As he descended the rickety ladder into the darkness, Orton felt his stomach churning in that old familiar shit-I-sure-hope-I'm-not-about-to-get-killed way, which made him realize with a start that this was probably only Enna's second or third dangerous situation. "Make sure that you keep your flashlight beam low to the ground, and whisper," he muttered as he stepped off the ladder onto a grimy stone floor.

"Shouldn't we use telepathy?" Enna whispered back. "And maybe some kind of magic night vision?"

Orton shook his head. "We might need that power for other things, and they carry their own risks. Using telepathy makes you vulnerable to psychic attack vectors, and bright light would blind us if we were using night vision -- if I even knew any night vision spells, which I don't."

"You don't?" Enna hissed back. "I thought you knew, like, all the spells, from the future!"

Orton chuckled grimly. "I know a lot of spells, I'll admit -- probably about twice as many as most people at my power level. But even that's a tiny fraction of all the possible magic -- I'm totally ignorant about several branches of magic that I know have power, like Qabbalah or Dzogchen, and I only know tiny bits of others. And that's not even counting the limitless branches of magic that I don't even know exist, or that I think are fake just because they didn't work in my original reality." He smirked a little bit at the thought that something completely ridiculous like Tarot might be an actual magical tradition in some other universe, then sobered. "Anyway, we need to get serious. We might find literally anything down here."

"Probably not ice cream," Enna snarked back. "Which sucks, because I could definitely go for some ice cream right now."

Orton winced. "A lot of mystical creatures will actually try to tempt you with sweets, so yeah, we might find ice cream down here. But if we do, don't eat it."

Enna blinked. "I... really?"

Orton nodded. "For really reals -- beats me why, though. I think a lot of them have trouble understanding that it's not fourth century B.C.E anymore, when you might have legitimately sold your soul for a really good strawberry trifle." He gestured for her to follow him as he began making his way down the corridor.

For the first thirty yards or so, Orton held out hope that this might just be the lair of a serial killer or something equally harmless, but he was quickly disabused of his notion; the corridor soon came to a metal door set into the eastern wall, from behind which he could hear sobbing, chanting, and shrieks of pain. He grimaced, gestured for Enna to stay put (earning her a glare) and kicked in the door with a qi-strengthened boot.

The two robed figures within, who had been in the process of committing unspeakable atrocities to a young woman wearing the tattered remains of a spandex exercise outfit, turned as one and attacked without hesitation. The nearest went into an incantation immediately, but Orton eschewed finesse for the direct approach; he empowered his flashlight with a snap of kinetic power, stepped in close while assuming a one-handed jodan no kamae battle stance, and staved in the other man's skull with a single blow. The other robed figure lashed out with a wickedly barbed dagger, but Orton easily caught his opponent's forearm and twisted it obliquely. He expected to hear the snap of a broken elbow joint, but was instead surprised to see it bend unnaturally as though it were a tentacle instead of a jointed limb; caught off-guard, his combat trance faltered and he staggered backwards. Hungrily, the remaining robed figure pounced in to grapple, wrapping its twisting limbs around Orton's wrists; he glimpsed at least two sets of teeth gleaming under its cowl and gulped.

As its shadowed face dove in for a bite at his throat, he heard Enna's voice call out something he couldn't quite hear, and a flare of power erupted in front of him; half-blinded, he watched his opponent abruptly fly backwards and impact with bone-shattering force into the opposite wall of the cell. Leaping to his feet, he quickly made the sign for Durga's Purifying Flame and was gratified to see a hiss of steam erupt from under the creature's robes. He darted over to it and pulled the robe away, but there was no longer anything underneath except a dark stain. He shuddered. "That was too close. But we got 'em, so hooray."

"What were those things?" Enna was half-hiding behind the doorway (quite sensibly, he thought) and seemed reluctant to enter the room. He gestured for her to come inside, making sure the door was shut behind her.

"In a minute. First, put her to sleep." He pointed to the sobbing, bleeding form of the prisoner.

Enna winced and nodded, tiptoeing over and muttering "Somnus," as she touched the other woman's forehead; with a sigh of relief, the woman passed out. "Jesus. What were they doing, torturing her?"

Orton began undoing the woman's bindings, trying not to look too closely. "Close enough. They were probably cultists, and not of anything cuddly, either; these guys make the baby-eaters back in Zurich look downright neighborly." He flicked his sight beyond sight over the fading auras in the room and shuddered again. "Ick, yeah. The first guy was at least human -- a cultist of Zimpagani, a demon prince. The other thing wasn't even close."

"What was it? Some kind of... snake-person, or something?" Enna rubbed her upper arms, trying to ward off a chill that didn't seem to be related to the temperature. "I've never seen anything like that before."

"Lucky for you. That was a Spawn of Ielmabaoth, and these guys are into some bad, bad stuff if they're able to summon those." He shuddered again. "Ugh, it threw off my humors just by touching me."

"As much as I'd love to know who or what Mama-bath is, I feel like we have bigger problems." Enna gestured uncertainly at the unconscious woman. "What do we do with her?"

"Ielmabaoth is a malahaeccus, a thought-monster, and those guys don't play by rules like demons do. The less you know about them the better, literally." He bent down and examined the unconscious woman lightly, touching her aura with only the most gentle of inspections. "Good. They hadn't gotten started on the real rough stuff yet. If we leave her here, she'll wake up disoriented, then wander out and forget where she was; she'll probably remember being mugged or assaulted or something pleasant like that."

"Pleasant?" Enna crossed her arms, furious. Orton winced.

"Okay, bad choice of words. But listen -- if we try to help her too much, she'll become caught up in all this. And then when she gets home, maybe her birth certificate doesn't exist anymore and she starts seeing strange things. Get it?" Orton turned away to search the human cultist. "People staying ignorant of the supernatural keeps them safe. Show or tell them too much, and they get caught up in the same shit we are -- only without any kind of powers to protect them. Not exactly a good deed."

"What about the bad guys? Are we supposed to be saving them, too?" Enna nudged the dead man's robe with her toe. "I don't know if I want to be that noble."

Orton shook his head. "Nope. They're Shades; already beyond redemption if they're tangled up in this kind of stuff. Just don't fight them physically if you can help it -- you don't know any somatic arts yet, so you might be in for an unpleasant surprise if you treat them like a normal human." He rifled through the dead cultist's pockets and grunted with satisfaction as he found a large iron key-ring. "It'd be very inconvenient for both of us if you tried to punch or stab a dude and found out he could turn your blood into wax with a pressure-point strike or something."

"Holy crap, is that a thing magic can do?" Enna blinked. "That sounds more like comic-book stuff than anything real."

"'Real'," Orton chuckled. "But yes. Magic basically falls into three categories: rites, invocations, and arts. Arts are the hardest to master -- each one is basically a 'magic karate style' that you can spend your whole life on -- but they're powerful and unpredictable. Arts exist to shatter stone, make people explode with a punch, almost anything you can think of." With an effort, he illuminated his rainbow-colored chakras and meridians so that Enna could see them glowing dimly for an instant; she blinked. "I've spent nearly sixty years mastering Prajna Yuddhan, so I can go toe-to-toe with most arts, but you should stick to blasting guys from a distance."

Enna rolled her eyes. "Great. I get to shout at bad guys while you do magic kung-fu. Why do I always end up playing sidekick to you, Orton?"

Orton shrugged. "Quite frankly, the power of your invocations is more than enough to make up the difference. That Spawn had the noumenal weight to ignore or resist most magic, but you blew it apart without even trying; a lot of enemy spellcasters have wards, but you're strong enough to plow right through them just by telling them to catch fire and die. Do you really want to complain about an advantage like that?"

Enna sniffed, then smirked. "I guess not."

Orton nodded, then pocketed the keys. "Then let's go."

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Gentry paused, taking a sip from his Darjeeling, then set the cup down with a satisfied sigh. He'd been expecting to spend a few days recuperating after that most recent set of rites, but to his surprise, he'd felt rather rejuvenated the next morning and had been able to get straight to business on his next set of divinations to locate the cult of Zimpagani. The first few attempts had not been fruitful, but it had only taken a day to find a promising avenue of inquiry and things had been moving along quite swimmingly since then.

He had been a bit surprised to be heading back East again so soon after leaving Switzerland, but he supposed that it wasn't much of a stretch for most of this particular tradition's history to be in and around Europe; after all, this was the Old Country, where the original and grandest traditions of demonology had been kicking around since the days of his great-sires. He took a bite of a scone, savoring it, and looked cheerfully out the window at the beautiful vista below as the plane soared over the Mediterranean. There was no denying it -- he was in a great mood, and he doubted that would change anytime soon.

An ordinary person -- that is to say, someone with a rather different psychology than Gentry -- might have been worried about a large number of things, such as what sort of opposition he could expect from a secret and hidden cult or what dreadful monstrosities he was working so diligently to unleash. Gentry, however, was generally of the opinion that things would work themselves out if he applied himself and trusted in his obvious divine birthright, and thus far he had very rarely had any experiences to dissuade him from such an approach. Not that he was going in unprepared -- perish the thought! He'd already replaced all his wards, cast a number of preparatory divinations regarding the sort of dangers he might be apt to face, and correspondingly added a number of additional spells and charms to his protections; these had included a spell which protected one from dangerous gases and another which let him fight underwater, which he was quite keen to try out. Dare he hope for a pitched spell-duel in the canals of Venice?! He sighed again contentedly; truly, his was a charmed life. He gazed out the window again for a bit longer, then let himself drift off to sleep. The time for excitement, as always, would come later.

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The next room had gone even more smoothly -- they had only encountered a single cultist amusing himself with the remains of a previous sacrifice, and had gotten something of a surprise attack. Enna had shouted a blinding word that disoriented the other man for a moment, while Orton, eschewing subtlety for expediency, launched a ki-empowered spinning aerial kick that literally tore the cultist's head from his shoulders. The next two rooms had been empty, and now they were wandering the corridors with a growing sense of unease mixed with boredom. Enna was new to this emotion, but Orton could clearly recognize it as the sort of anxiety most Americans born after 2001 were quite familiar with.

"Do you think we got them all?" Enna asked, glancing around and keeping her voice low.

Orton shook his head. "It's possible, but I doubt it. There's too many rooms here for it to just be two cultists and their pet snake-guy-monster-thing." He peered down the corridor, squinting and wondering if he should risk an active divination; his passive senses were almost useless in here since they were constantly just blaring the psychospectral equivalent of "hey watch out bro" into his supernal thoughtspace.

"So, you think there's more of them?" Enna clutched her flashlight more tightly, wishing she felt more confident about her magic.

"Probably." Orton had come to another door; he kept his own flashlight low as he quietly tested the keys he'd looted from the first cultist in the lock as he continued muttering. "I'd almost bet on three or four more, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was six or seven." With a grunt, he found the correct key and unlocked the door, then nodded in preparation to Enna; she nodded back, and he quickly twisted the knob and shouldered the door aside. His breath instantly stopped. "FML."

"What? What is it?" Enna whispered harshly, peeking around him to look.

The twelve cultists inside, who had been sharing a family-style dinner of six large tubs of meat (which Orton was trying desperately not to contemplate the origin thereof) stared back, as stunned as they were, for a good half-second before Orton recovered his wits first. "Run", he commented to Enna, then slammed the door shut and began to take his own advice. Startled, she blinked at the suddenly-closed door, then barked "Menó!" at it before she felt Orton's hand wrap around her wrist and yank her painfully after him. The door obligingly expanded, wedging itself into its frame with a grinding and groaning sound.

"Nice job, but it won't stop these guys," Orton panted as he dragged them both around a corner. Before Enna could protest, a cultist appeared out of the darkness before them, raising two unnaturally long-fingered hands and beginning a chant; Orton slammed as much power as he dared into his meridians, let go of Enna's hand, and launched himself forward into a rising sun kick. His thaumaturgically-empowered foot crashed into his opponent's jaw with enough force to both rocket the surprised cultist up into the ceiling and internally decapitate him by snapping his spinal cord free from the base of his skull; the corpse flopped bonelessly to the floor even as Orton dashed past it and hurriedly beckoned for Enna to follow.

"How'd that guy get in front of us?" Enna gasped. "This is a single hallway!"

"Shadowporting," grunted Orton, looking around for more threats as they ran. "Advanced technique. If you're not being observed, you can disappear from one place and reappear somewhere else." He dashed around another corner, parried a blow from a suddenly-appearing Spawn of Ielmabaoth, and made the prāna mudra with his free hand before jabbing it into the creature's stomach; it recoiled, shrieking, and disappeared into the darkness.

"Crap. I was hoping you'd blast it." He looked back to see Enna doubled over and gasping, and winced. "Right. Guess you can't invoke if you can't breathe." She gave him the finger, but he could see she was worried; this was definitely going south in a hurry. He drew back closer to her and threw out a few wards; they'd degrade quickly, but it was obvious Enna couldn't keep running. Like it or not, they'd have to make a stand here.

As the first pair of cultists came screeching out of the darkness from either side, Orton felt a brief surge of hope -- the situation might not be ideal, but it could definitely have been worse. The tight confines of the hallway limited his movement, but it also prevented more than one or two of the cultists attacking them at once. Still, this was a fairly desperate situation, and he needed to start taking things a little more seriously. He pulled a pair of short knives from his boots and reified them into a pair of glowing green wakizashi empowered with the purity and indomitability of his anahata chakra; as the cultists closed in, he fell into a niten-ichi stance and concentrated harder than he'd done in some time. What followed was a bit difficult for other people to apprehend, in more sense than one.

Orton split his consciousness into five tracks, spinning tendrils of thought into skeins of willpower and invocation with the skill of long practice; he dedicated one process simply to maintaining his martial trance, a second to controlling his physical body, a third to empowering and sustaining the enchantments on his weapons, and a fourth to creating and maintaining a holistic spatial map of his surroundings (tricky, but worthwhile since he couldn't look everywhere at once). As the cultists closed in, brandishing wavy-bladed daggers which smoked with bloody crimson auras of their own, he caught the strike of the first cultist on his left-hand blade and slashed under the guard of the second cultist with his right-hand one, opening a superficial but distracting wound on the other man's forearm. As his foe fell back, Orton spun fluidly, lashing out with both blades in a spiral of viridian slashes which scored the two cultists in several places; black ichor spattered the walls, but Orton was too busy to worry about the fact that they didn't seem to be bleeding regular blood. His awareness of Enna, still coughing as she struggled to draw her first real intake of breath for an invocation, hung illuminated in his consciousness as he landed adroitly, ducked a lash of some stygian force from an as-yet unseen assailant, and executed a perfect extended lunge as he fell into a natarajasana strike and impaled the first cultist through the heart with his left-hand blade. His other sword, thrown out behind him for balance and tucked behind his right foot, was in just the right place as he released his grip on the hilt and kicked outwards, launching the blade through the air and into the throat of the cultist who had been turning towards Enna. He allowed himself one instant of satisfaction as he rocked backwards into a controlled fall which rolled him back towards her, retrieving the other wakizashi from the dead cultist's body as he leapt smoothly to his feet. "Feel free to pitch in any time," he commented, smirking, as Enna scowled at him. Then the next two hostiles appeared, and Orton lost control of the battle entirely.

The first was another cultist, but this one was clearly different from the others -- his chest was bare and a long, curving scar decorated it from his left shoulder to his right hip. A matching scar arced across his forehead, and a pencil-thin mustache accentuated a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and a long, forked tongue. Orton pivoted to face him, but suddenly found himself spinning around; everywhere he looked, the scarred cultist was behind him. It's a spatial displacement Art, Orton realized, dropping into a defensive crouch as the other man lashed out with a spiked chain; the autonomous process controlling his limbs managed to bat the chain away despite not being able to see it reliably, but he realized he wouldn't get lucky a second time. He concentrated, trying to link up his sight beyond sight with the process controlling his combat actions, and in doing so lost control of his battlesense for the briefest of moments. In that instant, the second enemy appeared.

This was another Spawn of Ielmabaoth, but larger and significantly less humanoid than the previous two they'd faced; Enna gasped for air as it erupted out of the shadows and soared towards her with a sort of twisting spatial flow that never touched the ground. Her eyes strained to focus on it; it seemed hazy and indistinct, with sharp edges that seemed all out of sorts with the blurrier areas and hurt to look at. Too late, she realized it was going to reach her before Orton could stop it, and that her lungs and brain were too empty (of breath and vocabulary, respectively) to make any reasonable defense. Her gorge rising, she used the one weapon she had at her disposal in desperation.

The pages of Les Formes Élargies de l'Esprit - Au-Delà du Matériel fluttered gloriously as the book took flight, thrown into the air in between herself and the onrushing horror. The page with the Invocation of the Hawk's Stoop, floating free from its place tucked into the front cover, hung before her eyes for the briefest of moments, and she recited the Latin chant as if in a trance; the book glowed, elongated slightly, and then rocketed straight through the Spawn like a five-pound bibliographic wrecking ball.

If she had used any other projectile, the Spawn would have ignored it and plowed straight into her, consuming several aspects of her existence at once; but Les Formes Élargies was rather spiritually weighty in its own right, being the last surviving copy of a decidedly unique eldritch tome which codified all ninety-nine base thought-forms of human cognition (as well as containing the seed forms for the other nine secret ones). The resulting sophopoetic collision between a codified sum of arcane perspectivism and a decidedly inimical occult nega-being was quite spectacular, but Orton missed it due to being otherwise occupied and Enna had no idea what she was seeing; to her, it simply looked as if the book impacted the Spawn and both imploded. Great, she thought glumly, there goes all my power. She struggled to her feet as the last of the coughs subsided.

Behind her, Orton was hard-pressed indeed; his opponent, now occupying six-and-a-half positions in space simultaneously, castigated him with flurries of blows from all angles as well as throwing out deadly projectiles of shadowy bat-shaped un-light. Orton, illuminated with virescent phosphorescence, ducked and spun and parried masterfully, but even his impenetrable four-brained defense could make no headway against an opponent who was rather rudely molesting the entire concept of physical existence mid-combat. If he hadn't already been sweating, he would have started.

He was just struggling to spin up a sixth thread for a rudimentary battlespace projection when his opponent's heads (all eight of them) suddenly exploded unceremoniously; he glanced back to see Enna, looking pissed, and reminded himself yet against that she was someone he didn't want to antagonize needlessly. He nodded approvingly, then stepped backwards towards her and they fell into a back-to-back defensive pose as another wave of cultists rushed them. The next few minutes were a blur, but when the dust cleared, there were nine corpses on the floor, a smattering of stains where various Spawn had been excised from physical reality, and two exhausted mages still sitting back-to-back. Orton reluctantly let his servitor threads terminate as he and Enna gasped for breath; he was running low on power anyway.

"Is... is that all of them?" Enna panted, looking around through her sweat-damp and dust-streaked hair.

"Mostly," Orton grunted. "The one in the... fancy robe... didn't chase us." Orton imagined that the leader of a demonic cult might have enough clairvoyance to know when not to join a losing battle, but didn't want to undermine the victory for Enna. He sighed, shifting sore muscles as the ki drained out of his body; he'd be paying for this for at least a few days.

Enna shook her head. "Typical... management." She struggled to her feet, wobbling slightly. "So... what now?"

"Now," groaned Orton, dragging himself upright. "We get a hotel and some gelato. We're in no shape to fight Gentry after that." He shook his head. "So instead we rest and recover, and hope we can track him down again in a couple of days. With any luck, he'll still be in the city."

Enna nodded approvingly. "Finally, some real fucking wisdom from the Jedi Master. Let's go get sundaes."

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The sun was low in the sky as Gentry picked his way along the footpath between the canals; the flight had been smooth and uneventful, but he had a feeling that things would be exciting before the end of the day. He sighed, breathing in the salt-spiced air, and brushed an imaginary piece of dust off the sleeve of his jacket. Normally he dressed exclusively in banker's blacks, but his recent upbeat mood had found him feeling whimsical, and he'd opted for a pristine white suit which was simultaneously flamboyant and common enough that he could be mistaken for any one of a hundred holiday tourists. He hoped the outcome of his divinations wouldn't damage it -- it was a lovely suit.

He was beginning to wonder if he should stop for some shaved ice when the water in the canal to his left began to boil and churn precipitously; he prudently stepped back and began rolling up his sleeves. After a moment, the water exploded upwards in a violent plume, disgorging a bedraggled-looking old gentleman in what had once been a highly ornate blood-colored robe with golden trim but which was now a very sodden bathrobe-like garment atop absolutely no other clothing whatsoever. An oilskin, wrapped round a roughly cylindrical object, was clutched tightly in his wrinkled and clawlike hands.

"Ah, good evening, gran maestro," began Gentry, nodding respectfully. "Are you, perhaps, currently occupied?"