The Killiam Group
From DirtyWiki
In progress.
(Just, for now, be aware that it's essentially this, as told to Scout by Rue in a somewhat facetious and yet entirely accurate manner during a related conversation: "okay, so what this is? is the real page that makes this plotline not confusing anymore and also a real plotline. sure it's bizarre and very conspiracy theory, but hopefully less confusing, because there's no person inserting characters and things wherever she wants and taking control without asking anyone and adding levels of people and shit that came from nowhere! thank you, abby, for being a bad collaborator.")
Contents |
History
Background
Once upon a time, there were six people who all went to university together: Iri Burton, Shaun Killiam, Tobias Gregson, Douglas Reinhart, Sara Berkham, and Damian Harrow. They were all very good friends and all people with very industrious minds, and a lot of them went into lucrative business while still being involved in healthcare. They were all researchers, geniuses in their individual fields (neuroscience, business, engineering, psychiatry, dentistry and psychiatry again, respectively) and tried their hardest to work together as long as and as often as they could.
(Iri Burton was/is also an angel, but that really was beside the point for a very long time.)
After they'd all been in their respective businesses for some time, Reinhart and his wife Rose moved into Burton's childhood town, Blackburn, after she'd invited them their to consult on some interesting patients she'd started to see. A lot of the children going through the stress of Blackburn's foster and orphanage system (Blackburn had, at the time, one of the last full orphanages in England – today it's the last that operates under the traditional system, and is an orphanage-based town) were in great need of psychiatric care, she said, and they also coincidentally made very good research subjects for her.
She left out all the parts of how she had gone through it herself, and how she was one of the pretty weird things about Blackburn herself – the things Iri was seeing, they weren't like her at all, and Reinhart was instantly taken by them.
It was Killiam who told them just what they could do with these people they had. The strange things that these people could do, their mindpower, their talent, their somewhat preternatural abilities – they were all things that a small population of the world could do, a very small population, and if they could harvest them like they were doing in Blackburn, get them all together, well, they could come up with an amazing force of people.
Here, Burton or Reinhart should have said, "but they're not tools, they're only children!"
They didn't.
They started to hatch a plan, instead – and by the time they were done planning, the entire group of friends was in on it.
And Then ...
Gregson, the engineer, didn't play much of a role at first. He invented testing devices and came up with brain monitors, and that was all they really needed. He also offered a fantastic listening ear. Berkham, the dentist, paid close attention to her patients, as did Harrow. Reinhart, on the other hand, went out to seek them himself, encouraging every foster family he could into bringing children in for therapy. Burton oversaw everyone on the medical end, and it was Harrow and Reinhart's idea that they could use hypnosis to make it to their final end.
Perhaps, again, they should have started feeling guilt that they were turning children into mercenaries, into something to sell. Because they weren't just doing it for the good of the patients, teaching them to harness their abilities – that may have been Burton's plan at first (perhaps influenced by her own childhood, not that any of the others knew about her abilities) but by the time they really got into it, they weren't. It was a business. They were finding exceptional people, finding them young, and studying them.
And then bending them to their whims.
(If you want a pop culture example, think the Academy from Joss Whedon's Firefly on a lot of crack, and a lot less centralized – except for the town of Blackburn, which already had a lot of exceptional people – and then branch out into films like Gaslight and then just keep going. The collecting of exceptional people is sort of like the Academy in a way – the rest of it, well. There's no way to explain it except in how it is. A further note that the pop culture connection really is a coincidence. Rue started writing about this originally in 2002, long before she'd seen Firefly. Then again, for the creepy factor, you could also look at the "hunting" agency in "Hostel." Rue's advice is just not to watch Hostel, though.)
It was terrible, unethical, and a lucrative business idea. They still hadn't tried it, of course, not tried selling it, but they were certainly creating something. There were a few small fronts where each of the others lived, but the hub was in Blackburn where most of the exceptional people just happened to gravitate to, because Blackburn itself was simply a hub of weird that nobody understood or even tried to understand anymore.
Trouble in Paradise
Before they could get much of anywhere with the business angle, though, Shaun Killiam died suddenly. Nobody really knows how. (Or else Rue doesn't.) He just died. Go with it, people. They were left only with his notes, some general ideas, and his ruthlesness, and that was where Tobias Gregson (who had since married Sara Berkham) stepped in. He was the real ruthless one, and he came up with an idea that the others should have balked away from in order to get control of more patients: how about murder? Take some orphans, watch them, flag them, kill their adoptive parents if they get them and stay in the area (many did, liking to provide stability for the children, and many others just happened to move there after adopting kids – another disturbing Blackburn coincidence), provide trauma.
It should have been a really bad idea.
Instead, they all thought, because the corruption had started and then it had just kept going, that it was an absolutely fantastic idea. They started then to make mob connections, to pitch the idea to crime groups and freelancing criminals (one of whom was Dragomir Petrescu, but he was not interested in murdering anyone and thus didn't have any interest in participating – it was so long ago he likely doesn't even remember anything about the incident except that Iri Burton was frightening) and get a lot of people interested. Suddenly there were a lot of financial backers and a lot of criminals.
And quite a few casualties. (And a couple of coincidences, like on the part of Ezra Thacker, whose guardian near Blackburn just conveniently happened to have a heart attack before they ever found out about the boy, and no one ever claimed him after. They're all thanking the bizzarities of the town for that one.)
Blackburn's counts of traumatic, incidental deaths continued to rise, and because of how strange the place was, nobody ever really took notice of it.
(To be continued. Not that nobody knows, it just isn't summarized yet.)
Notable Personages
Where are they now?
The Six
- Shaun Killiam is dead.
- Iri Burton died in June, and came back to life in September. She's spending all her time at the safehouse in Scotland.
- Douglas Reinhart is in Blackburn, being a psychiatrist, when he's not on the run from the law.
- Damian Harrow and Sara Berkham are in the Cotswolds, working as doctors – nobody had caught on to them until very recently, when a couple of investigators enlisted a local psychiatrist they were already friends with (or that a helpful informant was, anyway) set up a sting to remove a child from their "care." They still haven't been arrested, because nobody has any proof – and they're jonesing for their project back.
- Tobias Gregson is a mystery.
Projects
- Aingeal Duncan lives in Cambridge, works at the London County Mortuary as a medical examiner. She was engaged to Scott, and their relationship sort of took a hiatus that as of September '08 they're trying to repair.
- Adelaide Greene lives in Soho and works at a clothing shop.
- Bree Ivers was recently removed from Damian Harrow's care (read: kidnapped) by Cary Vaughn-Blair and Estee Matthews and is now living in Maudsley Hospital.
- Derek Wernher has since done his time, and migrates across the world between various African countries (Egypt and South Africa) and England with his wife Bianca and son Alaric.
- Elsa Ivanova lives in London, working as an escort. Her Blackburn-born daughter Dorothea goes to New York University.
- Ezra Thacker owns an antique shop called Tick Tock's Trash & Treasures, also in London. (The Wernhers live above the shop. Ezra lives in Kensington.)
- Scott Laurence, too, lives in London, where he owns a used & rare bookshop. (As previously mentioned, has thing with Aingeal.)
- Tarquin Ramsey has just recently started living in London, and writes plays.
- Troy Erskine rather unsurprisingly at this point lives in London, and works for the Fitzwilliam Diamond Company as a designer, as he has the past four and a half years.
Timeline
Holy crap why am I trying to do this. Anyway I'll put this in when I'm done with it or at least half-done; this section is just to remind me to actually do it.
