The Gleam of Distant Years
25st of July 2006 A.D.
"Dad, Lydia, can you..." You look helplessly between the poor people strapped into this nightmare harvesting apparatus. "I have to get these poor people out of this, but we can't let the
monsters responsible for this get away." You spit out the word with more venom than you have ever done in your life. The rashka had simply been following its nature, most of them are not even capable of understanding that that mortals have their own will and agency rather than being props in their particular play.
"How on earth do I know so much about this?" you ask, still hovering mid-air.
"Usum, you called the fey back in Arctis Tor something like that thing, but they aren't the same, really really not the same...."
You shake your head. "How are you doing Lydia?"
"Not hurt, but I'm out of
potential, you know," She hives a halfhearted attempt to get the blood out of her hair in the water still streaming into the room.
Looking over at dad you are glad to see him looking fine, all the blood on him came from someone else.
And isn't is weird to be an expert on that.
"You are....flying." he says sounding surprised and a little uncertain.
You look down... yep still floating. With a thought you rise a few more feet, utterly unarmored from any earthly frame of reference. Something tells you you could fly straight up to outer space like this and it would take no more effort on your part than these first few feet. You firmly restrain your urge to squee, and manage to speak in a halfway normal voice. "Yeah, I can do that now."
Focus. With an effort you bring your attention back."Okay. I'll get the old people out of those things, and through the" you gesture at the hole in the basement roof. "And clean up this floating stuff; its too magic to leave it lying around." Looking over the disabled cultists, you remark. "Dr Niemi isn't here. Dad, I hate to suggest this, but you and Lydia better get after the rest of them, before someone gets the bright idea of setting off the gas mains to cover an escape." At Lydia's appalled look, you shrug."I saw that on TV once. Better not to give them time to improvise. Wait." You fumble out your phone one-handed . "Lydia , swap cellphones with me. If you run into stuff mine will let me know where you are."
"Sure..." As she takes the phone she looks down at the man she had killed. "What are we going to do about... I mean that has all sorts of forensic evidence on it doesn't it?"
"Don't worry about. In places like this... well let's just say it's the unlikely the authorities would launch that sort of investigation. Daedalus is not the norm when dealing with attacks by supernatural powers."
"I can incinerate it," you offer instantly. "I mean I'm gonna need tools to deal with the magic stuff, it isn't any harder to make several things than one as long as I do them all at once."
Dad gives you a worried look, but you are not sure what you are supposed to do about not feeling sorry. They were the ones who decided to feed people to a soul eating chthonian horror.
Speaking of the horror... As dad and Lydia leave you look at the pieces of dark glass and question if the bindings upon Iku Turso's prison need strengthening.
No, he has been deceived. You can almost taste its rage and bitterness upon the air, though that raises more questions that your crown alas cannot answer.
Next you start to draw out tools from the boundless pit of your shadow. First an incinerator of brass and black stone though before you make use of it you ask of the corpose what are the identities of the Pathfinder members. A mental list of eighty seven names is not what you had expected, nor the addendum 'those who open the way..'
The way to what?
Even as the questions keep piling up there is still work to be done.
You gently cut loose each of the prisoners from their pillars, then careful not to jostle them, you pull off the helmets. Good, they are still sleeping... you are not sure what you would have said if one of them woke up to be honest. Your look is a lot more kickass than comforting right now. Unfortunately there isn't anywhere soft to put the poor people, the best you can do it strip the jackets off the guards and make some makeshift pillows off of them.
You gain 1 Willpower -> now at 5/9 Temporary Willpower
Speaking of the guards... there is no way to know how long they will stay down for. You pull out a device that wrought of spindles and wheels, spinning and sparking, spindly robotic appendages pulling out the wiring that is hanging from the ceiling to make bindings.
The next thing you draw forth is not so readily recognizable. If it were not made of brass studded studded with blood red rubies and eerily glowing topaz you are not sure you would even recognize it as a machine. It looks almost alive an eyeless insect-like head atop a flexible metallic neck chewing up the black 'glass' until it becomes flexible like melted wax, sticky like tar. You spin it between your hands like clay on the potter's wheel until it becomes a small jar wider at the top and narrowing towards the bottom. Then you take more of the stuff and make the head of a man... no not quite a man, two horns arc from his temples in perfect symmetry and between then a sun disk with four rays. He looks vaguely like a picture you had seen of the Egyptian god Ra, but this is
not Ra, you know with rock solid almost painful certainty. You spend the next few minutes chasing pieces of gossamer around the room and scoping them up into the jar.
Ma'at to contain Isfet, order to contain chaos, the thought comes unbidden in your mind.
Lost 4 Essence (Two Crown Uses, One Tool Transcending Construct; One Crafting Excellency) -> Now at 2/12
That is what this is, you realize, primordial chaos which can be shaped into the most fantastical of workings and only fantastical workings. The substance rebels against the mundane and the commonplace against that which already has a place in shaped Creation. Precious perilous thing.
Gained Jar of Gossamer:
These are the tears that stone weeps, the symphony that fire sings, the sorrows of trees and thunder's secret laughter. The raw substance of improbable possibilities lies within. It can be wrought to and forged to make wonders and terrors, to bend the rules of the mundane wold in ways that no power of the world can match.
Gained 2 Essence from Urge -> now at 4/12 Essence
"They fey courts would pay a great deal for this for it sings of their nature and yet is unbound," Usum explains.
"Bargain with winter and wipe clean its enmity, bargain with Summer gain a strong ally against them."
"What do you mean?" you ask.
"The fey of the courts, of Winter and Summer, of Wyldfae are kin to it and kin to you, born of dreams yet born of flesh... I don't remember. A thousand pardons, Glorious Verdant Majesty" You had never heard Usum sound so angry with himself or so upset.
"That's OK Usum, it's more than we knew before," you try to cheer him up.
"Maybe we can ask Bob, or maybe Harry knows some fey who are less scary than Mab."
He does calm down a bit, but you can feel that it still gnaws at him. Before you can say anything else on the matter dad and Lydia come back with news. They had fought another bunch of guards, but in the time it took them to get to his office Niemi had fled after destroying his office with some kind of entropic magic. A lot of the rest of the staff has also fled, some in panic and others for less innocent reasons. everyone on your mental list is gone, other than the guards you have tied up and four more of them upstairs. Ambulances had already started to arrive outside as well as some people from the local churches, responding to a message from Ruth who had got her hands on a phone somehow.
"Things are in good hands here Molly," your dad says with utter conviction.
"Don't take it the wrong way, but that is a little creepy," you reply.
Lydia just kind of looks at you from green fire-crowned-head to brass-and-onyx shod toe for a moment before both of you burst into laughter.
What do you do next?
[] Deal with the Red Court presence in town
[] See if you can track down the escaped cultists
[] Return home, someone is going to have to deliver all these Pathfinder goons to the White Council
[] Write in
OOC: As far as Michael's sense of his task as a knight is concerned this was wrapped up as soon as you saved the people from the apparatus, but you can of course keep pocking this 'off the clock'. 
