Nick "Nicodemus" Dalton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nick_garou) wrote2016-01-21 10:16 am
nick_garou) wrote2016-01-21 10:16 am
Revelations about the ooze
This past weekend, Salem, Silvertip, Esther, Briari, Ghost and I took the Winnebago out to Olympia, WA with an eye towards examining the place where Ghost and her extended group had been hit by the Ooze's minions. (Echoes, I later learned they're called, but that's jumping ahead.) We did a drive-by of the location--it was a bunker of sorts near a suburb--and kept going. We parked several blocks away, Silvertip created some kind of animated gremlin/spy using a Native American kachina doll, and turned it loose to go spy on the bunker area to make sure it was safe. We settled in and rested, waiting until night had really and truly fallen, and then the garou went out on their raid. I'd hooked Salem up with a Bluetooth earpiece to make it a little easier for me to "ride shotgun" in a more coincidental manner and with a familiar object. Bringing Ghost? I didn't like that. What if she got killed? But her presence was useful as a guide as she had lived there and knew bits of what had transpired. With Esther, Ghost, and Briari there, I couldn't be too open about what I was thinking--none of them knew I was a mage. But it seemed prudent to follow Briari in, as she went in first to scout. There were dead bodies in there. Old dead bodies.
When Briari went back up--contact had been lost with the kachina doll--I took that opportunity to look back in time about two years to when the fight happened. I didn't have much time, but I saw the echoes phasing into reality, silently slaughtering the garou in their sleep. One of the garou awoke, and that caused a blade-armed echo (?) to say something incomprehensible before killing him. (The blade-echo becomes more relevant later.) There was one other thing present--something with eyes all over except where eyes ought to have been. No clue what that was about, but this was a past vision of multiple horrors, and I needed to focus on the present.
When I dropped my scrying, the garou had already come back downstairs as a group. I refocused my efforts and went to protect Ghost as they moved further down into the bunker. It didn't take a rocket scientist (or a warper who has a feel for when there's about to be a disturbance in the force) to realize something was about to happen. I mentally prepped myself to defend Ghost by laying out either a nice, coincidental Entropic curse or a violent, vulgar discharge of electricity against anything that came after her.
That's when the shit hit the fan. Echoes phased in from out of nowhere, dripping black ooze, and chaos broke out. Ghost froze, so I found myself instead using a Mind effect to help bolster her calm and ground her to the moment: focus. She then attached and bit the echo that was chewing on Esther, and the echo almost immediately dissolved away, vanishing. The garou were able to beat and kill the other echoes, which turned to ash and black blood--they're boneless and empty inside. I asked Salem via Bluetooth to get me some samples of the blood from the different creatures for analysis. (Maybe there are differences between A, B, and C? Or all they homogeneous?) Post-fight, as Salem and Briari rounded up some blood and Silvertip and Esther stepped into the umbra to check for signs of their foe, Ghost went off on her own--and DAMNED SKIPPY I stayed right there with her, ready to defend her if needed. She opened a door to a room and inside was one of the echoes--the one she'd bitten earlier that had disappeared. She froze again and the echo didn't attack. It seemed to sniff at her a little, as I began gathering energy to direct from afar. But then Silvertip returned, spotted it, and... it disappeared.
The echo that Ghost bit, that disappeared and reappeared later, and which then disappeared again was unique in that it had a bone face. And it was bleeding--in the way that these echoes seem to bleed, that is.
Also of note? When Ghost changed forms, I saw that she had bladed arms as she passed through her "wolfman" phase of her shift--bladed arms just like the echo(?) from the past. But I'd seen Ghost escaping in my scrying, so it wasn't Ghost. But.... there is a similarity of some kind between Ghost and the bladed-hand thing. And I'd seen Ghost shift previously, and she didn't have bladed hands in glabro. What is the link, and what is going on there?
Briari pulled the hard drives from the computers, Salem found an untouched burner phone on the floor, and I suggested to Salem that the bodies be gathered up, wrapped up, and stuck in the back of the Winnebago. Twelve garou corpses in all. We left for Saint Claire with our morbid cargo and transferred them to the garage at Edgewood. Briari dropped the hard drives off at the Hub. Salem passed the cell phone on to me after he found no evidence that it'd ever been used. I used some magic on the phone and could sense that it had a purpose--there was an expectation affiliated with it. I planned to make a trip out to Hanford before using the phone, though. I didn't want someone in Olympia potentially tracing the call back to Saint Claire, so I planned to do a little misdirection. Plus I had other business in Hanford I'd been delaying in getting to.
The day after we got back, Briari, Ghost, and I discovered Harbor Park had been vandalized with spray paint on the fountain and the restroom that read "None of this matters." Briari emailed the city about it, so hopefully they'll send a crew out to scrub it off soon. We--okay, I--figured it might have been a trap of some kind where anyone who went over and scrubbed it off who wasn't a city employee would get profiled/made by someone with ties to the Queen's Tower. So we stayed away. Ghost and I went for donuts, had a chat about her history, and it turns out that she'd been found by Elliot (her group's leader) as a baby, abandoned in a toilet in a run-down building in the UK. The place had a pack of Spirals in it, but they were all very weakened and killed easily enough. They chose to raise Ghost. We talked of visions, of dripping and cold, and there's another vision I haven't had that others (Ghost and Dakota at least) have--a woman with green scars fleeing from Last Days.
I've got a theory that maybe the woman with the green scars who fled from Last Days might have been Ghost's mother, as the blood.... But would her mother have had bladed arms? And why did Ghost have bladed arms?
I wonder if Ghost's mother, a Dancer, went to that fallen caern in search of power--like Jeb the city spirit had done when he awoke the anti-Nothing. The anti-Not.
The trip to Hanford got modified a bit when Emma turned up, having returned from an extended visit with her father and daughter. As much as I would have loved to have simply spent some time with her, I needed to press onward with this Ooze-related project, because it's a danger to the existence of the world itself, and time may be running out. So I invited her along for the ride.
"Hey, baby. Want to go to a nuclear waste site with me so I can try to make a phone call to a demi-god, experiment with using magick to de-irradiate material and shield against radioactivity, and maybe we could try out an interesting restaurant?"
When Briari went back up--contact had been lost with the kachina doll--I took that opportunity to look back in time about two years to when the fight happened. I didn't have much time, but I saw the echoes phasing into reality, silently slaughtering the garou in their sleep. One of the garou awoke, and that caused a blade-armed echo (?) to say something incomprehensible before killing him. (The blade-echo becomes more relevant later.) There was one other thing present--something with eyes all over except where eyes ought to have been. No clue what that was about, but this was a past vision of multiple horrors, and I needed to focus on the present.
When I dropped my scrying, the garou had already come back downstairs as a group. I refocused my efforts and went to protect Ghost as they moved further down into the bunker. It didn't take a rocket scientist (or a warper who has a feel for when there's about to be a disturbance in the force) to realize something was about to happen. I mentally prepped myself to defend Ghost by laying out either a nice, coincidental Entropic curse or a violent, vulgar discharge of electricity against anything that came after her.
That's when the shit hit the fan. Echoes phased in from out of nowhere, dripping black ooze, and chaos broke out. Ghost froze, so I found myself instead using a Mind effect to help bolster her calm and ground her to the moment: focus. She then attached and bit the echo that was chewing on Esther, and the echo almost immediately dissolved away, vanishing. The garou were able to beat and kill the other echoes, which turned to ash and black blood--they're boneless and empty inside. I asked Salem via Bluetooth to get me some samples of the blood from the different creatures for analysis. (Maybe there are differences between A, B, and C? Or all they homogeneous?) Post-fight, as Salem and Briari rounded up some blood and Silvertip and Esther stepped into the umbra to check for signs of their foe, Ghost went off on her own--and DAMNED SKIPPY I stayed right there with her, ready to defend her if needed. She opened a door to a room and inside was one of the echoes--the one she'd bitten earlier that had disappeared. She froze again and the echo didn't attack. It seemed to sniff at her a little, as I began gathering energy to direct from afar. But then Silvertip returned, spotted it, and... it disappeared.
The echo that Ghost bit, that disappeared and reappeared later, and which then disappeared again was unique in that it had a bone face. And it was bleeding--in the way that these echoes seem to bleed, that is.
Also of note? When Ghost changed forms, I saw that she had bladed arms as she passed through her "wolfman" phase of her shift--bladed arms just like the echo(?) from the past. But I'd seen Ghost escaping in my scrying, so it wasn't Ghost. But.... there is a similarity of some kind between Ghost and the bladed-hand thing. And I'd seen Ghost shift previously, and she didn't have bladed hands in glabro. What is the link, and what is going on there?
Briari pulled the hard drives from the computers, Salem found an untouched burner phone on the floor, and I suggested to Salem that the bodies be gathered up, wrapped up, and stuck in the back of the Winnebago. Twelve garou corpses in all. We left for Saint Claire with our morbid cargo and transferred them to the garage at Edgewood. Briari dropped the hard drives off at the Hub. Salem passed the cell phone on to me after he found no evidence that it'd ever been used. I used some magic on the phone and could sense that it had a purpose--there was an expectation affiliated with it. I planned to make a trip out to Hanford before using the phone, though. I didn't want someone in Olympia potentially tracing the call back to Saint Claire, so I planned to do a little misdirection. Plus I had other business in Hanford I'd been delaying in getting to.
The day after we got back, Briari, Ghost, and I discovered Harbor Park had been vandalized with spray paint on the fountain and the restroom that read "None of this matters." Briari emailed the city about it, so hopefully they'll send a crew out to scrub it off soon. We--okay, I--figured it might have been a trap of some kind where anyone who went over and scrubbed it off who wasn't a city employee would get profiled/made by someone with ties to the Queen's Tower. So we stayed away. Ghost and I went for donuts, had a chat about her history, and it turns out that she'd been found by Elliot (her group's leader) as a baby, abandoned in a toilet in a run-down building in the UK. The place had a pack of Spirals in it, but they were all very weakened and killed easily enough. They chose to raise Ghost. We talked of visions, of dripping and cold, and there's another vision I haven't had that others (Ghost and Dakota at least) have--a woman with green scars fleeing from Last Days.
I've got a theory that maybe the woman with the green scars who fled from Last Days might have been Ghost's mother, as the blood.... But would her mother have had bladed arms? And why did Ghost have bladed arms?
I wonder if Ghost's mother, a Dancer, went to that fallen caern in search of power--like Jeb the city spirit had done when he awoke the anti-Nothing. The anti-Not.
The trip to Hanford got modified a bit when Emma turned up, having returned from an extended visit with her father and daughter. As much as I would have loved to have simply spent some time with her, I needed to press onward with this Ooze-related project, because it's a danger to the existence of the world itself, and time may be running out. So I invited her along for the ride.
"Hey, baby. Want to go to a nuclear waste site with me so I can try to make a phone call to a demi-god, experiment with using magick to de-irradiate material and shield against radioactivity, and maybe we could try out an interesting restaurant?"