Rebecca's Reports (7)

[madimpossibledreamer]

Slightly misquoted from Ian Fleming.

 

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

 

Huginn & Muninn (Odin’s Ravens) (Chapter 81 Echoes)

I actually kind of expected these two to show up after Shaun figured out that Beaumont was probably Loki. Maybe Odin, but...given how many times in the stories Odin’s had to clean up after Loki’s shenanigans, that’s probably why he’s keeping eyes on the situation. Trying to help out in his own ‘I’m not going to step in directly’ way. Maybe they even gave Rukh a few tips.
Shaun didn’t think we should expect anything. He was already really thrown off by Loki being here, let alone any other gods. It makes me wonder, though. As much as Shaun hates to be part of the normies, he agrees with them that the existence, the influence of huge numbers of pantheons is waning. Supernatural forces still being around, sure, but, you know, Twilight of the Gods or whatever. The data points the academics squabble over is the why. Is it like that one Merlin movie where it’s the belief of humans that sustains them and they just withered away? Is it infighting that messed them up? Were they kind of absorbed by the Filth and the Buzzing and other powers?
But I’m starting to wonder if it’s not that they’re just...gone, by this point. If a lot more of them aren’t more like Beaumont. Who’s going to be a pain to fight, I get why Shaun’s so shaken up like this, but at the same time, if this was old ‘from the stories’ Loki he would’ve managed a locating spell no issue and have brought about the end of the world already. Maybe, instead, they’re all just diminished. Elves that haven’t gone to the West and just fade away.

Widow Eleanor Franklin (Chapter 83 Echoes)

If you listened to the locals, the foreman’s widow is a witch with more than ten cat familiars and will curse you if you set foot on her property. Some, like the Sheriff and the Reverend, still take it as their duty to actually check on her, but even the adults are spooked enough by the ghost stories to stay clear. With Desmond talking to her, though, it’s pretty clear she doesn’t know a word of a spell, any of the protections are due to the cats and maybe territorial ghosts, and she’s actually fairly nice. She’s not even blaming the Wabanaki for everything anymore, though she’s still racist. Just...less so.

Samuel Chandra (Head of Orochi) (Chapter 87 Echoes)

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the full picture of Desmond’s meeting with Chandra—the signal kept cutting out, probably because of all the sophisticated Orochi jamming tech I’d love to get my hands on—but there’s a couple things about the picture that worry me. For one, Chandra being there in the first place. The fact that Orochi know about the supernatural and keep interfering in supernatural situations is easy enough to prove—one glance at the latest ‘cooperate with them’ orders from the Council is enough for that, though it’s worrying and kind of proves one of Shaun’s points about how sinister Orochi is that the Council seems to not be in charge. Especially when Orochi isn’t actually a Faction according to any of the charters, even one of the minor Factions, and it’s so new. Either they’re handing the Council stuff they can’t get from absolutely anywhere else, say, from the Phoenicians that have popped up on the grid again, or they’ve got blackmail. I’m guessing the second, but haven’t turned up what it could be. Yet.
They are offering stuff even the Lumies haven’t figured out. All those special bullets Sarge was bragging about to anyone who’d listen? Courtesy of Manticore.
But all that’s just Orochi. Tracing the company and some of its operations is easy. Easy to the point of suspicious. They’re covering their tracks decently well, but now that I’m looking at this closer, it’s too easy. Even the leaks are all one big PR campaign. Like having fake books to show the taxman. It’s done well enough that most people wouldn’t notice, but I’m not most people.
So...same deal with Chandra. Even all of the gossip columns, even all the stuff that’s relatively consistent...I don’t know that we should be trusting any of it. Kind of the opposite situation we were having with Beaumont. We were lucky enough to finally have a lead on Beaumont (who turns out to be Loki, the kind of nasty surprise that’s becoming way too common recently), but we have too many on Chandra and I don’t know if any of them are to be trusted.
What I have seen suggests that he’s maybe well-aware of what’s going on in his own company, helping curate their image and getting involved in a decent amount of the stuff actually at their HQ, he’s not usually involved with everything. That’d be insane for even, say, a Bee. It’s a megacorp with eight different companies; there’s not even enough time in the day to watch every employee at all times, which is maybe why some things (like lax security) are getting through.
But he talked to Desmond. Knows who Desmond is. Even if he’s just keeping a lot closer tabs on the secret world side of things than we thought, that’s still more than we knew. And the thing I can’t shake with how he was pretty much just able to blackmail Desmond into doing his dirty work is that he actually knows a lot more about Desmond than we do, and I don’t like that feeling.

Subject Zero (???) (Chapter 88 Echoes)

I usually don’t have a lot of nightmares about most of this. Unlike Shaun I haven’t needed therapy no matter how awful the data I’ve found in my research. That being said, to find that Orochi has not just been taking samples from the infected, but has either been infecting them or put in the effort to track down the first(?!?) Filth-infected human is, uh.

 

There’s a reason I’m hand-writing this particular report and putting this second part on a completely new page. I’m not letting this go. Shaun was right; Orochi are in way too deep and we can’t let them get away with this. A lab leak in a crowded city would be catastrophic, and Orochi personnel based on their track record so far don’t have the skills like any BSL-4 personnel necessary from keeping, say, Ebola from getting out, never mind a supernatural corruption virus(?). If anything their camp in Blue Mountain is proof of this—they weren’t just studying the ambient Filth, they were actively bringing in this Subject Zero in a non-specialized van to a bunch of temporary tents. Most of what I know about biological research is from the occasional research for the databases and zombie movies and even I know how stupid that is.
If their stupidity gets their own agents killed, that’s one thing. It’s not fine, but there’s a reason they get hazard pay and Orochi’s policies of paying out to the families are even more generous than the army (probably, like, a legal bribe). But putting the entire world in danger from their incompetence is all kinds of not okay.
I’ll be discreet. Looking into this is probably going to break all kinds of Council treaties. It’s probably better if you read and then burn this page in the fireplace in your office. Plausible deniability.

Adelheid Van Wieren (Chapter 90 Echoes)

So, an Orochi spy. I can tell you this much for sure: she’s not one of ours. Sending Desmond after her using blackmail confirms Chandra knows Desmond’s been trained to be an Assassin, which will get him in a research frenzy the second he has a spare moment. The possible superior mentioned heading to Egypt might be a woman, but given the travel it’s not Geary and anyone lower means it could be absolutely anyone. I’d need to have a look at the kind of data she was sent to find to be able to give any guess and I don’t have my hands on that, so it’s something to keep in mind but kind of a dead end in of itself.

Marianne Chen (Chapter 91 Echoes)

How’s that saying go, once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action? Something like that, anyway. With Marianne, we’re down to enemy action at this point. I’m not sure if the second one is Karen or the Orochi camp but the point still stands that someone in the government is treating Solomon Island like a lab experiment. Just like the army her group of the CDC was sent in without funding, without resources, without backup, and left to rot. The fact that she’s being considered affected with the decontamination showers and full hazmat suit says a hell of a lot of really scary things about the Filth. The worst part of it is...it’s not like I don’t see the thought process there. Everything’s been on the upswing, including all the Filth, so knowing how to deal with it is probably going to be needed sooner rather than when there’s an outbreak at the Pentagon or the White House or whatever. It’s even the kind of thing that we could use for restoring Agartha. That doesn’t mean being sweet or trusting is a character flaw, though. Or that war crime level human experiments aren’t war crime human experiments, even if you call them anything else.
This might be a slight departure from the actual story since Paul Gamelin claims that nobody else can shoot, but while it’s Maine and not, like, Wyoming I still feel like that’s slightly unrealistic. That being said it’s been long enough James might not be great at it anymore.

James Inawolet (Chapter 95 Echoes)

James here took classes and tried to start a local militia just to try to stop what happened with Simon Madahândo from ever happening again. The others apparently laughed at him, but as long as he was just one well-meaning guy with a gun rather than a “troublemaker” with anyone actually following him they didn’t seem to worry about it. He ended up helping out with the Wabanaki Village tours, mostly because when the Madahândo brothers tried to run it by themselves their bickering chased away the tourists, and it seems like his skills came in handy keeping the ak’ab and wendigo at bay when they tried to invade the tourist...I can’t call it a diorama because you can actually walk around in it, but kinda similar to that. Maybe more like Kirkgate? Though I think the Castle Museum people had more of Shaun’s eye for historical accuracy, and I don’t think that’s true of the Wabanaki Village here. Guess that made him more ready for what happened than most of the others.

 

Joe & Frank Madahândo (Chapter 95 Echoes)

Grief affects everyone differently. Joe and Frank decided to react to their father’s death with anger. And they’ve been taking out that anger on the entire world ever since. They’re not angry that he was killed. They blame him for his own death. Decided that magic and everything else is just superstitions that got him killed and they didn’t want to be anything like him and die, too. I can’t be sure, but it looks like they’re probably the two biggest hurdles to any nice family reunion. They’re nothing but nasty to their sister, honestly might try to attack their uncle if he ever actually tried to show up, and keep being asses to Old Joe, maybe hoping that if they make living in the trailer park as uncomfortable as possible he’ll finally leave.
There’s a single exception; they’re happy enough to play up the whole magic angle when it comes to tourism, all too happy to sell off “handmade” (mass-produced, or as close as you can get when you’re two greedy bastards with an eye for get-rich-quick schemes and don’t actually want to pay for much of an inventory) dreamcatchers, tomahawks—hell, they actually talked about giving tours to their graveyard. Which is an attraction that exists, sure, but that’s usually to, say, ones where famous people are buried, like in Hollywood or a couple here. To their credit they did decide against doing that, but I think they mostly came to the conclusion it wouldn’t be profitable. Lately, they’ve focused mostly on the casino, but honestly I think they’re doing far better just holding rigged games in their trailer to hustle wayward army men out of their money.

 

Joseph Cajiais (Old Joe) (Chapter 96 Echoes)

Old Joe, it seems, never had a knack for the magic, not like Simon, but he made his best attempt at it anyway. I wonder if it was meant as a kind of penance? He didn’t believe Simon was doing the right thing. He does view the land the more traditional way, that it’s less a matter of owning the land rather than living on it, working with it, but probably thought that protests weren’t going to do much. But then after Simon’s death, no one else wanted to remember any of it. The heritage, the history, the warnings. So Old Joe became the storykeeper. That’s the word he uses, apparently, because to be a storyteller you actually have to talk about it and for the most part he doesn’t. He memorized the rituals, knows enough about them to know they’re not Hollywood or comic book-y, but most of them he’s never even seen, let alone actually performed. He doesn’t have the intuitive sense for it like Ami. Still, he’s one of the friendlier people in the trailer park, when he’s not falling asleep in his chair in front of the TV.

 

Paul and Annika Gamelin (Chapter 96 Echoes)

To give these two some (grudge-filled) credit, I don’t think they knew they were selling tickets to go hunt an endangered sapient species or twisted former humans. They did actually take some precautions to make sure their tourist clients didn’t get their heads yanked off by a wendigo. And when push comes to shove they’re practical. Stepped up to arrange around-the-clock guards at the entrances, figured out rationing, all of that. They even go out and actually hunt what normal game or fishing they can to help keep everybody alive. Which makes the situation a little weird. I think they’re actually better people during the middle of an apocalypse, which isn’t something I can say about absolutely everyone or even most people. Annika’s apparently the brains, so she’s probably doing most of the logistics, and Paul’s the one that’s actually pulling off most of this stuff.

 

Dame Julia Beatrix Tyburn (Chapter 3 Halls)

I’d say I want to be Dame Julia when my hair’s all grey, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. She doesn’t know how to use computers, and as awesome as still potentially kicking butt at her age is, I want to be able to keep up with all the technical stuff. But I would love to have her kind of presence and the ability to call everybody else on their shit and actually have people listen, and while Shaun and I have gone through all the records of her exploits during the Great War we all know that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that never got written down, and I’d love to know those.

 

Geir Hilmarsson (Chapter 4 Halls)

Small observation that might not mean much: here’s a former Icelandic fisherman that signed up with the Templars a while ago and everything I’m seeing in his files says he’s really good at it. He seemed as unsurprised as I did when the Council showed up, so I’m figuring he must’ve called them, too. But, interesting tidbit: he also acted like he knew Desmond and maybe the main reason he even called for the Council to intervene was to save Desmond’s life. Desmond didn’t look like he knew Hilmarsson back, and we’ve already had way more than our fair share of inquisitions so I’m marking this one as a watch & wait.