[@Jarl Coolgruuf][@Fetzen]
The man gave Clive a look of curiosity that was completely at odds with the situation. He looked for all the world like an average white collar worker, dressed neatly but not extravagantly, clean shaven, neither tall nor short, handsome or ugly. The other passengers streamed around them, mostly glued to the screens of their cellphones or anxiously wishing the baggage carousel to hurry up and magically produce their luggage. Abruptly the man let go of the bag that Mael was attempting to wrestle from him, seeming to completely lose interest in the theft he had just purported.

"You know, I'd never really considered it," the man said as a smile spread across his face. The wrongness of the smile was immediately apparent to Clive and Mael. The man had too many teeth, far too many, they packed his mouth sharp and jagged in lamprey like profusion. With deliberate nonchalance he bent his own elbow back. Tendons strained and there was a sudden pop of bone dislocating. If it pained the man his toothy grin gave no sign of it. The woman however began to scream in terror that was as false as it was believable. Passengers looked up from their phones in shock and a space began to open around Clive. TSA agents were already grabbing for weapons or radios depending on how rent-a-cop they were feeling.

"Help! This man is attacking my husband! Please somebody help me!" 




___________________


[@Rapid Reader]

The man's scream had a hideous inhuman characteristic to it as he shoved himself upward. The alchemical mixture spilled on his back hissed and popped as it interacted with some glamour or enchantment, noxious yellow smoke rose from the wound in tendrils and the mans whole body began to twitch rhythmically. Muscles and tendons stood out and there was a sound of ripping cloth as seams popped. His jaw descended, growing feral and more animistic with each passing heartbeat. The thing that had appeared to be a man placed one palm on the linoleum tiled floor, his spread fingers appearing now as misshapen claws. The other hand seized Val by the shirt front, lifted her into the air and hurled her across the hallway into one of the many stores which lined the concourse. She hit a wire shelf containing more copies of Outlander and Fifty Shades of Grey than really ought to exist in one location, sending them flying to the floor like obese butterflies. People began to scream both around Val and further down towards the baggage claim area. The man thing was on its feet now, spittle dripping from a mouth that contained too many teeth, its eyes blazed with primal fury as it lopped towards Val in a peculiarly simian  shamble, claw like fingers extended even as the smoke continued to rise from its burned back.  

___________________

Eleanor  was midway through composing a cutting retort when things began to move very rapidly. She pulled her cellphone from her pocket and thumbed it live, opening an app labeled Arcart with a stab of her thumb. The screen morphed into a video from the camera but with heavy modification. It looked almost like the movie depiction of an infrared shot though a practiced eye would see it more as a magnetic resonance. It was, in fact, a thaumatergic field read out overlaid on what the camera was observing. Streams of numbers danced across the image locking on various points of arcane locus as they rose above the background ambient. Clive appeared as a single greenish spark, like most humans though possibly a little brighter due to either run off from the other group members, or because he had drunk some of Val's coffee. Mael's body flickered with redish contact points, which was normal for him given his background, though the app pointed out that the intensity of his thaum field was rising quickly into the 20 millimerlin range. Most worrying was the fact that the thieves themselves were well above the background thaum levels, their human baseline was there but lines of ugly yellow energy rippled over them like oil being spilled onto a clear pond. She was just about to shout a warning to her people when the man deliberately broke his own arm and the woman began to scream bloody murder.

 Ice water splashed over Eleanor's guts as she realized the situation was escalating well beyond anything they had prepared for. Someone had obviously been laying this trap for them, someone with either direct intel or who could predict that the Group would send people to investigate whatever was going on. Neither of those options were good. Worst of all was that they had clearly staged a public scene, TSA officers were already shouting and moving to respond as the woman continued to scream and shriek. There was no way that Clive's false documents would hold up under prolonged scrutiny if he were detained. Options began to cascade through her mind and their repercussions spread outwards in her minds eye like dominoes toppling in all directions at once. Priority one, prevent her people from being arrested or shot in the next few seconds.

Eleanor closed her eyes. The field of endless nondescript gray stretched around her in all directions. She was naked and clean, ritually purified as she always was in The Other Place and her only adornment was a short stylus of gold and polished silver wires wound together and polished to a micrometer fine smoothness. She lifted the stylus and began to write an elaborate equation. There was no cause to hurry, time did not pass in this mental space in the same way it did in the real world and she was able to banish the panic and distraction of the real world through years of ritual practice. Glowing letters appeared in the air as she nested parenthesis and differentials with the complete focus of an EOD tech defusing an unstable bomb, knowing that any slip up might well be instantly fatal. It took a subjective minute to complete the spell, several hundred characters of mathematical shorthand so complicated that it would appear gibberish to anyone but another practitioner. That done she double checked the spell and then opened her eyes. Less than a second had passed in the real world, a literal eye blink from the point of view of an observer. Nothing visible occurred but the Arcart software registered a massive spike in Thaums, over 40 millimerlins, as her spell discharged. A light fixture fell from the ceiling, crashing into the path of one of the on rushing TSA agents and sending him sprawling to the ground in a pile that tripped up two of his fellows. Several other lights blew out plunging half the concourse into darkness save for the greenish glow of emergency lighting. The baggage carousel screeched and threw a belt, a high pitched whining filling the air. There was a rending crash of indeterminate origin somewhere off in the distance as the airport descended into chaos. A dozen other minor things went wrong all at once, none of them anything more than bad luck, but amplified by her entropic curse to make them all the more likely for the next few seconds, hopefully buying them all some breathing room. 


[hider=Synopsis]
Bad guys turn out to be badder than imagined. Eleanor curses everyone but us to have bad luck. Unfortunately this includes random civilians. 
[/hider]