The old man shuts the door to his room and turns on a white noise generator before returning the call that had gone to voicemail. "Kids. They're putting kids on beetles? Chiant. I'll meet you at the Tavern. I'll try to talk, but I can't guarantee I can keep my temper with them."
"What? A close scrape? Let me tell you a story, freluquet. I get hired to go out into the jungle, right? Accompanying this archaeologist. I thought it'd be a milk run. Worst comes to worst, some local small fry show up, I call up a loa, scare them off, maybe fry some of them to shove the point home, and we all move on with our lives. Well, here's the thing. We get to the temple, and there's signs of blood magic. Aztec type temple, so it's not so odd, except the blood? It's fresh. Not more than a few hours.
"Our employer started messing with things, didn't realize the hot water he was in. He gets possessed by a spirit. But that's not the worst part. I'm a houngan. Spirits are easy. A Loa can almost always get them out, even if I don't have much personal talent at exorcisms. But anyway, that's the easy bit.
"No, the hard bit is that the spirit that possessed him was just a hanger-on for something huge that had been bound with the blood magic on the altar. That's right, this thing was so absolutely huge, they used maleficum of the highest order to bind it. Like, bigger than the biggest Loa I can call without starting to bleed from the eyes, big. In the metaphysical sense and the physical one. We had to banish that thing twice. I thought we were all going to die, and then spirits know what this thing would've gone on to do next.
I think I can handle a few gangers, freluquet."