realsorien (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
realsorien) wrote2011-04-09 03:25 pm
realsorien) wrote2011-04-09 03:25 pm
Another Horror Writeup!
FINALLY I got this done. I hope to get #37 done today as well. Anyway, enjoy. Ignore the tense-switches in the text- I wanted to get it down, and wasn't as worried about perfection. :)
When last we left Our Heroes, they had travelled in Fey and ended up more than eight years into the future! All of their mentors are either dead (supposedly) or vanished off the face of the earth. They’ve received significant (and unexpected) inheritances, and as he was the only person they knew that they could locate, they have gone to visit Thomas Black Cloud at his home in Wyoming.
With their arrival at the reservation, Black Cloud welcomed them and made them as comfortable as possible. They gave him a brief explanation of their situation, which he accepted- however, he had limited knowledge of the fey, which puzzled at least Bill. He didn’t comment on the fact to Black Cloud or his companions, however. The shaman fed them and bade them to rest, telling them that there were those in his tribe who would want to hear their tale.
It was late evening by the time they gathered round the fire. Waiting for them were Black Cloud and a number of men, some older than the shaman, some a LOT older. They looked in curiosity at the four visitors, and awaited their tale. “So,” said Black Cloud. “It has been eight years since I last laid eyes upon you; what has occurred to you in that time?”
The four looked at each other, none sure as to who should speak first; Bill was semi-determined to NOT take the initiative this time, and for a time it was as if none would speak. Finally, Roy began.
“Well, first she got kidnapped,” he gestured to Jackie, “then we went after her. We fought some big bugs and went into a weird place that wasn’t here, then we saw someone get killed and were brought back out and we were near Boston.” He said this rather quickly, and with no storyteller’s flair. Bill rolled his eyes, and it was plain that this wasn’t what Black Cloud and his companions desired.
Jackie shoots a look at Roy, and makes an attempt; hers is a bit more detailed, but more halting; she’s not comfortable as a tale-teller. Finally, Greg takes over. He’s at least partly realized that what’s desired is a story, not just a recital. He starts slow, and initially his tale isn’t a lot better than what has gone before; Black Cloud’s associates mutter to one another, and Black Cloud says, “My friends have come here to hear a story; they are being disappointed.”
Greg swallows, pausing, and tries again. This time he tries to actually describe the scenes, to try and make the imagery come to life. Finally the story becomes a story, even if inexpertly told. The gathered men listen intently, with Black Cloud sometimes prompting Greg to greater detail. When the scorpions are mentioned, he asks Greg to describe them more closely; Bill does a crude drawing on the ground, and the men all lean to get a good look.
“There truly are dark things prowling about,” Black Cloud says.
The tale continues, Greg’s telling of their adventures in Fey and what occurred upon their return spinning out roughly; the accuracy of the narrative is questionable at best, which puts Bill’s teeth on edge, but he manages to keep his big mouth shut- this isn’t just for facts, it’s also for entertainment. FInally, the story is told and Greg goes quiet.
Black Cloud nods when Greg finishes, and speaks with his companions in their native tongue in low tones. Finally, he speaks again. “This is a place where tales are told, and a place where they speak to the spirits; my friends here have more questions, but your tale has convinced them that your cause is right, and they will help you. However, our power is not what it once was.”
As he spoke, Black Cloud’s friends were looking at Roy. They asked again, through Black Cloud, about the scorpions. After a short conversation between themselves, they have him lie down. Chanting, they place stones on different points of his body; Roy doesn’t feel anything other than silly. The evening comes to an end, and the four go to bed.
Morning arrives, with all having rested well and quietly; however, Roy’s awakening isn’t so pleasant- he’s not had any Dew for at least a day, and there is none to be found! He complains about it, grumbling. Bill looks over to him at this, saying, “you know, for someone who’s gone through as much shit as you have, you really are a wuss.”
Roy glares. “You’re lucky I don’t have any Dew.”
Each of the four are ‘recruited’ for chores; Bill does dishes, Greg chops wood with Roy attempting to help and Jackie helps with laundry. Greg gets into the work with gusto, the rhythm actually being rather relaxing. Roy... Can barely move the chopped wood. He starts getting sick, finally vomiting violently- and there are things... Moving in the material coming up!
Likely having known what was going to happen, Black Cloud appears on the scene, just after Bill has arrived as well (he’d finished the dishes). He draws a circle around the substance that Roy has coughed up, chanting. The ground buckles and rolls, rising to envelop the foulness entirely. Greg and Bill help Roy back to the cabin, and the other elders appear when Black Cloud stamps his staff on the ground three times. They look Roy over, then begin an ornate sand-painting on the floor where he lies. Bill hears, or thinks he hears someone say ‘Jackie!’ The voice seems vaguely familiar, and this is the second time he’s heard something like this. He starts listening intently.
Black Cloud, focused on the sand painting says, “Bill... Perhaps you should take Jackie for a walk; at least a quarter mile. Or more...” Jackie looks chagrined, but Bill just nods and heads for the door, waiting for her to follow. They walk down the road, and Jackie asks, “So what did you see?” She’d noticed his sudden attentiveness.
Bill’s response isn’t what she expects. He draws and extends the cold-iron sword! He keeps walking though and doesn’t seem hostile to her- just on guard.
“Bill!” She says again, getting exasperated.
“I heard someone say ‘Jackie’,” He tells her.
“Anything else?”
“No. But the voice was familiar. Not Joe, but MAYBE Gene... I’m not sure.”
Having reached at least the minimum requested distance, Bill wanders apart from Jackie and tries to hear the voice again. He succeeds, but its his own name he hears this time!
“Bill?” Its... Lazlo?
“Whoa. I thought it’d be Jackie that I reached first!” Lazlo proceeds to explain to bill that they’ve been placed in a vampire Blood Farm; none of their experiences from the point they were picked up on the freeway outside Boston were real. Instead, they were a complex shared fantasy partly generated by their own minds, partly cued by the computers they’re plugged into. Way back when they’d been part of his VR experiments, he’d primed them for future contact in a burst of his bizarre foresight.
However, the Lazlo that Bill is now speaking with is dead. He’d managed to hack into the system and send his artificial presence in, to contact any of his allies if they were captured by the vampires. In so doing, he’d been caught and killed. Bill now has the ability to ‘snap out’ of the vampire’s control... But the others have to be contacted too, and the way the control system works, he can’t just tell them! The strange conversation ends and Bill goes back to Jackie. He’s obviously upset, and his knuckles are white as he grips the sword.
“So what was all that?” She asks.
He sighs. “I... Its complicated. I can’t actually tell you... But listen for Lazlo. DON’T use your powers; that won’t help. Just... Listen for him.”
Naturally, Jackie is frustrated by this. She thinks Bill is being needlessly secretive and mysterious, not having any way of knowing that Bill really CAN’T tell her more. So she tires to hear Lazlo, and while it doesn’t come immediately she finally does.
Of course, things can’t stay simple. Greg, back in the cabin watching Roy get ‘painted into a circle’ in a literal sense, feels Jackie doing something strange through their mental link. He reaches out to her and manages to drag her into his own ‘mental world’. This breaks her connection with Lazlo for the moment. She tries to explain what’s happening, perhaps telling him TOO much, and at the same time she starts drawing in power. So much so that Greg can feel it- and Bill sees the grass nearby starting to curl up and die as she seems to be in a trance! He slaps her to snap her out of it.
She snaps out of the communication-trance, but she is still drawing power! She’s called... Something. Native american in its source, and it, or they, are NOT happy.
Bill tries drawing a protection circle- about the only magic he CAN do, and hopes that it helps. He also gets the assault rifle out and readies it.
Greg feels the horrid power wash over him. “Jackie’s calling the dead!” He whispers, then heads out of the cabin to see what he can do- the sky has darkened with grey stormclouds, and things are dying in an ever-widening circle around Jackie and Bill. He yells for Black Cloud, and feels Jackie’s power drawing on himself as well!
Black Cloud steps out and sees what’s happening. He says, “Oh no...” And starts to run to the pair in the distance. Around Bill and Jackie there are the ghostly forms of hundreds of Native American warriors. Bill slaps Jackie again, hoping to break her concentration and disperse the spirits... But it doesn’t work. Her eyes open, and they’re WHITE. The warriors swarm across the useless circle, one of them stabbing Bill with an all-too-solid blade! He knows he’s got one chance, and he doesn’t want to do it- Jackie has to be knocked out or killed to dispel the calling. He raises the rifle, yelling “Jackie, don’t!”
Black Cloud and Greg are charging towards the terrifying scene, getting close. Black Cloud has been chanting the entire time, building his own power for the coming confrontation. Jackie apparently senses them and turns to attack Black Cloud- No longer having an option, Bill fires- the round rips through her shoulder, throwing her attack off; there is a vast, sonorous rumble through the earth, and the spirits are simply gone. Jackie collapses, and so does Black Cloud.
Greg quickly checks Black Cloud, and finds no pulse or breathing. He goes to see to Bill and Jackie, thinking that there likely isn’t anything he can do for the old shaman. Both his friends are breathing, but Bill is the worse off. When Bill asks about Black Cloud, Greg tells him what he’d found... And Bill goes to help the shaman despite his injuries. Greg sighs and goes to help Jackie. Not long after, Bill collapses from bloodloss.
Greg does what he can to stabilize his friends, soon joined by the Elders. They take custody of Black Cloud, and Bill is moved into the cabin. Jackie is pointedly not brought inside. Bill is totally out, but at least he’s stable. Roy, who is up and about once again, snorts in disgust at the bandaging that’s been done to Bill. He makes a snide comment and redoes the bindings properly. He repeats the process on Jackie, and wonders aloud about the gunshot wound.
By this time Jackie is awake, and gets told what happened by Greg. She recalls little of what happened, and goes into hysterics when she learns of Black Cloud’s death.
Finally... The Elders gather Black Cloud’s form up and take him out of sight. They return shortly thereafter and say to Greg, “you and your friends are no longer welcome here.” Greg nods, and soon the quartet are loaded into the pickup with their belongings. A short ride later and they’re deposited at the edge of the reservation. Bill is still out. There’s some argument as to what to do, but no real solution to the mess comes to mind. Jackie is horribly upset about Black Cloud, and being unconscious there really isn’t a hell of a lot Bill can say. The conversation is terminated when the State Patrol finds them. Jackie and Bill go to the hospital (all of Bills weaponry having been returned to the deep-secret pocket of the coat), with Roy and Greg going to jail.
Time passes. Greg and Roy get a meal at the jail, and are told that they’re going to be there until things can be sorted out- there are a lot of suspicious things about the circumstances as well as about the half-assed story the police were given. Greg accepts this, and asks to make his phone call.
This is allowed, and within what seems to be seconds a lawyer from Dewey, Screwem & Howe is there to rescue them... So to speak. They don’t know what Bill knows after all. The pair are released, and decide to head to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a close starting point for the commune wherein Greg hopes to find Ariel and her mother. Unspoken are two possibilities- the first, that the dwellers therein will simply eat him and Roy in a literal sense, and the other, that there is no longer anything there to find.
At the same time, Bill and Jackie are moved from the small-town hospital to a much larger and better-equipped facility in Cheyanne, Wyoming. Both are in no condition to do much of anything, and Bill is still out cold- a condition unlikely to change soon. For Greg and Roy a ten hour drive from Albuquerque to the commune is ahead.
Most of the drive passes in silence. Greg is worried at what he’ll find, as is Roy- but Roy is a lot calmer about the whole situation. Greg is fighting his internal conflicts the entire way. Finally, they reach their destination.
Nothing remains but sandy earth and scrub growth. Roy sees some signs that something might have been here once, but its scant evidence.
Greg starts to search with increasing panic, digging in the loose soil bare handed- it takes a great deal of time.... But he finds what looks to be a mass grave. He stares at what he’s uncovered, and the directional stone for locating Ariel mutely points into the pit. He re-covers the remains, shaken to his core. He mutters to Roy, “I think we need to go back to Arkham...”
They decide to spend the night at the site; more precisely, Greg decides this. They make a small fire, Greg taking pains to not molest any spiderwebs that he comes across. He also tries to talk with every spider that he sees, with little result. He’s not taking things well to say the least. Later, a tarantula does appear at the campsite, and seems to listen to Greg; it doesn’t give much of a response to him though.
In the meantime Jackie has woken up; she’d been drugged for surgery on her wound, and for the transit to the larger hospital. She asks the nurse what’s going on, but the woman doesn’t know anything. However, a lawyer shows up shortly thereafter and explains what has happened since her injury... Or as much of it as he knows. He’s a vampire, and given what she now knows the fact makes her VERY uneasy.
The night is passing for Greg and Roy, though not comfortably- Roy is worried that Greg may now be psychologically unstable, and this isn’t far from the truth- however... Greg is finally reached by the Lazlo-recording. This changes a lot, and while he initially doesn’t quite believe it, it gives hope that things could change for the better- the horrors that he’s felt of late could all be a facade, and that hope is one he can readily accept.
He comes to somewhat less rattled, and more sane-seeming. He convinces Roy that they need to get moving back to Jackie and Bill, and shortly head out on that path. This isn’t to say that the trip goes quietly- Jackie makes contact with Greg, and the pair end up duelling psychically with pain- Jackie hurts her arm which Greg feels, so Greg punches the car, which SHE feels, and so on until she shuts down the link.
After this, Jackie tries to stay awake. She fails due to the painkillers and her generally poor condition. When she again wakes, she chastises herself and decides to go see Bill. She finds that he’s been moved to a private room as opposed to the ICU. After getting directions she finally finds him,
“So what did Lazlo tell you?” She starts off, the annoyance obvious in her voice. Her contact was interrupted and unlike Bill and Greg she’s not gotten the entire story. Bill, who is not in the best of moods and is half-crocked on painkillers, doesn’t respond well. She storms out as quickly as she can as walking wounded, and makes her way to the hospital chapel. As she arrives there, Greg once again contacts her and she allows the contact. He tells her that she needs to sleep and talk to Lazlo, and that he really can’t tell her more.
Back in Bill’s room, the nurse has arrived to check on him. He asks for the feeding tube and catheter to be removed, and gets no for an answer. He asks again more politely, and this time gets a maybe, and the nurse leaves. He grumps at being treated like he’s a child, not really thinking about how he’s actually acting like one.
Jackie has taken Greg’s advice, and gone back to bed for sleep and a possible conversation with Lazlo- it works, and she is at last fully clued in as to their situation. Eventually, Greg and Roy arrive, and the group gather in Bill’s room, he being the least mobile of the quartet. They figure out how to clue Roy in (he’d never experienced Lazlo’s VR machine), and concentrate on his instructions.
There is a small of disinfectant, and blood. It is slightly cool, and small twinges of pain tickle at them from their shoulders and arms. They seem to be standing up, or at least supported in an upright position. One by one they open their eyes- they’re wired to a high-tech pillar, with tubes running into them and wires through them pinning them to the pillar...
And there we broke for the night. Stay tuned for the next episode!
When last we left Our Heroes, they had travelled in Fey and ended up more than eight years into the future! All of their mentors are either dead (supposedly) or vanished off the face of the earth. They’ve received significant (and unexpected) inheritances, and as he was the only person they knew that they could locate, they have gone to visit Thomas Black Cloud at his home in Wyoming.
With their arrival at the reservation, Black Cloud welcomed them and made them as comfortable as possible. They gave him a brief explanation of their situation, which he accepted- however, he had limited knowledge of the fey, which puzzled at least Bill. He didn’t comment on the fact to Black Cloud or his companions, however. The shaman fed them and bade them to rest, telling them that there were those in his tribe who would want to hear their tale.
It was late evening by the time they gathered round the fire. Waiting for them were Black Cloud and a number of men, some older than the shaman, some a LOT older. They looked in curiosity at the four visitors, and awaited their tale. “So,” said Black Cloud. “It has been eight years since I last laid eyes upon you; what has occurred to you in that time?”
The four looked at each other, none sure as to who should speak first; Bill was semi-determined to NOT take the initiative this time, and for a time it was as if none would speak. Finally, Roy began.
“Well, first she got kidnapped,” he gestured to Jackie, “then we went after her. We fought some big bugs and went into a weird place that wasn’t here, then we saw someone get killed and were brought back out and we were near Boston.” He said this rather quickly, and with no storyteller’s flair. Bill rolled his eyes, and it was plain that this wasn’t what Black Cloud and his companions desired.
Jackie shoots a look at Roy, and makes an attempt; hers is a bit more detailed, but more halting; she’s not comfortable as a tale-teller. Finally, Greg takes over. He’s at least partly realized that what’s desired is a story, not just a recital. He starts slow, and initially his tale isn’t a lot better than what has gone before; Black Cloud’s associates mutter to one another, and Black Cloud says, “My friends have come here to hear a story; they are being disappointed.”
Greg swallows, pausing, and tries again. This time he tries to actually describe the scenes, to try and make the imagery come to life. Finally the story becomes a story, even if inexpertly told. The gathered men listen intently, with Black Cloud sometimes prompting Greg to greater detail. When the scorpions are mentioned, he asks Greg to describe them more closely; Bill does a crude drawing on the ground, and the men all lean to get a good look.
“There truly are dark things prowling about,” Black Cloud says.
The tale continues, Greg’s telling of their adventures in Fey and what occurred upon their return spinning out roughly; the accuracy of the narrative is questionable at best, which puts Bill’s teeth on edge, but he manages to keep his big mouth shut- this isn’t just for facts, it’s also for entertainment. FInally, the story is told and Greg goes quiet.
Black Cloud nods when Greg finishes, and speaks with his companions in their native tongue in low tones. Finally, he speaks again. “This is a place where tales are told, and a place where they speak to the spirits; my friends here have more questions, but your tale has convinced them that your cause is right, and they will help you. However, our power is not what it once was.”
As he spoke, Black Cloud’s friends were looking at Roy. They asked again, through Black Cloud, about the scorpions. After a short conversation between themselves, they have him lie down. Chanting, they place stones on different points of his body; Roy doesn’t feel anything other than silly. The evening comes to an end, and the four go to bed.
Morning arrives, with all having rested well and quietly; however, Roy’s awakening isn’t so pleasant- he’s not had any Dew for at least a day, and there is none to be found! He complains about it, grumbling. Bill looks over to him at this, saying, “you know, for someone who’s gone through as much shit as you have, you really are a wuss.”
Roy glares. “You’re lucky I don’t have any Dew.”
Each of the four are ‘recruited’ for chores; Bill does dishes, Greg chops wood with Roy attempting to help and Jackie helps with laundry. Greg gets into the work with gusto, the rhythm actually being rather relaxing. Roy... Can barely move the chopped wood. He starts getting sick, finally vomiting violently- and there are things... Moving in the material coming up!
Likely having known what was going to happen, Black Cloud appears on the scene, just after Bill has arrived as well (he’d finished the dishes). He draws a circle around the substance that Roy has coughed up, chanting. The ground buckles and rolls, rising to envelop the foulness entirely. Greg and Bill help Roy back to the cabin, and the other elders appear when Black Cloud stamps his staff on the ground three times. They look Roy over, then begin an ornate sand-painting on the floor where he lies. Bill hears, or thinks he hears someone say ‘Jackie!’ The voice seems vaguely familiar, and this is the second time he’s heard something like this. He starts listening intently.
Black Cloud, focused on the sand painting says, “Bill... Perhaps you should take Jackie for a walk; at least a quarter mile. Or more...” Jackie looks chagrined, but Bill just nods and heads for the door, waiting for her to follow. They walk down the road, and Jackie asks, “So what did you see?” She’d noticed his sudden attentiveness.
Bill’s response isn’t what she expects. He draws and extends the cold-iron sword! He keeps walking though and doesn’t seem hostile to her- just on guard.
“Bill!” She says again, getting exasperated.
“I heard someone say ‘Jackie’,” He tells her.
“Anything else?”
“No. But the voice was familiar. Not Joe, but MAYBE Gene... I’m not sure.”
Having reached at least the minimum requested distance, Bill wanders apart from Jackie and tries to hear the voice again. He succeeds, but its his own name he hears this time!
“Bill?” Its... Lazlo?
“Whoa. I thought it’d be Jackie that I reached first!” Lazlo proceeds to explain to bill that they’ve been placed in a vampire Blood Farm; none of their experiences from the point they were picked up on the freeway outside Boston were real. Instead, they were a complex shared fantasy partly generated by their own minds, partly cued by the computers they’re plugged into. Way back when they’d been part of his VR experiments, he’d primed them for future contact in a burst of his bizarre foresight.
However, the Lazlo that Bill is now speaking with is dead. He’d managed to hack into the system and send his artificial presence in, to contact any of his allies if they were captured by the vampires. In so doing, he’d been caught and killed. Bill now has the ability to ‘snap out’ of the vampire’s control... But the others have to be contacted too, and the way the control system works, he can’t just tell them! The strange conversation ends and Bill goes back to Jackie. He’s obviously upset, and his knuckles are white as he grips the sword.
“So what was all that?” She asks.
He sighs. “I... Its complicated. I can’t actually tell you... But listen for Lazlo. DON’T use your powers; that won’t help. Just... Listen for him.”
Naturally, Jackie is frustrated by this. She thinks Bill is being needlessly secretive and mysterious, not having any way of knowing that Bill really CAN’T tell her more. So she tires to hear Lazlo, and while it doesn’t come immediately she finally does.
Of course, things can’t stay simple. Greg, back in the cabin watching Roy get ‘painted into a circle’ in a literal sense, feels Jackie doing something strange through their mental link. He reaches out to her and manages to drag her into his own ‘mental world’. This breaks her connection with Lazlo for the moment. She tries to explain what’s happening, perhaps telling him TOO much, and at the same time she starts drawing in power. So much so that Greg can feel it- and Bill sees the grass nearby starting to curl up and die as she seems to be in a trance! He slaps her to snap her out of it.
She snaps out of the communication-trance, but she is still drawing power! She’s called... Something. Native american in its source, and it, or they, are NOT happy.
Bill tries drawing a protection circle- about the only magic he CAN do, and hopes that it helps. He also gets the assault rifle out and readies it.
Greg feels the horrid power wash over him. “Jackie’s calling the dead!” He whispers, then heads out of the cabin to see what he can do- the sky has darkened with grey stormclouds, and things are dying in an ever-widening circle around Jackie and Bill. He yells for Black Cloud, and feels Jackie’s power drawing on himself as well!
Black Cloud steps out and sees what’s happening. He says, “Oh no...” And starts to run to the pair in the distance. Around Bill and Jackie there are the ghostly forms of hundreds of Native American warriors. Bill slaps Jackie again, hoping to break her concentration and disperse the spirits... But it doesn’t work. Her eyes open, and they’re WHITE. The warriors swarm across the useless circle, one of them stabbing Bill with an all-too-solid blade! He knows he’s got one chance, and he doesn’t want to do it- Jackie has to be knocked out or killed to dispel the calling. He raises the rifle, yelling “Jackie, don’t!”
Black Cloud and Greg are charging towards the terrifying scene, getting close. Black Cloud has been chanting the entire time, building his own power for the coming confrontation. Jackie apparently senses them and turns to attack Black Cloud- No longer having an option, Bill fires- the round rips through her shoulder, throwing her attack off; there is a vast, sonorous rumble through the earth, and the spirits are simply gone. Jackie collapses, and so does Black Cloud.
Greg quickly checks Black Cloud, and finds no pulse or breathing. He goes to see to Bill and Jackie, thinking that there likely isn’t anything he can do for the old shaman. Both his friends are breathing, but Bill is the worse off. When Bill asks about Black Cloud, Greg tells him what he’d found... And Bill goes to help the shaman despite his injuries. Greg sighs and goes to help Jackie. Not long after, Bill collapses from bloodloss.
Greg does what he can to stabilize his friends, soon joined by the Elders. They take custody of Black Cloud, and Bill is moved into the cabin. Jackie is pointedly not brought inside. Bill is totally out, but at least he’s stable. Roy, who is up and about once again, snorts in disgust at the bandaging that’s been done to Bill. He makes a snide comment and redoes the bindings properly. He repeats the process on Jackie, and wonders aloud about the gunshot wound.
By this time Jackie is awake, and gets told what happened by Greg. She recalls little of what happened, and goes into hysterics when she learns of Black Cloud’s death.
Finally... The Elders gather Black Cloud’s form up and take him out of sight. They return shortly thereafter and say to Greg, “you and your friends are no longer welcome here.” Greg nods, and soon the quartet are loaded into the pickup with their belongings. A short ride later and they’re deposited at the edge of the reservation. Bill is still out. There’s some argument as to what to do, but no real solution to the mess comes to mind. Jackie is horribly upset about Black Cloud, and being unconscious there really isn’t a hell of a lot Bill can say. The conversation is terminated when the State Patrol finds them. Jackie and Bill go to the hospital (all of Bills weaponry having been returned to the deep-secret pocket of the coat), with Roy and Greg going to jail.
Time passes. Greg and Roy get a meal at the jail, and are told that they’re going to be there until things can be sorted out- there are a lot of suspicious things about the circumstances as well as about the half-assed story the police were given. Greg accepts this, and asks to make his phone call.
This is allowed, and within what seems to be seconds a lawyer from Dewey, Screwem & Howe is there to rescue them... So to speak. They don’t know what Bill knows after all. The pair are released, and decide to head to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a close starting point for the commune wherein Greg hopes to find Ariel and her mother. Unspoken are two possibilities- the first, that the dwellers therein will simply eat him and Roy in a literal sense, and the other, that there is no longer anything there to find.
At the same time, Bill and Jackie are moved from the small-town hospital to a much larger and better-equipped facility in Cheyanne, Wyoming. Both are in no condition to do much of anything, and Bill is still out cold- a condition unlikely to change soon. For Greg and Roy a ten hour drive from Albuquerque to the commune is ahead.
Most of the drive passes in silence. Greg is worried at what he’ll find, as is Roy- but Roy is a lot calmer about the whole situation. Greg is fighting his internal conflicts the entire way. Finally, they reach their destination.
Nothing remains but sandy earth and scrub growth. Roy sees some signs that something might have been here once, but its scant evidence.
Greg starts to search with increasing panic, digging in the loose soil bare handed- it takes a great deal of time.... But he finds what looks to be a mass grave. He stares at what he’s uncovered, and the directional stone for locating Ariel mutely points into the pit. He re-covers the remains, shaken to his core. He mutters to Roy, “I think we need to go back to Arkham...”
They decide to spend the night at the site; more precisely, Greg decides this. They make a small fire, Greg taking pains to not molest any spiderwebs that he comes across. He also tries to talk with every spider that he sees, with little result. He’s not taking things well to say the least. Later, a tarantula does appear at the campsite, and seems to listen to Greg; it doesn’t give much of a response to him though.
In the meantime Jackie has woken up; she’d been drugged for surgery on her wound, and for the transit to the larger hospital. She asks the nurse what’s going on, but the woman doesn’t know anything. However, a lawyer shows up shortly thereafter and explains what has happened since her injury... Or as much of it as he knows. He’s a vampire, and given what she now knows the fact makes her VERY uneasy.
The night is passing for Greg and Roy, though not comfortably- Roy is worried that Greg may now be psychologically unstable, and this isn’t far from the truth- however... Greg is finally reached by the Lazlo-recording. This changes a lot, and while he initially doesn’t quite believe it, it gives hope that things could change for the better- the horrors that he’s felt of late could all be a facade, and that hope is one he can readily accept.
He comes to somewhat less rattled, and more sane-seeming. He convinces Roy that they need to get moving back to Jackie and Bill, and shortly head out on that path. This isn’t to say that the trip goes quietly- Jackie makes contact with Greg, and the pair end up duelling psychically with pain- Jackie hurts her arm which Greg feels, so Greg punches the car, which SHE feels, and so on until she shuts down the link.
After this, Jackie tries to stay awake. She fails due to the painkillers and her generally poor condition. When she again wakes, she chastises herself and decides to go see Bill. She finds that he’s been moved to a private room as opposed to the ICU. After getting directions she finally finds him,
“So what did Lazlo tell you?” She starts off, the annoyance obvious in her voice. Her contact was interrupted and unlike Bill and Greg she’s not gotten the entire story. Bill, who is not in the best of moods and is half-crocked on painkillers, doesn’t respond well. She storms out as quickly as she can as walking wounded, and makes her way to the hospital chapel. As she arrives there, Greg once again contacts her and she allows the contact. He tells her that she needs to sleep and talk to Lazlo, and that he really can’t tell her more.
Back in Bill’s room, the nurse has arrived to check on him. He asks for the feeding tube and catheter to be removed, and gets no for an answer. He asks again more politely, and this time gets a maybe, and the nurse leaves. He grumps at being treated like he’s a child, not really thinking about how he’s actually acting like one.
Jackie has taken Greg’s advice, and gone back to bed for sleep and a possible conversation with Lazlo- it works, and she is at last fully clued in as to their situation. Eventually, Greg and Roy arrive, and the group gather in Bill’s room, he being the least mobile of the quartet. They figure out how to clue Roy in (he’d never experienced Lazlo’s VR machine), and concentrate on his instructions.
There is a small of disinfectant, and blood. It is slightly cool, and small twinges of pain tickle at them from their shoulders and arms. They seem to be standing up, or at least supported in an upright position. One by one they open their eyes- they’re wired to a high-tech pillar, with tubes running into them and wires through them pinning them to the pillar...
And there we broke for the night. Stay tuned for the next episode!