As part of preparation for our raid of the coffee shop, Modi leaves a copy of himself back in the safe room checking out camera feeds, with another monitoring police bands on a rooftop, and organizing the remainder with the usual equipment. Meanwhile, Zahra slips into the dead captive’s flak jacket, changing her body to fit, while the others grab the man’s heavy pistol and IWI Tavor assault rifle.
To avoid getting pulled over for stealing a vehicle, we then hilariously travel to the scene of this upcoming debacle by robo-cab, with the first person inside conveniently covering the camera to prevent identification of everyone involved.
The neighborhood we reach is not busy although still frequented, it being around 10:30pm. The coffee shop is only open for another 20 minutes or so. Getting out with all of our gear still in bags (to not attract attention), we examine the location more carefully and realize we need to be more controlled in our approach, depending. Currently the coffee shop is on the ground floor, along with some other retail stores and a restaurant which are all closed at this time of night. There is more retail business a level down, along the corridors running out to the subway. Meanwhile the next three floors up are office space for small law and tax offices, and then above those floors are twelve floors of residential housing.
We see small groups of people walking down the street, most likely going home, and we don’t want to loiter too long in case it draw suspicion, so we take a final look at each other and then wordlessly head into the shop.
It’s a small business, with only 5-6 tables inside, one in the corner having two old men staring a chess board. There’s one employee at the counter taking orders, while another is sweeping as part of the nightly closing prep.
Rasheed does his typical mind scans but doesn’t pick up anything relevant. No one is really paying us much mind yet. Rashed approaches the counter to distract the employee with a coffee order. On a hunch, he pushes a picture of Khepri’s face through the counter guy’s mind as he approaches, and gets back a thought about the 500 pounds sitting in the employee’s pocket – basically a bribe to ignore the girl being taken to the back earlier. He telepathically relays this to everyone else, plus the information that the staff door that we learned about from the dying guard’s mind is in back next to the single washroom.
As Zahra and Modi immediately veer towards the back hallway, the counter clerk calls out that it’s just a one-person facility back there, but they ignore him. He looks up at the camera a bit plaintively, and even the sweeper turns his head. A few of us notice there is a concealed pistol on the sweeper, although he doesn’t make a move to draw it. Modi also recognizes that he is wearing body armor under his loose shirt.
Rasheed immediately uses his mental pheromones to ease their anxiety. “Yeah, shift can’t end fast enough,” thinks the sweeper after a few seconds, and he keeps sweeping.
The group punches in the code and the door pops open. This draws another look from the sweeper, who sizes us everyone and then very pointedly resumes sweeping. “Eh, they know how to get in, so they must be with the others,” Rasheed hears him think.
While we’re prepared for an assault, ahead is simply another hallway with a single light dangling from the ceiling. The construction seems rather makeshift rather than being part of the original construction. On one side is another door that we know would lead back into the coffee shop kitchen area, with a key lock; there is also another door at the far end.
Rasheed gets his coffee, pays, and turns to follow the others. “Hey, 10 pounds for the cup,” notes the counter clerk, so Rasheed flips him the change.
Once we all regroup and head down the passage, Rasheed picks the lock at the far end. Behind THIS door is a circular stairway down, and this one is very clearly amateur – it’s made of corrugated steel cobbled into the hole at an awkward angle. There is no lighting in the stairwell.
“Oh, this is definitely going into my report,” mutters Zahra.
Rasheed gets out a cheap LED light and we all spiral slowly down the steps. We descend three floors before reaching the bottom. Rasheed still picks up the occasional thoughts from upstairs that bode well for us – the counter guy thinks he would have asked for a bigger bribe if he had known more people were coming, whereas the sweeper keeps wondering how much bribe the counter guy would take to clock him out early.
The level tunnel ahead of us looks like a bunker lined with red LED guidelines. Ahead is a door with facial recognition. Zahra gives it a shot, trying to emulate the face of the guard she devoured recently, and thinks she has gotten it right. But when she reaches out and opens the door, she immediately sees two riot shields propped on the ground and four men with guns pointed right at the door.
There are two riot shields and four guys aiming at the door.
All hell breaks loose. Modi’s bullet plinks off a helmet, while Zahra herself takes two shots that are mostly deadened by the body armor. Silent darts quietly up to the side of the door, flat against the wall, waiting for her moment.
As the hallway lights start to silently flash in some kind of alarm, Zahra snarls as her pseudopod flashes out to strike one of the shooters full in the face. As his whole body jerks into spasms and she sucks out his life energy to heal herself, she slips to the side as well to let the others pass.
Masil cuts into the room, heading for the far-right corner, but he trips over a chair and is shot in the ass a few times. Meanwhile, Hakim – the Amal personality currently at the fore – shoves his way into the room and sends little energy balls blasting through the guards, of which he can see two guys kneeling to support the shields and actually four shooters including the one whose face was burned off by Zahra’s attack. The red lighting continues to flash steadily.
“ATTEND PROTOCOL!” one of the uninjured guards shouts and tosses a flashbang into the air, which almost immediately goes off and blinds and/or deafens some of the invaders. Silent ducks in and stays low, sending her claws through one of the shields to be buried deep in the chest of the man who tossed the flashbang. Meanwhile, Zahra steps into the room and whacks the clearest target with a pseudopod. The man screams, sizzles, and collapses.
Masil scrambles up and dives back towards the men with shields, smacking the man behind one who falls. The only two men still up were either wounded by Hakim or stabbed by Silent. Unfortunately for him, Hakim panics due to his blindness and deafness and just starts spraying energy balls towards where he last remembers the enemy being located, and Masil is in the way. Blue balls rips through Masil’s torso, leaving gaping holes out which sand trickles.
As that barrage ends, Rasheed reflexively teleports behind the last man and mindblasts him, dropping him. Silent yanks her claws out of his chest so he can collapse properly to the floor.
The red lights suddenly stop flashing, as apparently one of Modi’s dupes has been able to turn the alarm off.
Looking kinda peaked, Masil walks up to Hakim shouting, “Can you actually SEE? CAN you?!” and starts slapping Hakim on both sides of his face. Rashed starts screaming into Hakim’s mind to not attack the person slapping him -- it’s a friend – and thankfully Hakim’s vision starts to clear even if his ears are ringing, so he can recognize a furious Masil.
“Stupid donkey!”
As Masil gets a hold of himself, we take a look around the room. Everyone who attacked us is either dead or close to dead – and the battle really didn’t take more than 10-12 seconds.
In this room are stacked storage boxes on one said and a table, chairs, and deck of cards on the other. Ahead there’s two doors in the wall.
We search the bodies and find key cards that we confiscate. Rasheed also swipes a pack of cigarettes. Modi asks Masil for the grenade launcher, so Masil disengages it and hands it over. Our Modi reports that he can see feeds of an empty meeting room, a hallway, and a room with two guards watching Khepri. We just haven’t yet found the locations of these camera feeds.
“Did I accidentally hit you, brother?” says Hakim, his vision cleared now. “We must kill more enemies.” Masil just glares at him.
Both of the far doors open into unconnected hallways. We try the left one first and eventually run across some cables running across the ceiling (“DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE” stickers all over them). We decide this is probably going under the subway and not the tunnel we need, so we walk the 2-3 minutes back and take the right-hand corridor, which ends up much more promising – we quickly reach a T junction with a door to each side.
The left door has a key lock, while the right door has a combination lock. Zahra bends over to study the number pad, and then asks Rasheed to look more carefully because she can’t tell what she’s seeing. Rasheed, more versed in this kind of breaking and entering, can recognize that all the numbers on the pad have smudges, although the button for “3” seems smudged more. There’s also an RFID on the top. When Zahra tries one of the keycards, a little green light flickers, but when we don’t enter the unknown key code, it quickly goes out again.
Modi jacks into the door and spoofs the password, telling the door to open as Zahra hovers over him. There’s a click, followed by two clicks, followed by a pleasant chime. Zahra flattens against the wall as she pops open the door, but nothing happen. This room is full of steel tables fitted with restraints and medical equipment.
“This is going on my report too,” she snarls, striding into the room, which smells vaguely of iodine and alcohol and having eerie stains on the floor that are most likely blood. Was there a code they didn’t violate here in this medical facility, she thinks while looking about, only relaxing slightly when she notes at least they did attach a proper inspection tag to the room’s fire extinguisher.
There are two doors, one of them labeled “Incinerator.” Modi carefully opens it and finds a ceramic box and vent, and in the box sits a weird lizard of some kind that isn’t moving, about 40-60 cm long depending on length of tail. Looking closely, Zahra thinks that, while it’s not moving, it is very slowly breathing and giving an occasional almost imperceptible blink.
“Hey lizard,” says Modi. “Can you understand us?”
“Why would it be able –” starts Zahra, until the lizard looks up and starts talking in perfectly clear speech.
“Of course I can,” it replies. “What do YOU think?
“What are your intentions?”
Pause. “Do you have food?”
Modi fishes around and finally pulls out a protein bar.
“Can it burn?”
Modi shrugs and places it next to the lizard, which opens its mouth. We all jump back as flames erupt to engulf the bar, and suddenly the lizard is tearing
It opens it’s mouth, flames erupt to engulf the bar, and then it chows down. “Ya Allah,” mutters Zahra.
Modi doesn’t seem plussed by the lizard’s fire. He asks if it is free to roam, and it replies it got out once and that was nice. When Modi offers to free it, it asks him if it is allowed to find food, and we tell it that it is allowed to eat any deceased humans we point out to it. The lizard crawls out of the incinerator and wraps itself around Modi’s shoulders.
“Remember,” insists Zahra, “you are not allowed to eat females,” thinking primarily of Khepri and not wanting any accidents.
“What should I call you?” asks Modi.
He says its name is Alliaceous. We quickly settle on calling it “Al” for short.
After we open the other door in the hall, Al sends a flame down the hall to test its breath weapon. While the flame is a bolt that expands into a cone the size of a Coke can, it is long enough to reach the far end of the hall. Rasheed tries to scan the lizard’s thoughts, but it’s just random chaotic thoughts he cannot make much sense of. However, one thought is that someone walked through here that doesn’t smell like “these people” he is with.
On a hunch, Rasheed asks Zahra if she has something of Khepri’s with her, which of course she does because she’s carrying a bag of spare clothes belonging to her roommate. After sniffing an article of clothing, Al reveals that yes, that smell is one of the smells he can sense in the hall – although he adds that “The clothes of the human smell happier than she does in the hall.”
Down the new corridor there are four doors. The first door on the left has a mop behind it that falls over as the door is opened. Modi offers it to Al if he wants it. Instead Al scurries inside, sniffs at a few things, taps at something, opens its mouth much wider than thought, and then comes back out with a can of WD40 in its mouth.
“Don’t eat that now!”
“Oh-ay, eye’uh ea ih ayer,” says Al, as Modi takes it from him and stores it.
Another door leads into a conference room, one of the areas covered by the feed Modi is monitoring, but no one is inside. There’s a PC and projector, and some doodling on a white board that only Masil can read – it appears to be an alchemical procedure to transmute ‘essence of heart’ into ‘essence of liver,’ whatever that might mean. Masil takes a picture of the equations before erasing them.
The further door on the right (which is locked) contains a utility closet with an air compressor, a fuse box, a bunch of wiring, and plumbing access. We open the final door and discover a dimly lit hallway. AS we step inside, the lights come on full. Al says the human smell is here as well.
At the end of this hall are two doors on the left (men and women’s bathrooms), and three doors on the right. Just as a precaution, Rashed announces that he is checking the man’s bathroom – and astonishingly when he walks in there is a pair of men’s shoes visible underneath one of the stall doors. He quietly scans for the man’s mind and picks up the thought, “Uggh, extra spicy sauce was a really bad idea.” After passing this info along, he flashes an image of Khepri through the man’s mind but gets no response except for a toothpaste ad.
As he’s trying to figure out what to do next, the man’s trousers hike up and he opens the stall door. Rasheed hears him think, “Who the fuck is this guy?” right as he mind-blasts him. The blast doesn’t kill the man outright, just leaving him tottering, but he does draw his gun on Rasheed. “Hands up, you don’t belong here!”
Rashed puts his hands up and steps to the side. “Don’t shoot!”
“How did you get in here?”
“Through the door.”
Rasheed tries to pheromone the man to better fast-talk him into believing he was sent to check on the captive and feels his anxiety level rise when hearing the sound of the safety clicking off.
“Who sent you?” demands the guard in his simple uniform. “No one is supposed to know she is here!”
But Rasheed has been fast-talking his way on the streets for most of his life. He launches into some lines about the leader of the hand-off team surviving and ordering him here. The guard hesitates slightly: “Why did he send you? We have everything under control.”
“Considering the shitshow that went down, I’m part of the cleanup crew,” says Rasheed. “One of the men was taken by the intruders, so there’s a big concern he might have talked and that that talk could lead them here.”
“Okay.” Rasheed watches as the guard mentally walks through everything and just hopes his story was convincing enough. Eventually the man lowers the gun, turns on the safety, and holsters it. “She’s in the panic room in the back.”
“Good,” replies Rasheed, trying not to sound too relieved. “Standard operating procedure. Has anything suspicious been reported?”
“The guys upstairs said more guys came in, but we checked the system and the back-lab doors went open – they must be working on something up there. We’re just guarding her; they can do (whatever work they want.” He adds that the “handover” (Zahra turning over the drives) sounds like it was a real mess.
As he walks over and washes his hands, Rasheed carefully puts his hands down and relays to the others that he could use some stronger firepower in the bathroom.
Almost immediately the door smacks open into the wall and Zahra strides in with fire in her eyes. The man glances over, thinking that it’s just Rasheed leaving, then sees it’s someone else. He wheels and tries to pull his gun but it’s already too late – Zahra’s pseudopod lashes out and splatters the man’s pelvis. Already hurt by Rasheed’s earlier mind blast, he drops straight to the ground.
If Rasheed is a bit taken aback at the immediacy of the violence, Zahra seems completely unbothered. She calmly strides to the man’s corpse, kneels next to him, and studies his face for long seconds. Rasheed watches as her features shift until she looks exactly like the dead man, even the slightly disturbed surprise on his face. She starts stripping off his shirt and other articles of clothing, frowning when she realizes his pants are completely unsalvable.
She stands, thinking, then drapes her own clothes in front of her to cover her pelvis area. It will have to do -- if she can think of a good excuse to not have pants on.
Rashed approaches and lifts the man’s ley card, wallet, sidearm, and key ring. He gets the man’s name off the ID and hands the key card, key ring, and wallet to Zahra before they exit together.
Silent has apparently snuck into the women’s room and soon reports back that “there are no more problems in here,” which doesn’t explain what exactly was in there to start with. But no one really wants to ask either.
“You smell human now,” volunteers Al unexpectedly to Zahra. It confuses her for a moment, until she remembers she is wearing a dead man’s clothes.
“Thanks, Al,” she says, nodding to the men’s bathroom. “There’s a snack for you in there.”
We check the final three doors. The first room we unlock with the guard’s keys is just a small storage room. The next is a surveillance office with no one inside – but there is a container on the desk with a suspicious red sauce conspicuously stuck to the lid.
Modi volunteers that, based on the feeds showing on the terminal screen, that this is the computer feed he is tapped into elsewhere. We can see all the locations mentioned – including poor blindfolded Khepri monitored by the two guards.
We carefully use the key to unlock the final door, prepared to fight – and only reveal a large room that would serve as a corner office high in a corporate facility. There’s no one inside. We can see a desk, a monitor, a fancier chair behind the desk, and a projector screen that can be lowered with a projector mounted to the ceiling. On the desks is a file folder with performance reports.
“Where are they?” asked Zahra quietly.
Everyone comes inside and begin to explore the office. It’s Masil who first thinks he can hear a muffled voice speaking, and soon enough he points to a particular wall and tells everyone quietly that there are voices on the other side. When we all listen, we faintly hear crowd noises and a whistle.
The guard had called the hiding spot a “panic room,” so there must be some hidden door in the office that we need to locate in order to get access. Zahra soon finds a gap between one wall and where the screen comes down, in which is a faint seam. Something must open it.
When she searches under the desk, she sees a scuff mark on the floor near the far back corner leg, which reveals a faintly recessed tile when she examines it more closely. When she pushes it, everyone watches as the wall silently folds in, revealing a 5’ corridor with a door at the end.
Zahra gives everyone a look, nods, then approaches the door still disguised as the guard and holding her robes draped in front of her waist. As the door opens, somehow she manages to maintain her appearance while seeing Khepri sagging in her wall chains, dried blood on her wrists and ankles.
The two guards are sitting on folding chairs, with a little laptop open on the third chair and a soccer game playing.
“Is the food here yet?” one says, as they both look at her wearing the guard’s appearance, then notice the robes draped in front.
“Yeah, but don’t eat the spice sauce.” Zahra fakes a grimace. “Does either of you have a pair of pants I can borrow?” She hopes she gets the right blend of outrage and embarrassment in her imitation of the guard’s voice.
It almost seems to work – one guard is trying so hard not to laugh that he can barely hold it all in – but the other one’s eyes widen and then he goes for his gun.
There’s a shot from the other room behind Zahra as Modi fires a rifle blast into the reacting guard, and then Al suddenly pops up to breathe fire on the man. The guard stops trying to fire his gun and instead starts screaming as he goes up like a torch.
The other guard’s eyes bug out at this sight. As he fumbles for his own gun, Zahra snaps, “It’s not funny, asshole,” and her pseudopod slams out, chunking out his entire torso so that his body falls in two sizzling pieces.
On the laptop screen, one team scores and the crowd erupts into a victorious roar.
Silent glances over at Hakim, then shrugs and does nothing.
The “living” guard collapses, no longer screaming at least.
Interposing herself between Khepri and the others, in case of stray firing, Zahra starts sloughing off the guard’s clothes and changing back to her normal shape while slipping into her own robes.
Al sniffs at the air. “Smells like her,” he says about Khepri, “more scared and wounded, but otherwise the same.” He pauses, considering the occasionally twitching corpse of the guard burning merrily on the floor. “Are you going to eat this one?”
As Zahra approaches Khepri, Rasheed tries to scan the captive woman and alarmingly finds that he can’t get into her thoughts. “ENTRY FORBIDDEN,” he hears reverberating through his mind, blocking him out.
Unaware of this, Zahra sees the bandages on her roommate’s wrists and ankles, underneath the restraints, and there is obvious bruising on her ribs, filling her with both remorse and rage.
“Khepri?” she says, carefully placing her hands on her friend’s face as to not scare her. “Khepri, it’s Zahra. I’m here, I’m here. I came for you!”
Khepri jerks in her bonds, tugging at the chains. It looks like she tries to say something but nothing comes out. There is a strained exhale.
“Khepri, I’m going to free you – hold on!” Zahra grabs the chains for each foot, burning through them with acid, then burns through the arm chains as well, leaving the shackles themselves in place for right now.
As Khepri is freed from the wall, she stumbles forward into Zahra’s arms, moaning – and then starts to pull away her blindfold.
Zahra gently takes her hands, trying to prevent her. “Please don’t, Khepri – please trust me, you don’t want to see what is in this room.”
Khepri jerks her head back and forth, then pulls the blindfold off anyway – revealing inhuman, brightly glowing green eyes. As the others take a step back, barely audible, Khepri says… “What… have they done… to me??!”