Insight 3
Babar Alvi, failed chemist postdoc, urban explorer
Insight 3
The library, for all its height and sprawling stone heft, has low ceilings, the tiles of which often show signs of old water damage. It is musty, slightly humid, cramped.
A pair of prim professors walked out as Knafferly and Alvi walk up the stone steps - do the professors notice the two?
Terra: 5
Bar: 3
Fail: 2
Terra looks away casually, and Bar is walking just behind her enough they don’t notice. The professors stare placidly ahead as they walk past, not talking.
“Who were those two, Terra? That you were, hm, avoiding?” Bar asked, sliding his library card through the turnstile’s reader.
“Avoid? They’re just some professors in my department. I wasn’t trying to avoid them” Terra said.
“Sure. ‘Cause, I thought you were, so, I tried to look inconspicuous.”
“Great, Bar.” Terra said flatly.
They head up to the biology research depository, the ninth floor. The carpet by the elevators is damp, the ceiling-mounted sprinkler having leaked again.
“Alright. Most of Bob’s work is over here,” Terra gestured. “You start there, I want to see about any other expeditions out this way. It’s a pretty unique location. I’m surprised Bob never spoke of it.”
Terra: 5, 1
Bar: 1
Bar doesn’t find much about Bob’s expedition to Alaska, other than an oblique footnote in a current professor’s publication he skimmed by mistake. (Adina Haun, anthropologist.)
(Terra discovered everything and something extra - legend, etc)
There were prior expeditions, in 1939 and in 1898, through the University. Both had ended dreadfully for the academics - no findings of serious note, other than a drawing of a shape familiar to Terra - the stump, eroded into the form Bob documented. A stump of wood preserved for 100 years.
Terra also saw footnotes that led to the autobiography of an Inuit trapper, using the pen name Jack Anawak, who grew up in the region. He, with his brothers, journeyed through the expedition site, practicing his trade, but reported that the flesh of beasts in the area was wrong, somehow - that it did not provide any sustenance. They was eventually tracked and hunted by a man with his own face, who the group barely escaped.
Terra reports on the prior expeditions and tries to keep the… face-stealing nature of this research from Bar. Can she?
Yes: 2
No: 3
The book is underneath everything else, a bookmark sticking out.
“What’s this?”
“Oh, a red herring, you know…”
Bar flips it open to the marked page, eyes flickering back and forth hungrily.
“A stolen face? Seems a theme.” He doesn’t look at Terra.
She shakes her head.
“That wasn’t… my face. She just looks similar. Not the same.”
“Sure."
Terra stares at Bar, who keeps reading the notes. “Listen,” she says, "I’ll go talk to Grace, the head librarian here, about materials storage under the library. Why don’t you snag Dr. Haun’s schedule from the computer lab downstairs?”
Bar nods and gets up.
He heads to the elevator. A single curved leaf of rust is in the carpet in the middle of the carpeted landing. No metal above, no metal around that’s rusted, despite the wet.
Bar insight: 1. No change!
“It’s nothing,” he thinks as the elevator dings. Someone gets out, but Bar is focused on the floor, then jerks his gaze away and heads inside.
A fruticose branch now juts from the flake, unseen.
Terra Knafferly, biologist and academic
Insight 3
Babar Alvi, failed chemist postdoc, urban explorer
Insight 3
Clues:
- Bob’s notes detail an Alaska expedition which uncovered a voracious and unknown lichen, which seemed clumped around a curiously eroded stump of wood. (1)
- One of the people on the trip, in the 80s, has the same face as Terra Knafferly, Bob’s niece. (1)
- Bob’s suicide note spoke of a gate and various incoherent things. (2)
- Adina Haun mentioned Bob’s expedition, which otherwise seems scrubbed away. She’s in the Anthropology department. (3)
- More face-stealing, now from the 1800s (3) and evidence that the lichen-stump Bob found has been around (but not transportable) for a long time (3)
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