Author's Note: Not a lot to say right now. Read, Review, Favorite and Enjoy!
Chapter 12: The Consequences of Absence
An Eqyptian golf course. Morgan had officially seen everything. How exactly a five thousand year old mummy managed to get into golfing or how he managed to convince her to tag along with him Morgan wasn't entirely certain. One thing that she was certain about was that she looked ridiculous in golf spats.
"Why are you making me do this again?" Morgan asked her attention directed towards the Patriarch of the DeNile Clan.
"Because when you get mad enough that you want to kill something I want you as far away from all my stuff and as many things of importance as possible." Ramses stated pointing his club at Morgan accusingly.
"I meant why are doing this specifically?" Morgan asked gesturing around her and more specifically to Bane who was acting as an caddie.
"Because you're a cheat and I'm still bitter about the last time you beat me." Ramses stated in a accusing tone of voice.
"I didn't cheat, I applied my vast sensory magics with high speed calculations to predict the perfect pitch and angle for eighteen consecutive holes in one." Morgan stated letting out a deep eye roll. It was three whole minuets before the conversation started again. "What?"
"Remind me never to take you to the casino." Ramses stated in a dry somewhat dead panned tone of voice.
"I only did it because I was trying to prod you people into moving along!" Like that Morgan promptly delivered the golfing equivalent to a curb stomp battle.
Apple was sitting in front of her vanity, which it should be noted also served the purpose of being the desk top equivalent to a mirror pad. Right now she was looking at a topic one would rarely think a well to do princess would be remotely interested in for: Horror movies. After the question that Ramona dropped in response to Apple's question about what their realm was like Apple took the liberty of delving into the topic in her free time.
"Hmm. Wonderland seems to be oddly popular these days." Which made sense when you considered that the entire realm was basically one big huge monster blender that constantly churned out some new horror or eldritch abomination every other day, in spite of people's insistence on living there. "Do Raven and Ramona live in Wonderland?" Well it made sense when you compared some of the other results Apple had gotten, somehow Morgan didn't seem like the irresponsible type to make her family live in a realm plagued by magically endowed serial killers. Plus apparently Morgan lived there for a time. "Neverland seems good too." Neverland seemed like another prime choice, according to Apple's own mother Morgan was actually quite close to her own one time magic instructor who was suppose to be a major player in that realm, at the same time this was the same realm that treated mutant carnivorous plants and fungus that turned people into mindless mushroom zombies as guard dogs so that also seemed good as a candidate for a horror movie type realm. "Hmm." Apple picked up Lizzie's invitation to her party and opened the letter. "Maybe I can ask Lizzie about it at her party." Apple read the invitation, it was quite hard to make out being written in the gibberish like language of the Wonderlanders but she was eventually make out the phrase 'You and Plus one.' "Huh. I wonder how Raven feels about parties."
Raven was beginning to hate these little dinner parties. She really was. Somehow this situation had devolved from Gory and Romulus making thinly veil jabs at each other and not so thinly veiled ones directed at Raven into full blown fisticuffs which resulted in the table and all the food on it being flipped over onto the floor and the resident Arachne plastering them both to a wall with her webs.
"Seriously? Are you really a werewolf?" Commissioner Rachnera asked looking at Romulus.
Scrawnier then most werewolfs, even transformed he fit comfortably inside of the disco suit that he wore to dinner.
"I'm sorry, do I look like one of those stupid brutes that got their tails handed to them?" Romulus asked glaring at Rachnera scornfully.
Well, anyone would look scrawny next to Ramona. Gory on the other hand reminded Raven very much of Laura, but considering the fact that she isn't much of a fighter either, and that Gory's currently hanging from the ceiling in a cocoon, that really shouldn't be taken as a compliment to Laura.
"If I had any blood at that dinner, you'd all be on the floor by now." Gory stated bluntly as she scornfully glared at Raven.
"Take. Them. Down." Raven growled looking at the two individuals in question. "Do you have any thing you'd like to say for yourselves?" Raven asked glaring at the two, to which they said nothing. "Then allow me the luxury being blunt, since I no longer have the luxury of being polite. Less than a decade ago your parents, along with the parents of most of the students now in the school, were involved in a war that nearly consumed this realm. I am referring to the incident where both sides of your little spat tried to kill one another, just wipe one another off of the face of this map." Raven gestured the wiping motion with her hand as flicking away a fly. "Continuing with my earlier luxury I state this: I don't know and I don't care for what reason the lot of you decided to try and kill each other. It could have been that the vampires over here were looking for a food supply, it could also have been that the werewolves decided to launch a preemptive strike. If you want my personal opinion I would simply say that the lot of you don't like each other very much. Considering the fact that there are more people then just you two who live and learn and actually give a damn about this school right now the concept of your respective factions going to war with one another is unacceptable!" Raven glared into both of their eyes simultaneous, magical energy was leaking off of her as she gathered up the liquid that had been scattered all over the floor. They formed another interface and soon a slide show had shown. "These are the students here who have been fed on! These are the ones who have hospitalized because they got into a fight with a werewolf, here are the ones who have been beaten up and fed on!"
It was barely a day since Ramona had left, barely two since Raven had gone chasing after her mother, yet without their protector others had chosen to run wild while she was gone and when she found out her patience had been grounded paper thin.
"Find your people, work every angle you can, or I will show you the methods my mother used to mass subdue your respective races!" Raven stated in all but a snarl.
In that moment, Gory and Romulus saw it, how Raven commanded loyalty and respect, they could feel every fiber their being tugging on them demanding that they give themselves to her right then and there and she bore herself with a down right regal bearing.
"What are you?" Gory whispered to herself in fear and awe.
"I'm a witch." Raven stated staring down the two brought before her.
Later that night Raven reported to the infirmary, not for medical attention but to give it herself. Bones were welded back together, the water in cells wounds were used to stitch injuries close, blood transfusions were provided, anything Raven could think of to mitigate the damage. Her guilt ran very deep, sitting there in the waiting room waiting for her magic to recover and staring at her friends who had been injured in those days that she was gone. Seeking privacy in a nearby bathroom Raven used a mirror there to contact her mother.
"Need someone to talk to?" Morgan asked her omniscent informant having already told her the answer. "Something happened at the school while I was gone. A bunch of people got hurt while me and Ramona were gone." Raven stated sounding distinctly like this was her fault.
"Do you remember triage?" Morgan asked in a coolly calculated tone of voice.
"The most severely injured goes first." Raven forced herself to calm down as she continued. "No one's life is in danger right now. Any potentially fatal injuries have been healed. I'm kinda a perpetual motion machine right now, I see people I..."
"Stow that talk." Morgan's voice was firm and uncompromising, a rock solid foundation in a unsteady storm. "You're on a slippery slope right now, and you do not want to take it down. Go home and get some sleep, I will be waiting for you when you get there. And I will be sending Nevermore to make sure you arrive there. Understood?" Sending a over protective dragon through a densely populated school smelling of a newly established war zone. "Yes mother. Understood."
"Good. Some of your father's men will be over in the morning to get to the bottom of this." Morgan stated sounding like this conversation was over. "Now do you want to talk?" Morgan stayed on the phone with Raven until she had flown back to the tower, Morgan's realm travel room made the matter of getting back home rather trivial to her.
Morgan put her daughter to bed that night, making use of a sleep potion strong enough to knock a dragon out rendering her completely unconscious, no night terrors to visit her that night. Nevermore and another dragon named Snarl, a hybrid of a Metal Mimic and Dragon and brother to Nevermore, in spite of his nasty sounding name he was actually quite the gentle creature and he would do well to keep an eye on Raven throughout the night. With that matter resolved Morgan went over to a closet and retrieved her chair. It wasn't a special chair by any means, in fact it looked rather uncomfortable, bar one: where she got it from. This chair sat in the office of the former headmaster of Ever After High Milton Grimm, and she sat on it while glaring at him with such intensity that she blocked out whatever he was saying, some days she could swear that she at some point in time some cursed it to induce wrathful feelings inside of those who sat on it. For this reason Morgan sat down in it and glared hatefully at the large mirror in the living room as she willed it to show her footage from the school's security mirrors. A large number of both wolf and vampire thugs choose these moments to attack, some even angled away from the security monitors, and the Narrator was trying her damnedest to keep Morgan from flying off the handle at a bunch of high school students!
"If you're not going to be useful about this then go spy on Ace for me." Which led to Morgan's next problem, Ramses was getting a supply of blood ready for Morgan, with any luck they'll be able to repeat the success of Carmilla and force feed Ace enough of the stuff to render him into a legitimately killable state. But it will take time, and power, and Morgan's focus, so if she choose to pursue the ones responsible for her daughter's miserable state then she would have to put putting Ace down on hold. How long she could do that depended on how far away he was from digging himself out. "I know that already show me the walking Popsicle!"
The shaking had gotten worst, much worst, the nearby village already had to evacuate. And Oda gave approximately zero damns about it having already honed and reforged his oversize weapon into the pinnacle of deadly perfection that it was and was now simply waiting for Ace to come out again. It wouldn't be very long.
"It's a good thing we checked in on him, even if I was focusing my attention on making the trap to kill him I wouldn't have enough time to deal with him." Morgan stated hand on her chin.
"What I need to do is pepper the area with enough obstacles to delay him from digging himself out. Taunting him won't do any good he'll just be expecting another trap. Somehow I doubt that I'll receive any holy blessings any time soon." He's a undead at the moment, traits of a fallen angel, dragon's slayer curse, powerful three hit combo with the weaknesses of each other covered, there was nothing too specific that she could dump in that area to slow him down. "In that case then this comes down to a matter of 'quantity' vs 'Quality.'" That being if nothing specific could be done to stop Ace, then she would do everything she could think of. Armed with that logic Morgan went over to a blood red contact book normally reserved for numbers that she does not use and blew off the dust as she started perusing it's contents.
Author's Note:
rmarcano321: I wasn't the one who came up with it. It varies from time to time, think human but scaled up and down depending on how many times bigger or smaller they are.
Zwei Eis: Good to know. That she is.
DJ: Alternate timeline remember? Step on a bug trigger the apocalypse type situation.