section 18 (day 24)

Perhaps the gifted boon did have a bane after all. Boons when granted as external gifts had their corresponding banes covered by the giver, but there was a downside to the speed gift endowed on Team Mothman by the Tooth Fairy. It did allow them to think on their feet, and use the same amount of time to accomplish more-- but at the same time, it also increased the perceived time the team had to wait for the auction to begin. They had time to establish a plan of attack for the auction, knowing the psychology and bidding strategy of the major players around them; Unwin, in his role as the Mothman, would cover that aspect. But the ability to wait so long left Moone alone with his own thoughts for an uncomfortable period of time, looking toward Gef's table halfway across the floor of the large auction hall.

Moone had plenty of time to talk to Cloud; maybe even time to ally the two rival bidding factions if he got in soon enough. The elongated period of wait before the auction proper began also gave Moone the opportunity to enact his part of the plan, to try to approach Cloud, and see if he could talk to her, but... Moone held back from approaching the table which belonged to the group that was known to the world as Team Punch, and sat at his own table a little longer, thinking through the situation he found himself in.

What would the practical effect be, of getting back in Gef's and the agency's graces, by this point? Here in a team with Unwin and the Pontifex, Moone felt secure, and at home. As volatile as his relationship with the Pontifex was, neither really feeling they could trust themselves around the other, it was still a life far more secure for himself than he'd ever had at Tetragrammaton.

But a life of espionage was the life that Unwin preferred. Not having to be on the run. Moone owed it to him, at least, to clear his own name and Unwin's through him.

He also, Moone grudgingly admitted, owed it to the agency. For all they knew, Moone was the mastermind behind this whole thing, and it went so much deeper than they could even expect. Those, alien forces, MacBeth had been working with. The world and its secrets went far deeper than anyone could fathom, and some of those ancient and eldritch beings, like Smith, even worked for the agency. But here was a direct threat against worlds both mundane and profound, prolapsing into where it didn't belong and bleeding [its darkness and secrets into the light.] Moone and Unwin were the only ones, the only ones, with direct evidence against that world and that unspeakable horror. It wasn't just [decency] but their moral duty to throw light onto MacBeth and his forces.

He'd need to go through Gef to do so, though. Gef, who was specifically here, and who would be specifically trying to track him down, thinking him to be the seller behind the NOC list. That would go well... right?

The lighting changed, and the room hushed in preparation for the auction to begin. Time to get started.

Moone sucked a deep breath in between clenched teeth, bracing himself for what came next, and bestowed a great chunk of his aura upon Unwin. [establish during hovercraft action scene that you can bestow Pontifex's gift off onto others if you have it; it won't take your own enhancement with it, so it will just be Pontifex's naked enhancement, of course. Pontifex had to take his aura back because Moone didn't want to part with it, though he could have gifted it himself.] Moone held onto some small part of the aura for himself, but his own enhancement shrunk to the minimum, his boon barely overshadowing his bane. All that mattered at this point were the recovering of the NOC list, and being able to uncover the conspiracy MacBeth was a part of. Moone's own life was... well, it was a tool to be thrown away if it meant the greater good, just like the Pontifex had described it. Right now, Unwin needed the enhancement more than Moone did.

With most of the enhancement off, Moone still wouldn't get attacked, intrinsically would have an aura that exerted no force upon the outside world so that no passersby would want to attack him; if he were to get attacked, however, he wouldn't have enough boon free to dodge it. The idea was, at least, that he'd make himself as non-threatening as possible, in approaching Cloud. Hopefully Gef wouldn't present too great a threat, trying to talk him down before engaging in physical confrontation as he'd done before after the assassination of the Secretary.

And by then... well, either Moone would have gotten his piece in with Cloud, or he wouldn't have. Even if Moone were taken into custody, or even killed somehow, hopefully Team Punch would have a strategy for locking down the NOC list. Team Mothman certainly did, if the two couldn't combine forces. Either way, the list was presumably safe. All Moone had to do was be on his toes, and make sure his own neck was, too.

Moone set off in Team Punch's direction, doing his best not to call any attention to himself and aided by the fact that from an outside perspective the force of his tides were still average and forgettable. Meanwhile, behind him, Unwin began phase one of his own plan, with his Pontifex-endowed, enhanced magical powers. In a sense, the plan had already been set rolling [an hour and a half] ago, when Unwin and the Tooth Fairy had slipped off to talk shop together.

The Tooth Fairy had many gifts, many of which he'd bestowed upon various factions and independent parties here. Team Mothman had received quick speed, one of the Tooth Fairy's more obvious secondary powers-- but most precious and well-known of all the Tooth Fairy's gifts was his vast wealth. It was ostensibly funded by such auctions as the one that was beginning; he hadn't bestowed any of this gift upon any factions here. But he easily might have, fueling the fire of the rivalry between those here, and Unwin used this fact in his plan.

Unwin's enhanced access of his own past allowed him to reach back and affect [probability], so that the Tooth Fairy's gift became a steady stream of income for each of the eight members of Team Mothman. At the moment he altered his own tides, the stream of the gift of speed simply retroactively became a small stream of income, starting when he made it so and acting like it had always been that way. Unwin could track the combined total of the boon via another one of the [macguffins] he had on him, which he'd cloned so that each team member could have one, monitoring each own contribution to the money pool. It would allow them to fake the [fortune signature]; normally it wouldn't matter if they actually had the money on them when they bid, as long as they would have the money when it was time to pay, but the rules to this auction were slightly more complex.

Hopefully, even after the auction ended they'd be able to squeeze the last few drops from their skim of the tooth fairy's funds, but it wasn't clear if the tooth fairy would decide to drop his enchantment of his boon on any one group or even the whole thing. Maybe be'd cease his enhancements as soon as the auction began. If that were to happen, Unwin was already on tracing the money back to locate the Tooth Fairy's coffers. After that, it was a matter of holding one's breath and hoping that nobody would notice the breach in security. [Unwin, or someone on his team, is a hacker, or some magical equivalent. Establish with them tracing Moone's location via his IP address thing.]

In a world full of immortals who didn't need to work to eat, dwarves who mined the center of the plutonic earth like maggots scavenging every last drop from a carcass, and alchemical powers that could transmute lead to gold and press carbon into precious diamonds, money, as the sleeping world knew it, was obsolete. The theory behind economy remained much the same, but instead of there being a gold standard or a silver standard in which bills could theoretically be exchanged for these precious metals, here in Babel they had an astrological standard. The intrinsic value acting as a point of value by which other currencies could be gauged was the value of slices of time, particular astrological sections of space-time having particular zodiacal effect. This was the origin of the idea of the word "fortune" meaning money; they used the word here not in some metaphorical sense, but still quite in a literal.

Behind Moone, the astrological signs appeared high in the air up near the front of the room, as if stock market symbols displayed against a giant invisible ticker board; the NecrOnomiCon was raised up on a pedestal below it, its image also displayed in the air as if on the same giant screen.

Moone approached earshot of Team Punch's table, and the auction began.

***

Aside from Team Punch and Team Mothman, who were on the same side, there were sixteen or seventeen other factions here vying for the list, including Himsters Keepses, who played for himself. Moone, hopefully through Cloud, had to signal to Team Punch his intention, and form an alliance between the two bidders who were still as yet rivals against each other.

Moone knew that they would instantly recognize him and the Pontifex, but wasn't sure about whether they'd recognize Unwin or any of his men. Slice Slit and Slash had seen them together, and whoever had hired them would know their allegiance. Moone suspected that the assassin Slash had been working directly for MacBeth, and that it would have been safest for Unwin to make the cold approach, but Unwin was representing the head of Team Mothman, and so actually couldn't directly approach Team Punch-- certainly not at this juncture, with the Tooth Fairy beaming and explaining the rules and stakes of the auction; the heads of all parties were expected to be seated at their tables now and patiently paying attention. Perhaps one of Unwin's men, but Moone still had that direct connection to Cloud, and so was the quickest easiest way of gaining Team Punch's trust.

Moone looked around and saw that he wasn't the only one running from table to table; almost all of the factions here were sending out runners to eavesdrop on the other tables as they discussed bidding strategy amongst each other, the team leaders and their collection of mathematicians and strategists. Keepses, the lone wolf, would have something of an upper hand in this part of the game, sharing his strategy with no one. In this covert game of open information, everyone knowing everyone else's secrets, Keepses's secrets were a locked trap; still, playing for himself meant that he had no runners of his own and wouldn't know anyone else's strategies. He would probably use brute force, rather than finesse, as his strategy; he was, after all, one of the richest most enigmatic figures in the room.

Team Punch being able to recognize him, Moone hung back, orbiting and observing Gef's team's bidding strategy from a distance. Moone, Unwin, and the Pontifex had assembled a pool of the probable bidding strategies that the factions here would employ, based on what was known about each particular player and what gift the Tooth Fairy had endowed each with. It was something of a game, with the NOC list going to the winner, and there was a trick in playing the game underneath the game. Moone already knew something of the strategy that Team Punch would employ.

Gef had one particular personality, but his Mr Punch persona was very precise. It was in his handwriting. [talk about the bid strategy he'd employ.]

Moone tried to find his opening with Cloud-- and found her nowhere at the table. Well, great, he thought, standing up straight and spinning, taking in the whole room. He'd known that it couldn't have been that easy. If Cloud was gone, she would probably be Team Punch's runner, and that fact had its upsides and its downsides. If Moone did find Cloud, at least he'd find her alone, away from Lovecraft and Gef, and he wouldn't have to be as careful in approaching her, as long as he invoked the contract between them in time. But where would she be? Which tables would Team Punch be most interested in scouting the secrets of?

And if he managed to puzzle that out, would Moone even be able to find her there? Moone thought about Team Punch's Tooth Fairy-endowed boon; it had been the Pontifex who had scouted out this section of the room, but the intel on Team Punch would have been someone Moone would remember intrinsically, not like any of the minor orisha warlords here or anything. Moone was fairly confident that the boon endowed upon Team Punch had been, the Gift of Night.

Moone grimaced and thought "well great" to himself again. Cloud could be invisible right now for all Moone knew. Perhaps still sitting at the table, even. Which meant that it was the first place he would have to scout... and it would be the one most perilous to approach.

Or one of the most perilous, at least. Moone was fairly confident that Keepses would recognize the man who had executed him, as well. Going anywhere near Keepses would also be fairly perilous.

Moone sucked in a breath, pulled up his collar to obscure his face, and did a pass-by of a seemingly empty chair at Team Punch's table. It scooted in as he bumped against it, empty, and Moone could see out of his peripheral vision behind him Lovecraft frown and check the chair for bugs. Not bad. They had noticed him, but they had misinterpreted his action as the covert planting of a listening device, and they hadn't seemed to recognize him even with his passing by so close.

There were two or three more chairs seemingly unoccupied, but Moone didn't need to check those ones, apparently. He'd passed right into their local bubble of the Gift of Night, and hadn't seen anyone there disguising themselves invisibly, Cloud or otherwise. Moone set his jaw and once more did a survey of the spacious room. They had sent her out as a spy, then, and it was possible to circumvent the cloak of night via close enough proximity. So where would Gef and/or Lovecraft be most anxious to receive word from?

[Moone thinks it through, attempts to track Cloud down, auction continuing meanwhile.]

The auction took place in [five] stages; it was a silent auction, with a hybrid tiered system and a steep entry price. After each round of bidding, the available funds would be checked against the number bid, and the top bidders would advance to the next round [or something.]

Moone checked his own wooden, bone-shaped [macguffin piece] hooked up to the team's Tooth Fairy-funded boon bubble. The income was still trickling in, the number going up steadily as Moone watched, but Moone could also apparently use the [macguffin] to monitor Unwin's progress through the back doors of the coffers of Babel, digging his way to the source of the income stream and digging the hole open a little wider for himself.

[research unusual auction systems and bidding-type games. make it complex enough to justify all the cloak-and-dagger surrounding the use of strategy. Think of it like a big old game of Diplomacy, but as an auction.]

[bid continues, pool narrows down I guess, pressure grows more intense, Team Punch eliminated in penultimate round leaving Team Mothman alone against Keepses and Moone's quest rather pointless. Auction wraps up, tallies are in...]

The winning bidder... was Himsters Keepses.

Having it over one way or the other, finally, felt like a big release... but Moone's head swam as he remembered what the defeat meant. "Well, we lost," shrugged Unwin, next to him.

Moone, light-headed and sick to his stomach, looked back over his shoulder at the Pontifex, who was sitting quietly at an edge table. Unwin didn't know, not really; they'd only briefed him on the plan they'd come up with while he was gone, and glossed over what the contingency was.

He would give the word, then. Bring the whole thing down. Destroy the Tower of Babel, scatter to the corners of the earth the wicked in it. He'd agreed. But Moone realized that he'd agreed when it was only his and Unwin and Unwin's men's lives also at stake. The last remaining noble members of his old team were here as well. How many righteous souls indeed, would it take to spare the wrath of God from smiting the earth?

"Of course, though," added Unwin who was still sitting in his seat unemotionally at the loss, "winning wasn't really our plan in the first place." He broke out into a sudden grin, and pulled out [the macguffin, now fully downloaded.] Traced through it, triangulated through the coffers' location and the [IP address stuff] of [the NOC list information he'd gained,] Unwin had the information he'd wanted to gather.

The location of the NOC list's holding room.