Poppy regained consciousness around 5pm, judging by the dimming outdoor lighting and the indoor lights just being on. Being aware of what’s going on while she’s not controlling the body is frankly exhausting and headache inducing, so she tended to go back inside unless needed or it was part of her scheduled time out. The first thing she noticed was that she was looking up at the ceiling, the hard wooden floor of wherever she was pushing up against her back. It was unlike Jack to have a nap on the floor, so maybe they were pushed or knocked out by someone — “sapped” as they’d say in the crime novels she liked to read. She did have a headache, but a radiating one, not localised, so it was unlikely to stem from a blow to the head. Just a forced headache from a rare forced switch, she supposed. Getting up off the floor, she had a look around further. It seemed to be some kind of curio shop, lots of magical knick-knacks, curiosities, and bric a brac. Not wanting to disturb Jack, she wandered over to the counter to try work out if whoever was running the place knew why they were there. She didn’t immediately see anyone, but looking over the counter, she found an unfamiliar man unconscious on the floor. He was breathing, but shaking him didn’t seem to do anything. Knocked out cold. This was not good. She’d have to talk to police or ambos or whoever and that’s a lot of social interaction and there’d be sirens and that’s a lot of noise. This was more of a Jack problem anyway, so she tried calling out to him. Due to being different spirts inhabiting a body, internal communication was generally quite easy for this single-bodied detective agency.
“Hi Jack.” She waited for a response. And waited. “Jack? C’mon please. Is this about me eating your flan? I promise I’ll get you a new one.” Still no response. If something scary happened maybe Spider saw something. “Hey itsy bitsy, you know what happened to Jack?”
“He - He’s gone~” Sally started crying.
“Oh. That’s not good. Hey, I’ll find him, OK?”
Poppy started putting the pieces together. It seemed that something had gone down here, possibly related to the possible sleep spell Jack was investigating. Poppy was unsure why it would only affect Jack, but her best guess was something to do with maybe it being single target and thus only affecting one inhabitant of the body.
‘Ah fuck, what a fucking nightmare. Rosedrop, handle the pigs for me’ beckoned Poppy and Rosedrop reluctantly took over.
Rosedrop didn’t like fronting. She was anxious and a bit of a shut-in, and there were certain aspects of Jack’s body that she really didn’t like thinking about. Most of what she did was “child care”, gaming, and watching medical dramas, unless her magic knowledge or basic spellcasting were needed. However, she’s the only adult around without sensory processing issues, so it has to be her to make the phone call. She looked outside to work out her location, wrote it down, and then rang 000.
20 minutes later, an ambulance took the proprietor of the store away and the police took a brief statement from Rosedrop. It was hard to give them much information since she wasn’t there and Sally is hysterical. Best she could work out is that some guy wearing a business suit — “dressed like Daddy” — threw some kind of magic around. It was a stressful conversation, and by the end of it, the body had several fresh scratch marks on its arms. They thanked her anyway, and she gave them their number. It was a big day for the kids so she decided it was time to get them ice cream, luckily there was a gelato store nearby. She got strawberry for them, it was their favourite mostly (Bad Sally preferred chocolate), but as they were sitting down, they got a message.
“Hey, did you forget about dinner?” It was Luna
“Something big happened. Getting ice cream. Tell you about it when we get there”
“Not Jack?”
“Yeah.” Luna wasn’t always the best at knowing who exactly she was talking to, but she was pretty good at narrowing it down to a few suspects. Jack just talks different to the others, it’s hard to explain.
Rosedrop got a small plush neopet out of her bag, asked the children to come to the front, and then peaced out until they were done. She did observe during times like this. She found peace and joy from seeing the kids be happy for a change, and it made Rosedrop smile. 40 minutes later, they were at Luna’s flat.
At about this point Poppy took over again. She grabbed her headphones from the bag, put them on, and knocked at Luna’s door. Opening on the door, she gave Poppy a looking over before saying
“Hey babe, c’mon in.” Poppy was the only other system member that she was dating. Rosedrop is straight, and the kids, naturally, are too young for that kind of a thing.
“Luna, right? I’m a bit dense.” Luna was plural too. Like with a surprising amount of autistic trans women, bad things happened a long time ago and now there’s a bunch of her. She has DID and her and her headmates collectively go by the Sega Master System.
“Mhm!”
“OK”
Neither of them were really great at words, and it is kind of awkward being around someone who shares a body with someone you’re dating, even if you’re dating them as well. Poppy sat the bag down on the couch, took Jake’s coat off, and gave Luna a chaste kiss. Anything too intense could cause a switch on Luna’s end which is not what Poppy needed at present. A scared syskid is not what you want to deal with on a stressful day. Afterwards, Poppy sat down at the table and Luna got a sandwich out from the fridge to eat.
“I made two of these, but I know the texture is bad for you. Do you want dino nuggies, or should we wait for Jake to come back?”
“That’s a lot of questions. Um, I’m not sure Jake is going to be back tonight. Or ever maybe. Something happened.”
“Oh yeah, someone told me something happened. You wanna tell me?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure exactly what happened but Sally says Jake’s gone. I think we were hit by some kind of sleep curse? Either way we can’t talk to him.”
“Any clue why this happened?”
“Jake was investigating Veronica’s GF. You know how she’s in a coma or something right? Jake thinks it’s magic. Maybe it’s some kind of serial cursing spree.” By this point, Poppy was rocking in her chair, and fiddling with Jake’s watch. She tends to stim when she gets nervous.
“You’ve never been without Jake have you, except for you know, before all this?”
“Yeah”
“I don’t know personally, but it can be hard to be without your main host. I hope you can get used to running things again. I know we were out of whack when Pamela went away before I showed up.”
“OK. I’ll try. Also, I do want the dinosaurs.”
Conversation went on like this for a while. They talked about tv shows and stuff, and Luna went on some weird rant about some shitty tv show she was watching that handled DID poorly (spoiler, every show that handles DID does it poorly). Eventually, Luna asked the big question.
“So like, what are you going to do. You know, about Jake?”
“I mean I have to do something. I know I’m not a real detective but I’ve seen Columbo and that’s close enough right?”
“Not at all. If someone’s whacking people off then you need to go to the cops about this, we care about you. We need Jake." Poppy found it hard not to laugh at Luna accidentally making an innuendo, but she steeled herself and continued.
“I’m not talking to the fucking pigs. I mean I’ve also seen Murder She Wrote. Ooh, and I’ve beaten all the Ace Attorney games. I’ll be ok. I mean how hard can it be?”
“You do realise that if the body dies, all of you but the children die too, right? We’re not taking more people into our body, we don’t have vacancies.”
“OK.” Poppy didn’t particularly care. She’d seen Jake do a million cases by now and she really believed she could do it. “I’m heading to the crime scene tomorrow.”
There was a bit of a pause, and Poppy made brief eye contact with Luna to see if she was staring daggers or something. Instead it seemed like she was dissociating.
“Hey, you alright in there?” No response. “Luna?”
“Owwwwwww. Not Luna” Whoever it was grabbed their head. Thunderclap headache. After a few seconds, they looked over at Poppy’s plate and grabbed off the last dino.
‘Probably a kid.’ Poppy thought. ‘Best to play things safe’
“What do we say when we want something?”
“... pwease?” Definitely a kid
“Yes. It’s ok though you can have it. How about you tell me which one you are, and then maybe we can watch something before bed time?”
“It’s Lilly, Auntie Poppy.” With her voice it came out closer to “wiwi” though. She started laughing, and waving her arms about. Lilly is one of Spider’s friends. If Sarah’s not still at the front of the ghosts, it might be worth getting Spider out to play for a bit.
“How about we wash our hands, and then you can do whatever you want tonight?” Lilly had managed to get barbecue sauce all over her hands.
“Even singing?” Lilly asked. She liked to sing, but Poppy’s sensory issues made that hard to tolerate.
“Maybe not tonight. Rosedrop is too tired to play.”
Eventually, Lilly decided to put on some old Dr Seuss puppet show on youtube, and after an episode, Spider came out too. Poppy wasn’t really sure what happened for maybe an hour and a half, but when she came back, there was paper and toys everywhere, and Lilly(?) was mostly asleep. Clearly, some people had had a lot of fun.
“Hey kiddo. Hows about we getcha to bed?”
“...kay”
Poppy let out a yawn. She was tired too. They cleaned their teeth, toileted, and then Poppy put Lilly in bed.
“I’m going to go out now, you remember how to lock the door?” Lilly nodded. “Great. Call me if you need anything”
40 minutes later, Poppy was at home, in bed, and drifting off to sleep.
