An attempt to thwart Lykaia’s Cleanse(Eric)
Date: 2025-11-02 20:51
(An attempt to thwart Lykaia’s Cleanse(Eric):Eric)
[Sun Nov 2 2025]
On Sycamore Avenue
It is night, about 43F(6C) degrees, and there are a few wispy white clouds in the sky. The mist is heaviest At Carnation and Sycamore/span> There is a waxing gibbous moon.
Eric says “right, so this originated from Windermere. Specifically below the Humanities building, it seems like.“
Jeremiah frowns. “Under it? Why does it not surprise me that the college probably has a secret torture lab/black magic den under the Humanities building?”
“At least my people aren’t responsible for it,” Tessa says, slipping her hand into Eric’s.
Eric heaves out a sigh, nodding. “Under it. The USB has some stuff about a choir room. Lets check that out first, I guess?” He scoops Tessa up, unwilling to let her run with her current wounds, before he breaks into an easy loping jog. “Building’s this way, I think.”
Jeremiah nods, and falls in alongside the larger man.
The trio moves through the streets, unimpeded, though few people are out and about. There’s a low, lingering tone just at the edge of hearing, not quite a bell or a chime, but a subtle vibration borne persistent upon the air, weighing at them. As they come to the building the door is, conveniently or perhaps suspiciously, left ajar. The hallways are likewise absent of people, and they clatter down the stairs, eventually reaching a heavy door at the bottom labeled simply, “Choir Pit,” with a music note above the words.
Jeremiah checks his weapons and nods to Eric. He’s ready.
Eric sets Tessa back down, before twisting the knob and flinging the door open, gun up and covering the, empty room. He sighs again. “It couldn’t just be a dude, we fucking shoot him and leave. It can’t ever be that easy, can it.”
“From the group named after an error code?” Tessa asks Eric, coughing once.
Jeremiah shakes his head. “Not here, it can’t.”
As the door flies open, what is revealed is a large chamber, with disused choir risers set against one wall, and a series of benches against another. An irregular series of scrapes marks the floor near the risers, as if they were recently moved, the marks left directly below a rusted steel grate. The acrid smell of char fills the room, underpinned with a musky, foul aroma, somehow thick and pungent upon the tongue. Splashes of ichor or bile spatter everything in long arcs, originating from that central point beneath the vents.
Jeremiah blinks as he looks around. “…the fuck?”
Tessa covers her mouth and nose with her sleeve, retching quietly.
Eric wrinkles his nose, then abruptly sneezes, violently. “Smells like dead broccoli,” he grunts, pacing into the room and looking completely ridiculous in the surroundings, clad as he is in a full suit. He primly adjusts his bowtie, scowling at the ichor getting on his shoes.
“Be careful, there, Bond Eric Bond. It looks like that shit on the floor came from that grate up there.” Jeremiah says to Eric.
Upon entering the room, the tone grows more distinct, concentrated. There’s a gentle tinkling thrum from the vent itself, while the sound seems to echo down from above somewhere, near the corner up near the ceiling.
Jeremiah raises his rifle to cover the grate.
A single crystalline speck drifts away from the vent, falling down and splattering against the floor in another arc of ectoplasmic goop.
Tessa skirts the worst of the goop, approaching the vent, sleeve held over her nose, other hand clutching her knife.
Tessa hums in the back of her throat, resonating with the note, like an absolute crazy person, as she doesn’t stab, but instead taps, with the side of the blade of her knife, against the crystal mesh.
When Tessa taps at the vent, it’s not the clang of metal on metal, but the tink tink of crystal, followed by the delicate membrane fracturing, tinkling away in a shower of shards that rapidly become goop. Though the tone from up near the ceiling persists, the vent stops thrumming along.
Tessa peeks up toward the ceiling, still tappy tapping the poor crystal, breaking it as one might the shell of a skittle.
Eric tilts his head, looking up and around, and finally points to an intercom speaker up near the ceiling. “It’s coming from there, I think,” he muses.
Jeremiah stands to the side, still covering the crystal with his rifle, just in case, and making sure that the others are not in his line of fire.
“I can throw a knife at it, but uh…” Tessa says, squinting up at the speaker, looking for a button nearby, anything to make it two-way communications.
Eric says “that’s just a speaker, I think. Saw lots of them on the way down here, uh… There’s usually like, a central place for that, right? Where they announce from?“
Jeremiah nods. “Some kind of control booth or room, yeah.”
While there’s no button, there is a bench placed directly below where the speaker is, covered in dust, wires, and various other audio equipment. There are two footprints in the dust, alongside a clear space amidst a nest of wires.
“I think someone took something from in here… Shall we go kick in doors until we find the right room?” Tessa asks, one last unholy tink before the crystal completely splits down the middle.
Eric says “lets see if we can find that upstairs, I guess“
Eric says “you know how much I like breaking doors“
Jeremiah nods. “Let’s do it.”
Tessa nods, meandering behind Eric.
Eric leads them out of the choir pit become strange magic laboratory, and as they pass through the musty hall outside and up the stairs, they pass several more vents, each laden with a light crystalline coating and thrumming in resonance to that ever-present tone. At the top of the stairs, the main lobby has three more doors. One leads back outside, one leads into the main office, visible behind a window, and the third is tucked nearly out of sight almost entirely behind a plant, scrawled with the word, “Maintanence”.
“Yeah, it’s pretty much got to be the Maintenance door, doesn’t it?” Jeremiah says to his friends.
Tessa peeks into the windowed door.
“I used to read announcements in high school,” Tessa admits, trying to slowly nudge open the door.
Jeremiah nods. “Okay. I never did, but that makes sense, too.”
The office door creaks open, and they’re able to enter easily, it’s not locked or anything. There’s a counter, with two computers, and the platformed microphone of a PA system between them. The green light on the PA system is blinking to indicate it is active. One of the computers is blank and turned off, while dim light flickers from the other, the screen showing a wavy line undulating like waves below the phrase, “See, the tricks were always smoke.”
With even the hint of movement from the mouse, the computer screen flickers away, displaying a standard home screen. Only after Jeremiah does some clicking and scrolling does he locate a seemingly inocuous icon, little more than a wavy line akin to an audio wavelength. When clicked, the screen returns with those words front and center. Beneath them, the wavelength line is superimposed over a wireframe grid of streets picked out with points of light.
“Check this out!” Jeremiah says. He takes out his phone and snags a picture of the screen, just in case.
Tessa is very smart. It’s the Ivory Quarter!
Eric pushes some buttons on the PA system. It’s a PA, he’s smart enough for that. He mashes the off button. The green light continues to blink.
Eric says “the fuck“
“Can yu like… uninstall the… program? Or just… reboot in safe mode, without networking?” Tessa says to Jeremiah, the resident I.T. expert.
Jeremiah nods. “Yeah. I can do that.” He proceeds to shut down the computer, leaving everything intact for later analysis.
Eric says “you sure that’s good enough? We could just, y’know“
Eric hefts his axe.
Jeremiah nods. “You could, and I wouldn’t stop you, but if you do, we get nothing more out of it.”
Eric shrugs. “I like to be safe,” he says idly, before absolutely demolishing the computer, the PA system, and part of the counter with heavy swings of his axe. Sparks fly everywhere, and he kicks the rubble with a satisfied grunt.
Eric says “fuck ’em, y’know?“
Jeremiah grins. “Fuck ’em, indeed.”
Tessa throws her arms up in the air, cheering, “Fuck ’em!”
As the computer is destroyed, the tone at last falls still. A round transmitter clangs away from the wires under the desk, bouncing across the floor before landing at Jeremiah’s feet, and detonating in a spray of plastic and metal.
Eric blinks down at the explosion, looking a bit pieved at being outdone.
Tessa kicks it, saying, “Tech confetti…”
Eric says “well. That’s one problem down, I guess. But the vents are still all, weird“
Jeremiah laughs. “I’m just glad that wasn’t a bigger boom, or else Jeremiah confetti.”
Eric says “I can smell it too, it’s not just enhancing the sound, the crystal is spreading something through the air“
Eric says “but it’s the whole quarter, so we can’t just clear every vent everywhere. Hm“
Eric says “lets go check the maintanence door, I guess. Can’t hurt. The USB said something about a HVAC tunnel“
Jeremiah nods.
Tessa says “Will you Here’s Johnny the door?“
Jeremiah laughs. “I’ve never heard that used as a verb before.”
As the trio descends through the maintanence door, a narrow stairway takes them down, down, back below the building, into the bowels of the earth. It opens into a central chamber strewn with tools, workbenches, and other ephemera, with a hatch in one corner marked simply, “HVAC.” The hatch is crusted over with the same crystal they’ve seen before, filmy and nearly opaque.
Tessa tippy taps the crystal, cracking more. If either are paying close attention, she’s rickrolling them through her tapping, and startles when a big chunk falls away.
Jeremiah hum hum hums. “…give you up…” hum hum hums.
As Tessa taps at the crystal, it does indeed shatter, though it’s unclear if it shatters from her tapping, or if her tapping simply incites what comes next. The hatch bursts open, and a column of crystal sprouts from below, growing impossibly quickly towards the ceiling above. But it’s not growing, per se. It’s ascending, as some sort of crystalline worm bursts forth, its every secretion leaving more trails of rapidly crystalizing phlegm in its wake. It opens a gleaming maw, and BELLOWS at them!
Jeremiah swings his sword at the creature.
The blade of the sword cleaves through the crystal with ease, sending fractures racing down the worm’s entire length. It hisses one final time, quivering, then suddenly detonates into thousands upon thousands of shards. With it goes the crystal covering the vents, the hatch, and everywhere else, the sound of crackling, crashing, and tinkling filling the entirety of the Ivory Quarter. Before the shards can harm anyone however, they transmute back into ectoplasmic gunk, splattering everyone liberally in clear, sticky goop.
Eric looks like he nearly chokes on his tongue, eyes narrowing, lips peeling back, before he glances at Tessa and visibly strangles his anger. IT’s clear he’d rather be strangling Thomas.
leads Tessa and Eric into the kitchen, where he begins to clear an area on the table. He sets down a wooden salad bowl, filling it with water. “Matthew is upset Malin broke up with him,” he informs them. “And so he’s hired some bitch of a weather mancer to bring a storm to Redstone, of all places…” He shakes his head. “But we have tools, don’t we?” He eyes Tessa. “Not going to get virgin’s blood from you, I’m afraid.” A beat. “But I’ll take a few drops all the same into the bowl, there.”
“If you get murdery at everyone who grabs my ass, you’re gonna have a bad time,” Tessa says to Eric, pulling out a blade, a slice of the side of her palm, droplets dripped into the bowl, with hardly a wince. Her conversational skills are excellent, she’s concerningly numb, or… there’s something not right with her, but, breezy as can be, she says, “Few roplets of sluts blood, instead.”
Eric huffs. “I do have a bad time,” he tells Tessa, sniffing. “A lot. Namely when multiple people in this room call me puppy, to name one example.”
“She likes it when I grab her ass,” Thomas comments to Eric. Then he shakes his head to Tessa. “Unless you’ve lost the baby, Tessa: there’s some blood even more precious than yours in there.” As the droplets hit, they begin to swirl, forming some kind of spiral in the bowl. Immediately, the magician begins to chant, and as he does it seems as if ghosts fade into being from around the walls of the kitchen. “Focus,” he says, as mist begins to rise. “We have work to do.” As the blood forms a spiral, it seems to reflect a storm: the very storm that pounds Redstone right now. “Now…” Thomas whispers, reaching in a finger to turn the storm. “What made you?”
As the image of the storm forms in the bowl, sensations wash over Eric, Thomas, and Tessa grief. Upset. Heartbreak — and amusement.
Eric pads closer, looming and leaning over Thomas’s shoulder, breath warm as he observes. From the strain in his neck and the clenched fists held rigidly at his sides, it’s unclear if he’s that close simply to get a better look, or if the silent threat is intended. Almost certainly both. He doesn’t hamper the magician’s work, but this close to the full moon and provoked, irritation bleeds off of him like heat from a furnace, mingling with the emotions imbued in that miniature storm.
Now, like some kind of mid-90s CGI pan-and-scan, the image shown in the bowl begins to zoom in: not towards Redstone, but towards some rather shabby All Saints office block with lofts above. A door says, in faded print, ‘ISABEL SHOWERS – MAGIC FOR HIRE’, and as the scrying lens zooms through the door it rockets up the back stairs to where a woman is lying, watching late night talk shows, in a pair of ratty boyshorts and a tank top. She looks up immediately, as if into the camera: “Who the fuck are you?”
Tessa startles a little from where she’s beside Thomas. “Oh… hi…”
Sotto voice, Thomas turns to Tessa and Eric. “It seems she can hear us.” He turns back to the water-filled salad bowl. “Thomas Hale,” he says to the water. “And friends. We represent the civic government in Redstone.”
Eric squints at her, then whispers to Thomas, close at his ear, “She looks like a shitty mage. Like you when you wear pajama pants.”
The woman — Isabel Showers, certainly — puts down what appears to be a print of low-fat Rocky Road. “Oh, fuck off,” she says. “I’m not in the mood. The man is all boo-hoo crying because someone broke up with him,” she tells the empty air. “God, men!” she huffs. “He’s the Autumn King there’s literally a whole court of weeping willowy ladies who want to have his babies!” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “Go away! This is a him problem, not a me problem!”
“I do magic naked and I look more serious,” Tessa agrees with Eric, quietly. She stifles a laugh, hiding her face with a hand. “He… yeah, I mean, it’s his problem, but your magic,” she says, addressing the other woman.
Thomas rolls his eyes where Tessa and Eric can see, and then replies back to the salad bowl-cum-scrying bowl, “I don’t care about Matthew and his broken hearts club,” he says. “Honestly, if he was raining tears over Bayview, it wouldn’t be my problem at all. But Redstone is very much in the Hellfire business, and so–” A pause. “It needs to stop.”
Isabel Showers replies, “Oh yeah?” She narrows her eyes. “Or what?”
Eric hisses out an irritable breath between his teeth, raking fingers through his beard before sliding easily into the role of bad cop. “Look, lady. Do what the professor says or I’m coming to your address. I routinely carry an axe.” He shows said axe to the salad bowl, very seriously. “I’ll make kindling out of your door and break all of your shit.”
Eric adds, defiantly, “And then piss on your carpet for good measure.”
Thomas asks Tessa, “Isn’t it a full moon? I feel like the axe is less concerning.”
Eric snaps at Thomas under his breath, “I collar on the full moon. You’re ruining it.”
“Almost full,” Tessa agrees to Thomas. “An angry, protective papa wolf who wants to protect my interests, with full moon boosts, she’d be a paint splatter.”
Tessa is apparently ignoring Eric’s reasonable point.
“Pussy,” Thomas mutters under his breath. He turns back to the bowl. “I have an angry werewolf and I just found your address,” he calls out to Isabel across the scrying link. “But death happens, doesn’t it?” he says. “It’s what comes after that matters: and death is my domain,” he tells her. “But then I don’t need to tell you that, Isabel. You knew it as soon as I said my name.” He smiles. “But I’ll make you a bargain.” Who doesn’t like a bargain?
In the scrying bowl, Isabel looks suspicious. “What kind of bargain?” she asks, as if on clockwork.
Eric’s sigh is long-suffering, but he gamely bares his teeth and snarls, low in his throat, settling back behind Thomas and Tessa, a silent, looming reminder of menace.
Tessa absent-mindedly licks the cut across the side of her hand much as an animal might, bloody knife tucked away without a second of hesitation. “A girl does love a bargain…”
“You end the spell,” Thomas says to Isabel. “We won’t eat you, or torment your ghost, or any of that bit,” he says. “But better yet: the Conclave will hire you for the next significant magical working we need to perform,” he explains to her. “Matthew knew when he hired you — knows now — that heartbreak is a wound that fades,” he says. “Loss is transitory: but for you?” he says. “Business has to go on.”
In the scrying bowl, Isabel tilts her head, clearly considering.
“Darling,” Tessa starts, brows raised, “You’re being quite generous, aren’t you?” she asks. “We could just kill her and end it like that…” she murmurs, twisting the ring on her finger.
Eric leans forward as if tugged by Tessa’s words alone, slipping once more into frame within the bowl, teeth bared. The way he crouches, tense and alert at her elbow, eyes intent and ever so slightly tinted towards amber, he looks almost hungry, watching Isabel with lips drawn back.
“It’s certainly a Plan B, isn’t it?” Thomas suggests to Tessa. Then he turns back to the pool. “Plan A or Plan B, Isabel?” he asks the figure. “I am -confident- that our werewolf is hungry: and even if you’re skinny, he can find some meat on the bones.”
There is a long, lengthy pause, and then Isabel nods. She makes a sharp gesture, speaks a word of magic, then: “Go the fuck away,” she says. “Let a girl eat her ice cream in peace. Matthew isn’t the only person with a love life or lack thereof,” she comments bitterly. “He just, quite literally, has the bigger dick. Or a dick at all. So everyone cares about him.”
“Pleasure doing business,” Thomas tells the scrying pool.
Eric remains silent. He just licks his lips, once, an idle drag of pink tongue over pale flesh.
“You should work on that,” Tessa offers, stroking the back of her hand against her creepy wolf’s cheek with absolute fondness.
Thomas makes a short, chopping gesture, and then the frame of reference in the scrying pool zooms out: out, out, out, until it is the storm once more. It is beginning to peter out — to break up, perhaps just like Matthew and Malin, as its rotation spins a little too fast. Whatever holds it together is gone, sending scattered tears across the city as the magic fades away.