[Jaunt] That Monk is Terrifying

[failgoyle]

Okay, okay, so, everyone stay the hell away from Matthew. I don't know what the hell he's doing, but he's some kind of monk, and he's talking to ghosts, and he and the ghosts are freaking terrifying and tried to kill me! And he was gonna interrogate me with this scary as hell tree-lady-ghost-thing who wanted my blood, and I barely got out of there alive!

...and...uh...he kind of startled the crap out of me, so I...ah...lost my tail, and I...er, well...he's...still got it...

Comments

[leftbehindagain]

To be fair, Matthew-san's pretty odd most of the time, but summoning ghosts is definitely not his usual thing. What did he ask you?

[failgoyle]

My name, who sent me, why I was spying on him, what my mission was, that sort of thing.

But I wasn't spying on him! I just sat on the wrong house. And he wouldn't believe me!

[leftbehindagain]

...How much did you say.

[He has a bad feeling about this...]

[failgoyle]

...I...I told him I didn't know who I was working for or how I'd gotten here?

...he was freaking terrifying, okay? You should have seen that ghost!

[leftbehindagain]

...oh, for Izanami's sake, it's Nova Venezia all over again. [siiiiiigh. Still, it's hard to hold that against a relative newbie, and if Naoki remembers the voice right this is the guy who's convinced the Trumps are fae entities.]

Hopefully you were vague enough that he won't be prodding even harder at the rest of us.

[failgoyle]

I didn't name any names, if that counts for anything.

Seriously, when he wanted mine, I just gave him a fake one.

[Please don't ask what that one was, please don't ask what that one was...]

...what's a Nova Venezia?

[leftbehindagain]

It counts for a lot, but now I'm wondering who I should pretend I don't know. [Of course he was going to ask what the fake name was.]

Nova Venezia was a total clusterfuck of a jaunt about six months back. A lot of infiltrators found out we didn't belong there - granted, some of them remembered the last time the Trumps dumped people there and no one investigating did, so they had the upper hand anyway, but still.

[failgoyle]

Gilligan. I said my name was Gilligan.

[There's a long pause.]

And if anyone asks you about a guy named Orange Julius, you don't know him, either.

Oh. Ohhhhh. I don't...I didn't say anything about what we were doing here. Just that I personally had been dumped here and had no idea what was going on.

[leftbehindagain]

Duly noted. [The lucky thing for Jules is that Naoki, at least, has no idea what those references mean - other than presumably he doesn't know Julius of any other color, either. It'll be up to other people to mock him.]

Well... it could be worse. Hopefully he won't connect that to the sudden influx of foreigners.

[failgoyle]

[He's not getting mocked for his choice in aliases! Hooray!]

Yeah, I don't know that he did. I mean, he could tell that I was a foreigner, obviously, but I don't think he thought everyone was with me.

[leftbehindagain]

[He's not getting mocked yet.]

And if we're very lucky, he won't. That summoning thing... I'll have to bounce it off a couple of my friends, but it sounds like it could be a useful cover for a few of us.

[failgoyle]

Just be careful with that, man. The local ghosts here are freaking nuts. Who knows if they'll take offense to that.

[leftbehindagain]

It's not ghosts, but we might be able to pass it off as ghosts. [Especially if Naoki sticks to his newer one, since there's a family resemblance there, kind of.]

[failgoyle]

Okay, but if they find out and get insulted and try to drag you into a horror movie, don't say I didn't warn you.

[leftbehindagain]

Can't be worse than going toe to toe with a death goddess.

[failgoyle]

[Can terrified squeaks make it through the psychic network?]

Does that happen often?

[leftbehindagain]

It was at home, not here, and only the once. When I said 'stood up to the wrong person and she threw a fit' wasn't even stretching the truth for my cover story, I wasn't kidding.

[failgoyle]

That's...uh...uh.

[Let him process this.]

Yikes.

[leftbehindagain]

What? We got better.

[failgoyle]

But still! That sort of thing shouldn't happen!

[leftbehindagain]

Yeah, and she shouldn't have been using our town as the site for her social experiment, either.

[failgoyle]

That's what hugely powerful beings do. Screw around with the little guys without caring who they hurt.

[leftbehindagain]

Which would be why we didn't let her get away with it.

[failgoyle]

How do you even fight something like that?

And why, when there's such a chance you'll get your ass handed to you and then some?

[leftbehindagain]

Because she thought a world with nothing in it was what humanity wanted, and that isn't her choice to make. We weren't going to let her do it.

As for how, she gave us the tools and then got all surprised when we used them against her.