#25 and 26 – Letitia Lock & General Ghost

Letitia Lock & General Ghost

LETITIA LOCK always thought of herself as nothing special. The troubled middle child between an agressively striving older brother and a younger sister content with obsessing over celebrities on BET, she continually got into all kinds of trouble. After getting arrested for fighting and underage drinking, and washing out of basketball, volleyball, and ROTC, she shocked everyone by doing well enough on tests and bullshitting an essay to make it into a good college. She’s smarter than she lets on, and even though she’s small, she’s been known to take out some big dudes. She got to college, partied too much, and was suspended, to no one’s surprise.

One night, she’s at a party at a rich classmate’s house when she stumbles into the study and sees a bunch of files labeled ENIGMA BRAVO, with what look like bloodstains on them. The folders have strange titles like “The Innermen”, “Operation: Wonderland”, “Universe 13”, and “The Infernal Hive Mind of Myriad, Indiana”. Overcome by curiosity and bored by her classmates (“this place was dead anyway”), she steals the files and hides them in her dorm room.

Once she starts looking at them, she’s overcome by the creepy feeling that she’s being watched. She wakes up with a start one night to see GENERAL GHOST standing over her. Strangely unafraid and unsurprised, she asks what he wants. He explains that he was tasked with the program codenamed Enigma Bravo, a top-secret military program. Initially documenting strange happenings that could be either contained or made useful to the military, the General realized that the files pointed to something much larger. He was murdered before he could find out what. A stubborn sumbitch, instead of remaining in the afterworld, or getting caught up in a ghost loop, he learned at the feet of the greatest military commanders and scholars of the world he could find in The After, and returned to our world to search for a living person who could help him finish the Enigma Bravo project. Letitia Lock, he has decided, is that person. “You do go to war with the army you have,” he admits after having observed Letitia’s current lifestyle.

The enemy:  forces from ‘Outside’ — things we call angels, demons, faeries, aliens.  They remain hidden, distorting and transforming things in the world for their use. Their primary agents are The Nephilim, offspring of unions betwen beings from Outside and living things (mostly but not always human). Letitia and the General have some allies: creatures classified as “cryptozoological” such as the elusive, scholarly Yeti, and the Outsiders’ most fierce enemy: the “little men” which show up in every culture’s legends – gnomes, menehune, leprechauns — that teach them things. But these creatures can’t always be counted on, at least not according to the General.

Now that Letitia’s found this world, and some kind of meaning, she’s hanging onto it with every fiber of her being. The general sees some potential in her, and agrees to guide her, though at times it’s painful for the both of them. She’s not dumb by any means, but she’s no scholar, she has no military discipline, she knows nothing about shadowy conspiracies. She just knows that she found the files, she can see the General when others can’t, and she belongs here and she’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. And even some people who don’t say otherwise.

Under General Ghost’s tutelage, she discovers that all the things she could deal with in her life were down to her ridiculous amount of willpower, from  a knack for beating up much larger oppoents to her ability to drink people under the table and function on amounts of drugs that would kill lesser mortals. She possesses a boundless amount of energy that can’t be contained by the normal world… but makes her a perfect soldier for the war General could never finish by himself.

Category: 2011, Drama, Scifi