Post by Reede on Dec 20, 2019 11:49:34 GMT -5
The white-tipped pointer thwacked against the chalkboard.
“Two worlds,” Felix began. “Ours.” He tapped the circle he’d drawn on the left side of the board, then smacked the circle he’d drawn to the right. “And Tom’s. Tom’s is also Oliver’s--he’s the dead guy--and in a sense Eli’s, though Eli was born here. For the sake of this briefing, I’ll be referring to Tom’s world as the Batshit Crazy World, or the BCW, and to our world as the Real World, or the R--”
Standing at the back of the parlor, Avery cleared his throat sharply. Their eyes met. Avery shook his head.
“... As I was saying, I’ll be referring to Tom’s world as B, and to ours as A.”
Character Origins:
World A
Aurelia Dumitru
Gerold Schoen
Seth
Eddie Fletcher
Avery Flynn
Felix Flynn
Ethan McDowell
Elijah Whitmoor
World B
Rachelle (deceased)
Tomlin Jefferson
Guisseppe Maniato
Oliver Tyson (deceased)
Fidel Camejo
“A necromancer and all-around maniacal personage known as Rachelle, from B, tormented Oliver’s family, and caused the death of Tom’s wife, Catherine, leading Oliver and Tom to team up and destroy her. With her dying breath, Rachelle cursed Oliver, see Figure 1.”
The white-tipped pointer stick drew a quick circle around a chalk drawing labeled “Figure 1,” that appeared to show a supine stick figure pointing menacingly at another stick figure.
“... Unbeknownst to anyone for many years, it was at this time that Rachelle managed to also infect Tom with a shard of herself. To possess him, in effect, if to--we believe--largely passive effect.”
There was no illustration of that point.
“Perhaps as an effect of the curse, Oliver died of consumption within a few years of Rachelle’s demise. Definitely as an effect of the curse, he was caused to be reincarnated--but his spirit managed to come between worlds, to A, for rebirth, perhaps as some attempt to protect itself. On A, Oliver’s soul was reborn in the United States of America to the Whitmoor family, in the form of a boy they named Elijah.
“Elijah was a bit of an odd duck, talking to himself and whatnot and generally being a mite creepy. As it turns out, he was very creepy, as he could perceive and converse with ghosts and spirits. This understandably caused tension with his family as he grew, though apparently he was well-liked in some corners, we’ll presume the creepy ones. See Figure 2.”
“Figure 2” appeared to be a drawing of zig-zag lightning bolts and a spiderweb--with spider.
“Being a creepy odd duck, Eli wandered far from home while still a smelly munchkin with barely a smear of peach fuzz on his chin. That is to say, he was very young. Being very young and scrawny, he naturally walked around like he was ten feet tall and wore guns as if daring the universe to try to off him. ‘Sure thing,’ said the universe, at which point it promptly tried to off him by dropping a gigantic interdimensional worm on top of him. Fortunately, that’s where Avery and I come in, see Figure 3.”
He tapped a chalky mess that was no doubt supposed to represent a gigantic interdimensional worm. Less easy to make out, given the limits of white chalk as a medium, were the pair of smiley-faced stick-figures astride the worm’s back. One could argue that the smiley-faced stick figures did indeed look very much alike, though perhaps with subtle structural differences that one could pick out were one familiar with them.
“We saved Eli, who hired us on the spot in our capacity as finders of the lost. He proved to be rich, which was fortunate as we were low on cash at the time.”
“While traveling,” Avery put in, speaking up from the back. “We were low on cash while traveling.”
“Right. I magicked us back to London, and we cleared out our storage room at Flynn & Flynn to put him up. That was not long after we’d met Miss Isabell Wickham, who needed the help of trustworthy locals here in London. We’d found a good place for her to stay by that time, and though we had not made much headway on her troubles it was thought that the experiment that resulted in the incident of the gigantic interdimensional worm might net results applicable there. It was also around that time that a job in the Fayns led to our first encounter with Miss Aurelia Dumitru, and our first experience of the Garden, and the acquaintance of the lovely Henrietta Olkswitch, proprietor therein.”
Avery drew an imaginary line across his throat twice with a finger.
Felix skipped ahead.
“We were hard at work on Eli’s case. The crux of it was that he heard things from spirits about himself that he did not understand, and had tatters of memories, and wanted to know what it all meant. He had a sense of a name applying to him. The name was ‘Bane,’ which struck us as more of a random-dart-flung-at-a-dictionary sort of thing until we remembered that we were dealing with Americans. We came to realize that, somehow, he was being sought here in London. We realized it in the form of me being sent to hospital for a lengthy holiday.
“Eli was having more and more dreams and hearing more whispers. The dreams were generally more agreeable, in that they began to contain information. All the same, it was our intention to earn our retainer by gathering more consultations. We thought, ‘Who better to examine a creepy Yank kid than a pack of ravenous, drooling, hyena-like rich British snobs?’ So once I was mobile again, we took him to an event at Carlington Manor outside of London, the key haunt in the United Kingdom of a group of which we were (nominally, it turns out) members. The group is known as the Frontiersmen, and the event was a dinner in honor of an old-timer Frontiersmen bigwig named Gerold Schoen, see Figure 4.”
Though Felix did not point out the drawing, there was a clearly labeled fourth drawing that looked like a happy stick figure waving from a wheelchair.
“Gerold Schoen came over from America for his big chance to get gawked at by white-tie strangers before retiring. We didn’t know at the time, but he came over from America B using a byway we weren’t cool enough among Frontiersmen to have heard of before. (They call it Limbo, which is frankly a terrible name that spits on the theological history of the term.) Gerold came with his partner, Seth, another dead guy walking around, and with Tom, who is not dead as far as I can determine. We later discovered that the true purpose of their coming to Carlington was to nominate Tom as Gerold’s replacement regarding his duties with Seth.
“Carlington is the ancestral home of the Gattry family, and currently the head of the family is Sir Richard Gattry. Avery schmoozed with Sir Richard previously, so we were allowed into the main arm of the gathering, where Eli promptly wandered off. From what I understand, he encountered Seth, who recognized his face as very like that of the deceased Oliver Tyson from B, and was subsequently introduced to Gerold Schoen, who was outside avoiding the hyenas.
“Avery tried to follow, but there was a bit of a tussle about that.
“Long story short, Eli had a surge of memory that left him with the revelation that I have outlined already: he was once a man named Oliver Tyson, from a world like ours but not. See Figure 5.”
Figure 5 appeared to be a baby with a pair of six-shooters.
“We met Tom that night, and in short order realized that he had two heads. No, no--a spiritual tapeworm. No, no--a hitchhiker inside him. We exorcised him and I bottled a gem that, it turned out, was a remnant of Rachelle--the same witch slain by Oliver with the help of Tom years before. Concerned about the implications, we realized that, though the job we’d been hired for was technically over, we couldn’t be done with so many threats remaining, and so many questions unanswered. Eli proved that the ‘curse’ that clung to him and kept him from accessing the magic of his previous self could be bypassed with some cleverness, by restoring wheelchair-bound and ill Gerold Schoen to health and strength. Thus, with none of us crippled, we set out for World B in search of knowledge of the gem, and how we might destroy it.
“Gerold, Seth, and Tom had all encountered Oliver Tyson before his death, and in all three cases under strange and sinister circumstances. This should come as no surprise; see the original name for World B in this briefing.
“While in World B investigating a seed spat out from one of Oliver’s troubles years before, Eli and Tom, along with Seth and a little girl named Persephone, received a message from the mouth of yet another dead guy. The dead guy passed on a message from someone he referred to as ‘the Boss,’ who was believed by them to be an entity known to the Frontiersmen as Arjen Augustine. Tom was offered a job, Seth thanked for giving the Boss an idea, and Eli was invited to Denver, Colorado, America, World B, for a party on Valentine’s Day, see Figure 6.”
The pointer whacked the blackboard at the center of a frilly heart being passed from one stick figure to another.
“Creepy odd ducks know creepy when they hear it, but the invitation ate at Eli as February was right around the corner and, armed with Oliver’s memories, he knew whatever it was, whether he was there or not, was probably not going to be good for the people of Denver.
“Though Avery declared himself king of the planet among the group, he figured he could work from home, and we returned to World A London and relative sanity for a time, and Eli came with us to make sure our sanity never got too sane.”
At the back of the room, Avery shifted and tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Now some time ago, after our earlier trouble (namely my medical vacation), we may or may not have tracked down the gang hired to introduce their footwear to my face, and we may or may not have exchanged pleasantries and gunfire with them. It came as news to us that the police force did more than shake down beggars and pose for photographs in front of naughty graffiti, but they eventually knocked on the door of Flynn & Flynn and invited Avery to meet the force and take a tour of their holding facilities. Eli had just woken from a nightmare that freaked him out, and I’m always usually often reliably awake at night, so we got out of there while Avery Averyed our visitors into clambering to list him in their wills and into telling him about their lovely daughters.
“Eli’s dream was of a party and a demon he remembered Oliver meeting--and killing. The demon was Tobias Higgins, in the employ somehow or other of Arjen Augustine, and progenitor of two-headed possessors of bodies. In the dream, he appeared to be overseeing the transformation of monsters into… other monsters, of the two-headed possessor variety, via a cauldron that was covered in eight stylized knotwork motifs: rats, flies, snakes, scorpions, locusts, jackals, spiders, and human skeletons. The dream ended with Higgins vanishing into a vista of what Eli was convinced was his hometown. (No, not Denver.) Frantic, Eli needed to go, and I needed to stay, as it was looking more and more likely that Avery’s Averying lacked the gravitational pull of the money behind the police visit. So before we could be arrested on charges of murder, I sent Eli to World B.
“As it happens, World A proved capable of copy-catting the mayhem of World B. While Higgins did appear at Eli’s family home, and while Eli, with the help of Tom, Seth, Gerold, and a priestly acquaintance, Fidel Camejo, did slay the demon (again?), Valentine’s Day loomed.
“Eli began to believe that he should go to Denver. To do what? How? And where in Denver? He had no idea, and with no plan his urge got stomped on. Seth, who enjoys smashing things, wanted to go to Denver all along due to the possibility of smashing things there. He set out to net some information. He came up with the name of an establishment--the Crosswire Casino--and the fact that word of this gathering was being spread far and wide among non-human denizens of the worlds. More than that, the rumor was that Denver would belong to the Dark, come Lupercalia Eve, or Valentine’s Day.
“With too many responsibilities to and tensions between our friends, allies, and clients, there is no way that Avery or I can ethically involve ourselves in this matter. Naturally, we’re doing it anyway. We’re dragging all of you down with us, but everything will work out in the end. We’re Flynn & Flynn.”
From the back, Avery cleared his throat again, but seemed to be satisfied. It was just a small thing.
“... and Associates,” Felix added. “See Figure 7.”
A group of stick figures appeared to be gathered on a chequered blanket with a curly-cue tree in the background and a little sun, enjoying a picnic. A more curled-up stick-figure sat scrunched in the shade of the tree with a grumble-squiggle over its head, but the grumble-squiggle did not appear to be dampening the general mood. All the other stick-figures were smiling.
“Two worlds,” Felix began. “Ours.” He tapped the circle he’d drawn on the left side of the board, then smacked the circle he’d drawn to the right. “And Tom’s. Tom’s is also Oliver’s--he’s the dead guy--and in a sense Eli’s, though Eli was born here. For the sake of this briefing, I’ll be referring to Tom’s world as the Batshit Crazy World, or the BCW, and to our world as the Real World, or the R--”
Standing at the back of the parlor, Avery cleared his throat sharply. Their eyes met. Avery shook his head.
“... As I was saying, I’ll be referring to Tom’s world as B, and to ours as A.”
Character Origins:
World A
Aurelia Dumitru
Gerold Schoen
Seth
Eddie Fletcher
Avery Flynn
Felix Flynn
Ethan McDowell
Elijah Whitmoor
World B
Rachelle (deceased)
Tomlin Jefferson
Guisseppe Maniato
Oliver Tyson (deceased)
Fidel Camejo
“A necromancer and all-around maniacal personage known as Rachelle, from B, tormented Oliver’s family, and caused the death of Tom’s wife, Catherine, leading Oliver and Tom to team up and destroy her. With her dying breath, Rachelle cursed Oliver, see Figure 1.”
The white-tipped pointer stick drew a quick circle around a chalk drawing labeled “Figure 1,” that appeared to show a supine stick figure pointing menacingly at another stick figure.
“... Unbeknownst to anyone for many years, it was at this time that Rachelle managed to also infect Tom with a shard of herself. To possess him, in effect, if to--we believe--largely passive effect.”
There was no illustration of that point.
“Perhaps as an effect of the curse, Oliver died of consumption within a few years of Rachelle’s demise. Definitely as an effect of the curse, he was caused to be reincarnated--but his spirit managed to come between worlds, to A, for rebirth, perhaps as some attempt to protect itself. On A, Oliver’s soul was reborn in the United States of America to the Whitmoor family, in the form of a boy they named Elijah.
“Elijah was a bit of an odd duck, talking to himself and whatnot and generally being a mite creepy. As it turns out, he was very creepy, as he could perceive and converse with ghosts and spirits. This understandably caused tension with his family as he grew, though apparently he was well-liked in some corners, we’ll presume the creepy ones. See Figure 2.”
“Figure 2” appeared to be a drawing of zig-zag lightning bolts and a spiderweb--with spider.
“Being a creepy odd duck, Eli wandered far from home while still a smelly munchkin with barely a smear of peach fuzz on his chin. That is to say, he was very young. Being very young and scrawny, he naturally walked around like he was ten feet tall and wore guns as if daring the universe to try to off him. ‘Sure thing,’ said the universe, at which point it promptly tried to off him by dropping a gigantic interdimensional worm on top of him. Fortunately, that’s where Avery and I come in, see Figure 3.”
He tapped a chalky mess that was no doubt supposed to represent a gigantic interdimensional worm. Less easy to make out, given the limits of white chalk as a medium, were the pair of smiley-faced stick-figures astride the worm’s back. One could argue that the smiley-faced stick figures did indeed look very much alike, though perhaps with subtle structural differences that one could pick out were one familiar with them.
“We saved Eli, who hired us on the spot in our capacity as finders of the lost. He proved to be rich, which was fortunate as we were low on cash at the time.”
“While traveling,” Avery put in, speaking up from the back. “We were low on cash while traveling.”
“Right. I magicked us back to London, and we cleared out our storage room at Flynn & Flynn to put him up. That was not long after we’d met Miss Isabell Wickham, who needed the help of trustworthy locals here in London. We’d found a good place for her to stay by that time, and though we had not made much headway on her troubles it was thought that the experiment that resulted in the incident of the gigantic interdimensional worm might net results applicable there. It was also around that time that a job in the Fayns led to our first encounter with Miss Aurelia Dumitru, and our first experience of the Garden, and the acquaintance of the lovely Henrietta Olkswitch, proprietor therein.”
Avery drew an imaginary line across his throat twice with a finger.
Felix skipped ahead.
“We were hard at work on Eli’s case. The crux of it was that he heard things from spirits about himself that he did not understand, and had tatters of memories, and wanted to know what it all meant. He had a sense of a name applying to him. The name was ‘Bane,’ which struck us as more of a random-dart-flung-at-a-dictionary sort of thing until we remembered that we were dealing with Americans. We came to realize that, somehow, he was being sought here in London. We realized it in the form of me being sent to hospital for a lengthy holiday.
“Eli was having more and more dreams and hearing more whispers. The dreams were generally more agreeable, in that they began to contain information. All the same, it was our intention to earn our retainer by gathering more consultations. We thought, ‘Who better to examine a creepy Yank kid than a pack of ravenous, drooling, hyena-like rich British snobs?’ So once I was mobile again, we took him to an event at Carlington Manor outside of London, the key haunt in the United Kingdom of a group of which we were (nominally, it turns out) members. The group is known as the Frontiersmen, and the event was a dinner in honor of an old-timer Frontiersmen bigwig named Gerold Schoen, see Figure 4.”
Though Felix did not point out the drawing, there was a clearly labeled fourth drawing that looked like a happy stick figure waving from a wheelchair.
“Gerold Schoen came over from America for his big chance to get gawked at by white-tie strangers before retiring. We didn’t know at the time, but he came over from America B using a byway we weren’t cool enough among Frontiersmen to have heard of before. (They call it Limbo, which is frankly a terrible name that spits on the theological history of the term.) Gerold came with his partner, Seth, another dead guy walking around, and with Tom, who is not dead as far as I can determine. We later discovered that the true purpose of their coming to Carlington was to nominate Tom as Gerold’s replacement regarding his duties with Seth.
“Carlington is the ancestral home of the Gattry family, and currently the head of the family is Sir Richard Gattry. Avery schmoozed with Sir Richard previously, so we were allowed into the main arm of the gathering, where Eli promptly wandered off. From what I understand, he encountered Seth, who recognized his face as very like that of the deceased Oliver Tyson from B, and was subsequently introduced to Gerold Schoen, who was outside avoiding the hyenas.
“Avery tried to follow, but there was a bit of a tussle about that.
“Long story short, Eli had a surge of memory that left him with the revelation that I have outlined already: he was once a man named Oliver Tyson, from a world like ours but not. See Figure 5.”
Figure 5 appeared to be a baby with a pair of six-shooters.
“We met Tom that night, and in short order realized that he had two heads. No, no--a spiritual tapeworm. No, no--a hitchhiker inside him. We exorcised him and I bottled a gem that, it turned out, was a remnant of Rachelle--the same witch slain by Oliver with the help of Tom years before. Concerned about the implications, we realized that, though the job we’d been hired for was technically over, we couldn’t be done with so many threats remaining, and so many questions unanswered. Eli proved that the ‘curse’ that clung to him and kept him from accessing the magic of his previous self could be bypassed with some cleverness, by restoring wheelchair-bound and ill Gerold Schoen to health and strength. Thus, with none of us crippled, we set out for World B in search of knowledge of the gem, and how we might destroy it.
“Gerold, Seth, and Tom had all encountered Oliver Tyson before his death, and in all three cases under strange and sinister circumstances. This should come as no surprise; see the original name for World B in this briefing.
“While in World B investigating a seed spat out from one of Oliver’s troubles years before, Eli and Tom, along with Seth and a little girl named Persephone, received a message from the mouth of yet another dead guy. The dead guy passed on a message from someone he referred to as ‘the Boss,’ who was believed by them to be an entity known to the Frontiersmen as Arjen Augustine. Tom was offered a job, Seth thanked for giving the Boss an idea, and Eli was invited to Denver, Colorado, America, World B, for a party on Valentine’s Day, see Figure 6.”
The pointer whacked the blackboard at the center of a frilly heart being passed from one stick figure to another.
“Creepy odd ducks know creepy when they hear it, but the invitation ate at Eli as February was right around the corner and, armed with Oliver’s memories, he knew whatever it was, whether he was there or not, was probably not going to be good for the people of Denver.
“Though Avery declared himself king of the planet among the group, he figured he could work from home, and we returned to World A London and relative sanity for a time, and Eli came with us to make sure our sanity never got too sane.”
At the back of the room, Avery shifted and tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Now some time ago, after our earlier trouble (namely my medical vacation), we may or may not have tracked down the gang hired to introduce their footwear to my face, and we may or may not have exchanged pleasantries and gunfire with them. It came as news to us that the police force did more than shake down beggars and pose for photographs in front of naughty graffiti, but they eventually knocked on the door of Flynn & Flynn and invited Avery to meet the force and take a tour of their holding facilities. Eli had just woken from a nightmare that freaked him out, and I’m always usually often reliably awake at night, so we got out of there while Avery Averyed our visitors into clambering to list him in their wills and into telling him about their lovely daughters.
“Eli’s dream was of a party and a demon he remembered Oliver meeting--and killing. The demon was Tobias Higgins, in the employ somehow or other of Arjen Augustine, and progenitor of two-headed possessors of bodies. In the dream, he appeared to be overseeing the transformation of monsters into… other monsters, of the two-headed possessor variety, via a cauldron that was covered in eight stylized knotwork motifs: rats, flies, snakes, scorpions, locusts, jackals, spiders, and human skeletons. The dream ended with Higgins vanishing into a vista of what Eli was convinced was his hometown. (No, not Denver.) Frantic, Eli needed to go, and I needed to stay, as it was looking more and more likely that Avery’s Averying lacked the gravitational pull of the money behind the police visit. So before we could be arrested on charges of murder, I sent Eli to World B.
“As it happens, World A proved capable of copy-catting the mayhem of World B. While Higgins did appear at Eli’s family home, and while Eli, with the help of Tom, Seth, Gerold, and a priestly acquaintance, Fidel Camejo, did slay the demon (again?), Valentine’s Day loomed.
“Eli began to believe that he should go to Denver. To do what? How? And where in Denver? He had no idea, and with no plan his urge got stomped on. Seth, who enjoys smashing things, wanted to go to Denver all along due to the possibility of smashing things there. He set out to net some information. He came up with the name of an establishment--the Crosswire Casino--and the fact that word of this gathering was being spread far and wide among non-human denizens of the worlds. More than that, the rumor was that Denver would belong to the Dark, come Lupercalia Eve, or Valentine’s Day.
“With too many responsibilities to and tensions between our friends, allies, and clients, there is no way that Avery or I can ethically involve ourselves in this matter. Naturally, we’re doing it anyway. We’re dragging all of you down with us, but everything will work out in the end. We’re Flynn & Flynn.”
From the back, Avery cleared his throat again, but seemed to be satisfied. It was just a small thing.
“... and Associates,” Felix added. “See Figure 7.”
A group of stick figures appeared to be gathered on a chequered blanket with a curly-cue tree in the background and a little sun, enjoying a picnic. A more curled-up stick-figure sat scrunched in the shade of the tree with a grumble-squiggle over its head, but the grumble-squiggle did not appear to be dampening the general mood. All the other stick-figures were smiling.