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)
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.
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 A lot of the historical content we've been given here has been written with a clashing sense of emotion to it.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.
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:
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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:
(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.)
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.
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:
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:
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.