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Ravena the Keeper
A patron of the arts
One day she found
A soul drifted apart
From her lover's grace
Blood on her face
She begged Ravena
Right his tragic fate
Ravena delivered,
"Be born anew
But upon his return
Pretend you never knew.
"Play your good part
And he will find life
Persist in your art
Again, become his wife."
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Truth be told, Jon’s wish perplexed Ravena in a way that — well, she didn’t necessarily dislike. She had intended the woman to become the cherry on top after Jon would have found his salvation, but for her to become the object of the wish itself? She didn’t think the man would have had the guts to do it.
Certainly, he would chew Her out once he found out about Her little conspiracy with the woman. On the other hand, the woman’s contract was made first, and Ravena wasn’t someone who backpedaled on her contracts.
Besides, if Jon were to properly reunite with his wife now, he would more likely hide in shame rather than openly communicate as a healthy human being. No, they were all sick, and they each needed time to develop and confront their flaws. They each needed time to believe that they deserved the things they wanted. Even the woman.
My, she was quite the vexing case, too. She was supposed to turn out decently. Putting her under the care of the Theater should have been a foolproof plan.
Alas, there were always these background affairs that kept on toppling Her pieces at the most vexing timing, and for Her client to have survived all of that — even coming out of it stronger without costing too much of her sanity — was a miracle in itself.
Some suffering was good, after all, but it shouldn’t be too much. It was Her job to make sure it wasn’t too much.
***
Jon was still sitting up on the stage floor, surrounded by nine dead guys. He’d just been shot, and there was this young woman beaming a smile at him. Granted, titanium mesh proved its worth yet again, and this lady didn’t look like she was out to get him. His chest was still sore from the hit he’d taken; had he broken something? He coughed. “Who are you?”
“Oh! Mind my manners” — she curtsied, though such a thing was entirely unnecessary in this day and age — “I’m Alyssa Rainsworth, an actress of the Theater. Ah, Lady Ravena had already told me, but would you mind giving me your name, yourself?”
“Jon,” he said. He got up, limping a little. He might’ve pulled something, or he was just tired.
“Why, you must be tired. Come, come!” Alyssa gestured along the aisle, and she skipped up to the far door, leisurely waiting for Jon to limp along. She steadied herself, realizing she might have come off as too excited. She wanted to make a good first impression on Jon, so she’d do this properly!
Unfortunately, he only thought of her as a strange ally. At least, he thought she was an ally. There was a modicum of Ravena’s personality in her, and also...something slightly familiar.
For the sake of operational security, he wouldn’t completely let his guard down.
He reached the end of the aisle, and she led him around the theater with a softer smile. The interior of the theater was starkly different: the stone surfaces had a mirror polish, and the carpets were vividly colored and well-brushed. The lights, much like the ones in the basement, were also kept on — so why did it look like shit from outside?
The girl in front of him had a skip in her step. She couldn’t help it, okay? After not having talked to a proper human being in so long, she just couldn’t stop extending her mental list of conversational topics to have with this fine gentleman on many more fine evenings down the road —
“Get any visitors here?” Jon asked.
“Hm?” Alyssa looked back at him. “Oh, not anymore, sadly, though I try to keep the place as sparkling as the day I first stepped foot here.” She smiled. “Ah, those were blissful days.”
She saw him into a room, which had a gaudy bed, a marble countertop laden with unwashed pots and crappy pipework, and a piling mound of trash bags in one corner. Moving from one side to the other, the scents abruptly changed just as much. Jon grimaced. A certain someone he used to know made a chronic mess just like this.
“Excuse the mess.” Alyssa blushed. “I wasn’t expecting guests today.”
“You’re the only one here?” Jon asked.
Alyssa was flushed. “W-why do you ask? Oh my, I never thought I’d be in this situation…”
What a weird girl. “You took out all those men alone?”
Alyssa lightly slapped Jon’s shoulder. “My, didn’t your mother tell you not to ask a lady about her weaponry!”
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One such weapon floated from the table and into her hand, and she turned to Jon with a smirk, hoping it had impressed him. Jon, however, reassessed his situation, because a magical phenomenon had just occurred right in front of him. He now knew for sure that when those men had walked out of that alley’s solid walls, that it wasn’t a trick of the mind. “How’d you do that?”
Alyssa squee’d. “Do you really want to know?”
Jon narrowed his eyes. She snickered. “It’s magic, darling! I think the Skill’s called Guntalker. Ah, you know Skills, don’t you?”
“Don’t call me darling — and no.” Jon pulled up a chair by the kitchenette and sat, all the air escaping from his lungs. Magic — this new intel changed things...and he needed to know more. He looked up at her. “You’re one of Ravena’s?”
“The one!… For the next three blocks! Ah, but there’s also you, and Lady Ravena said I should help you. What’d she want you to do, anyway?”
“Take down the Three Houses,” he flatly said. At this, Alyssa covered her mouth and started pacing up and down the room, muttering “this is big, this is big, this is big…”
“Hey,” Jon called out. Alyssa stopped pacing and looked to him. “Magic,” Jon said. He raised his hand and showed the back of his palm and the wispy tattoos crawling across it. “And this shit.”
“Right! We can’t go city-purging if you don’t even know magic!” She skipped in place. She hadn’t had anyone to teach in the longest time.
“And intel,” Jon continued. “Tell me everything you know.”
Alyssa happily obliged. “Follow me, then,” she said. She skipped out of the room, letting him follow, leading him to a maintenance closet. It was neat and orderly inside, some of the mops still damp from recent use. Alyssa touched one of the shelves, and a door behind her popped open, leading to a set of narrow stairs.
She led him below the theater, into a tunnel network paved with rough-cut stones, and supported by walls clad with stacked skulls and bones. The tunnels were illuminated by tube lights spaced in sparse intervals, but some of them were starting to fizzle out, leaving gaps of darkness. The tube lights were more like chemlights, Jon learned, that just happened to last 5 years, give or take one.
“Ah, I haven’t been down here for so long. Brings back memories,” Alyssa said. Her feet were sliding across the bumpy floor in perfect memory of every lifted stone. “I remember when my teachers locked me down here without food or water, and I had to survive for three days. Simpler times.”
She opened a wrinkled old door. Inside was a little library, thick books with bulletproof covers still opened where their readers had left them. Chains kept them tethered to their shelves, and there was one dangling just a sparse few inches from the floor.
Alyssa picked it up and closed it, putting it in its proper shelf. “My, I really must clean up the place.” She flashed a smile for Jon, but he only beheld her with business eyes.
She clapped her hands. “Right! Magic!” She picked out a thin booklet from the bottom shelf. Dusting it off, she handed it to Jon.
— The Small Book of Skills
The contents were structured like a dictionary, with text all alphabetically squished together. He flipped through it at a voracious speed, looking for keywords that explained the things he’d seen today.
***
Alleywalk. (Skill, 5T, spatial.) Phase thru walls to any loc. in an alley net. Range scales per T.
Guntalker. (Skill, 5T, kinesis.) Manip. guns w/ hands of the mind. Weight cap. scales per T.
***
“What’s this?” Jon pointed at the abbreviations.
“Hm? ‘T’ is for ‘tier.’”
Jon stared at her. Alyssa twirled her hair.
“B-because Skills come in tiers, you see? They get more powerful as you Prove them.”
“That’s what a Skill Proof is for?”
“Right.”
“How do you use them?”
“Well” — she scratched the back of her head — “you talk to Lady Ravena.”
“Do I just ask?”
“Yup.”
[Yes.]
Jon hummed an affirmative. “Can I use what I have?”
“Hm, well, you have an Assassin System” — going by his backpalm status — “so the first thing you have to do is kill someone with the Skill you want, then there’s actually a Level requirement before you can even purchase the starting tier.”
[You have to work for your rewards. Don’t you agree, Mr. Fuze?]
Something didn’t make sense. “How do I know if I killed someone with the Skill?” Jon asked.
“It’ll show up as a Skill Claim on your back palm.”
Jon looked back at the entry for Alleywalk. Did he just happen to not have killed the guy who had it? “On my way here,” he explained, “three men ambushed me. Walked through the walls. I didn’t get a Claim.”
“Oh, must’ve been Alleytunnel.” She shrugged. “It lets the user transport their friends. That, or” — she grabbed Jon’s arm — “magic! Let’s teach you magic!”
Jon wrested away her strong grip. She frowned, but her mood came back as soon as she nabbed another booklet and went to the door. “Come, come!”
Jon followed her to another part of the catacombs: a wide chamber, where chains dangled from the ceiling. There were a number of fire pokers lying over charcoal grills.
“We used to interview people here,” Alyssa remarked, her voice echoing about the hollow chamber. She stopped and faced Jon, remembering the rehearsed words of her former mentors. “With enough focus and concentration, you can manifest any natural phenomenon” — Jon lit his fingertip on fire — “w-woah, woah! That was too quick!” She threw up her hands. “Lady Ravena said I’d finally get an apprentice, and I really thought I’d give ’em the starting tutorial of a lifetime, but damn it! Oh Lady, I can’t teach a genius!”
Jon was too preoccupied with the possibilities of magic to notice her rambling. “Skills and magic,” he asked, “what’s the difference?”
“Hm? Ah, well, magic uses up the mana in the air, then when that runs out, your soul itself.”
Jon shut off the candle flame on his finger. Alyssa chuckled. “That’s why we prefer Skills, see? Oh, but something on a candle flame’s level is barely anything.”
It’s not as if Jon was afraid of the consequences of using too much magic. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to live long enough to see white hairs on his head. At least some magic use would be optimal. Still, Skills would be his mainstay. He was yet to acquire any, and mastering their use in various situations was another creature altogether.
“How many Skills can I have?” he asked.
“As many as you want,” Alyssa replied, “if you can take down that many Skill users, of course.” Jon nodded and rubbed his nose. That was good.
[That’s enough — a private message revealed itself to Alyssa — Do away with Lastifer. Hurry. We must push him along.]
Alyssa’s eyes widened, and she skipped in place. “O-oh! I mean — oh.” She stilled herself. “Lady Ravena has just issued me a new mission.” She curtsied. “Would you be so kind as to accept my companionship in the fall of the House of Lastifer? They did, after all, enter the hallowed grounds of this Theater d’Ravena with intent to kill, so it is quite perfectly legal for us to euthanize their dying legacy.”
“ ‘Legal’ ?”
Alyssa winked. “M’Lady’s temple is in tatters, but it remains revered the world over. Shall we remind the city that Her agents are still capable of a kill streak?”
“Maps and guns.”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Fuze, I’ll show you to the armory.”
They left that chamber with Alyssa excited to finally stretch her arms outside, and Jon, still just focused on the mission, but all the while trying to fit a new magical element into his plans.