When we last left our heroes at the East Branchwood District Library, the library was reeling from Fin's successful booknapping. The clouds outside have cleared up a bit, and there is now a gentle fog hanging over the asphalt outside. Oakwinkle has returned from his panicked phone calls in his office and is sitting at his desk, wiping his brow and nervously checking his phone and muttering to himself, "they should be here any minute, they'll know what to do..."
The teenage couple is still browsing the YA section, but are looking uncertainly your way. The homeless man is sitting up now and quietly looking for an outlet to charge his phone.
"Miss Sherri," Oakwinkle says, glancing up from his phone. "Miss Teri. Will you kindly escort these patrons out? We need to close the library at once."
"Hello, loves, I'm sorry, but there's been some sort of a problem and we need to temporarily close. Sorry for the inconvenience, darlings, but something came up."
The teenage boy looks over at Sherri, scowling. "Oh yeah? Well I -" He gets cut off when the girl elbows him in the ribcage and politely nods, saying, "Of course, we'll get out of your way right away, miss. Sorry."
"But I needed my book," the boy whines, and the girl glares at him.
The girl grabs the boy firmly by the elbow and frog-marches him out of the library, muttering about how they'll discuss things in the car.
@bobble The homeless man glances up when Teri speaks and nods hastily, averting his eyes. "Sorry. I'll, uh, yup. Sorry." He gathers up his phone and cord and slouches his way towards the door.
Oakwinkle, meanwhile, is pacing behind his desk and looking frantically at the door, checking his watch. He nods. "Thank you. You are free to leave now, Miss Sherri and Miss Teri. I can take it from here. Full pay for tonight."
"That would be lovely, dear, but I'm afraid you've piqued my curiosity now. Who's coming here "any minute"? What's gotten you so agitated? This is a library, for heaven's sake, not a high-security prison! I'm starting to think I took this job under false premises, darling."
"It's..." Oakwinkle blows out a breath. "This is a world I never wanted either of you to be involved in, do you understand? I hoped that I would not have to be the one to... well. You should go. I mean it, Miss Sherri."
"...I do not know." Oakwinkle is avoiding your eyes. "But sometimes there are doors that are better left closed. I will call you when the library is open again, and we will not speak of this again."
He picks up his briefcase. "If you need someplace to go tonight, you may visit me at my home. You will have to tolerate some vegetables, I'm afraid."
Sherri purses her lips. "Very well." She walks over to the door, unlocks it, and opens it slightly, gives a glance back at Teri, and then walks out, letting the door close behind her.
"My home is three blocks down to the east. 2271-3 Matting Street." Oakwinkle still looks supremely anxious. "Please do take care of yourself in the meantime, Miss Teri. I have taken to worrying about your well-being."
"Teri, sweetie, you've been here much longer than I have. Do you have any idea what's going on? Because I feel like he's hiding something, and I don't like it."
A slightly beat-up gray Toyota appears, lazily turns a corner onto the street, pulls up into the library parking lot, and parks in the last parking spot on the left, farthest from the entrance. The engine rolls down and shuts off.
The passenger door of the Toyota opens, and a clean-shaven, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a blue duster jacket emerges, with a brown leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He turns and waves to the driver as the car pulls back out of the parking lot and rolls away, and then takes out a small notebook, looking at the outside of the library closely and scribbling things down.
He walks a slow perimeter, peers at something on the front door, and then nudges the door open with his foot and heads inside.
Through the loose children's room window, you hear Oakwinkle's voice inside: "Thank Nalluvara and the eight moons you are here, Detective. My staff has been evacuated from the premises, and I cannot imagine they were involved - I assure you they have firm moral character. Please, tell me what you need."
"You have nothing to worry about, Nyllanock, I assure you," comes the reply. "We will find the person who did this as soon as we possibly can. I will need a statement from you, and a key to the back room. Are you certain the staff was not involved?"
"Yes, quite certain. Not only are they most ethical and upright, they are not from our world, Detective. You understand my meaning, I take it."
"Quite. I will still request a statement from them later, I think, but we will... frame it appropriately. Please escort me to the room in question, and I will see what I can do. Coulter will be coming later to provide his expertise - he had to leave Shaya with the sitter." You hear footsteps moving towards the back of the library.
We move away from Sherri and Teri for the moment, and shift to Nappanax Downs, where a horse race is in progress and Fin is ready to report her booknapping success to Brynne.
The VIP section door is absent of its usual bouncer, and you hear raucous cheering and drinking sounds from inside; the booking stations are empty as everyone is outside watching the race.
Fin looks for the same window she got her envelope from last time, and approaches the counter. She's still annoyed at the stunt the book played when she lamp-teleported
You sneak into the VIP area, which turns out to be a private box high in the stands, just below the nosebleeds and far above the front seats. The windows of the box look down on the horses rocketing across the track down below, and sitting in a folding chair by the window, whooping and holding a glass of whiskey in one hand as he watches the race, is Brynne, dressed in his usual grungy brown coat with his fedora jammed down over his eyes. "Go, Gambler, that's it! Hell yeah!"
The muscular woman from earlier hovers by his chair, and a few other men sit in the corners, smoking and playing cards.
"Whoa!" Brynne jumps, and the muscular woman startles back and reaches for something at her belt, but he waves her off when he notices it's you. "Oh! Damn! Fin, you're back! Why didn't you make a noise, huh, skipper?"
"Well, my stealthy short-statured friend, you certainly know how to scare the griffons off a man, don't ya..." He trails off and looks down at the book in his lap, and double-takes, his mouth dropping open. "...What..."
"You..." He seems speechless for a moment, then recovers himself and frantically pushes the Gesta off his lap as if it burned him. The book clatters onto the floor, the pages fluttering. "Oh, gods, don't let it touch me, criminy Christmas - how in the nine hells did you get that thing? How? How?"
"Hammer, pick it up! Jesus! Holy hells, I'm not letting it near me." He recoils as the muscular woman wraps her hand in a towel, leans across his lap and delicately plucks the book up. "Jesus... I didn't actually think... how did you steal it? What did you do?"
Fin starts to remember the sense of calm, from when she held the book for the first time... "It seemed to call out to me, I guess? Look, I got the damn, haunted, book. Where's my payment..."
Fin suddenly clocks that if Brynne doesn't want to touch it... and she carried it across the city.
"Oh crumbs. I carried that the whole damn city..."
"Criminy josephine, you actually did it. You..." He trails off, looking a bit white in the face. "Well, uh, here's the thing, skipper... that's quite a thing you did, ain't it..."
Hammer, meanwhile, is delicately wrapping the book in multiple layers of towels.
One of the people playing cards in the corner, a slender woman, looks up to see what all the fuss is about. Brynne blanches red. "Well, you see, kid... I, uh, don't have your money just this moment. Not right now. See, there was a minor... thing that happened... and I'm gonna need you to do one more quick job for me, and then you'll get your full payment. Promise. That okay with you?"
Back at the library, Teri is reading her book out of Sherri's view, and Sherri continues to eavesdrop. The voices inside are too faint to hear clearly, and it sounds like they have entered the back area.
Oakwinkle's faint voice says, "...the back room, Detective. Please do be careful. I haven't the faintest idea how the thief managed to bypass my alerting charms, perhaps Coulter will be of more use in that department..."
Teri is currently flipping through the index at the back to find where charms are mentioned, and silently cursing that she has a taxonomy book instead of a society/history book.
"What is it, Nyllanock?" says the detective, faintly. "Your ears are sharper than mine, I assume."
"Perhaps just the wind..." Oakwinkle says, uncertainly.
On page 89, Findelfyre explains the use of persuasive charms to make wilder magical beasts more permissive of your approach, mentioning specifically the use of speak with animals.
As Sherri hears that, a small gust of wind rattles the window again, but this time obviously the wind. Sherri finds herself wondering if she somehow caused that...
[Assuming "You create an instantaneous, harmless sensory effect, such as a shower of sparks, a puff of wind, faint musical notes, or an odd odor." for Prestidigitation works like that.]
"Yes, just the wind. It is quite frightening to me when I stay here at night," says Oakwinkle. "I imagine, being married to a wizard, you are quite frequently startled by odd noises..."
"Oh, yes," says the detective, merrily. "We have a habit of waking up to awakened kitchen utensils dancing around the room."
Teri's attempting to recall anything that would explain all this, but she mostly studied history and animals, not current-day stuff because she didn't imagine there was significant current-day stuff and/or there weren't many books on that
The voices grow stronger again as they walk back into the lobby. "I am most reassured that you are here, Detective, truly," says Oakwinkle. "You seem to have put together a good deal of evidence. I hope it is all right that I've also alerted SECO, given the nature of this object and my promise to inform them of any developments, but I imagined you would want to come first."
"I appreciate you trusting my agency enough to ask, Nyllanock. Rest assured that if SECO can't find the culprit, we will. And it will of course be on the house."
"You are too kind, Mr. Grimsley. Send my best regards to Coulter, please." Then you hear the sound of the front doors opening and closing.
The man reappears as he leaves the library and plops himself down on a bench outside, where he opens his notebook again and flips through, annotating and marking things with a pen. He checks his phone a few times, kicking his legs about and apparently waiting for his ride.
So since she doesn't see Teri anywhere, and curiosity getting the better of her, Sherri is going to attempt to nonchalantly walk down the sidewalk, getting a good look at this guy.
The man seems fairly mild-mannered and harmless, maybe in his late forties, and besides his coat - which seems very old and maybe a thrift purchase - his messenger bag is stuffed with either books or folders, it's hard to tell from a distance. He doesn't strike you as intimidating or malicious, just here to check out a crime scene.
As you approach, the man looks up and nods politely. "Good evening." Then he seems to blink a few times. "Ah, yes, hello. Nice to see you here. I'm afraid I don't remember your name... you must be from one of my old cases, maybe?"
Sherri glances at him, a little confused, but plays along. "Could be, dear. You do look slightly familiar. I noticed you walked into the library just now. I thought they were closed right now - some sort of emergency. What were you doing in there?"
"Oh, of course! Sherri." He scoots over on the bench to make room. "I was just checking out another case. The head librarian in there is a friend of mine, and he called needing some help. I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to disclose details - against my agency's policy, and all."
She hesitates for a moment, and elects to remain standing, but nods as a show of appreciation for the gesture. "I see, I see. The policy, of course. I do wonder why your..." She hesitates for a moment, searching for a word. "...talents, would be needed in a library of all places, but of course you can't tell me that."
"Talents? Oh, don't go flattering me." He chuckles good-naturedly. "But I'm always happy to take cases for my friends, and this is an important one. Very charming, isn't it? He takes such good care of it."
"Yes, of course." He smiles and checks his phone. "I do wish Coulter would get moving - he's awfully bad at keeping to timetables. But, well, you know the old joke about wizards."
At the reminder that other people are on the way, and with the feeling that she's not going to get much more information this way, Sherri goes "Ah, yes. Unfortunately, dear, I do have to be on my way, so I wish you luck with this... case. My regards to your family."
"No, please, do stay. I swear I know you from somewhere." He squints at you. "You weren't at the vampire case with the Bancrofts, were you? Or the poltergeist incident in Northumberland?"
He frowns. "No, surely not, it must have been that werewolf in Burlingard..."
"Not ringing a bell, dear, I'm sorry." Sherri is now regretting this entire idea, and pulls out her phone, making as if she had just received a text. "I'd love to stay and get caught up, but people are starting to wonder what's taking me so long. So if you'll excuse me, I don't want to miss my ride. I'm sure you understand, darling."
After Sherri has reached a spot where she's not in sight of Mr. Grimsley, she's just going to stop and go "My. God. What. The Hell." and try to process all that. WEREWOLVES??
"Poltergeists. Werewolves. Vampires. What the absolute Belgium."
i had assumed Brynne's slimy-ness and/or not expecting Fin to actually do it meant he wouldn't pay Fin right away for the job, seemed in-character for him. but if that's too much conflict for Fin at this time we can dial it back
We're not seeing quite as much of Teri as I would have liked... @bobble I'm not dominating the RP too much, am I? If I am, just mention something and I'll dial it back
@Mithical you're fine :) This session Teri spent mostly trying to figure out what in the world to do, while Sherri spent it doing things. Naturally your stuff comes through more.
And I wasn't sure how much internal narration I could reasonably write so most is implied
