“Here we are,” the driver announced, pulling up outside Midas headquarters. “Total should be on the display in the back.”

“Everything is digitalized these days huh,” Saxon said, pulling out his wallet.

“Ain’t that the truth,” the driver replied. “Too complicated for me. I just do what the company says, so long as I get paid.”

“Doesn’t matter the method,” Saxon said, “ if it produces results.”

Saxon handed over the money to the driver. “Should be something extra for you there as well.”

“Thanks man,” the driver said. “Have fun at work.”

“You too,” Saxon responded, stepping out of the car.

Before closing the door, Saxon snapped a picture of the taxi’s back seats. Saxon waved goodbye and entered the building.

In the meantime, he didn’t need to do anything special. He took a seat in the lobby and waited for around an hour.

Once lunch break rolled around, Saxon made his first move. Saxon identified a particular group of employees that exited the building to have lunch. Upon their reentering the building, Saxon called upon the mythos of The Gray Man and slid into their group unnoticed. Saxon followed the group into the elevator where he planned to wait for them to get off.

Entering the elevator, Saxon took a glance at the cameras in the elevator. From his knowledge, Saxon deduced that the camera didn’t pick up audio, just video.

During the ride up, one of the members of the group realized Saxon was out of place.

“Hey there,” the woman said.

Saxon looked up from the ground. “Oh, hi.”

Saxon had only acquired the mythos of The Gray Man today, and he was in a cramped environment, where everybody else was familiar with each other. All of these factors combined made it unsurprising to Saxon that he had been noticed. Saxon saw this as an opportunity to gather some intel.

“You coming back from lunch?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” Saxon replied. “I eat alone since it’s my first day, and I don’t know anybody.”

“What do you do?” the woman inquired.

“Human resources,” Saxon replied.

“We’re all in marketing,” the woman replied, gesturing to the rest of the people in the elevator. “Hey even if we aren’t on the same level if you ever catch us heading out for lunch feel free to join.”

“Thanks,” Saxon said. “About that level thing. I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but I kinda forgot what level human resources is on.”

“It happens,” the woman said understandingly. “Do you know specifically what you do?”

“I mainly do work relating to employee’s files,” Saxon answered. “Background checks, evaluations, compile reports, things like that.”

“Records should be kept on floor 13,” the woman responded.

“Knew it!” Saxon said. “It was between 13 and 12 for me.”

“You’ll get used to it,” the woman assured Saxon, unaware he didn’t even work there.

The elevator came to a stop, and the doors opened onto the 7th floor.

“Sorry this is my stop,” the woman said. “Never got your name.”

“Herman,” Saxon replied with a smile.

“Min,” the woman said.

“Nice to meet you, Min,” Saxon said, hiding any sign of recognition.

“Likewise,” Min replied, hurrying out of the elevator to catch up with her group.

Just as Min hurried out, Saxon followed behind her. He exited onto the 7th floor, just far enough till he was out of sight of the camera so that it appeared as if he had exited with the rest of the group.

Throughout the elevator ride, Saxon had been using Raijin to focus on the electricity flowing to the camera. As he stepped onto the 7th floor, he instantly cut all electricity going to the camera using Raijin, shutting it off.

Saxon's idea was that the main weakness of The Gray Man, and how James was caught, was camera footage. It only really helped to avoid people. By going onto the 7th floor before cutting the power, it created the illusion that Saxon had been a part of that group, and had simply exited onto the 7th floor with them.

Now of course his conversation with Min made it obvious he wasn’t a part of the group. Fortunately, Saxon had taken note of the fact that the cameras didn’t record audio before beginning that conversation.

After cutting the power to the camera, Saxon quickly reentered the elevator and began ascending to floor 13. Luckily, the elevator didn’t need to stop, and Saxon made it to the 13th floor without any other troubles. He planned on leaving the power to the camera cut until the elevator returned to ground level, since if the camera came back on now--with the elevator on the 13th floor--somebody with a keen eye could tell something was off when reviewing the footage.

Saxon called upon The Gray Man again, and casually explored the 13th floor. Since people were returning from lunch, Saxon figured that nobody would think twice about his presence, especially with The Gray Man active. It wasn’t long before Saxon found what he was looking for.

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There was a room that appeared to be where all the files were kept. Peering through the glass walls, in addition to traditional paper files, the room also sported a desktop that appeared to have all of the employee’s files saved onto it. The only problem was that the door had a thumbprint lock on it, and Saxon was confident not just any employee had access.

Saxon took a seat at one of the nearby tables where people were still finishing their lunches. He waited until somebody went into the file room.

Eventually a man came into the lobby area.

“I’m gonna go access the files,” the man announced. “In the meantime, the windows on the southside got graffitied again, so somebody please call the cleaners.”

Once the man had exited the file room, Saxon walked up to them.

“Excuse me, sir,” Saxon called out, catching them just as he left the room.

“What is it?” the man asked, frustrated.

“I and my friend over there have a little bet going on,” Saxon replied, pointing to the person furthest from him in the room. “I said people like palm readings, he said they didn’t. He bet me 20 bucks that I couldn’t get you to let me give you a hand reading. If you let me fake giving you one, and pretend you enjoyed it, I’ll give you 5 bucks.”

“I want 10,” the man countered.

“Sure, whatever,” Saxon replied. “Okay just hold out your hand, palm up.”

Saxon carefully studied the man’s hand, paying close attention to his thumb. While Saxon was faking the palm reading, he called upon Loki to transform his thumb to match the man’s thumb. While normally Loki can be quite taxing to use, a small transformation like this didn’t affect Saxon much.

“Ta-da! All done.”

“Wow!” the man replied half-heartedly.

“Thanks,” Saxon whispered, handing the man his money.

Following the man’s departure, Saxon approached the door and placed the thumb he had transformed using Loki on the lock.

Saxon considered using Raijin to depower the lock, however, unlike the camera, the lock protected sensitive information and thus may be rigged to trigger an alarm system if it loses power. Although Ina was certainly skilled enough to bypass numerous fail-safes--and had done so multiple times in the past--Saxon was nowhere near her level, so using Loki was the safest option.

Once inside the room, Saxon took out a flash drive to begin copying any files of interest onto it. Saxon started poking through some of the files, and while certain things, such as medical health records had been obscured, there was still plenty of information available.

For starters, Saxon checked if there were any files relating to the Epilogue, but nothing popped up. Either Midas had somehow caught wind of what happened and removed all evidence of their involvement, or they had nothing to do with it.

Quickly Saxon checked if Min Holt had any mythos. Since she had visited the Epilogue roughly a week ago, according to her husband, and hadn’t noticed anything was off, Saxon suspected she may be an avatar, which would explain how she was able to shrug off Octave’s mythos.

Saxon was surprised to see that Min Holt had no registered mythos. According to Octave, he had been working at the Epilogue for at least a month.

Something wasn’t adding up.

Out of curiosity, Saxon typed in Octave to see if anything came up. He was right to trust his gut.

Octave had tried to register for an internship with Midas when he was 14. What Saxon found strangest of all was that they had Octave’s mythos listed as Orpheus when Octave himself didn’t seem to know what it was. Saxon took a mental note to look more into Orpheus once he was back at work, and could access The Library of Alexandria again.

Next, Saxon searched for Desmond Riley.

Just as Saxon had suspected, Desmond’s mythos was indeed Bigfoot. More interestingly, it also listed out what the mythos did, and among the abilities mentioned, was that the mythos made the avatar harder to detect by people and cameras--not too dissimilar from The Gray Man. Saxon hadn’t even considered camera distortion, but it made sense given how all photos of Bigfoot in the media were of terrible quality.

This knowledge reinforced Saxon’s fear that Desmond wanted to get caught, because in the video of him jumping on the car there was no notable distortion, suggesting he disabled that aspect of his mythos that made him difficult to locate.

Scrolling back, Saxon noticed the name of Desmond’s mythos had been hyperlinked. Clicking on it sent Saxon to a separate list entitled “Avatars scheduled for retesting.” At the top of the page, a brief description had been provided, detailing the list’s purpose.

It highlighted that in light of recent abnormalities exhibited by certain avatars under the employment of Midas Millionaire Incorporated, several of the avatars will need to undergo a reassessment of the capabilities of their mythos.

Additionally, it stated that until the revaluations, all avatars that required one would be placed on paid leave. For several of the avatars on the list, their mythoi had begun acting strangely, and differently from how it was before, with seemingly no explanation.

Saxon had never heard of anything like this. A mythos changing wasn't a foreign concept, but certain conditions need to be met first. The first time Saxon heard that a mythos could change was from Eddi.

Over lunch, Eddi had told Saxon the story of a famous athlete named Jack Reisch who had the mythos of King Arthur. Originally, Jack’s mythos granted him enhanced physical capabilities, essentially turning him into a great warrior.

However, during his career, Jack suffered a brain injury that resulted in amnesia which caused him to forget about King Arthur entirely; since a mythos manifests based on the avatar’s understanding of it, Jack lost his mythos.

Eventually, Jack re-read the stories of King Arthur to jog his memory, and eventually, his mythos did come back. What was interesting was that now his mythos manifested as a sword that when wielded granted him enhanced physical capabilities. According to Eddi, the major difference was that Jack’s interpretation of the mythos had changed.

Beforehand he believed King Arthur was a great warrior, so his mythos turned him into one. However, upon re-reading the stories of King Arthur, Jack came to believe King Arthur’s power came from Excalibur, and thus his mythos manifested as a sword that granted him strength when wielded.

In exchange for the physical enhancements now coming from an item--which brought with it many downsides such as the risk of being disarmed--their effects were greatly enhanced. This turned Jack from being a nobody into a dominating force for the rest of his career.

What made the case with all the Midas employees different from Jack, was that they didn’t have any hard reset: something that causes them to forget their mythos. With the amount that were showing signs of their mythos changing, Saxon doubted they all had undergone something to make them forget their mythoi entirely.

From what Saxon could remember Eddi saying, in light of Jack’s case many researchers tried to see if changing an avatar’s interpretation of their mythos would change its manifestation, and couldn’t reproduce what happened.

What the researchers ended up concluding was that once a mythos had manifested there was nothing that could be done to change it. However, if an avatar were to entirely forget their mythos, then when they re-discovered it, it would manifest again, and that manifestation could be different from the original manifestation.

If there were a way to alter a mythos without needing a hard reset, then that would explain several abnormalities in the recent events, Saxon thought.

It would explain why Desmond’s mythos no longer hid him. Most importantly, it would give a reason why Octave didn’t believe he was harming anybody. Octave’s mythos could’ve just been purely musical, and was somehow altered to include the forceful dancing aspect.

Then Saxon recalled a crucial detail. Octave had mentioned that he had met with somebody who struck a deal with him and that that person had a real FMPD badge. To Saxon, that signified there was somebody in the FMPD who had somehow discovered a way to modify a mythos without needing a hard reset.

There was just one big question left. Who?