Excerpt: Dresden Philly

In the interest of getting something on here for today without a lot of prep work, here's another Dresden Philly excerpt. This came out of my attempt to write out our last session and wound up as a flashback to the session before that. Here James is reviewing his situation and making a mental inventory of some of the people he's 'working with'. I clipped out the more naughty sections -- the full edition will be posted on the Dresden Philly blog.

Kara is the woman whose home we unintentionally redecorated whilst attempting to not get killed tonight. Her front room looks like a slaughterhouse. I personally decorated her grandfather clock with one of the thugs' brains. The killing of the thug was intentional - the fact his grey matter splattered on the clock was not. Honestly, I don't go out of my way to cause secondhand destruction. It just seems to work out that way. Anyhow, Kara, from what I'm being told, is someone around whom electronics tend to fail, and fail catastrophically. She has an old-fashioned rotary dial phone, and I didn't see a single piece of electronic equipment in the place. No stereo, no television, not even a digital alarm clock. I wonder if she's the reason my mobile has been on the fritz all night.

There's Maeve, a woman with a sword. And also Sean, a bloke with a sword. And guns. At least the bloke has guns. I feel like I'm in a travelling circus.

They were all yakking on this evening about how scary and evil this sceptre-thing is and how we have to keep this court or that court or these bad guys or Mickey bloody Mouse or whoever from getting their hands on it. It was more or less at that point that I decided to take a smoke break.

Now, ordinarily, I'm on my guard when I step out of a building which backs onto a wood. Today being what it was, however, I was more concerned with finding and hotwiring one of the police cars we'd taken from the earlier scene and getting the hell away from these people. Not one of them was what you'd call normal, and they were all dangerous, even if only inasmuch as they were certifiably insane. Magic. Faeries. Pfeh.

So it took me completely by surprise when I heard the familiar 'crack!' of a high-powered rifle being fired from a distance and the experienced the distinctive but unpleasant feeling of a rifle round impacting my chest. A centimetre to the left and I'd be a dead man, shot straight through the heart. As it was I was certain I'd bruised a rib.

Have a good weekend, folks!