Miren also pauses to watch the familiar colors of home fade and shift to twilight shades of grey. The scent of water and vegetation hangs heavily in the air, strange and strong. Like Nace, she opens her perception to the world beyond and scans the shoreline.
Pierce the veil.
*Wait! Don't look! I don't want to see what the old man talked about.*
Miren shivered as some of the spirit child's fear bled into her own psyche. She breathed slowly and deeply to regain equilibrium.
We're looking for traces of the past, yázhi, not for something to battle. You heard him - that thing is too strong for us now. We won't try to fight it yet.
*I don't even want to SEE it.*
Miren tried to feel calm and reassuring. Anything we see will be pictures of the past. Don't worry.
Nace takes a moment to pause and Pierce the Veil.
Nace’s vision grows sepia-toned, and the scene alters. He sees the pond, but there are far fewer trees surrounding it. The forest has been replaced by farmland. It looks as if it is just after harvest, the fields bare except for a few haystacks. A rutted path runs roughly the same route as the path they had taken, except wider. As Nace watches, a small cart hitched to a horse comes into view.
Leading the animal is a man dressed in homespun and with denim bib overalls on, none too cleanly. His lanky brown hair is plastered to his skull and he looks tired. He guides the wagon down the fork in the path leading towards where the rental cottages stood. There is a ramshackle farm perched there now. As the wagon travels past Nace’s view, he sees several of the rune stones stacked in the back. The wagon makes its slow way towards the distant farm. Nace’s vision fades
Miren also pauses to watch the familiar colors of home fade and shift to twilight shades of grey. The scent of water and vegetation hangs heavily in the air, strange and strong. Like Nace, she opens her perception to the world beyond and scans the shoreline.
Pierce the veil. [dice=Perception]1d20+8
Miren is not granted a vision of the past - rather when she opens her perceptions, she sees the present still. Her eyes are drawn to a long dock that juts out over the pond from the distant campground complex. Out beyond it the water glows red with the setting sun, almost mirror still. As she looks at the water, two spots about 30 feet from the end of the dock bubble with a dark liquid. This liquid spreads into dark amorphous blobs staining the sunset waters an inky dark hue. Miren feels her skin crawling
Nace blinks and looks back at the others. ”I think I might have seen where some of the stones were taken. They were used in the construction of a farmhouse over that way. I’m not sure what use that is to us. It’s not like we can ask, ‘Hey, do you still need those stones that are holding up your house?’ But maybe it could help us understand what’s happening here.”
"Interesting," Miren answers Nace as her eyes scan the ara for mundane dangers, one hand resting on her sword, the other hovering near her handgun. Turning to look at Miren, she tenses as she notes the other woman stiffen slightly at whatever it is she sees.
Miren raises an arm and points to the water, in the general direction of a pier. "What... what is that?" Her hand trembles.
Miyuku shifts her vision as well at Miren's prompting, peering across the veil.
Miyuku also sees the spreading black stains on the pond
"That's now, but maybe it's because of the past? Think we should go closer - like to the end of that pier - and look closer?"
*No!*
Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to go into the water and look... but now that I think about it, that's not a bad idea...
*NO!*
"I think whatever that is, we can't just ignore it, so I guess so." Miyuku replies.
Nace stays alert. ”Does it look dangerous? Should we be ready for something to meet us?”
"I... I'm sorry. I'm not being very informative if you're not looking in the beyond," Miren glances apologetically at Nace, obviously still shaken. "I don't know what it is. Black... stuff is bubbling up from two places off that pier. It seems very wrong."
The party heads towards the rental cottage complex and the dock. A sign reads:
Adam’s Pond Comfort Cabins. Est. 1955
The complex is a set of five cottages set in a semicircle around a center area that looks as if it has been used extensively for sports. There is a volleyball net set up at one end and what looks to be several storage lockers commonly used for sports equipment on the periphery. The grass is almost worn away, and a trail leads to the dock which sits on the pond facing the cottages. On the other side of the cottages is a small gravel parking lot, empty save for several small boats on trailers, shrouded in tarps. Dirt driveways feed out to the cottages from the lot. From the back of the gravel lot a dirt road heads back through the forest, presumably meeting up with the road the group came to the Bailey House on.
There is one larger cottage and four smaller ones. The larger cottage sits in the center of the semicircle with two small cottages on either side of it. There is an old Plymouth minivan parked outside of one of the smaller cottages with Massachusetts plates. This cottage has lights on within. The other four cabins are dark, and look as if they are unoccupied.
In the center of the scuffed common area is an old well. It looks as if it was capped, and is no longer functional
Nace pierces the veil, to see if there is anything of interest among these cabins.
Nace scans the cabins in the fading light. His eye alights on the central capped well. There are several black runnels dripping down the well’s stones. The darkness seems to be issuing from under the well cap
”The well. It’s like it’s overrunning with darkness. I wonder if it’s the same kind of thing you saw in the lake.” Nace moves to give the well a closer inspection.
Drawing her sword, Miyuku follows with a nod.
There is still enough light to see by, but the sun is now below the horizon. The reddish clouds are fading quickly to brown.
The party walks into the cabin area. There is a lonely feeling to the place, an abandoned air that summer places assume when the tourists head home. Piles of leaves have collected in drifts wherever there is a place sheltered from the wind. Aside from the one lit cabin, the area is dark.
Approaching the well, the group sees that it is capped with a circular steel cap. There is a chain that is linked to a concrete patch to one side that loops over the cap and threads through two metal loops welded to the cap before ending at another concrete patch which has a metal loop sunk into it and a padlock locking the chain in place. A neat sign under plexiglass on the cap reads:
DANGER- Unused well. Do not attempt to open cap. If opening is necessary, the keys can be obtained at the main office
"What do you think? Might be worth checking out. Although I doubt they would give us the key."
Nace pierces the veil again.
Nace's mystic sight can see the darkness now, dripping from the well. This close, the black fluid seems almost alive. Its motion isn't like a fluid, more like questing small tentacles of night.
Nace's sharp eyes also pick up that the stones of the well have several broken pieces of the barrow stones incorporated into it. It looks like perhaps the farmer he saw earlier had broken up the stelae to fashion rock to line the well. The lines are very worn, but still slightly visible. His preternatural sight can see the faintest of blue glimmers off the carvings.
Finally, he notes that the iron staple holding the chain on the non-padlocked side is very rusted, and looks as if some bored child was hacking at it at some point. It might be possible to snap it and free the chain without unlocking the padlock.
Returning his vision to the mundane world, Nace tells the others what he saw.
”What do you think we would find in here?” he asks at the conclusion, as he absently kicks at the chain.
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Coyote Jones walks along the blacktop, his scuffed boots crunching the drifts of leaves collected along the shoulder. Occasionally a car blasts by, hurrying on its way to somewhere. He can hear the drivers’ thoughts like snatches of distant radio
… i told him not to fnuck with me ….
… that b!tch has a smart mouth but she is fine…
… kill kill anger anger revenge….
… i want a hamburger, no i want a cheeseburger….
Long experience allows him to let the thoughts become background, like the songs of the birds in the trees. He looks up at the sky, judging that he doesn’t have long before night falls completely. Judging from how many drunken thoughts he’s picked up from drivers before, he reckons it’s a good time to get off the road.
His last ride had told him the town he was in was called Halifax. When he had gotten dropped off, his intuition had told him to walk this way. So he had. Something was ahead, but he was damned if he knew what it was. Whatever it was, it hadn’t shown itself yet.
He adjusts his backpack and slogs on. Ahead a sign reads,
Adam’s Pond Comfort Cabins. Established 1955
Judging from the leaves on the side road, it didn’t get a lot of traffic. He gets a hunch this is the way to go. If not, there might be an unoccupied cabin or shed he could bunk in for the night. He heads off the highway.
After a short walk in the darkening gloam, he arrives at a small group of cabins on a lake. It looks fairly abandoned, but one cabin is lit, and there seems to be a trio of people standing about something near the center of the campground
.
A slender, young, tanned woman looks out of place in the New England autumn, seeing as how she's wearing a ponytail under a weathered brown Stetson wool hat, a plaid shirt with a brown oilskin rancher's jacket over it, and faded and worn boot cut jeans with what looks like the square toe of actual cowboy boots poking out from beneath the frayed jeans bottom. A compact sling bag completes her outfit. Some stray wisps of black hair, too short for her ponytail, have settled into damp, curling tendrils around her almost absurdly beautiful face with odd gold eyes, looking almost as if a model's face had been photoshopped onto an ordinary body with worn utilitarian clothing.
As he sizes up the group, the woman shoves a couple of the wisps away from her eyes, hardly paying attention to her own actions. Her attention is focused on something in the common area between the semicircle of cabins. She stares fixedly at the thing and seems to be muttering to herself unconsciously.
A man in his mid-20s is inspecting the old well. Over his broad-shouldered frame he wears jeans, a light blue sweater, and a black jacket. He has tanned skin and a mess of bright ginger hair, and his eyes are conspicuously different colors - one blue iris and one red-orange iris that seems to dance with flame.
He takes a close look at the chain holding the well cap in place.
Clad in black jeans, a long hooded black cardigan, over a fitted black tee and calf-high boots, another young woman stands alongside her companions. Bearing a rather attractive blend of European and Asian features, she quite notably holds a black-bladed wakizashi in her hand, her other hand resting near her hip. Long, raven-black hair moves in the light breeze as sharp violet eyes scan the area for signs of anything unusual, her porcelain pale face, accentuated with subtly dark makeup, a mask of focused intensity, her body language poised like a hunting cat.
Sensing the three figures standing around the well long before he sees them, Coyote approaches cautiously. Stashing his backpack under the low boughs of a pine tree, he moves to within a few dozen yards and sits down on the ground in the darkness.
OK, this is unexpected. Three Sci-Fi channel original movie characters staring at a leaky septic tank cap in the dark. Some kind of cult thing?
Coyote lights a cigarette, then quietly flattens himself against the ground in the puckerbrush just outside the campsite.
Maybe there's a film crew hiding somewhere. Or it's the skinwalkers again, and these are just weird meat-costumes. Nah, too obvious...
His brow furrows.
Or, they're working for The Machine. That would be bad.
Closing his eyes, he extends his senses outward toward the trio and the area around the well.
*Yázhi, can you see anything I can't about this well?*
Her shadow-blooded eyes easily piercing the gloom, Miyuku notices the stranger approaching and sitting not far from where she and her companions stand observing the well, her eyes narrowing as he lights a cigarette and squats down, clearly observing them.
To even the casual observer, the young woman goes preternaturally still, her gaze locked on the newcomer, though for anyone able to read beyond the surface a sensation, akin to the click of a sword being released in the scabbard, or a firearm's safety being disengaged, resonates in her mind.
"We have company!' she advises her friends in a terse whisper.
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"Tell me it's not Santa Claus," Miren mutters back. "Or Jeff Bezos, who I'm convinced is a wendigo."
Miren tugs the brim of her hat down to shadow her face, but continues studying the well, unconcerned with the newcomer - or at least confident in her friend's ability to handle one person.
Coyote casts his senses out towards the group. He gets a quick gleam of bright auras before a wall slides between him and them. He’s impressed. Few people can block their thoughts so efficiently
Coyote hears the snap of a twig under his body as he flattens out. The others heads swivel about
”Care to introduce yourself?” Nace calls out warily, looking to the direction of the sound.
Coyote hears the snap of a twig under his body as he flattens out. The others heads swivel about
"S@++," Coyote hisses under his breath. He doesn't move from his hiding spot, though.
"I think our observer would like to believe himself still unseen." Miyuku says, just loudly enough to ensure that the less-than-stealthy newcomer hears it.
With Butterfly's sting still drawn, but held low in a reverse grip, the woman in black stands up, eyes locked on the hiding man as she strides toward his position with the prowling confidence of a panther.
"But there's no point to hiding."
Time for plan B. Let's see... play dumb? Nah... Refuge in audacity? Nah, too dangerous... Both? OK, that might work...
Coyote waits until Miyuku is standing almost on top of him, then lazily rolls onto his back. He stares up at the woman in black, taking a long, slow pull from his cigarette.
"The f&#! are you staring at?" he drawls, exhaling a puff of smoke with each word.
"Someone nowhere near as good at hiding as he thinks." she replies with an arched eyebrow and a confident smirk. She stops, just outside of the range of his smoke, her posture relaxed, both non-threatening and unthreatened.
"Someone nowhere near as good at hiding as he thinks."
Though Miyuku seems ready to kill him on the spot if it comes down to it, Coyote seems to either not notice or not care. He cocks his head to the side, glancing off into the darkness.
"Yeah? Where? I don't see 'em."
Slowly, he rolls over again and pulls himself into a sitting position. Taking one last drag from his cigarette, he flicks the smoldering filter end into the woods.
"Anyway... I was just looking to head over and check out those cabins. Maybe see if anyone left anything I can steal, or I might take a nap. Maybe both. Sorry if I'm getting in the way of your Vampire LARP or whatever..."
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Nace smirks. This does kind of feel like a LARP. If only it were so simple. ”Sorry to interrupt your… burglary… or whatever. Do you always just announce that sort of thing?”
Nace smirks. This does kind of feel like a LARP. If only it were so simple. ”Sorry to interrupt your… burglary… or whatever. Do you always just announce that sort of thing?”
Coyote shrugs as he slowly rises from his seat on the ground.
"Sometimes. Most people just kind of ignore me, so it's not like it matters."
He fishes around in an inside pocket of his coat, producing a somewhat squashed pack of Delicados Supremos and placing one in his mouth. Quite nonchalantly, he conjures a marble-sized ball of brilliant green fire in the palm of his hand, lights his cigarette, and takes a long pull, the flames reflecting off the lenses of black plastic sunglasses.
The brief flash of light finally illuminates the odd figure standing in the gloom. The man is of average height, but skeletally thin, and he wears an old brown Carhartt coat over a worn zip-up hoodie that might have once been green, faded blue jeans, and scuffed steel-toe work boots. His face is harsh and angular, with leathery, dead-looking skin, and his dark, slicked-back hair is shot through with silver. Across his throat and the sides of his neck is a large, intricate tattoo of a butterfly or moth, executed in an odd, ancient-seeming style--not quite Greco-Roman, not quite Mesoamerican.
What stands out most, though, are his mangled hands. Only a couple fingers are still intact, and some are missing down to the palm. The skin is blackened, as if completely tattooed, or maybe charred by fire.
He exhales, letting out a large cloud of tobacco smoke.
"So are you gonna let me through or not?"
Nace’s eyes widen a bit at the magic trick. ”I’m not standing in your way,” he says. ”I can’t be an accessory to burglary, so if that’s your angle, best to move along. It’s certainly not why we’re here. But I gotta wonder - surely there’s better uses for your… talents.”
He runs his fingers through his unruly red hair as he considers what to say next. ”There’s something not right about this place. Something happened here a long time ago. Maybe you’ve felt that - or seen something. Do you ever see things that are not of the mundane world?”
Coyote lets out a small laugh, then falls silent for a moment before answering.
"That's great... "things that are not of the mundane world." Who the f*@& talks like that? I'm guessing you kids are pretty new to this."
Nace bristles a bit at that. His eyes briefly blaze with fire that quickly subsides. ”Enlighten us then. What do you call all this weird s%$@? What do you see when you look at this well?”
Miyuku tilts her head slightly, studying the man even more intently. If possible, it seemed as if the shadows were deeper around her, despite her being the one standing closest to Coyote.
"People who perceive more than most, is who." she quips back in response to the snarky question. "Like you for instance...clearly much more to you than what's on the surface...I just haven't decided if it's dangerous enough to do something about yet."
"People who perceive more than most, is who." she quips back in response to the snarky question. "Like you for instance...clearly much more to you than what's on the surface...I just haven't decided if it's dangerous enough to do something about yet."
Coyote takes another drag from his cigarette, his expression blank.
"Me? I'm just a harmless woodland creature. Nothing any self-respecting space ninja need worry herself about."
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”What do you see when you look at this well?”
"Not sure, but I can tell you what I see when I look at it poorly."
Coyote squints at the dark ooze spreading from the well, craning his neck to peer around the shadowy woman crowding his personal space.
"Some kind of slime, looks like. Maybe play it some Jackie Wilson, see if it'll dance."
Coyote had never seen anything like this before. But it doesn’t take a college degree to figure out that stuff is bad juju