The door opened with a slight whine. After all, it had been over two years since another family had lived here.

A girl appeared. 8 years old with a surprised look on her face.

"Hi!" She said. "Who are you guys? The neighbors?"

"It's a..a..a.. girl." Ralph muttered, clearly disappointed.

Shawn had been prepared to make a positive first impression, and he wasn't going to let a little thing like the wrong gender hold him back. "Hi, yeah! We're from across the street; I'm Shawn, this is Bobby, and that's Ralph." He indicated the other two in turn, and gave her his cheeriest smile, the one Mom always told him to give the casting directors.

"Alright then!" She said, happily. "You're going to the school around here, aren't you? How is the school are the kids OK?" She asked, curious, the door moving open further as she was clearly about to invite everyone in.

Shawn wasn't sure if Tiffany was going to go to the same school as he was, so he answered noncommittally. "Everyone's pretty nice around here. Where are you from?" He didn't try to enter yet, instead following whatever social cues Tiffany was giving him in that regard.

"We're from Arizona. A place called Buckeye. There weren't a lot of people there growing up. It gets hot down there in the summer time. You've got to keep water on you during these months if we were down in there."

"Want to hear a joke?" She offered, the door now fully open. As if inviting everyone to come in.

"Sure!" Shawn looks back at Ralph and Bobby as if encouraging them to follow him before walking in. d

The house was just as Shawn remembered it. Old and worn. The wallpaper was slightly peeling, a 1950s pattern of roses on white--now yellow faded--background.

Tiffany "Are you guys all from here? Do you live in the neighborhood?" She asked, walking around a stack of boxes.

OOC: Shawn Rolls Wits + Composure

OOC: 22:15, Today: Shawn Cramer rolled 2 successes using 4d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s with rolls of 7,3,10(+4),9. Wits + Composure.

Shawn looked at a stack of books that was sitting on one of the box. They looked old and were leatherbound. The names written on the binding were either written in flourishing cursive script from long ago, or etched in symbols and designs of a language he couldn't read. Titles such as Thelemite texts‎, The Kybalion: Hermetic Philosophy and On the Tricks of Demons were just some of the names of the books that were spilling out of one of the moving boxes.

"I..." Bobby said as if unsure. "I think I'm from here."

"You think you're from here? How is it that you don't know where you're from." Then she smiled.

"Oh,  you're just joking." She said laughing a little. "Good one. But you won't be able to pull one over on me. I finished first in all of my class this year with my grades. I got three As and a B. The best grades in the class." She boasted.

"That's really cool!" Shawn, all parental encouragement aside, wasn't all that great at school. He wouldn't mind having a smart friend. "Wow, you have a lot of books!"

"I'm smart." the girl confirmed. She turned to the books, looking down at the small stack of them spilling out from many of the boxes.

"Oh, those are my Dad's books. He's a parapsychologist. He studies things like ghosts and stuff. My Mom is a real doctor though. I mean the kind you go see when you get sick. But my Dad's work is still important." She justified, making clear to Shawn and the others that she was proud of her Dad and his work.

Somewhere during the conversation she produced a piece of bread and began to eat the edges.

"Para...parpa...parpa...parpa-buh-gol-o-frist." Ralph ventured, repeating the confusing word that sounded odd in his mouth.

Shawn was around 95% sure ghosts really did exist, but his belief in the supernatural was caused by some very specific evidence that he wasn't sure any grownups would believe. "Parapychologist, Ralph. That must be really scary, though - do you ever help him or stuff?" He hadn't heard that word before either, but he had practice at picking up new pronunciations quickly when the directors changed the script on him.
This message was last edited by the player at 11:58, Tue 04 July 2017.

"Oh, I dunno." She lamented, waxing with some sort of distant voice. "He's pretty secretive about what he does. Actually, he doesn't really let us do anything that he does to be honest. It's a real disappointment. I asked him if he was like one of the Ghost Busters once. He got pretty mad at that. But then he just said that when I was older I would understand. This is the fourth house we've lived in since I was a baby. Mom says Dad moves around a lot because he's 'looking for strange activity.'"

She finished the piece of bread.

"So, anything strange going on around here?"

"No." Ralph lied, his tone defensive and somewhat gruff.