“Tra la la la la, here I go all skipping my way to grandmother’s house, lee la lee!” With that sing-song tone, a silvery-metal robotic figure clad in an actual pink dress complete with bonnet literally skipped along a forest path. There was even an actual picnic basket tucked under her arm. The trees and bushes were orange and purple, while the grass was a light reddish hue. Still, the general image could have come out of any of a number of Earth storybooks. The figure pranced merrily along the path, seemingly oblivious to the multitude of predatory eyes staring from the nearby bushes all the way around the path.
With no warning whatsoever, the creatures there sprang out. There were six of them, each roughly the size and shape of an Earth wolf save for their monkey-like front paws and twin tails. They lunged at the skipping figure from all sides, snarling viciously.
Those snarls became yips and whines very quickly. First, their target spun inhumanly quickly, one metal hand lashing out to smack into the snout of the nearest lunging figure with a blow that sent it flying hard into a tree. Her other hand grabbed the second-nearest creature by the throat, holding it aloft while the thing kicked and squirmed wildly.
Meanwhile, the third and fourth creatures were unceremoniously dispatched as a new figure moved with blurring speed onto the path and cut both their heads off in mid-leap with a single swipe from a red-tinted sword. Their bodies continued sailing past their target to crash into the bushes on the far side of the path with wet thumping sounds.
Finally, the last two were dispatched by a couple dismissive shots from a laser pistol, even as they had started to catch on that something was wrong. The wielder of that gun, Judas Iscariot, looked even more out of place than he typically did as he stepped out of the bushes wearing his usual immaculate suit, silk shirt, and quite expensive and well-shined shoes. At a glance, he seemed to be a high-level executive at an exclusive bank who had just stepped through the wrong door and accidentally ended up in the woods.
“Really, Quip?” he addressed the dress-clad metallic figure who was still holding the only surviving attacker by the throat. “Skipping my way to grandmother’s house? Tra la la? You don’t think that was overselling it just a little bit?”
While the creature kicked and snarled while trying desperately to free itself, Quip turned pink-tinted eyes toward her companion. “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” Her other hand moved up beside the creature’s neck, producing a syringe from between two metal knuckles which injected something into it. Soon, the animal’s struggles ceased, as it slumped unconscious in her grip. She set it down carefully before rising.
Those eyes shifted from pink to green as Med took over. “There, the little guy should be out for a few hours. Long enough to do what you need to.”
Cleaning the blood off her sword, Stasia spoke up from the other side of the path with her distinctive Russian accent. “Let’s hope it actually works this time. We don’t need a replay of what happened before.” That was accompanied by a grimace at the memory.
“Some creatures are more protected against possession than others,” Judas noted, already moving to crouch next to the unconscious figure. “Given those Pechta bugs use something pretty close to Seosten possession, it’s not surprising that some animals evolved protections against it.”
The Robin System’s eyes shifted from the green of Med to the amber-brown of Hood. “Oh sure, you say that now, but I don’t recall getting that sort of warning before you tried the first time and ended up getting yourself catapulted so hard into a tree that you managed to single-handedly create a few decades-worth of toothpicks out of it.”
Judas winced at that memory. “Yeah, I’d rather not do that again, believe me. But if we brewed that little potion correctly, I shouldn’t trigger it this time.”
“Would you like me to put up a net anyway?” Stasia teased him with a slight smirk as she stepped over to stand next to Robin. “Just in case.” From her pocket, she produced a portable gas mask that just barely fit over her mouth and nose, holding it in place while giving him an encouraging thumbs up with her other hand.
“How about you just promise to catch me?” Judas shot back, plucking the sunglasses off his eyes to tuck into his jacket pocket while putting his other hand out over the slumbering creature. “It’s okay, I’m pretty sure it’ll work this time.” Despite that claim, the man still tensed up a bit and visibly braced himself while putting his hand against that furred back, calling on the possession power he had inherited as a Natural Heretic of Charmeine.
The other two braced themselves as well, Robin’s eyes shifting to red as Brawl took over, ready to lunge in whatever direction their friend might end up being flung in.
Fortunately, however, that didn’t turn out to be necessary. When Judas’s body vanished as he possessed the unconscious animal, a small puff of reddish smoke escaped its mouth and nostrils. The last time they tried this, that had been a full-on cloud of very noxious gas combined with the concussive wave that had sent the man crashing through that tree.
Once she was sure her vampiric senses weren’t about to be completely overwhelmed by more gas, Stasia lowered the mask and tucked it away once more. “That is a good sign, I suppose. Better than the previous attempt.” Her voice was somewhat tense, which was to be expected given how close they were to finally locating the man who was responsible for the deaths of her entire family. It had been an incredibly, painfully long journey to get this far. A journey that had brought them all the way from Earth to an entirely new planet. From there they’d narrowed his location down to a massive forest several thousand miles across. Then a guide had helped them narrow that down to one specific general area.
And yet, even that was a few hundred miles in diameter. Thus the need to narrow it even further and locate Rasputin’s actual hiding place. Which had led them to these monkey-wolves, known to the inhabitants of this world as Pauktahs. The Pauktahs retained perfect memories of every inch of their hunting grounds, which would consist of the entirety of the area Rasputin was supposedly staying in. They would have seen wherever he was living. All Judas had to do was search this one’s mind until he found it.
Nor was this a completely random guess when it came to which Pauktah’s to track down. Though Stasia couldn’t find Rasputin himself here in this enormous forest, she had smelled the man on these creatures. This pack had been near their quarry at some point recently enough to still smell like him. Given the way they moved around, that still didn’t exactly tell them where the man could be. Especially since they could have been around the man weeks earlier and Stasia would still be able to pick up his scent. But it meant they’d seen him.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly a quick process to search through that many memories. Judas just had to try calling up any sort of man-made structure or humanoid figure this beast had ever seen. It took time, and he couldn’t wake the thing up to let them know how it was going without risking setting off its anti-possession defenses. So, the other two simply had to wait until he was done. But at least they had a bit of a distraction in the form of needing to watch out for any of the forest’s myriad of other predators. This was not a particularly peaceful place to be.
In the end, it took almost twenty minutes for Judas to finish searching that thing’s memory. But finally, he emerged and dusted his hands off. When the others looked at him expectantly, he gave them a wink before his sunglasses back on. “Got it. We’re going about ten miles north-north-east.”
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Immediately, Stasia snapped her gaze in that direction, eyes narrowing as though she could see their target already despite the impossibility of that. “He’s been that close?” Her voice was a snarl of mixed annoyance and anticipation. “We were just in that area days ago. How did we miss any sign of him?”
“His place is very disguised,” Judas informed her. “Trust me, we could have spent months scouring the area and never found his exact spot. He’s in an underground cave. Our friend over there only found it because he and his pack went through a little hole in a tree looking for a nice snack.” He paused before adding in a flat tone, “They didn’t end up finding one.”
“How did he look?” Stasia’s voice caught just a bit with the question. Her feelings about Rasputin were complicated, to say the least. She had been looking for the man for so long, after he turned her into a vampire and saw to the deaths of the rest of her family. Including her mother, who had been one of his many lovers, and her little brother Alexei, whom Grigori had been responsible for healing.
Yes, complicated was one way to describe Anastasia Nikolaevna’s feelings about Grigori Rasputin. Blinding, indescribable rage was another. It was a good thing she had already agreed to allow the others to talk to him first, before she tore his throat out. Otherwise Judas would never have the chance to interrogate him about Charmeine’s past, and the Robins wouldn’t be able to find out where the man had last seen Marian, the first friend they ever made after waking up on Earth.
All three of them had reasons to track down Rasputin. But Stasia didn’t want to hear his excuses. She didn’t even want to hear his voice at all. She just wanted him dead. Yet she also wouldn’t take the opportunity for answers away from her friends–her new family. Robin and Judas were as close to her as her old siblings had been. She wouldn’t allow her rage when it came to Rasputin to hurt them.
She would control herself for as long as it took for them to find out what they needed to. But after that… Rasputin would be hers to finish. And her family would finally be avenged.
********
Judas hadn’t been wrong about how difficult it was to find the place Rasputin was holed up in. There was no visible entrance to the underground cave. It just looked like a slightly raised piece of ground in the forest. Even knowing exactly where the entrance was–or at least one possible entrance– they still had to hunt around that general area for several minutes before locating the exact tree. Which was unhelped, of course, by the fact that they had to move very carefully and disable what turned out to be a truly staggering number of alarms and traps of both the magical and technological variety. Grigori clearly valued his privacy. But between Judas’s long-familiarity with magic, Stasia’s enhanced senses, and Robin’s scanning ability (and general immunity to magic anyway), they avoided or disabled everything in their path.
Finally standing in front of the tree with the hole in the center of it leading to a narrow tunnel, Judas finished undoing a spell that would have transported anyone (or anything) that tried to pass it all the way back to a spot several hundred miles south, while also screwing up their memory. As he tucked his own engraver away, the man remarked in a voice that was reflexively quiet despite the numerous privacy spells he had put over all three of them. “You know, I still want to know how this guy can use spells. He’s an Akharu, right? That blood curse is supposed to stop all of them from using magic.”
“Yes,” Stasia murmured, “a weakness they pass to the vampires they create. Believe me, I’d like him to answer that question myself. Maybe it’s a secret I can steal from his corpse and utilize myself.”
“It would be nice if you could use magic too,” Robin agreed, their eyes shifting to the yellow of the eternally-innocent Sprite. “Then Judas wouldn’t have to cast everything.”
“I don’t mind,” Judas noted before giving the girl in question a side-long look as they stood around that tree. “But yeah, it could be helpful to have another set of magical hands, so to speak. If the option presents itself.”
As anxious as they all were to go in there, it was obvious that they were also stalling at this climactic moment. Even after everything they had done, after all the work they had put into getting this far, it could still turn out to be yet another dead end. Those creatures had found him weeks earlier. He could conceivably have left already. Maybe he knew they were coming and disappeared. If that happened, if Grigori had moved on again, none of them knew exactly how they would react. One thing was for sure, the underground hideout wouldn’t survive.
And yet, in the end, they had to find out for certain. Anxious as they were about what they would discover inside that place, the only way to be sure was to go in and look for themselves. There was no discussion about sending only one of them in to scout it out. Tactically sound as that might have been, they were going to do this together. They’d come this far by sticking by one another’s sides through everything, and that wasn’t going to stop now at the very moment (hopefully) that they finally found the man they had been searching for.
Still, that didn’t mean they were going to be stupid about it. Judas activated several stealth spells he had prepared on himself and Stasia for this eventuality. He could have done the same for Robin, but that would have meant the robot would need to disable his own magical immunity. They had decided it was more important to be protected from anything Grigori might have set up than it was to be invisible right then.
Stasia took the lead, going through the hole in the tree first. She had to crouch down and crawl through an almost-vertical drop, using her arms and knees to brace herself rather than dropping straight into a potential trap. The other two were right behind her, all of them preparing themselves for whatever might be waiting.
And yet, it didn’t matter how prepared they thought they were. None of them were ready when they emerged into the main part of the cavern. It had been set up to resemble a cozy home. Carpets decorated the ground through half of the cave, while the other half had hardwood floors. There was a full-sized kitchen to one side, nearest where they had come out, with a dining room nearby, then an obvious bedroom area, a library full of bookshelves, and more. It looked like a house with all the interior dividing walls removed.
And right there, seemingly waiting for them, was Grigori Rasputin himself. They all recognized him immediately, given his long beard, dark hair, and the intensity of his stare.
The fact that the table he was seated at was positively buckling under the weight of all the food and wine bottles certainly helped Stasia recognize him.
“You made it!” With that loud, boisterous cry, Grigori spread his arms wide, as though the entire incredible spread set out before him was in celebration of their arrival. “Come, come, sit and partake! You must be positively famished after such a long journey. Please, enjoy yours–none of that.” Though his cheerful tone didn’t change, he did interrupt himself as Judas reached for the vampire-disabling sonic device in his jacket pocket. It was a directional weapon, meaning Stasia would be unaffected as long as she stayed out from in front of it. But that became meaningless, as no sooner had he put his fingers on it, than there was a blur of motion. None of them were quick enough to stop him, not even Robin (though they did at least manage to move a step forward and raise their hand). They saw the blur leave the table and sweep past them, before Grigori was right back at the spot he’d started from, with the sonic weapon sitting nearby, next to a plate of fruit. “Please, there is no need for any ill-feelings.”
Stasia, finally getting over her reaction to seeing the man in the flesh once again, snarled, “No need for any ill-feelings? You killed my family! You destroyed my life. And I am going to destroy you.” She had already produced her sword.
“You also know where our friend is,” Robin noted, eyes the dark blue of Sec, the security-minded facet. “Marian.”
“And,” Judas noted while doing his best not to react to just how quickly and easily the man had stripped the weapon away from him, “I’m told you know something that could help deal with the ghost of Charmeine once and for all.”
“They get answers,” Stasia confirmed, hard glare still doing its level best to pierce straight through the man, “then I get to kill you.”
In that moment, Grigori Rasputin’s outward appearance of casual cheer and ease faltered just a bit. But it wasn’t anger Robin and Judas saw for that brief second. It was sadness and regret. Stasia seemed not to have noticed, angry as she was.
“You will all get the answers you desire,” the old Akharu agreed, sounding a bit tired. “As for my death–well, we shall see. In order… yes, I know quite a bit about Charmeine and her people, including her current… status.” His eyes found Judas. “She was, after all, the one who enslaved me to her will in order to carry out the elimination of the Romanovs.”
Before Stasia could even start to react to that, he looked toward Robin. “And I am equally aware of your search for Marian. You have been looking for her for a very long time. Thankfully, all your answers, from how to prevent Charmeine from ever being a threat again, to the location of this Marian, to proving that it was not I who chose to harm the Romanovs, are in one place, held by one person. He also is in possession of the ghost of Odysseus, which your… benefactor has been searching for. He’s even Marian’s teacher in the art of Necromancy, as a matter of fact.
“A man known as Jacob.”