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: Hatchetman, Hetairos (formerly)

Overview

History

Conflicting Accounts

Field Profile

Affiliations & Commentary

Footnotes

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

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

These "facts" have been supported by a handful of 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 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' 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. What follows is all of the supplementary info we've received on our small-time menace, as well as our thoughts. Feel free to refer to any and all documents relating to him by name, but steer clear of citing the incident files until we've finished our internal review.

RECEIVE - initiate Cronenberg frequency - SOMETHING WENT WRONG, SETH

Background

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 A lot of the historical content we've been given here has been written with a clashing sense of emotion to it.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 personal 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 are elephants in the room when it comes to Don's movements post-reconditioning.

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Background (Cont.)

As some of you 'Rhodites' in the organization know, things get wacky from this point. Bear with us, we have new insights, but we also have new faces that we feel need to be brought up to speed.

To do that, there are (unfortunately) two elephants in the room that we need to make clear:

Elephant the First: Ripples in Reality

The recent "temporal-spatial issue" that cabals worldwide have come to refer to as "reality ripples" puts a lot of our work into question. These are lost alternate realities, some people cite the Mandela Effect, whatever you want to label it, it is the latest entry in the Council of Venice's Book of Secrets.

Whatever you call the 13,521st entry, it is completely out of our field of knowledge as well as our capacity to deal with. If only we had better staffing, more agents, more money, more everything - to be frank, we don't, so we let the Council of Venice and the major cabals deal with the implications.

Whatever those implications are, the issue is a non-issue for most of us. After all, the only thing that the secret world at large knows is that something fucky happened essentially overnight and the people who know better have informed us and are investigating the matter. If we had a greater foothold, it would fall into our jurisdiction. We don't and it doesn't, so don't bother worrying.

All we ask is that you keep the concept in the back of your head as you read on.

Elephant the Second: Don Rhodes - Not Reality Ripples but just as weird

Now you're asking "who is this guy?" Don Rhodes is a technopathic nuisance who has stuck his nose into our investigations consistently. 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.

But this all 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, basically.

As far as the Big Three knew previously, Don Rhodes operated as a Phoenician agent between late-2012 to mid-2014, which was plenty of time for major players to rack-up surveillance, get their files in order, write up decent dossiers. Not to mention, cracking open and retrieving all official governmental paperwork from both topside and within the secret world.

Two of the factions, the Illuminati and the Templars, outsourced to us in an effort to sort low-level paperwork and assist with the public angle of the reality rippling. Out of all of the information given to us, we determined that most of it had translated perfectly to our "new" reality. Except for a handful, which necessitated a bit of elbow grease but we blew through those and kept passing it on, until we ran into the situation of Don Rhodes.

The job went from fact-checking to a serious investigation into why their resources on this guy were all 'wrong'. Wrong in a sense of anomalous, not factually deficient. Though, the Illuminati being factually deficient is usually an anomaly in itself, everything they had on Don Rhodes was wildly inaccurate in all ways; inconsistent, ill-dated and entirely mismatched against newer information processed for the guy. Ditto with the Templars.

Initially, we thought it was an open-and-shut case. Consensus reality had changed and it was 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, high-level administrators from both factions were insistent and explicit in involving us, so we couldn't just go through with telling them that. (Reparations for botching Whitechapel, I'm sure.)

Ultimately, the issue of Don Rhodes was not open-and-shut. No matter how hard we tried to theorize, the "reality ripples" could not account for our findings; Don Rhodes was - or is - an isolated issue.

At first we thought maybe there had been mass-tampering, top-office redaction, a security leak or other nonsense that took advantage of the recent phenomenon. Maybe it wasn't the same guy after all? We were given agents, as always, to help with the more obscure bits. None of our justifications checked out within the parameters we were given, so we tapped the United States government and that's when the rabbit hole deepened.

However, in doing so, this attracted negative attention from Don Rhodes himself and it blew open an existential and bureaucratic nightmare:

• Every single official document found was riddled with inconsistencies. Not only did it seem as if they were filed out by someone criminally incompetent, there was written evidence of people referring to the documents and even scrutinizing them rigorously with no problem. Even information coming from unofficial and clandestine channels are marked by these mistakes, most of which completely contradict the Illuminati and the Templar's take on things.
• According to various copies of his birth certificate, which also all passed muster, his age ranges from 22 to 27. There was no doubt that these were the real deal.
  • All documents that made use of his DoB suffer similar 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 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.
• Footage and eyewitness accounts from before compared to now point to drastic changes in physical and mental state that, again, contradict the Big Three, but also completely contradict one another.
  • His bank history describes transactions in both Tokyo and Cairo at the same exact time and date which went completely unremarked until we looked into it.

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 all of it 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 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 on their own - that's when we stopped thinking it was anything but high-caliber magic or a separate phenomenon.

However, there was one weird revelation that kept cropping up in our investigations: Don Rhodes - a more or less average mortal man like the rest of us - was declared dead as a doornail as of 2014. All of the paperwork, all of it, was consistent. Internally, even the Templars bought that yarn, but the guy's walking around again out of nowhere and we were forced to believe it was a trick on the Phoenician Brotherhood's part. Couple this with the mess above and you have a big, volatile "He Said, She Said" situation.

It wasn't until now that the pieces started falling into place: the Phoenicians had nothing to do with faking Don Rhode's death. They thought he was gone too.

If you're caught up to speed, you now know why this leak is such a big deal: the documents released by Viktor Verascu not only relinquish us of a long-standing contract, but may very well take Don Rhodes off of our hands.

Because officially, we are at our limit and will be ending our investigation here. Everything going forward is still under discussion until further notice.

This issue has slipped completely out of our jurisdiction as of this leak. We only have more questions on things that go completely above our heads, with no recourse and only thinly-veiled threats of disbandment should we stray off of the beaten path from here on out. Given that, we have picked out the one report leaked by Viktor Verascu that has led us to making this decision.

If you fancy digging deeper, we ask that you disaffiliate and turn in your equipment - go for it without us. As for the rest, 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 not up for discussion.

Initiate the full fathom five protocol - WHEN YOU WENT THROUGH, SOMETHING WENT WRONG

The Yellow Anchor Incident

𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕 𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕

𐤀𐤌𐤓 𐤅𐤂 𐤍‬𐤐𐤕

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The information on this page is incomplete and should not be relied upon as accurate or official. Please check back later.

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OOC Notes

• Don's SWL incarnation is almost entirely salvaged from an NPC from an old private event. He's thus the walking consequences from the finale of that storyline.
  • Dig deeper and you might even find out what those consequences are! Get your highlighters out and have a grand old time.

• It goes without saying that I'm not an awful person despite the character I play. I can be occasionally acerbic and confrontational about really dumb (dumb) stuff when I'm not roleplaying, but I'm not above apologies or toning it down when things get serious - and never will bad IC vibes leak into my OOC stuff while I'm roleplaying. I'm a writer first, after all!
  • If you're businesslike about any grievances, I'll be businesslike. If you're calm, I'm usually calm, etc, but I'd like to think that's not necessary! However, Don can get heavy and abrasive out of nowhere so it's necessary to clarify this and communicate when things bother you.

• 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 Black Watchmen's email servers in-universe. (wink)

From the internal email servers of the Black Watchmen:

Memo rerouted from the Illuminati

The man you're asking for is like a unicorn. Enigmatic, a smidge self-explanatory. Our agents typically overlook him after a while. But don't be fooled, he's the one snake hidden in the bushes.

Or an anomaly if you wish to dispense with analogies. Put bluntly, we don't know what to make of him. We know he's not one of our's. He doesn't fall under The Dragon, the Templars, even the Illuminati.

We have files on him that could generously be considered outdated and contrarian - in the best case, a fuck up. Worst case, a major glitch. Potentially as bad as when history unwrote the real Helena Blavatsky from reality for a weekend.

But don't get us wrong. We have our eye everywhere and it will be a cold day in Hell when we're caught unaware on our own turf. While there are still discrepancies, we can fill you in on what we know - namely that:

• Physically, Don Rhodes has gone from out-of-shape college burn-out to carrying himself like a proper licensed killer. With enough focus and liberal use of nootropics, he might even one day pass as an Olympian track-and-fielder. One thing that hasn't changed is his shitty hand-eye coordination.
• Psychologically, I'd hazard a guess and say about the same trend as above as far as we know; burn-out to sudden sociopath, narcissism glued in-between. Possible hidden depths, very specific triggers. Still volatile, but approachable for our purposes.
• Some of our older files frame this guy as harmless, unambitious, and hardly lucid. One of those socially-stilted blogger-types, you know, the kind that could easily be discredited as a delusional schizophrenic if he ever crossed any lines? Except Due Dilligence shows an inexplicable lack of present or prior internet activity. (So where did the fucking observation come from?)
• It bears repeating that he's not home-grown as far as we know. No real explanation for his skill-set and when we need a dispensable killer, the headline usually goes: college wimp with no prior symptoms loses it, rampages and then regains lucidity - instant regret followed by either criminal litigation or suicide.
• He is not one of our's, as previously mentioned. He was actually once accountable to The Dragon, a sleeper agent whose programming was minimal in both scale and duration. He was decommissioned unsuccessfully after the End of Days fiasco in 2012.

(We know his decommissioning was botched because he eventually gained cognizance of his programming and whacked a small camp of The Dragon's sleepyheads in Bolivia. Whole different story, whole different department.)

• Rhode's botched decomissioning does not actually account for the drastic change in his personality nor the sudden shift in his potential. More on that later.
• Intel snatched from The Dragon clues us in that the greens picked him to be their stooge-for-a-day because he was naturally compliant, led a dead-end life, and had no aptitude for anything that couldn't be trained for or implanted.
• The Dragon did not intend to utilize Don Rhodes as an agent, thus they threw out all investment. Didn't even give him a mental resistance regimen, which contributed to the aforementioned hiccup that spiraled out of control in Bolivia.

You see, mistakes in deprogramming have a way of unraveling even the hardiest of psyches, full stop. None of this half-measure shit that we're seeing with Don - we'd be looking at a less coherent Jeffrey Dahmer and not narcissistic John Wick.

• Despite all of the above, this 'new' Don Rhodes not only flaunts a greatly-expanded set of knowledge and skills, he retains autonomy and sanity on a level equal to our own field agents. This is a problem that just doesn't add up.

Our conclusion is that somebody else picked him up and reprogrammed him up to the nines. Our bet is on Orochi or the Phoenicians, maybe even the Council of Venice seeing how often and how vigorously they don't learn from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others. It may be that Don's just the product of another cluster-fuck between the three.

But. The hitch in that suspicion is that the whole thing is way more trouble than it's worth and we would have dug up something in the way of answers by now if they were stupid enough to try anyway.

Fact is, we find the "infodump" angle exceedingly unlikely. You just can't stuff huge volumes of instruction into somebody's conscious mind all at once, it's a huge time and R&D sink with a colossal paper trail and a Pyrrhic-ly slim chance of success. Trust us, we've tried and we got over it quickly, that's why we still use sleeper agents, implants and drugs if we want super expendable foot-soldiers that can operate outside of the test-chambers.

Besides the bragging rights, why bother with any of that when we can just use Google? (FYI: The success rate of 'brute-force cognitive training' is way below 1%. Globally.)

We digress, our point is that there are a few very concerning reasons to keep wasting our attention and memo-space on this guy - namely:

• We don't know when or how, but Don Rhode's raw occult metrics have grown to rival that of anima-infused infantry, themselves second only to the average Bee by dint of fancy clothes. This is a clear departure from anything we have on file for him.
• Don's previously negligible aptitude for empathic abilities has now manifested as wild technopathy. Which has been used with 'Home Alone'-grade creativity, let's say. (Now, when we say 'negligible', we mean '1 in 3 people have this level of aptitude' - it's common enough that your local Psychic Hotline can nail the diagnosis with 80% accuracy.)
• Signs point to an increase in overall stamina and flexibility in line with the exponential scaling of several occult parameters. In other words, we've seen this guy raw-fuck Newtonian physics just by asking reality nicely. We get it, RE: no hand-eye coordination, RE: no clue where it's all coming from.
• On that note, we played around with the idea that late-stage Darwinism took a rare pity on him via Bee. No such case - in fact, he seems to be persona non grata anywhere close to Agartha. We can only guess as to what that means.
  • He hasn't been dismantled on sight by any Agarthan drones or seen suffering from any unusual signs from just being around the gateways - only TSA in the form of a wall of bees.

You can imagine our frustration. He obviously shows no sign of infection by the Filth, hasn't sold his soul to Hell, isn't rocking any implants (cybernetic or arcane), and we'd commit genocide to get our hands on a psychic infodump that doesn't render our acquisitions into drooling messes, but we have nothing that points to the existence of such a project.

So what's up? We're obviously missing something even after several rounds of observation. Which has forced us to start officially 'encouraging' as many armchair investigators and 'volunteers' as possible to tail Don Rhodes in their 'free time'.

Even though this includes you, we like to think of all of our hires as competent and self-reliant at all times.

Thus, here are some common sense guidelines for you to follow:

• 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.

Keep to this plan and you'll be golden. I'm sure we'll get something out of your effort, so just keep forwarding your thoughts up the chain and we'll get back to you.

Also, it goes without saying that there will not be another public update on the matter of Don Rhodes. Assume that all new information is on a need-to-know basis and that that basis applies to you and only you. Yes, we're encouraging redundancy here. Don't wait up.