Chương 341: Book Eight, Chapter 8: Estate Auction

After I finished talking to Camden, I needed to find out where my character lived so I could have a good home base. Since I was the guy in charge, AKA the mastermind, it was probably the location where the team would meet up before the heist, so I should know where it was. I did the trick that we had learned, where you could improvise into having the keys to any car you saw, start it up, and then suddenly the car would be yours. That way, I could look at the registration and see where I lived.

Checking my driver's license would have worked too, but I liked the new way. Unfortunately, what I found was a hotel receipt. My character, it seemed, was from out of town or at least had been out of town for a while, so the hotel was where I went. It was the type of place that you could pay for a month in advance. The key card to my room was even in my wallet. It was funny that the first mystery in every storyline was learning basic things about your character. I had been Off-Screen for a while.

Just as I was about to reach the room my character was staying in, a couple of NPCs walked by talking about how Gerald Bellanti's belongings were being auctioned off later that day. They were really loud about it, so it was clearly a nudge that I needed to head that direction. But before I did, I wanted to check in with my teammates, so I decided to get use out of my Prop Department Requisition trope. I wasn't sure how to use it, but I was Off-Screen, so I could get creative.

I simply said I needed to find my contact list, the kind you see in crime shows, which would contain all the different people I knew who could help get the heist done. I found it pretty easily, written in my own handwriting inside my hotel room's safe. I easily found the other players' information in there. I went to the phone and called up Dina.

That's how, thirty minutes later, she and I were headed down the road in my new car on the way to check out the auction where all of the items in the house were going to be sold. The house itself would be sold a couple of days later. After a little bit of discussion on what type of dynamic our characters should have, we eventually went On-Screen and the banter began.

"Tell me this is more than just some house in the suburbs," Dina said as she put her feet up on my dashboard.

"Tell me we're not just common burglars now." I smiled and said, "It's not just any house, and technically every time we break and enter, we are burgling." Dina took in the surroundings like she wasn't impressed.

"When you climb up the side of a skyscraper to steal something, you don't call it burgling. It's a proper heist," she said.

"Well, if we're lucky, this will be one of the biggest heists of our careers," I said.

"And it is called burgling when you climb up a skyscraper to steal something. Cat burgling." We passed by a nice, average suburban park. It was very pedestrian. People were out playing with frisbees and walking their dogs.

"My God, Riley, turn the car around. I'm not this desperate. I had a good gig back in Albuquerque. It wasn't much, but it wasn't home invasion either." I laughed.

"Well, just lend me your eyes, help me get a fix on things. It's right up here," I said. We turned down the street where Lark House was located, and as we did, we saw that many cars were parked on the sides of the road leading up to our destination. It was going to be packed inside. I parked, and we began our walk up the hill toward the house. The first thing we could see for a long while was the wall that was placed around the property.

"So are we going to have to scale that?" Dina asked, looking at the massive bars set into the stone.

"Nope," I said.

"We'll use the front gate." She shook her head in annoyance. As we began walking up through the gate and were able to get a good look at the house, as the towering red cedar boards framing the outside started to show, Dina asked, "Is this a museum or a residence?" It really did look like a museum once she mentioned it. In fact, the storyline itself might have been from a museum in its own world, but I would never know.

"If I call it a museum, will you help me rob it?" I asked.

"You could start by telling me what we're after," she said.

"That might help." We walked our way through the garden filled with various vases and potted plants, as well as the remaining statues that didn't have to be removed for the safety of the guests. As we did, we were joined by a massive crowd of very well-dressed NPCs who were all smiling and chattering amongst themselves at the experience of getting to see a real-life hitman's mansion. As we moved further into the courtyard, the front door opened. Nicole stepped out.

She was wearing a red blazer and a smile that could only belong to either a real estate agent or a politician.

"Welcome, everyone," she said.

"Thank you for joining us at the Bellanti estate auction. My name is Nicole Van Note, and I'll be guiding you through Lark House today." I made intentional eye contact with Nicole to make sure she knew we were there and to let the audience know that I thought she was important. I had never played with her before, but she had a reputation as more of a leader than a follower. I had to hope that wouldn't be a problem.

I leaned over and whispered to Dina, "It looks like they're leaning into the criminal history aspect." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"Well, they weren't going to hide it very easily," she responded. She invited everyone in, and since the house was so large, we fit. With so many people in it, it looked more like a Stone Age cathedral, with the slate floors and the towering cedar beams, the glass refracting sunlight.

Nicole grabbed a stack of pamphlets and handed them to one of the NPCs, and they took one and started passing the stack around.

"This home was custom-built, with materials sourced from all over the world," Nicole said.

"The home will be auctioned off the day after next, so it will be gone before you know it. Better make a call to your bankers before it's too late." That got a laugh. I didn't know enough about rich people to know if it was realistic. Dina and I were doing the whole blend in with the crowd to case the joint routine. Our heads were on a light swivel, our eyes meticulously examining everything around us.

"There's an alarm," Dina said quietly.

"The windows are wired. This looks museum-quality at least. Now show me some guard dogs and call me intrigued. What is so valuable here?" I smiled but didn't respond. I was trying to look calm and cool, a George-Clooney-type, even if I didn't have the looks or charisma. That would make Dina Brad Pitt. Everything in the house had been examined by some appraiser, and they had left tags on things for the auction.

"Mr. Bellanti had eclectic tastes," Nicole said.

"Many of his personal items will be available for purchase as part of the estate auction. As many of you know, Mr. Bellanti had a… storied history, and many artifacts of that history can be found throughout the house. If you see anything you intend to bid on, keep note of its title and lot number." The furnishings and decorations had changed since I was here last before the storyline.

What was once a bit modernist with some touch of fishing cabin kitsch now looked like a world traveler lived there, with objects from all over, many of which seemed religious or occult in nature. I saw iron nails wrapped in twine in a strange pattern, various talismans hanging from the walls, a cracked mirror with a silver frame, as well as strange bundles of minerals and other pagan ingredients scattered among the more valuable objects.

I had to play it cool because I knew that most of these objects were clearly magical in nature, or at least related to the supernatural, but I wondered if my character would call that out. Luckily, Dina, due to her background trope, had a more organic segue into the supernatural conversation. I liked to approach my psychic background with reluctance.

"Guy was stocking up for the apocalypse," she said. I laughed.

"Which kind?" I asked.

"Every kind," she said.

"Must have been an occult collector. I have a contact who could fence a lot of this. Is this why we're here?" I shook my head. She shrugged and returned to looking around the room until she spotted something, probably using her Outsider's Perspective trope, and drew my attention to it.

"There are scratches on the floor," she said.

"See that, by the column?" It took me a while to see what she was seeing, because the scratches were only visible at an angle when the sun caught them just right. But sure enough, as we made our way over to the spot she was talking about, there were scratches that looked like arrows and numbers right into the stone floor.

"Don't ask me," I said.

"It looks like maybe the stonemasons marked it up or something. Maybe the supplier." That was a passable explanation, but I was sure we would figure the truth out later at an inconvenient time. After a few moments, Dina noticed another set of scratches elsewhere in the foyer, but before we could investigate them, Nicole was calling the group to climb the stairs. We followed because we didn't want to look suspicious.

We made sure to visibly identify any cameras or other security features we saw, just so that the audience would know we were being observant. The stairs were quite beautiful. They were made of the same large cedar boards as everything else, but they were a work of art, and the NPCs made sure to note that as we walked up them. It was like walking up a giant, hollowed-out tree, albeit in a somewhat abstract way.

"Magnificent," one of them said. On the red wallpaper, his name was Harlan Dyer, undoubtedly related to Dyer's Lake or Camp Dyer, yet another Carousel family. He was an old man, perhaps in his mid-sixties, very well put together in a wealthy, almost ostentatious way.

"Absolutely magnificent. You don't see grain like this anymore, not since the cedar barrens became legally protected. Is this recycled wood?"

"Why yes," Nicole said.

"Red cedar, recycled from barns in eastern Carousel, I believe. All of this is well over one hundred years old." I leaned toward Dina.

"More like poached straight from the barrens less than ten years ago," I said.

"It is so hard to find these days," Harlan continued.

"The native Carouseleans cried to the government that the forest is sacred, and suddenly half the local logging industry went belly up. My family has survived, of course, but most didn't. What a waste. Still, it is nice to see such a large collection. Why, this house is worth every penny if only for the lumber, and most of it left in such a raw state. Magnificent indeed. Miss Van Note, you find such gems." So he was like a lumber connoisseur of some kind.

We went Off-Screen for a while as the group moved through the house to get to the next shooting location.

"Guess that's Nicole's big fan from her trope," I said. Socialites were designed to be famous in-universe.

"How does a real estate agent have fans?" Dina asked.

"Carousel does its best with what we give it," I said. Now that things had quieted down, I found myself in the stairwell with wood surrounding me. I noticed that this particular type had many knots in it. They weren't dark and unsightly, but rather, they were faint. It was strange; if you looked at them long enough, some of those markings could look like a face. It was pareidolia, of course; the human mind tries to see patterns even when they don't exist.

But as I stared at it, the aura I had felt the first time I came to the house started to make its presence known once again. I shivered. Before long, we were moving on, and even when we went back On-Screen, I would find myself staring at the wood, looking for faces and hoping not to find any. As the tour moved past the study, which housed numerous valuable books and a vast array of occult items and research materials, I noticed that all the electronics near the computer desk were gone.

Wires hung about loosely, some from the ceiling.

"Feds must have taken most of this," I said. While the rest of the group continued the tour, it was time for Dina and me to slip away. As cool as some of the lots up for auction were, we weren't serious buyers, and we didn't want to get in the way of NPCs who were going to pretend to be. Instead, we found our way back down the stairs toward the basement. I knew where the door leading downward was because of Camden's blueprints.

When we arrived there, we were stunned to see how huge it was, probably as big as the entire house itself, and even more confusing, with wood panels forming long hallways and many different rooms that mostly seemed to be used for storage.

"Are you ever going to tell me why we're here?" Dina asked. I looked at her and responded, "Do you think you could hide a vault somewhere down here?" A look of revelation dawned on her face. She looked around at all the various paths that could be taken.

"You could hide a dozen vaults down here," she said.

"A secret mobster vault? Are you serious?" I nodded as we looked around. Somewhere in the house, a low, barely audible howl could be heard, just loud enough that it would be weird if it were the wind, but not loud enough to be sure it wasn't. Both Dina and I recoiled at the sound. It was certainly ghost adjacent, if not explicitly a ghost.

"Tell me that's the plumbing," she said.

"It's nothing," I said.

"Rats in the walls, maybe." I was trying to play it off as a joke, but even as I stood there, my eyes were drawn to the wood and the many faces that my brain was telling me it saw in the various patterns and grains. We went back upstairs and made our way out to the car before the auction for all of Bellanti's belongings started. We were still On-Screen, so Dina decided to carry on the conversation. She was getting much better at being on camera.

She had chosen Newcomer as an aspect to try to help her come out of her shell, but it had not had an instant effect, and even in this storyline, she had yet to use her aspect trope.

"You think a safe's really in there?" she asked.

"I sure hope so," I said.

"We could spend a weekend down there searching for it. If I had the time, I could scrounge up some equipment that could help us find it quickly, but not by tomorrow."

"Don't worry," I said.

"Our guy says he knows right where it is. Better hope he's right. We're going in tomorrow night."