"I F'n told you to shut up and leave me alone!"
There was a sudden spark of light. Liz Sherman was quite litterally spitting fire with her words.
"Well you can't just get up and leave again! You said you would stay here! You promised it!" Hellboy shouted angrily. His steps sounded like barrels on the concrete ground. Precariously in between the two, Aberham Sapiens paged through his book, a rather bored expression on his face.
"I'm going to visit friends! I'm aloud to do that, right! And stop saying 'You promised!' You sound like a two year old. Shit, I am so sick of you whining and shouting." Liz yelled.
"Who the hell makes 'friends' in a mental hospital! They're crazy people! They might not even remember you!"
"Yeah, well if their crazy, I'm crazy too! And the people who make friends with them are the same ones who date friggin demons!" Liz shouted back. This time, a small flame of blue actually shot from her mouth instead of the sparks from before.
Abe quickly shut his book and backed away, walking again, this time next to Tom Manning, who glanced at him before saying "Well, this is going to last."
Abe raised an 'eyebrow' at the man. "They just have... issues. In general, not with each other."
Hellboy said something in a taunting manner and Liz let out a howl of suppressed rage, her foot stomping down on the pavement and leaving a black burning footprint of her shoe. Tom and Abe stepped around it as though it were something that happened every day.
"Ok, maybe they also have issues with each other, but they would have issues with anybody. So this is good." He said, loyally defending his sometimes seemingly hopeless friends.
Manning simply snorted.
Tom Manning had come a long way since Broom's death, and especially Hellboy saving him. For a while after that, he had even tried to be friendly to Hellboy, before realizing he more hated him for his personality rather then for his own prejudices. Then he had moved on to Liz, who had hated Manning for his personality as well as her and his old prejudices. Finally, he had come to Abe, who he admitted (though not out loud, not that it mattered to Abe) had terrified Manning. Now however, he seemed to be more comfortable with the creatures around him. It was as though fighting a dead man who ran on clocks, being saved by a demon, and especially Professor Broom's death, had made this life seem more normal, somehow. He didn't understand quite how that worked, however.
Abe saw Manning open his mouth, slightly glaring at the fighting odd couple in front of them, but Abe lifted a hand quickly, shaking his head. "Don't even try. Trust me, no good will come of it to any of you."
"If Liz flares up while we're walking in this alleyway, I'm pretty sure the people inside the building will notice the big waving blue fire." He said sarcastically. Abe simply looked up at where Manning was staring, at the rows of bleary windows they were passing by on their way to the auction house on the corner of the street. There had been a crowd of people on the road in front of the house since news of what had seemingly just conspired there had spread fast, and Manning was afraid the garbage truck was beginning to look too suspicious to some people, magically showing up to pick up the garbage whenever there was some unexplained trouble.
"It's getting harder to hide you all you know. What with all these people who believe in The Loch Ness, when there's not even any evidence of that, and here there's all these blurry pictures of a guy with a tail and horns running around, and about a thousand witnesses. It's amazing their not teaching children about you all in schools by now. God, it's all gonna go down the drain. That's what I keep thinking about, I just know someone's gonna take a live camera shot or a non-digital picture, and then it'll be over." Manning got out a cigar as he was thinking. He didn't notice Abe taking a few steps away. Abe wondered vaguely why everyone he knew just had to smoke all the time. He definitely didn't understand any of the charm they seemed to think it had. He vaguely reached up and adjusted the new reseptor he had gotten last week. The thing was definitely preferred over the small tank he had been wearing around his neck, and worked just as well, but made him look vaguely like he was wearing some kind of blue bejeweled necklace. Not that he had ever cared about things like that, he had figured a long time ago that if he cared what he looked like, it wouldn't really make him feel better about his life.
"Well," he said with an air of pointing out the obvious. "You don't have to hide us." He said.
Manning turned to look at him like Abe had just said maybe it would be fun to jump off a building. "Do you even-"
"Hey!" Hellboy suddenly yelled. His stone hand had lifted, waving back to them. "Can you two stop yappin', we're there already." Liz rolled her eyes, the anger from the argument previously obviously still fuming in her head.
Manning growled slightly, but Abe ignored him, walking past Hellboy into the building.
Hellboy looked down at Liz. She had her head purposefully turned away from him. Through the obvious feeling of being a bit pissed off at her, he felt an odd wave of guilt that only she had ever been able to really make him feel, if he didn't count Abe once when he had used reverse psychology on him, and of course, father...
Hellboy felt himself wince without meaning to, reminding himself of the task in front of him. He didn't like to think about his dad if he could help it. It didn't matter if he did, anyway. No amount of thinking about him was ever going to bring him back...
"Ok, what little ghosty or ghooly popped up here?" Hellboy yelled when he entered the auction house, before freezing on the spot next to Abe. He heard a few of the people there who hadn't seen them before gasp as they came in, but he hardly noticed it.
The entire auction hall was covered in vines, great rocks fallen down in chunks from the ceiling, letting the cool night air into the room. The building looked as though it had been fast-forwarded a thousand years, the inside of it not fitting at all with the modern, sleek metallic and mirrored glass outside. The vines seemed to come from a single spot on the floor, where it had been split open from beneath, splinters and a broken pipe sticking up like stalactites of a cave. Thorns grew sharp as needles from the black flesh of the plants, along with withered dark purple leaves. Smaller tendrils of the vines wove around the toppled chairs in the auctioning audience place, as though they had gripped at the people in them.
"What the hell happened?" Liz asked, looking around, her eyes wide.
Almost immediately, a short, balding man stepped forwards. He had a mustache that curled on the edges, like one of the rich nobles of a time long ago. "Well, miss. I witnessed the whole thing, I'm the auctioneer you see, but it's kind of hard to explain... we have a video though." The man said, in an oddly childish voice that did not fit his personality.
"Yes... I'll see the video first..." Abe said slowly. His dark, gold flecked eyes were staring fixedly at a single spot across the room in front of the auctioning stand, a small frown on his face. Hellboy frowned at Abe, walking to the back of the room where a small group of people were attaching a television camera to a small black and white television. The owner of the camera was staring fixedly at all of them, his mouth half open.
A short woman with freckles stood there, glanced up at them and then quickly looked away, attaching a wire to the back of the TV and pressing a button on the camera.
The image jumped to life on the television screen. She pressed another button on the camera, and the image fast forwarded, the small figures in the auction zooming on and off the screen, putting items on a and taking items off. The people in the audience moving their cards up and down looked like they were doing the wave. Finally, she pressed another button. The image zoomed backwards for a moment before playing.
"Sold, to number 31, for $300! Alright, moving on to our last item folks, this one excites me a lot, let me tell you." The auctioneer said. While he was auctioning off items, his voice seemed to drop two levels of sound, sounding deep and professional now. "A great item for all you fans of folklore. What we have here is a piece of a crown from ages before any of our times. Processionals have not been able to pin-point an exact time it was made, but let me tell you the obvious from looking at it folks: it's old."
There were collective chuckles amounst the audience, which transformed into oos and ahs as the same freckled woman who had set up the TV walked on with a small wheeling table. On it was a small, glittering thing unable to be clearly seen on the black and white television.
"Is anyone here ever heard the legend of the Fantastics?" The auctioneer said. He seemed to almost whisper the last word, and the audience, captivated, looked onward. One elderly man near the back rose his grey head, staring onwards with hardly suppressed interest.
"There was a story a long time ago about a race of people that controlled an army made of shining gold. They ruled as the kings of this heavenly army by means of a crown, made of petrified wood in thin woven sticks and three gems. The crown itself was supposed to symbolize the four elements: the branches were earth, and the gems each symbolized an element on their own. There was a ruby for fire, a diamond for air, and in the center, a single pearl for water."
Not a single person in the entire audience moved a mussel as they stared at the crown. The man in the back was rigid.
"The story goes that when man came to this earth, the race of people made them their slaves. Man wanted to be free though, so one man stole the crown right off the kings head, controlling the Golden Army to go against it's past rulers. The race of people were driven away, where, no one knows. But the King stepped forwards, leaving his wife and child who he had told to flee, and walked through the army of gold to the one human. He took the crown from the man's head, and spoke these words: 'I see now this power is too dangerous for any of us to have, for on both sides there was pain. Power of this magnitude is not meant for life of any kind, so no life will have it again." With that, the King broke the woven crown into three pieces. Two he put in his family, to be passed down always to the first two born of his royal lineage, so they can always protect the world. The last he placed up here, in the human world, the element of fire put in the human world, part of the crown of the Fantastics. And on the back of this crown, ladies and gentleman..." The auctioneer breathed. "Are the first letters of the word: F, A, and N. Now, there's a good chance this isn't the crown folks." The audience laughed, the spell broken. "But still a magnificent copy, and enough to get the folklorists and historians going crazy, so can I hear one thousand dollars for this priceless-"
"SILVERLANCE!!" The man in the back of the audience had suddenly leapt up, shouting. Liz let out a slight gasp. He had been wearing a long coat draped over his shoulders, and a hat shadowing his eyes. When he leapt up though, the coat and hat fell to the floor. Even in black and white, his skin was unnaturally pale compared to the rest of the audience. His teeth appeared to be black, and too full when he opened his mouth. The strangest thing however was the wings protruding from his back, or what used to be wings. The looked like oversized dragon fly wings with all the clear windows in between the veins ripped out. The veins still twitched on his back, slight light from small filaments left over on the edges of the veins reflecting in the picture.
Suddenly, the speakers filled with the ripping sound of screams. The people at the auction leapt up, running away, some simply sat still, eyes wide with terror and still as statue, frozen with shear fear.
It was like watching a tree grow in speeded up motion, bursting from the ground the vines shot into the air first, black branches waving like boneless arms, thorns cutting through the air, gleaming on the screen like razors.
A gargantuan ball of vines rose as though the ground was choking it up. The tendrils unraveled like yarn, opening flower-like in the center. Where the seeds would be however, were two figures. One was a huge, writhing thing. The creature held his palms on the ground where he stood, like an ape, and the long grey gnarled feet were backwards, toes pointing uselessly upwards in twists that made them look broken. The head was oversized, the chin protruding like a bull-dog's. Vastly oversized lower incisors jutted crookedly up over his bat-like leaf nose, dark eyes staring blearily out, unblinking. An old dirty loin cloth was wrapped around the creature, and scales glittered down it's back when it turned.
The other figure, though not nearly as noticeable, seemed to gain control of every eye watching the scene. He was tall and lean, wearing a short dark robe as a shirt, a glint of pale metal chain mail hanging elegantly from his shoulders. He wore black pants, tucked into tied on boots of leather wound up to his knees. A cape flowed behind him as though it had been woven from water, billowing in the slightest of winds. He wore a mask that was held on his face by a cloth going back over his unseen head, large spikes protruding from it like a porcupine. The mask itself seemed to be molded of mirrors, reflecting the scene in front of him as he stared from behind two delicately carved ovals.
He seemed human in shape, yet it had never been more clear that he wasn't. It was a strange distinction that seemed almost impossible to make, if it weren't for the coal black skin, too dark to be a human's. or the way he seemed to flow across the floor rather then walk, his limbs moving as though through water. The other creature stepped out of the vines as their ends attacked the onlookers, the creatures leaf nose moving as he sniffed the air. The auctioneer was now frozen on the ground, his mouth hanging open as he looked on.
The thinner creature; human only in form; stepped forwards to the table, lifting a long, six fingered hand. With the very tips of his fingers, he held the bejeweled piece of the crown, examining it through the eye-holes in his mask, the image of it in his impossibly long fingers reflected in the mask.
"Wink, merle da la sie Fantastic. Erle fin." The words came through the speakers in a musical voice that sounded like honey over butter, shaping each word in the foreign tongue. The great bat-nosed creature nodded once, and then crawled oddly back down onto the stage of vines. The silver masked creature who had just spoken walked dream like over to the man in the back, the grey haired one who had turned into the thing with the broken wings.
"Sae lin, Nuala. Shre oni uhn freven al sui." He said. His voice barely picked up on the equipment, he whispered to the creature, and immediately the broken winged one dropped to the ground, spreading his arms like a child begging for an embrace.
"Ki, ka Ki, al sui me! Nuala nada!" He seemed to be begging, his body shaking. The words coming from his mouth sounded like a different accent of speech, but the silver masked one seemed to understand. For a moment he stared down, and then with a powerful whip of his hand, he reached down and tore the veined remnants of one wing from the creatures thin back.
The thing screamed in agonizing pain as the severed wing twitched on the ground where it fell, the other one stretching out and quivering.
The taller one turned away, but the creature it had just harmed reached forward, gripping at a single boot. He didn't even look down as he kicked forwards, and with incredible strength flung the quivering, bleeding thing forwards through the air, flying to the circle of unfurled vines. He hit the larger one, which let out a growl as he fell, still sobbing.
The mirror masked one walked forwards as though he had done nothing, stepping down onto the platform. The vines encircled him and the huge creature, and the last one, still shaking on the ground.
The largest of the old branches reached together, twisting into one another and scraping down parts of the ceiling like paper with the sharp purple thorns. They stretched outwards as if in a sigh of ecstacy, and then crumpled, turning to ash like rock. The three figures that had been in the center however, were no longer there.