Greetings, true believers!
Sorry it's been kinda radio silent here. I've been fighting to finish my freelancing assignment with a deadline looming and I just haven't had the time/energy to do these write-ups so now this one's gonna be a two-fer. (Conveniently, these two kind of flow well enough together, IMHO.) So let's get to it.
Okay, so where we left off, the group had figured out that the mob has started sniffing around Richard because of his involvement in Kenneth's investigation. So they've just kind of filed that away for now and their focus shifts back towards the police investigation into Richard. While they'd initially talked about giving it a couple of days, they decide to go ahead and retrieve the pearl necklace from Angela Rake's place and see what Rose has learned. Kenneth agrees to ride along and keep an eye on things from the car, just in case something goes wrong. Richard finds a spare motor he can pretend to install, and they head over.
When Angela opens the door and waves him inside, Kenneth realizes he recognizes Angela -- she's a secretary at the police department. But as this is an era before cell phones, there's not a lot he can do about it right now. So he just sits in the car, watching and listening.
Inside, Angela leads Richard to the room with the washing machine and leaves him to it. He opens it up to get the necklace and... it's gone. No sign of it. No sign of Rose, either. He spends a couple of minutes racking his brain as to what could have happened, then just replaces the part and steps out into the living room. Angela, not acting like anything is wrong, asks if the machine is taken care of and he says 'yes.' But then he asks about the wrench he found in the machine, and she looks confused. He asks if she's in some sort of trouble, if she's seeing someone who's destroying her stuff and she's in danger, if she needs someone to help her. She's flabbergasted and says she's married and her husband is away on business.
Richard says that he doesn't know if she can talk or anything about what might be going on, but if she needs something--
And at that point she interrupts him and tells him she needs him to leave. And so he does, slamming the door behind him in frustration. He then goes back out to the truck and bangs his head on the steering wheel, as that went so far off the rails from what he intended even aside from the fact that he basically lost one of the krewe's ghost allies. He tells Kenneth that the necklace is gone. Kenneth, in turn, tells him who Angela is. So now Richard is concerned that the necklace might be at the police station, and he asks Kenneth how they could get it back.
Kenneth comments that you have to feel a little bit for these people. After all, what could they be thinking given that they got the washing machine back and there was a pearl necklace of all things in it? Richard thinks that the necklace could still be in the house, but he's pretty sure Rose would have appeared if that was the case because that'd probably still be pretty close to her anchor.
Kenneth proposes going back to the hotel and looping Eddy in on all this. So they get back without incident and head to the office. So Richard shares with him that there's bad news, and then there's bad news. First bad news is that the necklace is gone. Second bad news, Mrs. Rake is working for the police. Eddy is not pleased. The hotel shakes a bit with his exclamation of "WHAT?!"
Eddy, furious, demands to know where Rose is. Richard doesn't know and just recounts what they do know so far. He demands Angela's address and immediately heads out to look for Rose. Kenneth recommends against it, but Eddy gets in his car and drives by Rose's place. Kenneth thinks he should stop him, but instead he just goes and pours himself a drink.
Cutting back to Eddy, he drives past Angela's house, which has a car out front that wasn't there before. He pulls around the corner and finds an inconspicuous spot where the house is within range of Boneyard. He activates it and views the house remotely. Two occupants, alive. He projects his senses into the living room where he overhears a conversation about Richard between Angela Rake and Detective Popham. When he 'joins' the conversation, Angela is wanting to know why the detective didn't tell her about the wrench he used to wreck up the washing machine. According to him, he wanted to make sure she was legitimately surprised if it came up.
They then go on to talk about the necklace -- why Richard would have put it there, why he wouldn't ask about it, what he was going to do with it. Neither of them has any clue, though. Angela thinks that between that and the way he was acting after repairing the machine that this was all some sort of weird pass at her. It also comes up that the detective was hiding in her bedroom for her safety.[0]
At this point, Eddy uses Boneyard to tweak the mood of the room, giving them the Shaken condition to get them talking. I didn't exactly have anything prepared and I didn't record down everything that was said, but it's pretty clear they know there's something different about him. They speculate that the necklace (which Popham says he has) is cursed and he's planning on having someone look it over and then get rid of it if it turns out to be normal (I think he talks about throwing it off Hoover Dam). But they start working each other up into a paranoid frenzy, worrying about what Richard might be willing to do, what he might have done already (in the moment they even begin to speculate as to whether he was somehow responsible for the death of Lillian Loch in the first place). Long story short, they're about to start lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks.
Eddy quickly draws on the Caul to boost his abilities to quickly improvise the Lovers' Telephone ceremony with a handheld radio and contacts Kenneth back at the office. He fills Kenneth in on what's going on. Kenneth thinks if Popham throws it off the dam, that's their best chance to retrieve it because they might be able to use one of a number of abilities to retrieve it from the bottom (Marionette, or get a ghost that can manipulate it, or something like that). But Kenneth says that if Eddy has any suggestions about the whole situation, he's all ears.
Back in the conversation in the house, Popham mentions he's going to go have someone take a look at the necklace off the books. He drops a comment that he'd be desperate enough to talk to the fortune teller on the outskirts of town except she seems to have mysteriously packed up and taken off. At some point during all this he lets it slip that the necklace is in his glovebox right now.
After a moment or two of thinking it over, Eddy uses the Boneyard to make sure nobody can leave the house while he goes and breaks into Popham's car, where Rose is sitting in the passenger seat.[1] He rummages through the glovebox -- it's only fair, after all -- and grabs the necklace. He and Rose run back to his car and head back to the hotel.
While Eddy's filling in Kenneth on what's going on, Richard wanders in and they get him up to speed. They talk about finding some way to make Popham forget about what's happened. The alternative is faking Richard's death, which is kind of a nuclear option.
Kenneth goes out to the warehouse where Carmen Cross works (where the slot machines are currently being stored). He says he's got a bit of a research project for her, and says he needs someone to go into the memories of a cop who's currently undertaking a difficult investigation. She speculates on things that could potentially screw with memories -- mementos, wizards, some ghosts, vampires. That last one is kind of a shock to Kenneth, who doesn't take the revelation well.
But as they talk around it, they zero on the idea of finding a ghost that can take memories. It's a rare power, but Carmen knows of a ghost in the Underworld who can do it if they can't find anyone currently in the land of the living. The ghost she knows is named Evette Wood (whom the krewe have met before), and she runs a saloon down in Las Minas. Kenneth thanks her for the tip and takes the knowledge back to the hotel where he shares it with the others.
They discuss their options and alternatives. Eddy thinks if they tell the detective the truth about ghosts, sin-eaters, and all of that, and lay out the situation and let him decide what he's going to do with that knowledge before they do something more drastic. The others don't like the idea, but Eddy wants to trust that the detective is reasonable and can understand that this wasn't something deliberate, that Richard didn't know what Lady Luck was going to do when he decided to let her confront her fiancé.[2]
Eddy just really doesn't like the idea of taking someone's memories away. But maybe they can talk the detective down and make him into an ally. But he's willing to accept memory-erasure as a backup.
Kenneth is concerned that Popham, being a cop and thinking the way a cop things, will still insist on there being someone to blame for this and that they won't necessarily be able to get him to let it go. Eddy thinks they can sell this as an accident, and pitch the idea that having sin-eaters around means they can prevent something like this from happening in the future. Kenneth still doesn't think it's a great idea, but he's willing to let Eddy try.
Richard reminds them they still have to get a memory-erasing ghost to begin with. So Kenneth suggests they take a quick poll of the Crossroads Krewe ghosts and if none of them can take memories or have any other suggestions, they just go straight to Evette. So they check with the krewe ghosts, basically confirm none of them can take memories, and head to the Underworld. The use the cemetery gate, and Kenneth uses the last of the coins he had on him when he died to open it up.
So we basically quickly montage their walk down to Las Minas -- they know the way by now. They go to the saloon and talk to Evette about what they need her to do. She sits down with them and levitates some booze over and they get to talking about specifically what can and cannot be done. They explain whose memories need taken and why as everyone tries very hard not to look at Richard. She explains that she can only take specific memories as she goes in, that she can't just rifle through his head and take what looks good. And that she can only take one, maybe two memories at most before the drain on her is more than she's comfortable risking. Eddy asks if they could get him talking and if he described a specific event, could she go in and then take that? She agrees that's possible.
So they take her back up with them to the surface. As they're reasonably-powerful sin-eaters by now, their very presence counts as an anchor so as long as she remains close to them she's fine (as long as they don't pick any fights with any Reapers). Richard uses the Chance Key to open the gate, accepting the Chance Key's Doom onto himself (this will matter later), and Eddy and Richard go back to the hotel while Kenneth goes back to his office -- his job is one of his touchstones that keeps him bound to the land of the living, and he can't risk this going badly enough to threaten that.
So Eddy goes back to his office, has a drink, and calls Popham over to talk about Richard. They stash Richard in a room adjacent to the office for good measure and Eddy sets up a Boneyard over the hotel. He establishes a New Rule against taking hostile action against the hotel staff or krewe.[3] Evette waits there, in Twilight where only Eddy and Richard can see her.
Popham shows up and his nose wrinkles at the smell of booze in Eddy's office. He has a seat and Eddy tells him that everything he suspects about Richard is true. That he's a medium and speaks to ghosts. He then asks when Popham suspected Richard. The detective explains that it was the strangeness of the Max Polk case and that phone call to the police. And the timing of that with the stuff that happened around the Johnny Wallis confession was just too weird to be coincidental in his mind.[4] He then talks about how there are other little coincidences, stuff that's happened, and how that's led him to the realization of supernatural forces at work.
Eddy goes into the history with Max, and Lillian, and how Max was working with Rossi to have her killed. Richard was trying to help Lillian and Max reconcile and it didn't go that way. The detective seems to be getting it, legitimately convinced, and Eddy explains that stuff with ghosts happens all the time, and he and his people are equipped to deal with it. And what happened to Max was an aberration. That 99 times out of 100, nobody gets killed and that sin-eaters can work to prevent these things from happening on the rare occasions they do happen.
Detective Popham asks where Richard is right now, quickly reassuring Eddy that he just wants to hear all this from him. Eddy then comes clean with a Cliff's Notes version of what really happened with Johnny Wallis and his wife.[5] Popham, very concerned and uncomfortable with this knowledge, says that he wants to talk to Richard because he already knows that Richard is a terrible liar.
Evette, at this point, tells Eddy that if he needs her to do something, then he needs to establish a signal or something. As he calls Richard out, he indicates to her that he'll knock on the table.
So Richard comes out and just casually says, as if this weren't a situation involving murder and ruined lives, "And now you know the truth." And the detective has to visibly hold himself back. Then Richard tells him that he didn't know what Lillian was going to do.
Slight problem, though -- Richard has to roll for the lie. The only way he has a chance of making this roll is by spending a point of Willpower. But because he's suffering from the Chance Key's Doom, if he attempts any roll with a +3 or more bonus that roll becomes a chance die and he risks a dramatic failure. Spending a point of Willpower provides a +3 bonus. You understand the dilemma. But resolving the Doom, succeed or fail, will add a Beat to the group's pool so he decides to spend the Willpower and risk it.
He rolls to convince the detective of the lie... and fails.
Detective Popham then says he now knows what he needs to do[6], and gets up to leave. Eddy, correctly reading that the situation has gone to shit, knocks on the table to signal Evette. She asks if he wants her to get this conversation. Eddy says yes, and to get every other instance he described that connects it all together (despite the fact that she'd previously explained that she can't take that much).
She jams her spectral hand into his head and appears to start physically sorting through his memories. She pulls out something like mist or ectoplasm from his head and absorbs it.
The detective is now dizzy and confused, unsure of what he's doing there. He remembers that Eddy wanted to talk, but Eddy suggests they try again another day when he's feeling better. Eddy walks him out to his car and returns to the office. Evette explains that she could only take two memories, so she took the conversation, and she took him first coming across the Max Polk crime scene. She says that she can't take away every instance of him having a brush with the supernatural, but that seems to be the big one and even if he's reminded of the murder later, he's lost the emotional context of coming across the bizarre scene. And that hopefully they've taken him off the path he was on. It's just the best they're going to have to do, but the others seem to accept that.
(For the record, however, this gets Richard off the detective's radar and the case will fizzle, so this subplot is effectively over.)
And we left off on Eddy walking her back to the cemetery gate so she can return to Las Minas, two memories richer and now owed a favor by some sin-eaters.
[0] -- Just to clarify, in case it seems confusing: Popham's car was stashed a short distance away while he himself was in Angela's house. After Richard left, the detective went and got his car and brought it back so he'd have it close at hand.
[1] -- For the record, ghosts aren't exactly tethered to their anchors, but they suffer consequences if they're too far away from one for long enough. So in general, unless I have specific reason to do otherwise, I have ghost NPCs stick to the safe radius, especially if they're in a situation where they have concern about being separated. So in other words, Rose could have stayed in Angela's house and hoped that Richard would show up in time, but she stuck with the necklace for good measure.
[2] -- For the record, Richard totally knew. But Eddy doesn't know that.
[3] -- Not that this would stop him, but it might help them subdue him if it comes to it.
[4] -- Just a reminder: Something unnatural tears up the alley where John Staff was murdered, then a few hours later Johnny Wallis shows up in the police station to confess to Staff's murder, his wife having been driven insane by some sort of trauma that in her babbling she says came from John Staff's unquiet ghost. The detective can't help but think these are linked, though it really is just a coincidence.
[5] -- This is the part where I look at the camera and reveal that this is where things started to go badly. Because Eddy said in so many words "Stuff like what happened with Max was this rare aberration and we sin-eaters can prevent it but just this one time things went wrong," And then follows it up with "Oh, by the way, here's another time where we could have prevented it and other things went wrong."
[6]-- For the record, 'what he needs to do' means 'burn down this hotel and everyone in it.'
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