Birthright : Bleeding the Behemoth

a_twilight_sky
2006-09-07 18:24 (link)

The Witching Hour.

The drapes were pulled, and the afternoon light blocked from the building’s top floor. The atmosphere created was like a womb, dark and warm; a solitary communion between the witch and another.

Her space was sacred. A circle was there, and she within it. Her legs were crossed, the witch’s feet bare beneath the fabric of her skirt. A pair of capable hands plucked and danced over her materials. Two statuettes were the focus of her attentions, one light and one dark. She wrapped twine around the figures, over and over, and secured them to the hilt of a knife. Tight until the threads creaked. Strong so they would not be broken.

Some magics were so common, the elements known so well, that a witch could visualize the results into material form. Others, like this spell, were older incantations. So old that the words from her mouth weren’t of a language recognizable to human ears, and rarely spoken by human tongues.

When the verses were done, she reached out to the counterparts, her fingers massaging the ether so that a connection could be made. And when she was sure, Star picked up her knife and gouged it through the centerpiece of her altar: skin of the wolf, horn of the ram, blood of the hart.

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nathan_rhames
2006-09-08 07:27 (link)

Sometimes, Nathan just needed to be high.

The sun shone brightly down on the city, illuminating it to a degree that couldn’t be matched by the glow of millions of neon tubes. Nathan had felt compelled to remain in Vegas after returning to this realm after his previous assignment had been completed. The tall buildings and massive amounts of people had offered powerful persuasion, and now the angel stood alone atop the New York, New York casino and stared down at the amount of people below.

That’s when he first began to notice the change taking place.

Though no human eye would ever be able to detect the subtle alterations to the ground below, his eyes narrowed at the sight he now beheld; the darkening of the soil underneath the city. To compare it to something in the physical world, it is much like the darkness that creeps in before a massive storm. Only the change was not evident in the sky, but instead dark pulses ran wildly and erratically through the ground, seemingly strongest to the south.

Two mysterious branches broke off of the main stream, and raced towards separate locations. Much to Nathan’s concern, one of them headed straight towards the building he now stood on. An invisible shadow slowly crept up the side of the building, five protruding fingers itched their way up, hungrily grasping for something – or someone – to grab a hold of.

The wind began to rip wildly, as if just released from being pent up for centuries. It howled raucously as it raced through the streets, and up the sides of the building, following the same pattern as the shadow had.

Nathan was lifted up into the air; his eyes shimmered with a bright light. He stayed there for what felt like an eternal moment, as the environment around him continued to make its invisible presence felt. He faded quickly, relocating to a different part of Las Vegas.

And the environment that had recently become so stimulated died back down into its customary state, leaving many people to wonder what had just happened.

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sinister_darian
2006-09-08 10:09 (link)

In another part of the city, an identical set of dark, smoky fingers crawled across the earth. They moved like infected roots, chewing up the ground and spitting it back out. In their wake, the dirt laid the same as before. To a supernatural with enough insight – an ambassador, perhaps – the appearance would be wrong. The ground sapped of its color, like ash.

The fingers were searching. They tilled the ground, the city streets, the glass and bricks and mortar of tall buildings, until they paused… flexed… clawed inward at right building, on the thirteenth floor.

Darian stood before a mirror and shrugged on his coat. He checked his watch, and his reflection. He didn’t notice when the mirror bowed and warbled. He didn’t flinch when the surface became viscous and stretched toward him, an expansive bulb about to pop.

The demon gave his reflection a last check. He leaned closer, apparently unhappy with something he saw. With his face only inches from the tarry surface, Darian frowned and angled his jaw another way. The black bulb paused.

Darian reached for a razor and stroked at a small patch of beard that he missed.

It sprung like a snake uncoiling, wrapped around his legs and torso, and lifted him high. Darian’s razor rattled in the basin after he disappeared.

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nathan_rhames
2006-09-09 13:45 (link)

One bright day, it was dark as night,
And two dead boys got up to fight.

Eyes blazing white with an unholy fury, Nathan faded back into existence right in the middle of the largest evil law firm in Vegas. Startled people stared in disbelief as the strange man in the sharp white suit grinned back at them.

It was then that they noticed his eyes matched his suit. Pure white, with the devil’s grin splayed across his face. No one said a word for several seconds.

Then the angel reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, and retrieved a menacingly sized handgun. With a short chuckle, he opened fire on the closest target.

With the explosion of a gun, realization set in the minds of everyone in that waiting room. The smell of gunpowder filled the air, matching the sounds of the screams that began to form.

More bullets flew, more bodies hit the floor. Nathan’s suit was laced with traces of fresh blood, but if he noticed at all, he didn’t seem to care.

Hearing the distinct sound of stiletto heels clicking fast down the marbled hallways and
into the lair of the beasts, Nathan’s head shot around just in time to witness a pair of tan legs and a head of long, blonde hair disappear around the corner. The was definitely one hot and terrified ass underneath that thin layer of material.

Suddenly, the heavenly warrior fancied himself as a skirt chaser. He had a feeling that he would fit right in at this establishment. So he began to stalk down the same hallway, putting a bullet into any stray head that might pop out of an office and rudely inquire as to what the hell was going on.

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sinister_darian
2006-09-11 10:59 (link)

The common noise of the firm’s lobby died to silence. Each person was startled into a loss of words, a lack of activity. Though violence often found a home in Wolfram and Hart, gun shots were not part of the ordinary.

While the man in white worked his way along an upper floor, a second man shimmered into existence on the first. He would be recognized by some, this demon who dealt with Jason Toren once upon a time, and traveled in the same business circles. If the first was an avatar, so too was Darian, who had arrived dressed in black with eyes to match.

He moved quick and sharp, no time spared for prelude, or pretending he was there for an appointment. Security was running in the other direction. The customers were shocked into paralysis. It left Darian a clear path to the receptionist.

Shelly was a pretty girl, with red hair always perfectly coifed and a figure to die for. She was meticulous and polite, a promising employee determined to work her way from the ground floor up. Careful training made her keep her cool despite the sounds from upstairs. She sat up straight when she wanted to scamper away, to find a hiding place in the break room, or a closet to bar herself in.

The man approaching was familiar. He could be rude when he wanted to be, and downright mean other days. She ran her hands down her smart, blue suit and gave her voice some authority. “M- Mr. Darian... you’ll have to wait your t--”

Darian scanned the surface of her desk and found the letter opener on the corner. It stood tall in a mug of pens, sharp and silver, engraved Class of ‘08. He grabbed it like a steak knife, put the tip under her chin, and slid well up into the roof of Shelly’s mouth. Her body gave a shudder before her chair rolled backwards. Darian walked around the desk to wipe his fist on her lapel.

The first bloodcurdling scream let loose. A clerk dropped her armload of folders and went running. So did the other customers in a mad rush for the front doors. It was too late. Wolfram and Hart was already on lockdown.

Darian put a finger on the appointment book and looked it over. The lobby was turning into a chaotic horde around him, with security personnel now mixing with clients who seemed hell bent on getting in the way. Darian headed for the stairs. A man in riot gear made it within ten feet, but it was too late. The demon disappeared.

He turned up on the fifth floor, outside the law office of Jill Andersen.

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a_twilight_sky
2006-09-11 11:12 (link)

Under the point of Star’s knife, the punctured bits of flesh, bone, and blood began to swim in a pool of red. It spattered up from the tip like a tapped vein, or a drain that gurgled once or twice before it overflowed. She didn’t recoil when the spray hit her chin and her hair. The witch’s fingers tightened on the hilt with its crudely fashioned avatars. Whatever purpose their union served wasn‘t done.

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nathan_rhames
2006-09-11 13:58 (link)

News of the assault spread like wildfire, and soon everyone was doing their best to get the hell out of the building before they became another body to decorate the morgue with.

Even so, the body count was rising higher and higher, and certain corridors of the law firm appeared as though large pre-schoolers had repainted the building using their bare hands and dark red paint.

The metallic stench of blood quickly began to saturate the air, filling the nostrils of every being trapped inside.

Trapped, as invisible hands suddenly slammed every door, and held it tight shut. Every elevator became locked into position in between floors, turning them into vertical hanging coffins full of anxious and terrorized victims.

For the moment, however, Nathan’s attention was turned to that of a higher plane. Namely, the roof. It would seem that before the unnamed power had locked everyone into their current plight, several employee’s had escaped to take refuge on the top of the roof. It took Nathan less than a second to appear right in the middle of all of them.

The screaming and begging was instantaneous with his arrival. One man grabbed the door handle, grunting and groaning with strain in an effort to get back into the building he had just been so desperate to escape. It was useless, the door held it’s position, allowing no one through.

Nathan’s arms went down to his sides, palms facing out and up. Without the appearance of the slightest strain, Nathan’s arms came up until they leveled off with his shoulders. As he did this, every person on the roof rose higher and higher into the air, until they all dangled helplessly about thirty feet high.

With another grin, Nathan’s palms moved from facing up toward the sky to out toward the edges of the roof. When his arms fully extended out, people went sailing through the air, past the edges of the roof, and raining into the streets below.

Nathan disappeared once more, and returned into the heart of the hive, anxious to find more little workers to play with.

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sinister_darian
2006-09-11 16:24 (link)

He wanted lawyers. It didn’t matter which; the droves of mail boys and file girls and administrative assistants were nothing compared to the degreed and decorated champions of Wolfram and Hart. Humans like Shelly were just ripples on the surface of a poisoned well that ran deep.

Jillian M. Andersen, Attorney at Law.

It was almost comical that he tried the knob, and broke down her door when it wouldn‘t open. Inside the lights were out. Clearly Jill’s appointment book was wrong, or she had taken an outside meeting. He walked in and took silent stock of the interior, from the leather chair to the obligatory desk, and the pair of shoes tucked beneath it.

Darian could hear him. The quick, terrified puffs of breath. The pitter-patter of sweat beads rolling off Don Sullivan’s nose to land on the plastic chair mat. It was an act of cowardice to hide in the woman’s office, and the lawyer would pay for it. Darian pulled him out by the scruff of his neck.

The switchover from hushed to pleading took less than a second. “No! Please, I’m new, I just got here last week, I--”

“Will make a compelling paperweight.” The decision to kill someone was quick for him. The way to do it gave Darian a moment’s contemplation. A peripheral view of a framed document decided it. He snatched it off the wall and broke it across the lawyer’s forehead. The cracked glass gave a pathetic last reflection of Wolfram and Hart’s new kid on the block.

Darian pushed the lawyer’s head down on the desk, which had become little more than a chopping block. He pressed the biggest shard against Don Sullivan’s neck.

“Hold still.”

********

In the hallway he headed north, and pulled up short when security rounded the corner. They weren’t the LVPD; there would be no order to stand down. The real ace up Darian’s sleeve -- moving from one place to another instantaneously -- worked.

Except the ‘door’ he left through landed him in a worse situation on the other side. On the eighth floor, he found himself staring down the barrel of a semi-automatic. The guard was as stunned to find him there as Darian was to see the business end of a weapon.

The guard squeezed off a round just as Darian knocked the gun aside. The bullet spun past the demon’s arm at point blank range. He took particular pleasure in knocking the guard’s nose into his brain with the butt of the gun.

An abandoned desk stood between Darian and what was probably a board room. The wall was made of fogged glass. Very faintly he could make out the shape of someone moving on the other side. He opened fire without bothering to use the door. The panels shattered one at a time in a slow line from left to right. The explosion of glass combined with sharp cries of surprise until his ammo ran out.

Darian tossed the gun and took the stairs that time.

By this time, the law offices of Wolfram and Hart were in pandemonium. With the elevators out and everyone racing toward emergency exists that wouldn’t budge, the stairwells were a traffic jam. Darian got to the fifth floor crowd with intentions to kill.

That changed with the arrival of the demons. The second wave of Wolfram and Hart’s defense came in various shapes and sizes, but all had something in common. They got paid to even the body count. Dozens of swept through the corridors and lobbies of the building, while a handful chased the smell of sweat into the clogged stairwells.

Darian stepped into the crowd and tipped his head down. From an outsider’s view, he was another man in an expensive suit, at a firm so large that the faces needn’t be familiar. In the crush of trapped people, no one noticed the flick of Darian’s hand by his side, and the bloodstained shard that appeared in it.

He slipped it into the pocket of a male bystander and waited for the sharks to find the scent.

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birthright_npc
2006-09-12 15:35 (link)

Outside Wolfram and Hart, another crowd formed. The people Nathan launched from the roof landed at the feet of pedestrians, and on the hoods of parked cars. One body buckled on a parking meter. The wail of ambulance and police sirens filled the adjacent streets. The primary directive? Get the doors open.

But the panicked clients and employees of Wolfram and Hart wouldn’t back away so the doors could be blown in. Streaks of blood marked places where noses were busted in the mad shove to get outside.

In the building, shrill alarms made certain that everyone knew of the attack. The fifth and eighth floors had been gassed to knock out anything sucking up air. But neither Nathan nor Darian were there anymore, and most of the people who were left behind weren’t breathing.

A few of the more hardened employees were taking up guns now, but finding the two intruders was a bit like locating a needle in a haystack.

From its foundations, the building shuddered violently. It was a clue that higher, more deadly powers were waking up and would take over the counter-attack soon.

Nathan and Darian were almost out of time. Accomplished so far: Chaos and panic, the deaths of more than forty employees, the righteous indignation of those that weren‘t dead, and the stage set for the inevitable arrival of replacements.

The only thing left was the sword.

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nathan_rhames
2006-09-13 07:37 (link)

Now that all the distractions had been put into place, the real mission could finally begin.

Up until now, it had all been a deadly game of made-you-look. What better way to draw everyone’s attention away from the basement than to start a shooting rampage on the upper floors and throw everyone off of the roof?

The angel was there now, in the lower recesses of the basement levels of Wolfram & Hart, it was almost still and quiet, at least for the time being. In the very back area of Basement Level 6, there was a large, open room that held secured lockers with names printed on the front.

Tarry, Keith
Therus, Amy
…
Toren, Jason.

He could feel the strong forces that held the locker door tight shut, and they were the kind that had been put into place by those of a polar opposite nature to him. His white, blank eyes looked up and down, trying to find a weaker point of entry.

He wanted that sword that was kept just behind the barrier. It had significance to him that no one could ever comprehend. The desire, the need to obtain it transcended all moral responsibilities that he normally possessed. He could feel the release inside of him to use whatever means were necessary to obtain it, and so he had.

That’s when he detected the softest of noises behind him. He whirled around to see what was there.

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sinister_darian
2006-09-13 11:09 (link)

Back in the stairwell, a pair of armed demons formed a terrifying barricade between the crowd of employees and any progress up and down the stairs. The veterans of Wolfram and Hart were accustomed to monsters. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the payroll with them, and shared a refrigerator in the break room.

It was another thing entirely to be looked up and down while one aimed an assault rifle in your face, and another one wielded a hatchet.

It all spelled shit stains in the end.

Brian Lucas had no reason to fear. He was as blue-blooded as Wolfram and Hart got. His father had been a financial advisor at the Chicago office, and his mother an interpreter for the doomed branch in L.A. His record was spotless.

In fact, the only mistake he ever made was wearing a coat with deep pockets.

Security 1 leaned close and took a long, suspicious whiff. He followed the scent down to the glass shard. When his crusty, brown fingers fished it out, Brian Lucas looked as surprised as the next guy.

Well, not really. The next guy over was smiling. He kept it when the back of Lucas’s head got blown out. The group shout made his teeth rattle, and everyone surged for escape.

Darian grabbed a woman and shoved her at the hatchet. It cut through her breastplate and got stuck. He used her torso like a battering ram against the Security 2, who was holding the handle, and pushed them down the stairs.

Security 1 had his gun raised and was firing at random.

When Darian disappeared, he was just one less body in the mess.

In the basement, he headed for the locker room. It was time he got reunited with an old friend.

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nathan_rhames
2006-09-14 07:03 (link)

Upon seeing that the only other being in the room was Darian, Nathan turned and went back to concentrating on the matter at hand. It took only moments more for the angel to be able to find the weakest part of the barrier. It was amazing how much difference one wrong syllable could make when doing incantations.

He spread his hand out over the area, and immediately the invisible barrier become visible and tangible. As he pressed more firmly against it, the area around his hand began to grow white, and from there spread out until jagged cracks appeared. It was only a few more seconds until the entire barrier shattered, and dissipated into a few plumes of purple and black smoke.

Nathan pulled the sword out of the locker, feeling a sense of relief as his hand wrapped around the hilt. He held it up in front of his face, inspecting it for only a few moments. He was already sure that this was indeed the proper blade. He turned back to face Darian, spinning the sword around in his hand so the blade pointed down and the hilt pointed up. He extended the weapon out for the demon take.

And that was when the building shuddered its hardest convulsion yet.

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birthright_npc
2006-09-14 07:24 (link)

The sword had passed through many hands in Nevada.

The watcher named Hayden stole it first, as part of his undercover job. He gave it to Monty, the overseer in charge of the small demon stronghold in the Searchlight mines, a group that knew about the mystical energy present, and secretly gathered arms nearby.

Tyler and Jade stole it from the stronghold. It was part of a deal with Darian, one meant to put Jade in danger and bring out the destructive potential in his girlfriend December.

Darian passed the sword to Jason Toren, as part of an unmet bargain with Wolfram and Hart, to give him a demonic physical form. Wolfram and Hart still owed on that deal.

Now Darian had it back in his hands.

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a_twilight_sky
2006-09-14 08:24 (link)

The altar rattled beneath the tip of Star’s knife, as if an unseen hand wanted to shake loose her hold. Her blade scratched around in a mess of flesh, bone, and blood.

What they came for was done. Now they had to retreat before progress was revoked.

She put her fingers to work. The witch’s cuticles were caked with blood and hair that got in the way when she unwound the bits of twine from the avatars, and practically clawed at the knots.

“It’s time you left.”

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sinister_darian
2006-09-14 12:03 (link)

With the last rumble, a cloud of plaster shook loose from the ceiling. Two waves of security had been thwarted, perhaps exposing a shameful lack of preparedness on behalf of the Las Vegas firm. Soon things would arrive that had no business seeing the light of day – things that hadn’t been seen since L.A. – and what a complete waste of resources that had been.

Darian looked up at the flickering lights, and gave Nathan a long, even look. “It is time.”

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birthright_npc
2006-09-16 09:12 (link)

Nathan and Darian’s appearances had been sudden. They were gone just as quickly. Each walked in the direction they had come from and vanished before the full might of Wolfram and Hart could be awoken to reap revenge and stop the theft of an important middle-eastern artifact. After retreat, the shudders of the building stopped and its doors swung open. Panicked survivors rushed to get out, while other, cooler heads began damage control, which included getting the Las Vegas cops off their back. Across town in her penthouse apartment, a witch collapsed in exhaustion.

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