Chapter 253
“Report, Agent Hall, Agent Jill, how’s the cleanup in San Francisco?” inside of a secret site of the Division, Josephine Wong was hosting a meeting with some of her most trusted agents and other teammates.
“We detected no further paranormal occurrences in the area, no residual negative energy.” Agent Jill answered: “The whole area was washed clean. Our injured agent has fully recovered and will be on probation and evaluation soon.”
“Good. How about the prepping for further cleanse?”
“We still have two more areas that need cleansing. And we are preparing materials. But it will take at least a week.” Agent Hall answered: “We’ll need more manpower if we want to speed things up.”
“Okay, we’ll need to budget our resources for that.” Josephine Wong sighed, then she turned to Nameless and Pei: “How’s your preparation going? Do you need more resources?”
“This monk thinks patience is the only thing needed right now.” Nameless answered: “A word of notice has been put out in search for accomplished and virtuous monks. This monk will also travel to my past temples for help.”
“Same with me. My contacts are bringing the swords and chains in. And we can only wait.” Pei sighed: “The delivery services we have right now are just not cut out for urgent matters like these.”
“Okay. ETA?”
“One week.”
“Drew, how’s the external sourcing application process?” Josephine Wong turned to a female agent sitting on the side.
“They are still verifying the details, but they are not giving us any timeline.” Drew answered: “They stressed that the matters of the Clearwater Municipal Hospital are top classified and should be off limits for all those that are outside of the Division. Even if you requested as a regional liaison, they still need to submit it to the committee headed by the commissioner. We are looking at scheduling a session with the committee here.”
Almost everyone in the room sighed.
“Fine, I’ll talk to the commissioner again if need be.” Josephine Wong shook her head: “Any updates on the dig into the hospital’s history? And the experiments on patients?”
“We suspected some kind of cover up. But it looks like it’s something of wider scale.” Drew answered: “We tried searching for some of the related governmental documents and official records. But a lot of them are missing or damaged, there are a few that we are able to gather, and we are gathering as much as we could from them.”
“Can you elaborate on what you’ve found?” Pei asked: “I tried asking around for the related information, but only got really fragmented information back. If there was a cover-up, it must be really good.”
“And what about the man I asked you to find? Did you find anyone matching that depiction I gave you?” Josephine Wong rubbed her temples and asked: “In the memories of the malice, he seemed like a person of significant position. I am not entirely sure what kind of position he was in, but there should at least be some kind of records of him.”
“Yes. That was the Chief Administrative Officer Eric Shaw.” Drew tapped on her tablet to find her notes: “He was in charge of the executive matters of the hospital at the time. We found some traces of paranormal experimentation, and remember the short video clips we got from some internet influencers’ livestream? Their researcher actually did some good digging - may I?” Then she pointed at the screen behind Josephine Wong.
A video was projected onto the screen, where a young asian man was speaking directly to the camera: "... And the mass hysteria? Get this: for several days, people saw themselves or people around them differently in the mirrors whenever they were in the hospital. For example, one old lady who was just visiting her son in law in the hospital, said she saw herself with bandages on her arm and her head, just for a brief moment. The other example was a young man in his 20s, he saw that a young woman was standing beside him, holding his arm ...”
Josephine Wong frowned, because she then saw Jason’s face appearing on the screen.
“... hey Branston Gang, we are currently inside of the hospital’s main building. We have your favorite guest and suspected medium Jason here with us. We are definitely getting an edge on filming the first ghost footage!” right now, it was a young man with an obnoxious attitude talking directly to the camera.
“And that’s about it.” Drew stopped the projection: “Then their stream cut off around five minutes, and there’s very little information in the footage so I’ll save everyone’s time. So my team went with the previous research guy’s route and looked up some archives of local newspapers - looks like there are a lot of seemingly paranormality related incidents happening around the hospital right about the time it went defunct. We are compiling a timeline of different reported incidents and we would be following up with some locals.”
“Hmm, I think I need to head to the Grant Academy to pay someone a visit.” Josephine Wong shook her head with a wry smile: “And who handled them?”
“It’s uh - when you were the newly elected liaison here.” Drew hesitated and said: “I think a team selected mainly by the Browns and Clarksons handled the case. They didn’t really leave a lot of records. But if you’d like I can try to take a look. I think they might’ve handled it as a hush-hush operation.”
“That’s a really serious accusation, Drew.” Agent Hall said in a stern tone, “And one that would need substantial evidence to back up.”
“Not an accusation, just a suspicion.” Drew looked at Agent Hall in the eyes: “It’s just quite interesting, because civilian crossing over to a paranormal site is a serious incident. And yet we just found out about it when we’re dealing with this time bomb of a hospital.”
“Oh, Ms. Wong?” another agent in the room raised his hand: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to visit the Grant Academy right now. I’ve heard they went on lock down, due to potential circulation of some highly dangerous material and are restricting travel.”