The Quadrangle. A mostly quadrilateral structure built in the middle of a desertic zone, a few hundred kilometers away from Temalas. Its actual location was [REDACTED], for obvious reasons. Inside, the Quadrangle was a sprawl of buildings and different areas. It was similar to how the Pentagon would look like if it was actually a square, and had been passed through a randomizer that shuffled its architectural style, its wings and the functions of the single rooms. What’s more was that there was no apparent logic to the hellscape of corridors and windows as seen from the outside.
What nobody knew for sure, but had an inkling of, was that there was powerful and ancient magic involved in the making of the Quadrangle. Just how much of it was unclear even to someone with the clearance of Samantha Cromwell. Not due to insufficient permissions, although that was a big part of the reason of course, but because not even the magic users involved in its construction seemed to be able to reach a consensus about it. What mattered was that the building functioned as it was supposed to, and it did. Every single corner of it did, in fact. There was not a single speck of dust that was out of place, save for what the low grade workers messed up all the time, leaving cups on tables and moving objects that were not supposed to be moved.
But even those things the Quadrangle fixed by itself, restoring its optimal shape and function in a matter of minutes after any disturbance. There were times when the new configuration was better than the previous, of course, and in those instances something inside the Quadrangle would recognize the improvement and make it permanent. This was a source of more than a little bit of confusion among the newcomers, who would often find themselves traversing a corridor where they expected to encounter a room, or end up in a torture chamber instead of a computer room.
This was where magic’s integration with technology came to play. For there was an app everyone could use to navigate the structure. Samantha was using said app to reach the main control room after leaving the holding cells, and finding herself in a biolab instead. She barely sighed, being used to these shenanigans that the Quadrangle appeared to have fun pulling on its human users, and changed route according to the pathfinding algorithm of the app.
Today was not a good day to be bamboozled by a building. But she forced herself to be calm and collected, and thought about the good things in her life rather than the bad occurrences of the last couple of days. Indeed, if seen from afar, this was a wonderful week for her. Grave events had happened and were solved by external factors, not even requiring her action. Good deeds were done. Progress was being made.
When she reached the control room, her mood had shifted into a thin smile of acceptance. That life was as it was, and that the prisoner would talk eventually. There was hurry but it was not catastrophic yet.
“Ma’am.” The room saluted, before returning to their tasks. There was a map of the whole continental united states in the big screen, with the projection of clouds and concentrations of something that she couldn’t quite see from here, shown in false colors superimposed on the map. Before she asked what was going on, PsyOps came to her.
“Did the guy talk?”
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Perhaps you should leave him to me.”
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Samantha felt something bubble up that she barely managed to contain. “No. I need the prisoner to be somewhat usable after the interrogation, and not a drooling mess.”
“But I—”
“No.” She looked at the screen. “What’s on there?”
Orson Smiths, codename PsyOps, shrugged. “Ask the space guy.” He said and stormed out. Samantha instructed the Quadrangle to direct him towards either his quarters or to places where he could do no significant damage and moved on. She did so because the more she spoke with the guy, the more she wished to send him straight back to the CARF for another exhilarating adventure from which he would return changed and perhaps a bit more useful. She needed him though, and she had to make do with his current intractability.
Actually, no. She changed her mind and instructed the Quadrangle further. The prisoner had been a tough nut to crack, even for Sekker standards, and she wanted to know why. “Authorizing further measures to break the prisoner.” She spoke into the app, which would then relay her instructions to whatever it was that regulated Quadrangle functions.
This was somewhat of a thorny topic for her, which her subordinates learned to avoid and circle around anytime it got brought up. You see, there was nothing she hated more than admitting that the very thing that kept the building going was out of her control and out of her understanding. Yet, no matter how many times she had asked for permission, she was never granted it.
She decided to switch her attention to the screens on the wall. SpaceOps was there, fiddling with the dials and screaming in the ears of the operator that was handling the computer system.
“What am I looking at?” She asked.
“Weather patterns,” the scrawny short man replied in brief.
The clouds formed a thin spiral that stretched all the way from the Caribbean to Alaska. The veil of clouds was barely visible, save for the fact that it was highlighted in red and labeled ANOMALY in bold letters. The eye of the supergiant cyclone was around Ohio, but there was an arrow and a yellow line depicting its movements. It appeared to have moved around randomly, or quasi-randomly in the past days. But there had been no sightings of a super cyclone in the news, no consequences on the scale that an event like this should have caused.
A further investigation of the data explained why. There were barely any actual clouds there, and it would take a keen eye to spot them even when looking at a meteorological model. What was being done here was beyond the minutiae.
“Anomalous weather patterns. I surmise.” Samantha said. Dealing with SpaceOps required special direction, or his mind wouldn’t follow.
“Caused by the Events.” He chewed his words.
“You are postulating correlation?”
“I am observing correlation. Postulating causation.”
Samantha hummed. “It’s not looking good.”
The clouds were just a thin veil. A disturbance in the wind patterns that caused abnormal condensation at the level of the jet currents. Such disruptions, however, were compounding into something more. Something that could evolve into the cataclysmic event she was not yet seeing in the outside world.
It was not enough for the Handler, her superior, to allow for more budget thought. She knew that. He was a politician through and through. He could not see the implications, he could not fathom the danger. And even if he did, she feared, he did not have the spine to act unless there was no other option. Unless he could hide himself and the truth of the hard, cold facts no more. She hated that mindset. Yet she had to deal with it.
“Get me some actual data to bring to the Handler. Fast.”
SpaceOps snorted. “What do you think I have been doing all this time?”
She took a deep breath, and SpaceOps never knew how close he got to dying that day. Fortunately, all that awaited Samantha now was a relaxing day at home, provided that she could indeed relax without constantly thinking about work. That was to be seen. Perhaps she could call her father, get his advice on how to do things. Perhaps she could visit him, see what the old military man had to say about this whole deal. After all, he had been the head of the BSA for more than three decades before she took over.