Ingram's Letter Home

0:06 Hey, it's me, Ingram Nasse, in case you've forgotten the sound of my voice already. Sorry it's been so long. This thing you have is a ghost wax recorder, and that cylinder is made of actual fantoma spit, and the seals on it, you can check, could only be falsified by a dark god or something, so you know it's me.

0:30 I know I really eroded our trust when you were dealing with that thing and I was super supportive and there for you but it turned out to be that simulacrum I made that was shitty but this is actually me you can't really lie on the wax you can check for yourself anyways it's been unreasonable here lately I can hear you saying some snide shit like when isn't it or it's already unreasonable but it's something else There's...

1:07 I don't know how else to say it. There's a war. There's this secret fucking wizard war going on and it's only going to get worse. That's why I wanted to send this. I'm going to be back with the Order longer than I thought. I thought I'd get here and they'd kick my ass out again like a revolving shame door or something, but no. It's really different. These cultist heretics hit the Arden really hard. Killed Von Sid's host, marked all the librarians, and a bunch of key staff.

1:45 And the vibe here is off. Olivia's dragging ass, recovering from pushing back the cipher, and the new Sid is... It's... I mean, holy shit, I don't really know what to say. You know how when people get hurt, it makes them better or worse? They either look inward, find empathy and grow, or they get nasty? Well, they got hurt bad, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of looking inward and growing over here. One of my first cases was a bunch of thrill-kill psychos hunted some hikers and took their faces. I thought, I was all clever and shit and raised them as revenants. Let them go get their faces back. It was awesome, but Sid, I've been calling him Sid, Von Sid, and like Owen, don't feel right anymore.

2:47 Sid knows I did it, but he didn't say shit. It's exactly the kind of punitive, gory, revenge-y violence he would have kicked my ass for before, but he just mentioned the news article and said something about a problem taking care of itself, and moved on. So yeah, I thought for a second there it would be open season, but...

3:11 Oh man. Last night we found this corpse in the Ardent and went over to the Pillar to listen to this recording the dead guy brought us in the presence of a Sybil, you know, for safety. Jesus, those things are scary. 150-foot hypnotic pattern snake and the feathers and, like, this mess of pushed-together animals at the front and a huge lady and all those tits and arms and their hair moves on its own and... I can hear you.

3:46 You work for monsters. I know. But, yeah, we listened and... It was this speech... This, like, sermon by their, I don't know, prophet? And he's batshit crazy, but he's got the ear of four glorious. He was able to take out this lodge that could have dealt with the horror of any of them, but they just hit them from so many angles at once, and, yeah. A whole lodge of blades gold got iced. Fuck. Not just iced. Fucking erased.

4:26 It was, well, I'm recording this instead of sleeping, which I'm not sure I'm ever going to do again. And, oh fuck. Once the rest of this chapter finds out, they're going to go ballistic. Tell the crew to keep their heads down if they want to keep them. Seriously. No jobs, no tweaks, no capers. They have no spare resources to deal with the kind of scams we are pulling.

4:51 So it might seem like a great time to slide under the radar and get away with that shit, That's what I was thinking, but yeah, I'm thinking there's big-time danger. They're just going to start cutting throat with small-timers like us and feeding us to eaters and moving on. No jobs. Also, spread the word to the in-betweeners that Varence is out and Adam A. is in as head strife, so expect a lot more fluctuations. He's preparing a big shifting of some kind. I'll get in touch with you again with more details when I get them, but yeah. Stay out of the gaps and inner places. They're gonna try to shake them out or crush them wherever they're hiding. The in-between is gonna get rocked. Not that I blame them.

5:40 The shit we heard, what they did, these not-or-the-braid cultists or whatever they are, it was... It makes my blood run cold. It's bad. It's gonna be bad. And yet, Sid will be back in the field again tomorrow and he'll probably just have that same detached approximation of a stuffy professor coming out of his creepy new baby face and I can't believe how much I miss that old funny wet blanket version that scowled at me and let me get kicked out of here for disappointing him. Luca's cool though. He's the one with the holes they were talking about that night in the Gap Tavern. Yeah, nice guy.

6:33 Doesn't think much of me, but that just means he's got good taste. Unlike you, who loves me. I'll try to get home soon, but being here this close to the shit that's going down is just too valuable. This message is going to save a lot of lives because you are going to warn the tweeners and you're going to make damn sure the crew keeps out of trouble. Please.

7:02 It really is going to get so much worse. Take care.