There is always water to pump out of even a good ship’s belly and something to repair, be it sails, ropes or clothes. Those long hours spent with monotonous tasks bring with them the risk of losing oneself in the borrowed identities, therefore the officers try not to draw on those people’s experience too much. Instead they hone their real life skills. Connor can coach the others in anything related to woodworking, while Gavin can pass down expertise in needlework of all kinds.
“When we’re back home, you can add Home Ec to your teaching portofolio”, he tells his husband.
“I could have done so before already, the cooking and gardening part, at least. But now I have a cool story to add to the needlework tasks. When I tell them that even the pirates of old used to sew the buttons back to their shirts, my students won’t cringe at the very idea anymore.”
“Your students – or you?”
“If I remember correctly, I have the right to remain silent to not incriminate myself, haha!”
Rika approaches the others. After a shift in the crow’s nest she is ready to flex her dancing moves. Finding all her friends appear occupied dampens her mood considerably. And so her response to Daniel’s “Maybe later, Rika. We’re still busy making sure this rat trap won’t fall apart.” is “A rat trap was the Adeline! Hank will see us home safely with the Diamond!“
“What did you just call the Adeline?!”
Rika instantly realizes that she has crossed a line. The old steamboat enjoys some fame as cruise ship and swimming wedding chapel. An important investigation had taken place on it, Daniel and Gavin had their first relationship crisis there (during said investigation) and later got married on the Adeline.
I love the Sims 4 steamboat a lot and was very happy when I found several recreations of it in the gallery. The current owner is distantly related to the Reeds.
But instead of apologizing now, Rika pushes further:
“I call her a rat trap and a floating coffin, and I’ll do it to your face, too! The old girl was ancient when she smuggled fugitive androids to Canada and didn’t get any younger since then!”
“Is that all you guys ever talk about? The android revolution and the Adeline?” Sigstein moans. “’cause if that persists, next we can talk about mutiny!”
“Shut your trap, Discount-Saruman!” Chris shouts. “Rika and the Reeds trash talk from passion - YOU talk and act from fear!”
“Big deal. You all are no less afraid than I am!”
“Then do something about it! If our conversation topics annoy you so much, then distract us for a bit. And that’s an order, auxiliary officer!”
It’s been a while since Siggy has picked up his guitar. He dimly remembers a brief time when he has played for tips, but nowadays he pulls the instrument out in private only. What had started as a lark, has turned into a deeply private pastime. Of course there is always an exception to make for mocking his victims…
“Well, let’s see…”
“Oh, no! No way! If I hear “Ten little fishies”, you’re going home in a trash bag!”
Sigstein opens his mouth to intone exactly that song. However, the words come out as:
♪♫The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, ♪♫
♪♫While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And left me deepening down to doom. ♪♫
“That’s not what I had in mind!”
The Reeds explode into laughter. “Your mind’s full of garbage, Sigstein, that’s the problem!”
“Oh, no, Gavin, look what you’ve done! You made the evil spellcaster sad…”
My sailors sewing is another motive I won't tire of taking screenies of when I actually play this ship in a different save.
After all, what does it matter that a bunch of lowly municipal cops is making fun of him or that the lyrics come out wrong? Playing the instrument makes Sigstein happy and he gets the definite feeling that someone has listened with interest. His host, probably.
At one point in his life Sigstein has craved praise. But when he had again and again failed to win some, he had stopped and instead focused on rising over everyone else. For a moment, however, the old desire is back. And what better way to rile up the cops than making their hosts cheer Sigstein? Maybe he can even force the bodies to clap, with Gavin’s, Tina’s and Chris’ minds being fully awake, yet unable to do something about it? Yay, that would be neat!
And so Sigstein plays on, for himself and for their hosts:
♪♫I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; ♪♫
♪♫Which none but they that feel can tell — Oh, I was plunging to despair. ♪♫
“Hey, did you guys here that just now? Sounds as if this song is about your Captain!”
Daniel and Chris jump up from their seats! Gavin and Tina quickly follow.
“Did you just insult Hank?!”
“Nope. I insulted Hank six years ago. Today I think I ridiculed him.”
About five seconds later Sigstein is perfectly integrated into the team. At least if “integrated” works as a synonym for “buried beneath”.
Rika tries to pull Daniel away from the spellcaster whom he is kicking repeatedly. Chris pulls at Daniel with the intent to free him from Rika’s grasp – while also kicking Sigstein. It is unclear what Gavin and Tina are arguing about – probably who gets to eat Sigstein (although a vampire and werewolf are perfectly able to share a meal, with one wanting the blood and the other the meat).
In the crow’s nest Connor turns his head towards the commotion. For a while he watches emotionless. It’s just his co-workers acting immature, nothing to worry about. In fact, the police captain feels reminded at his early days at the DPD.
What eventually convinces Connor to inform Hank about the brawl is the fact that his friends do not beat up Sigstein, with his track record of having utterly humiliated them, but the body of an innocent seaman who has lived two hundred years ago.
“Okay, that’s enough! It’s detention for everyone! What did you even think, Sigstein, provoking the other kids… your shipmates, I mean, like that? Five against one, really? You used to be more clever!”
“Yeah, my apologies, that’s entirely on me. I forgot to check my spell repertoire. The idea was to defend myself with basic Deliriate and Despairio and incantations. But turned out my host is restricted to fire spells. Can’t cast those on a ship!”
The hair on Hank’s neck rises. Has Sigstein just casually solved the mystery how the “Diamond” had found her end? Maybe this brawl has happened in the past, only for different reasons, and Sigstein’s host had resorted to fire magic, spelling doom for them all.
And also… has Sigstein just admitted that he had known his host to be a spellcaster, too, but not disclosed that detail to the team?!
In the crow’s nest Connor is whistling. He hardly processes what melody exactly, whether it’s something he remembers from Detroit or that he is reading from his host’s brain. Maybe a mix of both.
The lookout keeps a close watch on the ocean. Connor isn’t expecting anything, when suddenly his vigilance pays off:
„Maaaaaan overboaaaaaaard!“
Only it isn’t a man. It’s a kid no older than Daniel’s students back home, as the sailors realize after having fished her out. Her rescuers’ “Who are you?” prompts heard rendering disappointment.
“Pip”, the girl whispers. “I half and half expected not to get missed, but do you really don’t even remember my name?”
From the adults there is only silence. Hank gets the strong impression that he should recognize the name. Daniel feels deep down that he should remember. In both cases the shivers running down their spines suggest that this is something pertaining specifically Daniel and Hank, not their unnamed hosts. But the harder they try to pull away the curtain from this particular memory, the more the fragment retreats, until it is too far out of reach to even be real.
What remains is the awareness that the doomed whaling crew, that’s fate they’re replaying here, included at least one child. A child that is – or was – going to drown. The stakes have just gotten raised, no longer are the Detroit cops responsible for their own survival alone anymore, now there is Pip to protect.
If she has went overboard in the original timeline, but got rescued by the “visitors” from the 21st century in the modified chain of events, that’s a good sign, right?
Time to call it a day! I gave my sims free will, but they didn’t anything story-worthy, so I only have those pics from evening meal:
Not just Pip needed to get out of the rain, the adults, too, were in dire need of some warmth and comfort. And so everyone retreated to the galley, where Daniel cooked up a thick, filling fishhead stew. It sounded worse than it tasted.
However, nerves were still raw, especially for the little castaway.
“When are going to spear that mean ol’ whale!” she yelled at the Captain.
Hank then (autonomously) went to bed and while the emptied bowls were spoiling, Gavin helped Pip with homework…
…only to get corrected by his husband immediately. Looks like Gavin knows everything a third grader knows, but has no idea how to communicate that to said third grader, let alone how to keep her interested. Teaching seems to be a real job, after all, who’d have thought!
That's a fun turn of events! Pip seems cool. And could be an interesting clue.
I'm itching to tell who she is - another week, maybe (script is long finished, screenshots only for the next four posts). In any case, I created Pip in CAS from [redacted] and [redacted].
The next morning Pip wants to go up into the crow’s nest.
The adults allow it under supervision. So far nobody has had the heart to disclose to the cabin girl that they are not the people she remembers, but more or less possessing their bodies. It would be a bit much to take in after almost having drowned.
Pip should notice that she isn’t getting kicked around and yelled at anymore. Instead of making her work, the adults treat her like a neighbor’s kid that they are taking to a theme park: They keep a close watch on her, but let her try her hands at every task on board. However, Pip in turn behaves like a kid getting taking to a theme park by a nanny.
There not being any sign of hesitation, or at the very least of acknowledging a transition from one lifestyle to another, doesn’t strike the humans as odd. The androids, however, who have went from neglected at best, abused at worst, to free persons, cannot help but notice the inconsistency…
Life isn’t all work and no fun for the grown-ups, either. Sometime later (it is hard to define how much later exactly) Tina and Daniel decide to play tug of war…
…in wolf form.
“How’s that possible?“ Chris wonders. “If only our minds have time-traveled?”
“Maybe their hosts are werewolves, too?” Rika suggests. “Same as Sigstein’s is a spellcaster, only with a different specialization.”
The officers turn their heads into Siggy’s direction, expecting him to nod or grunt affirmatively now. Instead the spellcaster points his finger at them: “Are you all blind that you can’t see what’s in front of your eyes? That’s the Moonfury!”
Rika shrugs. Moonfury is a reality of werewolf life in 2050. It ebbs and rises in accordance with a were’s temperaments and during a full moon is shoots up like mad. Everyone knows this. You don’t have to be or know a werewolf to be privy to that information. It gets taught in grade school as part of social studies.
Chris, however, gasps when he hears the term: “No way!”
“Got it now?” Sigstein sneers.
Now the other two detectives, Connor and Gavin, join the scene. They find their friends transformed, with the final sparks of crimson still lingering around their bodies. Just like Chris, they take a moment to realize, because what they see here is perfectly ordinary. The moment Gavin and Connor realize what exactly doesn’t add up, their eyes and mouths open wide.
“The Crimson Mist!” Gavin squeals.
“The Crimson Mist”, Connor states solemnly.
„But – how? Tina?“
„Beats me if I knew.”
Tina growls. Ever since having accepted Mr. Greig’s “gift” in Moonwood Mill, she’s had to deal with the Moonfury as part of what it means to be a werewolf. But truth is, in the past werewolves only ever transformed during the full moon. Only in this cycle of magic the MIT having launched the so called Magic HQ into orbit has messed up the energies governing werewolf transformation. In 2050 were creatures are at the mercy of the Moonfury and at risk of dissolving into the Crimson Mist. In 1818 that would have been not only unheard of, but outright impossible.
“All I know is that I just had to keep my body together molecule by molecule and that it bloody well felt like MY body. Not a random sailor’s.”
You may remember that the first day after Werewolves got released, there was a bug that caused them to turn invisible, leaving only the red sfx. This is Tina in this state:
I decided to accept that bug as part of my lore.
„Maybe we only see the crimson mist because for us it is a normal byproduct of a werewolf transformation?” Connor muses out loud. “Even it feeling the same might just be Tina’s imagination.”
The words are English, but even so Connor speaks a different language. The language’s name is Disappointmentese and every detective knows it. What Connor is really saying is: “I don’t want to believe what I see, because it’s invalidating our beautiful hypothesis.”
Hank feels with his son and younger colleague. His own comment only requires four letters.
So that was the spoilery thing my sims did that I mentioned in an earlier post.
Chris jumps Hank, leaving the elder no time to react or even comprehend what’s happening.
The detective starts clapping Hands with Hank.
“Sing along!” he urges him.
Without thinking, caught up in the moment, Hank obeys. His tongue is on auto-run, same as his hands get piloted by the little boy he was once:
“My father went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see…”
"Ha!“ Chris says triumphantly. “Heard that? This is the old version of the clapping song, the one Hank would have learned in the eighties! When I left him no time to consider, he automatically defaulted to it. But when you…”
With these words Chris faces Connor.
“…played with your father, he sang “a sailor” and “they” – the lyrics my generation grew up with. He always sang “father” with my Damian, when he was little, he sings “father” and “he” for the twins, for the Reed kids and for your daughters!”
“Yeah, true”, Hank admits. The old man enjoys babysitting the Newcrest children, but he has trouble focusing on the clapping sequence. It takes all his capacity and so, despite trying to sing the contemporary lyrics, Hank always relapses to the older ones. Except that one day on the “Diamond”, with Connor.
“You’d expect father to sing either the 1980s lyrics or a 19th century version, if he was influenced by a sailor from that time”, Connor understands. “Under no circumstance should he have sung the modern version. Except if… But that would mean whoever forced his actions must be your age or even younger!”
"That would be a problem how?” Chris inquires, genuinely puzzled. Hadn’t they just made progress in this strange case?
“What I felt, when I played the clapping game with my father, was real”, Connor insists. “I’m not imagining things. There was muscle memory that I copied into my own hands, vocal chords and even soul.”
“There was a presence, indeed”, Hank agrees with his son. “I believe you. But we may have been wrong about the identity of that presence. You didn’t feel a young Ishmael born in 1800, but someone else. Our…”
Hank pauses before finishing his thought. For drama or from anger, who can tell?
“…captor.”
"Okay, the nerds have finished their part and it makes sense”, Gavin addresses his partners. “Let’s settle this Reed style now!”
“Reed style?” Daniel asks, amused, but definitely open to the idea.
“Reed style!” Tina agrees grimly.
Each of the trio has a distinct style of problem solving. There is no “Reed style” as such. What Gavin conjures up is his former reputation as the office bully in a time when Tina had been his lancer and when Daniel had wielded the (unironially) intimidating power of the DPD’s janitor. Whatever comes next, will beyond doubt advance their investigation – but at someone’s expense. Tina and Daniel need no pointer as to who that one might be. There is only one person on this ship with whom the DPD officers have a score to settle.
“I’d love to state that you collectively got over your festering grudge against me, but your body language tells me differently.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So if we’re still enemies, then why are you and me having a friendly conte…? Oh. Oh, no! Don’t tell me I’m your replacement Connor now!”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
Sigstein notices Gavin bite into the rim of his mug from suppressed laughter. Okay, that answers this question. The android marks “Am I Replacement Connor?” as “answered” and moves it into a folder that is the equivalent of a “completed quests” log. The DPD officers could be sooo predictable at times. They are living in the past even when they are not time-traveling, always referencing their days as rivals and enemies. With Connor being Gavin’s friend now, naturally he’d latch onto Connor’s evil twin as his new arch nemesis. So predictable…
Sigstein chuckles and the contest goes on.
There comes the moment when Sigstein cannot go on anymore. Whatever this detective’s host has for a bladder, Siggy’s own host cannot compete with it.
“I have not really lost to you!” the spellcaster says, when he rises from the chair while Gavin is still drinking. “Just my host to yours!”
Gavin grins, but he doesn’t comment on that. Instead he kicks back his own chair and races towards the latrines. At the same time Tina and Daniel grab Sigstein, press him down onto the chair again and tie him to it!
“Hey, what are you doing!”
“Tying you to a chair.”
“Why… no, scratch that, just let me go! I need to gooooo!”
Right at the beginning of their adventure Daniel had learned how torturous having to “go”, but being unable to do it is for humans. Nobody should have to go through this. But does this conviction still hold true when it comes to the man who has imprisoned his husband and Fated Mate? With no regard to what damage getting transformed into a fish might cause to their minds? Sigstein had even went so far to remove the individual feeding instructions from the tank and replace them with the cheapest pellets available at the market, a needless cruelty. No, there isn’t a single ounce of empathy left for that one. Daniel wants Sigstein to pee his pants and he wants to watch it.
Sweat runs down Sigstein’s forehead and cheeks as he fights for bladder control.
“Please, detective, untie me!”
“No.”
“I’ll… do… anything…”
“Anything, really? Even listening to me? Really listening, I mean?”
“Eh?”
“That’s the hardest part. Most people only hear, but don’t listen.”
“Uh… Just say whatever you want to say.”
“You don’t have to pee. You’re an android.”
“Oh, aren’t we funny! In this time I’m a human!”
“And this is where you’re wrong.”
Sigstein whimpers incomprehensively. Already he feels the floodgate give way. It’s over. He has lost and the immediate future will be yellow.
Except…
“No!!! I don’t WANT to!“
And if Sigstein Connor doesn’t want something, then it isn’t going to happen!
Gavin grins.
“You can untie him now, Danny.”
“What.. What just happened?” Sigstein stammers. He can recount the chain of events perfectly, except for the moment where he should have suffered a bladder accident, but miraculously didn’t. It is as if the problem had never existed, and that he tells the officers.
“Like in a dream”, Gavin nods. “Figured as much.”
“You FIGURED that, detective? You could have SAID a word instead of playing me for a fool!”
“Nope. Our shared past aside, that really made me savor every moment of this, I needed to keep you in the dark for unbiased evidence.”
“You’re stone cold, detective.”
“Thanks, I guess. I got called worse.”
Taking inventory… If Sigstein has only imagined to have a bladder need, then he isn’t inhabiting a human body. But the captives of the “Diamond” cannot be in their real bodies, either. In this case Gavin’s vampire thirst would have triggered days ago already. He can drink beer and eat fishhead stew, but all that does to the vampire is make him fat, it doesn’t provide sustenance.
“No bodies at all?” Sigstein concludes. “Our minds are making up the reality around us, following more or less gentle nudges? The world reflects what we think we should experience?”
“Looks like it. It’s ingenious, actually, and a typical vampire thing to do. The tainted part of me cannot help but admire the setup.”
“Haha, no!” Daniel chimes in. “Your vampire part is an adorable fruitbat that enjoys nibbling at melon slices! And squirrels.”
Squirrels! What wouldn’t Gavin give for a red squirrel now! Ever since coffee has stopped working for the detective, squirrel and chipmunk blood has acted as a substitute.
“Think, Gavin”, he moans. “The exact set of instructions that make up this play… is there anything about it that you recognize?”
If they knew what’s happening to them, that might be the key to figuring out the mastermind behind this farce. And with the perpetrator known, the officers might get an inkling how that one had done it and how they could reverse it.
“Fat chance”, Sigstein spats. “I don’t know of any piece of mythology that has a fire-slinging mage traveling the Seven Seas. This must be something coming from real deep of our subconsciousness!”
“No case file comes to mind, either. A work of fiction, then? Hank is a bookworm, he ought to know! Let’s go upstairs and shake him out of the illusion!”
Determinedly Gavin walks towards the ladder leading upwards, satisfied with his work down here. Sigstein holds their living in the past against the DPD officers, but now this is exactly like in the old times: Just sober up Hank and he’ll have all the answers.
Just when the four officers return to the main deck, Pip cries out:
"Whaaaaaaaaaale! There she blooooooows!!!“
“A girl whale, then?” Gavin asks. “That’s good!”
“Why’s that good?” Connor replies, clearly puzzled. What has the gender of their prey to do with anything? Already the harpooneers make haste towards the boats, and the boat pilots are expected to do the same. They’ve got a whale to spear!
“Because”, Gavin explains, “we found out that we’re trapped in a book. Specifically in a fantasy version of Moby Di.ck, starring a fire mage and a necromancer from Sulani.”
“And in this context”, Sigstein adds, “spearing a male whale is an absolute no-no. Because that might be Moby, and the moment they confront Moby…”
“Everyone drowns in the end, I remember”, Connor finishes the sentence. “I see.”
Trouble is, while Connor’s mind may “see”, his legs “hear”, namely the Captain’s order to lower the boats. It’s getting increasingly harder to resist the urge to obey.
“I’m a deviant android”, Connor tells himself. “I managed to break free from my program code, so there’s a chance I can ignore this outside influence, too!”
His fists balled, fingernails tearing into his palms, Connor forces himself to stand firmly on the spot and listen to Gavin and Sigstein. But they, too, hear the siren call of obedience…
Meanwhile the harpooners have reached the boats. Having failed to overhear their shipmates talk about the book hypothesis, they still think to possess historical seamen.
“So this is it… our first whale”, Daniel muses. “And whoever’s historic partner was capable of spearing one, will be able to do so now.”
“You and me could do it in the future, too”, Chris claims, and rightfully so. “But the thought of entrusting our boats to Gavin and Rika doesn’t sit well with me. Not AT ALL.”
“Haha, right! Gavin doesn’t belong behind a steering wheel, no matter what era” Tina laughs. “The first time I took Gav and Danny sailing, we crashed into the Adeline. It didn’t do the old girl any favors… Rika may have a point, after all.”
“So – you and me, Tina?” Daniel asks. “You take the rudder and I’ll stab the fishie?”
“Of course! Not even a question!”
Chris nods. They already know that something is fishy here. Simply NOT attacking the whale Pip has spotted doesn’t occur to them, but they can very well prepare for this battle in their own fashion.
“And I’ll pair up with Connor”, Chris announces. “I’ll be right back with him – don’t start without us!”
“…white, with a dozen broken lances stuck to its body!” Pip describes the whale she has spotted. In the light of what the crew has just learned, that isn’t good news. Not at all. However, when Pip eagerly asks Hank whether this is the whale they are after, the Captain nods with grim determination.
“Blow on and split your spout, whale!” he hisses, then makes a gesture that encompasses his officers as well as Sigstein, the auxiliary. “The mad fiends themselves are after ye! Blow your trump—blister your lungs! Detroit’s finest will…”
“We’ll four-letter-word-gerund do nothing!” Gavin interrupts the speech.
But Hank is adamant: “Thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!” he cries.
The words resonate in the whalers’ very bones. Their imagined bones. The scenario isn’t real, nor is the world it plays out in. But Hank Anderson’s Captain title is real and these men and women are used to following his orders blindly, because he has never let them astray.
This is wrong, Connor knows. They’re lowering the boats to row into their doom. After they have finally solved the riddle, this must not how their adventure ends! Alas, already Chris turns around, slowly at first, then with renewed vigor. Tina and Daniel are sitting in their boat already, harpoon and oars in hand. Rika is fiddling with some ropes and Sigstein nervously looks to the spot he is supposed to be now, but doesn’t want to…
Moments stretch into what feels like hours to the officers.
There’s no helping it. Hank is Captain and they are his subjects. If only someone else was playing Ahab, someone easier to rebel against…
“Hey, Gavin! Don’t you think it’s unfair that Hank gets to play Captain Ahab, when in truth you and me are the Captains of Detroit central station?”
“What’s gotten into… oh, I get it! The roles are fixed, but the actors are variable!”
“Right! I was your “white whale”, starting the day I came to the DPD. I even broke your leg once, that adds to your Ahab-ness. And you were thoroughly hated for years. If YOU ordered us to attack the whale, we could resist better. Plus, we’d get Hank’s head clear to think about a way out of this mess.”
“I’m not hated, Ishmael!” Gavin Ahab protests. “I may be a bit cursed, that’s all.”
“Whoa, that was quick! But what was that about you being cursed?”
Yes, what? Gavin has trouble sorting through the plethora of information the setting has just dumped into his mind to enable him to get into character. Scenes are popping out of the ocean of Ahab’s memory and vanish beneath the surface again, not connected in any way.
“Oh, just the trifle of spitting on an altar, getting hit by lightning and conjuring evil spirits on the ship by using a sacred tree as replacement mast, after the old one broke from my cursing. Stuff like that.”
“That’s… not in the book, no?” Connor ventures.
“Of course not”, Sigstein claims. “Not in the original, at least. Remember we’re in the fantasy version!”
“Actually it sounds like a Gavin-version. But in any case…”
“In any case this ends here!” the Captain’s voice rises up.
It has quite a long way to rise, on account of the Captain being played by Pip now.
“Please, Starbuck”, Pip Ahab says, not unfriendly in the least, “I can see your point. You do not support my revenge, you do not care for a single whale, only for many, many whales, that will get us rich. But we can still fill the hold with fat and whalebone after we finished our mission! We don’t have to be enemies!”
“What’s happening?” Connor gasps.
“Looks like Gavin is Starbuck now”, Hank replies. “I wondered where Starbuck was. Well, actually, I didn’t wonder while I was Ahab. As Ahab I was… surprisingly content, actually. But the moment I snapped out of it, the question came to mind.”
Ah, Starbuck, Connor thinks, finally familiar territory! Captain Ahab hunts the White Whale and everyone drowns, that is about everything the police officers know about the story. And that at some point someone named Starbuck plays a role.
“Could you become Starbuck?” Connor prods.
“That wouldn’t help us. Starbuck is unable to stop Ahab”, Hank explains. “In the book he pondered killing the Captain, but could not bring himself to do it.”
“But he can buy us time. Gavin is good at annoying people!”
“Right. Let me think… Mhm… I’d say if anybody has a chance to persuade Ahab to stop his mad crusade, then that would be Captain Peleg. Him and Ahab are friends of sorts, going back real far.”
Daniel watches from the sidelines how Ishmael, Starbuck, Captain Ahab and now also Captain Peleg argue.
For the other five crewmembers outside this circle, time seems frozen. They can only stand and watch…
Daniel’s mind is working, while his body is standing idle.
The scenario has assigned Gavin a new role, but kept his red hair. Nobody else has changed hair- or skin color to better match their role. What makes red different? (Other than that it is hot, of course, especially on his husband – Daniel has to muster serious effort to dismiss this thought of his.)
Gavin… Connor… Pip… Wait, Pip? What is she anyhow? Part of the scenario, like the landlord at the Inn, or another captive, a child stolen away from Detroit? Daniel has assumed the first, because at no point in this farce has the girl suggested that “Pip” isn’t her name, even when the adults had used their Detroit names all the time. What if the girlchild is literally called Pip? Or rather…
Daniel feels his hair straighten and retract into his skull. He strides over to the arguing people, and with each step it takes less effort. Halfway across the distance Daniel feels his android LED spring into life again.
“Pippilotta Dreamer! This has went far enough! Explain yourself, young lady!”
“Mi… Mi… Mister Reed!”
The voice of authority, but also the voice of a confidante. Mister Reed is Pip’s school teacher in Detroit.
“Is this really your doing?”
Despite Daniel just having accused Pip of being the instigator, he has a hard time believing it.
(Meanwhile Gavin, Connor and Hank look as if they experience a short episode of feeling redundant. Their former janitor apparently is perfectly able to solve the case on his own.)
“Not fair! Why doesn’t anybody want to play with me? Not that it mattered. You are not going home before the mean ol’ whale is history! It ATE the Captain’s leg. It ate it, but nobody cares! Everyone says Ahab is evil!”
“We’ll TALK about this“, Pip’s teacher says sternly. “But for now – everyone think of Detroit! Or of something nice!”
Defying the rules of this pocket dimension… focusing on the real world… on their identities… The DPD crew is a stubborn bunch, but without knowledge what exactly has caused them to get trapped here, will willpower be enough to escape?
Ten… twenty… thirty second pass, then Rika laughs through her nose.
“Oh, look! So cute! Whose idea was this?”
“Uh… I think that’s ours”, Daniel admits. “Our pool floatie.”
“I want to say “NOW I have seen everything”, Hank says, “But I know that would be a lie.”
And then the boats are getting put to water, after all. Because this cannot end, as longs as the “whale” isn’t defeated.
“So we’re sitting in an imaginary row boat, so that you can pop your pool floatie with a spear. Business as usual, right?” Tina comments the situation. “Also take care, Danny – this bad boy can still keel over and bury us beneath itself.”
“I trust your boating skills”, Daniel replies warmly.
“Everyone, don’t forget to open your mouths to protect your eardrums! Moby Float here will go out with quite a BANG.”
Daniel tosses the spear!
The boat rocks dangerously, when the giant pool floatie gets pierced. Instead of a bang, there is a drawn out leakage of air, accompanied by a high pitched sound. The trio in the boat holds fast to their vessel, when the gust goes over them. Tina gets some of the air into her mouth. She coughs, but that is the worst already.
Eventually the water is calm again and there, right at the bow, a gate opens.
Slowly the Diamond – that really has been the Pequod all this time – moves towards the opening. Darkness engulfs the captives, and for a moment there’s no sensory data at all coming in, then the void gets replaced by a different darkness: that of their own closed eyelids.
They open their eyes and smile at each other. The nightmare is over. The officers know the perpetrator’s name, they have her address and also an inkling of the motive. Now they need to get their hands on the “weapon”.
Finally awake again, the DPD officers gather in their inner sanctum: the cafeteria.
Over each one’s favorite “fuel”, they discuss the case: Thirium-310 for the androids, coffee for the humans, slices of raw meat for Tina and squirrel blood for Gavin.
By now they have deduced that every copy of Moby D. is contaminated, including the audiobook Chris had been reading in the patrol car. Whoever reads or hears so much as a single line of it, gets drawn into the scenario. In a city the size of Detroit the rather small chance of someone reading Moby D. adds up to quite a substantial number of victims.
“We need to put out a warning”, Tina says, but Connor must disagree:
“Tonight? People would think this is a Halloween joke. Or if they believed us, many might read the book just because. Our best bet is to quickly put an end to this spook.”
“I still cannot grasp how exactly we escaped”, Rika admits.
“Half of us were lucky to have their soul split. Having part of your very being stored somewhere save is immensely helpful. It helped us cling to our true identities instead getting swallowed by the scenario”, Connor explains. “At times it was close, but each of us who remembered pulled the others out of the rabbit hole.”
That causes the communications officer to smile:
“Haha! You mean we won by teamwork? The one category we consistently scored the lowest in each and every evaluation!”
To test Connor’s hypothesis, Sigstein and Chris summon their familiars. When Siggy had accidently split his soul, it had infused a neanderthal skull that had subsequently unearthed itself and returned to him as his familiar. When Chris had sent out a splinter of his soul with the express intent of becoming a spellcaster, his had found a living creature to bond with: Ashelia the phoenix.
“I briefly couldn’t sense you anymore. Have you died again?” Ashelia inquires, a mix of concern and friendly teasing in her gentle voice.
“No!”
A smug expression accompanies the detective’s statement. For Chris Miller is the only DPD officer who has a “times gotten killed” statistic in addition to the “confirmed kills” one.
Chris died twice in my game already, the first time by getting shot and left to die in the snow (technically death by freezing) and the second time by falling to his death during a mountain excursion. For this reason I chose a phoenix as his familiar.
Ashelia: He lying?
Scheisserle: Nope.
Ashelia: C’mon!
Scheisserle: Well, he very nearly drowned. But it was averted.
Ashelia: Ah, that’s more like my human. Thanks for clearing that up.
Sigstein's familiar is named "Little sh t"
It is still the night before All Hallows’ Eve, when the investigators leave the police station again already.
“How does it feel to walk out of here as a free man?” Daniel teases Sigstein.
“As if YOU knew!” the spellcaster sneers.
It is true, going from butler to kidnapper to revolutionary to janitor to police auxiliary and finally teacher Daniel’s path through life hasn’t always been the most honorable. At times he had seemed unredeemable.
But while Daniel has committed evil deeds, Sigstein IS evil. He strives when people around him go through bad times, literally feeding off it, boosting his own mood by basking in negative emotions. No amount of willpower will be sufficient to change Sigstein (not that he’d be willing to muster even a little), additionally a divine or at the very least magical intervention would be required.
According to Daniel, Pip’s home is the Dreamer residence at 215 Sim Lane. The girl lives here with her parents and maternal grandfather. There are also an aunt and uncle, about whom Daniel doesn’t remember more than that they exist, and a paternal grandfather, who lives elsewhere in Pleasantview.
The house looks no different from all the other homes in town. It is kept tidy and decorated for Halloween. A garden in the backyard is testament to at least one resident’s nature enthusiasm.
Nothing on the outside indicates that nefarious schemes are happening here.
Gavin takes a quick look at the surroundings in batform. He gives his report in a chirpy fruitbat voice, clearly having trouble to speak as a bat. In fact, to anybody outside the DPD Gavin the bat sounds completely unintelligible.
“There are still so many questions”, Hank says. “Pip has more or less confessed that she is behind the whaling scenario, but how? Children cannot split their souls. Even if she’d been the most powerful spellcaster or vampire in a previous life, now she is stuck in a pre-pubescent body that simply cannot access occult powers.”
“Other than lava bombs.”
“Other than lava bombs, correct, Tina. Let’s hope we won’t have to face some tonight.”
Hank’s total lack of sarcasm when he says this doesn’t bode well…
“Enchanting is the rarest and most complicated magical art”, Hank continues.
Because it’s a custom/modded skill ;-)
“In Detroit only two persons are trained in it.”
There is a moment of silence, when this truth fully sinks in. Because the two enchanters in question are Daniel’s goddaughter and Sigstein Connor. One or both men may still play the DPD for fools. If it turns out to be Sigstein, the investigators are equipped to deal with the betrayal. But if it’s Daniel, then Hank and Gavin, who have put their careers on stake for him in the past, are guilty of the worst of misjudgments.
“Good evening, Mr. And Mrs. Dreamer…”
“Mister Reed! Is this a home visit? Lotti isn’t in trouble…?”
But what are the chances of that, if their daughter’s teacher is accompanied by not one policeman, but a whole squad ranging from beat cops to paranormal investigators?
“Uh… In what ways is Lotti in trouble, Mister Reed?”
While Daniel talks to the Dreamers, Gavin assigns tasks to the rest of the team. They agree to let Hank to the talking.
“We’re investigating a case of artifact misuse and have reason to assume that your daughter has come into contact with – or possession of – an enchanted book. But first tell me, are any of you spellcasters?”
“No, Officer.”
“We shouldn’t take their words on that.”
With these words Sigstein takes a potion bottle out of his backpack. What he needs now is the ability to spot magic auras. There are various ways to accomplish that and gulping down a potion in the background is the least intrusive one. Unlike a spell cast on the Dreamer couple it doesn’t require their consent either. Hypocritically as that sounds, thus is the law.
After having imbibed the bottle’s contents, Sigstein looks around. But the only golden aureola he spots is the one around his own head.
“Stupid potion”, the spellcaster mutters. “I know I am magical. Who wouldn’t be aware of their own magic powers?!”
With the parents’ express permission the investigators enter Pip’s room upstairs. What will they find there?
On first glance nothing sticks out as being out of the ordinary. This is the domain of a child that still gets outfitted in the generic baby pink by her parents for the most part, but who has started developing her own preferences, now that she attends school and broadens her horizon.
Daniel smiles when he notices a red toy chopper resting on Pip’s treasure chest. Pip has built that one in his class, that is, Daniel had handed each child a bag of parts that they had painted and put together. The teacher then had slotted a tiny engine and two batteries in. Daniel still remembers the color each child has chosen, and who has given their chopper a name, but he couldn’t on top of his head cite his students’ classroom performance.
“Mister Reed!“ Pip gasps upon seeing Daniel. “And Mister Reed…”
The unspoken question is easy to decipher: Have Mister and Mister Reed swung by tonight, a teacher somewhat disgruntled by Pip’s misdeed and his husband? Or is it rather Mister Reed the teacher and POLICE CAPTAIN Reed? There being a whole squad of cops strongly suggests the second. In fact, there seems to be no end to policemen entering the room!
“I’m so sorry, Mister Reed”, Pip says in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have abducted you. But I didn’t know that would happen! That I’d snatch you of all people!”
“Pip… Kidnapping people isn’t less bad when you do it to strangers!”
Calmly, patiently Daniel reminds the girl that she knows how he feels after getting shanghait to the Pequod, and he makes sure to use this exact word instead of variations of “abducted”. He goes on explaining that her other victims, the ones she’s never met before, are feeling the same. Eventually it sinks in. Pip agrees to apologize to everyone she has forced to play Captain Ahab with her.
Daniel looks up, into his husband’s face, who nods solemnly. From listening to Daniel talk to Pip, they all have come to the same conclusion: Pippilotta isn’t aware of what exactly she has done. Especially she cannot even imagine that her involuntary playmates have died every time the Pequod sank in the dreamscape. It is better if she never learns of that cruel detail.
“That won’t be necessary”, Daniel tells Pip. “Or, what I mean is, you meeting everyone in person won’t be required. But you will write a long letter in which you apologize, young lady! And before you do that, pray tell us how did you do all of this?”
“I just wished for it to happen.”
Danggit. Up to this point it had went so well, but now the detectives are stuck again. No matter how they phrase their questions, or what angles they come up with to build bridges for the suspect, Pip simply cannot explain what exactly she has done to give her wish that much power.
Hank picks it up from the desk, closed, with a bookmark shoved in at the actual start of the story, after the preliminary poems and author’s musings. But just like Pip, the book itself doesn’t register as magical. The captives haven’t really been inside a book, but in a self-contained universe inspired by the Captain Ahab story.
“Maybe next time the Dreamers should get her something more age appropriate”, Hank says. “There must be child-friendly versions of this story aplenty?”
“I think it was a great version!” Gavin protests. “With the pirate gold, a fire mage and a necromancer! I’d buy a copy for our own children, if only all of them weren’t cursed at the moment! The books, I mean, not my kids.”
WHAM!
Hank playfully slaps the younger Captain with the book.
“They’re cursed with having you for their father, goofball!”
Gavin recognizes the mockery as friendly, but protests again nonetheless: “Hey!!!”
“That was the original goofball! You and Sigstein only made it sound like fantasy, because you never deigned actually reading it and so all you knew was Ahab bad, Moby bad, Starbuck exists.”
Hank has a point, of course, but that point isn’t helping them now.
Sigstein looks around… Somewhere in this room might be the solution to their case. But how is he to find it? In a little girl’s domain? The spellcaster never was a little girl himself.
“That’s exactly it”, Scheisserle supplies. “Look for something that’s out of place.”
“How? If I can’t even tell what would be in-of-place here?”
“Look for something that speaks to YOU.”
“Ah, makes sense. Thank you.”
While searching the room, Sigstein briefly wonders whether Scheisserle had children in life, and where their descendants might be now. The human genome does contain a quantifiable amount of neanderthal dna, after all. What, if anything, would those descendants be to him…?
The spellcaster’s train of thought is interrupted, when he finds something that both speaks to him and is definitely out of place.
“Say, Pip, St. Niklaus brought you’re your lump of coal awfully early this year, no?”
Proudly displaying the ultimate testament of being a misbehaving child would be something the Villareal children might do, but not this girl. So why does the coal have such a prominent place in the room?
“Oh, no”, Pip giggles. “That’s my wishing rock! Aunt Angela gifted it to me, not Santa Claus!”
“Your wishing rock?” Sigstein sputters. “You mean the rock you used to create the Pequod scenario to play in?”
“Yes!”
“But why didn’t you tell us so?”
“Did, too! I TOLD you I WISHED for it!”
Ah, right. And to make wishes come true, one needed a wishing rock. The fact that Pip’s wishes had come true already implied that she owned a wishing rock. From the child’s perspective that was perfectly clear. Silly adults not to understand that simple logic!
“And your auntie Angela is…?”
“She’s navigator on a freighter, together with uncle Dustin! Everytime they come home to Detroit, they bring us gifts. The wishing rock they bought at a market in Lani St. Taz.”
“Lani St. Taz…” Sigstein whispers. “But the rock itself doesn’t come from that island, correct? It was found further inland? Like, on the main island? In the Belomisia jungle?”
Selvadorada in my lore is the largest of the four Sulani islands. The nowadays very different Sulani, Selvadoradan and Omiscan cultures have the same roots.
“Okay, I must confess I longed to make this speech for years”, the spellcaster admits, “but I didn’t expect I’d sit in a purple children’s desk chair while doing so, or that I’d be surrounded by cops.” He briefly considers, then reifies: “Or if cops were present in my idea of this scene, then I envisioned them bound and gagged. Maybe fishified.”
“Get to the point!” Tina snarls.
“Well, see, this “wishing rock” is the reason why I wanted to travel to Selvadorada six years ago. Why I broke into the museum, when you closed all escape routes for me.”
“I remember…” Hank slowly says. Indeed the memory of this particular case has never really faded for those involved in it. “We spotted you through a window, in the Selvadoradan section, holding a lump of clay.”
That happened during a murder mystery challenge. Sigstein had free will and played with clay while my investigators were chasing him. It looked as if he had stolen it from the exhibition.
“You spotted that correctly. I had to check whether the clay blob perhaps was a World Stone. Turned out it wasn’t.”
“The World… Stone?”
“It’s a legend, old as magic itself, some would say. It certainly dates back to the height of Omiscan rule and therefore magical research. Maybe it has inspired the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone, too. It’s properties are peculiar, to say the least.”
“C’mon, you are dying to tell us, to tell anybody! Spit it out already!”
“For starters”, Sigstein starts elaborating, “a World Stone is always the same, in every parallel universe, down to the molecular level. It cannot get affected by outside forces in any way, shape or form, up to and including the heat death of the universe! World Stones may very well be what the next universe is getting born from every time!!!”
“Hey! Don’t get carried away!”
“Yeah, sorry.” Sigstein chuckles. “The problem is, there is no contemporary research on World Stones, even the Omiscan texts that mention them are of a later era already, so all we have to go by is legends. Or urban myths, like Professor Ember owning one…”
“Professor MORGYN Ember? Is that feasible?”
“Now more than before. A single World Stone bends reality in vague ways. But when two are close by, then you can look into parallel universes. Three have the power to open portals. What happened to us hints at, hm, there being two and a half World Stones in Detroit?”
“Half of an indestructible rock? How’s that possible?”
“See? That’s the problem right there. We know nothing. Let’s just grab the bad boy and leave here, okay?”
Sigstein may have claimed that he knows “nothing”, but his twin, Captain Connor Anderson, knows at least this: That the rock is evidence. And evidence is to get stored for up to ten years. If it proves to be no more danger, then it is to get returned to the owners, otherwise destroyed. With the Wishing Rock/World Stone there is little chance of either – it doesn’t stop being a danger and it cannot get destroyed.
So for the time being it will lay on a shelf in the DPD’s evidence archive…
…to occasionally get taken out and studied right next door, in the department for paranormal investigations. First by Detroit’s small circle of researchers of the occult, later by the MIT and later still by researchers from all around the globe.
Left to right: Jin Reed-Chen (Gavin’s and Tina’s Genius son), Lucy Klein (a seer), a smartspeaker that connects the department to the Institute for Paranormal Studies in Senbamachi led by Guidry, Morgyn Ember (aged to Adult), Sigstein Connor (Enchanter/Spellcaster) and The Garden Club Lady (the only permanent sage in this save, since I tend to accidently delete the other ones in my townie purges, Morgyn isn’t a sage in this reality)
The World Stone is loathe to divulge its secrets though, and there doesn’t turn up another one. It appears that the rock was able to bring its owners’ imagination to life only this one night, the night before All Hallows’ Eve, when the walls between the walls are naturally thin. Maybe the curious bipeds have to wait for the next time that happens? That would be Halloween 2051…
Comments
There is always water to pump out of even a good ship’s belly and something to repair, be it sails, ropes or clothes. Those long hours spent with monotonous tasks bring with them the risk of losing oneself in the borrowed identities, therefore the officers try not to draw on those people’s experience too much. Instead they hone their real life skills. Connor can coach the others in anything related to woodworking, while Gavin can pass down expertise in needlework of all kinds.
“When we’re back home, you can add Home Ec to your teaching portofolio”, he tells his husband.
“I could have done so before already, the cooking and gardening part, at least. But now I have a cool story to add to the needlework tasks. When I tell them that even the pirates of old used to sew the buttons back to their shirts, my students won’t cringe at the very idea anymore.”
“Your students – or you?”
“If I remember correctly, I have the right to remain silent to not incriminate myself, haha!”
Rika approaches the others. After a shift in the crow’s nest she is ready to flex her dancing moves. Finding all her friends appear occupied dampens her mood considerably. And so her response to Daniel’s “Maybe later, Rika. We’re still busy making sure this rat trap won’t fall apart.” is “A rat trap was the Adeline! Hank will see us home safely with the Diamond!“
“What did you just call the Adeline?!”
Rika instantly realizes that she has crossed a line. The old steamboat enjoys some fame as cruise ship and swimming wedding chapel. An important investigation had taken place on it, Daniel and Gavin had their first relationship crisis there (during said investigation) and later got married on the Adeline.
But instead of apologizing now, Rika pushes further:
“I call her a rat trap and a floating coffin, and I’ll do it to your face, too! The old girl was ancient when she smuggled fugitive androids to Canada and didn’t get any younger since then!”
“Is that all you guys ever talk about? The android revolution and the Adeline?” Sigstein moans. “’cause if that persists, next we can talk about mutiny!”
“Shut your trap, Discount-Saruman!” Chris shouts. “Rika and the Reeds trash talk from passion - YOU talk and act from fear!”
“Big deal. You all are no less afraid than I am!”
“Then do something about it! If our conversation topics annoy you so much, then distract us for a bit. And that’s an order, auxiliary officer!”
It’s been a while since Siggy has picked up his guitar. He dimly remembers a brief time when he has played for tips, but nowadays he pulls the instrument out in private only. What had started as a lark, has turned into a deeply private pastime. Of course there is always an exception to make for mocking his victims…
“Well, let’s see…”
“Oh, no! No way! If I hear “Ten little fishies”, you’re going home in a trash bag!”
Sigstein opens his mouth to intone exactly that song. However, the words come out as:
♪♫The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, ♪♫
♪♫While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And left me deepening down to doom. ♪♫
“That’s not what I had in mind!”
The Reeds explode into laughter. “Your mind’s full of garbage, Sigstein, that’s the problem!”
“Oh, no, Gavin, look what you’ve done! You made the evil spellcaster sad…”
My sailors sewing is another motive I won't tire of taking screenies of when I actually play this ship in a different save.
At one point in his life Sigstein has craved praise. But when he had again and again failed to win some, he had stopped and instead focused on rising over everyone else. For a moment, however, the old desire is back. And what better way to rile up the cops than making their hosts cheer Sigstein? Maybe he can even force the bodies to clap, with Gavin’s, Tina’s and Chris’ minds being fully awake, yet unable to do something about it? Yay, that would be neat!
And so Sigstein plays on, for himself and for their hosts:
♪♫I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; ♪♫
♪♫Which none but they that feel can tell — Oh, I was plunging to despair. ♪♫
“Hey, did you guys here that just now? Sounds as if this song is about your Captain!”
Daniel and Chris jump up from their seats! Gavin and Tina quickly follow.
“Did you just insult Hank?!”
“Nope. I insulted Hank six years ago. Today I think I ridiculed him.”
About five seconds later Sigstein is perfectly integrated into the team. At least if “integrated” works as a synonym for “buried beneath”.
Rika tries to pull Daniel away from the spellcaster whom he is kicking repeatedly. Chris pulls at Daniel with the intent to free him from Rika’s grasp – while also kicking Sigstein. It is unclear what Gavin and Tina are arguing about – probably who gets to eat Sigstein (although a vampire and werewolf are perfectly able to share a meal, with one wanting the blood and the other the meat).
In the crow’s nest Connor turns his head towards the commotion. For a while he watches emotionless. It’s just his co-workers acting immature, nothing to worry about. In fact, the police captain feels reminded at his early days at the DPD.
What eventually convinces Connor to inform Hank about the brawl is the fact that his friends do not beat up Sigstein, with his track record of having utterly humiliated them, but the body of an innocent seaman who has lived two hundred years ago.
“Okay, that’s enough! It’s detention for everyone! What did you even think, Sigstein, provoking the other kids… your shipmates, I mean, like that? Five against one, really? You used to be more clever!”
“Yeah, my apologies, that’s entirely on me. I forgot to check my spell repertoire. The idea was to defend myself with basic Deliriate and Despairio and incantations. But turned out my host is restricted to fire spells. Can’t cast those on a ship!”
The hair on Hank’s neck rises. Has Sigstein just casually solved the mystery how the “Diamond” had found her end? Maybe this brawl has happened in the past, only for different reasons, and Sigstein’s host had resorted to fire magic, spelling doom for them all.
And also… has Sigstein just admitted that he had known his host to be a spellcaster, too, but not disclosed that detail to the team?!
That same night…
In the crow’s nest Connor is whistling. He hardly processes what melody exactly, whether it’s something he remembers from Detroit or that he is reading from his host’s brain. Maybe a mix of both.
The lookout keeps a close watch on the ocean. Connor isn’t expecting anything, when suddenly his vigilance pays off:
„Maaaaaan overboaaaaaaard!“
Only it isn’t a man. It’s a kid no older than Daniel’s students back home, as the sailors realize after having fished her out. Her rescuers’ “Who are you?” prompts heard rendering disappointment.
“Pip”, the girl whispers. “I half and half expected not to get missed, but do you really don’t even remember my name?”
From the adults there is only silence. Hank gets the strong impression that he should recognize the name. Daniel feels deep down that he should remember. In both cases the shivers running down their spines suggest that this is something pertaining specifically Daniel and Hank, not their unnamed hosts. But the harder they try to pull away the curtain from this particular memory, the more the fragment retreats, until it is too far out of reach to even be real.
What remains is the awareness that the doomed whaling crew, that’s fate they’re replaying here, included at least one child. A child that is – or was – going to drown. The stakes have just gotten raised, no longer are the Detroit cops responsible for their own survival alone anymore, now there is Pip to protect.
If she has went overboard in the original timeline, but got rescued by the “visitors” from the 21st century in the modified chain of events, that’s a good sign, right?
Not just Pip needed to get out of the rain, the adults, too, were in dire need of some warmth and comfort. And so everyone retreated to the galley, where Daniel cooked up a thick, filling fishhead stew. It sounded worse than it tasted.
However, nerves were still raw, especially for the little castaway.
“When are going to spear that mean ol’ whale!” she yelled at the Captain.
Hank then (autonomously) went to bed and while the emptied bowls were spoiling, Gavin helped Pip with homework…
…only to get corrected by his husband immediately. Looks like Gavin knows everything a third grader knows, but has no idea how to communicate that to said third grader, let alone how to keep her interested. Teaching seems to be a real job, after all, who’d have thought!
I'm itching to tell who she is - another week, maybe (script is long finished, screenshots only for the next four posts). In any case, I created Pip in CAS from [redacted] and [redacted].
The adults allow it under supervision. So far nobody has had the heart to disclose to the cabin girl that they are not the people she remembers, but more or less possessing their bodies. It would be a bit much to take in after almost having drowned.
Pip should notice that she isn’t getting kicked around and yelled at anymore. Instead of making her work, the adults treat her like a neighbor’s kid that they are taking to a theme park: They keep a close watch on her, but let her try her hands at every task on board. However, Pip in turn behaves like a kid getting taking to a theme park by a nanny.
There not being any sign of hesitation, or at the very least of acknowledging a transition from one lifestyle to another, doesn’t strike the humans as odd. The androids, however, who have went from neglected at best, abused at worst, to free persons, cannot help but notice the inconsistency…
Life isn’t all work and no fun for the grown-ups, either. Sometime later (it is hard to define how much later exactly) Tina and Daniel decide to play tug of war…
…in wolf form.
“How’s that possible?“ Chris wonders. “If only our minds have time-traveled?”
“Maybe their hosts are werewolves, too?” Rika suggests. “Same as Sigstein’s is a spellcaster, only with a different specialization.”
The officers turn their heads into Siggy’s direction, expecting him to nod or grunt affirmatively now. Instead the spellcaster points his finger at them: “Are you all blind that you can’t see what’s in front of your eyes? That’s the Moonfury!”
Rika shrugs. Moonfury is a reality of werewolf life in 2050. It ebbs and rises in accordance with a were’s temperaments and during a full moon is shoots up like mad. Everyone knows this. You don’t have to be or know a werewolf to be privy to that information. It gets taught in grade school as part of social studies.
Chris, however, gasps when he hears the term: “No way!”
“Got it now?” Sigstein sneers.
Now the other two detectives, Connor and Gavin, join the scene. They find their friends transformed, with the final sparks of crimson still lingering around their bodies. Just like Chris, they take a moment to realize, because what they see here is perfectly ordinary. The moment Gavin and Connor realize what exactly doesn’t add up, their eyes and mouths open wide.
“The Crimson Mist!” Gavin squeals.
“The Crimson Mist”, Connor states solemnly.
„But – how? Tina?“
„Beats me if I knew.”
Tina growls. Ever since having accepted Mr. Greig’s “gift” in Moonwood Mill, she’s had to deal with the Moonfury as part of what it means to be a werewolf. But truth is, in the past werewolves only ever transformed during the full moon. Only in this cycle of magic the MIT having launched the so called Magic HQ into orbit has messed up the energies governing werewolf transformation. In 2050 were creatures are at the mercy of the Moonfury and at risk of dissolving into the Crimson Mist. In 1818 that would have been not only unheard of, but outright impossible.
“All I know is that I just had to keep my body together molecule by molecule and that it bloody well felt like MY body. Not a random sailor’s.”
I decided to accept that bug as part of my lore.
„Maybe we only see the crimson mist because for us it is a normal byproduct of a werewolf transformation?” Connor muses out loud. “Even it feeling the same might just be Tina’s imagination.”
The words are English, but even so Connor speaks a different language. The language’s name is Disappointmentese and every detective knows it. What Connor is really saying is: “I don’t want to believe what I see, because it’s invalidating our beautiful hypothesis.”
Hank feels with his son and younger colleague. His own comment only requires four letters.
So that was the spoilery thing my sims did that I mentioned in an earlier post.
The detective starts clapping Hands with Hank.
“Sing along!” he urges him.
Without thinking, caught up in the moment, Hank obeys. His tongue is on auto-run, same as his hands get piloted by the little boy he was once:
“My father went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see…”
"Ha!“ Chris says triumphantly. “Heard that? This is the old version of the clapping song, the one Hank would have learned in the eighties! When I left him no time to consider, he automatically defaulted to it. But when you…”
With these words Chris faces Connor.
“…played with your father, he sang “a sailor” and “they” – the lyrics my generation grew up with. He always sang “father” with my Damian, when he was little, he sings “father” and “he” for the twins, for the Reed kids and for your daughters!”
“Yeah, true”, Hank admits. The old man enjoys babysitting the Newcrest children, but he has trouble focusing on the clapping sequence. It takes all his capacity and so, despite trying to sing the contemporary lyrics, Hank always relapses to the older ones. Except that one day on the “Diamond”, with Connor.
“You’d expect father to sing either the 1980s lyrics or a 19th century version, if he was influenced by a sailor from that time”, Connor understands. “Under no circumstance should he have sung the modern version. Except if… But that would mean whoever forced his actions must be your age or even younger!”
"That would be a problem how?” Chris inquires, genuinely puzzled. Hadn’t they just made progress in this strange case?
“What I felt, when I played the clapping game with my father, was real”, Connor insists. “I’m not imagining things. There was muscle memory that I copied into my own hands, vocal chords and even soul.”
“There was a presence, indeed”, Hank agrees with his son. “I believe you. But we may have been wrong about the identity of that presence. You didn’t feel a young Ishmael born in 1800, but someone else. Our…”
Hank pauses before finishing his thought. For drama or from anger, who can tell?
“…captor.”
"Okay, the nerds have finished their part and it makes sense”, Gavin addresses his partners. “Let’s settle this Reed style now!”
“Reed style?” Daniel asks, amused, but definitely open to the idea.
“Reed style!” Tina agrees grimly.
Each of the trio has a distinct style of problem solving. There is no “Reed style” as such. What Gavin conjures up is his former reputation as the office bully in a time when Tina had been his lancer and when Daniel had wielded the (unironially) intimidating power of the DPD’s janitor. Whatever comes next, will beyond doubt advance their investigation – but at someone’s expense. Tina and Daniel need no pointer as to who that one might be. There is only one person on this ship with whom the DPD officers have a score to settle.
“I’d love to state that you collectively got over your festering grudge against me, but your body language tells me differently.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So if we’re still enemies, then why are you and me having a friendly conte…? Oh. Oh, no! Don’t tell me I’m your replacement Connor now!”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
Sigstein notices Gavin bite into the rim of his mug from suppressed laughter. Okay, that answers this question. The android marks “Am I Replacement Connor?” as “answered” and moves it into a folder that is the equivalent of a “completed quests” log. The DPD officers could be sooo predictable at times. They are living in the past even when they are not time-traveling, always referencing their days as rivals and enemies. With Connor being Gavin’s friend now, naturally he’d latch onto Connor’s evil twin as his new arch nemesis. So predictable…
Sigstein chuckles and the contest goes on.
There comes the moment when Sigstein cannot go on anymore. Whatever this detective’s host has for a bladder, Siggy’s own host cannot compete with it.
“I have not really lost to you!” the spellcaster says, when he rises from the chair while Gavin is still drinking. “Just my host to yours!”
Gavin grins, but he doesn’t comment on that. Instead he kicks back his own chair and races towards the latrines. At the same time Tina and Daniel grab Sigstein, press him down onto the chair again and tie him to it!
“Hey, what are you doing!”
“Tying you to a chair.”
“Why… no, scratch that, just let me go! I need to gooooo!”
Right at the beginning of their adventure Daniel had learned how torturous having to “go”, but being unable to do it is for humans. Nobody should have to go through this. But does this conviction still hold true when it comes to the man who has imprisoned his husband and Fated Mate? With no regard to what damage getting transformed into a fish might cause to their minds? Sigstein had even went so far to remove the individual feeding instructions from the tank and replace them with the cheapest pellets available at the market, a needless cruelty. No, there isn’t a single ounce of empathy left for that one. Daniel wants Sigstein to pee his pants and he wants to watch it.
Sweat runs down Sigstein’s forehead and cheeks as he fights for bladder control.
“Please, detective, untie me!”
“No.”
“I’ll… do… anything…”
“Anything, really? Even listening to me? Really listening, I mean?”
“Eh?”
“That’s the hardest part. Most people only hear, but don’t listen.”
“Uh… Just say whatever you want to say.”
“You don’t have to pee. You’re an android.”
“Oh, aren’t we funny! In this time I’m a human!”
“And this is where you’re wrong.”
Sigstein whimpers incomprehensively. Already he feels the floodgate give way. It’s over. He has lost and the immediate future will be yellow.
Except…
“No!!! I don’t WANT to!“
And if Sigstein Connor doesn’t want something, then it isn’t going to happen!
Gavin grins.
“You can untie him now, Danny.”
“What.. What just happened?” Sigstein stammers. He can recount the chain of events perfectly, except for the moment where he should have suffered a bladder accident, but miraculously didn’t. It is as if the problem had never existed, and that he tells the officers.
“Like in a dream”, Gavin nods. “Figured as much.”
“You FIGURED that, detective? You could have SAID a word instead of playing me for a fool!”
“Nope. Our shared past aside, that really made me savor every moment of this, I needed to keep you in the dark for unbiased evidence.”
“You’re stone cold, detective.”
“Thanks, I guess. I got called worse.”
Taking inventory… If Sigstein has only imagined to have a bladder need, then he isn’t inhabiting a human body. But the captives of the “Diamond” cannot be in their real bodies, either. In this case Gavin’s vampire thirst would have triggered days ago already. He can drink beer and eat fishhead stew, but all that does to the vampire is make him fat, it doesn’t provide sustenance.
“No bodies at all?” Sigstein concludes. “Our minds are making up the reality around us, following more or less gentle nudges? The world reflects what we think we should experience?”
“Looks like it. It’s ingenious, actually, and a typical vampire thing to do. The tainted part of me cannot help but admire the setup.”
“Haha, no!” Daniel chimes in. “Your vampire part is an adorable fruitbat that enjoys nibbling at melon slices! And squirrels.”
Squirrels! What wouldn’t Gavin give for a red squirrel now! Ever since coffee has stopped working for the detective, squirrel and chipmunk blood has acted as a substitute.
“Think, Gavin”, he moans. “The exact set of instructions that make up this play… is there anything about it that you recognize?”
If they knew what’s happening to them, that might be the key to figuring out the mastermind behind this farce. And with the perpetrator known, the officers might get an inkling how that one had done it and how they could reverse it.
“Fat chance”, Sigstein spats. “I don’t know of any piece of mythology that has a fire-slinging mage traveling the Seven Seas. This must be something coming from real deep of our subconsciousness!”
“No case file comes to mind, either. A work of fiction, then? Hank is a bookworm, he ought to know! Let’s go upstairs and shake him out of the illusion!”
Determinedly Gavin walks towards the ladder leading upwards, satisfied with his work down here. Sigstein holds their living in the past against the DPD officers, but now this is exactly like in the old times: Just sober up Hank and he’ll have all the answers.
"Whaaaaaaaaaale! There she blooooooows!!!“
“A girl whale, then?” Gavin asks. “That’s good!”
“Why’s that good?” Connor replies, clearly puzzled. What has the gender of their prey to do with anything? Already the harpooneers make haste towards the boats, and the boat pilots are expected to do the same. They’ve got a whale to spear!
“Because”, Gavin explains, “we found out that we’re trapped in a book. Specifically in a fantasy version of Moby Di.ck, starring a fire mage and a necromancer from Sulani.”
“And in this context”, Sigstein adds, “spearing a male whale is an absolute no-no. Because that might be Moby, and the moment they confront Moby…”
“Everyone drowns in the end, I remember”, Connor finishes the sentence. “I see.”
Trouble is, while Connor’s mind may “see”, his legs “hear”, namely the Captain’s order to lower the boats. It’s getting increasingly harder to resist the urge to obey.
“I’m a deviant android”, Connor tells himself. “I managed to break free from my program code, so there’s a chance I can ignore this outside influence, too!”
His fists balled, fingernails tearing into his palms, Connor forces himself to stand firmly on the spot and listen to Gavin and Sigstein. But they, too, hear the siren call of obedience…
Meanwhile the harpooners have reached the boats. Having failed to overhear their shipmates talk about the book hypothesis, they still think to possess historical seamen.
“So this is it… our first whale”, Daniel muses. “And whoever’s historic partner was capable of spearing one, will be able to do so now.”
“You and me could do it in the future, too”, Chris claims, and rightfully so. “But the thought of entrusting our boats to Gavin and Rika doesn’t sit well with me. Not AT ALL.”
“Haha, right! Gavin doesn’t belong behind a steering wheel, no matter what era” Tina laughs. “The first time I took Gav and Danny sailing, we crashed into the Adeline. It didn’t do the old girl any favors… Rika may have a point, after all.”
“So – you and me, Tina?” Daniel asks. “You take the rudder and I’ll stab the fishie?”
“Of course! Not even a question!”
Chris nods. They already know that something is fishy here. Simply NOT attacking the whale Pip has spotted doesn’t occur to them, but they can very well prepare for this battle in their own fashion.
“And I’ll pair up with Connor”, Chris announces. “I’ll be right back with him – don’t start without us!”
“…white, with a dozen broken lances stuck to its body!” Pip describes the whale she has spotted. In the light of what the crew has just learned, that isn’t good news. Not at all. However, when Pip eagerly asks Hank whether this is the whale they are after, the Captain nods with grim determination.
“Blow on and split your spout, whale!” he hisses, then makes a gesture that encompasses his officers as well as Sigstein, the auxiliary. “The mad fiends themselves are after ye! Blow your trump—blister your lungs! Detroit’s finest will…”
“We’ll four-letter-word-gerund do nothing!” Gavin interrupts the speech.
But Hank is adamant: “Thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!” he cries.
The words resonate in the whalers’ very bones. Their imagined bones. The scenario isn’t real, nor is the world it plays out in. But Hank Anderson’s Captain title is real and these men and women are used to following his orders blindly, because he has never let them astray.
This is wrong, Connor knows. They’re lowering the boats to row into their doom. After they have finally solved the riddle, this must not how their adventure ends! Alas, already Chris turns around, slowly at first, then with renewed vigor. Tina and Daniel are sitting in their boat already, harpoon and oars in hand. Rika is fiddling with some ropes and Sigstein nervously looks to the spot he is supposed to be now, but doesn’t want to…
There’s no helping it. Hank is Captain and they are his subjects. If only someone else was playing Ahab, someone easier to rebel against…
“Hey, Gavin! Don’t you think it’s unfair that Hank gets to play Captain Ahab, when in truth you and me are the Captains of Detroit central station?”
“What’s gotten into… oh, I get it! The roles are fixed, but the actors are variable!”
“Right! I was your “white whale”, starting the day I came to the DPD. I even broke your leg once, that adds to your Ahab-ness. And you were thoroughly hated for years. If YOU ordered us to attack the whale, we could resist better. Plus, we’d get Hank’s head clear to think about a way out of this mess.”
“I’m not hated, Ishmael!” Gavin Ahab protests. “I may be a bit cursed, that’s all.”
“Whoa, that was quick! But what was that about you being cursed?”
Yes, what? Gavin has trouble sorting through the plethora of information the setting has just dumped into his mind to enable him to get into character. Scenes are popping out of the ocean of Ahab’s memory and vanish beneath the surface again, not connected in any way.
“Oh, just the trifle of spitting on an altar, getting hit by lightning and conjuring evil spirits on the ship by using a sacred tree as replacement mast, after the old one broke from my cursing. Stuff like that.”
“That’s… not in the book, no?” Connor ventures.
“Of course not”, Sigstein claims. “Not in the original, at least. Remember we’re in the fantasy version!”
“Actually it sounds like a Gavin-version. But in any case…”
“In any case this ends here!” the Captain’s voice rises up.
It has quite a long way to rise, on account of the Captain being played by Pip now.
“Please, Starbuck”, Pip Ahab says, not unfriendly in the least, “I can see your point. You do not support my revenge, you do not care for a single whale, only for many, many whales, that will get us rich. But we can still fill the hold with fat and whalebone after we finished our mission! We don’t have to be enemies!”
“What’s happening?” Connor gasps.
“Looks like Gavin is Starbuck now”, Hank replies. “I wondered where Starbuck was. Well, actually, I didn’t wonder while I was Ahab. As Ahab I was… surprisingly content, actually. But the moment I snapped out of it, the question came to mind.”
Ah, Starbuck, Connor thinks, finally familiar territory! Captain Ahab hunts the White Whale and everyone drowns, that is about everything the police officers know about the story. And that at some point someone named Starbuck plays a role.
“Could you become Starbuck?” Connor prods.
“That wouldn’t help us. Starbuck is unable to stop Ahab”, Hank explains. “In the book he pondered killing the Captain, but could not bring himself to do it.”
“But he can buy us time. Gavin is good at annoying people!”
“Right. Let me think… Mhm… I’d say if anybody has a chance to persuade Ahab to stop his mad crusade, then that would be Captain Peleg. Him and Ahab are friends of sorts, going back real far.”
For the other five crewmembers outside this circle, time seems frozen. They can only stand and watch…
Daniel’s mind is working, while his body is standing idle.
The scenario has assigned Gavin a new role, but kept his red hair. Nobody else has changed hair- or skin color to better match their role. What makes red different? (Other than that it is hot, of course, especially on his husband – Daniel has to muster serious effort to dismiss this thought of his.)
Gavin… Connor… Pip… Wait, Pip? What is she anyhow? Part of the scenario, like the landlord at the Inn, or another captive, a child stolen away from Detroit? Daniel has assumed the first, because at no point in this farce has the girl suggested that “Pip” isn’t her name, even when the adults had used their Detroit names all the time. What if the girlchild is literally called Pip? Or rather…
Daniel feels his hair straighten and retract into his skull. He strides over to the arguing people, and with each step it takes less effort. Halfway across the distance Daniel feels his android LED spring into life again.
“Pippilotta Dreamer! This has went far enough! Explain yourself, young lady!”
“Mi… Mi… Mister Reed!”
The voice of authority, but also the voice of a confidante. Mister Reed is Pip’s school teacher in Detroit.
“Is this really your doing?”
Despite Daniel just having accused Pip of being the instigator, he has a hard time believing it.
(Meanwhile Gavin, Connor and Hank look as if they experience a short episode of feeling redundant. Their former janitor apparently is perfectly able to solve the case on his own.)
“Not fair! Why doesn’t anybody want to play with me? Not that it mattered. You are not going home before the mean ol’ whale is history! It ATE the Captain’s leg. It ate it, but nobody cares! Everyone says Ahab is evil!”
“We’ll TALK about this“, Pip’s teacher says sternly. “But for now – everyone think of Detroit! Or of something nice!”
Defying the rules of this pocket dimension… focusing on the real world… on their identities… The DPD crew is a stubborn bunch, but without knowledge what exactly has caused them to get trapped here, will willpower be enough to escape?
Ten… twenty… thirty second pass, then Rika laughs through her nose.
“Oh, look! So cute! Whose idea was this?”
“Uh… I think that’s ours”, Daniel admits. “Our pool floatie.”
“I want to say “NOW I have seen everything”, Hank says, “But I know that would be a lie.”
“So we’re sitting in an imaginary row boat, so that you can pop your pool floatie with a spear. Business as usual, right?” Tina comments the situation. “Also take care, Danny – this bad boy can still keel over and bury us beneath itself.”
“I trust your boating skills”, Daniel replies warmly.
“Everyone, don’t forget to open your mouths to protect your eardrums! Moby Float here will go out with quite a BANG.”
Daniel tosses the spear!
The boat rocks dangerously, when the giant pool floatie gets pierced. Instead of a bang, there is a drawn out leakage of air, accompanied by a high pitched sound. The trio in the boat holds fast to their vessel, when the gust goes over them. Tina gets some of the air into her mouth. She coughs, but that is the worst already.
Eventually the water is calm again and there, right at the bow, a gate opens.
Slowly the Diamond – that really has been the Pequod all this time – moves towards the opening. Darkness engulfs the captives, and for a moment there’s no sensory data at all coming in, then the void gets replaced by a different darkness: that of their own closed eyelids.
They open their eyes and smile at each other. The nightmare is over. The officers know the perpetrator’s name, they have her address and also an inkling of the motive. Now they need to get their hands on the “weapon”.
Pip has a very active imagination
Finally awake again, the DPD officers gather in their inner sanctum: the cafeteria.
Over each one’s favorite “fuel”, they discuss the case: Thirium-310 for the androids, coffee for the humans, slices of raw meat for Tina and squirrel blood for Gavin.
By now they have deduced that every copy of Moby D. is contaminated, including the audiobook Chris had been reading in the patrol car. Whoever reads or hears so much as a single line of it, gets drawn into the scenario. In a city the size of Detroit the rather small chance of someone reading Moby D. adds up to quite a substantial number of victims.
“We need to put out a warning”, Tina says, but Connor must disagree:
“Tonight? People would think this is a Halloween joke. Or if they believed us, many might read the book just because. Our best bet is to quickly put an end to this spook.”
“I still cannot grasp how exactly we escaped”, Rika admits.
“Half of us were lucky to have their soul split. Having part of your very being stored somewhere save is immensely helpful. It helped us cling to our true identities instead getting swallowed by the scenario”, Connor explains. “At times it was close, but each of us who remembered pulled the others out of the rabbit hole.”
That causes the communications officer to smile:
“Haha! You mean we won by teamwork? The one category we consistently scored the lowest in each and every evaluation!”
To test Connor’s hypothesis, Sigstein and Chris summon their familiars. When Siggy had accidently split his soul, it had infused a neanderthal skull that had subsequently unearthed itself and returned to him as his familiar. When Chris had sent out a splinter of his soul with the express intent of becoming a spellcaster, his had found a living creature to bond with: Ashelia the phoenix.
“I briefly couldn’t sense you anymore. Have you died again?” Ashelia inquires, a mix of concern and friendly teasing in her gentle voice.
“No!”
A smug expression accompanies the detective’s statement. For Chris Miller is the only DPD officer who has a “times gotten killed” statistic in addition to the “confirmed kills” one.
Ashelia: He lying?
Scheisserle: Nope.
Ashelia: C’mon!
Scheisserle: Well, he very nearly drowned. But it was averted.
Ashelia: Ah, that’s more like my human. Thanks for clearing that up.
It is still the night before All Hallows’ Eve, when the investigators leave the police station again already.
“How does it feel to walk out of here as a free man?” Daniel teases Sigstein.
“As if YOU knew!” the spellcaster sneers.
It is true, going from butler to kidnapper to revolutionary to janitor to police auxiliary and finally teacher Daniel’s path through life hasn’t always been the most honorable. At times he had seemed unredeemable.
But while Daniel has committed evil deeds, Sigstein IS evil. He strives when people around him go through bad times, literally feeding off it, boosting his own mood by basking in negative emotions. No amount of willpower will be sufficient to change Sigstein (not that he’d be willing to muster even a little), additionally a divine or at the very least magical intervention would be required.
According to Daniel, Pip’s home is the Dreamer residence at 215 Sim Lane. The girl lives here with her parents and maternal grandfather. There are also an aunt and uncle, about whom Daniel doesn’t remember more than that they exist, and a paternal grandfather, who lives elsewhere in Pleasantview.
The house looks no different from all the other homes in town. It is kept tidy and decorated for Halloween. A garden in the backyard is testament to at least one resident’s nature enthusiasm.
Nothing on the outside indicates that nefarious schemes are happening here.
Gavin takes a quick look at the surroundings in batform. He gives his report in a chirpy fruitbat voice, clearly having trouble to speak as a bat. In fact, to anybody outside the DPD Gavin the bat sounds completely unintelligible.
“There are still so many questions”, Hank says. “Pip has more or less confessed that she is behind the whaling scenario, but how? Children cannot split their souls. Even if she’d been the most powerful spellcaster or vampire in a previous life, now she is stuck in a pre-pubescent body that simply cannot access occult powers.”
“Other than lava bombs.”
“Other than lava bombs, correct, Tina. Let’s hope we won’t have to face some tonight.”
Hank’s total lack of sarcasm when he says this doesn’t bode well…
“Enchanting is the rarest and most complicated magical art”, Hank continues.
“In Detroit only two persons are trained in it.”
There is a moment of silence, when this truth fully sinks in. Because the two enchanters in question are Daniel’s goddaughter and Sigstein Connor. One or both men may still play the DPD for fools. If it turns out to be Sigstein, the investigators are equipped to deal with the betrayal. But if it’s Daniel, then Hank and Gavin, who have put their careers on stake for him in the past, are guilty of the worst of misjudgments.
“Good evening, Mr. And Mrs. Dreamer…”
“Mister Reed! Is this a home visit? Lotti isn’t in trouble…?”
But what are the chances of that, if their daughter’s teacher is accompanied by not one policeman, but a whole squad ranging from beat cops to paranormal investigators?
“Uh… In what ways is Lotti in trouble, Mister Reed?”
While Daniel talks to the Dreamers, Gavin assigns tasks to the rest of the team. They agree to let Hank to the talking.
“We’re investigating a case of artifact misuse and have reason to assume that your daughter has come into contact with – or possession of – an enchanted book. But first tell me, are any of you spellcasters?”
“No, Officer.”
“We shouldn’t take their words on that.”
With these words Sigstein takes a potion bottle out of his backpack. What he needs now is the ability to spot magic auras. There are various ways to accomplish that and gulping down a potion in the background is the least intrusive one. Unlike a spell cast on the Dreamer couple it doesn’t require their consent either. Hypocritically as that sounds, thus is the law.
After having imbibed the bottle’s contents, Sigstein looks around. But the only golden aureola he spots is the one around his own head.
“Stupid potion”, the spellcaster mutters. “I know I am magical. Who wouldn’t be aware of their own magic powers?!”
“Pippilotta Dreamer, apparently”, Gavin remarks.
On first glance nothing sticks out as being out of the ordinary. This is the domain of a child that still gets outfitted in the generic baby pink by her parents for the most part, but who has started developing her own preferences, now that she attends school and broadens her horizon.
Daniel smiles when he notices a red toy chopper resting on Pip’s treasure chest. Pip has built that one in his class, that is, Daniel had handed each child a bag of parts that they had painted and put together. The teacher then had slotted a tiny engine and two batteries in. Daniel still remembers the color each child has chosen, and who has given their chopper a name, but he couldn’t on top of his head cite his students’ classroom performance.
“Mister Reed!“ Pip gasps upon seeing Daniel. “And Mister Reed…”
The unspoken question is easy to decipher: Have Mister and Mister Reed swung by tonight, a teacher somewhat disgruntled by Pip’s misdeed and his husband? Or is it rather Mister Reed the teacher and POLICE CAPTAIN Reed? There being a whole squad of cops strongly suggests the second. In fact, there seems to be no end to policemen entering the room!
“I’m so sorry, Mister Reed”, Pip says in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have abducted you. But I didn’t know that would happen! That I’d snatch you of all people!”
“Pip… Kidnapping people isn’t less bad when you do it to strangers!”
Calmly, patiently Daniel reminds the girl that she knows how he feels after getting shanghait to the Pequod, and he makes sure to use this exact word instead of variations of “abducted”. He goes on explaining that her other victims, the ones she’s never met before, are feeling the same. Eventually it sinks in. Pip agrees to apologize to everyone she has forced to play Captain Ahab with her.
Daniel looks up, into his husband’s face, who nods solemnly. From listening to Daniel talk to Pip, they all have come to the same conclusion: Pippilotta isn’t aware of what exactly she has done. Especially she cannot even imagine that her involuntary playmates have died every time the Pequod sank in the dreamscape. It is better if she never learns of that cruel detail.
“That won’t be necessary”, Daniel tells Pip. “Or, what I mean is, you meeting everyone in person won’t be required. But you will write a long letter in which you apologize, young lady! And before you do that, pray tell us how did you do all of this?”
“I just wished for it to happen.”
Danggit. Up to this point it had went so well, but now the detectives are stuck again. No matter how they phrase their questions, or what angles they come up with to build bridges for the suspect, Pip simply cannot explain what exactly she has done to give her wish that much power.
Hank picks it up from the desk, closed, with a bookmark shoved in at the actual start of the story, after the preliminary poems and author’s musings. But just like Pip, the book itself doesn’t register as magical. The captives haven’t really been inside a book, but in a self-contained universe inspired by the Captain Ahab story.
“Maybe next time the Dreamers should get her something more age appropriate”, Hank says. “There must be child-friendly versions of this story aplenty?”
“I think it was a great version!” Gavin protests. “With the pirate gold, a fire mage and a necromancer! I’d buy a copy for our own children, if only all of them weren’t cursed at the moment! The books, I mean, not my kids.”
WHAM!
Hank playfully slaps the younger Captain with the book.
“They’re cursed with having you for their father, goofball!”
Gavin recognizes the mockery as friendly, but protests again nonetheless: “Hey!!!”
“That was the original goofball! You and Sigstein only made it sound like fantasy, because you never deigned actually reading it and so all you knew was Ahab bad, Moby bad, Starbuck exists.”
Hank has a point, of course, but that point isn’t helping them now.
Sigstein looks around… Somewhere in this room might be the solution to their case. But how is he to find it? In a little girl’s domain? The spellcaster never was a little girl himself.
“That’s exactly it”, Scheisserle supplies. “Look for something that’s out of place.”
“How? If I can’t even tell what would be in-of-place here?”
“Look for something that speaks to YOU.”
“Ah, makes sense. Thank you.”
While searching the room, Sigstein briefly wonders whether Scheisserle had children in life, and where their descendants might be now. The human genome does contain a quantifiable amount of neanderthal dna, after all. What, if anything, would those descendants be to him…?
The spellcaster’s train of thought is interrupted, when he finds something that both speaks to him and is definitely out of place.
“Say, Pip, St. Niklaus brought you’re your lump of coal awfully early this year, no?”
Proudly displaying the ultimate testament of being a misbehaving child would be something the Villareal children might do, but not this girl. So why does the coal have such a prominent place in the room?
“Oh, no”, Pip giggles. “That’s my wishing rock! Aunt Angela gifted it to me, not Santa Claus!”
“Your wishing rock?” Sigstein sputters. “You mean the rock you used to create the Pequod scenario to play in?”
“Yes!”
“But why didn’t you tell us so?”
“Did, too! I TOLD you I WISHED for it!”
Ah, right. And to make wishes come true, one needed a wishing rock. The fact that Pip’s wishes had come true already implied that she owned a wishing rock. From the child’s perspective that was perfectly clear. Silly adults not to understand that simple logic!
“And your auntie Angela is…?”
“She’s navigator on a freighter, together with uncle Dustin! Everytime they come home to Detroit, they bring us gifts. The wishing rock they bought at a market in Lani St. Taz.”
“Lani St. Taz…” Sigstein whispers. “But the rock itself doesn’t come from that island, correct? It was found further inland? Like, on the main island? In the Belomisia jungle?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, I think I need to take a seat.”
“Okay, I must confess I longed to make this speech for years”, the spellcaster admits, “but I didn’t expect I’d sit in a purple children’s desk chair while doing so, or that I’d be surrounded by cops.” He briefly considers, then reifies: “Or if cops were present in my idea of this scene, then I envisioned them bound and gagged. Maybe fishified.”
“Get to the point!” Tina snarls.
“Well, see, this “wishing rock” is the reason why I wanted to travel to Selvadorada six years ago. Why I broke into the museum, when you closed all escape routes for me.”
“I remember…” Hank slowly says. Indeed the memory of this particular case has never really faded for those involved in it. “We spotted you through a window, in the Selvadoradan section, holding a lump of clay.”
“You spotted that correctly. I had to check whether the clay blob perhaps was a World Stone. Turned out it wasn’t.”
“The World… Stone?”
“It’s a legend, old as magic itself, some would say. It certainly dates back to the height of Omiscan rule and therefore magical research. Maybe it has inspired the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone, too. It’s properties are peculiar, to say the least.”
“C’mon, you are dying to tell us, to tell anybody! Spit it out already!”
“For starters”, Sigstein starts elaborating, “a World Stone is always the same, in every parallel universe, down to the molecular level. It cannot get affected by outside forces in any way, shape or form, up to and including the heat death of the universe! World Stones may very well be what the next universe is getting born from every time!!!”
“Hey! Don’t get carried away!”
“Yeah, sorry.” Sigstein chuckles. “The problem is, there is no contemporary research on World Stones, even the Omiscan texts that mention them are of a later era already, so all we have to go by is legends. Or urban myths, like Professor Ember owning one…”
“Professor MORGYN Ember? Is that feasible?”
“Now more than before. A single World Stone bends reality in vague ways. But when two are close by, then you can look into parallel universes. Three have the power to open portals. What happened to us hints at, hm, there being two and a half World Stones in Detroit?”
“Half of an indestructible rock? How’s that possible?”
“See? That’s the problem right there. We know nothing. Let’s just grab the bad boy and leave here, okay?”
Sigstein may have claimed that he knows “nothing”, but his twin, Captain Connor Anderson, knows at least this: That the rock is evidence. And evidence is to get stored for up to ten years. If it proves to be no more danger, then it is to get returned to the owners, otherwise destroyed. With the Wishing Rock/World Stone there is little chance of either – it doesn’t stop being a danger and it cannot get destroyed.
So for the time being it will lay on a shelf in the DPD’s evidence archive…
…to occasionally get taken out and studied right next door, in the department for paranormal investigations. First by Detroit’s small circle of researchers of the occult, later by the MIT and later still by researchers from all around the globe.
The World Stone is loathe to divulge its secrets though, and there doesn’t turn up another one. It appears that the rock was able to bring its owners’ imagination to life only this one night, the night before All Hallows’ Eve, when the walls between the walls are naturally thin. Maybe the curious bipeds have to wait for the next time that happens? That would be Halloween 2051…