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It’s not really been a great time up there. One hopes that’s been coming across.

“Commander Marsh is in charge of the Americans here on the moon,” Reithner told him. “I am not even his direct subordinate. You should talk to him, not me.”

The cleaver-man scowled at Tobias. “He’s not one of us. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. If you are, you can tell us how to talk to him, get what we want that way.”

He might have said more, but Tobias interrupted. “Let me start right now. Harm the Lieutenant in any way, and you’ll get nothing you want.”

“You’re in no place to bargain, American. We have your life in our hands.” The cleaver-man reached out one of them, which looked more like claws than even before. “All I have to do is make a fist.”

“What I said wasn’t a bargain. It’s reality. And no, you don’t have my life.” Tobias leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. “I’m already dead. We all are. Hell, I’ve been where we go after all of this. You want to hear what it’s like? The void, I mean? Well. It’s dark, endless, empty — and, best of all: it’s not on the God-damned Moon. You think scaring me with going back is going to work? I’d sleep there if I could!”

I really need to do more research on Hallmark movies, but I kinda don’t want to. But I need to. The things I do for my art…

Usually, you found people who didn’t want to be found in the bad parts of town, but there weren’t any bad parts of town. Not really. When they showed Timmy one, the only difference was that there were a couple of newspapers on the ground, a few garbage bags against a dumper, and an oil can with a fire in it. Timmy had been in places where people would vacation here.

Talking to the local bums didn’t help, either. They didn’t know anything, hadn’t seen anything, and always started out talking gruff but then would stop and suddenly be all warm and fuzzy. The weirdest thing? None of them smelled bad. Bums were supposed to smell bad, because they never had soap.

Timmy didn’t look down on bums for that. There’d been lots of times he didn’t have soap, either. But these guys did. Or maybe they just don’t get smelly, he thought, and tried not to shudder.He’d searched the area for an hour before giving up. Frostvale Pines wasn’t big, so he’d been thorough, but wherever this guy was, he was hiding really well. Timmy was starting to wonder whether there was even a guy in the first place. One thing he had learned quick in life was that adults could be wrong. Like, a lot.

I just can’t keep my eyes open any longer.

It’s funny. Normally I’m a lot less confident than I sound about a scheme. You’d think that knowing that the complicated part in all of this was coming up with a line of nonsense that New Californians could believe would be less stressful than trying to fool a Dominion Archmage, but somehow it was even more nerve-wracking. They had more eyes to pull the wool over, after all.

Then again, what choice did I have? Was I supposed to tell them, Trust me. The ambassador has a secret heroine addiction? They’d never believe that. I barely believed it myself.

Stenches!

One of the advantages, and curses, of necromancy is that you become quite the connoisseur of stenches. Your nose becomes attuned to the differences between the various charnel bouquets, to the point where ghulmen are almost willing to admit that you might approach their level. 

Unfortunately, oldmen do not get the ability to find rotting meat piquant. The best we can do is simply keep the thought of the smell away from our gorge. So when I sniffed the presence of recently-killed vermin coming from the local descent to the Antiquity, I did not enjoy the experience. Or if I did, it was the enjoyment of someone who had just literally sniffed out a trap.

“Hold!” I muttered to Curwin and Marsh, both of whom were there to give me some physical safety while I performed my exorcisms. I can defend myself, but not while staring into the Veil. “There is death ahead. Many small deaths.”

“Christ on His Throne,” Curwin muttered, blanching and crossing himself, and I hastened to correct him.

“Not small human deaths, Lieutenant. There are a great number of dead rats and squirrels in the passage ahead.” I sniffed. “A remarkable number of dead pigeons, too. They are just now starting to rot.”

Huh. Apparently BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE wasn’t the load of steaming dung that I was more or less expecting it to be. I mean, Honest Trailers pegged it as being absolutely nostalgia bait, which it was. And they noted that it had been in Development Hell, which it was. And yet, they thought the movie… did what it came to do.

Go figure.

#commissionearned

October 15th! Looking forward to this one: Trail of Cthulhu is a fun game, and GUMSHOE is my go-to when it comes to investigation games. Heck, my current and future indy TTRPG projects both use the game engine, so a second edition is of professional interest to me as well.

No, seriously. THE PENGUIN is, like, good. Proper good. Good-if-you-just-like-crime-sagas good, in fact.

I don’t blame you at all if you had no expectations about this show, because I had no expectations about this show and I had a great time watching THE BATMAN. But I had like three, four people in a row today saying that THE PENGUIN was awesome – and, when I checked it out, I realized I agreed with them. If you have Max, check this one out.

#commissionearned