Battle at Cassandra's Lair

## Casualties

*“I’m going to bring us right up against the side of the main building away from the fires. Hopefully that’ll keep us away from the worst of the fighting if they mounted a direct marine assault. From there, we’ll deploy the bomb and take out as many from both sides as possible.”*
*“Sounds like a plan.”*
*“Which means something will go wrong with it.”*— Ben Talbot and Derek Hawthorne, *Esoterrorism*
The **Battle at Cassandra's Lair** was the conclusion of the Wazir's Campaign against the House. Following Derek Hawthorne's promotion to the Committee, the Red Room was able to locate Cassandra Cassidy's base, at which point Derek gathered a team and launched a full-scale assault on the base with the intent to plant a fire elemental in the middle of the base to destroy it. However, by the time they arrived, the Wazir had made his own assault with his forces, turning the planned assault into a three-way war between his forces, Derek's small team, and Cassandra's army of mercenaries.

In the end, despite several setbacks, the battle was a complete victory for Derek's team and the House. The Wazir and Cassandra were killed, ending their threat and sending their forces into the wind, and the final samples of the Matheson-22 virus were destroyed alongside the base. With the death of the Wazir, his crusade against the House came to a close and the countless deaths he was responsible for were avenged.

## Background

During his conversation with Derek, the Wazir gave him information on all of the crimes the Committee had committed. After doing so, he admitted that the intent was for Derek to use this information to ascend to the Committee himself and unite the House against Cassandra, with the two of them going to war until only one survived so that the Wazir could eliminate the winner. Though Derek did not want to play along with his plans, the crimes of the Committee motivated him into joining the Committee so he could mitigate their future actions.

With this information provided to him, Derek ascended to the Committee, with the previous members giving him an ultimatum: they would give him complete control over the House's resources and classified information, but he had two weeks to apprehend Cassandra and the Wazir before he would be executed. Luckily, Derek's method of increasing information sharing between Divisions worked like a charm, and before long, the Red Room had located Cassandra's Lair on an Indonesian island, with evidence that she had been reinforcing the location as much as six years prior. At the same time, the Emerald Eye officially made its demands, demanding that all government cease all cooperation with the House or they would release the Matheson virus as retaliation.

Knowing that they did not have the resources necessary for a full-scale assault, Derek came up with a plan to have a small group infiltrate the lair and destroy it from the inside. To do this, Derek tracked down and recruited his honorary uncle Ben Talbot, a retired Red Room agent with the perfect skillset to execute the infiltration plan. After a brief disappointment that Derek was only there to ask for his help, Ben agreed to lend his expertise. To that end, Ben came up with a plan for the team of him, Derek, Shannon O'Reily, and Penny Hawthorne to assault the base - they would fly there with a magic carpet, plant a Rubik's cube with a fire elemental inside it, and then flee the battle while the base was destroyed.

After some soul-searching from both Derek and Shannon, the team loaded up the magic carpet and made their way towards the base. However, before they arrived, the Wazir had also located Cassandra's lair and launched his own assault. By the time the team arrived, battle had already broken out between the forces, with the team's arrival officially bringing it into a three-way battle.

## Battle

### Stealthy Entrance

As the team used the magic carpet to come in to the lair underneath any detection systems, Talbot flew the carpet to an isolated area of land away from the battle; however, in spite of their isolation, they were immediately set upon by rakshasa, who came through a nearby wall to run at them. The whole group fired their enchanted weapons (though Derek was overcome by the recoil on his M16), quickly putting the group down with only one survivor. As he tried to crawl away, Derek tried to interrogate him, only for the rakshasa to reveal that Karl Bjornson himself was on the island before Derek had to put him down after another attempt to attack.

With the knowledge that the Wazir was actually there, the plan shifted; though the plan would kill Karl if he was actually there, if it was a homunculus, they would have to capture him alive to see if he had any Matheson stored away. The only "bright side" Derek could find was that if the plan failed and they were about to die, they agreed to let the fire elemental loose to take the lair with them.

The team found a door ripped off the hinges and used it to enter the compound, being greeted by the sight of a mutual massacre. As Cassandra began playing her wedding song over the speakers, Derek's team stumbled upon the bloody aftermath of a horrific battle, with human and monster corpses alike littering the halls. Realizing the humans were wearing gas masks, meaning that there was likely Matheson on the base, Derek found spares and distributed them to the three humans, while Shannon managed to find and open a secret door along the wall that led to an elevator.

### Inside the Compound

The team entered the elevator and, with no other lead to go off, took it to the bottom floor. After a brief moment of levity between Shannon and Talbot, Cassandra came over the intercom to continue taunting them. As Derek taunted her back, the elevator reached its destination at the bottom floor, opening to another lab filled with tanks of Matheson-22. The team realized with horror that she either intended to sell the virus to the USA or use it herself, making the lab the perfect place to put the Rubik's cube and destroy the base.

Despite knowing that they needed to take the Wazir's homunculus alive, the team agreed to scuttle that plan and worry about the consequences later, so Talbot solved the Rubik's cube, putting the team on a 45 minute timer. However, before they could leave, they were ambushed by a group of Sons of Mars led by Red Room agent Tommy Moretti, yet another traitor to the organization. After Shannon pushed Derek out of the way of gunfire, Talbot, Penny, and Derek managed to eliminate all of the mercenaries with Tommy; however, Tommy himself was utilizing a Red Hand of Glory to siphon his coworkers life force for his own, giving him the strength to survive countless gunshots.

With his extra power, Tommy quickly closed the distance and took Talbot and Penny out of commission, all while Cassandra continued ranting over the loudspeakers about how much she hated Derek. Derek quickly incapacitated Tommy while Shannon used her extra strength to get the Hand of Glory off of Tommy's hand; the second it was gone, Tommy's wounds killed him instantly. At this point, Cassandra herself arrived and shot Derek, incapacitating him, but as she yelled for Shannon to come out of hiding, Derek shot her in the hand, wounding her enough for Shannon to come out of hiding and knock her out.

To get extra power to heal Derek's shoulder wound, Shannon kissed an unconscious Cassandra; however, this gave her Cassandra's memories, which she then passed on to Derek through another kiss. With this, Derek learned the truth about Cassandra: rather than marrying him out of love or political ambition, she had actually been brainwashed by her father into marrying him, meaning she had spent their entire marriage suffering internally while he was in love with her. The Wazir eventually found her and freed her, but the damage was already done; by that point, the only consolation she had left was the potential for revenge against the House that traumatized her so severely, even if she knew the Wazir would never let her live once his plan was done.

All of this information left Derek more conflicted than ever, but he ultimately decided that he still needed to be the one to pull the trigger on her. However, before he could do this, the Wazir himself finally arrived and used his magic to destroy Cassandra's heart, killing her on the spot.

### The Wazir's Final Battle

The Wazir, as pleasant as always, greeted Derek and Shannon while holding the Staff of Hiawatha, showcasing that he had knocked out Penny and Talbot. Though Derek planned to stall for time to let the fire elemental kill both of them, the Wazir revealed the now-uncompleted Rubik's cube, meaning the timer had stalled. Karl continued to preach about how all of the team Derek had brought were heroes in his eyes, having defied the fates set out for them to back up all of their talking, and lamenting how the world had grown "fat" from peace.

However, throughout this talk, the Wazir made a crucial mistake; though he had originally focused on Derek and his new eyepatch, he eventually shifted all of his focus to Shannon. As he continued to talk about his long list of unrepentant crimes, Derek managed to sneak behind him and, catching Karl off guard, roundhouse kicked him in the side of the head. This popped out his glass eye and made him drop the Staff; though Shannon originally grabbed the Staff, it started to burn her, so she threw it to Derek. As Derek realized that the glass eye meant that this was the real Karl and not a homunculus, Derek told Shannon to shoot the eye, destroying it.

Karl roared that that was a mistake, as the duo had just destroyed an irreplaceable artifact, and the amount of magic released from the eye's destruction caused the entire island to shake. As Derek soon realized, the eye gave Karl his physical form, meaning its destruction left him incorporeal with most of his magic still intact. As Karl's form grew and shifted in clothes and appearance, Derek realized what had happened: the eye was Odin's eye, and when Karl used it, he had become convinced that he was Woden, the Nordic god of war.

Karl backed up those assertions by swearing that he would bring humanity back to the Stone Age and rebuild the Nine Realms in his own image. However, Derek used the Staff of Hiawatha with his own burgeoning magical abilities to redirect Karl's spells, converting them into raw energy and shifting the energy into Shannon. With each spell, Karl grew weaker, until after one final taunt from Derek, Karl was sucked into the staff entirely and absorbed by Shannon. Using her lilin physiology, she consumed all of his energy on the spot, killing him once and for all.

With the battle over, Derek and Shannon woke up Talbot and Penny, planted the Rubik's cube once more, and then the team flew away on the magic carpet while the fire elemental burned the base to the ground behind them.

## Aftermath

The battle was ultimately a complete win for the House, who were able to recover from the damage Karl and Cassandra had caused over the course of their crusade. In particular, while neither organization was completely destroyed, both the Sons of Mars and the Emerald Eye were crippled without their leaders and ceased to be major threats to the House, and the threat of the Matheson-22 virus was ended.

The fact that she almost died during the battle made Penny realize how precious life was and, shortly after the battle, she married her long-time girlfriend Lucy Danvers.

With the magical abilities Derek showed during the battle, he began to seriously consider the possibility of learning more magic, which eventually influenced his actions during the Protocol Zero War. In particular, his burgeoning magic became exponentially more powerful when he crossed paths with Bloody Mary, giving him the power to take on Dracula one-on-one. However, he remained haunted by what he learned about Cassandra during the battle for the rest of his life, never forgiving himself for the trauma he accidentally caused her.

Cassandra's death would come back to haunt the world in 2008, when her cousin Roland Cassidy teamed up with Nathan Hawthorne to destroy the House entirely and reveal the supernatural to the world out of his grief and rage towards Cassandra's death. Among other things, this led to Roland kidnapping Ashley Morgan and forcing her to awaken Balor; though that plan was stopped, Derek, Ashley, and Christopher Hang all died in the process, and they were unable to prevent the Truth from coming out.