Issue 1 Downtime

Wearing dark goggles and a lab coat, John watched as a complex machine played red beams over the dark stone surface of the enchanted tetsubo, Onihasaiki. Occasionally the light reflected in strange ways and sometimes not at all.

(open)

The machine's data screen chimed he he looked to it. It displayed an outline of the weapon with the inside colored red.

Code: Select all

Scan Incomplete - Surface Data Only
Max Depth Reached  = .001 mm

"Again?" he sighed, "...frikken magic..."

He tweaked the makeshift scanner's settings and restarted it.

Minutes later, smoke began to rise from the machine. "Shit! Nonono!" he said as he lunged for the power cable and unplugged it.

"... I hate magic..."

"Now now, keep talking like that, darling, and you'll hurt my feelings."

He turned around.

"Going to lecture me on trying to poke things with sticks? Because that would appear to be just as illuminating as my scanner is."

"Well, I rather think you're probably learning anything I could say about futility, darling, yes?"

"Considering I feel like a neanderthal trying to figure out how an Arc Reactor works by repeatedly touching it? Yes," he said as he raised his goggles.

Victoria smirked. "You'll be able to get some sort of reading on magic sometimes. Enough to say 'there's something,' I doubt it'll ever tell you what that something is, though. May I?" she asked, indicating the tetsubo.

He moved the club from the smokey, smelly machine to a clear space.

"Go for it," he said, "Just don't try to pick it up. Well, you can try but nobody but my sister and I seem to be able to lift it."

"Hm. Pick it up, then," she said. "Hold it up, if it's blood-activated, I might need to look it over while you're holding it to get a good idea what it does."

He nodded, picked the weapon up, and held it out.

Victoria held her hands along the blade, feeling for the enchantments, letting her senses sink in to see what sort of surprises lay in this weapon they'd worked to retrieve.

There were many enchantments bound to the club. The most readily discernible are a strong durability spell and a proximity triggered detection spell presumably designed with Japanese demons in mind. The detection spell was linked to a spell to repel weak-willed yokai. There was also a far older enchantment upon the material itself that seemed to push at Victoria's magical senses while also obscuring itself as if behind a wall of black smoke, hiding its deep secrets. Tied to it also were flashes of the enormous quantities of pain and death inflicted by it in the countless years before John's ancestor acquired it and had it purified.

Victoria frowned. "Be careful with this... If I had to guess, I'd say that whatever darker purposes this thing was put to have some not-quite-friendly enchantments backing them up, and they're all still in here. It doesn't seem to want me probing at that part too hard," she said, letting go with a little shudder. "Aside from that, seems to be your garden variety bane-of-demons sort of thing."

"Hrm... I guess that makes sense. It did belong to an oni before my ancestor acquired it."

"M-hm, that would explain a good bit of what I'm feeling there."

"The hardest thing or a scientist to grasp about things like this is that there really are things that shouldn't be explored, no matter what."

"Because they might be full of maneating spider-women?"

"Because they might lead to you being possessed by an ancient demon that uses its power and yours to destroy everything it can within a ten mile radius before people are forced to kill you?"

"...also bad..."

"Just a tad, yes."

"So... don't poke the Cthulu. Got it."