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Hello Thursday,

I want to say thank you very much for your comment. I am thankful and glad my project caught your eye, because your eyes have caught up on a lot of things. This unofficial editing pass is genuinely so helpful. Thank you! 

We're already working on fixing the layout and text issues you spotted. A few of them come down to the same root causes:

• I've been living with this text for over a year now (75% of it was written before the campaign even started). 
• Some early mechanics ideas shifted along the way (the Intel pool, for instance, was originally meant as a "bank" of points players could cash out at Warden discretion for a hint or a clue if stuck. I ended up cutting it in favor of a simpler "give your players a hint" and forgot to fully scrub it from the text)
• We had to change layout artists late into the project during MM25 crunch (and Mathieu stepped in and did an excellent job under real time pressure)
• And finaly I am a much harsher editor of other people's work than my own, especially after staring at this book for so long. I'm grateful you caught what I couldn't

On Dr. Helene Xu: her "right" text block should clear this up. The asterisk on p.23 points to Soy's background story. Dr. Xu herself is a lead scientist at S.O.Y. Agronomics, threfore responsible for that discovery (hinting that Dr Hernandez works for Dr Xu --> she is lower on the foodchain) and her career is on the line if this "mishap" goes any further. Dr Xu wants to bury the story and/or retrieve the experiment.

Concerning your questions, you were right on both counts: 

• The hidden trapdoor does lead to the Secret Lab. That's now stated explicitly in the revision. Editor Hadrien -->  On how the players might get into the lab - they can find the trapdoor or get into the "dumbwaiter" and follow the exits. 
• And on the murder: Mike B. did take over the hive mind for a moment while Soy was reaching outward, found this restaurant's network (one of several hacking incidents in the days/weeks before the story starts, hinted at in the escalation table), and this time didn't let go. Given what Mike went through: diying in the Court, his brain connected to a computer, then folded into Soy's collective consciousness... having a body under his control again, even briefly, was enough to trigger his old instincts before someone else in the amalgamation yanks the wheel back in horror. This felt like the right kind of tragic rather than a tidy villain reveal to me.  (Editor Hadrien --> I did add a line to his desciption pg33 that he was Hired muscle sent to collect Gaspard's debt. This is another example of things being shuffled around during writing and that didn't make it on one editorial pass, but you are right, it should be there to be more understandable)
  
  I kept the murder timeline deliberately vague so each players table could have their theory or resolution. What I wrote above is mine, and I'm glad you landed close to it independently.
  At its core, this is a classic "small, seemingly unrelated murder pulls the thread on a much bigger conflict" setup: the characters get framed and dragged into it, and have to navigate their way out before things get worse. 

I will update the revised version shortly. Feel free to reach out if you have any other comment or question.

I am still so impressed you got such a good read of the overall story in such a short amount of time, and I am so glad you felt involved enough in it to let me know. I do feel blessed you reached out and helped us make this a better version of what I worked on for so long.

Thank you so much ! 
Hadrien