Manchester, it was an evident war zone. Fires, corpses, looting, the works. Evidently they had come too late and the fight had come to Thig. In the end, they got to a certain point and hit a roadblock manned by someone who turned out to be a teenaged Chorister with a gun -- the Celestial Chorus was trying to do damage control by barricading the area to keep the war zone contained. Lucius did a very good bit of Entropy and the next time the kid shot at Skank, the gun fell apart. Between the shotgun that came out after that, the confusion that took place when the Chorister mentioned Tytalans and the massive Prime/Forces ward on the place, they weren't going anywhere until Marco Tratelli found someone in authority to sort it all out. At which point, Skank went to kick the crap out of cars for awhile and Kuo-Li and Lucius got into one of their typical discussions. Molly, meanwhile, just decided to drain the Prime out of the ward to take it down. She managed after a prolonged ritual and a little help from friends, and wound up with a shitload of Quintessence to show for it. At around that point, Marco turned up with some powerful Chorister and the gang just walked on by. Spirit scouts were sent out and they discovered that Merrick "Mr Touchy Man" Archbold was around somewhere that smelled of fermented fruit and grain -- a pub sort of place. Apparently, he'd holed up in the Student Union.
The Student Union was a total bloodbath. The downstairs bar was a whole lot of yick, and they found actual corpses in the shop -- one of them wore a small diamond around his neck and, since it wasn't a typical male item of jewellery, Skank pegged it (correctly, as it turned out) as a mark of his being one of the Diamond Children, a subsect of House Thig. Another they recognised as someone who sat next to Molly at the first Convivium banquet, and since one of them was a female of House Shaea, they reasoned that he was the House Flambeau representative. So the Flambeau people were fighting there, but they had no idea where Tytalus fit in, unless they were the ones who'd stirred up that particular hornet's nest. They started heading upstairs and then a very powerful Mind command hit them, telling them to go downstairs and walk straight out; none of them could resist but Molly, who used Forces to make Skank put her down and let them leave without her. Then the doors shut behind them and it took a lot of work in both door-kicking and Prime-siphoning to get the doors and wards down -- while they were doing that, there was foom from upstairs and they figured Molly had engaged somebody in combat. Once they got the doors down, Lucius and Kuo-Li did a shared Mind rote to turn the Mind tagging in the stairwell around to hurt the one who'd cast it. Then they barrelled up the stairs to beat the living hell out of Merrick Archbold.
They found a scorched Archbold and an equally scorched Molly battling it out; he got distracted and damaged, and Molly hit him in the head with the foom-stick. At which point, a bunch of Flambeau representatives came in, pegged Skank as Thig and threw a fireball at him, getting him in the shoulder. Molly, with Quintessence to burn, threw up a barrier to deflect the rest. Kuo-Li used the window of time to send a Mind-cast to the lead Flambeau guy, who apparently thought Kuo-Li was having him on or trying to confuse him, so kept throwing fireballs -- typical Flambeau behaviour. So they grabbed Molly, grabbed Archbold and booked, going out the back way because Molly's shield closed off the main exit. When they got out, they had to fight a homunculus who was attacking Michelle, Romulus, Remus and Kim, but they took it down in short order despite the fact that it cracked a few of Lucius' ribs. Then they healed him up, piled into the bus and left. They eventually had to stop and get some sleep, but from then they headed pretty much straight for Llandeilo and Bokugo -- home sweet home at last.
They stopped in Dolgellau to eat something (Five-Spice had had most of the lambas bread, and learned a new word -- "keki") and walked into an all-out bar brawl -- just normal thugs duking it out with normal patrons. Skank bullied his way to the bar and Kuo-Li used a Mind/Entropy rote to dodge his way through. When Skank was talking to one of the barmaids, one of the thugs accidentally hit him in the head with a bar stool and he decided to have a ... discussion with the thug, who didn't seem to like newcomers very much. When conversation didn't work, Skank spat whiskey in the man's face and pulled a lighter -- I thought he was going to light the thug's face on fire but instead used a Forces rote to try to push him away. Didn't take, and the thug punched Skank. He and Kuo-Li made short work of two of the thugs, Molly sicced a jinx goblin on a third (first he fell through a 'weak spot' in the floor, then ran out of the cellar being chased by what were probably wall wasps but screaming "Bees! Bees! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!") and Kuo-Li dropped the fourth. Turned out that the owners of this bar were a couple of mages (at least one of them was a Euthanatos) -- Laurel and Willow -- and that bunch of yahoos came in about once a month, kicked a little patron arse and then behaved for another month. They had a good lunch and when Molly asked for sushi, she started waving calamari in Skan's face and asking what it was. Lucius called it "Cthulu" and got Molly curious about the Great Old Ones, so she went to do research. Thankfully, she got derailed and instead of summoning Cthulu, Nyarlahotep or Azazoth, she summoned the Endless instead. Lucius and Kuo-Li got another view of past lives (WWII, Pacific Theatre, Lucius as torturer of a Japanese POW Kuo-Li who Awakened under the stress and administered the Kick of the Four Winds, taking that Lucius' head clean off), Lucius had a conversation with Death, they all met Delirium and Molly tried to cheer up Despair. It was fun.
Someone's building and renovating the old Technocracy watch factory, and there are tents set up on the borders of Bokugo territory. They didn't have the energy to deal with it until morning, though; after nearly three days awake, they were all wiped. Next morning, they gratefully went back to their old routines -- Lucius on the roof doing his sword kata (and Remus doing acrobatics on the roof; real show-off, that kid), Skank doing his howl-a-thon Prime-raise and Molly doing experiments -- this time she's trying to raise war-gods to ask one to make the Order of Hermes knock it off already. It didn't quite work out so we got the first of many utterances of "I think I know what I did wrong!" Skank then did some levitation to get an aerial view of Bokugo, stopping on the way to visit Kim on the roof (she cannot fly, she should take note). He noted that, despite the tents that had been set up for days, there was no campfire to speak of. He tried X-ray vision but botched and had "magic naked mojo vision" for awhile. So he went down to the tents to check it more closely, but didn't get to do anything of the kind because Kuo-Li and Lucius went down at the same time and the whole magic naked mojo vision thing got him giggling uncontrollably for awhile. Eventually, he calmed down and they noted that there was gear in the tents but none of it was unpacked. A little nonplussed, they searched for Prime signatures but only found vague ones way out in the forest. Instead of investigating further, they decided to go about their day. So they gathered the trade goods and went into town.
When they got in, they all felt the nasty sadness weighing down on them. Spirit sight revealed Alice's spirit hanging about; they tried talking to her but all she could do was pantomine. When they asked how she died, she rubbed her neck; she nodded when asked if it was her stepmother. Then she gestured to Molly, who stepped forward and watched Alice look at her and tick off her fingers. Then Molly sent her off "someplace nice" and went down into the cellar of the King's Nose. Skank went to talk to her and Molly told him that Alice was saying that she wasn't the only one -- that a lot of children in Llandeilo were being fed on. Lucius, deciding that he'd probably only say something stupid to the obviously upset Molly, took the boys on a tour of the town, did the trading and got some new clothes both for himself and the boys. Kuo-Li talked to Sarah, who told him nothing was wrong, evaded all his questions, seemed to have a minor injury somewhere on her back and asked him on a date, which he accepted. They stopped for lunch, exchanged bits of info and Kuo-Li snuck Chloe's little button box thing that Fliss gave her back at the Convivium -- the spy-trinket. Then they did the rest of the shopping -- chew-toys for Five-Spice and catnip ferrets for Loofah, meat from the new butcher in town and other sundries -- before Skank, Lucius, Molly and the twins went home and left Kuo-Li to go on his date.
They had a good dinner, a very good bottle of wine and then Sarah asked Kuo-Li if he wanted to go for a walk. He said yes, they went for a walk in the forested region holding hands. Then Kuo-Li heard a noise in the bushes and out came a hellhound -- a warg. Kuo-Li told Sarah to run and she did, but the warg got the jump on Kuo-Li and bit him hard on the shoulder. Kuo-Li was about to strike but the warg got bowled off him by a large mountain lion, who rolled the warg off into the bushes and bit its throat out, getting a good scratch to the shoulder in the bargain. Kuo-Li needed a minute to get up and collect himself, then searched for Sarah's mind. It faded in like a radio signal and he followed it, but when he got to where he'd found it, he didn't find Sarah; just some blood, some candles, a sigil on the ground and symbols carved into the trees. He kept looking but she found him, missing a shoe, bleeding from one shoulder and carrying a large tree branch as a potential bludgeon. She said it was probably thorn bushes that had done her shoulder in, then called him an idiot for doing the whole hero thing and letting himself be attacked that way. Then she kissed him, and a whole lot more. So now he's had his first shag in a millennium. Wow.
Meanwhile, Skank and Lucius were having visitors -- the house identified them as a mage, a lupine and an "unidentified non-standard spirit signature". The mage was a Japanese woman who identified herself as "Miyamoto Kaede"; there was a burly blond guy who identified himself as "Fett" and growled at the mention of Black Spiral Dancers, so obviously the lupine; the unidentified spirit signature was apparently attached to a Native American-looking guy who gave no name. They were there because of the box, and there to eliminate "Sabine Cardona" -- but there had to be pain and torture for the vampire. Given Alice's death and half the kids in town being 'ill', they had no problem with that. So they arranged a breakfast meeting with Miyamoto-san, Fett, the silent one and the rest of their band (as yet not arrived) and the new arrivals went to their tents -- Correspondence and Time enough ensured that they got their stuff there with minimal fuss and in good time.
Kuo-Li eventually came back and told them the situation with the warg, the mountain lion and the occult sigils etc, showing them a drawing he did. It came out that these were symbols linked to static magic, commonly used for shape-changing. Turns out Sarah's secret is that she's a sorceror ... and there's only one other 'person' who can use static magic in town that they know of. That would be Sabine, who scryed out Susanna that one time. So they don't know if Sarah taught Sabine or the other way around, but either way there's a possible connection between the two that's going to make things a little bit more interesting. So Kuo-Li gets on the angst-wagon after all.
Tired, but not sleepy really. Going to dick around with the Sims some before bed, I think. Then tomorrow, packing. Less than a week before I move. Agh!