My finding spell was able to trace the guy from the video of fast-food Mexican place to a residential home in a nice area. There was an extermination van outside like the one from the bridge. I was hoping that the rest of the hive would crumble after I removed the spirit from Rosa. No such luck.
We watched until an older woman in coveralls came out of the house and then we jumped her a couple blocks away. Larry pulled in front of the exterminator van and cut her off. She slammed on the breaks and I jumped out. I had 42561’s strength spell going and I ripped the door open and got a hold of her.
She bugged out bigtime. Even though I literally just did this a few days ago I was shocked once again by how strong she was. Someday I’ll learn. Or I won’t because I’ll get killed. She had me down on the ground and was getting into murder position when Huck clobbered her in the head with a ball bat.
That slowed her up enough that I was able to cast the spell to knock the spirit out of her. I wondered if she might die, on account of she just got brained with a bat, but she was okay. Not okay okay but she didn’t die is the point. Whatever bug-shit was going on must have prevented some of the damage instead of just puppeting her body along. Good to know.
Larry hopped in the van and followed us as Huck and I kidnapped her back to our hotel. Once there the kidnapee told us to call her Barbie. Barbie didn’t remember much. Like the telemarketing people in Galesburg she said that the time when the bug spirit was inside of her was hard to get a hold of like a dream.
She didn’t know Rosa or James but she did tell us that Taco Jorts and two other people were staying in that house with “her”. The one who infected her. That must be patient zero.
I healed Barbie up as best I could, bug-magic or not she was pretty banged up, and told her that she should probably lay low for a few days, get out of town if she could. She was pretty shaky but there wasn’t much else I could do for her other than offer to let her stay in our room.
“What happened?” was her primary concern. She said that she had flashes of herself doing bad things, hurting people. I assured her that was just the magic messing with her mind. There was no way to know what she had actually done while she was under their control. I’m not a great liar but I think she bought it.
Huck told her that what she experienced was a violation and she had to treat it seriously, like a physical injury that you have to recover from. You have to put in the work if you want to recover. You may want to ignore it but you can’t if you want to get better. You have to face it.
Sounded like she was speaking from experience.
