Eustace Delmont and the Case of the Rambler's Inn 01 - The Thing Upon the Tape and Love's First Glance

"It was a dark and stormy night," 

is how a certain type of gothic romance famously starts. One involving abandoned old houses, twisted love affairs, and creepy inn keepers, perhaps. Ghosts and old family secrets. Secret rooms and twisting corridors. The exact sort of adventure that Eustace Delmont found himself biking directly towards. Do not worry, though, Dear Reader, for this tale avoids that one particular cliché. 

It was a bright and sunny Monday morning. Our hero, Delmont, has been set upon this collision course with fates both foul and fair by a telephone call. A ship out at sea, the Archwitch, has been stranded by unseen forces which have destroyed its ability to communicate. And thus, Delmont, a veritable kit of supplies and copper cantrips in hand, moves inexorably towards destiny. 

<< At this point I wish to weigh in and remind the reader that the Archwitch was not actually stranded but without the tower the data would be to be recorded and later synced by hand. An inconvenience, to be sure, but not quite so dramatic. On the other hand, while Monday morning was bright and sunny, the night where Amy Patel, being the previous Saturday, May 12, had actually be stormy. Do with that what you will. >>

Rounding the corner of Damocles Drive, Delmont once again was forced to consider the Gordian Knot that was the Rambler's Inn. 

<< Yes, he is mixing up the two stories of the Sword of Damocles and the Gordian Knot. Yes, it is probably on purpose. Just humor him. >> 

At one glance,  you might think it a stately structure in a certain nineteenth century European style blended wrongly with a kind of pre-Civil War era vision of Alabama decadence. At another glance, you might see a maze of madness. The Inn is oversized with angles chosen to waste space. Balconies that line up with hallway windows and strange angles built into every corner so it feels as though it is going to fall away any day now. Every artist rendition Delmont had ever seen had drawn it differently. Windows and towers uncertain like some trick of M.C. Escherian ink. A space folded into itself past the boundaries of Euclidean sense. 

Delmont's own word to describe it was simply that it felt "anxious." This maybe more how staring at the Inn made him feel. He also was found of saying it was a large lost animal on the shores of a place too small for it. 

From a practical standpoint you must understand that it was a major tourist destination in Maidenstead, a place which was not otherwise really a tourist destination. The town had mostly avoided a certain type of beach traffic while the Inn allowed the folks who at least pretended to avoid that same beach traffic to stay and sip mint juleps and mint tea and eat mint cake in between buying plastic dolphins from Gulf Shores and Orange Beach on their vacation. 

On the other side of that coin is the old yarn that The Rambler Inn is said to be haunted or bedeviled or both. Few guests truly complained but all of the locals had tales. Kids running screaming from dark elemental forces. A dozen jilted lovers flinging themselves from the seventh floor. A dozen children crying out for their mother by the old playground. A dozen dogs barking past midnight. What is truth? What is fiction? Delmont never was quite sure. 

<< Of course there are dogs marking at Midnight. This southern Alabama. Every hour of the day has dogs barking. The rest is possibly hogwash. Probably. >>

Delmont approached the communications tower he had been dispatched to repair, located to one side of the Inn and facing, roughly, the beach on the other side of a few hundred feet of pine and scrub. There he found a smile upon his face. The great Cerberus standing at the gates of hell was but a mere pup. For there was the Society's tower, an elaborate bit of cobbled together electronics nicknamed The Gygax Cyclops, and Delmont was going to be a true hero after all. 

At its core, the Cyclops is a simply signal switch and booster system which allowed other towers (the other Cyclopes as it were: The Peterson Cyclops, the Siembieda Cyclops, etc) along the Gulf Coast to bounce signals between each other and between various locations and using some clever circuitry by Society President Ellie Lopez, a fairly precise signed signature based on a kind of physical Vigenère cipher sequence was also communicated so that later logs could be verified across multiple locations and timestamped. Fully decked out pieces of the web had instant translators running to break that cipher and to align other communiques in real time. 

When he was told the Cyclops was not blinking, as President Lopez likes to say, Delmont had feared something of the worst. Lopez was off spending time with family in a warmer clime, could he humbly stand before such an edifice as her great work and come even close to her famed prestige? 

However, rather than a complex lock, it was merely an open door. The compartment holding the central Eye had come open and some of the carefully magnetized gears that aligned the timing had slipped out, triggering a failsafe. [1]

Delmont was not only able to retrieve the gears and realign them but, dare he says, he was able to improve upon them. Within short time, he had the mechanism (complete with new batteries) whirring again. He closed the panel and twisted the clasp closed, making note to recommend locking mechanisms for the Society to install upon the Cyclopes. 

And then he stopped, for in the ground near the Cyclops he saw foot prints. Muddy ones drying in the morning sun. A leftover from a weekend storm. [2]

Glancing up towards the Inn, and spotting security cameras of some quality - he would have been loathed to admit that the cameras far outshone the quality that Ralph Harley might have carried in those days - Delmont decided the mystery had only just begun. He walked up to the Inn and went aside to seek access to the security tapes.

Gunther Strange, despite his name, was one of the most no-nonsense men in Maindenstead. In fact, the strangest thing about him was that he was one year younger than his own (half-)nephew: Martin Reed, the current owner of Ramber's Inn. The story has a certain gothic quality to it, as well as being later tied to the mystery surrounding that singular week in May 1995, so it might be germane to go into greater detail. 

In the years after the American Civil War, a particular "carpetbagger" named Darius Reed came to Southern Alabama to profit off of the Reconstruction. His ventures to try and take over fishing near Bayou La Batre failed as did he his quite literal carpet business in Mobile. He thought bought property in the are that would one day be called Maidenstead (as a town it was incorporated in 1880, partially through Reed's dime) and he built The Reed Inn and Tavern from a strange mashup of Victorian-era estate and Antebellum plantation. It did poorly. Locals did not take well to a carpetbagger coming down and naming a fancy hotel after himself. So Reed "sold it" to a local family, the Wellons, who renamed it The Rambler's Inn and managed to market both as a upstanding place and a place of wild partying at the same time. 

Its size and labyrinthine, strange layout meant it could inhabit any number of modes and personalities at a single time. 

A few years later, Reed bought it back while allowing the Wellons to continue to "run" it. Both of the transactions were a farce. Darius Reed had been the power behind the place the whole time. By the time Darius married Luanne Wellon and his son Timon took over, the not-yet-a-town had decided it was ok for Reed to be involved. 

Skipping ahead a generation, we get Timon's son Jonias as one of the richest man in the state. Jonias marries a young singer and bit of a wild child, Lilah Josefs, while she is only 16-years-old. By the age of 17, Lilah Reed gives birth to Elias Reed, the presumptive heir. She goes on to have two more children before something turns her on her husband and they manage a divorce in the 1930s when such things took effort. The bonus shocking bit is that she divorced Jonias in the same month that her son, Elias, got married to Molly Arnot: a popular socialite. 

The Great Depression was everywhere but somehow that Rambler's Inn gave enough money to shelter a particular group that bought into its spell. This might explain while Lilah, whose actions should have shunned her from the local society, was still treated by everyone, including the Reeds, as part of the family.

Lilah, now in her late 30s, marries Patrick Strange and the two of them have Gunther Strange as their only child. Patrick was a younger man, in his late 20s, and he signs up for World War 2. As does Elias and Hunter Reed (her first and third children). Neither Patrick nor Hunter survived the war, leaving a very young Gunther with a distraught single mom who by all accounts wanted to flee the state and try moving on with her life. Which she did.

So Jonias does something that seems a bit unexpected but makes a kind of sense, he takes in Gunther Strange as a kind of replacement for his now dead son, and adopts him in all but name. Right before the war, Elias and Molly had Martin, their only son, and Martin and Gunther grew up in a relationship about half sibling and half avuncular. Martin the big brother. Gunther the uncle. 

Some Southern family trees are less a march down the page so much as a great waltz around the margins.

Upon Elias's retirement in 1977, Martin took over the Rambler's Inn and claimed his uncle Gunther and his aunt Marjory (who had married another soldier named Brian Franklin) as partners. It did not take long for Marjory to be pushed mostly aside and for Gunther, according to rumor, to willfully sell his shares back to Martin while staying on as the Rambler's version of chief security officer. 

The exact reasoning is unknown besides more rumor. The Rambler's Inn is an enigma, some inexplicable piece of Darius Reed's inner mind. Did dozens of freed slaves die while building it? Did a group of a dozen Confederate veterans disappear one night while wandering its halls? Of course not, but it was the kind of place that attracted such stories. 

Which is to stay that the Ramber's Inn is as much a curse as a blessing. A birthmark staining those who are forced by fate to care for it. And Gunther, only a Reed by technicality, took his chance to back away.

Almost. 

"I got cops showing up in a couple of hours, Delmont, to investigate that banker's girl gone missing" said Gunther Strange as he spits more tobacco into a old off-brand tomato soup can. "And I got a security tape player that is jammed. I don't need to worry about you amateur astrology types!" 

Delmont looked taken aback at such inaccuracies, the besmirching of the noble and purely scientific act of Nomos Aster,

<< I have doubts that Eu ever studied Latin... >>

so unlike those strange superstitious types. Delmont also felt a stirring in his heart for Strange: one of Harley's more loyal customers. "My good man, I will make you a deal. Allow me the chance to repair the playback machine and will merely need a few minutes of time to glance at who might have messed with the Cycl...the fragile and important astronomy equipment... and I will be out of your hair! And if I cannot fix it, then Harley will surely supply a replacement." A boast of which Delmont hoped to not have to establish the veracity. Ralph Harley was a loyal member of the community but free merchandise was not in his general love language. [3]

Strange looked down at the younger man and nodded, feeling the truth of his conviction. "Alright, Delmont. You have until 11am. Get the machine working and you can watch until then. Martin will be showing up around that time to meet Chief Raylon. You need to be gone by then. The Chief seems to be taken Patel's appearance personally."

Ah, thought, Delmont, Maidenstead Chief of Police: Elmer Raylon. A man marked by his belief that great conspiracies were on the cusp of overflowing Maidenstead. The lesson goes that he was a junior police office back during the hippie days of the 60s and still thinks that Nixon was framed. [4]

Delmont did not have a strong fear nor love of the police, but a singular encounter involving a diner, an anniversary dinner, and ruining the latter by tripping the former's fuse box soured Chief Raylon to Delmont's more obvious charms. [5]

Eustace Delmont [6] entered the small security room on the first floor. The area was dusty. Gunther Strange apparently did not allow the cleaning staff to enter into his private domain all that much. A few soup cans (Delmont refrained from exploring them too carefully) were placed upon shelves and stacks of papers. Gunther Strange, never married, loved three things: old cowboy movies, chewing tobacco, and cheap canned soup. In which order? Delmont never wished to test. 

At the corner of the room was a large bank of several television sets, across multiple models and degrees of sophistication, showing a strange array of shots. Some angles covered some hallways. Some angles covered portions of the outside. None of the cameras seemed to move so at best there might be only about a third of popular spaces covered and several generally unpopular spaces. Luckily for Delmont, the one nonsense angle did indeed record the Gygax Cyclops and the trees beyond it. 

The playback machine was an old Sony SL-HF300 Beta machine that seemed to have some customization. Delmont clicked his tongue at this. "BetaMax?" Exploring the device, he noticed that someone had set it up to playback at even slower than  BIII speeds to expand the life of how much tape could hold but leading to even grainier images. No wonder it was being to junk up. 

Delmont found his mind wondering as he very nearly mindlessly worked on the box. Beta. Beta capsule. Ultraman. The fight with Gomora. The Gomora suit which inspired X-Skellazard in Mystery Force, the... 

<< Nerd. >>

Delmont found himself staring down at a working machine, nearly half an hour was up so he only had a few minutes to speed through the tapes. [7]

Watching the tapes (recorded four screens to a tape, rotated every 6 or so hours, and with only around 3 days of total memory stored unless something happened to flag them) he gets to Sunday night. And there is the Gygax Cyclops. Nearly impossible to see in the low resolution gloom. At least until he got to 10pm and then the image from that one angle fuzzes and and glitches and for half a second looks bright as day and then goes to static with deep lines and then resolves back to the gloom, a shape moving off to the left. The other cameras managed to keep working during this time: the only one showing any activity was some random balcony (B-6-AA) with a guest out smoking while the other two were of a random hallway marked 3rd-2-E and a fountain out back marked FTO. [8]

Glancing away for a half second, Delmont spotted a another tape not in the main stack. In large black letters it said "DELETE, DISCARD, DO NOT RERECORD " and it was there, as he reached to pull it out and consider giving it a look, that he happened to look out the window and saw her, his destiny. 

Something was wrong. A beautiful woman. In the morning daylight. Striking a match to light a cigarette only upon her lips. Crying. 

Delmont did not know the impact of his impulse until a couple of days later but at that moment he left behind the mystery tape and instead grabbed a box of tissues from Gunther Strange's desk and went immediately outside. 

Walking up to the dark haired woman of his dreams he asked...

<< Let me set the scene for you. I was outside the Rambler's Inn, having a meltdown, and here comes Eustace. A chubby, serious faced man in his early 20s and almost a foot taller than me and he comes up to me with absolutely no preamble and says, "What can I do to help?" holding out that box of tissues like the dork he was. Still is, by the way. A dork. I love him. 

I was 20 at the time. Looking at me now, you'd probably see a Japanese-American woman who looks a bit pudgy and has a bit of gray but who is mostly a feisty, sex mom. Eu will agree. Take my word for it. Don't worry about the paint on my shirt or my favorite recliner that has long taken on the shape of a certain butt sitting in it as I read long winded fantasy novels. Sexy mom's need hobbies and rest, too. 

At that time, though, I was going through a phase and was all grungy and skinny and surly. I had been traveling around with my sister Daphne and her boyfriend Frank for six months and was getting fed up. I wore baggy t-shirts, baggy jeans. Smoked. Cigarettes and pot. A lot of the first (only quitting when I got pregnant a couple of years later) and a little of the former (Frank having lots of connections around the state and beyond). I ate terrible food. Too much of it. I drank cheap beer. Listened to cassette tapes of bands like Buffalo Tom and the Pixies. Thought about cutting my hair. Dying it. Getting tattoos. Never did. Well, I got one tattoo, but let's no go there. 

I still had my accent back then. British, not Japanese. My mom, the renowned professor of economics at Oxford, Dr. Tomoko Meyer (nee Sato), had been born in London. She raised me until the age of 18 with me spending a lot of my youth being distraught and out of sorts in nearby (to Oxford) Bicester. At 18, I decided I wanted to come to stay with my dad, German-American Pastor Maurice Meyer of the Oakmount Church of Christ right on the outskirts of Mobile. A mega-church, of sorts. It shuttered a few years back after my dad's death and his successor, Auggie Williams, got convicted of fraud. 

In the late 60s, my dad met my mom at Oxford and mixed together four countries - United States, Germany, Japan, Britain - into a single power couple bridging both sides of World War 2 and, a few years later, gave birth to a fussy daughter that muddled her many countries of origin in a non-precise stew of appearance and temperament. 

In the 80s, when I was just seven years old, my dad returned back to the States to start his own church while my atheist mom refused. They went through a divorce, my mom keeping his last name which is a whole psychological thing I do not want to get into, and he remarried a Julia Angstrom and took on raising her daughter Daphne, whom he adopted. 

Pastor Maurice and his new family would fly out to Oxford once a year to spend time with Tomoko and Hitomi (that's me). It was always awkward but I did enjoy spending time with Daphne. She wrote to me a couple of years before the terrible stuff went down at Rambler's Inn and said she had been seeing a college boy named Frank Deacon whose dad was, well, a Deacon. Deacon Deacon's boy Frank had a new idea. At the time it was fairly novel. People of a certain age might consider something like Girls Gone Wild except for ghost hunters. 

The plan was to travel around in a van that his buddy Vern Majors would run recording and editing equipment. Vern's Investigation Van was the cornerstone of a subscription VHS service where people could buy edited and entertaining chapters of Frank and Daphne's explorations into the unknown from a website run by Vern: investigationvan.com. It was forward thinking in a lot of ways. Frank would have been a natural in the early YouTube years if he had lived long enough, if he and Daphne had not...

Anyway, I moved to the States and joined up with Daphne's crew and took on a pet dog: Libby the Lab. The five of us had visited dozen different locations around the South East and had come back to hang out for Daphne's mom's birthday when two things occurred. Three, really. First, one of Frank's friends that worked at Rambler's Inn had said that a guest, Amy Patel, had gone missing on Saturday night while she had been staying in supposedly the most haunted room. Second, Libby the Lab went missing on Sunday night while we were staying in an RV park near the Inn. 

Third, I met Eustace Delmont. And he ended up being the key to solving both mysteries. And more. >>

... "What can I do to help?" And she just stared at me. Exhaled smoke and then stubbed out her cigarette with her sneaker and kept staring. Before taking a deep breath, grabbing a tissue, and laughing. 

"You don't look like a dog catcher," she said. [9]

Delmont merely stood back and raised his arms. "I am a catcher of dogs and a repairer of things mechanical and emotional. What does your dog look like?"

<< This is, sadly, nearly a direct quote. >>

The beautiful woman, whose name was Hitomi Meyer, began to explain that her chocolate lab, Libby the Lab, had gone missing the night before and that someone named Frank and someone named Daphne would not help her to look for it. She quoted them as saying, "We told you to leave that d-----d dog at home." Someone named Vern was of the impression that the dog would show up as soon as she was hungry. Hitomi then went on to explain that Vern was a "s--t head who couldn't catch a b---h if he tried". She was very colorful in her language and did not seem to appreciate that poor Delmont was a bit lost at sea.

<< I was and I guess I did not. >>

At this time, as though this some mere mystery story, a great noise of several dogs was heard beyond the trees on the path down towards the beach. Delmont and Hitomi rushed towards the sound. Where they found a group of people staring at a group of dogs that were surrounding - barking and growling - something in the middle. 

"Are any of these Libby the Lab?" he asked. She said they were not. 

He moved forward into the crowd of canines and tried to use his gentle nature to appeal to their better barking nature and see what had them in the tizzy.  Delmont managed to get the dogs to back away a little bit and saw what they were digging into... [10]

A backpack with women's clothing now scattered upon the scrub at the edge of the beach. A wad of cash fills the bottom half of the backpack and laying in the sand is a piece of equipment that looks somewhere between a telescope and a remote control, smashed beyond all repair. [11]

NEXT TIME ON EUSTACE DELMONT AND THE CASE OF THE RAMBLER'S INN!

Delmont and Hitomi study the strange device! Chief Raylon confronts Eustace Delmont about a certain dinner! Frank Deacon makes a bet!

MECHANICAL NOTES

1. Scene type... Joker --> 1 (positive for Eustace). 3 of Diamonds. About an object. Scene task Ace of Clubs (3, twist... 3,6 magnet symbol  + 4,2 footprints symbol). 2 of Clubs. Easy Brainy task. Eustace has an exceptional success.
2. "Was there anything else to find?" 6 of Diamonds. No. 
3. 8 of Clubs: A scene about a task/action. 10 of Spades: a Hard Charming challenge. Eustace spends a Karma (2 remaining) to score an Exceptional Success. Doug's quick note: Maidenstead uses three different traits - Alert, Brainy, and Charming - instead of the standard - Brawny, Agile, Crafty. Rather than match them up by order I'll match them up by first letter (which sort of matches them up by theme). 
4. Used Random Realities to get a name and some personality traits. Probably not the best way to name a more modern person but had "El - mar" and "Rai - lin" or some such and it made phonetic sense. For his personality got "Detatched, Wary, and Searching"
5. Wanted to give a brief "run in" story and got 6,6 (tools icon) and 3,3 (fork and knife icon). So Delmont was working on something that ruined the chief's dinner one time. We'll leave that fairly vague for now.
6. I...do not know if I ever actually listed Eustace Delmont's stats anywhere. He's a Brainy Amateur Detective with a Fine Attention to Detail but prone to Daydreaming (especially about his favorite tokusatsu series which is a particular weakness). At any rate
7. 6 of clubs. Another scene about actions. So let's say it's the repair scene. 5 of diamonds: Easy, Brainy. Will uses Eustace's daydreaming to take a penalty here to regain some Karma. And he gets a single success.
   
8. Hmm, got a 4,2 (magnifying glass) and a 1,2 (book with a magnifying glass). Rather than roll a new symbol I decided to roll with it....pun...intended?
9. "How instant was Eustace and Hitomi's Connection?" King of Diamonds. So very instant. 
10. Joker --> 6, new event. Wild animals + Gathering. Jack of Hearts (good for solving the mystery of the missing pieces of equipment) 10 of Hearts. Hard Charming challenge. With karma spent, Eustace gets a single success.
11. The symbol was a magnet again and again the magnifying glass. The crime scene clue is "article of clothing" and "coins or jewelry". 

DOUG'S NOTES

I am not sure when the "editor" (aka, Hitomi Delmont, Eustace's wife and one of the main characters of this story as they first meet) became a Japanese-German-British-American. I think at some point in time I rolled on a random name table and got some name that made me go "Oh, Japanese" and then proceeded to lose that result. 

For the "mystery machine" crew from the random set-up (a group of kids and their dog are interfering with the case) I went for something that is sort of like but also not like the Scooby Doo gang. Having the love interest be a gender swapped Shaggy (also more grungy and angsty rather than hippie and chill) just seemed right. Humorously, while I changed Fred to Frank and Velma to Vern I couldn't think of a good "Daphne" name so I stuck with Daphne. It makes me laugh, at any rate.

I likely got nearly no details about the BetaMax machine correct. I did spend some time looking at playback speeds but the main thing I learned was that BetaMax would probably be terrible for such a task. So in the story it is terrible for the task. 

I know there is a huge dump of text in this one. It felt right for a romantic-mystery-horror-comedy to have a few lineages and built in things to hang the mystery hooks around. I have slightly changed the three "plotlines" by the way: It is now about a) the missing person, b) the missing dog, and c) the damage to the electronics. How the Reed/Strange connection connects and how it ties into all the weird "dozens of" rumors and the tape and the broken equipment on the beach and the hints about the old innkeeper and the strange stuff at the Inn: we'll see. I haven't a clue.

These are all possible the same mystery but they might not be.

I have never run a full mystery game or a full romantic-comedy style game so I have no idea what shape this will take. 

I continue to reference future events to try and "trap" myself. The "next time" summaries are based off of random things that pop up in my head. I then force myself to try and work them. 

Next time will likely be half this long but I might feel forced to go into a blue print. Blue prints are big in mystery novels.