NaNo Project: Chapter Seven

[thessalian]

Carl and Annette met up with Mike outside a back-street cheese shop somewhere in an unconsidered end of Soho. Upon catching sight of the two of them, Mike actually forgot about using his camera for once, settling for simply staring at the pair of them and asking, in a slightly horrified squeak, “What happened to you two?”

“Arse-Rape Me Elmo and the Hannah fuckin' Montana squad, that's what bloody well happened to us two. Now shut the hell up and tell us where the fuck the others are, okay?”

“They were at home,” Mike replied. “They're on their way but there was something about problems on the Northern Line...”

“Fuckin' gremlins,” snarled Carl. “They weren't supposed to pull that shite until next week! Does no fucker respect a gods-damned schedule anymore?”

Mike raised an eyebrow and fixed Carl with a very suspicious look. “Wait. That stuff is scheduled?”

Without taking her eyes off the cobbled-together device that she referred to as the Witchfinder General, Annette replied, “Like, sure. I mean, whatever Stiggy says about the Man trying to starve out the gremlins in the Tube or whatever, fact is that they do mess about with the Tube and stuff when they're ... you know, harvesting and the like, but they're generally ... I dunno, conscientious enough to, like, give us a schedule so that we don't get as inconvenienced as the mundanes and that. And Carl's right; they're, like, not supposed to be doing a big Northern Line harvest until next week or so. So ... huh. That's, like, so weird.”

“Eh, they'll fuckin' well be here when they get here,” grumbled Carl, as Mike tried not to flail at the relatively new information – how he could have got along for a year without knowing that the Underground was full of gremlins who did scheduled harvesting raids, he simply did not know, but he did know how much his inability to get his head around some of the weirdness that his new life entailed annoyed his associates, so he bit down on it as best he could. “For now, shutterbug, can you give us a lay of the fuckin' land here? There's at least one bugger up there I really want to smack around.”

Not really trusting himself to say anything, Mike nodded and opened his camera bag, considering lenses for a moment. There were a few that might be worthwhile in this situation, and deciding between them generally took more nous than he actually possessed, even now. He therefore went for the wide-angle lens that gave a broad and general view of supernatural auras to start with, so he could use what he gleaned from that to specify what other lens he needed. As he attached that, Annette said, “The one we want is up there, yeah, but there's, like, three more of them up there. It's, like, a little party or something, maybe. Or maybe housemates like us, you know?”

Mike squinted through the viewfinder of his camera as Carl pointed out, “Yeah, but I'm not having any fluffy fuckin' feelings for any bunch of cunts who set bloody plush animals to murder the hell out of me just 'cos they're doing that flat-share shite. Common fuckin' ground like that just means they're fuckin' Londoners who can't afford the rent on a place on their own – if that's a damn criterion, we're best bloody mates with half the gods-damned city.”

The view through the camera's viewfinder was interesting, as well it should have been. This was the sort of ability that Mike had – albeit accidentally – sacrificed the colour of his eyes to obtain, so it was always a little heartening to him to see that the set of witch-treated, goblin-made camera lenses were well worth the price he had paid. Through his selected lens, mundane stuff like brick faded into not non-existence but insignificance, and only the supernatural shone through, though it was a vague aura view at best. Four green figures, their auras shot through with crackles of copper-coloured lightning, could be seen through the now-insubstantial wall at about first floor level, and around them, puffs and sparks of livid blue and green moved through the air in odd configurations. “...They've got spirits in tubes,” Mike commented, sounding almost pained at the prospect.

Annette turned around to look at Mike, finally taking her eyes off the Witchfinder General. “They've got what?” By contrast, she sounded as close to truly livid as anyone had ever seen her get.

“Blue and green puffy sparky things moving in patterns, like through pipes,” he replied, adjusting the focus on his camera a bit. “There's four of them, you're right. There's a sort of an electric copper bit of their aura so ... I guess these are the ones that work with machinery. Techno-mages, wasn't it?”

“Technomancers, weenie,” sighed Carl. “But what's this shit about spirits in fuckin' tubes?”

Mike thought about it for a moment, digging through his memory for more of the stuff Annette had made him read. He still didn't understand it all but, under the right circumstances, he could parrot facts like a pro. “Blue and green ... that's air and water, isn't it? Colour-coding-wise, I mean. Elemental stuff – I never did really get it, but...”

“Sylphs and undines,” murmured Annette, looking up at the window with a combination of speculation and pure pity for the beings she'd named. “They've got sylphs and undines in tubes?!? Dude, the devas are going to be, like, pissed off beyond all recognition!” She shook her head, giving an angry little pout. “Well, anyway, sylphs and undines are, like, so friendly and stuff that it's possible that they could be doing it of their own free will, I guess, but ... can you have another look, Mike? Please? Just to make sure I'm not, like, totally overreacting here?”

Mike, who would have walked through fire for Annette even if he would rather die than admit it, simply nodded and switched lenses. Since he now knew what he was looking for, the selection was simple, and he was glad that the lens set had included a zoom lens with an elemental filter. Attaching it, he heard Carl ask, “So what the fuck would these sylph and undine buggers be doing in tubes, willing or not? I mean, shite, who bottles spirits?”

That got a moment's further speculation from Annette before she said, “Well ... I guess they must be steampunkers or something. That's why there was, like, all that tubing in the kit and stuff I kerboomed at Hamleys. So ... you know, air and water equals steam, and steam powers ... like, you know ... stuff.” She sighed. “You don't, like, really need elemental spirits for that, though, so ... it's, like, totally overkill, you know?”

Zooming in, and of course snapping a picture or two while he was at it (evidence was important in any cases, particularly ones in which the Watchers of the Way might get involved), Mike gave his report. “They're moving really fast – faster than I've seen this kind of thing move before. There's one spot over in the far corner that's all red crawly things, and they're giving off red sparks.”

Annette fixed him with a surprisingly serious look. “Just the red crawlies giving off sparks? Oh, and they're salamanders, by the way. Dude, they've got fire spirits, too – what's, like, wrong with using plain old mundane kit or whatever?”

“No,” he told her, turning away from his camera to look at her properly. “All of them are sparking. The blue ones, the green ones ... all of them. Red and black.”

“So they're angry and hurting,” said Annette. “Right. Not of their own free will, then. That's just ... like, mean!” The pout reasserted itself and she went on: “Okay, well, at least it means that their machine's, like, probably not working very well. Carl? Got your gun?”

Carl nodded. He never went anywhere unarmed, and the weapon itself had cost a pretty penny at the Side Ways Market – the pistol was designed to be dismissed as unimportant no matter who searched him, the circumstances in which the search took place or how thoroughly he was frisked. And then there was the ammunition... “Shifter rounds?” This as he pulled the piece and went rummaging in a jacket pocket for his ammo clips.

Mike, who at least had the general idea of what Carl and Annette were planning, panned out, scanned the area and then pointed. “There,” he said, pointing. “Aim right there. That's the weakest point that'll let all three colours out.”

“Ta, shutterbug.” Carl followed the line of Mike's pointing finger and took careful aim. “Now cover your fuckin' ears and wave bye-bye to the automatic wanking machine or whatever the hell they've got up there.” That said, Carl fired.

Annette followed the ear-covering advice, but Mike didn't, and ignored the loud gunshot and the ringing it left in his ears. He was busy turning his camera onto automatic to get some pictures of the bullet's progress. No damage was done to the wall – Carl had been entirely chuffed with his shifter rounds, which phased in and out of the Side Ways to allow unimpeded passage through things like walls if the need presented – but after the bang, there was a hissing noise and a sudden commotion as red, green and blue raced out of their regimented spots in the room and started filling it. That was followed by alarmed shouting from the human types within. Carl's aim had, once again, been true.

“Okay,” said Annette, carefully uncovering her ears to assess the situation. “I guess it's, like, my turn now. You guys might, like, want to find cover or something. This is probably going to get ... I dunno, witchy or whatever.” So saying, she stepped out into the all-but-deserted road to stand in front of the closed cheese shop, looking as stern as a smallish young woman barely out of her teens in hot pink boots and bright orange hair could manage.

Carl, who knew his limitations, complied immediately, though he had to come back after a few steps to seize Mike by the collar and drag him towards cover as well, leaving Mike only just enough time to squeak a protest and grab his camera bag by the shoulder strap before being bodily removed from the vicinity. “Oh, come on,” he finally managed once Carl had all but tossed Mike behind a rusted-out Ford Taurus. “Annette's generally really good with minimising collateral damage. Do you really think we're going to get into some kind of crossfire here?”

“Best not to take any fuckin' chances when they're slinging the bloody hoodoo, you daft bugger,” sighed Carl. “Neither of we fuckers have much in the way of defences against that kind of shit.”

Mike peered over the bonnet of the Taurus and couldn't help but snigger a little at the scene in front of him. “Sorry – it's just that this looks more like a Monty Python sketch gone horribly wrong than a--” There was a crash of breaking glass and Mike's face fell and his eyes widened. “Oh, what in the holy blue hell is that?!?” Though even as he asked, he was reaching for his camera bag to swap lenses.

The answer, to put it simply, was 'ambulatory cheese'. As Mike fixed his more mundane lens to his camera and started snapping pictures madly, the wheel of lactose intolerant's nightmare skittered across the pavement towards Annette on what looked through a good zoom lens like a little metal platform propelled by a dozen or so thin and tiny metal legs. As Carl and Annette stared at the thing and Mike kept taking pictures, it stopped about twenty feet from Annette and started emitting a quiet ticking sound. There was a creak, and Carl, whose senses were well-tuned enough for him to not really need a zoom lens to have some idea of what he was looking at, shouted, “Annette, fuckin' duck!”

It was well-timed. Annette dove out of the way as the cheese launched itself from the platform by means of a small catapult embedded into the platform. The cheese wheel flew through the patch of air formerly occupied by Annette's head and over the roof of the Taurus that served as Mike and Carl's cover, then smashed against the wall of the employment agency behind them. Frowning, Carl picked up one of the fragments and sniffed it, then dropped it, looking mightily pissed off. “That,” he bellowed in the general direction of the cheese shop window, “was an eighty-eight fuckin' quid wheel of Cahill's whiskey cheese, you wasteful arseholes!” To the utterly flabbergasted look he got from Mike, he gave a somewhat defensive shrug. “What? I'm not allowed to have a fuckin' appreciation for the finer damn things in life?”

Mike turned that thought around in his mind for awhile and then decided that he honestly couldn't think of an argument against it. After all, Carl did have a certain taste for fine things, which surprised a lot of people when they first met him. His four suits were all specially tailored and cost the GNP of small developing nations, his shoes were either designer labels or hand-made, and overall, Emma was more or less justified in calling Carl a 'label whore'. That fine taste did also, Mike recalled, apply to his culinary habits; while the Hunter's Get's weakness for kebabs and battered sausage were an exception to the general rule, his stock of alcohol included nothing but the best and his taste in cheese, when he ate it, was similar. Carl was the only man Mike had ever met whose cheese on toast was generally more costly than other people's chicken dinner. That all passed through his head in the span of time it took to blink, and once he'd finished cogitating, he just shrugged and changed the subject. “Do you think they've got that temptation cockatrice thing living in their heads too?”

“Buggered if I know,” replied Carl, still snarling a little at the waste of perfectly good fine cheese. “I mean, they could just be stupid uni students and – aw, shite, here we go.”

As the men of HIPPIE watched, Annette picked up the little walking metal platform from which the Cahill whiskey cheese had been launched before it could scurry away and took another two steps towards the cheese shop and the flat upstairs. “Okay, guys? Could you, like, come out here and listen for a sec, please? I think we kind of need to talk and stuff.”

A window opened, emitting a gust of hot wind, a mid-sized rain cloud and, after that, a soaked-looking young man with thin, horsey features, lank black hair and a pair of old-fashioned aviator's goggles perched on top of his head. “Piss off, would you? Or at least get the steam and fire and shit to knock it off! We're working here!” Then, after casting a look at Mike, he added, “And lose the paparazzo, huh?”

Annette rolled her eyes. “Look, you're, like, seriously violating the Way here, you know? Plus I think you're, like, maybe not entirely in your right minds and stuff, so ... you know, I think you should maybe cool it on the working for awhile and come down here so we can, you know, talk about it or whatever. We've got someone coming over here who can figure out if you're ... I dunno, possessed or whatever. So ... please could you put the technomancy away and let us talk about it a bit and stuff?” Then, as something of an afterthought, she added, “Oh, and they're really pissed-off elementals, okay? I mean, how would you feel if, like, you went to someone and wanted to make friends and they, like, superheated you and stuck you in a tube and stuff?”

That didn't get a reply. The technomancer retreated to the chaos of his flat, and Annette sighed and waited, apparently hoping that this meant that he and his fellows would be downstairs soon, that they had seen reason. However, judging by the look on her face, she seemed to be stretching even her near-limitless optimism to a breaking point with that hope.

Mike, sensing a good hiatus for questions, turned back to Carl. “So ... why do you reckon they might just be uni students?”

Carl glared at him. “Please fuckin' tell me that you went to bloody uni.”

Mike nodded, looking affronted. “BA in Media Studies; honours, in fact. Why?”

“What the fuck did you do in your uni years, exactly?”

Mike shrugged, not immediately seeing the point of that question. “The usual, I guess. Studied, did coursework, got very, very drunk and bored and...” Which brought him, of course, to the point. “Oh.”

“...And ran around like a crackweasel with its arse on fire, doing totally inadvisable shite because it seemed like a good fuckin' idea at the time.” Carl nodded, actually smiling a little. “Hearts full of youth / Hearts full of truth...”

“Six parts gin to one part vermouth!” They finished the Tom Lehrer quote in unison, grinning ... then realised they were having something akin to a male friend bonding moment and stared at one another, vaguely horrified. Deciding silently and in a similar unison to the spouting of the 'Bright College Days' quote that it had just never happened, both men turned their attention back to the window above the cheese shop, with Mike fixing his camera to that upstairs window on full zoom.

Between Mike's zoom lens and Carl's preternaturally good eyesight, both HIPPIE males caught sight of the complicated-looking apparatus that looked more or less like a gun being aimed out the window, directly at Annette. Annette, for her part, seemed oblivious to it, as she was examining the multi-legged cheese catapult, poking at each of its spindly little legs in turn. Smiling, she told the world at large, “You know, this thing is actually, like, really really neat...”

Carl screamed a wordless warning even as Mike, zoom lens still trained on the window, watched the gunman pull the trigger and forced himself not to wince as he prepared for the shot.

What followed the pulling of the trigger was a whole lot of nothing. The gunlike apparatus didn't even spark. Mike breathed a sigh of relief and pulled back on the zoom a bit, focusing his camera on Annette even as the little perky witch turned to Carl, concern writ large on her face. “Carl? You okay and every--?” Carl's own belated sigh of relief was choked off along with Annette's bewildered query as a bolt of lightning came down from a clear blue sky and struck Annette full blast, knocking her backwards into a lamp post.

Some cold, sadistic little part of Mike's brain congratulated itself on having caught the perfect picture of the lightning strike while another wondered idly what the mechanics were for calling down chain lightning from a technomantic point of view. The rest of him, however, was howling with grief and a need for vengeance, as being hit by lightning could not have done anything but kill the lovely, cheerful little sorceress he'd come to care for so deeply. Carl, meanwhile, had no such division of mind. The feral demigod pulled his knife in the blink of an eye – for the gun, of course, would be far too impersonal for what he had in mind – and vaulted the Taurus' bonnet, stalking towards the cheese shop with bloody vengeance so heavily on his mind that it was scrawled on his face like slanderous graffiti.

His quest for vengeance, however, was scuppered when he got four feet away from the Taurus, at which point he slammed into an invisible wall of what felt like solid air. He staggered backwards and fell, landing on his arse in a most undignified way, then came up sputtering. “What the fuckity fuck fuck fuck do these buggeredly wankstains think they're--?”

“Carl?” Mike, still looking through the viewfinder of his camera, though he was now crouched as low as he could go behind the bonnet of the Taurus and still get a decent shot, pointed. His hand was trembling as he did. “I don't think it's them.”

Carl blinked at Mike, then followed the trajectory of the photographer's pointing finger ... and just stared for a moment. Far from being dead, Annette was on her feet ... in a manner of speaking. A better way of putting it would have been 'hovering', as the platforms of her bright pink boots were poised a good eight inches off the pavement as she turned towards the window through which the technomancer had fired his weapon. The pigtails in which she had done her currently bright orange hair for her shopping excursion had all but exploded into twin frizzy masses because of the electricity that had coursed through her body, and on the whole, she looked like a postmodern Pippi Longstocking on the very, very bad crack. As she glared up at the cheese shop's upstairs window, she murmured, quite quietly, “.........Rrrrrrrright. You're contained. Gloves come off now, 'kay?”

Carl's eyes widened and, once he could finally bring himself to move, he didn't hesitate. He simply dove behind the Taurus again, nearly hitting Mike on his way over and quite simply not caring. Once he was more or less upright again, he joined Mike in peering over the bonnet of the Taurus from the lowest possible point, 'containment' notwithstanding. Quotes along the lines of 'meddle not in the affairs of wizards' and 'hell hath no fury' ran through his head on repeat, mingling into a single sentence that, lacking in coherence and grammatical structure as it was, still made perfect sense. For the first time in quite some time, Carl found himself actively wishing he was somewhere else. Antarctica would have suited him just fine. “Awwwwwww, ogre shit...”

A small crackle of sparks that were not electricity but pure magical power arced across Annette's knuckles as she made a pair of tight fists. Then she raised both hands, arms out straight, turned her palms up, and muttered one word: “Run.” Then she opened her hands.

The roof came off the cheese shop as if peeled from the top of the edifice by invisible hands. When she spread her arms wide, various pieces of impossible-looking examples of electrical engineering began flying out of the now open-topped building, large toys flung from a larger toy box by an impatient giant toddler. Some hit the ground perilously near Annette, but she paid them no mind, trusting that they would miss her completely. They did.

Four terrified young men dressed in the epitome of steampunk fashion came tearing out the front door. One of them was screaming; another appeared to have wet himself. The raven-haired boy in the aviator goggles still had his lightning gun out, though he didn't look as if he'd have the manual dexterity necessary to fire it, shaking and panicking as he was. The moment Annette laid eyes on him, she pointed at him, hissing, “You.” He rose a couple of inches off the ground, legs still pumping furiously for a moment until he realised he was not actually moving forward anymore, and then he simply shrieked, struggling against invisible bonds in a fruitless attempt to get his feet back on the pavement so that he could get the hell away.

Instead of moving forward, he drifted backwards until he was hovering squarely in front of Annette, and a flick of her fingers sent him flying backwards to slam into the cheese shop wall, quite hard to judge by his agonised little yelp and the volume of the impact. Carl, finally regaining the capacity for speech, whispered, “Fuckin' A.”

“You,” said Annette, so very very quietly, as she coasted forward to look the steampunk technomancer directly in the face, “struck me with lightning. That ... really wasn't very nice, was it?”

The horse-faced teenage wizard type broke down and started blubbering at that point. “Look, I ... I'm sorry, okay? Just ... I'm really really sorry – please don't kill me?”

“Oh, I'm not going to kill you, or anything.” Usually, Annette's smiles were dizzy and cheerful, or sweetly sympathetic; now, her tiny little grin was somehow beatific and unutterably scary at the same time. “You see, every time something really weird has happened the last couple of weeks, with people, like, violating the Way and basically turning all the Laws to poop or whatever, there's always been a ringleader with something screwy in their heads. This time, that ringleader is you. So I have to keep you alive, you see, so that Rachel can get a good old peek into that brain of yours and find out what's making you act like such an idiot, okay?” Then her head tilted to the side a bit. “Do you, like, have a name we can call you or something?”

The technomancer stared at her, terrified, still with tears running down his cheeks. “Dave ... but ... what ... thing in brain just ... look, please just let me go! I won't cause any more problems, I swear!” With that, Dave started struggling against the hold Annette had on him again.

“I'm sorry, Dave; I can't do that,” she said, gesturing again; Dave came forward until he and Annette were within kissing distance and then slammed into the wall again.

Mike, from behind the Taurus, murmured to Carl, “Okay, this bit of awesome was brought to us by Arthur C Clarke.”

“Shut up, you fuckin' geek-boy.” With that, Carl pulled out his mobile phone and hit a speed-dial button. When he got pickup, he said, “Hey, Rache; change of fuckin' plan. We're going to have to get the hell out of here so we'll meet you at the Oak in about a half-hour, okay? No, don't fuckin' argue with me, just fuckin' well trust me! These arseholes played some silly buggers and Annette went fuckin' Exorcist, okay? See you at the gods-damned Oak!” Clicking the phone shut without waiting for a reply, he called out, “Annette! Fuckin' hell, woman, let the stupid fucknuts down and let's haul arse to the Oak, okay? Treat you to one of those stupid fuckin' alcopop things you love so gods-damned much.”

Annette didn't even look round at first – just blinked at Dave and said, “Okay, looks like we're going to go, like, get a drink or something – no offence or anything, but I think you could, like, seriously use one. So ... you know, if you try to run away, I'm going to have to ... I dunno, turn your shoes into foot-eating wibbly things, okay?” When Dave gave her a spastic nod, she took a little breath and both Dave and Annette dropped to the pavement; Annette came down gently but Dave, not expecting it, staggered and had to be held up by a further exertion of sheer telekinetic prowess from the far less angry little witch. Then she turned to Carl and smiled cheerfully. “That's cool, you know? Carl, could you, like, cover this guy? Let's not have him, like, running off or anything after all this trouble.”

“Whatever you say, Annette,” was Carl's very respectful reply. There was no way he was arguing with Annette at this point; he'd never seen quite this level of ability from her before, and since something told him that she had barely scratched the surface of her talents with that little display, he had every intention of staying on her good side until he was sure she was back to her usual perky and well-controlled self. “Come on, you fuckin' wankstain,” he added to Dave, vaulting the car bonnet again and walking over to the technomancer in what he thought of as a menacing way. “We're getting out of here before the fuckin' bizzies show up.”

Though Dave was far less intimidated by Carl than he would have been without Annette's display, it still had the desired effect, and the quartet vacated the scene with all due speed, headed for Holborn.