Amber Alert: Kaede -- Connor Harold Steptoe
Age: 6 months oldEyes: BlueHair: BrownLast seen wearing: a white "onesie" shirt and blue overallsThe child was abducted from his mother's apartment in Kaede, while his caretaker was resting following an allergic reaction.
8.30 pm June 1st -- Capitol City Emergency Alert System
The Sentinal: June 16th -- Reward Offered for Return of Kidnapped Child
KAEDE -- "I'm already in debt for the procedure that brought him into the world, but I'll sell everything I have to get him back," vows Jane Steptoe, an accountant at Metacortex. The single mother has offered a reward of up to $100,000 for the safe return of her son, Connor Steptoe, age six months, who disappeared from her apartment after the nanny taking care of him suffered a bout of food poisoning while attending a Kaede Kings - Hampton Green G-Men game at Brown Field on June 2nd. Two female paramedics who treated the nanny are still persons of interest in this case. "This is the third tragedy to hit us in almost as many years," says Ms. Steptoe's maternal grandfather, Harold Hannaford, referring to the disappearance of his granddaughter Mercedes Hannaford in November of 2005 and the death of Mercedes's older brother Merrill in a terrorist attack on an office Downtown. "Seems like the universe has it in for this family, but we won't let it shake us." Mr. Hannaford has offered to mortgage his own home to help pay the reward.
© 2008 The Sentinel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Sentinal: June 18th -- TV Station Signal Hijacked by High-Tech Pranksters
BALDWIN HEIGHTS -- "We can't tell what the heck happened here," says Walter Brokaw, director of CCBS's Nightly News. "But it was an inappropriate gesture and an affront to the free transmission of ideas." Last night's broadcast of a debate among the candidates for this year's mayorial election was interrupted when the signal suddenly cut to static and a prank message began to scroll across the screens of monitors all over the station. Viewers found themselves staring at a message reading "Bring Home The Bacon", which was accompanied by a recording of what one expert found to be from a championship-level hog-calling contest.
System analysts aren't sure where the message came from, but redpill subculture members, many of whom are computer hackers may be to blame. A similar incident occured on KCFC, the Capitol City Family Channel, when a 24-hour looping broadcast of "Miracle on 34th Street" was interrupted with a hijacked broadcast of the action flick "Die Hard". Authorities aren't saying if any persons of interest have been identified, but they are looking into leads to the identities of four young persons, two males and two females, seen leaving an office in a building across the plaza from Network Media.
The Sentinal: September 7th -- Odd gathering in and commotion near Yueng Park
MURASAKI -- A local Tai Chi practioner, Miss Misato Ryuuga, was teaching a small evening class in the local park, when she reports seeing a group congregating near the northern entrance. "A lot of them were dressed oddly, some in business suits and those long coats, but I spotted one girl in a yellow dress who looked like she was ready for a picnic," Miss Ryuuga reports. "Some of them fired on the gang members [that congregate in the park] and frightened them away, but it frightened my students and we had to retire to my studio."
Later that evening, a night watchman in a office building north of the park reports seeing hearing gunfire coming from an office on the eighth floor. The watchman and his partner went to investigate the disturbance, but found no one up there. "There must have been some sort of intruders," says the watchman, who wishes to remain nameless. "There were bullet holes in the floor and the dividers of the office cubicles, and there was one computer that was switched on as if someone had been using it to access the office mainframe."
It is unclear at this time if either of these events are related. Video from a surveillance camera identifies some of the members of the gathering in the park as bodyguards, assassins, couriers, and others known to work in the employ of an ex-patriate French billionaire.
(It's really quite nice to see how the "awakened" community affects the lives of the bluepills, those still connected to the regular world and how they perceive those effects. Especially considering that a lot of the time, their opinions and the conclusions they draw from that can be just as intuitive and insightful as the redpills'. Kind of silly to think that simply because we've removed ourselves from that environment that we can see beyond it - further and more clearly than those who haven't.)
(( Mm, I've always wondered how the Blues react to some of the odd things that the Redpills trigger in the Matrix. Think of the reaction of the guy who gets his cellphone swiped from him by Neo during the footchase in the third act of the first movie. Even moreso: can you imagine a traffic reporter for a local radio or TV station reporting on the freeway chase in Reloaded?? Must have been going out of his mind. I like to think that while the Reds are more like an iceberg, that the majority of their undertakings goes largely unseen by the average Joe Blue on the street, but there's always that ten percent that they do see. It's fun to think of how their minds try and come up with logical explanations for the wierd things that go on: vampire and lupine Exiles are probably extremely wierd Goth types, and I think Andres Bonifaceo used to refer to the Reds as "drug subculture" types, back when Chadwick was still doing the Sentinel.
(( And as I said further up the thread: these are incredibly hard to write, for something so short and simple. The hard part is telling what happened by not telling all the details, and trying to describe it from an outsider's POV.))
The Sentinal: September 9th -- Handwriting on the wall in local churches
RICHLAND, WESTVIEW -- The caretakers at three local churches, Mara Congregational Church, Camon Heights Congregational Church, and First Unified Church in Sobra Shores, have reported finding handwriting on the walls of the vestibules in the respective houses of worship. The instigator may or may not have had something to do with an odd incident witnessed last evening in Mara Congregational Church. A local resident, Rita Rizzo, tells us, "I'd come in to pray the eighth day of a novena to St. Jude, when I saw a tall, bald man dressed in black with no shoes on com running into the church. Three other people, two women and a young man, came in as if they were following him." She could not make out much of the conversation, but the bald man seemed, "really upset or scared about something".
She continues that she saw one of the women, "a young girl dressed all in white, with amber-colored eyes" run out the side door and come back sometime later, taking what looked like "one of those old-fashioned feather pens" out of her breast pocket. The bald man then scribbled something on the wall behind the confessionals, after which he seemed less agitated. He spoke at length with the three young people, then approached the girl in white, who then took off her coat. The bald man then proceeded to write something on the girl's shoulder, "almost like he was tattooing something on her". The girl gasped as if in pain, and the bald man left shortly afterward. "She didn't seem too phazed by what happened, but I called the police anyway to check on her," Ms. Rizzo tells us.
When authorities arrived shortly afterwards, they found no sign of the intruders, except for the odd handwriting on the wall.
The Sentinal: September 13th -- Explosion destroys local drug dealers' den
LUCERO POINT -- A series of explosions rocked a neighborhood close to the Rogers Way line. Residents in a modestly upscale enclave report being awakened when a blast demolished a house known to be used by a strange gang who appeared to be trafficking in prescription drugs. Windows in the houses opposite the structure were smashed and damage was done to the facades, but few injuries are reported. "I can't say I'm not glad to see them gone," says Margarete Weiss-Wolff, the head of a local homeowners' association. "The people in that house were in and out all night, slamming car doors, revving motorcycles, playing loud music. I think they had some sort of wierd werewolf roleplaying game going on, since you'd hear howling and noises like dogs fighting, but it didn't sound quite right. My father used to run a dog-fighting ring, and I know what it sounds like."
Emergency crews have pulled the bodies of several persons from the wreckage. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing: they'd packed explosives around the center support pylong in the basement," says Michel Judge, a bomb expert with the police department. When asked if this could have been the work of terrorists, Mr. Judge replied, "Not likely. This may be the work of someone person with deep pockets higher up the food chain in whatever ring this group was involved in. The explosives used were military grade and the person who set them was probably ex-military themself."
A witness claims to have seen two men and one woman in military clothing running through a courtyard a half an hour before the blast, but no one has been able to identify them.
The Sentinal: September 17th -- Bizarre, occult occurance in Casino
CAMON HEIGHTS -- "I'm trying to run a business here," Terrell Bernarde tells the Sentinel. Last evening, an investor whom he wishes not to identify, entered, accompanied by "two young-looking companions or bodyguards, one a young woman in white, the other young man in grey". The trio, along with a third young man who accompanied them but didn't seem part of the group, sat at the bar for a while, "just talking. The investor then went out, leaving the other three. A moment later, a "strange-looking, barefoot man in a grey tunic" entered and threw what looked like a brown powder on the young man in grey. The stranger then left, after which the young man started acting strangely, " Like he was on something." The woman in white then called someone on her cellphone; shortly afterward, a young man in white and a young man in black entered. They conferred in low voices, then the young woman in white asked the bartender to "clear everyone out". The bartender and Mr. Bernarde led several customers out of the bar area, whereupon the woman in white shut the doors leading from it to the main floor. "Something was going on in there," Mr. Bernarde reports. "I listened at the door and heard what sounded like someone chanting in a wierd foreign language, like they were having some kind of ritual going on. I can't have that sorr of thing happening in my buisness, but I couldn't very well toss them out, in case our investor decided to withdraw his support."
Needless to say, the mysterious group later left the casino without further incident.
The Sentinal: September 28th -- Odd antics at party in the Vault
LAMAR -- Several young persons known to work for an expatriate billionaire of questionable repute had gathered in the local hotspot when some odd activity started. A "rather good looking fellow dressed like a Fed of some sort" entered and one of the partygoers, "a girl with wild red hair and a red get-up" left rather quickly, reports one of the bartenders, Ms. Caroline Maas. "I think these people were Redpills, and the Feds don't take too well to their types, so it didn't surprise me. But man, the Feds are hiring lookers these days." Later, another, a young man in a blackish-green leather coat, at first appeard to have had too much to drink, but according to Ms. Maas, he'd hardly had anything.
Wierd killings point to possible ritual
FURIHATA -- Caretakers at the Pi Shan Ting luxury apartment tower arrived at work this morning to find several bodies laid out on the pavement. The bodies, identified as being those of several members of the Silver Dragon gang, were laid in a large circle and had been bent so that their toes were thrust into their open mouths, and yet none of the spinal bones had been broken. The coroner, Mr. E. D. Samuel-Baroni, reports this is "anatomically improbable, but the evidence is there". A local expert on the occult points out that the placement of the bodies suggested an ourobous, "an emblem signifying death and rebirth found in several cultures -- Asian, Celtic, Egyptian and Norse" -- consisting of a dragon biting its tail", and adds that "given the name of the gang, there may be some cultish significance, but at the present, it's hard to trace why and what system it belongs to."© 2008 The Sentinel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Sentinal: October 14th -- Escaped wild animal in Creston Heights
Early yesterday morning, a groundskeeper at the Creston Heights Museum reports seeing a large animal running past the august institution. "Looked like the biggest black Labrador Retriever I'd ever seen, except the ears were wrong and the eyes were red as hot coals," says John Apfel. "Looked like she'd been in a bad fight: her coat was torn and she was running scared." The fifty-three year old immigrant from Germany reports that he contacted the Metro City Animal Control, but when the officials arrived, the dog could not be found anywhere. "But someone had dumped a bunch of papers into the plaza," Mr. Apfel adds. He and his crew reported that they tried to collect the papers, but that a high wind blew most of them away before they had much success.
The Sentinal: October 15th -- Memorial service held near landmarkFURIHATA -- Relatives of the members of the Hirose School for Arts and Sciences who were killed in the blast that shook the area gathered near the Taipei Monument to pay their last respects to the deceased. Among the victims of this senseless act of terrorism were a group a high-school aged students out on an evening's expedition, visiting the various monuments throughout the district.
Three students in particular are being remembered, all from the same Tenth Grade class: Rei Miyazaki, a budding artist; Shinji Anno, son of Hiraki Anno, a head of research and development at MetaCortex's robotics division; and an exchange student from Germany, Mina Zepplin. "These kids had so much to hope for," reports their teacher, Misato Kaneda. "And their lives were cut short so senselessly by people who clearly set no value in human lives, but only in whatever bogus ideals they've been indoctrinated with. The most I can do right now is hope their souls are in a better place."
October 17th -- Break in at Museum
CRESTON HEIGHTS -- Two young men and a woman, all dressed in dark clothes, were seen fleeing the area late last night. Alarms failed to go off and a containment system was somehow bypassed, but museum officials are still trying to determine what was taken. A bystander claims to have seen the woman run past carrying "a large, thick leather book", but many of the rare books of that description had currently been taken out of the musuem's exhibit rotation and put in storage, pending cleaning and repairs.
The Sentinal: November 6th -- Bizarre late Halloween display gone awry?
ZIA -- Groundskeepers at the Kalt Chemical Corporation were stunned to find what appeared to be several safes scattered about a plaza in front of the company's main branch in Richland, as well as what appeared to be several badly damaged Halloween props, mostly life-sized models of "demons, werewolves, skeletons in armor and vampires". There have been no reports of vandalized Hallowe'en displays and local costume stores reported no thefts of their merchandise.
Would-be broom flier takes nasty spill
SAI KUNG -- A bizarre parkour stunt seems to have gone awry in Sai Kung Canton. "Looked like someone who'd read the Harry Potter books a few times too many," says Ray Yao, a landlord of an apartment complex, who reports seeing a young man racing across a roof while straddling a broom. The young man then dove off the roof of the ten-story building and crash-landed in the branches of a tree. "I thought at first someone had left one of those crashed-witch decorations up there," says Susan Kwon, a resident of the building, who spotted the man as she was returning home from grocery shopping. "But I got closer and realised it was a person." Ms. Kwon ran inside to call for rescue workers, but by the time they arrived, the young man had vanished, leaving the broom still snagged in the tree. A trail of blood spatter ran from the foot of the tree, across the plaza to a phonebooth, then vanished.
The Sentinal: November 18th -- Business News -- Sharpe Jewellers announces a change of hands
The local chain featuring the finest selection jewelry has announced that its twenty-three stores are now under the ownership of Josefina Bourdeaux, daughter of Dr. Tranque Bourdeaux, a businessman of somewhat questionable repute. Details of the transfer of ownership have not been disclosed to the public, and given Dr. Bourdeaux's secretive nature and his connections to an expatriate French billionaire, it is not likely to become availible.
The Sentinel: January 4th -- Car damaged in strange accident
ROGERS WAY -- "I swear on my mother's grave, I have no idea where that woman came from," says Maury Purcell, a worker at the Capitol City power plant, who reported a very bizarre accident last night. While he was driving home to his apartment in Appollyn, his car was nearly totalled when something fell onto the roof of the 1991 Honda Accord. Mr. Purcell claims he had seen "something flying through the air that looked like someone bungee jumping off that stairway monument". A rescue crew on the scene at first thought Mr. Purcell had suffered head trauma that affected his recall, but despite the damage to the car and despite the fact that the crew had to use the Jaws of Life to free him from the wreckage, Mr Purcell had only minor cuts ans bruises. A crewmember on the scene took note of two shoe-print-shaped dents in the center of the car's roof. How it could have gotten there, and how anyone jumping from that high could have survived the fall have police and rescue workers stymied.
© 2009 The Sentinel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
