04. Vergessen Heist

[katzepaw]

(This is like two episodes so I will just link to some good parts while I try to summarize.)

The Mighty Nein are gathered in the woods past a wrought iron fence, outside a massive compound - the Vergessen Sanatorium - planning a break in to steal some amulets. They decide that Jester and Veth will accompany Caleb inside as “Team Firestorm,” and they will message the team remaining outside in the woods and Beauregard scaling the building, so they can magical diversions and be ready to bolt when it’s time to go.

They decide the code words to message will be ‘Sarsaparilla’ if everything is okay, ‘Licorice’ if they need the outside team to come in and help them, and ‘Red Hots’ if everyone needs to book it out of there at high speed.

The chamber inside the base of the tower is dark, with a few locked doors inside. Caleb messages ‘sarsaparilla’ to Beau, and hears her voice in his head saying the same thing back. Veth picks the lock to one of the doors, and quietly they begin to creep inside down a staircase into a basement hallway. At the bottom of the staircase is a chamber, and it seems to be some sort of breakroom; a guard in armor is sitting and eating a snack.

Jester approaches and casts a spell on him, and the guard looks up, sees all of them, and smiles as though he’s looking at old friends.

“Hi,” he says cheerfully. “Well, how can I help you?”

“Hi!” Jester replies, friendly as ever. “Is there anyone else down here with you? I have an idea for you! I need help getting to a specific room, can you help me get there? But I don’t want any of your guard friends to see us. It’s, like, a secret."

The guard awkwardly admits he's not sure how to do this.

“Okay, tell you what," Jester says, "I’m just going to have my friends come down here. I have a couple friends with me, okay?”

The guard seems awkward. “We aren’t supposed to have other people down here. . . “

“But it’s okay!” Jester announces, and the guard nods.

“For you, I’ll allow it.”

Caleb and Veth come down the stairway into the room. The guard looks very uncomfortable, as though he knows he shouldn’t be allowing people in here, but because of the spell he doesn’t find Jester suspicious and doesn’t want to disappoint her by disagreeing with what she asked.

Caleb seems a little vague, a little out of it, somewhere in his own world. He says a terse “Guten tag” to the guard, and then wants to continue on, not getting into the fun of any of Jester’s shenanigans.

(This is a good summary of the grim Darth Vader vibes of this next part)

Jester distracts the guard while Caleb casts a spell to dispel the magical trap on one of the doors. Veth approaches, far more stealthily than Caleb could ever be, and opens the door, peeks down inside. There’s a guard sitting at his post down the hallway. Veth takes out her crossbow and fires two crossbow bolts at him. The guard begins to scramble to respond, but Caleb has readied some components from his pouch and casts a spell, ending with raising his hand toward the ceiling and clenching his fist. As he does this, the guard is pulled to the ceiling. There’s the sound of metal hitting stone above, and a crinkling, crunching sound as the metal of his armor is crushed inward, in a ball shape. With a squelching sound, blood begins sloughing out of the now misshapen armor, the guard unrecognizable anymore as a human, just a bloody, crushed corpse encased in metal.

Caleb releases the spell, and there’s a loud sound of crashing as the metal armor violently drops to the ground. From a distance away, he can vaguely hear the sounds of Jester telling the guard not to worry about it, no need to go see what that sound was, a little panic in her voice.

Veth sort of stares at Caleb in wide eyed shock at how gruesome what he just did was. Caleb begins to look around the room, but the sound of footsteps can be heard as another guard comes to investigate the sound. Caleb raises his fist again, casts Gravity Sinkhole in the doorway the guard is running, and turns a second guard into a horrible meatball of metal, blood, and flesh. This time, he’s not dead, just screaming in pain as he’s crushed against the ceiling. Veth fires a crossbow bolt into him and he dies, and his body goes crashing to the floor again just as an errant bolt of Veth’s also shoots into the hallway. In the next room over, they can hear another voice shout “what the fuck.”

Caleb doesn’t seem to care about anything he’s done. He sends a message to Beau, in a hoarse whisper, vaguely pleased with his handiwork - “Sarsaparilla.”

“Hey, Jester, we’re about to go kill this guard!” Veth says, as Jester comes to join them, pointing at the next room. “Can you do something else?”

“No, don’t - ” Jester protests, trying to think. “Well. . . let me see. Maybe. . .”

Caleb opens the door and looks inside. There’s a guard at the entrance who tries to attack him with his blade; Caleb deflects the first with an arcane shield, but the second one strikes him, slashing against him. A second guard races at him with a spear, but his attack also hits the protective bubble of magic Caleb has shielded himself with and glances off. Veth manages to cast a spell to hypnotize one of the guards, but Caleb takes his staff and casts a ball of lightning from it. The lightning arcs through both guards, hits the wall behind them, and lightly zaps Caleb and Veth as well. Both guards fall to the ground, smoke pouring out of the armor, charred flesh and skin poking through, jaw stretched and eyes milky and near popping. Neither is dead, but they’re both in their death throes.

“Oh, right,” says Veth. “I forgot we travel with a stone cold murderer.”

“Yeah, this is bad,” Jester says, a little upset.

“These are not rent-a-cops at the yogurt store,” Caleb mutters. “This is a basement armory of the Cerberus Assembly. They do bad things here.” Veth and Jester still seem sort of nervous; he puts his hands on Veth’s shoulders. “We can unpack this when we get out of here. Will you please pick another lock?”

They open another door, and a mage is huddled inside, hiding at the top of the stairs. He tries to cast a spell on Veth, but it doesn’t take. “Please don’t attack us, I’m traveling with a murderer,” she says, but this doesn’t seem to dissuade him, so she runs over to him and casts a spell to electrocute him. The mage tries to fireball Veth, Jester, and Caleb all at once, and it does a little damage, but Caleb casts his own more powerful fireball and incinerates him, setting the room ablaze as well. The mage’s dead body falls down the staircase. Caleb walks through the room, using his magic to start putting out the fire, while Jester holds her head in her hands. The room they’re in is filled with dangerous chemicals, but also seems to be filled with a number of torture implements. Caleb gestures at this.

“See? They are complicit.”

Veth sends a message back to the group. “Uh, so we called ourselves Team Firestorm, we’ve caused a firestorm, things aren’t great here. . . just be ready to bamf us out of here.”

“Stay on task, Widogast,” Caleb mutters to himself. “Here we go.” They descend the staircase. At the bottom, they find a magical wall of force blocking a door with an arcane lock. They try to use magic to unlock it, but ultimately, Jester casts a spell to transport herself and Veth inside the locked room, while Caleb stands guard outside. Jester and Veth are taking a little too long; they’re just supposed to grab the amulets and go, but Veth can never resist an opportunity to steal an extra little more. Caleb is sweating growing panicky and nervous; they made a lot of noise, caused some smoke and left a trail of blood.

Jester and Veth reappear by Caleb’s side with a lockbox containing what they came here to get, and Jester grabs Caleb and tries to cast the spell that will allow them all to teleport safely back to another city, Nicodranas. But the spell doesn’t work. Walking down the staircase, his hand raised up to counterspell and a smile on his drawn jaundiced face, is Master Trent Ikithon.

“Well, if this isn’t extremely curious,” he says.

(You can watch this part, from 11:25 to 19:45)

Caleb goes rigid, seeing this man’s face and hearing his voice. He’s stiff with terror, but he also can’t help but look at Jester beside him and Veth behind him, two of the people who are most precious to him in the world. And without thinking or waiting to hear what this man has to say, he takes his components again and casts a wall of fire between the three of them and Trent. The chamber immediately fills with whooshing flames to the ceiling, but on the side Caleb and his friends are standing, there’s no heat. Trent, on his side, has to back up the stairs a little, but he casts dispel, and the fire dies down to embers. And he keeps walking towards them.

“I am quite curious,” he says, trying to sound placating, “what brings you here.”

Caleb ignores what he says; as soon as he dispels the wall of fire, he casts firebolt at him instead. Trent raises a hand and the bolt glances off him, goes wide and hits a wall behind him. Caleb backs up into Jester and Veth. Jester takes a deep breath, grabs both of them, and tries her teleportation spell again, a last ditch effort to get out of there.

“Now, this is extremely rude. I’m just asking questions. This wasn’t expected.” He puts his hand up, and there’s a blur the air as Trent begins counterspelling Jester again, unraveling her arcana, but Caleb raises his own hand and does the same. It’s like two waves of similar energy hitting and canceling each other out, and nothing happens, Trent’s spell fizzles out. The green cloak of Jester’s magic encircles them, swirls around them, and they vanish.

“You taught me well,” Caleb says, as the three of them disappear, and reappear on the apartment balcony of Veth’s home, overlooking the coastal city of Nicodranas, far away from the Sanatorium.

Caleb pulls Jester and Veth both into a fierce hug, his voice full of emotion, and says “I’m sorry. Thank you, I’m sorry. It was too dangerous to go in there.”

But as Veth is responding to him, he hears the cajoling voice of Trent Ikithon project into his mind telepathically. “Now, Bren, that was uncalled for. Conversation. See, now I’m worried.”

“You can sit and cool off,” Caleb mutters back. “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk to you yet.”

Jester and Veth both look alarmed, unsure why he’s saying this to them, suddenly angry.

“Sorry,” Caleb says. “He was talking to me in my head, like you can do.”

They open the stolen box, take out three amulets of protection from scrying and put them on. It takes an hour to attune to them, so they go into Veth’s kitchen and begin to eat baby carrots as a snack while they wait. Caleb is clearly sort of half here, half disassociating for most of this conversation.

As they walk inside, Trent’s voice again projects into his mind. “If you wanted anything, all you had to do was ask. This was unnecessary. And now I have to explain this to the rest of the Assembly. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

“I am aware of the strings that are attached,” Caleb spits back. “Go off and tell your tales”

“Is he talking to you, still?” Jester asks, concerned.

“Ja,” Caleb says softly.

“So, you guys,” Jester says a little awkwardly. “I, um. I didn’t know we were going to be murdering everyone in there? Things escalated very quickly.”

“Yeah, I sort of felt badly about it as well,” admits Veth. “It wasn’t just the killing, but we were really savage about it and crushing their bodies and sort of, you know, defiling them as we went.”

“Yeah,” Jester says softly.

“But they’re bad people, right?” Veth says, trying to soften it.

“They’re bad people and they did horrible things, Caleb,” Jester agrees. “They deserve it, obviously. . .”

Caleb takes a deep breath. “I regret that we did not flesh out that step of our endeavor before we embarked, but I - there are bad people in that building. I was not about to risk your lives, taking too much time. The very thing I was afraid of happening did and I am shocked the three of us are standing here now. That said, I hope you and they can forgive me.”

“Of course we can forgive you,” says Veth. “It’s just ourselves, you know?”

They try to contact the rest of the group, and then realize that Trent may be scrying on them; they message Veth’s family and tell them not to return to the home, message Jester’s mother and tell her to be on guard. The rest of the Mighty Nein, who had safely teleported out to a temple in Nicodranas, manage to come find them, and Caleb passes out the amulets to all of them.

“What happened?” asks Fjord, when they find each other.

“It was real touch and go,” Veth says. “We got the items, and some other things. And then Trent showed up and there was like, a little wizard-on-wizard battle, it was crazy. And we almost died, but Jester got us out of there lickety split.”

“Did he try to kill you?” Fjord asks.

“No. . . more try to talk to us?” Jester admits.

“Honestly, we were a little trigger happy. I was a little trigger happy for five minutes or so,” Caleb sighs out.

“It’s a stressful situation in a place that stresses you out,” says Yasha.

“You going to be alright, Caleb?” asks Caduceus.

“Y-yes,” Caleb says shakily.

“There were some casualties,” Veth admits slowly.

“I killed a few people,” Caleb says.

“We killed a few people,” Veth corrects.

“You might not have if I had not led the way. I take responsibility for it.”

Veth and Jester both start awkwardly reassuring him that they know these were bad people, and they had to do it.

“I mean, I killed a guy too and I wasn’t with you, so there’s that,” Beau points out.

Caleb is sort of thousand-yard staring through this entire conversation, but he pats Beau on the shoulder.

Just then, Trent begins to speak in his head again. “Why do you run, as opposed to talk? If you’re worried about DeRogna, she’s not much of a worry anymore. I see traces of dunamancy left in your wake. I have my theories on where you might have learned this.”

“In every barrel of apples, there is one with a rotten worm in it,” Caleb snarls back. “I am that worm.”

Everyone sort of stares at him until Veth explains he’s probably talking to Trent again, which he’s been doing all day.

“I think he has implied. . .” Caleb breaths out a little, nervous. “I’m a little worried for Essek. . . I have learned some dunamancy from Essek, have since reverse engineered a little more of it and I may have used some in Vergessen, and now I think he’s connected the dots.”

“He can tell the kind of magic you used?” asks Jester.

“He is the most dangerous man in the Empire, Jester,” Caleb says softly. Fjord casts a spell to see anything invisible in the room, and then gasps and curses when he sees a small orb floating above them, showing that Trent is indeed scrying on them, pinpointing their location. They begin to collect themselves to try to go somewhere safe, wondering where they should tell Veth’s family to go rather than returning to her house.

Caleb goes silent, sick, listening to Veth and Jester worry about the need to protect their families from Trent.

“Are you okay?” Veth asks him. When he doesn’t respond except for a slight shake of the head, “Which part are you not okay with? The Trent talking to you part? Or the killing people part? Or the endangering Essek part? For the endangering my family part, or - ?”

Caleb huffs a desperate laugh, because it’s really all of them. “Listen, listen, buddy, come here, come here, bring it in,” Veth says, going to hug him tightly. “This was a win! We got the things that we need to save the fucking world! This is good!”

“Yeah,” says Jester. “Essek is already on board, you know? And he knew what he signed up for when he got involved. I can send him a message to warn him, but you’re not responsible for that.”

“But I am responsible for your family,” he says to Veth. “And yours,” he says to Jester. “And you,” he says to all of them, looking at each of them in turn. “And. . . I worry that I am the very thing he told me I was.”

“Not yet,” Beau says.

“You did good,” Fjord reassures him. “We got what we needed.”

“Those guys probably tortured people, you know what I mean?” says Jester.

“They probably had kids,” Fjord mutters to himself, but moves past it. “We should move. We should really get going.”

“Can we walk and process at the same time?” Caduceus asks, beginning to lead them away. “I think walking will help.” After a few minutes of walking, he adds, “we’ve done a lot of honestly sketchy things in the last day, but let’s remind ourselves that it’s worth getting a few people pissed off because there’s something bad coming and we need to stop it.”

As they walk around the marketplace and towards the beach, the memory ends.