3737/With But A Spark...

With But A Spark...
Date of Scene:	08 October 2020
Location:	Garment District
Synopsis:	Part 1: A suspicious fire sets off an investigation between the Hellblazer and the fire-crowned sorceress of the Dark Dimension.
Cast of Characters:	John Constantine, Clea

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John Constantine has posed:
The intensity of a major fire lingers in the air for days after. It's hard for many people to envision what such a conflagration does; the sheer heat of it, enough to melt windows and wiring in the building. Waves rolling off the structure with such fury that the paint on nearby buildings bubbles and runs. It can reduce even stone buildings to crumbling husks that will need to be demolished in turn to leave way for something new.

It's a credit to not just firefighting techniques but simple fire prevention that keeps some of the burns from devastating whole cities. There was a time not long past when a spilled oil lamp or an errant match could set an entire town ablaze. And yet, sometimes fires still rage despite all that humans do to fight that ancient and most elemental of threats to habitation.

Ash whorls up around John Constantine's shoes. It clings to his jacket hem when he stoops in the midst of the gutted building and runs his fingers through the powdered remains. It had once been a custom clothing shop, one of the many boutique and high-end businessnes catering to wealthier clientele in New York's garment district. Now, nothing remains of the building except a crumbling facade and the barely-identifiable remnants of mannequins, interior decor, and charred fabric.

Constantine's eyes narrow in suspicion and he digs a crumpled pack from his coat to slap a cigarette free. Evading the firefighters and the arson unit outside hadn't been too difficult; pick a window and slip in while no one's looking. Getting the evidence he needs before the safety brigade returns, though, puts the detective on borrowed time.

Arson investigators rarely go looking for supernatural causes, after all.

Clea has posed:
Fire holds more than a scent in the air and a chemical composition on the pavement, soil, and sky. It releases an unseen energy around it, plumes of it fed high beyond the source, disrupting the actual ecosystem for a time. As temperatures tick higher, the ambient balance tips over and slews the ecosystem sideways. Whole weather systems shift to accommodate, blowing away the cloud and creating more favourable conditions for the flames to breed, take hold, and thrive. Nasty cycle, in a way.

Anyone with a scrap of talent for detecting that might well know the unsettled state of the world extends beyond claims to insurers leaping through the roof and tired assessors catching red eyes from Fargo, Pensacola, and Tulsa. Wherever a disaster isn't, they descend. But the furthest flung of these actuarial heroes in their own mind does not cover a smidgen of distance that Clea does. Fold space and two dimensions link, separating in a heartbeat later. Dark energies ripple to naught. It's a moment in time.

Sometimes, the most ancient and elemental of threats to civilisation must be answered by their kindred. Fight fire with fire.

Shadows seep in fine drifts, the soot kicked up by the shifting breeze the sort firefighters loathe and survivors of the great flamebaths in California, Greece, and Australia learn to despise. Light grit lifts up in puffs with no recourse to escape it. It hangs in the air and percolates through clothes. Clothes that hang in ruined scads, the fuel for the destruction. Last season's inventory reduced in a puff, hundred thousand quid of goods incinerated along with a working floor. Clea somehow manages not to upset the balance too much, floating three inches above the warped boards, surveying the damage with narrowed eyes. Yellow tape turned grey and barren cordons off the fire escape that twists in a spiderweb of melted, cooling metal down the side of a brick building, common in the District. Somewhere there's a fashionista bound to weep. This neighbour to the couture atelier has taken the brunt of disfigurement, sure to never roam around happily again.

She's dressed like she might be one of the atelier's clients, maybe someone staffed there. The haunted shapes of mannequins reduced to slag with limbs emerging is too unsettling to see from the gloom; her eyes narrow, and the first indications of movement other than the greasy black miasma hanging in the air train her gaze on the source. Is that sound?

John Constantine has posed:
Something changes. It manifests in a stiffening of John's neck hairs. He slows his steps and looks left, right, and takes two soft-footed paces to put a shoulder nearer a wall rather than standing like a fool in the middle of the fire scene.

Constantine pauses and then takes a few steps forward, moving around the area more suspiciously. Finely honed instincts are great, but unfortunately instincts don't complete the picture. A 'sense' of some other magic rearranging the nearby disorder of the fire's imprint is just that: a sense. Could be anything. Could be nothing. Could even be just one of those moments of the universe trying to restore order. Fire is a purifying force. The chaos it causes settles down into a perfectly bland uniformity that even vanilla mortals can sense. Such potential tends to attract the willpower of even minor entities who see the a chance to impose their will on such a blank canvas.

John moves sharp around a corner and nearly bowls Clea over. "Bloody *hell*!" he squawks. The magus stumbles back two paces and puts his hands up in a fighting stance; once he processes Clea's presence the hands drop and he gives her a look of supreme irritation. "Blimey lass, you scared the piss out of me. What are you doing here, huh? This is a crime scene." Immediately on the attack, talking fast. Maybe she won't notice he's dressed more like a funeral attendant than a city arson investigator.

Clea has posed:
Small alterations can nudge the balance, a few grains tumbling on the dish until it sinks further askew. Life needs just a choice nudge to reach somewhere interesting.

Clea tastes the flames like a vintage wine, a sommelier examining an unfamiliar vintage dug up from an unfamiliar cellar. Something unfamiliar beneath the ashy notes bears a fingerprint as unique as the firebug who set it, if only she can sift through it. Holding still, hand cupping the few smutted bits of soot, tells part of the tale. Magical flames or mundane ones incinerate a building and threaten to drop the roof on her head, patchy holes showing the sky above, but she's much more concerned about following the burn patterns and scorch marks. Less like a detective, more akin to a drop of water following its way up the estuary into a river until reaching the first spot she rained on way into the headwaters. Such position leaves her flitting forward, examining a blackened, greasy mark marking where some kind of painted fixture is turned to nothing, the waxwork scent unpleasantly sickening. It smells *awful,* and she wrinkles her nose.

"What?" Her head snaps up; English. Englishy English, but the kind tilted peculiarly like Sir Stamford Raffles rather than chawin' lass outta Newcastle-upon-Tyne. "Pardon!" Her hand drops; arm to the side, her body straightens, giving a sylph-slender silhouette to run into. Her hair is a white cloud, pale and pristine, even as she jerks back in a hop that skims several meters on. "You've what...?" A look down. No puddle there. "I wasn't aware the authorities came in place. Alas."

John Constantine has posed:
"Course we do," John informs Clea. "And you're tampering with evidence. I'd have you arrested if I weren't busy looking for some. Evidence," he amends, a beat later.

Something in John's posture shifts perceptibly. It goes from arrogant bravura towards a coiled readiness. Shifting balance, a hand in his coat pocket. Clea gets a head-to-toe examination that looks more professional than prurient.

"Actually, why don't we start with you answering some questions for me." His tone is more focused. Serious. "Bad form to just nip into a crime scene, y'know. Only bobbies and criminals hang around crime scenes, and you're definitely not a member of the constabulary. What do you know about--" a finger dances a vague circle around them. "All this, then? You witness any of the happenings while the building went up in smoke?"

Clea has posed:
The smile might be best seen in profile, the shades of it hinted for the pale woman. Light tends to find her even though the black speckles and grey dust coat every surface, and little penetrates through the broken roof. "Would you arrest me? Ah, that would be a shame but ignorance of the laws is no excuse," Clea acknowledges the fact brightly enough, soft-spoken all the while.

His position changing absolutely informs hers, but the open lines of her figure and slightly bowed shoulders speak volumes in silent reply. Her palms stay empty, hands to her sides. "The smell is so strong. There may be yet hot spots, which is why I came through. That and to be sure no one was trapped inside." She gives a light nod, subtle, only the ghostly wave of her hair giving way to suggesting movement at all.

No, she's definitely not a member of the constabulary or any form of police. Possibly because the echo of magic around her is like walking up to a lighthouse and staring the Fresnel lens full in the face for a couple minutes, then trying to see the ocean afterward. Possibly because she is still balanced on her toes. "Too late for me. I rather hoped you might have a glimpse and tell if this was an accident."

John Constantine has posed:
John doesn't have any particular mystical truthsense but there are few people alive who can bluff him, let alone lie with a straight face. Even if he were asked he couldn't articulate how it works; mortals, fae, even gods, often find Constantine seeing through their stories. Perhaps the most and yet least mystical of all his diverse skillset.

However it works, it seems to reassure him about Clea's intentions, and John relaxes a little. The hand escapes his pocket with a lighter tucked in his palm and he snaps the Zippo open to wave the flame under his cigarette. "Well you don't look like an arsonist," he informs Clea. "And I don't think in any case you're the one who did all this." The hand holding the cigarette gestures vaguely at the smoke and soot and destruction.

"But this isn't amateur hour," he informs Clea, and starts moving away to resume his investigation of the debris. The toe of his shoe nudges a stack of catalogues into collapse, their interiors a splash of faded color against the white ash and black soot around them. "You'll just be underfoot. This isn't a natural fire and I need to ... find the source ... fast." John trails off and starts walking away from Clea with an unhurried pace as if literally following his nose towards some scent or other sense he's picked up upon.

Clea has posed:
Storytelling with fine yarns is good for trickster gods, plenty terrible when an interdimensional conquerer's daughter. Niece. Both. Clea may be shifting and modulating her posture, tone, and plenty of other tells to present less of a threat, but that's akin to a cat opting to curl its tail and peep rather than raise hackles when not advised.

And this, if nothing else on Earth, she can achieve quite well. Not the scary one here, not at all. The blink of a flame from the lighter reflects off her dark eyes, a captivating distraction from the detective himself. "An arsonist would never wear silk," she agrees. "Washing this out would be impossible." The watercolour melange of the asymmetrically cut dress mostly lies close to her figure, but brushing up against anything dusty will be a lasting impression. "Telling you I had nothing to do with it wouldn't help you conclude it was or wasn't, so we can cross that bridge. You are here for similar reasons to me, understanding why. On that mark at least, I'm not quite an amateur. Bit better than a dabbler. Apprentice, you might say?"

The dark irony in that gives a buoyant little smile, and she sketches her palm along a collapsing pillar that held metal frames gone to misshapen stains. A tufted chair isn't anything but broken legs and cobwebbed, charred cushions. Down to the ground where that icky stain of shadow is. Drop to the source. The flames invisibly dancing around her head strengthen as a coronet, sharpening her sensitivity to traces left behind. Sparks and bits. Motes to reconstruct a burning wave.

John Constantine has posed:
"Apprentices are just amateurs with understanding bosses, luv," John informs Clea. His tone is still distracted, focus pulled by something else. They seem to be in an office of some kind; or it was at least, with a commanding view and the sort of layout that uses excess space as a power statement. In New York, nothing says 'wealthy' like superfluous square footage.

John leans over to examine the destroyed remains of a table and then drops into a squat next to it, hands interlaced loosely between his knees. Whatever's piqued his interest is a drab little blob of blackened char, almost unidentifiable under the mess. "It's not arson, though." His head tilts back to Clea but his eyes don't move off the item. "Not that the fire chief understands. Said the fire started in the manager's office. Looks like a chemical burn, except... no chemicals. No accelerants, no combustibles. Burned like... an oil fire."

John digs a pencil from his pocket and pokes through the ash. There's a muffled, metallic *clunk* and the investigator probes a little deeper before finding what he seeks. Beneath fabric and crumbled masonry, he pulls out a surprisingly intact oil lamp. Dust aside it looks undamaged.

"What the bloody fuck is this thing?" he mumbles, and rolls it around in his hands in consternation. "Fancy houselight or something?"

Clea has posed:
"Oh, none of that for me, I am afraid. The executives hold me to a plenty demanding rule, you can be sure. Bit worse than the police probably have..." Clea doesn't follow up on that statement, leaving some things better unsaid. John wanders here and there. She is slower to follow, more direct.

The impressions from the office speak to all the usual accursed measures places steeped in temporal power do. "Greed cuts thick. Less vanity than I might have expected. They were desperate here, maybe the financials were not good or they had competition coming in too close? Business isn't a strong suit." Pincushioned spikes of temptation and avarice prickle the fire-blistered silhouette laid out in the dessicated hulk of a computer. Maybe a drawing table might be back there.

Until the clunk. He pulls out a Christmas gift circa Princess Victoria of the Empire, but she nods at it. "That's a carcel lamp. Rather old. Sniff it, do you catch any signs of the oil inside? Usually whale or seal, but it possibly vegetable?"

John Constantine has posed:
"I'm not gonna bloody sniff it," John says, immediately. He looks back at the lamp with the furrowed brow of a scholar. Granted his knowledge of antiques is sharply limited to occult apparatus, but he does put on a pretty good show. Plays with the wick lever and the oil release; checks the glass with a rattle of his fingernails; rolls it around in his hands.

John chances a glance over his shoulder and when Clea's looking elsewhere, he sticks his nose in the heat vent on the top and takes a whiff. "Phwooooar," John wheezes, and holds the lamp away from his face. "That is /disgusting/." The magus gets to his feet, holding the lamp, and then looks at Clea and holds it out towards her at arm's length. "Here, you take a whiff," he invites her. The scent around it is subtle and short-ranged, but rank; a pigsty at low tide, something faecal and rotted all at once.

Clea has posed:
Oh, he won't, and yes, he will. The clockwork stylings of the lamp's metal functions are old, not jammed, and thus the fragrant stench rising up has no escape but as design and purpose intended.

It really is awful.

"Terrible," she agrees as John makes an icky offering, one little inclined to be taken, but with a game face, what other choice has Clea? She takes the slightest sniff. "Rancid. Utterly grotesque, which makes me appreciate electricity all the better." Her eyes don't spontaneously water but the smell imprints on the palate and leaves her near to gagging.

Two swift gestures with her hands mirroring the curl of her baby finger, the point of her thumb, incinerate all unwelcome scents with a trail of lychee and orange blossom. It lasts only a moment but it should cut through the worst of that thick, molten wax on the palate, taken from the sea's deepest reaches where years upon years of abyssal snow lie on a flat plain. Truth, if the water rolled back and vanished, no one at all would want to trudge along the continental slopes and deepest places. It would be hideous, covered in marine gunk.

"Even buying a vat of that has to be expensive, black market possibly. Norway or Iceland?"

John Constantine has posed:
John's fingers drum on the glass and he looks around the room again in a circle. At one point someone's grand aesthetic sense had imposed a unique sense of identity and purpose on the room. Order. Now, uniform destruction is the primary ouvre.

"Something's not right," he mutters. "Whole bloody office goes up, but this thing survives? Antique piece of shite from Ahab's boat?"

John digs a grocery bag out of a pocket and drops the lamp into it, then ties it off for good measure. "Well luv it's been an absolute banger of a good time meeting you, but I've got what I came for. I think it's time we parted ways," he informs Clea. "Recommend taking the basement exit, the fire unit's not much for looking for people *leaving* a major burn. I'll be taking the fire exit, so, don't go that way, there's not enough room for both of us to slip out the back. Cheers, aye?" Two fingers touch John's left eyebrow in a mocking approximation of a salute and he starts towards the backside of the building where the alley-side fire escape can be found.

Clea has posed:
There may be nicer uncleaned ovens in Hell's Kitchen. Restaurants scraped down of years of 'seasoning' that hold more appeal. This, whatever it once held, is a far cry from a beacon of fashion and sartorial achievement, from powerhouse visions and designs.

Ahab's boat; a chuckle escapes her, not a tittering laugh but the smoky quality of whiskey taken neat. "Watch out for the spirits. That has a tarnished residue I can feel from here." The speckled dust motes in the air get swatted away with limited success, only stirring up more. "It might act like a beacon. Lead isn't bound to be much good but with how hard it is to find asbestos, go for a good lined safe."

Cheers indeed; she doesn't need to use windows or doors. How curious humans are. Another sidestep is simply par for the course as the Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension brushes up against the otherworldly reflection beyond a crystal facet and prepares to slip within.

John Constantine has posed:
John pauses. He looks at the bag, then turns and looks at Clea with a wary and slightly uncertain expression. "Beg pardon?" The bag's hoisted and he turns completely around to face her. "This smells like the ass end of a Vegas oyster left in the sun. You know what it is?"

An eddy of wind whips up the ash around them in a tiny mini cyclone, three whorls and it flies against the wall with all the impact of a butterfly. It's the heat settling as the building gives up its last gasps at life. Little bursts of captured fire igniting for a torrid spark as oxygen floos over it to replace the C02 lingering below knee-height.

Clea has posed:
"Yes." Having the advantage of a few centuries direct experience and plenty indirect helps. Especially what with the technological anachronism he's carting around. "Some of it, anyhow. That's an oil lamp common about two hundred years ago. The fancy ones were owned by nobility or used in gambling parlours. But that being so plain, something you could find downstairs with the servants." Ah, she's twigged to certain slang, or it comes natural from a time overseas on the rainy isle and its many subsequent dependencies. The harsh truth of learning history of the world by way of a Tibetan master and their British friends, among others. "If you mean the other part about the spirits? Look at it. Fire and water, bound by metal. Charged earth if you like. The interior's a mirror maze if it uses the common bits, all of which looks resoundingly like a good prison or a fetish for a spirit. The stench is awful but if you dug around in there, you could come up with some traces perhaps? The thing that was in is out, presumably. But as it isn't destroyed, the lamp might be a fetter for it."

John Constantine has posed:
"Bugger me," John mutters, and eyes the lamp again with more wary suspicion. He looks at Clea with a measuring, weighted gaze, back at the lamp, then saunters towards her two paces.

"This doesn't look like arson to me, but there's nothing else it can be," John tells her. "See, an arsonist, they're all about fire as a tool of domination. Usually it's sexual. They want to scare someone or they get a thrill from the flames. Looked into the building's ownership. The rentors, the tenants, the employees. No one fits the profile. And the arson inspectors, I heard them talking about it a bit. Said lab results were 'inconclusive' for accelerants, but--" John gestures around a bit mutely. "This is an old stone building in downtown New York, and it went up like a bleedin' powder keg. Gasoline leaves something the bobbies can trace, but magic doesn't, and I am getting a /distinct/ whiff of something that smells 'off' about this place."

He looks at the lamp and holds it slightly furthur aside. "Apart from the bloody lamp, that is," he amends. "You sense it too, I'm guessing, and you're not just here for the guided tour."

Clea has posed:
Clea gives that almost sad smile. "Fire can be many things. An instrument of change and protection, a tool for transformation. Its destructive elements call too often to some, and becomes corrupted in the process. An arsonist wields something for a reason, I agree. Revenge hasn't shown as a motive? Too often that comes up as a cause. Nothing here to conceal or hide?"

Scrunching up her pale brows, she holds still and looks round as though the information might be scribed on the stones. "Pity none of the flames were still present in masse. Then you could sample one. Or I could, and ask a bit. As it stands, embers and ashes make an incomplete picture. Extracting a ghost of what happened from them would be hazy and quick, but it's a start."

John gains that summary look, swept down and then up again. "Yes." Well, no point in beating about the bushes. "The disturbing part here to me is the weight of the fire. Smoke felt wrong, and I thought to look."

John Constantine has posed:
"Oh, so now you're--"

Whatever John is about to say is cutoff by an explosion of fire and force. It hits the magus like a truck and sends him flying backwards. He crashes through a pile of ash and cloth and then the drywall behind it, breaking through both and crashing into the substructure of the adjacent building.

It seems like there is little combustible left in the room. Some soggy wet cloth bursts into flames; magazines and some un-charred wallpaper ignite. Decades of layers of New York living ignite passively in the presence of whatever congeals near where John was standing.

"<BURNING!>" The screech is an inhuman voice manifesting words that only the Wise can percieve. Emotions, flashing images of fire and flame and pain. A mass of curling fire gathers on itself like a magic act and turns white-hot eyes towards Clea amidst the fury of fire. "<BURNING!>" it screams again-- and a plume of fire blowtorch-hot launches itself at the Sorceress!

Clea has posed:
Flesh she has, true, but the paper-thin shell wraps around celestial fire that kindled when the first stars were young. Clea's eyes widen when John bounces away like that deranged desk lamp in a Pixar film. Reactions come just as quick.

Flames, violet and incandescent, burn through the ether as the illusion drowning them drops. With their manifestation comes the incandescence to her hands, sparks ablaze. It isn't an act of conscious thought, but the evoked shield is. Complex barriers drawn in sigils and triangles form doubled circles around her hands with words uttered in Tibetan. The hallmark of Kamar-Taj's teachings blend with energies very much extraplanar, frozen into a fire-girt shield boiling up into an ultraviolet barrier.

If the fiery denizen hits the shield is one thing. If it's inside, another, but she already floated and so skidding through holes and walls is a possible outcome.

<I already /burn/,> she snaps back with force, the Flames of the Faltine seething in a glorious aurora. Light show is that it is. <We are cousins! Stop that!>

John Constantine has posed:
"<BUUUUUUUUUUUURNIIIING!>" The shriek is subhuman. Inhuman. It grates against the psyche like a tuning fork to the teeth. The entity rapidly grows in size and intensity, going from sparkling road flare to pyroclasm on legs. Ropelike tendrils emerge and the fire-golem batters Clea's shields with those phantom limbs, scattering white-hot fire in every direction with each blow.

Fire is forceful but insidious. This new heat pulls up great whorls of ash and casts them into the air. Heat fills the air and sucks away oxygen from lunges. Unnatural though the fire-golem is, there are certain physics even the monster cannot ignore, and anything remotely flammable left in the wake of the previous fire explodes into searing starbursts of heat and light.

Flames hammer against Clea's shielding and the creature hurls itself bodily at the obstacle. Up close, the only visible features are a pair of white-hot eyes.

"<BUUUUURN!>"