Molly Toombs
In the life of a blossoming young
occultist, you found yourself and your daily activities making a
gradually tightening orbit around the consumption of knowledge.
Discovery was key when information was currency, and to stay on top you
had to treat it like trying to strike oil. Dig and dig and dig. As a
result, Molly's spare time began to wind its way around reading, or the
pursuit of new things to read. Her laptop occupied her lap more often
these days too-- the internet could not be discounted for its usefulness
after all.
So when she woke up one mid-weekday and found the
weather beautiful, she set out on foot for a bookstore on the other side
of town. Florence, now about seven or eight months old, was no longer
small enough for Molly to lift. She was a lanky brown thing whose head
came up past Molly's knees now. Give her another two years and she
would be something to contend with, to keep her mistress safe while she
slept.
Both mistress and hound were happily worn out and basking
in the sun after the jog to the bookstore and back again. Molly had
changed out of running clothes into a pair of shorts, a tank top, and a
cardigan (a warm-weather fallback if she ever had one) and gone to sit
out on her balcony. The door was propped open, and Florence was laying
in the sun, sprawled out to take up as much space as she could. A young
orange cat was dozing on the window ledge, and Molly was in a chair
with her legs stretched out and up, heels propped on the railing.
Sunglasses on, hair piled up, book in hand. The subject: dimensions and their alternates.
Spiegelung
Sometimes cats stare at walls. Dogs do it too.
It's fucking weird.
Molly
has been on the business end of a number of weird scenarios and
activities playing themselves out like her life's the sage. Especially
as of late. Why should today be any different? Because the sun is out,
goddammit, and it's shining. The weather is temperate and there is even a
cool breeze that picks up and playfully ruffles the stack of red locks
atop her and the pages of her book. There is no way that dark world
could touch her here.
It's reason enough to look up and enjoy the feel of the air on her freckled face.
That's when the barking starts.
That
glass door is the target of Florence's ire. She's still a puppy and is
no doubt still learning to bark, but has she been exposed to something
so terrifying she's trembling and whining between the loud explosions of
anger she's directing at the balcony door? This is something very
different. This isn't kids playing in the hallway and exciting her to
playfulness. Has Molly ever witnessed this gentle creature growl as it
is now?
In a strange intersection of happenstance Lucy the cat is
standing on the other side of that propped open door, staring up at the
same spot Florence, absolutely quiet and still except for its hackles
raising and hair bristling.
Molly Toombs
Reading
in the same position for too long would cramp a neck up, plus the
sunshine felt great on her legs and arms (protected by liberal amounts
of sunscreen, of course) and she'd like to have it on her cheeks as
well. It was like a tiny victory, knowing that she could still feel the
sun's warmth and smell the same-no-matter-the-brand sunscreen smell of
the lotion on her skin. The Undead hadn't stolen that away from her
yet.
Molly had just closed her eyes and pulled in a breath of the
cool air when her dog started to bark. That breath came out with a
startled exclamation, and she'd jumped and jabbed herself in the thigh
with the spine of her book. "Jesus fucking--... Florence, what are
you--?"
Having been prepared to scold her dog, Molly had twisted
to see the dog quite suddenly different from how she had been before, in
many ways. No longer laying down, no longer sprawled and sleepy and
resting. Instead she was up, arched in her back so her spine was
showing, snarling and whining and barking-- frantic with terror. Molly
had never seen the puppy behave this way, not even after that explosion
that had knocked both of them silly for a second.
She stood then,
approached the puppy but didn't touch her yet. Looked, simply, then
took notice of the cat on the other side of the doorway.
A sense
of dread began to bubble like tar boiling in her chest, and Molly's eyes
shifted to focus instead on the space in her doorway. The book was
still in her hand. She glanced down to it, back to the doorway.
Thoughtful and testing, she tossed the book in a light underhand through the doorway to see what would happen.
Spiegelung
The
door lands and like a lot of things that are thrown it doesn't land how
it started its journey. It's open to a page and it's a random page,
maybe, though there's always a reason to be suspicious of randomness.
Especially
when you're reading dimensions and their alternates and all the
possibilities while your dog is still barking away, and now that she's
said something, looking at her like: Come on, are you fucking kidding me, we're going to fucking die, because Molly knows Florence doesn't speak human and she's asking her what's wrong instead of taking a look.
That's if you're going to anthropomorphize the canine.
The
cat had remained still until the book fell and that makes it start. It
bolts through the doorway and into the apartment and, no, it doesn't
disappear through some interdimensional gateway. It keeps running under
the coffee table and under the couch and disappears after that.
Molly Toombs
The
book landed with a harmless 'plop' on the floor, and Lucy scampered
away to tuck herself under a piece of furniture. Molly wrinkled her
nose, as though she didn't trust it, but her pages didn't hop to life.
There was no portal that had suddenly appeared, and the book did not
land on any alternate planes.
So Molly looked back down to
Florence, as she noticed a passerby looking up as though concerned about
the animal he heard while passing in front of the building.
"Shhhh,"
she hushed, the sound a comfort rather than a command. She crouched
down and put an arm over the dog's side. Scrubbed her hand in the dog's
short chest fur and soothed her as much as she could manage or hope
to. Then she stood and cautiously, skeptically, walked through the
doorway.
Spiegelung
It doesn't happen when she
goes to comfort Florence, which works to an extent, and it doesn't
happen when she begins her way through the door. As she now knows from
her research of mirrors and reflections, the geometry is a mathematical
science of angles.
When she walks through the doorway there is a
flash in her peripheral vision. It follows the catching of the sun's
rays as the gleam and hit her own eyes. A sudden movement over the
surface of the glass door. A sudden and deliberate movement, like a
cockroach scurrying when a light is flicked on, that carries whatever
creature (not Florence, not Lucy, and not even Molly's own reflection)
out of that pane of glass, over the next, and into...
Into the wall where the balcony's window ends past the bulk of her air conditioning unit.
Molly Toombs
[Perception 3 + Awareness 2]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Molly Toombs
[Wits (Cool-Headed) 4 + Alertness 3]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )
Spiegelung
As
every alarm bell Molly has set up begins going off, telling her that
something is not right, something is quiet wrong, she gets that very
feeling that is becoming all too familiar. Maybe it was just the shadow
of a large bird passing overhead? Disappearing as the creature continued
over the roof?
No. It's a large form and it is shadowy, yes, but not a shadow.
She
knows this and she also knows that it hadn't just disappeared at the
edge of that windowpane. She just manages to notice the subtle passage
of darkness over a picture frame in the far corner of the living room.
Get gets the feeling that she could give chase if she reacted quickly
enough, or run if it's the creature that's stalking her.
Molly isn't sure which. Like its form, she can't make out its intention.
Molly Toombs
The
sudden movement in the corner of Molly's eye startled her, not unlike
the barking had. Her hands moved up, a reflexive move to protect her
chest and neck and face if she needed to. The thing was fast, and many
people less aware would be quick to dismiss it as nothing more
than the light reflecting off the window catching them off guard. Molly
knew better, though. It wasn't long before that she was fending off a
shadow-not-shadow creature with a beam of light. Fleeing from it when
it charged.
This thing seemed to have vanished, but Molly was fast
and sharp minded. She spied the thing as it slipped through the cracks
of window and air conditioning unit and glided past a picture frame,
deeper into her living room and home.
She could chase. She could run, too.
Instead, Molly took a breath and approached this as she did, many would say unwisely, so many other things supernatural.
She
gathered herself, did her very best to collect her calm and make
herself appear so. Her hands went into her cardigan pockets, and with a
controlled and stroll she stepped back into the apartment. The balcony
door was left open-- she wasn't going to lock Florence out four stories
above the ground, nor was she going to drag her back past the thing by
force.
In a voice that she so very much tried not to let shake,
she spoke into the room. "Out of sheer curiosity, I'd really love to
know who it is that's skulking around in my home, scaring all of my
animals."
Molly Toombs
[Charisma 2 + Empathy 2: Spending WP]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Spiegelung
Molly
doesn't give chase and there is another movement. This time it's across
her television screen and it seems to hesitate for a moment. It's just
long enough for her to almost get a good look at it. It almost seems
intentional in it. Not taunting? Playful. Almost playful.
And then
its gone again, a bob and a weave and it is off, through the apartment
and across another picture frame, existing only in the surface of those
reflective objects scattered throughout her living room, through the
kitchen and across a coffee pot before it's headed toward the nearest
bathroom.
The only bathroom.
Molly's bathroom.
Molly Toombs
Eyes
had already been keen to keep track of the shadow-reflection-thing, so
she noticed that its pace had slowed when it reached her television.
She could nearly make out a shape, the substance of that blur of
consciousness and motion, but then it was onward again.
Into her bathroom.
Molly
paused, then cleared her throat and turned her head to call over her
shoulder. "Florence, bed." It took her two repeats of the command and
beginning to walk back over to the dog before she moved, but soon the
pup darted into Molly's bedroom, aiming for the dog pillow on the floor
that was associated with the word. Whether the cat darted along with to
keep protection of the big brown thing with teeth or not was
inconsequential, ultimately.
When the dog was through the threshold, Molly closed her bedroom door and then turned to the bathroom.
Well-practiced
in the art of not committing to remaining in a room (thank you college
years), Molly gripped the doorframe of her bathroom, for the door had
been open previously, and leaned into the room to look immediately to
the mirror.
Call it a hunch.
Spiegelung
What's
there to see is something she has never seen before. The creature is
looming and its form too large to be fully contained inside the framed
mirror hanging above her sink. Its size isn't the most horrific part
about it, but everything else about it accumulated.
Let's start at the top, shall we?
Its
hair is plastered against its scalp, melted like candle wax and
bubbling drips, a dark blonde like rancid tallow. Calcified and stuck
there. Its flesh is all salt sore and dry and smooth like a scar in
spots, but built up like scales in others. Its face is asymmetrical,
eyes strangled and sunken and somehow blue and familiar, one side of its
face smashed flat and the nose as well, almost reptilian, but not
actually an animal's because no natural animal looks this putrid. The
other cheekbone is raised like it's trying to escape, burst free, full
of bone knob and puss, and it's jaw also seems to be trying to get away,
one side distended with a beginnings of a tusk like too many teeth
trying to emerge from one patch of gum, even making that half of its
chin bulbous.
But shall we return to the eyes? Sunken as ugliness
tries to overtake it, swallow them hole, and only telling them see the
light of day to know it should never touch it. The eyes look very sad.
And they look very familiar.
She knows those eyes.
The thing looks back at her from where she looks and seems to expect what reaction she will have.
Molly Toombs
[Courage]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Molly Toombs
What
Molly spied in the mirror was reason in part for her clinging to the
doorframe and leaning into the bathroom instead of simply strolling in.
What she saw in the frame didn't only take her by surprise, but it
repulsed and horrified her. This was a monster in its purest form. It
looked like some Hollywood practical effects and make-up studio was
given the project and time of their dreams to make something that could
turn as many stomachs in a glance as possible.
Molly wanted to
fling herself out of the bathroom, to look away and flee and find some
way to banish the thing from her home. Her stomach twisted from cheek
to skin to tusks as she registered each of them. Nothing good could
possibly come of what she'd found.
But then she met its eyes, and it flinched back in uttered a low oh my god.
Her
resolve wasn't flinty, but she pulled it together enough to keep
herself from flinching back and fleeing the bathroom. She was pale, her
eyes wide and expression unable to utterly wring the horror and, now,
mutual sadness for what she saw. Molly let go of the door frame and
stepped further into the bathroom to stand in front of the sink.
A
part of her wanted to reach out, the part that remembered and knew and
even loved those eyes. The other part was riddled with caution, addled
with worry and distrust for the situation. She didn't know the rules
here. She didn't know what would happen if she touched that glass. So
she gripped the sink instead and asked, sounding heartbroken:
"What did she do to you?"
Spiegelung
The creature is the one who flinches.
It's not at the first look or the ensuing and deliberate steeling of Molly's resolve.
It's
the question. The words seems to lash out at it the way she had tried
to keep her reaction from doing. It recoils and shuts its eyes, opening
them to give Molly a final glance through the mirror before it turns and
flees again.
Molly Toombs
"Harald!"
She
cried after it. Perhaps this is fueled by the reflection's owner,
mangled though it may be, having burrowed his way into her life. She
cared for the homely man dearly, cherished him even. This was
unknowingly reinforced and fed gasoline to fire by blood laced into a
mug of coffee or two. All that Molly knew was that it made her mirror
the mirror-man's reaction (that is to say: flinch) in turn.
The
monster that loomed in the small space of a mirror over a sink that
stood as a pedestal rather than built into a counter had turned and
fled, and Molly broke her own resolving rule and pressed the tips of her
fingers to the glass, like that could help call him back.
"I'm sorry! I-- I want to help, come back."
But, no matter how long she waited, the monstrous thing didn't reappear in her mirror. After about a minute, perhaps, she felt the air return to normal and the tingling notice of Something's Wrong abate. She was almost reluctant at first to step away from the mirror, but once she did excitement replaced that reluctance. This was a development out of nowhere-- something she'd been actively seeking had come right to her, into her very home!
She knew precisely who she had to share the news with.
Soon as Florence was calmed and mellowed and Molly was back in place out on the balcony, she made a phone call.
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