Backwater Static

A hurricane forms in the same part of the Atlantic every year and it has a mesocyclone in the eyewall, which is not a thing that happens. Thirty-fourth outside any jurisdiction.

A storm that forms once a year, between June and October, in the North Atlantic.

It has the size and the pressure and the wind of a very large hurricane. It also has a rotating supercell in the eyewall, which is not something a hurricane can have.

That structure is organized and it persists and it produces sustained tornadic activity inside a storm that should tear it apart.

It does not follow the season and it does not follow the water. It has formed over water too cold to support it and it has not weakened for it.

It tracks. What it does is go somewhere, and the somewhere is not predicted by the usual physics, and it is predicted very well by asking where a lot of people are.

It does not come ashore. That is the finding that the file is built on: in every recorded year it has turned before landfall, sometimes sharply, sometimes at the last hours, and it has never crossed a coast.

It weakens offshore and dissipates and the season ends.

Shipping is a different matter. Vessels in its path are not spared and the losses are in the file.

Nobody has established anything about it beyond the behavior. It is weather, by every measurement, doing something weather does not do.

It is tracked by the ordinary meteorological infrastructure, whose data we have.

The anomalous structure is managed at the publication stage: the eyewall data is adjusted before it reaches the journals, and the arrangement covers four agencies.

Shipping is routed. That is done through the ordinary channels and it is the only thing that saves anybody.

Nothing is flown into it. The instruction is dated after the aircraft.

The turn before landfall is not relied upon, and evacuations proceed as though it will not happen.

Attack 10 · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate 6

Traits: A Supercell In The Eyewall - which cannot happen and does. It Goes Where The People Are - and the physics does not predict it. It Has Never Come Ashore - not once, and always at the last hours. Ships Are Not Spared - and the list is in the file.

Put the party on a vessel. The turn comes too late for them.

Nobody ashore ever believes the evacuation was necessary.

It has always turned. Do not promise the table that it will this time.

Catalogued in 1931 by the predecessor organization, after thirty years in which it was filed as sabotage, because sabotage leaves footprints. Thirteenth on the Orleans Parish list.

The low ground behind the natural levee was cypress swamp until the turn of the last century, when it was drained for building, and it has been kept dry by machinery ever since. The land has sunk as it dried. Most of it is now below the river.

Every so often, the machinery is broken.

Pumps, sluices, ditches and flood banks, attacked with what the damage says were shovels and hammers, and the flooding that follows is expensive and occasionally fatal.

Nobody gets in. There is no forced entry anywhere and the cameras have nothing on them.

The older pumping engines were vulnerable, and the blockages put into them did enormous damage. Sealed electric plant is harder to spoil and most of that has stopped since the war.

Afterwards there is painting on the walls and on the machines.

Herons, usually. Stylized ones, in red and blue. Occasionally three gold fleurs-de-lis on a blue ground, which is the old arms of the colony.

The events are getting weaker.

They are also getting further apart. Somebody plotted them and the spacing has been widening since the first records, slowly enough that nobody noticed until there started to be empty years.

There have been four empty years in a row.

The drainage board and the two parish authorities are supported through a grant scheme and are encouraged toward sealed plant, which is good practice anyway.

Damage is attributed to vandalism and the compensation is paid without argument.

The paintings are photographed and removed within a day, and the photographs are kept in order, and the order is the point of them.

The file is maintained by one person at a small site. Nothing about the post requires anybody senior any more.

Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: The Pumps Come Apart - shovels and hammers, and no way in. The Water Comes Back - which is the point, and the land is below it. Herons In Red And Blue - and sometimes three fleurs-de-lis. It Is Running Down - weaker, rarer, and four empty years.

Show the players the photographs in date order before anything happens.

Nobody is caught and nobody is seen. Do not put a figure in the dark.

The empty years are the entry. Something has nearly finished giving up.

Reported by a state wildlife officer as a fish kill that was not one. The Foundation had four years of his observations before it had anybody of its own there, and his notebooks are the earliest and best documents in the file. Tenth in Louisiana.

For three days every September, things come out of the river.

They come out at night, within about seventy meters of the bank, and they go back before it is properly light. There are usually between thirty and eighty of them and they are not all the same.

They do not attack. They walk inland, singly, and they stop at things: buildings, fences, parked cars, and most often people's houses, where they stand at a distance and face the building for some hours.

Then they go back to the water.

Nobody has established what they are. The bodies of two that did not make it back were entirely ordinary animals, one a deer and one a dog, and the laboratory reports on both say so at some length and with evident frustration.

The conservation officer's notebooks record that the houses they stand in front of are not random. They are houses where somebody has died that year. He worked that out in his second season and told nobody for two more.

Three days of a road closure on a wildfire pretext, which works because it is September. Residents within the effect area were bought out over eleven years and the last holdout sold in the nineties.

Nothing is shot, netted or taken. That instruction is absolute and was made absolute after the deer.

A haunting that arrives on a date and leaves on a date, and does nothing to anybody. The party can stand in the road and watch a dog that is not a dog face a dark house for four hours.

The officer's notebooks are the entry. Four years of careful handwriting by somebody with no training and no support who worked out what the houses had in common and sat on it for two seasons because he did not want to be right. Give the party the notebooks rather than the answer, and let them get there in the order he did.

Reported by one of our own people who lived on the street and had been keeping a list of the dates, which is how anybody noticed what the dates had in common. Seventeenth in Florida.

A thunderstorm over one street.

It covers that street exactly. It stops where the road meets the next one at either end, and on either side of those junctions it is a dry day.

There is no pattern to when it comes, with one exception: it has never once happened on a day when the local primary school was open.

It clears at midnight.

The sound of the rain does something, and it only does it to people indoors on that street.

For about twenty minutes you feel flat. Disappointed with things, and bored, and not up to much.

Then it lifts, and what replaces it is the opposite. You feel like doing something, and you feel like doing it with somebody.

What people do is go and find each other. They knock on doors. They start projects. They get the board games out. They cook for more people than live in the house.

It lasts as long as the storm does.

There is nothing else. No damage, no lasting effect, nothing in the water, and nobody has been harmed by it in thirty years of records.

Anybody outside in it just gets wet.

No containment.

The street is monitored by one resident officer who is on the establishment and who volunteered and who has lived there since before the file was opened.

Weather records for the street are amended to match the surrounding area, which is a small and permanent clerical task.

No testing. Two proposals to move subjects into a house on the street during a manifestation were refused and the reasoning is one sentence each.

The school term dates are kept on file. Nobody has explained that and nobody is being paid to.

Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: One Street, Exactly - and a dry afternoon at either junction. Never On A School Day - not once, in thirty years. Twenty Minutes Of Nothing Mattering - and then it turns over. Then You Go And Find Somebody - and you spend the whole storm with them.

Trap the party indoors in the rain and take the plot off them for an evening.

Give them the flat twenty minutes first. Let them think it is a trap.

Never explain the school. Let one of them work out what that means.

Known locally and dismissed locally, because the ground here gives coffins up on its own and always has. A parish official mentioned it to a colleague as a thing the old people said, and the colleague went and stood in the wood on the day. Fourteenth on the Orleans Parish list.

At noon, in a clearing in pine woods, coffins come up out of the ground.

Black pine, plain, with a white cross on each lid. They rise until they are standing clear of the earth and then they stop, and the ground around them is not disturbed.

They are sealed and they are occupied. The remains inside are human, complete, dressed for a funeral in the manner of that region, and freshly embalmed: the work is days old, every year, done well, by somebody.

The dead are different every year. None of them has ever been identified. None of them matches anybody reported missing anywhere.

At midnight on the fifth day they go back down, whether or not anybody has touched them. They stop three meters under and stay there, and a coffin dug up during the rest of the year is empty.

Take one away and it does not sink. It also does not stop the ground: the following November there is another one in its place, and the count goes up by one and stays up.

The count is nineteen. It was fifteen. Four were removed, by us, over eleven years, before somebody worked out the arithmetic.

The wood is held through a forestry company and closed for felling operations every November. The clearing is watched for the five days and photographed.

Nothing is removed. The instruction is one line and it is the most expensive line in the file, because it means the site will be doing this forever and the budget for it is annual and permanent.

The four that were taken are in a store, still sealed, still occupied.

Five days in a cold wood with nineteen coffins and nothing to do but photograph them. Let the party get bored and then let one of them count.

The temptation is enormous and you should offer it: an intact, freshly embalmed body nobody will ever miss, available for any purpose the campaign needs. It costs one line on a spreadsheet in an office they will never see.

The four in the store are the payoff. Four coffins in a room, from four different decades, and whoever is in them has been embalmed for as long as they have been there, and is not going to change.

The parlor was bought with the business, discreetly, after the third family complained that the viewing had run long. It had run long by eleven hours. Eighteenth on the unknowns, and the only entry on that list where the Foundation knows exactly where it is and has kept the address out of the file on purpose.

A funeral parlor with one room in it where a wake is happening.

The same wake. An old man is laid out, the family are present, there is tea and there are sandwiches and somebody is telling a story about him that ends well. It is warm, it is sad in the ordinary way, and everybody in it is pleased that you came.

It has been going on for a very long time. The mourners do not know that. Ask one what day it is and they will tell you, wrongly, without hesitation, and go back to the story.

Time in the room does not match time outside it. An hour at the wake has been twenty minutes and it has been two days, and there is no way to tell which from inside, because there are no clocks and the light through the curtains does not change.

Nobody who has left has been hurt. Several have gone back.

The room is kept locked and the business runs around it. Nothing is done about the wake itself, because every proposal for doing something about it begins by removing the old man, and nobody has been willing to sign that.

Staff attending are briefed to accept nothing and to leave within a set time, by a watch left outside the door with somebody holding it.

Play it entirely straight and entirely warm. Nobody menaces the party. Somebody takes their coat, somebody says how good it is that they came, somebody tells a long fond story about a man they have never met and it is a genuinely good story. The horror is that it is nice, and that a player will want to stay for the end of it.

Do not tell the table how long they have been in. Track it yourself, roll it if you like, and tell them what has changed outside when they come out. Let one player decide to go back.

Nobody found it. It was collated, out of cemetery maintenance complaints, groundsmen's incident books and three separate parish newsletters, by a records officer who had recently buried somebody. Twenty-sixth on the list of shapes.

A person stands at a grave and says something kind to somebody they loved, aloud, meaning it.

Then the wind gets up. Not a gust: a steady, rising wind, local to that part of the ground, lasting hours and not registering on anything a mile away.

Stones move when nobody is looking at them. Small ones, curb sets, chippings, a vase. Never far, and never while watched, and afterwards the arrangement is different and nobody can say when.

The flowers do a year in an afternoon. Whatever is growing there buds, opens, browns and drops, in order, at a speed that can be filmed and has been.

The crows come. Rooks, ravens, jackdaws, anything of that family within some distance, and they settle in the trees and on the roofs and they are quiet, which is the part the groundsmen mention.

None of it touches the person. They are not frightened. Interviewed afterwards, without exception, they describe having felt company.

What follows is the entry. People who have had one of these stop visiting. Not immediately, and not deliberately: they tail off over a year, and when asked they say that they have said what they came to say.

Nothing. There is no containment and there has never been a proposal for one.

The department maintains relationships with cemetery staff in a number of countries, logs events, and sends somebody to interview the person about a week later if the interview can be had kindly.

The file has been reviewed four times. Each review has confirmed that no intervention is warranted, and one of the four says so in a sentence that somebody has underlined.

It is not a horror and you should not run it as one. If a player's character has lost somebody and goes to the grave and speaks, give them this: the wind, the birds, the flowers going over, and a feeling of company.

Do not explain it and never confirm anything. The file does not.

The cost is the part to play long. A character who has had one will drift out of the habit of going, and the player will not notice for months, and you should not point it out.

Discovered by accident, through a tracking device implanted in a junior member of staff, which kept transmitting after she was buried. Forty-eighth on the list of shapes.

Some of the dead go somewhere.

What decides it is not fully known. One thing is certain: it does not happen where the words rest in peace, or any version of them in any language, are written somewhere near the grave.

Headstone, plaque, plate, card on a wreath. It does not appear to matter which, and it does not appear to matter whether anybody meant it.

Without them, the body goes. Not the soul, the body, out of the ground and into somewhere else, and there it wakes up.

The first observation came from a device in an officer's ribs, which was Foundation-made and went on working. The video shows her falling through a cavern about three hundred meters high, with no visible end in any direction, full of rock and running lava.

She is a skeleton in the suit she was buried in. The bones are held together by nothing. She screams, with nothing to scream with, and she can hear herself.

Below her there is a plain, and on the plain there are a great many figures, and there is a great deal of noise.

The feed ran for some time. What is in the file is what was recorded, and the transcript stops where somebody stopped it.

Nobody has found any way in and nobody has found any way of reaching anybody there. The one-way contact has not been repeated.

The words go on the marker. Every Foundation burial, every plot, every plaque, in the language of the deceased.

This is now written into the standing orders for mortuary staff and is checked by a second person against a list.

Where staff have been buried without them, historically, nothing can be done and the file says so.

There is a list of those. It is two hundred and eleven names long and it is not shown to anybody outside the office that keeps it.

Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Six Words - or whatever your language uses, written anywhere near. Nobody Has To Mean It - a printed card on a wreath has been enough. The Cavern - three hundred meters, lava, and a plain with figures on it. One Recording - and it has never been repeated.

This is what the register is for. It costs nothing to prevent and everybody forgets.

If a player character dies, ask the table what goes on the stone, and write down what they say.

The list of two hundred and eleven is the campaign. Somebody keeps it up to date.

A funeral director opened a refrigerated drawer and found a dog in it, and rang the police, and the police report went to somebody who had seen one before. Ninety-third on the list of shapes.

Sometimes a body is not there any more and a dog is.

It happens between about twenty and eighty hours after death, wherever the body is: a mortuary drawer, a home, a hospital, the ground if they are already in it.

The dog is an ordinary dog. Healthy, middle-aged, not anomalous in any way that testing can find. They can be rehomed and they have been.

Every one of them has a thick coat in the gray that dog people call blue.

The body is gone. Not transformed into the dog in any sense that can be measured: gone, and the dog is where it was, and there is no remainder.

Three hundred and nine cases are recorded.

The pattern in who is not subtle.

Four in five were unmarried. Nine in ten had no children. Nineteen in twenty are described by the people who knew them as having kept to themselves.

The file does not draw a conclusion from that and has been criticized internally for not drawing one.

Coroners and funeral directors in several countries are on a notification list, under a public health arrangement that is real.

The family is given an explanation appropriate to the circumstances and, where the law allows, an urn.

The dogs are not held. They go to rescue organizations, are registered, and are followed up for two years.

Eleven of them were taken by somebody who had known the deceased. That was not arranged and is not prevented.

Soak 2 · Attack 2 · Defense 3 · Health Levels 4 · Movement Rate 12

A dog. That is all it is and all it has ever been.

Traits: Twenty To Eighty Hours - after death, wherever they are. A Blue Coat - every time, without exception. The Body Is Gone - entirely, with nothing left. Mostly People Who Were Alone - and the file will not say what that means.

Play the funeral director. This is somebody's ordinary awful Tuesday.

The dog is friendly and it is a dog. Resist making it knowing.

Eleven of them went home with somebody who had known them.

A body on a city riverbank with no name attached to it, and then another, and a pathologist who put the back of the second one under a microscope because of a mark she could not account for. Twenty-ninth on the American unknowns.

Bodies appear along a two kilometer stretch of riverbank, on the boundary between two cities, several times a year.

They are adults. They vary in age and sex and appearance. They are healthy and well fed and recently dead, often not yet stiff, and there is no injury on any of them and no cause of death on any of them.

They have nothing on them. No clothes, no rings, no watches, nothing.

None of them is anybody. Every database anyone has access to has been searched, here and elsewhere, and not one of them has ever come back as a person who existed.

Nobody has ever recorded a body arriving. Cameras have been put there, the stretch has been cordoned, teams have sat on it, and each time there has been a fault or a shift change or a call that took somebody away, and the next morning there is a body.

On the back of each one there is a letter.

It is cut into the skin with something finer than any instrument we have, evenly spaced, properly laid out, and small enough to need considerable magnification. It is written by somebody with the handwriting of an educated man and the manner of one.

All of them are addressed to the same woman by her first name, and she is not any woman we have been able to find either.

He is courting her. That is the plain reading and the file says so.

The early ones explain that he has found a way to work outside the ordinary limits of cause and effect, and that he is using it on her behalf.

His reasoning is that if he removes from the world the people who are better off than she is, the general standard comes down, and she is left better placed by comparison. He says this the way a man explains a gift he has thought hard about.

Each letter describes what he has sent. A student of his, promising. A mother of two who was content with her life. He is proud of the selections and he expects her to see the care in them.

She has never answered. The letters run from confident, to puzzled, to hurt, and they keep coming.

The stretch is watched by the police department, which is staffed, and the calls come to us.

Bodies are collected, photographed under magnification, transcribed, and held. They are not released and they are not buried under any name.

The transcriptions are the file. They are read in order, by one person, whose job that is.

No approach to the addressee is possible. There is nobody to approach.

The surveillance arrangement is reviewed annually and has never yet survived a delivery.

Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Nobody, Every Time - healthy, unmarked, and not on any record anywhere. Never Once Filmed - something always goes wrong the night it happens. A Letter On The Back - cut too fine and too small to see without help. He Is Courting Her - and he thinks the bodies are the romantic part.

The letters are the entry. Read one out and let the table work out what he thinks he is doing.

He has never been found and there is no version of this where he is caught on the page.

She has never written back. That is what the later letters are about.

Found by a clerk reconciling municipal spending. Four towns in one state had each paid for bunting in a month with nothing in it, and all four invoices described the work as annual. Twenty-second on the list of shapes.

A town discovers that it has always had a festival.

It starts with a poster, or a banner over a road, for a gathering on a date. Nobody puts it up. It advertises something the town already knows about, in the way a town knows its own things, and a week later there is a committee, and the committee has minutes going back years that nobody typed.

Then it happens. Bunting, a man in a costume, a thing the children make out of paper and carry. Food that is the food for it. A small parade that knows its own route.

Nobody can say what it commemorates. Asked directly, people give an answer, and the answers do not agree and nobody finds that strange, because you do not interrogate your own traditions.

It spreads by being mentioned. A visitor who hears about it takes it home, and a town that hears about it twice has it.

It also grows inward. The second year is two days. The fourth is a week. The file has one community at forty-one days and has modeled the rest of it, and the model is why the class is VOLATILE and why this entry has a standing budget.

Affected towns are all recent: places incorporated inside living memory, with nothing already in the calendar.

The Foundation gives them a festival.

A front charity funds a genuine annual event in any community that fits the profile: a real committee, a real budget, a date, and a thing the children make. It is ordinary and it is theirs and it does not go away.

A calendar that is occupied cannot be infected. This has held for thirty years, across a number of towns that is in the file and is larger than anybody outside the department would guess.

Run it as a nice day out. The party arrive in a town in the middle of its festival and everything is warm and slightly baffling, and the only wrong note is that no two people give the same account of what it is for.

The minutes are the moment. Let them find a minute book in a library, four volumes, in different hands, none of whom exist.

Their job is not to stop it. Their job is to get a committee formed, book a hall and arrange a fete, and if the party do it badly the town has two festivals next year and one of them is spreading.

Came to the Foundation as a missing persons case with thirty names on it and four hundred witnesses, which is the worst possible combination and took eleven months to put away. First on the Ohio list.

A school marching band, thirty strong, in uniform, holding their instruments.

They are in the band room the rest of the year, standing in a loose circle, arranged the way people are arranged in the middle of an argument about something that does not matter. Nothing moves them. Nothing marks them. Nothing registers on any instrument that has been pointed at them.

On the evening of a home game they finish the conversation.

It takes half an hour and nobody has ever recovered a word of it, because the mouths move and the air does not. Then they go out to the field and they play, and they play well, and at the interval they stand under the bleachers and wait the way a band waits. An hour later they play again. Then they walk back to the room, take up the circle, and stop mid-sentence.

The pieces are all from their own last season. The arrangements are not quite the ones they used. A musicologist went through fifty years of recordings and found that the changes accumulate, in one direction, and that what they are playing now is better than what they started with.

Three members of that band were absent on the night it happened. Two are dead. The third is eighty-one and has attended fourteen of these.

The school is condemned and fenced and patrolled, which is cheap and is not the part that costs.

The part that costs is the schedule. The band follows the home fixtures of a football team that has not existed for fifty years, so every August somebody in an office draws up a fixture list for it: eleven games, five at home, with dates. Whatever is on that list is what happens. It has been tested, in both directions, and the file is clear that the list is not a prediction.

The post is not popular and has never been left vacant.

Start with the office job. A player is handed a folder and told to write out next season's fixtures, and is not told why, and the instruction sheet is four pages long and covers what to do if two schools have been demolished.

Then take them to a game. The field is dark, the stands are empty, the fence is Foundation, and a band comes out and plays to nobody for eleven minutes. It is not frightening. Do not make it frightening.

The old woman in the third row is the entry. She was ill that week and did not march. She has come fourteen times, she knows every one of them by name, and she has never said whether she is glad she was ill.

Recognized late, because the first eleven affected people were treated as a coincidence by four separate health services in three countries. The file was opened by somebody comparing case notes for an entirely different reason. Eighteenth on the list of shapes.

A thing people pass to each other, by ear.

Somebody hears it, and afterwards they can produce it, and everybody who hears them produce it can produce it too. It is short. Written out it fits on one line and the notation is in a sealed file with the other one.

Carrying it does nothing. There is no illness, no compulsion and no measurable change of any kind. People who have it go about their lives.

What they have is the ability to pass it on and, on questioning, a very strong sense that they would like to.

Animals with good pattern recognition do not take it. Animals that mimic do: there are two parrots and a raven on the register as instances, and the raven is the reason the containment procedure is what it is.

Known carriers are identified, interviewed and released, because there is nothing to hold them for. They are asked not to and they are monitored in a way that does not require their cooperation.

The raven was not recovered.

The perfect campaign background hazard: it does nothing, it cannot be cured, and everybody who has it wants to pass it on and does not know why.

Give it to one player quietly, with no effect and no roll. Let them carry it for as long as they like. The only interesting question is when they choose to whistle it in front of the others, and whether they tell them first.

The raven is loose and has been for years. Use that once, late, and never explain what it has been doing.

Recovered as a recording, on tape, in a box of recordings, by a junior archivist who played it to check what it was and then could not account for the next four minutes. Twentieth on the unknowns.

The tape is not the anomaly. The tape is a copy.

A sound. Written down, it is a series of notes; it can be played, whistled, or produced by an instrument, and it works every time.

Anybody who hears it is being bitten. Not stung and not bitten by anything that is there: the sensation is of a cloud of small biting insects, on the face and the hands and the back of the neck, and it is completely convincing.

It gets worse while the sound continues. The first few seconds are a nuisance. A minute in, people are swatting at nothing and will not stand still. Past that, people have hurt themselves getting away from it.

There are no insects. There has never been a mark on anybody that they did not make.

People who cannot hear are unaffected, entirely, and have been the only reliable way to do anything about an instance while it is happening.

The written notation is held at one site, in a sealed file, and has never been reproduced. Recordings are destroyed on recovery. Personnel attending an active instance are deaf staff, by policy, and that policy is the only one in the section that names the people it applies to.

A weapon somebody can carry in their pocket, and the reason this is an event rather than an item is that the sound is the anomaly and the tape is just a tape. Anybody who learns it has it.

Run the escalation on the clock: a nuisance, then unbearable, then people doing damage to themselves to get away. Do not roll for it and do not let armor or a good result help. The only outs are stopping the sound, leaving the four hundred meters, or being somebody who cannot hear it, and a party who works that out has earned the way they solve it.

Noticed by a Foundation analyst who was not looking for it. She was reconciling missing persons figures against tourist numbers in fourteen cities and found four places where the two did not sit together, and all four were stores with a way of ordering. Twenty-first on the list of shapes.

Some places have a way of asking. A counter where the order goes in a particular order, a bar where the drink has a name only the regulars use, a hardware store where you ask for the thing by what it does.

None of this is anomalous and all of it is ordinary and most such places are nothing at all.

In the ones that are, a person who asks wrongly is corrected, or not corrected, and served, and nothing happens. The second time, the same. The third time they are not there.

There is no body, no sound and no gap in the line. The person behind them is already being served and was always being served. The staff member taking the order does not remember them and does not remember the two previous visits either, and the register is short by nothing, because nothing was rung up.

What the Foundation has is the other side of it: the people who came with them. Somebody outside in a car, somebody at a table by the window. Those people remember everything, in detail, including the three visits, and they are the entire evidential basis of this file.

Nineteen such places are known. Eleven are food, four are drink, two are hardware and two are neither and have been left in the file with a note.

The Foundation writes the instructions.

For each of the nineteen it maintains the correct form of words and puts it where a stranger will find it: guidebooks, forum posts, the laminated card by the door, a friendly regular who is on the payroll. The cover story is that the place is famously particular and you should get it right, which is true and which people enjoy.

It works and it is cheap and the department that does it sits inside cultural outreach, which is where it belongs and which nobody finds funny any more.

The party will not take this seriously, and you should let them not take it seriously. Run it as color: a bar with a way of ordering, and a barman who corrects them twice and is pleasant about it.

Do the third one when one player has stepped out of the room or is doing something else at the table. Come back to them a beat later and address the character standing next to theirs. Do not announce anything.

If the party want to fight something, there is nothing here. The only countermeasure anybody has is a laminated card by the door, and the party could write one.

An empty unit in Boston with a new sign on it offering something impossible, in bad spelling, where a unit had been empty for two years. One hundred and first on the list of shapes.

It happens to empty stores. Anywhere, in any country.

The inside is replaced. Whatever was in there goes, and what is there instead is an empty room with walls, floor and ceiling of a metal nobody has identified.

The front changes too. The name above the window becomes something else, or a sign appears where there was not one.

The signs offer things that cannot be offered. A free house. Gold in exchange for a small number. Work with no work in it.

They are written in whatever language that street speaks, and they are always slightly wrong: the spelling, or the grammar, or the word order, in the way of somebody who has learned the language from a list.

Go in and a metal shutter comes down over the front.

Whoever is inside is somewhere else for between two and eight minutes.

Then the shutter goes up on its own and the store is the store again, with whatever was in it before back where it was.

What happens in those minutes is known from one recording, made through an implant, and that recording is not attached to this entry.

Empty commercial property is monitored in a large number of towns, through letting agents, insurers and a sign-maker who is paid a retainer and thinks he is reporting fly-posting.

Instances are found by the sign. Response is to board the front and stand somebody outside it until it stops, which takes between a day and two weeks.

Nobody goes in. That was established after the recording.

The signs are photographed. There are nine hundred and forty and the errors in them are being studied, because whoever is writing them is getting better.

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Traits: An Empty Store - anywhere, with a new sign on it. It Offers You Something Impossible - in your language, badly. Two To Eight Minutes - behind a shutter, somewhere else. The Spelling Is Improving - year on year, across nine hundred signs.

Write the sign out and show it to the table. Get the grammar wrong on purpose.

Somebody will go in. Decide beforehand what those minutes contain.

The improvement is the entry. Whoever is doing this is learning to pass.

Assembled from eleven years of interviews in which people made the same unaccountable decision and gave the same reason for it. Hundred and fiftieth on the list of shapes.

About one fog in ten is this.

There is no way to tell from outside. It looks like fog, it behaves like fog, and instruments read fog.

Stand in it and you see what might happen to you.

It is quick and it is not orderly: flashes, fragments, a feeling attached to each one. A room you have not been in. A person you have not met. Something going well. Something going badly.

Nobody gets a narrative and nobody gets a date.

What everybody gets is certainty. Afterwards, the subject believes absolutely that what they saw is possible and that it is about them, and no argument, evidence or treatment shifts that.

There is no evidence that any of it is accurate. The follow-up program has been running for a long time and the results are in the annex and they are consistent with chance.

That is not the problem. The problem is what people do next.

They leave jobs. They end things. They begin things. They move countries. They go and find the person, and sometimes the person exists.

The file has the figures. The number of lives visibly redirected by a morning's fog is in the thousands and is a floor rather than an estimate.

There is no containment and there cannot be.

The phenomenon is monitored through meteorological partners on a signature that is in the annex and that gives a few hours of warning about nine times in ten.

Warnings are issued as ordinary weather advice.

Our own people do not work in fog. That instruction is the only enforceable one on this file.

Where a cluster of life changes follows a known event, the individuals are interviewed and are not treated, because the file has decided that what they saw is theirs.

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Traits: One In Ten - and nothing tells you which. Flashes, Not A Story - a room, a face, a feeling. You Will Believe It - completely, for the rest of your life. None Of It Checks Out - and that changes nothing.

Give each player three images and one feeling each. Do not explain them.

Whatever they decide to do about it, let it stand. That is the entry.

They are not prophecies. Never confirm one, and never deny one either.

A town in one country turned on a man over the course of a morning, and the same thing happened in a different country eleven months later. Hundred and fifty-seventh on the list of shapes.

It takes a jurisdiction. A town, a district, a county, a whole country in one case, and the boundary is always an administrative one: it follows the line on the map exactly.

Everybody inside it who thinks becomes certain that one particular person has to die.

That person is chosen by nothing anybody has found. They are ordinary. They have usually lived there for years.

The compulsion is total and it is not a mood. People arrange their day around it. They leave work. They organize. They are otherwise entirely themselves: they are not enraged, they are not confused, they can talk about it reasonably, and they will explain that it has to be done and then go and try to do it.

It stops at the boundary. Somebody who crosses the line is themselves again in a few minutes and is horrified.

It ends when the person dies. Everybody comes back to themselves at once and remembers all of it.

It also ends if the person leaves the area, and they are then fine, and so is everybody else, and the file is clear that this has worked every time it has been attempted.

Getting them out is the difficulty. Everybody in the jurisdiction is trying to stop that from happening.

Detection is by the shape of it: a sudden unanimous focus on one individual across an administrative area, which shows up in call traffic and in police reporting within hours.

Response is extraction. The target is located and taken across the boundary by air where possible.

Nothing is done to the population. They are not the problem and they are not treated afterwards beyond what is offered.

The extracted individual is resettled elsewhere and is not returned. Nine have been.

The list of areas where this has occurred is not circulated.

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Traits: It Follows The Line On The Map - exactly, whatever the line is. Everybody, All At Once - and they are otherwise themselves. Cross The Boundary And It Lifts - in a few minutes, and then you know what you were doing. Getting Them Out Ends It - and the whole area is trying to stop you.

The party are inside the boundary. Roll nothing and tell the players what their characters know.

The target is an ordinary person. Give them a name and a job before it starts.

One helicopter ride ends the file. That is the whole adventure.

An economist working for a state agency published a paper about a labor market anomaly and was quietly employed by us four months later. Fifth in Louisiana.

A group of parishes in north Louisiana where almost nobody does office work.

The rate of white-collar employment is far below the surrounding parishes and has been for as long as there are figures. Everything else is normal: the schools are the same, the incomes are comparable, the population is not unusual.

What happens is that people do not take those jobs.

Somebody from the area who trains as an accountant does not end up working as an accountant. They qualify, they apply, they get offers, and then something happens: they take a different job, or the firm folds, or they move back and work with their hands.

The people it happens to do not notice. Each of them has a reason and each reason is ordinary and checkable.

People who move into the area and already do that work stop doing it within about two years. The same way: reasons.

People who leave the area are fine.

It is not a compulsion and nothing pushes anybody. It is a pattern in outcomes and the only way to see it is to count.

The parishes are not poor and they are not failing. The work gets done, by people from outside, who commute in and leave.

Nobody there has ever complained about it, and the local view is that it is just how things are.

The statistical monitoring is the file and it is maintained quarterly.

No intervention has been attempted and none is proposed. There is nothing to contain and nobody is harmed.

Individual cases are followed where somebody is willing and eleven are.

The boundary is mapped by employment data and it follows the parish lines exactly.

The economist who found it is on the establishment and is still working on it.

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Traits: Nobody There Does Office Work - and nobody can say why. Every Individual Reason Is Ordinary - a better offer, a firm that folded, a move home. Move In And It Takes Two Years - the same way, with reasons. It Follows The Parish Lines - exactly.

The party investigate and find nothing. Everything checks out.

Give them one person's whole employment history. It is completely reasonable.

Nothing is wrong. Let the table decide whether that is worse.