Author's Note: Not much to say today, Read, Review, Favorite and Enjoy!
Chapter 66: Consequences for Trespassing
Morgan had a headache, she still had the roiling mess to sort through that was dumped into her brain by the one Lithilid that had made contact with the Narrator, and now she had to deal with another load of them. Deuce was a nice enough boy, sealing all the squids up in stone for her, though reluctant to rely on someone who was in many way's still a child Gorgons were so rare, and they usually drifted towards medicine instead of indefinite stasis. But they were not her primary most concern right now.
"The Hydra's venom did a lot of work putting you back together earlier, unfortunately several of your organs couldn't be salvaged." Frankie got dressed in front of Morgan while even more foreign than usual tissues settled down in her insides. "Just because dragon Organs have higher specs than regular ones doesn't meant that you should be pushing yourself now, the rest of you is still from your original body and it needs time to fuse back together. Something not helped remotely by you tearing off bits of yourself off in the name of multi-tasking." Morgan explained glowering at Frankie with a glare.
"Understood." Frankie stated pointedly looking away from Morgan. "Is there anything else?"
"Yes actually. I don't care if it was your idea or not. If someone gets the idea to go pay a wildly aggressive super predator a visit and you and Raven are there, stop Raven from doing it!" Morgan again snapped some of the rage bleeding into her eyes.
"Understood. I'm going back to the school now." Frankie stated pointing to the door.
"Yes your punishment for trespassing into dangerous territory awaits you." Morgan stated prompting visible cringe out of Frankie's body before she continued to walk away. "Now than how are you doing?"
Cthulu had gotten sick after eating the Hydra's poison, something that shouldn't be possible for something that was part Manticore, yet here he was curled up on a stretcher bellyaching from the poison pit in it's stomach. It meant that one of his other bits of himself was what was getting sick, the Lithilid, with the rest of him was slowly but surely producing anti-bodies for the poison, the draconic elements. What this meant is that once they had recovered they would finally have a way of immunizing themselves against the brain eating parasites. Not that that seemed to be a major concern for the time being, no the Lithilids seemed to prefer trying to eat people over converting them. Morgan had already run through the cities homeless shelters, and encountered a worried assembly of volunteers whose workload over the past couple of days had shrunk down, and though Morgan didn't find any indication that they had converted the homeless into more of their kind they did find their corpses with their heads hollowed out, and traces of the genetic material of monsters in the leviathan's stomach. What's worst with the drastic depopulation that the aliens had gone through thanks to them constantly taking them prisoner left open the very real possibility that they would now be actively trying to build themselves back up, and Morgan had a idea where they would be doing that.
"Of the realms that we know of there's only Neverland and Wonderland that should have one of these things Left inside of it." Morgan stated as she sat down in the waiting room of the hospital, her 'private security' forces surrounding her. "If they're interested in more Hat spores or riddlish then they'll be specifically targeting Wonderland over Neverland."
Both realms were nightmarish pits filled with creatures with a huge array of creative methods for dismantling the aliens, but only one of them had anything of real value with which was worth going to war over. That wasn't to say that Morgan would dismiss the other realm as a not target either, the miraculous properties of it's water and the magical power of it's people may look extremely appealing to those on the lookout for it. It also didn't help that she had no way of knowing where they are going.
"Right. Back to the vaccine again." Morgan stated scratching the back of her head.
"Madam president." A gargoyle in a suit stated walking up to her.
"I know, I know." Well the Tower had a better laboratory anyway.
Everyone who had taken part in the trek into the Enchanted Forest, Raven, Cleo, Frankie, Clawdeen, Ramona and Laura had been given detention for Saturday once they had gotten back to the school. Said detention had the six of them scrubbing every inch of the massive school clean while Raven's magic worked to put it back together after the shaking it got from Morgan's fight with the aliens.
"How many more rooms are like this?" Cleo asked watching as mortar went back into the walls thanks to Raven's magic. "This school teaches on average 200 classes each with approximately twenty students each simultaneously, roughly a quarter of those classes are reserved for creatures at least three story's tall, approximately half of the total are reserved for Centaurid body types while the remaining seventy five are large enough to teach at least three separate classes of average sized students like us at once. Aside from that there are rooms for holding the entire school at once such as the auditorium, the gym and the cafeteria. Even without spitting out convenient things like how tall the school is or how much real estate it takes up how big do you think the school is from that alone?" Raven asked as keenly aware of the answer as she was the massive amount of magical energy flowing through her body.
"In other word's, shut up and quit complaining. This is only the third average size room we've had to go through." Ramona stated in her painter's scrubs as she applied barrier reinforced wall paper to the class room.
"Next time, try high tailing it out of the forest instead of playing rope a dope with a seven headed poison spewing monster." Frankie stated tool box at her feet as she went about the process of replacing the door hinges of Cardea leading into the class room.
"At least I could avoid the hydra's blows. You on the other hand freaked the little princess out so badly that the hydra ended up kidnapping her!" Cleo stated accusingly pointing her finger at the mass of body parts.
"I'm ready for the next pile now!" Laura shouted from outside, leading to Ramona to pick up and shove out the nearest window a huge pile of garbage that Laura picked up via magic flying carpet and led to a dumping sight down the road.
"Don't you have any experience sweeping up that huge tomb of yours for the past thousand or so years?" Clawdeen asked looking at the mummy suspiciously.
"Even if I was awake for that is what servants are for!" Cleo snapped not a pleasant memory for her.
"You mean like us?" Ramona asked paint roller waved accusingly in Cleo's direction.
"Huu. Touche." Cleo admitted reluctance in her voice plain as day as she was forced to accept the new reality. This after all was not a one weekend job, it was entirely likely that they could spend months putting the school back together, longer if they kept complaining.
"Speaking of room number three looks finished." Ramona stated wiping her brow. "Number four then?"
"Let's." Raven stated clapping her hands together.
As Raven walked from class room to class room cracks in the building from all the shaking it was put through put themselves back together, a combination of Raven's own magic and the school's innate self repair abilities. Cleo went to work on the next room first, summoning up a sand storm on the spot to rip out damaged wallpaper, jip-rock, mortar, broken glass and other detritus and put it all into a convenient pile.
"Laura Over here!" Ramona stated leaning out the now empty window frame at the bat person who was floating at the last room they were just in. "We Got another pile started!"
"Not that the one who made it is going to do anything to help us get it out of here." Clawdeen stated watching as Cleo took a seat on a barely in one piece chair.
"Excuse me? I just saved you all three hours of work!" Cleo snapped a outraged look on her face. True, Cleo's ability to manipulate wind and sand stripped the walls of damaged materials that the rest of them were working to replace, a hours long labor intensive task even if all of them were working together.
"Ramona can use wind magic too and she's helping." Clawdeen stated thumbing to Ramona.
"Which requires that I be in my large form which doesn't fit through most doors or in several of the class rooms." Ramona was quick to jump to the mummy girl's defense, but she was quicker to dismantle her flimsy excuses. "When we get to the bigger rooms I'll do the stripping and then she can put up wall paper."
"Which is fair, considering the ability to fly and use your hands at the same time for wall papering several story high walls is going to be a necessity." Not that Cleo was ever one to be caught on the back pedal for very long.
"If you want to complain, wait until after we've done ten of these rooms." Ramona brilliantly summed up as she prepared to dump all of this trash out the window again.
While Cleo and Clawdeen bickered Laura dragged the newest pile of garbage over to the golem ship which was waiting for her, and watched as various movers were working to take cargo off of the ship as well, more supplies for fixing the school it seemed.
"What do you got there? If that's supplies for the detention students I can carry it over to the school for you." Laura stated perched up atop the edge of the golem ship and looking down at them.
"We're the contractors hired to perform industrial scale repairs." One of the men, a Gil-man of some type though Laura couldn't tell which one, stated bluntly.
"Oh the others will be glad to hear about that." Laura stated nodding her head. "Do you want me to take that back to the school for you?"
"With all do respect miss but this is sensitive equipment and we are legally responsible for looking after it, having a mutant vampire drag it for half a mile on a flimsy flying carpet will get us all fired." The other man, a Shadmok if his largely bald head and somewhat scrawny appearance were indicators, explained while he looked up to Laura.
"Fair point. Good luck!" Laura flew back to the school and made a couple of return trips while something itched at her from the back of her mind. For starters why did they come here on the equivalent of a garbage truck? And did Head Mistress Blood Good tell them that they would be receiving help for their detention? Because that kind of contradicted the point of detention. It was unsettling enough that Laura decided to get some second opinions.
"Can I complain yet?" Clawdeen asked stretching after having finished fixing the tenth of the 'normal' sized class rooms.
"Sure. You can complain about being dragged into a forest full of dangerous animals to protect a handful of people who weren't listening to you. You can complain about the fact that you repeatedly warned everyone that we were trespassing into the territory of creatures stronger than us. You may also complain about the fact that the creatures there were being bred specifically to protect a nation from invasion. And you may complain about the fact that you were right as well." Ramona stated making it clear whose complaints she was voicing.
"Uh guys." Laura was hanging off the side of the window by her wing talons, the latest pile sitting idly behind her in mid air. "Do you have a minuet?"
"Cleo will as soon as we start the next room." Clawdeen stated indicating the mummy girl who had been sitting out on the more labor intensive parts of their clean up operation.
"Okay. I can wait a minuet." Laura flew off to the garbage ship again, giving her another chance to have a look at the movers she saw earlier as they approached the school on the back of a industrial golem.
That was another thing that concerned her. If they were here to fix the school then wouldn't it be much faster to just park on the school's docks and start unloading from there? After all why wouldn't contractors hired to help fix the school have access to the docks.
"Oh Kraken!" Laura gave a censored swear under her breath. Laura finished the round to the garbage ship, suddenly making a U-Turn and potentially dumping her payload all over the lawn would have drawn way too much attention to herself. That said she did arrive at the next window in time for work to just begin on the room in question. "Guys! We need to talk!" Laura all but shouted less the two people on the lawn hear her.
"Need a break?" Ramona picked the petite vampire up and dropped her on her feet in the room. "Understandable. You look out of breath."
"Do any of you remember the Head Mistress mentioning contractor's coming in today to help?" Laura asked again.
"Weren't we over this earlier?" Cleo asked cocking a curious brow at Laura. "Even if the Head Mistress forced every detentionaire into laboring away their Weekend like this we'd still have to work every day for a month to get his place fixed up." Cleo stated gesturing around the school.
"Yes but isn't it weird that they didn't use the school's docks?" Laura asked with her new point in mind.
"They're probably considered structurally unsound like the rest of the school right now." Raven stated in dismissive tones.
"Wait does that mean we're in danger here?" Frankie asked not fond of the idea of being ground into paste twice in one week.
"The lingering barrier magic is holding the school together, magic we're gradually reinforcing by ripping out the rot and replacing it with fresh magic yes but it's still there. I should point out that the people who charged into a Hydra's layer without batting an eye have no right to complain about being made to restore a crumbling building from the inside and that this is likely meant to be incentive not to attempt any such attempts in the future." Raven stated having largely guessed the Head Mistress's intentions for them. "If it does make you feel better then the building hasn't decayed to the point that it's unsafe. Yet. And if it does do that then we'll be pulled out and they can reassign our detention."
"Only slightly." Cleo stated vividly recalling what it was like to be buried alive for a unspeakable amount of time. "Perhaps we should be focusing on the load bearing sections of the school, at least to make sure that the school isn't going to collapse on us at any moment?"
"Now that I'm thinking about it maybe we can fix up certain key areas to trigger a chain reaction and have the existing wards on the school do the rest of the work." Raven suggested the term 'do the rest of the work' appealing to the others. "If nothing else, we can spend the rest of our detention outside of this broken crumbling wreck of a school." Everyone nodded their heads in agreement. "Now Laura is there anything of genuine concern about these contractors that you want to share with us?"
"Well... There was only two of them near as I can tell." Laura stated prompting a suspicious look on Raven's face.
"Only two?" Raven asked with a hint of suspicion.
"I think what you mean to say is only two more." Cleo stated indicating the rest of the individuals gathered together.
"Are you sure?" Raven asked again.
"Yeah it was really easy to remember because one of them was a Shadmok." Laura stated prompting looks of horror on Raven's and Ramona's faces.
"Are you certain?" Raven asked every danger sign in her head going off at once.
"Is that bad? I mean the one I saw didn't look too intimidating." Laura asked starting to worry again.
"For two entirely different reasons." Raven replied bluntly. "Shadmok's are born of repeated crossbreeding between Vampires, Werewolves and Ghouls. Combining together chunks of DNA at random results in a being made out of parts that don't fit together. It's a process that leaves them physically frail and sickly. Additionally they're often shunned by society as half-bred mongrels and thus typically wind up as unsocial shut ins." Raven stated recalling everything she knew about the one and only Shadmok at the school that she knew of. "So tell me what is one doing working as a laborer?" Cleo opened her mouth as if to spit a witty retort, but paused before ultimately closing it again.
"What's the second reason?" Cleo asked already suspicious.
"Vampires, Werewolves and Ghouls are all formidable creatures, each of them quite capable of laying waste to small towns of lower ranked monsters through any combination of their supernatural abilities and superior physical prowess. Hybrids retain much of the powers of their parents, but Shadmoks bloodlines are so polluted that they don't have access to any of their parents abilities. They do however retain their power." Raven explained producing a ball of dark magical power in her hand.
"The power but without any ability? What do they do with them?" Clawdeen asked sounding concerned.
"They whistle." Raven stated prompting looks from her classmates like they were waiting for something else.
"Whistle? Like a Cat call whistle?" Frankie asked still not connecting the dots here.
"Oh sure just like a Cat Call." Ramona stated though the sarcasm quickly drained from her speech. "The last cat call you'll ever hear."
Review Section:
Starlord Master: Good to know. It's Morgan's story, it's a story about her life.
ChimaTigon: Your welcome.
