Etsy reveals she can see timelines by touch, describing Topher's secret marbles and his mother's death.
This chapter of The Call of the Void, an independent audio drama produced by Michael Allen Herman and Josie Eli Luchinsky, opens mid-crisis at a hospital where Etsy is being treated after a confrontation at the home of a man named Walt Rogers, who claimed to be a servant of a supernatural darkness and insisted that the void would reign before Topher subdued him with a table lamp. The duo gives a stripped-down statement to a rural Ohio deputy, omitting supernatural elements, while a body discovered at Rogers' house — the actual homeowner — suggests Rogers had been waiting for them specifically. On the road afterward, Etsy reveals her ability to Topher: she can read people's timelines through skin contact, including alternative paths they might have taken in other timelines, and must actively filter to stay on the timeline relevant to her. She demonstrates by reading Topher's memory of hiding tiger-eye marbles in his treehouse, and — unprompted — his memory of learning on that same day that his mother had chosen to take her own life rather than continue cancer treatment. The moment is quietly devastating. Etsy reveals this power first surfaced when she touched someone connected to Jam Labs, her father's destroyed research facility, establishing the supernatural and personal stakes of the larger mystery. They receive a call from April O'Neil at The Advocate, who reports that Marcus — a witness they had spoken to earlier — is asking for them again. They find Marcus in a hospital, obsessively scratching symbols into a tile floor with scissors, in a trance state. When Etsy takes his hand to read him, she sees that his entire timeline appears to be erasing into nothingness — a phenomenon she has never encountered before. Marcus attacks her before Topher and staff intervene. Officer Mason, now familiar with the pair, warns them privately that groups of people have been vanishing near Little Woods in a pattern that mirrors a previous disappearance event, urging them to leave. The episode ends with Topher learning his colleague Simone has stopped showing up to work and is unreachable, and the duo arriving at her home to find it empty with mysterious scratches on the trees outside.
