An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

[Relt PeltFelter]

Provisionally open, inquire here. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=18868)

10 months previous
London, England

It was always cold in Buckingham Palace.

The thrumming of the great turbines at each corner of the building was ever-present; they said it drove the guards mad, but the ethereal "they" said many things. They said that Queen Victoria died many years ago, but that her ghost still ruled. They were half-right. Group Captain Relt PeltFelter had never been in Buckingham Palace before, and from the grim blue light and ankle-deep mist that filled the place, she would not like to visit again.

Air Commodore Wilford Lightly, her immediate superior, had been summoned before Her Majesty, and instructed to bring his three best pilots with him. The officer had not told his men what the meeting was about, but Relt had asked his errand boy, and heard that when Lightly read the telegram, his face had turned an ashen grey and he had closed himself into his reading room for the remainder of the evening.

Relt shivered and pulled her jacket closed. They had been waiting in this anteroom for six hours; her, the Air Commodore, Wing Commander Chester Gumpfrie, and the only pilot younger than Relt herself, the prodigy Flying Officer Saraline Hackles. Rather easy on the eyes, that girl; Relt may have to have a word with her in private afterwards. Perhaps this word would extend into a restaurant invitation, a motion picture showing, and...well, it would be unladylike to continue.

The Group Captain's reverie was interrupted by the sound of a door opening quietly; the nation's regent, His Royal Highness Prince George of Wales, had entered. He handled the immediate responsibilities of royal requirement, which in this age of Parliament and Prime Ministers, was not much. He nodded somberly towards the assembled pilots, and gestured for them to enter the same door from which he had just emerged. His face the color of candle-wax, the Commodore led the way.

Relt had thought the rest of the palace was cold; it was a balmy morning on the Panama Canal by comparison to this room, the Royal Chamber. The room was much darker, the floor-obscuring mist was much thicker, and there was an unpleasant sensation of moisture and...squishiness. Across the massive, dimly-lit room was an enormous mechanical shape, picked out here and there with dull blue lights. Prince George emerged from behind the Commodore and beckoned the group to follow him towards the opposite room.

The sight that greeted them was one which would never leave Relt's mind; a loathsome bulk of iron and steel, greater than a steam engine or sailing vessel, filled nearly half of the chamber. It thrummed more insistently even than the palace's main turbines, and pulsating tubes ran from the wall, ceiling, and floor into various ports and crannies. At the center was a huge mass of pipes, cords, and hoses surrounding the shriveled, wizened, dead-eyed form of the Empress of India, Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

"Her Majesty is grateful for your visit," the Regent said solemnly, "And is glad that we might begin our discussion."

-----

Present Day
Radasanth, Corone

Relt Peltfelter sat outside a small sort-of cafe, nursing what was really not a terrible cup of tea and nibbling at what was really rather a terrible scone. The bruising around her eye was just beginning to fade from the result of a long story, and the sun made her glad she had left her jacket in the room she'd hired last night. She had spent much of her time since receiving her more formal introduction to the world of Althanas on two pursuits; the first, which had thus far been an utter failure, was to find a smith who could craft her some ammunition; apparently the combination of lead and black powder upset them in no small measure.

The second pursuit, which had been a trifle more successful, was to obtain some pleasurable company for the evening before. There was a sort of tavern in this town which seemed to cater exclusively to timid young women looking to avoid the rough-and-tumble of a real public house. It had not been difficult to find an attractive lass who, after perhaps an ale or two, was willing to enjoy the company of another attractive lass, this one in uniform.

After escorting the previous evening's young lady home, Relt had decided to have tea early so that she might visit the one blacksmith whom she had not yet spoken with, and who therefore would not chase her away as a woman dangerously insane and obsessed with making lead explode.

Checking the map so helpfully provided by her surprisingly forthright innkeeper, she found that the north end of the Bazaar held such a blacksmith. Relt smiled gently, paid for her meal with some of the strange gold currency that she had obtained through her current employers, the Bandit Brotherhood, and set off northward.

Finally arriving at the indicated smithy, she raised her hand to knock on the door when she noticed it was slightly ajar. The hairs on the back of her neck, a soldier's first line of defence, began to prickle with warning. Her hand went to the recently-sharpened trench knife which was her only real armament at the moment. She flattened herself against the wall and gently nudged the door open all the way. In the blade's reflection, distorted though it was, she saw an unmistakable sign of a bad morning: a pool of blood freshly dribbled from a man's throat.

Ye-es, it was never easy, was it; you try to find a man to make instruments of death, and someone goes and uses their own on him first. Clearly, there was no such thing as a simple day on this blasted world.

[Shadar]

"Brigitte, Brigitte, Brigitte," groaned a half-elf at the side of the counter. He wore a sleeveless black coat over a deathly white, long sleeved shirt that was unusual for two reasons. One, no one wears long sleeves and a coat in the middle of a Corone summer. Two, no one would, in public, wear a shirt with arterial spray down the front. His face might have caught a bit too, but his gloved hands blocked the view. "Please tell me that was one of Jackal's illusions," he mumbled into his palms as he rubbed them back and forth, perhaps trying to wake from a bad dream.

"He touched me!" the harpy on the counter insisted defiantly, her golden wings swaddled about her and one taloned foot sitting squarely where the blacksmith's jugular used to be. The bearded pervert was motionless while he leaned over the counter, his head swiveled as if to peep one last time at the harpy's jiggly bits. Unfortunately, his torso was pointed in the absolute opposite direction.

Suddenly, a third figure joined them around the prize kill. Above the cash box, he hovered smoothly, a humanoid form bearing canine flesh and adorned in regal crimson finery. More paradoxically, his fur was purple. Not rich velvet purple, but rancid grape jelly purple. "I love it when my girl shows initiative," he guffawed, he arms held wide in a gesture of praise that didn't reach all the way to his mocking sneer, "Way to protect the jubblies! Those are for daddy only."

Tearing a blacksmith's throat out would prove, it seemed, to be the calmest point of the harpy's day, for she was already lunging after the demon. Stale blood splashed, wings unfurled, and she shot toward her tormentor with bare, doll-like chest unveiled and talons yearning for another hold. She found nothing. Her body passed right on through the illusion that she knew was an illusion, granting her no solice other than the delightful thought of how she'd love to rearrange the demon's face if given the chance.

The third wheel to their little tussle was still at the counter, inky gloves stuck to his face as if, upon them, he was enjoying a scene of the lovely sunlit Bazaar, shoppers cheerfully browsing and every merchant's vital juices still in their bodies. Amid such happy imaginings, he peeked one frigid blue eye from under the veil, but not toward his fellows. His unwavering gaze locked on the door with the certainty that he had sensed much more than the simple glint of metal.

Unseen, a magic that could defile reality began to gather, and cold liquid steel started to pool upon the surface of his gloves.

[Relt PeltFelter]

10 months previous
London, England

"She doesn't talk anymore, you know," said the Regent, quietly. "When she died, it was thought that the Empire would crumble if it knew, so this...engine was built to keep her alive. At least, in a sense. The doctors say there's no electricity in her brain. She still looks at you, and if you get close you can hear her heart beat...but she doesn't talk anymore."

Air Commodore Lightly cleared his throat, managing to contain the note of muffled horror. "Ahm, sir, I must ask why we've been summoned..."

The Regent turned, his eyes a thousand miles away. "Yes. Of course. It pertains to the threat that certain of the Indonesian islands are posing towards our holdings in Australia. If you and your men here could..."

Relt couldn't remain focused on the man's words. She had broken out in a cold sweat, and couldn't stop looking at the nearly dead monarch, crucified on her life support engine. There was only the slightest rattle of breath in the toast-rack chest, almost hidden by her thick, black dress of mourning. Her eyes were milky and horrible, but they swiveled slowly back and forth from the Regent and the Air Commodore as they spoke; no real thought behind it, only a kind of loathsome instinct. Relt didn't know if her compatriots shared the icy revulsion she felt towards the Queen of England, but surely they must? Surely everyone who knew must, else everyone would know. Surely if this were a wholesome thing, than she wouldn't be a secret, shuttered away in her frigid palace for all time.

Relt noticed that the Regent and her commanding officer had finished their conversation. As one man, the soldiers turned to leave. They didn't talk to one another until the following morning, and none of them spoke of what they had seen in the depths of Buckingham Palace. It was not a thing that people should speak of under a blue sky.

-----

Present Day
Radasanth, Corone

Just as she was readying herself to go seek out someone whose job it was to deal with murders, Relt found herself overcome with a peculiar sort of vertigo; this is an unfamiliar feeling for an RAF pilot to experience. The very ground seemed to distort into an odd slope, when she knew that it had not been so before. Relt tried to shift her feet to steady herself, but only managed to stumble foolishly backwards and collide with the door to the murdered blacksmith's shop. She tumbled through it like a pinball, flailing wildly to try and grab a hold of something.

Her hand closed around the door handle, but the momentum of the thing swinging inward simply carried her on and slammed her into the stone wall of the smithy opposite the door's hinges. She let go, sliding to the floor as an enormous metal sphere on a chain collided with the thick mahogany of the door, cracking it as it swung closed, sealing the only exit. Relt scrambled to her feet, shaking off the slight daze of being pressed like a flower, and held the trench knife which now seemed stunningly useless against three assailants.

"I should warn you," she said, finally, after a long silence, "That I am both an officer in Her Majesty the Queen of England's Royal Air Force, and as of several days ago, a member in good stead of the Bandit Brotherhood of Concordia. I will not balk at a troupe of common murderers," The Group Captain took a moment to examine the scene and its occupants; the dead man was bent over his counter, his lifeblood a grisly staccato as it dripped to the puddle below. The three peculiar individuals were arrayed about the room rather haphazardly.

"Particularly," she added, "A troupe composed of a sort of turkey-woman, an Egyptian religious icon, and a knock-kneed Frenchman. Ha, it seems that besting the lot of you would be easier than rescuing an errant diver from the belly of a very sick whale. Happily, this scenario will likely not come to pass, as-" and the bluff was a bit weak, she knew, "-the town constabulary is in fact en route at this very moment. If you'd like to give yourselves up now and save time and effort, this would be considered acceptable." Her trademark rakish grin seemed almost to brighten the room as she dusted off her uniform, though Relt's only thought behind said grin was that she wouldn't be in this situation at all if she only had some twice-damned bullets!

[Shadar]

The half-elf's face, blood-spotted as if he suffered from some undiscovered disease, froze in an expression of pure bewilderment. The steel ball was forgotten, laying an inch deep in the floor where it had landed after pounding the door shut, and the chain that stretched back to his hand lay slack among a whole array of blades and bludgeons that had been dislodged from their holdings in the wild swing. The maneuver hadn't been meant to hit the witness -it was a given that the illusionary vertigo trick would put any unsuspecting person on the floor- but if it had... maybe he wouldn't have a sudden headache.

His approach to most awkward introductions was a simple, "What's your story?" just to throw the stranger off balance. When someone launched into it without any prompting, however, he was the one off balance. At least, he assumed she was yammering on about herself. She had an accent that he hadn't heard in the entirety of his life, and she spoke so fast that she must have wanted to pour her heart out before he could crank the steel ball across her face the other way. His hand twitched. It was tempting.

"Uh, Jackal..." he said from the corner of his mouth without turning, "What's England? Or Egyptian? Or constabulary? And whatever the hell else she just said."

Brigitte understood the insult thrown her way, at least, which set her feathers all up in a ruffle. But, she looked to her half-elf companion with questioning eyes first. "Shadar. Should I, you know?" She lifted one bloodied talon and flexed it. The blacksmith's "accident" had been born of pure instinct. When it came to a proper act of cold-blooded murder, she was more a follower than leader.

"God no," Shadar said quickly, "We'll have karma on our tails just over this." He waved at the smith, who looked out over his battered shop without a care in the world. With a hard pull, Shadar toed the metal ball through the scattered weaponry and swallowed its entire mass into the pitch-black portal of his gloves.

Brigitte lowered her foot and then her head, shamefully. "Sorry," she muttered.

"Bloody 'ell governa!" Jackal suddenly shouted in an accent thicker than the woman's. For some reason, he was now wearing a monocle and top hat. "Her Majesty's Royal Air Force, wot? Spot on! Thought I knew the britches from somewhere. Jolly good for standard issue."

Shadar could decipher the accent a bit more this time, but that only told him one thing. This woman was from off-world. Before Jackal had gotten himself trapped on Althanas' modest little chunk of the universe, he'd had a pretty good view of all that existed. If he was familiar enough with this woman to rattle off a spur-of-the-moment mocking tirade, she had to be from an interesting world indeed.

"Tell me," the immaterial demon added in his own grating voice, and he flickered closer to the woman so that he could sneer directly into her face. "How's Her Majesty doing these days?" he asked darkly.

[Relt PeltFelter]

In the face of this affront, not a muscle twitched across Relt's own visage. This sort of thing was not uncommon from those who believed proper, unaccented speech to be a novelty. Even coming from a sort of velvet canid, this sort of mockery could be safely ignored. "Rather better than the Kaiser, I'd wager," the pilot finally responded before shifting her attention away from the creature, "And certainly a bit better than the unfortunate proprietor of this smithy, I can't help but notice." Relt, thumbs jammed thoughtfully in belt-loops, strolled around the counter to observe the scene. The pilot almost wished she had a magnifying glass with which to survey the perplexing tableau in a most exaggerated fashion.

"Throat torn out. Nasty way to go. Knew a chap who fought at Ypres, you know, whose mate caught a bullet through the windpipe. Took him ten minutes to choke to death on his own blood, or so I've been told. Seemed to go faster for this fellow. What extraordinary luck. Were I you, sir, I would keep a tighter rein on your double-breasted budgerigar there." Relt grinned at the man, choosing to ignore the purple...animal creature for the foreseeable future, as clearly it was the sort of person (possibly?) which craved attention. If denied, it could become useful as leverage. Or dangerously unstable; either one could be an improvement.

She turned her back on the perceived leader of this gang to take in the wall behind the slain shopkeep. Fortunately for the woman armed only with a frightfully small trench knife, the smithy was filled with weapons. There was a small sword hanging on the wall just behind the corpse; a straight blade, dark in color, and giving off a beautiful impression of sharpness. This was a blade which could cleave the kisses from a country milkmaid. Relt tried not to look at it, but made a note of its location. "Ah, how impolite of me," she said, turning on her heels, wreathed in smiles, "In all the fuss, I've forgotten my manners. I am Group Captain Relt PeltFelter, at your service, sir. Pray tell, what no-doubt foolish name did your parents burden you with?"

[Shadar]

Jackal's illusion did not respond to the woman, but his voice rattled in the confines of Shadar's skull. What the hell? I'm sure she's from the world with the freaky queen, but she didn't even blink.

What are you talking about? Shadar asked through their internal channel with only minor interest. His eyes followed the off-worlder as she walked casually across the room, and the majority of his attention was upon the blade-strewn floor that she stepped gingerly over.

Nevermind, the demon grumbled, I'll break her before you get around to offing her.

Won't happen, Shadar droned in annoyance. However, he didn't know if it was just wishful thinking. His bizarre posse was in quite the incriminating situation, and the witness was clearly looking for a defensive position, or a viable weapon, during her stroll. Someone would have to be completely, full-out, ogre-tickling insane to wander among supposed murders just to examine their handiwork. Shadar was reasonably certain that this woman wasn't.

He raised a hand to still Brigitte from responding to the newest insult directed her way, and then he met Relt's smile with a sneer. "I'm not going to have a chat with you over a dead body, okay?" he said as a drop of drying blood fell from his chin. "And I'm sure we already let our names slip. But, if you didn't catch them, you'll just have to make your best guess on the witness statement."

He smiled darkly, and a spectral wind seemed to stir in the shop. "That is... if you make it out of here." In a flash, the room shed all traces of civilization. Weapons, both on the floor and displayed, broke into sawdust or melted into soft piles of cold, liquid metal, hissing with the audible undoing of the dead smith's work. The counter and walls were scrubbed bare, the ghostly wind reducing them to rough lumps and panels of wood.

As if lifted by the same force, Shadar glided on top of the counter. Space seemed to ripple behind him where he concealed his hands. Then, he whipped them forward and two flesh-pale blurs flew at Relt. The projectiles snapped open, revealing that they were actually disembodied arms with too many elbows, more like sinuous serpents than limbs, and a clutching, frantic hand at each end. They clearly yearned to give the woman a hug; a grotesque, overpowering hug.

[Relt PeltFelter]

The leader of the frightful brigade had responded, thought not cordially, and as his tone turned to one of outright menace, Relt wrenched the sword from the wall and whirled to face him. Without uttering a sound, she raised the sword to thrust it through the thin man, when the very world around her began to warp and distort hideously. The previously reliable short-sword dissolved like ice in her hand, and she cast it aside as useless. The pilot turned to follow her enigmatic attacker, just in time to be struck by the gruesome bolas about her chest and knees.

The arms pulled themselves tighter, confining the experienced soldier and dropping her to the ground. Immediately, the room returned to normal; the woman's face hardened, irate at having been fooled twice with such a charade. The blade she had lunged for was now inches from her ear, and fully intact. Relt struggled against the cold flesh of the freakish bonds, refusing to give the murderer-turned-kidnapper the satisfaction of hearing her cry out. With a lot of unpleasantly annelid wriggling, the Group Captain managed to roll over onto her stomach.

"Ah-HA!" Relt exulted, managing to pick the discarded sword up in her teeth. With some concerted effort, she began lining up a solid stab at the arms confining her own. The first pass drew blood, or at least a crude facsimile thereof. As she began a second attempt, one of the hands unclenched itself voluntarily. The bolas reached up and gingerly plucked the weapon away. It tossed the blade across the room, leaving it (as such things demand) shuddering to a halt, buried halfway in the far wall. "Oh, hellfire and damnation!" she shouted, vibrating impotently as the hand languidly restored its grip.

"I demand you remove these gravebred abominations from my person at once! I will most thoroughly divest you of your thrice-blasted goolies when I loose myself, you skinny frog!" Relt begin kicking her legs forward like a child swinging, making only cursory progress by curling into a banana-shape, extending, then curling once again. It must have looked absolutely preposterous, but Relt PeltFelter would rather make a spectacle of herself than admit defeat.

[Shadar]

Shadar's hand found his forehead once again. It had been many months since he had made such a forceful illusion, and the stretching of that unused muscle left quite the ache, though not because of scaling it up to the size of the room. The difficulty lay in connecting the threads of visual, audible, and tactile facades into a mix homogenous enough to be convincing. Now, with every trace of the illusion gone, he wondered if he could illusion away the percussion band between his temples.

"She's trying to-" Brigitte began, but she was cut off by the sudden whistle of metal and the harsh, vibrating hum of it finding a new home.

Shadar snapped his hand away just as the blade became still in the far wall, and he caught the last trace of movement as the pale appendages resumed their hug. "Nice arm on those... arms," he commented awkwardly.

Then, he cast his smirk down at the wriggling woman. "Please, shut up," he asked, though he clearly didn't expect obedience. "If 'hellfire and damnation' is what the afterlife has in store for you, you don't need to worry about seeing it just yet. Though, him..." he poked a toe into the dead man's gut, "I knew him for about three minutes, and I can tell you that he's probably not going anywhere good."

With the headache subsiding, Shadar found himself recreating the illusion in his mind. The smith's body had appeared to shred in the wind along with the rest of the store, but it was probably too fast for anyone present to notice the biologically-accurate details he had included in that little animation. A coroner would have been proud.

"Hey!" Jackal suddenly spouted from his illusion as it flickered to a crouching position on the counter that Relt was inch worming past. "Want this?" from one purple, clawed hand, he dangled her confiscated weapon, or to be more accurate, an impressive facsimile of it. "Huh? Huh?" he queried mockingly with the tip of the weapon just an inch from where she might have been able to reach it with her fingers.

Suddenly, there came a meaty thud from the other side of the shop, as if someone had tried to enter, only to find the misshapen door seizing in its frame. Shadar froze in the middle of reaching one glove hungrily toward the corpse. "Fine, his next of kin can have the body," he hissed, "Brigitte, skylight. Bring our friend."

Jackal's illusion disappeared as the harpy made an affirmative squawk and bounded through him. Her wicked talons fell toward Relt, and her wings flared at the last moment, turning a potentially bloody landing into the faintest of tickles as she gripped the upper arm tightly and heaved the restrained woman to the roof with her. Shadar was already there, shoes pressed against the side of a beam as he pressed his dark palms against the slanted boards above. The wood rippled as if he were dabbing the surface of a pond, and it apparently became just as malleable. Kicking off the beam, he glided through the roof, and Brigitte followed at his heels.

The accusing glare of the morning sun greeted them, forcing Shadar to shield his eyes and Brigitte, devoid of arms, to squint like an old woman. "This way." He launched himself out over the street. As Brigitte followed with her vocal charge, twin sheets of light appeared below them with the exact same hue and brightness of the sun overhead.

Below, the door was noisily forced open, and frantic shouts of, "Murder!" swelled in the street, quickly becoming a cacophony so distracting that only a few patrons noticed the odd distortions of sun glare that seemed to flicker over their heads.

[Relt PeltFelter]

Yeah, I'm an asshole. Sorry for the belated...SEVERELY belated post, dude.

After what seemed like weeks of noisome, flapping flight, Relt felt herself drop to the ground. The fall was, thankfully, cushioned somewhat by the waist-high wheat below. She managed to pull herself up, scrabbling somewhat in her bound condition. The wretched arms hadn't loosened an inch. The pilot looked around, spying her bizarre captor. She straightened, despite an insistent pain in her side, a clear expression of defiance writ large across her face. "An abduction," she spat, "Ha, do you think this is the first time I've been kidnapped? I'm an officer of the military, my lad, and I've had my share of scrapes with captivity."

"You see, during the war, my plane went down over no-man's-land, and I was scrounged up by the arms of the Hun. Blasted Jerries thought they could pry some secrets from me. Dragged me down into one of their immaculate trenches, and drugged me. I don't remember a thing after that. Apparently, I was found a week later in the French countryside, blood-soaked and screaming, with a crumpled pickelhaube in each hand."

Relt managed to summon enough charisma to wink.

"Clearly, you have me at your mercy. You and your wretched spectral dog-man and your blasted ambassador of the Erinyes and those impossible gloves you bear. But I swear on the Crown of England, if you do not release me in the next thirty seconds, I will, someday, destroy you utterly. This is no threat, but a promise, from soldier to scoundrel."

[Shadar]

Shadar raised an eyebrow as he hovered above the wheat. What's the wink for? It had been a long time since his last real conversation with a woman -once you looked past Brigitte's figure, there wasn't much 'woman' to be found- so there were some mannerisms that seemed incredibly foreign these days.

Maybe she likes being... tied up, like the last one, Jackal suggested, his voice thick with innuendo.

Shadar planted a palm on his forehead. The last one had liked it. No, it was much, much more than like. She had been tied and immobile, yet Shadar was somehow the one to come out feeling violated. He peeked through his fingers, saw that Relt, at least, wasn't rolling around in the wheat with pleasure. He relaxed.

His hand swept down his face and over his shirt, drinking every trace of dry blood. As immaculate as a statue, he looked down at Relt and twisted up one side of his mouth in a wry smile. "That 'death promise' just earned you another few minutes of being tied up," he chuckled. Then, he crossed his legs in the air and hovered down to sit upon the wheat stalks as lightly as windblown cotton. Off to the side, Brigitte stood as heavily in the wheat as Relt, her wings wrapped about her and her head swivelling as if a devil would leap from the field at any moment.

"If you'll shut up for a moment," Shadar continued as he looked down his nose, partly due to ego, but mostly because he was sitting three feet above her, "I'll tell you how the world works."

"Karma is not just a figure of speech. It's real, and for some people," he tapped his chest, "It's very swift. I guess it holds grudges."

"Oh!" shouted Jackal's voice, though his manifestation was nowhere to be seen. "Tell her about the troll under the bridge! I love that story!"

An angry squawk flew from Brigitte, but with no illusion of Jackal floating around, she had nothing to direct it at. She settled for glaring at the distant, sun-drenched farms.

Shadar was not going to tell the story. He hated it as much as Brigitte did. But, that didn't stop him from remembering. It had been a normal day in his posse's eternal existence. They were just flying among the Comb Mountains to the south of Radasanth. However, they weren't really paying attention to the trails and flew too close to a horse-drawn carriage. The driver looked ancient, one good night's rest away from never waking up, and the carriage was ornamental enough that whoever was inside must have been a lord. He could only assume, one who taxed heavily. So, it wasn't really a great loss to the world when the horses panicked and pulled the whole screaming ensemble off a cliff. Karma disagreed, of course. It wasn't hours later that Shadar, apparently for being his group's leader, was dealt some poetic justice.

He shook his head to clear it before the worse part flooded back to him, but he quickly realized that it was actually playing out before him in miniature illusions above the wheat. There was the mountain, the crumpled carriage below, and on the low ground, a heavily armoured troll leaned leisurely against his bridge, picking his teeth with a pair of very fresh leg bones. A miniature Shadar was at the other end of the bridge, dragging his legless self away.

"Did I...?" the half-elf began, then he suddenly narrowed his eyes. "Jackal!"

The demon appeared crouching over the My Karma Adventure Play Set. His purple claws were pinching the little Shadar, making him move as Jackal cried weakly out the corner of his mouth, "Oh god! My legs! Help meeeeee."

Out of nowhere, Brigitte's leg swept through the illusions, scattering wheat and blurring the scene into a multi-colored dust that quickly dissipated. Jackal's illusion disappeared on the end of her taloned foot too, though not without a barking laugh.

"They grew back," Shadar said before the bound woman could ask. "But, to avoid that again, I'm going to do something to help you out. So, just name it," he said without even a hint of charity.

[Relt PeltFelter]

With an affectation of casual interest, Relt listened to, and as it turned out, watched the sorry story told to her. Clearly, there wasn't much she could do to this man to make his life noticeably worse than it already was. There may be no love lost betwixt herself and her captor, but the cackling of the gaily-hued, phantasmal manimal would likely drive Relt to far worse atrocities, not to mention the potential for losing one's legs more than once. She had managed, by dint of much wobbling, to actually get to her feet. There was a hole worn in the left knee of her jodhpurs, which she examined with some annoyance before realizing that the kidnapper had finished his tirade.

"Oh, hm? Ah, uh, yes. Karma. The Hindus got that one right, certainly. The curry's not half bad, either, mind. Naan bread and such. Listen, from this point onward in the negotiations, could you perhaps get your grotesquely hybridized familiar to cease the interruptions? The whole performance is quite childish." Relt strolled forward, but upon drawing too close to the coterie of rapscallions, her loathsomely fleshy bonds tightened in warning.

"I assume that, despite your absence of enthusiasm, you are offering me some sort of boon. As you are clearly not a German, and the war has been over for some time, and as any attempts at physical or sexual coercion on your part will result in you carrying your John Thomas home in a small bag, I will indulge you in your attempt to mend the very specific fence between us."

With a sniff, Relt turned on her heel, staring off into the swaying grain of the field. She cleared her throat "If you will reach into the pocket on the seat of my trousers, you will find-" She stopped rather abruptly. One of the hands currently pinning her own arms to her sides had followed the directions, and extracted a folded sheet of paper from the pocket. It was a bar napkin, on which were some hastily sketched diagrams and measurements of the precise sort of ammunition which her sidearm was able to fire.

"Er, yes, thanks very much. Very gentlemanly. Yes. At any rate, on this sheet is what I need. As many as possible, this EXACT shape and size, and of this exact composition. Apparently every metalworker in this bloody city is either deathly afraid of progress, or far too busy bleeding all over everything he owns. If you can provide me with this, and set me loose, then I will rescind my earlier promise to have you messily destroyed by being tossed into an aeroplane propeller or some such unpleasant end."

The hand, incapable of examining the proffered paper, rattled it gently to attract Shadar's attention. Relt waited patiently, watching the grain wave back to her.

[Shadar]

"Ha!" spouted Jackal's voice from the air, "He uses his John Thomas so little that it's going to fall off anyway!"

Brigitte tilted her head to the side and stepped closer to Shadar. "Who's John?" she asked.

Shadar just answered her with a grimace that said, "Forget it." Then, he turned back to Relt, who had stood up and was almost at eye level given his perch upon the wheat tops. "He doesn't stop. Ever. Our only hope is to stop talking about things that get him going, like threats to my manhood; which is still very much intact, thank you."

Brigitte huffed and said to Relt as if it were news, "The dog's an idiot."

Shadar shrugged with the heavy resignation that accompanied years of Jackal's forced companionship. "Death, taxes, and Jackal," he said, adlibbing a phrase the demon had used some time ago. "And I think that, before he got stuck with me, he invented death and taxes."

Jackal growled low in the back of his head. You have no idea.

Shadar didn't answer. Instead, he squinted and tilted his head at the behaviour of the arm bolas. He hadn't actually intended for them to be self aware enough to throw swords and raid pockets. In fact, this was the first time since harvesting them from their previous owner that he had allowed them to exist away from his touch. It was very disconcerting.

"Okay, okay," he said to the severed arms when he remembered himself and took the napkin. With minimal flair, it disappeared into his palm and the Void beyond for later reading. More importantly, he had seen enough of the arms' intelligence to have visions of when they matured into some rebellious stage of their life. He stretched his hand out and whistled tentatively. The arms perked up like golden retrievers, each swinging one hand toward his and grabbing onto his arm. They slithered through the rippling surface of his gloves, returning to a world where they hopefully wouldn't get funny ideas of independence. One of them waved a farewell to Relt.

With that unsettling business out of the way, Shadar plucked the note from the air. A breeze suddenly swept over the field, pleasantly cool to those who could sense temperature, but foreboding to the half-elf; Karma's collection agent knocking on the door. He didn't have much time, and a glance at the napkin did little to settle his nerves. "That's it?" he asked incredulously.

He clapped his hands together and separated them with the note absent again. Raising one above the other, he cupped both hands, and a clicking stream of bullets fell between them. "I hope you don't mind delyn," he said as he offered a burgeoning handful of thirty brown-hued bullets. "It's heavier than steel and has some interesting magical properties. I don't know if that's standard for a gun." Firearms were familiar to him, in theory at least, but he still didn't understand their workings. In a more leisurely setting, he would have asked to examine her weapon. "If you ever shoot through a magic shield, I guarantee someone'll lose a few teeth." He failed to add that the someone might be her.

Reluctantly, he added, "This is pretty insignificant, though. The next troll will toss back a few of my toes when he's done snacking, that's about it. Anything else you need?" He strained on the last words. After taking so many kicks from Fate, Karma, and assorted deities, he knew when he was asking for trouble.

[Relt PeltFelter]

It was with limited success that Relt hid her delight and incredulity as she eagerly gathered up the ammunition. She stuffed the bullets, oddly hued as they were, into whatever pockets held nothing else of merit. Her arms were still a bit sore, but the pilot had far more important things to deal with. She flipped the revolver open and chambered six rounds; what sort of soldier would she be if she didn't test her equipment? She spun around, looking for a good test target...a tree, a hay bale, a-

Scarecrow.

She dropped her sidearm; just a few yards behind her captor, there stood a scarecrow. "Hold on, now..." she muttered to herself, "Hold on." Relt strode forward, pushing thoughtlessly past her erstwhile kidnapper as she approached the tatty thing.

It was a simple scarecrow: a wooden cross hung with old clothes, a burlap sack roughly approximating a head. There was nothing obviously amiss with it, save for - "Was this scarecrow here the entire time? I swear up and down that the damned thing wasn't here before. I...hm."

"At any rate," Relt rallied rather readily, "I thank you for the ammunition. I don't myself believe in magic and pixie dust and such gobbledy-gook, but I'm sure the material will survive the stresses sufficiently." She looked up at the scarecrow once again, his fabric non-face rustling impassively in the breeze. The woman fired a round through the ugly mannequin.

"Brilliant!" Relt beamed as the scarecrow's left arm cracked and fell into the wheat. "Yes, I think these will do nicely. In all honesty, I can't think of any other capacity in which I require your assistance. Perhaps, if we meet again, I can call in the favor at that time. Right, well, another time, Mister...oh, I just now realize that you never gave your...name..."

The pilot trailed off. As she had turned to walk away from the group, she found herself only a few feet from another scarecrow. It was built differently, in rather older clothes, and a pumpkin jammed onto the top of the wooden post served as the head, but this one was, most assuredly, not there before.

"Damnation. If this is one of your loathsome pet's tricks, sir, I am not in the slightest bit amused. If it isn't, then...let's figure out what's going on." While before this macabre occurrence would have been daunting, Relt now had bullets. Real, metal bullets. The faint, bemused grin on her face would have made Kaiser Wilhelm mess his bloomers.

[Shadar]

"Brigitte. Shadar. Jackal," Brigitte offered in the absense of Shadar's response. His eyes were narrow and vacant as he contemplated the relative risks of walking away without a karmicly corrective task under his belt. The gun shot did return some life to his face, but it was a wistful shred of entertainment that dried to dust as quickly as dew under the midday sun.

Don't look at me, Jackal spouted, I'd have giant spider legs reaching out of them if they were mine. That'd be awesome!

Shadar, after a short dance with bewilderment, recognized the predicament that Relt suddenly found herself in. "Were they...?" he asked toward Brigitte as he floated from his perch to stand, noisily, on the mat of tromped grain.

Brigitte shook her head vehenmently. With awkward, wary flaps of her wings, she hopped back from Relt and her silent blockers, only to find her back pressing against another loosely-clothed stick body. With a sound between a squawk and a scream, she spun in the grain, sent earth-toned feathers flying, and beheld the lopsided gourd stare of her assailant.

Face turned to the sky, Shadar laughed out loud, "That's it?" His shoulders lost their tension as he squinted into the sun. "The smith must have been a real monster if this is all I get." He thrust one glove toward the sky as metal pooled around the surface and lept upward to take shape. In no time, the nearly-organic growth of liquid metal became a gleaming sickle blade. Shadar spun and cleaved the air behind him where there, predictably, stood another hand-me-down sentry. It hinged back from its severed waist and drowned in the golden sea.

"It could be fun to chop our way out of this mess," he said over his shoulder to Relt as he dipped his scythe below the grain and readied another strike at a scarecrow that undoubtedly waited just to the side of his vision.

[Relt PeltFelter]

8 months previous
Batavia, Indonesia

The streets of "The Big Durian" were alive with commerce, as always. Automobile rickshaws zipped down market streets choked with haggling customers and stubborn merchants. The sun pummeled the great, sprawling city into submission, thwarted occasionally by dirigibles passing overhead or docking at a cast-iron refueling tower. Here and there, a small blimp would burst into flames, revealing its owner as too cheap to switch from hydrogen to helium, to their fatal detriment.

On a quiet back-alley, where only the cleverest cyclists knew to tread, a small cafe sizzled gently beneath a grass awning. Relt PeltFelter sat at one of only three small tables, nursing a gin and tonic and a tatty paperback novel. She looked up as a chair scraped against the cobbled street, and her expression soured. Sitting across from her, in Batavia of all places, was Captain Sarah-Lynn MacHampor, of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, her mortal enemy within the English military. "PeltFelter," she said, coolly.

"MacHampor. What the devil brings you here?"

"As I recall, me unit were called in fer 'peace-keppin' operations in the wake o' youse RAF beggars blastin' the hell outta heff o' Indonesia."

"Ah, of course." Relt sipped noisily at her gin and tonic, "My unit is being recalled in just under a week, as we're too important to be left here. I'm glad they were able to spare some Naval boys to make sure that the little pieces of the pirates we shot down don't, say, put themselves back together."

Unperturbed, MacHampor simply shrugged. "In Indonesia, I wouldna be surprised. Strange things are aflit in these jungles. Aye, lad, a gin an' tonic would be greet." The last was directed toward the rather laconic serving boy, whose manager (and mother) had insisted he take the newcomer's order.

"Don't tell me you believe that superstitious nonsense, MacHampor. We went to boarding school together, you should know better than to listen to that drivel."

The Navy woman's eyes narrowed. "Don't talk like that, PeltFelter. There's things in this world which ye canna explain. E'er hear o' the Manananggal?"

"That's that sort of Thai dish, with the lamb and coconut-"

"A'fore we came here, my unit passed by Malaysia. We saw one. On the street. They're a kind o' vampire, I s'pose, but not like Bram Stoker's fella. It was a woman. She...er..." McHampor seemed hesitant. "The sun went down, and this regulerr ol' washer woman, she jus'...broke in half."

The pilot snorted. "Terrifying."

"The top half grew bat wings, fer the record, and flew about. Took six shots to down her. Then a...an egg or summat fell out, and hatched, and a black chicken flew away."

"Listen," Relt said, standing, leaving a few gulden behind to cover her drink, "I don't cotton to any of that spiritual business that the Navy seems to embrace so fully. If I wanted to hear fairy stories, which would be an unlikely eventuality at best, mind, I would seek out some children, not a decorated Captain in Her Majesty's military. If it cannot be proven empirically, then it does not exist, and as such, I will take my business to an atmosphere with less questionable company."

The Group Captain stood and strolled off into the waxing morning, leaving MacHampor behind with a slightly warm gin and tonic. The Scotswoman scowled into her drink, tossed it back in one gulp, and called for another.

-------

Present Day
Some Field Outside of Radasanth, Corone

"There'd better be a logical explanation for this, or I'm going to owe that freckly Scot a very long apology." Relt muttered to herself. Another two scarecrows had managed to materialize at the borders of her vision, and the pilot strongly suspected that bullets, while effective at damaging individual maquettes, would likely not stem the tide of these things.

"Here's a thought," the woman stated aloud, after a moment, "Scarecrows are only found in fields, right? It stands to reason. So if we say, make a break for the treeline, we might be able to escape this mad press of loathsome straw men. Perhaps then we could determine why, exactly, this scenario is occurring."

The pilot backed up some, placing her closer to the bird-woman who had identified herself as Brigitte and the man who had called himself Shadar. "At the count of three," she said out of the corner of her mouth, "We run. If it's easier for you to fly, feathers, than do so. Actually, yes, gain some altitude. See if anyone is nearby, causing this. Alright? One. Two. Three!"

Relt's crashed through the waist-high grain, dodging and weaving as sudden scarecrow arms appeared-no, that wasn't quite the right word. There was no visual change from absence to presence, no flash of light or sparkle of dust. It was as if it had been always been there, despite the evidence of own's own memory. A particularly shrimpy scarecrow managed to trip her, sending Relt sprawling. A bundle of wheat nearly forced itself up her nose, but the pilot scrambled back to her feet, and with a dive, managed to cross into the woods.

With a heavy sigh, she leaned heavily against a tree. She noticed, after a moment, that it seemed rather dark for the early morning. And that the field she had just left had been replaced with an endless expanse of dismal, dying trees in a murky, misty forest. She looked up, seeing only a starless, black expanse beyond the clawing, swaying branches.

"In retrospect," Relt breathed quietly, "This may have been a bad idea." A peculiarly unearthly howl was her only answer.

[Shadar]

Shadar glided behind Relt with his toes just inches above the ground, the grain parting before his knees to produce a long, angry hiss of protest. “You know,” he called at her back, “I could just fly you out of here.” He swerved around a scarecrow that had arrived during a blink, and his sickle carved its body in two as he threw himself skyward.

There, he bopped heads with Scarecrow #17 and might have messed himself if his body had the capability to do so.

On instinct, he raised his weaponized arm and began shape-shifting the sickle into a blade better suited for close range. However, during the transition, the liquid metal met with the scarecrow’s long and outrageously bent support. The would-be weapon was splashed to the wind, then it flew back into his glove just as violently, producing a sharp pop of air suddenly vacated and a pained wince as he cradled his arm on the way to the ground.

He bounced on his shoulder and managed a few frantic strides before he got his head back above the golden sea’s surface. A quick glance ahead told him that Relt had suffered a similar hindrance, but was still moving. With a small hop, he set himself gliding again and twisted to look for Brigitte. A forest now lay behind as well as in front, though this one was made of stickmen on precariously leaning stilts. There were five in total one for each unsuccessful-

Six. She rocketed from the grain, an explosion of sun-sparkled feathers and squawking fury, and there hung another stalker. This one, however, was ripped from its post by talons angry enough to cleave steel plate. It took a second scarecrow to bring her down this time. Shadar swooped underneath and caught her, talons facing away, in his lap, which almost grounded him. The teenage-boy-fantasy curves that Jackal had graced her with, malicious creator that he was, did not make her easy to pack around. “Hold still!” he ordered when she tried to get airborne again, and he clamped his arms around her to pin her wings.

Gliding backwards and nearly blind, he rolled off the scarecrows more than avoided them, surfing a wave of jagged sticks and clinging rags. It was only luck (because karma would certainly do him no favours) that kept him from finding the broadside of a tree the instant that he crossed the threshold.

Shadar planted his feet and skidded to a halt with Brigitte glued to his chest. There she stayed even when their momentum had died, her face buried in his shoulder as if she couldn’t bare to look at the sky that had been denied to her. She was only a year old, after all.

“Yes, bad idea,” Shadar distractedly agreed with Relt as he listened to the distant howl and looked up through the warped branches. This was not the sky that Brigitte had been batted away from. It was a shroud as coldly oppressive as the scarecrows. He pressed a hand to the back of her head to keep her from witnessing it any sooner than she had to.

“Bad?! This is freakin’ sweet! If I could put it on a postcard.” Jackal’s murky appearance seemed entirely at home as his illusion appraised, with arms wide, the sickly trees and the darkness that enveloped them no more than ten paces away.

Brigitte popped her head up from Shadar’s shoulder, though her angry words became knots in her throat the instant she saw the forest. The ground seemed to shift in the darkness, and the air was filled with insidious wooden hands. The field behind was no better - because it was gone. In every direction, for the short distance the darkness permitted them to see, crooked branches pawed at the ambient fog. Shadar assumed that the shifting haze was what caused the barely perceptible twitching of the wooden fingers. But, he feared it might be the other way around.

Forcefully, Shadar pivoted and pulled Brigitte with him so that she wasn’t tempted to try an escape in the direction they had come. It had proven impenetrable as a mere field, and now it was a landscape both darker and hungrier. “I didn’t mention this earlier because I didn’t really know…” he droned toward Relt without looking at her, “But, apparently, being near me on a bad karma day can be dangerous. Lesson learned.” He finished with a half smile, because a full smile might have turned into mirthless laughter.

Jackal turned, eyes burning with joy, and said to the anxious few, “If this is the punishment, that pervy smith was healing lepers in his basement.” Without a word of explanation, he bowed and gestured in what seemed an arbitrary direction. “Shall we?”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt scowled at the flippant tone utilized by the phantasmagorical canid. While the prospect of actually using her newly acquired ammunition filled her with a certain giddiness, being trapped in an extradimensional hell-vortex with these numbskulls was certainly not her idea of a pleasant scenario. Still, she kept her sidearm at the ready. "Jackal, was it?" the pilot addressed the violet hound, "Funny. You look more of a 'Fido', or perhaps a 'Hailey'. I never was too fond of dogs, and I can see your inability to maintain focus in a crisis situation will do nothing to endear me towards your fellows' branch of the evolutionary tree."

Relt looked into the pervasive tangle of trees; the territory seemed to be rather homogeneous, with no real clearings. Obviously, the thick fog even now curling around her ankles hindered visibility considerably. The forest was preternaturally silent, broken only by occasional inhuman wails from a long way off. Even with the deadening of this mist, the sound seemed to be coming from something rather large. "Listen, I'm sure it will do us no good to get lost deeper in this horrible place. I don't pretend to fully understand how we got here, but it's almost certainly quantum. Now, there's plenty of dry wood, and I've a few supplies in my kit which might help us-"

At this point, Relt had managed to snap a brittle branch from one of the nearby trees. It quivered, fish-like, in her hands, and the stricken tree emitted a sound remarkably akin a child's scream through several layers of wet vellum. "Ah...perhaaaps...not," the woman said slowly, dropping the twig and backing closer to the strange bedfellows this particular crisis had forced her to adopt. From somewhere in the woods, a red spotlight snapped on, focusing tightly on Relt's face.

The pilot immediately drew a bead on the source with her service revolver. It seemed to draw closer, pulling in its wake a thrum so deep it would cause elephants to void their bowels in panic. A noise not so much heard as felt, first in the legs before rising and rattling the whole of one's being. It pulsed like the sickly heartbeat of a dying god.

A creature (for what other word was there?) emerged from the fog and trees, it's face nothing but a scarlet circle of blistering light, a dozen feet from the ground. It was skeletally thin, roughly humanoid, and with more than the usual allotment of uncannily spindly limbs; any further detail was lost in its light and the coiling mist. There was some ineffable quality to the thing which put Relt, anger wrestling fear for control of her limbic system, in mind of the wretched scarecrows the group had escaped.

The beast ceased its infrasonic bellow, and with a series of birdlike clicks, played the spotlight that was its visage over the faces of those before it. After what may have been consideration, the thing swiveled its empty head upward on a pencil-neck, emitting a piercing shriek and a gout of steam towards the empty voice of the sky.

Relt finally managed to fire a shot, and where the bullet struck, more steam emerged from fabric-like rips in the beasts hide. They did not seem to deter the creature from its alien task. "Don't just stand there gawping!" she shouted to her compatriots, a sense of unity striking her as the faint glow of more spotlights began to become visible amongst the distant trees. She fired again, missing by a hair. "Damnation!"

[Shadar]

Somehow, despite the alien terror grating over his nerves, Shadar found himself analyzing the mist-borne monstrosity. The bulbous eye, if it was an eye, would be adapted to a low light environment. This creature wouldn't be taken by illusionary tricks. Its stumpy hands, curiously lacking the twisted digits that so adorned the trees, seemed weak and non-threatening. Dismemberment seemed the best strategy. He released Brigitte as the liquid metal pooled around only one of his gloves. The other, its shifting surface tinged with bruise red, still burned from the forced return of metal moments ago.

The harpy did not move, but a small whimper escaped from her pale lips as the beast's reverberating presence crescendoed with an overwhelming shriek into the thick sky. Shadar couldn't help but put his hands to his ears, letting his would-be weapon shrink away in the process, and Brigitte cringed down into her clenched wings.

Then, the nightmare betrayed its design. A plume of steam shot from the upturned spotlight, which bathed it in crimson until it looked, unmistakeably, like vaporous blood. "You miserable bas-" he snarled in the direction, now empty, where Jackal's joyous illusion had once stood.

Still jittery with glee, the demon guffawed in the back of his head, Not me! That's karma's irony. She can be a real bitch with it.

The subsequent gunshot and wound only confirmed what Shadar already expected. Pulsing upward in a thin jet, the steam from the wound also wafted its way into the creature's light, joining the scarlet cloud above that widened and darkened to become one with the mist. More light beams appeared from the forest, slowly, as if the fog's mass dragged on their bodies.

"Stop wasting the freaking bullets!" Shadar shouted through the shrieking symphony, unsure if Relt could even hear. Their song, sharp and invasive, seemed to fill his body as thickly as their smog filled the air. "Grab her!" he shouted to Brigitte, shaking her into motion but not returning color to her white lips and ashen pupils. With straining wings and forceful talons, she wrapped around Relt from behind, locking the woman so close to her body that the deceased smith looked on enviously from his grave.

Shadar cinched one arm over Brigitte's shoulder and clamped it tightly against Relt's wing-wrapped torso. Then, all three bodies violently lost contact with the ground, skimming over it like a buoyant battering ram. Cool metal rolled up Shadar's leading shoulder, forming a thin wedge that, under their momentum, cleaved into the encircling shriekers as easily as Relt's bullets had.

Limbs cracked and snapped into Shadar's face. Whether they were the creatures' or the trees', he couldn't tell. Both splintered apart as if brittle, yet the biting shrapnel was humid and slick. Dismemberment be damned, the shriek continued in that single, piercing note. The air overhead became a ceiling of heavy, clinging steam, and something more. He felt a great weight above, far away but as inevitable as an avalanche.

The flight seemed endless, as all nightmares do, until the fierce tempo of breaking bodies dropped dead. There was suddenly nothing but the trees, the fog, and the darkness beyond that seemed comparatively safe for its lack of bloody spotlights. Shadar continued towing his charges over the mist-draped soil until he fell to the ground, exhausted. Their bodies separated and sprawled among the trees.

Gliding had never exhausted him before. But, whether due to the world's rules or the simple strain of keeping three bodies aloft, Shadar doubted he could stand from his crumpled position, let alone take to the air.

"Don't. Touch. Anything," he commanded breathlessly, though the act of breathing for both he and Brigitte was unnecessary. It was as if the shriek had planted itself under his skin and lay there, idly constricting.