After escaping the deal gone bad with the Kentucky Fed Cops and the Karst Following Cavers, the Bao Down cabal had some time to kill before the meeting with the other food trucks at Nash Dino Tracks. Reba took the truck and got it out of the city, worried that local police might be looking for it. That left Rachel, Tal, DBD, and the unspeakable servant to take care of business until the meeting.
Rachel wanted to make more unspeakable servants in order to keep the peace after liberating Salem. That meant she needed people to voluntarily sell her their eyeballs. Tal didn't hold out high hopes for anyone in Salem being desperate enough, but they figured they could find someone in nearby Lynn who would part with an eye cheap.
The group struck paydirt with the hophead Jason, outside a boarded up Italian restaurant. He would happily give up his eye for a pathetically small amount of heroin. The cabal wasn't sure about that. It would be easy to find enough H to pay the guy off, but it didn't feel good taking advantage of a drug addict. DBD wanted to help the man with his addiction, perhaps by giving him some adept percentages in order to displace his obsession with illegal drugs via a new obsession with casting wizard spells based on spicy peppers. Jason agreed to sell DBD his heroin addiction for a day, and only a day, prior to transacting any real business. Rachel facilitated the transaction using her Merchant powers.
DBD, overcome with the shakes, immediately shit himself and attacked Jason in order to take his nonexistent stash, punching him unconscious. As the cabal tended to the injured ex addict, DBD fled the scene, looking for a hit. He had the presence of mind to guzzle some hot sauce, in an attempt to generate a significant charge, and tried to use his existing obsession to achieve self mastery, looking for a Jew to explain his thesis on peace in the Holy Land to.
DBD's vision was swimming, he could barely see the first guy he ran into: a smartly dressed Korean guy, accompanied by a square shouldered, square jawed woman with steel teeth.
The handsome man offered David an abundance of dope, in exchange for a favor later on. DBD agreed enthusiastically, and the man gave him the key to a closed up used bookstore across the street. The man and woman got into a smart little Subaru with an "I'd rather be fishing" bumper sticker and drove away. Tal and Rachel found it suspicious that the guy had known exactly when and where DBD would need heroin. He didn't look like a drug dealer.
DBD unlocked the used book store and went inside. Among the old bottles and rat droppings was a package with a note:
MY COMPLIMENTS
- SW
DBD opened the package. Inside were numerous gel caps of heroin. Rachel and Tal entered the store. DBD tried to use his newly acquired knowledge of being addicted to heroin to sate his heroin addiction. Tal delivered a verbal beatdown, which came very close to convincing DBD not to shoot up. In the end, Tal's presumptuousness prompted DBD to shovel a vial into his mouth out of spite, but Rachel had her unspeakable servant drop a minor unnatural phenomena and make him vomit. The words YOU DID IT appearing in the pool in his own blood brought him to his senses. He cast Too Spicy For Me on himself, making himself afraid to inject heroin.
Tal got DBD cleaned up. It wasn't the first time they had to do this. In a day the heroin addiction would revert back to Jason, and they'd be able to purchase his eye, but DBD thought hard about cooking up a formula spell to displace addiction and help the guy out. The debt he owed the strange man was a troubling development.
So they had one eyeball coming their way, but Rachel figured they needed at least two more to cook up a good crop of unspeakable servants. She and Tal canvassed the underworld of the greater Salem area for any transgender crustpunks willing to part with an eye in exchange for exchanging their sex. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to meet the asking price. Rachel was able to purchase a few points of Status, and also learned an interesting fact about a visiting checker: Ardhanari, the hijra occultist who arrived with the Mak India crew, was a type of mage nobody had seen before. They could copy other people's powers. They also had a totally kickass jacket.
So nobody was selling eyeballs. But Rachel wasn't beaten. She knew just the woman to make the trade.
Rachel took Tal to visit Lindsey the Sin Eater at Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Framingham. Lindsey was strongly religious, but also an integral part of Rachel's lifespan laundering scheme. Rachel used her Merchant powers to take years off the sentences of prisoners and transferred them to Lindsey. As a result, Lindsey was currently sitting at a 300 year sentence. The convicts went free and, as payment, gave Rachel and Lindsey years of their lifespan.
Lindsey and Rachel exchanged the usual pleasantries in the visitation room, conducted their usual business of adding years to Lindsey's sentence and years to both their lives. Then Rachel asked about picking up a few eyeballs. Lindsey knew people who would give them up, but needed something in return: her sister, Yulia, was in some trouble. She was running with a bad crowd and done some stuff she didn't think she could tell Lindsey about. If Rachel helped her out, she'd find her the eyeballs.
Before the cabal left, Lindsey warned Rachel about a visit she had a few days ago. She'd been thinking all week about having a drink, a Manhattan. She didn't drink any more, on account of being incarcerated and her religious conversion, but for some reason she absolutely craved it. Then she gets this visitor, a Korean guy: Sin Woo Jin. He was here with this lady and her metal teeth, and he offered to take her out to a bar, let her have a night on the town, do whatever she wanted. He could set it up, she'd just owe him a favor after. She said no, of course, but the guy was clearly a checker.
With a few hours to go before they had to be in Granby for the meeting of the food trucks, the cabal headed over to Marblehead to figure out what was wrong with Yulia.
It took some serious banging on the door to get Yulia to answer. She looked terrible. She immediately went back to the kitchen and resumed what she'd been doing before the cabal arrived: staring at some blue rocks in a dish on the table. Tal and Rachel were able to pry out of her that she'd bought the stones off "Bobby Smiles", a fat guy who did electrical work at raves and sometimes sold her ecstasy. This was different, though. The stones would multiply if she looked away, but if she took them all at once she wouldn't have any left. She had to keep the exact right number on the table. When she looked at them, it was like the rest of the world disappeared, like the Zahir.
Tal used their catapsi ability on the blue stones, neutralizing their powers. Yulia fell over on the floor and vomited a black substance, which scuttled from the light like a carpet of cockroaches and hid under the furniture. Tal made sure she wasn't going to die of shock or anything, and tried to get more info on the supplier. Smiles usually sold regular drugs, but he was clearly slinging something else on the side.
Rachel left Scooby the Shoggos Boy with Yulia. Both to make sure she was ok, and to observe anyone who came to visit her. They got back in the truck and went to meet up with DBD and Reba, so they could get over to the Nash Dino center for the midnight meeting. Rachel drove while Tal flipped through news articles on their phone, curious if anyone had reported on the conflict at Bewitched Park earlier that day.
Turns out, the gunshots they heard were the third cop, Amy, shooting Mick, the ex military guy from the KFC crew who tried to set up an overwatch on the roof. He didn't make it. Tal wasn't happy about this - Rachel had to pull over on the shoulder and turn on her hazards while Tal pounded the shit out of the dashboard.
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