Cautious, paranoid, and careful, but being on constant watch makes him very tired, all the time. He believes a lot of things, some of which directly conflict, and take very seriously pretty much any crackpot conspiracy story you could hand him. Once exacting and mathematical and skeptical, he's now believing, suspicious, and scatterbrained due to lack of sleep--he's prone to nightmares. His insomnia has him up for days at times, and his level of functioning and put-togetherness fluctuates with how much sleep he's had. Without his medication, the odds of him getting to sleep are very slim. He wouldn't admit it, and he doesn't have to since at the moment he takes them every night by doctors' orders, but he's seriously dependent on his sleep medication, no matter how much he tries to hide it from himself. Just another thing to be guilty about, he assumes. As such, he's deeply against of anything else he considers to be "polluting" of the body, overcompensating for the shame he feels for needing the sleep meds, and a sense of control from trying to control the "self-polluting" of other people around him. His allergy to cigarettes is real, but most psychosomatic, and he pretends it's much more severe than the extremely mild reaction it is, and he leverages it to get people to bend to his way about their smoking habits. He also objects to all other "pollution", from junk food to beer to video games to hard drugs, with equal vocalism. The quintessential health nut.


Raymond Malone had, until the age of about 30, the very picture of an average, boring life. He grew up in a peaceful middle-class family in a town that wasn't too small. He did well in school. He was good at math on the high school chess team. He did his extracurriculars, did summer jobs, applied to the best universities that would take. Because, he figured, that's what everyone was doing anyways. It came naturally to him, it was the easy well-traveled road, and he went off the university to become an architect, because his father and his father's father were architects, and it was fully expected his child one day would be one. He more or less let his entire early life be determined by the amorphous outside forces of habit and ease and fullfiling other people's expectations. He did quite well at that, was a talented archtect and fit the role given to him well, but it would have been inaccurate to say that he chose it. He was the type to coast through life without ever thinking what he actually wanted from or valued in it, and introspection and thinking for himself weren't strong suits of his. He built his life doing the things that are just What People Do. He graduated from engineering school and the architectural college, and went on with his career.

Eventually, when he'd taken over as head of the building firm his grandfather had started, he was hired onto a contract that would change everything. It seemed like an average job at first, the likes of which he'd been overseeing his entire career. Just an average house-building, for a lady in a nice little out-of-the-way patch of land. He met the commission, and quickly was very taken with her. She made him nervous and giddy again like a teenage boy on his first date. She was beautiful and confident, and smart and professional and classically feminine. They hit it off quickly, and started spending a lot of time together, and then sharing living arrangements with her while he oversaw the building firm crew as they built the house they would all later move into.

Things were never right during the building of this house. Everything that could be wrong was wrong. Just a little, but wrong. Missing tools and such were only the half of it. He did what he could to keep it from his new lady-friend's ears. Sometimes tools would be put in their cases overnight, and in the morning would be ruined: a whole hammer literally bent into a right angle, a screwdriver left on a bench found charred and sitting over a burn the shape if its shadow as if it had been red-hot only hours before. Several other major incidents stood out, among dozens of other minor ones along those lines. One was what happened to one of the men on Malone's crew, a man Malone told the homeowner had gone home to see to his pregnant wife who was delivering prematurely. What had really happened, the men chose not to discuss among themselves, but the work went quickly and quietly after that, trying to get finished and off the site as fast as possible. The man had been in his tent that night. Malone and the homeowner stayed in an outbuilding, but the rest of the crew who lived too far from the building site to drive home at night would stay in tents on the property when the weather allowed to save a night of motel fees. He had been one of those men, and this had been one of those nights, early in the building putting up the frame. No one else had heard anything, and the few people spending the night in the area reported silence all night. But the man's tent was found in the morning torn open from the inside, and his footprints led off into the woods barefoot. The tracks simply stopped a few hundred meters away, as if he'd just disappeared. Another incident towards the end when they were installing the drywall, the house nearly done. They cut the drywall the their measurements...and found themselves short. They checked the blueprint again...the math was right. But the house was one inch too wide on the inside. To double-check, they measured the outside again. Sure enough, it was smaller than the inside wall, impossibly. They stared in uncomfortable silence, unsure what this violation of physics signified, and then finished putting up the wall because what else was there to do about it.

Of course, the worst incident was when they were already living in the house, and changed his view of life and the nature of it forever. People needed to protect themselves. People needed to know this sort of thing was out there in the universe, and they could run into it in any dark alley. Especially if he built it. He hung up his drafting table then, terrified of what his design had brought. He quit his job as an architect and left the professional associations, to start trying to pitch a radio broadcast telling anyone who will listen about any possible supernatural event or place, no matter how slight the chance of it being true. It wasn't important to him to look into the facts of anything, since awareness of the general idea was more important, and after his experience, he could believe anything. No one ever picked up his show idea, and so he struck out on his own, broadcasting on pirate radio signals, and distributing his show for free online as a podcast. This doesn't pay, obviously, and he lives off disability money he gets for his insomnia and anxiety he developed after the events at the house.

Lately, the therapist he's assigned to by the disability office told him that it would be good for him to start trying to discuss the house on his show, to help them unravel the events in their therapy sessions, and he felt he might be ready. He did an episode explaining the "legends and stories" that "people" say about the house, and its "supposed" history, leaving out any hint of his involvement or personal knowledge. It was as far as he could go yet. For that episode, he got an email, terse, short, and slightly rude, from one Barrett Ruger. He didn't need to be told who Barrett Ruger was, as anyone who moved in paranormal and psychic investigations circles was familiar with this...troubled...character. Malone had heard of Barrett Ruger by reputation, specifically the reputation that Barrett is degenerate hothead who can't keep himself out of the bottom of a bottle and can be trusted about as far as you can throw him, completely impossible to work with, but nonetheless one of the best at what he does in the entire world--though don't ask him about it. He was the sort of a man Malone detested, but he was too much of an asset to Malone's primary cause of spreading belief in the paranormal, and he couldn't let Ruger risk going back to the house and losing the good work he does. Malone is afraid he might have to go back to the house.