Absit Omen RPG

Saturday, August 11
Just past nine in the evening
The Black Chimaera
Northern Scotland

It was what passed for a lively Saturday night in the Black Chimaera, located somewhere in the wild forests of Northern Scotland. The infamous pub was now underground in more ways than one: its location was still a highly guarded secret, set underneath an old oak tree with entrance only allowed through a carefully guarded portkey, protected by a faithful Fidelius secret keeper.

Whispers of the Chimaera's revival had spread quietly since its reopening a year ago, weaving its way through shadows and down alleyways to find those who were inclined to be sympathetic to its owner's aims. Concealed as it was, it kept its visitors safe from the prying eyes of either Muggle or Ministry. These days, it was a popular escape for those unpopular with the Ministry: ex-Azzies, thieves and rabble-rousers, and those inclined to practice darker magics that might be frowned upon by those in power.

"Again?" Aviad asked, flashing his tablemate a bright smile as he used his wand to quickly recall all of the playing cards into a stack.

It had been almost five months since he'd removed himself from residence at the Shodding Arms Hotel, spooked by the assault against his neighbor[1] and news from his cousin[2] of Savvina Katopodis's survival. Living underground hadn't agreed with the mage: he looked paler now, with a strange sickly pallor about him that was difficult to exactly describe, but he seemed in good spirits as he began to shuffle the cards again.

Even if they hadn't quite been friends before, Nate Briggs was closer to one now. Aviad had kept in touch with his shabby former neighbor after he'd gone on the run. They'd fallen into a habit of weekly gaming nights, alternating between popular British magical games like Wizards' Poker and chess and those that were less common here. Tonight, Aviad was teaching the wizard how to play Ruach, a magical version of a popular card game back home.[3]

"You know, Briggs," Aviad said nicely, flashing his opponent a devilish grin as he expertly cut the cards, then continued to shuffle. "You aren't half bad at this. Are you sure this is your first time playing, brother?"

1.	March 20, 2012 - The Message
2.	April 6, 2012 - Why is This Night Different From All Other Nights?
3.	Similar to Yaniv, Ruach is a draw-and-discard game, where players draw cards from a central deck and then discard a card or run of sequential cards each round. It is made much more challenging by the fact that the cards turn invisible and visible at random intervals, meaning that a seemingly good hand can suddenly turn bad by the reappearance of an unexpected card, or that a carefully-planned strategy can get instantly scuttled when a key card disappears. It is also not uncommon for Ruach players to cheat by sneaking ghost cards in front of their opponent and then claiming that the card must have been dropped when it suddenly reappears.

They were the breezy, fleeting hopes of a pentral. Airy and ephemeral; yet trapped in a prison of cold metal rather than a cloven pine. The little spirit might be hopeful, but Aviad held no fantasy that it could make a clean escape from Lorelei Hunt’s straining skeletal fingers. The sorceress would never let her little prisoner get away.

His arafel spirit was still jingling ferociously at him, unwilling to let go of the argument. Aviad pressed his mouth shut into a thin line, displeased.

He wanted to grab the persistent little ghost and shake it. Where do you think you two could fly off to that you think you could escape Lorelei Hunt? His little spirit refused to even leave its glass home when the smiling witch with the dead eyes was nearby. Arba hid under his shirt collar whenever she entered a room. Not even Tzippori ventured near her.

Under his finger, the metal of the locket felt too hot, too sharp.

Are you trapped or free?

A year ago, he wouldn’t have given a damn what any of the living thought about him aiding a spirit. He’d invited himself into funerary homes; helped the dead find freedom away from the living.

Six months ago, Lorelei Hunt’s threats wouldn’t have phased him. He’d broken the wards on her home to get her attention and summoned her a pentral with a candle flame. Even though it had felt then like he was handing over his soul too, all he’d intended to do was watch, wait, and learn.

Watch, wait, and learn. Find a way to escape from the fate that he’d sentenced himself to, all those years ago.

And yet, was he trapped or free?

The mage stood still for a long moment, his finger pressed tightly against the locket’s clasp. It would be easy enough to do it. Even if Hunt raged at him, what did he care? There were other pentrals to torture, other spirits to use in her planned ambush. She wouldn’t dare cross Tawse in his own sanctuary – or at least if she did, she’d pay some sort of price.

Suddenly, there was a loud clacking noise from near the door. Aviad looked up sharply; he could hear heavy footsteps in the hall.

Without a word, he jerked his hand away from the suspiciously warm bite of the locket. Arba was clambering across the floor, hurrying to safety. His own arafel spirit had already darted away in terror, racing to find refuge in its glass nazar charm.

By the time the door opened, the mage was already bent back over the mirror that lay flat on the table, grimacing as he rubbed as if at a crick in his neck.

Behind him, the locket hung alone on the wall, swinging ever so slightly, as if a faint draft had just barely kissed it.

The sentiment that flowed out from the small locket was light and airy, interwoven with hope and yearning.

That was the other thing that made these arafel spirits, these pentrals, so different from the other shades that he’d encountered during his quarter of a century. Most spirits that were left behind when one of the living passed on did so because of intense fear and desire: to shy from the unknown that lay ahead, to recover something that had been stolen from them in life, to haunt those that had done them wrong.

But these pentrals weren’t driven by the echoes of longing and fear. The longer they lingered without crossing over, the more they seemed to let go of who they were, what they had wanted in life. They yearned for light and freedom, for bright places far from heart-shaped lockets and panes of glass.

That was their tragedy and their curse: for what lamp stayed bright forever, and what really came after freedom?

Aviad sighed, looking sadly at the locket. However sympathetic he might be to its plight, Lorelei Hunt guarded this particular spirit with a fierce jealousy. The little effort it would take him to open the clasp would be painfully repaid a thousand times over.

His arafel spirit was twinkling even more fiercely now, swirling and swirling in the air above his finger on the locket. The mage barely glanced at it as he shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said, to the spirits both trapped and free. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t find freedom so easily, little spirit. Hunt isn’t about to forget what’s hers.”

The arafel spirits had been a conundrum ever since he’d first encountered one slinking into his room at the Shodding Arms Hotel. Aviad still wasn’t entirely sure that spirit was the right word to apply to them. Sometimes it felt like he had spent more time mingling with the dead than with the living, but most of the apparitions that he encountered were shades of the living, shadowy echoes that had been left behind to go through the same motions again and again when they’d been meant to pass on.

These pentrals were different. Though each one that he’d met so far had died at the malevolent hand of Lorelei Hunt, they still didn’t strike him as the reverberating echoes of someone who had once lived. They had minds and impulses of their own, much closer to whatever Tzippori was than a typical ghost. It was much harder for him to understand their intentions, too, or to impose his own. Pentrals like his arafel spirit spoke their own resonant, bell-like language, and while he could often pick up on its meaning, it was fleeting that he could comprehend the words.

But this time, the meaning of the bell-like voice that twinkled in his head came through as clear as day.

Are you trapped or free?

Aviad went very still, and something caught in his throat. Out of instinct, he drew his finger back, away from the soft heat of the locket and whatever strange, spirit-like creature was cowering inside.

The room had grown cold as he’d been scrying; in the fireplace, once-bright flames had begun to die down into flickering embers. Near the door, Tzippori had halted its harassment of the door knob. Instead, it appeared to be peering at him, its empty sockets giving no hint of its meaning or intent.

There was a twinkling sound. His arafel spirit darted to and fro across his gaze, urging him forward again. Aviad shot it an annoyed look, and then impatiently laid a finger back on the locket.

“The living aren’t pentrals,” he said out loud, his tone more surly than conversational. Trapped or free? was a question for spirits, not for living mages who made their own decisions and occasionally had to consort with the human equivalent of dybbuks like Lorelei Hunt. “What do you want, little spirit? The other arafel spirit came to plead for you.”

Aviad huffed a sigh as he looked up from the mirror, his eyes tired from staring into the reflective surface for so long. Annoyed, he leaned his head first to one side, then to the other, trying to stretch out the crick in his neck.

It felt as if he’d been scrying for hours. The mage half-suspected that Lorelei Hunt and her silent, foreboding brother had conjured the list of names for him as a joke, something to keep him occupied while they waited to see how long he lasted. Considering the shrinking number of escaped pentrals and Leander’s growing network of haunted, decaying owls, it seemed as if there were diminishing returns for his name-by-name hunt, regardless of the veracity of the list.

Annoyed, he risked a glance around the room to take stock of his undead menagerie. Tzippori was occupying itself by trying to unscrew the doorknob. Arba, the four-fingered skeletal hand that he’d adopted after it had sacrificed a digit to replace one for Nate Briggs, had disappeared somewhere under the bookshelf. There was only the arafel spirit, bolder when the Hunts were a few rooms away, making its usual circles to explore the room.

But it was the arafel spirit that came racing towards him now, twinkling in the bell-like voice that it often seemed that only he could hear. Aviad rolled his eyes at it, pointing in the direction of the blue nazar pendant that he’d set on the table.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he told it, irritated. “If she’s coming back, you know where to go.”

But for once, the strange, mistlike spirit hadn’t fled to him out of fear of Lorelei Hunt. Frowning, Aviad regarded it, trying to get a sense of what it wanted. It was much more difficult for him to understand Hunt’s pentrals than it was those spirits that retained a more human shape, but it was still easier for him to comprehend the arafel spirit’s meaning than it was to understand something like Tzippori.

Finally, he grasped it. Brows knitting, he looked over to the hanging locket.

Hunt didn’t scare him as much as she might want to, but he still hesitated to disturb anything that belonged to her. And the pentral that resided inside this particular prison did indeed belong to her. She’d left no room to mistake it: she’d kept the little spirit close to her heart.

But his arafel spirit wasn’t about to take no for an answer; not even fear of Lorelei Hunt could dissuade it this time. It pressed at him, still twinkling like a bell, urging him to move. Sighing, Aviad rose to his feet and crossed the room to where the locket was hanging.

Touching a finger to the outside, he mentally reached out for the spirit inside.

The attack came suddenly and without warning.

Something struck the outside of the metal locket, causing a deep thrumming to reverberate through the hiding place within. Then it struck again, and again in quick rhythm, as if to force the tumbling pentral back into the land of the living through sheer percussive force.

There was another spirit outside, using empty eyes to try and peer inside her prison. But this spirit was not made of the fog of self and memories. Though it was hidden inside cold bone-armor, hints of bright, iridescent colors seemed to dance over it, constantly shifting and never quite there: scintillating tufts of ghostly green and blue pin feathers shimmering across its boney wings; the tips of curved purple horns, spiraled like a ghostly ram, poking out and then receding back into its skull; and an almond-shaped orange eye, striated like a cat’s pupil, which was attempting to examine her through the crack in the locket.

The prismatic, flickering spirit grabbed hold of the locket between the two bony pincers of its skeletal beak and gave the pentral’s locket another wrenching, rattling shake. Hints of tumbled questions were thrust at her, inquisitive and intense.

Why was she here? it wanted to know. Why wasn’t she on her way?

For a quiet, unassuming neighbor who largely seemed to keep to himself, Briggs appeared to have quite the knack for getting himself into trouble. Tawse and the pub, Hunt and the finger, now the incident with Bagnold: Aviad gave the other wizard a measuring look as he wrestled the skeletal hand back into submission.

"I wouldn't say that Tawse is the one who's thrown in with Hunt," he said, giving Arba one last, firm shake to remind it to behave.

To be fair, Aviad knew that he didn't really understand all of the ins and outs of the British magical underworld. But Tawse was particular about his grudges, and the mage's scruffy neighbor didn't seem like he was really worth nursing one against. Hunt was far more unpredictable, but that was more than enough reason to sidle close to her. Briggs seemed equally interested in maintaining his distance from both of them as he was with getting into fights with the Ministry dog catcher.

But that was the gist of it. If everyone was your enemy, then there was no one to have your back.

At least Arba seemed to have finally settled down. Aviad gave the skeletal hand a good, long look just to make sure its contriteness was genuine, and then placed it back on his shoulder, on the opposite side from Tzippori. 

"Well, you're going to have to take your chances somewhere, brother," he said at last, looking back at Briggs. "We can go have a drink in the Black Chimaera and decide what to do next, and if Tawse or Hunt come by, I'll be there to have your back; or you can go back to wait for the Ministry on your own and hope that they believe you over the dog catcher."

Briggs tapped his arm, and Aviad paused. The mage tucked the cigarette into his mouth as he turned to face his unlucky neighbor, taking a long drag as the other wizard expressed his concerns.

Unfortunately, his familiars were less interested in what Briggs had to say. Arba, presumably sensing the close vicinity of its wayward finger, began to scramble up and over his shoulder in an attempt to pounce on Nate's hand. This set off another jostling match with Tzippori, as the skeletal appendage intruded on the toucan's space and the undead bird snapped back.

"Ach!" Aviad had to take a minute to wrestle and separate them, which nearly lost him his cigarette in the process. Finally, Tzippori was settled back on his shoulder, smuggling preening its invisible feathers, and he held Arba at arm's length by its wristbone. The hand's four bony fingers scrabbled at air, twitching and squirming, though it was unable to get purchase on anything.

Heaving a sigh, Aviad turned back to face Briggs, giving him a long-suffering look.

"I know it is the second Black Chimaera," he said as patiently as he could manage, considering he was attempting to keep a grip on a writhing skeletal hand and carry on a conversation at the same time. "Why are you nervous, achi? If you're worried about running into Tawse, he's probably putting his kid to bed." Though the big Scottish wizard also might have his own thoughts on Hunt riling up the dog catcher who had gotten a knife into his side back during the zoo incident in December.

At least Briggs seemed to calm himself down after taking a deep breath. Aviad tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and clapped an extremely warm hand to the other wizard's shoulder. Then, with a half-look back to ensure that his neighbor was following,  he resumed his journey towards the door of the little bedroom, stepping over a large root tendril that ran across the floor.

The hallway outside their point of arrival was long and crooked. The floor and walls seemed to be made of hard-packed dirt, and there were plenty of roots running across the ground, weaving in and out of the walls. Tzippori and Arba both seemed to have settled their squabbles from a few moments before, with Tzippori sitting perched on his shoulder and the skeletal hand clinging to the back of his shirt between his shoulder blades.

None of this seemed at all unusual to Aviad, who moved down the hallway with a relaxed confidence, pausing only to make sure that Briggs was keeping up and to take an occasional drag on his cigarette.

"You British are all the same," he remarked offhandedly as they strolled down the eccentric corridor, which seemed to be angling slightly upwards. "Your Ministry slips its tendrils into everything, but you're so used to jumping when they tug on you that you don't realize they're the ones making you do it. None of them play by their own rules, have you noticed?"

Aviad raised his eyebrows, waiting patiently as Briggs put two and two together and decided to panic in response.

Arba had made it all the way to his shoulder, where it went through its normal routine of jockeying with Tzippori for prime real estate. The mage shot both of the skeletons a warning look as he dug through his pocket for a cigarette. Finding one, he took the portkey match and struck it against the table, then held it up to the end of the cigarette to light it.

Briggs had rounded on him again, looking somewhere between panicked and furious. As Aviad took a long drag on the cigarette, he tossed the remains of the match into the flame of the orange candle, where it quickly ignited.

"It's the Black Chimaera," he said calmly. "Relax, Briggs. Didn't you want to hear about other ways to deal with your Ministry other than letting them grind you under their boot?"

Following the events of The Message
Nearing on 10 PM

When the world finally stopped moving, they were standing in the middle of a bedroom.

The room was small -- even smaller than the mage's hotel room had been at the Sodding Arms -- and dark, with most of the light coming from a large, sloppy orange candle that was burning on a black plate on the nightstand. The restricted size was largely due to the fact that one of the walls seemed to be made out of an enormous wooden root, which jutted out into some of the space that might have otherwise been available for the room's inhabitant. 

The room itself looked simple enough. There was a small wooden bed pushed up against one of the room's flat walls, which had been left messy and unmade.  A round wooden table with two mismatched chairs sat under the tree. All of the table and the usable parts of the root were covered with the trappings of ritual magic: partially-melted candles with different colors of wax, chalk markings, rounded pieces of clear quartz.

Aviad dumped his canvas bag on the end of the unmade bed.  The skeletal hand jumped off of the duffle and onto the floor as it landed. Using its fingers like the rapidly-moving legs of a spider, it scurried across the wooden floorboards and over to Aviad's boot, where it began to climb up his leg.

The mage looked around the room, and then huffed out a breath. "You can leave your things in here for now," he told Nate, turning towards the door. "Come on. If Tawse isn't here, we can check with the spirit to see if there are any other rooms free."

Aviad was already waiting for him in the hallway.

The mage had his own olive-colored canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Tzippori was still perched on one shoulder, and the skeletal hand from January appeared to be clinging to the side of his sack. As Briggs exited from Room 73, Aviad was standing underneath the circular candelabra that hung from the ceiling, holding the blue glass pendant that he usually wore around his neck extended up towards the light.

A wisp of pale fog drift quickly upwards from the pendant. It rose to weave itself between the candles on the candelabra, thinning itself out until it was difficult to see.

"You know where to find me tomorrow," Aviad told it, watching to make sure it settled. "If they come, just get out of here."

A faint twinkling sound came from the candelabra, like tiny bells jingling. Aviad huffed out a quick breath, and then dropped his gaze to spot Briggs.

"Alright, alright..." he muttered, fumbling through his pockets.

It took him a moment to find the matchbook. It looked perfectly unremarkable, as if it had started life as a free giveaway from a Muggle restaurant. The lettering on the front read Blue Boar Inn.

Aviad used his thumb to slide the top of the matchbook open. He took a moment to examine the tiny sticks of wood inside, and then carefully selected one of the matches and broke it off. Pinching it between his finger and thumb, he extended his arm, holding the other end of the matchstick out to Briggs.

"Grab hold," he said simply. "Then we'll be off, brother."

The mage regarded him silently for a moment. On his shoulder, the skeletal toucan peered at him too, nearly matching the angle of its master's head, though the empty hollows of its eyes couldn't mimic his expression.

"Not here," he said, shaking his head. "If Bagnold is smart, he might have left a listening spell behind."

If that was the case, it was likely too late -- they'd both mentioned Hunt. But Aviad wasn't about to give up any more secrets to the British Ministry than he had to.

Aviad knew that he was taking a risk by admitting anything more to Briggs. He didn't know his shabby neighbor's whole history, or why he was on the fringes of things with both Tawse and the Ministry. The other wizard had already suggested turning on Hunt as his first instinct to get out of this mess. Pulling him in deeper, revealing a bit more of the collaboration between the dark magical factions in the community, clearly put them at danger of being exposed.

But he liked Briggs. And the other wizard clearly needed some friends.

"Grab what you need," he instructed him, turning back to the door.  "I'll go get Arba[1] and we can go."

He could leave the arafel spirit behind to stand watch for tonight, to see if the Aurors came.

1.	Hebrew for "four" and the name of Aviad's newest pet, which happens to be the four-fingered skeletal hand unintentionally gifted by Lorelei Hunt.

A strange expression passed over Aviad's face. He regarded Briggs, closing his hand around the burning nazar amulet on his chest. On his shoulder, he felt Tzippori peering at the other wizard, its skeletal gaze always inscrutable.

"I don't think that's a very good idea," he said, very quietly.

He knew what Hunt would expect him to do, here and in this moment. But the fact of the matter was that he liked his neighbor in the Shodding Arms Hotel a hell of a lot more than he did the sorceress. Hunt had a talent for necromancy, and Aviad was still holding out hope that he might learn what he desperately needed to from her. But she also treated spirits even more poorly than she did the living. It wasn't the murders so much that tugged at his conscience; it was the way that the arafel spirits were twisted and tortured in her care, locked away behind glass or forced to inhabit the living on a whim.

Aviad took a deep breath, looking back at the door. If the Ministry was really coming, he didn't want to be anywhere near here. A long spell at the Black Chimaera or a visit back home seemed to be in order. But if Briggs rolled on Hunt, Briggs would be dead. Tawse might be at risk too, if the Ministry got to asking Nate where to find the sorceress he was incriminating.

He looked at his neighbor, and then dropped his gaze pointedly to the blood on the floor. Briggs hadn't been moving like he was injured.

"It was Bagnold -- yeh?" he asked carefully, looking back directly at Briggs. "Do you really think they're going to let you walk away from this, Nate? If you're on parole, they've already got you living under their boot. There are better ways to deal with your Ministry, brother."

Aviad cautiously followed his neighbor into his room, looking around at the debris. It was obvious that the noises he'd heard had only been the short of it. It hadn't sounded as if the fight had lasted very long, but magical duels had a way of being more destructive than their length might suggested.

And then the mention of Lorelei Hunt. Aviad looked at Briggs, a chill growing in his spine even as he could feel the amulet on his neck start to prickle with heat.

Hunt had sent a werewolf hunter -- it had to be Bagnold -- Briggs' finger? He'd never talked to the necromancer about her encounter with his neighbor, and he'd never mentioned his own connection to the sorceress to Briggs. As far as the mage was concerned, the outfall from that incident had been mostly resolved when he'd helped to replace Nate's old fleshy finger with the new, improved skeletal one. But here Hunt was: hardly content with abusing spirits to ambush Aurors, now she was trying to stir up trouble with their other enemies.

Briggs' warning was a wise one, though. Aviad shot a nervous look back at the door.

"Sounds like it might be a good time for a holiday," he remarked, a new concern growing in his voice.

He didn't really understand his neighbor's connection to the magical underworld here in Britain. He'd never seen Briggs at Tawse's pub, and the shabby wizard was clearly on poor terms with Hunt. Maybe that was all there was to it: Briggs hung out on the edges, not really a part of any faction. He might be able to understand the desire for independence, but there was a danger in that. For those who didn't want to abide by the Ministry's heavy-handed rules, unity brought safety.

Frowning, he looked back at Briggs.

"Do you have somewhere to go?" he asked, putting a hand to the amulet on his chest. It was quickly heating up to an uncomfortable level; recently, the arafel spirit was becoming increasingly vocal in its dislike for its once-murderer. "I know Hunt's mad, but there are still places to lay low that she doesn't have a say in, brother. If you need to disappear for a while, I can put in a word."