Story Time!

Hello.

This page is all about ideas and their application.
Have you ever wanted to read someone's mind? Wouldn't it be fun! You are walking down the street and you see a pretty girl. She looks at you and you know that she wants to sleep with you or perhaps a person you work with once robbed a bank and hid their ill gotten gains in a secret place which only he knows....

Wouldn't that be fun!
You pass a stranger in the park and you know that he is going to rape, kill and then chop your mother into tiny little pieces...

Are you sure it would be fun?

In the novel, "The Hoodoo Man", Danny Stafford has a gift - or curse - which causes him to see into the mind of a person close by. In effect he knows everything about them. But it doesn't stop there. He can see future, past and present events in their life. Usually bad things.

I am going to use this premise and construct a game around it.
I think of a place, add some fictional characters then create a situation where the Stafford tingle comes into being....
This gets emailed to Steve and he replies.
Ready?

Sent 04 Oct 2002
Ian W

Are you ready?

and you thought that I had forgotten? hahahaha

Here we go.
You have been to your local pub, had a couple of pints, joined in on a pool game or two and generally had a good time. It's now 11pm and you are walking down the town centre main road, looking for a take-away. A happy couple pass you by. The female brushes past you. Your palms start to tingle....
Give me some good dirt here Steve!

Recieved 09 Oct 2002
Steve Harris

It isn't so much a tingle as an electric shock, which spins me round to stare after her. She's a good looking woman - tall, lean, long dark hair and she's wearing a very short skirt and has very pretty legs, but all this is noted distantly because of the electric slap and the information that comes with it like a bolt of lightning.

She's twenty eight years old and her real name is Catherine Weighill. It's not the name she uses. Weighill is pronounced Wheel and who wants to go through life named after a firework? She's Gracie Allen, a name she unconsciously chose from something her father said when she was three.This Gracie Allen doesn't have a George Burns: the guy on her arm is Stephane Glock, a distant and rich relative of the gun making family. Stephane currently has fourteen million dollars in his checking account.

When Gracie was six she got her father's Black & Decker electric drill from the garage, fitted a No. 6 drill bit in the chuck, captured a frog from the undergrowth near the garden pond and drilled it full of holes. The experience was strangely exciting. A few days later she repeated the drilling experiment - mainly to see if the intense pleasure she'd experienced when drilling the frog, would be multiplied by drilling something larger. Her brother was four. She put four neat holes through
each of his kneecaps before her mother came running to see what all the screaming was about. It was ecstasy.

She's a dentist now with her own surgery in Hounslow, Middlesex, above which she lives. She loves her job and hates novocaine.

Gracie is happy this evening, in spite of the fact that despises her boyfriend of three months. Stephane doesn't have the faintest idea that this is the case. Gracie is one hundred percent certain of this. She's happy and Stephane is happy because she's promised him something special will happen tonight. Stephane has no idea what this is, but Gracie does. She's planned it all out in great detail.

Something else Gracie knows is what Stephane's been up to. He's been secrectly giving and receiving anal and oral sex with male strangers he meets on Clapham Common every Wednesday evening. Gracie can't think of a worse way a man can betray a woman. If it'd been women he'd been meeting - prostitutes even, she could have almost understood. She would have extracted her revenge, of course, but she probably wouldn't have had to go this far with him.

Revenge is sweet, Gracie knows. She can now forge Stephane's signature so well that a graphologist wouldn't be able to see hers was a fake. She has
the details of all his bank accounts, not just his checking account. She can't mimick his voice, of course, but she can hire actors who can do an Austrian accent if necessary.

Stephane likes to be tied up and tortured, which is a happy accident, because when they met Gracie didn't know this. And she likes to tie him up
and torture him. Stephane doesn't want heavy, bloody-drawing stuff, but what they do is enough to get Gracie off anyway.

Over the last eight weeks or so, Stephane has wanted to be tied up and used in Gracie's dentist's chair. Until tonight, Gracie has refused him this pleasure. But this evening she's promised him his greatest desire.

Once Gracie has her man securely strapped into the dentist's chair, she's going to hang a sign on the front door of her surgery that says: "Closed Till Further Notice Due to Sickness". But passers-by, and patients who don't know their appointments are cancelled will be able to hear drilling from inside. And screaming, possibly. If Stephane has anything left to scream with.

Gracie's going to have a lovely week or two....

Sent 10 Oct 2002
Ian W

This vision you experienced two weeks ago has left you in a serious state. Did it really happen? Or did someone slip you something into your drink? You hope that it was the latter. You convinced yourself that it was the latter, until you read the local paper this morning. 'The body of a young man was found this morning in dense woodland. He was found by two young boys who were walking their dogs. Police have sealed the area and are now asking for witnesses to come forward. The boys are said to be suffering from shock and are being looked after by relatives' It could be anyone, you think to yourself. Perhaps it's time to visit the doctors. The doorbell rings, you go into the hallway and you can see a tall possibly male. shape behind the bubble glass door. Then your palms begin to tingle....
Ok Stevie what now?
Is this fun, or what?

Received 12 Oct 2002
Steve Harris

I already know who it is and what he wants. The tall, portly figure outside my door, his finger jammed on the bell push, is Vinge, a policeman from my past. Last I heard, he'd retired hurt after he caught the edge of a spray of shotgun pellets from a sawn-off during a bank job in Brighton. He lost an eye and right cheek looks like the craters of the moon. He's put on weight. I know this in two ways. The first way is that I can see him well enough through the glass to tell for myself. The second way is because I can hear his jumbled thoughts. He's wondering if I'm in, he's wondering what kind of reception he'll get (and he's worrying it won't be a good one) but most of his mind is on pulling up his trousers, which he can't pull up far enough because of his gut (which is getting bigger, one of his thoughts tells me) and which slide down his hips under the pressure of the gut above.

What does he want? He wants to know what I know about a murder. Now there's something new! Or not, as the case may be. I can't quite tell through the jumble of thoughts in his head which murder he's interested in (I'm not a murder fan and certainly don't go out of my way to find out about them all - or any of them if I can avoid it) or why he should think I know something about it.

I doubt it's to do with Gracie Allen and Stephane Glock, because that's now dead and buried, if you'll excuse the term. Or at least Stephane is. I did make an anonymous call to the local nick in Hounslow and tipped 'em off that something bad was happening in Gracie's dental surgery, but they must have thought I was a crank or something. I found out later that no one
bothered to investigate during the following week. Someone went round there eventually, but only because a fire had been reported. Turned out that Gracie had finished with Stephane and gone. Of course, she lit the fire before she left. I doubt she's still in the country.

I open the door and there's Vinge, red-faced, sweaty and embarrassed. "Bad penny," I say.
Vinge nods and gives a half grin, half grimace. 'Can't stop 'em turning up," he replies.
'How's the face?" I ask. I've seen him twice since he was shot. The first time at the hospital. Half his face has looked like minced meat. I couldn't believe how well it'd all healed up. Since the last time I'd seen him he'd been fitted with a prosthetic eye. A glass eye, they used to call 'em. I suppose they still. I don't know, I didn't ask. The glass eye was a perfect match to his other eye. It moved, too. I dont' even want to think about *how*.

Back at the hospital in Brighton, all those years ago, they'd dug some 12 gauge pellets out of Vinge's eye then (on his instruction) phoned me. He wanted me to hold the pellets and see what happened. What happened was, I became those pellets. This was new for me. During the following seconds, I lived the memory of the journey of those pellets from the cartridge and into Vinge's face. The slight shock as the firing pin hit the cartridge. The intense heat of the burning propellant, the huge G force as I was accelerated up the gun's short barrel. The impact of Vinge's flesh, the huge G force of deceleration. I was out a long time afterwards. I woke up knowing the gunman's name and address and about 10 years worth of his past history. He's doing life now.

I invite Vinge in, sit him down at the kitchen table and make him black coffee. There's cake in the cupboard and Vinge looks like a hungry fat man, so I cut a couple of slices and put them on a plate. Victoria sponge sandwich. It squishes down to nothing in your mouth. It squished down quicker and more efficiently in Vinge's.

"You read about this one," Vinge says, spraying crumbs and pointing at the local rag which is lying on the table.
"It was on the telly last night," I tell him. "Isn't this out of your area? I thought you were retired anyway."
Vinge winks. "I'm in north Surrey now. Camberley. DCI. Quiet job, they told me. Relaxing. Fucking liars."
"You love it," I tell him. He does, injured or not. You can practically see it leaking from his pores.
"This what you're here about?" I ask him.
Vinge pokes the second slice of cake into his mouth, nodding. "I don't know anything about it," I tell him, truthfully this time. I've lied to him many times.
"We're drawing blanks on it," Vinge says, chasing an errant cake crumb back into the side of his mouth with a stubby forefinger.
"And you want me to visit the site," I say, plucking his next words right out of his head before he has chance to say them himself. I do try not to be invasive, but there are times when I Can't help it. I have better control now, so it isn't so bad: I can mostly peek into tiny parts of people's minds and avoid the great dark yawning chasms that used to swallow me up.
"Will you?" Vinge asks and inside his head I can hear a mantra being chanted: he won't! he won't! he won't!
Then he surprises me by pulling something out of his pocket. "Here," he thinks and says at the same time and of its own accord, I see my hand going across the table to accept the small thing. Into my open palm, Vinge drops a plain gold ring. It's thick and heavy. The gold is dark - presumably 24ct. For a second a burning bright image of Vinge lights up in my head. Vinge and his wife, in fact. In bed, going at it hard enough to make the bed squeal in protest. Missionary position. His wife is called Marie and she's 24 years his junior. She screams a lot during sex and knows the neighbours hear and that makes her scream even more.
"You've worn this," I say and Vinge colours.
"Didn't want to lose it," he replies. "Poked it on my pinky for safekeeping."
I take the ring to the sink and turn on the cold tap to remove the taint Vinge has put upon it by wearing it, wondering why all I got was him fucking his screaming wife. There should have been more. Much more. Beneath the most recent memory there should have been endless layers.
"Did you put it on directly before you went to bed?" I ask him.
Vinge's face is now puce. He looks as if he head might soon explode. He nods.
"Marie wanted you to," I say nodding, leaving out the fact that Marie had wanted the ring of a dead man inside her. The ring of a murdered man. Funny old thing, sex. It'd worked for Marie, anyway. I fish the washed ring out of the sink, take it back to the table. I know that Vinge brought it here (after sticking it up his wife on his pinky) so that I could use my "gift" on it. It hadn't occurred to him till after the event that he might have left traces of himself on it and by then he was too scared to wash it under running water in case it removed any "evidence"
that had been put on it during the murder.
"If anything bad happens..." I said.
"Make you safe and keep an eye on you," Vinge said, nodding. We'd done
this before.
"I'm out of practice," I said. I was. It was a long time since I'd tried to do psychometry. However, the fact that I'd picked up Vinge off the ring without even trying - or going into any kind of trance was encouraging. I close my eyes, hold the ring tightly in my left hand and let myself fall away into the void. And I fall, long and fast. Through total, utter nothingness. No light, no
dark, no sensation except of falling. I fall and fall. Then I hit something hard and my being shatters into splinters. The next thing I know I'm standing in a street. I don't know where this is, but I don't like it much. Above me the sky is cloudless and green. The tarmac - or whatever serves as the road surface here is dull red and appears to be composed of millions of tiny spheres which I can see moving and swirling and swarming like shoals of tiny fish. The pavement on which I'm standing looks and feels terribly wrong too. It seems to be trying to grip my shoes and move me from where I'm standing. There's barely any traffic on the street. Once every few seconds a large silver cigar-shaped transit sweeps noiselessly by. There are no windows in these cigars, but I know there are "people" inside. I can't discern what the people in them are. It's all too alien for me to comprehend on a psychic level. The "buildings" on the street are tall and grey and featureless - no signs, no markings and no doors or windows that I can see. I'm a long, long way from home - that much is for sure. I suddenly become aware that my left hand is rapidly heating up, then remember I'm tightly clutching the gold ring. It's getting hotter and hotter and feels like its...wriggling. I open my hand and the hot ring has burned a circle in my palm and a circle in my two middle fingers. The ring now appears to be alive. It's squirming, the metal appearing to become soft and malleable. I watch, stunned as the thing squishes its way across my palm like a circular caterpillar and falls off my palm. It hits the pavement with a musical tinkle and the stuff the pavement is made of - or perhaps the ring under its own power - speeds the ring off down the street. Something hits me hard.
I'm falling again.
I wake up at my kitchen table. For a few seconds I'm horribly disorientated and dizzy.
"Okay?" Vinge asks.
"I don't know," I say truthfully. "How long?" It feels like I've been gone weeks.
"Ninety seconds," Vinge tells me. "Not long. What did you get?"
My left hand hurts. I can feel the ring in it and I can still feel the burns it's made in my flesh. I open my hand, already knowing what I'm going to see: burns and no ring.
Vinge is astonished. "The ring's gone. Where is it?"
"Somewhere you're never going to get it back from," I tell him, remembering that scary green sky. "Somewhere a long way away."
"Your hands were both on the table the whole time," Vinge protests. "It can't be gone! I was watching you the whole time!"
"And yet it's gone," I say. My mind feels sick. As if it wants to throw up and purge itself of the memory of that alien place.
"What did you get?" Vinge asks. "Anything?"
I shrug. What can I tell him that he'll believe? "Nothing," I say. "Nothing useful. What I can tell you is you're never going to solve this one. I'm sorry."