Post by Edra Ogunlana on Dec 11, 2011 20:20:02 GMT -5
Show me a barrel and watch me scrape it Faced with the music, as always I'll face it
Trouble loves me, Seeks and finds me Oh, please fulfill me, Otherwise, kill me
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If you were to ask any American Hunter worth their salt about crossroads, they’d most likely tell you about Robert Johnson, the blues prodigy who sold his soul to the devil at the junction of highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Ask an American Monster and you might get a different story. It was actually a musician called Tommy Johnson who’d come ready to trade his soul for talent. The creature he struck a deal with was the entrepreneurial African god, Legba; and the crossroads they met at was miles from the Clarksdale tourist trap. The reality was an unimpressive gravel-spattered X off of highway 8 that saw more crows than sightseers. ‘Pappa Legba’ still held court there once a season to harvest souls, as he had done long before Crowley cornered the market. Ever-evolving, he had moved on from the petty bartering best left to demons. Now, opportunists from all over the world gravitated towards Mississippi in an unspoken truce, ready for Legba’s Quarterly Crossroads Rumble. A small fortune awaited the top four fighters, while the souls of the bottom four were forfeit to their Crossroads host. Eddie had ranked somewhere in the middle for more years than she cared to remember.
The last full moon of Fall picked out row after row of weather-beaten cars, bikes and RVs. Sinister horse boxes and armoured vans were dotted around the fringe, couriers to a portion of the night’s entertainment. The remote little intersection had become a one night festival to rival Nevada’s Burning Man, lit by smoky fires, headlights and humming generators. The crowd was about three-quarters human – witches, warlocks, crooked hunters and the like – but the supernatural creatures wandered freely among them without the preamble of disguise. They teemed around the rows of hastily erected food stalls selling everything from raw sugar cane to boiled entrails, filling the air with an unholy stench underpinned by sweat and exhaust fumes. Music drifted from some of the vehicles but was periodically drowned by the roar and whistle of the spectators. Legba’s powers kept the noise from carrying and by dawn there would be hardly any sign left behind to track. His court remained safe for the night since only something as powerful as an archangel would dare provoke him. For now, the red-eyed god sat in a barker lounger bolted to the roof of a VW camper van, watching over the proceedings. He wore a flannel dressing gown and Bermuda shorts, acoustic guitar in one hand, tumbler of White Russian in the other.
Eddie pushed her way through the bedlam to the crossroads’ centre, a blood-stained Vodun sigil scratched into the ground and surrounded by hastily erected chain-link fencing in a 10ft wide ring. All around her exchanges were taking place, fuelled by the mystic energy of the intersection. Dragon’s gold, rune knives, hex bags, silver bullets and the ethereal glow of jarred souls; each flashed and disappeared just as quickly between eager hands. Two of Legba’s toadies were frantically gesturing to each other and to faces in the crowd. Their heated parley broke only when either stopped to take payments or scrawl onto a massive blackboard listing names and odds. She caught the eye of the nearest pundit, letting him take note of the face she wore, right down to the true colouring of her eyes. With a pointing gesture she was recognised and added to the board. She knew not to use her real name, here she was just ‘Copycat’. The shapeshifter grinned when she noticed her chances were significantly better than the year before. Nothing like an almost-apocalypse to thin out the competition.
Inside the ring a Kitsune was already getting his tail handed to him by a grey-skinned Aumakua that Eddie recognised. Mano, the shark-spirit, was a guardian to some family in Hawaii but his kind didn’t extend that courtesy to anything else walking on two legs. She remembered her first encounter ended with her kicking him right in his fishy little balls before knocking him out. As Eddie passed by the edge of the ring his dark eyes caught her pale yellow gaze. He grimaced at her with a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and, without looking away, bit down on the Kitsune’s throat. It was a promise to even the score this time round. Eddie stuck out her tongue and tried to ignore the anxious ball hardening in her gut as she settled on a place to watch and wait from the foot of Legba’s ‘throne’.
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Temporary Face: Wearing her own for once
Music: Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot
Clothes: Something like this
Notes: Tried to create something open to a variety of possibilities
Word Count: Around 750
Credit: Coding was quite heavily modified from its original template but may the fleas of a thousand camels still infest the crotch of anyone who steals credit from Ixi Stix of CAUTION!!
