Snake's Venom: The Candlestick Distrubance - Set 3: She's Not There

Set 2: The Song of Persephone

Patricia's Wellness Journal

So this is the way it ends? The pain is starting to fade away and I’m left with the slightly warm and damp feeling of lying in the expanding pool that’s spilling out over Mathias’s floor. That’s a bad sign, the body has started to give up on the pain signals. I’m going into shock.

Mathias is futzing about the room looking for his books, looking for something he can do to help. But that’s my job and I’ve got nothing I can do anything with right now. I already tried to close the wound and all it did was burn deeper into me.

I want to cry. I want to cry just to know I was still feeling. I want to cry even if it’s dry sobbing. But I can’t. The emotion is distant from me. Everything is fading away. I’ll be having that point of light next and moving on to wherever the dead go.

The darkness closes in and I feel like I’m drifting away. I’m heavy with regret and reluctance, clinging tight to my body.

I don’t want to go!

I was trying to help people!

I don’t want to go!

There is a flash then, the light pulls away, looking almost as if it is rotting away from my vision and I am pulled painfully back to my body which lurches back upright. I draw in air but I don’t breathe, and I can feel the dead flesh around me with a speck of darkness at the core.

“Oh thank god! Amata, you’re...okay. Well sort of. Okay, so now that you’re awake, you can…”

The rage comes on me like a fever and I leap to my feet, pushing him aside. I hear him hit the wall more than see it and crush down the urge to visit greater pain on him.

He was just trying to help. He was reckless. We were both reckless.

But we were trying to help!

This isn’t his fault. I know whose fault this is. I know who brought the guns into the shop. I know who interrupted the ritual and whose bullet killed me.

I rush out of the door. It doesn’t occur to me until I’m most of the way down the stairs that I could have opened it. But it doesn’t matter. I have something I need to do. There is someone I need to stop. A selfish monster that will feed me...that needs to be stopped.

I stop only once, when I hear the whisperings of the sleeping dead in the ground underneath me and I know. I know how I’m going to come after him. He brought guns and numbers. He brought a gang to kill two people. Well, that’s fine, I’ll bring an army to kill a gang.

And we will drag his tainted soul to hell!

Damn it! Damn it! Stop it! I’m not that way! That’s not me. I’m a healer. I’m a doctor.

I was trying to help!

Doctor Amata Dunkel

Former Rift of the Cleric

Newly Rift of Persephone

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So where did we leave off, right, Dr. Dunkel was cured of her curse. Pomegranate trees had sprung up in her garden and a pair of suspicious plain clothes cops were coming up to the house. There was some hesitation before the group opted to try and sneak out the side while the cops were coming straight in without even bothering to knock first. Unfortunately, one of the cops had gone around to the side.

They caught him by surprise and Kelsey or his muse did something to flood the guy with pain but he got a last shot off. Ophelia had pushed the shotgun out of line so the shot took his head off, but the noise called the attention from the other cop. With Ophelia going catatonic after contributing to the man's death and Kelsey still recovering from whatever he had done, Evan took charge of things and set up an ambush, catching Prince SWAT by surprise with his friend's shotgun.

Arranging the scene so that it looked like the two cops had shot each other, they left the scene. Prince SWAT survived, but he's a bit under investigation now given he was found with very non-regulation weaponry at a house without a warrant next to a dead cop killed by the gun in his hands. But that problem is neither here nor there.

Kelsey called one of his estate's servants who came by in a van outfitted with plastic sheeting and the lot of them returned to the estate in order to recover mentally and physically from the outing. Once there, they had some discussion with Amata who told them that the man that killed her was a smuggler that Mathias had been stealing diamonds from to power her resurrection spells. Not only that but he'd interrupted a ritual that resulted in him being imbued with some sort of power that seemed to describe the hellfire they'd found at the Melted Candlestick.

They decided to go about tracking down Mathias, working out that the last place he might go was a mutual friend named Zoe Vitale. Getting to her apartment it turned out Mathias was there though the two tried to keep him hidden. Talking to Zoe apparently allowed a twinge of some sort of mind control to work its way into Kelsey, but Evan's ability to see through the truth allowed him to notice this happening and further revealed that Zoe herself was not real apparently.

Sort of like you, the person I'm talking to in these journals and who I talk to over my shoulder when I'm stressed. Well, not like that, I guess, given they could actually see her and I've never even heard a peep or seen a hair of you. Zoe tried to deny her unreality, but in the end she faded to nothing in front of them. That made it easy to convince Mathias that she was the link between the smuggler and him, even for the fact that she had put the idea in his head to steal diamonds from a criminal.

With that in mind, they had an address were set ready to go take on this Merrit Travisham before things really hit the fan.