Mr.Dooty's Tea Party

In Illamini, burial sites are where hundreds of dead from various villages and towns are buried together in the same massive grave, so as not having to face the beyond without community. Burial sites are places to meet, host parties, be merry and keep the dead company.

Every town has them open, with tables and chairs, food stands, the places have an atmosphere of a yearlong Faire. Every town except one. Jagus Hills.

In Jagus Hills the burial site is surrounded by a fence over 20 feet high, topped with barbed wire.

An armer security guard stands silent at the only entrance, glaring at any and all unrecognized passerby.

Between bright warning signs lining the fence one may see pathches of fresh and new concrete on the otherwise worn and weathered decades old stone.

It is empty. Silent. A thick and hateful air hangs around the site.

Nobody will speak as to why this is, not to an outsider. It's as though it's taboo to speak what has happened, or perhaps what's happening.

Even Salinae and Oushiqae, two otherwise nameless wanderers passing by would be stopped by a town guard.

"What are your names?"

"What's your business here?"

"How long have you been in the vicinity of Jagus Hills."

"How long do you plan on staying?"

Locals linger too long to stare on their way to work.

Just one night at the inn, the pair would reply, it's late and they're on their way to Duphimevu up north.

They're let go, escorted to the inn, ordered to not come out until morning.

The morning comes abruptly, a platoon of guards bursting down their room's door at the crack of dawn, forcing the pair to press against the wall at gunpoint, frantically searching the roon.

Outside, Sal sees the high fence of the burial site, a crowd gathered, shouting, pushed back by one group of guardsmen while another group walk up and down the site.

"That's another one gone." Salinae hears a guardsman shout, his comrades shoving furniture aside in the room.

The village of Jagus hills has a problem, one that chills Salinae to her core.

Every few nights at the burial site a hole will be found in the concrete, a body missing.

The locations of each buried person are documented and kept track of on various stone tablets built into the concrete, so they always know who specifically has gone missing.

There's no pattern to the disappearances. Children, adults, women, men, though the culprit never touches the boxes with remains that were best left unseen at the time of burial. Every home had been searched, every resident questioned, every outsider stopped and interviewed. Salinae and Oushiqae had received a taste of this as soon as they entered the town.

Salinae, herself, is a spiritual woman. The idea of the living interfering with the dead like this, to pull a dead person from the grave, rip them from their community of the dead, possibly isolating them in death...

...it was any Illaminian's nightmare, hers included.

Thus, while Oushiqae wished to simply move on from Jagus Hills, Salinae insisted they stay, scouring alongside the guard.

It wasn't long before she happened upon a long abandoned house at the bottom of a forest valley.

The building looked rotting, the roof caving in.

Despite Oushiqae's protests, Salinae explored what little of the inside remained. No furniture, hardly any shelter,

no secret stash of corpses.

"C'mon, Sal, surely if a whole platoon of town guards working around the clock can't catch whoever is doing this, what chance do we have?"

Salinae shook her head, emerging from the house empty handed.

"It's important to me." She huffed, trudging around the house, leaves crunching under her boots. "If I walk away it'll haunt me for the rest of my life."

Salinae disappeared behind the house, Oushiqae following with a huff.

The cow woman rounded the corner, opening her mouth to offer words to help Salinae come to her senses, but her words died in her throat at what she saw.

There, Salinae was using her rifle to brush away loose foliage. Whole bushes popped out of the ground with ease, having been simply stuck there rather than grown.

Leaves, hay and grass all deliberately piled up in front of a cellar door to hide it.

Salinae broke the lock with her rifle, leaning down to hoist open the heavy metal doors.

"Sal..." Oushiqae began.

Salinae didn't respond, immediately stepping down into the dark abyss of the cellar. Oushiqae fidgeted...and followed.

Salinae walked down the wooden steps to the floor of the cellar and was immediately taken aback.

Instead of her boots clomping on hard cement they instead landed on flat carpet.

The woman's grip on her rifle tightened. There was no light in here.

Oushiqae snapped her fingers, fire magic she usually reserved for lighting her pipe sprang to life on her fingertips, the sole light to let them navigate.

The dim orange light showed peculiar things about the interior. The carpet was blue and patterned with triangles and squares and circles of different colors.

The walls were clean and brightly colored with friendly, smiling faces painted on.

Matted, soft looking shapes sometimes blocked the way. Everything looked artificial, squeaky clean.

They continued down the dark hallway as it twisted and curved, eventually coming up to a dim light coming from a room at the end of the hall.

Salinae stopped in her tracks, looking at the room ahead. Her heart thrummed.

She could faintly hear music, like a music box playing in the distance...

...and she could smell sulfur.