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WHO: Derek Matthews and Tatsuo Kihara
WHERE: Recolle Library
WHEN: April 11-13
WHAT: Quest for Zee
WARNINGS: N/A

It was five minutes until the end of their shifts at the lab, and Derek and Tatsuo were tidying up their respective areas. Tatsuo had plans to head to the gun range and, as he finished organizing the files he still needed to work on the next day, he considered inviting Derek along. It'd been a while since they went to the range together.

After locking the files in his desk, Tatsuo logs off his workstation and reaches for his jacket. As he does so, his phone vibrates on his desk, at the exact same time Derek's vibrates over on his desk. Tatsuo glances over at Derek's phone, then picks his own up, wondering who was texting them both. Could be any number of people. Matt, Foggy, Jirou, maybe Togusa... okay maybe the list isn't that long.

However, the person who sent him the text was not on that list.

Man you guys are kind of nosy, aren't you? No idea what you're digging for, but I admire your work ethic. How would you like to take on a small project for us? You can even stay in the city for this one.

Tatsuo lets out a small, surprised, "huh," then holds up his phone as he turns to face Derek.

"Did you get the same text I just got?"

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[Derek had also grabbed his phone when his phone vibrated. It was from Zee. He quickly reads it.]

If it's about Zee asking us to do a project for him, then yeah. What do you think? Want to do it? We're about to get off work anyway?

[Tatsuo taps the back of his phone speculatively. On the one hand, the last time he helped out in the city, he'd wound up in the subway fighting monsters reminiscent of Greek mythology. On the other hand... this time he'd have Derek with him and Derek has magic.

After a moment, he shrugs. He can't help but feel curious.]

Why not? I was just going to go to the gun range. Let's at least see what Zee wants.

[Derek sighs and texts Zee back that they are willing to help with a project. Zee quickly answers back coordinates to the Recolle Library.]

It looks like it's at the library? Do you think there are tunnels under the library and there are monsters we need to fight off?

I swear, if there are monsters, Zee can forget about it.

[any signs of monthers and he will NOPE right out of there]

Anyway, as I don't particularly care to go dungeon crawling in my work clothes, how about we head home first, grab some stuff, and then head to the library?

[Derek nods.]

Yeah, we can talk my car there.

[20 Minutes Later]

[Derek and Tatsuo pull into the parking lot of the library, ready to find out what exactly Zee wants them to do there. Derek, being the paranoid person he is, has his 72 hour kit in the back seat, ready and all packed. He looks over at Tatsuo.]

Ready for what ever shit is coming?

[Tatsuo shrugs]

I guess. When are we ever ready for anything?

[Tatsuo gets out and grabs his own pack from the back.]

Not that it hurts to try to be ready.

Alright, let's go.

[Grabbing his pack, he locks his car and walks up to the steps to the library. Once inside he takes out his phone.]

Zee's coordinates leads us deep into the library.

[He points a finger down a long row of book shelves.]

That way apparently.

[Tatsuo looks at the coordiants in Derek's phone then at the row of books Derek had pointed out]

900s. History. Of course. Lead the way.

[He falls into step behind Derek as they follow the blinking indicator on his phone.]

[Derek starts walking down the aisle, following the coordinates on his phone. He continues to walk until right before they arrive at their destination. Derek is also looking around and everything seems normal. Is he following the directions correctly? As he continues to walk he feels a sudden weird sensation, as if he's passing through an invisible wall.]

Wah?

[The sensation soon goes away as he continues to walk but he soon stops when he realizes that he is suddenly in a different room.]

Woah? Where are we? This reminds me of the records room at RPD.

[For a moment, Tatsuo starts to panic, seeing Derek suddenly vanish. He sticks out his hand and steps forward, watching his hand vanish up to the wrist. Ah. 'Invisible' wall. Tatsuo follows Derek through... and then stops to gape.

Derek is right. It's like the records room at RPD.

But worse.]

This is your fault.

[Derek is actually a bit insulted there and looks at Tatsuo with a look of confusion.]

How the bloody hell is this my fault?

[But before he could receive an answer, he hears the dings of their phones going off.]

We're a little behind on some spring cleaning, but I think you might get some use out of the information stored here. Organizing the room is in your best interests and it'll help us, too, so we can get more information out for you guys. Or that's what I'm hoping, anyway...

Edited 2018-04-22 06:06 (UTC)

[Tatsuo just raises his eyebrows at Derek. Because it is toooootally his fault.

After Zee texts their phones again, Tatsuo takes another look at the room. It is an absolute mess. But if there's useful information in here...]

Right. Let's take a look around in general, then we can start thinking about how we'll organize everything.

They honestly expect us to clean this? The two of us? Bloody hell they're insane!

[Derek starts walking down one of the narrow isle between the boxes of files. He picks up one folder and looks at the layer of dust on it.]

I'm slightly terrified of what we might find, yet exited though. I mean, they could have at least provided is what some way to organize all this. Like, filing cabinets, book shelves... ANYTHING! We're going to be here for days!

Eh, it's kind of hard to know what you want to organize things in if you don't really know what you have. So let's use what's already in the room for sorting and then once we have a better grasp of what all this is, we can just text him and ask for whatever else we need. Just... take it one box at a time.

[he moves to one part of the room and just... starts looking through a box]

I suppose...

[Derek reaches for boxes and opens it. He picks up the top folder and opens it. He skims it for a minute and then grabs another folder. This one, he found interesting.]

Well, this is interesting, this document is talking about some of the history of Retrospec and Recolle.

Some of it we already know, Recollé was founded by four families: the Vanderweele, Spinnato, Mahoney, and Cavendish families.

Two of those family names still exist among Retrospec staff today, Mahoney and Cavendish.

And there is something here about a Phillip Spinnato that I didn't find in that bunker back in October. It seems he was born in 1898, married and had three children -- only one of whom had a long enough line to marry himself. Robert Spinnato had twins with his wife Pearl, however he and the children appear to all die around 1966. Pearl's fate is unknown.

There is also information on the Vanderweel's. Apparently it it closely related to the Spinnatos... this should be good. Let's see... ah, here: Clarence Vanderweele's father, it seems, was married four times and Clarence had a large number of half siblings. Clarence himself was married twice... oh well this is interesting. The last connection he has, no official marriage, was 1960 to a woman named Agatha. Agatha, it seems, was given the death penalty for her hand in the murder of the Spinnato children. After that, most of the rest of the family died out too -- although Clarence himself has no final death date.

All of these founding families, Vanderweel, Mahoney, Spinnato, and Cavendish; were a part of both building Recollé and a project, this project to save worlds that are being destroyed. Their aim involved preserving and regrowing things from 'seeds' brought back by rescue teams. Recollé, was the safe haven for this project.

Retrospec has the mission to 'monitor the stability of the breaking universe,' to save worlds being destroyed by whatever is destroying them and regrow populations. So the current employees, interns and technicians alike who are a part of Retrospec, are continuing that trend. Or attempting to.

However, something went wrong and it has to do with Vanderweele. Apparently there was a suggestion Clarence might have been involved in the murders along with Agatha as he was ejected from the organisation. Where Agatha was executed it seems he was taken somewhere for indeterminate sentencing after prioritizing his own life in some way.

Ok, so a good hunk of this I knew, but this is the first time I've heard about this Agatha person. Are you familiar with that name?

[Tatsuo feels a shiver run down his back at the mention of the murdered Spinnato children. Even though it had just been a nightmare for him, Tatsuo still found the ghosts Dante had encountered in the 'Hell Mansion' deeply unsettling.]

I wonder if Agatha was the nursemaid that poisoned those poor kids. I'm not surprised Vanderweele was involved. Every time he's been mentioned separately from the other Founders, he's come off as slimy.

[And lo and behold, Tatsuo finds a newspaper clipping in a box, confirming just that, that Agatha has been the children's nursemaid. And then he finds a second... and a third... and after going through several boxes is amassing quite the pile of these clippings.]

I think someone didn't want people to remember what happened to those kids.

[Derek glances at the boxes of newspaper clippings.]

Wow, that is a lot of newspaper clippings. On the bright side, we can group those boxes together.

[Derek grabs another box and opens it.]

Well would you look at this... [Derek holds up some charts.] genealogical charts. One of for the Spinnato family and the other is for the Vanderweele family.

[Derek flips open the Spinnato family tree. The first few names were written in a strange language, but it eventually changed to english.]

Oh, I think I know why there are a bunch of news paper clippings. Look, [Derek shows the tree to Tatsuo.] Wells and Cynthia Spinnato were the youngest and last members of the Spinnato family. Agatha killed off any possibility of the family continuing on. Look here, [Derek points at Robert Spinnato's name.] Their dad committed suicide not long after his they died. And I thin these kids were important to the family. Not only were they twins, they were the first twins ever in the family. I wonder if being twins meant something?

[Tatsuo just boggles at the Vanderweele tree for a moment]

Damn the Vanderweele men really get around. How many did Clarence's father marry? Four? And then Clarence had... two wives and whatever was going on with Agatha.

[And then Tatsuo remembers the newspaper clippings his team found back in August. About the deaths of several prominent families.]

Hold on a sec...

[Tatsuo takes a closer look at the Vanderweele tree.]

Wow. They're all dead. Look...

[He points to the death dates of several family members.]

[Derek takes a closer look at the family tree dates.]

Blood hell. Drownings, animal attacks, avalanches, construction mishaps, and a heart attack for Christopher in 2006. They're like the Kennedy's, all dying one by one. Could it be a curse or some kind of jinx due to what Agatha and possibly Clarence did?

[Curse and jinxes are a totally valid explanation for Derek since he does have magic.]

Some sort of cosmic karma? Maybe. I mean, what Clarence and Agatha did was pretty reprehensible, but does that justify taking out the rest of his fam...

[Tatsuo scans over the family tree one more time]

Dude. There's no death date for Clarence.

Wait what?

[Derek looks closer at the family tree chart.]

I don't know... if he's still alive he would be 119 years old. Maybe the chart isn't updated. I mean, look the last person to die was back in 2006 and just [Derek motions to the room they are in.] look at this mess. I would not be surprised if someone didn't update the chart.

[Derek moves some boxes aside and starts opening other boxes. As he flips open a folder his eyebrows raise.]

We might be spending a long time in here reading instead organizing if we keep running into interesting stuff. Look at these notes:

[In the notes there’s a map of Recollé and a flowchart attached. Written on the map of the city is a note:]

"The Recollé hub shall be terminated to prevent the coming and going of those who have not met standards. The Company shall report a list of citizens and home worlds of which several will be sorted and set on trains outward.

Once the trains leave this central station, we shall close all tunnels and block exits as well despite whether the trains have a destination or not. No trains are to return after this point. This will then narrow our resources and provide a higher chance for a brighter, better tomorrow."

[On the flowchart itself, several of the boxes are labeled with instructions.]

”Has the planet set up barter and trade with ours?”

“Does the planet have resources we can obtain for ourselves?”

“Will this planet benefit us?”

“How pure is the family line?”

“Purging and the perfect storm?”

“Will reviving and reconstructing these souls benefit or hinder?”

[There are several other questions regarding the state of planets and the applicability of saving certain souls follow and it appears to be a chart to process whether revival of planets is worth the Project’s interest or not. ]

It almost seems like a check list of how Retrospec decides which planets or worlds to save or something.

[Tatsuo gives the flowchart a dubious look.]

Only, I'm pretty sure the current Retrospec employees have said they have no control over which 'souls' they manage to collect. So, are they lying, or was it once possible to interest with the other planets more directly?

[he flips through the papers a bit more and finds something else]

Whoa. Whoa. This just got extra creepy.

”As the project begins to grow I have come to find that my co-founders have separate goals than those of my own. While we had agreed that the purpose of the Retrospec project was to retrieve victims of planets lost and revive and reconstruct the souls that have also been lost, it has come to my attention that several of these wayward souls are not precisely what will benefit us for our project and for our plans to build a better tomorrow.

Georgia and Myrtle will be rather easy to convince backed by science and by fact, presenting them with the charts and the statistics of the few we’ve saved thus far. By the turnover rate, we can generate more energy in order to power this new planet.

Soul energy is a power we have yet to fully harness but with the expendables we will be able to research and provide a basis of power and magic under my reign.

As for Philip, he’s grown far too soft for his own good and believes that everyone can work together even those who would be better providing us with their energy rather than wasting our efforts on revival. There are ways to force his hand, however, and though I am not proud of them success comes at a price.

The people of this town will not be needed as more refugees gather in our city and we put them through the sorting process.

Should our group reach a disagreement, steps must be taken to enact the next phase of planning including deriving soul energy from those less worthy and rerouting it to obtain a higher power, explore the layers outside of the base of this planet and create utopia.”

[Tatsuo looks at Derek in alarm]

'Soul energy'? People are not going to like that.

I'm not even sure whose the bad guy anymore. I thought it was Phillip, but... this person just sound borderline insane.

You know how some people seem to be the only ones from their world or universe? What if everyone else was already used as energy and we're the only ones left?

[Tatsuo just stares at Derek for a looooooooooooooong moment]

That. Is super disturbing to think about. I do not want to think about that.

[So he turns and opens yet another box]

Oh look. More newspaper clippings.

[though there's a new one...]

Derek, look at this. Clarence Vanderweele was throw in the clink. And then on the same page, natural disaster kills several families. Natural disaster or 'natural disaster'?

Do you think they were cover up stories?

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