day 30 pt 2: the assassins attack

I'm making 500 words an hour, easily. 7,500 words left, that's... a little under. But I still have a thousand or so words of poker that I just need to polish up before I post up and add to my canonical wordcount, so we hecka good. A little over 600 words here of original word count; I'm adding context for your reading ease though.




so they're heisting 
This far wall consisted not of the small silver lock boxes that lined the outer walls from ceiling to upper-level floor, but a great wooden bookshelf, with many ancient tomes lining it. In front of the bookshelf, opened up on a book pedestal as if it were a dictionary, was the Necronomicon.

The shapeshifter went first, walking along one of the gently sloping side [paths.]

There was something out of the corner of Moone's eye. 

The two remaining assassins, Slice and Slit, materialized into the room. Moone's enhancement was down, so theoretically they should have been able to track him through that, but... how did they get a portal into the sanctum, with its properties that repelled magic and magick? I mean, they had shut down most of those core systems, but... they had shut down most of those core systems.

Oh.

The shapeshifter got an incredibly annoyed look on its face by this, looking back from its position in the middle sanctum into the outer sanctum where the rest of the team stood. Not terrified or anything, but annoyed. As if the fact that two time travelling hitmen coming in the middle of a well-planned heist was a mere inconvenience for her. Though Moone couldn't blame her; it was rude to interrupt.

Both assassins set straight for Moone. No more going alone, anymore, after one of them had been bested. Together. At least until--

"Spring Heeled Jack?" Unwin gushed as he seemed to recognize one of them. The assassin called Slice stopped in his tracks, turning on his springed heels to face the one who had addressed him. "You know me?" the assassin asked, in a thick Liverpudlian accent.

"Of course I know you, man!" Unwin was shaking.

“Mr Jack? Big fan of your work, really an inspiration. I crafted this whole, thing, based around, really inspired by you, see. ...

“It’s… listen, I’ve got a contract out right now, but iffen you want, we could talk shop at some later juncture, yeh?”

It took a few moments for Unwin to compose himself. He nodded vigorously.

"Well, actually, if you could hold on that too? We're in the middle of something. You can kill him later if you want."

A conflicted expression crossed over Slice's face. He turned back to Slit, who was just sort of standing there waiting for backup. Slice made an "I'm so sorry" face, and whisked back into the same portal that the two had come from. Slit turned to Moone, angrily, as if it had been his fault that that had happened. Thus it was that Slice held back while Slit attacked. 

If Slice was Spring-heeled Jack, and Slash was Jack the Ripper, then Slit was the one they call Stingy Jack, or Jack O'Lantern. (Jack Frost is someone else. And maybe not real; how was Moone supposed to know these things? Apparently the Tooth Fairy was real, but really being taken on by the identity of Nimrod; so really, anything was possible...) The story went, the carved vegetables were named after him because he now wandered the earth, too wicked for heaven but having tricked Satan into not taking him into hell. If they were the same character, Gentleman Slice could not be killed.

Phylacteries would work to entrap demons, apparently, but would they work against living souls immortal and adrift?

Slice scattered a ring of salt back onto the floor where the rest of the team stood, splashing a warding circle to prevent Moone's team from assisting. The shapeshifter, on a platform in the middle of the middle sanctum, similarly wouldn't be able to help, with both Moone and the assassin down in a bubble that repelled magical creatures. It was just Moon and the assassin now.

Moone's unenhanced aura was apparently a lot easier to manipulate than the enhanced counterpart Moone had sported back on the hovercraft; Slit didn't even need to be touching him the way Slash had in order to pry tiny psychic fingers into his soul and pulling apart his boon from his bane....

Moone attempted to fight it off somehow, using same mental and metaphysical muscles he'd exercised in twisting his boon and bane into pretzels. Would it be possible for him to fail this battle, still having his boon in place, having the necessary resources on him to fight off this supernatural attack?

There was a small pop somewhere in his soul, and Moone was left completely without his boon. Apparently, yes, it had been possible for him to fail.

This second attack, Moone could feel out the precise nature of the fingers that extended into his aura. The first time happening it had been too much of a shock for him to have been mentally present enough to pay attention to exactly what was going on, but here Moone thought he could sense a pattern to the attack. It wasn’t a presence being taken away; if it had been that, his boon would have rejected the attack. What was going on was more of an absence being given, allowing the virus or jinx or whatever it was to slip in under his magical immune system and more or less have the immune system attack itself.

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