Ten Things to do Before I Die
By: Wordsworth 13
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I do not own Chrono Crusade
Chronology: After Chapter 19 in the Manga
Chapter 3: There's Somethin' Bubblin' in Dublin
Rosette made her way down the stairs to the lower cabin and took a seat next to Chrono at the badly built fold out table, possibly something of Elder's conceiving. "What took you so long?" Chrono inquired
"I stopped to check on Azmaria, she's definitely seasick." The nun replied.
"Oh," Chrono replied, it hadn't really surprised him that much, Azmaria got nervous just about anywhere. "You know, I could probably make her some medicine." The Elder cut in. Rosette glared at him "Forget it! Anything you call medicine is probably an aphrodisiac!"
"Well, not anything." The old perv moped, pushing his fingers together. At this point Chrono saw it appropriate to change the subject. "So, Rosette what kind of demons d'you think we'll be fighting in England."
"And Ireland and Scotland and Wales." She corrected him.
"Okay, so, like I said, what are you expecting?" Rosette thought for a moment and eventually came up with "Meh, it's Britain so I guess it'll be things haunting people's attics."
"Isn't that ghosts."
"Same difference!" The overactive girl retorted, annoyed at having been corrected. Chrono looked over to the other side of the table and noticed something amiss. "Say, where's the Elder?"
Rosette let out a "Wha?" as she looked over and realised that the crazy old coot had indeed vanished. It was at this point she realised something and looked down to see the very man staring up at her frilly underwear, though considering her usual state of dress it wasn't as if everyone wasn't given a liberal view of them anyway.
Sometime after dinner had been finished, whatever it was that the three had been unenthusiastically poking at, none could tell but Rosette got the feeling it was something's spleen, Elder walked nonchalantly into the bridge of the ship. He then asked the captain "So how's the sailing coming?" And the captain, who looked just as clean cut, mildly dirty and shadowy as just about all the people in 1920's New York. The man turned around and said "Oh, we should be there tomo- woah! What happened to your face, there's a huge footprint on it!" Elder merely grinned, treated the captain to a thumbs up and stated "It was worth it."
The next morning Chrono awoke and had back pains from his stiff mattress. Rosette awoke and mentally prepared herself for the repercussions of the upcoming battle, by which I mean the damages bill. Azmaria awoke and was hungry from not having eaten the previous night. And so, each with their own problems, and each without a solution, despite some obvious ones, went back down to the galley for a bowl of crappy cereal with no sugar, one of the worst tortures ever.
As the three sat eating their lumps of wheat that had been squashed into what could have been bricks, a crew member in britches came down and reported; "We'll be arriving at the Irish coast in an hour." And then went straight back up the stairs. Rosette groaned "Aw, a whole hour."
"You have no patience." Chrono scolded her. Elder who was sitting at the table mainly because Rosette was there exclaimed "I like a woman without patience." Two seconds later there was a large bump rising from his head "You like any woman!" Rosette said, scowling at the old man and blowing the smoke off of her recently used fist. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. One hour later the four of them arrived at a port somewhere on the west of Ireland, and went down to the lower deck where they discovered a car waiting for them.
"All right I'm driving!" Rosette announced commandingly, jumping into the front seat behind the wheel. Everyone else just jumped into whichever seat was convenient; however Rosette wasn't exactly comfortable with the Elder precariously perched next to Azmaria in the back. "Okay, we're on our way." Rosette declared, going full pelt on the accelerator. At a dangerous speed the standard Magdalan junk pile rushed forwards off the boat and onto a cobbled road in a port town. "Which way, Chrono!?" the blue garbed teenager demanded. Chrono panicked slightly before stumbling through the glove compartment and fishing out the map. Wondering what the map Sister Kate had given them was doing in the glove compartment of a car they'd never before set foot in, he didn't have time to ponder, he pointed left and shouted "That way!" half a second before the turning came up, which Rosette turned onto at a speed which almost put the vehicle onto two wheels, and as the cobbles stopped the group found themselves on an old country road, which Chrono couldn't tell to be more or less bumpy.
"Are all the roads here like this!?" She whined.
"I dunno, what are you asking us for!?" Chrono snapped back
"Chrono, stop shouting, the last thing we need is you cranky on this trip!"
"Well then quit whining!"
About twenty minutes later when all arguments had been forgotten nothing out of the ordinary happened. Another twenty minutes later there was even more uneventful time. And at twenty minute intervals nothing happened for the rest of the several hours it took them to reach Dublin. Eventually they found an appropriate spot to park their automobile and thus parked it in that particular spot.
"Chrono, where are we even going?" Rosette asked out of the blue. The purple haired demon blinked and looked down at the sheet of mission specs he held in his pale hands. "Uh, some place called the, uh… Rosette I think you should look at this." He handed the over-energised nun the sheet, and when she looked it over Rosette discovered that the name of the place they were headed had been scribbled out with three straight, thick black lines from some sort of pen, above which had been written 'The Blue Kestrel Brothel'. Rosette reached through the window of their vehicle and grabbed a collar, then turned to face its owner. She was greeted by an Elder who was feigning ignorance to any changing of addresses on the mission specs, especially one's pointing to an illegal hotbed of perversion. No that was definitely out of character for him.
"Elder, where were we really going, you old coot!?" The Elder raised his hands defensively. "Some place called the 'King's Head.' An alcohol serving establishment of some sort, I think."
"Chrono, is it on the map?"
"Rosette, this is a map of the country, not of Dublin!" Rosette's eyes widened and she shuddered. "So we're flying blind?" She enquired hopelessly. Chrono thought for a moment before saying "Yeah, I guess." In an equally surrendering tone.
For a few hours the four companions roamed the streets of Dublin, searching high and low for a nondescript public house of nondescript title. They looked, double checked, scanned and played proverbial hide and seek at every square inch of the cobbled streets they found themselves on. Eventually the entire quartet had sore feet, no breath and sweat pouring from their brows like rain from a black cloud over Skegness.
"Rosette, maybe we should stop and ask directions." Chrono finally ventured
"What are you, nuts!? None of us speak Irish, do we!?" Chrono stared at the girl for a few moments before hailing a man with red hair and lamb chop side burns. "Excuse me; you wouldn't happen to know where 'The King's Head' is would you?" The odd hairstyle bearing Irishman turned to Chrono and said "Sure I do, Laddie, 'tis just 'round t'e corner, 'tis," and pointed down the stony path to the party's left.
"Oh, thank you." Chrono said.
After a few seconds Rosette burst out "wait a minute! All this time Irish people spoke English!?" She asked Chrono exceedingly loudly.
"Well yeah, that's why all the street signs were in English." Rosette sighed then asked abruptly in her 'why the hell didn't you tell me you stupid…argh, forget it' voice; "Wait, there were street signs too!?"
Around ten minutes later the troop found themselves in the pub and walking up to the front desk, and addressing a heavy set Caucasian man in a grey tweed waistcoat. He had dark hair and was names Seamus, and was apparently the owner and proprietor of the establishment. "Well this is odd," he said in a far less overestimated accent than the four had expected "the letter I received said there'd only be three of you, ah well, the more the merrier I suppose." Rosette nodded
"Mmm hmm, so what are we going to be exorcising today, a poltergeist, some kind of leprechaun?"
"The second one," Seamus said flatly
"What!? I wasn't serious!" Rosette cried in the shock of someone who tell a ghost story, then meets the ghost.
"Well, it's up in the attic." The greying man said casually whilst lighting his pipe.
Twenty minutes later Chrono, Rosette, and a now recovered from sea and car sickness Azmaria who hadn't spoken a word all day, were preparing all the necessary equipment, whilst the Elder was downstairs doing nobody-knew-what.
"Okay, is everything ready?" Rosette inquired. Chrono and Azmaria nodded. "Okay," she said, turning the old brass doorknob. Azmaria swallowed. The door drifted open, creaking like an old man's bones, to lead to a dusty old attic full of nailed shut crates and furniture with sheets over the top. It was pretty dank. Azmaria breathed in some dust and coughed, everyone turning around. She was wheezing in a fit, until, that is Rosette thumped her on the back. Hard, now she wasn't in an asthma like seizure, she was just winded. Rosette never held back, but if you'd talked to her for ten minutes or so, you'd already understand, "Okay, now that's over, is there a light switch anywhere?" she inquired to no-one in specific. "I think this is one." Chrono murmured as he pulled on a string with what appeared to be a metal fish as its handle. "Oh, an ictus." Chrono said in what could only be called a curious, mildly delighted, at the very least pleased, rather difficult to name, 'oh, wow, you don't see many of these!' sort of voice. There isn't a word for it so that took a while, but at least it filled up some space.
A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit up the room, at least partially, and everything started to look slightly newer. They do that in the light.
Chrono paced back and forth looking left and right. "I don't see anything." He uncertainly and cautiously reported to the others.
"So what now?" Rosette asked, once again, no particular sentient being. This time Azmaria answered
"Should we… look for it?"
Rosette looked up "I…guess…" she mumbled bemusedly. This was not what she was used to. It was something for detectives to do, not hyperactive, over-the-top, misbehaving, demon hunting, blonde haired, skimpily dressed American nuns. Then again, that wasn't really a very wide category. She sighed, and began checking behind boxes and tarps, and antique chairs shadowed by gabardines for any trace of anything that would reveal some kind of demon activity.
Chrono went to the back right corner and shifted a couple of crates out of the way. He found something very interesting. "Uh, guys, you, uh, might wanna take a look at this." Rosette and Azmaria, walked up behind him and was greeted by a large pewter cauldron, filled with sparkling gold dust. "Wow, it's gold," Rosette whispered marvelling, her mind going back to when she and Chrono had been on that boat a month ago. She had knocked him over the head for being dumb then, but the, when didn't she hit him for something. That was before Azmaria joined up, but things had changed a lot since then.
She lifted a handful of the dust out and let it flow back into the pot. Her mind also flowed back to a recent time, when she had found Chrono's notebook on the boat. "Hey, shame there's no rainbow here, huh?" She joked
"You want a rainbow?" An unfamiliar voice boomed menacingly, out of what was seemingly nowhere. Out of the blue, or rather the gold, a decaying clawed hand shot out from the pot and grabbed onto Rosette's wrist. "Sorry, I don't think I've got one of those." At this point every one screamed and Rosette was pulling out her gun. This was what she was good at.
Yo, everybody, after about 3000000 years I've got this chapter done, but I think my writing's slipped a little, maybe it's 'cuz' I haven't ready any CC lately, but review and give me your cruel, cruel opinions.