Mayday Plays - Doomed to Repeat Ep. 17 - “Taste of Decay”
Episode Date: January 29, 2022The bitch is BACK and the agents of PERENNIAL must return to Lansing, MI to finish what they started. It seems “that which was Marlene” has been busy subverting an old Delta Green disinformation s...ource (Phenomen-X) and transformed it into a cabal of deranged locals who may threaten to derail the agent’s plans. Merit and Tuck try to contain an active investigation with unmistakable unnatural elements. Meanwhile, Warp splits from the group to retrieve the items found at Baughman’s cabin in the hopes of finding a clue to stopping Marlene. Boomer seeks forgiveness from Samael and Hyde straddles her breaking point. TRIGGER AND CONTENT WARNINGS: Violence, blood and gore, death, body horror, mental illness, PTSD, manipulation, infighting, the topic of Covid-19 including conspiracy theorists, drug and alcohol use, harassment of hospital staff, allegations of child trafficing/pedophilia, use of lesbian d-slur. Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this podcast are © Mayday Roleplay, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property. CAST OF CHARACTERS • Aaron - Agent Samael • Allegra - Agent Tuck • Amanda - Agent Boomer • Caleb - Agent Merit • Eli - Agent Hyde • Zakiya - Agent Warp • Sergio - The Handler MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS • Post Sound Supervision: Sergio Crego, Eli Hauschel • Mixed: Eli Hauschel • Original Music: Aaron A. Pabst, Joe Sanders • Soundstripe (soundstripe.com) • Glitch Machines (glitchmachines.com/) • Soundly (getsoundly.com/) DELTA GREEN LINKS • Delta Green (http://deltagreen.com/) MAY DAY ROLEPLAY LINKS • Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/maydayrp/) • Patreon (https://patreon.com/maydayrp) • Twitter (https://twitter.com/maydayroleplay7) • Mayday website (https://www.maydayroleplay.com/) • Twitch (https://twitch.tv/maydayroleplay)
Transcript
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Doom to Repeat is a Delta Green actual play podcast
with violent themes in adult language.
For a full list of trigger and content warnings,
please check our show notes before each episode.
Listener discretion is advised.
Hello and welcome to episode 17
of our Delta Green campaign titled Doom to Repeat.
I'm Sergio, your handler.
I'm Erin A. Papst, and I'm Agent Samuel.
I'm Allegra, I'm Agent Tuck.
I'm Amanda Dominic, and I'm Agent Boomer.
I'm Caleb, and I'll be playing Agent Merritt.
I'm Eli, and I'll be playing Agent Hyde.
I'm Zakiya, and I'll be playing Agent Warp.
If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to like and leave
a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud,
or wherever you listen to us.
If you can't support us on Patreon, spreading the word
and making sure to give us five stars also
goes a long way in supporting us.
Now, let's begin.
Hey, Evans.
Look, if you're reading this, then know that I am already dead,
and there is absolutely no point in trying to search for me.
Or pray that I'm dead.
Look, attached are two folders.
The covering my ass, and my nosey ass is going to get me killed.
I hope to RuPaul that you don't pick the second folder,
which I think you will.
Now, if this person ever crosses yours, Liz, or Mel's path,
I need you to get that second folder.
If you see some creepy ass Robert De Niro Clint Eastwood
love child named Charlie, get the fuck out.
They're either black ops or renegade outlaws.
What?
I don't know.
But look, he's definitely either involved in some way
in my disappearance.
Either he just put the head out on me,
or I just kind of annoyed him.
I don't know what he's doing.
I don't know what he's doing.
I don't know what he's doing.
I don't know what hit on me, or I just kind of annoyed him.
I don't know which one.
You know how my mouth is.
But get Liz, get Mel, get the fuck out.
OK?
Now, with Liz and Mel, I'm going to be sending them
their own messages.
But I need you to really look after them.
I only trust one person with them, and that's you.
And I know that's not fair to you.
But I'm dead.
So it's kind of not my problem right now.
Sorry, buddy.
Shit happens.
But I know you'll do it because you love me,
and you love them.
I love you too, dickhead.
And I am so fucking proud of what we built together.
All right, now fuck off and get to work.
Thanks, Max.
Oh, PS, change your fucking cologne.
You're smelling like a douchebag.
Just like, I don't know, spend the money on Tom Ford.
So it's June 2, 2020.
You have all either seen it on the news
or have been personally contacted,
but it has become abundantly clear
that your business in Lansing, Michigan is not over.
You say goodbye to your loved ones.
You hop on a plane.
And eventually, you all land back
in the Capital Region International Airport
in Lansing, Michigan.
In the months that you have been away,
things have warmed up a little bit.
It's hotter out, and those cold days of April
are past you now.
Could I ask everyone to roll a D100,
and we'll go from lowest to highest
in terms of who shows up first?
14.
20.
75.
73.
A 73.
Oh, that makes sense.
Fuck.
90.
Fashionably late.
Tuck, you are the first to land.
And as you begin to make your way towards the exit,
you are greeted by a TSA agent who
is holding a little whiteboard that reads your call sign.
It just says Tuck.
I'll walk up to them.
That's me.
They nod, and they ask you to follow them.
They lead you to kind of some of the back offices
of the airport, a place really anyone rarely sees.
But you are let into a conference room,
and they're waiting for you, is Mallory.
OK.
Agent Mallory.
Oh, hello, Tuck.
Yeah, come on in, please.
Agent Tuck, you immediately notice
that Mallory seems exhausted.
Small bags under her eyes, kind of a flustered, frustrated
kind of attitude.
And whatever small, awkward talk that you have is short,
and she's mostly just waiting for everyone else to get here.
It probably tucks my wife in, let her know I'm landed safely.
Next would be Boomer.
You get off the plane, and same thing happens to you.
There is a man waiting for you with a white board that says
your name on it, your call sign.
I am going to finish the red bottle of wine
I took from the plane.
I'm going to be like, that's me.
Have you been drinking, drinking?
No, I would say I am on two bottles,
but it's like the small ones.
But I'm drink, I drank the second bottle.
Gotcha.
You are led into the same office where Mallory and Tuck are.
Hey, hi.
Good to see you.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Yeah, which was under different circumstances.
Oh, yeah, no.
So how many of us do you think are going to live in 24 hours?
I'm not going to talk about that right now.
OK, just trying to make fun of things, OK.
Warp and Merritt, you arrive at the same time,
and you kind of see each other across the terminal.
You catch each other.
I think I'm going to walk over with the warp
and along the way, you know, I'll just look at her
and go, your month.
Good, yours?
Good.
Great, onward then.
Perfect, straight up to the signed agent.
You guys are eventually brought into the back area
where only TSA agents and other people who are cleared are brought.
And you are now in the room with Tuck and Boomer.
Hello, hi, kids.
Tuck, Boomer, good to see you both.
Hello.
That kind of give warp like a long look of, you good?
Mm-hmm, great.
Hyde eventually walks into the room.
I'll just have like kind of my bag slung over one shoulder.
But like right before I get in the room,
I'm just going to quickly check the steadiness of my hands,
kind of like flex it a little bit,
take a deep breath, and then I'm just going to walk in.
I'm not going to really say anything.
I'm kind of just like head nod everybody,
and then I'm just going to take a seat.
Good to see you, Hyde.
So.
And then, Samael.
Now, Merid and I were on the same plane.
So if I was that far behind Merid, the only thing
that I can think possibly would have happened
is that I waited, I stayed on the plane until everybody left.
And then, obviously, I couldn't take my flask
through TSA security full because it's the TSA.
So when no one's looking, I'm going
to refill it off of all the little bottles
in the Stortis's cart.
Oh, boy.
OK.
Drown half of it, fill the rest of it back up
with the tiny little whiskey cups.
And then I will stumble my way out of the plane
and stumble into the room that everybody else is in,
wreaking of Jack Daniels.
That's a nice shiner you got.
Samael, I trust you took care of your personal issue.
I put the flask down on the table,
and I'll just kind of slide it out into the center of everybody
in case anyone else wants any of it.
It's kind of nice.
Certain things don't change, and then downing the shot
and slide it back.
Yeah, then I'll just quietly fold my hands and sit quietly.
This is becoming redundant.
I hope for all your sake that some things are
going to change this time.
We're going to need to be incredibly vigilant if we're
going to stop Marlene this time.
I hope that all of you sent home messages
to the people you care about.
Constantly.
Yes.
We don't know what she's up to.
She's up to a whole lot, apparently.
I'm starting to get the sense, says Agent Mallory,
that you are aware of something I'm not.
Could you fill me in on what you're all talking about?
How will you fill me in on what you're talking about?
Well, Mallory, I'm sorry.
We just don't know what you do and don't know.
So if you could explain to us what you know,
that way we can fill in the blanks.
I thought that was why you called us back,
was that you were aware of the situation.
We'll get to it.
Look, we have a major opsec situation developing here
in Lansing.
Last night, I don't know if any of you noticed,
but the local news played a leaked video from Sparrow Hospital
here in Lansing.
In it, a woman attacks and kills a night janitor,
a man by the name of Hector Sandovar.
They blurred the footage for the public,
but I was able to find the unedited footage
and it leaves nothing to the imagination.
Do you want to see it?
Not particularly, but we should.
Might as well.
Yes.
Boomer's going to have her eyes closed.
She's just nodding, but she's kind of like looking down.
There is a TV on the wall that she clicks a button
and the DVD menu kind of changes to whatever the video is.
And I believe that only Boomer has seen this footage.
Boomer, it's the same blurry night vision footage
that you saw on the news, except that the woman's body
is not blurred.
She is naked from head to toe,
but what is obvious is that there is this Y pattern
that goes from her shoulders to her chest
and runs down her abdomen.
Oh my God.
Yep, there it is.
Those of you who have any experience with dead bodies
or with autopsies would know that the only time
you see this is in an autopsy after the footage ends
and you see that this obvious cadaver strangles
and kills a man.
I'd like all of you to make sanity checks.
I failed with a 65.
Failed with a 92.
Success with a 31.
Succeed.
I had a success with a 36.
Those of you that succeed, you lose nothing.
Those of you that fail, you lose one sanity.
Mallory, not meaning to, but she pauses it
on that smile of the woman that's kind of staring
at the surveillance.
And she continues and she says,
the DO believes this is related to our work here in April.
And obviously none of you disagree, correct?
Oh, we know it's related to our work here in April.
We received personal invitations of a sort
from whatever this is.
I'm not, I'm not sure it was an invitation.
Threat was a promise.
More of an ultimatum.
They targeted our identities.
So they know who you are?
Thoroughly.
We believe this to be the corpse of Clyde Bowman's wife,
Marlene Bowman.
Well, at one point, whatever it was was in the body
of Clyde Bowman's wife.
Oh, this seriously complicates things.
I didn't know that this thing knew you so personally.
Just a smidge.
Well, frankly, neither did we.
Does it make a difference?
If this thing can come back like this,
then this is a terrible situation.
It gets worse.
Regardless of what this thing is, what this entity is,
I think our priorities need to remain the same.
We have to find a way to undermine
the local investigation that is going on.
We have to paint this footage as a hoax.
Secondly, figuring out how to stop this thing for good
is very important, as it clearly is playing
some kind of cat and mouse game with us.
Can't you just go ahead and do your men in black thing
and say it is a hoax?
Boomer, you are the men in black.
You are the person who is going to do the disinformation.
Jesus.
I thought you guys would get the heads up
and just like, I don't know,
stop the Joe Schmo security guard
from leaking the fucking footage.
To be frank with you, Boomer,
this is entirely the fault of perennial,
so you are the ones that need to solve this.
She's right.
This is our fault, whether we meant it or not.
We thought we could take care of it by burning it, and...
That was what the information we had was.
Let's go ahead and make a mock.
Can we hire somebody, because obviously,
because we are already under investigation
for some other murders.
Can we have someone go in, proclaim it is a fake tape?
Because I'm sure, like, come on.
Like, you see half the crap on YouTube.
I'm sure we can make something up,
and you'd be like, oh, it's a horrible prank
gone out of control.
I like where your head is at,
and that is the kind of thinking that we need to put this
into the hoax category.
I am just as much under the gun as the rest of you.
The DO has ordered that I stay local
and assist you where I can,
so as long as you're here, I'm here.
Unfortunately, I didn't have the time
to fabricate any aliases,
so we kind of have to go into this as ourselves.
Are our CDC covers not viable still?
I thought about that.
I mean, you could use them,
but the CDC recently changed their logo, their design.
The badges look different.
You can try to use them,
but there's a good chance that if you speak to someone
that knows of the CDC, you could run into a problem.
Fair.
Now, the local police are familiar
with a few of our faces.
Is that going to be a problem?
It's a big problem.
Probably, I mean, look, we need to approach this
as, I think, quietly and as covertly as possible.
Some of us should stay back and do the research
and the work behind the scenes,
but we do have two FBI agents,
and I think getting Tuck and Merritt in there,
injecting yourself into the investigation,
that way you can help control the flow of information.
I think that's going to be critical.
How about you, Mallory?
We're, if they get exposed too much,
it draws too much attention.
Why can't, I mean, I agree, Tuck and Merritt should go in
and start doing the legwork,
but can you proclaim to be like the front man
and you can be the one on camera
who will eventually explain all that?
I don't have FBI credentials.
Oh, you work at a Walmart?
Come on, step up.
Boomer, I am having a hard time appreciating
your sarcasm in this moment.
Can I just kind of, like, put my hand on Boomer's shoulder?
Too much, too much, too much.
Too much, too much.
I'm going to sit back and just sit.
I am doing what I can to make this as swift and easy
of a operation as possible.
I've got us accommodations at the residence in East Lansing.
I have already reached out to the local police
and let them know that I have FBI officers
who will be arriving today to look at the scene
and to speak to the Ludi detective.
His name is, and she kind of looks at some paper she has.
His name is Emil Brown.
He is a local.
Fuck!
That was Aaron.
Sorry, that was Aaron.
Yeah, no, I said uh-oh as Allegra too
and I was like, that's not Tuck.
The issue of the footage.
If you can make it a hoax, fine.
Otherwise, we need to go to the sources
and destroy the footage
and I could maybe get us access to WLNS-6.
That's the local news station.
I know that the footage can be found there on a hard drive.
I know that it can be found at the hospital
where the incident occurred and it is on the internet.
Oh.
That one's going to be hard to deal with, right?
It's on the internet.
I don't know how much of a chance we have.
Guys, I think I have an idea to help with this tape thing.
Okay, well if Marit and I are going in as FBI,
are you okay being in charge of the nerd squad?
Hold on, I think I should be with you two.
You think you should be allowed into the police station?
Why would we bring a preacher with us?
I think they have a drunk tank,
but I don't think anything past that.
Could we call you a consultant?
We're here right now
because I wasn't allowed to do my thing the first time around.
Now if you want that thing-
Oh my God.
If you tried your thing, it resulted-
If you want this thing gone for good,
I'm the only one here that's capable of doing that.
We tried it and it failed.
I didn't have enough time.
Semi, I thought we were making progress, you and I.
I thought you were coming to an understanding.
I mean, we accomplished a lot in New York
and you're ready to steamroll back to step one
and exercise this woman again
so you can be cut up a second time?
I was you getting cut up that first time, Marit.
Oh, it was,
but I don't want to draw attention to that fact.
I don't want to draw any attention to the fact
that if we had just burnt her the first time
inside of the septic tank and shut the door behind,
we would not be here.
We would be right back here right now for all we know.
Actually, can I actually, Sam,
can you just stay back
because I could use you for this plan?
It would be a lot easier
to get into a hospital with a chaplain.
See?
You two, tuck and marry.
You're going to the police station first.
That's your plan?
That's where we're being sent.
I'm actually sending you to the hospital first
as a scene of the crime.
Can we all move as a unit
and do boomers thing on the way?
I think that makes sense.
Here's my worry about that.
It also comes to a question to you, Mallory.
This is all well and good with detracting
from what we've done and cleaning up the traces, correct?
But this does nothing about the fact
that she's still out there pursuing us.
What are we doing to counteract
the fact that she's going to do this again
and we'll only have to clean that up as well?
Should we not have an alternative team
for at least spotting where she's going to be next?
I understand cleanup,
but this is an active crime scene, not a cleanup.
I have no qualms with anything you're saying.
The fact of the matter is,
I don't know what this entity is capable of.
You have all decided to withhold some vital information
such as that it knows personal details about you.
To our own point, we did think she was destroyed.
Facts.
We didn't think it was going to come back
and bite us in the ass.
We were very much of the opinion
that we had destroyed her and we had destroyed the cabin.
So the fact that we didn't tell you
that she knew us is pretty much irrelevant
because we thought she was dead.
Was there anything you all founded the cabin
that could provide a clue as to what it is?
Did you submit everything you have for analysis?
Oh.
Did you just remember the tape too?
Yes. Yes, I did.
And everything in that box,
we need to take a second look at.
Well, good thing we left it on the other end of the country.
We need to send one of the researchers out to New York
to retrieve it.
Do I need to order some plane tickets
or is this something that Heidi could fly them?
I'm here to do what anybody wants me to do,
so you got me to fly or fly.
If you want me to be here, I'll be here.
That leaves two of us completely without defenses.
I can go pick up what we left.
That's actually great because I need Sam.
You guys do the hospital.
We should not leave you two alone, though.
We're not in that way,
but in the way of we're supposed to keep you safe,
I don't feel comfortable leaving you two alone.
We barely survived the first encounter with her
and that was with a complete
on misunderstanding what she was.
Yeah, but I got protection now.
Sam can protect me.
You two do the investigation and they haul ass
and get the box.
What if we take you with us as a tech specialist
and a chaplain at the hospital?
I mean, if you must, but I don't see why I can't.
Because I do, I have an idea that I can solve this tape thing.
Well, then what's the idea, then tell us.
Okay, what if we do, we make Marlene,
she's alive and she's an anti-vaxxer
and she basically is making an anti-vaxxing tape
and setting it up as propaganda,
saying that the COVID-19 cures
or what is actually causing undead.
What I can then do, this is where I was going,
I can make up a whole bunch of websites
where she has gone down conspiracy rabbit holes.
I can go ahead and Photoshop possibly other photos
with her in other situations
where she's doing some creepy shit.
Vaccines aren't even publicly available yet.
People are still doing trial.
I know, that's the point.
It doesn't exist.
You use the conspiracy because she fucking nuts.
I hate that it's a good idea,
but it's not a bad idea.
The stupider we make it, the more the public could buy it.
It's terrible, but it might actually work.
Mallory actually agrees in the sense
that the more ridiculous sometimes
that you can prove something to be,
the more people will kind of dismiss it.
There's something else that we need to consider, Tuck,
and that's we need to ensure that the police
believe this story is, or whatever story us,
the FBI agents will feed them,
because if they decide to go against this hoax,
then it's all over anyways.
Police first, hoax second,
in order of importance of cover up.
Well, it's gonna take Boomer time to build this.
If you, Boomer, and I have a story
that we can start building from,
Boomer can build the practical side of it,
and you and I have to build the interpersonal.
Absolutely.
Agent Mallory, you said you're stuck here as well.
I will be at the hotel,
and I'm just a phone call away if you need me.
I know you didn't have much of a field presence at Cicada
when we were battling the interlopers, as it were.
Are you qualified to look after our researchers?
I think that we'll be nice and safe at the hotel.
I will happily keep an eye on them.
I've gotten us all rooms to share,
so someone can stay with me,
and if anything goes wrong, I can call you.
All right.
Is everyone okay with this plan?
I just, perhaps we could send Warp alone to New York.
I can do that.
But before Warp takes off,
do you mind if we all have five minutes to catch up?
Of course, of course.
I'm not saying I'm going to have to go to San's
other people, and obviously I'm not even being coy about it,
and I'm just blatantly looking at Mallory.
We don't have to be disrespectful towards Mallory
while she's in the room, team.
I think we have a...
There's some private things that I would like to discuss
that is about team building and what not.
And Mallory, I know you're dealing with a lot of stress.
I get it, girl.
So if you don't mind, let's go ahead and clear the air
really quick with some of the members
with the mission.
So, Agent Boomer, you're actively telling me
that you're keeping information from me?
Is that what you're saying?
No, well, I was going to actively kind of get a little
personal and kind of curse out other members,
and we're just going to yell at each other.
And frankly, I think it's counterproductive
if you're here, because it's better to sometimes
just air it out.
And do you really want to hear us, bitch and moan?
Risk it all then.
If it's any consolation, Mallory,
this truly is a part of our process.
Make a persuasion roll.
If Merit is helping you explain it,
then you can have a plus 20 on that persuasion.
Come on, baby.
Thank God, because let's be honest.
Come on, Lord.
Oh my God, dead even, 40-40.
Oh.
Hey.
I love you.
Fuck.
I need a drink.
I'm going to ask that Tuck and Hyde make alertness rolls.
Oh, balls.
Don't fuck that one up, guys.
16 with a 46.
Another fail of a 90.
Jesus, H.
Agent Hyde, you're the only one that notices.
Agent Mallory kind of takes a moment to compose herself.
And you notice that she gives Agent Merit a look
and then says, fine, I'll be outside checking flight times
and she steps out of the room.
Yeah, cell phones off.
Turn them off.
I'll wrap both of my cell phones up in like a coat
and shove it deep in my backpack.
OK.
Corners, do we see cameras?
Do we see recordings?
No, I think the most observant of you
can tell that there's nothing visible in terms of cameras.
There is like a communication device
in the center of the table that you can unplug and depower.
Yeah, you don't seem to find anything immediately obvious
that is recording you.
Boomer, I think you can sit down.
If they're recording us, they already have.
Before we get separated once again on a stupid side mission,
I got a visit from somebody who says they work for Delta Green.
Like the 1980s, Delta Green?
Yes.
Doesn't that mean us?
We don't work for Delta Green.
That's why I wanted Mallory out.
What do you mean?
Explain, please explain.
The fuck does that mean, Boomer?
OK, OK, so I get a mysterious thing during my summer vacation
and I got confronted by this lovely chap who with a big gun
decided not to kill me because of my personality.
But on weight, yes, I go look out the door.
Are you just swinging the door open
or are you like quietly trying to see where she is?
I think I do it quick so I can like try to surprise her.
OK, you do in fact startle her.
She is not close to the door, but she is like a couple steps away.
She's on her phone probably looking up flight times
and she kind of flinches when the door swings open and you're there.
Are you done?
No, not yet.
I just had a quick question for you.
You said that the officer in charge
of that Merritt and I are going to be liaising with.
Emil Brown, yeah.
Emil Brown, yeah.
He and that he was involved in the Messick investigation.
Just in a perfunctory way, a local.
He spoke to a couple of people who said they thought they knew something.
Right, OK, we'll be done soon.
This is I swear this is part of our process.
OK, then I'll stand by the door and kind of like keep an eye.
So.
Guy with gun didn't kill me.
Let it be known that we technically don't work for them.
Work for who?
Apparently we're working for people who are going to use this stuff
and probably use it for capitalism.
Well, we knew that March Industries.
But with things like Marlene, do we really want this shit?
Or do we want to actually, I don't know, destroy this stuff?
Because personally, I don't want a walking talking nightmare zombie
always out there.
Wait, so there's an alternate group that destroys things.
First of all, I'd like everyone to make sanity checks
as you realize your job is a lie in some facet.
I succeed with the 17.
I failed. I failed with the 74.
I failed.
Same with the 58, 60.
Because I said it, do you want me to roll sanity or no?
Yeah, this is kind of retroactive for you,
because I didn't really ask you to roll before.
But I think it's fair that you should be wrong.
OK, new failed. OK, minus one.
OK, those of you that failed, you're going to lose one.
Those of you that succeed, you lose nothing.
Basically, the reason I am even bringing this up
is because I realized that
everyone out here, everyone in this room right now
is on the same fucking level of knowledge as I am
and realize that we are literally in the middle of weird corporate
supernatural crap that, to be honest,
I can't trust with anyone else but here, OK?
So we have to learn to get like that's why I'm telling you
so I can be fully transparent with some of the crazy shit.
Yeah, yeah, I understand, Boomer.
OK, do you do?
Are you saying that we may be
illegitimate in some way?
Is that what you're getting at?
I think we are.
I think we are.
I disagree.
If we're if we technically work for a super spooky part
of the US government, it absolutely makes sense
that they're trying to make money off of weird shit
that they don't understand.
Are you kidding me?
This government, please.
And and how do you know that you can trust
whatever this guide said?
Like you haven't even told us his name yet.
His name is Charlie.
And that's all he'll tell me.
His name is Charlie or he was called Charlie.
Darling, do you even know my name?
You call me Boomer. Exactly.
That's what I'm his.
Your name is I know your name.
Tuck said it like two or three times.
I said it once on a do you mean agent Charlie?
Board Charlie.
I mean, tall six foot hands,
like a gorilla, large motherfucker, Charlie.
Well, if he is Charlie, then we do know his name.
His name is Curtis McRae.
That's right. We do.
You spoke with agent Charlie on the board.
And if we're all a part of majestic,
if we're a part of March Technologies, as you're saying,
they told us how many times to burn that corkboard.
Isn't that no one finds that at all odd?
Well, it's a good thing we have.
And is it?
Listen, this, if it's true, is incredible.
It's going to change everything that we've been a part of.
But what do we have besides blind faith
that what this man is telling you is true,
that what you're telling us is true, that any of this is true?
I can't make you trust Charlie.
But what I am asking, and I know this is going to be
very difficult for everybody here,
I am asking everyone to trust me and that I believe Charlie.
Why is this relevant?
Why is any of this relevant right now?
It's relevant because I don't know
if we can trust everything that Mallory is saying.
I'm being honest, I want everyone on the same page.
Boomer is already fucking obvious
that you were never supposed to trust Mallory from the beginning.
Well, who do we trust then?
Each other. That's all we've got.
We all want to survive this.
We all want to keep the world safe, right?
Is that is that a fair assessment of everyone?
You don't want to die.
You don't want to die.
None of you.
Then we trust each other.
We try to keep each other alive
and then we sort our way out of this fucking mess.
But like it or not, we work for that woman out there.
And and she's going to keep asking us to do things.
Majestic is going to keep asking us to do these things.
And if we say no, I'd like to remind you that we stop existing.
We have seen what happens.
Clyde Bowman, what we're about to fight tonight
is what happens when you say no.
And would you rather die with a clear conscience
or would you rather know that you just would cause more problems than good?
Rather not die.
Boomer, if I'm dead, I can't do any good.
We don't have to die.
We just we keep saying yes.
We do everything that we need to do.
So it looks like we're doing everything
they asked us to until it gets in the way and we don't.
Right. Regardless of anything,
we got to do what we're about to do.
So let's just do that and we'll figure out the rest on the other side.
Well, first, I just have one more question.
Boomer, if you don't mind.
Yeah, go for it.
What did he want?
I understand telling you.
I understand the perverse nature of wanting to shatter your world.
I understand the silencer on the gun.
I understand all of those things.
But what did that meeting have anything to do with us?
What did he want from you?
How did you get there in the first place?
OK.
Boomer's going to take a deep breath and
actually kind of sent a silent prayer out there.
This is probably going to get me killed.
I was there because I received
an email from Mr. Pleasant to deliver a package
that I have not run.
But I did save because he didn't they didn't say that specifically
and deliver it to an abandoned mall
not that far from Harrisburg.
And that's where I met Charlie and then per orders
take something from said Charlie and send it to Mr. Pleasant.
And if to show complete faith that I am not bullshitting,
I'm going to take a key out.
It is from a safety deposit box.
And I am going to slide this over to Tuck.
And I am going to give the bank information and info.
That is where you will find the two USB drives.
Why are you telling us this now, Boomer?
Because Mr. Pleasant originally offered me a way out.
So you were contacted by the Dio
of whatever company it is that we're a part of,
whatever program we found ourselves in.
You lied to us.
You kept that information from us.
And then you met with one of them on our time off away from all of us.
No, no, no, I didn't lie.
I just admitted you made decisions for all of us
endangered our entire team so that you could get out
and you want me to trust you.
She's telling us now, Merritt.
I told Boomer the calm down a minute ago.
I'm telling you to calm down now.
You are way overreacting, dude.
She's not done shit.
I don't think that the rest of you are reacting enough.
She decided for all of you, whether you live or die,
she did not decide whether we live or die.
She was given a choice and she made a choice.
That's all we do here is make choices
that maybe aren't the safest for everyone.
However, she told us.
She told us now, after the effect,
after we have already accomplished so much
when we could have been doing so much more.
Had we known, Merritt, what the fuck was she supposed to do?
She had no idea what was going on.
If you get contacted by the guy at the top
and the guy at the top tells you to do something
and asks you not to tell anybody else what are you going to do?
You would do the exact same fucking thing that she did.
Don't you be judging her right now?
If she had a way out, Merritt, I've heard enough out of you.
You've been you've been a great brain this entire day.
Now, I don't mind if you come.
I don't mind if you rail at me, Merritt.
I'll give a shit.
You can rail at me all you want.
But you start railing on Boomer.
You start railing on anybody else.
I'm not going to sit here and take that rail on me all you want.
But you leave her alone.
You don't understand what was at stake.
You don't understand what I could have done with that information.
Boomer is crying, by the way.
Boomer has started to cry.
OK, we need to take a break.
You don't know what I could have done. Merritt, stand the fuck down right now.
Could have been don't matter.
Could have done doesn't matter.
It's what we do from this point forward that does.
So you get your ass in gear, you support your fucking team and we stay alive.
I have always supported this team, always supported this team.
Warp hands, Boomer, a tissue.
Merritt, take a lock, buddy.
Catch some air.
I get up and I leave the room.
Warp, are you OK going to New York on your own?
Yeah, I can handle it.
Shouldn't be too dangerous, right?
Dangerous here, I think, right now.
So wear your mask, get the the tape.
What we were talking about earlier, take it out of the green box,
do keep it keep it close to us and get it.
Sounds like the plan is to send warp to New York to the, you know,
the new green box to receive the real to real tape and the cork board elements.
Otherwise, the rest of you, the five of you,
are going to head to the crime scene first.
Or would you like to go to the police station first?
Yeah, let's go to the hospital first.
Or we'll Boomer, we'll do we'll stop for your thing on the way. OK.
OK.
Eventually, you let Mallory back in and you inform her of the plan.
She says that she would like to be dropped off at the hotel
as soon as possible to set up the accommodations and stuff.
But, you know, if you're going to make her wait
until you go to the hospital first, that's fine.
Hide, can you take her to the hotel?
Yeah, I can stop, I guess, along the way, drop her off.
I actually want to go up and just like reach out my hand to shake hides.
I'm sorry.
Hides going to look you up and down and like just that like sarcastic grin
of like this is the worst possible time to be doing some stupid shit like that.
I don't care, but hide it.
It will take your hand, like slap it hard, squeeze it very hard,
but look you very deep into your eyes, like I'm not fucking around.
And then I'll let it go.
Yeah, we will talk later.
That's a bullshit.
Sounds like we're renting two cars.
Vans, Suburbans, what are we thinking?
Nothing that remotely looks like last time.
One van, one car.
So it's just a couple of minutes before noon
when you all get in your vehicles and you get on your way.
Warp, you jump on the next flight.
We'll say it's probably going to be like in two hours or something.
So you're just kind of stuck idling for the next two hours.
But you are given the the the location of the green box, etc.
Let's follow Hyde, Boomer, Samuel and Mallory first.
You drive to East Lansing.
You are currently CRI Airport is in kind of Northwestern Lansing.
So you have to jump on the highway and drive.
And you're kind of out more in the suburbs
when you find this residence in and Mallory hops out.
And she says, I'm going to have what is there?
There's seven of us.
That's two, four, you know, four rooms.
That sounds like plenty.
So she hops out and you guys get on your way.
Where do you head to next?
Well, let's go to the hospital. OK.
We'll say this puts you out about an hour.
So when an hour of time passes with
Meridan Tuck, we'll say that you get to the hospital. OK.
Meridan Tuck, you pull up in your sedan
and you pull in front of a hospital.
Sparrow Hospital is rather large.
It's rather modern.
It's pretty and there are branches of it that are open.
But you can see the police tape that leads into one of the wings of the hospital.
And you can assume that is probably where the crime scene is.
You go inside and you flash your credentials
and the police that are around.
Actually, I'll say that it's the the staff, the staff that are there
ask you to wait and a man comes.
He looks to be dressed like a doctor.
He's tall. He's dark skinned in his early 50s.
Handsome man.
He introduces himself as Eric Marini.
He is a director of the hospital.
And he says, yes, thank you for coming.
I will take you over to the scene.
Detective Emil Brown is waiting for you. Perfect.
Thank you, sir. Yes. Yeah, perfect.
Yeah, well, it's an interesting word to use right now.
But officers, what are the chances that we can kind of today be one
and done with this whole thing and kind of be able to open up this wing of the hospital again?
I can't really give you any information until I've seen the crime scene myself.
So if you could avoid questions like that till we're finished,
I can give you a better answer when I have information.
He seems annoyed by that answer, but he kind of shuts up
and he leads you to where you need to go.
The janitor, Hector Sandovar, was found in the hallway of the basement near the morgue.
So you kind of go down some stairs into a relatively poorly lit hallway.
There is a cut out on the ground of a body.
The body itself is not there anymore.
But standing waiting for you is a man named Emil Brown.
Kind of looks like a young Morgan Freeman.
If Morgan Freeman was ever young, he's just on his phone as you walk in
and he notices the two of you, walks up, extends his hand and introduces himself.
Merritt was such a high human intelligence.
You can tell within a few minutes of speaking with him that he is professional
and good at controlling his emotions.
But he seems a little hesitant to get too friendly with you.
It'll take long. Hello. Nice to meet you.
My name is Orson Bradham. I'm with the Federal Bureau with the CID.
I'm here to assist you on this case.
I just want you to know that up front, we're going to be working together closely.
This is my partner. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Agent Haley Moore, nice to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you both. Yeah.
We just want you to understand that while we're going to be working together,
I don't want you to think that this case is being lifted from your hands.
We're here to collaborate.
We want you to give us everything you find.
We'll give you everything we find.
In the end, we're going to find whatever happened here.
It's important that we can find some solutions, right?
He's a little disarmed by that, honestly, and gives you a second look
and then kind of smiles and chuckles awkwardly at that.
Well, I appreciate your candor.
Thank you, Special Agent Bradham.
Yeah, I mean, we have we have an interesting case.
This this man was killed.
We have footage of a woman who killed him.
And we're currently looking for her.
Is there any questions you have for me?
I wanted to know offhand what you felt about the case.
What's your read on it so far?
I like to see what the lead investigator thinks
before I make any assumptions of what I'm going to see.
Well, I think the best thing we can assume at the moment
is that the janitor was killed to cover up the theft of a corpse
that belongs to a woman named Erica Young.
That's who we've identified as the missing body.
Do we know how Miss Young passed?
Well, yeah, yeah, let's let's let's walk over to the morgue.
He makes his way over and you go inside and he says she was there, actually.
And he points to a storage locker, a cold storage on the wall.
And there are bodies in this room, most of them covered up at this point.
But you notice that one of the storage lockers on the wall is open.
He looks at a plaque at a kind of a piece of paper and looks at it and says,
she was actually a local nurse.
She died of a heart attack a couple of days ago.
I don't know if you guys have put this together yet,
but we have footage that has unfortunately been leaked to the public
that shows her doing something that's kind of impossible.
Did anyone witness the crime?
Was was anyone there as a physical witness to this
dead woman coming to life and murdering a janitor?
Physical, no.
But there was a security guard on, you know, on the watch
who, I guess, wasn't aware of what happened
until he looked at the camera and eventually some nurses found him.
But no one saw her physically.
No one saw her physically get up.
But again, that's why my theory is that it I mean, it couldn't have been her.
It it had to have been had to have been someone else.
Very astute. Absolutely.
I was planning to talk to the security.
I'm I have a feeling that they might have doctored the footage or something.
Or he could have been paid off to play a separate video,
make it look like the impossible.
That's that's an interesting theory.
Well, you know, these hoaxes like this, they make a lot of money on news play.
It could be a situation where, you know, it's a theft gone wrong, like you're
saying, and to make the most of it, two people working together
operate under that belief that they're going to make money off the news
and sell it out because this is all conjecture until we see the actual evidence.
Yeah, you know what?
I got to say, though, Emil, with everything presented here, as much as
that seems cut dry, it is it is a peculiar story.
When they briefed me on it coming in, I was intrigued to see this footage for myself.
I mean, I can't imagine what that would look like if it's believable enough
for the news and yourself to at least give it some lip service.
Well, I got to be honest,
Hagen Bradham, it does make me feel a little bit less crazy to have someone else
thinking things that I'm thinking of.
And to be honest, this isn't the first corpse that has gotten up and gone missing.
I'm sorry.
There's, well, this is kind of a secondary investigation to a bigger one
that I've been following that the last month or so corpses have been going
missing from morgues, frankly, showing up in rather odd places
a couple days, sometimes a week later.
Really?
Yeah, I have all of the resources back at the police station.
We could go there and I could show you what I'm kind of putting together here.
I just, I don't know, I just kind of feel a little crazy
thinking about the oddity of this whole situation.
By all means, Emil, I have solved more than a few cases by going with whatever
itch I have in my brain.
Don't feel like that should discredit anything we've done.
I think we should give it a look.
I think I'd like to talk to the head of security first.
Just get a get a read on our guard who was here at the time.
You head upstairs to the main floor to speak to the head of security.
So you were introduced to a man named John Burns.
He's a white man in his fifties.
Kind of looks like the disgruntled local.
It just kind of has this permanent grimace on his face.
Introduces himself and says, yeah, how can I help you?
We understand that you are in charge of security for the hospital.
Can you tell me anything about the security guard that was on on duty the night
that this occurred?
Yeah, Dickhead named Mike.
I fired him, you know, the whole falling asleep on the job.
And that kind of stuff, I I should have known.
You have a last name, Mike, the dickhead.
Maybe it's Dickhead. Richard.
He doesn't laugh at either joke, but he says Johnson.
And you fired him because he fell asleep on the job.
Fell asleep on the job and somebody died because of it.
Yeah, yeah, as has he had a history with bad attitude or poor work performance
in the past? Yeah, he has.
I warned him a couple of times not to sleep and not to play video games.
Yeah, you can't you can't trust these people these days.
You know what I mean?
You know what? We have some of the same sorts of people in our team.
We understand that more to a point.
Agent Mary, you can see on the on the other side of the room,
there's like a desk and there's a bunch of TVs that are looking at all
the different angles of the hospital.
Have you checked your other cameras for where Miss Young's body
might have come from or gone after after Mr.
Sandoval. Master, Mr.
Sandoval's murder.
Yeah, she she took the exit.
I guess I can pull up the footage.
It's not very long, though.
And she he just kind of pulls up a particular camera
that is not the angle you are used to when seeing the crime scene.
It is kind of facing an exit door in this in this lower area.
And you just see a nude woman kind of run out that door and disappear.
And he shows you an exterior shot of the hospital and this nude person
just kind of runs into the woods.
Have you isolated all of these pieces of footage
you have from the night, everything concerning?
I mean, yeah, we've we've pulled it away from from getting deleted.
It's on a hard drive.
And you usually delete this information.
Well, if nothing's happening, sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's footage that we cycle through.
It's a whole system.
Anything stands out.
We have 24 hours to save it.
Could we have a copy of this?
I he turns to the detective and says,
I think I'm going to have to ask our director
if I'm allowed to hand it over to you guys by all means.
He he makes a call and you can hear Dr.
Marini on the other end, just kind of the thing you mainly hear
is just just whatever gets them out of the building.
And he says, yeah, sure, sure.
And he takes a DVD and he burns you a copy.
And he hands you that DVD.
Do I get the idea that this man knows anything about technology?
It's obvious that he knows enough to get the job done.
He knows how to operate the recording machine
and the cameras and the computer that's there.
So if I said something about needing the original
and like spouting some techno bullshit that I've heard boomers say,
does it seem like I might be able to get the hot,
like the hard drive itself from him?
You could attempt to if you think you can make a persuasion roll
to throw your weight around a little bit and kind of, yeah,
use your techno jargon to try to trick him.
Yeah, I think I'm going to try to like like bring up like,
well, you have some tech specialists
and they're going to need the original.
I appreciate you burning us this copy for evidence sake,
but I really do think we're going to need your original copy
just to check for tampering any, you know,
technological skull that might be going on.
We've got some pretty elite folks working on this.
Sure, Tuck, go ahead and make that persuasion roll.
Let's see. Oh, yeah.
Fuckin' hell. I fail with a 57 and my persuad is 50.
God damn it.
I think what is obvious to John, Mr. Burns,
is that this is a insurance liability.
And I'm sure that he has been as the head of security
spoken to quite a bit about this.
The hospital needs a copy of this footage
to ensure if anybody soothes them over this
that they are protected.
Well, why don't you keep the copy and we take the original?
Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
You have the you have the same information as we do,
but we are looking for different kind of markers
within the video itself.
I'm going to make a call and he again picks up the phone
and calls the director of the hospital.
This time he hangs up and he says, the director's coming.
A moment or two passes and Dr.
Marini comes.
He's kind of flustered at this point and he says, officers,
I'm being told you want to take the original footage.
Is that right?
I simply can't authorize that unless I see a warrant.
That's perfectly all right.
I was just thinking of what you mentioned to me
when we first came into the door about making this process
goes fast as possible.
That was something that could assist with our process.
That's completely all right.
We'll go the long way around.
I'm sorry for any mess we made.
Yes, absolutely.
OK, Mr. Brown or Detective Brown,
does it seem like we can open that wing up again?
And he kind of turns to you guys just to get an impression.
Does it seem like we've seen everything we need to see there?
We've taken photos back at the police station
if you want to look at them.
I think that maybe you can wait a day.
Much to Dr. Marini's chagrin.
He says, all right, I'm sorry.
There's more information to be had here.
There were some things that slowed us down today.
Most likely, we'll have to be back.
OK, yeah.
Can you give us access to the building, the wing,
if we need to come in at any time?
I mean, I could let you back in at any time
if you want to come here and speak to me, sure.
So you can make yourself available at any hour.
I will make someone who is on site available to help you, sure.
Perfect.
Do you have a number I should take, a card?
Yeah. And as he pulls out his phone, it actually goes off.
It starts ringing his kind of personal phone.
And yes, one second.
Hold on. And he answers it. Yes.
What? OK. All right.
Yeah, I'll be there in a moment.
I'll be there in a moment.
Yes, he gives you his number in a hurry and then says,
I need to attend to something.
I'll be right back and he leaves.
Detective Brown says, I've already spoken to the two nurses
who are on staff at the moment or at the evening.
Let me ask you very quickly.
Have you spoken with the nurses that were on staff when Erica passed?
I have spoken to the majority of the nurse staff.
Most of them knew Erica.
I could probably find out who was on staff that night.
Yeah, if you could give me any information on there,
because if what your hunch is telling us
is that people are going missing long before now,
we need to find a correlation between the missing bodies
and what happened to our dear friend, the janitor.
At this point, you hear over kind of the speakers.
Security to the front desk.
Can we have security to the front desk, please?
And Mr. Burns is like, oh, shit.
He kind of grumbles and walks past you guys.
I give Tuck a look and, you know,
sort of like a motion of we should probably get that. Yeah.
Emile Brown follows you.
He's certainly kind of interested to find out what's going on.
As you make your way down the hall, you can start to hear it.
It's it's like yelling and people arguing.
Occasionally, there's like chanting and you turn the corner
and you can see that at the front desk,
there are there is a nurse kind of behind the desk
and she has a couple of nurses by her side.
And they're kind of yelling at what appears to be five or six people
on the other side, citizens, average folks.
But there's about four men and a woman,
and they are all like yelling and arguing
and pointing their fingers and their cell phones.
And one of them is carrying a sign that says, wake up, sheeple.
One of the guys is real thin, but he's wearing a Guy Fox mask.
Another one is real tall and he has this Goddy Save America T-shirt.
Another one seems to be dressed in military fatigues.
There is an obese man with this kind of long, gray hair.
And he has this shirt that says Phenomen X,
but the non part is kind of stretched out by his big belly.
So it's like Phenomen X.
And next to all of them is this kind of short, fiery red head.
This woman who has a cell phone on a gimbal
and she's just filming everything and they're just kind of making a big noise.
And now Director Marini is there and he's kind of, all right,
you folks, you all have to leave.
That's when one of them notices you guys down the hall.
And one of them calls out and says, hey, that's them.
That's the that's the the federalese.
Hey, are you guys the federalese and they all kind of start yelling
in your direction and they start kind of moving in your direction as well.
I think that Merritt sees this as a good opportunity to
propagate boomers, false propaganda there.
He's going to walk out in front of them.
He's going to flash his badge, you know,
and sort of cane over in front of all of them.
Excuse me, all of you get back.
This is a crime scene investigation.
You have no business being here.
Whatever it is you're bringing to this hospital,
you need to take it somewhere else immediately.
One of them, the kind of tall one with the Save America shirt says,
oh, so he's FBI, so he's a child pedophile, huh?
Yeah, he's one of those pedophiles, isn't he?
Another one says, what branch of the Luciferian government do you work for?
You go outside, I'll tell you all.
Go ahead, get out of the lobby.
Thank you very much.
They literally come face to face with you guys,
and they are making a ruckus.
They are screaming at you.
You know, is this all part of your COVID-19 84 plan?
And now they're they're kind of targeting you, Tuck.
And the woman with her cell phone kind of comes up
and she's got her cell phone in your face.
And she's like, what are you guys hiding?
What do you guys know about the Messick murders?
Are you saying that the Messick murders and COVID-19 are related?
Is that the the conclusion you're drawing?
And Tuck's going to like kind of laugh a little bit.
We know that you killed those parents,
so you could take those kids to sell them off like pedophiles.
Ma'am, I'm going to need you to stop drinking your Kool-Aid
and take a good six feet back from me right now.
You're trespassing.
You're breaking COVID regulations inside of a hospital.
Some people are sick here and in need of help.
Now, the rest of you can get therapists outside, please.
Emil kind of gets onto his walkie and says,
I'm going to need an officer inside the hospital, please.
We need to escort some people out of here.
All of the five individuals filming you,
holding signs in front of your face,
continue with their nonsense.
And at a certain point, they just keep chanting,
where we go one, we go all, where we go one, we go all.
And they just will not leave.
OK, I'm going to start walking out of the hospital
and seeing if they'll follow me.
I think some of them would.
Top, make a make a alertness roll.
Sure. All right.
All of my dice are mad at me.
That's an 87. That's a fail.
OK, that's fine.
Merritt, go ahead and make that alertness roll as well.
I have a pass with a 23.
Two of them kind of splinter and start following.
One of them is the real skinny guy wearing a guy fox mask.
And the other one is the one kind of dressed in
fatigues, military fatigues.
And they're saying things to talk like, oh, where you're running?
Huh? You're trying to run from the truth?
We follow the breadcrumbs all the way to you.
And as they're walking, you can see that behind his hip,
on his on his hip is a holster with a gun.
No. Oh, no, no, no.
But they will follow you, Tuck.
These two gentlemen start following you
and they are just harassing you the entire time.
Tuck is just trying to tune it out.
And like, I don't think she's even engaging anymore.
I think she she got like, I think the woman in her face got the better of her.
And now she realizes that she shouldn't have even fucking said anything.
So she's just going to keep walking toward the car.
What are you doing, Merritt?
I think I'm going to follow.
But I want to see if I can make eye contact with the one in the fatigues.
Sure, I think that's easy enough to do.
You you start making your way following Tuck.
The the other three of them kind of continue to harass you.
You know, they they are saying things like we've we've finally got you.
We're going to keep our eyes on you.
You can't come back to Michigan and do what you want with our children.
But yeah, eventually you kind of pass the gentleman in the military fatigues
and you can make eye contact with him.
I'm going to write on a piece of paper in my notepad
very quickly as quick as I can the directions to the Starbucks.
We stopped in season one and I'm going to write
today's date at eight p.m.
OK, and you're going to hand it to him.
Yeah, and then I'll get in the car.
He takes it from you.
And as soon as he takes it from you, he spits in your face.
Oh, I'm just going to wipe it from my face.
I'm going to look him square in the eyes immediately in the eyes.
Hold it for a second and then get in the car.
Hope you don't catch covid.
Well, we've we've had a point of order.
I don't want to keep saying I have my mask on, but Tuck constantly has her mask.
Sure, we we assume you guys are doing the right thing.
Yeah, these folks do not wear their masks.
None of them have a mask on.
Oh, of course, it goes without saying that I wasn't expecting it.
Yeah, none of us thought they were.
Um, Tuck and and Mary, you can both give me alertness rolls.
I don't even know why I'm bothering rolling tonight.
I don't know why I'm fucking bothering rolling tonight.
I succeed with a thirty seven.
You're you're just really annoyed by these folks.
And Emile, you know, Detective Brown says, all right, guys,
I want to meet you at the police station.
I'll see you there.
And he jumps in his own vehicle.
But Merritt, what you notice is the rabble stop in the parking lot
and kind of watch you guys get in your car, film you, et cetera.
But they kind of start walking to their own vehicles.
And you can tell that at least two of them have these black bumper stickers
with Phenomen X kind of written on it.
It's spelled P H E N O M E N and then a big capital X Phenomen X.
I'm going to take, I know I like I can get us to the to the thing,
but I want to take a kind of security route just to see if we're being tailed
by the weirdos. We can also say I would assume,
unless you don't want to do this, you probably message the other team
and say, hey, guys, meet us at at the police station.
I'm going to give a call to Mallory and I would like to call her
and see if we could get a warrant to collect the original and
the footage from the hospital itself, a warrant for taking the actual original.
She tells you that she's going to work on that.
Yeah, give her a few hours. OK.
Can I text back the talk after, you know,
here seeing that, you know, meet us at the police station
and just say, well, I need to look at the hospital.
Samuel is insistent that he goes to the hospital.
I think that's all right.
As long as they're with Hyde.
Unless you're thinking otherwise,
I could always go to the police station if you'd like to stay with them.
I'm just having terrible flashbacks.
The last time we let him do anything he wanted around dead bodies.
So here's the thing.
He's made it insistent that what we did the first time did not work.
We've made the same assertion.
I don't think there's going to be a lot of telling him he can't.
So we might as well allow him to do it and watch carefully
then do it without our supervision.
I mean, if you want to ask Hyde, if she's comfortable with that, that's you.
Yeah, I can give Hyde a call if you feel uncomfortable in that situation.
I don't think we are on speaking terms yet.
Well, it's quickly becoming that we have a rotation of non-speaking members.
Speaking of which, you and I need to have a conversation.
Yeah, I think we do.
I'm going to call up Hyde.
Agent Hyde.
Hello, yeah.
What's up?
So we just got done at the hospital and let me tell you
that the QAnon crowd has not gotten any better at dealing with us.
So just be aware that you may be spit on when you arrive at the parking lot.
But Sam I-L would like to look into the hospital itself.
We're thinking that you could take both Boomer and Sam in there
and see what you can find.
How do you feel about that?
I'm like holding the phone up to my ear and then I look over to Sam-L
wherever he is in the car.
And I was like, what's at the hospital?
I just want to see it.
I want to see where it happened.
It won't take long.
Quick stop.
I feel like this is a yes because there's no other choice in saying no.
That would be correct.
Hyde, that is extremely astute.
I'm picking up things.
Yeah, I'll go to the hospital I guess then, yeah.
Weird request and please don't repeat this to him.
If he performs any sort of rituals or spells, do you mind giving us a call?
Yeah, I think I can do that.
I have a feeling he's out to try new toys.
I don't want to know what that means.
Neither do I.
We're going to the police station.
We've got the local police under our wing.
He seems to be a good guy trying to do the right thing,
which of course means that we can persuade him wherever we need to.
We're going to keep moving in that direction.
We also may have a lead for all of you with Boomer's idea of faking a hoax.
We may have one of the local conspiracy theorists showing up to a Starbucks at 8 p.m.
I passed on some information, but I'm not sure if it's going to happen.
I think it might be better if the three of you meet him rather than the two of us.
Just because Boomer has a better idea of whatever hoax she's trying to fit.
Okay, I can relay that to Boomer.
Perfect, and tell her I'm sorry.
I think you will have to grow up and tell her yourself.
I think I will, but let's start with Baby Steps,
and then when I see her and we get some time in between dying, I can tell her myself.
Sure thing, Merritt, whatever you say.
I appreciate it, Hyde.
Hang up.
So, it sounds like Hyde's team is going to the hospital.
Go ahead and anyone in the car that would like, go ahead and make alertness rolls.
Succeed with a 28.
Pass with an 11.
Fail.
So, Boomer and Hyde, you have been warned by Merritt, and so you're kind of on the lookout.
Eventually, you put Samuel's head in the direction, but it is obvious that there are still a couple
of trucks and vehicles where there are members of whatever this strange group is outside.
Most of them seem to be conversing with one another, and some of them are kind of taking
self-videos, but you know that they will probably see you if you don't attempt to enter here quietly.
Boomer, can you do me a favor?
Can you open my bag, and can you grab out my military uniform, please?
Yeah, sure.
Go ahead, pass it over.
Good thinking.
Yeah, I'm going to put on my combat fatigues.
I have to put on my hair and shit.
So, you're going to look more like a military?
Yes.
I think it would make sense to escort a priest and with a military escort.
And hey, listen, if those guys give us any trouble, let me talk to them.
I work in a church.
I know how to deal with those guys.
I don't think being on their cameras is a good idea, to be honest.
Well, of course, but if we have to deal with them.
Maybe as low-key as possible.
All right, so you're entering the front door.
It sounds like you're attempting to be stealthy, or are you not?
Yeah, we're trying to just like walk in there like we kind of belong there.
Like hide and play in sight kind of situation.
I think it's worth a stealth role.
That's a fail to 95.
Yeah, I fail with a snubdy knife.
Man, I failed with a 15, y'all.
Damn, the pressing that is.
As you guys are making your way,
you can see that there are two police officers kind of standing out the front door.
And they are obviously there to deter these folks from coming back into hospital.
They nonetheless still notice you.
And one of them calls out, I think I heard this joke.
Military, a priest and some dyke walk into a hospital to rape children.
Easy, easy.
Just keep going.
I'm sure I have a really good dildo comeback.
I know you do.
You know what, Boomer?
Go ahead.
No, Boomer.
Okay, keep walking.
Can I at least know who said that in the crowd before I walk in?
So at least I know later if there's time.
Yes, it is kind of the larger, fatter man who has a phenomenon next shirt on.
Of course.
You guys walk into the hospital, but you walk in knowing that they have been riled up a little bit.
You can hear them saying, what the fuck?
We just saw FBI and now there's fucking military walking into this shit?
I knew something was up.
And they're all kind of filming and taking photos of you guys walking in.
Do we kind of duck our heads, Serge?
Like try the, yeah, at least try to not have our faces caught on camera.
Yeah, you feel like you successfully turned your head from them.
The nurse at the front desk is like, I'm sorry about those folks up there.
Is there anything I can help you guys with?
No, ma'am.
It's okay.
We're used to it.
Hi, my name is Dr. Blake Jones.
These are my colleagues.
We're consulting with the local police on the case here.
We would like to take a look at the crime scene if at all possible.
Oh, same.
Are you wearing your priestly garb?
I would say no.
Okay, so no collar.
She says, sure, let me ask Dr. Marini.
He's the director of this.
She calls him and sure enough, a tall, slender, very vexed man kind of comes in.
Yes, I believe you just spoke to our colleagues.
They asked us, they asked us to come follow up just to give it one more once over.
We don't need to, we don't need any, you know, we don't need any secure the access
or anything.
We would just like to see where the murder happened and where the body came from.
Yeah, they just left.
Why weren't you here with them?
We were just a little bit behind.
I'm sorry, but if you didn't notice, there's a bunch of folks who just try to
break into the hospital here.
I'm going to need some proof that you are with this investigation.
I'm going to pull out my phone and call Tuck.
What's up?
Sorry, we're at the hospital and the people in the front are given as
guff. Can you just verify for us that we're with you?
Yes, this is the other half of our team.
Oh, wait, wait, let me pass the phone over.
You pass the phone over and Tuck, if you're going to corroborate,
go ahead and make a persuasion roll.
Sir, do you don't make me roll?
All my dice are mad at me.
Pick different dice.
Every single game, I have five sets of dice and anyone that does poorly goes in the box
and everyone has gone in the box already.
Okay, I succeed with a 31.
Dr. Marini hangs up and he hands it back to you and he says,
all right, very well, I have a couple of minutes.
Follow me, please.
And he takes you to the crime scene.
As I described, there is a hallway close to the morgue where there is the chalk
outline of where Hector Senovar's body is.
And you know that just basically in another room across the hall, there is the morgue.
Uh, now, sir, you'll have to forgive me if I'm asking questions you've already been asked.
Was the body of the janitor recovered?
Yes, it's, I believe they took it in to the...
The coroner has it.
Yes, yeah, at the police station.
May I, may I see the morgue?
Sure, yeah, come this way and he shows you.
There is a morgue currently quarantined off, but there are bodies.
You can just see that, you know, there is one wall that has all of these
cold storage lockers and one of them is open.
Was that where she, she was kept?
The body that was taken?
Yes, I believe her name is Erika Young.
Yeah.
The bastard nearly pried the door off the handle.
And when he brings you closer, you can see that the door is kind of mangled open.
May I, may I ask if the door is busted?
If the, may I ask if the door is concave or convex?
Is it pointed in or out?
It is pointing out.
Got it.
Sir, may my colleagues and I please have a minute alone to confer.
Sure, I can stand in the doorway and he kind of just takes a couple steps away from you.
Out of your shot.
I'll have, I'll, I'll motion to boomer.
The, the stand in our, in his eye line with me.
Got it.
And I would like to just in this location, I would like to use the vorish sign, please.
Oh my God, what are you doing?
Relax, it's not going to hurt anybody.
That's not what I asked you, Sam,
which makes it imply that you are going to do something.
What are you doing?
Just trying, I'm just trying to see a little bit more clearly.
Into what?
So please mark off three willpower and one sanity, which you can project if you'd like.
Yes, I would like to project that onto my daughter.
Four.
Four, you're going to lose no sanity, but you need to subtract four from your willpower.
So that's a total of seven willpower lost.
And you're going to remove four from your connection with your daughter.
You cast the sign.
I'm going to ask that boomer and hide make sanity checks as there's like this little
gust of wind that kind of projects from, from semi.
I'll just just a little burst of air that blows all your hair back a little bit.
I got a 96 fail with a 78.
Okay.
You guys have to roll D fours.
Oh, okay.
Just one, just one, just one.
I got a three, which puts me past my breaking point.
Do you want to project it?
I can't.
Why can't you?
There's no reason why you can't.
Because I'm so low on my bods anyway.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fine.
I'll project onto, I'll project onto pops.
Thank God.
I can't be dealing with that right.
Three.
All right.
So you do not lose any sanity, but you're going to remove three willpower
and three from your bond score with pops.
It occurs and semial in a flash.
It's as if you put on like VR goggles or something like that.
The world just looks different for just a couple of seconds.
It's almost like a negative of the world.
And you look in the direction of storage locker, the cold storage locker.
And there is just the faintest bit of, it's almost looks like static,
but it's very quickly kind of fading away.
And there's just the tiniest bit of whatever this kind of unnatural energy left in the space.
But it does seem to be pressed into the door from the inside.
Well, that wasn't quite as much as I've been hoping for, but OK.
Please tell me this is something good, Samo.
And with a full turn as well, I'll just say you kind of do a cursory glance.
Yeah, as much as I can suck it.
All the other people in the room, including Dr. Marini,
do not have any of this kind of static.
Interesting.
The problem is, is that when you come out of it,
you can see you kind of end looking in the direction of Dr. Marini.
And you can see that he has dropped his cell phone and he is staring in your direction.
He rolled very high on his perception and he caught that something just happened.
And he said, did you did you all just, he's going to need to make a sanity check about about that?
What did you do?
OK, he fails that with an 86.
He loses for sanity and is just like, how did you do that?
What was that?
You know what?
I think that you know what?
That's actually a good point.
I saw a trick of the light.
We actually need to see the original security footage really quick.
If you don't mind taking me there right now.
I'm going to have to ask you to leave right now.
Sir, sir, sir, I'm asking you to calm down really quick.
I understand.
This is very stressful.
Here's the thing, sir.
He walked out the door.
He walked out the door.
OK, chase after him.
We're going to go very quiet quickly.
As he's turning the Sergio, as he's turning around,
I use obscure memory on him.
Please remove another three wheel power.
Yes.
And one sanity.
Oh my God.
Trying my sanity tonight.
Oh no, he's gone bonkers.
You need to make an opposed power test against him.
OK.
That is a success with the 17.
He fails with the 71.
Blessed.
What do you think the obscure memory kind of looks like?
How do you?
You know, I mean, the description says it's a waving hand
gesture and a kind of gutter allotterance.
You know, I just do that kind of Jedi mind trick motion.
And I say I was just a power surge flickering lights.
Nothing to worry about.
He goes limp, you know, just kind of suddenly just
drops his shoulders and then and then kind of snaps out of it.
And it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, power.
Oh man, we I'm going to need to get electrical down here
to take a look at this.
Can we?
Yeah, you probably should.
Yeah, no worries.
We're all.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, no, it's OK.
We're all.
I just have a splitting headache right now.
We're all done here.
Do whatever you got to do.
Feel better.
He leads you back upstairs and is kind of distracted enough
that if you wanted to split off and just go somewhere,
he could probably you probably wouldn't really notice.
I know what I need to know.
Do we need to do anything else here?
Do we need the security footage that they couldn't?
Well, we don't know.
Wait, do we know that they couldn't get it?
I think it's fair to say that they probably would have
informed you in some way.
I mean, we can shoot a shot.
We should let it.
We should let Mallor do her job.
I think we've done enough here.
We should go.
You begin leading your way out of the hospital
as you walk to your car.
There are the jeers and the cheers from these folks.
What are you covering up now?
Huh?
Would you leave behind?
I'm hiding behind Sam Isle's back and just holding on,
like, bearing my face in his back.
I'm like, no, I don't want to deal with it.
The reckoning is coming.
The great awakening is here.
That's great, Mal.
I flip them off.
Is that the same guy?
It's kind of all of them saying, you know, saying this.
There's still the group of them.
The reckoning is coming.
OK.
Cool.
We'll just usher both Sam El and Boomer into our vehicle.
Yeah.
As soon as the doors close, I say, good news.
There better be some news.
I can tell where she's been.
Where she's been is probably not as relevant
as where she's going.
No, that's good, though.
That's very good.
Good.
I'm going to pat him on the shoulder.
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not.
No.
I'm going through a lot right now.
I'm just, yeah.
Police station, then?
Yeah.
As you pull out of the parking lot,
the back window is suddenly smashed with a bottle or something.
We got the extended protection, right?
I have my gun on me.
I can stop.
Merritt's going to pull the gun on him when he sees that bill.
I don't think we need to stop.
Unless there's any serious damage, I wouldn't worry about it.
Can I look in some way to see who threw that bottle?
Yes.
You see the tall guy with the Save America T-shirt just
kind of tossed a whiskey bottle at you,
and it just shattered on the side of the car.
The windows and glass seem to be OK.
It seems like it's mostly just a bottle that just shattered on the car.
OK.
Yeah, I'll just pull out, drive away,
make sure we're not being followed in any way.
If you're going to make sure you're not being followed,
make an alert and just check.
That is a success with a two.
One of them is following you, yeah.
Sam, who's in front next to me?
I think Boomer and I are both riding behind you.
You guys are both sitting in the back seat,
so I'm just by myself.
Yeah.
Unless you ask me to be shotgun.
No, but I will tell you we are being followed,
so I need you guys to shut the fuck up and keep your head down.
I'm going to keep driving, and if there's any way I can try to lose them
or at least, yeah, try to lose them, I would like to do that.
Make a drive roll, please.
Go speed rate, and I'm ducking my head.
I'm a pilot, not a driver.
I fail with a 30.
They fail as well.
Oh, thank God.
So I'll say this, you do manage to lose them a couple of times,
but that's when you realize multiple of them have left the parking lot.
And where one might lose you, another one picks up on you.
I'm going to need one more drive roll to see if they follow you to your location.
Oh, that's a success with the two.
They succeed as well, though, and they rolled higher than you.
They rolled a 41 out of 50, and yeah.
Hide.
I mean, we're going to the police station.
I mean, what are they going to do?
I don't know.
Of course, we're going to the police station.
Where else would we be going?
I think anywhere else we'd be going would be more suspicious.
Okay.
You pull up to the police station, you do a scan, and you can see that across the street,
they are parked in their car, filming you.
Fuck me.
You want to go confiscate their phone or something?
I have no jurisdiction here.
What does the United States Army have jurisdiction here, Sam?
I am.
You, you, I'm not saying you have jurisdiction.
I'm saying you're big and you're scary, and you can get their phone if you want to.
I am wanted here in the state of Michigan, as well as this one.
You want me to do it?
No, Sam Alley, I want you to ignore it.
I want you to go out the back way on the other side where you can't be filmed,
and I want you to walk into the police station.
Hold on.
I think I'd be able to get their data information if we want.
I just need 200, what, like 200 meters?
I think we're close enough.
Do it in the car.
You can try as long as you don't get out of this car.
What you're doing?
Why would I get out of the car?
If I can just do it here.
Then just do it, Boomer.
All right.
So, Boomer, if you want to try to tap into their phones,
you know what?
I'm not even going to ask you to roll.
It's an 80%.
I think that what happens is, is you do your computer magic, and you are able to lock in
on their phone.
There are two people in the car.
You're trying to find out who they are, or what are you trying to find out?
Well, there's a couple of things you can technically do, I think.
Just copy simple data information.
I'm talking everything from the SIM card number, phone number, everything address.
The basic stuff off of the main account.
I think you can do that.
It's going to take time though.
You'll have to sit in the car for at least an hour.
Can I get the license plates of those vehicles so that I can text them to Mallory
and tell them we're being tailed and see if she can handle that shit?
I mean, hi.
I'm sure the first thing you checked was what's the, but I'm sure you saw their
license plate in the mirror or something.
Yeah, I'll say that you picked up their license plate.
That makes sense.
I'll text the license plates.
I'll say we're being tailed and we need to lose them.
And we're at the police station and text that information to Mallory.
Handle it.
She asks you for the relevant information where they're parked, etc.
And she says, I'll see what I can do.
Boomer, you suspect it's going to take a little bit to get all of this detail,
but you are kind of getting the information as you are hacking into their phones, etc.
There are two people in the car.
One of them is named Dave Moretti.
You get the phone number, things like that.
You're able to draw like personal information in terms of like contacts and things like that.
The other is a woman named Margaret Gaylord Breen.
The cover of her, you know, her cell phone wallpaper is a Phenomenonix logo.
Oh, this is perfect.
I got Patsy one and two.
Yeah.
And we'll say that you can get any relevant information you need about them.
By hacking into their phones.
And that includes social media like Facebook, Parler, and anything like that.
Sure.
You get their social media.
Dave doesn't really have much of a social media presence.
Pretty much the only thing he has active is a Facebook.
I love it.
Lots of photos of children and a wife.
And Ms. Margaret, Ms. Breen, you come to find that all of her social media is geared towards
the fact that she is attempting to run for Congress.
Excellent.
This costs you an hour, though.
So you're sitting in the car.
And they're there the whole time.
After about 30 minutes, some police come out of the station and they walk up to the car
and they have a discussion with these people and they just drive off.
Good.
Boomer make, just make it like an intelligence times five roll.
Okay.
I like that one better.
Yes, I pass at 34.
The name Phenomen X suddenly rings a bell in your head.
There's a website called Phenomen X that is like dedicated to aliens and ghosts and cryptids
and things like that.
Yes.
Okay.
You remember actually from the 80s, it was like a TV show and you never really knew what came of it.
And then you remember, oh, there's a there's a website.
I'm going to let everyone in the car know as I bring this up and be like, hold on,
it's related to this, this, this, so they are all cut up to speed.
Well, that sounds like exactly what we need.
I know.
Like this, this is like the perfect way we can go ahead and just about it.
As soon as we boom, boom, everyone just dismisses it.
This chick is bananas.
Yeah, if we can attach them to this in any way, no one's going to believe shit.
I know.
Well, let's let's make sure we can pull this off first before I celebrate at all.
But yeah, this makes it a lot easier.
So about 30 minutes in, they leave.
So you feel comfortable enough to get out of the car if you wanted to,
but it's going to take an additional 30 minutes to kind of resolve
all of that research that you're doing about them.
But do you guys go into the police station?
I will actually lean forward towards how to be like,
do you mind just stepping out for a little bit?
You can go in or you can just step out of the car.
Really?
And I just got it.
I just want to actually confess some things to the Padre spiritually.
Then I got to ask you to leave, too.
Spiritual.
I'm a I have a crisis right now.
Fine.
Hyde, just stand.
You can watch through the window.
You can watch me like a creep.
You can't hide.
You can't read lips or anything.
Right?
Maybe I don't.
I'll get out of the car.
I actually need to know it's very important to slam the door.
Before we get in there, I have I have.
Okay.
I don't know how to do this.
So walk me through this.
It is Heavenly Father for I.
Yeah, that's not them.
That's not important.
If you tell me it's confess,
I won't tell anyone what you're going to say.
Okay.
You know, you got to worry about it.
I ask you a question and you answer it with your advice
or do I just confess?
Well, I mean, technically, I'm just supposed to sit here and listen.
But if you ask me for advice, I'm not going to say no.
Okay.
So, so first things first, everything I did in my 20s.
And.
Okay.
You don't got to go through this.
Okay.
Give me a second.
Okay.
So I need forgiveness for being one for making kids orphans.
I need that.
Money doesn't help.
No.
Okay.
I just need that.
And I need forgiveness on hurting somebody who at first I thought was not the best and come to
respect and take something of his without his knowing and possibly setting him up.
So he takes the fall.
I need forgiveness on that.
How would one go about handling that father about I'm sorry about handling what purposely
hiding a key file from the person and possibly setting them up.
You mean you mean this?
Yeah.
Can I see that from outside?
If you're actively looking maybe.
Yeah, I am actively looking because I feel like they're lying to me.
I think it's fair enough that you see her hold something up or me hold it.
I have the key fob.
But yeah.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
Excuse me.
Boomer.
Yeah.
You might tell me your last name.
I'm not going to tell it to anybody.
Parker.
So it's Max Parker.
Maxine.
I'm AB negative.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
That's not it.
That's not how this works.
Maxine Parker in the name of God the Father his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
You are forgiven and no one else needs to know that this ever happened.
But what would you do, Father?
If I was in your shoes?
Yes.
Look, Boomer, Maxine, this isn't an easy job.
We got people pulling us from a million different directions asking us to do
a million different dangerous stupid things.
And you know, sometimes we do something because we think it is the best thing to
keep us or the people that we love safe.
And I'm not here to judge anybody for that.
And you know, we got the FOP.
We all know what's going on now.
We don't need to speak about this ever again.
You're actually pretty good, Padre.
And I'm just going to start wiping her eyes.
You good?
Anything else?
No, I think that's it.
Well, it's done.
You're forgiven.
Yeah, I think Hyde's getting a little staring for the glass.
Let's yeah, let's I pat Boomer on the back and
we both get out of the car and walk with her into the police station.
Hyde, it's a couple of minutes that they're in the in the car there.
You let them do their thing and you kind of just looking around and a thought pops into
your head that Marlene could be anyone.
She could be those protesters.
She could be anybody at the hospital.
She could be a meal brown.
And as you look around, you see strange looking people.
People that, you know, you almost second guess it's at Marlene.
And you're really fighting the paranoia in your own ways.
You are all fighting the paranoia.
Literally every person you meet could be Marlene and Hyde.
You know, you look down at your fingers that are just slightly trembling,
but you know, you kind of close your fists and push it push it away.
Do I notice that she's shaking a little?
Yeah, I don't think you'd immediately notice this.
You know, by the time you guys get out of the car, she's already shaken it off and,
you know, she's her usual stoic self.
And I assume you all three go into the police station.
Yes, sir.
Okay, let's cut away from you guys for a moment and let's go with Warp.
Warp, you jump on a plane and you make your way to New York.
A couple hours pass, you get off and you know exactly where you need to go.
Do you go straight to the green box?
Yeah, yeah, I don't think there's anything else she's focused on.
She wants to get it done.
Merritt, did you put this stuff in a particular green box?
Just something generic or what?
Whatever was nearest to the apartment.
All right, so it's most likely just kind of a freestanding building that is a storage
locker, you know, storage unit type of place.
We'll assume it's, you know, probably something like a like a large locker or,
you know, just like a freestanding kind of closet space.
And there is a large plastic bag with all of the elements of the corkboard.
There is the reel-to-reel tapes that are in a reel-to-reel player and a gun coffin
that has a big metal lock on it.
And I believe that is all the material that was left there.
Yeah, she's going to grab, I think, yeah, everything but the gun coffin.
She's going to grab the tapes and the player and the pieces of the board,
except for the actual frame.
Just take the pieces, it's fine.
Okay, what are you doing next?
I don't have anything else to really do in New York.
Oh, I want to text them that I made it and I'm alive.
And because Boomer said out loud that she was going to try to like
rally up some conspiracy theorists online, is there any way that warp, like, that's kind of
what she fucks around with in the between time?
Can she, like, send her all of the, like, connections that she knows?
Or maybe, like, if Boomer could send me what she's making,
then I could put it on wherever warp hangs out on the internet?
Something like that to help.
I mean, if you're communicating with Boomer, Boomer would probably mention PhenomenX.
Definitely.
Cool.
Have I heard that before?
You have.
Sweet.
I assume you're, so are you, are you getting a plane flight,
the next possible plane flight, back to Lansing?
Yes, yes.
Still going to be another couple of hours, probably a nighttime flight.
But you open your laptop and you go to the website PhenomenX.com.
You already know a little bit about the history of PhenomenX.
It started in the 80s as a TV show that reported on the occult and cryptid lore.
Nobody took it that seriously, but it was beloved.
Eventually it was canceled, picked up again as a YouTube show,
but when funding dropped out, it faded into obscurity.
And all that was left was the PhenomenX website and their message boards,
which remained a hub for conspiracy fans.
You know that in the last couple of years, the message boards have gained a reputation
as being infiltrated by more conservative militant types.
So as you log in again for the first time in years,
you see that there are countless COVID and big government conspiracies.
Conspiracies about how the current administration is trying to save America's youth
from vampiric Nazi pedophiles, all kinds of nonsense.
One section of the website is dedicated to local meetup groups.
You zone in on the Michigan group and you find there to be only 10 to 20 active users posting.
Starting around the beginning of May, you see posts discussing things that are relevant to you,
such as the murders in Messick involving the Stevenson's.
What appears to be happening is that one person that goes by the name
Ph03N1X keeps posting these drops in which they give cryptic almost poems
that pose questions about the Messick investigation.
Like the connection between the suburban found the next day after the murders.
And then isn't it strange that the body of Marlene Bauman,
who had been buried years before was found in the burnt remains of the cabin and
some of the comments are like, oh, this is clearly some kind of distraction campaign.
But little by little, this Phoenix, let's call them, is riling up the users of the site,
leading them to believe a federal conspiracy is grooming the Stevenson orphans with plans to
sell them as sex slaves. And one of the latest postings brings to light that a large anonymous
donation was made to the Children's Fund. And this convinces most of the users that the kids
have already been sold away to some satanic pervert.
One of the final posts that occurred on May 31st states from Phoenix,
there's something big happening at the hospital right now. We need to look into this.
Try to get the footage and leak it to the press.
I bet you the federales will be here in no time to cover it up.
One of the users responds with, yeah, I'll reach out to my buddy who works as security for the hospital.
I'm sure I can pay him to rip us a copy. And the rest of the users also respond with,
yeah, we're going to show up at the hospital in protest and we'll catch him in the act.
Warp, could you just make an alertness roll for me, please?
Yeah, that's a fail with an 86.
Okay, that's it. So with all that information you just learned, what do you do next?
What was the username of the person that paid off or wanted to pay off the security guard?
The White Knight 69.
Of course.
Ugh. Gross.
Okay. Great. Warp's going to respond with her usual cover username of Untreadable 76.
Like, essentially just checks in. Did we succeed? That's kind of all she's going to say.
And it's linked to an account that she's had for a while, but this is the first time she's posted
on this area. And then she's going to tell Boomer all of that. Like, if she could just
send screenshots, that would be easier over the phone.
Okay, we'll come right back to you. She's probably a couple hours ahead of you guys.
So let's go back. It's about three o'clock and you are all in the police station.
We'll say that for the last 30 or so minutes, you, Tuck, Merritt, and Emil have been in his
office. And on his desk are tons of papers and reports and printouts, elements from the different
hospitals and morgues, the medical examiners. All of this stuff is on his desk. And he's like,
I've been trying to make sense of this, but if you guys would help me, maybe we can figure this
all out together. And you guys looking at this, you suspect it's probably going to be like two
hours of just kind of putting this stuff together. Sounds good to me. After about a half hour or so
of kind of starting this, the other agents, Semi-L, Hyde, and Boomer come in and you, I assume, all
help in this. Oh, I'm not going to help. You're not helping. I'm not reading with me. I will be helping.
Sergio, can I just make sure that as we enter the police station that my elder sign is visible?
Where do you have it again? It's on my cross necklace, hanging from my neck.
Gotcha. You've etched it into the cross. Gotcha. I am going to share with you guys
what is the culmination of a few hours of work. It is the timeline that you are able to piece
together. Could someone kind of walk us through what this timeline ultimately looks like?
Tucker Merritt? Rock, paper, scissors. Okay. On shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
Two scissors. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
Shoot. Oh my God. Making decisions. It's over. I'll go. I'll go. I'll start.
That's hilarious. You just did four for four all of a sudden. Yeah. That tracks for us. That's why
they can't play rock, paper, scissors. We'll do half and half, okay? Yeah, okay. I'll stop after
May 7th and you can have the rest, right? Okay. April 27th, Jane Doe, female, 66, unknown,
is found dead. This unknown refers to what they died from. Is found dead in Hawk Island Park.
She is brought to Ingham County Medical Examiner where her fingerprints and dental records come
up negative. She had dentures and her fingerprints seem to have been disfigured. On April 28th,
the corpse of former cosmetologist Natalie Reed, female, 29, auto collision, is reported missing
from Ingham County Medical Examiner. Then on May 6th, Natalie Reed's body is found dumped off the
side of Highway 43 near the Sundance Chevrolet. It is brought to Waverly County Medical Examiner.
Waverly examiners are unaware of Natalie's disappearance from Ingham County. On May 7th,
the corpse of local novelist Jason Jennings, male, 42, dying of COVID, is reported missing from
Waverly County. Police are notified that same day Natalie Reed's information is cross-referenced
with Ingham County to learn she was originally there. May 16th, Jason Jennings is found behind
a dumpster of the Capital City Market Grocery Store. He's brought back to the Waverly Morgue for
examination. Examiners note that Jason's corpse is still in an early state of decomposition
considering his date of death. May 17th, the corpse of a local public relation specialist,
Anna Starker, female, 30, is reported missing in Waverly County. May 29th, Anna Starker's corpse
is found floating in the Grand River near Moors Park. Her corpse is brought to the Sparrow Hospital,
again examiners note that though the water has bloated her corpse, she is still in a relatively
fresh state of decomposition. And finally, May 13th, Erica Young is caught on tape attacking and
killing the night janitor of Sparrow Hospital, Hector Sandovar. A meal, you know, kind of turns to you
all and says, I think there's something happening here. Like what? I've been hiding something
because again, I just, I want to know for sure and maybe you guys, maybe you guys can
help me if you see it too. I haven't told anyone about this, but there was footage from Waverly.
He pulls out a DVD and he puts it in his computer and he says, this is footage of Anna Starker.
There's only one angle and you can see that this nude woman blonde hair walks up to a door
and goes through the exit. And he says, I know this sounds crazy, but I think these bodies are
getting up and walking away. And I just know that the connection is these chains of corpses.
And the crazy thing is I got a news conference in like two hours that I have to do and I just,
I can't go out and say what I want to say. Have you taken this to your superiors at all?
Was there a response? I was going to prep them for the news conference, but if you were in my shoes,
would you be able to so confidently just tell people what you think you're seeing?
No. No, of course not. There's no reason to cause panic.
Yeah, but the right thing is to inform people. The right thing has got to be to explain what
we think is happening. You're absolutely right, Emil. But first, we have to ensure that we have the
right message because if we're to say what you're implying, we're to corroborate that story to the
public, then we better have all our ducks in the row and be able to prove that that's what happened,
right? Yeah, I suppose big claims better have big evidence. Exactly. So we should look further into
this and well, if you think corpses are getting up and walking away, then we need to find out the
next one that's going to happen, right? I mean, we've already contacted Erica Young's family. She
was the only person of her family living here. She was single at the time, so I don't really have a
lot of leads as to we can look at her old apartment. We could maybe speak to the nurses and ask them if
she was anywhere. If she frequented anywhere, I don't know where we would find her. Right,
but that's something. We can start there. But for time being, I need something from you, Emil,
okay? I mean, we've been good to you so far. I need you to trust us for just a little bit longer and
tell the news that you don't know yet. I am in the same camp as you. I don't see how any of this
could happen without without what you're showing me to be true. But if we're going to say something
like that, we need to make sure we say it correctly. So we bite our tongue here. I take this footage you
have to my superiors, and I show them. We find out exactly what we have to do next. What do you
think? I'm going to ask you to make a persuade role specifically on what he is supposed to do for
his upcoming news conference. He is sounds like you are asking him to continue to obfuscate
and just tell the basics. Yeah, exactly. Okay. 22, which I believe is a critical.
He just turns to you and he's like, I'm just glad that there's somebody who when I tell this to
doesn't think I'm crazy. You're right. I'm just going to tell the news, the basics. We're looking
for Erica Young. She's dead and we think somebody has taken the body and that person murdered the
janitor. And I'll just say no comment when it comes to the footage. That's probably the safest
thing to do. Thank you. I mean, you know, usually working with local police force, I run into a lot
of guys who think they need to act of shit in front of me and I appreciate you. You not doing that
and understanding that I'm here to help together. The three of us were we're going to figure this
thing out. Well, the the six of you, right? You're all together. He points to hide and boomer and
semi L who are all here with consultants. Absolutely. I need to inform my higher ups what
I'm planning to do. I'll be right back. You guys can just hang out here. Sergio, can I ask a quick
question? Have I at any point of this, this detective, have I stood within 10 meters of him,
15 feet, 10 meters, actually 30 feet? Yeah, yeah. I mean, his office isn't very small. I'll say that
you're within 10 feet at the most. Okay. That's all I needed to know. He gets up and walks out and
kind of goes down to the other side of the police station. You guys are all alone in the room for
now. Okay. We need to make a call to Mallory. We need to get this footage to her. We need to
ensure that the warrant got made so we can get the footage from the hospital. And then we need
to decide what happens with the mail. He leaves the room and you guys are kind of discussing what
to do next. Something stands out to you. Every single cadaver on this page is named and found
except at the beginning, a Jane Doe. Hock Island Park. She's brought into Ingram County,
Medical Examiner, Prince and Denmark. Negative. She had dentures and everything. Hock Island. Does
anyone know where that is? It's just kind of a large park in Lansing. How close to the cabin?
Not close at all. It's in the city. Got it. In fact, I'll send you guys a link now in the
general chat that is a map of Lansing and there's a couple of unique places. I'm so sorry. How close
is Hock Island Park to the Clyde's apartment? In the center, you know, kind of downtown Lansing,
you can see Bauman's apartment and you can see to the south is Hock Island. So they're not any
anywhere outside of the city, really? Eventually, Emile Brown does return, Detective Brown does
return and is just kind of, you know, looking over your shoulders and listening to what you're
saying. Detective Brown, have there been any, I mean, obviously there have been some strange
discrepancies of these fingerprints and dentures and everything. Have there been any other injuries
to the body? Anything post-mortem? Oh, you're talking about the Jane Doe? Any of them, really.
Any of them being post-mortem? Any of them being... No, nothing strange in terms of injuries other
than, you know, whatever micro abrasions that may have occurred because their bodies were literally
dumped in different sites. They all, what the coroner says, exhibit an unusually fresh state of
decomposition considering half of them are over a week and a half, sometimes 10 days old.
Was there any evidence from, did the coroner mention anything about the bodies being potentially
frozen or kept in a cold storage unit? Yeah, they checked for that, but they said there was no sign
of frost or freezer burn or anything like that. The strangest is that the Jane Doe is really the
oldest of them all. She's actually still, she's down here in the corner down here if you wanted to
see it. By all means, we'd love to take a look. And is Mr. Sandoval here as well? Sandoval is here
as well, yeah. Might as well take a look at everyone that we can. You head down to the
morgue and which body would you like to see first? The Jane Doe. There is a locker, cold storage
locker that is pulled open. There's a sheet over this person's head. He lifts it up. It takes you
all a moment, but Agent Tuck, you're the first to recognize the face. It's Ms. Janowitz, Ms. Evelyn
Janowitz. Ms. Janowitz. Janowitz, the busybody. I fucking knew it. Ms. Janowitz. Bet. Bet. No.
I want you all to make a sanity test. You're not going to lose any sanity, but this might determine
whether your reactions are noticeable to Emile.
Success with a 29. That's a fail with a 49. I succeed with a 44. Success with a 28.
60, I failed. Boomer and Hyde, you give audible gasps. You recognize this woman and Emile,
Emile kind of takes notice of this and says, is there something I'm missing?
I'm still not used to seeing people like that. And then I look down. Have there been any missing
peoples reported? Any, I don't know, wellness checks? Not that match her description.
It's rare that you see someone this old having their dental records and fingerprints removed.
Yeah, I mean, when we found her, she just didn't have, she had just one set of dentures.
And the dentures obviously don't match the original teeth. The finger, the skin is kind
of what caught my attention is that it looks like somebody took a lighter to the fingerprints.
Well, this is interesting. I wish I had more information on who exactly this was.
That will be something we'll have to ascertain if we're going to support your theory.
We have to know why, if these corpses are getting up and walking around like you're saying,
why they are and why the corpses are being picked. Well, when you find out, let me know.
I'm going to, I think I should probably get ready for this news conference. Do you guys
want to be a part of it or? Oh, no. We're good. Thank you. Okay. Well, you have my number.
I have your number. Are you guys staying in town? Yes. Okay. We'll be around. I'm going to do this
conference. I have a wife to get to, but I'm available anytime you need me. Okay. You see.
Could we have copies of your of your timeline? Yeah, absolutely. Please make whatever copies
you need. And we're taking the footage to our superiors if that's all right with you.
If you think that's best, sure. You can take that footage. I appreciate it.
Okay. Well, wish me luck. I'm not very good in front of cameras. Thank you, sir. Good luck.
He walks out. Okay. So we all know who this is, right? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. We're in a police
station. Oh, well, you think they got microphones in here? Yes. You look and you actually see a
microphone for the coroner to speak into when they're doing autopsies? I mean, it's a dead woman,
of course. I think we should go outside. I do too. Discuss in the car. I could use some fresh air.
By the time you get outside, it's now about 5.30 and you're all standing outside in the parking lot.
Police come and go. Anybody have a note? Any of those guys who were tailing us? Maybe circled
back? Yeah, you have a very high alertness. I remember that. You do not see any of the
folks that you recognize from the hospital. Do we have any idea when we might be getting warp back?
Warp is probably not going to arrive until very early in the morning this evening. Should we wait
for her? I don't think we can wait very much. This is a
continuous timeline. I think we should keep going and then catch her up when she gets back.
It's safer. Yeah, it's probably safer for her anyways. So I have two places that I think that
would be worth visiting and that's one meeting with these crackpots at 8 p.m. at the Starbucks,
although who knows if they'll even show. I'm sorry, what, crackpots? Phenomenonix,
the crowd that was outside the... Why? Well, you're selling a hoax, aren't you? I'm just not
seeing why we would meet with them. We could sell them a story. And who do you propose is going to
go and do that? Well, I think we all need to be on the same page before any of us go talking to any
crackpots. Yeah, but if we're just sending one person off to do that, that's a liability. Oh,
not one person by any means. I only meant one person would be giving the interview. As many
people as you like can talk or go or whatever we mean. Well, we could have people watching from
like around a corner. Exactly. In fact, we definitely should do that. What are you going to say to
these people who are so set in their beliefs that is going to change their mind, that is going to
make them make them an asset rather than a liability? I am not at all going to change their mind.
I'm going to tell them vehemently that they are correct. No, I see what you're getting at. Yeah.
I think it's just... Well, clearly you can't be the one to... Exactly what I was thinking. I'm
exactly what they would think. I was thinking boomer since this was her idea. But they might be
more inclined to believe a priest. That's very true as well, if you think you could do so.
These guys are armed. We can't just put our research team out there like that.
I think as long as we have ample protection, we should be okay. The key thing I think is
they see themselves the heroes of their own story. So just fan the flames with that.
Boast the ego. Hyde, what are you feeling? I feel like it's a bad idea, but you know,
they've had hours to plan something. So I'm just saying. We don't have to do it. It was something
that I thought of as an opportunity to assist the hoax idea. But if we think we can do it without
accessing these people, then absolutely. Okay. Hold on. If you two... If you three are dead set on
this, this is my something of a compromise. You go tonight. You say it was a test of their trust.
You say it was a test of their belief in the system. You say it was a test of whatever. To see if
they thought that they would find something. I don't know. You give them a line like that,
make them feel important, make it boost their ego like Boomer was saying. And then we set a date for
tomorrow or the day after when we've had time to put shit together and plan. I don't think this is
a good idea, but I see what you're trying to say. I don't... I agree with that idea. And in fact,
I think it's a wonderful idea because then we can have our expert with us. We can have Warp go.
Warp knows... Warp's familiar with that kind of thinking. I don't mean to volunteer her because
of course it would be her decision. I would never volunteer a friend like that, but she would be
exceptional on this point of view. That makes sense. The other location I have in mind is we
should go see Bowman's apartment. What would we find in Bowman's apartment? Oh, in case Marlene's
been back. Yep. Yeah. I think she sent us a message. Why else would she use her? So how are
we going to split the party to do that? Are we going to go all together? I think we just go late
at night, right? We go, we all do this eight o'clock meetup, earn your trust, and then as soon
as that's done we get to you. Our first priority should be throwing off these whack jobs so that
they're not riding our tail the whole time because that's the last thing we need. We also got to make
our Mallory calls to get the warrant going and to find out what we should do with them. I mean,
she's got the warrant going. Oh, that's right. I'm sorry, to find out what we're going to do about
a meal, like whether we can bring him into the program, which I fucking hate because we know
we got it. We don't have to, though. We've bought, we brought in other cops. If we bring him in as a
friendly or into the program to begin with, we got to tell him what we just learned from Bowman,
though, because otherwise I'm going to feel like shit. You can't do that. That's a, that's a major
liability. Give him the choice at least. If we tell him and then he refuses, we have to kill him
if he kill, he goes in the care and he gets pressured by his upper management. If he disappears,
though, think about how weird that's going to look. And that's another body we left at Lansing.
Here's where we stand. It's like, you know, you guys have been talking for 20, 30 minutes. We'll
say that warp does not get in until about three or four in the morning. You have this potential
appointment at eight. What would you like to do in the meantime? We could go check the apartment out
now. Check the apartment. Yeah. We're going to Bowman's apartment. You get into your vehicles and
you head over to where you know is Clyde Bowman's apartment. It's the evening, so it's not particularly
busy. There are a couple of cars on the road, but there is still a quarantine in effect.
How are you approaching? Quietly. Round the back. We don't have, oh no, we have Keymaster with us,
so maybe we do. I saw the keys. Yeah, we saw Bowman's keys. I don't know if I would be helpful,
guys. I think I should stay in the car, be the driver. Boomer, with all due respect, I need
you inside of there because I do not want to see you die in this car. Oh, don't say that.
I got out of the car as soon as he said that. I was like, boop. Clyde, I think I need at least
a luck roll to determine whether you would have remembered to bring every single key you've collected.
I haven't collected that many keys, like two or three keys. Oh, I got an 11.
There is a reason why they call you the Keymaster because you never go without those keys that
you've been given. Something about, you know, when you were younger and you would play tabletop games
and it was always important to keep the keys. Hi, nerd. So you go in the back way,
you go upstairs. I assume you're heading to the correct floor, the third floor? Yes.
You know what, though? If we, I don't know how we'll get in, but if we can get into
Janowitz's apartment, that might be helpful as well. Well, you are in the hallway. You can see
the door that was once Clyde Bowman's apartment and you see the door that is Ms. Janowitz's
apartment. Oh, God, I hope no one else has moved in by now. I was just about to say,
is there like a door, like a, like a keybox on the door? Both doors are exactly as they were.
The difference is on Ms. Janowitz's door, there is like a piece of paper. Do you guys walk up
close to the door? Yeah. On the piece of paper, it reads formal declaration of 30-day notice
before we issue you an eviction notice. Oh, God, they don't know she's, oh, because she's a Jane
Doe. Yeah. Okay. Right. Right. Okay. But that Bowman's somewhat, some of the, by now, I would
honestly be surprised if I now know I moved into Bowman's place. So I want to knock? On Janowitz
or on Bowman's? Bowman's? Absolutely. I got a key. Well, but what if there's somebody in there?
What time is it? It's like seven? It's now about 6.30. Okay. Yeah, I'll go up to Bowman's. I'll
knock on the door. You knock on the door and a young man in his mid-20s answers. It's like,
oh, sub dude, hey, can I help you? Hi. My name is Special Agent Orson Bradham with the FBI.
I'm conducting a routine investigation of a missing person's case in this building. I was
wondering if you've heard anything happen down the hall in the last month or so while you've
been living here? Any strange occurrences, any interactions that rubbed you the wrong way?
Anything that you can offer to my case? Whoa. This is kind of heavy to learn. I just actually
kind of moved in a couple days ago. Oh, well, I'm sorry to trouble you with this information then.
I apologize. Who's gone missing, though? And he kind of sticks his head out to look down the
hall and he sees the other people. I can't really release any of that information to you at this
time. I apologize, but I do have another question for you. Since you've moved in the last few days,
did you notice anything weird when you moved into the apartment? Anything that felt out of place?
I mean, I noticed that the place kind of still smells like cigarettes, even though the landlord
said he was going to clean all that. I haven't, you know, I just kind of started living here,
so I haven't really met everybody. Completely understandable. The landlord, is he in communication
often? Not really. It's a little hard to get a hold of, but... Okay, well, this was just preliminary.
It's really just an ask and enter. I mean, listen, this happened maybe a month ago,
so I wouldn't even worry your head over it. Could I get your name just for the record? And
I'll take his information and everything, but I'm really just trying to get out of the conversation
at this point. Yeah, yeah. He gives you his information. Eventually, his girlfriend, who also
is like a 20-something, kind of comes up and asks what's going on and you're able to kind of dismiss
it and they, you know, they can tell that there's a group kind of around that door that you guys
know is Mrs. Janowitz's apartment, but it's like, all right, yeah, cool. Let's see you around and
they close the door. I'll come back to the group. I think that Clyde's room is a non-starter.
Yeah. Should we take this eviction notice down? I mean, no one's going to come for it.
I agree. Except if we take it down,
they might think that somebody had been by the collective. Is that in our favor?
Agent Hyde, you have an 80 in alertness. You've been standing there for a couple minutes and
it suddenly hits you. It's this odor of clean car smell. There's this very chemically
smell coming from inside the Janowitz's apartment. You smell that? What's that smell? It smells like
cleaner or something, something like pungent. I don't know, like car cleaner, something strong.
Like bleach? It sounds like when you're trying to mask something,
when you're trying to clean your car, you might put too much cleaner.
Where? Where do you smell it? Where's the strongest? Where do you think it is?
Can I double check that no one's looking at us from the hallway?
Sure. Yeah, you look both ways and right now it's quiet.
Okay. I'm going to draw my six hour. I'm going to try and hook my cane to my belt
so that I don't have to carry it. I will limp myself to the door and get ready as I usually do
and then I'll ask for Hyde to open the door. I think it's time we went in.
One of you could attempt to lockpick it or just kick the door open or just quietly try to bust it open.
Do any of us know how to deal with this? I know how to do it the old-fashioned way.
Hyde how loud? Loud. It's going to be loud.
That's going to draw attention. Oh, I got an idea. Go ahead. Go ahead.
What's the idea before we do this? I'll kick the door in. I'll kick the door in.
Are you trying to draw attention to us? If you're going to do it, Hyde, I'm going to first ask
that you make a you can either make a strength test at minus 20 as you're trying to kind of like
you're just trying to control your your attack or you could make a stealth roll first and then a
strength times five roll. I'm going to knock on the door. So Hyde kind of backs up getting ready
to charge the door. Tuck just walks up and knocks on it. Minute passes, nothing. Nobody's
answering the door. All right, so now can we do this, please?
I rolled 47, so I'm going to go with the strength roll.
You kick the door open in one hit. It is loud as fuck, but the door swings open and it's about
to close, but you've already kind of busted the hinge, so it just kind of like keeps swinging
back and forth. The lights are off. I'm going to shove as many of the people in and then I'm so
sorry, Sam, I'm going to turn around and slap you in the face. Oh my. You son of a bitch, how could
you do that to me? Fucking 20 years? How dare you smack, smack. Can I please turn on the lights?
Janowitz plays before we all get. I'm going to follow Hyde in and cover her shoulder. Same.
Tuck, Merit and Hyde disappear into the apartment. The door kind of closes behind them, although you
can obviously walk in and you kind of see the lights turn on, you know, through the slit in the
door. Samuel and Boomer, you're in the hallway yelling at each other. Boomer starting this kind
of faux fight with you, Samuel. Sure enough, about three or four of the doors in the apartment
complex open and folks kind of pull their head out and one or two of them were like,
will you shut the hell up? What's the matter with you? It's just, you know, women, you know how
they are could lose it sometimes. I'm going to go into the apartment. I'll stand outside the door
and just kind of shrug my shoulders and look at everybody out there and I'll just keep being like
women, you know, how they are emotional. You guys keep making noise. I'm going to call the police,
okay? I'm sorry. I'll try to keep her under control. I'm sorry. You live in that apartment?
My girlfriend does. Yeah, actually, it's my girlfriend's grandmother's place. We're just
borrowing it for the weekend. Make a persuasion check. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, Sam. I was worried for
a second there. I was too. Wasn't the women you know how they are? 61 out of 20. No. Okay. They
just go back into their apartment and close the door. Oh, balls. We don't have time. Just get
in here. I think they bought it. I think they bought it. Those of you who are inside and eventually
boomer and I assume Samuel when you walk in the room, height flips on the lights. It's different
than bomb inside of the apartment building. It's the design is a little different. It's a little
bit more of like a boxcar style where it's, you know, it's a long apartment. And the first thing
that is you are hit by is this chemically clean smell. Different fragrances like vanilla and,
you know, mango and all that kind of stuff. And what you immediately notice is that tied to the
ceiling are dozens, maybe hundreds of air fresheners like car air fresheners. And they're just dangling
about, you know, 10 inches or so from the ceiling and you're kind of bobbing and weaving your way
around them. And when you finally make it to the back area where the living room is supposed to be
situated and there is a very modest couch and television set up some cheap and old ladyish
kind of wall art, you know, like landscapes and stuff. But what you immediately notice is that
there is a chair facing out to what is a kind of faux patio, a very simple patio. And there is
somebody sitting in that chair. There it is. Oh, it is a nude woman with this kind of frizzy
long hair. And they're just sitting facing away from you. I'm going to point my gun at them. Oh,
yeah, gun is out. I'm going to do the same elder sign is out. I'm hiding behind Sam.
I'm like, Father, you better be ready. Marlene. There's no response.
Oh, that's not good. That's not good. Do we do we go back? I will slowly approach.
Oh, I was going to say, I throw something at it. What do you throw at it?
Like a like a coaster or something? Yeah, we'll say that you find something on the dining room
table or something and you just toss it and it kind of knocks it square in the head and the head
tilts a little bit. And then the whole body just kind of falls to one side and then boom,
it just drops to the ground. It's definitely a cadaver and I need you all to roll sanity checks,
please. Shit. I succeed with a 26. I definitely fail 73 succeed fail with a 63. Those of you that
fail, I think you're only going to lose one sanity. I'm at breaking point. You are going to hit
your breaking point, which means you are going to go temporarily insane. I'm going to I'm going to
run. I'm going to run. You just dart out the apartment and I assume you're heading back
towards the car or something. Yeah, yeah, I'm heading somewhere. I'm going to ask that you
make another sanity check to determine whether your disorder kicks in.
I fail with a 53. Fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, boomer. Follow her, please. She can't be alone.
It will hesitate. Then I'm going to be like fuck. Okay, then go. What are the rest of you doing?
Hide runs out. I'm going to check. Are there other rooms? There's a bedroom, right? In a bathroom?
Yes. The other rooms are empty and they do appear to be decorated by an old woman. Okay,
so after I screen those, I'm going to come back to the corpse. I'm going to turn her over. Well,
yeah, I was going to say, while he was doing that, I turned the body over. Okay,
Tuck, you turn the body over and she is definitely dead. And the main thing that stands out is that
the center of her stomach, there appears to be a very large piercing of some kind. Something
pierced her abdomen. Can I inspect the wound and see if I can discern what exactly what it is
that pierced her? I think you need to make a forensics role for that. And if the two of you,
you know, you both have skill in it. I'll say that you can have a plus 20 into that in case. Okay.
With the plus 20, I do pass. It's a 65. The tear is blunt and you start to notice wood fibers
in the in this in the embedded in the skin, almost like splinters, very large splinters.
Does she look like she's been decomposing long? She looks relatively fresh.
All right, we got to go. That wasn't subtle. We need to leave now. There's nothing else for us to
know here. You don't want to call that in to who to Mallory. Someone else has already called the
cops. I think we need to get out of here. Okay, whatever you say. And I'm as I'm saying is I'm
trying to push them both out of the apartment. The problem is, as you're convincing them to go,
you hear, you shouldn't leave so soon and a hand reaches out and grabs your throat.
And that is where we're going to end the session for tonight.
Oh,
Sergio, I knew I knew you were waiting for something. I knew it.
All right.
An emaciated man with a filthy beard dressed in dirty street clothes.
Watches from the darkness of an alleyway.
His gaze is set on a mob of people protesting outside Sparrow Hospital.
His eyes drained of color lock in on agents Tuck and Merritt as they exit the hospital.
They ignore the jeers from the crowd and jump into their vehicle.
They don't appear to be carrying what he's looking for.
As the agents speed off, he clocks that they're heading east downtown. No doubt the police station
next. The shell of a man slings into the alley and races out the other side.
There's barely anyone out on the streets these days to notice his unnatural stride.
He lands behind a dumpster, hasn't broken a sweat, isn't even panting.
He can see the police station from a distance and waits patiently.
An hour passes and a new vehicle arrives.
Emerging are the agents Hyde, Samael and Boomer.
He scans every inch of them but again no sign of his quarry.
He could risk getting closer. Find out where they've hidden it that way.
But this flesh is filthy and it would attract their attention.
No, better to be patient, he thinks. After all, they're following his plan to a T.
If they're here, they'll examine the Janowitz body soon enough
and it would lead them back to Bobbin's apartment. That's where he could wait for them.
He leaves the scene and in no time appears in front of the low rent apartments.
He scurries around the side of the building to the resident parking lot.
He finds an old Lincoln town car and lays down beside it.
He stops moving. A sudden gust of wind passes through the lot,
blowing dried leaves around like confetti.
Inside the car, the corpse of Erika Young twitches.
She's been covered by a blanket and unfolds out from under it.
Wasting no time, she clambers into the driver's seat and starts it.
The car pulls out from the lot and into the alleyway
that separates Bobbin's apartment from the parking structure.
The corpse parks the car just below the balcony of Mrs. Janowitz's apartment
and stops moving. Another terrible gust of wind rushes past the apartment building
and inside the old woman's home, the body of a red-headed hiker once named Kendall opens her eyes.
Without expression, she adjusts the chair she has been propped up in to face the balcony.
She smiles and takes a moment to appreciate her work.
Soon they would spring her trap and it would be hers again.
She would finally be whole and entirely thanks to the agents of Perennial.
you