Doctorow looks to Doc Marcus. "So um... this is fucking wierd." Doctorow begins typing everything out.
December 28th: 2 cats, 3 dogs and 4 people. Elderly Priest, Orphan (10), Policeman, and Thief. No Links
Church in Cornwall - Unrelated to priest, Register went missing, turned up in Sheffield looking aged.
"Check this out." Doctorow says and spins his laptop so the Doctor can see his notes.
Doc Marcus craned his head to the side as he looked at the screen, curious as all hell about what the heck was going on. "Some wibbly-wobbly timey wimey shit," he muttered. Perhaps they needed The Doctor.
And I'm not referring to me.
"Maybe the lamp post isn't what's significant?" He frowned, looking thoughtful. "Like, that one register getting taken and then being found looking significantly aged. Could be its the presence of the time-shifted items? Maybe we should see if we can figure out where these people showed up, like the orphan or the policeman or whatever... but look forward in time...?"
Ryan sounded pretty uncertain. "You got any ideas?"
"Check nuthouses.. um or um... around the area see if anyone um... showed up saying they are out of there time, or were kidnapped or something. Maybe if we could get ahold of something, that was um... reported missing, and found later, um, we could run some tests or something on it." The Hacker was just just spitballing and pitching ideas out there now. Not really knowing what were good and what were bad ideas.
Doc Marcus raised both eyebrows. "Well, the lamp-post is still in that development unless they tore it down... might be worth a drive to confirm that it is what we think it is. Also, I could make some calls, but let's do a quick internet search and see if we can find any news stories about people saying they're out of their time or whatever. Could be cookey, could work."
Once that idea was done, they could go to the lamp post and see what there was to see...
1 sux to assist
Int + Comp +3 equipment +1 assist -4 for Doctorow.
The first couple of stories don't really match what Doctorow and Doc Marcus are searching for specifically, although it is interesting. There are a few stories from the seventies and intermittently further back - usually situated in smaller English towns and villages - about people wandering about one day and finding themselves temporarily travelling along the same town decades, or even hundreds of years earlier. None of the instances are prolonged however, and the people interviewed claimed the temporal dislocation only lasted for a few minutes at a time.
One report however speaks of a woman, apparently suffering from paranoid delusions. In 2011 a homeless woman was picked up by police, wandering the street. She had been harassing passers-by, and intermittently descended into hysterics. She claimed her name was Anna Dawes, and that she had been kidnapped. That in itself would give reason for her state of mind; however she later claimed she was from 1912.
When pressed for more information later on from medical professionals, and the police, she further claimed her kidnappers were robed and she had never seen their faces. She could not recollect what had happened during her incarceration.
Disturbingly, during a power outage at the secure facility where she was kept, she disappeared and was not found again.
With the report is a photograph, although it is a little grainy and dark. Apparently, "Anna" had developed photosensitivity, and could not tolerate so much as a camera flash:
Anna Dawes
Doc Marcus frowned. "That's fuckin' freaky," he said, looking over Doctorow's shoulder. "We know where she was picked up at and held?" He decided to look into this more closely, because the report did not seem to say. Anna Dawes - who was she? Where was she picked up by police? Was it in one of the cities where the disappearances were happening?
"Let's figure that out and see where we can go from there..."
And so Ryan went about assisting Doctorow in finding out where Anna Dawes was picked up by police and where the secure facility was.
Irina said the penalty for us re: her is -3 since we have better information.
Doctorow just nodded and went right back to work.
Oddly, as much as Doctorow searched he was unable to locate the name of the facility that Anna was taken to. It's possible that information was always omitted, to avoid the press hounding a mentally disturbed woman. The woman was located in the San Francisco Bay area.
One of the searches does pop up another Anna Dawes though; unrelated to the appearance of a crazy woman. It is in fact, a very old newspaper print of a relatively well-to-do woman who disappeared. It was an update of what must have been a previous newspaper article that was not listed on the website. This article is from 1913, and states a woman known as Anna Dawes has not been located yet.
There is even an artists image, probably a painting commissioned by her parents a short time before her disappearance.
Grainy newspaper image
It certainly bears a striking resemblance to the woman in the modern newspaper article.
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Soul Searching
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