As Mitch sees that reflection in the mirror on top of the mantel — the elder Mr. DiGiuseppe's head being seen in the mirror quite clearly as a bleached-white human skull — Mitch needs to give me a Fright check at Will-3. As Mitch processes the uncanny sight, Mr. DiGiuseppe, still hunched and still seemingly pained, takes his gnarled hand from the oxygen cart and offers it to Mitch while saying, "Where are my manners. Armando. Nice to meet you, Mitch. Do you want to come in and give Frankie a call in the City?"
Mitch is like, uh, yeah, okay, that'd be great, yeah, thanks. He takes the old man's hand and stumbles into the house. His current plan: get to the phone and dial a random series of numbers. So yeah let's make the aura reading happen -- c'mon, activation roll!
Mitch is also eying that oxygen tank and thinking that he needs to keep it together, which is neither here nor there but the man is distracted, that is what I am saying.
So as Mitch's hand grasps Armando's bony, papery handshake, a torrent of information appears before his eyes. Armando's aura is a deep, rich purple: the sign of a man who was once vital and robust and vigorous and generous and outgoing. But spiderwebbed throughout this purple are darker veins of blue-purple ranging into the near-black: a sure sign of system-wide disease. The elder Mr. DiGiuseppe is most assuredly suffering from is cancer, cancer that started in his lungs and has spread throughout his entire body. Mitch is no doctor, of course, but if he had to lay money he'd say that Armando has a couple of months left to live. But that's not the most important piece of information to come from this Aura Reading. There is a second aura present inside Mr. DiGiuseppe.
That second aura looks to Mitch's eyes like a stripe or a slim core that looks like a TV tuned to an empty channel: pure snow, black and white cascading dots and the slightest hint of white noise. (I'm going to rule that Mitch usually doesn't get non-"visual" information from Aura Reading; this is one of the only times he can remember "hearing" something from an aura.) The aura is alien: it's not a human soul or spirit or anything that Mitch can match up to anything he's ever seen in a human aura before. It's markedly distinct from Mr. DiGiuseppe but locked into his body and, apparently, taking over his soul from the inside. As Mitch walks over to the phone sitting on a side table by the plastic-wrapped couch, he can see some of the photos on the walls: a few of a very young (presumably) Frank in what looks like the mid-to-late 1940s by the looks of the cars and clothes with both mother and father ... and then a couple of older, adolescent Frank with just his dad. In one of the mid-'50s teenage photos, Frank appears to be wearing a Civil Air Patrol uniform.
Mitch picks up the phone and is a little unnerved to realize that as he bends down to stick his finger in the rotary dial that Armando is remaining at Mitch's six o'clock, out of sight.
Meanwhile, outside, Jocasta has managed to get to a spot without curtains intervening that allows her to see more clearly what's happening in the front room of the suburban ranch home. There's also a back screen door leading into the kitchen that seems like a logical entry point if shit goes down. (Yay, Tactics!) Roger and Sophie are parked about a block away, and Sophie (whose distance eyesight is apparently not the greatest) is squinting, trying to figure out what's going on. She asks Roger, "Wait, is he going into the house?" And Roger can see that yes, Mitch has just shaken the old man's hand, and walked into the house. The old man shuts the front door behind them.
A rotary phone? Ugh, Mitch hates rotary phones, he can't divine with them for shit. Touch-tone he can very occasionally feel like he's cluing into something. He'll dial some numbers at random, just in case the stars align, though.
Assuming he gets the three-tone signal for a misdial, he'll sigh and hang up and tell Mr. DiGiuseppe that he's sorry to trouble him, there's been some kind of mix-up, he'll talk to Frank about it, and then Mitch will try to get outside. This is his plan, anyway.
It may be due to failed activation rolls, but Mitch is feeling like there's no longer a reason for him to be inside the house, that there is no darker secret upstairs or downstairs to uncover. At least that's his sense as he's dialing.
The random number that Mitch dials rings five, six, seven times with no answer. I'm assuming that will lead him to hang up like a misdial would. As Mitch turns around and says, "I'm sorry to trouble you, there's been some kind of mix-up," Mitch sees Mr. DiGiuseppe standing up straight and tall, no longer clutching his oxygen cart to hold himself up. Mr. DiGiuseppe begins saying " ... some kind of mix-up" and begins to say the words Mitch is saying at the exact same time as Mitch.
"I'll talk to Frank about it," Mitch and Armando say in perfect unison. Mr. DiGiuseppe is also mirroring Mitch's body language and gestures precisely and at this point I need Mitch to give me a Will-2 roll please.
Jocasta, it's hard for you to hear what's going on in the house but you can definitely see this and I think a Body Control roll at a minus 2 would be a good ad hoc roll to see if you can detect this uncanny mirroring.
Mitch continues to want to get outside.
Given Jocasta’s better position and last signal, Roger figures he’s not backing her up with a gun. So he prepares a fast getaway, for 4 people in a 2 door. He turns to Sophie in the back and says “So, you need to shift to sitting behind me. Good. And kick the passenger seat forward, like when you got in. And you want to put on your seatbelt. When I say, put your foot on the passenger seat; I’ll need you to hold it down. Now let’s just chill and be groovy for a bit.”
Okay, Jocasta: this old man is precisely copying every single motion of Mitch's, down to infinitesimal micro-movements in his fingers, around his eyes, in every muscle seemingly both autonomic and voluntary. Even their breathing is matching now, breath for breath, which shouldn't even be possible considering this guy is feeble and on oxygen. This is absolutely not normal.
Sophie steels herself, gulps down a nervous breath, and does precisely as Roger instructs, getting her right leg in position to allow for a quick push to get Mitch or Jocasta in the back seat.
So! Mitch! First things first. As the elder Mr. DiGiuseppe copies your actions and words you feel utterly drained. Your muscles weaken and get that achey lactic-acid feeling, like you've just run a sprint for a good distance. Your head aches, as it fills with random thoughts that rise to your consciousness unbidden. Mitch loses 3 Fatigue Points. Now given you've seen this ... entity's true self, I'm not going to call for a second Fright Check in this scene due to this psychic assault. But other than the unnerving mimicry the old man ... isn't really doing anything. He's not approaching, and as soon as you stopped speaking he did too. Mitch makes for the door and Mr. DiGiuseppe does nothing to stop him. Instead the two of you move in tandem, in the opposite direction from each other at the exact same speed and gait. The two of you pass each other in your mutual rush, and Mitch swears he can hear the old man run into the opposite wall of the front room as Mitch opens the front door and leaves the house.
Once I'm outside and staggering back towards the car I want to examine my own aura to see if I've been infect with white noise. It would be a few seconds before I was able to do that though.
Jo, pretty rattled by what's going on, is gonna try and keep her cool and edge along the side of the house in case Mitch is tailed, attacked, prevented from leaving, etc. But she's not otherwise gonna announce herself of make herself seen.
Jo watches Mitch make a clean getaway out of the house and make his speedy if stagger-y way back to Roger's car.
She'll make her way back quickly as well, but with her back to the car so she can keep an eye on if anything comes out of the house or anything odd is happening inside it.
Roger watches carefully, ready to peel out to her location. Mitch doesn’t get shotgun this time, unless he literally has one Roger doesn’t know about.
I kind of want to check everybody's auras now, just make sure nobody among Roger, Jocasta, and Sophie are carrying white noise in their souls.
“It’s time to get in the car, Mitch.”
If Mitch thinks his own aura is clean he'll climb into the back seat next to Sophie without complaint, and staring peering intently at her and Roger.
Roger sweats a bead that runs down his temple, thinking about Mitch concentrating that close to a gas tank — but just the one. Once the seat’s back in place, he starts the car.
Mitch peers deeply into his own soul, viewing the aura around his heart chakra (yeah, yeah) and it all seems his usual color in this agitated state (bright red-orange?). No fragments of whatever entity was in the old man seem to have lodged themselves in Mitch's soul.
Sophie's aura is a steel gray, no contamination but she definitely seems to be a little shut down from all the hubbub and fear and chaos.
Roger and Jo are also both clean but I'll let them describe their own auras if they want.
Mitch isn't 100% mollified because one of the symptoms of being the host of some kind of astral parasite might well be not being able to perceive said parasite. But he is 85% mollified.
"I think that was a bad idea. It seemed like a good idea. You know how it is." He gestures back towards the house. Mitch is addressing Roger, specifically.
“Anyone with guns or worse coming for us right now, man?”
Roger’s aura is fairly normal, except for a drum like pulse, and that it edges a little brighter and whiter towards the top of his head, and darker and with small snaking black bands around his throat.
But it looks like that usually.
Mitch shakes his head. "I don't think so. It's the guy's father's house, he's dying of cancer but he's got something bad hitchhiking inside him, I dunno what, I don't think it was expecting me. Maybe it was as scared of me as I was of it. Probably not but you never know... Damn it, I shouldna gotten spooked, guy's childhood bedroom is in there somewhere."
“Something bad? Shotgun bad, or burn the house down bad?” Roger winces as he recalls a little too late Sophie is still in the car.
The Librarian is staring straight ahead at the DiGiuseppe house in the middle distance, perhaps searching for a sign of Jocasta.
Jo will dart into the car and hiss "Burn it" as soon as she's sure nothing's coming out of the house. Her aura is a pale yellow bleeding into a cloudy blue.
Mitch honestly doesn't know whether the thing in the cancer patient tried to whammy him and he only got a glancing blow, or if the hit to his CNS was an unavoidable side effect of proximity, or what. He doesn't immediately leap to trying to burn up the house, though.
Roger takes Jocasta’s order as “Burn rubber,” if only to keep Mitch from burning them all.
Sophie takes a giant deep breath and lets out a shudder. "You know I'm not really cleared for the field, I've mentioned this before, right?"
“I’m taking us out of sight. Jocasta, you want to come back and burn it, we go get some gas cans and a plan. Solid? Maybe we take some folks somewhere safe first?”
Mitch doesn't know whether to feel slighted or supported by Roger's talk of gas cans. He'll try to calm himself down with Meditation, which probably has no effect but I guess might help him process his moment of contact with the old guy's parasite. (I just noticed I put 8 points into Meditation and 0 points into Calming Sophie Down.)
A successful Meditation roll can allow the GM to "enlighten" you on a particular moral dilemma, providing a hint as to which course of action "feels" right. It's certainly of a piece with Mitch's Advantages like Serendipity and Illuminated.
And Oracle!
I don't think that the question of whether or not to try to burn down Frank's childhood home with my mind, I don't think that qualifies as a moral dilemma.
Jo nods quickly. "Yeah, burn rubber. If you wanna burn this place down, that's not what I meant but I'd utter no objections. You okay, Mitch?" she says, looking into them to get any sign of whether he came out alone or brought with him a tag-along he might not know about ...
Mitch can't guess how Jo knows there's a risk he picked up an astral passenger, but he accepts that she's intuited that somehow. "I think so, I think so. I think the thing inside him stayed inside him, didn't lay eggs in my brain. I'm like 85% sure.
Sophie snaps out of her reverie. "Wait. Back up. That old man was a host to some kind of irruptor?"
Roger reaches across Locasta into the glove compartment, pulls out a grisgris bag, and tosses it back to Mitch: “Put this in your pocket — for luck with that. You never know." Roger doesn’t stop, but he’s not speeding
Jocasta turns to Sophie. "Maybe. That's what we're trying to figure out. Something was inside him and it looked like it was trying to find a new host, or something. It was mirroring Mitch inside and out."
Mitch is rubbing his temples. "He had something bad in him, I dunno what exactly. I could see it in his aura, burrowed in like a worm in an apple. Separate from the cancer, the cancer was a different thing. Fucking cancer... He started talking in sync with me, is what it felt like to me. You saw that, Jo? I figured it was a purely subjective experience. Anyway that was it for me, I split."
Jo will chat further with the group, again focusing on trying to keep Mitch on an even keel, about what's happened and what the best threat response is given the situation. (Deciding on whether to let an old, cancer-stricken man die in lonely confusion, to let him go through an extremely traumatic magickal ritual and THEN die in lonely confusion, or to just shoot him from a distance to get the whole thing over with is probably not the worst moral quandary she's faced, but it's the latest.) Once she's not in a moving car, she also wants to make some sketches -- mostly of the house, the old man, and what she saw when he was mirroring Mitch.
Mitch is severely bummed to learn Jo saw the mirroring, in the moment he thought he was hallucinating
"Well, I wouldn't completely discount the idea that we both hallucinated the same thing at the same time, but Occam's razor and all that ... "
“Are there standing orders about these kind of things?” Yes, Roger still has hopes that somehow there’s still SOP to follow. “If not, we have to head back to Livermore. A 45 minute drive is still faster than waiting an hour for the next check-in time. Much as I could use a beer.”
Fuck it, Mitch's next action is telling Roger to drive to the nearest bar.
Jo is going to want to make sure the Librarian gets back safely, and she's rulesey from the Army enough to know the importance of after-action reporting, so she'll tell everyone to hang loose if they want but she'll get a cab back to Livermore if she has to.
“Then let’s head to Livermore, check in, drop off who needs dropping, arm up, and come back and find out more. If it was going anywhere, it could have already left while we’ve been out of sight. Or Frank could come back. We come back, better prepped."
Mitch sighs, because he knows Roger is right, but says nothing.
“I gotta rum nip here if you really need something for the road.” Roger cracks his window, flips out a pack and a Zippo with practiced speed, and lights a cigarette.
He mutters something in French as he takes his first drag.
Sophie settles into her seat. She doesn't remove her seatbelt.
"If you don't need to go back, we can post outside the house while you find a field phone -- er, sorry, a pay phone," Jo says, watching Sophie closely.
Roger catches Sophie’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “Looks like we got a few minutes on a drive either way. Why don’t you tell us what you haven’t yet told us about this mirror spirit? I think we’re in the Need to Know now.”
So Sophie says, "I haven't clearly contributed my thoughts on the operation thus far, and that's been an error I have to apologize for." She seems chastened, but she's also now calling up what seem like old reserves of nerves and cool.
"As long as the host isn't allowed to interact with any other human beings, the êkimmu is not going to go anywhere. So I do think that continued surveillance of the home is paramount." She sighs. "I'm not ignorant of the moral dimensions of us needing to decide the length of the old man's remaining days on this earth. The world would absolutely be better off without one more irruptor in it. But ultimately we don't have all the facts here. The son is still an unknown. We don't know whether he's also possessed, or a willing or unwilling dupe of the irruptors, or ex-SANDMAN, or more than one of these." The Librarian looks down, away from eye contact with the three of you at the next bit of her spiel. "If it were up to me and I had the ability to do it myself? I'd want to capture and question that êkimmu. We could get some real answers there. But that's more having to do with my desire to know as much about a situation involving the Red Kings as possible. It's ... probably a luxury," she says with a dismissive hand gesture.
"Anyway, that's how I feel."
“Sounds like Jocasta’s right, and we need to post someone at the house, just in case of comings and goings. Jocasta, you good to watch solo? Drop you off, go get reinforcements, get back before any engagement? Two hours tops?”
"Oh, yeah. I'm ready. Don't take your time getting back, but in the meantime, if the old man tries to leave the house, or if anyone else shows up, I'll do my best to take them down but not out."
Let’s go with that.