Just a GPSL NPCs (birthrightnpc) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-15 16:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | npc |
Howling
Who: NPC Aaron Turner, NPC Shannon Foust, NPC Creature
What: A History and a Game of “I Spy”
When: 72 Hours Ago, Afternoon
Where: 10th Street Diner, Las Vegas
Warnings: Some Violent Imagery
Aaron Turner lived a small life, but he had big-time ambition.
He lived in a low-income apartment in a seedy area north of the strip called Naked City. One block over from his, the city’s pie-in-the-sky improvements, which involved tearing down dilapidated buildings and renovating housing, had stopped. It was like an invisible curtain lowered between his street and the next. That was alright by Aaron. Like most people who lived in that part of town, he couldn’t afford it, even if the developers made it to his block. So the chic lived on one side of the road, and the weathered on the other, with the Strat looming over them all.
Aaron worked as an overnight cashier at a 7-11. He was good at memorizing faces, observing the things people wore, what they bought, what they rambled about when he was aiming his price gun at the bar codes on packs of cashews and sunflower seeds. The only time that convenience store stopped humming was between the hours of 4am and 7am. When he finished stocking the shelves, Aaron turned to his favorite hobby, one he never spoke about with his coworkers or the endless chain of faces who came through his line: reading. The books he took out of his backpack had hard covers and pages thin like onion skin. They were priceless. The only time he ever got written up for misconduct was when a coworker spilled a coffee on his backpack and it soaked through to his copy of The Black Arts: An Expanded History of Demonology and Witchcraft. When she tried to dig it out and dry it off, Aaron pushed her and she burnt her hand on the roller grill.
After each shift, Aaron left the building with his shoulders rounded. He stripped out of his polo shirt and walked home in a white tank top, with a Dodgers ball cap backwards on his head and a cigarette burning in his left hand. He was 5’8” tall and hollowed out in the center. No one paid him any mind, or knew what he could do.
Aaron didn’t argue the point anymore. The thing he cared about most was going home and summoning what he thought of as the Howler.
On the first occasion, he had prepared the way with candles, anointing oils, the blood of a sacrifice, and a hand-drawn sigil. He had seen a sketch in an old witch's Book of Shadows, but not in his darkest imaginings had Aaron pictured the creature that would slip between worlds when he completed the ritual. It was greenish-black, slick, and writhing. When it stood, it rose nearly to the nine foot ceiling of his apartment. It was bipedal and had arms with claws and numerous stinging tentacles that fanned out from its spine. At the bottom of its face, a worm-like mouth opened into an oval of sharp teeth. It didn’t know human speech, but it could communicate vivid imagery between minds. What it wanted was to devour, not just flesh but power. Only when it had drawn enough could it remain in this dimension.
Aaron gave it a name when he saw what it could do.
It tore through the witches with ease: Jada Blount, Serena Martin, and Michael Gilson. The police found them with a stomach-lurching, mind-boggling array of injuries: claw marks, bite marks, lashes, and stinging welts, but none of those were the cause of death, and the autopsy report was inclusive. All three had been drained of not only their power, but their life force. There was simply nothing left. When it happened, Aaron’s creature had slipped into their world with a disorienting flash of light. The sound it made when it sucked them dry was like hurricane wind shrieking in their ears. Howling.
Now that Aaron and the creature were familiar with one another, he could forego the extensive ritual and call it with ease. It was only a matter of finding another meal.
On an ordinary afternoon, Aaron sat in a booth at the 10th Street Diner, waiting for the cheapest meal on the menu to arrive. A uniformed waitress, a petite college student named Shannon Foust, approached his table with a smile.
“Hey,” she told him, placing a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tomato soup in front of him. “I’m Shannon. I’ll be taking over your table. Lindsay had an emergency.” She put his glass of ice water on the table and took a straw out of her apron pocket. “Can I get anything else for you?” She raised her forearm and swiped at her temple with a delicate wrist. As she did so, a silver ring shined in sunlight that streamed in from the western-facing windows. There was a pentagram where a stone might usually be.
Aaron’s eyes locked onto it, sharp and quick like a bird’s. He took a closer look at Shannon’s half-moon necklace and the dyed section of pink in her white-blonde hair. “Oh cool,” he said. “Are you a Pagan?”
Shannon’s smile was quick and bright. “Wiccan,” she said, practically glowing at the chance to talk to someone of like mind. She checked behind herself to see if her manager was looking, then returned her attention to the guy at the table. They looked about the same age, maybe a few years apart. With no additional prodding required, Shannon launched into an excited explanation of how she’d found herself identifying as a witch, and how the old man at the magic shop she frequented thought she had a real gift.
[Written by Kate]