Scene #9749: American Psychic

Owner	Pose
Flamel Parsons	Following Flamel Parsons is honestly pretty straightforward stuff. Especially when he's taken up a small dorm in the Foundation for the duration of the hearings, meetings, and other activities. - At precisely 6:00 AM (local time), without any alarm, Parsons wakes up. - Immediately he engages square breathing, and then asserts several affirmations: "Your intentions are greater than any chaos. Your truth is greater than any misconception. Your mind is greater than any matter. Your thoughts shape your day. Today, you bring unrelenting kindness." And then he gets up. - 6:01, brushing teeth. - 6:02, washing face. He begins conversing with the mirror about his plans. - 6:03, combing hair. He generally lays out his intended schedule for the day, on the assumption that someone is monitoring him through one-way glass behind his own bathroom mirror. This is likely not the case. - 6:04, the closet is open and one of 12 near-identical outfits is selected. He has finished up the description of his schedule and probably idly rambled to ask if, among the many he assumes are monitoring, there are any members of one of the secret societies he recently heard about. That usually changes each day. - 6:07, on the dot, his coffee is done, having been started by a telekinetic hand earlier. - 6:10, he has finished setting out a biscuit, two sausages, a fried egg, and an apple, and telekinetically gets a newspaper to read. He usually advises anyone who's monitoring him that he won't be moving or doing much for about twenty minutes. This has always been true. - 6:30, he's telekinetically scrubbing down and putting away the dishes. - 6:32, on the dot, every day, he's out the door. Today it's a hallway in the Foundation campus. And that's how it has gone every day so far. On a Monday, he tends to head towards a small office he's commandeered for the purposes of an in-depth investigation into medical records that are constantly being delivered to him. Nothing unusual about that today, as well. He's surprisingly friendly to passerby in the halls, wide-smiled and cheery.
Regulus	The Guard has been assigned to 'keep tabs on' Madam Z's allies from outside the Foundation and Flamel Parsons is one of those allies and even a former member of Manus Vindictae. Suspicious! But the real reason she's been following after him is because she feels like he feels like out of all of them he's the one who will treat her best over doing this shit job she doesn't really want to do anyway. What Lilian said she'd do scared her! That was a scary thing! Meanwhile, Flamel tells her she can take breaks periodically. And best of all, if someone gives her grief she can just say he's obviously the most suspicious of all of them due to his Manus connections. Naturally, she doesn't go into his room. But she knows where he'll be. And the best part is, it's only at 6:00 AM which means she doesn't have to get up early. Sure, his schedule is weird and the fact he does the same thing pretty much every morning is also pretty weird, and she heard those affirmations while leaning her ear against the door, but at least she knows exactly when she need to turn invisible so that he doesn't see her while he's moving out of the door (and she knows she doesn't have to worry for twenty minutes about him opening the door early so that's nice!). But this time, The Guard has an extra objective besides slacking off because she was starting to feel like she was taking advantage of Flamel helping her out without giving anything back and so she wants to give something back this time! So this time, instead of turning invisible when he's about to open the door-- --he instead finds a crab. The crab holds out a chocolate bar, one that looks suspiciously similar to the ones from the cafeteria. It waggles the chocolate bar at him expectantly, delicately held between its pincers. She knows this looks weird. But she is one hundred percent banking on Flamel being so accustomed to weird shit that he won't think twice about this.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel regards crustacian, as a wise man once said. Specifically, he regards the crab at his feet when he opens the door. He muses to himself, "I wonder if critters have 'carcinization' the way people do." What does THAT mean? Well, anyway, he scoops the crab up and tugs the chocolate bar from the grippers. "Thanks! I'm watching my weight." So why'd he take it? "I'm trying to see if it's going to try any funny business." He says, letting the bar drift up, partially unwrap itself, and settle near his mouth for some nibbling as he heads off for work. "Gimmie a pinch if you're trying to go somewhere else." He says, as if he's able to speak to animals, which he's not. As if a crab would not pinch him anyway for unwanted handling or conveyance. When he settles in at his office space (6:45:15 rather than 6:45:00 like normal) he's got a number of packets of information to parse through. Around 7:00 is when he tunes into his favorite channel (95 1/2 KLOB pirate radio) for what seems to be a confused young child trying to DJ using the world's most meager record collection. It has probably been tough thus far to get a feel for what Flamel is actually looking all this crap up for; the volume of data that comes in obfuscates the meaning he might find in it. Maybe an opportunity for more insight, to interact directly? He's nibbling pensively on the chocolate while he turns through page after page, only rarely making a note or quickly getting a copy of something. This partciular thing, it hasn't been clear what he's doing or why. Around 7:30 is when he'll probably tune over to some other business he has, which is apparently, he's got a team down at a quarantine somewhere hosing some type of constantly-regenerating kaiju down with various acids and napalms and suchlike to try to keep it contained, SCP-style. That one, also, is fresh insight.
Regulus	Crustacean regards Flamel Parsons. The crustacean in question gives a hapless little wiggle of its body as if to say heck if it knows. Maybe Flamel has unlocked the ability to talk to animals after all? The crab is not aware if Flamel can speak to animals or not but, crucially, even if he can the crab hasn't learned how to talk while as a crab. A problem occurs! Flamel is collecting her! The crab doesn't want to be captured! But alas, hubris has its punishment and she is captured! The crab wiggles its feet to try and get away... but she is too slow! She's actually pretty accustomed to schmoving along as a crab but she wasn't expecting to just get scooped up! What does she do now?? She could just pinch him. But she wanted to do something nice for him, not physically harm him! She'd then have to find some other way to thank the guy and she can't think of anything else. Get him a slightly differently colored suit? He wears the same thing every day! And so, Flamel has a crab for the day, having successfully been delayed for fifteen seconds. The crab looks over what Flamel is looking at. She has no idea what he's looking for and even when the Guard activates her 'Actually Using Her Brain' skill, it's still clueless to her. But maybe she can figure out what exactly he IS looking for? He does talk aloud a lot... All she needs to do is... She reaches out with a pincer claw and pokes it in the direction of some random piece of data, hoping that Flamel will loudly remark as to why that isn't what he's looking for. Or why it is? It probably isn't what he's looking for. She has no idea what he's looking for. And honestly she doesn't really super care about what he's looking for but she'd be happy to help if she did out of gratitude if she was confident it didn't get her in trouble. Which she isn't just yet. Once they reach the kaiju though she's definitely going to panic at seeing a giant monster being bathed in napalm and other horrifying chemicals and will wiggle rapidly trying to get away from Flamel, having forgotten about the pinching option in her shock. It's not even 8 AM yet! This is too early for kaiju!
Flamel Parsons	Flamel doesn't know much about why crabs do things. He peers at the page. "No," He says. "Probably not, at least." He holds it up. It's the medical profile of a human with Situs Inversus, a disease mirroring his organs. He double checks something else, a psych eval for the same man. This one might be data from the eighties, which is to say, a couple of years ago. "No arcanist tendencies for him either. Or really any outlier." He pushes that one aside. "Appreciate the chocolate, but I don't think you'll help with this one!" With that, though, she can probably get a better idea of what he's doing. The process is simple: Grab a medical file for Situs Inversus, and try to find a correlation to... something. 'Arcanist tendencies'. Psych evals, chemical responses, even economic difficulties seem to get considered. Any time a human seems 'more arcanist' when they have Situs Inversus, or an arcanist seems 'more human' when they have it, then he's quick to sort it aside -- and to try to reference it against larger arcanist-human tendencies among people with physical deformities! He's not making a lot of progress. Nothing notable on this study task, but as one of dozens, it's something that gives information. Could she help? If not now, maybe some day, in the far future...? Luckily, while the Kaiju is surely dangerous, it's only on a screen, and Flamel's casual, bright, cheerful call doesn't take him away from the Foundation. He hardly minds the crab scuttling away when it comes time to make that call, but he hasn't moved away from the desk when the wretched visage is finally gone and he's back to his investigation.
Regulus	The Guard thinks Flamel is right. She probably won't be able to help with this, either as a crab or as Merel. She has an idea of what he's looking for now. The grey area between arcanist and human. But why? Isn't he Manus? Sure, he seems nice, but she's never known the Manus to particularly care about exactly where that line was. Nor the Foundation for that matter. Picrasmsa candy might be toxic to arcanists even two generations away from being pureblooded, but in the end couldn't you just say that trying to logic through this is like trying to logic through The Storm? The truth is, is that The Guard can't 'be a crab' indefinitely, it takes active effort to maintain the transformation so it's a good thing she has a chance to scurry away... Not too long after, The Guard returns as Flamel hasn't said he wasn't doing anything worth spying on to let her go just yet. It's an open area in the Foundation, so she can just sort of walk around like normal which is good because she's getting tired from using her arcane skill so long to maintain form of crab. She has reasoned that since Flamel has been helping her with spying on him, she should try to be helpful on his research. Fair's only fair. As she walks by, she says aloud, clearly attempting to emulate Flamel, "If I were looking into edge-case arcanists or humans, I'd probably not look at it scientifically so much as arcanely, though maybe looking at early records of arcanists raised by humans could help." She says to the air, though a little quietly because it's a little embarrassing to talk to 'nobody' in case 'somebody is listening'.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's work style is dedicated and focused, but he'll always make some time for a little subliminal influence! That's why he likes an open office plan. If he had an antenna or something, it would have surely perked when the passerby muttered something that could help inspire. --- The Parsons Institute Department of Inspiration receives an anonymous fax -- and they love a good anonymous fax. It doesn't take long before options make their way to the Problems and Creativity departments, and form fully as directives under the auspice of the facility Director. --- He puts in a few record requests. No big announcement one way or another, but he does stand, eventually, around lunchtime -- 12 precisely. Gotta be polite, take a lunch hour around the time a surveillor would want one. A BLT with precisely-calibrated quantities of mayo and chips that he eats in a highly regular timing of non-patterned pacing, always finding a new group of Foundation clerks and workers at the cafeteria to chatter brightly with each day. Always friendly! Never friends. He's back among records soon enough, but only once he's certain a hypothetical surveillor would be back on-duty. SPDM is on-campus and they have the densest literary resources. He's looking for arcanist history and records, arcanist theory and concepts now. What did arcanists feel about deformity, about medical conditions -- but he has to track them indirectly. They wouldn't keep simple, straightforward appendices about mirrored appendixes, so to speak. Arcanist sinusitis, arcanist heart conditions, and how they affect arcanum. Or weirder things, like bloodline-long experiments involving pre-industrial surgery, or alchemical inversion as a medium for arcanum... And a totally random, arbitrary spread of topics sought out. Were humans adopted by Yoruban arcanists better-suited when they were twins? Were Aboriginal and Malagasy picrasma trees, grown upside-down, less toxic? It's not clear if he's making better progress (probably not especially), but it's more than clear that, when prompted even slightly, he can think like an arcanist.
Regulus	The Guard is relieved that Flamel Parsons didn't just start talking back to her. It's entirely plausible in her mind that he would have because he is also the sort of person who announces to spies when the ideal times to spy on him are which she thinks is a little quirky. It was a little annoying at first, but buying into it has been a load off her back. Okay! She feels she has sufficiently repaid the kindness of the guy who let her slack off. She has no idea if that thought of hers would help but his research did make her think of her own parents for a moment there. Boy she hopes he's not looking for anything weird though... Well, she did her part so she can now take the rest of the day off-- --is what she'd say if she wasn't still supposed to spy on the guy. Okay, she can spy on him now and see if she learns anything new thanks to the power of anonymous fax. It's win win for both spyer and spyee. Rationalization complete, she decides to just kind of openly sit nearby and eat a sandwich while trying to unobtrusively look over and see what he's up to. As with last time in the cafeteria, she has this tendency to horde chocolate bars early in the week so she can have them throughout the week even if she can't make it back to the cafeteria on later days. She is a bit precious about her food. She thinks, observingly, that Flamel doesn't seem to have friends. Why is that? He seems perfectly friendly. Nobody's asking to sit with him but it doesn't seem like he's being bullied or anything. She feels a bit nostalgic returning to the SPDM Library but since she's already there she checks out a book she's been meaning to read while glancing over to Flamel when she thinks he isn't paying attention, though she's being a little more casual about it at this point because it feels like Flamel wants to be spied on--not TOO casual, since it feels rude to be like super obvious about spying even if they're all in agreement about how the spying should go? Like, she doesn't want to go all out here, but she needs to be the queen of doing ''just enough'' here. The Guard's own interest seems to be largely focused around mythological and arcane creatures. Gryphons, sea serpents, that sort of thing. Maybe she'd get along with Madeleine? Unfortunately, now that Flamel has shifted avenues, she's even more confused about what he's actually looking for here--or if he's making any progress, but she periodically takes a note in a notepad in case if she dots down the clues she'll eventually find ''the pattern''.
Flamel Parsons	It truly, truly can't be this easy, can it? No matter how close one watches, Flamel seems truly, absolutely, certainly unaware of the Guard's presence. Certainly, he's always believing that someone's following him, but he just has no thought at all that it could be specifically her. Does he want to be spied on, or does he just believe in his heart that the world only makes sense if that sort of thing is happening, to everyone, everywhere? Does he have any friends here? The day starts winding down before too long. Work hours are long but not unending. Where does he go afterwards? "One for Chicago, please." He's at the ticket desk of the transit center just outside the Foundation, boarding for the next Warpgate passage. It's not more than a twenty minute trip to Chicago of 1913. He doesn't spend much time there. There's not a lot to do here, now that Manus presence is reversed and elsewhere. It's a city that will someday become the city of Chicago in 1929, or, more likely, won't. In 1928, a parking garage will stand here. In 1913, a much smaller collection of squat residences. Flamel takes a seat in front, and just seems to talk to himself. Oddly, it's not the same talking-to-himself that he's been doing, speaking to a surveillor, so it's slightly harder to catch. "...Less like a brick wall and more like being lost, if that makes sense? I kind of envy your old clairvoyance. I could really use a hint, but then again, if you'd had more time to say it... Pfffhah. Well, no use being a sad-sack! So, we've got some major stuff coming up, a big case. I know, yeah, I should probably be focusing on helping there. Just hard to keep this off my mind instead..." He leans back on the bench, staring up, kicking his feet. "I even managed to catch just the slightest bit of a memory of you there, did you know? They had it in an optic nerve buffer. Worse than the photos, but they had a few more senses. I was even able to hear your voice for a second, isn't that funny?" He rambles a while more, no more than ten minutes probably. If the Guard checks this address later, it'll be found to be the brick parking garage where Schneider Greco and Flamel performed their very first operation together. He hasn't gone to this one yet, but with the 'big day' coming up tomorrow, it looks like he decided to self-soothe there. He does talk as if there were a friend there. He'll pick up some street food for dinner, subtly decontaminate it with some Psychonauts techniques, and head back to the Foundation soon after.
Regulus	The Guard hasn't been relieved from spying on Flamel just yet. Watching him work for long periods starts to tire her out and she almost dozes off so she ends up shifting to reading her book while lingering nearby, glancing up every couple of pages. She's an involved reader and can easily lose herself in what she's reading and it takes her considerable effort to pull her eyes from the pages to check in on Flamel from a distance. When he suddenly heads out to Chicago, that's pretty unexpected! She has to hurriedly buy a ticket with her own money. She hopes that she'll be compensated later. She won't. What could the Manus want with Chicago now, The Guard wonders. Or Elites. Or Psychonauts. She doesn't know. Upon arrival she collects a local transit map just in case and soon murmurs an incantation to go invisible again, following Flamel to where he finally sits doen. What is he doing? He didn't say she didn't have to follow so what is this? And what she gets feels personal. And heartfelt. And real enough that when she listens, she gets tearyeyed for whomever this lost friend is. She rubs at her eyes quickly lest it disturb her camouflage but ... she doesn't need to know who Flamel is talking about to feel sympathy. The Guard can weep when fictional characters are lonely let alone real people. Her immediate assumption is someone lost in The Storm but she reminds herself later that he isn't really Foundation. It could be anything. Friends you hoped would be lifelong could be snatched away from a second. Your parents could be taken away suddenly in an instant. It feels like Flamel is unlikely to find what he's looking for, in truth, and maybe what he's looking for doesn't even exist. She senses that this means she likely won't be following Flamel anymore once she delivers her last report. And she certainly has no other way to help him. But she can't just do nothing, can she? She looks at the map in hand, light bending around it and her fist clenches around it as she sneaks away partly through Flamel's rambling. Moments later what looks like a bird distant in the sky drops something towards Flamel. It swishes around through the air before ultimately, if uninterrupted, landing on his head: A transit map with the Green Mill Gardens and the White City Amusement park circled in pen. The Guard returns shortly after, following Flamel back to the Foundation in deep rumination.
Flamel Parsons	Yep, there's that sense that whatever Flamel is doing is mostly for him. It's not going anywhere. Hasn't for the last few days, won't still for however long he does. Yet, that thought of thinking about this like an arcanist might have planted a seed for something far, far later. The map mysteriously falls near him. Windy day, huh? He unfolds it after it plasters over his face a bit, thinking idly. Huh! The gangstalkers must be working hard today. He beams wide, getting back to his street food and nodding to himself, folding the map under one arm and thoughtfully resolving to head over there tomorrow sometime. Maybe it could be nice! Then, back to the dorm area he's taken up in the Foundation. He lets any surveillors know he's just going to be doing his workout, then watching some TV in the lounge for a while. And he does! Off to the Foundation gym (he runs cardio with his body at the same time that he lifts with his telekinesis, to keep both in shape), then enjoying some pre-recorded media in one of the lounges (given the state of the airwaves and all), then some late-night reading ('psychohistory', whatever that is). Dinner at 9:00, bathing at 9:30, brushing again at 9:50, tucking the map into a spot on his bedside table at 9:55, putting on a relaxing CD (the Theorist Mix of popular music across the eras, played in reverse to enjoy the subliminal messages). He has a few good-night things he says, to what he assumes is an empty room: "Seemed like today was a good one for subliminals, I felt pretty inspired." He gestures lightly while slowly winding his brain down. "Gangstalking coverage was solid out to even Chicago, kudos obviously. It's keeping my mental load light, I think, which will be good for me tomorrow. Lots to focus on, with that hearing... Sheesh, what a case. Well, I'll be asleep pretty soon, hope you all have a decent night yourselves. Say hi to the bureaus and agencies and suchlike for me!" He rambles quietly, to any hypothetical observer. And then, finally, exactly at 10:00 PM, after five minutes of staring at the ceiling and chattering to potential followers, Flamel falls asleep. And that's the whole day.
Regulus	The Guard isn't really lurking around Flamel until after he gets back to his room. She listens at the door, for a time, maybe more for a sense of closure than as an intent to gather intel. It sounds like he ... might be doing better? Or doing okay? What's a gangstalker? She puts these thoughts out of her mind. Sounds like there's gonna be some kind of hearing and he'll be able to focus for it? Nothing suspicious here. And isn't that the best thing she could hope for? ...It looks like she'll be returning to business as usual soon. ... She checks her watch, waits for it to hit 10:00 on the dot, and says, "Night, Flamel," before returning to her normal duties as a Vigiles officer. It's as melancholic to think about as it was inevitable, but it is what it is. She supposes she'll find out soon enough what this has all been building up to, whether she likes to or not, but she doubts it'll affect her one way or another.