A House on Fire

vicissitude
Last night Grace and Sam drove out to a Wal-Mart parking lot on the outskirts of town and sat there in the dark while the younger of the two completed his hack of the Department of Motor Vehicles. They continued to sit there while he smoked a cigarette outside the car and used the information he had grabbed off the Internet to find the guy's physical location.

What they found on the computer did not comfort either of them. The vehicle's registration expired in 1972. The man to whom the vehicle was registered was born in 1938. If he were still alive he would be nearing his seventieth decade. He would not look anything like the scruffy almost-attractive man in the painting Jenn had created.

Once he had a lock on the guy's location they went back to Sam's place. He stayed up all fucking night watching his computer monitor while Grace slept on the air mattress. When she awoke in the morning his eyes were red and kind of wide.

That was when Grace contacted Kalen. Whatever he had seen on the monitor had put him off meat again. He had taken a video recording and when Grace wanted to see it again he excused himself. What she saw on the video pretty much confirmed that they were dealing with violent psychopaths who had a thing for blood and guts and divorcing people from their skin. It's a good thing the warehouse is full of vegan goods after Lakhani's Quiet anyway.

So: one Mercurial Elite is at her apartment near the university. The other is in his apartment above the Chinese dry cleaner. And Kalen is...

Kalen Holliday
Kalen has a ridiculous commitment to keeping peace with some vampires.  That attitude does not extend to vampires that turn people into flesh-crafted horrors.  Once Grace has explained the situation and they have a plan, Kalen heads toward the safehouse.  Lighting the building on fire should be the easy part.
Should.

But when do plans do as expected?

Kalen parks his car several blocks from where the safehouse is, turns the engine off, and starts to murmur softly.

[Mind 1 | Mindshield | D=4 (3 (coincidental) + 1 (sphere))]


Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 7) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace is convinced. Even if Sam and Elijah aren't so ready to set people on fire, she is. She has video evidence. This is pretty open and shut. They aren't going to stop doing horrible shit to people, and therefore, when Kalen suggested the nuclear option... It didn't take much doing to convince Grace.

She's also quite ready to make sure this goes on without incinerating a city block.

First off, she's on the phone with Kalen -- Bluetooth device stuck in her ear and all. She's got a Soundcloud track of a guy screaming "INSTALL GENTOO" to a techno beat. It's rather low-key in the background, but still.

Kalen's idea is a good one. No matter what, taking care of your grey matter is a good idea. Therefore, she opens her "special program" and uses it on her own brain, bending the outputs back onto themselves, closing off the connections. Let's make a brain firewall...

[Mind 1, Mindshield, Diff 4 - 1 = taking time]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 4, 7) ( success x 2 )

vicissitude
In the other window Sam is listening to Swedish death metal. Because of course he is. It helped him whoop Grace's ass at laser tag once why wouldn't it help him whoop a Nephandus's ass at not getting set on fire.

He took Elijah back to his place to keep the Hermetic from having a total homicidal existential crisis by himself. It's not your fault Elijah. It's not your fault.

They can't hear what's going on at Chez Lakhani unless he keys in but they can feel him. Oh yes they can.

--

The house in question is on a block in center city Arvada, Colorado. As bustling as a city boasting a little over a hundred thousand people can bustle. On any side of the building in question is a real estate office and a marketing agency and an upscale loft-style apartment and a gastropub with funky nouveau retro sidewalk presentation.

If a fire took down here it would shut down an entire intersection and draw entirely too much attention to what they were doing.

Grace is working on a brain firewall. Sam is spying on the local EMS channel. That doesn't require magic or hacking. That just requires a cheap-ass scanner he picked up at Radio Shack.

The building in question is two stories tall. As Kalen approaches he cannot see in the windows. Some of them are boarded shut but even the ones that do not have boards over them are black as a starless sky.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen stares for a few seconds into one of those windows like a dark sky.  He remembers when some Umbral horror used darkness like that to try to devour his soul.  This hardly makes him feel like the monsters here could have been saved.

There is an intersection.  People.  These people are living closer to danger than they might guess.  He stops and takes in the scene, lighting up a cigarette.

And if they fail to contain the blaze?  What then?

Kalen bites his tongue hard enough that it starts to bleed, breathes in smoke, and exhales on a murmured prayer.

[Entropy/Life scan.  Are there vampire entropy sinks in that building?  Are there live people in that building? - D=3 (4-1(taking time))]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[Extending!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (6, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Grace
[Wrong number of dice...]

Grace
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

vicissitude
Beyond the cockroaches and the spiders and the rats nothing in that building is alive that cannot fend for itself.

Inside the building lie four dead bodies. Beyond the intelligence the younger of the two Mercurial Elites provided yesterday he cannot confirm or deny whether the one they seek is in there. But Sam has sent himself bloodshot staring at the monitor and the bodies haven't moved since the sun went down. Four bodies lines up with the number of upright individuals he saw there on the monitor last night.

Entirely possible that the four people inside that building have themselves warded against detection. That the swirling wrongness he feels through the smoke and the blood belongs to four Fallen. Either way:

They lurk. They sleep. They will rise again tonight.

Grace
Grace, rocking out to her awful free software mantra music, uses that to hide what she's participating in from her forebrain. This isn't the first time Grace has participated in a murder. It's not even the first time she's participated in murder by fire. Fire makes things clean again when nothing else will.

It's also still murder.

She finishes the program to rewire her mind into something tighter, more secure. Her screen dissolves into the static of unfocused Code again.

"I'm ready when you guys are," she says. Committed to the path, yes. Understanding of the path's importance? Also yes.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen looks around the building and starts to walk alongside it, still smoking.  Four dead.

"There are four," Kalen murmurs into the Bluetooth.  And there is a hint of something like regret in his voice.

Two of them are almost undoubtedly beyond saving.  The other two?  Do they deserve to die like this?  Do they deserve to linger in some twisted mockery of life?

Kalen swallows.  Wesley is hardly a mockery of life.  Just how much of an aberration is he?

Regardless, it is hardly as though Kalen is in a position to try to rehabilitate vampires.  Especially right now.

Instead, he looks for the most opportune place to work.  Electrical boxes, powerlines, anything he can use to his advantage.

vicissitude
There are four.

"Yes there are," comes Samir's deadpan voice over the Bluetooth.

He saw. So did Grace. He doesn't know about saving or not saving but he's sitting in a studio apartment with a distraught apprentice right now. They already tried the nonviolent angle. It isn't feasible.

That's all he has to say. He's conceding to Grace on this.

Grace
"Four? Not two..." Grace sighs into the receiver, a huff of static air.

Then, Sam reaffirms what he saw. All four of them were somehow involved in the... activities of last night. To be fair, Grace hadn't been paying too much attention. Who would?

"Shit. Well."

Well, that settles it, doesn't it?

"Okay, I'm going to zero in on Kalen's location, use that as the ground zero for this. I'd like to get the protections set up first. Then we move on to phase two."

Phase two being, of course, setting things on fire...

There's another huff of breath into the mic, and she sets to work. First off, to find Kalen and cordon off his general area...

"I'm going to start the action, Samir."

[Corr 2, Forces 2 -- Fire Containment Measures -- Diff 5 -1 for taking her time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

vicissitude
"Yeah. 'Shit.'"

Nearly half an hour away the young man pinches the bridge of his nose. Forgets to kill his mic as he answers a question neither of them can hear. This could be concerning for at least one of them. He did just spend most of last month in Quiet.

"... yeah, I've got it on fucking Deity Mode. Go ahead."

Dot dot dot.

Grace is zeroing in on Kalen's location. Protections first. She's going to start the action.

"Right behind you, yo."

[corr/forces 2: group casting wut.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
Kalen lets Grace and Samir work.  Quietly and without further comment.  He settles against the boarded up building near where a power line runs into it, and waits for Grace's word.

Watches the way that the smoke blows when he exhales.

And he prays.  For the two vampires he has accepted are beyond saving.  For the two he has accepted he can't try to save tonight.  Because whatever has become of them, whatever has been done to their souls, Kalen is no longer able to simply believe that they are without them.

Grace
It's taxing, bringing the Code to understand what needs to happen here. She follows Kalen's signal to him, sees the house with the boarded and painted windows. That one.

Samir's help comes in right behind her, a piercing assistance she can feel as much as she can see. He helps strengthen their efforts, making sure there are no glaring errors in what she's doing.

Now, the part where she starts focusing on the motions of particles. She doesn't slow them, she just monitors them -- catalogs them. When Kalen starts his fire, the heat from it will not spread. The molecules around the boarded-up house will stay just as full of motion as they currently are. They won't allow anything more.

At least, that is the hope.

We'll contain it.

We'll make sure nobody else has to suffer. Not tonight, not to these sleeping dead. Not to the vagaries of their Magic either.

[Extending!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (5, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

vicissitude
If this is the time for a philosophical debate on whether or not what they're doing is right none of them take it. This is not an issue of revenge for Samir although plenty would argue he has every right for it to be. A contemporary of the creature attached to the 1969 Ford Mustang fused the forms of two young women together and the rage-fueled brain inside that creature's head drove it to attack him and Elijah.

But Samir is not a vengeful man. This is not a matter of righteousness or retribution. If it happened to him and Elijah and it happened to those two young women it could happen again. A moral imperative inserted itself into their Code that night.

So here they are. Kalen has never seen Sam Work. He can feel it this afternoon as the young man types away at his console. The Code shows itself on a monitor wedged between the Dark Net and Civilization V. He could be distracted if he were the sort of hacker to allow himself distraction. He is not. Elijah is distraught but Sam is focused.

Grace's Work reveals itself to him. His may well reveal itself to her. They follow the same paradigm. They can contain the fire if they try.

[extending!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace
Samir finishes it off, they do a little testing, it looks solid. The heat won't spread.

"Okay. We've got phase one done. Kalen? Your turn."

Sorry about that, too, her voice seems to say.

Kalen Holliday
Grace says to go and Kalen shifts his prayers for the vampires he is about to kill into a different kind of prayer.  He starts to mouth words in the language Angels.  Reaches out to the essence of the power coursing through the electrical wires and its potential.

He takes a deep breath, breathes out the last of the cigarette smoke and watches it drift, and then closes his eyes.

It is only a single murmured Word that commands the effect to begin.  That sets the entwining of power and fate into the manifestation of his will.

[Entropy 2/Forces 2 | D=4 (3(coincidental)+2(sphere)-1(time)) | WP]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 7) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

vicissitude
A single murmured Word is all it takes.

Center city. Downtown. The nucleus. Everything revolves around the financial district and the transportation hub even in a city small enough to disappear from the face of a map and they are in such a city. Twenty-first century and with the passage of time comes the necessity of electricity. If he had to Kalen could conjure power out of the rivers and the mountains. They all resonate with natural force.

He calls upon chance and circuitry. Faulty wiring in a building that may or may not be up to code. A building that houses asbestos and termite-pocked wood. Plenty of reasons why the building may have caught fire while those its neighbors remain untouched.

As he wills it so it goes. A generator on the roof or a conductor in the basement. Some arced potential skips a beat and catches a spark and that's all it takes. A spark catches flame and he has to stand on the sidewalk for nearly two minutes before he realizes what has happened. Arson is among the slowest of crimes.

On the curve of the minute-hand's second lap he sees the sharp-bright lapping of fire shone through windows that oughtn't let light through either way.

Another minute after that Sam says, "No one's called about a fire yet."

He means 911. Kalen still has time to escape.

Grace
Grace now has time to tap her fingers on the little kitchen table that serves a solitary inhabitant well (but wouldn't for more than one). Okay, now someone is curious...

"I'm going to have a peek," she says, "Make sure there's nobody running."

Because, if there are, by some miracle, any escapees, then that would be less than ideal...

[Corr 2, Entropy 1 = Dead things? Are they staying put? Diff 5 - 1 for taking time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Kalen Holliday
Kalen breathes out.  Not a prayer now, just an exhalation.

And then, without looking back, he walks away from the building to the corner of the intersection.  He pauses and scans over the headlines of the newspapers in the box.  Lets the light change.  Waits to hear from Grace.

Grace
[Extending! Yes we are.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Grace
The vampires, if that is what they are, are trying to run. They don't make it very far. The building, well on its way to collapsing, doesn't give them much protection from the sun once it's aflame. By the time they've woken and realized that things are happening -- it is too late.

The sun is a harsh mistress. The hardiest of them makes it about ten steps.

Their signatures of tightly-coiled Entropy, like frozen Time? They release. One by one, their frozen bodies change. Irreparably. Into ash.

"It's done," Grace says, another sigh into the receiver. "Need to get out of there. We'll keep up the protection until that fire is out."

vicissitude
... until that fire is out.

Sam does not interrupt her but he does cut in as soon as she has that sentence out to say:

"Dispatch just called for an engine. They have a two-minute response time. You good, man?"

Kalen Holliday
Kalen stops scanning the headlines and heads away from the intersection now, toward his car.

"I'll be in the car by then," he says quietly.  "I'm fine."  There is a touch more weight in his voice than there was when the night started, but that would be easy enough to miss.  Easy enough to chalk up to the quickly approaching emergency response teams and getting the hell out of there.

"Should I pick up udon on the way home?"

Grace
"If you don't, I will," Grace says. They're going to need it, she thinks. That and some good tea and some contemplation. It'll be all right.

She thinks of the week that Samir spent in his own world due to them. She thinks of the two women knitted into one being. She thinks of the images she could barely pay attention to on Samir's video. Deserving it barely begins to describe. It's not exactly a deserved death they've brought -- it's something else.

She knows they're not the only thing out there that's going bump in the night. But they were one of them. They weren't going to stop. They liked it too much. And now they can't do that shit anymore. That simple.