Start Ups Paranatural

[Infinity Storm]

Jett followed Lilu as she entered the room, having to hold back a laugh when he noticed the multi-colored man in front of them. If he hadn't noticed the meteorite from earlier, it would have been nothing short of a miracle for him to continue to suppress it any longer. Closing the door behind himself, Jett quietly watched, choosing not to introduce himself just yet. If nothing else, it was due to the fact that he'd just destroyed school property in an attempt to show off, which was unfortunately likely to have some repercussions.

 

[Flaze]

"Oh crap it's the meteorite!" Ken yelled out in shock as he saw the meteorite sitting in the center of the room as well as the two Paranturalists that were there as well. "Oh wow, real Paranaturalists, awesome," he replied, staring at Yae in amazement.

 

[JakkuEbansu]

Ray enters the room, blinking softly at the surprisingly-small meteorite. They self-consciously toy with their furs in front of the accomplished paranaturalists, trying to appear smaller at the corner of the room as the group enters, slightly shy. Slightly. Honest. They keep their gaze focused on the cosmic object perched on the desk.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

After Yae had written down the party's account of the events, Ben stood up.


"My professional diagnosis is...This meteorite is haunted as fuck!" The sparkly rainbow man said.


"Goddammit Ben don't swear in front of kids!" Ellery said. He had been playing with a slinky, and hadn't even been paying attention.


"This is made of Brightstone. Yae, you have something on it in your scroll, right?" Ben said. Yae took the gigantic scroll off her back, and began to go through it.


"Ben over there might not look it, but he's actually an expert on Paranatural geology." Ellery said to the club. "And Yae's one of the GPI's record keepers. That scroll on her back has pretty much anything a Paranaturalist would need to know. A lot of it is her own research."


"Since you helped retrieve it, you deserve to know what it is." Yae said. The scroll was suspended in mid-air, open to a section with a picture of the meteor on it. It rolled itself up, moving to a part of the scroll with a picture of the human brain.


"PSI powers all stem from the mind." Yae said. "Anyone can close their eyes and imagine something, like a purple cow or a tree being struck by lightning. PSI users, through training, can make it so they can bring those things into reality. Usually only a specific thing. For example, I can use my PSI to control paper, but I'd have to train to be able to, say, create a sword using PSI."


"Different PSI powers are linked to different aspects of the mind. For example, someone who's very creative but not very brave would find it easy to create objects using PSI, but more difficult to use powers that attack opponents directly, like shooting bolts of lightning. This isn't a hard and fast rule, of course. Some techniques are unaffected by this principle, or work around it. But the point is, people with different personality traits have different proficiencies with certain PSI powers." The scroll turned again, moving to a page with a picture of the meteor.


"There are exceptions, of course. Trauma like being set on fire or being hit over the head can alter a person's brain and give them PSI. Brightstone's a bit like that. If someone with a nature people would call wicked - greedy people, sadists, stuff like that - is exposed to it, they'll develop a PSI power associated with it. My guess is that Teddy was a very angry person, and the stone gave him powers based on that." Yae rolled her scroll up.


"So what are we supposed to do about it?" Ellery asked, laying on a desk, still playing with his slinky.


"Ellery, you're the highest ranking one here. That's why you're here. To decide." Yae said.


"Hey, give him more respect, h-" Ben said, before getting hit on the head with the slinky.


"Nobody asked you. I say we lock it away. In the wrong hands it could cause a lot of trouble." Ellery said.


"Ah, there's a problem with that. See these cracks? It looks like it's split into pieces when it entererd earth's atmosphere." Ben said. "Four of them, to be precise. Not counting this one. So that would mean there are three other pieces. We should find the rest of them, and I know just the man for the job."


"I think I agree. The school's Paranatural Study Club should find it." Yae said, nodding.


"Thank you Ya-No I wanted to do it." Ben said.


"You had your chance. You got lost on the way here last night." Ellery said.


"Holy crap! Guys it's like we're real Paranaturalists!" Nick said. He had been sitting their quietly the whole time.


"We'll tell you when we have intel on the location of one of the shards." Yae said, as Ben left the room in a huff. "I have to go make sure Ben doesn't hurt himself."

"So I think this counts as us being real Paranaturalists? Maybe?" Nick asked. "We should celebrate."

 

[Peaceful Giraffe]

Lilu bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet as Yae and Ben gave them the news.

"Oh, cool! That'll be awesome!" she gasped happily. "This does warrant some sort of celebration."

 

[JakkuEbansu]

Ray nods fervently, excited, becoming a little more of their usual animated self once the paranaturalists leave. They even smile a little. Possibly. Into the furs covering most of their small form, so it's not exactly obvious.

 

[Flaze]

"Didn't think this would be the way we'll get to do it," Ken replied with a bright smirk as he turned towards the others and put his hands on his waist. He was glad that they had gotten a mission similar to the one real Paranaturalists would have, it made him feel like he was closer to reaching his goal. "But shouldn't we start searching first?" he asked curiously.

 

[Infinity Storm]

"We'd be searching blindly for three rocks that could have landed anywhere. Without a lead we won't accomplish much, so I'm with Nick on this one" Jett replied, leaning back against the wall as he spoke. To be completely honest, between this and the events from earlier in the forest, they'd definitely earned a chance to kick back.

 

[Peaceful Giraffe]

Lilu nodded enthusiastically. "Besides, don't you guys want to celebrate as much as I do? This is a pretty big deal, isn't it? It's our first experience as actual paranaturalists!" she grinned.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Later that day, the club had all gathered at their usual place to celebrate. The Doughnut Hole served coffee and doughnuts, and you got free refills on coffee. It was getting late, so some of the members might have left. However, Nick had stayed. He had a question for Ken.

"Hey, if you don't mind me asking." Nick asked, dipping a powdered doughnut in his hot chocolate. "What's being a vampire like?"

 

[Peaceful Giraffe]

Lilu was eating a chocolate donut, and some of it had ended up on her face. Her coffee was liberally filled with sugar and cream and she was obtaining a wonderful caffeine high. Not that it mattered- she generally had trouble sleeping when there was a cloudless moon anyways.

"I wonder how different being a vampire is from being a werewolf," she wondered as she took another chocolatey bite.

 

[Flaze]

"Hm?" Ken rasked an eyebrow as he stopped eating his chocolate glaced donut and turned towards Nick, a curious expression on his face before began to think about his friend's question. "Well I get really tired during the day and it's hard to sleep at night, I have to tire myself a lot," he cleared up as he set the donut down. "It's not impossible for vampires to sleep at night but it's the time of day where we feel we're truly awake. Anyways the sun doesn't hurt me but it does weaken me and I can sweat a lot which is actually kind of funny since my own regenerative system gets rid of that almost as quickly as it comes out, if anything I feel like maybe I'm special even among vampires," he explained as he thought back to the days after he had been bitten and how he had lived every day just trying to learn more about his new state. "I don't need to drink blood from things but it does make me stronger when I do, preferably humans, the smell of garlic is too strong but in general strong smells are nauseating to me."

 

[SukiWooper]

Victoria spat out her coffee in revulsion. How do adults stand this bitter stuff, let alone enjoy it?

 

[Peaceful Giraffe]

Lilu raised an eyebrow at Victoria. "Did you forget to put sugar and cream in? It makes it way better. Or you could just dunk a donut in and eat it without drinking the coffee."

She then turned to Ken and asked, "So do you get this sense that you're two different things? A vampire and a person? Because I get that sometimes, but maybe that's just me."

 

[Flaze]

"I don't know," Ken scratched his chin, leaning back on his chair for a moment as he turned to Lilu. "To be honest I don't feel like a vampire, I mean yeah there's all those things I mentioned but most of the time I just kind of forget to acknowledge them, when I first became one it was noticeable but now I've adapted so much I don't feel any different from when I was normal," he tried to explain, though he seemed confused with whateven he was saying. "That kind of changes if you try to stab my hand though, it'll just heal back and still amaze me," he laughed.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Nick was a bit distracted as he noticed Lilu eating a chocolate doughnut. Wasn't chocolate poisonous to dogs? He turned back to Ken.

"Huh. I'm kind of jealous." Then he noticed that it was already dark out. "I've got to get home. My mom will be made if I'm late." He got up and left the doughnut shop.

-----------------------------------
The next day, Nick was in the club room. It was an unused science room. Cedar Peak Middle School was a very large building, and many classrooms were simply not used. He'd heard that it was originally not a school, but he wasn't sure what it was before. He'd asked around, but nobody seemed to know. There was a large bulletin board, on which articles about Paranatural topics were put. There were also a few articles featuring the club or its members. That was what Nick was putting up today.

Spoiler

He was a little annoyed that the police had taken the credit for it. They could use the publicity. Still, he and the other members of the club knew. He had just finished pinning it when he heard a knock at the door. He opened it, and a tall, elderly man in a brown tweed jacket was on the other side.

"Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Henry Washington. Curator of the Cedar Peak History Museum. This is the Paranatural study club, correct? I have a job I'd like to ask you to do." He said.

"Uhhh...Yeah! Come in, come in!" Nick said, holding the door open for the man. He was carrying a large box of doughnuts, which he set on the table. Hiring an officially licensed Paranaturalist was very expensive. So the club sometimes took jobs from people who needed help with Paranatural phenomena. Nick took a doughnut from the box and began to eat it.

"What do you know about ghosts?" Dr. Washington asked.

 

[Peaceful Giraffe]

Lilu wandered into the club door and saw Nick talking to a very formal-looking man, just managing to hear the final question. She was holding the guitar she had obtained a few days ago.

"Hi Nick! Hi person I don't know! In my experience, ghosts smell like mothballs and cat hair, AKA the worst things ever known, and they look like a bad movie projection," Lilu offered. She wasn't terribly experienced with ghosts, but she'd encountered some in a library once and was not at all eager to repeat the experience.

 

[Infinity Storm]

Jett looked over to the man, having been napping at a desk towards the back of the room prior to the questioning man's entrance. Cricking his neck before standing up, he looked over and added "Also, dealing with them tends to be a pain, especially given the convoluted explanations people come up with to explain their existence."

 

[JakkuEbansu]

Ray had been sat against one of the walls quietly. From the dimming of the air around their face, it was apparent their eyes were closed, and their breathing was slow. However, as soon as the door opened, their eyes flickered open, illuminating the area around them once more, and they stood alongside Nick quietly, blinking at the Doctor.
"...Ghosts..?"
A slight frown crinkles their usually-impassive face, like a past pain.
"Imprints on the world of people... once their bodies break down."

 

[Flaze]

"Looks like we're getting anothe rmission," Ken pointed out as he looked at the man once he entered the room, only to immediately walk over to a sit and listen to what was happening.