Oh, hey, didn't see you there.
Okay, look, after a while I have trouble thinking of way to introduce these posts. Doing weekly write-ups means there's less room for interesting events and stuff to talk about. One thing I will mention, that I could (and possibly should) have announced before is that I'm working on the upcoming Realms of Magic and Mystery book for Scion 2nd Edition. It's a bit of an adjustment to me, because it's the first non-Æon freelancing gig I've had in the last three years. Which honestly feels like it's been longer because of a) our rapidly-slipping sense of time, and b) the sheer amount of Æon work I've had. Probably a couple of other reasons in there, too. But either way, yeah, unless I totally screw something up (nervous laughter) I'll be adding a Scion book to my writing resume.
So with that out of the way...
(BTW, CW for mention of Nazis, but in a historical sense)
So where we left off, Kenneth was driving out to Death Valley (where we decided he'd been left for dead), looking for the spot where Rossi had his legs broken and then dumped him and left him to die of exposure. He uses the Memoria Haunt to conjure up the memory and bottle it.
As he walks back to his car, he's approached by someone living out in the desert in ragged clothes. The figure is gaunt, and he looks like he might be wearing an army jacket, but nothing that might be able to identify him. Kenneth gets a weird vibe off of him.[0] The stranger asks asks, in a weird voice, if Kenneth can take him somewhere. Kenneth, wanting to be a decent guy, offers to maybe take him to a nearby town or into Vegas, but the guy doesn't know what 'towns' or 'Vegas' are. (As they talk it becomes clear he knows what cars are, though.) He informs Kenneth his name is 'Gimmick.' Recognizing that he's dealing with someone who's probably hit their head and suffering brain damage, Kenneth quickly revises/clarifies his offer to take the guy to the nearest town, with the option to continue on to Vegas if he doesn't like the look of it.
He and Kenneth walk back to where he parked his car, and on the way Gimmick points out an abandoned, half-buried military truck as the place where he's been living 'for as long as he can remember.' Kenneth takes a moment to recognize the license plate number to look into the truck later on (or at least report its location). Gimmick expresses appreciation for Kenneth helps him, and Kenneth says that that's his job as an FBI agent, and he takes a moment to show Gimmick his ID. Gimmick has no clue what the ID is, what 'jobs' are, or what the 'FBI' is.
In the car ride to the nearest town, Kenneth makes a token effort to talk to Gimmick about who he is, but Gimmick knows little and has done less, so there just isn't much to talk about. It eventually occurs to Kenneth that the military truck is a GMC truck, suggesting that Gimmick may have taken his name from trying to transliterate the logo on the vehicle.
Soon enough they reach Pahrump, which is kind of a one-horse town in 1951, but he finds a doctor's office. He explains the situation, and takes a picture of Gimmick before leaving him there in case there's a missing person's report they could attach it to in town. Kenneth silently acknowledges the irony that if Gimmick were dead, Kenneth would be able to do more to help him. Gimmick thanks him again, and the doctor says they'll take good care of him, but as Kenneth leaves he notices the doctor giving him an odd look.
Meanwhile, back in Vegas, while Kenneth's gone, Detective Popham turns up at the hotel to have a word with Eddy. Eddy offers him some coffee, he accepts, and they talk about Richard for a bit. Popham asks some standard questions -- how long he's known him (a few months), what he knows about Richard's work (he fixes stuff, and works around the hotel for room and board), how often they eat together (occasionally, and take turns as to whether Richard cooks or if Eddy has the hotel kitchen prepare something because his own cooking is awful), that sort of thing.
The detective asks if Richard ever talks about ghosts, to which Eddy says no, of course not, ghosts aren't real. The detective comments that the hotel has a reputation for being haunted, though. This leads into a little bit of a conversation about the history of the hotel -- the building is close to a hundred years old, but it's been rebuilt and refurbished over time and is kind of an ongoing work in progress. Popham tries to feel out Eddy as to whether 'scorned lovers' or anything like that might set Richard off. He's clearly referring to the Staff/Wallis situation, but Eddy's careful not to take the bait. He just stonewalls the detective and tries to his convince him to look at things from another angle, using Fast-Talking to reframe the discussion a bit. The cop leaves, with some food for thought.
A little later, Nicole Lombard shows up. As a reminder, she runs a local pawn shop and is an acquaintance of Eddy's -- she's the one who sold him the Memento dolls he has on a pedestal in the lobby. She's got a cardboard box to show him. It contains a wooden keepsake box. She says that someone brought it in after his brother died, that his brother had brought some stuff back from the war. Not a lot of Nazi junk (though a couple of items have some recognizable iconography), but stuff that might have been looted from battlefields.
The reason she's here is because something weird sometimes happens when the box is handled, but she doesn't go into details. She suspects that it or something inside it might be haunted, and she's got the impression that Eddy might know how to handle something like that.[1] And she says that once he does, his usual under-the-table clientele would be a better venue for unloading items like that. They negotiate a percentage of any such sale that he'd pass on to her, and she asks that whatever's actually going on with the box that maybe he let her know and perhaps even let her see how he resolves it.
She leaves him alone with it after that and he manages to open the box without setting off anything weird. It's got some knives, mostly folding knives but a fancy German paratrooper knife, as well as some pocket watches, wristwatches, compasses, and lighters. He's pretty certain that one of the items in the box is an anchor, and decides to roughly handle the box of stuff to try and provoke a reaction. After a couple minutes of this, a wind comes out of nowhere and then the ghost of a German soldier appears, shrieking at him in German, and lashes out, scattering stuff around the office before vanishing. As he's petty sure it's the paratrooper knife that's the anchor, Eddy carefully puts the knife in his safe (and puts the rest of the stuff in another safe).
He manages to get ahold of Richard and calls him to his office and then he goes looking for Sam, the soldier whose death kicked off this whole chronicle to begin with. He tracks down the ghost and explains the situation, discovering that Sam is conversant in German (having studied it when he planned to join the army). Richard finds them in the hallway on his way to the office. They decide to wait for Kenneth to get back, which he does shortly afterwards. Rose, the woman working the front desk, is on her way out as Eddy let her go an hour early and she runs into Kenneth on the way out and tells him Eddy's looking for him.
Kenneth takes a minute to wash up and he meets everyone in the office. He says he'd have been back sooner but he picked up a hitchhiker. Eddy says he's got his own hitchhiker problem and gives Kenneth the spiel. Kenneth, having served in WWII, has little to no interest in helping a German army ghost, but the others say they won't ask him to do anything more than just stand there and back them up, and he decides he can do that.
Eddy fiddles with the paratrooper knife (called a Fallschirmjägermesser) and the ghost appears again. He sees Sam and starts to freak out until he realizes he's surrounded by sin-eaters and keeps his shit together for fear of being destroyed. Sam tries to talk him down while Richard whistles a Dirge to calm his emotions, and they succeed.
They learn that his name is Lucas Fenstermacher, and with Sam as an interpreter they prod at him to try and find how they can get him to pass on. Kenneth's not happy with this - he doesn't want the ghost's life story, but there's no way to deal with this without learning his life's story, so they're stuck. They learn that Lucas parachuted into battle, got stuck in a tree, and was shot before he could free himself.
Despite his distaste for the situation, acknowledging that this sort of thing is probably what he was brought back to do, offers to use Memoria to conjure up the moment of Lucas' death in the hopes they can glean some insight that might help him come to terms with his death and pass on. As they've got enough information to 'reach' that moment without having to be there, they all watch as the Haunt brings up an illusion of Lucas's parachute getting stuck in a tree somewhere in France and dropping his knife as he tries to free himself from the straps. Three members of the French Resistance come up on him while he's dangling from the tree and there's a gunfight wherein he manages to shoot two of them with his pistol before he runs out of ammo and is shot in the head while reloading. Seeing it from the outside does seem to help give Lucas a little bit of closure -- it all happened so fast, he mostly just remembers firing wildly and getting shot in the head.
Kenneth suggests reaching out to an embassy to send Lucas' personal effects (the knife and a compass that's also in the box) back to his sister in Germany. So they package all that up (I didn't write down whether Kenneth is able to call someone right away or will do it the next day) and that helps get Lucas to a state where he can pass on. Over the course of the conversation, it comes up that the surviving French soldier who picked up his stuff later lost it in a poker game to an American soldier, which is how it eventually wound up in Eddy's possession.
But after expending more effort than he ever thought he would do for a 'fucking Nazi,' he stores the memory in another bottle and they put together a ritual to help Lucas pass on, pantomiming cutting him out of parachute straps and passing around some German lager ('one last drink for the road' has kind of become a signature of the Crossroads Krewe). The ritual succeeds and he passes on in a puff of what smells like gunpowder smoke, as the group gets a distinct feeling that regardless of one's affiliations in life, death is a great equalizer and just about everyone deserves better than the indignities of the Underworld.[2]
While it's not quite the harrowing experience that the group has finished other sessions on, everyone decided this was a good place to leave it off so we did.
[0]-- For the record, it remains simply a weird vibe, not a Disquieting vibe, if you get my meaning.
[1]-- For the record, she's never previously given the impression that she suspects Eddy's true nature, or anything about ghosts or hauntings in general. But as a pawn shop owner in Vegas, even in the early days of Vegas-as-we-know-it, there's a good chance she's had some brushes with weirdness.
[2]-- In other words, they got an exceptional success on the roll and got a Krewe Beat.
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