Preview Event

JAAs who were brought on early in the first wave were sent on a mission to resolve a haunting that concerned a family dinner. Our team did a comprehensive psychological analysis of the family members involved, dug through their social media pages for details and made some phone calls + emails. It was discovered that the following events had occurred leading up to the meal:

The father had a gambling problem and lost a lot of the family's savings that had been set aside for emergencies. He felt an urge to gamble driven by a desire to make up for his shortcomings as a provider, which his wife made him constantly aware of.

One of the sons had a host of disabilities which his parents were unwilling or unable to accept. He was not getting the help he needed and was tired of being compared to his more successful siblings, who were also unhelpful, insisting that he was just making waves for attention and needed to stop rocking the boat and get in line. His unusual interests and concerns were dismissed and ignored by the family except to discourage them. He was considering moving out to get away from that unhealthy environment.

The other son was a high achiever, but had high anxiety as a result of constantly struggling to meet his parents expectations. He expressed his anxiety by breaking the rules and having wild unrestrained parties.

There was also a daughter who was desperately trying to keep the wheels on the bus and slowly breaking down because of the strain of keeping everybody's secrets from her mother.

The mother was the central figure of the story and the individual whose memory the KNOT was trying to compress into an artifact. She had an image in her head of a perfect home, a perfect life with a perfect husband and perfect children. She believed wholeheartedly that this idealized version of her life was in fact the life she was living. Although she had suspicions and indications that things were not as they seemed, she chose to ignore and repress them as much as possible. But she had no control over her family, only on the household itself, which she kept in perfect order. It was one tiny piece of perfection, the only thing that maintained for her the illusion of the perfect life.

Weeks prior to the dinner, the over-achiever son had taken a small army of friends to the family's lake house for a party. Someone put fireworks in the toilet and the resulting explosion caused thousands of dollars in damage to the property forcing them to dip into emergency funds that weren't there to repair it. They needed to sell the property to offset the costs of the repairs, and the sale went badly. Because of the father's debt, and the disabled son's inability to find gainful employment the family was in massive debt and couldn't pay the mortgage on their home. At the dinner table that night, the family's daughter was too distracted with the pressure of keeping all the secrets to see that there was a foreclosure notice in the mail and wound up handing it to her mother to read with the rest of the mail. When her mother realized she was losing the house, the entire illusion of her perfect family came crumbling down. There was a huge family fight. All of the children went their separate ways and the shock of what happened ultimately killed the mother who couldn't bear the thought that her family wasn't as perfect as she had wanted them to be.

We compiled extensive research material by contacting her husband and digging through her son's online profile for information. This allowed us to piece together the above narrative and psychologically profile the individuals involved. Upon entering the KNOT with some of the senior aides, we found the haunting, and resolved the dinner peacefully in one go by talking it out as a family. Nobody read the extensive research material Tobias put together except one other person so we had to improv, with the rest of the team relying on cues we were throwing down. They did a fantastic job. I feel like there's an official writeup somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. We did not realize during our investigation that there was also an aunt present. The haunting served spaghetti. It was delicious.

While one team was dealing with the haunting the other was fending off shades. This occurrence was strange because we had been told they were not much of a threat, and yet they were attacking in droves, clearly riled up.

In the aftermath of the haunting one of the senior aides had vanished. It turns out that he had left to take a phone call about his daughter, who had been sick and died in the night. His resulting grief became a haunting which we had to fight. I believe we fooled it into thinking one of the JAA's was his daughter and almost let her leave forever with the haunting, but decided not to risk personnel and finally put down the creature and finished the artifact's compression. We brought home two artifacts and the senior aide was never heard from again. Presumably he became trapped in a mental prison. AHAB responded to mop up shades and get us an emergency evacuation.