Murphy's briefcase and documents¶
Murphy's briefcase and documents are the briefcase, fragmentary papers, wireless telegraph and NSA identification belonging to the man who called himself Agent Murphy.
| Type | Item (documents and props) |
| Aliases | burned papers; NSA badge; Morse telegraph |
| Holder | Agent Murphy, then the task force |
| Status | Papers and badge examined; the badge appears genuine but matches no one in the records |
| First appearance | Radford Horror 03 |
Description¶
When the team first met Murphy on the mountain road he was clutching a flashlight-like device, and he pulled out a badge: "I'm Agent Murphy. I'm NSA. You are fucking this up for me. Get back in your car and drive away." (Andre (as Agent Murphy), Radford Horror 03). His weapon is described on the flashlight weapon page.
At the end of Radford Horror 03, in a scene the characters did not witness, the device overheated and Murphy vanished in a pulse of light. In Radford Horror 04 the team followed his blood trail to a clearing where mildly high coyotes were eating his remains: the back of a suit, the back of a skull and a little brain, on a circle of ground melted to glass. His briefcase lay beside him as a melted wad of plastic and metal, and his wallet, with an NSA ID and a little cash, was the only other possession left (Radford Horror 04).
Kurt put on a welding mask from the trunk ("Once immolated, twice shy"), and Andrew forced the warped briefcase open with a foot on the latch (Tough, 8). The scorched papers scattered everywhere, and Kurt called it "fifty-two-card pickup" (Radford Horror 04).
Properties¶
The contents were a melted wireless telegraph with a hand key for Morse code, and loose, badly burned typewritten pages on plain printer paper with no letterhead. Kurt checked the papers with a black light for hidden messages and found none. Andre handed the players the legible fragments, and the players read them aloud. They include "...hind Salem, Colorado"; "abstract annihilation de..."; "autonomous political assets"; "unwanted scrutiny"; "Sequence homologue"; "homologue bias"; "religious ecstasy"; "...ig Bill"; "samples"; "Unknown servitor act..."; "Acceptable leakage"; "Menelaus"; and "...tiary objective" (Radford Horror 04).
The players read "...ig Bill" as probably Big Bill and tied "servitor" and "Menelaus" to the Radford Moth (whose Latin name is Morpho menelaus) and to servitors. Kurt said the pages looked unlike any classified NSA documents he had seen. The Biz speculated that they might be deliberately planted fake data used to trace leaks, although Kurt noted that a man who fought so hard to keep them seemed unlikely to be carrying decoys (Radford Horror 04). The episodes never settle whether the documents are genuine.
History¶
The badge¶
In Radford Horror 08, Kurt used his illegal contact to check the NSA badge (Manipulate Someone, 9). The result came back weeks later, after the team returned to D.C.: the badge was not a counterfeit, but no one with that name existed in the records, and if it was a forgery it was the best the examiners had ever seen. Kurt's reaction was "I didn't kill an NSA agent, officially." He planned to pull the teeth from the skull in his cooler, keeping them for identification, and dissolve the rest in acid (Radford Horror 08).