A/N: Just as a preface (this was going to go in the summary but goddamn makes you keep it short), this story was originally posted on Spacebattles . com (delete the spaces) under the same name, and is being updated there primarily. The version here is mostly for archival purposes and will be getting updates a bit later than the primary version. But... on the other hand when you read it here you don't have to deal with forumites, so it's not all bad.


It was a dark and stormy night on the outer edge of the London Metropolitan Area... for good reason. Considering what I was about to do, coming here on a bright and clear day would have been a pretty good way to get myself arrested... or worse, if those goons from the Association were still on my tail.

With a deep breath, I pulled the balaclava I had brought along over my face, and pulled the duffel bag of tools tight against my back as I approached my target.

In front of me was an overgrown fence marking the edge of a property that... as far as I was aware, hadn't been inhabited since well before either World War. It was old, rusted wrought iron, bent out of shape in places, but still quite pointy after all these years.

For obvious reasons, I wasn't exactly willing to use my flashlight, even out in the woods like this, but my eyes had already well adjusted to the dark out here I was able to find a safe spot where the bars were bent out of shape enough for even my aging behind to get over it easily enough.

With that first obstacle out of the way, I was finally able to approach the house itself. 1817 Godshire Lane, a half-collapsed Victorian manor that hadn't seen any inhabitants since the mysterious death of its last owner in the late 1800s.

Even from here, I could tell the house was in bad shape. There were scattered bits of broken stonework all over the forest that had grown up inside what had once been a back garden. Whether it was from overgrown pathways or scattered from whatever was responsible for the giant hole in the roof, it was too dark to tell. But even as dark as it was, I could still easily see several parts of the building were sagging inwards... unsurprising really, old wood like this was never meant to go this long without maintenance. Calling this heap an 'unsafe structure' was probably an understatement. If I was lucky, I'd be able to stick to the parts built from stone or brick.

But hopefully that wouldn't be much of a problem for me. I had done my research, and had a good idea of how to avoid falling through rotten boards and getting chunks of roof dropped on my head. It helped that what I was looking for was in the basement, or under the basement rather... then again, I didn't have a floor plan to go by here.

As I approached, I started to scan the place for an entry point. With the building in the state it was, there was a decent chance that I could make like the Kool-Aid Man and just break down a wall, but even opening a door might cause a structural collapse. Ideally I'd need a pre-existing way in...

There!

Windows full of broken glass stared out from most of the place like the ruined eyes of a desiccated corpse, but the back end had a section made entirely from brick that just so happened to feature a door with a brick frame. That I could get open.

As I was approaching the place, the smell of it struck me. Just like bodies, buildings that have given up the ghost tend to have a particular smell about them, and it was strong here, even just outside my entry point. Not wanting a lungful of god-knows-what, I pulled the cheap plastic dust mask I had brought over my face.

Christ, it was starting to feel like a cross between a haunted house and Chernobyl.

I reached into my bag and brought forth Ser Crow, Knight of Openings, and quickly got him to work at the door. I was hardly an expert at this, but if memory serves I just needed to slip the prybar underneath the latch, give it a pull, and...

The entire lock mechanism tore free from the old wood with a loud crack, and fell to the ground with a soggy thud.

Well, that was one way to get it open I guess. Gingerly, I pushed the latchless, rotted heap of a door inwards and revealed the interior beyond. Inside... well, it was like I was looking into the abyss itself. Deep inside me, the little kid who had been scared of the basement rose from its slumber, and I involuntarily shuddered.

Reaching into my bag, I fumbled for a second before extracting the high-powered flashlight I'd brought along. I might need to be careful about where I swung it, but there wasn't much choice when it came to getting inside of the manor and being able to see my hand in front of me.

Carefully, I scanned the interior with my flashlight. It was... well, frankly it was in absolutely awful shape, and certainly hadn't been abandoned cleanly. From the looks of it, this room had been the kitchen at one point, but now it was just kind of a brick cavity with a sagging roof and shattered tile floor. The main thing marking it as a kitchen at this point was a rusted hulk of a stove sitting up against the wall, and a row of counters with long-broken cabinets, with shattered plates spilling out onto the floor.

Safe to say, I probably wasn't the first one to come here... but on the other hand, I doubted London's population of teen punks would have made off with what I was looking for. Old Vic's notes had said the box was in the basement, buried about 3 feet into the ground underneath the 6th floor section from the stairs. Completely impossible to find if you didn't know it was there, or had ground-penetrating radar vision I guess.

I really had no idea where to go from the kitchen to reach the basement, other than 'probably not up', and there were several rooms leading off from it deeper in. At a glance they were a dining room, a way to the main entrance, and... aha! It was probably disguised as a pantry in the place's prime, but a stairway leading down to what was presumably a wine cellar was now completely exposed after the door had long-since broken off its hinges.

I approached carefully, and shone my light on the stairs to examine them. Wood... but not as wet looking as the other stuff around here, and pretty solid looking for what it was worth.

Gingerly, I placed a foot on the first stair and braced myself against the doorframe to test it. I pressed down with about half my weight and-

Crack!

-my foot was left dangling over darkness. Damnit... of course it wouldn't be that easy. I could try to clear out a space to put up some of my rope to climb down... but I was going to have to get the damn box out of there when I came back, and considering Vic, 'compact' didn't seem likely. I'd need to find another way down.

Sighing, I turned away from the wine cellar and picked another door. Main foyer seemed like a more promising starting point than the dining room, so I headed there, ducking under a half-collapsed archway and picking my way over a pile of rotted books from a collapsed bookshelf. Trust Vic to have random bookshelves in every corner of his house I guess. Guy was a weirdo like that, made me look like a straight-laced scientist... and I was currently breaking into an abandoned house from the 1700s in the hopes of finding mad science equipment.

God, what had happened to my career? 5 years ago I'd been working on a paper on electron dynamics in Germany... then I'd found that damn room and... well, then the last 5 years had happened, and it was all downhill from there.

Stupid Vic, why the hell had he had to back up his stupid claims with math that worked?

I shook myself out of it as I reached the foyer. As could be expected, it was a cavernous space, two stories and a big dome on top of that with... well, it had had a chandelier hanging there at some point. Now there was just a dangling rope and the shattered remains of... well honestly it looked more like some sort of antique globe crossed with an electrical generator (of the Esoteric Vic Nonsense variety of course) than it did a chandelier... if I had the equipment I'd probably be hauling this out along with the box, but I'd probably need a truck to move the damn thing. Shame.

Moving past the mad science ball, I scanned both floors for anything that looked promising. The stairs up on both sides of the room had the banisters practically rotting off, and rain was trickling down out of the shattered remains of the big stained glass window in the front and pooling in front of the big double doors. Most of the balcony upstairs was taken up with either the broken remains of doors and furniture, or yet more piles of ruined books. There were seven doors up there, each one probably leading to a death trap of a room of some type, and certainly none going to the basement.

Downstairs was a bit more promising despite a more limited selection. In addition to the door I went through, there were three others. One to the left that looked to be heading to the dining room, one to the right that probably headed to a livingroom of some sort... and an awkwardly shaped one near the stairs on the left that I was willing to bet was another way to the basement. Jackpot.

Sure enough, pulling the thing open I was greeted with another set of stairs going down, this time made out of glorious stone and definitely able to take my weight... not that that would stop me from testing each as I went down.

Luckily, the stone stairs stuck into the ground itself were not, in fact, liable to break underfoot, and I made it down just fine into the cavern of absolute darkness underneath.

I could hear the dribbling of water even as I entered, and was hardly surprised to find the basement waterlogged, with puddles scattered all over the cavernous expanse. What was more surprising was what Vic had apparently been using this place for.

This was hardly just a big empty space: it looked like Vic had used this place as a lab at some point. There were tables stuck in practically every part of the room, and each was absolutely covered in equipment. Chemistry flasks, what had probably been electrical test rigs before looters got here, yet more ruined books... concerning stains, surgical tools, and in the far corner a massive slab-like angled table... coin flip on if it was for surgery or torture, though given Vic I'm not sure there was a difference.

Funnily enough, none of that was the central attraction though, because right in the middle of the room, and smashed straight through all of that was an honest-to-god bomb.

It was... about the size of my chest, black... looked downright evil honestly, and was smashed right into one of the tiles and through several wrecked tables. Rain poured down through its entry point, and I looked up to see that the damn thing had apparently gone through the whole house.

Well, that explained the gaping hole. Still…

"How the hell did that get here?" I mused, as I swung my light over the thing.

Stamped on the tail of the thing with industrial precision, and actually hurting my eyes when I pointed the light at it and got the glare of my own bulb flashed back at me by the ungodly white paint, there was an honest-to-god swastika on the tail of the thing.

"Fuck's sake... really?!" I couldn't help but blurt. That was certainly an answer I guess! The fucking thing was from the Blitz. Looked to be a dud on impact if it was anything to go by, but who knew if the explosives inside were still good.

There might be some stuff still worth grabbing down here, but realistically anything shiny would have been snatched long ago. Besides, I didn't need any 200 year old Erlenmeyer flasks or graduated cylinders at the moment, and I was pretty sure I'd already tracked down most of Vic's more esoteric stuff, to say nothing of trying to loot around an unexploded Nazi bomb from WW2. No, what I needed was in that box.

"One... Two... Three..." I counted the large granite floor slabs slowly as I walked across the floor. The things were... they were fucking intimidating honestly. About a meter to a side and looked pretty thick... and well, 38 and a PhD in physics certainly didn't certify me for any heavy lifting. Still, I'd brought a car jack for a reason. Once I got the damn thing tipped up on its side, it would be easy. It wasn't like I needed to put it back after all.

"Right... X marks the spot. If I was going to do much more than grunt and exert while I did this I might put the recorder on... Now where'd I put my portable floodlight..." I muttered. This was a major find after all, and technically criminal or not I felt like that was probably worth a bit for posterity. But fuck it, I'd record what I found inside.

Getting the damn slab off the floor was hardly an easy task. It was a bit thinner than I had feared, about 5 inches or so... but it was still heavy as all hell, and the car jack definitely paid off. Even once I got the tables full of Vic's broken glassware out of the way, it probably took me at least half an hour to get the big block of shit up on its side.

I'll admit, the crash of it slamming down onto the granite floor when I flipped it over was pretty satisfying, even if that was still just the start. Underneath the slab there was still a great big muddy mess of wet, rain-soaked undersoil that looked to be pretty clay-y to my non-geological reckoning. Certainly it would be lovely to dig through. I wonder if that wacko Sam back in college would try to taste this diarrhea-looking substrate to see how close it was to the vaunted Sandy Loam...

With a groan, I grabbed my shovel from my bag and got to work.

"Fucking hell... this shit is supposed to be what grad students are for! My back isn't made for this shit anymore..." I grumbled, heaving piles of goopy soil onto the floor with a series of disgusting smack sounds and splatters of mud.

"Three feet down, right?" I muttered in-between grunts of exertion, "Gotta... be at... least two... down by now... Should be hitting it any-"

CLANG

The ring of my shovel striking metal was music to my ears. I'd been expecting a box of wood, but this was probably better, considering the miserably damp conditions.

I spent the next 45 minutes slowly excavating the rest of the box. It turned out to be a lot larger than I had anticipated. Vic's notes made it sound like this thing was just some old spare equipment and 'his finest creation', whatever that meant, but this thing was big, almost the size of a damned coffin, and I'd be lucky if it wasn't as heavy.

"Damn Vic! This better not have some poor girl's body in it, you creepy bastard." I exclaimed to the long-departed ghost of my generations-removed mentor-by-notebook.

The box looked akin to a steamer trunk, but made out of steel and riveted like a ship hull. It was rusted and dirty now... but I'd have to hope Vic had had the forethought to make the hinges out of something less corrodible. I wasn't in the mood for plasma cutting. Of course, even through all the dirt and mud, I could still see, plain as day, a label on the top of the long box. Engraved into the metal, like a carving on a tombstone, was a familiar phrase.

PROPERTY OF V. FRANKENSTEIN

Of course Vic would engrave his name on it, the pompous bastard. I could see his thought process now. Oh, what if some random outsider finds my precious creation? I had better engrave my name on it so that even they know how incredible I am for making this! Arrogant to the last he was.

...Underneath that, though, was something I wasn't expecting. I don't know if it was a name, an acronym, or what... but there was another word on the box, even larger than the first set of text.

EVE

Eve? Knowing Vic it was probably an intentional reference to the Bible, but... the name was concerning. I joked about the body thing, but I had read Vic's notes backwards and forwards. I probably knew the guy better than his friends had while he was alive. I knew all about his schemes to create a 'perfect life form akin to God'. It had always left me queasy looking at those parts... but considering said schemes to create life seemed to be inherently tied into his actual greatest work, stuff like his Perpetual Motion Engine, I could only assume that even if there was a corpse in there, it probably had some of the last surviving examples of Vic's real magnum opus shoved inside it.

"Well, nothing else for it. Come on baby girl, you're coming with me." I addressed the box as I began to wedge a prybar underneath it to leverage it out of its resting place. It was pretty well vacuum-sealed into the ground by the muck, and it made a nasty sucking sound coming loose... and then jerked free surprisingly easily.

It was weird: the thing practically looked like a miniature bunker, and even if the bomb had gone off I could belive this thing would be in one piece. And yet, I could actually pick it up fairly easily. Whatever was inside couldn't be much more than... about 48 kilograms if my estimate was anything to go by. The thing certainly looked like you could fit a body in it... mostly, maybe if you chopped it up first, which considering Vic, didn't seem entirely out of the question.

God, what had happened to my life?

Still, I was hardly going to look that light metal box in the mouth. 48kg was just about on the upper end of what I felt like I could haul out of here safely, so if anything it was a small miracle.

It was slow going dragging the damn thing back up the stairs to the main hallway: 'suprisingly light' for a giant metal near coffin-sized steamer trunk was still pretty fucking heavy, and certainly not easy to carry. I wasn't really able to check my watch to see how long it took me hauling 'Eve' out of the house. All I know is that I started hearing sirens before I went back for my tools.

"Shit!" I hissed.

I had no way of knowing if the cops were even coming this way. But... well, technically speaking what I was doing wasn't illegal I was pretty sure, but it was frowned upon, and between the giant metal coffin I was dragging and the .50AE piece I called Wizard Repellent, I couldn't imagine Britain's Finest would be all that charitable towards me.

Honestly I was a lunatic for even trying this. The Association's Clock Tower was practically in spitting distance. This was the lion's den, and if an Enforcer even caught wind of me within 50 miles of that fucking clock, the fuckers would be on me like hungry pirhanas. I was pretty sure that even 7 50AE rounds into one high-level Enforcer probably wouldn't be enough to put them down.

Still, what other choice did I have at this point? I was running out of options when it came to that stupid summoning ritual, and if I kept dragging my feet then the event in Romania would probably start without me, and I'd miss out on the biggest display of magical power since World War 2 just like that.

No, what I'd dug up here would be a game-changer. It had to be. What Frankenstein had been working on might have been insane, but his research was the key to all of this. If I could just get some more data, I could crack this whole Magecraft thing wide open, and the Association could fucking cry about it while I collected my Nobel Prizes.

But for now, just getting through this forest and safely off into the night would be enough. My van wasn't much further, once I was there, I'd be home free.

God, I wished I'd brought a cart or something. Keeping the damn box from going 'bump' over every root and stump was difficult, and I swear the sirens were getting closer... to the house at least, I was probably home free so long as I got out of here before any searching started...

Though thinking about it, assuming they were after me, why the hell would the cops even be here? This house had been abandoned for ages and was hardly some high-priority patrol route for them.

... Right, I was public enemy number 1 of a world-spanning conspiracy of ancient eugenics-practicing wizards who called themselves "magi" like a bunch of weirdos, who were hiding an entire branch of physics from the rest of humanity, exercised immense control over a good number of major governments, had the moral fiber of the CIA, and were somehow immune to bullets half the time. God, I fucking hated wizards.

What the hell had my life even become?

But, existential crisis over my possible dissociation from reality aside, that was ultimately why I was here. What was going on in Romania was big, huge, even I could tell that. You don't call something a "Great" Grail War for nothing after all. I was only able to tell what was going on from scraps, but the Association was going to war from the sounds of it. Some group of rogue wizards called the Yggdmillennia or something like that had apparently run Romania like a sock puppet right up until the Soviet Union fell, and had been untouchable for fear of triggering nuclear war.

But, the lack of Big Daddy Khrushchev to ward off marauding spellslingers with threat of mushroom clouds was only half of the matter: the other half was the other part of the name. This was a Grail War after all... and that had some connotations. Connotations like seven or more wizards summoning superpowered ghosts of major historical figures to battle it out over a magic wish-granting cup that may or may not have belonged to Jesus at some point, with the Catholic Church acting as referee.

... Fuck even thinking about that made it seem insane. Still, I had a decent degree of evidence that at least the History Ghost part of the affair was more than some mass delusion. And more importantly, the Grail War was one of the messiest recurring events in the history of this world of secrets and conspiracy that the magically abled lived in, where casters of all type would spend weeks, or even months, firing off all sorts of powerful spells at one another without a care for who saw them do it. In short, it was probably the best chance to study magic in action I was ever going to get.

And hey, if I could cut in on the whole summoning thing to get my own familiar in the form of William the Conqueror or something who could help me fend off bulletproof wizards while I recorded their nonsense in action, that was just icing on the cake.

That said, going to Romania filled me with apprehension for more reasons than just the 'spells getting fired every which-way' part. Or even the 'superpowered history ghost' part. Perhaps it was just indicative of the wish cup part being bullshit or something, but as far as I could tell, despite there being at least three Grail Wars before now, not a single one of them was ever recorded as having a winner.

And that couldn't be a good sign.