"Mary Keay also, maybe. --Possibly call them unpeople. They show up, they can interact with things, but they don't exist according to records and as far as we can tell they just sort of blink out of existence when we're not looking."

“Yeah, okay. ...Mary Keay and Sarah Baldwin both have weird skin, too—Raymond Fielding wore a coat, no clue about the Open Skydiving employee but probably his mom would have mentioned...”

"We know different spirits affect people differently... but it's still worth marking as a question. --I wonder if we can assume the Beholding puts everything relevant into the statements."

“...Good point. I don’t know that we can really say either way yet? But maybe it’ll get, uh, clearer, either way, what exactly the Beholding is getting people to say? At least we know now that it’s not making people lie.”

"...Now I'm wondering if we'll find Gertrude Robinson around here one of these days."

“...She is still technically listed as an employee, I think? They never, uh. Found her body.”

"Yeah, okay, I'm calling it, I'm going to run into Gertrude Robinson here one of these weeks."

“...I guess that’s fair. Really hope I’m not around if that happens. Um, no offense, sorry.”

"Yeah, reasonable. --You know which spirit I like? Meat. Meat has a very clear aesthetic and it behaves exactly in accordance with my predictions. I feel like I am not going to wind up confused about which statements are caused by Meat."

“This is fair! It is... pretty straightforwardly about meat, yeah.”

"Also it plausibly has a reasonable goal? From the slaughterhouse statement it really kind of seems like it wants to close slaughterhouses. --I guess maybe it's confused because I think having someone buy lots of meat and nail it to the wall is pretty counterproductive to the end-slaughterhouses thing."

“I mean, we still have no idea where he was getting it from. Maybe Toby Carlisle was only nailing meat to his wall if it came from a small farm where the farmer killed it himself. Or maybe his house was just where the weird conveyor belt-pit-thing was leading.”

"This is true. Maybe it is ethically sourced from horrifying carcass magic."

"I wonder if it's still... normal meat? Or if it has, like, horrifying magic side effects. I guess people would probably have noticed if the meat from the slaughterhouse was bad?"

"I expect the slaughterhouse's meat is just... normal? I wouldn't eat any of the spontaneously generated meat though. --Honestly I am kind of inclined to become vegetarian."

"Yeah, I... don't blame you? Seems like a good idea, honestly."

"Animal farming is, uh, kind of bad to begin with, and it might be a good idea to be cooperative with the goals of spirits that are... not evil."

"That makes sense. I'll, uh, stop buying meat, I guess. Didn't eat that much anyways, honestly."

Lev goes back to work. He rewrites the monster manual, fills the 'anglerfish' section with question marks, and adds 'unpeople' as their own category. After some consideration he puts "possibly actually a servant of a spirit tentatively named The Hunt?" under the lycanthrope category and "possibly powered by Mentis? objects typically seem to do mind control" next to Breekon and Hope. After even more consideration he includes "note possibly similarity of aesthetic to the Fractal" next to the Leitner books. 

Then he texts Melanie. 

Sarah Baldwin is mentioned in a non-digitizable statement with a monster strikingly similar to yours. You can swing by whenever if you want to take a look at it. Don't want to summarize the statement and bias your thoughts.

👍

I'll head over asap

It takes her a bit to arrive, but she gets to the Institute eventually and heads strait to the Archives. "Lev?"

"Oh, yeah, here it is, tell me what you think."

He gives her the original anglerfish statement and the research.

She hums quietly to herself while she reads.

Then she gets to the research.

"...This isn't the same Sarah Baldwin," she says, pointing at a Missing Persons poster for Sarah Baldwin. "Or--maybe it is, the hair and the skin are creepily similar--this was taken a decade ago and I met her wearing the exact same hairstyle--but the eyes are different, and the face shape, and my Sarah Baldwin was definitely shorter than the description. So... either it's a different Sarah Baldwin or whatever this monster is, it did something to her."

"...well, that's weird and I have no idea what it means."

"And you think I do? The one I met was definitely a smoker, though, so they have that in common, at least. ....Old Fishmarket Close isn't exactly known for hauntings, either. Maybe the Gray Lady at the CMH has a rivalry or something with this--anglerfish--and Sarah coming along was, invading its territory or something." Shrug. "I just really wish I knew more about what was going on. I mean, I've been doing my own research, but not everyone has a convenient spirit telling them which of the spooky stories are real, so it's been... slow."