WoD (May 2013; Thu 16 - Fri 17): Enter Eliza (C017, I009)
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Yuri, Jacob, John, Eliza, (Kate), & (Johnny) / [XP: 4]
Toni is still busy with wedding prep. Smike was exhausted and departed early. Bevin had an order to fill and started late, plus she had to work the next day and went to bed a little early.
Thursday, May 16th
Around 11:30 in the morning; John, Johnny, and Yuri were down in the lobby when a young blonde woman (eventually introduced as Eliza Eccleston) entered the building and shyly inquired about getting a job with the organization. After the snickering and joking about what they do in any way resembling a ‘job’ died down, the conversation turned into a sort of impromptu interview with the usual awkwardness and roundaboutness of paranormally aware people meeting each other for the first time.
Her morality checked out ok to Johnny. She’d apparently read something about the Lothridge case on Harbor Net, and the other PC’s eventually admitted to being involved in “the unusual”. When they got around to asking her what she could bring to the table, she said that she could interact with spirits and see into “the other side” (and at one point described herself as a ‘Wiccan’; which didn’t particularly impress them giving their recent dealings with them [WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?]). Given the number of malign spirits they’d had to deal with in recent weeks, she would certainly be an asset if she was telling the truth.
Someone made mention of “the couch”, and it was decided to at least give her a shot and see if she could put a dent in the Trent case. A call to Mr. Trent indicated that he wouldn’t be home until 3:30 or 4:00, so Yuri decided to send the new girl out to get him some shawarma (Johnny also asked for a six-pack of beer; John decided to test her intuition by asking her to ‘surprise’ him). Since there was no decent place to get schawarma in Harbor City and since she had time to kill, Eliza gassed up her car and drove all the way to Seattle.
While she was gone, John paid a visit to Detective Garfield and informed him that ‘Glitch’ had been taken care of.
Still a little groggy and describing herself as feeling like she “got drunk on moonbeams”, Kate dragged herself upstairs into lobby around 3:00 and got an abbreviated run-down of what was going on. Eliza returned around 3:15 with stone cold shawarma for Yuri, warm beer for Johnny (which he put in the fridge), and ribs for John. She, John, and Yuri then headed to Jerry Trent’s place.
John took Eliza to the landing and pointed out the wall opposite the upper flight; the one that he was certain hadn’t been there when the couch had been moved despite zero evidence that it had ever been removed and rebuilt. She didn’t see any twilight entities hanging around the area; but when she looked all the way through the gauntlet into the Shadow, a few things very much stood out.
For one, the gauntlet was incredibly weak on the landing; likely a verge which had been repeatedly opened. Secondly, the aforementioned wall did not exist in the Shadow copy of the house. She could see right through into the garage, in which she saw what appeared to be a high-tech (almost futuristic) machine shop. In the middle of the shop was a metal sphere around 6’ in diameter and covered with all kinds of techy-looking doodads. She thought she could see what appeared to be cockpit window facing towards he garage door.
With a little bit of time and creativity, Eliza was able to pry the verge open so that she and the boys could enter the Shadow; descending down into the garage via a small metal staircase up to the missing wall. A closer look at the sphere indicated that it was indeed some sort of vehicle (or at least a mockup of one) with a very complex-looking control panel. Many pictures were taken, but nobody started pressing any buttons.
John used his Industrial Oracle on the sphere and was rather stunned by what it revealed. It was actually some sort of ‘Shadow spaceship’, and it had been to other planets!!
When Eliza asked if she had the job, Yuri replied yes; but “only because he couldn’t get back to the real world without her”. Before they departed back to said real world, John took a quick look outside. When he asked Eliza about the ash falling from the sky, she indicated that it had been doing that ever since the beachings.
John regretfully told Mr. Trent that they were giving up on his case, but that they’d still be happy to come by to break up and remove the couch for him at a later time.
The trio got back to the hotel around 5:00 and filled in Kate and Johnny on what they’d discovered. When Kate demanded copies of the pictures that everyone had taken so that she could compile them, Yuri refused. And that was how Eliza first met Charlie: when he materialized in anger to tell Kate to ask nicely and Yuri to stop being an asshole.
Kate woke up Jacob so that he could get in on the ensuing conversation, and it turned out that Eliza had been in his biology class the previous semester. He remembered her as being very interrogative; always having her hand in the air when he asked for questions. She was also smart but didn’t really apply herself and had a solid B average. Then, just a few weeks before the end of the semester, she’d just stopped coming to class.
In the conversation (which pretty much covered everything related to the dead purple cyber-goth), Jacob made an off-hand reference to the “TV faces” and Eliza nearly freaked. She’d apparently run into one outside of her dorm building and she still vividly remembered what it had said to her…
“Reality belongs to all people. It is not a toy for your amusement. It is not too late for you to join us, but the only alternative is… removal.” Obviously she had not joined and had instead run like hell.
The conversation then made its usual transition into an argument, though it remained a reasonably civil one (at least by their usual standards). Jacob really wanted to reveal the spaceship to the world or at the very least move it to a more secure location, and Kate wanted to take it apart. Yuri and Johnny adamantly insisted that they leave it alone; the latter at one point commenting, “It’s a dimension-hopping space ball and I do NOT want to go to Guantanamo!”
At another point in the conversation; Johnny, not being particularly cautious since Eliza was essentially ‘in’ and had revealed herself as some sort of witch, accidentally outed Jacob as a vampire. Eliza gleefully asked him to sparkle; Kate then threw a vial of silver glitter on him.
Once that wound down, the PC’s decided to do some additional surveillance on Ann Dunsford’s little mansion on the coast. Yuri borrowed a low-profile boat from one of his allies and went out on the water with Kate, John, Eliza, and Johnny.
On the mundane side, they spotted a couple of security guards outside who looked like Chippendales with Uzis. Eliza saw nothing in Twilight, but indicated that the Shadow of the mansion looked like a hell hole.
When they got back to the hotel, Johnny disappeared into his room for the remainder of the evening.
Eliza was invited to pick out a room in the hotel, and she squeed in loud delight when she located a room on the center of the top floor (overlooking the courtyard) which had a mana spring in it. She ran downstairs and gave Jacob a big hug, which made him a bit uncomfortable. Her squeeing had riled Jawa, whom Kate introduced her to.
Jacob asked Eliza about school, and she indicated that it was her run-in with the screen-face which had prompted her to quit (and she had not in fact been back on campus since). It was at this point that Kate pointed out the fact that Eliza had been given an ultimatum and an offer to join while she had not. Perhaps these things had some connection with Mages?
Jacob ended up staying out all night hunting; John, Kate, and Yuri helped Eliza move all of her stuff out of her crappy little apartment in the Old City Block and into the hotel.
Friday, May 17th
Neither Johnny nor Kate were present at the meeting the next morning, though it wasn’t really much of a meeting. It was basically just Jacob saying, “Anything to discuss? No? Ok, I’m going to bed.”
But just as they began to disperse for the day, they heard someone approach the door and put something heavy down next to the door. But instead of knocking or opening the door, the person just turned and quickly crossed the courtyard to leave. When John finally opened the door, the person was gone and there was a big black foot locker by the door with a note taped to it…
“My brother is dead. You guys seem to maybe be picking up the torch he dropped. I don’t know anyone else to give his things to, so I’m giving them to you. You’ll have to break the lock off. Be safe.”
Yuri broke the lock off and opened the foot locker; and in the small tray at the top were a printed piece of paper and four other objects which appeared to be random knick-knacks from the 70’s.
The first was flat, hollow, plastic frog with a rectangular indentation in his back just the right size to hold a bar of soap. Between his back ankles was strung a piece of elastic attached to a plastic paddle. Apparently it was some kind of combination bath toy / soap dish.
Next was an old audio cassette tape; a store-bought blank which had been recorded on. One side was labeled ‘Bambi’; the other ‘Lady and the Tramp’.
The third item was an old hand-held ‘Merlin’ game; in good working condition despite its obvious age. Eliza could sense a bit of magic (her kind of magic to be specific) on it. An artifact perhaps?
Finally there was a heavy plastic cube with a slot at the top of each of the size faces just big enough to accommodate what was once a standard-sized Kodak photograph. The bottom appeared to be a wind-up base which allowed the whole thing to rotate, but nobody wound it. The four frames were currently occupied by very old pictures taken of several children (around 7 or 8 years of age) in a swimming pool.
The printed piece of paper read as follows…
To-Do
Jacqueline Pattillo
* Due at end of May; baby needs to go.
* Want to talk to ultrasound technician but REALLY don’t want to go back to Blackfield.
* Also need to find that damned idol and break its dick off or something.
Debora Shepard and Elizabeth Tompkins
- Not sure if witches or just full-of-shit spinsters.
* More investigation needed.
Marie Laveau
- Definitely a witch; also a racist bitch.
- Neither warrants termination.
* More investigation needed.
Max
* Query on above.
** GET MY AA-12 BACK!! (getting old; SPAS hurts my shoulder too much)
Gear Girl (formerly Belly Girl)
- Saw Belly Girl on the L again today; only now, her skin looks like plastic and her tummy was covered in interlocking cogs (no wonder she never wears a whole shirt).
- Jesse says she doesn’t recognize her as anyone in the freehold. Oh, dear.
- She got off at the next stop south-east of the Municipal Block and I managed to shadow her to an abandoned mall (she went around back and descended the stairs).
- I got a really bad feeling about the whole place and decided that I didn’t want to go in alone.
- Also found out that quite a few people (mostly young women) have disappeared around there.
* Next time Anastasia is in town, take her to dinner and ask her if she’ll go down there with me.
OMGWTFBBQ Lovecraftian Beaching!!!
- Something nommed on two surviving Narwhals so far; no Narwhals left.
- Might try to nom panda next?
* Worth staking out the zoo tonight.
** BRING FIRE!!
“He was a vampire hunter”, Jacob pronounced after reading it. The others just mildly derided him for the fact that the note made zero mention of vampires and that vampires were far from being the only thing that people hunted.
Removing the top tray, the PC’s found two addition things. The first was a small but heavy lock box; the actual lock of which was covered by a yellow and black piece of tape which read “DANGER!” in bold blocky letters.
The other was a SPAS-15 assault shotgun and three magazines of shells. One unmarked magazine (which was currently loaded) contained ordinary buckshot. One with a piece of red tape around it contained ordinary slugs. The third had a piece of blue tape around it; and though the printing on the shells indicated ordinary birdshot, John could tell that the business ends of the shells had been removed and re-sealed.
John ran Industrial Oracle on the box to try to determine what was inside of it that was so dangerous, but all he could ascertain was that it was a plastic bird. Yuri then invited everyone out to his car to play the cassette tape.
The tape was exactly what it said it was: copies of the record versions of Bambi and Lady & the Tramp. Someone, however, had used the extra space at the end of each to make what were obviously off-the-radio recordings of ‘Big Shot’ by Billy Joel and ‘Call Me’ by Blondie.
Yuri, Jacob, John, Eliza, (Kate), & (Johnny) / [XP: 4]
Toni is still busy with wedding prep. Smike was exhausted and departed early. Bevin had an order to fill and started late, plus she had to work the next day and went to bed a little early.
Thursday, May 16th
Around 11:30 in the morning; John, Johnny, and Yuri were down in the lobby when a young blonde woman (eventually introduced as Eliza Eccleston) entered the building and shyly inquired about getting a job with the organization. After the snickering and joking about what they do in any way resembling a ‘job’ died down, the conversation turned into a sort of impromptu interview with the usual awkwardness and roundaboutness of paranormally aware people meeting each other for the first time.
Her morality checked out ok to Johnny. She’d apparently read something about the Lothridge case on Harbor Net, and the other PC’s eventually admitted to being involved in “the unusual”. When they got around to asking her what she could bring to the table, she said that she could interact with spirits and see into “the other side” (and at one point described herself as a ‘Wiccan’; which didn’t particularly impress them giving their recent dealings with them [WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?]). Given the number of malign spirits they’d had to deal with in recent weeks, she would certainly be an asset if she was telling the truth.
Someone made mention of “the couch”, and it was decided to at least give her a shot and see if she could put a dent in the Trent case. A call to Mr. Trent indicated that he wouldn’t be home until 3:30 or 4:00, so Yuri decided to send the new girl out to get him some shawarma (Johnny also asked for a six-pack of beer; John decided to test her intuition by asking her to ‘surprise’ him). Since there was no decent place to get schawarma in Harbor City and since she had time to kill, Eliza gassed up her car and drove all the way to Seattle.
While she was gone, John paid a visit to Detective Garfield and informed him that ‘Glitch’ had been taken care of.
Still a little groggy and describing herself as feeling like she “got drunk on moonbeams”, Kate dragged herself upstairs into lobby around 3:00 and got an abbreviated run-down of what was going on. Eliza returned around 3:15 with stone cold shawarma for Yuri, warm beer for Johnny (which he put in the fridge), and ribs for John. She, John, and Yuri then headed to Jerry Trent’s place.
John took Eliza to the landing and pointed out the wall opposite the upper flight; the one that he was certain hadn’t been there when the couch had been moved despite zero evidence that it had ever been removed and rebuilt. She didn’t see any twilight entities hanging around the area; but when she looked all the way through the gauntlet into the Shadow, a few things very much stood out.
For one, the gauntlet was incredibly weak on the landing; likely a verge which had been repeatedly opened. Secondly, the aforementioned wall did not exist in the Shadow copy of the house. She could see right through into the garage, in which she saw what appeared to be a high-tech (almost futuristic) machine shop. In the middle of the shop was a metal sphere around 6’ in diameter and covered with all kinds of techy-looking doodads. She thought she could see what appeared to be cockpit window facing towards he garage door.
With a little bit of time and creativity, Eliza was able to pry the verge open so that she and the boys could enter the Shadow; descending down into the garage via a small metal staircase up to the missing wall. A closer look at the sphere indicated that it was indeed some sort of vehicle (or at least a mockup of one) with a very complex-looking control panel. Many pictures were taken, but nobody started pressing any buttons.
John used his Industrial Oracle on the sphere and was rather stunned by what it revealed. It was actually some sort of ‘Shadow spaceship’, and it had been to other planets!!
When Eliza asked if she had the job, Yuri replied yes; but “only because he couldn’t get back to the real world without her”. Before they departed back to said real world, John took a quick look outside. When he asked Eliza about the ash falling from the sky, she indicated that it had been doing that ever since the beachings.
John regretfully told Mr. Trent that they were giving up on his case, but that they’d still be happy to come by to break up and remove the couch for him at a later time.
The trio got back to the hotel around 5:00 and filled in Kate and Johnny on what they’d discovered. When Kate demanded copies of the pictures that everyone had taken so that she could compile them, Yuri refused. And that was how Eliza first met Charlie: when he materialized in anger to tell Kate to ask nicely and Yuri to stop being an asshole.
Kate woke up Jacob so that he could get in on the ensuing conversation, and it turned out that Eliza had been in his biology class the previous semester. He remembered her as being very interrogative; always having her hand in the air when he asked for questions. She was also smart but didn’t really apply herself and had a solid B average. Then, just a few weeks before the end of the semester, she’d just stopped coming to class.
In the conversation (which pretty much covered everything related to the dead purple cyber-goth), Jacob made an off-hand reference to the “TV faces” and Eliza nearly freaked. She’d apparently run into one outside of her dorm building and she still vividly remembered what it had said to her…
“Reality belongs to all people. It is not a toy for your amusement. It is not too late for you to join us, but the only alternative is… removal.” Obviously she had not joined and had instead run like hell.
The conversation then made its usual transition into an argument, though it remained a reasonably civil one (at least by their usual standards). Jacob really wanted to reveal the spaceship to the world or at the very least move it to a more secure location, and Kate wanted to take it apart. Yuri and Johnny adamantly insisted that they leave it alone; the latter at one point commenting, “It’s a dimension-hopping space ball and I do NOT want to go to Guantanamo!”
At another point in the conversation; Johnny, not being particularly cautious since Eliza was essentially ‘in’ and had revealed herself as some sort of witch, accidentally outed Jacob as a vampire. Eliza gleefully asked him to sparkle; Kate then threw a vial of silver glitter on him.
Once that wound down, the PC’s decided to do some additional surveillance on Ann Dunsford’s little mansion on the coast. Yuri borrowed a low-profile boat from one of his allies and went out on the water with Kate, John, Eliza, and Johnny.
On the mundane side, they spotted a couple of security guards outside who looked like Chippendales with Uzis. Eliza saw nothing in Twilight, but indicated that the Shadow of the mansion looked like a hell hole.
When they got back to the hotel, Johnny disappeared into his room for the remainder of the evening.
Eliza was invited to pick out a room in the hotel, and she squeed in loud delight when she located a room on the center of the top floor (overlooking the courtyard) which had a mana spring in it. She ran downstairs and gave Jacob a big hug, which made him a bit uncomfortable. Her squeeing had riled Jawa, whom Kate introduced her to.
Jacob asked Eliza about school, and she indicated that it was her run-in with the screen-face which had prompted her to quit (and she had not in fact been back on campus since). It was at this point that Kate pointed out the fact that Eliza had been given an ultimatum and an offer to join while she had not. Perhaps these things had some connection with Mages?
Jacob ended up staying out all night hunting; John, Kate, and Yuri helped Eliza move all of her stuff out of her crappy little apartment in the Old City Block and into the hotel.
Friday, May 17th
Neither Johnny nor Kate were present at the meeting the next morning, though it wasn’t really much of a meeting. It was basically just Jacob saying, “Anything to discuss? No? Ok, I’m going to bed.”
But just as they began to disperse for the day, they heard someone approach the door and put something heavy down next to the door. But instead of knocking or opening the door, the person just turned and quickly crossed the courtyard to leave. When John finally opened the door, the person was gone and there was a big black foot locker by the door with a note taped to it…
“My brother is dead. You guys seem to maybe be picking up the torch he dropped. I don’t know anyone else to give his things to, so I’m giving them to you. You’ll have to break the lock off. Be safe.”
Yuri broke the lock off and opened the foot locker; and in the small tray at the top were a printed piece of paper and four other objects which appeared to be random knick-knacks from the 70’s.
The first was flat, hollow, plastic frog with a rectangular indentation in his back just the right size to hold a bar of soap. Between his back ankles was strung a piece of elastic attached to a plastic paddle. Apparently it was some kind of combination bath toy / soap dish.
Next was an old audio cassette tape; a store-bought blank which had been recorded on. One side was labeled ‘Bambi’; the other ‘Lady and the Tramp’.
The third item was an old hand-held ‘Merlin’ game; in good working condition despite its obvious age. Eliza could sense a bit of magic (her kind of magic to be specific) on it. An artifact perhaps?
Finally there was a heavy plastic cube with a slot at the top of each of the size faces just big enough to accommodate what was once a standard-sized Kodak photograph. The bottom appeared to be a wind-up base which allowed the whole thing to rotate, but nobody wound it. The four frames were currently occupied by very old pictures taken of several children (around 7 or 8 years of age) in a swimming pool.
The printed piece of paper read as follows…
To-Do
Jacqueline Pattillo
* Due at end of May; baby needs to go.
* Want to talk to ultrasound technician but REALLY don’t want to go back to Blackfield.
* Also need to find that damned idol and break its dick off or something.
Debora Shepard and Elizabeth Tompkins
- Not sure if witches or just full-of-shit spinsters.
* More investigation needed.
Marie Laveau
- Definitely a witch; also a racist bitch.
- Neither warrants termination.
* More investigation needed.
Max
* Query on above.
** GET MY AA-12 BACK!! (getting old; SPAS hurts my shoulder too much)
Gear Girl (formerly Belly Girl)
- Saw Belly Girl on the L again today; only now, her skin looks like plastic and her tummy was covered in interlocking cogs (no wonder she never wears a whole shirt).
- Jesse says she doesn’t recognize her as anyone in the freehold. Oh, dear.
- She got off at the next stop south-east of the Municipal Block and I managed to shadow her to an abandoned mall (she went around back and descended the stairs).
- I got a really bad feeling about the whole place and decided that I didn’t want to go in alone.
- Also found out that quite a few people (mostly young women) have disappeared around there.
* Next time Anastasia is in town, take her to dinner and ask her if she’ll go down there with me.
OMGWTFBBQ Lovecraftian Beaching!!!
- Something nommed on two surviving Narwhals so far; no Narwhals left.
- Might try to nom panda next?
* Worth staking out the zoo tonight.
** BRING FIRE!!
“He was a vampire hunter”, Jacob pronounced after reading it. The others just mildly derided him for the fact that the note made zero mention of vampires and that vampires were far from being the only thing that people hunted.
Removing the top tray, the PC’s found two addition things. The first was a small but heavy lock box; the actual lock of which was covered by a yellow and black piece of tape which read “DANGER!” in bold blocky letters.
The other was a SPAS-15 assault shotgun and three magazines of shells. One unmarked magazine (which was currently loaded) contained ordinary buckshot. One with a piece of red tape around it contained ordinary slugs. The third had a piece of blue tape around it; and though the printing on the shells indicated ordinary birdshot, John could tell that the business ends of the shells had been removed and re-sealed.
John ran Industrial Oracle on the box to try to determine what was inside of it that was so dangerous, but all he could ascertain was that it was a plastic bird. Yuri then invited everyone out to his car to play the cassette tape.
The tape was exactly what it said it was: copies of the record versions of Bambi and Lady & the Tramp. Someone, however, had used the extra space at the end of each to make what were obviously off-the-radio recordings of ‘Big Shot’ by Billy Joel and ‘Call Me’ by Blondie.