“There’s a McDonald’s nearby, Hax, in case you truly want to experience what America has to offer,” I said. After the hotdish incident, though, I doubted it. Sure enough, he didn’t. Unfortunately, neither did Azure.
“I know I eat some really weird stuff, but that’s just too much,” Azure explained, batting her eyelashes. People usually don’t act so seductive when they’re turning you down.
“If you really want to go in, feel free. We’ll wait outside,” added Haxabalatnar. They walked to a table with an umbrella on the opposite side of the street and were immediately lost in gossip.
“Bring me back some empty ketchup packets!” Azure shouted as I entered the restaurant.
So I bought a hamburger. It wasn’t exactly good, and strictly speaking I was probably eating better in the wilderness, but I didn’t care. I can still remember the exact flavors on my palette (sweet ketchup, bland bun, yellow cheese) when the sound of sirens caught my attention. I dismissed them for about a minute, having learned a lesson from when I robbed Nebraska Savings. It was probably just another ambulance cavalcade. I was about to place a handful of French fries in my mouth when I seized up. These actually were police sirens! They were getting closer, too; had the police somehow figured out that I was behind the heist? I noticed the cashier staring at me with an expression of pure horror – either she was wanted for crimes of her own, or she was getting ready to attempt some sort of heroic citizen’s arrest, or barring that, at least a hue and cry.
“You! You’re the Black Queen of Minneapolis!” she shouted. “Do you even know how much blood’s on your hands?”
So the fuzz was after me. I needed to get out. I had a small, shiny black orb in my purse that numbered among the many treasures I’d gathered from our assault on Amdahl’s Arbalest. Azure had informed me that it was filled with the daemonic equivalent of tear gas. It was supposed to incapacitate and paralyze chthons until it dissipated, but she didn’t know what sort of effect it’d have on humans. Still, this was likely my best hope. Even with my ever improving texting speeds, it was hard to load up useful spellscripts on such short notice. I also had my Walther, but I was pretty sure that if I used it, the police would bring out theirs. Either way, I wasn’t giving myself up without a fight.
The first police car overshot the curb and spun out in the parking lot. This didn’t faze its passengers; they burst out and charged the entrance with batons and riot shields at the ready. Not the sort of tools I would use to detain a single suspect, but human police work in mysterious ways. A second car and batch of cops wasn’t far behind. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of my party still at the table outside. They’d stopped talking and were still trying to parse what was happening. No time to wait – I picked up the orb and threw it against the floor.
A vibrant cloud of purple gas (ooh, pretty!) erupted from the orb when it struck the ground. It quickly enveloped a few confused customers, and I heard muffled screams – whether they were fear, pain, or mere confusion I could not tell, until a fat man emerged from the gas with a cup of soda in his hand. His eyeballs had turned the same iridescent purple as the gas, and a hint of drool dripped out of his gaping mouth. He slammed into a stool that he apparently couldn’t see and fell down, but he continued to scream. I caught a few words about being chased by a werewolf. I figured I’d end up about the same if I didn’t get out.
Was this the intended effect? When imbibed by humans, it seemed to function as more of a fear gas than a tear gas. I was about to leave through the side entrance when everyone else who hadn’t huffed a mouthful of gas made a mad break for it. They almost trampled me! If I’d followed them, that would’ve been as good as turning myself in. Luckily, they didn’t seem to be interested in me, so I ran for the kitchen. It smelled greasy, and there was an unattended deep fryer here that was full of overdone fries beginning to smoke. I soon saw another door in the back of the kitchen, walked there, opened it, and was finally outside, though it wouldn’t be long before the police thought to check the back of the building.
Now that I didn’t have to deal with civilians, I could afford to be more aggressive with my choice of spellscripts. I thumbed through my current list and settled on two that seemed appropriate – an energy shield to (hopefully) reflect arms fire, and a “taser” to subdue cops who wanted to try their luck with their batons. Hopefully, these would last me for a while. I’d personally reverse-engineered the code from something written for a phone that ran Java, and I could feel the improvements I’d made as I brought my magic online. Once everything was in order, I made my exit from the scene. I made the point of dashing into and through an alley when I nearly tripped on an upended garbage can.
“Hey, man! That’s my home!” shouted someone from behind me. I didn’t care, and I kept running for about two blocks. I no longer heard footsteps, sirens, or anything that would lead me to believe the cops were mounting a pursuit, or even just fanning out in an attempt to catch me, so I stopped and took a moment to text Azure. “FIND ME,” went the text. I didn’t want to risk sending out something more verbose, but I didn’t need to. It was only seconds after I sent this out that I felt Azure’s gaze upon me. Unusually close, too-
I ran straight into her, and we collapsed in a sexy pile. Unfortunately, we had to disentangle ourselves in order to keep running from the police.
“Fancy seeing you in a place like this,” I said. I know – it’s a weak joke at the wrong time, but Azure still smiled.
“I think I’m wanted for a felony, but I’ve done so many things that I couldn’t exactly say what,” I continued. The bank heist was my first guess, but I also had a history of murder and mutilation that wouldn’t go over well in polite society.
“How are we going to get out of this mess?” asked Haxabalatnar, who had to be all business.
“Well, Canada has an extradition treaty with the US, so I think we need to get back into hell.”
“You need to evade the police first,” Hax cautioned me. “Then we can figure out how to get back.”
Still no sirens, but Hax had a point. We needed to find somewhere secluded, where any passersby wouldn’t snitch, but I didn’t see any obvious choices. We wandered aimlessly for a few minutes before I heard a strange, yet familiar chanting echoing in the air... archaic Koine Greek! The meaning eluded me, though.
“A church! They could help us get back into hell!” I told Azure and Haxabalatnar once I’d tracked the sound to an ornate basilica that towered over the surrounding buildings. “We might have to pose as missionaries, though...”
“Wasn’t that an episode of The Simpsons?” Azure asked; I sure didn’t know. We walked into the middle of a hymn – a group of middle-aged men with thin, flat voices attempting to praise their God and not doing particularly well. This was definitely a Greek Orthodox church. I most likely would’ve walked out on any other sect, but something lead me to believe that I could bluff and bullshit my way into some sort of assistance here.
“Alright, stop, stop! Stop! You have to keep the same tempo or the entire liturgy shall fall apart!” shouted the apparent conductor, dressed in full priestly regalia; the chorus spluttered and died out. “We’ll start again from the vespers-” And then he didn’t, for the choir had noticed us, and the conductor noticed that their attention was wavering.
“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked. I opened my mouth to speak, but then I saw a flash of recognition in his eyes.
“Are you Charlotte Metaxas? I have heard much about you in recent days.” I couldn’t tell whether this was good or bad. Haxabalatnar seemed to be slowly reaching for a gun, but I’d never told him or Azure about how the Greek Orthodox Church was sheltering my family.
“No need to worry!” he suddenly added, as he stared at Hax’s holster. “I have heard that you seek to slay the foul demon known as Sigmar, in order to strike a blow against those who would prevent us from spreading the gospel of the Lord.”<
br />
The rest of us, choir included, had no idea how to handle this news.
“You can’t be serious! I saw the wanted notice on TV! She’s just a criminal,” said the oldest and flabbiest of the men.
“Alfred, may I have a word in private?” responded the priest, who seemed to have forgotten his frustration with the choir’s musical ineptitude. “Sorry, Charlotte. This should not take long at all,” he said to me. The two briefly disappeared into a side room. When they returned, Alfred was blushing with apparent shame.
“I haven’t been on this planet in months. Can you fill me in on what’s happened since October of 2004? Actually, first, how do you know who I am?” I asked. The priest smiled slightly at us.
“Well, I was asked to join the Midwest diocese’s chthonic outreach program that month, so I spent some time at a mission in Milwaukee. There, I was introduced to your parents, who told me about your personal…crusade against Sigmar,” he explained. I just nodded at this, though I couldn’t help but wonder why they figured Milwaukee was safe from titans.
“The church supports your efforts, my child,” continued the priest, gesticulating as if he were still leading a liturgy. “If there is anything I can do to assist you in your mission, you need only ask.”
“The first thing I need to know is why the police are after me.”
“For that, I’ll need to pull up some newspapers. Could you and your companions follow me to the back room?” The “back room” was a surprisingly large closet full of candlesticks, boxed flour (presumably to bake bread for communion), a spare tabernacle, and an imposing PC running Windows Server 2003. How did I know this? I’m just that good. I could do without the Passion of the Christ film poster desktop background, but the customization was irrelevant as long as the priest would let us borrow the server box. After all, if I was going to be using the machine for magic, I would likely open enough terminal tabs and utility programs to completely cover the desktop. The priest rooted around in some file cabinets and pulled out a stack of newspapers, just as he’d promised.
“Before I get too myself into too much legal trouble,” he said, “Why did you steal so much money from the Nebraska Savings and Financial Company?” The priest’s “stern” face needed some work.
“That was my first attempt to bring Sigmar down. Kind of a long story. How did the police figure me out?” I responded.
With the aid of his newspapers, the priest spun for us a tale of a hard-boiled IRS agent named Steve who’d noticed some irregularities during a random audit of Nebraska Savings’ accounting affairs. Our heroic, square-jawed protagonist found what looked like a massive case of fraud in the bank’s records. For his efforts, he was nearly gunned down by an assassin hired by the bank’s board of directors.
“Astonishingly poor judgment,” said the priest, breaking from the tale for a moment. “Naturally, if a person has sinned, they should attend confession and seek God’s forgiveness.”
Divine forgiveness aside, Steve then went on an investigatory rampage and uncovered a plethora of financial crimes and conspiracies – most scandalously, a front to smuggle military hardware to a militant Hindutva group doing…something in Assam. I wasn’t clear what, and the newspapers didn’t explain much. After the majority of management had been hauled off to jail, the remaining employees had implemented a revolutionary new fiscal security system, and the bank was on the verge of being nationalized by the feds, Steve came to realize he’d never figured out what was up with the first case of fraud.
From then on, Steve lived a double life. By day, an ordinary accountant, by night, a vigilante tracking a cold case. Did this remind anyone else of anything? Steve’s escapades lead him on a fun globetrotting adventure that ended when he discovered the shattered remains of the old Aux coven.
Once Paul and I had defected (and survived – that was the important bit), Sigmar’s ranks on Earth were decimated by a round of desperate defectors. Most of them spent their time running from loud noises and participating in humanity’s criminal underworld, but one novice girl ended up hospitalized with a magically augmented case of bubonic plague. Steve found her; after a few sob stories, she told Steve that Sigmar had learned about my robbery...which was certainly new and from my perspective, the point where everything went to crap Earthside. The US government promptly put a warrant on my head, and the press had a field day with every chunk of story they could get.
“Does that explain it?” asked the priest after I’d stared in disbelief at the last few headlines for a while. I looked back to Azure and Hax – they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Then I looked to the choir; they were trying to sing again, with limited success. Something was missing in this story.
“Random question – has there been any recent changes in the local politics? Minneapolis, in particular,” I asked the priest. He shrugged.
“Funny that you should mention politics,” he said. “The mayor of Minneapolis resigned a few weeks ago; it wasn’t in the news nearly as much. The new mayor is promising to take a very harsh stance against magic and chthons. We sent some missionaries to ask her to reconsider. Hopefully, they shall succeed.”
I guess people prefer witches as villains to politicians in their stories about the destruction of civil society and the dawn of a new era of darkness and suffering.
“Oh, I forgot to properly introduce myself!” said the priest, interrupting my fanciful train of thought. “My name is Matthias Angelos. Might I have the honor of knowing the names of your companions?”
*Should we tell him?* Azure transmitted to me.
*Go ahead. You two aren’t wanted for anything yet,* I responded. They proceeded to introduce themselves, with much shaking of hands. Azure made her hair flash blue a few times; she definitely couldn’t do that at will before we retrieved Amdahl’s Arbalest. The priest was amused by this spectacle.
“Are you two from the...er...realms of chaos?” asked Matthias. Haxabalatnar completely lost himself in a fit of laughter.
“Why would you call them that?” said Azure, trying to stifle some giggles of her own. “I mean, most people just call it hell, even the nice areas.”
“To put it simply, the Orthodox Church does not believe that the lands that the public refer to as ‘hell’ correspond in any way to the mysteries of the afterlife, and what happens to those who do not accept the salvation of Christ. We have not come up with an official name to describe this. You would agree that calling them the ‘realms of chaos’ does capture at least some of its character, am I right?” I thought about it for a moment and decided that he might be onto something, but also that I was definitely not going to adopt his terminology.
“Well, you’ve got a point,” Haxabalatnar agreed with a snort. He was recovering poorly from his episode of laughter.
“Let’s not dwell on this too much. We need to use your computer to open up a portal to whatever you call the realm. Is that okay with you?” I asked. Every second we spent schmoozing with Matthias gave one of his sheep (most likely Alfred) a chance to rat us out to the police.
“By all means, do what is necessary. My understanding is that this machine should be more than adequate for your purposes, although I have never tried it myself.”
Matthias exited the storage closet, but turned back to us just before he disappeared completely from view. “If there’s anything you need, you shall find me in the nave, where I shall be practicing with the choir,” he quickly added, before leaving us to our business.
Matthias’ server was performant, well protected, and generally free of cruft. He’d ripped several Christian movies and TV shows from DVDs to his desktop, and loaded up his computer with two 100GB hard drives to store the files, but it was otherwise a suitable machine for a sorceress. My most pressing concern was that Matthias wasn’t running ThaumOS or a similar Linux variant, but once I thought about it, I realized it was unlikely to be a problem. The priest was running
Windows XP, which for all its literally-the-eternal-enemy-of-open-source design decisions was still more than robust and stable enough to safely open a portal. First, though, I had to prepare the computer for magic.
“I’m going to need a while to download a bunch of software,” I told Azure and Hax, who had treated my inspection of the computer’s specifications as a moment of distraction and weakness that would momentarily pass. “How much experience do you guys have with computer programming and software in general?”
“None,” Haxabalatnar said brusquely.
“Almost none,” claimed Azure. “I think I dabbled a little in GW-BASIC back in the 1980s.”
“Azure, just how old are you?” I asked because I didn’t want to let that become another one of the strange, inscrutable things that Azure occasionally says.
“I want to say I was ‘born’ in 1975, but I’m not entirely sure if titan life cycles really translate into human terms in any way that would make much sense to you.”
“Try me.” I was starting my software spree with a copy of Emacs, because it’s better than vim. I also had to download and install my favorite Emacs addons.
“The first thing I remember is staring at a primitive computer with no idea where I was, and literally nothing on my person except the sexy human female body you’re so…familiar with.” Azure really drew out the last bit. I liked how she dwelled on it.
“It’s possible I existed before that, but I don’t remember a thing,” she continued. “I certainly never had a childhood.”
“Humans don’t remember much of anything at all until they’re about three years old,” Haxabalatnar added.
“Somehow, I managed to build myself an identity and a life from such humble origins. I remember going on a trip with some humans to Japan, and then ending up in Seattle for some reason. I thought I was just another normal human girl. I went by Angela back then.”
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