Normally you don't need a night watch at midday…
Beta'd by Sesparra
Morgan wasn't quite sure what to make of the warlock the Merlin had sent him to find.
On one hand, her house had an incredibly potent threshold, and she looked… young. He still remembered first meeting some of the newer Wardens, like Yoshimo, and she looked even younger than them, especially all curled up around a pillow in one corner of her bed like she was.
On the other hand, there were enough immaterial spirits in the house to set his teeth on edge, and if she was being accused of violating the Sixth Law of Magic, her physical appearance meant about as much as the Capiorcorpus'. So, between the Sixth and Fourth laws, she was likely to have all kinds of countermeasures for interference, and thus he couldn't afford to allow the girl even a moment to react.
He could feel the buzz of her power against his skin as he secured the thorn manacles to her wrist with one hand, sword hefted to swing into motion at the slightest provocation.
She jerked away, eyes opening and taking him in with terror, and Morgan spoke. "Warlock Carpenter, you stand accused of breaking the Fourth and Sixth laws of Magic. The Senior Council will decide your fate, unless you seek to flee, in which case I will be forced to end your life."
The girl didn't even look like she saw him, chest heaving with terror as her eyes failed to focus. "Daddy!"
Morgan's heart hardened, and he added more charges of breaking the Fourth Law to her figurative rap sheet. He had never had children of his own, but he'd spent enough time with those who had to despise her for manipulating the family who lived in the house into treating her as their own. Hopefully once the situation was resolved the Gatekeeper or Wizard Listens-To-Wind could set their minds to rights.
"Put her down, boy," came an accented voice from behind Morgan, and both his head and sword arm turned to point at the man standing just inside the door to the room.
He was a short man, Japanese, Morgan thought, perhaps an inch or two more than five feet, and despite the cane he held in one hand, his bearing was steady. The man's face was wrinkled, his short beard and hair white, but despite him being caught clearly halfway through armoring himself with greaves and boots, his bearing spoke of his readiness to fight, and behind a thick set of glasses, his gaze was keen and assessing.
"This is a matter for the White Council of Wizards, you need not-" Morgan began.
"Put. Her. Down."
"I am duty bound to bring her into custody."
"Thrice I ask and done," snapped the man, and Morgan tensed at the familiar words out of what he had taken to be a mundane man's mouth. "Put her down."
Morgan apparently hesitated for just a hair too long, as determined by the man, who just sighed. "So be it."
He swept the cane up to horizontal and separated the two halves, revealing a chisel-pointed blade that flashed with its own subtle power as he swung it towards Morgan, the edge letting out a keening sound as it cut through the air.
Morgan dropped the warlock as he interposed his own sword, which rang out as the man's blade struck it harder than some vampires' weapons.
He struck back, but the man was already swinging in another strike, and he was forced to abort his attack to defend himself.
Over the next three blows, he came to the conclusion that he was outmatched. The man was a virtuoso with his blade, not a single ounce of wasted motion as he moved from Kendo to Iaido to a strike he vaguely remembered Captain Luccio favoring without even a hint of an opening, and Morgan was forced to concede ground step by step.
Then as if one master swordsman in the warlock's thrall wasn't enough, another man burst into the room, a cruciform broadsword clutched in one broad hand.
He was built like Wizard McCoy's barn, and displaying that quite clearly in a pair of jeans and unbuttoned flannel shirt, evidently also in the process of armoring himself for battle when he heard the cry. His eyes sought out the girl first, and when he saw she was unharmed save for the manacles, he turned a furious gaze and then blade upon Morgan.
Where the short man's blade tested Morgan through skill, the taller man bulled through every defense he could offer, two strokes of his own keening blade sufficient to jar Morgan's sword from his hands.
The shorter man's blade rose to tickle Morgan's throat once his own weapon was no longer in play, and he silently cursed the strength of the threshold for meaning he could barely summon up a minor tremor in the earth, let alone enough power to challenge these two men.
"Go to your daughter," said the Japanese man, eyes still coolly watching Morgan. "I will handle this man."
The taller man strode over to the warlock, took one look at her, and struck the thorn manacles from her wrists with one clean swing.
"Daddy!" she cried, burying her face in his chest as her arms wrapped around him.
"Shh, it's okay, Molly. I'm here, and I won't let him hurt you." He enfolded the girl in his arms as the weight of his oath resonated through the too-still atmosphere of the room.
"Now then," said the Japanese man, turning his gaze from the warlock to Morgan. "I have some questions for you, and suggest you answer well."
In my defense, I wasn't expecting to wake up with a man standing over me.
Shitty excuse, I know, but there's a certain expectation of safety that comes from sleeping in your childhood bed after so long away, and that goes double when your dad has fought Nicodemus and lived to tell the tale, especially since, you know, I didn't get the second-worst wake-up call I can remember last time the Shroud got stolen.
The issue is that there's a limited number of things that I can do that would seriously deter an attacker as serious as Morgan or Nicodemus that I'd be willing to keep in the same house as any of the Jawas, even if I could key them into whatever protections I could use.
There's idiotproofing and then there's childproofing, and of the two, one of them is distinctly more difficult.
My musings were interrupted by the Forge flaring up, three pillars beginning to rise out of the floor. One froze most of the way up, missing the top platform, and another dissolved into smoke and flowed over in the direction of my lab coat, but the third fully realized itself, emerging as a flat plane with little pegs on it that I recognized from TV ads for one of those kids' circuit toys.
As the pedestal solidified, I could feel an understanding of how to integrate nanocircuitry into weapons and tools press into my head, flowing oddly around for a moment before solidifying, and more than that, I could feel gaps in the knowledge, just out of my reach.
That, I assumed, would be on the mostly-constructed pedestal, which… maybe it would finish itself on its own, maybe I'd have to suss out the applications of the technology to anything other than a weapon or a tool, which was at once a broader and more constraining definition than it seemed, on my own.
Either way, I had a situation of my own to handle, with how Yoshimo almost ran into me halfway up the stairs, sword drawn and swirling with the roused winds that spoke to her wearing one of my new cloaks.
"What's going on?" she asked, eyes narrowing at my rumpled appearance and the blanket Dad had insisted on wrapping me in… which, to be fair, was more than a little comforting after waking up to a repeat of the last time I'd woken up with someone unfamiliar in my bedroom, thorn manacles and all.
"Intruder," I said, rubbing feeling back into one wrist. "Dad and Shiro caught him before he could do anything really bad to me, and they'll see what exactly he meant when he accused me of violating some law or another while sticking a sword in my face." I yawned, not nearly having had as much sleep as I'd prefer. "I was a little bit too busy being half asleep when he started yelling."
Yoshimo sighed, then sheathed her sword. "I'll go see if Luccio and Ramirez are done with their conversation yet, they might be able to help matters along."
With her departure, I found myself with little enough to do, to the point where I made my way to the kitchen and started rattling around like a rock in a tin can, preparing a cup of hot chocolate for myself just like how Grandma Carpenter always liked it, with a miniature candy cane hanging off the side of the mug and everything.
I watched Luccio, Ramirez, and Yoshimo troop dutifully up the stairs, the most heavily armed ducklings I'd ever seen, and then, after a moment, Sanya came out of Mom's sewing room.
He was still moving somewhat stiffly, the kind of half-tender, half-cautious gait that I'd had the first time I ever had biofoam, but his Sword was ready at his side and his eyes were sharp. "Flashbacks?" he asked, teeth flashing in a grim smile as he poured himself a mug of coffee and added a splash of vodka, then another as he resolutely ignored the occasional word from upstairs that we could hear.
"Not quite that bad," I said, fingers twitching for my wand or something else I could fiddle with to ground out all this nervous energy living rent-free right under my skin. "No, I just woke up to a sword in my face and thorn manacles on my arm again and… froze."
Sanya made a face. "I've had that before. Mostly in dreams, but… every so often, I just catch a whiff of sulfur and roasting meat, and think 'Shit, Rosanna has tracked me down.'" He shook his head and sipped at his coffee. "It never is her, but… she liked to use raw hellfire as punishment. Sometimes even far enough to burn me numb, and all that time, all you can smell is the stench of yourself burning and sulfur. Magog healed the body, but the soul… not so much. Does not so much need the mind or the spirit, just the strong back and the hand to hold the Coin."
We both nursed our drinks to the muffled sounds of arguing from upstairs for a moment. "And yet there was enough of the mind and the spirit to drop the coin in a canal."
"We are… stronger than they give us credit for." He bumped his shoulder against mine. "Plus, you have… you have more options than I think any of us suspect. Out of all of us, I credit you with the will to do what I have, even without phenomenal cosmic power in its place. With it… well. Nicodemus isn't invincible, even with all his little tricks and magic toys." He threw back the rest of his coffee. "Come, let us barge in on the grown-ups and see what is taking them so long."
I chose to take my mug along with me, which when combined with the blanket I was still holding around my shoulders, probably made me look even younger than I actually was, bodily if not mentally.
"Sorry to interrupt," lied Sanya, who had reached my room ahead of me, thanks to his longer legs, "but we could hear you all the way down in the kitchen. You're lucky that Charity and the other children are out."
As I peeked around him, I saw Luccio's jaw jutting out like she was spoiling for a fight- things must not have been going well, especially with how Dad was trying to loom over the Wardens and Morgan was lying hog-tied on my bed. Of everyone present, Shiro looked the calmest, and even he was looking at Luccio like he was expecting her to attack them.
As the Forge flared, I felt the knowledge contained on the last pillar slam into me as it expanded up and out, the golden light surrounding the pedestal coalescing into what looked like a pile of legos as the missing pieces of the understanding of nanocircuitry filled themselves out and then some, letting me understand both the microsystems that relied on the nanocircuitry as well as the ways that the civilization that this knowledge came from used technology on the large scale.
It wasn't quite as fancy as the stuff I'd gotten in the data dump on my datapad, or even my understanding of computers, but it was complete, encyclopedic, and I didn't have to read to understand any of it, so that was a win in and of itself, even if the timing was less than convenient.
As quickly as I could, I forced the knowledge into the back of my head and spoke up. "Isn't that the Warden that Harry mentioned was harassing him and trying to arrest him on spurious charges of violating the laws even when he hadn't?"
The reddening of Morgan's face confirmed that he'd been doing that sub rosa, and the impassioned denial that he offered in his "defense" didn't help matters. "He is a warlock who escaped the consequences of his murder of a Warden on a technicality, and cannot be trusted not to reoffend! Neither can you, not for your interference with the archives of the White Council or with this family!"
"Young man," said Shiro, turning an overly mild gaze to Morgan and nonetheless causing him to rear back as if slapped. "Do you really have so little faith in us Knights of the Cross that you believe that a child can bend our wills to her own?"
Morgan couldn't come up with an answer to that damning question, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luccio's jaw tightening.
"Madre de Dios," said Ramirez, rubbing at his face. "This just keeps getting better and better!"
And that's that!
Perks Earned:
Infinitely Customizable (Dead Space, 200CP): It's not that your guns are bad, by any stretch of the imagination, it's just that they could be so, so much better. And now you can actually do that. In this world, tools and weapons are aided by nano-scale circuitry, which leaves a lot of room for improvement, typically in the form of power nodes being welded into specific places to provide extra power to certain subsystems of the weapon, to increase power output, ammo count/efficiency, and even unlock special abilities, like setting enemies on fire, or exploding violently. As an added benefit, you also get the ability to break weapons and tools down into parts - specifically frames, tools, tips, accessories, and upgrade chips, see the Notes section for more information - and reconfigure them to your liking. You can even upgrade those parts individually using power nodes.
RIG: Resource Integration Gear (Dead Space, Free): All of your needs in one bulky, backpack-like attachment. All RIGs grant a small strength increase and have few small tanks of nano-biotic medical gel inside them, four for you, capable of binding most wounds, even serious ones, near-instantly, as well as some form of projector screen, either from the off-hand wrist, as on civilian models, or from a small projector screen in front of the facemask for more job-oriented models. They also have a course-finder that lays down a path of light in augmented reality leading to things that you know the coordinates of, as well as a folded-space container capable of holding up to four weapons and five cubic meters worth of objects, divided into what are basically one cubic meter, 'inventory spaces,' along with magnetic locks on the boots, an air reserve of about two minutes that auto-refills in atmosphere, and a built-in stability assistance system that allows for a form of space flight, for navigating space during an EVA trip. Each inventory space can only hold one type of object, be it ammunition, medical gel refills, etc. Some RIGs are better at other things than others, though, and you can outfit yours as you see fit here. You get a basic, unarmored RIG for your Background that is padded enough to stop 5% of damage for Free, and it can be attached to a single piece of armor or clothing you already own for free.
Modular Designs (Dead Space, 400CP): It's always easier to make better things from better materials, and your knowledge of far-future engineering is top-notch, meaning that all of the things you make are all that much better for it. Aside from being able to upgrade parts, tools, and weapons further, and make better base parts for tools and weapons, you can apply the bonuses of Infinitely Customizable to things other than tools and weapons, breaking anything down into classes of modular parts and swapping them around to your heart's content. This nearly obviates every part of the process of retro-fitting older creations with newer parts, aside from the actual manual labor and time.
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