#mag130

The Web has Plans Involving Jon, nothing new. And I have no serious ideas about why – seriously trying to woo him because Back Off Big Eyeball, We Saw Him First? Needing him to be ready for the Watcher’s Crown in some way either because it’s allied with Beholding, either because it needs the ritual to come close to completion in order to crash or hijack it? What was Jon supposed to make out of MAG130’s statement, and he did he completely miss the point or did he draw his own conclusions All According To Keikaku? … are they Jon’s own conclusions or The Web making him think about the conclusions It wanted.

I’m also wondering if, after all, Jon getting drawn to this and that statement since the beginning of season 4 wasn’t… Web-induced more that Beholding-induced. Actually, Jon has never explicitly said that knowing which statements to read, specifically, was coming from his Insights (the knowledge seeping through the cracks of the door):

(MAG126) ARCHIVIST: … I remembered Gertrude’s notebook […]. I’ve been staring at it for hours, in the hope something from it would just… come to me. And it worked well enough to point me towards this statement […].

(MAG127) BASIRA: And what was that you were doing yesterday? ARCHIVIST: … When…? BASIRA: You were sat on the floor for like four hours. ARCHIVIST: … Oh! Er, n–n–no, I was, er, I was… listening. Y’know, it’s, trying to see if any of the statements… called to me. BASIRA: And? ARCHIVIST: [FLIPS PAPER] BASIRA: Brilliant.

(MAG129) ARCHIVIST: I don’t like this. I don’t like… not being sure what’s going to be in my mind. What thoughts are mine and what are from… elsewhere. Why I just know some statements are what I should be reading. I assume this one is related to the coffin. To Daisy.

Is it knowledge seeping into his mind, or is it, let’s say, a web string pulling him in towards specific statements? Jon’s comment that “subtlety is gone out of the window” couuuuld possibly (it’s a possibility!) imply that he knows that the Web had been directing him towards them before (just… without wrapping them in cobwebs). Case in point, though: Jon got to Know about how Gertrude stopped The Buried through his Insights, and that one was pretty clearly Beholding-stamped. So, at the very least, it’s not only the Web teaching Jon about how Gertrude stopped the previous rituals. Somehow, both The Eye and The Web are glad to feed him the knowledge.

In the particular case of MAG130: this means that the Web has quite a strong hold on the Archives themselves – or did it send the tape randomly, à la Elias in season 3? (Your casual reminder that the conclusion of Jon’s thrilling saga of wondering for 20 episodes why Elias was sending him this or that file was: because Elias had no idea what the fuck he was doing.) And: where does this tape come from? We know there are more tapes than the ones Jon had listened to: Basira had been given three boxes of them when they discovered Gertrude’s body, and she gave him a few tapes and at least one of these boxes when she quit the police in MAG075. Leitner had told Jon, and then confirmed with Elias (MAG080), that Elias had gotten his hands of Gertrude’s files regarding The Stranger (and posssssibly about Beholding?) and Elias had indeed begun to send some of those documents in season 3 but explicitly refused to give them to Jon in one-go (MAG092), so drip-dropped them instead. Elias mentioned in MAG116 that he had taken Gertrude’s tapes into his “safekeeping” during Jon’s absence at the beginning of season 3, so he was still in possession of all of them at the end of the season.

Is MAG130 from Elias’s secret stash? Or from somewhere else, another hiding spot? In any case, it means that, in true spiders fashion, the Web can crawl its way into anywhere, unnoticed. It is there and it’s able to operate in the Institute. It knows the place as its own. (Is it also its own already…)

- Jon had wondered, a few times, why Gertrude was recording some statements and not others and… we still don’t have the answer to that?

(MAG044) ARCHIVIST: I will admit to some disappointment it doesn’t address any of my more… pressing questions about Gertrude’s tapes. Why did she begin recording them, and why stop? If she’d been doing so right up until her death, she would have likely gotten through much of the Archive […].

(MAG087) ARCHIVIST: I had assumed Gertrude had recorded to tape for a while and then stopped, but it sees she was recording them right up until the end. But if they did span decades of working at the Institute, why aren’t there more? And what decided which statements she transferred?

It’s a bit hard to guess a logic behind Gertrude’s recordings, but so far, we’ve listened to these ones, listed by order or recording (SINCE UNLIKE A CERTAIN SOMEONE, GERTRUDE ROBINSON HAD ENOUGH WORK ETHICS TO GIVE THE DATE OF HERS :wwww I’m not calling anyone out) (Jon, u suck.):

*04/11/1996: reading Lucy Cooper’s statement about the “Changeling / Imposter”, Not!Them (MAG077) *15/04/1997: reading Yuri Utkin’s statement about the Russian circus (MAG044) *05/09/1997: live statement of Walter Heller about the old Archives in Alexandria (MAG053) *02/09/2007: reading Robert E. Geiger’s statement about The Buried’s ritual coming close in America (MAG099) *03/07/2008: live statement of Mary Keay about getting her hands on the book of The End (MAG062) *19/12/2008: live statement of Lucia Wright about the Flesh’s ritual attempt in Istanbul (MAG130) *04/10/2013: reading Abraham Janssen’s statement about the last Stranger ceremony, in the Court Theatre Buda in October 1787 (MAG116) *04/04/2015: reading Sebastian Skinner’s statement about The Stranger’s people in the Gwydir Forest (MAG087)

Noteworthy: the oldest one that Jon accessed was about the Not!Them, and Gertrude had specifically highlighted (thanks to the statement-giver providing a recording of her true mother) that tapes were able to resist the Not!Them’s rewriting of reality:

(MAG077) GERTRUDE: It is at least reassuring to know that magnetic tape seems to escape being overwritten [by the Not!Them], so if I get changed, you can be sure this is my real voice. Based on Dekker’s statement, it would seem Polaroids are also relatively stable.

I could imagine that Gertrude might have recorded a few tapes with this in mind – in case the Not!Them would attack her, to leave some proofs of her existence and of her ongoing researches, since, following this one, almost all the statements that Jon listened to were tied to some aspects of rituals she was working on stopping. MAG044 dealt with a very active period of the Stranger’s Circus; MAG099 helped her narrow down the location of the Buried’s “Sunken Sky” (in America); MAG116 was a survivor describing the last Stranger’s ritual attempt; MAG087 was about the current activities of Stranger’s minions, now that the ritual was coming closer. The three other statements were lives: Mary Keay is an oddity, but Gertrude had sarcastically commented that it happened because Mary insisted on talking:

(MAG062) MARY: You… don’t really go out and look for yourself, do you~? Just wait here for the researchers’ leftovers. GERTRUDE: Mm! It’s not that bad. Sometimes, someone will insist on giving me a statement directly, though… I rarely see the point.

(YOUR CASUAL REMINDER THAT GERTRUDE WAS SAVAGE LIKE THAT.)

The other two dealt with what Gertrude suspected to be an old Archive (MAG053), and a witness testimony of the explosion that put a stop to The Flesh’s ritual (MAG130), so… still related to Gertrude’s activities: she had been searching for Walter specifically (MAG053: “It’s taken a long time to track down someone still living who found the Serapeum of Alexandria.”; the site was ~curiously~ bombed six months after she discussed its location, in March 1998) and she was in Istanbul ~in the flesh~ during “The Last Feast” (the old woman that Lucia spotted but didn’t recognize). Moreover, there are a few mentions alluding to the fact that she already had talked a bit with the statement-givers (and narrowed down what they experienced) before deciding to record their statement:

(MAG053) WALTER: Yeah, er, right. Er, wh–where do you want me to start? GERTRUDE: Well, you say you were serving in North Africa when it happened.

(MAG130) [CLICK–] GERTRUDE: Do you mind? LUCIA: What? Oh, hum. No. GERTRUDE: Excellent.

Whether live or written, was Gertrude almost only recording statements dealing with the rituals attempts? But then, it seems like there were three big periods of recording: 1996-1997, 2007-2008 and the last years of her carreer. We’re still back to Jon’s initial questions: why the gaps? Is it because tapes exist from the years in-between, but we only got a few samples that aren’t enough to discern anything conclusive…?

- But then, back to the usual question: what was the thing that made her decide to record Walter and Lucia live, when they could have… written it down or dictated it to another member of staff? (We know it was a thing that could be done in the 70s, with Nathaniel Thorp’s statement from MAG029.) (I doubt it’s Relevant but: fun thing! “Lucia Wright” shares her surname with the previous head of the Institute, “James Wright”, who ran the place from 1973 to 1996. Elias took over when he passed away.)

- Well, in Lucia’s case, it sounds like Gertrude’s initial intentions might have been a bit grim?!

(MAG130) LUCIA: Telling my story. To you. Will, will it help with the nightmares? GERTRUDE: […] whatever nightmares your experience has left you with, I’m sure they won’t be bothering you much longer. […] GERTRUDE: Well…! That – is – a relief. When I heard there’d been survivors of “The Last Feast”, I was rather concerned that one of them might be able to positively identify me, [CHUCKLE] which could land me in all sorts of trouble! But she doesn’t seem to remember me at all.

What were you initially planning to do if she had remembered you, Gertrude.

Because, uuuuh… we know from Basira&Daisy’s exchange in MAG112 that they kept having “dreams” long after giving their statements to Jon; telling their stories didn’t allow them to get rid of the nightmares (it’s just that apparently, becoming an archival assistant cuts you off from them, and from Jon seeing them?). So, hum. Could Gertrude have been planning anything else than… straight-out murdering Lucia then and there, and only changed her mind when Lucia mentioned an old woman without linking her to Gertrude?

That aside… we got confirmation from Gertrude herself that she was aware that live statement-givers also give their dreams to the Archivist – the “slim collection of gifted nightmares” described by Elias in MAG120:

(MAG130) GERTRUDE: […] I’m honestly impressed she had the strength to get through it, even if she does seem to have been… deeply affected by it. Shame about the dreams; I would avoid them if I could.

… Why couldn’t she in this case, though? Why did she have to take this one live, when we know that she tended to prioritize written ones (going as far as to ask François Deschamps to write down what he had witnessed alongside her in MAG102)?

There has been quite a huge amount of statement-givers mentioning their recurring nightmares when writing their statements; the specific of the Archivist receiving a live statement seems to be that it synchronizes their dreams a bit? Makes Jon able to see them? Or traps the people in his own nightmares of their experiences? (In Jon’s dreams, at least, the statement-givers blame him and feel like they’re here because of him.) Regarding Gertrude, there had been Adelard’s and Mikaele Salesa’s expectation that just writing their statements could have an effect too:

(MAG113, Adelard Dekker) I’ll even make it a statement. Give your patron something to keep it satisfied. It’s not like I sleep enough to worry about dreams.

(MAG115, Mikaele Salesa) So it’s another statement is it? Like I owe you something?  […] So I suppose if it’s a statement you’re wanting… it’s no inconvenience to me. I don’t sleep well anyway.

Does this mean they might have given live statements to Gertrude in the past, and assumed that writing it down would have the same effect? Does writing a statement end up having an effect on you, even though the Archivist doesn’t access those dreams? I wonder, now, if the dreams are not actually supposed to happen to… everyone touched or coming close to the Fears, and it's just that some people don’t think to mention their dreams in their statements? Adelard got interested in the case he described in MAG113 and was reminded of his hypothetical new emergence partially because people had been hurt when asleep – could it be that new emerging fears tend to first manifest through dreams…?

- Gertrude, are u lying through your teeth again.

(MAG130) GERTRUDE: Are you quite ready? LUCIA: H… uh. Will it help? GERTRUDE: I’m sorry? LUCIA: Telling my story. To you. Will, will it help with the nightmares? GERTRUDE: If that’s your primary goal, my dear, I would suggest you speak to a qualified counsellor. We can suggest one, if you like; that said, I do believe most people find the process of giving a statement to be rather… mm, cathartic.

I’m squinting at that “cathartic” (if it’s about the actual concept: WOOPSIE, catharsis in Greek drama does rely on you EXPERIENCING the terror and pity. It is not a nice process on the moment.)

Meanwhile, in Jon’s case, giving him a live statement has rarely been described as a nice experience for visitors, mostly because of Jon himself:

(MAG084) MELANIE: […] There’s nowhere left for me to go. I don’t know why, but… I just, I just felt that perhaps coming here might help. And talking things out with Jon. I mean. I mean he’s awful, but at least he listens, you know?

The only “positive” ones about it that I can think of are Helen, Tessa and Mike, and Oliver a bit (he was surprised to have managed it); and Julia, back with Gertrude, had felt that it helped:

(MAG047) ARCHIVIST: Perhaps. … Leave it with us, we’ll… do some digging and… see what we can find. HELEN: You believe me then! ARCHIVIST: I, er… yes. Yes, I think I do. (MAG101) ARCHIVIST: A– are you still going to kill me? HELEN: No. That was Michael’s desire, not mine. ARCHIVIST: So… S-So what do you want? HELEN: I don’t know. Helen liked you so… there’s a lot to consider. But I will help you leave. (MAG115) HELEN: Before, talking to you made Helen feel better. ARCHIVIST: You’re not. that. Helen! HELEN: I just want…! I just want to feel better.

(MAG065) TESSA: […] And it does feel good to talk about it. Y’know? ARCHIVIST: [LIGHT CHUCKLE] Yes, I… very much understand.

(MAG091) MIKE: Hm. You know? That was… that was nice. I’m not… not usually the sort for speeches, that was… pleasant change. So.

(MAG107) ARCHIVIST: Ah, yes. You–you know the Institute? JULIA: Oh yeah. Checked myself in there a while back. Ended up spilling my guts to this old woman about my dad, just letting it all out. ARCHIVIST: O–oh, that, that would be, er, Gertrude. My, my predecessor. JULIA: I didn’t catch her name. Weirdest thing, really. Didn’t mean to spill half of it, but. Really helped me put the pieces together, you know? ARCHIVIST: I’m… starting to.

(MAG121) OLIVER: Right. That’s a… hit, I suppose.

(But Oliver is cheating since Jon was still unresponsive when Oliver gave his statement – Oliver got Jon at His Best, uh.)

Then, I don’t have any doubt that Gertrude was probably better at sweetly coaxing people into telling their stories, rather than showing off in Jon’s apparent blunt manner (he does care!! But he’s also very off-putting, which… didn’t help when he was receiving statements.)

In the meantime: still nothing from Jon about his own dreams :www

- So Adelard also helped Gertrude in destroying the Gnostic temple!

(MAG130) GERTRUDE: Well…! That – is – a relief. When I heard there’d been survivors of “The Last Feast”, I was rather concerned that one of them might be able to positively identify me, [CHUCKLE] which could land me in all sorts of trouble! But she doesn’t seem to remember me at all. […] Dekker really came through with the explosives! It almost felt like cheating. Sad about the loss of history but Miss Wright didn’t seem to think the old Gnostic church got many visitors anyway.

Gertrude sounded so giddy to have blown the place up, efdusijrezkds. Did she provide the explosives and he handled them? He was super interested in the stock she had managed to get for The Unknowing, in his letter from MAG113. They’re adorable. Old people saving the world and bonding over their creative use of explosives.

Interestingly, it seems that Gertrude kept her allies separate? Gerry and Leitner didn’t seem to know that Gertrude was working with the other (which… makes sense considering Gerry’s distaste of Leitner because of the books); but neither did they ever mention Adelard.

Which puts me to mind again: what happened to Adelard? We know that he came in contact with the Institute at least in 1991 (MAG077, Gertrude: “I suspect this to be the creature that Adelard Dekker refers to as the ‘NotThem’ in statement 9910607”), whether he was personally acquainted with Gertrude or not at the time. Since then, they’ve apparently been allies on multiple cases: they collaborated to blow up the Gnostic temple housing the Flesh’s ritual (MAG130), and Adelard moved out the plastic explosives for Gertrude because she felt that she was under surveillance (MAG113). That was chronologically the last time we’ve heard of him at this point – from a statement that, according to Jon, was “undated, likely circa 2012”. Did he die, since then…? Became something worse than dead…? Is he hiding somewhere…? Peter Lukas has been looking for his statements to get information but didn’t mention the possibility of tracking him down: it could be either for manipulation purposes (better to not let the Archives team meet Adelard, who specialises in dealing with spooky creatures, when you’re yourself a spooky creature), either because he knows that Adelard is not around anymore…? (Then, my bets for the culprit are the New Emergence he was investigating, or someone amongst the Lukases, or Peter PERSONALLY.) (Could be Elias, I guess, since Adelard must have been a bit old at this point, but we would need to know what his voice was, since Elias’s criteria for murdering people so far have been 1°) you must be old, 2°) you must be voiced by someone from Jonny’s family.)

- Something that I found quite interesting in the statement itself is that Lucia had, from an overall point of view, no relationship whatsoever with meat – no attraction to it, nothing from her personal history that would imply that she could get drawn or involved with the Flesh. But, at the same time, the evolution from her being fascinated by religion to the Flesh felt only natural because of the Eucharistic dimension, and by the fact that her own appreciation of churches was both spiritual and sensual?

(MAG130) LUCIA: […] I loved churches. These big… quiet… echoing spaces of peace and beauty, designed to quiet the soul and prepare it for communion with the divine. Even if I didn’t actually believe in the God they were supposed to house… I always found them… meditative. And whenever I went on one of my breaks, I’d always try to find a local church – hopefully… not too full of other tourists like me – and spend an hour or two in quiet contemplation. I’d listen to the shuffling footsteps of the other people, and breathe in the lingering smell of incense, before lighting a candle to my grandmother.

With the Demiurge in mind, it’s almost surprising that The Flesh is (officially) the last Fear to have emerged (Gerry had mentioned that it had begun its ascendance around the time Robert Smirke had established his list of fourteen); but at the same time, you would have to fear the specific aspect of it as related to Flesh bending, twisting, getting reduced to a pulp, etc.? In True Flesh Fashion, Lucia ended up getting very conscious of that aspect during the whole ordeal (THANKS FOR MY WEDNESDAY’S DINNER, JONNY):

(MAG030, David Laylow) “There’s not so much difference between people and animals, you know? […] Weirdest thing is, you start to kind of see people as meat too. Not in a food sort of way, you know. I don’t wanna eat my co-workers. It’s just that, when you spend all day taking these living, breathing creatures – animals that move and cry and tremble in fear – and you turn them into lifeless blocks of dead flesh, it’s hard to believe in any special spark that makes us humans any different.”

(MAG072, Craig Goodall) “There’s nothing inherently special about us. We feel as much pain, see the world with the same eyes as a real pig. Meat is meat. That’s what John Haan said when they arrested him. The only thing he said. Meat is meat. […] It looked like this was what the kid had been doing. He’d been spraying the phrase ‘MEAT IS MEAT’ onto the door of the freezer, but the cops must have gotten him before he’s finished, so what was actually written upon the matt silver surface were the words ‘MEAT IS ME’.”

(MAG130) LUCIA: […] Squirming limbs were dragging, rising, extracting themselves from this mound of flesh, and making their way down to join their companions on the ground, one by one. Most of them could still be mistaken for humans at a distance, a few even wore clothes. […] All through this, the mouth got closer and closer to the edge of the pit, the pile of flesh within it larger and larger, sat there in an awful, half-solid slurry, chewed and crushed together. It was impossible to tell what had once been animal, and what might once have been us. It was all just meat.

-Curiously, Lucia didn’t mention any anchor in her statement? Orrr was it, in her case, an anchoring thought?

(MAG130) LUCIA: My back was screaming, my legs were weak, and my mind was numb from terror. But I was spurred on by one thing: the woman with the backwards arms had fallen, some time in the night, and her companions had shown no hesitation. They had gripped her shoulders, hoisted her up, and hurled her straight into the gaping maul. I swore it wouldn’t happen to me.

Could it be the focus that matters, more than thinking about something/someone from outside of the box? Focusing on something, whatever it is, and preventing the Fears from getting to you and swallowing you whole? It’s also how Basira had managed to exit The Unknowing on her own… So in the same way: would going into the coffin with the clear resolution of finding Daisy and getting back out with her be enough…?

- We’re slowly completing the list of failed rituals from the current batch!!

*The Buried: “Sunken Sky”, 17th June, 2008. (<- Vast-touched Jan Kilbride was thrown in pieces into the pit.)

*The Flesh: “The Last Feast”, October 2008 (since it was (until now.) the new Baby, this was probably only its first or second ritual attempt? Awww ;w; (Don’t worry, you’ll get used to seeing your ritual derailed.) (WE HOPE.) <- also with this one that Gertrude apparently confirmed that she could deal with the rituals with non-spooky means (maybe… Jan Kilbride… would have liked to know that a few months earlier…))

*The Spiral: “The Great Twisting”, somewhere during October 2009 or shortly after. (<- No explosives for this one, Michael Shelley gave an Identity to the Distortion instead.)

*The Stranger: “The Unknowing”: 6th August 2017. (<- TIM WAS THE BOMB…)

*The Eye: “The Watcher’s Crown”, incoming and Jon Has Suspicions about the year 2018. (<- Gertrude had a Plan for this, MAG080 seems to hint at “Fire.”)

Unclear: The Dark (15th May 2015? 10th February 2017? It Was Coming Soon according to Nathalie Ennis), The Desolation (before April 2015).

No indication (yet?): The Lonely (I’m very subjectively suspecting that this one might not have a ritual, since “almost” all of the Fears have one according to Gerry, and that that’s why the Lukases are collaborating with various other Entities’ clusters by throwing money at them), The End (I’m also thinking that this one could turn out to not actually have a ritual?), The Vast (are they planning to yeet Earth into Space), The Hunt (Gertrude was not convinced but mentioned that it could happen in America), The Slaughter (… we got a few statements showing that when a Slaughter event happens, it goes HARD anyway, so I fear (ha) what its ritual attempt would look like – maybe during a recent war or civilian repression?), The Corruption (though might have tried something in the tunnels below the Institute during The Hive’s invasion, given the ring of worms? Though it would sound a bit low-scale, since only Jane Prentiss was there…), The Web (Though There Is The Matter Of What The Heck Is The Deal With The House On Hill Top Road).

- Alriiiiiiiiiiiiiight, so:

(MAG130) GERTRUDE: […] Tom Haan might be a bit more of a problem, as it looks like he also survived, but I’m hopeful he has been weakened enough by this failure to not be an issue in the near future. Hopefully, he’ll fade away or burn out, as they tend to when robbed of their purpose. Still… I should keep a watch on him in case of any erratic behaviour that might lead to complications. Also worth watching out for any additional esoteric fall-out from the ritual attempt, like that Carlisle boy down in Wandsworth.

a) If I remember, Craig Goodall (the statement-giver from MAG072) had never explicitly mentioned that the Chinese-looking man that had attacked him was “John Haan” (the original owner of the takeaway restaurant, who had been arrested years before the events) – the fire was reported on 27th September 2009, almost a year after the Flesh’s ritual attempt, and the avatar talked about the relation between meat and religion… so indeed, it was probably Tom Haan there, too (I had been a bit confused, back then, unsure if it was John or Tom)?

b) Alright, and MAG030’s events happened in July 2013, we don't know of Tom Haan having been spotted since then, and what was described really sounded like… he put an end to Things then. So same as Breekon, maybe: he faded/self-destructed?

c) Toby Carlisle from MAG018 (“The Man Upstairs”) confirmed as Flesh! Though apparently, he didn’t participated to the ritual, dying in October 2007, although he was affected by its imminence.

I’m late to the party, only realizing now that the “Mrs. Carlisle” whose husband’s corpse wanted her to cannibalize him in 1845 (MAG058) shared her surname with “Toby Carlisle” – both about (MEAAAT) Flesh. Which means that Mrs. Carlisle probably gave in and ate her husband after her statement in order to survive, after all? And that one of her descendants was also Flesh-related? And we already knew about the fact that two people from the Haan family had a special relationship with meat?

We have the Carlisles, the Haans, the von Closens/Keays, the Lukases… Maybe Gerry had been a bit wrong in saying that the Fears don’t care at all about blood? Or are they, like the Fairchilds, adoptive families and the Lukases are still an exception?

- ;; Insisting on this: according to Gertrude, (avatars? monsters?) tend to “burn out when robbed of their purpose”, which indeed seems to have happened to Tom Haan four years and a half after his failed ritual. That…………………… is a short life expectancy if you fail indeed…………….. So even assuming that Jon is still alive (well, “not dead”) when a Watcher’s Crown attempt will be made, and even if he doesn’t die during it, and even if it is stopped in time… it means that Jon would be done for anyway.

Counter-points though: *Jared Hopworth began experimenting with The Boneturner’s Tale starting in 1996 and we know that he was still active and very chill About His Life in 2012 (MAG090). Though… did he even participate in that “Last Feast”, or did he just ignore it to keep doing his own thing?

*Jude Perry didn’t look especially erratic when we met her in 2017 in MAG089, although Gertrude had mentioned that The Lightless Flame’s plans had been stopped shortly before she recorded MAG087’s statement in April 2015 (“their own plans have so recently, erm, gone up in flames.”) So… we’ll… “see”…

- Once again, I really have no idea what state Daisy will be in, assuming that Jon does even manage to get her out of the coffin and that she’s still breathing (even if, hum, not human-shaped or human-minded)……………. But listen. Listen. We had an example of Jon managing to ground someone through compulsion: he did that to Tim during The Unknowing, and it worked! Forcing people to admit the truth manages to get their awareness back!

(MAG118) ARCHIVIST: Tim!! [STATIC:] What do you see? TIM: I see my asshole boss! W– wait… wait… […] ARCHIVIST: Tim! [STATIC:] What’s in your hand? TIM: It’s… I don’t… the– the– … the detonator…

My shipper heart really really hopes that Jon might compulse Daisy into remembering Basira, asking her ~who is it who matters to her~, since Basira was, almost literally, presented as Daisy’s anchor (MAG092, Elias: “the only person you care about […].Your last connection to humanity.”)

Problems: as of MAG122, Jon didn’t remember anything of the Unknowing past Gertrude’s entrance, which means… not remembering Tim’s last moments. And: Jon still had trouble pinning down the relationship between Basira and Daisy in MAG117 (“I–I– I don't quite get those two, I suppose. What they’ve done, seeing what they’ve seen… It’s a hell of a bond. The sort of thing I’ve mostly done alone.”), so… I’m not sure he would think of this option. Jon often has troubles with people’s relationships ;;

SO IT MAKES IT EVEN MORE VALUABLE THAT HE’S GOING TO TRY, ANYWAY, TO SAVE DAISY FROM THE COFFIN……………… Daisy who tried to kill him, who threatened him a few times afterwards, but whom he seemed to kinda like in his own awkward way? Jon really doesn’t want to lose anyone anymore, uh. (;; They’ve not been mentioned recently, but you can still feel the ghosts of Sasha and Tim lingering around.)

- YEAAAAH so Jon is getting ready to get injured again, and he does it in the most self-deprecating, heartbreaking way:

(MAG130) ARCHIVIST: […] What was it she said, “the siren call of Flesh”… Hm. It’s possible, I suppose. It would… hurt, but… Well. What’s another scar? … It’s been two weeks since I heard from Basira. I’m not waiting any longer. I’m getting Daisy back. End recording.

JON ;;;;;

a) If it is indeed a Flesh-related scar (will he get his hands on something from Artefact storage? or would it be “Flesh”-compatible by the simple fact of purposely injuring oneself?): Jon… is making progress on completing the set of Entity-related wounds. And we know he’s aware that it’s been a lot of injuries (MAG127: “Just another scar for the collection!”), but did he notice that he’s been covering all the Fears? We still don’t know for sure if the diversity is relevant, but it’s been a noticeable pattern (for listeners), and it sounds really suspicious… especially when keeping in mind how Elias had described the Archivist’s role (MAG092: “It is your job to chronicle these things, to experience them, whether first-hand or through the eyes of others. To simply be told, well…”).

Jon was touched by the Web when he was a child (MAG081: “The first of the dark powers to touch me, perhaps, but it did not claim me.”); he’s Beholding’s Archivist. As for the Corruption, he got almost eaten alive by Jane Prentiss’s worms (MAG039); “Michael” from the Spiral stabbed him when he tried to retrieve Helen (MAG047); Jude Perry from the Desolation burned his hand through a handshake (MAG089); Mike Crew made him experience the Vast and probably fucked up his lungs a bit (MAG091); Daisy strangled him and/or cut his neck (MAG091); the Not!Them toyed with his memories of Sasha (starting MAG040), Nikola punched(?) him (MAG097) and held him captive for a month (MAG101), and Jon ultimately experienced the Stranger’s Unknowing himself, getting temporarily lost in the madness (MAG118+MAG119); the End couldn’t totally get his grasp on him while Jon was in his coma but Jon was then “balanced on an edge” (MAG121); Melanie stabbed him in the shoulder with a scalpel while she was infected by the Slaughter (MAG125); since Peter Lukas has been running the Institute, Jon has mentioned multiple times that he was feeling alone/lonely, which… could be a Lonely-induced state of mind (MAG125, MAG129), with everyone drifting away because of its effects.

Jon is still missing the Buried, the Flesh and the Dark. If Jon is getting his scars from the Buried AND the Flesh in one go, he will only be missing the Dark’s (and potentially the unidentified ~New Emergence~), which is already lurking around the Institute.

It’s going FAST.

b) Jon has been holding back, so well and on multiple accounts é_è He stuck with it and didn’t try to come in contact with Melanie! If he didn’t lie by omission, he has been managing to not Know about Basira’s current activities (MAG129: “I haven’t heard from Basira, since she left on whatever secret errand”)!! Well, he went to see Martin when he got the Insight that he was around in MAG129, but Martin hadn’t told him to “stop finding” him yet, so Jon didn’t break any promise. And, well, although he’s resolving to go into the coffin at the end of MAG130… he managed to not try anything since Basira left two weeks ago, and she’s been taking longer than what she had announced (MAG128: “I’ll try and be back in a week or two. Don’t think about me.”); the fact that Basira is still not coming back indeed changes the paradigms a bit. (What is she doing… Where did Elias send her to… Was Elias’s plan precisely to remove her from the Institute, to get Jon more prone to getting involved himself…)

Even statements-wise!

MAG121 (+MAG122?): February 15th 2018 MAG123: February 17th (“Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired.”) MAG124: February 24th~ (“It’s been a week and… Melanie’s attitude towards me hasn’t softened.”) MAG125: ? MAG126: ? MAG127: ? MAG128: 3rd March (Basira leaving) MAG129: ? MAG130: 17th~ March (“It’s been two weeks since I heard from Basira”)

There was a very intense period from MAG124 to MAG128, but since Basira’s departure, it seems that Jon has gone back to the casual and safe rhythm of one statement a week. Take that, Elias and your “And I know you’ve had problems with moderation.” :www Jon has been doing good on his own!

c) It’s SAD, once again, that Jon reached the conclusion that he had to do something by himself, and that this something involved getting hurt. I don’t see any of the others taking it kindly: Melanie could be indifferent, but Basira will probably point out that Jon didn’t prove himself trustworthy (going into the coffin when she had told him not to) and Martin… would probably scream at Jon a bit for getting injured.

But at the same time, yes, what is Jon supposed to do? He lost Sasha when he was ignorant; he lost Tim when he was knowledgeable, and thought that Daisy had disappeared too. Jon is still the one who has the best chance of not dying; he’s the one with the most powers; he proved that he could neutralise Breekon when he was on the verge of attacking. Of course that, now that he’s discovered that he could possibly “undo” another death, and if the only downside would be him getting injured… he would take that chance. Especially when Gertrude casually mentioned that:

(MAG130) GERTRUDE: Also… I can’t rely on having this much lead time. I’ve had ten years tracking supplicants drawn by the siren call of Flesh, watching them gradually stockpiling meat. Very useful, in terms of preparation time for derailing the final push, but in future… I think I need to get a little bit more… proactive.

Meaning she let a few members of The Flesh run wild for ten years, for the Greater Good of “derailing” their ritual later. Meaning she probably allowed them to hurt, torture and kill innocent people all this time. Typical Gertrude and she had her priorities (saving the world, and at what cost?). Jon’s priorities are… Well. We don’t officially know them, but the assistants seem to be pretty much at the top of his list right now.

And damnit!! Jon tried to reach out to the others, to explain to them what was happening! He tried to infodump to Martin! He confessed to Martin that he missed him and was worried for him! He told Basira about his new powers and told her they were on the same side! And Martin and Basira both chose to remain solo in their own quests. But Jon tried; it has nothing to do with the way he tried to protect Tim and Martin at the end of season 2, or the way he avoided all the assistants before Nikola kidnapped him in season 3 (MAG098, Martin: “Yeah, we talked. Not long, he– Y’know, I think he thinks that the distance keeps us safe, you know? Like, like, if he just makes sure that we’re not involved, we’re somehow fine.”) He tried and just spent two weeks with the coffin for sole company, knowing that there could be a chance of rescuing Daisy and knowing that she is not having a great time inside (MAG128, Breekon: “You can stare at it, knowing how your feral friend suffers, knowing how powerless you are to help. And when you can’t bear it any longer, knowing that you can climb in and join her…”).

Jon is only finding another way now because communicating didn’t work when all he got was doors getting shut in his face. He would even have reasons to snap if someone were to reproach him for trying something alone… ;;

- Regarding MAG131, since we already have the title, I wiiiiish we could have Melanie stopping Jon dead (…) in his tracks and instead giving him a statement of The Flesh attack on the Institute, but alas :| If Jon is planning to amputate (perhaps temporarily, before sewing it back? He said “another scar”, didn’t mention a missing body part) or hurt himself (blood to attract Daisy once inside?), I don’t knoooow what he would aim for. Something grand and over the top like HIS HEART, SINCE HE MENTIONED THE WEB’S “HEART”? Something symbolically appropriate like his eyes (L I S T E N, ~THE RELATION BETWEEN EYES AND KNOWLEDGE~ HAS BEEN AN OLD ONE SINCE ŒDIPUS………………)? His head? … Honestly, I think I would be more disturbed if it turned out to be something small and… closer to a real-life injury (a finger, a bit of an ear, etc.) Another option would have been to use The Boneturner’s Tale or to ask for Jared’s, uh, “help” (stealing bones/organs directly from Jon), since Gregory Pryor had mentioned how he could still feel his own bones “twisting in someone else’s arm” after they had been stolen from him in MAG049, but we don’t know where the book is, The Flesh already tried to destroy the Archives when Jon was in a coma (they’re not allies), and Jon seemed keen on acting as fast as possible. Still, not totally excluding the possibility of Jon taking the time to go after a Flesh avatar in MAG131 (although it sounds like he’s getting ready to jump in the coffin already). Martin had even highlighted that he couldn’t be sure whether “J”’s gym was still running or not since August 2013 (MAG090: “The, um… the supplemental materials that should go with this statement, providing more details on addresses, names, and stuff, seems to be missing, so we don’t have any way of tracking down the gym, or finding out the name the business might be operating under. Not without a 2013 copy of the Aberdeen Yellow Pages. A bit of relief, in some ways.”) Orrrr I guess that Jon could also be cunning and only pretending to totally miss the point, just to make The Web freak out and come out of its hiding spot to stop him, but Jon hasn’t been hiding from his recording since the whole Sceptical Show from season 1… So I don’t know. (Why are you so intent on getting honest on tape now that you know that Fear entities are listening to you, Jon?)

Re: the coffin, by the way. I wonder how we would be “told” of what is happening down there, if Jon goes inside? Would we witness it live, through a tape recorder? Would we get the reactions from people outside (Martin, Melanie and/or Basira) while Jon still hasn’t come back, before Jon would give a quick summary? Would Jon (or Daisy) give a full statement of what happened? … Would Elias give a Statement Never Given of the whole thing? (In that case, I’d really hope that Jon’s anchor would turn out to be MARTIN INDEED IN THE END, because then, Elias would have to narrate the whole ordeal, and I’m ALL for Elias’s pain while he would grit his teeth with utter disgust, come on, you know you want it too.)

And still no idea about Jon’s anchor /o/ I said last time that I felt that MAG129 was precisely introducing the idea that it wouldn’t be Martin, since Martin told Jon to stop “finding” him… but it wouldn’t mean that Jon would stop. And it’s one of the few things that Jon actively seeks out himself – the tape recorders are the ones stalking him, for example, and sadly so was The Distortion (;; I want Helen baaaack…). We don’t know whether he tends to go back to the Web’s lighter or if it’s the lighter which stuck to him.