2015

The corporate offices of Chemimax were always very busy on Mondays, but on the fortieth floor there was a special anticipation at the beginning of each week; after all, that was the day that Gentry brought in the results of his weekend's labors.

Last week, it had been miniature bakewell tarts, filled to perfection with thick jam and delicately iced; the week before, hand-rolled croissants with a surprisingly bold custard filling ("it is called, I believe, a cornetto," he had smugly informed the curious). But this week, everyone agreed that he had outdone himself; four dozen petite miniature sticky toffee puddings, each containing exactly four quartered dates and mixed with inhuman exactitude to precisely the perfect consistency before being baked to a flawless finish and smothered in a decadent caramel glaze. Marjorie from accounting had nearly passed out upon sampling one ("is she diabetic?" "No, just dramatic") and there was serious concern that the question of who would get to take home the leftovers might come to blows if cooler heads didn't settle it in a timely fashion.

Gentry paid little attention to any of this; for him, it was enough that his work was satisfactory to him. Absent other factors, he would have dumped his excess product in the garbage after a perfunctory sampling, but distributing them along with a light infusion of astral interconnection served the pleasingly elegant twin purposes of reinforcing his presence in the minds of his officemates and of generating compliments, which he had been surprised to discover he had quite a hunger for. He cared nothing for the other employees of the company, of course; they were less than ants to him. But in addition to the solid, meaty gratification of knowing that his plans were almost two years ahead of schedule, he did not begrudge himself bit of pride in his cupcakes and blintzes. He was almost, but not quite, sad that his days of baking were almost at an end; after the ritual, there would be no more need for such things, after all. Still, he had always made a point of enjoying such pleasures as the universe made available for him at any given juncture, and saw no reason to stop now; tomorrow night, everything would be in readiness, and he could ignite the great sign Oghredu and burn this teeming, filthy nest of humanity to ash.

But first, dinner. And possibly a final batch of scones.

Orton brought the boat carefully alongside the ladder and reached out, grasping the rusted iron of the lowest rung; with a grunt of effort, he arrested their momentum, then tied a rapid knot to keep the boat from drifting away and began to climb up onto the island proper. "Careful," he murmured down to Enna, "there's some sharp parts on the right side."

She rolled her eyes, climbing up behind him as he mounted the concrete slab of the ferry terminal; during the day, Liberty Island would have been bustling with tourists, but it was silent as a tomb now. "I have climbed up a rusty ladder in the middle of the night to fight monsters before, you know. One time there was even a ninja."

Orton paused, turning around partway. "You fought a ghost ninja? And you didn't tell me? That's fucking awesome."

"Robot ninja," she sniffed. "Some kind of advanced Agent with no sleeves and camo pants." She dusted herself off and shrugged. "You'd have been disappointed with the fight. He tried to jump-kick me, found out that it's impossible to dodge lightning, and then exploded."

Orton sighed. "The youth these days. No sense of style." Turning back, he surveyed the area, grimacing. "No security guards. That should surprise me, but it doesn't."

"I mean, it's not like anybody's going to try to steal the Statue of Liberty," she pointed out acerbically. "It's a little heavy to pick up and stroll off with."

"What about vandals? What about sabotage?" Orton complained, walking eastwards along the promenade and gesticulating towards the three-hundred-foot-tall statue with annoyance. "It's the symbol of America! There should totally be guards!"

"There probably are, in a sensible universe," Enna said comfortingly. "But I don't think we're in one of those anymore."

Orton sighed, shaking his head sadly. "It's just not the same without physical security. Takes half the fun out of the job." He pulled a large, thick packet from under his coat and opened it, removing a few dozen sheets of thick paper. "Got your talismans?"

Enna nodded, removing a matching sheaf of papers from her messenger bag. She gazed at them bemusedly, tracing the symbols along the top of one with a fingertip. "Still feels weird to have something I know I made, but don't remember making. Servitors are creepy, I'm telling you."

"You could always make them by hand, if you really want to," Orton needled her. "But I seem to recall you saying you didn't like boring drudgework."

"Ugh. Yeah, enslaving an imaginary friend to make my stationery is way better, when you put it that way." She pulled the top sheet off the stack and held it gently between her thumb and forefinger, looking around nervously. "You sure these are gonna work? What if it rains?"

"It won't," Orton assured her, having checked the weather probability lines four times already, "but even if it did, they'd be fine -- the spells we imbued them with will resist water as long as there's a chance to do so, so they'll remain pretty dry unless you accidentally drop them in the bay. All you have to do is toss them in the general direction of any ghost you see, and they'll home in like magnets. It's dope, you're gonna love it."

"Fucking dork." Enna could not stop herself from grinning. "How long have you been waiting to show me your Cool Ghostbuster Spell?"

"A really long time. I keep having to stop myself from making 'squee' noises." Orton reached the end of his chosen path, turned, and looked up the stairs towards the entrance to the base of the Statue of Liberty. "Behold, fair maiden! The entrance to the most haunted location in the New World -- the Statue of Death!"

In Orton and Enna's original timeline, the Statue of Liberty had been an overpriced but otherwise unremarkable tourist attraction; in the particular worldline they now inhabited, however, it was rumored to be a veritable maelstrom of spectral activity (on par with the Winchester Mystery House in Orton's original universe). Enna, despite her bravado, couldn't help but feeling a little trepidation. Sure hope these things work, she thought to herself, crinkling the edges of the talisman between her fingers nervously.

As Orton ascended the stairs and began to make his way into the yawning, cavernous mouth of the pedestal's entryway, twin emerald lights appeared in the darkness; before she could blink, they were racing towards him, a shadowy outline of phosphorescence illuminated by two rotten, gangrenous orbs of light roughly where a human's eyes might be. She blinked, taken aback, then remembered what she was supposed to do; lunging forward, she released her talisman towards the rightmost wraith, half-expecting it to flutter to the ground or be swept by a gust of wind out to sea.

True to Orton's word, however, the strip of paper was pulled inexorably through the air in total defiance of atmospheric physics straight towards the spirit, slamming into it with hammer-like force; the creature shrieked horribly, then winked out like a blown candle. The strip of paper, now mysteriously blank, fluttered to the ground, and she shuddered as she pulled out her next talisman. "Why do I suddenly feel like we didn't bring enough of these things?"

Orton shook his head, making short work of the left-hand wraith with his own talisman -- this sort of thing was very, very old hat to him. "We made like, fifty. There's no way there's that many of them here."

"They don't seem very dangerous," commented Enna, trailing behind him as he made his way swiftly towards the deeper recesses of the pedestal fortress. "Can they actually even hurt us without physical bodies?"

"Oh, definitely," replied Orton, taking out another two wraiths as they crossed the vaulted main hall towards the stairs. "If they touch you, they'll stop your heart, and that can obviously be pretty fatal. Most warding charms won't stop it, either."

"How do they do that?" asked Enna, nervously banishing a fifth one that had been attempting to creep up behind her. "Give you a heart attack with fear, or something?"

"Nah, disrupt your pneuma," Orton answered dismissively, taking two more talismans in each hand and obliterating four wraiths at once as he began to mount the stairs up into the statue proper. "Physically it manifests as making your heart's electrical system shit itself, but that's just the effect. The root cause is them literally ripping out your life force, so I imagine it doesn't feel very good."

"Most ways to die probably don't feel very good," Enna growled, quick-stepping up the stairs as more glowing green pairs of eyes appeared in the darkness behind them. "Jesus, how many of these are there?"

Orton winced as he saw the pack of angry, vengeful dead coming up behind them. "Um, good question. You may have been right about not having enough talismans." Risking a few seconds of unguarded concentration, he conjured a barrier across the bottom of the steps and interwove it with gleaming strands of power; the wraiths tried to pass through, then recoiled with soundless howls as the vital energies scorched their fleshless fingers. "I guess we should hurry up."

The two of them dashed up the stairs, breathing easily despite the exertion; Orton had prepared draughts of Elephant's Endurance earlier, knowing that there was no elevator to the top (and wouldn't have trusted it anyway if there had been one). At first, the climb was relatively quiet other than their pounding footsteps, but it wasn't long before the darkness of the stairs below was swarming with more will-o-wisps of dead men's stares. Orton groaned. "Shit. I forgot... the other stairwell... joins up with this one... at the base."

"I thought wizards were... supposed to be smart," grunted Enna, rounding another flight of stairs. Looking down at the swarm, she executed a quick count, did some mental math, then dumped her entire armload of talismans over the railing; the paper sheets plummeted with unseemly and unerring haste and precision (respectively) and took out nearly three-quarters of the remaining wraiths, but several more still pursued them (and were gaining quite rapidly since they didn't have to actually climb the stairs). She sighed, despite her exertion. "If we die here... I'm giving you a bad review... in the afterlife. Didn't you try to... divine how many... we'd be up against?"

"I tried," gasped Orton, destroying three more wraiths that appeared out of the walls around him, "but divinations... aren't good at specific headcounts." He traced the rune he'd used against the revenants back on his first day in this timeline, sending a pulse of extropic energy outwards in every direction; more shrieks erupted from both above and below, and he cursed. "Crap. They're... surrounding us."

The wraiths, now numbering nearly a hundred, swarmed them from both directions; Orton quickly ran out of talismans and had to summon an idealization of the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi to hew through the wraiths, while Enna protected their rear with bolts of pure vajra energy, blasting enormous holes through the screeching spirits as they swarmed with single-minded killing intent towards the intruders. The running battle lasted many minutes, and it was only the preparation of Orton's alchemical draughts that enabled them to keep fighting.

Still, though the legions of the undead were vast, they were not limitless; and, sometime around the sixteenth or seventeenth floors, they began to thin out. By the time they reached the twentieth floor (where the paths to the crown and the torch diverged), only a dozen or so wraiths remained; but these were the hardiest and most crafty of their number, with powers of their own, and the battle became more fraught as Orton and Enna blasted through the ghosts' upper guard and cast what wards and spells they could against the cold green lash of spectral flames and lightning from their pursuers.

Halfway up the arm, they swapped positions; Orton took the vanguard against the ascending wraiths, slaying John William James, the Tainted Colonel, in single combat while Enna wove a web of spiraling, hypnotizing mist to distract Robert the Blind Warlock at the crucial moment before his Gaze of Poisonous Mortality could eat through Orton's protections. Soon, only one wraith remained.

Benjamin Alford Bluecoat, the greatest and most fearsome of the patriots who had volunteered to be entombed as unliving guardians of America's most secret occult treasure, was no mean opponent; he fought Orton to a standstill with swift, vicious strokes of his spectral sword and cleaved Enna's most powerful sorceries out of the air with slashes of ghostly power or words of fearsome condemnation, and was generally a big immortal undead pain in the ass. Try as they might, they could not destroy him, for such was the bottomless well of faith and power that animated him that he shrugged off even their most powerful attacks. Finally, Orton ran out of patience and imprisoned him in the Clepsydral Cavortation, knowing they'd be long done with their business here by the time the spirit escaped. Wearily, the two of them climbed the last few steps into the torch platform, panting for breath; Orton collapsed on the floor of the observation deck, feeling very persecuted. "Jesus Christ. Didn't anybody ever... tell this guy... we're the heroes, here?"

"We are? I thought we were... hobo warlocks." Enna put her back to the room's huge central pillar and sank down into a seated position, pulling a bottle of water out of her bag and gulping it down. "Besides... putting America... above saving the world... is pretty American." She hurled the bottle away and listened to it bounce down the stairs with grim satisfaction.

The two of them rested for a few moments, then Orton expended a fraction more of his power to help them recover; it was a risk, but he knew they didn't have time to recuperate naturally here. He tried to open one of the observation deck's windows, but they were (very sensibly) bolted shut to prevent unfortunate accidents; he cursed, then kicked it out, sending shards of glass plummeting down towards the harbor hundreds of feet below. "Okay. This next part is going to suck."

Enna pulled the length of rope out of her bag, tied it off around the pillar, and braced herself on either side of the broken window; despite herself, she kept glancing towards the stairwell. "Yeah, well, suck faster. Let's not be here when that guy catches up to us."

Orton groaned, wriggled (carefully) through the broken window, and began the arduous free-climb to the top of the torch, winding the rope around each anchor point he passed as he went. He slipped several times, but each time Enna's rope kept him from falling too far (although he couldn't stop himself from adding a small amount of tensile strength to the rope magically each time; trust only went so far, after all). But, eventually, he reached his destination, and scrambled back down to the observation deck with his prize clutched in sweaty, trembling hands. God help us all if I drop it now, he thought to himself grimly as he slowly and carefully made his way back through the broken window.

Inside, Enna was staring out over the harbor towards the glittering lights of the metropolis; they were facing north, looking out onto New York City at last. "That's a heck of an aura -- it's almost like the whole city is cursed. Is that because it's such a crap-hole, or because of what Gentry's done?"

Orton sighed, moving up next to her as he gingerly unwrapped the object he'd taken from the hidden compartment at the tip of the torch. "Hate to break it to you, but that's not Gentry's work. That's Gentry. His aura is thirty miles across."

Enna blinked. "Jesus fuck. And we're really gonna defeat him? Just us, without Jiann?" She clutched her hands over her heart, twisting her shirt with despair. "Even if we did have him... it sounds impossible."

"Under normal circumstances, maybe." Orton pulled the bright leaf-shaped steel blade out of its wrapping, and held it aloft. "But not with this."

The head of the Spear of Destiny, hidden in the Allies' most secure and secret hiding place by George S. Patton upon his return from defeating Adolf Hitler, shone brilliantly in the silvery moonlight. With unimpeachable clarity, Orton could see everything in the city ahead of him: every sure step, every easily-avoided threat, and every strike that would be needed to cut through every one of Gentry's defenses, right down to the time and place that they could stop him. Orton's eyes glowed brightly. "Ohhh yeah, that's the stuff. Now we have a shot."