xp_logs | Wytchbrats do house calls

xp_forge posting in

Amanda, with her bag of witchy tricks, goes to pay a housecall on Forge at Maya's urging. Forge is, well, Forge, but all's well that ends in a long-distance phone call.

Forge still felt like he wanted to die but the insistent thumping noise wasn't - for once - coming from his head. Blearily, he lifted his head a few inches - which took maximum effort - and glared at the door to his room.

Thump.
Thump.
Thump.

"Go away." he said weakly, but the thumping refused to desist. He was just going to have to build himself a butler or a voice-controlled door or something so he could tell people to fuck off from across the room. But until that glorious day happened he was going to go have to deal with it himself.

He managed to disentangle himself from his sheets, and remembering the demons and the dead people he spent all of last night running from, he grabbed a .22, stuck it in his waistband, and then went to go glare at whoever was disrupting his sleep. His hair was a riotous mess, he wasn't wearing a shirt, and his sweats had definitely seen better days but right now he couldn't be arsed enough to care.

If it wasn't Maya he was going to be seriously tempted to just shoot whoever it was then go back to bed.

It wasn't Maya. Instead, the blonde Rom-by-way-of-England witch he'd met a total of once before was on his doorstep. In one hand she held a cardboard tray with two take-out coffees in it, with a plastic bag full of what seemed to be snacks hooked over her arm and over her shoulder was a leather satchel with what looked to be a bunch of dried vegetation sticking out of it.

"About time," was her greeting as he opened the door and made as if to push past him and into the room beyond. "Got you coffee and something to eat. You'll need it."

He thought about shooting her. But she liked punk and loud music and that stayed his admittedly scrambled brain from doing something unforgivable. He grunted, winced, then reached for one of the coffees. "Whaddyawant?" he grunted before he guzzled the coffee.

Ah, blessed coffee.

He was so going to be regretful if she turned out to be a demon better at hiding than the last blonde woman he'd laid eyes on and he had to shoot her for the greater good.

"Maya emailed me. About the other night. So I'm here to make sure things are all right." Amanda's tone was no-nonsense as she set the bag of food and her satchel down. "She said you were seeing demons."

"Someone must have slipped me something." he said, still taking hefty swallows of his coffee and heedless of the temperature of the liquid. "But before we get too much deeper into this, I'm gonna need you to prove to me you're not a demon." he said, his free hand inching towards his Sat Night Special. "On the off chance that someone didn't slip me something and the shit I was seeing was real."

"What would prove that I'm not?" she asked, turning to face him. "I can say I'm not, but I s'pose that's what a demon would say."

"Demons I know can't abide anything pure." he noted, taking another gulp of coffee and being almost down to the dregs. "They corrupt and despoil. Christian demons can't abide symbols of faith." he said. "So guess it depends on what you believe. I'd hate to accidentally shoot someone that's not a demon but I don't play on that side of the street."

His migraine, which had been fading, surged to the fore and Forge grunted as his stomach soured and his vision blurred.

Shoot? Amanda mentally kicked herself as she realised Forge was armed. She'd figured with the mansion's rules about weapons being locked up in personal gun safes when on site would have covered that, but of course a paranoid former Army bloke would be packing. She held out her hands, all the while mentally preparing a spell. Good thing she'd recharged recently. "Hey, I'm not exactly pure, but I'm not demonic, promise. I'm one of the good guys. I fight demons - that's why I'm here. To help you with the Adversary."

And that was the final straw. The Adversary was the enemy of his people. They were the watchers at the gate, the protectors of the People. And this colonizer was going to tell him how they should deal with his corrupt evil? Nope. Last straw. Out came the gun, but his eyesight was absolute shit due to the pounding in his head and, in his pain and grogginess, he'd neglected to make sure said gun was _loaded_ before he pulled the trigger.

Click.

Followed by a double thump - one organic, one not - as his knees hit the floor and his stomach rebelled. He kept his coffee down but it was a near thing indeed. Then a softer thump as the gun hit the ground as well.

Amanda watched from the safety of her shielding spell as Forge went down. She'd figured her words would spark a reaction of some sort, so she'd had the spell ready as soon as she stopped speaking. Now she dismissed it and moved towards Forge, kicking the gun away from his reach and putting a supporting arm around his shoulders. If he threw her off, fine, but she wasn't about to let him fall face first on the floor.

"Sorry about that," she said quietly as she patted his back. "You need help, Forge. Magical help. If you let me, I can help you with it."

Her touch felt strange to him - sparkly, almost like asphalt and concrete and glass. He managed to get to his feet mostly by using his good leg to do most of the work then getting the artificial one locked out to support him. "I do not need magical help." he growled. "What do you think you're going to do, bippity boppity the horrors away?"

She rolled her eyes. "Of course you don't," she replied, sarcastically. "You're doing just fine, what with seeing demons and dealing with one hell of a block on whatever actual magical power you have. Aspirin working on that headache, is it?"

"I've head headaches since I was a child. Comes and goes." he said, still a bit wobbly from brain-pain and he collapsed into a nearby chair rather than trust his meat leg to hold him up properly. "You want to bippity boppity? Go ahead. Can't exactly stop you." he said with a sigh. He was going to have to have some stern words with Maya when this nonsense was all said and done.

With this somewhat ungracious permission, Amanda gave a nod and started her preparations. Stinky leaves smoking in the ashtray she'd brought? Check. Aura-heightening tea for Forge? Check. Disgusting khaki green powder for her? Shudder and check. Once she'd gotten everything set up, she set the small earthenware cup of tea before Forge and stirred a spoonful of the power for her into a glass of water before sitting down opposite him. "Cheers," she said, holding up the glass to him.

"Harry Potter business." he said with a sigh, then tossed back her tea like it was a shot. Not that he drank, but you see and learn some shit when you're in the Army. The herbs were familiar, though. Power-heightening and, unless his herbology was complete shit, a boon to seeing that which was hidden.

Maybe she wasn't a complete idiot. Even if she did smell like ozone and bus fumes.

Amanda did the same, drinking back the water holding the aura-enhancing powder as fast as she could in the hopes that it wouldn't touch her taste buds. No such luck, and she grimaced as she set the glass down. "All right, let's get down to business," she said, shrugging her shoulders as if to settle herself and closing her eyes. When she opened them again, they glowed unnaturally green and her vision narrowed down to the man in front of her.

Her spell revealed a man in agony. His hair, normally thick and braided, lay lank and listless, dull from being unwashed and uncared-for. His hand and leg were still missing in his Astral form and his body was covered by what looked like thick dirty bulletproofed glass like ones found in the sketchier parts of the sketchier parts of town. There were little air-holes in the thick coating, and those pulsed and writhed from something within trying to get out. But the dirty glass was coming from inside of his astral form and the force of the pain and the ... guilt? ... was oozing new thick plating to reinforce that broken down from whatever was going on within.

Amanda winced. It was, to be perfectly blunt, a bloody fucking mess. It was rare for a non-magical injury to be reflected in someone's aura, her own was free of the scarring on her back... unless that injury had become part of their self-image. Which meant Forge identified himself by the loss of his hand and leg. Not a good start. Then there was the 'glass', which might have been a protective measure at some time but now was smothering his aura. She blinked and focussed deeper, and beyond the glass she could see the faintest tracings of another form within, the barest whiff of power. Whatever had happened, his feelings about it were trapping his innate magical abilities under layers of guilt and fear.

Coming out of the trance with a sigh, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Another messed up aura, although at least this one wasn't terminal.

"Well, that's one fucked-up aura," she said at last.

"Gee. Thanks." he said sarcastically as he went looking for a shirt to wear - and coincidentally showing off the roadmap of scars on the right side of his torso, starting just below the armpit and going all the way down his flank to easily his hip.

"Sorry, my bedside manner's shite lately," was her reply as she rubbed her eyes as the spell faded. "And I'm guessing I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know. How long has it been since you last practiced magic? And don't give me any bollocks about not knowing what I'm talking about."

"Before I enlisted." he said quietly. "And no, I don't especially want to talk about it with strange colonizers." he added after a moment as he shrugged into a only-marginally-offensive GWAR T-shirt.

She shrugged. "You might not want to talk about it, but you are gunna have to talk about it. And soon. Not to me if you can't, but to someone. Because whatever happened that made you block off all access to your magic hasn't gone away and the headaches and the rest are just going to get worse." She stood, collecting her things together. "It can be fixed. That makes you lucky. Sometimes a thing gets broken in such a way that there's no fixing it ever." There was a shake in her voice as she said the last, but she clamped her mouth shut and swallowed hard, concentrating on putting her magical supplies away.

"Maybe. Maybe not. Was fine for a lotta years while I was building the new hand and leg, putting myself back together." he commented. He caught the catch in her voice but it really didn't mean much to him. Besides, outside of her taste in music he knew very little about her. "I don't think you have any right to tell me about any blocks I have, what's happened to my magic. You can see it. Congrats. Maybe you've even called it right. But sister, you do _not_ have the background or the tradition to tell _me_ what's wrong with _my_ magic."

"When there's talk of arch-demons or all-powerful magical evil, it's my job to check it out." She finished putting things away and pulled her satchel onto her shoulder, leaving the bag of snacks and the other coffee - untouched - where she'd left them. "Maya texted me, asked me to check in on you because you freaked out at her over email, talking about the Adversary. I've done what she asked, I've told you what needs to be done and now I'm leaving. Get help. Or don't. You're not a threat to anyone but yourself, so I don't give a rat's arse whether you actually do anything about it." With that, she headed for the door, pausing with her hand on the doorknob. "There's some willowbark tea in the snack bag. For the headaches. And I'll let Maya know you're fine, but you might want to talk to her."

She had a gift, he was just discovering, of making him feel like a complete shitheel on top of the aftereffects of whatever happened over Halloween. "Hey. Punk." he said to her retreating back. "Thanks. For the coffee." he told her, then let her walk herself out. At least she'd left him a coffee for himself, plus her nostrum. Sighing, he took a healthy swig of the - ugh, very frou-frou - coffee. He got an appreciation for the drink in the Army, where it usually had the consistency of mud and pushed as close to LD50 as it was possible to get. Civvie coffee just wasn't the same.

But she also wasn't wrong - if the Adversary was looking to play his games in our world once again, it was up to him - and, he supposed, Naze - to stop him. Which meant he knew where his next call was going to have to go. He didn't want to, his head was killing him, he was sweaty and itchy and gross all over, and his mood was not conducive to doing anything but vegetating.

He, however, picked up his cellphone and dialed a number from memory.

"C'mon, Uncle, pick up..." he muttered as his phone rang.