The Firehouse. Home sweet home.

[Bluehorse]

I could be a Cthulu cult! Or a sect of Babbel! Or the remenance of a Zorroastrian society! Or maybe one of the new pizza cults out of Chicago!

The truth was... it could be so many things that with the information they had so far it could be anything. Perhaps there was a missing peice of the puzzle? Some connection that would narrow it down?

For the record, you rolled well enough, but I want to see you both talk it out before I give you any kind of revelation.

[Taaz]

Awesome!

Jason continues clicking on the PKE meter and looking thru books while he speaks. This is fascinating data, but it isnt helping me nail the specifics, I have a hunch but more data is always better. Is there anything else youve seen anything you can tell me you learned about the church or what might be in it? No detail is too small. he sits down at his laptop and looks at Etta, Hit me, everything you can think about it.

[Pulpatoon]

Etta looks around. "Hang on." She runs over to the lab, and rolls out two of the whiteboards. Popping a top off a blue marker, she begins to layout everything she has found out.

Mayor Sandy Sanders
• Owns this franchise
–– Total Initial Investment: $1.1mil
--–– Sandy Sanders, Investor: $33,000
--–– FSWHREIMI, Inc. LLC: $605,000 ←Fort Enterprise White Hat Real Estate (in other words, still Mayor Sanders)
--–– GBHQ & Sub: $165,000
-- After expenses, we get 15% of profits from our activities. The rest of it goes to our investors.

• Explicitly Corrupt
–– Wants us to respond to or ignore calls based on his development goals.
-- Owns plumb near everything and is not afraid to retaliate.
-- Controls the building, and with it the Containment Grid.
-- GBI owns the portable equipment.
-- It’s easy to see a situation where we have to go against Sanders wishes, and he locks us out of the firehouse. Inevitably, this will be during a moment of paranormal crisis. We’ll need to be able to secure the contents of the containment grid and access to our equipment. ESCAPE PLAN!

Escape Plan
• Access equipment
-- A secondary location for storing equipment?
-- A secret door in to the firehouse?
-- Legal route to removing GBI equipment? (probably not a timely solution)
• Secure contained ghosts
-- How long can a ghost stay in a trap?
-- Backup containment unit?
-- Vehicular containment unit?
-- Can GBI periodically come and collect our contained ghosts and move them to a more secure grid?
• Get out from under Sanders thumb
-- Louis Tully finds a loophole in our contract (not counting on it)
-- Buy Out (anybody got a spare million bucks lying around?)
-- FBI (Corrupt real estate practices = federal housing charges) (will take a long time)
-- Discredit (hard to do: old boys network; the man is charming AF)
-- Run for Mayor? (Looooooooong shot)
-- Father Belmont: does he have dirt on the mayor? Are they in conflict or cahoots?

Father Belmont
That church of his is ten pounds of spooky in a five pound cracker barrel.
• From the parking lot, PKE reading Class 6, high rate of flux!!!!
• History of disappearances in Fort Enterprise (30% correspond to attendees of the Church of the Living God; 39% if you include attendees and those targeted by Belmont’s TV show)

• Church of the Living God: congregation of about 30.
• TV show used to terrorize/blackmail the populace. Victims/subjects show elevated rate of suicide, divorce, bankruptcy and disappearance.
-- Watch Dogs: collect dirt on populace for Belmont’s show.

• History:
-- Founded by Belmont’s father after mission among Native Americans
-- Fire: 1909, killed the pastor, Belmont’s father
-- The Rood: old cross, rescued from old church, after it burned down
-- Cordelia Moffet: Belmont’s wife (deceased). Died the same year she married (1916).

In addition to the whiteboard bullet points, Etta prints out the results of her earlier research:

Father Trevor Belmont is listed as being the longtime pastor of the Church of the Living God Church in Fort Smith. He was ordained back in 1911 at the age of 16 and quickly was appointed as the pastor of the small community church. He was known to have taken a very hard-nosed stance on fundamentalism in his interpretation of the bible. This sat well with many of the locals at the time since it was at the tail end of the Second Great Awakening which was a winding down in much of the rest of the country but had not quite begun to lost steam in this neck of the woods so to speak. His leadership brought high numbers as everyone came to see the young and fresh-faced preacher that spoke with such passion and offered salvation despite the scathing sermons he was already well known for.

In May 1916, he married one of the young women of the parish named Cordelia Moffet. They were happy and for all account had what seemed to be a perfect and respectable marriage. Cordelia passed away suddenly from a fever that December.

There are a few newspaper clippings on record that talk about the mourning pastor and how his church went into disarray for about a year.

There are even more about how he revived the church after that time and was strong a preacher as ever, but began to lose some followers as attendance began to drop. Currently, he is both the oldest practicing Clergyman in the state and the oldest citizen of the city. His church has had a leveling off of attendance which hovers around 30 people, most of them the great-grandchildren of his original flock.

Outside of his immediate church, most people hold him in ill favor. He runs a group out of his church called the Watch Dogs. He orders his church members to keep an eye out for those living immorally and to photograph and record them in the act so he can broadcast it on his weekly television show aired on Sunday Nights on Channel 3 @ 9pm. He names them, shares where they work, and where they live, what they have done, and when they have done it, condemning them and those that they associate with. He is said very open about what most people call blackmail, saying "They have like everyone else you see on this program given a chance to come to repent before me and the church but my pleads for their souls have fallen on deaf ears, so here it is..."

Etta finds a few connections to those that were shamed on his program to have lost jobs, had divorces (which he also condemned) and even a few suicides and disappearances. The later is odd in that some of the disappearances are even of those that have pledged themselves to the church, whether they are shamed on his program or not.

According to some publishes journal entries in a copy of early Fort Smith history. Father Belmont's father was a traveling preacher that settled in Oklahoma as one of the first settlers following the Land Run on what was then called Indian Territory. He had the goal of converting the Native peoples and was only somewhat successful. Later he would suffer from depression and come back to Fort Smith to open a small church.

There is a newspaper article saying that in 1909 the church burned down, apparently Belmont Sr. was held responsible. Apparently the man was prone to drinking and had set the fire while alone in the church. One of the only things saved was an old cross from the alter that had been gifted to the church by an alderman back east. Belmont (the current one) saved the cross and displays it prominently in his current church where it has been since it was built. "The Rood" is even registered with the Historical Society as a town artifact.

Church of the Living God: Built by the congregation of the Fort Smith Church of God in 1910 when the original church burned in the accident that killed the pastor. His son would take over as leader of the congregation in his father's stead. The church took some time to get off the ground again but after a couple of years it prospered for about a decade before attendance began to dwindle.

Missing Persons: It takes some digging but when Etta cross references those that have come up missing since 1920 (when records were started to keep up with these kinds of cases) almost 30% of them correspond to attendees of the Church of the Living God. After 1953 when the television show started, the percentage suddenly jumped to about 39% when both Church Attendees and those featured on the show.

Etta looks over the information with weary satisfaction. "It has been a morning."

[Bluehorse]

All victims had vice in common.

Belmont Sr. was an alcoholic.
Other missing persons connected to the church had other varying "sins" that were pointed out.

Jason narrows it to possible demon possession or powerful entity that uses these vulnerabilities

Or

A Romanian cult who's sacrificial rituals work the same way.

[Taaz]

Jason is walking looking at the whiteboards, Most of the victims had some nasty habit, even his old man was an alcoholic. He walks around the boards, Although these tend to be other Deadly Sins. Let me check something, but do you have any ideas he says to Etta as he pulls a book off the shelf and begins flipping through it. Off the top of my head we could be looking at demonic position, or some sort of even more powerful spiritual being or possibly some sort of cult trying to conjure up something just as nasty as either of those. He pauses and looks back over the room. I know I'm missing that one little thing, so i hope you're seeing what I'm not

[Bluehorse]

You remember that having vice was said in many cultures to make it easier for demons to effect mortals.

[Pulpatoon]

Etta chews on the end of a pen. "Sin... but not just sin, right? Father Belmont is very focused on outting sinners, making a public spectacle of them. So... shame? Is he in league with something that feeds off or is powered by shame?

"We should look up as thorough a registry as possible of who exactly is in the congregation, so we know them when we encounter them. Speaking of... I'm real focused on this," She taps the whiteboard where is says:

-- Father Belmont: does he have dirt on the mayor? Are they in conflict or cahoots?

"There's no way the two of them are oblivious of each other's influence. And there's no way either would let another rooster get too big in their strutting grounds. So they have to be either working together or against one another. And we can't take either down until we know which."

[Bluehorse]

And that was the moment they were able to cross reference their various resources and came across a Romanian Demon named Kindle. He was said to have origins in pagan Turkey but later came into present day Romania in the early middle ages where he tricked the priests there into serving it as a divine entity. It is said that the Demon was fed sacrifices of those who fell into guilt for their misdeeds which he used to drain their life force for his own uses or otherwise control their behaviors for a period of time. Kindle was bound to a beach tree in 1606 by a priest of the orthodox church.

[Pulpatoon]

"Damn," says Etta. "How much you want to bet Belmont's cross is made of beech?"

[Taaz]

Jason lets out a slow, low whistle at that. Yeah I would take that action. And your not wrong about the mayor. At first I thought he was just some old south daddy warbucks wanting to stay 1% He looks out the window and tugs on his beard as he talks But there's no way some demon is making this much noise for this long and a guy as looped in as him wouldn't know something was up. he turns back to Etta He may not know its Kindle or even Belmont, but they have to know this many people connected to the church were disappearing so something is rotten in Denmark. We cant just roll in there packs blazing until we figure out who EXACTLY we can trust around here.

[Bluehorse]

Promise I have not been ignoring this, just juggling kiddos.

-- Father Belmont: does he have dirt on the mayor? Are they in conflict or cahoots?

Etta FINALLY finds a connection to Belmont and Sanders dating back to 1973. Apparently, Belmont berated him publicly several times for not paying a proper amount of tithes to the church. After the first time, he switched his membership to another local historic church, St. Paul's Episcopal. This was apparently also the start of their long standing feud that seems to stay in stalemate with neither ever quite getting the upper hand on the other.

[Pulpatoon]

Should we infer from that that Sanders is a former congregant of the Belmont's?

[Bluehorse]

Explicitly

[GreyWolfVT]

you guys totally lost me...I'm like 3 pages back from all these long posts apparently...

[Bluehorse]

The Firehouse
Making Connections
Aug. 9, 2018, 2:00 pm
Hot and Humid Outside

It was about an hour later of heavy research and analysis that Etta and Jason heard something downstairs that sounded like a long creak of rusty hinges and s pair of heavy rattles, followed by the sound of a car engine and voices.

The guys were back with the new would be Ecto 1!

Actions? We will finish the prep here and when yall are ready to Roll I will make a new mission thread. No hurry.

Brownie Point Pool
Dr. Jason O'Roarke: 66/66
Dr. Vanette Conklin: 57/57
Lionel 'Freight Train' Williams: 52/58
Roy O'Dowd: 64/64
David "Mac" McAuslan: 58/58

[Pulpatoon]

Etta to Jason: "I think we did some good work here, O'Roarke. Let's share it with the rest of the boys, and see what followed them home from the dealership. Oh Lord, please don't let it be a sports car."

[Taaz]

Yeah we need to let them know what we know ASAP

[GreyWolfVT]

Roy "I still think we should have bought a van or something but the jeep is good enough. That salesman stuck me as a bit of a shyster."

[Rex]

Mac

"I like Jeeps and it may be handy to have a 4x4. So what is the emergency?"

[Pulpatoon]

Etta: "This town is a powder-keg. An ancient Romanian powder-keg.

"Come on upstairs, fellas. Jason and I have our finds all laid out for you in the library."

Rather than re-cap again, I'll direct everyone to this post, upthread. Pick up the thread there and continue reading until you get back here, to catch all the juicy details.