Thunder and Iron
3nd of October 2006 A.D.
"Now do you understand what I meant about wishes." The voice of her father, soft like the touch of falling leaves upon the well of her mind yet filled with an endless depth of complexity came upon Lydya. Foremost was worry at what was to come, but there was also pride and yet amusement, for as she had learned over the past months, Humor was important to those who walked with death, lets they go mad in their long vigils.
She hear
them around her, the click of clips, the monosyllabic grunts that marked warriors which had worked for many lives of men. they were the einherjar who had sold not their lives but their deaths to the Father of Battles and so could not die save to his ends which one death alone would not pay.
Beside and behind her the puppets shifted, her nervousness pulling at phantom muscles as Molly was going through the last of the plan, voice rising to its inexorable conclusion.
"Go! Go! Go!"
Lydia did not see the others fanning out to their own target. Even as the wind of the Otherwold opened at her back her own world narrowed to the people in her group, raiding party another elder presence marked it, one who recalled the days when cattle theft could make legends and break them. A wordless keening tore from her lips, like the cold wind over the moorlands, the wail of the banshee.
A bottle flashed in dawns light, not yellow but venomous green as it flew through...
***
Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden was no stranger to taking on the big boys with a spell on his lips and hope to magic and Whoever may be listening in his heart, if anything the strange part was how much backup he had this fine autumn morn at his right shone Amoracchius, throwing more light into the world than the sun cast on it and at his back the warriors of Odin looking just about tough enough to knock down walls with a well placed boot, but some walls you couldn't kick in, some walls you needed a wizard for, Grasping up and around at the edges of the world Harry pulled.... maybe a bit too hard
The proverbial door had been rotten all the way through. Where the Way opened the sky turned the color of old bruises, the clouds made ragged shadows. Where the Way pened the earth cracked into fissures filled with black gunk like there had been a oil spill in hell. Where the Way opened there was no weed choked land between rusting buildings, all was bare and open besides the tower twenty feet around at the base and fifty feet high that looked like it had been woven from steel girders bent and twisted like putty. At the very top was a throne or the mockery of one with the poor bastard called J nailed on top.
"How do we...?" The wizard hesitated on the edge of the Nevernever even as explosions echoed all around him, car alarms went off one after another in blaring cacophony.
That is when he noticed the two spirals left and right of the tower leading to the top, each of them twisting the same way in violation of space and geometry. Before he read Molly's Big Book he may have missed the significance, but this was a much an act of desecration as an upside down cross dipped in blood would have been: not Yin and Yang, but Yin and Yin, a place of willful unbalance.
"Wizard, if we bring the thing down can you catch the extraction target?" one of the mercenaries shouted as they ran across.
Gun for hire or not Harry had to admit, if only to himself, he liked his style.
***
Fighting the servants of Yomi was a breath of fresh air for the old man. Not a thought many would have he knew, but for the shih who often had to choose the lesser poison, to weigh the darkness of one soul against the warping of another purpose, it was a weight lifted from the shoulders to know they were fighting those who had surrendered all thought of harmony, all honor and purpose in the name of their own madness and ambition.
As the door blew off its hinges with a screech of tortured metal he could see the figure black against the smoke, raising a gun as he shouted.
One good kick should send it flying... Alas he hat forgotten than simple things can be the hardest of all to do and for the first time in years though he was one with the flow of Chi, in mind, body and soul committed, the blow simply did not connect
Shots rang out, a wild spray of steel, in the direction of mother and child... caught in a web of silver runes like flies in a spider's web. Oh the sorceress paid her price for the spell, blood pouring out of her eyes, streaking red and black but the bakemono cold only watch in shock so profound it wiped even anger from his features. It would be the last expression he would wear as three controlled bursts of gunfire splattered his head across the back wall and his surviving companions.
"Surrender or be judged!" he called, the traditional 'greeting' of the shih, not that he expected a bakemono to listen, the spirits who would twist a child into a vessel were particularly perverse.
"Just kill me then, kill me," she said, giggled, even as teas welled up in her eyes.
The two remaining guns turned to oblige her, but Devsimar had seen the gleam in her eye and he remembered Guangzhou, thirty eight years were not near enough to make him forget. "Wait!" he shouted. "Her life force is linked to the hostages."
To the baby most likely.
The demon-chained child's expression curdled into something foul and she began to curse at them in tongues not spoken by men for centuries.
Whatever foul gifts the unclean spirit had carried into its host they were no use against just being held fast by a pair of the war-sworn.
As only a pair of einherjar are necessary to keep control of the remaining bakemono Brother Devsimar, the rune-caster and three of the warriors are free to assist other fights. Where do they go?
Rune-caster 5/7 Health due to using her own lifeforce to empower the rune shield
[] Into the Nevernever with Micahel and Harry
[] Back to the Rally Point
[] Try to help in the torture chamber
[] Split up
-[] Write in how
[] Write in
OOC: Man poor Brother D managed to roll negative successes on 13 total dice. On the plus side Odin knew you were heading into a hostige situation so she send you a rune-caster who knew how do cast a version of the shield spell, even if she did have to hurt herself to stop a burst on automatic. Next up Molly inside the torture room. 
