6558/Team Sports

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Team Sports
Date of Scene: 14 June 2021
Location: Lighthouse Keeper's Cottage
Synopsis: Constantine and Meggan recover another chapter of the Darkholde-- this one masquerading as the Irish League's Euro Cup Trophy. Constantine is now the mortal enemy of all Belfast.
Cast of Characters: Meggan Puceanu, John Constantine




Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Playing hide and seek with British soliders forced to guard the peace lines was a past time for children of the 60s, 70s, 80s. Things may be proverbially quieter in the powder keg that is Northern Ireland, but sectionalism rubs shoulders with the gangs and the old boys clubs with more pride than sense. Painted murals for heroes slain in the fight for independence or merging two broken halves of an ancient country peer down like saints, Bobby Sands round the corner and a host of famous political martyrs tucked away in the old brickyards and blind walls around a city often convulsed in turmoil. Belfast isn't a place for the psychically sensitive.

Yet a daughter of those tangled borders, at least on the other side of the Irish Sea, stands here. The hate and vitriol are a far cry from where they used to be, but scratch that surface and it bleeds all the same. /The/ Falls Street divides neighbourhoods based on faith and loyalty, carved through Belfast like a knife, stripping them from us. Loyalist from Unionist, most distinctly determined by a small, vociferous group in their silly football uniforms piling out from a pub to shake their fists in impotent rage at cars and buses flying by.

The game doesn't matter. Old hurts don't either. Apparently it's all Dublin's fault they lost. Some issue slurred out in sharp words meets with stares from the younger set, and a golden-haired girl who cares not one whit except it's so fucking loud in her head.

So much for getting dinner at a cheap chippie around the corner with everyone's favoured cursed-blessed warlock. So much for munching on battered cod and making eyes at said person. Instead, she ducks into a doorway in one of the divided rowhouses, making a sound of displeasure.

"Bunch of chavs." Useful word, chav. Beats the other C word that would be awful coming from her lips, but still applicable. "Might want to cross elsewhere. The way they're going on, they're itching to start a fight and giving me a migraine."

John Constantine has posed:
"Bad night to be wandering about," John agrees with a murmur. A cigarette bobbles from his lips with the words, cherry ember waving like a wand in the air to trace smokey curlicues that rise skyward. He leans sideways to gauge the distance. A dedicating crossing spot nearby, not far from the hooligans and the pubs. On the other hand, the nearest pedestrian paths are a good distance away, and people have a reputation for driving recklessly while going down the Falls.

Even near 20 years later, there is still a fearful tension for going down the road alone at night.

"Well it's this or a couple miles of walking through Belfast on foot," John points out. "So we take our chances with hooligans or local boys looking for us to contribute to the cause."

He discards his cigarette with a flick, sending the stubby butt into a rain-damped gutter. It hisses once and fizzles out. John looks left and right, then beckons Meggan in his wake. He walks with a purposeful stride, hands in his pockets and a look on his face like he's got an appointment to keep with someone in Hell. John is not a big man, but the attitude he projects ahead of him is that of someone twice his size.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The truth in that statement isn't lost on her, and for a moment, the blonde fae peers around the pilaster supporting the rough door. Probably explains why they have bars on the screen door, a protective measure when things get 'rowdy'. Minor description for the riots that used to rage down the fracture line between two faces of Belfast, and a larger country itself. Scrunching her hands into fists, Megan forces her features to shift away from the familiar, buoyant girl into something much likely to stand out around here.

Medium brown hair hacked off at the shoulders, gaunt face with wide blue-grey eyes over a freckled nose will do, though she keeps approximately the same height so clothes aren't an issue. The flashing androgyny is probably fit to make someone's head spin. A gaunt look making her far less flashy, anyway, easier to fit in beside John and not turn heads quite so hard. "Got it. They get smart, keep movin' or go inside, right? I'll lead them on the merry chase."

The vitriol and hate she can pick up from them still feels like an open sewer, but one she can edge around to keep at bay. She knows the secret of moving in cities sort of unnoticed. Dangerous man, and then the shade behind him: one who walks with a fifty meter stare and a quick step, not staying long enough for th ecurrent to swallow her up. It helps to be just another likely Belfastian, one who can drink up the local dialect. Hands free, not shoved in her pockets, she trudges along.

And the hooligans snarl at cars and threaten others with their cares, shouting out harranguing litanies of dreams stolen, a city proud and free. The usual nationalist garbage, but of a sort that denies anyone wants to be a damn Irishman. No jobs, no future, no money; add a lot fo expletives, and it's the same tired old rhyme. "Fuck all!" yaps one with a florid set of cheeks and hair plastered flat. "Bet you want to see us bend over for the Dail, too!" That accusation is spat wherever it can be; apparently at John, apparently at the world.

John Constantine has posed:
"Aye, fuck 'em!" John raises his fingers in a splayed 'V', his accent a fair imitation of an angry young man well accustomed to rage in the area. Anger fills his voice, a better generator of sympathy than anything else; rage against FIFA, against the dark, against the world.

The hooligans crow and hoot and return to their expressions of rage, kicking over bins and throwing half-empty beer bottles at the concrete to celebrate their sorrow with a great chiming of shattered glass.

John grips Meggan's arm carefully and hurries her along a bit faster. The grip's firm and possessive, all blustering body language to dissuade the sort of cro-magnon brain that hesitates only at the thought of crossing into another man's domain.

"Sorry," John mutters once they're in the shadows, and releases Meggan's bicep. "Blokes have me a bit jumpy. Nice disguise by the way," he compliments her. The magus digs for his cigarettes and looks around. Lighting one reveals a slight tremor in his hands, adrenaline throbbing in the veins of his neck.

"Bloody hell, I half thought we'd end up getting swept along and wrecking a path to downtown. There's something in the air, innit?" he asks with an almost whimsical rhetoric.

Belfast pulses like a low heartbeat, angry and sullen. Heat and fury, sounds of destruction echoing about the alleyways as the casual violence searches for a critical mass to become a mob.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Everything Meggan can mirror, she does, the equation balanced by pulling in their own accents, cadences of speaking. Makes her a girl from just down the street, staring sullenly through her own dark hair. "Be seein' you with the Orange boys next month," she says vacantly, not quite making eye contact, but they certainly can't fault her for knowing her Loyal Orders. Throw her across the street and the Unionists might have sneers for that, but there they go.

Let those cheers and drink-quickened triggers join into a messy noise, the blurring vehicles heading past, a few honking. Those which do earn a litany of shouts, even if it's not all supportive honks bleating out of the mechanical voices. If someone stares a little too hard and considers hauling John into a fight just cause -- no reason except for a scrap -- he's not given the chance. One's a bit cagier than the others, and it's no badge of honour to know all is not right with a group of hooligans. Doesn't matter how good the odds are.

She may be missing one out of every five steps, anyway, but Meggan is almost back to floating by the time John reaches the safety, relatively safety anyway, of the shadows. Remembering to stay in contact with the ground is tough. "We turn west or south?' she asks, looking around to try to distinguish one dark chimmey from another. The graffiti isn't help, splashes of acid green and long rattled strands forming harsh eyes peering from the dark, elevated middle fingers, and the messy tagging of kids nowadays. Inverted crosses and snarling skulls are child's play next to the tangled threats sneering from bleary-eyed children catching grenades in their hands, Palestinian flags and soldiers standing over them ironically enough. A wolf snarls beside a geisha. A hole in the wall is an illusion, revealing a parade of clowns in blurry detail.

"Always bad around here, isn't it? They've been fighting the same fight since some King William or someone landed," she murmurs, leaning into him, looking around. It all hums, electric and thick, running on the power wires overhead and lurching from the heart of a tormented island. "Unhappy place. Fight or fuck here, that's what it is. Trying hard not to feel compelled either way, but I start looking like I want to throw you to a wall, just slap me or something."

John Constantine has posed:
John wipes sweat off the back of his neck and loosens his already slack tie a bit more. "Uh... I'm not sure," he admits. "Christ it's hot out."

The magus looks around, then beckons Meggan up some stairs. Belfast is a city built on hills in the ancient past, and even modern architecture is a slave to the cobbled foundations and stone flooring of homes that were razed a thousand years before.

Up they go and into a side street. The air is slightly clearer than the alley, but the atmosphere is no less oppressive. In the distance there's the sound of a lot of glass breaking, and hoots and cheers. The violence in the city is picking up.

"I had a clear fix on the bloody thing," John hisses under his breath. "It was in this part of town. But now I'm not sure," he admits. "I can barely get my breath, it's like a bloody jungle in this city."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Mind if I help?" The city built on hills is futureproofed against any sort of modern subway system or other comfortable means of transportation by sheer geography working against those lovely conveniences.

She takes in a breath and focuses a little, carefully playing with the air, trying to shift it this way or that until it at least feels a bit cool. Not cold, but that kind of calibration over elemental control for her isn't precisely easy. Given a few minutes and more trudging than must be comfortable, she stirs up the air behind the magus to give him the advantage of air conditioning -- Meggan-style, anyway. The closest she can hope to get, under the circumstances. Her pace quickens to mirror his, reaching that plateau cut into another bank of small, terraced houses and those wretched flats from the post-war period when any hopes of wealth were already sliding away with dreams of empire.

She looks sharply over her shoulder and then up to the sounds of shattering glass. Some hideous thud sounds like a body connecting with heavy furniture. It's all bewildering and upsetting in a strange way. "Only a matter of time before some wanker digs up a weapons cache from the bad old days. IRA arms weren't all confiscated, and you best believe the Loyal Orders have it up to their eyeballs." Lips thin and she turns back to him. "What does it look like? Can you see through my eyes, if I go up there? Pretty certain no one's going to care much about a seagull."

John Constantine has posed:
John nods once at Meggan's offer. The gesture is short, tense; when the cooler air reaches his skin, the sweat tightens flesh with a grip more clammy than soothing.

"I don't know what it looks like," Constantine confesses. "I did a little divination and I just know it's somewhere in Belfast. Cross-checked with two loa and a pissy spirit who got killed by the bloody thing in the 1700s. I had a read on the aura but..." Hands open and clench the air in frustration. "It's like sticking my head in a warm oven. I can't get a bead on it anymore."

Constantine looks back at Meggan and spreads his hands in mute appeal. "If you've a better idea, I'm all ears. This is a big godddamn city."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"You can borrow my senses as you like." Being a sullen, skinny brunette carries a certain darkness to her expression that Meggan just doesn't possess normally, free-spirited and happy. The very things Bobby Sands swore would be his revenge against the British, she very much could be. Maybe even bomb resistant. With her arm lifted, she gestures to the skyline. "What's the thing about except hate? I imagine a few places might stick out. The old jail they used for executions? Mmm, Crumlin Road Gaol, but I don't know the direction. That's got more death and dark rage. The Peace Lines are all around us, but suppose you want to hide an evil page, why not hide it behind lots of graffiti or walls guarded by the Crown? Keeping the peace means there's a lot of protection. There's a metal gate they shut when needed. The Sinn Fein headquarters are right over there?"

She shifts her weight foot to foot, grimacing as the night thickens and with it, an old and telling hate. Blood is damp and dark, unwelcome, sticking to the underbelly of the northern Irish outpost of empire. "Outside the city, my only guess would be the Druid's Altar. It's big enough, like one of those old faerie rings. It would take us somewhere if it weren't hiding a something. No dragons be there?"

She blows him a kiss and tilts her head to the sky, all too happy to take on avian form. "Unless your book hides where the Titanic was built?"

John Constantine has posed:
"It's not /my/ book," John snaps with a waspish tone. "I'm just trying to keep the bloody thing out of the wrong hands."

He glowers at Meggan, then as if realizing he's speaking out of turn, looks away with a grim remorse for the hasty tone.

"None of those feels /right/," John says finally. He starts walking, seemingly in a completely random direction. "Those are all places you'd expect some bloody ancient thing to be. But those are old hates. Old blood. The Dark-- the /thing/, it wants fresh anger. Suffering."

A bus comes by; John flags it down and the two head into the vehicle. Constantine elects to stand, back against a pole and arms folded sullenly over his narrow chest. The bus trundles past a major intersection; in the distance, an unidentifiable vehicle is the center of a bonfire with a group of hooligans leaping and cavorting around it.

"Bloody nutters," he mumbles.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The sting in the words kicks her up into the air, the stability of her features melting back into the blonde, though it's a deal made more painfully clear how wounded she is. Those green eyes are wide, shot by the barbs. Ah, but for John, the acid that comes so easily can burn her without so much as a touch.

"The book then," she says quietly. Tone cautious, light, skating past the open cut. That's the curse; missing the mark, knowing the regret. She's already airborne, a fine target for someone to shoot at, and she doesn't much care perhaps. "Empathy will tell you. I can crack open the door and tell you what, but you're going to have to follow where it goes. It's a city. I might walk you to a murder, or a hate crime. But you want to know what bleeds, or you want a path to the anger..." Her teeth set. "All here, written big for you. You aren't burning deep enough, dark enough to obscure it. Not by a long shot."

John Constantine has posed:
"I keep telling you, it's not that /simple/," John grates at Meggan. "It's not some domestic turned bloody or some Catholic clover-eater deciding to truncheon to a Unionist taking the piss."

The bus lurches around a corner, slowing; John grabs the signal cord and rings the driver to stop with two overly-prolonged blasts. The vehicle lurches towards the sidewalk and John is out the doors before they're entirely open, not looking back to see if Meggan can keep up.

The bus driver glares daggers at Constantine's shoulders, apparently having caught the magus' words. Meggan earns a share of that scowl as well and the doors shut almost fast enough to nip her heels. The trolley pulls off with a sharp acceleration as if eager to leave the two of them behind.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Then I'm tapped out." With a twist of her shoulders, a shrug dragged out of her body, Meggan doesn't even answer. A bus is a place already uncomfortable, given the proximity of people in their own dreams, their own lost thoughts. Some are dull, some leering. With her eyes shut, she can ignore it only a little.

The roads rumble under the wheels, and she doesn't catch the doors opening. It's the movement away, the driver scowling. For just one moment, the temptation is there, the swelling anger formed into a thin, lancing drag that goes right back.

//Awe.// He may despise the pair of them, but the spark of majesty, the emotion broadcast in a backhand ought to leave him shaken. When she darts for the door, wrenching it open takes a moment, two. Then the night swallows another victim.

"Rotten Belfast." She has to go somewhere. Following the magus takes time, but it's at a distance.

John Constantine has posed:
John doesn't seem to know where he's going. This way, that; a double back down a blind alley, then hopping a fence and trying to walk along a narrow pathway that hasn't been re-paved in years.

Inevitably the two end up almost colliding with each other and John rounds on Meggan.

"Bloody hell, will you keep up or kick off?" he says, almost shouting. The riots in the distance pulse and shout, angry catcalls questioning the parentage and sexual choices of anyone who's ever set foot in Dublin.

"This-- thisthisthis /thing/ you're doing," he sputters, pinching the air between them. "It's like a postit note stuck to my shoe and it's grating me fucking raw, let me tell you." Gunshots crack in the distance, erratic and unaimed; celebratory fire, most likely. Sweat beads on John's brow; his pulse beats in his neck. Meggan's talents seem to be doing little to actually beat the sweltering intensity of the heat affecting John. "I go hunting for a relic from the fucking dark ages, and my wingmate's the most useless empath out of Ireland!" he shouts.

"Yet I'm here shagging ass all over fucking /Belfast/ with my prick in hand, 'turr a lurra lurra'," he sings, mockingly out of key. "Just waiting for some stupid sod to decide 'Aye m'boyos, we got us a fuckin' Londoner here who needs a tuneup!'" John's accent is just accurate enough to be recognizably Irish and just bad enough to be belittling.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The key turns. The lock clicks.

For a deafening moment, the street rages around them both, all the sounds of a city bubbling up into an incomprehensible slurry. Engine roaring past, a Subaru tricked out to the nines slaloming through the city's dense neighbourhoods. An old Skoda stutters through traffic. Some chain creaks in the breeze. Shouting over a telly running comes out from a window. The sick pulse of the electric night boils over the exposed wires, it sings through the choked, fat-clogged arteries of the sewers underfoot. Violent pulse in her own veins vibrating in time with the resonant transparency of a neighbourhood caught up in whatever cities do, they teem and seethe and sigh, never truly quiet. Turn, turn through one of the winds and the sound is /there/ in the passages, a radio bleating the latest of BBC4, another caught up in the matches between Glasgow and Belfast, a third reciting whatever nonsense YouTube spits out that the kids love so much.

"This isn't you." A statement as hard as a punch to the gut, as light as downy snow on a mountaintop. He can wave his arm, he can shove himself into her face, or bowl her over in the rush to get out. Declarations shot fire-dark and caustic stumble in their patter, rushing back against a thin cataract of clarity that could so easily be inundated, so very quickly overrun by the pollution foaming from John's mouth like the cigarettes he inhales and the whiskey he downs. Like the memories of a demon in the veins.

"This is an... infection, a contagion." Hands stay firm at her sides; she won't raise them, even if he tries to hit her, even if the fire erupts from lips and eyes and hands, for there's more and less to be seen between the shadows, heard between the words. "You picked up on it. Or it found you." The green eyes sharpen for a moment, but she's as good as blind, the mockumentary seething through. "Besides, I'm no more Irish than you are, Constantine. Sorry, love of my heart, but I've been dragged through Hell. This is nothing."

The responses of catcalls and stinking heat, meals whipped up on the hob or in the oven clashing with the trash, with a thing she can't name. But there's a twist, a shift, as she faces him, not quite directly, but not far off. The wrenched plunge hurts when opening herself to it, but the Earth is her grounding and Meggan is, if nothing else, an empath inextricably bound to the Hiberno-Britannic Isles, to Gaea herself, and she drops herself into the cataclysmic dance of months and weeks and days remembered by the topsoil, the pavement, the very walls to *feel*. Whatever feeling is.

Infernal dukes might know that look.

John Constantine has posed:
"A contagi--"

John blinks. Meggan's words jar him out of the tirade for a moment. Surfacing to reality as if only then realizing how perilously close to drowning he is. The thermokinesis earlier just salved an open wound, a response to a stimuli that masqueraded as heat exhaustion.

Any idiot looking for a thermometer would find it a balmy evening in the low to mid 20s.

He shakes his head once, then again, and takes an inhalation of air that suddenly tastes less foul and acrid. "Fuck," John says, finally. "I walked right into that one, didn't I."

His hands drift to his coat pockets and pull out a pack and a lighter. He stares at them. "I haven't had a fag in ... four hours," he hazards. Quickly he lights up and the nicotine fills his lungs, prompting an expression of blessed relief on his face.

"Uh... right. We need to find this thing or shag ass, Belfast is going to burn," he tells Meggan. "Full riots."

His jaw offsets and a heel drums on the ground. John looks left, right, searching. "It's feeding off conflict. Hate. I mean, not just abstract, but that... /tribal/ feeling, pulling together and burning the nonbelievers. I think this particular chapter was present during a few of the Inquisition's bloodier events."

"But... where do we go from here?" John frowns and looks up and down the street. "We've got to be close. There has to be a... I don't know. A nexus, maybe a totem or something. What am I /missing/?"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Of course, it doesn't help that she doesn't _feel_ the temperature. She'd be perfectly happy in outer space on the toasty side of Mercury or the freezing one, adapting naturally to those impossible temperature swings. The physical touch of him would work, but Meggan's an intuitive learner and not like that.

"Sorry," she mouths, lost in the swirl of impressions storming through her. The mother's love for a newborn running by on a path taken by a stroller. Besotted teenagers infatuated with one another or their phone. Another symmetry of quarrelling lovers, hopes smashed to smithereens. Unscrambling the wariness of the divided Belfast neighbourhood from the weariness of a slog home takes forever, almost forever. She sways back and forth in the unseen current, plumbing through impressions left behind recently and whatever is there. John's crooked conscience stands out like smoke in a clear day.

"Tastes like iron and sweat," she murmurs. "Cheap beer, the watery shite. Hasn't rained in too long..." An odd sentiment, but that's the nature of an empath sleepwalking through postcognitive psychospheres, impressions laid down in complex detail waiting to be parsed through. Without much to go on, she flits through the myriad lesser impressions to very gently take hold of his arm.

Missing twice, telling how gone she is. Those green eyes are a blank slate of emerald, punctuated by the living electric energy of people, fed on them. Everything has a peculiarly detached quality as she nudges softly. "Come in, come in. Come as you are, shout to the high heavens. He's guided if he dares to go, led by the hand as she meanders in a more or less direct path _off_ the path, but one trod by hundreds, thousands, on a given game day. Tourists don't leave an impression, but a solid blue and gold line sure as hell does, and it's that she tastes in the incandescent glow of humanity. Up ahead is a well-signed portion of the park, green signage crowned by a glaring blue cross and golden ring.

IRISH FA TOURS

Golden shamrocks sit on the terminal end of each equidistant arm of the cross. Past that hallowed portal, a large structure rears, then smaller ones, scattered haphazardly. The Irish Cup, the grounds hallowed by its toil. The complaints of the _Crusaders_. Who doesn't love a little medieval irony?

"Tribal. S'only one thing they fight about today, John, only ever been one way for the working class to do it. Take their weapons, take their rocks and bottles, they still have their colours."

John Constantine has posed:
John sinks into the flow of senses from the empath. It's an awakening, an awareness of so many things that the human senses can't pick up. John's questionable good fortune had brought them here, but it would take a woman of Meggan's talents to point out why /this location/ was the terminus of their journeys.

John and Meggan stop in front of the largest display case. Front and center, for all visitors to see: IRISH FA, EURO CUP CHAMPIONS, 1990.

Silence reigns. "We're about to nick Ireland's Euro Cup," John says after a few seconds. "I once burgled a church for some pre-heresy silver relics."

A beat. "This feels worse than that."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Takes a Laughing Magician to find the gate, though, to walk through the knotted pathways of life to get them to the starting point and through the vagaries. What trolley wandered past? It might have headed in the wrong direction, taken a turn away from South Belfast for the north side of the city instead. Stopping for a cigarette to poison his lungs could've been the difference between spotting the sign or not seeing a smeared poster announcing season tickets this and Celtic this or that.

Could be loitering by the wrong door, seeing the wrong guard. Paying a visit to a holy site for footie fans is bad enough, but the sheer weight -- psychic, shiny metal, cloth banners -- could jinx even a fox in trying to know what to go for.

There's a cost for that, though, as Meggan pretty much leans against him a little and seethes with the commingled passions, good and bad. Drawing herself out of that ocean will be wet, messy, and miserable.

"Ours," she says with an emphatic tone of a lifelong daughter of Ulster, not at all like her Cumbrian Brythonic lilt. Places like this breed hallelujahs and despair. The fight or fuck reaction of sports isn't anything she's immune to. "Coming home, as 'twere. That make you feel less a shambles?" A little bit sing-song, she smirks. Twenty thousand Hertz, voices murmur and promises hiss, a thick soup of memory hurtling around them. Her gaze slides to his. In her pupils, the masses fighting it out for their side in bloody loyalty in the stands, ghosts of people coming and going, years they stood atop the greatest event worth having short of a World Cup. Almost.

A lift of her shoulder, a tilt of her head. Daring him, maybe. "Let's, mm?"

John Constantine has posed:
"I don't know what's worse," John mutters. "I know what the Book will do, but I'm not sure I'm ready for Belfast to come after me."

Constantine finds a broom closet and unlocks it with the careful rake of a hairpin and thin piece of steel. The commercial lock is child's play and he takes a few moments to scrawl glyphs inside the door, turning the frame into a literal portal to another location.

Larceny 101: Have your escape path prepped /before/ stealing something.

That done, John picks up a heavy brass bookend shaped like a soccer ball trophy and throws it through the display. The security glass shatters and a security alarm goes off in the distance.

Constantine grabs the heavy trophy cup in both hands and starts hauling it towards the closet, muttering the activating incantations as he goes. "Be a dear, get the door?" he strains at Meggan. "If they catch us, Guy Fawkes Day is likely to get a lot livelier."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"You don't want me to lead them on a merry goose chase when I can //be// the guard we spotted on the way in?" Saucy answer for an equally saucy man, for Meggan's already thick with the volatile atmosphere of the stadium two hops over. Giddy delight churns damn well through. "You know what happens if we don't."

A few darting steps put her near the door, but it's going to be a lost cause for any future investigator trying to get her footprints considering her feet aren't on the ground. If they were, they'd be all wrong, shifting bits present. The sleeve over her hand is used to pull the door open for him to make an escape. Quick escapes? Work of John Constantine, through and through. Escaping getting caught, that's probably a little tougher. She carelessly feels the density of the spells, the watery pull of energy materializing from his spellwork. Nothing she can command, but still remarkable to taste, to know.

Someone is coming, surely. The running pace is set like a thunderous crash, boots on tile, on linoleum. Security isn't stupid enough to announce themselves, after all, hastening to investigate. Guns aren't common here, but the muffled, distorted approach shaves the seconds away.

John Constantine has posed:
"If you like, but you'll be on your own for the walk home. Gate won't stay up forever," John grunts.

The two of them plunge into the infinite abyss of the void, crossing time and space in a few strides and emerging in John's motel room. It's much more upscale than the dingy cockroach trap he'd been staying in over at Gotham Wharf.

In Belfast, the guards are left with little evidence to go on; just security footage of a blonde bloke in a coat and an absolutely unremarkable woman wandering into the museum and stealing one of the crown jewels of Irish Football.

But at least for now, Belfast will not burn.