Moone experimented with juggling his three auras while he searched- Keepses indeed seemed also to have minor boons and banes granted to him, which Moone also practiced twisting up into pretzels, balancing them against each other. It was a strange sensation, the exercise of a muscle Moone didn't know he had, and it occurred to Moone how very lucky he was to be able to do his initial twisting of boon over bane. Maybe of course it hadn't been luck- he supposed that his ability to twist his enhanced aura around itself had been a direct action that led to his survival.
But the fact of enhancing his aura couldn't in itself allow him to twist it around itself like that naturally, could it have? After all, he couldn't knot it up like that normally, aura unenhanced. Either Pontifex's granted aura had made the fine threads of Moone's fate larger and thus more able to be manipulated somehow, or there was a lot more going on with Pontifex's aura than Moone had initially considered.
His suspicions of this were confirmed by his realization that the sense of life around him should have been impossible at the time. His lifesense, combined with Keepses's [ability,] created something stronger; he could now actually read people's minds to some extent, when... Moone glanced up to the ward hanging from the ceiling corner of the nearest wall, a glyph burning, but not being consumed, in an everlasting fire. Such security placed around should have made [mindreading] impossible, and yet, here Moone was.
Mindreading was something with which Moone had had some experience with in the past, though not generally a psychic himself. He probed around the minds of the bustling crowd around him, who were generally it seemed beginning their press into the building's lecture hall for the opening address. Through brief bursts of words and images, Moone collected an impression of the events around him-Gef, it seemed, was backstage, getting prepared for his address, Lovecraft assisting him in getting his final preparations together. Moone considered this information, then moved on, looking for other familiar faces, until he saw him, the man he'd been looking for, sipping at a champagne at the lobby's wet bar.
Moone approached MacBeth from behind, still a good distance off. Yes, there, he could see him, with his first two eyes this time. Considering his third eye, Moone wondered if he'd be able to infiltrate MacBeth's psychic bubble without the man being aware of it. Something else that should have been impossible, Moone tentatively attempted... and found that he accomplished it with ease. The fact that he remained undetected, once in, actually made a lot of sense when Moone dwelled on it: MacBeth was still a hostile, and Finn's boon would treat him as such. But his ability to get in in the first place was strange and frightening.
In an integrated psychic system like the kind MacBeth set up, reading someone's mind without their permission should have been impossible. The kind of psychic network MacBeth used to connect the team on missions, to link into the network one had to [accept the invitation of the bubble's presence]. But Moone found it as easy as reading someone's mind and then simply... pushing past it.
[bring bubble method up earlier, with brief psychic conversation between Moone and Keepses- Keepses knocks, Moone accepts, but the communication this way is brief, since Keepses's psychic powers are minor. Maybe Keepses sees something in Moone's head that spurs his suspicions?]
Moone, now only a few yards behind his former teammate now, probed around the edges of MacBeth's bubble, waiting for a receptive time to approach MacBeth, and pondered the paradoxes caused by the fact that his enhanced aura allowed him access to a system he shouldn't have been in. Relinquishing his enhanced aura upon gifting it to MacBeth-- would he stay within MacBeth's bubble, or suddenly drop out? And if he stayed in, would he still remain undetected? It would no longer matter being in MacBeth's psychic bubble once Moone revealed his true nature, since he would no longer be considered an enemy, and his boon wouldn't need to kick in at all. How would everything play out?
Moone steeled his courage, took the last few steps, and tapped MacBeth on the shoulder.
***
MacBeth turned around, and nearly spilled his drink as he came face-to-face with the flaming red eyes of the Mothman suit. "M- may I help you?"
"Mothman," Moone introduced, slipping into a flawless impersonation of Himsters Keepses (not that MacBeth would know the difference; still, it would be best for Moone not to use his own voice.) "Or at least, that's what they call me. I'm the one who terrorized that small West Virginia town a few decades back, remember?" MacBeth nodded vaguely, and Moone continued. "MacBeth, right? I believe a certain Finnegan Michael Moone is a mutual acquaintance of ours."
MacBeth opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Awful, what he did, isn't it?" He offered to buy Moone a drink, gesturing to the wet bar.
Moone declined. "My interest in contacting you is more... professional, if you catch my meaning."
MacBeth glanced around, and led Moone by the arm to a door across the lobby, which he pressed through to gain some privacy for their conversation.
They were backstage, in a long black-painted hall. Gef was visible not far distant, in the green room, psyching himself up in front of a mirror and dressed in a mongoose-sized suit and tie.
"You have evidence against Moone? Have some [need-to-know intel] on him? Gef is about to deliver a sitrep on everything we know-- if you need to deliver something personally to him, I'd be glad to introduce you..." He tried to lead Moone to the greenroom door, but Moone managed to stop MacBeth from knocking.
"No, no. I wanted to talk to you specifically." He tried to steer the conversation the way he needed it to go. "Gef? I'd heard he was here. Gef the... the Dalby Spook? I always thought that he was..."
"A hoax, like you?" MacBeth shrugged, the creased corners of his eyes pulling up in a wry smile. " Yes, I know you're not real, and no. The Dalby Spook was. Real, that is. Is real, actually. That's the thing with poltergeists- their hosts migrate."
Moone pressed harder. "I think I'd heard, though, that he's also connected to this case in another way...?" Moone probed, and MacBeth gave a nonplussed look in return. "Didn't Moone try to pin in on Gef in the first place?"
"The ordinance planted around the building, you mean? Gef's bombs, triggered by Gef's aura, but such things can easily be faked."
"MacBeth. You know Finn, and I know Finn. Do you really think he'd be capable of, well, not faking the bombs, but of killing the Secretary?"
"That damned boon of his. Always triggering in unexpected ways."
"But Gef is a poltergeist, like you said." His eyes flicked in through the window of the green room door, where Gef was straightening his tie in the mirror, Lovecraft lounging in a beanbag chair behind him. "Has he been... vetted?"
MacBeth snickered at this, and Moone reacted with an inquisitive tilt of the head.
"Did I say something funny? Is it so wrong not to trust spirits mischievous by nature?"
"No, not that, just... 'vetted.' He's a, he's a Mongoose, you see..." MacBeth had clearly had more than a little to drink of his own, already. Which was actually something of a blessing for Moone; it would make MacBeth all the easier to persuade.
"Vet as in veterinarians," MacBeth explained lamely, and somewhat superfluously, when Moone didn't respond to the joke.
"You're a psychic, are you not?" Moone asked, attempting to steer the conversation to a place where he could plant the idea of reading Gef's mind into MacBeth's head. "And you have the ability to, send up bubbles? Would you be able to put me in a bubble with Gef; I'd feel a whole lot better about the whole situation if you could."
MacBeth seemed receptive, so Moone pressed further. "In fact, I think it would be terrific if you could allow me into Gef's mind, without his knowledge. So he won't be able to hold anything back from me, you see."
MacBeth shook his head. "That's not how those work." He started to explain the deal as if Moone didn't know it, but Moone cut him off
"Well, what if you and you alone read Gef's mind, and reported back to me what you hear?"
MacBeth blinked rapidly in surprise, glanced through the door where Lovecraft was stretching and getting up, and locked his eyes into the red flaming ones of the Mothman suit. "You do not trust Gef at all, do you? Hum. And yet you trust me."
"Would it be possible, even, to read a poltergeist's mind?" Moone asked, heart thumping in his chest as the opportunity drew nigh; it totally drowned out MacBeth's explanation how he wouldn't be able to, considering the emotional bond between Gef and Lovecraft. "And if you were a more powerful psychic," Moone asked, "would you be able to then?"
"I'd have to make my way around these wards as well, of course, but... yes. What, are you suggesting some method of enhancing my psychic abilities?"
"Well..." Moone probed MacBeth's aura one last time, perhaps attempting to find an access point to allow him to attach the Pontifex's aura. He untangled his bane from his boon, prepared to detach the aura to give to MacBeth-- when an irregularity in the shape of MacBeth's psychic bubble gave him pause. The bubble was extended out to every aura and object MacBeth was focusing his third eye on, encompassing those within it. And it seemed in one corner to... extend, somehow. Reach upward. Outward.
"Well?" MacBeth asked, as Moone fought a catch in his throat.
"Maybe I will take you up on that drink offer," Moone said, and let MacBeth lead him back out into the foyer, to a wet bar set up across from the lecture hall's main entryway.
Moone held back, taking the drink in one shaking hand and probing his third eye through the long thin strand, out of the Pentagram and... into another mind. An alien mind. It didn't know he was here, did it?
Moone pulled his third eye back, and splashed the alcohol against the front of his mask, pretending he could drink from it. How did MacBeth navigate around the wards, get past all the security? Moone poked at the precise path that the psychic strand took-- wrapped around, passing through the recently repaired walls, which had had gems and spells of their own, subtly counteracting the security wards and allowing psychic access to, and psychic surveillance from, the outside world. Moone's head spun, his psychic connection to MacBeth almost slipping as he realized the truth.
The assassin, the bomber. If it had been Gef, he hadn't been acting alone; he'd had a mastermind [puppeteering] his actions. And it hadn't been Lovecraft. It had been MacBeth.
Behind them, the summit began.
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