Carrot and Stick - Chapter XXII (Patreon)

Chapter XXII

She reunited with Mister Silas after taking a brisk walk to the north and then jobbing back. The moving helped to keep her warm, and it was nice to just walk for a while. It let her work through some things in her head. 

Mostly, she was just happy that she’d made so many new friends lately. Winter holidays were kind of hard on her. She had a lot of friends at school, but they were always... school friends? Even if she really liked a lot of them and hung out when she could, when vacations arrived it was hard to keep in touch.

A few called, and she made sure to send funny texts when she could, but it was hard. Some friends left to visit family, or went on vacation, and while she had her mom, she was feeling a little lonely.

Mister Silas waved lazily at her. He was a weird guy, but she was fond of him all the same, even if it looked like he could use a shave and maybe six to ten more hours of sleep. She wasn’t convinced that that wasn’t just how he looked. 

“I’m back!” she declared, even if it wasn’t needed.

“I see that,” he replied before he stared off into the sky. “The one I placed was closer. By a fair bit. I think we have a direction now.”

“Oh?” she asked, then she moved up to her toes to see the map that he pulled out. He had already added a few lines to it. 

“Based on the points we have and the range... I made a rough extrapolation of the direction--that was the easy part--and the relative strength of the daemonic energy. The main issue is that I don’t have a good idea of how much energy an actual, active daemon would put out. We might over shoot and end up having to backtrack because I assumed it was far more powerful than it is, or we might undershoot. It could just be far from the city in that general direction.”

He gestured in what she thought might be the south-west, but she wasn’t sure. “We can wander that way, at least? You still have that little detector, right?”

“That will help, yes,” he said. “I’m mostly surprised that we found anything at all, really.”

They did just that, heading out and following the road, with the occasional stop for Mister Silas to check the ambient magical energy levels and a few more stops for him to add more to his map.

After forty minutes of walking around they ended up pretty far out of the centre of the city, but Mister Silas seemed pretty excited, and a little worried. “These levels are high, but we’re walking back into an area with lower levels.”

“So we’re past the, uh, middle of the magic?”

“The epicenter,” he confirmed. “Now that I have that, I think I can pinpoint the location, at least to within a block or so.”

He did just that, scribbling on his map and using her back as a board for a moment. Then they were off again.

Carrot had a pretty good idea of which building the daemon was in the moment they were on the right street. “Well, it’s obviously that one,” she said, pointing.

The building looked pretty normal. It was an older brick red building, some sort of old factory with the name painted up on the side and brushed off by decades of rain and weathering, but there was a large, simple drawing of a fish left, likely some old logo. The windows were boarded up, and there wasn’t much light within, but she didn’t need light to know that the place was capital-E Evil. 

“You think?” Silas asked. He pointed his device that way, and it buzzed a little. “The readings are pretty high, but....”

“I’m pretty sure,” Carrot said. “The place is oozing bad vibes.” She could feel it, like catching the smell of a fart in an elevator when there was only one other person in it. The entire space around the building had a shimmery haze in the magic around it. 

It was far too similar to the kind of wavery affect she saw whenever she used Rite of Dark Purification. 

They crossed the road, then wandered closer. Silas coughed and covered his face. “Oh, that’s vile,” he said.

“Yeah,” Carrot agreed. She breathed in deep through her nose, but there wasn’t actually a smell. It was all in her magic. “What do you call it when you feel a thing but it’s from the wrong sense? Like smelling colours?”

“Synesthesia,” Silas said. “And don’t worry, that’s quite common for magic-sensitive people. It’s even one of the tests to see if a child has potential. Urgh, this place reeks.”

Carrot nodded. The stink was pretty bad, but... well, it was just stinky. She could deal with it, even if it wasn’t pleasant. She’d definitely take a long bath once she got home, though.

“Let’s go in? I think it would be breaking and entering, but it also looks kind of abandoned.” And she didn’t know how to get into contact with the owners to ask for permission in the first place.

The front doors were shut and barred, with a chain running across them with a big padlock in the middle, all covered in a layer of crusty old rust, but there was a side entrance that was very clearly left just a little bit opened.

“Wait,” Silas said. He tucked his magic scanning device away, then stared to pat his coat down, checking where a few things were. “We might be ambushed once within.”

Carrot nodded, then looked up as something caught her eye. A seagull? The bird had a dead fish in its mouth. It flapped around, then landed on the roof above and then hopped in through an opened window with a wooden plank sticking a little ways out. The bird hadn’t seemed daemonic to her eyes, or her senses, but she couldn’t be sure.

Silas pulled out a small wand, and she found herself staring at that instead. “Is that a magic wand?”

“It’s a focus,” he said. “And a very cheap one, at that.”

“Neat! Can I try it?”

“No. You’d blow it up.”

She pouted, but after his hat had grown fifteen sizes, she wasn’t sure he was wrong, and not breaking a friend’s toy was like friendship 101. 

Silas moved up, then slowly snuck the door open. “It’s clear,” he muttered. “Do you want to do this? There’s no shame in wanting to avoid something that could be dangerous.”

“I think there actually might be some shame in that,” Carrot said. “If you have the power to help, then you should, right?”

Silas locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded. “I suppose so. Stay behind me, I don’t think you’ve mastered Shield yet.”

She pouted at that, but he wasn’t wrong. She was still perfecting that one. So, she followed when Silas stepped into the factory. Within, she was hit by a real smell. Trash and rotting fish. It wasn’t overpowering, but it was pretty strong.

There were several large machines a little further in, and lots of crates stacked up on heavy-duty shelving units. Carrot tugged her hat lower and walked with a bit of a hunch, following Silas’ example as he snuck around some of the taller boxes. The interior wasn’t well lit, but there were some grimey ceiling windows letting in enough light to see by, and there was more from the centre of the space.

Silas gestured for her to lower herself, and she did just that before he leaned forwards and looked around a box. “Damn,” he muttered.

Carrot took off her hat so that it wouldn’t poke out too much, then edged forwards and looked around Silas.

The main space of the room was a relatively wide, open area. There were three large sections. To the far end was a mountain of trash. Dead fish, bits of rotting food, lots of green stuff. There were daemons there. Two that looked like raccoons and a pigeon. Though as far as daemons went, they were definitely on the weaker side. They weren’t much bigger than the animals they had started as, really. It was only the fact that they were working diligently that made it clear that they weren’t normal.

Next to that area was a sort of chemistry space. There was a hopper, a large machine, and a small conveyor belt. 

The daemons were loading trash into the hopper and then turning a big wheel by running in it. The result was a sort of sludge pouring into buckets that were moved over to another machine, then blasted with magic of some sort. Those were carried over to another device and poured out with the results slowly dripping into what she suspected were repurposed beer bottles.

The last section of the room was a throne, or sorts. It was tall, set up on a few pallets and covered in dirty cushions. 

Atop the throne was a daemon. It was a long, slick-furred animal of some sort, with a fully tummy, sitting backwards, with a lit cigar in its mouth and a big ‘3’ tattooed across its face. 

The deamon reached down, picked up a beer bottle, swirled it around, then took a casual chug. “Ahhhh,” it said. Then it looked their way. “Want to come out from hiding, little fishies?”

“I think they know we’re here,” Carrot hissed.

“Yes, I’d noticed as much,” Silas said. “We’ll start with the weaker ones first, then run if we have to?”

“What if we try talking first?” she asked.

He sighed. “I don’t like that.”

“But I do! Hello, Mister Daemon sir!” Carrot said as she straightened and replaced her hat onto her head. “I like your tattoo!”

***