GM Background

In This Chapter

The truth of the case, its timeline, the two clocks that drive it, and the ways it can end. Players should not read this chapter.

The Truth

In 1912, Father Luigi Venturini carried a gilded reliquary from Padua to Erie, Pennsylvania, for the new parish of St. Anthony of the Harbor on West 16th Street. The reliquary holds a bone fragment of Saint Anthony of Padua, patron of lost things, and it had been made in Padua around 1587. For ninety-nine years it sat in a side chapel, and parishioners joked that you could not lose your car keys within a block of it.

Frank Mazur was the parish sacristan for thirty-one years. In November 2009, two months after his wife Irene died, he knelt in front of the reliquary and asked it to find her. Something came up the rectory stairs that night that knew Irene's name and did not know his. He wrapped the reliquary in a wool altar cloth, put it in a dark cupboard, and had the pastor bless the house. He wrote down what happened in the sacristy journal and never spoke of it again.

In June 2011 the diocese merged St. Anthony of the Harbor into a neighboring parish and scheduled an inventory of its contents. Frank did not trust the reliquary to a collector or a warehouse. On 22 June 2011 he rented unit 214 at Lakeshore Self Storage on Peach Street, put the reliquary in it with the parish's candlesticks, vestments, and papers, and set the rent to pay automatically. The diocesan inventory of August 2011 lists the reliquary as unlocated, and so does the Latchkey Archive's Relic Registry.

For fifteen years the relic sat in the dark. Anything lost on the storage property turned up outside unit 214's door, and the staff called it the Lost and Found Unit.

Frank Mazur died on 4 March 2026, aged eighty-six. His estate froze his accounts, the autopay stopped, and on 12 September 2026 unit 214 went to a lien auction. Curtis Hale, a reseller who sells estate lots online, won it for $340.

Curtis put the reliquary on his garage workbench while he sorted the lot. Within a night, lost things started turning up in the house.

His daughter Maddie, twelve, found Frank's note taped to the reliquary's base: St. Anthony, from the Harbor. Keep it in the dark. Don't ask it for people. F.M. She read it, worked out what the box does, and on the night of 17 September she knelt at the workbench and asked it for her mother.

Laura Hale died at Lakeshore General Hospital at 3:07 a.m. on 17 July 2024, of a ruptured brain aneurysm, aged forty-one. At 2:51 a.m., waiting for a scan, she called Maddie's phone. Maddie was asleep with the phone on silent. The voicemail was there in the morning, and Maddie could not bring herself to play it. In August 2024 she lost the phone at the Erie County Fair, cracked screen and all, with the message still on it. She has not forgiven herself.

Laura has not moved on. What holds her is a goodbye that was recorded and never heard. She has lingered, faint and quiet, on the fourth floor of Lakeshore General, and the night staff have learned not to put patients in room 411.

Maddie has asked the reliquary for her mother at 3:07 a.m., the time on the death certificate, for nineteen nights. The reliquary finds lost things. It is finding Laura.

At 3:07 a.m. last night it returned Maddie's old phone to her pillow. The voicemail is on it. Maddie has not been able to turn it on.

At 3:07 a.m. tonight, Laura arrives. Pulled from where she lingered, confused, grieving, and wrong, she comes up the garage stairs the way something once came up the rectory stairs for Frank Mazur. She will be a Grief Shade (Universe Guide, Chapter Eleven).

The Broker

Anselm Drury is a Candleless relic broker out of Cleveland. He saw Curtis's listing on 16 September, recognized a reliquary window in the background of a photo of brass candlesticks, and has been making offers since. His last one, yesterday, was $4,300 in cash. He is in Erie now, at a Bayfront hotel, and he has hired a local man named Wes Pruitt to lift the box from the garage at 1:40 a.m. tonight if Curtis still will not sell.

Drury knows the reliquary finds things. His client wants it to find something specific, and Drury has not asked what. He does not know about Maddie's petition, and he would be horrified to learn he was about to drive off with it.

Timeline

The Petition Clock

The Petition Clock tracks how close the reliquary is to finding Laura Hale. It has four steps and stands at 3 when play begins.

The petition means Maddie's request for her mother. Her other requests (her father's ring, the neighbors' cat and watch, her phone) were answered and are closed. Only the petition for Laura is open.

How the clock moves. At 3:07 a.m., the clock advances one step if the petition is open and the reliquary is not sealed in iron. At steps 1 and 2 the clock advances only on nights Maddie renews the petition within 30m of the reliquary. From step 3, the petition is strong enough to finish on its own: the clock advances at 3:07 a.m. whether or not Maddie asks again, and wherever the reliquary is.

What stops it. Two things, and only two:

• The petition is answered. Maddie hears her mother's voicemail. Laura's unsettled business is the goodbye; once it is heard, Laura moves on, and there is nothing left for the relic to find. The clock stops permanently. No roll governs this; it is a story resolution (Universe Guide, Chapter Nine, Curse Breaking: condition fulfillment).
• The reliquary is sealed in iron. A closed iron-lined case stops the relic's reach. The clock stops while the case stays shut. The petition remains open, and the clock resumes if the case is opened outside an Archive vault.

Moving Maddie away, persuading her to stop asking, or destroying the phone does not stop the clock once it has reached step 3.

The Case Clock

The case runs from 10:40 a.m. on Monday 5 October to 3:07 a.m. the next morning, a little over sixteen hours. Track the time. The characters will not have enough of it to do everything, and choosing what to do is the case.

Fixed times. Curtis is out on a flea-market run until 1:10 p.m. Joan Hale is home all day. Maddie is at school until 3:25 p.m. Drury starts watching the house from a rented Malibu at 7:15 p.m. Wes Pruitt breaks in at 1:40 a.m. The clock advances at 3:07 a.m.

The Mundane Surface

Everyone on Ridgeview Court has a folder for what is happening, and every one of them is sincere (Universe Guide, Chapter Twelve, rule one).

The contradiction that cracks it: every returned thing was lost somewhere else, by someone else, and every one of them came back within thirty meters of one garage workbench.

How It Can End