Rebecca's Reports (6)

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Hey, Sonnac, it’s me, your old favorite. Reports enclosed on my observations, written by only the best, the brightest, the sexiest agent we have, yours truly, as ordered, etc. -R.C.
Word Count: 2414
Rating: Teen
Spoilers marked by the name 

 

Sarge (Chapter 77 Echoes)

Sarge’s nickname stuck even after he was promoted to Captain and basically everybody but Olson calls him that. If I was able to spend all my time on this, I’d get all the details, but I didn’t have time for an in-depth hack into governmental servers. (Not that anyone’s going to listen, but internal investigations should really come second to the end of the world!)

I was able to confirm a lot of the rumors. Most of his unit’s experience seems to have to do with demons. He’s actually managed to negotiate with succubi before! His stance on non-humans has gotten even more hardass recently, probably because of indications that some sort of treaty with Hell has fallen through (probably the one we knew about and not one we didn’t given the timing, attaching a previous report here). I also might have found some evidence he’s actually been involved in counter-Red Hand activity in Siberia, but neither the US nor the Soviets felt like putting anything in accessible databases, and the usual Pentagon sources have clammed up. No matter how much Shaun’s over here drooling over the possibility of more insight into the Red Hand. I’m guessing the Lumies did their usual ‘remember, we have blackmail on you’ routine. They’ll reestablish contact but it won’t be right away.

Getting anything on Sarge’s actual orders would take more time, but I was able to dig up a roster and requisitions, and—seriously, boss, it’s bad. It’s possible that the government’s just being cheap, again, and assuming that their coordinating with Orochi will be enough to save their butts. If not, this highly decorated military officer and his army of inexperienced soldiers has been sent in to die for whatever reason. Vets deserve better than this. Even when their orders suck.

 

Karen Olson (Homeland Security Coordinator) (Chapter 77 Echoes)

Like Sarge, Olson has a pretty impressive track record, on her side largely having to do with closing portals. That’s not what she’s sent in for. Most of those weren’t there to start with. Seriously, I have no idea what kind of witch she must have pissed off. By now she has to have won some kind of world record for portals opening nearby, but given her attitude I’m not surprised. But if she had as much power as she thinks, again, it comes back to the money and resources, right? I mean, would the US underfund something they totally wanted done? Given everything we’ve seen I don’t think I can say no, it could just be incompetence, but I’m smelling a rat. Which gets even weirder when I add she’s all buddy-buddy with Geary, who wouldn’t bother if Olson really was a nobody and you and I both know that.

 

Edmund Franklin (Deceased Mine Foreman) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

Mostly, I’m basing this off Desmond’s searches on his phone; he’s digging into the island’s history, which as Shaun will tell you is generally a pretty good place to start when it comes to figuring out what the hell’s going on in the present day. Edmund Franklin specifically was the foreman of the Blue Ridge Mine the last time it opened. The story goes that he got spooked by the local Wabanaki protests about the mine being on sacred soil and he shot and killed their shaman, then hanged himself with the guilt. The mansion he and his wife lived in just happens to be covered in ghosts, so maybe he really had dealt with too much, but I get the feeling there’s more to this one, boss. Something a whole lot darker. Possession, maybe?

 

Simon Madahândo (Deceased Shaman) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

To follow up the last one, we have Ami’s father, the man shot by Edmund Franklin. A lot of his fellow tribal members thought he was just looking for trouble, that the guy didn’t know what he was doing, but that’s anything but the truth. A man who goes through “Indian Boarding School”, comes back rather than getting a job as expected, and stubbornly learns the language and everything his own father has to say about being a shaman doesn’t act without thinking. Now, he probably could have been better about communicating. No one else knows why he was so upset about the mine. My money’s on them having dug up something awful, between fiction and real life examples. The main issue is: what was it?

 

Frank and Joanna Devore (Original Foreman and Wife) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

So, signal-to-noise isn’t great for the next couple reports I’m sending you. They’re not big stories compared to some, but a lot of these have been picked over by True Crime podcasts and forum posts and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Krieg’s here in the first place. It’s exactly the kind of inspiration that asshole would go for. My years going through the Dragon troll posting comes in handy, sure, but it takes time. It’s going to have to wait.

The official story is that Joanna cheated on Frank, who killed her and got the death penalty. They’re the ones that built the house, so the ghosts probably started here. Frank’s partner got everything, but it didn’t work out for him either. In the background I can find some traces of Illuminati influence but I doubt even they would go far enough to arrange the creation of ghosts unless it benefited them in some way, and they’re not raking in that much from the tourism.

 

Jonathan, Margaret, Thomas, Patricia, and Nancy Delapore (Chapter 79 Echoes)

The disappearance of the Delapores was almost certainly covered up by Lumies. What actually happened, though, nobody knows. Well, slight lie there: the ghosts themselves know, but while a psychic (I’m covering her next) was able to get in touch, they didn’t want to talk about it. We do know that Margaret wasn’t feeling too great after the birth of their son Thomas and the doctor prescribed the country air and after an inheritance the Delapores were able to do just that. At first, the air seemed to help, just in time for the birth of twins Patricia and Nancy. And then Jonathan took a turn for the worse. He’d started out an absolute sweetheart, but the last time he was seen in public he went on a rant about how the mansion was going to swallow them whole. That’s probably where the Illuminati would like the story to end, and unfortunately they covered their tracks well enough between bribing the cops and casting spells to interfere with magical investigation that’s very well where it might end.

 

Elena Zhelikhovsky & Francine Sanders (Psychic and Occult Hotelier) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

A lot of people have claimed Madame Zhelikhovsky is a fraud, specifically because if you’re a psychic you should be able to see a car crash coming. Most of them had been looking for an excuse for a while, though, because two unmarried women running a business together is scandalous or something, not just plain awesome. None of the people who actually knew them had anything bad to say. Even Houdini, who had visited just to debunk her work, was less harsh than he was about most psychics. Probably because she didn’t actually ask for money; Elena specifically lived with her friend so she wouldn’t have to charge. While they both probably sincerely believed in the occult the ‘house-as-a-hotel’ was set up more like entertainment than a scam. She also refused to try to contact people’s loved ones, focusing on the (actual) ghosts in the mansion. Francine, meanwhile, ran a really nice hotel, was a great cook (always nice if you’re going to room with someone) and had a head for advertising. They’d probably get a kick out of the fact that after their deaths their ghosts became one more tourist draw, though.

 

Billy Lee (Hippie Serial Killer) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

At least we have a little more on this guy. Specifically, I was able to get my hands on his arrest report (which honestly matches pretty closely with the goofy horror flick in the 70s; which still shocks Shaun every time he thinks about it). Most forum posts argue about whether he was actually the leader of the hippie artist commune, but outsiders didn’t really know much. They mostly kept to themselves, only usually heading into town for supplies and the occasional usually unsuccessful attempt to sell their art. (The painters had a better time now and then, and some of the art still hanging on the walls of empty houses on Solomon Island is from that time; after the massacre a lot of it got sold off because tragedy sells and a lot of the civilians inherited the Illuminati’s mercenary attitude toward money.) No one’s proven that there was a leader, just those with more influence over the group than others. Billy Lee specifically was charismatic and well liked by the women (and some of the men), but the evidence points against him having specifically led the group to a remote mansion to be slaughtered. It wasn’t intentional, but it was what happened.

Personally, I think it was just chance. Something’s really wrong with the house. I’m attaching Shaun’s research on other tragedies like that; it’s generally a terrible idea to let clueless creative types live in tainted eldritch locations, and my best guess goes something like this: they were all affected. Billy just happened to be the first to lose it. Maybe where he slept was just closer to the source, or whatever. He held out for a while—there are records of witnesses stating he’d been acting paranoid and seemingly frightened of his own shadow on the supply trips for months—and by the time he snapped it was too late to run.

One survivor made it out the front gate: Harriet Braun. She ‘settled down’ in the worst meaning of the word, but after such a traumatic experience I can’t entirely blame her. She probably saw the massacre as some kind of sign that the hippie lifestyle gets you killed and that her parents had been right all along. She also refuses to talk about it, which makes a lot of the True Crime podcasts grumble.

Billy wrote messages in blood on the walls and was found naked in the lake “praying to pagan gods”. I wish the police had been a little more detailed in their report, because that would be really helpful in narrowing down the potential cause; Gladstone might be able to look at the poetry and make some connections. I’d say Shaun, but he’s busy dealing with Helwing’s Inquisition and he kind of sucks at interpreting poetry, too. I’m mainly seeing a lot of references to dreaming and nightmares, however helpful that is.

 

Tyler Freeborn (Conspiracy Theorist Blogger) (Chapter 79 Echoes)

You’re probably at least a little familiar with Tyler Freeborn and his blog. And podcast. And he’s branching out into video recordings. Shaun grumbles about him often enough. He’s tried to warn him often enough about posting about Orochi and Illuminati operations and conspiracies, I think out of a sense of solidarity, but Tyler doesn’t listen to that any more than he listens to all the legal threats and DMCA takedowns. Technically the platforms he’s on do that last part, and he will occasionally reluctantly take down stuff himself and then vaguepost about it and inevitably have to take down most of those too. He’s had to switch platforms, too, now and then, whenever they’ve gotten tired of his shit. I’ve traced roughly a dozen different accounts, more than half of which are still active.

He’s not wrong about what he posts. He has a journalist’s eye for the truth and he can’t be bribed to stay out of it. His grasp of folklore is higher than basically any civilian you could point at, having actually listened to and remembered every single Wabanaki legend the rest scoffed at. The only online posts he doesn’t get flack for are the ones where he’s seeking advice, like the best camera, how to improve lighting, sound quality, software. I ran the math (mostly because it was fun and I needed the distraction) and he does barely make enough between them to fund his continuing obsession.

Barely.

He does spend a lot of time trying to warn others. I’d like to think that a couple people survived an ak’ab encounter or something having just listened to him or read his post as entertainment, but he can be a little intense at times. I don’t think he has anything else, though.

I can’t be sure—again, I’d need more time for this. But I’m pretty sure it’s actually the Dragon keeping him funded and protected from legal issues. It’s all random. There’s no pattern, other than the motive. They’d love to poke Lumies and snakes in the eye with a stick. It’s just a little too random, you know? Anyone could be interested in his content, and truckers are one thing because truckers are always represented high in the podcast-and-audiobook crowd, because they’re bored out of their skull on the drive, but whenever I’m stuck on the puzzle of ‘what’s the similarity between an eight-year-old and a real estate agent in Singapore other than being subscribed to the same place’, and whenever things start getting that random it’s usually a sign of the Dragon.

 

Chief Sasquatch (Chapter 80 Echoes)

I was really hoping the Sasquatch weren’t actually extinct and they’re not, thankfully. Not thanks to poachers, but it’s really seeming mostly like they’ve perfected their hiding skills to survive. There’s so much we could learn from them, and what I’d give to have a conversation. Not right now, and obviously there’s the language barrier, but I have faith that two pretty intelligent beings can hash that out somehow. Among other things I’d love to pick their brains on wards. You’re never too good to pick up a few extra tips.

 

Friendly Ak’ab (Chapter 80 Echoes)

Okay, I wasn’t going to highlight this, but these supposedly ‘unintelligent pure evil’ critters not only actually listened to Desmond’s negotiation and left when asked, they’re actually keeping it up, which is awesome, and not just because it’s making Shaun lose his mind. They’re actually helping out the Sasquatch (and a little more reluctantly, the Wabanaki). Sure, they’re maybe just mainly trying to keep their little adorable killer moth babies from getting smacked down, but still. They’re actually easier to talk with than Helwing’s brigade.