Mystery Thread #9 | PavellumPendulum & TerraBooma

[Manna Beast]

@PavellumPendulum and @TerraBooma
Genre: Modern Fantasy
Gender Preference: FxF
Post Length: 2-3 Paragraphs

Prompt: Instead of the British industrial revolution, a magical revolution takes place in the late 1700s that results in the United States never becoming a superpower. Britain engages in a policy of isolationism, keeping all magical technology locked within its borders, while maintaining a dominant position on the world stage. As a British magic dealer Character A, (PavellumPendulum), an opportunity presents itself in 1999, so you start illegally transporting bottles of elixirs into the United States and turning a huge profit—until something unexpected happens. With things having gone as well as one might think, Character B (TerraBooma) is an investigator trying to discern just how all this has been going on for well... longer than one could imagine!

Time Limit: 10 posts each (20 in total) or June 16 (two weeks)

 

[TerraBooma]

Illusions may have usually smelled like Cinnamon when they were dispelled, but Kate didn't need her senses to know she'd finally cut through all the bullshit. It had taken weeks to get enough information to make some kind of substantial lead. Whoever was behind the recent influx of illegal elixer exports, she was going to get to the bottom of it today. One good interview is all it was going to take to get to the bottom of the whole ring; that was her oath as an Investigator of Magical Mishaps. If she could get her foot in the door, this entire ring was going to come down; along with all of the nefarious dealings that she had been investigating recently.

Stop the dealings, stop the trafficking, stop all of it; she just needed one more lead, and her sense of justice was going to carry her through it. That, and a small arsenal of permitted magics thanks to her standard issue caster. Katherine Briars was kit out with everything she needed to follow through with her investigations. Her caster would give her access to a few cantrips to help even the odds against the thugs that she would likely encounter in her dealings, and all inquisitors were modified with the ability to detect magic. There were whispers that the ritual cost them something primal, something innate. That by opening themselves to the arcane, they lost a spark of humanity deep within. Kate...tried not to think about that.

Caster drawn and mind stilled; open for the taste of magic, Kate pushed down the dark streets of Liverpool in the pouring rain, searching for her target like the rain seemed to search for anything that was once dry; as if the country was an affront to all things comfortable. It was a terrible day to be working, but Katherine tried not to pay it much mind. If she could bust this case open, maybe she could finally afford some decent transportation...

After nearing the corner of 7th and 10th, Kate looked up at the building. A run down looking dive bar called Creaky Culdron. From her notes, this was where she would find the criminal mastermind behind the elixers leaving the country.

And with that, answers!

 

[PavellumPendulum]

Times were changing. Your favourite barbershop closes down, replaced by a rune store. Your barber disappears off the face of the earth, without a single hair left behind. You shrug. Life goes on. Your local grocer gets bought out by enchanters. That's normal too. You tuck your overgrown hair behind your ears and keep walking, even when you hear him and his family getting kicked out on the street. Your good-for-nothing husband's tire factory shuts down because everyone's taking the damn floating trams everywhere and no one needs an overpriced circle of rubber. You balk at the numbers on your bills now that electricity mages power everything, because apparently their shit is top notch and premium (and the only power source in the city now), so they get to charge an arm and a leg.

Who cares, right? Life goes on. Your good-for-absolutely-fucking-nothing husband becomes your ex-husband when he walks out the door and never comes back. The door ain't even yours anymore. You'll be out on the street in a couple days, because rent's not paid and the bald bloke who owns the complex keeps banging it down even though this is the first time you've ever missed a payment in all the years you've ever lived here. Your savings have been devoured and even though you've licked that damn plate clean, nothing more comes out of it. Can't get blood out of a stone, or pennies from a bank that's closed its damn doors on you.

Who fucking cares.

It was when Molly Tottle took back her maiden name (not on paper but in spirit, of course, because even though we had wankers in the sky, we couldn't let divorce slide), that she was offered work, selling to those far far away, to lands where magic had never been harvested, never moulded and sculpted for human use. No, the land of the settlers, fragments of England, they were still living in the damn stone age. What a life it was, to never be probed by magic, to never have to bow down to it, huh? Molly half-envied them.

Still, she would never turn down a job, especially when she'd not only never had one outside of homeminding. Her coin purse was pretty much as famished as she was.

Liverpool had slowly become hers. Molly kept her head on her shoulders and kept her operations going the way she was supposed to, until without even blinking an eye, she'd become a bigshot, with only a few bigger heads on aging shoulders above her. The Creaky Cauldron was one of her fronts, one that she kept a particularly careful eye on, since it was always the one that got the most heat from the damn cops and their dirty pointer fingers. She kept it around, not to keep her business going, but just so that they had a shaky lead to hold onto, even when she closed up shop and moved it around every few months, just to keep them on their toes.

And so, sat at the bar, engaged in seemingly idle chat with one of her employees, she swirled about the gin in her hands.

The door swung open and every person in the bar stared. Little Miss Trenchcoat with a hard line for a mouth and furrowed brows entered the bar.

Molly Tottle (legally, Molly Linscott)

 

[TerraBooma]

The Creaky Cauldron smelled like a mix of depression and mildew. Impressive, given how short a time this particular instance of the operation had been running for. It almost managed to mask the scent of cold steel; the wards that had made it such a pain to find this place. Div-Ops hadn't been able to tell her anything about what to expect; she had just decided to come in blind anyway. Kate scanned the room upon entry, head on a swivel. She seemed to be satisfied with what she was looking for; perhaps the lack of direct threats attempting to cut her down upon entry into the room. Holstering her caster at her side, the investigator let out a small hum of....contentment? Something mixed between resolve and curiosity. She moved through the bar like an elephant through a laundromat; unaware how out of her environment she was, nor how most of the shaking wasn't due to her. She sauntered up to the bar, to the seat beside Molly's, though she stood instead of taking a seat, leaning one arm on the bartop.

"Molly Linscott. I'm Detective Briars, with the Inquisition." It was hardly a needed introduction. Everyone knew who she was with the second she walked in the door; the caster and the pocket watch gave it away, she was certainly no normal cop. She still flashed her badge; a small incantation and a hovering glpyh manifested in the air between the two women, fractured edges and splintered runes hanging in the air with all the authority the small symbol could usher into the world. Inquisitor glyphs were unique; no two were the same. Another part of the strange process that instilled their magical properties in their bodies.

"I'm here to ask you a few questions. Regarding your dealings with illegal elixir deliveries to the United States of America. You've been selling contraband as per the Salem accords. I'd recommend you cooperate, since you'd be looking at an extra five years for obstructing justice." She came out of the gate hard and fast; Kate didn't have the patience to sugar coat her leads, and she didn't have time on this investigation either. She needed answers, and needed them fast.

"We'll start with my questions, then I want to look around the back. Don't bother sending your goons to flush whatever you've got back there; I'll be able to tell." With a small huff as if the very idea of someone disposing evidence would effect her, Katherine pulled out a small note pad before raising a fairly unimpressed brow. "Tell me, where were you last Thursday?"

Smuggling magic; Kate couldn't imagine a more pitiable crime. Magic was powerful, life changing, but also incredibly dangerous. Shipping it out to the uneducated nations of the world would just cause pain and suffering. Lives would be destroyed with an abra cadabra and a flick of a wand. There was a reason that the U.K. Had restricted the arcane to her borders- if released en mass, the world would surely plunge into absolutely anarchy. Bringing Linscott in for that would just be cream on top. Though Kate had to keep focused. There was a bigger crime at stake here; one that burned inside her stomach with every passing stomach.

Ashwatch. They had her sister. And if her sources were right, Linscott knew something about them that the smuggler shouldn't. That was enough to warrant the Inquisitor to pick up this dead case. She just needed a lead. Some kind of source. So dammit woman, give her an inch, because she already felt like she was running out of time.

 

[PavellumPendulum]

Coppers always thought they were so smart. When in disguise, they thought they were the slickest shits in the world, but Molly and her associates could clock them from a mile away. Their disguises were always government issued, always coming in specific colour palettes, with specific tells, in order to assure that they did not catch fellow investigators from other branches in the act, blowing their own cover. And when they weren't in disguise, like this one, they waltzed around like they were the most important people on the damn planet. As if anyone really cared about their damn drone pocket watches or their rune IDs that were meant to be intimidating little shows of power. Molly had never respected anyone much, not her mam, not her pa, not her ex-husband, not enough for them to mean much to her, but Inquishitters?

If she could feed them all the heel of her foot, maybe she'd actually manage a belly laugh for the first time in years.

Her associates in the room, scattered across the room, did not watch, but they waited. Under the chatter and the messy slurping, she knew that they remained vigilant, ready for a scuffle if need be. She did not give the signal.

The cunt leaned against her bartop. Molly sipped lazily from her gin, dark lashes heavy as she stared into her drink. She remained unaffected until Miss Trenchcoat decided to bring up her legal name, to which she raised a thick brow at, finally turning to look her way. Detective Briars. At least she was named right. The only profession right for a thorny shrub was pig.

Without even brandishing a warrant or any sort of proof, Trenchcoat Briars went straight for the gullet with what Molly could only describe as a pillow that she seemed to think was a baseball bat. Molly's neutral expression nearly broke in that moment, a twitch in her eye, only able to hold it until the cop called her associates "goons." She couldn't help herself. Did the lil girl think she was in a comic book? She snorted, bringing her gin back to her lips and letting the last drops of it coat her tongue.

"A few questions? Sounds a touch like you're just talking at me than to me, Detective." she replied, still seated and ever uncaring, placing her short cup on the bartop for bartender to take, which they did promptly. "Tell me, is it the Inquisition's policy to waltz into an alleged crime operation and make claims without presenting even a rat's ass hair of evidence, or even a warrant? Sounds to me like someone's never read the handbook." Her voice was louder now, still ever so flat, as the bar quieted around her, as though she had her own gravitational pull on everyone's eyes. If Molly Tottle wanted eyes on her, she would get them. Those silver eyes never faltered.

"If by goons, you mean my employees," she continued on, making an extravagant display of sliding her pocket book into one of her suit pants pockets, "Then you might want to skip on wasting my time, hm? Perhaps a personal tour would satisfy you, unless you'd like to risk it and ask me questions while my goon-ish bartender and devilish chef scamper away with my priceless runes of erectile dysfunction that I am smuggling straight to the impoverished slop living across the ocean instead of attending to my actual businesses, like actual businesswomen do."

 

[TerraBooma]

Katherine had always felt a certain sort of disdain for the brains behind a criminal operation. She could sympathize with the feet on the floor; not agree with their decisions, certainly. But she could understand how poverty and desperation for a better life could lead to some less than ideal choices in ones' life. The bigwigs though. They profited off of the suffering they caused. Once someone got hooked on illegal magic, its conveniences were astounding. You could do anything, you could change reality at a whim. But that power came at a price. And the people that hired such services weren't exactly educated on what the cause and effect of a spell could be. Underground wizards; called Sorcerers, by the general public, were as much a menace to a society as any other would be criminal. Bringing them and their craft to a completely unprepared demographic like the states? It was ripe for abuse and exploitation.

The system was flawed, Kate would be the first one to admit it. But slinging spell-slots out of trenchcoats in a back alley was no way to conduct a business that was safe for anyone. Impure reagents, unqualified technicians, and desperate clientele- it made for nothing but desperate people hurting desperate people. Anyone could see that the restrictions and isolation of the United Kingdom had painful side effects...but a united and strong authority was needed to keep the peace.

"Please, Linscott. Don't get me started. We both know your ledger is a mile deep and half stained red. I'm not here to fuck around and play nice like you have with the last six detectives that came in here and started poking around. You play nice for a bit, give them a mile and they'll hang themselves by a dozen. I frankly, don't have time for you to play coy." She was being crass, she knew it. But this woman had a way to rile her up. "So let's cut to the chase. I'll take you up on your tour, you'll show me the things you think you've hidden well enough, and we'll see just how this goes."

Truth be told, Kate didn't really care what she found back there. She just needed to find some kind of connection to Ashwatch, and she could come back to shut this place down later. What mattered now was keeping her sister safe. Straightening up, Kate only started to pull out a note book and small black pen when she suddenly was overwhelmed by the smell of saltpeter and brimstone.

Evocation

The door opened.

"GET DOWN-"

Her cries fell on deaf ears as all of the air in the room suddenly seemed to flicker and die, sucked out as if parsed by a sudden vacuum. Kate had narrowly enough time to throw herself at Linscott and whip out her caster to pulse a weak barrier as the room erupted into an explosion of flame. Her meager sigils hummed in a weak sound that was overcast by the sound of splintering wood and crackling flame; the sigils shattered, and the two women would go flying over the bar and into the employees only section- saved most of the force of the blast by the Inquisitor's protective ward.

From the entryway, two figures stood amidst the acrid smoke that greedily drifted into the air. A well dressed looking gentleman with a cigar and cane, as well as a flaming hound that burned and growled in a choking voice; like it was suffocating with each passing breath. It seemed like Ashwatch had found them first.

 

[Miyu]

Good afternoon! This Mystery Thread has concluded due to reaching the deadline of June 16. If you both enjoyed roleplaying with another, then I highly encourage you both to continue to converse via PM or Discord if you are comfortable as such! If you wish to use the prompt given, please feel free to do so!

If you wish to participate in another Mystery Thread, just reply to your PM'd Application and request Manna Beast and/or Miyu to set you up for another one!

Thank you for participating; it was a joy to read along!