Editing Don Rhodes

=== December 29th, 2017 - In regards to Don Rhodes & the Venice papers: ===

''As far as our luck goes in pushing the Council to fill in the gaps, they too have been uncooperative. Frankly, it feels like this release is just appeasement on the sailors's part, but to which party and for what is currently unknown. Certainly not related to us small fry.''

Though no longer a matter of mundane knowledge for a number of riveting reasons, Don was one-of-two (criminally underpaid) workers in the employ of a notary in Seattle, translating and processing his office's immigration papers in total monotony. Where else but in Washington state?

Given the choice, Don maybe would have given anything to break the stress and disappointment. The typical dead-end life regrets, etc. He didn't have a choice. That much was stressed, put in bold and underlined; there are some intriguingly emotional accounts that have come out of Verascu's cooperation, considering he never crewed with more than a handful of people at a time. In either case, Don's absorption into the secret world began some time in the fall of 2011.

As it goes, The Dragon established a kamikaze cell, an uncharacteristically ballsy and desperate bid in preparation for the Mayan End of Days incident, whose activities centered around the northwest-to-midwest portion of the United States.  

Their goal was to triangulate and draw Illuminati attention to the location of Mayan artifacts that later turned out to be vital in defeating the Vestiges of the Wayeb' during the Nameless Days of the Mayan calendar - The Dragon used various methods to meet these ends. One of these methods was torn straight from the Illuminati hand-book: subliminal conditioning. The making of sleeper agents via television feeds. Couch potato soldiers of chaos.

Don's dissatisfaction with work and life developed into paranoia, induced violent distractions, low self-esteem and, my favorite, unreliable memory recall. He never noticed, nor later cared apparently, how many lives he inconvenienced or endangered when he commandeered or botched workload after workload of sensitive paperwork at the office. Nor did he notice that his life was slipping into ruin, as Viktor Verascu put it.

By the next year, The Dragon's agents had accomplished their goal of luring the Illuminati to the burial grounds and the artifacts, snatching pieces of the 'prize' out from in front of them, inciting a merry chase, getting some of the other factions involved, etc. After that debacle, the different artifacts would eventually land where they needed to; Maine, Egypt, Transylvania. What can I say, typical behavior for the green-heels in the end. By then, Don had been without a job for at least two months and his power was due to be cut off.

The Dragon cell dissolved in the goose chases and flights to South America. The Dragon managed to reassign or decommission their incidentals in whatever ways they could accommodate; the Phoenicians did not specify details here because I assume they didn't understand just how the job was carried out. Don was the only hitch throughout the process anyway.

Did you know? Improper decommissioning can lead to severe psychological duress and lasting trauma. And so it did for Don, a guy chosen for his total lack of importance and mundanity as far as we know. The Dragon had no intention to pick the guy up and his well-being was an easily measured expenditure, we think.

Going off of the idea that even they make mistakes, The Dragon likely miscalculated how things would play out. They knew that Don wasn't ''totally'' unimportant, he tested positively - and negligibly - for empathic abilities. Relatively common. No, the math took a turn - as Don's mental state declined, his violent thoughts didn't just echo endlessly in his head, they echoed ''out,'' not through organic minds, but through the inanimate. Through electronics and machinery. The occultech reverberations took out the infrastructure of a whole city block and replaced it with static approximations of Quentin Tarantino films.

Purportedly, you could have heard generators sputtering to the sound of Jules Winnfield's "That ''IS'' a tasty burger!" ad nauseum for four days. Downed powerlines that produced sparks of electricity to the tune of Ironside notwithstanding, Don had entered a stable thought-loop in short time, becoming less of a person than an occult gadget.

Perhaps that's why the Phoenicians were so quick to locate him. Verascu was rising up in the ranks at the time and his previous crew were in the area; The Brotherhood of Phoenician Sailors were expecting off-the-rails contraband that they could reclaim, not a person. But they took that person in anyway. Hell, by all accounts they could have left him the way he was. Malleable - they could have commoditized him and his ability. Instead, they reprogrammed as much of him as they could to a semblance of personhood.  

According to personal notes included by Agent Verascu, Don made sure "to never forget the mercy shown to him." Even when he got stuck crewing up on what became a suicide mission. Of course, there are issues when it comes to Don's movements pre-incident that we may need to discuss.

= Complications =

As some of you 'Rhodites' in the organization that have stuck to this issue from the beginning know, things become complicated from this point on. Bear with us as we explain for the benefit of those new faces that we feel need to be brought up to speed with this crazy mess.

'''Elephant the Second: Don Rhodes'''  

<font face=verdana>Now you're asking "who is this guy?" Don Rhodes is a technopathic nuisance who has stuck his nose into our investigations time and time again. We have even developed a danger meter completely reliant on whether he's made a cameo on an investigation or not, it's absurdly effective and we don't like it.

First contact goes back to a series of jobs after the 'reality ripples' first came to public attention. The monkey on our back latched on when we got paid to snoop on it, in other words.

As far as the Big Three ''admit'' to knowing previously, Don Rhodes operated under the Phoenicians between late-2012 to mid-2014. After which he vanished, presumably to New Carthage. This was plenty of time for major players to rack-up surveillance, get their files in order, do up a decent write-up on the guy. Not to mention, the cracking open and retrieving of all official governmental paperwork from both topside and within the secret world.

<u>We</u> were outsourced by two of the factions, the Illuminati and the Templars, in an effort to sort out low-level paperwork and assist with the public angle of the aforementioned reality rippling. Out of all of the work handed to us, we determined that most of it had translated perfectly to our "new" reality. Except for a handful, unwritten from reality and all, but we blew through those, until we ran into Don Rhodes.

We thought he was another 'goner' to throw into the garbage bin and we continued to make similar assumptions, as you will see, throughout the investigations that followed. The Illuminati in particular were vehement and provided fresh observations that proved the man was alive. At that moment, the job changed tracks.

It went from fact-checking to a serious investigation into why this one guy was such an outlier. Illuminati resources on him were all 'wrong' - screwy, anomalous. Not factually deficient. (Though, the Illuminati being factually deficient is typically an anomaly in itself.)  

Everything they had on Don Rhodes was wildly inaccurate. Documents were mis-dated or populated by nonsense data. Observations were inconsistent compared to newer information. In general, things had not transferred like the previous cases. Ditto with the Templars, though they were not nearly as vehement as their rivals.

Initially, we thought it was an open-and-shut case. Consensus reality had changed and it seemed logical at the time to tell our employers that there must have been a glitch in the Matrix and they'd have to start spying from scratch. However, that is never an acceptable thing to mention to the people that are paying you. Especially when high-level administrators come down and involve you by name. (Paying reparations for botching Whitechapel, I'm sure.)

 

At first we thought maybe there had been a security leak or other nonsense that took advantage of the recent phenomenon. Maybe top-office redaction? Maybe it wasn't the same guy after all? We were given agents, as always, to help with the more obscure bits.

 

<u>'''Ultimately, no matter how hard we tried to justify it, the "reality ripples" could not account for the findings we uncovered.'''</u> None of it checked out within the parameters we were given, so we took a risk to tap the United States government and that's when the rabbit hole deepened.

 

The ''moment'' we went down that hole, it attracted negative attention from Don Rhodes himself, but we immediately blew open an existential and bureaucratic nightmare:

*It wasn't just the secret societies laboring with bad info. Every single official document we found was riddled with errors. Not only did it seem as if they were filed out by someone criminally incompetent, there was recorded evidence of people referring to the documents and even scrutinizing them <u>rigorously</u> with no problem. Even information coming from unofficial and clandestine channels are marked by these mistakes. Bonus points for completely contradicting the Illuminati and the Templar's takes on things.

*According to numerous copies of his birth certificate, which also all passed muster, his age ranges from '''''22''''' to '''''27'''''. There was no doubt here that the documents were the real deal and not just fakes.

**All documents that made use of his DoB suffer from permutations. Basically anything from medical reports, state IDs in the United States, to online profiles, anything that relied on his age as a frame of reference all cited something different and made separate conclusions based on what was cited. This is less obvious with, say, Illuminati records - of course that is because they rely on internal metrics and usually not crap like birthdays.

*CCTV, civilian footage and eyewitness accounts taken from before 2015 point to drastic changes in physical and mental state that, again, contradict the Big Three - but also <u>completely contradict one another.</u>

<br>After some time, we were still operating under the idea that someone preternaturally talented, best in the world maybe, had gone through and doctored ''everything'' they could get their hands on in reference to Don Rhode's life.  

If someone '''was''' responsible, calling them a ghost was an insult. Nothing the Black Watchmen or the Illuminati did could reveal their presence. The thing that struck us the most about the whole thing was that there was no discernible reason for any of it - we had never seen such a legendary sleight-of-hand done just to scramble one guy's papers.

But there was absolutely no evidence of tampering or ''even scrutiny'' over obvious discrepancies until our investigation poked the hornet's nest. Let me wax lyrical for a moment to say that <u>everything</u> we do as people has a trace, a link, a suspicion behind it - this is what our ''jobs are predicated on'' here at the Black Watchmen, but not only did we find nothing, nobody in the relevant channels seemed to question crucial mistakes on their own - that's when we stopped thinking it was anything but high-caliber magic or a separate phenomenon.

Our investigation wound down with us looking into a bit of info that kept cropping up. We initially threw it out under the 'preternatural censor' theory, but: Don Rhodes was declared dead as of 2014. This would explain the "disappearance," but we had no way to verify if the information was planted or falsified by the Phoenicians. Intel is generally slim on New Carthage, there was no way we could swing locating a needle in that haystack.

 

Long story short to finish catching you up, Verascu's information gave us a lead too juicy to follow - either this is all a yarn being spun by the Phoenicians, or they had nothing to do with Don Rhode's could-be death, because to them, he actually was gone; papers signed, sealed, and cited.</font>

<br>'''If you're finally caught up to speed, you now know why the papers from Venice are such a big deal: the documents released by Viktor Verascu have given us the okay to relinquish a long-standing contract, while also offering some form of insight on Don Rhode's capabilities, but not much else.'''

Unfortunately, we're left with more questions than answers with no recourse to solve them. Things are beginning to fly completely above our heads, Don Rhodes is still a menace and officially, we are at the limit of our manpower and we are considering ending our investigation here before we make enemies for digging too deep.

Highlighted below is one of the reports that has contributed greatly to our realization. As of this briefing, our focus will be on utilizing the rest of the gathered information in minimizing Don Rhode's chicanery and coordinating our interactions around him. Everything else going forward is under heated discussion until further notice.

If you fancy going deeper, we ask that you disaffiliate and turn in your equipment - go for it without us, because we can't risk it. As for us others, we will have to feign closure and use the rest of the resources granted to us to tie up the loose ends and continue on with what we do best. This is the part that's not up for discussion.

*I have a habit of writing too much about Don and moving entire pieces out of his SWLRP profile (which you should investigate if you haven't) since they're too long and uninformative. Some of these pieces can be found on the email servers of various groups-of-interest in-universe. (wink)

== From the internal email servers of the Council of Venice & the Black Watchmen: ==

'''Memo rerouted to the Black Watchmen from the Illuminati'''

*'''DO''' engage Rhodes on non-hostile grounds when you encounter him.

**'''Do NOT''' incite a hostile situation. We need organic footage, not a Michael Bay sitch with our investments blown or picked out as kill-on-sight by whoever owns his leash.

**'''Do NOT''' clue him into the fact that you are one of our's or that he is being observed. If it's obvious or inevitable, spin it into a personal project and not a corporate mandate.

**'''Do NOT''' approach him if you value your cybernetics above your life. Or if they are what keep you alive in the first place.

*'''DO''' get into his good graces. Like, if he's Phoenician, it pays to have a merc open to us. He apparently likes a good macchiato.

**'''Do NOT''' get attached. Seriously, you are not in a chick flick or a romance novel; if he doesn't somehow kill you after you bang, we will.

**'''Do NOT''' believe anything he says at face value. We'll tell you what to believe and what not to believe. Yes, even if he tells you that he prefers getting it on with guys - you would not believe the incidents. See bullet above.

**'''Do NOT''' involve yourself in his business without prior authorization, keep it on acquiantance-level as we compile data. We are literally in no hurry to meet the doggy's masters.

*'''DO''' keep in touch. With us, not him - see bullet above. We want eye-witness reports, uncompromised footage, occult telemetry, the whole shabang that you can get away with in casual weekend wear.

**'''Do NOT''' compromise yourself or go out of your way to dig dirt on this guy. We've tried, it's confusing, obnoxious, and lethal for reasons that are on a need-to-know basis.

**'''Do NOT''' fabricate or fluff-up your reports out of fear that your career, i.e. your life, is on the chopping block. That will put it there, and 'impressing us' with 'groundbreaking' information is not cause to unflag you for termination anyway. Cite, cite, cite.

**'''Do NOT''' pester us with minutiae on his comings or goings. We have a dedicated team for that now and you're not getting yourself any favors for playing off as diligent.

[[File:Illuminati Symbol.png|150px|center|Don't believe everything you see.]]