[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/G2xPk9Gk/Jiggy-2.png[/img] [i]feat.[/i] [h3]GM[/h3] [@Lugubrious] [b]Level:[/b] [color=fed428]4 (6 -> 9/40)[/color] [b]Location:[/b] [color=fed428]RCPD HQ - Exterior -> Interior; Main Hall -> Library -> ???[/color] [b]Word Count ([color=fed428]Player[/color]/Total):[/b] [color=fed428]1911[/color]/3193 [color=fed428](+3 EXP)[/color] [/center] The battle on the roof quickly came to a head with the rapid, successive arrival of slightly overstaffed reinforcements. As it turned out, they wouldn’t be needed that badly, or for very much longer. The feline woman happened to be a more than capable duelist. All she needed was to have some of the attention taken off of her. Jak, the duo, and a mage who came from out of nowhere held off the fliers while her and the monk went to work on the centaurian angels that had just showed up to replenish their ranks, and in an eye-catching display of creatively grotesque self-dismemberment and a series of puns that were already wearing out their charm, the battle had reached an appropriate climax. By this point, Banjo had already put away Kazooie, who he’d been using as a stabbing weapon as opposed to the blunt paddle he forget he had. It was clear some seconds before the finishing blow that the fight was already over. The feliness, seamingly appreciative of the assistance, enthusiastically [b]offered to be helped[/b] again some time… in the form of another cat pun, of course. While she did cover the gratitude base in her line as well, it was pretty obvious that she was just reaching for an excuse to spit out another pun. [color=f60000]“[i]Nyah[/i],”[/color] retorted Kazooie, as if to say ‘nah’ in catspeak, [color=f60000]“I think we’d better not.”[/color] Banjo, a little warmer on the welcome and more forgiving of the excess of quips, took it for what it was with casual acceptance. [color=0aaaff]“Sure thing, Miss! Any time,”[/color] he returned with a nod and soft smile. Shortly, their escort arrived to usher everyone inside. Banjo decided him and Kazooie would be right behind them, opting to grab one of the fallen angel spirits. He motioned to crush it, but stopped short of it with a second’s consideration before handing it to Kazooie while he picked up another of the same. They then clamped down on their handled spirits to see if either of them yielded anything different from the other, or at all useful to either of them. Depending on the latter, they would decide whether or not the remaining few spirits were worth collecting and itemizing before heading inside, getting in step behind the feliness. [hider=For Banjo/Kazooie]You have acquired: [b][url=https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/bayonetta/images/3/34/PurpleLollipop.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/120?cb=20110823172940]Purple Magic Lollipop[/url][/b] A butterfly-shaped candy lollipop that increases one's alertness, it restores magical power when used. And [b]Accept-lance[/b] A large white jousting lance with ornate, golden, octagonal hand-guards and a row of golden spikes down one side. Heavy and difficult to aim while moving oneself. And 4x [b][url=https://p1.hiclipart.com/preview/563/977/194/sonic-the-hedgehog-icons-ring-gold-o-art.jpg]Ring[/url][/b] Pretty but with no discernable use, they’re easy to collect and keep in bulk, and may hold some value.[/hider] [color=0aaaff]“Looks like there are a lot of you stuck here,”[/color] Banjo observed. [color=0aaaff]“What happened?”[/color] he inquired to her. [color=f60000]“Besides what we were here for,”[/color] Kazooie interjected, making sure to get the obvious out of the way. [color=0aaaff]“Erm… yeah. Like, How’d you all end up here? For how long? What’s been going on since? How’s morale? That sort of thing.”[/color] The latter most point of questioning would become more readily apparent to them by the time they made it to the first floor to see for themselves. The scene they arrived at was a freshly quieted one of low mood, high anxiety, and sudden confusion that had some breaking off this way and that trying to make sense of the ‘ghost’ talk that went on without them, the lingering whispers of it they could overhear as some continued to discuss it among themselves. The feral pivoted her arms above herself, stretching lazily. “Weeeell, I’m not really with ‘them.’ Just stuck here. But I don’t mind letting the cat out of the bag. We came here from all over for shelter. Things are pretty bad, and have been for a while, about a week for the earliest arrivals, maybe? Supplies keep on dwindlin’, and people keep gettin’ picked off or turned.” Fortune motioned broadly to the survivors. “Most fighters are still around, ‘specially thanks to that Zombrex stuff, but soon there won’t be anything for ‘em to protect.” Thinking that to be sufficient, Fortune reached down to flick a bit of angel plaster off her tummy. “Aw, jeez. What’ll people say if they see angel dust on me?” She glanced at the newcomers with a smirk. [color=f60000]“Typical zombie movie fair kind of bad… got it.”[/color] Based on what they were given, and what they had seen for themselves, one couldn’t blame the breegull for coming to that conclusion. By appearances, it was very much in line with what could be expected from the average tropey zombie plot, but now with a paranormal twist. The feline woman seemed to gloss over Banjo’s first question regarding how they got there in the first place, but recalling his and Kazooie’s lack of remembering how they arrived at Peach’s Castle before, they chalked it up to an identical case of conditional amnesia. Her mention of the survivors ‘protecting’ something didn’t go unnoticed, which made a little more sense as to why they were still there when a group so relatively sizeable and capable as theirs could have fought their way out by now. The question of [i]how[/i] was more easily answered by the current situation at large. [color=0aaaff]“And what’re they protecting exactly?”[/color] Fortune blinked twice, as if her questioners were dumb. “Uh, the normal people?” She didn’t gesticulate again, but a simple look around was all it took to confirm the presence of a number of ordinary-looking people. Some were human, some other species, but nothing really stood out about them and they tended to sink into the background. Nevertheless, they were living, thinking beings, and being unable to defend themselves against the horrors of the night, they needed to rely on those Fortune called ‘fighters’ for protection. “Unlike where I’m from, the police here actually seem to take their job seriously--keeping folks safe.” While their interviewee’s eyes and tone called Banjo’s intelligence and awareness into question, Kazooie was turning her head about in surveillance to notice the ‘normal’ survivors in advance of her partner. Banjo rubbed the back of his head in slight embarrassment at his lack of realizing the obvious before responding. [color=0aaaff]“Erm… r-right… Anyways, I guess it’s good we got here when we did. You guys look like you could use the help. More of it, that is.”[/color] [color=f60000]“Now, to figure out how we’re supposed to help them…”[/color] Kazooie suggested, genuinely curious as to what came next for them. Banjo opened his mouth to respond, pausing short of his speech and cupping his chin in contemplation. He began to listen closer to the audio loop that he had thus far neglected to acknowledge in spite of its apparent importance, absentmindedly nodding along while letting it play one complete run before formulating any thoughts on it. Sadly, said thoughts weren’t many, as it left him with little in the way of clues or much of anything else to work with. The only idea he could generate from it was to see if they couldn’t find something spooky and out of place. [color=0aaaff]“I guess we could go look for whatever [i]that[/i] is…”[/color] [color=f60000]“We gonna be ghost hunters now?”[/color] [color=0aaaff]“Looks that way,”[/color] Banjo said with a standing, preparatory stretch. They had no idea where to start looking (for when did they ever), but they were content for now to defer to their usual instinct of going through the nearest areas on the lowest level they could access, starting with the east wing of the building. [hr] Perhaps unsurprisingly, their aimless search for signs of ghostly activity turned up inconclusive. They were usually much better at finding things than this--it was [i]kinda[/i] their thing--but it was clear that they were out of their element here. The task at hand was much more in line with detective work than the glorified scavenger hunting they were used to. Luckily, not everyone came up empty-handed. Donnie and Blazer were presenting their evidence to the Captain as Nero returned to read his own findings aloud. With these new developments, gears began to turn in everyone’s heads as plans and search parties started to form. The feral lady wisely her sights on the library, which the duo were thinking they probably should have done before. With this in mind, Banjo thought they might pair up with her to split the investigative effort. [color=0aaaff]“Care if we tag along, Miss…?”[/color] He let his question hang for a moment while he waited for the woman’s name and reply to the offer. “Fortune!” The catgirl gave a brilliantly white, fang-toothed smile. Not everyone was so pleased with their name, but not everyone’s name made for a natural pun. [color=f60000]"Figures,"[/color] Kazooie offhandedly remarked in immediate recognition of the fact. “And nyeah, by all means. Let’s see how purr-ceptive you two are.” Laughing, Fortune led the way to the second floor west side stairs, raced to the top, and through the door. [center][img]https://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/26/25551/thumb_620x2000/re2_2-8.jpg[/img][/center] Inside the trio found a double-decker room packed wall to wall with books, complete with its own internal staircase. Fortune wasted no time crouching by the nearest shelf, running a claw down the books’ spines one after another in search of a book that might help with the haunting. Her tail swished back and forth as her hungry eyes gobbled up one title after another. The bear and bird took to a different bookshelf on the wall opposite of Fortune where Banjo started thumbing and scanning through the assortment at eye and foot level while Kazooie reached over him to do the same. When or if They failed to turn up anything of interest on the bottom half of the shelf, Banjo would climb and shimmy along it so him and Kazooie could continue their search into the upper half of the bookcase. They searched mostly by cover and/or title for anything especially distinctive or relevant that might stand out to them as important, and would repeat their simple procedure either until they found something or cleared their half of the shelves on the room's first level before moving up to the second to try there. Nobody turned up anything for a while. The books situated on the ground level were ordinary, run-of-the-mill, stuff that had broad appeal. Nothing more interesting, or more useful, presented itself. At the very least, sections were bound together by related subjects, which helped the three speed up their searches by omitting rows at a time. Unfortunately, taking their hunt to the next level proved no more successful. More specific, in-depth, and clandestine books the upper level had, but anything directly related to the matter at hand it had not. [color=f60000]"Bunk… Junk… Rubbish…"[/color] Kazooie sounded off as she indiscriminately tossed one book after another over her shoulder upon cursory assessment of the absence within them of relative worth to their cause. [color=f60000]"You sure we're looking for the right thing?"[/color] she proposed to her partner, resisting the temptation to instead say [i]'write'[/i] in cheeky allusion to the matter. Without being specific about it, or what to try next, she had a point in that they were clearly getting nowhere trying to find any evidence in print. In one spot, however, Banjo and Kazooie stumbled upon a number of spiritualist and folklore books nestled neatly and noncommittally in between a fiction and nonfiction section. There, they found a thin paperback covering ghosts, haunting, and exorcism in a general sense. Whether it would prove terribly useful or not, Banjo handed it booklet to Kazooie to hang onto just in case. [color=0aaaff]“Hmm… maybe there’s something hidden in them? Like a switch or a secret passage or something,”[/color] Banjo conjectured, entering the realm of obvious cliches once more with his thought process. Though, for all either of them knew, the solution might just be [i]that[/i] simple. Either way, it couldn’t hurt for them to rule it out by checking around, atop, inside, and behind the bookcase, just as Banjo set to doing. At about the same time, a curious purr from Miss Fortune -also on the second level- suggested that she found something, too. One look her way was all it took to trash the possibility that she’d found the perfect book, though. Instead, she stood in front of a door with her hands on her hips. “Hey,” she said. “Doesn’t this look out of place to you?” Someone on the hunt for written material alone might never have noticed, but Fortune’s eyes were as sharp as knives in the dark, always on the prowl for something or other. This time they flushed a door--not at all hidden--that looked totally dissimilar to any other in the police station, and to the police station itself, for that matter. Wooden, neglected, and old, it was the sort that you might find at the porch of a house in some quaint backwoods, not a museum-turned-police station in what was once a large city. Without waiting for an answer, Fortune turned the misshapen knob and pushed the door open. Inside was a room of completely different style. It was the interior of a wooden bungalow, one clearly lived in at some point given the clutter lying everywhere. Another door stood to the left, a dilapidated cupboard stood across from it, and a rack of what might have been charms hung from the wall under a series of pictures. Candles provided light. Fortune went in, her eyes bright with wonder. “Whoa, how weird!” Dextrous hands rustled through the cupboard, turning up old tableware and moth-eaten cloths. She then walked along the decorated wall, brushing the hanging charms with her fingers. Those sharp eyes examined the subjects in the pictures. “Hmm...one family, it looks like. And not from this part of the world.” The next door was ajar. She went through. The second door led to a longer, rectangular room, with a staircase on the far side leading upward, a plain dining table sideways across the path. Its most glaring feature was the wide, shutterless window in the left wall, more of a neatly-cut hole than a real window, and on the other side the thick, impenetrable night. Long, cylindrical shapes could be dimly made out in the dark, swaying softly in the wind. Fortune realized that the air was warm and humid, shortly before realizing something else. “Wait a sec. That’s impossible. The library’s in the middle of the building on the second floor. We can’t be far enough to see outside.” Now her eyes held a tremulous spark of confusion, and therefore fear. Looking back the way she came, Fortune ran over her path in her head. “And...this is a window looking out left after we turned left. I should be seeing the library right now.” Her angle didn’t give her a straight view out the window, so she started moving forward, as if the library was hiding out of sight. The table lay in her way, a solidly-built thing, and very heavy. [color=f60000]“And we shouldn’t be standing inside a bungalow… within a library… in a police station… that [i]was[/i], up until recently, a museum. What else suddenly looks out of place to you?”[/color] Kazooie questioned somewhat sarcastically, more out of habit than curiosity, but not without a small amount of the latter to go with it. [color=0aaaff]“Kazooie…”[/color] Banjo uttered correctively to remind his partner of her manners while going through the booklet they found earlier to find whatever information he could on the present phenomenon. [color=f60000]“Right… Sorry,”[/color] she conceded. Banjo, slow in the moment (and perhaps in general) to find anything on spatial anomalies and paradoxes, having not even thought to search by such keywords, handed the book back to Kazooie, who continued picked up where he left off in his reading while he walked over to help Fortune move the table out of their way so they may get a better look ‘outside’. Fortune had been tensing to spring and bypass the obstacle entirely, but when Banjo went to push, the cat decided to help the bear out. Better than to brush him off or something; she did appreciate him being around after all, especially since being one of two smart-talkers in the same place rubbed her the wrong way. Together they shoved the dining table out of the way, and no sooner had they done so than something came out of the dark. A giant hand stretched through the open window and slammed down on the table, shaking the room like an earthquake and turning the furniture to splinters. From both the surprise and impact, Banjo strongly and instinctively recoiled, both the shock to the nerves and the trembling of the foundations throwing him off-balance for a second. The book Kazooie held went flying from her grasp as she flapped frantically to steer Banjo back onto both feet, all the while cawing loudly in alarmed aggravation. Fortune flew back, yowling in terror at the jumpscare, her wide eyes fixated on the shape outside of the window. A giant, spindly-limbed, with mottled gray-brown flesh, a stretched lower jaw with no visible mouth, and a single red eye glaring balefully into the room. The heroes were on the second floor, but the giant was hunching over to see inside, a hideous monstrosity with terrible strength. The duo backed what they presumed with no amount of certainty to be a safe distance from the window, all but hugging their backs to the wall as the made their way cautiously to the door. Banjo sidled and tip-toed along the corner while trying to elude the creature’s prying gaze, motioning advisingly to Fortune to do the same--or similar--to make herself smaller and stay out of sight while they made their way out. On that note, before simply bolting through the door back the way they came, the two took as quick a glance through it as they could spare to see if anything had changed about the previous room without them looking. Whether they could ascertain as much before having to make an escape would be moot still, as they certainly couldn’t afford to stay where they were in such a case. If there was anything to find out about that, they would probably find it out [i]after[/i] leaving the room. With a final glare, the ghost moved on, disappearing from view into the night in one giant stride. With it went the sound of raspy, desperate breathing, of massive volumes of air sucking through a tiny hole. Fortune’s hair, having stood nearly on end, settled down and she joined the others heading back out. With some relief she noted along with them that nothing seemed to have changed about the room behind them, offering a safe way back to the police station. But the feral wouldn’t be forgetting that thing anytime soon. She shuddered as she went through the door into the library, but not from any cold. “Well…” she began after a moment. “That matches the description. Safe to say that’s our ghost, huh?” [color=0aaaff]“Yeah…”[/color] Banjo concurred, hunched down with his hands to his knees panting with exhilaration to catch his breath. [color=0aaaff]“I think so.”[/color] Kazooie's feathers ruffled with a similar tremor of chill running through her. [color=f60000]“I miss when giant ghosts [url=https://www.gamersglobal.de/sites/gamersglobal.de/files/galerie/4345/banjo_kaz_008.jpg]ended at the wrists and just played piano,[/url]”[/color] she commented none too subtly in reference to past experience. [color=0aaaff]“We should go tell the others what we found,”[/color] the ursine directed to both of his companions. [color=f60000]“And then never speak of it again.”[/color] With that, Banjo casually nodded in agreement and proceeded back into the main hall with Fortune to convey to everyone else their findings.