fiveofnone | An important debriefing. ((for sweetcandygirl))

Harley enters the café, going through the many different thoughts in her head. Today she wore a black dress to suit the debriefing meeting. Following behind her is a Pokémon, a Poochyena.

It was easy to spot Caspar in the corner, and she smirked a little at the sight of him nursing that cup of coffee.

Harley slid into her seat. "Okay, Boris, I am back from my important mission. I got good information on Moose and Squirrel."

Harley gets a nod in greeting; the poochyena gets a rare smile. Looks like she managed to find a pokémon that met all of her qualifications.

Although he knows she's making some sort of pop culture reference, the specifics sail over his head. His lips purse into a frown, but he's not as annoyed as he could be. If she's making a joke, then whatever she found doesn't put Adia's life in imminent danger. He's fairly certain she'd be reacting far differently if that were the case.

"What'd you find?" he asks, all business.

"I have this strong feeling that Adia is in danger... but I am not sure exactly what sort of danger that would be." Harley answered. Straight to the point.

She pulled out a small binder. And placed it on the table. Inside were print outs of all the pictures she took while she was at the cabin.

"He is dealing with the occult. I know that much."

"And I found small proof that the woman who disappeared from the Nexus was last in his cabin. But nothing to straight out claim that he did something to her."

Caspar's posture stiffens at her words. He sets aside his coffee and takes the binder, flipping through the photographs, scanning each one methodically as if committing them to memory.

The initial photos of the strange items in the basement get an eyebrow raise, but it's the journal entries that make Caspar's jaw tighten with cold fury. Josh is obsessed with his girlfriend, and those feelings show no signs of abating.

He shuts the binder and turns his attention to Harley and her words. "The portal, you mean. And the dolls..." It's unnerving, especially for someone like Caspar who is unused to magic. It makes him frown and look away. "Well, he's a liar at the very least. And he sounds unstable. But there's no evidence that he's hurt anyone... did you run into his persian while you were there?"

"We did. But Poochyena was more than ready to handle his very first battle." The Pokémon in question perks up his ears, when Harley speaks about him.

"I got a scan of the Persian with my Pokedex." Harley noted.

"I want to find out more about the 'Game' he spoke about in the journal. And how it is tied into those dolls. And the Wheel."

"Can we use a computer here to research information from another world?"

"Good," he says simply. He'd been concerned about that persian causing trouble at the wrong time. "Have you met Professor Madrone? He might be able to tell us more based on the scan you took."

That seems secondary to Harley's comment about Josh's creepy accessories. "He's a game show host. Adia says it's trivia game that's broadcast online. I looked for it once, but without any more details than that, it was impossible to find."

His gaze flicks down to the binder.

"If we do a reverse image search with that wheel, we might have better luck." He stands abruptly, not even bothering to grab his coffee cup. "Let's head to the Plaza so I can access one of the terminals."

"Professor Madrone was the one who gave me Poochyena. That is a good idea about asking him for more information."

"I just get the idea that people are getting hurt... by being put in that game. That girl that disappeared during Christmas was one of them."

She stands with him, when he decides to access one of the terminals. "We should do a similar search on those dolls. They are pretty unique."

"He's a decent guy. Although Adia told me that he offered Josh a chance to research pokémon in the Wilds, so careful what you say. I don't want Josh getting tipped off that we're onto him."

Heading up the stairs and out of the coffee shop, Caspar sets a brisk pace towards the Plaza. He honestly couldn't give a frak about some random Nexus woman or any other contestants at this moment. All he cares about is Adia's safety. Fortunately, that's reason enough to look into Josh's game show.

"Do you have electronic copies of either of those images? It'll make the search faster."

"I have done a lot of undercover work. Don't worry about me tipping anyone off..."

Harley reaches into her purse and pulls out a flashdrive. "Here. It is always good to have a back-up."

Caspar stops in front of the closest available terminal. "Thanks," he says as he takes the flashdrive and inserts it into a USB slot. Then he lays a hand on the hard drive and concentrates. The folder containing Harley's photographs opens, as well as a web browser. There is a cycling of images on the screen, but that's more for Harley's benefit than his own. He's searching through the web's virtual database, checking out any online game reference to a wheel, narrowing down the choices, including the creepy doll parameter if it's relevant...

A webpage appears. Caspar blinks and looks at it. There's no sign of the wheel. Or the dolls. Just a disturbing variety of fonts spelling out the title.

"Trivia Murder Party."

Harley frowns at the title of the webpage. "Trivia Murder Party? Is it trivia about murder... or murder if you don't know the trivia?"

"Show me more..."

There's a play button on the bottom of the screen. Caspar uses the mouse this time to select it.

A video plays. It seems to take a couple of minutes to get going, but once the game -- and the stakes -- are revealed, Caspar can only sit in silence as the effigies of the players are put through their paces.

Until the end, when there is one survivor. Not winner -- survivor.

The host sounds nothing like Josh, his voice all deep and distorted, but it makes sense in a way. If the killer is going to remain anonymous...

"That," Caspar says, when the video ends, "Is really frakked up."

Harley is truly upset by the end of watching that video. She has seen some horrible stuff in her time. So she is not deeply disturbed by the game itself. But she is very disturbed to know that Adia could be a target of this psycho.

Her mind keeps on going to the part in the journal, where 'Josh' had written about how weak and pathetic that girl he took at Christmas time was. And how Adia would have been different. That Adia could have been a player in the game.

"We need to talk to Adia. Now." Her voice is serious.

Caspar looks at her, his face a cold mask. The same thought has gone through his head and the fury he feels towards Josh is blinding. But underneath that? He's terrified. And that he absolutely won't let show. Not even to Harley.

"Okay." He'd prefer to skip the middle man and eliminate Josh as a threat, but with no way of knowing where he is, he has to settle for warning Adia. "I'll text her. But we should tell her somewhere private."

Almost as an afterthought, he saves a copy of the video to the flashdrive.

"Let's go back to my place." Harley suggests.

She just hopes that Adia will listen to both of them.

He nods once and pockets the flashdrive for safe-keeping, then motions for Harley to lead the way. His steps are smooth, his expression set in a hard stare forward. The only hint to how badly this has shaken him comes when he pulls out his PINpoint and needs a second try to send Adia a text.

His hands are trembling.

Whatever he sends to Adia seems to do the trick. His PINpoint buzzes and he looks down at the screen. "She'll meet us there."

Harley leads him to her Nexus apartment. It breaks her heart to see how this situation has affected him. How broken he is... with his mask out of place.

"Caspar..."

This needs to be said without Adia around.

"I am going to make sure this 'Josh' character gets what is coming to him. I don't want you to worry about that."

Edited 2018-02-11 03:46 (UTC)

It's the belief that he's failed Adia somehow that upsets him the most. He's supposed to keep her safe, and yet this little psycho snuck right under his radar. Adia went on a New Year's date,/i> with him, for frak's sake!

He had one job.

As tempting as it is to tell Harley that he'll handle it himself, he knows why she's bringing this up without Adia around. "Keep it quiet or catch him in the act," he says gruffly. "Don't risk your fresh start over this loser."

"I appreciate your concern." Harley notes softly. But even with her fresh start, her friends are the most important thing to her. And she would risk anything to protect them.

They reach Harley's apartment. And she takes a breath.

"And remember, let me explain everything." She doesn't want Caspar's anger to get the better of him right now. And hurt their relationship.

His mouth puckers into a frown when she reminds him to keep quiet. "Gee, maybe I don't even need to be here at all," he snaps, before sighing and raising a shaking hand to his face, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "Sorry... dammit."

It's one thing to let Harley take point on eliminating Josh, but to not even say anything makes him feel utterly useless. But even he's aware that he's too angry right now to present the facts calmly. The last thing he wants is for Adia to write him off as jealous or over-protective.

Harley needs to be the voice of reason here.

Before they can even step inside, Adia has arrived. He heads towards them with a warm smile -- a smile that quickly falters once she senses the mood. "...what's wrong?" She looks from Caspar to Harley. "Did something happen?"

Harley was about to tell Caspar that she needed him to keep calm was so that Adia had someone to lean on. And that if Adia ended up hating someone over this... Harley didn't want it to be Caspar.

But that thought was unspoken when Adia showed up. "We need to talk."

"Come inside." Harley unlocked the apartment and let them inside. "Take a seat."

Harley felt that the best way to handle this situation was to start from the beginning. "Adia... during the Christmas party, I had witnessed the interaction between yourself, Caspar and Josh. And something seemed off to me."

"So I followed him home. And I found out a few things about him... that I felt that you should know."

Caspar would have told her that Adia is not the "shoot the messenger" sort of person, but he's certainly not looking forward to breaking the news to her. He wants her to be safe, but he wants her to be happy, too.

He takes Adia's hand as Harley leads them into the apartment and gives it a comforting squeeze, but it doesn't do much to soothe her nerves. What has the two of them so serious? Is someone sick? Did something tragic happen in the Nexus while she was gone? Her imagination runs wild with the possibilities in the time it takes her to sit down on the couch, Caspar at her side.

It takes her a moment to register what Harley is saying. Josh...? She must mean the game show host Josh. "Um... okay?" She has no idea what Harley is about to tell her, but this time, her imagination is blank. Josh is her friend... a little awkward and weird, sure, but that's nothing to be suspicious of.

Harley takes a breath, so that she can slow down her thoughts, and go through her story in a clear way.

"After he had left the conversation with you and Caspar, I had seen 'Josh' throw a Christmas gift he had intended to give you into the fire. Then, I witnessed him basically pick up a drunk woman, and take her home with him."

"I followed them to Josh's world. Since the situation seemed off to me."

"I didn't get a lot of information that first time, since Josh had a Pokemon at his home, that almost discovered me."

"But I kept my eye on the situation, because I was a little concerned about that woman. And she never returned back to the Nexus."

"A few weeks after that... I was in the Nexus asking about pets. I met the Pokemon professor. He gave me Poochyena to take care of." Harley takes out her Pokeball, to bring the Poocyhena out. He immediately perks up at the sight of people. And wanders over to them to smell their shoes.

"During my search for the right Pokemon for me, Caspar took me to the Pokemart to look up different kinds on their terminals. He had remembered that 'Josh' had bought you a keepsake from the PokeMart. And I remembered that Josh had a Pokemon. So we looked it up on the terminal. And learned about his Persian."

"It didn't sit right with me when Caspar told me that Josh told you that he didn't know anything about Pokemon. When he had one at his place."

"And that woman had still not returned to the Nexus. So I went back to his world."

Harley placed a large binder of photos in front of Adia. And pushed it towards the other woman. "Adia. I learned that Josh has been lying about a lot of things to you. And as I investigated further, I found some really creepy stuff. I learned that he was being paid to put people into his little game show."

"When Caspar and I searched his little game show on the terminals... it disturbed us even further. He is hurting people... he is killing people who don't get his little trivia questions right. And I can't prove it, but I know that the woman that disappeared during Christmas became one of his victims."

"And... Adia... I think he wants you to be part of his game."

Adia listens without comment, her expression one of disbelief. The things Harley describes initially are weird, certainly, although as she always does with Josh's "quirks", she tries to excuse them away. He was upset by Caspar's coldness towards him, people appear and disappear from the Nexus all the time...

The mention of the persian tickles something in the back of her mind, but Poochyena's appearance distracts her. As does Caspar's involvement in the story. She gives her boyfriend a look. "You knew about this?" she says, clearly disappointed.

Caspar doesn't drop his gaze, although he clearly wants to. "I was worried about you. This guy is bad news."

She sighs and shakes her head, opening the binder. It feels intrusive, but she'll look through it if Caspar and Harley think it's important. And at first, she's made uncomfortable, especially because it's now obvious that Josh has a crush on her. And apparently flirted with suicide...

The news of the game makes her raise an eyebrow, a trick she must have picked up from Caspar. "Do you have actual evidence that he hurts people?" she says. One last holdout for the sake of her friend. "Because so far it all sounds circumstantial at best..."

"She needs to see a video of the game." He says this to Harley, which makes Adia frown a little. Hello, she's right here! "Do you have something I can plug the flashdrive into?"

Edited 2018-02-12 16:24 (UTC)

"A whole squad of police showed up at his house Adia. They don't do that unless it is a serious situation."

Harley grabs her laptop and places it on the coffee table, so that Caspar can plug the flashdrive into it.

"I also took a scan of his Persian." Harley holds out the Pokedex with the scan of the cat-creature that she and Poocyhena faced.

Caspar does just that. Within seconds, the video begins playing.

At first, there is a long stretch of silence, the dolls on the screen unmoving, as if patiently waiting for the game to begin.

Then the show's host speaks. And Adia squirms uncomfortably. Because that is Josh's voice. Not his real voice, but the distorted one he used when he first spoke with her. It's ominous, it's... sadistic. This isn't some innocent trivia show she had initially assumed. It'd dark and macabre.

But they're just dolls. Right? Avatars for the real contestants? Except in his journal, Josh had written about what he was attempting to do with those dolls...

She watches the whole thing, clearly disturbed but not quite convinced. Okay, maybe Josh is more off-balance than she assumed. His emotions are clearly coming from a dark place. His feelings for her are borderline obsessed. But... a murderer?

Then Harley shows her the picture of the persian.

She has seen this cat before. And all at once, she remembers where.

Her stalker. The tableau of death he created for her during the Khan invasion. His shadowy outline on the laptop screen, grilling her about her willingness to care for others.

And one smug, cat-like pokémon.

Paling to ghost-white, Adia brings her hands up to her mouth in horror. "No no no, she whimpers, her voice soft and strangled. No, no. He can't be. He can't be.

"Adia." Caspar has his hands on her shoulders, staring at her worriedly. He expected her to be upset, but he's never seen her this terrified. "Adia. Adia, talk to me. What is it?"

Her eyes shut, like she might cry. "It's him. He's..."

Caspar is clueless. Adia never told him about her stalker. His eyes wide and desperate, he looks to Harley for help.

Harley immediately moves onto the couch, to wrap Adia into a supportive embrace. Her hold is not too tight that Adia can't get out of the hug, if she wants to.

She remembers Adia telling her about her stalker. About her promise that she would find out who he was. And Adia's reaction tells Harley that she has kept that promise.

"He is the one who was threatening you?" She softly finishes the sentence.

She barely registers Harley's hug, but leans into it all the same. Caspar puts a hand on her knee in an effort to keep her grounded. To keep them both grounded.

It's a truth that she doesn't want to face. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut, as if somehow that will keep it away. How can someone she considered a friend turn out to be a sadistic killer? Not only sadistic, but willing to use that sadism to toy with her? Josh has always treated her kindly, doing whatever he can to make her happy...

Harley's question is answered with a subtle nod of her head and a soft groan. All the strange things that Josh said and did come rushing back as huge red flags. She should have known. She especially should have known since Halloween. Why had her own intuition failed her?

Beside her, Caspar stiffens at the news. "Someone was threatening you?" Josh was threatening her? Oh. He is so dead.

Harley knows exactly what Adia is going through right now. It is exactly what Harley went through -- when she finally woke up to the evil and hate that was Joker. And it was hard to face the truth. To feel that her trust had been ripped away. That her faith had been misplaced.

So she will just hold Adia as long as the other woman needs.

Harley knows better than most how it feels to be blind to red flags.

She shakes her head slightly at Caspar. She knows that he is upset too, but that is not what Adia needs right now. She doesn't need a reminder that the person who she thought was her friend was someone who had wanted to hurt her in horrible ways.

"I understand Adia. I truly do."

"Someone was stalking me," Adia says, barely above a whisper. "I should have told you, but it was months ago and I didn't want you to worry..."

Caspar's anger gets snuffed out immediately, replaced with worry and shame. She was trying to protect him from his own fears. "Oh, sweetheart..."

His words, Harley's words, they barely register as she sinks deeper into a spiral of terror. This is so much more than a murderer being obsessed with her. This is about trusting someone who had lied to her about his identity and his intentions.

If she was wrong about him, then how can she know if she's right about anyone else?

"I have to go." She stands abruptly, pushing herself out of Harley's gentle embrace. Her chest is tight, and each breath she takes is shallower than the last. "I can't -- if he's --"

"Hey, hey." Caspar keeps her from going out the door, his hands on her shoulders once more, sliding down to her wrists so she stops worrying at the sleeves of her coat. "Let's go home then. Okay? Let me take you back home."

She nods numbly, tears threatening to fall, her body going slack in Caspar's arms. He wraps an arm around her and pulls out his PINpoint before looking at Harley. "I'll take it from here. Text me if you find out anything else."

Edited 2018-02-13 03:08 (UTC)

Harley does not know what to say, when Adia pushes herself out of the embrace. And just watches Adia stand, a little concerned.

She draws her knees up to her chest, watching how Adia is falling to pieces. And there is nothing she can do to help.

Right now her fury and anger are carefully bottled up, until the next time she meets 'Josh'. He is not going to get away with this.

Harley is only somewhat aware that Caspar has said something to her. She turns her head to him. And nods. "Take care of our girl."

Caspar's fury isn't so easily contained. It leaks out in the slight tremble of his hands, the ever tightening line of his jaw. But he can keep it under control for Adia's sake.

If he ever sees Josh again, it isn't going to be pretty.

He presses the PINpoint button, and they are gone.

An important debriefing. ((for sweetcandygirl))

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