Time: Wednesday, 25 August
Place: Father Andrew's Safehouse
Follows: Safehouse and Lucius' and Nicolas' Big Adventure
[A farm outside Toronto, Wednesday, 25 August, around 2300 Eastern Daylight Time]
A lone black car turned up the dirt lane, following the directions the driver had been given, until it reached a dilapidated farmhouse that fit the description the informant had given her boss two days before. It was a strange request, surely, but one the Enforcers could easily handle: a simple Whammying joined with the subtle suggestions to release any cult programming the whammyee had previously received. While the Enforcers' annals had had many of these requests during the 1980's, the return of Western society to mainstream Christian religions and the discreditation and dissolution of many of the more invasive cults had made this sort of assignment much less common this decade.
Shutting off the ignition, Captain Raven Blackbane stepped out of the car, double-checked her tool kit, and knocked on what remained of the door.
"Be ye friend or foe?" came the answer from within.
"I come from Father Andrew," the woman replied.
"Then be ye welcome, an' ye enter of your ane free will." The door opened, and an unwashed man, wearing only a linen tunic, ushered her inside.
"She's right here, Sister," the man said, leading her to a woman imprisoned in a long woolen swath of Clan MacDuff tartan.
Raven crouched down to where the woman lay, unable to move. "You do know why I'm here, don't you?"
"Chris said something aboot Father Andrew... an' somethin' that soonded like 'pre-Cana'..." she mumbled.
*Pre-Cana, right, Raven thought. "He thought you might have taken a
fever," she said, moving close enough to examine the redhead's eyes
to determine if she was as heavily-programmed as her fiance reportedly
thought her to be.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Dinnae. I was kidnapped frae the Shrine."
Chris glared at Heather with the black stare of an abuser who was about to beat the life out of a child who wouldn't along with his lies.
"What's your name."
"Heather. Heather Poinsett-Dunbar," she said, seeing Chris's black gaze upon her above where Raven was crouching.
Good girl, Chris whispered under his breath.
"And do you know why you're here?" the examiner asked.
"Chr-chr- Because Chris is jealous of MacNunkies," the prisoner stuttered.
Raven drew back slightly. "Who is MacNunkies?" she asked.
"MacNunkies," Heather replied, getting a drooly look on her face. "MacNunkies o' the bonny knees, wha' was brought across frae the ashes of Vesuvius."
*An Addict," Raven said to herself. This is serious. Even Enforcers knew enough to try to steer clear of the Pompeiian. How would he react when he found that one of his Not-So-Vestal-Virgins had left his shrine?
"Aye," Chris intervened, "an he's sae corrupted her tha' she thinks she can get awa' tae marry me, bu' he'll want her doory an' nae' jus' first night, bu' all nights, an' where are we supposed to hae bairns i' she's wi' him a' the time?"
Just as Andrew implied, an insanely jealous fiance, to boot, Raven thought. "Chris, I need your help to do this," she said. "I need you to hold Heather's head still while I examine her more closely. Can you do that?"
"Aye," the ersatz Scotsman replied, bringing his imprisoned fiancee upright and standing behind her, his hands keeping her head trained on Raven.
"There, that's good," the Enforcer said. "I need you both to look straight at me," she said, pulling down her sunglasses over her eyes and removing the hypnotizer from her inside pocket. There was a whirr and a flash. Than she waited a moment, noticing the two blank stares. She began the deprogramming. "There are no vampires. There is no Nunkies. There is no such thing as prima nocte. You are in Toronto for your honeymoon. You are madly in love with each other; nobody else exists for either of you -- and you both trust each other completely," she told them, working the whammyizer in an effective arc. "And you will forget that I was ever here."
As the couple blinked a few more times, Raven snapped the whammyizer closed, set it back in her breast pocket, and slipped back out into her car, and Toronto, before either of the two would come of the trance and find traces of her presence.
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NEXT STORY: DESPERATELY SEEKING SCOTSWOMAN
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