Department of Chaos

Thursday, 2:17pmEckert’s Auto Solutions: You’d gotten the place at a steal when old Eckert was looking to retire. He’d been happy to take your money, and you’d thought it was pretty funny that only the ‘Ec…to Solutions’ lights on the sign outside were still working.

Now, you all sat inside, desperate for something to do. It had been, what… 10 days since the phone last rang? Melanie, Jasper’s niece, was happy to take your money, too. This place was going to put her through college next year, and she’d negotiated $14 an hour, whether the phone was ringing or not.

And right now, the phone was most definitely not ringing…Until it does. The sharp thrill of the old-timey phone reverberates around the old auto-repair place. Eckert had been kind enough to leave some of his old junk lying around when he left.

"Adds to the, eh… aesthetic!" he claimed, as he fell over himself getting out of the place once money had changed hands. Now you can’t help falling over the stuff as you race to huddle around the phone. Melanie picks it up, takes a sip of her Starbucks, and then speaks the words you had all painstakingly agreed makes a good first impression:

"You’ve reached the Ethereal Squad. How can we help you?"

The voice on the other end of the call is frantic.

Jasper grins at the sound of Abby's excitement. He shuffles the tarot deck one more time and tucks it into the chest pocket of his faded surplus flight suit. Picking up his vintage foil-lined Minnesota Stars beanie from the battered tool box where he's been sitting on an equally battered swiveling shop stool, he scrunches the special lining onto his head. He grabs the med-kit satchel. His proton pack already is in the hearse; he's not very good with it, though.

"let's go!" he half-shouts. His gardening gloves are in the back pocket of the flight suit. He hopes they might help him actually grab a ghost.

You tumble into the car; packing the thing full of any kind of supernatural implement that might be called on in a call-out ghost hunt. It’s a tight squeeze once everything has been accounted for!

There was just no telling what you were going to be dealing with when you reached ground zero.

With a wicked screech, followed by the sound of your packed gear rearranging itself in the back of the hearse, the vehicle pulls out of the ‘Ec…to Solutions’ at speed. Melanie sips her coffee and sees you off, even as the dust cloud you kick up hits her.

The city is a big place, and so you’d never know that there was a dire supernatural event happening at this very moment just a couple of streets over. Niles puts the hearse to the test, as he zips this way and that through the sedentary, mid day traffic of this part of town.It’s only when you pull into the huge parking lot of the equally huge store, that you notice the presence of the citizenry is greatly diminished.

Tires screech by you, as cars whizz in the opposite direction. You’re approaching, while they are doing everything they can to get away!

Mundane though it may be, you had read that some entities manifest in such places to cause the most panic and chaos. Haunted houses and abandoned asylums could only stretch so far. It was better to strike the living where they least expected. The energy was that much sweeter when you hit them where it hurts; and what better place than the only place in town where you could get a hot dog and soda for a buck-fifty?

The automatic doors of the big store swoosh open as you step within range of the sensor. You hit hard in the shoulder by a slim woman racing outside while looking over her shoulder at whatever was transpiring within. Just before she slings a denim jacket over her Bullseye Team Member T-shirt, you see that her name is Lauren.

"Nope! Nope! Nope! Nope! Nope!… Ow!!" she says, taking your shoulder on her chin. "Sorry!" she says, as she pulls her canvas bag over her head and rubs the soreness out of her chin.

"You guys are nuts if you go in there!" she says, before scurrying on further away from her place of employment.

---

You hear the chaos going on all over the Bullseye! Luckily for you, the entrance seems to have been hastily and almost totally abandoned. Save for one confused looking man, speaking into his phone as he holds it in front of his own face.

A voice note:

"Where on Earth are you, sweetie? I’m… I’m here at the checkout!" he says, before shooting off the voice note and waiting for the response.