Category: Story

July 7th, 2025 – was this the day? Would I be driving home a new-to-me RV, or would I show up and find an abandoned vehicle graveyard, minus the one vehicle I was interested in, and down several thousand dollars?

Once more, Franklin and I woke up early (to us) and drove, yet again, across the state. I pulled into Schrodinger’s Fae Graveyard, and as I came around the corner through the gate, I breathed a sigh of relief to see the now-familiar giant white box sitting on the asphalt near the office (that I had never once noticed on any prior visit) in the sun with Jack wiping his hands on a rag.

The RV was plugged in to a regular household outlet, so it had a little bit of power to run things like the lights but not enough to power the air conditioning or the awning or slideouts, so we still had not tested any of those things. But he showed us the handful of other things that he had merely told us about before but could not demonstrate without power.

I finally guided the men towards the car with the intent of handling the title transfer down at the DMV. Fortunately, it was only a few miles away. Jack got in line and Franklin and I waited. And waited. And waited.

Eventually it occurred to us that I should get in line even though Jack was not done. Whenever he finished his title transfer from the previous owner to him, I would already be in the queue for him to transfer the title to me. So I got in line and waited. And waited. And waited. While waiting, I got really hungry, so I made a Taco Bell order for all 3 of us from the line and sent Franklin outside to pick it up. #LivingInTheFuture.

Finally, I got up to the Threshold Guardian, the gatekeeper of the first Test where I had to successfully explain our quest and beg for safe passage onto the next level. Eventually I was able to make her understand that I was there for a title transfer, but that the person transferring the title to me had to transfer the title to himself first and was already inside awaiting his turn. People seem to have a hard time understanding that the person I’m buying a vehicle from had not completed the purchase of that same vehicle from the previous owner himself yet.

When she figured out the situation, instead of awarding me with my own call number, she said I should just join Jack in the next lobby and go with him to the counter and do both of our title transfers under the same number. I passed the First Threshold and moved to the next chamber.

Inside, I found Jack sitting in a lobby that was overflowing with lost souls. Much like the quiet desperation of the Beetlejuice underworld but with significantly less interesting characters. I approached Jack, leaned down to mutter the new plan of me going with him to the counter, and then opened up the folding camp chair that I had slung over my shoulder.

You see, I have been dealing with the Unseelie Court, um, I mean the United States Department of Motor Vehicles, for many decades now. I am very well aware of their lower level tricks to create unease in those who dare to petition them for privileges, including the obnoxiously long wait times and lack of available seating. I grabbed my camp chair out of the car when we first arrived and used it to sit in the outer lobby, in the line for the Threshold Guardian, and now in the inner court.

Time passed, or perhaps didn’t pass at all (always hard to tell in the land of the fae) and our number was eventually called. Jack approached the window and began to explain his purpose. I stood a step or two back and let him do his thing, not really paying attention because I expected delays and confusion. At some point, Franklin was admitted inside to deliver our food, which I immediately ate while standing at the counter because I am frequently disdainful of bureaucracy. If they are going to insist on this long, Byzantine process that extends past meal times, I will bring my chairs and my meals in with me.

While eating and standing and waiting, I looked mostly at my phone but also around the room. Standing behind our clerk was a security guard that they must have gotten from Central Casting, because you don’t get more “security guard” than this guard. He was tall, perhaps 6 feet or so, with biceps bigger than my head bulging out from under the cuff of his short sleeved polo shirt, wearing all black, with a black billed cap perched on his dirty blond curly mullet. Yes, he had an actual mullet, which I could verify when he took his cap off to run his hand through his hair and reset it. The mullet matched the 1970s-era porn ‘stache. Under the full soup strainer, he looked maybe 20 years old.

After messaging Franklin out in the waiting room about the Central Casting security guard (who turned out to be the guard who let him past the wards and barriers to deliver our food), I started paying attention to find out what the hold-up was.

The clerk didn’t seem to want to process the title transfer without the seller being present because there was some kind of typo on the title. Jack gently asked about alternatives and the clerk grudgingly suggested some kind of power of attorney or certification verifying that he was who he said he was and that the seller was who he said he was and that the seller really did intend to sell the vehicle to the buyer.

Jack deflated and backed up a step, not sure what to do now and sure that he had just been stymied. So I stepped up and said “so this Bill of Sale here will not work as the proof you’re looking for?” The clerk blinked at me as if he didn’t realize I wasn’t a pet of some sort and had just become a person in front of him. I repeated myself, and he said “oh, yeah, that will work!” Apparently, he was not aware that Jack had a bill of sale with him and Jack did not think to offer it because it was not the specific set of words that the clerk had used.

With that final hurdle cleared, the title was transferred into Jack’s name and the clerk looked as if to dismiss us. So I stepped up again and said “great, now we can transfer it into my name!” The clerk paused for only a moment as if thinking “shit, I was hoping they’d forget that part because I was doing my best to look like I had forgotten that part”, and began the second title transfer. Whatever took so long and required 3 trips by the clerk to some back room for “verification” was apparently not necessary this time and we both signed and dated and initialed and finally the title was in my name.

I handed Jack a bank envelope full of cash and a copy of the bill of sale that we had Jill sign, and we fled the Unseelie Court, I mean the DMV. We had to stop back at Jill’s house down the street to pick up a tool that John had left, but then onward we went.

Back at the vehicle graveyard, Jack got out his tools and rags and bottles and pans, and got back to work to bleed the brakes as agreed on. Franklin sat in the car, his Portland blood and skin unable to handle the Florida sun and humidity. I sat on the tongue of a tow dolly for a boat that will likely never see the water again, close enough to offer assistance if needed and far enough away to not appear as though I was overseeing his work, and I surfed on my phone.

Time passed, or perhaps it didn’t, and just when I was about to give up offer to come back another day, Jack slid out from under the RV and announced that he was done. There was some kind of problem with one of the brakes and he couldn’t open it to bleed it of air, but he eventually got it (he thought) and put everything back together and it was ready.

Franklin took my keys and I took the massive keyring with more keys than a plumber from Central Casting has ever carried, and I climbed up into the rig. I found the ignition key, inserted it, turned it, and the engine purred. I eased the beast through the narrow gate, down the gravel road, and onto the asphalt. It was really coming home with me!

Did I successfully navigate a deal with the fae for a chariot, or was this just the beginning of my trials? Anyone who has ever owned an RV knows the answer to this question.

The next day, the woman messaged me that her boyfriend was out and had looked at the problems we noticed on the RV. She said that he said that it was just air in the line and he was totally qualified to bleed the brakes for us and he wanted to show us around the RV himself. She also insisted that there was no oil in the RV which, as you, dear reader, might remember from pt. 2, had just been replaced by a mechanic.

So I once again wake up Franklin to ask WTF and he insisted that he saw the mechanic put oil in the engine, which I relayed. There was much back and forth while I tried to pass along info between the two people who actually understood the subject, and a not insignificant amount of panicking. We began to make plans to get an Airbnb up in Daytona (where the RV was still currently parked) to spend the weekend up there to work directly with the boyfriend on fixing whatever needed to be fixed.

Eventually, we learned that they were mistaken about the oil, that it was apparently so clean that he did not even see it on the dipstick on his initial look, and that he was confident he could take care of the brakes. We also learned that we had already made a bunch of plans for this weekend and could not return until Monday at the earliest.

We finally scheduled another trip across the state to meet the boyfriend and talk in person about the state of the motorhome. So, once again, we woke up early (for us) and drove across the state with our daily thunderclouds pressing down upon us.

We pulled into the fae vehicle graveyard and met, let’s call him Jack. A tall, young-looking man with a commanding bearing and a kind face. Like the woman, he greeted us amidst a whole cadre of feral children, some of whom we had met before but others were new. I think this is just what fae children do. He talked engines and brakes with Franklin and showed us the RV as if we hadn’t already inspected it, which turned out to be helpful because he could explain parts of the vehicle that the woman, let’s call her Jill, had not. Such as what parts were accessible via which compartments, what parts did not work and what parts would work under which circumstances.

We then attempted to go to the DMV, where it turned out that Jack had not finished the transfer of the RV from the previous owner into his own name and that would have to be completed before he could transfer it into mine. We also learned more of his story.

During the last hurricane that flattened Central Florida in the fall of 2024, Jack lost 3 of his trucks for his trucking business and his restaurant. He and all his kids, and Jill and all her kids, have been living in FEMA housing for nearly a year, awaiting the resolution of assistance to get back on their feet. That, of course, came with all kinds of complications.

One such complication was that FEMA had run out of time for the housing they were putting people in and had to move them to hotel rooms, which were smaller and also more expensive. Many of these expenses had to be paid by the individuals and hopefully reimbursed by FEMA at some point.

Another was that Jack had been driving around a rental car this whole time. Because it was FEMA-related, he had a contract or an arrangement of some sort where he was paid up through the end of the month (or possibly through the next month), but some computer glitch somewhere said the car had not been paid since the previous month. Since this was midway through the month, the rental agency sent police out to pick him up for driving their property without “paying” for it.

Jack had a whole paper trail proving that he was not in debt and had a current valid contract, but naturally it wasn’t in his pocket when he was picked up, and even if it had been, it’s for the judge to decide at some later time. Because this is America and that’s how we do things – arrest you first, prove your case later, but first you need all the money up front to get out of jail and get an attorney and put together your case. All Jack needed was the bail money so he could come home, gather his records, and show them to the judge. Hence the sale of the RV.

Which he was able to do when we agreed to pay half the money up front. He was released, he went to his arraignment, the judge dismissed everything, and now he had to try and fight with an increasingly defunded FEMA over all the other things.

Hearing this story directly from Jack, with his earnest sincerity, greatly relieved Franklin, and we proceeded with the rest of the sale. But the further complication with the title transfer meant that we still could not complete everything today.

Once more, we headed back home, sans fae chariot, still not entirely sure whether this deal with the fae was a good one or a bad one. Would we ever bring her home with us? Would yet another roadblock jump in our path? At this point, however, I was starting to tentatively tell people that I *may* have just purchased a new RV. But we’ll see in a few days.

We arrived at what seemed to be a fae vehicle graveyard to inspect an RV that we really couldn’t tell what it looked like from the pictures. After climbing around it for nearly an hour with a looming storm overhead, we still couldn’t really tell what was going on.

But we felt drawn to it.

So we texted the owner and said we’d like to schedule an inspection with a mechanic and do a test drive. She said that would be fine, sooner was better than later. It took a couple of days, while we kept looking over other options, but nothing was really grabbing us like this one did. Certainly nothing in the same price range. This was worlds bigger than any other RV in our price bracket because of the slides, but it would require a lot more work. Many of the motorhome ads I looked at appeared to be road-ready, fully furnished and decorated and ready to go. This … was not. But I’ll get to that.

On June 30th, 2 days later, I messaged her again asking when would be a good time to test drive the vehicle. She asked if we could make it that day. I reminded her that we could, but that it was a 3 hour drive for us. The people she had scheduled for 4 PM that day had just cancelled and she said it was fine to arrive in the afternoon.

As usual, the afternoon Florida skies loomed heavy above. Franklin felt it was an ominous sign. I suggested he look around while I drove to find a mechanic who could do an inspection. He called one mechanic, who could not see us that afternoon, and reported back to me that we could not get it inspected that day. But, already on the way, we decided to at least test drive it.

The first rain drops fell as we pulled into the fae vehicle graveyard to see a young woman who didn’t look any older than 13 years old, surrounded by half a dozen children. She took us through the RV and pointed out some features, and then handed us the keys to test drive. I carefully negotiated the vehicle out of its resting spot, around trees and tow dollies and listing food trucks and feral children running through the tall grass. Eventually we got it out onto the road. I pressed on the brakes as I approached the end of the driveway, to turn onto the road, and the pedal went all the way to the floor before encountering any resistance.

“Um, Franklin, if you didn’t like the asshole’s brakes, you’re really not going to like these brakes,” I said.

“Why?” he asked me suspiciously.

“Because there aren’t any.”

I got the vehicle onto the road and up to a decent speed to listen to the engine. It purred. Franklin loved the engine sound. But now the deluge started and we were in a very large and heavy vehicle tearing down the road with no brakes. Well, that’s not true, it had SOME brakes left. But we’ll get to that. I drove for months on a car with failing brakes, so I was able to control the RV just fine without even making Franklin nervous.

Until I asked him if he wanted to test drive it.

Franklin took over, got the RV up and going, and then tried to stop. He immediately pulled into a parking lot and gave over piloting back to me.

Reclaiming the captain’s seat, I once again took control of the beast. She seemed to respond well to my handling. While the torrential downpour continued to beat upon our heads, I got her turned around and headed back to the graveyard. She stopped when I asked her to, but in protest each time.

Pulling into the lot, this poor young woman and her kids were drenched, awaiting our return. With Franklin’s directional assistance, I backed the chariot into its spot, cut the engine, and opened the door to let all the waterlogged into some dry relief.

I told her that we love the RV but that it had no brakes. That would have to be rectified before we could agree to anything. While we were test driving, I had asked Franklin if all the mechanics in the area were unable to see us, and he said that he had only called one place. So I instructed him to call around until he found a place that could see us today. By this point, the rain was letting up, and we arranged to have Franklin drive my car with the woman and her passel of children, and I would drive the RV with no brakes down the street to a nearby mechanic.

While the mechanic was looking things over, I would drive the whole lot of us around getting a bill of sale notarized and getting cash. First we drove to my bank, which notarizes documents for free to bank customers. However, as it turns out, they don’t notarize documents for bank customers, they notarize signatures for customers. Which means that they would only notarize my signature, not hers. Which defeats the purpose of getting the bill of sale notarized.

We found an Amscot, a check-cashing place, that would notarize for $10, but after packing up all the children and driving to yet another location, we learned that they would not allow her to sign on behalf of someone else without further paperwork legalizing her as his signatory (and the RV was in her boyfriend’s name, so we put his name on the bill of sale).

This is when we discovered that the vehicle was completely out of oil and that one of the brake calipers was bad and had air in the system. She said that was no problem, her boyfriend who owned it was a truck driver and would fix everything before we picked it up. But the mechanic said it should not drive without an oil change, so we took $200 off the sale price to have him change the oil.

When we could not get the bill of sale notarized, I told her that we would have to finalize everything when her boyfriend arrived in town and could make the transaction himself. She begged to have us pay half the price and she would give us whatever reassurances we wanted such as the keys and title to the vehicle, etc. if we just gave her some money today.

That sounded sketchy so I called Franklin back and he said he was not comfortable with that arrangement at all. So I went back to the lady and said we did not feel comfortable handing over cash without a notarized bill of sale or title transfer.

She broke down crying then, and told me more of the story. It turns out that her boyfriend owns this RV, and that she with her kids and he with his kids (9 in total) were each staying in separate halfway houses that would not allow them to stay together because of the legal limitation of “unrelated persons” staying in one residence. They were planning on all moving into the RV and going up north where he has some property to build a home and all live together, but he had just gotten arrested and she had to sell the RV to get bail money. He could not be available to sign any documents or complete the sale without getting the money first.

I’ve been in similar dire straits. I’ve been so poor that I did not have enough money to buy gas to get me to a gig that would have paid me plenty of money for the gas. I told my employer that I was turning down the gig because I couldn’t afford to get there. He asked me if I had enough gas to make it to the venue, and I said yes but I could not get home. He said he would buy me a tank of gas in addition to my regular wages if I could just get up to the town where the gig was.

I also was once so poor that I was living in my car with my 2 cats and had them sitting in the car in a parking garage while I worked because I needed to earn just one day’s wages for the deposit for a new apartment. When my boss found out that my cats were outside in the car, he advanced my paycheck to get me into the apartment immediately.

Everywhere I have ever lived, I have had to rely on talking to a live human person to explain my situation and to have someone take enough pity and a leap of faith on me to give me a place to live, because I do not have a w2 job that I can “prove” my income. So I immediately felt for this woman and her situation.

I called Franklin to ask his opinion, even though technically it’s all my money and the RV would be in my name. He was less moved than I was, but I explained to him that I felt emotionally attached and wanted to help, and that I felt like I could pay things forward for all the help I’ve been given over the years. So Franklin said that he was uneasy but he would back my decision, whichever way I went.

I went back to the lady and told her that we would rewrite the bill of sale to her name, making her responsible for this transaction, I would give her half of the sale price (which was the amount of her boyfriend’s posted bail), she would hand over the keys and the title, then I would drive her across the street to the bail bondsman to pay her boyfriend’s bail, we’d get the oil changed, then return the RV to the lot where her boyfriend would fix the remaining problems once he was released.

Trepidatious, with Franklin half-convinced I had just been scammed, I set about driving a whole litter of children all over the neighborhood to first meet back up with Franklin to get a new bill of sale printed from his computer (the mechanic’s receptionist helpfully printed it for us so that we did not have to also find a nearby Kinko’s), head back to Amscot, then to the bail bondsman, then back to the mechanic.

By this time, the mechanic was closing, but they agreed to complete the oil change. So once more we bundled the children into my car with Franklin driving while I helmed what was quickly becoming a mythical quest incarnate complete with side quests and challenges, back to the graveyard. The woman insisted the whole time that she would “do right by [me]” and make sure the transaction went smoothly, that her boyfriend was a “good man, a teddy bear!” and would take care of us, and that she was so grateful for the help.

We dropped them all off, once again, in the dirt lot surrounded by surreal vehicles and took the long drive back home. I texted my boyfriend that I should know in a day or two if I just bought a new RV or if I was just scammed out of several thousand dollars. Franklin was less optimistic. We rode into the sunset wondering what just happened and what was about to happen.

Next week, we meet the boyfriend.

They say that making a deal with the fae usually ends poorly for the human. I didn’t set out to make a deal with the fae and I’m not entirely sure when the deal happened. But I am reasonably sure that I ultimately ended up making a deal with the fae.

I suppose I will find out soon enough, whether it was a neutral fae or a malicious one. Let me back up a bit.

I am Joreth, the Innkeeper of The Inn Between. I have been trapped in Hell for 25 years. Also known as Florida. I moved here at the turn of the century to finish my degree only to get stuck here when I could never make enough money to leave. I was not aware that Florida was a hell vortex.

Fast forward past the beginning of the end of the world and I somehow managed to find nearly enough cash to tentatively start planning. So my spouse, Franklin, booked a plane trip out here to help me assess and see if we couldn’t finally make this happen. Seeing as how this was supposed to be our plan for our honeymoon when we got married … how many years ago now? Six?

Anyway, Franklin flew out here and took one look at my existing RV and promptly agreed with my initial assessment that it would likely not last through one more Florida hurricane season. Especially when the awning collapsed during the first normal rain day. So I started looking for used RVs for sale.

We finally got someone on Facebook Marketplace to respond to my inquiry (there are a surprising amount of scammers who put fake ads up and then don’t respond to anyone – not sure how that’s supposed to work), and we went to look at a class C motorhome. Franklin immediately said it was great, the engine was great, the price was great, we should take it!

I pointed out that there was no back bedroom, leaving only a cab-over loft bed and a kitchen table that converts to a bed, and it was 10 feet shorter than my existing RV. It was going to be really hard to squeeze in 3-5 people, given that we have family popping in and out to join us at various points throughout the trip. So we thanked the guy for his time and took our leave.

Shortly we scheduled another viewing. This time for a motorhome that was exactly the same make and model as my current RV, only a few years newer. Franklin said it was great, but a touch pricey, and we had just scheduled a viewing with another interesting-looking RV for the next day. So we thanked this owner and said we should know by the end of the weekend if this would work for us.

The next day, we looked at the very interesting RV. We brought my boyfriend along, and after driving instructions that included “turn off the paved road”, we finally found it. The husband was not home but his wife let us climb all over the RV and turn on the engine, and Franklin got really excited over this one. He said it looked great, the engine was great, the price was great, only the brakes were not so great. So we told the wife that we would schedule an inspection with a nearby mechanic and call back to coordinate.

Franklin immediately got on the phone and found 2 different mechanics who would look over different parts – apparently one place would do an engine inspection but not the brakes (they did not have a lift for an RV) and another place did brakes and tires but not engines.

So I texted the owner to coordinate an inspection, and he abruptly refused to let us take the RV off the property. He said he would not drive it anywhere, so I offered to drive it myself and leave my own car and license behind in good faith. He refused to let me take it anywhere. So we tried locating a mobile RV mechanic to come to the property, but everyone insisted it had to be put on a lift to inspect the brakes.

Dejected, I started looking for another RV. Several days passed with no luck. The listing for the interesting motorhome reduced the price. Apparently we are not the only ones who refuse to purchase a vehicle without test driving it. We continued to hem and haw over whether we should risk it and just buy the RV and factor in the cost of new brakes to the reduced price.

And then … I saw The Listing. It only had a couple of external pictures, but it looked different than others. It looked like someone had already made it their own, but I couldn’t see the inside. The price was also too good to be true. So I kept searching.

But this listing kept showing up in my searches. After a couple of days, on June 28th, I messaged the owner asking for interior pictures. What she sent me was … not clear. I could not tell at all what I was looking at. So I sent the listing to Franklin along with the pictures she sent to me.

Franklin also could not tell what he was looking at, but he was intrigued. The price helped. I messaged the owner and asked to schedule a viewing. She responded immediately asking if we could come see it that day. It was possible, but it was 3 hours away (normally a 2 hour drive, but something massive shut down the interstate that day, which we wouldn’t find out about until we made it back home).

We hurriedly dressed and packed ourselves into the car, and hit the road. And sat. And sat. And crawled forward. And sat some more. The skies darkened the further east we traveled. This is when Franklin started dropping hints about ominous circumstances.

My driving directions told me to turn right. I turned into an apartment complex. This doesn’t seem right. I drove through the complex, following the directions, but found nothing but apartments. This was definitely not right.

I drove back out of the complex and noticed a driveway / frontage road that ran along the fence to the apartment complex. After making sure there were no cameras or police, I did a left-hand U-turn from the apartment driveway into the suspicious driveway and drove until we found a gate locked with a padlock.

Referencing her notes, she said that she would not be able to meet us there, but she gave us the combination to the padlock. So I got out of the car, opened the bike lock and cable, swung open the chain link door, got back in the car, drove through, got out again, and closed the door behind us.

“That was weird,” Franklin said.

“Yeah, she’s just trusting us to roam around her RV without supervision? And letting us into the storage yard?”

We drove through what looked like a strange vehicle graveyard, all the way to the back, until we saw the white class C nestled in between a derelict speedboat and a broken down food truck. It looked exactly like the picture. I hoped the looming storm clouds overhead weren’t foreshadowing.

We opened the side door and peeked inside. Strangely, her pictures were accurate. We still did not know what we were looking at. I’ll write a whole detailed post describing the inside. Half of the features were unrecognizable, the other half were amazing. One of the unrecognizable structures opened up to reveal a “gold coin”. Neither one of us touched it, probably instinctively. One should not accept fae coin. We wandered through with our mouths open, feeling very surreal.

“I kinda love it,” Franklin said.

“I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think I kinda love it too?” I said back.

Eventually we closed everything up and bundled ourselves back in the car just as the misting turned into real rain. We left the vehicle that Franklin called the “fae chariot” behind us and I texted her to say that we love it and want to get it inspected, when can we schedule that? We haggled on a date and made plans to come back in a few days when she could “have a copy of the key made”. That was weird. We drove home as the rain and a sense of uneasy promise pressed down on us.