Theraputic Kidnapping II
Note by Rossi: The log that goes with this one posted by Alicia - the Job itself. The portion at the end had a bunch of posts get eaten, which would have required a re-write to fix which pretty much killed the momentum. There is more, but I'd have to search through the locked LJ post to find and compile it.
Originally posted on x_project.
"This isn’t going to work."
"Sure it will," Domino said cheerfully, brushing imaginary lint off Pete’s jacket. "We walk in through the front door just like all the other guests, sneak in, get what we came for, get back out. Piece of cake."
"And we had to crash the fancy party why exactly?" Sarah asked, a scowl on her face. "Why not sneak in the back way? I look fucking ridiculous."
"You look fabulous. We all do." Domino certainly did, in something sparkly and slinky and just this edge of too risqué for a private finishing school teacher. "And sneaking in would be guaranteed to get us caught. The thing about fancy parties is that they’re perfect to hide in. Lots of people, most of whom even the host doesn’t know that well, lots of shiny people to distract attention… You act like you belong there, and no-one questions you at all. Perfect cover. And speaking of which…" She glanced over at Amanda. "How long does this glamour thing of yours last? Wouldn’t do for Cinderella here to turn back into a pumpkin in the middle of the dance floor." She responded to Sarah’s growl with another of those disturbingly cheerful smiles.
"’Bout six hours," Amanda said, inspecting her handiwork. She’d done a bang-up job, if she said so herself – Sarah looked like Sarah, only without the horns and bone armour. An image inducer would have set off the metal detectors at the door and been a tad on the difficult side to explain, but the glamour spell would get them in under the radar – if there was anyone magically adept in the crowd, all they’d get was there was a low-level spell in use, and she was willing to bet if there were any magic users in there, they’d be glamoured anyway. There was a certain amount of vanity amongst practioners, and if you could get away with it, why not? It certainly beat plastic surgery.
"Plenty of time." Domino tucked her arm through Pete’s, gave them all that distressingly cheerful grin. "Let’s go and have some fun shall we?" she said, and lead the way up the steps.
Marie-Ange settled her expression into one that would not have looked out of place on Monet, or Manuel. Utter boredom and a vague sense that she had seen everything here before. It fit the dress. The one she had decided did more to show off an excess of money than any sense of real fashion. Though, the shopping had been fun, if only for listening to Sarah's protestations.
Amanda recognised Marie-Ange's look and grinned a little. She couldn't pull the same thing off herself, but she had other ways and means... Looking up at the butler who was discreetly checking invitations, she giggled most disarmingly, and said, using her generic 'BBC accent': "Oh, I say, this is going to be so much fun! It's been simply an age since we last had any real fun!"
"Dignity, ladies," Domino said, matching Amanda's accent and doing her a little better. "You embarrass me and I'm afraid that some of your favorite privileges will be absent for a truly distressing period of time." She gave the butler a bland smile. "So very tiresome," she confessed to the man, "but they do need some experience in proper society."
Sarah bit her lip in an attempt not to growl at the butler as she passed. She only had to look like she belonged, not like she enjoyed it. Her dress was clinging rather comfortably, though she'd never admit it, and if she didn't think about it, she could pretend she was naked. With the way it was cut, she might as well have been anyway. "You must have forgotten about the zoo last weekend," she remarked dryly, "The tigers were just fascinating."
"Dignity is so overrated," Amanda sighed somewhat dramatically, trailing dutifully after Domino and Pete. She was far more demurely dressed than the other two - well, in terms of actual skin exposed - but the fabric clung to her in a way that left very little to the imagination. She linked her arm through Sarah's, playing the ditzy wealthy Brit to the hilt. "Weren't they just? And weren't the bears just so precious?"
The ruse worked, no-one giving the group more than the expected looks as they cleared the entrance hall and made for the main ballroom.
Marie-Ange looked around the room curiously. The rich and beautiful, she decided, were not terribly beautiful. Some of them were, and she had to admit, some of the younger men were nice to look at, but really, the over-display of wealth was tacky.
At least, she thought it was tacky.
In a display of adjusting with her earrings, a set of what she considered part of the over-display-of-wealth part of fashion, she fiddled with the small earpiece inside the earring. She couldn't help it, she just felt odd to have a tiny little radio right at her ear.
"I feel like I'm in a Bond movie," Amanda confided as they gathered in a quiet corner for a last-minute conference and to catch their figurative breath. The plan was to get in, have Sarah and Pete create a distraction, allosing the other three to slip away to the private study that held the concealed entrance to the strongroom. "An' Sarah looks the part - right smashin' Bond girl you are in that get-up, mate."
"Enough fun and games - time enough for that later," Pete said, cutting off any retort from Sarah. He exchanged loos with Domino, who'd gone quiet. "Change of plans then?"
"Wot?" Amanda asked, startled, echoed by Marie-Ange's puzzled frown.
"I do not understand," the French girl began.
"Psi-blockers," Domino clarified. "On the front door, and probably covering the way to the strongroom. My power's out."
"Then how will we find our way through this maze?" Marie-Ange asked, then glanced at her roommate. "Perhaps a spell...?"
"The only location spell I got down only works on people, not things," Amanda replied, a little apologetically. "An' then I have t' have somethin' of theirs t' focus on. If this was Asgard, no problem, but here... I ain't good enough yet."
Well, Pete -had- mentioned this was supposed to be another practical exam. "I can do it." Sarah rolled her eyes at a skeptical look or two from within the group, and continued, "I lived underground for a while. If anybody's gonna be able to navigate down here, it's not going to be the uplanders. Fucking Bond girl to the rescue."
"Mind your language, dear," Domino said in a sotto voce snarl, smile still plastered on her face. Oh, how she hated psi-blockers. Made the whole world feel off-balance when her powers were out. Pete was looking at her in that way that meant he damned well knew that, too. "Improvisation it is, I suppose. Remember we're on a timeframe here."
Marie-Ange grimaced briefly, then returned to her bland expression of boredom. Improvising made her -nervous-. Sarah made her nervous. Following Sarah in an improvised plan in a maze made her -very- nervous.
"I -said- I can fucking do it," Sarah growled back, voice dropped to barely a whisper. She was getting sick of this situation real quick-like. She didn't like parties, she didn't like dresses, and she certainly didn't like pretty uplanders acting like she was the last resort to be used only in fucking emergencies. "You don't like it, you can stay here and enjoy the party. Yeah?"
It was a good thing Pete had a very firm grip on her arm, or Domino would probably have blown the job right then and there by leaping at Sarah and attempting to throttle the brat in full view of all the party guests. "Then mingle, darlings," she said with that too-cheery smile. "And remember what I said about what to do in case of fire. Safety first!"
Amanda took Sarah's arm and prepared to steer her away from Domino. The snapping wasn't a good thing. At all. "We'll be fine, Miss!" she chirped in that scary, cheerful way, before tilting her head at Marie-Ange enquiringly. "How about we see what this party has to offer, hmm?" she suggested. "Let the old fogeys do their thing?" She winked at the fuming Domino - she was so going to die for that later.
Marie-Ange smiled brightly and nodded. "Maybe!" she chirped back. "We can find some cute boy, or boys! Because really, that would be so very on." She made a mental note to first, never tell Doug about any of this, and second, to be very, very cranky for a day to make up for the saccirine sweetness she was projecting. She could feel her brain cells dying by the moment. "Can we get this done before I feel the need to kill myself?" She said, pitched so that only Amanda and Sarah could hear her. "I feel .. dirty acting this much like Monet."
"You an' me both, Frenchie," Amanda muttered, watching Pete and Domino head over towards the buffet table for the 'distraction'. Which turned out to be Domino somehow getting entangled with a passing waiter's feet, and the poor man falling headlong among the canapes. "An' here we go." Sarah in the lead, the three girls quietly slipped away into an ante-room, and from there into a hallway and an office, while everyone's attention was on the spectacle of Pete trying to help up the waiter and somehow managing to tip the man into the punchbowl instead.
The office was like the rest of the mansion they'd seen so far, opulent and just a bit ostentatious. Lots of shiny objects that practically shouted how expensive they were, thick carpet on the floor, and was that gold leaf on the walls? Marie-Ange nudged the gaping Amanda towards the rather unassuming door Sarah was already picking the lock of. "Hey, thought it was my turn for the break an' enter," Amanda objected, pouting a little, but with a mischievous glint in her eyes. She was having the time of her life.
"Sorry trouble. You can have the next one." she pushed the door open, revealing a hallway lit only by dim emergency lights sitting on the floor every fifteen feet or so. The one overhead light they could see remained dark. "Ugh. A little more light would be nice. Otherwise we're holding hands and doing this the hard way."
"Let me check..." Amanda stepped forward, closed her eyes, 'feeling' for any trace of enchantment or wards on the hallway. "Nothin' t' trip if I get us some light," she said after a moment. "Tho' the wards on the strongroom are pretty heavy." A flicker of doubt crossed her face but she pushed it away. She'd find out whether she was up to it when she got there. "C'mon, George, out you come," she instructed, snapping her fingers and generating the little ball of werelight. "That enough?" she asked Sarah, glancing at the Morlock, George bouncing over to dance around Sarah's head like an inquisitive puppy.
Sarah watched the light with a raised eyebrow, and it took all she had not to instinctually swat the thing away. "I don't need it for me, my eyes are pretty good in the dark. But we'll move faster if we can -all- walk without tripping over ourselves. So can you all see well enough?"
"Oui." Marie-Ange said, after having paused to slip off her shoes. "Though I will move faster with these off." Someday, she noted, she would have to find out who invented high heels and remember to hit them with something heavy.
"Off we go then!" Amanda said cheerily, in a tone that was far too like Domino's for comfort. George stopped buzzing around Sarah's head at her signal, and the Morlock blinked a few times to clear her vision of fuzzy spots before stepping into the hall. Amanda followed, and then Marie-Ange, pausing to close the door behind them.
It wasn't long before they reached the first fork in the hallway, and Sarah took a moment to peer down both ways before shrugging. "Anybody violently opposed to going left? It goes down farther than the right."
Marie-Ange shrugged. "Left is just as good as right to me." She pondered, for a moment, seeing if she could reproduce the instant-precognition that her power had been reduced to in Asgard, and then decided that maybe, a migraine right now would be a very bad idea. A very, very bad idea.
"Yer the boss, mate," Amanda said. She noticed Marie-Ange's moment of thought, and shook her head. "Save yer brain for the switch, roomie. Wouldn't do t' knock yerself out of the runnin' this early. Might need a wall or two later."
"Holy fuck but that's scary," Sarah remarked dryly, referring to her being the boss. She lead them down the hallway to the left. Three turns later (left, left, and right just to make it interesting), there was a door. "I think we're here. Looks imposing enough to be a storeroom for expensive things."
Amanda lay her hand on the door, and there was a brief shimmer, like a heat haze. "Unless they're keepin' cleanin' supplies behind a warded door, I'd say yer right." She closed her eyes, focussing on the spell warding the door. "Hmm. Tricky."
Marie-Ange watched quietly, trying not to fidget. Her hand kept darting to the tiny handbag on the strap at her wrist, and the Polaroid photo within. "Amanda? If we get dancing brooms and mops, I am never going to let you forget it." She should have -never- watched Fantasia with the smaller children.
"Shush. No mops. No talkin' mice, either." Eyes still closed, Amanda 'felt' her way through the spell, drawing on the training she'd gotten in Asgard. There she'd had the raw power to just smash her way through things like this, but Earth was another matter. The amulet on its chain around her neck began to glow blue as she started whispering a counter spell, concentrating on unravelling the wards without setting off any mystical alarms. The power she needed meant she couldn't sustain the werelight, and it disappeared. The light from Amanda's amulet cast weird shadows in the darkness.
Sarah waited, foot tapping softly against the floor. It took a moment before her eyes to adjust to the even darker hallway without the werelight, and finally she could make out the rivets and grooves on the door again, though just barely. She glanced back at Amanda. "Got it?"
"Just... about... There." When Amanda stepped back, wiping a little sweat from her forehead, there wasn't any change in the door, except the haze was gone when she ran her fingers over it. Snapping her fingers to summon George back, Amanda used the werelight to examine the lock. "Someone got a hairpin? Ah, lovely..." Taking the offered hairpin from Marie-Ange, Amanda stuck it in the lock and wriggled it apparently randomly. There was a click, and the door handle turned.
"I must have been absent from class the day they taught picking locks," Marie-Ange said dryly. "It seems everyone knows how to do it but I."
"Part of the livin' on the streets thing. There's a showbag they give you - 's got a blanket, a hat for people t' toss coins into when yer beggin', an' 'Breakin' and Enterin' for Dummies'," Amanda explained with a grin, handing back the rather bent hairpin. She pushed the door open cautiously, sending George in before her. When nothing went 'boom' or started shrieking at a high pitch, she followed, stopping not far inside. "Oooh. Shiny," she breathed.
Marie-Ange was perhaps a half-step behind Amanda, an almost catlike smile on her face. "Now would be one of those times when Doug would quote a television show. " she said, trying not to snicker. "I would, except I cannot remember any of those clever little things people on television say." She shrugged, and pulled a Polaroid photograph out of her handbag. "After all the practice, I imagine if I get this wrong, I will be terribly embarrassed." Glancing over her shoulder, she waved with a free hand to Sarah. "When I say 'go', grab the pretty .. whatever that is. I think we should do this quickly, yes?"
Sarah nodded. "Ready, set and all that. Let's get this over with so I can get out of this dress."
"Need help with that?" Amanda asked innocently, still mesmerised by the sheer amount of shiny stuff in here. There was also the tell-tale tingle of mystic energy, emanating not only from the ornate Grail-like chalice they'd been sent to retrieve, but from various other objects. No wonder the wards had been so strong...
Marie-Ange covered her eyes with one hand, sighing dramatically. "Perhaps less trying to get Sarah out of her dress, and more stealing?" Then, she giggled. Saying that was far too silly, and she couldn't maintain the loftily offended tone she'd originally intended to say it with. "Besides, Doug is not here, and I would feel left out."
"That's the point. Ours aren't here either." Sarah joked, grinning lazily. "Got to keep ourselves occupied somehow." She waited expectantly for a moment. "Readygo?"
Pete very carefully didn't swear when he clocked Anastasiou leaving the party. It wasn't what people expected of schoolteachers. His eyes flickered over to Domino, surrounded by a small crowd of men, and caught her nod. He turned back to the woman that'd been talking at him for the last fifteen minutes.
"Sorry, you'll have to excuse me. I think that crowd of young men need rescuing from my colleague, before things get out of hand. She's got this condition, you see, and if she forgets to take her medication..."
He stepped away before the woman would respond, clicking on his mic to talk to the girls downstairs.
"Heads up, children. Anastasiou just left the party, probably heading your way. Time to be away on our toes."
Marie-Ange glanced at the cup, and then down at her picture, and then back at the cup. "Go." - and as Sarah lifted the cup, its duplicate faded into place, just as solid and stupidly ornate as the original. Then Marie-Ange stuffed the picture in her bag, and let out the breath she'd been holding.
"Well done," Amanda said, grinning. "I'll just let Pete know we're goo..." Then she frowned, listening to the tiny earpiece. "Oh, bugger. Looks like we're about t' get company. Seems like Scrooge is comin' down t' gloat over his pretties." She glanced at the replica. "That should fool him enough for us t' get clear without hassle, an' I can put the wards back up, but we'd better scarper now. Lay low in one of those other passages, wait for him t' go past, an' then do a runner."
Marie-Ange scrutinized the cup in Sarah's hands, and then her own tiny handbag, Sarah's almost equally tiny dress, and Amanda's gown. "I hope that Domino has somewhere to put this, because I do not think they are going to believe that we got it as a door prize." She backed out of the room, and waited, trying not to pace as Amanda reset the wards.
"I'm going to wear it as a hat. Dom can't be the only one on this trip with a stupid hat." Sarah gave the chalice another once-over, and looked back at the other girls. "Do you trust me to get you through here without an extra light? As friendly as it was, I'm pretty sure that'll give us away."
Amanda stepped back from the door, panting a little at the effort of re-warding it, but still with that 'I'm having way too much fun' grin on her face. "I trust you," she said, her tone definite. "George has had his fun for the night."
Marie-Ange nodded. "I am fine. I ... " She paused, considering her words. "Yes, I trust you."
"Right then," Sarah lowered her voice as she closed her eyes for a moment to get used to the low light of the hallway. "Stay close, and I'll see about getting us the fuck out of here."
Amanda tucked her amulet under her dress, hoping the material would cover any residual glow as she recharged, and cancelled the werelight spell, plunging them into dimness. She reached over and grabbed Marie-Ange's hand, the same as she would (and did, frequently) in a club so she wouldn't lose her. Her other hand she rested lightly on Sarah's shoulder, not impeding the Morlock's movement, but keeping in touch so they wouldn't get separated. "After you," she said.
Low voices and footfalls ahead of them halted their slow, careful progress after a few minutes, and Sarah ducked into a side hallway, a dead end created to confuse people. Not her - she had a near-perfect memory of where they'd already come, and the almost-darkness wasn't bothering her. Light glimmered at the mouth of the cul de sac, and they dropped back further into the shadows, Amanda bringing to mind the cloaking spell, if they needed it - it was fairly intensive and wouldn't last long, and afterwards she'd be useless for any other magic, on top of the warding. A short, darkly-tanned elderly man, seemingly as round as he was tall and his face dominated by an enormous beak of a nose walked past without so much as a glance in their direction. The two obvious bodyguards with him were another matter, looking around them intently, but didn't see the three would-be thieves in their hiding place.
A very vexing and annoying tickle was starting to itch inside Marie-Ange's sinuses, and she was making truly ridiculous faces, trying not to sneeze. Her eyelids twitched shut for a moment, and then the tickle passed, and then her eyes snapped back open. "Merde." She whispered. "There is a problem..."
"I don't like hearing that," came the low growl from where Sarah stood beside them. "What's wrong?
"I .. think someone just made my image go away..." Marie-Ange whispered. "I cannot feel it there any more."
"Terrific." Just fucking super. Sarah watched as the guards hurried down the hallway towards the room they had just vacated, at the strangled sound of horror the elderly man had made. "We're going. Now." She reached out a hand to nudge them forward. If they left now, -maybe- they'd be able to get out unnoticed.
"Don't need t' tell me twice." Amanda glanced back over her shoulder towards the strongroom, and heard an extremely agitated torrent of Turkish "What d'you think? Psi-blocker on the old geezer? That'd fuck with Angie's powers, I reckon."
"I don't think now is the best time to discuss it," Marie-Ange said, pushing Amanda slightly to get her going. Even as she did, there was a shout behind them, and running footsteps. They'd been seen. "Oh, merde." She was using that word a lot tonight.
"Somehow I think yer right," Amanda agreed. "Sarah, you can't slow 'em down a bit, in a nice, non-lethal way? Somethin' that'll heal up eventually?"
"Pete, Dom, we've got a bit of a problem here..." Amanda was saying into the microphone cunningly disguised as a rather garishly expensive bracelet on her wrist as Sarah was occupied with the guards. The old man had come up behind the guards, and was saying what she presumed were some very bad words in Turkish about their morality. "I think we can expect a welcomin' committee," she said, listening to Pete's reply. "Looks like the old bloke here has a personal alarm." There wasn't time to say much else, as Sarah grabbed her hand and started dragging her after Marie-Ange, who, having ditched her shoes already, was in much better condition to actually run.
