Joey takes a long, slow breath–she’s felt on edge ever since the evening started, and now, she’s even more tense. Kyle’s still staring ahead at the now empty screen, likely still processing where they’re at.
He breaks the silence in his usual way--being overwhelmed with the looming dread they're now facing. “Fates on a stick, Joey. What did we get into? We were supposed to be researching something curious. Now we’re in a race for the fate of the world. How did this get so messed up?” Kyle forces himself to take a deep breath, and he’s stroking his beard like he always does when he’s stressed out.
“Just because it’s a giant mess, doesn’t mean we stand to the side.” She rises off the couch after having given the entire evening a long thought. “Kyle, they’re coming after our home. We’re not going to let them, plain and simple. But we need to work this like we’re counterintelligence. We need to play this smart, or we could get a lot of people killed.”
“Why can’t we just meet with them–”
“We can’t meet with them. King had an intricate knowledge of all of them. This means they were recently surveilled, followed, or otherwise observed by outsiders–something that Nick and Levine both noted. Phones and emails are super risky, and meeting them in person, too. We are an outside factor. Something King can’t count on,” she states with bold determination, and ties her hair back up. “We’ve got work to do, Kyle.”
“Um, ‘we?’ There’s a ‘we’ in this equation?” he asks anxiously, even as she throws on her old explorer jacket–why does it always seem perennially chilly here in Asqualia? The layer of fur on her true form would be a quick solution, but that presents far more problems, considering all her efforts to remain incognito. “Joey, what’s our plan here?”
“We have three tasks, Kyle. The first is to identify the saboteur. Our leading candidate could be Lavernius, but there might be others working with him and helping him cover his tracks, or he may be completely out of the loop! The only thing I vaguely remember about him is that I met his daughter at some picnic last summer. Kelly, I think?” She squints and presses a finger to her lips, and then it comes to her. “Goldilocks! But not in a bad way. She was just right.”
“Ahem. Time’s burning, and you’re making jokes,” Kyle grumbles.
“Right, focus time. We should at least check out Lavernius, and follow other leads. I think he’s a tech here intermittently. However, others have more immediate access and knowledge of the facility. For the second task, we need to find Volkir’s journals, wherever they’re located, and grab a copy. Then burn them.”
“Burn them?!”
“As a contingency. If we fail, the Talons don’t get their keys to godhood, not without a lot of time and effort,” she explains with a tap of her foot. “Do you want a murder-happy dragoness becoming a goddess, or having the power to destroy the planet?”
“I like my planet as it is, thanks. Even with global climate change, a terraformation on the scale you were talking about sounds even more ominous. What’s our third quest?”
“Find Drenar and Nick a way in. If we can’t find one, we make one.”
Kyle looks at her with abject terror. “Joey, if this is the point where you say you know how to make explosives, please don’t do that.”
“Hey, making explosives is a piece of cake! Well, for me at any rate. I had to make an alchemical bomb on one of the forays into a magical biozone with Nick and Professor Amaranth one time.”
“At what point is ‘giant bomb’ a solution to anything?!” he exclaims. “And why have you never told me this?”
“It's from the time when we weren’t together. Remember?” she says icily. He starts spinning his phone in his hand--he needs a fidget spinner, but hers is currently sitting in the lab! “Short version, we uh, we ran into a monster that gave even our verdant dragon of a hunter a run for his money. The bomb didn’t kill it. It just scared it off.” Kyle pinches the bridge of his nose, and groans in utter frustration.
“No bombs, Joey.”
“Fine. We’ll save that step for if and when the Talons roll through the front door. In which case, they will regret their life choices.”
“I find it troubling that you’re ready to incinerate or detonate our perennial terrorists, the Onyx Talons so quickly. I mean a lot of people would blanche at the idea of–” he stops when she glares at him with piercing lavender eyes.
“If we do nothing, they will break into our home, and kill everyone we know, Kyle. Including us. Do you want that to happen? I did a little research earlier yesterday. The Talons are bad news on so many levels. They’re very fond of taking no prisoners. I won’t even dare to mention the worst things they’re capable of.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah. So we’re doing this. You and me.” Kyle looks like he has something to say, and then he does that thing where he shrinks inwardly and throws up a hand in resignation.
“Alright, Joey. Where do we start?"
“Tomorrow, we prep the lab. Get every prototype you’ve got for weapons, armor, and equipment ready to go."
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"Boy, that could be dangerous, with the ordinance I have filed away," he mutters.
"We also need to rope in Curtis–if there are two people I trust with absolute certainty, it is Zameren and Curtis. Zameren will try to do the right thing and call SAF. But we need to be discreet until we find the saboteur. We also need to sub-task how they're going to get in. If you know any kind of exploits on teleportals, we need to examine it." From a high-level perspective, it's a sound strategy.
Kyle nods quietly while she lays out the game plan, and he makes some suggestions of his own.
It’s the start of a plan, at any rate.
First, they make a list of every staff member of Asqualia–something she’s dreading, because that list has too many people she thinks would never willingly betray the others. Most of the people that work here are dedicated to their career in the advancement of magitech, and making discoveries for various arcanist knowledge. Kyle protests when she starts breaking down people into tiers of ‘who would sell us out or get us killed for money,’ and protests even louder when a couple of his friends show up on the list too.
“Reeves is a penny pincher, not a psychopath.”
“Bitters gambles. He’s lost some money on the stock market.”
“So didn’t everyone else!”
“Seriously, I didn’t know Belichek was cheating on his girlfriend.”
"That schmuck is toast when she finds out, too."
This continues for a while. Kyle also brings up the idea of those with the greatest access to tech that could disable security, and those with the highest layers of access through the archives and knowledge of the overall facility.
More names came off the list, or are put in the ‘low’ priority risk pool. All she knows is that the number of people with motivation and access is surprisingly low, given the number of personnel here at Asqualia.
They spend more time working through the list and eventually, they both agree that trying to solve this while they're exhausted isn't going to be productive. Kyle breaks the immersion with a drawn-out yawn. “Joey, we should get some rest. We still have work tomorrow, and we need to keep up appearances. We have no idea how long we're going to be searching. Let's get a few hours of rest, alright?”
“Yeah, it's…oh.” It's three in the morning, when she looks at her watch. Pulling an all-nighter would be a bad idea. “Alright, a few hours of rest, then back to it. You should…um…” she trails off. “You should grab the couch.”
“I do have a dorm room here, you know,” he replies with a stoic tint to his words.
“Yeah, I don't care. I'm keeping the people I trust close.” She pushes away from the table and closes her laptop. Something is still bothering her--words unspoken after they had drifted for a spell, after the academy. “Kyle, we…we left some stuff unresolved before, that you and I–”
“Don't talk like there's a chance that we don't come out of this alive.” He looks up at her, her hand resting gently on his shoulder. “I know you, Joey. You have never failed before, and you're not going to start now. No matter what challenge you're up against, you've always found a solution. Let's work on the problem. Find our saboteur, and get that bunch of misfits here in one piece. Meantime, I had an idea or two. I'm gonna go and short out the teleportal platform.”
“Uh, I'm sorry…what?” She almost physically recoils at this idea.
“Fail-safes. If there are fail-safes that are tied into the facility's magical construction, doing that will trigger them. Do you know how I know that? It's a standard system design for teleportal access facilities like this.”
“You think this is how we get Drenar and Nick a way in?”
“Maybe. I need to test a few theories. Also, I remember who one of the tech guys for the teleportal is. Take a guess.”
“It can't be Lavernius, is it?” she gasps.
“Bingo, one of two guys, the other guy is Derek, he runs plant maintenance and the mana crystal power core. While in theory, someone could build another teleportal and splice into the leylines, that would take a ton of resources. I want to short it out and check his reaction.”
“This sounds like a bad idea,” she says worriedly.
“It's also the only major way to transport dozens of personnel at once. Barring that, we might find the secondary access routes. We just need to follow the surge of mana circuitry when I trip it.”
She finally lets out a faint smile. “Now there's the mad scientist I know.”
“Yeah, I'd have to be utterly mad to attempt this. Let's get some rest, and get cracking tomorrow.”
Eventually, she heads to the bedroom, and Kyle true to his word grabs a pillow, and the blanket still draped on the couch. He could have grabbed the clean and pressed one she’d left neatly folded…
Or, maybe it's because it smells like her? You're a weird, wild kitsune, Joey, she thinks with a sigh before closing the door.
She tosses back onto the bed and sits there, staring at the ceiling. There’s an errant thought that keeps bothering her, and it shouldn't. She's got a good match for faces, and it really shouldn't be possible.
But, why does it feel like this is not the first time she's seen Drenar and Julia? It's been bugging her all night. There's some strange twinge in the back of her head that tells her that getting them here is of utmost importance.
Or, she's exhausted and is betting the survival of all her work friends and associates on a group of misfit teens, now being led by a messy-haired, green-eyed intrigue, and an old friend of her professor who is technically going rogue on SAF. The people that should be protecting them.
Wait. What's with that? She swears she's seen Drenar before. Or, he looks similar to someone she knows. I'm being irrational. Before that yearbook, I’d never met him before in my life. I would know it. I mean he is kinda cute, in that awkward teen sort of way–
She puts a hand to her mouth and groans. No. Absolutely not! Don't get attached to someone you just met! The same goes for all of them! We've got a crisis to solve!