Rebels & Mutineers is set in modern day New Orleans, Louisiana. R&M is fueled by player's plots and group input.
Supernatural people have always had their place in society, hidden in plain sight or locked away for their own protection. New Orleans, a haven for the strange and mysterious and a magnet for the supernatural.
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Post by Charlotte Rae Devereaux on May 9, 2019 23:45:07 GMT
the rougarou
Although she's gone
There was a usually deserted diner on the corner of one nameless street and another, where the world felt trapped between the eighties and a bleak future. The neon sign outside no longer worked, but even in the dark, the thin outline of “The All Night Diner” was visible beneath the dust and grime of years. There was a woman who worked there, with dark eyes and a face somewhere between haunted and innocent, as though she was trying to remember something that kept slipping away from her. She had felt that way for over two decades, had visited doctors that could only shrug and send her on her way with sleeping pills and a pat on the head. But still, every night, she got up and donned the uniform she had worn for thirty years and worked the same late shift. It was quiet most of the time. Any drunks wanting late-night food had better options than subpar eggs and dry toast from the All Night. So she started her shift the same way every night: cleaning up after the day and taking inventory behind the counter with a “have a good night” text from her husband. Most of the time, only stragglers or the odd trucker came in, asked for black coffee, and left.
Melissa Devereaux didn’t mind it so much. It was a quiet life and let her be. She made decent tips when there were customers, but Cash was the real money-maker. The All Night often felt like more of a hobby, and she never thought about quitting. There were a few returning patrons that she liked, including a rather interesting one. There was one woman, one dark-haired woman, who came in now and again, ordered black coffee, and stayed until it was empty or cold. Melissa never remembered their conservations – surely they spoke to each other? -, but she always recognized the woman’s deep eyes and sharp suits. She was younger than her by at least three decades but seemed so much older, as though someone had asked her to see too many things at too young an age. She couldn’t imagine where the woman came from; she didn’t seem like she grew deep roots anywhere.
Her visits usually came like clockwork, every other Sunday night. There were a few years when they thinned out, and most concerning of all, there was one time she didn’t come for a full six months. When she came back, she looked more official, more confident. Melissa couldn’t remember why. All she could remember was the woman’s physical presence, her name, and the fact that she always paid in cash, exact change and a thirty percent tip. The woman was named Rae, which Melissa liked. As a child, she had a beloved dog named Rae, and had it ever been in the cards, she would have liked to name her firstborn that. It hadn’t been, however, so she never got to. She regretted it sometimes, not trying hard enough. Their old house felt empty with just Cash and her, but it came and went in waves. Some weeks were better than others.
She found an old pacifier once, when she was moving things around in her craft room. Cash had no idea where it came from, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out. It was silly, he said, but somehow it would feel wrong to throw out, as though the original owner would come back and miss it. Neither of them really understood it, but they kept it on top of their china cabinet anyway – just in case. It probably belonged to the previous owners; they would be safe to throw it out. Sometimes she even thought about it, had it over the trashcan, but she could never drop it in.
One night, right before the bottom fell out of a storm, Rae came again. As soon as she passed into the diner, the bell above the door chiming to her presence, the rain started to slap against the window. It didn’t bother the only other occupants (Melissa, two truckers, and a worn out cook), but thunder clapped not long afterwards. Lightning split the sky. “Storm’s not far off now,” remarked one of the truckers at the counter. His buddy nodded in agreement, grunting in response. The diner lapsed into silence once more, save for the muffled sounds of the cook’s radio. Rae took her seat in the back booth, looking darker than the sky outside. It had been a long time since Melissa had seen her like that.
“Black coffee, Miss Rae?” Melissa questioned, not even bothering to take out her pad. It was always the same thing anyway.
“Who makes the sweet tea?” Melissa had to strain to hear the question, the woman’s voice quiet against the back drop of the storm. She recoiled in surprise.
“I do, actually. It won’t hurt you or nothing, but I make it a certain way.” She hated the ready-made tea they bought and had pitched the owner to let her made a gallon or two every night. He only relented when he tasted it the first time. Come morning, hardly none was ever left. “It’s all about the sugar ratio. I put in a little more than I probably should.”
The darkness on Rae’s face parted a bit, but Melissa couldn’t read much more of her than that. She knew hardly nothing about the woman; whatever they talked about must not have left much of an impression afterwards. It surprised her to hear Rae say, “I know someone who used to make it so thick you could chew it.” There was a pause. “I’ll take a glass.”
The woman sat back into the booth and watched the rain. Melissa kept her eyes on her as she went to pour the sweet tea. She thought about texting Cash about the rain; he loved storms but the window in the laundry room leaked something fierce every time one came through. With all the hurricanes, she thought he would get it fixed, but sometimes it was like he just got lost along the way. Sometimes, he’d get distant and mumble about a Charlie playing in the next room, but they never named one of their dogs Charlie. Other times, he’d just shake it off and claim it was like sleeping while standing up, little bits of nonsense that didn’t mean nothing but that he couldn’t recall for anything. He’d surely forget to put a towel down in the laundry room.
She brought Rae her sweet tea, and for a second, the woman just looked at it as though it could talk. The moment lasted too long, so Melissa cleared her throat. “Anything else?” she asked, suddenly nervous. Rae looked up at her as though she were a child trying to decide if it was better to talk to the teacher or not. A frown tugged on the woman’s normally neutral expression.
“Can you sit with me? Just for a minute.” It was an odd request, one Melissa didn’t immediately know how to answer. But it was late, and the truckers were already made moves to leave. Unless she wanted to count the sugar packets for the third time that night, she had nothing else pressing to do. With a hesitant nod, she slid into the booth across from the woman, who now, for once, looked openly uncomfortable.
“Is there someone I could call for you, honey? If you’re hurt or something, we can go someplace together.” Without thinking and driven by her warmest impulses, Melissa reached out to Rae’s clasped hands on the table. Before she could touch them, the other woman jerked them away, and for a second, she thought she saw a child sitting hunch-shouldered inside the tailored suit.
“No, that’s fine. I just…I’ve done something aw-.” Words seemed to escape the other woman, and she drew in a terse breath through and out her nose. “Do you know the story of the rougarou? My mother used to tell me about it.”
Of course she knew the rougarou. She had grown up in the Deep South, where the rougarou felt as real as any bogyman. She remembered her grandmother telling her the stories with her cousins, promising that the bayou werewolf was going to sneak into their rooms and carry them off into the night for being bad children. None of them ever did get carried off, but even as an adult, she always made sure she said her prayers and did the right thing, lest it still come for her. “Everyone knows the rougarou, honey.”
Rae was quiet, staring into the murky waters of her iced tea. Melissa shifted in the booth across from her, not quite sure what to do about it. She second guessed her choice to sit down. What if the woman had finally lost it? What if poor Rae was one of those people who believed in superstitions too much? She tried to give her an encouraging smile, but Rae’s face had shifted back into neutral.
“I think, at some point in my life, I became the rougarou.” Oh no. Here it was. Melissa did her best to try to sidle out the booth without angering the young woman, but Rae hardly seemed to care as she went on. “Not literally. You don’t have to leave; I won’t hurt you.” Her voice was dry and had a whip-like quality; Rae was used to getting what she wanted. It intrigued Melissa, as she wasn’t used to women who were so forceful. It was a quality that she could never seem to have for herself.
“Well, what do you mean?” She paused her exit from the booth, watching the softness that cascaded over the younger woman’s harsh features. There was something about her that reminded her of Cash, something that she could never put her finger on; as soon as she narrowed it down, it disappeared again. It would come to her eventually, she knew.
Rae breathed in deep, and Melissa watched her close her eyes gently. “I’ve done awful things in my life. I’ve taken away what some people loved most, and I did it because people promised me that I would be safe. And after I was safe, I kept doing it because I forgot what it was like to be on the other side.” Melissa couldn’t follow what she was saying. It was tangled and quiet, as though she wanted to say the words but didn’t want anyone to hear them. “I forgot what it was like to be the scared kid. I knew that I was punching down, and I didn’t stop. I became the monster along the way, and because of that, bad shit happened.”
Melissa wanted to press, but instincts held her back. She wanted to comfort the woman, wanted to pull Rae into a hug, assure her that whatever corporate thing she had done was nothing on the rougarou, but that wasn’t her place. None of this was her place, and she felt so oddly out of sorts, as though she had been dropped into a different life for a short moment. She felt trapped and didn’t understand. “I…I don’t know what to say to any of that, honey.”
“I fucked up, and no one can know. I messed around, I got too attached, and then I didn’t stop it. People are dead because of me and my choices. People I…cared about. That’s pretty fucked up.” Rae leaned forward, and despite her best judgement, Melissa did too. Rae’s dark eyes pinned her down to the booth, and for a second, she felt like she was floating in cotton. She shook her head to clear it, but Rae was pressing on. “And that’s not even counting what I did to you.” She wasn’t sure when she remembered Rae pulling a picture out of her pocket, but she passed it to her.
Melissa picked it up gently in one corner. She recognized the background. It was a park near her house, one with swings and an old-style metal slide. There was something so strong about the photo, something that tried to desperately call up something in her. It took her a moment to realize that the woman in the photo, the one behind a sullen little girl on a swing, was her. It was like someone had taken her body and put it into the film of someone else’s life. The little girl in the photo leaned back against her chest, wild curls framing a cherubic but unsmiling face. The same dark eyes, the same hard set of the mouth, but not the darkness. It was Rae. “Where did you get this?”
“Monroeville raided your home and destroyed my childhood because they wanted to know if I could successfully disappear. I could, I did. My name isn’t Rae. It’s Charlotte, Charlotte Devereux. You’re my mother, and I can do freaky shit. You put me in Monroeville because I was a disturbed little girl. They promised to fix me, but they couldn’t. So they made me worse, and they made me make you forget. I’ve told you this twice before, and I took it back both times. I’ll probably do it for the third time.”
By all rights, it should have been ridiculous, but she knew it wasn’t. There was a validation in the story, as though she had always known it but had forgotten it. Like a long buried tune, it came back up; having a child was like riding a bike, she guessed. You never truly forget it. She knew the familiar sting of tears in her eyes. “We called you Charlie.” Warmth flooded her chest first, trying to keep ahead of the things she knew she had wanted to forget. “You liked Oreos and chocolate milk, but only if it was Borden. You called your stuffed rabbit Bingo; you couldn’t sleep without him. You and Cash built a dollhouse out of discarded wood, but the termites got to it. You cried.” But she remembered more, about the girl who she made forget about her dog so Charlie could bring it home. She was only ten, and she couldn’t understand why it mattered how she got the dog. It was cute and she wanted it; Melissa remembered her argument well. That had been one of the lighter things she had done. “We would sit on the porch and watch the rain. Once, you told me you felt like it was always raining in your head and that sometimes it thundered.”
Melissa also remembered when Charlie made the neighbor boy “remember” the gruesome death of his parents, only for them to realize the memory had been stolen from a horror movie they had seen the day before. She also remembered the day they visited Monroeville as a family, remembered what it was like to watch them take her daughter into the facility. Remembered the wild rage that had settled way too quickly into a cold hatred. Later memories came back, too: a young, still angry Charlie visiting the All Night and watching her, their conversations afterward about medical school and the patients. “Honey, what did you do? Please, I need you to tell me.” She didn’t want to know, but she had to. And Charlie needed to tell her.
Charlie’s head dipped, the curls cascading over either side of her face. “I’ve been in the room while they tortured kids. I wrote down how often and how loud they screamed. It didn’t bother me too much.” She met Melissa’s eyes once more. “But it got out of control, and they started dying. And I didn’t tell anyone. There’s a man who’s like the devil. You thought I was bad? I was child’s play compared to him. He put a girl that everyone loved in the chair, and he killed her. He killed the only person who was ever nice to me without wanting something in return. It was my fault.”
“I’m so sorry for that, Charlie. We failed you.” It was too much. Melissa’s head was starting to throb, her heart speeding up in time to the thunder outside the shop window. She felt like the storm outside, and she was overwhelmed. She didn’t want this burden of knowledge, and she remembered then the relief that had come to her when she sat in the Monroeville office before she forgot everything. She wasn’t supposed to want to forget her only child, but it’s all she wanted. She wanted nothing more than to forget again, to go back to the quiet of her empty house with Cash. “You won’t make me remember this, will you?”
Charlie shook her head. “At first, I thought it was cruelty to do what I did to you two, but I understand now.” Her hands were back on the table, gently pulling the photograph from the death grip Melissa had on it. “I wouldn’t want to remember all of what I’ve done. If I had the choice, I’d take that mercy.” Somehow Melissa doubted that, but her head was cotton and her eyes pooling tears once more. “Focus on me. This will be over in just a second.”
Five minutes later, Rae was leaving her payment, in exact change, on the table, along with her customary thirty-percent tip. Her glass of sweet tea was down to just ice. Melissa guessed she enjoyed it, but she couldn’t remember if she asked her anything. Still, she found herself a little more interested in the woman’s presence than she usually was. Perhaps it was just the sleep and her tired eyes; she felt like they were on fire. She just figured that she had to focus on something other than sugar packets or she was going to fall asleep early on her shift.
She nodded to Rae as she left, but the woman didn’t acknowledge her. She never really did. She nearly jumped out her skin when the cook tapped the order bell behind her. She twisted around, and he seemed a little concerned. “You and that girl were talking for a long time. You okay?”
They were? She couldn’t remember a conversation. “Oh, uh, it must have just been about the weather I guess. Goodness knows that’s always a lot to talk about,” she said with an unconvincing laugh. She just had to bus the table, which she hurried to do as soon as Rae had disappeared into the dreary drizzle outside. She pocketed the tip, not bothering to count it, and went to pick up the cash on the receipt when she noticed something in the bottom left corner. In neat, small writing, all it said was Charlie. Strange as it was, she couldn’t help but think it would be a cute name for a dog. She’d have to talk to Cash about getting another puppy.
She couldn’t remember the last time they had something small in their house.