Professor John M G Challenger / Douglas Rook

[Tesla]

Ok, I'm going to post a few things giving you all the details about the Professor / The Rook you would ever want to know. It will be in sections, each in it's own comment.

Part 1) Epilogue
Part 2) Character creation process. How the Professor became to be.
Part 3) The story of why the Professor became The Rook
Part 4) My back up character
Part 5) My actual background that I sent in (Be warned, this part is long)

[Tesla]

Epilogue
 
After Whisper Hills death knell, The Rook saw the signs. He moved his practice to Pine Bluff but he would disappear into the woods more and more often on the dread lady’s business over the years.
One day he just didn’t come back. But now and then the locals will see a pure white crow flying through the trees as if it has important business somewhere. It’s sometimes accompanied by a crow with one blue feather among the black.
And somewhere, an unsuspecting person opened a package from a relative they don’t remember. Inside they find a crow skull necklace, and the memory passes along…

[Tesla]

Character creation thought process
 
When I first created the Professor, I hadn’t been LARPing in a long time. I wanted to create a non-combat support role, but I didn’t want to make just another healer. While they are important, I wanted a job that would stand out. I came across the Speak/Read language skills in the Professor branch and I was off.

The Professor’s entire initial build was an attempt to be useful, hoping that some group would want him to tag along out of utility. Security system for the cabin I was in, One Percenter so I would have a few credits to use.  Add the Armchair psychiatrist to help with sanity. Since I was already into information skills, I added scholarly research and Study.
I wanted him to have a little something different, so I added a splash of the Shaman header. I figured that he can already speak with anything alive, now he can speak with spirits. (The whole distinction between Spirits, Ghost and Shadows came about because of my forum questions to Jacob before the game started)

I also took level 3 strange inheritance just because it looks so interesting. Because of this, I needed more twist points and thus The Professor was doomed to be Human. I actually wanted him to be Psychic so I could speak with ghosts too, but there just wasn’t enough points.
 
For a name, I wanted something easy to make into a nickname. You ever notice support characters quickly become named after their jobs? Healers become Doc, so I figured Professor would be mine. It was good enough on Gilligan’s Island. His name is based on Arthur Conan Doyle characters, John Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Brigadier Gerard, Professor George Challenger.


As for costuming, I was trying for the tweed jacket, patches on the elbow, pipe smoking professor stereotype, but I also wanted something to give my character a signature. I decided that after finding the crow skull I used for my strange inheritance, I would add crows to my costume.
When the first Crow spirits showed up before the Lady in White, I knew that I had found My Plot. It was like destiny.

[Tesla]

Why The Professor became The Rook

Let this be a cautionary tale, people. Be very careful what you put in your character background. One little sentence can give Staff all types of dangerous and fun ideas.

I had written a fairly extensive character background. To embellish it a little, I used the names of fictional people for everyone in the Professor’s background (Parents, friends, acquaintances). As an example, I wrote that Barbara Wright was his mother. That’s the name of The Doctor’s first companion.
I also added a bit of philosophy and pseudoscience to help explain why he could speak with spirits. (Shaman Header). I basically used the background to explain how he would have the headers, advantages and disadvantages I had picked.

Then I ended the whole background with

“(Of course, considering his history of seeing things, the entire memory of his life and history could have just been one long delusional episode. Only the butterfly knows for sure.)”
 
Just a little off-the-cuff line. No big deal….
That sentence would come back to bite me.
Fast forward about 2 years. I had been playing the Professor for a while, but I had become a bit bored with him. I wanted a more active role, a chance to go out and swing a weapon. So I sent a message to Coco and staff in general to ask if it would be ok if the Professor had a nervous breakdown. Give him an in-game reason to start acting different. My reasoning is that having dealt with everyone else’s problems, he had no one to turn to for himself for therapy and he finally snapped.
Staff came back with “Surrrre. The Professor can go a little crazy and not act like himself, no problem.”
Gods and Goddesses, this must have given Staff a few giggles, knowing what they already knew about him.

In game, some people noticed my odd behavior. Most assumed that I had been replaced with a Crow spirit, as I had been hanging around with the Lady in White a lot. (My devotion to her actually manifested in a different way.) Leo really was bothered by these changes. Sorry, man.

A few events later, we had helped The Dread Lady stop the Well of Bones in its travels and we entered it with the help of Mr. Saturday to try and bolster the Moriggan’s army of souls in preparation to confronting Balor. We were supposed to call out for souls inside the Well and either persuade them or force them to exit the Well.

I stepped in and called out for a soul and out walks the ghost of Professor John M. G. Challenger yelling at me, calling me a “Murderer” and “Thief”. I was stunned. My jaw was on the floor!
It turns out, I wasn’t Me.
Several conversations over a few events and much apologizing later, I learned that I was actually an unnamed patient of the real Professor Challenger and I had murdered him in his office to steal the crow skull necklace that I now wore. The skull contains a powerful memory spirit and that allowed me to tap into the real professor’s memories and skills.

Yes, people. This means that you all were getting therapy from a murdering psychopath who had by this point had started worshipping the Morrigan, goddesses of Death and regularly made blood sacrifices over an altar to her. You may have noticed the cut marks on my arm some days. I don’t think anyone notice the fingers I cut off people we killed to keep snacks for the crow spirits when they visited.
The ghost of The Professor actually forgave me for murdering him, but requested that I stop using his name. By this point The Lady in White had appointed me her new Rook. The old Rook had been slain in the war with Balor. That’s when I started to ask people to call me Rook and had my name changed to Douglas Rook on my ID.
My change in costume actual came about because I lost some things, the purple and red ties with crows screenprinted on them. While packing for an event, I found them missing. I went through my other ties, but none really went with the rest of my outfit. Looking in the back of my closet, I found a white tie I had worn ages ago to a Samhain Dumb Supper. The friend I had gone with had earlier commented that she only ever saw me where black. So I showed up in all white, head to toe. Seeing that tie reminded me, I still had the pants and a shirt. As Imitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery, I went for it. Showed up in the All White copy of the Lady’s clothes.

[Tesla]

Back-Up character

I warned Staff early on that if the Professor was killed off, my next character was going to be an IRS agent. Considering where I work, this wouldn’t have been a huge stretch of character.

I introduce Maximillian Decker – IRS agent and secret member of the Bavarian Illuminati. Working on destroying the US Dollar as a currency.  I don’t know if the Bavarian Illuminati actually exists in Occam’s Razor universe, but Agent Decker or Maximillian (Never Max!) believes his family has worked in secret with them for generations.

[Tesla]

The Background and History of one, Professor John M. G. Challenger


As with most human beings, the professor’s life story started with his parents meeting. His father was George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Yale University and previously of Brown University. John’s earliest memories of his father are of a busy man who was always nervous, having the haggard appearance of someone haunted by the past. His Mother’s name is Barbara Wright, currently retired from administration in the History department of Yale University after her husband passed away. She has aged quite well, not changing at all from when John can first remember.

The two of them first met at a Yale University faculty function. George had just transferred from Brown University and Barbara had just moved in from London, taking a spot in the Archeology dept. They hit it off, having a mutual interest in ancient civilizations. George was fascinated with the development and the spread of languages while Barbara had such a vast knowledge, you would think she had actually been there. After a short courtship, they were married. When Barbara switched areas to the History department, they moved into faculty housing on campus and lived there quite happily until George passed away only a few years ago.

The couple decided upon their nuptials that they should both keep their last names, but combine them with a hyphen. They found the last name of Wright-Angell to be terribly amusing. The child who would grow up to be the professor was born 2 years later. The name they graced their first and only offspring with was so horrifying of a pun, that it need not be placed in print here. Let it just be said, that upon his 18th birthday and reaching his majority, he immediately had his name legally changed. That he was an avid Arthur Conan Doyle fan was quite evident. As he named himself for four of his favorite characters, John Mycroft Gerard Challenger.

From an early age, the John knew that his parents were busy people. They were constantly going off to the far corners of the world to delve into some dig site or other. His father always looked like he was running away from something while his mother always seemed to be searching for something. This did not leave a lot of time to raise a child and to be perfectly honest, while highly educated, both of them were not very well suited to the task. John always thought that his mother must have been married before meeting his father. She never spoke the other man’s name, but she always talked fondly of a Doctor. His father, on the other hand, didn’t like to talk about his past. Usually he referred to the people at Brown University as a cult.

Because of the horrible name his parents had given him, he was a target of bullies at school. This meant that he was a solitary child, having no brothers or sisters and his parents being preoccupied. But while he was alone, he was never lonely. Luckily, John had his Friends. Most children have imaginary friends when they are young, slowly growing out of the need for them, until they vanish as memories of youth. This was not John’s case. John had always had Friends that no one else could see. But these Friends were quite a bit more than imaginary. He spent time playing hide and seek with Abraham Lincoln, played checkers with Lazarus Long and learned proper manners from Marie Antoinette. As he grew older, he had two particular friends that taught him much of life at Yale, Nicholas Carraway and Tom Buchanan. When he was old enough to wonder who these friends were, he came to believe that he was able to see ghosts and his mentors were past professors at the university, since they seemed to know so much about the school.

He did make the mistake once of telling his mother that he thought he could see dead people. This caused a full year of psychoanalysis and therapy to break him of his “delusion”. His psychiatrist, Dr. Cole Sear was a very nice fellow. He gave John lollipops and listened to his stories of playing baseball with Babe Ruth and learning math from Albert Einstein. He made no progress in changing John’s mind about his Friends and the therapy sessions abruptly ended when one of Dr. Sear’s other patient, a Malcom Crowe, killed himself. The doctor ended his practice and dropped all his patients. His mother, believing that John was better, never found another doctor. And John, having learned his lesson, never mentioned his Friends to anyone again.

The professor did have to admit that growing up at Yale, with all its history, its libraries and other facilities was a great place. He found that, like his father, he had a talent for languages. He was taught Algic by Sequoiah, Brythonic by Boudicca, Hieratic by Moses, and Sinitic by Sun Tzu. He learned to enjoy music from Peter Tchaikovsky and Janis Joplin. He got lessons on how to shoot from George S. Patton. He even got his “Birds & the Bees” talk from Marilyn Monroe herself.

It was a good, if strange childhood. Upon his 18th birthday, he decided that he needed to go out and see the world, before going to college and finishing his education. As previously mentioned, he had his name officially changed. While it disappointed his parents that he was delaying his education, they understood the need. With little experience but a lot of luck, he signed onto a merchant ship named the Firefly that was light handed. The Captain, Malcom Reynolds welcomed him aboard and advised him not to misbehave, or they would have words. They put out to sea for a 6 month tour. John did have some trouble with one of his shipmates, a man by the name of Jane. John was used to having his own name made fun of when he was younger, so he tried to be sensitive about the matter. That was the wrong course of action. Jane hated the name and didn’t appreciate the sympathy. Instead, John stayed below decks, working in the engine room with the two oriental engineers, Kai and Lee.

Out on the sea, he found that his Friends did not follow him. He was able to learn to deal with and work with real people. This was a good time in his life. But it had to come to an end. Five months out on the trade routes, they sailed into a serious blow on the North Atlantic off the coast of Norway. The pilot, Hoban tried to take shelter in a fjord. One of the hatches broke open and John volunteered to go out on deck to try and get it closed before the ship was swamped, while he did succeed in getting the hatch closed, he was swept overboard and lost to the sea, while trying to get back inside. The ship patrolled back and forth after the storm and the crew looked for him, but had to report him as lost at sea.

He actually washed ashore quickly and was able to crawl into a cave on the rocky beach for shelter. Amazingly, he found an old grizzled man sitting by a nice warm fire inside the cave. He didn’t think anything of it when the old salt with one eye helped get him dried off and fed him some barley porridge and stockfish. The two ravens sitting on the stranger’s shoulders watched him, as the two wolves lying at the greybeard’s feet just yawned and went back to sleep. Then the old man started talking. John was in that cave for 9 days. What that elder told John, he has never told another soul. For the first time though, he understood that not all of the beings he saw were his friends. He now knew that they could threaten, that they could be malevolent and that some even had the power to harm. He had learned to be scared of his Friends.

He walked to the nearest town and then hitchhiked to the nearest port. He was able to find another ship headed back to the U.S. Captain Robert Brown listened to his story about being thrown overboard but surviving and granted John a berth on “The Ophelia”. The fast flying ship was on its way back to the States after an expedition for a Dr. Leguminous Calgori. The trip home was uneventful. Even though John was certain that the crew members were some type of pirates. They were often drunk and a danger to themselves.

When he arrived back home at Yale his parents were overjoyed to find out he was still alive. With his parent’s recommendation and his prior excellent academics, he was admitted to Yale University the following semester and he settled in to try and live a normal college life. He moved out of his parent’s place and into the dorms. He started a major in languages, but that was very little challenge. He soon changed to psychology where he found that he liked delving the nuances of how people thought. He had many long discussions with his dorm roommate, Bobby Newmark. A computer science major who only lasted a semester before taking off with some girl he met named Sally or Molly or something.

He spent much of his time avoiding or ignoring the people that other people couldn’t see. He didn’t want the world to think that he was crazy after all. He even found time to date. His first girlfriend was Topanga Lawrence, but she decided she was to grown up for him. She wanted a man, not a boy. Later he found Rory Gilmore, but that didn’t last either. She was always more interested in hanging out with the girls. While he wasn’t lucky in love, he did fine in classes. The only incident that marred his record was two other students were caught cheating off his exam. It wasn’t his fault, but Robert Underdunk Terwilleger Jr. and Montgomery Burns were disciplined and almost expelled. They both vowed revenge for his turning them in, but nothing ever came from their empty threats

It wasn’t until his fifth year, after getting his bachelor’s and working on his PhD, that he had a revelation about his ability to see the unseen. Up until then, he had assumed that what he was seeing were ghosts, spirits of the departed, souls if you will. He had done some studying on spiritualism, but there were very few credible sources. He did come across a fairly good journal article by a Margaret Gwendolyn LeFay McCoy that sounded promising. It covered spirits of various types, but started to definitely get weird when it moved onto the subject of Fae. He had to discount most of it, but it did mention a fellow in Chicago by the name of Mortimer Lindquist that sounded like he might know something. Apparently he had even written several books, but John was unable to track any of them down in the local libraries or bookstores.

While going through the local bookstores though, he did come across Garretson Trudeau, editor-in-chief of The Yale Record, Yale’s college humor magazine and cartoonist of the comic Bull Tales for the paper, the Yale Daily News. John found his new-found friend’s comic to be hilarious and Garry thought John spun great tall tales about his imaginary friends which he chalked up to both of them liking to smoke a little something that wasn’t banana peels. It’s possible some of John’s friends may have had an influence on Garry’s later writing. After one particular late night bull session, John woke up the next morning to see Zonker Harris making an omelet in his kitchen. He was obviously a spirit, fairly translucent and weak. But the part that amazed John was that Zonker was a fictional character from his friend’s comic strip, a fairly recently added character at that. Though Zonker was based on a real life friend named Norville Rogers, who had dropped out of school to drive around the country in his van with his dog and his friends, meddling in other people’s business, Zonker himself was not real.

John’s whole theory of seeing spirits of the dead was debunked. Since Zonker Harris never existed, there is no way he could have a ghost. Zonker kept showing up though. Getting more and more solid as the weeks passed. It was then that John had his epiphany. Zonker was getting stronger as his character was getting more popular. The more people believed in him, the more substantial he actually became. John’s study of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious clicked into place. These spirits he saw were not souls of people passed. They were the psychic distillation of what people believed. He had never met George Washington. He had met a Spirit of what people around the world “believed” George Washington was. It had coalesced out of the ether according to the psychic impression of human beings. To put it simply, if people believed in it, it existed out there somewhere.

A recent book by Robert Heinlein, “The Number of the Beast” also helped shape this new concept. Heinlein’s theory of the World as Myth could mean that John was actually seeing into a different ”Fiction” across the border into the multiverse or, more likely, entities from those other dimensions were coming close enough to John’s home plane for him to see and interact with them. And that people’s belief in these entities made that connection stronger. John based his doctoral thesis on this concept of mankind’s psychic influence on an infinite multiverse. That the very thought of something actually is the act of creating it somewhere/somewhen or possibly that the existence of something in the infinite other worlds allows a person to conceive of it, posed a wonderfully complex philosophical and psychological question about existence. This and several articles that followed won him acclaim and several awards.

On the day after his graduation, John received a package from Oslo, Norway. It was a bequest from a great Uncle he had never met. In truth, his father had never even mentioned him. It was an odd little thing. A bird’s skull, he thought either a crow or a raven, on a loop of leather fashioning it into a crude necklace. A short note from the deceased, Sigfodr Alfodr Wôdan simply stated that the necklace was an old family heirloom and that he may find it interesting. John didn’t think much of it, but lent it to an ornithologist friend to identify. 3 nights later, while he was attending a lecture, his apartment was broken into and trashed. It was pretty obvious that someone had been looking for the skull and were upset that they didn’t find it. They left a note scratched into the wall, “Gives it to uss”. He got the necklace back from his friend and has kept it close ever since. He bought himself a pistol for defense and he makes sure that wherever he stays, he gets the best security he can find.

That academic notoriety from his theories led directly to a teaching position and not long after that, a professorship at his alma mater. He was officially now, Professor Challenger. One of the first duties he performed was to help his father out. Miskatonic University needed a professor versed in Brythonic to finish teaching an advanced class in that language. The normal teacher, Professor Warren Rice, was recovering from some incident that happened in Dunwich. Usually, His father would take on the duties of a traveling professor in languages, but he seemed particularly reluctant to take on this post. He spent a night with his son and a bottle of Scotch and convinced John that seeing how other universities worked would be good for his career. John went with some reluctance, but found the university most interesting. He had no problem filling in for Professor Rice and was actually able to develop a working knowledge of the Uralic language while he was there. He returned to Yale better educated and with a few new friends to correspond with, the life of an academic was treating him well.

It was 10 years after his incident in the cave and he had started to forget it, but it came back to haunt him with the shadow of a black wing. John had been having trouble sleeping. Several nights of nightmares and the strange half-remembered images of black feathers had him huddled in his easy chair reading long into the night. He heard a rapping noise at the window. When he looked, it was a raven on the sill, banging a beetle on the ledge to kill it. John thought nothing of this, but his sleep deprived brain kept insisting that he could faintly hear a raven’s croaking over the next several days. He tried to ignore it, but it seemed to get louder and more persistent. Finally, one night, he went over to the window and opened it. A raven was sitting there, as if waiting for him. The Professor, being a gentleman, gestured for the bird to enter. But not before muttering under his breath, “If you croak ‘Nevermore’, I will stuff you in a pie and bake it myself.” The bird flew once around the room and settled down on the back of the davenport and eyed the National Geographic map of the world he had decorating the wall. With great deliberateness, the Raven poked a hole in the Four Corners area of the United States. After eyeing the professor for another minute, the bird flapped again and flew out the window.

Not being dimwitted, this heavy handed message told the Professor he needed to make a trip. He applied for a leave of absence from his teaching duties, told the University he was off to chase down some obscure Native American language and booked a flight to Utah. Renting a jeep after he arrived, he drove south. Not knowing the area and working only on a vague feeling, he had to pull over and get directions to the Navajo Nation from a guy headed in the other direction. Name was Fox Mulder, guy was pretty spooky. He looked like hell, like he’d been buried alive.

It was many dusty miles later that he spotted a raven flying overhead. As the crow flies is an old saying and more hours of following the raven found him out in the middle of nowhere and in front of an ancient hogan. When the bird landed over the door, he knew that he had arrived. He entered the low building and that’s the last thing he remembers. He passed out and when he awoke, it was night and he was staring up at the stars. The raven skull felt warm on his chest. The hogan was gone, as if it never existed. The only thing left was a pile of black feathers by his right hand and a pile of white feathers by his left. Shaking his head, John just headed back to the safety and relative sanity of Yale.

Professor Challenger was a popular teacher, with his strange theories of human psyche and his habit of talking to people that weren’t even there. The students thought it was some novel teaching technique of his and found these debates with imaginary students to be instructional. He published several more papers on the collective unconscious, but it seemed his facilities with languages were being used more and more as his father’s health started to deteriorate. He has his father to thank for one of the more colorful and fascinating adventures of his life.

Professor Angell heard through some sources that there was a fellow living in the small Central American country of Hidalgo who claimed to speak fluent Mayan. Andrew Blodgett Mayfair was an old lieutenant colonel that had retired to the sleepy little country as an ex-pat and spent his days enjoying the sun and his evenings talking to the senoritas and brawling with their brothers, when they objected. His father, not being in the best of health, implored John to take the time to learn and preserve this language. It was extremely rare for a non-native to be fluent, as even the local tribesman only had a few words left of the old language.

John listened to his father and took a sabbatical and headed down south via the Hidalgo Trading Company and soon found Mayfair drinking cervezas at the local watering hole. On that first night, he got drunk, got into a bar fight, wooed a local lass and jumped into the Atlantic ocean naked. (Not in that exact order, but the memory is a bit fuzzy) He spent 3 glorious months in a tropical paradise, learning Mayan, listening to the old coot’s impossible stories about his old boss, Clark Savage Jr., drinking and getting into mischief. Mayfair even commented that John looked a bit like Clark, once John had taken more of a tan, a faint family resemblance. He told him to look up the Wold Newton family when he got back. After the Professor felt he was as fluent as he would ever be, John wished Mayfair a fond farewell and promised to look up his friend who still lived in the states, a Theodore Marley Brooks who resided in an elderly housing facility in upstate New York. Mayfair told him to bring Brooks a ham as a special present, he’d love it.

John settled back into academia with contentment. Years passed as classes were taught, students were counseled and faculty functions survived. John did find that his father was a distant offshoot of the Wold Newton family and they had fun tracking down some of the family tree. His father’s health did not improve, actually declining as time passed. His lungs, then his heart started to betray him and fail to work up to standard. John continued to travel on occasion, sometimes at the Call of the Raven. Some form of omen or sign would tip him off that he should take a trip. Sometimes it was an exotic locale, sometimes terribly mundane. I won’t recount all his exploits here, but I will impart one more of the trips precipitated by the raven skull pendant.

It was in April, and a particularly urgent message was given. A flock of Ravens swarmed him while he was walking through New Haven Green. They left behind a branch with a sakura, a cherry blossom on it. As the cherry blossoms had already fallen in Washington D.C., but were still blooming in the south of Japan, he deduced that he was headed for the land of sushi and sararimen. It took some lying and some help from his mom, but he was able to get an immediate week off for a fake family emergency and he was flying to Kyoto to see his cousin “Usagi Tsukino” who was getting married to “Mamoru Chiba” in a hurry. He landed in the morning, just in time for the Sakura Cherry Blossom Festival at the Jishu Shrine. A huge sign at the airport pointed the way to Kiyomizu-dera. The row of blackbirds on top of the sign told him that he should head directly there.

He was met at the Shrine’s entrance by the usual greeters, but one of the Buddhist monks saw him and motioned for him to follow. The fellow had the longest and reddest nose the professor had ever seen. Quickly and without a word, the odd little fellow guided him out past the Otowa waterfall to a quiet courtyard and with gestures, bade him sit. After a few minutes, a giant black bird flew into the yard and landed on the bench across from John. The bird ignored John and stared at the raven skull that John wore as a pendant. John could swear that the skull and the bird were talking with each other, though he couldn’t hear a sound. After what seemed like a very boring half hour, the raven jerked, stood up on three legs and flew off as two cats wandered into the courtyard. One white and one grey, the felines both seemed to have moon shaped patches on their foreheads. The cats stopped to stare at John, which he did not like at all. He left and picked up his luggage, just in time to catch the next flight back to the U.S.

His father finally passed away 3 years ago. He kept his morale up to the very end. He joked on his death bed that there are worse ways to die, it sure beat being pushed down a hill be a negro sailor. For some unknown reason, he found this hilarious and laughed until his lungs failed and he passed. His mother staid another year to clear up loose ends, then resigned and moved back to London, where she now has a cottage in the Shoreditch area. She left the bulk of his George’s estate to John. It wasn’t a fortune, but it made for a small trust fund that would see him through his years.

Recently, one of his psychology students, Niles Crane mentioned that some new discoveries had been made at L'Anse Aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. The sight is believed to be a possible ancient Viking settlement. Near the end of the summer break, the professor heard the call of the ravens again. Notifying the Department head, he arranged for a sabbatical for the upcoming semester. He then packed up his kit, said goodbye to Julie Newmar and headed off north. Since he had a little money tucked away, he decided to rent a classic Cadillac convertible and cruise through New England and Quebec on the way to Newfoundland. He made good time heading through Massachusetts but ran into trouble in New Hampshire. On a small deserted country highway, a girl ran out from behind a bush onto the road in front of him. He was able to miss her, but the caddy ended up in the ditch. A bit rattled, he looked for the girl, but couldn’t find a trace of her. He eventually flagged down a greyhound bus and they gave him a lift to the next exit, a little town by the name of Whisper Hill. He was able to convince a sleepy gas station attendant to go tow his car to the garage, where he got the bad news. The gas tank was breeched and a new one would have to be ordered before the car could be fixed. He nearly missed the ravens on the wire above the local motel when he checked in, but maybe, just maybe, he’s where he’s supposed to be for now.

(Of course, considering his history of seeing things, the entire memory of his life and this history could have just been one long delusional episode. Only the butterfly knows for sure)

[Tesla]

For those keeping track at home, I’ve made references to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror”, Doctor Who, Pythagoras, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his characters, over 13 historical figures, “The Sixth Sense”, Robert A. Heinlein and some of his creations, “The Great Gatsby”, “Firefly/Serenity”, Odin (or possibly Loki), The steampunk band- Abney Park, William Gibson’s books, “Boy meets World”, “Gilmore Girls”, “The Simpsons”, The Dresden Files, Gary Trudeau and Bloom County, Scooby Doo, Edgar Allan Poe, The X-Files, Raven-the native-american deity, Doc Savage- Pulp fiction hero and the Wold Newton family as imagined by Phillip Jose Farmer, Tengu, Sailor Moon, “Frasier”, “To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar”, Silent Hill, and Zhuangzi

[redraverfae]

And now I can finally say it: HAHAHAHAHA, so good. <3