Don Rhodes

'Rhadamanthus'

Played by: Rhadamanthus

INFORMATION

Mortal, Male, See Accounts

Aliases: Daryll Louis; Mr. Louis, Rhadamanthus, Shallow-6
Nationality: American
Residence: Transient
Employer: The Brotherhood of Phoenician Sailors
Function: Free Agent

Overview

History

Conflicting Accounts

Official Loadout

Affiliations & Commentary

Gear & Abilities

Footnotes

In regards to Don Rhodes & Venice Out-Reach:

The contents here have been released to us and a handful of others outside of our jurisdiction via the Council of Venice by one Viktor Verascu, allegedly a senior agent within the Brotherhood of Phoenician Sailors, allegedly the former handler and operations manager for our 'problem-child'.

These "facts" have been supported by multiple junior PR officers under Elias Berbera, but both Berbera himself and the Phoenician council ambassador have avoided comment for indeterminate reasons. (Though we have a fairly good idea why, See: Affiliations.)

As far as our luck 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' part, but to which party and for what is currently unknown. Certainly not related to us small fry.

In either case, we're regurgitating the gist of all we've gotten. This is all the supplementary info we've received on our menace, Don Rhodes. Feel free to refer to all and any documents relating to him by name, but keep clear of the incident files featuring him until we've finished internal reviews.

𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕

Though not a matter of public knowledge for a number of riveting reasons, Don was once a young and underpaid stooge in the employ of a notary, translating and processing his office's immigration papers in total monotony. Where else but in Washington state?

You would think, given the choice, Don would give anything to break the stress and disappointment. The typical dead-end life regrets, etc. He didn't have a choice, actually. A lot of the historical content we've been given here has been written with a clashing sense of emotion to it. 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, a ballsy 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 hijack. 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 botched workload after workload of sensitive paperwork. 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 aims in luring the Illuminati to far-off burial grounds, basically snatching pieces of the 'prize' out from in front of them. After that debacle, those different artifacts would eventually land where they needed to; Maine, Egypt, Transylvania. What can I say, typical behavior for the green-heels. By then, Don had been without a job for at least two months and was due to be cut off.

The cell dissolved in the subsequent goose chases and flights to South America. The Dragon managed to relocate or decommission their incidentals in ways only they could accommodate, the Phoenicians did not specify details here. Don was the only hitch throughout that process.

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

Except The Dragon miscalculated how their models would play out. They knew that Don wasn't utterly 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. Don had entered a stable thought-loop in little time, becoming less of a person than an occult gadget.

Perhaps that's why the Phoenicians were so quick to find him. Not the Illuminati and certainly not The Dragon. The Brotherhood of Phoenician Sailors were expecting off-the-rails contraband they could reclaim, not a person. But they took that person in anyway. Hell, by all accounts they could have left him malleable, commoditized him and his ability. Instead, they reprogrammed as much of him to make him ... well, him, again.

According to the margin-notes from Agent Verascu, Don made sure he never forgot the mercy shown to him. Even when he got stuck crewing up on what would become a suicide mission. However, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to Don's movements post-reconditioning.

Situation Recap

As some of you 'Rhodites' know, things get a little wacky from this point. Document-wise and explanation-wise. Bear with us, there are new insights, but we also have new eyes we feel the need to keep in touch with.

Don Rhodes operated between late-2012 to mid-2014, plenty of time for major players to rack-up surveillance, get their files in order, write up a good dossier. Not to mention retaining all official governmental paperwork, both topside and within the secret world.

Except two of the Big Three all came to us to investigate why their resources regarding this guy were all wrong. Wrong in a sense of anomalous, not factually deficient. Though, the Illuminati being factually deficient is itself an anomaly, the observations were all incorrectly dated and entirely mismatched to their newer scope of Don Rhodes.

Maybe there had been mass-tampering, top-office redaction, a security leak. Maybe it wasn't the same guy? None of those checked out within the parameters we were working with, so we tapped the United States government and that's when the rabbit hole deepened.

Not only did this attract ongoing negative attention from the guy himself, it blew open a bureaucratic nightmare:

• Every single official document is riddled with inconsistencies, as if they were filled and filed by someone with no idea of their job, but supplementary material gives an idea that many pieces were rigorously inspected and passed. Even unofficial and clandestine information are marked by these mistakes, some of which completely contradicts the Illuminati and the Templar's take on things.
• According to various copies of his birth certificate, which all passed muster; there was no doubt that they were the real deal, his age ranges from 22 to 27, see the problem here?
  • All documents related to his DoB suffer a similar permutation effect. Basically any observations, such as in medical reports; check-ups, that relied on his age as a frame of reference all cited something different and were thus all of varying conclusions. This is less apparent with, say, Illuminati records - but of course that is because they rely on internal metrics and usually not crap like birthdays.
• All accounts of his physical and mental states point to drastic changes that, again, contradict info from the Big Three et al, but also directly overlap with periods of time documented by the secret societies. Again, giving us the impression that this is a totally different guy, but every method available to us and our contractors scream "this is the same guy." Aggravating to say the least.
  • This is something we found out after-the-fact, but his bank history describes periods of activity that could not possibly have existed. Take our word for it, it'll save you the headache.

The weirdest thing about all of the above is that we had never seen such a clean and organic body of paperwork, free of interference. It feels filled-in, it feels like someone incredibly talented, world-class even, had been paid to doctor all of it and got lazy half-way through.

But there was absolutely no evidence of tampering or even scrutiny over the most obvious of discrepancies until we came along. Everything 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 obvious and crucial mistakes - that worries us. A lot.

As of this briefing, however, we do have a view of the bigger picture.

The Yellow Anchor Incident

If your character existed in TSW (The Secret World) before coming to SWL (Secret World Legends) -- how do you treat the transition? Are they exactly the same? Did they suffer memory loss? Are they some 'alternate reality' version of themselves?

Everyone knows someone. What groups, people, friends, and relatives does your character have ties to? Would other characters know them from a favorite hangout or a particular organization?

Are they demon-possessed? A skilled Elementalist? Want to describe their awesome powers or trademark equipment they always carry? This is the place to do it.

From the internal email servers of the Black Watchmen: