Of Whiskey and Worries
12th of January 2007 A.D.
Anastasia Luccio was not, as the youth put it, a happy camper and it was in no small part thanks to the riffle in front of her, this sleek thing of brass and coils, arcane arrays and bottled spirits. The problem was not any short-coming on the part of the device or the slowly awakening minor demon inside of it, quite the opposite, the light of gas lanterns shone on a thing out of a thing out of the imaginings of H. G. Wells, though unlike in those fictional works there would be no convenient deus ex machina to save the powers of earth from an army out of the Thousandth and First Hell. The reports had made for an exceedingly worrying reading even without Donald's little 'exercise of imagination'
Given the limitations of transport into and out of her domain it would take Miss Carpenter proximately a month to draw enough forces to establish a military beachhead in a defensible but easily expanded upon position like Iceland where she could tap the ley lines to empower hybrid techno-sorcerous workings of the sort which the Council has never encountered, but all too familiar to the earliest writings of the Hermetics. Magic and the machine are converging as they have not done in all the time since the flight of the Hermetic Circle to Egypt.
Morgan, rational, practical Donald Morgan, the man who in their shared youth had been called 'about as mystical as a block of chalk that's only used to write out algebra' had effectively delivered a doomsday prophecy even as he had supported the Merlin's ex cathedra decision to seek alliance with Sanctuary.
"The problem isn't the girl, it is what she represents..." Anastasia whispered to herself, an argument made loud enough to cause the vaults of the the Hall of Glass shake. "As above so below."
Nestled among many philosophical principles passed on by the old and often given only lips service to newly ascended wizards of the Council was the idea that the Nevernever was a tilted mirror, it reflected the physical world yes, but due to the angle at which it rested it often reflected aspects of the changing world before those had become material manifest, the same principle that allowed prophetic spirits to exist writ impossibly large, too large in fact for any one mortal wizard to guess as to the pattern, but if one were to gather the wisdom of many....
The Warden Captain poured herself a glass of aged whiskey, downed it, then swayed. "Porca miseria!!" she cursed her new weak eyes and she cursed Corpsetaker and she cursed Ancient Mai for being the one to ask her if she was alright today when they all knew damn well she wasn't and that she had to be. The war didn't wait for the frailties her own folly had inflicted upon her.
The elderly wizard had not even been smug about being the one to warn about the danger of Mikaboshi claim to the hell of 'Wicked City'. It had been a problem 'of the Wu Lung', the troubles of the east often strange but rarely deadly, certainly not compared to the peril red in tooth and claw that was the Red Court. Yet here they were, the spirit of the age was industry reflected in the works of rising powers.
Not that the White Council was a stranger to powers arising seemingly from nowhere. From their perspective the rise of the Christian Church persecuted eastern cult to one of movers an shakers of the world mundane and spiritual had been frightfully swift. The stacks here in Edinburgh still held tomes brought over from Rome and even Alexandria before it filled with the terrified revelations of wizards who had borne witness to the birth of an Age of Faith. At least compared to
them the present council was better off, they had not fallen to infighting and myopic political games, seeking secular power, but that was a low bar indeed to step over.
The news from Avalon had come in the middle of a heated debate on how much manpower they should put towards the study of changes to the tides of magic in the middle of a war. Miss Carpenter had done the...
highly improbable again and gained not one but three grand favors of Summer enough to restart questions on it she were planning to make a move to expand her power into the material world under cover of such favors spent.
Whatever the result of the newest round of talks Anastasia would be drinking a lot more before the week was out.
OOC: Some more hints as to what the ages of this world look like and when the cut off was as well as a bit on the history of the Council and its predecessor.
