Seance

*Posted by : Winteroak on Mar 10, 2018, 12:52am*

- August 18th, East Twin, Evening -

Gentlewoman Elvira Oswald waited in her small living room for this evening guests. A glass of elderflower liquor in her hand. A gift from the late wife of Councilman Jeremiah Spink. Directly from Elesium she had claimed.
The young woman had been a regular visitor following the death of their youngest child. Taken at the age of two by Whopping Cough. She had seek Elvira's talents, the year of his passing. The bottle had been a gift after their last season. Before her suicide.

She was surprised someone had asked for a session today. Everyone of stature and with connections, from The Twins, to The Centrum to Highholm was at the Councilman's party. Elvira stood near here fireplace gazing into the greenish flagslag embers. Hellish shadows cast by separate dying embers as they wrought its ghosts upon the floorboards.

A knock at her door pulled her away from her memories and into her guests and this evening session. Gentlewoman Elvira Oswald had plied her trade in this city for almost four decades now. Many doubted her abilities and called her a charlatan but she was one of the few that could ply her trade openly. She had even hosted First Citizen Hazard in her humble home before his rise to the seat of power. Her clairvoyance, thought-reading and summoning abilities. Elvira was a ghost whisperer. And she had influence. Influence like few women in Dusk could dream of having. A female medium was often a better communicator than a male medium because she had a better predisposition to spiritual perfectability.

The young couple that now sat in her living room were in no way different from the hundreds of other couples she had seen during her time. Coming to seek communion with a departed soul. In this case a young daughter dead at the age of five from lung fever. They should her the pictography of the toddler in her death bed. Not many could afford pictography and it seemed macabre to Elvira that many chose to keep such a memento, a post mortem eternal snapshot.
Images of deceased loved ones were now a fad among the elites and middle classed . Commissioned by grieving families, postmortem pictopgraphs not only helped in grieving, but often represented the only visual remembrance of the deceased and were becoming a family's most precious possessions.

The sat around the table. The man glancing nervously at a wooden box in the far side of the room. The young woman eyes were wet with tears.
"Is that it? The doorway.." he asked in a hushed tune.
"Shush dear. Let us begin. The witching hour is upon us..." she instructed them to place their hands palm down on the white embroider tablecloth.
They kept quite and Elvira stretched that silence as much as she could.

"Departed spirits. Join us. We seek Communion with the Aether." Eeire silence followed her request.
Suddenly a rapping was heard followed closely by some scratching somewhere in the room. The wooden floorboards appeared to moan as if a small weight shifted across them.
Her guests looked around.
"We seek to send a message to..." she looked at the young mother.
"Victoria..." the woman said in a tiny fragile voice.
Just than the heavy purple curtains rustled on a unseen breeze.
"They're here..." she declared, her eyes rolling in the back of her head as another pounding sound was heard, this time closer to the box. Elvira lifted her hands from the table and her young guests gasped as they glowed green in the dark room.

A sudden commotion from the corner of the room and the the wooden box swung open. The couple jumped on their seats as the dreaded figure of a *rag baby* emerged from the darkness.
"Do not move. Do not attempt to touch it..." the medium spat sharply and in a violent tone that no longer sounded her own.
The child ghost dragged its feet as it walked towards the table. He was here to deliver a message to the conduit. Only Elvira Oswald would hear his wispy voice.
And once it did, it would simply return to the shadows from which it had been summoned from...