World On Fire: Shadow Ops [a Fantasy WWII Quest]

[><] Looting isn't a crime if your family wants a Luger for Christmas

With the idiot dead - and god, it's getting worse - you set about checking him for anything. Papers you gather up, something that looks like an ID you gather up, and lastly you gingerly pick up the gun - you're pretty sure it has some sort of magic on it, but you can't tell what. The moment you touch the thing, your headache intensifies, your vision blurs, and your stomach threatens to disembowl itself. You almost drop it, but quickly toss it into a sack on your person and close the flap.

The instant the sack is closed.

The very instant, like a burst lightbulb, all the pain, confusion, and headache vanishes. You stare at the sack for a few seconds.

"Well, fuck me," you say, before getting back into the air.

The battle continues in a back-and-forth of sorts for another few hours, but slowly the IJA is pushed back to the narrow canyon leading to the valley, where they plug up and become too firmly lodged for you and your troops to remove in your present, exhausted, state. Fighting dies down steadily over the rest of the afternoon, with both sides digging emplacements and the monks (with Abigail's help) trying to get the tank working.

As you settle in to write reports for the evening, you can't get that damn gun out of your mind. Clearly it has some sort of effect on you, whoever its opponent is, whatever - if you could recreate it, get the gun to stop using it on you, or just figure out how to reverse engineer it... there are a lot of people out there in the Japanese military with high pain tolerance, but every little bit would help.

The problem is, while you can make a broom, and make a basic wand or staff, enchanting a gun, with all its metal and moving parts, is beyond you.

But you know some people people who it might not be.

[ ] Ask Ethel to analyze the gun - she's been up and down Africa, makes her own magical puppets, and has met people from every country in the world, perhaps she knows something
[ ] Ask Abigail to analyze the gun - she's a repair mage to begin with, and she maintains her own tank, surely a mere handgun is within her ability.
[ ] Ask Simon to analyze the gun - he is a literal centuries-old pirate, who has sailed just about all of the seven seas. Surely as a vampire he's seen some strange enchantments in his time.
[ ] Ask Liu Bei to analyze the gun - he, like most of the other people here using names from the Chinese classics, clearly knows his way around magic, and you would bet money (if not much) that the enchantments on this gun were East Asian at the very least.

[><] Tiebreaker Vote - Liu Bei

After a great deal of deliberation - mostly deciding between Simon and your host here in Shangri-La, you decide upon the latter. For one thing, there are a few traits to the enchantment's design that you're fairly certain are Chinese. At the very least, they look similar to what you occasionally saw from enchantments back in San Francisco's Chinatown and Little Tokyo, even if the quality leaves something to be desired.

You walk into his lab that evening after dinner, sack in hand, after having told him at dinner that you wanted to talk to him. You smirk to yourself as you see where it is - underground. And looking all the world like any other mage's lab, that is, like the laboratory of someone who should be making a death ray to kill Superman, or a monster cobbled together from parts of corpses.

Or, y'know, Fu Manchu's lab, but you're not going to tell him that if he asks for your opinion on his interior design choices.

You shake your head as you descend the last stair. This is a fairly serious matter, so you probably shouldn't approach him with a smile. For his part, he doesn't notice - he's focused on a leather-bound book in front of him, and wearing reading glasses. You didn't see him wear such glasses at the meeting earlier, so it must be in ultra-fine print.

He looks up as you enter the lab proper, and nods, closing the book with a heavy thud. "Ah, Captain Saitou!" he says as he waves the book away. It obediently deposits itself in a nearby bookshelf at a speed that makes you glad you're not in its way.

You lift up the bag, letting it shake a bit. "Got something I want you to look at, think it may have been enchanted here."

"Yes, yes," he says, in a way that somehow doesn't sound impatient. He puts the glasses aside and pulls out a set of goggles tinted so dark you wonder if he can even see through them. But of course, when working with enchantments, it pays to be cautious - and that's what enchanting lenses look like, anyway.

Turning away from him, you put the bag on the table and pull your hat over your eye-

"There's a spare set over by that beaker- the, oh, blue one, it should be."

Putting the enchanting goggles on your head, you turn round and look at the Nambu. Your eyes adjust slowly to the filtered light - everything looks like God was using a restricted palette, though the enchantments on the gun stand out some. Mercifully, their effects do not - the most you feel is a vague sense of malaise.

Liu Bei examines the gun for about thirty seconds before he lets out a gasp. He looks up, at you. Probably in the eyes, but it's hard to tell with the goggles.

"This is... how much do you know about the Imperial Seal of China?"

You have to think about that one for a moment. "The... which one? There were a few, weren't there?"

He nods. "I am referring to the one from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but yes."

You sigh. The last time you read that, you weren't the one reading it. "Last time I read it I was seven, so..."

"Well..." As he talks, he keeps examining the gun, though with much more delicate hands than he'd been using before. "Most translations leave it out, but the original - the Heirloom Seal, the one lost during the tenth century, had the power to control minds. It was said, used in the right way, it could influence the minds of the people using any document it was placed upon... some emperors, themselves mages, could even use it directly as a focus."

That gets your attention. "You're saying that this is some sort of mind control gun? And that the Japanese have this seal?"

"Oh, no," he says, shaking his hand. "No. I doubt any standardized semiautomatic pistol could handle the strain of even attempting the sort of things the Heirloom Seal was capable of. But the gun does have similar enchantments... even if they don't seem to be very skillfully made."

"So it's a stomachache gun?"

He shakes his head again. "No. If my guess is correct, it's supposed to be a 'mind control gun' as you so aptly put it, but the enchantments and the gun itself are so crude that some level of debilitation is all it's capable of. But even that is concerning - at the very least, this gun indicates that the Japanese Army either knows something about the Heirloom Seal, or is actively looking for it."

With that cheerful thought, the analysis of the gun continues from there, though you don't learn much more - the gun is indeed meant to control the target at the behest of the wielder, but the enchantment job is so shoddy the most it can really do is give the target a migraine. Which, having experienced it, is still pretty useful.

Still. These sort of enchantments done right, in the wrong hands - and these are the sort of 'done right' enchantments you wouldn't even trust the President with - could do an incredible amount of damage if anyone figured out how to work them. And it's still a Nambu, so the gun part of it is still a piece of scrapmetal. On the other hand, knowing about an enchantment is the first step in countering it...

[ ] Destroy it
[ ] Keep it
[ ] Send it to R&D
[ ] Give it
- [ ] To who? (Write in)