Saturday, December 17, 2022

This week's news of the weird

• Headlines of the week
• I'm familiar with Roger Smith-Takahashi as another collector, but didn't know him personally
  • He passed away on November 25th, and his memorial was on December 15th, so it's likely if there was a feeding frenzy over his collection it may have already happened
  • His obituary:

• Through my network of contacts, I get the granddaughter's email, and get word that it sounds like most everything outside of really, really high ticket items (like a Steve Jobs letter worth around half a million)

• Agnes contacts animal control about the snake sightings and gets told about another snake rescue group…which as far as she knows there isn't another group in town aside from hers
  • They can't recall the name and Agnes thinks the person she talked to sounded off and confused and messages the group about it
  • Aoife looks for any info on recently registered LLCs, and Agnes' group is the only one that she could find, so if there is another group they're either super, super recent or not actually registered
  • Aoife, Agnes, and I will go to look into it, but need to wait until Monday when they're open
• Agnes finds a copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the library that has been altered to have increasingly creepy images of the Grinch
  • She's pretty sure it's something that someone has infused with Autumn magic to cause fear or discomfort
• The rest of us go to the Atlanta Humane Society to look at dogs
  • Not entirely sure why, but you know, dogs!
  • The person at the shelter tells us that all the puppies have gone to good homes "with big back yards and a kid"
    • Moira and Aoife are sure the woman has had her memories messed with
  • I talk to an old pug named Potato who tells me that a couple kids came and took all the puppies
    • One of the kids was very big (bigger than human children are supposed) and they all were mean and smelled of outside, dirt, and wrongness
  • I go on and speak to a three legged dog named Benjamin
    • He says he doesn't think they were actually children, because they were all mean and children aren't mean
    • He could smell they were bad, and that they all smelled like books and one of the kids had a bag full of books (print on demand ones)
    • There was an adult with them and he seemed scary
  • The third dog, an elderly chihuahua named Puter (short for Computer)
    • He is a scamp and a liar
    • He says they smelt of papers, outside, and bad dreams
      • The one that smelt most of papers also smelt of the woods, and fat kid smelt of the desert, and the last little girl smelled like rotting things
      • The adult smelt like money from a strip club
  • Aoife and I talk to the lady and I use Enkindle on her and Aoife uses Grandeur and is able to blow what is effecting her mind away so she remembers
    • She shows us the security footage from the 15th; the footage is glitchier than you'd expect, but we can clearly see two little girls (one Wednesday Addams-ish, the other like a Girl Scout) and a very husky, large boy, and a sketchy looking male adult
    • Aoife gets her to send a copy of the footage to her email and contacts Sir Sam with images of the people, suspecting that they're Thallain
  • We adopt all three of the dogs and take them back to Moira's studio first, with plans on enchanting them and taking them home to the freehold
• Agnes wants me to try and connect with a possible hunter, an Irish-American guy named Mick Donnelly who is some sort of alt-right dude that runs a homeless shelter in the city

Week of Monday, December 19, 2022

Some down time

• We transition into downtime
  • Moira trying to build influence and connect with Marina Blue
    • And does well
  • I bet on the World Cup finals
    • I make $500 cash, 5 successes towards an Influence project of raising Resources…and get arrested for drunk & disorderly and a bit of light property damage
    • I make my one phone call the following morning, Monday, to Aoife to get her to come bail me out
    • I'll probably have a hearing in the New Year
  • Blaze tries to train Jimmy in performance
    • And does mediocre
    • Blaze notices over the course of the week someone that doesn't appear to be part of the production watching things, and he seems to be paying more and more attention to her over time, and she finally goes and talks to him on Tuesday
      • He's evidently Bert Grimaldi, who has a bunch of shows on TV and is filming something else on another soundstage on the lot (Project Huntress, early on in production)
      • He wants her to come on to a big production to take the place of a stunt performer for the lead
  • Agnes
    • Monday morning Agnes finds a meeting on her work calendar for tomorrow (Tuesday) with someone named Marsha Crowe, who is a senior special agent and regional director overseeing east coast operations for the FBI
    • She emails her partner and boss, and her boss says it's been cleared and please talk to her
    • Agnes declines the meeting and replies saying to clear anything with her before putting something on her calendar…and 30 minutes later gets an email from her boss to go to the meeting
    • She goes to the meeting on Tuesday and Crowe, after sweeping the room for bugs, asks about her interest in adopting Lucas Mueller (the boy from Germany)
      • Crowe says Agnes isn't a suspect, but wants to know why she was looking into the boy because he's associated with a number of suspected murders and missing children
      • Agnes is pretty sure Crowe isn't supernatural (definitely not a mage or technocrat like Paul or Chatterjee), but definitely gets the impression that she has shot a werewolf
  • Aoife
    • After getting the call from me in jail, she gets an email from someone at Merit and Ashmore law firm who wants to talk to her about joining the firm
    • She does come and bail me out
• Paddy calls me mid-week and says he has a Christmas present to drop off before he leaves town for the holiday
  • He's going with Tiara and her kid to a resort in Mexico, and maybe to Mexico City
  • He gives me a folder of pieces from Smith-Takahashi's collection (a lot of 90's early 2000's b-list celebrities)
    • There were supposed to be 10, but there are actually 11, which includes the Steve Jobs letter
    • The signatures include Frank Stallone, Randy Quaid, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Steve Jobs, Carrot Top, Lorenzo Lamas, Joey Fatone, Erik Estrada, Tara Reid, Mick Foley, William Hung
  • Agnes asks to take a look at them, and she's pretty darn sure none of them are mystically tagged or enchanted in any way, and no one is trying to actively track them
• I tell the others about the spate of good luck I've had, and others chime in with things that have been happening with them that seem to be signs of unusually good fortune
• Aoife goes to meet with Merit and Ashmore on Thursday
  • They reveal that Paul is a client of theirs and tell her that they don't mean any harm ("if we wanted to harm you, you would have never made it across the threshold")
  • Merit comes out and bluntly says that they are looking for a Changeling partner, and that they are mages