Seeking Truth

My astute readers will notice that I've kept my mission secret, as well as my location. Well, there's no secret that Morningsatr has been trolling me, so why give him any ammunition to work with?

I received an email from a contact I will call Paperclip from this point forward. A few months ago, Paperclip had sent an email to my old yahoo account (zer0mbr is my handle there), because I had mentioned it, literally eight years ago. I've received all sorts of mail during my death, but most of it stopped five years ago. Paperclip wrote the most recent, and I felt that there was a chance that I might be able to help him. Though, what I could manage, remained to be seen.

Mike dropped me off in an urban setting, by this point, I had already texted Paperclip that I was finally in the area. I took an hour or two to buy some new secondhand clothes, and met up with yon client...is client the right word?  I'm not taking any money from him for my assistance, but 'quest giver' sounds pretty weak. Client it is.

PC was the sort of man I figured I'd have become when I was forty. Comfortably overweight, wearing business casual slacks and a polo. He was balding (which as I understand it, I will not suffer that particular fate, thank you Grandfather), and wore glasses. He had an affable, perhaps even harmless look to him. I awaited outside a Cracker Barrel, on one of those slat wood benches, as he approached, my small collection of gear, sans sword, on my lap.

He noticed me, and stopped about six feet away. He then adjusted his glasses and drew out a piece of paper. "Ah...'What do you do when the exterminator is late?'" He read the words off of the call and response I had given him in a very stilted delivery. My high school drama teacher would've held him over for extra lessons.  I gave out a cough, then replied, "Burn down the apartment complex." I was reminded that I had forgotten to call and respond to Mike earlier, and started to text a note to myself to remember to keep OpSec. He waited patiently for a few moments as I fumbled over this phone interface.

"So ah, you're ...you're him." I managed a curt nod, I didn't like discussing this in a public setting. "Can we talk in your car?" He gave a double nod, then gestured across the parking lot. I folded my clothes and backpack around my sword, leaving only the handle visible and joined him.

In retrospect, I should have had him turn out his pockets, just in case there was a firearm around. I glanced over his car, looking for anything out of the ordinary as he got in. I took the seat behind him. Naturally, he started to look over his shoulder, I politely asked him to stop. "Just talk. Tell me everything."  I needed this position of power over him, just in case for some reason this was a trap, or he was a plant. Hell, lost causes and troubled souls could be used as a honeypot trap for me, if I weren't careful.

He summarized what I had already known, that he felt his father, whom I will refer to as Matchbook, was under the influence of something supernatural. PC had noted erratic mood swings, a nagging cough, and occasional nose bleeds, but naturally there was more to it than this. He had also discovered what we in the /sage/ field refer to as a 'notebook full of crazy'.



Story checks out.

There are certain thoughts that the human mind just aren't meant to handle. Consider the eldritch nature of these creatures from afar that have scruples and morals completely foreign to us. Communication alone must be taxing, to even comprehend each other.  As a man to an ant, or a god to a man, as they say.

So imagine if I were to put a thought in an ant's head. Something simple, perhaps 'go eat an apple'. The ant has no point of reference for me. In its own terms, it'd understand the concepts of 'eat' and 'apple', but my use of terms for it would be completely alien. How would the ant communicate or follow an instruction it had no way of knowing? Most likely, its scent would change, and it would move in erratic patterns, then probably die.

Humans have something of a pre-lingual underbrain, one that can fathom some of these concepts better, I figure. And yet there are no words, so we do the one thing that can help express these thoughts.

We draw.

A notebook full of crazy is a prime way to ID someone who has lacked the rational capacity for proper digestion of mental knowledge. I thumbed through it as he continued, explaining the story I had already heard.

Paperclip's sister had been slain barehanded a few months back, in the family home. Deep furrows that could only have been impressed by something supernaturally strong, were ripped into her.  There wasn't much to go on, except that his father, Matchbook, was on site, slumped over a chair, in a coma.

"Was there any trace of blood on him?"  Paperclip shook his head from afar, "Nothing overt. That police chemical though...uh.."  I added the word for him, "Luminol."  (I had to google it to spell it correctly).  He nodded vigorously, "it showed that he had blood on him, but it was all cleaned up apparently."  I continued, "And the coma?"  "Well, the doctors have their theories, but there was no blunt trauma or anything, nobody really knows. Been that way since."

Honestly, I was well out of my element by this point. I could scheme, I could fight, but solving a murder was outside of my league. What did he expect me to do, just look at his father and tell if he...oh right. I *have* done that.

It was part of whatever brainfuckling happened with the Bleeding Tree. I had been able to see if someone was tainted with the supernatural, I didn't know if there were different 'flavors' of it all, but my time in Sanctuary showed me that it still worked, a strange, almost....infrared look of a person.

Unsettling as all hell.

As I thought to myself, he had continued talking, and snapped me out of my musings. "So do you think this could be something that that Hollow Man could do?"  I thought about it, and voiced my thoughts. "Yes, but as I've recently learned, there's so many more things out there than just /him/. All sorts of a myriad of nasties and unspeakables. But these violent mood swings, the attack...It could be."  I continued, after a breath, "But you have to understand two things, that this could have been the act of a perfectly rational and sane person, your father might have had something trigger inside him, whether it be PTSD or something else that went unnoticed. You may not just get some sort of answer that gives you someone to blame. You need to understand that."

"Secondly, my experience here is limited. I'm pretty good at a few things nowadays, staying on the move, fightin', and tracking."  When I put it that way, I'm a thug.  Great.  "I'm going to read this notebook and get back to you, I've seen a lot of strange symbols in my time, if I see anything I recognize, I'll understand a bit more about what I'm dealing with. That also means I need a lot of time to do online research."

Paperclip looked at me in the review mirror, "You can use my computer at home, anytime you need to."  I grimaced, "I will pass. In fact, you need to stay out of my sight until I contact you again. I will need to visit Matchbook, is he in long term care, or in a hospital?"  Paperclip dug through his wallet, "Hospital. He's got an armed watch on him. Nobody figures he's going to just spring up, but he's been called a 'person of interest' in the case...what little there is of it.

That was going to make it hard for me to bring my magic sword inside.

Also, who the fuck actually says 'magic sword' unironically? I suppose I shouldn't say that, I've got no proof that it is anything more than a piece of shit.

Though I've read that it was used to help kill a second Redlight...that alone says something.

For now, research.