Chapter 171: The day after Tomorrow

Garth sat in the pews, glaring at the orb held by the black statue of Sassia. Garth had no idea why one of Dr. Daniel’s old partners in crime was immortalized in stone, holding an orb that disseminated tiny, self-replicating curses, but it didn’t really matter right now.

When he had seen the orb the first time, it had been dormant, but now that he was attending mass, he was absolutely sure that it was doing exactly what he thought it had been.

Tiny little flecks of dark red mana shot out of the orb like omnidirectional rain. They were so tiny that Garth might not have been able to see them before his senses were roughly equivilant to an eagle with a telescope. He could see them sinking into people’s skin and then gradually drawing on mana in the environment to replicate, about one copy every half hour popped out of people as they sat, listening to the priest’s sermon.

A magical disease. And the symptom was forgetting someone.

On the plus side, for the orb to work, the field that suppressed mana had to be lowered. The field was generated by a lever out of sight of the congregation that plunged a rather large Aether crystal down into a similarly large, intricately carved dungeon core.

Garth briefly considered stealing that too, but decided against it. With Linda’s connection to the multiverse, there were less risky ways to smuggle Aether crystals onto the planet.

The biggest problem, Garth thought, idly playing with the nearly indestructible seashells around his neck, Is that I can’t touch the damn thing. That had been the first thing Garth had discovered.

He might be Jim’s brother, but either his planty-ness or his not being the spawn of the cunt’s semen, meant that grabbing the thing himself was off the table. That was the first thing that Garth had checked a few weeks ago, while Fred and Zack distracted everyone by beating the crap out of each other.

I liked the part where Fred bit the priest, Garth thought with a grin.

Being unable to touch the damn thing was a setback. It meant Garth would have to come up with an alternative, either make a workaround, or find a Jimspawn patsy.

Garth had decided to try the second one first. After studying the orb in his memories, divested of its physical shell, he was able to reverse engineer the bit of magic that only allowed people descended from Jim to touch it.

The technique harkened back to when he first learned Recursive Spell from one of Beladia’s powers.

It was a relatively simple piece of work, and the way the spell was shaped required that there be a drop of the founder’s blood at the very center of the spell, which Garth was very interested in obtaining.

The spell read the blood inside, and decreed that anyone descended from aforementioned blood would be allowed through the barrier. The interesting part was that it boosted it’s power by drawing energy from churchgoers.

There is power in will, even if the people praying don’t notice it, they still cause a little eddy of magic.

Not enough to do anything themselves, but the effect was there.

It reminded Garth of static electricity. Magical static electricity generated by thousands of people worshipping the same guy in the same way.

The orb collected that and used it to reinforce it’s own defenses.

With its shields up and the latent power of tens of thousands of people supporting it, Garth wouldn’t be surprised if Linda couldn’t nuke it from orbit.

Well, maybe on the second try, once all the believers were vaporized.

Still, Garth was pretty sure he had an easier way to get the orb.

Enter Caitlyn.

Caitlyn was sitting next to him fidgeting nervously. She was a lot worse at dealing with stress than Alicia was, her eyes constantly darting around and jumping at sudden noises.

Not exactly ideal.

Garth had done a little sword-from-the-stone testing and found that Caitlyn was distantly descended from Garth’s brother. She was also descended from Garth on account of her mom being Garthspawn, but who wasn’t at this point?

That’s a bit of a downer, Garth thought. She was lovely, but also his brother’s great, great…whatever. It was meaningless, but still messed with his head a bit. Best not to think about it.

“You’re gonna be fine, relax.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” she asked, nearly hyperventilating.

“Stop and smell the flower,” Garth said, pulling a flower out of his pocket and offering it to her.

Caitlyn inhaled the mild sedatives deeply and relaxed back into her chair, handing it back to Garth while the priest continued his sermon.

“If it doesn’t work, just go back to what you were doing, like nothing happened.” Garth explained. “When it does work, you finish mass and walk out of here.”

“Like nothing happened?” the redheaded girl asked, glancing up at him.

“Now you’re getting it.”

They waited until Communion, when everyone was called up to accept the flesh of Jim.

Garth shuddered. It was a little wafer like before, but it was still gross to think of it. I mean, what part of Jim’s flesh exactly? His taint? And who wants to ritualistically cannibalize their deity anyway?

Garth joined the back of the line, and when Caitlyn made it to the front, as close to the orb as she could get, he felt a hand grab his shoulder.

“The fuck did you just say to me?” one of the new recruits, a kid named John said, glaring up at him.

“I said you’re a scrawny cunt with no manners!” Garth shouted, enjoying his role in the distraction this time around.

Let’s see if I can bite that priest on the other ankle.

John obligingly tackled him halfway across the gigantic church, landing them squarely twenty feet opposite Caitlyn. In order to rubberneck, the crowd would have to look directly away from the orb.

And who doesn’t love rubbernecking?

“Hey! Not again!” the priest shouted, limping over to them as the crowd of some five hundred people turned to watch them.

That’s your cue kid, Garth thought.

Just like they’d practiced, Caitlyn leapt to her feet, hopped over the decorative bannister and touched the orb with her smuggler’s band. The blue-green glass orb flickered out of existence, then back in as a perfect replica took its place.

Caitlyn hopped back over the bannister and turned to watch the scuffle.

John was on top of garth, possibly channeling some kind of resentment for his months of intense training through feral punches, but Garth barely felt it.

When he saw Caitlyn watching, he gave her a wink before biting the priest’s uninjured leg as the man tried to separate them.

“AAAH!”

******

“And stay out of the house of the Founder, you mad dogs!” The enforcer said, tossing Garth and John out onto the street.

“That went pretty well,” Garth said, levering himself up from the muck. Horse drawn carriages included a lot of horse-shit on the roads.

“Pssh, you didn’t even put up a fight.” John said, dusting himself off.

“Wasn’t part of the plan. Why, did you want me to?” Garth said, looking down at John. The six-foot tall kid came up to his nose.

“Um…no sir.”

“Good.” Garth tossed John a thousand credit coin. “Go take the rest of the day off. I still gotta wait for the package.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, ambling in the direction of the re-light district.

“Don’t spend it all in one place!” Garth shouted after him.

Garth settled into waiting outside the church, idling his time away by designing a spell that would make Jim’s statues show signs of aging, growing paunchy beer guts, big noses, and hair in their ears over the next hundred years or so.

So slow, they won’t even notice, Garth thought to himself, chuckling as he added a receding hairline.

Garth put a pin in the side-project when mass started being let out. Garth leaned against the wall of the building opposite the church’s entrance, watching each and every person exit the wide doors and walk down the marble steps.

After a minute, Garth saw Caitlyn walking up to the entrance, her head down, looking nervous.

We really gotta work on that. Garth thought as she walked through the entrance.

Every part of her except the Status Band. That struck some kind of dome that turned opaque against the status band.

Garth extrapolated the size and shape of the dome from that small piece of it, and realized there had to be something buried deep under the church that prevented anyone with making off with the orb. Or maybe it was meant to protect Jim’s blood. That might be more likely.

Well, damn. Be nice if something went according to plan one day.

Garth spotted the dome flare into existence just as an ear-piercing alarm went off and an adamantium sheet began to slam shut in front of the startled redhead. He could simply go home and tear up her contract, leaving her holding the damning evidence with no memory of how she got there, but that seemed like something of a dick move.

Haste, Teleport, Greater Invisibility

Garth leapt forward, tunneling through space to tackle Caitlyn to the ground and rendering them both invisible, using the spell he’d gotten from studying Succubi abilities.

Garth clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged both of them away from the startled crowd clogging up the exit in slow-motion.

“Let’s make lemonade,” Garth muttered as he watched the priest go for the magic suppressing lever in slow motion.

“Don’t breathe.” Garth warned Caitlyn, who nodded.

Before the priest could flip the switch, Garth filled the entire room with his patented forget-me spores™, dragging Caitlyn to the back entrance.

The priest almost managed to flip the switch, but after a couple breaths, he and everyone else in the room stood staring blankly at the walls like zombies.

Garth hustled the two of them over to the rear entrance that led deeper into the church, where an armed response team was boiling out of the inner sanctums, eyes full of zeal.

Garth and Caitlyn silently waited for all six of the armored knights to clomp into the church before tracing their steps further into the church.

“What’s going on?” Garth heard their leader shout as they tiptoed behind them, plunging deeper into the bowels of the church.

When they expect you to run away, the best place to hide is under their nose.

And Garth really, really wanted that book.

“Father, what’s…going…on?”

Seemed like the forget-me spores were having their effect, despite the resistances to poison in the men’s enchantments. It wouldn’t last forever, though. they had an extra few minutes to find the thing preventing the orb from leaving, smash it, and be on their merry way.

On the other hand, Garth thought, grabbing the status band and trying to teleport it away. It didn’t work.

Ah well, guess we have to do this the hard way, Garth thought as they crept down the stone steps.

“You can breathe now,” GArth said as they got to the bottom, far outside the influence of his drug-filled spores.

Caitlyn inhaled a gasping breath.

“We’re gonna die!” she whispered. “Why did you go deeper!?”

“Relax,” Garth said, handing her the flower again. “This isn’t even the most dangerous pickle I’ve ever been in. Did I ever tell you about the time I pinched my sister-in-law's ass by mistake?”

She looked at him with rounded eyes and shook her head.

Garth summoned Shadow in the form of a black Labrador. Garth could use some extra scouting power. Garth bent down and ruffled the dog’s ears. See if you can track down the source of that spell keeping us in here, please.

Garth stood back up as Shadow started sniffing around in front of them. He launched into the sordid tale in order to keep Caitlyn distracted from the possibility of death.

“Well, we were out shopping…”

Caitlyn McDonnell

Human

Non-citizen of the Inner Spheres

-Strength- 20 - Capped

-Endurance- 15 - Capped

-Speed- 25- Capped

-Intelligence- 30- Capped

-Memory- 20- Capped

-Senses- 20- Capped

Blessings: None

Class: None

Skills: Enchanting, Smithing, Engineering, Etiquette, Mana Channel*, Mana Wielding*, Spell Theory*,

Spells: Telekinesis, Mass shift, Heat Metal, Ice Grasp, Force Armor, Fly, Force Shield,

Evolutions: Mana Sight