Beam POV: Day 72
Current Wealth: 74 gold 17 silver 22 copper
Time passed, and several things started to happen. I began my new career in smithing, as the blacksmith- Ardin- was suitably awed by some of our designs to join up. Unfortunately, it involved working myself close to ten hours a day in the process of learning. Fortunately, I was well used to that sort of exertion, and I quickly discovered all the right ways of moving to ensure that I was working as many of my muscles as possible in the process. It didn’t take me long to fall into a rhythm with it all.
My friends kept themselves busy, too. Both of them continued learning their magic, though Solitaire cut his practice down in favour of concentrating on his chemical-fuckery, and of course we sold plenty more gunpowder to keep our coffers topped up. Our accommodations soon grew with our funds, and all of us got accustomed to hot meals, baths, all the little luxuries we’d spent our earliest days missing. It was good, peaceful, and relaxed. Except for Solitaire’s ever growing paranoia.
Now, Solitaire was a great guy. Well, okay, fine. A good guy at least. Or, not actively bad. Certainly there were worse people one could meet…If you searched enough. He wasn’t actively dangerous, at the very least. Under most circumstances, and as long as you didn’t make any sudden movements in his peripheral vision. The point being, I liked Solitaire, really, he was one of my best friends. But he had a tendency to…Freak out, when he thought trouble was approaching.
And in this case, he was absolutely fucking right, trouble was approaching. Corvan must have heard of us by now, and we were rapidly closing in on his expected arrival time. Solitaire dealt with that kind of pressure- or any other pressure, for that matter- about as well as a landmine. A nuclear landmine, which knew how to make other nuclear devices.
Suffice to say, I was a bit worried for him. Every day he was developing a new conspiracy theory, moving around, muttering to himself all twitchy and dark. He spasmed whenever something even slightly unexpected happened, went for a knife whenever someone startled him, and otherwise made himself resemble a rabid wolverine occupying the body of a human.
“We need a fort.” He snapped, for the fiftieth time. “A bunker, a…a defensible position, chokepoints all around it, with overlapping fields of fire and barbed wire and minefields and-”
“We need to relax.” I tried, and he glared at me in that magical way he had. The one that left me convinced, even after all our years of friendship, that he was about to come flying at me and start chewing bits off.
“You need to fuck yourself.” He snarled. “Fucking morons, all of you, idiots, cattle. Happy to just waddle around chewing grass with your mouth open, waiting to get killed. Well fuck that, I’m too clever to die, I’m too clever for anything to even hurt me. I’m-”
“-Being a cunt to your friends.” Xangô cut in, eying him coldly. Solitaire snapped around, glaring his way. Xangô kept talking before he could reply. “Or am I stupid, mindless cattle for pointing that out?”
Solitaire hesitated, tightened his jaw, swallowed as if something bitter were in his mouth. Then looked away.
“Sorry.” He managed. A few moments passed, and I saw his frenzied rage replaced by something else. Shame.
It always came to him after an outburst like that, and like always he pretended it didn’t, and we pretended not to have seen it.
“We do need to protect ourselves.” Solitaire grunted, after a moment. “Corvan will be here tomorrow, at the earliest, and not much later. This isn’t an ignorable problem anymore. We need to be ready for whatever he tries to do.”
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“Alright.” Xangô answered, warmer, now, “How do you suggest we go about that?”
He hissed, thinking.
“I want to know when he’s coming and from where, so…I’ve sent along a few bribes to the gate guards. Figured if it worked for him, it’d work for us. Our reputations probably helped with that, too.”
Xangô didn’t look surprised, just nodded.
“Okay, what else? How do we take him?”
“I can have one of his hands off before he’s even cast.” I volunteered, and Solitaire eyed me.
“He shielded himself from an explosion within seconds of waking up, I don’t think I’d like to bet on you managing that.”
Truth be told, I would have, but he wasn’t exactly wrong that it’d be risky at least. Certainly, there were easier ways.
“Xangô has a gun.” I noted. “That’ll be helpful, how do we make sure he gets the chance to use it?”
His accuracy was improving, though not as quick as it had a few weeks ago. Little, fractional changes we noticed by the day. He had about one and a third times the hit ratio now than when we’d headed out to take back the fort.
“Unless Corvan blocks it with magic.” Xangô answered back, Solitaire sighed.
“We should have Ardin cast us some iron balls to shoot, they won’t weigh as much, but they’ll hold together a lot better than lead. Might keep their energy concentrated enough to punch through, maybe.”
It depended, of course, on how strong Corvan actually was, which was a bit inconvenient given that the fucker happened to be stronger than any other magus we’d met. Hell of a person to piss off.
Then again, he’d started it.
“This’ll all be useless if we don’t have a decent place to catch him.” Solitaire noted. “This warehouse won’t do, he could probably bring it down in seconds.”
We were talking about it, now, I realised, properly talking about it. Corvan’s attack wasn’t some future event anymore, it had drawn close enough that we had no choice but to actually engage with the threat. A chilling thought.
Our back and forth didn’t last us as long as it might have. Mostly because it was helped by a man who’d spent more of his life thinking about the best ways of defending himself from the kinds of power we’d be assailed by than any modern citizen ought to have.
It wasn’t long before our plan was readied, and we went about preparing it. Argar was sent grumbling from the place with a big burlap sack, Helena was marched away to gather more, and Xangô went out looking for a new hire.
Days passed, we worked, we grew more and more scared. And then we grew less scared.
Argar and I were in charge of gathering little stones and pulverising them with hammers, on Solitaire’s insistence. He wanted sandbags, the weirdo. Well, maybe it was fair enough, if they stopped machine gun fire then it was worth trying them out against a wizard, at least, and it gave us something to do. He was keeping himself busy as well. Making more gunpowder, filling our pockets by the day.
Xangô kept himself busy, too.
He’d told us about the blonde noble lady who’d approached him, of course, and we’d all kept her in the backs of our minds, worrying as she was. Well, she made herself known again, soon. Calling on Xangô for a meeting about…Something, something we weren’t allowed to be told beforehand, apparently. That sparked a new discussion among us, which ended in the only way it could have.
Ideally, we’d have all gone. But we were busy, preparing, and ill suited respectively. Solitaire in particular could activate a woman’s fight or flight response just by coming within a fifty foot radius of her, which made him a poor choice as company for such a meeting.
So Xangô readied himself to head out alone. I was still stacking sandbags when he finally got ready to, and Solitaire was busy mixing, so neither of us really gave him much of a look as he headed out of what was rapidly transforming from “warehouse” to “bunker”.
We turned around soon, though. Because he wasn’t so much as five feet out the door when all of us felt magic on the air, and then a wave of fire rolled down towards him.