Jack the Lad

Well I'll be damned.  Ever since I wound up in the Secret World, I've known one thing only.  Everything is true.  Every myth.  Every legend.  Every monster.  I've seen, killed, and drank with most every spook and creep from heaven to hell.  But if I was to pick one that couldn't have been true, Jack would have been it.

The story goes that Jack managed to put one over on the Devil.  Hell relinquishes all claim on his soul in exchange for something, and Jack came out on top.  He used his immunity to turn his soul into the blackest ball of hatred and evil the world had ever seen.  The Devil always gets the last laugh though, because when it came time for Jack to face the music Hell wouldn't take him and Heaven didn't want him.  Jack was forced to wander between the winds for all eternity, spreading his fury and malice across the world while occasionally amusing himself by luring travelers to their deaths by causing his hatred to glow in the real world.  Apparently, that suited Jack just fine, because he's still doing it, and the wisps in the swamp were proof.

I never put much stock in Jack's story, because I'd seen the wisps in the swamps, and they were of this world.  I figured if the wisp part was false, the rest smelled funny too.  The Devil always wins, and Heaven would have banished him to Purgatory for a few millenia to purge the evil.  Nope, I always figured Jack wasn't real.

Was I wrong.

As it turns out, the story is a bunch of crap, I called that one right, but the monster is very real.

One of the locals told me about an incident about fifteen years ago.  Teenage girls started dying during the summer, torn to bits.  The city pinned it on a farmhand, and life went on.  Normally I'd have put it down to the reminiscing of an old lady, but something niggled at me about the details of the case.  I'd heard stories of unsolved murders all the way up and down New England.  Teenage girls being ripped to bits.  I'd have said serial killer, but they only happened every ten or fifteen years, almost never in the same place twice, and they'd been happening for almost a hundred years now.

The newspaper clippings matched the other stories I'd heard.  Questioning the Sheriff and reading the case file resulted in more similarities, not to mention the inconsistencies in Checkon's story.  "Ask my ghost," he told Sheriff Bannerman.  So I did just that.

Are you a Bee?  Then don't tell me I can't talk to ghosts.


He was pretty reticent, part and parcel of being dead, but the inscription he was staring at...

No idea what it meant.  Until I ghosted outside and saw a white raven sitting on a police cruiser.  Nevermore jokes aside, it pecked at me until I followed, and found a line of ravens, singing that old nursery rhyme.

One for sorrow, two for joy

Three for a girl, four for a boy

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret, never to be told

Four of them summoned another ghost, but he was more than a ghost.  He pulled me out of the spirit world.  I didn't think that was possible!  Then he cackled his name.  Jack the Lad.

King of the Patch

I don't think he expected anybody to find him, because he tried to gut me before running off.  He jumped into a hole in a pumpkin patch and that was that.  Dick Sonnac gave me a little background on the man that became a monster before chastising me for being "willing to go to such lengths to uncover" him.  As it turns out, the real story is that Jack was an Irish immigrant working as a farm hand for a mage, he got caught with the mage's daughter and cursed for his wandering jollies.  And of course the mage was working for the Illuminati at the time.  Is there anything on this island that isn't connected to the Illuminati?  For decades Jack has been the King Ghoulie on that island, only leaving to get his killer kicks.  King of the Pumpkin Patch, which is what allowed him to leave Solomon Island at all.  Not anymore though.  The fog has brought bigger problems, Jack doesn't even rate a 5 on the scale anymore, and the only reason I care about his fate is because he tried to kill me.  That makes me mad.

Run while you can, Jack the Lad.  Next time we meet, I'm turning you into a pie.

Kingsmouth arrival

Solomon Island, the north end of nowhere.  I'd been out here once before, my team had been hired to escort a set of twins to Innsmouth Academy about six years ago.  The place hasn't changed.

Scratch that.  Everything has changed, but the place is still rotten to the core.

I ran into an old friend outside the portal to Agartha named Jack Boone.  He is, or should I say WAS, like me, an independent Troubleshooter on the outskirts of the Secret World.  As in, when there's trouble, we shoot it.  I met him and his partner John Wolf in Afghanistan when a Djinn was causing trouble for coalition troops in 2008(? I think?) and again when I was hunting vampires in France with the Silver Wolves in 2012.

An old friend

Now he's protecting Agartha from zombies.  That's right, I just used the "Z" word, and after five minutes in Kingsmouth anybody who says they're not zombies is delusional.  Now I only joined the Templars a few days ago, but somehow he knew all ready.  I don't know how the two of them do that.  I hadn't actually told anybody, and  he doesn't have a computer or phone so he's not reading this.  Jack and John just know things.  Like when the darkness is going to hit the fan.  They got here before the fog, they just knew it was coming.  Like the vampire infestation.  Like the Djinn.  Whatever their source of information, I'm sure the talking heads in London and New York are green with envy, because they are ALWAYS in the center of what's going down.

The two of them usually go everywhere together, but he was pretty mum about where Wolf was.  He told me there were more important things at the moment.  Such as making sure the dead rest.  Everyone deserves their six feet, he said.  He's right.

I found survivors in Kingsmouth.  Most of the sheriff's deputies were still alive, a bunch of citizens, and the sheriff herself, Helen Bannerman.

The Sheriff of (what's left of) Kingsmouth

No questions about where I came from, what I was doing there, anything like that.  She just seemed relieved to have another gun available, on the condition I remember I'm not a deputy.  Easy enough.  Then she asked me to pitch in and help her people out against the dead.  Even offered a small reward for anything I could do.  Nothing like the checks I used to get with the Silver Wolves, but what the hey it's a poor town out in the boondocks and at the end of the day Temple Hall can cover the difference.

I know Dick wants me to forget the "case by case basis," but these people are screwed without at least some help.  I've got the skills and the time, and nobody's going to care about the pockets of the dead, so what's the harm?  I can pitch in.

I also know you read this, Dick.  That's why I'm calling you that.  And your annoyance at me helping can take a flying leap.  You sent me to clean up the mess out here and I'll do it, but I'll do it my way.

Initiation

Welcome to the Templars, I guess.  Dick Sonnac asked me to do this to "provide a peer to peer connection with aspiring Templars in the modern age."  Or something to that effect.  Translated: "You get in trouble a lot.  Write about it to help recruitment."

I suppose I should make this clear before we go too far.  I may be working for the Templar organization, but for me it's strictly business.  The polite term is "Private Contractor," but let's leave the niceties in the so-called Real World.  I'm a mercenary.  I work for cash.

When my previous organization broke down, a team of Templars found me drunk in a dive in Egypt.  They invited me back to London, and Dickey boy struck a deal with me.  A steady paycheck and access to Templar resources for...let's call it a side project, and in return I wear red and hunt the monsters London tells me to hunt.

Temple Hall

The Templars are a little garish for my tastes, but the money's there.  Dickey was all business of course, but he's a typical bureaucrat.  Try not to hold it against him if you wind up joining.

Brigadier Lethe, on the other hand, was my kind of guy.  Old warrior, knew every trick of the trade, and they don't make them much tougher.  I have an extensive knowledge of firearms, and even I didn't know half the stuff the old codger showed me.

No rest for the wicked, though.  Not even two minutes into the Crucible and I get a text from Dickey with my first assignment.

Pictured: Necessary Annoyance

He spends two seconds telling me everything has gone to shit on Solomon Island, and five minutes preaching about the evils of the Illuminati.  News flash, Dickey boy, my old team worked for everybody, even the Lummies.  Everybody knows they've got skeletons on that island.  So it seems I'm off to new England to put the skeletons back in the ground.  First mission.  Yay.

I guess I'm a Templar.