Chill: Making Contact

Yesterday was Chill! I am very sleepy, which is nothing to do with Chill. Here's last time, on we go.

The envoys are in Nicholas Failor's car following their weird ordeal in the woods. Amelia Rostov is pretty wiped; she's not the most lithe person on the best of days and she had to really push herself to get out of the strange barrier zone that some Unknown being imposed. Mercy Williams is chilly and damp from the rain, but otherwise intact. Britt Lepus is mostly fine, as she spent most of this time in the trailer looking for (but not finding) Unknown influence on old SAVE papers.

The group talks a little about what happened and what the next steps might be. Digging up the area where the presumed SAVE envoy was buried might be a start, but they don't want to try and do that at night. They're all tired, but decide to check in with the four friends who are experiencing Unknown difficulties. Britt texts them, and Dustin and Danika reply. Jean and Rochelle don't, but they both have young children and might already be in for the night. They decide to do a drive-by, just to make sure no one's house is on fire or anything.

Rochelle lives nearby, so they check her place first. As they approach, they see a woman in a bathrobe walking along the street. They pull up and find that it's Rochelle, kind of stumbling along. Amelia gets out and gets in front of her, and touches her shoulder, using Disrupt. Rochelle starts, and then looks around, unaware of where she is. She says she must have been sleepwalking. Amelia walks her back home, and Rochelle's mother emerges from another room and speaks to her in Russian. Amelia asks what's being said, and Rochelle answers that her mother was reminding her that this has happened once before, but she didn't get out of her driveway. Rochelle goes to bed and Amelia wards the room.

Rochelle's mother notices this and then gets Amelia's attention before she leaves. "Ведъма?" she asks? Amelia's Russian isn't great, but she recognizes the word "witch." "Kind of?" she says. The older woman points to the bedroom then to the front door, and says "more." "She's done this more than once?"

Rochelle's mother holds up five fingers. "Five times?" Her mother nods, and then mimes typing at a computer, and then drops her head forward. "While she's working?" Another nod.

Amelia thanks her, and goes back to the car and reports all this to the envoys. They discuss why Rochelle didn't report this, but Amelia suspects she might not remember, or might be in denial a bit. In any event, with the ward Rochelle should be safe for tonight. They head to Jean's to check on them.

There's a light on at Jean's house, so Britt and Amelia go up and peek in. They see Jean's wife walking around the living room holding their son, but no sign of Jean. They decide to roll the dice and knock on the door; after all, she's up, hopefully she won't be mad (and hopefully Jean has told her at least something about what's been happening). 

She answers the door and is perhaps a little perplexed, but talks to them a bit. She tells them that Jean is asleep; their leg was hurting and they took a pill to help sleep. The envoys thank her and wish her luck with the little one (he's got an ear infection and is having trouble sleeping), and head out.

The envoys figure that they're best off sleeping in the same (warded) room, so they head back to Amelia's place. She wards the living room and they all bed down, and manage to get some sleep.

Next morning, Tuesday, July 9, the envoys wake up bright and early and rested. Britt texts the group for a check-in, and gets responses back from Jean and Rochelle (which makes sense, if Dustin and Danika were up later they might wake up later). They go and get some coffee and talk through their plan.

They decide not to immediately go into the woods to start digging up bones. Instead, they decide to do some research. They head to the trailer to go through papers and learn a little more about what's happening.

Amelia digs through the archives looking for names of former envoys in the area. She comes up with four: Desiree Cummings, Stan Walton, Dee Thorton, and Mimi Renault. They know who Mimi is and where she ended up. That might mean that Desiree was the woman murdered in the woods, and maybe Stan was the guy that did it (or, rather, whatever was possessing him). 

Mercy tries to get a sense of how long the HQ in Seward was active, but isn't able to come up with anything definitive. The last dates she sees are in 1998.  

Nicholas looks into learning the Art, and comes up with some stuff they already knew (the six schools), but also a little more consolidated info about how the Art is taught. Very generally, it involves focusing on the same feelings or instincts as sensing the Unknown, but then filtering those feelings through different areas of the body or mind. Want to learn Restorative Arts, you push those feelings through the body as a whole and the muscles, that kind of thing. Nicholas also sees some discussion of an upcoming "Symposium" in Seattle, and sees the name "David Robinson" mentioned as a speaker.

Britt takes the names that Amelia found and starts researching them. She learns that Stan Walton's body washed up on a beach a little ways south of Seward in late 2000. Desiree Cummings was reported missing in May 2000 (which lines up with her being the victim of the murder the kids witnessed). Dee Thorton died in a weird accident in Anchorage in 2000 - she fell down an elevator shaft. Apparently the door opened, she was talking on her phone and didn't notice that there was no elevator, she stepped in and fell to her death. There were witnesses and everything.

They do a bit more digging (and Mercy goes to work), and find that Desiree Cummings has a sister named Deanna who still lives in Seward. They decide to go see if she's feeling chatty. As they pull up, they see an older woman working in her garden. Amelia and Britt go to talk with her (Nicholas stays in the car). Amelia introduces herself as being from QCOM, and tells the woman (who is indeed Deanna Cummings) that she's working on a project to shine some light on missing and abused or harmed women from the area, and would she mind talking about her sister?

Deanna agrees and lets the two of them into her house (her ancient yellow lab, Callie, gives a perfunctory wuf and then goes the heck back to sleep). They all sit down and Deanna says that Desiree disappeared in May of 2000, but she'd been acting strange for a few years before that. Actually, Deanna thinks her sister joined a cult. She started hanging around with a group of people that took up a lot of her time, she wouldn't talk about what they did, and the only one Deanna ever met was a guy named "Stan." With something of a sinking feeling, Amelia confirms that the "Stan" in question was Stan Walton, and informs Deanna that Stan died a few months after Desiree disappeared. 

Deanna says that they held a service for Desiree a couple of years after she vanished (when she was declared legally dead), and Amelia asks if there was anyone at the funeral she didn't know. Deanna says that there were maybe five or six such people, but she doesn't know their names (obviously). Britt asks if there was a guestbook for the service, and Deanna goes upstairs to find it. She returns and points out a group of names that she believes were the people in question: David Robinson. Alison Ware. Mimi Renault. 

Britt and Amelia take some photos of the guestbook, thank Deanna for her time, and head back out to the trailer. The three of them start googlin'. "David Robinson" is a bust; it's far too common a name to get anywhere without more parameters. But as Nicholas searches for Alison Ware, he finds a personal web site that's password protected. "That seems kinda of SAVE-y," says Amelia. 

Nicholas obligingly types in "SAVEy" as a password. The page disappears and is replaced by a page saying "HOLD ON." And then a second later Nicholas' phone rings. 

"You've got ten seconds," says the voice on the other end. Nicholas, who isn't capable of saying anything quickly, takes a breath, but Britt grabs the phone and actually starts talking. Once it's clear that the envoys are indeed envoys, Alison is much more forthcoming. 

She was the office manager of the SAVE HQ in Detroit, she says, until that HQ was destroyed. She barely made it out alive, and she doesn't do field work anymore. She did, however, present at the Seattle Symposium in 1998; she's a master of the Kinetic School of the Art. David Robinson is a friend of hers ("he lives in New England somewhere, maybe Maine?"), and is a master of the Incorporeal Art. 

Alison gives them a crash course in SAVE history - started in the 1850s by some dudes in England, spread all over the world, had some ups and downs, one of the biggest downs was in 2000 when the Society was infiltrated and nearly destroyed. But then a Syrian woman named Hayat Nejem came along and taught SAVE how to survive and fight a bigger and badder enemy (she had been involved with the struggle against Al-Assad's regime), and SAVE shifted to its current model of mostly autonomous cells with some, but minimal, contact between them. She also mentions that some HQs still run on the old model of having lots of contact and organization, which is great, but the more you know, the more knows you. 

She tells them, too, that Anchorage used to have an HQ with maybe 20 people at its biggest (but to the envoys, that seems amazing; "we could have naps?!" says Britt). But Anchorage fell during the infiltration. She came out to Seward in 2002 for the service for Desiree Cummings ("she was a badass, really good at the Restorative stuff"), and worked briefly with David on trying to find out what happened, but there was so much else going on that they couldn't spare much time. She is not surprised to learn that Desiree was murdered, though is a little taken aback that it was Stan (or something wearing Stan) that did it. 

But on to the matter at hand: The envoys explain everything that's been happening, and Alison notes that the creature seems to be using them (and the four meditation friends, and Stef Copeland) to use powers through each of them. She tells them that creatures of the Unknown that show this kind of diversity of ability are generally pretty powerful and dangerous, but notes that it might be multiple creatures all summoned in the same act. The way to test that, she says, is see if powers are getting used simultaneously in different places (but does note that if something has its hooks into all of them, that might not matter - the Unknown is a bitch that way). 

Around this time, Nicholas' phone jumps out of his hand, spins around, and throws itself through the trailer window. Nicholas goes after it, and the wind immediately kicks up, blowing debris around and into him. He goes back into the trailer and Amelia wards it, and the wind immediately dies down.

Mercy, who'd been on speaker, calls back and confirms that everyone is all right, but then immediately gets an emergency call and has to hang up. Amelia goes to Alison's site and Alison calls her back (and actually gives her a number this time), and says that she'll do some digging on her end. 

Mercy heads out to her call, which turns out to be at a shop in a strip mall. It's called "Sweets of Seward"...that's Jean Cameron's store. A man is there waiting for them, and tells them that he went into the shop and saw someone lying on the floor bleeding. Mercy and her partner rush in and see that Jean is the one on the floor. Both of their wrists have been cut, the knife is lying on the floor nearby.

The two EMTs patch Jean up and get them onto a stretcher, but Mercy starts to feel a pain at the back of her neck, just like she did last night. The pain grows in intensity until her muscles start to spasm. She tries to fight it off with the Resilience discipline, and tells her partner that she thinks she's having some kind of neurological event, but then passes out. 

Britt texts the four friends and asks for a check-in, and everyone responds except Jean. Dustin says he's right near Jean's store, so goes to look in, but quickly discovers that there's no one there and a lot of blood on the floor. He talks to someone who says that one of the EMTs passed out and both the EMT and the person working at the store were taken to the hospital.

Hoping that Mercy is OK, the envoys ponder their next move...