RP:Valentin is Proper Effed

Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc

This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.

Creature's Lair, Dark Forest, Vailkrin

The forest was quiet. This wasn't so unusual, being that it was the sort of forest in which predators preyed primarily on each other. But even for a such a place, it was silent - lacking the quietest of furtive sounds, for many of its more dangerous occupants were dead, remnants of them scattered by scavengers here and there showing proof they'd been hewn down by a drow-wrought blade. This trail of bloody wrecks was enough for anyone to follow, and led directly to the lair of the creature whose head sat in the midst of the clearing here. And beside that head, which was so horridly desiccated as to make it seem that death had taken it many years ago, as opposed to merely a few short hours, was a sight unseen in Lithrydel before, or else not for many thousands of years...

Tenebrae's armour had, upon sensing that its host was close to true death, latched its feeding tubes onto her and reversed the feeding process, regurgitating liquids and salts into her body in order to preserve it. The once-living chitin had closed about her smoothly, tightly, so it seemed there lay in the clearing not the Necromancer herself but a stone effigy of her, carved with such minute detail as to offer it an eerie and utterly lifelike aspect. And beside this sarcophagus, two small bodies, every bit as mummified as the awful head of the monster whose dwelling this had been. One could be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled on some ancient burial site.. except for the sly tentacle still embedded in the chest of the least-desiccated child, a horrid extrusion leading from 'coffin' to its prey. It too was faded from black to a stony sort of grey but still moved feebly now and then, a sluggish writhing that marked the Empusai's symbiote as not quite dead, yet..

Valentin was grumbling. As he had been now for several solid hours of forest hiking. He'd had one hell of a time figuring out where the blimmin' witch was once he'd hightailed it out of Larket and returned to Vailkrin. Mind you, after he'd managed to bribe one of the locals into admitting they'd seen the gauntleted figure of his mistress stalking off into the dark forest, he'd put two and two together. And two and two in Vailkrin added to 'forget it, son.' except Valentin didn't have that luxury. He had things he needed doing, but couldn't comfortably do them while he had these damn tasks looming over 'is blimmin' head. And so the butcher had grit his teeth and wandered into the Dark Forest, like anyone could tell you not to do. Now, he weren't a fool, and the trail of dead things (originally left by Kuzial's mad frenzy, but now largely eaten by the denizens of the blasted place) gave him a place t'start. The rest came with a little innovation. Part of the ritual he and Leifong had put together, which had caused this whole sorry bollocks-up, involved exploiting the link between Maladroit and Tenebrae. Admittedly, that had gone so wrong as t'beggar the imagination, but it hadn't been without some profit. And so the butcher carried, in a little sigil-engraved cage, a re-animated eyeball created by the whim of his mistress hell-knows-when ago. And the sigils gave the cage a certain magnetism, pulling him as the crow flew in the general direction of Her Grand Spiky Rabidness. Which was where the problem was. If the bitch had been in Vailkrin: no worries. But she had to be in the Dark Forest. By the time Valentin reaches the clearing, he is covered in the ichor of numerous oversized spiders, the blood of one particularly feral lycanthrope and the pack of wolves it ran with, and a buggerload lot of cobwebs. It was with mixed feelings that he surveyed the scene. "Well. Ain't this a fine to-do, an' no two ways about it." In what was a tried and true method through all of existence, Valentin pokes Tenebrae with a long stick.

The stony carapace covering the Necromancer withstood that first prod, but not the second. Such was its Mistress' need, for she had bled herself near-dry for the sake of spite and further opportunities to vent it, that her armour had given its all to save her and become quite brittle in the process. The carapace thus cracked, crumbling in toward Tenebrae's nearly replete form below. And since Valentin had poked her - in the head - with that stick, he'd hear a faint spluttering as she spat armour-dust from her mouth. The one remaining feeder-tentacle made a feeble attempt to extract itself from Kuzial's 'gift' to her, sensing fresher meat close by, but was spent and with a shudder ceased all motion. The sarcophagus trembled, buckled outward, and cracked. A violent coughing could be heard below it all, and the odd muttered curseword between those bouts. Eventually, Tenebrae sat up. Looked at Valentin. Looked down at her own pale-as--new-marble torso, and said in a voice ragged with debris, "Do you mind..?" She tore one small, bare hand free of the rest of its encasing, dead chitin and made a spinny-motion with her forefinger in the air, signalling Valentin to turn around.

Valentin allowed himself a sense of perverse satisfaction when the stick punctured Tenebrae's apparent carapace. The spluttering helped his mood too. But it hadn't yet made up for the spiders or the wolves. It about cleared the ledger for the cobwebs, though. With a demonstration of the infuriatingly blithe and wilful misinterpretation Cenrilli southsiders were known for Valentin replies "I don't mind at all, guv. I see dead bodies all the time." There was not a hint of smile in his face or his voice. The butcher would win the war in stoneface competitions with the best of poker players, hands-down. "I take it from the gesticulating that you want a cup o'tea or somethin'. 'Fraid I didn't bring a kettle. Or teacup, for that matter." Again, his expression remains utterly impassive, his tone as monotonous and inevitable as a geological event. Ledgerwise, he was halfway to balancing out the spiders, he figured. "Anythin' in particular cause this sorry state of affairs?"

Tenebrae snarled, and the pretty facade she'd worn thus far suffered for it. "Aside from you, you mean?" A sneeze shook the rest of the carapace-dust from her nose before she glanced about, seeking in vain for something to cover herself with, dismay burgeoning on those slightly-more-bestial features now. "My armour.." Her right hand rose, its gauntlet a chalky mockery of its formerly terrifying state. One hard flex of her fingers shattered the weapon. "..gods... damn..." the tirade went on from there, creatively and at length, until her peridot ire once more settled on Valentin. "... completely and utterly, fu..." The screech of Vailkrin's version of an owl interrupted, and left her merely glaring at him a moment longer. "Your coat, Scleratus. Would be of immense use to me, presently." And the set of her lips, thin as straight as string, would let him know her sense of humour was about as brittle as her former body-covering, at this point.

Valentin adjusted his inner ledger to mark off the spiders. Now all he had left were the blimmin' wolves. But those could wait. Valentin was as patient as a glacier when it came to balancing his ledgers. He'd been right chuffed when he'd finally managed to force the heinous wench to drink her own foul magical hangover cure. In fact on the evening of that occurrence, in the privacy of his own room, Valentin had allowed himself a damn good laugh at her expense. "Well yes, guv, aside from m'self." Valentin shucked off his large and bulky leather duster jacket. It was currently a somewhat tattered camouflage jacket, what with the viscous greeny-yellow paint of spider ichor mixed with the red of blood and a coating of leaves and cobwebs stuck onto the mess. All in all, he was happy for her to wear the damn thing. He didn't really want to wear it himself right now - he'd be replacing the blimmin' thing as it were. With the horribly desecrated item of clothing offloaded to preserve the Guildmistress' amusing display of apparent embarrassment vis-a-vis her nakedness, Valentin asked a more pertinent question "Now, should I be preparin' for whatever it was gave you a bit o'trouble to be dingin' the bell for a second round any time soon?"

Tenebrae kept very probably (for Valentin) blessed silence as she gathered the grue-spattered garment around her small frame. Not as an act of modesty - the Empusai possessed no such values - but to hide from the vampire the small mouth-like openings dotted here and there on her skin, most still plugged with the dry remnants of her armour's feeder-tubes. There would be a time for the revelation of such secrets - and this was not it. While tugging these remnants free of herself under the cover of the (for her) oversized coat, she pondered the Butcher's last question, green gaze hunting around the clearing for a killer that obviously wasn't there... "Perhaps..." she said, lips pursing briefly in chagrin at Kuzial's absence. In his state, a great many things could go wrong, and while this by and large had the potential to be amusing, she did not want the drow damaged too badly. "But not right now." The little openings in her skin closed seamlessly, once free of chitin, and she stood up, slinging the coat around her shoulders and clutching its lapels together. "More immanent is the problem of my being here." Spoken somewhat waspishly as she tried to kick at the mummified beast's head, only to be flummoxed by the coat's dragging hem. Kicking about in that instead, and frowning, she added, "Can't go home without armour."

Valentin couldn't help but agree with the problem of Tenebrae being here. 'Here' being anywhere where Valentin could feasibly be reached or contacted in any fashion. The whole scenario still caused him to grit his teeth in annoyance. He still hadn't been able to figure out what went wrong, as the more complex elements of the ritual had been designed by Leifong. Although, a part of the butcher's inner self was making meaningful looks and jerking its head in the direction of the Haruspex. What had been the error the bastard had corrected? Valentin had been too focused on the task at hand at the time to make a proper note of which sigils had been altered by Leifong. Valentin was suspicious by nature, and things weren't adding up nicely. But all that aside, what had the damn woman just said? "Can't go home without armour? What d'you mean?" The butcher did not like the sound of anything which delayed her prospective departure from this realm of existence. "Plenty o'smiths in Vailkrin." But Valentin knew already it wasn't going to be that easy. The carapace had looked disturbingly like an advanced application of the Necrophidiae - the necromantic precepts which, amongst other things, guided the creation of flesh golems and the like. Oh well, to hell with it. Valentin knew this was going to end in more bloody work "Or is this somethin' t'do with th'vats an' barrels I've got on order for you, Mistress?"

Tenebrae had planned to take her leave, and soon, but before that wanted to present Valentin and Leifong with a tantalising -- and of course, entirely non-reproducible - demonstration of the slew of flesh arts she'd learned in her time away. Mainly to leave them maddeningly frustrated, just one entry among the long list of vengeance-acts she'd concocted in her head for them while waiting for her flesh to finish reconstituting. Now, it seemed... "Yes," she said, in reply, canting her face up to meet the Butcher's gaze. "Everything to do with it. Vats.. barrels.. oh, and some copper tubing," she frowned and amended, "Lots. As well as a few mineral oils and the like, best see Jobbie for that, if that nasty hobbit hasn't perished under the weight of his own blubber yet." The Necromancer shuffled toward the two small corpses then, coat-tails dragging behind her. Frowning down at them - had the drow done that for her? such a conundrum, he was - she went on, "When you and that addled, animate cadaver caused me to vanish from my lovely new home, I was three hundred feet above the Thassian Plain, on my warbeast. If you bunglers do manage to send me back, and I arrive from my point of departure... " her pause was to allow Valentin to surmise the obvious. "My armour will help me survive the fall, just as it helped me here, to survive.. " Tene swivelled about to face Valentin, ".. this. So yes, I need armour, in order to go home." Her left eyebrow hitched up over its pale green eye, then, as if to ask whether he had any further questions on the matter.

Valentin was careful not to ask the question actually on his mind, which was 'Do I actually care if you survive the return trip home, you horrendous lunatic thorn in my side?' Naturally, it would have been a creative act of suicide to venture that thought aloud. Instead, Valentin repeats back "Copper tubes, Hobbit shopping, an' armoured cushion for potential freefall. Gotcha." Before Tenebrae can call him out on that, he continues "An' you might want t'talk t'the Haruspex 'bout the ritual t'return you. He was the one what checked that everythin' was ready t'go before activatin' it. Now, I'm thinkin' the exploded pigeongrubber somehow messed up th'ritual, but if y'have any suspicions, the Magister Letum will be able to help you with 'em." There was a deliberate ambiguity and suggestiveness to that phrasing. Something told Valentin he'd need to be distancing himself heavily from the whole affair. An' the best way to do that was to let someone higher up have the grief. Leifong had already tried to hang the entire thing on him, an' he was not playin' whippin' boy in any trade. "Put together a shoppin' list, an' I'll plug m'nose an' go see that bloated bucket, Jobbie. The foundry workin' on th'vats can fix up the copper tubing. We jus' need t'add t'the order. Nice an' easy."

Tenebrae stared at Valentin, slightly askance, "The exploded... what?"

Valentin mentally backtracked a moment, and realised that maybe she hadn't witnessed that part of the ritual due to the timing of her arrival "Th'beastie w'tentacles on 'is face what exploded when you popped up uninvited in the ritual we had set up t'send the blighter to you." There was a slight, yet unspoken or vocalised, subtext of disapproval there: as if Tenebrae had ruined what had been a lovely little ritual, quite souring the tea and crumpets presumably served at such a splendid event. "Can't have two things in one blimmin' space, after all. You'd end up like the inept Rogen the Black, splattered all over the summoning circle when he got confused as to where the caster should be standin'. Lorkain tells th'story better. Anyway, damn critter resisted the ritual, despite all his hints to suggest he wanted t'go back, an' the link probably pulled you t'his location, rather than t'other way around. Anyway, he's partially scattered in the Blood Fountain, partially splattered about Fountain Square, an' partly stainin' m'shirt an' apron. A right mess, all in all."

Tenebrae was quiet for several minutes, in which the sluggish breeze ruffling the fog-misted leaves of the dark trees surrounding them ceased, as if it too had reason to fear the Necromancer's impending reaction to this news. In that silence her pale green eyes glazed over somewhat, and her white cheeks, aglow with their recent influx of nutrients, blanched to the point of near-translucence. Tenebrae opened her mouth, but no sound came out. It remained open while she organised her mind into a semblance of coherence from the abyssal apoplexy that threatened to render the forest, its sundry corpses and Valentin into so much confetti. Finally, she said: "Exploded." Another pause. "My gaunt." Yet another precipice of silence. "Tell me," she went on, the sepulchral colour of her not improving at all, "Why I should not simply explode both you, in kind?" But there was no pause before she spoke again, "You realise, don't you, what you've done?"

Tenebrae somehow managed to continue to appear inherently dangerous while clad in nothing but a spider-stained, oversized man's coat.

Valentin let the silence linger unhindered, knowing well what that kind of silence led to. His own sire had possessed a similar temperament, so the butcher had a good frame of reference for the scenario. Which was the only thing which prevented him from perversely pointing out 'actually, you exploded him'. The results of a wrong choice of words around folks like his sire and Tenebrae tended to be classified as 'self inflicted death by misadventure' in most courts - if such people could be contained within the confines of a mere courtroom. So instead, the butcher responded with further implacable, taciturn silence. He was as close to standing stoicly to attention as a civilian could be - but this was an ageold tactic used by countless generations of apprentices in every trade: when the master is annoyed, shut the hell up - if they haven't already knifed you, you're nine-tenths in the clear. Valentin's features were granite, displaying no emotion at all as he stared fixedly to a point slightly above and to the side of Tenebrae's head.

Tenebrae's turn to explode, - not so literally as her bat-winged creation - into a brief but mind-raddling burst of rage, in which her body actually re-articulated itself to an impossible angle that could not feasibly be comfortable, in her efforts to make to herself a head and a half taller, so that may vent said rage directly into Valentin's face, fangy and slavering, her forked tongue smacking his cheek, her eyes green fire as she fulminated: "I shall bloody well enjoy the moment when you find out exactly what in hell it is you've done!" And with that ominous promise of impending doom, she dropped back upon her oddly-angled heels and retracted her teeth to a length that didn't involve tongue-biting when she spoke, more sanely now, "We'll need an extra vat. Which..." though her teeth were not so horribly long now, they were still sharp as dwarvish awls when she showed them to Valentin again, "Of course, you will pay for.." In gold or flesh wasn't clear, and she didn't make it so. Her forehead creased, as she threw a glance to the shrivelled children. "Better make that ... two."

To give full credit to the Scleratus, he didn't flinch, didn't shift the slightest muscle. He'd steeled himself for anything from rage to medium levels of injury. But then, he'd spent several months subjecting himself to the horrors held within the Chest of Torment found beneath Venturil - it took a lot these days to make him flinch. But he did make a mental note that she was a bit more peeved than usual. An' a bit uglier too, if one got right down t'brass tacks. The bifurcated tongue and weirdly morphic body were somewhat new, as far as he could tell. He let her vent without a shift in expression. He was also careful not to mention that he'd already paid for the vats and barrels, and her latest statement was an exercise in statin' th'bleedin' obvious. Valentin figured he'd also better not mention how pleased he had been when the damn critter had exploded. That would not be politic. There was not a tremor in the butcher's voice as he responds - He'd frustrated his own sire on many an occasion over the decades by failing to respond to the bastard's raging tantrums with the usual abject terror he had enjoyed from previous, long deceased, apprentices. - "I'll let 'em know about th'extra vats when I order th'copper tubin' guv. Y'got a delivery address for 'em yet?"

Tenebrae blinked. "As it happens..." and then blinked again. "I .. do not."

Valentin grunts "Tha's a problem we'd better fix right quick. Now, we've got three likely options, as I sees it"Thr The butcher ticked off the options on his fingers, as if Tenebrae hadn't just threatened to end his very existence "One: the guild laboratories. Two: your old mansion. Three: We kill off some bleedin' pair o'fangs, use their joint, and kill anyone else who complains about th'arrangement." Valentin scratches at a muttonchop, wiping off some of the spittle from Tenebrae's tonguelashing as he does "It kind o'needs to be a location in Vailkrin, 'less you have some way of shifting several large metal vats out o'the city wi'relative ease. The wooden barrels are easy enough t'bring by wagon from Larket, so that aint an issue" It was evident he'd already given it a fair amount of thought.

Tenebrae turned away abruptly, shuffling toward the forest whilst trying not to trip over the coat's hems and leaving Valentin the not-very-onerous task of following, "My manse will do, for now." What further thoughts she might have on the matter weren't mentioned. Instead, she said, "Valentin. My armour..."

Valentin was already onto it, gathering the bits which hadn't already crumbled away. He had no idea what she needed the ruined bits for, but then, he had little knowledge of the Necrophidiae so his opinion on the matter was irrelevant. Realising the futility of trying to carry the wreckage himself, Valentin let the cantatus of cryumbral summoning cascade from his lips, a small golem of shadowice forming with a large tray appearing in the place of the typical ornamental head the Novus Morior habitually envisioned in their efforts. Piling the bits of armour on the tray, Valentin followed Tenebrae, cryumbral servitor in tow. "A'right. I guess all that's left is a visit t'the foundry to add to th'order an' the fat bucket."

Tenebrae spared a glance at the ruins of her symbiote and continued with the sentence she had not quite finished speaking, ".. it used to be a vampire." Blithely continuing their stroll, she kicked the coat-hems and whistled a tuneless ditty until the odd pair had almost reached the main road. "I shall see to the manse. After I find some.. clothing.." Her nose wrinkled a little, "Such as that I am likely to find in this hovel. Gunther and Raoul, I rather think, might assist me there. Shall we meet at the manse tomorrow, then?" The smile she gave the vampire was sickly sweet. "In the meantime, hunt up the Necromancer's thingy-book and mark yourself in as Thanadule." Her smile grew toothy again. "Anyone skilled enough to eff-up a dimensional banishing to this degree -deserves- the position. Don’t you think?"

Tenebrae added, "By the way, we don't need the remains of that armour. Unless the manse's bathroom tiles need re-grouting."

Valentin had successfully handled every nuance of what he had considered an inevitable shitestorm as the result of the bungled summoning, up until the point the bitch snookered him. "You what? Blimmin' Thanadule?!" Damn and blast th'wench. He thought he'd been in the bloody clear, but she'd saved the worst for last, an' no doubt about it. Bloody Thanadule. Next she'd be finding some useless bugger or bint, an' fobbing the pissant Novus Morior on him as a 'prentice. He knew how her twisted blimmin' mind worked. The evil, heinous bitch. It would take creativity to get her back for this, creativity and... subtlety. A notion which already set his teeth on blimmin' edge. But oh, he would make her pay for this. Scleratus had been a cushy rank. A nice balance of easy work, responsibility, plenty o'research time, and the ability to blame the superiors if things went balls up. But Thanadule. Oh no. That had the ring of 'authority' about it, which meant the buck stopped there. Buggrit. He had to grit his teeth not to snarl the next bit. But he managed to regain his taciturn inflection just in time to say "Right you are, mistress. Thankee, mistress."

Tenebrae did her level best to look exceedingly smarmy and blithe at the same time. "I'll have Gunther whip you up a nice new coat, while I'm there." And off she went, inwardly wincing at the thought of her reunion with the swank couturiers while garbed in the Butcher's dreadful rag.