Arc II, Chapter 30: The Ribbon Cutting
Questioning Dr. Howard Halle was coincidentally very easy. All it took was a call to the number on his business card to find out that he was at an event at Hallowed Heart Hospital just up the street.
He was Jed Geist’s personal physician. He knew something. He may even have been the killer. It was clear that the plot was pushing us in his direction.
We could have walked, but Chief Willis (Officer Willis in this storyline) insisted on driving us.
“Can’t leave my vehicle unattended out here,” he said. “Gun theft is a rising crime.”
That was his subtle On-Screen way of telling the audience there were more guns in the car than what he had on his person. When we went Off-Screen, he told us that explicitly.
“Carousel has a sticky relationship with guns,” he said. “Doesn’t like them making things too easy. You understand that you’ll do just fine. Listen to the flow of the battle and move with it and you’ll get the best results. Hotshots out here trying to force a win end up on a little white missing poster sooner or later.”
He was mostly talking to Antoine. Antoine was our powerhouse. We only really had one fighter so if we got a gun, we knew who it would go to nine times out of ten. I could probably use it to blow up a gas tank or some other feat of precision, but if we needed to gun something down, we had to put it in our Athlete’s hands.
“Is that what happens next?” Cassie asked nervously. “We have to fight?”
“No use worrying about if you have to fight,” Willis said and he pulled into the parking lot of the hospital. “You’re never more than a few scenes from a fight. After a while, it’s the peacetime that will make you nervous. Now use that Moxie to act brave and let’s get this show on the road.”
As we approached the non-emergency entrance of the hospital, we saw balloons and banners celebrating the opening of a new wing at the hospital.
All we had to do was follow the signs.
The hospital was one of the expensive, fancy ones I had only seen on television. The banquet room we arrived at was on par with the ballroom at the mansion that had hosted the pickled wizard masquerade.
A hundred or so NPCs were in attendance and all of them dressed in their best tuxes and gowns. We were completely out of place.
Luckily, it would seem, we arrived right at the end of the event.
A man was standing on the podium in the middle of a speech. Behind him, a large, red ribbon hung tight ready to be cut. On the red wallpaper, his name was Dr. Howard Halle, the very man we sought to talk to. He was a refined and well-dressed gentleman with an ease of elocution that almost distracted from the fact that he was marked as an enemy on the red wallpaper.
Dr. Howard Halle in Cold-Blooded Things.
| Dr. Howard Halle
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| Plot Armor: 25
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| Tropes
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| Intellectual Curiosity
| This villain will alter normal targeting to pursue players who trigger his curiosity.
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| Non-Combatant
| This villain cannot be attacked On-Screen until it attacks the player or is otherwise identified as hostile. Attacking it will not be effective, nor will it change the story. It will cause the player to go Off-Screen for a time.
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| They’ll Never Believe You
| When tangling with this villain, the authorities will not believe or take seriously anything the players tell them.
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| PHDs Unlimited
| This villain has an education in every scholarly topic related to the storyline.
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| The Mad Doctor
| This villain cannot be dissuaded from their strange or unethical beliefs.
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| Heart of the Operation
| An attempt to kill this villain by players or allies will attract powerful protectors buffed by his Moxie.
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| Advanced Rhetoric
| This villain may use their Savvy stat as Moxie.
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| Minion Maker
| This villain is able to summon or create low-level monsters to do its bidding.
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| 2 Additional Trope Imperceptible
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