event } the honk is coming from inside the ship

[seeingyou]

WHO: Everyone left behind on Navi.
WHAT: There’s a goose on the loose!
WHERE: Anywhere on Navi.
WHEN: Feb. 20-March 13
WARNINGS: Add these to your comment subject lines as needed! And if the goose pecks through your skull, please make sure to fill out the death page.

Those of you who haven’t been swept off to a hell dimension may find that Navi is … unusually empty. Those links you had with your partner? It’s like they’ve just been shut off with the flick of a switch. Weird, right?

However, Navi’s halls are not exactly quieter for the emptiness. At first, you might think you’re imagining it, but soon enough, it becomes evident that there is something else on board this ship and it honks. The honking is intermittent, but it never truly ends for good. You’ll hear it through the walls, outside your cabin doors, on the next floor - everywhere.

After a few hours of this nonsense, Navi reaches out to the passengers via the mental link and asks them to find the source of this infernal noise and round it up so it can be ejected from the ship. It’s driving Navi nuts, they can’t tell where the honking is coming from, so they can’t take care of it themselves. It won’t be easy, because this goose is wily (and an eldritch being, technically), but it needs to be handled, and there’s no one else around. Good thing you’re still here to help!

Comments

[ungodlily]

The murder train isn't even general goose thievery or dinner? There are some things in the world Sharon will never understand and it's how men handle most things.

"Uh, yeah, you got me. I'm...," she hesitates, the name Heather on her tongue, before she quickly recovers (that girl wasn't necessary here), "I'm Sharon and it managed to snag my vest."

"It was a birthday gift. A little blood-stained but, you know, memories." Translation: it means way more than something like that should.

"You happen to hear it anywhere recently?"

[sisterswitch]

Jack can agree - why are men? She sure doesn't know and has yet to hear a convincing explanation.

She raises an eyebrow at the description of the vest as blood-stained, but that could be from anything, really. She's seen plenty of weirdness in the last few years, so she's not easily shocked.

"Sounds like there's a story there." One she'd definitely be interested in hearing, if Sharon feels like telling. "I haven't heard it in a while, but I think I can do one better. Gotta ask first though - what are your thoughts on magick?"

[ungodlily]

"Sadly," Sharon confirms with only a mild grimace. Once, she'd have thought her vest's adventure would have been unbelievable but now that she's dealing with a strange space adventure and thieving goose, it feels like it'd be pretty simple for anyone to understand.

She might tell Jack at some later point but right now her focus is just on getting that vest back. At the mention of magick, she raises a dark brow, curious rather than doubtful, "Don't know much about magick, honestly, but if it can help me find that goose, I'm open to it."

As long as there's not human sacrifice involved.

[sisterswitch]

Good. That's a better reception than Jack's experienced from other passengers.

"OK, follow me." She waves Sharon toward the end of the corridor, into the lounge, which is mercifully empty. Once inside, Jack pulls a notebook out of the inside pocket of her vest and sits on the ground with it open in front of her. The pages are scribbled with a row of alphabet letters on the top, numbers in a row on the bottom, and a pentacle in the middle of the pages. Inside the star's points are alchemical symbols of the elements, and ringed around the pentacle's edge are the words YES NO MAYBE UNKNOWN.

"I didn't have much luck with looking for the goose using my fancy DIY divination last time," she explains, unclasping her necklace from around her neck and holding the small crystal on a chain over the book's pages, "but maybe if we focus on the vest, we'll get a better fix on where it is." Join her, won't you, Sharon?

[ungodlily]

Jack has Sharon's rapt attention and she takes in every little detail she sees, curious and fascinated. She sits down when Jack does, legs crossed, leaning forward. The symbols are familiar, things she's certain she's seen elsewhere, but she presses that thought into the background.

"All I gotta do is focus on the vest? Would it be more useful if I focused on its physical attributes or the emotional attachment I have for it?"

She's not sure how this is meant to work and just wants to get it right; that vest means too much to just be taken from her.

[sisterswitch]

"Oh, the emotional attachment for sure. That's much more powerful."

And it's a bit of a relief that Sharon's asking questions that a genuine rather than dismissive. Jack tends to hear the latter type all too often; people have their - almost always erroneous - ideas about magick and witches.

"The real power behind magick is the intention," she explains. "Crystals, cards, candles - all that stuff's just a tool for focusing your intentions. I mean, they're neat things, but they don't have any real inherent power on their own. The person using them gives the tools the power by using them."

She holds out her free hand to Sharon. "When you've found your focus, take my hand."

[ungodlily]

"Glad I asked."

Sharon knew a little about magic: the commercialized, teenage girl sleepover Hollywood creation, and the magical school, and she knew a little more about the real thing, though they never called it magic. Jack's magick sounds more like what she'd read once in an occult magazine, though she had a feeling Jack knew more than the writer of that article.

Instinctively, Sharon's eyes slip shut as she thinks back to when she'd first seen the vest. Chris had taken her to the nearest mall to their new 'home'. It was one of the first things they did when they moved: find their meeting place if going home was too dangerous. It'd been in the window of one of those expensive stores, the ones she'd never have looked twice at, the ones where the employees would eye her warily if she dared to step past the detectors, but the white leather stood out against their classy black backdrop. She'd even dared to get a closer look but then she spotted that price tag: 400. For a fucking vest. She didn't feel disappointment, honestly, because she'd expected it.

She never hoped for things like that.

Chris had noticed her looking and asked if she'd liked it. Sharon remembered laughing at him and giving him an eye roll as she asked him if she seemed the type to shop there (ugh, yuck dad come on).

He knew, though. He could always see through her.

Sharon reaches out to take Jack's hand then, her heart tight in her chest. All over a vest.