DISCLAIMER: Mage: the Ascension and the World of Darkness is the property of White Wolf Publishing. All characters in this story are, however, mine.
What follows here are a number (three, to start with; more are almost certainly forthcoming) of stories dealing with the Awakened citizens in my fictional city of Dougal. They're all kind of short, so it didn't really feel justified to post them all separately. Enjoy. =]
As for this particular story… I needed a character for my upcoming M:tA roleplaying thread, and this is the one I came up with. What can I say, the Taftâni are just too cool for words. :D
The carpet sped past the skyscraper in the Dougal business district, giving the office workers quick enough to catch a glance a most unusual view. About ten seconds after the unorthodox vehicle, a big, black chopper followed, rotor blades roaring.
The woman on the carpet went by the unlikely name of Denise ibn Rashid. She was dressed in baggy trousers, an embroidered vest and a turban fastened with a gleaming metal buckle. A blonde braid fluttered out behind her as she made the carpet turn ninety degrees at the end of the building and speed down the crossing street.
"Yee-haw!" Denise shouted cheerfully into the wind as the windows whizzed past. She had gotten the chopper on her tail a few minutes after entering Dougal's airspace, but she was confident of her ability to get rid of it. It was faster, yes, but as long as she stayed below the height of the rooftops, that wouldn't do it much good. There was something to be said for manoeuvrability.
As she was making another turn, she licked one finger and held it up in the air. Hmm… taking into consideration the natural effects of moving at very high speed, the current wind should be in… that direction…
As the chopper appeared behind her again, Denise took a big bottle made out of smoke-coloured glass out of her modest pack. Holding it out as far away from her body as possible, she uncorked it.
Nothing happened.
Well, this was really very embarrassing. Denise resisted the urge to peek down the bottleneck, since that would be about as clever as doing the same with the barrel of a gun. Instead, she probingly patted the back of the bottle.
The storm wind that came blowing out knocked hats off everywhere at several blocks' distance. It also gave a few more or less innocent pidgins a nasty surprise, and, more importantly, forced the pilot of the black chopper to exercise all his considerable skill to avoid being knocked into one glass-and-steel wall or another.
"Must have gotten a little stale," Denise mumbled and made a mental note to check up on all the other bottles on her arsenal once she had landed.
She noticed that the chopper had escaped the wind by lifting up over the rooftops. Denise nodded and smiled. That was good. About time that silly boy realised that he was not going to catch her and gave up.
Then the windows on the building across the street started breaking, one after the other in a neat row. Denise could faintly here the hoarse chuddachuddachudda of machine gun fire from above.
"Hey, you can't shoot at me in a crowded area!" Denise protested. "Aren't you guys supposed to be all about protecting the public and stuff?"
Rather than wait for the agents of the Technocracy to remember that that was what they were all about, she kicked the carpet into even higher speed and went down lower. She should be more difficult to keep track of when she was outlined against a lot of moving people and cars. As she rushed past right over their heads, people who had been staring and pointing turned to screaming and running.
"How're you all doing?" Denise shouted down at them as she went by. "Fine day for it, isn't it?"
The guy in the chopper seemed to have come back to his senses, because no one fell down dead struck by gunfire, but he was still following her overhead. That was no good; eventually she'd run out of strength, luck, escape-routs or bottles. She chewed thoughtfully on her lip as she flew over the street. Then she saw something that made her light up; a stair down to a subway station.
"Yee-haw!" she hollered happily and flew over to and down through it. Men and women with suits and briefcases threw themselves out of the way as she passed by. Denise waved to them. None of them waved back, though. Really, big-city people could be so rude sometimes.
She decided to not stop and pay for a ticket, partly because she wasn't planning on getting on a train anyway and partly because she was moving so fast that she wasn't sure she could stop without a very long breaking distance. Instead, she made an elegant turn and disappeared into the railway tunnel.
"That ought to shake him," she chuckled as she flew along, two feet or so above the tracks. "Yee…"
The headlights of a train appeared from out of a turn in the tracks ahead of her.
"… haw?" Denise said somewhat dumbly.
Well, this was no good at all. She couldn't stop in time. She definitely couldn't turn back in time. She couldn't fit herself between the train and the ceiling; Denise was a bit on the slim side, but at this speed, there was a very big chance that she would hit the train, the ceiling, or both. She could fly through the train, destroying everything in her path, but that would probably not be very nice for the passengers, and Denise didn't really feel like committing mass murder on her first day in town.
That left one chance, and about twenty seconds in which to take it. Wasting none of her precious time, Denise started reading a poem in Arabic. It wasn't really a very good performance, seeing as she spoke three times as fast as was aesthetically pleasing, but Denise gathered all her carefully hoarded strength and made it work.
Everything went black for a moment, and the rumble of the train quieted to a mumble… and then to nothing. When Denise's eyes adapted, she was flying through exactly the same tunnel, but now there was no train in it.
What was in it, though, were… well, things would probably be the best way to describe them, really. They were slimy. They were icky. Some of them had eyes, some of them had legs, and some of them had even what could be described as faces in the traditional sense of the word, but almost no one had more than one of the three.
"Don't mind me," she shouted. "I'm just passing through. Love what you've done with the place, though."
A small, green creature that looked a little like a starfish with hands dropped from the ceiling and landed behind her on the carpet. Denise gave off a yelp and quickly reached into her pack for the club that her master had made her bring. The righteous flame of magick was all very well, but in a tight spot, a suitably heavy stick was a girl's best friend.
"Get off!" she complained as she bashed the starfish-thing with the club. "You're getting slime all over my carpet! Do you realise what this thing costs to dry-clean?"
The starfish-thing showed no sign of knowing what the carpet cost to dry-clean, but eventually it decided that no matter how tasty a morsel Denise looked like, she wasn't worth the hassle. It leaped off the carpet again. Denise sighed with relief, and started reading another poem.
As she reached the forth stanza, there was that moment of darkness and quiet again, and then the creatures that had lined her way were gone. She was flying through an empty tunnel again. Behind her, she could faintly hear the sound of the train she had had to dive into the Invisible World to avoid.
A sign appeared out of the gloom. Denise slowed down to read it. Whitebrook Station. Ah, a stroke of luck; that just so happened to be where she was going. Smiling tiredly, she sped up the carpet and flew up to the station, over the ticket booth and on to the stairs. There she landed the carpet.
There were people all around her, most of which seemed to be pretty upset about the fact that a blonde in a turban had just flown a carpet out of a railway tunnel. Denise ignored them as she got to her feet. She groaned at the pain of her aching muscles; the result of practicing blatant magick in front of hundreds of unbelievers, no doubt. Just a scrape compared to what she had had to put up with sometimes, but still… Paradox wasn't this bad home in Nevada. There weren't enough people around to make it this bad.
She grinned to herself as she rolled up the carpet, took it under one arm and lifted her pack in the other hand. Well, that just meant that she would have to work all the harder to turn the unbelievers into believers, didn't it?
She walked up to the top of the stairs, then stopped and turned around.
"Yes, good people," she said cheerfully to the gaping crowd below her. "You did, in fact, see what you're right now wondering if you saw. Magick is real. Tell your friends, if you have friends. If you don't have friends, make a website or something, every little bit helps. Thank you in advance."
Then she walked away, whistling to herself.
It took her half an hour to locate the Black Moon Bar. She strolled into the shady interior and looked at the crowd that were sitting at their tables. Most of them dressed strangely, wore a lot of quasi-religious symbols, or both. In fact, she didn't feel all too much out of place here, which was saying some.
She walked up to the bar and sat down on a stool with a happy sigh.
"So," she said to the barkeep, a young Goth man who viewed her with amiable calm. "I heard through the grapevine that you fellows were looking for some extra muscle?"
Behind her, she could just faintly make out some guy talking to his wife.
"Come on," he mumbled. "We're leaving. In fact, we're going on a vacation."
"A what?" the wife said. "What? Why?"
"Because that's a freaking Weaver, that's why," the man grumbled. "Don't worry, we can come back in a month or so. If Dougal is still standing by then."
Denise grinned widely. It was always nice to know that your Tradition had made a name for itself.