ARC1/C19 – Questionable Rescue
Sam and his new ally Traksis acting as intermediary with the beetle mobs managing to finish off the remaining members of the team in short order. Sam realized there were so many things he did not know about this world that is was a wonder he had not completely messed up by now.
Scooping up the equipment and leaving the cores for the mobs he left the mirror realm, cloaked and headed back to his hotel. In case someone was trailing him he stayed cloaked until he was a fairway from the mirror, following the road until he judged he was at a safe distance at which point he hailed a taxi, before popping the trunk to deposit the equipment. It was taking a risk, letting the taxi guy know about the equipment he’d pinched from the team, so he placed them in at the same time as his rucksack while they were covered by psi energy.
During the ride he wondered about his next course of action. He had thought a change of identity would help him remain anonymous but clearly this was far from the case. Something far better would be needed – a Spiderman costume maybe?
Arriving at the hotel these thoughts were dispelled as he knew Sarah and Maria might well object to anything to crazy he thought up. Then his mind swiftly moved onto the fact that it had been well over two hours since he had left without leaving a message, apart from a cryptic one at the reception desk. So when he got to the floor they were staying on he was a bit flustered – also carry an invisible floating bubble behind you was ok in the mirror realm but inside the hotel it made for slow progress and much anxiety. This turned out to be quite fortunate as it turned out, as it meant Sam was continually scanning his surroundings for anyone who might collide with his bubble full of equipment.
So he easily spotted the unexplained guards outside his comrades’ room. What to do? He could try a straight up confrontation but not having any clue about these people levels and capabilities was a major handicap in itself.
He decided in the end to go back out the way he came after leaving his equipment in his room which appeared undisturbed. However Traksis let him know that someone had been there as she could detect traces of psi energy which weren’t his. It could have just been a member of staff but it seemed a strange time to be doing cleaning and so forth. So he went with his gut instinct that the guards were not there for reasons of protection but quite the opposite.
Cloaking himself he exited the building and used [Flight] to scale the outside of the building until he reached his Sister’s floor. He was pretty certain this was where her room should be otherwise someone was about to get a rude awakening.
Now this was going to be a bit tricky to say the least. He would obviously need to enter without detection. But did the hotel have an armed alarm system? Looking closely outside the apartment windows he could see nothing. But he thought better not to risk it. So throwing caution to the wind as always, he created the thinnest psi blades he had ever made, in the form of a open ended box shape and used it to slice a square out of the wall instead of the window.
Luckily perhaps, Sarah and Maria did not see, the gaping hole in the wall that winked out of existence as soon as Sam entered the room. As they were both knocked out cold on their beds. At least after a quick check of their vitals, Sam decided this was the case – drugged and breathing very slowly. They were also trussed up with some sort of cord. Sam went to remove it but saw that it was not simple cord but connected in someway, as he could see residual psi energy coming from it. Not knowing what to do he just left it for now.
Sam, then tiptoed around their room in the half light, scooping up any of their belongings he could find. Then he floated his two comrades and their belongings back out the way he came in. Now where to go in an unknown world with unknown threats? He didn’t even know where Lopez and Bartholomew were.
Sam groaned inwardly, realizing that torturing someone for information seemed one of the few avenues open to him. Assuming he could subdue them that is.
A plan slightly less desperate formed in his head as he hovered outside the hotel. He could try and follow the guards back to their evil mastermind. As these idiots might not even know anything useful except perhaps how to remove the restraints safely from his friends. He also suspected he knew exactly who was responsible – “The Group” no doubt or possibly they had sold them out to someone else though the former was more lightly in such a short space of time and due to the fact that they were still in the hotel. Either way this led Sam to think that Lopez and Bartholomew were also in danger. So plan B it was.
Sam placed Traksis inside the hotel room by way of another hole in the wall. This time leaving the windows open to explain how the two had escaped the room and also to allow Traksis exit if needed. He then made his way back down to just outside the hotel entrance. He had thought of giving the insectoid instructions to wait a certain amount of time but was then nonplussed to realise that he had no idea even what their units of time were and so quickly gave up on that line of thought. He also had only asked Traksis to cause a disturbance and wasn’t sure what the little beast would do.
And so when the two guards exited the hotel shortly after, he was relieved to see the plan had worked and Traksis was safe and sound also.
The two much were talking into some devices or other. Did they have normal phones in this universe? He speculated idly while he waited that they must be pretty much the same functionally – hopefully in this world they weren’t junk.
He remembered at this point of the equipment that he had left back in his room which could lead back to his activities in the mirror realm. Oh hell! Thought Sam feeling himself sinking further and further out of his depth. He had always been a good kid at school, maybe if he’d been a criminal he would have had more of an aptitude for thinking on his feet, as this new world seemed to demand.
The decision was made for him when he thought about the fact of not knowing how to safely release his sister if he lost these guys which was a distinct possibility as he remembered how slow he had been travelling through the desert of the Seracian Kingdom with his comrades cloaked in bubbles of psi energy.
Sam shot out to tendrils of psi energy to grab the two guys’ communication devices at the same time. Luckily the shock this caused them gave him time to cover them in psi energy bubbles thus containing them. He then looked around and breathed a sigh of relief as he could see no onlookers. Shooting up to the top of the building he landed with all his bubbles.
There was no time for niceties, so he removed the bubble from one of the guy’s heads so he could interrogate him. It was weird to say the least to see a disembodied head appear before him but then weirdness was becoming his middle name at this point.
“Try anything and you’re dead” said Sam flatly.
The guy immediately went to shout, so Sam slapped some psi energy duck tape over his kisser.
Sam’s mind drifted back to the shopping center were he’d killed the guy, squashing him like an over ripe tomato or was it skewering as he used shards of glass to do it. It was weird how he didn’t really think that much about the people he had killed but torturing someone gave him trepidation. However his anger at being stuck in this stupid position helped him easily overcome this. That was his sister they had kidnapped!
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But could he even break this guy to tell him anything, they were essentially gangsters it seemed. Maybe there was some other way of tricking them into spilling the information rather than spilling their guts. His [Telepathic Illusions] being level 112 wasn’t just for show surely.
He cloaked the guy completely in case someone, a surveillance helicopter or drone should happen to spot his night time activities on the roof. Funnily enough he had been.
There was a flash of bright light and Sam found himself temporarily stunned by the sensory overload. He felt his arms clamped behind his back as manacles were placed around his wrists and he was hoisted up. Sam turned to find a whole team of uniformed personnel on the roof top with him.
Despite being dazed, Sam’s mind registered that this was not “The group” and most lightly local law enforcement, if that was a thing, judging by the uniform.
“Can you at least untie my Sister and her friend?” Sam asked hopefully, looking into the eyes of the most officious looking of the group, a burly man with thinning hair and flat expression.
“Maybe I can. You will first need to tell me who exactly you are. And I have a tracker here so don’t even bother with falsehoods.” He said shortly.
Sam slumped in resignation. “We are from Earth brought here by The Group but it seems we were duped. As kidnap wasn’t what we were really expecting”
Everyone on the roof noticeably became energised at Sam’s response and all eyes zeroed in on him.
The leader just nodded his head for another team member to come over to Sam while he looked on sceptically at Sam. The woman placed a slender outstretched open palm to Sam’s chest and closed her eyes. Sam could feel a strange pulling sensation from his chest, as the dark haired woman did whatever she did. After a moment she stepped back looking very warily at Sam.
“Earth yes, but that is far from all. This guy had been very busy over the past few hours but on balance I would say a victim rather that a perp, Sir” the woman said regarding her senior officer, as she finished up her preliminary evaluation of the suspect.
Sam felt like the woman had looked through his soul.
The man his chin thoughtfully before replying “Let’s get this situation wrapped up before we get any more attention. We’ll finish their psych evaluation back at base”
At this point Sam, gave a sigh of relief and some of the tension left his body as he let himself be man handled into a transport – he was just glad to see he was in the hands of someone not directly hostile and maybe, just maybe he would finally get some much needed answers down the line.
Trackers were cool, scary in that they could use psionic powers to trace through your mental projections to find out what you had been doing over the past hours, days or even weeks depending on the capabilities of the tracker and what they had to work with. Some trackers could even pick up mental projections or traces from non-living objects like cars and things, very strange.
The cool factor was that whoever these people were they did not need to torture Sam and his friends to get to the facts and also he didn’t need to convince them of all the crazy things that had happened since he’d got there. Which was good as he’d tried several times thinking up ways to make it sound plausible – that they were the good guys but with the things he’d done he wasn’t even sure that was the case anymore.
Who were the good guys in a multi-verse were it was dog-eat-dog and any newly merged universe was easy pickings despite what the news channels portrayed.
Well at the moment it seemed that the military arm of the multi-verse – the unimaginatively named “Star Corps” were the current “good guys” even though they had them locked down in this facility somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
It had now been hours and Sam was starting to get antsy. The crew had filled him in on the details: They were innocents and from the details their tracker gleaned Bartholomew and Lopez had been shipped out under guard by “The Group” to be disposed of. It seemed newly merged worlds soon lost their cache – their inhabitants losing value drastically in the multi-verse as their population became easier to obtain.
Sam was of course tempted to escape then and there. The manacles they had placed on him, made of some metallic substance pressed into his wrists, no doubt they were meant to block his psionic abilities but his psionic juice just kept on flowing. If anything they seemed a bit worse the wear, as he looked down at the material under the florescent glow of the room’s bare lighting.
He realised as he looked around blinking several times to try and clear his vision, this was the first time they hadn’t been on the move in well over a day. The holding cell, a fifteen by fifteen foot cube was a weird futuristic thing, a stark geometric contrast to his life on earth the past few weeks. Where everything seemed to have gone back in time not forward, with building wrecked and burned – very much the typical apocalyptic scene.
He had of course pleaded to be allowed to go with the “Star Corps” to help in the rescue bid but had just been given some weird looks. Did they think he was some wild cannon, who would go off the deep end and jeopardise their mission? He wondered how much and how far exactly that tracker had seen into their minds. What did they know? It was driving him kind of nuts not knowing. Driving all his thoughts towards the idea of busting out of there.
He looked at Sarah and Maria’s pale gaunt faces, the drugs clearly hadn’t done them any favours and with those stupid cuffs on all their strength seemed to be sapped from them, leaving them in a groggy stupor. At least they were safe here for now. If only he could think of a way forward, a way out.
Sam pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, sitting up on his bunk bed, and bathed in the temporary decrease in a throbbing headache which had come upon him. Maybe coming here had been a bad idea, at least on earth he knew where the hell he was and who was friend and who was foe – mostly. Here the friendly of the bunch was lightly to incarcerate him for just to survive in this messed up multi-verse. Could he get a lawyer? Did they have such a thing? No harm in finding out Sam thought, his mind erratically ping-ponging around ideas.
As it happened they did have something like lawyers but they weren’t human at all. Clearly long ago the law enforcement here had decided reading a felon their rights was a lengthy and wasteful use of time and henceforth had delegated the job over to someone who would never get bored of such things – an AI.
Sam stared at the spherical object that looked like a cross between a lucky cue ball and a digital alarm clock. He addressed the thing after placing his index fingers where he’d been told too by the guard.
“What happens to us now?” he asked, kind of holding his breath but biting the bullet as he had to hear the news good or bad.
“You are currently being held in this facility for future evaluation by the Star Corps administration. However at the current rate of depletion of your account you will need to be transferred to another facility in under 2 hours and fifty three minutes.” Said a surprisingly human voice.
Didn’t that just take the biscuit being billed for his time in the cell.
“What will happen to me after evaluation?” droned Sam in monotone, not liking this AI.
“The possibilities are many but at the same time few. As you have no backer you will need to apply to one. This can be done automatically for you once you Psi evaluation is completed.” The Ai replied.
“Where will I be transferred to when my credits run out?” responded Sam.
“You will be placed on the market and will be then transferred to your owner’s choice of destination” the AI said causing Sam to jolt upright in his cot.
Ok, good job I asked for a lawyer or whatever this is, thought Sam looking across at his sister and Maria who he was grateful to see seemed to be still out for the count and none the wiser.
“Is there anyway the Psi evaluation can be done quicker, I mean before the two hours and fifty or so minutes are up?” Sam probed.
“I am authorised to make the evaluation if you agree to me doing so now” said AI, cueball.
“Yes, yes I do.” Blurted out Sam who didn’t want to become an indentured slave any time soon, if he could help it.
“Place me against your chest and I will begin the evaluation” said AI, saviour.
With some difficulty Sam brought the object to his chest, his manacles getting in the way. He then found his hands were trapped against the side of the AI as very unpleasant streams of some kind of energy pulsed into his chest.
Then he was somewhere else altogether.
He was in a vast space that seemed to stretch for eternity in all directions with him suspended in the middle, or at least his consciousness as he had no body visible. But it wasn’t a complete void behind him a vista of billions of stars and galaxies hung in space like a neon cityscape at night. Then his mind felt like it was being pulled inside out, as all around him blurred.
Sam awoke mouth dry, lying half on and half off his cot in the cell, the AI floating a few inches from his face.
“Your evaluation was successful and due to your unconscious state I have had time to send and receive data on your applications. Would you like me to read out your choices for admission?” said the overly efficient AI.