3rd Ghost Story: Ch.3 [The VerbenaVerse]

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~~META:
title = 3rd Ghost Story: Ch.3
~~
====== The Third Ghost Story: Northampton - Chapter 3 ======

//Game session: ?/2011//

===== Friday, October 2nd, 2009 =====
After reviewing the Botanica's finances, [[wod:geist:pcs:anita|Anita]] comes to an inescapable conclusion: she can afford the $50,000 bond for [[wod:characters:adela|Del]], but if Del skips town the Botanica will be in serious trouble. At best, Anita would have to declare bankruptcy, but at worst she'd lose the store outright and two generations' of hard work will be lost. She grabs one of her grandmother's nasty beers and sucks it down while she simmers; [[wod:characters:victor|the cat]] eyes her and muses that if she's going down below later, being drunk may not be the best idea. Anita shrugs and says the beer will be out of her system by then; the krewe is meeting at the X Pub at 9 o'clock before heading to Forest Park.
 
Anita ends up venting about Del to the cat, and asks if he knows of any way to keep a troubled teenager in one spot. The cat retorts sarcastically, "Sure, prison." He then half-jokingly recommends duct tape, but sobers and points out that since Del is still a minor, she could theoretically be shipped off to some tough-love camp. Anita considers that last suggestion, but the cat muses that since Del is seventeen already, most likely those types of camps won't bother because as soon as Del hits eighteen, she can walk out. The cat then points out that Anita has a resource she isn't utilizing yet: the dead. Several ghosts know, "where the money is buried, so to speak." He also jokingly suggests dumping Del into the Underworld to keep her out of trouble, but he grows concerned when Anita puts serious thought into that idea. Anita decides to keep options in mind and will go visit her little sister on Sunday; Del is in the women's correctional facility in Chicopee.
 
Anita closes the store on time, at 7 o'clock and finishes the end-of-day at 7:30, which is early for her but for good or for ill today was fairly dead, and she's really only had the cat for company. She heads home and finds [[wod:characters:abuela|Abuela]] cooking a chicken and rice dinner; Abuela is surprised to see Anita at 7:40. They eat, and Anita reveals [[wod:characters:tj|TJ]]'s visit and Del's troubles. Abuela mutters into her beer that she knew her daughter should have stopped popping out kids after she had Anita; Anita nearly chokes on her rice. Abuela makes it clear that she will support whichever decision Anita makes about the bail money, as she understands balancing a business with family. Anita finishes her food and tells her grandmother that she's going out tonight "with the //gringos//" and enjoys Abuela's sputtering when she reminds her grandmother that she's found some //gringos// who know how to properly ward a building.
 
As [[wod:geist:pcs:peter|Peter]] and [[wod:characters:doug|Doug]] are driving back to Indian Orchard, they get a call that their precinct lieutenant wants to speak to them before they punch out. Peter recalls that Lt. [[wod:characters:gardner]] is ex-military and still has many habits from those days, but overall he's a firm but fair man who Peter has never had any problems with. As far as Peter and Doug can tell, Lt. Gardner's two hobbies are his job and rock-climbing. When they get back to Indian Orchard, they head up to the lieutenant's office; Jeff Gardner is a Caucasian in his mid-forties, with a military-style crew-cut.
 
Lt. Gardner asks why they intervened at Central High, which falls in the Pines Point precinct. Peter explains his friendship with [[wod:geist:pcs:david|David Klein]], and how David's been getting increasing flak from the local gangs as he tries to steer the local youth away from lives of crime. Lt. Gardner nods and makes it clear he doesn't mind the out-of-precinct moonlighting, but he adds that "the two Des's" have a few notes about excessive force on their respective police jackets. Peter and Doug admit they never even got the officers' names, and Lt. Gardner says the black officer is [[wod:characters:church]] and the Latina is Desdemona Vallejo; they've been partners for a few years now.
 
Lt. Gardner confirms that Doug and Peter were on the first floor and did not witness the confrontation between the officers and [[wod:characters:luis]], so they did not see how Luis's head got cracked open. He warns the two that the Internal Affairs Bureau will be investigating the matter because of the prior excessive force complaints, and advises Peter and Doug to lie low and keep their noses clean for the time being. They both agree and head out. Peter returns home and does some household chores before grabbing dinner and driving to the X in Springfield for the meeting with the krewe.
 
David heads home after the police investigation wraps up at Central High. He's still wired, so he grabs some "probably Chinese" takeout and a six-pack of beer on his way. He settles in for the next two hours and catches a Family Guy marathon on Fox. [[wod:geist:pcs:isobel|Isobel]] wraps up her shift at the physical therapy office with no further creepy teenagers, so she heads home, grabs some dinner, and catches a nap before their trip below. Isobel swings by the Montoya-Perez household to pick up Anita, as Anita's Honda Civic is still impounded as evidence.
 
David, Peter, Isobel, and Anita gather at the pub at 9 o'clock, but [[wod:geist:pcs:erika|Erika]] seems to be running late. The Sin-Eaters grab drinks but realize David is already tipsy. The conversation veers straight to the gutter after Isobel explains the term "three sheets to the wind" which somehow that leads to lobsters with giant phalluses having sex with clams, but the clams snapped shut, castrating the lobsters. David compares his love life to being the lobster, and he eventually reveals to the women what happened at Central High School this afternoon; Isobel and Anita are annoyed that he or Peter hadn't said anything when they got to the bar.
 
By 9:30 there is still no sign of Erika, so David calls her cell phone. It rings four times before going to voice mail, so David leaves a message. As David is talking Peter mutters that the coffee here is terrible. David wants to know why Peter is sticking to coffee while they're all in a bar, and Peter holds up his Alcoholics Anonymous poker chip as a reminder. The women mock David for forgetting something that important, but they eventually decide to walk over to Erika's house to check on her.
 
Erika's house is only three blocks from the bar, so it's a ten-minute walk. They arrive to find Erika's car in the driveway but no lights on. They've never been inside Erika's home before, and realize the house itself is a three-story century-old colonial modified to look like a Victorian – or it might be a century-old mini-Victorian modified to look colonial, they're not entirely sure. They head up to the porch and knock, and they find the door is slightly ajar. They step inside, and immediately notice that the power appears to be out; no appliances are lit up. Peter's cop instincts flare and he immediately begins searching the house after no one responds to the krewe's calls to Erika. Isobel assists Peter while David and Anita step outside. Anita checks on the electrical meter and discovers that someone deliberately snipped the power line to the house. David checks the mail and finds nothing backed up; Erika's mail is sitting neatly on her kitchen table. David recalls that Erika was at Central High this morning, and she seemed perfectly fine.
 
Peter finds the first floor – foyer, living room, dining room, and kitchen – all neatly in order, so he and Isobel sweep upstairs. They are immediately hit with the stink of bleach, and find several gouges in the plaster of the walls of the master bedroom. A small bedroom has been converted into a workshop of some sort, but it has been quickly cleared out of anything occult-related. Peter examines the gouges in the wall and concludes someone dug out bullets to confound forensics investigations. He initially worries that Erika has been killed, but figures the shots must have come from silenced pistols on single-shot mode, as the houses in this neighborhood are very close together. He wonders if she was hit with tranquilizer darts instead.
 
Anita borrows Peter's police pad and pencil, and sits down in the master bedroom to utilize the //Distant Voices// ceremony. She concentrates on Erika and asks, Are you alright?" After three minutes of being in a trancelike state, automatic writing kicks in as Anita gets a response. Unfortunately, while the response indicates Erika is very much alive, the response itself is a collection of mish-mashed song lyrics, bits from SNL skits, and other gibberish. Anita concludes that Erika is alive but heavily drugged. She shares the writing with the other Sin-Eaters, and Peter wonders if Erika got "spooked" by the men in black she discovered in the black Ford pickup last month.
 
The Sin-Eaters head outside to continue their investigation. There are no footprints or tire tracks in the street, as relatively clean pavement prevents such easy clues, but Peter does discover a fresh pool of motor oil in front of Erika's house which he estimates is a leak from a big van. They swing into the tiny backyard and look around; they find a yellow and black bandana by the kitchen window! David immediately hits on Luis as a suspect, but wonders if the ganger even knew Erika. Peter hesitates and opines that the bandana was either from another potential crime, or was planted. He argues that the "snatch and grab" of their krewe-mate was too professional and clean for Luis's thugs.
 
The Sin-Eaters debate what to do next; Peter initially suggests going to talk to the neighbors to see if they saw anything, but at 10:30 at night that's stretching things, especially since Peter is unwilling to flash his badge quite yet. David agrees to call it in and claim he and his friends were at the pub waiting for Erika to join them for a beer, and they came here to check on her when she didn't show and called the cops when they smelled bleach. Since that's essentially the truth anyway Peter isn't too worried, but he wants to keep his presence on the down-low so he snatches the bandana and stuffs it in his pocket before ambling back to the bar.
 
David gives him a ten-minute head start and then calls the Springfield police. The female dispatcher remembers his voice from this afternoon but listens to David's story and promises to send a car to Erika's house – in twenty minutes or so. There's been some gang violence in Metro Center, so most of the local cops are tied up there. David understands, and settles in to wait with the women. Peter returns to the bar and whiles away the time, but hits on the idea that if the men in black were responsible, they may have "nudged" Luis into openly showing his face at Central High School today. He texts the others and they agree that it is a possibility – and a frightening one at that.
 
The Sin-Eaters spot a cruiser with lights on but no sirens swing onto Erika's street and come their way. The cruiser parks and two cops get out, Officer Eric Chamberlain and Officer Manuel Vargas. They swing through the house after taking brief statements, and then they call it into dispatch in the usual babble of numbers that means nothing to non-cops. Within several minutes an unmarked car pulls up and a Caucasian man gets out, his face deeply lined by the stresses of his job. He introduces himself as Detective Michael Grayborn, and takes more detailed statements from the three Sin-Eaters. After the statements are recorded, he does a walk-through of Erika's house with David, Isobel, and Anita separately, to eliminate their fingerprints. The Sin-Eaters find Det. Grayborn to be focused and methodical, but not overly friendly.
 
===== Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 =====

Isobel, Anita, and David are sent away a little after midnight, and hike back to the bar to find Peter reading a book in his car. The Sin-Eaters debate postponing their trip below, but decide to go through with it anyway. They hike down to Forest Park and slip inside without being spotted. Mindful of security guards on carts, Anita, Peter, and David sneak carefully to the Barney mausoleum – and they're halfway there when they realize they have utterly no idea where the hell Isobel is! For her part, Isobel slips into Forest Park and masterfully skulks her way to the mausoleum – all in a fugue state broken with flashes of sneaking across no-man's-land to get to the German trenches of World War I!
 
When the other Sin-Eaters reach the mausoleum, they find Isobel straddling one of the stone lions cheerfully. She slits her palm as the others approach, and smears her blood over the central gate. The gate vanishes with a faint rumble, revealing the utter blackness that is the Avernian Gate to the Underworld. As soon as the gate opens Anita, David, and Peter feel their respective geists perk up; The Corpsman is already active. They enter the gate and feel their way along the skull-corridor to the sloping tunnel, when Isobel turns to find Anita reaching for her! The Witch is very aroused, which isn't helping Anita. Peter mocks them both and Fallen Snow mutters, "Will they just fuck already?" The Discarded just sighs.
 
The Sin-Eaters clamber down the slope to the grotto without trouble, but find the grotto itself to be oddly placid. Peter is leery of getting his crotch bitten again, but he wades in bravely. David follows, and then Anita while Isobel brings up the rear. The four Sin-Eaters see the feral ghost-children pop up from the water and watch them warily, but the ghosts do not approach. They submerge and swim through the tunnel, and Peter feels something child-sized scrape along him! He lashes out and whatever touched him swims towards the grotto, wiggling past the other three Sin-Eaters in the process.
 
The Sin-Eaters surface in the dead garden without further trouble. They head into the hallway, which is raucous for about ten seconds – and then it dies down as the ghosts realize their landlords are here! The Sin-Eaters estimate it's about 1:30 in the morning, so they are a bit late. On a whim, Anita decides to count the number of apartments. After twenty minutes of walking, she's reached one hundred and three, and her brain refuses to count any more. She's pretty sure the hallway itself is unstable, with apartments vanishing and reappearing at random. The only fixed points seem to be the blue silk brothel and the Professor's apartment.
 
As soon as they reach the brothel, [[wod:characters:madam|the madam]] with the blue chips for eyes steps out and offers them their rent – a bowl of slippery-looking... liquid. The Sin-Eaters haven't formally made an arrangement with the madam, but decide to accept anyway. The madam looks at the krewe and asks, "Where is your leader?" David accepts the offering on behalf of the krewe initially, but spoils it when he asks, "Is there any offering from your establishment that doesn't look like splooge?" The madam replies calmly that they pay rent however they can. Anita takes the bowl from David and apologizes to the madam "for the ass-clowns here." The madam bows slightly and returns to her place of business, while the Sin-Eaters eye the bowl and look at each other to see who's willing to drink the... rent. Anita sighs and mutters that it's her turn to something strange to be put in her mouth, and then she pinches her nose and upends the bowl. The semi-congealed... stuff slides down her throat and burns like vodka after it hits her stomach. Anita looks repulsed, but did gain some plasm.
 
Peter asks Anita if they should formalize the arrangement with the brothel now, but she decides to wait until next week. The others agree, so Peter nods. He decides they should claim one apartment here for their own use, and tries to find one where there is no noise. The Sin-Eaters discover that the quietest apartments are the ones closest to the brothel, so they walk directly across the hall and force that door open.
 
The apartment opens into a kitchen stocked with all the modern appliances – from the 1930s. A breakfast bar separates the kitchen from the living room, which trails to the right of the door. The front room seems to be an exact copy of the Soviet-era cinderblock apartment buildings, with saggy furniture. A tiny hallway leads to a bathroom of indeterminate age and a bedroom. The Sin-Eaters open the bedroom door... and stare dumbfounded. The bedroom itself is very opulent, with a massive four-poster bed from the 1760s taking up almost all of the room. Delicate silk curtains obscure the bed, which is big enough that all four Sin-Eaters could sleep on it without being cramped. A dresser and a linen chest are squeezed in the room as well.
 
The Sin-Eaters return to the living room and agree to try and stake a claim on this apartment, although Anita wonders if the apartment will "wander" down the hallway. Peter is not sanguine about the idea of his office constantly shifting in a long hallway, and the others agree that they need to do something to make this place a fixed point in the hallway – but they have no idea how to go about doing that. They head back out to the hallway, and traipse down to [[wod:characters:professor|the Professor]]'s apartment.
 
Sitting in one of the skull's eye sockets is a tube of glowing blue... stuff. Isobel shrugs and grabs this one. She slugs it down after a few jokes and cribbed lines from //Repo! The Genetic Opera//, and discovers that the liquid gave her plasm – and a massive high as its essentially liquid speed. Isobel starts babbling immediately although The Corpsman is quite happy, and the other Sin-Eaters rear back slightly as they're definitely not used to Isobel being chatty.
 
The door next to the Professor's apartment is the "Frogger room" and David notices a can of old-fashioned Mountain Dew sitting outside. Assuming that's the [[wod:characters:groups:faceless|gamer kids]]' rent, he grabs the can and slugs it down. It tastes exactly like Mountain Dew and does give David a hit of plasm – but the caffeine equivalent is about twelve cans of mundane Dew, so David starts bouncing off the walls as well. Isobel exclaims, "Who wants to decorate the hallway?!" and David enthusiastically volunteers. Peter is utterly bemused and goads them on as the pair races up and down the hallway looking for... something that only makes sense to speed-freaks.
 
Sighing, Anita fishes out Peter's pad and pencil and scribbles a note to [[wod:characters:assistant|the Professor's assistant]] asking if she knows of any way to keep a troublesome teenager in one spot for an extended period of time. She stuffs the message into the skull's eye-socket and there is a squelching noise as the paper is sucked into the apartment. Anita then hears rustling in the apartment and a very clear exclamation of, "What the fuck?" The female ghost in the power suit opens the door as Isobel and David go rushing by, and Anita looks embarrassed. The Assistant looks confused, until she realizes Isobel drank their rent, and she admits the rent was "some effluvia from a failed experiment."
 
Anita explains in broad terms that she needs to keep her sister safe for a period of time, but Del has a habit of making trouble. The Assistant points out that Dell could be stashed in the Underworld, but should she? After all, Del would likely go completely insane if subjected to even the Autochthonous Depths for a brief period of time. Anita acknowledges that as Peter runs by and asks for the mind-control serum. The Assistant angrily retorts that the serum is strictly regulated by the Professor, but winces when she realizes Peter just goaded her and she fell for it. She tries to recover and coyly offers to renegotiate the rent if Anita needs Del held for a bit. Anita promises to consider all options, but for now she's just gathering data. The Assistant also suggests claiming an apartment in the hallway to use, and also as a place where Del will be relatively safe.

//Recap originally published on [[https://nwod-verbena76.livejournal.com/6978.html|Livejournal]].//

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<WRAP group>
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[[{}wod:geist:recap:3_chapter_1_2|<= Chapters 1 & 2]]
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<WRAP half column rightalign>
[[{}wod:geist:recap:3_chapter_4|Chapter 4 =>]]
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