Lashbrook glanced back over his shoulder before entering the server and archive rooms. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Omni was going to simply appear behind him, silently, like he had in the office. Thankfully, that thought was just paranoia, at least for now--the HQ was still deserted.
They were definitely real,Lashbrook thought, mentally reliving the whirlwind lunch break where he’d realized his family had not, in fact, died in the explosion of a house that they, in fact, hadn’t lived in. Even if that wasn’t the right house, even if Omni took them somewhere--they were real.
Lashbrook opened the door to the server room and glanced over the workings. The old Detective didn’t understand how all of this newfangled nonsense worked, but he knew that the strip powering it all should probably be plugged in: sure enough, as soon as he did so, lights, fans, and monitors roared to life. As far as Lashbrook was concerned, this cinched it: the sudden blackout of the Department’s web presence had definitely been intentional. Whatever was on their homepage was something Omni suddenly didn’t want anyone to see. Lashbrook made a mental note to revisit the site after giving the server some time to boot.
Next, he tackled the Archives. He had to drill into Omni’s locked top drawer to find the master key to the filing cabinets there, but it was easier than drilling out every single lock inside. The archives were not very well labeled, so he decided to start on one end in the labyrinth of steel drawers and then adjust depending on how far off from the target date he was. He was looking for whatever happened just before and after October 31st--when the gacha allegedly appeared. He was tempted to start a full week back, since he’d remembered things being normal before his vacation, but he was coming to realize that memory was a very fluid construct, as were the laws of physics and reality. What hadn’t seemed to change were actual physical artifacts: this would be the place, if any, to find the truth.
Lashbrook pored over thousands of old files and documents, starting with the 50s and working towards the present. As the work became rhythmic, the idea that Lashbrook himself was a gacha of some sort wriggled into his mind, hanging like a knife over his already tenuous sanity. Upon thinking it through it logically, though, he had come up with some very convincing evidence to the contrary:
Matt said the memories gacha came out of their capsule with were the bare minimum required for them to function as their character should. Matt himself explained he remembered bits and pieces of a fictional city, getting fired from a Blockbuster, and starting a garage band, but even he seemed immediately aware these memories were a form of mental flavor text. Lashbrook’s memories were complex and complete, every detail from the way his daughter felt in his arms the first time he held her, to his worst game of poker ever, to random times walking around Wal-Mart, to the call he received about the explosion… he knew that last piece was fabricated, tampered with, unreal, but there was no reason to think the rest was.
In addition, though his memories of the home had been falsified, it was not a fictional location like in Matt’s memories. Though he hadn’t seen inside, every external detail, at least, matched his memories perfectly. GachaCorp would have no way of knowing every detail about a random home in a coastal area of the American south. It was too oddly specific. And for what? Why bother giving him such detail in his backstory at all? Why would he have started out, of all things, operating as a high-ranking officer of the Woodruck PD, second only to Omni himself? Matt’s first memory was hearing people trash-talk him when he came out of a gumball machine. Lashbrook didn’t remember anything about gacha at all, except the shock he felt when he first ran into them upon his return. He certainly didn’t remember popping out of a capsule at a K-Mart!
And finally, Lashbrook reasoned, he had no unusual powers to speak of. It seemed like every gacha was some over the top stereotype or fantastical monster with reality-breaking magical abilities. Lashbrook couldn’t punch with sonic energy, breathe fire, teleport, or anything crazy. Those were the sorts of thing gacha seemed aware of innately, and Lashbrook had nothing but a decent understanding of firearm techniques consistent with the mundane and very human job he held down in normal human society. Which all served to pose the question: if he wasn’t a gacha, then what happened to his memories, and why!?
Lashbrook got no closer to the truth from perusing the archives: everything from 1982 to the present had been expunged. The folders were there, sure, but they were empty… someone had systematically destroyed all of them.
Lashbrook’s heart sank. His throat closed. He was going to have to become a fugitive, constantly on the run from Omni, after going to all this trouble and leaving so much evidence behind--but he’d found absolutely nothing to show for it. He had pretty strong proof now that something massive was being covered up, but it didn’t take a detective to figure that out.
Lashbrook ran past all the other filing cabinets in case something had been missed in the rest of the storage. There was a supply closet in the back--maybe something had been thrown away prior to the data purge? Lashbrook walked towards it and immediately felt himself consumed by the metaphysical pressure of instinctual terror. Standing in front of this door made him feel sick in every way. His intuition told him he wouldn’t like what was inside, but that just meant he needed all the more desperately to learn what it was. The Master key didn’t work on this one, so Lashbrook fetched his drilling kit and went to town, trying desperately to shake off the growing nausea and panic.
When the lock finally succumbed, Lashbook kicked the door open. Two dark figures leapt out at him--heart momentarily stopping, Lashbrook leapt back just in time and readied his pistol. On closer inspection, though, there was no immediate danger--the two humanoid figures that had fallen at him were already dead and in body bags. He held his breath and opened them, nearly gagging at the sight and smell of the nude, bloated corpses. They couldn’t have been here for long, as they’d only just started leaking in a couple spots: three- or four-days tops, Lashbrook estimated. One was a mid-20s looking, clean-cut black-haired Caucasian male with an average physique. The other was a large, middle aged Black male with a dad-bod covering a clearly once buff figure. Lashbrook had never seen them before, but they felt important--very important.
The detective checked the bodies over thoroughly. No sign of any illness or injury, except for mysterious nozzles implanted in the carotids on each side of the necks. When Lashbrook touched the nozzle on the boy, he expected blood to come out--instead, only air sputtered through. The corpse was slightly bloated, but must have been systematically drained of every last drop of blood. When Lashbrook tried the nozzle on the older man’s neck, a steady drizzle of blood launched out. This one was still being harvested.
There was nothing more to see here. It felt like sacrilege to just leave the bodies there, a spritz of blood trailing from one still… but getting out before Omni popped in was top priority, and Lashbrook had a feeling his safe time here was fleeting. He turned all the lights off on the way out and tried to make the Chief’s office look as untampered with from the outside as possible. If Omni even glanced at the drilled lock, it would immediately be game over, but that was out of his hands now.
Lashbrook ran back to the PC in his office and quickly navigated back to the department’s website. It had to have been around half an hour since he’d booted the servers back up, so the website should definitely be live again. Sure enough--bingo.
“Welcome to the Woodruck Police Department’s Official Webpage!”
A sinking feeling filled Lashbrook as he scrolled down past the banner. The last update had been a photo uploaded on October 31st, 1999, and he knew instantly why the website had been so quickly pulled. In the photo stood the black-haired boy, dressed as a cheap facsimile of Ash Ketchum from that Pokémon thing the kids loved, standing to the left of the larger, older Black man, who was rather comically dressed in a homemade costume of a Pokémon that Lashbrook did not know was called Snorlax. The caption beneath read the following:
“Happy Halloween, Woodruck! The Woodruck PD is working hard to keep your children safe tonight, but we’re not beyond having a little fun ourselves. From our Halloween party last night, state award-winning Detective Lashbrook (left), famous for nabbing the Napfield Napper last Fall, and our own beloved Chief Rickson (right), showing that when it comes to criminals, we know how to catch em’ all!”
Lashbrook didn’t have the time to weather this heart attack before another hit : the front door to HQ was being opened!! The Detective put on his best innocent face, grabbed the completed files of the Tinkerpot and Grimm cases, and turned off his monitor, walking to the front door himself. He could feel his heart pound through his gritted teeth.
“Well, howdy hey, champ,” Omni chuckled, nodding with a plastic smile as he stepped in. “I just remembered I left something important in my closet, and figured I’d check in and make sure you were keeping out of trouble.”
“Perfect timing, Chief,” Lashbrook replied with deceptively chipper gravel, tipping his fedora politely. “I just finished up those cases you mentioned.” He handed the files to the Chief, who looked genuinely pleased. “Took me all night, but that’s how it is in this biz’, eh?”
“You got it, Lash, old pal!” Omni replied, giving him a hearty pat on the back.
“I’ll get out of your hair, John. Have a great night.” As soon as Lashbrook was down the stairs, he made a mad dash for his cruiser, hopping in and driving away at the fastest speed he could muster with any semblance of safety, sweat pouring from his trembling face. He didn’t know where to run to. He didn’t know who to run to. He wondered if Omni could appear in his backseat any moment he wanted to. Little did he know that Omni could do just that, and that the only reason he’d let the Detective go was the ease with which he could teleport over and kill him if his suspicions proved true.
Nowhere was safe. Not the police department. Not his car. Not his apartment.
Not even his memories.