Rachel's unspeakable servants were born. The eruv was set up, granting Tal Safdie control over Salem's minor magicks. Endemic Spice retired to their rented cottage, while the Bao Down gang met up to discuss their next move. They still needed to guarantee the New Maks' independence. Rachel could allocate an unspeakable servant to protect the McDonald's where they worked, but that would still leave Dandy vulnerable to demonic possession. DBD had a plan for this, worked out with Endemic Spice. He would teach Dandy Hirsh capsacinaturgy, so she could make herself too spicy for demons to infest.
Dandy was a teenager, and lived with her parents in Peabody, adjacent to Salem. She was grounded after being caught underage drinking at the site of an attempted mass shooting at the Blood For Sex Club a couple nights ago. Rachel bought her "grounded" Status and assigned it to one of her unspeakable servants, confining the beast to the Bao Down truck. Dandy accompanied the crew to Mack Park, where DBD made the offer: he'd make her an adept in a spicy spell school, which would keep the demons away. Dandy was a little suspicious, she knew from the anon list that being an adept was no laughing matter. But the crew was able to persuade her that it was worth the cost. She sealed the deal by eating an extremely spicy dumpling and gaining a few percentages of DBD's power.
Rachel asked if Dandy was ok with Bao Down putting an unspeakable servant in the Ronald McDonald statue outside the McDonald's where the New Maks worked. Dandy asked what an unspeakable servant was. Rachel showed her the one in the truck. Dandy freaked the fuck out. Rachel and DBD calmed her down. Dandy also mentioned that a guy from the Court had offered them all great scholarships if they'd sell out the Rite - the two cabals had a truce, but that didn't preclude economic warfare. Rachel confirmed that this man was Sin Woo-Jin, and he was not to be trusted.
Now it was time to load an unspeakable servant into the Ronald McDonald statue outside the Salem McDonalds. The statue was solid plastic and they needed a way to hollow it out. There were a number of ways they could do this, but they'd just observed the cigar smoking mage Alice use her powers to delete an engine out from inside a vehicle. And she had given them her cell number, in hopes that Reba would call her. And Reba was kind of into the whole "butch cigar smoking Jaws" thing.
Reba called up Alice. Alice had hoped for, but not expected Reba to call, and immediately suggested a lunch date at the Blue Fez - the same Moroccan restaurant DBD had rushed through a few days ago during the absurd "gunfight" with the Kentucky Fed Cops and the Karst Following Cavers. Reba hadn't been on a date in ages, and got some coaching from Tal in the couple hours before noon. Rachel had a plan to get Alice out of Sin Woo-Jin's service. She paid a homeless man 10,000 dollars in exchange for taking the obligation to bodyguard the Usurer off of Alice. On arrival at the restaurant, Alice was amenable to the transaction, after realizing that Rachel wasn't there to ambush her. In exchange, Alice spent the necessary charges to blast out the inside of the statue, sending smoke billowing out the eyeholes she installed.
The date went great. Smoking was disallowed indoors, but the Blue Fez had outdoor seating where Alice could light up a cigar. Reba learned all about Alice's cigar based magick, various other smoking based schools, and her metal teeth. The rest of the group waited just outside line of sight, half expecting another Court attack. It actually went really well. Reba and Alice exited the restaurant. Alice paid, though she joked that
she was now unemployed and shouldn't be spending so frivolously.
What happened next was a bit of a surprise.
Someone blinked. It was night. The moon was so close overhead you could almost reach out and touch it. This was a little unusual, but didn't deter Alice from what she was going to already suggest doing: swaggering on over to Salem Common with Reba, ostensibly to continue smoking, in actuality hoping to cop a feel. Salem Common was home to the statue of Tituba, the witch who used her powers to kill the inquisitors when they came after her sister sorceresses, demonstrating the supreme power of magick.
That wasn't how it happened, right? The Bao Down crew realized that a cliomancer had just used a major charge to rewrite history, or at very least how people remembered it. The Salem Witch Trials ended with the witches winning, probably courtesy of Genesis Peru getting the charge off the moon. The rest of the gang decided to follow Reba and Alice to the park, in case Granny Ethel was up to something, or needed their help.
The statue in Salem Common, formerly Roger Conant, now depicted the witch Tituba, standing over a heap of slain witch hunters, holding a human heart above her head. Around the statue were wooden poles, on which were mounted scarecrows. The four scarecrows were dressed in a yellow raincoat, a police uniform, a priest's uniform, and military fatigues. On the ground in front of the statue was a crescent shaped table of polished marble. Sitting at the table were three women.
- Granny Ethel
- Genesis Peru
- A woman who resembled Rachel, dressed in a midnight black Carmen Sandiego getup.
Rachel and Tal approached the table. Rachel said hello to her mother. Her mother grinned from behind a pair of black wraparound shades and struck the table with an athame - a wave bladed ritual dagger. Time slowed to a crawl. Rachel, Tal, and Rachel's mother, Lucretia "Lucky" Tudor, stood in an untamed forest, the moon still vast overhead.
Rachel's mom admitted she was wrong. Rachel wasn't a total fuckup after all. She was her mother's clone after all, killing that Harmonious Repose wizard in the vent at the club like it was nothing. Lucky would be proud to have her at her side. See, Lucky, GP and GE had formed a triune. Genesis Peru was the maiden, Lucky the mother, and Granny Ethel the crone. That none of them actually embodied the avatar archetypes didn't matter. What was important was their magick powers had been supercharged by the cliomancy major, which raised background belief in witchcraft, and therefore made actual witches even more powerful. And Lucky was happy to let Rachel take the maiden slot. She just had to kill Genesis Peru to get it.
Rachel wasn't interested in killing GP's seat. She decided to take Lucky's instead. She could see through her servants' eyes that she wasn't really in a forest. She was still standing in front of the table. She ordered her abominable servant forward to intervene. Lucky grinned again. Her inky black clothing flowed over her body, bloating to form a suit of living armor, formed of two unspeakable servants of her own. Her wraparound black shades fell away to reveal two empty eye sockets. Battle was joined.
by Loic Muzy
The rest of the Bao Down crew rushed into the park. Alice freaked the fuck out and tried to blow the dueling unspeakable servants away with her revolver, which had no effect. Reba screamed at Lucky, using their magickal curse powers to get her attention. They shouted that Lucky was an absolute dogshit parent, and if she couldn't raise a literal clone of herself properly then it was absolutely nobody's fault but her own. This sent Lucky into a rage, and she vaulted over the table toward Reba, abandoning any magick she was going to cast in favor of pummeling the Bao Down leader with her armored fists. Rachel's unspeakable servant tackled Lucky and they all went down in a big sticky pile of gross creatures. Granny Ethel smashed the teacups that the team drank out of when they visited her herb shop, using gutter magick (supercharged by the effects of the cliomancy major) to cast a "death spell" on the Bao Down gang. Too bad for her, the most powerful gutter magick in the world was still minor magick, and therefore negated by Tal's freshly activated control over minor magick in Salem.
Tal yelled at Granny Ethel to stop trying to hex them, after all they'd been through. And why the fuck was she attacking Tal, when Lucky had just told her daughter to kill Genesis Peru? That didn't make GP happy to hear. Tal was convincing enough that she dropped a few of her freshly acquired cliomancy sigs on a spell to verify that yeah, Lucky definitely did try to sell her out and replace her with Rachel. So neither Granny Ethel nor Genesis Peru intervened in the battle that happened next.
Lucky's unspeakable servants used their sigs to teleport themselves, Lucky and Rachel to the moon, less than a mile above them , hoping to get her alone and finish her off there. Unfortunately, because Rachel was a clone made from unspeakable servant goo and Lucky's DNA, they fucked up their targeting and ended up teleporting Rachel's abominable unspeakable servant with them. So Lucky and Rachel ended up on the moon, above the rest of the group, along with Lucky's two unspeakable servants and Rachel's abominable servant.
On earth, Rachel's remaining unspeakable servants (she had three to spare) stretched out from earth to the low hanging moon above, forming a "ladder" for the rest of the group to climb. They needn't have bothered. Rachel's abominable servant flowed over the two lesser servants, immobilizing them with Lucky inside. Rachel finally got to use her birthright: the power to bite an unspeakable servant and convert it to obey only her commands. She bit into the first of Lucky's servants, PUNISHMENT, and bound it to her. The second, VIRTUE, realized it wasn't going to escape, and violently ejected Lucky toward earth in an attempt to save her from Rachel's wrath. The witch went spinning into the dark water of the bay a mile below, disappearing from sight. Rachel really hoped she didn't die when she hit the ocean. She was worried that Lucky had designated her a magickal proxy, and any attempt on her life risked killing Rachel instead.
Rachel and her servants climbed down the moon ladder back to earth. After a short negotiation, Genesis Peru and Granny Ethel agreed to give Rachel the "mother" seat that they had reserved for Lucky, making her a member of the triune. Reba found Alice behind the statue, reloading her revolver. They commended the smoking mage on her quick reflexes, and assured her the danger was passed.
It turned out, they would need Alice's powers again before the night was over. After that brief episode of trying to kill each other, the Bao Down gang, Granny Ethel and Genesis Peru rediscovered that they still agreed on all the stuff they agreed about before. Like disliking the Brahimin Occult society's leader Coffin and his habit of dealing drugs that enslaved people as ghost slaves. And they were just a short walk away. And they had a big pile of unspeakable servants and powerful mages to put the hurt on the fat WASP wizard.
Alice used the last of her sig charges to turn the outer wall of the BOS clubhouse into smoke, but discovered only an empty room. They had to go in through the front door, and face the clockwork samsara. Rachel used her Merchant powers to buy invulnerability from one of her abominable unspeakable servants, making her immune to damage. Good thing too. She went in first, and immediately caught a dagger to the heart from the Society's caretaker, Salisbury. The killer butler was quickly subdued, and the rest of the gang accompanied the unharmed Rachel up the stairs to the samsara.
The clockwork samsara was locked, eye closed, pendulum hanging silent, wheels arranged in a configuration that would lead nowhere. The team recognized it as dangerous, and brought in Raul the Mechanomancer, captain of the Ice Man truck, to take a look. In exchange, they promised he could keep the samsara once he'd unlocked it. Raul massaged the clicking wheels to avoid the various hells and netherscapes that the wheel could transport intruders to, and got the gang into the clubhouse.
The clubhouse was abandoned. The weapons and artifacts were stripped from the display rooms. The paintings were intact, but all the people in them had been replaced by skeletons. In the study, Coffin's massive skeleton sat on the couch, grossly fat even without any flesh to coat it. In his lap sat a tureen shaped like a crab. In his forehead was a bore hole, like a third eye. Granny Ethel pulled some gutter magic, using a bone and the crab tureen to create an improvised compass to see if Coffin had escaped his body and gone somewhere else. The bone spun around wildly, indicating a result of straight down. He'd gone through the tureen. Into the pool rooms.
This was not acceptable. Genesis Peru loaned the cabal the rubber raiding boat she used when she went through the pool rooms to open a portal to the moon. The team spent some magick charges in the backroom of the Salem McDonalds to open up a portal, and down they went, searching for whatever Coffin had turned himself into.
In the pool rooms, sitting in the rubber raft with his rifle, DBD closed his eyes and used the connection to the water he acquired from drinking the poolman to visualize where Coffin had fled to. He had the impression of a worm, swimming through the water like a planaria, eyes sensing light only vaguely, navigating by other senses. He knew where to go. They set off into the tunnels.
The boat approached one of the large galleries the tunnels sometimes opened up into. DBD's awareness of the creature he was tracking ended abruptly, as though it had been devoured by something larger. The chamber ahead stank of rotting compost.
It was the pile, or a smaller version of it, sloughing out of a tunnel, whipping its tendrils around, flinging broken glass and rusty nails. Tal freaked out. DBD shot the beast with a burst from his galil. Tal panic cast their antimagick ability, preventing the Pile from rusting his weapon into uselessness with a detritomancy spell. DBD shot it again and killed it. Of Coffin, there was no sign. His degraded form was either devoured by the thing, or passed beyond DBD's awareness and escaped. The cabal turned the boat around and went back to the surface.
Endemic Spice was waiting for them in the McDonalds. They were on their way to the airport, but stopped by to give DBD one final gift. Art handed DBD a white box, and gave him a stern warning: the pepper inside would kill him. DBD asked if it would give him a major charge. Art winked.
DBD opened the box, intent on eating the pepper immediately. The rest of the cabal rushed to stop him.
Freeze frame.
THE END.
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