New Blood (multi-series fusion)

[Academia Nut]

Sailing through a metre of reinforced concrete originally designed to resist shelling by 16” guns before it had been reinforced against energy weapons, Seras observed that she really quite hated fighting shoggoths. The thing was quite literally capable of taking everything they threw at it and shrugging it off like it was a flea bite. Actually, she was fairly certain that the creature was getting stronger the longer she and Mercer pounded on it.

The biggest issue was that it was mostly an amorphous blob of goo with no actual important organs, so that all the usual methods of stabbing, slashing, and pounding did not really do anything. Oh, they could puncture eyes or knock out teeth, but those were not particularly important. Worse yet, when they did manage to hack off a chunk, it just reintegrated with the main body with stunning speed.

Of course, an eternally regenerating blob would not be that scary if not for the fact that the bloody thing was ridiculously strong and fast. It could cover prodigious amounts of ground in an eye blink and its pseudopods could throw torso sized boulders at anti-tank velocities. Mercer had nearly been bitten in half three times now, the last time actually losing a leg when Seras pulled him out of the ravenous maw.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, the two of them had pulled back from the beast and started pelting it with chunks of broken masonry, which didn’t really do anything but piss it off and elicit return fire. If it weren’t for the fact that Ellie had run off blindly – almost literally due to the one eye shut by a wound on her forehead – they would have made a complete retreat. The two of them were completely outclassed, but neither was prepared to retreat. Well, Seras wasn’t about to retreat, she was not quite sure about Mercer although she suspected it was some mix of familial loyalty and simply not being physically able to retreat.

Trying to draw the creature’s attention as it started to get bored and move back into the base in the general direction Ellie had gone had elicited Seras to get a little closer than she probably should have, and her subsequent trip through the local architecture was the result, although she was fairly certain that the shoggoth had intended to reel her in.

The only good news was that there was a pair of huddling Dagonite cultist soldiers on the other side of the wall. Grabbing the two screaming humans, Seras jumped through the hole she had come through, dodging a tree trunk sized pseudopod that was breaking the sound barrier in a whip crack that sounded like thunder. Landing next to Mercer well away from the protoplasmic monstrosity, Seras tossed one of the screaming, thrashing men to Alex to top up his reserves before she buried her face in the other man’s neck.

The both of them were leaping away a second later, the remains of their meal dragging behind them as they jumped onto a badly listing loading crane. Sucking in the last drops of blood before she let the corpse drop, Seras asked, “Got any special moves you’ve been hiding?”

His feeding tendrils withdrawing with the last few bits of his own meal, Mercer replied, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m afraid that an army of ravenous ghouls won’t be much help at this point,” Seras replied sadly.

Leaping clear of the crane as it started to topple with its base crushed by the shoggoth barrelling over it, Mercer noted, “I’ve fought bigger things before, but I usually had a tank… and even then the fucking things had the decency to have organs.”

“I hate to ask, have you tried jamming your tentacles into it?” Seras asked while tilting her head to the size to avoid a head sized boulder that was moving just shy of the speed of sound.

“First thing I tried. It tastes worse than you,” Mercer replied while vaulting over a former blockhouse to put some distance between him and the shoggoth. Seras just flew over it, but stayed close enough to listen.

“So even if it had blood I probably wouldn’t be able to drain it,” Seras mused.

“You drain any sorcerers?” Mercer asked.

“Nope,” Seras replied.

Back flipping to dodge a section of spinning pipe that was making a really weird noise as it travelled, Mercer leapt away and said, “Well, I’ve eaten enough to have some good theories on the nature of shoggoths, but I’m incapable of sorcery myself so I couldn’t even begin to work on a control spell.”

Grabbing a five tonne girder out of a pile of rubble that had once been a building and hurling it at the beast, Seras noted, “What we really need to do is to burn it up and destroy the majority of its biomass.”

“Oh for the days of gasoline,” Alex lamented.

“Isn’t this island studded with energy weapons?” Seras asked, glancing about in the bleak rain at the various areas on fire.

“It was and most of them were still viable despite my tender ministrations, right up until the fishy freak showed up with his pet,” Alex said, pausing to leap a good five metres straight back to avoid a pseudopod that put a two metre wide crater in the concrete. Continuing he said, “The fuck did not seem to care about the collateral damage caused, and then the NEG decided to pull off a bombing run.”

“If it weren’t for the fact that they were as likely to hit us as the shoggoth, I would ask for another one, preferably with napalm,” Seras noted.

“They stopped using napalm decades ago. They use a fullerene stabilized thermite-white phosphorous-magnesium-ozone gel these days,” Alex pointed out helpfully before he grabbed a Deep One in power armour and hurled it into the waiting maw of the shoggoth, slowing it down for a second as it chewed on the tough alloy.

“I have a question then: if the technology is that advanced why the bloody hell don’t these powered armour suits have guns?” Seras asked in disgust as she broke one of the useless things over her knee and threw bits of scrap into the shoggoth at excessive velocities, slashing it up and burst its eyes. Sadly, as always the damage was quickly regenerated.

“The NEG’s best minds have come to the conclusion that the designers were quite simply incredibly stupid,” Alex replied with a resigned shrug.

Abruptly the mid-fight banter and consultation was interrupted by the sky lighting up as one of the plasma cannon batteries that had previously gone silent began to fire again, tracking across the sky in a way that indicated that it actually had a target. Seras and Mercer both blinked at each other before Mercer said, “You have that funky telekinesis so you won’t break it when you pick it up, I’ll keep the attention of ugly over here.”

“Don’t get eaten before I get back,” Seras told him.

“I’ll try,” Mercer replied in a way that indicated that he was being serious and not sarcastic.

Putting herself far from the shoggoth while Alex threw blast doors at it to draw its attention, Seras centred her mind and then stepped through the substance of the bunker that housed the still firing gun. A group of five cultists were inside, and reacted rather well to her suddenly stepping out of the shadows, which was to say that they immediately opened fire with automatic weapons. The non-blessed lead bullets were like a refreshing rain after the beatings that the shoggoth could dish out, and Seras had to admit that she wasted a little time replenishing her stock of blood and souls.

Going through that wall had cut free a few souls and the snack she had had early had been wholly insufficient in making up for the deficit.

Her chorus of souls once more in the positive for the battle, Seras wasted no more time in ripping the weapons battery out of its mooring; although considering that the generator, fire control, and actual gun were in three separate places that actually took a bit of work and juggling. She kind of wished for a Flak 88 despite doing less damage and being heavier, since it wouldn’t leave her juggling cables and components. Plus, there was something viscerally pleasing about pulling a trigger.

Flying up high and slow with the height of her burden, Seras knew that she made a rather tempting target and just hoped that the shoggoth did not have a keen sense of spatial awareness and the tactical insight to figure out what she was doing. Fortunately it was too busy snapping at Alex’s heels as he ran around in frantic circles about the ruins of the island to really notice her.

Seras shouted no war cry and gave no warning. She just typed in the firing solution to the quad-battery anti-aircraft plasma cannon and opened fire. Like a thunder-god of old, Seras poured bolts of brilliant energy into the shoggoth, which squealed an incongruously high pitched, piping noise of agony. The ground about it exploded as the packets of super-hot, ionized gas slammed into matter and boiled it away. Seras did not let up, but carefully played the anti-vehicular weapon around like a fire hose, trying to obliterate every last trace of the shoggoth.

Unfortunately, she spent a little too long sitting high in the air firing energy blasts that were visible out to the horizon down into the island, and the NEG aircraft hidden by the bad weather decided that a red and black woman floating impossibly in the air while shooting things was probably something they should launch a missile or two at.

Reforming on the ground amidst a halo of burning wreckage, Seras had barely finished pulling herself back together when Mercer grabbed her arm and hauled her upright in a thoroughly unnecessary but appreciated gesture. Nodding at the glowing crater covered in bits and pieces of bubbling black tar, he said, “I think you got it.”

Reforming her head so that she could reply, Seras said, “I think you’re right, but still; ouch.”

“Let’s go get Ellie before she gets herself into trouble,” Alex suggested gruffly, although Seras could also detect an unsaid, ‘Or another air strike arrives.’

“I think she’s somewhere near the centre of the base and down deep,” Seras replied, leaning on her connection to her master to locate her. “Let’s get… going…?”

Seras trailed off as she heard a most peculiar sound behind her, one that caused both her and Alex to turn in pained disbelief.

“Oh that’s just not fucking fair,” Alex faintly whined as the two of them watched the bits of sizzling black tar swell and merge, fed by an extradimensional reservoir of biomass. It grew larger and larger with each passing moment, but whereas before it had no defined shape beyond temporary sensory and offensive organs grown and discarded as needed from moment to moment, this time it had definite shape. Thick, segmented bands of a dull metallic material wrapped around a distinctly serpentine shape that eventually terminated at one end in a tri-pronged maw that was filled on the interior with the same amorphous black tar studded with randomly shifting collections of mouths and eyes.

“Not fucking fair at all,” Seras agreed, before she added on, “Think its plasma proof?”

“I bet if we threw it into the sun that would do it, but otherwise yes,” Alex replied as the two of them were backing away from the shoggoth as it finished its regeneration and let loose a high pitched, warbling whistle that was far more disturbing than it should have.

“Have any idea where we could find any of that super-napalm you mentioned earlier?” Seras asked.

“It doesn’t spread underwater so Dagonites don’t use it,” Alex replied while he had a distinctly uncomfortable look on his face.

“Well… I’m out of ideas,” Seras replied.

“I’m fairly certain running would be futile at this point,” Alex agreed.

Rearing up as if to strike, the shoggoth then abruptly turned and slithered away, disappearing into the North Sea. Both Mercer and Seras blinked for a second before Mercer said, “Huh… the sorcerer controlling it must have died and the shoggoth returned to instinct.”

The two of them turned to each other before they both blurted out, “Ellie!”

[Satori]

Not the Spear of Logos.. LUGH's Spear. This is Tuatha magic.

OH! I didn't notice she's lost an eye.
And Died. And might die again.

Shit, that really changes things...

She's got too many X chromosomes to be Woden....

[LadyTevar]

No one ever said there was a chromosone limit on the Quest for Wisdom.

[EarthScorpion]

And male, female, she's the one with the stabby spear (that can stab through the Guard of Yog Sothoth) right now.

[Academia Nut]

Ellie woke lying face down in cold, barren dirt. Feeling like she had been kicked repeatedly in her everywhere, she struggled to her feet and looked up. She then closed her eyes for a second, felt the ground beneath her, and then opened her eyes more. She blinked repeatedly a few times and then went to rub her eyes just to check if she was seeing things correctly. At that point she clued in to the fact that her gloves were missing.

Ellie was not in the Index. In fact, she was fairly certain that she was not anywhere near the British Isles, and quite probably not on Earth, considering the strangeness of her translocation. Where before she had been deep underground in the cold and damp of a rocky island in the North Sea now she was laying in the dead earth of a pair of dirt paths that met at a crossroads, surrounded on all sides by black, twisted, desiccated trees that seemed to have shadows cling to them like parasitic moss. The sky above was overcast with bleak, inhospitable clouds that seemed ever on the edge of terrible rain that would also never come to parch these trees. What light that did leak through was sickly and crimson, like the heavens above were bleeding.

“Ah, jeune fille, you awake at last,” a peculiarly accented man’s voice said from nearby, followed by a wry chuckle and the addition of, “Awake of a sorts in this case.”

Looking over her shoulder, Ellie found a man who she was sure had not been there for her first scan of the area slouched against one of the trees. He was dressed in antique military fatigues, with much of his face obscured by a combination of unruly hair, a broad rimmed floppy hat, and a prominent leather eye patch over his left eye. Despite his military outfit, his hair extended in a definitively off-regulation ponytail that was looped casually about his neck.

“Who are you?” Ellie asked in confusion and worry as she tried to get to her feet.

“Un ami, or ah, I suppose I should rather say a friend,” the man said. He then grinned in a peculiar way and said, “Although mon ami, I should warn you that there are many who would claim to be your friend in this place.”

Struggling to her feet and earning an impressed whistle from the man, Ellie asked, “Okay Mr. Clever, where are we then?”

“A place of death and madness,” he stated, before he grinned broadly and said, “Fortunately we are dead things already and all a little mad to have got that way in the first place, so it affects us little.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Ellie asked in trepidation.

“The servants of your vassal, notre Reine… ah, our Queen. I suppose that makes you Queen of Queens. We shall protect you in this place,” the man explained.

“You know, you haven’t really answered any of my questions,” Ellie pointed out.

“Cela est vrai,” the man replied with a shrug. “Then I suppose I should say that mon nom est Captain Bernadotte, loyal retainer of the Raven Queen, Seras Victoria. I am here to escort you back to her castle for the time being.”

Shaking her head, Ellie stated, “No, I’m not going anywhere until I know where I am.”

“The forbidden place of dreams,” a small, female voice whispered just behind Ellie’s left ear, causing her to nearly jump out of her skin. Before she could locate the source of the voice she saw Captain Bernadotte throw something behind her, followed by an almost comical squeal of pain.

“What the bloody fucking hell was that?” Ellie cried out in horror as Bernadotte slouched over to the vacant space behind Ellie that now had a rather plain looking silver pitchfork sticking out of the ground.

Picking up the pitchfork, Bernadotte said, “It is one of those things that you don’t want to say the name of, lest you give it strength. Let it be safe to say that I am keeping an eye on it.” He then glared at a point just behind Ellie, eliciting a slight hiss and for Ellie to spin around and find nothing. There was a grunt, and Bernadotte said, “You can not see it unless it wants you to, part of its nature is that it is always behind its chosen victim.”

“That’s… that’s excessively creepy,” Ellie said, feeling her back crawl with the thought of something following always just behind her, and she found that she was constantly checking her peripheral vision.

“Ah mon ami, that is, it is not recommended. There are, ah, things in this place that like to lurk in the edges of the vision like that. It is best to ignore that which creeps behind; it is mostly just playing with you and will soon grow bored if it does not get the entertainment it desires from you,” Captain Bernadotte advised.

“Oh, I have a greater attention span than that,” the girlish voice whispered, and Ellie shuddered, just knowing that the thing creeping behind her was smiling in glee at her distress. Bernadotte threw the pitchfork once again and again elicited a yelp of pain and irritation.

“What is that?” Ellie asked.

“Ah, a gift from a friend of yours to help keep the creeper off you,” Bernadotte stated, seeming to enjoy having access to the strange weapon.

“From Seras?” Ellie asked.

“Non,” Bernadotte said darkly, leaving it at that. Ellie could somehow tell that the thing behind her was frowning.

“We shall have to have words later,” the creeper muttered darkly.

Captain Bernadotte glared at the presence behind Ellie and said, “As much as it irritates me, you are invited. You don’t need to follow her around.”

“I merely wish to ensure that she stays safe in this place,” the creeper behind whispered sweetly.

Bernadotte menaced with the pitchfork for a second, causing the presence to back off just a touch. Shrugging dejectedly, he replied, “Isn’t she a little low down on the food chain for you to bother?”

“She has drawn the interest of those for whom it is my job to be interested in,” the voice said with an innocent verbal shrug at the end.

Rolling his one good eye, Bernadotte said, “Well if I cannot discourage you further, c’est la vie. Just remember I have this.” He then hefted the pitchfork over her right shoulder and began to walk away. A soft hiss from behind Ellie’s left shoulder was the only response.

Ellie followed the strange man through the scary woods, which was something she was pretty sure that her mother had advised her not to do, but the existence of the thing behind her kept her moving forward in any case. Between him and the voice, she would rather follow the one she could actually see. As they walked across the parched dirt path, the trees seemed to close in further on the sides and above with each step, until finally they were in tunnel of dead branches that had all locked together into a solid mass.

“How much further?” Ellie asked speculatively, trying not to let the motion in her peripheral vision get to her.

“Ah mon jeune fille, we are already here,” Bernadotte replied.

Ellie blinked and found that the scenery had abruptly shifted and that she was now standing within a great hall that looked like it was simultaneously out of some historical drama and yet also from no time in history. If she had to guess, it almost looked like some great medieval feast hall, but furniture was all from the past century and instead of shields and swords on the wall there were guns. Lots and lots of guns. What really made the hall stand out as something from out of time though were the thrones at the ends of the great table that dominated the centre of the long room.

There were three of the great chairs set at the table, two at one end and the third at the opposite end of the table. The single chair was singular in the heavy, brooding malice and darkness it radiated, like it was carved from the heart of a black hole, as impossible as that was outside of metaphor. Despite the great weight of that single chair, it was perhaps the most subdued of the three. Of the other two chairs, one was closer to the table and set a bit lower than the other, and was crafted of human bones and red leather in a way that said that the only name it could possibly have was ‘Skull Throne’. Somehow even it was eclipsed by the final throne.

Ellie was drawn to that great, high backed chair, upholstered with rich purple velvet and decorated with images of chained dragons that held gilded regalia. In comparison to the other two thrones, which were more than a little malevolent – the bone throne less than the black one for some strange reason – the final throne, while more than a little gaudy also oozed dignity and regal – no, Imperial – power.

Captivated as she was with the room on display, Ellie missed the approach of the occupants of the room until one of the women said, “Pip, you were supposed to protect the girl and look what’s following her!”

Captain Bernadotte shrugged and said, “It started following her and could not be discouraged.”

“Well I can take over from here, so give back the Trident to the beings behind the veil that lent it to us; you’re going to be needed on the walls anyway,” the woman said while making shooing motions. She was a kindly but firm looking older dame with a fashion sense from some century other than the one Ellie was intimately familiar with.

Rolling his eyes in annoyance and earning a swat for his trouble, Captain Bernadotte hurried over to a quiet section of the hall that was curtained off. One look at the curtains made Ellie instinctively know that she did not want to know what was on the other side. Instead she focused on the silver haired matron who looked at her and said, “Don’t mind Pip, he likes to change around his accent to annoy visitors.”

“What? I… oh, he’s French or something like that, right?” Ellie said, stumbling over the abrupt declaration.

“He is indeed French… French-Swedish and he was raised in part in South-Africa and is a world traveller, so trying to place his accent is an exercise in frustration. I hope he wasn’t too annoying,” the woman explained.

“I… I think I was a little distracted,” Ellie admitted.

Glancing over Ellie’s shoulder, the woman glared and said, “And don’t you know it’s rude to stalk people?”

“It’s rude not to keel over you old hag,” the voice behind Ellie whispered.

“I didn’t get to be chamberlain by having poor hearing dear,” the woman quipped, earning an irritated hiss from the voice behind Ellie. She then turned back to Ellie and said, “And yes dear, I do know that I am bludgeoning you with facts before introducing myself. I am Chamberlain Katherine Waters, loyal servant of the Raven Queen, Seras Victoria.”

“Okay, you know, maybe you can give me a straight answer. Where am I?” Ellie asked, feeling inordinately put upon now that she no longer felt like a hideous monster was going to come crashing out of the forest.

“You’re in the Dreamlands my dear, so technically you’re still in the Index. Also you’re not entirely in the Dreamlands since you are much more within the Queen’s soul structure right now,” Katherine explained.

“The Dreamlands… as in the thing that drives people mad or kills them in their sleep?” Ellie asked, her fear rising again.

“It was not always so, and Seras has reached something of a détente with the ruler of this place… who you are going to have to have an audience with,” Katherine stated, sucking on her teeth a touch towards the end.

Ellie blinked. Ellie considered this. Ellie blinked again. Finally, she said the only thing possible in such a situation.

“What.”

Holding her hands up in a placating manner, Katherine said, “Just an avatar you can understand. Nothing sanity blasting. The beings behind the curtain insisted.”

“Besides, it would be no fun to end the game here,” the voice at Ellie’s shoulder whispered almost mockingly.

“What.”

“Well, when a representative of one of the Outer Gods demands that you be given a proper audience, even a Great Old One has to listen, and when an unprecedented three do so, even the master of the Dreamlands has to acquiesce,” Katherine explained. She then shot a glare over one of Ellie’s shoulders, generating a light giggle.

“What.”

“Plus without you to bind the Queen to the material world she probably would have moved shop here entirely, something that the Shadow of Night has been trying to avoid for the past five decades or so since he first got his nose punched in by the Queen and decided she was more trouble than she was worth. Especially since as the Queen’s queen attacking you would be an attack upon her person directly and essentially a declaration of a hot war rather than the cold one we have maintained,” Katherine continued on, obviously ignoring the glaze appearing over Ellie’s eyes.

“What.”

“So yeah, you have to meet the Eater of Dreams to appease the interests of the Gentleman Beyond the Veil, the Singer in Strings, and the Herald,” Katherine stated.

Before Ellie could say ‘What’ one more time, an all too familiar voice behind her said, “Indeed.”

Ellie froze up, a fortunate act as Katherine immediately blurted out, “Ellie! If you value your sanity don’t turn around.”

Ellie didn’t move, and the dark voice behind her said in good humour, “Oh, you always were the flatterer Katherine.”

There was an annoyed, feminine sound from behind Ellie and the voice said, “I suppose I have you to thank for the insect getting his hands on the Trident?”

“It was a joke I suspected you would appreciate, Madonna,” the voice chuckled out.

“We do have a veiled off area for those of you possessing incomprehensible dimensionality without causing harm to our more sensitive guests,” Katherine suggested.

Laughing with just-killed-corpse-warmth, the dark voice said, “I know, it’s why I came to fetch this one.” There was then a sound like an annoyed kitten being picked up by the scruff, and Katherine practically tackled Ellie to avert her gaze.

Just at the edge of her peripheral vision, Ellie saw something that she did not want to see, but fortunately the majority of it was obscured by argent and sable checkerboard patterns swirling through the air before whatever had been behind her disappeared behind the curtain on one edge of the room. Ellie lost track of time for a moment that was lost forever, but when she came back to she was sitting on the most regal of the three thrones.

“The Raven Queen informs me that she is currently preoccupied with taking care of your physical body, so you shall have to meet with the Shadow of Night on your own,” Katherine informed her quietly.

“By the authority of the Outer Gods, <Azathoth>, <Yog-Sothoth>, and <Nyarlathotep> we bid <Gurathnaka>, the Shadow of Night and Eater of Dreams to send an avatar to this place of meeting, so that we might discuss the matter of Elizabeth Doe, Heir to the Hellsings and Vassal-Lord to the Raven Queen, Mistress of Blood and Shadows, Devourer of Souls and Saviour of the Lost, Seras Victoria,” the rich voice behind the curtain boomed out, and Ellie nearly bolted for it, especially at hearing the names that the universe knew the gods by, not the ones that humans knew them by.

The greedy shadows about the black throne seemed to grow thicker for a moment and then coalesced into a vaguely humanoid form that hurt Ellie’s head to look at in any manner other than straight on, like it was trying to slip around her peripheral vision into the back of her eyeballs. The inky form exhaled in a way reminiscent of a death rattle and then said, “I am Gurathnaka, and I acknowledge the invitation to this place.”

Ellie looked around saw that the gathered human faces were waiting expectantly. Dredging up what she could remember of social cues, she said, “I am Ell… err… Elizabeth Doe… ah…”

“Show some more spine girl, you have the attention of the cosmos on this one,” the dark voice whispered in her ear despite the fact that she knew the body of it was far from her.

Something snapped, and Ellie blurted out in irritation, “And what do you want me to say?”

“A surrender of rights of territory would be nice,” the Shadow of Night mused.

“As Queen Elizabeth is the vassal-lord of the Raven Queen, that would require her to be in attendance,” Katherine pointed out.

“Indeed, we do not want you bullying her so crudely in your approach. Show a little more creativity,” the creeping voice stated sweetly from somewhere beyond the curtain.

“Is this a discussion between the mortal and me, or me and her coaches?” Gurathnaka asked in a bored tone.

“I would hardly call the Argent Madonna to be an ally of the Young Queen. However, you are correct that she needs to speak for herself,” the rich voice stated.

“And I say again, what do you want me to say? I’m not royalty and I’m not some god like the rest of you. I’m just some stupid girl picking through the wreckage of the world who has been thrust into things so far over my head I can’t even seen the surface of what I’m drowning in anymore. I spent my life avoiding insanity like Old Ones and Outer Gods and the Dreamlands, and now you want me to negotiate? Fuck that! Fuck you all!” Ellie cried out, feeling increasingly belligerent and manic at all the forces trying to push her about for their own purposes.

There was a sound that was distinctly like popcorn being chewed on coming from somewhere on the other side of the curtain and Ellie completely lost it. She screamed wordlessly and threw the spear she had not known she was holding through the curtain, eliciting a yelp of surprise and a deep, booming laugh of infinite amusement.

“YES! Yes, Young Queen, rage against the heavens! You do it so well!” The dark voice proclaimed.

“FUCK YOU TOO!” Ellie yelled, practically foaming at the mouth as she threw her spear once again, causing more approving laughter to erupt.

Gurathnaka chose this moment to speak up, and said, “Far be it from me to interrupt a mortal when they are attacking representatives of the Outer Gods, in fact the very ones that are protecting you from me, but I can’t help but notice that you have a Spear of Yog-Sothoth bound to you?”

“What of it?” Ellie barked.

“Well, if that is indeed yours then perhaps you do have some ground to negotiate as more than a pawn. Fighting mortals with such weapons is so tiresome when they will expire soon enough anyway, especially if you have the vampire at your command. I propose an extension of the truce offered to your vassal. I and my minions shall leave you in peace for the rest of your life, both in my Dreamlands and in your mortal world, and in extension you acknowledge my dominion over the rest of the Dreamlands,” Gurathnaka proposed.

“And what do you get out of it by my saying that you have the Dreamlands?” Ellie asked, too furious to really think about the fact that she was making demands of a Great Old One.

“It means you can’t attack him at a later date for being in the Dreamlands, that he has legitimate authority here in every place but that claimed by the Raven Queen,” Katherine explained.

“Exactly so,” Gurathnaka stated.

“And if you attack or your minions me in the waking world?” Ellie asked.

“I cannot,” Gurathnaka stated. “The power of the Outer Gods would bind me to my word, as it would bind you to yours, although you should see what a greater burden it will be to me since I will live so much longer than you and your power to affect the Dreamlands is so much less than mine to affect the waking world.”

“Okay, we’ll do that,” Ellie agreed.

“So it has been agreed,” the rich voice declared.

“Good. This avatar is tiresome in its simplicity and crudeness of communication. I feel as if my form is being contaminated by the mortal thought processes needed to form these words. Farewell and good riddance,” Gurathnaka stated before dissolving away.

Slumping back tiredly into her throne, Ellie asked rhetorically, “So if I hunted down his minions in the waking world and forced them to divulge vital information to a third party hostile to the Eater of Dreams…?”

The presences behind the curtain exploded into delighted laughter.

[Lerryn]

After several readings, I'm pretty sure I figured out what just happened, even if I'm not entirely clear on all the people (to use the term very loosely) involved. And it was Awesome.

[LadyTevar]

Ok... The little shadow behind her was the Crawling Chaos,Nyarunai-san

The one-eyed Frenchie is Capt. Pip Bernadotte the first soul Seras ever ate (after he begged her), and the man she still loves. Even the writer has said that in other circumstances they'd have been the perfect couple.

I am still trying to figure out if The Voice is Alucard or not. ACNut is being coy. Whatever "The Gentleman Beyond the Veil" is, he is Outer God power level, and equally mind-blowing should a human view him.

Spear of Yog-Shoggath? Uhh... Bonded to her. Shit... and here I was thinking it was "just" Gunghir.

[Academia Nut]

“Any questions rookie?” Agent Meddezy, senior OSS Agent and member of Project CHORUS, asked Agent Chandler.

“Two actually,” Chandler admitted. “The first is: are you going to start spouting witty one liners when we go into combat?”

Meddezy blinked a few times before she asked, “Agent Kolya?”

Chandler nodded, causing Meddezy to pinch the bridge of her nose in frustration. After a moment she said, “His brand of insanity is… atypical, so no, I won’t be doing that.”

Chandler mulled it over before he said, “Your word choice suggests that my second question is already answered, and in an unfortunate manner.”

“What was your second question?” Meddezy asked.

“Do you ever stop feeling silly with these camo-units?” Chandler asked, referring to the combination of sorcery and holography that produced the illusionary ominous black cloak he was expected to wear while interacting with non-OSS agents.

“Umm… have you studied sorcery?” Meddezy asked hopefully.

“No,” Chandler replied.

Shaking her head, Meddezy replied, “Then no, you won’t get used to until you do.”

“I thought shadows were dangerous for sorcerers? Isn’t it a little crazy to wear them?” Chandler asked pointedly.

“They’re not shadows, which are the absence of light, they’re a refraction of light in such a manner that you appear black from the outside while remaining fully lit on the inside. They’re quite useful just for that, but they really help keep us looking enigmatic and detached to those outside the agency,” Meddezy explained.

“Right… right…” Chandler muttered, accepting the technical if not the social explanation. He then asked, “So honestly, what’s your crazy release valve?”

Meddezy looked askance for a moment before she leaned in and whispered, “When the shit is really flying, there’s nothing quite as relieving as activating a few special tricks and cutting loose with lightning while cackling maniacally. My therapist is still trying to sort out if it is healthy or not.”

“Really.” Chandler said flatly.

“Really. I can already tell what your ‘healthy’ response to the stuff you see in the OSS will be,” Meddezy stated. She then smiled enigmatically and said, “But I’m not telling you until I see you do it because you might resist and pick an unhealthy response out of spite.”

Chandler blinked and said, “Look, I already only barely escaped having to go hunting for giant mecha-eating tigers – a phrase that I think actively drains IQ points just saying – in India because the Hellsing family name appeared on our radar twice in less than two weeks. I really don’t need that sort of thing.”

Glancing at the display screen on her AR glasses, Meddezy said, “Oh, looks like we’re less than a minute out. Better seal up.”

Rolling his eyes and sighing in frustration, Chandler sealed up his NaNBC suit and activated his camo-unit, which sealed him in what appeared to the outside world to be a light devouring black cloak that shrouded his face and body in shadow. He did have to give it to the OSS that at least their dress code for these sorts of situations did not actually require him to wear robes as the loss of mobility would have been outright suicidal. Better to go naked…

Before Chandler had a chance to ask the question about OSS sorcerers in need of ritual purity the transport they were on touched down and he was piling out along with her and their collective troops onto the ruined remains of the Dagonite base that had been blown to hell 26 hours previously by the military in an attack of opportunity. That had been the easy part, as once the guns had fallen silent they had wanted to drop a couple massive ordnance penetrator bombs into the location and permanently deny its use to the enemy but then the GIA had demanded a chance to run through any surviving data systems to look for intel.

It was at that point that things had become ‘sticky’ in inter-departmental terms. Since they needed to plan for a team to go into the base, they had looked up the last set of blueprints for the place, only to find that no one had bothered to upload the physical set to digital files and that had triggered a 12 hour tail chase until someone found them in old pre-NEG British Government archives. It was at that point that the name ‘Hellsing’ was noted on the files and that set up flags for both the OIS and the OSS. Everyone wanted a piece, particularly Project OSIRIS, but unfortunately they had already won an internal bid to go tiger hunting in India, and Chandler was too junior to the OSS to go without another in support, so they made a deal with CHORUS to let them have the case while Chandler tagged along.

So it was that Chandler was teamed up with the Nazzadi sorceress Meddezy of CHORUS so that they could coordinate with OIS and GIA elements in taking the island base. He had had Osiris and Raquel attached to his command to provide extra firepower in addition to the GIA commandos and OIS PA elements. He was not quite sure what it was exactly that CHORUS had brought aside from their own commandos, but the fact that they apparently had a primary base somewhere within the remains of Nevada was not particularly comforting.

Putting on his best ‘mysterious and dangerous government operative’ stride, Chandler walked out to the perimeter around the base that the forces already assembled had prepared. Meddezy walked up to the leader of the OIS PA team and asked in a modulated, hissing voice, “The area is secure?”

Speaking via wireless comms the power armoured team leader said, “Yes ma’am. There is no sign of activity on the surface.”

“Any sign of the outsider detected by the missile cams?” Meddezy asked.

“Negative ma’am. We have found no signs of a body either, although there are signs of what looks like some form of mechanized warfare,” the man replied.

Rumbling on to the scene, his bright wardings concealed by a tarp wrapped about him like a cape, Osiris seemed to sniff the cold, salty North Sea air before he declared, “He was here… he might still be here.”

Nodding, Meddezy said, “We have confirmation on the presence of a Keter-level threat, along with the probable presence of another Keter-level. If either is encountered, pull back.”

“Shoot to kill, at least one of them is a shape shifter so it can appear far less deadly than it actually is. If it doesn’t go down to the first volley I recommend turning your guns on yourselves, because I’m incinerating anyone I think could have possibly come in contact with the target,” Osiris warned.

There was a palpable aura of dread before there was a slight tilt to the power armour and the man announced to his men, “Everyone maintain infiltrator status. If anyone goes out of contact, they are to be assumed hostile and I will personally shoot anyone who disobeys that order.”

“Move your men forward,” Meddezy ordered, relaying it to all commands and sending in the teams that had been assembled, carefully sweeping the debris and rubble.

Chandler quietly sidled up to Meddezy and whispered over the encrypted OSS channel, “I know the OIS team lead, that’s Pankaja Bachchan. I went out for a beer with him last month.”

“Are you going to let this get personal?” Meddezy asked sceptically.

“No, I just thought it best I inform you of that lest it come up later at an inopportune time. Plus it’s really weird since I know he thinks I’m dead,” Chandler admitted.

“Thank you for your honesty, and that’s actually one of the big reasons we wear these camo-units: it keeps people from our past lives from recognizing us unless we go out of our way to let them know, which is of course frowned upon. How is Agent Bachchan?”

“He’s a good, solid professional. Oh, we should probably make sure the team members I took with me from OIS are deployed well away from his troops, lest they get recognized,” Chandler stated, somewhat belatedly.

“I’m passing along a deployment update as we speak,” Meddezy stated coolly.

Shortly after Chandler and Meddezy had their little talk a broadcast came in over the radio that said, “Sir, ma’am, we’ve got a weird body that looks to have come into contact with an outsider.”

“Open a video session, let’s get a look at what you’ve found,” Meddezy ordered, and in short order there was a live video feed from the sergeant of the squad that reported the body. The feed was filtered for potential AWS vectors and for stability, but neither was really needed here as the sergeant was keeping his head professionally steady as he looked over the splayed out body of the Dagonite cultist lying in the rubble of a bunker. The deranged human was unnaturally still in death, and even more unnaturally pale. The cause of this was due to the gaping wounds in his throat.

“Huh… never encountered a vampire before,” Meddezy noted on the private OSS channel.

“I’ve encountered weirder, but yeah,” Chandler agreed.

“Secure the area, OSS assets will make a physical assessment,” Meddezy ordered, cutting the video feed. She then went to the general broadcast and said, “To all units, at least one of the outsiders present causes death by controlled exsanguination. Mark and record all bodies discovered bearing fang marks around the throat and suffering from a complete draining of blood or other vital fluids.” She then glanced at Chandler and asked, “Do you want the honours or shall I?”

“I need to keep an eye on Osiris, so it’s all yours,” Chandler proclaimed.

“Good call. Squad Epsilon will provide escort services,” Meddezy ordered, leaving Chandler with the rear guard about the perimeter.

Chandler’s caution paid off a few minutes later when Osiris announced, “Rock strata are beginning to interfere with communication between HQ and deeply penetrated squads. Requesting a repeater to be set up to ensure constant real-time communication.”

“Request acknowledged. Squad Zeta will accompany me as we move to establish a relay station. Anything else to report?” Chandler stated as the men around the perimeter began to accompany him as they threaded the path of debris and collapsed rooms and passages to the most forward position that Osiris was holding.

Osiris switched to the private OSS channel and said, “My wards are tingling with residual energy. There was some major sorcery here very recently but it has been dispelled.”

“How major are we talking here?” Chandler asked quietly over the private channel.

“We’re talking about edging towards the ‘nuke the site from orbit’ end of the scale of workings. Someone put a serious amount of energy into this place. The last time I felt like this was when we deployed to assist in the clean up of the mess at Herkunft. It had the same broken ward feeling… although…” Osiris reported, hesitating towards the end.

“Although? Do we need to pull back and let whatever CHORUS brought with them off its leash?” Chandler asked while putting up a fist to halt the advance of the squad attached to him.

“No… no. This ward was not broken by brute force. If anything I would say that whoever built it willingly dispelled it. That’s how the residual energies feel on my wards in any case,” Osiris reported, causing Chandler to get his troops to resume their forward advance.

“Did you get that Meddezy?” Chandler asked.

“Negative, I was busy examining this corpse and did not listen in. It is… it is wow, I have never seen anything like this before,” Meddezy replied.

“We have a breached warding reported to be of a similar magnitude to the sort used to contain OSS projects. I don’t want to hear things like that,” Chandler replied.

“I agree. I will need to examine more thoroughly back at a lab, but this body has no residual anima-neural patterns, which usually persist for at least a few days before decay causes total cessation of activity,” Meddezy stated.

“So the Dagonite was drained of not just blood but his soul too?” Chandler asked incredulously.

“It certainly seems that way. I’m having the troops tag this body and moving to your position, we can collect the remains on our way out,” Meddezy replied.

“Affirmative. We are at Osiris’ position and deploying the relay now,” Chandler reported, watching out of the corner of his eye as the men went to work. The majority of his attention was taken up by Osiris scanning about the ruined antechamber they found themselves in. He reminded Chandler vaguely of a hunting dog tracking by scent.

“Zeus was here,” Osiris muttered darkly. “But there’s something else going on. Zeus has never shown any inclination towards sorcery.”

“Can you describe what you feel in any more detail?” Chandler asked.

“The sorcerers can do that better than I can… for me it’s like a lingering scent in the air or a tingle of static on the skin, and I can only compare it to what I’ve felt before. There was something big buried in here,” Osiris described quietly.

“Does it feel like Dagonite magic?” Chandler asked.

Osiris seemed to pause to consider it before he said, “No… no, it is not like… wait, yes, yes I have felt something like this before, shortly after my entombment, but it was much, much weaker then. This is human magic. Old human magic, before it was cleaned and sanitized in this century.”

“So cultists?” Chandler asked.

“No, no this is… how much do we know about the people who controlled this place before the Dagonites set it up as a sniper’s nest for our aircraft?” Osiris asked.

“The Hellsings were some sort of black group under the old British Government who disappeared at the start of the First Arcanotech War. Most of their files were never transferred to computer and we seen neither hide nor hair of them until we got a hit on someone claiming to be the Hellsing heir in that row with Chrysalis last week. Other than that they’re a mystery,” Chandler stated.

“You know, considering the bodies we’ve been finding, the thought occurs that there was an Abraham von Helsing in Dracula,” Osiris mulls over.

Chandler blinks behind his helmet and cloak before he says, “No. No, seriously no. I know that fairly tells often have horrid grains of truth behind them, but I refuse to accept that two hundred year old published fiction could possibly be at work here. I can accept vampires as some sort of species of ghoul or the like, but Dracula? Really?”

“You know stranger things have happened,” Osiris chided.

“Yes, but nothing so contrived as published fiction turning out to be true,” Chandler decried.

“Umm… sir, we’re going to need another relay for this one,” a soldier stated over the radio, offering a wireless transmission of spiral staircase descending even deeper into the stone. The man took a step forward and the signal crackled, showing the problem, before he stepped back to maintain contact with the outside world.

“We’re going to need a landline for that,” Chandler noted sourly.

“PA won’t be able to navigate those stairs. It is foot troops only in there,” Osiris noted darkly.

“Oh wow, I just got my first taste of that warding you were talking about Osiris. That’s one hell of a residue,” Meddezy announced over the radio.

“Let me guess, it is centred on whatever is at the bottom of the stairwell,” Chandler stated.

“Actually the warding at this level is distributed throughout the local stonework, although there are multiple ones I am picking up and it looks like there are more deeper down… and yeah, when I throw a map overlay overtop they line up quiet nicely with the location you’re recording, just about thirty metres down,” Meddezy replied.

“Will you be taking this one?” Chandler asked.

“No, seeing all of this I need to pull back so that I can authorize use of CHORUS assets if needed to sterilize this location. You’re up rookie,” Meddezy answered cheerfully.

“Fuck,” Chandler muttered to no one but himself before he switched over to the OSS command channel and said, “I want an assault squad assembled from OSS assets. Osiris, I want you on the other end of our cable as we go down there and if you lose contact I want you to incinerate the stairwell and pull all assets back. It might not help, but it might buy Meddezy time to get her toy ready.”

“Of course,” Osiris replied. He then said, “I won’t pull back though. I can buy more time if I block the stairs.”

Chandler nodded, although the gesture was muddled behind his disguise. In the short time he had know the cyborg Chandler had come to know that Osiris was a lot of things, but he was not averse to making the same sacrifices he demanded of others.

Waiting a few minutes for Meddezy to get clear and for the OSS squads to sort out who was best for the job, Chandler and Osiris moved into position and watched the selected men assemble. Carrying an excess of heavy weaponry, the only odd man out was the one in charge of carrying the spool of cable that would keep them in contact with the surface as they descended into the rock.

Wondering if his second OSS mission would be his last, Chandler took a deep breath as he ordered the squad forward, trailing behind to oversee them as he also made sure that the fibre-optic cable spooled out properly. After a few tense moments they reached the landing, where the man on point held up a hand to pause the squad.

“We have grenade and bullet damage sir,” the man reported at just above a whisper, pointing to the tell-tale chips and blackening of a fragmentation grenade detonation and the pock marks of bullet impacts.

“That’s… peculiar,” Chandler muttered quietly. “Not the typical tools of Keter-class threats. Please breach when ready.”

The soldier nodded and the men quietly consulted amongst each other in military sign, the point man extending out an optical cable around the edge of the archway that served as the passage. After a moment he signalled no enemies but that there was a hazard. At a silent command from the impromptu squad leader the men surged forward. Trailing a moment behind until he got the all clear, Chandler exited the stairwell into the chamber beyond.

Two men had gone out ahead to circle around the arcane-looking cube at the centre of the plateau and signalled all clear, prompting several of the soldiers to turn on high powered lamps and several others to crack open flares, providing illumination to the ghastly place. Chandler’s eyes swept about the area and took in the features; particularly the dark, tacky spots that signified that something with iron based blood had died within the past day.

“The first three kills were quick, headshots if I have the spatter correct. They were in close formation… looks like the clean kills form a half circle, so the whole group was probably in a full circle,” Chandler muttered as he analyzed the details. Nodding, he said, “After the first three things get messier…”

Standing over the splatter on the stone bridge, Chandler crouched down to examine it and said, “Looks like a dozen bullets exiting from the stairwell, and two dozen going towards it, with the second grouping being post-mortem. Human, or whatever it was, shield then. We have another headshot over there, but that had to have occurred after the bastard here was shot, because I see spatter coming from that direction.”

Tracing out the angles in his head, Chandler looked over at the last spatter before he said, “Whoever was attacking, and they were attacking, then dropped their shield. The calibre changes with this one, and the spacing is different. Someone used a bigger gun with a lower rate of fire, and at least half the shots were unnecessary. Someone check the rubble of that grenade blast for anything like a syringe or auto-injector, I think we’ve got a berserker.”

“Yes sir,” one of the men guarding the man with the cable announced, the leashed soldiers keeping his gun up to watch out for his fellow as he examined the group.

“We’ve got bodies sir!” Another soldier announced, shining a high powered lamp down into the darkness of the chasm surrounding the platform. A good forty metres down the broken bodies of six Deep One elites could be seen, having fallen into an enormous pile of human bones. The soldiers were tossing in more flares to illuminate the ghoulish collection, but it seemed like the bones surrounded the platform to an unknown depth.

“Subterranean cannibal cults, just perfect. I hate those,” Chandler muttered darkly. He then snapped his attention back to the evidence before him and carefully treads forward. “Okay, we have a few bloody boot prints from stepping into the pool of blood from the Deep One shield, so there was a seventh member.” He then asks, “Number of bodies down there?”

“Unknown, potentially thousands, sir,” one of the soldiers reports.

Mentally kicking himself for imprecision, Chandler revised his question and asked, “How many fresh ones?”

“Six here, sir,” the man immediately reported. There was a flurry of negatives from the rest of the men examining the pit.

Patching in to the fibre optic relay, Chandler asked, “Osiris, Meddezy, are you getting all of this.”

“Affirmative Chandler. I want you to confirm there are no hostiles in that cube and then I will head down there personally. I’m also telling the GIA and OIS that the OSS is taking this location over personally and ordering the military to secure the waters around this island no matter the cost. This is big,” Meddezy answered.

“I see this too, but this is not Zeus’ MO at all. He was in this stairwell at some point very recently though,” Osiris replied, clearly disturbed by the data.

“Sir, I’ve found the remains of an auto-injector. We’ll need forensics to tell exactly what was in there, but it has definitely been used,” the soldier searching the rubble reported.

“Okay, so we have one confirmed Keter-class threat definitely on this island, and another probable Keter-class what with being able to pick up an emplaced AA gun and flying with it… and we have someone hitting up a berserker stim to assault Deep One commandos with an assault rifle and a heavy pistol. What the fuck was going on down here?” Chandler mutters mostly to himself as he approaches the entrance to the cube, where a faint amber light is spilling out and the assault squad is lining up for another breach.

Standing off to one side, he gives the go ahead and the men quickly storm in, with a chorus of “Clear!” following shortly thereafter. Moving inside, Chandler looks about the room in mute awe and horror.

He can feel the arcane power in here. He can see the strange fetishes and tomes on display. Glancing about, he sees that a few of the cases seem empty, and while it is harder to tell he bets that the shelves are missing books.

“This… this is the Amber Room, sir,” one of the men reported.

“The Amber Room?” Chandler asked.

“It was originally constructed by in the 18th Century by the Tsars of Russia in St. Petersburg. The original was looted by the Nazis when they invaded and the replacement was blown up by the Migou, but this is… I’ve seen pictures and this is definitely the Amber Room,” the trooper explained.

“What the fucking hell is Russian architecture stolen by Germans doing in Northern Scotland?” Chandler demanded. He then added on, “And why is it glowing?”

“I think I found a clue about that sir,” one of the troopers called out, waving towards an empty display case.

Shining a flashlight on a brass plaque attached to the display case, he the man read out, “This spear was recovered by Hellsing operatives in February 1945 from a member of the Thule Society in Berlin. The Thule Society believed it to be the Lance of Longinus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ and gained mystical powers in doing so. Further examination cast doubt on the claim and the family placed the artefact in storage.”

“You know, I heard a rumour that it was Nazi vampires that attacked London back in 1997,” Osiris mused over the radio.

“No. No, the universe is not so stupid as to allow secret supernatural hunting societies and Nazi fucking vampires armed with spears out of mythology!” Chandler raved.

“We are a secret supernatural hunting society,” Osiris pointed out.

“Yeah, but we work with the public societies! Who the fuck lets monsters knowingly roam the night and refuses to tell the public about them?” Chandler ranted.

There was a polite chuckle and Meddezy said, “Congratulations Chandler, you’ve had your first break with reality. You’re demanding that it conform to your standards.”

Chandler paused for a moment, before he held up his hand to excuse himself. He then slowly and carefully walked out of the mystical cube filled with no-doubt incredibly dangerous artefacts. He then ever so carefully pulled off his helmet and took a deep breath.

Far away, a sonar operator was forced to admit to his supervisor that he heard distant, muffled profane language on his hydrophone, an event that was flagged for inspection by the intelligence agencies.

[The Vortex Empire]

Keter-Class threat? So the SCP Foundation is here too, eh?

Man, this story keeps getting better and better.

[LadyTevar]

Roll for SAN loss.

Very nicely done, loved the "published fiction turning true" quip. Did the NEG sanitize Lovecraft or something?

[White Haven]

Dammit, now I want to get back to Final War again, that whole published-fiction bit hit too close to home.

[Academia Nut]

Ellie awoke.

Upon reflection shortly after realizing that she was in fact awake, she realized what a miracle that actually was and felt the need to assess the situation to see just how far she had pressed her luck. The first thing she noticed was that she felt like she had been stuck in a ring with a gorilla for a couple of rounds of bare knuckle boxing. The second was that her throat felt like the Sahara desert.

Slowly, painfully untangling herself from the sheets wrapped around her, she stumbled over to a nearby bathroom. She was not particularly concerned about where she was at the moment, since she was clearly not a prisoner. Lurching up to the sink, she turned the tap and filled her shaking hands with the lukewarm water. Drinking the stale, slightly bitter water proved difficult at first, her parched mouth and throat coughing it up until she managed to get enough moisture to have her saliva flowing again.

After a few spluttering, messy handfuls, Ellie felt slightly more normal and decided to actually pay attention to the face staring back at her in the mirror over the sink. She grimaced at the sight, and the face staring back at her did so in turn. Her hair had fallen out for the most part, a known side-effect of abusing the contents of the injectors, leaving only a few wisps behind and patches of bleached out fuzz in their place. Her skin was also blotchy and bruised, covered in blue-black splotches that were starting to go green and yellow as the bruises started to fade. The large gash over her left eye had been expertly cleaned and stitched up, but both eyes looked like they had also blown blood vessels.

Closing her left eye experimentally, Ellie found that her perspective did not change. Switching which eye was open and which was not, she found her world went dark. Muttering darkly under her breath, she then shrugged and decided that she should be lucky to have at least one functional eye, let alone to be alive after what happened. She guessed she would have to do without stereoscopic vision for a while, or maybe even forever.

Examining the rest of her body, she found an achingly sore spot over her right kidney, and a large dressing about her left calf, both wounds from where she had taken damage from the reflective spell of the Deep One sorcerer. Wincing in particular at the wound over her kidney, she found that now that she had some water in her and that she was moving the toilet was calling rather insistently.

A few minutes later Ellie was rather glad that she could safely discount ‘bleeding from the kidney’ on her list of injuries, although her general dehydration was now even worse than before. Deciding that drinking from the bathroom sink was entirely inadequate, Ellie endeavoured to find a glass or something, and possibly to find out a bit more about where she was.

Exiting the small, cramped room where she woke up, Ellie discovered that she was at the top of a set of narrow stairs with two other adjacent doors. Peeking inside the other doors, she finds an even smaller room and a closet. Shrugging, she limps painfully down the stairs to find a small, antiquated kitchen, with Alex sitting on a rickety metal pipe chair at a dilapidated, peeling vinyl table.

“Heard you get up,” Alex noted while fiddling about with a pair of PCPUs, one of them presumably being Ellie’s.

“Where are we?” Ellie asked groggily.

“Southern Scotland, just off the east coast. We stole the submarine the Deep One sorcerer and his troops arrived at the island on,” Alex replied as he got up and grabbed a glass frosted over with mineral deposits.

Ellie blinked and asked, “Why do Deep Ones need submarines?”

“Why do people need cars?” Alex countered as he filled up the glass and handed it to her. He offered as advice, “Go slow or you’ll just cough it back up.”

“Thanks. You found an abandoned house?” Ellie asked as she gratefully sat down on another battered old chair that creaked and whined at the weight applied.

“Sort of,” Alex replied with a shrug as he went back to the electronics. “There was a crazy old man in a Hawaiian shirt ranting about his ‘wee keebles’ but when he determined that we weren’t cultists he decided to let us stay. He then wandered off into the night with a combat shotgun and we haven’t seen him since.”

“That’s… strange,” Ellie noted as she sipped at the bitter water.

“Half this village was burned down and the rest was abandoned save for him when we came ashore. It was clearly attacked, possibly by cultists, but I think the old man is the more likely culprit. Either way Seras is patrolling for him, just in case he is in trouble or forgets he let us stay here,” Alex explained.

“How… how long was I out?” Ellie asked tentatively.

“Sixty-six hours, give or take,” Alex stated before he finished up and looked Ellie over and scowled slightly more than usual. “How’re your eyes?”

“Left one’s blind,” Ellie replied.

Alex grimaced before he shook his head and said, “You’re lucky the women on both sides of your family have a habit of head-butting death in the face or it would be a lot worse right now.”

“Yeah… yeah…” Ellie said, trailing off.

Alex was quiet for a time before he said, “Seras told me that you had some unpleasant dreams while you were out.”

Ellie shuddered and said, “I would rather not talk about it…”

“I’ve eaten enough therapists to know that’s a bad idea,” Alex pointed out dryly.

Making a faintly amused nasal noise despite the morbid nature of the comment, Ellie added on, “…because I don’t want to draw the attention of the other participants. Also, most of the dreaming was just in my own head. Nightmares mostly.”

“What kind?” Alex asked.

Hanging her head for a moment, Ellie sort of half laughed and said, “Ironically, despite the shoggoth and the other things what most scared me was the Deep Ones. One of them picked me up and… and well, you know the stories. I… yeah, I really don’t want to talk about this, it really shook me up to dream about what they would have done.”

“They would have interrogated you and probably then either shot you or slit your throat,” Alex replied clinically.

“I… but you hear all those stories about the camps and-” Ellie began, half forgotten nightmares welling up.

Alex just shook his head and said, “It’s not like that… or rather not like how the NEG lets people imagine it. Deep Ones are not intensely sexual beings like humans are; rape is something alien to them.”

“But they’re always talking about rape camps in the news. Are those lies?” Ellie asked, confused.

“They’re… convenient truths. I’ve absorbed knowledge about them from a few cultists and Deep Ones and other individuals with first hand knowledge over the years. Legally and morally what goes on in them is rape, but it’s not the common cultural idea. Think less ‘Rape of Manchuria’ and more ‘Comfort Women meets Dachau’. The rape camps are a mixture of slave labour concentration camps and indoctrination centres,” Alex said, before he went a little distant, like he was dredging up old memories.

“The camps… they isolate you, take you away from friends and parts of your family. They tend to keep young children paired up with parents or older siblings for the purposes of increasing the despair of the inmates. They force you to work long hours with inadequate rations, but there’s an out you see. If you consent to sex with a Deep One you get reduced work and extra rations, and if you have children under your care they share the benefits. Some people can starve themselves to death… most can’t, not when there’s an out, and especially if they have to watch their kids or younger siblings starve first. So, a lot of people eventually break and do it. They make justifications that it will be just once, just enough to make it through until the camp is liberated, which they know has to be soon… but liberation rarely comes. So now, now they’re marked. All the other inmates know what they did, know that they’re unclean… but the guards, the guards are celebrating them, calling what they did a holy, sacred act. Eventually, you go again, and again, and you start standing out as having privilege. The other prisoners see you and hate you for what you are doing, so you ask your new friends if you could possibly move to new quarters. Next thing you know you’re shouting ‘Praise Dagon!’ on Sundays and you know you can never go back because you’ll be executed by your former friends, so then you pick up a gun and guard over the next batch of damned souls herded into the camp,” Alex explained in grim, academic detail.

Ellie just stared and gaped at the appalling truth.

“So yeah, the camps are rape camps, but they’re not some sort of industrial cattle processing centre where nubile young women are stripped naked, strapped down to metal tables and are assaulted day in and day out. Think living skeletons in black and white stripped uniforms three sizes too big, and middle aged women take off their clothes willingly just so their children can get something to eat. The camps don’t rape the body, they rape the spirit, and they are so good at it that the NEG would prefer people to shoot themselves in the head rather than go in there, because then they don’t have to shoot the victims themselves later. So they don’t tell you the full truth, they just let you imagine something more visceral but ultimately less horrifying,” Alex stated coldly.

“Well… well fuck,” Ellie breathed.

“So yeah, don’t worry about that. The Deep Ones will never pin you down and ravage you; they don’t understand that kind of thing. They will just make your life so horrible you either die or submit. That takes weeks though, and anything that would stop either Seras or I from bailing you out after the first day would probably vaporize you along the periphery, so that’s something of an unreasonable fear,” Alex said, a morbid little smile creeping in at the end.

“You’re just a ball of sunshine today, aren’t you?” Ellie asked.

“Well my only living relative decided to do something stupid and repeatedly almost died and was in fact clinically dead at one point, so I suppose I might be a touch grouchy,” Alex pointed out with a hint of sarcasm.

“That is true…” Ellie mumbled, hanging her head.

“I’ll get over it,” Alex replied. He then grinned and said, “Do you want to see what we recovered from the Index.”

“Well I know I got that weird spear thing…” Ellie said, trying not too hard to think about the name it had been called by an entity she did not particularly want to recall the name of.

“Yeah, that’s one hell of a weapon. I did some quick spectroscopy on it – the sub the Deep Ones used had a small lab space – and the metal is a nickel-iridium steel,” Alex said.

“So it’s meteoric in origin?” Ellie asked, somewhat dreading what else could be present then.

“In all probability, since it is definitely older than the 19th century when iridium was actually isolated. Although, the abundance of the element is significantly higher than most meteors, if still well below 0.1% of the total mass,” Alex explained.

“Great… just great. I bet it’s Colour-contaminated,” Ellie muttered.

“We checked and it’s not emitting anything like that,” Alex replied.

Frowning but deciding it wasn’t worth the effort to get upset about in comparison to everything else Ellie asked, “So what else did we take?”

“We had limited time, so we picked up the things Seras said ‘every Hellsing needs’, along with two artefacts she said she didn’t trust in the hands of anyone else. One was this sphere made of interlocking rings she said to never, ever touch and the other was this wooden mask she also said not to touch. Other than those two she picked up an antique pistol, a lead sword, a rosary, and about a dozen books,” Alex listed off idly.

“What books?” Ellie asked nervously.

“The Index had six copies of the Necronomicon, so Seras took the most complete version,” Alex replied.

“The Necronomicon? Seriously, the fucking Necronomicon?” Ellie asked with incredulous horror.

“Yup. I don’t know how, but they got their hands on an actual Arabic copy of the text and compiled it together with Greek and Latin versions and then translated it into English. It’s one of a kind in its depth and completeness,” Alex explained.

Ellie blinked. She then said, “I’m not a full blown occult scholar, but the Necronomicon was originally written in R’lyehan.”

Alex looked at her for a moment before he laughed, shook his head, and launched into an academic diatribe, “Oh right, you’ve been fed that lie. The Necronomicon, or Al Azif in the original Arabic, was primarily a history book originally, although some of the rituals it discussed could be used as actual spells. The big thing about it was that it talked about deities and history outside the accepted worldview of Islamic and Christian scholars, so it was banned in the mainstream for centuries. By the late 19th and early 20th century it had a bit of a revival when an English translation appeared, but by then it had been massively debased by multiple translations, commentaries, and additions. Seras says that most of the Greek editions made between the 16th and 19th century were actually made by the Roman Catholic Church and were intentionally laced with faulty spells to kill or drive insane anyone reading it. The English version from the 19th century was mostly disarmed in this sense, actually a bit too much, and for a while caught on as something of a ‘coffee table tome’ for dilettantes in the occult. From there things got kind of weird as it gained ‘cult’ status in the non-occult world, and as shifting attitudes meant that talking about the possibility of intelligent life on Earth millions of years ago didn’t get you automatically thrown into the crazy bin or burned at the stake there was an air of dissatisfaction with the book. People started to assume that the reason they weren’t crazy was because they had a faulty version and started looking around for ‘purer’ translations, which lead to even further debasing of the tome. Finally someone decided to translate it into R’lyehan and call it the original language. Incidentally; this was from English, so the tortured prose would certainly drive most linguists insane at this point. The NEG formed shortly after that point and decided to just run with it, declaring that edition to be the definitive one.”

Ellie absorbed all of this information and was silent for a time before she asked, “So how much does the NEG lie? I mean, I knew that they didn’t tell the truth all the time, but what you’ve told me…”

Chuckling harshly, Alex said, “You want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes? Well, while Seras picked up things like Unausprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, Book of Eibon, and the Book of Five Shadows as being essential to your eventual education…”

“Hold up! Hold up! Even if those books aren’t as bad as the NEG might say-” Ellie interrupted.

“Some are worse actually,” Mercer counter-interrupted.

“That makes my point even more poignant, which is how did the Hellsings actually keep their sanity with a collection like that?” Ellie demanded.

“Apparently they trained them from a young age to be incredibly strong willed and they also had a habit of summoning forth outsiders and then shooting them… repeatedly. Never summon up what you can’t put down was a strong theme in the family,” Alex said.

“How does that explain… Ser…as…” Ellie’s eyes went wide as the full implication of her statement overcame her.

Alex nodded and said, “Yeah, apparently the cults avoided the British Isles for a good century and a half, and the English crown had already been quietly whipping them for a good two centuries beforehand. That is in part because Seras said that the very first book you needed to read was the family’s own annotated and updated copy of Principia Arcana, originally written by one Isaac Newton.”

“What,” Ellie stated flatly.

“Now I’m more of a biology geek myself, but as a scientist I’ve always had a bit of an appreciation for the Big Newt so when I had this conversation with Seras it was also a bit unexpected,” Alex stated somewhat sarcastically. “However, it turns out that the occult advisors to the crown at the time agreed to indulge in Newton’s exploration of the supernatural so long as what he actually published for the rest of the world showed that it was all rubbish. The fact that the rituals he attempted in public life were rubbish went a long way to helping on that front.”

“That… actually, Newton was into stuff like alchemy, wasn’t he?” Ellie asked, seeing the weird logic in the system.

“Yeah, it’s one of those things that seem absurd at first before you actually stop to think about it,” Mercer replied with a dark chuckle.

Laughing about it too, Ellie says, “You know, a little over a week ago I would have told you both to stuff it, that I wasn’t picking up a bloody grimoire no matter how safe you said it was, but fuck… now I can do this.”

Ellie then held out her hand and the spear was within it. The transition time was essentially zero, but there was a distinct after impression that it had sort of unfolded from other dimensions into her hand. Alex was visibly taken aback by the sudden appearance and he said, “Fucking hell, that’s way more powerful than we both thought.”

“Yeah… yeah,” Ellie said before she casually tossed it back into nothingness. She then yawned and said, “I think its time I went back to bed.”

Alex checked her over and said, “Yeah, you still need more rest. I’ll come wake you in an hour or two though; you’ve already been lying down for far too long.”

“Thanks,” Ellie said while she idly wondered what her dreams would be like.

[LadyTevar]

And that's the short list. All that's missing is the Hellsing Family History.

[bilateralrope]

“There was a crazy old man in a Hawaiian shirt ranting about his ‘wee keebles’ but when he determined that we weren’t cultists he decided to let us stay. He then wandered off into the night with a combat shotgun and we haven’t seen him since.”

Old Man Henderson would be an entertaining addition to their team.

[Academia Nut]

She swam through green-yellow seas rich with nutrients energized by the shifting patterns of the stars. Her permeable skin absorbed the charged chemicals in the water, filtered out the cosmic energy, and then released the material back into the boundless oceans to be recharged. The careful, slow release of stored energy was a delicate balancing act, and out of the seething chaos of entropy and evolution her species had developed mobility to best take advantage of the shifting tides and the intelligence to best control their metabolism. Advanced social cognition had been something of an accident falling out of other adaptations.

She was not quite sure how she knew these details, but she felt that they were being filled in by an outside source for the purposes of context. This generated a somewhat persistent feeling that something was wrong, but she just swam onward, dancing through the subtle, complex currents. Another part of her mind, not concerned with the unusual narrative flow, felt a touch lonely. There should have been more like her around, but for some strange reason this patch of ocean was devoid of her kind.

The answer to her question of missing comrades was answered when the water abruptly took on a very different nature. There was a current of dead water cutting through the living waters. The charge of the cosmos had been drained from the sea in this place, and something hot and bitter and acrid stuck in its place. She thrashed in pain as she felt the delicate membranes of her skin being broken down by the strange water, and only pure chance let her escape to waters free of taint quickly enough to survive.

Her whole body tingling with lingering pain and corrosive chemical residue, she wondered how many of her fellows had blundered into currents like that and been unable to escape. What was it? Where did it come from? She had no memory of any current like that in that area before, so it had to have been something new. Whatever it was, it was quite dangerous.

Peering back into her memory, she thought about all the strange, new things she could think of. There had been some peculiar things close to where the world ended, maybe she should go cautiously seek one out and try to figure out if it was in any way related to the dangerous current. If she found any of her fellows that had not yet encountered that thing or anything like it, she would have to warn them to be on their guard.

Skilfully navigating the near invisible currents by feel and memory, she found her way to where the world grew thin, the rippling mud of the deeps growing close to the mirrored dome of the sky that buckled and broke with its own rhythms. There was however something new in the green waters now, something that unnerved her greatly just to look at it.

The thing, or rather things since there were two of them, were great black pillars, dark as the lightless deep. The pillars were as solid looking as lifeless stone, and yet they were also strangely organic looking nature. At the top, protruding through the sky, the pillars seemed to merge together but were obscured by a strange, totally opaque membrane that was almost obscene in its construction. She could see thin tubules like the primitive things that wriggled in the mud in some places, but they were somehow merged together in a hypnotically regular pattern that was made all the worse by the way the entire mass moved with the pulsing current.

The strange then inexplicably – impossibly – moved. One of the pillars suddenly jerked forwards, stirring up a chaotic swirl of mud and then something erupted from out of the sky. She did not get a good look due to the speed of its motion, but it seemed to be another pillar but this one broke into five wriggling tentacles at the end. Moving faster than any moving thing had any right to, it grabbed on to her with substance that was strong as stone and yet also disgustingly yielding, like nothing she had ever felt before.

Then, against all possibility of reason, the pillar retreated through the sky and hauled her along with it. Hauled from the warm embrace of the water, she found the world beyond the sky an incomprehensible mass of swirling images and colours that were impossible to properly focus upon, while her whole body felt like it was going to be torn apart by invisible forces that seemed to want to drag her back below the sky. The thing that held her was an incomprehensible mass of blackness and colour that boomed out with the sound of thunder that somehow seemed to carry with it patterns that were painful to focus upon long enough to try to work them out.

The thunder the thing made eventually trailed off and the impossibly strong substance of its short tentacles upon its upper pillar relaxed their force, allowing the invisible forces to haul her back through the sky, into the world proper. She floated in the waves, stunned in mind, body, and spirit and lost track of the black pillars for a moment. When her gaze returned she found instead another member of her species swimming languidly in the place of that terrible, dark thing.

The newcomer however was very strange. His membranous skin was a dark blue-green to the pale yellow-green that was normal and his bulging, too large eyes were a brilliant gold that were equal parts intriguingly exotic and disgustingly unnatural. His tentacles then began to squirm in speech.

“Is this form more pleasing to you, young one?” The newcomer asked, the tense quiver of his limbs as he moved them inflecting a degree of predatory amusement.

Still badly shaken by the encounter with the dark pillar thing, she had trouble formulating a reply, and instead allowed her tentacles to float freely with the water, indicating tired assent.

“Excellent, excellent,” the newcomer signed in a backwards manner to indicate falseness of feeling. “I have been waiting for you here, because I knew you would come young one. You are curious to know what has happened to your friends and family.”

“Yes,” she signed weakly as she reassembled her senses after the traumatic encounter.

“As you suspected, they all died in that strange current, or ones like it. There are few of your kin left these seasons, as this little patch of ocean is one of the few remaining that has yet to succumb to the taint of things that have come from beyond the skies,” the thing that she now realized could not be her species told her as it circled in a predatory manner.

“What are these things? Why have I never been told of them before?” She asked.

“They dwell in the places your kind cannot go, either beyond the sky where you will die without water, or in the lightless deeps where the waters go blue and black and you will starve before you are crushed to death. Their activities create a poison that they are immune to but that is quite toxic to your kind,” the thing told her.

“What can be done?” She asked.

“Done? Nothing, your kind will cease to exist,” the thing signed out tauntingly.

“Then why do you tell me this?” She exploded out.

The thing vibrated with mirth before it said, “Because if you wish I can teach you new ways to use the energy you take from the stars. I can teach you how to alter your body so that you can go to the places where the invaders dwell, and to be inured against the poisons they carelessly dump so that your people can continue on for many more generations.”

She thought about it for a moment. Teaching spawn was an important part of her people, in how to extract the energy from the living essence of the waters and how to seek out the most richly charged currents. Teaching was a sacred task, as was ensuring the survival of the next generation. Despite the strangely tense, mocking behaviour of the strange thing, surely a teacher could not be trying to lead her into a whirlpool. That was just not done.

“Then teach me… what is your name?” She asked, realizing that proper introductions had not been given.

The thing signed out, “I have no name but what you give, but I already know yours C-”

Ellie’s eyes opened, her soul snapping back into her body from the vision she had been having in her dream. She only vaguely remembered how she had arrived there, but what she had witnessed was so real it had to be a memory of some sort, taken from some distant alien world. In fact, she knew which one it had to be, but her mind refused to properly process the information lest she come to the correct conclusion.

Ellie stumbled out of bed. Her clothes stuck to her in a cold sweat that drenched her body and made her feel like she had been swimming in the North Sea again. Stepping into the tiny bathroom she looked at her wretched form in the mirror and for a second it was not her own face looking back at her, but a silver haired mask that leered with unwholesome lusts back at her.

The memory of a voice whispering over her shoulder returned to her.

“Do you like my gifts, Young Queen?”

The knowledge of not just a completely alien world and ecology and evolution but actually being something not human surged back from the dark corners of her mind where she had been desperately been trying to hold it back. Her legs gave out from beneath her as she suddenly felt the pull of gravity without a buoyant fluid to support her. She managed to grab on to the sink with rubbery arms and prevented a complete collapse, but she almost immediately threw up the thin bile that was in her empty stomach as she tried to figure out how she could let her digestive system work without conscious monitoring. She could feel her entire autonomic nervous system lock up in confused existential horror as two conflicting sets of survival directives warred within her tortured brain.

Her vision swirling and going black as her breathing seized up, Ellie struggled to regain control of her own body. She was not an alien creature that was like a cross between a cephalopod and a jellyfish that fed off of something like colour-charged primordial ooze in a method not unlike managing a fission reactor. She was a human being, and her central nervous system took care of things like the beating of her heart, the exchange of gases in her lungs, the balance of hormones in her blood, and the break down of matter in her digestive tract. She had muscles and bones and nerves and organs, and she definitely did not have tentacles.

Glancing back up at the mirror as her body shuddered with involuntary sobs as she forced air into her lungs, she saw that silver bitch leering back down and lashed out, smashing the aged glass with her fist. The pain that flared in her fist was enough to snap her back into her own body for just long enough let out a desperate scream for help before her other hand slipped from the sink and she tumbled to the floor. Curling up into tight little ball, the pain and despair soon faded and Ellie stopped paying attention to the world.

Alex burst into the room in concern, but Ellie was only mildly interested, like the event was happening on a television in someone else’s house while she stood in another building across the street and looked through the window. It wasn’t really her concern. Neither was when Seras joined in, having evidently returned to the house where they were camped out.

Ellie quickly grew bored and turned away from the TV in the other house. There wasn’t much interesting in this room either, so she just sort of remained where she was. At some point she felt like the room was filled with files dumped there by some outside agent, and boredom won out over apathy as she began to pick through them. They were memories and context not her own, and the distance she had from them made them seem so much less terrible, if also less real.

She knew the senses of the being she had been seeing through. She idly mused that if she was a Dagonite that she would probably be either hailed as a saint or executed as a heretic for her knowledge. She knew very little about the theology of the Dagonites other than what was taught in school to defend against their propaganda and subversion attempts, but she was fairly certain that the creature that would be their capital G God had taken up the offer of the other to modify its body into something distinctly different.

Eventually Ellie noticed that she was in the other room, the one with the television, and that it was getting bigger and harder to ignore as there were fewer other things to look at. Looking at what was on she saw that she was sitting at the kitchen table with Seras and Mercer talking to each other about her. Idly musing about the performance, she wondered if she would say anything.

Ellie blinked and while there was definitely a gap in the conversation indicating another complete space-out, she was back behind her own eyes once again. She idly glanced between Seras and Mercer who looked back at her with deep concern. She blinked a few more times before she said calmly and serenely, “Fucking Nyarlathotep.”

---

Ellie sure was lucky to pass that SAN check.

[Robo Jesus]

"Stepping into the tiny bathroom, she looked at her wretched form in the mirror, and for a second it was not her own face looking back at her"

You can get rid of every comma listed in this line here, as they are very much unneeded. Keep the one before the "But", but ditch the rest.

"confused existential horror as too conflicting sets of survival directives warred"

Too needs to be changed to two here.

"she wondered if she would saw anything"

Saw needs to be changed to say here.

[Academia Nut]

Of all the people Chandler had ever encountered, by far the most unsettling and frankly terrifying had to be Director Takeshi Kamina. In the five minutes since he had actually met the man who was his boss Chandler had never felt more off balance and out of his league. He had waded into a den of Disciples of the Unnameable who had been summoning outsiders non-stop for a week and not felt a fraction of the apprehension he did sitting in front of the Director’s desk.

From his experiences with the rest of the OSS Chandler had half expected Director Kamina to be some sort of bombastic figure, but instead the man behind the desk was a short, quiet Japanese man in a sombre, dark suit a few generations out of date. If anything, he looked like he had stepped out of a photograph from a century and a half ago of some sort of government bureaucrat or businessman. He even had glasses that appeared to be for actual visual correction rather than as AR displays.

Chandler had been brought into the director’s office precisely on schedule, but the man had been busy with something and had asked him to quietly sit while he finished up some paperwork. Somehow the director of an OSS project was actually doing physical paperwork, and his office had shelves filled with physical books. He appeared to have no electronics in his room and he had no active processors on his person. Chandler had thought this was a joke at first, until he had slowly realized that the man was serious. Out of politeness Chandler had shut off the majority of his own electronic gear, leaving him to sit quietly and think about why he was here and what sort of man could be simultaneously so antiquated and yet in charge of a bleeding edge paramilitary research and investigation group.

Finally Director Kamina assembled his stack of papers into a neat pile and moved them off to one side. Looking up at Chandler with oddly warm yet cold eyes behind his wire frame glasses, he smiled in a peculiar way and said, “I apologize for the delay. I do hate to keep people waiting, but unfortunately the information I needed to go through was significantly longer than expected.”

Chandler bit down on the suggestion that the Director use some actual technology to streamline the process and instead said, “I would have been fine waiting outside your office, sir.”

“No, no, I keep all of my appointments properly. If I made you wait outside one of us could forget that there was ever an appointment at all. Also, there is no need to call me ‘sir’ or any other such military formality. Director or Director Kamina is just fine for the times when you need to specify me,” Director Kamina stated.

“Ah… yes. I must say that I have been somewhat confused as to the degree of formality that is acceptable,” Chandler said, letting one of his concerns come out.

“There is always a degree of settling in around here, but I have found that excess formality tends to add unnecessary stress for the staff,” the Director explained.

Chandler bit back what he wanted to say, but the Director noticed and said, “Please feel free to state any concerns you might have with my policies. I cannot tolerate sycophants and yes-men; they disrupt the efficient flow of information necessary to keep this operation running.”

“Sir… Director, self-discipline is a necessary component in managing high stress levels and a key component of developing and maintaining discipline is formality, particularly between different levels of the chain of command. Your informal policies seem counter-productive,” Chandler stated.

Director Kamina gave out a long, “Hmmmm…” and nodded a few times before he went quiet. Seemingly lost in thought, he let Chandler stew for a good ten seconds before he said, “This is true, and is known to me. This, however, touches on a fundamental problem the Office of Special Services has to deal with. Do you know why you were given no choice in the matter with regards to your recruitment?”

“Agent Engel mentioned that the OSS does not want people who actively want to be within the organization to be brought in,” Chandler stated.

“Indeed. The various Projects occasionally go through organizational experiments to determine the best way of managing the things that resist being managed, namely the all too fragile psyches of human beings under extraordinary circumstances. We have found that there is a very fine line of formality that needs to be balanced upon. Too much discipline and formal behaviour and thinking becomes locked and responsibility gets dispersed. Too little discipline and the impression that no one is in charge sets in, that there will be no punishment for violating the rules because there are no rules. Ultimately we have chosen to err on the side of laxness than on tightness. Our policies do evolve, but we are very careful in adjusting them,” the Director explained at length.

“That’s… that’s less crazy than I was expecting, honestly,” Chandler replied. A moment later he realized that the statement had been more candid than he had intended.

“The men and women of the OSS are crazier than you can imagine. You have been assigned your first therapy session, correct?” The Director asked.

“Ah… yes. I do apologize for my outburst. I was not expecting to need to see a therapist so soon,” Chandler stated.

“Actually, due to circumstances somewhat outside my control you were delayed in seeing your therapist. Every Employee and Agent in the OSS is automatically in therapy from the day they walk in the door. The only question is when we start issuing the drugs. Also, try not to worry about your outburst, it is a healthy reaction,” Kamina explained.

“Expressions of rage only reinforce that it is acceptable to explode when you are angry, which in turn increases the hostility of others around you and makes you angrier. It is a well known counter-productive behaviour and a discredited coping strategy,” Chandler countered.

Director Kamina nodded and then said, “Not for OSS Agents.”

Chandler blinked and then asked with a touch of heat, “You’re saying we’re supposed to act like raging maniacs?”

“No. It is just that when you work in the OSS, you give up your ability to cope like a reasonable human being. Our therapists need therapists, who in turn need therapists, because they do not make us better. They do not keep us sane or restore balance to disturbed minds. They keep us functional. That is hard on them. The people who become psychiatric therapists are doctors and healers; it is against their natures to make a patient more ill for the sake of expediency. It is a hard sacrifice we ask of them, just as we in turn make our own sacrifices for the safety of our species,” Director Kamina explained, momentarily taking off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose.

Chandler went silent as he processed this information and felt his stomach twist into a knot. Finally he asked in a voice that was far too small and timid, “What?”

“Being in the OSS drives you insane, but we cope. Agent Meddezy sent me her assessment of your behaviour and it was filled with praise, along with her lay diagnosis that you are starting to exhibit signs of Irrationality Rage Syndrome. It is pervasive feeling of rage towards the universe for not making sense, or at least not the kind of sense you want. It is a specific class of a variety of other mental illnesses that is considered somewhat culture specific to the OSS. Your therapist will help you to control your anger, to vent it upon your enemies. You will in all likelihood find your tolerance for strict protocol growing short as you deal with constant, undirected anger welling up inside you and seek a state of relaxation when out of the field,” The Director explained.

Chandler blinked, and then found anger trying to rise up through a blanket of confusion. His nose twitched a bit before he demanded, “Why don’t you fix the problem then?”

“Because you need something to keep you going from day to day and minute to minute in this job. Rage is a particularly effective motivator for Agents, especially out in the field. The therapists tell me that the most psychologically healthy response that people should be having to what we do is post traumatic stress disorder and chronic depression. We keep out suicide rates to almost nothing by intentionally inducing other, more useful, disorders. Considering that Aeon War Syndrome is present in almost all Agents to some degree, this has been deemed an acceptable work around,” Kamina detailed out.

Chandler let his face fall into his hands in disbelief at what he was hearing. After a moment he started to mutter, “No. No. No! Nononononononononono! I am not hearing this fucking bullshit!”

Chandler exploded up from where he was sitting, knocking his chair down with the violence of his rise. Director Kamina’s expression did not change, he just watched him impassively. Clutching his head, Chandler warred with himself, pacing back and forth a few times before he eventually bent over and picked up the chair, righted it, and sat down. An embarrassed, ashamed look came over his face and he said, “I apologize, sir. That was incredibly unprofessional of me.”

Nodding, the Director said, “That was one of the more restrained responses I have seen in my time. I knew there was a reason I fought so hard for your inclusion in our agency. As a point of note, if Meddezy made a correct diagnosis then you will have your condition aggravated by Agent Engel. He has an almost unique case of Irrationality Irreverence Syndrome, whereby he deals with the universe through casual dismissal of danger. As you no doubt have seen he can be quite serious, it is just that he has essentially burnt out his emotional response to fear. He has rigorously retrained himself in how to do cost-benefit and threat analyses via purely intellectual means, it is just that he still has the physiological response to danger and he has become something of an adrenaline junkie. He transfers his own frustration at the universe into something resembling enjoyment while, thankfully, avoiding any sort of sadistic behaviours.”

“Isn’t that a violation of his privacy?” Chandler asked, slightly aghast.

“No, he gave clearance to the therapists to make certain facts about his condition public to the rest of the Project. Most OSS agents do, some of the more jocular ones even treat their illnesses as something of a game. People vastly prefer to know in advance that you have a hair trigger temper induced by trauma and need a little space, so long as you don’t use that as an excuse for bad behaviour. This is one of the reasons we tend to go for a more informal atmosphere. Everyone is trying to be considerate of everyone else’s conditions, so it is easier to let everyone figure out their own system rather than try to enforce uniformity in how we all interact,” The Director stated.

“Oh. This… this is a lot of take in,” Chandler said.

“I know it is. We are working on more effective and rational solutions, but it is a difficult task,” Director Kamina said before he looked at one of his piles of paper. He then said, “Actually, if you are up for it, there is an inspection of Project LOGOS coming up soon. Project OSIRIS is one of the more trusted projects, while LOGOS is… well, you really have to see their facilities to understand. The OSS has to police itself so we need good, solid, dependable Agents to go in to assess that their activities are both being done in a safe manner and that they are working on legitimate research. Now, their research is considerably more… illegal… than ours, but they have special licenses to violate certain laws in certain ways. Are you interested?”

Chandler thought about the proposal for a moment before he asked, “If I have the IRS thing like you have suggested, wouldn’t it be a bad idea to send me in to a situation that could aggravate it?”

“Actually, no. Those with IRS are probably the least susceptible to contracting anything from LOGOS, and they won’t try to give you any sort of run-around if they know you’ll just get angry with their nonsense. You will of course need to begin therapy first, but the inspection isn’t scheduled for a few weeks so you will have time to begin working on managing your illness – whatever it may actually be – and reading up on what to expect. Still interested?” The Director asked.

Chandler went silent for a long moment, Director Kamina watching him with casual focus. Finally though Chandler said, “I could do with a bit of a return to investigation. Since joining I’ve had two combat ops in less than two weeks, and in both it was the guys in the HAZMAT suits that did most of the police work.”

“Excellent. I shall have the files sent over to you right away,” The Director proclaimed.

Chandler got up to leave as if he had been dismissed before he paused and asked, “Is that all you wanted to speak to me about? I thought you wished to discuss what happened in the Dagonite base?”

“I read the reports and they were all properly thorough that I require no further briefing. Unless you feel there is a matter that needs to be brought up?” Director Kamina asked.

Considering it, Chandler instead shook his head and said, “No Director, I can’t think of anything.”

“Excellent. Now if you will excuse me, if there is nothing further I would like to prepare for a meeting with the head of Ashcroft London. Beastly man, so hard to figure out what he’s up to,” Director Kamina said in a musing manner.

“The guy with the creepy beard?” Chandler asked, somewhat unexpectedly.

“The very same,” Kamina replied as he began to go through a new stack of papers.

Grimacing in sympathy, Chandler said, “Well, then I shall leave you to it. Thank you for your time, sir.”

“Thank you for seeing me. I do apologize again for being away when you were first brought aboard, I do prefer to have a more personal relationship with my subordinates,” Director Kamina said cheerfully.

Shutting the door behind him as he left, Chandler began the process of reactivating his electronic gear, and found that at the top of his in-box there was a file on Project LOGOS waiting for him. How the hell had the Director sent him the data already?

Looking about, Chandler only saw a mirror in the hallway leading up to the Director’s office. Going up to it, he wondered if perhaps it was half-silvered and someone on the other side was watching him. Running fingers through his hair, he wondered at what he had been told. He had long felt his humanity slipping through his fingers like grains of sand as the stress of working in the OIS got to him. Would the OSS ask him to let go of it completely?

Would he care if they asked him to?

[LadyTevar]

That is always the question: how far into the darkness are you willing to go, when you chase monsters.

[drakensis]

Is it bad that the reference to Ashcroft London's head worried more than the OSS's policies on therapy?

[Academia Nut]

Is it bad that the reference to Ashcroft London's head worried more than the OSS's policies on therapy?

I don't know. How much of EarthScorpion's work have you read?

[LadyTevar]

I've read far too much of EarthScorpion's work.

[drakensis]

Is it bad that the reference to Ashcroft London's head worried more than the OSS's policies on therapy?

I don't know. How much of EarthScorpion's work have you read?

Enough.

[Academia Nut]

“…stated that no volatiles had been stored there for decades and as such the explosion was…”

Click.

“…in the third day in tour to restore confidence to London. The family is engaged in a…”

Click.

“…major offensive restored over one hundred kilometres…”

Click.

Seras idly flipped through the news channels while on watch, bored by the way the 24 hour news cycle had it so that she already knew all of the latest news since they kept repeating the same safe, sanitized news stories over and over again. Idly she telepathically checked in on Ellie and found that she was in fact sleeping properly without being tormented by alien gods. The girl needed her rest.

The door to the tiny house they were camped in opened up to admit Mercer inside, the viral abomination dripping with rainwater from the atrocious weather. Not even bothering to look away from the television she was not paying attention to, Seras asked, “Any change?”

“There are no new files being added to the servers I can get access to, so the hunt of the physical records is probably winding down. There was however an inquiry to the British Museum about a ‘Tunguska Egg’ that was bouncing about the ‘net,” Alex replied, reporting back on his nightly jaunt to hacking a telecommunications cable five kilometres away.

Seras leaned back and glanced at him and the glare he was giving her, to which she replied, “Never touch the bloody sphere, got it?”

“I presume burying it is out of the question?” Mercer asked with dry sarcasm.

Sighing, Seras slumped down and said, “It would be a good idea, if not for the fact that if it’s not somewhere I know is safe I would be freaking out that someone might stumble upon it and start playing around.”

Alex just shook his head before he asked, “She still sleeping?”

“Yeah. Peaceful, natural sleep,” Seras said, passing along the information. She then frowned and said, “She’s burning out though. She’s scared and isolated and having way too much information thrown at her at once.”

Seras wasn’t watching, but she could feel the scowl form on Mercer’s face. He said, “And who’s the one telling her to read the brain breaking books?”

“She’s strong enough to take it, and it will help give context to what is going on,” Seras replied.

Stalking around into view and interposing himself between her and the TV, Alex glared down at her. Two things had kept the two of them from coming to blows in the past two weeks. The first was that both knew which of the two of them would win. The second was that the one who would win was far more laid back than the one who would lose. Still, it was not within Mercer’s personality to just back down, and since they had set up camp he had been in her face in one way or another whenever they were around each other. Clearly seething on the inside, he said, “I’ve eaten enough doctors and sorcerers to know that’s not a great idea.”

Turning off the antique television with a press of the remote, Seras looked up into Alex’s eyes. For a moment she considered what to say before she said, “Yet you haven’t made strong opposition.”

Alex glanced away with a grunt before he muttered, “I’ve been seeking other options…”

“Which is to say that you know as well as I do that Ellie’s mental health won’t improve sitting around here, but it would be even worse if she had nothing to do but stew in her own thoughts,” Seras pointed out.

Mercer let his scowl deepen before a tiny piece of the tension drained from him and he said, “She needs a goal to work towards… and as of right now studying the occult is better than nothing.” He then snapped, “But she needs something better.”

“I agree. She also needs to take control of her life. The two of us, we’re more or less complete individuals. We know who we are. Ellie… Ellie’s barely even an adult right now, and she’s been drifting since her parents died. She needs to decide who she will be,” Seras replied.

Pacing back and forth, Alex asked, “But what is that supposed to be? Vampire hunter?”

“If she wants, so long as she is the one to choose what her path will be. I do however think that she wants to hunt the things in the night. You saw her reaction to finding out the Index was under Dagonite control. I wanted to go there because I had hoped it would be a quiet place to lie low and let Ellie find out about her ancestry. Instead it is an enemy base and her response is to attack just to ensure they do not gain access to the information buried within. She’s got fire within her,” Seras stated.

Sitting on a creaking chair, Alex tapped his fingers on the worn out table and mused, “IF you define a self-sustaining fission reaction as ‘fire’ I will agree to that. There are elite commandos with less steel in them than her; she just hasn’t known it until recently. Although then again she’s been a grey market salvage expert since… fifteen I think she said. She’s lived her whole life being more scared of people than of monsters or radioactive fallout.”

“The things people can do can hurt more than nuclear explosions,” Alex muttered in a manner than suggested authority on the matter.

“We both know what she needs in terms of mental health at this point,” Seras prodded.

Alex looked away and said, “It’s too dangerous.”

“And letting her mind rot out here isn’t dangerous?” Seras asked.

“It’s less of a risk than getting close to civilization,” Alex countered.

Seras and Alex briefly got into a staring match that would have wilted any nearby plants just from peripheral exposure before Seras asked, “I’d thought that you had erased her identity.”

“There are secure servers that even I can’t reach. The OIS is definitely off her scent, or rather has the wrong scent at this point, but there are most likely isolated places that have her original biometrics and can make the connection to all of the ruckus we’ve kicked up,” Alex said.

“And what are the odds of them finding her here as in comparison to a place where there are people?” Seras asked.

Mercer sighed and admitted, “About the same. Less around people actually, if she can blend in and disappear into the crowd.”

Quirking an eyebrow up, Seras asked, “So why are you opposed?”

Mercer frowned and refused to answer the question, which resulted in Seras grinning impishly. “Oh, does big bad Mercer not want to let Ellie go out into the world on her own. Maybe got a little parental instinct there?”

Alex growled inhumanly in way of rebuttal to Seras’ teasing, which caused her Cheshire Cat grin to grow even smugger. Eventually he said, “Look at the mess than happened the last time she went unsupervised, and if we went into a major population centre neither one of us could be near her for the most part. We’re too easily tracked because of our natures.”

“And if Ellie gets into a big city and decides to disappear from the both of us?” Seras asked, deciding that it was time to cut to the heart of the matter.

Mercer blinked, opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it again wordlessly. He mulled it over for a time before he said, “I… I don’t know. I guess I go back to waging war on the Migou.”

“You wouldn’t hunt her?” Seras asked.

“I… I… maybe. I can’t say that I wouldn’t. I probably would, but… but then what? If my family has rejected me, I have nothing holding me back,” Mercer admitted.

Seras blinked, shocked by the stumbling honesty of the reserved and taciturn Mercer. Her grin faded and she asked, “Thinking about going full monster?”

Alex was quiet before he nodded and said, “It would be the best use of my talents at that point.”

“And Ellie is what is holding you back?” Seras asked.

Alex nodded.

Seras leaned back with a pained look on her face before she said, “You’re scared of what she might do; you’re scared of what you might do.”

“I’ve come to terms with what I am long ago…” Alex started to protest.

“Of course you have. You’re a complete and total monster, but not completely irredeemable either. Your identity has as a core element that glimmer of still knowing what is right and what is wrong, and if you give that up you give up a key part of yourself. You cannot tell who you will be once you pass that boundary. Trust me, from one monster to another, I know that fear,” Seras explained.

“Have you gone past that boundary?” Alex asked.

“Similar ones on multiple occasions, but not that last one you are edging up on. When you’re a predator that can only prey upon sapient beings, and were one of those beings at one point, it becomes harder and harder all the time to cling on to any sense of morality. How can survival be wrong? But eventually it stops becoming about survival and starts becoming about power,” Seras opined, her speech going a little numb in self-reflection.

Picking up the morbid train of thought, Alex said, “Their lives are so short, their bodies so fragile, and their squabbles so petty. Why shouldn’t I make them better?”

“I can squash them like bugs and their weapons can’t hurt me. Why can’t I use my power to do what I want?” Seras muttered darkly.

“Would it even be wrong if I am the one who gets to define wrong at the end?” Alex asked.

“But…” Seras stated.

“But…” Mercer repeated in agreement, before they both trailed off into silence.

“Morality for monsters,” Seras joked morbidly.

A semi-comfortable silence descended on the two of them that was only broken by the sounds of stirring from the floor above. Even then the two killing machines waited for Ellie to actually enter into the room before they actually said anything. Her frazzled appearance suggested that she should have gone through the proverbial ‘aged ten years in a week’ but that was not actually true. She was clearly stressed out, but both sides of her family were quite resistant to the ravages of entropy upon their bodies. The most noticeable affect was her hair falling out, but hair loss was something that had long since been overcome by pharmaceutical nannites. As such, after two weeks she had white hair that after a bit of styling by Alex was about even with her jaw line. It was only the haggard, tired look in her eyes that suggested that anything was really wrong.

“Hey. What’s with the sombre looks?” Ellie asked, clearly picking up on the moods of the two of them, which was probably an excellent survival skill considering that either one of them being in a bad mood was a rather dangerous thing for anyone within a hundred kilometre radius.

“Just talking about you,” Seras replied reassuringly.

“What do you want to do?” Mercer asked bluntly.

Seras turned and glared at Mercer for his lack of tack, but Ellie just sort of slumped and said, “I don’t know… beat the shit out of the avatar of Nyarlathotep?”

Both Seras and Mercer turned to Ellie in gobsmacked exasperation. Her fingers were twitching like she wanted to wrap them around someone’s throat. “I know it won’t really help, but I would really like to pry that fucker’s eyeballs out with a fork.”

“That’s not really helpful…” Seras muttered, although she had to admit that horrific revenge had a certain visceral appeal.

“Certainly a long term goal,” Mercer replied thoughtfully. “You can’t exactly just march up to the Director of Chrysalis Corp.” A sideways look crossed over Mercer’s eyes before he added on, “One does not simply walk into Johannesburg.”

Seras snorted at the reference, but then Ellie asked, “Was that from the 2035 or the 2068 Lord of the Rings?”

Seras blinked in confusion while Mercer face-palmed and said, “Oh right, those. Considering that they were post-meta-ironic referentialism and Reconstructive New Wave revival-referentialism, respectively, it may come as a shock to you that the line being referred to was in the 2001 version. The other two featured that line, since it was part of the original book, but they never spawned the same memetic features as the original movie they were both referencing.”

“They made the Lord of the Rings twice more?” Seras asked, aghast. She quickly shuffled through some of the memories of the more modern people she had eaten and found that it was indeed the case.

“Yeah. The other two trilogies were terrible in my opinion. We are drifting off track though. Perhaps we should step the conversation back a step. If you want to skull fuck Nyarlathotep’s avatar with rusty utensils I suggest you think on what you need to do to get there,” Mercer replied.

“Well, obviously I’ll need the two of you backing me up…” Ellie began.

“I have to stop you right there Ellie. I’ll follow you into hell itself, but I’ll need my coffin to do it. I’m sort of tied to it. I can’t leave the British Isles until we retrieve it,” Seras interrupted.

“Don’t tell me it’s back in the mansion, because the NEG has that placed locked down tight,” Alex asked in exasperation.

“No, the Hellsings stored it off site to strengthen the bindings on me. It was hidden in a secret chamber beneath Westminster Abbey,” Seras replied.

“Oh. Fuck,” Mercer and Ellie stated in eerie unity, the two of them glancing between each other in confusion for a second.

“What?” Seras asked in confusion. “I know it’s not exactly the easiest place to sneak into, but it’s not a military base either.” After a second she added on, “Right?”

“Westminster was flattened in the fighting with the Nazzadi during their initial invasion,” Mercer stated.

“The fact that I didn’t immediately break free of all bindings suggests that my coffin is still intact then,” Seras noted.

“Well, what did survive was placed in a communal mass grave and memorial that is right smack dab at the centre of the London Arcology, which is sort of centred on Westminster and extends out over a significant portion of the original London Metropolitan Area. We’re talking about multi-band security cameras, mystical wards, atmosphere sniffers, biometric scanning, random gene scans, and military check points. Neither one of us could get within ten kilometres of the site before we were tagged as Outsiders and had a battalion of mecha on our head,” Alex explained.

“I could do it,” Ellie said in a very small, timid voice. “I could go into the arcology and retrieve the coffin.”

“Ellie, that’s…” Seras began before she was cut off.

“That’s doable. The NEG doesn’t know who you are anymore. You could totally do it,” Mercer said thoughtfully.

Trembling a little, Ellie laughed in a brittle fashion and said, “Yeah… yeah I could do it. Weird isn’t it that the mere thought of going there is scaring me worse than the thought of confronting an Outer God is, but well… raised my whole life to be deathly afraid of the place. That doesn’t disappear quickly, you know?”

“It will probably take a few days to work things out once you’re inside. There are a few cult safe houses in the area we can quietly hit and use as a base of operations, but you’ll want to make the transit in and out of the Arcology as little as possible, which means finding lodging in there,” Alex mused in a planning tone.

“Little girl alone in the big city for the first time? Sounds so cliché,” Ellie said with a slightly manic chuckle.

Seras just frowned but decided to make the best of it as she went through her various memories to figure out the best location to hit. After a moment she found one and smiled in a feral fashion. Turning to Mercer, she asked, “How good are you with machines?”

“Better than any other being in the Solar System,” Alex replied confidently. He then asked, “Why?”

“Well, there’s one cache near London that includes a miniature but full fab and machine shop, and if we’re going to start preparing I think building me my favourite thing would be a great idea,” Seras said.

“What’s your favourite thing?” Alex asked suspiciously, although he was clearly intrigued by access to a fabrication facility.

“Don’t you know? As my old sire used to say, ‘Get that bitch a cannon. Bitches love cannons’,” Seras said with a grin.

[LadyTevar]

OH yeah, Bitches love cannons.

[Singular Quartet]

When does Seras not use a gun taller than she is?