You take another moment because you burned through all your psyched upness just getting to the door.
You knock.
Don'tbeweirddon'tbeweirdon'tbe--
"Oh, hi Plaire! Kate texted and said you'd be coming. Would you like to come in for a minute? I know the walk here from the bus stop is a pain. I have tea?"
"S-sure. Uhhh... decaf, if you have it."
Kate's mom leads you inside.
The TV is playing a show about whether or not Biblical angels were actually aliens.
"Oh," Ms. Halford adds from her kitchen, "and Kate said to remind you about the laundry room...? I figured you'd know what she meant."
"Oh, yeah," you reply, forcing a smile even though she can't see you. The laundry room. Before you left the house, you, Kate, and Cici decided to have one more look around for it, and
uh
Oh.
God dammit.
Slowly, you take out your notepad.
Please, Memory Holed Past Plaire, please have remembered to actually write something down. I know you're dumb, but please, just this once, do not have fucked this up for us. Sincerely, Current Plaire.
You open the notepad.
Thumb through the pages.
You don't notice anything new or out of place
until you hit the most recent entry.
THE JUJU IS BAD
INFINITE STAIRS?
DARKNESS EATS EVERYTHING
HOUSE LOUD
HOUSE DOES NOT
WANT US UPSTAIRS
. . .
The handwriting is yours.
Sloppy, maybe written in a hurry, but absolutely yours.
Fucking
UPstairs?!
W h a t.
Maybe it's one of those little foldout staircases that pop out of the ceiling.
You're trying to visualize the structure of your house and you might have room for a little attic. It's not that crazy.
In retrospect, you don't remember looking at the ceiling all that hard when you originally searched for secret passages.
It's fine. It's fine, normal even, aside from everything else about it.
Ms. Halford returns, handing you a glass of tea. It is, unlike last time, an iced tea. Heather Halford out here living life on the wild side
"Are you okay?," she asks. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
You barely manage to keep your face from making the face it wants to make.
...Well, let's start with mentally thanking Past Plaire for writing so much and in vivid detail even if it now makes very little sense without context.
Keep your face excited! Heather is hot and all that. Try... not to think about the bad juju upstairs, but maybe text Kate about it once you have a chance to do that without being rude. Oh, and enjoy the iced tea.
I think we all missed it, Plaire included. It's good storytelling meant to emphasize that her memory's been lost, if she doesn't remember it why should we?
Consider that the story follows plairs memory, if she dosnt know something g happened, we don't iether. Its as if the moment in time dosnt exist from our perspective until plain remembers
Plaire should read a bit more of the book on haunted houses before going to sleep. Does it explain what sorts of things might make a haunted house itself the problem?
Something tells me those infinite stairs work on Mario 64 rules. Reach Key Item(TM) and the house will let you get to the top of the stairs. Now I'm wondering if the "HOUSE LOUD" means if it was physical sound, or a psychic one.. I guess we could always ask Kate for clarification once we get to the trailer.
+1 to getting enough stars to reach the top of the staircase. Or else figuring out how to do a series of backwards running jumps to skip past that altogether.
Thank you past plaire. Hmm. It might be kind of weird but you could ask Kate's hot mom her full name? We may or may not want to tell her about the house because she has a hard time not telling strangers everything but she seems like she's the kind of person who wouldn't question asking for her full name too much.
I've been torn about advising you to spill everything to everyone who registers more Good than Evil, like even a scintilla north of Neutral, but the thing is, the shit will hit the fan (sooner or later), and you can't protect everyone. You need all the help you can get, but getting innocents wrapped up in your life-or-death trials is a good recipe for dead innocents.
You know this already, certainly. That you haven't dropped the truth on Heather, or the Back Room guys, or even Maria, means you're trying to minimize the collateral damage. Hell, if you'd known how dangerous your life was going to become, you might have kept both Cici and Kate at arm's length, too.
(no matter how much Kate seems to love it)
But, perhaps Heather can help you safely. Try this: Ask for advice, but couch it so it seems innocuous. For instance, ask for advice about the mayor, but say that you and Kate are arguing about what will (or should) happen in the next season of Bunny the Vampire Killer.
Don't overuse this technique, though. She may be naive enough to invite a maybe-vampire into her home, but she might catch on and try to get involved if you solicit her advice too often.
So this gives me an idea for Future Plaire -- perhaps we could get Temperance to teach Plaire how to take notes in Shorthand? Someone at her level of secretaryness should have mastered that, and it'd be an excuse for us to get back over to the mayor's at some point. Maybe an icebreaker of sorts? It'd be super useful if we need to take notes again while in danger of being memoryholed and/or fear for our lives. xD
Agreed, past-Plaire could easily have made more detailed and specific notes. There must have been something interfering with her ability to record/communicate.
Okay. The memory gap seems to start after agreeing to search the house again and ends sometime after getting on the bus (maybe). I would recommend writing the time of the gap in the notebook. Maybe adding a note about having Kate document future house searches. As for the more recent notes, it's possible that the stairs mentioned are in the laundry room or connected to it.
Until we know more about how to approach the cause of the memory loss (maybe the book would help) I think it might be best to just think about what we can do with the simple fact that we know there's memories missing about specific subjects. At the very least, we can try and ask questions next time we're in the dungeon.
Yes, maybe the dimensions of the dungeon roughly parallel those of the spooky house. Or maybe they only parallel the contours of Plaire's mind? Time will tell, but +1 to consulting the book on haunted houses about their ability to affect memory.
We've been hanging out with Kate, what do you expect? How's she been anyway, and what's with the bait shop still being open this late? Do they seriously get customers out here? I don't think there's even a lake for miles.
After dinner, call Kate to get the lowdown on what really happened, and ask to use the computer to contact the TFLs.
If we're going to ask about the mayor, we should do it in a friendly way, asking about the time she came to visit and what she was like.
You walk up onto the porch.
You take another moment because you burned through all your psyched upness just getting to the door.
You knock.
Don'tbeweirddon'tbeweirdon'tbe--
"Oh, hi Plaire! Kate texted and said you'd be coming. Would you like to come in for a minute? I know the walk here from the bus stop is a pain. I have tea?"
"S-sure. Uhhh... decaf, if you have it."
Kate's mom leads you inside.
The TV is playing a show about whether or not Biblical angels were actually aliens.
"Oh," Ms. Halford adds from her kitchen, "and Kate said to remind you about the laundry room...? I figured you'd know what she meant."
"Oh, yeah," you reply, forcing a smile even though she can't see you. The laundry room. Before you left the house, you, Kate, and Cici decided to have one more look around for it, and
uh
Oh.
God dammit.
Slowly, you take out your notepad.
Please, Memory Holed Past Plaire, please have remembered to actually write something down. I know you're dumb, but please, just this once, do not have fucked this up for us. Sincerely, Current Plaire.
You open the notepad.
Thumb through the pages.
You don't notice anything new or out of place
until you hit the most recent entry.
INFINITE STAIRS?
DARKNESS EATS EVERYTHING
HOUSE LOUD
HOUSE DOES NOT
WANT US UPSTAIRS
. . .
The handwriting is yours.
Sloppy, maybe written in a hurry, but absolutely yours.
Fucking
UPstairs?!
W h a t.
Maybe it's one of those little foldout staircases that pop out of the ceiling.
You're trying to visualize the structure of your house and you might have room for a little attic. It's not that crazy.
In retrospect, you don't remember looking at the ceiling all that hard when you originally searched for secret passages.
It's fine. It's fine, normal even, aside from everything else about it.
Ms. Halford returns, handing you a glass of tea. It is, unlike last time, an iced tea. Heather Halford out here living life on the wild side
"Are you okay?," she asks. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
You barely manage to keep your face from making the face it wants to make.