Alice’s Saturday evening odd encounter(Alice)
Date: 2025-08-09 17:33
(Alice’s Saturday evening odd encounter(Alice):Alice)
[Sat Aug 9 2025]
In Boxing Ring/span
The boxing ring dominates the center of the room, its canvas-covered platform
elevated three feet above the polished hardwood floor. Four corner posts
wrapped in worn padding support three rows of ropes, the topmost covered in
red vinyl, middle in white, and bottom in blue. The canvas shows
discoloration from years of sweat and blood, with faint stains that persist
despite regular cleaning. Overhead, a rectangular array of metal halide
lights bathes the ring in bright, even illumination, eliminating shadows that
might interfere with training or sparring. The surrounding floor space
contains rows of folding metal chairs for spectators, though most remain
stacked against the walls. Heavy bags hang from reinforced ceiling beams in
the corners of the room, their leather surfaces cracked and re-taped multiple
times. The walls display faded posters of boxing legends and local fighters,
along with a large mirror on the eastern wall that allows fighters to check
their form. The air tastes metallic and carries the permanent scent of
exertion, while the floor vibrates subtly with impacts from training
elsewhere in the building./span
It is about 60F(15C) degrees. The mist is heaviest At Foxglove and Franklin/span
(Your target discovers a small, forgotten god living in an abandoned subway station, sustained only by the offerings of a single elderly homeless person. When that person collapses from illness, the desperate deity begins granting increasingly dark miracles to attract new worshippers, each miracle corrupting both the god and recipient further. The characters must decide whether to help the dying god find ethical sustenance, put it out of its misery, or simply walk away from this pocket of fading divinity.)
The sounds of weights, speedbags, and the grunts of hard lifting dominate the air here, heavy with sweat and testosterone as it is; it’s within that orchestra of physical might that something else pierces through: a phone call, for King. It’s Alice, who hurriedly and panickedly explains, “King, no time to explain. There’s something seriously rotten down here.” You can hear what sounds like an argument in the background of the phone call, and she goes on to explain, “Subway. Please come quick. There’s a lot,” and then she hangs up.
You recall there was a half-assed effort to create an underground rail line for New Haven, quickly scuttled after many of the funds were embezzled or otherwise disappeared into greedy pockets, but several of the tunnels were built and are now inhabited primarily by homeless encampments.
King holds up a hand when his phone goes off to indicate to his opponent in the ring that he needs to get it. He slips under the ropes and drops down to the floor outside the ring. Then he answers it, gets the quick comment from the Warden. He looks at his phone for a moment after the call ends and says, “Y’all didn’t boss me when I was Master Shield, Ya just gave information, and let me handle things.” But he shrugs his shoulders then and slips his phone away into his jacket pocket. Then he heads out of the gym to get on his horse and head toward the subway area to try to expedite things. Sure, he will have to dismount to go down into the tunnel, but at least he will arrive faster this way.
It’s a dank and unpleasant journey down into the old abandoned station. Luckily it’s not too terribly far from the Lodge’s main gym; the tunnels were started from Downtown, and were going to spiderweb out to each borough in three lines: Red, Green, and Yellow. An Orange line was planned for a later expansion to connect New Haven with Boston, but no tunnels were ever opened.
It’s the smell that hits first. There’s the usual abandoned underground smells, of course: rotting trash, abandoned items, dust, vermin and critters galore… but the old station is thick with the desperation of humans left behind by life. The downtrodden, the victims, the mentally ill, addicts… all of them wrapped into the label of ‘homeless’. It’s with one of those wretches of society where King finds Alice. She’s applying a bandage to the man’s bleeding head, bossing him around, too. “Please be still, I- stop moving- you’re bleeding. He got you pretty good.”
The man, to his credit, informs Alice helpfully that he was a veteran of at least two wars and could have beat that guy if he didn’t have that weird club. Alice, on seeing King, perks up, waving and calling him over. “King! Thank god you came. Something’s wrong down here.”
King crinkles his nose as the smell hits, and then he rubs at his face as if it will somehow help erase the memory of the smell. Sadly, it does not, as evidenced by the fact his nose remains that way once Alice spots him. He steps closer to the vet and Alice, then crouches down. “What’s goin’ on?” he asks, glancing around, trying to avoid breathing too deeply. He gives a nod to the vet though and asks, “Why ya down here? Better places ya could be.” While he is not currently armed, his tactical belt probably suggests that he can be at a moment’s notice.
Closer now, you spot a hat that proudly declares him an Army vet, and you recognize service badges for both Desert Storm and Iraq.
The vet introduces himself as Greg Arneston, adding, “M’down here because of the wishes.” He looks rough, and not just because he got glassed moments before King’s arrival. Alice is cleaning that up, letting King talk to the man. At a glance, King can see rotten teeth, gaunt cheeks, and what looks like a broken leg that never healed quite right. He’s seen better days. For better or worse, though, he seems more willing to talk to King than to Alice. He doesn’t need prompting to explain further: “I’m gonna get my youth back, get my body workin’ again. Get clean. There’s gods in these tunnels, and they’ll fix ya up, give ya food. You just gotta worship ’em a little. Shit, it’s worth a shot, ain’t it?”
Alice looks to King after Greg tells his story, nodding and adding to it, “I came down here chasing an odd magical distortion, and I found Greg here getting smashed over the head with a bottle by another man who ran off. They were fighting over the door there,” she gestures to a door with an old, rusted, smashed padlock on it. Looks like it goes to a maintenance hall or a machine room.
King may not be a medical doctor, but he can tell the veteran has been through the ringer. He looks over at Alice then toward the door. “Gotcha. I’ll check this out and see if I can… sniff out a trail,” he says, a little dread for the task coming out in his voice, along with the continued crinkle of his nose. He looks back at the veteran and says, “Ya don’t need gods and fae. Ya need help. We can get that for ya. But fer now, I’m gonna go see if I can’t find the guy that got ya.” And with that, he heads off toward the door. While he usually runs around with his shield out in combat situations, he does not break it out for the moment, trusting in his own supernatural endurance if someone decides they want to hit him with a bottle.
The door is easy to open, with the padlock destroyed and the rust of years preventing it from latching correctly. Just before you open it, you can hear speaking behind – and when it opens, you are greeted not with an angry bottle-wielding man, but some sort of… creature. It’s humanoid, but small and malnourished, with an over-large head and sickly gray skin. A raggedy, stringy mop of hair tufts out of its bulbous head, greasy and unkempt, and its eyes are sunken into its skull yet massive, their whites stained a jaundiced yellow around solid black irises and pupils. It doesn’t even looke like it could stand on its knobby stick legs, or strike you with its twig arms, but it has a certain sentience in its gaze as its eyes track you.
It was the thing that was speaking behind the door, too, muttering, “Just a few more… a few more, and I’ll be back on my feet…” To the left, you spot a man – no, a corpse. An incredibly elderly man, dead from illness according to your nose. No wounds on him. Looks like he passed less than a week ago, too, you reckon. He’s been covered in a ratty quilted blanket, and surrounded by wilting flowers, shiny objects, and nearly-melted candles, like some kind of… shrine, or memorial. The godling speaks, its voice raspy, but coming from both its mouth and somewhere in the back of your skull at once:
“Come for a blessing? Make an offering. I will grant your wish. You want to crush your enemies? Woo the girl? Money? Power? I can do it,” it promises. It begs. You hear desperation in its pleading. It needs your offerings. It’s…
Dying.
King scans the area swiftly, letting various instincts drive him like through this like many battles before, reining them in once he spots and focuses in on the dying creature. He pauses here, his nose still irritated from the surroundings. When the creature is finished with the pitch, he steels himself and then lets out a quiet chuckle. “Naw, thanks. I got everythin’ I need. And ya can’t grant the one wish I’d make. No one can,” he says confidently, at least outwardly. Any divine being of any real power would hear his heart rate accelerate, his breathing become rapid, maybe even notice his eyes dilate in the darkness. “But I thank ya fer the offer. How long ya got like this?” he asks almost conversationally, unwilling to budge from his position of non-involvement with the offerings being made.
The thing is weak. So weak. And more than that, it’s… sick. Both in the ill way, and the twisted way. Little glimpses of its aura reveal that fact, dark tendrils sliding around and coiling around its limbs and its neck, tugging at it, choking it. It draws a raspy breath, and for a brief moment, you do feel something scrape across your skull, like it’s trying to reach… but it fails. Whatever tendril it extended doesn’t have the strength to penetrate a mind, no matter how feeble.
“How long…? Starving… years. So long. My priest, my priest, my beloved priest! He kept me alive, but now he’s… I was the One Who Holds, once. Worshipped. Loved. Now reduced to bargaining with creints…”
It drifts off, bitterness in its voice, then it holds one shaking, spindly hand out towards King. “Offer,” it begs again. “Offer, or find me someone who will. The last one gave me years… I just need a few more.” Its chest rises and falls shakily with its breaths, and you realize that although its eyes are tracking you, they’re glassy, distant. It might even be blinded.
Alice, behind King, is taking care of Greg; he’s bandaged, now, and he pipes up, demanding of her, “Lemme go, I want my wish. I wanna be strong again.” That word seems to stir the little godling, but it can’t get up.
The One Who Holds is reduced to bargaining with cretins, that is. Not creints.
King shakes his head and backs up to the door, pulling it closed behind him. If it has a way to lock it from this side, he does so. Then he looks back at this creature. He is silent for several long moments, perhaps knowing this being can read his thoughts and trying to clear them, or just considering the options available to him. “Yer not gettin’ another one. If we gotta drop this tunnel on ya, yer not gettin’ another one,” he states firmly, or at least tries to. His heart has not slowed a bit, and the other responses to his mental state have him on edge. “Just you’n me in ‘ere now. And ya ain’t got nothin’ I want,” he follows up with, crouching down and resting his elbows on his knees. It could be a lupine or canine gesture tweaked to fit a human, sitting on hind legs with front legs still holding the chest up maybe. “In light of ya not gettin’ no more though, if ya wanna find a way to end yer sufferin’ and ya would like help, I’m willin’ to do that,” he reasons out quietly, dancing into one of those gray areas perhaps from an Order perspective.
You get the sense that this thing is… uniquely vulnerable, as starved and depowered as it is. You could get its neck in your jaws. You could clamp shut. It wouldn’t take long. Hell, you wouldn’t even need to shift.
The godling picks up on your meaning; it tries to scramble away as you crouch down, and you hear Alice’s voice on the other side of the door: “King? Are you okay?”
“Don’t kill me, don’t, don’t kill, don’t kill,” pleads the godling, but its arms cannot pull the weight of its body any further away, and it just slumps over onto the floor, unable to pick itself back up. It’s a pathetic, wretched thing, to be sure. “I w… I want to stop… but I can’t… They come, they ask… I give. It feels good. And they leave happy. What do I care what they do with strength?” It justifies its actions blithely, but it seems to be floundering. “Just want to stop hurting… wait, my children. Could I be with my children? The… the rats,” it begs you again. There was a colony of rats in the tunnel, but it’s hard to tell if the thing is just trying to get something out of you in desperation, or if the rats really are its children.
King uses his radio to hopefully be heard through the door without shouting enough to be heard by the veteran and any others that might be out there. “Clear the tunnels. Someone is down here, feeding on them. It’s weak though. I believe it is a threat to innocents if left alone,” he says, just loud enough to make sure the weakened god can hear him. “It is very old, once fairly powerful. No longer worshipped,” he adds for clear communication then. “Any advise?” he then asks before standing back up. He steps toward the frail creature in front of him, glancing around as if seeking something that might confer some sort of reason to keep this being around. He listens to the area, listens to the decrepit god, but he is stretching his senses beyond, like he can all but sense a puppet master behind the scenes here. His gaze narrows as he does so, despite the darkness, which he can thankfully somewhat see through.
There’s a crackle from your radio, and two beeps – a yes without needing to say the word, perhaps. You can hear, through the door, Alice gently guiding Greg upstairs, and he doesn’t really have the strength to resist even her, though he complains loudly the whole time. After that, you get blissful quiet, broken only by the squeaking of rats out in the tunnel, your own heartbeat, and the raspy breathing of the godling.
A moment later, you get another crackle, and Alice’s voice comes in tinny across the airwaves: “If it’s a threat, we need to take care of it. Could it be rehabilitated? Or… relocated, maybe?”
The godling begs again, lifting one skeletal hand towards King, palm upturned. “Am I going to die?” it asks pathetically, begging again, “Let me see my children before I die. Or… or! You let me live! I turn a new leaf! I’m nice! You help me find worship, I don’t need to eat anymore,” it plaintively pleads.
The room itself is a fairly simple machine room: some old, non-functioning water heaters and electrical equipment, and a spot where some larger machine once was, but it must have been disassembled and removed years ago. And you. And the corpse. And the godling. And when you listen so closely, you can hear its heartbeat, too. Tiny, weak, scared… and conniving. Its eyes dart, its muscles twitch. It’s looking for a chance.
King considers the questions posed to him through the earpiece and in person alike. He glances back toward the door. Then he has a flash of an idea. “I can’t allow ya to drain people’r pact them’r cult them fer the gains yer offerin’. But if ya can turn yerself into an item’r relic or somethin’, we can possibly keep ya that way,” he offers then, shrugging his shoulders. Then he takes a moment to send out on the radio, “Probably not on rehabilitation. Ancient beings ain’t known fer turnin’ new leafs. This’n would offer’s whatever it thinks we’d want fer a chance to stay alive.” He presses his lips together in a line, then draws in a deep breath, managing to forget about the smells for a moment at least, then huffs out the air as a sigh, looking back at the broken creature in front of him. “If not into an item, ya can pass on yer power and fade away,” he suggests as an alternative.
“Pass on,” it repeats, trembling. It doesn’t speak again for several long, awful moments. Its glassy eyes have a little more focus, sharpened by the fear of death, but it stares at King until finally, acceptance seems to pass through its mind. It cannot cry – probably wouldn’t, if it even could, its mind too warped to be self-serving, but it seems to fully understand the situation it’s in. It is going to die anyway, either of starvation, or… something even worse. It reaches over to the corpse of its priest, casting a hand out. One of the items in his memorial, a shiny silver dollar, begins to nudge itself towards the god, too slow to be a projectile, just scraping across the floor until the little godling can touch it with a weathered finger.
“Pass on… no pain. Promise?” It looks to King hopefully, and fearfully.
“I ain’t here to be cruel. I’ll always try to have mercy,” King says to the being, honestly and sincerely, using the words of the King as his guidance in this. He watches the coin and the being touch the coin, but he does not interfere with whatever it is about to do. “All things must come to an end. That’s what gives anything value,” he says to the starving deity, trying to sound comforting at least, even if it is to be the end for it. “Perhaps there’s a reincarnation option, and ya can give’t another round,” he offers as further comfort, shrugging his shoulders, as he obviously has no idea what lies Beyond. “But this could be yer last good deed fer this world, and I won’t sully that,” he concludes with a stern, approving nod.
King’s non-interference proves to be the right move. The godling echoes one last time, “No pain…“, then the silver dollar glows to a blinding brightness. It stays that way for a moment, a tiny little annoying flashbang, then fades, and with it, the godling. Its body goes limp and begins to decompose into dirt, and from that dirt springs a few colorful flowers, blooming as though they were planted and watered with love.
The coin remains on the ground, the light in it steadily fading until it looks… well, more or less like a regular silver dollar. It smells of magic, though, keen and noticeable to King’s nose.
“Rest in peace,” King says, bowing his head in silence for a few moments for the passing of a deity. He crouches down then picks up the coin. It may not seem like much, but if it contains the final essence of a dying god, he is sure someone out there has a use for it. He turns back to the door and unlocks it, pushing it open slowly to not hurt Alice on the other side. “Thanks fer clearin’ folk. Ancient starving, dying god. Wanted to build a new followin’,” he says, holding out the coin to her. “This contains the last of his power,” he tells her, though he likely has no real way to use it himself. “We should get the people down here to various services to help them get back on their feet too,” he says, jaw clenching tightly at something that ripples beneath the surface for him.
It’s a good thing King thought of that, because Alice was RIGHT on the other side of that door, nosy as hell and looking concerned. She backs off when he’s coming out, though, brow furrowed as he explains the situation. “… oh.” She holds her hand out to take the coin, and mentions, “I’m sure Ezra will want this. Maybe he can figure out something to use it for,” before she looks up to King with a smile. “Sorry to interrupt your day, King, but… yeah. I’ll call some Scrolls down to start gathering them up, and we’ll get them fed and connected with better services,” she agrees, nodding emphatically. “Thanks so much for coming to help me out,” she adds with a bright, toothy smile.
[OOC: That’s all that was planned! Feel free to submit cdrives, and head down when you’re all finished up with what you want to do!]
//OOC: That’s all that was planned! Feel free to submit cdrives, and head down when you’re all finished up with what you want to do!]