Molly certainly does, headache notwithstanding.
Beta'd by Sesparra
Anastasia Luccio wasn't entirely sure what she was supposed to expect when Shiro Yoshimo and his fellow Knights mentioned a safe location, but she would have been willing to accept even a poorly-maintained hostel in the face of what had already happened tonight.
At best, they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a mere target of opportunity for the Denarian that had ruined their vehicles and then attacked them. That was, however, supremely unlikely to be the case, given how potent Nicodemus' ability to gather information was, and she couldn't afford to treat it as anything less than well-informed, precisely directed enemy action.
Still, with the Knight's truck leading the loaner that Dresden had secured from the mechanic and Shiro's sedan into the parking lot of Saint Mary of the Angels, she felt as if she could afford to release her staff. Even if the Denarians did choose to follow them onto holy grounds, they weren't operating at nearly as potent an informational advantage as they had been, and unless Nicodemus had brought Magog along with Ursiel, which was unlikely since that particular Fallen had always been more prone to work with Polonius Lartessa and Rosanna, he could not bring nearly as much direct power to bear, not enough to be assured of his victory over all three Knights and herself, even if Dresden, Ramirez, and Yoshimo the younger were unable to contribute.
Before she managed to emerge from the sedan and attempt to aid the staggering Russian, there was already a girl clad in what seemed to be an oversized lab coat there, pulling the passenger door open and bracing one shoulder under his arm to lever him out of the vehicle. "What happened to him?" she asked in a familiar voice that Anastasia couldn't put her finger on, presumably feeling the way that he swayed but managed to remain upright.
"Ursiel knocked him into a wall with a charge," said Shiro. "Ramirez and Dresden bought me the opening I needed to end the fight before anything else happened."
"He's worst off, then?"
"My niece dislocated her wrist, but she should be able to manage." Suddenly, Yoshimo's skill with her sword made significantly more sense- Anastasia hadn't fought with Shiro for very long, but his bladesmanship had made an impression, and her style of combat was close to what she remembered of his, if less polished. One day, she'd make a terrific instructor or field captain for the Wardens, assuming she remained in the Order for long enough.
"Right, and we're worried about… internal bleeding or cranial trauma?" Anastasia refocused on the girl, and she was indeed a girl- she had the coltish look and oversized hands of someone with at least a handful of growth spurts still to go through, and yet… there was something about her bearing that put paid to her seeming youth, a familiarity with how best to support the Russian Knight without causing him further harm.
"Could be either, could just be a blown-out eardrum." Shiro shrugged. "I'm no doctor."
"Yeah, okay, I'll make sure he gets taken care of." She lowered her voice, but not enough. "Keep an eye on the kids, please?"
Another curious quirk, seeing as how she appeared to be younger than the Wardens. In another time, Anastasia would have suspected her to be the Archive, but she knew that the repository of all the knowledge of mankind was a child younger than ten, and not to be seen outside the company of the Hellhound to boot, who wouldn't be caught dead around any of the Knights if he had any other choice.
Shiro offered the girl a smile. "Of course, Molly," he said, and there was more respect in those three words than Anastasia could remember him offering to any of the people who had been involved with the situation with the Stygian Sisterhood three decades ago. Another piece of the puzzle that was the girl… and Anastasia was unsure if she wanted to hunt down the rest.
"If you ask," said Shiro, quietly enough that none of the riders in the truck could hear, "she will answer."
Anastasia colored a shade or two redder at being caught before quashing her blush response. "Should I?"
Shiro shrugged. "It's not an easy thing, knowing the Truth." Anastasia could hear the capital letter there, although she wasn't sure why it would be there. "But it is a burden that only you can decide if you are strong enough to bear."
And with that, he turned and walked into the church, cane tippy-tapping as he went, leaving Anastasia to start and hurry in his wake.
The church grounds no longer felt quite so comforting, with all the questions swirling around the inside of her head.
Thankfully, it was just a ruptured eardrum, and even though Sanya would be lopsided for the rest of the night and maybe into the morning, depending on how strong a response his body had to biofoam, he should be fighting fit by the time things really heat up.
"So," I said, walking slowly through Saint Mary and trying to find where Dad and Shiro had gotten off to, "how'd she work?"
"Like a dream," said Sanya, patting the sheath I'd used my gun magic on before he'd gone out with Dad and Shiro to bail Harry's ass out of the figurative fire, and the Wardens with him. "Got Ursiel very worked up, loud roaring and 'this cannot be' type of thing. You know how he is."
I chuckled ruefully. "Thankfully not. I don't think anyone managed to spring Ursiel before I came back, although that might have something to do with the fact that at some point Harry lured him into one of Hades' vaults before killing his host and leaving the coin for the Lord of the Dead."
Sanya whistled, then winced, one hand rising to his wounded ear for a moment before dropping back to his side, and he worked his jaw before speaking again. "That's one way to remove the Coin from circulation, although I am not sure we can do so for all thirty. Sooner or later someone would arrange for a heist, and then we would have all the Coins in one person's hands."
"You're not wrong." I opened my mouth to suggest another idea, but froze when Harry's voice rose angrily from one of the rooms ahead, somewhat muffled by the weight of the sturdy wooden door between us and them but still audible.
"What do you mean 'I can't be involved,' Michael?" he said, and I fancied I could feel someone in the room drawing in power in response.
Sanya hit the door first, almost slamming it open in his haste to be the first one through, and as I made it to the door, I could see him trying to interpose himself between Harry and Dad, who he was doing an admirable job at looming over for someone who Dad could break over his knee like Bane broke the Bat.
"What is going on here?" I demanded, and I winced as my voice cracked halfway through, even as it seemed to drain the fury out of Harry as he turned almost sheepishly to face me.
"Molly? What are you doing here?"
"I had a theology question for Father Forthill and Dad agreed to drop me off when he went to go do his Knight errand," I lied, and based on the way that Luccio's eyes narrowed, she caught it too, but her expression was largely dominated by exasperation at Harry being Harry. To be entirely fair, it was hard to blame her, since that's more or less what I was feeling, but still.
"Right, yeah, that… makes sense," he said, seeming to almost deflate as he rubbed at the back of his neck sheepishly. "Sorry about that, I'll be out of your hair."
"Harry, you have to understand that this is for your own safety," said Dad, which, to his credit, did get the man to hunch his shoulders some, but he otherwise continued walking out of the church without replying.
"You were never going to get him to skip town," I said. "If you did he wouldn't be Harry."
"And if I didn't try I wouldn't be me, Molly," Dad said, exhaustion weighing down every word.
"And who's this?" Ramirez asked between bites, sandwich in one hand and energy drink in the other.
"Ah, yes. Wardens Ramirez, Yoshimo, and Luccio, this is Molly, my oldest daughter. If you don't mind, it's going to be past her bedtime if we stay here too much longer, so I'll be taking her home now. Shiro, Sanya, if you wouldn't mind coordinating with the Wardens? Thank you."
After about five minutes' worth of small talk, we managed to disentangle ourselves from the conversation and make it out to the truck, and then home, mostly avoiding the situation at hand by talking about school.
"Sleep well, Molly," he said, as we separated to go to our separate rooms.
"You too, Dad."
As I sat down on my bed, I felt the Forge flash, two pedestals made manifest like a time-lapse of mushrooms growing, and then-
A secret of the universe, the cornerstone of an ancient art, revealed to me in an instant. What is the job of a smith, at its core?
A smith, and an artisan in general, is an agent of change. Be it ore to blade, iron to weapon, man to hero… nail to Sword… all these are changes, the core of a Smith's craft, and this is the secret that Goibnu, the mighty smith of the Tuatha De Danann, held at the core of his art.
A Fomor plague struck down Goibnu before the fall of the Tuatha De Danann, before they were diminished to the Sidhe, nobles of Summer and Winter, but the subtle strength of his profound insight into reality, the strength that would allow a smith to beat an ingot of bronze thrice to produce a spearpoint that would cause a foe to bleed to death through a mere nick, lived on in me.
That was my last coherent thought before the headache hit me like a freight train, and I collapsed backwards into my pillows.
"My host, you must awaken."
The stench of sulfur accompanied the words, and the combination of a voice inside my head that I couldn't ignore and the unfortunately familiar odor of Hellfire finally dragged me back to consciousness, feeling like I hadn't slept a wink.
"What the fuck happened?" I slurred, pain still pressing in at my temples and making my tongue clumsy.
"This is what happens when an unprepared mortal mind comprehends a secret of the cosmos," said Lasciel, and almost by reflex, I turned my spiritual eyes to the new pedestals before flinching away.
When the expected pain didn't come, I turned my attention back to the displays.
The larger one, the one representing the secret nature of change as understood by the mightiest smith of Eire, had a mallet atop it, the type that wouldn't have been out of place at any arcade or country fair in America, tethered to one of those strongman games that every teenage boy would love to smash right to the top and, inevitably, walk away disappointed from. At its foot stood… not another pedestal, no, it was an anvil, with a miniature forge and assorted other implements around it in a mind-bending arrangement that worsened my headache before I turned my focus away from it.
"Careful, my host," said Lasciel. "Even though you are… more than mortal, now, you are still fragile from being reforged in so short a time. The soul is more than capable of comprehending this, but the mind, and the flesh… all too breakable."
"Right," I said, peeling myself off the bed. "Thanks."
Then, I took a moment to marvel at the absurdity of my life. What the hell kind of situation was I in that I was thanking a fallen angel for saving my body and mind from the universal insight I'd been handed like a damn nightcap.
I was halfway tempted to get up and try and get to one of the bathrooms, but a moment to Listen and I could hear the sounds of the showers spraying, the gurgling of the pipes and the slapping of flesh against the tub. Then, I turned to my dresser to get my hairbrush to try and get my hair to at least pretend I'd washed it… that I'd left in the bathroom until I was sixteen and hadn't gotten around to keeping it in my room again, right.
Well, I could sneak down to Dad's workshop and put something together, a comb, maybe, and that should work out well enough.
I changed my clothes really quick, leaving off my uniform jacket for the moment, then slipped downstairs on clumsy feet. The two Wardens in the kitchen were chatting with Sanya over coffee as Mom worked the stove, and more pertinently, with their backs to me, so I was able to make it out to the shed without anyone paying me much mind.
From there, finding a piece of wood scrap big enough to carve down to a comb was relatively simple, and I sat down heavily at the workbench, already modeling the most time-efficient way to get enough teeth on the comb to be worth making.
I got to work with the carving knife, but a mere three rough passes of the blade over the wood left me with the kind of polished, pearly-sheened comb that you'd expect in a museum, and it was only belatedly that I realized that yes, my understanding of the nature of a worker of arts as an agent of change worked on other forms of craft than just smithing.
Running the comb through my hair once cleaned and styled it like I'd just spent a week getting spa treatments, and I could feel as the item seemed to… peel the sweat and other byproducts of a day from my flesh, a lesser effect than what it did to my hair but no less valuable given how unlikely it was that I'd be able to squeeze my way into the bathrooms for a shower this morning before I had to leave for school.
"Morning," I said after reentering the house. "Where's, uh… the third Warden?" I didn't have any reason to know Yoshimo's name, as far as the Wardens were concerned, so I couldn't refer to her by it without getting a hairier eyeball from Luccio.
Luccio frowned. "Warden Yoshimo should be here by now. The tea house she mentioned isn't far from here, and it doesn't take that long to prepare matcha."
I gave Mom a significant look, and she opened her mouth, frowning, before pausing and shuddering in the way that I'd often seen when people remembered what they bore witness to in a Soulgaze. She deflated, pressing her lips together, then sighed. "Fifteen minutes. If she's not back by then, you can go look, and I'll call you out from school."
Both Wardens turned to look at me, Ramirez more than mildly confused and Luccio with calculation clear in her gaze. "Why would that be?" Ramirez asked, turning back to Mom after a moment.
I spent the next fifteen minutes leading the two of them on a merry jig around the truth, not technically lying but certainly not telling them anything informational even when the Forge flickered briefly and distracted me.
By the time that mom's deadline had elapsed, Ramirez was looking like he would like to get off this roller coaster, please, while Luccio was looking at me like she was wondering how easy burying me in iron filings inside a circle would be.
"Go for it," Mom said, seeming to deflate even more. "I'll call the school."
I was halfway up the stairs before she finished "school", and after grabbing a hoodie and a different pair of pants, I tore open a slipspace portal to the Future Witness and stepped through.
"Aine," I said, closing the portal behind me, "spool up the sensors. We've got a Wizard to find."
And that's that!
Perks Earned:
Goibnu (Irish Mythology, 600 CP): The greatest of the Tuatha smiths, Goibnu could create a spearhead with three strikes of his hammer, and it would be so sharp the man it cut would surely bleed to death. Like this legendary smith, you can forge or assemble anything you've the materials for, no matter how complex or intricate, in moments and whatever you forge shall be of mythic quality, whether armor lighter than cloth and harder than a mountain or plows that can turn over ten acres with one pass. Truly you are worthy to be called the smith of the gods.
Basic Tools (Irish Mythology, Free): You have the mundane tools of your profession. A warrior will have a shield, arms and armor. A noble slightly better versions of the same. A Smith will have tools and materials for metalworking. A druid gets the badges of their office and a pouch of herbs. A Bard, a musical instrument.
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