Iron and Gold

[Midtime]

((This should be the second rôleplay I have ever created myself; my first, made several years ago, died down in eight posts or so due to my then-Draconian rôleplaying tendencies, which I like to say I have gotten rid of; I haven't any undue hope, but I do wish that this will call some attention.

 

To save my breath and your time, I had better get down to it. :P

 

The following is an introductory entry, and you can follow it in like manner, without an entry form.))

 

"We still remember! so we do,

Who tarry here - we sorry few -

the silver lights across the sea,

The flame and fear and devilry

That ought have driven us away

Were we so prudent; yet we stay -

And so diminished we remain

And hide from you, who are our bane,

Who seek our tributes, chain our life

To phantasies and madness rife."

~a chant heard close to a faery fort

 

John Webster walked along Pemberton Avenue; no more precise term for his gait could have been dredged from the mind of any observer, and none paid him much attention at all. It was late in autumn, after all, and cold, and each pedestrian hurried along, hunched into his clothing, breathing clouds of fog and wishing for nothing more than to get out of the morning chill and pallid sun, and into their own homes.

 

It would have been difficult to judge anything about him, really; he was firmly ensconced in a mud-brown trench-coat, dirty and shapeless as a tramp's, reaching down to his shoes, and its collar high enough to hide everything save his black (or perhaps dark brown) eyes, and his rust-brown hair. Even if you could make out his face, you might hazard him to be anywhere from twenty to forty years old; and whichever number you picked, you would be wrong.

 

You would certainly never guess that the .45 SIG-Sauer in one of his jacket pockets was only the beginning of the munitions he had on his person, along with a rather rusty combat knife, a selection of false identities, and not the least surprisingly, a cell-phone.

 

Webster was not, technically speaking, working for anyone; if you had caught him on another day he would not have been working at all. He had in the past, however, worked for MI5, the CIA, and numberless Other Government Agencies, who still bought his services on occasion, this being the reason for the phone.

 

He was not working for anyone; he was working for a particular some-one. This he knew; who the person was, he did not. The man had called him one day, and stated himself to be the representative of an organisation called 1st Refuge: Webster had never heard of it, which was strange, but he never concerned himself with identities. Apart from his jobs, he never concerned himself with anything at all.

 

Right now he was carrying out a task for his employer. He was also making good on contracts from no less than eight intelligence agencies. They all concerned one man, and what he kept in his basement.

 

Webster knew no-one was watching him; with barely a ruffling in the wind he stepped smoothly into a dirty alley, frightening a rat out of a dustbin. Setting off at a remarkable pace, he was soon behind the apartment. Most of the windows on this side were closed to keep the stench out, but there was one that was not. It was at the right corner, and unused: more to his advantage, it was on the first floor.

 

With deceptive grace and little effort he sprang up and through it, throwing up billowing clouds of dust with his landing. He was inside, and no-one had seen it. Crossing quickly to the door, he pulled it open and was confronted by a cabinet.

 

This room really had been forgotten. He leaped the cabinet, and shut the door quickly behind him. Now he was to make for the stairs: the land-lord had recently gone outside, and this was a perfect chance. He followed the corridor, ignoring the gold numbers flashing along-side him, and then the flight of stairs to the ground floor; then he strode down another passage, and finding the trapdoor hidden under the carpets and securely locked, he produced a set of picks.

 

In six seconds the trap-door was open. In seven it was closed again, and Webster was descending a steep set of stairs in pitch darkness. There was a strange wind blowing, and he heard the keening sound that confirmed his intelligence.

 

The stairs took an abrupt twist, ending in another door: with no patience to pick locks in the dark, he delivered a powerful kick which threw it neatly off its hinges. The keening sound, like the wailing of a bush-baby, was abruptly very close; he swept his hands along the wall and found a switch, which connected to a dim electric bulb in the centre of the room he found himself in.

 

It was nearly bare, of course, and walled with stone. A table stood on one side of the room, whereupon were arrayed a good selection of silver implements that he might have mistaken for medieval torture equipment. How occult, he thought, giving them a cursory examination before leaving them for evidence.

 

The basement had been furnished with one other feature. Set against the wall was a chair of iron, and chained in it was, without doubt, a screaming child, chained to it by wrists and ankles with inhumanely tight bands, with pleading in her weeping eyes. Webster spared her a distant smile, before drawing his silenced SIG-Sauer and firing one-handed four times.

 

The manacles broke almost simultaneously. The child was free: she stood as abruptly as if the whole chair had been heated to its melting point. Her form liquefied, passing indecisively through endless forms before settling on a huge, scaly-skinned brute of an ape, its fangs glistening with blood and venom as it bared them wide and howled for freedom.

 

"Hostile," Webster murmured to himself, and fired one more round. The steel slug struck the creature in the chest, burying itself deep and throwing it against the wall with the fury of a rhinoceros. It did not do as well as iron, but the specimen would be paralysed for more than long enough.

 

The land-lord was dead. Webster had knifed him a few minutes after he left his apartment.

 

He dialled a number on his cell-phone as it lay twitching, and the voice on the other end said cautiously, "Agent Summers, FBI."

 

"It's me, Summers," he said laconically. "I have a tip-off..."

 

 

The story of the FBI's heroic capture of a faery specimen never reached the head-lines, but the department received much praise from all those persons politically lofty enough to know of what actually happened there, having proved itself worthy of that praise once again. The specimen itself was acquired for the Government, and several sums of money were by varying means transferred into the account of one J. Webster.

 

 

((As you can suppose, faeries (known by other names) do exist here. They can take on any shape they wish, and inherit all power - supernatural or otherwise - thereby associated: if ever there were ghosts or sirens, a Bigfoot or a Scissor Man, now there are only the faeries that take on their shape as they fancy.

 

Iron is their bane, the purer the better: its touch shackles their power (and thus themselves entirely), and they can do nothing against it. If a human can cause a faery to drink from their blood, then the faery is bound to their wishes as long as they live.

 

In modern days, nearly no faeries live free. Humanity has bound all of them, and though their existence is a secret to most, those who know their uses, or find out about them, have for a long time sought to exploit their power. Nearly all government agencies know of them, therefore, and a clandestine international truce has spawned united efforts to bring them into responsible (read: our) hands.

 

Whether faeries truly feel and think, or whether they only mimic, is very debatable. They have no real form.))