1.2 A Resort for the Undead

After searching inside the Vanderburg home for mischievous spirits, Mab proceeds to their back lawn.

A yellow cloud dares to make cackling noises at Mab.

She's not very sure of this contraption Masterson gave her.

But it sucks up the spirits just fine, and stores them neatly in its containment chamber.

The Vanderburgs had quite an infestation.

Mab never learns what this old man did to piss them off, but once the spirits are contained, the voices whispering to him are gone, and Renauld surprises Mab with a tight hug.

As well as a lot of "Thank you! Thank you!"s.

He will gladly pay her fee, and even offers to serve as a reference for future clients.

The Vanderburg name will carry a lot of weight.

After sleeping through the morning, Mab visits the address Masterson gave her.

She's hoping he wrote down the wrong street number...

...until he appears at the door.

When she tells him she's captured some spirits, he wastes no time inviting her inside. Masterson's place is all cold stone rooms, poorly lit and filled with antique furniture. Mab can't help gawking.

"Don't dawdle," Masterson sighs, impatient.

Masterson leads her into some sort of study, and empties the containment chamber into a square glass contraption. "Yes, yes!" He's grinning now. "It works!"

Mab folds her arms. "What works?"

"This containment field! I can hold them now! My theories were correct! This is excellent. Where are the others? You said spirits. Plural."

"I... released them." She recounts the story of her ad in the paper, Vanderburg's request to have spirits removed from his home, and how she set all but one of them free on the other side of the river. "Move them far enough from their spot, especially across a river, and they get disoriented. I don't think they'll be bothering Renauld Vanderburg again."

Masterson listens intently to every detail, nodding along.

"I hope you'll not mind if I ask you to find more for me. I need to perform some tests, and create stronger containment units."

"Are these tests gonna hurt them?" Mab is certain these bundles of energy have sentience, of a sort, though she's not sure about the depths of their thoughts and feelings. They don't seem quite like people. But she's seen them angry, and she's seen them frightened, and she won't be party to destroying them. She tries to explain this.

"I have no need to harm these things. I'll set them loose when I'm done, if that makes you happy. I am after something... something else, ultimately. Something that has caused me a great deal of pain. Here, take your payment." He passes a few crisp bills to her. It's the amount he promised, not more and not less. "Have you put any thought into staying in Hidden Springs for a while?"

Mab looks at the money in her hands. She can't remember the last time she had this much money. "I could start."

Mab is able to purchase a tiny cabin in the woods. It only has one bedroom, but it's furnished like a home, having been used long ago as some kind of camping get-away.

That's not to say the place is a paradise. Mold had to be aggressively removed from the furniture, bug nests had to be torn from the ceiling with a rake she borrowed from Masterson, the bed is in danger of falling apart, and every use of the washing machine causes a flood in the living room.

The television barely even gets reception.
 

The refrigerator has a funny smell in it. The sinks don't want to work half the time. The stove seems like such a bad idea Mab won't even dare use it.

Outside, Mab sees mostly forest. Somewhere through those woods she has neighbors, but she has a feeling she could play music as loud as she wants and they wouldn't hear. Her house could catch fire and they'd probably not even notice the smoke; the trees are so tall and obscuring.

It's perfect.

"I could get used to staying here," Mab informs the house.

______

The big pink house is owned by famous fashion designer Anna Menon. 

"I hear these voices!" Anna cries. "I can't make out what they're saying, and every time I turn the corner to investigate, there's nothing there! Renauld said you could help me..."

"I can help you," Mab promises.

After a night catching spirits, Mab brings them to Masterson, and is paid a small amount for each.

"Who do these spirits think they are?" Gabriella Ornales huffs. "I didn't pay for this nice house only for it to become some resort for the undead!"

"You can see them?" Mab queries uncertainly.

"Anyone with eyes can see them! Now take care of them, or I'll have you arrested for fraud."

"Stop being a little pest!" Mab commands the spirit. Like children, they enjoy the chase, and it's all a game to them until they're caught in the containment unit.

While the spirit Mab convinced to show itself in the graveyard was behaving normally, lacking the energy to manifest itself to ordinary sims, the spirits invading the Ornales house are super-charged with energy. Something odd is going on in this town.

Mab informs Masterson of the highly scientific sounding super-charged spirit theory. He nods absently; this is not an unheard-of situation, in Hidden Springs.

"It's the mountain," he says vaguely. "The planes are out of shift..."

"What does that mean?"

He doesn't answer her, absorbed in his work.

Calls for ghost catching services begin come in steadily enough for Mab to feed herself and even buy extra things, such as new blankets to replace the ratty quilts she found in a drawer in her bedroom. She even purchases some artwork for her walls.

Her next mission, when she has some more simoleons, will be to replace this gritty old tub with a proper shower.

Inspired by the artwork she bought, Mab buys herself an easel and entertains notions of decorating her home with art of her own. She enjoyed painting as a child, and it's never too late to get good at it...

Mab goes downtown to buy groceries. Laila Al Fahad had groceries in mind, too, but the child she's carrying has other plans. If Mab kept up with town gossip she'd know the father of Laila's child is Bert Alto, who dropped Laila like a hot potato in favor of Gabriella Ornales. 

Another night, another haunting.

There's nothing like steady income, but Mab feels weird about it. She's never seen an entire town so afflicted with troubled spirit activity.  

 

The frantic phonecall she received asking her to come here mostly contained screaming, and few clues as to what's actually happening in this home, but before she even walks in Mab can sense it's poltergeists.

Charles Facq has never been so frightened in all his life... or so he claims.

His wife, Sarala, is in a similar state.

"I've got this under control," Mab assures them.

Once she's banished his unwanted guests, Charles thanks Mab about a thousand times, and promises to never doubt her abilities again.

"You doubted me before?" she teases.

"Maybe a little bit," he admits.

Charles would like Mab to stay for tea and meet his wife Sarala and newborn daughter Reisa, but Mab's got to get going. There are, amazingly enough, more haunted houses to deal with tonight.

Mab begins to visit Masterson even when she doesn't have spirits to sell him. They talk for hours in their own techobabble, about spectral planes and the psychology of apparitions. When he's rather busy and would prefer not to talk, Mab stays anyway and teases him about the state of his house. Her jibes include such winners as "what, are you keeping a vampire in here somewhere?" and "I think you'd be less grumpy if you had more color in your life!"

He doesn't ever ask that she leave. The most he'll do is scowl, sigh heavily, and remind her he's trying to work.

Mab gets the chance to return the courtesy, or whatever it is, when one afternoon she returns from a jog to the library (to use the computers) to find Masterson has let himself in her house and is sitting at her table, staring, really really STARING, at the juice carton she didn't throw away that morning.

Instead of pitching a fit right away about an invasion of privacy, she takes the seat next to him. "Uhm. Want to talk about it?"

"No," he says.

The juice carton continues to be stared at. 

Suddenly, he picks it up and tosses it in the trash. "Mab Archer, you shouldn't be living in the middle of the woods by yourself. It could be dangerous."

"So you decided to break in, to prove that to me?"

"You left the door unlocked!"

"So?! It's my house, you don't have the right to just walk in!"

He frowns in a more worried than stern way, for a change. "I apologize for how I have expressed my concern. I see it is not appropriate, and has violated modern social customs."

"Dude..."

"Where is your family?" He interrupts whatever she was going to say. "The potential for magic runs in families. Why aren't you with yours?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but I ran away from home when I was teenager," she mumbles. "I didn't even finish high school. The other kids bullied me, and I couldn't imagine spending my whole life in the same town, with them. And then suddenly I couldn't imagine spending another day. I thought the torment was never going to end, if I didn't escape. So I escaped. I've been afraid to talk to my parents ever since, because I knew how selfish of a choice I made, and I didn't want to tell them about all the things I've done just to get food and shelter since then. I kept thinking I'd go back when I was someone they could be proud of... but the years went by, and by... and by."

Masterson is quiet for a while. Unreadable.

"I can't remember much about my parents," he says finally. "They sent me away when I was very young."

He won't say any more about it. He's here to give Mab his latest invention, designed to emit a disruption that will force spirits to become visible.

"I don't know if I'm comfortable with this thing. Are you sure it even works?"

"I am almost certain it works."

"Alright..."

"You've had cases where spirits successfully hide from you, after spooking the townsfolk, yes?"

"Yeah, yeah. I can see the uses of this thing. I still think you could have called, before showing up here."

"I dislike phones," he says.

Mab realizes she doesn't have his number, and wonders if he even has a phone.

Masterson's device works.

"He cheated on me!" the old woman's ghost shrieks. "I'll never let him forget it! I know! I know what he did with that Emily Shawkti!"

Mab has discussed the psychology of ghosts many times with Masterson. How some of them seem to know when and where they are, while others seem stuck in a particular place and time. This ghost falls somewhere on the latter side of the spectrum. Emily Shawkti, Mab finds out from this house's owners, lived about five generations ago. Mab's task is now to convince the ghost her husband is too dead to be haunted, and all she's doing is upsetting her own descendants.

Learning that she's given a small great-great-grandchild a lot of nightmares, this ghost relents, and fades away.


________________________________________________________
Etc.: I had hoped to get a screenshot of Anna Menon, the fashion designer who has a creative block (or, as the bio and her insane trait suggest, possibly a mental breakdown)... but, like most of Mab's clients, she was uncooperative and walked away. Mab didn't have time to chase Anna down, since she had a lot of assignments that night and they can be a pain to complete on time if the lots are large.

This is my first time rolling Hobby or Obsession. I've chosen painting for Mab.

She's artistic, and the first thing she wanted to buy when she had some cash was a painting worth $250 or more. Of course I bought it for her, since I'm desperate for lifetime happiness points. As of the end of this chapter, I was finally able to buy Mab the steel bladder. Usually I buy other rewards first, but it was really annoying to have to direct Mab to her clients' toilets in the middle of jobs. The bladder need only goes down on lots with toilets, so this isn't a big deal for most jobs, but when you're a ghost hunter... most of your clients do, in fact, own toilets.