In Which Hester Remembers That She Likes Spirits Better Than People Of COURSE I'm gonna want something from this one!
The minute I saw that you had a Hester running around your WIPs, I was like OH! SAME HAT!
Though mine is a 7ft tall haunted doll who loves trains and who I am playing in my wife's folk horror tabletop game, so I think they are...maybe a little different LOL. This piece is one I started writing after our last session, where a bunch of things turned my generally good-natured gal into a bit of an anxiety-ridden mess. I wanted to try something a little weird with the formatting, so all of the disparate scenes are being written up as if they're sub-headers in a report of why she's having such a no good, terrible, awful bad day. Starting with this one!
Saint belongs to @themilokin :>
The list of things that are ruining Hester’s perfectly nice day are as follows; — — (1): Saint is binding spirits and throwing up black ichor all over the floor of her lovely train car. Admittedly, Hester is more upset about the former than she is about the latter. The ichor certainly looks worse — black as pine pitch, with a faint oil-slick sheen that flashes in a greasy rainbow of colors as Saint heaves long, ropey strands of it across the floor — but it is also not entirely real. Even as she scrambles backwards away from the foul puddle pooling at their knees, Hester can see the edges of it starting to evaporate, the roiling black turning into smokey grey as it crumbles to join the low bank of Shroud still curling over the floor of the luggage car. In a few seconds, it has become something more like a miasma than a puddle, barely more corporeal than some of the Ghostlight's passengers. The spirit, on the other hand, had been very real. “What was that?” Hester demands as she staggers to her feet, not quite shrieking but getting closer to it with every word. “What did you do? What are you doing?” “Circle,” Saint croaks between bouts of heaving, swatting a feeble hand at the air to shoo her away from the glistening red ritual circle in front of them. As if she needs the warning; Hester’s whole chest had cringed away from it the very second she had stepped within arm’s length, reflexively curling inward against the vortexing current of something trying to pry something precious and vital out of her. She takes a dutiful step back, but fixes her longest, hardest stare down at Saint, as if that alone can coax them to stop vomiting up little gobbets of black muck and tell her what they’ve done.
