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09:09, 29th April 2024 (GMT+0)

Dr. Daniel Kendall

The Basics

Name: Dr. Daniel Francis Kendall

Gender: Male

Age: 35

The Physical
Height & Weight: 6', 170 lbs.

Hair & Eye Color: Dark Blonde/Blue-Green

Physical Description: Daniel is tall and fit, exercising in some form or another every day (and sometimes excessively).  He has wavy hair that’s dark blond or light brown depending on the light, with eyes that are bluish-green.  Generally, the lighter his hair seems, the bluer his eyes, the darker, the greener but that's more an effect of the light than mood and certainly nothing supernatural.

He tends to dress well in suits or at least a nice dress shirt, often painfully crisp and precisely fitted.  He smiles easily and often naturally, but when no one is watching it tends to flatten, almost as though it was held aloft with invisible strings.  As a result, he's easily seen as an extrovert who is much happier around other people than he is alone and much more energized.  Perhaps this is why he sometimes talks to himself to fill the silence (though usually takes notes on an old-school microcassette recorder).  It might also be why he talks to his cat Ralph when alone at home.  Fortunately, he’s not delusional about it and knows that Ralph is just a cat, he just tells himself he doesn’t like the silence.  Similarly, he’s usually playing music, has the TV on or something, anything to keep his thoughts from turning too far inward where he doesn’t want them to.

Questions

1. Do you work for the Magnus Institute, or do you simply work alongside it? If the former, state your current position at the Institute (Archive Assistant, Field Agent, Artifact Containment). If the latter, detail your relationship with the Institute, why you choose to help them, and in what capacity you do so.

Answer: Daniel's official designation is Researcher though he's expected to perform a variety of functions in the understaffed NY Office:

2. Do you have any connections to the various Entities? Do you follow any of them out of respect, or due to religious reasons? Do you hate them all? Detail your feelings about the Entities below.

Answer: Daniel has had encounters with several entities both prior to and after joining The Magnus Institute and a complex relationship both with those he's encountered and those he's only experienced in their more natural, mundane, and/or metaphorical forms:

3. How long have you been working for or with the Magnus Institute? If you have worked for the Institute for longer than six months, state whether you consider being transferred to the smaller New York branch a punishment for past mistakes on the job, or an opportunity to further advance your career.

Answer: Daniel discovered the London branch in 2019 while doing his own independent research into a series of incidents that plagued his family but was unable to join due to personal responsibilities.  He continued his own private research for the next few years until he recently learned of the opening of the NY Branch after reaching out to London regarding an unrelated discovery he thought they might find interesting.  In return, they shared an opportunity with him that he might find interesting.

Talents

Education: Dan has a medical degree from the University of Washington with a Master's in Psychology from UC Berkeley.  He is a Certified Psychiatrist with roughly four years of practice before being recruited.  He undertook his residency on loan to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Seattle where he participated in trauma and PTSD treatment as part of the ongoing IMPACT program being conducted between across the nation.

Skills: Daniel is often looking for ‘stress’ relief techniques, both for himself and to learn more about them so he can encourage others.  He’s tried Yoga, but gets bored with it, tried Tai Chi enough he can do the short form, but again… bored.  He’s a little better with meditation and tries to sit for at least 15 minutes every morning.

He also works out regularly as another coping mechanism and is physically fit.  Most recently he’s taken up boxing, but more along the lines of a workout than sport or combat art (in other words, he works the bags).

He’s an excellent dancer and should The Eye keep tabs on him after hours he often goes out to clubs to get drunk, dance, and if he gets lucky, sleeps with someone.  At the very least, he usually gets drunk.  He used to be very good at Karaoke but hasn't gone in years.

He's currently taking cooking lessons online, usually at night when he can't sleep.

He's also knowledgeable about various archaic (i.e. non-digital) recording technologies and has a vast collection of recording devices and media.

Artifact: Dan has a piece of old lace ribbon.  It's pure white with an intricate pattern that can be somewhat mesmerizing if you look at it too long, like a pattern within a pattern within a pattern within a pattern.  Technically that's kind of true of all things once you get down to the atomic level or out to the cosmic and various points in between.  In this case, the pattern is vaguely web-like with smaller and smaller webs at the heart of the larger webs.

The ribbon is approximately a foot long or maybe a yard, he forgets.  He even forgot that one time he tied it to a doorknob and stretched it from one end of his apartment to another and though he doesn't have a particularly large apartment that was way more than a few feet.

The ribbon was originally part of a baby blanket they'd been given by someone when Polly was born.  He doesn't remember who gave it to them, only that Polly wouldn't sleep without it that first year or so.  It was pretty ratty by the time she was approaching three but she had thrown a tantrum when they tried to take it away, tugging and pulling it back until the lace edge ripped away.  She won that argument and kept the lace, dragging it around for another year like the leash of some imaginary pet dog that had run away.  Eventually, it found its way around the neck of a toy rabbit they found in an antique store while on vacation along the Oregon coast where it remained until shortly after her mother's death, and now it resides in Dan's nightstand or pocket, bound up in a little bundle.


Under The Hood

Personality: Dan is quite empathic though in a very natural way and nothing psychic or supernatural.  He tends to mirror those he deals with, either in a sympathetic way (matching) or a supportive way (balancing).  As a result, he can be a bit mercurial in his moods, which sometimes makes his ‘cheerfulness’ seem fake.  In fairness, it sometimes is, but he believes in the old adage, fake it until you make it, so faking it sometimes isn’t so bad, as long as you’re not in denial about it.  Denial is in his mind one of the worst things to be, though admittedly he might be himself, assuming optimism and determination isn't a key to success like he tries to believe.

He tries very hard not to be arrogant or a know-it-all but he sometimes is and can get angry or down on himself when he is and turns out to be wrong.  He tries very hard not to be controlling but very much wants to be so he tries to limit this to himself (e.g. his body, his clothes, his office, his house).  He tries very hard to ‘keep it together’ when around others, dealing with his own trauma and issues privately, and not always in the healthiest of ways, though in a sense that’s also what he sometimes preaches, so at least he’s not a total hypocrite.  In this regard he is not a perfectionist nor does he expect perfection and can be quite forgiving of others and even himself.

Fears:  Dan has a fear of The Dark and he keeps some lights on at all times, has flashlights and emergency lights stationed throughout his house, and has candles and a lighter in his nightstand (and not just for the sake of the hot wax).  He has some fear of abandonment and fear of abandoning, or alternatively simply being alone which is why he generally avoids it or 'fakes' company in the form of music, movies, and/or the company of a cat.  As a result of both he is a high-functioning insomniac.

Backstory: Dan's life began ordinarily enough.  That wasn't to say it was uneventful, just common enough not to be all that unique.  Abusive father, enough to warrant a few police reports but not enough to end in some tragic backstory beyond divorce.  The most tragic part was a few years after that when his father incapacitated himself in a failed suicide attempt and spent the next decade in a long-term care facility before his death.

Dan's background suggests that had he not encountered Corporal Ronald McCalister his life would have been ordinary and completely respectable despite some early difficulties in childhood, most notably reports of abuse at the hands of his father, an often out-of-work construction worker.  Police reports suggest most of the abuse fell upon Dan's mother, though it could be surmised that a hospital report of a broken arm at the age of six may have been caused by the father rather than the reported ‘fall’ cited in the documents.

His parents divorced after another incident which warranted a police report but included few details beyond it being a ‘spousal disagreement’ resulting in David Kendall being removed from the house.  Two years later saw the incapacitation of David Kendall by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.  David Kendall passed away in a long-term care facility in upstate New York of natural causes a decade later.

Jessica Kendall, Daniel’s mother remarried a few years after her divorce to a co-worker, Gerald Baker.  There was a court petition to legally change Daniel’s name to Baker shortly after but it was denied due to “the wishes of the minor in question”.  There were no further police or court records related to the family.  Daniel graduated from Thomas High School outside Rochester, NY, and moved to California to attend college at UC Berkeley, continuing on to graduate school there, before moving again to complete a doctoral program in Washington State.

It was there he met Shannon Miller, a fellow student.  The two were married in 2015, just as Daniel was entering his medical residency and Shannon began a career with a local tech company.  Their daughter Polly was born less than a year later.

In later interviews, Daniel would note there were early signs of anomalous activity that were ignored by inattention and parental ego.  The first was Polly's early speech capabilities.  By the age of one, she was speaking with relative coherence using direct verbs, nouns, and the occasional verb/noun combinations.  Blanket, Lift, Give Doll.  The second missed red flag was a shift from early communication to a lack of communication.  Though capable, by the age of 3, Polly rarely spoke.  Being a trained psychologist, this of course concerned Daniel and when neither he nor his wife could get to the bottom of the problem, they began to consult experts, and though no conclusion was ever reached.



The doll was found in a secondhand store in Portland, OR.  It presented as a small stuffed rabbit with reddish-brown fur and yellow eyes with a worn old silk ribbon around its throat.  His recollection is fuzzy and alternatively, it was Jillian who picked it up first or Polly.  In either case, Polly began to throw a tantrum when they tried to put it back and they gave in.  They bought it along with a few other vintage things which have since been thrown away.



He wasn't there when it happened.  Polly was 6 when her mother died.  There are no records of what occurred leading up to the death and interviews with both Daniel and Polly herself have revealed no further information.  Polly was crying when Daniel got home, unable to say anything other than Mister Fuzzles told her to do it.  The official cause of death was ruled suicide as Jillian had jumped from their eighth-floor balcony to the street below.

Outwardly, Daniel took the entire experience well.  Polly on the other hand couldn't sleep and would wake up screaming at Mister Fuzzles but when Dan tried to take the old rabbit away she'd scream even worse, demanding him back.  This went on for several nights until in one back and forth and they were tugging over the doll Polly wound up with the doll and Dan the ribbon around her neck.  Immediately Polly stopped screaming.  Unfortunately, she stopped everything but breathing and has been virtually catatonic since.

He's tried everything from clinical to crazy.  He even tried tying the ribbon back on Mister Fuzzles but nothing changed in Polly.  She lives with her grandmother now, Dan's mother-in-law, a retired nurse from Beaufort, SC.  Dan has moved them both closer to the City and she has good days and bad days.  On a good day she watches cartoons or colors, usually abstract things with no discernable patterns.  On bad days she's as stiff as a board or screams.  She's starting to have more good days than bad, something that gives Dan hope but he's also made note of a concerning pattern, her bad days are most often the days after he visits.



He became pretty obsessive after his wife's death.  Some of the things that drove him on seemed random.  He grew fascinated with the work of Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne, a physiologist who pursued opthography, the process of capturing images from the retina of the eye and believed the eye 'recorded' the last images seen before death.  He was obsessed with recordings in general and began to collect tape recorders of all types to the point he had to get a storage unit for some of them (and the associated tapes).

This eventually led him to The Magnus Institute.  While researching Stone Tape Theory (the theory that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings) he stumbled across The Magnus Institute's project of recording accounts of the esoteric and the weird.  He was in England at the time (which was where the Stone Tape Theory originated) and sought out the Institute at which point he nearly joined but didn't want to risk uprooting Polly since she was starting to show signs of improvement.  Still, he kept in touch with them, sending them information he discovered as he continued researching weird phenomena on his own.



It was recently when he reached out to share information regarding a story about a small town in rural Idaho where a number of residents disappeared during a blackout.  While most of the missing were eventually located there were two individuals who he couldn't track down and when he broke into their house he found strange symbols scrawled into the walls of the basement in black soot, a symbol at looked like a partial sun or a closed eye.

It was then he learned about them opening the US Branch and needing both money and a little stability, he joined.


Writing Sample:

<Statement of Dr. Daniel Kendall regarding the final words of Corporal Ronald McCalister.  Statement given June 19th, 2020, London Branch.  Statement beings.>

"Have you ever done this, been on this side of the tape recorder?  I sort of think you should all have to do it, at least once, even if you don't have a story to tell, just to have the experience.  It's unsettling, just talking and wondering if you're going to be believed and sort of knowing it almost doesn't matter since nothing's going to come of it.  It's disheartening but also, I don't know, a relief?"

"My name is Dan Kendall.  Doctor Daniel Francis Kendall, if we're being precise.  That's important, I guess, it probably means I'm not your run-of-the-mill crackpot just calling up or turning up off the street.  I went to school, a lot of school, an undergraduate degree and Masters from Berkeley and a medical degree from the UW, that's the University of Washington.  I guess, you usually don't care about a lot of the background stuff, my childhood, all that, but you can verify that, Berkeley from '05 to '11, UW from '11 to '15."

"I met Ronald at the Seattle VA when I just started my internship in November of 2015.  He'd been deployed to Iraq in 2007 and said he hadn't been scared about going except for one thing, the spiders.  He'd always been afraid of spiders since he got bitten by a brown recluse as a kid.  They turned up in woodpiles around the Pacific Northwest and while they weren't necessarily deadly they have a dermonecrotic venom that can cause loxoscelism.  That basically means it kills the flesh.  It's a common enough problem that doctors have a mnemonic device to help figure out if it's venom or something else.   Numerous Occurrence Timing (wrong season), Red Center Elevated Chronic Large Ulcerates (too quickly) Swollen, Exudative.  NOT RECLUSE."

"Also not really relevant but what is was that when he was a kid he got bitten by one and had the scar to prove it on his leg.  He'd had a fear of spiders ever since and that was his big fear about going to Iraq, not insurgents, not roadside IEDs, not being away from his family, but in 2005 there were these stories about giant spiders in Iraq.  It was a hoax or urban legend or whatever you want to call it, forced perspective that made the spiders seem bigger than they were.  Or I guess they aren't technically spiders but solifugae, same class but different order."

"This is hard.  You really should try it yourself sometime.  I don't think any of this matters but it's hard to edit memories in recall, it all sort of flows together.  I guess if I was writing this and not speaking it I might cut most of it out."

"Ronald, Corporal Ronald McCalister was suffering a pretty severe case of PTSD when I met him and claiming to be suffering from sleep paralysis, at least he said he was, we never got him into a sleep study so I can't verify that.  Anyway, when we were talking he recounted a story from his deployment. He'd asked his squad mates about the spiders when he first got to Iraq and they played it up, said they were even bigger than those pictures and other things.  He felt pretty silly when he found out the truth but he was still scared of them because of his childhood experience."

"There was this one guy, Private Williams, he thought himself a practical joker but they were mostly mean jokes, fake Dear John messages, stories about friends getting hurt on patrol, the worst kind, just mean, angry things that they all brushed off because egging him on just made him escalate.  Anyway, this guy kept up on Ronald, put dead spiders in his bunk, his shoes, stuff like that.  Ronald started getting paranoid, would check everything before he put it on, before he went to bed, to the showers, grabbed a meal.  It got to the point he looked out for those spiders more than he did IEDs or snipers on patrol.  He knew it was bad but he couldn't help it, it became an obsession."

"One night on patrol they were searching a building and when he turned on his flashlight it cast a huge spider shadow, like the bat signal out of the comics.  Not that I'd ever read comics as a kid but I knew what he meant.  Anyway, Williams had taped a spider over the front of it and just, it was dumb joke but now Ron was going to have to start checking all his gear too and that made him pretty mad.

"The thing is, he said, even though he had scraped the thing off, there was the shadow wherever he pointed the light, like it had been burned into the glass and it got bigger and bigger the further he shined the light.  He smashed it and got a new one but even after that he kept seeing that shadow reaching out of every dark doorway or corner, small at first, then growing bigger and bigger until he either looked away or closed his eyes."

"They started to have trouble then, in the unit.  Little things at first, a slip up here, a slip up there.  Then they started getting injured.  One of his friends missed a tripwire.  Ron saw it, right before it went off.  He said it glowed like silver.  Their LT got hit by a sniper and Ron knew exactly where it had come from, he pointed to a window and it was like there was a thread from it to his LT's throat and as the Lieutenant fell, so too did the thread, like it had been snipped at their end.  People started to get afraid of him then.  He seemed to always know who was next or at least did just a moment before anyone else.  He was getting more and more isolated."

"They were on patrol again one night.  He specifically remembered there was a full moon and that when they reached the top floor he went through the door first.  They always made him go through first now and that night he saw his shadow stretch out when the light hit him from the window.  He said it was like with the flashlight, how it stretched, starting small then getting bigger and bigger and bigger."

"He'd been transfixed, he said, unable to move as the rest of the squad moved forward and where they stepped into his shadow it stuck, like a piece of gum on their shoes and as they went further in, his shadows stretched thinner and thinner until it was like he was a hunter with a pack of hounds on black leashes."

"Those were his words and so I asked him what he was hunting and he said he didn't know until it showed itself at the other end of the room, a beam of light coming from somewhere down a hall.  His Sergeant gave an order for quiet and to take up positions.  He remembered the sound of buzzing in his ear, that sound you hear in the movies when soldiers power up night-vision goggles.  They don't actually do that though, at least not any after the old first gen versions but he heard that sound anyway and when he put on his they didn't work.  He learned later, none of them worked, some sort of mass-defect the inquiry would find but before they could do anything to fix them that light came through the doorway, nearly blinding them."

"A lot of things were shouted then, in English, in Arabic, the usual stuff, put down your weapons, identify yourself, down, down, get down, an avalanche stuff that usually puts people off their game enough for you to take control of the situation, they even called out a nightly code call only they didn't get any response, the light just stayed there pointed at them, unmoving.  Then it popped like an old flash bulb."

"Ron said, you never forget the sound of a bullet zipping past your head like an angry wasp.  You maybe learn to ignore it but you never forget it.  That was one of the things he liked about the northwest, there weren't a lot of bugs like that around.  A few, sure, but he couldn't imagine living in the south and having to deal with that sound all the time."

"Anyway, he said they heard that sound, that angry zipping sound, and they saw that flash and they did what they were trained to do when you hear that zip and you see that flash, you return fire."

"They never bothered figuring out who hit him and who didn't, it didn't really matter, you get hit with a single 5.56 and you're in trouble and he was hit with eight."

"There was an inquiry.  It wasn't clear why two squads had been sent to clear the same building from different sides or why Williamson didn't return the counter call.  The only thing they really determined was that Ron was the only one who hadn't actually fired his weapon."

"Ron said he stopped seeing the shadows after that.  They broke up the squad and spread them around to other units for the remainder of their tour.  Two of them died over there, the rest not long after they got home, a car crash, overdose for the other.  Ron was the last one left.  And that was his story."

"Then he said he was sorry.  At first, I thought it was just the way people sometimes do when they feel like they've burdened you with their problems.  People do that a lot, apologize for sharing their pain.  That's what they're doing, you know, sharing it.  Sometimes it's like an infection or a disease.  Those are the ones you have to watch out for, the ones that want you to hurt with them but for most it's like a weight they carry and for a moment at least, when they share it, someone else is helping them hold it up before they have to take it back all on their own.  It's good when they do that.  It's like practice and if they do it often enough, long enough, sometimes they can put it down and walk away."

"It can still catch up to you though.  No matter how far you run, how long ago, a bee buzzes past your ear, garbage truck drops a bin, a song comes on the radio, a smell fills the air.  For him it was a shadow.  He saw a shadow."

"I didn't know about The Institute back then or any of this stuff, if I had I don't know, maybe things would have turned out differently.  Not his death.  That... I don't think I could have done anything about that but maybe the rest.  I don't know."

<Statement Ends>