Events of Friday, 29 October 2010

From May 28th's session, actually detailling events that happened the following session. At some point I'll collect all this and put it the right order or something.

I paired up with Mike, the cat-person, and asked him to wake me in four hours. I wanted the second watch, so I could be up and at 'em, ready to hit the pavement as soon as it was light. Despite the bizarre incidents of the evening I managed to not shove my pistol in his face when he came to wake me.

In that dead quiet that falls in the few hours before dawn, I contemplated my situation. I was on the hook for this sceptre for my client, who had threatened to basically hand me over to a local bounty hunter if I failed to return the thing to her. Not for the first time, I regretted not showing her pretty ass out the door. She'd only made the threat after I'd agreed to find the sceptre, the bitch.

Tony had given up the information on Augie far too readily, and without a flicker of surprise at the fact I was looking for some ancient bone stick thing. Of course, the assassins who'd come gunning for Augie had put a serious hurt on me as well. To a soldier, in a situation like that, a target's a target. Someone's in your way, you knock 'em down. Simple. It's business. But Tony had sent those thugs, and that was a bit more than just business. He'd known I was looking for the sceptre because I had come asking about it. I had my suspicions that he had arranged for the cute little 'drug bust' that had descended on us at Kara's flat like a flight of steel-clad vultures. Tony was definitely on my list of people to have a serious chat to once all this crazy shit settled out.

And the woman who was my client had been wrong in all kinds of ways. She'd never given me her name, nor a contact number. I mentally kicked myself for the umpteenth time for accepting this job. I'm not a private eye. I don't find things for a living. I kill things for a living, generally. Why had I gone so willingly into such a questionable contract?

I paused a moment to remember the sight of her as she flowed into my office that morning. Hell, had it only been that morning that this had all begun? She had an unearthly beauty that had seized my attention immediately. She was mesmerising. She was exotic. She was probably one of these crazy faery elf neverneverland bozos Kara and the others had been discussing. If they were even real. But that woman was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, and it's not as if I've not seen beautiful women before. I once had occasion to dance with a Russian princess at a gala fete in Rostock-- now there was a rare beauty. Gossamer white hair framing a heart-shaped face set with piercing ice-blue eyes, a gown the colour of the early morning frost clinging to blades of grass, and the subtlest of touches that could make a man --

I was getting off the track here. Whoever this woman was, she was odd. Beautiful no doubt, but not your average female type person. She was, I realised, merely the first in a long series of odd people I'd made the tentative acquaintance of today. Yesterday. Whatever.

And these people I was holing up with. It's not as if I've not hidden out with oddballs before, in the name of survival, but these -- well, I suppose an inventory is in order.

There's Mike, the tall kid who changes into a jaguar. He changes. Into a jaguar. No special effects. No lights, no sound tapes, just a fucking jaguar.

There's Alvin, the big cop. 'Big' is not a big enough word for Alvin; he's the largest man I have ever seen. Easily seven and a half feet tall and built like a fallout bunker, he's a fan of shooting first and making demands later. To call him a loose cannon does disservice to any of the loose cannons I've known over the years, and believe me, there've been more than a few. Despite this trait, he seems to be very dedicated to enforcing the law. I'll have to be careful not to act too much like a felon in front of him lest he decide it's prudent to remove my arms from their sockets and wave in the jets at the airport with them or something.

There's the weird fellow who must've put a bug on me or Kara's burnt-out flat, as he claimed to have heard, from the street, a conversation I had while I was inside said flat. He's still with the group, so as long as I can keep an eye on him I don't really have to worry about whether or not I'm personally bugged. I'll have Delia check me over when this mission is finished. That, at least, will be relaxing. And enjoyable.

Kara is the woman whose home we unintentionally redecorated whilst attempting to not get killed tonight. Her front room looks like a slaughterhouse. I personally decorated her grandfather clock with one of the thugs' brains. The killing of the thug was intentional - the fact his grey matter splattered on the clock was not. Honestly, I don't go out of my way to cause secondhand destruction. It just seems to work out that way. Anyhow, Kara, from what I'm being told, is someone around whom electronics tend to fail, and fail catastrophically. She has an old-fashioned rotary dial phone, and I didn't see a single piece of electronic equipment in the place. No stereo, no television, not even a digital alarm clock. I wonder if she's the reason my mobile has been on the fritz all night.

There's Maeve, a woman with a sword. And also Sean, a bloke with a sword. And guns. At least the bloke has guns. I feel like I'm in a travelling circus.

They were all yakking on this evening about how scary and evil this sceptre-thing is and how we have to keep this court or that court or these bad guys or Mickey bloody Mouse or whoever from getting their hands on it. It was more or less at that point that I decided to take a smoke break.

Now, ordinarily, I'm on my guard when I step out of a building which backs onto a wood. Today being what it was, however, I was more concerned with finding and hotwiring one of the police cars we'd taken from the earlier scene and getting the hell away from these people. Not one of them was what you'd call normal, and they were all dangerous, even if only inasmuch as they were certifiably insane. Magic. Faeries. Pfeh.

So it took me completely by surprise when I heard the familiar 'crack!' of a high-powered rifle being fired from a distance and the experienced the distinctive but unpleasant feeling of a rifle round impacting my chest. A centimetre to the left and I'd be a dead man, shot straight through the heart. As it was I was certain I'd bruised a rib.

I noticed the tell-tale red dots of laser sights on my chest and dropped to the ground immediately. At the same time a deafening roar, similar to the one I'd heard earlier in the evening, rang out. I hoped it was Mike and that the smell of my blood hadn't made him hungry.