Empty Names

6 - Background Checks

For all its gothic gloom during the night, Bridgewood Manor is surprisingly well-lit during the day.  Mostly this is due to Carnette having installed large windows looking out onto alien landscapes in most of the rooms and halls not directly connected to the building’s outer shell as a flex on visitors, but - much like her - that is quite literally neither here nor there at the moment.  No, Sullivan’s gaze is set on his laptop.  The vista behind him is only worthy of his attention insofar as it’s creating an annoying glare on his screen, and even that he’s pointedly ignoring.  To move from his overstuffed chair to a seat with less glare would be letting the window win, and he’s not about to concede to an inanimate object in a contest of wills.  

And so Sullivan commences his last-minute review of files with the sun shining indirectly in his eyes.  It’s been two weeks since he agreed to his friend’s latest ill-conceived venture, and every day of it’s been busy.  Now his friend is out wrapping up details with a client for an initial test run job - he refuses to call it a quest - and wants to bring in the new team - definitely not an adventuring party - tomorrow.  Of course, the new office space - no way in any hell is he calling it “the guildhall” - still isn’t ready yet so now he has to play host.  After spending the past three days getting the full staff of cleaning and maintenance constructs up and running again to make the manor presentable once more he finally has a free moment to go back over the compiled dossiers of the newest round of poor saps to get pulled in by his friend’s wide-eyed idealism.  It’s an exercise that’s one part risk management and one part intimidation tactic.  Nothing like casually alluding to secrets to get fools in line.

The musclehead’s first on the list.  Eris.  First Backstage encounter at seventeen, dropped out of the local community college, got a job as a long-haul trucker - plenty of liminal spaces for spooks to slip through in that line of work - shortly thereafter, and has been making waves in the monster hunter community ever since.  After two years of that she found Crossherd and for some reason got herself a day job with the city’s sanitation department.  An odd choice to have a day job at all for a hunter, but then again Sullivan’s seen enough sewer monsters and bodies left in dumpsters to figure there’s probably more overlap between the two professions than anyone wants to admit.

Only limited contact with her family or anyone else on set, so cleanup should be easy if she bites the dust.

Sullivan starts flicking through an archive of gathered images.  High school yearbook, crime scene footage, commercial driver’s license, group photos pulled from other hunters’ social media accounts, security camera stills, Dog Park volunteer outreach materials, medical records, discreet surveillance from paid informants.  His friend wasn’t kidding about the autogenesis; that’s not a physique anyone’s pulling off without either magic or a damn-near lethal amount of drugs, and if the collateral damage to buildings and vehicles from some of these aftermath shots of hunts are anything to go by, she’s even stronger than she looks.  Sullivan chuckles to himself.  It looks like she’s living up to her moniker with the messes she leaves behind.  On the other hand, he’s yet to be able to turn up anyone with a bad word to say about her, so hopefully his friend’s right in their own assessment of her.

Still though, he can’t help but wonder if that body is a manifestation of pride or self-loathing.  The last thing they need is her getting pushed over the edge by something and going full monster.  That almost never happens, but it’s always ugly when it does.

All in all, the kind of person Sullivan would expect to reply to his invitation for purchase requests with a gym’s worth of exercise equipment and a small armory’s worth of weapons.  Oh, and what’s this?  A follow-up email adding an armored van to the list.  Why not?  She did bring him that fascinating and delicious-looking specimen the other day.  

Sullivan makes a note to call his car guy later, mentally files away Eris as “dumb, friendly, expendable wrecking ball and meat shield” and then switches over to the techie’s profile.  Lacuna.  He’d thought the name sounded familiar when his friend told him about Eris’s recommendation.  As it turned out, she’d been one of the victims on the penultimate job the two of them had worked before their spat.  He’d say “small world” but he’s always gone back and forth on the nature of coincidence.  

But as for the file, it’s usually been his experience that the less his research turns up the more likely there’s a secret to be found, but in this case he’s starting to suspect this woman really is just that boring.  Schooling with no records of extracurriculars from elementary through university.  No social life to speak of.  Half a dozen social media accounts with no posts.  A few profiles on job hunt sites.  Employment records with a software startup that was never more than moderately successful.  And then a reset of the same boring stuff all over again after falling Backstage.  A job at a similar company on Crossherd doing similar work but with paratech.  A few purchases of books on witchcraft followed by attending a single seminar then never returning - the usual sign of a wannabe mage realizing they have no potential.  Still no social life, save for the informants looking into Eris spotting the two of them together on a semi-regular basis.

Just two tidbits that stuck out to Sullivan in the end that he’d made a note of at the bottom of the profile a few days ago to follow up on later.  The first was that the paratech company this Lacuna had been working for was bought out a month back and RevaTech, the new parent company, had scrubbed the public records of whatever their new acquisition had been working on.  Suspicious on the surface but pretty standard fare for RevaTech, and they almost certainly would have slapped anyone that didn’t stay on with a geas-enforced NDA, so it wasn’t like she’d be able to say or do anything to make her old work relevant.

The second part was her family.  Well, not the immediate family.  Just a couple of normies for parents that, if phone records and airplane tickets were anything to go by, she still keeps in touch with.  No sign of a Masquerade breach though.  Good luck to her keeping that up.  The extended family on the other hand, now that had a few names that were giving Sullivan a niggling feeling of recognition.  Strange, but with everything else pointing toward Lacuna having no prior Backstage knowledge before a few years ago, he’d designated further research low priority.

As for her physical profile, a classic example of the other side of autogenesis.  A scarecrow of sickly skin and bone hiding under baggy clothes.  The exact kind of exaggeration you’d expect to manifest in a shut-in nerd with confidence issues.  Definitely not someone they’d be getting any fieldwork out of.  Looks like the autogenesis might even be holding back her transition.  That does manage to get a rare twinge of sympathy from him.  He’d not had that problem himself, but it’s not the first time he’s seen fear of change being impossible outweighing one’s identity.  Might be worth keeping an eye on what happens if she ever gets over those doubts; could make for an interesting rebound effect.

That said, Sullivan’s just about to finish mentally filing it all away as “boring IT tech to shove paperwork off onto” and move onto the next profile when he notices she finally sent in her equipment request last night.  About damn time.  Looking at the list, he wonders aloud what his friend told her she’d be doing.  Multiple high-end server racks.  Drones.  Projectors.  3D printers compatible with esoteric materials.  Blast-proof safety glass.  Laser cutters.  And “one small potted tree; bonsai or similar”.  Either she’s messing with him or those notes for followup need higher priority after all.  Approved in full either way.

That leaves the wizard.  Ashan Glassheart.  Unlike the last two, there hadn’t been any public records apart from the obituary of a nine-year-old boy over a decade ago.  Fortunately, Sullivan had been keeping tabs on this kid for years now.  Anchor world born mages with offworld training are the kind of rarity worth keeping an eye on when they crop up, whether you’re looking to capitalize on them or stay out of their way.  As much as it irks him to admit, there’s some truth to the oft-repeated story structure of “normal kid goes to a magical otherworld and becomes a big damn hero”.  Sure, no one likes to talk about when it goes wrong, but on the times it goes right you can wind up with some truly bullshit feats of bending reality.

Like Carnette.

No, no one’s like Carnette.

Sullivan shakes his head, as if that actually does anything to clear the passing thought and turns his attention back to the file in front of him.  Back to this Glassheart kid.

And he is a kid compared to everyone else that’s going to be on this team.  Barely out of his teens, assuming an approximate temporal sync between worlds.  Probably the most experienced of the three though, despite that.  It hadn’t been easy connecting the off-world mage who picked up the mantle of wandering do-gooder that Sullivan’s friend left floating on the wind to a supposedly dead child, but once he came across a report of an individual matching Glassheart’s description setting up wards around the private residence of some normie family the pieces started to fall into place.  After that it was just a matter of collecting old news reports from the area - mundane and Backstage - exhuming an empty grave in the dead of night, and calling in a favor with an offworld contact to put together a picture of who this kid was.  Exhuming the grave was probably unnecessary in hindsight, but Sullivan had reached peak boredom at the time, and that was half the reason for investigating in the first place if he was being honest with himself.

The story, Sullivan imagines, goes something like this:

Once upon a time, in a sleepy little small down in the ass-end of nowhere lived a little boy.  This little boy, ever since he could remember, had lived a magical childhood, with all manner of sprites and fairies and monsters roaming the woods outside his home.  This is actually quite normal for small children in sleepy little towns in the ass-end of nowhere, although most dismiss it as playing pretend once they get older, except on nights when they are fantastically drunk and/or tripping balls.  Or they get gobbled up.  That’s been known to happen too.  

What set this little boy apart was one day an honest to goodness wizard by the name of Aliana Glassgaze appeared before him and told him he had a magical destiny if only he would leave his family behind and come with her to another world called Orthon.  The little boy, like any healthy young boy presented with the opportunity to go on a grand adventure and gain wizardly powers, accepted this offer.  But he was a good boy who didn’t want his parents to worry themselves looking for him, so he did the reasonable thing and faked his death - a wonderfully thrilling experience, as Sullivan can attest from multiple occasions.

On Orthon, the little boy traveled all over with Glassgaze learning magic and going on all sorts of fun adventures.  But probably not too fun because he mostly liked lame pacifist spells for making walls and bubbles and instead of cool spells like fireball and bone rearranger.  Eventually the little boy became a moody teenager and then a definitely emotionally stable young adult, completed his training, took on the wizard name Ashan Glassheart - as is traditional on Orthon to show the bond between student and teacher - then at last parted ways with his mentor and came home over a decade later to play super hero with his new wizard powers.  But because secret identities are lame and real heroes are living icons twenty-four seven with no personal life, he skipped the most fun part of faking your death and didn’t show up to surprise and distress all the people who attended his funeral.

Oh, and for some reason he runs around in cosplay despite claiming to have never heard of this season’s new hit shojo anime, Crystal Witch Arya, starring a near-identically dressed protagonist nor met the author behind the manga it’s based on.  That’s one mystery Sullivan’s thrown into the “funny, but too stupid to bother solving” pile.

All in all - especially having seen the boy in action personally - Sullivan mentally files this one as “valuable asset, especially if his hero’s journey left him with emotional maturity instead of repressed trauma.”  Not quite valuable enough though to grant his sole equipment request of access to the Bridgewood Manor Library.  Well, maybe the lesser library.  Under supervision.

Sullivan exits out of the files and closes the laptop.  That’s enough looking at these clowns for today.  Void knows he’s going to get more than his fill of them in person soon enough.  Funny though that no one on this team uses the name they were born with.

He stands up, stretches, and walks off, leaving the laptop on the chair.  It’s not like anyone else is here to get into it, and he can always send a cleaning golem to fetch it later if he doesn’t feel like coming back for it himself.  Besides, his next spot of research to catch up on isn’t going to have a digital source.

Thankfully, his friend’s asked him to try picking up from where their leads on their “big quest” have hit a dead end, and that means he’ll be working that case solo while everyone else is doing team building exercises.  Said dead end turned out to be fairly literal, with the base of operations for a multi-word smuggling ring cleaned out of all its goods and all its members slaughtered thoroughly enough that attempts to call up their ghosts or reanimate their bodies to ask what happened have failed.  The hours not spent violating his soon-to-be-coworkers’ privacy or fixing up the parts of the manor he’d been letting slide lately he’s been making visits to old contacts - from Eyeball Jerry, the street food vendor with a side hustle as an info broker, to Edard Jariden, the Crossherd Commissioner of Public Safety whom he’d had a two month fling with back when the man was still an intern - and somehow none of them knew anything more than speculation.  None of the local players - criminal or otherwise - were taking credit, the incident didn’t fit the MO of any of the handful of outside groups with a history of meddling in Crossherd’s affairs, and if there were any survivors or associates of the smugglers they’d all disappeared.  Or been disappeared.  If Sullivan hadn’t been so starved for a proper challenge lately, he might even call it frustrating.

But for the moment, he’s simply intrigued.  No, not “simply” intrigued.  Invested enough to go downstairs and unlock the manor’s greater library again.  If he can’t find anything on the dead smugglers, perhaps he might be able to dig up something on what they were smuggling.  His friend said that it was the theft of a device capable of binding and controlling lesser deiform entities that got them on this trail in the first place, and that is the sort of thing Carnette had an interest in.  With any luck he might be able to find a match in the library and from there… well, that will depend on what he finds.

He stops in the middle of the hallway in front of a blank spot on the wall between a four-armed suit of armor and a marble statue of a long-bearded wizard.  He reaches out and knocks a rhythm on the wall.  Once upon a time the passcode would change twice a year, but the teasing inside joke Carnette left it on last still causes the wall to slide open.  On the other side is a gilded spiral staircase descending down a long stone tube.  A good meter of empty space separates the edge of the stairs from the outer wall.  Room enough for the adventurous to slide the whole way down the banister or for the exceptionally durable to jump.

Sullivan puts a foot forward but hesitates on the threshold as memories rise unbidden.  Carnette showing off the false windows to other worlds spaced along the shaft to give the impression of descending from the heavens to deep beneath the sea during his first visit.  The ornate door at the bottom.  Being pushed over the edge of the banister.

He forces the memories back down and takes another step only to be interrupted once again, this time by tugging at his pant leg.  He looks down to see a fist-sized black orb suspended on eight spindly legs.  Or rather, suspended on seven and getting his attention with the eighth.  Seeing that it has its master’s attention, the maintenance golem begins making a series of chittering noises.  Sullivan sighs and rolls his eyes in response.

“You know I can’t understand you,” he says, “so just get on with it.”

The golem squeaks and begins scurrying down the hallway.  Sullivan closes the hidden door with another - less elaborate - knock and then follows after the tiny servitor.  Either his friend is back or there’s something broken in an area that needs explicit permission from the master of the house to enter.  Either way, it’s something best not kept waiting.

And it’s an excuse to keep putting off going back down there for at least a little while longer.