[center][h1][color=lightblue]Donnie[/color][/h1][/center]
[center]Word Count: 2,115[/center]
[center]EXP: (34/40) + 3 = 37/40[/center]


Donnie examined his options as he looked over the map he had been given. This ghost was a criminal. A dangerous and violent one. Therefore, it would probably want to [i]avoid[/i] places associated with punishment, such as the jail in the garage, or the interrogation room. On the other hand, where was the most secure, safe place in a city garrison, where one could afford to breathe easy? The office of the garrison’s commanding officer. The perfect place for someone who craved wealth, lived a fast life and led a petty gang of bandits. Donnie was sure that Pichai would appreciate the irony of being able to kick his feet back and relax in a place where he would have definitely been loathed in life. Hell, he’d probably killed the former police chief back when this place was operational. The other option was this “Break Room.” He assumed that was where the guards had lunch and stuff. Probably another place for him to relax--THAT WAS IT!

“I’m going to the Break Room,” Donnie said. “This ghost is starving, right? Has a mouth the size of a pinhole, unable to eat or drink? Where would a starving man, trapped in a city garrison, go for food? The place the guards eat and drink, obviously.”

“Anyway…” he turned to Fox. “You want to head there with me?”

The vulpine pilot pointed a finger at himself, eyebrows raised in surprise. Evidently, he’d assumed himself out of the running for possible companions given his captain’s distribution of duties, but the monk invited him to join him nonetheless. “Er, well, uh…” There were a million things he could be doing to try and help everyone out, including basic sentry duty, but the heart of a hero beat within Fox’s chest. Not that he’d been petitioned, he couldn’t bring himself to turn the offer down. “Sure, I’ll come with you. Or, since you’re new here, I’ll just take you.” Confident in his newfound comrade’s complicity, Fox took off at a brisk pace, leaving Donnie to follow.

“I mean, I [i]know[/i] you weren’t singled out, but I’m not going on my own and I figured the more people on this, the better,” Donnie said.

Fox led the way through the corridors of the museum-turned-police station, past a singular fortified checkpoint established for the purpose of containment in case of an undead breach. Their journey, to a destination also on the first floor, lasted only a couple minutes. With an air of alertness, Fox pushed the door open softly, as if Donnie’s suspicions had manifested some danger in a room in a secure part of the station often frequented by survivors. His taciturn intrusion revealed a single occupant, a big, fluffy white [url=https://wargroovewiki.com/mediawiki/images/5/53/Caesar_Portrait.png]dog[/url] in splendid battle armor, sound asleep on a shiny brown leather sofa. Even asnooze the canine exuded an aura of inspiring majesty. Littered around the room were various empty cans, discarded packages, and torn-open wrappers, the byproduct of taken consumables. There were also a number of magazines and comic books, and even a couple of board games.

“...Huh. I’d imagine if the ghost was here, the armored hound over there wouldn’t be happily snoozing...and he seems to have eaten most of the things Mr. Manpaiboon would have wanted anyway.” He walked in and started looking through some of the lockers and boxes. “We might as well see if another newspaper clipping or something turns up, though.”

While Fox broke off to briefly pet the glorious labrador, Donnie got busy searching the room. With only some shelves and tables as storage, nothing lay hidden by anything more formidable than another magazine or book or two, so he could scan his surroundings quickly and easily. He found material covering a variety of subjects, from food to cars to lifestyle, most of it for entertainment. There were more professional works like magazines on vacationing, gardening, fashion, and sports, counterbalanced by more dubious publications covering curated wellness, spiritualism, and celebrity gossip. Once the dog was pet, Fox joined Donnie in looking around, but he didn’t seem to find much of anything interesting on his side of the room.

“Nothing,” Donnie said as he put down a spiritual magazine on several religions with a deeply annoyed sigh, more at the fact that he had to sit through the magazine’s underwhelming list of folklore than anything else, as the stuff he read through seemed quaint at best--wait, what was that?!

“Hey Fox, I found something!”

[i]Monsters from Myth: Incredible Spirits the World Over[/i], the headline of a subsection of the spiritual magazine read. After a brief introduction talking about how fascinating different cultures’ interpretations of supernatural phenomena were, the first page gave a table of contents of the creatures to be outlined. [i]Strigoi, banshee, skondhokata, La Llorona, preta, jiangshi,[/i] it read, promising a page-and-a-half look at each complete with illustration. When Donnie turned excitedly to the next page, however, he found the entire subsection ripped out.

“Dammit, the rest of the magazine’s probably in that dog’s stomach!” Donnie said, “We already checked the room enough, it would have turned up by now. Let’s get back to the Main Hall. Hopefully the others had better luck.”

For a moment Fox didn’t move. He leaned over to look at the torn-out magazine. “Huh...a dog wouldn’t eat something like that, especially this guy. Too classy. Actually, someone probably took them, maybe as a reference in case something like this came up. It’d have to be someone with ghosts in their homeworld, otherwise it probably wouldn’t occur to them. But almost everyone was in the Main Hall while the radio was talking, and nobody said anything.” The gears and cogs in his head turned, powering through every one of his acquaintances to determine who might possess the pages. Donnie could practically hear the clockwork.

“You said [i]almost[/i] everyone. But it doesn’t need to be one of ours. It could be an outside actor who’s clearly intelligent enough to know [i]exactly[/i] what we were going to need before we even realized we needed it. As if they knew about this whole issue ahead of time. Or they’ve rehearsed this scenario.”

He put a hand to his chin. “And the culprit doesn’t need to be among the living either. This is the Dead Zone, a decaying metropolis full of rotting corpses and demonic trees the size of multiple castles. There were probably thousands of ghosts in this place even before the killing started, all dumped here when the worlds collided. And a ghost could get away with it much easier. Intangibility, invisibility, a lack of breathing, no body heat or scent or ability to collide with anyone they don’t want to...they’d easily have been able to waltz around this place completely unnoticed, doing whatever they wanted with absolute impunity. Maybe even sitting on the sidelines during your battles with the undead and treating it as first-class entertainment. I’ve seen people that depraved, in life [i]and[/i] death. They might have even known the other ghost was there the entire time and stolen the papers days ago.”

He caught his breath before he kept rambling on. “Look, I know there’s no direct evidence for what I just cooked up, but I don’t think any of you guys are suicidal enough that you’d opt to screw over yourselves and everyone else here, based on information you couldn’t have even known about without being in the Main Hall at the specific time the radio was playing, then ripped out the pages at just the right time to deny everyone critical information. But a ghost has nothing to fear from another ghost or this place in general. They’re already dead, and they’d know about the hungry ghost anyway. I feel it’s much more plausible.”

The verbosity with which Donnie outlined his theory impressed Fox. “Well, you make a strong point. Why don’t we take both angles? I’ll go and ask the survivors, and you can do...whatever you think will help with your situation.” It didn’t take a leap of logic to conclude that Fox didn’t know how to make use of the monk’s hypothesis, but splitting up made reasonable sense regardless.

“...To be honest, I’m frankly not sure how I’d try to find him if he’s intent on not being found, and it [i]is[/i] still an untested theory. But we know Pichai is a threat, so we should focus on him. And now that I think about it, judging by some of the rituals and rites and such in this magazine that I already saw, I’m half-certain that we don’t have to eliminate him, just give him what he wants so he stops screwing with us. Like that ‘[i]ofrenda[/i]’ thing in the Day of the Dead article, or that time I had to deal with a [url=https://wow.gamepedia.com/Blind_Mary]depressed banshee[/url] and ended up giving her a ghost-thread comb. It was all a plot to make a [i]telescope[/i] of all things and it didn’t do much for her mental state, but I got what I wanted. What better to draw out a hungry ghost than food?”

He opened the nearby fridge, looking inside it to see if there was any food left. “I might not know how to make the offering or what words to say or how much to give or [i]if this’ll even work[/i], but I think we’re going to need food if we want to stop this thing. Maybe we’ll even pre-smash it so it’s easy to eat.”

Pivoting from ruminations on the perpetrator of the missing pages to a solution to the haunting itself made for a somewhat quick line of logic to follow, but Fox was all about fast. And he was quick to leave the matter in the hands of an expert. “Alright then, good luck with that. Not really my area. I’ll go and ask around. Be back in a bit.” Then he sped off, gone the way the two came. The general commotion had awoken the dog, who treated Donnie to a regal but not unfriendly stare, the sort a king might offer to the people of his hometown on a visit. He then started panting, what with the slightly warmer air circulating through the station.

There wasn’t much inside the mini-fridge to reward Donnie’s instincts, given that he’d never seen a food-cooling apparatus before. With the whole station low in supplies, it figured that the well-used break room would be no exception. Two bottles of water, a can of beer, and squat. The snack cupboard nearby, the main source of food for a room where people might idly chow down on something small without any preparation, wasn’t much better. The only thing there was a singular unit of Cup Noodles.

Donnie was more of a cat person himself (perhaps his tiger theme had influenced his pet-keeping habits), but he pet the dog anyway out of sheer respect for his aura of majesty. And because it was cute and friendly. After petting Caesar (not that he knew the dog’s name), he looked again at what he’d turned up: Some kind of pre-packaged ramen product. Pre-dried, and judging by the helpful directions printed on the package, it just needed boiling water and something to hold the lid closed. Brain-dead easy to make, but it wasn’t edible in its current state. But that fortunately meant that it would keep at room temperature until it was prepared, which would be critical since he didn’t even know where the ghost was right now. 

He had some supplies in his Luggage, of course, but there was no chance that he was going to use any of it on a ghost that could probably be punched anyway unless he needed to. The food, in the absence of any further information, was probably going to be bait. And he was fine with that, as, again, he could always opt for his supplies if he needed anything other than that.

And with that, took the Cup Noodles in hand and headed back to the Main Hall to meet up with the others.

“He’s not in the Break Room,” he told Captain Howard. “I had a hunch that we’re going to need food to stop it, so I took this. I figured we might be able to draw it out with an offering of food, maybe even satisfy it.” he put the Cup Noodles on the front desk. “And Fox,” he turned to the vulpine, “Did you have any luck?”

Fox gave him a look. “I’ve been here about a minute and a half. Asked one guy.” Beside him, Ghalt waved. “Give me a sec.”

Donnie laughed a little at his own mistake. “Sorry about that. I’ll leave you to it.”