Taking The Next Step

      Christmas is a hard time for those of us who know what happened to those children. We all sat together this year, and remembered what had happened. thinking of those thousand-or-so children who all opened their gifts, only to be poisoned by them months later. It kills me. Silas, for as tough as he always seems, is probably the most affected by it. He's soft on the inside. We all are.

      April 29th, 2011 was the day we met up with Silas in that junky little cafe. It's been over a year since we discovered the truth about the poison. It's been just over a year since Allen died, christmas eve, 2011. It's really hard to believe it's been a year without him. Honestly, I only knew him for a year, less than that, really, I met him in january of the year he died, but I feel his loss every day. Every day we get closer to solving this thing, every time we misstep, and find ourselves lost again, I can feel Allen guiding me toward the next step. It's been a hard year without him, but I'm going to make sure this all comes crumbling down, and everyone knows who is responsible for it.

      As we sat in that diner, at the end of april, two years ago, we ordered more cups of coffee, and silas went out for maps. we covered the table with America, sprawled out under cups of coffee, salt shakers, and packets of sugar, circling locations and connecting the dots. We were re-tracing the steps that had led everyone here. Compiling the story that Allen would later re-tell here. I think we all hoped for a pattern to emerge, but it couldn't. We were missing important pieces of information. We needed to know how the toy company had gotten the material, where that terrible poison had come from. We had a lot we needed to learn. It all started with the toy company. We spent the next two days researching the company, and researching their games. we never realized how many of Gregory's clues were twofold, until we looked at a list of all the games the company had made. He had even turned his own body into a life-sized operation, hoping that the similarity of the clues would tie things together for whoever was trying to stop this mess. It was morbid, but Silas had a little laugh to himself when he noticed. I can never really tell how he felt about Greg.

     After two days of research, we finally got on the road to try to get closer to the headquarters of the toy company.