5789/House Party of the Damned

House Party of the Damned
Date of Scene:	30 March 2021
Location:	A New York Loft
Synopsis:	Vorpal follows a strange woman through a portal and gets far more than he bargained for as he meets the queen of all that is dead and dying and must rescue a group of girls from a Hellborn demon.
Cast of Characters:	Hope Svelgate, Terry O'Neil

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Hope Svelgate has posed:
    The rumors started back in 2013, an urban legend really. It went something like sometimes, particularly around the area of Hell's Kitchen, if you got in trouble, really really bad trouble, the kind with magic and demons, sometimes a white witch would appear to help. The stories continued up through 2018 but after Loki's invasion seemed to die off. Maybe whoever or whatever it was has long since come and gone and yet of late traces of magic, both necromantic and chaotic have been turning up around the area again...

    The night of the full moon, the witch's esbat, a time of significance for many of the magically inclined. This night finds Hope, the leather clad stuturesque woman who for one ostensibly trying to blend in ...still has a fair amount of difficulty doing that, out on the street outside of an old dilapidated church looking up at that full moon.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
There is a thing with cats and full moons- but the fact that he is out and about tonight is purely coincidental. The real reason that he is out here is because he's been doing some research on some special topics. The strange and mysterious oftentimes is dismissed by many, but Terry has seen enough and /been/ enough to know that There Is More Between Heaven And Earth...

So it purely coincidence that Terry O'Neil is walking in the shadows near that dilapidated church, following the lead of old stories and rumors.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
    The tall blonde Scandinavian woman pulls her eyes away from the full moon and looks up and down the street as if checking to make sure she is alone. Raising one hand for a moment it looks like she is about to summon the power of greyskull or something similar when something tugs at the edges of her senses and she spins around to look directly at the figure in the shadows, "Who is there?" One can never be too careful with shadowy figures on New York streets after all.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry stops dead on his tracks. Usually when someone calls out to you wanting to know who is there tends to never be a good sign. Especially when there's skulking in the shadows under the full moon.

Reflexively, his hand goes to turn his bracelet over and reveal his mirror... and then he realizes that you can't really see a reflection of your eyes when you're in shadow.

Crap.

"It's just me. Who's there?"

He frowns. that was a crappy answer. He's been hanging out with Gar too much.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
    The valkyrie looking woman scowls, "There isn't time for this" She says in annoyance, perhaps more to herself than to Terry. Hope turns away again and whips out a hand once more. This time something /does/ happen though. A sword appears in her grasp, a full on medieval longsword that seems to almost crackle with Chaos Magic.

She does not summon the power of greyskull with it, what she does do is seemingly slash the fabric of reality itself, a glowing gaping rent in space/time and step through it before it begins to reseal behind her.

    Loose ends will simply have to be tied up later. That is, unless one is quick enough and foolhardy enough to try to follow before the rent vanishes completely...

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Quick AND Foolhardy? That might as well be on Terry's business card. The teen hesitates for a moment, but it's not too long because the pull of Chaos magic overturns his caution and pretty much everything else. He sprints as soon as the woman is out of sight, and as soon as the slash in reality shows signs of collapsing.

What? He can make his own! Piece of cake, right?

Right?

It briefly dawns on him that he might not be abl to come back... if this goes to another dimension.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
Terry is perhaps fortunate that the portal does not in fact go to another dimension. Fortune is a fickle thing though, because where it does go might as well be Hell. The first thing that hits the young Cheshire Cat is the sound, a pounding beat of dance music interspersed with screams and shrieks of horror and pain.

Beyond the wall of sound are the nightmarish sights of what must have once began as a seemingly innocent loft party. But not the walls are covered with strange Satanic looking sigils and chaotically scrawled writing in English, Latin, and older more obscure scripts as well.

In the center of the far wall a young blonde party girl, perhaps in her early twenties, has been disembowled, and nailed to the wall in the form of an inverted cruxifiction. Upon the floor a massive inverted pentagram has been scrawled in blood taking up almost the entire loft space, with the inverted cruxifiction centered between the two upper points, and standing at the five points of the star are five young men who all look like their names should be Chad or Dylan or Brad. The young men are all chanting in unison in a language that isn't English as a spark of mystical energy begins to form in the center of the star.

The screams and shrieks seem to be coming from off in a side room where who knows what is happening, but judging from the sounds it can't be anything pleasant.

Also present just on the other side of the rapidly collapsing portal is the statuesque sword-wielding blonde woman Terry followed through the portal to get here. She doesn't seem pleased by the scene she has just stepped into, not pleased at all.

"First one who says boys will be boys is fucking dead." Her eyes begin with shine with a blue glow of arcane power.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
To say that Terry goes pale is rather meaningless- outside of perhaps Death herself, Terry /is/ pallor, he is the person Morticia Addams stands next to when she wants people to think she's gotten a tan. But it is fair to say that, if Terry's skin possessed enough color to matter, right now it would be drained. But his eyes go wide, and his throat tightens as the danger of nausea rears its head.

Terry can't deal with this, not a gruesome sight like this, so it is no surprise that his hand quickly turns the bracelet over and his mouth intones the words almost on autopilot as he looks into his eyes.


The Cheshire Cat is equally offended by the scene., but unlike Terry he is cushioned from the horror by that part of him that is older than a great many things, and madder than a fair share of them.

And right now, he is very mad.

There are no jokes, there are no quips, but the brilliance of purple-red chaos magic summoned forth and a glowing Harley Quinn-sized mallet that pulses with the will and intention that bends it into being.

While he really wants to get his mallet acquainted with the faces of the murderers, the girl is clearly dead, while someone in the other room /sounds/ like they are about to be killed.

"They're yours," he says to the woman, "I'm going to stop whatever's going on in the other room."

Considering the woman looks absolutely pissed, Vorpal can bet she is not on board with being part of Rosemary's Baby Shower, so that means that, for the moment, she is probably an ally.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
The appearance of Hope Svelgate through a portal momentarily takes the chanters off guard, as if they were expecting a portal but it appeared in the wrong place. The spark of magic forming from their ritual begins to collapse again as they stop chanting.

"This is wrong! Get her!" Shouts the one of the five who seems to be in charge, wearing a hollowed out ram's skull with some impressive horns.

Hope herself is momentarily distracted by the arrival of Terry, most humans can't actually follow her through those chaos tears, and his subsequent transformation. But he doesn't seem like an ally of the demonic, so she elects to ignore him for the time being, turning back to face the oncoming rush of yuppie cultists. "Yes, come. Death awaits you."

The side door from which the horrific sounds, screams, and shrieks are emanating leads to a kitchen, which is its own terrifying scene.

One young woman lays upon the center island, stripped, with her hands tied behind her back and legs folded beneath as she faces upward with a look of abject terror on her face, screaming. Nearby three other young women sit bound to chairs, shrieking against their gags, seemingly awaiting their own turns on the table.

Looming over the first girl is a tall man, older than the others but still very physically fit, perhaps in his mid-40's with black hair and a sharp black goatee. The man is holding carving utensils in his hands as Terry bursts in. "Do you mind?" He asks perhaps a bit too non-chalantly of the new arrival, "You're interrupting my dinner."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"I do."

The first thing he attempts to do is to open a Rabbit Hole under the defenseless hostage to get her out of the monster's reach as fast as possible, depositing her safely behind him if he gets it right. Once that is accomplished, the Cheshire cat extends his hands to either side, and a flash of purple chaos magic spreads from him, seeking to imbue implements and appliances with his magic, seeking to enchant an army for himself.

There are only two kitchen authorities Vorpal recognizes: one of them is too saintly to ever be seen in this kitchen, and the other one is back in Wonderland. As the wave spreads from him, he issues the command to whatever kitchen item come alive under his magic.

"Slice harshly at this little brat!
and beat him when he wheeezes,
He only does it to annoy
because he knows it teases!"

/She/ would have approved, he thinks.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
The first of the four charging Hope is met with that mystic blade of hers, Apocalypse. Though a strike that should by all rights have cleaved the young man in twain is somehow evaded, even as another moves in faster than a mortal should be able to and slams a fist into the side of her face, leaving a trickle of blood dripping from the Scandinavian woman's mouth. Though despite the cracking sound she remains on her feet.

"This isn't your first time is it?" She practically snarls the words, as the glow in her eyes intensifies, the color fades from her skin, and blonde hair turns a stark bone white. Lady Death shrugs off the illusion that inhibits her true powers, "Then I guess I should stop holding back."

Even as she says it the hand not holding Apocalypse flicks up and hurls a glowing sphere of Hellfire into the midst of the demonically capable young men, exploding into an inferno that begins to engulf the loft. Now there is a new set of screams as the ritualist murderers begin to flail attempting to put out the fires engulfing their clothes and when that fails, stripping them off before the atomizing flames can move on to their flesh.

In the kitchen the goateed man narrows his eyes at Vorpal when the young woman he was about to carve up disappears from before him. "Rude." He pronounces, though he doesn't get much further than that before being impaled by a wide array of animated cutlery from cleavers and chefs knives, to filetting knives, steak knives, tableware, and even a bread saw. How did a bread saw impale anything? Well that had to hurt.

"Ugh, are you an acquaintance of that insufferable Etrigan or something?" The man asks as his eyes begin taking on a reddish glow and with a sudden flex of his muscles all of the impaling implements are expelled from his flesh, "Perhaps I'll just have to carve /you/ up instead? It's been awhile since I've tasted cat."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"What a coincidence," the Cheshire cat says with a smirk. "It's been a long time since I've been tasted."

In the blink of an eye, his uniform is gone, replaced instead by a getup that appears right out of a 1950s pin-up, down to the blond ringlet wig, ten miles of eyelashes, mini skirt and high heels. One hand grabs a nearby stool and he deftly perches himself on it in a pose that is perfectly vintage Gil Elvgren-meets-Bugs Bunny.

Green eyes shoot the demon a glance that is full of feline mockery in the guise of seduction. "So what are you waiting for, big boy? Afraid your butter knife isn't up to the task at hand?"

In the meantime, the surviving pair of utensils work their way towards the hostages, to try to undo their bindings.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
Not waiting for the young men infused with demonic energy to recover from the Hellfire hurled into their midst, Lady Death steps forward and instead of a slash the closest of the cultist is simply impaled upon her blade with a vicious thrust. A wrenching turn rotates the blade from horizontal to vertical while still in the wound and in a feat of utterly inhuman strength the blade is wrenched upward and out through the top of his head, leaving an even split from the hips upward that kind of sags to either side as he falls backwards. While at the same time her other hand, glowing a brilliant blue with the power of the Energy Arcane reaches towards the unfortunate soul invertedly cruxified upon the wall. <Stiga upp från döden och hämnas!!> She shouts in her native medieval Swedish as she corpse's eyes suddenly begin to glow with that same blue mystic energy and it begins tearing itself off the wall in renewed unlife.

Meanwhile in the kitchen, small horns begin to appear from the man's forehead, even as the glow of his eyes intensifies. "Well aren't you adorable." The knife is flicked in Vorpal's direction with enough force that it might as well be a bullet even as long vicious claws extend from each of his hands. "Simply delectable."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
    The knife goes into the Rabbit Hole that opens to intercept it, and it clatters to the ground after impacting one of the cabinets.

"How typical of demons," the cat says in a husky voice, kicking the stool over as he stands up, "Horny, uncreative, but always ready to rumble. But I'm not dressed for the Rhumba, so-"

Darkness falls over the kitchen, and then it is broken by a large circle of light created by a spotlight that encompasses both of them. The plaintive tones of an unseen bandoneon scream into the darkness, and the first few measures of "La Cumparsita" begin to play. Taking a step forward, dragging the tip of the shoe in the classic tango step, Vorpal grins wickedly- "Let's tango."

Hope Svelgate has posed:
The ritually sacrificed and disemboweled blonde young woman, hair stuck to her face from her own dried blood first wrenches one arm free with a sickly tearing sound as the metal nail resists the flesh and then the other arm in turn like something out of a Japanese horror film, before finally leaping from the wall on top of one of her killers. The risen corpse claws at him with the ferocity of the undead, bony fingers tearing into his flesh, demonic power or not. The Hellfire doesn't seem to bother her, not that it doesn't damage her but she simply does not care.

Lady Death now draws another blade from somewhere on her person, somehow, where she was hiding that will be debated by Sages for ages, maybe it was under the cape... Focusing her Energy Arcane through the weapon, what was a Norse short blade scribed with mystic runes grows and contorts to become a wicked rune-forged scythe instead. The weapon is then hurled as if it were a boomerang, guided telekinetically by the Energy Arcane, it spins forth like a grain thresher slicing through one demon powered cultist and then another before making its way back to her. "Pathetic, you seek power for power's sake and yet you are still no weak. Your souls are not even worth claiming, perhaps I shall simply consume them."

The Hellborn in the kitchen hates this, he really hates this, all of it, but then hate is an intrinsic part of his existence. "I hate dancing." He informs the Cheschire Cat flatly and throwing his arms wide the kitchen begins to fill with Hellfire, much to the dismay of the four still bound young women who begin screaming frantically and struggling against their bonds, but to no avail.

In the other room, the kitchen door is suddenly blown from it's hinges by the eruption of demonic flames, only to land at Lady Death's feet. "Fuck." It isn't the most articulate response to the escalating situation, but it encapsulates it and her feelings about it well enough.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
When the fire erupts, a blur of activity zooms through the room. The Rabbit Hole is like a flying, detached maw that devours the hapless hostages and Vorpal- only instead of actually digesting them, the women are deposited safely into the common room of the Tower's couch.

This might be incredibly puzzling if someone is in the middle of movie night.

After a few seconds, the Rabbit Hole opens again and shows the Cheshire cat- but Vorpal isn't at the tower, but rather outside of it, by the shore. "I'm sorry, sir," he says, wearing a fireman's uniform, "But that is not up to fire code!"

The Rabbit Hole moves. It speeds, actually, becoming submerged within a few seconds as it streaks towards the ocean.

And spews a high-pressure wave into the kitchen.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
Lady Death looks from the door now laying at her feet to the kitchen inferno, "So, the real threat was hiding in there." She notes, thinking out loud, as she begins stalking towards the kitchen inferno.

If the last cultist standing was smart he would be running as far away as he could right now after seeing his compatriots so brutally cut down by the White Witch of Death. Drunk on demonic power as he is though, he takes her turning her back to him as an opportunity and charges drawing a wicked looking ritual dagger.

However in a movement almost too fast to see, at the last second Lady Death turns to look at him again and simply taps his forehead with her Energy Arcane infused index finger. As she does this the light simply vanishes from his eyes and the soulless body of the former cultist crumples to the ground, dagger clattering across the floor.

As Lady Death nears the kitchen, suddenly a torrent of sea water begins pouring in from somewhere. The effects are both spectacular and likely unexpected as the Hellborn is sent flying back into the wall by the high pressure impact though the mystic Hellfire resists being doused. Instead the meeting of massive quantities of high pressure seawater and a room full of unquenchable Hellfire fills the space and surrounding area with great scalding clouds of superheated steam, even as the excess water flows out of the kitchen and begins flooding the apartment.

The Hellfire summoning Hellborn is left with an expression that screams 'what the fuck just happened' as he stares for a moment, perhaps wondering how everything suddenly went so very wrong and rethinking his life choices. With the girls gone, an ocean pouring into the loft apartment from one side and the Hell Lord Lady Death bearing down on him from the other, the Hellborn seems to decide there is little value in remaining and a lot in getting the fuck out of here as he begins chanting and shaping the Hellfire into the formation of a portal back to Hell.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Vorpal waits for a few seconds before he moves the portal away from the water and peers through. He appears to be wearing a wetsuit and scuba gear, but this is mostly illusion. When he spots the demon manipulating the fires further, he takes the mouthpiece off and says "- not deep enough for you? Alright, the Mariana trench it is!"

He says it with such gleeful abandon, and a twinkle in his eye, that it's perfectly believable. "But this time, let's take /you/ for a ride!"

The rabbit hole starts to approach the demon, moving at just the right speed to be ominous.

Hope Svelgate has posed:
The Hellborn once so full of confidence is now scrambling in a panic. Unfortunately for him, the barriers between dimensions are not a trivial matter. If portals to hell were so easy to conjure there would be no need for all of these books and elaborate rituals and sacrifices. Still he does manage to open a Hellfire gate to /somewhere/, probably still on this plane and wastes absolutely no time in diving through it. "This isn't over!" He screeches as he disappears through the enchanted flames, which are now beginning to spread beyond the kitchen.

His exit is none too soon, as Lady Death emerges from the scalding steam with a scowl on her face. She glances from the vanishing portal of the fleeing Hellborn over towards towards the still extant moving portal of the Cheschire Cat. "I wanted to question that." She sounds angry, but really for Lady Death that's pretty normal. She stands there, blue mystic power of the Energy Arcane burning in the white pits of her eyes, rune-forged scythe in one hand, the Chaos-forged blade Apocalypse in her other staring at the Chaos Cat. "Where are the girls?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"And I wanted to drown him in the Mariana Trench, but as a certain philosopher once said," the Cheshire cat climbs through the portal and dismisses the wetsuit illusion. "You can't always get what you wanna."

The Rabbit Hole closes, and Vorpal looks down at the thoroughly wet floor. "The girls are fine. I dropped them in on Vic and Gar's game night, so at this moment they are most likely untied, been seen to by someone with first aid training, and are probably in the middle of a heated bout of Dance Dance Revolution while the authorities are being called."

"Question answered, now it's my turn- Who are you, and do you usually spend your time beating the crap out of hellspawn?" He pauses. "That's not me judging. That's me approving."

Hope Svelgate has posed:
Lady Death's eyes narrow further at Vorpal. Hell Lords in general are rarely accustomed to being denied and Lady Death is no exception. "Idiot. Now it will just continue. Whoever is behind this is being very careful to conceal themselves, three different archaic tomes of demon summoning rituals just falling into the hands of those naive and arrogant enough to use them. Now one of the Hellborn here, seemingly pulling their strings and now he's gone." Not the most charming conversationalist.

Even with everything doused in sea water, the Hellfire continues to burn consuming more and more of the loft apartment, though Lady Death seems largely unconcerned. "Who am I?" She asks rhetorically, almost faintly amused at Vorpal's lack of recognition. "The Queen of all that is dead and dying." And with that she turns and raises the Chaos-forged blade Apocalypse into the air before slicing a glowing orange rent in the fabric of space identical to the one Vorpal followed her through to get here. "Come." She commands the shambling undead blonde, who had continued tearing apart the remains of her killers throughout all of this. The undead creature obediently rises and shambles its way over to her.

"You should probably go, the mortal authorities will be drawn by the fire and sea water raining from this place soon." Almost as an afterthought Lady Death waves the rune-forged scythe through the air gathering it around the blade and drawing it after her through the portal, leaving the Cheschire Cat standing in a smoking waterlogged loft apartment with sirens approaching in the distance.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Vorpal frowns and looks at the mess that has been left behind. "Well, she's a charmer, alright," he mutters to himself. All in all, at least there was a partial success- he had taken that demon-thing's victims away. And he rememberes what the man looked like.

That meant he was going to try to taunt him out by usurping his appearance and doing some very undignified, embarrassing things in the public eye.

But for now- it was time to vamoose. He didn't have enough answers to give the police. Not yet, at least.

And, besides, he needed to see to the ex-hostages, and offer them some soothing hot cocoa.

He walks through the Rabbit Hole, briefly wonderig if he should ask Raven how exactly do you put out demon fire...