Bartholomew Conrad Fitzroy and Tegan Annabelle Milburn, in spite of their relatively extended time together at the beach house (a grand total of 3 weeks), and further in spite of the very slight overlap in social circles (will-workers, vampires, and the Troubling Entities Who Hate Them Both), rarely darkened each other's doors. They were cordial enough, and occasionally made small talk over metaphysics to their mutual benefit, but their relationship was one that remained as close and warm as office workers whom occasionally lunched at the same time, regardless of whether or not they shared a BFFFE (Best Friend For ****ing Ever) in Mona Oliveira, or a living room. Thus, it had come with some surprise to Tegan that Bart, ever-unassuming, grease monkey, tomcatting Bart, had gone out of his way to study under one of the most powerful curandeiras he knew to learn to deal with those mages whom had handed over their souls to beings that would make Bosch, Blake and Ligotti hide beneath their bedcovers, specifically due to her barely-articulated misgivings, and those mostly voiced to their mutual friend. This act, unfortunately, seemed to close off yet more of their conversational ease, translated into tight, nervous smiles and slow, deliberate waves. So it came to pass that Bart and Tegan spent their time separate, each seemingly absorbed in their own worlds while simultaneously fretting the same problem, from entirely different ends, and it was this fundamental, invisible barrier that would leave them so very, very vulnerable to that very same thing.

Bart's particular flavor or magic ran on such a personal, subjective level that it seemed an impossible thing to discuss, though in subtle ways it permeated almost everything he did. A journey that had begun with an acid trip gone terribly awry had led him to a juncture where a deep breath could awaken him from the lulling drone of time, where touching a finger to his thumb untethered him from the illusion of distance. Still, in spite of, or perhaps because of, this elevated understanding he did his best, most thorough work in automotive operation and maintenance on obnoxious, chrome-plated muscle cars, his current vessel a sunset-orange, 1971 Dart Demon. He drove along the coastline, jagged rock on his right, straight, deadly drop on his left, and hairpin turns as far as the eye could see. Calm as a cow in Calcutta while his speedometer veered awfully close to the triple digits, he breathed through each shift, feeling the machine respond and speak to him through his intricate workings of the clutch and gearshift, listening to the motor's mantra humming in his ear. The Dart was, for the time being, his mobile sanctuary, his rolling mechanism to tune into the resounding spheres of Creation. Rarely did anyone join him in his temple, and especially not without a strong, enheartening connection to that person.

This made it all the more surprising when, after a tight, serpentine bend, a small middle-aged man with a lamb-like beard and argyle sweater vest appeared in the middle back seat.

((A Scene involving Bart Fitzroy, Mona Oliveira, Tegan Milburn, Doc Wormwood, and Tep Maly.))

Bart's room seemed to have a pall cast over it, the wood of the door pitted and rotting and the knob nearly rusted shut. Food brought to him often crumbled to dust before it reached his lips, save for preservative-laden or salted foods, and either the purest of waters or the most chemically-laden soft drinks provided him with hydration. Everything in his room seemed centuries older than they were, worn down and fallen to pieces around his gray-skinned, sickly form.

This persisted for three days before Tegan's desperate call to her professional acquaintances had been answered; however, their response belied a definitive sense of urgency. Tegan returned from the porch, a gloved hand settling at the door's frame as she looked in on Mona, brows tilting nervously above her pitch-dark eyes and the points of her ears left to peek from the curtain of pin-straight hair. "They've arrived."

Mona sat between a perplexed looking mastiff and vacant eyed macaw, each one sharing the air of a group of people called to play jury to a particularly gruesome murder trial. Mona looked up to Tegan, misty eyed and her mouth set forlorn, and without a word she rose to her feet. A gloomy habit played itself out then as those same pale brown eyes shifted to the rotting wood of Bart's door; a ghost looking to an empty spot where a favored piece of furniture had once sat. Swallong hard and clenching her fists in the pocket of a faded, moth eaten gray hoodie, Mona found nothing there, no hope. Pointless. Head dipping down into a solemn bow, she walked the wellworn path to the front door and to the porch just beyond Tegan to greet these associates of the Kiasyd's. And suddenly Mona felt what numerous others must when greeting guests to a loved one's funeral.

"Ohhh sod it all." One spindly hand settled on Mona's shoulder in a bid for reassurance, if not solidarity, while the other lifted to cover her face and wipe down. The vehicle arriving was a black, 1950s Cadillac hearse, gold dragons painted along the sides. It drifted just past the driveway before backing in, smoothly insinuating itself next to Bart's entropy-gnarled Dart Demon.

"Eugh. Yeaah, I can? Nmt, I can taste if from here." A woman's voice, smoky and low, chirped its disapproval from the passenger's seat before the parrot-green hair popped out from the passenger's side, the figure emerging compact and draped in a flowing, slitted skirt with a top more fitted to a rave than a rescue mission. From the driver's side, a pale, bald head tipped out, followed by a long, broad stretch of a black winter jacket and full-break slacks, seeming to float rather than walk alongside his companion and up the steps. the Colorful Woman and Ghoulish Man both bowed on reaching the top of the steps, with the former settling a sympathetic wince to Mona. "Hi. I'm Maly? this is Jianyu. Uhm?" She interrupted herself to give Tegan a smile and wave before turning back to Mona. "So, let's get your friend out, and see if we can do something to help, yeah?"

Mona, who had been watching their arrival with the heedfulness of a markedly barbarous guard dog, looked both Maly and Jianyu up and down, her gaze lingering on the bald man just long enough for familiarity to briefly outshadow the bereaved look in her eyes. Nodding her dark head, her defenses still cranked to eleven, she brushed her fingers along Tegan's pale arm and turned to guide them into the house. Hallah let go of a low, languishing groan but the dog didn't bark, not when there were worse things just lurking beyond the door to Bart's room. From the parrot they would recieve nothing but a beady eyed stare before the bird resumed plucking at a couch cushion's loose thread. To be fair, Batata was a bird, and they were notorious for simply mimicking emotions. Paying the animals no mind, a phantom in her own home, Mona stopped abruptly a few feet from the door where the carpet had been worn down to its plastic threads; a sure-fire mark of constant pacing.

Jianyu took Mona's extended regard with a single, swift quirk of his brow and an inquiring glance down to Maly, who wordlessly bobbed her head in a smirk to indicate just how much the Doc's reputation likely preceded him.

Maly drew in a breath as she caught sight of the animals, bringing a subtle, but noticeable flair of life about her that seemed to calm some of their nerves, while a less- subtle pop and flash of green, gold and red swirls popped and rolled around her person as she approached the door.

A similar series of patterns, wrought of monochrome, chilling drifts of color moving inward and downward dragged over Jianyu's form, the both of them girding themselves for the act of opening the door to Bart's room. The Doctor touched the knob with two fingers, and just as soon it broke off in his hand and drifted open, revealing the dark, rotting interior of Bart's room.

"Ohhh this is? hm." Maly stopped herself mid-sentence as Doc Wormwood trudged inside, turning to face Mona with a nervous, yet kindly smile and a glance to Tegan in place by the door, tall and forlorn with her hands folded together. "So? yyyeah, if you want, you can ride along with us back to the Doc's. I squared it away before we left, so it should be safe for you." Dark eyes glanced from the dark interior of the room and back to Mona, black-painted lips twisting up in deference to the clear bond that stretched from the Iberian and to the patient drowning in miasma within.

"He's my best friend.." Mona blurted the words out before what she had wanted to say could make it to her tongue, and try as she might, Mona just could not get it out. Those three words, while irrelevant when spoken to nearly everyone who crossed her path, became her way of accepting the invitation. Head and heart both heavy, the girl pressed her hands together as if in prayer, kissed the tips of her fingers and pointed the steepled digits at the parrot haired girl and the man she vaguely recognized from an obscure pulp paperback. It was a gesture of gratitude. Turning once more and meandering past Tegan and the watchful eyes of that giant dust-mop she called a dog (Batata was making headway with that thread), Mona moved back onto the porch and fixed her thousand yard stare on a seagull cleaning its foot atop a fencepost.

"? Maly?" The Doctor's voice was low, slow and deep, like a river nearly broad enough to make for a long lake. Although it held little modulation, the very act of him speaking aloud seemed to send his companion wide-eyed and lurching inside.

"Wope? yeah? the hearse isn't locked, so enter whenever you'd like." The sounds of a Midwestern man voiding his stomach of unspeakable substances nearly drowned out the ends of her sentence as she hustled within, casting flickers of color in the ink-dark room as she and the Doctor hauled Bart out, her at his head, and Jianyu at his legs.

Tegan could only open the door to the porch, her own head bowed as a single streak of red ran along her pale cheek and dropped to the floor. At the bidding of an outstretched hand and after a cursory glance outside, a pair of black tendrils curled beneath Bart to aid her Hell-escaped acquaintances in hauling him through the living room, down from the porch, and loaded into the back of the hearse, the cabin littered with incense braziers, jade charms and prayer scrolls thick enough to coat both walls and ceiling.

Once Bart was inside, Tegan placed her palm on Mona's back and offered her a single nod, worrying her lower lip between her teeth and glancing back toward the interior of the house. "I shall tarry here, with the beasts. Please, go with Mister Fitzroy and inform me of his well-being." She looked away after speaking, caught in a knot of internal conflict that culminated in a raspy, purely muscle-memory cough.

"Eu prometo, Tegan," whispered the Iberian lass while she hitched herself up onto her tiptoes and planted a quick peck to a pale cheek. During her walk to the hearse, Mona's brain brutally began the Funeral March of a Marionette, just in case she forgot how dire the situation really was. By the time she reached the meat wagon, she was almost in tears, but the force of sheer will kept them mercifully at bay. If I had been with him, she wanted to say but couldn't to those strangers, If I had been riding with him, maybe it wouldn't have ended with... Mona frowned. She didn't remember climbing into the passenger seat, but she was there.

((conclusion of a scene involving Bart Fitzroy, Mona Oliveira, Doc Wormwood, and Tep Maly))

Maly drew in a deep breath as she set her hand on the curtain, and the air around her seemed to crackle to life, in sharp contrast to the freezing decay on the other side of the curtain. Flickers of color coiled and whipped upwards, shifting from green and blue to a deep, bright red. Next, she pulled back the curtain, standing just off to the side with her shoulders right in line with Mona's.

The room was incredibly dark, lit primarily by the flickering disco-aura that surrounded Maly and the struggle of the street light's rays to filter in. The Doctor, far more visceral than the pulps could have imagined him, grappled with a slick, black creature that seemed to emerge from Bart's exposed chest. Out from the mage's mouth, the darkness crept upwards, forming a lozenge-shaped portal into a cold, dark expanse, nearly palpable, nearly a thing of tangibility instead of a dearth of light. This was the home of the horrible things that Tegan, that Cosimiro and Anouk called to when invoking their shadowy arts. Maly seemed to shift, deep rips forming in her arms and down her legs from which white tiger fur sprouted, fingers ending in talons and a single, pale blue plume extending from her right hand, aimed toward the vaguely humanoid mass that had attached itself to the Doctor. As it bellowed, a single, floor-rattling subsonic note, it peeled away form Jianyu's face, enough to show the blazing orb in his forehead as he set dire, dark eyes on Mona. "Hold him down!"

Mona was gone a flash; so fast that the tail end of Jianyu?s command hit her ears seconds after she had placed her cold hands upon Bart?s chest. There were far too many things going on for even Mona?s oil stained mind to process, and so it simply shut down all of the bits that, left unchecked, drove a person a stark raving bonkers when confronted with such an expertly sewn patchwork of monstrosity. Bart was still a very real thing, as were The Doctor and Maly. She pressed the minuscule weight of her upper body down against Bart?s, clenched his shoulders in her hands and used every bit of strength she could muster in trying to keep him down, even as reality grew thinner around her.

The Doctor and Maly had their tasks ahead of them. The great, black expanse in the portal started to warble, tendrils unfurling like fiddleheads to curl around Bart's arms and Mona's shoulders, their pull slow, insistent. The Doctor had the warbling, black spirit-thing in his clutches, bits of it flaking away as its essence fled into his mouth by a gossamer mist, crumbling like dried paint on the sidewalk between his feeding and Maly's persistent stab from the ethereal blade held underhand.

With her free hand, the parrot-haired, tiger-handed woman grabbed a nearby bottle of soju by its base, whistling in a strange, avian trill. "Hey! Catch." She tossed the botte underhand to Mona, still wrestling with the roiling curtain of black that still beat at her companion.

Her head a weight against Bart's shoulder, her face mere inches from his cheek, Mona used her newly liberated hand to swipe the bottle out of the air. Keeping her skull down, her eyes ever keen, she swung the blunt end of the bottle around to strike at the dark unguis. The most distrubing part- of which a person could fill books about this entire night- was that the shadow was solid, and Mona's mind reeled from that cognitive dissonance. Her arm, as guided by some unseen force, redoubled its effort until at last the bottle shattered against an inky tentacle, peppering her the back of her legs with bits of broken glass. Clinging to Bart, she eyed the new weapon but for a split second- familiarty there- and the jagged ends of the broken bottle were buried repeatedly in one slate arm and then another and another. It may have appeared, to any fool on the outside looking in that, Mona was engaged in the world's most violent game of Wak-a-Mole.

The Abyssal Arms, thankfully, hadn't the strength of those channeled through the will of an undead death-machine. As Mona stabbed into the grasping arms, they shrank back like gradually-salted slugs before bits of them broke off and crumbled into dust fine enough to slip back between the cracks of physical existence. The shadow-spirit in Doc Wormwood's grasp finally let out one last, almost comical sousaphone blare of a death knell once the monolithic, bald monster consumed the last drop of its essence, dark eyes blazing behind a completely serene expression. He settled one hand on Bart, dipping around Maly in order to let the other rest cautiously on Mona's shoulder. Though dreadfully cool, his hand spoke of calm, of closure.

Maly, in the meantime, climbed onto the counter where the portal still spat and sucked in the heat of the room, a rainbow of colors flashing around her shoulders as she took hold of each end, eyes wild and teeth gnashing as the hidden definition in her arms flared to life, pulling the eye to Hell closed, as much as it trembled in resistance. With one, hateful scream, she slammed the Eye shut, loud as a door slamming in a long hallway. As the light from the street lamps poured in and the fixture above send down a diffuse, warm glow of red, she took a deep breath and dropped to the floor, leaning against a cabinet door with eyes half-lidded and lips parted. "****?" She spoke the word with glee, her love of English swear words peeling off of her like the scent of honeysuckle.

For his trouble, Bart let out one last, wet cough of black, tarry substance to crumble and crack in the air, tapping the Doctor's wrist to let up as the other clumsily patted Mona's shoulder, blue eyes blearily cracking open under a layer of crust. "Ghhn? hey?"

The inner working's of Mona Oliveira clicked back on, one at a time, as if an army of small men were running around in her head flipping switches after coming ball shakingly close to meltdown. Still straddling Bart, she slowly sat up, looked from The Doc to Maly with questions leaping eagerly from her throat, but That Fitzroy Boy's voice culled each and everyone. Elated, and, shockingly, happy, like a dying man stumbling towards the redemption of pond after years in the desert, Mona pelted Bart's face with a dozen little kisses. "Tenho suadades tuas.." Opaque red tears rolled down her cheeks and she motioned to Maly and Jianyu. "They brought you back, Bart. They brought you back to me."

Bart's head bobbed under the pelt of kisses, skin and body still quite frail and tender, yet he still managed a slow, weak smile beneath Mona. "Yeah? that? wasn't a good time?" The patting hand on her shoulder took three trembling strokes along her hair before draping around her shoulders, childlike in his hold while trying his damnedest to get his forehead to meet hers before falling back with a resigned "Ptch."

Maly seemed to stay put, the sores in her skin where talon and fur pierced through melting back to her smooth, dark skin as she flexed her fingers. She all but resembled a tired-out cat lazing in the nearest place it found comfort.

Jianyu, on the other hand, lifted his touch from Mona and Bart, standing next to the doorframe, the orb still jutting out of his forehead, but restfully so, just as much a part of him as his ears and his deadpan expression. His voice came smooth and low, modulated in the easy tone of bedside manner, consciously professional, yet still grazing upon the framework of empathy. "We will need to keep him here for a few days, so that his body and spirit may recover. You may use the guest room at your leisure during this time." He closed his eyes and pressed his palms together, bowing from his waist. "Thank you for your assistance."

Maly reached up, lazily tagging Mona's hip in a wayward pat, some animal sign of affection as she started her quadrupedal prowl out of the room and off to a nice, secluded corner of the flat to lick her wounds. "You guys're all right. I'm gonna go be antisocial. Have fun."

She realized perhaps a bit too late that Bart was probably still a teensy bit fragile, and though her expression teetered on sheepish as she slid to the ground, it never quite made it there. "Thank you both. Really. If there is anything I can ever do for you then I would hope that you would let me know." Because favors were Mona's preferred currency. She grinned from ear to ear, all of her evil little teeth put on display, her hand slipping into Bart's. Turning to face the prone figure, Mona put on her very best Devil May Care But I Don't Give Two ****s face. "I don't have nothing else to do, you know, so I guess I could hang around."