House Ramses Under The Table Meeting

[wrecking_yard]

It’s pouring down rain after I manage to use a little extension of the local forest to get over the outer wall to the “courtyard”. The place is built like a modern version of an old style fortress, for good reason considering what happened before; from the size of the compound they must be building new lab complexes and everything. It wasn’t easy to find either - they’ve even set up electronic blinds to make it invisible to satellites and fly-overs. I only made it on dumb luck, calling in an old favor with someone who works for them I helped out back in my wandering days, and even then they only told me how to find the place on the condition no-one else would hear about it.

I don’t make it far into the clear open space of the yard before there’s an aerial patrol drone changing its path to investigate the sudden overgrowth, with little serpentine ones poking up out of the ground all over the courtyard. Despite my best efforts at masking presence and masking my glamour, the aerial is following me for my entire sprint to the door, and the little ground garden-eel ones are clearly zeroing in on me within about ten feet.

The door opens as I’m reaching to knock, and I’m facing a wall of primordial power and muscle in a loose house dress who has a good foot or so on me.

“Lady Neith! Pardon my sudden intrusion and the glamour - my name is Xiao Yin, and I’ve sought you out on behalf of the Greywater Guild to discuss a shared threat, discretely.” The glamour should be masking my power mostly and mean I look like a bedraggled random person in a hoodie and cargo pants; she doesn’t seem thrown off by it.

“Wallace told me you were coming.” She reaches down to usher me inside out of the rain, with visible restraint to nudge me inside instead of just scruffing me like a drowned kitten. I drop the glamour as soon as the door closes, standing on an inside mat in a growing puddle. She’s already turned to duck around a hallway, returning quickly with an armload of towels. I slip out of my boots, wrapping up in a couple of the offered towels and trying to make a nest of them on the couch nearby.

“I can’t say I was expecting the Bounty Hunter’s Guild to go looking into the Artificial Guardian Project like this.” She has her arms folded, but she’s calm and unbothered, her power at rest.

“We had an …. Incident recently with casualties - one that was clearly a prelude to worse. Triki and I agreed it was time to look for allies before the inevitable escalation. Honestly I had hoped to reach the other two Avatars of the House, but your brother is hard to find, and Anubis is difficult to contact discreetly.”

She nods, listening, and turns to a small kitchenette nearby, pulling a mug out of a cupboard rather than picking up one of the three sitting out and setting about something with it. “Well, you beat them here, but they’re both coming; your Guild aren’t the only ones who’ve run into signs of trouble.”

That explains why there’s towels, other mugs, and every sign she was expecting company before I showed up on the doorstep.

“So, you may as well dry off and relax; save the important parts for when we’re all here.” She walks over, leaning down to hand me a mug of hot chocolate.

The next hour or so passes with quiet small talk; she’s calm and soft-spoken in private, but definitely pleasant company, very grounded and thoughtful. Eventually, the security panel by the door chimes announcing an approaching identified vehicle, and she gets up to get another of the mugs ready, keeping an eye on the panel to time opening the door before there’s even a knock.

Anubis slips in, wrangling an umbrella; even in plain clothes he’s dressed semi formal, and only gets halfway through normal greetings before one ear rotates toward the couch and his attention focuses on me, glancing away to Laura with an eartilt and a questioning gesture.

“Same reason we’re meeting; I got warned he was coming, but there wasn’t a good way to let you two know without risking it being on the record.”

He nods, but he’s still watching me warily. “I thought Greywater was maintaining strict neutrality on certain matters.”

“Oh we were, against my advice, but recent events decided for us.”

He doesn’t seem entirely convinced, but he’s not arguing it, accepting his own mug and settling on the couch - but even when he’s not visibly keeping an eye on me, there’s an ear always turned my direction, and he’s definitely being stiff on the scattered times he joins the conversation.

It’s hard not to notice the last one reaching the door - there’s a lot of power, and it’s somehow more raw and immediate than I’m used to sensing, never mind an odd, faint scent as the rain starts to clear of embalming herbs stubbornly defying anything else. Instead of an umbrella, he’s shaking off an entire hooded cloak and hanging it by the door - deathly pale and there’s odd darker patches on his skin and one entire hand that look papery and dried.

Osiris has his own moment of pause at me, but he’s much less stiffly guarded about it as they’re settling down.

Once all of them are on the couch, Anubis turns the small talk into motioning to me. “Perhaps we should start with making sure we are all on the same page?”

I sigh over my cocoa. “Well, to start with, I am here on behalf of the Bounty Hunter’s Guild of Greywater. We recently had some requests to handle Miramon outbreaks out by a wilderness mine - routine enough… except we had multiple people go out on the job and not come back. Triki sent Zora and myself to investigate what had happened to them, and we found an entire hidden Shadow Decree base, guarded by Miramon who were suspiciously coordinated and clearly under their control.” I motion away from the mug. “That’s the basic idea, anyway. They tried to trap Zora and I and damn near succeeded. We don’t want to openly answer their assault until we’re prepared, and the way they were controlling the Miramon seemed relevant to your House.”

Anubis’s ears flick back and there’s a faint growl to his “Hm”, but his power actually settles - he’s still on edge but I’m not the target of it as much anymore.

Osiris shifts, hands folded over his staff. “If you don’t mind going into more detail, I think what you encountered would help greatly in making sense of what we’ve been dealing with - then we can compare notes more easily.”

It’s very diplomatic and honest, but also nudging me as the outsider to put my cards on the table first, before they share anything potentially sensitive. Considering the previous attacks on their House, it’s entirely reasonable.

I start from the beginning, going over the entire event like a report to Triki, albeit glossing over some of Zora’s emotional crises. By the time I’ve finished up to my recovery, the table is silent, and stays that way for a bit.

“When Amunet brought you back to town injured - you said you were drugged to suppress your powers, and they were trying to capture you?” Osiris is clearly thinking hard as he speaks, and has a silent side-glance to Anubis, who flicks an ear uncomfortably.

“Yes. The tea was for both of us, but she was too agitated to accept it - which saved both of us.”

Anubis’s ears go from angled back to almost flattening, another on-edge tension rising up in his power as he dead-eyes me. “Your missing people. Did you recover bodies, and were you able to confirm they were dead?”

I do not like that question. We found photos of some of them, but the town traitor’s documents were clearly just what he was recording. “…No. we know from the photos Zora found that at least some of them were left in pieces, but…”

Anubis’s nose wrinkles with a growl.

“What should I know?”

“Human experimentation,” he says curtly, teeth showing. “They’ve been working on altering the controls from the stolen Artificial Guardian project to something that works on Espers. They turned almost the entire Moon Eye gang into living suicide weapons, and were working on altering a Prime Avatar to harness one of the Greater Miracles.”

The way Osiris’s eyes narrow at the last part, it must be new information to him.

Almost dying is suddenly the least unsettling part of the ordeal, and an intelligence-sharing mission is not the time to think too hard about how little we know about Hela’s power and if she could’ve made that less of an obstacle to their primary goal.

“Who posted the job to the guild?” Anubis is clearly on the same page as I’d been going over it initially.

“The miners, but…. Joffrey would have been aware from the start.” It was an easy set-up to bait our people out - scare the miners into asking for help, then…

“Giving them an easy source of potential test subjects without revealing their intentions.”

“Oh, we’re going to make sure they regret that idea.” I’m telegraphing and I don’t care - ears back, tail ticking, thorns curving around the blooms on my horns.