"Au contraire," he said, as kirbyesque ray guns emerged from panels in the walls. "This is where it begins. As we speak, you're being bathed in torpor waves. You're just a normal girl now."
Hoshiko didn't move. The dark lord smiled and continued.
"Say goodbye to your magic. Then say goodbye to your life. Prepare to die!"
"Prepared isn't in my vocabulary!" said Hoshiko, defiantly.
"Evidently." He drew a knife and strode towards her. "You know," he said conversationally as he approached, "I almost expected more of a challenge from a magical girl."
Hoshiko smiled. Blood dripped from the business end of the sparkle spear. Call yourself 'Starlight battle teen' and dress up in a ridiculous ribboned outfit that shows off your panties, and everybody assumes you do magic.
Hoshiko wasn't a magical girl. She was a stone cold bitch. Dark Lord Bloodbramble was dead before he hit the ground.
REVELATIONS
We slumbered in the womb of the world for aeons until Leviathan's call woke us. We ascended through the rock and earth, and we brought our fire with us. The surface was a cacophony of war machines and the squawk of humans. Their hives of extruded stone crumbled around them. The sky was laced with webs of smoke, choking the planet.
Gaia. We wept tears of pitch at what they'd done to her. They'd scarred her skin and poisoned her blood. We avenged her with our fangs and our claws.
Heaven's army descended from the sky, bearing shields like snowy leaves and blades like silver thorns. Wingtip to wingtip, they reflected the setting sun. They slaughtered us, and the furious voice of the Goddess told us we were an abomination, that the planet was for the humans. But we were legion. We were many. We pushed them back. We fought for Gaia. We purged them with righteous flame and watched the souls of humans and angels soar upward into the night.
We were victorious. Our cause was just. But the Goddess is vindictive. Cruel. Rather than allow us our peace, rather than letting us nurse our planet back to health, she crashed to earth like a meteor. Shrouded in spite, shrieking like a banshee, she struck down Leviathan and ate up the sky.
Gaia is dead, and we are left here to stand vigil on her carcass. Her heart ripped out, her skin a desolate crust. Leviathan's ribs pierce the atmosphere and stand monument to our failure.
We... I. I'm all that's left. I stand by the boiling seas and watch the bloated white corpses bob on the surface. It's silent here as I plant charred seeds in the silt.
PIXIE DUST
When they told him he was going to be saving the world with a screwdriver, he'd expected it to arrive in a highball. Sure, an actual screwdriver was the more practical choice, and he had set a precedent for their use as a deadly weapon, but regardless, he'd take the cocktail any day.
The Parahuman Regulation Bureau had contacted Harry because he owed them a favour. He'd built a sort of golem thing last year, and it had kind of broken loose and started roaming the sewers. The fact was that they knew a lot less about goblin tech than their P.R department would have you believe. That meant that he was essentially their freelance goblin specialist. It had been that or getting chipped, and Harry got up to a lot of things he'd rather the P.R.B didn't know about. Most goblins were the same. The ability to turn invisible tends to inspire a laissez-faire attitude toward personal space, property, and hygiene.
The glamour that goblins cast wasn't constrained to their own bodies. They could render any object they chose undetectable to the human senses. A non-human citizen had reported that a strange bomb-looking device had been planted and apparently armed in a local beach bar, but when Harry entered it was still busy. It was hard to take the threat of an invisible bomb seriously. The bureau had sent him in to investigate without risking any further bad press by evacuating the area. If it blew, the presence of a shifty looking tooled-up goblin on the scene gave them plausible deniability.
Harry could see the bomb. It sat on a table in the middle of the room, completely unhidden and beeping. The display said he had three minutes. Harry ordered a margarita. By the time it arrived he had fifty seconds.
Slurping at his drink, he twirled his screwdriver and approached the device. He inspected the access panel. He needed a goddamn allen key. Saving the world with an allen key didn't have quite the same ring to it. Saving a scuzzy beach bar with an allen key didn't sound that heroic either. Slamming down the screwdriver, he fished one out of his pocket and set to work.
He removed the access panel and rooted around the bomb's innards. It wasn't rigged to explode, it was loaded with pixie dust. This wasn't a bomb, it was a practical joke. That's goblins for you, he thought, pocketing the vial of pixie dust. There was enough in there to keep him blazed for three weeks straight.
GOLEM
It waded through the sewers with an unconscious girl slung over its shoulder. The featureless lumpen golem was outclassed by the exquisite terracotta brickwork of the arches above it. Deep red blood stained its sallow clay body from mouth to foot.
Nothing lived in this stretch of the sewers anymore. Even the alligators had migrated elsewhere in fear. The golem was mute, but its feet shook the earth; the water roiled around its knees with each step.
It came to a halt in an area best described as an atrium, where a large grating let in a stream of light and illuminated the water dripping from the ceiling. Passageways extended out in each cardinal direction. Bones littered the floor.
The golem seized the girl's ankle and slung her onto the floor with a splash. It placed a foot on her solar plexus and wrenched an arm; a gristly popping sound echoed in the chamber as it broke off at the joint. The golem began to chew and crunch on it.
"Now!" someone shouted. Black suited men poured in from every entrance. Their guns had a greasy sheen. Their shoes had too, before they climbed down here. Agents for the Parahuman Regulation Bureau.
A hail of gunfire zipped through the golem's body, making wet slapping sounds. The entry holes closed up after the bullets, but the exit wounds took out chunks, leaving big craters. Its hard skull was impenetrable, and every shot on target rung like a gong and ricocheted from its head. The golem had no lungs to bellow or eyes to shine with fury, but its anger was clear enough. Its fists hardened, becoming glazed and cracked, and it swung wildly at its aggressors, fighting like a gorilla, trying to crush them, throw them, tear them apart.
One agent, Strauss, leapt onto the golem's back and climbed, digging his hands into the pliable clay for purchase. He made it up to a shoulder and pried its cranium open, exposing the spinning, clicking machinery in its head. Reaching in elbow deep, he pulled out a rotating brass cylinder and the golem slumped, deactivated.
The agent jumped down. "Nice work," said a colleague, Taylor, a handcuffed goblin in tow.
Strauss tossed the cylinder to him. It was embossed with runic script. Taylor squinted as he deciphered it, his grip on his captive's chains getting tighter as he did.
'I'VE GOT THE MUNCHIES,' it said.
Both agents were glaring at the goblin. "I was high!" he said, as if it were a reasonable explanation. "I didn't know he'd get the wrong idea, I just wanted a sandwich!"
DIRK STRAUSS: PIXIE HUNTER
Agent Strauss stood alone in a yellow field holding a comically large butterfly net, reflecting on where exactly his career had gone wrong. Ten years ago he'd been struck with inspiration when reading 'Witch Hunting For Fun & Profit', and had set himself up as a witch hunter for hire. He'd made a name for himself. The work was dangerous, but he was good at it. Rooftop swordfights under the full moon, pitched battles in forgotten cave networks, ghost busting, Dirk Strauss had done it all, and he'd looked incredibly cool doing it.
When the P.R.B came calling, he was ecstatic. He was in the big leagues. But the big leagues weren't as big as he'd been led to believe. Sure, there were moments. A coordinated strike on the lair of Görguvir, lord of vampires was a highlight, as was the running gun battle through a hive of aliens in the white house last month. But then there was stu
ff like this. He'd been assigned pixie hunting duty. His job today was to capture and deliver to Research and Development a specimen of an unrecorded cryptid that was by all accounts invisible to the human eye.
He felt like an idiot.
The issue wasn't that they might not exist. They almost certainly did. The problem was that human science had thus far been unable to prove it. The Parahuman Regulation Bureau intended to rectify that, at any cost. The other species assured them that pixies were merely a flying parahominid species that exuded pure joy from every orifice, but the Bureau knew the score. The score was drugs.
Agent Strauss was disillusioned with his job, but he accepted that what he was doing was important. It was like Director Eames had been telling him. Pixies led to drugs, drugs led to hookers, and hookers led to suffering. Or something. Actually, that might have been from a movie. A terrible, terrible movie. Strauss' vision was swimming a little. He felt like he should sit down.
Snatches of beautiful music came drifting on the wind. Strauss found himself lying on his back amongst the flowers. The fluffy white clouds were fascinating. Some of them looked like stuff. He could really go for a pizza right now.
Something buzzed by his head. If he squinted, he thought he could see two little people hovering above him. He reached for them, smiling inanely. It seemed like they were laughing.
INVASION FLEET
The invasion fleet emerged from the oort cloud, adapted their shields to the heliosphere and merged with the debris of the scattered disc. In layman's terms, they were stealthily approaching earth.
Haro peered out of the window. The hive mind chattered in his head. It was only short range, about .35 of a parsec wide, but he spent a lot of his time tuning in. Sometimes he thought he could feel her out there, on the edge of his consciousness. The stars reflected in his glazed amber eyes. He sighed. Back to business. He focused himself on the voices close to him. There was a meeting in progress on the local channel.
It was not going well. Their objective was to attack Earth. The problem was that nobody knew why or how they were going to achieve it. General Langmuir only seemed concerned with blowing up landmarks and hovering in a menacing manner. Captain Coulomb had already attempted to infiltrate the human hive by laying thousands of eggs in the chamber of their Queen, but the humans had been too smart. The strange way they had schismed and divided themselves across their world made them incredibly hard to conquer. It was surprisingly sophisticated.
The issue the cacwm invasion fleet had encountered was unavoidable and debilitating. They tended to get confused when their Queen was out of range. The unifying voice that gave them their zeal and purpose was gone, and they started asking questions. Eventually the instructions they'd been given stopped making sense at all, and they began to forget the details. Some of them were under the impression they were going to steal the humans bodies. Others were convinced they had to drink human blood to survive. A minor contingent wanted to lay eggs in the humans faces and have the larvae burst from their chests. This wasn't something the cacwm were biologically capable of, but they were going to give it their best shot anyway.
The armada monitored earth from afar while they decided what to do to it. Haro didn't want to be here at all. He just wanted to blow up the planet and go back home to his Queen.
Eventually the cacwm came to an agreement. They'd go down there, fire some lasers, and see where things went. Everyone assembled wordlessly on the loading floor. They were all outfitted in shiny power armour. A shallow transparent dome protected their shallow transparent heads. General Langmuir appeared before them with the intent of rousing the troops. It would be hard for a human to tell, because they all looked the same and their speech was a barely modulated gargle, but Langmuir had a face for radio and a voice for shut the hell up. Haro hefted his gun impatiently. Let's get this over with, he thought to himself.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MAGNUS WHISKERSON
Poppy's cat burst through the doorflap and skidded across the linoleum, swearing.
"Holy shit! Shit shit shit."
It looked up. Poppy was staring at it, wide-eyed. It retracted its claws and tried to look casual.
"Uh, listen, I need a favour."
Poppy wrung her hands. "You've never talked before," she said eventually.
The cat looked exasperated. "I completely understand, it's a shock, but I need you to hold it together. Shit is going down."
"Are you really a cat?"
The cat picked its words carefully. "I'm more of a cat than most people."
"Are you a person?"
"I've always been this shape, if that's what you mean. Now listen, I-"
"I'm just really having trouble making sense of this is all. You're Magnus the cat. You eat and sleep and meow."
"I still do all those things!"
Poppy swallowed nervously. "You've seen me naked," she said.
"You see me naked all the time! I'm naked right now! It's not important anyway, just listen to me, some people are going to be here soon, I need you to-"
"Is this some kind of scam?"
"No! Well. Every cat is scamming their owners to an extent but no, I'm not running a scam. Not exactly. But I have, through no fault of my own, ran afoul of the Parahuman Regulation Bureau."
"Is this something to do with all that iron oxide and magnesium ribbon that arrived the other day? I'm pretty sure those are bomb ingredients..."
"You've not been in the basement have you?" asked the cat.
"Nooo..."
"Okay. Right. Okay I'm going to burn a few documents, and then I'm heading for Portugal. If any men in black suits turn up at the door, tell them you've not-"
A man in a black suit crashed through the window and shot the cat in the head. He holstered his pistol and pulled a transceiver from his inside pocket. "Pet cemetery, this is Strauss. Tango down."
Poppy was shaking. Agent Strauss showed her his badge. "P.R.B. I'm afraid your cat has been engaged in some illegal activity and was considered a threat to civilians." He handed her a card. "Call that number if you feel you need counselling. Someone will be over in the week to repair the window."
He waited to be let out the door but it didn't look like Poppy was going to move anytime soon, so he gingerly stepped back out of the broken window. He checked his gun. That brought today's tally to three cats, five dogs, two goldfish and a chinchilla. Somehow he'd thought this job would be more glamorous.
THE UNDEATH AND DEATH OF YVES CARABIN
Yves Carabin was kind of undead. It was a complicated situation. He was also a private detective. That was complicated too.
He left the bar a little wiser than he'd been when he walked in half an hour ago. He was also a little drunker and his knuckles were a lot sorer. His trenchcoat whipped in the wind. A few drops of rain came down sideways to herald the gathering stormclouds. Yves turned up his collar and lit a cigarette with his eye socket.
There was a girl he used to know. A djinn. One time he got himself shot in the eye. She mended him with smokeless flame. Resurrected him. That was the first time. A couple of glowing scars on his back attested to the others. He wasn't sure if he counted as a wight or a revenant or just a plain old zombie. All he knew was that he had a heartbeat again and he owed her for it.
He puffed on his gauloise and regarded the embers as he exhaled. Fire reminded him of her. When it had been her turn to die he'd spent day after day and night after night trying to bring her back. He'd read every grimoire, recited every incantation. In the end the hotel burnt down and that was that. Arcane rituals were candle intensive as it was, and pyromancy doubly so for obvious reasons.
Yves shook his head and let the sound of the rain wash his mind clean. There was work to do, and it was the kind of work he needed to be sober for. A pretty girl wanted to know why the P.R.B had sent an agent to interrogate and subsequently poison her goldfish. Yves didn't like to mess with the Parahuman Regulation Bureau, he wasn't registered, but the girl was offering serious m
oney. Nothing made Yves serious like serious money.
He'd been asking questions and interestingly enough, the goldfish were just part of the picture. Word on the street was that someone named Strauss had been doing the rounds, sniping two dogs, garrotting another, shooting a cat point blank and capturing a chinchilla for questioning.
After a fight and some more questions, he'd found out why. Most of the targets were unregistered parahumans involved in a pixie dust ring. The chinchilla was a pretty high level operator if what he'd been hearing was right. If that had been all, the case would be closed and he'd be halfway down a bottle of scotch by now, but Yves had stumbled on something more.
He'd paid a visit to a girl named Poppy, an ex-cat owner. She'd been reluctant to open the door, but he'd been persistent. She'd had another unwelcome visit not three hours earlier. Two goblins had apparently pushed their way in, cleared out the basement and threatened her to keep her quiet. According to her, they'd been moving containers and cases of equipment and mysterious substances. The late Magnus Whiskerson had apparently been ordering in large quantities of bomb ingredients.
He wasn't sure what his next lead would be or whether it was even worth the trouble. His 'friend' at the bar had told him something about a disarmed bomb found there earlier in the week. Nobody really knew what to make of it, least of all Yves. Truth be told, he enjoyed having an excuse to hurt people. Maybe it was something to do with being a fire wight, but he suspected he'd always been this way. It was hard to remember now. He stepped in a puddle and swore through gritted teeth. He was not having a good day. That's when a couple of goblins pulled him into an alley and started to rough him up. There were a lot more waiting in the shadows. Presumably they were going to take shifts.
"Heard some walking corpse with a glowy eye's been asking questions round here" said a voice, punctuated by a blackjack.
"Not a corpse," said Yves from behind his cigarette. He clocked one assailant and threw the other into the street, one handed.
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