The Others [IC/PG-16/Accepting]

[Skaia 611]

The girl was fine to sit back and watch Brian dig the hole himself, worried about whatever that could be under the dirt, only to back off a little with an "eee," as she saw that there was a dog skull buried there. With a ghost dog roaming around she supposed this was a pretty obvious conclusion to reach, though the girl wasn't sure if unearthing was going to cause some pack of ghost dogs to come down on them immediately. Brian seemed entirely unperturbed by this though as he went to place down a seal on the dog skull without incident. In fact nothing happened at all. Still keeping a bit of distance from it the girl looked at the skull and then to Brian asking, "sh-shouldn't it have like...fwooshed, or something?" 

She was pretty sure if they had managed to seal away the ghost there would be some form of spectacle that came about as a result of it. But no such thing happened this time. The girl frowned at the notion that their job wasn't quite as easy as she would've preferred, and that she would have to keep searching this woods that might also be a mysterious bog for more animal skulls guarded by deer. All the same she agreed with Brian and thought that putting the skull back before it could do anything like actually curse them could happen. Once they did the girl, reluctantly, was ready to get going to search deeper into the woods. 

"Hey! What are you doing?" 

The girl let out an "Eep!" as she heard the shout of the man who had employed them. 

She turned around to see him there now, looking between them and the dug up patch, before saying, "I never gave permission to go digging up my land."

Carmen had gotten very used to not having to worry about anything other than Brian and the ghosts that they were hunting that the employer being here was a frankly foreign situation to her. Add to that , that she had felt like she had gravely offended the man and that he was likely to be both incredibly angry and perhaps kick them off the property thus failing the mission and making her have to report such a failing to Shiki, Carmen couldn't help but start stammering "uh...ghost...skull...there was, er we thought that there was something uh...haunted? About the dirt, ground...there was a skull and uhhhhhh..."

"Of course there was a skull. That's where I buried my son's dog years ago...You don't intend to start digging everywhere willy nilly do you?"

If there was another patch of dirt somewhere that looked suspicious she had figured that would only be the obvious course of action. She had sense enough to not say that though, instead letting out a brief, "...no?....Sorry..."

[radio414 936]

Unfortunately, Carmen was right. If the seal actually exorcised anything about the dog skull, it would have burned up, and probably taken the skull with it too. Brian made a little “pah” sound and placed the skull back in the dirt -- still with the seal on it, just in case. He had just gotten ready to shovel the (thankfully small) pile of dirt back in when Kenneth decided that he wasn’t okay with whatever he thought Brian and Carmen were doing, and though Carmen did her best to try and soothe the situation over, in classic Carmen fashion, she really was only making things worse.

Brian gave Kyle a nod that he hoped signified respect. “Apologies, sir,” he said, echoing Carmen but more sure of himself. “You’re correct, and we probably should have called 811 while we were out here too, but when your problem is a ghost dog and you stumble on some dog bones… you can see why we made some assumptions, can’t you? If you’re taking your car to the mechanic to get serviced, you want to tell the mechanic all that’s wrong with the car before they start tearing it open to look, right?”

Klyde grunted. “Haven’t had to take a car to a mechanic in a long time…” he said, which made so much sense to Brian, one more puzzle piece put into place even if he couldn’t explain why. But Kaden shook his head. “Alright, but don’t start digging up holes everywhere.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Brian said. The phrase was especially boy scout-ish, but better safe than sorry. “So long as there aren’t any other dead dogs we don’t know about, we’ll keep the hole-digging to an absolute minimum.”

K. narrowed his eyes. “No, no other dead dogs. Wherever that ghost dog came from it wasn't around here. No more holes.” But he didn’t seem in the mood to keep an eye on the two, and he turned around and went back to his house.

Brian watched him go, making sure he was back inside and out of earshot before he started talking smack. “Seriously, like, are there any more dogs, Kent? Maybe you only have one ghost dog now but how many ghost dogs in potentia do you have, Kent?” Whatever. If there weren’t dog bones there were probably human bones or something. He turned to Carmen. “I almost don’t want to fill in this hole now, but that’ll definitely make more ghost dogs. You know, if there is even one here in the first place. Give me a sec.”

Displacing the same amount of dirt the second time was technically easier thanks to gravity, but not by much. “Alright,” Brian said. “The bonus of having a shovel is there’s now something we can whack it with, I guess. That’s not nothing. But you’re digging the next one and leaving the talking to me.”

[Skaia 611]

Carmen was glad to see that Brian had managed to save her from dealing with the man's aggressive posturing towards them randomly digging up something in his yard. Of course, she had figured that she had done something wrong, as it was very obvious she was capable of doing a lot of things wrong, so in the face of such fault being presented towards her she didn't really know how to act appropriately. As Brian had mentioned that he would handle the conversing while she did the digging, she meekly nodded figuring that such a thing was for the best. 

With Kevin having left, she then went back to her exploration of the area. There wasn't anything that was much different then what she had seen before, which is to say the signs of things still being dragged were around here and there, keeping the girl on edge. This was only made worse as night fell and the presumably haunted woods with unexplained dragging was now darkened. Before it had become completely dark, though, Kevin had come to see them. "Aren't you done yet? I'm not paying by the hour right?" He asked her as he approached. 

Carmen froze, unsure if she should speak as Brian had explicitly had left that to himself. However, she hadn't dug any holes yet so perhaps his end of the bargain wasn't to be fulfilled yet and she didn't want to try and ask him for fear of being reprimanded for being stupid. "Eh? Uhhh..." The girl will look over to Brian and then back to the owner saying, "I uh...um, think we're salaried? But, er, uh...we haven't seen the uh ghost yet so uh, um..."

"So now you have to see it to get rid of it?" He seemed a bit grumpy by this. "Then what's the point in coming so early..." He frowned and thought a while. "Well, fine, but you'll have to find your own food. Don't take too much longer."

"Uhhh...right, right...sorry about all this, er, well, we'll uh...it'll be all good  - er, right I'll be fine with my own food or yeah."

"Right..." He didn't seem convinced. Then suddenly he said, "and don't do any drugs or something like that while you're here."

The girl waved her hands frantically saying, "I wouldn't, I don't - I've never done any kind of drug or something, sir. Uh...we'll be clean? Out here." 

[radio414 936]

If the ghost dog thing really was a hoax, Brian thought, it was entirely possible that Krark was the one behind all of this. There were all sorts of reasons that one might want to lure hapless ghost hunters into the middle of the woods and none of them were good. Then again, if Kelvin really did want to kill them, he probably would have done that one of the dozen other times he’d waddled into the woods after them, looking to chastise Brian and Carmen for some minor technicality instead of doing what he was told. How hard was it to sit tight and let the professionals work?

Brian also shot a glare at Carmen for daring to talk even after they’d agreed otherwise, but he supposed he should have expected her to flake at the slightest amount of social pushback. Whatever. Brian said, “Well, sir, my impression was that you were going to take a nap soon.” Aside from the occasional glimpses of Abby, was there any other reason to have NCIS on the TV? “You said the ghost dog only shows up when you’re about to fall asleep, right?”

Kai could only grumble at that. “That’s when I noticed it. Not like I’ve been able to set up cameras to find out. And I’m not old enough to be taking naps this early.”

Brian glanced up at the quickly-darkening sky, pretty sure that Kaveh was in the minority on napping between the three of them. The long nights were starting to take a toll on Brian and Carmen was Carmen. “Pretty sure that that’s a correlation, though, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re working with all the information we’ve got right now. Hey, tell you what, since it’s getting dark and we don’t want you getting attacked on your way back, take this protective talisman…” He grabbed a seal from the box and offered it to the man. “Just stick that on your chest and we’ll continue our work out here. No food or drugs, promise.”

It looked for a moment like Keevan wasn’t going to take the seal, which got Brian all excited, but he did and he stuck it right on his chest. Brian tried not to look as disappointed as he felt. Kennedy said, “I don’t see what a ghost dog could do besides be annoying but alright. As long as you understand.” He said it in a way that implied he didn’t know what a physical dog could do to a person, but at least he was gone again.

Again, Brian waited a few moments before returning to Carmen, though he couldn’t be sure that Krispy Kreme made it back to his house in the fading light, so he kept his voice a little low. “So,” Brian said, “with him actually doing what he’s told out of the question, I guess we should see where things are getting dragged to? I hope I’m right and there’s a cave or a ditch or something, but I’ll take what I can get.”

[Skaia 611]

Carmen was glad once again that Brian was there to do the talking for her, and meekly followed along as he suggested to go find where the dragging marks were leading to. Taking the shovel from Brian, as his role in speaking had been fulfilled and so her role in potential digger was to be done as well, the girl continued to walk forward with her eyes to the ground. Unfortunately, it had been getting progressively more dark, as was often the case with nightfall, and becoming harder and harder to actually see where anything was being dragged off to. 

After a moment, though, the girl stopped in her tracks. Her eyes fixated on something wholly unnatural for the area they were in. Between the trees she could see a faint glowing figure, a creature with which she could discern nothing about from where she was. The girl didn't want to say anything about it, in fact she felt like acknowledging would only give its presence more credibility and make the danger she was feeling all the more real. In fact, she was doing her best to ignore the obvious light so much that she decided to  keep scouring the ground for a moment for drag marks but found it all the more difficult. And, of course, her eyes kept being drawn back to the curious light. Without looking to Brian she said, "I uh..." but never finished the thought as she slowly inched forward. As she did, though, she could start to tell what it was that she was staring at. 

Its body was semi-transparent, a grayish white glow for the color it was radiating. And its body belonged to that of a dog. Carmen wasn't particularly knowledgeable on dog breed but she was pretty sure it was some kind of labrador. Its breed, however, mattered much less to her then the fact that it had started to run towards her. "Ahhhhhhhhhhh! Dog!" The girl shouted as she ran back the direction she had come from. Holding the shovel out to defend herself, while also artfully using Brian as cover from the hound, the dog stopped in its track just short of the shovel. The beast crouched for a moment, before backing away and turning back to face them once more. With the two sides now in a stalemate the girl asked, "wh-what do you think?" 

[radio414 936]

Brian would have thought he’d be a bit more used to encountering supernatural phenomena at this point in his burgeoning employment under Shiki. And, in fairness, some of his shock at the sight of the spectral dog fed off of Carmen’s (admittedly quite predictable) yelping and cowering. He flinched. He wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it later. “Fuck!” he said. “Okay…” Thankfully, the dog did not seem outwardly hostile like the last few ghosts, even as Carmen flailed the shovel at it.

Still, the box of seals was already in Brian’s hand. It would have been rude not to at least try. Brian grabbed a handful of the papers, and unlike the other ghosts, the dog seemed more curious about the talismans than aggressive, almost like it thought Brian was going for a treat. The dog sniffed about, still avoiding Carmen’s shovel, but still trying to see exactly what was up.

“What do you think?” Carmen asked. Honestly, if it were a human, Brian wouldn’t have even bothered exploring the situation further. With a dog, well… He didn’t especially like dogs, but at the same time, he didn’t want to have to wrestle one to the ground like all the other ghosts if he could help it.

Instead of a seal, Brian offered his empty palm to the dog. “No food, sorry,” he said. “Klyde wouldn’t let us bring any.”

The dog approached and gave the hand a more direct sniff, but turned and ran off a ways before Brian could actually touch it. When it looked back, it crouched down with its tail wagging. “What?” Brian said. Now he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. What did dogs even like to do? Food, pets, walks, and…? He grabbed a stick and tossed it off to the side, perpendicular to the dog and expecting it to go fetching after that, but no luck. The dog just made the same motion again, forelegs splayed out. What, was it beckoning them?

He took a step towards the dog, and the dog did a little loop, turning and moving away before looking back at the pair until Brian took another step and the process repeated again. “Alright, come on,” Brian said, grabbing at Carmen until she too was on her way further still into the forest. At least it was easier to see where they were going with a luminescent canine leading the way. The dog was determined but not impatient. It moved quickly through the woods, but made sure that Brian and Carmen were always right behind it, still following, until it stopped and sat down next to a tree.

Brian sized up the tree. It didn’t look any different from the other trees that he could see, not that there was much visibility this late at night. He sighed. “Well, you said you would dig the next hole,” Brian said to Carmen. “Hop to it, then, and I’ll keep watch and try and make sure Kane doesn’t get too mad at us for this.”