Afterlife - Meeting Eddie and Gwendoline (Backdated to May 22nd and this time in the right journal!)

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Dori, Artie and Sarah have the (mis)fortune of meeting two people of questionable aliveness on what was shaping up to otherwise be a normal night.

Artie stared and tapped Sarah on the shoulder. "Do you see that?" he asked, letting the text run across the floor in front of them. "Or have I like, gone crazy and started seeing things?" He wasn't sure which option was worse.

Sarah looked at Artie before remembering to look back down at his projected text. "No, I mean you're not going crazy, not that I didn't see anything. I saw... something." She shuddered a little and may have moved just a little bit closer to Artie, just in case something was really out there.

Doreen was typing slowly on her laptop, it was hard to do with claws but she could manage it well enough. The world didn't need to know she was writing fanfic at the moment. "Who saw who in the what now?"

"That. There."

The figure Artie was pointing at raised a hand and smiled before scratching his head.

Next to that figure another one appeared, slightly taller but hunched over. An aged feminine voice, somewhat grandmotherly, could then be heard. "My heavens but it's dark in here. Why is it do dark? It's just like that time Peter forgot to pay the light bill on time, and we had only candlelight for a fortnight. Why, it's like the time my cousin Myrtle - poor cousin Myrtle, she lives alone, you know, her own children won't take her in, positively shameful, that - cousin Myrtle... oh, yes, how she'd encourage me to follow my passion for acting, ever since we were little girls..."

The other figure shook his head. "Acting? Acting is very dangerous. They know your face if you act and come for you in the dark and take you away. It's all a CIA plot, is amateur theatre... But it is a little dark in here. You! Tail girl! Can you turn the light on? And your laptop off? They monitor laptops. You know that, right?"

Artie just stared. "What. The. Fuck?" This was up there on the list of weird things he'd seen. In fact, it was up there with being chased by dinosaurs.

"Tail... girl...?" Doreen popped out a headphone, "Who said that?" it couldn't have been Artie, he couldn't talk like that. And Sarah was a girl, "You guys remember my name, right?" SquirrelGirl was writing fanfic, Doreen, however, wasn't inclined to turn on the light or the laptop off.

Squinting at Dori, Gwendolin ceased chattering long enough to draw in breath (surely a force of habit more than anything else) and to give her a quick once-over before resuming. "You look like Bessie Madison's daughter, you do. What was her name again? Marilyn? Melinda? Matilda? Matilda, yes, that's it. Matilda Madison. Can you imagine? Oh dearie me, the poor child, why, I tell you, why would you do that to a child? Quiet girl, too, then again who could blame her? Bessie would hardly let her get a word in edgewise, oh, she could prattle on, and on, and on, some people just don't know when to be quiet. Positively scandalous, almost as outrageous as the prices at the market lately. You should see what they charge for an apple, an apple, nowadays, it's appalling. No wonder we had a depression not that long ago and will have one soon, dollars to donuts, I'd wager anything, not that I gamble, no no, not me. That was our neighbour, Mr. Petten, now he was another story..."

"Um.... Artie, what's going on?" she asked and signed, though the last was somewhat clumsy This wasn't exactly normal, after all.

He switched back to projecting text, for Sarah so that she'd be in the loop, too. "I have no freaking idea but they're seethrough. SEETHROUGH." Right now, Artie wished, rather desperately, that one of the three of them had an offensive power of some sort. Just in case. "So scratching dood. who are you?"

Eddie blinked. "I go by Eddie. It's ...enough of a name for now. And you ought to be more careful, wandering around being a mutant using your powers and looking like one like that. It's not safe. You know that, right? There are these government programs that are there just to track and arrest mutants, turn them into killing machines. You too, miss with the tail."

"...Yeah, and WoW is a training program for gaming zombies, like that thing in the CLERKS cartoon," Doreen returned. Sure, people did some horrible stuff to mutants, but she didn't think the US government was pulling them off the streets. It'd be pretty obvious if they were, "Who are you guys? And how'd you get here?"

"I'll have you know that I was born and raised here, young lady, thank you very much." Gwendoline raised her chin a little as she spoke, looking down her long nose at Doreen and the others. "Gwendoline Anderson, from this very place, as a matter of fact. Why, I went to school just up the road from here, I did." She pointed out in one direction in where perhaps once a schoolhouse had stood many decades before. "We had to walk to school in my day, mind you, there were no automobiles or buses driving around all willy-nilly then. You were lucky if your family had a horse, and that would be for working the fields, not for prancing about town like some... some git, heavens no. Not that we didn't work the fields, oh my heavens, we did, father was not one to tolerate laziness. Intestinal fortitude, that's what young people are lacking these days. And moral fiber." She nodded, still not having completely answered the question.

"Pfff. Moral fibre. You say that like it's more important than tinfoil on the windows and a cache of MREs and a hell of a lot of collodial silver for when the war comes. Honestly, it's people like you that put us into this place, you and your hard work and trust in the government," Eddie replied, scratching his arm again. "And, honestly, if you've bought into the mainstream mythos about everything that you can't even tell that we wouldn't be here if we didn't want our things back..."

- Hide quoted text - "Artie, any idea where the heck these..." she didn't want to say 'ghosts' and 'things' was rude, "people came from?" Doreen asked, now doing her best to just ignore the one that was obviously more insane than the other one.

"No. Let's just quietly walk away and maybe they'll leave," he replied.

"An excellent question, that!" Gwendoline followed them, talking away as she floated towards them. "I cannot speak for this young lad here, of course, but as for me, it's an interesting story. You see, my father was from... no, wait, it goes back even further than that. My father's father... his father, in fact, who was named Aloysius - now there's a name you don't hear very often, do you? Oh, but I know several - Al Smith, who only liked to be called Al, Aloysius Jones - he was so tall, oh my - Wish McKenzie - Wish is a nickname for Aloysius, of course..." She didn't seem like she'd be going anywhere any time soon.

Sarah shook her head, sighing as the ghost rambled on. "I don't think we're gonna be that lucky, unfortunately." She wondered just exactly what they were going to have to do to get rid of them, and how on earth would they be able to figure it out?