James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-09-09 18:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, ~phanuel |
Demolition Man
Who: James and Phanuel
What: Flashback
When: June 14, 2016
Where: The Strip, Winchester, NV
Ratings: Language
The Riviera hotel and casino sat so far south on the boulevard that its zip code properly placed it in Winchester rather than Las Vegas. Erected in 1955, it had been proposed by a mobster, the first high-rise resort to stretch above the collection of roadside motor courts and determine the future aesthetic of the strip. It was a storied place. Liberace himself cut the ribbon. Over a dozen iconic Hollywood films used it for a backdrop. But it was plagued by owners with questionable business acumen. There were suspicions of mafia involvement and embezzlement to go along with poorly planned expansions. Ultimately a shift in foot traffic took tourists in a different direction and bankruptcies followed in ‘83, ‘91, and ‘10. The doors closed permanently in 2015. By June 2016, it sat abandoned, stripped of asbestos, awaiting demolition yet full of potential.
All the trouble at the Riviera, and all the magic, had created a nexus of strange mojo. Historical places such as that held power. It would be a shame to let packs of controlled explosives take it down before anyone tapped into that grid.
At 1:52 a.m. on June 14, 2016, less than an hour before the first planned implosion, James Hutchins stood in the casino on the bottom floor of the twenty-four story Monaco tower. Outside, a crowd had gathered at what was deemed a safe distance, celebratory fireworks and percussion at the ready. He circled around a symbol on the floor, a collection of five candles, and a pyramid made of stone at the center.
It was simple. Open a door. Tap the source. Channel it into the object. It was nothing he couldn’t do. He sat a bottle of Jack on the floor and knelt to make sure he’d gotten the angles right.
It was simple. Sneak in overnight, take in the surroundings, the history of the place, and get out the back long before detonation.
It was really simple. Phanuel could walk the floors of the tower, and when dawn came, she could simply fly out from one of the abolished outer walls and back to Searchlight.
It was logical that people would gather well in advance to watch things be destroyed. Which meant witnesses, should she launch herself off the top of the Monaco tower and fly home. So now she needed to find a way out. And despite the bare floor plan, an easy exit was the hardest to find. Stairways were blocked or half-crumbled already. Finally she reached the casino floor, with less than an hour before detonation.
Only to discover she wasn’t alone. At first she assumed the man was an explosives expert, doing a final check on the charges before giving the command to blow the building. But they didn’t normally burn candles and build stone pyramids. “What in the holy fuck are you doing here?”
The voice came out of nowhere. James tripped. His boot sent a boline skittering across the hotel floor. The knife buried itself in the drywall by the elevators. Thu-u-u-u-ud...
“Oh what the fuck!” he said, the words overlapping with hers. The warlock’s hand flew up beside his head. Anybody trying to get a spell done before a building got blown to smithereens would be mildly on edge. He wiped his palm over his mouth and went to pull the blade from the wall. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”
Part rhetorical, part deflection. He’d go with whatever her answer was. James blew the white powder off the knife and gave the blonde woman a dirty look.
“If I’d hazard a guess,” the pun not lost on her, “you were looking to pull some kind of black magic shit in a condemned building.”
She took note of where the knife had come from. Where there was one weapon, there would be others. Phanuel’s guard cranked up to ten. “And nice deflection. Still didn’t answer the question. So spill.”
Some ‘black magic shit.’ His head cocked, the handle of the ritual cutting tool turning in his fingers. That was a hell of an assumption.
“Seriously?” James spread his arms and looked around. “We’re T minus forty minutes until this place gets blown off the boulevard. I don’t have time to stop and chat. Get the hell out of here.” Flipping it in his hand, he pointed at an emergency door with his knife and got back to his circle of magical items
He pulled a zippo from his hip pocket and started lighting the candles one at a time, stopping once to look up at the blonde through a lock of dark hair. James figured he hadn’t been the only one with this idea, but he was the first to squat on the focal point.
“Fuck you.” Phanuel refused to take marching orders from her Father; there’s no way she was going to listen to this guy. “Why don’t you explain it then, to us plebes?”
James shook his head at the word. Sarcastic references to caste systems left a bitter taste. “The pyramid’s a conductor,” he explained. “You draw all the psychic energy from the place,” he lit another candle, “In through the stones. Trap it. Bind it.” James finished the last candle and straightened. “Take it home. I thought about using a stack of poker chips but it seemed tacky.”
In the history of dangerous ideas, this ranked in the top fifty, Phanuel reckoned. And despite her disdain for pretty much all of humanity (save a few) she wasn’t about to let someone kill himself, let alone tell her what to do.
So she did the same thing when she opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars. She sat down in protest.
James snapped the lighter closed and balanced on the balls of his feet. They stared at one another, a hippie in loose-flowing garments and a magic user in a pair of ragged jeans and a Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt. He tossed the lighter in his bag. “Suit yourself.” As long as she kept her mouth shut, it was no skin off his back whether she watched or not. He pulled a book out of his bag and flipped to a marked page, fingers tracing the text until he found his spot. “Might want to avert your eyes, though,” he mused. “Liberace had a hard-on for shiny things.”
He reached into his pants pocket and took out a gemstone. James set it atop the pyramid. He gave himself a moment to think about what he was about to do, to envision the words draining the energy of sixty years into a focal point within that circle, pulling it through the pyramid and into the stone.
“This is gonna go tits up,” Phanuel muttered under her breath. And like he was someone to lecture her on Liberace. Who did he think he was talking to? Sparkly things? She could show him sparkly things.
“I saw Liberace perform, you know,” she added, this time loud enough for him to hear. “He’d cringe knowing that you’re desecrating his memory like this. They all would.”
James’s body remained still, but he looked up from his book. “Right. Dean Martin, Dice, Jinx. The great ones love to see their work go down in a pile of rubble, then get paved over by a convention center.” He set the book on his bag and stood up, a lanky pair of legs calmly walking the perimeter until he faced north. It struck him that she’d have to be old to have seen Liberace in his heyday. James caught himself wanting to give her a second look, but fuck it. Maybe she caught the farewell tour.
He edged up to the boundary of the ritual area, extended his hands palms-down, and started to breathe through his nose. The longer he stood there, feet shoulder-width apart, getting a feel for the energy of the space, the more his back relaxed and the lines eased out of his forehead. James closed his eyes. By the time he began to speak, he wasn’t annoyed anymore.
She could leave. She should leave. When this went sideways -- and that was a big-assed when, not if, because she didn’t trust magic users as far as she could spit -- Phanuel would be caught in it. And it’s not like this asshole gave her reason to stay. He’d prefer she vamoosed, of that there was no doubt.
And yet. She was always drawn to momentous events, even if they were on a personal level. The Angel remembered her visit with Tomas, centuries ago. He was surrounded in the rubble of humanity and yet refused to give up. This guy, though, was no Tomas.
Phanuel listened as he began to speak. “Your inflection is off.”
“Thank you, Hermione, but we’re not in Hogwarts,” he muttered. “And I’m not Ron Weasley.” James kept going, holding his center, anchoring the spell. The words, done in Latin, repeated and repeated.
The flames skewed sideways on the candles. Bit by bit, their environment began to change.
The air temperature rose, as did the ambient noise in the space. It was a quiet, almost indistinguishable chatter of soft voices at first, then dice, cards fanning on felt, ice in glasses, the nervous laughter of a crowd, luggage wheels on marble, the tinkle of piano keys, the squeaking complaint of a headboard, an elevator bell chiming. Years and years of life. It was one hell of a pull from the ether.
What was the color of that life? It was blue, purple, vibrant yellow, and red. Phanuel’s face was awash in neon lights that weren’t on anymore. It was coming from the pile of rocks, from the gemstone at the apex of it. James saw the colors through the backs of his lids and opened his eyes.
“Steady,” he said, watching his ritual space. A spellcaster in total control of his work.
“Well truss me up in rope, sprinkle me with ginger, and call me Pancake Betty.” Phanuel saw and heard the same as the man casting the spell. It was… glorious. She’d never witnessed such beauty on the mortal plane before. Oh the Renaissance came a very close second, but this.
This was magical.
The Angel could admit when she was wrong. She wouldn’t, but she could.
As a warlock and a fallen angel shared a moment of wonder, somewhere deep within the hard earth of Clark County, the Old ones laughed. That energy spring that had drawn people to the desert for centuries chose that moment to yawn and stretch, its periodic crescendo underway. The epicenter? South Las Vegas Boulevard.
James’s arm hair stood on end, the way it might around sparks of electricity. His ears started to ring with a high-pitched frequency, one that didn’t originate from the altar, but the city block around them. He stuck a finger in his ear. “Do you hear that?” There wasn’t a chance to answer before the noise in the casino ratcheted up three dozen decibels and the kaleidoscope of color went disorientingly white. The floor under the pyramid of rocks began to spiderweb.
She hadn’t felt a rumble of power like that since the tectonic shift of the continental plates. And it wasn’t coming from the warlock’s spell, but underneath it. The noise deafened her. Phanuel put her hands to her ears, hoping to shield her eardrums from shattering. Blood trickled down both her ears and her nostrils.
“This wasn’t you!” she shouted into the din, not that she expected him to hear. She was sure of it; the energies didn’t match. Cracks in the foundation walls spread like a child drawing on an etch-a-sketch.
Phanuel pushed herself off the floor and fought against the solid wall of light to reach the man. “Can you stop the spell?!” she called out into the ether.
Two candles rolled around the floor, white cylinders spinning in half-moon arcs with each shake of the resort’s foundation. The other three flared up like pyrotechnics. James shielded his eyes and looked at the pyramid of rocks. The gemstone was the source of all that light. It had become a beacon, not of the Riviera’s energy but every living thing within three city blocks, thanks to an injection of adrenaline by whatever was coming from the bowels of Las Vegas Boulevard.
All he had to do was knock over the stack. Pick up a rock and break the gemstone. Just break it. Outside a hundred car alarms screamed into the night. People along the strip stopped gambling or drinking to ask their neighbors if they felt it, too. The crowd gathered for the demolition wondered if one of the packs of explosives had detonated early.
No.
“I can hold it off,” James yelled, not because he wanted a charged object that badly, but because it was there. Because he didn’t like to lose. “I can hold it.” He went into the circle, knelt and put powerful hands over that white light. Hands that had worked thousands of spells, painted symbols in blood, reached through the veil, and carried the DNA of witches and seers.
The wrong fucking hands.
“Wait! I don’t think--” The resulting concussive wave threw the Angel through a concrete wall, bringing plaster, concrete and drywall down on her.
That same wave traveled through the magic user and outwards from the Riviera. The electricity browned out and then left the buildings in darkness. People on the street were knocked from their feet. Cars slid askew in their parking spaces. Three of them crashed on the boulevard. A gas pump sparked and caught fire on the corner of Paradise and Presley.
With the air forced out of him and his body hurting, James coughed. His mouth tasted like iron. He rolled onto his side where he landed and looked through the cloud of dust. The gemstone was broken on the floor. There was a hole in the wall where the blonde woman had been. More damage to the structures around them. A light fixture swung on its wire in the ceiling above them.
The charge packs.
They had to get out, now.
James struggled to get his legs to cooperate. He half-crawled, half-lunged across the floor until he found the woman’s shoe sticking out of the pile. “Come on.” He grabbed her leg and pulled. James didn’t know if he was trying to drag her to him, or him to her. “Come on, get up!”
Unfortunately, he grabbed the leg which was attached to her shattered ankle. The shockwave of pain jolted Phanuel awake. She pushed herself off the ground, rubble spilling about, and let out a howling “Motherfucker!” as she attempted to put pressure on the foot. She coughed up a bit of blood. “Easy, Sundance,” the Angel muttered. “Yuh-you’re gonna have to buy me dinner first.”
Phanuel broke off a piece of a dislodged wooden beam and used it to stand, keeping her bad ankle off the ground. She looked for the exit the warlock had pointed to earlier, only to find it blocked by debris.
They weren’t going to get out the normal way.
The Angel looked up. The blast had blown a hole through the ceiling. She could count three or four accessible floors.
It was doable. “Do you have a fear of heights?”
James had gotten himself upright, but the desire was strong to take a second and grab onto his knees. Something was wrong in his midsection, right up under the rib cage. But there wasn’t any time for it. He tried to look up where she pointed, shook his head no. “Why?”
Phanuel began to disrobe.
James gave her a confused look. What was she going to do, make a rope ladder out of her clothes? Maybe it was the head injury. He guessed they only had a few seconds left before one of the charges blew and started an early chain reaction. He straightened and looked around for another way out. Did he have enough juice left in him to move solid objects? It didn’t feel like it. It felt like whatever magic blew through him had stripped him dry on its way out.
He held out a hand to her. “It’s gotta be now.” His feet angled toward the front of the building. If he could get to the lobby, there would be windows and doors. If he didn’t make it, so be it. The Riviera might blow, but he wasn’t going to stand still for it.
Outside the property, sirens wailed.
Outer garments tossed aside, Phanuel unfurled her wings and took his hand. “Yippee-kai-yay, motherfucker.”
James’s mouth opened. “What--”
In the blink of an eye, they were four stories aloft. Seconds later they were at the eastern egress.
The magical charge in the air ignited the first round of explosives early. It snaked into the wires of the other charges, setting them off in succession. Boom.
The Monaco tower slumped and fell inward, caving as its supports crumbled. The ground shook hard enough to take out the Monte Carlo tower with it, which wasn’t planned for demolition for another two months. A massive cloud of dust erupted from the site of the resort, larger than it should’ve been. That wave of gray-white debris spread for blocks. It enveloped the crowd of people waiting for a fireworks display and obscured all the cars on the road.
A gas line exploded the next block over. Balls of fire licked at the man’s feet as he dangled in the air, held aloft by the fallen angel.
James’s hand squeezed the Angel’s as he swung underneath her, the torque of the take-off nearly dislocating his shoulder. It was disorienting, hard to know whether to look down at the destruction or up at her wings. Wings…! His hand was sweating. He tried to get his breath and say anything other than--
“Jesus fucking Christ!” The look on his face. Disbelief. Shock. Pain at the unnatural stretch of his body.
“You’re not far off, Sundance.” Soot, ash and dust obscured their flight over the Las Vegas Strip and over to the roof of the Wynn Hotel, where she finally brought them down with a light thud. Phanuel landed on her bad foot and toppled over in pain. She shook off the remnants of the Monaco tower from her wings, a plume of dust scattering in the wind.
“That was by far, one of the stupidest, most selfish acts I’ve witnessed in over a century. And that includes the whole Franco-Prussian war provocation,” the Angel admonished. “What in the grand fuck were you thinking? It was enough of a gamble to try and trap that much energy, let alone in a building wired with explosives.”
Phanuel placed a hand on her ankle and, slowly, a warm light emitted from her palm. She grimaced slightly as bones re-knit themselves and strengthened enough so she could stand again. “You think Moses didn’t pay a cost for parting the Red Sea? Not something they teach you in bible school, that’s for fucking sure. The idiot couldn’t hold it long enough for everyone to get across. It wasn’t just Egyptians who drowned that day.”
With a scratch of his boots on the roof, James pushed himself up against a massive heating and air unit. He sat there with his legs outstretched, a hand covering his midsection, breathing, trying to focus on what the angel said. “You think I went to Bible school?” He smiled, coughed up and spit pink saliva next to him.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know what I can do.” He wiped his mouth. “It would’ve worked if it wasn’t for...” He shook his head. The back of his skull lolled against the metal framework. The spike. He didn’t know what to call it. It didn’t have a name, but it was something every sensitive in Las Vegas knew about, and he was Vegas born and raised. James let his arms rest in his lap. They were covered in black ink, every design intentional, a part of what he had become.
He turned his palms up and looked at them. The fingertips twitched.
“For those meddling forces of nature beyond your control?” she huffed. “That’s the problem with humanity. Always think they’re the top of the food chain, with dominion over everything. Never a second thought about the gaping maws of gods and gnashing teeth of demons. And when shit goes tits up, they cry out to their deity, or worse, pass the fucking blame.”
“I know precisely what you can do, Sundance,” Phanuel spat. “Your disregard for anyone other than yourself could’ve killed a shitload of people. Fuck only knows who down there may have gotten hurt. Or did. And if I hadn’t been here, you’d definitely have been a casualty.”
“James.” He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his t-shirt. If she was going to join the long line of religious zealots reading him the riot act, she might as well get the name right. He looked at her standing there with her wings, power and condescension spilling off her in waves while she talked to him about ego. Just like the fist of a preacher slamming on a pulpit, it was an empty gesture to him.
“Doesn’t matter... if that’s what you think of me,” he said. “You’re not the first.” It was hard to breathe, like pushing past cotton in his lungs. He sniffed and closed his eyes. “Dominion’s your thing. So’s treating humans like an ant farm. ‘S not who I am.” He winced as something cramped in his abdominal wall. “But I’d die before I cried out for your god or anyone else’s.”
“Then who are you, James? Inquiring minds want to know.”
She knelt down, studying him. “Fuck.” Phanuel rubbed her hands together. “I want an answer, so no dying on me.”
The angel laid her hands on his chest, stomach. A warm light radiated from her hands and spread across his torso.
He startled awake when she touched him. The feeling was like insects vibrating in his torso, knitting organs that had been torn by proximity to the blast and started to bleed into his abdominal cavity. James looked at her hands, at the light that came from them. He’d seen his hands glow, but not everything he touched worked again.
He took because he could. He gave it away because he could. He held onto nothing. All the anger and spiritual traffic in and out of his body had hollowed him out, and he was as empty of purpose as his hands were of magic right now.
The pain was leaving. James’s brow twitched. He hesitated and then laid a hand on top of the Angel’s. With her light, he could see right through himself: red tissue and capillaries and bones. Human.
The pain was increasing. Organs were torn, blood pooling into her abdomen. It would last minutes before healing itself; a price to pay for healing another. She could see right through him.
She saw something worth saving.
It was enough. Phanuel continued taking on James’ injuries until he was fully mended. Confident his body was now strong enough to complete the process, the Angel sat down and joined him in leaning against the heating and air unit.
“Guh-got that… answer for me, Juh-Juh James?”
His heart raced as he looked from his stomach, the rapid in-and-out motion of his diaphragm pushing air, to the person at his side who had saved him. Her soft wing brushed his upper arm. James leaned his head against the box and watched the smoke and dust in the distance. The noise of sirens reached to the roof of the Wynn. He was exhausted, all the way down to his soul if there was such a thing.
How much longer could he stand there, screaming into the void, daring it to scream back, until he gave up and jumped in? He wanted it so bad sometimes it hurt.
He closed his eyes and felt the tension drain out of his body. His hands were finally still.
“Someone who’s tired of being pissed off.”