Orpheus dispatch received a call from Agent Doug Sands at 3:00 A.M. He and Agent Amy Rodriguez had entered the Elsevier Heights School for Gifted Students and were now facing a hostile situation. The call was interrupted by another voice in the background, yelling the word "Hyde!" then several gunshots. Then the call disconnected.
Deputy Director Kate Hennisson immediately requested that a team be sent to investigate, but for some reason the Board of Directors refused to sanction the mission. She asked Agent Supervisor Walter Hanley to organize an unofficial meeting in secret, while she remained at headquarters and attempted to bring the Board around.
Hanley summoned Agents MacMillian, Herschler, and Watts to a "temporary headquarters" in an unfurnished office downtown. He briefed the Agents on what few details were then known, and warned them that they would not have Orpheus Group's backing for this mission. Agents MacMillian and Herschler, who are unable to project without Orpheus Group's specialized cryogenic facilities, remained in their bodies. Agent Watts projected and left his body in the care of Jimmy Spengler.
At the school, the Agents found a NextWorld van in the parking lot, unlocked and abandoned. The back of the van contained a gurney and medical monitoring equipment, mostly trashed. They also found two hypodermic needles filled with a viscous, black substance, and the body of a NextWorld operative stuffed under the vehicle.
Doug Sand's car was parked nearby. It was empty, but the radio had been left on. As the Agents approached, they heard a voice from the radio that seemed to address them directly, identifying itself only as "Radio Free Death." When they tried to communicate with the voice, they heard only static.
Inside the school, they found Rodriguez' body, hacked nearly to pieces. The nature of the wounds suggested that her spirit had been attacked while she was projecting, with the damage manifesting on her physical body. There was no sign of Doug Sands, but the voice from the radio, speaking through the Agents' headsets, informed them that more people were hiding upstairs.
On the second floor, the Agents discovered another dead NextWorld operative, and Cheryl Banning, the only surviving member of the NextWorld team. Banning was in an extreme state of panic when the Agents found her, and accidentally shot Agent Herschler with a bullet designed to do damage to incorporeal ghosts.
Once she calmed down, Banning explained that the NextWorld team had arrived in the middle of the night to covertly investigate an incident at the school that had occurred a week earlier, in which several students had overdosed on a strange drug, called "pigment", and fallen into a coma. NextWorld was itself testing this drug as a way to allow its operatives to project in the field. Banning's colleague, Ernie Stackmeyer, had used the drug, but while he projected his body was taken over by a spectre, who had hunted down the rest of the team and murdered them. Banning was the only one left. Ernie's spirit was still at large, but unable to return to his body while the spectre still occupied it. Banning knew nothing about Agents Sands and Rodriguez, since they arrived some time after the catastrophe. However, she suggested that since the students had overdosed in an attic in the school's north wing, perhaps Agent Sands had made his way there.
The Agents, along with Banning, entered the north wing. Agent Watts noticed patches of a hard, mucus-like substance coating the walls. The substance was visible and tangible only to ghosts and projected spirits, and could not be passed through.
Before they could reach Sands, the Agents encountered Stackmeyer's possessed body, which attacked them with a fire axe while constantly yelling the word, "Hyde!" At the same time, a large spectre with scythe-like arms attacked Agent Watts. Agents Herschler, MacMillian, and Hanley were able to drive out the possessing spectre by causing massive physical trauma to its host body. Ernie Stackmeyer, driven to desperation by the horror of his situation, attempted to re-enter his bullet-riddled body despite the Agent's warnings. He died almost immediately.
Agent Watts was severely wounded when Banning shot the scythe-armed spectre with a ghost-affecting bullet, which dispersed the spectre but also passed through Watts' corpus. Watts ripcorded back to his body with life-threatening injuries.
They found Agent Sands barricaded in the north wing attic. He explained that he and Agent Rodriguez had been tipped off to the situation at the school by a mysterious voice issuing from the car radio, and had unwisely decided to investigate before calling for backup. Once inside, they had become separated, and Sands had locked himself in the attic to get away from "Hyde".
The attic where Agent Sands hid was the same place where the four comatose students had overdosed on pigment nearly a week ago. Before they left, Sands showed the other Agents two things, with the help of a pair of Kirlian imaging goggles that had been dropped by one of the murdered NextWorld operatives. The first was a large hive-like structure in the corner of the ceiling. It was constructed from the same substance found on the walls of the north wing, but it also contained the spirits of the four comatose students. Their faces were clearly visible in the hive's walls.
The second object was right in the middle of the floor. It was a plastic chess piece... a white bishop.
The Agents removed Rodriguez' body and left the school without further difficulty. The incident was hushed up, and the Agents were not censured by the Board of Directors for their actions. Agent Watts is in stable condition.
The whereabouts of the spectre calling itself Hyde are unknown.