itsjustashadow (itsjustashadow) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2021-12-29 22:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | #june 2018, jen, jen x liam, liam |
Who: Jen & Liam
Where: Main Street
When: Friday afternoon, 6/22
Status: Complete
Jen was enjoying her last day of freedom, mostly window shopping now that she'd bought herself new shoes for work. Everyone she talked to seemed adamant that she should have quality shoes or work would kill her so she took the advice and used the chance to buy herself some cute tops while she was at it. She was considering whether to go home, call Phee or keep shopping when she spotted a familiar figure down the street.Funny how she'd easily come to recognize her friends from afar, both from their clothing and the way they carried themselves. It was Liam! Without his girlfriend no less! Jen picked up speed to catch him before he wandered into a store.
"Hey there, stranger," she chirped, grinning at him as she sidled up to him and bumped her shoulder against his arm. "Where are you going? Meeting Brynn?" If he wasn't, maybe she could drag him to joyland for a quick meal or something and she really hoped they could hang out, even if it was just for a little bit. She had no idea what the summer was going to be like for either of them and with him having a girlfriend it seemed time was even more limited.
Liam was still wrapping his head around the fact that he was a senior now, that he only had one more year of high school, and that he was somehow dating a cheerleader. He wasn’t sure he was one of the popular kids, but it felt like a step up just to have the previous class gone. Like he’d been granted an upgrade. It was a good feeling, one he was looking forward to, hoping that his senior year would be a little easier than the last one. He had the day off, so he’d met some friends for lunch, then wandered a little in town, wasting time before meeting Brynn later that night. He heard the approaching footsteps and turned toward them, smiling when he saw it was Jen. “Hey! Just wandering a little. I’m meeting Brynn tonight for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I’ve got a few hours to kill. What’re you up to?”
"Oh my god, I went to see Nightmare on Elm Street last night with my uncle," Jen said with a grin. "It was so cheesy. Maybe I should try to drag him to this one too." She held up the bags she was carrying and wiggled them a little. "Today I'm shoe shopping - and shopping in general. Starting my new job tomorrow, woo!" She dropped the bags back to her side and groaned softly at the thought of work. "I was thinking about getting something to eat, are you hungry?" In all honesty she'd probably go home for food if he wasn't, she wasn't really in the mood to eat by herself but then maybe Phee wasn't busy.
“That’s a classic,” Liam grinned. “Freddy’s fun because he skirts the line between horror and humor. Texas Chainsaw’s a little less cheesy and genuinely scary. But also iconic, so if you haven’t seen it, you need to.” Maybe someday enough weird shit would happen to him to put him off horror movies, but so far it hadn’t happened yet. They felt safe and predictable in a way that real life just didn’t. Liam cringed as she held up the bags. Shoe shopping was his least favorite kind of shopping. “I’m always hungry,” he answered. “Wanna grab something real quick? You can tell me about this new job of yours.” It’d been a while since they’d caught up and he was probably to blame for that, but having a girlfriend tended to eat up a chunk of his time, as did his own summer job.
Success! Jen smiled and nodded eagerly, glad he wasn't busy. "There's not much to tell," she said with a little handwave and was about to start suggesting places to eat when a sign across the street caught her eye; 50% off everything at the antique store. "Ooh," she cooed, eyes going a little wide. "I wanna stop by that place first, do you mind? I've always wanted to go in there but it's usually closed. But they're actually open and they're having a sale!" She beamed and it felt like she had to go there right away or it'd be closed again by the time they were done eating. Maybe it was full of crap and she wouldn't find anything of interest, but old things were always fascinating and even just browsing an antique store without buying anything sounded like fun.
“You could start with where you’re going to work,” Liam laughed, his smile fading a little when he looked where she was pointing. Of all the places she might want to go, he’d been hoping to avoid the antique store. The shop itself wasn’t particularly ominous, but it was where Liam and Brynn had bought the masks that had almost gotten them killed. It was also where they’d gotten stuck during the fog, until they’d moved over to Joyland. It hadn’t done him any ill will then, so it was probably all in his head. Just because the masks had been cursed didn’t mean that the shop was. “Sure,” he said. “Just as long as you don’t buy a mask.” The chances of that seemed slim though, so they should be fine.
God, Jen had forgotten all about the mask fiasco and she pulled a face as Liam reminded her. How had she forgotten something so horrible? Maybe because she hadn't been directly involved? All the awful things just felt so far away today and the random thought that maybe buying something at Loomis wasn't a great idea left her mind as quickly as it entered because by that logic they shouldn't be walking the streets of Point Pleasant at all. Awful things happened everywhere and if she started looking too hard for patterns she'd drive herself insane. "No masks," she promised as she led the way to the antique store. She wasn't even sure she'd actually buy something, she'd just always wanted to see what was in there, like visiting a mini museum of weirdness without having to buy a ticket.
Liam had done his absolute best to forget about the mask fiasco and on a daily basis he mostly succeeded. The desire to kill Brynn had been completely quashed, thank God, but he sometimes felt his mind drifting to the kind of magic that would create such an object. Someone, somewhere, had made those masks, laying a trap for whomever discovered them. There was something sickly fascinating about it, and Liam tried not to think about it, aware of how close his life had come to mirroring the sort of horror movies he loved. It should have put him off them completely, but it didn’t. Liam followed her into the shop, expecting a sense of dread to settle over him if it was a place of danger, but nothing extraordinary happened. It was just an antique shop, the owner nowhere in sight, as seemed the norm. As far as Liam could tell, he only made appearances when someone needed to buy something. “We were stuck in here during the fog,” he told her. “At the beginning, at least. Eventually we got hungry and made our way over to Joyland.”
Liam and Brynn had survived the night so that had to score a point for Loomis in Jen's mind. Or maybe she just really wanted to actually browse in this store so she believed what she wanted to believe. It was pretty cool, weird vintage pictures in elaborate frames, strange little doodads cramping the shelves. It did a good job of distracting her from thinking about Liam and Brynn creeping between locations in that horrible fog. Jen had only gotten a glimpse of what was in it and it had been terrifying. "I so wouldn't buy a music box here," she said as she picked up a pretty little box that turned out to just be a jewelry box, no little ballerina inside. It was weirdly disappointing but she had said she wasn't going to buy it anyway. "It's probably haunted." She gave Liam a jokingly wary glance before closing the box and putting it back on the shelf. "I'd say at least fifty percent of the stock here is haunted."
“Maybe,” Liam said with a little laugh. “Maybe all antiques are, since they’re all old and previously owned. And the strength of the haunting is based on the death of the previous owner.” He was making this up, of course, but he could see how it could happen. Some cursed objects had to be created by accident. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would create them on purpose, then just let them go into the wild. It seemed rather irresponsible. “I wouldn’t buy a doll here either. I mean, I wouldn’t buy one period, but if I were a doll person, this place seems dangerous,” he said. “Dishes seem safe. I’ve never heard of haunted silverware. Except in Beauty and the Beast.”
"I think most ghosts don't have time to haunt every single item they've ever owned," Jen said as she kept perusing. "I had a lot of toys as a kid, dolls included, I don't even know where all of them are anymore. There's no way I'd haunt them all." The antique store wasn't disappointing her, there were a lot of interesting little things there, nothing that called out to her though, nothing she felt like she had to have and that was a weird sort of relief. She should be spending her money on practical things and saving up for the winter. "But hey, maybe ghosts are really bored and have way better memory of things they used to own and are able to track down their stuff so they just find someone who's fun to haunt."
“Okay, I totally didn’t think about the number of things that a ghost might plausibly haunt,” Liam said as he followed Jen around the store, picking up occasional things and setting them back down. Everything in there was somewhat interesting, but nothing really called to him and he was okay with that. “And I don’t think everyone becomes a ghost. So there’s got to be a sweet spot between the object and the spirit, like—like a reason the thing’s haunted, right? ‘Cause if I were a ghost, I wouldn’t attach myself to some random toy I owned when I was five. I’d be something of value to me, probably at the time that I died. Right now I’d probably end up with a haunted xbox controller,” he snickered. What a stupid thing to haunt, though maybe he could suck someone inside the game a la Jumanji. That would be awesome and terrifying.
"I guess I'd haunt my bicycle," Jen mused. "Or my phone. The Haunting of Instagram." She gave Liam a sufficiently spooky look before grinning and going back to browsing. "Besides, most ghosts are like 18th century or something. I think we'd be really lame ghosts. Also, you probably have to go insane in death or be a really shitty person otherwise we'd just be pretty chill ghosts, just hanging around, changing the channels on the tv. God it'd be so boring not being able to do anything." She picked up a leather camera case off the shelf, still thinking about hauntings and how hard it might be to move things as a ghost as she looked it over.
“How would you haunt your bicycle?” Liam asked. “Would you make it ride around on it’s own? Follow people and run them down? Seems kinda weird, but I have to admit, I’d probably freak out if a bicycle started stalking me sans owner.” Any inanimate object that started popping up places it shouldn’t was creepy. Liam just couldn’t decide if it was scarier if it was something big or small. Small things could show up in the most unexpected places. “I don’t think I’m angry enough to become a ghost. I’d probably just bore whomever I was trying to haunt. Or annoy them. Depends on the rules. I don’t really know how they work, but I’m pretty sure they exist.”
"You could take the rider somewhere they don't wanna go," Jen said with a wicked grin. "Make it go too fast, or make it stop abruptly when it's going really fast. I think I'd have to hate that person a lot to be that mean though, if I liked the new owner I'd just protect her, you know. Be a really cool ghost." Of course there was that popular theory that even the nicest people became insane after death, that ghosts weren't really people but echoes of events or emotions. In that case there was nothing she could really do about it, no matter how good her intentions. "I need to find the shopkeeper," she murmured, changing the topic away from haunted bicycles. "I wanna know how much this costs and if it's as old as it looks." She'd opened the case she was holding and pulled out an old looking camera with a whole lot of dials she would have to learn to use - if the thing was even functional. It wasn't often she felt inspired to learn something but this looked really neat and she had wondered about taking photography classes, it just seemed so useless with all the fancy cameras installed on phones these days. This though, this was the real deal. "I wonder if it works."
“The shopkeeper’s weird. The only time I’ve ever seen him was when I bought the mask. Brynn and I couldn’t even find him when we were stuck in here during the fog,” Liam said, giving a look around the shop. He knew the man must be there, since the shop was open, but it was creepy the way he only appeared at key moments of his own choosing. Apparently that didn’t include helping starving teenagers during a weird weather event. “I feel like we saw that camera that day, but maybe it was another one. You thinking about getting it?” He didn’t know a lot about old cameras except that they used film and you had to develop them in dark rooms. It sounded cool, in theory, but would require a bit of research to make it work.
Jen liked a challenge and since she'd always wanted to learn how to do this - like some weird bond to the past she would never be a part of perhaps - she wasn't sure how she could say no. "I'm gonna find out more about it," she said, though if the damn thing worked her mind was pretty set on buying it already. Unless it cost a crazy amount of money of course. She kind of expected it to, probably hundreds of dollars - especially if it worked - and she was already wondering if she could sweet talk her parents into buying her an early and very expensive birthday gift or something if that was the case. The old shopkeeper showed up right when she needed him and she hurried to catch him before he could disappear into the back again, leaving Liam by the shelves as she asked about the camera. It cost thirty dollars and he was pretty sure it worked just fine, it only needed a film. Thirty dollars was a ridiculous price for an item like this, even if it was steep for a recently graduated teenager. The wise thing probably would have been to leave it be but then the man lowered the price to twenty-five and how could she say no? Even if he was possibly a tiny bit creepy about it in that way older men tended to be because they didn't know how to treat young girls.
Once she had her purchase all bagged up, she re-joined Liam and nudged him lightly. "Unless you're buying another creepy mask, we should totally go eat something now."
Liam watched the exchange between Jen and Loomis without a word, the man’s sudden appearance creating a knot in his stomach. He couldn’t put his finger on why the man creeped him out and chalked it up to the fact that he’d been the one to sell him and Brynn the masks that almost killed them. But there was no way he could have known that. He couldn’t imagine him selling the masks knowing what they could do. He breathed a sigh of relief when the exchange was complete and gave Jen a smile as she joined him, her new antique camera in a bag. “That would be a hard pass,” Liam said with a little laugh. “On the masks, I mean. Not food. I’m starving.” Together they exited the store, putting Loomis and his antiques behind them. The store had a very out of sight, out of mind effect on Liam, who promptly forgot about it once it was put behind him. There were better things to focus on, like friends and food, so he never saw the wolf mask back on the shelf, waiting for another buyer to pick it up.