Claudine Vega sat in the back of a well-loved Ford Escape, flanked by a pair of greaseballs with concealed firearms bulging out of their stained polo shirts. A third wise guy drove the car, and Claudine actually recognized him. Troy Gottardi, a Genovese family hood. Getting into a car with these idiots was a bad idea for a caster, ever since the New York families declared war on all "satanic black magic shit" in their territory. But Vega had an angle. It was 2004, the monsters keeping magick users from gaining charges in New York City were dead. She was going to get a slice of the treasure. If the mobsters recognized her on sight as a sorceress who could answer their questions, it meant her scheme was working.
The mobsters picked Claudine Vega up at H'ist Dat Rag, a gay bar in the Bowery where she spent the previous couple hours arguing with people. It was maybe 3 AM and they were on the way to the Fresh Kills Landfill, a decommissioned garbage dump brought back to life by the local authorities as a sorting ground for 9/11 debris. The mobsters didn't want to talk but Vega broke through their facade and extracted information from them with friendly conversation. Something was up with the capo's daughter and the mobsters were shaking down wizards for information. By the time they reached the landfill they were embarrassed to have kidnapped her at all, and tried to pretend the original plan wasn't to interrogate her at gunpoint and then leave her body in the trash for the forensic investigators to dig up alongside all the asbestos caked bones of the World Trade Center victims. She negotiated with Troy while Slow Eddie and Mazama smoked and stared at the city lights in the distance. They'd take Claudine to meet with Nico Ambrosio, the captain in charge of their little crew. He'd tell her what the problem was and she'd put her occult contacts to work solving his problem.
Claudine spotted a figure in a trash bag ghillie suit picking its way through the rubble. She pointed it out to Troy who immediately pulled out his gun and and advanced, telling the civilian he didn't see nothing and needed to back off. A rebar arrow came sailing out of the middens and hit the greaseball in the thigh, narrowly missing his femoral artery. Claudine retreated into the car, Mazama panic fired his little wheel gun into the heaped garbage while Eddie dragged the wounded man back to the vehicle. With everyone loaded into the sedan they peeled out of the dump. Something large swooped overhead, blocking out the floodlights and spraying masonry dust all over the car. Claudine tried to get a good look at it and was almost hit in the eye by another rebar arrow that penetrated the rear window. Vega recovered her composure and patiently explained that the dump was colonized by a cabal of violently territorial trash mages. The mobsters swore they would return with shotguns and molotovs to burn the ragmen out, but right now the priority was the capo's daughter.
The gangsters dropped Claudine off at Lobsternado, a shitty seafood restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. Mazama took her inside while Eddie drove Troy away to get his leg looked at. Inside, Nico Ambrosio sat facing the door and ate shrimp and corn from a steamer bucket. He was thin but sweaty and he swore at his underling through a mouthful of seafood. Who was this woman and why was she still alive? Mazama explained that she could help save his daughter if he explained the problem to her. Nico grunted and laid out the situation. His little girl was sick, real Exorcist type shit. Could Claudine save her? Vega thought about it and said she could find people to help. The capo gave her twenty four hours to show up at a brownstone in the east village with a cure. He scribbled the address on a damp napkin and told her the clock was ticking. She didn't want to make him find her. Mazama told her on the way out that Nico had been an ornery fuck ever since he quit smoking. He gave her a number she could call if she needed to talk before the meet, but only to arrange a conversation in person. There were things you didn't discuss over the phone.
Vega decided to ask George Gets Fired for help. The cabal of ageing videomancers had spent years making artifacts using charges they got from Seinfeld, allowing them to retain much of their power after the show stopped airing new episodes. She headed for the subway station and noticed a figure in an alley that looked suspiciously like the trash bag man from the dump. And another. A whole crowd of black plastic figures that made noises like crows. Some wore articles of clothing, others arranged shiny objects from the loose bags of trash piled in alleys. All of them followed Claudine. They crowed louder until one got bold enough to throw a bottle, which hit her in the collarbone. She shouted at them and they shouted back. They could only speak two words at a time but they told her the men she was with were bad men who hurt birds. She surmised that the mobsters had probably killed one of the trash bag men trying to get info about the capo's daughter. She tried to explain the situation and Mazama came barreling down the street, shouting at the strange hobos to leave her alone. Faced with a superior adversary the hooded figures scattered. One got caught climbing a fence and tore its trash bag open. A bunch of crows flew out of the plastic sack, which fell to the ground in the vague shape of a man. Mazama kept his cool and didn't try to shoot the corvids as they ascended, knowing he couldn't hit them with a pistol at this distance. Claudine didn't feel good about helping the mob, who were just a bunch of piece of shit landlords for crime, but told herself it was all part of the plan.
The Demagogue fought through exhaustion and made it to Bryant Park in time to catch the cabal. Three middle aged mages in cosplay at a chess table with a portable TV and VHS player.
- A Black guy with a bald head, glasses and flannel.
- A Chinese lady with curled hair and a lightweight jacket.
- A White guy in brownface with a chef's uniform and mustache.
Across the park a group of local teens played basketball with two enormous twins, who looked almost identical aside from being male and female. The big lady went for a layup, noticed Claudine and tossed the ball over the backboard. Rather than retrieve it she swaggered across the court and went to talk with her male counterpart, who hit up a payphone rather than continue the game. Vega noted the musclebound duo's interest and tried to strike up a conversation with the Videomancers. The guy dolled up as the Soup Nazi cut her off and angrily pointed at the empty chair. She sat down and endured The Contest, speaking up again when the episode was finished.
Vega talked with the guy dressed like George while the others rewound the tape and argued over what to play next. He told her the twin superathletes were Stavros and Stella Hurtwater. Originally one guy, they spent a major to split in two so they'd always have someone to compete/play with. Also, they were Sleepers, which explained their interest in Claudine. This was a problem, but Claudine had a bigger one. She was on the hook to the mafia to cure the capo's daughter of possession. Old man Costanza wasn't happy that she came straight to him while probably under gangster surveillance, but she talked him into helping. Nico's crew would keep killing mages until the problem was solved, so un-possessing his daughter would benefit everyone. The lady dressed as Elaine gave the Demagogue an address in the Meatpacking district where she could pick up an item that would solve the problem.
On the way to the subway, Claudine passed three Cliomancers stuck in a standoff outside the magic carousel.
- Boss Tweed wore a top hat, American flag cape, a big Freemason amulet, and a dead rabbit on a stick.
- John Dee Rockafeller wore nothing but Lenape beadwork, draped in layers across her body from her hair down to her toes.
- JP Mordiggian wore the winter uniform of a Union soldier from the Civil War, accessorized with chains of iron, bronze and silver.
There was no helping them, not at the moment. Realistically they'd all point fingers at each other until Monica Barburry showed up and scared them all off.
The meet was Food Wall, a dim sum place where Claudine waited maybe ten minutes for service before finally flagging down a passing waiter and asking if they had something for her. The guy went in the back and came out twenty minutes later with a mannequin on a handtruck. He took the truck away and left Vega with the statue, along with a post-it note explaining how it worked. The mannequin absorbed harmful magick directed at any person whose clothes it wore. A trivial solution to the possession problem if she could just get it across town. It was bulky but not heavy, she slung it over her shoulder and almost decapitated it going out the door onto the street.
Stavros waited for Claudine on the subway platform, dressed in a Talking Heads style oversized suit that was probably the only one he could find which fit. He pretended not to notice her but she walked over to him and asked what the deal was. He offered her a handkerchief which he fished out of his giant pocket with chopsticks. She declined to take it and he thrust it at her, but nearly fell over when she neatly dodged and boarded the train. Stella came down the stairs after him but it was too late.
There was another trash bag crow man in the alley outside the brownstone where Vega brought the doll to meet up with the mobsters. She talked with it, hoping to avert a full scale war between the cabal of corvid rag pickers and the mob. It told her she needed to confer with Asbestos in the city dump. Was that the large bird that sprayed dust all over the gangsters' car? Before she could investigate further a hood she hadn't seen before burst out of the row house and chased the birdman off with a baseball bat. He and Slow Eddie invited her and the mannequin inside.
Nico Ambrosio scarfed ribs and let the bones fall to the floor outside his daughter's bedroom, more concerned with his child's health than keeping the rug free of sauce. He read Claudine the riot act, which she had heard before. She went in to un-possess Art. The Capo's daughter was tied to the bed and gagged to stop her self-mutilating or biting her tongue off. She laughed through the gag when Claudine came in, then stopped laughing when the Demagogue set down the statue and dressed it in a jacket from her wardrobe. The woman in the bed arched her back against the restraints, then stopped thrashing. The mannequin rattled like something inside was trying to escape.
A voice came from inside the doll. A stream of racial slurs for all of the Demagogue's possible ancestors. She let the demon exhaust itself and then got down to brass tacks. It was a spirit induced to possess the Capo's daughter. It hated the mafia because of what they did to its original body and wanted them all to suffer. She would wager with it to gain information. She would ask it twenty questions and it would answer truthfully. If she couldn't figure out who was behind the possession scheme by then, she would trick the Capo into allowing the spirit into his body.
Claudine very quickly figured out that the Sleepers were behind the possession scheme. The demon challenged her to double or nothing. She could ask forty total questions but would only win if she got the perpetrator's name. It was a gamble because she could only guess the name if the demon described someone she already knew. Art regained consciousness halfway through the game, but was unfazed by the talking doll. Big Jew, the mobster who chased off the crow man earlier with a bat, was more upset. He barged in when he heard an unfamiliar voice and nearly blew a hole in the doll with his holdout piece, only relenting when Claudine slammed the door on his arm.
Lucky for Vega, the man behind the possession game was someone she recognized based on the clues: the demonologist Dr Piter Ataturk. The guy was occult mainstream, a member of the Grolier Club and author of many publicly available papers on early modern grimoires. The demon was disappointed to be beaten but Vega wasn't done with him yet. She borrowed a big cardboard shipping box from the mobsters and carefully inserted the statue inside, avoiding skin contact, so it could be held and transported safely. Nico tried to act tough but when his daughter called his name he couldn't think of anything horrible to say to Claudine. The Demagogue had the crew of mobsters eating out of her hand. With them on her side, she could go to work on the Sleepers.
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