Venue: The Secret World
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Nine: The Gypsy's Diary
Chapter Ten:The Ground's Keeper
Chapter Nine – The Gypsy’s Diary (By Madam Roget)
Danny came by earlier, with Carter. I did a palm reading for her and the look on his face when I told Carter she would fall in love with a close friend... Teenagers. Who needs cold reading when you can practically smell the hormones? Anyways, Danny mentioned that he wanted to put together a book of stories, local ghost stories and urban legends. I'm not sure it is a good idea - this island has a lot of secrets and some of them are buried deeper than others.
Still, I can't say no to Danny and I have a story that I heard when I first decided to get into the palm reading business. It scares me because of the things that I can do, and lately, the truth of those things that I see. Especially the responsibility that comes with it.
You see, history is written by the victors. And if time is a circle, perhaps the future is as well. My visions could be road signs guiding people to the wrong places.
To Exodus. -- M Roget
In the beginning, the family wasn't sure that they wanted to settle on Solomon Island.
"It's cold" complained the youngest girl, Sinfoy. "Papa, it is too cold."
"It's lonely" complained the mother, Kezia. "Husband, it is too isolated."
"It's dark" complained the older brother, Onas. "Papa is too dark."
Abraham, who was a good father and did his best to make his family happy, considered their words carefully. His mother, Elderia, spoke quietly. "The roots of magic have grown deep on this island. We will find peace here."
Elderia was a seer and her predictions always came true. Abraham weighed his mothers words before making his decision.
"We are Romany, Sinfoy. Our fires drive away the cold. We are Romany, Kezia. Our family will drive away the loneliness. We are Romany, Onas, our hearts bring the light wherever we travel. Mother is right, there is a great future here for us all."
So they settled on the island and, in time, grew to love it as their home.
Elderia eventually fell sick and, on her deathbed, she called for the girl Sinfoy. Pulling the girl closer to her, she produced a thick leather diary from beneath the covers.
"This diary is distorted in time. Every morning of your life, when you check the diary, it will tell you the events of that day. Every night, the same page will be blank and you will need to write down exactly what happened."
Sinfoy took the diary, running her fingers over the leather in wonder.
"Should I read it? Should I know?" She asked. But Elderia was dead and the question went unanswered.
Time passed, and the diary came to be everything to Sinfoy. She read through the daily entry each morning and prepared herself for the events of the day. She knew what she was supposed to do and she followed the script of her life. Every night she dutifully wrote down everything that would happen.
When the diary told her that her brother woudl break his leg, she didn't warn him and she didn't flinch at the news when it happened. The diary told her that he didn't want to know.
But when she came home that day, she found her parents gathered around her brother. His leg was broken, and his pelvis and his hips. He had been beaten, and sodomized, by a group of ruffians from the town. Written across his chest in blood was the epithet "GYPSY SCUM".
"If you knew what was going to happen, would you have told yourself? Sent a letter to yourself in the past? Even if you couldn't change it?" Sinfoy asked her brother, tears streaming at his pain.
Onas shook his head.
"The man I was this morning was a happier man. Knowing this...this pain was coming would just have robbed him of his happiness. I would never tell."
That night, Sinfoy wrote only that her brother would break his leg and that he didn't want to know.
Sometime later, Onas met the love of his life while getting a medical checkup.
Life continued, until the day that Sinfoy was performing her regular ritual of reading the diary to prepare for the events of the day and she turned the page to the current date and gasped, shocked by the words written there.
"Today, mother and father died in the fire that burned down our house. This is the saddest day of my life."
Distraught, Sinfoy ran immediately to warn her father.
Confronted by his hysterical daughter, Abraham listened to her ramblings about his imminent death. Being a kind father, he humored her and spoke to his wife. Together, they made sure that no fire or spark was lit in the house that day or night. All the while, Sinfoy clung to them, convinced that they would somehow find a way to burn and die before her very eyes.
The night came and they both still lived. Relieved, Sinfoy returned to write in the diary. But she hesitated. What if she wrote that nothing had happened? Wouldn't the fire actually happen then? Had she prevented the fire by warning herself about it? Was the only way to prevent her parents from dying to, in fact, lie and write that they were going to die?
She filled in the entry exactly as she had seen it that morning.
But as time passed, Sinfoy began to lose trust in the diary. What was she leaving out at the end of each day? What were the things that she wasn't telling herself.?
These worries weighed on her and she began to live her days in constant fear of the details she didn't know. Any surprise was not to be trusted. She began to keep herself in the house, preferring to stay inside where it was safe.
She grew listless, only checking her diary in the morning and at night, filling it with the same safe phrase day after day.
You stayed home. All was well. You are safe and you are still beautiful.
A black depression seized her and her parents brought in several doctors to examine her. But there was nothing that could be done, Sinfoy had simply given up on living her life.
It was almost a relief for her, on the day she opened the diary and read the very last entry. Today you are going to die. You will walk to the cliffs near the Langmore Bridge and throw yourself off. You will always be beautiful.
Humming, she dressed herself in the best clothing she had that still fit, bade goodbye to her parents and walked along the road to the Langmore bridge.
And there, she threw herself off.
And as she fell, the last thought that passed through her mind was:
"Who wrote that?"
Chapter Ten – The Ground's Keeper (By Carter)
"Danny asked me to put something together for the League - a creepy story for Halloween. I guess he figured with this school and all, there'd be a lot of creepy stories getting around. And he's right, this place is full of them. Montag is an encyclopedia of horrible stories - but the way he tells them he doesn't even know they are scary. And Ms Usher, she always talks about the fae and the things that lurk out of sight. But all of that stuff is a bit too academic and I know Danny wants something more...local.
Weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island. And the people here...there is something wrong with them. This is the story of a local man, a groundskeeper who worked at the school. What happened to him.. Well, weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island."
--Carter
Sometimes you'd see him looking at you, you know? Just staring. If you looked back, he'd just cock an eyebrow and take a swig from his hip flask. He never seemed intimidated at all.
Almost worse were the times when he wasn't looking. You'd be changing with the curtains open and you'd look outside and he'd be there, pruning the tree outside your window. But not looking, no. Never doing anything that could get him fired or in trouble with the staff. He was just there, in the space that you swore was empty just a moment ago.
I'd put it down to him being just a dirty old man getting an eyeful, but it wasn't just the girls, it was the boys too.
There was something a little off about Donnie Bedloe.
He was a townie, a Kingsmouth local his whole life. Since I started at the Academy, he was always here, employed as the groundskeeper. He lived in that shitty shack just outside the walls and he never wore anything but a dirty leather smock, a pair of brown overalls and a stained white singlet. I never saw him with a haircut, his hair just hung in dirty grey tatters around his shoulders.
During the day he'd be here and there around the grounds, fiddling with this and that, but always looking. He was always fixing things - at least that was what you assumed - but among the kids we were always whispering about the trap he was setting.
You see when the library dome shattered and seven kids had to go to the infirmary with serious cuts, someone said that they had seen Donnie up there with a hammer. And when one of the viewing stands on the lacrosse field collapsed and all those kids got hurt, there was a rumor that Donnie had been there just before, carrying a wrench.
Some of the older kids thought it would be a good idea to tell Montag about the rumors, just in case they were true.
Three of the seniors tried to go up to the Headmaster's office, Millicent Durae, Johnny Stephenson and Ron Tucker. But Donnie was waiting for them on the staircase.
As usual, he didn't say anything. He just looked and cocked an eyebrow, took a swig from his flask, and went back to hammering on the banister with his rusty old hammer.
They didn't have the nerve to go on. By night, Donnie was a watchman. He used to walk around the walls, carrying a high-powered flashlight and keeping an eye out for any kids who thought it might be fun to sneak out and go to Susie's. Anyone who got caught came back trembling and freaked out.
"He wasn't there...and then he was right on top of me." One of them told me.
One day, Donnie Bedloe disappeared. Nobody saw him around the grounds and his shack became overgrown and abandoned. Eventually some kids found out what happened.
Apparently, one summer night, Donnie Bedloe, the Groundskeeper drank too much from his own hipflask and went stumbling into the ocean down by Mason Crescent. They never found his body, but they did find his empty hipflask and boots.
It's a horrible thing to say, but all of us kids drew a sigh of relief. For a while, we reveled in the freedom, sneaking over the wall at night and into town.
But every now and then, you'd get the feeling someone was watchign you and when you spun to look, nobody was there.
Then one night, Millicent Durae and Ron Tucker went missing.
Montag and a group of teachers did, you know, their thing and found a trail. It led out of the school, past the old groundskeepers shack and down to the beach near the end of Mason Crescent.
And there, by the water, they found the clothes which belonged to Millicent and Ron and an empty hipflask.
This is Innsmouth Academy and accidents happen all the time, but this was really disturbing. It was even worse when the teachers announced that it has been some kind of suicide pact. Anyone who knew Millicent or Ron just knew that wasn't true.
Johnny Stephenson became super paranoid after that. He said he was being watched, wherever he went. But no matter how fast he looked, he could never see who it was.
Of course, all of us were talking about Donnie at this point and we all knew why Johnny was feeling the pinch. And when we woke up one morning and Johnny was gone from his bed, we all knew what they would find, down by Mason Crescent.
And sure enough, a pair of shoes, a nightgown, and an empty bottle of booze were the only signs of Johnny Stephenson.
When Montag gathered the school together and told us the sad news of Johnny's "suicide" someone, I don't remember who, shouted out something about the similarities between the deaths of the student and the death of the groundkeeper.
I'll never forget the look on Montag's face when he replied.
"Young lady, this school hasn't had a groundkeeper since 1806"
Final Report
The Dragon:
Let me tell you a story from the future. A security guard reads a book of spooky stories. One of them triggers a fear reaction - his pupils dilate and icy fingers seem to touch his spine. He shivers and wipes his eyes. In the space of that shiver, you are past him and into the maximum security area of Orochi Tower...
Stories are the purest form of telepathy. They allow us to communicate across space, but also across time and spirit. A skilled writer can communicate every skipped heartbeat, every fearful breath and every blood wound. Words are power. Your future depends upon them.
The Illuminati:
That Danny kid is wholesomely adorable, isn't he? Most of the kids you meet in this job are either possessed by entities from the outer dark, filled with some kind of godly power or busy trying out the benefits of erotic asphyxiation. Okay that last one might have just been Bieber when we first picked him up. Anyhow, don't judge the whole organization by the massive black hole of occult fuckery that is Solomon Island. That place is a magnet for weird shit and if you haven't learned anything else by now, take this one to heart: this could happen everywhere if we don't slam a lid down on Tokyo.
The Templar:
Solomon Island may well qualify as the location in the world with the most ghostly stories per square feet in the entire world. No matter how deep you dig on that island, there always seem to be a layer of fresh skeletons waiting just beneath. The fact that you found all these stories is remarkable; the fact that you could verify most of them... that's disturbing. We'll pass this to the archivists. They tend to score a bit further down the courage scale than your average Templar - this collection might keep them up for weeks.
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Nine: The Gypsy's Diary
Chapter Ten:The Ground's Keeper
Danny came by earlier, with Carter. I did a palm reading for her and the look on his face when I told Carter she would fall in love with a close friend... Teenagers. Who needs cold reading when you can practically smell the hormones? Anyways, Danny mentioned that he wanted to put together a book of stories, local ghost stories and urban legends. I'm not sure it is a good idea - this island has a lot of secrets and some of them are buried deeper than others.
Still, I can't say no to Danny and I have a story that I heard when I first decided to get into the palm reading business. It scares me because of the things that I can do, and lately, the truth of those things that I see. Especially the responsibility that comes with it.
You see, history is written by the victors. And if time is a circle, perhaps the future is as well. My visions could be road signs guiding people to the wrong places.
To Exodus. -- M Roget
In the beginning, the family wasn't sure that they wanted to settle on Solomon Island.
"It's cold" complained the youngest girl, Sinfoy. "Papa, it is too cold."
"It's lonely" complained the mother, Kezia. "Husband, it is too isolated."
"It's dark" complained the older brother, Onas. "Papa is too dark."
Abraham, who was a good father and did his best to make his family happy, considered their words carefully. His mother, Elderia, spoke quietly. "The roots of magic have grown deep on this island. We will find peace here."
Elderia was a seer and her predictions always came true. Abraham weighed his mothers words before making his decision.
"We are Romany, Sinfoy. Our fires drive away the cold. We are Romany, Kezia. Our family will drive away the loneliness. We are Romany, Onas, our hearts bring the light wherever we travel. Mother is right, there is a great future here for us all."
So they settled on the island and, in time, grew to love it as their home.
Elderia eventually fell sick and, on her deathbed, she called for the girl Sinfoy. Pulling the girl closer to her, she produced a thick leather diary from beneath the covers.
"This diary is distorted in time. Every morning of your life, when you check the diary, it will tell you the events of that day. Every night, the same page will be blank and you will need to write down exactly what happened."
Sinfoy took the diary, running her fingers over the leather in wonder.
"Should I read it? Should I know?" She asked. But Elderia was dead and the question went unanswered.
Time passed, and the diary came to be everything to Sinfoy. She read through the daily entry each morning and prepared herself for the events of the day. She knew what she was supposed to do and she followed the script of her life. Every night she dutifully wrote down everything that would happen.
When the diary told her that her brother woudl break his leg, she didn't warn him and she didn't flinch at the news when it happened. The diary told her that he didn't want to know.
But when she came home that day, she found her parents gathered around her brother. His leg was broken, and his pelvis and his hips. He had been beaten, and sodomized, by a group of ruffians from the town. Written across his chest in blood was the epithet "GYPSY SCUM".
"If you knew what was going to happen, would you have told yourself? Sent a letter to yourself in the past? Even if you couldn't change it?" Sinfoy asked her brother, tears streaming at his pain.
Onas shook his head.
"The man I was this morning was a happier man. Knowing this...this pain was coming would just have robbed him of his happiness. I would never tell."
That night, Sinfoy wrote only that her brother would break his leg and that he didn't want to know.
Sometime later, Onas met the love of his life while getting a medical checkup.
Life continued, until the day that Sinfoy was performing her regular ritual of reading the diary to prepare for the events of the day and she turned the page to the current date and gasped, shocked by the words written there.
"Today, mother and father died in the fire that burned down our house. This is the saddest day of my life."
Distraught, Sinfoy ran immediately to warn her father.
Confronted by his hysterical daughter, Abraham listened to her ramblings about his imminent death. Being a kind father, he humored her and spoke to his wife. Together, they made sure that no fire or spark was lit in the house that day or night. All the while, Sinfoy clung to them, convinced that they would somehow find a way to burn and die before her very eyes.
The night came and they both still lived. Relieved, Sinfoy returned to write in the diary. But she hesitated. What if she wrote that nothing had happened? Wouldn't the fire actually happen then? Had she prevented the fire by warning herself about it? Was the only way to prevent her parents from dying to, in fact, lie and write that they were going to die?
She filled in the entry exactly as she had seen it that morning.
But as time passed, Sinfoy began to lose trust in the diary. What was she leaving out at the end of each day? What were the things that she wasn't telling herself.?
These worries weighed on her and she began to live her days in constant fear of the details she didn't know. Any surprise was not to be trusted. She began to keep herself in the house, preferring to stay inside where it was safe.
She grew listless, only checking her diary in the morning and at night, filling it with the same safe phrase day after day.
You stayed home. All was well. You are safe and you are still beautiful.
A black depression seized her and her parents brought in several doctors to examine her. But there was nothing that could be done, Sinfoy had simply given up on living her life.
It was almost a relief for her, on the day she opened the diary and read the very last entry. Today you are going to die. You will walk to the cliffs near the Langmore Bridge and throw yourself off. You will always be beautiful.
Humming, she dressed herself in the best clothing she had that still fit, bade goodbye to her parents and walked along the road to the Langmore bridge.
And there, she threw herself off.
And as she fell, the last thought that passed through her mind was:
"Who wrote that?"
Chapter Ten – The Ground's Keeper (By Carter)
"Danny asked me to put something together for the League - a creepy story for Halloween. I guess he figured with this school and all, there'd be a lot of creepy stories getting around. And he's right, this place is full of them. Montag is an encyclopedia of horrible stories - but the way he tells them he doesn't even know they are scary. And Ms Usher, she always talks about the fae and the things that lurk out of sight. But all of that stuff is a bit too academic and I know Danny wants something more...local.
Weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island. And the people here...there is something wrong with them. This is the story of a local man, a groundskeeper who worked at the school. What happened to him.. Well, weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island."
--Carter
Sometimes you'd see him looking at you, you know? Just staring. If you looked back, he'd just cock an eyebrow and take a swig from his hip flask. He never seemed intimidated at all.
Almost worse were the times when he wasn't looking. You'd be changing with the curtains open and you'd look outside and he'd be there, pruning the tree outside your window. But not looking, no. Never doing anything that could get him fired or in trouble with the staff. He was just there, in the space that you swore was empty just a moment ago.
I'd put it down to him being just a dirty old man getting an eyeful, but it wasn't just the girls, it was the boys too.
There was something a little off about Donnie Bedloe.
He was a townie, a Kingsmouth local his whole life. Since I started at the Academy, he was always here, employed as the groundskeeper. He lived in that shitty shack just outside the walls and he never wore anything but a dirty leather smock, a pair of brown overalls and a stained white singlet. I never saw him with a haircut, his hair just hung in dirty grey tatters around his shoulders.
During the day he'd be here and there around the grounds, fiddling with this and that, but always looking. He was always fixing things - at least that was what you assumed - but among the kids we were always whispering about the trap he was setting.
You see when the library dome shattered and seven kids had to go to the infirmary with serious cuts, someone said that they had seen Donnie up there with a hammer. And when one of the viewing stands on the lacrosse field collapsed and all those kids got hurt, there was a rumor that Donnie had been there just before, carrying a wrench.
Some of the older kids thought it would be a good idea to tell Montag about the rumors, just in case they were true.
Three of the seniors tried to go up to the Headmaster's office, Millicent Durae, Johnny Stephenson and Ron Tucker. But Donnie was waiting for them on the staircase.
As usual, he didn't say anything. He just looked and cocked an eyebrow, took a swig from his flask, and went back to hammering on the banister with his rusty old hammer.
They didn't have the nerve to go on. By night, Donnie was a watchman. He used to walk around the walls, carrying a high-powered flashlight and keeping an eye out for any kids who thought it might be fun to sneak out and go to Susie's. Anyone who got caught came back trembling and freaked out.
"He wasn't there...and then he was right on top of me." One of them told me.
One day, Donnie Bedloe disappeared. Nobody saw him around the grounds and his shack became overgrown and abandoned. Eventually some kids found out what happened.
Apparently, one summer night, Donnie Bedloe, the Groundskeeper drank too much from his own hipflask and went stumbling into the ocean down by Mason Crescent. They never found his body, but they did find his empty hipflask and boots.
It's a horrible thing to say, but all of us kids drew a sigh of relief. For a while, we reveled in the freedom, sneaking over the wall at night and into town.
But every now and then, you'd get the feeling someone was watchign you and when you spun to look, nobody was there.
Then one night, Millicent Durae and Ron Tucker went missing.
Montag and a group of teachers did, you know, their thing and found a trail. It led out of the school, past the old groundskeepers shack and down to the beach near the end of Mason Crescent.
And there, by the water, they found the clothes which belonged to Millicent and Ron and an empty hipflask.
This is Innsmouth Academy and accidents happen all the time, but this was really disturbing. It was even worse when the teachers announced that it has been some kind of suicide pact. Anyone who knew Millicent or Ron just knew that wasn't true.
Johnny Stephenson became super paranoid after that. He said he was being watched, wherever he went. But no matter how fast he looked, he could never see who it was.
Of course, all of us were talking about Donnie at this point and we all knew why Johnny was feeling the pinch. And when we woke up one morning and Johnny was gone from his bed, we all knew what they would find, down by Mason Crescent.
And sure enough, a pair of shoes, a nightgown, and an empty bottle of booze were the only signs of Johnny Stephenson.
When Montag gathered the school together and told us the sad news of Johnny's "suicide" someone, I don't remember who, shouted out something about the similarities between the deaths of the student and the death of the groundkeeper.
I'll never forget the look on Montag's face when he replied.
"Young lady, this school hasn't had a groundkeeper since 1806"
Final Report
The Dragon:
Let me tell you a story from the future. A security guard reads a book of spooky stories. One of them triggers a fear reaction - his pupils dilate and icy fingers seem to touch his spine. He shivers and wipes his eyes. In the space of that shiver, you are past him and into the maximum security area of Orochi Tower...
Stories are the purest form of telepathy. They allow us to communicate across space, but also across time and spirit. A skilled writer can communicate every skipped heartbeat, every fearful breath and every blood wound. Words are power. Your future depends upon them.
The Illuminati:
That Danny kid is wholesomely adorable, isn't he? Most of the kids you meet in this job are either possessed by entities from the outer dark, filled with some kind of godly power or busy trying out the benefits of erotic asphyxiation. Okay that last one might have just been Bieber when we first picked him up. Anyhow, don't judge the whole organization by the massive black hole of occult fuckery that is Solomon Island. That place is a magnet for weird shit and if you haven't learned anything else by now, take this one to heart: this could happen everywhere if we don't slam a lid down on Tokyo.
The Templar:
Solomon Island may well qualify as the location in the world with the most ghostly stories per square feet in the entire world. No matter how deep you dig on that island, there always seem to be a layer of fresh skeletons waiting just beneath. The fact that you found all these stories is remarkable; the fact that you could verify most of them... that's disturbing. We'll pass this to the archivists. They tend to score a bit further down the courage scale than your average Templar - this collection might keep them up for weeks.
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