Event - Material Goods

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Material Goods

➥ By Hook or By Crook

(cw: potential for violence, criminal activity, bombs/bomb threats, injury, incarceration, police brutality)

It's not difficult to identify the crates marked for Things of Beauty. They're colorful things, some might even say garish. Whoever chose them has a particular sort of taste, and it seems to be stuck somewhere in the 70s. They're stacked up on one of the docks, waiting to be loaded into delivery trucks by burly dock workers who look alternately annoyed by the hideous crates and disturbed by something about them. Anyone stopping to eavesdrop will hear one of them mention that he heard the crates murmuring. The concerns will be dismissed quickly as they move to load up the trucks, though.

The boat that's brought these over seems… confusingly small, like it's something local, rather than anything international. Getting onto the ship, itself, would be impossible during the day, and it seems to leave after having dropped off the boxes, heading out of port and off to places unknown. Anyone checking the ship's name–The Tarabroo–will quickly find it's not a ship that seems to be appropriately registered. The Tarabroo, as an internet search, does bring up some interesting information about a black hound with two snouts that oozes gasoline and breathes fire. It seems to be a legend associated with the Appalachian region.

There are, of course, many ways to disrupt the supply chain, and while stopping the actual boat that brought things isn't an option, there's slashing tires, incapacitating drivers, and attempting to shift or destroy cargo. However you try to stop things, best be careful not to get caught. There's security on the docks day and night, and they don't take kindly to intruders. You might find yourself boxed, tased, or otherwise incapacitated, if caught, and arrested by the police if a longshoreman doesn't decide to just punt you into the harbor for getting in their way. Enjoy the very icy swim.

Or maybe you're going the more… call in a bomb threat, or a gas leak, or otherwise cause a mess of paperwork route. It's not a simple task, either way. The people dealing with the bureaucracy at the docks seem to be uncannily well-organized and are quick to dismiss obvious lies. There might be more luck with bomb threats and gas leak notices at Things of Beauty, but after one or two, the police are going to catch wise to lies and start looking into exactly who has been making those calls.

For those who are caught, either in the act on the docks or making calls that tie up police resources, you'll find yourself chucked into the city jail for a night, maybe with someone else who was caught. The police seem to have varying degrees of what's considered appropriate use of force against those they catch, especially once they find out they're associated with ADI. You're horning in on their turf and making their lives difficult? How about they leave the lights glaring on you all night while playing some really annoying music and taking away any semblance of comfort? If you got arrested by a particularly angry officer, you might even end up with some bruises or a bloody nose for your trouble, before you're released.

➥ Comfortably Numb

(cw: body horror, injury (hands/arms), bleeding, mouths where there should not be mouths, supernatural drugging/apathy)

Despite best efforts, at least some of the product intended for Things of Beauty do actually make it there. Not many, but a small amount. ADI is tasking volunteers with the mission of acquiring whatever product has made it into the hands of the public… by whatever means necessary. (Which will likely amount to stealing.)

What is the product? Well, it appears to be… phone cases that have the approximate appearance and texture of flesh. Maybe even human flesh. With so much apparently persuasive marketing ahead of time for a product that will “change lives”, the fight to acquire one of these phone cases is intense and people are paying absurdly high prices for them. Those that aren’t able to buy the phone cases from the store itself can be seen offering even more money to those walking away with the precious goods.

Their efforts are all apparently in vain, though. Once someone has their hands on a phone case, they seem to be even more obsessed with it than they were with obtaining it. Any attempts to get them to relinquish the object–either legally or through less honest means–are rebuffed. They also appear to be very reluctant to let the cases physically leave their hands as well.

Even when the cases start growing mouths. Toothy mouths that are employed to bite at their hands. If people notice this disturbing occurrence, they don’t appear to care at all and continue to jealously guard their possession even as it makes a mess of their hands. Victims of these cases can be identified by the blood covering their hands, if they don’t happen to be holding on to the case.

Tracking down and retrieving all the cases will take a few weeks. It also poses a bit of a logistical challenge. Seeing the victims being utterly unaware or uncaring of their mangled hands doesn’t make any sense… until you physically come into contact with one of the cases. Then the reason becomes crystal clear (or will become crystal clear, in hindsight.) Touching them–even with gloved or otherwise protected hands–quickly begins to produce both an obsession with keeping possession of the object and an indifference to pain of all kinds, including emotional. Disposing of them becomes unthinkable, which poses something of a challenge for the mission characters have been given. However, if the cases are taken out of a person’s possession, both the numbing and possessive effects quickly wear off. They can then be destroyed or even just thrown away. Hopefully where no one else will be able to find them again.

➥ Feed Me, Kahlil

(cw: severe emotional distress, emotional blackmail, internalized victim blaming, kidnapping, injury (hands/arms))

Things are not beautiful at Things of Beauty. In the days leading up to the launch the proprietor, Kahlil Nassir, sporadically haunts the place with a wide-eyed, tearful look and bandaged hands he tries to hide under long sleeves, his presence peppering the place with outbursts at complaining customers and his own numb, blank-faced employees alike. Weirder than that, perhaps, is how often he isn't seen around his shop at the height of the new product launch and the days following. ADI's investigations department has been having trouble sniffing out just where he's been going; it appears that he hasn't gone home in at least half a week by the time they finally give up on subtlety.

On the morning of January 18th, Kahlil is hauled kicking and screaming into an interrogation room on floor B1 of ADI headquarters. It seems that a pair of native ADI investigators took it upon themselves to stake out Things of Beauty and caught him pulling into the alley behind the shop several hours before opening time. He was driving a car that wasn't his own and that investigators suspect might be stolen, and at the time they apprehended him they also confiscated several cardboard boxes full of more fleshy phone cases that had been in the car's trunk.

This rather heavy-handed approach has not been immediately fruitful. Kahlil is clearly terrified but has been refusing to answer questions. Tensions are high at ADI; not all staff believe that bringing him in was the correct move, and removing him from the situation doesn't seem likely to have completely cut off the supply chain or sales of the phone cases. He's here now, though, and information is needed. Anyone who thinks they can get him to talk will be allowed to try, though higher ups make it clear that torture is not permitted.

➥ The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

(cw: body horror, uncanny valley, pregnancy imagery, loss of skin, implied animal death, implied human death, unsanitary conditions, self-doubt/body image issues)

The warehouse is virtually silent when people enter. No sounds of industrial machinery, no signs that anyone is there, just the low hum of electric lighting and a heater running. The entryway appears to be utterly unremarkable, and it's not until moving deeper in that people might begin to notice something off. It starts with a smell, the scent of rotten, putrid meat, and the deeper into the heart of the warehouse one travels, the more pronounced that scent grows. The walls, too, take on a moist, unpleasant sheen, turning from an industrial gray to something that looks almost… living, flesh-like. Touching the walls, people will find they feel warm and quiver slightly. It's like touching the inside of a mouth. The doorways, too, seem to be warped, appearing to be more like gullets than anything else. They squeeze inward whenever someone passes through, shrinking just a tiny bit more with each passage. If there are too many people going in, they may find it significantly harder than they expected to leave.

There's a sound in the air, carried faintly through vents, and growing louder as people move toward the center of the warehouse. It's a bleating sound, like there are animals being kept in this place. Finally entering into a large central room, the source of the sound becomes clear: This room is infested floor-to-ceiling with what at first appear to be plants with fuzzy white flowers. They're roughly the size of fists, and in the form of giant puffballs on thick, glistening green stalks. The bleating is louder in this room and seems to be coming from the flowers. Anyone checking closer will find that the flowers are actually malformed lambs, their stalks more like umbilical cords growing out of their stomachs, propping them up.

All around the room, there are scattered evidence of animals being fed to the lambs. Blood and bits of bone are visible in the field of flesh. For the keen-eyed, they might also spot what appears to be some blood-stained clothes and larger bones.

The lambs will nip at anyone reaching for them, and those who manage to pick one up without being bitten will be in for an unpleasant surprise. The lambs split open, once they're 'picked,' sloughing off their skins and transforming into… the phone flesh cases being sold at Things of Beauty. These 'freshly formed' phone cases seem to have a different effect than their packaged and shipped counterparts. Instead of biting, they whisper.

They whisper your deepest insecurity into your mind. They promise they can take that away if you just hold them, if you just feed them. Unfortunately, these early stage phone cases haven't developed a numbing effect, yet, and when they bite, it hurts, but maybe it's worth if for them to be able to take away the thing plaguing you most?

Those not waylaid by the cases will have a tricky time dealing with the plants themselves. They don't seem to respond to being burned with fires fizzling out on their uncomfortably moist bodies and within the warehouse that pulses almost like it's a living thing itself. There are other options, though. Poison maybe? Hacking them to pieces? Eating them? The warehouse has all of the standard safety equipment one might think of. How would you go about murdering a field of fleshy flowers that grows back at a disturbingly rapid pace? The lambs seem to be able to regrow from any part of a live plant.

➥ Mod Notes

• GENERAL - Players are welcome to play NPCs for themselves when they are needed in a thread. If you need more information on general behavior for these types of NPCs, please feel free to ask! In general, the information provided in the prompt should be sufficient and you're welcome to make up any details beyond that for your specific scene. Please remember that character deaths are permanent and plan accordingly!
  
  
• BY HOOK OR BY CROOK (15-16 January) - Information on the Tarabroo as a cryptid is sparse, but stories seem to tie its appearance to disasters involving mines, particularly anything where a collapse or explosion led to the release of a tailings pond. These ponds hold the poisonous cast offs generated during mining operations and are highly toxic. When they break and run downstream, it can poison a landscape for miles.
  
  Anyone attempting to look into the crates at the docks will get a sneak preview of the flesh phone cases, but not have time to really do much with them.
  
  In terms of the dock disruptions, players are encouraged to get creative! Not every officer will be abusive if your character ends up arrested, but some will be. Characters will be held overnight, then released with a fine ranging from $500-$2,000. No complaints to the police from those who are jailed will be taken seriously, but ADI will help to pay fines... provided you're working with them regularly.
  
  
• COMFORTABLY NUMB (16-31 January) - The effects of the phone cases are not instantaneous, but they do come on quickly enough that characters attempting to steal and dispose of them on their own will have serious difficulties in accomplishing the second part of the task. The phones can be dealt with in any way that destroys them except for the use of fire (thus neutralizing their effect) or brought into ADI for disposal. (Or they just can be thrown away, though that does run the risk of them being rediscovered and is not ADI’s preference.)
  
  
• FEED ME, KAHLIL (18 January) - Characters will have the opportunity to talk to Kahlil in this prompt. Please respond to the NPC Threads comment below for responses from him. Shortly after he's brought in, investigations reveal that the car he was driving belongs to Hakeem Williams, a retired bank teller who was reported missing last week. Legally-minded individuals might realize that a private investigations company like ADI "taking Kahlil into custody" constitutes kidnapping–Kahlil is certainly aware of that fact.
  
  
• THE VEGETABLE LAMB OF TARTARY (18-19 January) - While the vegetable lambs' whispering will mainly focus on body image insecurities, if your character does not have those, they will hear the lambs whispering about other insecurities that plague them. Fire is the only option that will not work to kill the lambs, and they're numerous enough that no one person will be able to wipe them all out, whatever method they're using. Once the lambs are killed, the walls of the factory will revert to normal walls. Until then, they will appear to be uncomfortably close to real flesh and will bleed if cut. The 'blood' that comes out will appear to be putrid, black, and corrosive.

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Comments

NPC Interactions

[apocalypsehownpcs]

If you would like to interact with Kahlil in the "Feed Me, Kahlil" prompt, please post here!

[lesbeau]

[As much as Beau follows a moral code, this wouldn't be the first time she was responsible (directly or indirectly) for kidnapping someone. Whoever this guy is, he has to know something, and if he's being haunted by something maybe they can offer some kind of deal or protection to keep it at bay. Whatever the reason, the best thing Beau does is find the truth, and she's going to.

Which is why as soon as she gets clearence, she's sauntering in, pen behind her ear and notebook in hand.]

Hey. Kahlil, right? I know it's probably stupid to say this is a decently safe place to talk, but it's the best you've got right now, so I'd go with it if I were you.

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[He eyes her warily, hands resting on the table but his knuckles white where they grip one another.]

You're not the police. You can't do this to me. Let me go, I won't tell anyone, I just have to get back to--I have to go. You have to let me go.

[lesbeau]

[She just sighs a bit, sitting down opposite him and removing the pen from her ear.]

Yeah, yeah, we're not. But I don't think you want them in on this. Not with all those skin cases on you that would start biting them.

[Beau looks towards him, serious but level. It's going to take a lot to get this guy to trust her, but if she has to get violent, she probably can.]

I dunno what other people have said to you, but it sounds like to me you're just a guy in over your head with some dangerous stuff. We can help with that.

would you like to forward date this to after his threads with Aelwyn and Meredith below?

[apocalypsehownpcs]

I don't have anything like that on me. You people took all my stuff, remember?

[His stuff meaning those cardboard boxes full of fleshy phone cases. Yep.]

Say I believe you. Why should I trust you?

[aelwyn_aberration]

[Aelwyn enters, a notebook and a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. She flashes him a small disarming smile as she sits across from him in the interogation room.]

Hello, Kahlil. My name is Ren. It's a pleasure to meet you. Do you know why you're here?

[Hopefully he wasn't getting sick of the good cop routine. Luckily, she's not planning on keeping it up for long.]

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[His eyes are fixed on her from the moment the door opens, wary and cornered.]

No.

[He doesn't sound too sure of that.]

You know I'm not here of my own free will? That's kidnapping.

[aelwyn_aberration]

[She shakes her head and clicks her tongue.]

Khalil, Khalil, Khalil. If this relationship is going to work, some degree of commmunication is necessary.

[She leans forward resting her chin on her hands with a knowing smirk and stare.]

I think you know exactly why you're here, Khalil. And I think you know that nobody's coming to rescue you.

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[He leans back, withdrawing as far as he can in his chair, and stares at her for a long, long moment. His mouth is trembling now and for a moment he gives up his meager efforts to look defiant.]

Are you going to kill me?

[henchgal]

Meredith shows up to the interrogation room with a file folder in hand. She quietly sets everything on the table, laying out a notepad and a couple of pens, the folder, and two glasses of water. There's a lot of show in making sure everything is just so, before her attention turns to Khalil.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Nassir. I'd like to ask you a few questions."

She has never done this before, but she thinks she may have a fresh angle on things.

[apocalypsehownpcs]

He watches her intently, trying and failing to pretend he isn't eying the glasses of water. It's been a hot minute, and she's the first to even imply to offer him a drink.

"I'd like to go home," he replies, not sounding the slightest bit hopeful about it.

[henchgal]

"I understand that, Mr. Nassir. We have some information we need from you before that can happen, though." Her tone of voice is even, edging toward sympathetic, as she sits down across from him. "Your cooperation will smooth the process here. The more you give me, the more leeway I have to help you."

She sets one of the glasses down within his reach.

[apocalypsehownpcs]

"I don't..."

He sighs, eying the water but not moving to take it. "It's not going to make any difference if I remind you this is illegal, is it? I don't see how this is going to end well for me no matter what I do."

[oldbookshop]

[ Aziraphale has to figure that, at the very least, he probably can't make things any worse by getting in here and trying his hand.

Although in his honest opinion, the fact that a "no torture" stipulation even had to be tacked on says some very unfortunate things about the quality of his new interdimensional colleagues. In general.

He knocks before he enters. This is purely because when he's not sure what else to do, he starts with manners. ]

Hello. My name is Aziraphale. I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but, well. Given the circumstances.

[ He makes a truncated "this whole situation" sort of gesture. ]

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[By this point, Kahlil would have a few things to say about Aziraphale's new interdimensional colleagues. The knock warns him, so he doesn't startle when the door opens but he is watching, wary. He looks tense but tired, like someone who's been on edge not just all day but for a long while now.]

...Given the circumstances. There's a lot of circumstances to give.

[oldbookshop]

As circumstances go, yes. Rather a hefty set to find ourselves carrying.

[ He settles himself very primly onto the other available chair, wringing his hands in his lap.

Been in more comfortable spaces for board meetings. And that's saying something. ]

I don't suppose you'd like to share anything you know about where those telephone cases were manufactured?

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[Kahlil watches him, looking a little dubious, trying to work out what the angle is this time. Aziraphale's question startles a mirthless little laugh out of him.]

I wish they were manufactured.

[More seriously, he frowns to himself, considering.]

They're plants. They grow...sheep. Tiny sheep like flowers. And when you pull them off the stem....

[He makes a motion like he's turning something inside out.]

That's where the cases come from.

[inlieuofadad]

Gil eases his way into the room, closing the door softly behind him. He's watched--or at least seen the results of--the work of some of the others.

For a second, he studies Khalil with sympathy and a little sadness, before smoothing his expression into neutrality. The emotions are sincere. They're also carefully staged.

He pulls out the seat across from Khalil and sits down. "From what I hear you've been good-cop bad-copped all day. How're you holding up?"

Gil lifts both hands. "Not a good cop question. I genuinely want to know."

[apocalypsehownpcs]

"...Gil?"

Gil is greeted with a look of wariness, followed by confusion, hope, and then wariness again. He's certainly right about what Kahlil's been through; he looks even more exhausted than his usual, like he's been running on nothing but adrenaline all day.

"I'm...I'm not okay, I think that's kind of obvious...you work for these people?"

[inlieuofadad]

"I work near these people," he says dryly. "There aren't a lot of options for someone in my position."

No harm in admitting his own helplessness here.

"They let you eat anything? I'm going to take a wild guess and say they haven't encouraged you to have a nap." This time, the concern in his expression is real and unstaged. "How long have they been holding you in here?"

cw semi-graphic description of torture in dialogue

[apocalypsehownpcs]

"...In your position."

If he sounds dubious about that...well, he doesn't have a ton of sympathy ready and available for anyone else's position but his own at the moment. Kahlil shakes his head.

"Someone called Ren gave me a soda, but only after threatening to tear my lungs out. I've been here all day; I don't think bad cops are big on naps."

Re: NPC Interactions

[the_archivist]

[Jon finally steps into the room. It had been seeing Martin's bloodied hands that had done it. This man had been at least partially responsible for what had happened to Martin. And, well, he's never been particularly rational when it comes to that.

He's dressed normally, like a researcher. Neat but a little rumpled, and he's smiling when he sits down and places paper and pen onto the table. As gently s he can.]

Hello. I hope they've not been treating you too harshly. Concern for loved ones makes people... act rashly.

cw semi-graphic description of torture in dialogue

[apocalypsehownpcs]

Oh, no, not too harshly. Only one person's threatened to brand me and tear my lungs out, but she got me a soda afterward. So I'm sure that's fine.

[Kahlil has, apparently, been through enough today to hit the point where he's getting sassy about it. Still, he eyes Jon distrustfully, waiting to see whether he's playing good cop or bad cop.]

Re: cw semi-graphic description of torture in dialogue

[the_archivist]

It isn't fine. And I'm- I'm sorry.

I'm not here to ask more questions either, not really. I imagine it's been... wearing.

days later

[apocalypsehownpcs]

[True to his word, Kahlil does sit down and write a statement for Jon. It seems Jon's powers worked on Kahlil for at least a while, but perhaps Jon will need a little more juice the next time.]

I've never been much of a businessman. I'm sure that's not a surprise, all things considered; Things of Beauty has been about to go under for most of the last ten years, long before it became...what it is now.

I should start at the beginning. My parents always used to say that they were living evidence that the American Dream could come true, that you could be whatever you wanted to be if you worked at it hard enough. But Things of Beauty was their dream, not mine. I grew up working the front counter after school and that shop's probably more of a home to me than my house is, but I never saw myself doing it the rest of my life. I wanted to be a software developer, can you believe that? It's not even an interesting kind of dream to have, but it was something I was good at, something that might get me out of Gloucester and away from old people and tourists haggling over dusty furniture.

Then Dad died, ten years ago now. His health had been declining for a while, but it was still a shock to me and Mom. Suddenly the question of what would happen to the shop once my parents weren't running it anymore wasn't totally theoretical anymore. Mom wasn't in any shape to run it alone and she was afraid of dying before she ever got to experience retirement, so...well, so I gave in. I agreed to take it on. And I've been running the place ever since. The problem is, I'm not so great at it, not like my parents were, and even if you know what you're doing the antiques market is in bad shape these days. But for Mom, and I guess for me too, knowing that the shop is still open and doing business is like still having a little piece of Dad around. I do the best I can; I started selling tourist stuff too, knickknacks and postcards and whatever, and I've mostly been getting by.

Last year was hard. Summer always used to be our biggest season. You'll see a spike around Halloween with people stopping here on their way to Salem or wherever else, but if you have a bad summer, that means you've had a bad year. It was bad enough I was looking at options I don't like to look at--do I let some of my people go, do I sell off Mom and Dad's furniture, not shop stock but the nice stuff they collected for the house--or do I finally just throw in the towel? And what do you know, as I'm going over the books again and again, that's just when help shows up.

It was August when Ignatius von Brandt first stopped in. He was nice at first, came into the shop a couple times to browse, and we got to chatting. He didn't throw an offer at me right away, and by the time he told me he had connections, that he knew people who invested in small businesses like mine, I liked him enough that I believed him. I remember when we shook hands over the deal; it's one of those memories that sticks in my brain. His hand was so warm to the touch, like he'd been sitting out in the sun, and at the time I found it kind of comforting. And I remember he said...because it was such a weird way to say it and I had a second where I thought it was some kind of race thing, I remember he looked me in the eye, and he said, "Yes, my boy, you'll do."

The money didn't come from von Brandt himself. It came from Faulkner, Yuan, Reid, and Eames, Incorporated. I don't have any proof of that, though. I keep clean books, everything legal, and going back into my records I'd be able to show you every deposit that came in...but there's nothing with their name on it. None of the letters I'm sure I got from them. It's all just gone. I didn't notice it right away though, probably would never have noticed if I hadn't thought I could get out of all of this if I figured out how to scrape enough together to give them their money back. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If the summer was rough, fall was worse. You might not know this, but everyone was hit hard when the Halloween tours all got canceled and people started talking like something a lot scarier than they'd wanted was happening in town. Or maybe you do know. Maybe you know more about that than I do, with what kind of work you've told me you do here. Either way, Things of Beauty was struggling with the tourism slump, and I got stuck with a bunch of unsold plastic skeletons and that kind of crap because I'd thought a little pandering would boost sales. That's when von Brandt's people started reaching out more often, asking when they were going to see a return on their investment. That's when they sent me all that creepy shit that's in the shop now, saying that since I couldn't make a profit on my own, I'd better read up on section whatever paragraph so-and-so of our contract--which I still can't find, by the way--about how they could dictate the terms of my business for me. I was ready to turn around and send it all back along with all the money no matter what I had to do to make that happen, but then...it arrived.

It was a plant. Just a weedy-looking little potted plant, nothing special that I could tell, but I'm not exactly a botanist. It didn't come with any kind of tags or instructions, just a note from von Brandt that he was trusting me to look after it. That was weird, but I had other things to worry about and I just sort of set it aside. It should have died, I thought, since I didn't water it, didn't even put it in a window for sunlight. But every day I'd come in and that plant on the storeroom shelf in the basement would be as green as ever, leaves getting bigger all the time. It even started to bud, a thick swelling at the center of the plant that grew and grew, almost too big to be a flower.

It was the same day I'd ransacked my accounts and finally gotten the money together--I was ready to send everything back, to tell those funders thanks but no thanks, get out of my shop and out of my life. It was when I was hunting for a letter from them, anything with a return address, when I walked past the plant in the basement for what must have been the hundredth time and it...it bleated at me.

The plant was mostly the same, but there was this fuzzy white thing on the end of the stalk where the bud had bloomed. I can't describe it any way other than to say it was a sheep. Just a tiny sheep stuck on the end of a stalk in this potted plant. That almost sounds cute, right? Except this thing was shaped wrong, all bloated out around the stomach where it connected to the plant, and when I touched it, it was...moist. And then it bit me. It hurt like hell, like a little piranha clamped onto my hand, and I swear it took a chunk out of me before I got my hand back.

There was a while there, after I came up out of the basement and my staff got all freaked out about the blood and helped me with the first aid kid--there was a while when I couldn't believe it had really happened. Like, I must have daydreamed it or hallucinated or something, because...what? Seriously? Tiny biting sheep on a plant? That doesn't make any sense, that's not a thing. But it was still there the next time I went down there, and it was still there a day later when I got another letter from von Brandt. It was all this stuff about how our partnership was finally bearing fruit and...he knew. He knew what he'd sent me and he thought it was funny. He told me I'd better feed it if I didn't want it to feed itself. And...and there was a postscript. It just said...

"Your mother likes flowers, doesn't she?"

Just that. And I mean, I couldn't, obviously I couldn't stop it at that point. This wasn't about money or even someone using the shop as a front for something, this was something that shouldn't even be possible and if I didn't keep playing my part...I had to keep playing my part.

The things grew like weeds. There was just the one to start, but it kept budding off and I'd have to track down all the little pieces it'd drop--I remember when I missed one and it rooted into the floor behind the storage shelves, it bit the hell out of my arm when I realized something was back there and went to pull it out. I tried feeding them cat food, thought maybe that was good enough, but I'm not being dramatic when I say these things wanted blood. I'd buy those frozen feeder mice from the pet store, whatever hunk of meat I could get from the butcher, but it was never enough and there just got to be more and more of them and they got hungrier and hungrier. I'm not proud of it...I trapped a few animals, raccoons and rabbits and birds, and I...it wasn't okay. None of it was okay, but I was getting by, I was playing my part.

They started filling the basement; at first it was just a couple of them that got out of the pots but then it was more and more and--I've got people who work for me. I've got neighbors. People who could get hurt, who didn't deserve to get dragged into my little personal hell. So I found a place I could put them, that old warehouse I told you people about. It took me weeks but I moved all of them out there, hauled out all the ones in pots, combed through the whole basement for any that got away. And they just kept growing, kept filling up the new space. I'd go out there and I could hardly think because it was so loud, all that bleating.

Late December, von Brandt got in contact with me again. Called and told me that January 16 was the launch date, but don't worry, they had the ad campaign on lock. That was all news to me, and I asked him, "launch what?" And he just laughed and told me to go pick some flowers and I'd see



[The handwriting trails off here. If Jon asks the guards who were with Kahlil, they'll say that he'd had his head down and had been writing nonstop like a machine for minutes on end before suddenly stopping. They'd asked if he was alright and he'd seemed groggy, then apologized and said that he wasn't feeling well and if they'd excuse him he'd rather not write down the rest. Kahlil seems to be of the opinion that he's shared the last parts of the story with ADI interviewers and was not willing to finish his written account once whatever impulse had led him to sit down and start it had faded. The story as-is will be somewhat nourishing for Jon's connection with the Eye, but unsatisfying in its incompleteness.]

[Mod note: This was more of an undertaking than originally anticipated! Future statements for Jon or other characters with similar powers may take the form of OOC summaries.]