Bear's Beauties: Existential Crisis 15 (Patreon)

[center]<<Lisa Wilborn>>[/center]

[Bear nervous]

Thank you power, I couldn’t tell. Pushing aside my power’s apparent need to state the obvious, I refocused on the maps that Taylor had made. Black had shared the vault number we wanted, while Bill Weasley had shared how Gringotts vaults were ordered. Meaning we knew which vault we needed to hit. The problem was…

“It’s just past the range of what my bugs were able to map out,” Taylor apologized.

“It’s still better than what we had,” Bear brushed her apology off, focused on the map along with the rest of us. “We’re going to need a way in and a distraction. Ideas?”

“Ah’ve been told Ah can be a bit distractin’,” Harley chimed in, arm thrust up into the air with a grin on her face.

[Is deliberately understating]

“What if some of us go in to ‘open an account’?” I asked aloud, ignoring my power.

“That would get us into a cart, so it’s probably our best bet for getting down to the vaults… It can’t be myself, Cameron or Nikhol, as since we were in the meeting with Kragnus we’d be recognized,” Bear said as he rubbed at his chin.

“Speaking of which, why isn’t Kara here for this?” Taylor asked, a touch of concern in her voice.

“Because of the other goal for this endeavor,” Nikhol said, her voice a mask of calm despite the vibrant yellow-orange glow coming from her eyes. “Killing that monster that calls itself a banker.”

[Feels violated after having read Kragnus’ mind]

[Kragnus compares unfavorably to former colleagues and hutt gangsters]

… I don’t know what she saw that made her think the goblin ranked lower than Sith and hutts, and I don’t think I want to know.

“We would be leaving some anonymous tips with the Ministry,” Lana said, “but we can hardly afford the havoc that another Goblin War would cause.”

“There’s also the fact that even if we did, it’s highly unlikely that Fudge has the balls to do anything but sweep it under the rug,” Bear quipped. “But to give you an idea, if we had Kragnus and those like him, the guards at Auschwitz would have gotten better treatment at the hands of the Allies after Nuremberg.”

“If we may return to the matter at hand,” Cameron interrupted, while also refocusing us.

[hr][/hr]

“Hello! We recently obtained a lot of gold and we’d like to open a vault!” I said with a fake hyper energy as Lana and I stood in front of a teller.

“To open a vault requires a minimum deposit of twenty galleons, do you have the…” the teller’s voice trailed off as Lana and I opened the chest we brought with us to show the entire inside completely filled with gold bars.

“Is this enough?”

“Pass one up here.”

Lana reached down and picked up one of the bars and handed it to the teller, who carefully examined it both by putting it on a scale and looking through it with a jeweler’s lens.

“Pure gold, how did you obtain it?”

“Does it matter?” Lana asked rhetorically.

The goblin stared down at us, before ringing the bell and calling out, “Snapfang!”

Another goblin came out and led us to a series of mining carts. As we climbed in, there was a commotion at the entrance, but before we could look our cart was moving.

[hr][/hr]

“Lana and Lisa should go in to open a new vault, using gold I mined from the asteroid belt. Once they’re heading down, Harley comes in and causes a distraction,” Cameron suggested.

[hr][/hr]

As the cart moved deeper into the depths, I turned to Lana and gave her a nod. Giving a nod herself, she turned and tapped the goblin on the shoulder.

“What is it huma…” the goblin snapped before his eyes went blank as Lana waved her hand in front of him.

“You will take us to Vault 937.”

“I… will take you to Vault 937.”

“You will forget that anything unusual happened.”

“I will forget anything unusual happened.”

“These are not the droids you’re looking for,” I said with my trademark grin, making Lana give me a flat stare. “What? I’ve always wanted to say that.”

Lana just rolled her eyes before turning back to the goblin, “You will show us how to operate the cart ourselves.”

“I will show you how to operate the cart yourselves. Grip here to adjust the speed…”

[hr][hr]

“Once in a cart on the way down, Lana uses the Force to make the goblin take them to the Lestrange vault. While this is happening, Nikhol uses the distraction caused by Harley to kill the cannibal and his guards.”

“While I do know Force Stealth, I’m not particularly well practiced with it,” Nikhol pointed out. “If I just go in lightsaber lit and shooting lightning, then it doesn’t matter how much of a distraction Harley is, I won’t get to him.”

[hr][/hr]

“Hyacinth, can I talk to you for a moment?”

“Oh, sure,” she said while waving off Rhonda and Hermione. Following Nikhol, Hyacinth did her best not to let the fact that she was standing so close to a woman she was crushing on affect her, and instead simply asked, “Did you need something?”

“Yes,” Nikhol said, her eyes half hooded as she looked down at Hyacinth and stepped up to the younger girl. “I heard you have a rather… fascinating cloak. Could I perhaps borrow it?”

Forcing back the blush that wanted to form and swallowing the lump in her throat, Hyacinth maintained a presence of mind to ask, “W… why? What d-do you want it for?”

“I just want to examine it, see if I can tease out its secrets. You’ll get it back undamaged.”

Hyacinth swallowed again, before managing to say in an almost steady voice, “Sure… it’s fine.”

Nikhol smiled, before reaching out and cupping her cheek, making Hyacinth lose the battle to control her blush and her heart race. Then she said, “Thank you dear. You know, you’d be more than welcome to join our Family.”

“R-really?” Hyacinth squeaked.

“Think about it, you’d have a large number of people at your side, see worlds beyond imagining, and besides your coven, do you really have much holding you here?”

[hr][/hr]

“Hyacinth’s invisibility cloak is one of a kind, if she’s willing to loan it to us we’d probably have no troubles. If not, the Order has some, but I wouldn’t trust them as much.”

[hr][/hr]

Nikhol moved through the corridors of Gringotts, easily backtracking the intentionally confusing route that they’d been led on when brought up to meet Kragnus. It had nothing on some of the Rakatan ruins she’d navigated, let alone that time she’d found herself in the Works on Coruscant without a map.

Within five minutes, she was at the door to Kragnus’s office. Smirking, she used the Force to open the door and stepped inside. The score of guards as well as Kragnus and his assistant all started and turned to face the door in surprise. But, with Hyacinth’s cloak on, and her rudimentary Force Stealth activated, she was completely unnoticed by them.

“Check the runes,” Kragnus ordered as Nikhol stepped into the room and shut the door.

“Don’t go too far,” she drawled as she dropped her Force technique and removed the cloak.

“You,” Kragnus snarled. “You have some nerve, human. You shouldn’t have come here, especially alone.”

“You shouldn’t have covered your guards in metal,” Nikhol returned, making Kragnus blink in confusion.

Letting the Dark Side flow through her, Nikhol raised her arms and let loose with torrents of Force Lightning, letting the currents of energy flow to the most conductive items in the room: the metal clad goblin guards. She could have used enough power to turn them to ash in an instant, but it had been some time since she’d gotten to play. The assistant grabbed a battleaxe from the wall and threw it at her, only for it to stop a full foot from her head.

“You dropped this,” Nikhol said with a chuckle as she turned the axe around and sent it flying into the goblin’s head, maintaining her Lightning the entire time.

Feeling the last guard expiring, Nikhol let the Force Lightning die. Now alone in the room with the stupefied Kragnus, she stalked up to his desk and sat on it, scattering the papers that had been on it in the process.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” she said, staring down Kragnus.

“You’re no witch, you’re something different,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. What you’ve done here will spark the next Goblin War.”

“How can it? After all, you never ended the last one, you just changed the battlefield. I admit, it was a rather clever strategy. You couldn’t handle the losses in population the previous wars had dealt, so you turned what would have been a pyrrhic victory into a disguised death blow. Though I wonder if your ancestors realized just how massive a victory this decision was.”

“You mean the fact that the Wizards have barely changed in the last five hundred years?”

“Ah, you don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t matter. Much as I’d like to burn this entire establishment to the ground and find countless new and creative ways to execute your kind until I’ve driven you extinct, there are far more pressing matters that mean I will have to settle for just you. For now.”

[hr][/hr]

“Once Nikhol is on her way, Harley’s distraction has served its primary purpose. Sooner or later, she’ll be forced out. After that, we give Lana and Lisa fifteen minutes to get the Horcrux before the second distraction.”

[hr][/hr]

“Vault 937,” the goblin said as we arrived.

[Is considering keeping both of you for breeding stock]

[Heard that higher ups consider human infants a delicacy]

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Lana said, moments before her lightsaber flashed and the goblin’s head fell over the edge of the cart.

“I’ve always been told to respect other cultures, but that’s too far,” I said as I shuddered. I’d been getting readings like that the entire trip down, and by now was glad it was over.

The two of us climbed off the cart, taking both the chest and the body with us, and made our way to the vault door. There was a low rumbling hiss as a pale reptilian head turned in our direction, but I lifted up a two-headed bell thing and started shaking it. As soon as it heard the clanging, it cringed back with a whimper.

[Pavlovian trigger: was tortured as infant whenever bells were rung]

Rachel would hate these guys, even if it were dragons instead of dogs. Pushing aside the thought, I dragged the goblin’s corpse up to the vault door and pressed its hand against it as Lana fiddled with the chest. There were several loud clacks behind the vault doors, before with a pressurized hiss they slowly creaked open.

[Amount of gold within erroneous]

[Coins not solid gold]

[Gold colored lead]

“Well, looks like you don’t get to use the Force to open the vault after all,” I teased Lana as I filed that bit of information away.

Lana just rolled her eyes before finally getting the chest to open. Inside was a deep pit, and the sounds of someone climbing up a ladder. After a few moments, Cameron climbed out of the chest and strode into the open vault.

[hr][/hr]

“The vault needs to be opened by a Gringotts employee. If not possible, Lana should be able to use the Force to rip the doors from the bedrock. Once the vault is open, open the chest borrowed from Auror Moody to allow me to enter the vault and retrieve the horcrux.”

“Is he going to let us use his chest?” Bear asked.

“I already procured it with his permission.”

[hr][/hr]

Cameron walked through the vault, ignoring the vast piles of lead, torture implements, paintings, and other such items. Bear had provided a description of her target. Spotting it at the top of a large pile of lead coinage, Cameron calculated the optimum means of retrieving it. Her metal endoskeleton meant she’d be too heavy to climb up the pile, so instead she’d need to bring it down to her.

Her CPU scanned the mount of lead, and with a snap kick she destabilized the pile in such a way that the cup was sent rolling down to her hands. Holding it, she immediately ran a self-diagnostic test to determine if her grip had caused any curses to trigger. No problems found. Careful examination of both the cup and the rest of the vault found no signs of any other possible alternatives.

Setting aside the issue for later, Cameron turned around and exited the vault. Climbing down into the chest, she heard the beep of a communicator from the Yamato and the signal for the last phase of the plan.

“Taylor love, would you mind showing them what the Egyptians went through in Exodus?”

[hr][/hr]

“Why are you retrieving the horcrux? I’m more likely to sense any traps or curses on it,” Lana pointed out.

“I am least likely to be harmed by any such curses. In any event, after retrieving the horcrux, Taylor provides the final distraction with a swarm in the Gringotts lobby. In the ensuing chaos, all four of us leave hidden in the crowd. We meet with our ally from the Order and return to Hogwarts.”

[hr][/hr]

It was complete pandemonium. People were screaming in fear, spells were flying through the air as household pest control charms were used, the goblin guards drew their swords to fend off any that came too close, and above it all, a veritable mass of insects and arachnids, swarming in a massive cloud of wings, silk, and chitin. Then, the cloud shifted. It took a shape, forming into what looked like a massive head with glowing eyes, staring down at the people within.

PEOPLE OF WIZARDING BRITAIN

Movement within the lobby stopped, as the crowd stared up at the terrible visage above them, as it spoke in a voice made by the buzzing of wings and chirps.

SOON, YOU WILL BE FREE FROM THE MONSTERS THAT FEAST ON YOUR LOST. THOSE THAT STOLE YOUR FUTURE FROM YOU WILL BE BROUGHT LOW. READY YOURSELVES FOR THE OPPORTUNITY WHEN IT COMES. SO SAYS SKITTER.

With that final declaration, the mass collapsed, a swarm of spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, flies, and other assorted bugs falling to the floor. It wouldn’t be for some time that the goblins of Gringotts discovered the numerous dead elsewhere in the bank, but by then the culprits were long gone.