Chiron Academy

Strange Tales Issue #30: Can You Keep A Secret?

The wind shook the Grey Ghoul's shirt collar against his neck as he stepped through the small portal. It was much smaller than he would have made it. He wasn't a tall man but even he had to duck low to fit through the cramped space. None of the other portals springing up across the city had been particularly large, but this one had been the easily smallest. He hoped that that meant they were on the tail end of the whole phenomenon, though that might have just been wishful thinking on his part.

He pulled his grey jacket around him, grateful that he'd worn his whole uniform, the uniformly slate grey suit with the gargoyle mask. Back on the mortal plane, the thick jacket had been an almost suicidal choice, what with the recent heat, but here, it served as a nice guard against the wind chill. He'd almost opted against the suit but in the end, had opted to wear it.  It was a bit of a long shot, but the Grey Ghoul persona commanded respect in some parts of the realms and he just might need to take advantage of that. 

He cast his eyes around the dry, dusty rockscape around him. It wasn't anywhere he recognized. The Ghoul had traveled a lot over the years but there were easily hundreds of realms that existed and he wasn't much of an explorer. If anything, he was more of a fireman, putting out fires as they popped around the realms. Based on the energy in the air, he was pretty far from the mortal plane. Very far, from the feel of it. At the same time, things looked pretty normal, almost mortal-like, hinting that they were farther out than the Al-Easif Makan, in one of the Far Out Mundane planes near the edge.

Turning his mind back to the case, he began studying the scene. At his feet, the bland brown rock was covered in items that had been sucked in from the Reynold's apartment. The ground was littered with papers and books lying askew in the bland brown dirt. Even heavier items were not immune: a small television, surprisingly intact for the distance it had been thrown, lay among the detritus. The trail was quite long, stretching out at least 50 feet. Granted, the wind had blown loose items farther from the portal, leaving almost a cone of items.

However, there was no obvious sign of the missing kid. Had he merely walked away? But then why not just return to through the portal? The possibility of him being kidnapped or captured was a real one, (not that he would tell Mrs. Reynolds that), but judging on the surroundings, he doubted it. None of the Outer Mundanes were known to be home to beings of any real intelligence. People hardly ever came out here. He himself had been to one once, but it was only because the previous Grey Ghoul had insisted on showing him the different planes during his training.

Granted, that didn't mean that the Reynold's boy was out of the woods entirely. Just because he hadn't been taken by something didn't mean he couldn't be eaten by something. He definitely wasn't going to tell Mrs. Reynold's that.

Walking to the edge of the trail of trash, he scanned the horizon for further hints about the boy's whereabouts. Squinting against the wind, his eyes managed to pick out the frame of a wooden chair, lay on its side maybe a hundred feet from the portal. Its frame was almost skeletal,  spartan in design, without any expensive engraving. As he got closer, he could see it wasn't too well made, he could see the spots where the thing had been glued back together along deep sinuous cracks. It almost certainly came from the Reynold's apartment, but it was odd that it had been thrown a such a  distance and not broken as it had apparently had done before. 

Still, if the chair had been thrown this far and was unharmed, maybe the boy, Gary, had made it as well.

Grabbing a waystone from his pocket, he tossed it behind him towards the portal. As it left his hands, he could feel the familiar thrum of vibration in his mind point him back towards its location. It never did to get lost in one of these places. 

Heading in the direction that the chair had left the portal, he went off in search of the boy.

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