Disclaimer: I think it's already been established that I don't own anything besides original characters/concepts. Oh, and a really nice lamp (it's expensive, at any rate.)
Chapter 2: Coming to an Understanding (Sort of)
Having long since had her wand reduced to a pile of splinters, Ciara found herself wondering why she and her family had even bothered to entertain the delusion of following the rules of the Harry Potter universe for so long anyway. God knew that the Clockwork Tower had been pissed off enough at the fact that there were thousands of people hidden in plain sight across the world whom had access to what the stuffy bastards liked to call 'anarchistic magic the scope of which has never before been seen.' Add in the fact that those people had since 1997 taken a liking to using inoperable sticks and shouting spells in dog Latin had nearly given the council of the Clockwork Tower a simultaneous aneurysm.
"Oh, yeah, that's why," she said aloud. "Anything to bust their balls."
Sighing when the air once again warped as thousands of glowing weapons slid into reality, Ciara barely managed to sidestep what felt like the tenth onslaught of flying projectiles. By sidestepped, meaning that she scrambled through the dry heat of multiple explosions as a series of shockwaves passed over her, nearly sending her sprawling into a fruit stand that had caught fire from a misfired round. She actually would have found it pretty cool if it weren't for the stench of burning flesh and petrol permeating the air, the torn pavement and broken glass of storefronts ricocheting around her like so much shrapnel and the fact that her left eardrum was bleeding.
Oh yeah, she had teleported (she had vowed from this day forward to never again utter the word Apparate, or anything else Harry Potter-related again) into the nearest town, resulting in millions in property damage and dozens of wrongful death claims that would probably creep into the hundreds given a couple of minutes. Oops?
Shouting over the din of explosions in an attempt to warn the group of senior citizens riding power scooters up ahead, she jumped over a low-flying Noble Phantasm that bore more than a passing resemblance to a self-playing electric guitar and which promptly burst into a seemingly endless sphere of shrapnel as soon as it touched ground.
The old people were immediately reduced to a mulch-like consistency, splattering Ciara in a warm, sticky shower of blood and viscera. It felt like her last family trip to the Los Cascadas water park to visit relatives in the Caribbean, but with more carnage (there had been an incident which she was in no way related to).
"Music slays the savage beast…Or at least some hapless seniors," she said dryly as she dodged a caravan-sized pair of scissors that nearly sliced her head off. Unfortunately, she'd expended so much energy into not getting turned into a vertical smear on the ground that Ciara hadn't paid attention to where she was running. Hence, upon turning the corner, she found herself boxed into the perpetual twilight of an alley located between a butcher's shop and a clock maker's, face to face with a…Metallic horse with a jagged blade-like horn protruding from its forehead?
Ciara regarded the shiny anomaly for a moment, her bewildered expression slowly morphing into one of utter annoyance as she realized that what she was currently seeing was in fact not the side effect of a concussion. "Well shit," she said. "An honest-to-God robot unicorn."
Stymied at this newest turn of events, she sank to her knees, oblivious to the grit digging into her flesh and the fact that were likely used hypodermics scattered amongst the dirt. "That fucker really does have a prototype of everything in that gate of his," Ciara muttered. A thoughtful look crossed her face. "I wonder if he's got a prototype Eminence Monster Metal…"
Just as the unicorn simulacrum began to paw the dirt, head lowered and nostrils emitting steam as it prepared to charge, she pulled herself to her feet, determined to at least die standing if she were to be killed in such a ridiculous fashion.
As it ran at her, hooves lifting off the ground momentarily from its speed, synthetic skin catching what little sunlight filtered into the alley and throwing prisms of rainbow-hued light in every direction, it came to a grinding halt (literally, she could hear the gears inside of it grating against one another) upon coming within several inches of her.
Ciara looked on confusedly as the robotic unicorn sank onto all fours and laid its head in her lap, docile as a kitten.
"Oh, that's just anticlimactic," she declared as she absentmindedly stroked its muzzle.
"Yes, quite," her Servant said from his perch atop the roof of the butcher's shop. Leaping down with a dramatic fluttering of his red cloak, he landed before her, golden armour clanking with each of his movements. The noise frightened off her new robot buddy, who cantered off with a frightened whinny and accidently impaled an unfortunate paperboy through the heart upon reaching the opposite pavement.
"Yeah, that kind of takes away your gravitas," Ciara noted. At the half-confused, half-irritated glare that he threw her way, she added "You sound like a bunch of trash bins being thrown around in a hurricane. Or a Transformer having sex with a dryer full of ball bearings."
Drawing himself up with a huff, the gold-clad servant gestured towards his armour. "I'll have you know, foolish girl, that my armour is crafted by the gods-whom I despise, by the way, but that's neither here nor there," he informed her with more than a hint of annoyance creeping into his otherwise haughty tone.
Ciara, however, was unable to appreciate his explanation, as she was engrossed in staring at a passing dandelion clock floating in the breeze. "…What's your point?" She asked after it had drifted away.
The Servant slapped a hand against his forehead. "It means," He said through gritted teeth, "That though it may seem as such to your plebeian human ears, my armour most certainly does not sound like, as you so eloquently put it, 'like a bunch of trash bins being thrown around in a hurricane. Or that second bit of idiocy you spewed earlier. Mongrel," he added in a disdainful mumble.
"Whatever you say Goldilocks," Ciara said agreeably from her spot on the ground, bringing her shoulders up in a shrug. "That reminds me: Why are you a blonde, lily-white pretty boy, anyway? If you're the two thirds-god king of Babylon-seriously weird understanding of mathematics and biology back then, by the way-shouldn't you be a bronzed, bearded behemoth instead of an Abercrombie model?"
There followed a long pause in which the Servant gaped at her and she looked toward the mostly un-ruined butcher's shop and reminded herself to pick up some lamb shank eventually.
"How did you glean my identity, mongrel?" Gilgamesh demanded. "I know for a fact that your summoning of me was through chance rather than deliberation."
Rather than immediately answering him, Ciara instead craned her neck to look up at the sky. "Wasn't all that difficult to piece together, really," she said after a moment, mauve eyes squinting slightly as she continued to stare upward. "Especially considering the fact that one of the swords you flung at me had the words 'Property of Gilgamesh' engraved on the hilt, along with what looked like a dick. A really big one, too. The dick drawing, I mean, not the sword; the sword was pretty average."
Exhaling loudly, Gilgamesh pinched the bridge of his nose, looking as though he didn't know whether to laugh or scream. "Damn it, Enkidu," he muttered under his breath. "I knew that your love of scrawling phalluses on my belongings would be my undoing." Redirecting his attention to Ciara, who had yet to tear her gaze away from the clouds, Gilgamesh, miffed that anyone would dare to ignore his presence in such a fashion, snapped "Woman, what exactly in the sky is so interesting that you would gawk up at it like a slack-jawed imbecile?"
Gesturing for him to look up with her index finger, Ciara said simply "Missiles."
"Oh," Gilgamesh said with a nod. "I see." As the whistling shriek of the incoming missiles increased in volume, he turned to Ciara, who hadn't made an effort to move. "Either you have a death wish or a plan. From what I've seen of you so far, I'm not sure which one is a more disconcerting notion," he observed.
"Column B," she confirmed.
Gilgamesh looked down at her when she moved into a crouch, the sleepy/bored expression that appeared to be her default never leaving her face as she began to mutter a series of disjointed words under her breath.
"This ought to be an interesting spectacle," he commented before pulling a jewel-encrusted throne with a heavily cushioned seat from out of the Gate of Babylon and settling down on it.
It was certainly a spectacle, in any case. As soon as the rocket had reached within two feet of her, Ciara extended her hand and grasped it by the nose. The air around her wavered from the sudden influx of prana even as the missile violently ignited as though it had been packed full of dynamite, sending shards of molten steel in every direction with a resonating boom that knocked her flat on her face.
"Ow," she coughed into the dirt as she sent up a half-assed shield to shelter her from the worst of the shrapnel with what remained of her prana.
Gilgamesh nudged Ciara, who had conveniently landed right in front of him with his foot. "While it's refreshing to see that you've learned your place, we have no time for foreplay," he drawled.
Ciara curled up onto her side and brought the furry-lined hood of her jacket over her head. "Ugh, go away you gold-plated shit gibbon," she groaned. "You spew so much hot air it's like listening to the planet Jupiter, and my prana is lower than a midget's balls right now. Now's not exactly a good time. Or ever, really," she added.
Rather than the expected furious outburst, Gilgamesh merely let out a hearty laugh as he got up from his throne. Hauling her up by the back of her oversized cargo jacket, he dangled his half-heartedly struggling Master in front of him like a wayward kitten. "Normally, I would kill someone for daring to speak to me in such a manner, but I must admit, your pluck is amusing," he said, leering. "It's not often that I've emptied the Gate of Babylon to such extent, even if you did mostly just dodge."
Ciara rolled her eyes. "Lucky me," she deadpanned. "What with the creeptacular grin, I'm starting to think that it's better luck to gain your hatred than your interest."
Once again, Gilgamesh laughed at her. "In an age where the majority of the populace is content to bleat along in formation with the rest of the herd, it's refreshing to see a few who have some semblance of nerve."
"So…You like to be attacked and insulted?" Ciara asked, confusion written across her face.
"More that I enjoy audacious people whose endeavours are far beyond their reach, but I suppose there is a fair amount of overlap between the two," Gilgamesh admitted. "Speaking of which," he continued, "I wonder if it's a genetic predisposition of green-haired people to be so impudent. You're the fifth one I've spoken to, and so far you've all defied me in one way or the other."
Ciara dropped her chin into her hand, looking thoughtful. "My father is not only tied hand and foot by her apron strings but gets pegged by my mother on a nightly basis because she 'likes it when he bites the pillow', so I'm going to go with no. Although the both of us are really more of a mint than a straight-up green, so who knows?" She said, shrugging.
Gilgamesh shot her a dirty look. "Of the myriad effects that I've acquired, the sordid details of your parent's marriage are not one I wish to possess." His mouth twisted in distaste. "Nor the definitions and accompanying images delivered to me by the Grail, either," he added disgustedly.
"Tch, try walking in on that shit," Ciara snorted. "Nothing destroys someone's image of their parents like seeing their mother re-enacting Last Tango in Paris with their father, complete with butter. And everyone wonders why I have no interest in sex-Ow," she said as she was dropped onto the ground. "What was that fo-Geeze you bastard, tell me that we're playing before you try to go for second base!"
This was exclaimed at the top of her lungs when Ciara found herself pinned against the alley wall, wrists above her head and bricks digging painfully into her back as Gilgamesh unceremoniously yanked her shorts and underwear down, his fingers rooting around in her nether regions like a team of archaeologists excavating the remnants of a prehistoric society.
After a few perfunctory 'hmms' and 'ahs', he released her, looking satisfied. "You're a virgin," Gilgamesh stated.
Buttoning her shorts, Ciara levelled him with a look that could have curdled milk. "I'm not sure how things worked back in the day, but in this day and age we generally ask about someone's sexual experience rather than just shove our fingers in each other's orifices like Little Jack Horner with his pie. Just saying, it's considered pretty bad form nowadays."
Unperturbed by her unfavourable reaction, Gilgamesh simply folded his arms across his chest. "In my era I would have taken the same liberties as I did just now, only with far more than just my fingers." He leaned towards her, a predatory gleam in his eyes. "In fact," he said in a soft voice that nonetheless carried and made her skin crawl as though she'd been thrust into a tub of ice water, "What's to stop me from doing exactly that? Amusing though you might admittedly be, but I'm willing to bet that you'd be even more entertaining on your-
Before he could finish his sentence, Gilgamesh found himself interrupted by a series of annoyingly loud crunches that echoed throughout the dim alley like the rapid emptying of a gun's magazine into a pile of soda tins. Gritting his teeth against the sound, he scowled balefully at Ciara, who had procured a bag of Cheetos from her coat pocket and was eating the cheesy snack one piece at a time, as though to capitalise on the noise that she was making.
"Where did you get that from and why are you ignoring me when I speak to you?" Gilgamesh asked tersely.
Tossing a Cheeto up into the air and attempting to catch it in her mouth only to miss and have it hit her in the eye, Ciara winced, grasping her newest injury. "It came out of your Gate of Babylon. As for the second part, well, you're kind of a doucheboat," she admitted as she removed her hand from her eye.
"The Gate of Babylon most certainly does not contain those…those…orange-dust coated atrocities," Gilgamesh spat. "My treasury is home to all of the riches of the earth! The mere thought that it could possibly be host to such utter garbage is no less than an insult! And another thing," he added, voice increasing in volume with every word, "STOP IGNORING ME, DAMN YOU!" His tirade over, Gilgamesh fell back, face stained an angry red and breathing like he'd just run a marathon.
"Nah, I was just fucking with you," Ciara told the hyperventilating King of Heroes. "I ganked it off one of the corner shops you blew up." She tossed a handful of Cheetos into her mouth. "You're one needy S.O.B, by the way," she said as an afterthought, chewing. "Were you not hugged enough as a kid or something?"
A sneer formed across Gilgamesh's face, although it was slightly tempered by an undercurrent of something which looked suspiciously similar to uncertainty. "I'll have you know that my mother loved me very much, and I reciprocated," he retorted.
"Uh-huh," Ciara said knowingly, recognising the proverbial chink in his armour and deciding to poke at his exposed innards with the psychological equivalent of a tetanus-riddled nail. "What about your dad?" She asked.
There was a bout of silence that lasted for so long that Ciara had to check her watch twice to make sure that time hadn't come to a stop, which was a moot point seeing as how it had been broken during her desperate fleeing.
She was just about to sidle out of the alley in search of some Cidona to chase down her Cheetos with when she once again found herself being seized by an irate demi-god; an occurrence that she predicted was going to become a long-standing tradition for quite a while. Worse, she dropped her Cheetos.
Fingers digging into her shoulders with enough force to leave bruises, Gilgamesh leaned his face into hers, red eyes appearing vaguely insectoid in their wideness. Combined with their sudden proximity bringing them literally nose to nose, it was more than a little disconcerting. In fact, Ciara was pretty certain this was how the majority of murder-suicides began.
"Uh, our faces are touching…"
"You, offal, have just brought me to a most uncomfortable realisation," Gilgamesh intoned robotically. "Would you like to know what it is?"
"You're into children?" Ciara ventured despite herself. Her brow creased. "Hold on a second, did you just compare me to foie gras? Because-"
A deep, slightly manic laugh rumbled in Gilgamesh's chest, his shoulders shaking with mirth. Mentally, Ciara began to compose her will-She wanted a Viking funeral with excessive drinking on the part of the mourners.
"My sexual preferences are both all-encompassing and nigh-incomprehensible," Gilgamesh informed her in a relatively composed voice, cutting off her meandering thoughts.
"And no," he continued simply, "What you've made me realise is this: I hate my father." Having finally admitted the childhood trauma that had evidently been corroding his psyche for millennia, Gilgamesh stepped away from her, looking expectant.
Running a hand through her slightly frazzled waves, Ciara mustered up as much articulacy as she could under the circumstances. "Congratulations?" She asked rather than stated, grimacing inwardly at her lack of a proper response. Upon being presented with a glare that was probably the origin behind the superstition of people having the ability to kill with a single glance, she hastily wracked her brain for something more ego-boosting.
"I bet your dad was a total cunt," she tried again after a moment, looking unduly proud of herself.
However, Gilgamesh appeared to be pleased with this proclamation, judging by his nodding. "Indeed," he said. "I amass all of the treasures in the entire damned world, and that lowly bastard didn't even have the decency to give me so much as a 'well done.'" A shadow passing over his countenance, he continued in a dark voice with a lowly uttered "I refuse to so much as mention the tongue-lashing I received from him after the incident with the Bull of Heaven," before falling into a pensive silence.
Feigning a cough to dissuade the awkward hush that was currently reigning supreme, Ciara threw a longing look towards the alley's exit even as she began to slowly shuffle towards it.
"Good talk," she said, falsely cheerful. "I feel like we've really learned a lot about each oth-ACK," she choked upon being grabbed by her collar and spun around to face Gilgamesh, who yet again leaned in far too close for her liking.
"Did I say that you were allowed to leave?" He said calmly.
"No?"
Gilgamesh closed his eyes, looking tranquil as a monk on morphine. "Well then, perhaps you ought to sit down," he suggested.
"But-"
"Sit. Down."
Ciara raised an index finger and took a deep breath as though to argue only to think better of it and plunk down onto the ground with her legs crossed, where she proceeded to entertain herself by drawing pictures of cats in the dirt with a disembodied finger that she'd taken as a souvenir earlier.
"Sooooo," she said after five minutes had passed and Gilgamesh hadn't shifted from his close-eyed, arm-folded thinking position. "Are you done doing whatever it is you're doing?"
"Yes," Gilgamesh answered, opening his eyes. Pulling himself away from the wall, he strode over to Ciara and unceremoniously tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. "We're going now."
"I kinda figured," Ciara said, staring sadly down at the Cheetos scattered across the dirt. She was so busy bemoaning their fate that she didn't even notice that they were moving until she saw the smouldering wreckage of what had once been the town square.
A more accurate summation would be a crater, actually. The place looked as though it had been rezoned for strip mining only for the person heading the project so say 'fuck it' and nuke the town from orbit. All of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and what remained of the streets couldn't rightly be called pavement so much as it could be called gravel. Solitary flames occasionally flickered across the wreckage, shining through the smoke-clogged air like faerie fire across a swamp, which was redolent with a stench not unlike that of a broken gas line.
And then it happened. One of the few cars that had merely been overturned rather than reduced to what might charitably be described as scrap metal exploded without any apparent provocation. The blast triggered a chain reaction due to the gasoline hanging in the air igniting, with all of the other undestroyed vehicles following suit as they too were engulfed in fiery red halos moments before simultaneously detonating in a symphony of screeching metal and shattered windows.
Flaming shards of steel and glass rained from the sky like confetti from Satan's birthday piñata, feeding the fires that had finally just begun to burn down. It was only through divine intervention that the remains of the town weren't consumed in a massive firestorm that wiped it entirely from the map. In any case, though, it was obvious that rebuilding was going to be a long and very costly process.
Ciara gazed at the destruction from her position slung across Gilgamesh's shoulder. "Shit."
"Surely such wanton devastation deserves more than a single-syllable description," Gilgamesh commented, shaking his head at her lack of garrulity.
She deliberated for a moment before shaking her head as well. "Meh, shit is the short and sweet summation of this clusterfuck," Ciara decided. "You can practically hear the italics."
Gilgamesh rolled his eyes. "Just get in the Vimana," he sighed, setting her down.
"Whatev-what the hell is that Escher-esque metal monstrosity?"
The monstrosity in question was in its general outline not too dissimilar from a fighter jet, if one turned their head and squinted. However, looking at the thing with a straight gaze caused reality to disappear and pure imagination to take its place.
For all intents and purposes, the Vimana was essentially a gigantic golden triangle affixed to two smaller pylons with razor-edges that looked like they could slice through reinforced steel running parallel to the main body and floating on four acid green protrusions that were either solar panels, sails, or the bastard offspring of the two. Also, it lacked a roof for some reason, which seemed sort of odd if it was in fact meant to be used for battle.
All in all, in Ciara's mind it gave off the distinct vibe of having been designed by someone who habitually forgot to look at the sticky note on their refrigerator that read "Don't forget to take your Risperdal."
Ciara turned to Gilgamesh. "Sheesh, is everything you own gold?" She demanded. "Do you have a prototype set of twenty-four-karat golden anal beads in that Gate of yours?"
"I'll show you later if you're truly so eager to see," was all he said before picking her up and throwing her bodily inside of the Vimana. She slid across the red leather interior and hit the wall with a resounding thunk.
Gilgamesh smirked at her predicament as he slipped inside as well; ignoring her complaints about how the Vimana was a single-seater.
As he steered them up into the air, she shoved her hands into her pockets and attempted to make herself comfortable on the floor, only to wind up desperately clinging to Gilgamesh's leg to keep from tumbling off the edge when he made a sudden turn.
Feeling her death grip on him, he looked down at her rigid figure holding on to his leg like a toy koala on a pencil with a raised brow. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Gazing up at your nutsack with fervent adoration."
"Ah. You may continue. In fact, I insist that you feel free to extrapolate."
Curling up into the swaddling confines of her jacket, Ciara pulled her hood up and shut her eyes against the wind tearing at her face with icy fingers and hoped that the ride back to her house would be a short one.
It took two hours.
Author's Note: I no longer know where I'm going with this (not that I ever did) but anything that lets me write such random tripe obviously can't be all bad (for me). Seriously though, writing crack is therapeutic. Also: Can you tell that I got bored with the Harry Potter route and decided to go semi-Type-Moon? Because I totally (sorta) did. Like I said, I'm not sure about anything here besides the fact that this story, for lack of a better word, is utterly and deliberately preposterous.