Chapter 1: Over Easy
The Forester Grill in Wicker Creek, Inglenook, was not the sort of place you would find a vampire, or her cohorts of various psycho-slashers from a formerly-abandoned asylum in the woods; it was the sort of place where Matronite faithfuls gathered before the middle of their days to have a nice luncheon with each other in the fake-log cabin-styled interior over scrambled eggs and maple pancakes.
In 1984, just as the Miasment Crisis was beginning to pose a serious concern for the areas of Inglenook beyond its origin point up in the Bay Area and Fort Merchant (or Fort "Miasment", as it was now being referred to, after the Fort Merchant Security Barrier had been left in place to quarantine the city from tne rest of the Kingdom of Inglenook's access), that idea — that you wouldn't expect to see a vampire and her cohorts there on any given day — was still in place.
However, as most citizens in Wicker Creek were busying themselves wondering if the mutagenic pandemic would reach them there or not, and the Matronite faithfuls began gathering for their daily luncheons, it was indeed a vampire and her cohorts — half caked in swamp, half dressed in ancient clothes — who entered the premises and chose a nice, square booth along the center promenade at which to sit themselves down and have a nice meal all for their own.
"This is terrible," "Doodles" Wellington said, picking at his eggs.
"Don't eat it," Sable Belgrave responded, her wide blue eyes and pale, sharp cheekbones reflecting a look of disdain and absence at anyone in whose direction she happened to look, including the servers, dining children, and other faithfuls in the diner who were also there tending to their luncheons.
Jimmy, known as "Doodles", had chosen something called "over easy" for his eggs, because it didn't sound especially or terribly complicated to make or for him to eat. The mess on his plate seemed to do nothing but turn his stomach.
"They're just runny mush," he said, poking at them with a fork. "I should've gotten the sunny-side-up ones."
"You still wouldn't have eaten them," chimed the ghost of Edward Hyde, who was a ghost whose spectral form shone transparent mist across the restaurant from his position in the booth, on the wall side of Jimmy Wellington.
"Did they remind you of someone?" Sable asked, her eyes peering at Jimmy from behind her broken, black-rimmed glasses. She didn't need them, she just liked the sense of an extra layer of distance it formed between her and everyone else she looked at through them.
Jimmy knew who she was referring to; Sunny Mercury-Chance, a friend of his from back in Grimshaw who was only dubiously real. He shrugged, setting the fork down. "They just sounded good. Like they wouldn't be mush I have to scrape up with toast."
"You didn't have to get them," Sable said.
Jimmy took a drink of his maple tea. "This is wonderful, though. So nectarous and bright."
Harvey the Hook, who was sat on the aisle side of Jimmy on Jimmy's left, suddenly banged his hook upon the table. Instead of both human hands, he had one human hand and one hook hand, which he had gained after his resurrection by Sable herself during the Revenant War back in Grimshaw. He was a mechanically-minded man who once worked on his brother Captain Stoker's steamship on Blackwater Lake, and was already terrified by the state of affairs in the new world to which Sable had brought them beyond the boundaries of the Grim Grove, where they were before.
"I tire of this!" he shouted, a little loud enough for the Forester Grill's other patrons to flance their heads in the Slashers' direction, as if they weren't doing that already. "When are we going to get our work started, Sable? We're exchanging pleasantries with these folk, these normal humans, these average people, when we should be finding Alderville. This world is sick, its warmth cuts my soul like a knife. I gaze upon these pleasant faithfuls and older individuals and I see only fear and tolerance in their eyes, not the thrill of our own like us. Why are we still here? Why haven't we moved on, Sable?"
Sable sipped her own drink, a red and sugary nectar of bubbles mixed with white vanilla ice cream, and waited for him to finish. "Are you done?" she asked.
"I will never be," Harvey said. "We have work to get started, Sable. You raised me for a reason, shouldn't we get to it?"
"Alderville will be there for us when we get to it," Sable said. "I want to find Gallo just as much as you do; more than you do, actually, since he's my brother and all. But we need to find a way to make ourselves unknown here. It's a weird world, and we don't want to draw weird attention unless we know we want that to happen. And we don't, remember?"
"I would prefer not to," Harvey said, putting aside the memory of their first awkward encounter with a Wicker Creek camper in the woods immediately after they had left the Grim Grove behind them, at least for now.
As they spoke, the stares from the Matronites and their fellow patrons of the restaurant began to get more intense, and a creeping feeling at the back of Sable's neck informed her their lunch was, in fact, approaching its end.
"Finish up," she said to Jimmy, as she finished her ice cream float drink. "We have to go, after all."
They took a bus. It was the line from Wicker Creek to Logworth, a larger city north of town, where they'd be able to arrange a more suitable method of transportation from there to their destination.
"It's in the Brinks," Sable said, referring to a guidebook she had picked up at the bus station before they headed out. "Alderville, I mean. They even have their own superheroes, but it doesn't seem like they actually do anything. Tourist trap appeal for a market-based economy, it seems."
"What?" Harvey the Hook said, gazing at her while waiting for the bus.
She held up the guidebook; it was a copy of 1984's edition of The Adventurer's Guide To Inglenook, published by Scrivener House, which purported to be a complete listing of every important city, township, and tourist destination in the whole of the Kingdom of Inglenook, and had been put out in its updated form every year since its original iteration, penned by the famed adventurer Aldridge Haggard, reached the publishers in the year of his infamous disappearance: 1938, 46 years before Sable was to pick up the copy she was holding then.
"Everything but Grimshaw," she said, holding it by its corner. "No one wants to visit our little shadow in the woods, I guess."
"Why should they?" said the ghost of Edward Hyde. "We wouldn't want them to, at that."
"Maybe," Sable said. "Still, it's not very complete or finished if it doesn't have our neck of the woods listed."
A small child was watching Doodles from behind his back, and Edward, upon noticing it, swarmed his spectral mist up behind her and conjured up a twisted, spooky, horrifying face instead of his normal one, which resembled ground dog meat passed through a rat on its way to the sewer. An otherworldly wail cried out, and the girl turned, and screeched as she saw the face he had conjured instead of his own.
"Boo!" he shouted, and she ran in the other direction.
He snickered, while Sable quirked her eyebrow at him and crossed her arms.
"Just for fun," he said. His spectral mist turned in the other direction, and Sable pocketed the updated copy of The Adventurer's Guide, because the bus had just arrived and it was finally time for their journey to start, and for the Slashers to get a move on toward their destination.