Echo
It's actually a peaceful place, were it not for the fact that Margot knew there had been a dead body here back in June. With a little digging and information she would remember that it was the body of one Jacqueline Paix- a ski instructor and Colorado Springs native. The two of them headed out tot eh edge of El Paso county, watching likely as the mountains became larger and tree cover became less sparse. The body had been found by an avid hiker who had decided to go a little off the rails, it would seem- Evelyn Murray. Forty-something, kids in college (out of state), finally really breaking down and enjoying her divorced years after a clean split.
It was just horrible, Murray reported, those blank eyes. I thought it had been drugs- it had to be. She was so young, nobody shoots a kid like that unless it was over drugs.
Like that. Like that meant the bullet holes in the woman- the one in the head, according to the report. But reports are incomplete, you know. Margot would have known it, Ned would have known it. There was a suspicious lack of evidence on this one, and a suspicious lack of digging that likely left a bad taste in their mouths. Whatever time of day they got to the area was inconsequential, because the quiet of the place was the same. The wind barely blew, and though fireflies drifted on and off just barely in the distance near some pond it appeared to be the only living movement in the area. The air was cold when it came into their lungs, no matter how warm it felt on their skin.
This was the right place.
Margot
The drive south was a pretty one. The mountains grew more ambitious in their reaching toward the sky, and trees crowded the peaks and summits closely enough to be deemed a 'forest' now. The road was two lanes only, one in either direction, and Margot minded the speed limit and tried not to spook Ned the Vehicular Passenger too much when she asked him to help her keep an eye on the sides of the roads for deer.
There were no encounters of the cervine kind, and Margot pulled her car off on the shoulder of the road closest to the murder site. She thought initially to park a good half a mile away for the sake of flying under the radar, but ultimately decided against it. They were remote enough that anybody who might connect her car with the murder would do so even if she were parked a full two miles away instead. Plus, when you dicked around with Magick and sent whispers through the Gauntlet to invite things through, it was good to have an escape route planned. She wanted to be as close within sprinting distance of the car as she could manage.
She locked up and pocketed her keys and rouned to the front of the car to look at the scene off the road's shoulder slope. She was dressed in a pair of dark jeans with the cuffs tucked into a pair of hiking boots, with a black tank top left on after she'd shed her red flannel and tied it around her waist instead. A faded black backpack that wasn't originally intended for hiking but did the trick fine was on her back, and her hands held the straps at chest level. Fieflies flitted on the horizon, testing their beacons in the dying afternoon light, readying them for the evening soon to fall.
"Night's the time for the dead," she'd explained to him if any question on the timing had come up. In this moment, though, with the mountains to the west casting early shadows on the land, she took a breath and glanced over to Ned.
"Ready to meet Jacqueline?"
Ned
"Says you and John Carpenter."
Ned would throw back. a distracted flutter of head turns sending his gaze around and about at the terrain and forestry, minimal though it might be. The mountains loomed over them with dreadful suggestion, sending his thoughts back to imagining what it must have been like for the poor woman who had been found out here. Part of Ned's curiosity suggested to him that there had been some game played. A chase or a hunt of some sort, with the young woman, Jacqueline as the target of someone's sense of the dramatic. He'd mentally gone over some of the work he'd put into memorizing various efforts to ensure a surprise if they ran into similar trouble.
"I'm ready to deal with this. Best I can say at this point, is there's no telling what condition she'll be in or even if stual he's going to be available. I imagine this sort of trauma leaves behind a pretty disturbed individual." Ned's memories coasted over their mutual ghostly history at the thought, a vague grimness catching his features. He was dressed in a simple black T=shirt and cargo pants, a knife sheath tucked into the waistband at the small of his back. He'd foregone any sort of carrying case or satchel, in favour of a water bottle tucked into his back pocket.
"Remember what I said. I get possessed you make sure to blind me and run. Count the spaces between the car and the crime scene so you know how far to go." They had not discussed what would happen if Margot was the one who got possessed. Ned didn't have Spirit, afterall.
Echo
It was smart to make allowances for potential spiritual possession, all things told. It was a real and dangerous possibility here, headed out into the wilderness- in a place where the barriers betweent he worlds may have been low enough that it made a real and true difference. Perhaps that had been the point- of course it had been the point. The reason behind coming out here (that and the fact that Margot had some spatial limitations when it came to her magickal practices).
The rocks are smooth and worn over the creek. The moon is three quarters of the way to full, lends itself more to illumination but there was no time to think of the moon and her symbols. That language was not spoken here; the air kept its secrets. No language would be spoken at all.
A perimeter is easily set, and sure as they can tell they are alone out here. Let it be said that this place is one of solitude.
Margot
Ned's penchant for pragmatism came in handy a lot of the time. Margot wouldn't have considered a back-up plan to possession. His concern-heavy voice on the subject of the deceased Jacqueline Paix's psychotrauma had the little blood witch settling a similarly concerned look onto the side of his face.
"You remember the girl-spirit from the frat house?" Of course he did. "She was tormented by her death. She tormented herself even worse afterwards. But she wasn't inherently bad. Maybe because she wasn't built to be, or maybe because she wasn't given enough time to get there, but we could communicate with her. She got what she wanted and left. This lady here and now? She's only been dead a few months. And I doubt she died a villian." Even as she tried reassuring him (herself as well) that this spirit was unlikely to want to attack or harm them, doubt sparked dull red and inconspicuous in the edges of her voice. There were too many variables that were different here, of course she couldn't guarantee the temperament of a summoned victim.
All the same, she took a breath and set off away from the gravel of the road's shoulder, the bottom of her boots slipping and pulling on the long grass that sloped down to a shallow ditch. From there she'd start forward, her path clearly set toward the small pond that was visible from the roadside. The lapping water and bright outline of the moon pushing through the dim periwinkles of dusk on its surface spoke to her, to Her, in a particular manner.
It was at the edge of the pond, several feet from the edge, that Margot settled. She sat down upon her knees with the heels of her boots tucked under her rump and opened the backpack that she'd shrugged off onto the ground beside her. From within she produced a couple of things: a white ceramic water bottle, a smooth bowl made from the wood of an ash tree, a stick lighter, and a good sized bundle of dried greens that were tucked away into a ziplock bag so that they wouldn't crumble all over the interior of her bag. Half the herbs were pulled from the bag and crumbled in her fist to fall into the bowl set central in front of her.
As she worked, the very air around her seemed to go still. Not just still, but taut, like the string of a bow being pulled and held with the potential to let loose at any time. Margot licked her lips and brought the stick lighter to life with flame, and spread the fire across the top of the loose dried bundle of green and yellow plant. Soon dense smoke twisted up from the bowl, and Margot leaned back. Her hands cupped loosely around the smoke like she was warming her hands on the embers within, or like she was trying to encourage them to grow...
[Summoning the ghost of a murder victim - Spirit 2] (WP!)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Ned
Ned didn't offer anything to Margot's reassurance. Not one for optimism he seemed intent on their surroundings, allowing Margot the chance to do what she needed to do, to prepare for the moment ahead. His face continued to hold that vague grimness, though the knife had yet to make an appearance beyond the slight flash of a sheath at his back.
Instead, Ned's questing gaze continues it's scanning movements, head canting from one moment to the next even as he double checks their surroundings with a swift mental and physical departure from reality. The essence Doc explained as 'Quint' floods out of him and into his gaze, hands locking around some inner tension, fists formed at his sides while Margot works.
(Forces 1 / Life 1 / Matter 1: Reality X-ray (Searching for objects, heat blooms and pulses in the immediate vicinity. Diff 4 - 1 for Quint)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Echo
Ned is a sharp, astute sort of creature. Ned is also an observant sort- to the point that one could argue he was hyper vigilant- but that vigilance pays off and the world does as it will do. It is shoved aside and forced to render its secrets to Caesar. He reaches out and around, feels the heartbeat of a nearby deer. Some fish in the stream fleeing their presence. The only real heat coming to them is the heat held in the initiates' chests; he notices an odd lack of heat, really. A lack of others beyond themselves in this area because even now the doe is taking her leave of them.
All that is near them is the trees, the rocks, the natural. The only man made goods are those they brought with themselves. They are alone- save for this:
The dried greens in Margot's hands take the flame as a welcomed companion- they drink the warmth there and soon the when they are placed where they are intended there is a movement there. Dense smoke is plucked forth like the notes on a lyre as it twists and curls into the air. They say that there is something that needs to be cleansed when the smoke has something to grasp, and this smoke does grasp at the atmosphere around them.
She may look from her focus, from her ritual and see something move there- something in the smoke moves, like if Margot herself had pulled her hand through its coils. The movement is that of a magician's assistant, some kind of movement in the smoke to divert from what the other hand is doing but Margot Travers knows to look left when others point right. The smoke turns, braids, pulls to a thin line that reaches to hold-
Something.
It will take another pull to bring that something across.
Margot
Smoke twisted and curled in the air before her, thick and grabbing something in the air to show that it existed. Not wind, though-- the air was still, abnormally so with the lack of singing crickets and chirping birds overhead.
"You're there," she whispered quietly from the ground, speaking through the smoke to the Other Side to whatever was left of Jacqueline that she was trying to coax out-- hoping that it was Jacqueline at all. A hand dropped down and shook the bowl a little, tossing up the embers with the dried dandelion that it hadn't eaten yet and giving more oxygen to help fuel the burning as well. She licked her lips and focused on the smoke hard enough that she was looking into it, through it to the other side. The very image of the smoke reflected strong in her big eyes, taking mirroring lessons from the pond in front of them.
Fingers curled over the smoke again and moved in delicate motions, like she could tug the smoke to be more dense and strong, and then began to delicately pick it apart to help out whatever was Beyond.
[C'mon little spirit, I hear you in there. Extending.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Ned
Ned's attention returned to the Ritual, satisfied they were mundanely alone in this affair, his eyes seeming to blink particles of quint away to waft into the returning fold of reality. He is apart from where Margot kneels, regarding the feathering smoke and coiling 'presence' that seemed to be hovering on the outskirts of where and whenever the 'Other side' could be found.
In this moment, his hand was around the length of leather wrapped handle, attached to the honed and sharpened hunting knife. A glance at Margot given, both quizzical and patient, even if all nerves were firing, all muscles tensed for a potential bombardment of something otherworldly they might not be expecting.
Echo
And in that moment the air grew thicker and in a space smaller than one would expect, the air is rent, torn, and pushed through is a woman who stands nearly as tall as Ned is but with possibly half the bodyweight. She is some fae creature, or perhaps not. Perhaps this is their dead woman- what with her large eyes (seemingly sightless, milky save for the single pinpoint of what may have been pupils) and her narrow nose and delicately sculpted brows. Her proportions are distinctly human and her attire is non-existent.
She finds herself nearly standing on top of Margot. Her brows knit together and she cocks her head to the side- all that blonde hair toppling to one side. The smoke has long since grown cold, and where she stands there is the crunch of frozen earth.
"... where is this?"
The voice doesn't come from her, but rather it is ambient and half-muffled, as though parts of her never made it past the gauntlet.
Margot
All at once Margot felt the air expand and contract simultaneously. Stillness and cold flooded over her and by the time she'd focused her eyes back outside of the smoke Margot realized that she was seeing a manifestation of legs right in front of her knees, thin and maybe slightly discolored, maybe still colored the deep gray-blue of the smoke or maybe still fleshy. She looked up and blinked and realized that the woman was blond and present and speaking with a voice that didn't entirely come across with her, and that she was naked.
Margot made a small noise of discomfort (of course, squeamish over the proximity of the dead woman's nudity as opposed to with the concept of death or any visibility of a bullet hole in the head [she hadn't checked that far yet]), and pushed herself back away from the woman's feet and scrambled up onto her own soon after. She didn't retreat immediately to Ned's side but cleared her throat, brushed her hands on the thighs of her jeans, and tried to ignore the flush of embarassment burning on her cheeks and ears.
"The mountains in north El Paso county," she answered, testing her voice with the fact and finding that it would be fine after she cleared her throat. The clearing-throat sound came, a glance back to Ned followed, and then she looked back to the woman (eyes now checking for that bullet wound in the scalp, curious if it were to appear there still or not).
"...Are you Miss Jacqueline Paix?"
Echo
There were no bullet wounds at all in this body. Her fingertips are bluing and her lips have no color but she is intact. Clean. Like she'd just stepped out of a shower and everything was fine there. Like she had never even been dead at all save for the fact that she feels like the frozen cosmos; she looks around and her lips press into a fine line.
Is she Miss Jacqueline Paix?
"Why am I here?"
So incredulous, this one. She walks away from the little witch and takes a stance where she can observe her surroundings and those near her, "why did you bring me here?"
Margot
Ned was hanging back a few feet, and when Margot looked back to find him a brief glance and understanding was exchanged. This was her ritual, her show and pony. Both of her cabalmates were useless when it came to Spirits (though only for now, she was sure). He would watch carefully and she would continue to serve as liason to the dead. Her mouth set in a grim line, but Margot turned to address the dead woman once more.
"To help." This was her answer to both questions, and though her voice was still quiet and almost pleading it did not quake or quiver. Much like the air when she'd summoned the spirit forward, she was and would remain steady. Hazel eyes followed along after the woman's trailing steps, and her hands rested at her sides with a conscious effort not to fidget while she communed with the woman's spirit.
"We're trying to stop people from being killed, because the police don't seem interested in or able to do so themselves. We might, though." The 'we' clearly being her and Ned. She paused, frowning at how to pose this next question without running the risk of sending the spirit flying into a fit.
"...It's cold here, before and after you arrived, Miss. Was it so cold when you were here last?"
Echo
"I haven't been this far down the creek in months, not since May," she said, though the times may not quite correspond. Her body was found in June.
"Not since Beltane with Evan and Odessa and Evelyn and..." she looks concerned again, as though she was trying to remember something and the details were just escaping her. She seems keen on pacing. Her attention flickers from the little witch to the smoke "-but we all went home after that. I met with clients the next morning, it wasn't cold at all... It hadn't been cold in weeks."
Ned
"...Last names of your friends? We;d,,,"
Ned clears his throat gently, trying to decide whether to lean on the Orderly training he'd accmulated over the years or simply gut-punch things into the reality that was unfolding at the moment. He'd opted for more comfort than control.
"...like to check with them as well and hopefully be able to piece together some details about what's going on...Some confusion all around it would seem..."
Margot
[Intelligence + Enigmas: C'mon, Brainy Kid, don't those names sound familiar? The word Beltane should definitely tip you off.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5) ( botch x 1 )
Margot
Margot cast a polite glance back to Ned while he asked about the last names. Margot didn't need surnames herself, though. The ones given tied to the word Beltane had her gears turning. They sounded familiar, they were significant in a Magickal sense, not just in the way that she may have read about them in newspaper articles.
"Odessa," she repeated quietly, more for herself than anyone else. Her brow furrowed as memories bled together and refused to be separated. Vampiric flesh molding? Or a Swan-Spirit, perhaps?
"But that doesn't make sense...."
She was left to quietly mutter under her breath, near-silent for how soft it was, while trying to sort her threads out in her mind. This would give Jacqueline time to answer Ned or tell him to fuck off.
Echo
"Evelyn Murray," she says, carefully. She seems to be regarding them with a great deal of scrutiny, as though she isn't entirely certain what to make of this particular experience or the fact that she is in the middle of an area that she hadn't been to in months, "Evan's always just been Evan and Odessa doesn't have a last name."
But it doesn't make sense-
"What is confusing. You're talking about people being murdered- who-" her voice hits a pin point, not originating from her but, instead, from the place where the smoke smoldered quietly still "-which murders are you talking about?"
As though there were more.
Ned
Ned takes the name and sets it aside somewhere in the compartments of his mind. Something to investigate later or at least hand over to Grace so she could do her techno-thing. For now though, his brow knit together tempted to hand things back over to Margot before the young witch seemed to wander off into her memories and thoughts for a second, sourcing out details that...refused to untangle themselves. It left Ned with an eyeful of expectant ghost.
"Do the words Peregrine or Wiley mean anything to you?"
Echo
"Peregrine is a rank," she explained, "in the Fraternal Order of the Falcon. Like how the masons have their degrees and secrets, they have theirs. It's an honor to be part of that."
She seems to take her time to muse over the second part. Wiley-
"Like the Coyote?"
Ned
""That's wily, but yeah. This one's with an E. W.I.L.E.Y. The nickname of someone we found. Apparently, he got into this order." Ned offered with a vague smile that suggested 'Lucky fellow, right?'
"A brotherhood. Gentleman's club?" Ned draws closer to the ghost, his interest suddenly piqued at the mention of some order or other. That would no doubt gain some hits and attention from a few bodies and minds among them, though a small part of him was trying not to think about another 'Order' in the Mage community this could be attached to.
"So this order accepts people into it. Honourable types? Do they have a purpose? Protective of Falcons? Wilderness and Environmentalist group?" Ned's half-hearted joke was meant more toward alleviating the sudden dread creeping into his system. He did his best to remain relatively deadpan and settled.
Margot
"But wait..."
Margot cut in finally. She'd missed out on the majority of the conversation surrounding the Fraternal Order of Falcons and this Wiley person, still stuck with zero traction while gears in her mind whirled around the names Evan Evelyn and Odessa-- Odessa being the drain that her mind kept circling around in particular, unsure of whether it wanted to land on 'Vampire' or 'Swan'. She'd blinked and given her head a little shake when finally coming back to reality. She'd just have to give up on that particular train of thought for now.
"What's the last thing that you remember? As a whole, I mean, Miss Paix? If you weren't here since May, if you remember clients, then there's something missing between the last time you were here and when you... ended up here last."
Echo
"Somewhere between a hunting lodge and a gentlemen's club. Some of the men in the lower levels take lessons with me-" took lessons with her, but she doesn't dwell on it "-they donate to the NRA and anti-fracking groups, so there's that? One of my clients told me that the only way you get to the higher echelons of the organization is a successful and dangerous hunt."
But what did she remember. What could she say about all of this? Her head turned and... what did she remember. What were her last moments that she placed and-
The air grows terribly cold for a flash and she, dead thing, stops.
"I can't tell you that."
Ned
"...ok. That's ok."
Ned offers a moment of reassurance, regarding the ghost and moving into her peripheral when she turns on Margot with a cold front sweeping in. The orderly training pulls his hands up, showing them to her with a careful sort of 'calm down' ease, that has them fall away slowly while he speaks.
"How about you tell me what sort of lessons you taught these men? You must have been important if they allowed you access to their members. What did they have to hunt for anyway? Dangerous hunt sounds like a grizzly maybe? Or a wolf?"
Margot
An order of brothers, possibly tied in to Magick, but definitely shady. The best way to get to the higher levels was to perform a special hunt. At that reveal, Margot was furrowing her brow. She was already focused on that instead of waiting with baited breath for the answer to her question-- the what happened?. It was fine all the same, for the dead woman couldn't reveal any answers to her anyways. The sudden strengthening of cold's grip in the air was not missed, though. Margot's skin tightened and she shivered.
It was while she was untying her flannel that Ned caught her eye. The gesture had her scowling at him briefly, insult flashing across her face before immediatey conceding to agreement. She was picking up what he was putting down, and was quiet while she pulled her arms through the sleeves of her flannel.
While she was buttoning the buttons, though, after Ned mused about the hunt, Margot did pipe up with one add-in:
"Or people. Hence the murder victims."
Echo
"I still don't know which murders you are talking about," she snapped, "who else died? Who else do you know died- you can't push this and I can't help you if you can't tell me who died."
She straightened, tall and strong and defiant and alive in the way that the dead should never really be. She is aware of the cold, it makes her look around and-
"Yes, like wild boars with a pocket knife or something like that- I haven't heard of much else. Evan is the one who told me about the hunting, she would know more."
Ned
"La Croix." Ned butchers the french pronunciation. Doesn't even try. "Laura Fairbanks." He states the names with obviousness. No guile or misdirection this time. His gaze travels to Margot, brow perked as if in
Ned
^question.
Anyone else?
Margot
Eyes hopped to Margot to ask if there were other names that were missing. Margot listened to the names that Ned had provided and nodded, picking up where he'd left off and looking to the woman that she'd summoned. She was built slim, this Jacqueline, but there's a power that all spirits held within and perhaps that was what helped make her seem so impressive when she was drawn tall and taut like that. Or maybe that was just the way she was in life. She spoke of Beltane, of names that rang bells of magickal significance and familiarity, she taught classes to a Brotherhood of Birds. There was power in knowledge and Magick and that could manifest afterlife as well.
"There's been a body found each month so far. Fairbanks was in the Colorado Springs suburbs, found in April. Then in May they found Chet St. Croiz near Pike's Peak."
Margot paused and her mouth twisted uncomfortably. This was the part she was worried about. Certainly the woman knew, but... to say it... well...
"A woman found you here. In June." She gestured to the area around them vaguely with her hand, palm up and fingers relaxed out. To her credit, her tone was gentle and sympathetic, a Funeral Voice if there was one. "The circumstances surrounding each murder were suspicious, increasingly so, down to you."
"....they haven't reported any other similar findings since then, and it's September now."
Echo
"La Croix was a Falcon- new guy, new money- but... Who is Laura Fairbanks?"
She looked genuinely confused, pinpoint pupils blow out to something that makes her seem almost human, almost alive for a moment. She walks and the ground takes the barest bits of ice with it, the ground thaws when she leaves.
The ghost looks down, pauses-
"If you're finding bodies, it's not the murders you should be worried about-" she moves past the sentiment quickly "who found me?"
Ned
"Evelyn did." He offers it without much in the way of thought. Throwing the name out with the familiairity that suggests Jackie knows which Evelyn. If only to see what sort of reaction that might bring.
Once again, Ned's hand is behind his back, carefully fingering the knife handle.
"...So we know that each of them was gifted. We know at least one of them was part of the Order and you Ms. Paix...were at least connected to them, through teaching methods?" Another little aside left there for if the Ghost felt inclined to answer.
"Seems like an in house problem though. Especially given we're supposed to be worried about....not the murders...I find it hard to believe there's something of higher priority than the murders right now..."
Margot
The ghostly Ms. Paix's wandering drew notice to the fact that the cold seemed to be permeating from her directly-- it followed her through each step, the ground thawing after she moved on listlessly to another part of the bank, but never wandering far from the witch and crafter who summoned her. A trailing thought-- the cause of death was the cold, and it had followed her beyond the grave. That felt significant, but the warning that she gave (don't worry about the murders) distracted her from it (for now).
She'd glanced to Ned, then folded her arms uncomfortably across her chest. The dandelion smoldered down toward ash in the bowl crafted from the tree of the name, but smoke still drifted dutiful to keep the worlds drawn together for the exchange.
"They were all apprenticed in Magick....," Margot almost whispered this, it could almost have been missed if the place weren't so supernaturally quiet already. Her eyes had been unfocused with the thought, drifting near ground level as she'd listened and pondered, but now they lifted up to focus upon the tall and surprisingly calm spectre. They were wide.
"They're only targeting Magick. You... you died of hypothermia, Jacqueline. Was that your resonance? Cold?"
Echo
Was that your resonance? Margot asked,Cold?
"Placid." the ghost replies.
She died of hypothermia, she says-
"It's too warm for that-" she says swift and ready "-I-"
This was when there was a moment to perhaps test the placid nature that this creature had told them she possessed in life. And yes, how it would be tested because the dead were creatures of roaring passions, it was what fueled them. It was that which kept their forms together and she was no different and at that moment she was beginning to feel the effects of despair, and her fists clenched and she stepped away from the two young mages, Hands go up to hold the sides of her head.
"-I saw Evelyn before I was- I went to her, I'd found out that-" which was when her eyes went dark, black and bottomless. Fathomless and abyssal- "NO."
The leaves shake with this, the air stirs and her form flickers brighter than it would before fading back ethereal- barely here.
"I can't tell again, I will not- this is not my secret, I remember! I. Am. No. Thief."
Ned
"Send her back, Margot."
Ned's voice is low, as if he were attempting not to draw the ghost's attention, ire or regard suddenly. His gaze doesn't travel quickly at the younger mage, merely glances at her out of the corner of his eye.
Margot
Truth be told, Margot was surprised that this conversation had been going so well. Jacqueline explained that her resonance was not cold, but placid, and perhaps that contributed to the experience going so smooth as it had thus far. But again she brushed up against the memory of the moment of her death, and each time before she had shied away from it. This time, however, something snapped and a sudden rage arose.
Margot went stiff in spine and muscles, and her toes gripped at her boots. Her arms stayed folded across her chest (steady), but they tightened about her ribcage and her eyes had gone wide. The ghost was shouting about protecting a secret that wasn't hers because she wasn't going to steal anything and it was a secret that she had found out when Evelyn... this Evelyn...
Send her back, urged Ned.
Those big eyes hopped over to Ned when he whispered to her, but panic didn't cling to the edges of them. She didn't need to turn her head too severely to see him, there was no dramatic whipping of the head to be seen. She considered this suggestion, then looked back to the ghost who flickered near-etheral, near-gone, whose hands were up over her head. She spoke soft and steady as before.
"You're not. I won't ask you to be either. You've helped us a lot, Jacqueline, you have our thanks."
Echo
"She knew," the spirit said, with her voice so terribly heartbroken, the kind of heartbreak that can only fuel the purest of rage. The kind of betrayal that hurts to its core, Jacqueline closed her eyes tightly "I told Evelyn about them all and she knew- I didn't know I'd promised- I didn't remember-you have to believe me!" she wailed.
Margot could have sent her back, could have been ready to give the ghost back to her plane but the air was so cold, so frightfully cold. There is the feeling, perhaps for that moment, that maybe something was amiss. The cold that came with her, the dreadful, oppressive cold that had not lifted gave way and the shadows converged for a moment upon where the ghost had been standing.
The ghost shrieked again when some thin, alabaster hand seemed to come through the shroud, grasped her shoulder and then pulled. Limbs graceful and willowy, and the barest strands of gossamer thread hair seemed to come together, as if Jacqueline and some other, more ancient being were attempting to merge. Whern she speaks again it is the voice of a chorus-
"Know that your word is your bond, children, and woe to those who would dare steal from the spirits that which is theirs. This is the wisdom of the Keeper of Secrets."
And with that, she is gone. Both she and whatever had been with her this time are away, and the silence and the cold and the stillness of the area seems to begin to bleed away- the earth itself releasing its breath to relieve the tension.
Echo
"She knew," the spirit said, with her voice so terribly heartbroken, the kind of heartbreak that can only fuel the purest of rage. The kind of betrayal that hurts to its core, Jacqueline closed her eyes tightly "I told Evelyn about them all and she knew- I didn't know I'd promised- I didn't remember-you have to believe me!" she wailed.
Margot could have sent her back, could have been ready to give the ghost back to her plane but the air was so cold, so frightfully cold. There is the feeling, perhaps for that moment, that maybe something was amiss. The cold that came with her, the dreadful, oppressive cold that had not lifted gave way and the shadows converged for a moment upon where the ghost had been standing.
The ghost shrieked again when some thin, alabaster hand seemed to come through the shroud, grasped her shoulder and then pulled. Limbs graceful and willowy, and the barest strands of gossamer thread hair seemed to come together, as if Jacqueline and some other, more ancient being were attempting to merge. Whern she speaks again it is the voice of a chorus-
"Know that your word is your bond, children, and woe to those who would dare steal from the spirits that which is theirs. This is the wisdom of the Keeper of Secrets."
And with that, she is gone. Both she and whatever had been with her this time are away, and the silence and the cold and the stillness of the area seems to begin to bleed away- the earth itself releasing its breath to relieve the tension.
Ned
The knife is out.
Ned's attention is latching onto that alabaster limb punching through from the other side and the ghostly voices that suddenly rise to collect in the vicinity. His mind is pieecing things together into some format, even as he is witnessing events quick wits formulating thoughts and ideas even as they are happening.
Because really? It's all he can do. All he has access to at the moment.
There is a merging. The cold is batted aside like some errant child, crushed and delivered into a shadowy presence that sweeps up Jac
Ned
queline and Ned is watching. Sympathetic? Empathetic? Or merely a witness. One would be hard pressed to decipher which based solely on his protective stance and the deadpan on his face.
When it all goes still ad silent, he is the same for a few moments. Then: turning to Margot, slowly, carefully he sucks in a deep and slow breath and releases it with the same controlled ease.
"We've got a lot of information. I have some thoughts but nothing concrete and we need to know a lot more before any of it will shake out. For now though? We need to get the fuck out of here."
Ned
(Wits 4 + Awareness 2)
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Margot
[Wits 3 + Awareness 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 6) ( success x 1 )
Margot
"I do!" Margot was calling back to the ghost now, insisting belief. She felt for the woman, something about the righteousness of rage stoked by betrayal called to the Goddess that she could feel in her bones. There was more reassurance that she wanted to offer to the woman, she wanted her guided back to the other side peacably, but soon the area made thin by Margot's smoke summons and the lack of the city's choking nature was pushed through by something else. The hand seized Jacqueline by the shoulder and a small startled and fearful sound strangled its way out of Margot's throat. Her arms finally unfolded only to allow her hands to clasp over her mouth as she watched what transpired with wide eyes.
When the cold and the hand and the warning had faded away and quiet returned, Ned finally turned to face Margot and she turned her head slowly to look at him. Hands slowly lowered from her mouth but her eyes were still wide. He'd taken a breath to calm himself but she didn't do the same. Rather, she looked back to the spot on the pond shore where the ghost had been pulled back where she belongs.
"There's no danger here," she said, and though the tone wasn't reassuring the message was supposed to be. "What we saw... It's not..." She didn't finish, but shook her head and concluded differently instead. "Well, let's say I'm keeping that warning close."
She went back to the bowl of dandelion ash and knelt down to clean up. The ash was tipped into the pond itself, the bowl rinsed with the water from the bottle she'd brought and scrubbed carefully with bare fingertips then dried on the hem of her shirt. Supplies packed away she shouldered her backpack and rose, waited for Ned, and when he seemed ready she started a comfortably-paced walk back toward the car.
[[ End Scene: Not seen on camera, the car drive back hashing out theories on what's going on. Tune in next time for Getting Home and Filling Doc In! ]]
September 12, 2016
September 9, 2016
Mid-August, 2016 - The House [Doc, Ned] [ST'd by jamie]
Sepúlveda
If this were an episode of an hourlong drama, prior to the credits rolling the audience would be made aware of the fact that Andrés Sepúlveda, the unhinged Mad Scientist with a genius-level I.Q. and two delinquent students, went to high school with a fellow named Jerry Maklin. Maklin grew up to become a demolitions expert, and the two kept in touch about as well as anybody manages to keep in touch after nearly twenty years, and then one day he went missing. One day stretched into three. The police get involved. It sort of makes the papers.
On an ordinary day, Sepúlveda would not have given half of a shit, because he works for the county and has other things to worry about. Maybe he knows Maklin well enough to suspect a bender or an affair or something else that's none of his business. This is not an ordinary day. He got involved. He stopped by Maklin's office, found a bundle of hundred-dollar bills along with a receipt signed by one Jason Porter to demolish a house on the outskirts of Aurora.
According to the county clerks office, someone filed a death certificate for Jason Porter three days ago. Cause of death: heart attack. Supposedly. Sepúlveda asks around but can't find the name of the medical examiner who did the autopsy.
Long story short, there is a Jeff Porter living in Loveland of all fucking places who, when Sepúlveda paid him a visit at the end of the workday, confessed to being the Jason Porter in question. They had a nice chat. Porter is the sole heir to the Boucher fortune, the family details of which Sepúlveda sat through but didn't care enough to retain, but wants nothing to do with the estate. According to Porter, the place is unlivable, and that's why he hired Maklin to demolish it.
Put your shoes on, says the text message the kids receive around 7:20 on a Monday night. We're sticking our noses someplace they don't belong.
Followed by about 15 party emojis.
---
After he's collected the two of them and they're buckled up in the Wrangler, Sepúlveda informs them they're heading to Aurora.
"Some idiot I went to school with's been missing for three days," he says, "and the cops... are cops. If we run into any Dreamspeakers or drug-addled cult members or anyone else who might want to attack me on sight, do me a solid and try not to antagonize them, eh?"
Ned.
Ned
"This is what they call a 'Negotiable stance'. I want a pony for my good behaviour."
Ned is strapped into the backseat, comfortable as far from the dashboard as he can get without simply refusing the car ride. He'd been using his bicycle for the last few months, especially in the weeks since he'd quit his job. It had resulted in a small adjustment to his fashion sense, both in functionality and simplification; t-shirts and dark jeans were the goto these days with a new pair of grey runners that supported the more active lifestyle.
Aurora, however, was a bit out of the way so Ned had opted to accept the ride rather than 'meet them there'.
"This 'idiot' you knew from back during the 40s have a name, Doc? And you also don't go chasing things for thin reasoning. What sort of trouble are you expecting? Beyond cultists and Dreamspeakers, that is."
Margot
That's what we're good at. Margot's text came in response. No emojis. Just that plunk in the bucket of a contribution. She would be ready when the Doc came by to pick her up, though. Dressed with her hair in a braid crown (tied up to keep her fingers busy while she chose to pour over a book about chance while getting ready), with a pair of black denim shorts, socks and sneakers, and a white tank top cut loose to catch summer breezes when they came. She sat in the backseat with a messenger bag in her lap, tossed open so that she could double (triple, quadruple) check the contents.
A witch's kit in disguise as a college kid's bag. All sorts of old and uncomfortable things to be found with likely existed within-- her craft was growing quickly, and she was stocked and prepared to perform such feats as summoning the dead these days.
"What makes you think we're going to be running into something like that?" She leaned forward between the seats some to pose the question and better hear the answer.
Margot
Scratch the backseat-- if Ned was there first Margot was in the front. Doc wasn't chaperoning or anything, after all.
Ned's questions got a glance back toward, then a look to Doc as well.
Answers, teach!
Sepúlveda
Given that he spent his formative years around people who either spoke nothing but Spanish or English with a thick Mexican accent, Sepúlveda is lucky that he can tamp down his accent when he has to. It pops up when he's agitated, or excited, or otherwise wound up.
So... most of the time.
Which means the letter 'J' gives him some trouble. He wants to pronounce his old classmate's name Herry, or Yerry. Sepúlveda, being Sepúlveda, tends to do whatever the fuck he wants. Now isn't an exception.
"I should have left you two at home," he says as he pulls onto the freeway.
They're going to protest. He cuts them off.
"Can it. I don't know what to expect. That's why I brought you, in case I fall in a hole and fracture my femur or something. All I know is there is this house, and it's abandoned, and Jerry Maklin--" He goes with Yerry. Deal with it. "--went to this house with the intent to demolish it and now he's missing. Okay?"
Ned
"I could have been watching Hell's kitchen-"
Can It Ned claps his jaws shut around the joke, biting his lips to keep it contained. The Doc pulls onto the Freeway and the young Initiate's eyes go out the window to regard the passing landscape, swifter now with the higher speeds. When the Doc explains as much about 'Yerry' and the demolition location they are going to, his attention comes back into focus on the Mad Scientist in the driver's seat with a vague frown.
"So an old classmate went to collapse a House out in Aurora that had been...abandoned...and then promptly went missing himself...while visiting the abandoned...not condemned...not inherited...but abandoned. In pleasantville, sweet american dream, pumpkin pie, Aurora..." Ned pauses to let that all sink in for a moment. "Does this suburb have a hidden Crack Den presence or meth lab industry I'm not familiar with?"
Sepúlveda
The tiniest shred of empathy: he does not make a joke about pulling over right here and letting Ned out to walk home.
He does say, "Actually, yeah, one just blew up last week. You should've seen the bodies."
Ned
"...I changed my mind. I want a Humvee for good behaviour..."
Sepúlveda
Scoff.
"'Good behavior...'"
Margot
"So there's probably something there that keeps driving people out. Or making them disappear."
Margot stated the obvious, apparently in an effort to keep the conversation on track. They'd both been told to 'Can it', but Margot seemed not to have heard. That or she assumed that it applied dominantly to Ned, as was often the case. She clasped the messenger bag's flap closed and set it down on the floor between her feet.
"Could be anything...," she added quietly in lieu of speculating on the endless possibilities one by one. Watched where they were going out the windshield and eyed road signs to mark how long until their arrival.
The topic of meth labs was left entirely untouched, thank you very much.
Sepúlveda
He so rarely turns on the radio in this vehicle that the knob sticks when he tries to pointedly flick it on. A brief scowl, a cracking noise as whatever had gunked it closed loses its grip, and a top 40 station fills the car with a midtempo four-on-the-floor house-influenced song, A minor with a female vocalist.
"Yes it could," Sepúlveda says before cranking the volume.
---
They reach their destination not long after the Etherite decides he's done answering questions. He pulls off the highway after another sixty seconds or so and they're cruising through a sprawling near-rural landscape while a slower-tempo half time tropical-house tune, G minor with a male vocalist, provides a soundtrack.
Which he kills as soon as he sees the house. 'Abandoned' was as good a word as any.
The yard is overgrown, dying, untouched by a caretaker in what looks like years. Thick as the brush is and fading as the light is, they can't see more than ten or fifteen feet through the brush. What trees there are are covered with ivy and creeping vines. Sepúlveda looks out the window with a grim expression, then takes a deep pull off his flask and steps out of the Jeep.
Out in the open air, they can hear birds and small mammals twittering and rustling.
[roll perc + awareness, you filthy animals]
Margot
[Perception 3 + Awareness 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Sepúlveda
[perc + aware]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )
Ned
(Perception 3 + Awareness 1)
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Ned
"Amittyville."
Ned climbs out of the backseat with a glance at the landscape and the lawn. His eyes track the house itself for a moment before he's scanning the further out boundaries and how close they are to any potential civilization. Distant neighbours, rural back-drop and the suggestion of isolation. On the plus side, coincidence and vulgarity looked nearly the same around this point.
The downsides?
"There's either someone with a fire axe. Someone with a chainsaw or someone with a butcher's knife waiting out there in the fields, for schmucks like us to come along and say things like 'This is a lovely spot, just needs a little touch up'..."
Ned makes a mock face, meant to render a happy family oriented ignorant, hands interlocked before him, up on his tip toes and everything. The face falls away a moment later, grumbling under his breath and already reaching for something indescribable.
(Forces 1, Matter 1: X-ray Blueprinting the House. Diff 4 - 1 for Quint)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 4) ( success x 1 )
Ned
(Not the house, the yard/grass^)
Margot
The door closed gently behind Margot after she'd climbed out and down from the Jeep's passenger seat. She was looking over the property, sweeping the lawn briefly and settling for a longer study on the house itself. On the windows and the door and the siding and the foundation. She tightened and adjusted the strap of the messenger bag across her chest and shoulder, so that it rested at the small of her back for the time being.
A glance was cast to Ned while he began murmuring and focusing in, then back up and forward to continue her initial study.
"It looks like it's been empty for a while. Did you say how long this place has been abandoned since the last people lived here...?" She was askind the Doc this question directly, clearly, while waiting for whatever surveilence data that Ned might come back with from whatever deeper search he was doing on the property.
Sepúlveda
Did you say how long this place has been abandoned since the last people lived here...?
"... fuck do I look like, a real estate agent?"
He kind of does. A deranged alcoholic real estate agent, but he's dressed like he spent more of his day in court than in the morgue.
Once upon a time, a stone wall lined the property. All that now remains supports a faltering iron gate, verdigris mixed in amongst the rust and god knows what else stains its surface. Sepúlveda walks around it, brazen, his feet seeking the cobblestone pathway leading up to the front door rather than thrashing around in the undergrowth like some kind of asshole.
He doesn't appear to notice. The kids do: something is wrong. They cannot identify the species of the animals making the noises and the closer they listen the more the hairs on their arms and necks want to stand up.
As oblivious to emotions or otherworldly sensations as he is, even Sepúlveda notices the graveyard off to the left of the path. Eighteen stones for those of them counting. He has no interest in investigating that part of the yard just yet.
Sepúlveda
Margot notices a vile stench, a mixture of graverot and sulfur, on the righthand side of the path. This is the source of the twittering noises.
Ned
"Why the fuck does this place have it's own graveyard?"
Ned isn't one to forego particular qualities, especially those activating his 'Horror Movie Trivia' meter. The older of the two students has stopped amid the grass to stare at the distant Graveyard, brow furrowed in utter bafflement and rising alarm even as his own resonance begins to push back against the flush of grating nerves and rising disturbance lingering in the air. His glance toward Margot carries a seriousness to it and she can see, as the Doc wanders through the brush toward the porch of the house, Ned's hand gleam metallic; the hunting knife he'd taken to carrying, gripped firmly under fingers.
Short, shallow breaths. Like trying to reduce panic. That was the feeling of Ned's suffocating yet controlled resonance. A push for normalcy in a world of fright. He is slow to move into the Doctor's wake, though not enough to linger and allow the Doc to enter the property and out of sight.
Margot
None of the three of them looked particularly pleased to find the small graveyard on the property when walking the path to approach the front door. Margot's face paled some while she counted the stones and tried to guess how old they may be by their state of wear. She had started to shift the messenger bag from her back to her hip, slowly reaching for the buckle to undo it while surveying the yard.
Something caught her attention and pulled it to the right, away from the graveyeard. There had been a sound, some kind of animal that she couldn't peg down as being avian or mammal. She'd startled ever so slightly as something had occurred to her and looked sharply to the ground near to the right of the path, by her feet then sweeping out further. Her nose was wrinkled, something smelled wrong, something felt wrong.
"Guys...," she called after them, sounding slightly alarmed and more than a little worried when she'd looked up and realized the Doc was already by the door and Ned not much farther behind him. She hurred along after them and plunged her hand into the front of the bag, coming up with a small cloth pouch pulled tight and tied secure at the mouth.
"I don't like it." She shook her head, nose still wrinkled up from the very memory of the egg-and-rot stench that had wafted up into it moments ago.
Sepúlveda
"Eh, you know, you whack the weeds, get rid of all the cobwebs, slap a new coat of paint on it..."
He isn't fired up about just waltzing inside but neither is he creeping along as if he's scared. They have yet to see their mentor scared. That isn't an indication of anything other than the depths of insanity which he's already plumbed in his life, how much horrific shit he'd seen and done before he came back to Denver.
If going into a Technocratic stronghold to retrieve a complete stranger didn't induce fear in him, if digging up the body of his dead wife and hauling it back to his lab to do god knows what to it to try and bring her back to life didn't put him in the ground after her, there's probably not a lot left that could actually make this man fear for his life.
Their lives, though, is a different story. Thus far he hasn't gotten the impression they're in any danger.
Boarded up windows seem to leer at them the closer to the house they come. The porch steps croak and cry underneath Sepúlveda's negligible weight. On the porch itself, a chair-swing sways with the breeze. Three filthy rocking chairs hold court to the left of the door, which is hanging off its hinges and yawning into a dusty entryway.
"Hello?" Sepúlveda calls as he toes open the screen door and holds it ajar with his elbow. "Jerry, you asshole, you in here?"
Ned
"Doc....are you kidding me?"
Ned is staring at the fucking Rocking chairs on the god damn fucking porch, the wind setting them to creaking just so. Just. Fucking. So. The chains on the porch swing do their thing in conjunction with the Doc's own footsteps on the porch boards and Ned is...three slivers of a inch away from potentially losing the control portion of his resonance which has begun to die down steadily. Nothing more than a vague flutter of gulping breath at the back of the throat. The hunting knife doesn't dance or move in his hand with any reflexive comfort. Merely gripped and prepped.
Margot's call from behind has him turning in place to stare at her as well. These fucking two were walking Tropes at this point. Ned's jaw is clenched and his eyes are doing that thing where they refuse to blink unless absolutely necessary incase something is creeping up on them from the shadows of-
"This is the part where we juice the lights in this place and make sure they're all on before we go in, yes?" Then turning back around toward the Doc, his voice have climbed down into a whisper.
Margot
Up on the porch there was a particularly dark and dusty cast to their surroundings. The wind played with the paranoia of the young Initiates and where Ned was watching rocking chairs Margot had glanced back toward the yard for a brief moment before apparently changing her mind and replacing the pouch back in the bag once more. When her hand emerged it was with a small glass vial with a rubber cap upon the top. The contents were dark red and clung to the glass walls-- blood, clearly, certainly.
Ned inquired quietly about lights but Margot kept quiet, listening carefully for whatever might reply to the Doc's call. She was also focused in on working her own Craft in this moment as well.
The cap of the vial popped open and she tipped the vial upside down against her fingers, wetting the tips of them with crimson befor the hand still-clean took up the task of re-capping and then tucking the vial away in her front pocket instead of back in the bag. The fingertips slick with blood rubbed together and her eyelids fluttered closed for a second. Lips moved ever so with a silent half-prayer while she evoked that connection with the Goddess. With eyes still closed she raised her hand and touched her fingers to her eyelids, then drew half-circles of red beneath them as well. When her hand dropped away it looked like a gruesome racoon's mask, and threw into relief the whites of her eyes when she opened them and searched the yard once more.
[Spirit 1/Life 1: What lurks? What lingers? What waits? Diff 4 - 1 Foci]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )
If this were an episode of an hourlong drama, prior to the credits rolling the audience would be made aware of the fact that Andrés Sepúlveda, the unhinged Mad Scientist with a genius-level I.Q. and two delinquent students, went to high school with a fellow named Jerry Maklin. Maklin grew up to become a demolitions expert, and the two kept in touch about as well as anybody manages to keep in touch after nearly twenty years, and then one day he went missing. One day stretched into three. The police get involved. It sort of makes the papers.
On an ordinary day, Sepúlveda would not have given half of a shit, because he works for the county and has other things to worry about. Maybe he knows Maklin well enough to suspect a bender or an affair or something else that's none of his business. This is not an ordinary day. He got involved. He stopped by Maklin's office, found a bundle of hundred-dollar bills along with a receipt signed by one Jason Porter to demolish a house on the outskirts of Aurora.
According to the county clerks office, someone filed a death certificate for Jason Porter three days ago. Cause of death: heart attack. Supposedly. Sepúlveda asks around but can't find the name of the medical examiner who did the autopsy.
Long story short, there is a Jeff Porter living in Loveland of all fucking places who, when Sepúlveda paid him a visit at the end of the workday, confessed to being the Jason Porter in question. They had a nice chat. Porter is the sole heir to the Boucher fortune, the family details of which Sepúlveda sat through but didn't care enough to retain, but wants nothing to do with the estate. According to Porter, the place is unlivable, and that's why he hired Maklin to demolish it.
Put your shoes on, says the text message the kids receive around 7:20 on a Monday night. We're sticking our noses someplace they don't belong.
Followed by about 15 party emojis.
---
After he's collected the two of them and they're buckled up in the Wrangler, Sepúlveda informs them they're heading to Aurora.
"Some idiot I went to school with's been missing for three days," he says, "and the cops... are cops. If we run into any Dreamspeakers or drug-addled cult members or anyone else who might want to attack me on sight, do me a solid and try not to antagonize them, eh?"
Ned.
Ned
"This is what they call a 'Negotiable stance'. I want a pony for my good behaviour."
Ned is strapped into the backseat, comfortable as far from the dashboard as he can get without simply refusing the car ride. He'd been using his bicycle for the last few months, especially in the weeks since he'd quit his job. It had resulted in a small adjustment to his fashion sense, both in functionality and simplification; t-shirts and dark jeans were the goto these days with a new pair of grey runners that supported the more active lifestyle.
Aurora, however, was a bit out of the way so Ned had opted to accept the ride rather than 'meet them there'.
"This 'idiot' you knew from back during the 40s have a name, Doc? And you also don't go chasing things for thin reasoning. What sort of trouble are you expecting? Beyond cultists and Dreamspeakers, that is."
Margot
That's what we're good at. Margot's text came in response. No emojis. Just that plunk in the bucket of a contribution. She would be ready when the Doc came by to pick her up, though. Dressed with her hair in a braid crown (tied up to keep her fingers busy while she chose to pour over a book about chance while getting ready), with a pair of black denim shorts, socks and sneakers, and a white tank top cut loose to catch summer breezes when they came. She sat in the backseat with a messenger bag in her lap, tossed open so that she could double (triple, quadruple) check the contents.
A witch's kit in disguise as a college kid's bag. All sorts of old and uncomfortable things to be found with likely existed within-- her craft was growing quickly, and she was stocked and prepared to perform such feats as summoning the dead these days.
"What makes you think we're going to be running into something like that?" She leaned forward between the seats some to pose the question and better hear the answer.
Margot
Scratch the backseat-- if Ned was there first Margot was in the front. Doc wasn't chaperoning or anything, after all.
Ned's questions got a glance back toward, then a look to Doc as well.
Answers, teach!
Sepúlveda
Given that he spent his formative years around people who either spoke nothing but Spanish or English with a thick Mexican accent, Sepúlveda is lucky that he can tamp down his accent when he has to. It pops up when he's agitated, or excited, or otherwise wound up.
So... most of the time.
Which means the letter 'J' gives him some trouble. He wants to pronounce his old classmate's name Herry, or Yerry. Sepúlveda, being Sepúlveda, tends to do whatever the fuck he wants. Now isn't an exception.
"I should have left you two at home," he says as he pulls onto the freeway.
They're going to protest. He cuts them off.
"Can it. I don't know what to expect. That's why I brought you, in case I fall in a hole and fracture my femur or something. All I know is there is this house, and it's abandoned, and Jerry Maklin--" He goes with Yerry. Deal with it. "--went to this house with the intent to demolish it and now he's missing. Okay?"
Ned
"I could have been watching Hell's kitchen-"
Can It Ned claps his jaws shut around the joke, biting his lips to keep it contained. The Doc pulls onto the Freeway and the young Initiate's eyes go out the window to regard the passing landscape, swifter now with the higher speeds. When the Doc explains as much about 'Yerry' and the demolition location they are going to, his attention comes back into focus on the Mad Scientist in the driver's seat with a vague frown.
"So an old classmate went to collapse a House out in Aurora that had been...abandoned...and then promptly went missing himself...while visiting the abandoned...not condemned...not inherited...but abandoned. In pleasantville, sweet american dream, pumpkin pie, Aurora..." Ned pauses to let that all sink in for a moment. "Does this suburb have a hidden Crack Den presence or meth lab industry I'm not familiar with?"
Sepúlveda
The tiniest shred of empathy: he does not make a joke about pulling over right here and letting Ned out to walk home.
He does say, "Actually, yeah, one just blew up last week. You should've seen the bodies."
Ned
"...I changed my mind. I want a Humvee for good behaviour..."
Sepúlveda
Scoff.
"'Good behavior...'"
Margot
"So there's probably something there that keeps driving people out. Or making them disappear."
Margot stated the obvious, apparently in an effort to keep the conversation on track. They'd both been told to 'Can it', but Margot seemed not to have heard. That or she assumed that it applied dominantly to Ned, as was often the case. She clasped the messenger bag's flap closed and set it down on the floor between her feet.
"Could be anything...," she added quietly in lieu of speculating on the endless possibilities one by one. Watched where they were going out the windshield and eyed road signs to mark how long until their arrival.
The topic of meth labs was left entirely untouched, thank you very much.
Sepúlveda
He so rarely turns on the radio in this vehicle that the knob sticks when he tries to pointedly flick it on. A brief scowl, a cracking noise as whatever had gunked it closed loses its grip, and a top 40 station fills the car with a midtempo four-on-the-floor house-influenced song, A minor with a female vocalist.
"Yes it could," Sepúlveda says before cranking the volume.
---
They reach their destination not long after the Etherite decides he's done answering questions. He pulls off the highway after another sixty seconds or so and they're cruising through a sprawling near-rural landscape while a slower-tempo half time tropical-house tune, G minor with a male vocalist, provides a soundtrack.
Which he kills as soon as he sees the house. 'Abandoned' was as good a word as any.
The yard is overgrown, dying, untouched by a caretaker in what looks like years. Thick as the brush is and fading as the light is, they can't see more than ten or fifteen feet through the brush. What trees there are are covered with ivy and creeping vines. Sepúlveda looks out the window with a grim expression, then takes a deep pull off his flask and steps out of the Jeep.
Out in the open air, they can hear birds and small mammals twittering and rustling.
[roll perc + awareness, you filthy animals]
Margot
[Perception 3 + Awareness 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Sepúlveda
[perc + aware]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )
Ned
(Perception 3 + Awareness 1)
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Ned
"Amittyville."
Ned climbs out of the backseat with a glance at the landscape and the lawn. His eyes track the house itself for a moment before he's scanning the further out boundaries and how close they are to any potential civilization. Distant neighbours, rural back-drop and the suggestion of isolation. On the plus side, coincidence and vulgarity looked nearly the same around this point.
The downsides?
"There's either someone with a fire axe. Someone with a chainsaw or someone with a butcher's knife waiting out there in the fields, for schmucks like us to come along and say things like 'This is a lovely spot, just needs a little touch up'..."
Ned makes a mock face, meant to render a happy family oriented ignorant, hands interlocked before him, up on his tip toes and everything. The face falls away a moment later, grumbling under his breath and already reaching for something indescribable.
(Forces 1, Matter 1: X-ray Blueprinting the House. Diff 4 - 1 for Quint)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 4) ( success x 1 )
Ned
(Not the house, the yard/grass^)
Margot
The door closed gently behind Margot after she'd climbed out and down from the Jeep's passenger seat. She was looking over the property, sweeping the lawn briefly and settling for a longer study on the house itself. On the windows and the door and the siding and the foundation. She tightened and adjusted the strap of the messenger bag across her chest and shoulder, so that it rested at the small of her back for the time being.
A glance was cast to Ned while he began murmuring and focusing in, then back up and forward to continue her initial study.
"It looks like it's been empty for a while. Did you say how long this place has been abandoned since the last people lived here...?" She was askind the Doc this question directly, clearly, while waiting for whatever surveilence data that Ned might come back with from whatever deeper search he was doing on the property.
Sepúlveda
Did you say how long this place has been abandoned since the last people lived here...?
"... fuck do I look like, a real estate agent?"
He kind of does. A deranged alcoholic real estate agent, but he's dressed like he spent more of his day in court than in the morgue.
Once upon a time, a stone wall lined the property. All that now remains supports a faltering iron gate, verdigris mixed in amongst the rust and god knows what else stains its surface. Sepúlveda walks around it, brazen, his feet seeking the cobblestone pathway leading up to the front door rather than thrashing around in the undergrowth like some kind of asshole.
He doesn't appear to notice. The kids do: something is wrong. They cannot identify the species of the animals making the noises and the closer they listen the more the hairs on their arms and necks want to stand up.
As oblivious to emotions or otherworldly sensations as he is, even Sepúlveda notices the graveyard off to the left of the path. Eighteen stones for those of them counting. He has no interest in investigating that part of the yard just yet.
Sepúlveda
Margot notices a vile stench, a mixture of graverot and sulfur, on the righthand side of the path. This is the source of the twittering noises.
Ned
"Why the fuck does this place have it's own graveyard?"
Ned isn't one to forego particular qualities, especially those activating his 'Horror Movie Trivia' meter. The older of the two students has stopped amid the grass to stare at the distant Graveyard, brow furrowed in utter bafflement and rising alarm even as his own resonance begins to push back against the flush of grating nerves and rising disturbance lingering in the air. His glance toward Margot carries a seriousness to it and she can see, as the Doc wanders through the brush toward the porch of the house, Ned's hand gleam metallic; the hunting knife he'd taken to carrying, gripped firmly under fingers.
Short, shallow breaths. Like trying to reduce panic. That was the feeling of Ned's suffocating yet controlled resonance. A push for normalcy in a world of fright. He is slow to move into the Doctor's wake, though not enough to linger and allow the Doc to enter the property and out of sight.
Margot
None of the three of them looked particularly pleased to find the small graveyard on the property when walking the path to approach the front door. Margot's face paled some while she counted the stones and tried to guess how old they may be by their state of wear. She had started to shift the messenger bag from her back to her hip, slowly reaching for the buckle to undo it while surveying the yard.
Something caught her attention and pulled it to the right, away from the graveyeard. There had been a sound, some kind of animal that she couldn't peg down as being avian or mammal. She'd startled ever so slightly as something had occurred to her and looked sharply to the ground near to the right of the path, by her feet then sweeping out further. Her nose was wrinkled, something smelled wrong, something felt wrong.
"Guys...," she called after them, sounding slightly alarmed and more than a little worried when she'd looked up and realized the Doc was already by the door and Ned not much farther behind him. She hurred along after them and plunged her hand into the front of the bag, coming up with a small cloth pouch pulled tight and tied secure at the mouth.
"I don't like it." She shook her head, nose still wrinkled up from the very memory of the egg-and-rot stench that had wafted up into it moments ago.
Sepúlveda
"Eh, you know, you whack the weeds, get rid of all the cobwebs, slap a new coat of paint on it..."
He isn't fired up about just waltzing inside but neither is he creeping along as if he's scared. They have yet to see their mentor scared. That isn't an indication of anything other than the depths of insanity which he's already plumbed in his life, how much horrific shit he'd seen and done before he came back to Denver.
If going into a Technocratic stronghold to retrieve a complete stranger didn't induce fear in him, if digging up the body of his dead wife and hauling it back to his lab to do god knows what to it to try and bring her back to life didn't put him in the ground after her, there's probably not a lot left that could actually make this man fear for his life.
Their lives, though, is a different story. Thus far he hasn't gotten the impression they're in any danger.
Boarded up windows seem to leer at them the closer to the house they come. The porch steps croak and cry underneath Sepúlveda's negligible weight. On the porch itself, a chair-swing sways with the breeze. Three filthy rocking chairs hold court to the left of the door, which is hanging off its hinges and yawning into a dusty entryway.
"Hello?" Sepúlveda calls as he toes open the screen door and holds it ajar with his elbow. "Jerry, you asshole, you in here?"
Ned
"Doc....are you kidding me?"
Ned is staring at the fucking Rocking chairs on the god damn fucking porch, the wind setting them to creaking just so. Just. Fucking. So. The chains on the porch swing do their thing in conjunction with the Doc's own footsteps on the porch boards and Ned is...three slivers of a inch away from potentially losing the control portion of his resonance which has begun to die down steadily. Nothing more than a vague flutter of gulping breath at the back of the throat. The hunting knife doesn't dance or move in his hand with any reflexive comfort. Merely gripped and prepped.
Margot's call from behind has him turning in place to stare at her as well. These fucking two were walking Tropes at this point. Ned's jaw is clenched and his eyes are doing that thing where they refuse to blink unless absolutely necessary incase something is creeping up on them from the shadows of-
"This is the part where we juice the lights in this place and make sure they're all on before we go in, yes?" Then turning back around toward the Doc, his voice have climbed down into a whisper.
Margot
Up on the porch there was a particularly dark and dusty cast to their surroundings. The wind played with the paranoia of the young Initiates and where Ned was watching rocking chairs Margot had glanced back toward the yard for a brief moment before apparently changing her mind and replacing the pouch back in the bag once more. When her hand emerged it was with a small glass vial with a rubber cap upon the top. The contents were dark red and clung to the glass walls-- blood, clearly, certainly.
Ned inquired quietly about lights but Margot kept quiet, listening carefully for whatever might reply to the Doc's call. She was also focused in on working her own Craft in this moment as well.
The cap of the vial popped open and she tipped the vial upside down against her fingers, wetting the tips of them with crimson befor the hand still-clean took up the task of re-capping and then tucking the vial away in her front pocket instead of back in the bag. The fingertips slick with blood rubbed together and her eyelids fluttered closed for a second. Lips moved ever so with a silent half-prayer while she evoked that connection with the Goddess. With eyes still closed she raised her hand and touched her fingers to her eyelids, then drew half-circles of red beneath them as well. When her hand dropped away it looked like a gruesome racoon's mask, and threw into relief the whites of her eyes when she opened them and searched the yard once more.
[Spirit 1/Life 1: What lurks? What lingers? What waits? Diff 4 - 1 Foci]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )
SepúlvedaWith the screen door still propped open with his elbow, Sepúlveda turns to cast a baffled frown back at his students. Not so much at Margot, whose Working is silent if bloody, but at Ned, who has been voicing his disapproval since they got out of the Jeep and is now asking if he's serious.
He doesn't answer with words. Just chews his lower lip, the flesh seeming to disappear with the darkness and the shadow cast by his beard, and lifts his eyebrows. Further questions, and Sepúlveda rolls his eyes.
"For Christ's sake," he says, "I have a flashlight. Change your diaper and let's go, we're burning daylight."
And so he goes, leaving the kids to decide if they want to follow him in or not.
The entryway and parlor are one large room, boasting three couches and a number of tables. On the center table sits a large bible, which Sepúlveda gives a wary glance but does not approach. Curtains on the wall to the left and the wall straight ahead.
"Jerry!" he calls again, thrusting aside the curtain straight in front of them. It reveals the dining room. Sepúlveda plants his hands on his hips. "Huh." Nothing there. He leaves the curtain open and tries the one on the left-hand wall.
Inside, that sense of wrongness pervades the air. Hangs heavy and obvious without the stink competing with it for their attention.
So far as Margot can tell, no ghosts are hanging around. They are not alone in the house, though. There are several small lifeforms underneath them. Probably rats.
NedNed flicks his hands in the air negligently at the Doc's commentary, dismissive as the PhD was of the horror movie implications (or perhaps simply ignorant of their existence given his age and proclivities for archaic tech) that were currently surrounding them on all sides. Moving into the house a half dozen paces behind the Doc, Ned is cautious and careful, eyes traveling back toward Margot with a wary sort of check-in that asked with a glance if she was ok as much as
Are we going to be ok?
He doesn't give her enough time to facially respond, before turning to catch the Doc's second bellow for attention. Ned's wince is visible in his shoulders and face, while he skates off to one side to regard the large parlour, it's host of furnishings mostly ignored in favour of the table with the Bible on it. Ned's inspection is cursory, half-hearted attempts at Sunday school when he was young, drawn up and discarded in the space of a glance at the once reverential volume.
SepúlvedaRegardless of how many pages Ned flips through the heavy, dusty book, they're all the same: blank.
MargotOf course Ned and Margot followed Dr. Sepúlveda in through the screen door. There was only the barest pause beforehand, for Ned to check back for Margot's input and for her to deliver it back in a nod (though he only gave enough time to check and see that there wasn't panic on her face). She'd held the screen door to keep it from slapping closed and was gentle in bringing it back to the doorframe to rest. She didn't close the front door proper-- she'd seen enough horror movies to know she didn't want to fuck around with a barrier and knob if she had to haul ass out of there.
Inside the house Margot cast her eyes around, perceiving first the cavernous great room they stepped into and skipping right over the bible on the table to start looking through and beyond, hunting for the ghastly whisps and chills and breezes to indicate spirits (ghosts, she anticipated, but found none) or feel the throb-hum-pull-warmth of life. A few rats, perhaps-- Margot doubted that though, staring not around the room but down past the toes of her sneakers at the basement beneath.
She snorted a little at her own conclusion, the sound quiet but abrupt and disagreeing with the initial thought that she was now correcting. "Oh those aren't rats," she said more for herself, and then lifted her eyes to look between the other two. "There's some of the things that were making those weird animal sounds outside, down there in the basement. They stink like the grave. I don't know what they are."
SepúlvedaThey have the option of going through the dining room to check out, presumably, the kitchen and the mud room, or they can go through the left-hand curtain and rummage around on the ground floor before heading upstairs or into the basement. Given that Maklin isn't answering the hollering, Sepúlveda seems to be debating whether he wants to continue to waste time looking for someone who is either dead or not here.
He picks the strangest times to give a shit about other people.
"You two check this floor," he says. "I'll go upstairs."
If either of them draws a breath to argue, he'll turn towards them and say, "Shut up, if you find a spider or something, I'll be able to hear you scream. It'll be fine. Be are be."
With that he goes through the curtain straight ahead and closes it behind him.
NedNed doesn't argue for once, merely turns in place to regard their surroundings. Margot's indication of 'animals' that she can't identify 'stinking of the grave' puts him on high alert and he's already conjuring methods and ways to put his various efforts to use. Much of them are left to the wayside as useless, including the hunting knife which is set into it's sheath tucked into the back of his waistband in favour of freeing up his hands and limbs.
Ned glances at the Doc who is moving up the stairs toward the second floor and it is a moment before the Initiate, no longer able to see the other man, finally turns to regard Margot with a perked brow.
"Keep behind me but eyes open and around. We'll scan each room before entering. Try to give me a warning of whatever is present if you can. We'll pull back to this location and meet up with the Doc if we find anything. This entire situation is outside of knowing right now and until we get at least some clue, we're best to take it in baby steps."
That said, Ned moves through the already drawn curtain the Doc had pulled, stepping around the delicate and rustic finery of the location that led toward the doorway and on into the kitchen. If nothing else, there may be more weapons of use this way.
MargotThe pair seemed to know how much sense lay in arguing with the Doc about his going upstairs. Because of course they weren't going to effectively search a house all huddled together like a flock of scared geese, and after all weren't they all Initiated now? Capable of more than just perceiving alone?
Margot had lifted a hand to start rubbing at her brow, and absently smeared blood further to swipe out toward her temple. She looked back to Ned when he'd turned to address her with the plan of attack. She, far more than Ned and Andrés, gave the impression of belonging in a place like this. The grave rot went well with the steadily progressing wave-crawl of gore and horror that her Magick cast about. This, combined with the dark hair and blood-mask about her eyes in the shadows? Well, if anyone else were there monster hunting with them they couldn't be faulted too much for confusing her as being the monster.
She didn't give any sign of disagreeing with Ned and fell into step behind when they started in the direction of the kitchen.
"I don't know... if it was going to spring on us for invading then I'm pretty sure it would have done so by now. It's either hiding, or it doesn't move and it's waiting." Her left hand was resting in the depths of her messenger bag, holding weaponry far more useful to her than a knife. She looked cautiously about, focused on the corners and shadows in particular.
"...maybe it's not even animate."
SepúlvedaAs soon as they walk into the corridor, they come upon a door to the left, ajar and lined with bookshelves. In the center of the room is a table with four chairs around it. They could lose hours in here. Libraries are treasure troves for Mages regardless of age or experience.
---
Right next door to the library is the game room, dominated by a billiards table. In the southeast corner is a chess set.
---
Across the hall from the game room is a bedroom, presumably meant for guest use, with nothing more than a daybed and a dresser inside. Around the corner from this room, a corridor branches off to the right.
A quick peek around the corner will reveal a large hole in the floor, blocking the way to any of the rooms down that wing.
---
Right next door to the game room is a water closet.
Across the hall from the water closet is a destroyed room, busted beams and crumbled drywall covering the furniture inside.
Margot[Extending Perception Scan! Corr/Life/Spirit, 4 - 1 diff (blood foci)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 7) ( success x 2 )
Ned"...We haven't given it, them or whatever any reason to want to harm us just yet. We also could just be hunting by all accounts and maybe give up after a little while like some others have." Optimism didn't sound well or right coming out of Ned's mouth. "All in all, we don't know much about anything right now except there are creatures scuttling around in the basement we are unfamiliar with and there's a graveyard nearby and a blank paged Bible on the foyer table. Kubrick would have a field day with this place..."
Ned's eyes are adjusting and moving as he goes, pausing in his steps to take in each room as they venture past it. The library receives a quick glance (and a faster one sent back toward Margot to usher her along, incase she got distracted by the knowledge waiting there) and the game room a more lingering one, before finally coming to the bedroom. He pauses here, hand resting at the back of his waistband where the knife is tucked under a loose t-shirt.
Ned turns the corner and immediately rears back, head peeking around to regard the hole in the floor. Then back down the hall and finally at Margot.
"Chunks of this place are unstable. Ruined. A little worried the floorboards might give under us in places. Should probably avoid the corridor ahead. Big hole there makes for unstable footing." A pause, eyeballing the library further down and the water closet on the same side of the house.
"You picking up anything interesting beyond the scuttlers in the basement?"
Sepúlveda"PUTA MAD--"
This, from upstairs, following by squeaking and skittering and the pitter-patter of tiny feet disappearing into small spaces.
"RATS. THEY'RE JUST RATS. NOBODY PANIC."
Margot"What?"
Margot looked surprised when she pulled her eyes from a ceiling corner of the kitchen to look at Ned.
"That Bible had no text?" She frowned heavy with thought, but didn't get too far for the sudden burst of swearing from the top floor of the house. Margot startled like an animal that heard the crack of a rifle, physically and sharply, but when the shouting about rats followed she sighed heavily and shook her head. Glanced down and scrubbed the blood off her fingertips onto the dark denim at the hip of her shorts.
"Weird." Then, she shook her head, dismissing the pondering. "No, just rats, Doc's confirmed for me now. There's nothing else alive here. No spirits or tears in the Gauntlet or anything like that, so I don't think anything's come across." She scowled harder and looked at what bit of blood was still dried onto her fingernail beds.
"So it's probably a goddamn zombie again. Or a vampire."
Ned"...Or a Flesh golem." A pause, cause that might receive a look "Like frankenstein."
Ned's inspecting the hallway they had traveled down a moment ago, backtracking around Margot toward the water closet and the game room. He turns into the doorway to the gameroom to regard it's contents, eyeballs the chessboard with careful scrutiny. He takes a deep breath, turning briefly around to give a slow panorama view of...well everything, before stepping up to the water closet. His free hand wraps snugly around the knife handle at his back, while the other reaches for the closet's handle, pushing downward to unlatch the portal without actually opening it.
He waits a moment, eyeballing Margot.
"We'll go take a look at the library. See if any of the books can give us an idea as to what or who might have been here before."
Ned pulls the Water closet open, enough to get a peek inside.
SepúlvedaOne side of the chessboard is defended by human pawns and great leaders throughout the 1800s, bright pink. The other side's pieces are a bilious green, their pawns in strange shapes that evoke memories of monuments and monsters. Fine craftsmanship on the pieces, even finer craftsmanship on the board itself. Its face reveals vague outlines of planets, stars, galaxies...
He doesn't want to look at it for very long. It will reel in his attention if he looks at it for very long.
In the water closet, the toilet does not work. There is a bathtub, unclosed by a curtain, which is closed. Opening the curtain will only reveal dirt and mildew and fungus.
As for the library...
[Margot, roll Perc + Investigation, diff 8.]
Margot'Flesh Golemn' certainly did receive a look; an arched eyebrow and 'what the hell' expression were what prompted the further explanation. The specific example seemed to set the matter to rest, and while he surveyed the game room Margot peered along the corridor and into what she could see through the open doors. The guest room wasn't particularly eye catching, and though she spied the chessboard past Ned in the gameroom (and though that chessboard had her wrinkling her nose like it reminded her of something bad and looking quickly away), she did seem concerned when he reached what was apparently the bathroom.
"Just be cautious of the mirror," she advised him. A lunatic's advice to most ears, but she knew mirrors were an easy way through the Gauntlet. There was a reason that stories to scare kids included summoning things in a darkened room before the looking glass.
As Ned scoped out the bathroom, Margot touched lightly the wall and frame of the library doorway as she peered inside.
[Perception 3 + Investigation 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (5, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SepúlvedaMost of the books in the library are of a mundane nature. Of note is the fact that the newest book was published in the 1980s; most of them appear to have been published the century prior to that, and several of them are in Latin, German, or French. It could take hours to pore through the volumes for anything that might be relevant or even interesting.
Margot gets lucky. She finds something interesting, but it's not certain, immediately, whether it's relevant or even useful: an account of a voyage from Hong Kong to San Francisco, in which the captain claimed to have seen mermaids off the coast.
Out of a hollowed-out book falls a small box. On the box is a label that reads pour l'air; deux heures. Inside the box are five pills.
This entire time they could hear Sepúlveda moving around upstairs, his steps making the floorboards cry out not because of his [negligible] weight but because of the age of the house. He pauses the longest in the room directly over the water closet. Pushes something that sounds heavy, lets it fall to the floor. Muffled talking-to-himself, most likely an expletive.
They have about twenty seconds before he walks up the hallway and comes back downstairs.
NedNed will make a cursory inspection of the water closet's contents. He gifts Margot's advice a moment and avoids whatever mirrors are present with his eyes, taking a second to inspect the dirt and film in the bathtub before pulling back out of the room hurriedly and sealing the door behind him.
"What have you foun-" Ned stops mid-sentence to regard the box on the floor, a brow perked at the oddity followed by a glance up at Margot. Both had their reasons for avoiding narcotics and intoxicants. Weed was their shared vice and Ned, for his part, seemed to look at the offering of pills with a glance of disapproval, if not outright disdain. He sucks in a breath to inspect the landscape of books, perusing for himself for a few moments, leaving Margot to her own discovery in the process.
"A lot of languages here. Doc could probably make sense of most of these." Which gets Ned thinking about what he'd need to auto-translate different languages. Google translate sucked and that would take forever, anyway.
"Lot of age here. Decades or more... Someone was into first editions...so why the hell did they leave it all behind?"
MargotInside the Library Margot found nothing immediately threatening them. After a cursory look-about, and once Ned had appeared at her shoulder to investigate the Library as well, she'd stepped inside. The books inside were old, and not just in that they were leftover from a house forgotten since the early 1980's. The languages spanned multiple cultures and histories, and much of it Margot couldn't make heads or tales of.
Something caught her eye, though. A particular spine, a particular way that it was bound had drawn her attention and honed it in. The sense of importance murmered in the back of her mind and that importance was through blackened-and-bloodied teeth of an Old Goddess who compelled her to do things like paint her face with blood.
The small box that fell when she opened was scooped up quickly, as though out of fear that something may have broken. Nothing broken, but five pills nestled within and text in a language she did not speak herself. "Ned," she called for his attention around the time he'd already come at the motion of something falling. She was quickly typing something into her phone, a translation feature.
"'To the air... two hours...,'" she locked the phone screen and tucked it back into her messenger bag. The pill box was next handed off to Ned so that she could hold the book open and flip through the first several pages and check the covers, hunting for handwritten notes or anything else that may jump out.
"Maybe they didn't plan to. Maybe it was an experiment gone wrong? I mean, who else owns a library like this and gets into spooky situations like this than someone who fiddles with Reality like us?"
Sepúlveda"WELL, YOU TWO MISSED OUT."
They hear their mentor before they see him, he hollering to them from the stairwell in the kitchen the second his shoes hit the hardwood and then hastening through the parlor and into the corridor. When he wings around the corner, he nearly bumps into Ned. Does not, but comes close.
"There was something seriously fucked up going on in this house." He flicks his eyebrows up, once, a flash of teeth like this is a grand discovery and not a potentially dangerous situation. They haven't gone into the basement yet. Based on horror movie pacing and tropes, that's where shit is going to hit the fan. "No sign of Maklin yet." Then he tilts his head. "What's in the box?"
Ned"Please don't suggest someone similar to the Doc got into something unpleasant and went missing or got eaten or whatever other uglinness might well have transpired. World's not big enough for two of them..."
Ned's attention wanders the library shelves, pausing only to take the small box, glancing along it's inscription at the translation provided, before palming it comfortably for safe-keeping. He peruses and explores the shelves with careful, if quitck assessment, not bothering to pull any of them down.
"Might be worth considering just torching the entire property to the ground like they were originally thinking-"
The yelling begins again and he is wincing at the loudness and how much closer it was. He doesn't finish his thought, merely waits for the man to appear again. He jolts a second time as Andres comes around the doorway corner in a rush of eureka.
"Could you define 'fucked up' a bit more?" Ned hands him off the box, pinched between several fingers, tapping he inscription on it carefully. "Don't suppose you want to just...burn this place to the ground?"
MargotNed really didn't want Margot to suggest that there could be two Docs in the world, but the only answer she offered him was a shrug of the shoulders. 'Welp,' that shrug said, 'I'm not sure what else to tell you'. Because of course it was possible. More than possible, it was probable. Their kind did lean into exploration of the Unknown, New, and Dangerous rather heavily, after all.
Take, for example, exactly what they were up to now.
With a sudden burst of noise Dr. Sepúlveda reappeared on the second floor and came swinging into the library to explain that something very fucked up had been happening and he'd clearly found evidence of it upstairs.
"Raising the dead?," she asked the Doc as though trying to guess the right answer on the test. "Or summoning the Undead?"
Sepúlveda[matter 1: doo de doo what's going to happen if we eat these pills?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
SepúlvedaSepúlveda had taken off his glasses at some point, tucked them into the breast pocket of his suit jacket so the lenses wouldn't get cobwebs or rat shit or whatever else on them while he was poking around upstairs. As the box comes into his possession he takes a step back like to give himself some room, then uses his teeth to extend the arms and shove his glasses into place. A quick nudge from his middle finger to center them on the bridge of his nose, and he removes a bulky device from his back pocket.
It looks like the document transmutator he used the night they met up at the strip club, but it has a retractable antenna fused to its side.
Holding the device in the crook of his elbow, Sepúlveda tucks one of the pills into a slot in its top and scowls as Margot talks. A few beeps from the device.
"You two are starting to rustle my jimmies, you know that?"
Whatever the device tells him has him tucking the pills into his breast pocket and tossing the box on the floor. He looks back up, lips parted as if in a protracted inhalation, then yanks off his glasses.
"My hypothesis, which I've formulated on the basis of my findings upstairs, is that this house, which belonged to a family by the name of 'Boucher' up until their demise roughly twenty years ago, was the site of ritualistic, possibly Nephandic although I've found no evidence of Qlippothic energy anywhere on the premises yet, eh... worship of a nonhuman entity which may or may not exist in the Deep Umbra. Now--" He runs his hand down his beard. "--I have reason to suspect that the basement is inhabited, and that whatever is inhabiting it may or may not be entirely human. My secondary suspicion is that the inhabitant is the last remaining heir to the estate, that h--" A hitch in his throat. For some reason he's loathe to use human pronouns here. "--eeeee? is the product of generations of inbreeding, and may or may not have successfully summoned this, eh... nonhuman entity."
You asked, kids.
"I'm just going to go downstairs and confirm Maklin can't possibly be anywhere else, and then we can leave. Burn the place to the ground, if it'll make you feel better."
NedNed takes all of this in with a bare, thin and careful scrutiny, head tilting just slightly askew as the Doc's hypothetical description comes to a rousing close. Then of course, there is the plan of action that says the Doc is venturing downstairs. This leaves Ned with the singular sort of recognition and calculation that he's come to expect during moments where the Doc is along for the ride.
It's the same level of calculation he does before he and Margot run off and do something stupid/necessary. Mutually exclusive, those two things these days.
"Alright." Ned's initial response. A firming nod afterward, that has the hunting knife appearing again, his eyes tracing the edge as it dances over his palm and fingers briefly. "Alright, then."
MargotThe hypothesis was taken in silently and seriously. Margot had closed the book that she found the pills in and tucked it into her messenger bag for now, then watched with a grim look on her face as the Doc turned to approach the corridor again and from there to seek out the stairs that would take him down to the basement.
The second 'alright' to touch her ears drew Margot's attention back to Ned, and her eyes found quickly the knife in his hand. Her lips pressed together and she swallowed hard. Did it feel suddenly warm to the others in here as well, or was the sudden spring of sweat to her skin just because she was recognizing the familiar sense in her gut of knowing where that knife had been buried before.
"Okay," she said to echo the sentiment, bracing herself more than agreeing or offering solidarity. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and with a quick rake of fingers through hair to tuck it back behind her ears and away from her eyes (it was sticking to the drying-flaking mask of blood about them), and moved to follow suit after the Doc.
He was just going to go downstairs to confirm, and she was (probably) just going to listen down the stairwell to make sure that he was going to come back up in one piece.
Sepúlveda
A measured pause during which the Etherite's eyes tick from side to side and then he scratches his cheek and says, "That was a joke. We're not... I like arson as much as the next guy, but we're not burning anything down. Let's go."
So they make their way back through the entryway and the parlor, with its black bible. He takes them through the dining room, in which a cursory glance reveals nothing worth further investigation, and the kitchen, where Sepúlveda has planted two sets of his own tracks already, obviating any others that might have been there before.
Everything in the kitchen is covered in dust. It's better that they don't dally here. The air in here smells stale.
Just before they come to the basement stairs, Sepúlveda removes his cellphone from his back pocket, awakens the screen, then opens an application that emits a bright light from the phone's flash bulb and tucks it into his breast pocket to keep his hands free. He needs his hands free in order to start prepping his... whatever the fuck kind of gun that is, that he removes from a holster he apparently wears under his suit jacket.
Down they go. As they descend the geriatric stairwell, the smell of smoke and rot and sulfur rises up to meet them.
"Jesus," Sepúlveda says about halfway down, "your farts smell like absolute hell."
Whereupon they reach the stale, dark vestibule. A cold furnace and a bin of coal occupy the northwest corner of the room; near the middle of the south wall, someone has stacked four six-stick bundles of dynamite, slightly corroded blasting caps nearby.
Remains belonging to a man lie facedown on the dirt floor. When Sepúlveda sees it he recoils, bumps into Ned if Ned is following too close to him, then swears under his breath and continues forward again, using the toe of his boot to flip the body onto its side.
By the looks of it, small animals have picked his bones clean, crawled up into his clothes to do it. Sepúlveda crouches to rifle through the body's pockets in search of ID.
[ned, roll perc + alert diff 8 or perc + investigation standard diff]
Ned
(Perception 3 + Alertness 2)
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
[perc + investigation: sigh.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
Ned
Ned, for his part, follows along like a ghost behind the Doc. His footsteps on the creaking floorboards are the only real indicator he's present, even his breathing his minimized in favour of maintaining a significant lack of presence. His glance back toward Margot is momentary, delivered on the edge of something cursory and protective (followed of course by a gesture, to keep her eyes out while she's upstairs incase they missed anything in their exploring).
Down the steps they venture and the Doc's flashlight leads the way. Ned's glance at their surroundings is brief, however, as the Doc lunges backward into him, sending him recoiling to the right and out of the older man's path with a slight grunt. He glances down at the body with careful regard, a frown on his face and free hand dusting down the front of him, as if he could remove the stain of dirt and filth clinging to the air down here.
He squints into the gloom, to peer at the Dynamite and his eyes spark wide, jaw dropping open to mutter some Ned inspired bit of wisdom. Only for it to clap shut when he recognizes where they are. He didn't want t give away their position or numbers any more than the Doc might already have. So he remains quiet, hand loose around the haft of the hunting knife hiding along the length of his inner forearm for now. His gaze lifts and levels with their surroundings, returning to the Doc occasionally as the man rifles and pick pockets the body on the floor.
Margot
Margot faithfully walked with the other two to the top of the basement stairs, and just as faithfully she would remain there for the time being. She had looked down the stairs with wide eyes and glanced quick-and-nervous to Ned's knife, to Doc prepping his flashlight and ray-gun(?), and had swallowed. She didn't really need to say anything, how her hand moved to grasp the doorframe spoke of her desire to stay, not to go if she didn't have to.
Keep an eye out was the last-glance-and-gesture that she got, and Margot nodded quickly with a look of grim resolve and smashed-down anxiety on her face.
As backs and bodies descended to the basement and vanished from sight Margot positioned herself to stand with her front facing out into the corridor, her shoulder and hand still on the doorframe, and her head leaned around the corner into the stairway itself so that she could keep a keen ear turned toward downstairs. Listening hard for anything from the slightest scuffle to lowest moan of agony as a callsign for her to come impact the situation like all of that dynamite against the wall could.
Sepúlveda
As much of a creep as he strikes other people as being, Sepúlveda isn't interested in pocketing the corpse's cash or credit cards. He finds a billfold, flips it open, finds the driver's license he was looking for, then sighs and tosses the thing into the air in a parabolic arch, letting it fall on the now-meatless backside of the poor bastard.
One would think he would want to maintain the integrity of the crime scene. He does nothing about the fact that his prints are now on the dead man's wallet, that his DNA is now on his shoe. Sepúlveda plants his hands on his knees to give himself leverage to stand back up, then pushes his glasses back up on his nose and seems to remember Ned is still there.
The Etherite holds up a finger like to shush the younger man, sarcastic even when he opts not to make a sound. Frowns before turning to survey the room. More to the point, the wall near the dynamite. He tiptoes over to it, then gropes around as if he's looking for something, or has already seen it.
Of course there's a secret fucking door set into the stones. Patting and pushing eventually causes it to slide inward, revealing an unlit, craggy corridor.
Sepúlveda looks back at Ned, then starts into the corridor.
If Ned stops to examine the wallet, he'll find it belonged to one Jerome Maklin of Gilpin Street, Colorado.
Ned
Ned stares at the Doc as he moves toward the Dynamite and there is a very real silent flailing moment as the simple equation of Doc + Dynamite + Proximity = Twitch, emerges in the young initiate. He controls it however, tamping it down under a hard resolve in favour of maintaining careful scrutiny of their surroundings.
The secret door chimes open with the grinding of stone and Ned jumps slightly at the suddenness of it. A soft grunt escapes him (probably at the cliche) before he turns to look up the stairs at the unseen presence of Margot.
Ned moves over to the stairwell, tapping the steps and moving up a couple as the Doc begins to descend the corridor. When Margot peeks around, he'll point and mouth, miming a 'Secret door, we're going down' and gesturing with his hands. Then, another reassuring gesture to keep her eyes out, and Ned moves into the Doc's wake.
Down the rabbit hole.
Sepúlveda
The corridor is not long but it is dark and it is dank and the only way the two initiates can see which way to go is by focusing on the beam of light shining from Sepúlveda's pocket.
Which is to say, they have to hustle a bit to catch up, as their fearless leader isn't going to wait for them to decide they want to accompany him further into the space that reeks of death and the devil's gastrointestinal distress.
In the next room, which has two equally appalling options for exits, they are greeted by a carpet of ankle-thick goo. Rotting flesh and cracked bone belonging to some sort of small animal, about the size of a dog or a goat. Even Sepúlveda, who deals with bodies in various stages of decomposition every day, pinches his nostrils shut so he doesn't take the full brunt of the stench as he picks the least disgusting route through the place.
He skirts the perimeter of the room, keeping his back to the wall so that he goes to the corridor straight ahead of him. Keeps his right hand lightly outstretched so he doesn't lose track of his path.
Margot will have to strain to hear anything after they pass through this point.
Ned
Before Ned even manages halfway down the tunnel, the smell hits him like a freight train. Orderlies are used to the muck and disgusting elements of clean-up when it comes to handling Hospitals. Shit, piss and blood are mingled freely in their histories. Ned however, still gags slightly and reaches up a hand to pinch at the base of his nose, a sudden piercing pain accompanying the sharp gesture as his fingers dig for a bit of focus.
Blue lights and yellow glows dance behind his head, attempting to blur together, even as his feet and shoes impact the first dribbles of the pool and puddle in the next room. Ned follows in the Doc's footsteps.
(Life 1: Turning off the sense of Smell. Difficulty 4 - 1 for Tools used)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Margot
[Life 1/2: No Nausea anymore!: Diff 4 - 1 (tools)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Sepúlveda
In time the men's footfalls stop making noise, either on the dry ground or squelching through an unnameable muck. They go deeper into the place, its low ceilings and general cramped air making it seem as if they're in an animal's burrow rather than a space meant for human use.
They come to a place where thick roots penetrate the earth overhead and twist deep into the dirt below. It creates a nest-looking bundle of darkness. Inside, Ned can hear intermittent chittering and rustling. Whatever it is, it's more afraid of them than they are of... whatever they are.
Once they're through that area and in another corridor, their options become as appealing as before, with a room off to the right and another one straight ahead.
Sepúlveda pauses to look back over his shoulder, confirming that he still only has one of his students to worry about. His eyes tick down to the knife in Ned's hand. He shrugs, once, loose-limbed in spite of the milieu, and retrieves his weird gun-looking device from his holster.
And into the righthand room they go.
They make it about five steps in before it becomes apparent that not only is there no place to go but back out the way they came, but they are not alone in the chamber. Glowing yellow eyes, eight sets of them, open up in the darkness. They belong to small, hairy creatures with matted gray fur, rotted yellow teeth, and that high-pitched twittering voice the kids have been hearing all this time.
Yet they stand upright, humanoid. Hungry.
"Uh," Sepúlveda says. "Edward. Run?"
[inits for the boys]
Ned
("That's your plan?!?!" Init: 7 +...)
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
["YESTHATSMYPLAN" +6]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Margot
Upstairs, in the meanwhile, Margot had grown weary of standing anxiously and just listening with nothing but twiddling her thumbs or picking the paint off the doorframe to occupy her time. Instead she crouched down with her knees out and set her messenger bag on the ground nearby. From within she produced a pouch of linen, dyed dark gray. It had been tied securely with threads, and when loosened she dipped two fingers inside and withdrew them covered in ash. This was spread in a vertical line across the center of her lips, from right under her nose all the way down to her chin.
With that, she banished nausea as a sensation from her body entirely. Smell and disgust and horror wouldn't churn her belly any more or less than one another. She took in a deep breath, as though to test the impact of the effect, but the effect of anxiety on her stomach had confirmed its success already. The pouch was tied off and returned to the bag and another pouch, very similar but dyed a dark blue in color instead, was taken up in one palm instead. She pulled the bag's strap up across her chest and shoulder and, after casting a final glance about the ground floor (still nothing), she set her jaw and started walking down the stairs.
She hadn't had a chance to hear what the men had found. Maybe it said something that she chose just that moment to approach all the same.
Sepúlveda
[group 1, +5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (3) ( fail )
Sepúlveda
[group 2, +5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
ROUND 1
doc: 15
ned: 13
group 2: 11
group 1: 8
margot: moving
group 1: nom on ned!
group 2: nom on ned!
Ned
Ned curses under his breath, even as the Doc says it.
He's on the move, with careful, if quick steps in the dark, using the Doc's bouncing flashlight to guide the path ahead of him even as his hand flips the knife around onto the flat of the blade and smacks it along the length of his arm. Blooms of dull pain, thread beneath the flesh of his limb, blooming in his vision as bright sparks of electric red.
He fishes in his pocket for his phone, already thinking through the half dozen horror movies he's seen about people under the stairs and what sort of terror subterraneans must have of bright lights.
(A) Run like a motherfucker.
B) Throw flashlight activated phone behind them. Forces 2: Make a sudden and powerful burst of light behind them using flashlight on phone)
Sepúlveda
Sepúlveda did not include himself in the imperative verb. He was suggesting that Ned run. Which Ned starts to do.
For his part, Sepúlveda intends to fry the little bastards. If they hadn't eaten his high school weed dealer, they wouldn't be in this situation in the first fucking place.
[corr 1/forces 2: BZZZAP. base diff 5, practiced rote and fast-casting cancel each other out, -1 for quint, spending WP.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 5, 7) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Sepúlveda
Neither of his students are around to see the cremated mess he makes out of the eight creatures that were in the act of lunging after Ned. Let no one say he never does anything for the bug-eyed little shit.
Without even having broken a sweat, Sepúlveda would have plenty of time to catch his breath if he were of a mind to inhale deeply. Depending on how fast Ned runs and how long it takes for him to realize Sepúlveda isn't right on his heels determines how nearby and clear the next sound is:
A click! as a shotgun's hammer sets. A voice, clear and resonant and smooth, saying, "Put down your weapon and turn around. I won't harm you so long as you cooperate."
Ned
Ned doesn't make it far. He didn't plan on going that far to begin with. The Doc's light had made his vision somewhat upended, ruining any chance at a more natural night-vision this far below. Some distance and a brief moment to summon up some sort of heat vision would suffice to provide him-
BZZZAAAAP
Da Fuq?
Ned is turning back around to face where the Doc came from...and it's the reason he is caught off guard by the sudden click of a shotgun and the hum of a voice. Ned flinches. Curses under his breath and for a split second entertains the thought of saying something. Instead, he turns slowly, the hunting knife held between two fingers. He flicks the knife to one side, ensuring it hits the wall and scrapes down it with a clatter before hitting whatever muck they've been treading in.
"Easy. No need for hurting."
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Margot
A sudden commotion had kicked off somewhere deep within the guts of the basement (not in the same room though, she noticed), and Margot stopped walking down the steps and leaped down the rest of the way. Margot was very fast, and when she wanted to cross distance she got there in a hurry. In a flash she was across the basement-- nearly tripped on the dead Mr. Maklin and yelped a little as she twisted and found her step again.
Through the corridor, and suddenly into the room coated in a disgusting ankle-deep mess of something goopy and crunchy both. It smelled tremendously bad, and even though her stomach didn't heave and retch she still felt as though the hairs in her nostrils were going to smoke for how badly the sulfur burned and the overall strength of the stench offended.
She had just crunched her way into the room, just spied Ned's back as he was turning and his knife was clattering against the wall. She had heard the 'clack' of something small and metal and heavy and felt like ice water and poured into her stomach. Her feet faltered and she skidded to a stop, a girl with blood and ash on her face and wild wide eyes taking in the hostage scenario unfurling, and the grotesque setting in which it was taking place.
"Wha--," she started to ask breathlessly, looking between the Doc and Ned and back to the Doc again with the gun aimed at him and from him to whoever held the very lethal threat. Her hands didn't raise, she didn't have the gun trained on her and she was half blocked from view by Ned's place between them. Her hand curled carefully around the blue pouch still grasped in her hand and brought it near to her hip.
Sepúlveda
Hearing Ned's knife clatter to the floor has Sepúlveda sighing deep and complying with the order aimed at him.
By the time the kids converge in the corridor behind him, they have the Etherite's back, his hands held palms-out and up by his head, and the flashlight is illuminating the fellow who's gotten the jump on them. Their mentor is no longer in possession of his heat blaster.
He is not a large man to begin with, but Sepúlveda looks very small with his hands in the air and a shotgun pointed at his heart.
The fellow in question is about thirty years old and quite handsome, even with all the muck and bones around him. About six feet tall and fairly complected, he is used to walking around in darkness. The beam on Sepúlveda's phone makes him squint but he does not order the smaller man to turn it off.
"I don't want to hurt you," the man says. "Any of you. Truly, I don't. Please, follow me. I've been waiting so long for someone who could understand me to show up."
With a tilt of his chin, the handsome man indicates the chamber straight down the corridor, and begins to walk backwards, keeping the shotgun aimed at Sepúlveda. For once, their mentor doesn't have something smart-assed to say.
Ned
"My name's Ned. I don't want myself or my friends to get hurt so we're off to a good start."
He introduces himself. Orderly training kicking in. Befriend, Distract, Defuse. Ned's hands go up and he takes several cautious steps forward, movements pushing him to present as far a second target as he can, outside of the Doc's obvious beeline between gun barrel and chest. Ned isn't smiling or even making more than a face dedicated to the seriousness of the moment.
"Who are you and what are you doing down here?"
Margot
[Uggggh, PTSD]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Margot
Sharp white eyes against the shadows painted onto her face watched the Doc put his hands up as any smart person with a gun to their chest does. They hopped to Ned next, then went back to the face of the man holding the gun. From the man to the gun, specifically, and fixing on.
When Ned spoke up, choosing the path more calm and, well, orderly, the witchling looked anxiously to him as well and swallowed hard. Recalled a mantra and closed her eyes for a moment to take in a deep and shuddering breath. Her hands clenched together in front of and against her chest like the weight of them could calm her heartbeat and stiffle the panic trying to well.
They began to walk forward, and though she felt the need to find more air and scream and cry and run all at once she did none of those things. Instead, hands still up and clenched together (overtop that little blue pouch), she walked with resolve upon weak knees to bring up the rear.
Sepúlveda
"Come, come. Sit."
They still have a choice, but it's not much of one. At this close a range, the fellow could hit two targets with the same blast and the third would have enough emotional scarring to be temporarily useless. Something about the triad tells him that the oldest of them is the one he'll want to take out first.
It may have something to do with the charred rat-people corpses in the other room, or the fact that Ned ran when told to run.
At any rate, this is the cleanest room they've been in yet. An altar takes up the center of the room and frescoes adorn the walls. Like the chessboard, something buried deep in their brains tells them they don't want to look at them for too long. On the western wall, a triptych reveals what is an obvious sequence of human sacrifice and transformation.
There is no place to sit here, so the man backs up as far into the room as he can without bumping into the blood-stained altar and keeps his shotgun pointed at Sepúlveda, who will extend his arm and push Ned back with it if he catches him creeping up into his peripheral vision.
The man says, "My name is Philip Boucher. For years... I don't know how many... I've lived here, beneath my former home. Ever since the day Father said we were to call the living god. It was time, he said, and I was not one to argue. The bell rang, announcing the service would begin in ten minutes, and I... I went to Philius's room, he was a friend of ours, staying at the house, and I bolted the door. I was wicked, you see. I knew what my family was trying to do. They planned to bring a thing that should not be into the world. The chant had started without me, even though I was late."
Sepúlveda exhales, hard, like he suspected it was something fucked up and knows he isn't prepared for how much more fucked up it's about to get.
"Thunder split the house, and I heard Father roar. I ran to the temple, and all my family was there... they had called upon the living god, and it had answered. They were... hunched over, whimpering, changed, and I... I blacked out. Since that day, I've watched my family, all of them, even those buried long ago, turn into those things out there. I've tended them, and fed them, but..."
Ned
"...But, it's getting more difficult?"
Ned takes a small stab at it, the amount of uncertainty in his voice exaggerated as if he were trying to find something to feel sympathetic with. As if he were offering to be sympathetic if only the man would explain just a bit more.
He doesn't answer with words. Just chews his lower lip, the flesh seeming to disappear with the darkness and the shadow cast by his beard, and lifts his eyebrows. Further questions, and Sepúlveda rolls his eyes.
"For Christ's sake," he says, "I have a flashlight. Change your diaper and let's go, we're burning daylight."
And so he goes, leaving the kids to decide if they want to follow him in or not.
The entryway and parlor are one large room, boasting three couches and a number of tables. On the center table sits a large bible, which Sepúlveda gives a wary glance but does not approach. Curtains on the wall to the left and the wall straight ahead.
"Jerry!" he calls again, thrusting aside the curtain straight in front of them. It reveals the dining room. Sepúlveda plants his hands on his hips. "Huh." Nothing there. He leaves the curtain open and tries the one on the left-hand wall.
Inside, that sense of wrongness pervades the air. Hangs heavy and obvious without the stink competing with it for their attention.
So far as Margot can tell, no ghosts are hanging around. They are not alone in the house, though. There are several small lifeforms underneath them. Probably rats.
NedNed flicks his hands in the air negligently at the Doc's commentary, dismissive as the PhD was of the horror movie implications (or perhaps simply ignorant of their existence given his age and proclivities for archaic tech) that were currently surrounding them on all sides. Moving into the house a half dozen paces behind the Doc, Ned is cautious and careful, eyes traveling back toward Margot with a wary sort of check-in that asked with a glance if she was ok as much as
Are we going to be ok?
He doesn't give her enough time to facially respond, before turning to catch the Doc's second bellow for attention. Ned's wince is visible in his shoulders and face, while he skates off to one side to regard the large parlour, it's host of furnishings mostly ignored in favour of the table with the Bible on it. Ned's inspection is cursory, half-hearted attempts at Sunday school when he was young, drawn up and discarded in the space of a glance at the once reverential volume.
SepúlvedaRegardless of how many pages Ned flips through the heavy, dusty book, they're all the same: blank.
MargotOf course Ned and Margot followed Dr. Sepúlveda in through the screen door. There was only the barest pause beforehand, for Ned to check back for Margot's input and for her to deliver it back in a nod (though he only gave enough time to check and see that there wasn't panic on her face). She'd held the screen door to keep it from slapping closed and was gentle in bringing it back to the doorframe to rest. She didn't close the front door proper-- she'd seen enough horror movies to know she didn't want to fuck around with a barrier and knob if she had to haul ass out of there.
Inside the house Margot cast her eyes around, perceiving first the cavernous great room they stepped into and skipping right over the bible on the table to start looking through and beyond, hunting for the ghastly whisps and chills and breezes to indicate spirits (ghosts, she anticipated, but found none) or feel the throb-hum-pull-warmth of life. A few rats, perhaps-- Margot doubted that though, staring not around the room but down past the toes of her sneakers at the basement beneath.
She snorted a little at her own conclusion, the sound quiet but abrupt and disagreeing with the initial thought that she was now correcting. "Oh those aren't rats," she said more for herself, and then lifted her eyes to look between the other two. "There's some of the things that were making those weird animal sounds outside, down there in the basement. They stink like the grave. I don't know what they are."
SepúlvedaThey have the option of going through the dining room to check out, presumably, the kitchen and the mud room, or they can go through the left-hand curtain and rummage around on the ground floor before heading upstairs or into the basement. Given that Maklin isn't answering the hollering, Sepúlveda seems to be debating whether he wants to continue to waste time looking for someone who is either dead or not here.
He picks the strangest times to give a shit about other people.
"You two check this floor," he says. "I'll go upstairs."
If either of them draws a breath to argue, he'll turn towards them and say, "Shut up, if you find a spider or something, I'll be able to hear you scream. It'll be fine. Be are be."
With that he goes through the curtain straight ahead and closes it behind him.
NedNed doesn't argue for once, merely turns in place to regard their surroundings. Margot's indication of 'animals' that she can't identify 'stinking of the grave' puts him on high alert and he's already conjuring methods and ways to put his various efforts to use. Much of them are left to the wayside as useless, including the hunting knife which is set into it's sheath tucked into the back of his waistband in favour of freeing up his hands and limbs.
Ned glances at the Doc who is moving up the stairs toward the second floor and it is a moment before the Initiate, no longer able to see the other man, finally turns to regard Margot with a perked brow.
"Keep behind me but eyes open and around. We'll scan each room before entering. Try to give me a warning of whatever is present if you can. We'll pull back to this location and meet up with the Doc if we find anything. This entire situation is outside of knowing right now and until we get at least some clue, we're best to take it in baby steps."
That said, Ned moves through the already drawn curtain the Doc had pulled, stepping around the delicate and rustic finery of the location that led toward the doorway and on into the kitchen. If nothing else, there may be more weapons of use this way.
MargotThe pair seemed to know how much sense lay in arguing with the Doc about his going upstairs. Because of course they weren't going to effectively search a house all huddled together like a flock of scared geese, and after all weren't they all Initiated now? Capable of more than just perceiving alone?
Margot had lifted a hand to start rubbing at her brow, and absently smeared blood further to swipe out toward her temple. She looked back to Ned when he'd turned to address her with the plan of attack. She, far more than Ned and Andrés, gave the impression of belonging in a place like this. The grave rot went well with the steadily progressing wave-crawl of gore and horror that her Magick cast about. This, combined with the dark hair and blood-mask about her eyes in the shadows? Well, if anyone else were there monster hunting with them they couldn't be faulted too much for confusing her as being the monster.
She didn't give any sign of disagreeing with Ned and fell into step behind when they started in the direction of the kitchen.
"I don't know... if it was going to spring on us for invading then I'm pretty sure it would have done so by now. It's either hiding, or it doesn't move and it's waiting." Her left hand was resting in the depths of her messenger bag, holding weaponry far more useful to her than a knife. She looked cautiously about, focused on the corners and shadows in particular.
"...maybe it's not even animate."
SepúlvedaAs soon as they walk into the corridor, they come upon a door to the left, ajar and lined with bookshelves. In the center of the room is a table with four chairs around it. They could lose hours in here. Libraries are treasure troves for Mages regardless of age or experience.
---
Right next door to the library is the game room, dominated by a billiards table. In the southeast corner is a chess set.
---
Across the hall from the game room is a bedroom, presumably meant for guest use, with nothing more than a daybed and a dresser inside. Around the corner from this room, a corridor branches off to the right.
A quick peek around the corner will reveal a large hole in the floor, blocking the way to any of the rooms down that wing.
---
Right next door to the game room is a water closet.
Across the hall from the water closet is a destroyed room, busted beams and crumbled drywall covering the furniture inside.
Margot[Extending Perception Scan! Corr/Life/Spirit, 4 - 1 diff (blood foci)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 7) ( success x 2 )
Ned"...We haven't given it, them or whatever any reason to want to harm us just yet. We also could just be hunting by all accounts and maybe give up after a little while like some others have." Optimism didn't sound well or right coming out of Ned's mouth. "All in all, we don't know much about anything right now except there are creatures scuttling around in the basement we are unfamiliar with and there's a graveyard nearby and a blank paged Bible on the foyer table. Kubrick would have a field day with this place..."
Ned's eyes are adjusting and moving as he goes, pausing in his steps to take in each room as they venture past it. The library receives a quick glance (and a faster one sent back toward Margot to usher her along, incase she got distracted by the knowledge waiting there) and the game room a more lingering one, before finally coming to the bedroom. He pauses here, hand resting at the back of his waistband where the knife is tucked under a loose t-shirt.
Ned turns the corner and immediately rears back, head peeking around to regard the hole in the floor. Then back down the hall and finally at Margot.
"Chunks of this place are unstable. Ruined. A little worried the floorboards might give under us in places. Should probably avoid the corridor ahead. Big hole there makes for unstable footing." A pause, eyeballing the library further down and the water closet on the same side of the house.
"You picking up anything interesting beyond the scuttlers in the basement?"
Sepúlveda"PUTA MAD--"
This, from upstairs, following by squeaking and skittering and the pitter-patter of tiny feet disappearing into small spaces.
"RATS. THEY'RE JUST RATS. NOBODY PANIC."
Margot"What?"
Margot looked surprised when she pulled her eyes from a ceiling corner of the kitchen to look at Ned.
"That Bible had no text?" She frowned heavy with thought, but didn't get too far for the sudden burst of swearing from the top floor of the house. Margot startled like an animal that heard the crack of a rifle, physically and sharply, but when the shouting about rats followed she sighed heavily and shook her head. Glanced down and scrubbed the blood off her fingertips onto the dark denim at the hip of her shorts.
"Weird." Then, she shook her head, dismissing the pondering. "No, just rats, Doc's confirmed for me now. There's nothing else alive here. No spirits or tears in the Gauntlet or anything like that, so I don't think anything's come across." She scowled harder and looked at what bit of blood was still dried onto her fingernail beds.
"So it's probably a goddamn zombie again. Or a vampire."
Ned"...Or a Flesh golem." A pause, cause that might receive a look "Like frankenstein."
Ned's inspecting the hallway they had traveled down a moment ago, backtracking around Margot toward the water closet and the game room. He turns into the doorway to the gameroom to regard it's contents, eyeballs the chessboard with careful scrutiny. He takes a deep breath, turning briefly around to give a slow panorama view of...well everything, before stepping up to the water closet. His free hand wraps snugly around the knife handle at his back, while the other reaches for the closet's handle, pushing downward to unlatch the portal without actually opening it.
He waits a moment, eyeballing Margot.
"We'll go take a look at the library. See if any of the books can give us an idea as to what or who might have been here before."
Ned pulls the Water closet open, enough to get a peek inside.
SepúlvedaOne side of the chessboard is defended by human pawns and great leaders throughout the 1800s, bright pink. The other side's pieces are a bilious green, their pawns in strange shapes that evoke memories of monuments and monsters. Fine craftsmanship on the pieces, even finer craftsmanship on the board itself. Its face reveals vague outlines of planets, stars, galaxies...
He doesn't want to look at it for very long. It will reel in his attention if he looks at it for very long.
In the water closet, the toilet does not work. There is a bathtub, unclosed by a curtain, which is closed. Opening the curtain will only reveal dirt and mildew and fungus.
As for the library...
[Margot, roll Perc + Investigation, diff 8.]
Margot'Flesh Golemn' certainly did receive a look; an arched eyebrow and 'what the hell' expression were what prompted the further explanation. The specific example seemed to set the matter to rest, and while he surveyed the game room Margot peered along the corridor and into what she could see through the open doors. The guest room wasn't particularly eye catching, and though she spied the chessboard past Ned in the gameroom (and though that chessboard had her wrinkling her nose like it reminded her of something bad and looking quickly away), she did seem concerned when he reached what was apparently the bathroom.
"Just be cautious of the mirror," she advised him. A lunatic's advice to most ears, but she knew mirrors were an easy way through the Gauntlet. There was a reason that stories to scare kids included summoning things in a darkened room before the looking glass.
As Ned scoped out the bathroom, Margot touched lightly the wall and frame of the library doorway as she peered inside.
[Perception 3 + Investigation 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (5, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SepúlvedaMost of the books in the library are of a mundane nature. Of note is the fact that the newest book was published in the 1980s; most of them appear to have been published the century prior to that, and several of them are in Latin, German, or French. It could take hours to pore through the volumes for anything that might be relevant or even interesting.
Margot gets lucky. She finds something interesting, but it's not certain, immediately, whether it's relevant or even useful: an account of a voyage from Hong Kong to San Francisco, in which the captain claimed to have seen mermaids off the coast.
Out of a hollowed-out book falls a small box. On the box is a label that reads pour l'air; deux heures. Inside the box are five pills.
This entire time they could hear Sepúlveda moving around upstairs, his steps making the floorboards cry out not because of his [negligible] weight but because of the age of the house. He pauses the longest in the room directly over the water closet. Pushes something that sounds heavy, lets it fall to the floor. Muffled talking-to-himself, most likely an expletive.
They have about twenty seconds before he walks up the hallway and comes back downstairs.
NedNed will make a cursory inspection of the water closet's contents. He gifts Margot's advice a moment and avoids whatever mirrors are present with his eyes, taking a second to inspect the dirt and film in the bathtub before pulling back out of the room hurriedly and sealing the door behind him.
"What have you foun-" Ned stops mid-sentence to regard the box on the floor, a brow perked at the oddity followed by a glance up at Margot. Both had their reasons for avoiding narcotics and intoxicants. Weed was their shared vice and Ned, for his part, seemed to look at the offering of pills with a glance of disapproval, if not outright disdain. He sucks in a breath to inspect the landscape of books, perusing for himself for a few moments, leaving Margot to her own discovery in the process.
"A lot of languages here. Doc could probably make sense of most of these." Which gets Ned thinking about what he'd need to auto-translate different languages. Google translate sucked and that would take forever, anyway.
"Lot of age here. Decades or more... Someone was into first editions...so why the hell did they leave it all behind?"
MargotInside the Library Margot found nothing immediately threatening them. After a cursory look-about, and once Ned had appeared at her shoulder to investigate the Library as well, she'd stepped inside. The books inside were old, and not just in that they were leftover from a house forgotten since the early 1980's. The languages spanned multiple cultures and histories, and much of it Margot couldn't make heads or tales of.
Something caught her eye, though. A particular spine, a particular way that it was bound had drawn her attention and honed it in. The sense of importance murmered in the back of her mind and that importance was through blackened-and-bloodied teeth of an Old Goddess who compelled her to do things like paint her face with blood.
The small box that fell when she opened was scooped up quickly, as though out of fear that something may have broken. Nothing broken, but five pills nestled within and text in a language she did not speak herself. "Ned," she called for his attention around the time he'd already come at the motion of something falling. She was quickly typing something into her phone, a translation feature.
"'To the air... two hours...,'" she locked the phone screen and tucked it back into her messenger bag. The pill box was next handed off to Ned so that she could hold the book open and flip through the first several pages and check the covers, hunting for handwritten notes or anything else that may jump out.
"Maybe they didn't plan to. Maybe it was an experiment gone wrong? I mean, who else owns a library like this and gets into spooky situations like this than someone who fiddles with Reality like us?"
Sepúlveda"WELL, YOU TWO MISSED OUT."
They hear their mentor before they see him, he hollering to them from the stairwell in the kitchen the second his shoes hit the hardwood and then hastening through the parlor and into the corridor. When he wings around the corner, he nearly bumps into Ned. Does not, but comes close.
"There was something seriously fucked up going on in this house." He flicks his eyebrows up, once, a flash of teeth like this is a grand discovery and not a potentially dangerous situation. They haven't gone into the basement yet. Based on horror movie pacing and tropes, that's where shit is going to hit the fan. "No sign of Maklin yet." Then he tilts his head. "What's in the box?"
Ned"Please don't suggest someone similar to the Doc got into something unpleasant and went missing or got eaten or whatever other uglinness might well have transpired. World's not big enough for two of them..."
Ned's attention wanders the library shelves, pausing only to take the small box, glancing along it's inscription at the translation provided, before palming it comfortably for safe-keeping. He peruses and explores the shelves with careful, if quitck assessment, not bothering to pull any of them down.
"Might be worth considering just torching the entire property to the ground like they were originally thinking-"
The yelling begins again and he is wincing at the loudness and how much closer it was. He doesn't finish his thought, merely waits for the man to appear again. He jolts a second time as Andres comes around the doorway corner in a rush of eureka.
"Could you define 'fucked up' a bit more?" Ned hands him off the box, pinched between several fingers, tapping he inscription on it carefully. "Don't suppose you want to just...burn this place to the ground?"
MargotNed really didn't want Margot to suggest that there could be two Docs in the world, but the only answer she offered him was a shrug of the shoulders. 'Welp,' that shrug said, 'I'm not sure what else to tell you'. Because of course it was possible. More than possible, it was probable. Their kind did lean into exploration of the Unknown, New, and Dangerous rather heavily, after all.
Take, for example, exactly what they were up to now.
With a sudden burst of noise Dr. Sepúlveda reappeared on the second floor and came swinging into the library to explain that something very fucked up had been happening and he'd clearly found evidence of it upstairs.
"Raising the dead?," she asked the Doc as though trying to guess the right answer on the test. "Or summoning the Undead?"
Sepúlveda[matter 1: doo de doo what's going to happen if we eat these pills?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
SepúlvedaSepúlveda had taken off his glasses at some point, tucked them into the breast pocket of his suit jacket so the lenses wouldn't get cobwebs or rat shit or whatever else on them while he was poking around upstairs. As the box comes into his possession he takes a step back like to give himself some room, then uses his teeth to extend the arms and shove his glasses into place. A quick nudge from his middle finger to center them on the bridge of his nose, and he removes a bulky device from his back pocket.
It looks like the document transmutator he used the night they met up at the strip club, but it has a retractable antenna fused to its side.
Holding the device in the crook of his elbow, Sepúlveda tucks one of the pills into a slot in its top and scowls as Margot talks. A few beeps from the device.
"You two are starting to rustle my jimmies, you know that?"
Whatever the device tells him has him tucking the pills into his breast pocket and tossing the box on the floor. He looks back up, lips parted as if in a protracted inhalation, then yanks off his glasses.
"My hypothesis, which I've formulated on the basis of my findings upstairs, is that this house, which belonged to a family by the name of 'Boucher' up until their demise roughly twenty years ago, was the site of ritualistic, possibly Nephandic although I've found no evidence of Qlippothic energy anywhere on the premises yet, eh... worship of a nonhuman entity which may or may not exist in the Deep Umbra. Now--" He runs his hand down his beard. "--I have reason to suspect that the basement is inhabited, and that whatever is inhabiting it may or may not be entirely human. My secondary suspicion is that the inhabitant is the last remaining heir to the estate, that h--" A hitch in his throat. For some reason he's loathe to use human pronouns here. "--eeeee? is the product of generations of inbreeding, and may or may not have successfully summoned this, eh... nonhuman entity."
You asked, kids.
"I'm just going to go downstairs and confirm Maklin can't possibly be anywhere else, and then we can leave. Burn the place to the ground, if it'll make you feel better."
NedNed takes all of this in with a bare, thin and careful scrutiny, head tilting just slightly askew as the Doc's hypothetical description comes to a rousing close. Then of course, there is the plan of action that says the Doc is venturing downstairs. This leaves Ned with the singular sort of recognition and calculation that he's come to expect during moments where the Doc is along for the ride.
It's the same level of calculation he does before he and Margot run off and do something stupid/necessary. Mutually exclusive, those two things these days.
"Alright." Ned's initial response. A firming nod afterward, that has the hunting knife appearing again, his eyes tracing the edge as it dances over his palm and fingers briefly. "Alright, then."
MargotThe hypothesis was taken in silently and seriously. Margot had closed the book that she found the pills in and tucked it into her messenger bag for now, then watched with a grim look on her face as the Doc turned to approach the corridor again and from there to seek out the stairs that would take him down to the basement.
The second 'alright' to touch her ears drew Margot's attention back to Ned, and her eyes found quickly the knife in his hand. Her lips pressed together and she swallowed hard. Did it feel suddenly warm to the others in here as well, or was the sudden spring of sweat to her skin just because she was recognizing the familiar sense in her gut of knowing where that knife had been buried before.
"Okay," she said to echo the sentiment, bracing herself more than agreeing or offering solidarity. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and with a quick rake of fingers through hair to tuck it back behind her ears and away from her eyes (it was sticking to the drying-flaking mask of blood about them), and moved to follow suit after the Doc.
He was just going to go downstairs to confirm, and she was (probably) just going to listen down the stairwell to make sure that he was going to come back up in one piece.
Sepúlveda
A measured pause during which the Etherite's eyes tick from side to side and then he scratches his cheek and says, "That was a joke. We're not... I like arson as much as the next guy, but we're not burning anything down. Let's go."
So they make their way back through the entryway and the parlor, with its black bible. He takes them through the dining room, in which a cursory glance reveals nothing worth further investigation, and the kitchen, where Sepúlveda has planted two sets of his own tracks already, obviating any others that might have been there before.
Everything in the kitchen is covered in dust. It's better that they don't dally here. The air in here smells stale.
Just before they come to the basement stairs, Sepúlveda removes his cellphone from his back pocket, awakens the screen, then opens an application that emits a bright light from the phone's flash bulb and tucks it into his breast pocket to keep his hands free. He needs his hands free in order to start prepping his... whatever the fuck kind of gun that is, that he removes from a holster he apparently wears under his suit jacket.
Down they go. As they descend the geriatric stairwell, the smell of smoke and rot and sulfur rises up to meet them.
"Jesus," Sepúlveda says about halfway down, "your farts smell like absolute hell."
Whereupon they reach the stale, dark vestibule. A cold furnace and a bin of coal occupy the northwest corner of the room; near the middle of the south wall, someone has stacked four six-stick bundles of dynamite, slightly corroded blasting caps nearby.
Remains belonging to a man lie facedown on the dirt floor. When Sepúlveda sees it he recoils, bumps into Ned if Ned is following too close to him, then swears under his breath and continues forward again, using the toe of his boot to flip the body onto its side.
By the looks of it, small animals have picked his bones clean, crawled up into his clothes to do it. Sepúlveda crouches to rifle through the body's pockets in search of ID.
[ned, roll perc + alert diff 8 or perc + investigation standard diff]
Ned
(Perception 3 + Alertness 2)
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
[perc + investigation: sigh.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
Ned
Ned, for his part, follows along like a ghost behind the Doc. His footsteps on the creaking floorboards are the only real indicator he's present, even his breathing his minimized in favour of maintaining a significant lack of presence. His glance back toward Margot is momentary, delivered on the edge of something cursory and protective (followed of course by a gesture, to keep her eyes out while she's upstairs incase they missed anything in their exploring).
Down the steps they venture and the Doc's flashlight leads the way. Ned's glance at their surroundings is brief, however, as the Doc lunges backward into him, sending him recoiling to the right and out of the older man's path with a slight grunt. He glances down at the body with careful regard, a frown on his face and free hand dusting down the front of him, as if he could remove the stain of dirt and filth clinging to the air down here.
He squints into the gloom, to peer at the Dynamite and his eyes spark wide, jaw dropping open to mutter some Ned inspired bit of wisdom. Only for it to clap shut when he recognizes where they are. He didn't want t give away their position or numbers any more than the Doc might already have. So he remains quiet, hand loose around the haft of the hunting knife hiding along the length of his inner forearm for now. His gaze lifts and levels with their surroundings, returning to the Doc occasionally as the man rifles and pick pockets the body on the floor.
Margot
Margot faithfully walked with the other two to the top of the basement stairs, and just as faithfully she would remain there for the time being. She had looked down the stairs with wide eyes and glanced quick-and-nervous to Ned's knife, to Doc prepping his flashlight and ray-gun(?), and had swallowed. She didn't really need to say anything, how her hand moved to grasp the doorframe spoke of her desire to stay, not to go if she didn't have to.
Keep an eye out was the last-glance-and-gesture that she got, and Margot nodded quickly with a look of grim resolve and smashed-down anxiety on her face.
As backs and bodies descended to the basement and vanished from sight Margot positioned herself to stand with her front facing out into the corridor, her shoulder and hand still on the doorframe, and her head leaned around the corner into the stairway itself so that she could keep a keen ear turned toward downstairs. Listening hard for anything from the slightest scuffle to lowest moan of agony as a callsign for her to come impact the situation like all of that dynamite against the wall could.
Sepúlveda
As much of a creep as he strikes other people as being, Sepúlveda isn't interested in pocketing the corpse's cash or credit cards. He finds a billfold, flips it open, finds the driver's license he was looking for, then sighs and tosses the thing into the air in a parabolic arch, letting it fall on the now-meatless backside of the poor bastard.
One would think he would want to maintain the integrity of the crime scene. He does nothing about the fact that his prints are now on the dead man's wallet, that his DNA is now on his shoe. Sepúlveda plants his hands on his knees to give himself leverage to stand back up, then pushes his glasses back up on his nose and seems to remember Ned is still there.
The Etherite holds up a finger like to shush the younger man, sarcastic even when he opts not to make a sound. Frowns before turning to survey the room. More to the point, the wall near the dynamite. He tiptoes over to it, then gropes around as if he's looking for something, or has already seen it.
Of course there's a secret fucking door set into the stones. Patting and pushing eventually causes it to slide inward, revealing an unlit, craggy corridor.
Sepúlveda looks back at Ned, then starts into the corridor.
If Ned stops to examine the wallet, he'll find it belonged to one Jerome Maklin of Gilpin Street, Colorado.
Ned
Ned stares at the Doc as he moves toward the Dynamite and there is a very real silent flailing moment as the simple equation of Doc + Dynamite + Proximity = Twitch, emerges in the young initiate. He controls it however, tamping it down under a hard resolve in favour of maintaining careful scrutiny of their surroundings.
The secret door chimes open with the grinding of stone and Ned jumps slightly at the suddenness of it. A soft grunt escapes him (probably at the cliche) before he turns to look up the stairs at the unseen presence of Margot.
Ned moves over to the stairwell, tapping the steps and moving up a couple as the Doc begins to descend the corridor. When Margot peeks around, he'll point and mouth, miming a 'Secret door, we're going down' and gesturing with his hands. Then, another reassuring gesture to keep her eyes out, and Ned moves into the Doc's wake.
Down the rabbit hole.
Sepúlveda
The corridor is not long but it is dark and it is dank and the only way the two initiates can see which way to go is by focusing on the beam of light shining from Sepúlveda's pocket.
Which is to say, they have to hustle a bit to catch up, as their fearless leader isn't going to wait for them to decide they want to accompany him further into the space that reeks of death and the devil's gastrointestinal distress.
In the next room, which has two equally appalling options for exits, they are greeted by a carpet of ankle-thick goo. Rotting flesh and cracked bone belonging to some sort of small animal, about the size of a dog or a goat. Even Sepúlveda, who deals with bodies in various stages of decomposition every day, pinches his nostrils shut so he doesn't take the full brunt of the stench as he picks the least disgusting route through the place.
He skirts the perimeter of the room, keeping his back to the wall so that he goes to the corridor straight ahead of him. Keeps his right hand lightly outstretched so he doesn't lose track of his path.
Margot will have to strain to hear anything after they pass through this point.
Ned
Before Ned even manages halfway down the tunnel, the smell hits him like a freight train. Orderlies are used to the muck and disgusting elements of clean-up when it comes to handling Hospitals. Shit, piss and blood are mingled freely in their histories. Ned however, still gags slightly and reaches up a hand to pinch at the base of his nose, a sudden piercing pain accompanying the sharp gesture as his fingers dig for a bit of focus.
Blue lights and yellow glows dance behind his head, attempting to blur together, even as his feet and shoes impact the first dribbles of the pool and puddle in the next room. Ned follows in the Doc's footsteps.
(Life 1: Turning off the sense of Smell. Difficulty 4 - 1 for Tools used)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Margot
[Life 1/2: No Nausea anymore!: Diff 4 - 1 (tools)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Sepúlveda
In time the men's footfalls stop making noise, either on the dry ground or squelching through an unnameable muck. They go deeper into the place, its low ceilings and general cramped air making it seem as if they're in an animal's burrow rather than a space meant for human use.
They come to a place where thick roots penetrate the earth overhead and twist deep into the dirt below. It creates a nest-looking bundle of darkness. Inside, Ned can hear intermittent chittering and rustling. Whatever it is, it's more afraid of them than they are of... whatever they are.
Once they're through that area and in another corridor, their options become as appealing as before, with a room off to the right and another one straight ahead.
Sepúlveda pauses to look back over his shoulder, confirming that he still only has one of his students to worry about. His eyes tick down to the knife in Ned's hand. He shrugs, once, loose-limbed in spite of the milieu, and retrieves his weird gun-looking device from his holster.
And into the righthand room they go.
They make it about five steps in before it becomes apparent that not only is there no place to go but back out the way they came, but they are not alone in the chamber. Glowing yellow eyes, eight sets of them, open up in the darkness. They belong to small, hairy creatures with matted gray fur, rotted yellow teeth, and that high-pitched twittering voice the kids have been hearing all this time.
Yet they stand upright, humanoid. Hungry.
"Uh," Sepúlveda says. "Edward. Run?"
[inits for the boys]
Ned
("That's your plan?!?!" Init: 7 +...)
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
["YESTHATSMYPLAN" +6]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Margot
Upstairs, in the meanwhile, Margot had grown weary of standing anxiously and just listening with nothing but twiddling her thumbs or picking the paint off the doorframe to occupy her time. Instead she crouched down with her knees out and set her messenger bag on the ground nearby. From within she produced a pouch of linen, dyed dark gray. It had been tied securely with threads, and when loosened she dipped two fingers inside and withdrew them covered in ash. This was spread in a vertical line across the center of her lips, from right under her nose all the way down to her chin.
With that, she banished nausea as a sensation from her body entirely. Smell and disgust and horror wouldn't churn her belly any more or less than one another. She took in a deep breath, as though to test the impact of the effect, but the effect of anxiety on her stomach had confirmed its success already. The pouch was tied off and returned to the bag and another pouch, very similar but dyed a dark blue in color instead, was taken up in one palm instead. She pulled the bag's strap up across her chest and shoulder and, after casting a final glance about the ground floor (still nothing), she set her jaw and started walking down the stairs.
She hadn't had a chance to hear what the men had found. Maybe it said something that she chose just that moment to approach all the same.
Sepúlveda
[group 1, +5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (3) ( fail )
Sepúlveda
[group 2, +5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda
ROUND 1
doc: 15
ned: 13
group 2: 11
group 1: 8
margot: moving
group 1: nom on ned!
group 2: nom on ned!
Ned
Ned curses under his breath, even as the Doc says it.
He's on the move, with careful, if quick steps in the dark, using the Doc's bouncing flashlight to guide the path ahead of him even as his hand flips the knife around onto the flat of the blade and smacks it along the length of his arm. Blooms of dull pain, thread beneath the flesh of his limb, blooming in his vision as bright sparks of electric red.
He fishes in his pocket for his phone, already thinking through the half dozen horror movies he's seen about people under the stairs and what sort of terror subterraneans must have of bright lights.
(A) Run like a motherfucker.
B) Throw flashlight activated phone behind them. Forces 2: Make a sudden and powerful burst of light behind them using flashlight on phone)
Sepúlveda
Sepúlveda did not include himself in the imperative verb. He was suggesting that Ned run. Which Ned starts to do.
For his part, Sepúlveda intends to fry the little bastards. If they hadn't eaten his high school weed dealer, they wouldn't be in this situation in the first fucking place.
[corr 1/forces 2: BZZZAP. base diff 5, practiced rote and fast-casting cancel each other out, -1 for quint, spending WP.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 5, 7) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Sepúlveda
Neither of his students are around to see the cremated mess he makes out of the eight creatures that were in the act of lunging after Ned. Let no one say he never does anything for the bug-eyed little shit.
Without even having broken a sweat, Sepúlveda would have plenty of time to catch his breath if he were of a mind to inhale deeply. Depending on how fast Ned runs and how long it takes for him to realize Sepúlveda isn't right on his heels determines how nearby and clear the next sound is:
A click! as a shotgun's hammer sets. A voice, clear and resonant and smooth, saying, "Put down your weapon and turn around. I won't harm you so long as you cooperate."
Ned
Ned doesn't make it far. He didn't plan on going that far to begin with. The Doc's light had made his vision somewhat upended, ruining any chance at a more natural night-vision this far below. Some distance and a brief moment to summon up some sort of heat vision would suffice to provide him-
BZZZAAAAP
Da Fuq?
Ned is turning back around to face where the Doc came from...and it's the reason he is caught off guard by the sudden click of a shotgun and the hum of a voice. Ned flinches. Curses under his breath and for a split second entertains the thought of saying something. Instead, he turns slowly, the hunting knife held between two fingers. He flicks the knife to one side, ensuring it hits the wall and scrapes down it with a clatter before hitting whatever muck they've been treading in.
"Easy. No need for hurting."
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Margot
A sudden commotion had kicked off somewhere deep within the guts of the basement (not in the same room though, she noticed), and Margot stopped walking down the steps and leaped down the rest of the way. Margot was very fast, and when she wanted to cross distance she got there in a hurry. In a flash she was across the basement-- nearly tripped on the dead Mr. Maklin and yelped a little as she twisted and found her step again.
Through the corridor, and suddenly into the room coated in a disgusting ankle-deep mess of something goopy and crunchy both. It smelled tremendously bad, and even though her stomach didn't heave and retch she still felt as though the hairs in her nostrils were going to smoke for how badly the sulfur burned and the overall strength of the stench offended.
She had just crunched her way into the room, just spied Ned's back as he was turning and his knife was clattering against the wall. She had heard the 'clack' of something small and metal and heavy and felt like ice water and poured into her stomach. Her feet faltered and she skidded to a stop, a girl with blood and ash on her face and wild wide eyes taking in the hostage scenario unfurling, and the grotesque setting in which it was taking place.
"Wha--," she started to ask breathlessly, looking between the Doc and Ned and back to the Doc again with the gun aimed at him and from him to whoever held the very lethal threat. Her hands didn't raise, she didn't have the gun trained on her and she was half blocked from view by Ned's place between them. Her hand curled carefully around the blue pouch still grasped in her hand and brought it near to her hip.
Sepúlveda
Hearing Ned's knife clatter to the floor has Sepúlveda sighing deep and complying with the order aimed at him.
By the time the kids converge in the corridor behind him, they have the Etherite's back, his hands held palms-out and up by his head, and the flashlight is illuminating the fellow who's gotten the jump on them. Their mentor is no longer in possession of his heat blaster.
He is not a large man to begin with, but Sepúlveda looks very small with his hands in the air and a shotgun pointed at his heart.
The fellow in question is about thirty years old and quite handsome, even with all the muck and bones around him. About six feet tall and fairly complected, he is used to walking around in darkness. The beam on Sepúlveda's phone makes him squint but he does not order the smaller man to turn it off.
"I don't want to hurt you," the man says. "Any of you. Truly, I don't. Please, follow me. I've been waiting so long for someone who could understand me to show up."
With a tilt of his chin, the handsome man indicates the chamber straight down the corridor, and begins to walk backwards, keeping the shotgun aimed at Sepúlveda. For once, their mentor doesn't have something smart-assed to say.
Ned
"My name's Ned. I don't want myself or my friends to get hurt so we're off to a good start."
He introduces himself. Orderly training kicking in. Befriend, Distract, Defuse. Ned's hands go up and he takes several cautious steps forward, movements pushing him to present as far a second target as he can, outside of the Doc's obvious beeline between gun barrel and chest. Ned isn't smiling or even making more than a face dedicated to the seriousness of the moment.
"Who are you and what are you doing down here?"
Margot
[Uggggh, PTSD]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Margot
Sharp white eyes against the shadows painted onto her face watched the Doc put his hands up as any smart person with a gun to their chest does. They hopped to Ned next, then went back to the face of the man holding the gun. From the man to the gun, specifically, and fixing on.
When Ned spoke up, choosing the path more calm and, well, orderly, the witchling looked anxiously to him as well and swallowed hard. Recalled a mantra and closed her eyes for a moment to take in a deep and shuddering breath. Her hands clenched together in front of and against her chest like the weight of them could calm her heartbeat and stiffle the panic trying to well.
They began to walk forward, and though she felt the need to find more air and scream and cry and run all at once she did none of those things. Instead, hands still up and clenched together (overtop that little blue pouch), she walked with resolve upon weak knees to bring up the rear.
Sepúlveda
"Come, come. Sit."
They still have a choice, but it's not much of one. At this close a range, the fellow could hit two targets with the same blast and the third would have enough emotional scarring to be temporarily useless. Something about the triad tells him that the oldest of them is the one he'll want to take out first.
It may have something to do with the charred rat-people corpses in the other room, or the fact that Ned ran when told to run.
At any rate, this is the cleanest room they've been in yet. An altar takes up the center of the room and frescoes adorn the walls. Like the chessboard, something buried deep in their brains tells them they don't want to look at them for too long. On the western wall, a triptych reveals what is an obvious sequence of human sacrifice and transformation.
There is no place to sit here, so the man backs up as far into the room as he can without bumping into the blood-stained altar and keeps his shotgun pointed at Sepúlveda, who will extend his arm and push Ned back with it if he catches him creeping up into his peripheral vision.
The man says, "My name is Philip Boucher. For years... I don't know how many... I've lived here, beneath my former home. Ever since the day Father said we were to call the living god. It was time, he said, and I was not one to argue. The bell rang, announcing the service would begin in ten minutes, and I... I went to Philius's room, he was a friend of ours, staying at the house, and I bolted the door. I was wicked, you see. I knew what my family was trying to do. They planned to bring a thing that should not be into the world. The chant had started without me, even though I was late."
Sepúlveda exhales, hard, like he suspected it was something fucked up and knows he isn't prepared for how much more fucked up it's about to get.
"Thunder split the house, and I heard Father roar. I ran to the temple, and all my family was there... they had called upon the living god, and it had answered. They were... hunched over, whimpering, changed, and I... I blacked out. Since that day, I've watched my family, all of them, even those buried long ago, turn into those things out there. I've tended them, and fed them, but..."
Ned
"...But, it's getting more difficult?"
Ned takes a small stab at it, the amount of uncertainty in his voice exaggerated as if he were trying to find something to feel sympathetic with. As if he were offering to be sympathetic if only the man would explain just a bit more.
[ Scene fades to black here-- the guy they found in the basement turns into a monster type thing and makes some death-explosion in his contained little lair that kills his own ass. The Mages manage to escape with the good graces of magick, luck, and divine ST handwaving to boot. ]
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