chapter two: "the take over, the break's over"

[syrup]

One thing was for certain -- the Watchkeepers' headquarters was extravagant. It was more of a castle than anything, hidden where people would find it, and guarded by some of the most powerful magic users that could be found. Being chosen to protect the Watchkeepers' home for training, where they discussed their plans and learned, and for some, lived and died, was a honor that most magic casters would never reject. It was an honor to be allowed into that world, where knowledge and magic went hand in hand, to be acknowledged as someone worth of the ranks, someone who the Watchkeepers trusted.

Meals were taken in the main hall, which was about the size of around two floors in Todd's apartment complex. Training took place in different rooms, each thrice the size of the apartments you could get there, too. The structure had been built many years ago, and it was serving it's purpose even now.

Which was Todd didn't understand why the fuck they rented out a shitty little conference room for every meeting they had.

It seemed like common sense, but then again, it wasn't like they could just shuttle back and forth between the two places. And, he'd have to do without the blueberry muffins that were kept in the room just beyond the conference room that was specifically for them. Well, perhaps that would make it a fair trade.

Clancey arrived to pick Todd up, and the rain had stopped then. When he climbed into the car, Clancey greeted him instantly -- "You look awful."

"I just had a very close run-in with a particularly angry spirit, but thank you for the compliment."

A chuckle, one that didn't sound too pleased. Todd's sarcasm wasn't appreciated. "Come on, now, we've got a long night ahead of us. Let's get to the scene first, and then to the meeting."

It was, luckily, a short cab ride to the scene of the bombing. What had been hit was the National Post, and there were few causalities from what Todd could see it. It was approximately 2:30am and he had every desire to go home, but he hobbled around with Clancey, smelling fire and smoke and listening to the shouts as they got it under control. Clancey had the perfect excuse for this situation: He was a Minister of Science and had the right to be here. Todd, he explained, was a colleague who was working on the case as well. They were allowed to get a look around, ask questions and soak up the information.

Nothing deviated from the pattern. Once the fire had been calmed and the firefighters had gotten inside, they let them know it fit the bill. They couldn't prove it, for sure, the fire had been so wild most of what was in it had gone up in flames, so the cause was hard to find. They would receive a call once they knew, but Todd and Clancey exchanged a glance, knowing that they wouldn't. The fire had been too big, and this was obviously the work of a caster; they had no choice but to go back with so little to report.

"There was this," the firefighter said, and he held in his hand a white envelope. Clancey seemed to stiffen, but he reached out and took it anyway. Peeling it open, he pulled out a card, and gave Todd Allison a look. With that single look, Todd knew that this had been Violet's work. It was her calling card, so to speak.

"Shit," he said as they climbed back into the cab.

"You're telling me," Clancey retorted, closing his door with a bit too much force. Todd folded his arms in a manner that made him look like a child, but he didn't care. This was quickly getting to be more complicated by the second. It was already too much that he had to hunt down the demons, monsters, spirits and everything else that Violet was summoning, and now that was bomb number five. What was the goal here?

They wouldn't know if it completely followed the pattern until tomorrow, when they could inspect the remains of the building themselves. If it was, however, it was clear that things were, in a phrase, heating up.

"If we could get in there now, this wouldn't be as difficult. I can't stand pretending that we're not the ones going to solve this case. The police have no clue what they're dealing with."

"I don't think most people would believe us if we just announced we were Watchkeepers, you know, and besides, working in secret is part of the job. It's training."

"Training my arse, this is bloody difficult and you know it. We're going to be stuck working on this case until the whole damn city has gone up in smokes."

"Charming outlook on the situation," Clancey said with raised eyebrow.

The car ride went on in silence, and Todd Allison didn't notice when he had dozed off. It was about 3:30am, nearing 4am, and they had pulled into the lot of the building when Clancey began to wake him up.

The walk up the stairs to the room was much more grueling than he remembered, but he kept going regardless of how much he wanted to fall asleep -- mostly because falling asleep while climbing the stairs sounded like an awful way to die.

From the room came a chorus of voices, dissenting and arguing and all sorts of things, in a awful medley that made Todd remember how much he genuinely hated this group of people. He did, sadly, have the luxury of ignoring it, and so Clancey opened the door and in they went.

The second the door opened, the talking stopped, and one by one, the heads in the room turned to gaze at the pair. There was four of them, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes and Bentham, and each looked more tired and annoyed than the last. Perhaps the only one who didn't seem to be that tired was Bentham, but then, Bentham always seemed a bit fresher than anyone else in the group, so perhaps it was nothing.

The room was poorly lit, and dreary. It was hard enough for Todd to really communicate and think with these baboons, and the crap lighting wasn't helping. In fact, it seemed to be enticing him to rest even more so...

"Finally! The call was over an hour ago, and we damn well can't spend the whole night waiting on you both to waltz in here like a couple of clowns late to a birthday party." Rousseau seemed more annoyed than anyone else in the group, and this wasn't an unusual thing by any means.

"I'll have you know that this has been a very busy night for all of us, and that includes me! I just had to deal with, of all bloody things, a spirit in my own apartment! Excuse me if I'm not prompt enough for you--"

"A spirit?" Clancey, who had pulled a chair out for himself, gave Todd a scrutinizing look. "Come to think of it, isn't your apartment a few blocks away from the National Post...?"

"It is?" Todd thought for a moment, and then realized exactly what he was saying. "You don't think...?"

"We're all a little annoyed, but if what you're saying is true, you might have the missing clue from the National Post... which is, now, mostly ashes."

Bentham folded his arms. "So there were no physical clues at the scene this time?"

"Well," Clancey started, and removed the envelope from his coat. As he sat, he placed it on the table. "One of the firefighters gave me this."

He opened again, and from the envelope slipped the card. Todd sat next to Clancey, Rousseau glowering as he did so. The card joined four other cards that had been placed in the center of the wooden table. Each card had, in loopy but clear writing, a word on it. The sentence had yet to be finished, but the five cards read, 'The worst are full of'... what the worst are full of hadn't been revealed, just yet.

"A supernatural happening, a bombing and a card. It's definitely Violet." The room went silent.

Whenever there was a bombing, there was a supernatural outbreak, so to speak. In addition to these coincidences, Violet left for them a card. The cards' meaning they hadn't deciphered just yet, and no one could quite agree on what the saying, once they were all together, would mean. It could be nothing, some argued, but there was, of course, the dissenters, who argued it could mean everything.

Todd gave the room a once over, still remarkably tired but conscious enough to hear Hobbes say, "How wonderful. More pieces to a puzzle we're not sure is even relevant to catching Violet."

"And what's more," Locke added, "there's another happening." He adjusted his spectacles, and placed his elbows on the table, looking quite ready for business. Locke always had some kind of info, and more often than not it came off as gossiping, but they took what they could get.

"Is it related to Violet?" Rousseau seemed more intrigued than the rest of the group.

"Possibly... It's a little eerie, actually."

Bentham shivered a bit. He never did have the stomach for this sort of work, even if he was brilliant in another way. Todd inhaled sharply, attempting to keep himself grounded enough to hear.

"You see," Locke said with the air of telling a story by a campfire, "over at the tramways, people are seeing something they're starting to call 'The Wanderer'. Supposedly, it started with a woman. Now, it's starting to catch on more. Recently, a young girl died--"

Bentham interrupted, "Elizabeth Wellbroom?"

"You knew her?"

"I--I saw it in the paper this morning... She was coming home from school, and apparently killed herself.... It was awful. They found her in a ditch with her throat slit. Apparently it was so grisly, they thought it was a murder, but they found her suicide note stuffed in a nearby tree. Yech."

"That's right."

"Come to think of it," Clancey said, "I think I heard about that this morning, too. It's rather gruesome, so a lot of people were talking about it..."

"Apparently, some friends of her's from school knew something that hadn't been released. They knew she was going to kill herself."

"And it's related to this... 'Wanderer'?" Todd spoke up.

"Yes, naturally. See, it goes like this. The Wanderer is something who you wouldn't want to meet, but if you ride the tram at night, you might. I thought it was some kind of cautionary tale, at first, but no one talked about how this person became ... this. They appear on the roads at night and only one person can see them. It's only their legs, but once you seem them, it follows you everywhere. Apparently, it'll reveal more and more of itself to you, and once you've seen all of it, it'll kill you."

"Sounds like your average ghost story," Hobbes noted, already bored.

"That's what I thought, too, until I found out that this was a recent occurrence." Locke adjusted his glasses again, apparently pleased with himself. "Additionally, I managed to speak with one of the late Elizabeth's friends... Her suicide note wasn't much of a suicide note."

The entire room went cold.

"It just said, 'She's going to take me now'."

The color from Todd's face went, and his expression contorted. "An angry spirit?"

"Perhaps," Clancey said. "We'll investigate it."

"Don't you think we should be focusing on Violet? Something like this seems more for the Hunters. We still don't know the meaning of these cards, and--"

"And we don't know what signs there are of a creature being Violet's or not." Rousseau leaned just slightly out of his chair, a hand in the air the accentuate his statement.

"I'd like to say something, please," Todd retorted in a calm voice. "If we can eliminate Violet, most of her monsters would disperse. I find it incredibly alarming that despite the fact we have been working on this case for how long now, we're nowhere near figuring out who she is, and even if she's one person. For example, the level of summoning magic we're assuming she has... doesn't that seem like a bit much for one person? Besides, assuming the vampire coven that's just moved in is her work too, what sort of person can get vampires to do as she wants?"

The room was quiet as the men looked at one another, all quietly seeing the logic in Todd Allison's words. He was tired, but he was ready to close this case.

"The first bombing, we had a werewolf attack, the second one, there was a demonic possession, and now we have an angry spirit manifesting blocks away from the bomb, not long before it goes off. With this information, we can assume Violet is connected to all these supernatural occurrences, and we know through the boy who had been possessed that Violet was releasing a bunch of monsters into Melbourne. If she is connected to this Wanderer and the vampire coven, we need to consider the possibility that it's not one person. A dozen, perhaps... Mr. Clancey and I agree that the scale of these attacks is too big for one person. We know that dealing with spirits and demons is one thing, but vampires? Werewolves? There's more going on here than we're thinking. The attacks are too perfect, too calculated, and we don't even know what her goal is. These cards, for example, if we could crack them, we might figure out the motive, and maybe there's a patter -- something -- to give us a hint as to what's Violet's next move. Just off the top of my head, I know there's a vampire outbreak, at least two angry spirits, a demon on the prowl and we still haven't found that werewolf. Perhaps if we worked closer with the survivors, we could--"

"Excuse me, gentlemen, but your allotted time for this room has run out," said a worker, who had opened the door so quietly that none of them had heard him enter. He let himself out, and Rousseau cursed under his breath.

After paying for one more hour, they all called it a night and dispersed. Clancey and Todd made their way out last, as Clancey thanked the workers for allowing them to stay so late. When Todd stepped out, he saw that the same cab was outside, waiting for them. Not thinking much of it, he climbed in, closed his car door, and closed his eyes.

"Rough night, eh?" The cab driver's voice had a distinct drawl to it that Todd couldn't quite place. Perhaps it was an urban sort of thing, or he came from the country. Either way, he didn't have the energy to really think about it.

"You have no idea," he said, and the cab driver chuckled. Was he even a cab driver? Clancey climbed in next to Todd, snapped his fingers to keep him awake, and they left.

Although Todd Allison was dropped off home, he didn't get to rest. On the contrary, he changed into a fresh set of clothes, nearly crashed into Petunia on his way down the stairs, and went to work. If looks could kill, Todd Allison would have been a serial killer by the mid-afternoon. Incidentally, that was when he started feeling woozy.

Woozy enough that even Hana's loud voice seemed distant, he wasn't sure, but he thought he heard her accuse him of being sick, to which Todd Allison responded very angrily, "I am not sick!" He then promptly fell over into the trash.

Of course, he was sent home.

The problem arose when Todd Allison did not actually go home, but somehow fell asleep on the tram. When he came to, the sun was setting, and the whole tram was bathed in orange. People were filing off the tram, shuffling around in an attempt to get off as quick as possible. The noise all seemed to distant, and turning his head to look was so difficult. It seemed like an hour had past before he turned his head to look to the side and see--

A man.

"Good Lord!" He shouted and recoiled, but once the initial shock wore off, he realized--

"Calm down, I'm just the conductor, sweetheart. Listen, you nodded off, and missed your stop. We're at the last one."

"The last stop?!"

"That's what I said, isn't it?"

"I have to go--"

"Hold it."

Todd froze mid-step, looking aside to the conductor, who rested an elbow on his knee and cupped his chin in his hand. "Do you know how to get back?"

"...Pardon?"

"I see you a lot. This isn't your usual stop. You're not too far from it, but it's still a ways, so I am asking you, do you know your way home?"

Todd paused, and didn't answer. The conductor stood, smiling, and said, "Well, then, I'll draw you up a map real quick. Wait here."

"That's... nice of you. Thank you?"

"No problem." He disappeared into the back, presumably to draw up Todd Allison a map. He was too tired to really question it, and besides, a tram conductor would know his way around town. Something was nagging him, however. He couldn't quite place his face, but his voice was familiar. Considering that he operated the tram enough to know what Todd's stop was... it made sense that he'd have heard his voice before, perhaps announcing the stops and whatnot. It seemed logical, and yet...

"Here you are," the man came back, a sheet of paper folded up in his gloved hand. He held it out for Todd, who took it and opened it. It was indeed a map, and a straight-forward one, too. He'd have no problem following it, although the man's handwriting was a bit loopier than he expected.

"Um, thanks."

Todd turned to step off the tram, and it was nighttime now. He cursed inwardly, he'd have to be careful. Around here was the vampire coven's hunting grounds, and he didn't have anything defensive on him.

"Be careful now. Bye," said the tram conductor with a friendly wave.

"Ha...haha, I will. Bye."

He turned, and left. The sound of the door closing echoed in his mind, reminding him of a car door slamming, and all at once, he realized where he'd heard that man's voice. That's right, just thick enough with a drawl to be hard to trace, but deep and dark -- he'd definitely heard it just last night.

"Excuse me, wait--"

As he turned to call after the conductor, something hard hit his head, and he blacked out.

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