Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

25st of July 2006 A.D.

After the first moment's thought you dismiss the thought of killing them altogether, no matter how distasteful they had been your allies this day, but if they could be persuaded to keep fighting, to bring an end to evil worse than their own by their own admission. Not to mention Usum has a point I do still have that contact information.

Covered in a thin layer of blood and worse things starting to freeze over, clutching in one hand a sword of balefire you speak their fate, voice as clear through water as it would have been through empty air: "Go now, and know, that on this night, I hold no grudge against you and yours and will remember your service here. When our paths cross again, as long as no innocent is suffering from your actions, I do not foresee myself pronouncing judgement upon you."

As you speak the relief is palpable in every motion of bloodied claws, in every twitch of ragged ears and bright it is in eyes accursed. If I would but reach out my hand... The thought is a little scary in how reasonable it sounds in your own head.

Nope, nope, I'll handle it later. Evil fleshshapers now, potential vampire minions later.

Turning you descend to the base through the dead water, bodies and bits of bodies floating down all around you like some bizarre precipitation. And on today's weather it will be pouring guts with a light drizzle of semi-intact corpses, you think in one of those cheery weather girl voices, the sort that make you want to throw your coffee at the TV in the morning

Usum finds it utterly hilarious... you aren't sure how to take that.

"Dad, Lydia, are you there?" You ask into the radio, but all you get is static.

Heart racing in your chest as it had not done through the whole battle you dive into the broken dome after them. Passing through an U bend you come to an air lock that hisses with an impotent hydraulic voice, opening onto a scene of carnage. What the guardian had been in life you cannot say other than it must have been some misbegotten melange of eel and octopus by way of rusted cybernetic implants.

Some of the bodies are more human-like, and humanlike it all that you can call them, as though someone had made one of those storefront in mannequins flesh and blood rather than plastic.

"Molly! Over here!" you hear Lydia call from up ahead. Her head poops behind a corner in the sterile looking corridors. She had tried to wipe the blood off her face, but there is no saving that T-Shirt without magic.

"What happened, where's..."

Then dad comes round as well as you can finally breathe free. "We're alright Molly"

Their radios had shorted out when they had fought the eel-thing, it had spit lighting apparently, though it had been no more able to resist the Sword than any other monster. The creepy mouthiness, eyeless thralls had been some kind of flesh-crafted siren, making them utterly powerless against dad's will and faith and the last flash of Lydia's power.

"Nothing's ever getting in my head again."

You are not the least surprised to find its' their blood Lydia is wearing.

In the third chamber, a equipped with metal tables, with straps of course, and surgical tools arrayed in a procession from the banal to the horrific dad and Lydia had finally caught up with the mysterious doctor Niemi as he was about to cut and run. Now that he was dealing with a threat more dire than tricked senior citizens he did not last long in spite of the spells he tried to use. After that well...

Clean up is hell, not because it's hard but because of how pathetically easy it is. Absent both the Grey Thing and Niemi all the thralls seemed to just fail. Most of them went unresponsive, a few bashed their heads into walls or took other more creative means to end their lives. One particularly motivated frog man killed five human Pathfinders, the last ones here before biding off his engorged tongue. You find him drowning in his own blood unable to speak, but he seems to find some comfort in Lydia's company at the end.

That is not the worst of it, the worst comes in the form of carefully labeled shelves and filing cabinets filled with experimental data. Pathfinder Pharmaceuticals is more than just a cover to fun a retirement home, far more, though it has no interest in healing people. Even just a cursory look is enough to confirm that Rhys the Ragged, the thing you had killed, had been looking into alchemical processes to create shock troops out of humans.

"A better way to make thralls out of humans..." you explain. "Normally they need to target someone with the Gift, you know, magic."

"But everyone's a bit magic," Lydia cuts in. "There is no such thing as a human with no... oh."

"I do not think they were using the gossamer in the transformation, not directly." You shake one of the pill boxes, this one with a bright red label that reads 'X-treme Supps for an X-treme Bod', the pills are X shaped, they are also neon green and you think somewhat magical, if they had been made directly from the stuff of dreams and nightmares that would be more than faint. "They prototyped the substance with Gosamer to get just the right effect and then they worked backwards to figure out a less exotic way to mass produce it. I think the act of taking it of your own free will day in and day out, hoping that it will give you say the perfect body is part of what triggers the transformation."

"The transformation into what?" your father asks.

So you tell him, describing the headless marrow-drinking thralls, the frogmen, though you are not sure what kind of desire for physical transformation would do that. Though you are pretty sure that the Illusion-spinning living mannequins are the final result of a diet tea called 'SlimDream'

You had never seen your dad look more sick and horrified before, not even at the museum.

"They are using people who want to change something about their bodies..." Lydia trails off. "No, people who are desperate to change something about their bodies. It's kind of like what we heard the Pathfinders do only instead of a one on one self-improvement sell that turns cult-y you can just use advertising. Does the stuff work, before it turns you into a thrall I mean."

You give a grim nod putting the files down on the nearest table, thankfully free of blood. "There are still some kinks to iron out, partly with making the victim sick, giving them nightmares, but also with inducing just the right psychic mental sensitivity that the minor sorcerers can do their Pied Piper impression and sneak their new thralls out of sight once they mutate beyond the bounds of what can be seen in public."

Though you had not found anymore gossamer you did find the pods in which it would have been stored for prototyping... and from the looks of things the tanks are not very good, they would have started seriously leaking in a matter of tens of minutes, an hour at most, what is why the experimental facility had to be near the extraction point

What do you do?

[] Take the files and a sampling of the pills, destroy the rest

[] Try to strip as much equipment and arcane machinery as you can out of the base

[] Write in

OOC: So you know how World of Darkness has Pentex... that gave me ideas for moving the Dresdenverse fomori into the modern age. Yes they are thee dregs and monsters of a thousand mythologies, but that does not mean they cannot adapt for greater evil in the twenty-first century.