Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27612790-20160308221034

To say that Dexter had no direction in life might have been a bit of an overstatement. That being said, no one could honestly call him a driven person. Dexter lacked goals. He lived only for himself and those around him. Dexter had no personal cause or crusade, he just wanted to have fun. Dexter also had a fascination with the occult and a queer love of puzzles. As such, he decided on his eighteenth birthday that he wanted to be a private investigator. Though, not just any kind of private investigator. No, he would be a paranormal  investigator. He expected to have deadly and perilous encounters with demons and vampires. Instead, he got calls from paranoid folk who were completely convinced that their house was haunted, and Drug addicts who believed they were possessed. Saying that all of his work could be divided into those two camps would be a blatant lie, but it wouldn’t be far from the truth.



Dexter’s work very rarely involved anything remotely supernatural. Most of the time the paranoia was just that, paranoia. Occasionally, Dex found a crack-head with an actual demonic presence. Or some phasmophobic housewife would actually have a poltergeist in her home. To his amusement, Dexter found that such cases were rarely as exciting as the false-flag jobs. Demons rarely required anything more than a splash of holy water to leave their hosts. According to some research and his own experience, most demons in the mortal world were too weak to have their own forms. Sometimes, one would be powerful enough to maintain a small imp-like form. Most books mentioned that if a demon with sufficient power were to enter the human world, they might have an actual, full-power demonic from. Dexter had neither heard of nor seen such a thing.



Ghosts were even more disappointing. In his five years of work, Dexter had only once found a ghost who wasn’t driven from whatever space it was haunting by burning incense and asking it nicely to leave. The one exception was the only truly paranormal case to provide a challenge to him. The ghost was stubborn, and so Dex decided to do some research. He found a certain type of magic, one that actually worked. It was called Sigilism, and with nothing but a sizeable tattoo, Dex could bend the forces of nature to his very will. He could control existing portions of the four classical elements, send Demons back to hell, move people and objects without touching them, all with tattoos. Of course, the tattoos could only deal with the most general of magicks. If he wanted to, for example, bind a specific entity (read: A ghost) to a container, he’d have to draw up his own sigils on a flat surface. With the power of sigilism, Dexter Card excelled at his work. Eventually, he found that there were not enough paranormal happenings for him to maintain an income. As a result, he recruited an old friend of his and took to normal, non-paranormal, private investigating. Thus began the Investigation Firm of Card and Addams.



Dexter was awoken by the ringing of his phone. He groaned as he held up a tattooed left arm towards the phone. One of the tattoos, right above his elbow, glowed a lilac-like color. The ringing cell phone gravitated towards him. He groaned in tiredness once more as he answered the call.



“You’ve reached the-” he yawned groggily. “-pardon. You’ve reached the Investigation Firm of Card and Addams. Dexter Card speaking, how may I help you?” Dexter spoke in a monotone voice, he answered every call the same way. When he finished speaking on the other end, he heard a woman crying. His half-closed eyes shot open as he pressed the phone closer to his ear. “Hello?”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“D-dex?” The woman asked. He knew the voice. It belonged to a woman who rarely cried, his girlfriend of a year. Her name was Riza. If Riza was crying, something was seriously wrong.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Riza!” He said desperately. “Is that you?” He asked the question despite knowing the answer.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Dexter Card.” She spoke slowly, as if reading from something. “Riza Hinton. Kristine Card. Shawn Addams. Janice Card. Cynthia Addams. Do you know these people?” Her voice was choked with tears.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Riza, of course I know them.” He wanted to laugh, but something was very wrong. “You, my mother, my best-friend, my sister, best-friend’s wife.” He listed his relation to each person in order. “Riza, what’s wron-” She cut him off.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Elliot Wakefield.” She said, her voice catching. The name made him shiver. He knew Elliot, alright. In his years as a detective, only three people had ever struck him as truly insane. A murderer who’s name escaped him had hired him to defend him. A desperate looking man who claimed that he was from a continent in the middle of the ocean, he hired Dexter to find his missing wife. The third, was Elliot Wakefield. Wakefield had been the cause of several kidnappings in the Chicago Area. All of the kidnappees bore a striking resemblance to his deceased sister. Dexter had been hired to find the girls, and he did. He just didn't find them alive. Wakefield had surrendered himself to the police but escaped custody before he could enter a plea. That had been over a year ago.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Riza. What. Is. Wrong.”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“W-we have them all.” He suddenly realized what was happening. Someone was making her say this. “Wakefield requires your abilities, surrender yourself to us within twenty-four hours. Every twelve hours beyond the deadline, we kill the people from the list in the order.”

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“What does Wakefield want?” She hesitated. He heard whispering in the background.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“He...lost someone dear to him. He needs your help to...find it.”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“How do I know that you have them all?”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Because they do, Dex.” Riza spoke for herself. “Don’t give them what they want, find a way to get us out of th-” Her words were cut off by a gunshot. Screaming on the other end.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“We shot her in the leg, Mr. Card. Surrender yourself within twenty-four hours or the next one will be in her head.” The call ended. Dexter stared at the phone for a long time, an hour at least. By the time he stumbled into his kitchen, it was nearly 6:30 AM. He had until this time tomorrow to figure a way out of this. He wouldn’t help Wakefield, he couldn’t. He had the creeping suspicion that Wakefield wanted him to resurrect something, or someone. Such things were far beyond his abilities, but he doubt that he could explain that to Elliot. He had no doubt he was serious either, his henchmen had shot Riza. He decided to call everyone on the list.

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Hello, you’ve reached Kristine Card, please leave a message at the b-.”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Yello? This is Shawn, I’m busy at the moment so please leave a mess-”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“This is Janice, I’m out at moment so jus-”

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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:#ffffff;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">“Hello! This is the answering machine of Cynthia Addam-” It was true. He had them all. Everyone he cared about, all in the hands of a mentally unstable murderer.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"> <span style="font-size:16px;font-family:'TimesNewRoman';color:rgb(255,255,255);font-weight:400;white-space:pre-wrap;">Great. <ac_metadata title="Story I&#039;m Using For a Writing Contest. UNFINISHED. UNREVIEWED."> </ac_metadata>