day 29 pt 3: highway fight

Andrew suggested that the original, just Kissifer attacking after all that buildup, was kind of underwhelming, so I hope this is better. There's still room for more in this scene, but this is as much as I've time to do for now. ciao




slice rips off moone's boons
All the villains. Draculas and dinosaurs and demons and those little biting dolls from the ice planet in Barbarella, and there were other letters of the alphabet that were represented there too it's just an astonishing coincidence that everything I listed just now happens to have started with a "d." Kibo the Usenet Admin, who had just shown up because he heard that somebody had mentioned his name.

Every creature that had been patiently waiting for Moone's pretzel-knotted boon to drop now converged directly on him, from all directions, swarming from the land, and from the sea (the Sea of Crete! part of the Aegean Sea!) and from the sky. Thermopylae was just about a hundred miles from here as the crow flies (Moone knew a lot about the geography of Greece!) But it still reminded Moone of the quote, misattributed to Leonidas but historically actually spoken by Dienekes, one of the commanders who fought under him: we shall have our battle in the shade.

Dienekes was famously the bravest of the Greeks to have fought at the Battle of Thermopylae; Moone didn't feel nearly that level of confidence right now. But he did also know a lot about Greek history.

And Greek etymology! The word plethora doesn't just mean a lot of. It specifically means an excessive amount of, the way one can have just too many pinatas. Only instead of having too many pinatas, there were too many monsters, and they all wanted to use Moone as a pinata, beat him up and spill his guts out and eat them like weird man-candy. The plethoric nature of the monsters meant that if they wanted to get at Moone, they had to get at each other first, to gain the privilege of being the one to strike the final blow at him. Kibo said something about bozos.

Slice was still tearing Moone's boon away, fondling his face and kneading Moone's soul and enjoying it too much, holding Moone writing in place as the nemeses arrived. The familiarity of what Slice was doing to him... not the rapey similarity familiarity, but something else, some other aspect of what the assassins had done to him...

Moone finally pieced it together.

The assassins’ boon the whole time had been to bestow their boon as Gifters, not only gifting their boon to others, but gifting that self-same boon of Gifting: their victim would then become a Gifter themself, which would allow the assassins to take back the boon that they’d partially Given, along with any other boons that may have been swabbed up as part of it.

That meant that, as long as Slice was directly taking away his Boon still, Moone was now a gifter.

Time to use this to his advantage.

His Bane was still his Boon, twisted up like this though unraveling. As true of any Gifter, using their Boon and Gifting exposed their concomitant Bane. He could Gift his own Bane back, as a Boon. And the exposed Bane of Slice was that he would have no choice but to accept.

Slice eyed the incoming melee, now coming for him instead of Moone... but flicked his attention back to Moone, a leering expression on his face, swinging his blade through the air in a cool-looking display of determination. Moone's bane may have been now on Slice... but his boon was still down right now as well. It was not a safe time to be attacked, particularly not a safe time to be attacked by a time-traveling superassassin who was himself being attacked by a myriad of monsters who were themselves all attacking each other as well.

So instead of standing his ground, Moone did the rational thing, and tried to run.

moone has an ignored epiphany
They were scrambling over each other, tearing each other apart, hundreds of eyes cast hungrily toward Moone. Not that Moone still had his bane on, but that these creatures were so consumed with bloodlust, and Moone was so helpless there. The bane having grown stronger and stronger, with its never having been used for months- these poor creatures were maniacs, driven insane by their desire for blood.

Is this what it was like for Pontifex, Moone wondered. All the pain of all these creatures, them all living in agony, it spread out amongst all of them trying to get at me, when all this time the pontifex was feeling all of their pain, but concentrated into one man. No wonder he longed for death.

I thought that I hungered for the Pontifex. But I had no idea how much someone could hunger for me.

Moone did astonishingly absolutely nothing with this newfound epiphany. But that doesn't mean he didn't have it.
(pontifex/Christ parallels, taking on everyone's pain? Pontifex surviving the agony by offloading his own pain onto Christ? "Beware of false prophets in sheep's clothing, when inwardly they are ravening wolves.")

kibo is defeated
"Vote for the happynet...!" Kibo proclaimed, flying off into the sky and disappearing in a twinkle of light. Oh dear, Moone realized. Oh crap. I don't think that guy even has magical powers. Oh no. Oh goodness. On the plus side, I totally understood the reference he just made. So, there's that.

moone defeats kissifer for good
The waters of Bernini flowed through his soul. Healing his boon, and his bane along with it. The final villain, Kissifer himself as furious as his home of hell, maybe even almost as furious as a woman scorned,  stood in front of him. He had held back, while the other lesser peon demons had taken each other out in the ruckus; he had waited thousands of years so what was the harm of a few more minutes for sweet vengeance?

I couldn't act earlier in your timeline, because of my own fear about time paradoxes.

"What you need to learn... is that it already happened... and so that makes it... oh for the love of..." Moone, who knew that he would horribly butcher the Pontifex's point about paradox, decided to shut up about time travel, and bid Kissifer off to the netherworld without a saucy quip. He was wrong, of course, so it was for the best that he kept his lips zipped; it really would have caused a paradox for Kissifer to have acted earlier, because this wasn't about cause-effect at all.

Moone still had the pocket watch that had once acted as an anchor for a djinn, had acted as a body that was now void, a vacancy ripe for possession...

Moone slammed the pocket watch against Kissifer, the way he had with the phylactery against him, a few months ago from Moone's point of view but nearly an eon from the demon's. Kissifer shriveled up and melted into smoke and folded into the watch, and Moone threw the watch to the side of the road anticlimactically and banished it back into hell and fell onto his knees, drained.

All of this, and it was only like 9:00 a.m. and the day wasn't over yet and Moone had so far today only managed to save his own hide and there was the tiny matter of saving the damn world to get to...

Moone was on the back of the truck still, the traffic on the street booping onward apparently blissfully unaware of anything that had happened. He cast his eyes in the direction of the Acropolis, the high city visible from basically all of Athens, as long as the numerous buildings and shrubberies weren't blocking the line of sight.

He had a heading at least. Was there an easier way to get to it? He folded from his knees to a side-sitting position, one hand resting on the top of the truck cab. Looked over his shoulder, noticed the spring heels of the Spring-Heeled Jack, just sitting there with little ribbonized bits of the assassin still sticking out of it. Considered this, scooched over, tapped the grisly bits out of the mechanism, snapped them over his own feet. They were kind of like ankle braces, only Victorian-era, with gears and interlacing springs and things. They didn't look terribly difficult to operate...

Moone bounced all the way to the high city, taking surprisingly long strides and getting there surprisingly quickly and wondering if anybody noticed this, either, if nobody seemed to notice the sky swarming with supernatural nemeses.