[PART 5.]
[MAYBE ANOTHER INTERLUDE IN HERE.]
After the ritual, the eight of them found themselves in the Ancient Plains of Shinar, on the edge of a sprawling city, with a certain staggeringly, almost incomprehensibly tall tower gleaming white in the sun. Moone oriented awkwardly toward the edifice and took it in; he had to crane his neck even at this distance to see the top of the tower.
Moone hadn't known where they'd been going, but that landmark's presence made it almost cartoonishly clear. "Ah," Moone said. "...
Gotham. Never actually been to the Big Apple before; it's everything they said it would be and more."
Keepses ignored him, but one of his men, [name and personality,] actually seemed to almost crack up at this.
[also give opportunity earlier on to maybe meet them the first encounter with Keepses, as well as more interactions in these scenes.]
"The Babylonian black market," Keepses said, brandishing a piece of toast and flipping up the hood on the tunic he was wearing. He guided them deeper into the city, toward a marketplace. The Ancient Babylonian black market, the central hub for the world's magical underground trade.
Keepses had reckoned, and his suspicions confirmed via surgical intelligence gathering, that MacBeth would be in no position to use the NOC list he'd taken off with for himself, but would instead fence it off here. There was to be a sale later on this evening, the list out in the open, apparently here in the city of ancient antediluvian Babylon, frozen in time and existing now more as a place to be visited freely than a time set in stone. Moone had heard something of how this worked. Travelers could come from all over the world, from every time period in history, in a one-way trip, and exit back to where and when they'd gone in once their trip was completed.
If they lost the NOC list here, it would truly be blowing in the wind, being anywhere in the world or anywhen in its timeline. Those most interested in using the NOC list for themselves would still most likely come from around the late 20th century, but such a mismatch in timelines would still render the list permanently lost if taken off with- and the intelligence from the list would be useable at any point after the list was broken away from its seal, that afternoon at the summit which to Moone was a few weekends ago, but in the space of the world's reckoning would not yet occur for another 5,000 years or more.
Keepses had explained his reasoning, attempting to track down MacBeth via the Necronomicon. The fact that he had a personal stake in the safety of the NOC list was, as far as Keepses was concerned, killing two birds with one stone. Retrieving the NOC and ensuring its safety would keep his own legend secure, but the seller being exposed would clear Moone's name and thus Keepses's along with it.
Moone wasn't sure how much he trusted the idea. MacBeth hadn't been working alone; he wouldn't have been able to abscond with the NOC list by himself. There had been that alien presence, ostensibly a whole organization of them, MacBeth had been working for. They could have made excellent use of the NOC list, without needing to fence it. Had Moone's interference thrown them off that badly?
If Slice, Slit and Slash were working for MacBeth's organization, and they now knew that Keepses was working with Moone, wouldn't the organization know that Keepses would be able to figure out the location of the sale. Of course, the sale had been going to go on before they knew that Moone was working with Keepses, but now that they knew, would they still go through with it? Would there be another backup plan, if indeed fencing the NOC list on the black market had been a backup plan to begin with?
Maybe the sale, occurring in the past, already happened, and so they had no choice but to-- no, that wasn't how this worked. This was a low form of time travel, even lesser than how the assassins navigated through time; no causality was actually being violated, just because the city of Babylon had a timeline a few hundred or even a few thousand years longer on the inside than the time that passed on the outside.
What was the goal here, then? MacBeth must have been acting alone in this, Moone [reckoned]-- perhaps the NOC list wasn't the end game, or at least, not for the organization. Were they working at cross-purposes?
"You sure that the, uh, list is going to be somewhere around here?" Moone asked Keepses, walking close enough to whisper in his ear.
"Yes. No. Yes. But no. 'Somewhere around here.' For sure, right. You really think that it's going to be fenced at, one of these booths, like some common fae whore? No, no," Keepses said. "The Necronomicon is going to be auctioned off. A classy event, black-tie, gala, highest bidder, super-rich. At, the big one." He gestured toward the city's most prominent feature.
The Tower of Babel. The tower, built too steeply to truly be called a ziggurat, stretched out up into the atmosphere, an artificial mountain. It probably wouldn't have been capable of actually reaching heaven, like the familiar account nonetheless suggested, but the mountain was the idea, Moone realized. It was what the Pontifex had been saying about Axes Mundi. Mountains are pillars of the earth, a liminal zone between earth and the under- and over- worlds. Man-made mountain, artificial heaven. A temple built to no god but to the strength of Man's hand.
And here they were, in a time before man's hubris was punished. As exotic as the sights and scents around him were, people of all skin colors and body types, wearing clothing of every stripe and hue, Moone realized that the voices around him weren't speaking diverse languages as would be expected of any other market in the world.
No, of course not. The people's language had not yet been corrupted. The tongue here was strange, but Moone found that he could understand it without a single degree of difficulty-- this was the universal language, the language that all languages have in common. He slipped into it, and speaking to his companions found that they all did the same.
"So we speak the, uh, Primordial Language, thing, now?"
"Some of us better than others it seems." Keepses shrugged. "Only insofar as we remain here in Babel; if we go back to a time after the scattering of languages [something about speaking in tongues.]"
"When we cease the ritual, at, back where we came from, we're just going to get pooped back out at the moment we got in here?"
"That's the idea. I've been here a few times, know my way around, and, honestly, it's kind of comforting how limited the ability is. Otherwise there's no such thing as, time, at all. Everything would collapse. People speak of wanting to be able to erase mistakes, but, continuity is our friend. Truly. Stick close, now. We're getting to the gate."
[they make their way in, and after some more travelling finally make it into the Tower, where Moone has the opportunity to examine in closer detail the white stone-like substance that the tower is comprised of.]
The uncomfortable realization thumped against Moone as sharply and suddenly as a cat jumping onto his head with its claws out. "Human teeth. The whole building is made out of... human teeth."
Keepses tilted his head to the side, eyes closed and brows raised, in a gesture that was halfway shrug, halfway nod. "Strongest material known to man. Or something."
Moone narrowed his eyes. "Diamonds?"
"Diamonds are the hardest. You know what hard means, hard means brittle, hard means breakable. These teeth..."
"They're disconcerting is what they are."
"Only material capable of building an edifice this size. Um, only, non crazy space-age alloy, that is. Babylonian level technology. Babylonian level technology."
"Where do they get all these... oh. Oh, no." The rest of the group, the Pontifex included, seemed very amused as Moone made all the connections as he pieced the truth together. "The tooth fairy is real, isn't it?" The group tittered like maniacs at this. Not being raised into the supernatural world, but still being adopted into it, Moone generally thought he had a pretty good handle on the true nature of magic. Curveballs were by this point relatively rare.
But they still happened.
"Come on, you've got to be... that's just a story. Not even a universal story. It's just an American adaptation of a Norwegian tradition, putting discarded baby teeth into mouse holes in the hopes that the adult teeth that grow in will be as strong as rodents'." Moone, working from memory, hoped that his provenance of the folklore was correct. "I mean, I know that certain beliefs and superstitions retroactively alter reality to turn the magic true, but... really, the tooth fairy? That's... that's even more of the parents than the Easter Bunny. The real teeth, they just go into, drawers and jars and stuff."
"And there's a monetary transaction, which acts as a contract," Pontifex said gently. "The metaphysical essence of the teeth, of all fallen baby teeth throughout time, come here. Like how the body of Christ is literally the Eucharist."
"I'm a Protestant!" Moone nearly shouted, growing flustered. "You're a Jew! I think. None of this... none of this makes sense. You just invented that medium."
The Pontifex pursed his lips. "Well, not the medium. Maybe the application, I'm overextending, but the literalism of the Biblical statement does act as a sort of superstition, so I'm not sure. What matters is belief, at least... and that is how contracts work."
Moone felt chided at this, as he realized that the Pontifex was correct. "So, so, what. The tooth fairy. Is she-- he-- is the tooth fairy here?"
"I am," came a male voice from behind Moone.
Well, this isn't the oddest situation I've gotten myself into, Moone thought, and turned around.
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