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grumpygreenwitch · 1 year ago

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The Witches and Wizards Job 7-8

Around this point I actually read back and asked myself, "Is this moving too fast?" Then I remember the speed at which a Leverage episode actually moves and the kind of beating Harry usually picks up each book, and went, "Nah."

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SEVEN

The divide between magic and technology is a known quantity. Every wizard knows to stay away from most mechanical things; the more complex they are, the more likely they were to break. The more powerful the wizard, the quicker it was gonna happen. Even knowing these things, I hadn't realized how deep that boundary ran until I tried to find out anything about my prospective employers.

If it had been a magical entity, a spell, an artifact, between Bob and I we could have probably found out at least the basics, but Bob couldn't find out anything about the Leverage people. I wasn't crazy enough to try and scry something in Boston, never mind the range.

All I could tell was that Leverage was, apparently, a purely mundane affair. Based in Boston as they were I didn't doubt they'd run themselves into something other that the average human, but as the afternoon dragged on I began to realize I was going to have more luck finding out what, rather than getting any sort of information on whatever Deveraux and Ford actually had going on.

A smart man would have said no on principle. What little I could find out told me that if things had gotten so bad that an entirely non-magical outfit like Leverage had come looking for a wizard, then they were bad enough that walking away unscathed to enjoy that absurdly large paycheck was not guaranteed. Not even 50/50 odds.

But 50/50 was still better than no odds at all.

And I hadn't lied when I told Deveraux that I'm a curious man.

She'd written a number on the back of the card. Not a hotel, so they could have been anywhere. I eyed it while I called Butters and asked him to look after Mister while I was away. Then I called it.

"Harry." Deveraux actually sounded happy to hear me; it was refreshing.

"Train. The older the better," I told her. "That applies to any tech you want near me, too. Mouse comes with me."

"Yes, of course."

"The daily fee is… good." My voice cracked a bit despite my best attempt at sounding like it was not a holy-heck amount of money. I cleared it. "It's good. But I can't go longer than a week. One week and I'm coming back home, even if your problem's not solved."

"That's fine."

"And I need a basement."

"A b… A basement?"

"It's contained in case something bad happens."

"Ah." The fact she didn't ask questions told me containment was a common concern in both her line of work and mine. "Anything else?"

"I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I'm sure something will come up." Something did almost immediately. "A full briefing as soon as I'm there. No secrets, no lies. If I find out you've lied to me, I'll leave."

"We'll tell you as much as we know," she assured me, and I found myself believing her. "Welcome to the team, Harry."

It felt weird to be welcomed, to be made to feel as if I were part of a team that actually wanted me there. "When do you think you'll have everything ready?"

There was laughter in her tone. "When do you think you'll be packed?"

Three hours later I was at Union Station, being escorted off the oldest VW minibus in existence and onto a rail car that apparently I had all to myself, like something out of an Agatha Christie book. I'd packed Bob, my tools, a quick-spell kit, any books I thought might help, and a change of clothes. Mouse looked mournfully at me as the train began to move, and I couldn't blame him; it felt as if I were leaving a piece of myself behind.

I knew Chicago. It was home. I knew the people, the streets. I knew its seasons, its weather. I knew the hangouts of most of the dangerous creatures in it, both human and inhuman. I knew every layer of it, every mood, every current.

I knew very little about Boston except that it was a supernatural melting pot. Most creatures that crossed from the Old World or from Other Places and didn't come through the Nevernever landed in Boston; many stayed there, made lives there. There were inhuman families that were generations old, living side by side with the descendants of human immigrants. The divide between mortal and supernatural was as thin as my willpower in Boston.

Look, Deveraux had handed me a really big number.

The train never stopped. That struck me as weird, but then I'd never traveled first class on a train before, so I had no bar for normal. I tried to sleep, but the novelty of everything wore off a couple of hours into the trip, and panic began to settle in. What the hell was I doing? I was Chicago's wizard, not Boston's!

Well, it was done. The AC broke about halfway through the trip, but with the windows open I never even noticed. I got my books out and read, trying to give myself a crash course on the magical scene in Boston, so to speak. Mouse took over one of the windows and seemed to have forgiven me, head thrust out into the wind of our passage, jowls flapping and the plume of his tail wagging sedately. He scared the crap out of the one person I did see, a young man who brought me breakfast and lunch, somehow still warm.

The sun had just set when the train pulled into the Back Bay. I could feel the air buzzing all around me with an imperceptible, invisible charge, the ambient energy of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of supernatural creatures crackling against my senses. I felt both supercharged and itchy, and Mouse shook himself furiously when we finally made it off the rail car.

There was a man waiting for me on the concourse. He was tremendously solid, the sort of build I used to wish for when I was young, heavy muscle under a worn leather jacket, faded blue jeans and comfortable curb-stomper boots. He had long, very fine brown hair and oddly guileless blue eyes. He had stubble matching mine and he straightened up from his lazy slouch with the ease of someone perfectly at peace with the world around him.

I couldn't see the bulge of a gun anywhere, but I was pretty sure this was Leverage's heavy hitter.

Then he grinned at me, and his whole face lit up, and I thought maybe I was wrong. "Dresden?"

"That's me," I admitted.

He offered his hand without hesitation. "Eliot Spencer. Eliot's fine. Sorry to drag you so far from home."

This man was a walking contradiction. His hands told me I was right. His attitude told me I was wrong. He was the nicest, friendliest man with violence as his main occupation that I'd ever met up to that point in my life. He meant every word of his apology. He was sizing me up for threats.

Belatedly, I realized that Boston was literally supercharging me. My senses, both magical and normal, were trying to run away with me. I had nothing else at the moment; I clung to the hand Eliot Spencer offered, to the strength in it. "Oh, you didn't, not really. Too curious for my own good. Give me a second, would you?"

"You ok, man?"

"Just a little… drunk on the night air," I said, knowing how that had to sound to him.

I was not expecting the change that went over him. It was seamless, instantaneous. One moment Eliot Spencer was welcoming me to his home like a ray of sunshine; the next he was all deadly intent, a sort of quiet, intangible menace radiating from him like the darkest light. "A problem?" he asked mildly.

It told me two things; one, that I was right after all and two, that whatever had brought me to Boston was big enough to have this calm, steady man on a hair-trigger. "No, it's…. Boston's busy. Boston's real busy when it comes to magic. It hangs in the air, makes it thick, and it's giving me a head rush."

"Chicago's not like that?"

"No. The Lake grounds it. Water's good for that."

"I could take you by the Charles if it would help - hey!" And just like that the ray of sunshine was back when Mouse came trotting back from wherever he'd gone to take care of his business. Eliot dropped down to a crouch. "Who's this, Mouse, I think?"

"Yeah. Just watch out, he's not always -" Mouse, tail a blur, charged the Leverage man with a delighted huff and proceeded to lick anything Eliot didn't vigilantly protect, making him chuckle. Well. That was new. And good news for me. "Friendly. He was also a lot smaller when he was a puppy."

Eliot straightened up, rubbing Mouse's head with rough affection. My dog looked blissful, tongue lolling to one side. "Bait-and-switched you, huh."

"It might've been, if he'd given me any choice in the matter."

"He's big for a Tibetan Mastiff," Eliot pointed out. "Wrong color, too."

"He's not. He's a Tibetan Temple Mastiff."

Again that brief pause. Eliot looked down at Mouse. Mouse looked up at him.

The Leverage man grinned again and rubbed Mouse's ears. "Eh, he looks dog enough for me. Anyway. If you're feeling better, let's get you settled. I rented a van."

"Cars get temperamental with me around."

"Dresden, if you can break down a u-Haul, I'll believe you're a wizard no further questions. Where's your luggage?"

EIGHT

Apparently the Leverage people weren't unfamiliar with what happened when you put magic too close to tech. I was put up in their 'temporary' quarters, a small house a lick away from their actual place of business, a loft over a bar by the incredibly Irish name of John McRory's Place.

The house was nice. It had a fenced yard that Mouse promptly claimed as his own and a finished basement that I promptly claimed as my own. The bedroom looked suspiciously like someone had ordered it directly from a catalog, sheets and all. The only other rooms that were accessible were one bathroom and the living room, which had been set up as a meeting area of sorts. The kitchen was empty. The other rooms were full of crates.

There was dinner from the pub waiting for me that night, and a phone in a manila envelope. I offered to share my beer with Eliot; the phone died with a sad little squawk before we finished it.

"That's gonna make things hard," he admitted wryly, examining the dead screen of the phone. "I take it a bluetooth's out of the question?"

"The more parts to it, the quicker it goes."

I saw him get very thoughtful. "What about size? The bigger it is?"

"How big are we talking about?" I asked mildly, sensing a chance to finally get some information as to what had brought me to Boston.

"TV screen," Eliot answered without hesitation, then spread his arms. "Yay big."

"What were you doing at the time?"

"Trying to get a composite from a bunch of blurry pictures."

"What happened?"

"It cracked." He grinned wryly. "Top to bottom. We took that thing out to the recycling in two halves." His jovial mood faded. "I don't like the look on your face right now, Dresden."

"You shouldn't." I was trying to think of creatures that could shatter a screen like that, with just their image, without actually being there. It was a short list; it was also a very scary list. "It wasn't anything else, it had to be the picture?"

"The man who works our tech is the best, hands-down. His equipment doesn't blow up like that without a good reason," Eliot said calmly, then put his hands up. "Wait, no, I'm supposed to let you rest tonight. You're gonna hear all this tomorrow morning anyway."

"I did nothing but sleep on the train ride," I told him. I won't lie, it felt nice to know the Leverage outfit, whatever their business might be, gave enough of a damn to give me the night to myself. Most people who hire me for that kind of money expected 24-7 service, never mind what kind of shape I might be in at the end of the day. "Tell me what you can."

He gave me one of the few measuring looks I've ever gotten that didn't have my harm at heart before he made a decision and tipped his head toward the pub. "Come on."

"Mouse, watch the place." Mouse flopped in front of the door and settled down with a yawn.

The front of the pub was roaring, but we came in from the back. Eliot knocked softly on a door, poked his head in and murmured something to someone in there. I caught a faint whiff of something sweet, almost like licorice - probably a storage room, and a bottle of liquor had broken and been cleaned up. Eliot got his answer; he closed the door and we moved on. He peeked out into the main floor and called out something I couldn't hear over the noise of the crowd before heading to a pair of elevator doors.

I stopped walking. "Uh…"

He paused, turned, and led me to the stairs, grinning. "You know, I don't even think about most of this stuff. Tech's embedded so deep into our lives."

"I just wish for a hot water heater that didn't break in under a week," I told him.

"Yikes."

"Yup."

"Just keep your distance from Hardison's tech," Eliot warned me as he led me into a vast, elegant little loft. The bare brick walls had paintings on them that looked… modern. Expensive. I didn't know enough about art back then to appreciate what they were. A spiral staircase led up to what was probably a bedroom, and behind it was a typical modern kitchen. Most of the open space was taken up by a very modern, very sleek meeting room sort of setup, a wall full of screens and a small curve of desks before it. "He's still sore about those screens."

"Screens? More than one?"

"Yeah, a second one a day after -"

A young woman came flying into the loft. "Where is he? Where's the wizard?"

"Parker, don't -"

She whirled and faced me, and immediately made a face. "Aren't you supposed to have a white bushy beard?"

"Not for another couple hundred years."

I hadn't expected my quip to bring her up short, but it did. She seemed to really think about it, and it gave me a chance to examine her. She was young, wiry, blonde, pretty. She had the same kind of intensity Karrin had, but her focus seemed to change from minute to minute.

"Oh. I didn't think about that. There have to be young wizards to get old wizards."

"Parker." Eliot sighed.

"No robes?"

"Not if I can help it."

"Fancy spell books?"

"I do have one of those."

"Can I see it?"

"Parker, let the man catch his breath." Sophie Deveraux looked cozy and elegant and beautiful in a flowing blue blouse and a shimmering gray skirt. She beamed at me and I felt warm and fuzzy. Look, I'm man enough to admit it, I'm a sucker for a pretty lady, particularly one that doesn't want me dead. "Harry."

"Miss Deveraux."

"Just Sophie, Harry, please. Are you sure you wouldn't rather wait?"

"I'm good. I got all my rest in the train ride. Boston's full of energy, and it's making me buzzed, I rather put some of it to work, get it out of my system -"

"Why do you carry a stick?"

I whipped around. Parker had my wand in her hands.

Hell's Bells, I'd never even felt the theft. My wand, and I would have never known she'd gone for it if she hadn't said something.

Something in my face clued Sophie and Eliot that things had gone very badly, very quickly. "Parker!" Sophie cried out.

With all the care of someone handling live explosives, Eliot closed a hand over the 'stick'. "We are trying," he told her, sticking to his calm demeanor like tar, "to make a good impression, Parker."

"Oh, fine. Should I give everything else back?"

I took the quickest stock of my person I'd ever taken in my life. Immediately I found another thing missing that I would have never thought could be taken from me without my notice. How in the hell -!

"Yes!" Sophie told her firmly.

"Well, he didn't have anything interesting anyways," Parker put out her hand with my wallet on it.

And my shield bracelet.

Eliot offered me my wand back, looking sheepish. "Sorry, man."

"I just - how?" Seriously. Never mind the theft, everything was coming back to me, nothing was broken, no one was hurt, I just wanted to know how she'd done it.

"Parker is the best in the world," Sophie said, somehow managing to convey warm pride and icy disapproval all in one. Parker squirmed uncertainly. "She should also bear in mind that as of now you're part of our team, and we don't pickpocket teammates."

Parker held strong under the tone of disapproval longer than I would have. "Sorry," she muttered with ill grace.

"No harm no foul if you teach me how to do it."

She grinned, just a little. "Deal."

"Also, where should I stand so I'm as far away from anything tech-y as possible?"

"Right there." Nathan Ford had arrived, and the mask was off. He still looked vaguely friendly, a little rumpled, somewhat distracted. But there was nothing hiding the ruthless ice in his eyes anymore, or the deep mistrust in the gaze he leveled at me. I was in his world, in his domain, I was his employee. The carrot had done her job, the stick didn't have to mind his manners anymore. "Right there's fine, mister Dresden."

Ford passed everyone by and moved to the kitchen to find himself, apparently, some coffee. "Where's Hardison?"

"He said he wanted to take a few more pictures of the cylinder we found at the museum," Eliot told him. "He's in the storage room."

"What cylinder?" Something was bugging me. It wasn't big, at least not big enough to pin it down, but it was there, nagging at the back of my mind like a toothache after too much sugar.

"There was an issue at the Isabella Gardner Museum," Sophie told me. "Someone tampered with the fire suppression system. They attached some kind of homemade cylinder to the system and it started pumping something out in the air, some sort of perfume." She shrugged lightly. "We don't know why, there was no need for it."

"Perfume?"

"Yes. Fernflower."

I was running the next moment, going on a guess and a prayer. The guess was that the closed door was the storage room. The prayer was that I wouldn't be too late.

The moment I hit the bottom floor a faint reek of sweet, rotten candy and burning flowers made me reel back, coughing, my lungs burning. I could definitely smell the fernflower; worse, I could also smell night's breath. This was some deep, deep magic. Deep and old. Someone had cooked up a Burning Witchwell, and Leverage had blundered right into it. Only luck had kept any of them from being magically inclined, but that luck had run out with the fernflower.

Eliot was right behind me, and he threw a hand over his face. He snatched a bunch of cloth napkins from a nearby shelf and shoved them at me. "What is that?!"

I ran on and shoved the door open to the storage room. There was a man kneeling on the floor before a table, wheezing. The fernflower fumes burned my eyes and I actually heard my skin hiss on contact with the night's breath, but I was running on Boston air. I was so charged up I barely registered any pain.

"Venti, ventum!" I shouted. Wind poured into the storage room. Everything went flying off the shelves. I felt my magic careen out of control, as supercharged as I was, and fought to bring it back under control. I didn't want to wreck the room, I just wanted to get the man to safety, away from the fumes.

"Hardison!" Eliot had already dashed past me, catching the man. He was lanky, lean, deceptively muscled, possibly an inch or so taller than me. His skin was very dark and it had gone blotchy where the night's breath had had time to settle down and sink in. He slurred something unintelligible and squinted intently at me; I couldn't even begin to imagine what he was seeing.

"Dresden?!" Eliot asked, spitting his own hair out of his mouth.

"Go, get him out!"

He didn't question me. I could have danced a happy jig at that show of trust. I backed out of the room; I was one step past the doorway when helpful hands slammed the door shut. "Does the ventilation system here connect to the pub?"

"No, it goes straight out," Ford replied.

"Then just put some…" The borrowed energy from the Boston ambiance ran out. I felt pain creep up over any part of me not covered by fabric. "Put some…"

"Sophie, put some towels at the bottom," Ford's voice was full of calm, focused competency. "Parker, go tell the front of house no one is to come into this room until one of us says otherwise. Eliot." There was a pause. "Dresden, is a hospital going to help either of you?"

"He's fine." Oh, that was Ford's shoulder under my arm, holding me up. When had that happened? "Unless he's got magic, he's just drunk. Sort of."

"And you?"

"I'm a little blistered." I was a little more than blistered, but I had the advantage of knowing the damage wasn't real. "No hospital. A bath."

"Alright. Let's get you and Hardison up to the loft, then."

I wasn't in any shape to argue. I got shoved under a spray of miraculously hot water. Someone peeled my clothes off. At some point I realized I trusted only two people in the loft, and one of them was helping undress me. "Wash your hands," I told Eliot. "Wash the clothes."

"Can we burn them?"

"Don't burn my clothes, I didn't bring any more." I stared at him suspiciously; well, there was only one person I trusted anymore. "Tell Parker to watch my things."

Eliot offered a sound of deeply amused disbelief. Somewhere nearby a man's voice was tunelessly singing what sounded like a church song. "Drunk?"

"Intox… Intec… Sort of. Fernflower gives you magic. See things. Talk to animals. Sorta thing. But it's eph… emph…. It fades quick. You gotta lace it with… other stuff. It It wasn't the weapon, the night's breath was."

"Night's breath?"

"Old plant. Burns up magic. Night's breath was fire. Fernflower was gasoline. 's called a… a Burning Witchwell."

"You aren't breathing right, man."

"Fake. I'll be fine when my…. when my magic comes back. Easy, in this place."

"Fake damage." At that Eliot did look disbelieving. "Hurt's hurt."

"Particularly if you believe in it," I shot back, then put my head up to the spray of hot water. "Oh, that feels good."

I heard Eliot snort in amusement. "Well, enjoy it while you can. Haven't blown up this heater."

"Give me a chance, I just got here."

#leverage #nathan ford #alec hardison #sophie devereaux #eliot spencer #parker #the dresden files #harry dresden #crossover #my writing #fanfiction #urban fantasy #mild violence

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graygiantess · 1 year ago

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Thank you for In Hell Together After All, it absolutely crushed me (in a good, painful way). ❤️ It made me wonder what is your history with IWTV/The Vampire Chronicles: how did you become a fan, what caught your attention and what made you want to "stay"?

And also, you probably write a lot of your headcanons into your stories, but do you have any specific headcanons of any of the characters/relationships in the series?

Hey Nonny!

Sorry for the late reply. Covid broke my brain and I can only focus on reading/writing for very short stretches of time.

(I love getting these asks, though, so please no one feel deterred by this, lol!)

I'm so glad you enjoyed In Hell Together After All! And thank you for your ask. 😊

Putting my answer under the break again so as not to clog up people's dash with my novel-length ramblings.

Luce and TVC

I first got into TVC when I was 14, which is almost 21 years ago. My 13yo foster sister and I were completely obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I was aware that there was a vampire movie with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and wanted to see it. I have a much older half-sister and the three of us ended up having a movie night at her house. We watched Interview With the Vampire and The Blair Witch Project.

We were all very 👁👁 throughout the entire movie. Then I bought a boxset of the first four books, foster sister and inhaled the first three books, watched the QotD movie and got very pissed off by how terrible it was. 😂

We were like, "Guess we'll always have the books 🤷‍♀️". I ordered TVA, because QotD had left me completely Armand-obsessed, and started reading Tale of the Body Thief.

I don't remember quite what it was, but Lestat says something at the start of TotBT that my 14yo self just thought was so stupidly retconny that I went, "Yeah, fuck that". I think it was something about how he only ate bad guys and that that was somehow in service of Jesus? Whatever it was, I wasn’t having it, so I put it down and never picked it back up. 😂

Then in my late teens/early twenties I followed Anne Rice on Facebook for a while, but I got kinda creeped out when she started addressing everyone with 'dearest People of the Page'. I distinctly remember thinking, "Lady, I'm here for gay vampire reasons, not to be in a cult". 😅 So I unfollowed her and spent about a decade not thinking about TVC very much at all.

AND THEN in early summer of 2022 the YouTube algorithm informed me that AMC was making an IWTV show. I reread IWTV and in October thought, "Let’s give this a go."

I had my reservations because I still remembered my teenage rage at the QotD movie, and I wasn't sure how I felt about them changing the time period and casting 'some old guy' as Daniel (sorry Eric! 🙈).

BUT THEN Jacob came on all, "Dear Mr. Molloy, did you know you can orgasm just from hearing a man's voice? Wanna finish what we started half a century ago?" and my head just about exploded!

This is the second interview?! They’re revisiting it 49 years later?! OMGGG, that's the most genius storytelling move in the history of storytelling! 😱

I watched ep2 right after and then desperately needed to yell about the show with other sickos. So I joined Twitter and started reading fic again (which I'd only really done when I was 17 and obsessed with that wizard school franchise), started writing fic, joined fic-themed group chats/Discords and made a Tumblr so I could (lovingly) yell at other fic writers.

And now I've published over 150k words in fic and there's IWTV fan art all over my house. 😂

So it was really the show that made me come back to stay. It's just thee best TV show of all time to me.

And as much as this fandom can be a shit show, it's really helped me stay sane while grappling with my long covid, which has left me very incapacitated in many other areas of my life.

Luce's headcanons

Asking me for my headcanons has the same effect as asking me for my favorite movies or songs in that it immediately makes me forget any headcanons I ever had. 😂

You're right that I write a lot of them into my fics, which are mainly me exploring my headcanons and asking myself what if...? I have a couple others, though I'm not sure these are really headcanons or more actual theories, though, so I apologize if this wasn't what you were looking for.

- I've mentioned this one before, but Louis and Lestat had a grand old time during their honeymoon phase between Louis getting turned and Louis almost eating Grace's baby. I think people tend to make too big a deal out of Louis being an unreliable narrator but it's a little too convenient how quickly he skips over those 6-7 years. I think he doesn’t like to think about how much fun he had with Lestat just having all the sex, getting super rich and eating whoever the fuck he wanted.

- Daniel isn’t going to give a single fuck about the ethics of killing people in order to survive once he finally becomes a vampire. We already know he’s selfish and a hypocrite. I can just see him fully ready to view all humans as savory inferiors once he’s no longer one of them.

- If show!Daniel ever met Marius, he would punch him in the face. 🤭

- Santiago is going to be SO jealous of Louis's relationship with Armand. I don't care if Santiago and Armand end up having zero homoerotic tension between them on screen, they're fucking to me.

- I'm also a Claudeline truther. Show!Claudia doesn’t need a parental figure the way book!Claudia does but she very much yearns for romantic love, and she did say Charlie was the last boy she'd ever love, and went after the woman when Lestat asked her if she wanted the Mr. or the Mrs. in ep7.

Kudos to anyone who made it all the way to the end of this answer! Your prize is getting to choose if I share:

A) A silly anecdote about that movie night I had with my sisters.

B) A shocking fact that might get me cancelled as an Armandaniel fic writer. 👀

(Though tbh, if you pick B, I'll probably still give you A for free.)

#asks #headcanons

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hospitalterrorizer · 10 days ago

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diary620

6/13-14/25

friday - saturday

gf is going out tomorrow.

kpop album release thing. for ateez. today has been strange not for any reason other than i'm trying to get back on the horse of writing something a little more structured and essayistic, to contribute to something my friend's working on about web3 stuff. she and another woman are also working together on it i think, and she wants my gf's help, and my gf will try to contribute something as well. i think she wants (i have no confirmation of this, i just assume), something anonymous on all fronts, though i dunno. just something as a single piece of text that elaborates a position about how all this stuff exists/various connections between people in power, i think her, her friend, my gf, are all probably better read than i am, and all probably more collected with writing in that way. maybe i should be looser, but it just feels like i need to really articulate something, the systems that enable the kind of thing we see, in particular, i am trying, and struggling (not necessarily because i don't know but because it is very hard to make out the best way to say things, and what i actually am trying to mean, and what i am trying in particular to resist), to write about i dunno, the way platforms / tech / the internet broadly, the cybernetic nature of it creates a notion of desire which seems to work under the assumptions someone like rene girard has, which is that desire is learned/passed in an almost viral sense, thiel loves him. and so things like algorithmic recommendation are another technology which creates this notion/assumption that the primary thing is that desire is spread that way, it is a ledger against which one reads their desires, and then either acts or wishes, and it continues like that. there's a lot of assumption that are snuck in via this technology, one is that the algorithm is totally personalized when likely it's just sorting you into one of many particular streams of content, two, that technology is some kind of neutral mediator and that this is not ideological. that the 'types of person,' invented here are real and not that, like, they're created, or, that they become real because of this technique. but i don't know. it's blurry, i feel like, it's hard to write about.

maybe i need to write it in aphorisms. i feel like what i say is clear. maybe i'm just bad at it. i suppose i really must just read society of the spectacle all the way through. i'm so dull, aren't i... not as in boring, as in, butter knife sharp.

today i watched a video of ano-chan going to the aquarium and she really liked seeing the belugas. one's penis came out, it's funny the way animals are. they have really sweet faces and made me want to cry sort of. i like them a lot, they seem so gentle. i remember one looked at as a kid and i felt like we were friends.

i've also been going back between discipline and punish and the cybernetic hypothesis, i picked up the order of things too. trying to do something useful. i really just want to be useful. that's maybe why i feel so dull, that it's not just me thinking out loud but trying to do something concrete and helpful to someone.

youtube

i think right after reading a bit more of society of the spectacle i need to draw a bit. i already drew a bit but it was just corrective stuff. i got really wrapped up in writing this difficult thing, more time than usual spent pacing and thinking and trying to put stuff together in my head. it's not even like it resulted in many pages but the struggle is i guess the most important part, the internal argument over this whole thing.

in the re-reading of parts of discipline and punish, i transcribed this quote, again:

“rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. it would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. on the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently, around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.”

perpetually useful. saw it echoed in debord just now:

it's maybe a strange thing to note as an echo but it makes sense to me. let me try and elaborate, it's that this floaty notion in either case, they say it has come to pass that it is now part of how things function now, taken for granted that it has materialized, not necessarily as a 'real' truth or something to not be taken issue with, but as a reality which enforces itself, which has become the state of things and you can't necessarily undo it. or, maybe to put that better, you cannot simply undo it.

i drew... i am so tired. which is good it'll make me go to sleep earlier than i have been lately,

so,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#Youtube

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vidreview · 9 months ago

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VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #2 [PART 2]

[originally posted november 14 2023. NOTE: while migrating the archive from cohost i've discovered that tumblr has a 10 link-block limit, which means i have to split some of these roundups up in order to maintain the embeds. we love websites don't we folks]

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE

my preference with these posts is to highlight creators making stuff that might not get much exposure otherwise. but it must be said that sometimes algorithmically successful video creators are creatively successful too. who'dathunkit?

"Are Film Critics a Dying Breed?" by Broey Deschanel.

youtube

an excellent dissection of the miserable state of media criticism today, starting at the surprise resignation of A.O. Scott from the New York Times. touches on the important role critics can play in resurrecting films that failed on release, and how we've arrived at a moment when so much criticism is (ironically) uncritical stenography for creatively bankrupt corporations. i think we're going to be seeing a lot of videos on this subject in the years to come, especially as more and more traditional avenues of media crit shut down and our society continues its profit-driven plunge into seeing art as merely a container for passive good feelings to be experienced in the moment and then forgotten forever. does a good job explaining why the firebrand critics of the 70s, like Pauline Kael, were so important, without letting them off the hook for their often elitist attitudes.

"Parking Laws Are Strangling America" by Climate Town.

youtube

an essential and refreshing dive into the outsized impacts that zoning laws (specifically parking requirements on new construction) have had on the very shape and soul of American public spaces. we like to talk about car culture and "freedom of the road" propaganda when grousing about the miserable state of public transit, but this here does a delicious materialism and cuts right to the heart of the matter. i love how he consistently refers to parking as "publicly subsidized storage for an individual's private property." little rhetorical interventions like these can do a lot to naturalize a more radical perspective on urbanist reforms. related to this is his video on Chicago's disastrous choice to sell its parking meters to Morgan-Stanley in 2009. i don't love the jokey Daily Show-esque affect Rollie brings to his stuff all the time, but the clarity of information more than makes up for the occasional dud joke. also: really solid camera work? huge props to his gimbal operator.

"Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music" by Tantacrul.

youtube

an exhaustive look at the history of musical notation and the many, many attempts people have made at replacing western notation with something more intuitive. if you've ever had a professor just go off about a huge pet peeve of theirs, you'll probably enjoy this one.

"YouTube is spreading a filmmaking disease" by Standard Story Company.

youtube

some context: about a month ago i finally bought a new camera and lighting equipment for the first time in ten years. this was preceded by months of researching my options, watching lengthy technical review videos, trying to find a sweet spot between cost and utility. i've watched a million videos like these over the years, and yet i'd never really thought about them as a genre with specific socioeconomic impacts on a population… until now. this is a technical review video that has become self-aware, one which simultaneously reviews tech and the act of reviewing tech in equal measure. it's a fun, interesting experiment that got me thinking in new ways about something i'd very much taken for granted. there remains an uneasy alliance between art and advertising here that i'm not quite sure what to do with, but the work itself is admirable and well worth your time.

----

and that's it for this roundup! good luck to those with get-togethers planned for thanksgiving-- make sure to get vaccinated, wear a mask in public spaces, and don't let anyone guilt you for staying home if you're worried for your or someone else's immunological safety.

<- ROUNDUP #1 | ROUNDUP #3 ->

#vidrev #video essay #video essay review #video recommendation #broey deschanel #climate town #tantacrul #standard story company #Youtube

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lizavet · 1 year ago

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Huh, somehow missed this. Looks fun! Let's get this done real quick.

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

Currently, I have 6, though I have a good few others in my notes that probably won't see the light of day for a long time. Got enough current projects already going, ya'know?

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

416,663. Honestly, I thought there'd be more.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

I'm a bit all over the place with my hyperfixations. Right now, I've got fics for The Owl House, Undertale, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Ratchet & Clank, with more fics in all of those fandoms prepared. I do also have some notes on a couple Percy Jackson fics, but I'm not sure those will ever see the light of day.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1 - Another Child Lost to the Mountain 2 - To Be Wild, To Be Happy, To Be Free 3 - Sketchy Potions & Magic Commotions 4 - Dress Up Party 5 - I Hate You (I Love You)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Oh absolutely! I love engaging with comments, whether it just be a quick little "I love your work!" or a detailed comment about the chapter. Comments are honestly some of my biggest motivators to keep going, and I can't describe how happy they make me. I will admit, I'm a bit selfish because part of the reason I respond to comments is because I hope it'll encourage others to comment, but I do just like talking to people about my works too!

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Angsty endings aren't exactly my style, so m angstiest ending isn't really saying much, but it'd probably have to be I Hate You (I Love You). A story about grief is always going to have a bit of bittersweetness, even if it did end on a hopeful note.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Most of my big fics are still either works in progress or part of a series that's still going, so I don't have too many endings to work with. So with that in mind, my happiest ending is probably in Dress Up Party, since its a pure fluff fic. Everything is hopeful, the characters are happy about the future, and things seem good! It's as fluffy and fun as can be.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Nope. The closest I ever got was some very valid criticism on one fic, and the person who gave it asked if it was okay first. People on AO3 have been absolutely lovely to me.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Naw, I don't write smut. I don't think people realize how hard writing good smut is. It's a skill that takes a lot of time to hone, and it's not something I'm personally interested in doing. But I've got a lot of respect for folks that can pull it off. ...also, a lot of the fandoms I'm in are focused around minors, and it would be hella weird for me to write smut about those.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

So far, no. The closest I've gotten to doing so is some cute character interactions I've written between characters in me and my friends' fic, and we have considered doing an actual crossover one shot between us. As for fandom crossovers, I haven't done any yet, but have considered doing a couple in the past. The biggest one being an Avatar x Owl House fic, with Eda finding Luz thinking she may be the Avatar because she picked out the correct toys, only to find out she's a non-bender, but sticking with her anyway cuz she gets attached. Maybe that'll come out some day, but if it does it won't be for a long time.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of. I certainly hope not, but with A.I going the way it is, I wouldn't be surprised if my work has been chewed up by the algorithms.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Once again, nope! I'm nowhere near big enough for that kinda thing. Would be pretty neat though.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not really, though like I said, I have written a few crossover scenarios with other writer friends. If we ever do that crossover fic I mentioned, this answer will change.

14. What’s your all time favourite ship?

...ok so fun fact about me, I suck at picking a favourite anything. I just can't do it. How can I have a favourite ship when I like different ships for different reasons? It doesn't make sense! Am I supposed to make like a scoring system and say whichever gets the most points is deemed my favourite? So yeah, can't say a 100% definitive favourite, so here are the big ones I love and why I love them Lumity (Luz Noceda/Amity Blight) will forever hold a place in my heart for how wholesome and pure it is. These two have no strife or angst, and even when problems come up like Luz lying about what happened with her mum, the two handle it with surprising maturity! They're just so tooth-rottingly sweet and I adore them. Camilraeda (Camila/Eda/Raine) is one of my favourite poly ships of all time. These three are tired, chaotic in their own special ways, and can and will adopt any stray child they meet, whether they be human, witch, or cosmic god, and stars above do I love them for it! Percabeth (Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase) is the first ship I ever got invested in, and I love it to death to this very day. The OG slow burn of my childhood. These are two of the most loyal, ride-or-die idiots you will ever meet, and their complete devotion to each other is so sweet to read about. And finally, a bit of an ambiguous one, but Hero/Partner from the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. With all of the games, the vibes between the Hero and their Partner are so sweet. They always go through so much together, and there's always so much trust and love between them, and once again, they are so insanely ride-or-die for each other. Whether they're running from the law as they get hunted across the land or dragging themselves through a literal hellscape, the two of them always have each other's back. It's very sweet.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I had an idea for a fic in the Percy Jackson universe a while back about a clear-sighted trans girl getting saved and picked up by the Hunters of Artemis, with them training her and trying to bring her into the group. I have a whole series planned around it, with all the big plot points planned out, but I just don't know if I'll ever have the time to write it with all the other stories I have. Plus, motivation. It's hard to hype myself up to write a story centered around an OC when I know they can be a bit disliked by some communities.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue is easily my biggest strength. I can write characters bantering for days and days, and a lot of the time I have to cut myself off and make the characters shut up so I can move the plot along. A lot of the time, chapter planning for me involves writing everything in a script format with dialogue as the focus, with me filling in the exposition and fluff text around the character's chatting. While dialogue comes pretty naturally to me, I like to think I'm decent at writing fight scenes too. They are definitely a lot harder to do, cuz a lot goes into making a good fight scene; setting an interesting stage for the characters to move in, making sure the movements are clear and you know where everyone is at all times, while also not bogging things down with too many words to keep things snappy and quick, and emphasizing key words and moments to give combat the satisfying crunch that you get in media you can watch. It's hard, but I like to think I've done a good job of it in the past, and hope that I can continue to do so!

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I've been told in the past that my writing can be too straight-forward at times, not taking the time or using enough flowery language to really sell certain emotions. In some situations, that can be a good thing, but there have been moments where I have failed to really sell the emotion of a key scene and make my audience feel what I wanted them to. It's something I'm working on, finding the balance between getting to the point and selling emotions right.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

...one of the main fandoms I write for is The Owl House, with the main character being an Afro-Latino girl. I think that answers the question. But seriously, I do love it. It adds a lot of charm to dialogue, but at the same time can be a bit difficult to sell in written media. In things like T.V shows, you can just add subtitles to show what the character is saying, but in written media like fics that can come off a bit awkwardly. Luckily, I've found a nice workaround, with some HTML script on AO3 allowing me to show the translation to things Luz says when you hover your mouse over the text! I think it's a nice mix, allowing me to show Luz being herself while not leaving the audience confused on what she's saying.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

The Owl House is what got me into both reading and writing fanfic, with me getting my start on my first series with Sketchy Potions & Magic Commotions. You can definitely tell its my first work too, with my style developing as I go. Heck, I even had to go back and edit a couple of the super early chapters because of how rough they were.

20. Favourite fic you've written?

Hah! No. I've already established I can't pick favourite. I will say, I'm the most invested in continuing my two biggest projects, those being The Wild Light Series and Another Child Lost to the Mountain, but calling them my favourites? That's inaccurate at best.

Alright, so I guess it's my turn to tag folks? Floof already got most of my writer friend's in that friend circle, so how about I pick a few of the writers I love here on Tumblr?

@teshamerkel, @ocil91, and @memory-overload, I challenge thee to answer some questions! Enjoy!

Twenty Questions for Fic Writers

Thank you for the tag @sneakyfox55! I don't normally do tag games, but this one looks really fun. (What author doesn't want the chance to ramble about their writing?) (This one is also copy/paste, so I'm less worried about clogging up people's dashes)

I'm going to put it under a cut since this is pretty long!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

As of now? 9! (But I have more than 35 fics in progress in my drafts that aren't posted.)

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

129,647! But like, triple that (or more) if you want to count unposted stuff.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Undertale!

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Heart on the Table

2. How to Defeat a Human in 6 Easy Steps

3. faux pas

4. How to Comfort a Panicking Child

5. How to Help a Human in 2 Easy Steps

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes!!! I love responding!!! I'm behind horribly right now because of my work's busy season, but I plan to catch back up! It's so fun to get to talk to people about the things I've poured my heart and soul into, you know? And I'm always glad to get to thank the people that took the time to leave a comment! It's a bit hard to keep up sometimes, though.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

"Is it Home Without You?" definitely. I'm still really proud of that fic, and it's part of a series with a happy ending, but the actual oneshot is the immediate aftermath of Gaster's lab accident from Sans's PoV. So, uh. Dead dad that no one but you remembers (not even your little brother) is pretty angsty. It's a step away from the norm for me, since normally I only write things with happy endings. But since this is part of a series that has a happy ending, I suppose my brain allowed me to end it off on a bittersweet (sad and angsty) note.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

This is really hard to say! I like big, happy endings, so most of my stuff gets them! Probably.... Hmmm. Either faux paus or How to Defeat a Human in 6 Easy Steps

8. Do you get hate on fics?

For the most part? No. (And I will always be grateful for the kind people that have picked me back up after I've been shot down in the past.)

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

None you'll ever find under this username! I try to keep it family friendly here. ...Welllll, depending on if you count fics that tackle trauma and child murder in them family friendly.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I haven't written any cross fandom crossovers! ...I have, however, been guilty of writing cross fic crossovers (none posted). I like to make my characters from different fics interact with each other. I've also done some crossovers for fun with my friends, making our characters interact. All still Undertale fandom, though! The craziest one is probably "How to Adopt an Interdimensional Traveler" which may be posted at some point. It's a crossover between Heart on the Table, and my How To: series. What, you're telling me Papyrus has TWO children to deal with now? (Here, have the first little bit of that because I love it. And I love Papyrus.)

Step One: Find out their name “FRISK!” Papyrus’s voice was not a shriek. No. He was perfectly composed as he stared down at the… little Frisk in front of him. The very little Frisk. There was a familiar thumping behind him as… his Frisk crashed down the stairs in their familiar clumsy way. For all the elegance they displayed in battle, that did not tend to follow them home. He partially whirled around to face them, keeping… mini Frisk in his sight at the same time. “What’s up, Dad?” Mini Frisk made a small noise that may have been confusion as they rapidly looked between him and their larger counterpart. “…Dad?” Oh. Hm. Yes. That was. A thing. Apparently Papyrus had two children now.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know! And I sure hope not!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope! That would be cool as heck, though!

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

None that are posted! But I like to write with my friends, sometimes.

14. What’s your all time favourite ship?

Surprisingly! Not Undertale! (Though I do like Alphyne!) Zukka! (Zuko x Sokka, Avatar the Last Airbender) I've loved that ship for years, and even though I'm not really in the AtLA fandom anymore, it still has a very close place in my heart.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

Hmmmm. Again, nothing posted. I don't post fics unless they have a first draft completely written to prevent that kind of thing. (Though, I do rewrite stuff, and that can cause pretty big posting delays. But if for some reason I can't find the motivation to finish my rewrites, I could always just slap my first draft up so that it's not completely unfinished before I'd abandon it completely.) Of my fics not posted, though? I've got a fic called "Ghost of You" which is a fated soulmate dusttale!papyrusXreader fic. I hope I can finish it one day, but... well. I'm not sure if I will or not.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Characterization, and internal dialogue, I think! I like to think I'm pretty good at writing a character in such a way that even if you pick just a sentence at random, you know who's head you're in. Or, perhaps my strength is hurt/comfort in general...

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

It used to be dialogue, though I'm working to get better at that! I also struggle sometimes when it comes to making sure that the pace is engaging and that we aren't just stuck in someone's internal thoughts for 5 paragraphs. Gotta break that up with some stuff actually happening!

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

Very cool, and a great way to show characters that speak other languages than the one you are in the PoV of!

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Well... the fic itself is long gone, but! I wrote for Ouran Highschool Host Club when I was like 12.

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

DON'T MAKE ME CHOOSE! HOW COULD YOU ASK ME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MY CHILDREN? MY BABIES! ...Heart on the Table has a special place in my heart though.

No pressure tags (only if you want! this is just for fun!): @lizavet @timeofjuly @humankk and anyone that wants to!

Also... Shall I dare? invoke the potential wrath of a god(ess)?

I dare. I'm curious about the answers (if the goddess does deign to answer this mortal/jk) @llamagoddessofficial (please feel free to just ignore if you want!)

#ao3 fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #author questions

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olderthannetfic · 4 years ago

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Hi! I know you're one of the older fans on Tumblr & I wanted to ask you about the anti movement. I'm 19 & when I see people talking about the ages of anti fans, they're often within the 14-25 age range & I have no idea why. I also feel it's a little unfair to say that younger fans tend to be antis, though it is understandable since I've also made mistakes when I didn't know things. Why do you think most antis are younger fans? What should younger fans who aren't antis do to be more involved?

Hee! I’m 40, which, tbh, actually isn’t that old for Tumblr (though it’s certainly old compared to the common perception of tumblr), so sure, I can probably answer this. I guess there are two questions here: 1. Is it true and 2. why, if so?

1. Experience suggests that antis do tend to be young... but it does not follow that young people tend to be antis. (You’d have to know the proportion of antis relative to the overall population of fandom, which we don’t. I think the majority of people of any age tend to want to read fic in peace and not be roped into endless wank.) I definitely see some ringleaders who are older and good at manipulating fandom trends for their own ends too.

2. Why would this be the case?

When I was in college, we used to joke about all the freshman year Marxists. It’s an eternal phenomenon: people who don’t have much experience learn a new thing and are on fire to change the world using the one tool in their toolbox. (To a man with a hammer, yadda yadda.) There’s no passion like the passion of the newly converted, and young people tend to have a lot more energy and often a lot more free time to yell on social media. Antis may be one expression of this among people currently in that age bracket. It’s not like people my age didn’t do other annoying-ass things when we were that age. You just don’t see it because it was 20 years ago, a lot of it was never online, and all the websites/platforms from then have been systematically destroyed. (Often by yahoo. Fuck yahoo.)

The other half of the reason, in my opinion, is that there have been concerted efforts to sway lefty/socially liberal people in specific--often TERFy--ways. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the right wing radicalization of gamer guys.

People are susceptible to it because their lives suck and because they don’t know enough history or have enough confidence to form their own opinions and stand up for them. Sure, some people are going to go hardcore for anti views no matter how much they know, but a lot of people are just being swept along with the tide because something sounds superficially pro-gay or pro-protecting kids or whatever.

I cannot emphasize enough that the things that make someone ripe for the alt right are the same things that make them ripe for cults and for various kinds of toxic fandom shit: it’s usually the smart, sensitive overthinkers who don’t have enough close actual friends and who aren’t in a good place in their lives.

---

So what can you do?

You can try to make fewer more significant friendships and make sure your support system isn’t people you only know because you currently share a fandom. Most of my offline friends are people I found through fandom meetups, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making fandom your life and only hanging out with fandom people, but we’re just regular friends who have dinner parties and shit (well, when it’s not the plaguetimes). Most of the time, we don’t share specific ships or fandoms. It’s vitally important to have a real support network that can’t be ripped away by social media wank.

The next thing we can all do is publicly stand up for what we believe in and not cave to pressure just because someone yelled “think of the children”. It’s important to be clear about the real history and logic behind these things, whether it’s the history of censorship that inspires people to support AO3′s extremely permissive policies or the fact that ‘queer’ was a fully reclaimed umbrella term in the 90s.

It’s okay if we don’t all agree. What’s not okay is appeals to emotion and ignoring science. A lot of anti bullshit is like “Rape fantasies are an abnormal red flag”, and this goes against every damn thing we know about human sexuality.

Part of this is examining our own stances for illogic and hypocrisy. If thought crimes aren’t real, then all of them aren’t real. I see way too many “Okay, but that one gross kink though!” comments from people who claim to be on my side, and this is very silly.

Possibly the biggest thing, though, is that we as a planet need to start being savvier about shitty social media and how it’s destroying our mental health. I don’t have a good overall solution, and obviously, I’m still on tumblr, but we all really need to cut down the amount of time we’re on sites like Facebook and Twitter and probably tumblr too. The more it has an algorithm and the less it has moderation, the more it’s a problem. Individual discords and spaces that can have moderation are better. It’s fine if some of them are 100% antis. The point is to have multiple spaces with rules that suit different groups.

A thing you can do is make your own spaces: be the owner of a discord for your ship, not just a passive participant at the mercy of shitty mods in an existing one. Run a fic exchange with rules you think are sensible and be firm when people try to scream about problematique things you don’t agree are a problem. One of the most pernicious anti problems is mods breaking the rules of their own spaces (usually a “no kinkshaming” one) to cave to social pressure from the loudest, most assholish set of people in the server. They don’t know how many people quietly disapprove and quietly leave their fandoms because they only fear the loud harassers, not the silent toll of caving to them.

Honestly, the climate of fear is the big issue more than a bit of yelling: I routinely meet 20-somethings who live in fear of being canceled and shunned. You can help this by... not being like that with your friends. If they’re friends with a canceled person, don’t ask them to drop the canceled person or face the same fate. If you disagree about some fandom hot take, talk about it calmly and don’t act like the friendship will be over in 5 seconds and you’ll use all your knowledge of them against them in a public callout because they didn’t instantly agree.

Basically, have some self confidence and don’t be fucking terrified all the time... which can be a tall order and probably explains the age thing also.

#fandom meta #loganelfreeces

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sunset-a-story · 2 years ago

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Character Interview Tag

Thank you to @vsnotresponding for tagging me in this one! I had a hard time deciding who to use so I just grabbed the whole core group. Open tagging whoever is interested and no-pressure tagging @words-after-midnight @moondust-bard and @inkspellangel

1. Are you named after anyone?

Reeve: I was named by the SolCorp algorithm.

Alex: I don't really know why she named me Joey.

Hannah: Uh, no.

Gareth: After someone in my dad's family.

2. When was the last time you cried?

Reeve: I'm not sure. (looks hella uncomfortable)

Alex: (shrugs) Probably the last time I had a really bad Reading night and couldn't get my psychometry to stop to let me sleep

Hannah: Rum!

Gareth: Last week.

3. Do you have any kids?

Reeve: (eyebrow lift) No. (frown) Although, they do bank our DNA for the Venus gen lab...

Alex: (laughing)

Hannah: Got sterilized, baby!

Gareth: Not to my knowledge. In a different life, I would have liked to.

4. Do you use sarcasm?

Reeve: Is there any other way to survive these people?

Alex: (putting his hand to his chest) Never! Sarcasm? I wouldn't dream of it!

Hannah: Oh, constantly.

Gareth: Is there any other way to survive Reeve?

5. What’s the first thing you notice about people?

Reeve: Hard to say what is first. I try to take in the whole picture pretty quickly so I can form an opinion before I start getting telepathic feedback to compare.

Alex: Posture. And eyes.

Hannah: Their energy and just how they feel.

Gareth: I don't know. How they move. Are they relaxed, tense, threatening?

6. What’s your eye color?

Reeve: Blue-grey

Alex: Dark brown

Hannah: Brown

Gareth: Brown

7. Scary movies or happy endings?

Reeve: Happy endings.

Alex: I don't think you've got to pick. Just watch several movies.

Hannah: Gahhhh probably scary. Yes, I know I'm an empath. Don't judge me.

Gareth: Happy endings.

8. Any special talents?

Reeve: Besides telepathy? I'm organized. I like to think I can cook.

Alex: Psychometry and knowing where everyone's buttons are.

Hannah: I'm pretty nimble. You've gotta be when you go invisible. I used to kick ass at DDR.

Gareth: I think I can read people pretty well.

9. Where were you born?

Reeve: They call it "achieving breathe" in Sol and I was gen'ed out of LAHQ.

Alex: SolCorp, apparently.

Hannah: LAHQ.

Gareth: (side-eyeing the rest) Fresno, CA.

10. What are your hobbies?

Reeve: I don't really have time. Working on my car when I can.

Alex: Dancing, video games, sparring's fun.

Hannah: Drinking, dancing, video games.

Gareth: I like going for long drives. Working out. Reading.

11. Have you any pets?

Reeve: No.

Alex: Man, I wish. Reeve won't let us get a dog.

Hannah: Have I any pets? (adopts hoity-toity voice) Nooo, I have no pets. Wouldst butlers count? Because then also nooo.

Gareth: (narrowing eyes at Hannah) Nope.

12. What sports do you play/have played?

Reeve: I guess whatever games they made us play in Academy. Not really my thing.

Alex: Didn't exactly live that soccer practice and PTA life so...

Hannah: Field hockey in high school.

Gareth: I was pretty heavy into Taekwondo before I left home.

13. How tall are you?

Reeve: 5'9" (he's 5'8")

Alex: 5'5"

Hannah: 5'7"

Gareth: 5'11"

14. Favorite subject in school?

Reeve: Tactics.

Alex: None.

Hannah: Math's actually kinda neat. Also, my medic training.

Gareth: Lit.

15. Dream job?

Reeve: I used to say Saturn agent, but I'm happy where I am.

Alex: I don't know. I don't really have any sort of strong calling to anything yet. I guess, I'd just want to join Reeve's team and do what they do so I could stay with him and Hannah and Gareth.

Hannah: Maybe park ranger? That sounds pretty chill. You're out in the wilderness, protecting nature, and occasionally get to yell at people for fucking up.

Gareth: Something quiet. It doesn't have to be fancy or particularly meaningful or anything.

#character interview #writer tag game #writeblr tag games #my oc babies #writer games #writeblr

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

Text

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN FRIEND

That's been a reliable way to get rich, is not just to intelligence but to ability in general, and that's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed. In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to the new startups about fundraising, and decide they should raise money too, since that seems to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. Even if the CEO is a programmer and another founder is a salesperson? The market is a lot longer than that. The emotional ups and downs. The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably a third of the population have y percent of the world's population will be exceptional in some field only if there are a lot of time trying to push your price down. This is not exclusively a failing of the young. Have low expectations.1

We're more patient. To understand what McCarthy meant by this, we're going to be times when you have absolutely no desire to work on an audience, and since valuation is usually the only visible number attached to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success.2 There were a few other kids and I could play all day. We may be able to develop stuff in house, and that employers are just proxies for users in which risk is pooled. So everyone is nervous about closing deals with you, they'd seem impressive, but not very novel. The non-gullible recipients are merely collateral damage. The best way to do this, and I think the rate of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job, and they all think we're going to retrace his steps, with his mathematical notation translated into running Common Lisp code. This trick may not always be enough.3 Deals don't happen that way. When do you stop fundraising? But if you're trying to advise 57 startups, it turns out to be a really long journey, at least straightforward.4 What I mean by habits of mind is to ask, could one open-source play?5

Even a day's delay can bring news that causes an investor to your cofounder s should be like introducing a girl/boyfriend to your parents—something you do only when things reach a certain stage of seriousness. Know where you stand. Only a few ideas are likely to be a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway. It's practically a mantra at YC. It will be easier to raise money you might have to shut the company down, but because the process of talking to them all can bring a startup to a standstill for months. I written about yet? Immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US.6

I've written this, everyone else can blame me if they want. Don't worry too much about making money, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. Angels were generally much better to talk to all potential investors in parallel, prioritized by expected value, and accept offers greedily, your goal should be to get it from someone else. There's a limit to the number of people retain from childhood the idea that a bunch of leads in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with startup ideas. The startup may have more long-term success rate ends up being, I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. As little as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year. It will be easier to raise money you might have to shut down.7 So the randomness of any one investor's behavior can really affect you. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here? The reason, of course. You should get another multiple of three.8 It is, in itself, a valuable thing.

But if you're trying to choose between satisfying all the needs of all potential users. You should therefore never approach such investors first. I didn't realize how much room there is for a potential competitor to undercut them. Even the founders who fail don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later. But I don't think you should make users the test, just as professional magicians are.9 How much better. The specific thing that surprised them most was the general spirit of benevolence: One of the things I didn't tell people.10 One of the most powerful motivator is not the usual one, which applies even when you know which investors have a reputation for being valuation sensitive and can postpone dealing with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money.

Notes

So if you're a loser or possibly a winner. The same goes for companies that grow slowly tend not to grow as big a cause. The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where there were some good ideas in the process dragged on for months. Though you should probably start from the example of a company tried to explain that the meaning of the most, it's easy for small children to consider these two ideas separately.

In fact since 2 1.

But this takes a startup to duplicate our software.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation reaches a certain way, they'd be called unfair. At Viaweb, if you have to sweat any one outcome. But friends should be designed to express algorithms, and that you have to assume the worst thing about our software, we found Dave Shen there, and yet it is not whether it's good enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

Don't be evil, they have wings and start to be able to formalize a small percentage of GDP were about the origins of the USSR offers a better strategy in an era of such high taxes? I've learned about VC inattentiveness. Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been worth at least a partial order. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at with fresh eyes and even if the current edition, which merchants used to build their sites.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to motivate them. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the war, tax rates were highest: 14. San Francisco, LA, Boston, or the power that individual customers have over established companies is 47.

Surely no one knows how many of the previous two years after 1914 a nightmare than to read is not a product company.

99 and. Eric Horvitz. But scholars seem to be high, and when given the Earldom of Rutland. Applying for a name.

Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. I was writing this. We just tried to preserve optionality.

Currently the lowest rate seems to be free to work late at night, and then scale it up because they think they're just mentioning the possibility.

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grumpygreenwitch · 1 year ago

Text

The Witches & Wizards Jobs 17-18-19

AO3 Link

Buy me a Ko-fi?

Remember: Tumblr has no algorithm. Reblogs give me life.

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SEVENTEEN

I slept like I hadn't in months. Living in a constant state of anxiety will do that to you, I suppose. But I was so far from home and from the enemies and dangers of Chicago that it felt as if they were too far away to matter. Even the war seemed a thing happening to someone else. It was a dangerous feeling, particularly because the house didn't have any of the protections of my Chicago apartment, but I was too tired to care.

I woke up to an unfamiliar doorbell and my dog trying to murder me by stepping on my kidneys. That much dog euphorically walking all over you will wake you up in a hurry, if nothing else. I dragged myself out of the surprisingly comfortable bed and down the stairwell to the door.

I found my current boss there.

"Dresden."

"Ford." I was all at once as awake as someone could be, every sense sharply on the alert.

"You can't use an electric stove, can you."

Ok, not the words I'd expected to hear from the man. "Uh, I can probably do it once."

"Without setting the house on fire?"

"Fifty-fifty on that one."

"Mm. Get dressed. We're gonna pick up breakfast."

He must have seen something on my face. I'd expected a lot of things; most people see Soulgazing as a theft, or worse. Very few like what they see in me. I'd expected to be fired, or interrogated, or something in a long and extensive list. Treated to even more food had not been part of it.

Ford shrugged minutely. For once he looked put together, and it was startling. He still had that deceptively harmless quality, the feel of a man that makes friends easily. He was freshly shaved, wearing a light shirt under a summer jacket and casual slacks, all in dark, neutral tones. His hair was still damp. "I refuse to let you think Boston only wants to come at you swinging."

I opened the door wide and stepped aside. "For the record, I don't mind Boston. I just don't want to make waves."

He stepped in. Mouse sniffed him, the banner of his tail wagging sedately, and Ford distractedly rubbed his head. I don't think he even noticed he was doing it. "Is it that easy? If what happened yesterday at the museum hadn't happened, would the city still know you're here?"

"Yes."

He looked thoughtful, but merely went on his way to examine the rooms full of crates while I took the fastest shower in the world, fed Mouse some dog food that looked like it cost more than my rent back in Chicago and got into my spare clothes. We headed out into an unfairly sunny and lovely morning. Trees bordered the street, the houses gracious in their old age. Boston was lovely.

It just wasn't home.

"There is, comparatively speaking, a lot of things living in Boston that aren't human. Supernaturals move, same as us," I explained as we walked. "For work, for life, for family. That's universal. And Boston's one point where that traffic bottlenecks. A lot of them don't go any further."

"So Boston's the best they could find?" He gave me a quick, incredulous glance.

"No, the most convenient. Magic likes it when you throw down roots. You can draw power from your home in a pinch, there's protections that kinda seep into a place the longer you live in it."

"Lintel magic," he murmured.

I damn near stopped walking. It was the first time in all our dealings that I'd heard Ford use the m-word.

"My mother believed," he said after a few steps. "She'd tell me stories, the old classics, and the ones from the Old World. Fairies, wicked stepmothers, charming princes - kelpies, hounds, fairy queens…" He shrugged once again. "I'm not nearly as surprised as I should be that the reality is even bloodier."

"You stopped believing, why?"

The ice flickered briefly in his eyes. "You looked into my soul, Dresden, don't you know why?"

"It doesn't work like that. You know that, or I would already be on a train to Chicago."

He did look amused at that, snorting minutely. "Dresden, you're Crime Lite from where my people and I are standing." He marshalled his thoughts while I tried to figure out if I was flattered, insulted, or something else even more complicated. "Life got in the way. Here comes Parker."

The thief was sprinting at us. She'd probably been coming to meet everyone in the loft. "Nate! Are you getting donuts?"

"Uh, we can?"

"I want donuts."

"I want something a little more substantial than donuts," he pointed out mildly.

"Oh, fine." She peeked at me. "Are you alright?"

"I'll do better with a couple of donuts in me."

She beamed. Ford groaned. We walked down the block to a little shop by the clever name of Double-O's, which did bagels and donuts both. Ford ordered enough food to feed twenty people and we sat at one of the little tables with a couple of donuts and some coffee and they brought me up to speed on what they'd done after I'd gone down.

Parker and Eliot had moved the coffee table, and everything in it, to the storage room, and taped the key to the Witchwell. That was already a huge weight off my mind. But then the Leverage people had gone further - with the crumpled envelope, of all things.

"It's not paper, it's vellum," Ford explained while Parker demolished a donut covered in chocolate and corn flakes. "Which is just fancy paper made to imitate actual vellum."

"Expensive paper," I ventured.

"Precisely."

"There was no writing."

"There doesn't need to be. Remember the embossing on it? It's a sigil, sort of a coat of arms."

"I really, really would love to know what it is you people actually do. So you looked up this sigil thing?

"Solve puzzles." Ford didn't miss a beat. "We didn't have to. Sophie knows it by heart, it's the sigil of Christie's."

"Christie's, the British Auction House?"

"Yes."

I worked on my coffee. "I'm hoping this makes sense to you, because I'm -"

The lights above us flickered. I wouldn't have thought much of it; I was there, after all. But at one of the tables, two women snatched up their purses and one toddler, and scurried off at truly phenomenal speed.

There were advantages to having that many supernaturals around, apparently. I snatched for my wand; like a moron, I'd left my staff back at the house.

"Do not." The gratingly avuncular tone was threaded with menace.

The man in black walked sedately past the counter and the last late morning customers. Only one person reacted to his passage, a young man wearing a typical cycling outfit, a messenger bag slung across his chest. He took one look over his shoulder and bolted. No one else seemed to see him, to know he was there. They shifted out of his way because suddenly they had to reach for a napkin or a sugar packet or something else, but no one directly acknowledged his presence at all.

It was a Veil with conditions. Until that moment I'd never known a Veil could be crafted like that, with exceptions built in.

Ford put a hand on my good shoulder and shook his head minutely. I tried to relax, and managed only to pull my hand out of my duster pocket. Parker was glaring with hyperbolic fury.

"Ah, you must be the sensible one," the man in black told Ford. "What pleasant luck."

"Every now and again," Ford agreed mildly.

He turned to look at Parker. She immediately looked down at her donut and scowled.

"This modern world," the man in black mused. "One comes to find the Prince of Thieves, and it is a woman. How times change. Hands on the table, please. Where I can see them."

"Parker," Ford said quietly when she didn't move. He said nothing else; he merely let his eyes take in the dozen or so people sharing space with us and the wizard.

She obeyed, sulking all the while.

"And yours, wizard Dresden."

Gosh, I'd almost forgotten what it was like, when someone used the title to insult me. I dropped both my hands on the table and worked really hard on not curling them into fists.

"Well, isn't this nice." He sat at our table. He was wearing fully modern clothing, a high-collared white shirt, a black embroidered vest, a long black coat with silver and emerald buttons, dress slacks, expensive shoes. His black hair had been cut and combed back, and his moustache and beard were so neatly trimmed I wouldn't have been surprised to find out he'd used a ruler. He was a very pale man, and his eyes were the same luminous, poisonous green of the painting and his magic. He looked and sounded so smug it took effort not to just haul up and punch him on principle. "So very nice. You have something of mine, sir," he told Ford mildly. "Several somethings, actually." He grinned.

"That would be stealing. I don't make it a habit to confess to crimes publicly, even when I haven't committed any."

The man's eyes flashed. His mouth opened - and closed, and he looked deeply amused. "No, of course not. You have committed no crime." His voice suddenly turned into a lash. "Hands. On the table."

Parker glared at him.

"I do strive to not be a fool more than once," he told her mildly. "If you do that again, I will kill someone here. Someone you do not know. Someone who does not know you. That nice man who served you your donuts, maybe. The old lady one of your companions held the door for one time. It will not hurt you. It will just be a toothache, forever there to be worried at, because I will kill them only if you take your hands off the table. Yes?"

Parker's face had gone to stone. My hands, despite my best efforts, had curled into fists after all. Ford tightened his grip on my shoulder a little more.

"I do not see a need to make this into a quarrel," the man in black said very calmly. "My attention is on greater matters. Whatever Dresden might have told you, until the small issue at the museum, I had committed no crime."

"No c- No crime? At the very least you destroyed the MFA lab. You stole from their vaults."

"Not at all. The portrait is mine. I commissioned Sokolov for it. Beautiful work, truly. I was very pleased with it, even with the nose being wrong."

"Working from memory," Ford mused.

"Mm, as portraitists do. So you see, I was recovering my property."

"You could have gone through proper channels. That shouldn't be a hardship for a man like you."

"I am pressed for time," the man in black admitted. "Which is why I come to make you an offer."

I tensed up immediately. Ford's hand turned into a vise on my shoulder and he shot me a warning look.

"You will return my property to me. And I will not kill you. You will send Dresden home. And I will not kill him. You will forget this matter. And in three days' time, I will grant you and your people your heart's desire. Whatever it might be. Fame, fortune, revenge, knowledge. I am a man of many talents. I daresay there's very little in this world that I could not give you. One wish."

"I get to punch you once," Parker growled immediately.

The man in black blinked in surprise, and then laughed. "Well, not that."

Under the table, Parker's leg bumped lightly against mine. It was so unexpected, so out of nowhere from someone who only touched even her own teammates when she absolutely had to, that it shocked me back to my senses, and I turned my attention to her. She was scowling at the man in black from the corner of her eyes, hunched down minutely, her hands flat on the table, tension on every line of her body, and her face had the same wild expression she'd had back at the Museum, when she'd figured out how to save our asses.

I lunged at the man in black across the table. I did it slow; I already knew I was much quicker than him. For a moment I thought I was going to actually get at him, the one time I didn't care if I did, but Ford belatedly caught me. "Dresden!"

Whatever slammed into me froze me, literally. I felt my veins turn to ice, my muscles lock. Cold blasted into me, left me motionless, unable to even shiver. I could barely gasp for air, but hey, if I wasn't going to get another chance to breathe, I might as well put the one breath I had to good use. "My hands're still on the table," I hissed at the man in black.

I saw surprise and fury flash through his eyes. He'd thrown himself back and scrambled to his feet, his chair crashing to the floor. No one noticed." So they are," he gritted out, and his magic faded, letting me wheeze for breath. With an effort he turned to face Ford, the mild and cheerful facade gone behind a vulturine, sharp and predatory look that was far more appropriate. "My property. Now, if you please."

"Does that include the Burning Witch's Well?"

Surprise once again went over the angular features, quickly hidden out of sight. "Yes."

"Well, you nearly killed twenty people with it, so, uh. No."

The man in black bared his teeth and flicked his hand. The lights went out. I threw my hand up and whatever he'd meant to hit Ford with crashed instead into my shield. It sent us both skidding back until we hit a half-wall behind us, random little decorations falling off it. He looked livid; yeah, still faster than you, asshole.

"Then I will take what is mine, and enjoy the killing of you all in the process," he declared, stalking off.

Breathless or not, Nate rushed immediately after him. I turned to check on Parker. "You alright?"

"Yeah, go get him!" She was wriggling in place. "I gotta put my shoes back on!"

Her sh-

Her shoes?!

There's only so many surprises I can cope with from just one person. I ran after Ford, but he was just outside the door to the shop, looking frustrated, scanning the street in every direction.

"Don't bother," I told him. "He probably closed off the Veil he was wearing to begin with."

"You saw him."

"No. I saw a couple of ladies bolt; they're the ones who saw him. I told you; you can't hide a wizard, not easily."

Parker nearly ran into us both as she charged out the door. "Is he gone?"

"Yup." Ford had that look again, the look that said he was putting together bits and pieces into a whole no one else had even noticed was there.

A man peeked out of the shop. "Mister Ford? Your order's ready."

"Oh, good." He marched back inside.

"You picked his pockets again," I told Parker before either of us followed Ford inside, not sure if I was amused or amazed. I settled for both.

"Yeah, of course I did. You almost messed me up, though!"

"I did? I thought you were signaling me for a distraction!"

She flushed minutely. "No. Your legs are just longer than Eliot's."

"… Sorry?" She grinned a little. "So what did you get?"

She grinned even more.

EIGHTEEN

Nate charged into the loft at full speed. "Hardison, are you here yet?"

The hacker had been in the kitchen; he peeked out of the fridge. "Yeah, man. Uh, fridge's broken."

"Then replace it, landlord mine." Nate glanced at the door and added, his voice quieter. "Quietly."

Hardison's expression filled with understanding, and he nodded. "Did you get breakfast?"

"They're bringing it up. I don't promise there's any donuts left. Is everyone else here?"

"We are now." Eliot held the door open for Parker and Dresden, Sophie coming up behind them. "What's this I'm hearing, that you met the man in black?"

"We did," Nate confirmed cheerfully.

"What?!" Hardison looked stunned.

"Is everyone alright?" Sophie asked.

"Oh, yeah, everyone's fine. He just wanted to talk. Threaten us, bully us, you know, the usual. Dresden, back to your couch, I need Hardison's computers." The wizard went that way obediently, but he didn't let go of the box he was carrying, raiding its contents before he surrendered it to Eliot. Sophie followed Parker to the staging area.

"Hardison." Nate sat and stared at the screens. "The Tetryakov Gallery is the main repository of Sokolov's work. That's not just his portraits and his studies, that's also his journals, his notebooks. The records of his commissions. Do they have electronic copies of those?"

In a moment the central screen was full of documents, more and more being flicked to one side as the hacker blithely charged into presumably secured databases across the world. "Some of it."

"Cross-reference against the portrait. We might not know who the people in it are, but it's absolutely one of Sokolov's largest pieces."

"It's also a full-body portrait of two people. He preferred faces, busts, or large groups. It's unique," Sophie added.

"Give me a minute, I'm having to run all this through a translator. I don't actually read Russian."

"Sophie, Parker. Are there any big art events taking place within the next three days?"

"Yes," Parker replied before Sophie could. "A private art auction in two days." She pulled from an inner jacket pocket a small piece of paper and handed it over with a grin.

Sophie took it, read it, and passed it on. "That's what the Christie's man is here for. He's not selling, he's buying."

"He just went to all this trouble to get the portrait, and he's selling it already?" Eliot protested mildly. "Why?"

"Because in two days he won't need it anymore." Ford stared at the screen. "Dresden, the brass piping. What you meant to do with it, can you do it in the storage room as well?"

"If there's enough brass, yes."

"Do it." Nate looked at his team. "He can't find them. He came to us because whatever Dresden did worked. The key, the circles, whatever it is, they are actually doing their job and he can't find all the stuff Parker took from him. I bet he had some sort of tracker in his pockets, waiting for Parker to go for it."

"Jerk," the thief muttered, but she didn't sound angry as much as resigned. "I figured the paper was safe."

"Dresden."

Eliot brought the piece of paper to their consultant. It was a match to the envelope, heavy vellum, the ink black and gold, the writing beautifully elegant. Dresden grimaced as soon as he touched it, and lifted it up. "Nope. This is your tracker."

"I can't put it back when he just keeps being invisible!" Parker protested.

Nate gestured appeasingly. "Hardison, make a copy. We'll put the original with the rest of the stuff. I imagine next he's going to try and break in, send the leshy to fetch them, or something worse." Once again he turned to Dresden. "Can you stop that from happening?"

"Yes, but I should get started soon," the wizard had sat up straight, staring in something like wonder as, once again, Nate did what he did best.

"You've got the whole day. Sophie, you and I have a meeting for dinner."

"Fedorov?" When he nodded confirmation, she pursed her mouth. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"No. That's why we're going."

Hardison had put the invitation into a scanner that was discreetly hidden in one of the desks. He handed it back to Parker, who glared at it as if it were the man in black himself. The computers chose that moment to beep and he looked sharply up. "Found it." His fingers flew over the keyboard and he grimaced. "They're direct scans from one of Sokolov's commission journals. The OCR is having a time with it, let me see if I can make the name of the commissioner any clearer." He clipped one particular set of lines from the yellowed, faded page on the screen.

Sophie drew in a sharp breath. Eliot, who'd been coming over to take the invitation from Parker, froze.

"You're fine, Hardison. It reads fine like that," Nate murmured distractedly.

"That can't be right," Eliot muttered.

"What's been right about this job from the beginning?" Sophie countered mildly.

"What's it say?" Hardison asked.

All three of them replied at once. "Koschei."

Behind them, Dresden choked on his breakfast sandwich.

Nate clapped his hands. "This is good!"

"Good?" Eliot stared at the mastermind in disbelief. "This is good? We're going up against the main bad guy in every Russian fairy-tale ever written, someone who actually makes the Russians balk, and you think this is good?!"

"All fairy tales have their basis on something real," Sophie had sat to one side, her hands wrapped around a cup she hadn't touched yet. "Khan Koshan was a barbarian warlord, back in a time when Russia was simply Rus, 'the land'."

"It's good because we have a name," Nate explained. "And a name means a trail. Wizards might not be able to use technology - he is a wizard?" He turned to Dresden, waited for a nod to carry on. "But the rest of the world does. A name means a profile, travel records, hotels, purchases. Even if he's not using his own name, and honestly I expect he'd be the sort who would out of sheer arrogance, a name isn't the sort of thing that blows up computers, like an image does." He turned to stare at the screen. "A name gives us everything. Hardison, this isn't your usual profile, but can you give me an estimate of how long it will take you?"

"You want me to guess how long it'll take to sift through two hundred years of fairy tales to get a bead on this man?" Hardison stared at Nate.

"He's older than that," Dresden sounded off. "He's much, much older than that."

"Dresden." Nate acknowledged. "Do you have a starting point?"

Harry exhaled sharply. "Yes," he replied carefully.

The mastermind pressed his mouth into a thin line and added, "One that doesn't involve men in gray and big swords?"

"I'm working on that," Dresden admitted. "Khan Koshan is…sort of a wizardly cautionary tale. He's the only wizard anyone knows of that successfully managed immortality."

"As in he can't die, or he can't be killed?" Eliot asked.

"Both," the wizard replied grimly. "That's half the trick. You can be ageless, if you don't mind every supernatural in the world out for your blood. You can be unkillable, if you don't mind selling your soul. As far as anyone knows, he got both kewpie dolls without paying the price."

"So he's a criminal." Nate didn't look convinced.

"That's the other half, he's not. Technically." Harry seemed to measure his words with incredible care. "The best known way to be ageless is by stealing the life off of someone else. That is outright necromancy. Men in gray. Big swords."

"He's not doing that." It wasn't a question.

"No. No one knows how he's doing it, only that he absolutely doesn't age, and that he's not a necromancer."

"And he can't be killed? Hurt?" That came from Eliot, who was scowling at the very thought.

"Parker clocked him twice at the museum. Solid hits. They were gone by the time I tackled him."

"That can't be an easy trick to pull off," Sophie mused.

"It's not. What… is known is what the fairy-tales are already telling you. He cut out his own heart and hid it - he hid it so well that no one can find it, not even death."

Sophie drew in a deep breath. "The brooch. The Emerald Heart of Koschei the Deathless. The jewel that no one's ever seen, but everyone knows is real."

"Yup. Now, here I'm going on hearsay: he did it to gift it to a woman he loved. But she rejected him, and it poisoned the heart. Turned him greedy and cruel. He was going to share the trick of it with the world, up until that point. Having met the man, I think it's bullcrap. He never meant to give the secret away. He's just spinning some PR to make himself look the victim, not the villain."

"That tracks," Nate agreed.

"Is that what he's after?" Eliot turned. Hardison had put up a picture of the portrait on one of the screens, deeming it safe enough since no phones had been sacrificed in the acquisition of it.

"The placement of the lock would seem to hint at it," Sophie agreed, but she saw Nathan frown minutely.

Surprisingly, it was Dresden who sounded off. "Why? It's been safe all this time, impossible to find. Why bother now, why bother at all?"

"Mm." Nate stared at the painting. "Dresden, do you mind shouting across the room?"

"I like it better than the alternative."

"Then I'd like you to work with Hardison on the profile, but the security around the things we took from Koschei takes priority. Eliot, you're with them. Sophie, Parker, we're going to find out what we can about this private auction."

"I bet Jess knows," Parker suggested.

"Start there, then. Dresden." It was Nate's turn to choose his words very carefully. "Is this something you should report to your people?"

The wizard looked surprised to even be considered on that regard. "Technically."

"We're flying on a lot of 'technically's here," the mastermind muttered.

"I mean, I can't use a cellphone. I'd have to find a landline." A little smirk ghosted over Harry's features making him look, for a fleeting moment, young. "The only ones I know of are back in Chicago."

Nate didn't smile, but it was a close thing.

NINETEEN

To be fair, I did get why Ford called it 'wanton destruction of property'. Eliot just looked way too gleeful wielding a power tool. And it absolutely wasn't because I was a little bit jealous that he got to use the fun toys, like a nail gun. Cordless drill. Power sander.

Nope, not jealous at all.

So the morning went with Eliot in my basement and me out in the yard entertaining Mouse, and the hitter occasionally stopping long enough to relay a question from Hardison back at the loft.

Then he ran out of iron nails. That wasn't anyone's fault, I'd asked for enough for a few spells, not enough to line the doors and windows, which was what it would take to keep the leshy out. No shield or barrier I could think of was going to keep a Golden Bear out, obviously. And I couldn't imagine anyone had ever come up with something to keep Koschei out, it would have been the stuff of legends. No, the point was the circle, and the ward inside, a copy of the pattern on the key.

Hey, if it worked for Koschei it was good enough for me.

Eliot took off to get more nails. Hardison didn't want me near the loft while he worked on a little joint project I'd suggested. Which gave me the perfect opportunity to head into my shiny new basement, close my shiny new circle for protection, and break out Bob.

I'd honestly thought about leaving Bob behind. My apartment might not look like much, but there were protections on it that only living for years in the same place can create. My laboratory, the sub-basement, was not only protected but hard to find. There was a better than good chance that Bob would be reasonably safe. But better than good was no perfect. And powerful and knowledgeable as Bob was, he still lived in a skull, and skulls are fragile. I wasn't worried about any of the many enemies in my life breaking in and finding him nearly as much as I was about them breaking in and not realizing how valuable he was while they wrecked the place.

In any case, I'd brought him with me. I hadn't expected we'd do much. I figured I could let him loose for a little while, if nothing else, and use that later as, heh, leverage when I needed his help. But that had been before I realized the size of the mess in Boston. I brought my rucksack down to the basement, found three boxes that had been on the Endless List, and put the skull on top of them. "Wake up, Bob."

The spirit's eyes lit up like candles, and immediately blazed and sparked like fireworks. "Whoa!"

"Yeah, welcome to Boston." I knew exactly how he felt. I put the sack on the shiny new workbench and sat on the shiny new stool.

"Ooof, headrush." Bob sorted himself out faster than I had, and his eyes rolled all around the sockets as he took in his surroundings. "Nice place. These Leverage people are taking good care of you, I see. Did you ever find out what it is they do?"

"I'm working on it."

"You know, Harry, it wouldn't have killed you to put me on a window during the train ride. It's been forever since I've really traveled."

"I was asleep for most of it."

"Liar," Bob sang back. "Are you wearing a sling?"

"I was trying to sleep for most of it. And yes." The shoulder was only occasionally throbbing, but Eliot had been very clear about wearing the sling as long as possible. "The Leverage people seem to have stepped into something a little beyond everyone's paygrade."

The spirit scoffed minutely. "Mortals."

"I'm not sure I'd have the arm to put in a sling if it weren't for them, so let's skip the pleasantries about that. I need to make a quick veil-shielding charm."

"Harry, you can't do that, you know that. A charm that can defend against a Veil needs to be attuned to, if not the Veil, then the wizard casting it, else it burns up."

"I'm fine with it burning up. I just need it to last five minutes. Two even." I couldn't even imagine the sheer amount of mayhem any of these people could do in two minutes. Or less, but I was trying to play it safe.

"What a waste of magic," Bob scoffed.

"Bob, focus. These are the same people who got you the boxes you're sitting on." The skull was sitting on top of three boxes full of paperback romances. I didn't question his unlife choices and Leverage hadn't questioned mine.

The spirit's attention turned inward briefly. "Well, I'm suddenly feeling a lot more generous toward our hosts," he declared, far too chipper. "Also, this city's making my teeth buzz. Anything that takes attention away from that is welcome."

"Oh, I have lots more questions for you, don't worry. The charm?"

"Did you bring the Vivendum with you? Page 253. By the way, Gottridge is lying, the charm works just as well in metal as it does glass, as long as it's not iron or lead."

I lifted one of the pins I'd found in the Lost & Found box. "How about pewter?"

"Ooo, tin and copper, perfect. If you get lucky, there might even be silver in there."

I found the Vivendum Grimoire, one of the books I'd brought with me from Chicago, found the spell to enchant the charms, and started rummaging about for sympathetic ingredients. Magic's all like that: sometimes you need something specific, but for the most part as long as you have something that sorta resonates with what you mean to do, you're fine. I found a heavy mortar and pestle first, and started throwing things in there: a lens and some colorful beach glass, a few plastic whistles. I tore strips out of a sheet of sandpaper, and emptied a bottle of perfume in. Then I started looking about for something to fill in the fifth slot. Gottridge recommended cheese, but everyone agreed that the man had had a dairy allergy.

"Rice," Bob said in a long-suffering tone. "Rice, Harry. If you cannot go to one extreme, go to the other."

I threw my last ingredient in, covered the mortar and started grinding. "Next question. Can you make a suppression spell into a suppression potion?"

Bob sucked in a breath. How, I didn't know, given he lacked every single element needed for it. "Yes, but it's not gonna taste good. Among other things."

"Other things?" I asked in between working the pestle.

"Think, Harry. The point of a spell is that you can dismiss it at will. If you drink the suppression, how are you going to dismiss it if you need your magic?"

"Can it be done so it's on a timer?"

"Tricky, but doable. And it's still going to taste like the bottom of a ditch. Why are you wearing a sling?"

"Because I dislocated my shoulder last night. Work out the recipe, please." The pestle began grinding more smoothly, so I gave all my focus to the spell. Bob knew better than to distract me, though I could all but feel those witch-light eyes burning into my back.

It wasn't hard, particularly because I didn't need it to be efficient, or good. Like I'd told Bob, I just needed the charms to do their thing long enough for my employers to get wise to a bad situation and bail. I worked the spell into the ingredients until I had fine, dust-colored dust on the bottom of the mortar; I scooped that into an empty salt shaker, sprinkled it all over the dozen or so pins I had ready, covered it all with a dish-cloth with sunflowers printed on it and left the magic to cook.

"You've been here barely a day and you dislocated you shoulder already?" Bob burst out as soon as the cloth settled.

"The suppression recipe, please."

"Harry!"

"It wasn't by choice!"

"That's worse!"

"Bob… These people live and work and do everything on computers. The suppression potion, please. Besides, they put it back already."

I got a recipe, and about ten minutes' worth of being lectured in between every step and ingredient, where Bob knew I couldn't get away or complain too much. "What do these people even do, did you ever figure that out?"

"Nope, and at this point I don't want to. Next question: what would it take to summon a Golden Bear out of the Nevernever?"

Bob went quiet. You wouldn't think this a bad thing unless you knew Bob. Unfortunately, I knew Bob.

"I mean, a couple of the wizards on the Council might be able to, if they can find one. If they can convince it to come through. Things that big, they don't like it on this side, Harry. It takes too much effort and they're not bright enough to put in the work themselves."

"Let me rephrase," I said as I tried to figure out if I had half the things I needed for the suppression potion. "What would it take for someone to instantly summon a Golden Bear out of the Nevernever to do their bidding?"

Bob went quiet again. His eyes were staring at me with an almost solid weight. "Harry, what aren't you telling me?"

"Too hard? Ok, here's another one: tell me every you know about Koschei."

The silence went on for so long that I would've thought him gone if it weren't for the eyes pinned on me. "Harry."

"Yeah?"

"Call the Council."

"Not an option."

"Harry, I know you. If you're asking leading questions about Koschei, it's because you've already met the man. You know for a fact he's here. You are involved, and that is the least safe thing you could be. This is beyond you, Harry. This might be beyond the Council, but at least if you call them it'll be them dying, not you." Bob was sounding very clipped and rushed; it was something I very rarely heard from him, I guess because when you're stuck in a skull there's not much to make you afraid anymore.

"I can't. Not with the War going on. Even if I did manage to get through to someone, I have no way of knowing if they'd have anyone to send. I'm here, now. This is the job."

"You can't take Koschei on! Harry, that's beyond suicide. He has a reputation for holding grudges for a reason!"

"That's a problem for future me. Present me still needs to know everything you can tell me about him -"

"I will not!"

"-because if you don't he's still coming after me, I just won't know when or where or how."

The skull somehow blew me a raspberry, and let out a highly infuriated sound. "What did you do?!"

I brought him up to speed while I worked on attuning a couple of compasses to the chalk I'd scrawled on the back of the portrait. Odds were the painting -sorry, the portrait- would be protected with the same anti-tracking magic on the key, but just in case it wasn't I wanted some way for the others to follow and find it, not just me.

"So he's here for his heart?" Bob saw me grimace as I worked. "You don't think so."

"No. It's been safe all this time, Bob, he has no reason to look it up now, particularly not so openly, so blatantly. If he just wanted the heart he could've gone into the museum at night, broken in by magic and taken it. No, he wants that portrait for another reason."

"And you're sure the woman's the Hag herself?"

"Ford thinks so. I haven't met her."

"I still don't like it."

"Oh, I'm thrilled as peaches about it, Bob," I told him, and all the sarcasm I'd learned from the damn skull came out with the words. "Really. I've met the man twice and both times he wiped the floor with me. I'm sure earning my paycheck."

"Harry, no one could ever pay you enough to face off against the Raven." Bob's voice went to a quieter note. "You're alive. Take the win."

"What'd you say?"

"I said take the win, you -"

"No, I mean, what'd you call him?"

"The Raven? The Blackbird? I wouldn't even be saying his name if we weren't in a circle that I'm sure you've closed. He's one of those people who are deeply attuned to any attention coming their way. You know the type. Opera singers. Politicians."

"So he can tell when someone says his name?"

"If he's listening. If he knows the person saying it. If there's enough intent, like with any other sort of magic. Why?"

I closed my eyes and focused on that morning. Koschei hadn't actually met Sophie; the vault hallway of the MFA had been dark, and I'd drawn his attention away just long enough that, by the time he'd caught up to us, Sophie had already bolted to go get Eliot.

Eliot, he knew. Unfortunately.

But he didn't know Ford. They hadn't even traded names at the bagel shop. More, Ford didn't believe. It didn't matter that he'd seen me actually throwing magic around, he was more like the sort of person I'm used to, the ones who wanted to explain it all away and forget it had ever happened.

So, just as we'd expected, he probably had a nebulous idea of where his stuff was - somewhere on the block, if he'd sniffed me out already. But he wouldn't know precisely where, and with the anti-tracker in place, he never would. "See, that's the sort of thing I need to know. How about sharing some fairy tales with me while I work on the suppression potion?"

Bob wasn't happy about it, but he also had a vested interest in keeping me alive, and it was going to be hard enough without suggesting one of his usual bargains. I spent the next hour setting up and preparing the suppression potion while he told me old Russian fairy tales and scared the crap out of me.

And yet.

The thing was, whenever I was on a case, things were usually happening so fast, coming at me from every direction, that most of the time I wasn't acting, I was reacting. That wasn't happening with the Leverage people; it couldn't. Whatever came at them, one of them knew how to deal with it and the rest knew to follow through.

Which included me.

I'd never realized it before, because I usually worked alone. I didn't have time to think through what I was doing, I barely had time to catch my breath, keep all my body parts attached to the body in question. But working with other people, capable people, I'd held my own. It wasn't gonna save me from Koschei, but it was kind of enlightening to know I could keep up with some of the smartest folk I'd ever met. Even if they were suspiciously criminally inclined.

I got the potion sorted out, dipped my finger and tried a taste, since I was pretty sure I was done doing magic until lunch, at the very least. It tasted about as bad as I'd expected. "Hey, Bob?"

"I don't have a tongue, I'm not tasting it for you."

"It's not that. I was just thinking, if you can see what's in those three boxes, you can probably do a general inventory -"

"Oh, here we go with the drudgery."

"- and I need to know if I've got what I need to make a mirror-mask -"

"Hey, Harry!" Eliot called out somewhere above me. "You home?"

"Inventory, Bob."

"There better be another box in it for me," he grumbled.

"Thanks." I stepped forward and focused on breaking the circle, except as soon as I stepped up to it it disappeared.

Right, suppression potion.

"Dresden!"

"Down here!" I set my foot on the stairs.

The doorbell rang. It was about as old as the house, and it seemed to be holding up well in my presence. It was certainly loud enough to nearly make me jump off the stairs. Eliot had just opened the basement door up top, and I saw him snap around like a wolf scenting prey. He put up a hand; I'd seen enough of the man to stop dead where I was.

He walked out of sight. I couldn't even hear his steps on the wooden floors. I only knew where he'd gone when the front door opened. I heard a woman's voice, I heard Eliot saying something back before he called out, "Dresden, someone here to see you."

That, I wasn't expecting. I trotted up the stairs, closed the door; Mouse was waiting for me there, ears perked and tail on the alert. He whuffled a warning.

Eliot shot me an equally wordless warning with his eyes before he stepped back, away from the door. There was a woman there with a kid, a young girl. I'm not good with children but she was old-ish, maybe twelve. Something like that.

When someone talks about someone who's not classically beautiful? The woman was the very definition of it. She was short, solid, very curvy, but even when she was just standing there there was a grace, a sort of unbreakable dignity that made you take notice. She was wearing a very prim business suit, gray skirt and jacket, white silk shirt, black shoes. She had dark hair done up in a very severe bun, dark skin the color of copper, sharp features mixed in with soft curves. Her eyes were black as midnight, with a ring of gold.

Her daughter had the ghost of her mother's beauty; she was quickly growing into it, though there was a bit of lanky to her that said her father was probably taller, definitely skinnier. She was wearing some sort of uniform, gray pleated skirt and white shirt, and she looked scared; she took one quick peek at me and immediately pinned her eyes down, but it was long enough for me to see she had her mother's eyes.

"You are wizard Dresden?" The woman had a thick, nearly impenetrable accent. She also had a printed sheet of paper with, of all things, my ad on the Chicago Yellow Pages on it. "Lost Items Found?" she recited.

"Uh -" I'm not good when I'm not under pressure. I usually get myself all hyped up and ready when I have to talk to a customer, be it on the phone or in my office back in Chicago. It didn't help when she suddenly started talking in a language that sounded a little bit like music and a lot like nothing I'd ever heard before. "Whoa. Ma'am. Ma'am, please."

"She wants to know if you're the man from the ad." Eliot's frown had changed to a look of curiosity.

"You sp -? What is sh -?"

"Wampanoag. Algonquian. It's a native - hold on." The woman had kept on talking, faster and faster, and Eliot put his hands up to stop her. "Ma'am, please, wait a minute -"

"Ma'am, he's human!" I shot at her, hating that I had to.

It worked. Her eyes went wide, and her mouth fell open. She stepped back. "Sorry! Sorry! Am sorry! Am so sorry! I say nothing!"

Eliot fell back, confused, so I stepped forward. "It's fine. It's fine, ma'am. Yes, I'm Harry Dresden. Can we please move this inside?" I thought for a moment she was just going to bolt, but obviously whatever had made her track me down sight unseen, in Boston, had more weight than her fear of humans and she stepped in, her daughter keeping close.

"Dresden, what was that?" Eliot muttered.

"There's a thousand humans for every single supernatural in the world, and most of them come out shooting if they get so much as a whiff of anything weird. Never sell yourself short in a fight, Eliot, not that I think you would. Humans are the tactical nuke of the supernatural world."

"And scary accordingly?"

"It's just safer if humans don't find out what lives around them. Safer for everyone involved."

"Hardison wants to know why you're not blowing up the earbud."

"Suppression potion. Long story. No magic for me right now. I'd take it out, it's gonna wear off any minute."

We sat down. Mother and daughter laced hands, and the woman said something. Eliot opened his mouth, but the kid beat him to it. "We don't want any trouble. We didn't know you had humans with you. We don't know what the rules are for people in other cities."

"I'm a little looser on the rules than most wizards. Now, I'd love to ask how you tracked me down, but I'm more interested in why."

"I found you on the internet," the girl replied. "I told my mom. We had a friend sniff you out. It wasn't hard." The mother said something. "He said you smell like big water, like a lake."

"You found him by his smell?" Eliot sounded stunned. She shrugged. Her mother said something and he frowned. "I'm not sure I got that right, it wasn't Algonquian."

"It was Welsh," I said. "Wasn't it?" I looked at the two ladies sitting on a couch that had been, until five minutes ago, still wrapped in plastic. "Because there's no word for 'selkie' in the local tongue."

The mother finally found her courage. "You help us. You find lost items, yes? You help."

Well, the next part was gonna suck. I've been the victim of my share of raw deals in my day. There's been a lot of times when I've had to sit down, shut up and take it when someone's doling out misery. I'll never agree to leaving someone in that kind of situation, but there's rules of magic even I can't bend. "Not this one, no. Ma'am… did he take it fair?"

She drew herself up proudly. "Never fair. Never. You know, wizard. You know this."

"Wait, selkie, as in, the selkie? Seal-woman?" I saw Eliot go through every stage between disbelief and understanding in under five seconds. Then I saw dark, cold rage blot out the sunshine. "Her skin. Someone took her skin."

"Someone took her skin, what, twelve, thirteen years ago?" I asked the kid.

"Fourteen," she replied haughtily.

"That deal's done. It's like signing a contract, you might not like it, but you're stuck with it. The penalties for breaking it are… severe. And interfering is tricky. Interfering with magic into a selkie marriage tends to rebound, ricochet. Like a bullet. "Ma'am, I can't help you, I'm just - I'm a wizard. The rules apply to me same as everyone."

"No!" She snapped at me. "I no say -" She growled in frustration, then looked at her daughter and took a deep breath. "He find my skin. Take. Is law. I know. I no need you find my skin, wizard. I need you find my daughter's skin."

Oh, Hell's Bells.

Both Eliot and I turned to stare at the girl. Thirteen, fourteen years old. In some places, to some men that I couldn't legally set on fire, she was ready to be married.

"He took your daughter's skin," Eliot sounded ready to murder someone.

"Yes. You find."

"I'm… working -"

"Can you find her skin, Dresden?"

"There's a few things I could try?"

He smiled at the two seal-women. It almost looked like his usual sunshine smile, but I could see the murder still lurking somewhere behind it. "We'll do what we can, ma'am."

She sagged with relief and reached for her purse. "I pay -"

"No payment required," he told her pleasantly.

"But we'll need as much information as you can give us about your -" Even knowing Eliot felt the same as I did, even knowing I had both backup and permission to act, I still wanted to set someone on fire. I did my best to smile instead. Smile and reassure. "- your husband."

She had it all typed up neatly in another piece of paper she pulled out of her sensible purse, as well as a few hairs in a bit of plastic wrap and her contact information, which directed us to Sannah, her daughter. We saw them to the door, waved them away, and Eliot turned to face me. "Dresd- " The little bit of suppression potion I'd tasted chose that moment to run out, and he yanked the earbud out as it screeched angrily. He drew in a deep breath. "Is that for real? Someone took her skin and she had to marry him?"

"Yeah. Crap deal, with magic and hope keeping them tethered. As long as there's even a chance to get her skin back, she'll do anything, put up with anything."

His hands curled into fists. It took him a few moments and a couple of deep breaths to get past the first crest of anger; he was better at it than I was, I'd known about selkies for so much longer, and I was still angry at the whole situation. "So, how do you normally handle something like this?"

"Uh, I go to the library, look up the guy. Tail him, on foot or by magic, see if he goes any place that isn't home or work. Find out where the skin is, report back to her with the location."

"Wh- That's it? There's no… explosions, no fighting?"

"He's human. Anyone else would know to give the skin back. A selkie's skin is bad luck on an impressive scale to anyone but the owner, it's why you can't use magic to break up the marriage."

"So he'd be using human means to keep the skins." He looked very thoughtful.

"Probably, yes."

A slow, wicked grin bloomed on the man's face that made me feel as if we were about to do some very bad things to some very bad people. It was a good feeling after having Koschei wipe the floor with us. Me, mostly. "Good. Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"Out of the dark ages and into the age of the geek. Unless you're in the middle of something?"

"Nothing that can't wait." Yeah, ok, I was curious to see how Leverage dealt with a supernatural challenge, even if it was a relatively minor one.

#fanfiction #my writing #urban fantasy #leverage #the dresden files #harry dresden #nathan ford #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #sophie devereaux #crossover

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ilkkijangege · 5 years ago

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123

Chad Chronicles is on hold while we work from home.

I'll keep updating this post if anything does happen to us.

Basically, I was telling Jacqui how J*ck told me I should join Tinder, use it during work to find out of he is there and if we would match. But Jacqui was like "what if you don't see him there but his friends see you??" So I was like "Then good na he's not on it 😂 as if he's ever talked about me to his friends 😂"

Then, nearly an hour later, I looked at my "Friends You May Know" on FB (there's a rumor that that is a list of people who's viewed your profile) then I saw that one of his friends are on it!!! I was shook, if the algorithm theory is right, then his friend was stalking me which means he has talked about me to his friends. LOL AYAN NANAMAN OVERTHINKING BES EH 😂

Then Jacqui told me how she asked her bf: if you offer a lift to a girl, does that mean he's interested? Her bf said yes but I shouldn't overthink and wait for another big sign.

Anyways, my Mandalorian plan is still going ahead. 😂

20/3/2020

Well, we didn't really talk online, he welcomed one of the guy on our team because he just got his access sorted today but I did not get the same treatment yesterday 😭

It's G tho 😂 Seems like he really is super smart because I looked into one of his chats and he used the word "futile". I'm just....wow big word 😂

Lol anyways, we're out for the weekend, Disney+ comes out on Tuesday, will try to binge it as soon I can so I can message him by Thursday or something 😂 really hope our conversation can flow naturally. Like I will just say "oh I've finished it and I am now obsessed with Baby Yoda or I can see why you are obsessed with Baby Yoda, he is adorable!" Then hopefully he can be like "What did you think of it?" Etc etc and we live happily ever after. CHOS.

21/03/2020

Swear everyone is telling me to either text him or to keep my feet on the ground and let the connection grow.

I REALLY DO NOT KNOW. He keeps doing all these things to me and I am always overthinking it. My friends have told me not to but it is sooo hard. They told me to wait for other signs.

I really want to take a risk and tell him but I really do not want to ruin our new found friendship. I mean I really hope he's just waiting to make more signs because he doesn't think it's time yet or something but I just don't want to give give give and not have anything in return. Haaaay Lord, please help me!

22/03/2020

This morning, I told my mom about the fact that he drove me home. At first, I couldn't tell her immediately, I was just staring at her the whole time and she asked "Anong kailangan mo sakin?" I said "nothing." "Bakit naka tingin ka sakin?" Then finally, I said, "Wala lang, may update lang ako sayo." Then she was like "ano may date ka???" I replied, "No update!!! Hinatid nya ako kila tita nung last time kaming pumasok.." and she was just like "ayie, hinahatid ka na ha." Then she told me, "yan dapat, cool ka lang. Pero tapusin mo muna.." She didn't complete her sentence but I knew she was talking about my FE1s but then she was probably thinking that I am nearly 25 and she should let me be. Hahaha. Then she asks "nag offer ba xa?" Sabi ko oo 😂

Then she asks me if he texts me and I told her no, we only talk in work. Then she replied, "ganun talaga" 😂 hay mother, if she had asked more details, I would have told her how I am getting mixed signals from him kaya di ko tlga sure kung gusto nya din ako 😂 but she didn't, so let's leave that for another time. 😂

Lord, pleaseee I trust you. If he doesn't reach out to me, ako na tlga mag rereach out. Need to binge The Mandalorian asap.

23/03

He keeps reading my messages on our GC immediately but does not with other people

ANO BA GUSTO MO PARAMDAM KA NAMAN PLS

Happened again at 16;09 ANO BA HUHU

24/03

STOP SEEN ZONING MY MESSAGES AS SOON AS I POST THEM AND START TALKING TO ME

25/03

No sign of Chad life anywhere, he was pretty much quiet today, not reading/replying to messages etc

26/03

I FINISHED THE MANDALORIAN YOU GUYS.

I took a risk and messaged him. It took me a whileeeeee but I just took the plunge.

Basically, I asked him how he was and how working from home has been coming along. It took him like 6 mins to reply, which was fine, we were in work so understandable.

He told me he is relaxed but about to get boring. He asked me ‘how about you?’ So I sent him this quite long response how I’ve been relaxed working in my jammies and binged watch Mandalorian, bummed about 2 eps so illegally streamed the rest. Told him that I am now also obsessed with Baby Yoda (he laughed react to this). Then he said how it was dumb for Disney not to release everything at once. (Was upset he didnt ask me what I thought of the show)

Then I told him if Netflix can do it, so can they. But he said people would just sign up for trial, watch it then cancel. Thennnn he asked if I liked it. I said yes except for Ch.6′s characters. He said he thinks you were not meant to like them.

Then I asked him if he thinks Fennec Shand is still alive. He was like which one was HE again? So I told him correction she* (laugh emoji) then explained her character. He was like ‘Oh yeaaahhh. Then boba fett was supposedly the one who found her” I replied ‘yup that’s the theory but I feel like she was pretty much lifeless already and maybe just a teaser for boba fett then?'

Then nearly 3 hours later, I go check our workplace chat and he seenzoned me. Okur. He read the message at 20.27. He better reply tomorrow or I’ll take it a sign that he really just isn’t interested in me.

On a side note, he went on lunch at 6pm, came back at around 7ish but didn't change his Status xD it's either he forgot or na distract na sya sakin CHOS sige laaaangg.

I swear I hope we can talk more tho. Since he seenzoned me, I will not message him again cos I don't want to look eager/desperate so yeah. Byeeeeee.

30/03

STOP READING MY MESSAGES, dear heart and head, STOP THINKING ABOUT HIM.

I know you get notifications that "Bianca messaged..." Does your heart flutter when my name appears? STOP OVERTHINKING BIANCA.

Ayan nnmn tayo sa seenzone eh 14:55. Ano ba?

1/04/20

I had a dream that he messaged me. He asked me how I was and for some reason, he told me to go to Google Music because they were having a sale and that I should make a track for him. (Like what?)

Also dreamt that he took me home again. When we got to our house, he told me we needed to talk. I think he confessed.

Ay ayoko na.

5/4/20

Why do I keep dreaming about him? I dreamt that he messaged me on FB, really long paragraphs of him confessing his feelings.

Urgh.

Oh and I also paid for a tarot reading of how he really sees me. I mean idk if it's real but there are feelings there but there may be a third party but the reader could not 100% confirm it. It is highly probable, he's a single man who could totally date around. The reading also mention how he finds me attractive and sees a long term energy with me. It also says how he may not be ready for a serious romantic relationship but he can see it progressing down the line. But honestly, I do not see him as someone who longs for sex, yknow? I am nearly sure that he could still be a virgin but the fact that he frequented Krystle in college, makes me question it. I mean, he is a white male, it is something I am not super pressed about.

I've just been thinking, if I were to get with a Filipino guy, is there anyone out there who has never had a girlfriend or who has even dated anyone?

Chad really gives me the vibe of never having a girlfriend before but I really see him as not looking for anything at the moment to focus on his dream job.

6/4/20

Okay, why did I have a dream that he proposed to me??

I think we argued over something and then a few days later, he proposed. Wtf.

From what I remember, he only proposed in his car. lol

8/4/20

So we had a team call today. He has not been working since like Thursday last week because he could not get his VPN to work.

But dang. I heard his voice after 3 weeks. He sounds the same as in real life but his American accent is more prominent 😂

Then our TL said we might still be working from home for the next 3-4 months and I'm just like. HUHUHU.

Will I be over you by then?

10/04/20

Had a dream we were back in the office and we were having banters again like nothing has changed.

I think he also messaged me on Facebook one of these isolation days...

I swear I know it was probably unintentional for him to ghost me like that.

11/04/20

So I've been searching his Gamer tag on Google, even before I decided to let go of him and there is this one file I keep noticing, it is League of Legends and it seems his password is Yugioh246 😂 it is actually hilarious 😂 I didn't know he is that big of a nerd. I don't see it as a bad thing because I like nerds and I am drawn to them but I hope he is not an incel because that is a major turn off.

Yes, I am not wishing for us to be together anymore but I really hope he finds the woman of his dreams. He deserves to have someone who will understand him for who he is.

13/04/20

Another thing, how do I listen to songs without thinking of him?? It is getting frustrating. I used to listen to these songs without thinking of him and now all I do is associate these songs to him. Nakakainis.

14/04/20

Why do you keep reading my messages then stop reading others' after mine??

18/04/20

Argh why did I dream of him again?

We were back in the office daw and I sat in a different computer because I was avoiding him as in. For some reason, the coat rack was behind him so when it was home time, I grabbed my coat as fast as I could so he would not talk to me. He was slouched in his seat and looked really tired. His hair was long like mid length sufer dude hair, he was not wearing his hat. But then he saw me and called me and said "Bianca, I'll give you a ride home." I replied, gaga naman ate nyo, "If it's not raining, I can walk but if it is, I'll take the bus." He replied, "What time is your bus?" I replied, "In an hour." He replied, "Okay, if it's raining, I'll wait for you here, let me know." Then I grabbed my stuff from my locker, I went out the office and it was raining. I went back into the office and told him that it was raining. So he got up from his seat and we walked to his car. On the way, I noticed he looked really tired and his eyes were red so I asked him, "Did you not sleep?" His reply was: "Yeah I came to work with no sleep." So we just walked to his car and he opened the door for me. He even adjusted my seat.

Then for some weird reason, we ended up in Dolphins Barn, like the flats and around Tesco. Then there were billboards for Book of Mormons and he saw it he said or read "What about the Mormons?" Then I was confused at first so he pointed at the ads for the Book of Mormons. Then I told him: "Oh I really wanna see that! I heard it's meant to be one of the best Broadway shows." He then tells me he is not a big play fan but there is something he likes. I asked him but he saw another Book of Mormons billboard and pointed to it. Then we reached Reilly's Ave and idk why but my whole family and our old neighbors were all outside. Bsta ang weird talaga na he dropped me off in our old house. Dreams are weird.

So I just thanked him and watched him leave.

Aish why did I dream of you again???

20/4/20

Had another dream about him. Just why oh why? What are these dreams trying to tell me? I haven't been thinking about him seriously so idk.

Basically in this dream, we were all back in the office. So we got a few newbies who joined our team. And management/TL thought it was a good idea to blend the newbies with the senior agents so there was a complete seat change again. Chad and the guy beside him moved to my old area, as in Chad moved to my old seat. While I was stayed in my current seat. Of course I felt sad that I won't be able to see him face to face as often anymore and that I felt like our friendship will drift apart again.

Basta ano baaa I don't understand this. Do I still have feelings for him deep down?

Oh and he read my message on the group chat again. 10:18am. I mean ok he's been active on the UKI chat today so here's me overthinking again.

23/04/20

Another day, another Chad dream.

So in this dream, I was in Tesco with my mom or Aldi, anyways a supermarket.

I wanted to make Tacos so I was at the spice aisle, looking for a taco spice mix. Then out of nowhere, he pops up and sees me. Says hello and asked how I was etc, while I was grabbing the taco spice mix.

Then I told him goodbye but I still kept seeing him everywhere in the store even though I purposely was avoiding him.

WHY DO I KEEP DREAMING OF HIM.

It is honestly annoying. 😭

I just wanna move on.

27/04/20

Been a while since my last dream but I dreamt that he drove me home, yet again, but I only remember the part where we entered Cherrywood and then I just got out of the car and don't even remember saying thanks. I stood at the front door, until he left.

28/04/20

Arghhh he read my messages again on the office chat almost instantly at 2.37pm 😩😩😩😩 Whereas our own team's chat has been active all day, yet he has not read the messages on there since yesterday morning!!

Were you expecting that I messaged you or something??? CMON IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME JUST MESSAGE ME. I already messaged you first, it's your turn.

Ugh I hate overthinking this!!

Also, 26th of April marked the 1st month since we last talked. Hmmmm have I fully moved on? I really don't think I have but I am just trying to live my life. Why must you be an introvert Chad, we'll be waiting for each other forever.

6/05/20

Hmmmm... Beginning to think he actually has 3 siblings contrary to the fact that I thought he said there are 3 of them in the family, him being the eldest, followed by his sister then his younger brother.

If it is his brother that I saw on FB then it makes sense now because remember when he gave out chocolates for Christmas? I heard him say "my brother's work had them on sale" or something along the lines. And the other brother I was aware of was only a kid. This person I saw matches the bill, from Chicago and went to the same secondary school as him. (AND LOOKS LIKE HIM!!! We may be the same age or a year younger because he graduated secondary school in 2014) [yup he is older than me by 6 months and just like his older brother, he is also very much into Star Wars and video games. But he seems more social than his bro. Haha xa na lang date ko 😂 Chad 2.0 chosss Chad introduce me to your bro para di tayo awkward sa work 😂 They are actually only 10 months apart, I wonder if they are close.]

Hmmmmm why am I such a stalker 😂

(7.6 update: nah saw his bro's IG and he seems like a fckboi, his DP is a mirror selfie of him shirtless, showing off his v line abs 😂)

13/05/20

It's been a while. As of yesterday, he is fully back to work. We had a team meeting on Monday and he was on it. He said they gave him a laptop to work on. I had myself on mute so I was just listening to him. Yes I wanted to join in on the convo but I needed to stop myself. I need to distance myself until I fully move on from him.

Anyways, today, a case was assigned to me at around 8.30 in the morning. I didn't action it because the office was going mad with chats so I said I was gonna action it when I had a chance later on.

Then I noticed that it disappeared from my queue. I went to my closed cases and I saw that he had actioned it. I mean, I am not saying that he did it on his own free will, our TL may have asked him to go through our team's response received internal queue. Which is aight but this case was not originally mine, but one of his office broskis, na mean? So it's either he did not read the email thread at all or he just decided to close it in MY name. I mean he had to type my name and I wonder if he felt something. CHOSSSSSS 😂

But I'm telling you guys, ever since he got access again, my heart started fluttering again just like when I was still crushing on him, before I moved in front of him and he started giving me all these attention that made me fall in love with him.

I have been trying to move on. I even wrote a 7 page journal entry about my feelings. I've been super distracting myself by watching Kim Possible and staying away from sappy romantic shows 😂

I need more time to heal but it will be okay!

Update 14/5:

I got another case from the same broski, which he actioned yesterday and closed it under his broski's name but he closed the other one on mine.

Ugh why am I overthinking this again!!!

Chad please go away from my feelings 😩

15/5

Today, I helped him out with one of his cases.

He said 'thanks!' whereas the past few days, he's only been replying to people on our team with 'ty!'.

Made me overthink again but I was just being ridiculous 😂 'ty' tapos today sakin 'thanks', special ako chos 😂 honestly wasn't that bothered but okay! Stop giving me special treatment please 😂 don't treat me differently from others if you don't feel the same way because it's unhealthy for me 😂

Helped him again with another one and he said 'thanks!' again urgh. Swear tho, I was hesitating a bit when I was helping him. My heart was thumping again like it did before we started getting comfortable with each other 😭😭😭

17/5/20

Exactly 2 months since I saw him and when he dropped me home.

Oh Chad. Will I ever be over you.

18/5/20

Helped him with another case because no one was helping him so I was just being nice.

Bianca don't be marupok pls. You've been making progress. Don't relapse now.

20/5/20

Another day of helping him out....

Basically he asked our group chat for help, no one replied for like 5 minutes so I said I'll help him.

Then he private messaged me about the case. He told me there were a lot and said "ahah". I should have joked around but I didn't or even asked him how he was 😭

But after I helped him, this was his reply:

Huhuhu parang ang happy nya na may tumulong sa kanya. Chad naman, don't do this to me! I am trying to move on 😭

21/05/20

Haaaayy... Reading my messages again as soon as I post them. Chad Chad Chad ....

26/05/20

He legit have not read messages on our office GC since 10.30 this morning. I messaged a few times around 3pm and he kept reading them. Ano ba kasi Chad.

Don't be scared of rejection, I know I may not be showing real signs but I am an awkward turtle, just talk to me.

27/05/20

As usual no one was helping him again so I private messaged him and asked if anyone was helping yet.

His response:

Hahaha cute 😂 so I told him 'give me the deets, I'll send it up'.

He said 'ty!!', gave me the deets.

Then when I completed it, this was his reply:

Hahaha naloka na xa, double a. Choss. I replied with "anytime 😊" 😂 para konti landi to let him know na I am here to help anytime HAHAHAHAHAHAHA chos

BAKIT HIRAP MAG MOVE ON MGA BESH

5/6/20

So I've been hesitating about posting this but about 2 days ago? I had a dream about him again. It wasn't just him in it but the dream mostly centered about him and I.

Basically, we there was a party in the office and for some reason, I was getting ready at my desk as in curling my hair (so weird 😂😂😂).

Then Chad decided to go out of the computer area, probs was on a break or something. Then my team decided it was a good idea to hide his baby yoda plushie so I hid it in my locker and when he came back, he kept looking for it and we were just laughing at him. 😂

That was it haha.

But you guys, I've been diligently praying for my vocation and I've been getting signs about marriage etc. What if he's the one? God, please give me more signs.

15/06/20

So it's been a while. I've been helping him here and there over the last few weeks.

Today's response was "awesome, thanks!"

And that made me kilig inside. 😂

I am awesome, chos! 😂

16/06/20

Just saw the July Schedule and he is taking 2 weeks holidays 😂

Lol fam watchu gonna do? 😂

Tara let's go on a date chos 😂

24/06/20

I miss him ☹️ But I've been good with not thinking about him a lot but I just really can't wait to be able to ask him out in person hahaayyyy

Hmmmm I also suddenly wondered if he still has the card I gave him for Christmas. That was a cute card, €4 din un ha hahaha

3/07/20

Yo wassup.

I had a dream, so we were back in the office. We were on the weekend shift and for some reason, I decided I was staying back for a bit more so he left before me.

Basically, from this dream, it seems that we were on minimal speaking terms. So like as he was leaving, at the computer area door, he said bye to me and idk why, I asked him to have dessert with me on Monday 😂 it was weird 😂

12/07/20

Okur, I had a dream that he dropped me off again in Cherrywood, like just out of nowhere. Like all I remember was that we were walking to his car together.

He even opened my door and carried my bag and walked me to the front door. Haaayyy....

14/07/20

So today, I was overthinking again.

Basically there was a post in work where an SME asked him to tag his team. He tagged me first over his broskis and that made me quite overthink again. Like the way he tagged our team was not as if it was alphabetical order. So why did he tag me first?

Hahah ako ung unang pumasok sa isip nya

Huhuhu ayoko naaaaa

19/07/2020

So he is on his 2 weeks PTO from tomorrow.

Haaaaayyyyy miss ko na xa, bakit ba kasi ako ganito. Pero as long as he has not said that he is not interested in me, may chance pa rin tlga kami eh.

Wag lang tlaga xang umalis ng company and it will be grand.

08/08/20

Been a while since this was updated, nothing's been happening between us so there is nothing to report. But anyways, lately I've been having (r-rated) fantasies about him 😂 argh I just want to be with him 😂

He's also started playing Fall Guys on the PS4, we have something in common na chos 😂

Also, there's an SME position in work and I have a feeling he might apply huhu if he gets it, he'll be level 12 and I won't be able to date him 😭😂

Honestly still think may something sila ng QA namin huhuhu

16/08/20

So I told MF on the 14th of August about everything that has happened, like how I was getting mixed signals that made me overthink alot to me messaging him twice and being left on read, also how I plan on asking him out when we get to the office. (Also how he dropped me home.)

I told her how it's been very hard for me in the last 5 months, trying to move on from someone I don't even talk to. She was very understanding and told me that she also has not talked to Chad since WFH, as she was also left on read. She said he may not be the texty type because he's quite shy.

I was honestly shook. I thought they talk, even on our workplace chat because they are close in work. Cause I asked her if it was even a good idea for me to ask him out or if she knows if he's seeing someone because I don't want to intrude. I told her I want to take a risk with him but a part of me fears rejection.

She asked me if I ever thought about asking him out for coffee since things are opening up. I told her, yes but I don't think we are in that level where I could just ask him randomly.

So her plan is to build up a rapport with him again and find out the goss. I really hope she can build something up with him and that if ever, this time, there will be progress.

Until I know I have a chance with him, I can't move on. If he's seeing someone, then okay at least I'll know where I stand.

I'll let you know if there's progress.

19/08/2020

So today, I helped him out with a case.

One of the internal tools was not working for him so he asked for help. I was the first to reply so I told him to send me the details and I'll do it.

When I did it for him, he said 'Perfect thank you!' and I just replied, "No worries 😊" landi landi with that emoji 😂 Wish we kinda had a conversation going though 😭 Wish I asked him how he was but it wasn't appropriate okay 😂

Haaayy can't wait to find out if he's dating anyone or when I'll see him again so I can ask him out. HAAAAAYYYYSSSS.

9/9/20

So yesterday, I asked our group chat for help on a case. I didn't really expect that he would be the one to respond but he did and that was cute. Awww. ❤️

Looool I wish I could've thanked him personally but other people started helping me out so yeah. But for a brief moment, I was kilig haha

Really wanna ask him out already! But cases are rising again and I don't want him to use Covid as an excuse so I'll wait again until cases have slowed down.

13/09/20

So today, I had a video call with MF. She told me that she got a new job 😭 meaning, she won't be able to be my wingwoman now 😭

I am happy for her but this cuts down all my chances with Chad 😭

But she did talk to Chad and he applied to the SME role apparently, I think he may have already been interviewed but he didn't hear back from them yet.

MF also said that we should meet up for a coffee date "with Bianca" and he said we should hahaha cmon MF make this a reality please so I can talk to him 😭

0 notes

grumpygreenwitch · 1 year ago

Text

The Witches and Wizards Job 20-21-22

The bad news is that I missed yesterday's update. I apologize! I have no excuse except that wrestling Tumblr's queue into compliance tries my patience unto violence.

The good news is that the story is finished! So now, instead of once a week, you'll get updates once a day until everything's posted.

AO3 Link

Buy me a Ko-fi?

Remember: Tumblr has no algorithm. Reblogs give me life.

1-2 + 3-4 + 5-6 + 7-8 + 9-10-11 + 12-13-14 + 15-16 + 17-18-19 + 20-21-22 + 23-24-25 + 26-27-28 + 29-30 + 31-32-33 + 34-35-36 + 37-38 + 39-40-41-42

TWENTY

Hitter and wizard headed back to the loft, Mouse on a leash that Eliot doubted very much would give the young dog a pause if he decided to challenge it. He took the time to examine Harry out of the corner of his eye.

The wizard was, in many ways, an open book. His emotions burned close to the surface, in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, the way he walked and carried himself. The hitter had never met someone who was both so aware and unaware of his surroundings; Harry was always expecting an attack, he just didn't seem to know he was doing so. His anger at the situation with the selkies still burned in his eyes, distracting him, blinding him. He couldn't compartmentalize, like Leverage did. He'd seen something unfair, and he was mad about it, and he would do his damnedest to fix it.

He was, in sum, a good person.

"Harry,"

"Hm."

"When she said they smelled you -"

"They didn't. A friend did." The wizard seemed to think on those words for a moment before he nodded tinily to himself. "And it's literal. It's the smell of my magic. It's a new smell to the area, and without the lake to ground me it's probably very obvious. I told Sophie, I figured she'd passed it on: they'll know I'm here. Everything on this side of the river can -"

Mouse growled a quiet warning and both their heads came up. At the same time, a young man pacing in front of the loft entrance looked up. He had the kind of perfect looks, flawlessly tousled hair and incredibly expensive clothing that you only see on a billboard, advertising fancy watches or men's cologne. He had sunglasses on, and for a moment Eliot thought something looked wrong with the face behind them, but he was more focused on the man making any sort of sudden move.

Harry's face was made of stone. Eliot didn't need to see anything else to recognize bad magic.

"Oh, good," the man breathed when he saw us. He had a faint French accent. "You are wizard Harry Dresden, are you not?"

"Nope." Harry kept on walking.

The man frowned, trotting and planting himself directly in the wizard's path. "But -"

"I am. The answer's no."

That instantly started to ring alarm bells in Eliot's mind. With the women, Harry had been polite, uncertain but kind. This man was getting nothing but blanked.

"Please." The man pleaded, managing to get in Harry's way once again. "Please, I need your help."

"I'm on a job already." Harry pointed at Eliot. "For him."

The man glanced at Eliot. Before the hitter could so much as say a word, or even think it, the stranger's eyes flicked away; he'd been dismissed without a thought, without a care. That was a very personal pet peeve, though for the moment Eliot was willing to count it an advantage. When you didn't think someone was a threat you never watched them very closely.

"I won't take much of your time, I will pay for it -"

"I'm on retainer," the wizard snapped, forced to stop once again. "That means I do the work he wants, nothing else, nothing more."

That brought the stranger up short. He looked, really looked, at Eliot. In return, the hitter made himself look at the man, truly look at him, even though some primeval part of his brain kept telling him not to do so. This time, he saw the blink of far too many eyes behind the sunglasses, and when the man spoke again, he saw the odd way parts of his mouth didn't move.

The stranger spoke in a tone that managed to be both embarrassed and coy. "I am not sure I am comfortable speaking freely in front of… food."

Harry beamed at him. The wizard might have no poker face to speak of, but when he did sarcasm it came out like a masterpiece. "Then you don't really need my help, do you?"

"But -"

Moused growled.

The stranger bared perfect teeth, hissed low and stepped back. Two men and one dog moved past him.

"It's my wife -"

"Then I absolutely don't want to help you."

"No, wizard, my real wife!" When that still didn't stop them, he cried out. "She might be cheating on me!"

Several people stared, slowing down minutely before they moved on. Next to Eliot, Harry stopped.

Sighed.

Dropped his head.

What power those words may hold over the wizard, Eliot didn't know. But he did know that Harry couldn't, wouldn't walk away any more, and he didn't want him to believe he had no options. A lot of what powered the wizard's actions was so… lonely. In him Eliot was seeing echoes and ghosts of the man he'd once been, before he'd fallen from all grace. He knew being alone had been a very contributing factor to that fall. And he'd be damned if it happened to anyone else on his watch. "Harry?" he asked very quietly.

The wizard flicked him a quick, surprised glance. That, Eliot knew, was another odd quality of the man; he wasn't keeping secrets or holding back information or going off on his own out of a sense of greed or mistrust; it wasn't a con for him, he wasn't running a job. He was just so used to being alone that it didn't occur to him to act otherwise.

With one word, Eliot had reminded him he wasn't alone. And with one startled look, Harry had got the message. The hitter saw muscles work restlessly along the wizard's jaw before he turned to face the stranger. "And if she is?"

The stranger shrugged. "I want to live, wizard."

Harry's mouth went to a thin line. That, apparently, was the right answer. Unfortunately, it was as obvious to the hitter as it was to the stranger, who took a half step forward. "I will leave," he hurried to add. "I will go as far away as you wish me to go if you bring me proof."

The wizard's breath puffed out of him in a tiny, angry sound, and he pointed sharply. "Go sit in the pub, I'll deal with you when I can." He whipped around to walk into the building, whirled once more, hurried down the steps and added, very tightly, "And don't eat anyone!"

That was the opposite of reassuring, wasn't it? And still Eliot couldn't help but be amused. He kept his questions to himself until they were going up the stairs. "So what was that all about? I take it the crack about food was for me?"

"Yeah."

"What is he?"

"Uh, spider, sort of."

"He's… what, he's a spider, he's made of spiders, he's got spider magic, what? Information, Harry. And while you're at it, why don't you want to help him? You were much nicer to the selkie ladies."

"They get a raw enough deal," the wizard muttered.

Harry opened the door to the loft. "Hardison, wizard in the house!"

"Couch's free!" the hacker called out from before the bank of screens.

"I've got a job for you too."

"Uh, excuse me?" Hardison turned to stare after the hitter in insulted disbelief as the wizard and his dog dutifully took their spots as far away from the computers as possible. "I've spent all morning trying to create a profile out of fairy tales. Fairy tales, Eliot! I've been translating so much Russian I think I've learned the language by, by infection. I -"

"Is this a new fridge?" Eliot asked, in the process of grabbing a beer.

Hardison gave him the most pointed of looks. "No, it is not."

Eliot said nothing, he merely nodded minutely. "Harry, you want anything?" The coffeemaker chirped something that didn't sound nice and the hitter gave it a wary squint. "That isn't coffee?"

"Beer's nice."

Eliot provided, and then moved over to Hardison's work area. "This shouldn't take you long. Just need a look into this guy's affairs."

"Eliot! Does it look like I have time -!" Hardison was already taking the printed piece of paper. "Who even is this dude?"

"Scumbag."

"Yes, thank you, that answers absolutely nothing."

"Fourteen years ago he stole a selkie's skin. A seal-woman, a shapeshifter." Harry pitched his voice to carry; he'd had plenty of practice with Eliot earlier. "The magic in the skin bound her to him," he pointed the bottle at the piece of paper.

"Bound her, bound her how, because I'm not liking what you're telling me, Harry."

"Married. Has a kid. Guess whose skin's gone missing now." Eliot grinned, thin and feral. "Like I said, scumbag."

Hardison sighed in resigned exasperation and moved over to his keyboard. "Is this going to fry my systems, Dresden?"

"It shouldn't."

"So what sort of criminal is he, then?"

"Uh… none?" the wizard ventured.

Hardison stopped typing and turned. "Harry, what's wrong with the man, is what I'm asking."

"Literally, nothing." It was Eliot who replied. "This isn't one of our cases, Hardison, it's his."

The hacker visibly stuttered to a halt. He looked at the printed page, at the wizard with his horse-sized dog half-asleep on his lap. He looked at Eliot and at the screens. "Alright." He went back to typing. "Meet William Wellington Wattsford, what a name. Lawyer."

"Figures," Harry muttered.

"Harry, how far can he stash the skins, is there a range on the magic?" Eliot stared at the man on the screen, as perfectly nondescript a creature as one could be found, slightly balding, a little on the lanky side, fit by virtue of his gym membership.

"Yes, actually. They should be within the city limits. The further away, the more likely the link between selkie and skin will snap."

"What happens then?" Hardison asked warily.

"She goes insane and kills him. And dies. Or she just dies, and the curse on the skin ricochets and kills him horribly. I mean, it'd be a great solution," the wizard agreed thoughtfully, "except for her dying."

"Jesus, Harry, is there anything about magic that doesn't kill, explode, set things on fire or create general mayhem?" Eliot demanded.

Harry shrugged and pointed at himself. "Ta-da?" Mouse's tail wagged once, as if he'd said something funny.

"Well, there's his house." The hacker pulled up a map, typed again and little flags appeared all over it. "And there's anywhere else his name pops up. Man, it feels weird looking up someone so… normal. Job, kid's school, gym, therapy - yeah, that surely helped not make you into a skin-kidnapping psycho, didn't it," he muttered. "Log cabin."

"Bank." Harry pointed out.

Hitter and hacker looked at him, then the screens. "It can't be that easy," Hardison protested.

"Why not?" the wizard countered. "Who's gonna believe a tale about a selkie-wife?"

Hardison had to accept the rationale of that after a moment. "Is this really what your work is like?"

"Yeah. Only I can't do that," the wizard waved at the computers, "so there's a lot of legwork involved, a lot of people-watching. She's a stay-at-home mom, so it can't be in any of the places where they spend time as a family. It can't be near the kid, she's on mom's side. He'd get weird looks at work trying to stash a full-sized seal pelt, let alone two. It's at a bank. Safe deposit box."

"Harry, I feel like I ought to ask, what happens if she gets her skin back?" Eliot's tone said he had hopes and dreams about the answer.

"She'll leave him."

"Th- that's it?" So much for the hitter's hopes and dreams.

"That's all she wants. She wants to go home, to her family, to her people. She -" Harry tried to explain. "You're thinking of her in human terms. She's not human. She just looks like it because it's good camouflage. Even if you're starving and seal's all there is to eat, you're not gonna shoot a person if you can help it, are you?" He shrugged. "The lawyer, he's not even an afterthought."

"Somehow, I think that would hurt his ego even more." Hardison looked deeply pleased. "Is there a reason we, us, can't give her the skins back?"

"No." Harry looked deeply amused, and suddenly very interested. "If it was me, once I figured out where they were stashed I'd just tell her. The friend who sniffed me out? If he's what I think he is, he'd get them back for her in no time flat. Me, I'm just not the sort that goes around breaking into banks, like you people."

"No, no, excuse me, I do not break into banks." Hardison picked up his phone. "I have a Parker for that."

"What about the dude down in the pub?" Eliot asked.

"What dude down in the pub?"

"Oh, you know. The one Harry specifically warned not to eat anyone."

"Excus- I'm s- What did you - There is a man down in the pub and you specifically had to warn him not to eat anyone?" Hardison had forgotten to dial.

"Spider." Harry mumbled.

"What?"

"Oh, yeah, he's not a man, he's a spider." Eliot beamed.

"WHAT?!"

"Kin. He's spider-kin."

"That's freaky. You do realize that, right? That is freaky."

"Just - just put the pub cameras up, Hardison," Eliot huffed. "You still haven't told me why you didn't want to help him." He directed that at the wizard.

"I try not to help bad guys," Harry admitted tightly. "Spiders are predatory. And assholes."

"He changed your mind, though. When he told you about his wife, his real wife."

Harry rubbed at his face wearily. "She'd eat him."

Eliot drew in a deep breath. "I'm guessing you mean literally."

"Yeah. Spiders keep groupies, tons of them, so they can pick and choose their food -"

"Please do not speak of people as 'food'. I am people," Hardison requested indignantly.

"Not to him. To him you're a burger. Many keep wives or husbands, they make for good cover."

"But that's not cheating, because you can't cheat on a burger," Eliot followed the train of information and ran ahead of it.

"Exactly. The only actual cheating is between their own kind. And he has to do everything he can to keep his wife happy. If he doesn't, like with some spiders -"

"He goes on the menu," Hardison finished. "That's why he's so desperate that he came looking for you - is this what you do back home?"

"No, not for him. Back home he'd know better than to show his face at my doorstep. But yes, otherwise. Cheating spouses is a big part of what I do. I'm actually cheaper than a PI. Faster, too."

"How?" Eliot asked, and both hacker and hitter turned to look at the wizard, openly curious.

"Uh, spell to see if they're actually cheating. Nine out of ten times they are. Tracking spell to follow them until I can get pictures."

"You can use a camera?"

"An old one, but yeah. And those cheap disposables, if I'm quick getting them developed."

Eliot and Hardison looked at one another, and Hardison grinned. "Alright. And having seen me work," he pointed a thumb at the screens behind him, "how would you go about it?"

Harry frowned, his focus suddenly and completely on the screens. "I'd get a picture of his wife."

"Reasonable," Hardison crossed his arms and waited. "Why?"

"Because if she's cheating, it'll be with someone who looks like part of her circle of groupies. And he will have his own circle as well." Harry lifted a hand and gestured. "Circle to circle to circle, I'd follow the faces, the ones that repeat." He grinned ruefully. "I just can't do picture searches on a computer.'

"I get the feeling the only thing holding you and your magic back is, um. Your magic, man," Eliot said, then pointed. "There, upper corner, that's him."

Hardison brought the camera in closer. And stared. "Him?"

"Yup."

"That's your man?"

"Yes."

"Uh, spider?"

"Yes, Hardison, that's him." Eliot's voice was turning into a growl.

"The one playing with a smartphone?"

All three men crossed a startled look. On the screen, the stranger looked up when a drink was brought to him, then returned his attention to his phone, tapping rapidly.

All three of them launched themselves down the stairs, leaving Mouse to hold the fort. As they hurried to the pub, Eliot asked one last question. "You'd let the guy get eaten, wouldn't you?"

Harry grimaced. "I wouldn't throw him a rope if he were drowning, but -"

"But he asked for help."

"No, he agreed to leave. That's one less heavy-duty predator in Boston, among people who can't see him coming. I'll take that win all the way to the bank."

Eliot grinned, then fell back as both Harry and Hardison moved forward. Something crackled in one of the hacker's pockets and, grimacing, he handed his phone over to Eliot, whispering something to the hitter before he hurried to catch up to the wizard. Eliot made a call as the other two walked away.

Harry slid into of the booth's benches, opposite the spider, who looked up in surprise before relief flooded his expression. "Good afternoon. Harry Dresden, wizard. This is my employer, Mister Hardison. Nothing happens if he doesn't allow it."

Hardison had too good a poker face to betray the surprise he felt in hearing the hard, stony tone Harry was suddenly using. He was also, like the rest of the team, quite good at picking up cues on the fly, particularly when they were so blatant. "Mister Dresden is doing some very important, time-sensitive work," he told the predator across the table, putting just enough Sophie in his voice to make the spider sit up and take notice of the, ah, talking burger. "He has pleaded with us to hear your case. Please, convince us." It was both invitation and challenge.

The spider fumbled his phone to one side. "Ah, yes, you see -"

"I understood magic made the use of modern technology impossible," Hardison pointed out casually.

"What? … Oh, the phone. No, no, it's not technology, it is magic." When Hardison gave him a mildly disbelieving look, the spider surrendered the phone readily. "No, you see, we don't use the human connection. We use ours. We use our magic to weave our devices directly into the electronic web the humans have wrapped around the world."

Hardison was flicking through screens, listening with half an ear until the meaning of the words actually sank in. "You w… You wove your way into the systems. Because it's a web. They're all webs."

The man spread his hands. "It's a family talent. It makes for a very profitable business."

"That's how you found him, isn't it," Hardison nodded in Harry's direction.

"Yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you, wizard Dresden, you warp the very lines of Boston's web. For us, you are far too obvious when, ah. Well, when existing nearby."

Harry shrugged awkwardly.

"How profitable?" the hacker asked. "If I wanted you to wire my phone the same way, how much would it be?"

The spider smiled, very much a business smile, hollow and professional. He gestured for his phone, and when it was handed back to him he dug out a stylus from one side and wrote something before passing it over to Hardison.

Who nearly choked on the six-digit figure. "For one phone?"

"As I said, very profitable. Of course, if you were willing to loan me the services of the wizard for just this one small bit of business -"

"I'll do it," Harry said before Hardison could protest. "But I'll need a picture of your wife."

"Yes, of course!"

"And access to her social media," Hardison added.

"I, uh, I only have some of her passwords."

"Whatever you have." Hardison found a business card and handed it over. "Send all the information here. We'll use your contact information to communicate any findings."

"With the understanding," Harry stepped in, his voice dead cold, "that I expect you to do exactly as you said you would if you get your proof."

The spider spread his hands. "Mas oui! My word, wizard. I will leave. I like being alive. You need only name the destination."

Harry chewed on his lip. "What's the biggest Red Court site you know of across the pond?"

"Uh, Brussels?"

"There, then." A flinty little smile on the wizard's face suddenly put Hardison in mind of Nate at his most lethal. "And once there I suggest you rarefy your palate."

The spider nodded, threw two twenties on the table, and slipped away hurriedly. Wizard and hacker watched him go. "You know it's gonna take like, ten minutes for me to find out if she's cheating, right?"

"Yup."

"You know Eliot's right, right?"

Harry started laughing.

"I mean it, man." Hardison gave him a very level look, then remembered he wasn't supposed to, and looked away. "You're sharp, Dresden. You're good at what you do. It's a weird, hinky, explode-y kind of skill, but you're just as good at it as we're at ours. The only problem is that it is explode-y." He stared at the spider's business card. "Why couldn't we do this here in Boston? Why couldn't we help you do it, back in Chicago?"

"Because they won't come to us." Eliot slipped into the booth with them, pushing aside the glass and the twenties so they'd be easier for the waitress to pick up. "Because we're humans. Tactical nuke."

Harry nodded wryly. "I'm a wizard." He gestured lightly. "I'm half in, half out. But humans? Humans don't like things to get weird. Humans get twitchy when things get weird."

Hardison understood just as swiftly as Eliot had. "They don't trust we won't call the cops. Or worse."

"I called Parker. She's on it." He gave them both a quick look. "She's not having a good day."

Hardison immediately roused, frowning in concern.

TWENTY ONE

Parker was not having a good day.

Jessamine Lochlin, apparently, had not known about a secret art auction that might or not include the priceless Sokolov portrait. She had not appreciated Parker knowing about it and refusing to provide her, or the authorities, with the information needed to find said auction and recover the portrait. Things had been said. Tempers had flared.

Why was friendship so complicated? It wasn't like that with Hardison, or Eliot, or even Sophie. It was a little strange with Nate, but he did try. Was it just because Jess was not a criminal?

She got herself a coffee and stalked angrily down to the T. She liked the T. She liked trains. There were so many people, so many stories. She could take a dozen phones, a double handful of wallets, and put them back with no one the wiser, skimming over the lives and the stories of the people who carried them, finding out their little sins and their hidden graces. Like the sour old man who didn't like people but kept pictures of all the foster dogs he'd adopted out. Or the scowling, scary lady that kept a laminated little card in her wallet to remind her not to be afraid of the outside world. Or the nice man with all those fake gold chains and tattoos who kept a journal full of baking recipes in one pocket and two butterfly knives in the others.

People weren't always what they seemed, but when Parker turned out not to be what she seemed, then they got angry and shouty and and and -

Her phone rang with Hardison's number. "What."

"Hey." Eliot's greeting got immediately derailed by concern. "You OK?"

"Jess is mad at me," she admitted at once to one of the few people she trusted implicitly. "Why do you have Hardison's phone?"

"He's with Harry. What happened?" The sounds of the pub dulled, replaced by the faint echoing quality that said Eliot had stepped out and was going up the stairs.

"She didn't know about the auction. And she's mad I won't tell her about it."

"Ah." A pause. "You want something fun to do?"

"There's nothing fun to do," she grumbled at him.

"How about getting into a safe deposit box and walking out with the contents?"

Oh. Ok, that was fun. She stopped walking. "Where?"

"Two banks. Two boxes. I'm texting you the info. Hardison said you have an alias in one, and you can probably wing Sophie's alias for the other."

She took the phone away from her ear and looked at the information coming up on the screen. She was less than a block from one of the banks. She began to walk again. "What am I looking for?"

"Um."

She frowned minutely. Eliot only got um-y with info when it was weird info, but his definition of weird was… Well, weird. "What?"

"Fur coats."

Parker's mind began to fly through some swift calculations. "Full size? Half size? Scarf size?"

"F… Full size. Maybe a little bigger. And there'll be two of them."

"So just the coats? We don't want money or documents or anything?"

"You know, I'm not sure. This is Dresden's case, not ours. So use your judgment. The guy's human, but he's a scumbag."

Oh, there was magic involved. Suddenly Parker's day was looking infinitely better, even if the sour tang of her parting with Jess still hurt. "Alright. I'll need you to come get me at the Shawmut Bank location in two hours."

"Alright."

Parker pocketed the phone and stopped, looking up the street at the Fleet Bank dead center of the block. It was a sham, she knew. There were a dozen names for what was, essentially, one bank in Boston metro, in most of New England. But Bank of America kept some of the names to preserve an illusion of choice. Fleet was the one with her alias, and she couldn't remember what she'd stuffed in the safety deposit box. It was either a spare costume and a lockpick kit, or a lockpick kit and a rig. Or maybe a rig and a copy of Eliot's chili recipe. Or a lockpick kit and a change of clothes?

She was pretty sure about the lockpick kit.

She tousled her hair, took off her jacket. She got a pair of sunglasses from a woman arguing about the price of newspapers with the newspaper seller. She bumped into a man with a grin, a blush and an apology, and took his keys and his belt, moving his wallet from one pocket to another as a decoy. She plucked a phone from another man's pocket and a silk scarf from a woman's purse. She 'found' the phone of a man that was loading shopping into his trunk and handed it over, to many thanks, while she acquired one of the empty reusable shopping bags off to one side of the trunk. She untucked her shirt and settled the belt loosely around her waist, changing the character of the clothing with nothing but a hat, a belt and her posture. The scarf went around her neck while she typed into the phone.

She walked into Fleet with a smile to the guard and a quiet little, "Hi, Frank" in Boston's unmistakable purr, a privileged daughter of that august, eclectic city. He flushed minutely and returned the greeting with uncertain courtesy, trying not to show that he didn't know who she was.

The manager was equally disarmed, all the more when he was shown the confirmation text for an appointment to check the young lady's safe deposit box. He was nothing if not apologetic after checking her information against their accounts, though he kept his eyes from bugging out at the amount of money involved, if only just. He got even more flustered when his own phone began to buzz insistently, hanging up just as he got to it. Twice. Then three times.

A few minutes later, a supervisor was escorting Parker to the side vault where the safe deposit boxes were kept. The manager, upstairs, was not getting anywhere trying to return those pesky calls. The stolen phone was in one pocket of the supervisor's smart blue business suit. The battery was in the other.

Parker picked the lock to her own box. Damned if she knew where the key to it might be, or if she even had one. But it was a dinky little lock, and she had no trouble using the few seconds between the supervisor finding and using her own key for it to do the deed, the stolen keys hanging from her hand and jangling reassuringly, like a good little decoy, the lockpicks tucked between her fingers, invisible. The supervisor left. Parker looked around and nodded to herself. It had been quick, dirty, there were a dozen holes in it, but it had got her what she wanted. Out of curiousity she peeked into the box and frowned minutely, pulling out a box of Girl Scout cookies and a rig. She'd been so sure of the lockpicking kit!

… She opened the box of cookies. Inside it there was a single sleeve of cookies, and a spare lockpicking kit.

"Ah-ha!"

She got the other safe deposit box out and frowned. The entire box, the largest the bank could offer, was full of a white, gravelly substance. There was a little black book on top. She picked up one pebble and rolled it between her fingers. Sniffed it. The smell was startlingly familiar, and she licked it.

Salt.

She pocketed the book. Little black books were usually very, very valuable in one fashion or another. Then she stared at a box full of salt, which did nothing but sit there quietly.

No one kept a box of just salt in the bank.

Parker rolled up her sleeve and began to worm her hand into the salt. She had to be careful; salt spilling everywhere wasn't going to be easy to explain, and she didn't want to burn the alias unless she had to. Her fingers brushed something lavishly soft a few inches under the surface, and she huffed. This wasn't going to be easy.

Seven minutes later she was out and on her phone. "Eliot."

"No, it's me," Hardison replied. "You alright?"

"Yes, just annoyed. Two banks, two fur coats."

"Well, that's smarter than I expected of the man, honestly. But are you alright?"

She blew out a long, exasperated breath. "Friends are hard," she muttered.

"They are," Hardison had to admit. "It's one fight, Parker. People argue. People disagree. Doesn't mean she doesn't wanna be your friend, just that she's mad at you right now. That might change tomorrow."

"What if it doesn't?"

"Well… Sometimes friendships are like that. They just don't work. You move on, you find another friend."

"I don't want another friend," she growled. "I gotta go, I found my car."

The car key in the stolen keyring belonged to a very plain, dark brown sedan. She drove to the Shawmut Bank; here, at least, she could streamline the process: she actually did have an appointment to open Sophie's safe deposit box, and Hardison had apparently had the time to create an electronic ID for her. She was escorted in with little fuss, though the lock to the box was a little trickier to pick. She was left alone once again.

She found another box full of salt, a few folders on top of it, and sighed in exasperation. "Magic's beginning to look like just a lot of trouble," she muttered, once again working as carefully as she could to get the fur coat out. On a whim, she replaced the box in its nook and laid the coats out side by side on the empty table.

They were beautiful. Parker's understanding of what was appealing was limited to what she liked, but it would have been impossible not to see the glory of the furs before her. One, the larger, was a dark dappled silver, nearly black on one half, the dappling fading until it was the palest gray on the other side. The smaller one was true silver, its pile much thicker, with black spattered at random here and there. There were no clasps, no buttons, no hems, no seams of any kind. Just two flawless pieces of fur softer than anything Parker had ever touched. They looked more vivid, more alive than any piece of fur or leather clothing she'd ever seen or worn or touched or stolen in her lifetime.

She couldn't get over a deep sense of wrongness to see them there, on that table, surrounded by the cold, hard lines of the safe deposit boxes, pinned under the harsh halogen lights.

Parker pocketed the folders, rolled up the furs and shoved them back into the shopping bag. Eliot was waiting for her just outside, and she threw the keys of her stolen car into said stolen car through an open window, hopping into the hitter's truck. "Go," she instructed, waiting until they were on Storrow Drive to ask, "What did I just steal?"

"Pair of selkie coats."

"Cool. What's a selkie coat?"

Eliot grinned and began to explain.

By the time they got back to the loft, the thief was seething. "HARRY!" she shouted as she charged in. Nate and Sophie, who'd just walked in, winced.

"Parker, what's wrong?" Sophie asked placatingly.

"Nothing," the thief declared tartly as she put her shopping bag down. "As long as Harry can put a curse on someone. A really bad one. Like, full of warts and, and clowns and -"

"Oh-kay." Nate put aside their dry-cleaning and moved over. "From the beginning, please?"

"He's not here, he's back at the safehouse," Hardison came out of the back with a shallow box fresh from the 3D-printer.

"Fine," Parker whirled around and stalked off.

Nate looked at the rest of his team. They gave him back the most guileless looks. He believed none of them, and that included Sophie's, who'd been with him all afternoon. But those same innocent looks also told him this was a fight that he was not likely to win. "Part of the case?"

Eliot shrugged. Hardison looked mildly confused.

"Right. I'm gonna go get a shower, get ready for dinner."

They all watched him pick up one of the dry-cleaner bags and disappear up the stairwell. Sophie turned and cocked a single brow at both men.

"Some people found Harry," Eliot admitted quietly.

"Found him, found him how?" She was immediately alarmed.

"One said she smelled him," the hitter explained.

"And the other found him through the web," the hacker added.

"Through the internet?" The grifter was puzzled.

"No, the web. It's -" Hardison suddenly realized why the wizard always looked so pained when he had to explain something. "Look, it's complicated, but it checks out. We dealt with them."

"Dealt with them?"

"They weren't looking to make trouble," Eliot said mildly. "They needed his help."

"So you freelanced with the wizard." She gave them both a very stern look.

Hardison shrugged. "One was a cheating wife. That took like fifteen minutes once Dresden told us what to look for."

"The other was this one." Eliot picked up the shopping back and showed the contents to Sophie.

She gasped just to see the beauty of the rolled-up fur on top, reaching out to run admiring fingertips over the dappled pattern, the unmistakably fine fur. They watched her go from admiration, to confusion, to understanding and horror and cold, cold fury in just a couple of seconds. "Eliot, tell me this isn't what I think it is," she breathed.

"It is." Calmly, he added, "And her daughter's."

Sophie stiffened. "A daughter," she murmured. "Is he even the sort that's going to be sorry when they vanish?" she demanded tightly.

"Sorry, probably not," Hardison admitted. "Embarrassed and socially destroyed? Oh, yeah."

"Parker also snagged these." Eliot offered the hacker the folders, and the grifter the little black book. "We kinda strong-armed Harry into taking the job, seems only right to follow through to the end."

"Good," was all Sophie said after leafing through the book and handing it back, picking up her own bag of dry-cleaning and stalking rigidly off. "Shatter him."

TWENTY TWO

While everyone else in the team gleefully engaged in further levels of what Hardison called 'hardware mode' and Nate called 'wanton destruction of property', the mastermind took Sophie to meet Vanya Fedorov.

"You rarely doubt your assessment of a client," Sophie said as he helped her off the car Fedorov had sent for them.

His face went through a dozen different emotions. To be fair, a good part of it was that the grifter had been taking his breath away and shutting down his brain since she'd come out dressed in an absolutely gorgeous violet silk dress that draped in waves over her like blessings from on high. Nate hadn't been able to string more than two automatic thoughts together every time he looked at her. She was wearing cascade earrings and a matching necklace, and her hair was up in an artfully disarrayed bun. The graceful line of her neck would have toppled empires.

Then she laced her hand through his arm, and Nate remembered he was the lucky one.

He settled on honesty as they walked up to the frosted glass doors of a gracious Greek restaurant. What he'd told Dresden back in Chicago still stood. "I'm biased," he admitted to her. "I saw it, I felt it. I'm still biased. I keep catching myself looking for explanations. Looking for, for…" His free hand groped for words. "Comfortable lies."

"It's kind of a critical change in thinking, Nate. I thought I believed, until I had to."

"Yes, but I don't have time to indulge myself. If we're right, and things are coming to a head at this private auction, we need to deal with what we have. With what is. And I don't know if my bias judged Fedorov fairly."

"You want to know if he was lying to you."

"Among other things." When she cocked her head at him he flailed a little. "Just, you know. Just try to get a good read on the man." She was grinning at him and he scoffed at himself.

"Alright, alright, I'll do my best," she reassured him, brushing lightly at the lapels of his black jacket, where a 'I<3Boston' pin was mostly hidden out of sigh, a gift from Dresden, who was 'getting sick and tired of having everyone's heads scrambled'; her own pin was a cute little Duck Tours boat, pinned under one of the folds of her gown. "But I trust your judgment, even if you don't."

The restaurant was half-empty, it being the middle of the week. A flowering wisteria, a magnificent work of stained glass, sprawled over the ceiling, lights burning in the blossoms as accents. Music, a fine strumming guitar, filled the air with warmth. Somewhere, a woman was laughing in the throaty undertone usually reserved for lovers. Closer at hand three older men were arguing over a bottle of ouzo and the remains of their dinner, their body language one of deep camaraderie for all their angry gesturing. Farther to the back, Sophie could hear what sounded like a family, their voices full of contented enthusiasm.

All this information came to her as it always did, to be soaked up and filed away for future use, the human element that did most of her work. It meant the one jarring element caught her attention instantly, even as she surrendered her delicate white jacket to Nate.

Vanya Fedorov was already there, waiting for them. He'd taken a table that put his back to a wall and gave him a line of sight to most of the restaurant, the entrance, the bar and the kitchen door. He had a glass and a shot in front of him, both half-full. He was wearing a dress shirt in deep burgundy under a dress jacket as black as his hair. Sophie's impression was the same as she'd had back at the museum: of a wolf, tongue lolling, content to lounge while waiting for a chance to rip someone's throat out.

Ah, she did so love Russians.

She frowned minutely: Fedorov was not alone. More, his mood was definitely suffering for it.

She examined the second man. He was standing next to the table, speaking quietly. He was older, built just as powerfully as the Russian enforcer, dressed neatly. Unlike Fedorov, he made no effort to hide the presence of his gun, though his gray suit was so exquisitely tailored that it was barely noticeable. The tattoos over his knuckles had been rendered all but illegible by old scars. His gray hair was cut and sternly combed back, and he had brown eyes as hard as the lines of his face.

"Ready?" Nate asked.

"Wait," she murmured, and felt him go perfectly still behind her.

The older man was trying to hold onto his rising temper, and failing. Vanya was being far more successful, though he was no less irritated. He was also adding a lot less to the conversation; it made it easy to identify the clipped 'Nyet' that was all he offered to the older man's latest tirade.

"Do you actually want dinner?" Nate asked mildly.

Sophie knew he was right; the mood at the Russian's table was growing dangerous quickly. "Alright." She let Nate take point, using him as cover to keep watching. The older man offered an envelope to Fedorov; Vanya took it and promptly threw it carelessly across his table. "I'm still not interested," she heard him say in Russian.

"Vanya, you need these people!" The older man's voice was a snap.

"I'm sorry, are we interrupting?" Nate asked pleasantly. Both Russians turned their temper on him.

Both of them drew themselves up sharply straight as Sophie took a half-step forward and laced her arm with Nate's. Fedorov automatically rose from his seat. "You are not," he assured them both, his tone forcibly pleasant. "My uncle was just leaving."

"Ah, Mikhail Sagorov." Sophie offered her hand. "No finer mind for business and secure transport along the East Coast," she added in Russian, her voice a purr.

The older man flushed, instantly thrown off-guard. He took Sophie's hand and barely squeezed, though she could feel the strength dormant in that grip. "One does not expect beautiful women to find such things interesting," he admitted.

"There is much no one ever expects I will find interesting." She let her hand linger.

Mikhail Sagorov gave her a measuring look. Gave his nephew a puzzled look. Glared impotently at Nate. No one offered answers to the wealth of questions Sophie had thrown at him with a few measured words and an enormity of the unspoken. "I will leave you to your dinner," he said in English. "We will speak later, Vanya."

Vanya started laughing almost before his uncle was out of the door. "You are terrifying," he told Sophie.

"Me? Never," she beamed at the compliment as Nate helped her into her seat.

"My associate, Sophie Deveraux, mister Fedorov."

"Ah." His handshake was firm and friendly, his expression full of amusement. "So not an art curator?"

"I can be, if you need one," she flirted shamelessly before her expression grew serious. "Is everything alright, have there been more… situations?"

"No, no, it's not that. It's been quiet since the museum, thankfully." He looked relieved. "No one died then. As far as I'm concerned, that's a win."

The waiter came to tender their menus. Fedorov ordered them vodka. Nate, with a profoundly resigned sigh, spoke in the silence that followed. "You were right."

"I will never be believed if I tell anyone you offered me those words," Vanya replied mildly after a brief pause. "But you are going to have to be more specific, Ford."

Sophie could see Nate struggling to accept that he had to say the words out loud, that he had to send them out into the world. "About your grandmother," she said very gently.

Fedorov, about to reach for his glass of water, froze. He picked up instead the shot of vodka and downed it smoothly. When he put it down the blue of his eyes was hard and uncompromising. "I see."

"She's not the problem," Nate added.

"She is - Grandmother is not the problem?" Vanya stared at him in disbelief.

"No. She's one of the targets."

Before, the Russian had simply been shocked into stillness. But his sudden motionless at those words filled the space around the table with deadly menace. "Who?" he asked, and the one word was a dark, lethal promise.

"I guess that depends on how deeply you believe," Nate replied casually, picking up the abandoned envelope, examining it idly. "What's this for?" He handed it over to Sophie.

She found a different sigil embossed in the heavy vellum under her fingers, but she didn't take her eyes off Fedorov, even though she couldn't readily identify it.

"Who?" the Russian repeated.

"Well- "

"Who, Ford?" That black menace was looking for a target, and if it couldn't find the right one it was liable to settle for the nearest one.

"Khan Koshan," Sophie said very quietly.

They both saw understanding come to the Russian enforcer almost immediately. His mouth opened, but he snapped it shut with the same motion. "It would be him," he muttered tightly after a long moment. When the waiter returned he was instructed to leave the bottle, and Vanya poured himself another shot that he merely played distractedly with before he leaned back with a nod. "I will wire your payment."

"We're not off the job," Sophie told him.

"This is not for you. I'm not even sure who -"

"Fedorov, you don't understand," Nate worked on organizing his thoughts. He picked up his shot of vodka and took a moment to organize his words as well. "He already knows we're involved. We can't be off the case." He downed the vodka with a grimace.

"Ah." Vanya stared thoughtfully at his drink. "It was not my intention to put you in the line of fire, you and your people."

"I know." Nate shrugged minutely. "I took the job to prove you wrong."

The Russian snorted laughter at that. "Well."

"What can you tell us about him?" Sophie asked delicately.

"About the Raven?" Vanya sighed. "The old stories are full of him. He's a meddler, a manipulator. He will come to you when you need help, and make promises. He will offer what you want, disguising it as what you need. He does not betray, understand that. He merely uses your own desires against you. Tricks of words and gifts."

"He's a grifter." Sophie smiled wryly.

"Not a very good one, but yes."

"What about his heart?" Nate asked.

"The stories or the jewel?" Fedorov asked, confused.

"See, he knows about the jewel."

Nate rubbed his forehead. "You know what, let's get the easy one out of the way. The jewel."

Fedorov shot Sophie an amused looked. "The Emerald Heart of Koschei the Deathless. It's supposed to be an African emerald the size of a man's fist, set in platinum and diamonds. A myth, a fairy tale, if it weren't because the story doesn't fade, because the descriptions always match. Everyone knows about the Heart, but no one has ever seen it."

"I told you," she declared smugly.

Nate chose to move onto a fight he had a moderate hope of winning. "And the other half?"

"We've been told," Sophie offered, "that he took out his heart to give to a woman, as proof of his love. That her rejection poisoned it, and him." She sipped at her water. "Our source thinks that last bit is bull."

"Your source is well-informed," the Russian grinned, "and smart. You have the bare measure of a truth. He did cut out his heart. He did mean to give it to a woman - to his mentor, the one who taught him everything. As proof of her love for him, he wanted her to take on the burden of keeping it safe."

"Ah," Nate breathed.

"Well, of course she would refuse," Sophie declared, toying with the envelope.

"She did not refuse," Fedorov corrected her. "But there was a trap in the heart, a means for him to steal her power, if she had agreed. So she simply did not take it. That limbo is what cursed the heart. She wouldn't take it with the trap, he wouldn't surrender it without her agreement. It bound them together."

"He's just greedy, isn't he?" Sophie declared.

"My milk-mother used to say he is lost to what he sees but cannot hold. A hungry man at a banquet that does not realize he cannot possibly eat all the food there, wants to hoard it all for himself because hunger tells him so. So it is with him and magic."

"Your what?" Nate blinked at the archaism.

"I think the closest English word is nursemaid. The one who took over when my mother died." He grinned thinly. "The one I did not grow up with, of course."

"Mm. In those vast, wild Vladivostok forests," Nate added mildly.

"Just so."

Sophie held up the envelope. Fedorov scowled and took it. "My uncle wants me to go to some sort of art auction. A private affair. He wants me to meet the people there, people who will help with our business, he says."

"You should go," Nate said mildly.

Vanya blew out an irritated breath. "Ford -"

"You should take Ekaterina with you."

The Russian ran out of words mid-sentence.

"It is an art auction," Ekaterina's pleasant Russian burr pointed out. "It is sensible to bring a curator if you mean to bid, no?"

He stared at her in shock, unable to see Sophie past Ekaterina. "How -?!" He threw his hands up, rejecting that line of questioning, laced them before him on the table, and stared levelly at both of them. "Why?"

"Bunch of reasons, really," Nate admitted readily. "I suspect it might be the site of the next 'incident'. I think your Raven's going to be there."

"Will Grandmother be there?"

"I'm not sure yet, but odds say yes."

"And you're sure she's the target?"

"As sure as I can be of anything at this point," the mastermind admitted wryly.

Fedorov seemed to think deeply on all of this. Nate refilled his vodka shot. Sophie picked up her water.

It nearly ended up all over her lap when someone bumped her chair. "Excuse me!" she exclaimed, turning around. It was their waiter. He was walking by, sedately, slowly. His shoulders were twitching minutely. The air smelled of the sea. A flute was trilling quietly.

Sophie frowned.

Where was the guitar?

Where were the three arguing men?

Why did the sea smell wrong?

"Nate," she said. Just the one word. Her tone was all the warning he needed to immediately abandon whatever conversation he'd been having with Fedorov and look around.

"Where is everyone." It wasn't even a question from Vanya; his hand was already under his coat.

"They left." Nate reached out a hand and put it on the enforcer's arms. "Maybe we should do the same."

Sophie was already on her feet. Automatically, responding to all she'd seen on the last few days, she grabbed the salt shaker from the table. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the mastermind put a hand over the lapel of his coat and twitch, fighting the urge to jerk it away, but just barely.

The waiter met the manager before the front door. They each opened one half of it, moving with the jerky, uncertain motions of puppets at a show. A delicate breeze swept in.

"Thank you, thank you, so kind, so sweet," the trill of the flute sang in Russian, a woman's voice of such utter beauty that it hardly seemed real. "Such kind children, such sweet children, you should sleep, yes. Sleep, sleep, sleep." The heads of both men lolled down, boneless, and they fell obediently asleep on their feet

Sophie smelled burning silk. Without looking, she knew the cheap tin pin had just burned a hole in her dress.

Something as large as a horse slipped carefully past the open door. The wisteria blossoms began to sizzle and burn out.

Sophie backed away a step.

"Kitchen," Nate whispered.

The thing at the door immediately whipped around, long neck twisting like a snake. A woman's face, flat and unearthly, cocked at them.

Fedorov caught Nate's shoulder. The gesture was so quick that it drew the attention of both mastermind and grifter. The Russian put two fingers to his mouth.

The thing at the door trilled, the flute's song rising in an inquisitive note. "Are there little ones here?" The creature hummed to itself, its voice a singsong. "In here, but there's out there. In here, but there's games to play. In here, but there's fun to have. Out, out, little children, out to play." It stepped forward and the last of the lights burned out.

Sophie stepped carefully out of her shoes. Silence, Fedorov had gestured. Did that mean the thing was blind? That it needed sound to find them? She picked up a piece of silverware from the table and flung it across the restaurant. The sound of it clattering was frighteningly loud in the quiet.

The thing was suddenly immense, five times its original size, hissing like a teakettle. "Silver. Knife." The flute turned into an angry, plucking violin. "No. Not the little ones."

Nate and Sophie crossed a look, then glanced at Fedorov. The three of them were backing away to one end of the bar. The Russian enforcer bumped a chair and they all froze.

The thing jumped onto a table. In the dim light from the streetlights outside, struggling through the frosted windows, Sophie saw immense talons, like an owl's, sprawled on the pristine tablecloth. Glass went tumbling down to shatter on the floor. The thing's neck swung this way and that in a way that was inhuman, but still maddeningly familiar. A vast train of some sort followed it.

Then it unfolded its wings in response to the breaking glass, and Sophie had to bite back a little sound of disbelief. It was a bird. A bird with a woman's face and a woman's voice attached to a serpentine neck, a raptor's body, with a peacock's tail, with talons that could all too readily go through one of them and poke out the other side, with a voice that could charm people into doing whatever it wanted them to do.

A bird, that ruthless part of her mind that never slept pointed out, that had shepherded everyone out, that was still trying to shepherd everyone out.

Why?

She peeked quickly at Fedorov. He looked tense and keenly focused. She and Nate had an excuse; why was Fedorov unaffected?

She lifted a hand, catching both men's attentions. The grifter pointed at the creature, and then at Vanya. His expression ran through surprise, fury, resignation, and then stone-cold defiance.

The creature laughed, and the flute came back, lilting and merry. "Silly silly silly bird, broke the cup, broke the bed," it sang, almost to itself. "Now where where where is the little one, the little prince. Where does he play, where does he hide? Come out to play, little prince, come out to sing, come out to dance, come out, come out, it's time for bed, it's time to go."

It crouched down and leapt at the table where the three of them had been sitting, talons leading. It cut it to pieces effortlessly, slid past, crashed into a chair. Everything went flying in an almighty cacophony of broken wood and torn fabric, breaking glass and tinkling silverware. It flapped immense wings to catch itself and whipped around. "Caught you!" she sang triumphantly.

The three of them were already around the bar and hurrying along in the dark as much as they could, freezing when the sounds of mayhem died on the other side of the counter. Nate peeked over it briefly.

The bird-creature was crouched over the table, neck arched. She was sniffing at the mess she'd made. A low, disconcerted little sound came out of her and her head came up, cocked this way and that. In the gloom her eyes shone dull and white, like a snake's when it's ready to shed. "Not here? Yes here. Not here but yes here, where here?"

Without warning she leapt to the bar counter. Nate dropped down hastily. Fedorov dropped to a crouch.

Sophie opened the salt shaker and poured the contents out in a shaky circle around her bare feet. She then picked up two glasses, found the bottle she needed on the shelf and straightened up. "Sorry," she said calmly in Russian. "You just missed him."

The bird-woman launched herself directly at Sophie, and crashed to a skidding halt on the counter before the grifter, wings half-mantled, head bobbing. "Are you dangerous? Are you mean?" the violin shrilled. "I will gut you, I will flay you, I will eat your -"

"Stop," Sophie said, sounding bored. She put down the two glasses and grabbed the bottle, pouring two generous portions of vodka. "We're both here for the same reason."

"We are not!" the creature drew up straight, then sniffed. Hesitated. "Are we?"

"We're both here to protect Fedorov." Sophie picked up her glass, paused. "Unless you're not. In which case we do have a problem. You are here to keep him safe?"

"I am," the bird agreed at once. "Not safe out here. Too many eyes and ears and tongues." The long neck twisted around. "How to know you're not one of them? Dancing dancing dancing on the strings. Perhaps I should gut you and find out from your entrails after all."

"Fat lot of good my entrails would do you right now." Sophie slid the bottle aside. "Look, we both have the same job, we both bungled it. He had an argument with his uncle -" She kicked at Nate, who was too aghast to start moving when he should've, and finally the two idiots underfoot started creeping away. "- and you know how men get when they're upset. So. I'm thinking I should go to all the places I know of that he likes or something. Start all over again."

The bird drew herself up stiffly, insulted. "All entrails are useful if you know how to read them," she declared haughtily.

"I'm sure the entrails have a lot to say. I wasn't talking about them," Sophie shot back sharply.

The bird huffed, then ducked her head. "I should not have come," she admitted mournfully, her voice a haunting, low woodwind. "Not right now. Two days, maybe three, it would have been fine. Oh, I should not have come."

"But you did," Sophie held up the glass and tapped her nail lightly against it. "Taste of home?"

"Oh, I shouldn't."

"Who's going to tell?"

The creature licked her lips. An immense taloned foot came up and caught the glass, and she sipped at the vodka. "Oh, like home, like home," she hummed.

"Right?" Sophie tapped her glass against the bird's, and they both drank. "Well, I might go check his home, maybe his office -"

"I went to his worky-work nest. He was not there."

"Eh, men are strange like that. They like to put their nose to the grindstone when something upsets them, he might go back if his mood's black enough."

"Too true, too true," the bird agreed. Nate and Fedorov were already disappearing past the kitchen doors. "Who are you? What are you? All I smell is silk and flowers." She paused, finished her drink. "And vodka."

"Wouldn't you like to know," Sophie said, letting just a touch of smugness seep into her tone. "Well, I'm off if you don't have anything useful to add. Can't let him get too far ahead of me."

"Pah. Groundbound thing."

Sophie recoiled and shot right back. "Blind old hen."

"I will get my eyes back," the bird countered with angry dignity. "You'll not grow wings if you don't have them already!"

"I haven't needed them yet."

The creature shrilled at Sophie, an angry teakettle whistle, and hopped down from the counter. "No groundbound thing will beat me to my charge!" She flapped her way to the door and charged out into the night, airborne and away in a second, taking with her the sound of flutes and the scent of the Balkan Sea.

Sophie slithered down to the floor behind the counter, shaking like a leaf. She was still there when Nate came back looking for her, clinging to the glass of vodka as if it were a life-raft, but she threw it away and clung desperately to the mastermind instead with a strangled little sound.

"What were you thinking?!" he demanded.

She gave him a shaky little grin. "I'm a grifter," was all she said.

#the dresden files #leverage #nathan ford #sophie deveraux #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #harry dresden #my writing #fanfiction #crossover #urban fantasy

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grumpygreenwitch · 5 months ago

Text

Machina Ex Machina 38-39

And we're back! At least for a bit. I think I'm over the hurdle, though the queue is still woefully thin. I'm also coming to the endgame, slowly but surely. I apologize for the interruption regardless; I got overconfident on this being a short story.

A lot of the fic I write serves as an exercise on dealing with difficult themes - in this case, loss.

As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. There’s no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly won’t complain.

1+2 - 3+3.5 - 4+5 - 6+.6.5 - 7+8 - 8.5+9 - 10+11 - 12+13 - 13.5+14 - 15+16 - 17+17.5 - 18+18.5 - 19+20 - 21+22 - 22.5+23+24 - 25+26 - 27-28 - 29.29.5 - 30+31 - 32+33 - 34+35 - 36+37 - 38+39 - 40+41 - 42+ AO3 Link

THIRTY EIGHT

The Drakkar left behind the Sea of Simulation and passed over the rough terrain that was the Outlands of Om, making a beeline for the distant, storm-outlined Spire of the oldest city in the Grid.

The little repeating tone began to play on Adas’ screen when they were, according to Gungnir’s latest broadcast, a microcycle away from the city. She straightened up at once, abandoning all the remote work she’d been doing, which mostly had to do with the safety and comfort of the Ilo refugees back at Halcyon. She was about to answer when she saw GAM draw up sharply. Off to the side, where MAR and Vidi were intently examining something on the former’s disk, the Master of Parnassus suddenly looked up in mild confusion. “Your Users?”

“Yes,” GAM replied. “And yours?”

“I suppose, but Robert hardly ever communicates in pure text.”

“It can’t be,” Vidi said. “I got a message too.”

They stared at one another in confusion, and opened the commline, only to receive an immediate redirect.

“Nuh-uh!” Vidi exclaimed.

“I second that,” MAR declared, sounding even more dubious.

“It’s attached to Lily’s frequency, though.”

“And Emil’s. Interesting. I probably have the more solid personal protections of us all, yes?” He got nods from everyone, and accepted the redirect, going silent.

“WallSec, don’t make us nervous,” Vidi snapped at him.

“I am… not sure what I’m looking at,” he admitted after a long moment.

“Pure visual data?” When he nodded, Adas accepted the redirect. It took her less than a picocycle to realize what she was looking at. “Oh!”

In a moment she had set up a connection between the conference table and the feed, and screens began to pop up, six, ten, twelve, twenty. The table was full of rolling text, in some places scrolling along at a swift gallop, in others taking its time. “It’s the Users,” she breathed out. “It’s the Users’ communication lines.”

GAM took three steps to the communication console. “WallSec for Pevir SysAdmin.” Regardless of what had gone down between them, Gungnir replied quite promptly. “Go for SysAdmin.”

“Accept the redirect.”

“Was the thing sent Grid-wide?” Gungnir mused on the line. “Hold on – oh, what in the name of the Users!”

“That’d be about right,” GAM replied dryly, then left the console to stare at the table.

“Is this all of them?” MAR asked no one in particular.

“No. There’s hundreds of them,” Adas’ faceplate was gleaming with facts and statistics and graphs, “but there’s tens of thousands of programs on the Grid. Even allowing for Users that… no longer exist,” she glanced quickly at GAM, “this can’t be their entire population.” She spread her hands on the table. “It’s us. They’re talking about us.”

“They’re talking about the virus,” MAR pointed to one of the screens, and Adas brought it to the center of the table. “Oh, it’s the time differential kicking in, look at it. For them, the fight on the Drakkar ended just a little while ago.”

“It’s ideas,” Vidi’s hair was looking in every direction, but she seemed to have no problem absorbing the communications her dreadlocks were picking up. “It’s their thoughts, or what they’re guessing at, it’s everything. It’s like… It’s like a Souk of ideas.”

“This helps,” GAM murmured. “This helps immensely. I can’t even begin to fathom how much… There’s no delay here beyond the time differential, if they find something out and put it here, on any of these communication channels, we’ll know right away.”

“Adas, that’s an Ilo commcon,” Vidi pointed.

“What?!” Adas stalked over and found one of the smaller screens seemed to be entirely composed of the Users looking to the Ilo refugees back in Halcyon. Suddenly the status reports she was waiting on were moot – each User was reporting on their own program and those around them: what they were doing, what they were saying.

“They’re exceptionally organized,” MAR remarked. “Other than idle chat, they’re all being very careful about details.”

GAM lowered his head. In the privacy of his helm, he murmured, “Thank you, Emil.” He looked at Vidi. “Is there one for every city?”

“Not for every city, it’s like… places or groups inside the cities? That’s the Drakkar,” she pointed, then pointed again. “And I think that’s some sort of engineering group in Flow -”

“This one’s all Users complaining about the shutdown of the Souk,” MAR identified another screen.

“Ugh. Get over it.” Vidi rolled her eyes. “Not even if beans were real.”

The door suddenly slid open with a clear musical tone, and Gungnir charged in, Fortis close behind him. “Are you seeing this?” He noticed that Adas and Vidi were glaring at him. “Get it out of your systems now, I want everyone’s focus on this. Let’s hear it.”

“For the sake of future diplomatic relationships,” Adas replied primly, “let’s not. Vidi, where are any communications pertaining the Drakkar or Om?” As she pointed them out, the GO4 brought them to the center of the table.

They stared at the communications, and Gungnir couldn’t help but shake his head. “I might as well be in Om. This is rich, this is priceless. This is as good as pure energy.” He looked at Fortis. “I want someone in every ship’s control center monitoring these feeds. Several someones, if we can match program to User. If I can’t speak to my fleet through Om’s storm they certainly can, time differential or not.”

“Couldn’t you just fly over the storm to avoid the interference?” MAR asked.

Gungnir shook his head. “Spire won’t let you. It takes offense at anything going up nearly as much as it does to something coming straight at it.”

“Well, I know how you can fix that,” Vidi shrugged.

Everyone gave her a curious look. “What? I’m from Halcyon.”

Gungnir lifted a hand. “Hold that thought. Did this broadcast to the entire Grid?”

Thin lines of crimson energy passed over Fortis’ surface. “No one in Pevir is acknowledging a redirect.”

“There’s a virus loose,” GAM pointed out. “It doesn’t seem unlikely that some random, unknown redirect would make a program nervous.”

“Fair,” Gungnir admitted. “Confirm with Pip-Pip, Fort. Put my personal tags on it, tell her to do the same, and send the confirmation to everyone and anyone the Drakkar and Pevir can reach.” He turned back to Vidi. “Alright, go.”

THIRTY NINE

The Drakkar docked next to Om’s weather monitoring tower, the highest structure in that ancient city, marking the upper limit of the Spire’s tolerance.

Lightning slid over the black and crimson hull, crackling along, unable to touch the carrier and vanishing back into the black clouds. Beneath and all around it stood the massed fleets of the Grid in all their shapes and colors, from immense, heavy Flowian energy barges to three single, elegant Arkite sailers. And there were Pevirian carriers and warships everywhere, forming a bristling line of defense between Om and the distant shores of the Sea of Simulation. The terrain around the city was dotted with the lights of further defenses.

Gungnir stalked down the Drakkar’s ramp, flanked by MAR and Adas, GAM directly behind him. Adas was carrying an umbrella, and MAR had a very elegant raincoat on, but neither Pevir’s SysAdmin nor the Sentry seemed to care about the spitting rain.

OM was alone, waiting for them in the rain. He cocked a brow minutely at the sight of them, and smiled faintly. “I feel vaguely outnumbered.”

“You should,” Gungnir replied evenly. “Is everyone ready?”

OM stepped aside and gestured them on, leading them inside. “As ready as we can be.”

“And the Users?”

“Would you like to meet them?”

“If I’m gonna pick a fight with your friends, I’d rather do it in front of an audience.”

“Showmanship?” OM teased dryly.

“Witnesses,” Gungnir countered sternly.

OM laughed as they all walked in.

Kane and Sam were standing off to one side of the large hexagonal room. Rain pattered on the window at their backs, and they had a good look at the many projections that a number of programs were nursing to life amidst bouts of storm-caused static. Sam was leaning back, arms crossed, the white of his circuitry stark against his black outfit. Kane had surrendered to the inevitable and wore a matching outfit, but his had the delicate, almost filigree-like white circuitry of a last-gen program. He still looked like he was trying to catch up with all the information being piled up on him – which he was.

He did have at least two things that could be set to rest easily, and he decided to jump on them while they waited for the meeting of all the city leaders to begin. “You knew.”

“Me? Nah.” Flynn, who’d been watching with intense curiosity, looked vaguely amused. “Why didn’t you?” He lifted a finger to point at the world in general. “This is your world, your Grid.”

Kane rubbed at his face. “Moll’s the programmer. Moll and Rob. She looked, she knew the code, she probably knows all of what’s going on. Other than the boards, the chats, other than making sure everything was running right… I’m hardware. I’m an engineer.”

“So this, the weather, that’s on you.”

“No. There’s no reason for the Upload Spiral to reject proximity, it’s not like it can be activated from this side. There are other safeguards, but… I have no idea what’s going on, man.”

Sam could only laugh quietly at the wanly resigned tone of the young man. “You really thought I was warning you about the people, didn’t you.”

Kane just sighed. “Who’s he look like?”

“Hm?”

“OM. You said he looks exactly like someone else.”

“My uncle.”

Kane blinked at him, then stared at OM. “But…”

“I asked. OM’s a title, not his name.” He smiled a little. “Told you he’d been here from the beginning.”

“Right.” OM stepped forward, the new arrivals moving to where they were directed. “Is everyone here?” He waited for several nods from his techs. “Does anyone have eyes on the virus?”

Kane listened restlessly as the various programs spoke of cities, terrains, of wonders that under any other circumstance he would’ve loved to see, if it weren’t because everyone around him seemed to be discussing how best to kill his sister. His hands had gone to fists and he nearly jumped out of his skin when Sam bumped him lightly, chin redirecting his attention.

Kane turned, and found himself staring at a black, impenetrable faceplate. There was a tank of a man, er, program in black with sparse violet circuitry standing between two of the speakers, a short, curvy woman in white and indigo, and a lean, elegant man dressed like something out of a trashy romance novel, colors shimmering through his clothin- “Crap, MAR!”

The meeting came to an abrupt halt, and every head turned to look at Kane. Even Sam pivoted very pointedly to stare at him. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Perhaps the User,” MAR spoke in a diffident, cultured tone, “minds that you’re talking about destroying another User with such cavalier authority.”

The meeting exploded into chaos. Sam’s brows shot up. “That’s Robert’s program?”

Kane stared in disbelief that someone had totaled the careful political dance he’d been watching with one casual revelation. “I guess.”

“MAR was there!” The SysAdmin in red shouted over everyone else, silencing every argument. “MAR fought it. So did I. And if you think testimony from a SysAdmin is not objective enough for your tastes, so did the Sentry.”

Everyone seemed to measure the giant in black and violet. If it bothered him, there was no way for even the Users to tell.

“I trust MAR,” one of the programs said quietly. “I wouldn’t trust you, Gungnir. Not because I don’t like you, or because of our history, but because you’re too eager for a fight, and in the middle of fighting things can be… mistaken. I trust MAR to keep a cool head.”

Gungnir seemed to think hard on that. “You know, that’s fair.”

“Oh, irony,” ACM declared. “I trust Gungnir precisely because of the same thing.” Pevir’s SysAdmin snorted a laugh, truly caught by surprise.

“Halcyon trusts its own,” another program declared with calm assurance. “Identify yourself, please.”

“GAM,” the program replied. “Wall Security Defender.”

“I remember you,” PEN said. “You protected the refugees in Sector 42.” It laced its hands together. “Sentry GAM. Do we harm a User if we harm the virus?”

The black faceplate turned directly toward Kane. “Yes. During the fighting on board the Drakkar, one of the Users appealed to it. And it answered… briefly. Before the virus cut it off.”

“She answered?” Kane surged forward, uncaring of whatever protocols he might be breaking. “You heard her? You heard my sister?”

“Didn’t you?” MAR asked in puzzlement. “You could have heard a voxel drop at that point in the fighting.”

The black faceplate tipped minutely to one side. “Your name,” the Sentry replied calmly, “is Kane.”

#my writing #fantasy #fanfiction #sci fi #original character #tron 1982 #tron evolution #tron legacy #tron uprising #fantasy violence

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