Mist of Shadows

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 10

Hermione gave Scarlet an uneasy look as they headed back towards the tower after turning in their quest to collect the gnomes. "What makes you think I can even do a cartwheel?"

"Because it's easy," Scarlet replied cheerfully.

"Prove it," Neville replied, unwilling to admit that he only had a vague idea what a cartwheel was.

"That might not…" Hermione trailed off as Scarlet leaned sideways, raised her hands and threw herself sideways, causing her dress to fall down when she...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 9

"Are we going to help?" Hermione asked as she scanned the well maintained green that reminded her more of a golf course on a sunny day than a battle site where a small army of brightly painted mechanical garden gnomes with miniature cattle prods were fighting against a large army of one foot tall naked humanoids with almost comically large heads for the size of their bodies and tiny knives.

"The animated toys seem to have it under control," Neville said thoughtfully, not seeing a reason...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 8

Hermione looked up from her notes when her mother walked back into the living room. "Is something wrong?"

"I'm afraid I have to cancel our second trip to the alley," Sarah admitted. "I need to head into work because one of our patients slipped on his skateboard and hit a railing with his teeth and your grandmother has her monthly bridge tournament that she'll whine about if your father and I miss it."

"Can I go with Myst and Scarlet?" Hermione asked hopefully, wanting some extra b...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 7

An: I want to give an extra thank you to Dogbertcarroll for helping clean up a number of glitchy sections and make sure certain characters were as amusing as they were supposed to be.  

Myst grinned when he woke up from a weird dream about goblin bankers chasing him to pay a bunch of convoluted fees and saw Scarlet sprawled on the other half of the bed, wearing just a long white t-shirt, reading one of the text books looking a bit like a kid in a candy store with birthday money...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 6

Scarlet pulled her attention off the teenager with pink hair that was eating an ice cream cone at another table and focused on the letter Myst was carefully copying to parchment. "Writing an acceptance letter shouldn't take this long."

"I haven't used a fountain pen in years, quills are worse," Myst complained, not looking up from the letter he was writing to Amelia and Moody, mostly because his penmanship had a nasty tendency to get unreadable or at least close to it if he hurried whil...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 5

"I'm running out of mana!" Scarlet shouted, trying to be heard over the goblin's screams of vengeance and rage as a massive goblin led the charge up the ramp towards where she was standing.

"Don't worry!" Myst shouted as he mentally combined the fire and wall runes. 'This better work,' he thought, doing his best to hold the image of what he wanted to happen in his mind as he pushed mana into his improvised spell, causing a wall of sickly flames to erupt from the floor and block off four...

Replacement Boy That Lived Part 4

"Let me guess, someone forgot to pay the maid, for the last decade? Scarlet asked thoughtfully as she glanced around the damaged cabin that looked like it had been the site of a magical battle then left to rot for a couple of decades, wishing she had something to cover her nose as the stale air was getting to her nose.

Myst pulled his attention away from the pile of water damaged books that had fallen from the collapsed shelves into a pile on the floor and looked at the teenage girl he'...

Taylor, Tinker, Thinker... Spider? Part 3

"You're smirking," Danny said as he turned a little wide into the parking lot to avoid the camera on the back of the pet shop.

"I'm wearing a dust mask, how can you tell?" Taylor asked, unwilling to admit that she was smirking as she scanned the area for more cameras.

"I've worked with the union for years," Danny replied dryly. "Do we need to worry about the other cameras?"

Taylor glanced at the camera on the back of the second hand shop, using her Thinker power to judge wha...

Taylor, Tinker, Thinker... Spider? Part 2

"Any luck with Gallant?" Danny Hebert asked as he waited for the light to change.

"Nothing," Taylor admitted as she pulled her attention away from the information her HUD was showing her about Kid Win's power. "Maybe he's sick or homeschooled."

"Or he goes to Winslow, Immaculata or Clarendon," Danny pointed out as he twisted the wheel and turned onto 5th street, heading downtown.

"Seems unlikely considering the various problems Winslow has but I guess the other schools are a...

Taylor, Tinker, Thinker... Spider?

Amy Dallon, otherwise known as Panacea scowled at the parahuman on the hospital bed that was freaking out about a force field only she could see. Normally she would have already told a doctor to schedule a psych consult but the girl that she'd healed was clearly a parahuman which meant that she might not be insane or at least she might have a reason for seeing things. "Keep your voice down!" she snapped in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

"Sorry, you just walked through my field ...

Harry Potter and the Twisted Game Part 5

"Let the training montage begin," Xander said cheerfully as he grabbed a training sword off the rack.

"Shouldn't we start with a wooden sword?" Hermione asked warily, less than enthusiastic about the idea of getting cut up during training, even if she understood why everyone needed to learn the basics.

"Normally," James replied as he grabbed one of the swords out of the rack. "However Taylor has a regeneration aura which means we can jump right into hacking off limbs and stabbing ...

Harry Potter and the Twisted Game Part 4

Hermione pulled her attention away from where Willow was checking her new outfit out in the mirror that Sirius had conjured and looked at Harry. "This isn't going to work."

Harry looked up from the jacket that he was going to move a defensive enchantment to and looked at Hermione. "What's not going to work?"

"We're talking about going into a dungeon filled with monsters. This isn't like sneaking around and looking for the stone when we were kids, we're planning on fighting actual ...

Harry Potter and the Twisted Game Part 3

Xander looked up when he saw a shadow on his cards and smiled at Dawn and Hermione. "Are you ready to watch Kenny die?"

"You're not going to…" Kenny trailed off as Xander tapped his mana battery card with his finger then dropped an elder warlock card on the table. "That is blatantly unfair, you know that right?"

"You're the one that let me get enough mana," Xander replied as a hologram of the warlock appeared over the card and tossed lightning across the table into Kenny's army,...

Harry Potter and the Twisted Game Part 2

Taylor had a moment of disorientation as she went from running towards the Endbringer shelter with her mother to being sprawled on a narrow bed looking up at the ceiling of the airship they were taking to get to London and went from looking up at the ceiling wondering what her cousins would be like to wondering if she was losing her mind. 'Great, I've either lost my mind because I've been stuck on a ship for a week or I'm currently having a bad trip because Leet hit us with something to save ...

Harry Potter and the Twisted Game Part 1

"Breakfast!" a female voice called out waking Harry from his dream about running through a maze filled with monsters and causing him to fumble for his glasses. He stopped fumbling for his glasses when he realized he could see perfectly well despite the fact that his room was cast in shadows and he wasn't wearing his glasses. He glanced around the comfortable looking bedroom, noting the polished stone walls, old fashioned wooden furniture, a framed poster of an old fashioned cabin in the woods...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 39

"We should have used an antigravity unit," Prototype complained as she tried to get the remote controlled glider to turn in something approaching a reasonable fashion so she could get a better look at something that looked suspiciously unnatural.

Leet glanced up from the go-kart schematic he was working and looked at his shard's puppet who was sitting in a chair with a cobbled together remote on her lap. "You're the one that didn't want to wait for Dragon to finish machining all of the ...

Taylor and the Twisted Game part 38

Taylor twitched and swung her LED flashlight back when she thought she saw something move that shouldn't be moving. She relaxed when she realized it was just the way the light had reflected off a cloak that was draped over the back of a broken chair. "I'm going to need a vacation from my vacation when I'm done exploring everything."

"Welcome to my life," Amy replied as she watched Egwene and Rand dance on the village green. "What's the problem?"

"At least half the doors have rotte...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 37

Ishamael's clone watched several of the villagers pick through the remains of a burned out home while another group helped cart away the bodies of the small raiding party that had tried and failed to burn the village to the ground in the middle of the night. "How many dead?" he asked as Skitter walked over.

"Nine, most of the Coplins and a couple of the Congars," Taylor replied, a bit annoyed that her precog hadn't warned her about the attack until their house was already on fire and on...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 36

"Any luck?" Amy asked, not taking her eyes off the group of eight naked women on the air mattress, mostly because they were cultists but also because they were decently attractive women.

"Everyone picked up at least a couple of points in various talents and half of them got a temporary boost to their strength, not to mention the various temporary talents everyone picked up," Taylor replied as she finished writing her notes on the last cultist's talents and affinity changes.

Amy gl...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 35

Pedron Niall looked up from his paperwork when he heard someone breathing in the otherwise silent room. "How did you get in here?" he asked the nondescript man dressed like a member of the king's guard.

"Does it matter?" Taylor asked as she studied the leader of the local Inquisition. "Do you even care how many innocent people your followers kill?"

"You can't blame me if some of the Children are overzealous in their efforts to deal with darkfriends," Pedron replied.

"I'm afr...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 34

"If you had to fight the Forsaken, how would you do it?" Taylor asked Lan, ignoring the two Aes Sedai quietly discussing Verin's list of Black Ajah.

"Assuming I couldn't lure them to a stedding, I'd put a couple of dozen arrows in them from behind or cut their throats while they're sleeping," Lan offered.

"Stedding?" Taylor asked.

"They're basically areas where channelers can't touch the source which means they wouldn't be able to burn me to ash with a gesture," Lan explaine...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 33

"Who was Fain looking for, do you have names?" Moiraine asked, wondering if she could narrow things down in her own search.

"He had three names, Matrim, Perrin and Rand," Taylor admitted.

Egwene stared at Taylor. "Why was he looking for Rand?"

"Something about one of them being a dragon," Taylor said, wishing she'd asked for clarification of a couple of things before she'd let Shaper experiment.

"As in the Dragon Reborn?" Thom asked warily.

"Might have been," Tay...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 32

Nynaeve al'Meara walked out of the workshop and froze when she saw a tall blue skinned woman with long pointed ears standing in front of a familiar peddler's wagon. 'Is that an ogier?' she asked herself as she walked over to investigate, fairly sure Ogier didn't have purple skin but not sure what else the woman could be since she didn't seem hostile despite the fact that Wit Congar seemed to be badgering her about something. "What's going on?"

"I was just asking her what happened to Fai...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 31

"What do you think?" Leet asked as he gestured towards his portal device that was sitting on the folding table next to the chair one of Skitter's puppets was using to get a decent look at his prototype.

"How the hell are you still alive?" Taylor asked after a couple of seconds studying the science fair quality device that Leet had cobbled together from 'random' bits of junk.

"Decent safety protocols and luck, mostly luck," Uber admitted.

"What's wrong with my portal device?"...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 30

[How is Eidolon doing?] Wings asked Emulation as she flew away from the apartment where Warp lived, heading towards Elisberg to test her jury rigged monster trap.

[He's currently cutting through an army of undead for experience and loot], Emulation replied cheerfully, happy that she didn't have to cover the energy cost for his powers in the simulation because it would have been significant. [Were you able to steal energy from demons?]

[I wasn't willing to risk using it given the h...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 29

Lung scowled as he stalked into the backroom of his casino where Oni Lee had gathered two dozen of their least moral and most troublesome minions for a secret meeting that he hadn't been invited to. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded as he glared at the collection of nervous looking minions.

"You are not a dragon," Oni Lee told Lung in a tone of voice that was very out of place from his normal emotionless voice then pushed the button on the remote he'd been concealing, setting o...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 28

[That wasn't supposed to happen], Split complained as her host was yanked away from his desk and through what seemed like a portal into a commercial bathroom in the middle of puppetting him through one of her paths.

[Issues with your predictions?] Admin asked as she used her Widow's Venom spell to stun Coil so she could steal his weapons without having to worry about getting shot. She let the portal close then quickly stole his pistol and boot knife. "Stunned, twenty five seconds!"

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part Part 27

[We're here to save the day!] Sparkling Trickster cheered as her host walked into the surprisingly clean ferry terminal.

[Is there a reason you're overly cheerful?] Admin asked as she turned to look at the hero wearing a skintight sky blue costume with white lightning bolts and flames scattered over it.

[Zion is dead and you're fixing things!], Sparkling replied cheerfully.

[Do you need any help?] Admin asked as Armsmaster walked over to greet Legend.

[Can I have permi...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 26

Taylor blinked when Kil'Jaeden's head exploded from her mind blast spell and she found herself floating in a black void. 'At least we're done second guessing ourselves and running around like lunatics trying to grab everything we can steal.'

A deep voice announced, "Congratulations on defeating the mythic version of the last boss of the expansion. Please fill out the exit form to have your flaws and drawbacks removed."

Taylor grinned when a floating view screen appeared in front o...

Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 25

"Shit!" Hijack cursed and fumbled the glass jar container she was making when her least favorite host vanished from her senses.

Alec pulled his attention away from the enchanting book he was reading and focused on his puppet/power. "What's wrong?"

"I might have screwed up," Hijack admitted a touch sheepishly.

Alec glanced between the broken jar and the girl his power was puppeting, noticing that she wasn't even looking at the jar which meant it was probably something else. "...