<hr/><div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/a/ac/600full-kenneth-branagh.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Tommy Flanagan (https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=200832.msg9819558#msg9819558)<br/><strong>Faction:</strong>None<br/><strong>Date:</strong>May 20, 1876<br/><strong>Time of Day:</strong>afternoon<br/><strong>Location:</strong>Outside Babel's Tower<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Walker, CLOSED<br/><hr/><br/><br/>A less confidant man than Tommy Flanagan might have charted a straight course to the telegraph office and paid top dollar to wire a message back to his superiors looking for guidance. Tommy was not that man. He was not going to go yelping for help just because some Injun supposed there might be something a little out of the ordinary creeping around. Everyone knew the red man drank a lot, at least when they weren't smoking things a lot stronger than Tommy rolled into his cigarettes.<br/><br/>Could be real, though. And so Tommy set out to put together the best darn devil-hunting kit a man might throw together, if'n that man happened to have a skull full of little to no direct or indirect knowledge about the creature he was supposedly an expert on. A flush beats a straight, a full house beats a flush, and most of the time the Jokers were content to play the game the way men had invented it. This business of creeping around dreams and killing kids struck Tommy a little like playing with an extra deck under the table. Fair's fair, after all.<br/><br/>The carpetbag, newly purchased, nearly bulged at the seams. It had cost him a fair bit of coin that wasn't doing him much good in the first place, half of it in donations that Father Navarro over at St. Martin's had seemed to be happy to accept. The man had also extracted a promise to see Tommy in church on Sunday, which seemed like a sucker bet to the Irishman. If this monster turned out to be real then Navarro'd have a hard time getting Tommy out of there, whether he was hanging onto a pew or in a pine box up front.<br/><br/>Two crucifixes, a jug of what might or might not be holy water, a Bible, a hymnal, some candles, a sack of rock salt, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, two pounds of dried beans, a hammer, a box of nails, three wooden kid's pistols and three dolls in gingham dresses, a whole mess of rope, some salt pork, two sticks of dynamite, two sharpened stakes, an extra pair of wool socks, a cast iron frying pan, a tin of shoe polish and a tin of tooth powder. Plus a couple of things that, unbelievably enough, were probably even less relevant to the whole monster-hunting enterprise. The whole mess weighed nearly forty pounds and must have cost him almost a hundred dollars, though he hadn't been counting too carefully near the end. Looking down at the bag at his feet, Tommy realized that toward the end there he just might have been panicking a wee bit.<br/><br/>Soon enough Tommy was joined by Walks-Around-Too-Damn-Quietly, who appeared behind him like he'd spontaneously coalesced out of the dust. Tommy did a credible job, he thought, of not acting too spooked. The length of the the mens' shadows across the ground was a grim reminder that evening was coming on all too quickly.<br/><br/>"All right, chief. Seeing as how we're running short on time, I don't suppose you'd happen to know where we could find one of these kids who's been having the nightmares? If not, let's head over and find us a knot of Whippersnappers. A few coins oughta point us in the right direction." He looked down at the bag at his feet, then back up to the well-built Injun. "Probably better you carry that, chief. I need to have my hands free... just in case the worst happens." He tried to pronounce the last part as ominously as possible, because he did not want to carry the bag. Because it was heavy.<br/><br/><br/>