Dead Water: A Wammy's House Casefile

Exposition

I'm going to start by telling you that I am not the author you may be accustomed to. When the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases were released to the public- you're welcome, by the way- they were authored by a man named Mihael Keehl. I'm going to refer to him by Mello. It's what he would have wanted. 

Mello and I were raised by a foundation called Wammy's House, an orphanage founded by one Quilish Wammy. We were trained from a young age to be the greatest detectives in the world. We were trained to replace L, should he ever die. 

Now allow me to repeat myself. I am not Mello. You may find my prose to be... Different. I don't care; unlike Mello, I have no one to leave these files for. I have no one to speak to. These will be nothing more than a cry into the void. With that squared away, let's begin.

Sylvester Stone was a crackpot reporter for the Mad Times, a media group founded right around the turn of the century, during the Y2K panic. The Mad Times, from the very beginning, latched on to any scrap of bad news available to them to draw in a massive following... Not too different from Japan's Sakura TV, now that I'm thinking about it. Stone was one of the founding members; he got his stripes by passing off a photograph from Hurricane Hugo as a preliminary consequence of Y2K. Through creative storytelling, and the general public's lower access to information at the time, Stone and the Mad Times generated enough panic to cause several large grocery stores to sell out of essential products. This resulted in increased panic, which fed back into the Mad Times's sales. An effective strategy you might recognize from today's world.

In 2012, the Mad Times attempted to capitalize on the Mayan Calendar Panic. Who better to handle the narrative than the Mad Times veteran, Sylvester Stone? Stone traveled south, collecting photographs of gang violence throughout Mexico and other parts of Latin America and piecing together a false narrative; "They know what we don't! The Mayans were right! In the last days, VIOLENCE will RISE!"

Hate speech. Fear mongering. Racism. The Mad Times would use these tools to manipulate its following, just as they did during the Y2K panic, and as they did during the Kira Investigations. Only... It didn't quite work out that way, this time. During his travels through Latin America, Sylvester Stone vanished. Public records chalk it up to gang violence-- after all, the Mad Times isn't the only news source to take advantage of human emotions-- but I happen to know the real story, and the secret crisis that was born from this incident. In the wake of the Kira Investigations, most of the world was still numb. Half of the remaining population prayed for Kira's return, and the other half lived in constant fear of it. But the world at large was still moving forward.

The case of Sylvester Stone's disappearance, and the investigation that followed, has been labelled as the Dead Water Case. If you'd like a fun fact... It was my second real investigation.

Let's begin.