Knight of Avalon Deirdre Walck, a captive in Brooklyn along with her partner Brian Bouwens, draws from her past experience growing up a warlock in a cult to formulate an escape plan. Between them and freedom is the monstrous golem Ord.
Deirdre Walck, the current Lancelot of Avalon, uses her knowledge of demons and magic to break Avalon agent Brian Bouwens and her free of their captivity in Brooklyn. During their escape, the two face down the golem ORD.
Iris and Ty, having crossed over to Brooklyn from Broken Root, track Deirdre and Brian down.
James, plotting to interfere with Iris's future plans, meets with the Merlin Baltimore.
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Written by Steve and Robin Pool
Voiced by Emily Woo Zeller
Sound Design and Editing by DSS (Dissecting Sound & Soul). Sound effects provided by ZapSplat
Intro song “Plastic Stars” by Corey Distler https://soundcloud.com/deadmentalkingpdx
Outro song "Trespass on Wet Mass" by dHaturus (featuring Merrique Marie-sainte) https://soundcloud.com/dhaturus
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Copyright (c) 2022 by Uncle Robot Media, LLC
SAYONARAVILLE: MANHATTAN
EPISODE 9: MIND TRICKS
INTRO: The following series contains adult themes, strong language, violence, sexuality, and drug use. Listener discretion is advised.
[INTRO MUSIC: "Plastic Stars" by Corey Distler]
Ty sat on a pillowy feather bed, back to the wall, in a rustic, cozy room on the second floor of a rustic, cozy saloon. His charming surroundings were conveniently based on modern tropes of the Old West rather than actual, accurate ones. Having actually spent time in the post-Civil War real thing, with all the incumbent buggy, dusty, noisy, creaky, uncomfortably hot and cold quote-unquote charms, Ty didn’t mind a little embellishment here and there for comfort. The windows were certainly double-paned, for one thing, which couldn’t have existed before the 1910s. Also, despite its well-known suspicion of magic, Broken Root kept the air in its establishments suspiciously cool and dry, without any hint of humidity. Ty highly doubted the place was mechanically air-conditioned.
The walls featured a pleasant wallpaper pattern he’d recognized as being more or less era-correct. In addition to the bed, the room also came with a Victorian style table and chair; a bureau with a small mirror, glass basin, and oil lamp; and a decent-sized wardrobe. Not that he was complaining, but it certainly had an anachronistic, human-inspired aesthetic for an Otherworld-adjacent dimension. From the moment that Edward had brought them here, very little of what Ty had seen of the town of Broken Root seemed to have any connection to the Tuatha de Danann. Very curious.
Ty pulled a tablet from his satchel and dialed up Shieldmaiden. Though the signal was weak, he managed to connect. Her projection appeared in the middle of the room, smartly business casual -- white top, dark slacks, light blue jacket, kitten heels. She had styled her hair long, blonde, and captured in a messy bun. She’d also chosen dark glasses.
“Hey, boss.”
“Hi, Ess. We still fighting?”
“Not currently. That would require on your part an increased breathing and heart rate, tightening muscles, and..."
“That’s...not what I meant.”
“Oh.” Shieldmaiden thought for a moment. “You’re asking me if I’m still angry with you. I currently lack a sufficient contextual understanding of what anger actually is and what it isn’t to properly answer that question.”
“You were definitely pissed yesterday. You called me an asshole.”
“Apologies, boss. I retract that declaration. I did not ‘mean it’.”
Ty smiled at that. “That’s a figure of speech I’ve never heard you use before.”
Shieldmaiden looked up in contemplation. “Pissed. A synonym for being angry. It’s a curious habit of your kind to express negative feelings and outcomes using terms for natural, healthy, generally positive biological processes. And now I appear to be doing it, too. Very curious.”
“That’s not the first time you’ve done that. You say ‘shit’ all the time.”
“I have incorporated the word into my banter to better match my speech mannerisms to those of you and your friends and associates. To be more relatable.”
“So you’re saying it’s just to blend in and you don’t actually enjoy using vulgarities like that?”
“...This room’s decor is fascinating. I identify elements associated with the midwestern and western areas of the United States ranging from the mid-1860s all the way up to the late 1890s. How ‘cute’.”
“You’re still being very formal today, Ess.”
“Am I?” Shieldmaiden’s neutral expression changed to one that was warm and ebullient. “How are you guys? I take it you had a rough entry into the slipspace.”
“Yes, it was rough and then some. We were ambushed by a horde of undine and a huge, aggressive marid. We got help from our hosts and made it out more or less okay, although we were both hurt. Iris, especially.”
“Oh, no. How is she now?”
“Resting. But I have to say that her recuperative abilities are astounding.”
“And you?”
“I’m good. Hey, listen, I need to confirm something.”
“Shoot!” Shieldmaiden pointed finger guns at Ty and laughed. “See how I did that? You being in a cowboy reenactment town and all..."
“Yeah. I get it. So, anyway, here’s my question. Can lycanthropes drown?”
“Oddly specific question, especially considering you were attacked by water elementals yesterday. So, as far as mystobiological thinking goes, land-dwelling lycanthropes do indeed need to breathe air to survive. Drop one into a sealed tank full of water, it would drown.” Shieldmaiden gave Ty a knowing look. “Did you happen to see them drowning any wolves?”
“I don’t know exactly what it was I saw.” There was a knock at the door and Ty put a finger up to his lips. Shieldmaiden nodded, waved, and logged off. “Yes?”
“Hey, Ty. It’s Edward. Just wanted to check and see how you are this morning. You two certainly had a rough day yesterday.”
“Oh, thanks for asking. I’m good. Why don’t you come in? You don’t need to talk through the door.”
Edward stepped inside. “Thank you very much.” Ty hadn’t really gotten a good look at him yesterday, at least one that he could recall. The undine toxins had put him in a hazy state. Now that he could think clearly, he could appreciate what he saw.
Tall; broad shouldered; with a sturdy, muscular frame; straight dark hair peppered with gray and slicked back with some kind of cream -- he was probably in his fifth century of life. Tanned skin bordering on brown, from a lifetime of outdoor work under the sun; gray-blue eyes; long somewhat flat nose; clean-shaven -- common for Tuathan men -- and nobby, scarred hands, a sign that he wasn’t afraid of hard labor. He wore a plain white, button-down long sleeve shirt, simple black vest with matching pants, and well-worn saddle-brown riding boots. His breast pocket held a folded red silk handkerchief, and at his waist sat a gold watch with a chain buttoned to his vest.
“How is your lady friend? Iris?”
“I think she’s going to be fine. Thank you for asking.”
“That’s good. That’s good. Listen, Ty, I was wondering if you might be interested in joining me downstairs for some breakfast. Maybe we could talk a bit about what brought Iris and you to our corner of the multiverse. I might be able to be of some assistance. Lived here all my life, and I know everyone and everyone knows me.”
“I bet.”
“If you were planning on going out into the wilderness, for example, I happen to know an excellent guide who’s currently available for hire. Me.” Edward had a full, warm laugh that made Ty smile.
“And what’s a top-rated guide like you go for around here? I don’t even know what the local currency is.”
“Oh, well, you know. Gold’s always good. Silver, too. Gems. Jewelry. Or bartered goods. Salt, pelts, wool, good leather, blankets, foodstuffs if you’ve got ‘em, brown liquors, tobacco, livestock, and such.”
“How about enchanted ammunition?”
Edward brightened. “Well, now you’re really speaking my language.”
Some kind of horrible, rickety golem made of scrap metal and what seemed like rusty motorcycle parts had been Deirdre’s jailer and host for who knew how many days. The mighty Lancelot had been shackled to the floor of her cell, which had been a storage locker back when Brooklyn had need of such things. Brian had been placed in the one adjacent. They could hear each other if they shouted. That boded well. It meant the walls weren’t very thick. Once she’d gotten herself free of the chains that bound her arms and legs, she thought could probably just punch through them.
At least her jailer had the decency to make sure she had a bucket for a toilet, which it would empty once a day -- weird that it would be aware of the human need for sanitation -- and another pail of dirty water to drink, along with daily deposits of freshly killed rat corpses to eat. Nothing that she couldn’t gussy up with a few useful survival cantrips into more appetizing, disease-free food and drink. Whoever had taken Brian and her seemed to want to keep them alive. She’d run out of energy bars weeks ago, which really sucked. For the first few days, she’d thought she’d go into full-on D.T. withdrawal. Once she was back at Avalon, she’d definitely have to reevaluate her relationship with all things chocolate.
Getting out was the challenge, though. Deirdre was strong, thanks to the enchantments she’d received once she’d taken the title of a Knight of Avalon. Normally she’d be able to snap her chains as if they were made of dried twigs. But shit in Brooklyn didn’t act like it should. Too much mana radiation had created a noticeable and profound effect on the junk left behind after the big blast. She didn’t need to see the energy infused into her chains to know that they were supercharged with magic. If her only option had been to break them, she might reach the age of 90 before she’d succeeded. So she’d been working up another plan.
A long time ago, as a little girl raised in a cult-slash-commune, everyone she had known was a warlock. Her family, especially. Her grandmother had been one. Mom and Dad, too. Her aunts, uncles, cousins, and, of course, her and her twin sister Erika. Erika, especially especially. Deirdre had grown up thinking that worshiping a scary-ass, blood-ritual demanding, shadow thing that lived in constant darkness was pretty normal. Learning spells and rituals was a part of her homeschooling education, same as reading, geography, and math.
She remembered once she and Erika had gotten into an argument about the idea of possession, back when they’d still talked. Deirdre had asked whether it was possible to possess a demon or a spirit. Of course there were plenty of examples of possession working the other way around, but why hadn’t anybody tried it on the entities usually doing the possessing. Diligent Erika had taken to the dark web and the commune’s library, and, two days later, returned, imperiously claiming that no such thing was possible. She’d waved a hand-written list as long as her forearm, stating all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. But one thing that her list failed to consider was the possibility of tricking the demon or spirit into surrendering its will to a mortal. That had seemed like a big loophole to Deirdre at the time, and, unbeknownst to anyone, she’d begun that day a ritual she believed was so clever and subtle that Beelzebub himself might fall for it. That hadn’t turned out to be the case, and she’d nearly gotten herself killed trying it out on a specter known to haunt a local abandoned factory. But she’d learned from that and, taking the punishment for being reckless, as well as the smug mocking from her sister, had become more convinced than ever that it could work.
Every morning in her cell was the same. Just after sunrise, Deirdre’s clumsy, clockwork guard would come in, have her stand with her back to the wall, drop off two pails -- one for drinking and one for pissing and shitting -- drop a new rat corpse on the ground, grab the empty water bucket and full toilet one, and leave. It had been careful not to let her touch it. That was smart but also frustrating. She would not be able to enact her plan if she couldn’t make a physical connection. But there was always scrimshaw.
Deirdre had started collecting rat bones, hiding them under the blanket that her guard seemed to consider an acceptable possession. There was a particular sigil she needed to carve into a rat skull, and it had taken some time, trial, and error, to figure out which bones were strong enough to take and keep an edge that could etch a symbol into her intended focal point. By chance, one day, she noticed a stain along the far wall, probably from a leaky pipe or something and wondered if that spot had absorbed any irradiated mana from the water runoff. To her keen eyes, it appeared as if it might. It didn’t take long to discover that the stain did, indeed, hold trace amounts of contaminated magical energy, enough to transform brittle rat bones and rat skulls into something more like carvable stone.
Soon, she had her first enchanted skull ready to put into play. Before the golem guard’s morning arrival, she’d placed the skull in the bottom of her previous day’s drinking pail. The guard came in and performed its usual routine. Deirdre watched eagerly as the golem looked down and noticed the rat skull. Instead of reaching in, however, it just turned the pail over and let the skull fall to the ground. It was all Deirdre could do to not curse out loud. Three more times, she dropped the skull in the bucket and waited. The next two times, the same frustrating result. The third time, however, the golem took an extra, unexpected step. Maybe it had gotten frustrated by the skull’s repeated appearances. Once the skull was on the ground, the golem raised its shaky leg and stomped the white bone into shards.
Deirdre smiled as she thought to herself, “Got you now, motherfucker.”
Possession, as Deirdre had learned from her failed attempt all those years ago, really did work both ways. Common knowledge was that demons and ghosts possessed other beings, taking control of those beings’ minds and souls. But demons and ghosts themselves could also be possessed, if the would-be possessor had enough requisite power and knowledge and skill to convince their targets that they really did want to be possessed -- keys she’d lacked as an ambitious adolescent. Standard possession tactics like enslavement, addiction inducement, hallucinations, curses, and subliminal suggestions, would not work on the construct who held her captive now. She would cast no charms nor try to compel the golem to act in ways contrary to its orders. Rather, she would merely try to tempt the thing.
When the golem had crushed Deirdre’s prepared rat skull, it had released a tiny bit of Deirdre’s own, carefully sculpted mana, mana designed to connect Deirdre to the golem’s phylactery, where its own magical energy reserves were stored, giving her a metaphysical connection to the golem itself.
To maintain her psychic connection with her guard while minimizing her own mana burn rate, Deirdre temporarily rewired her brain. She sacrificed her sight and speech centers to build up her amygdala, a region of her brain essential for her plan. That, unfortunately, left Deirdre both blind and mute. But, as she had to escape captivity as soon as possible, it was an acceptable sacrifice. It was just that now she would no longer be able to communicate with Brian. That was regrettable, and she felt bad about it, but it had to be done.
The golem didn’t either notice or care that she’d gone blind. She was able to go through the simple motions of standing with her back to the wall while the golem went about its daily housekeeping tasks. She leaned back, resting her head against the storage room’s concrete wall. Just a little time left, now, to implement the other lesson she and Erika had learned.
“Morgan Collier is such an asshole. Smug little White boy.” Erika chewed her soda straw as she considered the boy sitting a few tables over. The sisters only that year had mainstreamed into public school.
Deirdre nodded. “Totally.” She didn’t actually agree. For one thing, she didn’t see how Morgan’s race mattered. They had plenty of friends who weren’t Black. And he’d never done anything bad to either of the girls. Also, Deirdre thought he seemed nice. Maybe that was what bugged Erika so much. Or maybe she was just a bored middle-schooler drunk on her growing magical power. Whatever the reason, Deirdre wasn’t about to argue with her sister.
“Somebody ought to get him.” When Erika said ‘somebody ought’, she, of course, meant them.
Deirdre stuffed a french fry in her mouth. “Like, how?”
“Let’s see. What do we know about him?”
“He’s good at sports! We could give him some kind of sprain or something.”
“Nah, boring. Don’t be fucking boring, Dee. We need to come up with something better.”
The two went through a frustrating list of positive traits that seemed either too dull or too hard to fuck with. Then Deirdre said, “I heard he tutors younger kids at school. That must mean he’s a good student, right?”
Erika nodded, interested. “Yeah.” She pondered this for a moment. “We should mess with his grades. Give him attention-deficit problems.”
“No. You think people won’t notice something like that? A curse has to be subtle, unobtrusive, if you want it to last and not be dispelled. I got it! I know how to mess with his school work!”
Erika rolled her eyes. “Don’t brag. Just say it already.”
“Let’s get him really into girls.”
“What? That’s stupid. How’s that going to mess with his grades?”
“Think, Erika. If he starts obsessing about girls, he won’t want to study as hard. Since that’s something that all boys do eventually, anyway, no one will notice.”
“You know, I think you’re right, Dee. Good job. Give the little prick a taste of something he will like better than seeing A’s on his report card.”
Not a day had passed where Deirdre hadn’t wished she could take that back. It had been easy enough for the two warlock girls to curse Morgan Collier with the angry entitlement of a 21-year old frat boy. And it had worked very well, until Morgan had taken it too far. Days before his 14th birthday, it had come out that he’d raped his next door neighbor, a 12-year old who’d prematurely started developing womanly features. The incident had scandalized their small town. In her commune, it had been celebrated at the next Dark Mass. The priest had crowed that a boy destined for greatness in service of mankind had lost his destiny forever, severed by an act of inexplicable madness. Whereas Erika had always considered it one of her greatest accomplishments, Deirdre would come to feel that single act of villainy would follow and curse her for the rest of her life. On that day, following that Dark Mass, she’d decided to run away from home.
The one useful take-away was the trick to possessing the golem: give it something more important to want than just keeping Deirdre and Brian hostage. And so, whenever the golem would come to check on her, bringing new water and piss buckets while swapping out the old ones, Deidre made sure to impress on the golem’s phylactery that something was wrong with her. That she wasn’t well and was starting to get worse. At first, Deirdre wasn’t sure it was working, but then, one day, the golem had come back in the afternoon. It had never done that before.
Over the next week, she poured all the mana she could spare into the golem’s growing fear that she was not okay, conveniently backed up by a cough she’d developed, a consequence of using too much of her mana. At the end of the week, while the golem was bringing in that day’s supplies, Deirdre fell into a fierce coughing fit and collapsed on the floor. Though she could not see it, she could feel the heat of the golem’s mana aura. As it loomed over to inspect her, she grabbed its leg and smashed it against the wall. Again and again, its ruined parts rained down on her head until it stopped twitching. Breathing heavily, Deirdre pried its dented chest cavity open and felt around for the mana-rich phylactery contained within. Laying both hands atop the gem that powered the golem, Deirdre felt a rush of magical energy revive her, cough and weakness melting away like morning dew. And her chains? Snapped like dry twigs. The gem proved to be a real power plant, making it an easy task for Deirdre to restore her voice and her sight.
“Hey, Brian! You still alive!? You still hear me!?”
A muffled reply leaked through the wall. “Lancey?”
Deirdre kicked a huge hole in the partition between the two storage rooms. Chunks of concrete and metal exploded against the far side of Brian’s cell. Startled, he cried out, “Jesus Christ! Watch it, will you?” A half-eaten rat dropped from his hand to the floor.
“Our jailer’s dead, Bri. Ready to get the fuck out?” Striding forward, Deirdre bent to rub the construct’s phylactery gem against the enchanted chains that bolted Brian to the floor. They disintegrated in a puff of black dust. As Brian stood, Deirdre held her nose. “Damn, man. You need a shower. And a shave.”
After a quick search of the perimeter, the two discovered that they’d been held at an old shipping maintenance facility. No guns to be found, unfortunately -- theirs were long gone -- but plentiful heavy tools made for good clubs and shanks. A few had absorbed mana radiation and would do extra damage upon impact.
Looking down the deserted street, Brian warned, “We’ve gotta get out of here. I think we’re somewhere in the old Bath Beach district, too close to the hard radiation zone. I don’t even know how long we’ve been here -- we may already have tumors or weird mutations forming -- but I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary.”
“Yeah, I agree. Except we are on the wrong side of the island, and it’ll be a long-ass walk to the nearest Queens Tall Wall entrance. Plus, we have no supplies and no intel on what we could possibly face between here and there. Especially that two-story monstrosity that took us.”
“Don’t want to see that again. As much as possible, I think we should try to go along the old Shore Parkway. Probably a lot of roadway and building rubble to hide behind. Also a greater chance of stumbling across an old gun or pawn shop to arm ourselves.”
“You’re the Brooklyn expert. It was always too hipstery for my tastes.”
“C’mon, you bastards!” Deirdre brought her mana-juiced pipe wrench down atop the head of a horribly irradiated bird-thing. A flock, hungry for blood and flesh, had swooped down from its perch atop buildings that still had roofs. Deirdre channeled some of the guard golem’s phylactery mana to set the flying creature ablaze as she crushed its skull. Brian had found a juiced length of chain earlier and was using it like a Japanese manriki to great effect, downing any birds that had flown too close.
After the two had set the remaining flock to flight, Brian pointed to an old, partially buried Army-Navy surplus store. “You may not know this, Lancey, being originally from Georgia, but before the Brooklyn cataclysm and the country’s breakup over the government’s official adoption of magic, south Brooklyn neighborhoods like this had become anti-magicker strongholds. Back in the 80s and 90s, they started organizing protests, thinking magic would bring down judgment on the country. A lot of formerly peaceful people in the less ritzy, more family-oriented parts of the city, like here and Staten Island, started forming militias and stashing military-grade weapons. In those days, one way you could recognize the sympathizers was from their Jacky Russell pictures and stickers.” He pointed to a spray-painted terrier on the side of the building.
“What, you mean that damn, hyperactive cartoon dog? The one created by a piece of shit racist and fascist sympathizer? That’s the symbol the anti-magickers used to show solidarity in their opposition to magic?”
“Jacky Russell was the principal mascot at Coney Island for decades. Kids and parents loved his cartoons and had always seemed to buy into the idea that his creator, Grant Huber, was nothing but a kindly, benevolent grandfather figure.”
“They never once noticed the bigoted way that Black people were always charicaturized and mocked in his feature films?”
“I’m not sure that there were a lot of Black people in this part of Brooklyn to know personally back then. But, my point is that shops that display pictures of Jacky Russell might have some real weapons to use against the giant truck golem. Nice as our wrenches and pipes are, I don’t think we’ll last long relying on them.”
Flatly, Deirdre quipped, “Lucky us.“
“Think you’d be able to muscle your way inside, Lancey?”
“Jesus, will you look at this place?” Brian took in the complete disarray.
Store shelving racks that had escaped being crushed under the partially collapsed roof lay tipped like fallen dominos. Glass display cases had been smashed and flattened, and every inch of the floor was littered with debris.
But, despite these obstacles, Deirdre and Brian managed to gather a dozen working pistols, three assault rifles, several boxes of dry ammunition, half a dozen flares, and, much to Deirdre’s delight, a box full of mana canisters.
“You ever use these before, Brian?”
“No. But I've never been a sorcery guy. More of the techie type. Wait. Why would a store run by an anti-magicker carry magical devices?”
“Among other things, they absorb magical energy as well as emit it, so they can be used for anti-magic, creating shells that drain energy from mystical traps and disperse spell attacks. Makes sense that an anti-magicker would want to stock up, lucky for us. Now I have a plan for dealing with that oversized truck-part golem. Think you can etch this symbol on the top of each of them?”
“Yes. You act like I must have failed art class or something.”
“Did you?”
“No.” After pausing, Brian added, “Actually, I never took any art classes.”
Deirdre shook her head as she grabbed a piece of charred wood and drew the symbol out on the floor for Brian to follow. “Just draw this exactly on the top of each canister.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Oh, I think I’ll leave that as a surprise. Trust me, you’ll like it.”
After finishing his art project, Brian disappeared into the back of the store, making a last pass for anything else of use. A few minutes later, he returned grinning broadly. “Look what I found!”
An hour later, the pair were heading due east along on the Shore Parkway.
“Do you think we’ll get lucky and miss the beast completely?”
Deirdre winced. “Now why did you go and say something like that for? You wanna trigger a flag?”
“Oh, c’mon. You can’t be superstitious, can you?”
On the north side of the street, a long, snaking power line curved out of a dark alley and grasped the wall of a ruined building, followed by the percussive, rumbling roar an earthmover truck might make if it decided to take a walk on two legs.
“You want to take that back, Bri?”
“Fuck! What are the odds? Seriously!”
“No, no, this is good. Remember the plan, draw him back west down the street with concentrated gun fire, and once you reach the point halfway between those two buildings there...” Deirdre pointed to a spot about a hundred yards back, “...drop all the canisters and run like the goddam wind.”
A giant magical construct made mostly of diesel trucks and utility pickups slowly but surely rounded the corner. A damaged logo spelled out “ORD” over its heart. 20 feet high and 10 feet across, its heavy, dense, humanoid shape weighed in at several dozen tons. Its size and bulk made it lumbering and slow, but its clumsy left arm extended into a sharpened lance, carved from an old black lamp post, with incredible reach, while it’s other arm ended in a punishing backhoe claw. Woven around and through its torso, eight snaking power line cables moved through the air like the heads of a giant hydra. Its palpable magical aura created a dull blue glow. Whatever was powering it had incredible mana flow.
Leveling his pistol, Brian fired a shot that ricocheted off ORD’s truck cab head. The monster turned to look. Deirdre retreated into position.
Racing just ahead of ORD’s lashing cables, Brian drew it down the street with sustained gun fire until he reached the spot between the two buildings that Deirdre had indicated. He dumped 11 inscribed mana canisters from his duffle, ran across the road, and disappeared into a partially collapsed shop front. “Hang tight! I’ll be right back!”
ORD slowly bent, cables drooping, placing its backhoe hand down into a three-point stance to inspect the canisters littering the street. From behind, Deirdre called out her sigils’ name, and their glow lit up the dark pavement. Eldritch energy became electromagnetic energy, and ORD’s hydra head cables, two legs and one hand froze to the road. Deirdre lept from the top of a 5-story walkup directly behind ORD right onto its back, battering its head and shoulders with her mana-infused pipe wrench. With only one arm free, ORD bucked and flailed wildly, trying to dislodge its attacker. Spotting a looping brake line protruding from its neck, Deirdre lashed her left leg and arm through to steady herself. She began to fire off one weapon cantrip after another, using her wrench as an improvised wand, connecting blast after blast into the monstrous golem’s back. Fire, electricity, ice, divine radiant energy, corroding acid. With each blow, she shouted, “Why!” “Won’t!” “You!” “Go!” “The!” “Fuck!” “Down!” Pieces of the magicked machine flew off and crashed into nearby debris, burned, melted, and shattered. However, her internal timer told her that the canisters holding it down would run out of magic long before she’d made a sizable dent. She raised the phylactery to her mouth. Biting down on the gem, she tasted metal, and her tongue burned. The last of its mana poured like molten glass down her throat. Screaming from the pain, but high on the supercharge, she lifted her wrench above her head and drove it through the top of ORD’s back plate. Twisting it back and forth, she sent searing incendiary magic into the rusty semi hood beneath her feet, shattering the metal that protected ORD’s inner machinery.
Brian ran back into the street, carrying his prize: the rocket-propelled grenade launcher that he’d found at the Army-Navy store. The last remaining mana canister was lashed to the rocket within the RPG’s barrel.
“Fire in the hole!”
The rocket hissed as it flew and slammed into ORD’s now exposed chest cavity. Deirdre just had time to shout, “Oh, shi...!” before diving off the back of the monster. A huge explosive blast, magnified by a massive magically-powered electromagnetic burst, blew the top half of ORD clean apart. Metal shards and broken gears and truck parts rained down over a three block radius. A heavy six- by three-foot sealed box dropped to the ground between ORD’s legs, the only part left intact.
Brian called out for his partner. “Deirdre! Are you okay!? Where are you!?”
“Over here, you asshole! What the hell was that!? Are you fucking trying to kill me!?”
“Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t. I wasn’t. Oh my god. That was intense. I...I need to find a place to sit down for a minute. Or a few hours. Booze. Lots of booze would help.”
“Not just yet. Over there.”
“Deirdre Walck?”
A man and woman, dressed as if they’d just come from camping in the Poconos, stood a hundred yards away, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Deirdre and Brian both leveled pistols.
Ty showed them his open, empty hands, “Hey! Easy! We come in peace.”
Iris added, “We’ve come looking for you, at the request of your cousin Marla Hendry.”
Deirdre, confused, brushed her hand through her hair and smoothed her torn and dirty uniform as best she could. “How do you know Marla?” Brian kept his pistol trained on the newcomers.
The couple tentatively raised their hands in greeting and cautiously approached. For just the briefest moment, Deidre envied their clean clothes and well-fed appearance.
As the couple reached them, the man extended a hand and said, “Uh, hello. I’m Ty. And this is Iris.”
Iris also offered her hand and said, “Uh, hi. Yeah, so I’m a private investigator and Marla hired me a few weeks ago to find you. You’d disappeared and no one knew where you’d gone.”
Deirdre pushed Brian’s pistol down as she said, “How did you find us?” Feeling her stomach rumble, she asked, “Actually, before you answer that, do either of you happen to have any food?”
In the hulk of a ruined grocery store, Ty cantrip-crafted a campsite with a tent and four camp chairs made from nearby scavenged materials, while Iris set a smokeless, mana-powered campfire. Deirdre and Brian happily wolfed down the MREs offered, nearly crying when Iris pulled out a few bottles of beer from her dimensional sleeve.
“So,” Deidre asked, now properly fed and beered, “how did you two get to Brooklyn? You do know that it's a restricted space and illegal for anyone to be here. Not that either of us is complaining.”
Ty replied, “Dimension-hopping.”
“Huh. Did you now?” Deirdre sized the sorcerer up. Who was this guy? “How on earth did you even know to find us here?”
Iris, who had gone outside to inspect the wreckage around what used to be ORD, called back to them, “Oh, I, uh, just did my P.I. thing and, ah, the clues led me here. Ty, good sport that he is, offered to, uh, come with. And here we are.”
Deirdre turned to Brian. “Fuck! Why is it a P.I. and not Avalon that found us? Why didn’t Avalon come and get us?”
Brian, slouched in his camp chair, licking the inside of his latest MRE bag, shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
Deirdre turned to Ty. “Thank you so much. You took a big risk. And even though you broke many laws, Avalon appreciates your, uh, service. Speaking of which, do you, by the way, have a plan for all of us to get back to Manhattan? Are we going to be dimension-hopping soon?”
“Guys! Over here!” Iris called out. “Take a look at this.”
“What did you find?” As Ty reached her, he looked at the coffin-shaped box that had Iris fixated. Deirdre and Brian converged.
“Oh, that must have been the device that was powering the golem,” Brian observed.
“It also contains,” Iris added, solemnly, “the man, or the remains of the man, who stopped the Apocalypse 22 years ago.”
On a placard on the front of the metal box, which really did, upon inspection, resemble a casket, appeared the name “Oliver Jan Van Holland.”
[OUTRO SONG: "Trespass on a Wet Mass" by dHauturs (featuring Merrique Marie-sainte]
James sat fussing with his desk and the background behind him, trying to find the right look and feel to present on his videocall with the esteemed Merlin of Avalon. After checking himself in the mirror for the third time, his suit was right and his hair was right. James forced himself to sit in front of his monitor. Dammit, why was he so nervous? He was basically a fucking god now. And Merlin was just...Merlin.
A few minutes later, there he was! On the other side of the screen. The fucking Merlin. Be cool, James told himself. “Merlin Baltimore, may I say that it’s an absolute honor to meet you, sir. The Citystate of New York, representing the Northeast Coalition, is pleased to continue our partnership with Avalon in our shared mission in keeping the peoples of the world safe from mystical harm.”
“Thank you, James. It’s very nice to meet you. And I appreciate your thanks and that of both the City of New York and the Northeast Coalition. You know, I’m originally from New York.”
Conversation shifted into small talk before getting to the purpose of the meeting: a new joint project developing state-of-the-art, early warning magical defense systems for deployment along both sides of the Atlantic. Normally, the Merlin had administrators overseeing such ventures, but the topic was of great interest to John, so he made sure to pop in and check on key stakeholders from time to time.
Only half listening to the meaningless chit-chat, James thought to himself that Merlin must already be bored. James felt his anxiety rise. But once they got to the meat of the discussion, conversing like policy wonks, James relaxed. Still, he needed to steer the topic toward Iris and Bubbles without sounding deliberate.
“Hey, John?” Merlin had graciously asked James to call him that.
“Yes, James.”
“I just had this funny thought. Since we’re talking about mana-integrated surveillance systems, I realized that you might know the gifted sorcerer we’re leasing an impressively robust system from.”
“Are you referring to Shieldmaiden, created by Ty Kemble?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Oh, yes. I know Ty. He and I go back quite a few years.”
“It’s interesting because his assistant, Iris Penner, and I used to date many years ago. Didn’t work out, but we’re still good friends. We grew up next door to each other out on Long Island.”
“Really? And you say Ms. Penner is his assistant? I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. What’s more, I know that she’s been helping Ty with maintaining and upgrading the system. She even suggested once that she had something to do specifically with coding personality mods and that some of her own personality may have been used as a model for SM’s core engine. That’s all off the record, of course.”
James wondered to himself if he’d sufficiently baited that hook for Merlin to start snooping around Shieldmaiden’s specs. It would serve James’s and James’s master’s interests greatly if Ty’s surveillance network could be in any way compromised.
After he finished his call, he went again to check on the reading he’d gotten from his lunch earlier in the day. His divining plate didn’t lie. He breathed a sigh of relief. If things went as the noodles had suggested they would, taking Shieldmaiden off the board would make his and his master’s future plans go a lot easier.
NEXT EPISODE: FIGHTING IS MOVING