The Upside Down
| The Upside Down Chapter of Beneath Cold Boughs | |
|---|---|
 A walk in the otherworld. | |
| Chapter 4 of The Widening Gyre | |
| Chronology | |
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| Seeping Through the Skin | Intrusions and Invitations |
Diana and Jane deal with the aftermath of Morris' rampage and find more layers to the mysteries and strangeness of the world they have descended into.
What Happened
Investigations and Paranoia
After parting ways with Morris and feeling the unsettling sense of being watched fade, Diana headed for home to sleep and determine her next course of action. Carter would need time to work his craft on the Row, so there was no point rushing back there immediately. Better to leave things a few days and then swoop in and take advantage of the chaos. The next few days would be spent digging into the financial secrets of Blackmouth, and of Ormwood Development in particular.
A day of calling in favours, digging up information and following threads later and she did not like the picture that was coming together. Ormwood Development was a shell assembled only for the project that bore its name. Beneath the surface lay a score of land management forms, small businesses and independent contractors, all of them clustered about three points of interest: Greyburn Enterprises, Alan Coleman's company that seemed to be the beating heart of Ormwood Development, Delgado & Murray, attorneys and legal support to the whole enterprise, and Hafford 1020, the source of the money and the outer layer of a Matryoshka doll of shell companies that lead back to Pinnacle Solutions, which belonged to Theodore Slocum.
Slocum. That was the third time that name had come up. Nathan Slocum had been a part of the group who had sealed the Tree in the '80s, and it had been an angel investment from his will that had started Condor. Diana was starting to feel like a pawn on someone else's chessboard and she did not like it. She turned on the news as a distraction to let the information settle and saw footage of a traffic accident, a car going through the front of a bar in Ormwood. Morris' indiscretion, but it had been edited to remove him, to make it a simple traffic accident. Shocking but mundanely so. She searched for the footage she had seen before but it was gone, video and channel, without a trace.
Paranoia crept up her spine. Something had wiped away the evidence of Morris' actions. Something been watching Morris, watching them both. Something could be watching her at that moment. She called Price in and plans were made. He recommended a specialist to sweep the office of bugs and listening devices, expensive but thorough and would begin the very next morning. They left the office at Price's insistence, muddying the trail as they went before settling in a bland little motel just off the I-95. As they were considering their options, Diana decided to show Price somewhere they could truely not be spied upon and opened a Pathway to the Basement.
Elsewhere, Jane was having an uncertain evening. She had been feeling hungry for so long now that when she saw someone walk past a beggar on the street, likely not even seeing the man as he slumped his way home, she snapped, shoving the man into the wall and berating him for not caring. He shoved the last $20 in his wallet at Jane and fled for home as soon as he could, leaving Jane feeling good at his punishment and sickened at herself in equal measure. As she tried to process that feeling she felt a presence of someone in the tangled network of their Lair, and sought out a park to cross into the Garden.
Within the dank maze of murmuring pipes that made up the Basement in the Lair, Diana was telling Price some of what she was when Jane arrived. To his credit, Price took everything in his stride. This was not his first encounter with the unnatural - Baghdad, 2006 was all Diana saw in him, but his reaction to her mention of that was enough to know he had seen something before - and it did not change their professional relationship. He suggested that the altered video suggested someone trying to cover things up, something he seemed to have personal experience with, and he was quick to consider ways to secure the Basement, especially the stairwell leading to the ground floor. Stairs that neither Jane nor Diana had ever considered before in the short moments they had spent within the place.
In the Upside Down
At the top of the stairs was a still, grey echo of Willowgate Arcade, a baleful crimson moon visible through the space where a roof should be. Outside was Willow Avenue, still and silent and suffused with a faint grey mist and the light of the crimson moon above, but otherwise like the street they knew and the city sprawled off into the misty night. Nothing moved, no sound, no sign of another living being to break the deathly stillness of that place. Jane and Diana decided to explore, leaving Price in the safety of the known Basement, and so set off into the silent streets.
It took perhaps five minutes before they saw something move. In an alley a few blocks from the reflection of Willowgate, a stain of deeper shadows moved and within they saw an afterimage in the darkness of a woman grabbed and assaulted, bitten by something man-shaped but not human. She whimpered piteously as it savaged her, tearing the lifeblood from her veins as she struggled in vain against its iron grip, and with that the image disappeared into the shadows of the alley. Jane told Diana of the vision she had seen in Moth Park and they decided to travel there through this otherworld which Jane took to calling the Upside Down.
Along the way to Moth park they saw more places like the shadow in the alley. A windswept street where the shade of a jogger fled from something long and low loping after them, a freezer truck thudding rhythmically as something tried to open the locked door, the flickering half-light of a man burning in his car, and a dozen others. Some were livid as raw meat, vivid enough to almost see visions of the pain of those frozen moments, while most had begun to fade into the mists, like wounds healing with time. Something watched them as they walked, a figure standing atop one building then another, always distant, always watching. In Moth Park they found the place Jane had seen, the shadows of the girl and those harming her gone now but they felt the Lair there instead. The hedges of the Garden were one with the twisted hedgerows at the edge of Moth Park, while the great sycamore cast its long shadows across them.
They moved on, uneasy and unsure of why. Perhaps, Diana reasoned, they could find the warehouse where the tree had been kept and bring it back with them into the Lair, or at least into this place away from Ormwood Developments, Slocum and whatever plans were being made. More echoes dotted their path, most indistinct save for the last remnants of fear and pain that hung in the mist like faint, aged scars. The shadows about the warehouse were raw and livid, carved deep by Morris' violence they were impossible to ignore, and Jane and Diana both saw the man's last conscious moments as something brutish and strong crushed him into panicking unconsciousness with contemptuous ease. Yet they could not claim the place, it hung heavy with shadows that neither of their Hearts posessed. It would have to be Morris that claimed that place and used it to steal the Tree.
Hecate
- meeting Hecate. The notebook.
Visiting the Raven
- going to the Raven. Information traded, stories told
- to meet the vampires.
- Quinn, was that thing a werewolf?
- the willowbys and the Moths, always trees
- Nicole to check what she can find out.
People Encountered (in order of appearance)
- Price - Shown the inhuman truth by Diana and Jane.
- Hecate (First Appearance) - Otherworldly being seen Diana and Jane in the Upside Down. Gave Jane a notebook.
- Nicole Morgan - Talked shop and traded stories, convinced to network Diana with vampires.
- Quinn (First Appearance) - Nicole's housemate, quiet nerdy werewolf.
Locations
- Happy's Motel - dull little place in Stanton off the I-95. Where Price and Diana holed up.
- The streets of Willowgate, where Jane stalked a man for daring not to care about others.
- The Upside Down - the otherworld outside the Chambers, named by Jane.
- The White Raven - visited after an excursion into the Upside Down. Things were learned
Notes
- Diana learned many things about Ormwood Development and its twisted corporate schemes, gained Inspired Condition
- Diana's Resources are temporarily suppressed, paying for a highly skilled counterespionage sweep of her offices.
- Diana revealed her supernatural nature to Price and invited him as a Guest into her Lair.
- Jane attacked and fed on someone in Willowgate.
- Much information and favours traded in the White Raven