Kira Aleshin was annoyed. She was currently waiting for the PRT and Army to come out and take custody of the people she found had ignored her various warning marks and crossed the river and were trying to break into her daughter's lair. To be quite honest, Naichi would have been more than capable of defending her own lair from them, even though this place wasn't the best lair and wasn't too defensible.
Perfectly adequate while living under your parents' protection, but that also allowed it to be used as a lesson on proper defenses.
She smirked as she remembered some of her first choices for a lair, after her parents kicked her out of their lair all those millenia ago on Toril. The house had been nice and she didn't have a whole lot of treasure to hide in the cellar. When she signed up with a local group of priests of Bahamut, she was immediately given an audience with one of the elder gold dragons, and a lair suitable for one such as her was located, cleaned up, and made ready for her to inhabit.
It had come with local duties, but that was fine.
The complex behind the waterfall had been an excellent choice, both well built and elegant. The beings who'd constructed it had hidden things well. She even had a small garden where sunlight managed to come in through discreet windows hewn through the rock.
A shake of her head brought her back to the present.
"Whatever am I going to do with you?" she said in one of the various forms of the trade language called "Common," matching what she'd heard her prisoners speaking
"We're not talking," one of them muttered.
"I suspect you will," Kira answered, with a grin that was more a predator's show of teeth.
"Please don't make us talk," another one, much younger, whined. "We only just managed to come back, and He'll send us back to where we came from. I don't want to go back there."
"Ah," Kira said. "No promises about that." The younger man's comments told her much more than she let on. These men had been brought back by a necromantic ritual, to do their master's bidding and then be returned from wherever they came from. The problem was that until they completed that task, they'd keep reviving, over and over and over again, getting a little bit worse for wear every time. And the evil part was that they still felt pain. You would be inflicting pain and suffering on them every time you struck one or killed one. The merciful thing to do would be find the necromancer and
kill him, which would end the ritual's hold on its victims, and return the dead to their rest.
Assuming, of course, that "rest" was part of their afterlife. The young man's comment implied otherwise.
The necromancer could also kill them to keep things from being found out, but when they did that, they would have to be re-summoned by a new ritual. Otherwise, the animated dead would go through things as if they were alive; eating, drinking and sleeping. They'd even heal as if they were alive, even though they knew they weren't.
It was a shit way to raise an army to do your bidding and one she'd seen multiple times. And it sucked to be the defenders of whatever they'd be attacking, because you'd eventually be worn down by them unless you did something that most civilized nations would consider war crimes because of the brutality involved.
And then you had a bunch of angry ghosts to deal with anyway.
I'd say this is above my pay grade, she thought to herself,
but around here I'm about as high as it gets. I guess it's time for some D.I.
Hey Boss, she thought in a specific way,
We got a problem you may need to offer us some advice on...
= = = = = = = = = =
"So why aren't we using the highway?" Schneider asked as the group marched through the woods north of Brockton Bay.
"No cover," Pirotess answered. "We'd be out in the open when the militia opened fire."
"So we stick to the woods," Arshes continued, the tone of her voice suggesting that she was lecturing a rather stubborn child.
"I get that," Schneider grumped. "Kinda limits my effectiveness. They could get close enough that anything I do would hit us as well. I'd prefer not to do that, it's embarrassing."
"We'd prefer that to not happen, too," Pirotess shot back. She was interrupted by one of the scouts running up. "What have you got for us?"
"There's no one living in the area," the scout reported. "Evidence of a disaster of some kind; maybe a tidal wave, given all the salt rime I see all over the place. Saw a lot of that back home.
"We're on a peninsula," the man continued, bringing a paper map out of his pouch. "Found this in an abandoned shop." He carefully opened it up revealing a highly detailed road map of the area. "We've got an inlet that wouldn't be too hard to cross if we had some boats, but my crew did get a look at the bridge there."
"What's it's condition?" Arshes asked.
"Very good," the scout answered. "It's been used recently. It could easily handle everything we have all at once."
"It's also a choke point," Schneider added. "One approach on our side. It could easily be defended by a small number of men." He pointed to an area out at the end of the point the bridge connected to. "If I were tasked with defending that bridge," he mused, "I'd destroy the smaller bridge to the east, forcing us to go down the peninsula, and make us pay for every step we take towards the bridge."
"Do you have any more of these maps?" Pirotess asked the man.
"Indeed, I do," he said, taking out four more from his pouch.
= = = = = = = = = =
Warrant Officer Four Jack Calico leaned back in his chair. The Privateers had been deployed to the Kittery Naval and Coast Guard station a week prior, and he was using some of his abilities to keep track of the intruders who were making their way down the coast towards Kittery Point.
He was mainly a Brute / Mover kind of cape, able to move between patches of shadows, and was stronger and faster than a normal person, but he had another, minor ability: He could create a couple of small feline-like shadows and send them out using his Mover ability. He could see and hear through them, which made him very useful for recon work. And his control range was based on the distance to him through the patch of shadows they emerged from.
On the downside, he couldn't do it for long as it would tire him out quickly. And his shipmates already chided him enough about being lazy, trying to sleep as much as he could. At least that bad habit he could blame on his partial feline nature.
One of his cat shadows had picked up a conversation. He couldn't understand a word of it, but what they were looking at had caught his attention. "Well that ain't good," he muttered.
As he was nearing his limits for how long he could keep them out, the shadow cats were recalled. As they re-appeared from a nearby shadow, he gave them each a pet before he dismissed them.
Getting up, it was a short walk to the common area of where they were quartered, and to the office where his boss was.
"Got a minute, skipper?" he asked after knocking.
"Whatcha got, Jack?" Captain Jones answered.
"Our invaders have gotten themselves some road maps," Jack continued. "Sir," he finished. Mustn't forget the military decorum. "Looks like they might make for the Kittery Point bridge."
"That matches the rest of our intel," Captain Jones answered.
"I also managed to see three that stood out from the rest," the cat-man continued. "One mean looking guy, might be a Blaster based on how he looked like he was complaining about the close cover and making gestures like something blowing up and the tone of his voice. Not dressed in armor like the one thicc babe and another who is almost cat-like. Meow."
"Jack, what have I said about that?"
"To be respectful of other genders," Jack answered in an offhand fashion. "Or I'll have to go through sensitivity and diversity training at the Washington Naval Yard. Again." He shrugged, and gave his commanding officer an insouciant grin. "Can't help it if it's true. The babe with the black hair is
thicc. Except for those two, everyone in the group is male, or close to.
"Anyway, they're north of Kittery Point, and east of US Highway 1 and west of Maine 103," he continued. "Probably northeast of Crockett Neck, given how they were looking at the map and pointing at the bridges on it."
Captain Jones nodded. "Good job, then, and I'll hold off on sending you back down to DC," he added with a grin. "Take a break, while I talk to my contacts in Brockton."
"Don't need to tell me twice," Jack answered. "Sir."
Captain Jones just waved him off, pulled out a phone and began dialing.
= = = = = = = = = =
Taylor's day was not going well. The whole business with Naichi having to abandon her lair – something that didn't sit well with any dragon, but neither wanted to face Kurya's ire about not listening to her – was unnerving and now the school was going over its evacuation plans in case of a disaster or attack. The entire school appeared to have a pall of doom and gloom over it.
Even Vicky was subdued and quiet. "There's something going on," she said quietly.
"Really? I couldn't tell," snarked Missy, trying to enjoy her lunch. "But there's definitely something going on. They've been running stealth drones up and down the coast."
"Well, there's attack helicopters out at Pease," Chris added. "They arrived last night. Made one heckuva racket."
"I just hope it doesn't mean a mass casualty event," Amy grumbled. "Those are never fun. For anyone."
"At least Tamara will be able to help out," Natalie said from where she was sitting. She took a bite out of her sandwich. "And if I haven't said it before, thanks for
your help, Taylor."
"Not a problem," Taylor answered. "Glad to help, and I had the room."
"Helped with what?" Vicky asked. "You've said you don't have a lot of space, and having been to your house, I can see that."
"She helped me move my collection somewhere safe," Natalie admitted. "Mom
insisted."
"Oooh, yeah," Vicky continued. "You don't argue with Mom. It never ends well." There was silence and you could almost hear the wheels grinding in her head. "Why'd your collection have to be moved to a safer location?"
"For the same reason the Army is out in force on American soil," Natalie answered.
"The only reason for that to happen is because there's an army on our home soil," Dean commented. "Something that hasn't happened in this area since 1815." He looked at Natalie with an arched eyebrow. "Are you basically saying there's a
hostile, foreign army on American soil?"
"Yes."
"Fun." The sarcasm was unmistakable.
