Halloween 2024 IF,  Interactive Fiction

Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Day 27

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The others were looking back at Star. He closed his eyes, for a moment wondering how it ended up like this. Dandelion was his leader, the one Star was used to making all the decisions. But Star was the one who’d met her previously, so of course Dandelion was leaving this up to him.

Though actually, Star had only met her in passing before this, he realized. Caoimhe was her friend, and might either feel very strongly about saving her for their friendship, or killing her for the betrayal. Star didn’t think it was passing off the responsibility to at least ask her which should be done, not when speaking over Caoimhe would be a betrayal of its own.

The fact that he didn’t have much more of a stomach for killing other fey than he did for killing humans… that had nothing to do with it.

Regardless, he was hardly going to kill Éabha in front of Caoimhe, unless she wanted that. Which she might. She wasn’t the least murdery fairy Star knew. He knelt down beside her, wincing at the raw sight of her wrists, and brushed her hair back. “Hey. I know what I want, but what do you want done with her? She clapped you in iron, and was going to use you to sell Dandelion to his enemy. But she’s desperate, and is bound herself to do what her master would wish. So what do you say?”

Caoimhe winced as she half-sat up, still straight-backed and serious. Her gaze searched over the fallen, bloodied Éabha. “I should want her dead,” she murmured.

“Do you?” Star asked softly. If Caoimhe wanted it, he’d do it.

But after a long moment, Caoimhe shook her head. “She’s bound. If he has her skin, she belongs to him no matter what else is true. If she wants to be her own again, she must find her skin and get it back. She’s hopeless. Desperate. Let’s help her if we can and see if she can re-earn my trust again after.” She pointed at Éabha, flesh flaking from around her wrists. “And if we cannot help her, let her die on her choices, not ours.”

It was a relief. Star he nodded, rising, spinning around and clapping his hands together. “Well, there you have it, then,” Star told Éabha. “We’re not going to kill you, so instead of falling into despair over that, let’s find your path to freedom.”

She blinked slowly, tears making wet tracks in the dirt on her face. “My path…?”

“What series of choices can give you that kind of chance?” Star asked. “Here’s what I think.”

He spun and began to pace, feet making slapping sounds against the concrete floor. He knew she could hear it, and imagined it’d have the same dramatic effect as watching would. “We have to take on the demon. We don’t have any other choice, you get me? They’ve decided to target Dandelion, and maybe we could run, or maybe we couldn’t. Either way, they’re clearly focusing on emotional damage, given this whole hostage scenario. They want Dandelion to hurt on more levels than just the physical, so running away wouldn’t prevent that. We brought my friend to the Lindwyrm to keep him safe, but he’s got a life to live and so do we. So we have to take on the demon sooner rather than later. More to the point, we’re not going in assuming we’re going to lose. We have to go in assuming we’re going to win. With me so far?”

Éabha made an annoyed, confused noise.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Star said. “So, we’re going to beat the demon. If we find your skin, we’ll bring it back to you. In this case, it’s in your best interests to help us beat the demon. That’s the surest way to get your skin back.”

“But if you can’t win—”

“Going to,” Star said. “But if we can’t win, you might as well go out for a big betrayal of the demon instead of a small letdown. If it’s a ‘you’ve failed me for the last time’ scenario that’s just kind of embarrassing, right? Might as well have it be a ‘You? YOU turned on me?’ moment.”

Slowly, Éabha began to frown. “I feel like you’re not taking this all that seriously.”

“You have no idea how seriously I’m taking it. This is my defence mechanism,” Star retorted. “But can you say I’m wrong? One’s a path to your freedom. Why pick a path that’s a guaranteed dead end?”

Unlike other monsters, unlike humans and witches and even vampires, fairies didn’t have souls. The end was surely the end. It’s why when they made that ancient pact to tithe souls to the demons, they had to trick and gather humans for it. The nobles likely wouldn’t be unwilling to harvest from the fairy host to pay their debts, but they couldn’t. A fairy lived as long as they weren’t killed, and when they died, that was known to be the end.

“But then what happens after?” Éabha asked. “The Lindwyrm…”

“Right,” Star said. “I don’t know if you know this since we didn’t talk all that much, but you didn’t turn on any of the Lindwyrm‘s people. A friend, yes, an ally, and I don’t think he’d be happy with you if he found out, but not someone he’s sworn to protect.”

Miette made a little scoffing sound, and when Star glanced over at her, they just kind of shrugged. 

Star shrugged back and added, “and, like, of course he’s going to find out. Even if one of us didn’t say it, and Miette here didn’t say it, it’d probably come out at some point. So isn’t your best bet to actually work with us so we can in good faith say how you helped us solve the problem in the end? I don’t think he’d kill you if we spoke for you, not when he’s offered you protection. And even if he kicks you out, or you leave on bad terms, well, that’s not great but if you have your skin back, you don’t need his protection anymore! The demon would be gone and you wouldn’t need the Lindwyrm to live.”

For a long moment, she was bitterly silent. Then she began to laugh; not a particularly humorous sound, but nevertheless, there was an edge of relief to it. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. You’re completely right. Why give up when there’s still a chance? I don’t remember what hope feels like, and I don’t think I’m feeling it now, but I would like to feel it again sometime.”

Star did not let his legs go weak, though he stopped pacing. “Good, okay,” he said.

“That was very attractive,” Dandelion called over to him.

Star felt himself go scarlet. Just because Éabha could hear it regardless didn’t mean he shouldn’t have whispered. “COOL! Cool. Anyway, uh.” He shook himself all over. “We have questions. Then we’ll need to get you somewhere safe…”

“We don’t need to tell the Lindwyrm right away,” Dandelion said. “I think Miette could take Éabha, Caoimhe, and Adrien back to the Lindwyrm and tell him that I up my donation to protect my band-mates while they recover. They’re in too much pain to do anything now anyway. Yes?”

Miette scratched their chin. “No fur off my tail. I can do that.”

“Great. So once we have some answers, and in exchange for your phone number so I can ask you other questions if I think of them later,” Star said, “we’ll get you to safety before we go to deal with the demon. Now: What’s the demon’s name? We weren’t even sure until recently that it was a demon, not a witch.”

He supposed it still wasn’t 100% confirmed, but Éabha fixed that a moment later: “Ramullin of the Wastes. They believe you owe them many years of torture, Dandelion, and their legions were decimated in exchange for their part in failing to retrieve the tithe. It did not affect the other two so badly because they were not as eager to go to war; Ramullin invests in their legions.”

Dandelion grimaced. “Ah,” he said. “Politics. And there’s nothing I could do to bring that army back, so what’s left is for me to suffer.”

“Yes,” Éabha said. “To my understanding, a year ago they learned not just that you were alive but what gate you came out of.  I’m not sure how they learned it, but they did. So they spent some time digging up connections you had—rather, not just the connections that you’d made, but finding those who’d act against them. ”

A year ago was when they’d met Ferthur, as part of Viv’s whole incident, and the demon had been furious to see ‘the exile’ moving around between worlds instead of staying in the human realm. He must have gone back to the others and complained about it or some such, and Ramullin was the one who’d decided to do something. Star glanced aside at Viv and found her looking stricken and guilty—as if it were her fault, but Dandelion had insisted on helping her. 

She swayed abruptly, and Star revised at least some of the reaction to sheer exhaustion. He remembered that she’d been actively casting over and over since getting in here, turning off alarm spells and cutting through metal, over and over again. She probably was almost out of her reserves.

He turned back to Éabha, putting that aside as a worry for a later Star. “By the people connected to those connections, you mean yourself for Caoimhe?”

“And his succubus ex Yuree for Adrien, and your sister for you,” Éabha said off-handedly. “Though I think there was an issue with the sister or some such? At least, they switched to using one of your rivals at the track, yeah?”

Star almost didn’t hear the last. He was reeling with the thought. The nixie in the water on the track had looked like him, as they’d said, but he hadn’t recognized her. 

Then again—perhaps it wasn’t his older sister. Perhaps it was his younger. She’d just been a chubby little filly when he’d left, centuries ago, and he didn’t think he’d recognize her now if he saw her. Perhaps he already didn’t.

“Star—” Dandelion was next to him now, sliding an arm around him. He collapsed gratefully against Dandelion’s side, fully gearing up to throw a big tantrum, and drew deep breaths to try to get himself back under control. “Star.”

“I’m here,” Star whined, butting his head into Dandelion’s shoulder, hard. Only the wince reminded him Dandelion had just injured that. “It doesn’t change anything. I don’t know her, and if I did, she clearly bears no love for me.”

Dandelion didn’t answer, just squeezed him briefly. Star tried to breeze past that, put that echoing your sister, your sister into the past instead of the present. “And where are they now? Weren’t they going to come check on their hostages?”

“Yes,” Éabha said. “But no. We were all supposed to check in, and they’d come here after we all had. I did, I don’t know if Yuree did or didn’t get a chance to, but obviously your jockey did not. Once enough time has passed and we haven’t checked in, they might nevertheless come check it out themselves.”

“You don’t think they will?”

She shook her head. “I think they’ll consider that one a failure and stay at the track, where they’ve set up their main base. Instead, I think they’ll speed up their plans, since they’d know you’re onto them if you’d managed to deal with the hostage situation so quickly. I think they’ll go after the other thing Dandelion loves, and do it as soon as possible.”

Star glanced up at Dandelion, but he was also looking confused, a frown between his brows. “I don’t have any people I care for more than my three vassals. Who would it be?”

“I didn’t say person,” Éabha said. “I said thing. Perhaps I ought to have said place?”

The confusion only lasted a moment longer before Dandelion’s eyes widened. “They’re going after the city?”

“The city’s still not entirely stable,” Éabha said. “Physically, the damage from the Valleys sucking the geography down has left a number of instabilities under the ground. Magically, the gates themselves destabilize land masses; that’s why streets move around in the deepest part of the Valleys. It’s not something that could happen accidentally, but someone deliberately going in and setting up nearish to the gate to pinch and tweak and divert energies, yeah, that could get in under the city, couldn’t it? That’s on the magical side. And on the physical… they have a fuath.”

It wasn’t a term from the area of the world Star himself was from. There was a reason he called himself a nixie; he was the exact sub-breed of the brook horse fairy that had grown up in the area of Faerie closest to Germany. One who grew up close to Scotland might be a Kelpie, one near Orkney a Nuckelavee. They had slightly different appearances and abilities, but they were all essentially the same thing. 

But he nevertheless knew what a fuath was to the Scottish and the Irish fairies, and that by their reckoning he would count among them. Fuath were malevolent water fairies: drowning fairies like merfolk or like brook horses, river weepers like washerwomen and banshees, manifestation of water weeds like fideals, river-cursers like beithirs. Somehow, Star didn’t think Éabha was talking about the beithir they currently held captive in the truck. A nixie had a closer tie to river water since they actively drowned others.

Still, there was no major river that ran through Branwin, and it was pretty far from the Great Lakes or anything like that. Some streams, sure, but not enough to be a major threat. “What does that matter?”

“The geography, like I said,” she said. “What’s under the ground everywhere on this whole human planet?”

“Groundwater,” Dandelion answered for Star.

Éabha nodded. “The track wasn’t just to give that nix a place to hide out, or to eliminate guilty witnesses. It was a test. From what I heard, they made tens of times the amount of water the trucks were supposed to carry gush out of them. Now, what if they get themselves deeply embedded enough into the magical webs coming up from the gate and running through this town and then made ten times the amount of water there? What do you think would happen to the Valley? Or the city above, if its precarious balance shifted when the Valley did again?”

Star shook his head. He was imagining it, unfortunately, and didn’t like what he saw. He’d survive a flood, but who else would? At what costs?

“And they’re setting up at the track?” Dandelion murmured. “…Then we have to get there. Make sure we can stop them.”

Star had to agree. It should be done, they needed to get there and kick the shit out of whatever magic circles they were setting up there, whatever rituals they were doing. 

Was there anything that needed to be done first? How much time could they afford to take?

Who should he bring along for this? And what kind of advance planning could they even do?

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7 Comments

  • fordatspoff

    If Viv is tapped out, you probably shouldn’t bring her. However, she’s already been in touch with the witches council looking into protection and so on about this very issue. Since you now have reason to believe that what’s going on is a danger to the whole city, might they not want to provide a bigger scale of support? She should contact them for you.

    This might be a good time to include Dom… the track is his home turf, too, so he should at least be able to help come up with a plan of attack. Georgio could be useful for the same reason, and, if he can get back in time, possibly for stomping people with his hooves, I guess??

  • Skivx

    I agree with Fordatspoff.

    Additionally, the way I see it there are multiple avenues Star and gang could follow for the angle of attack:

    1. Blitzkrieg: If time is absolutely positively of the essence, Star and gang could gather and rally whoever and whatever forces they can quickly muster (maybe rallying the locals to the cause?), and launch an all-out assault on their foe’s home base. If done quick enough, Star and crew might be able to take their foes by surprise, which could turn the tide of battle, especially if it confuses and disorients their foes. This could be combined with a stealthy incursion into the home base to really throw the enemy for a loop.

    2. Patience is a virtue: If time isn’t of the essence, this could allow time to gather and increase Star and the gang’s overall strength. Not only through allowing injured comrades to rest and recover, but also to recall comrades sent away (BFF Georgio!) and to alert local authorities (witches’ council, local governments and local law enforcement, possibly also federal governments and federal law enforcement (the mounties???), etc.), and the local public at large about the threat. Once that has been achieved, a large rallying of forces, a grand assault or a really well coordinated stealth assault can be undertaken.

    3. Deception is the name of the game: Éabha could report to Star and gang’s foes that she was successful in her attempt to capture those who Dandelion holds dear. Éabha could then “imprison” all of the “hostages” in false bindings and bring them to the enemy. Then the waiting game begins. Once Dandelion shows up for “hostage” negotiations, Éabha and the “hostages” break free at the most opportune moment and attack, taking the enemy completely by surprise. This would be even more effective if combined with a stealth assault, by having whoever and whatever rallied allies stealthily get in place to assist when the “betrayal” occurs. Such an action would cause even more confusion in the enemies’ ranks.

    4. Pull the rug out from under them: From what I understand, this plan the enemy wants to enact will require them to place magical incantations or seals on the local area’s aquifers and groundwater to be a success? If so, instead of attacking the enemy, why not prevent the incantations and seals from being put in location in the first place, or allow them to be put, then destroy them before they can be activated. This may or may not require the assistance of local forces (witches’ council, local government and law enforcement, etc.), depending on the abilities of Star and the gang to locate and destroy these incantations/seals, ideally in a quick and stealthy manner. If the enemy is arrogant enough, and sure of their success, they may just assume their plans are in place and unstoppable, and may try to rub Dandelion’s face in it, to gloat or to negotiate with him. At that point Star and crew could combine option #2’s approach with this one, since ideally it would give them more time to prepare.

    5. Fire Attack: If history has taught me anything, it’s that a fire attack is a good way to not only terrify one’s foes, but also pretty effective at out and out routing enemy forces. If conventional fire might not work, and if magical fire won’t, try something like white phosphorus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus ), Chlorine trifluoride ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride ), Dioxygen difluoride ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride ), or all three combined (the best option!). I’d like to see the enemy put that fire out! Caution: that fire really isn’t gonna wanna be put out, so uhhh…..be prepared for that side effect. But hey, fire cleanses all things, including Star and gang’s foes…hopefully.

    I’m probably missing some angles of attack, but that is all that could come to my head right now. Here’s hoping Star’s BFF Georgio can assist somehow (and hopefully survive as well!).

    Ty again for everything, and I hope you are feeling better.

    Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

    Til next part! 🙂

    • MeredithKatz

      Hi Skivx! For future parts, can I ask you to not include so many links in your comments — WordPress thinks you’re a scammer as a result of it and whenever you’ve included links, I’ve had to go find your comments in spam folders and approve them manually 😉 (Besides, going wiki diving is just giving yourself extra work that won’t necessarily be helpful here — keep in mind that the characters only have access to the things they’d seem to logically have access to and the cast you have is several fairy musicians, a horse-back rider, and a nerdy witch, so anything military or high-access just isn’t available to these characters. If I introduced a military scientist, you’d absolutely be welcome to get this specific, I just hate to think you’re doing all this extra work for something that is inaccessible to the cast you’ve met and the resources you know they have.)

      (also as to the other stuff obv I address things in-text mostly, but calling out one thing because it’s my bad for not having made it clear in this section — for the rituals, they’re doing that from the track! So they’d have to go to the track to stop it there.)

      No need to change this comment, just wanted to clear it up for future sections!

      • Skivx

        Hello! Apologies for the links! I honestly only include links when I use terms I think might possibly be unfamiliar. Honestly just trying to save you from having to wikidive lol! You make a good point about keeping in mind the character’s abilities. I was honestly just listing out strategies that came to my mind, because sometimes I don’t know what to contribute, so I’ll just contribute whatever comes to my mind, and for that, I apologize.

        Lol, been playing Romance Of The Three Kingdoms 8 Remake recently, so them having an advisor/strategist would be a big help lol! And it’s very sweet of you to say, but honestly I don’t spend a crazy amount of time writing my suggestions, I’d say 5-30 minutes, and the large majority of that is reading the text, coming up with ideas, organizing my thoughts, and then typing them out. I will keep your recommendations/requests/suggestions in mind though, and apologies for you having to take the time out to inform me of them.

        Thank you for specifying re: where the rituals were going to take place. Apologies for getting confused on the locations, I should’ve assumed the track, but it just sounded like they were only able to do the ritual there due to the water trucks, so that to do this larger ritual, they’d have to interact with the water sources (aquifers and ground water) directly. Again sorry for the trouble.

        Once again, thank you for everything, and I hope you’re feeling better. Sorry for any trouble caused during the course of the story, you have my genuine and sincere apologies. Have a great week, and I’ll keep on commenting! Til’ next time! 🙂

      • Skivx

        Also, How do you edit comments? You mentioned changing/editing a comment, but It doesn’t give me the option to do so. The only thing I can do is reply to a comment.

        • MeredithKatz

          Haha, all good! I just don’t want to lose any of your stuff to the spam filter etc :Db

          I thiiink you can only edit a comment that hasn’t been replied to, but I don’t know if everyone can do it. Obviously it’s my site so I see it on all the posts :(b

          • Skivx

            Appreciate you looking out for me! 🙂 Also, just tried to edit some non-replied to comments on some other days as tests, but no go, I can only reply to comments. Ah well!

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