Leona Lillywhite
birthday: December 4
sex: female (by choice)
occupation: NEET
theme song: Sheer Mag - Night Isn't Bright
likes: gun customization, spicy snack food, noisy shoegaze, Memphis rap, Sim City, golden age sf, revenge movies, tragic anime characters, helping people, imagining yaoi ships as yuri ships
dislikes: public affection, expensive clothes, cocaine, old Hollywood movies, fake friends, restaurant decor, drag shows, soft-boiled eggs
Note from Provisional Undersecretary of Operations: Tracking our POI’s history didn’t pose a challenge for our analysts. Making sense of her did. We consulted sixteen subject matter experts in the course of assembling this dossier. And by “subject matter experts” I mean we had to put a call out on Teams to see if anyone knew what a “futanari” is. We have had to assemble dossiers on many transgenderists in the course of this work-- on the off-chance they involve themselves in actual terrorism, usually, though this individual does not fit the profile. Lillywhite doesn’t fit the profile of a typical terrorist and wouldn’t be a POI if it weren’t for the current social circumstances. Anyway, if you find yourself as baffled as I was, I’d recommend reviewing the appendices or set up a meeting with the subject matter experts. Considering the challenges and opportunities brought on by our visitor’s arrival, I believe it vital that we understand this person.
POI Lillywhite’s footprints appear around age 10 (Seems late – E.). Based on school records, before 10 she spent her time on unstructured physical activity outside, but maintained good grades in language arts and hands-on activities-- her records show a patter of periodic violent altercations with other students. No explanations are noted. These preferences seem consistent with her family’s values (see Appendices C-17 for Psych’s write-up on the domestic terrain). Her parents nearly divorced twice in the period before the ten-year mark. It is not clear how much Lillywhite was aware of this. Though we have reason to believe things were bad enough that the mother spent three months living with a friend in New Jersey in 2003, elementary school counsellors do not refer to any family issues in their notes on Lillywhite’s violent outbursts. They do note that all her friends were girls, but if these friendships were real, they are not reflected on her Facebook network.
Her first social media were Facebook and Snapchat but she barely uses these. Data Analytics informs us that she spent most of her time online reading pirated manga while listening to music in a private and VPN-protected browser. Her tastes in both are polarized between extreme (extreme violence, emotions, or sexuality) and content our in-house hentai expert has described as “very gentle”. She has a notable interest in structures and systems expressed in forms like worldbuilding (at age 11-12 she was an active editor on the Magic the Gathering lore wiki, clocking over 400 hours on the site in the spring of 2008). Taste in pornographic fanfics and doujinshi escalates from age 11-14, stop abruptly, and only resume when she discovered the parasocial sex work and fanart economy on Tumblr, where she adopts an ethical principle of only consuming explicit content by people she maintains a relationship with. Several private Snapchat accounts record a slide into delinquency (frequent partying, alcohol, vandalism, drug abuse) that corresponds with a decline in her grades and mental health, as well as marking the most time she spends with males her own age. In grade ten, a Vice Principal notes possibly investigating Lillywhite’s home situation, but does not follow through.
She gets her act together by grade 12 with a no-holds-barred effort to pull her grades back up. Her social studies teacher in this subject wrote an impassioned, 3-page letter in support of Lillywhite’s university applications and she lands a scholarship to the University of Washington. During this year her online presence almost vanishes save for two crucial areas: she creates a Tumblr (actually her second, after one she used in middle school for lurking) and starts reading radical literature online (as part of a broad program of study of social and political thought, that also includes canonical liberal and historical texts, but investigates the radical tradition above and beyond the needs of university preparation - e.g. as well as Marx and Bakunin she reads recent anarchists like Fredy Perlman). Psych’s personality network models mark this as a nodal tipping point in her life.
From university on her online record is much denser and I will let the extensive documentation in the folder for this period speak for itself (see Appendix D-23). Almost immediately she switches to he/they pronouns on Tumblr and in some class assignments; the idea probably did not arise from her social setting at the time, but dates back at least to the nodal tipping point. For eighteen months she was a member of the Cult of Black Domnu, but did not appear to participate in any of our recruitment or influence operations connected with the Cult. She began using she/her pronouns on her Tumblr during this period. Location tracking information shows she is superficially outgoing during this period, active in both music and activism scenes, as well as attending parties and forming Facebook friendships (she still barely uses Facebook) with people in a wide range of social and parasocial networks, but only forming dense relationships online (and, briefly, through the Cult). Her own creative activity – some experimental electronic music project – is also exclusive to her Tumblr, through which she meets POI Mai Obiakolam.
Mai appears to have been her only serious relationship, despite a wide dating history (see Appendix D-44 for a detailed reconstruction of their breakup through Tumblr and Facebook Messenger records, and how it might apply to the current situation) and introduced her to most of her current and estranged long-term friends, including Delilah Jung who had a second-priority folder in NSA records before her suicide efforts succeeded.
The person of interest’s current politics, as indexed by a selection of most relevant recent Tumblr posts flagged by our algorithm in Appendix F, appear to our agents most familiar with the context to be still influenced by the Cult’s blend of anarchism and Leninism. Like other members who internalized these politics, she appears to have retreated from concrete activism in the past two years, outside of mutual aid and transgender issues. Unlike others, particularly those who rejected the Cult, she does not appear to have deradicalized. Her recent Tumblr posts (see Appendix G) suggest a personal elaboration of these ideas based on the idea that the dominant world systems of capitalism, colonialism and bureaucracy can only be dismantled with the influence of a radical, powerful, external force. These beliefs would have been a sufficient justification for lifelong retreat and eventual normalcy had recent events not made them exceptionally dangerous.
Ajax Lillywhite
birthday: June 12
sex: male
occupation: NEET/aspiring petty criminal
theme song: Rare Americans - Cats Dogs & Rats
blood type: B
likes: caramel coated popcorn, stimulants, anime abridged series, target practice, mid-2000s FPS games, music while high, success stories, staying out all night in the fields, life-or-death risk, things he can’t have
dislikes: having to drive everywhere, cheap beer, incuriosity, cop guns, patronizing people, job hunting
This POI should be a much more pliable subject than his sister, in theory. Commander Richmond would like to note that that’s a big “in theory”. First of all, turning against his sister overtly would appear to verge on the impossible. Leona’s transition, at a time when Ajax was socialized almost exclusively by typically homophobic rural high school boys, should have alienated him from the older brother he looked up to as much as anything our psychological teams can orchestrate, and instead may have actually made them closer. It is unlikely he will ever admit this, but Jax had shared Leona’s music Tumblr with a number of friends, stopped associating with them shortly after sharing it, and had rumours that he was a “faggot” spread around several school Snapchat channels. This is when he struck up a close friendship with local druggie Alistair Keyes [see next document].
This was, however, more or less the first and only time Jax stood up to peer pressure so overtly. Jax picked up a moderate interest in all of his sister’s childhood interests but seems to have lacked the capacity for isolation to pursue them in the depth she did. This did not mean he was ever especially popular. He played a different team sport almost every year, and in at least one Facebook exchange was promised he could continue hanging out with his team members on the condition that he didn’t fuck up their scores next season. Based on gym records, this can’t have been because he was especially physically weak; it likely had more to do with the same lack of focus that was remarked on by many of his teachers (and, indeed, an in-school psychological assessment conducted when he was 6, which suggested ADHD and appears to have not been followed up on by his parents). The one exception to his difficulties seems to have been anything to do with guns, a shared interest with Leona in which he seems to have been the more enthusiastic learner online, although it’s unlikely he could have mastered them physically without her.
During his sister’s high school delinquent phase (while he was in middle school), he seems to have played very safe, perhaps for the benefit of family stability. At the same time this is when he started spending more time online, becoming a regular on 4chan’s /k/ and /out/, as well as lurking websites and forums devoted to various extreme lifestyles - drugs, extreme sports, raving - almost all inaccessible to him. He even had Tor browser installed, though he uninstalled it and wiped his hard drive quickly a few months after downloading. His online rabbit holes seem to have allowed him to affect a worldliness that became a source of social currency, significantly widening his friend group (not only beyond that of his own childhood, but anything Leona ever managed) in high school, where he embarked on an even sharper downward trajectory than she had as soon as she left (even before meeting Alistair). He was nearly held back a grade for cheating on an exam, and starred in a local viral video showing up to class intoxicated. Jax graduated the year Leona moved back, deferring his acceptance to Montana State University, and has since abandoned a string of job opportunities secured for him by his father. His current illicit venture with Alistair is the latest of a string of get-rich-quick schemes, including a months-long effort at building a brand as firearm influencers on Youtube, which revealed a powerful work ethic provided he is allowed to direct himself, but burned out after their channel was demonetized over a meme video that was interpreted as threatening a minor Soundcloud rapper.
Alastair Keyes
birthday: March 23
sex: male
occupation: drug dealer
theme song: Burial - Ghost Hardware
blood type: O positive
likes: hustling, the weird side of Soundcloud, trolling boomers on Above Top Secret forums, feet, pegging, femdom, making people think he’s a school shooter
dislikes: blackpilled people, older Millennials, 12-step programs, fact checkers, glowies
A preliminary report tagged Alastair Keyes as potentially one of the most destabilizing influences on Leona Lillywhite.
Further investigation suggests she is unlikely to take him seriously. Alastair Keyes has had freer reign to develop his niche interests than either Jax or Leona, having lived on his own since his parents divorced at 15 and both moved out to find jobs in different cities. On paper his mother held custody, simply by gendered default and due to his father’s criminal record (drunk driving and a half-hearted armed robbery as a teenager); however, they were probably less close, and records from social workers, POI datafile teachers and guidance counsellors suggest his father was the more involved parent throughout his childhood - which isn’t saying much. So Alastair was happy to catch a bus out to Kalispell periodically and spend a weekend with his mother to prove to social workers that he was “living” with her while staying behind in the vacation cottage his parents had repurposed into a full-time house for the past fifteen years - and continuing to go to school in its district, an impressive oversight even by the standards of our system. “Going to school”, on the other hand, only meant on average 2-3 days a week, rarely staying for the full day; the main reason he didn’t drop out entirely appears to have been that high school was his main marketplace for various controlled substances.
Simply from her public social media profile, his mother (Lucinda Naylor, employed as a receptionist from a chiropractor to a sketchy nonprofit) is obviously a chronic stoner; this may have been part of her neglectful parenting style; her metadata also reveals few hobbies outside of smoking. His father (Clinton Keyes), whose ranch security job drug tested him periodically, may have been cleaner, but disappeared on weekends for overnight parties with a small circle of friends almost all of who have records for cocaine, opioids and other substances. The first rumour of him dealing marijuana, probably from his mother’s stash, appears in school notes at 13, but he spun it into a bullying case and had the snitches disciplined for spreading rumours, with a manipulative cleverness that crops up surprisingly often for someone so habitually isolated and - on tests, at least - stupid. (Speaking of tests, while these are obviously unreliable it’s worth noting that Alastair compiled an unusually thorough psychological profile on himself in the form of various online diagnostic and personality quizzes between the ages of 14 and 16. He classifies himself as a “narcissist empath”, a category too obviously made up to be supported as well as it is by the results.) Alastair would eventually inherit both of his parents’ habits at least, but his interest in drug selling would have been as much the money as the drugs - both his parents were poor, both before and after the (itself costly) divorce, and the regular allowance he received from both of them was scaled to the assumption one of them was taking care of him when neither was.
Alastair does not appear to have perceived any of this as tragic or traumatic. In the most viral video on his surprisingly popular “hickcore eboy” Tik Tok account (and several followups clarifying it wasn’t ironic) he boasts about how lucky he was for the freedom parental neglect afforded him, saying it made him “supersane” and advocating it as a model for the “reptile parenting” of the future. (He drinks amanita muscaria tea harvested from his own backyard throughout the video.) Reports from school counsellors - including one jealous aside that he acts a counsellor for half the other troubled kids they see - show nothing at odds with this. This outlook dovetails with his radical politics, which could best be described as “inchoate but principled libertarian”. He may owe this to a synthesis of his parents, a born-again Republican (dad) and left-of-Dem hippie (mom) who bonded over back-to-the-land ideals and rage at the Establishment, but whose political differences played a significant role in their separation. Unlike most William Cooper-reading gun nuts in his area, he consistently supports queer rights and religious freedom. He aligns these with his defence of drug use in a series of formative forum arguments with Hoppeans, following a doxing attempt over which he abandoned any explicitly political subculture outside of conspirituality. Keyes is a Gnostic dystheist who believes our universe is a wargame being played by aliens. His worldview is almost as idiosyncratic as Mai Obiokolam’s, which may have been what drove him, in a remarkable coincidence, to Obiokolam’s content. (A general curiosity about electronic music and trans women didn’t make this more difficult.) During an extended period immediately out of high school, he attempted to prove that UFOs were administrative programs correcting glitches in that system, and claimed Mai as part of a faction of “conscientious objecting angels”. He has since wiped most of this older content in his attempt - diligently capitalistic, a quality that distinguishes him from his partner Jax Lillywhite - to rebrand as an eboy and seduce cottagecore girls to come visit him. (During most of this period that could be described as a psychotic break, Jax was his only friend and vice versa, and their dealing ambitions grew from the petty to the grandiose.) It is unclear how much of his worldview remains and will influence his interactions with the Lillywhites and the First Contact.
His porn profile is too vast to approximate without a full second report. You gotta see some of this shit.
Mai Obiakolam
birthday: ------
sex: female (by choice)
occupation: musician (Patreon)
blood type: a
likes: the night sky, speculative physics, jazz, funk, lo-fi, chiptune, early modernism, weird tonal systems, pastel-neon colour combinations, marijuana, DXM, psychedelics, binaural beats, fairy kei, 70s UFO mysticism, J-pastries, alternative idols, aquariums, free association (all meanings)
dislikes: shock videos, mean-spirited shitposting, white pop culture canon, trivial callouts, people who ask her to do an OnlyFans, the segregation of queer spaces, 99% of hentai, Lolita forum drama, indoor heat
theme song: Ah-Mer-Ah-Su - Be Free
Discography: Zaxxor - Zerg Beat
Zaxxor - Afro Etudes
Xilla - Fibonacci
Xilla - The Tournament Arc Years (competition collection
- fundraiser)
Zaxxor - NDFE: Not Dead Fuck Everyone
Xilla &
Xiaox - (deleted)
Sleep Prophet - Laser Visions
Mai Starchyyld -
The Metaculture Mysteries (EP)
Mai Starchyyld - Nebula Womb
Mai
Starchyyld - Queerz Bop 1 (covers collection)
Mai Starchyyld - Amphisboena
Mai Starchyyld - Queerz Bop 2: The Loosies Album
Mai
Starchyyld - Queerz Bop 3: I Need Money
I can’t overemphasize the importance of this file; Obiakolam is probably the single most important asset to controlling Person of Interest Lillywhite, and also the most dangerous, unpredictable influence on her. Any overly heavy-handed approaches to using her are likely to backfire explosively.Obiakolam’s mother, a light skinned African American who grew up in a housing project in one of the gang heartlands of Chicago, both alienated and fetishized by the culture around her (reputedly the “Helen” of a minor gangland Iliad when she was 13) ran away from home and married Jerome Obiakolam, an Evangelical Christian serial entrepreneur recently immigrated from Nigeria, as soon as she graduated high school (it’s not clear how much earlier they had been talking to each other). They bounced between cities for several years before settling in Seattle in time to raise their first child. Since settling Jerome Obiakolam has steadily grown a house cleaning business that operates a bit like a pyramid scheme, and is now a recognizable institution of the city’s black neighbourhoods.Her school records (as “Max”) suggest an imaginative, enthusiastic learner who had few friends but attached herself to teachers as surrogate parents and took any excuse to spend time away from home. She was tested for giftedness several times but apparently had a tendency to shut down completely at tests. We don’t entirely have to rely on secondary sources like this to understand her childhood; unlike the Lillywhites who have completely stonewalled us, both of her parents have been exceptionally open to our investigations. “I should never have let in that Sailor Moon show,” Jerome told our agent at a bar. “It only took one episode, I turned it off before the credits, one episode, for the subliminal witchcraft to completely rewrite his brain! Does he still wear his hair like that?” Even before the exposure to Sailor Moon, however, Jerome suspected something was wrong with his child. “The first time he started talking in a language I had never heard, and he had just barely started learning English and Igbo, I was overjoyed, I thought, he is speaking in tongues! So I took him to the preacher, and then he started talking about who taught him this language, the… creatures he would draw, that didn’t look like anything, just colours and shapes, but had names. And the preacher was afraid! He tried to exorcise him then and there! But my stupid wife said, this is just what children do, they make up stories. And I would say, children should not make up stories, they will start to tell lies next! The teachers said he was smart so I would give him lots of tutoring and workbooks but he would scribble things on them, and when my wife bought him his first computer…!”Her mother, for her part, blames trauma rather than demons. “I believe in demons. I have seen them, in my own husband. But the house my son grew up in made him not want to live around humans. Jerome doesn’t remember this but such a big part of everything he talked about was the peacefulness, the nonviolence, and he was getting his ass whooped for crying before he could talk, and would come home to see me getting my ass whooped for cooking a jollof the wrong way… The thing that’s hard to understand when you’re that young is that Jerome wasn’t bad. He doesn’t do those things because he wants to, but because he believes in it, and back then I thought I would endure anything from a man who is trying to do what’s right over a man who doesn’t care about it at all. Eventually I learned this was wrong and we resolved things with the help of our pastor, but I still feel that way sometimes, because what if it wasn’t his father and was something I did that made him turn out this way? All I can only know is what I believe, and that I’m trying to do what’s right.”
Mai’s natural artistic inclinations seem to incorporate every medium; drawing was one of the most important at a young age, as was writing, though her impulses in both of these areas were poorly understood even by sympathetic teachers; she responded poorly to attempts to focus them into an academically recognizable discipline, and seemed to partly believe her father’s account of them as a form of demonic possession, which she would arguably later reframe into the core of her personal mythology. Music only became a possibility after she obtained her first laptop at the start of middle school; her parents originally refused to allow an internet connection and so instead she explored every preset program, quickly falling in love with GarageBand. As soon as she had that outlet, she mostly stopped drawing and writing on her assignments and started doing better in school; her few drawings from this time, around middle school, however, started to take on a more realistic character, featuring an alter ego of herself as a girl. “He told me this was his girlfriend, when I saw her,” Jerome told us. “And I would say, bring her home, so we can find out if she’s good for you! Then one day at a parent teacher conference I asked the teacher to point me out in the yearbook Max’s girlfriend, and she said, Max has no girlfriend. And then I found out what was happening to him.”Mai meanwhile had also found an outlet for her imagination outside of her parents’ supervision by joining her joint middle-high school’s anime club, and started sneaking her laptop into school where her new friends taught her how to get around parental filters and use a proxy. Her first exposure to the concept of transsexuality was Ruka in Steins;Gate. When she started posting her music online she had barely listened to anything besides her father’s Afrobeat records and anime soundtracks; yet despite the distinctly Fela-ish theme-and-variations structure of her early compositions, she had managed to intuitively reinvent the basics of chiptune by messing around in presets. Her first friend she was willing to share her music with (Alex Jankowski, now a famous femboy cosplayer, estranged) told her as much and soon got her entering chiptune competitions, while she explored the wider world of music with a passion that eclipsed her interest in anime: jazz fusion, Chicago house, avant-garde electronics, indie, prog, funk. Her discovery of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane (hundreds of hours of scrobbles respectively logged on Last.fm) may have been a turning point leading to the development of her mature persona - and Nina Simone, as she has mentioned in several interviews, gave her a core of comfort with her voice, though she would still not attempt singing until she transitioned. Her earliest online profiles were carefully degendered, as well as deracialized (see Appendix A).
The break leading to Mai’s transition and self-mythologization, however, was her first suicide attempt, in Grade 10. It is unclear even from our conversations with her parents what was happening inside the Obiakolam household at this point, but her mother had just begun standing up to her father, who probably responded by taking more of his anger out on her; he had been micromanaging her appearance to make her more masculine, forbidding her from shaving and enforcing dubious diets to make her lose weight; and using a matchmaker to set her up with Christian girls, one of whom, according to a rejected application she made to a domestic violence shelter a year later, attempted to rape her, claiming her father’s explicit permission. (Mai was not even unattracted to girls, but uncomfortable with the dominant role expected of her; after this experience she became equally uncomfortable with the submissive role.) When she resisted and fled the house she was accused by the girl’s parents of assaulting her, and shamed publicly in the church. Within a day she had locked herself in the bathroom, slit her wrists with her father’s straight razor, and survived only because she passed out midway through making her cut. She spent a month in a mental hospital, in which she was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, manic depression and borderline personality disorder - gender dysphoria not once mentioned. “After this I stopped loving him,” Jerome tells us chillingly. “How could I? He had responded to my attempt to discipline and redirect him, to save him, by bringing shame on me. It was a declaration of war - and unlike him, I am a man, when I make war, I mean war.”By this, reports from guidance counsellors suggest that Jerome Obiakolam’s “discipline” went far beyond the Biblical “rule of thumb”. Mai’s fictionalized self-perception has called her accounts into question the few times she has made them publicly - her KiwiFarms thread describes them as “a tragic Mary Sue backstory” - but in our conversations Jerome casually admitted to making use of many of the same professional torture methods as our own interrogators. He now hid much of this abuse from his wife, attempting to present himself as a changed man, while she in turn, became a tormentor of a different kind, fearfully monitoring Mai to the point of demanding to watch while she showered. Mai’s computer was now desktop-monitored, and she could only access the internet from school computers, including a Powerbook gifted by a sympathetic guidance counsellor. When she returned to the internet it was under a new persona, this one clearly presented as female. She made another attempt in a school bathroom, overdosing on pills she had stolen from the locker of the local dealer, who was suspended in the aftermath, and her behaviour began to distance her from her anime club friends. Her grades slipped - attempts to prepare her for college or a career were futile: her parents had told her she would not be permitted to graduate or leave the house until she was “healthy” or dead. A chiptune forum owner she finally confided in helped her set up her first bank account in secret, set up a Patreon, and gradually accumulate money through fundraisers, some explicitly attached to her name, others not. Four months before she was scheduled to graduate, she ran away from home.Multiple people from the forum had reached out to host her, but the forum owner insisted that she not accept any offers from a strange adult until she turned 18 and instead spent her first several months in a youth shelter. Her parents called up and visited every shelter in the city, however, and after several close calls she ran and took up the offer of another forum user, Xiaox, who had been her “rival” in the contests. Her experience was as bad as the owner had feared; 24-year-old Xiaox had sexualized their relationship in his head, assumed she was a cis woman, and didn’t understand that being a trans woman didn’t make her interested in men. Xiaox took no for an answer when it came to actual sex, but still insisted on showing her erotic fiction about the two of them and romantically-tinged collaborations (we know this primarily from a callout post Leona eventually persuaded her to write); she nonetheless put up with him for almost two years, surviving on his income as a tech support manager which gave her almost uninterrupted time at home to craft her musical style and persona.
There is far too much “Mai Starchyyld” lore to summarize here, though an attempt is made in Appendix C. The statements about herself, the universe and its inhabitants scattered across the blurbs and lyrics of her hundreds of songs, interviews, account descriptions, blog posts, microfictions and hidden webpages connect in the sense of a massive ARG, though they are not meant to be followed in any particular game-order or lead to a hidden goal; they are simply the world she convinced herself, to the most genuine extent not diagnosable as psychotic, she was living in, at least whenever she made art or presented herself publicly. Like Mab, she understood her gender dysphoria supernaturally, as an alien soul inhabiting her projected by “starlight laser”, the main cosmic communication network, which sought out new worlds like our SETI transmissions except transmitting entire souls (note the analogy to Scientology Thetans) as probes. Her “human” soul as Max had prayed to be released from his pain as a child, thereby making a contract with the Starlight Laser, and was now living somewhere in peace among the stars, while her female soul, Mai, spread the “cosmiculture” on Earth. Stars themselves gave birth to lifeforms, which contained part of the stars’ own souls; resonating with your star’s soul enabled you to transcend your body and return to the star or travel the cosmos as an energy consciousness, and most civilizations crafted bodies at will as “game avatars”. Gender itself she understood not as an attribute of bodies or a social construct but one of many “harmonics of light”. “Silent planets” (she may have encountered C.S. Lewis at church, but never acknowledged the influence) which did not know how to resonate with their stars were prone to tragic suffering due to their inhabitants’ confinement to nonconsensual bodies. In one post, she claims Scriabin’s Mysterium was humanity’s sole failed attempt at resonating with its star, and a model for any future one. Mai would write her “world building” automatically, synesthetically while listening to music, “translating” it, and compose music in the opposite way, often writing out a description of part of her universe and attempting to “translate” it back to music. The musical style she developed by doing this was a combination of jazz fusion and bedroom pop, gradually replacing simple chiptune soundfonts with bizarre, alien-sounding ones she designed herself. Xiaox lived in the suburbs well outside Seattle, another reason she chose him to avoid her parents; as her music started picking up popularity, Mai began to venture into the downtown again to perform. She had also been working on coordinating women’s clothing and makeup, which Xiaox was particularly picky about (and she was in her own way), and could by now pass fairly well even without being on hormones. On her third concert, marking the release of her first complete album in her mature style, Nebula Womb, she was invited to a trans group house which included Delilah Pankhurst and a member of the Cult of Black Domnu, and ran away without a word to her former host. A brief attempt to recruit her to the cult bounced completely off her own idiosyncratic worldview and introduced her to Leona. Her relationships with Leona and Delilah over the next two and a half years have their own files. Despite being the happiest period of her life both in terms of personal relationships, normal life experiences and online artistic success - developing her signature style of fusion jazz in experimental, self-coded soundfonts and blend of accessible pop song covers and more ambitious compositions - she struggled to enjoy this period in any stable way. The more freedom she had to be herself the more freedom she had to process things she hadn’t allowed her to feel, but she worried about the risk of sinking into it, and when Delilah died she took it as an excuse to start containing herself again - including, arguably, breaking up with Leona.Mai shares Leona’s left-wing politics in a distant, abstract, idealistic sense inseparable from her personal mythology of a better world. This abstraction is the problem - no realpolitikal compromise we could persuade POI Lillywhite to accept is likely to sway her. Her death, moreover, would only fix her place forever in POI Lillywhite’s soul. The uncanny proximity of that mythology to the world POI Lillywhite has discovered - a world that seems substantially closer to hers than ours in terms of scarcity, militarization, political structure and bewildering diversity, with the exception of being at war - gives us a rare opportunity to neutralize the threat she poses by breaking her.
Caroline Bennett-Fog
Sex: female
Occupation: strategic consultant
blood type: AB
likes: the human spirit, Golden Age sf, filk music, game theory, well-written history, very caffeinated black teas
dislikes: sitcoms, military men’s culture, the is-ought fallacy, insight porn
Theme song: Julia Ecklar - Hope Eyrie
To all appearances an overwrought fascia of nervous energy that has stumbled into the catastrophically wrong line of work. But that’s Edison for you: takes information and intelligence professionals who have big dreams but can’t get work elsewhere. Just need to be a body on the scene for when the real big guns show up. It can be surprisingly easy to infiltrate groups of people like that—so used to living on an eternal island of misfit toys they take any oddness as yet more misfittery. Most colleagues just think she’s an idiot—showing they don’t understand just how useful being thought an idiot is.
Grew up in a Boston exurb, lives alone. Though ostensibly outgoing, since her recruitment she’s disappeared from the lives of all those around her, visiting one divorced parent or another on holidays and maintaining a palmful of steady connections through fan communities. Analysts have wondered why or how someone so unattached to people should be so committed to humanity.
Her important credentials aren’t recorded anywhere it’d be easy to recover. We’ve driven someone like her into the heart of every one of Edison’s field teams, but even among our coterie of genuine experts (secured at significant expense), she stands out for her incredible CV and bizarre commitment to the organization’s mandate. We’ve often wondered why someone with such a deft analytical touch would be willing to work with us instead of getting all up in policymaker’s panties. My hunch is that she really wants to be there when it happens, right on the front lines. If it ever happens. Which, realistically, it won’t.
Bennett-Fog is a big picture thinker, to the point where her ideals seem ridiculous to her more practical-minded colleagues. Human immortality, interstellar travel, and astral physics are not just lofty science-fictional concerns to her: she sees it as a moral imperative for all people to struggle toward the utopia that the stars—with their infinite resources—surely represent. (She holds it as a matter of dogma that the only way to resolve the problems humanity will face due to climate change can only be resolved by exploiting extraterrestrial resources.) From everything we’ve read we have few doubts that she sincerely believes humanity is doomed to torture itself eternally and suffer an ignominious death if it doesn’t orient itself to the stars.
But with little talent for mathematics and physics, engineering was out of the question. Xenobiology remains an avid interest, but has for many years struck her as little different from concept art meant to amuse people with biochemistry PhDs. As such, she focused her education and personal skills on having the social and sociological tools to build towards the inevitable—as far as Caroline is concerned—first contact. Hence her single-minded focus on working her way up in the institutions who will be involved. In addition to her proven field experience, she has developed a breadth of theory and knowledge so far largely abstract and conjectural. Most professionals would say she could do more elsewhere, but as far as she’s concerned she’s exactly where she needs to be to make the greatest possible impact on humanity’s future.
One of those people who was always the butt of stupid jokes about how hot she is until she turns around. A voluptuous figure crammed uneasily into clothes that were never meant for her mushily voluptuous shape, her face has been described by shitty people as “somewhat Innesmouth-y”, her teeth are crooked, and her eyes pop a bit too much out of her head. She has long earned enough to alter these facets of her appearance and so far hasn’t. People like to assume ugliness and stupidity go hand in hand. She has of course made the bizarre observation that attractiveness and stupidity also go hand in hand. Either way, the important thing is that people always believe you’re much stupider than you are.
Was initially recruited after an Edison contact at an obscure publication (Proceedings of the Tritonian Society) flagged her exploratory treatise on certain ramifications of Liu’s Dark Forest theory to how first contact would play out. Fervently denies that her suggestion was to simply kill any ET that we encounter though acknowledged this is a possible conclusion of her observations. Doggedly pragmatic, logical in a way that is both quick and flexible, her sole commitment seems to be towards the cosmological destiny of the human species. This alone endeared her to our sponsors and Edison secured her. Maintains a succulent garden in her rather slovenly apartment, lifelong member of debating societies until her recruitment, still has something of a theatre kid vibe from doing lots of theatre, has published a truly ludicrous amount of better-than-average erotic Star Trek fanfiction—though HR thinks this might be something of a smokescreen.
Can’t rule out the possibility that she’s on someone else’s payroll.
FINGAL HADAK
Birthday: October 15
Sex: male
Blood type: O
Likes: dates (fruit), “intact” cultures (see Appendix S), “intact” dicks (uncircumcised) & holes (virgin), peyote, animal social structures, novelty
Dislikes: clothing, the Abrahamic demiurge, modernity (except for military hardware), casting pearls before swine, female sexual selection, his past life, the Coven of Black Domnu
Seen with: Jax Lillywhite, Sacred Band of Sol
Theme song: Cut Hands - No Spare No Soul
Fingal Hadak was one of the first soldiers Waldo Beek recruited through his online platform. Not long after he did, Waldo Beek became much more careful about recruiting from his online platform. But he never found someone like Fingal Hadak anyway.
While Beek loves to flaunt his suburban McMansion, rotating cast of wives and dogs, his Achilles (or Alcibiades) has effectively produced the illusion of having no civilian life at all. Hadak obscures his cultural origins along with his identity in general, identifying at will and with zero compunctions about appropriation with any culture he deems “intact”, but our research suggests he is likely a scion of almost-forgotten Scottish nobility (at times he will claim a bloodline of Nicholas De Vere’s Dragon Court, but doesn’t specify which). While his current name (he insisted on adding eight middle ones to his file; he is rumoured to collect them as trophies) is likely cobbled together from his anthropological and mythological obsessions, his family probably doesn’t want anyone knowing the real one either. Our investigations have found the most likely candidate for his previous identity XXXX XXXXX, a rather shallow social fixture of the North European occult industrial scene at the time Waldo Beek was making his name in former Yugoslavia. (This would make Hadak’s actual age only a few years younger than his former commander, putting some alarming credibility to his claims about self-rejuvenating practices). Particularly corroborating this claim, XXXXX appears on the staff listing of a military field recordings label that would have had contacts in the areas of Beek’s campaigns. But it wasn’t until Waldo Beek began producing motivational videos in the late 2000s that Hadak would follow the call to war himself, and there is an unexplained decade-long gap that may simply be explained by XXXXX moving back in with his parents as a complete recluse.
He joined during the highly publicized campaign against the cartels, which Beek was attempting to convert into an actual documentary series for a proto-Tea Party filmmaker before the Mexican government sued them, so there is a surprising amount of footage of his earlier self, a sprightly soldier with the Ken-doll appeal of his decade’s male heartthrobs mitigated only by his vaguely sickly complexion - he had only just begun his regimen of colloidal silver, and while he advertises it every chance he gets, its most infamous effects have barely begun to show. The cult success of “Coyote Hunters” is likely the only reason anyone outside of mercenary work would have recognized his not-yet-finalized name in the widely screencapped /k/ threads - “Remember Caleb Hadak? You will not in a million years guess what happened to him”, “Evidence Caleb Hadak is possessed, pt. 2”. A repeating call in to Waldo Beek’s online radio show, “Hey Waldo, why’d you let Hadak leave?”, was finally answered on August 6 2014, claiming a “Callum Hadak” was a faggot and had made a move on him. The call ends in disconcerting rambling and laughter from both parties. The legend of Fingal Hadak since then has appeared in an extremely distorted form on bodybuilding forums, achieving Charles Atlas-like health exploits with the help of various magical indigenous teachers and spirits giving him idiosyncratic tips promoted by the posters. While the earliest threads may credibly have originated from Hadak himself or someone in his circle, he has shown the opposite of Beek’s interest in online fame; one attempt to contact him in a thread was met with an anonymous throwaway account stating, “Fingal Hadak does not communicate with those who do not fight.” A significant proportion of younger recruits may, however, be familiar with these threads. Seasoned, professional mercenaries, on the other hand, will often deny he exists in public.
Within the mercenary world, we can find that one of Hadak’s major employers since switching over to a lifestyle and ideology incompatible with most employers was none other than Azoth Inc. His handpicked, all-male, nudist squadron served as nocturnal shock troops at several contested sites supplying a large proportion of Azoth’s lithium. Their victims can rarely be a source of information; often whole militias seem to disappear without a trace. When not employed, he and his closest companions do not return to civilian life but appear to operate as bandits and scavengers in the hottest warzones they can get away with. There is also evidence that they may have been singled out for off-the-record patronage and support by Azoth, which would imply some degree of contact with Hiram Ogier, and raises questions whether his presence on this mission was really Waldo Beek’s decision.
The paradox of the nature of his activities is that virtually all the information we know about him could also be a huge LARP - or even a psyop manufactured by Azoth for whatever reason - but would necessarily look exactly the same if it were all true. And the bad news is, this is hard to actually maintain if you’re keeping up an act. If nothing else, Hadak is probably one of the most immediately urgent of the many cults and fringe ideologues converging on the IIEF, looking for their one-time opportunity to direct the fate of humanity, seemingly enabled by Beek and our own patron Ogier.
VAKHA BASHTAEV
Theme song: Arvo Pärt - Orient & Occident
Likes: manuls, Russian naive art, Platonic friendships with foreign e-girls, sacred minimalism, ashiq, ice hockey
Dislikes: mafiya aesthetics, caracals, video games, Eurovision, stock trading, Reddit OSINT
The annoying Gladio B guy keeps getting his picks filtered by Lillywhite and got all the way down to this one. He only fought with them for two years when he should have been in high school but could help us meet the Russian quota. But heads up, this is another weird one. The origin alone should be a red flag - at one point, the same cell was running both a köçek ring that compromised a number of high-profile Georgian and Chechen politicians, and a jihadist group that targeted them. Bashtaev joined the latter at 15. There’s not enough documentation of the former left to say if there was any connection on that end, but it wouldn’t be the first time it happened even in that specific cell.
Like Hadak, he’s fought on a lot of sides, sometimes at the same time, but he’s not the kind of combat freak who doesn’t want to live any other way. It’s more like he keeps trying. Again, he only fought with them for two years, and was pardoned by Kadyrov with a couple of the younger members in exchange for some higher profile targets. He served with Kadyrov’s own forces from 18 to 20, not in a combat role, then returned to civilian life and apprenticed as an electrician, but was tapped by a remnant of his old network for the Sheikh Mansur Battalion just before getting his certification. After fighting for most of a decade up to the treaty, he settled down in the ruins of Bakhmut, working with a number of volunteer medical and construction corps and attempting to open a bookstore before being apparently coerced by the local pro-Russian militias into joining one of their new “international volunteer” fronts replacing Wagner Group in Africa. He defended Midas Resources mining sites being targeted by Azoth-backed rebels in the Central African Republic on behalf of a regional coalition. He had retired briefly in Crimea, in uncharacteristic luxury for him, albeit still restrained for a mercenary of his experience with connections in multiple geopolitical factions, when he applied for this mission.
Many ideological and religious mercenaries throughout the Great Game theatre, including most of his formative superiors, take such successful retirement as an opportunity to relax the strictures and expectations of their role, but Bashtaev has proven a surprising exception, and not only because Crimea remains under the thumb of some of the most violently homophobic of his old comrades. Bashtaev seems incapable of or uninterested in seeking out sex outside a battlefield - perhaps it serves a function there he has no need of in civilian life, replaced by mysticism and his other secret life as a hyperactive user of Western social media. Bashtaev debuted - possibly under Gladio orders we don’t have access to - as a prolific uploader of combat footage to various leak sites, both raw and structured in rambling “documentaries” spliced together with religious music, haphazard interviews, even-handed but pedantic conflict history and cryptic anecdotes. He alternates dozens of anonymous accounts in the comments on these sites, as well as alternative and mainstream news, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and other platforms arguing seemingly trivial points of every conflict he’s participated in, often sharing unverifiable information (limited hangout)? These accounts, often recognizable as belonging to a single user and known by local pseudonyms, engage for hours a day with military, political, extremist and OSINT accounts of various denominations, primarily male, while striking up less combative and more vulnerable, if asymmetrical friendships over his literary and religious interests disproportionately with women. While his political and religious syncretism in person and on his other accounts skews towards a sober and scrupulous traditionalism, in these relationships he seems more tolerant of Western progressive and even radical ideas. Of interest: for the last two years Bashtaev has been one of the highest-paying supporters (his tier gives him access to a one-on-one encrypted communication channel, usage unknown) of a femdom and esoterica influencer, Amaterasu Draconis, who is one of the five known members of the current Coven of Domino. UPDATE: On reviewing the “Of Interest” section added to this file Waldo Beek immediately approved Bashtaev’s recruitment, quoted “Oh hell yes. Let’s throw them in with [POI Lillywhite, pejorative] and see what happens.”