Haunted Chaos: Side Stories

Meeting of the Minds

The North Wing Archives of Blackwood University smelled exactly like forgotten ambition and dry rot, a haunting aroma that clung to the aged leather and yellowed paper. For Alastor, then a fiercely dedicated solo investigator operating slightly outside the conventional channels of the obscure para-scientific community, the scent was the sweet, familiar smell of a solvable, measurable problem. He was thirty, rigid in his methodology, and impeccably equipped. He had spent years—and a small fortune inherited from a great-aunt who specialized in occult metallurgy—developing his gear. His specialization was the measurable containment of ethereal disturbances. His heavy, black, silver-threaded tactical vest held specialized, multi-band, low-frequency acoustic dampeners designed to cancel out most spectral noise, and his custom infrared visor was meticulously calibrated to register the faintest flicker of ectoplasmic bleed and residual energy signatures. The target: a stubborn Class-2 Banshee of Missed Deadlines, a persistent, high-frequency sonic entity whose panicked, temporal wails were causing structural cracking in the archival foundations and inducing acute, debilitating anxiety in the student body. This entity was anchored to the profound, collective despair of generations of students who felt they had run out of time. Alastor felt nothing but clinical impatience for the phenomenon, treating it purely as a mechanical disruption that needed an engineered solution.

Alastor was knelt by a dusty bookshelf dedicated to obscure 19th-century poetry, carefully setting a grid of dampening patches into the carpet to prevent the wails from vibrating the ceiling and escalating the entity. He used tweezers, measuring the distance between each patch to the exact millimeter, prioritizing precision above all else. He was charting the resonance frequency on a handheld scanner, utterly absorbed in the technical challenge. That intense concentration was shattered when a voice spoke, bright and close enough to make him jump violently, nearly scattering his finely tuned equipment into the dust.

“You’re going to need a lot more sage than that, sweetie, or at least some better taste in vinyl. That low-frequency static is only going to irritate her. She doesn’t want silence; she wants structure.”

He spun around, instantly on guard, the infrared visor whirring noisily as it struggled to classify the human figure, failing to find a recognizable uniform or energy signature. Standing casually amidst the towering stacks was a woman his own age—Letta. She wore heavy, tore up jeans with a thick black anime shirt and a worn leather jacket, with her bright teal, unruly hair tied back with a faded purple bandana. She looked less like an operative and more like a talented, if slightly messy, gamer who had taken a wrong turn. In one hand, she held a large, sticky vial of what looked suspiciously like consecrated house paint—specifically, a light, ethereal green—and in the other, a feather duster that appeared to have seen better centuries, the feathers themselves subtly shimmering. She was humming a complex, slightly jazzy, and utterly off-key tune that seemed designed to intentionally disrupt the solemn quiet of the archives.

“Who are you? This site is under a provisional Containment Order,” Alastor said, his tone clipped, professional, and accusatory. He disliked surprises interruptions while he worked. “I have locked down the building using every available security protocol, including sonic frequency locks on the old vents. You shouldn’t be here, and you are actively interfering with a sensitive spectral extraction process.”

Letta didn't move. She leaned against a shelf of defunct microfiche, completely unfazed by his severity. “You call that locked down? I walked right in the moment your temporary spectral isolation field dropped for its five-second recharge cycle—you know, the one triggered by your external generator overheating? You’ve sealed the physical doors, but the metaphysical doorway you left open is humming like a poorly maintained refrigerator and drawing power from the psychic distress field. And here’s the real kicker: you’re using static-pulse dampeners for a purely sonic entity driven by emotional resonance. All that pricey tech is doing is giving the Banshee a wider, higher-wattage amplifier to scream through, because it feeds on the technical friction.”

“My equipment utilizes proven principles of spectral isolation based on quantifiable energy readings and waveform cancellation,” Alastor argued, feeling a potent spike of professional indignation flare up, hot and embarrassing. His expensive, bespoke gear was his pride, purchased only after rigorous testing. “Your methodology appears to consist of… a bird feather, a tin of craft paint, and a distinct lack of proper safety apparatus.”

Letta winked, holding up the feather duster with an air of immense importance. “This is a consecrated hawk’s feather, perfect for chasing down the specific echo of fear. It’s light, it’s fast, and it hates stagnation. And this paint is mixed with graveyard earth, ground mica, and high-altitude lavender oil—it’s not for binding. It doesn't physically bind the spirit; it just makes the ambient air smell too pleasant and structurally sound for the depth of despair to take hold. I’m simply making this entire space hostile to misery, starting with the scent and color profile.” She then pointed to the Banshee’s anchor point—a stack of brittle, unsigned transfer forms—which was vibrating uncontrollably.

Before Alastor could launch into a lecture about the impossibility of scent-based spectral disruption, the air temperature plummeted—the psychic cold hitting them like a dense, physical wall of sudden winter. The sensation was immediate and penetrating, not just physical cold, but the icy dread of looming failure. The Banshee, having absorbed the conflicting energy fields and sensing the presence of two powerful, disruptive individuals, was escalating its output violently. The marble flooring beneath their feet began to vibrate with a low, dangerous frequency. A shelf full of forgotten yearbooks dedicated to the graduating class of 1948 suddenly ripped itself free from the wall, the books flying out like angry, hard-bound birds, impacting the ceiling with enough force to crack the plaster. The creature's wail started low, a mournful, deep hum that felt like the earth itself sighing over lost opportunity, but it rapidly climbed to an ear-splitting, destructive frequency—the high-pitched, panicked sound of an assignment due yesterday, amplified to lethal volumes and underscored by a thousand frantic, forgotten ticking clocks. The lights flickered, popped, and plunged the archives into near-total darkness, illuminated only by the Banshee's shimmering, destructive outline.

Alastor instinctively raised his specialized Frequency Shield, a small, kinetic barrier designed to deflect physical matter and moderate energy fields. But the Banshee wasn't throwing books anymore; it was throwing raw, weaponized sound and time. The sheer auditory and emotional pressure overloaded his state-of-the-art gear immediately. The dampeners sparked uselessly, shorting out with a puff of noxious smoke that smelled like ozone and sulfur, and his infrared visor went dead, leaving him momentarily blinded and deafened to everything but the Banshee's psychic roar. He winced, hands instinctively covering his ears, his training momentarily useless against this purely non-physical assault that targeted the mind.

Letta, however, didn't flinch or cover her ears; she seemed to absorb the psychic shock, using it as information. She grabbed Alastor’s arm with surprising strength, pulling him roughly behind a heavy, steel filing cabinet labeled "Unfiled Correspondence" which, thankfully, was bolted to the floor. “See? It feeds on noise and electrical static—the friction of time and worry! Your gadgets are just giving it a seven-course dinner, complete with dessert! We have to meet the emotion, not the sound!”

“And your lavender oil is succeeding only in making it furiously angry!” he retorted, trying desperately to reboot his dead visor while the filing cabinet vibrated and began to skid slightly across the marble floor under the sonic assault.

“It’s responding to rhythm, not volume!” Letta yelled back over the deafening wail, which was now so loud it was cracking the glass faces on the wall clocks and popping the fluorescent tubes overhead. “Not force! It needs a rhythmic lullaby! Something stable to anchor itself to—something that can't be rushed!”

Alastor, disarmed of his fancy tech and forced to rely on pure instinct, finally saw the logical truth in her chaotic approach. His structured, forceful containment had failed because it addressed the symptom (the sound) and not the source (the emotional panic). He needed to meet the entity's emotional need for structure and peace, not its physical manifestation.

“Rhythm,” Alastor repeated, thinking furiously as dust and book covers rained down on them. “If I can generate a perfect, silent, low-frequency hum—a technical, rhythmic beat—it won't feed on the sound, but it might respond to the stability of the waveform. But all my dampeners are fried, and my core is tapped!”

Letta grinned, her eyes bright with sudden, dangerous inspiration—the look of a scavenger who’d just spotted a rare treasure. “Use your jacket! It's got metallic threading for insulation, right? It’s silver-laced—perfect conductor! Channel your raw energy, your stability, into that metal, and I’ll provide the charm to give the frequency meaning.”

They moved in perfect, frantic sync, a team before they even knew it. Alastor ripped off his heavy, reinforced, silver-threaded jacket. He focused all his desperate, contained psychic energy—the same controlled stability he used to power his batons and shields—into the silver fibers. He didn't just push the energy; he visualized it as a perfect sine wave, utterly steady and unhurried. The jacket began to glow with a faint, steady, almost unheard low-frequency thrum—a vibration below the range of human hearing, a pure, silent rhythm designed for order and structural stability. This was the only non-sonic, non-chaotic force that could possibly counteract the Banshee’s chaos.

As the sound-vortex of the Banshee’s rage turned toward them, Letta stepped out from behind the cabinet, ignoring the psychic pressure and the falling debris. She opened her vial of consecrated paint and began to hum softly, matching her tone exactly to the frequency Alastor was desperately generating in the metal fibers. Her humming wasn't a powerful, forceful chant; it was a quick, soothing, melodic charm—a technical lullaby designed to comfort the spirit's deepest, primal fear of time running out and things being eternally incomplete.

The combination was immediate and profoundly effective. The furious, destructive wail of the Banshee faltered, like a record skipping and finally stopping, leaving an abrupt hole in the air. The vortex of books slowed, dissolving into floating dust and drifting paper scraps. The spirit, caught between the pure, unyielding, structural rhythm of Alastor's channeled technology and the gentle, magical, emotional melody of Letta's charm, didn't resist; it simply calmed, the panic evaporating entirely, leaving only a residual, sorrowful shimmer.

Letta quickly pulled a broken, softly ticking antique alarm clock—a piece of forgotten, mundane time that still worked, its brass casing tarnished and its face reading perpetually 11:59—from the inner pocket of her jean and held it up as a beacon. With a final, quiet phrase of binding, she gently encapsulated the now-peaceful spirit, offering it the promise of endless, completed time. The Banshee, shrinking, settled into the alarm clock with a long, soft sighing sound that sounded suspiciously like relief, the desperate anxiety finally contained in a beautiful, harmless relic.

They stood side-by-side in the sudden, ringing silence, adrenaline slowly fading into exhaustion. Alastor looked at his smoking, useless gear scattered on the floor. Letta looked at the dust motes settling where a furious, destructive spirit had been.

“My name is Alastor,” he said, extending a slightly shaking hand, his voice rough. “You saved my life, and, paradoxically, you’ve rendered my entire professional thesis on acoustic containment completely obsolete.”

Letta shook his hand firmly, her palm calloused but warm, still humming slightly under her breath. “Letta. And you provided the stable, controlled, non-magical foundation my unpredictable magic desperately needed to work, which is honestly very, very rare. Most technical guys try to fight the feeling instead of channeling the stability. I don't like fighting the feeling; I like giving it a better home.”

Alastor nodded slowly, the truth settling deep in his core. “I just realized that my approach handles the how—the mechanics, the structural integrity of the energy. Yours handles the why—the emotion that drives the chaos. We need both. I can’t—I shouldn't—do this alone anymore. My way isolates the problem, but your way fixes the cause.” He looked at the antique clock, realizing the newly bound artifact was the perfect cover. “We need a shop. A place where we can clean up the things we find and hide them in plain sight.”

In that dusty, damaged archive, amidst the scattered remnants of forgotten ambition, the foundation of Witches - Lost & Found was cemented: two new best friends, one organized and precise, the other intuitive and artistic, realizing that the key to dealing with the world's supernatural chaos wasn't found in one discipline alone, but in the perfect, complementary blend of both. They simply couldn't afford to hunt alone anymore, and for the first time, Alastor didn't mind the unpredictability , so long as his new best friend Letta was there to help him face it.