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Friday, August 21, 2015

Grace Cook (713: The Drowned Bride)


Concept: Ghost of a dead woman/ Element of a divine story.

AKA: Members of Grace’s family often refer to her as Cookie, dating back her infancy and her love of Cookie Monster. Yes, that’s right. Cookie Cook.

Desc: A slim translucent African American woman, ruined make-up and hair. Eyes with no pupils.  A long bedraggled wedding dress smelling of river water and rot.

History: in a time before time, and a place beyond place, there was a god whose name no longer exist for us. He made many servants. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them only had numbers, only a few had proper names. Each of them were powerful spirits, each of them, an element of the story of the whole of creation. At times, they are loosed upon the world to shape the story of this world and to shape the story of each individual life they come into contact with.  While this old god, (Might be Vishnu, but nobody is sure.) is a benign being and has humanity’s best interests at heart...Well. Not all of his spirits are benign. Nor are all of the stories they are meant to shape, happy ones.

Enter Grace Cook. Beautiful. Funny. Smart. Talented. Got a degree in sociology. Plays the piano at the concert pianist level, but isn’t so uptight or ambitious as to be interested in that life. Has a good job and has her own money. Active in her church. and, as a general rule, the kind of person who is simply a ray of pure sunshine to most of the people around her.

She met Ron Lawson at a church function having to do with their outreach mission. He works for Doctors without Borders. Working in various countries, treating people, obviously,  but a lot of his work had to do with compiling epidemiology data for the W.H.O. They hit it off and began seeing each other every time he was stateside.  Ron was old fashioned and even asked her father before getting down on one knee and popping the question. She’d been hoping he would.  

That year was a dizzying year for the young bride to be. Her pastor was delighted to help her out in return for all that she’d done for Riverside Presbyterian.
Her family had some money, but also they were very helpful in ways of making the wedding something special in ways that went beyond money or at least enabled her to cut costs.  Her sister’s catering business and her cousin Jamal’s DJ rig got pressed into service pretty fast.

It would have been picture perfect, but for the rain.

And nobody expected the riverside retaining wall to rupture. I mean, that thing had been there for decades, had withstood some of the strongest storms that have ever been through this area.
But when it burst, the wall of water practically slapped the church off of its foundations.

Chaos. People running everywhere and some were able to swim to safety. But things happened very quickly.
Grace didn’t make it. Like Ophelia, her sodden dress dragged her down and down and down...

Unmarried. No ring on her finger.

And now she haunts the ruins of her old church. (713 Riverside drive) You can almost always see her going back and forth on the anniversary of her aborted wedding. (July 13th)  and if someone brings one of the pair of champaign flutes around the church, that will ALWAYS get her attention.

At times, she might think someone is Ronnie. If she does she might approach them and speak to them, but when she touches them, their lungs fill up with river water and she doesn’t seem to know how to turn that off. Make no mistake it’s easily as traumatic for her as for anyone watching it. It’s not impossible to survive this unfortunate effect, but it does take quick action and maybe a little supernatural assistance. As a result, there have a been a couple of inexplicable drowning deaths in that area. Naturally, the Cook family LOATHES talking about any of that.  Some of the more superstitious people in the community have been real assholes about blaming the family for somehow causing the whole thing.

Attitude: “Ronnie?   Is that you...Ronnie?”

Skills: As a ghost, Grace doesn’t really have skills that would still be particularly applicable. Although, she does still roam around the neighborhood surrounding the old decrepit church and knows the environs and denizens pretty well.  At times, people can swear they hear the church organ being played...but that old thing hasn’t worked in years.  (She's definitely got Ghost Speech and Ghost Sign, and the drowning thing is probably closer to a spirit numina of some sort.)

Gear: Again, not much going on here.

Home: The ruins of Riverside church are where she hangs her veil. filled with rot, mold, rat droppings and old, discarded church regalia. She won’t appear outside if it’s raining. On odd occasions, she appears in the honeymoon suite (Suite 317) at the hotel where she and Ron were planning to stay before heading out to 2 weeks in Macedonia.  Many times this scares the shit out of whomever is occupying that suite. It’s pretty traumatic for her too. “Who ARE you and what are you doing in my suite?”   So far, no one has connected these infrequent appearances to the legend of the Riverside Presby ghost.

Circle: She usually refuses to appear to anyone from her family. It’s too painful. She might know other Ghosts in the surrounding area and has been sought out by ghost enthusiasts on occasion.  It went very badly for at least one of them.

Story Uses:
* “ I’m SORRY! Please! Ronnie! Don’t die!”
Grace is pretty tragic. and frankly, unless your players are utter cock-monsters, they should understand that treating her like a garden variety poltergeist is an asshole move.  On the other hand, she has caused a number of deaths. So.. Burning the church and destroying all the anchors MIGHT do the trick...But then again, she’s not exactly your garden variety ghost...And that’s liable to upset her something fierce.

* “Why do I keep seeing this number?”
The other end of this thing is that Grace is the living, and now dead, incarnation of a divine story. A cautionary tale to be sure, and certainly tragic. But if someone were able to hunt down the heart-broken Dr. Ron Lawson in Rwanda or wherever he is, and talk him into going back to the site of his greatest tragedy, and get him to take her hand and slip the ring on it...She could slip joyously away. Rejoin her divine brothers and sisters. Shed this sorrow and become a new story.

Maybe Ron would be able to move on. And you know, anyone who helps to tell that story to its completion, might earn that old god’s favor.  Or even, his INTEREST.

Connections:
Norman Cayce is probably the only person who still knows anything about the deaths in that neighborhood. The people who drowned were found with dry clothing and naturally that piqued his curiosity. 
* One night, she happened to see a man that she sensed was following a woman in the neighborhood. She sensed a deep wrongness in the man and as he moved to attack the woman, Grace attempted to stop him by drowning him...Somehow he was able to fend her off and even damage her. She's been on the lookout for him ever since.  That dude was Lewis Flowers.
Charlie, of course, can see her perfectly well and talks to her whenever he roams down this way. But it's not as if she can exactly send messages through to anyone. He's homeless and his mind is as orderly as a box of kittens.
* Grace was laid to rest at Parker Mortuary and Black Creek Cemetery and while Trent might barely remember her, he might also be their best source for the story if the family won't talk to the PCs. (Or the PC's have pissed them off.)






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