So upon arriving at the condemned slaughterhouse, our three heroes decide to take a cautious approach by going in through a window rather than via the front door. Ursa goes in first, finding herself in what looks to be a lab clean-room type area. Nora follows through the next window over, this one leading to a wide dark space.
Merlin has been messing about outside trying to switch off the sun with magic (and learning a ‘turn glasses lenses to sunglasses’ spell), and he hears this sort of humming noise, like fingers round a wine glass.
In short order, everyone can hear it, and it reminds Nora of the Morris Server – that specific blend of magic and technology. She shouts out to Merlin to have him Message that to Ursa, but he hears the hum rise to a deafening volume, feels something grab his ankle, and promptly vanishes.
Nora rushes to find Ursa but in her haste slips in the window, and vanishes too. Ursa sees that she cut herself on the broken window glass, and thinks maybe it’s to do with spilling blood (as she doesn’t know Merlin has disappeared and just assumed he wandered off to get hot dogs – new york, baby!)
The hum gets quiet for a second… the she vanishes too.
Merlin finds himself blindfolded in the back of a van. He feels something viscous and nasty covering his eyes, and also feels some sort of tag around his ankle. He can’t cast spells.
After a moment, he hears a sort of reeling sound and an ‘oof’ as someone lands in the same state he’s in. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ she asks.
‘I assume that’s Nora then,’ says Merlin. He attempts to use his Medusa knife to petrify the ankle bracelet, but it seems that magic items he’s attuned to are similarly disabled.
A voice from the front of the van is saying ‘Wait, we’re losing this one… steady… ok got her. Pull.’
Then Ursa lands on Nora and begins babbling ‘cause she’s freaking out (she just like me fr). She shouts at the front but they ignore her. Nora too calls them cowards, and the drivers slam the brakes in a petty act of punishment.
‘We’ll just have to see if Merlin can rescue us then,’ says Ursa.
‘Ursa, I’m here too.’
‘What? Oh. I thought you’d just gone to get a hot dog.’
‘I wasn’t going to get a hot dog. Why would I just…?’
Ursa eyes him, though doesn’t do a very good job of it what with the blindfold. ‘Are you saying you don’t like hot dogs?’
‘I like hot dogs, of course I like hot dogs. Who doesn’t like hot dogs. But if I were to go for hot dogs I’d get hot dogs for everyone,’ says Merlin.
How far we’ve come.
Ursa just ends up feeling her way to the front and shouting and booting at the partition, while Nora attempts to get the black ooze off her face – succeeding in freeing one eye as the van pulls to a stop.
She turns to obscure that one eye can see as footsteps come round to the back, and the doors open to reveal that they’ve come to a stop beneath a bridge.
‘Oh this is definitely the kind of place you bring someone to shoot them in the back of the head,’ thinks Nora. She rips off the rest of the inky blindfold, and spears their captor, sending them to the ground with Nora on top.
Nora pulls a knife and holds it to the throat of Agent Edelweiss of the Blue Chamber. In turn, Agent Blackball stands over the scuffle and holds a katana to the throat of Nora.
‘Alright, you’ve got the bigger dick,’ she says.
‘Whoa am I missing something fun?’ says Ursa. She charges out in an attempt to help Nora, but unfortunately still has her eyes covered and doesn’t get any hits in.
Merlin is just lying on the floor pretending to be a corpse.
Edelweiss dusts herself off and tells them that they’re fugitives, having broken laws in smuggling, weakening the wards of American soil, and resisting arrest, and that they’re supposed to be bringing them in but since they embarrassed her and Blackball by putting them to sleep (and because it’s less paperwork) they’re just going to do a bit of extra-judiciary murder to add to the extraordinary rendition they’ve just carried out.
‘Fuck that,’ says Merlin, ‘why don’t you switch off the anti-magic and fight us fair and square?’
Blackball wants to go for it but Edelweiss shushes him. ‘Because we’re professionals, not tennis doubles. And because of American taxpayer dollars at work.’ She gestures to the machine atop the van that is emitting a magical tether to their anklets.
Blackball dismisses his blinding spell so they can look. It melts to ink and tastes like black liquorice. Ursa barfs.
Nora, despite her mage armor not working earlier, reaches into her chest and draws the Mantlepiece, which somehow still manifests despite the antimagic. She looses a shot at the generator… and a massive armoured Forester from the Green Chamber plummets down from the bridge above and blocks the shot, caving in half of the van when it lands.
The Forester is about the size of a tractor, vaguely humanoid but without a head. Instead, in its centre is a glass sphere housing a bonsai tree. Its left arm is a chainsaw the size of a wardrobe door.
Merlin tries to leap out but gets his lower half trapped. Despite the danger of the huge mechanical monster, Ursa leaps into the fray to try and pull him out, only to have Blackball attack her with his damned katana.
Nora meanwhile has the forester charging for her, but manages to get out of the way by shooting at the bonsai core and causing it to stumble. Edelweiss however blocks her escape with a Wall of Ice and the forester turns for another charge.
Ursa can’t get Merlin out without breaking his ankle, so scrambles up to the anti-magic emitter and begins smacking it with her baton. Blackball goes for another slice but she breaks it enough to disrupt one of the beams – the one on Merlin.
Merlin, still pinned, immediately casts his favourite lightning bolt, but Blackball gets a nat 20 on his save and leaps up into the air to redirect the lightning, Sekiro-style. He turns to leaping-stab Merlin, who misty-steps away — and when the ankle cuff is left behind, he promptly disappears, reappearing in Death 49 outside the slaughterhouse.
Back on Fulcrum, where it turns out Ursa and Nora have been pulled back to, Nora has feinted that she’s running off before shooting at Blackball as he leaps up to go for Ursa again. It hits him in the helmet hard enough to spin him in the air and crack the eight-ball itself. He hits the floor and doesn’t get up.
Edelweiss shouts at the forester to leave the clearly-very-acrobatic Nora and aim for the one messing with the tethers, and it begins charging chainsaw first for Ursa, who sees this and goes ‘aargh’ and attempts to break the thing twice as fast.
She succeeds, getting her magic back just in time to hit both Edelweiss and the charging Forester with an upcast Hold Person.
She and Nora clasp hands and Nora uses her jacket to teleport them out of their anklets, telling Edelweiss to get fucked as they disappear.
Appearing on either side of Merlin back in Death 49, they ready themselves to resume the search for Alkahest.
‘So… did you get those hot dogs, Merlin?’ asks Ursa.
(Back on Fulcrum, we also see Edelweiss and Blackball getting in trouble, ha ha fuck ‘em)
Roll History 