By William Keith
Jordi bakes.
No, I didn't know either. But you have to understand this if you want the
mission background, so accept it. You see, Jordi is perfectly happy taking care
of his Word and not dealing with humans very much, but he's obedient to God's
commands and just decided he should start from something he knew cold --
"they need to eat to survive" -- and learn more about why humans seem
to constantly complicate things -- "I'd like to build a tiny house out of
gingerbread today." So he decided he'd learn how to bake.
*Really* bake, too. Learn the art of it. Possess some poor vegetative schmuck
in a permanent coma with a satisfied Destiny, courtesy of Yves' investigative
sorts, with Archangel-level Kyriotate possessingness, and live a life as an
award-winning baker. Understand it completely. No worry about humans either;
stunning revolutions in baked goods aren't likely to successfully upset the
delicate balance of the War anytime soon, but probably won't hurt either.
Yes, I can see you're surprised. Imagine how the Shedite felt.
I mean, there he was. Vapulan Shedite Songmaster, in a quiet town in the
Italian countryside trying to hear some new Songs, and some baker taps him on
the shoulder (or, in the Shedite's case, the monitor of his laptop) and grins
that little grin that Superiors have that cuts through matter and probability
and says, "Hi, I'm a Superior, you're on the Other Side, and one of us is
having a reeeeeally bad day...."
The Shedite probably would be rendered Forces floating around the Symphony
right now if he hadn't been strumming some distinctly interesting Symphonic
chords just before Jordi found him; as it was, Jordi decided he'd be better off
binding the Shedite into an object near at hand as a relic, trapping him for
later leisurely interrogation. (And maybe something more. I dunno, Kyrios. No
offense.)
So he possessed the Shedite out of his laptop, nabbed the now-celestial demon,
and bound him into a nice fresh flan that happened to be just coming out of the
oven. Waste of a flan, in my opinion, but whatever's handy. He then
dispossessed the Vessel and proceeded to finish with a nice slow-rise loaf that
had just gotten ready.
Well, Archangels can screw up. It just doesn't happen that often. You don't
expect a flan to walk off by itself, after all. Why should Jordi have known
that the Shedite had had another Vessel it had managed to drop off hastily, a
small clockwork lawn gnome? For Heaven's sake, why would Vapula give something
a lawn gnome as a Vessel? (Though we're a little worried that he may be testing
out pieces of larger android bodies for his Shedim, but that's another
mission.)
Best not to delve into the mind of the Mad Prince, anyway. The point is,
there's a lawn gnome out there that's sufficiently close to being a Remnant,
now that its soul is bound into a flan, to evade detection by supernatural
abilities. It shouldn't be hard to find, really. How many lawn gnomes carry
around fresh flans?
Admittedly, the town is pretty big -- not in people, but kind of sprawling over
the mountainside forest. And we expect that there's a small Technology Tether
around here that the gnome may be vaguely heading for. And various animals might be considering the
flan as a decent snack, which frankly I don't mind visualizing at all but then
that's my Malakite proclivities talking, but orders are to find it ASAP.
Look on the bright side. If you catch the gnome before it gets there, mission
accomplished. If you find the Tether, it probably won't be particularly well-guarded;
it's clandestine, not fortified. We'll take a Tether over a gnome.
On the other hand, a gnome and 'is land would be... oh, go join Search Team
Coordinator #4 and get to work.