Chronicles of The Omniverse Archived Downtown Saint Lemeux

The woman's playing grew more aggressive as the boy became stressed, trying to lure as much attention away from the incident as she could. Her body was at the fountain, but her mind's eye was elsewhere, overlooking the transgression.
 
The smoke uselessly blew apart as he ran through it, eliciting a frustrated groan from Tethys. Of course the paladin would draw his gun on a teenage boy. She expected such a thing, but had some inkling of hope that he wouldn't. So much for hope. Her smoke recollected at her feet into a thick, acrid pool only a yard in diameter. Even if others were watching, she had to be faster than the boy, somehow. As if a hole in the floor appeared, she fell into the smoke, which proceeded to slither across the floor in a serpentine manner, and much faster than Fabre could have hoped to run on foot.

As it caught up to the fleeing youth, he would feel his footfalls growing heavier, being weighed down by some unseen force, before long every step would become like stepping through mud, then like quicksand, to anchor him in place.
 
Shit!

The kid ran. He did not need the kid running. But running was what the boy was doing.

"Look kid, it's best to stop running! I don't want to have to cause any harm, so just stop now and we can sort this out!" He glanced at the scanner. It was definitely in this area. Whatever was here, it was either the boy or something possibly more sinister. Looking around he tried to assess the civilian risk. It was his job to ensure that the civilians remained safe. That there was no loss of life - no risk to them.

Was it worth telling people to evacuate? What was the risk of not having people evacuate? The place was packed with holiday shoppers. He grabbed his radio instead, deciding to call back to base.

"I have a situation down here at the Mall. I think I'll need back up. I'm unsure as to what the disturbance is. There is a boy running... Looks like he could be slowing down. Shall I evacuate? It was packed with shoppers here, it's thinned a lot but still, people are here. With an unknown... I'm not sure what the risk will be to civilian life should they stay."

It didn't take long for a response to come back.

"Evacuate. We'll see if we can get some other's to assist." A male voice came back.

Mat put his radio back and looked at the remaining people. "Evacuate now! Get out." Him running, with his gun out, and ordering an evacuation, should hopefully point out at how dangerous he thought the situation could be, which would be enough to get any remaining lurkers out of immediate danger.
 
"What..." the youth struggled as he found himself gradually unable to move. Panic seized him. "No... wait... stop it! Let me go!" He squirmed in place, his feet stuck in the ground as if weighed by an anchor.

He looked over his shoulder at the advancing paladin. Oh god. He was getting closer.

"Please, don't..." Sweat mopped his forehead. Veins pulsed from his skin. His heartbeat was a drum in his ears. "No... no... no..." He curled into a ball on the floor... before a shockwave of force exploded around him, shattering the glass windows of the nearby shops.

Mat's scanner would detect a sudden surge of arcane energy. Both Tethys and the musician would detect a new, immensely powerful aura emitting from the boy.

He looked over his shoulder at the knight. The whites of his eyes had turned pitch black. He grinned.

"Yes."
 
There was no time to even register what happened. The scanner beeped, and suddenly glass was breaking and Mat was flat on his back a few feet from where he'd been running towards. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he lay there stunned. His gun was no longer in his hand, nor was his scanner, both scattered just out of his reach.

It took him a few minutes to become aware of the situation again and get himself standing again, his body hurt from the impact, but he was still in one piece.

The boy's eyes changed colour and Mat frowned. He glanced around for his Lawkeeper. He saw it to the right and slowly started to move towards it while keeping his eyes on the boy, not saying anything just yet. The situation was suddenly very dangerous.
 
-----------

Arianne Fabre sat alone at a table for three in the corner of a cafe. The paladin Durandet had requested to meet her, but he and the guest he wanted to bring were late, as the witch expected. A pale hand briefly ran over her opposite sleeve, feeling the outline of the sacrificial knife hidden along her forearm. She couldn't remember how long it's been since she didn't keep it on her person.

Her cellphone sat at the edge of the table, distinctly lacking any new messages, much to Fabre's annoyance.
 
The phone buzzed a moment later with a text.

RUNNING LATE, HELD UP @ MONSTRY. HELP THE KID AND THE DURID, ULL KNO THEM WHEN U SEE THEM

A moment later.

DRUID*

Arianne wouldn't have to wait long. Not two minutes later, a young, handsome-looking lad and an auburn haired lass entered the cafe. Fabre, with her sensitivity to magic auras, would likely pick up on the latent natural energies resonating within the girl. The boy waived down a server.

"Scuse' me. We're supposed to meet a friend here."
 
As Aoife stepped into the cafe, wearing a pale cream shirt to replace the black strips she'd ripped her last shirt into, she inhaled deeply, the heady aromas of both the drinks and the people swarming into her and bringing her to a fully alert state. It had been a while since she'd gotten some good sleep, and she was finally feeling the effects. As she relaxed in the scents, her aura became stronger, the excess natural energy actually shimmering into the visible spectrum ever so briefly as a soft amber glow on her skin before fading to nothing.

She looked around, as if to spot the witch just by look alone, but everyone in the place seemed reasonably normal, so she stayed close to Kol. As she waited, she fiddled with a strand of curly, copper-colored hair that had fallen out of the heavy braid draped comfortably over on shoulder, twirling the already curly lock as she began to zone out slightly.

If the witch was here, she'd certainly recognize the druid, if by nothing else than by the massive, dark-blue tattoo clearly visible on her right arm as it ran from under her sleeve down to the back of her hand.
 
Arianne instinctively glanced up at the chime of the doorbell. With Durandet's text she easily identified the two new patrons as her contacts, and waved them over. She snickered a little to herself at realizing just who the druid was, having encountered her once before. The smallness of such a vast world was hard to accept sometimes. She frowned slightly at the druid's glowing, but dismissed it after a few moments.

The chairs at her table slid out to let someone sit in them, but nobody had touched them yet.
 
Kol looked over at the chairs moving of their own accord.

"Ah. I think I see our friend now..."

He led Aoife over to the Arianne. "Hey, are you Arianne? Savien told us to meet with you. I'm Kol, this is Aoife." He smiled and gestured to the druid.

"I think she's been looking for you."
 
Aoife looked at the woman for a moment, but didn't recognize her right away. She hadn't really managed to get a good look at her the last time they'd been near one another, so her memory wasn't the clearest on what Adrianne looked like, but there were enough similarities that she could at least accept them as the same. Without more than a moment's pause, the druid seated herself, trying to think of what to say.

So many things had happened since that day int he forest, and she still didn't have answers. She had inklings and insinuations that something dangerous was going on, but nobody had been straight up with her yet, and so she was still in the dark. Hopefully this woman would be able to provide at least a few answers or, barring that, a lead to where answers could be found. As these thoughts raced through her mind, still Aoife remained at a loss for words. After an awkward pause, she finally opened her mouth.

"Oi can't say for certain if it's pleasure to meet you or not, Miss Adrianne, but that's only because Oi'm not sure where we stand with one another." She scolded herself mentally, realizing that this wasn't the best way to start the conversation.
 
Last edited:
The elder witch glanced across Kol, then Aoife. She knew many magicians were poor conversationalists, but she couldn't help to judge them anyways. She and her coven had collective millennia of practice, even if much of that time was spent in complete isolation from the outside world. The pair had only uttered a few sentences each, and Fabre was already growing bored of them. Roundabout greetings, vague attempts to gauge relations and power, it tired her patience.

"I'd appreciate if the point of this meeting was brought up sooner rather than later. The paladin failed to tell me why exactly you two wanted to speak with me." She did not hide her impatient tone, even if she didn't have any appointments to see. She simply wanted to be doing something else.
 
Kol lounged next to Aoife, idly perusing a menu. It'd been a good few hours since he'd had a proper meal and the young scoundrel was feeling hungry. Gunfights and grand theft auto were occupational hazards of living in Lutetia, but an empty stomach was unacceptable. Barring all other pleasantries, a Lutetian should always be well fed.

He peeked over the menu and perked a brow at Arianne's impatience. The scoundrel grinned, folding his list of the afternoon's specials and giving Aoife a nudge. "See Aoife? I told you we should have gone for the 'classical' approach." He leaned forward with brows knit, gruffing at Arianne in his best impression of Macbeth. "How now you secret, black, and midnight hag! What is t'you do?"

He smiled. His Scottish brogue was impeccable.
 
So the witch wanted to be brusque? That would be all to the better then. Aoife's eyes gained a faint ring of amber at the outer edges as her emotions mixed with her magic. She cleared her throat.

"You were in Lornanine recently, and while here you woke a manticore which you then fled from, leaving none but me to take care of the problem. While manticores aren't the worst trouble, they're still a mess to deal with, and Oi'd like to know just exactly why you thought it would be a good idea to traipse through my forest like you owned the damn place, when you barely belong outside a god-damned library where you can practice your flighty little bits of spellwork while staying all secretive, as if it were some secret only you knew about and couldn't let the world in on it." As she spoke, the druid's voice grew louder and more angry. By the end, she was standing with her hands pressed down on the tabletop, speaking rather loudly but not quite yelling.

She realized that she'd lost the little amount of decorum she'd had when they got here and seated herself, taking a few calming breaths.

"Oi want to know what the hell is going in this damned city, because it must be pretty massive for your kind to come to my forest."
 
"Your forest? That's cute, really," Arianne grinned wide, almost devilishly so. "I'll have you know I've been living and operating in those forests longer than you, your grandparents, your great grandparents and their great grandparents, combined. Additionally, I am not even the elder of my coven, I'm simply the only one that bothers truly interacting with the outside world. I would ask you to hold your tongue, child." Sinister, all-but-invisible wisps flowed from the multicentennial witch, the strands of darkness harmless but nonetheless unsettling. "If Archdruid Ylva, a colleague of mine, wasn't busy, I'd have her deal with you, but I'll make this easy to understand for you. If I were to spend all my time dealing with manticores and other simple beasts, I wouldn't be able to perform my duties as a Fabre. You do not want me to fail in my duties, nor does every soul, living and dead, on Issunar."

The dark witch stood up once her coffee was finished, and began to walk. "You can gnash and rage all you like, but I am a busy witch. I'm disappointed that this is what Paladin Durandet called me directly to speak to. I was expecting something less of a waste of my time."
 
"I suppose Paladin Durandet was thinking of the city's welfare and saving innocent lives," Kol mused, "y'know... 'altruism', 'honor'... all those pesky little trivialities his Order seems so fond of. Really, the nerve of the man. You think he'd know that your time is more valuable than say, a dozen or so humans mauled to death."

While the scoundrel kept teasing, he couldn't help notice Aoife's growing anger. The druid was having a much more difficult time shrugging off Arianne's obviously baited barbs. He supposed she didn't have as much experience in verbal combat, growing up with her father in Lornaine.

"Aoife, come on," he said as Arianne began to walk away. "She's not worth it. We can deal with this on our own."
 
Even with Kol trying to guide her away from the conflict here, she wouldn't back away without saying something.

"You...You hag. You ugly, worthless speck of putrefied vermin. You think to talk to a guardian of Nature as if Oi were no more than a passing urchin on the street, just because you're older. Age does not beget wisdom, and neither does power. You might've existed in the forest, but you've never lived there. You don't know the creatures like Oi do, because to you they're nothing but animals, or worse, test subjects." She jabbed a finger towards the woman as she retreated from Aoife and the table. "Your Archdruid and Oi can talk as much as we'd like, and there'd likely be some understanding, but a foolish old witch, but form you I expect I'll get less proper conversation than I would from the meanest maggot to crawl from Hell's own anus."

She was letting her anger affect her, both causing her emotions to spiral in onto themselves and continue to cause her to spit vitriol as well as cause her power to begin fluctuating. Ripples of amber light shimmered into view around her, pulsing in random directions, from her feet to her hips, her shoulders to her elbows, down one leg and up her neck, and even just swiping back and forth across her torso at every angle. Despite the strength of that power, she didn't bother trying to grab it. She let it run wild, not caring because this gods-forsaken woman had the gall to insult her when she had tried to come here to work out something potentially beneficial for them all.

"If you think you're so amazing, then lets see you stand against Old Winter itself. Oi'd love to watch you get your ass mauled by forces nobody understands anymore, because that's what Oi think we're up against, but you don't seem to care. Go sit by your cauldron with your coven around you to help you feel safe, because gods know that it won't do a lick of good when the time comes." Her anger seemed to be steadying out, but the ripples of light were growing more frequent, and the barest hint of a tremble in the ground could be felt. She blinked, and her eyes shone with the same light that had now suffused her from all angles, a steady amber light flowing out from her.

"Domhain, crith agus crush an talamh ar a dtréim. Glacaim orm ort an ithir a sracadh agus na clocha a dhéanamh thíos faoi deara faoi na cumhachtaí uamhnach atá agat. Cuir in iúl mo naimhde an fórsa atá tú go fírinneach, agus ná déan dearmad ar aon neart. Domhain, múscadh agus eagla a chur faoi deara iad siúd nach meas tú," she said, and the tremble from before became significantly worse as Aoife's lips curled into a small smile.
 
Arianne halted at the sounds of a Druidic incantation, and waited. The witch went so far as to tap on her phone as she waited for Aoife to finish. She even chuckled at her device, all but ignoring the druid's light show.

"Oh you have to see this, this cat's trying to jump onto the counter but he keeps slipping!" Fabre giggled and held her phone out for the pair to see. "Ylva just sent me that, she always finds the best ones," she sighed in amusement as her silvered gaze scanned the 'contact'. On and on they prattled, less and less she cared. "Clearly you won't understand, so I won't bother explaining it to you any further. And unless you want me trapping 'Old Winter' in a jar and making it cool frozen peas for me, I'd recommend you think twice."

Arianne turned away once more, a fur coat appearing from thin air as she pivoted, phone in hand. "Peons, always so territorial," the elder witch remarked aloud, mostly to herself.
 
Though the Fabre remained unconcerned with Aoife's display of power, the common bystanders were far less indifferent. People clutched one another for support as glasses rattled on tables, several empty chairs falling over and clattering on the floor. Some looked up at the druid and gave a cry of terror, shrinking away from the waves of arcane light radiating from her person.

But something underscored the quake - a deep rumbling, more synthetic than natural, which thrummed into the shifting tectonic plates and added to the groaning of the earth. A monastic destrier pulled up to the cafe not a moment later and Sir Savien Durandet swiftly dismounted the bike. He shot Arianne a brief, familiar glare as he passed her and walked towards the druid. He stopped roughly twenty-five feet away.

"Aoife," he said, "you need to calm down." His hands weren't near his weapons, but his whole body looked tense - loaded and primed to act.

Kol lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. Several of the cafe customers had removed their phones and were calling the police.
 
At Savien's words, Aoife turned to look at him. Despite the growin vioence of the quake, she was completely calm. Almost eerily so. She took a step toward him, causing Kol's hand to slide gently over her shoulder, her balance entirely on the balls of her feet. She simply smiled at him.

"Oi'm perfectly calm, Knight." She raised one hand, a ball of golden light coalescing above her palm, almost seemingly supported by her half-curled fingers. She looked at it, smiling. "The witch decided to test me, either by feigning disinterest, or by simply deciding to insult me and my kind. Oi'll not tolerate it. We're a dying group, and while this may not help the situation, one less dissenter might not be the worst thing the world has seen."

The quake continued to grow worse, tables rocking back and forth, causing glasses to fall off and shatter. She took no notice, as if everything were perfectly fine, and to her, it was. She was in control of the stones beneath her, the very bedrock upon which the building rested was her thrall. She shifted, lowering her arm and then flaring both arms out to the sides at her hips, a crack splitting the sidewalk outside with a loud report.

"Come now, Arianne. Oi know you're strong of talk, and likely strong in magic as well, but surely you can't simply disregard nature so much. Perhaps you'd like to explain to the officers who are no doubt on their way here right now to apprehend me how you destroyed public and private property just because you couldn't handle dealing with someone who earnestly wanted to help others, even if they wanted an apology from you first? Surely your pride is not so great as that, is it?"

The ground continued to shake, splinters cracking up and into the air from the floorboards as they strained under the immense motions. Along the crack outside, several more small shears in the concrete joined the first. All the while, the glow around Aoife only seemed to grow thicker and more potent.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top