Listen to the Rain

On Friday, I (and schoolpsychnerd and a few other people) made characters for euripidesredux's Call of Cthulhu game! And, uh, we may have accidentally started playing Shadowrun...

So, here's the pitch we were given:

This will be modern age, set in bustling mid-sized city Arkham, Massachusetts. For backgrounds, characters should have either lost their most recent jobs or been unable to find employment in their primary field due to the economy or other circumstances, and have consequently come together to form a private investigation firm (a booming growth industry in Arkham). I'd also encourage some interest (or unconfirmable, tenuous exposure) to the occult or supernatural.

It took me a while to come up with something that would fit that, but I eventually settled on Elias Chrzaszcz (proununced "shunsh"), a former executive at a startup tech company dedicated to trawling through public health data, social media posts, and so on, and using software analysis to identify trends that might speak to breaking epidemics or other public health concerns.

Unfortunately, the crash of 2008 sent his business reeling and the sequester dried up the government grants and finished it off completely, so he declared bankruptancy and moved on. But Elias remained convinced that the government was hiding something. He had seen too many odd sequences in the data that could only speak to a coverup--places like Groversville, Tennessee; Nacogdoches, Texas; or Nargestown, West Virginia where there was a suspicious lack of any of the normal irregularities found in anonymized health data.

So with the help of a former occult bookstore owner driven out of business by Amazon and the internets, he starts up another tech company devoted to app-based private investigating. Download the app, request investigators through that, avoid phone calls or unexplained visits that might give away your investigations. Especially useful for people in precarious situations. The problem is that driven by a desire to know what's really going on, Elias is determined to run his own private investigating firm to provide proof of the app's value when making a pitch to license it out to others.

And that's all well and good. I spent my points so that Elias is a pretty good programmer. But please allow me to represent his skill at private investigating in gif form:



Also in the game are a former park ranger fired for being weird and abrasive to visitors/arm-wrestling with Bigfoot, a scion of a prominent Maine family who's determined to carve her own path in life and not rely on her father's money, and a photojournalist who lost his job when the paper decided to fire all the photographers because reporters have ssmartphones, right?

I'm sure this won't end in screaming and arson!