Entranceway Application

[burntvideocassette]

Name: Cephei
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: cephei.rp@gmail.com
IM: mindstrel #4686 (Discord)
Plurk: N/A

Other Characters: N/A

Character Name: Jay Merrick
Series: Marble Hornets
Timeline: Post-Entry #80/Post-death
Canon Resource Link: http://marblehornets.wikidot.com/jay

Character History:

Back in the summer of 2006, when Jay was an undergrad film student, his classmate Alex asked him to help out with a student film. The film, “Marble Hornets”, left much to be desired, with amateur actors and a script that made “The Room” look like a masterpiece of modern cinema, but Jay still agreed to be the script supervisor. From Jay’s perspective, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly strange about the filming, but Alex--who was already a bit of a condescending jerk to begin with--behaved more and more erratically as production went on, culminating in his cancellation of the movie and decision to transfer to another school. Before Alex left, Jay offered to take the footage he’d shot so far; he didn’t want Alex’s hard work to go to waste.

 

Three years later, struck by nostalgia, Jay found the old tapes and watched a few. He was expecting to see a half-finished student film, but mixed in with the B-roll and bad takes, he found hours and hours of Alex filming himself. Beyond that, he started to notice something in the background of several shots: a tall, humanoid figure with too-long limbs and a blank face.

 

Stumbling upon a Something Awful thread about sightings and legends about a similar creature, he asked if anyone wanted to see the footage. There was some interest, so he put together a YouTube channel to collect his findings, naming the channel after Alex’s student film. To answer questions and mark his progress, he also started a Twitter account under the same name, signing his communications as “J”.

 

As his investigation continued, Jay’s health deteriorated; he suffered from severe anxiety, pounding headaches, and high fevers, and a visit to the doctor turned up nothing.

 

Another YouTube user named “totheark” started to respond to Jay’s videos with coded messages. Evidence pointed toward totheark being someone involved with the “Marble Hornets” shoot, someone who knew Jay personally. Whatever happened in 2006 was still happening, it seemed, and now Jay was a part of it.

 

Jay expanded his investigation beyond Alex’s footage. He tracked down Tim Wright, one of Alex’s actors, and pestered him with questions under the pretense of finishing the student film. Tim insisted he didn’t remember much, but he shifted Jay’s attention toward his former friend, another actor named Brian. With the help of an anonymous tip, Jay located Brian’s house, but he found it empty. Unwilling to give up his only lead, he broke in and found the place ransacked.

 

In one of Alex’s tapes, Jay found footage of himself complaining about the cold in the middle of summer. Present-day Jay had no memory of the events on the tape. Something had caused him to forget.

 

Jay returned to Brian’s house again, but this time, someone was waiting for him. A figure in a painted white mask and a tan jacket tackled Jay and wrestled him to the ground, only letting him loose when it collapsed in a seizure. Afterwards, in the safety of his own home, Jay wondered if this masked thing--human or not--was totheark.

 

Jay’s home wasn’t safe for long, however. Jay finally admitted to his viewers that he’d turned the camera on himself, much like Alex did in 2006, and that something significant had turned up in his footage not long after his second visit to Brian’s house. The masked figure had not only followed Jay home; it had broken into his house and watched him while he slept. Jay himself had started sleepwalking, evading the view of the cameras even when it should have been impossible. Jay was officially in danger, and he couldn’t trust his own memory. He needed the camera.

 

A message from totheark led Jay to the nearby Rosswood Park, where they had left Jay a tape Alex had suspiciously neglected to give Jay back in 2006. This footage showed Alex leading the cameraman Seth into an underground tunnel, directly into the clutches of the faceless creature Alex had come to call the “Operator”. Alex told the camera that he couldn’t remember what happened next, but that Seth--and the rest of the Marble Hornets cast and crew, Jay included--were “gone”.

 

Jay, confused by Alex’s words and very much not “gone”, returned to Brian’s house yet again, this time during the day. The sunlight wasn’t much help, however, since the house rearranged itself as Jay walked through it. Jay lost time as the white-masked figure led him on a chase through endless hallways and doors that led to new rooms every time Jay went through. Finally, Jay found himself in the tunnel where Seth had gone missing. As Jay tried to find a way out, his footage started to buzz and tear, and at last the Operator itself made an appearance.

 

Jay woke up at his house a day later with a broken camera and a hole in his memory. He decided to give up the investigation.

 

Less than a week later, he said that he felt “functionless” since quitting. Ten days later, he was looking through footage again.

 

After totheark hacked his account to send a threatening message, Jay fled his apartment, choosing to live out of hotel rooms. A few weeks later, he got a call from someone he knew, telling him to turn on the news. In his absence, his apartment had burned down.

Again, Jay tried to distance himself from the investigation. This time, he felt better; his health started to clear up, and he stopped noticing gaps in his memory. Clearly, this was the right choice.

 

Then, he received two things: a text from an unknown number and, shortly after, a package delivered to his hotel room. He hadn’t escaped at all. Whoever had sent the package knew exactly where he was, even after changing locations.

 

Inside the package was a cry for help, a tape containing chopped-up footage in the style of totheark, but with a time stamp that indicated a week prior. The footage showed Alex Kralie and his girlfriend, Amy, escaping an attack by the Operator.

 

Alex was still alive, and Jay was going to find him.

 

Then Jay woke up seven months later in a strange hotel room.

 

All Jay had to go off was a bag of clothes, a flashlight, a bottle of painkillers, a key, a number-locked safe, a hard drive of video footage, a chest-mounted camera, and a neighbor named Jessica who said Jay seemed familiar.

 

On the drive, Jay found footage of someone wearing the chest-mounted camera and fleeing the Operator. In the hotel, Jay and Jessica continued to meet, and Jay continued to come up with excuses for why he was carrying a camera and living out of a hotel room. Unfortunately for Jay, he was unable to keep his stories consistent--and in one memorable moment, he claimed he was making a “documentary on hotels”. Finally, Jessica begged Jay for the truth, admitting that she was missing months from her memory and, beyond that, was suffering similar symptoms to the ones Jay experienced during the early days of his investigation. Jay, now with solid proof that Jessica had something to do with his missing seven months, told her to pack her things; they’d need to get on the road as soon as possible. Jay gave up on the locked safe; escaping with Jessica was his top priority.

 

Of course, nothing could be that easy. While Jay uploaded his footage of her confession, Jessica disappeared from her room, leaving only a slip of paper containing the code for the safe. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Jay opened the safe, finding seven months’ worth of tapes inside. Just as he got the tapes into his bag, the masked figure appeared behind him and attacked, much like it had in Brian’s house. In a moment of panic, Jay clocked it across the head with a flashlight and ran, barely escaping with the tapes.

 

In an attempt to piece together the missing seven months and track down where Jessica might have gone, Jay looked through the footage on the tapes and the hard drive.

 

It appeared that Jay had tracked the return address on the package to an abandoned building. While his first visit was fruitless, his second turned up Alex himself. Seconds after Alex appeared, the masked figure emerged from a storage room and attacked, wielding a folding knife. While Jay floundered, Alex wrestled the figure to the ground and unmasked him, revealing the face of Tim Wright, the actor Jay had interviewed a year prior. Alex demanded that Jay hand him the knife. When Jay refused, Alex decided to improvise, crushing Tim’s leg with a block of cement.

 

From the corrupted footage at the end of the tape, present-day Jay was able to piece together an argument between himself and Alex. Past-Jay had apparently been horrified by Alex’s actions, while Alex insisted that he should have done worse. Jay asked what their next move would be, and Alex said he should lay low until he called.

 

From then on, past-Jay and Alex started working together to find Amy, Alex’s missing girlfriend. As time passed, Jay grew impatient with Alex. Nothing they did seemed to be getting them any closer to finding Amy; it all seemed like a bunch of walking in circles in the woods, with occasional senseless encounters with the Operator and an as-yet-unidentified hooded figure. They weren’t making any progress, and Alex seemed to be hiding things from him.

 

Thus, Jay decided to sneak into Alex’s house while he was taking out the garbage. The break-in was a near-complete disaster. Alex came back before Jay had a chance to get out, so Jay hid in the closet. Alex then called Jay, whose phone buzzed loudly, alerting Alex to his position. Alex found him and snidely returned his flashlight, which had been left outside the closet, seemingly more offended by Jay’s incompetence than by the fact that he broke in. The Operator then appeared behind Alex, and Jay ran for his life (but not before stealing Alex’s spare key on the way out).

 

The next time Jay and Alex argued over their progress, Jay was ready. He stole Alex’s key ring from his belt and locked it in his own car, holding the keys hostage until Alex gave him the phone number for Amy’s roommate, Jessica. (She, present-Jay realized, was the same Jessica who had been in the hotel with him.) Jay discovered that Alex had told Jessica he’d gotten in contact with Amy, and that she was fine. Clearly, Alex had a plan, and Jay wanted to find out what it was. 

 

Jay started stalking Alex during his solo visits to Rosswood Park. Unfortunately, Jay wasn’t particularly stealthy. Alex heard Jay’s footsteps, and Jay bolted.

 

(Present-Jay checked the hard drive, which he now realized contained footage from the chest camera that Alex had been wearing in Rosswood. He discovered that Alex had confused an innocent hiker for Jay and, in a fit of rage, had murdered him. Alex hadn’t just been shady, he’d been planning to murder Jay, and past-Jay hadn’t realized.)

 

Not long after, Alex asked Jay and Jessica to meet him at Rosswood. Even without the evidence that Alex was homicidal, past-Jay still found this suspicious. He still returned with Jessica, but he brought a knife, and he left a video message in case something happened to him.

 

Jay was right to think Alex was dangerous, but a knife wasn’t enough. Once Alex lured Jay and Jessica into an abandoned building, he pulled a gun on them, announcing that he had to kill them because they knew too much. Specifically, he accused Jay for getting Jessica involved; he wouldn’t have had to kill her if Jay hadn’t told her what was really going on. Mercifully--and unexpectedly--Tim came to their rescue, wearing a mask and wrestling the gun out of Alex’s hands. Jay and Jessica escaped, though when they reached the parking lot, Jay realized that Alex’s car window was open. He took this opportunity to grab Alex’s camera and hard drive from the seat, taking them with him when Jay and Jessica fled to a nearby hotel. Jay locked the tapes in the safe using the last few digits of Jessica’s number as a combination, and he and Jessica made plans to get Alex off their trail.

 

However, they were too slow. Alex may not have found them, but the Operator did.

 

In a fit of ill-advised heroism, Jay ran at the Operator, hoping to protect Jessica and fight it off. It wasn’t fazed in the least, clearing seven months from Jay’s and Jessica’s memories before disappearing.

 

Now Jay knew what had happened, but he wasn’t sure how to move forward. He still had no idea where either Alex or Jessica had gone. He tried wandering around the small town near Rosswood, hoping a lead would fall into his lap.

 

Miraculously, it did. Jay spotted Tim, maskless, leaving a doctor’s office. Determined not to let this lead slip through his fingers, he sat outside the doctor’s office for a week, waiting for Tim to come back. When he eventually did, Jay cornered him, throwing together a quick cover story: He was still trying to finish “Marble Hornets”, and he’d like Tim’s help. Tim reluctantly agreed, and Jay waited around outside the office for Tim to get out, anxious to ask more questions. (Of course, when Tim emerged and asked if Jay had been outside waiting for him, hadn’t.) Tim gave Jay his number and, a few days later, more tapes from the shoot. Tim didn’t have a camera that could play the tapes, so he didn’t know what was on them.

 

Jay meticulously went through each one. He mostly found a lot of on-set goofing around and some location scouting, but he eventually tracked down something relevant to the investigation. On one of the tapes, Tim showed Alex an abandoned, burned-down hospital that could work as a location for the movie, making a strange point to steer Alex away from the annex building next door. When Tim wasn’t looking, Alex came up behind him with a piece of rebar and knocked him out in what could have been a murder attempt. Tim escaped, and if what he told Jay was true about not knowing anything about what was on the tapes, he had forgotten the entire encounter.

 

Keeping with his cover story--that he was trying to finish Alex’s movie--Jay convinced Tim to show him the hospital. Pretending to be unsatisfied with the location, Jay then asked to see the annex. After some pestering, Tim reluctantly gave in. As Jay’s faux “location scouting” continued, Tim became increasingly suspicious. When Jay spotted the hooded figure from the missing seven months and gave chase, that was enough evidence Tim needed to tell Jay to finish the movie on his own; Tim was done helping.

 

Jay concluded that, if he wanted to get Tim’s help again, he’d have to come clean. When Tim asked to meet, Jay decided it would be the perfect time. The worst that could happen, Jay guessed, was that Tim would tell him to leave him alone, which he’d already done. If it went well, though, Tim might give him some more help. Jay reached the meeting place, an empty parking lot, anxious but ready to explain himself.

 

Jay was not ready for a punch to the face.

 

It turned out that Tim had found Jay’s Youtube channel, and he was horrified that Jay had found out so much about him--had shared so much about him with the internet--without ever considering the consequences. Tim didn’t remember anything that happened while he was in the mask, and Jay had chosen to keep him in the dark for years. Jay feebly protested that he’d kept it a secret because he didn’t know whether or not to trust Tim, that he’d posted everything online because he “wanted people to know.” Tim stormed off, giving Jay one last, furious request to stay out of his life.

 

Jay may have lost Tim, but he still had another lead. He retraced his steps back to the hospital annex and returned to where he’d last seen the hooded figure: the maintenance tunnels below the annex. He guessed that the hooded figure wanted him to find something, and he was right. They had left him a thick folder labeled “LIAR”, containing Tim’s medical records, and a blank-faced doll Jay had last seen back in Brian’s house. Before Jay had a chance to look at the records, though, the Operator appeared. Jay ran for his life, crawling under pipes and sliding over dusty concrete until he reached the entrance to the tunnels.

 

He’d managed to keep a tight grip on the records and the doll, and when he got back to his hotel room, he put together a video for the viewers. He went through each page of Tim’s medical records piece by piece, showing each one to the camera. The most significant thing he discovered was that Tim had apparently been showing symptoms of the Operator’s influence since childhood, and that he’d been institutionalized for several years when he was young. Tim was definitely a major piece of the puzzle.

 

Seemingly unsatisfied with Jay’s progress, the hooded figure--now clearly totheark (or at least a member of totheark)--sent Jay a video of himself breaking into Tim’s house and stealing his medication. Without his pills, Tim succumbed to a seizure, reverting to his masked state. The hooded figure taunted Jay, writing: “This is your only chance.”

 

Jay knew he’d have to act fast if he wanted to help Tim. That night, camera and flashlight in hand, he went back to Rosswood. However, he didn’t seem to have worked out what to do once he found Tim, because once he caught sight of him, he ran. Tim, masked and feral, tracked him down and attacked. Tim and Jay woke up the next morning by a shack in the woods, bruised and exhausted but alive.

 

At this point, Tim conceded that they’d have to work together. Jay insisted that they look for Jessica first, but Tim shot the idea down, saying they needed to stop Alex.

 

They returned to Rosswood first to investigate the tunnel where Alex killed the hiker, but instead of evidence, they found the Operator. Tim collapsed and told Jay to run, to save himself. Jay did. When Jay reached the parking lot, he found that Tim had somehow gotten there first. Tim, silent and clearly traumatized, drove off, leaving Jay shouting after him.

 

A while later, Tim handed over the footage from that day to Jay. What had actually happened was unclear, but it seemed that the Operator had sent Tim on a merry chase through the woods, warping reality around him. Tim was in such a bad state by the end of it that he returned to the hospital on his own, reverting back to his childhood mindset and cowering in his old hospital room.

 

Tim brought Jay back to the hospital soon after and confessed something that had been eating at him since he saw Jay’s videos: He was probably the first person in the “Marble Hornets” cast and crew who had seen the Operator. Therefore, they might not have been affected at all if they hadn’t met him. This whole mess might have been his fault. Jay tried ineptly to comfort him, reassuring him that at least he didn’t turn out like Alex. It didn’t help much, but the two agreed to keep working together until they tracked down Alex.

 

As they continued their investigation, Jay became increasingly jumpy, seeing things out of the corner of his eye only to wind back the tape and find nothing. In a newly discovered set of tapes from 2006, Jay and Tim found evidence that Alex attacked Jay after handing over his old “Marble Hornets” footage. Jay had no memory of this happening, and the knowledge that he’s been forgetting things since long before he started his investigation is enough to ratchet his paranoia even higher.

 

All this came to a head when Jay and Tim investigated Alex’s old house. Jay claimed he saw the Operator, and when it didn’t appear on the tape, Tim insisted that Jay seek medical help. He recognized his own symptoms in Jay, and he wanted to stop it before it got worse. Unwilling or unable to accept it, Jay claimed he was fine, that he was just jumpy from lack of sleep.

 

It was clearly not fine when the Operator showed up, sending Jay into convulsions. Tim put himself between Jay and the Operator, protecting him until it saw fit to leave. Tim managed to get Jay into the car and back to the hotel, but Jay was not well. In a fleeting moment of lucidity, Jay gave Tim the passwords for the Twitter and Youtube account, and Tim temporarily took control of the channel while Jay recovered. Tim shared his pills with Jay in the hope that it would help speed up his recovery.

 

Two months later, Jay was finally lucid again. Tim told him what had happened while he was out, including the fact that he’d been sharing his pills. Jay, visibly unsettled, told him to stop, saying that the pills couldn’t “magically fix everything.”

 

They agreed that, since they had evidence Alex had been staying in Tim’s old house, they’d head back there and try to find him.

 

However, Jay was also thinking about something else: a tape he’d seen in footage of Tim’s house, one that Tim hadn’t shared with him. Once the two were convinced that Alex wasn’t around, Jay caught sight of the outline of the tape in Tim’s pocket and pounced, wrestling the tape away from Tim and accusing him of lying. Jay ran off and watched the tape on his own.

 

The tape contained footage of masked Tim and the hooded figure kidnapping Jessica from the hotel and failing to protect her from Alex and the Operator. Tim knew where Jessica had gone the whole time and hadn’t told Jay. Jay was furious.

 

Working alone again, Jay tried to retrace Jessica’s steps through Rosswood in the hopes of finding some kind of proof, either that she escaped or that she’d been killed. He went through the tunnel where Alex had killed the hiker, where Tim had run from the Operator, and once he came out the other side, he started noticing strange changes in the landscape. He recognized landmarks from the opposite side of the tunnel, rearranged in a way that didn’t make sense. Jay started to hallucinate, and from there, he started to panic. He pulled out his phone and called Tim, leaving a terrified message apologizing for running off, describing what he saw on the opposite side of the tunnel, saying he understood why Tim hid the tape, and asking to work together again.

 

The message never made it.

 

Jay succumbed to a coughing fit, and from there, a seizure. When he woke up, something in his mind had shifted. After several failed attempts to get in touch with Tim, he showed up at Tim’s house with a folding knife and zipties. Tim wrestled the knife away from him, and when Jay continued to be aggressive, Tim wrestled him to the ground and tied him up with his own zipties. Tim announced that he’d take the next step in the investigation--visiting an address that either Alex or totheark had left them--on his own. Jay would have to stay behind for his own good. Tim took Jay’s camera, which sent Jay into a panic, shouting after Tim to leave it behind, that he needed it. Tim didn’t leave the camera.

 

Unfortunately, Tim also didn’t remember to lock the door. The hooded figure appeared, gave Jay their own camera, and left Jay a knife to cut his restraints.

 

Jay escaped the zipties, took the camera, and went searching through Tim’s cabinets for pills. Not finding any, he rushed to his car and followed Tim to the address. It turned out to be an abandoned part of a college campus, the college Alex attended after he abandoned “Marble Hornets”. Catching sight of Tim, Jay followed close behind (with limited success). Eventually, he managed to find a room where, according to the photos taped to the walls, totheark had been holding Alex prisoner. However, Alex had escaped, and the only thing left was a note that said, “Benedict Hall. Find Alex. Find the Ark.”

 

After uploading his first video on campus, Jay waited outside Benedict Hall for someone to leave the door open and let him slip in. Eventually he spotted Tim fleeing the building. Tim left the doors unlocked, so Jay was able to sneak in. At first, Jay saw nothing, just old classrooms being used as storage. He continued further. There was a noise behind him, and he turned--

 

Jay was face to face with Alex Kralie, gun ready and pointed at him. Expressionless, Alex pulled the trigger. The bullet punched through Jay’s side, and running on adrenaline, Jay managed to escape into a side room and lock the door behind him. Jay slid to the ground, clutching the wound. The last thing he saw was the Operator reaching out for him, ready to collect.

Abilities/Special Powers:

Jay doesn’t really have anything considered a supernatural ability. He has a formal education in film, and he has extensive experience condensing hours of tapes into a coherent narrative for his Youtube viewers. Years of decoding messages from totheark has made him a skilled codebreaker. While he’s not the greatest at sneaking around undetected, he’s still decent at tracking people down and getting as much information out of them as he can. He’s good enough at his detective work to have survived an investigation that was equal parts terrifying and soul-crushingly boring for four and a half years.

 

His brain’s been badly abused by repeated neuroelectric assaults, mind-wipes, and some possible subtle mind control, but it still functions as well as it can. “As well as it can” has included hallucinations, seizures, and long periods of limited lucidity. These become significantly more pronounced if the Operator (or, likely, any creature that works in a similar way) is present.

Third-Person Sample:

There was something moving.

 

Jay shot upright and reached over to the bedside table, flicking the lamp on. Frozen in place, he listened. Nothing. Nothing but the heave and rattle of the air conditioner and the scratching of cheap hotel sheets. But there had been something; he’d heard it, the scrape of claws or the shuffle of shoes on carpet or something, something that had registered in his head as abnormal, something that had set off the alarms.

 

(He wondered if the alarms had gotten too sensitive lately. He snorted. Better safe than sorry.)

 

Jay glanced over at the tripod, at the handheld camera pointed at the bed. Red light on, still recording. Don’t need to change the tape yet.

 

Taking in a breath, he shuffled out of bed, leaving the comforter pulled back and the sheets in a rumpled mess. If it was nothing, he’d be back under the covers soon anyway. If it was something, it wouldn’t matter; he’d grab his bag and run. He’d deal with the hotel charges later. Jay stepped into his shoes, loosely laced on the ground. (Easier to run if he’s not in bare feet.) He moved forward softly, as quietly as he could manage. Nothing in his line of sight, but the doorway was still dark, the switches next to the bathroom still off. He peered into the space between the bed and the wall. Still, nothing.

 

He’d left the closet door open (safer that way), and a quick glance inside turned up only wooden hangers and a cloth bag for the iron. He felt the bag and confirmed that the iron was still inside. (He thought about what it would feel like, metal and plastic coming down on the back of his head. He thought about Tim’s scream when Alex crushed his leg, the sound warped and distorted and played back over tinny laptop speakers again and again and again as Jay tried to time the cut just right.)

 

He switched on the bathroom light.

 

He’d already pulled back the shower curtain when he got in that afternoon--open the closet, open the bathroom door, pull back the curtain, shut the blinds, start the camera--and the rest of the bathroom looked exactly how he’d left it. A ragged toothbrush and a half-finished tube of toothpaste lay on the counter next to a bottle of painkillers and an empty cup of water. Same as before, same as always. On a whim, Jay checked the cabinets. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

 

What had he heard?

 

Eyes roving over the beds, checking the top of the dresser, checking the ceiling, Jay made his way over to the window. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to look, but how else would he know?

 

He pulled back the curtains and peered down through a crack in the blinds.

 

It was just the parking lot, just the flat slab of asphalt that reached from the lobby back to the treeline. (Jay didn’t look between the trees.) From his room on the fourth floor, Jay could see a few cars spread sparsely across the lot. This place wasn’t exactly a tourist destination, but it wasn’t far from the highway. Jay wondered how many people in that lot were on their way to somewhere else.

 

Jay leaned back, pulling the curtains shut again. Nothing abnormal. Nothing peering into his window, nothing watching him from the parking lot. Jay sighed, scrubbing at his eyes.

 

He checked the window: still locked. He checked the camera: still running. He checked the front door: still locked, still latched.

 

Hesitantly, Jay kicked off his shoes and crawled back into bed, wrapping the thin comforter tight around him.

 

He’d check the footage tomorrow.

First-Person Sample:

[The video feed takes a moment to focus, first on Jay’s hand as it pulls away from the lens and then on Jay himself. Jay is seated at the edge of what looks like a hotel bed, fidgeting with a handheld camera on his lap. The camera’s light is on.]

 

[When Jay speaks, it comes off disinterested, a near-monotone with a faint Alabama drawl. He’d practiced a few times before starting the transmission.]

 

I know this thing is supposed to, uh…

 

[He gestures at the communicator.]

 

...be all we need, but does anyone know if there’s a place to upload footage that’s not part of some kind of...conversation?

 

[He shuffles uncomfortably, glancing up and away from the lens.]

 

Like a big backup drive or a server. I’ve got, just a sec...

 

[He grabs the communicator with his free hand and points at the ground next to the bed. The footage is shaky, but it’s possible to make out the shape of a significant pile of MiniDV videocassettes.]

 

I’ve got things I want saved, in case something happens.

 

[And now the camera’s back where it had been propped before, pointing at Jay’s face.]
 

I don’t want some--some event to come through and ruin weeks’ or even months’ worth of footage. Not if I can help it.