Mr. Beefgnaw's Wild Ride

It’s probably too late to get him into GitM but all these moth/lamp memes have me pondering Mothman in the Hunter Holystone universe.

The scene: Hunter is in her office, about to go out on a case or some such thing. She picks up her stuff, turns off the lights, opens the door, takes one step into the hallway… and the phone rings.

She goes back in and picks it up. “Holystone Agency.”

Heavy breathing for a moment, then:

“turn it back on”

“…what”

“yur lamp”

“Who the hell is this?”

“blease”

Hunter goes to the window, looks down onto the street… and sure enough, there at a pay phone on the corner…

“Dammit, Mothman!”

“hhhh lamp”

“You’re being creepy. Stop being creepy.”

“I pay bill?”

“…what.”

“Lamp… bill?” Heavy breathing. “I pay?”

This is bordering on inappropriate but… she turns the lamp back on and hangs up quickly so she doesn’t have to hear the reaction.

The next day there is an envelope containing three fifty dollar bills shoved under her office door. The envelope is unmarked other than a childlike scrawl of “pay lamp” on the back and a few dark smudges..

…I also imagine Hunter gets called to the hardware store on the regular because Mothman has wandered into the lighting department and is just standing there breathing heavily and spooking the customers…

One of the running jokes in the Hunter Holystone universe is, since everyone accepts zombies and vampires and ghosts and other assorted monsters roaming around and monster hunters do their job in broad daylight with licenses from state agencies, when Halloween comes around or when people want to be scared just for fun, what do they turn to?

The answers: 1) space and 2) the deep sea.

We'll look at 2) some other time but 1) brings us to the other running joke: the Fmitths.

Sleve and Tobb Fmitth are a perfectly ordinary Earth human bondpair. They enjoy typical Earth human activities such as watching TV, walking their dog, converting pleasant sounds into sustenance, and using the replicator from their ship to convert junk into gold and other materials Earth humans consider valuable, and trading those materials for weird green paper Dol-Larz to exchange for goods and services.

The Fmitths will have a walk-on in every Hunter Holystone game. Hunter will make pleasant small talk with them. Her companion, however, will always pick up on something about them that just isn't quite right...

But before any of that happens, they meet a new neighbor.

( Aliens don't exist. )