Magic, Monsters and Other Nightmarish Things

The Ring Around Paris

Darkness spread over Paris like a well-worn blanket. The sky was not its usual pure black, penetrated only by the stars. Tonight, there was a blue haze that had lightened to the point of disappearing. This has happened 3 times in the last 94 hours. Enough times to know that the next two hours the blue would spread a couple of miles further. And it was up to Detective Louise Lavigney to stop it.

It was midnight when it first happened. Exactly midnight. Louise was closing her curtains when she saw a blue glow growing at the tip of the Eiffel Tower. Leaving the curtains as they were, she rushed to her wardrobe, pulled on some clothes, grabbed her phone and keys, and hurried out the front door. After leaving the door unlocked - there was no time for such trivial things - she pulled out her phone and called the station.

"Hello, Detective," a familiar voice answered, though Louise couldn't put a name on it, "This is a late time for you to be calling." (Obviously, this conversation was in French. However, it has been translated for the benefit of the reader)

"The Eiffel Tower, it's... glowing."

"Glowing, you say," he chuckled. "How much have you drunk?"

"I swear to you it's glowing. Blue -"

Louise was cut off by a loud whump. She stared as the blue light exploded away from the Tower and spread. It was coming towards her.

"Oh God, something's happening," she panicked, "The light's coming towards me," Then, she whispered, listening. "I think I can hear screaming."

Suddenly, like a wall of flaming bricks, the pain hit her. She doubled over and started screaming herself.

It was agony. A blue hot fire burning inside her. Her scream joined countless others as she rose, off the ground, a hurricane forming around her. She screamed and screamed and screamed, tears running freely until everything... stopped and Louise collapsed, out cold.

She woke to blinding hospital lights and urgent questions. The light had spread over 3 miles in every direction, reacting with every person. Only 1 in 50 had survived. The doctors had thought it was because of the appendix, as Louise's, to her horror, had melted. She was admitted to hospital along with 5 others they had rescued. The other survivors had stayed within 'The Ring', only to be seen as figures on a screen. No one dared go after them.

24 hours after the first blast, it happened again. More and more of Paris was quieter than anyone had ever dared achieve. Paris was emptier than anyone had ever imagined, and fuller than anyone had ever thought possible with corpses. But, if the first beam had been a kick-start, the second was a supercharge. The 5 others hospitalized escaped. How? One blasted a beam from her eyes, melting the glass. Another called upon birds to pick himself and a ferret, once a teenager, both with a ragged scar across their right eye, away. The fourth glitched out of existence and the last grew wings and carried the eye-beaming women away.

Louise blamed this phenomenon on the morphine she had been given. She changed her mind.

The strange light was not a laser, melting appendices which were different but a power giving beam that looked for certain brainwaves. Logical, sly, angry and without mercy. Unfortunately, Louise Lavigney fit into three of these categories. She was almost never angry.

And that is how Detective Lavigney found herself floating onto a slated roof-top, underneath a blue tinted sky and was about to walk into a death trap with the best detective this world had ever seen. She didn't know what was more dangerous, the super-powered horde that wanted to kill her or the psycho detective, Kirsty Willer.

Kirsty was Scottish and didn't look it. If you ever asked her where she 'really came from' she would smile sweetly and reply with a right cross that broke a nose on impact. She was only ever asked once. Her darker than black hair fell just below the shoulders, two blue and pink stripes mirroring her face. Her nose was rounded and small, her eyes a deep chocolate brown. Kirsty wore a black turtleneck and black jeans and a mischevious smile plastered on her otherwise innocent face. Humming a twenty one pilots song, 'Oh Ms Believer', she dangled her legs off the edge of the rooftop. Louise walked up next to her, silently and slowly. She had never met the infamous detective, but she had heard enough stories to understand you do not mess with Kirsty Willer. Not if you wanted to live.