Gobel Babelin was the prettiest girl in Wurzburg. That’s on record. It’s on Wikipedia. When she was 19 years old, she was tortured until she said she was a witch. Then they cut her head off for being a witch. Later, the guy that accused her of witchery admitted that he said she was a witch because she wouldn’t give up the pussy. The priest that killed her also later said that she only confessed because of the torture. Even later he said that he didn’t think any of the hundreds of people he killed were witches.
In 2013, Gary was on vacation in France. While there, he bought a bauble that was said to have been made from an iron nail that Gobel had in her pocket when they burned her headless body. I guess that was something people did in witch times. The nail was supposed to be good luck. Clearly it didn’t work for Gobel Babelin.
Gary made this purchase not just because he was a sick bastard, but also because he felt that it had magic in it. Does that mean Gobel really was a witch? Gary doesn’t think so. He thinks that the trauma of her torture and death imbued it with magic. He doesn’t know for sure how magic things come into being.
The next year, a guy from Sweden flew all the way to Texas to talk to Gary in person because he wanted to buy it. I don’t know what to call it because it’s not really anything. It’s a lump of metal made into a vague shape. I guess it’s art.
Gary said no. Next the Swede and some ruffians show up to bust him up and take it. Gary magics his way out of that jam. Stymied, the Swede tries negotiating again. The Swede is part of a magic tradition that has been after the Gobel art-blob for generations. They were thwarted by a protection spell some other magic people put on it, but it was broken when Gary bought the thing. Commerce kills magic I guess.
The Swede’s new offer was that they could use it to do magic shit together. Gary says no again. Black mages aren’t good at sharing. The Swede and his crew come at Gary hard. Gary uses his sorcery and black magic fuckery to get some 1 percenters on his side. Groups such as the Banditos and the Zulus. Also, ironically, the Warlocks.
You’ll see that in Grapevine, Texas in late 2014 to early 2015, the murder rate goes up 1 million percent due to “gang warfare”. I found a bunch of articles about it, none of which seem to question why a bunch of foreigners were in Texas fighting it out with outlaw bikers. The answer as far as the police and press were concerned was “drugs”.
Gary was ultimately victorious, despite the Swede and his crew setting off a bomb at a mall Gary had invested in as part of a downtown rehabilitation project that killed 8 people. The bomb, not the rehabilitation project.
What does this have to do with anything? These are the people Gary wants us to ask for help. The Swede is still around. He said that we could give them the magic lump in return for them helping us with Eterno.
I told him that sounded like the worst idea I ever heard in my life. He was behind his bar making himself a drink and he looked at me like I was the stupidest kid in grade school. This may not be word for word but this is basically what he said –
“Grace, you can’t do anything alone. It takes a lot of hands to get anything done. And a lot of those hands are going to be filthy Grace. You don’t have to like someone to use them for your own ends. To get by in this world you have to make deals with a lot of horrible people. But it’s just business. If it takes a hundred people to build a bridge, it doesn’t matter to the people driving over it that some of those people were killers. A bridge is just a bridge.”
