Issue 6

From AngilleWiki

August 9, 2010 Monday

The group is in the car, headed towards Kansas City. Sammy seems excited about what Bea said about heroes. "Costumes! Do we get costumes?" Raf remarks that, "Armani doesn't make costumes." After Sammy's dreams of spandex are derailed, the party arrives at Kansas City, MO around noonish. Bea suggested talking to an Edward Hastings, so we try to contact the man on the card.

Andrea wants to go to a hotel. Everyone looks at her like she's grown a second head; Sammy puts forth that he just wants to get this done with so they can try out Spandex! Raf gets on the horn with Hastings.

• EH: Good afternoon, this is Edward Hastings.
• Raf: A mutual friend of ours named Bea suggested we get in touch with you. Where's a good place to meet?
• EH: insert address here - This is my business address. Feel free to come by anytime.

The address is probably 10-15 miles away, pretty quick by car. Or flight. Or teleportation. Whatever. The office is in a small office building. Raf's plan is to poke around in the computers for... us. Our names, our titles (Sammy: "Titles? We have titles?") or whatever. As it turns out, about 20 different companies are working in this complex, but Raf manages to hone in on Hastings' office. He has very minimal information on us - names, vague description, etc, emailed from Bea. As we enter the building, Raf reads up on Hastings' emails. He's apparently a PI, with lots of clients' emails, including some from Bea indicating that she's needed to find people locally. He seems to have quite the range of investigational skills, but not too high profile.

His door, alas, isn't a glass door with a big eye on it - just a normal office building door with a plaque next to it. Raf opens the door and steps in. The office is... tiny, and filled with filing cabinets, with stacks of paper on the desk, yet somehow meticulously organized. Hastings himself is in proper business attire, sans jacket and long sleeves, due to the fact that his AC is a little fan by the window. He's 40ish, slightly stout, only just balding, and unlike PIs in movies, clean-shaven and neat.

• Raf: Mr. Hasting, you have some information for us. What might that be?
• EH: I was told that you were going to help me track down Reflection and shed some light on that.
• Raf: repeats Bea's email verbatim
• EH: Did she send you a copy as well?
• Raf: No. I just read it.
• EH: Ok... so... that means I have to put up a better firewall -
• Raf: You could certainly try.
• EH: So Bea wants hackers to help?
• Raf: I don't think you'd consider us hacks. What do you need from us, and what can we get, information-wise, about Reflection?
• EH: I have much, but I need to know where she keeps her files.
• Raf: Where's her base of operations?
• EH: Further north, not near here.

Getting up, Hastings reveals his height at about 5'9", and pulls out a rather thick file. Opening it up, he pulls out a picture and shows it to the group. The woman is in her thirties, a white business suit, and a very vacant expression.

• EH: This is Liz Ferrina, AKA Reflection. I found her residence and her place of business (rattling off addresses) -
• Raf: Are those within five miles of each other?
• EH: Yes. Her business card says she works as an importer / exporter. But she does meet with some very strange people.
• Raf: Circus folk?
• EH: Supers. Assorted riff-raff occasionally.
• Andrea: Is her business legit?
• EH: I'm not sure. One of the things I was able to get in her office once, her files appear to have next to nothing in them. Only one cabinet, and as far as I could find, her computer doesn't have much in the way of business matters on it.
• Sammy: Business matters? What did it have?
• EH: Very little I could find.
• Andrea: What about the IRS?
• EH: The IRS files are legitimate.
• O'Malley: Has she been audited, or are they taking her word?
• EH: I haven't found a recorded audit. But... from what little I could find of the IRS files, she appears to be living slightly above her means.
• Andrea: Did you do a credit check?
• EH: Everything's fine. She doesn't use credit much. She has two assistants. One named Anthony M. Tigard, with no obvious superpowers.

A picture is produced of a man with a weathered, tough face, forties, crew-cut slightly graying. Think Billy Bob Thornton.

• Raf: Any kind of military history on this guy?
• EH: Nothing I could dig up. No record under this name. The other assistant is Mira Tarasova.

Just looking at the picture, she's got to partly super (or Photoshopped) - she looks like she's beginning to freeze. Dark hair, forties, Russian possibly Baltic.

• EH: Reflection's never been observed without these two people, traveling directly between work and home, with one of the two always driving, and they run her errands when she needs them. I've never seen her go to a store, or out anywhere except home and office.
• Raf: Sounds paranoid.
• Sammy: With a name like Reflection, have you ever seen her in a mirror?
• EH: That's what's odd. Her office and house are both littered with mirrors. I've seen nothing odd in the mirrors, including her.
• Andrea: Does her import/export specialize in mirrors?
• EH: Among other things. Mostly furniture-type items.
• Raf: Furniture boxes can contain large things.
• Andrea: Also, drugs can be stuffed into cushions on furniture. Cocaine has been trafficked through children's books even.
• EH: It doesn't appear that her clientelle is picking drugs up. I haven't seen anything to indicate that. But... with the people she does see, I wouldn't be surprized.
• Raf: I think it's more than drugs she's moving around. You don't assassinate the president with drugs.
• EH: Whuh? She's part of the president consipiracy?
• Raf: Isn't everyone? You are now.
• EH: Brilliant. Oh, she has no windows in her office. Just the mirrors.
• Raf: So she goes only to her office and home, at all hours of the day, and there are no windows at her office. She may have some kind of teleportation ability, maybe through a mirror or something.
• EH: Yes, that is a possibility. I unfortunately would not know where she's going.
• Sammy: Uh, can anyone here break a lot of mirrors at once?
• Raf: A sonic blast? A hand grenade would work well.
• EH: Yes, but they don't exactly sell those at the army surplus.
• Sammy: So... what's the plan?
• EH: Well, I was hoping that possibly you people could do a little investigation. I would love to see the rest of her files. She's obviously doing more than just import/export... but I can't tell what.
• Raf: Well, let's find a nice restaurant within five miles of her work and residence, and we'll see what we can turn up.
• EH: If you don't mind, I have other business to conduct, but feel free to figure whatever out. Would you like a photocopy of the file?

Raf sneaks into Hastings' mind, to find that he's not hiding anything relevant to the investigation. We nab a copy of the file, and he asks that we cover the copy bill. Raf surrupticiously hands him $100 and Hastings nabs a thumb drive from the local vending machine so we have a digital copy as well. We end up at a local upscale diner where Raf slices into the slipstream. The TV in the diner mentions the three supers we stuck in a freezer, including the way one had to be tazered after slicing a couple officers.

Raf finds that Reflection's home has two computers, neither belonging to Reflection herself, and neither with much interesting on them. So he goes for the work computers. On those, he finds a bunch of import/export stuff. Legit stuff. But... one of the names looks peculiarly familiar. From the San Diego obituaries. (!?) The date of the transaction is post-mortem. Wow. For end tables and the like. As it turns out... everyone Reflection works with happens to be dead. Not their estates. Not their executors. Dead people. Including dead from the 1940s. Some of the exporters are foreign. Dead foreignors. Andrea comes up with a theory that these are people made up to get around the PATRIOT act. Hrm... maybe not. Nobody appears to have subscriptions to the death index or geneology.com.

She's not dead. She has a good SS#. She has a good birth certificate (she's 32). She couldn't hold down a job until 26, when she got her two assistants, and she's been flying high ever since. She dropped out of Kansas State without getting a computer degree.

Sammy says she could be time traveling through the mirrors. Holes get put in his thoery. Meh, he's not a time traveller. He couldn't know. Anyway. We have a list of dead people who Reflection's worked with. Raf tries to cross-reference Reflection's correspondance with Distortion's correspondance. None. We're just flummoxed that she can pull off this whole thing without getting nabbed by the IRS because of the dead SS numbers. Not every transaction is under $500, and there really aren't that many in total. Weird.

Maybe she's put some sort of glamour up on people she's met that stops them from actually noticing the weird stuff. We just haven't met her. Hastings has met her, so there's a tick on the list of things that push this theory forward. Sammy wants to know if one of us can interact with her without interacting with her, because her power might work through senses.

ding - these "dead" people still have contact information. Does Rutger's number exist? A couple of calls here and there, but he's not in the customer database. Maybe there was no monetary interaction? Barter? Ok, this isn't really going anywhere. We try the assistants. No dice, but they do at least have real birth certificates. Still not going anywhere. We'll have to get physical.

Raf ties into the security system at the office, and finds that they're there. So we head to her home. Their home. The building all three live in. Sammy enters first, to open the door for everyone else, during which... nothing happens. Sammy leaves to watch for the car while everyone else searches, after mind-linking with Raf.

It's a decent sized apartment, though the decor is rather strange, all things considered. There are a bunch of partial paintings, weird modern art sculptures, and... mirrors. Various shapes, sizes, locations. There is a single chair in the middle of the living room that seems to have a lot of the mirrors pointing towards it. Also, four flat-panel TVs around the room. No pets. Bathroom though, with medicine cabinet. Nothing weird in the cabinet. No yearbooks, no musical instruments, nothing personal on the bookshelves. "This isn't a person, this is an alien!" Andrea exclaims. "You can't do anything with a person who has nothing. She goes nowhere except home and office with only two peole, and does business with dead people. For all we know, she's an enemy so big and bad we were sent here just to get gobbled!" The fridge implies that mostly delivery is eaten here. No spandex super-outfit in the closet. On to the mooks' suites.

Much more normal people. Bookshelves, messes, pictures on the walls, yearbooks etc. Tigard has gun and ammo magazines, Mira has quite a few travel magazines with lots of warm pictures, and tropical pictures on the walls. They seem to be more normal in the kitchen. They also don't appear to be a couple, but might have relationships outside their working one.

O'Malley notices that the chair in the living room is the only one that really gets used. He, uh, sits in the chair. It's comfy. Suddenly, all the artwork completes themselves! But only to O'Malley, through the mirrors. It's the parallax of the reflections that does it. He notices that no matter where he turns, he can see a specific set of desk drawers. He goes to open that drawer. Inside appears to be a number of personal files, including on the house, the office, and... the second office! At that moment, Raf gets a message from Sammy that he's starting the car - they're coming.

Raf manages to engage Reflection's brakes, stopping them three blocks from the house. Just enough time to scan the second office files with Mira's scanner, save them on the thumbdrive and skedadle.