[Mage: The Slenderman Plot] Zero-X (Part III)

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

Zero-X: A Story About the Dead (Part III)

by Chimera (Hannah Nyland), Azazel & Eos (Jerad Sayler)

What follows is the next transcript of the debriefing led by neophyte Chimera, Sleepwalker Agent Eos, and Chimera’s fetch Azazel on the Slenderman incident in North Dakota in 2014.  Out of Character, the entire plot took place over the course of the entire week of Halloween in 2014 and over 60 hours of game play.

Story Parts:
1. Part I
2. Part II
3. Part III
4. Part IV
5. Part V: The Monster

May 23rd, 2014. 2:41 am

Chimera: Around this time, the news coverage of the murders began to really ramp up. Add in the bizarre graffiti messages that has started to appear all over the state (we’ll get to that later), and you’ve got a media sensation waiting to happen. People have their heads low and their ears pricked; in times like these, fear makes even the impossible seem possible to them. Trouble is, many of us impossible people don’t want to be found.  There’s one name that keeps popping up everywhere I look: Noah Maxwell, a film student in Mandan North Dakota who lives with his parents. At most times, the things he’s saying would have him dismissed as a lunatic, but this isn’t most times, and he’s making the most of the media’s attention on him. The supernatural is real, he says, and he has proof.

Proof comes in the form of film clips aired on several news outlets taken from his YouTube channel and website. They’re ambiguous enough to be questioned but not nearly ambiguous enough. And the guy just won’t shut up. He’s always proclaiming that he’s got more video tapes than what the media is willing to show, and if even those tapes aren’t enough for people, he’s going to find some footage that is. You can practically hear the fanaticism dripping from his voice in interview. He’s following a calling. It would almost be admirable, this Sleeper getting his 15 minutes of fame for his efforts, if it didn’t make him such a huge pain in the ass.

And that’s how I end up breaking into Noah Maxwell’s house in the middle of the night and confiscating his tapes. Of course, it still leaves the matter of Noah himself; a truth seeker in all the ways people like me don’t want him to be. He’s idealistic. Reckless. Determined to the point of obsession. Let’s just say that if someone doesn’t "persuade" him out of his little project, he’s going to end up dead, one way or another.

Azazel: He did provide some clues through his recordings of what was going on with the children and the entity’s influence over the Tenemos and through it the negative effects on their Onerious.

Chimera: When I arrive Noah isn’t in his bed. No shock; from what I gathered on him, he’ll be out with his camera looking for evidence at this hour. This is an easy enough job, and it went smoothly; pick the lock on the back door, sneak over to his room, locate the tapes and stuff them into my bag.

(Note to self: Some of Noah’s tapes mentioned someone called "The Observer". We never encountered anyone by that alias. What was his involvement in this?)

It’s there when I walked out the back door. A flicker, a blur. A man dressed in a plain black suit, limbs long, limp and gangly, like some sort of sick puppet.

Eos: A daddy long-legs… so creepy

Azazel: A swaying tree,

Chimera: It’s tall. Pale. I look at its face.

There’s no way to explain, no way to describe... that, not unless you’ve seen it yourself. Ice cold hands wraps itself around my heart, delivering the psychic force of the darkest part of the Abyss like a sledgehammer, and in that instant I want to be dead. If I was I wouldn’t have to see it any more. I will never forget it and yet cannot remember it clearly, the wound of it, not what caused it.

Azazel: A defense mechanism for the psyche, your mind rejected the image. Some aspect of its face, or non-face induces a psychotic break. If I were to witness this effect it would cause serious harm to my being. The psychic force of it would annihilate me.

Chimera: Yes. Something snaps in my mind, a cascade of bleeding red and roaring sound. When I come to six hours and twenty three minutes later, I’m curled up on a bench at a bus stop, every muscle screaming in agony. Sprained muscles. Twisted leg. Shivering uncontrollably, despite the warm spring morning. The bag of tapes is still clutched in my hand.

I can’t remember a single thing from the time I was out. I try to trace back the precise events that led to me getting here, but find that I can only trace around; it’s as though there’s a gaping black hole in my head, sucking in memories, and my consciousness is a satellite around it. No holes cut into my chest though, no organs removed. I can barely believe I’m alive.

A few hazy moments later, I know that I shouldn’t be. It had me, stunned and off-guard. Wheels turn. Whose house was it? It starts to come back. Noah Maxwell’s. A seeker of occult truths, hard evidence, the unknown, and out in search of all three.

I wasn’t the one he’d been after.

Azazel: And he wasn’t just some nosy sleeper either, that wouldn’t fit the M.O. in the end.

May 23rd, 2014. 9:00 pm Chimera: Nergal receives a call at work from an old ally, Father Forthill, currently comforting a bereaved family in Mandan after a sudden, grotesque murder. I think you can guess who the victim was.

Eos: He was cute too…cute Jewish guys.

Chimera: Kairos, Seraph, Nergal and Eris go to investigate. The body was first discovered by Noah’s little brother Milo, as he cut through the playground across the street on his way to school, probably shortly before I regained consciousness. I saw that playground from Noah’s bedroom window. Pretty little place. Quaint. When it comes to Milo, all I can say is . . . that poor kid. But by that point, sorrow for the dead was starting to feel like ticking off boxes on a list, however sincere the sentiment.

When the police found Noah, he was tied down to the merry-go-round of the local playground with several layers of rope and duct-tape; chipped paint below him and empty, blood encrusted eye sockets staring up at the sky. More duct tape across his mouth, blunt force trauma to his head, his camera lying smashed on the ground a few yards away, and some sort of unidentifiable plastic wrap in his insides, which were predictably missing a few pieces - namely the kidneys. There were also crumpled up pieces of paper in Noah’s coat pocket – incomplete sketches of a tall, thin man and the scrawled ramblings of a mind neck deep in madness. According to his family, the handwriting was not his own. He was conscious when he died - chafing on his wrists, a look of horror on his face.

Eos: Why did it take so long for your powerful friends to act?

Azazel: It’s not surprising really. Again, remember that the first victim was killed by Prodigy, the next by "Slendy" and the third by Slendy and its helpers. Each murder was different, each victim died of different circumstances. They were spread over 9 months and no murder occurred in the same city twin. The police never would have connected the dots. It takes three consistent murders all in the same state to declare a serial killer on the loose, and the lack of physical evidence would prevent anyone from being completely sure they were the same killer.

Eos: But they have magic, I mean this can’t be hard right? 

Azazel: Hindsight.

Chimera: Nergal puts the time of Noah’s death at 2:42 am. Cause: blood loss, sped along by head trauma inflicted with blunt instruments by a group of humans of below average strength. Children, like middle schoolers. Because of some extremely convincing police disguises (Imposter spells), the officers on the scene willingly provide what they know. A few speculate that the cause may have been anti-Semitism, due to the personal nature of the murder. Noah’s parents stand by in stunned silence, unwilling or unable to believe what’s happened to their son. 

Naturally, the body has been removed by the time the four mages (minus Casstiel) arrive on the scene at 10:00 pm, but Kairos is able to confirm police reports on the matter via post-cognition – though the post-cog itself took a healthy chunk out of his sanity meter. He saw a boy wake up screaming silently into duct tape, thrashing but unable to free himself. A young man who knew he was about to die. And then it was there, a form looming over him, and the images splintered like Kairos’ psyche. Later his Cabalmates ran some Mind interference, to exorcise the foreign influence and attempt to patch the trauma, Casstiel will be maintaining that mental-Band-Aid spell on Kairos for the next year. 

But at that moment, having seen what no one should ever see, he notices the words. Pale orange tangles of spray paint up the street, on the sidewalk, winding around the trees. Somehow, they have a way of dodging the eye, as though they belong there and always have. Always will.

"Don’t look or it takes you." 

"Can’t run." 

"Watching you." 

"He knows."

Eris takes a moment to call Casstiel and inform him of the recent developments.

Tarot Draw: Ace of Swords reversed
Confusion, a lack of clarity, an uncertain plan that has not yet been put into action

In the meantime, Nergal is waved over by Father Forthill, who is sitting on a bench side by side with Milo. The kid is not exactly in great shape for talking at the moment, but a few relevant facts emerge. First, Milo has several new friends his age that seemed to deeply dislike his brother, and recently his brother offhandedly made mention to being stalked by them on his late night searches for evidence. He hasn’t mentioned this to the police or his parents. Probably doesn’t want to think on those implications too hard. 

Bludgeoning wounds to the head caused by several people of subhuman strength. A couple of middle-schoolers trailing Noah Maxwell in the middle of the night, when he’s alone, distracted by his work - at his most vulnerable. His method of death points to Slenderman, and he was left nice and wrapped up for it like a Christmas present. Do the math. At this point we’ve got two murderers on the loose, one of whom apparently has the capacity to indoctrinate children. And children do feature prominently in the original Slenderman mythos. We end up calling them Proxies in accordance with the modern legends. 

Milo also mentions a dream he keeps having – a tall, thin man outside his window, looking at him. He becomes agitated when Nergal tells him not to look at it, believing that this means that the disturbing man is real – and that it killed his brother (though it’s not like he was wrong . . . ). As they leave, Seraph reaches into his mind and removes his memories of the conversation, and of Slenderman. 

Pleasant sleep for someone, at least. 

Eos: We hoped.

Azazel: He didn’t succumb like the other children did, perhaps that made the difference.

Eos: Nergal made the kid cry, it was kind of despicable. Guy nicknamed "Creepy" and they send him to talk to the kid?

Azazel: Oh, I should also note that they also checked Noah’s body at Med Center One to confirm the M.O. of the Slender-being and also to look for any additional trace evidence. While the body really didn’t reveal anything knew they also noticed another unusual body brought in the previous night. A dried out corpse, dated years into decay and found impaled by a tree in the riverside parks in Bismarck. The corpse was missing its heart which had been bisected by the impaling. We later realized that the reason for the advanced decay and staking was because this was most likely a vampire. It would seem that the Slenderman could pray on any number of supernatural beings and gain substance and augmented strength from their organs.

May 31st, 2014

Chimera: We dream, everyone who has gotten close to the Slenderman case so far.

Nergal states in the morning that he dreamt of a bridge out in the mine hills, fire glinting through the broken windows of the abandoned cars nearby. A flock of bleach-white ravens land at his feet, cawing out First Tongue in raspy voices, "The white king comes for thee." He turns, and jagged black nails on a spindly hand are an inch from gouging his eyes out.

Kairos dreamt of a walk in the countryside, where the silence is a knife at his back. Tension and dread build like the climax of a horror movie. There’s something there, something following close behind. But when he turns, he sees nothing. And ultimately, there is nothing. The stage was set for an actor who never arrived; slowly, the nightmare dissipates into pleasanter things.

Eris dreamt of a place deep in the forest, where the redwoods reach to heaven and the air is wet and drizzly. She comes to a clearing where eight naked, decapitated bodies lie in a circle, each impaled through the torso by a large tree branch. A sound echoes through the trees, like a child’s giggle but too low, and she feels pain shoot through her abdomen.

Seraph dreamt of past lives (he says that is normal enough). First a man living in a cottage out in the wilderness with his two sons, but tonight only one returns from the woods. The boy is frantic, pleading crying. The whole house shakes, and a skeleton with too many limbs comes bursting through the doorway. Then he’s a knight, fighting a bony, spindly legged dragon with feet like lances. It passes, and he’s out on the plains of North Dakota, seeing meteorites rain down from the sky to wreak havoc on the earth. The plain floods over, filling with lizard creatures, and he watches as the sea boils and churns. Somehow though, the water is cold; slimy like a tar pit.

Azazel: He watched the Acamoth, the Darkness that Thirsts, fall to Earth as the world was sundered and wait for the entire span of human history. The Slender’s future "step-father."

 Chimera: I also had a dream. I dreamt of a portrait, but the canvas is stained through with oil and sickness. On a plane over the Atlantic Ocean, the laughter of faceless men and death rattles resound in my sleep. Delirium. A fevered mind forces itself back into equilibrium, and the threads of thought return to an empty pew in a hellish church. I wait.

June 15th, 2014

Roughly a day before the trap is set to be sprung on Prodigy, he arrives at the Sanctum with a mind to kill.

I was fighting my own battle and far, far outside the country at the time – to my relief, for multiple reasons. From what I’ve heard and seen of the man, he was a killing machine. If I’d have been there, the most I could’ve done was end up as a hostage, or simply dead.

No one was keen on talking about the attack on the Sanctum. Kairos just shrugged. Seraph was Seraph. Casstiel looked pained, then cheerfully suggested I look into it myself, framing it as "a learning experience".

Eris, the only one I could wring any info from, explained that the reason the trap didn’t go as planned was because it actually worked perfectly. Basically, there’s an alternate timeline where they snared Prodigy in the maze, but he had a Save Point set up, jumped back 24 hours, and tried to use what he now knew to get out of it, but nothing worked. Killing his family members in order to prevent them from being used to pull him into the trap was evidentially not an option in his mind. Give him a cookie for being a decent human being in that regard.

At that point, he saw striking preemptively as his only choice. From post-cogs I figure that he popped up in the Sanctum at around 12:30 pm and went straight for the first person he could find in the backyard, which happened to be Seraph. Bad luck choosing a guy who could accurately be described as a walking tank. Prodigy was probably planning to pick them off one by one, but Seraph was still more than kicking by the time the other four (plus Persephone) came running.

It was a nasty little showdown, and I only grabbed bits and pieces. The time stream was flickering in and out every time I put too much of my attention on Prodigy. More than that, it shriveled up as though somehow in agonizing pain, and that same sensation of ice cold ran through my body again. It’s like the Abyss was protecting him even then. I’ve never heard of a post-cog being affected that way, even by Abyssal magic, but Prodigy was a unique case for a number of reasons. Even watching him makes my head start to swim.

Flashes of violence. A sword impales Nergal through the shoulder as his shadows writhe around him. Kairos nocks his bow and takes aim. Prodigy’s picks up Eris with magic and slams her into the ground, and her nimbus flares as she begins to cast. Persephone unleashes her dogs. Casstiel mutters under his breath and fingers a Tarot card while bleeding from the nose.

Tarot Draw: Ace of Wands
Power, passion, a time to make thoughts a reality

And it all ends with Seraph’s sword a hair’s breadth from Prodigy’s neck, and Casstiel yelling out a command for him to hold back as he finishes the spell that holds their attacker immobile. He’s battered and bloodied now, and now that he’s still they’ve got the time to notice something. There are dark blue stitches crisscrossing much of his skin, and he is older than he should be. Prodigy’s been gone two years but aged for ten. On that subject, he’s evasive.

There’s no guarantee of how long they can keep him restrained without their carefully constructed trap, but they have a nice little chat, working to shore up the magical restraints on him as they go and binding his hands with zip ties. Kairos notches an arrow and aims it at his heart. Despite his predicament, Prodigy seems almost bored with the whole thing. He’s had this talk before, in a sense.

He admits that torturing Orion, the Guardian sent to hunt him, was unnecessary, but enjoyable and that his kill count numbers into dozens, including Denarians, their squires, the soulless and other Scelesti. It is his belief that he’s never murdered an innocent; that every one of his victims were beyond redemption. He tried to guide Nergal onto the "right" path through his dreams, which the latter rejected. And all the death, the isolation, and the price he’s paid? All worth it. He’s not willing to admit that he needs treatment, much less accept it.

Azazel: For a little context. The events in which the Horsemen banish the Acamoth back into the Abyss, the event that released the Slenderman, Prodigy had started showing up in the dreams in which Nergal was being tempted by the Acamoth. Prodigy claimed that Nergal was an Abyssal god, that Arulle and the Watchtower of Tarnish and Rot was his and that he should accept it. Rejecting the false Watchtower and burning out the Abyssal corruption from his pattern hurt Nergal egregiously but he made that choice. Apparently it wasn’t the entity wearing Prodigy’s face but the actual mad-man trying to tempt Nergal with power, their souls aligned close enough with the Abyss that they could bridge their sleeping minds. Rejecting his offer and the horrible wounds his suffered as a result were ultimately the reason Nergal decided that they needed to get rid of the Acamoth immediately and finally spurred the Horsemen to action. In a way Prodigy actually helped Nergal get rid of his dark passenger before it further harmed his soul, the Tenemos, and all sleepers in close proximity to the Acamoth’s oil. 

Chimera: According to the lie-detecting spell placed on him, this is all true from Prodigy’s perspective. He believes every word; this is the "peak of his potential", after all. 

Then he starts monologuing like any good villain, and that’s when things get fucked up. Well, more so. I’m hearing the speech through the post-cog; there’s no magic, tainted or otherwise, but the Abyss is here like a presence, icy fingers digging underneath my skin. Flashes of words: "Before creation . . . great dreamers in the oceans of chaos . . . wanted to be gods . . . reality is trying to invade, not-" 

Later, I come to in the Sanctum backyard with a three hour long hole in my memory. I’m starting to suspect that my encounter with Slenderman has left a psychological mark on me regarding the abyss. Dazed, I rewind time again – just back to the point where Prodigy finishes his speech. 

Azazel: He spoke blasphemies against reality and the very nature of the Supernal.

Chimera: Casstiel proposes the idea of taking away his magic to save him, but the idea is immediately rejected. Casstiel looked simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Taking away Prodigy’s magic would have required the removal of his soul and the replacement with a sleeping soul. So not only would soul handling harm whoever had to do the touching but then you would have to damn someone’s eternal soul to belong to someone else and keep the rotten one in a jar or something. 

Kairos murmurs something, but all I can catch is the word "goodbye". He releases the arrow he’s kept notched and Prodigy is consumed by celestial fire. There is very little left of the body by the time it clears. 

Azazel: Famine’s Bow is one of the aforementioned WMDs. While it utilizes a large amount of mana it hyper accelerates the bolt to supersonic speed, has perfect aim and guidance, and when fully charged will detonate like a high-explosive rocket, creating craters in the ground and blasting targets to small burning bits. This was a slightly powered down version to prevent shrapnel. 

Eos: I’m actually a little surprised they actually went through with it.

Azazel: My former master was as well. To this day he still harbors doubts that there might have been another way. At the time though he knew he was emotionally compromised enough to know he couldn’t make the call on his former friend’s fate. In the end it was the most practical, and pragmatic choice. Most likely the Autark was stalling for time in order to fashion an escape, call upon Gnomon or summon void-beings to aid him.

Chimera: Autark?

Azazel: Lone-wolf Selestus boss, outside of a cult or left-handed legacy. 

Chimera: Afterwards, Seraph and Nergal returned to the unused trap. While in the heart of the spatial maze, they were ambushed yet again, this time by everyone’s favorite Abyssal horror, who walked straight through the wards and displayed the capability to nullify their supernal magic. However, Slenderman’s attempt to remove a few choice organs from Nergal was cut short by Seraph ripping his face off through good old-fashioned martial prowess. 

Azazel: Before Seraph could attempt to harm it further it simply disappeared. The ability we later dubbed "slender-walk" or "slenderstep" appears to be some new capability for the creature to step sideways directly into the Tenemos. Really quite remarkable. Dream of the Endless is the only other entity that has shown a similar capability, to jump straight across the chimerical threshold and straight from matter into the world of ideas. Or tt could have stepped into some other null-space that we simply do not understand yet.

Chimera: It’s a cliché, but I’m glad Seraph is on our side. Ultimately the two completed their mission, destroying the trap and disposing of Prodigy’s remains to prevent all chance of resurrection or time manipulation. It is fitting that he is buried under Beulah’s cemetery. 

Eos: Too bad the creepy baby-thing never showed.

Azazel: Indeed. It must have predicted the trap and ambandoned its new master like many masters before him. It’s probably found a new pawn by now. A blight that can unlock a mage’s horrible potential at the cost of their sanity. It is a shame the Pentacle have yet to destroy the thing.

Chimera: To Eris and Seraph, killing Prodigy was removing a threat. To the others, it was the loss of a friend for the second time. The wounds of losing Loudon are also re-opened. 

For my part, I was of mixed feelings. I never once met Prodigy, not even after he lost himself to the Abyss. I can’t say whether he really could’ve been saved, or if he should’ve. When I think about the state of Orion’s corpse and the enjoyment taken in torturing him, I wonder. But some time ago, I made a promise to a friend to help find Prodigy and bring him back, a promise I wasn’t able to fulfill.

Sorry Cass.

Chimera: Okay, gotcha.

[Mage: The Slenderman Plot] Zero-X (Part II)

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

Zero-X: A Story About the Dead (Part II)

by Chimera (Hannah Nyland), Azazel & Eos (Jerad Sayler)

What follows is the next transcript of the debriefing led by neophyte Chimera, Sleepwalker Agent Eos, and Chimera’s fetch Azazel on the Slenderman incident in North Dakota in 2014.  Out of Character, the entire plot took place over the course of the entire week of Halloween in 2014 and over 60 hours of game play.

Story Parts:
1. Part I
2. Part II
3. Part III
4. Part IV
5. Part V: The Monster

May 4th, 2014 

Chimera: Casstiel was slated to introduce Kairos and I to the Fargo Concilium; a necessity with both of us moving to the area in the near future. North Dakota is largely considered an untamed backwater by the mage community. The supernatural residents and phenomenon of the state aren’t what you’d call well charted out, meaning that there’s effectively several hundred miles of "paranormal wilderness" between Fargo and the next nearest Concilium in Minneapolis and from the western side of North Dakota all the way into Montana. The Concillium of the Red River Valley (also more commonly referred to as the Fargo Concillium) included half a dozen Awakened spread across the eastern side of the state with splits in influence between the Silver Ladder and Free Council. It encompasses only a small number of mages overall. 

Chimera: None of this seemed of much importance to me at the time, because I was too busy worrying. Trying not to offend is one thing when the person you’re speaking with is a "muggle," and quite another when they’re capable of lighting you on fire just by thinking about it. Casstiel has told me that the Cabal of the Five Horsemen has traditionally been distrusted by the Powers That Be - some Orders even consider them terrorists or Banishers – but they’re slowly trying to change that. Making a good first impression to the concilium here is one small step down that road. 

Azazel: Having Awakened away from a concillium with no one but themselves and Gabrielle to mentor them it is really not surprising that when they found out about the Pentacle Orders they were distrustful and uninterested in joining. After all, all the Orders expect to get something out their investments in new mages, things they were unwilling to grovel for. This combined with their rapidly growing powers and incidents involving powerful workings of magic greatly concerned the Fargo Concillium as they watched their neighbors swear allegiances to no-one but their own moral code. I also don’t blame the concillium for their distrust. Some years back they did distribute a Charter that included and reiterated the basic premises of the Great Rights and the Lex Magica to show that the Horsemen did largely follow the rules of a more conventional and Order-aligned Cabal. The introduction of Chimera and Kairos was a great first step in attempting to play nice and take some of the long shadows into the light.

Chimera: The Hierarch wasn’t in attendance, but three members are: Panoptes, Black Moon, and Spooky. I’ve never met any of them before, although Kairos seems to have a history with the former Black Moon and Panoptes. And he can’t help but cheerfully note that Spooky is also the name of his cat. The woman isn’t particularly amused by this. After a bit of spirited sniping back and forth, the introductions are made. We exchange contact information, then leave. It was very awkward. 

Azazel: Kairos knew them because Panoptes and Black Moon came to the rescue of Indra’s family when her cousin David was abducted by a hobgoblin and dragged into the Hedge on Thanksgiving 2013. They helped manage the fallout and since these events took place in Lakota, North Dakota, they were considered in the fringe of the Fargo Concillium territory. Kairos, Indra, Nergal and a mage named Witness were involved in the incident and would have more information on what actually occurred. STARK has a section in the audio-archives recorded during the event that can be reviewed as well.

Chimera: Later I received a warning from Casstiel to be on alert for Prodigy, a message that’s exceedingly sparse on the details – the sort of thing that gets a young apprentice’s teeth gnashing. It’s also around this time that I learned, through experience, that STARK can be persuaded to go behind his creator’s back. Seems that STARK is a little more human-like in reasoning than I think it (he?) was ever intended to be. You should probably look into that, Cass.

Azazel: Unless of course he had previously authorized the Virtual Intelligence (VI) to provide information pertinent enough to help… but probably not really the case here.

Chimera: In the weeks that follow the murder, Seraph works through his contacts in the Adamantine Arrow in the mid-west, informing them that the group intends to hunt down a rogue Cabal member. Additionally, he acts on a suspicion of his. He recalls seeing Prodigy’s warped familiar referenced somewhere, in a book on Abyssal threats. Using his connections in the Arrow, he’s able to obtain access to a several century old, sanitized tome about such creatures.
Chimera: In this tome, Prodigy’s familiar is named as Gnomon; meaning "He who discerns" or "One who reveals", as well as the piece on a sundial that measures time by the position of its shadow. Illustrations depict a pieced-together abomination of human flesh; the head of an ancient woman and a young boy sewn onto a bloated, hovering body and lolling grotesquely. Two chubby baby feet hang from the swollen mass of skin and stitches, and a tangle of spiderlike limbs are attached to the creature’s back – some ending in surgical tools, others in blades and syringes filled with colored chemicals.

It’s said that Gnomon was created in the 1700s by a mage named Galen Mire. For weeks he worked tirelessly in a dark, hidden Sanctum in the London Royal Hospital to create a being that could bring him to the height of his magical potential in an instant. It’s also said that he succeeded; Galen’s understanding of magic skyrocketed literally overnight. For a moment, the secrets of the universe were in his grasp – and then it was too much, and his overburdened mind snapped like taffy.

Insanity is always a risk for mages. When the very threads of the universe are at your whim, when your enemies range from the murderous to the outright hellish, there are all too many incentives to simply let go. In fact, I’m of the opinion that no mage is truly sane, at least not in the way Sleepers would define it.

But Galen went beyond that, plunging into horrific, irreparable madness. He went on a killing spree, murdering dozens of innocent civilians before deciding to off himself. Gnomon however, lived on. Every few years after that fateful day, it would appear to a new mage, offering its services and the innermost secrets of magic - each time mistaking the person for his original master. And every single time, this new "master" gained enormous supernal power almost instantly - and then fell into a violent madness from which there was no return. Though many have searched, the room that Galen constructed Gnomon in the hospital has never been found.

There are other rumors as well- that Gnomon can return from the dead through the hidden room in the London Royal Hotel, that it made an old woman young again and erased her memories, that it at once sees into the past and the future but never the present. And that it’s capable of jumping a day backwards ahead or behind in time, taking a passenger with it.

Prodigy’s changes are starting to make a lot more sense.

Azazel: The entity must have shown up right when Prodigy hung behind at the site of the breaking of the final seal of the Hellmenth, promising to fly back so the Horsemen could venture to the Underworld to stop the Denarians on Dec 27, 2012. It offered him the power to fight and win against the Order of Judas and he took him up on that deal. I wonder if Prodigy’s willful tampering with Abyssal corruptions of magic may have called to Gnomon.

Chimera: Everyone starts making plans; more research, training, divination. I continue to spy on their efforts; I mean was curious, and more than a little alarmed.

Eos: In all fairness, it’s pretty easy to spy on them when you have STARK and Azazel on your team.

Azazel: I don’t consider providing safety information to young mages spying. Also, I must point out, that access to the logs and records of the Cabals’ venture were conveniently left open for your use…

Eos: Wait, so your saying Casstiel left the back door open for us to do this? He wanted us to do what we did? Putting us closer to that thing… on purpose?

Azazel: I do not know Eos, my former master’s understanding of cause and effect is not linear. Perhaps we needed to do something in order for the events to occur as they did.

Eos:… asshole. I’m not a pawn… fuck him. That better not be the case, we need to do something about him.

Chimera: Anyways… while they made plans, the image of Orion, that mage’s broken corpse keeps making its way into my mind, unbidden. Which is worse, I wonder. To have that inflicted on you? Or to be depraved enough to inflict it? The idea of either sends chills rolling down my spine.

More ominous signs: we start to hear reports of unusual weather patterns moving over the state; great rolling masses of heat and light. Local leylines are suddenly sporadic and infrequent; as though they’ve seen what’s coming and decided to run the hell away from it. 


May 24th, 2014

Chimera: STARK catches wind of something over police channels and passes it along; the murder of twenty-seven year old Jay Bolton in Cavalier, North Dakota. It isn’t the victim that makes this case stand out, though. It’s the killer.

His name was Alex Kralie; an employee of Cavalier’s one and only CENEX. When interviewed by police, his employers had nothing but good things to say about him. By all accounts, he was a model employee until he murdered Bolton in cold blood late one night. The only one on shift at the time, Kralie then closed up the store, drove himself home, and phoned the police to confess to his crime.

And when they arrived a few minutes later, he was dead.

Chimera: Suicide? Sure, if Kralie was somehow capable of disemboweling himself, removing his own internal organs and then making them disappear. Heart, liver, stomach – gone. The wounds that killed him are too precise, and entirely too clean. Meanwhile, Bolton is reported to have only suffered defensive wounds, and they’re about as messy as you’d expect.

Cavalier is an itty-bitty little town in the middle of nowhere where the only causes of death are old age and boredom. Such a murder is practically unheard of there. The two bodies have been transferred to the Pembina County Memorial Hospital morgue; neither flagged for autopsy yet. The CENEX is vacated and taped off; scrying reveals no police presence and no security.

It’s as good a time as any to portal in and have a look around, and after the usual draw of the Tarot by the resident cartomancer, Casstiel, that’s exactly what our powerful friends decide to do.

Tarot Draw: Five of Pentacles Reversed

Spiritual poverty, loneliness and isolation

Chimera: CENEX first. The place has clearly been cleaned up by local law enforcement since the murder happened; no blood, brains or other unseemly body parts lying around on the floor, which immediately puts it a few steps above the last crime scene they visited. Unfortunately, it also means that there’s no mundane evidence here to pour over. But supernatural evidence is a different story. 

First off, the post-cog. A stocky young man in a CENEX uniform, brown hair, a full goatee, and vaguely Native American features stands behind the counter of the convenience store. His eyes are dull and sunken back in his skull, but he’s frustrated, angry, almost feverish under Life sight; he taps his fingers on the counter in a frantic beat as his other hand scrolls through text messages on a nearby smartphone. It’s late, nearly closing time when the Jay Bolton walks in. 

Bolton is an unremarkable man, the sort that would never stand out in a crowd; the sort that there’s not much to like about on first meeting, but not much to find fault in either. Nergal’s sights peg him as someone accustomed to working with his hand, a welder or mechanic, and that he often stops by at the end of his shifts to grab a snack and energy drink. He smiles at the Alex and opens his mouth, no doubt about to indulge in that brand of banal, harmless brand of friendliness native to the Midwest.

Alex’s eyes snap up from his phone, and he locks onto Bolton with a look than can only be described as utter hatred. He leaps over the counter and tackles the man to the floor as a crazed, feral scream tears out from his throat.

For the first few seconds, Bolton is too stunned to react as Alex rips into him with animalistic rage, landing blow after vicious blow and tearing at his exposed face and neck with his teeth. In response to this onslaught, all the man can offer are a few whimpered protests ("What the hell man? What-"). He flails out at Kralie with his arms, trying to push him off, to little effect; Alex doesn’t even seem to register his struggles.

He keeps hitting Bolton long after he’s stopped moving; the man is a limp, mangled corpse on before Kralie pushes himself away and staggers to his feet. He looks dazed, as though just awakened from a particularly vivid dream. And then he looks down, and sees it. The blood on his hands. The body on the floor.

You can see the moment the realization hits him; Alex sways, barely managing to stay on his feet as a single syllable escapes from his lips.

"No . . ."

The vision ends.

Casstiel detects no supernal magic around the site, and Eris senses no spirits around now or back when the murder occurred; furthermore, as far as she can tell, she two men barely knew each other. So what the hell was with Kralie’s reaction to Bolton? It looks more like a crime of passion than anything else, but the motive just isn’t there.

A quick trip to the Pembina County morgue fills in a few details, but also raises new questions. The two men are kept in body bags in an empty room. Not much in the way of mortuary services yet; it’s like no one quite knows what to do about them yet, these murders that shouldn’t have happened.

The body of Jay Bolton reveals nothing remarkable; only fear, defensive wounds and the kind of fractured bone and pulped muscle that seems impossible to inflict by bare hands. He was simply beaten to death by someone more physically powerful or more committed; it’s downright mundane. However, Alex’s contains a number of oddities, not the least of which is the slick, glossy membrane covering the gaping hole that is his abdominal cavity. Under Matter sight, it has roughly the texture of flimsy saran wrap. The wound – stretching all the way up to the Solar Plexus - is horrific but cut with surgical precision. Nergal determines that the organs of his abdomen and torso were carefully removed before being reinserted with a few missing – his heart, liver and stomach, as we have already established. Minor hemorrhaging of his capillaries. His eyes are closed, and blood is dried around his nose and ears; a detail more significant than it at first seems.

Bolton’s resonance is also too stained by the moment of his death to be a source of much information. Alex’s, though . . . there’s something a little odd about him; a part displaced, ethereal, more attuned with the spirit world than with this one. A legacy carried in his veins – an animal howling inside him that never quite managed to break free. Kralie was wolf-blooded. They wonder if he had family nearby – a pack of Uratha. 

Azazel: At least that was our best working theory. While all present have at least seen a werewolf once or twice, this would be the first time we’ve seen someone who isn’t one of the lycanthropes but carries a seeming of their aspect in his genetics and spiritual being.

Chimera: I actually did some poking around and was able to confirm this theory; I have Alex’s sister Julia to thank for most of the details. After I did some (what I thought was covert) snooping around the Kralie residence, she caught up to me, expressing an earnest desire to answer some of my questions and a politely phrased threat of ripping my lungs out if I ever screwed with her family. Delightful woman. Details of what I was able to glean recorded below in case they prove useful to someone later. 

STARK was also able to positively identity members of her pack.

The Kralie family. Images provided by STARK:

Julia "Ištu" Kralie

(Ištu means the part of the moon opposite the sun) 

Alex’s sister

Julia’s feelings on her family can best be summarized as love mixed with discontent. Chafed by what she perceives as hidebound dogma and an overly strict hierarchy, she spends more time scouting with the family’s assorted mutts than around her own kin. As we talked, the words came spilling out of her as though she’d been holding them back a long time. Even she seemed surprised at the amount she was willing to divulge to a total stranger. Maybe only to a total stranger. And still, they are family.

Malcolm Kralie

(now deceased)
Alex and Julia’s father

Malcolm was a Hunter; his wife Bethany an Uratha. Given that, the story of their courtship is likely very interesting and very violent. Regardless, the two ultimately ended up in a stable, loving marriage that was cut short when Malcolm died in a "hunting accident" a few years back; Julia declined to provide further details on the incident, but I got the feeling that she and her father were close. The rest of the family didn’t take a Hunter marrying-in so kindly; Joshua held a particular enmity for him. But while they may have found his presence disturbing, disgusting, and outright distasteful, Malcolm was always treated with at least a modicum of respect, a product of his refusal to ever use silver against their kind.

Bethany "Ice Wind" Kralie
Alex and Julia’s mother

I was a little startled to hear Julia describe her own mother as "cold"; she spoke of her with a great deal of respect, but little affection. From what I gathered, Bethany is an excellent scout, crafty and calculating, bordering on callous at times. She’s her father’s loyal right hand; her only real divergence from his will was her marriage to Malcolm Kralie.

Elijah "Wah-yah" Blackwell

(Wah-yah means wolf) 

Bethany and Joshua’s father 

The patriarch. Elijah is rigid, unforgiving, authoritarian, accustomed to barking out orders, and not at all fond of outsiders, but most of all, he cleaves to tradition. The family is culturally an even mixture of Mandan Catholic teachings; Elijah ensures that they’re very strict when it comes to accuracy and adherence, and they all speak fluent Latin. He’s a hard man on his family; even his daughter, who he’s got a soft spot for, falls under intense scrutiny.

Joshua "Hanhapi wi" Blackwell
(Hanhapi wi means the Storyteller)
Bethany’s half-brother, Elijah’s son, Christopher’s father

Joshua hates his son, minds his sister, and fears his father. He wears a mean, hard-edged smile and likes to throw his weight around. As the storyteller, he gives his time and attention to making sure his family remembers the old legends – one in particular. But we’ll get to that...

Christopher "Hushilu" Blackwell
(Hushilu means Spirit-talker)
Joshua’s son

A perpetual disappointment in his father’s eyes, Christopher always seems a shade off balance when dealing with people and his nervous mannerisms do him no favors in that regard. He has little skill when it comes to fighting either; his real talent lies in his exceptional ability for dealing with spirits. Christopher is the one who spends the most time interacting with the pack totem: a spirit of the Tongue River that’s grown ornery and resentful in the many years it’s been bound.

Kennedy "Red beard" McGrath
Family friend of Bethany and Joshua

Kennedy is what you’d call "chaotic neutral"; virtually the only thing about him that can be counted on to stay consistent is the fact that he’s not consistent. That said, he tends towards eccentricity. He’s perhaps the least cowed by Elijah’s authority, but is good at keeping his mouth shut.

Chimera: Julia speaks of her brother with regret. Alex was the sole mundane amongst a pack of werewolves, and thus the only one left out of the loop when it came to the supernatural world. For years his family scrutinized him, waiting for what they call the First Change that never came . . . as time rolled on, their interest twisted itself into disappointment and pity. Alex knew it and fumed. And still they told him nothing. He was the black sheep of the family, but never learned why. One day he simply left; having had more than his fill of cryptic statements, condescending looks, and occurrences that couldn’t be logically explained, he was determined to have nothing to do with any of them ever again.

They kept an eye on him, of course. He was family, and the Change might still come, unlikely as it might have been by that point. On some level, none of them could believe it; that their long, storied heritage had come to this – lowly Alex Kralie, human gas station clerk. Their ancestors lived free and proud. They walked with spirits. They bound a god, once.

And there’s the key. Long ago, a trickster god fell and the Abyss lapped him up. Iktomi the spider had many names; Ikto, Ictinike, Inktomi, Unktome, Unktomi. When the cold darkness swallowed him, he forgot them all. What emerged wasn’t a man, wasn’t a god, but a thing – spindly and many-limbed, as gorged on wrongness as the pit that spawned it.

Eos: Woah! Spoiler alert! We haven’t even got to that thing yet. Wait. So it was a creature from Native American legend? And this pack is related to the ones that put it into the butte?

Chimera: That’s the theory.

Azazel: Iktomi… that… makes perfect sense. Bravo boss! So like the Spearfinger and the Gentleman, there seems to be some precedence for tribal entities and Acamoth corruption in this state. This one just happened to be the overlap between the two…

Chimera: Ahem…the tribes felt the change, felt the wrongness. And when the deaths started coming, men, woman and children cut open and left to bleed out, they acted. The packs came together (they were greater in those days) and planned amongst themselves. Then came the hunt for the Thin Man, that thing that was once their god. They found it, they caught it, and they bound it, because for all their strength they could not kill it. The Thin Man slumbered in silence below Eagle Butte, and for years upon years, no power would wake it.

Julia’s recounting of the legend ends in a foregone conclusion: about a month ago, the Butte tore itself apart in a rain of fire and ash as the bindings came undone. The Thin Man walks the earth, and her brother is its first victim. She stops there, eyes wet, gives me a nod and some stock phrase or another, and turns to go. I’m left with fresh questions and an increasing sense of foreboding.

Chimera: Back to the morgue, because there’s still something they’ve yet to try. Nergal focuses on the corpse of Alex Kralie, and draws a translucent veil of ectoplasm out from his eyes. The substance writhes as it’s held suspended in the air, gradually forming itself into a coherent image. The last thing Alex ever witnessed is plain for all to see:

Chimera: Eris recognizes the blurry figure immediately. In 2009, one thread on the Something Awful forums hosted a competition that challenged users to edit photos to make them into something creepy and supernatural. The winner was Victor Surge, whose entry depicted a tall man with gangly limbs with no face, dressed in a dapper black suit and tie; the thread named him Slenderman, and he quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, being featured in video games, cosplay, fan art, creepypasta stories, and youtube videos. A search by STARK returns over a million results in the first 2.5 seconds; this is going to take some time to sort out. Knowing that the ambulance will be arriving soon to move the bodies to Grand Forks, the five decide to relocate to the Sanctum.

It was at this time that I received a phone call from Casstiel warning me of the second murder and try very hard to sound surprised; I’ve been keeping pretty close tabs on the situation via STARK and my own small investigations.

Cynead and I are instructed to spend the next few days researching organ theft. I, specifically, spend most of that time sweating. When you realize that you’re dealing with an ancient Native American god and deadly urban legend wrapped up in one, oh shit doesn’t even begin to cover it. But I keep my mouth shut. They’ve already got a pretty good idea of the danger they’re facing.

And I have the suspicion that what it was in the past matters a great deal less than what it is now when it comes to killing it. 

It’s a lot easier to find references to mundanely motivated organ theft than anything supernatural, a fact that shouldn’t surprise me by this point but still does; Sleepers are wide eyed with simultaneous cynicism and ignorance. The Chinese government supposedly extracting organs from prisoners on death row. Murdered refugees and a trail of missing body parts in their wake. Whispers of an American missionary to Nicaragua beaten into a coma when rumors of him harvesting the organs of local children spread. Believable enough. But start talking of monsters in the night, and to most people, you may as well be a madman. 

Still, a few especially unusual stories surface:

1. A South American creature called the Pishtaco, which despite its name’s striking similarity to the words "fish taco" causes very real problems. Supposedly, they’re man-like beasts that torture people and steal their body fat and organs for nefarious purposes. Namely, eating them. Rumors of the monster has caused some locals to reject aid from US Food for Peace program, on the suspicion that the organization is run by Pishtacos trying to fatten up their children for harvesting.

2. Reports of a murder that baffled a homicide detective with thirty years of experience. The body of a 60-year old homeless man found in an abandoned rowhouse in Philadelphia with a rope around his slit throat and a torso pitted with missing organs; heart, liver, kidney, esophagus. An occult specialist was eventually called in, but no satisfactory conclusion was ever reached.

3. Crime waves of genital theft in Africa. A nefarious crime supposedly performed through a simple handshake between perpetrator and victim. Modern medicine was reported to be of no help to the afflicted. The stolen organs were supposedly sold to faith healers and occultists for use in rituals. 

Odd cases, but none is quite what we’re looking for. I slip what I learned from Julia Kralie in the story into our report, and hand it over to the boss, with the mention that they’ll want to think on the motivation behind the theft; in two of the three strange cases Cynead and I found, the organs were needed as fuel to be consumed, a sort of power source. There’s a decent chance that is also the case here, further implied by the almost surgical precision of the removal; whatever this was didn’t want its prizes damaged.

Azazel: Ladies, it is also worth noting that while the investigation was gearing up with one mage causality directly attributed to Prodigy and one wolf-blooded sleeper attributed to some kind of internet meme/urban legend, during the weekend of 15th of May Casstiel and Seraph were called away to investigate an unrelated Abyssal entity plaguing contacts in Colorado Springs. Seraph was forced to deal with a very large swarm of Shard Crows, the same swarm that killed his wife. Witness was also sighted, much to Casstiel’s dislike. There is a separate log file in which Casstiel details this event called "One for Sorrow." This may have contributed to the slower reaction to the developing situation. They still had no evidence connecting the two events in any way, or connecting the Shard Crows to the Slenderman. It wasn’t determined until later that Prodigy killing Orion and the Slenderman’s predations were completely unrelated.

Eos: Jesus, so much Abyssal shit. Is this normal!?

Azazel: No. I’ve theorized that the upsurge in Abyssal manifestations may speak to the continuing decay or the Fallen World or speak to the Horsemen’s uncanny ability to attract or cause trouble.

Eos: Azzy, I’m not sure which I think is worse. Please don’t tell me anymore. I don’t think I should know anyway.

Azazel: I firmly embody the intellectual concept that ignorance is never bliss. Ignorance is stupidity, insane, and unforgivable. This is why you did not sign your name upon the Watchtower. This is the opposite of true wisdom.

Chimera: AZAZEL! Stop. Now. 

Eos: Ouch…

Chimera: And she really isn’t supposed to know unless it’s relevant and a secret that needs to be shared. Is it relevant to her now? 

Azazel: Yes boss, shutting up. No boss, not now.

Chimera: Eos… 

Eos: It’s fine. His lizard/bat brain was made using an imprint of Cass’s mind. So he is a jackass too. 

Chimera: ...Right. 

Eos: Moving on? 

Chimera: Okay, moving on to the trap they made. There’s more than one problem at play here after all. Seraph and Kairos dig out a maze in the Beulah cemetery, a trap for an old friend. Capturing Prodigy is going to be a complicated endeavor. Snaring a mage is hard enough when you don’t know, but when he he’s got the ability to jump forwards and backwards in time is going to require some prep work, to say the least.

The trap consists of the following elements:
a. Application of Prime that will negate Prodigy’s spellwork
b. Limiting the physical space he has to maneuver
c. Temporal Occlusion around the site d. A trigger that will put the spirit residing in his weapon to sleep
e. Spatial Oubliette, preventing his movement f. Destroying the trap on success or failure (as a method of preventing his temporal jumps)
g. Strengthening the Gauntlet around the site h. An application of Forces that will obscure his senses 

Azazel: The plan is to target Prodigy sympathetically and Teleport him into the trap. The trap swings shut they’d have him captured. The problem is that he is most likely spatially anchored or behind wards. They cannot risk building up a large and powerful working, no matter how veiled, without the risk of the action being detected and countered. Eris’s unique Legacy Attainments allowed them to reach him using her ability to bridge the gap between spatial sympathy to genetic or familial sympathy in order to reach him. This is an application of the Arcana that defies how Supernal magic should work in the Fallen World.

Chimera: So they’ll teleport one of Prodigy’s sisters in, and Eris will use her abilities to affect Prodigy through his family members, pulling him in as well. Since it’s so outside of what magic is supposed to behave, Prodigy is assumed to have no defense against it. 

Eos: Wait… so they kidnap his sister? That really crosses a line Chimera… that is just… wrong.

Azazel: She was magically sedated and teleported. She never knew she was gone from her bed.

Eos: Azzy… is that supposed to make me feel better?

Azazel: No. But it was deemed necessary. Though the act does seem to have a bit of symmetry. One of the Denarians once kidnapped his sisters and the Horsemen of War murdered him with excessive violence.

Eos: Great, way to make anyone murderously angry. And five on one… their fear seems a bit lopsided. 

Azazel: At the time the Cabals thought Prodigy had called up the Slenderman somehow, a Tulpa of popular nightmare. The connection to the explosion butte had not been established and Prodigy was known for his rapid degeneration and the knowledge to summon Abyssal entities. The bizarre Abyssal resonance or lack thereof (or being unwilling to befoul the senses with it) at the murder site (there had only been the one after all) obfuscated the direct similarity to resonances at the butte. Prodigy fueled by Gnomon’s gifts had become terrifyingly powerful, or at least perceived to be so. If he had succumbed like the others to accept Gnomon’s powers he was also a dangerously insane mult-master. And possibly one of the Mad, the boogeymen of Awakened society.

Chimera: Kairos goes to Casstiel with a request. Their planning would benefit greatly from some advanced Time Divination, which in turn would be benefitted by knowing Prodigy’s true name. Like any other imperfect, fallible human, a mage is always redefining themselves; if anything, magic only accelerates the potential for individual change. We can have a dozen different shifting identities, each with its own name. But by the laws of the Supernal, the name signed on our Watchtower is the only one that truly matters. In that sense, our souls remain constant. 

So Kairos’ plan is this: write down Prodigy’s possible true names on a slip of paper, then magically study each individual name until he finds the one that resonates. Because of the sympathetic connection between Prodigy and his names, there’s a good chance of him feeling a little psychic twinge as Kairos does it, so he needs an application of Prime to mask his scrutiny; a draw of his Tarot leads Casstiel to believe Seraph is the one who should be casting it.

Seraph requests that Kairos obtains a two way mirror (easy enough for a Matter master to procure) in order to help focus their spells. Most of the names written on the paper are purely mundane, but one stands out because of the sheer weirdness of the temporal distortion around it. He’s occluded it, but that in and of itself is a tell. Jonathan David Tally. They’ve got what they need, and as far as anyone can tell, avoided catching Prodigy’s notice, and their own occlusions will hopefully prevent him from catching wind of their plans. Casstiel’s next Tarot draw isn’t fortuitous.

Tarot Draw: Five of Cups reversed
Trouble in future endeavors, better to hold on to your current advantages

Chimera: Casstiel has made efforts at locating Prodigy in the past using Space, but the man is heavily, heavily occluded and uses Space magic to fix his location in space except under his own will, so Casstiel’s successes have been very limited. He uses Divination that even peripherally involves him will encounter the same difficulties. Thus Kairos, Casstiel, and Seraph all decide to pool their efforts, with Eris providing a Zone of Extremity around them.

Azazel: Prodigy also displayed the ability to erases the timeline in areas where he previously was and used many other methods to avoid tracking or detection. 

Chimera: Things go awry when Seraph accidently puts a knife through his arm, and both he and Eris drop out of the ritual. Luckily, the two remaining mages are able to complete it themselves. Kairos gets three questions, two of which he devotes to getting advice on perfecting the trap. The third answer he receives is the most hopeful; Prodigy can indeed be saved with the means the group has. Though Casstiel notes that because they didn’t clarify what "saved" meant, this information is of dubious value.