by Sean Davies
The Supernaturals looked around with awe; although their surroundings were dank and dismal, it was buzzing with unseen magical energy. Freaks looked down at them from the rundown buildings with surprised and excited faces.
Alexander pulled a notepad and pen out of his coat and began making observations. “This is fascinating.”
“You’re such a nerd,” Brooke joked playfully. She leaned in and gave him a kiss. “But I like it.”
He blushed. “Saving my life and kissing me in the same day – I’m going to have to make this up to you.”
“Yes, yes you are,” she said seductively.
Veronica skipped along holding Winston’s hand. “So this where you Book Wielders go? Not that easy on the eyes, but I’ve never felt so good.”
Puppet Freaks started coming out of the buildings, some using the doors and others climbing out of windows, and gathered by the side of the road to watch. It started to remind Winston of a parade.
The Mayor burst his hand into one of the boxes and began throwing handfuls of sweets to his people. “Delicious treats and sugar packed sweets from your beloved Mayor and my boy Winston, the conveyor of candies!”
The Freaks quickly grabbed and shovelled the real world food into their mouths and went wild with delight, chanting ‘Mayor’ and ‘Winston’ as they walked down the street towards the Gloom equivalent of the Hotel Noir.
The Mayor encouraged Winston to throw some too. “This is good for publicity my boy, good for publicity indeed!”
The crowds dissipated as they came to a street of ruined theatres, cinemas, and shattered shops. From his real world bearings Winston knew they weren’t far away from the street that the hotel was on, but the Mayor brought them to a halt.
“Go get Miss Aurorana and her needle maidens,” the Mayor said to one of his guards. It ran off in a comical fashion into the largest theatre, which had a broken sign reading ‘Marionettes Playhouse Theatre’ above it.
Soon after, the guard ran back out of the theatre, and a group of female puppet freaks clothes in grimy yet fancy dresses walked gracefully behind him. They had relatively glamorous hair styles, some form of makeup, and beautifully crafted facial features, although they were covered in stiches where they had been extensively modified. They carried buckets of black Gloom water, wicker baskets filled with dirty balls of thread, bits of material, and long sharp needles.
Behind them strode Mortissa Aurorana. She was a tall woman, face mostly covered in a hooded cloak, and her puppet body was squeezed tightly by a black and white corset which plumed out into short pleated mini skirt. The lower half of her looked beautifully human but as scarred and stitched as her needle maidens. She was armed with a wide range of knives, daggers, pins, and needles that were strapped to her body wherever they could be.
“What a looker, huh? You won’t find a more beautiful bunch of ladies in all the Gloom! Oh no, you won’t!” the Mayor said to Winston excitedly.
“What do you want of me?” Mortissa asked in a horrifyingly distorted voice.
“We’ve brought you a new project my girl, that we have!”
The Freak guards tossed the groaning Inquisitors over to Mortissa and her girls. They looked over the half dead soldiers, running their fingers over their rusty power armour and poking at their guns.
“I can fix them up but you’ll need someone from Pollutia if you want to get the guns working,” Mortissa said to the Mayor.
He nodded excitedly and the needle maidens got work. They pried the sturdy high-tech helmets off the shock troopers, revealing their vulnerable aged and withered heads. The Mayor’s attacks had sucked the life out of them just as it had done with their armour.
“Unhand me, foul creature!” one screamed. “May the light of the Twin Goddesses judge you without mercy!”
The others cried, wailed, or were too withered to do anything but to moan.
“Start with the feisty one,” Mortissa said ruthlessly, “and let the others watch what fate will befall them.”
Two smiling needle maidens held the man’s head still as he screamed a tirade of pious threats and religious phrases, and a then third straddled him, prying his mouth open and reducing him to angry muffled shouts. Another walked over with a bucket of Gloom water and poured it over the trooper’s face. He glugged and choked as the corrupted fluid washed over him, and the needle maiden straddling him put her hand over his mouth and pinched his nose, forcing him to swallow. Winston remembered what Lewis had said about how the Gloom water had tasted and did not envy the Inquisitor one bit.
The needle maidens released the man and left him to choke, gargle, and spasm on the ground as black veins started to pop up on his face. Mortissa kneeled beside him with a basket in one hand and a large thick needle in the other. She brutally jammed the needle into one eye and popped it out of the socket. She opened her mouth to reveal very human and well-kept teeth, and slowly put the eye into her mouth like it was an olive on a cocktail stick. A trickle of fluid ran down her chin as she deliberately chewed it, savouring every moment, and then she did the same for the other one. Reaching into the basket, she produced two glass spheres and forced them into the empty sockets. With great strength, she yanked his teeth out one by one with her fingers and chucked them in the basket with the other bits and pieces. She plucked out eyebrows and lashes, ripped and sliced skin, tore out his tongue, stitched material on, and artistically placed thread features.
The rusted armour creaked and whined as the newly formed Freak trooper picked himself off the floor, walking towards the Mayor and giving a salute. It was hard to tell that he’d ever been human.
“Good work, my girl! Good work indeed!” the Mayor said, dancing on the spot.
Everyone was speechless and mortified, and yet they watched in fascinated horror. A transition from human to Freak had never been seen or even heard of. It was a horrific transformation, and one that Mortissa and her maidens repeated on the other five Inquisitor shock troopers.
“How does she do that?” Winston asked, eyes wide with shock.
“She has power, my boy, old power from way back when everything was still a bit fuzzy. She left the others of her kind, the ones that looked like you before they went all nasty and became bloody Demons, to watch, study, and chat to us lot. She got a bit too fascinated with us, if you know what I mean? So when her face and body started to go all messed up and demon-like she started replacing them with bits of us, and whatever and whoever she could get her hands on. All that’s left of the old her is her head, so she’s more like us than one of those scummy scumbags. I do hate Demons, indeed I do!”
“The Demons used to look like us?”
“Didn’t you know that, my boy? I thought everyone knew that!”
After Mortissa and her girls had finished their work, the Mayor paid them off with a large quantity of candy and continued escorting them to the hotel.
“Wasn’t that a show and a half, everybody? A show and a half indeed!” the Mayor boomed to the Supernaturals. “I told you I had a treat lined up for you and I delivered, didn’t I?”
After what they had just witnessed, everyone did their best to pretend they’d enjoyed the procedure, with big fake smiles, enthusiastic nods and thumbs-ups being given generously. The Mayor looked very pleased with himself.
When they had finally arrived at the hotel, Winston and Lucius shook hands with the Mayor and both sides agreed on continuing and expanding their business relationship. They all entered the hotel, and the tall Freak with the long grubby top hat was at the reception desk just like before.
“Ah, Mr Reynolds, welcome back,” the Freak began. “Will Sir be staying with us again? And do your many friends require rooms too? We have plenty of vacancies!”
“They’ve all got a free pass, Lanky. That they do!” the Mayor said, passing him a few sweets. “Any of Winston’s friends are always welcome free of charge; the rest you can kill or eat or whatever.”
Lanky tried a
sweet, leaving the plastic wrapper on. He crunched it up with his big square teeth and looked like he’d just snorted a line of Rushdust.
They parted ways with the Mayor and Lanky. Winston advised that they take the stairs, so the whole gang quickly stepped up the concrete staircase with its many fluttering Blightmoths. Mage lights were summoned to light the way, and when they finally reached the top floor Winston opened a portal into the real world.
As soon as they were all back on the top floor of the Hotel Noir, Winston collapsed the portal and their phones started beeping excessively. Lewis had made it back okay and wanted them to come to the garage as soon as possible. Without a moment to lose they proceeded to meet him, this time taking the cosy real world elevators, and rushed to see Lewis and check on the goods.
In the underground garage the big vans were parked ungracefully together, their back doors wide open, and some of the grim looking Gloom crates had been offloaded and opened. The humans struggled to get more boxes off so the Supernaturals took over. Lucius himself tipped the drivers generously with more cash than they’d probably ever seen, and they left quickly, feeling lucky for their lives and extremely rich.
Lewis was clapping slowly. “Good job, guys! Good fucking job!” he said cheerfully. “You have got to see this!”
“Was there any trouble on the way back?” Lucius began concerned. “Were you followed?”
“Nah, not at all. The streets were dead – if there were any more Inquisition wankers about we got here way before they were dispatched! So relax boss-man, and come see your haul!”
They walked towards the open crates, hearts beating heavily with anticipation, and looked inside to see if all the effort was truly worth it. There was a small crate completely filled with Crimson Blightmoth wings, a larger one stashed to the brim with Nightmare Nettle, another big crate contained a stack of Ashrooms, and that was only the start of what they had offloaded.
They cheered and continued opening the crates with as much excitement as a child opening presents on their birthday. The night would lead to the biggest, most lavish celebration the Shadow Circle had ever had.
Chapter 6:
The Inquisitor General’s Report
Inquisitor General Alice Eve stood in the cockpit of the airship behind the pilot and co-pilot as they tapped the blue holographic and touch screen controls. She wore her usual uniform of her shiny white officer’s trench coat, black shirt, boots, and trousers, with a white tie. She’d decided to wear her chestnut coloured hair in a bun and to wear her glasses over her dark brown eyes to further her formal look for the meeting. They had just passed over Galleon Anchorage and looked over the vast and Inner Sea. It was a glorious sunny day so the water was calm and peaceful. It helped her nerves as she tried to process the malevolent things she had seen.
She clutched her handheld computer device, a thin flat screen that had a touch sensitive interface, called a ‘HCD’ for short. Amongst other things, it featured state of the art short-range wireless data transmitting; this was how she had her evidence, and it was all that kept her from believing she was completely mad.
In her white trench coat was her notepad, the thing she had that she shouldn’t, the leather-bound book that she had found and had transformed into a stylish journal when she’d picked it up. It whispered to her and tempted her to read its pages, but she had never caved into her foul temptations and opened it. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy it either, though. Every night she would pray to the Twin Goddesses for guidance and ask for the strength to rid herself of the strange book, but if anything it had the opposite effect. She would usually fall into a peaceful sleep and awake uncaringly, and it would only be until later in the day when she realised the book was on her person that the pattern of thought would repeat. Was it an evil object or was it a sign from the Goddesses? Was she supposed to open it or fight the temptation? But the strange book was the last thing on her mind right now.
To say that her mission in Imperia City had been a failure would have been an enormous understatement. It had started so well. She had felt so proud and powerful storming the World GOVT building, arresting and interrogating the wicked non-believers, sending the obviously guilty ones to the work camps indefinitely. It was like cutting the head off the evil snake of corruption coiled around Imperia. But the interrogations soon dried up after the weak willed ones were weeded out. Even after a severe beating and a bit of torture, some of their main suspects still would not confess, which meant they were more afraid of them than us. Records had been torched and hard drives wiped as the shock troopers were storming the building. And the worst part was that the Governor had escaped. They had followed every lead but he was nowhere to be found. She was sure he was in the Hotel Noir, but the search had turned up nothing out of the ordinary. Now she wondered just how thorough her Inquisitors had been, or had some of the evil that she’d witnessed been at work there?
To make matters worse, the Military Peace Keeping forces were even less cooperative than she had anticipated. They were rude and arrogant, used to getting everything their way, and had absolutely no faith whatsoever. Records were not accurately kept, discipline was beyond a joke, and trying to find one that wasn’t crooked was like searching for a needle in a haystack. They were continually disobedient, disrespectful, and didn’t give a damn about serving the greater good of the Imperian world order because they only cared about themselves. Fights had broken out between her people and theirs, equipment had been sabotaged, some Inquisitors had even been violently attacked by MPK’s, and she had executed the offenders herself by shooting them in the head with her pistol. The Inquisition had the technical edge, but they didn’t have the numbers to police the police too.
Alice and her forces had been sent to the Capital primarily to purge the World GOVT building, but also to investigate and pressure the ever growing gang problem. What they’d found was something else entirely. Reports of gunfire in the industrial area had come into the MPK HQ. She’d assigned an Inquisitor Captain to oversee them, and they’d dispatched an airship and troop squad to intervene and hopefully capture a few suspects to squeeze for information. The Airship had been downed and the squad was missing in action, and after reviewing the data that had been transmitted wirelessly from the Airship’s cameras and shock troopers’ helmets, they were obviously dead or worse. She wondered if all the gangs were actually run, consisted of, or were influenced by these evil forces.
The footage that she now had on her HCD was mind-blowing, reality shattering stuff. She had heard all sorts of stories from the seriously injured soldiers treated at Central Isle when she was little, stories about Vampires jumping from plane to plane, Werewolves knocking over tanks, and Mages that could do things that made bombs and artillery shells look tame. But she’d never given them much credit – no one had. The nurses had said they were just crazy ramblings due to post traumatic stress disorder. But now she had seen for herself that these foul creatures of the night were a deadly reality. She had videos of people shooting magic from their hands at the airship and the poor shock troopers, insanely fast people wielding swords and pistols with deadly efficiency, big terrifying Werewolves and ultra-quick ones on all fours. The thing that haunted her thoughts the most was the helmet-feed close ups of the big puppet-man with his wide grin of golden teeth, cold black inhumane eyes and startling resilience. He had thrown them all together and dragged them off to a distortion that the cameras couldn’t pick up. Their vital displays had transmitted that they were still barely alive at that point but she didn’t hold up an ounce of hope that that was still the case.
Alice had personally investigated the scene of the disaster with some of her finest people and come up empty handed. All they had to go on was a trashed factory and warehouse complex, a ruined iron fence, and the mostly melted back half of a cargo container. She wondered why it had been a site of interest to these creatures, something worth battling over so fiercely; all that the Inquisition had found was unhealthy sna
ck food. No money, no drugs, no weapons. Just an ordinary candy factory. It was now under observation, but apart from an extensive rebuild operation nothing of interest was going on there.
Somehow she had to convince the Autocrat that these dark forces were real, but she was worried that he’d have her committed her for insanity or worse. She had the evidence on her HCD, but would it be enough? He had ordered her back to Central Isle before she had the chance to request an audience when she had spoken to him over the radio network. She’d only had time to say that something unbelievably bad had happened before he’d cut her off.
“Home should be on the horizon soon, General,” the pilot said.
“Thank you pilot,” she replied. She knew most of the Inquisition by name from growing up with them in the orphanages, but they’d been taught from a young age to put duty and formality first.
The tall Central Tower rose above the horizon first, with its floor to ceiling windows glowing with reflected sunlight. To Alice it was like a beacon of hope and purity rising out of the murky world. Then followed the tall black rockets that consisted of the Research and Development team’s space project, using a supersized version of the Deep Vein Oil missile that was used against Tropica during the war to force their surrender. Following the recent discovery of the plasma energy they were spending most of their time retrofitting them to accommodate for the superior energy source. Soon most of the isle was in full view. Most of the sleek modern buildings, research centres, stonework cathedral, barracks, and airship landing platforms were all enclosed by the ruins of the ancient amphitheatre that predated recorded history. The harbour, docks, and some other smaller structures were dotted around outside its perimeter, becoming their own towns and villages. The island had expanded beyond the ruined amphitheatre, just like the Capital had spilled out beyond its walls.