"I'm alive," the Pontifex said, sitting up shakily.
"Yes, of course Xemf left you alive," said Moone sourly. "If it had killed you, it would have lost your aura enhancing its powers. You haven't figured that out yet? What else haven't you figured out? Let me lay out the situation for you. We're trapped down here. In a vault. Someone's coming for the list soon, and they will find us, and they'd just reactivate the security system, and we'd be dead, because my boon would be canceled out by the antimagic. Even if nobody comes down here, someone still will, because my bane will trigger, without your aura enhancing mine, I will get attacked again. We're dead men walking, except sitting here, being dead."
Moone panted, exhausted after the [rant,] and, sitting on the ground, slammed the rest of his body down, so that he lay prone. His bane would trigger...
His bane would trigger.
Moone sat back up, the gears turning in his head. His bane may have been [up and running now,] but so was his boon; the anti-magic defenses were still down, and though he was in real danger of attack for one of the first times in months, he did have the resources to get out of this. Even out of the vault, even out of Babel. Right? If anything was a situation both supernatural and dangerous, surely this was. Whether they'd be able to track down and stop MacBeth and Xemf was still up in the air, but some way, somehow, there was a solution to escaping even these [direst of straits,] in the bowels of ancient Babylon.
Moone looked over at Unwin's collapsed body, lying in a pool of something brackish in the bottleneck outside the vault, and sighed. Unwin... Unwin would have known what to do, but of course if Unwin were still alive, they wouldn't need his help. They'd just have him end the ritual, just have him... release.
"Is it a function of the aura, that anchors us here in, the past?" Moone asked the Pontifex, who was also sitting upright now, with legs folded. "How did Unwin hold us here when he brought us in, and how would he have brought us back to the present?"
"Yes, the aura. The plane one inhabits is a function of the aura," the Pontifex nodded. "We're not in the past, as much as, on a plane that exists in the past, and present, both acting as one."
"The dreaming, right. The halfway Dreamtime, a dreamtime minus the energy that leads to creation."
An echo of superstition back into religion. [maybe establish more of this earlier.]
"Your aura is a portal to the Dreamtime," Moone continued, now standing up and pacing a short circle around the lower half of the upper level of the vault. "In a sense, you still have your aura on you, the part that you hold onto to make yourself you. Something's stabilizing us in this plane. Put here by Unwin's ritual, but our auras are what [keep us on the plane.] Would there be a way to use your aura to destabilize us, still?"
"Bestowing my aura on myself here, the two dreamings would cancel each other out, as the deeper dream made a direct circuit to this lesser plane. I don't have my aura to bestow."
"And what if you were to do the opposite of bestow your aura on yourself, would the opposite happen? Not bestow your aura on yourself, but give up your aura entirely?"
"If I do this, the last remains will go to the creature Xemf. And my boon will be gone permanently."
"And we'd be out of here?"
The Pontifex knit his eyebrows, then closed his eyes. "And..." He paused, lips twitching as if trying to say something. "And we'd be out of here," he said softly.
"This is your decision, Pontifex. Our contract would be complete."
"Our contract is complete," said the Pontifex. "And this is... my decision." He stood up, eyes open, wide open. He steeled himself. Reached inward, somehow.
And breathed.
...
All was black, suddenly.
Or... not black, just, dark. It was dark; they were in a lightless, ancient room. [they illuminate it somehow.] Moone saw that he and the Pontifex both had collapsed to the floor, and were lying in a thick layer of dust. Not cold iron dust. Just, dust.
They were back in the present, but not in the same time and place that they'd initiated the ritual; rather in Babel, the modern-day city of Ancient Babylon, where the ritual had taken them geographically. Thousands of years later, and in the location that the vault eventually would become. Changed place, and changed time as well, from the initiation of the ritual; instead of being brought back the moment after they'd set out, time had passed here at the same rate as back in Babel. They'd spent [time length] in Babel, and so now it would have been [time length] after they'd completed the ritual to have brought them into Babel in the first place.
Moone looked over at the Pontifex, lying face-down, breathing heavily, and tried imagining the sacrifice that his action just now had represented. He had given up the last of his aura. All his life, as far as Moone knew, the Pontifex had gone thinking that he'd be able to sacrifice himself and access Dreamtime at some crucial moment-- but now he wouldn't be able to bestow his aura upon anyone else ever again, let alone himself.
Which left the man purposeless in life.
But who was Moone to pity? Not everyone knew their purpose so clearly as the Pontifex had thought that he had. Most people had to find purpose for themselves, somehow.
And the goal now was Xemf.
Moone thought about Xemf. Too little made sense. What was its plan with the NOC list, if it was part of the same organization MacBeth was working for, and MacBeth had tried to fence the list? It made no sense. Unless they were trying to accomplish something publicizing the knowledge that the list was in the open, though keeping it for themselves.
Their auctioning of the NOC list had brought Moone out of hiding. Moone and the Pontifex. Was that what it was all about, getting the Pontifex's aura for themselves? And now Xemf had the full thing, not just to enhance its own powers the ability to bestow and enhance others' powers as well. Apparently the conspiracy was only in place inside the Pentagram after Moone had gone off with the Pontifex, otherwise they would have taken him and his power sooner. They would have been able to have the NOC list any time they wanted, but it wouldn't have been complete without both the Pontifex and the list, for whatever reason.
But what of the heist? If the conspiracy really wanted to hold onto the NOC list, there was no guarantee that they'd be successful heisting. And the heist had only happened after the auction; couldn't they have won that in the first place?
Unless...
Keepses had died. Just as Cloud had died. And Keepses had won the auction.
The Pontifex only noticed Cloud in the room after Moone had seen Keepses slip off somewhere; Moone hadn't been able to track Cloud down during the auction until there was a break, and Keepses would have been able to slip away. [Keepses's gift from the Tooth Fairy had been the Gift of Night, just as Team Punch's had been.] Xemf had turned into Keepses, assumed his identity, just as it had assumed Cloud's. It was Xemf that had won the auction; the list would remain in their organization's claws even if there hadn't been an attempted heist.
And the heist itself, getting the Pontifex to bestow it aura like that... but heisting as part of a different team. That team, of course, showing up at the same time as Moone's... that had been no coincidence. Of course not. And then telling Gef that Moone was trustworthy, Moone willing to believe it was an altruistic gesture, but really just getting the Pontifex to trust Xemf after seeing that.
They had been playing into Xemf's hands, into the conspiracy's hands, this whole time.
Moone collapsed against a dusty wall, looking again to the Pontifex. Yes, people still made their own destinies, every day. In spite of the past. Now that Moone realized his [reactivity,] he could fight against being the puppet this time. Would they see that one coming?
So now what would Xemf do?
What purpose could be accomplished that required both the Pontifex's aura and the Necronomicon?
With the Pontifex's aura, now fully incorporated as part of its own, Xemf's own powers wouldn't just be amplified, but it would be have the power to amplify others' as well. Those alien beings that comprised the conspiracy, did they all have Xemf's power of shapeshifting, body, mind, and spirit? But Xemf already having its own power amplified, there wasn't much use for it to bestow the aura onto others...
But maybe Xemf would still be able to bestow the aura on itself.
Complete the ultimate purpose with its aura, open a portal to Dreamtime? That was possible. Maybe it wouldn't have been if the last, core part of the aura hadn't been given up to release Moone and the Pontifex from the vault.
Was even this release of the last drop of the Ponifex's power just playing into the conspiracy's hands as well? Moone shook his head. There was no time for that kind of thinking. He still had to do something. Something the conspiracy wouldn't see coming, this time, if it were possible.
There was a thumping noise from one corner of the room, and the wall bust in. Behind it stood... Unwin's men.
"See, told you he'd be here," said one of them to another.
"What? How? What?" Moone asked. He may not have known what the conspiracy would or would not have seen coming, but this was definitely something Moone hadn't seen coming, at least.
"Well, said the man called [name,] "you weren't in the vault when we came looking for you, after that thing came barreling down the labyrinth halls. Figured it was a friend of yours or something, right? We saw Unwin's body there, and that woman Lovecraft's, but you two were gone. So unless that lizard thing was you, which we figured unlikely, we knew that you two must have gone back to the present. We released the ritual, landed back where we started, only you weren't there either. So you must have gone back the other way, hopping straight out of the plane down to ours."
"That's common knowledge that that's possible?" sputtered Moone. Apparently it was also possible to release someone else's ritual somehow even if that person were dead.
The man shrugged. "Apparently. Anyway, we knew you must have been here, so we came all the way to Iraq to find you. With your bane naked again, Moone, it was pretty easy to find your precise location once you did manage to pop back into this plane."
Moone was slightly dizzy. Of course Unwin's men had left after Moone and the Pontifex had, but arrived before. That was how that worked. There was a level of time travel here, low-level but time travel nonetheless. "Well, uh, thank you," Moone managed.
"You're welcome. But it was actually kind of selfish on our part. See, we're better at taking orders than actually leading ourselves, so, Unwin down, we figured we need a leader again. Tracking you down is the most proactive thing we've done by ourselves, in years."
Moone nodded absently, eyes and mind elsewhere.
"So," said a different man, [name.] "Do you have a plan?"
Moone grinned. "Believe it or not, actually I do."
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