Saul Devlin | Steve Jinks (minitesla) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2012-01-14 00:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | saul devlin, zoë griffin |
Who: Saul Devlin & Zoë Griffin
What: A little object retrieval.
When: Saturday
Where: Austin, TX
Warnings: TBD, likely none
"Keep Austin Weird" aside, something strange was going on in Austin, Texas.
Normally, Saul didn't really keep up with the news. It was usually way too depressing, and keeping up with his family and having a vague idea of what was going on in the reincarnate community was about as much of that as his brain could take. He was aware of the first destroyed house only because people kept coming into the gas station talking about it, and it was a little weird how the house was all smashed up on the inside before it caught on fire. It had started in the kids' room, they said, and the child had been so traumatized that they'd had to get rid of all the toys in the nursery just so that she'd stop having nightmares. It was a sad story, but at least everyone had gotten out of the house. It died down after a few days, and Saul had pretty much forgotten about it.
Then it happened again - another family, in an entirely different part of the city, but the house had been smashed up and burned down, and once more it had started in a kid's room. When it happened to another family in less than a week, he started to figure that something really weird was up. In Steve's experience, and therefore Saul's, something weird being up could only mean that there was an artifact involved.
Steve had never retrieved an artifact on his own, but he knew the basics, which meant that Saul did too. He felt a little stupid, going to the Warehouse and grabbing what supplies he could scrounge up for the job, especially since he couldn't even say for sure it was an artifact... but what else did he have to go on? With purple gloves, a bag, and enough goo to douse a bus, he was ready to start the hard part: tracking down the artifact itself.
Even dressed in his nicest clothes, he didn't look quite as convincing as he would like to in the role of an insurance investigator, but he figured he stood a better chance at that role than some other government agency. The family didn't seem convinced, but one of the fake IDs Bonnie had made up in case of this very situation persuaded them to at least talk to him. Subtlety seemed to be getting him nowhere, though, and he wasn't expecting his last question to get him any leads either. "Had you bought anything new lately? Maybe something for your child? Maybe something... old?"
The child's father started to deny it, but her mother interrupted. "Just a stuffed bear from a yard sale. I don't see why that's important."
Steve was suddenly more alert inside Saul's head, making his own heartbeat pick up a little. "It might not be, but just in case, do you know the name of the people who sold it to you?"
They gave him the name and address dutifully, and even though Saul knew in his gut that the answer was no, he checked, just in case. "And where is the bear now? Do you still have it?"
"Oh, we took it to Salvation Army, along with all of Ellie's other toys." Her mother shook her head. "She kept having nightmares about that silly bear, so we got rid of it. It's funny, she didn't seem nearly as frightened of any of the other toys, even though they were all in the playroom when the... well, when the accident happened."
A trip to visit the people who had sold the family the bear in the first place just confirmed his feeling that the toy was the key. "It was my grandmother's," a nervous young woman told him. "She kept that bear with her all the time, even when she started to get sicker. Sometimes I even caught her talking to it. Her mind was going, you know, I guess it didn't do any harm for her to talk to the bear. She'd had it as long as I could remember. I always wanted to play with it when I was a kid, but she wouldn't let me. When she passed, I just couldn't stand having it around. We were close, and it made me think about her. I know it's horrible, getting rid of something she loved so much, but a friend of mine was having a yard sale and I thought maybe there'd be some other little girl out there who could use a friend."
"And how did your grandmother die?" Saul was a reporter this time, taking notes furiously in a small book.
"It was a fire. She was getting sicker, and she wanted to just... go on, but the doctors wouldn't let her, and... we think she started it, but we don't know how. There weren't any signs of matches or lighters or anything. Just her and Tibbers - that's the bear. It's funny, I guess she protected him somehow, even then, because there wasn't a speck of soot on him."
The second family confirmed to the nice young man trying to find his sister's lost bear that they had bought a stuffed bear at Salvation Army for their five-year-old daughter, and it had made it through the fire that started in the child's playroom just fine, but their daughter had developed a strange aversion to the toy after the fire and thrown it out the car window when they weren't looking. He used the same cover with the third family, finding it a little easier to fake than impersonating a government agent. The mother was surprised he'd tracked them down, but believed that he'd read about a bear surviving the blaze that sounded a whole lot like his younger sister's. "We kept it for a while, but this apartment is a lot smaller than our house was and we had to downsize. She wasn't that fond of the toy, so I gave it to a friend of ours that's expecting her first baby."
It almost bothered him, how easy it was to persuade her to hand over her friend's address. "You can try to convince her to give it back, but she seemed pretty attached to it. She said it looked a lot like a bear she'd had as a little girl. I guess you wouldn't know how women are when they're pregnant, as young as you are, but she's emotional right now and that bear is a whole lot more important than it would be, otherwise."
And that was how he'd ended up outside the home of the family that had a stuffed bear that somehow managed to destroy houses. He had his gloves, and his bag, and his goo, everything that he needed to neutralize a dangerous artifact. What he didn't have was any idea how to get that bear and get out without causing too much of a problem... and hopefully without telling any more lies.