genessia | (no subject)

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Let it never be said that Harry Dresden was not a forgiving, kind boss, especially around the holidays. For instance, even though he had his newest employee working all day on Christmas Eve he had no problem with adding an extra coal to the fire to keep warm.

You know, if there was a fireplace in the office. Or if the heating worked right half the time.

Harry had set his newest deputy Guardian to work on the task that nobody ever wanted to do but what every new guy in history had managed to pull: inventory, taking stock of all the various supernatural objects and spells he had locked up in the office's evidence room. He had given him a clipboard, a pen and a set of specific instructions such as "don't read anything outloud, ignore any voices whispering to you, and for God's sake, leave the glass case with the doll alone."

Harry, meanwhile, was up front at his desk looking over charts and maps of the town and scribbling down a few eldritch calculations. Even in this town, an invasion by giant zombies was not business as usual and when things weren't business as usual he got suspicious and started poking at things.

Finally, he sat back, scrubbing a hand over his face thoughtfully and stood up, heading to the door to the evidence room and calling inside.

"Hey, kid, grab your coat. It's time for some legwork."

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Harry doesn't actually need the coat these days, even the harshest temperatures the city had dropped to was barely much more than a fall breeze to him these days. Perks. Even so, he already had his battered old duster on when Jaune came out of the room and has just slipped a heavy revolver into his coat pocket.

"Those zombie attacks were bugging me so I did some work, and figured out where I would set up if I wanted to work necromancy on that scale." He grinned. "Somewhere out there is the site of a very powerful, possibly volatile, black magic ritual. We're gonna go poke it with a stick."

Jaune kind of wilts when he hears what the job is. "P-Poking necromancy with a stick?" That sounded about fifty times worse than poking a bee hive. Still, he got his gloves and hat on, pulling the black wool hat over his blonde mop. Then he plucked his sword from where it sat leaning in a chair and made sure it was attached to his belt. He just kind of felt that he'd need it.

"So... Where is it then?" He didn't know the first thing about necromancy, "I mean... is it like a graveyard? You'd need lots of... ah... dead bodies to do that, right?"

"Professional-like."

Harry had the same idea, dropping a length of wood about a foot in length into an interior pocket of his coat, checking a bracelet of interlinked chains and set with shield-shaped charms and picking up his staff from where it leaned against the wall. You had to know the guy, he was practically marching to war.

"Got it in one." He said, and headed toward the door. "A ritual like that works best where the surrounding energy is attuned to it. Like I said, I wanted to figure out where I'd go to do it and right smack in the middle of the Everglade cemetary came up as the best spot."

"Ooooo-kay~" Jaune said with no shortage of unease, but he made a gesture to Harry in any case, two pointing fingers. You're the boss, Harry! "Well then let's go! To the cemetery. With the zombies."

Unfortunately, Jaune didn't know the guy or what half of his trinkets did. That said, he didn't fully grasp the severity behind Harry marching off with blasting rod, staff, and a wealth of charms in hand. Jaune had a sword and a shield - so he was the muscle, in other words. Odds were Jaune would learn some things from Harry - how to handle certain supernatural things and the like - but for now? He's more of an observer than not.

Hey, Harry would never knock the benefits of having somebody with a sword and shield around. Even with all the power he could throw around, his life had been saved plenty of times by somebody being around with a perfectly mundane weapon.

"Yeah. It'll be fun."

It's never a long trip to the cemetary from any part of Everglade, the tombstone-covered hills are visible from virtually any corner of town. So it isn't a very long drive before Harry and Jaune are at the old cast iron gates, Harry shoving them open with an ear-splitting creak.

For a second Harry eyes the high walls of the graveyard, mulling over the idea of them being like the walls of Graceland Cemetery, meant to keep things in as much as to keep intruders out. A pleasant thought alright as he walks through the towering gates.

"Anybody home?" He mutters to himself.

Jaune's idea of fun only sometimes had to do with zombies. But those were virtual zombies, fake ones that couldn't hurt. This was all very real, and as such, less fun.

Following Harry, Jaune winces as the gate screeches open, and nervously follows along into the cemetery. "Man there really are a lot of graves around here," Jaune says, just noticing that some of the hills were lined with them, "I didn't even think there were this many people in Everglade... or Genessia, or anywhere."

Did something happen? Jaune could only make sense of the situation by thinking a bomb must go off regularly.

As they march through the rows of resting dead, Jaune takes careful and deliberate steps to avoid stepping directly ON any of the plots. Call it respect, call it superstition, but he's not comfortable stepping on other people's graves. The whole place gives him the creeps, and if there's a necromancer there... Well, he has his sword and shield at the ready. He is, by a long shot, way more tense than his boss.

The funny thing about graveyards was that a zombie outbreak happening inside of one was actually pretty damn unlikely. If you thought about it, the corpses her eyes sealed up in heavy stone mausoleums or in wooden boxes with several hundred pounds of dirt heaped on top of them. No, zombies weren't the big things to worry about in this place.

The ghouls on the other hand....

"Everybody winds up somewhere." Harry sighs, looking out over the rows upon rows upon rows of markers. That much was true, but the sheer size of the graveyard was still staggering. Harry wasn't sure if it was just time or something else that had produced so many bodies, but he was really hoping on the former.

As for tension, well, Harry had plenty of that, he just didn't show it. The worst things in the supernatural world were basically predators, and predators always looked for the easy kill so it was best not to look like an easy kill. Stomp around like the big dog in the yard, act like you owned the place, and a surprising number of things would back off.

"Okay, so," he stops at the top of a hall next to an old, moss-covered tombstone and looks around, "if you were looking to get maximum coverage for your magic spell, where would you go?"

Harry grim outlook on death is far from comforting, but Jaune takes it as Harry's attempt to settle his nerves. True, everyone ended up somewhere. But a seventeen year old kid rarely ever thought about where he'd end up when he dies. He sure doesn't want to think of that now, so he pushes the thought out of his mind. When he dies? It's going to be in the arms of a total hottie. And he'll have like a million hero medals. Or something.

He nearly bumps into Harry when the man stops, and Jaune looks up at him before looking around. "Well, I dunno how spells work," He answers, lowering his sword and shield to give it some thought, "So... Well if you want a lot of bodies, then you go where there's the most bodies, right? But if you want a surface area then you go... Somewhere high up?"

He lets out a misty breath as he looks around too. Graves, eh... Crypts? Not bad, but still pretty 'eh.' Were there catacombs beneath? Probably not...

(Let's add some spooky!)

A sound interrupts Jaune's train of thought.

A death toll.

A bell.

It's hard to tell just where it was coming from, but he can hear it over the cold, dead air of winter hanging frigid over the cemetery. "... A bell tower?" He looks up at Harry, looking nervous, with grit teeth and all. That bell does not help, not at all.

Funny, Harry barely remembered a time when he never thought about where he was going to end up when it was all said and done. A long time ago, he'd probably imagined dying in the arms of some beautiful woman, and then that had been replaced with hopes of dying surrounded by loved ones with a smile on his face. And now, all he really hoped for was that when he did go, it would be while standing on his feet, shouting defiance and bringing something or someone who deserved it with him.

For what felt like the thousandth time, he heard the voice of an old man in his head. Last words spat at him, coated with the purest hatred and malice and carrying a vicious curse along with him. A curse that he still felt in his bones and that, years ago, had written his ultimate fate in stone.

Die alone.

Heh. He'd probably deserved that one, really.

Fortunately, the distant sound of a bell broke him out of those thoughts before he could get any more morbid.

"Good thinking, kid." He lifts his head, frowning and trying to pinpoint the source of the sound before heading off into the gray, cold mist.

Die alone? Sure, but not right now. He still had a job to do.

Harry can't die alone right now anyways, because Jaune's there! Though Jaune being with Harry might not be the most significant thing in the world, it does technically make him not alone. Curses followed technicalities, right?

In any case, he followed Harry through the mist while eyeing the horizon. The thing about a graveyard that spans such a distance is that, perhaps, there isn't just one bell tower or just one church or cathedral. Depending on the size of the lot, there could have been a few rather spaced out. That meant if a necromancer was going to use one... it'd have to be the absolute biggest, tallest one.

"... Wonder how long this place has been around," Jaune speaks as they walk. The crunching of snow beneath his shoes and Harry's boots was an awkward silence. "I mean... You woke up in a pod here just like me. So at one point there must have been no one here."

Oh the questions... Somehow being faced with the idea of dying here, Jaune's getting awful contemplative about the whole Genessia thing.

It's probably not best to think too much about the technicalities of a curse. Especially considering the only thing preventing Harry from dying alone was if Jaune was suddenly not around any more.

At least Harry and Jaune are on the same page, although for slightly different reasons. Magic wasn't like crop dusting, it didn't need a high place but if there was one thing the crazies liked, it was a big, dramatic spectacle and if you were setting up in a graveyard anyway, what better place? Same page or not, Jaune had a good head on his shoulders.

Which he continues to demonstrate by asking all the right questions about this place.

"No idea." He sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Everything has to start somewhere but, this damned place just doesn't make any sense. And I'm not just talking about the crazy weather or the super paperboy."

"No, but those things don't make any sense either," He says, his eyebrows rather wrinkled in thought, "It's like the holosuits glitched out or something, except for real. It's totally messed up! A cat landed on my face, man... the scratches were there for days!"

Jaune pauses as he spots a rather grandiose structure in the distance. "Oh that has to be it," He says, gesturing afar to a distant-looking building. It was bid though - and had at least five bell towers. Four smaller ones and one huge one! And there was a big stained glass window, and the building itself was at least two stories high - maybe three, it was hard to make out from that far away. The darn thing must've been yanked straight from a Castlevania game.

"If I was a crazy raise-the-dead guy? That's where I'd go."

Atop the belltower, a lone figure reclined with arms folded and head bowed. Harry and Jaune could be seen making their way to the tower, and that was well and good. The ringing of the bells successfully drew their attention, and they should be arriving soon.

Lust didn't like to be kept waiting, after all.

She watched them approach calmly from beneath her thick lashes, neither smiling nor frowning. If she'd wished nothing more than to join them in their search, she would have approached on foot down below. However, it suited her purposes far more to bring them here, as they shared a similar goal: find the necromancer.

"'Raining cats and dogs.' Yeah, that was cute. At least it isn't random guys anymore."

No time to talk about that though. Harry let out a low whistle as the tower manifested itself out of the fog. Yep, he'd put money on that being the place they needed to go.

"Yeah, they love stuff like that." Now, you might expect him to take a more cautious approach when walking up to the seat of power of a black magic wielding nutcase, but nope. Right up the steps to the front door. "Keep an eye out. They love minions too."

Jaune follows rather close to harry's heels, but as much as he trusts the guy, he still can't help but question him. "Wait, wait, you sure there isn't a back door or something we could use? I mean, you could open that door and there could be anything back there!"

"Zombies!"

"Undead knights!"

"Explosions!"

Then, a pause, as Jaune just looks at Harry.

"So... the front door it is then, huh?"

"Nah, it'll be fine." Harry waves a hand and jogged up the mossy steps leading up to the heavy wooden doors.

He paused at the door, extending his senses into the wood, searching for any wards or traps. Satisfied with that he raised his staff up to the door.

"Huffus Puffus." And he tapped the end of the length of oak against the door, releasing a blast of force. With a loud crack of splintering wood the two doors blow off the hinges and tip forward to hit the ground with a deafening thud. "Knock knock!"

Jaune can only watch as Harry checks for wards and spells. He's never actually SEEN Harry perform any magic before, so for a while Jaune has no idea what Harry's even doing.

Then he says his magic words.

"What the he--"

*CRACK!* The door splinters and is forced intwards with such a resounding force that Jaune jumps, scrambles back, and has his sword and shield lifted out of sheer terror. There's a moment when the dust settles where he says nothin, and Harry just marches inside.

"Whoa dude, what the heck was THAT?" Jaune laughs, jogging in after Harry, "That was awesome."

Harry doesn't really do the "subtle" part of "subtle and quick to anger." Not that there was any point to it right now, anyway, if there was somebody in this tower they would have known they were coming for awhile now. Better to come in with a nice, big display of power.

"Just a little trick for dealing with doors. Didn't look like the doorbell was working." It really wasn't that impressive, from a magical point of view. Just a simple application of raw force, really. Everything had its breaking point.

Harry let his staff strike the wooden floor loudly with each step as he walked into the room and looked around, before tilting his head upwards.

"So, what do you think? Upstairs?"

Yeesh Harry, shouldn't we be quiet? If something hears you and Jaune dies, he's haunting you forever.

Jaune chuckles at Harry's little joke. That guy was full of sarcasm, wasn't he? Well, so was Jaune, so maybe that's why he likes the guy. It seems like nothing shambling out to attack them. "This is weird. Shouldn't a necromancer have some kinda... I dunno, skeleton bodyguards or something? This place is empty!"

His voice echoing through the halls is a pretty decent nod towards this fact.

"Yeah. In games, it's always the very top or very bottom of any place," Jaune answers. Yeah, he's comparing this to a video game, "... And in books too, right? It's just cliché enough to be a real thing."

In that case, he's got a little bag of depleted uranium and other ingredients with your name on it.

"You'd think so." He frowns for a moment and then just shrugs. "Maybe they ate him."

Despite the joke, it really is out of the ordinary. Sure, he'd marched in here with a head full of steam like there was nothing to it but he'd expected to hit something whether it was minions or wards.

His gut was telling him that they had the right place, but something was definitely off. Either this guy didn't know enough to defend his stronghold or he was stupid and arrogant enough to think he didn't need to.

Either way, it was starting to look like this guy was a lot more small-time than Harry thought.

"Fiction is usually a little based in reality. Like the first guy who ever wrote the line 'it's too quiet' probably knew what he was talking about." He frowns, but starts heading for the stairs anyway. "Keep your guard up."

"Haha, maybe they did eat him..." Jaune said that in a tone that conveyed he really did kinda wish that had happened. It'd save them the trouble of looking for the guy.

But Harry didn't have to tell Jaune twice to keep his guard up - Jaune kept it up! While Harry marches onwards, Jaune's looking all over the place, even behind them, taking a few backwards steps from time to time in order to do so.

There, that's the kind of optimism you need in this line of work. Never give up on your dreams, Jaune.

Harry will let him worry about the lookout, keeping his own eyes forward while they march up the steps. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Okay, this was getting ridiculous.

Finally, he shoves open another heavy door at the top of the belltower and stops a couple of steps in when he realizes that they aren't alone all of a sudden.

"Aw, you didn't need to wait up for us." Smart-ass remark and a quick warning to Jaune that trouble might be at hand at the same time. Look at this guy go.

Jaune stepped in backwards through the grand doors at the top of the bell tower, and when Harry puts down that subtle, snarky hint that there's trouble afoot, Jaune perks right up pretty darn quick. "What? Who? What're you talking about? Who's there?!"

Then he bumps into Harry's back and whips around quickly, sword and shield up. "GAH- oh. Heh." n_n;

"We meet again," Lust smiled, closing her eyes and inclining her head slightly at Jaune.

If she was annoyed at the snark, or at the long wait while the two paranoid adventurers tip-toe'd into the old mausoleum, it sure didn't show.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to come up here. Judging by the looks on your faces, I'd say you were expecting somebody else."

They didn't really think the necromancer would be somewhere so cliched and obvious, did they? ........Oh, they did. How foolish. Lust shook her head, never budging from where she perched on the stone still with her long legs crossed. She turned her head to gaze out across the town and surrounding woods, blanketed by a thick fog. "Come here, wizard. I have a task for you."

"Erf." Harry grunted when Jaune bumped into him, and he slowly shot a look back over his shoulder. Okay, okay. They could work on the subtle cues.

Wait, meet again? He turned back to the mysterious woman with the question already loaded before he realized just who it was directed at. And Jaune got another, questioning look, You two know each other?

That would have to wait though, as the mystery strumpet speaks up again.

"Oh yeah? Well, I can hear you just fine from over here so howsabout we all stay where we are before we start talking about tasks?"

He never met this woman before, but mysterious beautiful woman in a slinky black dress waiting at the top of a scary tower? Yeah, that was setting off almost all of the alarm bells up in Harry's head.

Jaune could hardly believe his eyes... it was HER. He nudged Harry with his shield somewhat, speechless to Lust, but he leaned aside and quietly whispered to his new wizard mentor. "Harry, this lady isn't normal," He said in as hushed a tone as he could, "I saw her when I got attacked by some troll zombies in Everglade. She took two of them out. Cut them right in two."

Poor Jaune was almost shaking, but he took a deep breath and settled down as best he can in such a situation. If this lady wanted to talk to Harry, then that was fine - but the guy had better be careful.

Lust sighed, brushing an ebony lock of hair away from her face. "If I wanted to speak with you, I wouldn't bother asking you to change your location. I want to show you something, and you can hardly see it from there."

Folding her arms again, and ignoring Jaune's rude hushed comments, she gazed out over the fog-enshrouded landscape before. "You are a wizard, from what I understand. If you are able to clear the fog for a few moments, I think we'll both find what we're looking for."

Harry turned his head slightly, listening to Jaune's hushed report without letting Lust leave his line of sight. Cut two of the roid-zombies in half, huh? Those things weren't exactly pushovers, and anybody who could take them down like that had to be pretty bad news.

He took a second to consider his next move.

"Aw, hell, since you asked so nicely and all." He walked forward, keeping an eye on the woman the whole time until he was at the window. "Ventus Cyclis."

His staff cracked against the ground as he unleashed the spell and immediately the air inside the room whipped up into a strong, biting cold wind. But it was nothing compared to the howling that sprang up outside, whipping up the fog and pushing it away from the tower and lifting a swirling vortex of fallen leaves and debris into the air and clearing the line of sight for several dozen feet in all directions. Then, with one final effort of will, he pushed the spell outward, the winds building on each other and carrying throughout the graveyard, driving a wall of mist ahead of them.

"That oughta give us a little while."

Edited (These people are never happy.) 2014-01-16 03:24 (UTC)

Jaune stepped in after Harry, following along like the ever-dutiful sidekick he now was. He kept an eye on Lust, because the woman freaked the ever-living heck out of him, and he let Harry have his space to perform his spell while Jaune just watched and waited.

... Oh, right, Harry could perform magic spells. The wind that kicked up surprised Jaune, and he shielded his face from the wind with his sword arm, more or less using his elbow to cover him. He stepped closer and stood on his toes to curiously watch out the window as Harry pushed the spell outwards - which sounded much less impressive than it was. Poomph! Just wind in all directions!

"Whoa..."

Edited 2014-01-16 07:06 (UTC)

Lust wasn't watching Harry watch her. All of her attention was fixed on the landscape spread out below. Honestly, this would have been far less suspicious if she just told them flat out what she wanted and why, but she wasn't about to let them ditch her when she wanted to find this necromancer as well.

But still, the spell was impressive, and just what she'd hoped for.

"Watch the forest," she instructed. "With the fog cleared, he should be easy enough to find. Just look for barren trees and rotten vegetation." That was her theory, anyway. Any person who exercised so much unnatural death-related magic couldn't possibly be healthy for the environment.

She crooked a finger at Jaune as well. "You too. Come and tell us what you see."

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