Free Van

[hazlogs]

Currently the moon is in the waning Crescent Moon phase (31% full).
Currently on this breezy and crisp summer midafternoon in the general St. 
  Claire area, it is 64 degrees Fahrenheit (17.8 degrees Celsius). The wind is 
  coming from the south-southeast at 5.2 mph. The ground is wet. Skies are 
  overcast with a small chance of precipitation.

Industrial Sector, Southwest Side
Several blocks encompassing the southern ends of 13th, 14th and 15th Streets 
  extend in an area poor and abandoned, with but a few businesses struggling 
  to survive. Along the northern edge of the district is a junk yard filled 
  with old washers, dryers, tires, and the myriad other elements of 
  human-created unrecycled waste. Smoke pours from a few factories, and the 
  more productive factories to the east combine with it to lay a thin film of 
  dark ash across much of the streets. Other factories, and warehouses between 
  them, lie abandoned or are home to the poor; at night, from some of those 
  with windows, the orange glow of oil drums used for heating and light shine 
  dully through the grime. Small shops serve the few factory workers who 
  remain in the area beyond the end of the working day, or during the lunch 
  hours grudgingly allowed. In the northeastern corner there is slightly more 
  activity in bars offering drinking and even some gambling in dark corners. 
  Along this stretch of street, the alleyways have stairways to second-floor 
  rooms, with the occasional alley entrance occupied evening and night by 
  painted women making blatant offers to the male passersby. Southwards, on 
  the southern side of Grym Broders Avenue, the train station falls into 
  disrepair similar to the rest of the area.

A fat ruddy faced man comes out of Medina Coffees, carrying what appears to be 
  a large cuppa. He pulls his bulk into a shitty half-painted, half-primered 
  1980s Econoline Ford cargo van. He is sweating profusely.
Casper sits cross-leggeed on some stranger's stoop, drumming an idle tattoo on 
  his knees as he surveys the city.
Magister trudges down the sidewalk with head lowered, looking as though he's 
  been awake for twenty-four hours or more, eyes shadowed behind the 
  wire-framed glasses. Hands in pockets, backpack strapped to both shoulders, 
  the teenager keeps his gaze more or less fixed on the cracked pavement a few 
  feet in front of him.
Seirian is leaning idly against one wall of a nearby alley, watching the time 
  pass with a thoughtful expression. Occasionally, she drops one hand to rub 
  at her left leg, then returns her arms to a crossed position over her chest.
The van sputters into painful life a minute after the old rusty door scratches 
  closed. Emitting a hazy cloud of foul smelling oil-smoke, the van lurches 
  forward down the street, perhaps a block or two and dies again. Cursing, the 
  fat man climbs out of the cab and comes around to the front of the van, 
  still carrying his coffee. He spies Magister, sips from his coffee and tears 
  off a blue streak of foul language that would embarrass a South Park 
  student. He then turns a half-smiling face toward Magister. "Hey kid," he 
  says. "C'mere."
Magister jerks his gaze up at the stream of angry obscenity, but would have 
  gone on without comment if the man hadn't addressed him. Still, he 
  hesitates. "Me?"
Seirian's nose wrinkles at the cloud of ugly smoke from the van, and her gaze 
  follows it until it dies, eliciting a small smile from her. Craning her head 
  slightly, she watches the exchange between the large man and the kid in mild 
  curiousity, still smiling.
The fat sweaty man nods. "Yeah." He fishes around in his pocket. "How'd you 
  like this van?"
A backfire report shoots out of the tailpipe. It sounds just like a nine 
  millimeter gun shot.
Casper takes off his shoe and starts gnawing at a brown toenail. His dark eyes 
  roll up to watch the scene, though they read as blanks right now.
Seirian jumps slightly at the backfire, then calms, shaking her head and 
  chuckling to herself about nerves.
"Your van?" Brow furrowed, Magister eyes the battered vehicle dubiously. "Um," 
  he says, and turns his eyes back to the fat man. "Thanks, but, um, I don't 
  have any money."
"I'm sick of this piece of shit." He pulls his huge hand out of his ratty jean 
  pocket, belches contendedly and dangles a pair of keys hanging from a cheap 
  rubber keychain -- the kind you get from an auto repair shop. "Here. Enjoy." 
  He flips the keys toward the kid and then starts to walk the other way -- up 
  the street with his coffee.
Magister makes a grab for the keys, catching them awkwardly. "Uh, thanks." 
  Bemused, he surveys the van again and adds, under his breath, "I think."
The man starts to whistle to himself. He doesn't look back, although he does 
  pause to drink from his cup of joe.
Seirian raises an eyebrow and glances between the van and it's previous owner 
  a moment before shrugging and taking a moment to stretch.
Casper watches the man and then Magister and then the van and then his toe 
  again.
Magister jiggles the keys in his hand for a moment before curiosity overwhelms 
  his bemusement and prompts him to approach the ugly hulk. He circles around 
  to try the driver's side door.
The fat man disappears around a corner.
The drivers door opens easily; it's unlocked. There is a huge pile of trash -- 
  from fast food, drive through coffee places, gas stations. A pair of fuzzy 
  dice hang from the barely connected rear view mirror. There's a distinct 
  stench from inside the van -- perhaps one Magister's not used to smelling.
After he finishes with the toenail, Casper spits out the bitings and sits up. 
  Looking back at the van he calls out to Magister, "What will you do with it?"
Seirian settles back into her lazy lean, humming under her breath as she looks 
  around. Brushing her curls out of her face, she continues with her casual 
  observations of the street, though Casper's voice turns her attention back 
  to the van for a time.
Magister probably isn't used to smelling it, the whatever-it-is. He wrinkles 
  his nose, partly from the smell, partly frm the garbage and the sight of 
  fuzzy dice. "I haven't a frocking clue," the kid replies, before stepping 
  out to locate the source of the query.
Casper jumps up from his seat and ambles down to better see the van. He slides 
  his hands in his pockets and adopts a speculative look as he peers over the 
  dark youth's shoulder, into the interior.
Seirian smirks and pushes off from the wall, wandering at a lazy pace towards 
  the van and those peering at it. "Thing's a pile o'junk, I say. Donnae look 
  like it'd go much o'anywhere at th'moment."
Casper's previously calm eyes bulge and water slightly as his nose takes in 
  something nasty. Putting his hand to his mouth he quickly steps to the rear 
  of the van.
Magister watches Casper warily for a moment, but so far, the other doesn't 
  alert any of the kid's asshole-detectors. After a beat he turns away and 
  climbs back into the van. "Clean it out, first of all, I guess," he says, 
  reaching for the fuzzy dice. "Cruk!" He grimaces anew at the smell and 
  concentrates on breathing through his mouth.
Rorschach pages: You can percieve the outlines of something vaguely humanoid 
  in the back.
Casper runs around to the side again, hearing the other's exclamation. He 
  sticks his head in the open door and asks, "What is it? What do you see?"
Magister seems to catch sight of something as he unhooks the fuzzy dice from 
  the rearviw mirror. Frowning, he climbs further in, kneeling on the driver's 
  seat. "I think there's somebody in here."
Rorschach pages: It's a body, seems like. Covered with wrappers and trash and 
  shit.
Casper hisses air through his teeth and whispers hoarsely, "What does it look 
  like? Maybe you shouldn't touch though..."
You paged Rorschach with 'How dead does it look?'.
Seirian blinks and stops about two feet from the van. "Eh, if'n it smells tha' 
  bad, I donnae think I'll be puttin' m'head in there an'time soon." As the 
  kid mentions someone being in the van, though, she's at the door as quickly 
  as she can be. "Are ye sure, lad?"
Rorschach pages: Waaaaay fucking dead.
The smell of rotting death is pretty apparent to anyone who's smelled it 
  before. Whatever used to be in the back -- it's been dead for a long time.
Casper looks up at Seirian, "Oh, Seirian... could you uh, see to this? I'll go 
  see if I can get help."
Magister takes a closer look, and goes dead still for a moment. "Ohmygod," he 
  says quietly, and then scrambles backwards, retreating from the van at all 
  speed, a hand going to his mouth, face suddenly pale.
Casper looks flustered and runs down the street.
Seirian pulls back, expression set in distaste as she nods to Casper. "Aye, 
  I'll take care o'it." Moving away from the door, she goes to the rear of the 
  van and tests the lock on the back door.
The back door is, perhaps predictably, locked.
Seirian leans around and calls to the kid. "Hey lad, think ye could toss me 
  those keys ye got? I want t'try gettin' th'back o'this thing open."
Magister, though, probably dropped the keys when scrambling out of the van. He 
  makes it around to the front before becoming violently sick, stomach 
  convulsing as he vomits up breadsticks from Garcia's last night.
Seirian frowns in concern for the kid before moving back up to the front to 
  retrieve the keys from wherever they might have fallen.
Seiri digs through the trash at the front of the van, throwing piles of 
  garbage out into the street. An old El Camino rolls past, slowly, beating 
  out a rap-bassline LOUDly. They slow a touch, but don't stop -- turning the 
  corner as Seiri finds the keys attached to a cheap rubber keychain.
Seirian grumbles about the loud music and grabs the keys. As she pulls back, 
  she can't help but cast a glance into the back of the van for a moment.
There's a vague looking humanoid shape under a mound of trash. It might just 
  be a trick, but you think some of the wrappers are rustling.
Magister leans against the rusted hood of the van, bent over almost double. He 
  coughs, his body still trying to sick up the contents of a now-empty 
  stomach. With the puddle of vomit at his feet (some of it on his boots) and 
  a stream of saliva coming from his open mouth, Magister isn't exactly at his 
  best or most attractive at the moment.
Seirian frowns a moment and pulls out of the van, determinedly headed to the 
  back of the van. She spares a few words for the sickened Magister as she 
  tries the keys in the lock. "Lad, try sittin' down an' puttin' yer head 
  twixt yer legs. Might help a bit."
One of the keys fits in the lock, but it only moves fitfully -- like the lock 
  was rusted shut.
Seirian sighs and patiently jimmies the key in the lock, not wanting to break 
  the key before she can get the door open. "Come on, silly lock, open up."
The Galliard twists the key and moves the lock enough. *Klick*
Seirian whews and turns the handle on the back door, with care that it, too, 
  might be rusty. "Success. Now...what've we got in here, eh?"
Magister hawks and spits up a glob of phlegmmy saliva, and then nods 
  wordlessly to the woman's advice. Still pale, he stumbles toward the curb 
  and sits down with a thump. While Seirian wrestles with the van, Magister 
  leans forward and puts his head between his knees, thin fingers laced 
  together at the back of his neck.
The door opens easily -- like it'd been recently oiled. The thick, ripe smell 
  of fecund decay assaults Seirian like a brick in the face. It coils out at 
  the still living target and threatens to dislodge Seiri's lunch too. Lying, 
  face up, is the gruesome dessicated face of a human -- you think. The flesh 
  has putrified and run off in gruesome pools of blood and ichor. Just then, a 
  *tremendously* huge rat pokes his head up from the rib cage of the 
  once-living thing. Eyes and whiskers twitching -- a bit of debris still 
  clinging to the rat's matted grey fur. It scurries away from the free meal 
  and dives under a pile of trash in the far front corner. Seiri sees another 
  rat run for her and flee into the street, vanishing down a sewer grate. The 
  dead things eyes -- you notice with eerie disquiet -- are perfectly 
  preserved and staring directly toward you.
Seirian freezes dead at the sight of the body, horror filling her expression 
  in an instant. She swallows repeatedly to keep her own lunch down, but finds 
  herself unable to take her eyes off of the mess in the van. "Sweet Mary 
  Mother of God......" she whispers, trailing off as she raises the back of 
  one hand to her mouth.
The apparently dead thing's lips move. "Kill me," it seems to be mouthing... 
  you think. It only happens for ten seconds and then you're not quite sure it 
  ever happened. The pile of trash in the corner wriggles again as the huge 
  rat tries to find a place to hide.
Magister unlaces his fingers and sits up carefully, somewhat recovered, for 
  the moment anyway. Hands shaking, he fishes inside his coat pockets for a 
  small packet of tissues wipes his mouth with it. His eyes move, with macabre 
  curiosity, toward the Van O' Death.
The smell starts to waft wider, since the backdoor is now open. Magister can 
  still smell that sickly sweet smell of decay and death hang around the van 
  like a shroud.
Seirian frees her hand from the door and reaches it, shakingly, into the van, 
  trying to find a piece of trash or something to at least cover the body's 
  eyes with. She fails to hide the shocked expression from her face.
Magister's gills turn green again. He swallows convulsively and turns his face 
  away, with the clump of tissue still pressed to his mouth.
The huge rat finds no suitable place to bed down and just as Seiri's hand 
  reach to find a piece of trash to cover the dead thing's eyes, it dashed 
  straight for the Fianna, and makes a perfect leap out of the van and 
  wriggles down the same nearby sewer grate. On top of the face's rotted (and 
  now-missing) nose is a scrap of paper with a extremely familiar looking 
  glyph to Seiri -- the Wyrm.
The glyph alone is enough to shock Seiri back to her senses. Draping whatever 
  piece of trash she found over the corpse's eyes, she grabs the scrap of 
  paper quickly and turns, looking up the street in the direction the fat man 
  had gone. "Damn..." She turns back to the van, coughing at the stench but 
  trying to push it aside to search for any clues to go with that little scrap 
  of paper.
Ew. Seiri pokes around the dead thing -- and quickly discovers that there is a 
  large pile of the glyph mimeographes on squares of paper in the front pile 
  of the van.
Searching the van completely would take hours and hours.
Seirian's eyes widen and she pulls back, closing the back door of the van with 
  a slam and locking it. Moving back up to the front of the van, she gathers 
  up as many of the squares as she can and crumples them up, tucking the 
  wadded papers into the pockets of her jeans. She then shuts the door to the 
  front of the van and backs off for a moment, moving so that any prevailing 
  winds blow the stench away from her. "Oh damn."
Magister scrubs at his mouth again with the tissue. "Cruk," he mutters. 
  "Cruk-frocking-cruk." He looks up toward the woman.
Seirian shakes her head while stuffing the last of the wadded up paper in her 
  pockets. "Damn, damn, damn." Another sigh and she looks back over to the 
  young man. "Y'all right o'er there? I'm thinkin' t'call the cops on this, 
  so, unless ye really want tha' van e'er again, might be best fer ye t'light 
  outta here."
Magister wipes at his mouth again in a reflex of disgust. "I'll be fine," he 
  says vaguely. "Um. You can have the van, or whatever." He's already backing 
  off, prelude for getting the hell out of the area.
Seirian nods and rubs her head as she looks at the van. She ohs a moment and 
  looks back to the kid. "Hey, lad, ye got a lighter or somethin' on ye?"
Magister pauses. "A lighter? ...Um, no, I don't."
Seirian frowns, "Matches or anythin' like that?" She looks back to the van 
  with a slowly growing expression of annoyance.
Magister shakes his head, weight shifting, his body ever-so-subtly leaning 
  away from the scene.
Seirian sighs and waves the kid off. "Go, get outta here."
Magister pauses a moment, a slight frown creasing his forehead. Then he turns 
  and walks toward the corner, pausing only to toss the soiled tissue into a 
  waste-can.
You go east towards the more active industrial sector.
Jermantown Avenue, Industrial Sector
From warehouses a few blocks away from the river, across a chunk of city more 
  than a dozen blocks wide, factories brood over the streets like dark dragons 
  over their piles of treasure, greedy and all-encompassing. Huddling around 
  the factories are smaller, less imposing buildings that are probably 
  warehouses, or storage locations for trucks. The factories spill fumes into 
  the air, darkening the area and blanketing it in a stench to mark 
  humankind's domination over the world. Some of the warehouses stand empty, 
  some are boarded over, and some, on the northern and western fringes of the 
  area, have been converted to bars, with bizarre lighting, frequent brawls, 
  and music that blares loudly at all hours of the night. There are no 
  residences here for anyone to complain, and the factory workers populate the 
  bars thickly. Throughout the area, trash and oil mingle together on alleyway 
  streets, impeding the paths to the dumpsters at the ends of many of the 
  alleys.
Contents:
Truck
Obvious exits:
Filthy Alley  Forgotten Church  East  West