Tal had business to attend to, and the cabal didn't want to visit Granny Ethel without them, so they decided to collect more eyeballs for Rachel's unspeakable servants. They had two days left before the ritual took place, and wanted to get it out of the way.
Rachel and co had arranged for three eyeballs - two from Lindsey the Sin Eater in prison and one (hypothetically) from Jason the heroin addict in Lynn. Three was enough for her hypothetical Unspeakable Servant security force to protect the town, but she had a total of five animal corpse piles she'd been ritually preparing over the last few months, meaning that she could use another pair of eyes.
The team decided to do some arbitrage at the local hospital. If they could get an already terminally ill guy to agree to being loaded up with diseases, Rachel could buy the diseases off a bunch of terminally ill kids, curing them and taking a payment of eyeballs from their parents in exchange. The gang parked the food truck outside Salem Hospital and headed inside.
Rachel dressed up as a visiting specialist, and the others pretended to be the family of a patient. With that disguise they were able to get into the palliative care ward without being hassled by the front desk people. Rachel looked at the charts of the patients, and identified the cancer victim Edric as a likely mark for negotiating a terminal disease based deal. They offered Edric a wish of his choice if he would accept a few diseases from other people that would kill him faster. Edric wanted to know what happened when he died.
Nobody in the Unknown Armies world actually knows the answer to this, but Rachel suspected it was reincarnation, so she told him that. He asked her to reduce his time in the bardo to zero, so that he could get into his next life instead of spending time in any hell that existed. Rachel couldn't exactly do that, so she gave him several years of lifespan she had acquired from her deals with Lindsey. The way she framed it, she wasn't technically lying, so her merchant powers didn't block the transaction.
Next, it was time to buy some terminal diseases and eyeballs from dying children and their families. Getting into the ward with all the kids was a little more challenging. The team went back to the truck and made a bunch of custard bao, then brought the delicious deserts in as a treat for the sick children. It's the kind of plot that might not have actually worked if the doctors were paying attention to the kid's diets, but it was creative enough to work. There was only one kid there who had parents there in the room, so Rachel targeted them to make a deal. The kid had a neurodegenerative disease, Rachel could fix it, using the "miracle worker" she'd brought with her: Scooby the Unspeakable Servant, currently disguised in a dumpling mascot. In exchange, she just wanted an eyeball. Scooby conjured up a few minor unnatural effects in order to cement the illusion.
The parents debated who would surrender the eyeball. The dad insisted that it should be him, but the mom wouldn't allow it - if the loss of his eye wasn't work related he could be fired without cause. She surrendered her eyeball, and Rachel took the palsy from the child and transferred it to her Unspeakable Servant. There were no other parents in the ward, and the group wasn't comfortable negotiating directly with the other children to take their eyes, so Rachel just took all their diseases and gave them to Scooby. DBD gave all the children spicy dumplings and told them that it was the spice that saved them.
A Doctor blocked their path on the way out. He wanted to know what they did to the kids. Either they told him, or he'd tell security they gave all the kids fentanyl. They gave him a special order dumpling, explained that magick was real, and took him back to the terminal illness ward. Because she only got one eyeball off the kids, Rachel altered the deal with Edric a little: in addition to giving him all the diseases she'd loaded onto Scooby, she'd get both of his eyes. Edric didn't have any interesting last words, he was ready for his new life. Rachel took his eyes and loaded him with diseases, killing him. Doctor Vrolick observed with interest, then looked out through the wall with the enhanced vision he got from the special order. He told the cabal someone was robbing their truck. It was raining.
The crew ran outside into the storm. Officers Walker and Kent, two of the three Kentucky Fed Cops who previously showed up to the meet at the Bewitched Statue, were going through the contents of the Food Truck. Reba shouted at them to get the fuck out, stacking a debuff on Walker using her debuff ability. Kent stepped forward and backhanded her in one fluid motion. Rachel had Scooby spend his one significant unnatural effect for the day to teleport the cops a mile away.
Unsure of how long they had before the cops came back, the team made the most of the temporary lull. Reba went inside the hospital and, through a conversation with Dr Vrolick, got medical treatment for the gash above her eye, and the security tape for the hospital parking lot, to prove the cops broke into her truck and hit her. DBD and Rachel found the car the police arrived in and burglarized it, taking a shotgun, a radio, a surveillance camera and a bulletproof vest. DBD used random magick to turn enough of the car's gasoline into hot sauce that it couldn't drive anywhere. Then the team got in the truck and drove away fast.
With three eyeballs in their collection, the gang went back to the prison to collect the remaining two from Lindsey the Sin Eater. As usual, Rachel bribed the guards to set up the meeting. Lindsey was happy with the cabal's work rescuing her sister, both from the grip of the blue stones and from the goons who tried to break into her apartment. Lindsey had found out that the trio of strange gardeners were Granny Ethel's henchmen. She also had another tip for Rachel: Sin Woo Jin, the guy who tried to buy her off, was now "upstreaming" her, getting woman charged with petty crimes out of jail in exchange for favors owed to him. This could be a real issue in the long run.
With all that out of the way, Rachel took the offered payment of eyeballs that Lindsey had negotiated with the other prisoners. Besides that, the usual freedom for life-years scheme netted Rachel a writer of bad checks and a crackhead. That took her mini-cult of emancipated prisoners up to three members, who she housed in one of her family properties that her mother never showed any interest in.
Business conducted and eyeballs in hand/in head, the team went back to Lynn to finish their business with Jason the heroin addict. The heroin addiction that DBD temporarily lifted off him had returned to Jason, as per the terms of the agreement. The group didn't need his eyeballs anymore since they already had five, but they still wanted to help him kick the habit. DBD had been working on a new capsaicinaturgy spell that would displace his addiction using spicy food, but he didn't have the significant charges necessary to cast it. He decided to generate one by attempting to convert Jason to his spice based religion while significantly impaired by a mouthful of hot food. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't working. That is, until Jim the Gremlin showed up with more special peppers from Endemic Spice. This was Rachel's first time seeing Jim in person, and she surmised that he was some kind of familiar, working for a mage. Jim explained that the special peppers were created by Ramachandran the Videomancer, who loaded up mundane chilis with special magick using video tapes and sorcery.
DBD scarfed a pepper and convulsed as his whole body was seared. It gave him guaranteed casting of a single spell, at the cost of physical injury. He cast his random magick spice purge spell on Jason, and fed Jason one of the remaining peppers for good measure. Not only did this put Jason's heroin addiction into remission, it also opened his third eye enough to make him a capsaicinaturge too. DBD remanded the care of his new convert to Rachel, who decided to house Jason with the freed prisoners. She was a little annoyed that DBD had given him an Adept school, since it meant she couldn't grind the Mancymancy she had gotten from Ardhanari by passing it around to him.
With the eyeballs secure, the group pondered what to do next.
With Tal gone, they weren't ready to visit Granny Ethel yet, and they didn't want to explore the Pool Tunnels (or even necessarily know how to find them) without consulting her. That left a suite of options still on the table:
- Find more memory for Abe the artificial man, in exchange for an unknown gift from the Milk and Honey truck
- Find health insurance for the Ice Man truck, in exchange for a powered exoskeleton from their mechanomancer, due in six days
- Attend the New Maks' show at No Blood For Sex that night.
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