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Role: Archivist & Data Analyst, FDG Digital Containment Division

Background:
Marcus Baines worked in IT support at a secure government facility in 1999 when he found a cluster of mislabeled files buried deep in a network mirror. They contained transcripts, images, and sensor data from a surveillance project—one that referenced “Entity 6: The One Behind the Glass.” The files described it as a presence that moves through reflections, not light.

He deleted them. They returned the next morning, slightly altered. New timestamps. New metadata. One folder included his name.

He stopped asking questions. The Institute contacted him the same week.

Now a veteran of the Digital Containment Division, Baines oversees the FDG’s archival integrity systems and digital anomaly monitoring protocols. He tracks self-generating file structures, unstable data clusters, and reflection-based phenomena that bleed into network spaces. He prefers to work alone, usually in low-lit rooms with curtains drawn.

Skills:

• Advanced expertise in network architecture, encryption irregularities, and recursive data loops
• Specialises in identifying fae presence within digital reflections and mimetic file behaviors
• Maintains an isolated drive system coded entirely in dead languages, used to trap unstable files
• Has mapped multiple “reflexive incursions” across FDG systems and shut down at least two embedded observers

Personality:
Quiet, guarded, and unflinchingly methodical. Marcus keeps his workspace immaculate and avoids anything with a reflective surface unless absolutely necessary. Speaks in clipped, technical language, but has a dry sense of humor when relaxed. Often listens to old jazz records while running scan sweeps.

Motive:
To prevent another breach—and to understand how digital systems might be evolving into new fae-adjacent thresholds. He’s never spoken aloud what he saw the last time a screen flickered. He doesn’t need to.