New Guy's October Update

I saved Halloween.

Maybe I should put that in context.

I know I've been pretty incommunicado-- I've mostly been running around playing troubleshooter. Sometimes proverbially, sometimes literally. This is the life I live now.

Anyway, I happened to be passing through Missouri on secret mission stuff, at which point I hear that there's a fledgling cell getting its shit together in Jefferson City. Like, they'd been stuck in the shadow world for awhile, or some crazy bullshit? I have no clue.

It's a small cell (for now). There was a werewolf, a lady who turned into a flock of crows (or was it a flock of crows who turned into a lady?), a zombie-ghost, and a woman who said she was normal but after I saw her zing around some brain-powers and show up with a cowboy ghost sidekick, I'm pretty sure she's a zombie-ghost too. Maybe she doesn't know it yet? I don't know how this works. Also I'm not including their names for security reasons (and also because I may be a little drunk and can't recall them properly).

But yeah. By the time I showed up, shit was already going bad. As apparently, the Church of Ultimate Truth set up a nine-block Halloween party literally next door to the Citadel. Hoo-boy. And I thought Houston was bad.

And just to make things worse, as soon as people streamed into the Halloween block-party, they got transported to one of those pocket-dimension things set up to look just like the couple of blocks. We blunder around for a bit, and take a quick trip over into the spirit-world, at which point we see the LITERAL SPIRIT OF HALLOWEEN flailing and vomiting and being taunted by lesser asshole spirits and otherwise having a shitty day. Seriously, it was this twenty foot tall skinny dude with a giant pumpkin head. What the fuck.

So naturally, I take one look at the horrible giant spirit monster, and I realize “Oh hey, I bet some Truthy assholes are trying to summon him through some kind of corrupted ritual in the physical realm.”

I don't know what's worse, the fact that -I- knew this, or the fact that the other Accordists hanging around didn't. Seriously, that's your job, weird things! I'm just supposed to be the guy with the press pass and a drinking problem.

So yeah. At this point the werewolf went chasing off after one of the lesser spirits like he was chasing a squirrel, ghost-zombie dude went invisible, and we kind of left ghost-zombie-girl-in-denial in the spirit world for a bit. So it was just down to me and the bird-lady to run around and start destroying the weird Halloween totem-poles that were the physical components of the summoning ritual. Oh, and the crowd had been mind-controlled into doing the thriller dance, plus there were some asshole Servants running around-- some kind of weirdo wizard and a werewolf made of silver.

Eventually, we manage to regroup at a CUT church at the epicenter of the weirdness-- I pull the fire alarm to get any mundane folks out, and I manage to talk/sneak my way to the basement … at which point everything just goes to shit.

Werewolf guy went off beserker-ing at the wizard (but didn't catch him) and zombie-ghost-in-denial lady chased off after him trying to play damage control. Meanwhile, in the basement, there's a full-out Evil Ceremony going down, complete with robes and chanting and a line of hypnotized bystanders getting sacrificed. Oh, and there's some kind of corrupted artifact that looked like one of those orange buckets of kids candy. And the Pumpkin King is getting sucked through a giant portal in the basement. That kind of day.

Bird-lady and zombie-ghost-dude managed to keep the heat off of me long enough to empty my .357 into the artifact-bucket and destroy it. That's when things really got crazy, at which point it pretty much descended into a shitshow of a brawl, in which I got:

Stabbed. Multiple times.

Bitten by a werewolf who gave me a weird foot disease (but not lycanthropy, thank god).

Cursed (but not badly?)

And I picked up a minor mutation, to boot. Woo. Silver lining is I'm working on getting that shit fixed, but it still sucks.

And again, this is the part where I realize I've been in the Accord for too damn long. Because the Jeff City Accordists were flapping around wondering 'wait, should we kill this guy?' I had to note: “These assholes are ritually cutting throats and chanting and wearing robes in a church basement. They are the literal definition of cultists. Fucking SHOOT THEM.” The one time indiscriminate slaughter is the legit solution, and I wind up working with the only Things in the Accord who have sudden pangs of conscience.

I will at least note bird-lady was the MVP of the night, doing all kinds of bird stuff (like, say, going all Alfred Hitchcock on mobs of cultists), and otherwise keeping her head in the game. Jeff City, you should give her shiny things or cash money or something else for being good at her job.

So yeah. I nearly died, which sucked. But by then The Spirit of Halloween came all the way through the portal to the material world. But, since I had the foresight to destroy all the physical components, including the artifact-bucket, The Spirit of Halloween gave us a little assist (also: candy), and bought us the time we needed to escape. I pumped a few silver bullets into the Servant-werewolf on my way out, for good measure, so there's some more RQ lowering for you.

And now, I'm just going to hole up in an undisclosed location with an undisclosed amount of hard liquor until I can take these stitches out. Silver lining: chicks dig scars, right?

But still. Seriously. I SAVED A HOLIDAY. How crazy is that?

Now I'm really fucking paranoid I'm gonna have to go to the North Pole come December.