Episode 05 – Mister Rich
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Previously on Whitechapel
Six escaped from his cell at the Whitechapel Project disguised as Dr. Tucci, one of the project’s employees. After leaving his prison, a black car pulled up that seemed strangely familiar, and Six was told to get in. During the ride, the mysterious driver referred to him as Dr. Tucci, but asked some unconnected questions, constantly keeping Six on the ropes. They finally arrived at Eden Park, where the meeting between the driver and Dr. Tucci was supposed to take place, and they found Tucci’s car wrecked on the side of one of the park’s roads. Inside the car was a corpse completely missing its skin. As Six examined the body, the driver shoved him against the car, put a gun to Six’s head, and demanded to know what happened.
Episode Five – Mister Rich
I struggle to put my hands in the air while I’m awkwardly shoved against the side of the wreck. I take a breath to speak, and the cloyingly rotten smell of the corpse assaults my nose again. “Okay, I’m not Dr. Tucci. I’ll explain what I know. Let me up.”
“If you try anything, I won’t hesitate to kill you. Do you understand?” The driver pokes the heavy metal object into my head again for emphasis.
I swallow a smart-ass comment and simply say, “I understand.”
I nearly fall backwards when the hold suddenly vanishes, but the smell doesn’t seem to go away. I grab the side of the car and quickly steady myself before I let go again, my hands back into the air. I close my eyes…
… and I hear the malice in the driver’s voice. “I know what you can do. I said not to try anything.”
I open my eyes in surprise and look at my captor. He’s taller than me and wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jacket, brown slashed with orange stripes. It suits him, since he’s built like a football player – wide shoulders and thick legs encased in fitting jeans and sturdy work boots. His hair is short – it looks like a military cut, but I can’t be sure. He’s certainly not what I expected a partner of Dr. Tucci’s to look like.
He’s also pointing a gun at me. A large gun.
I try to ignore the hand cannon. “How do you know what I can do?”
The man shakes his head. “No. I have the gun, so I get to ask the questions. You don’t have the gun, so you get to answer them.”
I nod. “Fine. Can I at least put my hands down? My arms are tired.”
“Not just yet.” He walks over to his car and opens a door to the back seat before waving the pistol at me. “Get in the back seat, and sit on your hands.”
I carefully walk over to the car, feeling a sense of deja vu. Have I been captured before? A scene explodes into my brain…
… I can taste old jellybeans in my mouth, gummy and dusty. I want to spit them out, but I force myself to swallow as a brown dog with one ear sits next to me, hopefully wagging her tail…
… and I’m on the ground, face-up, frozen grass poking into my neck. My captor, my savior, whatever he is has the gun by his side. His face is surprised, concerned. “Six… is that you?”
My mask. The skin of Dr. Tucci is gone, taken by the stray image in my mind. He doesn’t seem to be shooting me over this revelation, so I risk sitting up. “Do I know you?” I ask, feeling like everything has been a question or a bruise since I woke up.
“Do you know me? I’m…” The man falters for a moment, and his face closes back up. He’s the detached professional again. “For now, I’m Mister Rich.”
Mister Rich. The name rings a bell, a faint one. I get the impression that I know more, but… the moment is gone. I nod slowly. “Okay, Mister Rich. I’m sorry I fell over. I just had an image of eating stale jellybeans, and for some reason it knocked me over.”
Mister Rich laughs. “Yeah, that was the time that I… well, never mind that. Go sit down.” His gun isn’t pointed at me anymore, but it’s still in his hand, ready and available. He seems to know me, but he still doesn’t trust me. That’s fair – I don’t trust myself, either.
I sit back on the hard seat and put my hands under my ass. Mister Rich crouches down on the frozen grass, arms over his knees, his gun dangling from one hand for easy access. I try to think about what to say, what to pass on and what to leave out, but instead I’m telling him all that I know. I describe everything from when I woke up to when I came out of the building. The story pours out of me like fountain, a steady stream of murder and lies and theft that led me to the back seat of his car.
And the whole time he’s looking at me, listening. He never interrupts me or looks distracted. He just sits there, a patient receiver of every impression, every image, every word. Finally, the stream becomes a trickle, and then a drop. I finish the story and look over at the wreck.
Mister Rich notices the look. “Did you realize your disguise would kill him?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t… I was hoping that maybe it was a mistake, that it was someone else’s body in that car. I had this feeling like I was wearing his skin, but I thought it was an abstraction, a way of understanding what’s going on in my head. I didn’t think…”
Mister Rich stands up and looks down at me. “And you don’t remember anything else?”
“No, nothing.”
He looks around at the frozen park. “Okay. This wasn’t how I planned to spend my evening, but what the hell. We need to get out of here.” He opens the passenger side door and reaches inside.
I lean over and start to pull my door shut, but Mister Rich grabs the door before I can. He startles me with how fast he is. His face is close to mine, and for a moment I panic. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe he’s just going to shoot me and cart my body around in the soundproof, air-tight backseat of his car.
He throws a paper bag into the back seat before handing me a paper cup with a straw. “God, you stink. But here’s that food I promised you. We’ll eat on the way.”
I don’t even notice the car glide back out of the park. I devour everything in the bag as if it were the finest meal ever made. Right now, at this exact moment, there aren’t any secret underground hospitals or mysterious gun-totting drivers or amnesiac psychics who can kill people at a distance. All that exists is a hamburger, french fries, and a cup of ice-cold soda. I lose myself in the simple joy of food.
All too soon, I’m left with the cardboard and paper corpses of my meal. I bury them all in the bag when the speaker crackles back to life. “There’s a motel nearby that I know. We’ll be able to find a room for the night.”
I set the bag of trash next to me before leaning back into the seat. “Can you put the divider down?”
“Not just yet, Six. We have a lot to talk about before I trust that you won’t cut me into bloody ribbons.”
“Do you mind if I ask some questions while we drive?”
“We’ll have time for all that at the motel.”
True to his word, within a few minutes we pull into the parking lot of a motel that should have been condemned. He tells me to stay inside before walking into the lobby. Soon the car is parked behind some trees, well away from the street, and he’s leading me to room 339. He pulls out a plastic card to swipe through the lock, and I shiver. It’s not because of the cold.
The room itself is uninspiring – two twin beds with faded comforters, a scratched and worn nightstand between them with a lamp, a dresser across from them with a TV set that looks twenty years old, a chair and a desk that were probably salvaged from a school. Wallpaper flakes off in long, ragged strips, and there are dark stains on the threadbare carpet. Mister Rich motions to one of the beds and sits down on the opposite one. The gun is still in his hand, resting in his lap.
“It seems like you’ve been straight with me, so I’ll try to be straight with you. I don’t completely trust you yet, but it’s clear you’re looking for answers, and I might have some of them. Some questions I won’t answer, but I’ll try to answer a couple that won’t make our immediate relationship more awkward.”
“Who am I?” I blurt out.
“That’s one of those questions I won’t answer,” he says. “Not yet.”
I look at the gun in his lap. “Can you put the gun away, at least?”
He smiles. “That’s oh-for-two.”
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to wrestle with all of the questions in my head to settle on a couple that Mister Rich might answer.
What two questions should I ask?
“Why were you meeting with Dr. Tucci?”
“Why did you call me Six?”
“What do you know about the Whitechapel Project?”
“If you know me, why don’t you trust me?”
“What do you know about my powers?”
“What happened to Dr. Tucci?”
The choice is yours.
(Author’s Note: There were a couple of tense mistakes that I didn’t notice before recording. I edited them here, but the podcast may not completely sync up as a result.)
What two questions should I ask? Total Voters: 29
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October 7th, 2009 at 12:03 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Eddy Webb. Eddy Webb said: Episode 05 – Mister Rich http://is.gd/41JSe [...]
October 7th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Much as I hate to nitpick, the tense shifts in a couple of places (notably the para beginning “Mister Rich laughed.”) and it’s a bit jarring.
As for questions, “Why did you call me Six?” allows plenty of room for expansion without straying into getting shot-down territory, as does “If you know me, why don’t you trust me?”
In general, VI finding out about himself is more important than finding out about what’s chasing him–and he might just get that information on the side as well.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Thought I caught all those. Thanks for pointing it out — I’ll try to revise later today.
Also, it seems the poll didn’t open correctly — it should be working now.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Corrected that, as well as a weird font error and a dangling clause. Such is the nature of fast writing. :(
October 7th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Poll gives no place to click, no submit button. Sadness.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Poll didn’t open as it was programmed to, so I opened it manually.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Oh man. Can’t I just vote for all of the options? Haha. Seriously, I want all those questions to be answered but since I only got two I played ball. Before I move on to my point-by-point break down I just wanna say how happy I am to see Mr. Rich being someone who’s sort of helping VI. That was pretty much what I wanted when I voted for him to get into the car… and now I’m happy my vote last week didn’t come true. Weird how things work out. Anyway, on to my analysis.
“If you know me, why don’t you trust me?”: This was one of the two I picked. I think I already know the answer, Mr. Rich knows about VI’s powers.. at least something about them, and that would be the most likely reason. Still, this question seems the most In Character at the time. The natural question.
“What do you know about my powers?”: This was the other one I picked. Mr. Rich made a couple comments about VI’s powers or allusions to knowing about them. I figured it was the best bet to get some real information about our main character.
“Why were you meeting with Dr. Tucci?”: I’m curious about this, but it didn’t seem to give me answers about VI. I mean, yeah, this guy doesn’t look like a Tuccite. There could be a million reasons though and it didn’t seem like a direct path to real answers about VI.
“Why did you call me Six?”: Man, I was curious about this. Up until now he’s called himself Six because he didn’t know what else to call himself but now someone could answer. We could find out what exactly VI means. Still, its a small question in a bigger puzzle.
“What do you know about the Whitechapel Project?”: I already knew the answer so why should I ask the question? “The Whitechapel Project” is an interactive horror novella blog and podcast. Hahaha. Ok, seriously. I was curious about this too (like I said, I wanted to vote for all of them) but its mostly because of the lack of information we have about the Project up to now. I was considering this vote over the questions about his powers because this one could indirectly lead to that question anyway… still, I felt the direct route better.
“What happened to Dr. Tucci?”: I don’t have much faith in Mr. Rich to be able to answer this is any satisfactory manner. I mean, VI used his powers and now Tucci is dead… Its a question I want answered but I just don’t feel like Mr. Rich is the guy to answer it. Plus, if we discover more about VI’s powers we could just piece this together on our own.
All in all, another fantastic episode Eddy. Keep it up.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Thanks for the breakdown as always, Rob. :)
October 7th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Holy crap, I picked the same two options as Rob! Global implosion in 5… 4… 3… 2…
Honestly, those were the two questions I figured VI would probably get the most mileage out of since I’m thinking Rich would probably stay more tight-lipped about the other topics. This is getting VERY interesting. Very cool!
October 7th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Oh crap. Now you’ve killed the world. THE WHOLE WORLD.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
That was very hard to choose! I went with Why did you call me Six and What do you know about my powers. He needs info about himself before he can tackle the problem of the folks who undoubtedly want him for those powers. Plus, maybe it will jog his memory.
Another excellent episode. I didn’t want it to end! I kind of hate this format and love it too. I hate it because I just want to see the story continue, but when you gave us two options instead on one this time, I nearly did a little happy dance! Keep up the good work!
Oh, please don’t do anything bad to the dog. Please?
October 7th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I’m glad you’re hooked! :)
And I don’t know if anything bad will happen to the dog. I guess we’ll see!
October 8th, 2009 at 3:53 am
OK, so Mr.Rich is involved then. Figures, why else would he pick up ‘Dr. Tucci’ from the WCP location. Now he seems friendly to VI. Not overly excited to see him, which is an interesting distinction. Is he a warden-like figure? Or maybe Tucci was selling some info to outside/parties?
Some of these might help clearify Mr.Rich´s position as well, which is a big bonus at this point. VI´s first order of business is to get to know himself, so I´ll pick ´Why did you call me Six´. The awnser to this question might make the ´What do you know about the WCP´ question redundant, so I won´t pick that question. Same for ´What do you know about my powers?´. Come to think of it, `If you know me, why don´t you trust me´ is linked to this as well.
So by asking two question, VI can learn so much about both himself and his current companion. First, ask him why he called him VI. If the answer is satisfactory, move on to ´why were you meeting with Dr. Tucci´, to help clearify his position with regards to the WCP. If he´s not forthcoming enough, the other WCP-related questions can be needed. But for now, I´ll stick to the ´Dr.Tucci´ and the ´Why Six´ questions.
Great work again Eddy, keep it up!
October 8th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Interesting theories!
October 10th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Telling the truth finally pays! FOOD! Lucky VI.
Why did he called him Six? He must know something. Makes me think he could be Five or Seven or Four or… you get it.
Also, what is Whitechapel Project? Might lead to answers about VI’s powers. But might just not. Let’s see in two weeks.
Ho… and this is one of the best yet. Great job Eddy!
October 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Glad you’re enjoying it! :)
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:25 pm
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