/Muuuch better,/ Dante thought, gloved hand closing around a vial of blood still warm from Anne's body. He blinked a couple of moments, readjusting vision to the changed light levels.
It was cool and musty down here, but dry enough. The basement ladder stretched back upstairs behind him, with a very small room in front of him with random crates of ammo, and some stored particularly choice tabloids. (Dante took a particular perverse sense of pride in knowing when _Men in Black_ had actually brought up the idea of tabloids as paranormal information resources, he'd been already using them as such for a couple years.) There was also a doorway, which he made appropriate use of, the leather of his coat and pants making muffled rustle and squeak noises as he passed through, shutting door.
Beyond was dark. He fixed this with a quick switch, which flared on the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp. And off the spines of leather-bound volumes, stretching into the musty dimness.
This was the real prize of his efforts.
Ten years had been spent getting it, with blood, sweat, and tears, sometimes literally in a few cases. While Trish put her faith in her memories of her time in Mundus's service and what leads she could dig up online, this was the heart, soul, and backbone of Dante's own knowledge of his trade. He'd started it when he first achieved his majority, and kept it up all this time and added to it with payment for various jobs, sometimes as plunder from them, or exchange with the sparse network of other devil hunters around the country. There was one fairly slender, but extremely valued notebook, filled with notes he'd managed to transcribe from memories of Mallet Island, and what he'd remembered from gleaning from the now-destroyed libraries there in between marionettes and worse trying to dice him.
Dante glanced at it, remembering bits of those readings. / Those Castellans were. Fucked. Up./ Anybody that made a practice of worshipping Mundus needed a head from ass extraction emergency surgery.
He dug past, finally going 'aha' as he managed to excavate the tomes he needed. After shuffling through them, confirming that they were what he wanted, he plopped down at the ancient desk with its lamp, leaning back in what had been one of his old swivel chairs and was now more auditioning for being put out of its misery. He dug through the drawers, excavating a pair of reading glasses. After putting them on, which produced an appearance the cognitive dissonance of which would have made most of his regular acquaintances run off screaming and Trish to blink at him in horribly worried puzzlement, he leaned back and started to read.
He kept reading for at least a couple of hours, gloved fingers tapping intermittently as he thought.
Once or twice, he shuffled between volumes to corrobate, crossreference, and double-check things.
At long last, he leaned back, looking thoughtful, then stood up and stretched, popping abused vertebrae back into place. He thought he had what he needed.
That thing may have been a faerie, but certainly some adaptation and changing values would produce something that would work. And Dante himself was hardly without power to spare.
If nothing else, half-demonic blood added a lot of oomph.
Which was good, because he *sucked* when it came to fine control. Most other fully human devil hunters, weaker and slower though they were, had magus abilities to back up any feats of arms. On top of that, their magery was far more detailed than he himself ever could manage in the pinch of battle. Damn demon instincts played hell with Dante's mental composure when they kicked him into full Slaughter Mode. He hadn't had any luck harnessing his demonic half for fully voluntary paranormal things until Alastor and Ifrit gave him crutches.
Thank whoever this wasn't in the heat of battle.
Dante pondered this as he carefully drew the glyphs with a piece of chalk, keeping his hand steady. He checked the positioning of the objects within; one now cooled bottle of Anne's blood, a folded paper of blackened, evil-smelling flakes, a small vial of clear water, and between them, a cold-forged iron bullet etched with yet more glyphs.
Dante fought a small bit of smugness at having contacts at the Washington Cathedral that allowed him a steady supply of holy water. Then, upon realizing he didn't have any reason to *not* be smug, got obscenely so. Maybe it wouldn't work on faeries, or at least the type he was targeting, but hell, fresh water was fresh water, blessed by Episcopalians or not. Or Catholics. Or Baptists. Holy water was amazingly non-denominational, especially when it was giving him hives from skin contact.
He hadn't been lying about *that* to Anne. This provided a side track of idle thought into how on earth his mother could have given Vergil and himself proper Catholic christenings without the head diaper rash to end them all, but unfortunately his mother being twenty years dead put an end into that line of inquiry. So did his father's being similarly unavailable for asking if it set *him* on fire or boiling or what have you as it tended to for full-blooded demons. Then again the Dark Knight Sparda had been an...unusual case. Dante filed that as yet another thing he really wished to God he could have asked his father about and never got the Manual On Being Demonic on. This gave him more to grouse on as he purified a ritual althame for the next stage and finished weaving in the finishing touches to the network of glyphs.
"Booyah. Let's cook this turkey," he muttered to himself, and began.
It was cool and musty down here, but dry enough. The basement ladder stretched back upstairs behind him, with a very small room in front of him with random crates of ammo, and some stored particularly choice tabloids. (Dante took a particular perverse sense of pride in knowing when _Men in Black_ had actually brought up the idea of tabloids as paranormal information resources, he'd been already using them as such for a couple years.) There was also a doorway, which he made appropriate use of, the leather of his coat and pants making muffled rustle and squeak noises as he passed through, shutting door.
Beyond was dark. He fixed this with a quick switch, which flared on the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp. And off the spines of leather-bound volumes, stretching into the musty dimness.
This was the real prize of his efforts.
Ten years had been spent getting it, with blood, sweat, and tears, sometimes literally in a few cases. While Trish put her faith in her memories of her time in Mundus's service and what leads she could dig up online, this was the heart, soul, and backbone of Dante's own knowledge of his trade. He'd started it when he first achieved his majority, and kept it up all this time and added to it with payment for various jobs, sometimes as plunder from them, or exchange with the sparse network of other devil hunters around the country. There was one fairly slender, but extremely valued notebook, filled with notes he'd managed to transcribe from memories of Mallet Island, and what he'd remembered from gleaning from the now-destroyed libraries there in between marionettes and worse trying to dice him.
Dante glanced at it, remembering bits of those readings. / Those Castellans were. Fucked. Up./ Anybody that made a practice of worshipping Mundus needed a head from ass extraction emergency surgery.
He dug past, finally going 'aha' as he managed to excavate the tomes he needed. After shuffling through them, confirming that they were what he wanted, he plopped down at the ancient desk with its lamp, leaning back in what had been one of his old swivel chairs and was now more auditioning for being put out of its misery. He dug through the drawers, excavating a pair of reading glasses. After putting them on, which produced an appearance the cognitive dissonance of which would have made most of his regular acquaintances run off screaming and Trish to blink at him in horribly worried puzzlement, he leaned back and started to read.
He kept reading for at least a couple of hours, gloved fingers tapping intermittently as he thought.
Once or twice, he shuffled between volumes to corrobate, crossreference, and double-check things.
At long last, he leaned back, looking thoughtful, then stood up and stretched, popping abused vertebrae back into place. He thought he had what he needed.
That thing may have been a faerie, but certainly some adaptation and changing values would produce something that would work. And Dante himself was hardly without power to spare.
If nothing else, half-demonic blood added a lot of oomph.
Which was good, because he *sucked* when it came to fine control. Most other fully human devil hunters, weaker and slower though they were, had magus abilities to back up any feats of arms. On top of that, their magery was far more detailed than he himself ever could manage in the pinch of battle. Damn demon instincts played hell with Dante's mental composure when they kicked him into full Slaughter Mode. He hadn't had any luck harnessing his demonic half for fully voluntary paranormal things until Alastor and Ifrit gave him crutches.
Thank whoever this wasn't in the heat of battle.
Dante pondered this as he carefully drew the glyphs with a piece of chalk, keeping his hand steady. He checked the positioning of the objects within; one now cooled bottle of Anne's blood, a folded paper of blackened, evil-smelling flakes, a small vial of clear water, and between them, a cold-forged iron bullet etched with yet more glyphs.
Dante fought a small bit of smugness at having contacts at the Washington Cathedral that allowed him a steady supply of holy water. Then, upon realizing he didn't have any reason to *not* be smug, got obscenely so. Maybe it wouldn't work on faeries, or at least the type he was targeting, but hell, fresh water was fresh water, blessed by Episcopalians or not. Or Catholics. Or Baptists. Holy water was amazingly non-denominational, especially when it was giving him hives from skin contact.
He hadn't been lying about *that* to Anne. This provided a side track of idle thought into how on earth his mother could have given Vergil and himself proper Catholic christenings without the head diaper rash to end them all, but unfortunately his mother being twenty years dead put an end into that line of inquiry. So did his father's being similarly unavailable for asking if it set *him* on fire or boiling or what have you as it tended to for full-blooded demons. Then again the Dark Knight Sparda had been an...unusual case. Dante filed that as yet another thing he really wished to God he could have asked his father about and never got the Manual On Being Demonic on. This gave him more to grouse on as he purified a ritual althame for the next stage and finished weaving in the finishing touches to the network of glyphs.
"Booyah. Let's cook this turkey," he muttered to himself, and began.
