Logs:Ghostly Investigations

Ghostly Investigations
Dramatis Personae Avi, Naomi, Sera, M-kids
In Absentia	2021-10-17 We got a fan club now?
Location <NYC> Renwick Smallpox Hospital - Roosevelt Island
Life is reclaiming parts of this dilapidated ruin, greenery pushing up through the piles of crumbling brick strewn over the grounds, vines climbing the exposed metalwork and moss tinting the half-erect walls green. What remains of the narrow hallways and cell-like rooms is mostly open to the elements, the ceiling fully collapsed throughout much of the structure. A good thing, then, that it's been a lovely day, warm and clear even as dark falls over the island. Avi has come prepared -- for what, it's unsure! -- a backpack full of water and snacks, salt in a pouch at his hip and a poker in his hand, a headlamp strapped to his forehead. Even so he doesn't look entirely sanguine as he steps over a pile of rubble and stops in a doorway, tensing abruptly at a clattering from beyond. When a raccoon scurries off beneath a bush his startled laugh is a little too breathy, his grip on his poker easing. "If you was a ghost," he's asking his companions in a hushed voice, "where around here would you be hanging out?" “The basement, duh,” Naomi replies, a little louder as she hops over the threshold in front of Avi. Naomi is surprisingly well kit out, if perhaps unseasonably so, in hiking clothes and boots acquired in a dimension far far away. Her pack is similarly well kit out, though she has forgone salt for two big white candles tucked into the water bottle pockets. Her flashlight appears to be her phone, gripped tightly in one hand, a GoPro strapped to her head in a similar fashion to Avi. She is radiating mostly confidence, though there’s an undercurrent of nervousness as she looks up at the ruin. “Or, like…. I dunno. The morgue? Wherever the morgue was?” She looks around, unsure which way to proceed. Sera, in denim overalls and a bright orange jack-o-lantern t-shirt, has been emitting nervous excitement that spikes when the raccoon surprises them. She's got her own headlamp, but otherwise not so well-equipped as her companions -- just a small messenger bag with a stylized leaping rabbit embroidered on its flap and a pink thermos stuck in its outside pocket. She shuffles closer to Avi, eyes wide as she scans the ruins around them. "I bet the the morgue is underground," she opines in a loud whisper. "But if I'd I'd died here? I'd spend my days under that skylight." She points over the edge of a crumbling interior wall at a much more in-tact part of the structure -- an octagonal brick and mortar frame like the mouth of a well two stories up. "Drawn to the last sky I ever saw..." Avi glances up towards the skylight -- and then the exposed moldering beams of what used to be the roof, just on the other side of the wall. "Ghosts can't move five feet to the right?" He sounds deeply skeptical, but regardless is moving closer, pulling open what remains of the door with a creak to cross into the room. He peers up toward the octagonal opening before heading further back. He's aiming the glow of his headlamp down a dank stairwell, what can be seen of its wooden steps half rotted away. There's a flutter of fear in him as he approaches the stairs, muscled back down in a determined flair of bravado. "Hope that camera's running because there gotta be something creeping down here." He starts to brace his hand against the wall as he heads down the shaky stairs but quickly pulls it away from the slimy stones, testing each stair with a cautious sneakered toe before descending. Naomi shivers. “Don’t make it sound like you gonna die here today, that’s too creepy.” Sera’s excitement twists with her own nerves as she follows Avi into the stairwell. Clicks on the camera, the GoPro pressing up against her scales. “Y’all wanna say something for the viewers? Bout how brave you are?” Naomi’s own bravado wavers looking down into the stairwell, and gestures, magnanimously, for Sera to go ahead of her into the dark. Somewhere below there's a flicker, a shift, briefly moving down where the headlamps and flashlight get swallowed by the gloom. Just a small ripple of motion as though one patch of shadow is pushing back against the dim illumination before slipping away. "Maybe the ghosts are trapped in the past, and can't see the way that everything has changed around them," Sera suggests. At the sight of the staircase her enthusiasm waxes strong even as her control of her power slips and draws the other teens along. "Oh, this place is just marvelous!" She flashes a bright smile at the GoPro. "I wish you could feel the weight of history that lingers on the air." There's a shiver of trepidation in her zeal as she graciously accepts Naomi's offer and follows Avi down. Then that trepidation flashes into a thrill of real fear spiked with real excitement as she points off into the darkness. "Omigod did you see that?" she's actually whispering now. And walking toward where the shadow had seemed to move. "Huh." Avi's voice has gotten more hushed as he heads down the stairs. "Maybe. I'd be a pretty angry ghost if I was stuck in a quarantine jail for eternity, I hear this place was --" He cuts off at the flutter, eyes squinting up to try and peer into the darkness. His, "ohmygod," comes with a heavy dose of exasperation as Sera just walks off after the shadow. "You ain't even know what's in there," does not stop him from joining her, his hand clenching tight on the fire iron. Naomi is carefully stepping exactly where Avi and Sera have already tested the boards, phone flashlight on and pointing down. The camera swings up at Sera's exclamation, though neither it not Naomi can spot anything in the darkness. "See what?" Naomi trails them both, trying to keep her face pointed towards her companions while her trepidation rises. "I can't see for shit in here." Her free hand reaches for one of the candles, clutching it in her fist. There's another movement, a pool of blackness shifting in the gloom as it flees toward a side room, whisking straight through a half-broken door. Sera can just barely feel a flare of anger, at once intense and fuzzy like a scream stifled behind a pillow. "There!" Sera hisses when the shadow moves again. A sudden fear spikes the swell of her excitement, but though her steps slow uncertainly she does not shrink away. "It's gone in there," she points out the side room, voice still hushed, green eyes very wide when she glances at her schoolmates. "And it's angry." "Yesss," is Avi's first excited response, "I told you these ghosts finna be pissed." The excitement is for a moment eclipsed by curiosity: "-- so you can feel ghosts, where'd he --" That soon bleeds away into a colder fear. "... how angry?" "Angry at what? Us?" Naomi whispers, her fear bleeding into her voice. "Or just -- in general?" She looks down at the candle in her hand, the pouch of salt at Avi's side. In the darkness, the split second flicker of glowing green in her eyes is clear and eerie before it disappears. "Hi?" she offers in a louder voice. "If you are a ghost can you please not be angry at us?" This, at least, is just a scared request. The anger that Sera can feel flares again, sharply, together with a much fainter shiver of fear. The odd patch of darkness reemerges, pushes its way closer -- more recognizably vaguely human in shape, though its features are indistinct, just a fuzzy silhouette that sucks in all the light when it moves. It closes its arms around Sera -- a tingling and cold sensation where its limbs wrap against her, the light from her headlamp swallowed entirely by shadow, now -- and starts to drag her back into the gloom. "Um, angrier now?" Sera does backpedal, but too late to avoid the shadow's chill embrace. The darkness doesn't stop her shrieking at the top of her lungs, though, nor does it stop her terror from gripping everyone around her. The odd cold tingling spills over, too, but under the circumstances probably not all that noticeable. She thrashes, trying to twist around for better purchase on the debris-strewn floor and pull away from the entity trying to drag her away. Her second scream, even more piercing than the first, resolves into "{Help!}" Avi's eyes go wide-wide when the darkness grabs at Sera. He rushes forward, grabbing a handful of salt from his hip pouch and flinging it in the general direction of where a head should be, if the shadow-entity were more solidly human. He grips his tire iron with both hands after this, but hesitates on actually swinging it for fear of hitting Sera as well. Naomi's eyes go wide too, wide and glowing green as her panic twists in with Sera's contagious terror. "Hey hey hey 'stop! Let go of her!'" The hissing undercurrent of the command, clearly intended for the shadow, doesn't make her sound any less panicked. For a split second as the salt hits it the shadow wisps away into nothing, leaving the handful of salt to scatter over the floor and Sera's head in equal parts. It reforms a moment later, still coiling around Sera and pulling her back. Naomi's command stops it, a sluggish confusion trickling through its hostility. Its grip loosens briefly, but then it is tightening its hold once more. "You -- don't -- 'belong' -- here." The voice that fills the space is a low rustle, scratchy like dry leaves blowing across the stones. There's a squeak of hinges at the half-broken door behind Sera and the spectre; the door pushes open with a sudden flood of light into the dim space. Behind it it doesn't look like the ruins of the hospital at all, a cheerful warm glow coming from some sort of a cosy lounge. The ghost -- and Sera -- have frozen in space. A short brown-skinned teenager and a taller muscular Black boy, both wearing green-and-silver masks and capes, are tumbling out of the doorway. "C'mon!" the shorter of the two is calling urgently, "quick, this way!" The taller boy is moving to pry Sera loose from the frozen ghost, whisking her back through the doorway before she unfreezes in time. Sera flinches at the scatter of salt and would absolutely have fallen flat on her face when the shadow evaporated if it didn't immediately reappear. "Please let me go," she gasps, clumsily trying to generate calm but meeting with little success in her panic. "We didn't mean any harm!" If she'd been about to say -- or scream -- anything else, she goes as silent as she does still when the M-Kids arrive. When she returns to real time she looses an "eep" of startled confusion, then blinks up at the tall boy, blushing faintly. "Oh! It's you!" she blurts eloquently, her relief sweeping out in an almost palpable wave. "Thank you!" Though she's peering around her savior at the shadow now, eyes still very, very wide. Avi does not need to be told twice. He's reaching kind of instinctively for Naomi's hand as he dashes through the open doorway, his eyes wide and his breaths racing as he heads out of the hospital and into -- where?? He's only giving a cursory glance to the room they've ended up in, mostly staring back through the dilapidated door towards the shadow. "That place haunted for real for real -- do y'all see a lot of ghosts? I didn't think..." He trails off, staring at the kids who just came to save them and only belatedly catching up to, "Thank you." Naomi’s hand grips tightly to Avi, dropping the candle in the process onto the dilapidated floors. She, too, turns back to look at the shadow when they’ve crossed the threshold, eyes still wide and glowing, mouth open to ask it a question before spinning back around to the M-Kids. “'How’d y’all do that where are we wait shit don’t answer those for like a minute you don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna—'” Naomi pulls her hand out of Avi’s to slap it over her own mouth, squeezing her eyes shut as she sucks in a few deep breaths through her nostrils, waits for Sera’s relief to wash away her terror. When she opens her eyes again, they’re a little damp in the corners but no longer glowing or snake like. “Sorry,” she mumbles, mouth still covered, “thanks.” "What the door, that's my --" begins the shorter of the two M-Kids in response to Naomi's string of abortive questions, though their answer is truncated as well. They slams the door behind them; on this side it isn't rickety, just a plain sturdy wooden door. The room around them is small, comfortably appointed with plush armchairs and little reading tables. A lanky girl in jeans and a red sweater and neatly tied red and yellow hijab looks up from the biology textbook in her lap, levelling a steady look toward the other M-Kids first, and then the newly rescued Xavierites. "Shadow didn't get them, then?" "Not this time," says the bigger boy, leaning back against the wall with a broad grin. "Uh -- why were you fighting that weird wraith, anyway?" Sera recovers her physical equilibrium quickly and lets go of the tall teen. That she then grabs Naomi's arm is probably more a matter of her emotional equilibrium, though her terror is draining steadily away. "Whoa..." She gazes around the room. "Did a ghost just try to kill me?" This sounds shockingly calm, all things considered. "I guess we were trespassing -- oh! But, how did you know where to find us? Or that we were even in trouble at all?" Avi only lets go of Naomi's hand once the door is firmly shut behind them. He's still looking at the door a bit warily, as though he's afraid the ghost will pop back through any moment. "We weren't tryna fight a ghost, it just decided to fight us. We actually --" He hesitates, then forges ahead. "Actually were kinda hoping you lot would show up. How do you do all this?" “Shoulda asked if it was a ghost,” Naomi mutters, tucking her phone into a pocket and slapping the newly free hand on top of Sera’s. “I ain’t convinced.” Her attention turns to the kid that had begun to answer her questions, then to the door. “If I open that door now, it ain’t gonna be the basement, right?” "We don't go looking for ghosts, to start," says the girl in the chair. "Plenty of trouble out there without making more." "Lord, you lot have a lot of questions." The boy against the wall shakes his head slowly. "Do it with a lot of practice. Hoping we'd show up? We got a fan club now?" The teenager by the door crinkles their nose, shakes their head. "Good luck if you want to open it, it's locked." Which doesn't stop them from opening the door back up -- now it leads out onto the quiet nighttime street of Salem Center, just outside the arcade. "Next time you could just send a message, you know. TikTok is way less likely to try and kill you." "You go around saving people, with superpowers, in flashy costumes," Sera points out. "How do you expect to not have a fan club?" She frowns suddenly, thoughtful. "Huh... Anyway, people go looking for ghosts all the time. Maybe it only seems so harmless is because those who do find them get eaten." Despite this somewhat morbid conclusion, she lets go of Naomi's arm when the door opens again, the pull of her delight mild now but still plainly sensible. "Wow." She steps over the threshold, twisting around to peer at where the other side of the room's wall should be, then back through the door at the others. "We really need to up our game." "You saved me from a whole can of whup-ass my ma would have brought down, if you ain't had a fan club before I'd have started one." Avi whistles, low, when the door opens back up into Salem. "That's some trick." He follows Sera slowly through the door. "Aight. DMs and not ghosts, I hear you. Thanks for the rescue." He looks up to Naomi's GoPro, giving it a crooked smile. "Found us some ghosts and some superheroes. Pretty successful night, I think." Naomi hesitates on the threshold, turning her head so the GoPro can catch each of the M-Kids in its recording. “Don’t leave us on read.” She steps through the doorway after Avi, turns around quickly to catch a last glimpse of the room. “We gonna have a lot more questions.”