Sundering
22st of July 2006 A.D.
How do you get into this thing? Almost without meaning to your left hand goes to your pocket, there's no time for Clippy and with this much magic in the air odds are no signal either. So you do the next best thing, go for the pointy bit, it's called a coms tower or something, but the ladder is on the other side, no time to walk 'round... so you jump again.
This time you do not misjudge your strength, going so high you almost brush the reeling, one of the lights popping from the heat of your sword as you raise it to land point first into the hatch held fast with spite and sorcery. It screens as it tears and like a living thing is bleeds a black tar, trying perhaps to seal away its wounds. Luckily you are not alone, like you Lydia had taken the high road and she wastes no time starting to pull away the steel where it had been torn, exposing the ladder and the room below. Once you imagine that ladder had been fire hydrant red, but now bears the color of old blood, blackening as it goes down
"Well, should be fun to see just how much damage this form can do, anyway. Bet it's more than you can, anyway, unless you're hiding your own magical superform?" You tease Lydia as much because you do not want to think of what had been done in there as anything.
Down the ladder you come to a cramped room covered from the linoleum floor to steel ceiling in piping and wiring, instruments and dials. What purpose they may once have served you do not know, but now all the dials point down like the fangs of some strange beast and all the clocks are stopped at the same hour 14:35 and yet they were ticking... all ticking, a sound like a thousand demented brass soldiers dancing on your head.
You take a breath, another, you feel the clarity of deed fade, the voice of power dimming... and so you call it back.
Lost 1 Essence -> now at 5/12
Laying about you with a sword of fire driven as much by fear at what is going on outside as by anger at fake Bob you do not slow when arcs of electricity pass through Usum and into you, you do not stop when the thing starts speaking you, its voice a broken pastiche of Bob and something... someone else, cold chillingly urbane.
Lost 1 Wound
"Such grace, such power. Why do you act ze vandal? Let us speak yes. If the ship dies you shall die with it, all this power must pass somewhere and gross matter cannot hold it, it is like ze atom.... breaking. Perhaps gods might live, but what of the mortals, the old man, the wizard?"
Like and earworm, or a mindworm, you recognize the enchantment for what it is and banish it with an act of will. Power is too precious to burn now.
"Get out of my head!" The last of the instruments are broken so you rush the door towards the front, cut your way into... well it looks like a bedroom, but all the sheets are covered in oil or blood or both. There are bodies in some of them.
"Don't look!" you shout back to Lydia. You mostly take your own advice, but you know even the glimpses you catch of them will haunt your nightmares. These people, you think it is more of the staff had died... badly. One woman with her wrists bound together in mockery of prayer and her neck slashed open starts to twitch as though to shamble to her feet, but then she jerks and falls, mercifully inanimate again. Whatever power the dark had gotten it was not infinite.
OK that is the brain of the ship, what's next the heart, the engine? No, batteries.
Even as you feel the ship lurch lower the two of you burst into the next room to find... well you
think they are the batteries, though just from the ghost fire that pours through them you are pretty sure they must be important. You get to cutting and Lydia gets to smashing.
At some point between stab number six and Lydia putting her hand through the hole you made the whole structure shudders and the 'life' if that's what you call it seems to go out of it.
The ship still smells of blood of oil and of rot, but it no longer feels like it's watching you. Dead or maybe just gone... at the very least the ship isn't taking you anywhere.
"Er..." Lydia swallows. "Maybe we can go out some other way."
So you do, out through what must have been the galley, emerging into a hall, like yet unlike the one you had left. For one the water is draining out, leaving behind the expected mess of broken display cases and other flotsam, but also Harry and Gard are standing a little apart from Arawn looking up towards the somewhat scorched sub, now laying a little on its side from the sudden expulsion of the water.
Lydia waves at her father. "Hi dad, we handled the ghost!" In a softer voice to you: "It was a ghost wasn't it?"
"Dark spirit," you correct, happy to see everyone OK. For once you had taken the most hits, not that you can feel it.
"We handled the dark spirit!" Lydia corrects, still smiling fit to burst with pride.
"I can see that snowdrop." He clears his throat, it is very clear this is not a man who is used to being surprised, but something about you does it. "Who is your friend?" he settles on.
What do you reply?
[] Molly Carpenter, if you are asking what I am, not entirely clear on that myself
[] Think of me as a Good Samaritan, though one who has questions
[] Write in
OOC: You guys do not know this in character yet because you did not see it, but since I know you are going to ask it and there is no reason to keep you guessing yes Arawn got Capricorpus.
