Encounterlogs
Irenes Odd Encounter Sr Alabaster 241009
On a stormy night in the small town of Haven, Irene, clad in a maroon jumper and wielding a malfunctioning android phone, embarks on a mission shrouded in mystery and the occult. Her goal is to intercept a shipment of significant value to her undisclosed employers, rumored to be linked to the supernatural upheavals troubling Haven. Guided only by vague instructions from a contact known as Mr. Wolf, she navigates the Franklin Bridge, a strategic point in her quest. The bridge, a rusty structure offering a view between crowded and sparse townscapes, becomes the stage for Irene's peculiar yet calculated encounter. With no weapons or faction symbols to her name, her only tool is a deceptive act of vulnerability, aimed to entrap a courier driving a green Honda Accord earmarked in her brief.
The courier, cursed by a mix of anger and impatience, falls victim to Irene's ruse - a feigned drunken stupor masking a sharp mind and swifter actions. A sudden surge from a hidden taser stuns the man, giving Irene the upper hand as chaos ensues on the bridge. Quickly appropriating the courier's firearm, she coldly completes her mission, transitioning from an act of drunken incompetence to executing a clinical assassination. With no time to waste amid growing attention from bystanders, Irene commandeers the vehicle, ensuring her escape with both the mysterious shipment and the urgency of disposing a body in tow. Despite the precarious conclusion to her mission on the bridge, her journey continues into the woods, where she must contend with the aftermath of her actions in solitude, guided only by terse communications with Mr. Wolf. Irene is far from dismantling the enigmatic forces at play, but the night's events edge her closer to understanding the depths of Haven's and her own entanglements in the world of shadowy dealings and supernatural encounters.
(Irene's odd encounter(SRAlabaster):SRAlabaster)
[Tue Oct 8 2024]
On Franklin Bridge
The rickety old steel truss bridge runs north and south and affords its
travellers a view of scenic Haven through its rusty black supports. A
walkway runs on one side of the narrow two-lane bridge, five feet wide,
wooden planked and railed with a chest-high railing. To the north, the town
seems crowded and dense, while the south seems more sparse and quaint.
It is night, about 56F(13C) degrees, and the sky is covered by dark grey stormclouds. There is a waxing crescent moon.
(A supernatural entity has been terrorizing the small town of Haven. The townsfolk are terrified and some have already packed their bags to leave. Your target has been asked by the town's mayor to investigate and put an end to this. They will need to gather information, identify the creature and find a way to either banish it or convince it to leave Haven peacefully.)
Traffic rattles over the bridge. Irene has been given the tip-off -- from who, it's hard to say. The CIA? The Temple? One of her connections in the black market world? Regardless, well: there's a shipment coming through town of interest to all of them. She may be fuzzy on -why- Haven is important, but it is a destination point for things associated with the occult. Things come to Haven and then they seem to just disappear.
The shipment tonight is one of those things. According to the file dead-dropped to Irene, it's a lead box of some sort that has value to the kinds of people who send her on missions, even if understand -why- it is valuable is still beyond her present level of ken.
The humble figure that is Irene, in her warm fuzzy maroon jumper, really does not look like someone who would have anything to do with this sort of thing. Nevertheless, when the notification flashes across the broken screen of her shitty android phone, she takes notice, and redirects her course through town across the bridge. It's a message from someone known only as Mr Wolf. It explains little. Irene does not require explanations, only instructions. Whatever goes on in this humble, fuzzy human's brain, it does not require any thought to follow.
If only her GPS was a little better. The run-down phone is in dire need of replacement, but eventually, she manages to get the spinning compass to stabilise and direct her to the rendezvous point. With no weapons, no faction symbol, and nothing that would mark her as any kind of threat, this NPC of a woman aims to aimlessly wander by, doing her best to observe without seeming worth observing. A civilian. A nobody.
A nobody, indeed. Irene's contact has given her a description and a plate -- it's a 2006 Honda Accord, dark green, with a dent in the driver's side rear quarter panel. License plate is NY, 404 GRB. As she waits, she can see headlights on the bridge, heading north-bound just in time for what the burn package from her superiors suggest. Her orders are clear: stop the car. Recover the contents of the box, and then get the hell out of the area.
In the scheme of things, perhaps Irene needs to look into getting a gun. Life goals.
Poor Irene is not just a nobody, but a drunk nobody. Swaying and staggering about in her boots and fuzzy jumper, she hazily steps out onto the road in the middle of the bridge, clutching her stomach. Did she even see those headlights flashing up ahead? She doesn't move out of the way, a deer caught in them, raising up her arm to try and get herself noticed too close for comfort. Her dark eyes narrow into a bleary squint, perhaps ready to accept her fate.
It's interesting that five minutes ago she was walking perfectly upright, stone cold sober.
Isn't it? Of course -- New York 404 GRB doesn't know that. The car's breaks squeal, and there's a bank-and-forth swerving on the road as they smoke, skidding to a halt right in front of Irene. The window goes down and there is cursing -- yelling, in some Eastern European accent. "Get the hell out of the road, you drunken whore!" comes the yell. He could use some lessons in politesse, it seems.
"Please," Irene calls out, in a thick Hispanic accent. "Please ... they killed ... they killed ..." And now this drunken damsel is in distress, too, with tears running down her cheeks and dampening her eyelashes. She must be suffering from a serious stomach wound, surely the bloodstain is only invisible due to the colour of the fabric. Why else would she be clutching her abdomen like that? With her one free hand, she twists the air in the cursing driver's direction, reaching for support, approaching this brusque and likely criminal man who would surely be her saviour.
"They killed what, you drunk ass bitch!?" The eastern European man's anger is increasing, and he's less than happy when Irene approaches. His window is down, though, and he doesn't see her as a threat. Instead, he's getting into cursing her in the way only a man with anger issues can, yelling at her at length. Sometimes taking things out on another person can be cathartic; perhaps it is this way for him, because he's got that joy that comes from yelling at someone.
Closer and closer the drunk ass whore/bitch tries to inch her way to the Eastern European man, with a noticeable limp and a pronounced slouch. For a woman Irene's tall, but she looks small right now. "The Temple ... they killed ..." Without support, she looks likely to collapse. The damsel tries to drape herself against the angry misogynist's car door, where she might just be about to bleed out.
No one expects to be tased, do they? Especially not a distracted courier in love with the sound of his own voice -- no one expects this no good alcoholic of a cunt who can't even walk straight to -- there's a look in his eyes, along with the sizzle of frying flesh. He croaks out an upset "Bitch", the syllables lengthened by some combination of pain and Slavic pronunciation, and then he drapes, hard, on the steering well.
Tasing someone doesn't really knock them out -- it just hurts them, stuns them for as long as the button is depressed. Given the battery life, that isn't ever very long, but now Irene has some moment. Behind her and the Accord cars are lining up, honking.
Irene really should look into getting a gun -- life goals and all -- but the wounded gazelle act doesn't work so well when you look like a lion. So with very limited time, the now totally sober and uninjured woman casts her eye into the car for any sort of weapon she might be able to improvise with. A gun, a knife? Even keys? Keys could go into this man's throat if he doesn't have sanctuary, right?
Keys in the ignition, and ... yes. There's a bulge under the leather jacket the man wears. He's not happy to see her: no, he's packing. If she goes to look under the jacket, it's a Glock. He's a commuter, too: he has the red glow of someone who spends too much time in and out of Haven. Irene may not really know what it means, but she knows it means that the man is at risk. More honking, though: she needs to get this car moving, somehow.
For a drunken whore, Irene really is a fast thinker, and not someone who hesitates. Is this man human? Which faction is he associated with? Irene doesn't know, and Irene doesn't care. She reaches for the glock in his jacket and very promptly attempts to blow his brains out.
Look, she wasn't totally lying when she said the Temple killed. She was just being prophetic.
Now that the car has extra cargo (potentially a dead body), all that remains is to transport it into the passenger seat, and climb through the window to take hold of the wheel.
The honking ceases. If Irene has any guess, it is because it is being replaced by the sound of people frantically dialing 911. She gets into the driver's seat, kicks the corpse aside, and it's time to drive -- drive as fast as she can, north across the bridge. At least she has some open road ahead of her, on account of the traffic jam she has created clearing the other side of the bridge.
Unfortunately, Irene's GPS is very poor. That part of her wounded gazelle act wasn't really a lie. So she isn't entirely sure where she's driving, but she tries to put as much distance between herself and the Accord as possible. When she finds a moment, she tries to put in a call to her contact, Mr Wolf, putting her shitty android phone on speaker mode.
North of town is the woods, but Mr. Wolf goes to voicemail. It's a moment before he responds via text:
> Did you intercept the package?
The Accord is off to the side of Elm's Bane, not quite to where the Forest's shadows grow lives of their own.
"Ben zona," Irene mutters under her breath, raising a hand to wearily rub at her eyelids when her contact doesn't take the call. Driving and texting is a big no-no! She checks the rear-view mirror to be sure there's enough distance between herself and anyone who might be following, and then pulls over somewhere in the dark and gloomy otherworldly woods.
It takes her a few tries to get her burned-up burner phone to respond; many of the keys are stuck.
> Where to?
The woods have a kind of eerie silence that surrounds Irene, as the fall seems to introdude into her. It's as if, in the distance, she can hear some wailing, some sort of strange note. It's there and then gone. Her phone has shitty bars, and it's a moment before the response.
> The goal was stopping the shipment. If the package survived, consider it asset forfeiture and use your discretion.
The strange wailing sound has Irene looking warily over her shoulder. She picked this spot because of the poor light, and the lower likelihood of cameras or witnesses; she doesn't actually know anything about the things that go bump in the night.
> You want the driver's phone?
Irene and her contact have a way of communicating by saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. In five words, she makes clear her method of stopping the shipment, and the likelihood that there's a body on her hands. She imagines that his next text will make clear whether disposing of it is her responsibility or not, too.
> Affirmative.
> Handle cleanup.
> Send next update in the AM.
She's on her own, now -- retrieve whatever is in the lead box, clean up the mess, and then find a place to write a report tomorrow.
Irene is well on her way to accomplishing her life-goals. Now she has a new gun, and maybe even a new car. Leaving the phone beside her, she turns her attention to the road, driving towards the sound of the sea. Somewhere out in the woods, and far from her current residence, she'll feed the body to the fishes, and leave this car parked. But she keeps the keys, and any valuables that might be found within. If no one comes to claim it within two days, she's just saved a couple thousand on getting herself a vehicle.
The courier, cursed by a mix of anger and impatience, falls victim to Irene's ruse - a feigned drunken stupor masking a sharp mind and swifter actions. A sudden surge from a hidden taser stuns the man, giving Irene the upper hand as chaos ensues on the bridge. Quickly appropriating the courier's firearm, she coldly completes her mission, transitioning from an act of drunken incompetence to executing a clinical assassination. With no time to waste amid growing attention from bystanders, Irene commandeers the vehicle, ensuring her escape with both the mysterious shipment and the urgency of disposing a body in tow. Despite the precarious conclusion to her mission on the bridge, her journey continues into the woods, where she must contend with the aftermath of her actions in solitude, guided only by terse communications with Mr. Wolf. Irene is far from dismantling the enigmatic forces at play, but the night's events edge her closer to understanding the depths of Haven's and her own entanglements in the world of shadowy dealings and supernatural encounters.
(Irene's odd encounter(SRAlabaster):SRAlabaster)
[Tue Oct 8 2024]
On Franklin Bridge
The rickety old steel truss bridge runs north and south and affords its
travellers a view of scenic Haven through its rusty black supports. A
walkway runs on one side of the narrow two-lane bridge, five feet wide,
wooden planked and railed with a chest-high railing. To the north, the town
seems crowded and dense, while the south seems more sparse and quaint.
It is night, about 56F(13C) degrees, and the sky is covered by dark grey stormclouds. There is a waxing crescent moon.
(A supernatural entity has been terrorizing the small town of Haven. The townsfolk are terrified and some have already packed their bags to leave. Your target has been asked by the town's mayor to investigate and put an end to this. They will need to gather information, identify the creature and find a way to either banish it or convince it to leave Haven peacefully.)
Traffic rattles over the bridge. Irene has been given the tip-off -- from who, it's hard to say. The CIA? The Temple? One of her connections in the black market world? Regardless, well: there's a shipment coming through town of interest to all of them. She may be fuzzy on -why- Haven is important, but it is a destination point for things associated with the occult. Things come to Haven and then they seem to just disappear.
The shipment tonight is one of those things. According to the file dead-dropped to Irene, it's a lead box of some sort that has value to the kinds of people who send her on missions, even if understand -why- it is valuable is still beyond her present level of ken.
The humble figure that is Irene, in her warm fuzzy maroon jumper, really does not look like someone who would have anything to do with this sort of thing. Nevertheless, when the notification flashes across the broken screen of her shitty android phone, she takes notice, and redirects her course through town across the bridge. It's a message from someone known only as Mr Wolf. It explains little. Irene does not require explanations, only instructions. Whatever goes on in this humble, fuzzy human's brain, it does not require any thought to follow.
If only her GPS was a little better. The run-down phone is in dire need of replacement, but eventually, she manages to get the spinning compass to stabilise and direct her to the rendezvous point. With no weapons, no faction symbol, and nothing that would mark her as any kind of threat, this NPC of a woman aims to aimlessly wander by, doing her best to observe without seeming worth observing. A civilian. A nobody.
A nobody, indeed. Irene's contact has given her a description and a plate -- it's a 2006 Honda Accord, dark green, with a dent in the driver's side rear quarter panel. License plate is NY, 404 GRB. As she waits, she can see headlights on the bridge, heading north-bound just in time for what the burn package from her superiors suggest. Her orders are clear: stop the car. Recover the contents of the box, and then get the hell out of the area.
In the scheme of things, perhaps Irene needs to look into getting a gun. Life goals.
Poor Irene is not just a nobody, but a drunk nobody. Swaying and staggering about in her boots and fuzzy jumper, she hazily steps out onto the road in the middle of the bridge, clutching her stomach. Did she even see those headlights flashing up ahead? She doesn't move out of the way, a deer caught in them, raising up her arm to try and get herself noticed too close for comfort. Her dark eyes narrow into a bleary squint, perhaps ready to accept her fate.
It's interesting that five minutes ago she was walking perfectly upright, stone cold sober.
Isn't it? Of course -- New York 404 GRB doesn't know that. The car's breaks squeal, and there's a bank-and-forth swerving on the road as they smoke, skidding to a halt right in front of Irene. The window goes down and there is cursing -- yelling, in some Eastern European accent. "Get the hell out of the road, you drunken whore!" comes the yell. He could use some lessons in politesse, it seems.
"Please," Irene calls out, in a thick Hispanic accent. "Please ... they killed ... they killed ..." And now this drunken damsel is in distress, too, with tears running down her cheeks and dampening her eyelashes. She must be suffering from a serious stomach wound, surely the bloodstain is only invisible due to the colour of the fabric. Why else would she be clutching her abdomen like that? With her one free hand, she twists the air in the cursing driver's direction, reaching for support, approaching this brusque and likely criminal man who would surely be her saviour.
"They killed what, you drunk ass bitch!?" The eastern European man's anger is increasing, and he's less than happy when Irene approaches. His window is down, though, and he doesn't see her as a threat. Instead, he's getting into cursing her in the way only a man with anger issues can, yelling at her at length. Sometimes taking things out on another person can be cathartic; perhaps it is this way for him, because he's got that joy that comes from yelling at someone.
Closer and closer the drunk ass whore/bitch tries to inch her way to the Eastern European man, with a noticeable limp and a pronounced slouch. For a woman Irene's tall, but she looks small right now. "The Temple ... they killed ..." Without support, she looks likely to collapse. The damsel tries to drape herself against the angry misogynist's car door, where she might just be about to bleed out.
No one expects to be tased, do they? Especially not a distracted courier in love with the sound of his own voice -- no one expects this no good alcoholic of a cunt who can't even walk straight to -- there's a look in his eyes, along with the sizzle of frying flesh. He croaks out an upset "Bitch", the syllables lengthened by some combination of pain and Slavic pronunciation, and then he drapes, hard, on the steering well.
Tasing someone doesn't really knock them out -- it just hurts them, stuns them for as long as the button is depressed. Given the battery life, that isn't ever very long, but now Irene has some moment. Behind her and the Accord cars are lining up, honking.
Irene really should look into getting a gun -- life goals and all -- but the wounded gazelle act doesn't work so well when you look like a lion. So with very limited time, the now totally sober and uninjured woman casts her eye into the car for any sort of weapon she might be able to improvise with. A gun, a knife? Even keys? Keys could go into this man's throat if he doesn't have sanctuary, right?
Keys in the ignition, and ... yes. There's a bulge under the leather jacket the man wears. He's not happy to see her: no, he's packing. If she goes to look under the jacket, it's a Glock. He's a commuter, too: he has the red glow of someone who spends too much time in and out of Haven. Irene may not really know what it means, but she knows it means that the man is at risk. More honking, though: she needs to get this car moving, somehow.
For a drunken whore, Irene really is a fast thinker, and not someone who hesitates. Is this man human? Which faction is he associated with? Irene doesn't know, and Irene doesn't care. She reaches for the glock in his jacket and very promptly attempts to blow his brains out.
Look, she wasn't totally lying when she said the Temple killed. She was just being prophetic.
Now that the car has extra cargo (potentially a dead body), all that remains is to transport it into the passenger seat, and climb through the window to take hold of the wheel.
The honking ceases. If Irene has any guess, it is because it is being replaced by the sound of people frantically dialing 911. She gets into the driver's seat, kicks the corpse aside, and it's time to drive -- drive as fast as she can, north across the bridge. At least she has some open road ahead of her, on account of the traffic jam she has created clearing the other side of the bridge.
Unfortunately, Irene's GPS is very poor. That part of her wounded gazelle act wasn't really a lie. So she isn't entirely sure where she's driving, but she tries to put as much distance between herself and the Accord as possible. When she finds a moment, she tries to put in a call to her contact, Mr Wolf, putting her shitty android phone on speaker mode.
North of town is the woods, but Mr. Wolf goes to voicemail. It's a moment before he responds via text:
> Did you intercept the package?
The Accord is off to the side of Elm's Bane, not quite to where the Forest's shadows grow lives of their own.
"Ben zona," Irene mutters under her breath, raising a hand to wearily rub at her eyelids when her contact doesn't take the call. Driving and texting is a big no-no! She checks the rear-view mirror to be sure there's enough distance between herself and anyone who might be following, and then pulls over somewhere in the dark and gloomy otherworldly woods.
It takes her a few tries to get her burned-up burner phone to respond; many of the keys are stuck.
> Where to?
The woods have a kind of eerie silence that surrounds Irene, as the fall seems to introdude into her. It's as if, in the distance, she can hear some wailing, some sort of strange note. It's there and then gone. Her phone has shitty bars, and it's a moment before the response.
> The goal was stopping the shipment. If the package survived, consider it asset forfeiture and use your discretion.
The strange wailing sound has Irene looking warily over her shoulder. She picked this spot because of the poor light, and the lower likelihood of cameras or witnesses; she doesn't actually know anything about the things that go bump in the night.
> You want the driver's phone?
Irene and her contact have a way of communicating by saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. In five words, she makes clear her method of stopping the shipment, and the likelihood that there's a body on her hands. She imagines that his next text will make clear whether disposing of it is her responsibility or not, too.
> Affirmative.
> Handle cleanup.
> Send next update in the AM.
She's on her own, now -- retrieve whatever is in the lead box, clean up the mess, and then find a place to write a report tomorrow.
Irene is well on her way to accomplishing her life-goals. Now she has a new gun, and maybe even a new car. Leaving the phone beside her, she turns her attention to the road, driving towards the sound of the sea. Somewhere out in the woods, and far from her current residence, she'll feed the body to the fishes, and leave this car parked. But she keeps the keys, and any valuables that might be found within. If no one comes to claim it within two days, she's just saved a couple thousand on getting herself a vehicle.