Verona, Master Scrivener

[viceversailles]

Title: Verona, Master Scrivener
Rating: Teen
Major Warnings: None
Genre: Action
Summary: Written for the End of Pale Bonanza, in response to a prompt from seafoam15: "There was much more mention of the direction Verona's practice could have gone if her pen that could move letters around hadn't been broken. How do you think things would have gone if she'd been able to keep it?"

- :3 -

“You should focus more on your surroundings."

The first of Musser’s people had scaled up the side of the building. A face she recognized from the Blue Heron, though they’d never interacted. Easton Songetay.

He had two archetypes either side of him. A spear and a sword, armoured, with bodies made of solid smoke. They were composed well enough, with definite edges, indicating a firm pattern present to give them shape. Perhaps if she could take them apart, she’d find something worth salvaging. Behind them was a doll in elegant clothes, and a twenty-something practitioner who might’ve been a relative of Mrs. Graubard, wearing a similar dress in a more modern cut.

“Au contraire, Easton,” Verona declared, standing to her full height. Still shorter than the shortest of her opposition, but confidence loomed large. “And hello! Graubard, I presume?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t matter,” the woman said.

“Very well!” She waved her chalk at the motley crew. “Can your family’s dolls stop harassing my friend, please? We’ve business to attend to.”

“So this is the big diagram, huh?” Easton asked. He was a bit older than Verona, his hair buzzed short. She closed one eye to peek at his gauntlet with half her Sight. An Implement, for certain. Wrapped plastic gauze spun out from beneath his skin, through its fingers, and out to shrink-wrap his archetypes. Firm Claim, and connections to puppet them by. He took a long look at the work Verona had accomplished. “Why three? One at this school, one at the hospital, one at the factory?”

“Whyever not?” Verona asked.

He ogled her, and not in a fun way. “Why-ever? What, did you get even weirder since your stunt at the Blue Heron? Trying to copy Bristow now that he can’t stop you?”

Verona grinned as widely as she could, trying to give cheshire from beneath her mask. “Do you often stick your nose in other people’s business?”

Easton scoffed. “As if you could stop me.” He put the gauntlet out, and the diagram she’d done to safeguard the edges of the roof began to shimmer, distorting under the strain.

Two more Others climbed up after him, animal-people, with smashed-in faces, like pugs, each with magic circles around their necks, like collars.

She could have hassled out an eidolon of her own to face them, but she had something more immediate in mind. “Don’t you know what they say about that? Sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?”

Easton punched the barrier, and it shattered into light. Glamour.

“You’ll get a Faceful,” she said, punctuating the name with a stomp.

The glamour carried the name and the stomp forward as a single slowing shockwave, the light heavy in the air- until it soured, and became the shine of fangs. Where the flash had blinded, the dark afterimage deepened into the inside of a mouth, Verona standing still as the tongue rolled out like a red carpet beneath her.

Verona watched Easton’s smug smile fall from his face, and pulled her mask over her head to match her grin. In tandem, Faceful’s new features rolled over from behind the mirage.

Cats eyes large enough to frame the moon, and whiskers long enough to split the horizon.

Most extant Others needed to be named thrice to be summoned, but Scrivening Others travelled as fast as information. More than that, she’d adapted some of Matthew’s practices to attune her movements to the Mimeisthai. Less of a parallel relationship- dancing together, every flick and flourish followed up by a Faceful- and more of an artillery situation.

The Mimeisthai bit down.

The Graubard doll extruded metres of noodly arms, yanking back its owner and Easton while it yote itself away. Teeth crushed what arms couldn’t withdraw in time. Easton yelped as Verona, his summons and the collared beastie-boys were swallowed whole.

Of course, Faceful was just a head, even with the Typetap Kitty’s motifs attached. They stood there together in the darkness for a moment, she and the enemy Others. When nothing else happened, the beastmen tilted their heads at her, confused.

“Mrmmgmgm,” Faceful said, a rumble she could feel past her ears, in her skull.

She sighed. The Mimeisthai had stationery for brains, so he wasn’t exactly the sharpest pencil in the nutcase. It was a good thing she’d managed to convince him to abstain from the Carmine Contest. What he had in brute force, he made up for in numbed skull.

“Take them. Botch any bindings. I’ll stay and clean up the practitioners.”

Verona felt the shadows undulate a gulp, and the darkness disappeared, the bound Others along with them. Verona stood exactly where she had. Easton and the Graubard stared at her, dumbstruck. Another practitioner arrived at the top of the building- the spellbinder, presumably, given his frantic search for the beastmen.

She just smiled back, and offered a beckoning claw. “Care to try again?”

Easton braced his gauntlet and shot a bolt of fire at her.

And the Graubard doll blocked it. With a cat’s paw.

Verona’s grin grew past what it could without her mask on. The Typetap Kitty wasn’t nearly as viral as The Turtle Queen, but what she lacked in size, she made up for in coherency. She’d set the Fancy up to ride along with other friendly neighbourhood Bugges- a cute little payload for linked practices, like teeth biting down as viral fangs. It helped that she stopped Verona’s Self from straying too far. She had Rook’s loot from Basil Winters to thank for that.

A torrent of cat paws whirled at the practitioners, the porcelain-mask head replaced with a smiling maneki-neko. Easton knocked the spellbinder over as he conjured a wall of earth to shelter them. The Graubard grasped at the air, turning connections to threads, and yanked at the doll to try and control it.

“You are property of my family, built by their ha-”

The paws returned to hands. The figurine became a mask again.

And after a brief fritz- as connecting threads became computer cables- a pair of cat ears popped out from the Graubard’s french bob.

Instead of continuing her Claim, the practitioner meowed.

“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”

“Dammit Shay!”

Easton chucked a gout of flame her way, but ‘Shay’ only hissed, yanking the doll into defending her. As the name implied, Typetap Kitty was especially good at messing with controls. With all of Shay’s expertise, the Fancy leapt over to Verona’s side of the roof, defending her still.

The Bugge’d Out Graubard gave her a pleading look with one-and-zero eyes. “Mraow,” she yowled, swiping an imaginary collar at her neck.

“That so? Take her to my demesne, then. We’ll see what we can do about unbinding her.”

With a slow blink- the eyes turning on and off again- ‘Shay’ leapt off the roof and landed on all fours, unharmed, before mounting the doll as a steed and bounding off to Half Street.

“And then there were two.”

“And we outnumber you again,” Easton sneered, apparently an optimist. “You’re insane, messing with Bugges like that. I bet you’ve already gone mad.”

“Depends on your definition. I like to think I was always a little weird, in the best way. Now, are you going to keep fighting me, or are you going to leave my town alone?”

“This is Musser’s town. And it doesn’t matter where you’ve hidden my creations. It’s his town, I work for him, and they work for me-”

He raised his gauntlet, clenching his fist like he was marshalling forces behind him.

“Cute argument. Kinda feel like you’re copying my Faceful bit from earlier.”

“They’re mine. I made them.”

“And copying Shay too, huh? Well, it’s important to have role models.”

He was gritting his teeth now. Summoning with Self alone.

That made him vulnerable.

The archetypes coalesced behind him.

With green and gold scale-mail, blades as black as night, and helmets with inlaid crowns.

“Knights of The Turtle Queen, seize these men,” Verona said dismissively.

The practitioners wheeled on Easton’s corrupted summons, only to both be slapped across the face.

Much like with Shay’s threads, the same firm Claim that might have let Easton resist The Turtle Queen instead became wide avenues to take him over. His gauntlet turned black and gold, and a hexagonal pattern was shaved into his hair. He stood to attention.

“The Queen wishes to know how we may be of service,” he conveyed.

She took off her mask, and flapped it around like she was trying to dry laundry by force. It was back to normal when she stopped.

She let the bravado bleed out of her a little. As fun as it was to puff herself up, it was also crucial for resisting being Bugge’d Out herself.

“Go help Lucy. I’ll finish up the ritual here.”

They marched off, as she surveyed what remained of her hard work.

Her diagram was a mess. A riot of symbols and styles, even the most basic runes turned into wide eyes and gaping mouths, or cat ears and computer keys, or turtle shells and crowns. The chalk ran like watercolour paint, transmuting to an oily luminescence as it swirled. She could almost imagine it sorta-working if she finished it now, not to summon Miss, but to plunge Kennet into a Bugge’d Out Knot.

Irreparable.

For most people.

“Thank you Miss!” Verona said to the moon, brandishing her quill pen like the treasure it was.

It was a good thing the feather had lengthened as she’d used it- it definitely wouldn’t have had the strength to take in all this power if she hadn’t been so dedicated. She pressed the golden nib to the centre of the diagram, and it drank deeply. Not the runes or geometries, but the styles. The quill’s black tuft became the canvas for the palette the Bugges had provided, rainbows fluttering up its length to make the craziest tesseracting peacock plume there ever was.

Leaving the Founding diagram exactly as it was beforehand.

With a final flourish of chalk and dashing diacritic, the ritual began. As the moon began to hatch, Verona grinned so wide she felt she might cry.

It felt right, to bring their mentor home with the first gift she’d given.