[IC] Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - A Modern Fantasy Adventure!

[Naril]

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations

A Modern Fantasy Adventure

An introduction

The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - cocoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the room, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being eaten at exactly this second, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, back out into the night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the huge warehouse, lent only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.

He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into an old and slab-sided van with large, knobbled tires. It came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, rocking on its suspension and spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.

The van’s doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were - save for the driver, who stepped out and closed the distance to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the cut of her tailored suit. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.

"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you."

Cameron looked at the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, back at his warehouse. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.

"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"

Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.

"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.

Cameron saw the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. They were rumpled, disheveled, exasperation written plainly across their faces. A man held a shotgun with a practiced casualness that Cameron found alarming, and he would have sworn he saw embers and motes of light dancing around another woman’s hands and arms. The driver, though, his attention kept coming back to her. He couldn't help it, something he could no more resist than the pull of gravity.

"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.

"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Morgan. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."

Inside the warehouse, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, its legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground Cameron usually associated with forklifts. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood unruffled, the ghost of a grin tugging at one side of her mouth. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun, loud enough to make the sheet-metal walls vibrate in sympathy. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled and half a meter of monstrous spider-leg punched through. With a wail of tortured metal, the leg started tearing toward the ground through the sheet metal, a couple of rivets zinging out into the night.

"I wouldn't worry," Morgan said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."

[HeySeuss]

Gabe Boudreaux, nature lover and resident expert on supernatural animals...or, what a normal person would call monsters. The first thing he did was look at that warehouse, in the darkness, with its rows of barrels and tight confines and said to himself, hell no I won't go.

"Look, no offense, but let's try not to agitate the man-eater, okay? We need it to feel comfortable and potentially hungry, because we want it to come out, not stay in there and hunker down. Because I'm not volunteering to go in there."

The first instincts were usually best. He wasn't in love with the idea of tangling with a giant spider inside its domain, where it had webs, food, eggs, if female. He didn't get a good enough look yet to determine sex. Instead, the hairy man of the group, a flannel-wearing shit-kicker with a Mainer accent, which was a lot like a Canadian accent, was advising caution from a position of expertise on supernatural wildlife. He wasn't Steve Irwin, who got himself speared by a manta ray trying to shove a finger up its quacker and he sure as Hell wasn't Jonah, who got himself into the belly of the beast.

Beyond that, Priest and Hawthorne could be liable for damages to all this expensive-looking whiskey, in addition to human lives lost. So guns blazing didn't make a lot of sense here.

"Look, spiders usually aren't aggressive unless provoked, but they are predators and usually they eat things that eat sugar. They'll go after likely prey. That's us," he pronounced, "so stop provoking it." It probably picked the whiskey distillery for a number of reasons. It was cool, dark and there was a doughnut bakery with a retail space called "Devilish Donuts." There was a coffee roaster there too, Kahuna Coffee Roasters. And they had a shop right across from Devilish Donuts, so people could sugar up even more. While both of these had sweets, it didn't have the ideal conditions for a spider...but it was in proximity to the sort of prey a spider would eat at that size. It needed something that consumed enough sugar to satisfy the carbohydrate requirements, since a spider wasn't just going to raid the donut bakery. But it was going to find a lair close to the Diabeetus Den so it didn't have to go far to pick off some sugar-coated protein.

The smaller cousins of this spider evolved to eat ants and pollinating insects, so it made a certain twisted sense that this spider made a lair near a prime food source. There were spaces between the slab-sided warehouses with their metal doors, which were tall enough, but there were plenty of things where a spider might string up its webbing. Sure enough, he drew a flashlight out of a leather holster on a worn leather belt, clicked it on and shined LED's on the points where there were webs, thicker than the usual kind, but still the iridescent lines that were familiar to everyone. They were strung up all over the place, strategically, but there was plenty of open parking lot/loading yard space where the spider couldn't strike easily.

Unless of course, it decided to charge. But spiders didn't work that way, usually.

"Let's stay clear of those for now," he noted to his colleagues.

He caught a whiff of something sweet and groaned; it had been a long day of sitting in that fucking van with Blackwood, rubbing Vicks under his nose and trying not to turn into a drooling, sex-starved caveman. He'd done as much as he could to open windows, spray Fabreeze and otherwise disrupt the charm. He'd probably pissed off everyone else and offended Morgan multiple times. The Fabreeze made him sneeze, chemicals and a sensitive nose, so he switched to Vicks. In fact, he was moving to keep her down-fucking-wind when the plan clicked and he stopped in mid-stride on those scuffed work boots like lightning hit him.

"Guys, I have a plan," he told the group, "We need to get our beasty to get comfortable, so let's try not to be too loud or bright with lights. And I'm gonna need some help on a couple wish list items. We need to make that warehouse kind of warm and the air out here a little more humid while keeping it cool. We also need a way to create something really sticky on the ground. We're all professionals here, so I'm just listing our needs."

Then he turned to Morgan and, quite conversationally, addressed her, while rubbing his nose a bit to disrupt the more overt tones. In the course of the spider punching through a wall with one hairy, frighteningly spiny leg, the adrenaline must have kicked up her scent production or something. He thought he was used to it and then she blasted him with this whammy. It was their first time really working a case together, so there was a learning curve. He kept the tone very conversational, all things considered, though his voice was a bit muffled by his hand on his face.

"Blackwood, if I may respectfully suggest, you look like you're famished. It's time to go get some donuts."

[Hour Error]

"Donuts?" Toma excitedly piped in. She sensed opportunity. Delicious, wonderful, fried dough opportunity.

Sol had told her that there would be no more stealing. As an employee of Priest and Hawthorne he said that she had certain standards to live up to. Apparently. It was all very boring, but she owed them, so she'd behave. Mostly. However, if she was stealing as part of an officially sanctioned job? Well now, that was an entirely different matter.

Stealing donuts wasn't as fun as robbing a bank, stealing from arcane vaults, or ancient liches. It was a step down, but it was better than chasing a damned spider halfway across town for the better part of an evening. A wasted evening. Morgan hadn't even let them stop to get a drink. Toma had asked. Several times. The alluring woman was a cruel mistress. Toma had decided that she liked her already. Even if Morgan stilled smelled vaguely like an employee of a three letter agency. Not that it made any sense to the young wizard. The woman wasn't like any agent Toma had ever met before.

Most importantly, a pastry heist promised to be far more fun than fighting a spider in the dark, confined quarters of a warehouse distillery. Toma wasn't afraid of spiders, but she treated giant spiders with a healthy dose of respect. They were like grumpy, venom spewing horses with a taste for blood and a habit of collecting alarming numbers of victims in their dark lairs. If they only stuck to eating stockbrokers, it wouldn't have been so much of a problem. Toma might even have looked the other way.

"If-" Toma began, feeling her heart skip a beat or two with excitement and anticipation. She dared to take a step closer to Morgan and Gabe, and did her best to appear cool and uninterested. "If the donut store is closed. Which it certainly will be at this hour. I can get us in! They won't know what hit them! It will be the greatest donut caper of the century!"

She hadn't intended to talk so fast and Toma felt certain that she'd let her accent slip. She had to salvage the situation. The young arcane thief pretended to cough.

There was a pleading, desperate, and hungry look in her eyes as she nodded deferentially towards Morgan,"I mean, if that'd be helpful..."

[Penny]

The nocturnal chill plucked at Sophia’s smooth armpits as she half stepped, half stumbled out of the van, her legs warm with the heat of blood returning after long repose. The smell of the distillery crinckled her nose, the sour mash was redolent on the air, like old laundry that had been boiled with too little soap. Sofia rolled her shoulders to loosen them, a sinuous catlike motion that stretched the fabric of her top around her pointed scapula. The moon was already losing its lustrous fullness taking with it the promise of an entire month. Sophia grimaced and rubbed her aching her fingertips against the coarse weave of her jeans. Almost an entire month she had laboured polishing a silver mirror under the light of the ripening moon, buffing and rebuffing until her fingertips cracked and bled .Twenty eight nights with neither sleep nor rest, all for nothing because this God cursed spider had chosen this night of all nights to make its appearance. It was fair to say that her mood had been better.

The distillery looked like it might have started life as a warehouse but was fast succumbing to the gentrification that was rippling out from the city center like the shockwave of a bomb blast. The brutally functional building had been graced with a pale stucco facade complete with a steeply roofed portico. Pipes and exhaust ducting jutted out from the sides and above, giving the building a peculiarly overstuffed look. Sophia lifted her tracking construct and peered into it, even though Morgan’s conversation made it clear that such caution was unnecessary. When magic was involved there were plenty of things you couldn’t control, Bruja that lived to be crones tended to be the ones who took no chances. Those were few enough in all truth.

The construct, a vessel for a tracking spell, was a simple coca cola can. Held upside down so that the concavity at the bottom formed a shallow bowl, it was an ideal vessel. Sophia had used a paper clip to scratch runes and designs into the thin coating of red paint around the sides, the intricacies of the working visible as bare aluminum against the trademark red background. Inside the improvised bowl the severed leg of a regular house spider floated in a half inch of spring water. The hairy limb twitched in the direction of the distillery with a gentle insistence, waking ripples that were vaguely luminous in the moonlight. Sophia nodded her head in agreement and dropped the can to the gravel of the parking lot, crushing it flat beneath the heel of her brown leather hiking boot. *Blank* could lecture her about littering another time.

“If we could move this along?” she asked acidly, running her fingers through her lank and unwashed hair. It had been a long day, the scent of febreze tickled her sinuses and she blinked her eyes rapidly to avoid sneezing. Her main task had been to track the creature, and now that was done she was eager to be done with the job. In terms of combat experience she was a junior member on this team, most of her killing had been done from a safe distance with a drop of blood or a lock of hair. With studied nonchalance she crossed her arms beneath her breasts, hugging herself against the chill and wishing she had bought a jacket.

Even at this close range she couldn’t get a sense of the spider. It was unclear to her whether it was truly a magical being, the result of a spell, a demon, or some sort of arcane construct. They simply didn’t have enough data to tell. Assuming it would act like a regular spider might be a mistake but in the two months she had been with Priest and Hawthorne she had learned that Morgan and the others could pretty generally be relied upon to handle an unexpected reversal. Her hand slipped into her pocket to wrap the hilt of a slender obsidian blade she kept there. The athamae was a more reliable weapon than the automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans, currently concealed by her dark grey Slytherin t-shirt. The cold metal pressed against her hip, heavy with the promise of easy violence. She blew a breath out from between her lips and muttered to herself in Quetuha. Something told her that the night was just beginning….

[vietmyke]

"Still think its easier to just kill the damn thing and be done with it." Jacob remarked to no one in particular, as he racked the short barreled shotgun in his hands with a satisfying crack. Wildlife preservation wasn't exactly one of Jacob's main goals when it came to this job. The spider was a pest, sure it was a very large pest, that killed humans instead of bugs, but a pest nonetheless. Still, Gabe was right. Going into the dark distillery with a literal man-eating spider the size of a small vehicle was not exactly the smartest of plans.

The distillery was an old, barely functional looking thing. Far enough out of town not to attract attention, close enough that it still had the occasional visitor- probably why their quarry decided here was a good place to hunker down. All the same, once they were finished her, Jacob had half a mind to 'confiscate' some of the very expensive looking whiskey that was being brewed here- if the empty brand named barrels to the side of the building had anything to say about it. Gabe helpfully began listing things that they'd need in order to start luring it out, and finished by stating that Morgan might need to go eat some donuts. Had Morgan been any mundane woman, Jacob was sure she'd be somewhat offended, but Morgan was Morgan, and she operated in mysterious ways. Fishing the van's keys out of his pockets, he gave Gabe a whistle and tossed them to him.

"I don't suppose we're all just gonna head out and leave this thing unattended?" Jacob mused aloud. Not that he was entirely confident that one, or even two of them would be enough to deal with the spider should it decide to take a late night stroll outside of the distillery, but it would be pretty embarrassing if they left and came back to find out that the spider had disappeared while they were grabbing coffee and donuts.

Straightening his jacket, Jacob pinned the shotgun underneath his armpit and fished out a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He flipped open the package and grabbed a stick of unburned cancer out of the package with his mouth and replaced the carton for a lighter. Resetting the shotgun back into his hands, Jacob pulled the cigarette out of his mouth with his offhand and exhaled.

"Can't do anything about making the air out here humid, but if you want it to get warm in there... Distilleries are filled with boilers aren't they?"