Amber’s Wednesday evening odd encounter(Lillian)

Date: 2025-08-27 18:19

(Amber’s Wednesday evening odd encounter(Lillian):Lillian)

[Wed Aug 27 2025]

At Liberty Bell Playground/span>/spanafternoon, about 76F(24C) degrees, and the sky is partly covered by wispy white clouds. The mist is heaviest At Birch and Atlantic/span>/span(Your target discovers a ghost bound to an old music box at an estate sale. The ghost desperately needs help completing their unfinished business before the box is sold and they’re trapped with a new owner – but they can only communicate through the melodies they play.)

Amber usually tries to avoid hanging out beneath the sun, but Lillian insisted on an afternoon date to the park and at least here at Liberty Bell the park’s oak trees provide hefty shade she can use to keep from burning. She’s not the only one taking advantage of the shade, though, as a woman has set up some various tables beneath the trees to publicly sell off items that appear to have belonged to someone now deceased. They’re enjoying their time just chilling on a bench together when Lillian gets up. “I’m going to get myself ice cream from across the park. You wait here.” She gets up, leaving Amber to her own devices. Maybe a minute later the normal ambiance of the park is interrupted by the sound of a music box sitting on one of the tables farthest from the woman running the sale. “Help! I need somebody! Help! Not just anybody! Help! You know I need someone! Heeeeelp!”

“Uh- yeah, okay. I wanted to check on something here anyway,” Amber admits as Lillian wanders off. The music box sound sets her on edge, though, tensing immediately. “Fuck I told her that blowing cursed shit up never works,” Amber grumbles harshly to herself. She eyes the source of the sound, then the woman, then shuffles over, “Please tell me there isn’t a cranky Victorian ghost in there.”

The woman running the apparent estate sale doesn’t seem to notice the music box playing a tune on its own accord; Amber is far closer to it than she is. It’s quiet for a moment after her response, but then it starts playing a spooky little tune similar to that of Spooky Scary Skeletons. That tune seamlessly transitions into Billy Joel’s piano and voice saying, “Someday, we’ll all be gone, but lullabies go on and on, they never die…” And then fades out before finishing out that particular song.

Amber gives out a depressed little sigh, shuffling over to the box to study it more closely. See whether it’s wound, maybe a joke, or if it’s just chatty ghosts?

The music box is in fact not wound. And based on how music boxes work, it probably shouldn’t be doing voices at all. Yet here it is, managing to include those with its musical melodies. It’s quiet for a moment, then starts winding itself again and plays part of a chorus from The Police. “I hope that someone gets my… message in a bottle.” If Amber were to check the tables of the estate sale, she’d find no message in a bottle. What she would find, however, is a ship in a bottle on the table next to the one with the music box.

“Okay, so… I already feel like an idiot for the help part,” Amber admits, shifting uneasily, “But I guess I’ll check the bottle. If this is a dead end, too, it’s an exorcism up in this bish.”

There is nothing immediately special about the ship in the bottle, except that maybe atop the ship’s deck is some tiny capsule that appears to have ashes of some kind within it. However, there is no way to retrieve that from within the bottle, and the ship certainly doesn’t react to Amber the same way the music box does. The music box plays the part of “Come Sail Away” by Styx in which the lyric “come sail away” is repeated.

Amber squints at the ashes with a small frown. She eyes the lady manning the sale, then the bottle, then the music box. She waits for when the lady isn’t looking, then picks up the bottle and chucks it towards the road. She then quickly returns her attention to the music box, as if she never did anything.

The music box is quiet for a moment, then plays again. It’s just two lines from a song this time, another by The Beatles: “I’d like to be under the sea.”

Amber seems a bit surprised there was no reaction to her chucking a glass bottle into the street, but she shrugs and runs with it. Literally. Snatching the music box and making a break for it to chuck it into the ocean, next. Today, throwing things is the solution. Either this fixes it, or it makes it someone else’s problem.

steals the box so fucking well that the woman probably doesn’t even remember she put it or the bottle out in the first place. Almost immediately, too, the box begins playing the tune for “ashes, ashes” in Ring Around the Rosie, and yet no one around notices or decides that anything seems off about Amber’s behavior.

Amber pauses in her running when she passes the shattered bottle. She pinches up whatever remains of the ash and-or capsule to bring with her on her journey to commit littering.

And again because Amber is doing such a good job of stealing and littering sneakily, no one opposes her along the way. As she makes it to the beach and the Atlantic enters her view, the music box plays another song, this was far more recent than the rest by being a Struts song. “We were everything, two names on a beating heart…”

Amber grabs the things in both hands over her head. She hears the song playing and belts out, “I don’t give a fuuuuuuuck” as she overhand throws and makes the haunted music box the ocean’s problem.

The music box and the ashes are gone forever, probably. Back at the park, Lillian is coming back to the bench she left Amber at with a vanilla ice cream cone now in hand.

Amber gives a little shudder as she watches the waves a moment, performing a warding gesture over herself just in case. She starts to shuffle her way back to the park and to Lillian, “Heeey, maybe we should check out a different park…”