5 Make it Loud, Make it Noisy

It took three weeks for Desmond to finally to begin fulfilling young Miss Otieno's request. He didn't mind much though.

Whether it was because having something to focus on kept his powers from building up and warping the space-time continuum of his surroundings. Or whether it was the rules, showing him some clemency by not forcing him to deal with 'visitors' while he was working. Whenever Desmond had to fulfill a request, he would not have to keep his nightly vigils during the time that he was fulfilling that request.

After stepping through the void-gate that lead to Lamia's chateau all the way over in the island-continent Lagarina, Desmond found himself right in the middle of a scene from a horror movie.

He'd exited the gate and found himself in a bedroom that would have been luxurious enough for royalty to sleep in if it weren't completely covered in garbage and splattered in blood. Lying splayed in the middle of the room, atop a pile of trash bags, was a body. A man's body.

The cause of death was easy enough to figure out. Even without his connection to the akashic giving him a play-by-play of how things went down, Desmond didn't need to be a psychic to know that the man's death had something to do with the gunshot that had splattered more than half of the man's face onto three out of the four walls of the room.

What Desmond had a harder time figuring out was why the seemingly harmless young lady who sat in his room in Ottaviano, waiting for updates on his progress, had then gone on to dismember the man's body.

Rather than call it dismemberment, it might be more fitting to call it a dissection. The corpse lay on a collapsed operating table and was surrounded by bloody tools. It looked as if after realizing what she'd done, the young lady had then retreated into herself, and then gone on to treat the man like another of the research subjects that were kept in the lab that lay in the basement of the chateau.

Distracting herself from her crime by dissecting the body for a while before someone interrupted.

A quick tour through the rest of the house would reveal that Lamia's bedroom wasn't the only one covered in blood. The halls outside the room had their own uneven coat of red-brown paint.

Warmed by the late summer heat, the whole house stank to high heaven and was filled with the stench of rot and death. Maggots crawled over the partially vivisected corpses of the chateau's servant staff. Their bodies cut apart by some kind of brutally efficient martial art.

It seemed that Lamia had gone on quite the killing spree before deciding to settle down, indulging in a meal of only junk food. Spending the next three days after her little freakout watching Saturday morning cartoons and playing video games.

Lamia had expected that the three day period would be the limit before someone came over and discovered what had happened. She'd expected that three days of freedom was just about as long as she'd have before some amongst the lowest level staff that had managed to escape the massacre, finally worked up the nerve to go and report what had happened to the authorities.

Lamia spent those three days enjoying herself in a carefree manner, because she'd already decided to handle matters herself, before anyone could get to her. The only fate that awaited her if she let herself be caught was a fate worse than death or a life not worth living.

Escaping was not an option because despite mostly spending her days indoors outside of the public eye, the girl's face was fairly famous. Being the spitting image of her legendary mother's face. Thus the only way out that Lamia saw available to her was the path taken by ghosts and demons.

Lamia ended what she'd thought would be her last day, by seeing if the stories her mother used to tell her about a friendly shadow monster that knocked on doors and could be visited if you knocked back, were true.

Lamia had expected nothing to come of it, she'd expected to spook herself and have a last bit of fun before saying goodbye to the world of the living, but as they say within every tale, there is a kernel truth, or in the case of the tintenklopfer legend, a whole cob of truth.

Looked at without context it seemed like Desmond's current client was something of a villainess. An insane murderer who killed without remorse.

Looked at 'with' context Desmond could only cluck his tongue and bemoan that yet another life had been lost to monologuing disease.

More than 100,000 people were lost each year to villainous monologuing disease.

Like most rational, intelligent people, Desmond didn't know what it was about doing something terrible to another human being that made one want to stand in front of someone who had the means to do them serious harm, and brag about one's misdeeds. Whatever the cause was, it happened enough that Desmond felt like it was worthy of serious scientific research.

In this case, it seemed that a certain Octavio Smith had been feeling pretty sure of himself roughly five days ago.

Desmond wasn't sure whether it was seeing the large lump sum that had been recently dropped into his bank statement, or getting his jollies during a recent visit with his newest mistress that put the extra fire in Octavio's system.

All Desmond knew was that after trying and once again failing to try and push his timid fiance Lamia into giving him a little 'something extra' on top of all her life's work and her family's dwindling wealth, Octavio started to get a little too talkative for his own good.

The girl was downtrodden, filled with self-loathing, and insecurities. Traumatized by losing almost everything that had mattered to her. It perhaps made a little sense for the cold-blooded young master of the Yang Kingdom's Smith family, to think that giving the girl one last push would break her. Making Lamia good and 'pliant.'

In a moment of 'brilliance' he revealed that he, and his father, and his father's financial cohorts, the people who'd taken over Otieno Corp, were all part of a secret conspiracy.

A conspiracy that had worked together to engineer the girl's mother's death and stage it as a suicide so they could take over the company.

For some baffling reason, they'd decided the best way to do so was to make it seem like the former-CEO had cracked under the pressures of motherhood. Meaning that they'd have to gaslight the girl till she was convinced that she was the cause of her mother's death.

Then they'd stripped Lamia away from the kindly uncle who'd served as her mother's right-hand man when he got to close to the truth. Framing the man for several crimes that he hadn't committed and getting him executed by the kingdom of Yang. His alleged crimes including larceny, drug dealing, pedophilia, and murder.

Lamia tried to save the man standing up for his character, so they'd yet again had to do some more truth-spinning. Convincing Lami and the rest of the world that Elliot Wallace was actually a twisted character. A man who's sinister crimes were all for the ultimate goal of building an underground coterie and eventually raring his adopted daughter into being the wife he'd always wished his former-employer to be.

They likely would have done away with Lamia as well, but she'd turned out to be like a younger version of her genius mother. Talented in the martial way and skilled in the field of biological magics and the study of magitek, but a lot more manipulable.

This made her into an asset for them, instead of an obstacle. An important asset that they'd need to keep the company alive since they'd gone and cooked their first golden goose.

Thus within a few days after CFO Wallace execution they affianced the then thirteen-year-old Lamia to the thirty-five-year-old Octavio Smith, as a way of keeping her under their control.

In hindsight, it was clear that Octavio had miscalculated how much self-loathing the girl had for herself, versus the world that had taken her mother away from her. He also might have done well to refrain from making this revelation while she had the prototype of a new gun-based artifact sitting right there on her work table, beside her.

The result being, that as the man had stood sneering at the girl, imperiously waiting for Lamia to breakdown, Lamia had picked up the gun that lay next to her and, fully and finally, wiped the stupid grin off of the man's face.

Horrified by what she'd done, Lamia ended up in a fugue state. Unknowingly beginning to take the corpse apart, in an attempt escape reality. Dissecting her victim's corpse just as she would any of the other research sample's Octavio, and his people, brought her. Then a servant saw what she was doing and startled the girl out of her trance.

Zombie-like, frantic and frenzied, Lamia chased after the witness to silence them and keep them from telling anyone what she'd done. Which lead to yet another servant witnessing 'that' murder and having to be killed to keep their silence. With the chain going on, and on, till finally everyone in the chateau was dead.

The whole messy situation ending the same way certain adult cartoons about people who were caught having illicit *** and tried to use more *** to cover it up, usually ended. Ending in a big cluster*** of epic proportions.

To Desmond the deaths of the servants were unfortunate, but everyone except the girl herself was mostly aware of what was happening to Lamia, and unreasonable as it might have sounded, the sins of a master still splash the servant's shoes.

Even if it was too much to expect any of the normal folk who worked in the chateau and in the company to say anything when they saw what their superiors were doing, keeping quiet made them complicit.

In certain circles, complicity equals culpability. This was why when clans and factions fought, their helpers and employees were always thought of as collateral damage.

Ultimately, Desmond wasn't a judge on the good and evil of people's actions. His idea of being good was being a courteous and semi-decent person while trying to get one's way, and evil was anything that went against his goals. A realistic but plainly self-serving view.

When it came to the matter of objective good and evil, Desmond was doing the best he could to keep his morality alignment neutral. Staying neutral because it made his life a lot easier, and because he sensed his own innate nature wouldn't allow him to pick the side of good if push came to shove.

Thus all Desmond cared about was granting Miss Lamia's request as per their agreement. Her full request when properly explained was a desire to slay her past self. Right the wrongs that she perceived herself as being guilty of due to her weakness.

(Though, in Desmond's in own opinion she was expecting a little much from an eleven to twelve-year-old girl. There wasn't much she could have done besides getting herself killed. He knew first hand that real life wasn't tv, and in real life spunky children that went up against evil adults usually just ended up in shallow, pint-sized, graves.)

Finally, she wanted to lay down the ghosts of her past and settle the accounts she held with all the involved parties, so she could start her life anew.

Fulfilling the first portion of this request meant that Desmond had to use magic to reconstruct Octavio's corpse. Then Desmond had turned himself into a cloud of vapor and flowed into the nine orifices of Octavio's newly reconstructed head. Possessing the dead man's body, while taking the opportunity to consume the wretched fellow's resentful soul.

The new Desmond-Octavio had then walked around the chateau using restoration spells and reconstruction spells on every one else in the building, using necromancy to bring them back to life.

Desmond cast cleaning spells to get rid of all signs of the massacre that had taken place. He cleansed the psychic residue that had been left behind by so many traumatic deaths happening in the same place.

Then he used his aura to scare away any pesky spirits that might have been lingering around in hopes of getting justice.

Chasing them into the deepest portions of the distorted realm where Nishant's mechanisms of life, death, and reincarnation were stored.

At one point he had a very tense confrontation with an angelic psychopomp. The spirit she was escorting was a young man who was crying for his mother. Since Desmond generally tried to limit his evil quotient, even when on the job, he let the angel go.

Assured that if the angel decided to report what she'd witnessed, her story would actually aid Desmond's endeavor by adding yet another confusing detail to the story of what had happened in the chateau.

Desmond 'resurrected' all the victims, replaced Lamia with an alchemically made simulacra, and erased all evidence of the massacre by restoring the chateau to perfect condition.

He had then had to spend the next three weeks putting to lie any rumors or whispers of an 'incident' happening at the Otieno Chateau.

Temporarily reuniting a few people with friends that they'd thought had died. Fielding awkward phone calls from policemen who'd thankfully been too intimidated by the Smith family's status to ask too many questions. Hanging around with Octavio Smith's family and friends and enduring their scrutiny as they tactfully tried to confirm that all was well. It was now time for Desmond to go out and complete the other portions of his client's request.

He would bring an end to the people responsible for his client's suffering. He'd make it loud, he'd make it noisy, and by the time he was done, if there were any who'd survived and still cared about what had happened in the chateau a few days ago, the events that were coming would assure they knew better than to look into the details.