Protagonists#

• Short, Lance - Foreign Service Officer (Γιάννης)
• Miller, Liam (Agent Dave / Jocko) - Naval Special Warfare Group One (SEALs) (Παναγιώτης)
• Lensing, Emma - Professor of Philology (Τάσος)
• Bennet, Wendy - Criminal Intelligence Analyst / Assistant Professor of Criminology (Κωνσταντίνα)

Recovery - Wednesday, May 31st, 2017#

Agent Myra drives Agent Jocko to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno for surgery. He leaves his rented vehicle in the hospital’s parking lot, unaware that surveillance cameras are recording his actions.

Later in the day, Agent Myra was notified of the successful completion of the surgery.

Clean-up Operations#

Anthony Pitzerelli informs Agent Locke that Anthony Cooper should be regarded as an asset and should be apprehended alive for questioning and study. He also lets her know that he can temporarily halt Sparks PD from performing forensics and tampering with evidence at Caffeine Cantina’s crime scene, by citing federal jurisdiction.

Agent Myra contacts Lt. Willstater for assistance. He provides a summary of recent events.

• Learned about Baraclough’s murder while monitoring Reno’s police radio frequencies.
• Collected evidence from the crime scene, including a fingerprint found in a glove, which led to information on BLA carter and the sicarios.
• Investigated the owner of the car used in Pena’s murder, spoke with Tammy Lynn-Cassidy, which led to identifying Hernando Roland as the actual owner and locating him at his workplace, Caffeine Cantina.
• Noted that Agent Jocko is hospitalized and should not be investigated further.

Agent Myra’s attempt to convince Willstater was unsuccessful. (Failed his Persuade roll 83% on a 78%).

Agents Locke and Nikita arrive at Caffeine Cantina and perform the following activities:

• Remove Agent Myra’s blood and prints from the scene.
• Investigate Hernando Roland’s house:
  • Collect drugs, weapons, and maps of Reno with pertinent locations circled and routes marked.
  • Discover Roland’s body is hidden in the drywall.
  • Take Santa’s notebook, showing entries for the killings: time, place, how many need to die. It mentions no one by name. The final entry in the notebook is for June 2.

Agent Locke picks up Huxian Zen from the animal shelter he was earlier taken to.

She then assists Special Agent Earnest Manning and finds that the location of Grbhgrsnh92’s IP address should be located less than 1km south of Greater Nevada Field.

Tapping into Hypergeometry – Thursday, June 1st, 2017 – 01:00#

Agent Nikita arrives at the hospital. She requests to see John Doe who underwent surgery earlier in the afternoon after a shootout. The police guard notes down her FBI badge credentials and lets her in the room.

She finds Agent Jocko with a dead bat in his teeth, removes the animal, and calls upon the favor of the dark mother, Shub-Niggurath.

Her Healing Balm and restores life back to Jocko (10HP).

Agent Jocko disarms, knocks out, undresses and put the guard in bed. Writes down a note next to his: “The voices told me to do it.”

On their way out, Jocko gets caught on camera (Critical Failure - 100).

Scientia Mors Est#

The agents gather at Atlantis Casino Resort Spa. Everyone realizes that Jock has a slight tint of the Scent.

Agent Lock receives the mathematics equations from Dr. Iris Hill. After studying them, she realizes the following:

• The killings are placed in multiple dimensions. These are:
  • Time and the three dimensions of space.
  • The blood of a killing.
  • Perception. The killers deliberately looked up to the watching drone and to whoever would watch the footage, communicating their awareness of each other.
• The placement of each killing in those dimensions forms a design, a sigil in dimensions seen and unseen, drawn in the world and in the perception of observers.
• The killing at Rancho Manor Drive on June 2 will be the last. That will finish the strange and bloody design.
• Whoever knows the pattern and its purpose is subject to the ritual. The next time they come in sight of a Persistent Vigil drone, they will vanish.

She keeps the knowledge to herself to protect others. “Scientia Mors Est”. “Knowledge is death”

The Guru#

Early in the morning of 1st June 2017, Agent Myra disguises himself as a guru / cult leader and heads out to the nearest mall center with wi-fi access. From there he sends an e-mail that was prepared by Agent Locke to Kim Boyer from Brigid e-mail.

The e-mail states the requests for the following:

• To view the glitch that appeared on the date of Norah’s disappearance.
• To find and locate the sicarios.
• To not talk to the police.

Twenty minutes later, Myra receives a reply with a URL and then rushes back to the hotel.

The Glitches#

The agents view the two glitches from Norah Brigid’s disappearance and Barraclough’s murder:

The Hell Glitch#

• Norah Brigid drives to 1281 Gault Way. She gets out of her car. She begins to cross the street. She looks back. She’s gone.
• The drone’s view of the same event was interrupted by a single-frame view of a bizarre landscape, seen from far overhead, a desert whose topography does not match that of Reno at all.
  • A straight, black line runs across the northeast. It is the thin shadow of a single, immense structure at least four kilometers long, clearly not a natural formation.
  • The lighting is strangely soft, as if coming from two directions.
  • Zooming in reveals cracked and craggy terrain and unidentifiable trees of weird proportions that grow from outcroppings.
  • A small pattern, perhaps of stones carefully placed, can be seen near the center of the image. The pattern is countless rocks gathered to form a message in three words: “HELP RANCHO MANOR”
  • A corpse lies nearby with red blood spread in every direction. It is Norah Brigid.
  • If one accepts the image as something real, assembling the message must have taken hours or days. Yet the timestamp shows the photo was taken only half a second after the last photo of Brigid in the street.

The Death Glitch#

A black 2008 Chevrolet Malibu emerges from the 401-499 South Sierra Street parking garage at 10:20 P.M. and takes backstreets to Gault Way, avoiding traffic cameras.

At 10:50 P.M. three men get out wearing ski masks and plastic coveralls and carrying what look like tools. They cross quiet yards and come to the Barraclough house from the back. They kick in the back door and enter. They drag Barraclough out to the patio in back and hack her to death. After a few minutes, they put bloody coveralls, gloves, and tools in a trash can. They walk back to the car. One of them looks up toward the drone and waves. They drive into the West Stadium Parking Complex at the University of Nevada, Reno, taking backstreets and avoiding traffic cameras. Footage loses them there.

• This glitch emerges with the murder of Lyudmila Barraclough at 1281 Gault Way in Sparks.
• It is all black with the infrared camera.
• No source of heat whatsoever. It doesn’t show an absence of data but an ambient temperature of −273° Celsius or −460° Fahrenheit.
• The agents cannot resist the suspicion that they are somehow witnessing the universe after heat death.