[Action] House Meeting: October 5, Friday, 1pm

[mysterium_npc]

[At around 1pm Elias and Taylor can be found in the drawing room, along with an older gentleman with iron gray hair, a hawkish nose, and wire-rimmed spectacles. He is smoking a pipe which he seems to be in the habit of tapping nervously against the palm of his hand

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[The response to these questions might be rather startling: Dr. Armitage goes pale, looking suddenly frightened, as though of something unseen lurking there with them in the room. He turns towards his two colleagues, and Elias seems to take pity on him and relieves him from having to provide the answer himself.]

In some ways it's difficult to say exactly when, I'm afraid. It's a matter of reconstructing events after the fact, but I will tell you as best I can.

The artifact that is currently in the basement of this house--the one Taylor and I were trying to retrieve--was stolen on from the university vault in late August. Judging from what we witnessed on the night you all arrived, and what happened here last night as well, we were right in anticipating some sinister purpose attached to the theft. But the events to which we refer stretch back before that.

Last winter, a man bearing a strange aspect came to the university library to study a particular rare and ancient tome housed there, one of only a few extant copies. [He looks back at Armitage as he speaks, as though for confirmation that he is telling the history accurately, and receives a nod from the librarian.] It was this man's interest, along with his sinister, foreboding demeanor which alerted Henry that there was cause for concern.

The man was after, so he said, a formula or incantation to do with the name-- [But here, Armitage makes a sudden half-choked sound of alarm, and Elias stops himself, leaving the name unspoken. He pauses, then clears his throat and goes on.]

At any rate, it was Henry's perception of the man's unwholesome nature that made him refuse to lend the book when he requested to borrow it for research. This man--Wilbur Whateley was his name--claimed to need to try things from within the text 'under certain conditions' alone. Once he had been sent away, Henry began to make inquiries and to issue warnings to other libraries that held the volume that they must not release their copies to this man.

But other things happened in the winter last year as well, like the reports of some strange events down in Innsmouth where they say a Navy submarine fired torpedoes into Devil's Reef, trying to keep the whole affair quite secret, despite the rumors that have long surrounded the place.

And then before that, up in Vermont, all the bodies that were found in the rivers when the rains in the mountains brought the flood waters down--bodies which many claim were not human at all, but certainly were not animal either.

Those things might just be idle gossip, of course, based on nothing more than folk tales and overactive imagination, but given what's happened here, they are suspect. And there have been events more recently, closer to home, which are harder to deny.

In early August--it's hard to believe this was just two months ago-- In early August, someone or, er, something attempted to break in to the library at the university, no doubt with thievery in mind. The intruder was attacked in the vestibule and killed by the guard dog, but Henry, along with two other colleagues of ours, saw the thing before it expired.