Just another yarn...
Have you ever noticed that evil cults and madmen can never find the decency to build their depraved temples and worship-houses in more inviting, well-lit buildings? No, they always manage to find the most wretched, most decrepit hovels in which to do their dark works.
Believe me, it wasn't the first time I'd had that thought since arriving in this cruddy New England squat-hole. It'd been about a week and a half since I'd been sent by the Conclave to track down this sick bastard and bring him in, and let me tell you, it was almost like six weeks worth of touring the worst residential hovels America had to offer.
Looking at this particular specimen from the outside, I probably would've had it condemned anyway, regardless of the occult imperative driving me. The wind whistled freely through several cracked and broken windows, making that sound almost too stereotypical to really exist... yet sending a chill up my spine all the same. Unealthy vegetation crept into the two-story edifice through several breaches, most notable among them a vacuity the size of a small truck near the eastern entrance.
All of this, combined with the constant drizzle of sulferous rain, left me with that distinct "I wasn't even supposed to be here today" feeling.
Actually, if the truth is to be told, I really wasn't supposed to be here. This assignment belonged to a dear friend of mine, Nylus Moore. A couple of months on this case, however, and he had been returned to us... in forty-seven pieces. Obviously the group he was investigating was keen on sending him as a rather poignant warning for us to keep out of there affairs. But, what can I say... Chop up my elementary school playmate and send him to me in unmarked brown bags? I can't help but wonder who would NOT be impelled to investigate/destroy the persons responsible for such an act.
Which, I suppose, is why I hadn't turned back the several times assassins and illusionists had been sent to dispatch me. The first would-be killer in Anchorage, a half-wit spell-caster in Chicago, and no fewer than three of each at each of the six other cities since. Up until now. Up until this place. It was almost as though once I'd reached the unhallowed borders of this backwater, inbred hamlet I was safe. Safe, of course, being a relative term when compared against nightly threats from bumbling piece-men. But I digress.
I moved away from my car, and down the cracked and split walkway leading to the aforementioned east-entrance, all the while keeping a sure grip on the dagger under my coat. Certainly, the Conclave wanted these bastards alive, but justice is justice, and I wasn't about to become their next Fed-Ex endeavour.
Once I reached the portal, I was forced to wonder what object would make so large an intrusion as the fourteen foot scar in this wall? More importantly, how would it gain that momentum? Shaking these thoughts from my head, I tested the knob. ~You're off your rocker, McEntyre... there's a ready-made entryway just beside you.~ Regardless, either propriety, decency, or habit kept me from stepping through that aperture, and instead through the now-ajar doorway.
The soft crunch of leaves, insect carapaces, and Hermes only knows what else matched each of my footfalls as I made my way down the first hallway. Obviously, they had no more desire to decorate the inside than to keep the outside kept, this group of madmen. The paint was chipping off of the walls, and there were several places where rat-holes our owl-burrows could be seen. Though, it was a curious thing I noted, there were no inhabitants to these, animal or vegetable, once I got inside. It was like those sick, crawling vines from outside atrophied and died upon entry into this tomb-like manse. Unsettling, to say the least.
Despite my edginess, my mind somehow found occassion to wander a touch, bringing up the details I had come across while looking for this residence in an otherwise derelict town. Oh, certainly, there were people in some of the homes, if people they really could be called. But I had my doubts as to whether or not they were the type from whom taxes would ever be collected... or upon whom hygine had ever been practiced. Bulbous eyes, scaly, greasy skin... The very image of an incestuous upbringing. The few I'd dared to speak to were uncooperative at best, and hostile at worst. It was with a certain degree of trepidation I once again checked the bite-wound one had left me as a souvenir on my right forearm.
A sickly brown had traced at the edges of the wound when I first received it late yesterday evening... A hue which had only deepened in these squalid conditions. I knew that I could have woven some kind of a healing glamour to chase away the wound and its accompanying infection, but I didn't want to risk the chance that my quarry might detect the subtle shifts in the quiltwork metaphysic of this place.
A sharp, scraping sound tore me from my careless musings, setting my teeth on edge and heart racing quite suddenly. The disquiet continued for several moments longer than I was personally comfortable with, the sound itself being what I would imagine the Tin Man of Oz fame might have made were he forced through a cheese-grater.
I once again wrapped myself in caution, offering a glance through one of the cavities in the wall, hoping that daylight ((what little of it existed)) would hold out for me just a short while longer. I kept my mindful pace through the husk of a dwelling, picking my way among the debris until I reached a starewell. It's descent was made into an inky void free of any sort of cheer or delight. A hole blacker than the hearts of most on death-row, and colder than the flesh could recognize. It was exactly the type of place one would suspect the Infernal Host to reside for the summer.
Steeling myself with another tightening of my grip around my weapon, and a silent prayer to whatever gods might be brave enough to present themselves in so impious a place, I made my first furtive step into hell.
Stone stairs, stone walls, stone ceiling... It was almost as though all of the cost skimped on the rest of the dump had been at once put to use here in the catacombs below. I was certain that, if I could see, the walls might very well be covered in tapestries and wall-hangings of Egyptian or Roman design. Perhaps the ceiling would be decorated with carvings or mirrors to entice and confuse the traveller. Alas, despite my mind's fancies, I could not perceive any of these possibilities, as the darkness was rather absolute.
That horrid grating soudn which had, to this point, led me here rather abruptly stopped. I hadn't noticed while it had commenced, but my teeth were rather tightly clenched, grinding against each other. I stopped the span of four heartbeats, then forged on forward, unwilling to allow the silence to frighten me any more than that dreadful cacophony. I felt my way along the walls, again cursing my inability to cast my senses out as normally I would have. I must have been accurate about the wall-hangings, however, as I did brush across several leather-and-silk textures as I groped about the passage.
Upon finding myself at a T-junction, I attempted to calculate from the few remaining echoes where my prize lay... left, or right? After short deliberation, and the swift conclusion that I wouldn't know until I had arrived, I selected left, based mostly on a lifelong preference for it.
As I travelled down that curving passageway, I was almost delighted to see a vague glow far ahead of me. Almost, you see, because of the sickly green hue it cast on the walls some meters up from my position. A hue that seemed, almost of its own volition, to cling to the corridor despite physics. It was in these considerations I found myself when the voices intruded.
"You'll not find us, human stain. There are places even the Empowered were never meant to tread."
"Come now, manling, you value your life more than this? Return home, find your wife... spend this earth's last days with her..."
"It is no use... He chooses sorrow and death instead of the fleeting delights of family and home. Welcome, then, ill-advised investigator... Welcome to the maw of Oblivion, and the end of your world."
My nerves were set even more on edge, of course, once I discovered that these voice were not drawn from an external source, but rather they echoed inside the confines of my own psyche. Again, I took several minutes to gather myself, and consider my situation. Obviously, despite the caution I had to this point attempted, my presence here had been noted by the dark powers bound to this place. They also used the formal "Empowered" to denote my abilities, so there would be no advantage in not utilizing those same talents now.
With a certain degree of hesitation, I removed my hand from the dagger in my coat, and formed my hands into the shape of the Spirit-Brush, letting the words of Evocation spill from my lips in their honeyed song. I felt the current of strength drift out from my Will to interact with the tapestry woven beneath all things, allowing me to change what I didn't like of the world into that which I might prefer.
Delicate work, of course, and so it was made even more difficult when all of those previous voices, and a legion of others, exploded in my skull, peels of laughter too loud to ignore. But it is against just such an intrusion that the Academy Professors condition us, and so I was prepared. I finished the incantation, and all at once, the voices stopped. The corridor was lit in a brilliant ruby light, emanating from all of the conflux points on my hands. As the tension between my shoulderblades eased, I continued my march down the passageway, a little more confident.
All of that dauntless courage nearly escaped me when that wretched keening of metal-on-metal started up again, this time much closer than before. Conscious of it now, I forced my muscles to relax, my teeth to unclench, to retain my dignity and composure as I crossed the last few meters to the entryway.
The sight that opened up before me was not of a majestic hallway with a summoning circle inlaid in gold, or even of an infernal pit teeming with demons and harpies. No, it was at once more petrifying, yet unassuming than either of these.
A single room, no larger than my living room, made of the same dull granite as the hallways behind me. The ceiling was lower than a man of my considerable height might find comfortable... but if the closeness of the ceiling is where I drew my uneasyness, it would be because of what was painted across it, and the walls... and the floor.
In a rust-colour that could be nothing other than the lifeblood of innocence, runes and glyphs of all blasphemous design were crammed overfull on any surface that would take them. Several overlaid one another, creating macabre images to graven to be put to paper. The metallic tang of the morphemes throughout the room left me all but choking on the bile rising in my throat. And it is with not-too-great a shame I say that the next image left me uncontrollably vomitting.
Standing near the centre of the room, a hulk of a man stooped, draped in gore and entrails to diverse and numerous to consider. His shoulders heaved as with some great physical exertion, his mammoth paws clenching and unclenching. A sharpened stone, ten-inches in length, held clutched in crimson-stained teeth. His gaze rose from its place on the floor, slowly, to greet my own. A gobbet of flesh hanging from the tangled mass of hair on his head dropped, only to be caught abruptly in his snakelike forked tongue as it shot out between tooth and stone to catch the morsel.
I'm certain that, were my focus on this abomination before me, I would have found satisfaction in his gold-slit eyes as he watched me purge my stomach of refuse at his diabolical image. When again my eyes met his, he was holding the sharpened stone in his hand, that vile tongue dancing slowly across his black-skinned lips, tempting and taunting at the same.
Gathering the scraps of courage I had remaining, and drawing on the rage of dear Nylus' death, I prepared to speak to this bane... this desecration of any pure thought or deed. But before I could find my voice, he found his.
In a voice I'll not forget for so long as I live and breathe, he spoke to me. The sound of it compelling thoughts of the First Fall, of the Great Plagues, and every other manner of hellish long-ago, intoned slowly with invective and bile.
"Empowered... You have come a long way to die." A simple statement, yet one spoken with such clarity of purpose that I simply could not doubt him. Still, I found my voice, and tried my speech... though my throat was dry and my conviction hollow.
"Damned Soul, you have desecrated the Natural Order of the tapestry, and cut the ties by which all good and right things are bound... Rep..." My voice failed me a moment. "Repent, and you shall find absolution through fire." I finished the age-old censure upon dry lips, again slipping my hand into my coat to find that dagger.
A long silence, punctuated only by that vile sound, the source of which I could not place, despite it's proximity. Our eyes held locked by each other, though I daresay his held sway over that binding more than my own, before he deigned to speak.
"My pretty little thing..." He took a step forward, more gore dripping from his ebon skin. "I have no intention, nor desire, to find absolution. I am not in need of repentance, but rather, I offer it. Come, dear, sweet boy. Do you not hear it? Do you not hear the sound of your earth's salvation?" That dreadful voice cooed, malice and mischief behind his gold eyes.
The unearthly clamour rose again in pitch, sounding for all the world like an accumulated abyss in sonic form. My ears pained for silence, and my brain screamed in panic, as though it knew but couldn't quite grasp what it was being subject to. He must have taken my silence to mean that no, I did not understand. And damn him to his Oblivion for enlightening me.
"That is the protestations of your worlds thin barriers... They buckle and crack under the pressure of the Other World. You see, it will begin here, but will spread swiftly." He paused, tapping that stone against his blood-flecked lips, almost as though considering tomorrow's weather. "Like a poison, the joy of Oblivion will move from place to place, ending all life, love, glory, and rapture. All pain, suffering, fear, and dread. All of it will end, young empowered..." This last spoken without the consideration of it's previous uses. "All shall be found naught... All shall be made equal in demise."
The gravity of his intentions fell upon me in crashing waves, and at that moment, my mind was made to realize the truth. I could see it, just beyond the gauzy membrane seperating our world and the Next. An inexorable nothing ever-so-slowly taking up space, pressing against that which was with that which wasn't. I may have screamed then, or it may have happened an eternity later... I don't know. I only know that my fingers fell nerveless from that dagger, and I crumpled to the floor, unable to tear my bleeding gaze from the horrid sight.
The rank disonance of this unholy rape was dwarfed only by that laugh... that painful, truthful laugh so full of spite and misery. This man, this... thing which brought such end to all we know... he is still down there... several hundred meters below our earth... and that Oblivion is still coming. It may not arrive in my lifetime, he told me, but it will arrive.
It is for this reason, Chairperson, that I must insist you not build your Institution upon these unhallowed grounds. You must cast out his evil, if there is any way. Do what you will with his darkness, but do not aid him... Do not give him the souls of the mentally crippled. I have written you this, my account... the experience which drove me to your care. Please! If you do not heed the words of a scholar, at least heed the wisdom of a broken mind! No good will come of your building an Asylum here! You will only expediate disaster! Please!
I await your reply, Chairperson...
-Dr. Hendry Fueller
Believe me, it wasn't the first time I'd had that thought since arriving in this cruddy New England squat-hole. It'd been about a week and a half since I'd been sent by the Conclave to track down this sick bastard and bring him in, and let me tell you, it was almost like six weeks worth of touring the worst residential hovels America had to offer.
Looking at this particular specimen from the outside, I probably would've had it condemned anyway, regardless of the occult imperative driving me. The wind whistled freely through several cracked and broken windows, making that sound almost too stereotypical to really exist... yet sending a chill up my spine all the same. Unealthy vegetation crept into the two-story edifice through several breaches, most notable among them a vacuity the size of a small truck near the eastern entrance.
All of this, combined with the constant drizzle of sulferous rain, left me with that distinct "I wasn't even supposed to be here today" feeling.
Actually, if the truth is to be told, I really wasn't supposed to be here. This assignment belonged to a dear friend of mine, Nylus Moore. A couple of months on this case, however, and he had been returned to us... in forty-seven pieces. Obviously the group he was investigating was keen on sending him as a rather poignant warning for us to keep out of there affairs. But, what can I say... Chop up my elementary school playmate and send him to me in unmarked brown bags? I can't help but wonder who would NOT be impelled to investigate/destroy the persons responsible for such an act.
Which, I suppose, is why I hadn't turned back the several times assassins and illusionists had been sent to dispatch me. The first would-be killer in Anchorage, a half-wit spell-caster in Chicago, and no fewer than three of each at each of the six other cities since. Up until now. Up until this place. It was almost as though once I'd reached the unhallowed borders of this backwater, inbred hamlet I was safe. Safe, of course, being a relative term when compared against nightly threats from bumbling piece-men. But I digress.
I moved away from my car, and down the cracked and split walkway leading to the aforementioned east-entrance, all the while keeping a sure grip on the dagger under my coat. Certainly, the Conclave wanted these bastards alive, but justice is justice, and I wasn't about to become their next Fed-Ex endeavour.
Once I reached the portal, I was forced to wonder what object would make so large an intrusion as the fourteen foot scar in this wall? More importantly, how would it gain that momentum? Shaking these thoughts from my head, I tested the knob. ~You're off your rocker, McEntyre... there's a ready-made entryway just beside you.~ Regardless, either propriety, decency, or habit kept me from stepping through that aperture, and instead through the now-ajar doorway.
The soft crunch of leaves, insect carapaces, and Hermes only knows what else matched each of my footfalls as I made my way down the first hallway. Obviously, they had no more desire to decorate the inside than to keep the outside kept, this group of madmen. The paint was chipping off of the walls, and there were several places where rat-holes our owl-burrows could be seen. Though, it was a curious thing I noted, there were no inhabitants to these, animal or vegetable, once I got inside. It was like those sick, crawling vines from outside atrophied and died upon entry into this tomb-like manse. Unsettling, to say the least.
Despite my edginess, my mind somehow found occassion to wander a touch, bringing up the details I had come across while looking for this residence in an otherwise derelict town. Oh, certainly, there were people in some of the homes, if people they really could be called. But I had my doubts as to whether or not they were the type from whom taxes would ever be collected... or upon whom hygine had ever been practiced. Bulbous eyes, scaly, greasy skin... The very image of an incestuous upbringing. The few I'd dared to speak to were uncooperative at best, and hostile at worst. It was with a certain degree of trepidation I once again checked the bite-wound one had left me as a souvenir on my right forearm.
A sickly brown had traced at the edges of the wound when I first received it late yesterday evening... A hue which had only deepened in these squalid conditions. I knew that I could have woven some kind of a healing glamour to chase away the wound and its accompanying infection, but I didn't want to risk the chance that my quarry might detect the subtle shifts in the quiltwork metaphysic of this place.
A sharp, scraping sound tore me from my careless musings, setting my teeth on edge and heart racing quite suddenly. The disquiet continued for several moments longer than I was personally comfortable with, the sound itself being what I would imagine the Tin Man of Oz fame might have made were he forced through a cheese-grater.
I once again wrapped myself in caution, offering a glance through one of the cavities in the wall, hoping that daylight ((what little of it existed)) would hold out for me just a short while longer. I kept my mindful pace through the husk of a dwelling, picking my way among the debris until I reached a starewell. It's descent was made into an inky void free of any sort of cheer or delight. A hole blacker than the hearts of most on death-row, and colder than the flesh could recognize. It was exactly the type of place one would suspect the Infernal Host to reside for the summer.
Steeling myself with another tightening of my grip around my weapon, and a silent prayer to whatever gods might be brave enough to present themselves in so impious a place, I made my first furtive step into hell.
Stone stairs, stone walls, stone ceiling... It was almost as though all of the cost skimped on the rest of the dump had been at once put to use here in the catacombs below. I was certain that, if I could see, the walls might very well be covered in tapestries and wall-hangings of Egyptian or Roman design. Perhaps the ceiling would be decorated with carvings or mirrors to entice and confuse the traveller. Alas, despite my mind's fancies, I could not perceive any of these possibilities, as the darkness was rather absolute.
That horrid grating soudn which had, to this point, led me here rather abruptly stopped. I hadn't noticed while it had commenced, but my teeth were rather tightly clenched, grinding against each other. I stopped the span of four heartbeats, then forged on forward, unwilling to allow the silence to frighten me any more than that dreadful cacophony. I felt my way along the walls, again cursing my inability to cast my senses out as normally I would have. I must have been accurate about the wall-hangings, however, as I did brush across several leather-and-silk textures as I groped about the passage.
Upon finding myself at a T-junction, I attempted to calculate from the few remaining echoes where my prize lay... left, or right? After short deliberation, and the swift conclusion that I wouldn't know until I had arrived, I selected left, based mostly on a lifelong preference for it.
As I travelled down that curving passageway, I was almost delighted to see a vague glow far ahead of me. Almost, you see, because of the sickly green hue it cast on the walls some meters up from my position. A hue that seemed, almost of its own volition, to cling to the corridor despite physics. It was in these considerations I found myself when the voices intruded.
"You'll not find us, human stain. There are places even the Empowered were never meant to tread."
"Come now, manling, you value your life more than this? Return home, find your wife... spend this earth's last days with her..."
"It is no use... He chooses sorrow and death instead of the fleeting delights of family and home. Welcome, then, ill-advised investigator... Welcome to the maw of Oblivion, and the end of your world."
My nerves were set even more on edge, of course, once I discovered that these voice were not drawn from an external source, but rather they echoed inside the confines of my own psyche. Again, I took several minutes to gather myself, and consider my situation. Obviously, despite the caution I had to this point attempted, my presence here had been noted by the dark powers bound to this place. They also used the formal "Empowered" to denote my abilities, so there would be no advantage in not utilizing those same talents now.
With a certain degree of hesitation, I removed my hand from the dagger in my coat, and formed my hands into the shape of the Spirit-Brush, letting the words of Evocation spill from my lips in their honeyed song. I felt the current of strength drift out from my Will to interact with the tapestry woven beneath all things, allowing me to change what I didn't like of the world into that which I might prefer.
Delicate work, of course, and so it was made even more difficult when all of those previous voices, and a legion of others, exploded in my skull, peels of laughter too loud to ignore. But it is against just such an intrusion that the Academy Professors condition us, and so I was prepared. I finished the incantation, and all at once, the voices stopped. The corridor was lit in a brilliant ruby light, emanating from all of the conflux points on my hands. As the tension between my shoulderblades eased, I continued my march down the passageway, a little more confident.
All of that dauntless courage nearly escaped me when that wretched keening of metal-on-metal started up again, this time much closer than before. Conscious of it now, I forced my muscles to relax, my teeth to unclench, to retain my dignity and composure as I crossed the last few meters to the entryway.
The sight that opened up before me was not of a majestic hallway with a summoning circle inlaid in gold, or even of an infernal pit teeming with demons and harpies. No, it was at once more petrifying, yet unassuming than either of these.
A single room, no larger than my living room, made of the same dull granite as the hallways behind me. The ceiling was lower than a man of my considerable height might find comfortable... but if the closeness of the ceiling is where I drew my uneasyness, it would be because of what was painted across it, and the walls... and the floor.
In a rust-colour that could be nothing other than the lifeblood of innocence, runes and glyphs of all blasphemous design were crammed overfull on any surface that would take them. Several overlaid one another, creating macabre images to graven to be put to paper. The metallic tang of the morphemes throughout the room left me all but choking on the bile rising in my throat. And it is with not-too-great a shame I say that the next image left me uncontrollably vomitting.
Standing near the centre of the room, a hulk of a man stooped, draped in gore and entrails to diverse and numerous to consider. His shoulders heaved as with some great physical exertion, his mammoth paws clenching and unclenching. A sharpened stone, ten-inches in length, held clutched in crimson-stained teeth. His gaze rose from its place on the floor, slowly, to greet my own. A gobbet of flesh hanging from the tangled mass of hair on his head dropped, only to be caught abruptly in his snakelike forked tongue as it shot out between tooth and stone to catch the morsel.
I'm certain that, were my focus on this abomination before me, I would have found satisfaction in his gold-slit eyes as he watched me purge my stomach of refuse at his diabolical image. When again my eyes met his, he was holding the sharpened stone in his hand, that vile tongue dancing slowly across his black-skinned lips, tempting and taunting at the same.
Gathering the scraps of courage I had remaining, and drawing on the rage of dear Nylus' death, I prepared to speak to this bane... this desecration of any pure thought or deed. But before I could find my voice, he found his.
In a voice I'll not forget for so long as I live and breathe, he spoke to me. The sound of it compelling thoughts of the First Fall, of the Great Plagues, and every other manner of hellish long-ago, intoned slowly with invective and bile.
"Empowered... You have come a long way to die." A simple statement, yet one spoken with such clarity of purpose that I simply could not doubt him. Still, I found my voice, and tried my speech... though my throat was dry and my conviction hollow.
"Damned Soul, you have desecrated the Natural Order of the tapestry, and cut the ties by which all good and right things are bound... Rep..." My voice failed me a moment. "Repent, and you shall find absolution through fire." I finished the age-old censure upon dry lips, again slipping my hand into my coat to find that dagger.
A long silence, punctuated only by that vile sound, the source of which I could not place, despite it's proximity. Our eyes held locked by each other, though I daresay his held sway over that binding more than my own, before he deigned to speak.
"My pretty little thing..." He took a step forward, more gore dripping from his ebon skin. "I have no intention, nor desire, to find absolution. I am not in need of repentance, but rather, I offer it. Come, dear, sweet boy. Do you not hear it? Do you not hear the sound of your earth's salvation?" That dreadful voice cooed, malice and mischief behind his gold eyes.
The unearthly clamour rose again in pitch, sounding for all the world like an accumulated abyss in sonic form. My ears pained for silence, and my brain screamed in panic, as though it knew but couldn't quite grasp what it was being subject to. He must have taken my silence to mean that no, I did not understand. And damn him to his Oblivion for enlightening me.
"That is the protestations of your worlds thin barriers... They buckle and crack under the pressure of the Other World. You see, it will begin here, but will spread swiftly." He paused, tapping that stone against his blood-flecked lips, almost as though considering tomorrow's weather. "Like a poison, the joy of Oblivion will move from place to place, ending all life, love, glory, and rapture. All pain, suffering, fear, and dread. All of it will end, young empowered..." This last spoken without the consideration of it's previous uses. "All shall be found naught... All shall be made equal in demise."
The gravity of his intentions fell upon me in crashing waves, and at that moment, my mind was made to realize the truth. I could see it, just beyond the gauzy membrane seperating our world and the Next. An inexorable nothing ever-so-slowly taking up space, pressing against that which was with that which wasn't. I may have screamed then, or it may have happened an eternity later... I don't know. I only know that my fingers fell nerveless from that dagger, and I crumpled to the floor, unable to tear my bleeding gaze from the horrid sight.
The rank disonance of this unholy rape was dwarfed only by that laugh... that painful, truthful laugh so full of spite and misery. This man, this... thing which brought such end to all we know... he is still down there... several hundred meters below our earth... and that Oblivion is still coming. It may not arrive in my lifetime, he told me, but it will arrive.
It is for this reason, Chairperson, that I must insist you not build your Institution upon these unhallowed grounds. You must cast out his evil, if there is any way. Do what you will with his darkness, but do not aid him... Do not give him the souls of the mentally crippled. I have written you this, my account... the experience which drove me to your care. Please! If you do not heed the words of a scholar, at least heed the wisdom of a broken mind! No good will come of your building an Asylum here! You will only expediate disaster! Please!
I await your reply, Chairperson...
-Dr. Hendry Fueller