Saturday, March 18, 2017

[Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen] Patient 1: The Doppelganger

Out of Character (OOC):
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Story: The Asylum
Chapter 3 – Scene 3 “Doppleganger”

Storyteller: Jerad Sayler


North Dakota State Hospital
Patient Case Study #1 The Doppelganger


The following is an excerpt is from an active play-by-post Story Plot starring Chimera (Hannah Nyland), Jack Bismuth (Alex Van Belkum), Overwatch (Andrew Buchman) & Eos (Jerad Sayler). The Story is called The Asylum and involves the supernatural badness of the Jamestown State Hospital in Jamestown North Dakota. Now that the Malus Loci is closed and several months has gone by, Chimera shifts her attention to some of the peripheral oddities at the NDSH. She sends her familiar Azazel to interface with STARK, a highly advanced magically created Virtual Intelligence, to plum the depths of the hospital records looking for anything odd.



You get in thanks to the backdoor STARK put in place when you were still talking to him.  After several hours of rummaging around you finally find one case that immediately draws attention.  It was compiled by an intern, Mathew Case (B.A.) who was working on his dissertation on extreme psychiatry.  He interviewed a Charlene Brezniak in November of 2016.  She claimed at that time that a monster haunted the depression/suicide ward of the La Haug Building that was drinking people’s breath.  Transcript to follow:

Patient: Various
Attending Physician: Various — Report Compiled by M. Case, B.A. (Student Intern)
Case Number: None

Incident Report
As part of my internship at the North Dakota State Hospital, I have been interviewing as many of the patients as I can, in part for my own research for my master’s thesis and in part to test out some of the new psychological tests made available to the facility. Over the course of my work, I have gotten to know many of the patients quite well (especially in minimum security), and recently one of those patients shared a strange story with me. I was recording the conversation; the transcription of the relevant section follows:

Charlene Brezniak: There’s a monster here in the La Haug.
Matt Case: A monster? What do you mean?
CB: It’s a monster. It can look like anyone it wants to.
MC: But you can recognize it?
CB: No, not always. I don’t think it comes around during the day. I see it most often at night.
MC: How do you know when it’s here, if it can look like anyone?
CB: I don’t know. Sometimes if you look at it right, you can see it kinda ripple. Like water or smoke. Sometimes somebody walks into the room, and Mike’ll say, “Hi, Bill!” [Bill refers to the orderly, Bill Carlyle] But then Josh’ll say, “That’s not Bill, that’s Steve.” [Not sure who “Steve” is.] And that’s how I know to look, when two people see somebody different.
MC: But if it can be whoever it wants, why —
CB: No, no, not whoever it wants. I think maybe it becomes who you expect to see. And then it drinks your breath.
MC: What?
CB: I saw it in the corner. It was kissing Amy [Amy Moore, a nurse currently on maternity leave]. At least I thought it was kissing her, but then she stumbled and it disappeared.
MC: Disappeared?
CB: Like smoke.

Charlene, the woman who told me this story, self-admitted to the hospital after her teenage son committed suicide. She is lucid and intelligent, and only takes medication as needed for depression. She has no history of hallucinations or any other kind of psychosis or thought disorder, so when she told me this story, it gave me pause. I asked her if anyone else had seen the “monster,” and she told me that no one wanted to talk about it.

I interviewed a few other people in minimum security, including Mrs. Moore (via telephone). She told me that she had, some months ago, passed out while on the clock, but it was in the early weeks of her pregnancy and she hadn’t eaten that day. She said that Charlene was probably getting a little stir crazy (she has since been discharged, and is apparently doing quite well), and might have been poking fun at me. I decided to ask around some of the patients; Mrs. Moore advised me to avoid “priming” them so as to avoid bias.

What I found was interesting, if not remarkable. Of the 18 patients in minimum security at the time, 10 were unable or unwilling to speak with me. Of the remaining 8, three of them told stories similar to
Charlene’s when I asked them if they’d seen anything strange in here (all of them had stories to tell, but 5 out of the 8 told stories consistent with their disorders). These three patients were all self-admits, one for depression, one for anxiety and one for agoraphobia. Similar to Charlene, none of them were predisposed to seeing things.


It’s possible, of course, that Charlene told them what to say, but the details varied enough while remaining internally consistent to make me think that something strange is happening in the depression ward. All of these patients told specific stories about people seeing someone walk into the room but “recognizing” the new arrival differently. In all cases, the “people” whom witnesses saw made sense in context; no one ever saw the Pope, for instance, but employees of the hospital and family members were common. It was as though whoever walked through the door appeared to these people as whomever they expected or wished to see.

This by itself was strange, but then I looked into the hospital records and looked at the codes for the nights (always nights!) that these incidents occurred. In all four cases, someone passed out, vomited, tripped, fell asleep in a strange place or reported dizziness or weakness. It was never the same person twice, and never the person who reported seeing someone. Other such reports (dizziness, fainting, etc.) happen on other nights, too, of course. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, but rarely does a week go by without something like this happening.

Charlene said that the monster drinks people’s breath. Many cultures have legends about creatures that do exactly that. We’re all familiar with Western legends of vampires. Ghosts, though, in some stories do so as well. Even cats supposedly steal the breath of sleeping people. A German legend talks about the doppelgänger or “co-walker,” a ghost that takes the form of a living person. And here were have witnesses talking about something that takes the form of whoever the people around it are expecting to see. Meanwhile, other people collapse or grow weak when it is near.

Obviously, all of this sounds rather far-fetched. But the fact that people who have neither seen the “doppelgänger” nor the people who witnessed the doppelgänger have collapsed, vomited or otherwise been afflicted is significant because it implies that the doppelgänger is attacking the people who don’t see it at all. It strikes only at night, when staff is minimal and those on staff are tired, and most of the patients are in bed. How many more patients might have had their breath stolen while they slept?

One of the lingering questions is: Why this building? Why does the doppelgänger not haunt the higher-security wards, where many more people have died over the years? Note that I’m not suggesting there is a ghost present in the hospital.  I’m simply stating that something is going on, and it requires us to keep open minds about possible causes. I would like to stay on at Bishopsgate and write my thesis on the doppelgänger, try to figure out where these stories come from, whether Charlene Brezniak spread the story around before she left and, in short, whether there is a rational explanation for these occurrences.

There is a sticky note taped to the scanned papers:
MATT: YOUR INTERVIEWS ARE GOOD, AND YOU’VE GOTTEN GOOD

REFERENCES FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF JAMESTOWN.  SO I’LL LET YOU STAY. BUT YOU CANNOT GO INTO THIS WITH THE ASSUMPTION THAT THERE’S A GHOST. YOU NEED TO PROCEED LIKE A SCIENTIST, FIGURE OUT WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON AND THEN WRITE YOUR THESIS ACCORDINGLY.  THIS IS YOUR FIRST AND FINAL WARNING.

After viewing the dream-memory of one of the witnesses still at the hospital by entering the Depression/Suicide watch floor, she uses her understanding of Death and a Sympathetic Link of the creature's encounter with a patient to track it to a room in which its drinking the breath of a victim while in Twilight. She isolates its Anchors and quickly severing them, quickly banishing the deranged shape-shifting ghost to the Underworld. Case closed.





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