Flipping Haunted Houses For Fun and Profit! S.01 - The Symbol Of Despair (Patreon)

Set a week after the first chapter

It was a perfectly normal day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Harmony Riana Adlawan—Hari to her best friend, because once upon a time both of her names had been too long for the child he’d been to pronounce properly—walked with a spring in her step as she headed towards her meetup. Any urges to self-medicate was because of her sweet-tooth, which she womanfully resisted for the moment, and the box of store-bought fudge brownies she was carrying. It was from the good bakery chain, and thus luxuriously sweet and decadent, so her resistance would be crumbling later today when there wasn’t as much of the brownies to tempt her into eating so much. She planned to live to be at least a hundred, and while she had resistance to becoming diabetic, she didn’t have Lor’s outright ‘the world is unfair’ immunity. That said, one or two wouldn’t hurt…

The Temple of Princess the Hopeful of Selurong was some distance from where she lived with her aunt and uncle. Devoted to the Goddess Omutan in her aspect as the goddess of love, it was a popular venue for weddings, and on every other weekend they held a matchmaking event where the unmarried attended to meet new people. They even had Amatsushima-style fortune-telling—Omutan was also the goddess of games and luck—where for a small ‘donation’ you could draw your fortune and learn if you had good luck or bad luck in your immediate future.

As she entered the threshold, Harmony took a moment to look up at the walls and ceiling to appreciate the artwork of the temple. Painted in imitation of frescoes, the ceiling was decorated with paintings of the representations of the Goddess: the archer of love, the hooded shadow of conflict wielding an anachronistic handgun, the pig-tailed child playing games, the gambler with a spear in one hand and six dice in the other, and the Thaumaturgist with glowing purple eyes and clad in an armor of veneplate.

Beneath each representation were depictions of historical heroes fighting abstracted representations of manifested keres. There were doctors and alchemists facing Plague keres, noted Necromancers and philanthropists holding back Ego keres, soldiers and vigilants fighting Wrath keres, artists, performers and writers standing against Empty keres…

In her opinion, some of the pairings seemed to be a reach, but she could almost agree with the artists and performers. Tearing her gaze away, Harmony headed towards the back, nodding at the priests and priestesses she recognized.

Most of the week, the temple’s several function rooms were available for various groups to use. There was a book club, a Spiritualist coding circle, a study group, a board game club, a wargaming club, a support group for recovering gambling addicts… and those were just the ones she knew about. None of those were the group she sought, although she occasionally joined the board game because they always had great games.

Finding the right room, she opened the door with a cheerful, “Hey! What’s up, party people?-!”

Everyone stared at her. Some looked amused, but most were bemused, and a few looked exasperated.

“Hello, Harmony,” Rin said, standing next to the refreshment table and opening a new pack of paper towels. She wore a strained smile like a bad mask, and while more humans and oni tended to have trouble being able to tell payatin expressions because of their lack of eyes, Harmony could tell it hadn’t been a good week for the woman.

“Hey, Rin,” Harmony greeted back as she put the brownie box onto the table with all the other snacks everyone else had brought in, looking it all over to make sure everyone was keeping to the ‘no alcohol’ rule. No rum balls, and all the bottles chilling in the Styrofoam cooler full of tube ice were made of plastic and filled with softdrinks. “Rough week?”

The woman sighed, her tentacles wrapped around her shoulder and arms like she as trying to give herself a hug. “I’ll… bring it up later.”

Ah. A bad day at work, then. “Need a hug?” Harmony offered as she pulled the brownies out of the box and tore open the clingwrap protecting the goods from bugs. She’d learned long ago that if the brownies weren’t out and ready to eat then no one would get around to eating them. “Or a brownie?”

Rin’s left ear twitched, the long, pointy appendage angling upward slightly. Harmony had learned that was basically the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. “Self-medicating or trying to give yourself diabetes?”

“Ugh, don’t you start too, doc. I get enough of that from my bestie.”

“Then you should listen to him.” the pediatrician said. Still, her mouth curved up slightly. “I’ll have one, though.”

Harmony spread her arms, took a step to close the distance between them, and enfolded Rin in an embrace, tentacles and all.

“The brownies, Harmony,” the payatin said dryly, but didn’t push her away.

“Oh, right.” She looked around, spotted the dull butterknife in the utensil pile, and began to cut the brownie along the lines that had already been scored on it. “Here you go!”

Rin daintily took the fudge brownie that had been impaled into the end of the butterknife. “Thank you,” she said, looking amused despite herself.

“Anyone else want one?” Harmony called out to the other in the room. “Come on, I don’t want to have to bring any of this home, I’m a diabetes risk enough as it is!”

Was this all obnoxious? Probably, but Harmony knew how far she could push, and she’d always been good at reading a room. She was exasperating, but not annoying, and not enough to bring anyone’s mood down.

Her little bit of performance art done for the moment as people slowly helped themselves to the brownies she’d brought, Harmony grabbed a paper cup and went to the soft-drinks to self-medicate. Just a little drink, some sugar to make her tongue feel good…

Harmony was on her third cup and had helped herself to some doughnut balls that someone had brought—either Carla or Benny, they liked doughnut balls—when everyone finally arrived, so they got to sitting down on the chairs in a circle. As Thea, that week’s facilitator, brought things to order, the Symbols of Despair Support Group meeting got underway.

Most of the time, Harmony had no trouble keeping the smile on her face. After all, why wouldn’t she? She had a great job, a great family, the bestest best friend, and while she was single at the moment, now that Lor was done with education and was a gainfully employed adult—even if it was only until he could apply for an internship to get the credits to finally get his license—she could now drag him off and introduce him to people so that whoever she ended up dating will be able to understand they were a package deal.

Co-dependent? Probably a little, but they’d been friends for longer than they’d had coherent memories, so that was only to be expected. He was basically her brother!

Then there were the other times. The times when she lay in bed at night and for some reason her thoughts had turned to how dangerous the world around her was. How her parents and her older sister didn’t have magic and would be helpless against the dangers out there. How even as a Symbol who didn’t use her magic much, she’d be much healthier than any of them and could expected to live well into her first century in reasonable health, wits and mobility, leaving her family behind. How her laptop, so new and shiny and fast, would be chugging along slowly in five years and probably die by itself in ten…

In those dark, solitary times, she could feel her power inside her, so close to the surface that all she had to do was reach…

It was like some kind of curse from an old mage tale, of how a wicked Flame witch would curse someone with what they wanted most.  She, who had always dreamed of having a magic to awaken so she could become a vigilant, had gotten exactly that. She’d awakened a power she was now loathe to touch except at need, or when forced. Whenever she Symbolized… well, she’d been warned about what would happen. Using the power of a Symbol changed you. Symbols of Hope would become increasingly optimistic, Symbols of Rage become easier roused to anger… and Symbols of Despair became prone to depression.

She knew the statistics. Symbols of Despair had a suicide rate of 63%, but those numbers were skewed because most of the rest died in combat in the military or in the vigilants, usually when serving some kind of delaying action. To her knowledge, the number of Despairs who managed to live to a ripe of age with their health and sanity intact was positively miniscule compared to the other six. There were less than forty in the whole world, according to her research,

Most of the time she didn’t think about and… well, it worked. She’d grown up with a naturally cheerful and optimistic disposition, which was both helpful in not sinking into gloom and making it difficult to access her own magic. It was one of the strange quirks of Symbolism—right up there with it literally being mind-altering for the user—that it essentially needed to be switched on, otherwise she was for all intents and purposes an ordinary person who just happened to be fitter and healthier than normal.

Harmony was lucky and she knew it. But even she had bad days when the little sad threatened to turn into the big sad threatened to give her almighty sad powers at the price of eventually making her sad forever. She didn’t regret Symbolizing so that Loren could get into his apartment long enough to get the stuff he needed. She was young, her brain was still elastic enough to bounce back, and this was exactly what self-medicating was for. But…

But…

Well, good reasons or not, the aftermath still sucked.

Still, Harmony knew she was better off than a lot of the others in the group. Billy, who’d Symbolized in the middle of being assaulted—violently, not sexually, but did that really matter?—had by his own admission already started developing a depressive brain alchemy, and was taking pills to try to even it out. It wasn’t helped by the fact he seemed the sort of person who could be described by the phrases ‘quiet, kept to himself, didn’t cause any trouble for anybody’ and ‘we never expected him to snap like that and kill all those people’. Unfortunately, he also had the habit of Symbolizing when his meds left his mind high as a kite but his soul felt trapped inside the body of the resulting mind those thoughts flowed like thick syrup. Symbolism unfortunately worked on how you felt, and not how your brain said you felt.

So Harmony was happy for him and applauded with everyone else when he reported how well his new dosage was working, and how he hadn’t Symbolized in over a month. He just looked so relieved at how The Weight had gone away, and he could actually be happy.

They all knew The Weight. It was their power—ha!—and their curse, why the power of Symbols of Despair was so inextricably linked to gravity. The hopelessness, the apathy, the inability and helplessness, all made manifest in an actual physical force that pulled down. As Symbols, they could control it, direct it, channel it… but they would always bear it, a boulder on them that they would one day be too weak to resist.

Rin’s story was as terrible as Harmony had feared. A doctor, she had Symbolized in her mid-thirties when she’d been caught in a car accident, and had needed to completely change her career path from Internal Medicine to Pediatrics because… well, her line of work involved far too many depressing diagnoses, even with the advancements made in medicine, alchemical pharmaceuticals, and medicinal magic. While children often got sick, most of their afflictions were easily treatable and nearly always survivable.

Most. Nearly.

“He had cancer,” was all Harmony needed to hear to know this story was going to suck, and she immediately went to get another brownie and a sugary drink. She wasn’t the only one.

Fortunately, the diagnosis had been made early enough that it was treatable with modern medicine and Flamecraft, but even then, such a diagnosis for a child wasn’t pleasant for the doctor.

Finally, it was Harmony’s turn. “I changed this week,” she said. “I guess it might have been for a petty reason, but it didn’t seem like it at the time. You see, the night before, my bestie showed up at our house after midnight. He was barefoot and wearing sleeping clothes, because he’d run out in the middle of the night after he found out the hard way that his apartment was haunted…”

As much as they all tried to avoid it, sometimes you just needed to Symbolize, or couldn’t avoid doing so. A really bad day, a moment in the middle of the night when your thoughts turned dark and sleep couldn’t come fast enough and closing your eyes and focusing on breathing just didn’t help, and the darkness was so tempting… The change could even be involuntary, although that was rare. After the first time, sudden traumatic injury could induce an involuntary change, meaning that the site’s of a Symbol of Despair’s suicide was either very messy or very well-thought out and creative.

Whenever Harmony told her latest story of why she symbolized, she was always afraid the others would think she’d been frivolous. ‘You changed for that?-! Are you taking this seriously?’ A part of her always worried she would met with that judgement. After all, was it really necessary that she risk her mental health just so her best friend could get a few stuff from his apartment? It wasn’t like she was trying to protect her coworkers from two murderous ghosts, after all.

And yet, as she related the little misadventure, all she saw was understanding. A few, like James, looked impressed that she’d been able to keep the presence of mind to limit her magic, not to mention focus it on the ghost. Avoiding using their magic or being overwhelmed by them meant many of those in the group didn’t really have a lot of practice with control.

“…I’ve been self-medicating with food, candy and coffee over the past week,” Harmony related, and Rin and some of the mothers in the group frown. “And yeah, my bestie’s already been on my case about it. I managed to bounce back two days ago, and my brain’s managed to keep feeling good. If I can go without changing for a couple of weeks, I should be fine. Work helps, and honestly, knowing I did it because my bestie needed me goes a long way towards me not sinking into a big sad.

“There’s just… when you’re there on the floor, and The Weight is pressing you down and getting cute with the visual allegory by making chains come up from the ground to wrap around you—” there wry smiles, nods and amused rolled eyes as everyone understood what she meant, “—and your brain is telling you everything sucks and always will suck and nothing will change, I was able to tell it ‘yeah, so? That means bestie still needs me’. It was… purposeful, I guess. Necessary. It sucked, but I did it for a reason, and that reason wasn’t something I’d change my mind about when it was under, you know? I think that was why it was easier to take it off afterwards too. Now that the reason I changed was fulfilled, I didn’t need it anymore, or at least not at that moment. I think… I think I was glad. I was glad that I was able to help my friend, and it wasn’t a hopeless thought. I wasn’t empty, so there was something to push The Weight off. An emotional lever kinda thing.”

There were considering looks and nods from some of the older people in the group, although the latter looked sad as they did so.

“Thank you, Harmony,” Thea said once Harmony indicated she was finished. “This was a very good example of a purposeful transformation. If you have to change, do it for a specific reason, one you won’t feel different about when you’re feeling The Weight. When we do something for ourselves, when The Weight sets in we tell ourselves it doesn’t matter to us anymore. So do it for someone else. Someone who needs you. Someone you want to pull The Weight for. Do it for them, and The Weight becomes something we have a reason to bear. Friends, families… they give us a reason to bear this cursed blessing. Under The Weight, we might think we don’t matter… but could you say the same thing about them?”

Harmony found herself nodding along. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard the sentiment, but it had just been words without context for her. Now…

She had a lever.