Colonel Jonathan O'Neil, who had delivered the letter, would serve as liaison. He explained that there were two additional objectives. Kanza was believed to have acquired a nuclear bomb, which he intended to detonate in Kisangani. He was also planning a ritual which would destroy Garamba National Park, and presumably summon something nasty.

I called Musashi, John, and McGuire and arranged transport to the Congo. I briefed them on the situation en route. McGuire immediately asked if this was a Game. Interesting question. Without hesitating, I told him that it was. It never pays to show doubt in front of subordinates.

The sniper opened fire as we disembarked at the Simi-Simi Airport, in Kisangani. Strategic surprise, at least, was clearly out of the question. When we searched his body, we found a slip of paper with the address of the Palm Beach Hotel.

It might be a red herring, but we couldn't afford to ignore it. We suited up, fired BZ gas grenades into the room, and charged in. Inside we found a Congolese woman and … a nuclear bomb. Bingo.

As soon as the team of experts I had positioned in Kisangani took possession of the device, we headed to Garamba. There was nothing we could do about disarming the bomb, and therefore no point in worrying about it. We did later learn, however, that the nuclear device was successfully disarmed and transported to the United States.

The prisoner had provided Kanza's location, which turned out to be accurate. The operation to neutralize him went surprisingly well. We were dropped by a stealthed helicopter a few hundred meters from the site and proceeded through the jungle. After dealing with several obstacles, we took Kanza and his guards by surprise and killed them. Papers in his desk revealed the location of a bracelet that would be key to the summoning ritual, and after searching the nearby jungle we found it and called for extraction.

O'Neil congratulated us on our success, and asked me to give him the bracelet. I hesitated. That wasn't one of the objectives. Moreover, in the wrong hands, it might still be used to complete the ritual.

What did I really know about O'Neil? Was I sure I could trust him? I had never interacted with him before, and had not had the opportunity to evaluate him. Moreover, as a possible Harbinger's representative, I had been reluctant to use special means to establish his trustworthiness. But I wasn't just going to give him the bracelet. I took him to the other side of the room, where we could speak privately, and made conversation, attempting to get a feel for his nature.

The more we spoke, the less I liked him. Finally I asked him point-blank who he worked for. He transformed into some sort of gelatinous tentacle monster and attacked.

This was awkward. We quickly established that neither bullets nor blades had any appreciable effect; his pseudo-flesh closed over the wounds as soon as they appeared. I had napalm grenades, but he was standing right in front of me.

What followed was as confused a fight as any I've seen. We struggled to put distance between us, and he fought to stay toe-to-toe and rip us apart. Finally John picked him up and bodily hurled him more than twenty feet. Tagai immediately followed with a hail of napalm grenades. Soon O'Neil was a bubbling soup.

Or not O'Neil, as it turned out. The real colonel's body turned up shortly afterward. The creature, whatever it was, had murdered him and taken his place.

All that was left was cleanup. Using the troops I had prepositioned around the national park for just this purpose, we wiped out Kanza's insurgents, as well as the poachers and assorted riffraff using the park as a base, and rescued his prisoners. Then we headed home.

Musashi and Frogard showed up as well. They seemed to know John.

We were to gain control of an object located in Sterling City, Texas, and ensure it remained undamaged. Apparently we would know it when we saw it.

Without much to go on, we headed to Sterling City and began nosing around. I soon learned that a funeral was being held today for a 16-year-old named Adrian Smith who had apparently fallen from a windmill. A number of things about the case didn't add up.

I attended the funeral and spoke with Adrian's family and friends, offering condolences and making a few discreet inquiries, while the others conducted their own investigations. Between us, we learned that he had met with two friends, Eric Kelly and Caleb Russell, only hours before his death. They had gone to visit an abandoned house reputed to be haunted. We would need to check it out.

The house did appear to be abandoned; the windows were boarded up, the yard overgrown. It was in surprisingly good shape, however. Inside, there was very little dust, and a library filled with occult tomes that showed signs of regular use.

We were in the sitting room when a hobo suddenly opened the door, tossed in a grenade, and slammed it shut.

Hobos are like that.

Tagai leaped forward and swatted the grenade out the door. Seconds later, bullets slammed through the wall and ripped into Frogard. We charged into the hall, but there was no one there.

After a few tense moments with no enemy in evidence, we began moving quickly from room to room, looking for the shooter. We found him – or rather, he found us – in the kitchen. It was the hobo. Musashi charged in to attack, but had barely tagged him when he vanished. He was a teleporter.

After a short but vicious battle in which the hobo ably demonstrated that teleporters are among the most frustrating antagonists you can face, he made a fatal mistake. He blinked out of reach of the others, and landed directly in my sights. I blew him away.

With no more targets aboveground, we swiftly moved to the basement. There we found a bizarre apparition guarding the stairs. It was only vaguely humanoid, and stretched like taffy; its reach was incredible, and its fists struck like pile drivers. It died hard, but it died.

That was when the bizarre behavior started. It didn't take long to realize that someone or something was trying to seize control of our minds.

There was no time for caution. We ran forward and found – nothing. No visible opponents at all.

Where we fighting something invisible? Was there a concealed room? Or some sort of incorporeal being?

Frogard's eyes went blank, and for a moment we feared it had taken control of her. But it turned out she was using her own abilities to locate the enemy.

There were two of them, and they were behind an apparently featureless wall. There was no door and no way in.

Yet. John promptly began ripping at the wall, demonstrating incredible strength. In moments, he had a hole wide enough for one person to squeeze through. Fortunately the wall turned out to be brick, neither particularly sturdy nor very thick.

Musashi was first through, as he always seemed to be. As soon as he was in, however, he froze, his face going blank. He seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, then abruptly swung his sword in a vicious arc at one of the two men inside. His sword struck the man – and he almost decapitated himself. Somehow, the damage had affected him instead of his target. Perhaps if we beat this one into unconsciousness … .

There was only so much these mind controllers could do at close quarters, however. The fight was vicious but short. All in all they weren't as bad as the hobo.

That left us in possession of the house. But what were we in possession of? What was the object we needed?

An investigation turned up a door of some unknown metal. We couldn't open it, so we decided to go around it; but when we began removing the surrounding wall, we found that it covered a wall composed of the same metal. Soon we determined that it was an entire room, with walls, floor, and ceiling of the mysterious metal, completely airtight and as far as we could tell with no way in short of blowing the door.

We sat down to discuss the matter. Should we break in? Was the object inside? Or was the room itself the object, in which case breaking in would damage it and forfeit the Game?

Finally we decided that the room was the object. I purchased the house, razed it, and constructed a secure facility to safeguard the metal room. Presumably the Harbinger's interest would be made clear in time. If not … what could be inside it? Quite likely, something potentially dangerous. Quite likely, something that might emerge on its own. I doubled the pay of the personnel who would staff the facility – and made sure they had plenty of life insurance.

It wasn't an ambush, though, unless you consider a Game and ambush, which it really kind of is. Anyway, he handed me one of those envelopes with the weird "M" on it and I let him jog off. I wondered if I should have killed him. I mean, would that anger the Harbinger or would it care?

Eh, I don't kill unless I get paid to or have a pretty good reason.

So I opened the letter and found directions to stupid Norway. I hate cold mission Games. They're always loaded with zombies. Or Nazi zombies that are almost impossible to kill. Cold Games suck ass. I really considered not going (stupid cold places) but my little run in with the pack of god level assassins made it clear that i needed to get a lot better if I was ever going to be the best.

I scheduled a flight to Norway.

I ended up working with Hays, his body guard and Froggy. We were sent into a really old forest to get some trees and stop another group from getting some trees. Lethally if necessary.

Hays talked to some people ('cause he's Hays and I'm pretty sure that his Powers run off yadda-yadda-yadda energy) and hired a couple guides and we were off. Everything was cool until the trees came alive and started trying to eat us. We dodged the ones we could and smacked around the ones we couldn't all the while following the trail of the other group.

It was a close thing, but we found the saplings we were looking for and caught up to the four jackasses that we were sent to stop. We tried to take them alive, but NO. They had to put up a fight. One chick took off with a bunch of saplings tied to her back. The two dudes pulled guns and the last chick pulled a freaking sword.

It was on. I went for sword girl. I came so, so close to cutting her head off with one swing of the blade, but, sadly, it took two. Snicker-snack and her pretty little head went spinning off to the ground. I really hate killing cute chicks. It seems so wasteful.

Not that that stopped her. The evil headless chick couldn't be killed. She just kept coming at me, swinging that giant freaking sword. I had already won the fight, but had to spend the next minute running and fighting like mad. Hays and Taggy (not sure of the spelling, but I like Taggy) put down the dudes and swapped to lethal rounds. Between the three of us, we managed to put down the unkillable death woman. Hays lit her on fire and I chased after the last chick.

And chased and chased and chased. This chick worked out. I mean, I am really freaking fast and she was really freaking faster. I threw tons of smoke bombs at her and ran as hard as I could and she still got away.

Hays and Taggy decided to split off and see if they could intercept her before she got to the car (Which I had cleverly sabotaged. Go ninja!) while Froggy and I tracked her directly. Turns out that while she's a quick little thing, her speed was cheetah-like. All short bursts followed by rest.

We closed in. I left Frogs and the guides behind, got confirmation and sent the GPS coordinates to Hays. He and Taggy circled around, boxing her in. Then we killed her. Lots. It sounds pretty nasty, but we tried to take her alive once and she was not alive-takeable.

Hays stayed behind and ironed things out with the authorities while Froggy and I delivered the saplings to our sponsor.

Yay! Happy ending.

Well, I was pretty mega-sneaky. I decided to get even sneakier. I didn't add a lot of tricks to my all ready tricked out gear, but I did stop by Hawaii for some well needed practice in the art of being vewy, vewy quiet. I crept around the jungle for days and, and, I walked around the cities and towns practicing walking right up behind people without them noticing.

I was all tip-toe-tip-toe "Hi!" and they freaked out and stuff. God, I'm good.

Anyway, I also took some time to learn about security systems and the like. It seemed the smart thing to do, but honestly not very ninja-like. I mean, I know that modern ninja's probably know all about this kind of stuff, but there wasn't a ton of laser activated surveillance in the Edo period. Unless you watch the right anime.

Anyway, I'm not going to be deconstructing complex devices or feeding false images or any of that other nerdy stuff, but I should have enough skill to get past alarms and such without totally bungling stuff.

At leas that's the plan. Stupid correspondence courses.

The mission was twofold: We were to obtain a sample of a rare tree, and to prevent a rival team from doing the same. The other team, surprisingly enough, was not High Rollers. No doubt they would be formidable all the same.

We hired guides and set out into the forest after the others, who had a day's start on us. After sunset a fog rose, and we had to slow our pace, but the moon provided enough light to continue with caution. When we found their campsite, our guides wanted to stop for the night as well, but I dismissed the suggestion. We were now only a few hours behind them.

Suddenly roots erupted from the ground, seizing one of the guides and beginning to draw him under. We leaped forward and managed to extricate him after a short but fierce struggle.

Backing up to a safe distance, we paused while Osby went into some sort of trance and surveyed the area. She reported that some of the trees were sentient and predatory. More helpfully, she was able to identify the ones to avoid.

For a while this sufficed. Soon, however, we came to an area where all the trees were aware.

There was nothing for it but to try to sneak past. Some twenty meters ahead, we could see an area where towering giants gave way to slender young trees and then to saplings – a nursery of sorts. If we could make it that far, we could dig up a sapling and accomplish half our goal.

One by one, we moved slowly past each tree, trying to keep our movements smooth and even. It wasn't enough. The trees suddenly came alive perhaps two-thirds of the way across. Sprinting the remaining distance, we managed to make it to the nursery relatively unscathed.

The trip back was not so easy. The trees seemed to be waiting for us, quivering with anticipation. By the time we made it across, I had been mauled, as had one of the guides. As Osby bandaged my wounds, I reflected wryly that monsters always seemed to go for me. It was natural enough, I suppose; evidently they recognized that I was the leader of the group, and critical to the success of the mission.

The other team had been wise enough not to retrace their original trail, but they seemed to be paralleling it. Very likely they would emerge from the forest at the same point where they had entered, and where they had left their vehicle. If we had known that for certain, we could have headed directly there, rather than keeping to the slower pace necessary to watch for sign. But we couldn't afford to take the chance that they would abruptly change direction.

Several hours later we suddenly came upon them. Both sides attacked instantly. We cut loose with a hail of grenades and bullets, and two of them went down. Fortunately for them, we were using nonlethal weapons; I wasn't going to kill them out of hand.

One of the others sprinted away at incredible speed, a small seedling strapped to her back. The remaining opponent, a huge blond woman wielding a massive greatsword, stayed to delay us as the runner escaped.

If the runner got away, they would win, and the outcome of the fight wouldn't matter. We attempted to brush the blond woman aside, only to discover that her confidence in her ability to delay our entire team was not at all misplaced. She was some sort of berserker. We had no choice but to focus on taking her out while her friend widened her lead. She brushed aside our nonlethal weapons with casual indifference, and nearly clove Musashi in two. He responded in kind – and she continued fighting without a head. By the time we put her down, the runner was gone with the prize.

We were in trouble. If we resumed tracking her, we might not catch her until she was out of the forest; there was no choice but to take chances. Musashi and Osby followed her trail while Tagai and I rushed directly back to the entry point. I knew that she might have gone some other way, or she might be lying in ambush. If she was, she was.

She wasn't. We made it to the entry point and saw that she had not passed, though she might have circled around. I waited anxiously on Musashi.

Finally I received a broken, barely understandable radio call. He had caught up with the runner and was trailing her; she was almost here. I briefly debated setting an ambush, but I didn't want to fight her this close to the edge of the wood. Tagai and I moved up; we would try to catch her between us and Musashi.

Every once in a while, things go as planned. This turned out to be one of those occasions. We managed to catch her unawares, only a few hundred feet from the forest border – a few hundred feet from losing the Game.

That one was too close.

As I was going through paperwork on the way to the airport, I came across an envelope with a stylized M. Very likely another Game, then. I flew directly to the address in Tahiti – an upscale restaurant, as it turned out.

Musashi's arrival confirmed that it was almost certainly a Game, so I sent my bodyguards downstairs – aside from Tagai, of course. The Harbinger's Representative walked in shortly thereafter.

The mission was simple: We were to retrieve three items owned by one Kevin Choa, an additional item he was seeking, and Choa himself. His last known location was on Atiu, in the Cook Islands. A little background research revealed that he was an extraordinarily talented master of the martial arts.

I bought a dive shop on the way there, to have a base of operations if necessary. Although the store itself proved unnecessary (but potentially profitable), the manager was quite helpful, and directed us to a tour guide who had spoken with Choa. Unfortunately, Choa had left Atiu about a week ago leading a scientific expedition to Takutea. The necessary permit to mount an expedition of our own cost $3 million. The mayor evidently saw foreigners as walking cash machines.

A heavy storm almost centered on Takutea made the crossing difficult, but the pilots I had hired were the best, and we made it safely. We wasted no time, heading straight into the interior. It didn't take long to notice that the air pressure was far higher than normal. Related in some way to the strange storm? Doubtless we would find out.

Just inside the tree line, we were challenged by one of Choa's students, Batenga Rivera. I went forward to speak with him. As soon as I asked him about the air pressure, however, he attacked.

I began questioning him after we finished tying him up, but was interrupted by a small tornado which seemed to appear out of nowhere. We barely managed to get out of the way. When it lifted only moments after touching down, Rivera was gone.

The tornado seemed to be heading to the center of the island. We followed at a run, but couldn't quite manage to keep it in sight. It didn't matter, though. Very nearly at the center of the island was an ancient tomb of some sort. We entered cautiously.

A single passage led to a chamber with a raised casket. Inside, Choa and another of his students, Gombat Torres, were untying Rivera. We didn't give them time to finish.

Torres went down quickly, but Choa proved far more difficult. Even three on one, we barely managed to incapacitate him. He was carrying three metal-and-stone orbs, apparently foci of some sort; I placed them in my pack. Then we had to find a way to transport the casket, which seemed to resist being moved.

Finally we made it back to the ship. We knew two more members of Choa's team were on the loose, both probably casters. Torres claimed they had left the island, but Choa might not have told him what they were really up to, so we had to watch for ambushes while moving the casket and the prisoners.

As we headed out to sea, we noticed that the waters around our boat roiled and lashed angrily, and sea creatures – sharks and other predators – followed us closely. Perhaps the casters were planning a rescue.

The attempt, when it came, was from an unexpected direction. Suddenly my pack yanked me over the rail. I managed to grab the rail as I went over and held on for all I was worth, while my pack continued jerking and weaving, trying to wrench me loose. The orbs, it seemed, wanted to return to the sea.

Or Choa wanted them to, at any rate. He was awake. Musashi quickly beat him into unconscious again, and my pack went still. Tagai helped me back over the side just as a shark attempted to seize me from below.

We reached Tahiti without further incident, though the waters around the boat remained rough. We turned in Choa and his students, and I headed back to Atiu to organize a research expedition. I had paid $3 million for that permit, and I intended to get full value.

Random guy knocked on my hotel door. As per sanity, I immediately grabbed whatever gear I wasn't already carrying. Now, this might seem weird, but Harbingers aren't really known for their politeness and I've heard stories of Roller's getting ported to jobs, Games, naked. So I grabbed my pack. This has caused weirdness before. I mean, every time a maid knocks, I'm going for a sword, just in case. But hey, ninja!

Anyway, this time it wasn't a maid or an old drunk at the wrong door. It was a guy delivering a letter. I asked him questions and he walked off like a girl at a club (I seriously have to get better at talking to girls at clubs). The letter had that "M" on it that meant it was a job or a trap so I popped it open and got an address.

It was a restaurant. Outside the restaurant were a bunch of cops. There were trying really hard not to look like cops, but they failed. Like, really badly. Inside the restaurant was Hays and some little Filipino dude that worked for Hays.

I sat down and waited for the rest of the Rollers to show up and then our host arrived and gave us the job. About five minutes went by before I realized that this was it. Just me and Hays on this one. I've never been on a job with less than three total Rollers. Maybe the Filipino counted? Didn't seem like it. He just didn't seem messed up enough to be a real Roller.

Anyway, we were supposed to go to this place and get all this stuff and bring this one guy back alive. Yadda yadda. Blah blah.

We ended up on an island with a name that no one should be forced to pronounce and Hays talked to a lot of people while I kept an eye out for a reason to go badass. Nothing happened. Hays talked. Then Hays talked. Then Hays kept talking. I guess it's good to have a talky guy around for talky stuff, but it's also really really boring.

After Hays finally got done talking to people we went to another freaking island with a stupid name. A guy totally called out to us from the woods while we were walking towards, well, the woods. And Hays started talking.

sigh

This was good though, because Hays walked toward the voice, right? And he got to the woods a couple feet from the guy. Now, the beach didn't give me much cover, but I was able to get Hays directly between me and the other guy and use his big Texas self to conceal my approach. When I was like, right behind him, I totally used the trees and stuff to sneak off to the side. Other dude never noticed. I totally had him flanked.

They kept talking, but other dude decided to spice things up by throwing a punch. I responded by kicking his butt. I didn't kill him or anything, but that might have been a mistake, because once we had him tied up Hays started talking to him.

AGAIN!

Lucky for my sanity a magic tornado showed up and Dorthied the tied up guy. We chased the tornado and found this storm cellar thing. Inside we found the guy we were looking for and his bodyguard and the tied up guy, still tied up.

I guess I should tell you that the guy we were after was this super-grandmaster martial arts god. The two dudes with him were his less godlike, but still martial artsy students. As you can imagine, a fight ensued. And it was a cool one.

I, like, opened up by throwing a concussion grenade that Hays and given me. The grandmaster totally knocked it back at me. Then I totally swatted it back to him. I can't really remember how many times that happened before the grenade went off but it was so awesome. Then ol' grandmaster and super ninja (me) faced off while Hays and his body guard threw gas grenades and dealt with the student that wasn't tied up.

It was close, man. I mean, the student was taken out by the gas and the rest of us had to Captain Planet the guru's ass (By Captain Planet, I mean combine our powers. Maybe Voltron would have been a better example?). It was hard, not just because he was like this super badass, but also because we were supposed to take him alive.

I'm a ninja! I'm good at taking people apart, not alive.

We won. Eventually.

Three magic orbs? Check

Defeated but living martial arts guru? Check.

Big-ass hard to move coffin that he was apparently trying to open? Well, it took a long time, but yeah. Check.

That was about it, except for the time that the martial arts guy woke up and tried to throw Hays over the side of the boat with magic. I knocked him out again and all was well.

The last mission wasn't the hardest that I'd ever been on but it wasn't the easiest either. Go somewhere, investigate a little, kill a baddie. No problem, right? Until you wake up the next day in somebody else's body.

It felt dream-like. Not real. Trippy. I decided to ride it out. Turned out it was real, though. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. The body I was stuck in had none of the skills and abilities I had cultivated over two freaking decades. I went out with a single, poorly aimed and delivered punch. The body I was stuck in sucked that much.

I woke up chained to a table with a gloating jerk-face standing over me. He was all, "We'll put you back in your body and you can be our slave forever!"

And I was all, "Uh, no."

And he was like, "No? But, it'd be great! You could convert to a crazy sect of religious nuts and not do any of the fun stuff you like to do and totally do all the work without pay. Fun, right?"

And I was like, "Look, dude. I'm for hire. I mean, total freelance assassin guy here. You get me back in my body and I'll totally do a job or two for you as best as I can and we'll be cool. 'Kay?"

And he was all, "Sure, sure. I'll totally agree to that and not back stab you by using sucky mojo to make you into a slave for all eternity. Promise."

Yeah. He totally had his fingers crossed there. Anyway, we got in touch with Farnsworth from the job, the guy that was really good at getting hurt, and he had my body. We agreed to meet at a warehouse.

Then everything went totally wonky. I tried to get my body. Jerk-boy started being all teleporty. Farnsworth started being all shooty. And then my super cool body was gone. Just freaking gone. Stupid jerk-assassin had taken it and totally ported out. Stupid jerk-face.

Anyway, I eventually got my body back and totally owe some weird random stranger a huge favor or five. Ugh.

There are days I really hate being a ninja.

Not many.

But some.

It seemed identical to the pagers I had received in several previous Games. Most likely this was a Game from the same Harbinger – or a trap by someone who knew that Harbinger's modus operandi.

The address was Room 319, Hotel Gillow, Mexico City. My plane was already prepped, since we were about to return to Washington, so we were airborne in minutes.

Tagai and his men checked the room and found it empty and untrapped. If this was indeed a Game, I was the first to arrive. We set up to serve refreshments.

Shortly thereafter, a man with the High Roller look about him showed up. He introduced himself as Nicholas Jacobson, but he immediately began drinking water, and my cleanup crew had no trouble securing his DNA. His real name was Nathaniel McGuire.

This was almost certainly a Game, then. I sent away the rest of my people, aside from Tagai. A few minutes later, Frogard Osby showed up.

Frogard Osby. I had been on three Games with her, quite some time ago. She had become famous since then; or perhaps I should say, infamous – as the prime carrier of the Woodville Plague. There were all sorts of rumors about her culpability for the plague, but I didn't know which were true. I would watch her carefully and decide whether to report her based on her actions during the Game.

When no one else had arrived in half an hour, we looked outside and discovered that the hallway had changed. The hotel was now lit by gaslight, and the furnishings seemed from another era. The same changes had taken place in our room. An alternate dimension, perhaps?

There was a young Mexican woman with long black hair in the hallway. I stepped out to speak with her.

The instant she saw me, she began screaming and ran into Room 316. We followed her in, and finally calmed her down enough to talk with us. Her name was Rosa Diaz Costallo. Sadly, she was almost incoherent, and we couldn't get anything useful out of her except that she didn't want Mr. Colvin to find her – whoever that might be.

We looked around her room and almost bumped into an invisible wall of some sort. Anything that touched it disintegrated. Peculiar. We began investigating the rest of the hotel, with a pillow extended in front of us. By sacrificing quite a few pillows, we discovered that the invisible wall hemmed us in on all sides.

So. We were trapped in a small section of the Hotel Gillow of a century past. There were several dozen rooms in this section, and apparently no way out. There was nothing for it but to go room to room.

We found a maid lying unconscious in the hallway. We couldn't wake her up, but she had a master key, which we appropriated.

After checking a few rooms, we spotted a door that was slightly ajar. Inside was a man who appeared to be a bellhop, also unconscious on the floor. Was everyone but Rosa unconscious? That could make things difficult.

Well, presumably this Mr. Colvin was awake, though from Rosa's description he might be more inclined to stab us in the back than talk to us.

A few doors down, in Room 323, we found an American wearing a dress shirt and suspenders; again, lying unconscious on the ground. On the wall were a rifle and a Colt .45 revolver, both of post-Civil War vintage. This was getting surreal.

Then we heard a tapping sound, metal against metal. We followed it to Room 342 and came upon an elderly Mexican man tapping on a black metal box with a small hammer. Bingo. He identified himself as Pedro, apparently the hotel maintenance man. He had found the box while making his rounds. We examined it but couldn't determine how to open it. This Harbinger's boxes were always a pain to deal with.

Suddenly the lights flickered. Pedro commented that it was time. Everything went dark.

We found ourselves back in Room 319. A few things that we had moved were back in place.

We went outside. Rosa ran into her room, screaming. The maid lay unconscious on the floor, but didn't have a key this time. The pillows we had used to trace the invisible wall were back in their rooms, undamaged.

We proceeded down the hall and found that the bellhop, whose name was Miguel, was awake. He knew Mr. Colvin, who lived in Room 341 – next to Pedro – and had a thoroughly nasty reputation. We headed for Pedro's room, and met another resident, an Englishman named Gerald Ashton who resided in 349.

Questioning Ashton, we learned that everyone here had been trapped at about the same time. There had been no new arrivals. He was quite curious about how we had arrived, but we couldn't tell him much.

The lights flickered, and we were back in 319.

This time the maid, Maria, was awake. She let us into Pedro's room to look for the black box. Tagai and I followed her in, but before McGuire and Osby could join us, there was a soft step to the rear, and abruptly a thin, dark-haired man rushed us, swinging a straight razor with crazed determination. Maria shrieked and slammed the door, locking it quickly.

I turned and attempted to grab the key, but Maria fought back wildly, frantic with terror. It took several moments for Tagai and I to wrest it away and unlock the door.

McGuire had managed to fight off the attacker, who Maria identified as Colvin. He lay dead with a knife in his throat, and McGuire was badly slashed. The man had been as deadly as he was insane.

Verifying that the black box wasn't in 342, we then searched 341 and found it in a drawer. After several attempts, Osby managed to open it. Inside was a shallow impression with the imprint of a crest – a rearing stag in front of a checkered shield – and a key of reddish copper, which somewhat resembled Maria's master key. Perhaps the Harbinger had provided a master key of our own. We tried it in the door, and it promptly snapped off, then fragmented. Wonderful.

We continued searching Colvin's room and a found a safe concealed behind a painting. The keyhole appeared to fit the key we had just destroyed. Fortunately, McGuire was able to open the safe. Inside was an assortment of papers and knickknacks. McGuire began searching through them for something that matched the impression in the box.

The lights flickered.

We knew we had only seconds remaining. I opened the box and held it out. McGuire suddenly spotted a flask with a raised crest, rearing stag in front of checkered shield; he grabbed it and held it out. Tagai seized the flask and placed in the box, then slammed the lid closed.

The lights flickered again, and abruptly we were back in 319. There was no sign of the black box. Had it disappeared, taken by the Harbinger? Had we won the Game? Or had it shifted to some other room in this infernal hotel?

Tagai and I stepped cautiously into the hallway. McGuire and Osby didn't immediately follow us.

I felt a terrific blow to my back, and a sharp pain.

Darkness.

We were back in 319. The others were staring at me for some reason. Tagai was overcome by emotion – the first such occasion I could recall since his father's death.

Hesitantly, they told me what had happened. The American from Room 323 had been lying in ambush in the hallway with his long rifle. He had shot me in the back, killing me instantly.

We were in some sort of time loop. Changes to physical objects – including us – were reverted each time the loop began again. Memories remained intact. The residents trapped here seemed to be becoming increasingly homicidal; several had attacked the group while I was … dead … and had almost wiped us out, even attempting to burn down our room on one occasion. Only Rosa and Maria were not violent. And there was at least one caster present, who had paralyzed Tagai and McGuire for a time.

They reported that there was no sign of the box. We would have to hope the Harbinger had taken it.

Rosa had told us that no one came back from Ashton's room. A way out, perhaps? Or perhaps he was the mastermind behind all this.

Osby, it seemed, could temporarily improve our performance by infecting us with Monarchs – and then could cure us with no ill effects. Very impressive indeed; and very useful. We needed every edge we could get.

Suddenly we heard a gunshot outside our door. We charged out to find the rifleman had just killed Rosa. We cut him down.

Moving at a cautious trot, watching for ambushes with our weapons at the ready, we reached Room 349. Osby and McGuire were suddenly paralyzed, but we broke down the door and killed Ashton as he attempted to perform further magic. He was the caster, then.

His room confirmed it. Occult papers were strewn around, and the bathroom was covered with arcane sigils. The bathtub was filled with absolute blackness; it seemed he had converted it into some sort of altar.

Osby and I pored over the papers, while McGuire tried to damage the altar or the sigils. He had no luck, even with a thermite grenade.

It took longer than I liked, but Osby and I finally managed to make sense of the papers, which were in four languages. Ashton was some sort of black magician. He was using the altar to sacrifice victims and garner souls for his dark art. He had created the time loop so he could sacrifice the same people over and over again, growing in power all the while. I didn't understand how he could harvest the same soul more than once, but then, this was hardly my field. The important thing was that we could break the time loop by destroying the altar or sacrificing Ashton in his own ritual.

Time to get some use out of all those grenades Tagai and I had been carrying. We rigged a couple of ropes to pull all the pins at once, and McGuire yanked it from a distance with a tendril of water. Then we ran.

Ashton's room erupted in shrapnel and flame. The lights flickered.

We were back in 319. We ran the gauntlet once again, using grenades and cover fire to suppress the enemy. When we reached Room 349, we burst in to find Ashton on fire. He had immolated his room and himself in some sort of attempt to prevent us from breaking the time loop. McGuire dumped water on him to put him out; he screamed in frustrated rage. I gunned him down with rubber bullets.

Suddenly Rosa burst in and pounced on Ashton. She had followed us here. She dragged him into the bathroom and began chanting, casting some sort of spell.

Something shifted. We were still in 349, and the lights hadn't flickered, but the furnishings were modern. Rosa was still there, but there was no sign of Ashton. Had she sacrificed him in his own ritual, thereby breaking the time loop?

We returned to Room 319. No invisible wall, no gaslights, no antique furnishings; we were back in our own dimension.

We waited in 319 for a time, but there was no sign of the Harbinger and no indication of further instructions. The Game must be over.

Rosa, Maria, and Colvin had survived. There was no sign of the others; either we had killed them or, presumably, they had killed each other. Clearly, death in the final time loop was not reset.

Osby cured everyone of Monarchs before she went her way. She had proved surprisingly effective, and had not shown any inclination to spread the Woodville Plague. It would not be necessary to report her, then. If her performance remained steady, she might even prove herself an asset.

Research failed to identify the families or histories of any of the three. In any case, they were outside their time; everyone they had known was probably dead. Rosa was incoherent, and Maria and Colvin seemed to be in a coma. I arranged the best possible care, and had a team of researchers begin searching for the closest possible genetic match. It would take time, but sooner or later we would find a cure, and their families.

Rosa and Maria should be able to reenter society, eventually. Colvin … perhaps he could be treated. Perhaps. If he remained homicidal after treatment, if he tried to resume his murderous ways, he would have to be executed. Time would tell.

I had wrapped that up and was gearing up my laboratory to resume work when a man in a red shirt, black pants, and a white trench coat contacted me. He identified himself as an agent of Fury Corporation, sometimes known as the Whitecoats, and invited me to a Game. Interesting. This was at least the second Harbinger organization I had worked for; the first had been The Company, headed by Company Man. I wondered who the head of the Whitecoats might be.

The objective was to eliminate the problem that had shut down one of Fury Corporation's mines. I was transported to the site, where I met a researcher named Terrance Engleman and a writer, a rather odd woman who called herself Maribel Lopez.

The Whitecoats had sent three teams to investigate. All had been heavily armed. None had returned. This told us that we would not be able to accomplish the mission by force. Perhaps that was why they had brought in three Specialists who lacked combat skills. We could hope so, at least …

I had my sample case with me, and gave a few elixirs to the others. As with any business, it was necessary to create demand before your products really took off. And they might give us the edge we needed to win.

After the mission briefing, we were teleported into the mine – the only method of entry or egress. They were going to collapse the mine if we didn't clear the obstruction within three days, so we got moving.

As soon as we opened the door to leave the transport chamber, corpses and gore flooded into the room. A pile of bodies had been pressing against the door. This seemed to be the third team; they had either been attacked upon leaving the room, or driven back to the room and slaughtered.

On that note, we headed north, towards the main junction of the mine. When we reached it, we would need to head either east or west. Mining operations had been underway in two locations, the east face and the west face of the mine. It was likely that whatever had gone wrong had done so in one of those locations.

As we approached the junction, we heard screams and gunfire. Could one of the teams still be alive?

We cautiously rounded the corner, to see two groups in red jumpsuits locked in a vicious battle. One side was armed with rifles and was calling out to each other in Japanese. The other side had sword blades instead of hands and was shouting in English. There were no Whitecoat operatives anywhere in sight.

So there were two separate sets of invaders, and they didn't like each other. It might be possible to use that to our advantage. We withdrew down the corridor and waited for the sounds of combat to end.

After a time, things grew quiet. We investigated cautiously and found only one survivor, a wounded swordsman.

We decided to speak with him. It was touch and go for a few moments, but we persuaded him not to attack us, and managed to learn the basic situation. The swordsmen came through a one-way portal in the west mining face. They believed the gunmen were guarding the way out, a portal in the east face of the mine. They didn't have any memory of their pasts and didn't know where they came from, but they knew they wanted out of the mine.

We needed to learn the gunmen's side of the story, so with some trepidation we headed east. Fortunately, both of the others spoke Japanese.

After a short while we encountered a party of gunmen moving to the front. We managed to talk with them without being shot out of hand, and learned that their situation was essentially the same as that of the swordsmen: They emerged from a one-way portal in the east mining face with no memory of their pasts, and believed the other side was guarding the way out of the mine.

It took some doing, but we were able to negotiate with both commanders and persuade them to attend a parley. We served as mediators and arranged an agreement in which each side would send a small group to try to go through the other side's portal. Unfortunately, it turned out that both portals were one-way for everyone. There was no exit here.

There was, however, a secret passage – or two, rather, one at each mining face. We split up; Engleman and I went through the west passage with the swordsmen, while Lopez went through the east passage with the gunmen.

It turned out that both passages emerged into a central chamber. In the middle of the chamber was a large vat. Gunmen and swordsmen were being produced in the vat and transported through tubes to the appropriate portals, where they were spat out.

The gunmen and swordsmen stopped and stared in shock.

Oops.

I had to find a way to defuse the situation. There was an active terminal to the side of the room; I hurried over and studied it. The only obvious control was a red button labeled “Deactivate.” On the screen were two warnings, one stating that production was shifting to combat mode and the other stating that too many miners were being produced. Checking the settings, I saw that one batch was set for English-speaking, with blades as the selected weapon; the other batch was set for Japanese-speaking, with guns as the selected weapon.

I began trying to find a way to shut down the production line without pushing the big red button. The system promptly asked for a password.

I was no computer whiz; I wasn't going to hack a top-notch system like this. Probably not a bottom-notch system, either … I started guessing passwords.

There was no time. The soldiers were shouting angrily and readying their weapons. They were certainly going to kill us as well as each other. I was getting nowhere with the password. I mentally plotted the best route back to the teleporter. I tensed, ready to sprint for it if the whole place started to collapse.

I pushed the big red button.

The production line shut down immediately. Success!

The soldiers began to bubble and melt.

I pushed Deactivate again. Nothing. I looked at the screen. Nothing helpful there. I hurriedly chugged an elixir to help me think quickly in tight spots, and felt my thoughts begin moving like lightning. Then I frantically began trying to find a way to reverse the deactivation. There didn't seem to be one; or if there was, I wasn't able to find it in the few seconds available before the gunmen starting shooting at me.

I dove behind the terminal. A bullet struck my arm, but it didn't seem bad. Several more stitched a path across the terminal I was using for cover, and those did seem bad; the system abruptly died.

The soldiers died moments later. Soon there was nothing but puddles of protoflesh where they had been.

I stood up shakily and stared. We had talked with them, negotiated with them, almost persuaded them to end their feud; they had been people, as real as I. And in a few scant seconds, they had all died, because I pushed a button.

The system had been designed that way. They were expendable people, to be liquidated at the touch of a button.

These Whitecoats had a lot to answer for.

The address was for a hotel in Mexico City. Gillow Hotel, room 319. Getting there wasn't particularly difficult. Getting out… well, I'll get to that. Anyways, Senator Hays was in the room when I arrived. I wasn't aware he was a High Roller, but in retrospect, not that surprising, really. We talked briefly before he sent away his extra people and kept only his personal bodyguard on hand.

It was only a short while longer that Frogard Osby walked into the room. That's… well. That might be a problem. She hasn't been in the news much lately, but it would be hard to have missed that entire little episode. Frogard Osby, one of the major vectors of the Woodville Plague. I was seriously concerned for my personal safety with her on the mission. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Shortly after Frogard entered the room, things… changed. We were not somewhere else, but everything suddenly seemed of a particularly old style of furniture and technology. The Game had started.

Our immediate task was to explore. We started with the room we were in, and found nothing of note. We checked the hallway, and encountered a woman who seemed a bit… unhinged. We tried to communicate with her, but got nothing useful. So we tried looking through the rest of the floor. We found a lot of things that were interesting, but little that seemed directly related to the Game. Until we met the maintenance worker who was trying to open the black box that was apparently this Harbinger's signature. Our attempts to open the box proved futile, but we had plenty of time. At least, we thought we did. The lights went out, and we were back in room 319.

The same thing happened several times. We would explore a bit more, discover something new, and the lights would flicker and we were back at the start. Completing the objective was easy enough, we found the box, we found the item that was meant to be put in the box, and we put it into the box. Mission complete. But escape was our difficulty. It took us several…resets? Shifts? I'm not sure, really. But it took us a few more light flickers before we came to the conclusion that there was no direct way out, so we would have to find something indirect.

It did not help that the people who had spoken to us previously, with the sole exception of the girl we had met first, were all constantly trying to kill us. Nearly succeeded too, on several occasions. But we did, eventually, manage to find the caster who had created this strange situation. It took quite a bit of doing… quite a bit of doing, but we managed to even discover the spell he had cast to create this strange dimension. And how to undo it. Rosa was the one who did the deed, she needed to sacrifice him in his own altar to break it up and send us back to our home reality.

The task was… well, not simple, but simply explained. One of his company's mines had gone dark, and they wanted myself and the other contractors to determine why. I questioned him as much as I could, and did learn that the location was in Canada, that they had sent scouts which had not reported back, and that we had three days to resolve the situation before they assumed we had been lost and they would destroy the mine. A time limit, then.

I notified Senator Hays that I might be away for some time for a… research expedition, of sorts. I suppose it is completely true, I will be learning something on this task, but it should be enough that he knows I am on a Game, and may well be away for some time.

The man provided transportation to his company's facility, and I was able to meet the other High Rollers that would be working with me on this mission. A man and a woman. Farnsworth and Nelson. Two more names, two more contacts. Farnsworth provided Nelson and I with several free 'samples' of wares that he was able to create. Potions, of a sort, which he informed us were capable of improving our capabilities for a brief period of time. Interesting. Perhaps I will be doing business with Farnsworth on a regular basis, once I have something to trade.

We spoke with our sponsors again, and received essentially the same information, though we were allowed to temporarily requisition gear from them for the purposes of the mission. We did learn one thing of substantial significance: they had sent large armed forces into the mines in an attempt to pacify and solve the problem themselves, but they had disappeared and were presumed dead. Attempting to fight our way through this will likely not end well for us.

We did requisition some gear, and eventually made our way down to the mine. It took us some time to gather the information, but I can lay it out plainly. There were two factions, one which used swords, and the other used guns. They both originated from some sort of portal, and both believed that the other had a portal that would allow them to escape, which caused them to fight against each other in an attempt to reach the portal. Of course, neither faction could speak the other faction's language, which only perpetuated the problem.

Our initial efforts leaned towards ending the conflict socially. That did not end as well as we had hoped, particularly since neither side was happy to discover that there was no portal out for either of them. Then we decided to explore and investigate something we had spotted at an earlier point in one of their portal chambers. Apparently there was some manner of secret passage in each portal room, which led to a room that neither faction had seen or heard of.

That was when things grew a bit… difficult, I suppose. We had decided to bring both sides in on the passageways at the same time, so as to give neither side an advantage over the other, but neither side was happy to discover what we found in the hidden chamber. A vat, of some form of liquid, and a machine that was apparently creating them and releasing them from the 'portals'. Farnsworth was nearly shot when he attempted to figure out the machine, but he did manage to shut it down, apparently. This not only disabled the machine creating them, but began dissolving the vat people. A tragedy, to be sure.

Our trip out was, fortunately, much less eventful than our trip down had been. Our sponsors thanked us for a job well done, and sent up on our ways home.

Of course, he did quickly advise me to make nice with Chief Bo Perkins. A reasonable thing to do, since I will be working in a semi-public office position for at least some time, and since he happens to be on duty in Senator Hays' own state of Texas. He's apparently quite dedicated to his job, so it would be best to be on good terms with him.

The job itself is well within my capabilities as a researcher. Its even enjoyable, since I have access to a wide range of interesting research materials, and I am occasionally assigned more… interesting projects. Likely this is as a direct result of my association with these… Games, as Senator Hays calls them.

And the Games themselves… Hays only spoke of them in general terms, and never for extended periods. But he did tell me there would be substantial rewards, and he advised me on his preferred approach to such missions. I doubt I can be as eloquent or charismatic as a dedicated politician, but, as with all such advice and information, I filed it away for future reference. It may be important.

He also mentioned a few of his own experiences with the Games. He did not describe them at length, but used them largely to explain his points of advice. Nonetheless, even filtering out the bias towards social conflict resolutions, there was a great deal of useful information there. Enough to survive and win? That will depend a great deal on the opportunities presented, and the chances taken.

Time will tell.

We were the first to arrive. Templar and Drew showed up shortly thereafter. Drew was … different. He was wearing a full burka, with a pack under it, and looked very strange. Later I learned that he looked even stranger without it: He had grown an exoskeleton.

Almost on Drew's heels, the same man who had briefed us last time entered the room. He got right down to business.

A group of Novices had lost a Game, and in the process had compounded the problem they were supposed to solve. No surprise there. We were to complete the mission and retrieve the two surviving Novices. The mission objective was to capture an errant spirit. We could use whatever means we wished, but the Novices had had a box which would presumably be the most convenient method.

Without further ado, we headed to the small town of Addis, Louisiana. We didn't have any solid leads, so we tried to think the way Novices would think. We checked hotels and the local Walmart, and looked in the yellow pages for anything that might have caught their eye. We immediately spotted a flashy ad for a fortune teller.

One of the Novices had indeed consulted the fortune teller. He was able to give us a description of their pickup truck. Armed with that information, we used traffic cameras and Mark 1 eyeballs to locate it.

Our first attempt found a spot at the edge of town where they had stopped for a while. We went to check it out, and were immediately ambushed by five translucent lizard-things. They latched onto Templar and began draining him of vital energy. By the time we finished them off, he was exhausted and depressed.

After a short rest, we continued our search and eventually found the Novices at the south end of town. We followed them until they stopped, then confronted them. I told them bluntly that I knew what they were doing, and I was here to help. They agreed to go to a hotel room and discuss the matter.

No sooner were we inside than we were ambushed by ten translucent lizards. This was getting old.

Our prospects didn't seem particularly good inside, so we decided to go outside. The Novices tried to block us, confirming that they were working with the lizards and, presumably, the spirit. Probably possessed, then.

After a stiff fight, we managed to drive off the lizards and capture the Novices. By that time, we all felt drained and exhausted. They were nickel-and-diming us to death. We had to deal with this spirit before we got any weaker.

An interrogation produced the location where the box had been dumped into the river. We didn't really feel like diving for it, but there was no choice; into the river we went. We would just have to hope that the spirit didn't take the opportunity to ambush us yet again.

For once it missed a bet. Two hours later, we had the box and remained unambushed. Without further delay, we drove to the farm where the spirit made its home. According to the Novices, its focus was somewhere on the property. Get the focus in the box and we would be home free.

The farmhouse and barn turned up nothing, so it had to be in the silo – only the silo was full of soybeans. Tons and tons of soybeans. Were we going to have to dig through all of them to find the focus? Talk about a needle in a haystack … . And presumably the spirit would not leave us alone to search in peace.

But there were two ladders to the top of the silo. We decided to try that first. Drew led the way.

As he reached the top and climbed onto the roof, something huge and pasty white stepped forward and took a swing at him. He leaped forward, towards the center of the silo roof, which was inexplicably obscured by a thick fog. The monster's massive paw grazed him as he shot past. I used the opening to clamber up and move aside to give Templar room. He scurried the rest of the way up the ladder, and both of us opened up on the monster.

Full automatic fire at point-blank range can be quite effective. The monster disintegrated under our concentrated fire. Pale chunks of not-quite-flesh flew everywhere, but there were no guts or blood. Interesting.

Abruptly Drew came flying out of the mist and fell to the roof, unconscious. Whatever had struck him had mauled him severely; he was bleeding copiously. A copper ball was grasped tightly in his fist.

Tagai and I sprinted to his side. I set the box down; Tagai grabbed the ball, thrust it in, and closed the lid.

The mist vanished, as did the monster's remains. But I had no time to pay attention to this. I began working frantically to staunch Drew's wounds.

It was touch and go for several moments, and twice I thought I had lost him. Finally, however, I managed to stop the bleeding and stabilize him. We carried him carefully to the SUV and left without further delay. Both Novices agreed to go with the Harbinger, so we turned them and the box over to him and went our separate ways. I searched through the contact list on Drew's phone and managed to find someone to take care of him, then headed back to Addis. There were some loose ends to tie up.

We had quite a bit to go on. DeWitt's body was a powerful focus, and we quickly secured his personal possessions. The townspeople were eager to cooperate, once the situation was presented to them properly, and it didn't take long to identify and take into custody four more cultists, including one on the town council. The other three were the recruiters; it was their job to persuade idealistic fools to give their life-energy to the cult. It seemed this Spring Born Cult was trying to create a god. Idiots. Didn't they realize how badly wrong that could go? Playing with fire didn't cover the half of it. But they were cultists, and probably insane in any case.

We had to back into this information, because the four cultists we captured had been mindwiped by DeWitt. He was a ruthless bastard. That didn't get them off the hook, of course; they had committed numerous capital crimes, and were duly tried and executed. All of the recruits had been killed in their rituals, so the cult appeared to be extinct. Of course we knew it wasn't; the book I had recovered predated the cult's presence in Midwest. And there were other indications that Midwest was not the point of origin. The Spring Born Cult had arrived in Midwest as a well-established organization. Unfortunately, however, DeWitt's elimination of the other cult leaders had severed any ties with the larger cult.

Though we failed to backtrack the cult to its home ground, we did learn quite a bit about the magic it practiced. I had recovered four scrolls in addition to the book, and I knew just who could analyze them for me.

Dr. Finch reported a startling result. The magic described in the scrolls was neither Sorcery nor Mythos Magic. It was a previously unknown form which the Miskatonic researchers were calling “Legacy Magic.” Soon the MJ-12 team was running around in a tizzy, and both a circle of sorcerers and a circle of psychics were on site trying to learn everything they could.

Between their efforts and mine, we were able to thoroughly document the activities of the cult in Midwest and learn the background of every recruit. Our experts peeled away and analyzed the spells on the Labyrinth one layer at a time. One of those spells was apparently anchoring the Labyrinth in this dimension, and the whole thing vanished. Good riddance. In spite of all their efforts, however, they were unable to learn any of the spells, or find any way to duplicate them. It just about drove them nuts.

With the most critical phase complete, I returned to Washington. A great deal of research and analysis remained to be done, but it would be painstakingly slow, and might take months or years to reach fruition.

Capturing another Legacy caster would speed things up considerably. We would have to keep our eyes open.

The immediate issue was with Professor Preston. We had solved one of his strange problems before, but Gerard had been our primary contact with him then. Since that event did not end as hoped for, I acted as the contact this go around. It took some convincing, but he eventually spilled out a tale of one of his students being hunted by a vampire. He wished for it to be solved discretely.

Discretion is often a challenge in these things, but I gave my word. The creature had visited its victim, Daniel Maise, two nights in a row. We decided to stay up with Maise and protect him. This went well enough, though the creature tried to separate us from its meal during the night.

The following morning Maise, the professor and I met for breakfast. It was then and only then that Maise told us how he had come to the creature's attention. The vampire had appeared as an old woman and given him an electronic device, some kind of music player. It was then that she began to track him. The Professor was able to research the beast and tell us of its feeding habits. The gift to Maise had established a link, one that couldn't be broken but could be transferred.

Maise transferred the link to me and we set a trap for the mad beast. Unfortunately it was not stupid. It refused to enter our trap. We were forced to hunt it down, tracking it through mystical means to its hiding place. The vampire was a special type that could only be destroyed with fire. we were well prepared, but it had chosen the ground and that counted for more than I anticipated.

It had holed up in the basement of a an old tenement. We quickly confronted the vampire, setting it ablaze as it played mind games with my head. Things looked up for a few moments, until of course the fire system turned on, drowning the flames in foam.

Needless to say, things took a turn for the worse. She, it, managed to invade my mind and forced me to attack my fellows. I was lucky that they proved competent. Nathaniel and Drew were cunning enough to sabotage the fire system and slowly burn the vampire to death. It took time, but once the deed was done, my mind returned to me and the three of us were able to walk away, battered but alive.

What magical abilities I now posses. I can tell if a being has a soul or not with the briefest incantation. I can just the quality, the morality of the beings I encounter. I can know a man better than his closest lover with little more than a glance. These are wondrous tools for a man burdened with my cross, but the price… the price is high indeed.

Whatever cruel monsters set up these jobs are devious indeed. I have no doubt that I was selected for their purposes do to my unique curse, but I had expected a reprieve from it as payment, not escalation. The Gifts I have been given are truly wondrous, but using them burns up my stores. I get Hungry faster by their use. Add to this complication that the only way to grow stronger, to learn more, is to practice these incantations again and again. Even worse, the more potent and complex the spell, the more it tends to drain.

The better I get at killing the more killing I need to do.

A neat circle. One that is designed to spiral out of control. Whatever beings are in charge of deciding my payment has devil for a sense of humor. Still, I am not out of control yet. I am not yet to the brink. I can still accomplish more good than evil. Protect more than I murder.

I have to believe that.

Otherwise, why live at all?

You don't say.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/public-rebuke-of-culture-at-goldman-opens-debate/?hp

Of course, I really wasn't expected to get a message in the middle of the flight telling me we needed to go to Waltham, Massachusetts. Fantastic. Thankfully, I got a private flight, so it wasn't too hard to get them to go elsewhere, though it was a bit on the expensive side.

Our point of contact was one Professor Reginald Preston, again. He apparently wasn't happy with how we managed our mission last time around, and Girard was sadly not on the mission with us, so Gregor went in to talk with him. He was apparently convinced that one of his students, by name of Daniel Mays, was being preyed upon by a vampire of some unknown variety. He needed us to gather more information on the vampire until we could manage to give him enough to pin down the type, and then follow it up by breaking whatever link or spell or whatever the vampire had hit him with.

Our obvious course was to go meet with Mays. Our other obvious course was to wait it out and see if we could protect him from the vampire when it came calling, so to speak. For the record, I really hated the plan, so many ways for things to go wrong, but I couldn't think of anything better, so… yeah, we gave it a shot.

Thankfully, the vamp wasn't some sort of dream eating critter that we couldn't touch at all, so we were able to hold it off long enough for it to lose interest. Managed to get some ideas on its capabilities, but not enough for Professor Preston to pin it. So, investigation time it was. Gregor did pretty much all of this. Cephas can't really walk around town as he is, and since Gregor was checking out the campus, we decided it for the best that I stay away from where Preston was likely to spot me.

Gregor managed to turn up all sorts of interesting bits of information, enough to figure out what it was. A vrykolakas, apparently. Some sort of Greek vampire, with abnormal feeding habits – even for vampires. One of those habits was a weak point that let us (rather, Gregor) track it down. The other… well, it was apparently only really vulnerable to fire. So we loaded up on some monster burning gear and set about killing the damn vampire.

She had some nasty, nasty little tricks, set Gregor into a trance a few times, and even managed to set him to try killing me at one point. Crazy hobo's freaking strong, parrying his swings took a lot of effort on my part, especially since I couldn't just ignore the vampire we were trying to kill, but he managed to shake it off, and we did manage to take her down, though it took a lot of doing.

This would Tagai's first mission as my bodyguard. I had mixed feelings about that. I felt considerably safer with him watching my back. On the other hand, his father and grandfather had died in my family's service. I was determined that he wouldn't join them.

Templar was there, carrying a black-and-white kitten. The kitten was wearing a sweater. Templar's behavior wasn't nearly as … uneven … as last time, in spite of the kitten – a huge relief.

Drew showed up shortly after I did. A brown-haired man in a nice suit followed him in, and briskly began briefing us on the mission.

We were to go to Midwest, Wyoming, to retrieve a book and a boy. The boy had been imprisoned, in a sense – whatever that meant. Apparently we would recognize both the book and the boy on sight.

No more information was forthcoming, so we drove to Midwest, population 404. On the way we did some research and learned that the oil refinery had been shut down for repairs two days ago. There didn't seem to be anything else out of the ordinary, so we went straight to the refinery.

The manager was happy to give us the grand tour. I made a point to speak with as many of the workers as possible.

I've toured many refineries, and this one was little different from most. The interesting part came when he showed us the drill that was being repaired. The last twenty meters of the bit had been severed cleanly, as if by an extremely sharp blade. This was particularly odd because it had happened at a depth of eighty meters. As it turned out, no one had drilled in this area before.

The manager didn't know of any nearby caves or underground rivers, but suggested that an old man named Randall Porter knew the most about the town and its environs. We promptly went to see him.

Porter did know of a cave in the desert which seemed to attract unusual visitors from time to time. Perhaps the boy was being held there. We drove out and located the cave with some effort.

Entering, we found ourselves in a small cavern with a stone door at the back. We went through the stone door into a labyrinth.

The darkness seemed to absorb light; the beams from our flashlights didn't stretch as far as they should, nor shine as brightly. Our footsteps seemed to be swallowed by the gloom.

Suddenly a pale figure loomed out of the darkness. Swollen and malformed, it resembled a human only in that it had two arms, two legs, and a head. Before Tagai could react, it struck out viciously, hurling him against the wall. It leaped towards him, attempting to disembowel him before the rest of us could intervene, but he managed to parry its attacks. We cut it down while it was focused on him.

Tagai was too badly wounded to continue on point. Drew, who literally had eyes in the back of his head, was guarding the rear; Templar had some skill with hand-to-hand weapons, but refused to go first, so I took the lead.

The passage branched and branched again. We began using chalk to mark our route. It soon became evident that this was futile, however; the corridors seemed to shift and change – on several occasions, even while we watched. We soon gave up trying to head in any particular direction and simply looked for anything out of the ordinary.

Another of the creatures charged us from the darkness. It seemed to come from nowhere, sinking its claws into my side before any of us were aware of it. I went down, but Tagai blocked its attempts to finish me off while Templar and Drew took it down from behind. The things were as single-minded as they were stealthy.

Since I was limping badly and Tagai wasn't in much better shape, Templar reluctantly agreed to take point. We continued, looking about futilely for any more of the beasts.

Finally we saw light in the distance. That was certainly unusual down here, so we headed towards it.

We stumbled abruptly into a large chamber with a sarcophagus in the center. It was draped in eight long strips of paper with occult symbols. We removed the lid to see a sleeping boy clad in white. He seemed to glow, and in some way counteracted the darkness. We were able to wake him up, but he seemed in a daze; he would walk where we indicated, but didn't respond to questions.

We left the chamber, turned a corner, and then turned around and went back. Sure enough, we were in a different chamber. In this one we found the book.

And now we were ready to leave. Of course, it wasn't quite that easy, but several creatures and a great deal of wandering later, we made our way back to the entrance. Stepping through the stone door, we found our vehicles and drivers waiting for us.

Suddenly a man appeared out of nowhere. I was getting sick of surprises.

We recognized him from our research on Midwest: Everett Dewitt, a member of the city council. He immediately demanded the book. Templar launched into an elaborate con, but Dewitt just laughed and cast a spell at him.

Templar recognized that he was being targeted and seemed able to counter the spell in some way. The rest of us opened up, but our attacks always seemed to go just wide of the mark. Clearly, Dewitt was a formidable mage.

Realizing that Templar was too tough a nut to crack, Dewitt turned his attention to me. Unfortunately, I knew no way but strength of will to resist magic. It had served me well enough in the past, and I felt my will was as strong as it had ever been; but Dewitt overwhelmed me as if I weren't even resisting. And in that instant, I felt the worst pain I had ever experienced.

It was as if my very soul was being ripped apart. I could feel a jerking and tearing, as if the sorcerer were pulling my soul out of my body and then shredding it. The agony seemed to go on forever, though it must have been only a few seconds.

Abruptly the pressure was gone. I staggered back against the wall. Something else seemed to be gone, too; I felt somehow lessened. But there was no time for introspection. We redoubled our attacks, while the sorcerer lashed out in rage. Our two drivers arrived and began pouring fire into him, all of it barely missing.

But Dewitt must have been at the edge of his strength. His defenses collapsed with startling suddenness, and our shots slammed home. He spun around and fell to the ground, dead on impact.

And that was about it. On the drive to Cheyenne, we finally got the boy to talk. He didn't know his name, but he knew that he wanted to go with the Harbinger, so we turned him over and went about our business.

And there was quite a bit of unfinished business. A town council had harbored a cultist. Certainly, there were those who had known. The whole town, or just a few?

I would find out.

1- Pay attention.

Attention is cheap. Every one can afford to pay it. Say, and this is just an example, you are sitting in a bar in some semi-tropical location. It is very important to pay attention to the people surrounding you, especially the ones who don't appear to be threats. In fact, the more someone looks innocuous, the more likely they are to be a well disguised assassin just waiting to kill you with some ancient Tibetan poison.

Obvious danger is frequently just a distraction, aimed at keeping you from noticing less obvious but more real danger. If a seven foot tall cyborg with a fully automatic grenade launcher in one hand and a severed head in the other happens to mosey through your favorite door, be prepared to ignore him. He's probably just lost.

At the other end of the spectrum, a slender young lady with a nice smile suited up in what amounts to thick dental floss, pay every, very close attention. She's dangerous. Take for instance the cute nose. Too cute for nature's creation. The slender waist leading to extraordinarily well formed hips are, again, too perfect. And last but not least, be sure to note the overly buxom and top heavy torso. There is only one conclusion.

She's a death bot

2-There's more than one threat

When surrounded by floss-clad death bots, it's equally important that they don't consume you're full attention. Becoming overly focused on real threats can distract you form other equally lethal dangers, not to mention irking the death bots by seeing through their well proportioned disguise. Other dangers can involve bartenders shorting you on the alcohol content of your piña colada, obnoxious frat boys on spring break, or the intermittent, magically appearing envelope.

3- Have your gear

This is important. Many a High Roller has met their end do to lack of proper equipment. Some of these early-truncated careers actually had gear near them but not on them. Do to the dickish nature of many of our benefactors, High Rollers are often teleported to a Game without warning. If you aren't carrying your gear when something strange happens, pick it up before responding. And never, ever, read your mail in the bath.

Trust me on this.

4- Handle with care

Now that you have picked up your laser rifle, nap sack, and Kevlar wrapped kitty, it is time to respond to whatever agent, flier or what have you with care. In the case of a magical envelope, be sure to wear gloves, hold the item up to the light, and hope for the best when you open it. If you are not immediately transported to an island filled with unkillable zombie hordes, find out the location of the meet up and make transportation plans.

Transportation note: It helps to be a millionaire.

5- Meet up and determine the weakest link

As far as I know, all Games have multiple participants. More than likely, some of them will be complete idiots and others will be psychotic monsters. If you can't peg who's who, you are likely to be the former. Tough luck, champ.

The importance of this step can't be stressed enough. You are going to need someone to feed to the ravenous monster when things go wrong (Hint: they will always go wrong), and you don't want it to be your only friend in the world or the one guy that can get you past the Mythos sealed hell-gate.

Take a good look around. Do you really need that mutant spider thing? How about the the crazed Texan Senator? His weird Filipino body guard?

Find the most useless person and be prepared to help them be useful, if only once and for a very short amount of time.

6- Learn your goals

By your goals, I of course mean your employer's goals, because that bastard has hired you to fulfill them and he pays really, really well. The necessity for politeness when having a heart to heart with a demi-god level entity cannot be overstated.

7- Go to the Game

Yep. A lot of the time, you have to arrange your own transportation to Games. These little adventures can be set in all kinds of locations. Ancient ruins, alternate dimensions, and college campuses have all served as back drop for the horrific volunteer projects that makes High Rollers really High Rollers. So has exotic Wyoming.

Seriously.

A cave in Wyoming.

It's a glamorous life.

8- Be in the middle

When a group of Rollers is tiptoeing, walking, or “Fuck Me” sprinting through dangerous territory, the guy in the middle has the highest chance of survival. How do I know? I'm the guy in the middle. You can look for other opinions on this subject but it'll be tough to get in touch with the brave guy in front or the slow guy in back without a séance.

9- Don't freak out

There are going to be mind melting moments when on Game. Be especially suspicious of books as they are more dangerous than bikini babes and crazed Texans combined. The Games are probably the one profession where illiteracy is a survival skill.

However, there are other sources of mind fuckery, some of which don't even sodomize your sanity, but are just plain strange. When confronted by an Elder Being, flat-ass weirdness, or the prospect of reading a book, KEEP CALM. For instance, if you are in a labyrinth that has dimensional pockets that keep you from knowing where the hell you are because everything keeps shifting around, not panicking will increase your odds of survival.

Not by a lot, but I'm assured that every little bit helps.

10- Don't die

Now, before entering the Games, I would have thought that this could go without having to be stressed. That said, I have sort-of died three times. You can tell that I have not completely died as I am not giving you this survival list from beyond the grave, as hilarious as that would have been.

After the you've survived monsters and madness, it's time for the big nasty reveal. There is usually some extreme unpleasantness waiting at the end of a Game. Sometimes it's a three hundred foot fall onto rocks, other times its a mad caster with plans to destroy the world. Okay, it's almost always mad casters with plans to destroy the world. You'll probably want to stop these guys as it tends to be your world they're ten seconds away from destroying.

So, now you've got to stop the crazy evil caster. There's a lot of ways to do this, but the best way is always the one that doesn't kill you.

Good luck with that.

Of course it helps to have monsters chasing you. I can't tell you how long it's been since I've been invited onto one of these psychotic little adventures but I was starting to feel rejected. I have never been able to figure out how the powers-that-be select the victims-that-be (High Rollers such as myself), so I really don't know what my long, long extended fucking break from “The Games” was all about. Maybe they took offense to my little outing with Rowan. Perhaps there was some kind of filing error that led to my last job working with a group of complete strangers. Or maybe I am, in fact, too sexy for my work.

Almost definitely the last one.

Anyway, it gave me a lot of time to exercise my demons. Like any responsible demon owner, this means whipping the little buggers into shape instead of evicting them. All play and no work makes Simon an interesting but board boy. I spent a lot of time in places where the ladies are sun bronzed and the seasons pretty much don't exist. Most of this bit of hobby time was spent in indulgence, but I have to give myself credit, even after months and months of no invite, I still kept all of my “Don't Fucking Die” gear at hand.

I did change things up a bit though. My briefcase of incredible coolness became my briefcase of incredible redundancy, so I swapped the sucker out with a groovy new kit. If my luck holds, it will be completely useless baggage for about five Games or so before it becomes the most important fucking thing in existence. At which point I will wallow in glorious foresight while chanting “I told you so.”

I'm good at that.

I originally intended this little entry to be a summery of what I did on my summer-fall-winter-spring-summer vacation, but I really haven't had much to brag about. With no direct threats to my rather incredible life, and no other Rollers dialing up with side jobs, life has been the usual beautiful women, tropical paradises, and reserved drug overdoses.

You know. Boring.

When I arrived, I met Simon Templar, who I already knew, and a man with a spider's eyes, who I didn't. He introduced himself with a pseudonym, of course, but it wasn't difficult to obtain a DNA sample and learn that his real name was Cephas Drew.

We were joined by Major General Alex McKay, who gave each of us an access card for certain files at the Library of Congress. By the time we got there, Templar had stolen mine and Drew's, for no apparent reason. Odd. Then when we were admitted to the document room, he promptly began ripping up documents. I had to have him escorted out.

Templar had displayed bizarre behavior from time to time in the past, but on this Game it proved to be continuous. He almost seemed a different person – childlike, but far from innocent. Had he undergone some sort of breakdown? If so, I hoped it was something from which he might recover, because he was almost more trouble than he was worth. He was constantly looking for ways to amuse himself and payed scant attention to the mission. More than once I was tempted to simply leave him behind, but I kept reminding myself that it was undoubtedly better to know what he was up to.

Our objective was to retrieve the “complete record” and tie up loose ends from a biological research program gone wrong. A familiar story, unfortunately. These mad scientist types always seemed to go, well, mad. Definitely more trouble than they were worth.

The mad scientist involved in this particular fiasco was a Dr. Nelson Tutson. We searched his house in Florida and found the coordinates of the facility, which turned out to be on the ocean floor forty miles offshore – outside U.S. territorial waters. We rented a research submarine and went there.

Someone had beaten us to it. A small submarine was in the docking bay – torn to shreds. Beyond an airlock we found an entry chamber with the corpses of a Gerthuth assault team, similarly torn to shreds. Evidently the Army had tried to shut the place down once before.

We proceeded to explore the facility, with Templar causing problems at every step. (No, an underwater lab wasn't the place to leave him behind, with 600 feet of water above us and who knew what sort of equipment lying around.) The staff had turned into amphibious mutants, but they weren't what had taken down the commandos, and we were able to deal with them. Then we found the source of the destruction.

She was about five foot three, with long black hair and gently-dappled grey skin. She also had gills and claws. Her name was Tara, and she appeared to be in her early twenties.

“Who are you?” she asked. She seemed surprised to see us.

Before I could say anything, Templar stepped up and started flirting. She didn't respond, but didn't seem displeased, either. After a few moments she simply walked off.

So. She was the product of Tutson's experiments. He had earned the death penalty.

We found him in his private laboratory, hard at work. He planned to mutate her further, it seemed. He put up a stiff fight, made all the more difficult by the fact that we had to take him alive, but we finally took him into custody and persuaded him to answer our questions.

He had conditioned Tara to remain and defend the facility until he released her. Properly encouraged, he released her, and she swam away. She would never rejoin the human race, but at least she could live her life in freedom.

Then we destroyed the facility and took Tutson back to our sponsor, who as it turned out had only wanted his head. That left a bit of a mess, but we let McKay deal with it. We had cleaned up his mess; now he could clean up ours.

Hey look, it's Nathaniel. Only this guy can hold his breath longer.

Zing!

Dating has been going poorly, and I'm growing tired of the drama that comes with dating married men. At first, their double lives fascinated me and reminded me of myself. It took me far too long to realize that the secrets they keep are far different than my own. They weren't made to live as I was, and they chafe under their cultural conditioning. Adulterers are like children playing with matches, overwhelmed by guilt and passion. Even the most passive ones seemed a dangerous to me.

I've been writing a book about an adulterous man, inspired by the ones I've been dating. It's helped clear my mind of the notion that betrayal is some romantic adventure. Next, I will be pursuing the 25-35 age range, looking for a suitable mate. I find that the young men are often naive about the commitment of marriage and so engage in it too readily, and that the older men are desperate and so lower their standards.

Children have always seemed so irritating to me, like even stupider people. But I think their simplicity is growing on me. It's as if they're the alpha, the origin, the seed. I'll see one grow to be a fine young man or woman under my care.

“In the western Arctic, the Beaufort Gyre is driven by a permanent anti-cyclonic wind circulation. It drives the water, forcing it to pile up in the centre of gyre, and this domes the sea surface,” stated Dr. Katharine Giles, lead author of the CPOM.

“When you have clockwise rotation - the fresh water is stored. If the wind goes the other way - and that has happened in the past - then the fresh water can be pushed to the margins of the Arctic Ocean.”

This could result in large quantities of freshwater suddenly entering the North Atlantic. The circulation currently holds about 10% of all the freshwater in the Arctic.

This development has gone largely unremarked in the mainstream press. However, Dr. Martin Richardson, an oceanographer who has written about historical climate change events, warns that sudden freshwater entry into the North Atlantic has proven catastrophic in the past.

“Sometime between 8,700 and 8,200 years ago, Lake Agassiz, a glacial lake in central north Canada, drained catastrophically into the Arctic Ocean, circulated past Greenland, and then flowed into the North Atlantic. The sudden entry of Arctic freshwater disrupted ocean currents and caused rain belts to shift south. It's believed that the Gulf Stream stopped for decades, possibly longer.

“There is also a risk that winds could initiate greater mixing of ocean layers in the Arctic, as a consequence of the reduced amount of sea-ice in the region. Since currents are driven by temperature differences, any decrease in those differences is undesirable.

“On that occasion, the disruption of ocean currents triggered a brief return to glacial conditions. This resulted in freshwater being locked up in ice, increasing the salinity of the oceans. The change in salinity restarted ocean currents, which in turn ended the renewed glaciation. However, a similar event today would not cause glaciation; modern climate change prevents that from happening. Should ocean currents stop today, there would be no such phenomenon to restart them."

Behold:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RcZw68FqLs&feature=fvwrel

The Mayor confirmed that the dispute was not related to the recent fire, and has come under some criticism for the timing of the leadership change. The Mayor pointed out, however, that the Commissioner was not directly involved in the arson investigation.

"Fortunately, the theater was closed at the time," said Commissioner Dale Chipman. "Otherwise casualties would have been much higher."

Bring that which the Pillager prizes most
From Lake Turcot to Lake Sakakawea.

As I was puzzling over it, my phone rang. It was McGuire. Apparently he had been contacted and given a task and my information. A Game, apparently. Interesting. It had been quite a while – something I didn't entirely regret. Well, I would at least investigate.

Lake Turcot was on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, in North Dakota. There was a town of the same name at the south end of the lake. The nearest airport was in Minot. McGuire was flying commercial, oddly enough, so we agreed to meet there.

By the time he arrived, I had arranged for a helicopter piloted by a flamboyant fellow named Chris Haines to take us to Argus, just outside the reservation. I had also purchased an SUV and arranged for it to be airlifted there, and still had to cool my heels for several hours. McGuire really needed to come up with faster means of transport.

From Argus we drove to Lake Turcot and spoke with the locals. The only thing we learned which seemed at all unusual was that a woman named Fleur who lived at the north end of the lake was reputed to be a witch, and was blamed for all sorts of ill luck. Some said she was the wife of Michenichepoo, the Water Man, the spirit of the lake, and that she had borne his child. It was all rather vague, which could mean that she was clever enough to avoid directly implicating herself, or could mean that it was a bunch of superstitious claptrap. We did hear of one person who visited her, a girl named Pauline Puyat who had worked with her for a time in Argus. And then we learned that Fleur's last name was Pillager.

It would be necessary to hire Pauline as a guide. Assessing her would give us an idea of Fleur's character. For evil may conceal its nature, and may even conceal the nature of its hangers-on; but it cannot surround itself with truly good people, unless they are fools, or in bondage. Thus is it revealed.

With a little trouble, we persuaded Pauline to take us to Fleur's cottage. My impression of her was positive; she seemed benign, and not particularly foolish. I doubted Fleur was evil. But we would see.

It began to snow as we arrived. Fleur was surprised to see us, but invited us to share her supper and spend the night. We accepted. We spoke quietly for a time, and she gave me a dreamcatcher.

It was not truly necessary to know what she prized most. I wasn't going to steal from her, or allow McGuire to do so, but if she came to Lake Sakakawea, she would certainly bring with her what she prized most. Thus, our task was to persuade her to come to Lake Sakakawea. But it was easy to learn that she prized most her three-month-old daughter; a child of rape.

Fleur seemed determined to remain in her cabin. She had never gone further than Argus, and had no desire to do so. We retired for the night with her unconvinced. No matter; there was still morning to persuade her. The best tack would probably be to point out the advantages to her daughter, Lulu, whose opportunities would inevitably be limited if she lived out her life here.

As we were making our beds on the floor, McGuire stopped abruptly. He had heard a branch snap. Quickly we prepared to fight or flee, then went outside to investigate.

A mob, thirty strong, was approaching from the direction of town. Fleur asked if we had led them here. That was an interesting question. We had driven through Lake Turcot on the way. Had they followed? If so, why? They knew where she lived; her cabin was visible from town. Perhaps our questions crystallized a decision, moving them to action against the purported witch – or inspiring them to wipe out the evidence of their crime. Regardless, if we had triggered this, then we owed her a debt.

The underbrush was too heavy for rapid flight; in all likelihood the mob would catch us quickly if we went that direction. The only other choice was the lake. McGuire and I led Pauline, the infant, and Fleur to her rowboat and hurriedly pushed off. Then McGuire began rowing out into the lake as quietly as possible. A mist had risen, and we hoped it would soon conceal us.

Not soon enough. The mob had evidently anticipated this, and had three bark canoes with them. Six men pushed off in them, three paddling while three opened fire. I recognized the town's lone policeman as one of the shooters. I pushed the women to the bottom of the boat.

McGuire continued rowing while I fired at the canoes. I was hesitant to harm the pursuers; though I guessed their intentions, I didn't know for certain. Moreover, the canoes seemed fragile, and with explosive rounds might be easy to disable.

They seemed to be firing at our boat, which suggested that they might intend only to arrest us – though they had not called for us to surrender, or indeed spoken at all. A splinter struck my face, which began bleeding lightly. I continued firing at the lead canoe, and it began to lose headway.

Abruptly they changed targets. McGuire grunted in pain as he was hit. I began firing on the second canoe.

Suddenly pain exploded from my left arm, and I staggered back, stunned.

I looked down in shock at the ruins of my arm. It was shattered, indeed almost severed; I would not be able to use it without medical treatment, and perhaps not even then. But I could fire with one arm. I struggled to bring my rifle to bear.

Without warning, Fleur leaped to her feet. She handed Lulu to Pauline and said, “Take care of her.” Was she speaking to Pauline, or to all of us? Not that it mattered. Then she jumped overboard.

I fought to speak, to act; but my body was still in shock. I seemed to be moving through molasses. McGuire did not slow down. Our boat rapidly pulled away from Fleur, and the gunmen rapidly drew closer. The policeman was in the lead canoe, but he made no effort to apprehend Fleur, gave her no chance to surrender. Instead, he leveled his shotgun at her.

I finally brought up my rifle and fired.

I missed.

His shotgun went off.

My head was spinning as my lifeblood pooled in the bottom of the boat. I fought with the darkness and lost.

For a long time, I was aware of my surroundings only for brief periods. I struggled to wake up, knowing there was something urgent I had to do, but I couldn't retain consciousness for long. I knew I was in a hospital, and little more.

Finally, after an interminable period, I regained coherence, and was able to call McGuire to learn what had happened.

He had handed over the child to Michenichepoo, who had sworn to care for her. What was a lake spirit's word worth? Did it serve God or spurn Him? I would have to hope for the best. There was nothing I could do for the girl now.

We had accomplished our task, but at such a price … too high a price. Is the price always too high, with these Games?

I would keep the arm, but would never regain full function. I could no longer articulate the joints in my fingers or wrist; my hand was useless. I could still fire a rifle, but it would behoove me to learn other methods of fighting, just in case. And I would be in trouble if I needed to climb a rope. Would I survive these Games with such a handicap? No matter; it would be as God willed. I would pay whatever price He called on me to pay, in His service. I only hoped no one else would pay for me, ever again.

But now the guilty must pay for their crimes. McGuire had reported the murder to his contacts in law enforcement, and an investigation had been launched; but now he was refusing to testify. I was disappointed but not surprised. Well, I would testify, as would Pauline; justice would be served. And Pauline agreed to come to Montana to join the church: One more of the faithful to hold the flame against the darkness. Good could come out of evil, and joy from sorrow. Fleur would not be forgotten.

But in any case, she was in Mexico. Apparently there were complications, but not of the sort that I'd expected. There's a bounty on her now… when I heard that, I made a note not to mention the bounty hunter license I'd just picked up. I have no interest in collecting on her, but convincing other people of that sort of thing… I'm really not good at that.

I arranged things as best I could manage for her to get into the country. I don't have any ability to fast-track paperwork, or create paperwork, so all I could do was arrange a few trips where questions wouldn't be asked, and leave the rest to her.

She did eventually manage to show up in the city she'd told me her letter directed her to. Boston. We were apparently to meet with the mayor for some unspecified appointment. I'm guessing that's where we'll get our mission.

We made a quick run over to the appointment, after taking some time to get Amy some minor equipment. Our task was apparently to find the Mayor's daughter, Rose, and bring her back safely. The lead we had to start with was her friend, Bridget.

We met up with her, and that meeting went pretty well, it was the next meeting that went badly. My fault completely, I'm no good at the talking thing, so I botched things up pretty badly talking to the Chief of Police. Not something we can't recover from, and we did get some useful information from it, but I still felt pretty damn bad about it – especially on the heels of dropping Amy off at the hospital that other time.

Thankfully, Amy's good at these things, and she managed to recover the situation. She dug up some useful dirt on the Chief, enough to get him to listen to her and give us information. Of course, the Chief still didn't trust her, which is probably why he didn't give us all of the information at once.

The first thing he gave us did lead us to a local church, which not-so-coincidentally, was where he decided to head first. Amy went inside and looked around the area with him, while I put on my helmet and checked out the outside. Worked out damn well, too. I found tracks – not just any tracks either. Ghoul tracks. If they're like what I ran into with Gregor, Cephas and Girard, they won't be all that dangerous, but I'm not going to bank on that.

I let Amy know about the tracks over text message, so she could pass the information on to the Chief. She did explain a bit about the idea of having leverage over someone, and her having that sort of information seems like it would help her case with the Chief.

I followed the tracks to a crypt in the nearby graveyard. Then to one of the two sarcophagi inside. The Chief refused to come along with Amy and I as we investigated, he insisted on having backup. Perfectly reasonable, but Amy and I can't really afford to rely on that.

Of course, we gave up on that about five minutes later, when we encountered 5 ghouls inside of the tunnel under the sarcophagus. The last time I dealt with these things, the crew I was with had less of a numbers disparity, and we were all at least competent with weapons. Amy, though, isn't good with weapons, and there are only two of us.

The Chief's backup did arrive, and we let him know about the ghouls. That's when he let us know that there was another place we might find Rose. A Theater not too far off from where we were. She'd expressed some interest in seeing a magician there, by name of 'The Great Raspini'. So we investigated.

It did take us a while to find him, but find him we did. And a difficult encounter it was. Raspini was a Mythos Mage, as Gregor calls them. Which means he was insane, irrational, aggravating, and remarkably dangerous despite all of this. Had a hell of a time dealing with him, and we never did manage to kill his pet zombie, but Raspini was dealt with, spitted at the end of my spear. Rose was rescued, though somewhat the worse for ware – blinded by gas, I had cut her while trying to remove her bindings. And – more importantly – Amy and I both managed to get out alive and intact.

Now, answering the door, that was odd. It was a woman, absolutely beautiful, eyes the color of dull gold, and completely nude. She introduced herself as Faun.

She had a job for me, which didn't surprise me in the slightest. She had that air around her. She told me to 'bring that which the pillager prizes most from lake Turcot to lake Sakakawea', and gave me a business card with the name Michael Wood, captioned as a 'Self Proclaimed Man of God', and a phone number.

Needless to say, I called him up as soon as Faun left. These things are always best dealt with as quickly as possible. We made arrangements to meet up as closely to the Lake Turcot reservation as we could, and start from there.

By the time I got in, Wood had been in the airport for a while. He'd managed to line up a helicopter pilot for us, for relatively rapid transportation, and had bought an SUV for use on the mission. Pretty well prepared for the mission, I have to admit.

So we flew into Argot, the closest town to Lake Turcot, and drove into the town on the shore of the lake. We started doing some exploration and information gathering. We managed to get all sorts of information, but the most interesting bits were all the rumors about Fleur, the town outcast. No one seemed to really know for sure what she was, but everyone was pretty sure she was evil. I'm not sure, myself. In my experience, when there is someone actually evil, with the kinds of powers they were attributing to Fleur, there is no one alive to spread rumors. But of course, we have to check – especially when they mentioned that her last name was Pillager.

We did have one fairly reasonable lead we could work with, a woman in Argot, Pauline Puyat, who visited Fleur regularly. She could probably lead us to Fleur's home, and ask her to speak with us. Wood even suggested something else: if Pauline was a good person herself, we could make a preliminary judgment on Fleur.

It proved a bit difficult to tricky Pauline's assistance, but we did manage. She was happy to help, once Wood convinced her employers to let her go for the day.

She led us to Fleur, who seemed generous and friendly. She offered us soup, even with what little she had available. Wood engaged her in conversation, and managed to turn up that the only thing she truly valued was her child, Lulu Nanapush. I think we might have to walk away from this one, there is no way I'm going to steal a woman's child from her.

It was when we were preparing to sleep that trouble came up. I heard it first, and stepped outside to take a look. The townspeople had apparently followed Wood and I, and had come as a mob to murder Fleur.

We tried to escape on a rowboat that Fleur had nearby. We did what we could, I rowed, and Wood fired back, but ultimately, Fleur sacrificed herself to save the life of her child. The townspeople killed her, in cold blood, in the middle of the lake.

Wood had taken a few shots, and my hamhanded efforts to treat him left him unconscious. Not much I can do about it, except get him to a hospital. This I managed, with the help of the helicopter pilot he had hired earlier on. He probably won't recover full use of that arm though, so I left him Freeman's contact information, and a note that told him that Freeman could probably heal him, but wasn't exactly… safe. Up to him if he calls the man or not, I can only give him the option.

From there… to lake Sakakawea. I delivered the child to a man who met me on the shore of the lake. I had to convince Pauline to let him take her, but she did relent. The man walked away, with a promise to care for the child.

With that done, only two things to be done. First, I made some provisions for Pauline, she would probably not be going back to that town, not after what they did. Then, I called my contacts in Law Enforcement. Murder is a big deal, especially in cold blood, the townsfolk probably won't get off lightly, more than a few will end up in jail, I'm sure. If not… I might have to go back on my own, when I am stronger.

I once witnessed a golden yolk broken, and it was the saddest day of my life. That potential: lost. Yet, for all the times I've left myself, have I ever gotten anywhere? The golden pool swallowed me easily, like a teardrop. My mind was wrapped in the gauze of the octave, and I ran from the blazing skies. My home, the pool, embraced me, wrapped its maternal wings about me, and I saw the feathers and thought the world of myself. Imagine the shock, the mind-funeral, when I discovered that hole; that which would bring me from her caring grasp back into the cold, dry plain of waterless cracked mud. A thousand thousand hands gripped at me, passed me between them, and I was naked for the first time in after.

It's still there in the sky, that yellow mass. It bleeds upon me each night, and the dogs that consume my flesh either do not see or do not care that I am dieing. Will I leave a crater when I finally land upon the earth? I miss that which I have rejected, but the stream flows swiftly and in one direction as time does for those of us who are doomed to perish. Perhaps I will lay down in finality against a silk sheet. Or perhaps in a ditch. Don't close your eyes, but avert them. This is not for your benefit, but for mine. That pool of light may never hold my soul again, and I find the cold dirt refreshing. Who are you to ask this of me?

I was humming to myself when the doorbell rang. A quick check of the monitors revealed a rather peculiar-looking woman at the door. A Game, perhaps?

Even that wasn't enough to upset my equanimity. I had had a good two months undisturbed; I was ready for a Game, if that's what it was. I shut down my current project and answered the door.

She handed me a notice that I had been accepted for an interview for Chief Medical Investigator with the Meridian Center for Experimental Psychiatry, near Roswell, New Mexico. It sounded like either a Game or a trap. I left immediately.

I arrived at the Roswell airport and met Du Lac and McGuire, who were interviewing for Chief Security Officer, and the hobo, Gregor, who was also interviewing for Chief Medical Investigator. Although there was a small chance that more than once person could get each job – perhaps “chief” referred to grade rather than to supervisory status – it seemed more likely that only two of us could win. Gregor clearly had better medical skills than I, which could be awkward. On the other hand, he was a hobo.

We took a taxi to an oval building and were given a quick tour. It was a holding facility for crazy superpowered types. Arkham Asylum, basically. Nice. The rooms – cells, rather – were arranged in a spiral pattern, winding inward, with the control room in the center.

We were given a quick tour. There was a man with vines growing from him, isolated on an island in a pool of weed-killer; a very muscular woman in heavy restraints; a putty-like man frozen in ice; a telepath; a speedster encased in tar; and more. A real Rogue's Gallery. Then our guide mentioned that all of them had once been High Rollers. Great. Was this really a job interview, or were they expecting to add us to their collection?

We arrived at a conference room next to the command center and met with the director, who explained our task. A staff psychiatrist had recently resurrected his wife after she died of a virus, using some sort of mad science gadget. Apparently she came back as a zombie, and when she killed him, he became a zombie, too. Now a zombie virus was loose in the facility. We were to contain the infection and determine what caused it. They would evaluate our performance as individuals and decide who would be offered the two available positions.

I disliked that immediately. If I was competing with another High Roller, I wanted a clear metric; “most valuable player” was far too squishy. Well, I would just focus on the job and see what happened.

We began gathering information, and took blood samples from infected and healthy individuals. Gregor analyzed the samples and realized that both groups were … androids.

Yes, that's right. Androids.

Once we asked them point blank, our hosts were able to confirm it. Staff and patients were all androids. We were the only humans in the building. Apparently they were barred from disclosing this unless asked directly.

We were dealing with robot zombies. Better and better.

That put a new complexion on things. The original virus that killed the psychiatrist's wife was a computer virus. The mad science he had applied to revive her involved transforming the computer virus, and ended up transforming it into a zombie virus.

Suddenly the five androids in the room with us slumped over. In seconds they revived as zombies and attacked.

After a stiff fight, we managed to dispose of them. Realizing we didn't have much time before the entire facility was zombified, we hurried to the control room … and then hastily ducked back out and barred the door. All fifteen of the control staff were zombies.

Du Lac essentially won the Game at that point. (Obviously he would be offered the Chief Security Officer position. McGuire was out of luck.) With the assistance of an assistant with whom he communicated through his tablet, he came up with a sequence of flashing lights which triggered an epileptic fit in the control room zombies. We hurried in and dealt with them before they recovered. Du Lac's assistant then used the source code of the zombie virus we had obtained to come up with a “vaccine.” The vaccine didn't help those already infected, but it prevented the infection from spreading. It contained the infection, thereby achieving our objective. We used the control room servers to distribute the vaccine.

Then we left. They ended up offering all of us jobs of one sort or another, but none of us were interested; we had a sneaking suspicion they wanted us as patients, not staff.

We weren't even sure it was really a Game. Fortunately, it turned out it was, and that all of us had won. Having four of us compete for two positions was the director's idea, not the Harbinger's … though I didn't doubt the Harbinger had enjoyed watching us squirm. Bastard.

Getting across the border to Mexico was not difficult, but I wish I had gone up north to Canada. Mexico is a dirty, desperate place, and it can be dangerous. Letho answered his phone and said he'd make the trip down to bring me my things, the sweetheart. Funny how these people stick their necks out for someone they barely know but are willing to kill those they don't without question. I hope he remembers to feed Myrtle; from what I gather, he's recovering well from his injuries. The turtle, that is, not the assassin. I'm going to have to be more careful with those feathers if I'm going to become a person of interest to the United States Government. They don't grow on trees, you know.

The new name is Mercedes Verdú. Fake ID again, and I'm still not on any government lists, but Mexico City is a dusty place, and I'm bound to blend in amongst the filth. It's funny. I've never noticed it before now, but these married men and women are so desperate for the touch of a new person. I'm not the most stunning person on earth, but they seem to practically throw themselves at my feet. I find the double lives these people live fascinating. It reminds me of myself.

The inauspicious crescent moon had climbed over the mountain only hours after he and Amy had. Damn, was she beautiful, and not just attractive but capable, intelligent, and mysterious. She blended into a crowd, but he knew that there was more to her than met the eye. She had guided him here, given him the tranquilizer gun, and spoken to the family they were guarding. The residents might have been uncomfortable about the whole situation had Amy not spoken their native language, French, with them. Nathaniel stopped pacing for a moment and took a deep breath. He wished he had some sort of relevant skill.

What was that? A noise in the house? Everyone should have been asleep so he decided to check it out; he wouldn't want to let his partner down. There was a palpable silence that hung in the air like a blanket on a hot night. First he checked the entryway. Nothing. Then he made his way into the kitchen, boots clacking on the tile. It was empty. Finally he made his way upstairs; that's when he saw the ape. Without thinking a single thought he raised the gun to his shoulder and took aim. The monkey turned around just in time to see the dart enter its left bicep. That's when he realized his mistake.

How could he have been so foolish? How could he have been so dense? He heard Amy scream his name and a curse, and the when he looked more carefully he noticed that it wasn't the ape he had shot after all. It was Amy. A lump as big as his over-sized fist dropped into his throat. He'd set things straight.

Amy, who at this time had already tied a tourniquet around her arm, gestured for him to come over to her. He did as he was told, and she whispered urgently to him, “No matter what, don't send me to the hospital.”

“Okay,” he said, lying through is teeth. As she slipped in and out of consciousness, he helped the paramedics load her onto the helicopter. Would he be able to finish the job without her? Unlikely, but he'd have to try.

Scars rip across his face, and his eye gazes only at what he's doing. He lives his life moment-to-moment, and he's not the sort of person who would think twice about taking a life if he needed to. For now I'm convenient, and I doubt I'm being kept around as anything other than a possible ally. One shouldn't place much trust in those who practice killing all day.

Letho speaks like a child, but his casual demeanor is backed by apathy and is so profoundly disturbing on some level. He's agreed to teach me a thing or two about defending myself with weapons; apparently I'll be needing that knowledge if I continue to accept jobs from these mysterious employers. As for him; it's all he knows. Is there a fitting end to his sort of life? If there is, I suppose it would be face down in a ditch somewhere. Forgotten.

In the meantime, he's proven useful. I get the feeling that I won't be staying with this madman indefinitely, though. I've been struck with a wanderlust, and these “missions” seem to be a good way to quench it.

I met up with some of the other Rollers I know. Danforth, Girard, and Gregor. No Cephas this time around, for some reason or another. I'm sure he's fine… well, unless he went on a Game that I didn't. If that happened, I have no idea if he's fine or not. Poor guy just has all the luck.

Anyways, the four of us all had the same address. Apparently Girard and I were there for the Chief of Security job, while Gregor and Danforth were both there for the Chief Medical Officer job. Might be some conflict there, but I'm hoping this is just the invite stuff, and it won't actually pit us against each other.

We bought a car and drove to the address. Weird egg shaped building. And of course the inside was odd too, had a spiral layout. Thankfully there were doors on the insides of the rooms, so we didn't have to walk the whole spiral to get to the center. That would have spoken badly for any escape routes. And let me tell you, escape routes seemed important. We saw some of their patients, apparently they deal with insane and/or troublesome beings with power. Pretty sure any one of them would be a tough fight.

So we got near to the center of the spiral and had a meeting with a couple of their science types. I'll spare the song and dance and skip to the ending. Androids. Every single being in this facility, with the exception of the four of us, is an android. That's… creepy.

Apparently they wanted us to solve a problem for them, some sort of computer virus that was corrupting them and making them crazy monster androids. And of course, as we're talking about solutions, the five in the room suddenly get infected and start trying to kill us. Good thing they didn't have weapons.

We did manage to take them all down, after a bit of a tough fight. We didn't get all that badly battered, but it was bad enough to know we couldn't take these guys down in a straight fight, not if they had the numbers advantage and weapons.

Girard was really the key to solving this problem. Well, Girard's assistant, really. She read and wrote code like it nothing. Girard sent her a sample of the virus through his tablet, and she sent back a workable antivirus. All we had to do was beam it to the androids through the command center. That proved a bit tricky, but once again, Girard's assistant managed to pull through for us.

The surviving androids did offer us jobs, if we were interested, but we all declined. I really don't want to work in a crazy house like this, not if I can help it.

The only person I got ahold of was Amy Nelson, which, I'll admit, concerned me. Only two people on the mission? I guess there could be more people that I don't know that will show up, but… yeah. Understaffed. We'll have to be careful.

Luckily for me, Amy had an idea of where we were supposed to be going. A small time investigations office in LA. No directions were given, of course, but we needed to sign up with the agency and work with them for whatever job they had for us, I was fairly sure.

The man in charge was Ernie Zoolie, or something along those lines. He had just picked up a job that he wanted us to take on. He wanted us to chase a monkey. Seemed pretty silly, and yeah, it kinda was. He gave us an address and a name to visit at the Griffith Park Zoo. Benjamin Wilson, the zoo director.

Director Wilson gave us the information we needed to start our investigation, and we were off. We did end up investigating a number of false leads – quite a number of those, really. I'm not that good at the whole investigation thing, I'm really more of a tracker than an investigator. But we did manage to put together some things.

First off, the monkey was unusually smart. Probably smart enough to read, unless I miss my guess. It also wasn't any breed of monkey that the zoo keepers knew about, and they had an expert in primates studying the critter. It also seemed to want to kill the Zeapin family. And we were supposed to capture it alive, unharmed, and without it having hurt anyone. That's going to make things tricky.

Amy and I rushed to the Zeapin residence, where we convinced them that we were there to help out, and that there was a wild animal in the area that we were trying to capture. I think that was the story, at least – everyone there was speaking French, and I don't speak that language.

In any case, we were clear to patrol the area. That's when I got my first clue that the monkey was a lot more than it seemed to be. See, I came back from my first circuit of the area, walked inside, and saw the monkey. So of course I shot it with the tranquilizer rounds we had prepped up. Why wouldn't I? And that's when the illusion broke, and it turned out that I'd just hit Amy, with a tranquilizer shot weighted for a gorilla sized monkey.

The next few minutes were a panicked rush, but we did manage to get Amy delivered to a hospital, where they treated her and made sure she'd be alright. I paid, of course. My mistake, so I needed to do what I could to fix it up.

So just me, the family, and the monkey left in the area. And the police were coming in in about two hours to kill it dead, and get it out of the way. So now I had a new time limit. Had to hit it with a tranquilizer and keep the family safe for at least two hours. Fun.

I tried tracking the thing down, and that didn't work, it pulled a clever trick and left a false trail. But when I rushed back to the house, it was there, and it hadn't hurt anyone yet. Lucky me, I managed to plug it with a tranquilizer on my first shot, so all I had to do was survive long enough for it to take effect.

I tried to stick it out, but after getting the ever living hell beat out of me, I finally backed off. I would almost certainly have died if I'd kept it up. I can only hope that the family managed to get away safely and clearly. The monkey will probably be knocked out by the time the cops show up, so they'll capture it instead of killing it. I need to get myself to a hospital and get some treatment.

I'd been given an address in Waltham, Massachusetts. Time is usually of the essence in these things, so I immediately made travel arrangements to get there. When I arrived, I found that Gregor, Cephas, and Girard were all present, with the same address. We swapped what information we had, and it turned out that I was the only one who had received the name of our sponsor this time around.

Thankfully, Girard was on the mission with us. As Gregor said, he's got a level of professionalism that's been missing from the group. He'd done some digging, and we were to meet with a professor by the name of Reginald Preston. Girard and I went in, being the most normal looking people in the group.

Our mission, as given to us by the professor, was to investigate a local family, the Blaines. He suspected they had some form of Mythos ties, and wanted us to investigate them and return with our findings – with a minimum of property damage. That last part will probably be the hardest, to be honest. But nonetheless, that's our task, so we set out for it.

We made a stop before we started investigating the Blaines, to gather some equipment and do some research on them. We didn't get too much that was really relevant to the modern family, though it did stand out to us that the recorded floor plans for their house were not filed. They were completely absent, as a matter of fact. That's enough to know there is something suspicious going on, though nothing concrete.

So we moved on to the property itself. We hid the car on the other side of the road, and left Cephas there – poor guy is still missing a leg, so he's not well equipped for running. Gregor went to investigate the house itself, while Girard and I checked out the Cemetery on the grounds. We didn't really find anything in the cemetery, though it was in better condition than the damn house.

And that's around the time that every electronic item we had was completely blown out. Annoying on two levels: we lost out on the benefits of our electronics, and I had just replaced that crap! Dammit, I'm going to need more money if I lose my stuff all the time.

Gregor met up with Girard and I rather shortly after the electronics blew out, and we decided to regroup with Cephas. Except he wasn't at the car. That was not encouraging. There didn't seem to be signs of a struggle, but I was able to track him down fairly quickly. Thankfully, he hadn't been turned or killed or wired with explosives again, as far as we could tell. He did, however, tell us that he had met with John Blaine. Apparently the man claimed to be a prisoner in his own home, kind of hard to believe, honestly.

Girard and Gregor wanted to ask him a few more questions, so we tracked him down and had a chat. Ultimately, he agreed to distract his family, so we could explore the house and find some evidence of wrongdoing and then deal with his family.

After speaking with him, Girard noted that John seemed more annoyed with his family at being unambitious than anything else, which was when we decided to capture all four of them, if it were possible.

The agreed upon time came, and we slipped into the house. John had even left us a note, that there was a secret door in the basement. We searched the entire house, and we didn't find any direct evidence that was condemning, but we found enough circumstantial evidence we could use. Not to mention that John had distracted them by convincing them the perform a mythos ritual – which is horrifying magic, and is a capital crime regardless of the outcome of the ritual. That's enough for us to bring them in.

It was relatively easy to capture the rest of John's family, but John himself gave us a bit of a chase. He'd summoned a half-dozen ghouls, which were enough to make us back off – until we realized that the ghouls were running away from us, instead of trying to kill us. So we pursued, and managed to pick off the ghouls a few at a time each time we encountered them. We wanted to take John alive, but once he shot at Gregor, that seemed infeasible, so he was killed too.

We then had the freedom to search the area completely. It took us a while, but we did eventually find truly incriminating evidence: a journal that John had taken from the house with him when he ran. We brought that back to Professor Preston, and while he wasn't exactly pleased with our full execution, we did manage to complete the task he'd set before us. Mission accomplished.

Now to go replace my damn gear again.

I've been crazy lucky on these things so far. A bit of caution helped too – a learned habit when you swim in some of the places I do – but still, damn lucky. Some of the others I work with have gotten torn the hell up from the things we've had to deal with. Not to mention what happened to poor Cephas – and what's currently happening to Cephas. Extra eyes? Obsession with spiders? I think he's turning into one, the more of these missions we go on… and despite this, he's still only the second weirdest person I've met through these things. The weirdest/creepiest? The doctor guy, the one who melts and manipulates flesh.

Though on that note… I have to wonder what's really going on with these missions. They seem to be getting progressively more difficult, the more of them I go on. Are they supposed to be some sort of training? Because that seems a lot like what they are. Start out at a low baseline to gauge strength, then throw tough and tougher challenges at the trainee to work for improvement. Of course, a normal growth pattern wouldn't really keep up with these things.

But then again, the growth we get from these missions… its hardly normal, is it? Cephas is turning into a spider, as best I can tell. Gregor's got some weird magic tricks he uses from time to time. And even the mundane stuff is massively accelerated. I've learned more in the past few months than I had in the past years before that.

So… yeah. Training. Potential. As best I can tell, that's what these things are about. Should be interesting to see the results of my own training, when it comes about.

Off to Boston airport, where I meet up with Cephas, Nathanial and the hobo. Cephas looks even less right than he used to, and he doesn't seem to be talking again. Nor, despite his wealth, is he carrying anything to write messages with, so later on he's forced to report with a stick in the dirt. Something seriously wrong with that man. Granted, he was almost choked to death by a zombie tongue.

We talk with Professor Reginald Preston, who studies ancient languages at Brandeis. He knows nothing of our employer (Carl Stanford) but we talk him into revealing what he knows. He demands that we gather information discreetly, with no violence, no property damage. Fine by me.

He stumbled across some strangeness with the Blane family, a family in decline with an established but shady history, likely connected to several disappearances and in some way linked to what he (and Gregor) call the "mythos." Evil magic. Enough said.

We do some extra research on the Blane place. Before heading out, we discuss how to manage entry to the house. The others seem eager to present ourselves as scouts for a horror film, but their disinterest in perfecting the story with details permits a switch to a bounty hunter cover. Gregor will be the fugitive, sneaking into the house as a scout while on headset with us. Cephas, given his extra eyes, will stay with his SUV. Nathaniel and I will be the bounty hunters. We get temporary licenses arranged and go.

Gregor sneaks in and presumably does fairly well until there's a burst of static over the earbuds and all our electronics are fried. Then he comes bursting out a boarded up second-story window and sprints for the graveyard, which we'd been investigating. Two of the four Blanes, with old shotguns, had gotten the drop on him. We head back to the SUV, finding it also fried and Cephas gone. We track him to the graveyard we were just at. Through stick-writing, he tells us about John Blane, who he met in the woods and who claims to be a prisoner, but who wants us to murder his family to free him. Cephas can't fill in details given his muteness, so we track John and have a talk with him. Turns out he made a deal with Carl Stanford to be freed from his family. He provides us with details but he's very clearly upset, not that the rest of the family are cultists, but that they're unambitious cultists. It later turns out he's the big mythos guy of them all. We make a deal with him; he'll lure his family to the graveyard to do a ghoul summoning ritual, allowing us to get evidence against them. Of course, we plan to capture all four and take them in.

We find a secret room in the basement with a ring from one of the missing people, as well as a tunnel underneath the house. We're off to the graveyard, where TASER rounds prove their worth. We're able to capture the family, but no sign of John. Certain he would be headed to the house to retrieve his great grandad's journal of nasty evil, I go back and run smack into six ghouls. I back off until the others join me. The other three charge the ghouls, Gregor with an axe and the others with firearms. I note an open kitchen cabinet, likely where John hid the book. We need to stop him.

Three of the six ghouls escaped. After a brief consultation, we decide we must pursue the ghouls as we can't guess where John might have went. The rest of the family are trussed up in one of their mausoleums and not cooperative. We track the ghouls into an ambush, with John firing a .22 at us in support. Things don't go well for his side, though he hurts Gregor before gunfire takes him down. Not much left to capture.

Eventually, we locate the mythos journal in a bag hidden near the ambush site. We deliver it and the other evidence to the professor, and the prisoners to the police.

"Dr. Lodge's quick action prevented the plague from spreading beyond the initially infected area," the President stated in a press conference about an hour ago. "By immediately requesting a quarantine, and remaining until the end to transmit every possible bit of data, she saved countless lives and prevented a nationwide epidemic. I am proud to posthumously award her the Presidential Medal of Freedom."

In any case, I got to the seminar a bit early. At least I thought I was going to be a bit early, there were already other people in the room. A man by the name of Letho Gullet, and a woman by the (apparent) name of Amy Nelson – she seemed an odd sort, but honestly, after working with Gregor and Cephas? Yeah, really not all that weirded out by her.

In any case, there were places set for exactly three people in the room, with name plates and manilla folders. Unless the sponsors are doing things differently, that means this is probably the whole crew. Time to get started. The only lead we were given was a news article from an occult magazine, 'Odd Events'. Apparently there was an odd humming noise bothering the locals in an out of the way community called Billingswood Grove. No other information was given, but that could just be a starting point. Really hope I don't end up driving back and forth between states again, like last time.

The community was pretty close by, so we drove over there. Thankfully, the place is small enough to walk around, so we won't have to drive everywhere. I parked the car and we started talking to people. Buster Kates was the man to talk to about the hum and the reward, apparently, so we started off with him. He seemed irritated to see us, but then, he'd been getting dozens of weird people hopping in and asking the same questions, looking after the reward. Obviously, none of those folks were High Rollers, because the problem hasn't been solved or made worse – which seem to be the only two things that happen when Rollers get involved in anything.

Kates directed us to Dr Trullent, who had been mentioned in the article as well. Seemed he would know the most about the hum, since he was actually investigating it. I gave him a call and lined up a meeting at the local Starbucks. And of course, the moment he saw Amy, he completely blew me off and started trying to talk her up. Hardly professional, but whatever, Amy worked some womanly magic on him – mostly a really striking poem, she wrote it on a whim, but damn if it wasn't a good one – and we managed to get some information out of him.

The most useful bit of information was the existence of Dr Lodge, who was also investigating the humming, but from a biological angle, seemed to think it was a condition of some sort, something off with the people, rather than the area. I tried to set up a meeting with her, but she said she'd be busy for the rest of the day. Arrangements were made, but patience is not a virtue on a Game, so we kept busy.

We started searching around the community, met up with people, asked questions, learned a whole lot of weird and out there theories, nothing useful, but nothing we could rule out either. Weirdest of all was Louis, the old man on the bike. He seemed to think the crows were watching the people in town, answered pretty much nothing in any sort of useful fashion. Of course, then he shot one of the crows, and it was in no way normal. Too many eyes - way too many eyes. Definitely something good at watching, if that's what it was doing. Dr Lodge would probably be interested in that, since she's investigating a biological approach.

Next stop was to drop off the crow with someone who could actually analyze it. So we visited Dr Lodge, and showed her the crow. She immediately fixated and dissected it, and concluded it was engineered, in some fashion. No idea how she concluded that, but she's the scientist here, so… yeah. She needed more samples to get a better idea of things, so she told us to bring her more crows.

But before that, we had some other things to take a look at. We needed more information about the effect itself. We knew from Louis that there was a limit to the range of the effect, whenever the humming got too bad, he left town until he felt better. So where does the effect end? How is it shaped? Probably important information. So we drove around the desert for a bit, in a reasonable pattern to figure out the shape – turned out it was a circle – sphere really, I think the actual center is underground, since we didn't see anything but we don't have time to look that up just yet. Digging is tiresome, especially with only one shovel.

We went back to town and started hunting some more crows. Easy enough to do, I'm pretty good with a throwing knife. The Sheriff drove by to see what we were up to, it was pretty easy to convince him we had a damn good reason to be killing crows. All we had to do was show him one of the weird ones with too many eyes. Seemed to set him at ease, since he let slip something about disappearances. I asked after that, it was almost certainly related to what we were doing.

He gave us locations and names. We checked out one of the houses pretty quickly, the most interesting thing was the circular heat distortion on one of the windows. We were on our way to the next house when we heard screaming. Screaming is always a bad thing, searching the other houses could wait.

The screaming turned out to be mostly harmless. No one got hurt, just one woman saw a giant bug of some sort, which flew off as soon as she saw it. We got a description, nothing precise, but enough that we could probably identify the bug if we saw it ourselves. We finished up our searches with the other two houses, both of which had similar distortions, which the fourth house did not.

We dropped off our new samples with Dr Lodge, and set out to check out the middle of the circle. We ran into Louis on the way out, who decided to come along – and when I called Dr Lodge to tell her about the samples that he had found and where to find them, she decided she wanted to come along too. Turning into a regular gathering this; here's hoping we aren't all gathered for our own funerals.

We did get to the center of the circle we plotted out, and I started digging. I switched off with Letho, and about 10 feet down, we found something that was definitely not natural. Some sort of extremely durable plastic material. Armed with that information, Dr Lodge found us an opening into the thing.

Didn't take us long to stir up the inhabitants, which were weird, giant, vaguely bug-like critters. After a stiff fight – a ridiculously stiff fight made only worse by the fact that their stupid magnet thing had taken all of my metal gear, we managed to kill the damn things. Then the doctor ran off and somehow shut the doors behind her, leaving us behind. Bitch.

Took a damn long time, but I eventually cut the door open enough for us to get out of the room. Thankfully, the iris above us had been left open – that would have been a pain in the ass to cut through, especially since it was 10 feet above us. I hopped out of the facility, and found the doctor's… flesh lying there outside of the building. I honestly thought it was a corpse at first, but it was only the outside part of the body, no bones or organs. Freaky.

Anyway, we got out of there just in the nick of time, the whole thing collapsed into the ground after us. Amy reported that the humming had finally, finally stopped. I couldn't think of anything else we were supposed to do, so we departed. Time to go replace my damn gear.

The past week has been unusual to say the least. I awoke naked in the jungle, clutching two fist-fulls of red feathers. There I met a very polite man in a black suit, but I never got his name. He transported me to New Mexico first by limo (which drove exceptionally well through the jungle, though it didn't seem odd to me at the time), then helicopter, then plane, and finally by car. He showered me, gave me clothes, and even provided food. Very polite.

Eventually I found my way into a hotel meeting room. I was somewhat swept up in the moment, but there was food, so I stayed. This is also where I met Letho Gullet, a horribly scarred and troubled man who appeared relaxed but was always on edge. Though he was curt, he wasn't cruel, and in fact he would prove to be very generous in the coming days. The only other soul in the area was a large, athletic man by the name of Nathaniel McGuire. He was far more polite than Letho and equally generous.

There were three name-plates on the table: one for each of us, and mine read Amy Nelson. I've assumed that as my name for now. Compared to my other wakings, this one went exceptionally smoothly. I didn't need to sell my body for money, learn a new language, kill anyone, or steal anything, but all the same it was not without its own share of complications. Although my new identity and re-introduction to society was handed to me on a silver platter, things quickly got more complicated. It appears that the men who found me were a part of some sort of conspiracy or organization. They seemed to not know why we were inside a meeting room, or even who was expected to arrive, but they picked up a trail and started an adventure all the same. Sticking along seemed like the best idea at the time.

We were offered a ten thousand dollar reward to solve a mystery, but my companions didn't seem interested in the money. Nathaniel even went out of his way to buy me equipment, including a new set of clothes, a cell-phone and headset, a bag, a pen, paper, and several other small items. Letho stuck around but didn't say much. They hadn't met before, but seemed to form an immediate bond similar perhaps to the one that two soldiers in the same army might share. Even stranger, they seemed to consider me to be a part of their group. They told me that we would probably be facing danger soon, but I didn't leave them; a little adventure could be exciting now and again.

We interviewed citizens, talked to doctors, searched houses, and generally investigated the humming sound. Things didn't get strange until we found some crows sporting many eyes watching us. From there, things got even stranger, culminating in a battle with several giant bugs underground. Letho and Nathaniel proved to be invaluable during the fight, and without the rugged clothes they bought me earlier, I'm not sure I would have survived.

I felt somewhat useless during the fight itself, although I did disarm one of the bugs by throwing a nearby turtle at its weapon. The doctor was behaving somewhat irregularly. At first we thought she was turning into one of the bugs, but I'm not sure…

The place self-destructed as we left, and we didn't even bother trying to get the reward. I managed to save the turtle, and my companions survived as well. Both offered to let me live with them while I established myself, but I chose to go with Letho because Nathaniel traveled too much. Letho was kind enough to puchase me a good fake ID and a plane ticket to New York, and I must say I was simply taken aback by his generosity. I wonder if it's because of my gender.

Letho named the turtle Myrtle, no doubt after the Christian hybrid-god of Venus and Murcia which represents sloth and slowness. He may be more clever than he looks.

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The one in the middle is dressed in tailored casual and catches quite a few eyes as he cautiously strides into the area. The other two are far larger and flank the first; their eyes sweep the room at all times. Any sort of atmosphere is lost on the three. They're clearly here for business.

Squinting, the short one in the center carefully enters the bar area. He is looking around for some sign or person or weakness to the place, and those who notice might suspect there's a good chance he'd find it. A man, an employee, approaches the trio and some soft words are exchanged. Afterward, the three follow the man away from the main rooms and into a back area. In this new room, the only other exit is blocked by a brick wall. One of the large men keeps an eye on the waiter, the other looks back to the entrance.

The smaller man's eyes skim around the room, resting on curtain, papered wall, and the black X burnt into the floor, before turning to the waiter. “Is some sort of-a joke?” he asks calmly through his thick accent.

The waiter shakes his head.

After a moment of silence, he turns to the other two men and barks an order in Chinese. The one at the door takes a step outside. A few minutes later, he returns, carrying two sledge hammers at his side. He passes one to the other large man and the pair gets to work on the wall. The wall having been reduced to rubble in short order, they begin to clean the mess as the Chinese man walks through into the room beyond. More eyes than he's used to turn to greet him.

With a slight bow and glance around the room, he's off to the bulletin board. He takes a photo of the board with his cellphone, admires himself in the mirror, and produces a small printed sheet of paper from his coat pocket. One tack is stuck through a scrap of torn paper reading “RIPT.” He uses that one to post his notice. Once he is done, he orders a drink and takes a seat in a distant booth. He doesn't appear to be waiting for anyone.