Yeah, I know, these write-ups tend to be either right after the session or at the last minute, and this is the latter. In my defense, I've been working on edits for a freelance assignment.
Speaking of which, because I'm shameless, here's another reminder that Terra Firma, a book I worked on, is out! Rather than getting into a huge thing I'll just link the blog post I previously made on it.
And now, let's get to it.
So where we left off, the krewe had discovered that Johnny Wallis had murdered John Staff[0], the man whose ghost would become the geist called the Lonely Proprietor and offer the Bargain to one Eddy Black. And Eddy wants to go over to his place and "Boneyard the shit out of him," haunting him to get him to confess to what he did and maybe offer up connections to Manny Rossi.
Kenneth is really concerned about the legal propriety of it, and in the end they frame it as Eddy conducting a private investigation looking into the death of an old friend. If he finds a suspect (Johnny Wallis) and convinces him to confess, and steers him towards a federal agent of his association (S. Kenneth Brown), then that should be fine. And then Eddy has that federal agent friend of his hanging out in the car outside just in case the confrontation goes badly but also so he can unburden himself quickly. By and large, that'll probably dot enough i's and cross enough t's for the FBI's liking.
So next thing we know, the krewe is parked outside of the Wallis home. Eddy's got the memory bottle on-hand in case he needs it. He starts pumping a buttload of plasm into Boneyard, just everything he's got into the house, using the New Law power to set down a law against hiding one's crimes.
The haunting starts small: Johnny Wallis, sitting in his armchair and reading the newspaper while smoking a pipe, starts hearing things, snippets of the conversation from the alley that night. He thinks Laura[1] is talking and he's mishearing her, but she's in the kitchen cleaning things. He goes to check the radio to see if it's on. As he approaches, the radio bursts to life and starts playing out the 'recording' of John Staff's murder that night. Staff's face appears in reflective surfaces all over the house (mirrors, windows, polished toaster in the kitchen, etc.), startling both Johnny and Laura.
The murder starts playing out in the reflections as if the alley scene is happening in the room and is being reflected in said surfaces. Laura, still in the kitchen, wants to know what Johnny did, and he yells back that she knows damn well what he did. She starts freaking out more, collapsing to the floor and sobbing "What have I done" over and over. (While it's not Eddy's intent to catch her up in this as well, Boneyard just isn't that precise of a power and he was willing to accept that as a possible consequence.) Johnny tries to leave. The power goes out, the kitchen door slams shut (to protect Laura/Delores in case Johnny reacts to all this with violence), and as he approaches the front door it opens on its own.
Beyond the door he can see the inside of the Northern Club, and an image of John Staff comes out, carrying the deposit bag as he did on that night. The door closes behind the image and he starts mouthing his half of the argument as seen in the vision, and Johnny Wallis snaps and shrieks "You stupid son of a bitch, you shouldn't have let D catch you stealing from the till!"
Cue the record scratch as that sentence clicks into place. Like, out of character, I mean. Minds blown. I may or may not have cackled a little bit[2] at my players' reactions as now everything they thought they knew about this situation has been turned on its head.
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Laura/Delores is apologizing to whom- or whatever will listen for what she did. She caught Staff skimming from the till, and the shine had come off of Vegas at that point and she wanted out... so she told Rossi everything in exchange for what she needed to build a new life for herself.
It takes everything that Eddy has to hold back the Proprietor from breaking free and just tearing apart everyone and everything in that house.
Eddy uses Boneyard to produce an image of the Proprietor in the kitchen, looking crestfallen and reaching for her, asking "Why?" over and over again. She confesses everything to him directly, what she did, how she sold him out to Rossi. The image of the Proprietor carves out its own heart and offers it to her and she collapses into an incoherent sobbing heap.
Kenneth and Richard can't see what's going on in the house, though Eddy is keeping them apprised and they can hear some of the screams, and Kenneth reminds him that he doesn't want to fuck them up so badly they're rendered incompetent to stand trial. Eddy agrees.
Inside the house, everything stops and there's a knock at the door. Wallis demands to know who the fuck is out there, and it's Eddy. He wants to talk. Johnny ignores him for the moment and goes to bang on the kitchen door to check on Laura, but it won't open. Eddy opens up the front door with a wave and strolls in. Johnny demands to know what he is. Eddy says he doesn't have time to get into it but wants Johnny to confess to what happened, and who put him up to it.
Johnny agrees under the condition that Eddy leaves Laura/Delores out of it. Eddy, sort of mentally 'glancing' to his geist to see how he feels about that, basically gets the Proprietor dismissively snarling that he's done with her. Eddy agrees to Johnny's terms and Johnny makes it clear that if Eddy ever approaches or talks to her again, he will personally kill him. Eddy just snarks "Wouldn't be the first time I died" and all but drags him out of the house.
Kenneth introduces himself, offers the man a hit of gin to calm his nerves, and Johnny confesses to everything. When asked, he indicates there are paper records of the payments from when Rossi hired him to look into whomever was embezzling from the hotel, and the payment for killing him. Kenneth explains that now they're going to take Johnny to the police station where he'll sign the proper confession and go into custody while some uniformed officers come to the house to retrieve the records. Johnny agrees and goes to check on Laura first. She's not doing well, still reeling from what happened and out of it.
Rather than leave him unsupervised with the phone, Kenneth calls an ambulance for her. Wallis wants to wait for them to arrive but knows not to push the federal agent's patience. So Eddy and Kenneth take him to the aforementioned police station while Richard keeps an eye on things at the house where an ambulance does arrive and they take a nearly-catatonic Laura away on a gurney. Johnny signs his confession at the police station and the FBI's going to send someone down in the morning to get him sorted out (and probably vanish him into the system with a new identity -- Witness Protection won't formally exist for almost 20 years, but this is a thing the FBI did from time to time before then). Kenneth goes back to his house to make sure nobody else gets the evidence at the house before the officers show up to collect the boxes of files.
But anyhow, that's some progress towards one of Kenneth's goals of dealing with Rossi in the long term, and it all wraps up Eddy's Remembrances.
By the time Kenneth's done with the initial round of paperwork and gets back to the hotel, Richard's got a bunch of stuff ready for Jeremy's passing on. For those of you unfamiliar with Geist, one thing the characters can do is help ghosts pass on to whatever reward lays beyond with a Ceremony. So Richard gets a bunch of New York City bric-a-brac like postcards and what have you to represent where Jeremy came from, and he also gets some fool's gold as a symbol of his quest. They throw him a little going away party and give him a last shot for the road, and pile into the truck with Richard driving, Jeremy riding shotgun, and Eddy and Kenneth in the back.
They take off driving out of the city, on a major highway northeast like they're driving him home. They talk about his life, his dreams, just little chit-chatty stuff, and if Jeremy weren't translucent it would be all too easy to forget this wasn't just a bunch of guys taking a spontaneous road trip.
After they've been on the road for an hour, on an empty stretch of highway between Glendale and Bunkerville, with the desert stretching off into every direction and the perfectly clear stars glittering overhead, Jeremy just leans back against the seat and closes his eyes like he's about to take a little nap. And then, between two ticks of a clock, he's a fading afterimage, like a dust cloud waiting to blow away. As the image fades, a feeling of contentment settles over the truck.
They find a good spot to turn around and head back towards town, and as they drive Eddy brings up that the other ghosts reported Abe missing earlier. So they start talking about the logistics of tracking him down, and talking about when he was last seen. Before his proper disappearance he'd been spotted in passing a few times, but the last time anyone remembers seeing him doing anything was when he was part of the group following up on Mel's art dealings, specifically sniffing around the pawn shop where Eddy encountered the Bandit for the first time.
So the group heads out to the pawn shop to see if they can find anything useful. Eddy wants to be cautious, as the woman who runs the pawn shop is a friend and a colleague and he doesn't want to upset her. So they focus on the nearby alleys and find the ghost of a homeless man in one of the alleys, just mechanically repeating the action of drinking from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Eddy offers him a hit of spectral booze to get his attention and that kind of wakes him up. He's seen Abe around, and remembers seeing the Bandit poking around as well, and finding a bunch of plasm strewn about in a nearby alleyway shortly after seeing the two.
Eddy thanks him for his time and makes sure to tell him about the hotel if he needs help and they can get his anchor there. The ghost is comfy for the moment, but considers that.[3] They can find remnants of the plasm around but no other signs of a struggle or anything. The group is pretty sure that the Bandit got him and dragged him down into the Underworld. They make plans to go down there, and Kenneth says he has easy access to a coin that might get them down there -- he still has all of his stuff from when he died, including his pocket change from that day, and given that the cemetery gate's key involves coins someone had on them when they did, he figures they can give it a shot.
And we leave off on that, on the group planning to venture into the Underworld to look for him.
[0]-- In my notes and in play I've had a tendency to refer to both of these folks as 'Johnny,' because that feels appropriate for a 1950's guy who might have some questionable connections (and I'd named them at different times and didn't think anything of it until I found myself having to refer to them both in one scene), but I'm trying to break myself of that habit for clarity's sake.
[1]-- Aka Delores, aka "D." She was John Staff's flame, who married Johnny Wallis some time after Wallis murdered Staff. The assumption is that "Wallis stole Staff's girl."
[2]-- I did.
[3]-- The alley is one of his anchors, so there's not a whole lot they can do to relocate it.
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