A searing pain in Azalea's head was the only thing that kept her from a proper sleep. All her life, she had been capable of lucid dreaming. Whether that meant she was knocked unconscious or simply fell asleep was irrelevant. Currently, such a situation was her saving grace, as she now had time to process what had just happened.

"Hey... Fane..." Yeah? "What the fuck?" I don- "Like what the actual fuck? Excuse me but I thought we were on a frontier planet?" We are "So why the hell is PINNACLE here?!" Well if you'd let me ta- "We're on the fringes of explored space! What's even out here? We're not doing anything that Pinnacle is opposed to! We know they're against human experimentation, but we haven't touched that! In fact that's the LAST thing we want to do!" Azzy calm down "CALM DOWN? Fane, it's PINNACLE-" Or a copycat. You said it yourself, Pinnacle has no reason to be out here. Their hiring platform doesn't even allow for commissions against normal civilians like us.

That line made her pause. Right, right, she'd forgotten she had looked up their website out of curiosity during college. In the empty void of her dreamscape, she curled up into a ball and began counting. From one to seventy nine, saying each number in passing without caring for timing. Sometimes seconds would pass, sometimes she would say multiple as fast as possible. But she always counted to 79, and when she opened her eyes, it was slowly, making sure that she could adapt to the waking worlds light.

Although it didn't get rid of her headache.

Wincing at the pain in her head, she opened her eyes and found herself surrounded by coworkers. Several alien species she recalled the names of immediately, as well as several humans. Her eyes flit around constantly, one of them glowing yellow before static filled half of her vision, making her grunt involuntarily. One of her coworkers, one miss Kchur of the Lorban species - a race of primate-looking people with massive ears and fur covering their arms and legs - noticed her. "Oh, miss Clover, you're awake!" She called, and helped Azalea up to her knees as best she could with her hands bound. Struggling to move her hands herself, she looked down and noticed they were also bound with basic electronic cuffs.

"Fane-" Already on it. "Good job. Keep it up."

The conversation between her and Fane had been done in almost an instant, and her right eye began to glow before she closed it. He had already uplinked to it, and she just needed time for it to be cracked before she could undo it whenever she wanted.

"Thank you, what's going on?" Azalea asked, leaving Kchur to sigh and adjust her position. "Well to be honest, Miss Clover, we're being held hostage... we don't exactly know what they're looking for, or why, but... some people who were caught late say that they saw mechs outside." Azalea took a deep breath and shut her other eye for a moment, thinking about how exactly she was going to get out of this and began to scan the room. She refused to die so easily, at the hands of some god damn copycats at that.

She rubbed her face with her hands and sighed out quietly, enough for them to see that she was annoyed, but not particularly worried. "I'm amazed you're so calm, I'm barely keeping myself together as is, and seeing you is kind of helping. So thanks for that." Kchur told her. Azalea didn't particularly care for the fact she had made them calmer, until she realized that if they weren't calm, she probably wouldn't be either. Looking at how many people were captured, she made note of groups that had formed. There were lots of people from the same research facilities together, including several formed from her own area. There were even some who she knew well in a single group.

You could use them "I could. The question is if they can be utilized well." I'm sure you can find some way to make it work. "No hint?" Schematics. "How helpful."

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Her left eye was a flurry of movement, searching for a group of people she could use to find a way out without being noticed. Licking her lips, she felt them pull into a smile. Oh this was going to be easy. "Sorry, I need to check on some friends." Azalea excused herself as she began to stand up. She saw other people standing, so figured she was fine to, and walked over to a group of friends and acquaintances while she pondered over what he meant by schematics. The world seemed to dim as she quietly took a step and the entire world seemed to feel like a chess board, and she was putting these copycats in check, and as she came back to reality, she took a breath put on a worried face.

"Oh my gosh, you're all okay!" Azalea gasped out in worry. "I was afraid that something bad would have happened to you all."

Your acting is scary as usual. "If I can't fool you then I still have work to do."

Conversations of catching up, trying to figure out why these people were here in the first place, as well as making sure that no one was entirely hurt took place, and Azalea joined in and put on the role of someone who was scared and just needed to feel safe. It evidently seemed to work, as her friends all tried to comfort her. Eventually it turned to Azalea, who had just asked when the approximation of the ISPF—the Interstellar Police Force—would appear.

"Ahh, right you were unconscious for a bit. They turned off the hyper-comm line. Are you okay by the way? We can't have them leave a scar." One of the girls of the group explained it to her and looked at where Azalea had been hit, but she shook her head. "I'm fine, but really, thanks for the thought. Not like I had a chance with anyone in the first place." She hoped a bit of self depreciation would help her garner more sympathy before she told them of her plan.

While she had been talking, she had been searching her memories for schematics, trying to figure out which one he was talking about, and it didn't take as long as she had originally thought it would to find out what Fane meant. She'd remembered that she was privy to finding out about a secret exit to the hypercomms relay and the executive emergency vehicle bay. And its entrance was in the corner of the room furthest from the entrance.

In the end, she began to tell them about her plan.

"There's a secret exit in the corner of the room." She whispered quietly, crouching down. "I know the code, but I don't want to risk being found out. It leads to the Hypercomms relay, if I get in there, I can turn the relay on and send out a distress signal to to ISPF, but I need them not to know what I'm doing." She gestured her head towards some of the guards at the entrance to the emergency room. Originally, this was meant in case of a panic, like the facility was overrun by a stampede of creatures they didn't know about, or if there was an intense natural disaster going on.

Quite handy in this case, though. "Yeah I don't think they intended for it to be used in a hostage situation. I'll tell them about the flaw later." What are you going to do with the reward money? "Money?" For catching 'Pinnacle', or at the least criminals. "Probably send most of it to mom and pops. Oh, I need to get my brother his marital gift, I almost forgot."

As Azalea and Fane communicated while her friends deliberated on if they should help, she decided to assert how it would work. "The hypercomms relay has an activation time of ten seconds before it reaches the nearest system. If I put it on the emergency channel, it takes immediate priority on messages sent out and connects directly to the ISPF channels."

Cuffs hacked. "Took you a bit." Never had to hack them before. "Fair enough."

Some of her friends sighed, and debated for a bit longer before one of them, a man born in the middle sectors like her, nodded. "Alright... but be safe, okay, Az?" She nodded, and guided everyone to the corner of the room. There was some other people there, and even Havardin, but they thankfully let them have some room, but when they made space in the very corner for Azalea, they asked why. "She needs to be in an enclosed space to calm down. She has a fear of wide spaces." Was the excuse. For those that didn't know Azzy it might as well have been the truth.

She opened her right eye again and it scanned the corner of the wall, revealing an invisible panel that she began to tap on, And when she was a digit away from completing it, she gave a quick 'see you soon' to the group, putting it in and sliding through as she shut the passage entrance behind her before it had even opened all the way.

Cuffs off? "Yup."

And the narrow passage before her brightened up with dim white lights, and a sign that displayed two lines. Hypercomm Relay and Vehicle Bay.

Naturally, wanting to one-up some copycats, she went to the relay.