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You rapidly rattle off everything you discovered about the sludge to Edward, including the redacted documents and how it's messing with your senses.
"Okay, so whatever this entity is, it doesn't want us to find out anything about it." Edward cracks a bitter smile. "Sounds familiar, like that weird 199X fellow."
"Might be an anomaly related to ARC." Edward throws out his best guess so far. "Anomalies take on many shapes and forms; it wouldn't be impossible."
"Probably why it's haunting this place. Noted, keep investigating."
You get back to your feet. Next thing you're going to investigate is the filing cabinets. You want to see what documents are missing, if it coated any of the documents in here with sludge, you know. The works. It takes a lot of effort to open one of them.
Inside are piles on piles of loose, disorganized documents. A wry grin crosses your face as you begin to sort through them. You know your way around paperwork; this won't take long. You don't have time to read every individual file in detail, so you skim through them.
A lot of the papers here are boring tax paperwork or routine inspections of various facilities scattered across the US. The only thing about the paperwork that catches your eye is a few common names that regularly pop up.
'Sr Dir Johnson', 'Dr. Caspian' and 'Grd Callie' seem to always be there, no matter what paper you flip to. From 1945 to 2015, their names would always appear.
You ask Edward if he recognizes any of those names. He's pretty confused by the question, "Uh. Yeah, but those guys were dead for a while. Most of them died back in, like, 1987?"
Odd. Their names still appear long after that. That's not the weird part, per se, there's one other name.
"Asst. Res. [REDACTED]". That name pops up in a document from every year ranging from 1932 to 2021. Their name wouldn't be inserted where a name should be, though.
There's an odd pattern that's manifesting as you keep skimming through the paperwork. Their name would exclusively appear in disciplinary documents, usually when some researcher or guard or director fucked up. The sections that would label what offense the person did would be fully redacted.
In place of what the person actually did, the simple if awkward phrase of 'Asst. Res. [REDACTED] has purified any charges assigned to these fine folks' would be recorded instead. The handwriting of that phrase would always be radically different to the rest of the text in the document.
Someone, or something in this case, is trying to cover something up. You think the documents you saw on the floor were also disciplinary documents...but what offense is this anomaly trying to cover?
You relay this information to Edward.
"Oh, great, we got a ghost trying to cover corruption?" Edward bitterly laughs at what you just told him. "What kind of crime is SO bad that a ghost has to redact it?"
"I dunno but that's what I saw-" You're interrupted by an odd, electrical crackle coming from the ceiling.
