So when Dr. Kirby Bellman calls envoys together at the Seward TGI Fridays, he includes two new faces: Kat Jameson and Tristan St. Cyr. Kat is a home health aide, fitness/weightlifting enthusiast, and practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu who happened to be working at Seward Rest Home when the fire started, and had the misfortune of seeing the living moss head. Her Drive is her belief that life is for the living. Tristan might not be Seward's only goth, but he's definitely the gothiest of them. He's a lifelong resident and has been studying the occult and paranormal phenomena online for years, and then found a few of the wayward SAVE papers that got lost from the community center. Recognizing them for what they were (more or less, the SAVE terminology wasn't necessarily familiar) he looked for and found their real owners, and SAVE has been interested in him ever since. His Drive is, obviously, to comprehend the Unknown.
On this particular Thursday (1/30/25), Dr. Bellman explains over cheese sticks that in the nearby city of Homer, AK (I mean, "nearby" is relative), an elementary school called Fireweed Academy has lost three teachers inside a week. None of the deaths look Unknown-related on the face of it, but this kind of string of "accidents" always has the potential to involve the Unknown. Dr. Bellman says this is the favorite kind of case, the kind that is probably nothing.
He gives them what info he has: On Wednesday, 1/22/25, science teacher Dean Torney slipped and fell on a staircase inside the school and cracked his skull. No one witnessed the fall. That Saturday, English teacher Tanya Valmier was shot in the chest in her home, and Bellman says that he's learned that the death was initially ruled suicide but then changed to accidental, and he's not sure why. Finally, just this past Tuesday, math teacher Donna Fitzroy lost control of her car and hit a tree, and was killed instantly. He doesn't have a lot more information than that, and again, hopes that this is just a run of horribly bad luck in the community.
The envoys get their stuff together, and the next day they jump into Kat's 4x4 and Tristan's van and head to Homer. They roll into town about noon, check into a hotel (where they haggle over rooms a little, until they decide that Arlo and Tristan get to share a room because Arlo doesn't mind sharing a room with Ialdabaoth, Tristan's pet raven), and then start their investigation. They decide that Tul, Tristan, and Arlo will head to the school - Tul knows an assistant coach who works there and figures that's an in. Kat and Kayla go to find a coffee shop and listen for gossip, maybe do some internet sleuthing.
When they get there, there's an ambulance parked by the door. As they walk up, they see a couple of EMTs pushing a stretcher out. A boy of about 11 lies on it, looking pale; the envoys look as he goes by and see no obvious injury or wounds, but he's got an oxygen mask on and his breathing is labored - probably an asthma attack. A bearded man and a woman with a stethoscope watch from the door until the ambulance leaves, and then the man says "thanks, Mary" and both turn to go in.
Tul catches the man before he walks away and introduces himself, saying that he's here to talk to Miguel; the man (one Cal Darbonne, the principal) points him to the office to get a pass and says that Miguel's in the gym. Tristan starts a conversation with Cal and uses Telepathic Empathy to help guide it, and learns that Cal is overwhelmed - he's lost three good teachers in terrible accidents, he made the decision to keep school open but opinion from parents was about 50/50 and he's not at all sure he did the right thing. The boy that was taken away in the ambulance, though (Nat) is going to be OK, he just had an asthma attack, but the nurse was there quickly and got him breathing again. Cal doesn't know any connection between the teachers, other than they all worked here - they weren't the same age, they weren't really friends, they were at different points in their careers, they didn't teach the same grades or the same subjects. He feels that maybe the school is cursed somehow, but recognizes how silly that is. He's just under a lot of pressure, and is clearly grieving. He mentions that moving forward and finding some normalcy is maybe the best strategy - Donna Fitzroy even planned on having a test in her pre-algebra class on Monday.
Tul and Tristan get passes and head to the gym to find Miguel. Miguel is happy to see Tul, and talks with him about the situation, but doesn't know much more than Cal did - except he does mention that all of the stairwells have security cameras and the one that should have caught Dean Torney's death "wasn't working."
Arlo steps out to have a smoke and then lingers in the vestibule. A security guard checks in on him and reminds him that there's no smoking on school grounds. Arlo chats with him, but he knows about what the other staff did - terrible accidents. The guard isn't sure if school should still be open, but they're going ahead - there's even a basketball game tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, Kayla and Kat find a place called Captain's Coffee Cafe and Bakerium not far from their hotel and decide to grab some coffee and pastry. Kat notes a bunch of people in scrubs, and then realizes that the Cafe shares a building with Hospice of Homer. The two of them sit and eavesdrop, and hear a couple of people talking about a mechanic. One recommends taking her car to "Gregor's Garage," as the guy who works there does good work and doesn't overcharge. The other tells her that the mechanic in question actually died recently - he was working under a car and the jack collapsed or something! Kayla does a little quick research and discovers that Baines Gregorov (42), the mechanic in question, died a couple of weeks ago (1/14/25), and was survived by his brother Tom (38), his sister-in-law Judy (36), and his nephew Samuel (11). They also note that the garage is right across the street, so after lunch they decide to go have a look.
Back at the school, Tristan and Tul chat with the secretary and ask about the video feed and whether it's working. She says it is, though it malfunctioned when Dean Torney died. Tristan, after using Telepathic Empathy again, notes that she really wants to talk about this to someone, so pushes a little, and she shows them the footage. The camera catches Mr. Torney going down the stairs, and then glitches - static, pixelations, and then the camera on the next landing catches him lying at the foot of the stairs, bleeding from the head. But apparently, just those two cameras glitched during those few seconds.
Kayla and Kat go across the street and check the place. There's a sign in the door saying that they're closed indefinitely. They check around the back and find a door leading into the garage, and Kat expertly picks the lock. They enter the garage and look around - there's the scissor lift, there's smears of blood on the ground where Baines would have died - and then Kayla focuses and senses the Unknown.
Kayla experiences the Unknown as weird, otherworldly echoes, and they get louder as she gets closer to a drain in the floor. Kat checks it, and there's some smears of blood, but no detritus, which in a garage like this you'd expect. Did the police clean it out?
They're pondering this when the light clicks on and a woman in her early twenties asks "who the hell are you?" Kat notes that she has a phone in her hand and "911" is already dialed, she just hasn't hit "send" yet. Kat and Kayla talk her down, falling back on the old "we're from QCOMM in Seward and we're here to help" cover story. The woman - Sheri - says that she worked her with Baines, and that his brother Tom is thinking about selling the place to a Take 5 or something; he doesn't want to run or own the business himself. That puts Sheri out of a job, though Kat points out that good mechanics don't hurt for work, at least. Sheri isn't able to tell them much; Baines was working late, the lift's hydraulics failed and a car crushed him. She found him in the morning. They do ask about the drain, and Sheri says that she cleans it every couple of months, as it gets clogged with lugnuts and other metal junk and oil, but she hasn't cleaned it since before Thanksgiving.
Sheri gives them Tom Gregorov's card, and shoos them out. The envoys reconvene at the hotel and talk through everything they've learned. Tristan is very interested in the drain, and wonders where the blood is going. Maybe they could go into the sewers and look? ("Seriously?") They figure that Samuel Gregorov might be part of this - he attends Fireweed - but they aren't sure how.
The envoys plot out timeline, and look into who else has died in Homer over the past couple of weeks. Baines died on 1/14/25, and then nothing out of the ordinary for a week (there are deaths, of course, there's a hospice, after all), and then Dean Torney died 1/22/25, Tanya Valmier on 1/25, and Donna Fitzroy on 1/28. Nothing since...unless the asthma attack today is related? Tristan verifies that there's no history of this kind of thing happening in Homer, no "one every 23 years" kind of situation. This seems to have started with Baines Gregorov.
They decide to sleep on it and then tomorrow check the pipes beneath the garage, the accident site where Donna Fitzroy died, and see if they can learn more about Tanya Valmier's death.
They bed down, and Tristan dreams:
He's in a gym, clearly at a school. Where the bleachers should be is the remains of a scissor lift, a wrecked car, and smashed metal. He can see blood oozing out from under the wreckage, but it's oozing in the wrong direction, like something is sucking it in. Behind it all, he's aware of a loud, constant, ticking, like an alarm clock. It stops, and he realizes his heart has stopped as well.
Tristan wakes with a start, which has the effect of waking up Arlo, too. Tristan asks if he hears ticking (he does not), and then sods off for the shower. The envoys split up - Tristan, Tul, and Kat go to the garage to try and get into the sewers, while Arlo and Kayla decide to try and get hold of Tom Gregorov.
Kayla calls Tom Gregorov and he immediately hangs up ("take me off your list"). Arlo calls back and manages to get him talking, explaining QCOMM. Tom doesn't need anything from them and isn't much interested in talking to him, but does let slip that Samuel was close to his Uncle Baines.
The others find a manhole near the garage, Kat pulls it up, and they descend. The find where the drain empties, and Tristan senses the Unknown, but doesn't get anything. If there's something supernatural, it hasn't fallen down into the sewers. Tul touches the wall and gets a mental map of the sewer system, so at least they don't get lost, but a bit of looking gets them nothing but a bad smell.
The envoys go back to the hotel and wash the stank off, while Arlo and Kayla grab some lunch for everyone. But then someone mentions the basketball game, and Tristan is horrified. They need to be at the game. And, based on the ticking, time might be a factor.
But there's a few more hours, so they decide to check out the death sites of Donna Fitzroy and Tanya Valmier in the meanwhile.
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