#next chapter: MY DAUGHTER APPEARS AND THROWS AN ENTIRE DUDE BECAUSE SHE'S SWOLE

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches of LA, Chapter 2: I hope you like exposition and pro wrestling jokes because that’s all we’ve got here

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3] 

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

“And where exactly did you say we’re going?”

“It’s called Nine-Tails Vale! Jinxie – you remember her from New Years? – works there and invited us up for a yokai festival today!”

“A yokai ff – is it too late to get off the train and go home?”

-

Nine-Tails Vale sits in the hills at the base of the mountains of Kurain, far enough away that there’s a chance that they can have as normal a day as anyone at a yokai festival could, but close enough that the hills around the valley still might be faery mounds. Like most days at the WAA, anything goes, and Apollo has to live with it. And maybe he’ll die with it one of these days, sooner rather than later.

Trucy keeps trying again to explain to Apollo the storyline of the local wrestling scene, which she and Jinxie are avid fans of, on their walk over from the train station.

“It’s like a soap opera combined with a fantasy story, but also with grown men hitting each other with chairs,” she says, which is definitely a pitch that would appeal to certain people who aren’t Apollo. “They’ve got their thing that’s kinda like Court, or if there were two Courts who hated each other, and they battle it out in the ring like Daddy says some of the fae do within our legal system. Because the wrestlers are all masked and they’re the proxies for these powerful spirits who possess them whenever they’re wearing the mask. Like selkie skins but if the seal was separate and you were being controlled by it.”

“Uh huh,” Apollo says, surveying the main lane they’ve come up along. The dirt path, lined with a few scattered cobblestones, is overladen with little wheeled carts and pop-up stands selling little charms and trinkets and decorated with leering faces of yokai. Overwhelmed and shoved aside by the merchandise are older buildings bearing signs with both English and Japanese writing and weathered stone statues that have little offerings and candles scattered about their bases. “I wouldn’t feel like being possessed by a seal is very useful. What am I going to do, flop around a lot?”

“There’s always slapping,” Trucy says. “But I’m saying it’s like that. You put on the skin and you turn into it, wear the mask and bam.”

“Uh huh.”

“So when the wrestlers lose, they can have their masks stripped off, which is the ultimate disgrace because they lose both their power and the world and their enemies know their face and name and can claim them.” Trucy stops and leans over a table of paper tags marked all with a paw print and otherwise with a variety of characters and symbols. “And anyway it never got real big until the Amazing Nine-Tails – he’s one of the wrestlers obviously – started being active outside of the ring. And that’s a real no-go to use your powers like that, but he started getting attention, and the Vale started getting attention, and then this yokai craze kinda started up and now there’s lots of tourists from way out of the area watching the matches and visiting!”

“They’d have to be from way out of town,” Apollo says, “because there’s no one I know from the LA area who would hear about a town in the mountains full of monsters and say ‘yeah, I’m going to spend money to go spend time there’.”

“Yet here we are,” Trucy says. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a bracelet of wooden beads. “Oh, here.” She grabs his arm and slips it onto his wrist next to his bracelet, then shaking her own wrist to draw his attention to a matching one she wears. “I forgot to give you this sooner; it’s rowan wood, which is—”

“An anti-fae charm like iron,” Apollo finishes.

Trucy nods. “Yep! And anti-yokai, it overlaps. Anyway, Daddy says it’s very important to not get rowan mixed up with hawthorn wood, which the fae like. He says that’s a very dangerous mistake to make.”

(“Are you speaking from experience?” Apollo asked, and Phoenix cracked a broken smile and told him that’s all he has to speak from.)

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Apollo says.

“I know you’ve got your ring, but it can’t hurt us to be extra cautious out here today.” Trucy pats the necklace she is wearing; a small horseshoe-shaped charm that must be made of iron dangles from it. Horseshoes are a lucky thing, or thought to be, Apollo knows. Clay has one he keeps with him. “I think that’s why Daddy wanted you to come with me. I think he’s worried I would get into trouble alone, since Jinxie’s working and I won’t be with her all day.”

“I thought he sent me with you because he hates me,” Apollo says. Trucy smacks him on the arm.

Uphill to the alderman’s manor, the dirt roads merge with a well-kept cobblestone path to lead them into a beautiful garden, full of paper lanterns and long banquet tables. Trucy sticks her nose into a bush of beautiful golden flowers and is still admiring them when Jinxie, wearing an apron over her dress and carrying a round serving tray, finds them and slaps a warding charm – one of the thin formal slips that Apollo saw for sale down in the yokai extravaganza, like she wears on her own forehead, not a sticky note – on his forehead. Even after she remembers that she’s met him before, they have to make their way through another circular argument about whether or not Apollo is a fae demon. Trucy has apparently given up on convincing Jinxie of the truth, because she says, “He’s a demon but a good one!”

Does he look extra monstrous today, for some reason? Is his hair spikier, his voice louder? What has he done to deserve this?

Jinxie works as a maid at the manor, though she doesn’t live in the Vale but instead in the neighboring Tenma Town, and with her job she can’t spend all afternoon with them. She imparts on them some local lore from the village about the powerful and terrible yokai, Tenma Taro – is it coincidence or significant that its name bears such similarity to Tenma Town? Like Kurain and Khura’in, what does that mean? – imprisoned in the mountain that the manor is built against. Today’s festival, she explains, is a much more robust version, bolstered by tourist dollars, of a ceremony they hold every year, ritually releasing a shade of Tenma Taro and then banishing it.

Though instead of the Nine-Tailed Fox, the village’s guardian yokai – is that an oxymoron? Apollo once would have thought so, but he works in an office that has a guardian ghost fae – doing the banishing, the wrestler the Amazing Nine-Tails, will be.

Which reminds Apollo of Trucy’s one-sided conversation on the way over, and he interrupts Jinxie and Trucy starting to gush over some recent matches to ask, “So all of this you’re talking about, the wrestlers, uh, kind of channeling yokai spirits – that’s all just in the fiction of wrestling not really being real, right?” They both glare at him. “They aren’t actually using magic and summoning demons, right?”

“Apollo,” Trucy scolds, her hands curled into fists on her hips. “You can’t break kayfabe! You should know that!”

He wishes he had the strength to believe that it isn’t real, and that no one could be so stupid to be fucking around that deep into fae magic for the sake of televised entertainment, but he’s also here at a goddamn yokai festival on one of his days off and that’s pretty stupid too.

“I should get back to work,” Jinxie says. “I’ll see you later – ah!”

Making its way through the garden, causing people to spring out of its path, is a tall bird-creature, with gray feathers and three yellow eyes and sharp talons on its hands and feet, which with their yellow skin resemble the legs of some kind of raptor. It resembles the yokai on the scroll Jinxie showed them, the Tenma Taro, but it’s just – someone in a costume? Right? A costume for a festival, and not actually—

It rounds on Jinxie with a hiss. “Better watch out, little girl, or I’ll sssnatch you away!” She raises her platter up over her face and cowers back into one of the banquet tables. Apollo thinks that it probably is just someone in a costume, now that he’s seen it speak; its beak doesn’t move and its tongue lolls forth even in the middle of its speech. It’s too static, or is that wishful thinking?

But no one else is looking at the monster and how it’s cornered Jinxie, no one moving to help her – and Apollo realizes he is moving forward, not sure what he could do if it’s a yokai and knowing he shouldn’t do anything if it’s a performer (like how he and Clay got banned from a local haunted house when they were 13 because Clay reflexively punched one of the actors in the sternum), but still unable to stand by.

“Hey! Don’t stare like that!” someone nearby warns, at a volume that tries to be a whisper but doesn’t really succeed. They must be talking to Apollo and Trucy, because no one else, not even Jinxie, is staring. “If Tenma Taro locks eyes with you, he’ll steal your soul!”

Apollo turns his eyes to the ground instantly, reflexively, because that’s the one thing he knows not to take chances on even though, as he thinks about it, he’s more sure that this monster is a costume and even if it weren’t, he doesn’t think there’s anything powerful enough to just simply take a soul so easily. And if there were, they wouldn’t just casually set it loose. (He hopes.)

“Look!” Trucy whispers, nudging him and pointing toward the manor, where a small figure stands on the roof dark against the blue spring sky. Whatever – whoever – it is leaps down to the lower roof, disappearing from sight, but only a few seconds later springs again, with a long leap far too long to be human. (He thinks first of Lamiroir’s disappearing act and wonders what the trick behind this is.) The man who lands in the midst of them, between Tenma Taro and Jinxie, wears a wrestler’s belt and a golden fox-head mask, with a collar of the same color fur that turns into a cape of many long foxes’ tails. If he was going to guess, Apollo would say that there are nine.

Clearly the Amazing Nine-Tails, and with some silted words about vanquishing evil, he chases Tenma Taro back toward the manor. And Apollo might now be really convinced of the scriptedness of it – and admittedly relieved by that – but the crowds are cheering and Jinxie no longer looks like she’s about to faint from fright. With her platter still clutched across her chest like a shield, she waves goodbye and returns to work, and Trucy drags Apollo off to explore the town.

-

Trucy wants to buy everything. Apollo should have expected that – the amount of Gavineers merchandise that she acquired in the two weeks between their meeting Klavier and the concert was astonishing – and to that end he should have expected that she would run out of money and turn to him. She at least considers herself an organized businesswoman, enough to write up the invoice of what she owes him, and he strikes from it the paper warding charms they buy. He isn’t sure yet if he believes in them, but he’d probably be getting a few for his and Clay’s apartment anyway, and Trucy is talking about how it would be nice to have some kind of protective charm to give to Vera that wouldn’t hurt her like iron, and getting something for their friends seems a worthwhile investment. Trucy’s attempt to wheedle a few dollars out of him for another plush Nine-Tailed Fox keychain is not.

It’s warmer now than it was last April, enough that Apollo tentatively hopes that the fae are done throwing their winter tantrums. If Trucy had to drag him anywhere – and she would consider that a necessity – it’s a good day for it, pleasant to spend time out under the sun and the clear sky. He’s not even convinced that the town is as cursed as he first assumed.

Naturally, that’s where it always goes wrong, letting his guard down, no longer anticipating that the worst is going to claw its way up out of the dirt.

He and Trucy circle back to the manor as a crowd is starting to gather at the front doors; at the center of it, once they manage to push through the people, Trucy helping clear a path by sending Mr Hat off to the side to draw people’s eyes and attention the way a will o’ the wisp does, is Jinxie, simultaneously wild-eyed and looking close to passing out. She stretches out one visibly-trembling hand and grabs Trucy by the wrist, her other arm still hugging the platter close to her chest. It must be iron, it must. “Alderman Kyubi is dead!” she cries. “T-ten – Tenma Taro murdered the alderman!”

She sways on her feet and Trucy takes her by the elbow and helps lower her to sit on the ground, and Apollo does what is starting to become a habit in these sort of situations – which are becoming habitual in themselves – and rushes in, pocketing a charm that Jinxie throws at him as he goes.

The scene is a small room Jinxie called the Fox Chamber, up the entry stairs and down the hall to the right, and there, one thing is certain: the alderman is dead.

-

A classic locked room murder mystery: two men, one dead, the other unconscious, no one else seen when Jinxie discovered the crime. The killer? Obvious, seemingly: the unfortunate unconscious man, whose murder plan clearly ran into a hitch when it came time to get away, and for motive who happens to be the mayor of the neighboring town currently disputing over municipal issues with the dead alderman.

Except the mayor is Jinxie’s father, and if he goes to jail she has no other family, and she’s adamant that Tenma Taro did the killing, and the last locked-room murder case that Apollo defended ended up not being one at all. So, classic setup, maybe, never the obvious solution, and Apollo’s record of stumbling into complex cases while he’s trying to do something law-unrelated with Trucy continues. Is it her? Is it him? Is it them both, together? He can only write so much off as coincidence.

And he wishes he could write off Jinxie’s ramblings as those of a superstitious girl scared witless by the feathers and bloody footprints at the crime scene, and maybe once he could have, maybe this time last year, but he’s seen too much since then. If a monster, a yokai – are they connected to the fae? They must be. Isn’t everything? – murdered the alderman, then the question becomes: how does he prove it? How does he convince the judge and prosecution of it?

He should start with asking Mayor Tenma what happened, first.

Trucy tells him that the mayor can seem scary, but he’s nice, really, promise not to run away, Polly. His nerves would be frayed enough without it, but her warning snaps several more of the barely-connected threads, and like a self-fulfilling prophecy, he’s jumpy and nearly flees the room, sheet of glass between them or no. Mayor Tenma is very good at setting some very bad impressions, loudly, with great force, giving Apollo’s heart time enough to stop several times before the mayor corrects the misconception. It’s a very anxiety-inducing interview, and the facts he gleans from it are worse: Mayor Tenma’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, and he, asleep from being drugged, remembers nothing, including who was it that hit him on the head. Apollo can’t see the wound or a bandage; the mayor’s entire scalp is covered in Jinxie’s warding charms, as though to make a full hat. Does he believe, or is he humoring his daughter? Apollo doesn’t ask.

He has barely left the building when he receives a phone call from the last person he expects. “Mr Wright? What’s going on?”

“Trucy tells me you’ve found yourself a case over in Nine-Tails Vale.” No preamble, no small talk: Phoenix, friendly as ever.

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“Are you still at the Vale right now?”

“No, I was just talking to the client at the detention center. Why?”

Phoenix sighs heavily. “Because I’m at the airport, picking up the new addition to the Agency – Athena Cykes, Trucy’s mentioned her to you before? And I mentioned your case, and that was it, no stopping her, Athena ditched me with her luggage and took the rental car and is heading out to help you right now.”

“She – you what? She what?” Apollo won’t say that he doesn’t feel some small sense of satisfaction at Phoenix having to suffer someone else flaking on him, but what an impression to make on your new boss.

(Almost as good as punching him in the face.)

“So I need a favor, basically: can you go back to Nine-Tails Vale and intercept her?”

“I—” Once again, the way this day is going takes a sharp turn off the road. “Yeah, I can. But I’ve never met her – what’s she look like?”

“Yellow,” Phoenix says.

“What?”

“She’s got long red hair, and the way you’re red, she’s yellow. Hard to miss with how much energy she’s got.” The description is somehow both vague and incredibly specific – he can’t exactly picture Miss Cykes in his head, but he knows he won’t mistake anyone else for her when he finds her.

“Okay. I can do that. I have to go back anyway to check out the crime scene.” Did he say that Athena had a rental car? He can only dream of how convenient that will be once he gets to her.

“Cool, thanks. Good luck with the case – and with the Vale.”

So much for putting himself at ease convincing himself that it was just a man in a costume, and that there’s some sort of easy explanation for the feathers. (Or not an easy explanation, because saying that Tenma Taro passed through is very easy, but a mundane one.) “What does that mean? Mr Wright?” He doesn’t answer right away, giving Apollo’s stomach enough time to flip over itself and then squish his heart up into his throat. “The stuff Trucy was saying about wrestling, with the yokai and the masks and uh, channeling them? Or whatever it is – that’s not – that’s just the story on the show, right? That’s not…?”

“Not actually real? For most of them, it’s not, no; no magic in the mask but television magic and a tall tale to keep the audience.”

“But – most of them. You said for most of them? So for some of them it is real?”

“Yeah.”

Apollo wants to sink down to the sidewalk and cry. Or scream. Definitely scream, right here next to a police building where they can arrest him for disturbing the peace very easily.

“I can say with certainty that if any spirits involved were actually powerful and smart enough to be malicious, they wouldn’t be stooping to playing a part in half-scripted on-camera fights between half-naked men. Maybe it’ll be a nuisance to your case, at worst, but no threat to anyone’s lives or souls.”

Apollo wishes he could believe that wholeheartedly, and that he could say for sure that Phoenix’s definition of nuisance is something close to his own. “If you don’t get the Not Guilty tomorrow, when you head back up to investigate again, I’ll let you borrow the magatama,” Phoenix adds. “Just so you can really keep an eye on everything, if it’s needed.”

He thinks there will be a second day – that if Apollo doesn’t win in one, then he will have kept his head above water well enough to drag it out. He doesn’t expect Apollo to lose in a day. He thinks Apollo could win in a day.

“Thanks, Mr Wright.”

“No problem. Now you’ve gotta find Athena, and I’ve gotta figure out how to lug her suitcase home.”

Athena, Athena – what else has Trucy told him about her? She was studying in Europe – did she grow up there, too? Does she know what Los Angeles is like? Will she think him superstitious or ridiculous for everything he knows to be real? Does she know what she is walking into in Nine-Tails Vale? Did Phoenix warn her?

Apollo starts walking quicker than before. Of course Phoenix wouldn’t warn her – but hell, to be charitable to Phoenix (for once), he might not have had time to say anything to her before she took off.

If, against his own nature and his lived experience, he tries to be optimistic, he hopes for three things. First, that everyone involved in the murder his plainly human and that no monster committed murder. (That seems the most likely: would a monster know to plant the mayor’s fingerprints?) Second, that Athena has enough sense to be cautious about whatever village folklore they’re stumbling into instead of immediately dismissing it. And third, if he’s really dreaming, that Klavier will be the prosecutor on this case, easily able to identify who is and isn’t human and probably willing to share it.

But Apollo knows that’s all a little much to hope.

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles #next chapter: MY DAUGHTER APPEARS AND THROWS AN ENTIRE DUDE BECAUSE SHE'S SWOLE #and we also meet -- oh FUCK we meet fulbright oh FUCK #i'm not sure if we'll meet simon in 3 or 4 tho. depends on how quick i can gloss the investigation portion