apocalypsehowcomm | Seance... Say Twice (Closed)

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Seance... Say Twice (Closed)

Who: Mercy Graves, Yelena Belova, Katrina
When: September 30th, into October 1st, the witching hours
Where: A graveyard in Gloucester
Summary: The gang does a seance... and suffers the consequences for it.
Warnings: rituals, ghosts, mild grave desecration

A graveyard in the middle of night is, undoubtedly, the best place to summon a ghost. So say the resources Mercy's been able to find on the internet. Yelena has been a part of this since the idea's inception, so she's along. Katrina is newly returned to Gloucester and someone that Mercy trusts, even months on from her perspective. The siren also has healing abilities if things get into a very tight spot. Which is something Mercy thinks Yelena might not approve of, but could be vitally necessary, depending on just how unhappy the spirits they summon are.

She leads the other women by torchlight through the graveyard. It's not one of the well-mainted ones; rather, it's an old, rundown thing on the outskirts of Gloucester, nearly bordering on Dogtown. She's already found and cleaned the grave of the oldest death in the place that she could find, and it's there that she stops.

"All right. I brought candles and some holders. We're gonna needs to set up a circle with them." She pulls them out of her bag and offers them to Yelena and Katrina. "Think you can help me light these and stick 'em in the ground?"

This has to work. She needs... some sort of win. After the terror of the tiny town, they need to find answers. They can't keep going like this.

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Katrina nods as she takes the candles. In her world, the dead live on in the Spirit Realm. Surely the dead here have someplace that's similar.

"I start here," she says as she goes and places her first candle. From her jacket pocket she pulls a lighter and easily lights the candle. "This place should not be abandon. What we do for this grave, humans should do for others."

Yelena is half turned away, scanning the flickering shadows cast by the torches with a focused sort of intensity, but she looks back at the sound of Mercy's voice, and nods, stepping close to take her share of the candles.

"Humanity is bad enough at taking care of the places needed by the living," she says, with a small, half-apologetic grimace in Katrina's direction. "Maybe if it was historically significant, someone would care - but probably this is too close to Dogtown for people to want to spend much time here now."

She crouches down on the opposite side of the grave from Katrina, then glances back up at Mercy. "Does your spell say there needs to be a specific pattern? Or just a circle?"

Mercy pauses to consult her phone. "Looks like it's just a circle. We'll make the pattern with the salt I brought." She looks at the other women with some concern. "We'll need to clean that up 'fore we leave. Salting the earth ain't good for plants, and I don't want to hurt anything growing around the graves."

She turns her attention briefly to Katrina. "I'm planning on coming back here to tidy things up over the next few weeks. You're right. Places like this should be tended and the folk below honored. Hoping Mrs. Betsy here'll give us a few minutes to talk with cleaning things up for her." Mercy motions to the grave before going back to her own set-up.

"Humanity is... careless," Katrina remarks, but she does not stop working on placing her candles as directed. This is worth their time, as is Mercy's plan for after the seance.

"Mercy, I come with you to honor this place. But for this, Yelena and Mercy speak to spirit."

Katrina is aware she is... not the best at having conversations with people who aren't sirens.

"Very," Yelena agrees, amiably cynical as she always is on the relative sense and worth of the human race.

She places her own candles, evenly spaced, working in the opposite direction from Katrina so that they'll meet approximately in the middle. It's more efficient that way, and if there's no significance to where and how the candles are placed, beyond that they form a circle, efficiency is, to her, the key.

"Unless you're hiding a few wheelbarrows of salt, there won't be enough to do any lasting damage. But we can clean it up anyway, if you brought some shovels."

Mercy... holds her tongue. The people of this world certainly seem a bit more careless than the ones in her own. At least about the land around them and care for the dead. "I stashed a pair of shovels near that tree over there." Don't... ask her why. Thank you.

Right, though. They've got the candles set up and lit. Mercy consults her phone one more time before taking out a large round container of salt. "This'll just take a moment." She uses the candles as her guide, creating a many-pointed star with thin lines of salt. "And the last bit..."

Mercy puts the salt away and pulls out her dirk. "Don't reckon either of you is squeamish about blood, but you might wanna look away if you are."

Preparedness is not strange to Katrina. Nor is whay Mercy is about to do.

She steps back to give Mercy space, her senses trained on their surroundings.

Yelena glances from the dirk to Mercy's hand and back again, then shakes her head, the corners of her mouth crimping slightly. A flick of her hand produces a small knife, blade much shorter, but wickedly sharp.

"Use this," she says. "It will cut cleaner, so there won't be so much damage to heal. Just do not cut your hand, please."

Mercy pauses, then sheathes her dirk and takes the proffered knife with a nod. "Thanks." Instead of offering her hand, she instead pulls up one of her sleeves and presses the blade to her forearm.

"Spirits of Gloucester, those who once lived and died in this place, hear us. Hear our plea. We face a great evil in this land that you called home. Your descendants still walk these lands, and though we ain't of them, we wish to protect them as our own kin. We call on you."

She draws the knife across her arm and watches the blood well and fall into the center of the circle and sizzle in the earth with a strange, crackling static.

"Blood and bone cannot confine
The souls we seek to now unbind.
Let them free to dance and run.
Let them speak with mortal tongue.
Rise from death for seven nights.
Seek the shadows 'tween the lights.
Brace yourself for truths of grave,
And know that dead cannot be saved."

There's a moment where the world around them seems to still, to quiet, and then the crackling of Mercy's blood on the ground starts once more, grows from a soft shurring to a cracking, screeching, howling sound that's accompanied by glitching in the air itself. Brave as she is, Mercy backs away, eyes wide and the knife clutched tight in her hand. She looks to the other women to make sure she's not somehow the only one seeing and hearing this.

Edited 2023-10-07 18:47 (UTC)

It's the hissing in the air that makes Katrina hiss, ready to lash out at whatever has decided to attack them--

Except the attack does not come. She meets the others' gazes, tense and poised to leap, but nothing emerges from the shadows. Only...

"Air feels... colder."

The first strange, static crackle of Mercy's blood reminds Yelena just a little of the sparking copper snakes that had infested Steel's demesne, and her gaze drops, scanning the grass for motion, shoulders tense. For a moment, the alien howl that follows in the wake of the incantation is almost a relief - but then it keeps rising, and the air flickers like the wake of a severe blow to the head.

"It looks wrong," she says, eyes fixing on that strange, distorted space. Her hands flex, open and empty for the moment, though the small knife she'd offered for the sacrifice is hardly the only one she's brought along.

"It is wrong." From the cold that slices through her to the sounds and sight. To the very taste of the air. There's a final, deafening burst of static, and then screeching as a tower of energy rises into the air and dissipates. Mercy shields her eyes from the light, but she catches glimpses of humanoid shades that seem to swirl and rise up the column, flinging themselves out into the city.

And then it's gone. Everything stops abruptly and there's an elderly woman in clothes that Mercy knows people of this time consider 'old-fashioned.' She is almost transparent and seems to be confused, frightened, as she looks around and then starts to move. She seems to hold a basket of some sort on one arm. Mercy jerks out of the way, arms curling in toward herself as she feels a bone-deep cold aching inside of her. The knife is clutched tighter in her hand as she watches the woman and begins to shiver.

"M-Ms. Betsy?" The woman looks over.

"Where was I going, now? Oh, the market. Must remember. Must remember. Just past the Wolfe House and down the lane. Are you young ladies on your way, as well?"

Edited 2023-10-12 05:37 (UTC)

Katrina watches the ghosts fly out from the circle, then fixes her gaze on the ghost Mercy calls Ms. Betsy. She goes and stands just behind Mercy, pauses for a second, then turns so her back faces Mercy's back. She's literally got Mercy's back here.

"You talk with spirit," she whispers. "I keep you safe."

Yelena tries, for a moment, to track the flood of shapes, strange greyscale images that distort the world seen through them in a way that makes her eyes ache. One lingers, an elderly woman, and she forces herself to focus on that one, not yet noticing the way the colour has leeched from the candlelight, from her companions' clothing.

"Yes, but we are very turned around," she says. "Can you point us in the right direction?"

Mercy nods slightly to Katrina, letting Yelena take the lead for a moment. She feels a strange and unpleasant cold creeping through her. The night is chilly, but she'd dressed for the weather and something still this warm shouldn't bother her.

"It was... Oh! It's just over this way. Just this way." The ghost starts to walk, meandering through graves along an imagined path. Mercy hesitates for a moment, then moves to follow. "Now, you girls stay close. We have to pass the Wolfe house. Terrible place. Terrible people, really."

There's a terrible taste in Katrina's mouth once she starts to follow; it gradually goes away as she walks. She stays alert, always aware of where her companions are.

"Why is this house terrible?"

Yelena falls in with the living women and the dead one, half wishing she'd had any reason at all to scavenge up a paper map before this excursion. She'll have to make do with memory, and so watches the ghost's path, trying not to flinch when she passes through what should be solid matter.

She dearly wants the answer to the question Katrina's posed, and so for the moment, she says nothing that might interrupt or distract.

"The people in it, lovely girl!" the woman says as she keeps walking. Mercy keeps up as best she can trying to dodge the physical obstacles the ghost seems to be ignoring. "The Wolfes. Witches, the lot of them, you mark me. That fence keeps them in, not us out."

Mercy glances at the other women. "What's wrong with witches?"

The woman seems to splutter for a moment. "What's wrong with- Everything! They're practicing dark and wicked magic, child."

If only the ghost knew that this particular "lovely girl" is, in fact, a lethal predator whose other form borders on monstrous.

"They do magic that hurt people?"

"How are they kept in?" Yelena adds, thinking of monsters penned beneath an office complex not so far away, and how poorly that had held, in the end. "We're from the harbour, there are only rumours there about the family."

"Yes, yes, of course they hurt people. They get some of the servants' heads all twisted around or scared to go anywhere at night, worried something's after them." The ghost continues to huff and puff as she walks. "I don't know how it all works, but the men put the fence up with the priest overseeing it. I expect it's God looking after us."

Mercy refrains from asking which god. She's been here long enough to know.

Katrina also does not ask about this god. It's not the point.

"Is there... way to stop them?"

She misses hunting, sue her...

"The priest from the Church of Holy Light?" Yelena asks, head canting slightly. She suspects it's not so easy a throughline, but if the ghost corrects the name of the church, that's something else they can look into, another piece of the strange puzzle that is Gloucester.

"Holy Light? No, no. It's just the church at the corner. You know Father Matthews, don't you?" She glances over in Katrina's direction. "As for stopping the Wolfes? Well, deary, I can't imagine how. Unless you've got enough money to buy them out of the whole of Dogtown and Gloucester. You don't get rid of a family like that, but you can contain them. We hope. It's-"

Very suddenly, the woman vanishes. There one moment, empty air the next. Mercy whirls around, looking to her companions. "You see where she went?"

For the very observant, they might note that there is a flickering figure back at the grave where they started.

"She is gone," Katrina murmurs, turninggher head left and right to around the graveyard. "I do not... there." She points to their starting point. "Is this another ghost?"

Yelena snorts softly when the spectre says the Wolfes can't be gotten rid of, but makes no comment. Or maybe that's merely because the woman disappears before she can. She, too, searches the darkness, all black and grey, thick with shadows, and turns to follow the line of Katrina's finger, eyes narrowing in a slight squint.

"The same, I think," she says. "That's strange. The others did not seem to snap back..."

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Seance... Say Twice (Closed)

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cw: implication of self-harm

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cw: discussion of self-harm

cw: self-harm, ritualistic sacrifice, ghosts

Re: cw: self-harm, ritualistic sacrifice, ghosts

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cw: ghosts

Re: cw: ghosts

ack, sorry, I thought I'd replied ages ago!

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