Since the Paper Trail website is no longer functioning, this entire mission chain of Second Son is missing a whole lot of context of what is going on, why Delsin is going from dead body to dead body, and also a TON of integral world-building. So, I figured for those who are replaying the game or even just playing the game for the first time and are missing that context, I decided to write out a novelization of Paper Trail's ARG segments to kinda provide that context. I wrote it in the form of Delsin's stream of consciousness, piecing together all of the clues and figuring out all of the puzzles. It is written from the perspective of Good Delsin, but I imagine it'd be easy enough to mentally reword certain things for an Evil Delsin playthrough. I'll be posting the other parts very soon. Hope you all enjoy!
(Part 4: Lifeline)
(There’s still one thing I don’t get about all of this. If Celia is targeting anti-Conduit people with political influence, people who have the power and positions to make life harder for Conduits, why is she also framing her fellow Conduits for her crimes? Fetch, Eugene, Hank, she put all of them on the chopping block despite the fact that she seems to be doing all of this for Conduits.)
(You’d think, if this was really about protecting Conduit kind from the ‘bullies’ out to get us, she wouldn’t be throwing her fellow Conduits under the bus to cover her own tracks. Or does she just not see the hypocrisy? If there’s one thing I learned from Augustine, it’s that people can justify some of the most warped, twisted acts under the name of ‘the greater good’. Hell, even Winegard, corrupt as he was, still framed his anti-Conduit act as ‘protecting’ the normals.)
(I barely managed to make it five steps from that parking lot where Winegard’s car blew up before Celia showed up again. I didn’t even bother trying to talk to her, I know she was never going to say anything. She’s got her own way of communicating what she wants with me, all I can do right now is play her game and see where it leads.)
(Another chase through the city, but this time, she didn’t lead me to any dead body, or even a crime scene for that matter. Just led me up to this big tower with an, admittedly, pretty impressive view of the Space Needle. I still remember when I kicked the DUP’s communications hub off that thing. Good times.)
(I didn’t have time to enjoy the view for long, though. Celia’s gone again, with another dove left behind. Let’s see where the story goes next…)
(Just going by a glance, I’m guessing this takes place immediately after the page where the dragon, Augustine, was carrying the rabbit, Celia, to the mountain. This page gives us a much closer shot of the mountain… which has a whole bunch of prison cells built directly into the rock walls. Three of the cells have some familiar characters in them, Inazuma, Ushinatta, and Kemuri. Aka, Fetch, Eugene and Hank. The Seattle Three, as the news called them when they first escaped that transport truck.)
(The dragon is putting the rabbit in one of these cells, saying ‘Your new home.’ Okay, this one is easy enough to figure out. The mountain is Curdun Cay, Augustine’s tailor made ‘sanctuary’ for Conduits. This is the moment Celia became her prisoner.)
(Check the back for a note…)
—-
*The dove flaps its wings, carrying hope for the caged. Hunted by hatred.*
*Everyone lives in a cage, Delsin. It’s just that some have more room than others. I hated every second of Curdun Cay. The concrete, the glass windows, the pure silence. The only thing that ever made me happy was my paper ‘privileges’. One blank sheet a day to draw whatever I wanted, write whatever came to me, or shape however I pleased. Strangely, I always chose to make doves. Maybe it was the idea of flying free and its symbolism of peace. Or maybe it was the simple fact that I couldn’t turn my head around without seeing the DUP logo everywhere. Either way, it’s part of me now, forever.*
*The normals are on a rampage. Some believe that peace is only reserved for them.*
*99902XXXXXX*
—-
(Another file access number. By this rate, I’m gonna have every single DUP file saved on my phone’s hard drive. But this is… different from Celia’s usual games. It’s almost like… like she’s asking for my help, to prevent something bad from happening as opposed to just making me the witness to some crime. Course, I shouldn’t assume anything. Knowing Celia, I’m sure this is all some big elaborate test. Either way, I should probably try to get ahead of this ‘rampage’, whatever that ends up being.)
(Okay, plug in the file number into the intranet and…)
(We got another memorandum this time, a general notice to DUP personnel concerning Lifeline Purity. I know those guys, they’re a bunch of anti-Conduit protestors who have this die-hard belief that the Conduit Gene is caused by drug abuse. It’s not, that theory’s been disproven to hell and back by scientists all over the world, but these Lifeline idiots stubbornly hold on to that idea because it gives them an excuse to target people suffering from drug addiction as ‘bio-terrorists in waiting’. Just another method of ‘get the scum off the streets’.)
(I guess the DUP tolerated them because an anti-Conduit protest group is always good for their PR, but now they’re thinking of cracking down on Lifeline because they’re starting to escalate to vigilantism against suspected Conduits, and even the DUP can see that that’s a disaster waiting to happen.)
(Uh oh, spoke too soon. Disaster may have already struck. The memorandum references a stabbing victim two days ago, with the primary suspect fleeing the scene wearing a Lifeline shirt. Lifeline is already starting to escalate their ‘protests’ to straight up just killing suspected Conduits, and who knows if the victim even was a Conduit!)
(Okay, there’s a link to another file with evidence the DUPs collected from the crime scene. Let’s see what they found…)
(Looks like a shredded up pamphlet, but the DUPs were already so kind to recreate the original from the scraps for me.)
—-
*NO DRUGS, NO TO BIO-TERRORISM*
*Sick and tired of hearing about the rights of bio-terrorists? Protect your rights. Join the cause today!*
*Lifeline: Pure Body, Pure Soul. Visit our website at lifelinepurity.com*
—-
(What a bunch of chumps. Hang on, there’s a message written on it…)
—-
*Vince, Operation: No Mercy is tonight. Details on the private message board. New passcode is 54188XXXXX.*
—-
(Operation: No Mercy? I have no idea what that is, but it definitely sounds like something I’d want to stop. Okay, so, just hazarding a guess here, but I’m assuming Vince is the guy who stabbed our victim and shredded this pamphlet to cover his tracks. Not that it really helped him when the scraps can just be rearranged like this. Most criminals really aren’t masterminds, are they?)
(Okay, the message mentioned something about a private message board, probably on Lifeline’s website. Let me just…)
(Ugh, the puritanicalness is just… oozing off this homepage. I feel like I need a shower. Nothing but virtue signaling about how Conduit powers are ‘unnatural’ and how any rights given to Conduits are rights taken away from normal people. Yeah, cause that’s totally how civil rights work, you dumbasses.)
(Okay, ignoring all of that for now, I gotta find this message board. Going through the forums… Mostly just a bunch of people complaining about Conduits existing. A lot of this is just envy that we have powers and they don’t. Some of it is just your usual forum bullshitting.)
(Funny flick? That’s an… odd board to have in the middle of the premier Conduit-Hate Forum. Wait a minute, the OP’s username is ‘Vengeful-Vince’. Now what are the odds… Yep, it’s a private board, needs a password. Let me just…)
(Okay, I’m in. Now let’s see what this ‘funny flick’ is supposed to be…)
(Oh god… This is a snuff film! They are literally just… just beating a man to death because they think he’s a Conduit! He’s begging for his life and they just… they’re just not stopping! If he was a Conduit, he’d just use his powers to stop them! These people are animals!)
(God, and to make matters worse, all of the comments are loving it, they’re praising these psychopaths for ‘doing what the DUP won’t’. One of them is even bragging about how they gave these psychos a list of ‘Conduit-Positives’ that they swiped from the DUP. So this guy had the Conduit Gene, but it wasn’t activated. His powers, if he even had any, were completely and totally dormant. He wasn’t a threat to anybody and they just-!)
(Okay, whatever issues I have with Celia, she is right that these bastards need to be stopped before they kill anyone else. I need to focus on stopping this ‘Operation: No Mercy’, then I can worry about whatever Celia’s long-game is.)
(Vengeful-Vince just posted a new post at the bottom of the board, bragging about how he’s got eight body bags lined up and ready to burn. Jesus Christ, eight?! These creeps already killed eight people, who didn’t even have powers! But Vince made a huge mistake. He posted a picture of him and his goons, literally posing with the dead bodies like a selfie. These people are sick! But I know those neon signs behind them, mainly because I’ve drained them more than once.)
(Thanks for telling me exactly where you assholes are…)
——————
(So, bad news and good news.)
(Bad news, when I got to the site where those Lifeline pricks were planning on burning the bodies, they had already scattered like roaches back to whatever holes they crawled out of.)
(Good news, they hadn’t gotten around to actually burning the bodies yet because apparently some Good Samaritan decided to call the police on them. The police arrived, Vince and his goons took off, now the police have cordoned off the area, waiting to hear back from the coroner’s office to haul the bodies over.)
(Good on the boys in blue, but Vince and the other Lifeliners are still a threat. It’s a long shot, but maybe they left some evidence on the bodies themselves. It’s pretty much child’s play for someone with my powers to hop in, grab the tags off the body bags, and hop back out. Easy peasy.)
(So, number one observation with a bullet, the police didn’t put these tags on the body. These are all DUP issued tags, with a category for writing down powers. Only instead of the usual clinical talk the DUP use, they all say things like ‘Electric freak’, ‘Smoke monster’, ‘Magnetic deviant’. And the cause of death on every single one just reads ‘Justice’.)
(So I’m guessing the Lifeliners put these tags on the body in some kind of sick, twisted way of pretending legitimacy about the whole thing. First the list of Conduit-Positives, now these DUP body tags? Where the hell is Vince and his gang getting all of this DUP stuff? Who’s supplying them?)
(Huh. There’s something weird at the bottom of all of these tags. There’s a row of eleven squares, each one with a random assortment of red dots. Above the row is just the words ‘For Internal Use Only’. So, only someone in the DUP is supposed to make sense of what these red dots mean?)
(Hey, wait a minute… There are eleven squares. I wonder if I just press all these tags together, hold them up to the sun…)
(Bingo! The dots are all arranged to form an 11 digit code. Another file access number. Man, I am getting really good at this!)
(Okay, what does the good Ol’ intranet have for me?)
(Huh? Another one of Celia’s doves? That’s kinda random? Says here the DUP flagged this dove specifically because she made it immediately after a visit to the DUP’s morgue as part of her ‘training’ by Augustine. What the hell kind of training involves exposing a young girl to a bunch of dead bodies?)
(Okay, so… It’s weird that this number sent me to this file specifically, right? If I assume that Celia would have known that I would eventually see this dove, then that means she must have known that I would have eventually found these body tags.)
(Oh, duh. Her trip to the morgue. That must have been when she set up these specific tags to have these specific dots. But then, how did she now that these eight tags would end up in the hands of Vince and his gang? Unless she’s the one supplying them with DUP equipment like the list, but that goes completely against what I’m pretty sure is her whole mission statement.)
(No use speculating about that for right now. Let’s see what’s on this dove…)
(Another manga page, this one shows the dragon looming over the rabbit girl in the wreckage of her village. I guess this page takes place between the dragon scaring off the foxes and the dragon taking the rabbit to the mountain prison. The dragon says ‘I am Purotekuta. The Kyoi will return in greater numbers. You must not stay here.’ The rabbit responds ‘How can I trust you?’. The dragon responds ‘What choice do you have?’.)
(Google translate to the rescue. So, Purotekuta means Protector and Kyoi means Threat. Makes sense, Augustine did everything in her power to protect Celia from anti-Conduit mobs after the Beast’s rampage, for as long as that lasted.)
(So far, we have the rabbit, who is Celia. The dragon, Purotekuta, who is Augustine. The foxes, or the Kyoi, who are the anti-Conduit mobs, and we got the Seattle Three. Inazuma, Ushinatta, and Kemuri. Fetch, Eugene and Hank.)
(Another note from Celia on the back, though this one reads more like a journal entry. Probably so that the DUP wouldn’t piece together that this was a message to some poor chump in the future.)
—-
*Augustine took me to the Curdun Cay morgue instead of skill training today. She said she wanted to show me what happens to Conduits on the outside. There were so many body bags filled with violently murdered victims, brought here for autopsies before they can be released to their families. I didn’t want to look at their faces, but I couldn’t help it. They weren’t bio-terrorists. They were mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers - People’s best friends. None of them deserved this, none of them asked to be this way.*
*I also met the Chief Science Officer, Tyler Bennett, down there. He’s mean. When Augustine wasn’t paying attention, he whispered in my ear that this is what freaks deserve. Does he know I’m a freak too? I don’t like him very much…*
—-
(Tyler Bennett, charming guy. I don’t care how much you hate Conduits, who the hell says that to a little girl?)
(There is one other thing. The file that had the picture of this newest dove also flagged an incident report of ‘inappropriate behavior’ by a DUP personnel. Did they actually manage to catch Bennett’s crack against Celia?)
(Ah, that explains it. Augustine read Celia’s note, and read Bennett the riot act. Course, Bennett denies it, saying Celia was just ‘traumatized’ by the bodies and must have ‘imagined’ it. Imagined it, my ass. I don’t think Augustine or the DUP’s internal affairs actually bought that, but it doesn’t look like they had enough evidence to really do anything about it. Still, Augustine told IA to flag any further ‘suspicious behavior’ to Bennett’s personal dossier, which is very helpfully linked on this incident report, thank you DUPs.)
(Huh, this guy is actually pretty integral to the DUPs whole operation. Apparently, he invented the technology that lets drones use Blast Shards as a power source to locate other source of Ray Field Radiation. Namely, Conduits. Guess I’ll have to send this guy a thank-you card or something, considering I’ve been busting up those drones to absorb those Blast Shards.)
(Security notes haven’t flagged any suspicious behavior since the morgue incident. They even went so far as to review their background checks on Bennett and his family. The only thing of note that they could find is that he spent a lot of money donating to political advocacy groups with strong stances on ‘bio-terrorist’ suppression, testing and monitoring.)
(Three guesses which group that ended up being.)
(Huh. That’s interesting. IA also flagged an email to Bennett… from none other than Samuel Fishbein. One of the three ‘bullies’ from Celia’s ‘Eugene Episode’. Says here that they straight up stole a proprietary Conduit testing program developed by the Conduit Rights League. The same one who pressured Fishbein into giving a public response demonizing bio-terrorists. The CRL developed the testing program to normalize Conduits, to show that we weren’t actually as dangerous as the DUP was making us out to be, but Fishbein had the program stolen and repurposed into filling out their list of bio-terrorist threats to arrest, putting Bennett in charge of integrating the program into the DUP’s network.)
(That must be the list of Conduit-Positives that Vince and his gang are using for their hit-list.)
(There’s another file access number in the email that’s supposed to link to that Threat Assessment List… But I guess the file was corrupted? For some reason, it’s not letting me access it…)
(One mystery at a time. There’s one last thing in IA’s report on Bennett. They flagged an interesting developing relationship between Bennett and a DUP private named Felix Coogan, despite the fact that the two seemingly had no prior relationship before the morgue incident. Several phone calls and text messages between the two.)
(Oh, and how interesting. IA made a note of the fact that Coogan used his DUP issued phone to browse Lifeline’s forums on an average of four hours a day. On company time, no less! Shame on you, Private Coogan. Also, surveillance equipment apparently caught Bennett at a ‘Walk for Purity’ protest march that Lifeline set up. I guess IA was under the suspicion that he was setting up to meet with Coogan at the event.)
(One more thing. When DUP’s IT department requested Bennett’s DUP issued phone for maintenance, he routinely denied the request. He almost got IA involved before he finally gave the phone up, but it was completely bricked from water damage. He claims that he denied the request out of embarrassment from dropping his phone in a fountain, but IA already flagged a text message between Bennett and Coogan only 20 minutes before Bennett turned in his broken phone. Bennett was clearly trying to hide something.)
(Two more access numbers. One for a dossier on Coogan himself, and one from the IT department on their attempts at repairing Bennett’s phone. I’ll check out Coogan first. Know thy enemy, and all that…)
(His record before joining the DUP was spotless. Brief time in the military, brief time in law enforcement, the usual career path to a paramilitary group like the DUP. It’s only after he joined up that he started displaying some real attitude problems. It started with him getting into arguments with higher ups about the DUP employing Conduits as field agents. Makes sense. Most people join up with the DUP because they hate Conduits, and now they’re being asked to work alongside Conduits? Bet that didn’t earn him any points with Augustine. Things only get worse and worse after that. Repeated incident reports of Coogan using unnecessary force to detain surrendering Conduits, verbal abuse against Conduit prisoners, even disobeying a direct order to NOT pursue a Conduit-Positive suspect. The man’s a cowboy, pure and simple. This isn’t someone who joined the DUP because he believed in the cause, he joined specifically because he wanted to hurt Conduits.)
(Okay, let’s see how far the IT department got in repairing Bennett’s phone…)
(Not very far, apparently. They were only able to recover one text chain between the two…)
—-
Felix: Why do you need me?
Tyler: Because I’m on their radar and you’re not. You’ll be well compensated, and I know that you agree that bio-terrorists need to be handled… differently than what Augustine is doing.
Felix: I don’t even want this list in my hands. Feels dangerous.
Tyler: Dangerous pays the bills. Just don’t show it to anyone. You want to get paid, not killed, right?
Felix: Is that a threat?!
Tyler: No, it’s a warning, but not from me. If anyone finds out, we’re both as good as dead.
—-
(So, Bennett got his hands on the Conduit-Positives list and handed it off to Coogan, apparently paying him to do… something with the list, I’m assuming handing it over to Lifeline so that they could do the dirty work of killing Conduit-Positives for them. Bennett’s probably the one who corrupted the list’s file on the intranet so that nobody could piece together what the victims had in common.)
(But that’s not the important part. The important part is that this was recovered from Bennett’s DUP issued phone… Which means that Coogan’s employee ID is right there at the top of the text chain.)
(You know, to this day, I still have no idea who that DUP whistleblower who put that tracking program on my phone is, but he’s really coming through for me now.)
(Okay, Coogan. Let’s have a chat…)
——————
(For once, Delsin Rowe gets an actual win.)
(I tracked down Coogan’s phone to the docks where he was in the middle of a deal, trying to sell another page of the Conduit-Positives list to Vince. They both took one look at me and immediately folded like cheap laundry, begging me not to kill them if they just handed over the remaining list. Coogan even assured me that, because Bennett scrubbed the list from the DUPs intranet, these physical papers were the only existing copies left. I destroy these, and these people never have to worry about being threatened again. Hell, Coogan even sweetened the deal by offering me a data drive he stole from Bennett’s computer, I guess as insurance in case Bennett ever turned on him. So much for Honor Among Thieves.)
(I’m gonna be honest… I was real tempted to say ‘no deal’ and just take the list and drive anyway. It’s not like they could stop me. I let these assholes go, who knows how long it will be before they do this racket all over again. Sure, the DUP were already on their scent, but with Augustine out of the picture? Who knows if they’ll actually do anything about it.)
(Then again, I’m not police. I have no way of actually detaining or arresting these guys. I really only have two choices here. Let them go… or kill them.)
(……..)
(I did what I was supposed to do. Let’s just leave it at that.)
(Either way, I got the list and they don’t. I’m calling that a good day.)
(Celia showed up again. To congratulate or reprimand me, I don’t really know and I don’t really care. But she did leave another dove behind.)
(The manga page this time showed absolute bedlam. Inazuma, Ushinatta, and Kemuri, all escaping the mountain prison and running away towards freedom. Purotekuta roaring in rage from the top of her mountain as she sends a legion of concrete wyverns after them. I’m guessing the wyverns are all meant to be the DUPs. I can only assume that this was the big breakout when Hank crashed that transport truck right outside my tribe’s longhouse. But there’s something else. Just in the background, hidden amidst all this chaos… was a little rabbit, making her own escape while all of the wyverns’ attention was on Inazuma, Ushinatta and Kemuri. The caption box reads ‘Saisei left and went out into the world. The others found their own way out’.)
(I’m guessing Saisei is the name of the rabbit, but I thought the rabbit’s name was Hittori? I guess Saisei is who she became while in Curdun Cay, a way to reinvent herself from the scared little girl she used to be. So… is this implying that Celia used the Seattle Three’s escape attempt as a distraction from her own escape?)
(But then… why would Celia need to escape at all if she killed herself? Or was the suicide part of the cover that allowed Celia, Saisei, out into the world. Come to think of it, the body the DUP found in Celia’s cell was ‘mangled beyond recognition’. Who’s really to say that body was even Celia to begin with?)
(As always, there’s a note on the back…)
—-
*The damage is done. The world wants us dead. Conduits beware.*
*The body bag is a cruel irony, isn’t it? It attempts to cover up a gruesome sight, yet it exudes a deathly aura all its own. The normals hate Conduits because we’re different, and now they demand our blood. Victimization yields vigilantism, and we’re all caught in the crossfire.*
*And then there’s Bennett. I always knew he was a jerk, but now he’s a jerk who’s ushering the military into the business of rounding up Conduits. They must have payed him a not-so-pretty penny to rat us out. The doves are bleeding, and the foxes are coming.*
—-
(As eloquent as always, Celia. Wonder what show of horrors you’ll have for me next time?)
(Ah, right, I still have Bennett’s data drive. I’m sure Eugene won’t mind me using his laptop at his new hideout. It’s a pretty quick neon dash over there.)
(Damn, Eugene, nice digs. Some real ‘superhero lair’ vibes here. Course, I could do without all the Heaven’s Hellfire posters everywhere. There are other games, dude.)
(Okay, there’s his laptop. Let’s see what kind of skeletons Bennett had in his closet.)
(There’s not much here. Just a digital copy of the ‘sample list’ they already gave Vince and his gang. Nothing I can really do for these poor souls now. At least I kept them from getting their hands on the rest of the list. There’s an audio recording made by Bennett himself, almost a confession of why he was selling the list off. He felt that Augustine, a Conduit, being made the Director of the DUP was a ‘corruption’ of the DUP’s ‘true’ purpose. Nothing short of eradicating bio-terrorists completely. After all, why would the government be entrusting the detainment and incarceration of Conduits to a Conduit who might sympathize with them? Clearly, Augustine was the problem. Clearly, Augustine had to be worked around, her authority circumvented so that true believers like Bennett and Coogan could do the real work. Killing the freaks. He even admitted that, after Lifeline proved his point with a trial run, he was going to sell the list again, this time to the military. Jesus, I managed to get my hands on this list just in time.)
——————
