xp_logs | Fenrisulfr - Cult of Personality (Reply)

Doug wakes up in the cultists' camp. He does his best to bluff his way out of things, but gets caught short when the leader of the cult gives him a task to prove his worth.

Doug grunted as he came to. His head felt like it was about three sizes too small to hold his brain, and there was a disturbing ringing in his ears that wasn't going away. He rolled over, trying to get back to sleep, then paused, clearly puzzled as he felt the hard surface underneath him. He brought one hand up to try and feel for his pillow, but both hands came up together. Slowly, his brain began to catch up, and he remembered the library, and getting slammed in the back of the head as a pair of burly blond cultists frowned at him.

He rolled back over and levered himself up to a sitting position, testing the zipcuffs that bound his wrists. This was absolutely Not Good.

"You will sit quietly and not move until you are told." One of them grunted, in heavily accented English. "Or else." He rested one hand on his bulging jacket pocket, obviously weighed down with a handgun appropriately sized for 'very large Nordic man'. He turned to the other blond man guarding Doug and nodded towards the door, speaking in a harsh language. "~One's awake, go tell Bjarne. And check on the other two, just in case. We can't afford to fuck this up any more.~"

Guns. Why did it always have to be guns? Doug's mind raced. The man was speaking the Giant dialect of Asgardian, just like the cultists who had attacked Shiro had. Which meant they were the same people. They'd walked right into a trap. Time to see if he could squeeze his way out of it.

"~You have no idea how badly you've fucked up, you cretin,~" he told the guard in the same language. "~Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting? How difficult it was to maneuver those two girls to the proper place at the proper time? Release me,~" he barked in a commanding tone.

The guard actually barked out a laugh, despite the surprised look on his face at Doug's choice of language. "It looked to me like you had maneuvered one of them right where you wanted. We fucked up? I wasn't the one halfway down that pretty redhead's mouth while your blonde friend was getting tied up." He kept to the Giant dialect, with Norwegian filling in places where his grasp of Asgardian didn't meet up with what he wanted to say.

Doug's accent and command of the dialect was clearly better, as he never had to resort to fumbling around for a word or speaking in Norwegian. "Well, I had to get my enjoyment somehow while I was waiting for you idiots, didn't I?" he asked testily. He really never was going to be able to live that down.

The guard paused, obviously thinking things over. "What are you talking about? I don't know you, you aren't one of us. You do not worship the old Gods." Or did he? He looked at Doug carefully. He was small, and a bit short, certainly, but blond, and healthy, and he could have blended in with any crowd in Oslo.

Doug sighed in put-upon fashion, then spoke slowly as if he were explaining things to a child. A very -slow- child. "Would I speak this dialect, and better than you, if I didn't worship the Aesir?" he asked the guard. "How would I even know of this language's existence? Are you really so egotistical as to believe your group is the only one in the entire world that practices the old ways?"

"Of course not! We are simply the most dedicated to the sly one." The guard said. His prisoner did have a point. The language was obscure and hard to learn, and he did speak it better then anyone except Bjarne. And Bjarne had been studying it for thirty years. And he might even speak it better than Bjarne did. "I need to speak to our leader." He explained. "You stay here.. no. No, wait, you come with me. I don't want you alone and trying to sneak off. For all I know, you've gone to one of those American colleges where they give you a degree in basket weaving and languages no one speaks anymore."

"Very well," Doug acquiesced. He got to his feet awkwardly, then gestured with his bound wrists. He thought about asking to be cut free, but better to move things along slowly. "Lead on."

--

Bjarne Olsen was a startling average looking man. Thick dark brown hair and beard, only a few inches taller then Doug and he didn't exude the outright aura of Viking-ness that both of the guards had. But unlike the guards or cultists that had attacked them in the library, he wore a set of robes over his pants and shirt, and had several runed rings on his fingers, and a necklace depicting Loki as a horned man carrying a sprig of mistletoe. After the guard explained the situation, with many interupptions from Bjarne, he waved him off and turned towards Doug. "You worship the Aesir, and speak the old languages?" He questioned. "How is this?"

"You are aware that I've -been- to Asgard?" Doug asked Bjarne, slightly incredulous. When Bjarne looked back at him blankly, and slightly unbelievingly, he snorted. "You've been tracking us, and you don't even know that we've already been there?"

Bjarne let out an obviously frustrated groan. "If you must know, the scrying ritual was only focused on those people who have used runic or Aesir magic. As you must know, It is impossible for any Midgardian to open the gates to Asgard alone, we had hoped to find a battery to fuel a group effort." At Doug's nod, he continued. "Midgard, Earth, if you must call it that, is weak and impure and must be destroyed. If we must bring about Ragnarok to do so, then so be it."

Ragnarok. Not only were they a crazy Aesir-worshipping cult, they were a crazy -apocalyptic- Aesir-worshipping cult. "Finally, someone who understands," he said in a relieved tone. "I've been trying to get back ever since they made me use the blonde's power to return us to Midgard. I have all the knowledge, and that British bitch gets all the power? I ask you, is that fair?"

Bjarne narrowed his eyes at Doug. "The blonde is the magician? But you used her power? How? Tell me!" He rubbed his hands together in eagerness. "How did you share her power and leave her alive? Why did she let you?" He reached deeply into the pocket of his robes and pulled out a long and twisted looking knife. "Here, let me cut those ties off you, and you can show me exactly what you did to the blonde." He neatly snapped the plastic ziptie with a quick slash of the knife and yelled back towards the guard who had brought Doug to him. "Go get the red haired girl!"

"Blood transference," Doug said simply. Judging from the use of the blood eagle, he didn't think he was giving them anything they didn't already know. "I still have the scar over my heart." Meanwhile, his mind was racing. He doubted that 'get the red haired girl' meant 'oh, we're sorry for the confusion, here's your girlfriend back'.

"You had to accept her blood?" Bjarne asked, intrigued. "That must be the step we are missing, it wasn't in any of the records, none of what I've translated. So many failures, so much wasted time, and all for that? I should have guessed at that!" He threw his arms up in the air in obvious disgust with himself. "Well, perhaps the fates deemed it necessary. It did weed out the weak and unwilling, and put us in the right place to find you. I take it that you knew that Japanese who sent my man back with second degree burns? Or your women knew him?"

As he spoke, he walked towards the trio of wooden storage sheds where Doug had woken up, and presumably where Marie-Ange and Amanda were. "What is taking him so long?" He asked, obviously thinking out loud. "Probably went to go smoke a cigarette. It is a huge problem here, everyone smokes. You don't, do you?"

Doug shook his head. "Hardly anyone in America does, these days. Government keeps legislating and raising taxes." He tried to keep his answers short, as Bjarne clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Perhaps he'd let something important slip, something that would enable them to escape.

As they approached the sheds, the sounds of a struggle became more apparent, and then the guard, practically dragging Marie-Ange, came from behind one of the sheds. She had the guard's jacket wrapped around her head, mud and grass stains covering her pants, and the guard's arm wrapped tightly around her neck. "The bitch -bit- me and tried to run." he said, showing Bjarne and Doug his free arm, with a oval of teeth marks on his forearm. He looked at Doug and grinned ferally. "If you want any help ripping her lungs out, just say the word."

Doug's gaze was locked on the guard and Marie-Ange, so he nearly didn't notice when Bjarne held the dagger out to him. It was obvious what the cult's leader intended for him to do with it. They'd badly underestimated these people. The mistaken identity issues had led them to believe that the cult was incompetent, but it was clear that Bjarne had a healthy helping of cunning.

Doug's carefully constructed bluff came apart at the idea that they wanted him to mutilate or kill his own girlfriend. He'd been able to pose as someone who wanted power at all costs, but he couldn't go through with it. The panicked look on his face said everything Bjarne needed to know.

"Weak, or unwilling?" Bjarne asked, repeating his words from earlier. "Which is it?" He shrugged diffidently and flipped the dagger in his hand deftly. "You've told me all I need to know. If the ritual tomorrow is a success with the blonde, I might let you live long enough to see Ragnarok. You may give your regards to Odin, or Thor, or whomever you worship." He gestured with the dagger at the middle shed. "Inside. And do not try to escape, we will be watching." He paused, and without taking his eyes off Doug. "Put the red head back in with her friend. Tape her mouth shut, she obviously likes using it."

Doug walked to the shed in a sort of daze. He thought briefly about resisting, but the way Bjarne held the knife made him remember the words of his martial arts instructor. "Rule one of knife fighting: if there's a knife, someone's getting cut." And judging from the competent way Bjarne handled it, Doug suspected it would be him.

Bjarne merely gave him a shove into the shed, and the 'snick' of a padlock was audible as they locked him in. Doug sat on the ground, his head in his hands. It had gone well, right up until Bjarne called his bluff. Time to come up with another plan. If they had time.

Absently, Doug reached under himself to pull out something sharp that was poking him in the rear end. Before he tossed it aside, he glanced down at it. Then his eyes widened and he looked around the rest of the shed. The shattered remains of Doug, Amanda, and Marie-Ange's cell phones lay strewn about. Doug moved quickly and silently around the shed, gathering all the components into a pile. In his posturing, Bjarne had forgotten to order Doug bound again.

Stripping the external casings away, Doug carefully examined the circuit boards and modules. All he needed was one working keypad, a transmitter, and a GPS module. "Time to see if hanging around and tinkering with Forge and Mark pays off," he muttered, taking a loose wire and biting to strip the insulation off. He twisted that wire around another one, hoping and praying that it would actually work. He just needed to be able to send one transmission to get the cavalry coming.