7544/1000 Faces: Death by Misadventure

1000 Faces: Death by Misadventure
Date of Scene:	25 August 2021
Location:	Bayt al-Hikmah, the Underworld
Synopsis:	A harrowing adventure after jumping through a door in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens sends John Constantine into the lands of death, and traversing his way to a Realm that may have the answers he wants. But at what cost?
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Hela, John Constantine
Tinyplot:	1000 Faces of Death

---

Hela has posed:
The world turns to ash. All colour streams away from the darkness, the bright greens and warmer browns of the garden evaporating. A gorgeous sunset rendered bloody no longer remains.

Instead there is a stairwell. As far as stairwells go, it feels particularly unkind. Chopped steps drunkenly meander in a tight curve away from surface level. Where that may be. No amount of light provided from hellfire or a wisp of magic produces a sense of a trapdoor nearby, a quick nick out of Dodge. Stairs twist in such a way to circumnavigate a helix multiple times, drunkenly curving around, and continuing to head further down. Those steps broaden as they descend. In the dark, the confined, pinched walls and uneven footing is plain unwelcoming. Almost deadly. Topple here and who would ever find him?

Him. A man in a trenchcoat covered in ash and dust. His corporeal state seems whole enough but that's entirely a matter of perspective. "Whole" and "alive" do not have to remain synonymous, after all.

Without light, he wanders in the dark over worn rocks and erratic grout, fingertips not at full span telling which way to wander.

John Constantine has posed:
Well at least John has a lot of practice with drunk walking. He's sober now, so this is probably only about ten times worse than normal stairs drunk? Okay, so maybe it's not *that* easy. At one point he probably did turn to try and go *up* the stairs. If down is where he's forced to go, it's not unfamiliar that. There's even something a bit comforting about it... going down.

But he's not panicked, not yet. He's been in worse places, much worse, than a dark stairwell that leads to nothing. He is dying for a smoke though. He pats his pockets, searching, paused on the stairs to do so. Reflecting back on the 'just before', he takes note that Stephen isn't here and lets out a sigh of relief. Thought for sure the idiot would follow, but he's glad it didn't happen.

Hela has posed:
Sobriety whilst ripped asunder? That's a new one. Down the stairs goes the visitor alone. Others must have come this way. Not very many of them leave their traces, however. Ancient rock seeps cold, fungi clinging in places where the liquid perhaps gathers just enough to sustain it. There isn't water to be had here, though, unless John cares to lick the rock. Now might not be an issue. But after hours walking? Hours navigating the dark?

The deep stairwell keeps on switchbacking. At one point, it reaches a flat hollow that might be a landing. It predictably smells like a hobo urinated there over the course of months, not great, but enough. A suspiciously dank puddle in the corner, too, is worthy of concern.

John Constantine has posed:
Wouldn't be the first time he's licked rocks or walls, or other hard surfaces. John wasn't even thirsty those times, just... trying to decipher what an odd substance smeared thereon might be. It's on the landing that he decides to stop again and light a light a Silk Cut, the lucky one, from behind his ear; the one he always replaces once it's been smoked.

He calls forth that Hellfire to dance on his fingertips if it works. If not, he has his zippo back - gotta remember to find that girl and thank her and maybe decide if she's worth the trouble.

Not the time for that John, he chides himself mentally. Gotta get home, made a Vow and all, big V that one. Is that puddle actually what the area's smells would have one believe it to be? When dealing with death and magic, things often aren't what they seem to be, are they? Could be a puddle is actually some weird rabbit hole to somewhere else.

He squats beside it, cigarette in one hand and dips the fingers of the other into that dank, nasty thing only to sniff them after.

Hela has posed:
To the diners, the spoils. Why limit oneself to purely gustatory experiences? Lighting the Silk Cut comes odd. For one, the hellfire turns the strangest shade of pale. It doesn't get a healthy red in here, not in the least. At best the flame rolls a girly shade of pastel pink, used by newborns and Easter princesses everywhere. The flame sputters. Down here it doesn't want to work well, pulled through the veil of tears and cuts that leak out his soul.

The cigarette smoke pools. It barely rises, sinking instead to the ground. Satisfying as the poison may be, even the flavour is tarry and off. Slow to burn, as the ember barely lights.

The puddle in question is wet. Ammonia-heavy stench, ripened over time. He runs his fingers through it.

A pair of fangs made of the same nastiness bites him before he can quite withdraw his hand.

John Constantine has posed:
It's fitting that the first words he speaks are, "Bloody Hell," hissed out as he jerks his hand back. John tucks that cigarette between his lips, too much a habit and a need to care about the rest of it, but this time when he tries to shed a light on things, he leaves the hell out of it and just tries to call forth a flame of normal fire in his opposite hand.

Mental note: Carry a flashlight from now on.

He stands straight again during the process, if he manages to get any light at all, he'll take a gander at his surroundings, lit, for the first time. If he doesn't manage to light the darkness more with magically summoned flame, he'll resort to the Zippo. His tried and true friend for all the years since Chas gifted it to him.

Hela has posed:
Normal fire sputters weakly to being. It takes a consider amount of magic to pull such a simple spell. The pallid yellow turns bone white around the edges, even that weak creamy hue barely worthy of 'yellow.' Crack an egg and it'd probably be in greyscale. Alas, an egg would be a nice tasty treat right now.

The weak light from the flame he conjures reveals the grey walls forged from blocks and the faintly amber-dark sheen on the dank corner. Most of the blocks are variably dark, somewhere between basalt black to a middle-tone grey. They don't look anything less than deliberately chipped out and hewn together, the mortar between them slapped in there and not the even rows of a modern brick layer or someone with much pride. But salvageable, pulling a stone out won't be easy or wise. The stairs themselves are crooked stone risers, some of them dipped in the middle from the passage of many feet. Hints of old scratches lie in places. Maybe a dribble of wax if he leaves the landing and wanders another three switchbacks. A couple bored holes, possibly to hold up something metallic, given the scrapes. Whatever bracket was there, if for a torch or lantern, is hard to tell. It mostly smells dank, that musty odor of being long closed up or long underground.

John Constantine has posed:
Well, he's irritated and his Silk tastes bad. Not the first time he's pissed in a corner. It's not something meant to do anything. It's just John's little way of leaving his mark on the place so many seem to have marked before him. The crazy fool relieves himself in that corner puddle, adding to it, before zipping back up again and dosing the fire on his fingers in favor of pulling out that zippo. Better to save the magic reserves for later, if there is a later to be had. If he's not doomed to spend an eternity walking these stairs.

Stop it John, don't go dark. Think of Meggan, waiting.

And he does, with every ounce of himself, he thinks of her, of what's waiting at home. Of what he has to return to. He even closes his eyes to picture it more clearly. Hell, she's not even sprawled on the bed or the like when he does; it's just Meggan, her smile and warmth. ...and just for a moment or two, enough to chase away the shadows threatening to make him just sit on this landing and wait for it to be over.

That silk gets plucked from his lips and when he opens his eyes again, he *opens* them, allowing all of his senses to come alive, including the mystical ones. Something he, admits to himself now, that he's been afraid to do thus far.

Hela has posed:
A man relieving himself in a corner is commonplace in some parts of the world. In others, it warrants capital punishment. The stairwell in a dank corner smashed between places cannot boast too great a legal structure, given the evident lack of cameras and law enforcement.

The crazy fool zips up to finish his business.

His business isn't finished with him, lashing out with a suddenness as before. Fangs bite. They don't sting the way hardened enamel or pointy hydroxyapatite would passing through the skin, all the better given his groin is a rather tender spot.

Stealth becomes easier when John loses himself in more desirable thoughts than the endless march down the core of a skyscraper or some endless switchback to access the Chunnel's track level. Borer is a job and the Boring Company's joke cannot be lost on those men engineering confined spaces.

Indeed, only his pants being wet in spots, easily mistaken for casual accidents, pass anything out of the ordinary.

The mystical eye opens.

The whole damn place is a solid grey sheet of power. Power, through and through, and it takes a good ...what's time anyways down here? A good long while for it all to settle down to be more than 'bright on bright.'

John Constantine has posed:
"Fuck you," John snarls at the puddle, at the source of it all really, as his knees come together in that 'punched in the nads' sorta way. Defiant as ever, he flicks his spent Silk into the puddle.

He's not known to be a patient man, but few realize the amount of patience he actually has when he needs to have it. An hour, a day, a week... seriously does it matter down here ... he waits for things to settle down and come more into focus before deciding his next move.

While he waits, he imagines that smooth white stone in his hand, wrapped up tight in the warmth of his closed fist. He thinks of Meggan again, not calling out to her; never that. He'd never want her *here*. Instead willing that blasted rock, that little bit of his soul preserved over there, to give her the message somehow: I love you and I'll be home soon, just hold on.

Hela has posed:
The puddle doesn't have anything to say. It retreats whence it came, not only to the corner, but slithers out of sight. Only the cooling urine in the corner remains, perhaps useful as a landmark.

Not that there may be other ways to gauge distance and detail for the perceptive. John has his cigarette, his Zippo, and one hell of a migraine to deal with as his sight confirms he is indeed somewhere rife with power. A lot of power, although cobbled in ways that defy any sense of understanding. Blocky chunks pixellate the apparent world around him, giving hints of exhausting stasis and raw streaks of inviolate order. In other spots, the crumbling jots of pain leave distant stains like rust rings in a bathtub. Not prominent, but they linger here or there. Always, always there is longing.

And not much of a spirit or spell to be found, separate from the transient presence. Whomever came through left. Long ago? Near ago?

After all, does it really matter down here?

He has a choice, to try and retrace his steps. To wind down means to walk in the delirium of no time at all, as the mind screams and stretches, trying to make sense of what it cannot do without. Those in caves, especially divers, know it well; POWs, too, in the Hanoi Hilton and elsewhere. They might tell of how the touchstones for now and tomorrow breaking down is the first step to coming undone.

John Constantine has posed:
Retracing his steps is pretty counter-intuitive to the very core of John Constantine. Never go back. Even looking back leads to pain and suffering, but actually *going* back? Starting over, doing over? Why would anyone want to when the ultimate outcome is likely to be nothing but the same?

But when down seems endless and up only less so, the less so is the better option, init? Depression is starting to kick him in the teeth, as is often the case when he starts to see his actions as having 'failed'.

Meggan.

Even thinking of her, it takes longer than it did the last time to pull himself out of it. The fuel in the lighter won't last forever and he knows it, so once he's made up his mind and starts back the way he came, he douses the thing for now.

He grips that lighter in his hand though, never putting it away, feeling the coolness of it against his skin until it warms to match.

Chas - The other 'love of his life' if in a VERY different way. His brother, his best mate, his family in ways that blood can't even compare.

It can't possible be as easy as that, but he tries anyway. Chas. With that beloved lighter, a prized possession really despite the simpleness of it, as a catalyst for it, as a potential boost for it; all the memories both good and bad of it, the missing it while it was gone, the spells lit with it, the Silks lit with it, birthday candles, kindling for a warm fire at home. All the emotions associated with that single item - he takes it all and wills it to be his guide, to protect his steps, to lead him, no matter how indirectly, back to the one that gifted it to him. It isn't a spell that forms on his lips so much as it is a prayer, to anyone that's listening to a tired, worn out, battered, broken and potentially *dead* little magician lost.

Hela has posed:
What to do when the light slips away and time no longer matters? Back when he still cares about change and movement, maybe time is a torment. Those seconds and minutes piling up away from the people he cares about, from the bloodied gardens where he left more than a few people alive.

Time isn't anything more than another sense stretching at the brink. It hardly exists. Light cuts out when he starts walking up away from the path, thoughts clouded.

And there comes the rub. Turning back up the stairs is hard. Somehow they are taller rises each time. Lifting his legs for the first few is easy. The tenth, the twentieth? Not a man in good shape, lungs blackened to tarmac, the price he pays turns wheezy fast. Lactic acid builds up in stringy muscles that protest every turn. Aching knees betray age. Ankles hurt, the bones hurt. Everything, soon enough, protests in a wail.

Easy then to make mistakes. To slip. To bang into a curve of the wall he misjudged with night-vision blasted by the second sight over it, and it's tough to adjust when handholds are absent. More than once he trips. Maybe he falls.

Those steps are just so much easier. Another flittering shadow becomes a glimpse at the corner of his eye when he lands. Teeth in the dark, or some ghostly protrusion of pins from the length of the arm, the shoulder, an extra two joints attached to a bottomless carapace that could be an empty rib-cage. Albeit one with skin, tightly drawn.

Another, another step. Then he might find himself running into another shape, blocky and all edges, the end of a bed as tall as he can reach. A squared off corner then going at least six feet up.

John Constantine has posed:
It's certain that he falls, probably a lot. Maybe a time or two when he just lays there after, darkness eating away at his thoughts, hope fading. It's only when the worst of it happens, the hardest falls, that he actually lights the lighter still gripped in his hand. It's not even to light the darkness around him, but to light the darkness threatening to overwhelm the *inside* of him.

One period of brief rest and respite he allows, ends in him puking from the pain and exhaustion of it. But he pushes himself up *again* because that's just what John Constantine does. He keeps going.

Megan.

Chas.

Phoebe - when did the kid slip in there?

"You rode a fucking *God*, John, you can do *this*," he chastises himself at one point. Keep going.

Six feet up, a mere inch taller than him. Easy right? He can do this. How many times does he try, taking what running start he can to add momentum to his attempts to scramble up and over. A few too many more like than not. Especially with his unwillingness to let go of that lighter, the one solid piece of all he's working to get back to that he has in his possession. Maybe the next time, it'll be a wedding ring.

Meggan.

Hela has posed:
Sleep. It's the dreamless sort down here. Rest costs nothing when the dark closes in and the sounds that would normally be found here among the rock-mortared walls are absent.

He empties his stomach, but not his head. His lungs, but not his heart. On John goes, and the spectral shape fades through the wall. Surely? His mind might be fucking around with him, but when he runs into the damn edged column, he rebounds off the top the first time. It takes a few more scrabbling tries for him to haul himself up there, and he leaves skin and dignity on the rocks.

The lighter does not leave his hand, but sweat is clammy and the surfaces are hard. Metal, stone, they prove slippery in their way. When he hauls himself up to the top, he might feel grooves. Know the shape of...

Marks. Scratches. Angular shapes, too deliberate. In the dark, what can anyone see? To a mage's eye, they feel a little more purposeful but expired of any light, barely standing out at all against the iron-clad greys everywhere. Not veins, these, but deliberate shapes hacked out by whatever was at hand. A tiny rusted file might be found jammed into the rock. Another closet-sized spot isn't wide, the lip sticking out over a hole.

A deep fucking hole.

A rusted, thick meat hook hangs from the ceiling of the cubicle, whatever he calls the rectangular space he occupies. It seems to be attached to some sort of cable, one stretching out over the void. Good luck seeing the other side, but that braided line -- isn't metal, looks a lot more organic, rope? -- burns as true as anything here. Truer than his lighter. Truer than his shoes.

Just how to use the damn hook to zipline?

John Constantine has posed:
John pulls another Silk from his pocket. His hands shake through the process of lighting it. He leaves the lighter burning a little longer than necessary to light the smoke. ...then he flips it shut and tucks it away safe and sound in an inside pocket of his trench coat.

There's a running commentary going on in his head, a litany of 'you can do this, John, this probably, likely, isn't even your *real* body, you can do it, you can do it.' It isn't long after he begins that he imagines the same words in other voices, the voices of the people the loves. Loves... it's still a bit of a foreign word for him, if only because he denies it so often.

...maybe there's another way, just turn the hook upside down, use your belt. No, it's a meat hook for a reason. You can do this...

He reaches up and grabs the thing, feels the business end for sharpness. He's shaking to the point of barely being able to hold it. Impulse moves like riding a God, touching a void, those are easy. This is not that, this is considering ramming a giant hook into his own torso.

He sucks in a breath, huffs it out... "You got this John." Talking to himself, he's going crazy for sure. "You can do this. Just brace it against the wall." A few more of those breaths. "Just... brace it against the wall and ...." Fuck!

...and that's what he does. As close to the edge of that dark pit as he can get, John braces that hook against the wall, a little sideways and pretty much throws himself at it, dead center. Can't be too far to either side, he'd just rip right off the thing from his body weight. Can't be an arm or a leg, hook's too big and same problem. So dead center it is.

If he succeeds, he's spinning and dropping into that pit of doom immediately after, before he has the chance to pass out. He's also screaming, loudly, and a lot.

Hela has posed:
Another Silk lit in grey sends smoke waterfalling to the cabin of sorts, pooling on the blood-stained boards and trickling over the edge. Those boards are warped and old, scarcely fit to support a man's size. The staircase rests a six foot drop on one side. Three steps span the distance to falling into the void. Poisoned emanations from the cigarette drool out of sight, maybe never reaching bottom.

Love and despair sink beneath the waves in this autochthonic extension of the upper world where he marched through the flowers and felt the huldra throw their venomous black rainbows against his ward. Far away from wet-soaked streets of Liverpool and a meaningful club stocked by too many candles, piss poor music, and not much else.

As he reaches for the hook, it creaks on its rusted pulley. The rope stretches, white and grey, the blanched pallor of a winding cloth dragged against some impossible distance The darkness tugs with it, or it could be the light-stunned eyes striving to find any spark of light. Terror, another note to the fragrant emotive potpourri. Nothing like a mad man, shame he was made like that. Rustling hastens somewhere in the depths.

Sometimes a bigger corpse comes tumbling down and scavengers for miles and miles away converge on the blood-stained signature passing through cold, unchanging recesses where the light doesn't burn. Stirring darkness surrenders its mysteries like a tight-fisted codger. Hints of shadows moving on his position filter through desperation and elusive murmurs. Wet scales drag across hard surfaces, closer, closer now. Faster they move, splotches of grey in the distance. Not fireflies, but corpse-candles approaching. One two, ten.

Stones bear those scratches as his shoes scrabble on them, heel catching the shiv jammed in, a shock of pain. Small tidings, but sweet for the predators used to moving through a colourless oblivion in search of a scrap thrown from the Sunlight Zone. Claws scrape and ram into roughened surfaces, and he can hear them, a hive, the plethora as he reaches for the hook. A bald, bare head sliced off diagonally at nose-level to the back of the skull emerges. Hands tear at khaki, dull dull beige everyman coat.

Can he?
    Will he?
           Does he dare to --

He lurches forward. Not of his own volition. The meat hook does that itself. Rusting metal rips through his chest, instead of a hand, a shoulder. Some organ breaches his back and lands with a squelch on the wall. Pain roars and rips through the space caved in between bone and sinew. Squealing wheels turn. Blood runs down his shirt, ribs splintered open. The hole glows a pale, milky green around gore-grimed ghost-steel. His chest, the organs inside transformed to plasm.

No sounds offer John Constantine comfort. No leering murmur from the dark, no threats. There isn't a curse to him. Other than the piss-soaked serpent that struck him twice over and the disembodied torso and arms studded in a prickle-veil of nails, there have been none other to interrupt his malaise. he goes shuttling through the chthonic gate, rushing where a weak corpse-hair rope spans the everlasting night.

It runs as long
     as his terror will hold
          and despair finally gives way to
               the purged acceptance, of what is.

                    Mind the lurching end on a half-moon flagstone court.

               When he's knocked over.
          Not dead, just
     Sore but somehow
Intact, kind of.

John Constantine has posed:
When John rolls over to his hands and knees and vomits again, it's nothing but dry heaving and it lasts for a good few moments before he gets it under control. When he stands, he fishes that lighter back out of his pocket again. ...and flicks it to flame. It's only partially to get a look at his surroundings, it more to chase away the darkness from his own mind again.

Meggan.

Chas.

Phoebe.

It's getting harder to hold on to them though, to hang on to the getting back. The longer it goes on, the longer he feels like he's failed on some huge, fundamental level, the more difficult it becomes for him to even move one foot in front of the other.

What's the point? There is none. He's nobody, why'd he ever think he could make a difference? Meggan's better off without him anyway. Chas'll probably live two hundred more years on the lives he has left without him and Phoebe will be spared all of it.

He considers sitting down right there and just giving in even as he's looking for the next step he needs to take.

John Constantine has posed:
John looks down at the lighter in his hand and snaps it shut. He weighs it a second or two, bounding his hand up and down and shoves it back into his pocket. No. He's not giving that up. He can't. Without it, he'd likely just sit down and die. All of his sanity is wrapped up in that one connection to home, it's more a part of him than the spleen and lungs truth be told. Means more.

He studies the gate for any writing, sigils... any hint as to where he's at other than 'somewhere in the underworld'. Specifics, details, they matter at this point.

Hela has posed:
Subterranean passage ends at a chipped arrangement of flagstones that once might have bore beauty, in some distant way. Rotten petals and spilled deep-green stains gather between the mortar that locks them together with geometric regularity, even if the blocks themselves are irregular and hewn to a less exacting standard. Curved shapes then emerge from a low broken rim along the periphery, fat headstones worn illegible by the years worked directly into the wall separating the courtyard. An act of deliberately climbing or bellying over it reveals seated figures on a jagged terrace descending a perilous slope in several chopped steps. These figures bear human-enough features to stand apart, their arms broken off, a face pulverised from the nose, the broad chest and seated thighs enduring on a seat but no legs or head remaining.

Pressure of a thousand thousand tons of rock threatens to bear down. A tiny breach and pop! It might all end. Those walls and roof to a great cavern must be somewhere, jumbled out of a Victorian subway tunnel and the Great Cloaca of Rome, all mixed up in the sense of tripping through an abandoned wing of a museum somewhere. The path that cuts through the stepped terraces is more of a rutted route overgrown with patchy fungi, dark and squishy, doglegging severely at the bottom to where all manner of ramshackle fishing shacks pop up among broken-roofed Roman nymphaea, the pillared and dome-roofed follies so common to European gardens, and a number of chippies or takeaway spots that bear scraps of colour in the complex paints sprayed over there.

The only thing that glows, aside from his chest, or the corpse-lights floating around, is a flickering yellow light blotting a graffiti-stricken

                                  bus stop?                                  

John Constantine has posed:
Looks like he's taking a bus, dunnit? If John can make his feet move in the right direction. Seriously, they're getting heavier by the second; but it's all in his head. Doubt mingling into the darkness like the cancer that nearly killed him.

"Move, John... move. You good for nothing, piece of shit, murderin' bastard... move." In his mind, it's the voice of his father. Maybe if love can't sustain him and get him there, anger and hatred can.

...it changes something inside him, on some level he doesn't understand, on some level he's not even aware as of the moment. Flips a switch, it does.

But it puts one foot in front of the other toward where he needs to be - toward the bus stop.

Hela has posed:
Touchstones of a rotten childhood, a scapegrace adolescence. What proper British city lacks a good chippy? The best of them are never much to speak of, occupying the same spot since the War -- the first one -- and usually mired in about six generations worth of oil. Faded shapes pinned to a wall should be photographs, maybe an ancient portrait of Her Maj, and three beaten-up tables featuring salt and malt vinegar in wire containers. Crumpled newsprint makes the best sheath for beer-battered cod and fat, greasy chips worth licking one's fingers over. To hell with ketchup, that's a proper deep-fried meal to round the belly. One sticks out among the other mishmash, where fishermen's shacks and dodgy spots where the poorest of the poor scraped a meager existence from the dockyards. Places where even his rotten upbringing might seem palatial.

Old Liverpool, younger Manchester, drops of London. There are touchstones here, if he knows where to look. Relics of a place that he mght touch, but not perfect enough to be sure of a place.

Less you get to the busstop. Rule of them, of course, doesn't differ much in any of the great metropolises. The light there is stuffed with fungus, not electricity. A bulb crammed full of the junk goes yellow, fading little by little. A flat board boasts marbles, thick wax running down between them to spell routes and places.

N8. Bayt al-Hikmah.

N12. Athenaeum.

NI10. Epsilon Canceri.
???? Kingdom of Wire

John Constantine has posed:
If the most famous, best, amazing, perfect chippy in England delivered here and he could have it in seconds? John would probably barf when it arrived and then toss it in the trash bin. He stands there, far longer than he rightly should, studying his options. ...and there's only one remotely even half close to a destination that might keep him on the path of why the fuck he did all this to begin with.

He closes his eyes and listens to his father telling him, "What, you going to pussy out now? Coward. Thinking about the one that looks the easiest out? Worthless little shite."

...and when he opens his eyes, he whispers, "No." It's hard to say if he's speaking to the voice in his head or everything, all of it.

But in the end, he follows his own instincts rather than his impulses and the voices in his head.

N8. Bayt al-Hikmah.

Hela has posed:
Hints of life linger here, such as life can be called. The huddled figure peering into the rotting nets outside its humble dwelling is weathered before its time, shapeless clothes swallowing its bent shape. Another figure in a porkpie hat cowers in the entrance to what might have been a newsagent or smokeshop of some kind, the windows leaking condensation. Two other foggy shapes behind the cracked windows keep watch, repeating the same actions over and over, wiping down wood and sorting through debris. Other shapes may be there, but too wise to come out. John heads through the chipped and ruined statues, his feet slipping on the ground.

A cool wind reaps the promise of heat, sending yellowed newspaper tumbling end over end down the sloped road. Graffitied walls and smoked-up plastic sagging in the frame of the busstop offer a milieu of weird shapes, conforming to a single message:

            All riders must pay the one-way fare on the Night Bus.            
                          The Night Bus is cashless.                          

It takes time for N8 to roll up. One comes before it -- a fucking subway car mashed up against another, rolling out of nowhere on no tracks worthy of noticing. The telltale sound of a subway, delirious familiar, strikes tones when its doors open and nothing spills out but mist. Inside are figures, gaunt and thin but sort of human, locked in their own passion plays. When he doesn't get on, he will wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait.

True dark drizzles down and the street of this lonely harbourside, ramshackle community blazes with an eerie electric sheen. The scorpions come. Little rolling eyes set in brass frames sprinkled with sharp, unfriendly legs skitter here and there. Curving tails hang with glowing grey weirdness. Their flotilla marches where it will, spreading. One stands on the adjacent bench, needle-point tail swaying back and forth. A blinking human eye: hazel. It peers at him. Another watches from the sidewalk, such as there is a sidewalk.

A ghastly diesel groan announces the rattle-trap creation of a double-decker, painted not a garish shade at all, but stuck with a few ofrenda of sorts. A wilting chaplet of flowers stuck in a window is frighteningly orange where he hasn't seen anything but yellow. A row of skulls grin foolishly, eyes stuck with the Pogs and folded up Pokemon cards so popular once. Charizard sort of sparkles, a shiny that twinkles in a dull shine. The door of that ancient bus creaks open, all 1970s psychedelic music, nag champa and patchouli mixing with the rank odor of unwashed bodies and sweat seeping into velour. It's a fucking London bus, they haven't done much in a half-century or less. The driver is skeletal thin, tilted hat at a rakish angle, hands gripping the wheel. Straight off the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, not a Beatle, but damn close enough.

"Fare's due," he announces in a chipper baritone. "That will be something orange or your best memory from childhood."

John Constantine has posed:
John waits, he has no choice but to. He shoves his hands in his trench pocket and hangs his head against the drizzle, he focuses on his shoes to try and keep the doubt and darkness in his head from spreading. His shoes are nice and simple, same old things he always wears, familiar, almost a comfort in them. Easy, no thought.

Does he even *have* one of those? A best childhood memory? Does he have anything orange? John pulls that lighter and a silk from his pocket, lights the latter and ... offers the lit thing, the little cherry on the end burning orange, at least in the moment.

He'll be hard pressed to find anything else of that color on his person, if only he'd worn the boxers with the little pumpkins on them?

...and happy childhood memories are so few and far between that giving up even one could erase so much more.

Hela has posed:
The lighter burns with an orange flame, normally. The Silk Cut's got orange embers, sort of, though they expire all too quickly when consumed.

The door lies open. The driver holds out his gloved hand, fingertips stained by black ink that spreads in splotches and smudges, especially along the heel.

"You ride as long as it burns. When it stops, you are off," he says, still smiling in that jolly way of a man who appreciates his gig. Back behind him are two rows of those velour-covered seats. Memory would substitute them being blue, but blue is not a colour natural to the underground world. Clandestine stares and watching eyes of the other few riders follow him. A woman with bloody tears streaming down her gaunt face wears her white, lace-bound wedding gown. Another pair face one another, shuffling the same tattered, dog-eared cards between them, wearing an archaic style of braces, shirts, and trousers last popular when Vicky was Empress of India. A gangbanger tatted up to his eyeballs nervously sneers from another seat. The windows are a mucky sort of way.

One burning cigarette.

What was that about time not mattering?

The door squeaks shut behind him. The Night Bus doesn't wait for John to sit. With a growl it's off, turning along the road until the road is no longer, and the staggered line of pitiful shops and shacks interspersed by the odd collapsed building finally gives way to a rotting wharf. It's barely long enough for two dories, or a miserable sloop. The engine growls in a low throb and it's here the bus accelerates, planks heaving and cracking. Out to the water it heads, the driver grappling the big old steering wheel from a time when power steering wasn't a deal.

The bump when they hit the current swivels the bus around, pointing the bonnet downstream and churns past, riding low enough the dark, torpid water should roll up over the windows. Not quite.

John Constantine has posed:
Hands shoved in his pockets still, John chooses to stand rather than sit. Nor does he choose to take in the sights. He finds something to hang on to and, unless told to do otherwise, he stands and waits for his stop. Sitting is a dangerous. Sitting means forcing himself to get back up again. The next Silk John lights is for himself, tar tasting and nasty or not. Just like his shoes, there's a comfort in them, just in the act of smoking. It's a comfort that overrides his distaste for the difference in them down here.

Hela has posed:
The smoke pools on the floor of the bus. Music plays, but it switches through crackling and clear vocals. T. Rex comes grooving through the swampy prog rock of Soft Machine. Minutes stretch out to the soporific influence of Pentangle and the Albion Band, fading in and out, as the bus sways across the impossible path of the water. A ding announces the next stop, jarring and loud.

Sticky advertisements hang overhead. They don't hawk past-dated concerts, pubs or 10 percent off if you mention this ad at Boots Pharmacy. Secrets discovered within this Realm cannot be removed.

The bus loops and swerves, taking on a definite ink darkness. Polluted and thick, the flow contains detritus best not to look too deep on. A dumpster or a bloated bovine-like corpse might not be too disturbing.

But John Constantine brings his own ghosts. From Mucous Membrane to the recent deaths attributed to his intervention in Tamil Nadu, they are never so far.

They paw at the windows. Reflected on them, No visitor may harm a shade in this Realm. They lie just under the surface, accusing faces and fingers. And the dead, the whole point is that they do not go. They cannot disappear. To kill a person, truly and utterly, is not so easy as the living perish. Yet here the souls are, caught in the flow, herded and corraled and spun around and around.

Maybe it's better to sleep. Maybe it is better to forget.

Maybe it is easier
    not to be anymore
        but slip into sweet
            oblivion?

The Night Bus lurches to a stop, breaks squealing, hydraulics gasping, puff-puff-whoosh, puff-puff-whoosh, squeeze tight and push. The driver cranks open the door, hand on a thick manuscript sprawled over the steering wheel with a sugar skull swaying madly from overhead, almost knocking his tophat askew. A rakish grin follows, showing white teeth. The orange-flecked cigarette still burns in a skull made from bone and the melted down medals of... something or another. All ash under the bridge.

"Your stop. Bayt al-Hikmah. Keep to the left when you want to catch the return ride." He nods.

A tattered sandstone wall confronts John upon exit, cracks and smashed holes forming another string of words. Upon entering this Realm, you must announce your presence to all.

John Constantine has posed:
It clicks again, that switch. From on, to dim, now off. Or was it the other way. It doesn't matter does it? All that matters is that fundamental change that began, it continues. It would be easier to just lay down and die, but John will see it through because it's what he does.

Laying down and dying, that can wait until he's seen this through. Rather than turn away from those accusing faces, he stares right at them. It's not as if he can escape them by turning away, they'll just turn up in his nightmares.

There are no more thoughts of Meggan or Chas or Phoebe. Of anything really, but getting the task in front of him done. If that rock wasn't black before, it may as well be now or close to it; because the death he's feeling inside himself now is way more damaging than loss of life. He's beat that before, come back from it. Like to again the way it looks now.

"John Constantine." His voice doesn't even sound like his own when he speaks as he steps off the bus. It's as flat and dead as he's feeling inside. Is that good enough, or does he need a bloody bullhorn to announce his wretched name to all his victims?

Hela has posed:
When he turns away from the sandstone wall, his voice echoes off its battered length. The bus stopped at something barely marked as a stop at all. Only a chipped bit of plaster, a spiderweb of cracks pockmarked by some ancestral violence left behind ten or a thousand years ago.

Off to the left lies a sandy embankment that slopes down, the wet and clammy stretch only about a dozen meters long. A bar of sorts fades away into a black-stained morass, then perhaps the strangest of all visions that presents itself.

A bog stretches forth like a drowned garden, though it very much is. It stinks of the dead breath of autumn chewing up the last stalks from the field, not quite pigshit so much as brackish peatiness that chokes Ireland everywhere outside a Guinness halo. Small, broken plants poke dark leaves up. No bridge spans the bog, at least visibly, the sandbar fading away into a patch of brown moss tufted enough to give a possible flotation device for his shoes, or bare feet. A rusted gate locks off an irrigation canal choked under clumps of organic matter, though peering long and hard enough might reveal the stalks are half papyri, the other series probably maize or wheat or barley, whatever grows black in bloody Olde Englande when they actually grew things there. What clogs up the canal are clumps of paper, squeezed together, ink long-since run. Other bits must be moldering scrolls. The really tacky shit is leather, decomposing in the sweaty darkness. Seeds float on the water, small pepperings, some berries, others like tough kernels, floating round and round. No way past that spot, other than the wall he waited at. To the left's through that brown, sediment-heavy pond that stretches too long to actually warrant 'pond' as a moniker, like Emerson. So why bother?

The cracked stone dais barely palpable as a grey block, maybe. The only other solid spot anywhere else. Must be the bus stop.

John Constantine has posed:
After everything else, what's a little bloody bog water. At least he's not being dunked upside down in it this time? John wades into the water without much of a second thought. Well maybe he has one: How easy would it be to just drown here? Maybe he's hoping for it?

When it doesn't happen, when he's not instantly snatched and dragged to a watery doom, the first thing he does is attempt to clear away the nasty shite from in front of that grate. Somewhere, something might need that canal running freely again. Or it just seems the thing to do. The seeds, in all their forms catch his attention and he can't help but to reach out to snatch one for a closer inspection somewhere in the middle of clearing the debris.

The lighter that meant so much such a short time ago, forgotten in his pockets and likely wet before it's all over with.

Hela has posed:
For a man snakebit, flayed open with his lungs glowing milky-green on display through the hole, beat down and battered, a wade through the bog is somewhat uneventful. The water rolls over him, slimy and slippery, thick with the castoffs of so many countless inundations and fields. Harvest is over.

He's vomited out the contents of his stomach and emptied his bladder. Not wept, but exhausted his breath and pushed past the point of hope and love to something darker. Is the flame quenched while stuck in that sodden world? The weak gurgle of the bog fills the irrigation canal, earth and mud dragged down into some kind of drain. Hell, he might feel the weak tug threatening to bring him down.

Closer then to the dais, a block of rock with an older texture than the wall. It feels like it's been there a damn long time. Though where is the House of Wisdom, if not here?

The seeds in his pocket might just be sustenance if he needs them, depending on what he decides to grab. They're weird little things.

What else is a seed but a kernel of fate, a tiny engine for growth, a spark of what -could- be? Beginnings. More than sustenance, but sustenance still.

John Constantine has posed:
No, he leaped right past weeping. Weeping means sadness and where John's at is more than that. A person hits despair and there's no more room for weeping. The fact that he's not railing and screaming at his situation, cursing under his breath? Should be enough to tell the Gods and anyone else listening just how far beyond just 'sad' John Constantine is in this moment.

If Nergal came now, in this second, he'd go quietly without muss, fuss or fight. John's all out of fight. It's all it's been for months is fight. Even the mighty Constantine has his limits. He's been suicidal before. Hell he's been institutionalized before. When he does decide to have a snack, it's one of each and without a care for what they mighty do to him or mighty not do to him.

It's really because of the warning that knowledge found here can't be taken with him than anything else, a last 'fuck you' to this God forsaken place. If it wants to stop him from taking those with him once he finds his way out, it'll have to rip him apart to get them. ...Or, hold him here until he takes a bloody dump.

How far under the water does the rock extend? Hell feel for a possible entrance under the damned bog water.

Hela has posed:
Screaming here may have no effect unless he wants to howl at the monstrosities in the pit he crossed on the meathook or the shades hovering in the shacks, chippies, and shops. Any chance to talk came on the Night Bus, either to the driver from a Beatles album cover or the denizens hiding in their seats.

Water gurgles and runs down the irrigation canal drain. More meanders in the slow, ponderous spill through the flooded plain. Papyrus stalks barely rattle. Slumped grains, society's foundation, rot slowly into the sediment-rich water. Seeds spill past on brown curls, piling up on the islets. Firmer pockets rooted by plants and heaped soil stick out like hillocks in the drowned garden, but nowhere is exactly firm to walk. Wouldn't be much of a bog otherwise.

His march takes time, longer than it should, slip-slewing through what feels like a reasonable distance and ends up stretching out in the weird way time moves without any sun, moon, or stars to judge by. The dais stands out as a large block in its dark grey splendour, the cuneiform and elaborate Arabic-esque script worn down to near incomprehensible patterns. It stands five feet above the swampy territory, rounded off edges slightly irregular. Cracks cleave through the top, scoring a path, the remnants of arrowheads and blades almost rusted to nothing around a reddish-brown patch in places.

The intrigues for ancient languages might be present, but otherwise it represents somewhere dry, the only spot aside from the Night Bus stop that is.

John Constantine has posed:
Nice place then, dry as it is, to have a smoke and a pocket full of seeds. Maybe his last smoke and his last meal? After studying the dais for any sigils, markings, carvings, both either mundane or only seen on the mystical side of things, John climb on top it. Even at only five feet tall, it's not an easy task at the moment.

His pack of Silks, he's down to about six, the pack damp but not soaked considering its placement in an inside, upper pocket of his trench coat, is retrieved, along with his zippo, that seems to matter no more than a means to light a cigarette at this point. He lights up, tucks them both away and just, for a minute, lays back on that dry safe haven to stare up at the sky.

In his mind, his father's voice berating him and the accusing faces of his victim's battle each other for attention. His mother would surely be among the latter if he could remember her face.

Barring anything insane happening, it's likely that he'll lay there for a long damned time, maybe even until he's smoked all but one of those Silks.

There might be a time or two, when he closes his those faded blues, that a single tear runs down the side of his face before he's nips that right in the bud with an angry rub of a heel of a palm over closed eyes.

Hela has posed:
A pocketful of seeds, nuts, the odd berry. Thing about seeds, they technically come in different forms. The stonework dais echoes strength and endurance, apart from the never-ending stasis thickly wrapped around the place. The bog embodies something a drowned end, rot and the harvest carried off. If spring were to be the season of growth, the end of such things fronts the House of Wisdom.

Whatever that House happens to be. Wherever. A flat fucking stone block it surely cannot be.

Smoke fades and flows. The poison in his veins skids through, grinding down resilience, until even the dark shelf of stony darkness overhead seems to sway with date palms thrashing back and forth. A olley of arrows shot across archways and smooth walls send cracks through the ceiling. Sand trickles down atop him, ash spilling in small, persisent gouts.

In the shadows, that strange gurgle continues, the drain falling down.

It's only his mind that whispers: lose me once I'll come back stronger. Lose me twice, I'll leave you forever. Name me.

John Constantine has posed:
"Fuck if I know." More like the fuck should he even care. The sound of his own voice is completely foreign to John by now. He finally struggles himself back up, sitting at least, knees bent, arms resting on them and his head down.

"Faith, a fuckin' tooth, I never had the first and I'll gladly give up all the latter if you just leave me the fuck alone."

Oh, dark John is really dark. He reaches up to wipe the sweat beading on his forehead on the sleeve of his coat. He's nauseous, his head's killing him, his whole body aches and, no matter how much it doesn't quite 'hurt' the gaping fucking hole in his chest is disturbing him to no end.

Why is he doing this again? Sitting here answering the voices in his head? He's starting to have a hard time remembering.

Hela has posed:
The price is named.

John Constantine is received in silence, a pocketful of destiny and a lighter in his coat. Poison seeps through the bites swollen on his hand and more intimate spaces that wither with a rocky hurt. Ectoplasmic force oozes through his chest where his lungs should be. Begs the question what's going on with the smoke he breathes in, the tar, his lungs abandoned somewhere.

Those parts are purely the mechanical truth.

The fundamental is that the world waits. That's all it ever has. Beyond the graveyard of time, through a door in the void, what else is there?

John Constantine has posed:
There are other things John Constantine, or any wizard worth their salt, keeps in the many pockets of that trench coat. One of them is a simple pocket knife. It beats the hell out of biting into ones own palm when a drop of blood is required for a spell on the fly.

What's a fucking tooth after being run through by a meathook? There's not even a second thought to it really. What's it say about where he's at that he doesn't even really finch when he digs one of his own molars out of the back of his mouth... with a pocket knife?

It pretty much says that he's numb to that 'minor' little physical pain as much as he's numb to the emotional now. He spits the blood from his mouth out onto the dais and then slams the extracted tooth down. "What the bloody fuck ever," he mutters.

Hela has posed:
What is wisdom if not the cumulative experience brought through life? All the wit and intelligence acquired in a library is useless without experience, after all.

The dais comes alive with flickering torches were none were before. These too share the pale butter hues from the bus stop in a nameless river settlement, though the flames show faces screaming, meditative, determined, pained. A row of such brands continue over the submerged irrigation canal, leading straight away from the cracked dais.

His blood runs down his face and as soon as the tooth comes free, John has a plasm molar filling in, just like in his chest. It feels a tad more jellied than he might be familiar with. Pain throbs and burns around the vacated hollow in his jaw, but the damage just isn't quite what it should be. One foot in the grave?

The blood splats down and a rivulet carries away the tooth to the paws of a gynosphinx with eagle wings folded at her sides. Gloriously painted in the monochromes and dull hues of this place, the lifelike impression of kohled eyes and razor-sharp talons concealed among furry toes extends to every feather in swept sandstone. She flanks a crude stone archway with a definite curve, a wall that wasn't there anchored to the masculine counterpart. His face is human but remote, the lion's body replaced by the tiger. A cruelty glitters in those eyes.

And they so very much watch, because where the veil falls and blood pays the tithe, John may well realize the still, static magic in a block retracts into a circle behind them. The Great Guardians of Bayt al-Hikmah face him, and the female of the pair hooks the tooth on the tip of a talon, tilting her head down to admire its bloody, scratched appearance.

"You may pass, John Constantine," she says. It's in bloody fucking Sumerian, though how he can understand doesn't much matter.

"Bring no violence within these walls," murmurs the male, so deep a voice that mortal bowels and bones rattle.

"Do not work your will here." The gynosphinx pulls her left wing closer to her body, making clear that blazing, slow passage for him to walk. "The hospitality of victuals and libations will be offered to all true knowledge-seekers. You will not want for nourishment within this Realm."

John Constantine has posed:
He doesn't much acknowledge either one of them. John's just ready for this vacay to be over already. "Won't bring it unless it's brought," is all he has to say on any of it. Before he forces himself to put one foot in front of the other and blazing path. What good's knowledge anyway, if it's suppose to remain here.

Battered and beaten, hands shoved into his coat pockets, hopeless, aching, tired and just plain old empty, John walks into the Temple of Wisdom a shadow of a man, in many more ways than one, than the one who risked it all back in the Gardens in an attempt to save ... strangers.

Hela has posed:
"It will not be done," repeats the female sphinx, and her dark gaze travels after John. The male of the pair goes back to silent, though he kneads those black claws against the ground. Dark eyes glitter fiercely, the curl of his equally black lips impressively telling.

The torches continue to blaze. Crossing through the crude arch produces a sense of tipping forward, the first instant of stumbling and falling before he can catch himself. Mentally lurching means often a bad landing, a transition of shock.

Warm light pours down from a massive ring of pierced lanterns set in the huge cylindrical hall. The round wheel echoes Baghdad's fabled round walls and spoked streets, long since lost to modernity. The high ceiling is enough to strike someone used to seeing great creations dumb with wonder, for the enormous skylight forms an elegant dome inlaid by countless meandering sea-green and lapis lazuli scrollwork over gold.

Stairs and halls strike out from the great ground-level galleries, stretching through honeycombed tiers of a knowledge layer cake. Impossible staircases hang suspended like cobwebs, surely incapable of holding his weight, and yet very much can. Narrow halls or grand aisles wreathed in the frosted trappings of art, books, scroll niches, and more fill halls that may just be visible. No direction is off limit, for even at the high dome's pendant rests a tiny chamber with a single crystal-shaped lozenge large enough for a man to curl up and read.

Other shapes flit through and forth, most of them not humans. Forth go certain cat-like creatures and soft-winged birds of paradise, long tails swishing in fine detail. No hints of fur, feather or dropping dares disrupt the place. Between the art and the knowledge in vast stores are occasional spots: fountains that splash with wine, blood or coffee. Plates heaped in fruit and vegetables are in one spot. Another contains flavoured ices, further down another brazier warming a set of grilled lamb. The scents don't flow to clash with one another, pooled where they belong. Food, such as it is.

Offerings for the living? For the guest?

In the calm of the greatest collection of lore assembled in its age, the violence that destroyed it is little in evidence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a message etched onto the floor in white chalk is almost impossible to miss: Bring no violence to this Realm.

It has a long, long memory.

John Constantine has posed:
Knowledge might as well be one of John's addictions, particularly anything related to the mystical side of things. He spends as much time reading tomes from the library and engaged in conversations with people - some of them even demons and monsters - as he does at the bar drinking, makes a person wonder when he sleeps. One would think he'd be awestruck by this place.

He isn't.

He just wants it to be over. When he sets off down hallways, up stairs and down them, around corners and twists and turns, he gives in and lets hunches and nudges guide him. Hopefully to the proper exit.

But what a man wants and what they need, those two things rarely line up and, generally, Synchronicity doesn't care what John *wants*.

What he needs is information. After wandering for a bit with no neon flashing Exit sign to be had he stops, looks heavenward, a long way from there this is, and yells, "Just tell me already! Why? Why's the underworld falling apart?! Why are the Gods having turf wars?! Who's making a play for power?! How do I stop it?!" ... a beat and he adds, "...and where the fuck is STRANGE?!" Shouldn't Stephen be *here*? He's not, so where the hell *is* he?

Hela has posed:
The felines trotting down a hallway move across a high bridge, a pair of them flipping around their direction as they disappear to the underside. Another mewls insistently at one of the shelves, finding no recourse from a row of disorderly, tattered scrolls stuffed into a number of angular nooks. Such is the world of the House of Wisdom.

Any direction to set out produces a set of effects. Chaises and chairs, plump cushions, weird recliners from a dozen different cultures present themselves. Occasionally a table appears, something right out of a Carnegie library from the turn of the last century. John could well just hurl himself onto one and sleep for hours in dreamless dark.

Neon signs do not burn here for seekers. The work must be done themselves, for even the slip of a shade wrapped up in a veil and billowing desert robes will not wait for John or anyone else. Illumination comes from the stories-tall atrium under that glass dome, spilling down, or the countless lanterns and lamps caging light, not fire. The yellow glow synonymous with comfort, someone leaving the porch light on for a son or daughter coming home late, suffuses most of those halls to a degree as to be cozy and not overwhelming. Soft smacks from his wet shoes leave a trail, and the birds of paradise move unhastened around him, purposeful in wherever they want to go.

Plucking any of the written materials from a shelf reveals any number of different materials. Different signs or scraped marks in ink, string, anything at hand gives some sense for what each hall contains. The Great Hall breaks into smaller places, some inscrutible without command of Farsi, Arabic, or much older languages, like Proto-Elamite. Some speak of BYZANTINE TACTICAL ALKEMIA or PRIMARCH RELATIONS. Others scream of ABANDONED HOST: MALAKAITE, or ANNALS OF SAMEDI AND THE GHEDE.

He wants his answers, he starts one step at a time. He's going to dig.

John Constantine has posed:
He just wants to go *home*. John's so exhausted that his tired is tired. His minds foggy and everything *hurts*. But he starts with the beginning, because that's a very good place to start. At least the beginning of when he became aware of an issue. He starts with Annals of Samedi and the Ghede. He gigglesnorts, losing his mind he is... that rhymes.

The little gigglensort turns to a hiccup of a laugh that he barely manages to rein in before it dissolves into a fit of laughter that would fall far short of humorous. Insane laughter is nothing to laugh about.

Book to book, topic to topic, backwards from the rhyming one that threatened to take him under and out for good. He still can't think the words Samedi and Ghede together without threat of it happening again.

Hela has posed:
Food and a nap might do him well, if there is a home to go back to, a life to regain. Bits of himself scattered down here might portend making a new place.

A cackling warlock has historically been a good sign someone needs a proper exorcism or a burning at the stake, the latter more likely for a demonic exorcist won't respond to another booting him out. In this frozen library, full of lore and lyrical wonders penned in parchment, vellum, skin and leaves, other things besides, a man sits. Reads.

It will be a consuming process. Hours measured by mortal means squeeze through an hourglass that no longer flows. Only his base need will guide him true, likely. John will need food, beverages, sticking his head in the fountain of water or slurping up coffee with his bare hands. Chewing on bread in fluffy unleavened rounds, otherwise seeking nourishment. He might rest. He might not.

The pages in that Annal are written in tobacco leaf and on browned skin. The lash of words lends well to the smells of rum, incense, and blood. Such a thing exudes power, every bit here does. Learn of interventions and prayers, what purpose is that?

The sun may have dropped and risen again by the time he finds it.

Brown lines. where they gathered at the altar to praise the good Baron. The offerings made attracted interest. Such power in the community of faith strengthened him greatly and the Lord of Mictlan hungered for such strength in his bones and being. The apt choice then was murder. Kill the god and consume the faith, said he. It would be sufficient to warrant a place in the closed Court of Death.

Another page, another scrap, the leaves brittle instead of supple, move through his hands. ...slew the followers to attract the Ghede. Such death demanded response in kind from the Baron, already deeply under pressure in his traditional dominions in the Caribbean. The Aztec lord of death sought a renaissance of power by devouring Baron Cimitiere, thus provoking an outrage that Baron Samedi must answer. But once decapitated, torn apart, his essence and name were lost and the Lord of Mictlan's promise with Pluto affirmed. Baron Samedi's end irrevocably unbound the Ghede to make any coherent stand against the Court of Death as it consolidated its power over the dread realms of the Underworld as one unbroken overlordship.

The writer ceases shortly thereafter, reflecting on the loss of Baron Samedi and their own certain destruction as the 'sound of rushing wings signals my end.'

John Constantine has posed:
Most of that John had kind of guessed. But there are new bits of information that frame it all in a different, if not entirely new, light. Another always have for a magus worth his salt is a small pad of paper and a pen or pencil. John prefers the latter as they make for good pencil rubs when something etched into a wall needs copied.

The pad's damp-ish but serviceable enough for him to jot down a note or two. His exhausted mind will never remember all the details of anything he reads here so that little notepad might be full by the time he leaves.

One can only hope the real one has the notes jotted once he gets back to that one.

Abandoned Host: Malakaite. Doesn't that sound like fun reading. Thing is, it normally would be for John. Today it's just a task he needs to get through between eating and drinking only when he can't go without any longer - everything's dull and tasteless even when it's not actually. Just get through it. He doesn't even know to what end anymore other than it's something started that needs finishing.

Hela has posed:
Always good for a mage to carry writing material, though it may be something jotted down that ends up in the bog, clotting up the irrigation canal again. Laws are laws, after all, especially when they involve irritated tigrine sphinxes.

Scrapings leave impressions, but the pencil isn't leaving stronng marks. Almost as though the lead cannot make a lasting impression, lightly sketched, letters felt more than seen. They're a mess, sadly, compared to beautiful calligraphy and exceptional penmanship espoused on one scroll or another text. The only thing they seem to have in common is antiquity, or things he's probably never read before.
The Malakaites seem to be some heavenly force in the Silver City he has never heard mention of, and their story, though interesting, doesn't bear any direct information. Unless losing a pissing match with history counts, preserved in their downfall only here. A flip through a page or two or six in the handwritten materials would suggest a monastic origin.

Next, the Laws of the Realms of the Dead is strange for it consists of tablets and scrolls. Then for some reason, a digital tablet that only flips through an app that displays the details. Ancient laws and details seem incomplete in places, whole sections excised. Pages are blank in the book. Scrolls abruptly stop. Whole sections pick up later on.

Laws that define the principles of an ordered universe: The living who in their mortal time express belief shall be ordered according to that belief after perishing. Just as an apple does not cease to be an apple after it falls from the bough, the worshipful of Anubis does not transform after he dies. It is the Oldest Law to send the dead on to their rightful places. The Old Law declares that none shall interfere with the final passage or avert the Sworn from reaching their final threshold. Of course, Powers may swear alliance or claim the solemn duty to see the dead ushered on in the event a Power fails. It is the natural course that deathlords will change. Their duty to Death remains the same...

Another cracked tablet states the simplest of things in a language written by a scribe, convoluted as it twists itself to something legible. Enochian bleeds past in one way or another, or it's the nature of the place to know dead languages.

Why does She permit so many faces? Are they all her masks? A question I asked as I prostrated myself low to the gods and heard no sufficient answer. But it was the will of the Storm Kings in the north to devour their unfaithful neighbours after they fell into corruption and decadence. A mighty wind scythed the rotten crops. None rode forth by chariot or on horseback. Instead a woman wore her propitious sheepskin robe and walked barefoot through the dark fields where had been HE, the GREAT LORD. She held forth her hands and claimed not only those of the loyal Hurrians but also the accursed Hatti.

John Constantine has posed:
Are they just left blank or is something *erasing them*? John tucks that away to think about later. His eyes are heavy, man's never felt more exhausted in his life. He reads and rereads the important bits until his vision blurs and he has to stop and close them, thumb and index fingers pressed into the corners. He might even doze, but if it happens, it's no longer than a few moments before he's up again and paging through more books to see if he can find anything else.

But someone is bending the laws of death. But who. Nyx? Hel? Too tired to think about it. Filed away for later. It's a start though, something to figure out or pass on for someone else to figure out. That sounds better, someone else. So he can just sleep.


Each time he gets up to snatch another book, it's more difficult than the last to just *get up*.

Hela has posed:
Deliberately blank. Subsections may be referenced; ancient law codes aren't exactly clear like modern one. "The decree of the Lady" may reference "Her words of the harvest time" and the Harvest Time Decree is empty after its name. The narrative picks up squarely thereafter, as though spaces were left but not filled for some reason or another.

John can find places to rest. The cats don't bother him, atypically for cats. They sleep on shelves and sit on couches or tables. The birds of paradise sing their odd crows, the sounds strange and eerie, but not so loud or common to wreck the ambiance. He could curl up on a chaise, there are enough. Or lie in the pillows, plump and fat and grey, then drift off for a time. Who would know? What would it matter if time is not a construct here?

Primarchs and the Servants of Death. The book his fingers alight upon is practically tattered, falling apart. The contents span wild names, references barely printed and others grooved deeply. Who is the Hatti god of the dead, taken over by Lelwani? A name lost to time. Other names are obscure, a calvacade from dead cultures the world round. There are names for Aborigine gods and Indigeneous tribes in the Americas who never survived conquest. There are Olmecs and people of the Harappa culture, some who probably originate before agriculture ever took hold. There are survivors to the modern day, Baron Samedi on the last pages.

The Court of Death has several blank entries. There are entries crossed out.

Mictlantecuhtli. Apep. Baron Samedi. Thanatos. Yama.

And their fates, too, scribbled in detail.

Destroyed by Blackbolt Boltagon of the city of Attilan, monarch of the Inhuman peoples.
Slaughtered by Set of the Ennead.

Slain by Mictlantecuhtli.
Power claimed by Arawn, aided by the Sorcerer Supreme.
Slain by Arawn.

Other names: Ta'xet, ripped apart by Sedna.
Weles, struck down by Marzanna and Pluto.
Sidapa, devoured by Apep.
Supay, slain by Vichama.
Barastyr, Asto-widhatu, Inshushinak: names taken by Ereshkigal.

John Constantine has posed:
...and he knows who aided Set, had a front row for that one, literally. John subconsciously rubs his palm where that mark was, might still be fading. How long ago was that? If feels like forever, it's only been a few weeks. If there's any connection; any pattern to any of it, he doesn't see it yet. Just death Gods killing other death Gods, but names are another thing he can research later.

He never dozes longer than a few moments here and there.

Who's *left* on the Court. It's the information John looks for next, if it's to be found. Seems Ereshkigal was a greedy bitch, dunnit? Whole sheepskin thing doesn't fit, but he tosses the name on the 'list of suspects' anyway. Not to mention that the name sets off twenty kinds of alarm bells. Why does *everything* have to be connected to *him* in some way, every fucking time.

Hela has posed:
How long ago indeed? Days? Not even a week? Hardly a consequential span in the life of a man at that fabled age when messiahs and rock stars often die. A couple days. A week. Nothing compared to millennia spent in what kind of ruinous escapades, power games clinched for millions or billions of years.

Time is all relative when you are a god. Or dead.

Powers slip off the map. Entities no longer hold sway. The eternal is eternal but not changeless, not always.

He might consider pieces to a puzzle. An empire of the dead in France rises under its Gallo-Welsh overlord. The Asian-spanning empire of the many faces of Yama, reduced to silence by Corinthian columns and proud trees. The Slavic battleground, no longer a draw. Roman risen, one Greek fallen. A demon dance that ends in tears. A dragon who reports the dread Izanami in the House of Windowless Rooms has shut her doors, barred the entrance, and her mad servants deny the lesser kami entrance. A wicked serpent trying to devour Tyrean residents, staked to the dead. Back, back, back.

The stories are penned in blood and time, lines stained by soot or the moths. Water marks from being entombed in the sea or devoured by floods mark everything preserved in fine detail. Some is simply excised, banished in a crumpled act of wanton ruin. Crumbled tablets, time-eaten inscriptions, and all never withstood the grinding gears of civilisation can be found here.

John is sure to realize what may be missing. That which hasn't been destroyed or lost. That which never vanished from the world by certain acts is not to be found. Some points appear between the lines, mentions of Sedna, Ereshkigal, Set. Many suggestions that have nothing to do with him at all. Names struck from the Court of Death may be known, but the incomplete holes in the Great Laws, the Court composition, or ongoing tales still being told by living souls and vibrant minds? No claim made by the House of Wisdom there stands, for that knowledge is not for here. Not for him.

John Constantine has posed:
John's not that much of a narcissist. It's the connection to the *him* that the Laughing Magician dare not even thing the name that set off the alarm bells. Is Ereshkigal's involvement why he's heard nothing from *him* about a deal offered in the heat of the moment, screamed in the streets?

Retaining it all at this point is difficult enough, something he's trying to do even as he jots his notes. Processing will have to come later and, perhaps, by someone else. ...because he really just wants to sleep. How. Why. Hints to Who. It all rather leads to the how to stop it, dunnit? Figure the who from the clues and go on the offensive rather than the defensive? Still, it's worth a shot since he's here, to pour through pages to find a possible alternative solution.

What if Samedi could be brought back somehow. The Loa bound again. If a mere mortal man can come back from the dead, why not a fucking God?

He files that away for later. ...and looks for other possibilities. If they're not found, he moves on to 'where the fuck is Strange', because as important as the rest of it might be, that's just as in his mind. Stephen... didn't deserve whatever it is that's happened to him.

Hela has posed:
Sleep. Sleep, the nourishment for the soul as much as the blessed coffee -- smelling freshly roasted, poured out in quantity -- is for the body, and those plates of greasy meats or scrumptious breads could be for the belly. Sleep deserves to be sought.

The winks of shut-eye on the Night Bus surely cannot be enough to sustain an exhausted self, the soul ground down to the deep, imploring urgency to fade into rest for a time. No longer to dig through the lost lore from ages past, but to curl up and finally, utterly rest.

Even his body cannot hold out eternally. Even John Constantine has limits. He finds them so often by bashing into walls and crashing past care, but limits all the same. Eat. Sleep. Void. They all boil down to that in the end, sundry other advantages still needed: spot of contact, dash of laughter, bit of affection.

In his coarse fumblings to loosen details, no information exists of Stephen Strange's whereabouts. His name by title has come up now or then, but the pertinent inquiries that take laborious efforts to acquire do not enlighten the mage any more. That, it would seem, is wisdom the House chooses to refrain. Maybe she's a sister to his bloody pile of sticks and shares some opinions about the judicious abuse the Mysteries put up with.

A fluttering page lands at his feet before sleep snarls him. A picture of a river in flood past a city in its circular wall, that terrible sense of perspective before the Renaissance hit fully in play. Reeds bend in the water stained black by ink and loss. A book grows from the papyri shoots. Leaves resemble hands, the slope of a shoulder, an outstretched arm. In another, a very small person in a terrible rendition of a child nestles against a golden wheat sheaf resilient to the water.

And then, the sweet oblivion must come, even then.

John Constantine has posed:
The first three are necessities, the last three... they don't even hit his radar right now. John fights it until there's no fight left, head dropping and snapping back up again to try and focus on reading more. Like a sleepy child in a highchair. At least he's not face first in a bowl of spaghetti when he can't fight it any longer. The last thing he sees before sleep takes him is the accusing faces and pointing fingers of his 'victims', particularly those of the friends he's lost, the friends he's ... killed. Murderin' bastard that he is.