As brilliant as the city skyline looked during the night, the morning sun brought its own kind of beauty in how it shone against the rooftops. It glinted off glass panes, shone into the faces of tired businessmen who grumbled to themselves and turned more snugly into their pillows. As the night owls of Fairmouth City checked in for the day, the rest of its people got dressed, ate their breakfast, and set out to take care of whatever they needed to do.

It was lovely weather today, a sweet spring morning with no clouds in sight. Given how much rain had been falling the past few days, it was a pleasant surprise, though there were still deep puddles gathered in more than a few streets and gutters. A few children, enjoying their Saturday off, sprung out the doors of their apartments and into the sidewalks, kicking up water with their feet and making their families very unhappy somewhere. The cafes were starting to fill up for the morning rush, and hundreds of storefronts turned the “CLOSED” sign in their window to “OPEN”.

Cordelia Gable owned one such storefront. She arrived every day at 7:30 A.M., sharp. Not a minute sooner, and not a minute later. She greeted her workers as they left for home, or arrived for their shift. She pulled her labcoat out of the dryer and wrapped it, still-warm, around her shoulders, and went to sit at the desk in her office.

The Gable Clinic was a tidy little establishment, albeit not in the tidiest section of the city. It was sandwiched between a pawn shop and a “QUICK FOODS: DINNER, LUNCH, DESSERT”, a quaint brick building that had lost much of its color to the harsh sunlight. If you stepped inside, you would find the place remarkably clean and well cared for. The wall and tiling was a sterile white, made nearly blinding by the fluorescent lights installed in the ceiling. The art that hung on the wall was somewhat odd, depicting strange, surreal landscapes and pastel skies. There were ferns in the corners. The couches might have been soft, if not for the sheet of thin plastic wrapped around every cushion.

It was an excellent place for treatment, even if you could afford a regular hospital visit. The doctor (who, in all truth, probably had never been to a medical school in her life), accepted both money, and favors. Favors were her preferred currency, if she had to choose. She kept an extensive list of who owed her, and for what, just in case the opportunity ever came where she needed one in particular.

Sometimes, the favor would be as small as going out for tea with her, or brunch.

Other times, it would be far less simple.

It wasn’t all about the payment, however. Doctor Gable enjoyed her work. Yes. She enjoyed her work very, very much, which is why she was rarely found anywhere else but her work. All that was needed to begin was a client.

Edgar & Violet

Cold. It was cold and dark. Just the cold and the blank curtain of nothing surrounding him. Adrift in the liquid abyss, frigid and placid. He felt numb. The cold had sapped him of all warmth but there was comfort to be had in willingly casting off the bandaid of room-temperature equilibrium and just embracing the cold. So he laid, sailing the abyssopelagic depths of his empty mind, only tangentially conscious of what he was doing.

"Get up."

The soft yet sharp feminine voice cut through his mind, rousing him with a start. With a sudden surge he sat up from beneath the pool of water which laid contained within his bath tub. The ice cubes, stirred by the motion, swam about as they started to gather at the intersection between the water and Edgar's torso. The brackish water dripped back off his torso into the brownish grimy water, stained by the filth of his very being. He gripped the edge of the rusted bowl of discolored white metal he called a tub and slowly lifted his frigid form out of the soupy brine.

Stepping from the filthy tub he set foot on the bathroom floor which had last been cleaned days before he rented the apartment some two years ago. Across from him standing in the doorway to the bathroom was the human form of his sister, her feet hovering a good couple of feet from the slovenly trough of a floor littered with many varieties of garbage. Her dress danced in ethereal air, keeping away from the mess of the floor as though repelled by a magnetic force exuded by his trash.

_
"Seriously, If you didn't have me around you'd never get to work on time." She admonished him, arms crossed as she leaned on some unseen structure. With a wave of her finger she slung the stained old towel hanging on the nearby rack into Ed with her telekinetic ghost powers. The towel splatted out covering most of him, face included, with the musty old thing.

"Clean up and get dressed. It's boring waiting for you to get done with your daily morning ice bath."

Ed pulled the towel down off his face, casting a glare at his sister as he started to dry the frigid moisture off himself. Not bothering to voice any complaint he simply dried off and started off into the main room, navigating through the rough foot path set inbetween towers of old pizza boxes, discarded ramen noodle bags and macaroni & cheese boxes which filled the one room apartment. The carpet which the landlord had installed because he was too cheap to afford decent hardwood flooring for this cheap dive crunched beneath Ed's feet, the fibers of the fetid mat containing enough crumbs to feed someone for a month if the rampant bacteria from the rotting food didn't kill them first. Luckily it was of little concern for the many roaches which called his garbage heap home.

Over on the couch laid his work clothes, stained with filth from other people's trash. Since the last of this apartment's washing machines stopped working and the landlord has yet to have them fixed he, like many others in this apartment, hasn't been able to run his laundry through for three weeks now. It hadn't bothered too many residents since not only was this apartment located in the slums of Fairmouth City. Being a major draw for people both mundie and enscribed alike it meant the rent pretty much across the board was practically an arm and a leg. Even this heap of dilapidated housing wasn't cheap. For the nearly everything it lacked it made up for in being close to work. While everyone else was taking their shot and trying to make it big this little slice of the city belonged to the slum lords and those clinging on by the skin of their teeth. Ed clung on not out of ambition however. He did all this purely because his sister insisted that this city was it. Whatever that meant.

_
He got dressed up for work, chewing down a block of dry ramen noodles for breakfast before rinsing his mouth out with a bottle of mouthwash and setting out for work. The elevator wasn't working so he had to take the stairs down. Half the lights in the hall didn't work and the walls in the stairway were riddled with crude graffiti. Not even the talented stuff, just some basic gang signs and the kind of stuff you'd see written in a scummy washroom stall. Stepping gingerly around the fat homeless guy that was passed out at the base of the stairs he eventually made his way outside, the bustle and noise of constant traffic greeting him as sure as the morning sun itself.

So he waited at the bus stop, hands in his pockets as he looked at oncoming traffic wondering how late the bus was going to be this time. It was pretty much a guarantee that this bus was going to be late on any given day. As his eyes started to wander however they fell upon a peculiar sight. In the alleyway behind a dumpster were what appeared to be three kids, none older than twelve from the looks of it. It was hard to tell however since they were wearing goat heads over their... Well, heads.

Painted on the wall in some kind of dark red stuff that really kinda looked like blood was a pentagram. Above it and below it were written the words In Hell We Trust in the same stuff the pentagram was drawn in. Come to think of it as he examined the scene from afar the goat heads those kids wore looked very realistic, kinda like they could have belonged to a real goat. Almost as if in response to Ed's staring the kids stared back at him, their eyes unseen in the dark confines of their strange goat heads.

"I swear this world's getting crazier by the day." He muttered to himself, looking away from the kids and turning his attention back to traffic. With that the kids calmly left.

"Yeesh, you REALLY are dull." The voice of his sister spoke, sounding as though she were right behind him. He knew better however. This wasn't real. It was simply in his head.

"What tipped you off?" He gruffly answered back without bothering to try and face her since it didn't matter which direction he was facing.

"I mean, knowing you for pretty much your entire life for one. Seriously though, you see some spooky occult action and your answer is to just ignore it?"

"What was I supposed to do? Charge in, punch some kid, hold 'em up by the collar and demand they tell me what the hell's going on?"

"Tsk. Always the dull witted approach with you. At the very least you could have shown some curiosity. I swear if I ever left you your personality would collapse in on itself in a black hole of suck."

Ed had little time to humor Violet's critical wordplay for the bus had arrived. Wordlessly he swiped his pass along the scanner and shuffled on over to the back. Pretty much everything else went as expected for a day of work for him. He got to the dump, clocked in, got aboard a dump truck and set back out into the city to take out some trash. He didn't much care for trash but work was work. He rarely fell back upon his epithet to make things faster, opting to do things the old fashioned way and throw the trash bags onto the truck by hand. Perhaps it was because of his tendency to not try and one-up his co-workers, be they mundie or otherwise, or because he just generally didn't give a damn about how effective he was at his job but he rarely felt justified in using his epithet to assist in his work despite how his epithet was literally half of his job title. He was a Trash Man. Still, he was not one to take the easy approach despite his non-committal feelings towards the whole business.

And so his day went on, eventually finding him behind the QUICK FOODS store right next to the Gable Clinic. Rather than simply having the truck hoist the big metal dumpster over and dump it into the truck he dug through the contents first. This place, much like any restaurant or food service establishment, would throw out any leftover product that would begin to get stale and old. For a guy on a budget like him the stuff they threw away was basically free food. Luckily for him this neighborhood was a bit more upscale than the slums meaning less competition for the best picks out of the dumpster.

Standing at the side of this dumpster he took a bite out of an old scone they threw out last night. Just Ed enjoying some lunch out in the back alley.

Overall just another normal day.