As I write this, it's midnight and I got a serious headache.  I am sitting in the Field Office, trying to make heads or tails of the team's after action reports.  Things didn't exactly go well today and that's understating the truth.  The writing was on the wall when we arrived at Jackson Square - 300 protestors and 150 cops.  As things panned out the cops won - batons vs sandals tend to come out on top.

Here's the weird stuff - everyone saw different things.  Agents Martikian, Deveraux and Sommers all saw masked agitators in the crowd.  Agents Chance and Parisi swear they saw masked men wearing period costumes.  Parisi also got himself involved in a brawl with demonstrators over a child who appeared and disappeared like early morning mist.  Some kind of aerosol hallucinogen dispersed in the air?  I don't know but it must have been a mass drop by a C-130 because the team were within a full block in terms of distance.  Agents Greene, Winchester and I were in a mobile CP and were unaffected - except that Greene can't stop drawing but that seems to be normal, all things considered.

Anyway, the demonstration seemed to go screwy about an hour after it began.  First, the protestors were seen to move in an organised formation - described in some of these reports as a ‘dance'.  Not your boogaloo mind - more of a pavane - whatever the heck that is.  Then the shooting started and chaos ensued.  The NOPD boys then had the excuse they needed to knock heads and call the cavalry in.

The shooter was in the bell tower of St Louis Cathedral and Deveraux led the team in pursuit.  Other than an encounter with an enigmatic Priest - Father Jeremy Marchant, there was no drama.  The shooter hanged himself after leaving a drawing of a mask and the words ‘I am the last King to come' scrawled in chalk.  Turned out he was NOPD - a former sharpshooter recently put on psych leave after a messy divorce.

Now Father Marchant is an interesting character.  He predicted our shooter would be mentally disturbed - which is not much of a reach.  Blowing people away with an M40 is not exactly rational behaviour.  He put it down to the influence of the ‘King in Yellow' - the owner of our mysterious sign that is all over the city.  Apparently the King's story is detailed in a play of the same name - a blasphemous story banned by the Catholic Church after it's publication in 1895.  the play is set within the fantastical alien city, Yhtill, adjacent to Aldebaran. The plot centers on the members of the city's royal family and their struggle for the throne. Their normal lives are disturbed when they hear of a mysterious stranger who is carried to the city by winged demons, who openly wears the Yellow Sign and an eerie "Pallid Mask." At the same time, everyone begins seeing a mirage of a city on the other side of the Lake of Hali. The city's upper towers are hidden behind one of the planet's two moons.

The royal family question the stranger, who calls himself the Phantom of Truth, but he only gives cryptic answers and claims to be an emissary of the terrible mythical being known as the King in Yellow, or Last King. At a masked ball honoring the royal family, the Phantom of Truth reveals that his "Pallid Mask" is not a mask, but his true face. Outraged, the queen and high priest torture him to death, but learn nothing in the process. As the Phantom of Truth dies, the King in Yellow arrives from across the Lake of Hali, driving most of the population insane as the mirage-city across the lake vanishes. The King in Yellow informs the royal family that Yhtill has now become the city of Carcosa, under the rule of the King in Yellow. The play ends with the royal family awaiting their imminent doom.

Marchant indicated to Agent Chance that Carcosa is a real place and the sign is a device to spread insanity and mayhem.  On today's evidence, I struggle to disagree.  Question is - who is spreading this sign across New Orleans and why?