[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Icelander

As the PCs decide what to do, it's it's crucial that they have a good overview of their options. And it would be plausible, as well as interesting in a dramatic sense, for Kessler to be the sponsor of a charitable institution, in Galveston or close by, concerned with mental health issues, friendly with the police and willing to provide support to criminal investigations at highly favorable rates. Favorable enough to make it unlikely that the county of Galveston would want to contract with any other medical facility for when they need official psychiatric evaluations.

I'm hoping there is some real-world building, hospital or facility on or near Galveston that I could traduce in my campaign by casting them in a sinister, conspirational light, in violation of all professional standards and relevant laws, even if it is ultimately rationalized as doing the best that can be done in an imperfect situation, as well as for the greater good of saving the world.

I'll try to research the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston, as Kessler is already established as a major donor there. Do they have any treatment facility connected to their psychiatric program?

Are you effing kidding me!?

Things I had already established in play:

1) Kessler has some mysterious connection to the University of Texas Medical Branch, among other things financing a laboratory connected to, but distinct from the Galveston National Laboratory, which not only has similarly hush-hush research goals, but also experiences enough mysterious electronic failures and unexplained health issues among the staff for there to be constant suggestions to relocate the laboratories, something which the main financial contributor strongly opposes.

2) The PCs were sent there the day after their experiences with villainous sorcerers and unearthly energies, to have a battery of poorly explained tests performed, ostensibly because Dr. Dao Van Sang, the doctor about the Penemue, was concerned about possible long-term health effects, specifically noting that Ms. Talbot had been exposed to an unknown pathogen and that her vital signs were troubling, with suggestions of low levels of function in nearly every important measurable indicator.

3) The PCs were assured that any records would be copied to Mr. Kessler and his trusted staff exclusively and that the specific people at UTMB they would meet would never place these records in any official data banks at hospitals or the university, nor indeed admit their existence to the police, if pressed.

Things I found out when I Googled whether UTMB had a psychiatric department and/or any linked psychiatric care facilities:

4) "UTMB also has a major contract with the Texas Department of Corrections to provide medical care to inmates at all TDC sites in the eastern portion of Texas. UTMB also has similar contracts with local governments needing inmate medical care." (Wikipedia)

5) This means that any psychiatrists called to interview the villainous kidnapper in Galveston PD custody would be from UTMB if this happened in real life, and in my setting, it was about 100% that any such psychiatrists were either influenced or flat-out owned by Kessler.

6) And yes, the UTMB did have a psychiatric care facility. "In 1996, UTMB purchased the adjacent 128-year-old St. Mary's Hospital, the first catholic hospital in Texas. The building was converted into the Rebecca Sealy Psychiatric Hospital." (Wikipedia)

Are you effing kidding me!?

The UTMB certainly has a psychiatric care facility. It was founded in 1996, the year after Kessler lost a whole field team to the Vile Vortex at the Bermuda Triangle and his organisation would have required an unprecedented amount of psychological and grief counseling for their friends and families, making it plausible that the decision to launch it was influenced by this need.

And for some reason, the UTMB didn't build a new facility. They bought the historic St. Mary's from the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, of Galveston Hurricane fame.

Kessler is not, as far as the PCs know, a Catholic (or any religious flavour at all), but his steward, right-hand man and bodyguard (Jean-Michel Alexandre), his librarian and main ritual magician (Alfred L. Lapointe) and his long-serving personal chef and obeah woman ('Aunty Genie') are all devout Roman Catholics, albeit none of them terribly orthodox in their faith. Indeed, Roman Catholicism is, by a considerable margin, the largest single denomination among those members of Kessler's organisation whom I have detailed so far.

The current adventure, and thus the campaign, started at a certain Walmart in Galveston. It stands at the site of the former St. Mary's Infirmary and Orphan Asylum, run by that very order of nuns, indeed, run by nuns who otherwise lived and worked at St. Mary's. In 1900, 90 children and ten sisters of the C.C.V.I. were killed at that site by the worst natural disaster in US history. Poignantly, the three children who survived report the sisters leading them in song of the hymn Queen of the Waves.

In the Seawall Walmart at the site of this historic tragedy, the PCs discovered a Threshold around a part of the store, which was both unusual for a public place, and disquieting, in that the Threshold was badly damaged and as the sun set, becoming a Bad Place. Someone or something had deliberately shattered the Threshold that existed there, profaning it with murder and dark rituals.

The resulting negative energy was drawing spirits from all over Galveston, not only free spirits and ghostly forms, but unformed husks that may be what remains when spirits with personalities degrade, or they might be qlippothic entities that never lived and never should. In any case, they had no sentience and little discernment, but such a concentration of them could be very dangerous.

In the process of preventing some catastrophic spiritual singularity, as well as defending themselves, the unaware humans in the store and, important for Lucien Lacoste at least, those spirits inhabiting the place who still had personalities and whom he considers the souls of the restless dead and deserving of being led to their proper place, the PCs conducted a ritual of exorcism to cleanse the despoiled Threshold and and activated a telluric seal to prevent any rift in reality from opening.

While they finished their rituals, they needed to keep the qlippothic waves from overrunning them and everyone else. So Lucien Lacoste, familiar with the Catholic legend for this place, led the unquiet spirits in a rendition of Queen of the Waves. Linking hands with small ghostly hands, unseen by anyone else, Lucien felt the presence of the courageous Sisters who tied themselves to the children in a doomed attempt to rescue at least some of them, and who felt it small price to pay to have died with their charges if their presence provided some small comfort at the end.

So, yeah, there is such a place as a psychiatric hospital with mysterious connections to Kessler and his organisation. And the PCs have met some of the original founders of that asylum.