Jay and Derek
Mr. Guillory grudgingly escorts Derek through the rear door of the kitchen. As you step outside into the muggy nighttime air of New Orleans, several wall-mounted motion sensor lights bring sudden illumination. The lights are bright enough to make you wince slightly until your eyes adjust.
The walled backyard of the Guillory House is not terribly big, but in a congested residential neighborhood such as Carrollton, they rarely are. You find yourself standing on a brick patio furnished with black iron cafe tables and chairs. Surrounding you are trestles of flowering vines and plant beds of camellias, rose bushes, magnolias, irises, and other lush greenery. Enclosing the backyard is a high rock wall overgrown with hanging ivy and Spanish moss. Passed the wall, you see the upper floors of the adjacent houses. Somewhere, perhaps from a neighbor's yard, you hear the soft sound of bubbling water.
Mr. Guillory gestures to a small storage shed set in one of the back corners of the yard. When you open the shed door, you are struck by the smell of cut grass and gasoline. The light inside the galvanized metal shed is dim, but it's enough to get the job done. Aside from a lawnmower, bags of birdfeed, cans of paint, empty pots, lawn furniture, and other assorted supplies, you locate a plethora of tools. They are mostly of the gardening variety: shovels, trimmers, spades, rakes, etc., as well as various power tools and construction tools. You are quickly able to acquire the necessary shovels.
Derek and Jérôme meet up with Jay at the west side of the house. Almost the entire perimeter of the home is lined with beds of shrubs and flowers, but you are able to locate a gap in the plant bed that's large enough to accommodate your digging. Beyond the decorative foliage lining the house's base, you see the support pillars that raise the house up. They are stubby brick piers that are spaced every six feet and elevate the house about half a story above the ground. It's a fairly common design feature in French Creole architecture. In the five-foot high space between the ground and the floor of the house, there is a wall of packed dirt.
OOC:
The above picture is to provide an idea of what the piers raising the house would look like.
The dirt is uneven in many spots. Some of it is spilling out from under the house. The more you look at the dirt, the less it seems to have been placed there purposely. Rather, it looks like soil, silt, clay, and mud that has accumulated from over a century of flood water deposits. The dirt even has the same orange-brown color as the sediment of the muddy Mississippi - a color most New Orleanians know well.
Jay performs his ritual with the tobacco and sage. Jérôme observes closely but says nothing. Both of you grab shovels and begin to dig. You scoop out the dirt and heft it into a pile behind you. Each of you can feel Jérôme watching for a moment. Then, surprisingly, Mr. Guillory removes his jacket and places it onto a nearby bush. He unbuttons the cuffs of his dress shirt and works the sleeves down to his elbows. He then grabs a shovel for himself and proceeds to join in.
OOC:
Jay and Derek, each of you please give me a Strength + Stamina roll.
