TIME July 10th, 10:20am (continuing) LOCATION Understage, the Regent Theatre
BACKGROUND:
The Vessentaag was down in the water below the stage, Griffiths and Pitr still armed and dangerous beside him, and four members of the audience were still standing with unopened letters in their hands as the clock ran out on the sixth round.
WHAT HAPPENED
Griffiths didn’t wait to see how the fight would go – he unloaded a battery of magic missiles into Raven, hurting her badly, then rounded on Pitr before he could finish the job himself.
“No, Pitr, not yet! Get the Vessentaag, or I swear I’ll put a hole in your head and skull-fuck you with that toy of yours! Drag him over here. We need to get him out – to the dock.”
Dr Griffiths
Pitr hauled the unconscious cleric across the wet understage floor toward the open cargo doors overlooking the canal, leaving the scythe behind on the boards.
On stage above, TeeCruise – still wearing Raven’s face – broke for one of the remaining letter-holders and lifted the note clean out of her hand before she could open it.
Raven threw a thunderstone into the doorway Pitr was working toward; the blast rang through the basement and left him clutching his head, deafened.
Ash found a fourth Griffiths hiding among the stage equipment and put three shots into him, popping the illusion.
Above, Krusha broke from the mob to chase down a second letter-holder and missed his swing; Sanchez ran down a third and cracked him across the skull with his baton hard enough to end the argument.
The last two notes in the hall were opened almost together.
One detonated on the final word of its ‘praise’, killing the man reading it and the patron seated in front of him instantly.
The other holder couldn’t read what was written on hers at all – Jouvaine script, and she didn’t have the language for it – and the shock of not understanding snapped her straight out of the enchantment.
She saw the carnage on the far side of the hall and started screaming.
It was enough.
Whatever anger the crowd had been nursing collapsed into plain fear, and the mob became frightened citizens again.
Understage, Griffiths shoved the Vessentaag’s limp body out through the cargo doors into the canal and turned to Pitr, gesturing at a wand on his belt.
Pitr, still ringing from the thunderstone, took it anyway and hosed the stage equipment with fire.
Raven pressed the attack through the flames and slipped on the wet boards; Ash got a clean line on Pitr through the smoke and burned him with a scorching ray.
On the stage, Krusha called out for the audience to bring their letters straight to him and TeeCruise instead of opening them – and, remarkably, they listened.
Sanchez, note still in hand from his last takedown, vaulted onto the stage and vanished behind the curtain after Griffiths himself.
The fire was spreading fast now.
Griffiths, seeing Raven badly hurt, put one missile into her and unloaded the rest into Ash – and the spider swarm he’d summoned a round earlier finally arrived to finish the job, swarming over her with a hundred small bites.
Raven and Ash both went down.
Krusha was already moving for the stairwell into the smoke when the sound of booted feet and raised voices reached him from below.
Boosay’s voice cut through the noise before he did –
“Where is the elusive Dr fuckin’ Griffiths!”
and then he was there himself, Dranathess soldiers pouring down the stairwell and the trapdoor behind him, Kemercannon already raised.
Sanchez reached the base of the stairs with his stolen note still in his hand, and reached Griffiths at almost the same moment.
“You killed Kowalski!!!”
Sanchez, charging
He got close enough to read it aloud before Griffiths could stop him.
The detonation tore through all three of them – Sanchez didn’t survive it.
Griffiths and Pitr, badly hurt but still on their feet, didn’t get the chance to recover before four massive tentacles rose out of the canal, wrapped gently around them both, and drew them straight through the doorway and under the water without a struggle from either man.
Boosay demanded ID first from the closest thing to an Agent in the room – one of the troupe, still wearing a stolen Agent’s face from earlier in the raid.
The disguise didn’t survive the question.
“I’m a Jongleur – see,”
he admitted, his features shimmering back into the plain black clothes underneath.
It didn’t help him.
“Impersonating an Agent of KemerLexi is a capital offence,”
Boosay said, and shot him where he stood.
Boosay took in the rest of the scene, unimpressed, and started working through the handful of remaining Griffiths duplicates cowering by the stairwell with the same process of elimination.
“Point him out, then, you idiot,”
he told the first wrong answer, and shot him too.
The next actor gave up his double without hesitation –
“Thanks. That’s for withholding information,”
Boosay said, and shot him anyway, one dead Jongleur for every answer, right or wrong, until the real doctor’s escape had cost the troupe dearly with nothing to show for it.
Boosay noticed Raven, down and barely conscious on the floor, and crouched close enough to be heard over the fire.
“Do you remember our first meeting? I do. You were very… offensive. Some choice words, if I recall correctly.”
He straightened up, sniffing at the smoke.
“Oooh, it’s getting quite hot in here.”
Krusha tried to explain that they were Agents, that Griffiths was getting away out the canal doors – Boosay didn’t care. He had the Dranathess bind them all with rope, working through the theatre with the fire climbing higher around them.
One of them, a woman, worked the rope around Krusha’s wrists herself. As she pressed something small, cold and sharp into his palm and closed his fingers around it, she leaned in just close enough to be heard.
“I remember you. That night at the NIL raid. Your companion saved me when I was shot. This repays the debt.”
Then, louder, for anyone else listening –
“We don’t need Agents’ help for our work”
– she cracked him across the side of the head hard enough to rattle his teeth. Krusha clocked the blow for what it was: entirely for show.
Boosay raised his cannon to Krusha’s throat at point-blank range, hesitated through some visible argument with himself, and lowered it – ordering the Dranathess out with the surviving Jongleurs in tow and leaving the Agents to the fire.
They freed themselves in time to drop 10′ into the canal as the Regent Theatre came down behind them in flames, and were pulled out by canal workers and passersby drawn by the noise and the light.
Somewhere out in the Bay of Chuza, unseen by anyone left standing in the wreckage, an enormous squid surged through the dark water toward the sea wall and the flotilla beyond – five shapes bound in its tentacles, carried out past the gate and gone.
Back at the Section House, Krusha reported the assault to Bowlohr and Brin was debriefed on everything else:
Ash’s read that Boosay had aligned himself with Hextor and had a hand in the children’s abduction.
The Jongleurs’ own statement, given freely and sympathetically, praising the Agents’ conduct and calling the whole affair an act of terrorism.
Krusha’s own read that the troupe had been Griffiths’ intended escape route all along, willingly or not.
The surviving audience gave conflicting accounts of the night, most of it explainable by whatever spell had held them – though everyone agreed a troop of Agents had swept through the building moments before it started to collapse.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Sanchez is dead – killed by the same letter-bomb trick that killed Kowalski, at Griffiths’ hand. A funeral is being arranged.
- Griffiths, Pitr, and the Vessentaag cleric escaped Chuza entirely – carried out to sea by something enormous, toward a waiting flotilla.