31/31 - DAY 8 - DEPUTY LINDSEY SORIANO, CAVE DIVER

“I’m pretty happy with my job, yeah. If you’ve ever been cave diving, there are some really beautiful places around here to do it, just make sure you take the proper precautions. A lot of people completely disregard our signs down there and press on, only to get stranded or hurt. Sometimes there’s trash down there, which is super inconsiderate, but we’ve been working hard on getting it cleaned up.” 

Deputy Lindsey Soriano is a tall, thin woman with blonde hair tied back into a bun. She is ATHLETIC, SERIOUS, and INTERESTED IN THE UNKNOWN. She is a rescue diver who works for the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department and is certified for cave diving. Sometimes she finds more than just stranded divers and dead bodies. 

Removing bodies from sub-aquatic caves is no easy task, and unfortunately for the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department, divers occasionally die in Demaines Hole, an underwater cave northwest of Crestview, FL. What the members of the Sheriff’s Department don’t know is that the Painted Walls, a chamber inside the cave past a long restriction, has some strong magic inherent to it. With magical places, ritualists can sometimes take shortcuts that also make their magic stronger, and Lindsey often ends up removing the bodies of exactly these kinds of people who don’t take the time to train for cave diving. 

In her off time, Lindsey keeps some of the more interesting artifacts from the underwater rituals in a large plastic tote at home. She isn’t knowledgeable about the truly occult or what the objects actually represent or do, however she has the feeling that they carry some kind of power. Small idols, waterproof bags full of birth certificates and diplomas, an emergency flare stuck into the top of a large candle, and a rusted call bell in a paper bag are a few of the items in the tote. Among these items is a silver, Victorian-era hand mirror with an entity trapped inside. 

The entity, which Lindsay calls Eeyore, communicates with her in images. The image it displays more often than not is a faded, gray shape that roughly resembles the Winnie the Pooh character. When she speaks with it, it will display shapes and blurry images, but the exact nature of what it’s trying to communicate is not always clear to her. When it gets frustrated, it will flash several irregular shapes before going blank for a while, usually for several days at a time. Lindsay has been able to discern that the entity was once a person who had some kind of connection to a few of the other items she’s encountered, but interpreting anything about the person or the ritual they were involved in is too difficult.