Carly Parker

**Carly** is the narrator and main character of RABBITS.

She encounters the game while searching for her missing best friend Yumiko.

## Profile

*Carly Parker began working at the Public Radio Alliance as an intern while still attending college. She became an associate producer during her second stint at PRA, many years later. With her new show, RABBITS, Carly is back as a Producer. We're excited to have her home with us at PRA, and we're excited to hear what she comes up with next.*

## Background

Carly self-identifies her family as lower-middle class, being four or five years behind the rest of the families in the neighborhood. Despite that, her older brother Eric was able to amass a large collection of computers, disk drives and consoles, including a *Centipede* arcade cabinet. Carly looked up to her brother and played games with him frequently, sharing his obsession with video games and video game culture. After Eric's suicide (possibly RABBITS and VIII-related), Carly inherited his basement bedroom and everything he collected in it.

Carly studied Journalism in college, and Yumiko eventually joined her. As best friends, they spent their free time together and generally tried to live as close to each other as possible. At some point while she attended college, Carly became an intern at the Public Radio Alliance. Unbeknownst to Carly, her parents were also involved in something possibly RABBITS-related and passed the same year VIII ended while she was in college. Carly moved into her aunt's place and lived with her for two years before moving out. After graduating, she returned to the PRA as an Associate Producer.

Before Yumiko disappeared, she and Carly had scheduled a dinner together to celebrate Carly's recent promotion to Producer at the PRA. When Yumiko didn't show up, Carly headed to Yumiko's apartment and asked the Super to open the unit. Upon entering, she fed and took care of Yumiko, who seemed dazed and not in control of herself due to endlessly watching a looping video.

Carly and Adam decide to schedule another dinner with Yumiko in order to stage an intervention, but Yumiko doesn't show up. Shortly after Yumiko's disappearance, Carly learns Yumiko may have been looking into a game called RABBITS. Carly asks Terry Miles if she can start a RABBITS podcast as part of the Public Radio Alliance.

Carly now runs the podcast RABBITS to help document and find Yumiko. Some of her previous responsibilities at the Public Radio Alliance involved owning its relaunch, including repainting the studio and re-covering old chairs.

## Season 1

#### **"Episode 101: Game On"**

Carly becomes concerned when Yumiko's disappearance goes unheeded by the police, and begins investigating her disappearance. She receives a login and password from Yumiko's younger brother, Adam, and finds a PDF of a scanned page from a notebook uploaded to a file hosting account Carly knew Yumiko used because her friend was a developer. Carly uploads the PDF to the RABBITS website. The file name is "Notes on Hazel", and references a previous Player in RABBITS called Hazel, and a publisher named Byron Preiss. She calls Conrad Evans, who she finds collaborated with Preiss on a couple of audiobooks before he passed, but Conrad nervously cuts the conversation short when asked about both Hazel and RABBITS, sharing that, "they listen to us now, all the time". Later, Carly receives an instant message on an app called CatChat from a user named Concernicus Jones: "Is she who you think?" with a revealing photo that may be Yumiko. Upon a reverse-image search, she finds the photo on an escort site with four photos of the same woman that all seem to have been taken around the same time. One of the photos reveals a tattoo Carly recognizes as Yumiko's that says, "love is the every only god" in cursive, a quote from an E. E. Cummings poem.

#### **"Episode 102: Concernicus Jones"**

Carly shares what she knows about Yumiko to a detective at the police agency, but gets rebuffed. Carly then decides to retrace Yumiko's steps herself and takes another look at *Wizardry*, finding the link to the personality test Yumiko had taken. She tries the test several times with different answers, but on her third try she reads more carefully and responds as truthfully as possible. Carly gets access to the same torrent link and video Yumiko received, and asks Harper to watch her watching the video to make sure she doesn't end up in the same situation as Yumiko. Carly describes the video as a, "film-within-the-film, like The Ring. It was a lot of grainy patterns, and videotape-tracking adjusted weirdness. [...] As if somebody was behind my eyes, watching through me. [...] I'm beginning to wonder about whether or not I believe in something outside of our regular human experience." While watching, Carly realizes she can't pinpoint the start and end of the looping video, and decides not to upload the video to the RABBITS Notes section out of caution. Carly receives a phone number from Jones through CatChat, and in a call Jones explains he knows of Yumiko because she may have metaphorically stepped in front of someone else Jones had been following in RABBITS. Carly receives two files from Jones through CatChat after the phone call: a PDF of two scanned pages - an early draft of a research paper, and a screenshot of a series of escort forum reviews. Afterward, Carly decides to follow up on Harper's lead and visits the Burke Natural History Museum. She meets with the museum's director Ron Palahniuk, who takes Carly to the exhibit Yumiko inquired about - a passenger pigeon. After the trip, Carly reviews the second screenshot Jones sent over again and messages AmyX, an escort who received bad reviews and ratings from someone named Gary, an active user who replied in Yumiko's original thread. AmyX provides Carly with Gary's contact information, and Carly asks Gary on a date under the name Lysandra. After Gary confirms Carly isn't the police, Gary recalls Yumiko asked him a question, "How many steps to the lighthouse?" Jones calls Carly again from a different number, and asks Carly if she took another look at the speech - what Carly thought was a research paper (page 1 of the PDF Jones sent earlier). Jones indicates he knows Carly went to the museum to push Carly to share what she knows; Carly confesses Yumiko was looking at a passenger pigeon exhibit. They make an implicit agreement based on their mutual exchange of information to work together. Before going to bed, Carly hears a computer startup sound and finds Yumiko's laptop has somehow turned on, asking for a password. After trying a few birthdays and pet names, she types in `rabbits` and logs in.

#### **"Episode 103: Marigold and Persephone"**

Upon logging in, Carly finds Yumiko's desktop is clean save for one photo in Yumiko's Photos folder of her and Yumiko at Starbucks. Carly is wearing a Redd Kross band shirt she had supposedly lost three years before their meet-up occurred, and the photo looks to be taken from across the street. To ask for some support, Carly contacts Nic Silver, Producer on the Tanis/The Black Tapes podcasts and sends him the photo to see if he can help. Carly goes back to the "H Marigold" clue and decides to read it as 'II Marigold' instead to see if it might lead to better search results. She finds a discrepancy in a *Seattle Daily Times* article posted during iteration II about a pirate radio station called 'Marigold' that illegally broadcasted music, as well as a confessional radio talk show that lasted for two years. Specifically, Carly notices the article is dated February 29, 1965, but 1965 is not a leap year; therefore, the article is misdated. She gets in touch with a short-wave radio forum moderator named Max, who shares that 'Marigold' is actually the name of one of the radio jockeys, and links her to hours of show recordings afterward. One recording is Marigold conversing with a caller who goes by the name 'Persephone'; she mentions she's worried about global warming, that she's been followed since she started playing "the game", that she's been abducted, and that while she's currently home, it doesn't feel like home. Separately, after Carly pushes Jones to share more with her on a call, Jones sends copies of Carly's parents' death certificates to her that share the same likeness to the death certificates she already owns with a few exceptions. Nic Silver calls Carly back to share more RABBITS trivia his informant found in a subreddit comments section, starting with Alan Scarpio, the billionaire recluse. He shares that Scarpio is rumored to have won his fortune winning an underground game (possibly RABBITS). Nic also shares that he was able to dissect Carly's image and find additional images hidden within it - a jigsaw puzzle of a dozen pieces that, when combined, results in a version of Andrew Wyeth's *Christina's World*, Carly's favorite painting. Because Carly is familiar with the painting, she notices the farmhouse in the painting has three windows on the top floor instead of two. Afterward, she receives a text message from Jones with an address and an image of a brunette women looking at the *Christina's World* variant. Carly heads to the address of a coffee shop ten minutes away before noticing people in grey; at this moment, Jones enters and brings her outside to leave.

#### **"Episode 104: Doglover in Hell"**

Shortly after sitting down at the coffee shop to wait for Jones and setting her phone to start recording, Carly notices everyone clearing out. She steps outside and tries to call Jones, but realizes her phone has no reception and her recent recording plays back as static. As two figures dressed in grey start converging on her, Jones and a dozen kids on skateboards he's called on help her escape. While Carly rides back with Jones on his motorcycle, Jones wonders aloud if the two figures are RABBITS participants who wanted to ambush her because she's unknowingly playing RABBITS in her quest to find Yumiko, though it's clear they may be Wardens interfering with the game earlier than usual. Carly is upset at both possibilities and gives in to Jones' suggestion that if true, they should learn and better prepare themselves by visiting The Magician. During their visit, The Magician theorizes that Hazel's disappearance in XIII is the reason why players are continuing to disappear in IX, including Yumiko. In order to dig deeper into Hazel's disappearance that started it all, The Magician hands Carly a business card with a long number, a login and password combination meant to point Carly to a location. At home, she inputs the long number into a search engine that results in a login page, where she types in the login information (Login: NO, P/W: FUTURE) and loads into a portal called *The Hazel Dossier*. She clicks the first link that goes to a graphic of an acronym (WTF), standing for Where's the Future. The second link is a screen capture of American Bank's front page but taken over, pasted with a scary-looking rabbit graphic and a message in red inside it: "I want the future we were promised, not the future we deserve. - Hazel". The other links were filled with similar things - a diatribe of the future that Hazel referred to as *The Roddenberry* - explaining that we should be further along on solving systemic world issues. The last link is an old painting of an old Nazi SS officer with a small dog while fires burn behind them in a distance called *Doglover in Hell*, a marker used to signify the start of iteration I. To demonstrate, Jones points out there are birds with lines woven into the officer's collar that, when combined with lines from the dog's collar, result in a Smitty code that translates to four words: The Door is Open. Afterward, Carly presses Jones again to explain how he got Carly's parents' death certificates and if he knew anything more. Jones explains that as he was looking into RABBITS to find his own parents and ran into a few disparate clues - 1) video footage of a female reporter who was playing RABBITS, but ultimately jumped in front of a train at a train station in Prague in January 2007, 2) Carly's parents' death certificates found in her purse after her death 3) Carly's parents' names listed, like Jones' parents, on a pre-screening list for a medical study belong to the Gatewick Institute, a medical research organization that operated in the 70s and 80s.

#### **"BONUS EPISODE #1"**

Carly plays back a few questions and comments from her listeners. The first listener asks Carly if RABBITS is a global game, noting that she had seen a RABBITS flyer in her neighborhood even though she doesn't live in North America. The second listener, named Nick, mentions he's just one bus ride away from Leeds library, asserts that the library card from Episode 101 is from Leeds and really wants to go check it out. The third listener mentions that back in school, she read or heard about a personality test that led to a download, similar to the one Yumiko found. She recalls that the link is random, and it doesn't matter what your answers are. She also notes that while some of the handwritten notes on "What does it mean to play a game?" in the Notes section mainly relate to things that disappear, Whitby Abbey is where Dracula in the form of a dog arrived in England and climbed 199 steps.

## Relationships

**Yumiko Takata:** Carly identifies Yumiko as her best friend. Aside from a few years after college, Carly and Yumiko committed to live near each other and were able to walk to each others' places within 15 minutes. Usually they would spend time together frequently, but recently started to miss each other due to work.

**Eric Parker (Deceased):** Eric was Carly's older brother by 19 years. Eric committed suicide jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1999.

**Mr. & Mrs. Parker (Deceased):** Both of Carly's parents passed away while on vacation for their 33th wedding anniversary in a capsized ferry accident. Carly has two copies of her parents' death certificates that list different dates - January 3, 2007 vs. February 14, 2007, and the type of water that was in their lungs at the time of their death - freshwater vs. saltwater. Their January 2007 death certificates were found in the purse of a reporter who The Magician confirms was playing RABBITS by recognizing her from video footage. Their names were also listed on a pre-screening list for a medical study at the Gatewick Institute.

**Adam Takata:** Carly works with Adam, Yumiko's younger brother, for the first month after Yumiko's disappearance to try to find her. Together, they put up posters listing a tip line they would answer calls from. After Adam's husband Marco has a serious health scare, they move to Bellingham, leaving Carly to respond to calls by herself.

## References

1. ↑ RABBITS, "Episode 101: Game On"
2. ↑ https://www.rabbitspodcast.com/about-1
3. ↑ https://www.rabbitspodcast.com/notes
4. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.\_E.\_Cummings
5. ↑ https://www.burkemuseum.org/
6. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redd\_Kross
7. ↑ https://theblacktapes.fandom.com/wiki/Nic\_Silver
8. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap\_code