Breath of Spoiled Air

[madimpossibledreamer]

Is that a reference? The Shadow Knows!
The game mentions nothing about a union, but I figure it makes perfect sense given the time period so I’m extrapolating.
I may also be pulling in a bit of Until Dawn, but given that it’s the one good game the studio made and there are wendigo everywhere, with...okay, a little explanation in the Lore but not much of one.
Desmond really just out here having an existential crisis over realizing “yeah, ghosts exist, but wait there are Implications there”. Yet more stuff got pushed to the next chapter after he pulled that, but it also was incredibly important worldbuilding of ‘how to exist in TSW as an Assassin’, so I’m keeping it.
Oosbeck called it a while ago, but this goes for anyone who was thinking Beaumont wasn’t human without commenting it: pat yourselves on the back!

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World

Summary: They all use the downtime while they can.
Word Count: 3307
Rating: Teen

 

        It’ll always be slightly nerve-wracking, letting Rukh go off on his own, even if he’s demonstrated pretty well that he can take care of himself, thanks. Bob tries to take off after him, and Alice only manages to catch him at the last moment. He tries the acid trick on her, again, but if he thought that would somehow deter a proto-dragon holding him, he has another thing coming.
        They’re all a little nervous sitting out here in the open, but it feels vaguely white like a hiding spot, so Desmond’s not too worried they’re going to get ambushed, and it’s a good opportunity for a couple things. He makes sure they all eat, hit the public bathrooms (after a quick check that nobody’s going to get anything like a ghost looking for revenge coming after them), and after that they all have a bit of time. Nate’s walking Lydia through a few other more complex hexes, and Alice, rather than bugging Desmond for more lessons, has actually taken the opportunity to try to teach Bob how to actually aim his acidic attack, and maybe even narrow the target rather than hitting the entire area. Like with most things the ak’ab does, it’s a whole lot more enthusiasm than skill, but with some positive treat reinforcement, he is slowly starting to at least get the idea, even if the execution needs a whole lot more work.
        Desmond takes the opportunity to rearrange the inside of his pack, trying to make sure that it’s at least a little more organized in there. It’s not easy. One of the downsides no one ever bothers to warn about is that bags using magic to break the laws of physics make it a little harder to keep track of what’s in there and find what you need when you need it. He does eventually manage to find the book on the mine, flipping through and looking for anything that stands out, anything that might be useful. As he’d expect, really, it’s pretty clearly one of those kinds of takes on history that Shaun would complain about. It’s really biased and doesn’t have the most convincing of stories. Given the ‘Solomon Island Press’ thing on the cover, it was probably commissioned by the Illuminati trying to drum up their local tourism. But Desmond has also, between Shaun’s explanations of how to interpret some of the common stretched truths and having to interact with people like Vidic, gotten pretty good at reading between the lines, and from that perspective this book was definitely worth it.
        Most of this stuff is interviews with the widows and surviving family, with a retrospective on the two times the mine got opened. Desmond would like to say it treats the Wabanaki like a footnote, but it’s worse than that; they’re absolutely the sacrificial scapegoat. Weird accidents? Clearly Wabanaki sabotage. Nothing to do with the speed they pushed forward probably exceeding safety standards, or effects from the Filth or ghosts. Collapses? Again, Wabanaki sabotage. The writer mocks Wabanaki protests as ‘being driven by primitive superstitions’ and point out that the land was ‘rightfully bought with good money’ (because, as Connor would point out, annoyed, that is the usual excuse, isn’t it, assuming that the land can belong to someone in particular when it’s meant for all, with the occasional fight over hunting rights). They even try to blame the miners sleeping badly and occasionally getting violent or talking about hearing voices on ‘the ongoing fears of the Native opposition to the mine’. Given everything Desmond’s learned about the Park, that doesn’t seem too likely. The writer seems very invested in demonstrating a difference between the ‘savage superstitious Native Americans’ and the ‘rational, superior Americans’, so they probably wouldn’t have taken magic into account. Unless they did and this is a cover-up too. A cover-up through bigotry. Humans suck sometimes. And honestly if what Krieg does most of the time is read about this kind of stuff, rather than anything cool humans have done, no wonder he’s a depressive drunk.
        Oh, and—here’s a weird note that actually makes Desmond look something up. There’s an offhand accusation that the Wabanaki ‘led miners to commit sabotage themselves and engage in mutiny’, which is not a word that Desmond would associate with miners. The actual incident, he learns, is a union strike. The workers were asking for better pay and more safety measures. Desmond doesn’t know a whole lot about unions; he’d basically avoided most association-type stuff he could join, in what he’d thought at the time was just wild paranoia that he could be noticed. What little he does know suggests they’re basically the modern-day equivalent of Guilds, and that he can absolutely wrap his mind around. The overseer then, Frank Devore, was not quite so understanding, given that he hired some weird cross between a private detective agency and a bunch of mercenary thugs to end the strike, and people died. There’s no proof that the Wabanaki were involved in instigating the strike, and some people online (including Shaun in a single forum thread) argue that there’s no proof that the Wabanaki were behind any of the sabotage at all, just protests. Not that it proves they weren’t involved either, ‘Guy Fawkes’ is careful to add. Just that none of the miners had expressed views sympathetic to the Wabanaki or were seen talking to them, and the demands didn’t include giving the land back or anything that would benefit Native populations. The entire thing feels vaguely familiar and it takes Desmond a good few minutes to realize it’s because he’d at least skimmed it before: the one Shaun’s arguing with is illumination576, and they’d offhandedly referenced their, in Shaun’s words, ‘previous skirmish’, though given that Shaun wasn’t too sure proof-wise either way, this time he didn’t bother to argue for long and was almost downright civil, for him. Desmond smiles a little at his phone and then gets back to the book.
        That first attempt with the mine died in 1881. It didn’t die with the foreman or with his wife, apparently. Just that in a fit of jealous rage, Frank Devore killed his wife and was hanged for it. Given the writer’s previous track record here, it’s kind of surprising that he doesn’t try to blame this on the Wabanaki too, somehow. Instead, the focus moves on to the partner, Young, but the writer insists that the mine was only abandoned due to the market for iron and not anything else that had been going on.
        He then promptly gets sidetracked, again, by something the writer considers an actual footnote: the “rumors” of a haunting or a curse on the house they lived in. It’s...well, it prompts all kinds of questions, very few of them related to the actual book or the mine. Maybe he should’ve thought about some of this before, and maybe he was avoiding thinking about it. Or that it hadn’t really registered because thanks to the Bleeding Effect he was used to seeing ghosts. But it can’t be that every death at home leads to a haunting, or a whole lot more houses would be haunted. It can’t even be that it’s every violent death. And there’s questions like: does that mean the Villa Auditore would be haunted in this world (even assuming they died by Alberti’s betrayal)? Hopefully Ezio’s attempts to give them some peace were successful, or that would be really fucking depressing. (And, weirder, does that mean Giovanni could have possibly accompanied Ezio in death and helped him out by being a terrifying ghost?) And it gets kind of weirdly existential. In this world, assuming Assassins even exist, is being respectful and trying to honor a target’s last moments in this world, more for survival than for professional respect? Because if the dead aren’t at rest, they can make that a real problem for the living. He finally comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t care what anyone else does, he’s still doing it partly for them because from everything he’s seen it sucks to be a ghost, so preventing that is probably doing them a favor.
        Desmond does not know the statistics of how common tragedies like these are in houses, but he is absolutely going to ask Rebecca or Shaun when he can. To his untrained eye, it does look like a lot, the kind of history a horror writer, like Krieg, would drop in a book to convince you that yeah, this house is very haunted, beware.
        Only one guy gets out alive, and that’s because he shows up, gets a weird feeling, and leaves. He refuses to even come back to the house to finalize the sale, so it has to be done remotely. The second case is a little more murky. A family buys the mansion, but there’s no record of them leaving. Or, really, any record of them after a certain date. It’s like they just vanished off the face of the earth. Which might even be possible in this world, but still doesn’t rule out foul play—like, if they just got sucked into a mirror at some point, even if they’re not dead, that’s still not something you want to happen, and it’s not like any of them managed to escape, either. There’s a newspaper clipping that suggests they moved out, but it’s a local newspaper, so probably Illuminati-run. Desmond’s first instinct is that the Illuminati used them as some kind of ritual sacrifices, but that’s possibly unfair. They’d been pretty much useless bystanders when it came to Archibald Henderson’s murderous rampage, so maybe they’re just covering up something, again, that wasn’t actually their fault.
        The internet spends a lot of time on the two women who bought the mansion to turn it into an occult hotel, with a bunch of stuff about famous people who had stayed there (of which Desmond only recognizes a few names, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and a lot of speculation about whether Elena and Francine were friends or actually lovers. Which might be nice, if it seemed like the kind of thing they would’ve liked people to have known and it was about honoring their wishes in death, but it seems more like ghoulish gossip for entertainment. The first mention of their death reads as kind of anticlimactic: car crash. Desmond makes the mistake of glancing at another article in the search results and swallows. Jesus, that sucks. It wasn’t fast; they crashed into a bog or swamp or something right past the mansion, and were trapped in the car as it slowly sank. They weren’t found for days. If their ghosts are around, he definitely needs to set them free.
        And the next one, a hippie art commune that moved in not too long before a massacre with a single survivor who gave up on art and went into accounting instead. Apparently the police had found the killer at the swamp trying to talk to ‘the ones who dream’. Given the Filth connections to dreams and nightmares, Desmond’s gonna guess he’d been infected, maybe, but if so, that might indicate something about the mansion itself, not just the mine—unless. Maybe Devore had brought something back to the mansion with him? That would explain a lot. He’ll have to look before he heads to the mine itself.
        And the last one, the Franklins. Desmond’s already heard a bit about them, so he doesn’t need to dive deep into this, but he is curious how the book is going to depict the incident. (He has a guess, given what he’s read so far.)
        More than a little unsettled, Desmond returns to the book. Most of it is about the second opening of the mine, and the stuff before was just context. It didn’t even last three years, like the original. The writer spends way too long on how Eleanor Franklin, like Joanna Devore, brought class to the island with her extravagant parties. The publisher even spent a bit more to include pictures of the parties, like it’s a winning argument. Desmond half suspects the writer is one of those guys that would deeply love to ‘comfort’ the woman through her grief. But soon enough the good times come to an end.
        The main incident in question is the death of Ami’s father. It basically follows the ‘cover story’ Ami described: Edmund Franklin’s shooting the medicine man, getting a verdict of self-defense, and then hanging himself. The incident afterwards, with miners getting trapped. The collapse is blamed on Wabanaki sabotage again, with some of the miners getting rescued, some never being found. The murders start after the ‘heroic rescue’, and the Wabanaki are once again blamed, but this time they’re found guilty and imprisoned. The book grudgingly acknowledges the later verdict with the new evidence of the autopsies (because humans can’t make those kinds of wounds) and the release of the imprisoned tribal members, though the writer grudgingly attempts to sneak in a remark about how it still wasn’t magic but even if it was, it was an Indian curse. Desmond guesses the guy thinks he’s being clever, but forgot to switch ‘Indian’ to ‘Native’ again. Or maybe that’s on the editors missing an instance of trying to at least sanitize their writer’s issues.
        The name of the writer isn’t familiar—nobody Desmond has met, though he’ll keep an eye out for a Thomas Allen. Desmond is very amused by the rants from Shaun about how Allen is a hack. It’s kind of nice finding that he had a similar opinion on how factual any of this was. ‘Bias is human but this kind of slavish devotion to being wrong is inexcusable’ is one of Shaun’s kinder sentiments on the subject of any of the man’s books.
        Devore had his own mining company, so he served as owner and foreman. He might’ve been an Illuminati to start with, but Desmond’s leaning toward him having been recruited later, since he didn’t have any honors or influence in local politics until a few months into it. They could have been trying to be discreet, but that doesn’t seem very likely, since the company that bought it the second time was Blue Mining Company, a former coal company that swapped to general mining after the country started the transition from using coal. “The best is Blue!” the ads proclaim. Desmond’s slightly embarrassed on their behalf. At least Abstergo doesn’t scream Templar. And then, after that, to fund the casino, the Wabanaki sold the land to Sycoil. The thing is, Desmond’s heard, or rather seen, that name, specifically at the abandoned gas stations in Kingsmouth and Innsmouth. Who wants to bet that Sycoil is an Orochi subsidiary? That would explain their interest in the island. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to confirm, because it’s right there on the Orochi website: Sycoil is, in fact, their energy division, currently investing in cleaner gas and solar panels and trying hard to convince you that they just want a brighter future for all. And unlike their predecessors, they’re probably not here for the quarry, or for iron, and given that all the zombies around the Sycoil stations had been infected with the Filth...maybe they’re trying to figure out how to use the Filth for power. Which is a terrible idea, but it’s not like they’re going to consult Desmond about any of this.
        Rebecca’s not leaving reminders about what he’s supposed to do on his screen for multiple reasons, including the fact that she’s not talking to him due to orders and that he’s not in the Animus anymore, but that doesn’t mean he’s not capable of it on his own, too. He just needs to actually take stock.
        There’s the lead with Tyler Freeborn, based on the text. Desmond checks, and yeah, the earlier video talking about the fog is gone. Tyler had talked about Orochi or the government telling him to take that stuff down, so if the army doesn’t have a file on him, Orochi should. And based on Desmond’s new discoveries thanks to the book, Orochi should have a camp here in Blue Mountain, checking in on their investment. He wants to check on them in general anyway, make sure they’re not up to making a bad situation even worse. The army suggested he talk to the sasquatch, which might not be a bad idea as long as he can get through. They probably have a better idea of what’s happening to the land and the wards than, well, most of the other possibilities aside from the ravens. Who said to find them, and while Desmond’s not entirely a fan of them not just coming out and saying whatever they needed to say, they definitely sounded like they actually knew something useful. He wants to go find the rest of the Wabanaki too, though given John Wolf’s words, he’s less hopeful that they’ll know too much, other than maybe what they’re up against and maybe how to reactivate the wards, or reinforce them. And if he had to guess, the obvious ‘keyhole’ on the island that Beaumont is looking for would make the most sense to be in the Blue Ridge Mine. He has to assume that Beaumont could have figured that out on his own a while ago, though. Maybe—actually, he’d had the zombies digging, and was looking around using the plane. Maybe he was looking for another way in? Especially with the collapse. Maybe he’d known exactly what he was looking for this entire time, with his potential history with the island, and it’d just been rendered inaccessible.
        It’d be easy to say ‘that’s fine’ and just turn away and assume the problem is fixed, but Beaumont is patient and really set on this plan of destruction, so sooner or later he’d find his way in. And as long as he has that sword, it makes everything on the island worse.
        “We good to go, Boss?” Nate asks, probably noticing he’s finally looked up from the book, and the rest gather around, Alice picking up a squirming Bob.
        Desmond has been trying not to think about it, but he’s really going to have to start getting prepared if the situation is close to what he suspects. “You think Beaumont isn’t human?”
        Nate sighs the sigh of someone who’s also been trying not to think about it. “He’s probably not, yeah, though if he’s half-human, I have no idea. It would explain his strength. Longevity’s possible, especially with elixirs and such, but...combined with everything else, signs point to ‘inhuman’.” He notices Alice’s glare and corrects himself. “Non-human.”
        “I thought it was obvious,” Alice adds, which is probably perfectly straightforward. It’s obvious to her, so she assumes everyone else would know.
        “Any tips for killing non-humans?” Desmond asks, because as with a lot of things, it’s a matter of being properly prepared and having the right weapons on hand.
        Alice considers that carefully, snake eyes narrowed, and then states simply, “Magic weapons. Extra fire. Extra stabbing.”
        “That sounds pretty doable.” She straightens slightly, having been helpful. “Anyone know how to communicate with sasquatch?”
        Nate sighs (which is annoying; he’s going to have to get over that hangup eventually) and it’s actually Lydia who points out reasonably, “Look, if anyone’s going to know how Gaia and the wards are holding up, it’s them.” She really is getting better about her own issues, too.
        Nate doesn’t get to be the one for diplomacy here, Desmond decides, but there is something he can do. “Anything about wards they tell us, you memorize and get to tell Rukh when he returns.”
        “Can do, boss.” He’s even minimally sarcastic about it, but Desmond’s going to have to talk to him about it sooner or later.