(no subject)

Last Chance Charley’s isn’t a nice place. It’s in a bad part of town and it sells the pawned hopes and dreams of people who couldn’t quite make enough money to get them back. It’s dark, dingy, dank, and always has that faint smell of mildew that you just know you don’t want to get it into your lungs. If the owner would bother to call in someone to fix it when the air conditioning started to break, instead of when it was on its last legs, then the place wouldn’t be such a cesspit. It’s all that Ryan O’Dael can do not to take bleach to the whole damn place. As it is, he handles everything with gloves and copious amounts of sanitizer.

Last time he’d been here, he’d fixed some wiring so that the main lights would actually work, this time it was the AC, and next time it’d be something different, and he ought to feel bad about helping a place like this continue to exist, but if you got to go to hell, might as well have air conditioning for the visit. The concealed firearm under his plaid shirt makes him feel safer, but it wasn’t till the metal barred door swung shut behind him that the Etherite felt remotely secure. He exchanged a silent nod with Charley, and then made a bee-line for the broken device.

Doesn’t take long, but the night that had been just falling is in full swing by the time Ryan is done and removing his gloves. The red neon OPEN sign flickers enough to grate his nerves as he waits for Charley to finish haggling with a woman over a box of random things. Ryan pulls out a screwdriver and some wire working tools from his pocket and fixes it, deftly manipulating the wires to correct the current flow. He finishes just as the woman pushes her way past and out the door, grumbling as she shoves money deep into a pocket.

The Etherite passes over his bill to Charley; the two have a long standing arrangement to pay in cash based on set prices for repair work. As Charley reads it over and unlocks the cash box again, Ryan lets his curiosity get the best of him and peers into the box. Something shine immediately draws his eye.

“M-may I?” Ryan asks, managing to only stutter a little on his words, and indicating with his hands that he’d like to poke inside. Charley waves him on but doesn’t really seem to care, just waiting to see if he can get a sale or a better deal. The shiny metal turns out to be an odd pendant, made of wire and a lug nut, strung on a simple chain. Ryan lays it out on the counter, coiling the chain, and nods to Charley. The man counts out the standard fee, looks at the pendant, and pulls back one of the bills.

As Ryan leaves, tucking both money and pendant into a deep pocket, the Etherite knows that he paid too much. No one ever gets a good deal at Last Chance Charley’s

(no subject)

Ryan goes down and he goes down hard, feeling the bullets pierce and rip through his chest. He doesn't have time to cast anything or to trigger any of his devices. For a split second, he can feel his blood seeping out as the Etherite falls to his knees, before the blood rushing out takes his consciousness with it. He's dying. Well, shit. The last thing the electrician is aware of is the white spots closing in on his vision... they almost look like sparks...

Unconscious and bleeding out, Ryan O'Dael is oblivious to the way the pendant he bought just minutes ago from Charlie sparks into life deep in his pocket. Even as he falls, weird arcs of energy begin to shed off him, increasing in number, frequency, brilliance. Feeding off of his resonances, they are electric, bright, and burning hot, cackling in the air and bursting out from him. Up and down the street, anything electric violently shorts in a pop of static and sizzle in a radius from the fallen Son of Ether in a demonstration of magical chaos that would have made the OCD mage blow a gasket.

While the electricity seems to do little more than cauterize the wounds of the Electrician, not even burning his clothing, they scorch the ground around him, and it's a fair bet that anything flammable catches fire. Almost as quickly as the sparks began, they are gone, leaving only the chaos and damage that they left behind. And some how, Ryan is still alive. Barely.