Gothic by Gaslight - Episode 2

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2:03This Actual Play is performed by adults and in an adult setting. Listeners should know that this Actual Play may include mature themes and scenes. All content including names, places, events, and so forth, which may bear resemblance to entities living or dead is strictly coincidental. My name is Maverick Hensey, and for tonight's game, I will be your keeper. Good evening everyone and welcome to another episode of the Old Waste Podcast. I'm your keeper this evening, keeper mav. My pronouns are they them, and I'm excited to welcome you to another episode of Gothic by Gaslight, our Gaslight campaign here on the Old Ways. Got a fantastic crew as always assembled with me, but before we get to them,

3:06I'd like to, as always, say thank you to our listeners and our Patreon supporters. You make what we do possible. If you'd like to see what we have to offer on Patreon, including an exclusive Delta Green campaign of God's Teeth, you can do so at patreon.com slash the Old Ways Podcast. And now let's get into some introductions to my right. Hello, I am Michelle Schneider, a go-by-sheetay pronouns, and I am playing Adelaide Greenwood, who goes by she-her. Fantastic, and next to Michelle. Hello, I am Danny Mendoza, he-him, and I am playing Dr. Juliane Valdez, he-they. At the end of the table, hi, I'm CC, I use they-them pronouns, and I am playing Warren Stormright, he-him pronouns. Fantastic, and next to CC. Hello, I'm up, I use she-her pronouns, I am playing Lydia Darling, who also uses she-her pronouns. And last but never least. Hello, everyone, I'm Brandon O'Brien, my pronouns are he-him or they-them,

4:11and I am playing Herschel Forbes pronouns he-him. Fantastic. So when we last left our intrepid penny dreadfuls, or the dreadfuls as they're known at the club, they had just investigated the remains of Agnes Potter. They made who's been brutally murdered, perhaps by the return of Edward Hyde, who knows, and they were setting off to investigate in another direction. So you were headed off to Dr. Jekyll's cabinet. So you make your way using Warren's carriage, which is a very convenient thing to have, especially in the cold. You make your way to a residential part of town. It's not uncommon for doctors of this era to have a split domicile, where they live in half, and their medical cabinet is in the other half. And so that turns out to be the case for Dr. Henry Jekyll.

5:15And you approach the residents having gotten the address previously. It's interesting. There's no one living in the houses on either side of the cabinet as far as you can tell. They look empty. There's an air of malaise in this little area, and the house itself looks partially burned out. It's been a year, almost, since what happened with Mr. Hyde, and no one's attempted to rebuild this building. It just stands there a monument to its former owner and the dark things that happened inside. The half of it that used to be his residence looks partially burned out. It might be a little dangerous to go in, but you can if you'd like to. Then on the other half, you have a shingle hung out for Dr. Jekyll, but it's hanging loosely,

6:21swinging from one chain in the breeze. It's stepping out of the carriage. I just want to assess the environment that we're in. If there's people around or if people generally avoid this area because of the things that are tied to this house, you don't see anybody around. There's nobody walking up the street. There's, like I said, the two buildings flanking the house and cabinet are up here to be empty. It's strange. You feel uneasy just standing here in the cold air outside this building. I take it that the building is probably locked. Are you going to attempt to open said doors and see if they're locked? Yes, I will. Okay, which one are you going to, the cabinet or the dwelling, the residential?

7:26Let's start with the cabinet. I think anything important will be there. All right, you go to the door of the cabinet and you jiggle the handle. It is locked. I think that it is locked. Is there space between like here and like another house? Is there like an alley that runs between? It's not an alley, but there's space. Are there any windows? There are windows, one of which has been smashed in. There's shards of glass sticking up. This does look rather important, as I say as I gesture at the smashed window. Maybe Mr. Hyde is wandering around in a new body. From the broken window, because it looked like it was smashed inward or outward,

8:27it looks like someone threw a rock through it. But the fact that the door is still locked presumes that they did not succeed. Or they just went out the window after they were done. Is the window broken in such a fashion that would allow for a person to make their way through it safely, which is it looked like the sill was cleaned off of broken shards? It's enough to fit someone. No, it looks like it might have been a van, an act of vandalism, maybe a small child throwing rocks at windows. There might be another door along the side, a servant's entrance or something of that sort around the back. But you don't think you can get in the window here unless you break the rest of it and carefully brush the glass away. I take off my coat. Okay. I wrap my coat around my forearm.

9:29I break the rest of the glass. Okay, you break the rest of the glass very carefully. In for a pennein, for a pound. You break the rest of the glass, you think you can get through here safely. It'll be a bit of an adventure getting through here. And you'll have to be very careful because there are shards of glass everywhere. But you can get through the window. As soon as I safely land inside, I open the door. Okay, you open the door. So, Herschel has managed to make his way inside. You smell must in the air, must and mold. There's chairs that have been set up as if for a waiting space in this room that you passed through the window to get into. There's peeling wallpaper and the smell of mold is very heavy in the air.

10:30No one's been in here for a while and the rain has come through the broken slats and the roof. But you open the door so that everyone can enter. And I do enter. So inside, you find this sort of waiting area. If you pass through that, you find the doctor's examining room. Beyond that is another door. I immediately go to that other door. It's not locked. You swing it open and you see what appears to be a laboratory. There are tables set up with various equipment on them. Some of them you'd recognize Julianne, but the rest of you, you're not quite sure. There's little burners. There's test tubes and all sorts of lab equipment set up around this space. Off to the side, there's a small table with some unbroken little vials.

11:30There's there's against the wall, what looks like little packets, like little metal tins set up against it on a table. And there is a back door as well leading out of here. It looks like nothing has been touched on the inside. Well, you have to go in to figure that out. Dr. Valdez is going to walk right in, but on the way passing the doctors more public-facing area, relatively speaking. Is there anything notable to Dr. Valdez about it that would be telling of the psychology of Dr. Jackal that would also be unusual? So this room looks like it hasn't been used in a long time. There's no equipment set out, like even longer than the rest of the building is what you would say.

12:36And you know from talking to Stevenson that Dr. Jackal hadn't managed to keep up his practice for some time because of his struggles with hide. He turned away patients, he closed himself off. You get that feeling in this room that almost despair in here. That's what you feel. I move past it quickly, clocking that and uncomfortable with how it makes me feel, and move into the laboratory. Okay. I'll also follow into the laboratory. Are there any, what it will look to be maybe notebooks or anything where they Dr. Kipz notes on the experiments? There are some scraps and notes scattered about here, like those scraps of paper. There's no full-on notebooks.

13:37Herschel, you would know from the Little Writers Group that you've attended with Stevenson, that Utterson, the solicitor, burned a whole bunch of the books that he found, the notebooks, the texts and so on, that he found when he found Jackal's body because he didn't want whatever it was. Jackal was working on getting out into the world. So a lot of it was burned. You know the library at the book club has some scraps and fragments as well, but you know that there wouldn't be tomes left here. I mean, if there are any scraps of like anything, I would like collect them and see if there's anything interesting on them. So you collect the scraps of paper that are scattered around in here? What about the rest of you? What are you doing? I am not entering the laboratory, although I do point out to Dr. Valdez that there are vials, like there are several vials that seem to have the exact same substance in them that I imagine

14:41is no twerthing. So I say something to the effect of surely those were put together for a reason, and are probably related to anything here that looks like an experiment that was still in progress. But I don't have the expertise to figure out what those things are. And then I redirect my attention to that like forward-facing testing room to see if there's evidence that any patients were here or any evidence that somebody was being like studied or treated or even experimented on in this room. Okay, so you have a look around there. Warren, what are you doing? I guess I would just be trying to see it. Imagine that this place hasn't been touched for some time. There'd be a level of dust trying to see if anything has been moved recently or if there's been any evidence of people in here. Okay, you can give me a spot hidden role while you're doing that, Adelaide.

15:46Do we do a similar thing as Warren? And also just doing some like really quick little sketches of the space. It might help me recall something later that I overlooked or whatever, but definitely doing that for both the domicile side as well as the laboratory. Okay. And Julian? Julian will follow Hershall's recommendation to check those vials first and then turn their attention to those aspects of the laboratory they would assume they are best suited to assess those that are most esoteric or specific that the others would not have the necessary prior knowledge to investing it. Okay, so we'll start with Lydia. Lydia, you collect these fragments. Some of them are

16:47looked to have been torn off. Others have burn marks around the edges. It's interesting these fragments because it looks like they were put here. They don't look like they were like the book was set on fire and this is just a fragment that's left because you would assume those fragments would have been cleaned off. But you find notes on dividing the soul. These philosophical and alchemical and esoteric phrases that you can piece together with your knowledge on separating one part of the soul, the most the darker part of one's nature from one's whole self. And there's notes in the little bits of margin that are cut off that you can't quite make out. But there is a

17:50reference to she and her that pop up multiple times. And you don't know who it's referring to. These notes in the margins, there's a she says she wrote from her but you can't figure out who that means. Yeah, I'll definitely make a note of it as I'm looking through and collecting these papers. And especially if we if I know that back at the the book club we have, it's some of his older notebooks maybe taking these comparing something there might lead me to who this she is. I will also let everybody else know that a lot of stuff in here refers to she or her. But I have no idea what it means. Okay, but you've got these note fragments and Warren, how'd you do on your spot hidden?

18:54I got a 44 out of the eight. Okay, so you find dust and you find ash on some of the on the floor in some places and then this fine dust across some of the shelves in here. You can see places where things once stood they might have been pulled off and destroyed when Utterson went through here. But around that back door and on this table in the middle where there's that single burner and the tube, the unbroken tubes, it's clean and there's footprints in the bit of dust that you find near the table. Someone's been here. I will definitely relay that information. Somebody's been here recently. Julianne, you go looking at these unbroken vials

20:01and there is a strange substance in them, this liquid or is it a liquid? Because it seems to move with this sort of thickness, get ripples that you approach it. It's got the strange, purpley black sheen to it and you can make me a power roll as you approach it. That is triple zeros. That is a 100. That is a critical failure. You become convinced Julianne that it is watching you and you can see it like slithering around in its little tube and you feel it tracking you as you move. You know for a fact this liquid is following your movements and you're going to lose one point of sand for this because it feels uncomfortable and whatever this is, one, it looks strange, but two, it shouldn't be

21:04able to do that. I note that it is following me, understanding that this now in my mind is clearly the concoction responsible for the split and it is now seeking hungrily to split me similarly. I am afraid and yet I approach. Are these vials covered? Do they have a stopper at the top? They do not. I pick one up and look into it as it looks at me. What does that feel like? It feels like something malevolent and on that failed pow as you pick it up. You hear a strange

22:14peel of laughter. Peel of laughter you heard before. I ask in my mind if they wish for me to take this for further study. You don't get a response, but the liquid moves and you feel almost eyes upon you. I have an intrusive thought about drinking it and look for a stopper. You find a stopper and you stop up the vial. Is it any less loud the attention from it covered up or does it make no difference at all? It makes no difference at all. You still feel it everywhere you move. I stop up the other two as well. I believe there were three total. Yes. And I put all three carefully into my medical bag wrapping them in a bit of cloth to try to keep

23:21them from breaking. Or if there is a strapped area that I could strap them into, I would strap it there and then cover that in the cloth. And I do not share this with the others in this moment, but I do turn my attention then from that to anything else in the space that I would be able to analyze uniquely. All right, while you're doing that, Herschel, you went back into the main cabinet and the waiting room. So you can give me a spot hidden. Okay. 57 does not be 45. Okay. So what you do find is one of these massive sets of footprints that your attention was drawn to outside the house, the Mortimer's house, you do find that. It's not hard to find. It's

24:23dusty. The footprints go out into the the doctor's area and then go back into the lab. You don't find any remnants of patients memorabilia or or anything of that sort in here. Your writer's brain keenly analyzes every little detail, but you don't find anything particularly of use out here. It's been abandoned for quite some time. But to be sure, it doesn't seem like there was any evidence that anyone else was here. From the appearance of it, the deduction that I'm making is hide entered as hide. But is there any evidence that he took this serum afterwards to return to Jekyll? You have to go back into the you have to go actually into the lab itself

25:27and have a look at the serum, which Dr. Julianne has put into his bag at this point. My eyes follow the footsteps. They'll just sit entering the lab and then I immediately give up that line of questioning. Well, you do find regular size shoe prints in here, not in the the cabinet part, but in the lab. If you look, you do find regular human-sized footprints, shoe prints, and then you coming in and then you see the large footprints of feet, not not clad in shoes. So I will give you that. You don't need a role for that. But it's hard to tell what the serum was for, especially because you're not able to take a look at it at the moment. Without entering the laboratory, I call to my screen. Perhaps it would be useful to get a good

26:30scale sketch of that foot print, that shoe print right there. I'm pretty sure it's not mine since I haven't entered through. It doesn't look like Julianne's. I could definitely do that. I also check it against the sketch of the footprint we found at the base of the tree. Do they match? They match. Very interesting. I'm going to quickly sketch that and then could I channel a little bit of the occult here and see if I can get like a vibe check of the space into a painting to see what comes out. I'll let you make an art role as part of your sketch, like you're sketching here. So make your art role first. Sadly, not very good. I did an 89, though I have a 70, but it's not quite good enough to be that.

27:33Would you like to push the role? You know, check them out. Hide. Two-sided thing. I a little heat in this stick side is coming out because I do something kind of similar. So I am going to push it. Okay. 19. 19. All right, fantastic. So you start sketching, but you feel a bit blocked. You can't quite get a sense of the room. But as you focus on this idea of your two sides and Jacqueline hides two sides, your sketch starts to take a little different shape. I'd like a power role. You're going to get something regardless, but 10. 10. All right. What's your power? 50? 50. Okay, so that's an extreme.

28:34You see a shape in the corner of this lab. A shimmering shape. Is it a familiar one? It is a very familiar one. And Quincy's spectral form moves towards you. You reach out, touches your hand, and you start to sketch with this cold feeling in your hand of Quincy guiding you. But you're in control this time. You weren't last time. This time you are. You're just being guided. And you sketch out quickly a hulking shape. It's massive. Whatever this, this thing is it's not quite human. But you sketch it out and you start sketching the symbols,

29:34those occult symbols around this shape. You don't know what it means, but you've got the shadow. How visceral is this shape? It makes your chest tighten. Almost as if he could leap off the canvas. Okay. In this moment while I'm doing that, my mannerisms are different. They're more able a little bit going into that. And then I kind of just like slowly ebbed back into Adelaide. I want to I want to tell Mr. Forbes that the footprint matched. And then I want to find the good doctor and see what his professional opinion on all this is.

30:37Okay. Lydia, what are you doing while this is going on? You have your stripes of paper. I'd like to continue to just poke around the laboratory, see if people like to have hidden compartments and desks in behind the bookcases out of curiosity. I'm going to see if I can find anything that would be put in a place where you don't want other people to find it. So you can give me a spot hidden for that. That is a 38 or 55. So on one of the book shelves or the it might have held books. It might have held laboratory equipment. You're not quite sure. You do find a little sliding panel. And inside you find a stack of notes that the good solicitor, Mr. Utterson, seems to have missed.

31:44And you can start pouring over those if you would like to. Yes, I would. Okay. We'll come back to you in a minute. Warren, give me a spot hidden as you're looking around. 28. Okay. You look up and you see painted above this back door is a symbol in red. Probably paint, right? And I don't have the most art capability. It's a sketch copy of it. I would also like to peek out the back door. Okay. You have a look out the back door. It looks dreary outside. There's dirt scattered about, but it's stone outside, this stone back area that they don't really have backyards in Victorian London. So you're not going

32:48to see much in the way of shrubbery or trees or anything like that. There's a fence back here. And then there's more, there's another building behind it. This building also looks empty. Does it look like, so that looks like the dirt is sort of trailing off? Yes. Not wanting to separate the group, especially with everything going on. I will circle my way back. And again, relay that information of looks like there was something outside trailing dirt. Possibly a house. Okay. So as you're doing that, Julian, you were looking at what else you could find in here? Yes, with a particular focus on the least common elements of this laboratory. Mm-hmm. So you find a, you find these small boxes, like these little metal boxes

33:51that I described before on this table. There's a stack of them and they are not dusty. But they're a metal that looks interesting. It's an odd metal that you don't recognize, kind of silvery golden color. There's a chemist label that you don't recognize. It's newer than the metal. It's a language you don't know. But there's a large letter B in the center. When you say it's a language, I don't know. Do you mean it uses an alphabet that is different than the alphabet that I use or is it simply a construction of those letters that I don't recognize? There's strange letters that aren't in the English or Spanish alphabets.

34:52You're not quite sure what it is if it's an actual language or a construct or just some odd language from somewhere. Understood. Is there any way I could formulate an initial opinion on the probability of a cipher? You could give me an intelligence role. That is a 39. Okay. It's a language, not a code. I would... How big are these boxes? They look like a tin you'd get at a chemist of some kind of like maybe smelling powders or things of that sort. They're not very big. Would I be able to fit all of them into my bag? Would I need to ask others for assistance? Hmm, you could probably fit them in your bag. There's six or seven of them. They're not that large.

35:53Your bag's getting very full. I know. That's part of what I'm thinking of here. It's not a bag of holding. Yes, I think I think I'll take the six or seven metal boxes for further study. Okay. So you take them without opening them, put them in your little doctor's kit. Do you try to do this without anybody noticing or are you pretty blase about just opening your bag and shoving them in? I'm careful about it. I'm not trying to draw attention, but if someone sees it, someone sees it. I'm not trying to hide that from from the others. Okay. They may be able to help me to code what this means. Okay. Do I find the good doctor at this point? Yes. Okay. I walk up on you, Shelby Nid in your bag. Hello. How has your part of our little adventure gone so far? So far so good. It is, it's going well. Yes. Um, whoo, that looks interesting.

36:58Yes. I will hold one up with the label toward you and say, do you recognize this language? I have determined it is a language, not a safer. You do not. No, I don't happen to recognize it. It's not French. Hmm. No, it wouldn't be. I'm not sure that it is Latin based at all. I feel that I would recognize more about it if it were interesting. I put it away. I did make a little bit of a discovery. I just did some painting in the other room. And this is what I came up with. And I'm just going to show him the painting. What I need to roll about finding any sort of insights off of this painting? Not really. It doesn't look like the shadows that you saw saw the other night. It looks like something

38:00primal. It's not quite human, but not quite animal. And you get a feeling off of it of menace. I'm wondering here because Julian is torn about this. Is it the menace that I get from an occult sense or is it the psychology that leads to the creation of this sort of depiction that I find menacing? Both. I'd love to study it further to, it doesn't have to be now. But Dr. Valdez is fascinated, says May I, and reaches out to grab onto the painting. Yes, of course. I will obviously have it when we go back to the club and start verifying with them. Lydia's referencing as well. Could you take me to where you were when you painted this?

39:08Mm-hmm. I will also say we found a similar footprint. At least Mr. Forbes did. And I said cross-reference that based on the one we did at the house. Were you able to recover any biological materials as Mr. Forbes did at the house? I didn't check for that. I just sketched. If you could show me where the footprint is, I will look for that as well. Thank you for the information. I'll show them where the footprint is first and then I'll take him to the spot where I did the painting. I'll look for biological material to potentially recover in a similar fashion to what Herschel did at the house. You find threads of fabric again and a little bit of blood. I would take a sort of a sample kit, something that I could try to put it in that would preserve it at least a little bit out of my bag to put the threads and blood in trying to pick up the blood without

40:14touching it. Okay. For sure. Lydia, you go flipping through these notes. You're oblivious to everything else that's happening around you. These little discoveries, paintings, all this stuff because you have found these notes. And Warren and Herschel, you might notice Lydia sitting down in a corner, flipping through some pages. And you find more references to she and her. She promised me another delivery, but there's something different about this one. I can't quite put my finger on it. The color is odd. And then there's a page of scribblings about distilling the essence of the soul. And then there's another page about I find I don't know myself when I become him.

41:15It's becoming harder and harder to control him, the rage, the violence, the strength. I hate him, but I love him because I am him. We are one to stop myself, is to stop him, to stop him, is to stop myself. Is this my pure essence? I hope she will be pleased. And I'm probably muttering something like, who is she? I lean over Olivia's shoulder as she's rooting. And I'm stopped here or anything. I will like seeing you as my dancing. I'm seeing more and more references to a she or a her. As far as I'm aware, you know, lab assistants and see here, there's this this is a line about she's provided me this and it's a little bit different. So not a victim and a complex? Possibly. Maybe there was some sort of

42:24I am unaware of how this even worked. Maybe there was some sort of strange esoteric ingredient that he needed and she got for him. That's the only thing that that could make me think of. What's that to reason? I doubt he guesses all of his ingredients all by himself, especially the rare or expensive ones considering the kind of work that he did. I look around the rake D waiting room for any kind of like guest book or a rule of decks. Any other anything that would have evidence of someone else's personal information like an address or a number. Okay. So give me a luck roll. Lucky faith. That is happening. That in real life let alone in game. Oh, 65. Nice. So you do find a rather molded book address book. It has the names of what you

43:34assume to be several patients. There's several male names, several female names, and then little notes about like hysteria and knee pain and little notes about what they were seen for essentially. You find this not in the waiting room but in the main part of his cabinet. Does it have, I take it every single address here is of a patient, not any members of like staff or anything like that. You don't see any members of staff as far as you're aware, he only had household staff. He had his cook and he had his butler but he didn't have a nurse or anything of that sort. He operated alone, not operated operated, but just operated his cabinet alone. He wasn't a surgeon.

44:36Still valuable, I guess. Maybe one of these people have seen this unknown woman might be for my possibility. Also, is there evidence of what the fabric that the threads that I collected came from in any of these rooms? If you go back into the lab, you find stashed away in a corner, a pair of shredded trousers. And I do mean shredded. Ah delightful. Ah well, that's not pleasant. Although it does presume that he's changed his clothes recently. So I'm getting a better sense that at some point, hide did stop being hide here. What of that means?

45:36I mean, you say that a load. I do. Like I haven't pointed out the trousers yet because I'm waiting for people to get, I'm waiting to get people's attention, but I do say everything that I just said alone. And when somebody does glance at me, I point at the shredded trousers. Ah, Warren would be standing next to you. That's also operating under the fact that this might not be a copycat, because we also don't know for sure if Jackal's slash hide is dead. If we believe that one mortal person is capable of grabbing someone by the very sternum and tearing them in half with their bare hands, then it's the reason that that same figure can survive a blow to the head. But it doesn't necessarily disprove that there is a copycat, because we have evidence to presume that

46:37hide can make other hides. We just can't confirm whether it's one or more, until we find whoever's responsible for this. There is a trail leading out the back door, assuming that whoever came in might have gone out that way. And then I'll also gesture to the symbol above the back door that I discovered. I'll make a note of that as well in my notebook. The fact that there is both the large footprints and the otherwise very mundane Hugh print, right beside it in the lab, says either someone stopped transforming at some point after entering this room, or that there was another person present. I'll, at this point, mention to everyone that I do find handsome notes and there are some references to a she. So quite possibly someone was helping him.

47:40We're all reasonably within the same space at this moment. All of us are able to hear each other. For my own sake, I'm presuming we're all huddling by the door where I refuse to enter the lab. Probably. I, Dr. Vadez has two primary areas of interest. Would like to go examine the symbol directly, paying special attention to whether this seems wet still or not, leaving it to the others to create copy of the symbol for us to study later, and would want to know more about these references to she and her. So you go and take a look at the symbol, make me an occult role. Sure. That is a 15. Okay. So it's an alchemical symbol transformation. Okay. And it does look still fresh. Okay. I wouldn't happen to either have on my person or see

48:51anywhere in this lab a, a sample kit that would allow me to use something like a swab to take a bit of this fresh, uh, it's called it paint, uh, without touching it for further study. Give me a look, Roll. Sure. Yeah. That is an 84 over 60. Yeah, you don't find anything like that in here. Um, you could maybe dab it with your, your handkerchief or something, but you don't have swabs or sterile equipment. Hmm. Oh, and for a pennion, for a pound, and I do take out a handkerchief and touch the, uh, wetness with it. Uh, don't know if it would seep through to touch me or not. Would be trying to not have that happen. Mm-hmm. Give me a power roll.

49:55Uh, that is a 69, uh, and my, yeah, my power so that everyone knows is a 70. Um, so double nice. So it doesn't seem to touch your skin. You're able to take a dab of it and very carefully fold it up and put it in your bag. So would you like to continue here? Go back to the club. What would you like to do? Um, we could discuss it on the way, but, uh, for my part would love to ask Lydia more about, uh, this she and her and get all of the information that I can about this. Okay, we'll definitely show you the notes. I'm assuming Lydia that you're going to keep the notes with us, correct? Yes, these are coming with us. Okay. Um, real quick, I do think looking at the trail out the back of the door might be good, just make sure that there's nothing particularly missing. It's not much of a trail. It's just some mud and dirt that was tracked towards here.

50:59So yeah, it's not really a trail leading anywhere. Okay, then I, I would say we get back in the carriage and head back to the club. You mentioned that there was, uh, resident health house here as well on this premises. Yes, the other half of the house, the, uh, fairly burned out piece, but you could go inside if you wanted to. I, I did take sketches of that. Okay, so you go into the burned out part of the house. I assume it's almost, it's mostly all destroyed. It's fairly destroyed by a first fire and then by damp. But you do find, uh, as you're poking through very gingerly, you do find a book. There's a fairly thick book that you see, uh, in the, what must have been the library.

52:00There's some other books all piled up around and some of them have been burned fairly badly. Um, but this one you see poking out of a desk drawer. And it's spattered with blood. And there's no dust or dirt on it the way there is on the rest of this room. And it's called on the transubstantiation of the human spirit. Rand, that sounds not at all disturbing. Um, I take, I, I lift the book, I take the book out of the drawer. I like on the way, took back to the door. I like wave through the burnt out windows so everyone can see the book. And, uh, when I exit, I give it to Julien. Yeah, Julien, it's partially burnt in the corners. It looks like it was maybe pulled from a burning

53:01pile. Someone saved this book from fire. Uh, it looks to actually be in Greek. But with the English translation, scrolled in the front, uh, the, the name, which is how Herschel figured out what it's called. Uh, if you flip through it, maybe in the carriage, you see that there's some translated English sections uh, in the margins. It's a well-thumbed through book, uh, but it appears to be written by, uh, philosopher known as Kaster or Pollix. Both names are in here. Pollux, and I wouldn't recognize either name. Um, you can give me an occult. Sure. Oh, that's a 95. Sounds familiar, but you're not, not quite sure. So you pile into the carriage once more and head back. Julien, you have this text with you at this point. But you go back to the club.

54:07Are you going to the library to do some research? Yes. Okay. So you enter the library with your new tomb and the papers and things that you found. The library is full of books. There are shelves everywhere, uh, with books on anthropology, archaeology, the occult biology. Pretty much anything you can think of, there's going to be a book on it here or more. There's also, you know, restricted, restricted section in the back where you're going to find, if you're allowed back there by the very stern librarian, Mrs. uh, Miss Lanagan, Mementos and, uh, texts and things that were brought in from previous cases that the book club has worked on. But you see Miss Lanagan seated behind a desk. She's a tall, angular woman, little glasses perched on the end of her nose. Uh, she's wearing Tweed. Very severe looking.

55:10Her hair is piled up in a bonnet at the back of her head and she just looks at you as you come in. She checks a book as if and looks back at you as if to make sure you're allowed to be in here. And then she folds her hands and says, uh, what can I do for you, ladies and gentlemen? We believe that there are notes from Henry Jekyll in the library and we would like to take a look at them. Ah, the Jekyll case. Yes, we do have some things of his. If you'll have a seat at the table over there and she points to a table that is well within eye shots so she can keep an eye on you, I will bring it out to you shortly one moment please. Thank you. You see her pull on a pair of white cotton gloves and she takes a large key ring from her belt and goes to the very back, disappearing out of sight. You can take seats at the table. There's a couple other patrons in here

56:13off at other tables. It's very quiet. Occasionally someone will whisper something to someone else but generally it's a fairly quiet place for study. After a few moments, Miss Lanagan returns. She's carrying a small, like, locker box style box. It's not as small as the tins but she brings this out. It's got a little label on it that says Jekyll and she sets it down on the table in front of you and pulls out a little key and unlocks it. It says, you may not remove any of these from the library. Please be careful in touching them. If you touch any of the papers, please use gloves. She looks at you, Lydia, as Miss Starling, I assume you're prepared for such a thing. And good. Good. And let me know if you need anything else.

57:14I probably have extra pairs of gloves that I give to anybody else who may be handling whatever's in here. I don't think I'm going to be handling anything. I think I'll just kind of sit down and start being ready to take down some shorthand notes as everyone is looking through the books and stuff. That way we have everything compiled into a singular list. And then do have we come to the library and done stuff like this before? You've probably been in the library before. You've never been on a case, like a proper case with the book club. This is your first one. But you've come to read some texts, maybe do some research. Herschel, you definitely have been in here several times. Julien maybe as well. If you want to take advantage of some of the more esoteric texts that the book club has access to. So you've all been in here before. It's not a brand new space for you.

58:18I think before I get fully settled, I'm going to go up to Lydia and just kind of ask, may we possibly ask for like a private room or something? I know some of the material we have is kind of confidential or if seen with it can give distrust others. Well, Anakin would have to trust us out of eyesight first. Yeah, it was just like the library. I don't think the library interests us. This is not my library. So are you opening the box and having a look inside? Yes. I will put on the gloves that were given and assist. Okay. So inside you find another one of those little metal boxes, Julien, like what you put in your bag. The label is mostly peeled on this one. And it feels a lot lighter as if there's not as much inside, whatever might be inside here. But it's that strange metal as well. You also find fragments of a text.

59:22The text. Scribblings in the margins. You're starting to recognize the handwriting by now, Lydia. You recognize this handwriting from the notes that you found in the cabinet and brought along with you. And you also find the original of the letter he wrote to his solicitor, Gabriel Utterson. This is the letter he wrote explaining what happened, how he became hide, how hide took over, and became uncontrollable, his some basics of his research. Do you know this is what Stevenson was basing his book off of, essentially. And you find the original here. You can look through it. He wrote this specifically to Utterson. And Utterson passed it along to the book club. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be scouring this. I'm especially going to see if there are any more references to this mysterious woman. There's as you're looking through the fragments,

1:00:27there's notes about the nature of the soul. What is the soul? Is it all of us? Is it just the good parts of us? Can you separate the soul from the body? There's a note about rending the veil. And then a note that just says she requests that and then it's burned off in the corner. But there are definite notes in here about rending the veil and the human spirit and the psyche and splitting oneself. As doing this, I will sort of have my own notebook open and I will be writing my own notes as well, just sort of gathering all of the information together. Anything that looks important. In the references, all of these discussions of the soul, are there any noted, related, even indirect discussions of the body, particularly body parts,

1:01:38particularly heart or liver? So you do find a note about the soul and the liver. Where is the soul actually stored in the heart, in the brain, in the liver? And you find there are all fragments, right? There's no complete paragraphs of his musings here, just the these bits and pieces. But you also find a note about the soul and the body are one. And you know that hide wasn't split off from Jekyll, Jekyll became physically hide. So if he was separating out part of his soul, it became him in his own body. Fascinating. As we have decided to speak about this in more detail away from the prying eyes of our librarian, I won't share more

1:02:38now, but I do intend to when we have an opportunity. I'll just have all of the various sketches and everything and the various notes and all that kind of just set out. To see if we can make any correlation. Herschel Warren, what are the two of you doing? I am in particular and looking more into the means of Jekyll's quote unquote death. I'd see a few different preference to, you know, his body, a burial site. So you know that you know from Utterson's account that Jekyll shot himself to prevent hide from taking over again because he was worried that if he became hide once more, the Jekyll part of himself would be completely lost. You know that Utterson heard the shot went in and found that Jekyll had

1:03:41taken his own life. You could, if you want to learn more, you could always go talk to Utterson. He had the first hand account. He was there. He's the one who burned the books. He's the the one who found Jekyll. He was the closest thing Jekyll had to a friend, at least at the end. But what you have right now is what is the account that he gave to the book club? Yeah, making note of that and then probably later on I will look more into Utterson as all these killings have seemed to be related to Jekyll in some way. Just so I'm able to also keep an eye on it. Herschel. At the moment, I'm only focused on two things. One is I've taken two sheets of paper to draft. What is essentially the most believable public facing version of the events so far as we've

1:04:44discovered them. So I can write essentially, or report to the police with no supernatural details included. But that had concluded us adding that we don't know where the culprit presently is and we're still investigating. So I'm just waiting for everybody else going through those files see if they notice any notes where the locations where it would be possible that Jekyll or Hyde would retreat to what at any point in time that is not his lab that might also be worthy of investigation. So what you know from the letter that Jekyll wrote to Utterson is that Jekyll was harboring Hyde. He kept returning to the house and the cabinet and would pass himself off as a friend

1:05:51quote unquote of Jekyll's and he spent most of his time hiding out there or living there and being a right old bastard to the servants who rightly hated him. But Jekyll doesn't make any mention of other places. He may not have been aware of places that the Hyde body would go. He seems to have memories of some of the more violent, violent undertakings but he remembers returning to the house and keeping himself there essentially. And he doesn't mention any commonalities between any of the places where he remembers there was a tax taking place. The way he writes about it makes it sound like Hyde was just taken over with a sudden fit of violence. Maybe something something small triggered him or he just

1:06:58saw the elderly gentleman or the young child walking around and was overcome with the desire to inflict violence. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason which differs a bit from the murders that have happened so far right because the ones that have been happening have been connected to the Hyde, Jekyll Hyde case. All four of them that you're aware of. So he's not just doing it for the violence but we think there is even if it's like a really buried motive that could be connected to the book that we found in the house. The burned book about where the soul is. Once we're able to discuss things privately with some high confidence, what would the space be here at the club that we would feel most

1:08:01confident speaking privately? You could go to the reading room where you met with Vance and assuming there's no one in there you'd be able to speak privately. The writing room you don't want to go into because there tends to be a lot more people in there. You could go to the visitors room which is outside the Porter's little cubby where visitors sit. If there's no visitors in there you'd be alone. So you have a couple different options. I think the reading room if it's empty would likely be the first that at least no thought about this would look for. Okay. One more thing that I wanted to look for would be any correlation that Jekyll had with vehicles because as far as I'm aware these symbols were

1:09:02only discovered at the murder of recent murderers not once that happened a year ago. Yeah so Jekyll became very involved in the occult when he had this idea of magnifying the human spirit. It was a very important thing for him but there were no symbols painted at the bodies of uh sir Danvers or the little girl uh or any of the others uh because those were those just seemed to be pure acts of brutality and no one no one was doing anything with them there. No occult symbols, no paint, nothing in the blood just pure brute force. So are you packing up the little box of Jekyll's belongings and passing them back to Miss Land again before going to the reading room or did you have other things you wanted to do in the library?

1:10:04Would I be able to while still in the library look for any other work associated with Caster or Pollux? Mm-hmm. You can make me a library use role or you can get Miss Land again to assist you. Could I also miss this being a librarian? Yeah make a library use role and if you succeed you'll give Dr. Valdez a bonus die on his role. Yeah you just ask and I can point you in the right direction of it uh that is a 19 or first 75. Okay Julian. Copy it would have stood in the first one it's a 51 and the library use for me is unfortunately 20. Okay if you want to get Lydia to look for it for you I will allow that or you can get Miss Land again Lydia you passed your library use role so you'd be able to go looking for things. I think Lydia would be the one that I would go to first given how Lenigan is distrustful of us

1:11:08wouldn't quite but I think in this moment uh Julian is more apt to go to Lydia first. Okay so Lydia you can go looking on your own it'll take you a little bit but you do find some references to you you know that Kaster and Pollock's were identical twins and they were turned into the constellation Gemini in Greek mythology so that they would be together forever melded into one essentially. You don't know who this philosopher is but they seem to you find some other texts by them on similar uh trans-transubstantiation notes on the nature of the soul uh that have been translated into English but this Greek philosopher took on the name of Kaster and Pollock's maybe it was one person using a double name maybe it was multiple people you're not quite sure

1:12:12you can still guess something and I will let you know that like the that Kaster and Pollock says in trying to Gemini and the you know the stars and it could be one person could be two people and now I'm suddenly thinking of the philosopher that the academic I met in my prelude to where who is the angry philosophy if the philosopher or the author potentially is a pen name we might be able to get more information from the um publisher potentially. It's an old Greek text. Old Greek. You're not gonna you're not gonna find a publisher. I'll take a risk with our librarian here and with this information ask

1:13:15what do you know of this Greek philosopher who took on the non-duplum of Kaster and Pollock's? She looks over her glasses at you. Kaster and Pollock's Kaster and Pollock's yes uh it's not known if they were one person or multiple people writing together but they were very interested in the nature of the human spirit. They believed that the soul could take on a life of its own if it was split but they but they believed that it could become its own body. We don't know if they meant they could take over the the main body or make a new body we're not entirely certain. They also had dialogues between themself back and forth about whether the soul is the true essence of a person's nature whether it's their true self

1:14:22magnified or if it's just one aspect if you could magnify an aspect of the self they would have these fascinating dialogues all in Greek unfortunately if you don't speak Greek they're a little difficult to to read but we have we have a couple of them here in the library but uh that was their their entire life's work as far as we have any record of them. Thank you for your assistance and for allowing us access here we hope that we have taken good care to earn your trust. Your members in good standing as long as you take appropriate precautions you are welcome to anything in the library just don't remove it without permission and there's a tiny smile. Would not think of it and help put everything back carefully where it was

1:15:26in the box that we will then return. Okay so you put everything back in the box return it to her she locks it takes it to the back and you go to the reading room. On my end yes. Meal I think so I make a little mental note to like do one of my little um nature paintings or sketches like I love doing like um landscapes and whatnot just as a doodle make sure to um mentally make a note to drop off for the hard library and to try to butter her up for next time. Excellent so you make your way to the reading room to discuss your findings in a more private space. First thing that I mention to the group is that the heart and the liver were taken and as we have seen noted here

1:16:28there is a focus on the potential distillation of the soul and a question of indicating the notes referring to some who was found in the library the writings of castor and polyx and the writings of uh jekyll directly. There seems to be an interest in the potential of elements of the body connecting up to the distillation of the soul it uh connecting that with the what I assume is blood and here I pull out the handkerchief careful not to touch the blood stain on it on the symbol at the back door similar in nature to the blood in the symbology that we found at uh agnases um say bedside. It seems that there is a ritual involved here focusing on the distillation of the soul potentially uh transmutation of the soul and body through that in a way that would lend itself to what we know of uh dr. jack one mr. hide. For what purpose I do not know in what way would it help to take this

1:17:36from agnus are they trying to do something with agnus's soul elsewhere that seems possible I pause for a second and admit I do think there is a her to whom he answers based on the letters that we have found the writings refer in a way that articulates deference I think about the laugh I heard when I looked at the vials and I look at the cloth covering them do you all have any theories on who she might be? I think as you're talking I throw together kind of like a little map of like where everything is so like I do a sketch of like very basic floor plan of the hide lab the domicile agnus's room where the tree is outside

1:18:43and then I put the correlating um sketches and drawings that me and Lydia did um over the various scenes and put them in the correlating spots where they were found so that we have kind of like an over words I view of everything you know on all accounts everything we've learned about agnus she was extremely good she she did everything she was supposed to she was a wonderful maid very kind to their children is he trying to transmute his own soul what about the other the other bodies are are they all what we would consider as a society good people is he trying to change that it made nature of the hind

1:19:47it certainly sounds like it from the notes and things like just the sometimes it's the absolute curiosity if you can do something later on you figure out did there consequences to it right so maybe initially he did something accidental then found out later that hey things were wrong attempted to cancel that out it didn't work as in how he's looking at the only other means to force a change which would be this was the information about the symbols possibly being binding symbols was that shared earlier so you and I have the same brain uh no and uh that was actually exactly what where I was going to go the records let's call them drawings paintings

1:20:48of the symbols in both places where we found them whatever one feel comfortable with William spreading them out in the privacy of where we are uh to look at them side by side yes go for it go ahead keeper uh are they the same the symbol you found above the door is one of the symbols in that circle just one of them and does any of the symbols match from when I did essentially the vibe check menacing picture are those symbols correlating to any of those or are they completely different what do you mean so when I did my vibe check painting with Quincy there are symbols around the figure are any of those symbols matching what was found in agnosticous rooms okay I see what you mean some of the symbols do match up okay but there are some that are different there are some that are

1:21:53different okay okay uh do you share that yes I like I said I've put as you were talking of like initial theory I was placing everything out so we could see everything where they were according to the three locations that we checked so that we can ground ourselves in this clearly between those symbols that are the same and the one that we found in the door or have we seen a commonality among most of the symbols though not all um that were found uh agnosticous are there any that we still could identify as completely um as not repeated so far I'm gonna say keeper ma did say that there was some that were not repeated in the painting that I did with Quincy so there were some new ones there right sorry what I'm trying to uh identify as how many basically like have we have we identified most of the symbols then and then there's a few

1:22:56that are still escaping us uh is it more 50-50 I'm trying to get a sense of how there's five that you can't identify you still have the stuff you pulled out or put in your bag Dr. Valdez does any of that language is there a similarity in those symbols that we already took sketches of compared to the vials that you have with the odds language that you were like unsure what it was so they look like they're from the same language or alphabet no um the symbols are occult symbols they're not part of the language okay so two separate things so we have unknown language and symbols that we better occult really did I will however pull the tins out and carefully place them uh side by side so we can see

1:23:57the language on there as well with large b that is upon them uh so that if it is helpful for anyone to look at everything together uh that is there uh and available for anyone to look at as you'd like and I will uh mention the insight here about the question of whether this is these symbols are binding in a manner to keep something in or out and I really focus in there on the symbol on the door there is a suggestion but this is a supposition that the symbol on the door one might think is a security measure however in a situation wherein someone is experimenting I don't think that that and by I mean Dr. Valdez I don't think that that clarifies anything for us at all actually if I were Dr. Jekyll uh I would put a symbol up could keep me in if I lost control

1:25:09or is it a homing beacon essentially of something that he can automatically recognize with he's in an altered state to know to return to this space but that also be it I suppose that is a wave interpreting binding um making a return somewhat automatic so the question becomes there is a binding or something with eggness certain body parts are missing we can assume that those have been used to distill a soul the intention whether it works or not is not for us to determine yet the intention seems to clearly be from what we've faced together that agnus's soul is being utilized as a material for experimentation and that the person utilizing it is convinced that by taking the heart and the

1:26:12liver uh that there would be an opportunity to use those pieces of agnus's body to achieve the scent I would concur I guess the question becomes we did know that someone's at the lab recently do we have reason to believe that they will return and how careful were we in disturbing that space not careful at all we took many things that they'll notice immediately are gone I myself took these three vials and these six or seven tins that on its own gives us away so possibly he will not be returning to this space but going somewhere else which means potentially going where his unknown benefactor is which we don't have any idea on well addendum he will return once we are assuming he we don't just from a rigorous perspective know that

1:27:18it is possible this is not mr. Hyde it is possible this is the she to whom mr. Hyde answered or some other unknown person but I do believe this person will return once find that they have been disturbed and then we may potentially have an advantage if we can watch the cabinet for activity we could see without being seen if we are careful who enters and exits when, why and how and what they do after following them to where they may go in a state where they may not be in as much control as they would like because they do not know necessarily who entered or to what end just that someone or someone's did enter and took things they would not want to have taken yes that is a possibility another possibility is us putting Scotland Yard

1:28:26on notice regarding this location and letting them essentially do the legwork for us you trust Scotland Yard enough for that no but Scotland Yard does trust us to a certain extent given that the inspector was here this morning if anything it may force a particular result either escalation or de-escalation I'd also ask for an idea role at this point that's a 43 on my side okay anyone can make this role 72 under 75 nice I got an 83 over 75 yeah mine was a 43 under 75 okay yeah I failed my role so okay that's 33 okay 55 so it comes to mind just as you're trying to figure out what to do next the people that have all

1:29:35died so far have been connected people connected to the case there's at least one person you know of who could be a target and that is Gabriel Anderson the solicitor yeah if anything we should either talk or keep an eye on the solicitor being the last person we now involved in this case he is probably the most at risk does it climb out of a phone yeah I think it would have a phone a telephone I turn to the group and I say if we're confident that that's going to be the case the first the first person who should know is the police if we get there if we find others and just just in time for mr. Hyde to have some designs on him I'm pretty sure if we tried to shooting him again

1:30:37it would might go well for the five of us I also feel like we're not particularly trained in that regard I mean you may be able to break out of indoor mr. Forbes but not exactly sure how you would do against a monster who used to be a man no offense I would also not like to fight something um that remarkably becomes more a monster stress I like all of my joints if we notice I Scotland yard they're going to wonder why we're looking into it so we need to have a decision made on how we came across this information to be providing them to where they at least look up on it and not necessarily into us uncomfortable potentially making contact for this unless one of you has a

1:31:40good relationship with someone at Scotland yard I dread the whole lot of them we do have vans his name and we don't need to give them hours we just need to let them know that vans needs to know that that isn't a big job you can always just talk to vans himself and then he can pass things along but if I also recall vans also didn't want to be correlated so if we do contact we'd be better to talk to vans himself not somebody else saying vans is interested mm-hmm absolutely fair all right and with that we will leave you there for this evening thank you all for listening can't wait to see what comes with this planning session and we'll see what happens next time thank you and good night