Starting Location: Lafourche Parish, Louisiana – Thibodaux
Create characters that are human.
This is a rather poor area (avg. income $26K/y).
If you create a character that originates from this area you may not have more than 2 dots in resources.
Nobody can be a member of the local government
No characters can be associated with or members of law enforcement.
(a free contact with the sheriffs department is automatic and free – more later).
The Party Hook:
Three weeks ago [8/6/07], a mysterious statue appeared in front of the Jean Lafitte Center, Thibodaux, LA. The statue depicted a civil war era soldier. He is holding a rifle and peers auspiciously into the distance. The statue is cast in bronze and set atop a marble base. A gold plaque on the base reads
“Will carry the weary
and spur the woeful.
Triumph shall be found
top the souls of the tyrannical.
That is where the
sons of the South
must venture.”
Nobody in town saw who or how it was delivered, but it is a nice statue so the town has decided to simply keep it. Your character has seen this statue before. For many months now (if not years) you have dreamt of a soldier, walking in trepidation. He carries a rifle and is adorned in the uniform of a confederate rebel. The dream generally take the form of watching the soldier move through a dark wooded area, but occasionally you are the soldier and the palpable fear of death was terrifying. The air itself is wet and haunting. You distinctly remember a black oppressive force stealing your breath.
Awaking in a cold sweat, these images haunt you. The dreams may have become a serious problem; they were becoming more frequent and more intense. The interruption to your sleep and the anxiety they inflicted was beginning to affect your sanity. That is until they abruptly ended [8/27/07]. Only recently did the relatively insignificant news article come to your attention; that of a strange and anonymous gift appearing in Thibodaux - a statue of the soldier in your dreams.
Friday, August 31, 2007
The Date
The chill of the night air had grown since they had gone into the theater. Sam had always felt disoriented at the cinema. You go in and its light out, but when you come out the night has blanketed the city. Perhaps it was something more to do with Sam. Beth never seemed to have the unsettled feelings he did. Sam had always passed it off to the entertainment of the cinema. He is easily engrossed in movies and time seems to flow differently while a film is playing. This had to be the case. Titanic, a huge bore of a flick, didn’t feel to Sam the way his friends described it. They felt tortured and trapped in endless drivel. Sam barely noticed the three hours.
Tonight should not have been any different. The movie experience was swift, and this film was even something good. “I’ll add that one to the DVD collection,” was his thought. SO why did this night feel different?
Beth was the same, he was sure of that. She was already picking apart the plot and complaining about the way people flew through the air. It was a martial arts movie and those special effects were why a crowd gathered to see the flick. It sure a hell wasn’t the choppy doubed-over English, or the “realism” of Ancient China. People see Kung-fu movies for the Kung-fu. They want a nasty ugly evil villain, who is killed by a righteous hero, who gets the girl, and refuses reward. It was what Sam and every other poor slob wanted.
Sam looked around. Beth was droning on about blunt force trauma and how no human cold withstand that kind of impact. Her medical training kept her from enjoying so many things in life. She was always either studying medicine or talking about it. Sam didn’t really mind, as that kind of passion is a rare and beautiful thing. Her mind was so engaging and needful of knowledge, how else could it be described, beautiful. That was why he kept taking her to movies. Yes the prattle about taking a kick to the head was boarder-line psychotic, but it did reveal her truly wonderful mind.
And there it was again, that feeling that something was out of place. The humid Louisiana air was a think warm blanket, but none different than the past three weeks. The streets were the correct palel sodium orange and the people were the same. Everything looked correct, but it didn’t feel right. If it had been an extra long movie, then maybe the feeling would be justified, but this movie was barely 90 minutes. Sam listened to the city. New Orleans was a major metropolis, despite the storm. This area was close enough to the French Quarter that it stayed dry, so life went on pretty much the same as it had in August of 2005. The fact that everything looked normal made the disjointed feeling that much more troubling.
Beth guided them to the far end of the parking lot where the bus stop was. A sizable crowd had already collect around the plaxiglass shelter. Few people were inside, as the heat was doubled once you were isolated from the summer breeze, but there was one man. He would have stood out to Sam even if he weren’t in the heating bubble of the bus stop. He was in a leather duster and wore a broad brimmed hat. His face was angular and his shin was dark. Sam thought that if he met this man in a dark ally he would have turned on his heals and bolted. The crowd obviously had drawn the same conclusion, because as Sam and Beth approached the bus stop they could see those gathered were allowing a wide birth to this figure.
This is when Beth pinched him; well more like stabbed her fingernails into the palm of his hand. Sam stopped and was about to curse Beth when he saw the look in her eyes. She was frightened. Her pale blue eyes were fixed and a medical term hung impotently on her open mouth.
Sam followed her gaze to the cloaked figure. He was just standing there, granted he was looking at them, but it’s not like he was staring. He looked back to his girlfriend. She had stopped, frozen to the spot, her nails still pressing painfully into Sam’s hand.
“Beth…BETH! What’s wrong?” but she had no answer. She was transfixed, staring in horror at the bus stop. Her fear wrapped his uncomfortable disjointed feeling and made the bottom of his stomach lurch. “Come on. Let go back to the theater and call a cab.” He tugged on her hand. As she followed Sam’s lead and she turned away from the bus stop the color returned to her face, but tears started streaming down her face. Sam wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. The sweltering souther summer made it difficult to hold her, but something had obviously frightened her and they would be cooler once back in the theater.
As they put some space between them and the bus stop Beth turned and asked, “What the hell was that?” Sam was confounded.
“A man in a long coat?” he questions in response. It obviously was not the stranger she was talking about, but he didn’t see anything else.
“No.” she replied coldly. “Next to him. Did you see that mist?”
Sam turned to look back, checking for a mist. He knew he hadn’t seen anything, but wanted to just be sure. Unfortunately they had walked past quite a few cars and could no longer see the bus stop. “Sorry sweety, but I don’t think I saw any mist.”
Beth turned to him flabbergasted. “What do you mean you didn’t see any mist.” Her tone was sharp and her pitch was elevated.
In an apologetic a tone as possible Sam tried to make sense of this “Beth, lovely, I didn’t see anything.”
Sam allowed her to move outside of his embrace and she turned on him with an accusing voice, “Were your eyes shut? How could you have missed that…that…stuff swirling around?”
Sam didn’t know what to say. He had not seen anything unusual about the man. Sure he felt "off", but dragging his cinema experience into the conversation just felt like he might be throwing gasoline on a fire. “I didn’t see anything.” They paused as Sam continued, “What did it look like?”
This comment was perhaps as innocent as possible, but Beth was incensed. “Are you trying to piss me off? If you were, you are a perfect success!” she snapped.
“No, no, not at all. I just, well…” he left the sentence trail off as he looked at her. There was no recovering from this one. What ever had happened Sam was not catching on.
“What are you playing at?” her words stabbed at him.
“Beth, what the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t see any mist. All I saw was the same old bus stop we use every time we see a show.” Sam worked hard to keep the edge out of his voice, but he knew he was failing. “I mean, we have been here like a thousand times. We even arrived at that stop, but lets just call a cab.” And at that Sam began to search for his cell.
“You have got to be kidding. If you think I am going home with you, with the way you are acting, you have got something else coming.” Her tone was downright hostel and people were starting to notice. “I am not going to take this kind of abuse from a sniveling turd like you.” She wheeled on him, “My mother was right, you are just garbage.”
“Beth, I…”
She sliced through his stammering, “And keep your ‘yellow toping’ covered paws off of me. I am not going to let you grease stain another $85 blouse.” Walking with purpose Beth headed straight for the dark edge of the parking lot. Sam was left speechless.
He had never heard her speak like that. She was hostile and vicious. The Beth he knew was always talking about medicine and studying. She was never unkind and certainly never a public spectacle. On top of that he had never met her mother, how on earth could she have any idea what he was like. “Abuse? Sniveling turd? Garbage?” her words echoed in his head. It was like a scene from a bad melodrama. It was all so surreal. As he watched her disappear into the night Sam was left to sort out the occurrence and try to make some sense of it.
“I had better go after her.” He had no idea why she had fired upon him like that, but without some sort of a life-line this may never make sense. With a brisk pace that he thought would catch up to Beth in short order, Sam headed off towards the edge of the parking lot.
The lights from the parking lot did not reach around the building so Sam had no idea where the smell was coming from, but it was sharp on his nose. He knew that acrid metal smell of fresh blood. From childhood he remembered the smell, after his father had hit that deer. Here it was again, someone had hit a deer, or something.
Cloaked in the moonless night and blanked in the wet heat, Sam suddenly lost his step. He slipped and rapidly met the earth.
Other than the slight pain in his knee and wrists he was fine. He quickly looked around to see if anyone had watched him fall, and might now be laughing. Of course there wasn’t, but the reaction is perfectly instinctual. It was then that Sam discovered that the ground was wet…and warm. He pulled his hand up off the ground and pressed his fingers together. They are wet and sticky.
He pressed his thumbs to his palms. There was dirt, and wet, and something soft and rubbery. The smell was stronger. It was even worse on his hands. He couldn’t help but remember the deer. The old Ford had killed the creature almost instantly, but in doing so had torn open its underside and spilled out the contents. The road was stained red and random bits of dark and light tissues were scattered across the scene.
The creature’s limbs were all bent in impossible ways and its tongue, separated from its body, was somehow adhered to the headlight. Sam watched his father curse and stomp as he assessed the damaged truck. All that the 7-year-old Sam could is take in his surroundings. In the fading light of dusk, it was not so much the sights of the accident, but the smells. It was this smell that Sam now recognized. He was inhaling the fumes, the smell that is trapped inside every living thing, only to be released by violence.
It was choking him. He could feel the pressure of the air and it was hard to breath. The memory of the deer and the smell of the wet dark brought the images back to him like a weight on his chest. It was so hard to breath.
The night air was thick and hard. It seemed to press against him like an unwelcome intruder. The air itself was vicious and it attacked. He didn’t want to breath. That would let it in like an open door. He was not going to invite this intruder, but the fire was building. At first just warmth, but it soon grew to fire.
Refusing to breath is not just an act of will, it is a conscious effort to accept pain. Sam was inviting the fire into his lungs in order to keep the dark night out, but how long could he resist? He remembered Beth once telling him that children are sometimes so determined that they hold their breath until they pass out. This may frighten their parents, but the moment they loose consciousness they begin to breath again. Was this what was going to happen to Sam?
...burning...
Now at the end, why did it seem to be taking so long? All of his life Sam had seemed to skip fast forward. Every movie he saw sped by like lightning; so beautiful, but yet so fleeting. Why now during the greatest of dramas was everything so slow? The good passed by in haste and horror with overwhelming malaise.
Sam pondered the situation for what felt like hours. The black mist was fully inside his lungs. Breathing was useless and worse yet painful. Why was it that he kept trying? Perhaps it was just habit, after all everybody does it all the time. Was it so automatic that even at the very end, you could not stop? How could he get control over his body and stop his breathing? So many questions, all this time, but no answers. What kind of way is this to die?
...
The incantation recalled the entity to its master and with it the life-breath of this geeky looking man. The breath could be seen as silver moieties pulsing within the black vaporous body. As it coiled around its master's head and chest, the sparkling sliver spots flowed to his body.
The enchanter could feel them sliding into his skin. A feeling like the touch of a perfect lover, the breath passed to him. He was filled with the vital force, satiated and full. He would not need to do this again for several days, but for the feeling.
He had grown to love the feeling. It was life and he loved it. The pretty one had provided more than enough for him, but when this pathetic thing walked into his grasp, what was one more? He didn’t need it, but that did not stop him. It would never stop him; it was the feeling that drove him – perhaps forever.
Tonight should not have been any different. The movie experience was swift, and this film was even something good. “I’ll add that one to the DVD collection,” was his thought. SO why did this night feel different?
Beth was the same, he was sure of that. She was already picking apart the plot and complaining about the way people flew through the air. It was a martial arts movie and those special effects were why a crowd gathered to see the flick. It sure a hell wasn’t the choppy doubed-over English, or the “realism” of Ancient China. People see Kung-fu movies for the Kung-fu. They want a nasty ugly evil villain, who is killed by a righteous hero, who gets the girl, and refuses reward. It was what Sam and every other poor slob wanted.
Sam looked around. Beth was droning on about blunt force trauma and how no human cold withstand that kind of impact. Her medical training kept her from enjoying so many things in life. She was always either studying medicine or talking about it. Sam didn’t really mind, as that kind of passion is a rare and beautiful thing. Her mind was so engaging and needful of knowledge, how else could it be described, beautiful. That was why he kept taking her to movies. Yes the prattle about taking a kick to the head was boarder-line psychotic, but it did reveal her truly wonderful mind.
And there it was again, that feeling that something was out of place. The humid Louisiana air was a think warm blanket, but none different than the past three weeks. The streets were the correct palel sodium orange and the people were the same. Everything looked correct, but it didn’t feel right. If it had been an extra long movie, then maybe the feeling would be justified, but this movie was barely 90 minutes. Sam listened to the city. New Orleans was a major metropolis, despite the storm. This area was close enough to the French Quarter that it stayed dry, so life went on pretty much the same as it had in August of 2005. The fact that everything looked normal made the disjointed feeling that much more troubling.
Beth guided them to the far end of the parking lot where the bus stop was. A sizable crowd had already collect around the plaxiglass shelter. Few people were inside, as the heat was doubled once you were isolated from the summer breeze, but there was one man. He would have stood out to Sam even if he weren’t in the heating bubble of the bus stop. He was in a leather duster and wore a broad brimmed hat. His face was angular and his shin was dark. Sam thought that if he met this man in a dark ally he would have turned on his heals and bolted. The crowd obviously had drawn the same conclusion, because as Sam and Beth approached the bus stop they could see those gathered were allowing a wide birth to this figure.
This is when Beth pinched him; well more like stabbed her fingernails into the palm of his hand. Sam stopped and was about to curse Beth when he saw the look in her eyes. She was frightened. Her pale blue eyes were fixed and a medical term hung impotently on her open mouth.
Sam followed her gaze to the cloaked figure. He was just standing there, granted he was looking at them, but it’s not like he was staring. He looked back to his girlfriend. She had stopped, frozen to the spot, her nails still pressing painfully into Sam’s hand.
“Beth…BETH! What’s wrong?” but she had no answer. She was transfixed, staring in horror at the bus stop. Her fear wrapped his uncomfortable disjointed feeling and made the bottom of his stomach lurch. “Come on. Let go back to the theater and call a cab.” He tugged on her hand. As she followed Sam’s lead and she turned away from the bus stop the color returned to her face, but tears started streaming down her face. Sam wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. The sweltering souther summer made it difficult to hold her, but something had obviously frightened her and they would be cooler once back in the theater.
As they put some space between them and the bus stop Beth turned and asked, “What the hell was that?” Sam was confounded.
“A man in a long coat?” he questions in response. It obviously was not the stranger she was talking about, but he didn’t see anything else.
“No.” she replied coldly. “Next to him. Did you see that mist?”
Sam turned to look back, checking for a mist. He knew he hadn’t seen anything, but wanted to just be sure. Unfortunately they had walked past quite a few cars and could no longer see the bus stop. “Sorry sweety, but I don’t think I saw any mist.”
Beth turned to him flabbergasted. “What do you mean you didn’t see any mist.” Her tone was sharp and her pitch was elevated.
In an apologetic a tone as possible Sam tried to make sense of this “Beth, lovely, I didn’t see anything.”
Sam allowed her to move outside of his embrace and she turned on him with an accusing voice, “Were your eyes shut? How could you have missed that…that…stuff swirling around?”
Sam didn’t know what to say. He had not seen anything unusual about the man. Sure he felt "off", but dragging his cinema experience into the conversation just felt like he might be throwing gasoline on a fire. “I didn’t see anything.” They paused as Sam continued, “What did it look like?”
This comment was perhaps as innocent as possible, but Beth was incensed. “Are you trying to piss me off? If you were, you are a perfect success!” she snapped.
“No, no, not at all. I just, well…” he left the sentence trail off as he looked at her. There was no recovering from this one. What ever had happened Sam was not catching on.
“What are you playing at?” her words stabbed at him.
“Beth, what the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t see any mist. All I saw was the same old bus stop we use every time we see a show.” Sam worked hard to keep the edge out of his voice, but he knew he was failing. “I mean, we have been here like a thousand times. We even arrived at that stop, but lets just call a cab.” And at that Sam began to search for his cell.
“You have got to be kidding. If you think I am going home with you, with the way you are acting, you have got something else coming.” Her tone was downright hostel and people were starting to notice. “I am not going to take this kind of abuse from a sniveling turd like you.” She wheeled on him, “My mother was right, you are just garbage.”
“Beth, I…”
She sliced through his stammering, “And keep your ‘yellow toping’ covered paws off of me. I am not going to let you grease stain another $85 blouse.” Walking with purpose Beth headed straight for the dark edge of the parking lot. Sam was left speechless.
He had never heard her speak like that. She was hostile and vicious. The Beth he knew was always talking about medicine and studying. She was never unkind and certainly never a public spectacle. On top of that he had never met her mother, how on earth could she have any idea what he was like. “Abuse? Sniveling turd? Garbage?” her words echoed in his head. It was like a scene from a bad melodrama. It was all so surreal. As he watched her disappear into the night Sam was left to sort out the occurrence and try to make some sense of it.
“I had better go after her.” He had no idea why she had fired upon him like that, but without some sort of a life-line this may never make sense. With a brisk pace that he thought would catch up to Beth in short order, Sam headed off towards the edge of the parking lot.
The lights from the parking lot did not reach around the building so Sam had no idea where the smell was coming from, but it was sharp on his nose. He knew that acrid metal smell of fresh blood. From childhood he remembered the smell, after his father had hit that deer. Here it was again, someone had hit a deer, or something.
Cloaked in the moonless night and blanked in the wet heat, Sam suddenly lost his step. He slipped and rapidly met the earth.
Other than the slight pain in his knee and wrists he was fine. He quickly looked around to see if anyone had watched him fall, and might now be laughing. Of course there wasn’t, but the reaction is perfectly instinctual. It was then that Sam discovered that the ground was wet…and warm. He pulled his hand up off the ground and pressed his fingers together. They are wet and sticky.
He pressed his thumbs to his palms. There was dirt, and wet, and something soft and rubbery. The smell was stronger. It was even worse on his hands. He couldn’t help but remember the deer. The old Ford had killed the creature almost instantly, but in doing so had torn open its underside and spilled out the contents. The road was stained red and random bits of dark and light tissues were scattered across the scene.
The creature’s limbs were all bent in impossible ways and its tongue, separated from its body, was somehow adhered to the headlight. Sam watched his father curse and stomp as he assessed the damaged truck. All that the 7-year-old Sam could is take in his surroundings. In the fading light of dusk, it was not so much the sights of the accident, but the smells. It was this smell that Sam now recognized. He was inhaling the fumes, the smell that is trapped inside every living thing, only to be released by violence.
It was choking him. He could feel the pressure of the air and it was hard to breath. The memory of the deer and the smell of the wet dark brought the images back to him like a weight on his chest. It was so hard to breath.
The night air was thick and hard. It seemed to press against him like an unwelcome intruder. The air itself was vicious and it attacked. He didn’t want to breath. That would let it in like an open door. He was not going to invite this intruder, but the fire was building. At first just warmth, but it soon grew to fire.
Refusing to breath is not just an act of will, it is a conscious effort to accept pain. Sam was inviting the fire into his lungs in order to keep the dark night out, but how long could he resist? He remembered Beth once telling him that children are sometimes so determined that they hold their breath until they pass out. This may frighten their parents, but the moment they loose consciousness they begin to breath again. Was this what was going to happen to Sam?
...burning...
Now at the end, why did it seem to be taking so long? All of his life Sam had seemed to skip fast forward. Every movie he saw sped by like lightning; so beautiful, but yet so fleeting. Why now during the greatest of dramas was everything so slow? The good passed by in haste and horror with overwhelming malaise.
Sam pondered the situation for what felt like hours. The black mist was fully inside his lungs. Breathing was useless and worse yet painful. Why was it that he kept trying? Perhaps it was just habit, after all everybody does it all the time. Was it so automatic that even at the very end, you could not stop? How could he get control over his body and stop his breathing? So many questions, all this time, but no answers. What kind of way is this to die?
...
The incantation recalled the entity to its master and with it the life-breath of this geeky looking man. The breath could be seen as silver moieties pulsing within the black vaporous body. As it coiled around its master's head and chest, the sparkling sliver spots flowed to his body.
The enchanter could feel them sliding into his skin. A feeling like the touch of a perfect lover, the breath passed to him. He was filled with the vital force, satiated and full. He would not need to do this again for several days, but for the feeling.
He had grown to love the feeling. It was life and he loved it. The pretty one had provided more than enough for him, but when this pathetic thing walked into his grasp, what was one more? He didn’t need it, but that did not stop him. It would never stop him; it was the feeling that drove him – perhaps forever.
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