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Haunted Mansion
Taylor and Lisa watched out over the half-sunken city, dark clouds being swept away after a long, long storm. Things weren’t amazing, but eventually, they would set themselves right. It just needed time to recover, time to reap the gains of being Leviathan’s graves, instead of just the damage.
“It’s going to cause a lot of tourism,” Lisa noted, staring into the distance, at the section of the city where Coil’s base had been. With some luck, he and every horror in there would’ve drowned along with the rest of the city, but there was no luck if Coil was around. Nevertheless, there would be a lot of attention on the city, and the man would have something else on his mind very soon.
“It is,” Taylor noted right back at her
“So… you still want out?” Lisa asked, and Taylor nodded softly. Eventually, she’d recover, but for now, Taylor needed time. “Because I have some ideas involving a certain piece of real estate I got documents for back in the bank vault, and I have some ideas.”
“Booh!” Aisha said, suddenly appearing right in front of her older brother, as if she’d always existed, or however that worked. Taylor didn’t know much except that she couldn’t sense her at all whenever using her power. Lisa had certain ideas, but all Taylor knew was that sometimes, when Aisha was running around the mansion, the floors creaked, doors slammed and the chimney howled without any sign of her doing it at all.
Still not as bad as the blinding darkness outside the windows, Grue’s mist obscuring the very existence of a world outside of the mansion. No light, no sound, just a great empty void.
“Could you please stop that!?” Lisa shouted, hands holding her head, tears hidden in the corners of her bottle-glass green orbs. It was strange, Taylor had never taken her for the type of girl to get scared in an ancient new-England mansion older than the nation itself. But here they were, spending one night in the mansion so that it would legally belong to them. Well, to an LLC holding subcompany in turn owned by several different shell companies somewhere in a polynesian microstate, but that was the same thing.when it came down to it.
Something in the mansion howled again, and a shiver went down Taylor’s spine. “Cut it out Alec!” she shouted, throwing an empty can of coke in the direction of the couch. He was there somewhere, being a git.
She sat back in her chair, grabbing another can of coke as her insects explored the rooms they hadn’t entered yet. The whole place was lousy with spiderwebs, including some absolutely massive varieties she hadn’t seen before. The place had probably belonged to an amateur arachnologist, long ago when he’d still been alive. In fact, the place felt like no-one had stepped inside for long ever since the last owner had died. When she closed her eyes, she could just imagine her spiders skittering past a long-forgotten corpse lying somewhere on a bed, covered in a cocoon of dusty spiderwebs.
“Webzzzz” Aisha shouted, suddenly appearing right in front of Taylor, scaring the living bejeebus out of her hard enough that her entire swarm started scurrying and running around, causing another commotion throughout the mansion.
“Shut it Aisha, I mean it,” Brian said, ever slightly louder than a proper brother should, steaming darkness into the area around him.
“I’ll live. We’ll all survive, we can make it through this…” Lisa said in the meantime, whimpering in the corner.
Taylor really didn’t get what the problem was, it wasn’t like there was some sort of ghost moving around the mansion, she would’ve noticed the effect on her swarm-sense which could’ve noticed the cold of the…
Well, maybe it was a bit cold, and the growling of Rachel’s hounds was very unsettling when you thought about it.
Charlotte could do nothing but scream as she dashed through the ancient halls, her face covered in wet, sticky webbing, her vision obscured by clouds of endless darkness. In front of her, one of her classmates tripped, right into an old, dusty pile of pillows, covered in cockroaches that crawled out and swarmed over her.
It was always good to hear Emma screaming, especially when you could run straight past her, through a cloud of endless shadows, and right into a demonic spirit from beyond the void, appearing right in front of her eyes, with a cackle and a grin that caused her to spin, run straight into another empty void of nothingness, through a room filled with an ancient bridal spectre, past an old four-poster bed with the mummified remains of a couple on their wedding night, feasted on by an oversized spider that was fighting a monstrous hellhound. Three more doors, and she darted past a panicked Victoria Pelham wearing her official custom to a haunted house for no reason, through a sea of darkness, and out of the back door, finally returning to the warm embrace of the sun.
“Best… Haunted House… ever!” she half-shouted half-panted as a set of caretakers walked towards her, with a heat blanket and a mug of coco at the ready.
“Ultimately, it’s a simple question of mathematics,” Gallant explained, looking at the assembled Capes, Cronies and bureauCrats. “Given their previous behavior, we can look at a… mediocre deficit to the city budget caused by aggravated vandalism, with a corresponding increase in merchandising payouts that are just not quite equal in value. Of course, opposed to that is a possible decrease in public trust, but that gets twisted right back if we take into account the effect of allowing villains to go white hat, especially after their contribution in Leviathan’s demise. Additionally, there’s an absolutely massive social media craze going on right now which, I believe, will boost additional tourism caused by the fight by an additional 20%.”
“Nonsense,” one of the older idiots exclaimed. “There’s only what, a hundred guests a day? That can’t be worth much compared to the rest of the city.”
“And a horde of onlookers watching to see how people manage to escape, as well as every influencer this side of… well, everywhere.” Gallant continued. “The eyes of the world are already on Brockton Bay and we need every tourist attraction we can get. Even with the risk of heart attacks or other health problems, the very fact that that’s an issue means there’s a constant crowd of onlookers, meaning the need for medical personnel is already a thing, which I’ll remind you, Tattletale has ensured there was an emergency team available.available.”
“I still don’t like it,” one of the spooks, Calvert, said. “They can’t be trusted. They’re criminals. Who knows who they’re working for or what their plan is? We’ve never figured out their plan for that bank robbery and we know they’re working for someone , they wouldn’t have had the resources they have otherwise.”
“And whoever they worked for? Probably dead,” Armsmaster stated. “I agree with Gallant here. We can deal with whatever is going on with their possible employer while we reap the benefits of their seeming redemption.”
Gallant smiled beneath his armor, knowing that nobody here would really deliver resistance now that the eviscerator of Leviathan had agreed with him.
Thomas Calvert had a problem. That problem was that several of his capes had decided that they were too good for good-old-fashioned criminality, and instead had decided to operate a haunted house, out of an old haunted house.
That wasn’t usually a problem. Children did silly things all the time, and the good thing about being him was that you had a lot of ways to handle silly children.
The problem was, that every time he’d send people out to inspect, they’d disappear off the face of the earth. Not a problem, he could just try again, but then it would happen again .
Which left him with a simple solution. Go himself, and inspect what happened. Which meant going into a… haunted house. Operated by teenagers. This was unbecoming of a criminal mastermind.
Yet he had to do it, so he did.
The mansion, old and not as dilapidated as it was on the wikipedia page, looked imposing, set on top of a hill, with a small ticketing stand, a row of waiting, trembling people, and an exit with an emergency squad ready to help out in case someone was traumatized, which about half the participants were, according to the news. He wasn’t afraid, his men had spotted Tattletale, Lisa, halfway across town in a business meeting of some sort with a shelter, and the rest had no chance of identifying him.
The row was… not that long, not after half the people suddenly got scared and left. Simple, given that most of them had been his to begin with, and it left him nicely near the front of the line.
Ten minutes later. He’d gotten his instructions. Don’t talk to the staff, don’t attack the staff, keep running, eventually you’ll make it out, any darkness is safe to go straight through, don’t go in if you have a history of heart-attacks or seizures. It was very nicely done, on a piece of paper that looked like it was old but wasn’t, that also gave some context about the mansion. There were a half-dozen myths about it. It was haunted by a spectral bride, that had also had a possessed demon-child somehow, and the next owner’s bodies had never been found. It was also said that, if you kissed your lover on the top floor of the mansion, you were guaranteed a perfect, lifelong marriage together. Awfully sappy for a murderous mansion of doom, but he wasn’t about to give it a try. Too close to some of the darker capes he’d read about. A better touch was the little form they made you sign that you weren’t a mass-murdering maniac and were only here for a good and/or terrifying time, which looked official, even if it wasn’t. It even had exclamations that the guilty would be forced to live through all the torments they’d ever inflicted on others!
It started at the entrance, the creaking wooden steps, despair filling his heart. Something, someone, was watching him. Imp, probably, from one of the windows, or perhaps the balcony.
He stepped through the entrance door, the floor wet with a sticky not-quite translucent liquid dripping from the ceiling. The effect looked like ectoplasm, but it was clearly one of Hellhound’s hellhounds under the effect of a pavlovian stimulus. He moved onwards, powering through the urge to puke as the world twisted around him, the windows blacking out, the door behind him disappearing in darkness. Interesting combination of powers, especially with Regent attacking his sense of balance somehow, but nothing he couldn’t deal with. He’d been a trained soldier far before he’d become Coil.
His journey went on, into the old mansion, past locked rooms that were probably the living quarters, through a strange black void, into a long, long hallway that twisted part way through, as if gravity changed directions. Simplistic really, simple practical effects combined with a darkness that removed all light except a few specific sources. Howling, like wind, or maybe just normal dogs.
He walked through the hallway, which twisted along with him (expensive, but Grue’s mist would silence the sound of the mechanical devices) and ignored the whispers, reminding of his guilt, his sins, the ways he’d treated people as property, as playthings. The murders he’d comitted, even if only in his own private worlds. The systems he’d corrupted, the widows he’d left behind.
Standard fare, really. Nothing too impressive. Anyone would’ve been able to do so with some prep work…
At the end of the hallway, he stepped back into a normal room, where he could see the corpse of someone, dried and covered in webbing, lying on an old bed in a tattered wedding dress.
A shiver went down his spine, and something suddenly appeared in front of him. A woman, only half-solid, wearing a long white dress with a veil. Obviously Imp.
“So, we have yet more cattle for the slaughter,” Aisha said, trying to sound like a much older, more demonic woman. “Bloated with the sins of a thousand worlds. Oooh, we will enjoy feasting on your suffering, in this world, and the next!”
At that point, Thomas was done with the melodrama, and he dropped that timeline, instead sitting safely in his office, in a half-drowned base, in front of his computer, thinking.
Except something was wrong, a malfunction in the temperature control, causing the room to quickly drop in temperature. Then, his screen started flashing, before the LCD screen somehow shifted into white snow, and the spectral figure once again appeared, floating down from the roof.
Its voice screeched as it moved closer, a ghastly howl and a deathless smirk. “Well, I must admit, I didn’t expect the next world to be quite so literal.”
Coil screamed, the spectral bride laughed, and Brockton Bay slowly recovered.