fay 15: Gef/Moone Reunion & heist planning

 I started filling in the gaps today of the first chapter, finding the ways I wanted to phrase things, that I hadn't managed to find before. It's just scattered words, and wouldn't make much sense to post up here. Getting to the action scene, though, research had revealed that the magic wouldn't work the way I'd set it up, which would mean the whole action scene would need a complete overhaul? I explain more over at my other blog. Instead, I started the bits leading up to the caper. I only had time to do 667 original words, which is 1,000 under on a good day, but I need to do some planning now. Once again, words from last year are italicized, included for context.

in front of the vault

On the other end of the hall was the other team... Moone held his breath... 

But for some reason he kept pushing forward, while the three figures opposite also advanced, until the Gef, Lovecraft, and Mushroom Cloud-shaped figures turned out to be exactly what they appeared to be in the flickering tooth-fueled torchlight. Except for Mushroom Cloud, of course, who wasn't what it looked like at all. They stood face-to-face outside of the vault doorway in the dead center of the symmetrical hallway. A long pause... who would speak first?

...

...What had happened after the summit? MacBeth would have been the one offering up the list on sale, so he could even have been here in Babel somewhere, but what did Gef and his team think of him? 

Gef explained his side of the story now. [flashback] The two friends embraced. Gef was entirely naked, which was common enough not to normally warrant mentioning, if not for the fact that he'd spent the greater portion of the last six hours with his body stuck inside a puppet head, and now wore no such disguise. And we're definitely not mentioning that because of the totally heterosexual hug the two shared now. GEF'S NUDITY IS NORMAL AND NOT WEIRD AT ALL.

Feeling completely exonerated, justified in his actions around Gef, Moone realized that feeling totally accepted was something he hadn't felt in months, easily. Had it really been that long, apart from the team, on the road with the Pontifex? The Pontifex, with the potentially preternatural gift of cutting straight through Moone's psyche, was someone Moone couldn't fully feel relaxed around. That and one other thing, but, it was with Gef that Moone realized he had been missing something. Gef would put Moone on edge in different ways, of course; Moone could never be sure if the little furry mongoose was about to say something balls-to-the-walls inappropriate, but there was a different sense of ease around a friend that Moone experienced. Something stirred at the back of his mind thinking about that- even though he was surrounded by his team members frequently, they never attacked him, or were compelled to like random other supernatural creatures were. If it truly were random, at least some of the supernatural danger would come from a closer source, but it never did. He'd pondered this frequently: was  there some magic around those closer to him? And if there were, was the Pontifex truly on his side? Bane or no bane, him being the only one around Moone or not, if it were true that the Pontifex wasn't playing Moone, hadn't found some loophole in the Contract the two shared, would the Pontifex feel the obsessive-compulsive urge to damage Moone if they were on the same side, whether he fought against it or not? Or was the feeling of suspicion Moone found about that just some latent animosity over Pontifex jilting his advances? If the Pontifex himself had pointed this out to him there would be a reason to be suspicious, but Moone realizing it on its own made it come across as pure refreshing truth. He did need to let that go. But what of the mysterious circumstances regarding the mysterious mysteries? Things had gone wrong, like example and example, that were too mysterious to pin on Pontifex being a trickster. It would have been the perfect cover. 

~segue back to the heist at hand!~

Unwin explained his team's plan (they'd planned everything and seen that it would work but hadn't seen the other team's approach because of the involvement of the shapeshifter.) The weaknesses of this plan were this: [WEAKNESSES.] Lovecraft explained Team Punch's plan: [PLAN. WEAKNESSES.] This new hybrid plan would hopefully smooth over the weaknesses. There wasn't a real way of seeing how well the combined plan would do, however, or if there was Unwin couldn't see it, seeing as how there was a gap in Unwin's sight where the shapeshifter was involved. The plan hinged around the shapeshifter as the team infiltrator, choosing the shapeshifter over Unwin, because the shapeshifter ostensibly would be able to make its way around its own gaps in the future, which Unwin wouldn't have been able to do.

The Pontifex withdrew his aura back to himself, and extended it to the shapeshifter, touching Moone again, draining all the boon off of him, and extending his hand and touching the forehead of the Shapeshifter, all in one fluid motion, as though he were practicing Tai Chi. The Shapeshifter's form fluctuated, seeming to grow bigger at the increase in power, or taking a deep breath in as though breathing in a new burst of fresh air.