12470/Low Level Issues

Low Level Issues
Date of Scene:	17 August 2022
Location:	London - England
Synopsis:	Stuff also happens!
Cast of Characters:	Meggan Puceanu, John Constantine

---

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Behold, for there lies the spectre of a heat wave upon the great city of London. Parched grass lies dead and brown on cracked fields. Few Londoners have air conditioning, so they flock to melt on patios and terraces, hiding in the wilted shade of stressed trees. Even the mighty Thames is but a trickle, showing massive stretches of mud populated by trash and gunk, where mudlarkers frolic to gather spoils. Though it's an old tradition, it has a dark side.

Criminal activity means the police have a large stretch of the filthy bank cordoned off. The mud is sticky and awful where the water flow has been recent, cracked at the sides. A few meandering pedestrians listlessly stare over the rails to see where a barrel emerges from the dirt, a swollen white arm marked in ritual cuts flops on the ground. Bloodless; the injury was done and washed away. The barrel stinks, the body inside stuffed in partly to the keg. Mostly it's just a case of convenience. Police have a miserable job, hanging about.

It makes the news as a footnote to the political turmoil, hose pipe bans, the waste of water utilities that need to be nationalized. Not really a matter of concern. Nor the signage on a betting shop nearby, crooked and splintered. No reason to care about the rush of humanity going by, ignoring the dead.

John Constantine has posed:
Bloody Hell.

Among other things, in this world where super science and magic and the occult are all real and everyone and their grandma knows someone who can cast a cantrip or open a doorway to the Quantum Realm or some shite, there are few people more reluctantly phoned than the Hellblazer himself: John Constantine.

"_Bloody Hell_."

John pushes his way through the crowd after having had his dinner date with his wife interrupted by a call from Scotland Yard. Luckily, Meggan isn't in her Unseelie phase yet, so she's been cheerful about it. Still, it's difficult to recognize him in his much cleaner black and white suit as he makes his way through the crowd towards the detective clearly in charge, towing with his presence the stunningly gorgeous blonde.

"Oy, you rang?" His eyes scan the scene, and he makes a beeline for the bloated arm carved with sigils.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Sucks to be the Hellblazer, worrying about the beat in Gotham or smoking six cigarettes away from his wide-eyed child trying to pronounce "Daddy's Silk Cuts" unsuccessfully while out of earshot of her pointy-eared mother. Also, pointy-eared toddler.

Meggan has a deeper symbiotic link with Britain than she lets on, most of the time. He probably knows; she slept cradled in the island's bedrock while he went to the Underworld several times, and spontaneously became a Bangladeshi girl the moment they stepped foot in Whitechapel another time. Put her in Yorkshire, she turns into a sheep.

Not really. But close.

The blonde following after him is, in fact, a blonde. Strawberry-blonde in this case, and reacting poorly to the wilting heat, the withered river, and the outcry of ten million people entirely unhappy it's 35'C in a city without requisite air conditioning. Her only help here is that Meggan is naturally air conditioned to start with, meaning she can be trusted to keep someone from melting down. Get close enough and she is exactly 21'C, not one smidge higher or lower, and the air is pristine to those who gasp through the polluted threnody of the atmosphere sitting around knee level. Sludgy water is a mournful sight for her, and she clearly looks bothered by the appearance of the Thames. "It shouldn't be this way. Look at it, I've no idea if the tributaries dried up or they're hiding, but..." Murder on one side, and murder on the other. Another activist of the environmental sort going Poison Ivy is no one's idea of fun, surely, but it's pretty much a sign things have gone entirely astray.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Meanwhile, cops. They aren't being paid enough to melt in their uniforms, and mostly they tell people to go away. John included; /they/ didn't ring, clearly. "Ey, this is an active scene. Move along then, let's go," repeats one on automatic.

Down below, greyish-brown water sluggishly flows by. The tape doesn't even wave around, hanging lank from posts jammed into the muck. No blood, no obvious knife hanging about. The barrel, up close, is a thing made more from metal than wood. Alas, no oak cask worth 400 quid. It's a cheap model with peeling tape and evidence of labels stuck to it once, though mostly reduced to flapping sheets of waterlogged stickiness, not much else. The top is missing, and whatever spigot might have been popped into the bung long since torn or carried off. It lies on its side, and the body crammed therein can't be that large.

Not a child, but a skinny youth, a woman, maybe. The muscle tone isn't great, the arm thin, and most of the marks all slashed up in a method to suggest it's not Greek, Roman or Sanskrit. No classical horrors here.

Those are hieratic Egyptian marks.

John Constantine has posed:
"Easy, lad," John tells the cop trying to stop him. He digs into his pocket and pulls out the permit from Scotland Yard. "I got the official call, less you're jockeyin' for the responsibility of dealing with..." He squints at the arm. "Possible mummy curses and Egyptian plagues?" He looks the officer in the eyes and then turns back to the barrel.

"Meg, luv, can you give me a light breeze for a mo so my stomach doesn't do the flips when I'm leaning in on it." Because last thing anyone wants to get a nice hard whiff of a corpse if they can help it. He'll have to smell it eventually, but for the moment, he'd rather not.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Easy doesn't it; the copper squints at John and the card he carries. The relationship between the Met and Scotland Yard is about the same as the local police in the US and the FBI. In short, bad.

"Oh, feck, I don't get paid enough for this. You get /thirty minutes/," he growls. "Under escort. No poking your nose about to check out whatever. Ruskin," he bellows. "Got a flipper." He waves his hand and mouths into the radio, though he's audible as far as Chelsea at this rate. "Bollocks, I've no time for this." The steps leading down are grimy and mired by a lot of tracked mud, dust, and bird shit. Little else recommends going down to water level, especially near one of the bridges usually smothered in traffic.

A barge sails past, the driver probably dreaming of a trip to Norway. He can't be bothered to peer at someone flapping around in a stifling coat.

The officer waves off John. The one in waders mucking in the Thames with gloves on isn't any happier, sweating like a pig, face florid. He scowls. "How'd you think I'd know?" Ruskin whines. "Mummies? We're not the British Museum." Crackpots on scene, great.

Meggan might be expected to have aversions to dirt, or being dirty. True, the Thames is a polluted cesspool and she's a goddess of the fae who congenitally hate cold iron. She isn't one of them, oddly enough, made of sterner stuff. Or the gods pact with iron when their mum is the earth. She leans over the wall, smiling at Officer Crankypants up top. "Oh, I'm not getting closer. He's the professional one. Me, I'm just here to offer support." Blinkblink, to that staring glare. She shakes her strawberry-blonde hair out. "Gloriana of Excalibur. Tights and cape optional." Beeeeam.

The air doesn't really want to move, sweltering and thick, but she stirs it with a lazy swirl of her hand.

John Constantine has posed:
"Much obliged, luv," John says, once the stifling, rancid aromas get pushed away by the breeze. He steps up to the barrel and pats himself down, trying to find something. Ah, there it is.

He pulls out a cigarette and a lighter, standing with his back to the breeze so he can light the cigarette and turn back to the barrel to inspect it.

First, he puts on some gloves; a tendency he started to have after Meggan gave birth. Next, he lifts the wrist, checks lividity, and turns the arm around, inspecting the hieretics to try and make some sense out of the sigils.

He also tries to discern the potential demographics of the victim -- age, sex, race -- which might help, or might not.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The small things count for something. Bits that help keep someone from melting down to death, though that far from Meggan, John still has to suffer heat beyond anything his younger years in London gave. New York, sure. But nowhere in Britain has ever been so hot.

Fair to say the man in the box has a shitty run of it. Biracial bloke, probably no older than twenty-one or twenty-two, that tender age of raving stupidity or eyewatering pride. Flop of wavy hair is dark, brows the same. Aside from the hieratic Egyptian carved into his arm, he has a few bruises on his knees, no signs of a ligature around his nevk. A pretty posh little fellow, given the clothes, and the glaring absence of a chunk of skin on the back of his neck is pretty much a circular tear that's missing a splotch of flesh about as wide around as two of his fingers side by side. It's a pretty ragged cut, unlike the marks that grove his arm. Sigils that plop together in cuts are hard to make out without actually being an expert in Middle Egyptian, but some features are clear. Lots of that damn grain and the hawk. Messy as the flesh is, the coughed up notes would imply someone being left for the crocodiles, their soul cursed.

A curse, then, a fairly angry one to invoke the monster of the rivers.

John Constantine has posed:
"Sobek."

John lifts a hand to his brow and rubs it a little, ashing his cigarette off to the side. "Fuck me sideways, last thing we need is that scaley blighter swimming up and down the Thames."

Next up, John takes a final drag of his cigarette and then puts it out, taking his jacket off and finding a place to put it where it won't be completely ruined. Then he drags his sleeves up, exposing his tattooed arms, and stands over the barrel, hands out, fingers spread. He closes his eyes and starts to chant under his breath, a quick incantation to check and see how far the curse -- and the potential summons -- are.

Can he halt it now, or is he going to have to deal with the river demon whether he wants to or not?