Post by iamcrute on Nov 6, 2016 16:51:10 GMT -5
I'm a while away from sitting down and writing issue 1 and I'm still trying to get his voice, tone for the series etc but this whole scene pretty much sprang into mind so I did it as a writing exercise as a bit of practice and I've decided that it's a 0 issue set before my series begins:
Hellblazer 0- a mini issue for the forum
John Constantine stepped as quietly as he could through the open doorway. He had no idea what lay for him on the other side. A large abandoned print works down by the Thames. The light in the building was low with just the distant street lights and glow of the city on the other side of the river providing any external source of light.
The flicker of candles across the massive expanse of what used to be the shop floor of the factory provided a flickering source and was his target. When the light was right the large black stain across the front of his shirt could be seen to be red rather than black. Stained with blood.
He walked into the room hunched down slightly moving through the shadows as best he could. Stealthily but with some haste he moved as best he could towards the light. He wasn’t sure what sort of fight he was getting into.
“Some stupid friggin’ demon-cult,” he had first described them as. They cropped up frequently in his line of work trying to summon one demon or another to Earth, they failed a lot thanks to him and his ilk. That’s not to say there weren’t a fair few successes, he himself had quite the storied history with demons of his own. The blood of Negral which still to this day coursed through his veins was testament to that.
This one had stepped up from ‘creepy loners trying to make some bargain to get them money, power, superpowers or whatever else they thought they needed to get a date with a pretty girl’ as he thought of many in this situation to ‘evil beyond measure’ as the newspaper had dubbed the whole issue when they kidnapped 5 little girls.
John had already found four of the girls, too late to do anything, hence his current blood soaked mess. It had taken him all night to get here, whoever these sick sods were they knew their stuff and had kept their information as compartmentalised as they could which meant he went on a sodding goose chase from one location to another which spelt out some the name of their demon in an ancient symbolic language ‘Ruskoff’. John had no clue who the demon was or how he’d built up his following, his name doesn’t appear in any ancient tome or manuscript. He had managed to find him in some goth’s blog or another which talked about him being the son of Trigon. That was a name John recognised at least.
Still he thought doesn’t matter if he’s the new boy or the next Wunderkind of hell. Five kidnapped little girls bring down the full force that he can muster on them. Time was therefore of the essence but it wasn’t going to help anyone if he rushed into a fight that he couldn’t win with some massive force of crazy cultists.
He was slammed harshly from behind sending him skidding to the floor with a grunt. His attacker was on him in a second. He had one knee in his back, one on the back of his leg, his hands were pinned and a hand snaked around his face while another began to unleash blows against his head slamming it into the floor.
John Constantine was a powerful magician who could bend reality to his will when the mood and the need took him but with his hands restricted, unable to speak and his face being slammed into the floor repeatedly there was little he could do. He couldn’t even get his concentration together long enough to give out a weak telepathic blast.
Handily however he was not just a powerful magician, he was a ‘likely lad’ who people liked so he had brought backup.
The iron pipe slammed across the head of one of the blokes causing a small splatter of blood to arc out a few feet across the room as it raised again and came back down on the back of his head again. Chas to the rescue. He yanked back the second cultist’s head before he could react and he wedged the pipe across the bridge of his nose and yanked him back hard, hard enough for there to be a crack of either cartilage or bone as he tumbled backwards.
Constantine began climbing to his knees. He turned to glance back at Chas who was currently smashing his suitably meaty fists into the face of the cultist. He leapt up and began to unleash blows with his heavy boots. “You sick bastards!” he spat through gritted teeth as he continued.
Chas was always handy in a fight, good with his hands and feet, so much so it seemed almost instinctual to John who was self-admittedly as useful as a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest when it came to kicking arses. Yet this was something more, Chas didn’t like people who messed kids about, people who hurt them. He never talked about why (other than obvious human nature, there was clearly something else which had gone on in his past) and John being a good mate never asked why. This is why Chas despite normally being strictly the driver on John errands had decided he was helping out this time. He’d not been prepared for what he had seen in the first four stops, hence his own vomit and cultist blood which now lay down his blue jumper and was crusting on his hard featured face.
“Stop hanging around Constantine,” he spat.
Constantine stood up and nodded off to the other side of the room “heads up,” Chas looked in the direction of two more men who had just entered the room and were now running towards them.
“I told you to stop hanging about. I’ll handle these two,” he growled as he gripped the pipe tighter in his hands and took off running towards them screaming like a mad man.
“Well, element of surprise is over,” John said as he turned and sprinted towards the candle light his trench coat flapping behind him. It didn’t take him any time at all to cover the distance despite his lungs screaming at him to stop because of years of smoking and unclean living.
John Constantine went by many names in occult circles ‘the constant one’, ‘the con man’ but most commonly if they weren’t calling him by his name he was being called ‘the laughing magician’…there was no laughing now, no jokes, no quips or snide comments.
His eyes flicked to the circle on the floor just before he crossed its lines and assessed it as only a summoning circle, there was no extra protection built into it. He planned to slam his full weight into the man and knock him straight over but he instead was met with the man turning to meet him and he rolled with the blow which meant he ended up on the bottom of the two-man tussle. The cult leader who had been conducting the ceremony was stronger than he had any right to be given his build and frame, his face was anointed with glowing sliver marks indicating some enhanced strength.
John didn’t care. He didn’t have to overpower him, being on the bottom worked just as well for what he needed. His hand fumbled in his right pocket and he found what he needed, cold and damp. He shot his hand up and dragged it down the face of the man smearing red across his features. The pooled blood of the four dead girls.
He began to speak the spell that he had been perfecting in the taxi since he had come across the first girl. Basic sympathetic magic taken up to the next level. He finished it with a glob of his own spit in the man’s face “Bleed you bastard!”
The cultist’s face twisted in pain, twisted in grief as the spell took effect. Everything he had had his men do to those girls was delivered onto him. John watched as his eyes were gouged from his head, blood started to pool on his clothing as his chest, from his hands, from his crotch. He gurgled with a scream before collapsing. John couldn’t know for sure but he was quite certain he had just heard the scream of someone’s heart being cut out whilst they were still conscious.
He pushed the body off him and stood moving towards the girl who lay naked and unconscious in the middle of the circle. Chas was behind him a second later. “Is she….?”
“Yeah she’s alive,” Constantine said with a nod “we got here just in time.” John stretched out his hands and weaved some minor magic to summon a blanket from a hotel that he’d stayed at once a few years ago, it was the first thing that had sprang to mind. He wrapped it around her and hoisted her into the air and put her into Chas’s arms.
“Get her in the cab, I’ll be out in a few minutes. I need to finish this… then I’ll sterilise her so they don’t track us down and drop her off unseen,” Constantine lit a cigarette in his mouth and nodded to Chas who turned and moved quickly back the way they had come.
Constantine sighed heavily looking over at the cultist. Thankfully that sacrifice in the circle wasn’t of the right kind to finish the ceremony. They needed, they needed an innocent, a virgin to finish it. Constantine reached into his left pocket and pulled out the sleeping mouse which he had enchanted to slumber. Chas’s niece would be gutted of course but needs must for the greater good.
John snapped its neck with a twist and dropped it into the centre of the circle where the girl had been. He crouched over it and waited.
It took about a minute before it began to glow. Its neck twisted back into place and it began to twitch. Constantine shifted and pressed his shoe against its lower body pinning it in place. It took a few seconds before it began to twist wildly under his shoe.
“Not exactly the body you were expecting eh mate?... tough,” he grinned down with a bit of a sadistic smile. “Loads of new senses, pain included,” he added as he shifted his weight putting more pressure on the tiny creature “smell of a mouse, whiskers picking up on vibrations…. a smell you may never have come across before is petrol. You’ve been doused in that by the way. John flicked the fire onto the end of his finger to life and pointed it towards the creature where it became a blow torch. The creatures body became engulfed in flame. John could hear the little demon voice screaming through the vocal chords it was twisting in the mouse to a shape where it could produce sound Constantine could hear.
He kept his foot in place until the fire started to bur his foot. He shifted his weight one last time and quickly stood to his feet before bringing his foot down hard on the creature splattering its insides across a few inch radius.
He turned to look at the edges of the room. He looked at the four girls who stood there holding hands with one another. He waved to them before he turned and began to walk away.
Hellblazer 0- a mini issue for the forum
John Constantine stepped as quietly as he could through the open doorway. He had no idea what lay for him on the other side. A large abandoned print works down by the Thames. The light in the building was low with just the distant street lights and glow of the city on the other side of the river providing any external source of light.
The flicker of candles across the massive expanse of what used to be the shop floor of the factory provided a flickering source and was his target. When the light was right the large black stain across the front of his shirt could be seen to be red rather than black. Stained with blood.
He walked into the room hunched down slightly moving through the shadows as best he could. Stealthily but with some haste he moved as best he could towards the light. He wasn’t sure what sort of fight he was getting into.
“Some stupid friggin’ demon-cult,” he had first described them as. They cropped up frequently in his line of work trying to summon one demon or another to Earth, they failed a lot thanks to him and his ilk. That’s not to say there weren’t a fair few successes, he himself had quite the storied history with demons of his own. The blood of Negral which still to this day coursed through his veins was testament to that.
This one had stepped up from ‘creepy loners trying to make some bargain to get them money, power, superpowers or whatever else they thought they needed to get a date with a pretty girl’ as he thought of many in this situation to ‘evil beyond measure’ as the newspaper had dubbed the whole issue when they kidnapped 5 little girls.
John had already found four of the girls, too late to do anything, hence his current blood soaked mess. It had taken him all night to get here, whoever these sick sods were they knew their stuff and had kept their information as compartmentalised as they could which meant he went on a sodding goose chase from one location to another which spelt out some the name of their demon in an ancient symbolic language ‘Ruskoff’. John had no clue who the demon was or how he’d built up his following, his name doesn’t appear in any ancient tome or manuscript. He had managed to find him in some goth’s blog or another which talked about him being the son of Trigon. That was a name John recognised at least.
Still he thought doesn’t matter if he’s the new boy or the next Wunderkind of hell. Five kidnapped little girls bring down the full force that he can muster on them. Time was therefore of the essence but it wasn’t going to help anyone if he rushed into a fight that he couldn’t win with some massive force of crazy cultists.
He was slammed harshly from behind sending him skidding to the floor with a grunt. His attacker was on him in a second. He had one knee in his back, one on the back of his leg, his hands were pinned and a hand snaked around his face while another began to unleash blows against his head slamming it into the floor.
John Constantine was a powerful magician who could bend reality to his will when the mood and the need took him but with his hands restricted, unable to speak and his face being slammed into the floor repeatedly there was little he could do. He couldn’t even get his concentration together long enough to give out a weak telepathic blast.
Handily however he was not just a powerful magician, he was a ‘likely lad’ who people liked so he had brought backup.
The iron pipe slammed across the head of one of the blokes causing a small splatter of blood to arc out a few feet across the room as it raised again and came back down on the back of his head again. Chas to the rescue. He yanked back the second cultist’s head before he could react and he wedged the pipe across the bridge of his nose and yanked him back hard, hard enough for there to be a crack of either cartilage or bone as he tumbled backwards.
Constantine began climbing to his knees. He turned to glance back at Chas who was currently smashing his suitably meaty fists into the face of the cultist. He leapt up and began to unleash blows with his heavy boots. “You sick bastards!” he spat through gritted teeth as he continued.
Chas was always handy in a fight, good with his hands and feet, so much so it seemed almost instinctual to John who was self-admittedly as useful as a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest when it came to kicking arses. Yet this was something more, Chas didn’t like people who messed kids about, people who hurt them. He never talked about why (other than obvious human nature, there was clearly something else which had gone on in his past) and John being a good mate never asked why. This is why Chas despite normally being strictly the driver on John errands had decided he was helping out this time. He’d not been prepared for what he had seen in the first four stops, hence his own vomit and cultist blood which now lay down his blue jumper and was crusting on his hard featured face.
“Stop hanging around Constantine,” he spat.
Constantine stood up and nodded off to the other side of the room “heads up,” Chas looked in the direction of two more men who had just entered the room and were now running towards them.
“I told you to stop hanging about. I’ll handle these two,” he growled as he gripped the pipe tighter in his hands and took off running towards them screaming like a mad man.
“Well, element of surprise is over,” John said as he turned and sprinted towards the candle light his trench coat flapping behind him. It didn’t take him any time at all to cover the distance despite his lungs screaming at him to stop because of years of smoking and unclean living.
John Constantine went by many names in occult circles ‘the constant one’, ‘the con man’ but most commonly if they weren’t calling him by his name he was being called ‘the laughing magician’…there was no laughing now, no jokes, no quips or snide comments.
His eyes flicked to the circle on the floor just before he crossed its lines and assessed it as only a summoning circle, there was no extra protection built into it. He planned to slam his full weight into the man and knock him straight over but he instead was met with the man turning to meet him and he rolled with the blow which meant he ended up on the bottom of the two-man tussle. The cult leader who had been conducting the ceremony was stronger than he had any right to be given his build and frame, his face was anointed with glowing sliver marks indicating some enhanced strength.
John didn’t care. He didn’t have to overpower him, being on the bottom worked just as well for what he needed. His hand fumbled in his right pocket and he found what he needed, cold and damp. He shot his hand up and dragged it down the face of the man smearing red across his features. The pooled blood of the four dead girls.
He began to speak the spell that he had been perfecting in the taxi since he had come across the first girl. Basic sympathetic magic taken up to the next level. He finished it with a glob of his own spit in the man’s face “Bleed you bastard!”
The cultist’s face twisted in pain, twisted in grief as the spell took effect. Everything he had had his men do to those girls was delivered onto him. John watched as his eyes were gouged from his head, blood started to pool on his clothing as his chest, from his hands, from his crotch. He gurgled with a scream before collapsing. John couldn’t know for sure but he was quite certain he had just heard the scream of someone’s heart being cut out whilst they were still conscious.
He pushed the body off him and stood moving towards the girl who lay naked and unconscious in the middle of the circle. Chas was behind him a second later. “Is she….?”
“Yeah she’s alive,” Constantine said with a nod “we got here just in time.” John stretched out his hands and weaved some minor magic to summon a blanket from a hotel that he’d stayed at once a few years ago, it was the first thing that had sprang to mind. He wrapped it around her and hoisted her into the air and put her into Chas’s arms.
“Get her in the cab, I’ll be out in a few minutes. I need to finish this… then I’ll sterilise her so they don’t track us down and drop her off unseen,” Constantine lit a cigarette in his mouth and nodded to Chas who turned and moved quickly back the way they had come.
Constantine sighed heavily looking over at the cultist. Thankfully that sacrifice in the circle wasn’t of the right kind to finish the ceremony. They needed, they needed an innocent, a virgin to finish it. Constantine reached into his left pocket and pulled out the sleeping mouse which he had enchanted to slumber. Chas’s niece would be gutted of course but needs must for the greater good.
John snapped its neck with a twist and dropped it into the centre of the circle where the girl had been. He crouched over it and waited.
It took about a minute before it began to glow. Its neck twisted back into place and it began to twitch. Constantine shifted and pressed his shoe against its lower body pinning it in place. It took a few seconds before it began to twist wildly under his shoe.
“Not exactly the body you were expecting eh mate?... tough,” he grinned down with a bit of a sadistic smile. “Loads of new senses, pain included,” he added as he shifted his weight putting more pressure on the tiny creature “smell of a mouse, whiskers picking up on vibrations…. a smell you may never have come across before is petrol. You’ve been doused in that by the way. John flicked the fire onto the end of his finger to life and pointed it towards the creature where it became a blow torch. The creatures body became engulfed in flame. John could hear the little demon voice screaming through the vocal chords it was twisting in the mouse to a shape where it could produce sound Constantine could hear.
He kept his foot in place until the fire started to bur his foot. He shifted his weight one last time and quickly stood to his feet before bringing his foot down hard on the creature splattering its insides across a few inch radius.
He turned to look at the edges of the room. He looked at the four girls who stood there holding hands with one another. He waved to them before he turned and began to walk away.