As I've said in the channel, I do feel it would be more appropriate to focus on Dolores' role as a shaman... But I do think purging curses and using a combination of Banishment and support from Suibhne feels more appropriate for a shaman than summoning a random water elemental, even if that's labelled as the path of a magus.
I'm switching to Quick, too.
Day 1 - Invasion III
The feeling of the smooth crystal against her bare skin did little to reassure Dolores.
Stuck in a tight space with a hostile fire spirit and nothing but her own wits keeping her from a date with Death. The tension was definitely getting to her.
She firmed up her spine as the seconds ticked by.
It would be unsightly of her as a Lady to be caught bawling her eyes out like a child. Even more so as a Shaman. Her ancestors would rake her over the coals if they learnt their bloodline was ended because of a lesser fire spirit.
And Dolores didn’t intend to be scolded like that.
‘Better have a plan.’ She felt Suibhne’s mind nudge hers.
Dolores pursued her lips.
Of course she had a plan.
Well, the magus had an idea.
‘Better than nothing.’ Her familiar concurred.
Well, at least one of them was being positive.
The little shaman wasn’t that certain her plan would even work.
For starters, she had little to no experience using these borrowed mystic codes. Even those as straightforward as a jewelcrafter crystal became little more than one time use batteries in her hands. Which was such a gross misuse of a piece of Mystery, however tiny, that it rankled her pride.
None of that changed the fact that she had no spells that used them.
So that left her with just syphoning the energy from them.
And the only spells she could use them for were either physically taxing or time consuming.
‘We could summon an ally.’ Suibhne suggested.
And it was a valid one.
To begin with, Shamans weren’t supposed to take to the front of a battle. They were supposed to hang back and provide assistance to their familiars through spells and healing. And if need be, by summoning more familiars to fight for them.
Dolores, however, wasn’t your garden variety shaman.
She was impatient.
She was fierce.
More likely to lash out at an enemy than to allow her precious companion to risk her life fighting for her. In a way, she was highly unorthodox for a shaman despite - allegedly - embodying all their virtues and tenets. Meaning that as far as she was concerned, preserving her spiritual allies ranked just as high as preserving her own life and legacy.
Snapping her fingers up, she let out an emerald bullet of magic, drawn from the bottom of her rapidly depleting reserves, and trusted Suibhne to follow up with the opportunity.
Violently pulling on the mana in the jewels, she felt the first be reduced to ash even as two more spells fired from her fingertips. Twisting to the side, she felt the return fireball scorch past her, singing her dress and setting part of her hair aflame. Keeping up the pressure, she laid into the burning child and pumped shot after shot of magic into its chest, trying to hit roughly the same area, doing everything she could to keep him off balance.
Suibhne wasn’t just sitting around either.
Closing in for the kill, the spirit leapt for the monster’s neck. Flying true, she ended up grabbing the thing along the side of its torso. However, just as she landed, the monster twisted, jabbing the stump of its missing arm into the spirit’s chest.
Yowling in pain, Suibhne raked her claws across its burning stomach and shoulders, twisting as the fire spread through the cat’s stomach.
Crying out in sympathetic, burning agony, the Magus channeled the energy of another jewel into her familiar - washing away the pain with a wave of soothing, cooling healing. Still, her focus remained. Battering against the spirit, Dolores pulled on a third gem, consuming that too, and lashing out with a powerful, crushing Rebuke.
Undead flesh cracked, blackened bone split, and flames guttered out.
Even then, the undead kept attacking, slashing out at Suibhne with its claws. Thankfully, the weakened monster was unable to do more than scratch at her, only drawing red, burning lines in spell flesh.
Snarling, the Magus rushed forward, tapping into the last of her magical strength and pumping it all into Reinforcement. Rearing her fist back, just as the last of her Mana depleted, she lashed out. A single, brutal jab that lashed out at the monster’s face, knuckles smashing into warped bone with the kind of strength only someone who wielded magic could muster.
Unfortunately, that was also when the last of her mystic strength ran out… meaning her fist had all the momentum of an Enforcer’s punch behind, with none of the increased endurance.
Bone crunched and snapped, the monster’s head exploding into a cloud of dust.
And so too did Dolores’s arm snap like a twig. Her knuckles were smashed, her fingers twisted and covered in blackened ash and bone dust, and even her forearm cracked and snapped from the transferred force.
Falling to her knees, she screwed her mouth shut as the pain made her want to scream.
Biting her lip so hard she tasted blood, she clutched the shattered limb to her chest.
Dress smouldering, body in agony, tears poured out of her eyes and just like that the last of her strength left her. Wanting to whimper, wanting to cry, wanting to scream and wail in utter agony, the Magus did neither of those things. Heaving, barely able to suck down air, it took her three tries to stand.
Tipping over, she jostled her ruined arm, actually giving out a muffled cry as her vision flickered black, before violently tugging at a damaged finger.
The pain focused her.
The pain kept her present.
Actually making it to her feet this time, she turned to the monster and hobbled over. Shoving her good hand into the neck stump, she rooted around until she felt something warm. Something dark and sickly and corrupt. Something that made her skin crawl and her blood curdle and her wounds ache more and more. And Dolores wrapped her fingers around it, steeled herself, and pulled.
She pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled and when the monster’s core finally came free, it did with another crack and sent her flying.
This time, nothing stopped her from screaming as she instinctively tried to block her fall with her ruined arm, the zombie child’s unholy core thrumming in her other hand. The pain washed out everything for a long while and, by the time she rallied, Suibhne was curled up against her side - licking at her injuries - and the young Shaman was left holding the unliving monstrosity.
It was a strange, otherworldly thing.
Both there and not.
Perhaps the only reason Dolores could hold it was because of her own affinity for the spiritual. A beating heart of black glass, thrumming with veins of molten magma which seemed to pulse rhythmically. The mana of its creator pulsing with the warmth of a brazen bull against her skin.
The core was rough, unpolished, but most cores weren’t larger than marbles. Nor did they contain enough mana to power a greater ritual.
This one comfortably filled her palm.
And the implications made her feel queasy.
Obviously, the… thing in her palm was intended for some kind of ritual. Most likely some particularly cruel or evil one. But the fact remained that she simply lacked any ability to identify the particulars. Doubly so with how her arm hurt.
“Great spirits.” She gasped, voice watery.
“You seem fine, Kitten.”
Dolores aimed a disbelieving stare at the cat.
“Which part of this seems fine to you?”
The sidhe smiled, something both warm and alien on the face of a cat.
“You aren’t dead. And that means all we need to do is keep moving. Besides, you gave me enough magic to purge the curse from my body, so you’re clearly ready to keep fighting.”
Well, the cheeky little thing wasn’t wrong. The agony in her arm was starting to fade into a dull, constant throbbing. And though she was seriously worried about her familiar, the scratches were only very slowly healing, neither of them had suffered anything particularly permanent. Or even maiming. However much her arm looked like it was a wet sack filled with chunks of stuff.
“Look. Something is happening to it.”
Her familiar meant the smoldering corpse of the burning spirit.
Somehow, the thing was still intact, even with its core ripped out and Dolores’s first thought was how that was impossible. A spirit’s core was what held its motivating will - a heart and brain in one - and most of such a being’s power too. A dragon had its core, a vampire its blood, a Magus her circuits. It was only when she looked very, very closely that she noticed small flakes of ash coming up off of the still half smouldering bones.
The breakdown was happening.
Just slowly.
Very slowly.
“We’ll have to leave it behind. I’m out of mana for a proper banishment. Unless you feel like helping yourself to it.” She gestured to their shared kill.
Suibhne looked scandalized.
“I am not eating that!” Chuckling at her familiar’s scandalized squawk, no matter how much it hurt her arm, the duo moved on from the corpse.
Taking stock of her wounds, Dolores couldn’t help but wince every time her limb twitched. Fortunately it was a physical wound from the force of the blow and not a more complex one due to her spell. If she ‘broke’ her arm with reinforcement there was just no way of putting it back together.
At least not as it was before.
Not without a dedicated healer at least.
Dolores stumbled forward, gingerly placing the core of the defeated spirit into her pocket, careful not to jostle her arm any more than she absolutely had to. Her brow was damp with sweat and her clothes were torn and stained with both her own blood and that of her enemies… not to mention barely covering her decency.
She eyed her buster sword, sadness welling up from within.
‘We’ll come back for it.’ Suibhne comforted her. There was simply no way Dolores could carry such a weapon in her current state.
So it was with a heavy heart that the small Shaman turned away from her lost prize and stumbled her way back to the entrance to the cellar.
“I called the fire zombie. Come get your magic sword!”
There were calls from the men above, but she didn’t really have the strength to deal with human interaction right now. So, turning away, she began walking towards the department’s open gates - leaden steps carrying her inside the familiar bounded field. The magic itself a comforting sensation after all the running around and fighting she’d had to do.
She was a Shaman, dammit, not an Enforcer!
The irony that she’d been fighting spirits and undead completely avoided her.
Thankfully, the path down to the Department was narrow but straight forward. No great defenses like the one she’d taken earlier with Warden Dominika, as this was an older design meant to facilitate travel between the surface and the underground complex and thus bereft of anything but the bare minimum to keep out intruders.
After all, secrecy was the best defense - even against magic.
With a low ceiling and sparse walls of brick lit by torchlight, it was more of a hidden passage.
‘The only thing missing is a rolling boulder.’ An image of a particular movie pressed up against her thoughts, with a famous actor fleeing from a great stone ball.
‘Kindly don’t jinx me, Suibhne. I think we had enough excitement with tunnels to last a lifetime.’
Her familiar huffed playfully, a flick of her bronzen tail tickling Dolores’s leg as the ancient cat took to walking in front of her. It wasn’t long until they found themselves nearing the other side of the tunnel, a gate much like the entrance, fortunately there weren’t any trapped fire demons this time.
But something bothered her.
“Why is it closed?”
“It's a gate, shouldn’t it be closed?”
“Not when those who access this normally come from the department.” Could it have closed because of the horror show outside? So many questions and unknowns. Dolores badly needed to rendezvous with her fellow Shamans.
Something wasn’t right.
A second pulse of mana washed over her as the gate checked her for entrance. Heavy stone shuddering as it sunk into the ground, a dust cloud shrouding her sight as she walked through the opening. There amidst the dust, she could see something, a form, some kind of shape?
‘A person.’ She blinked, eyelids heavy with exhaustion.
It moved towards her and Dolores’ vision swam as she teetered on the edge of unconsciousness. A flash of worry echoing from Suibhne as a pair of arms encircled her just as she was about to collapse. Vision clouded and tired, it was all Dolores could do to look up at her impromptu savior.
Coming face to face with…
Last edited by Wyvern; April 17th, 2021 at 06:22 PM.
3
2
Buff Cous' to the Rescue
The Act of dozing off in the afternoon is a luxury indeed.
Coffee would be nice, though.
[Collection of my Servant Sheets]
Now Revamped!
Seconding this!Originally Posted by SleepMode
2
Quest of Fate
Apocrypha Universe Fate Quest Project
---
Beast's Lair Discord Server For Fate Quests
Hermes Servant Collection Master Post
2. Any tiny girl needs to have a buff man for comedic purposes !
2!
“Woah! What the Hell happened!”
Pushing through the dust, Marcus came stomping through.
Shirt missing, large bloody slashes across his chest, and glowing blue fists at the ready - the Heir looked like he’d been three rounds with a chimera. And he was definitely ready for more. Unfortunately, Dolores was at her limit and all she managed was a weak smile before she passed out.
Blinking her eyes, the Magus tried to clear bits of brick dust from her vision, wondering how long she’d been unconscious.
Obviously she was still underground, the tunnel still made up her Earth and sky. But when she realized why she was moving the young woman tensed up. Because right now she was being carried in two strong, warm arms, held up against a wounded chest, and her dress was.... less than presentable.
“If you peeked, I’ll curse you.”
Mumbling, her cousin’s loud, almost roaring laughter only made her blush more deeply, before he bumped her arm and made her cry out as the destroyed limb, already turning an ugly yellow and purple, was nudged.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to do that! I thought my spell had stabilized the break, but it’s clear it didn’t work. Still, don’t worry, you haven’t got anything to peek on.”
As much as she might have thought Marcus was Spirits sent at the moment, Dolores was still compelled to retaliate by lightly pressing a finger into one of the chuckling man’s cuts.
“Ow, ow, ok, ok, ok! I didn’t peek!”
She pouted.
“You didn’t promise.”
Here her cousin gave a slightly embarrassed grin.
“Well, I did have to stop you from hitting the ground. Couldn’t let you conk your head when you were already damn near dead! Besides, it’s easier to transfer mana like this.”
Noticing that there was a comforting trickle of energy leaking into her body, almost like a cup of warm tea in fact, she only blushed more deeply. For a Magus to not only be saved by another, but for a Shaman to have to be carried by another human… both were deeply embarrassing. Doubly so when they weren’t even of the same house! But what got Dolores the most deeply was how she could feel small tears prick at the corner of her eyes. How relieved she was at not dying and how safe and comfortable she felt.
“Suibhne?”
In the end, she decided to ask after her familiar - the Sidhe being somewhat behind them and in astral form. Kindly conserving what little energy her summoner had left.
“Tired, but alright. Take a look.”
Lifting her up a little higher, Marcus let his cousin peek over his shoulder. Only to see a very lazy cat napping atop the head of a floating skull.
“Did your Lar really let a cat sleep on it?”
Here Marcus chortled again, doing his best not to jostle Dolores’s arm again.
“No, but your cat also kept jumping on top of them. That one eventually just gave up.”
It was deeply concerning that her cait sidhe had just bullied the spirit of one of Marcus’s ancestors into serving as a floating spirit. Hell, it might have been one of her ancestors too.
Though it was considered something of a faux pas to use human spirits in shamanism, there were certain loopholes when said individuals consented to the experience. Unlike how necromancers used the remains of the dead to call forth incomplete shades, shamans like Marcus instead preserved the spirits of their ancestors as much as possible.
It was… somewhat unorthodox… but he was still considered a valued member of the department.
So long as he kept it in the family.
‘Now if only he stopped asking me to join up.’ She was not planning on dying and giving someone else permission to summon her.
Nope.
Not at all!
“Still, what happened to you? Suibhne hasn’t said much.”
Dolores felt her skin crawl at the reminder of her fight with the burning spirit. Barely escaping from death for what must have been what… half a dozen times over the course of a few days? More than once against the same entity no less!
“A rogue spirit tried getting in through the figgy pudding store. Had to fight it.”
Her cousin laughed.
“Well, color me impressed, little miss bookworm fighting on the frontlines?”
Her cheeks colored in embarrassment.
“I’ll have you know I know some handy exorcism spells. There’s no way that overfed zombie stood a chance.”
“And I don’t doubt that. Maybe we should have you clean out the ones near the other entrances when we get back.”
Now wait a second.
“There are more of them? How many?”
“We still have a couple dozen left, though whoever is summoning the damn things keeps refilling their ranks whenever we start banishing too many.”
Which had to be Caster’s work.
There was no way that a Servant didn’t have a plan. Especially a Caster. Whatever she wanted, whoever she was backing… they wanted to attack the Spiritual Evocation departments. First Summoning, now Shamanism. It was too much of a coincidence that both were being attacked by the same enemy while Berserker rampaged through the skies of London.
“So I take it we are heading there?”
Her cousin gave her a smile, the sorta roguish one that usually meant he was about to get in trouble for something.
“Nope! Just the opposite. We are popping over to the storage area!”
The smaller shaman felt her brow twitch.
“Dare I ask why?”
“Well, you can. But you’ll probably not like the answer.”
So they were gonna do something suicidal if not insane. Probably both given who she was accompanying.
“What’s the plan?”
Marcus grimaced.
“After the first couple of waves, things got bad. You can only fight so long or have so many people in a single place. These zombies are pretty shoddy work, but they keep popping out of the woodwork. Definitely a heroic spirit behind it.”
Which made sense.
A battle of attrition against an undead army often went poorly.
“So you want a super weapon.”
That was the obvious answer. If attrition was costing them dearly, and it said something that the Shamans were being pushed back, then they would do something risky to try and win.
“Is it a Mystic Code or a particular spirit?”
Shaking his head, Marcus clearly thought about how to try and answer.
“I would say it’s a way to call upon a specific spirit.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips. “The Department is going to try and summon a Servant. Which one?” It was only right that they try and combat the enemy with something of the same caliber. All they needed were the means to anchor the spirit and the energy to keep it around for the battle.
Here is where he actually looked slightly pensive.
“Death. War. Something of that sort.”
Eyes going wide, she grasped the true breadth of what her cousin was saying.
“A Divine Spirit. Death and War… are you sure we could… contain something like that. Even if the whole Department is pooling its strength, we can’t be sure that even the echo of a god could be directed.”
“We don’t have a choice. There have already been several thousand undead that have assaulted us and we’ve taken a few losses. If another wave of homunculi show up too….”
Dolores nodded, understanding what he was saying.
Most Shamans were insanely powerful, but also very, very niche. And very, very odd. Few of them would be able to function as a truly potent combat force, even if any attempt at actually overwhelming them would end exceedingly poorly for even a Dead Ancestor Apostle. After all, the Department was their domain.
But an army of humans turned weapons of war, combined with the living dead, and all lead by the flaming children? That was a lot.
“So you mentioned zombies and now homunculi, I’ve seen those too, but what about burning children?”
He shook his head, holding her in one arm as he used the other to do something with the door to the Department. Now at the end of the tunnel, it had taken so long because it was on lockdown mode and space dilation abilities stopped working.
Meaning her trusty steed had actually just walked a couple kilometers.
That alone would have defeated most Magus with how lazy and out of shape they tended to be, but carrying her too really said a lot about how much she owed the man.
Closing her eyes, she let her circuits naturally activate. Not to their full capacity, or even close to it, but just enough to align with the trickle of energy entering her. Placing her good fingers on Marcus’s chest, Dolores began feeding that energy back into her cousin - right into his wound.
She was no healer, but the slightly weeping wounds began to close, forming a crusty scab and pulling tight.
“You should focus on your arm.” His words were low as they stepped through the door, coming out into a well lit, slightly dusty, and comfortably cool room. It was full of heavy brown wooden boxes and Dolores shook her head.
“I’m not good enough to fix it. Mostly I just shut off my pain receptors and did my best to lock all the muscles and veins in place - try and make sure I didn’t keep bleeding internally.”
The older Magus grunted.
“So we’re just hoping your arm doesn’t fill up like a sack of meat juices?”
Smiling, Dolores shook her head.
“We’re hoping that we find the catalyst you were sent for before I bleed to death internally.”
Suibhne, having been doing her best to recuperate, chose that moment to give a loud screech.
“Your human magics can wait, my partner needs help!”
Leaping off the top of the skull’s head, the sidhe hobbled its way over to the pair of Magi.
“When I stopped feeling pain from you I thought you’d fixed your arm, we need to see about that, now!”
This was touching, but the Lady Morello wasn’t so selfish as to take such a risk.
A Magus walks with Death. And a Lady has her Duty.
“I’ll be fine. The worst thing that can happen is that you get my soul a bit earlier than anticipated. Besides, the whole Department is counting on Marcus. Helping him is the least we can do.”
“But your arm….”
Clearly unsure how to express her hesitation, Suibhne ended up simply turning around in a circle, frustration and disagreement pouring off of her. Marcus even pulled Dolores a little closer, slightly jostling her arm.
“To be honest, you’re not in a great state, little cousin. You look more like you took a bomb to the face.”
Huffing, Dolores took offense to all this, this… faffing about!
“Then put me down! The sooner we find your catalyst, the sooner we can get someone to see to my arm.” Climbing out of Marcus’s grip, the little Magus reinforced her body just a bit - to make sure her arm wasn’t injured any further - and started looking around the store room. Row after row of wooden boxes with tiny labels were placed on hundreds of floor to ceiling shelves. Each one was attached to a rail system that held rolling stairs and it suddenly hit her just how… vast this room was.
Turning to look back at the door they’d used, finding nothing but empty air behind her, she swallowed as she began searching.
“Now, what exactly are we looking for?”
Marcus began rattling off a string of letters and numbers, clearly the archival code of the catalyst. Mostly he seemed upset that she wasn’t taking her injury seriously enough.
Which, objectively, was flattering.
But the point stood that it would be the height of arrogance and cowardice to leave the Department to die, just so she could get her own injuries taken care of sooner. Just like how she’d left those civilians to die, just like how she hadn’t seen to the wound on her side. And that meant finding this catalyst would come first.
“Oh, I think I found it.”
Sitting right in front of her was, in fact, the exact box they needed.
Totally innocent and completely unsuspicious.
Because things like that happened during emergencies and when lives were on the line.
Swallowing, she pressed her good hand against her side, squeezing out a little blood, before pressing it against the wood. With a click and puft of air, the lid began sliding off. Inside there was….
3
here is a list of my servant sheets(new and improved format for my servant sheets)
Come explore the White Library, and reach the bottom of this Abyss
Fate / White Memoria
3
Wonder what wild spirit of conflict will we invoke...
The Act of dozing off in the afternoon is a luxury indeed.
Coffee would be nice, though.
[Collection of my Servant Sheets]
Now Revamped!
2.
3
There was… ice on her fingertips.
Raw prana washed over her and made the Magus’s hair stand on end.
A man’s hands caressed her in ways Dolores had only ever imagined.
Swallowing, she firmed up her grip on the horn. It wasn’t too large, perhaps an ox’s horn or an auroch’s, with a few flecks of gold around the base. Enough it was clear this was an ornament attached to a helmet at some point, perhaps ceremonial, perhaps simply because it looked cool. What mattered was that there was enough weight to this hunk of bone to crush a man.
Thankfully, she was a Shaman.
It still made her feel weird and she didn’t appreciate the handsy ghost one bit.
Suibhne even hissed at whomever or whatever it was, slashing at the air.
“Thanks.”
Letting out a small yowl of displeasure, the sidhe made her thoughts clear through a dismissive wave of her tail.
“Damn. I wasn’t even sure if what they were telling me was real. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is even a good idea.” Marcus sighed, locking a particularly… fleshy looking box. “The truth is, what the Department is doing now, well, I have to admit that this is probably us taking advantage of an opportunity to pull off something that would get us all slapped with a sealing designation any other day of the week.”
Narrowing her eyes, the Lady of the Clocktower felt her eyebrow twitch.
“Are we in the process of doing something suicidally stupid?”
Her foot began tapping before the young woman could stop it, the annoyance she felt only heightened by the earlier molestation. The simple truth was, her body just wasn’t ready for something like that and it made her skin crawl.
Suffice to say, it hadn’t made her day any better.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s suicidally stupid….”
Bringing her finger up, the young Magus couldn’t help but feel a spike of pure frustration.
“So what you’re saying is that this is a stupid idea! And in a crisis like this, why aren’t we taking action? What’s the point in some cocamamy plan that gets us sent to the back lines while our comrades bleed and die! Why, if we weren’t in such a dangerous situation I would-”
Biting her tongue, the young woman realized what she was about to say.
Grinding her teeth down until she felt blood, the Magus reasserted herself.
Because there was no shock.
No pain.
And no pain from her arm.
There was no pain from her arm, no exhaustion burning inside her very soul, and neither fear nor hesitation in even the darkest, most cowardly corner of her heart.
“The horn is affecting me.”
It would be a lie to say that saying the words out loud made it any easier to process the truth. After all, right now she wanted nothing more than to tear a strip out of Marcus’s hide for being a coward and then slaughter a hundred of those fire demons… zombie… child… things.
She looked down at the box.
This was a relic.
Something that shouldn’t have any presence unless it was drawn out by a ritual of spell. And just being near it was… leaking through her.
What the hell was that horn?
“Badly. Marcus, am I in danger?”
“Truthfully?” Her glare returned full force at his question. “Fair enough. Uh, well, Valentine, you know, the American I sometimes drink with?”
“The one you sometimes get drunk with and then proceed to bully the interns from the other departments for being nerds and end up getting into a blood feud with a few hundred nobodies, none of whom have the morals and self control needed to become a Shaman, but all of whom think themselves the next coming of the Buddha?”
Visibly flinching, the older, taller male suddenly seemed to shrink slightly.
“Well, you see, he mentioned that it would be a fun surprise. For me. And, well, I didn’t think-”
“Marcus.” She sighed. “I got felt up by a ghost.”
Okay, so felt up was a bit of a misnomer for what happened. A spectral entity had just attempted to reach into the pulsing heart of her life force… through her chest. Which in ghost terms was probably being felt up.
That didn’t make her feel one bit happy.
And, of course, that was when the spirit decided to make itself known again, a barely visible shape of vapor leaking out of the box and whatever it was inside it… by copping a translucent feel of her chest.
Again.
Dolores shivered feeling her very self recoil in horror at the unwanted intrusion of… whatever this was. Whatever Marcus was planning to summon should not be trying to manifest without a freaking ritual.
She let out a gasping breath as a cold hand reached through her ribcage and gripped her heart in an icy vice.
Which in turn prompted the exhausted, previously mutilated Suibhne to violently launch herself at roughly where its face would have been, fur and claws flying, only to catch a hold of nothing.
This almost caused an incident, when the now clearly furious sidhe began to swell in size, body distorting under the force of violent rage she felt at some soon to be re dead spirit daring to force his attentions on her mistress. Now, considering they were currently in the middle of one of the Department of Shamanism’s Reliquaries, that was a bad thing.
Because all that emotion, all that power combined with the Mystery pouring off of the horny horn. And now every single container in the room began shaking.
Thankfully, their foes were completely without self preservation and so a large, six armed homunculus, roughly shaped like the goddess Kali, forced its way through a door at the far end of the room.
Poison dripped from wicked slashing talons, acid dripped from long spines, and electricity bounced along webs of dripping demonic slime. All as a mouth split open, revealing a string of heads, shrunken and where a human’s uvula would be, had been anchored to the back of a massive, frog like mouth.
Even worse was how the body’s vaguely feminine shape undulated, a dozen cracking, twisting tentacles began to lash out - drinking in the sheer quantity of Magic feeling in such a small space.
Any sane Magus would have run, screaming, from the area.
Any Shaman would have politely asked their familiars to aid them in preventing whatever was about to happen from spilling out of the Reliquary.
Any utterly batshit insane, incompotent, novice Magus would have known that attempting to employ undirected mystic violence in such a charged atmosphere would have had dire, dire consequences.
None of this mattered to the homunculus, no matter how much the two whiter-than-the-bone-horn Magi might have wished it did.
So when the twisting, spitting, screeching ball of fur and hate and fuck you launched itself at the only target it could find, the now mountain lion sized sidhe began to rapidly shred and mutilate the hostile before it with all the fury of a warden unable to protect their charge. One could even go so far as to mention that it’s utterly stupid to piss off an already angry spirit.
But that might be a bit redundant, seeing as spraying arcs of strange fluids, the wails of souls being torn to shreds, and messy chunks of faux spell flesh were all that was left underneath Suibhne.
Underneath her, splattered on the walls, and liberally applied to the ceiling too.
Dolores tried to reach out to her partner, only to gasp, that same icy coldness returning as the well of unadulterated power coming from Suibhne cut off. Falling to the ground, her weakness returned, the Magus even cried out when her wounded arm was jostled as Marcus caught her, stopping her from falling into a row of shelves and possibly getting them all worse than killed.
“Easy there cousin.” He adjusted his grip, holding the younger shaman’s body protectively against his own.
“Sui-Suibhne… she is?”
Marcus grimaced.
“Raging. She’s a guardian spirit after all.”
Dolores wracked her brain for answers, hazy as her mind felt. It was like someone had stuffed her head full of cotton. Every thought was slow and muddled. But she could clearly feel the thread tying her to the Cait Sidhe. Her family’s sworn protector and guardian. Something whose protective anger was rooted in hundreds of years of tradition.
Even if they had just bonded for a day, Suibhne had been connected to her family for generations.
“I… have to calm her down.”
Her cousin shook his head.
“Negative. You are lucky to be alive, a nascent bond shouldn’t be that strong. Unless something tried to supplant it.”
Dolores blinked owlishly, the memory of death’s cold hand around her chest flickering through her mind’s eye.
Had the relic tried to… connect to her?
No way.
Impossible.
It was the dead remains of something.
She was a Shaman, she was trained to be an existence resistant to unwilling possession.
Unless… this was….
“Marcus-” she breathed out in pain. “What is this?”
Even now, she felt box weight, its presence looming over them. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t even a remnant of something resembling a spirit. It was a shade, a shadow, the memory of something preserved through hundreds… no… thousands of years. And it had just tried to possess her.
Something so weakened.
So pitifully small in comparison to the whole.
And it reached straight into her heart.
“I have no idea. They didn’t tell me. Only that it was a catalyst for something old.”
Swallowing, the young man shook his head.
“The implication was that it would be a divine spirit.”
Thud.
Dolores’ clenched fist, feeble and weakened as it was, smacked her cousin on top of the head with all the exasperation and frustration her frail body could muster. She probably had hurt herself more than she did his thick skull. But it was the sentiment that counted.
“You… you… idiot! That’s too much! Way too much! What are you thinking?!” She’d have jumped away from the fallen horn had her legs not felt like jello. Though every millimeter of her being was yelling at her to get as far away as she could from the relic.
“Listen, I didn’t think it would affect you.” He tried to desperately explain. “I’m sorry, I…”
Dolores wouldn’t have it.
“Marcus. That thing just, whatever it is, whoever it belonged to, just tried to possess me. It’s active, after hundreds or thousands of years. You can’t tell me you thought we could use that to summon something?”
This wasn’t a rowdy shade or the ghostly remains of an animal.
That old piece of dusty bone and metal still retained enough of whoever owned it to try and take over her body.
“Listen.” He tried again. “If we get this to the others, we’ll be able to summon, maybe bind, whatever that scary thing was. And whatever memory is left can’t be strong enough to throw off us four - never mind the fact the whole Department is going to be helping us too.”
Dolores did not like what she was hearing.
“You three, you mean? I can’t walk, Marcus. I can barely talk and Suibhne isn’t responding to me.”
At the moment, that great cat was prowling around between the shelves, hissing at any box that rattled too loudly. This was all made a bit worse from the bits of her kill still clinging to the spirit’s fur.
“Listen, its fine. Master Harfang is probably already back by now. We’ll get him to help and whatever this thing is will fold.”
A familiar summoned using an artifact that predated their families by a couple centuries? Folding to a bunch of teenager shamans and and older shaman?
Not bloody likely.
“And besides, this is what Bram’s poofter of a dad said to do. We need backup, this is the least likely to violently murder us kind of backup, and if someone like that thinks this is an emergency bad enough to need back up, maybe, just maybe, a broken clock is right twice a day.”
Marcus fidgeted.
“Ok.” Dolores sighed. “Let’s get moving. Just… don’t let the horn touch me. If nothing else, I think Suibhne will still shadow me. I am keeping her bound to this plane of existence after all.”
Giving her a bright smile, the giant idiot adjusted his package, picked up the other one with the leave of his jacket to avoid touching the bone, and started moving.
There were a few routes to getting back to the main room, but the best one was….
2
Can be convinced to take either 1 or 3, but at the risk of an outage, this seems to be a better of two dangers given our current physical and magical condition.
The Act of dozing off in the afternoon is a luxury indeed.
Coffee would be nice, though.
[Collection of my Servant Sheets]
Now Revamped!
Hmmm... Dealing with recalcitrant eldritch beings is all part of a shaman's job. I vote 3.
2
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