The world was slowing down and the Phoenix team were watching it lurch around them. Seiren slid down the banister, the splinters facing away from his legs as he watched a gauss-propelled bullet fly past him and rip a hole in the cleaver-wielding man's thigh.
Seiren watched the cleaver fall out of the man's hands and sail over the banister, intersecting Seiren's direction of travel and landing in the ground below. He turned to spot the man with the sub-machinegun and landed on his back, firing his pistol three times at the man - hitting his legs twice while the third shot hit the wall a couple of feet behind him - while another burst through the ceiling above the sub-machine gun wielding man and struck him in the shoulder, near the joint.
Overhead, Seiren could see another series of shots overhead as the sub-machinegun wielding man crumpled and fell - followed shortly by another report from the gauss gun. Aoi turned around to see a woman in her twenties fall face down on the floor, gargling and mewling through the newly acquired trans-tracheotomy.
Aoi flinched and backed into Bronzi, jaw agape as a rivulet of the woman's blood splashed at her feet. She took a step back and clung to Bronzi for a moment before releasing her grip.
All she could feel was a rising churning in her stomach and her breathing shortening as she fixated on the red puddle from the woman's neck growing bigger and bigger and seeping through the cracks in the floor. "This was what I was trying to avoid-" She breathed as she rushed down the stairs to follow Bronzi, watching Seiren roll over to get up and move with them.
-
"Its fine, but its gettin' kinda windy up 'ere." Melissa replied to Zeta. "Narn' 'em's game to climb up after I put 'em back down."
Zeta and Panther examined the Lmanel in front of them, and he didn't seem to be like the others. Judging by how he ran earlier, Panther was able to guess that he was fully aware of what he was doing.
He was lying face down with his shoulders on the side, one arm holding the ground beneath him and the other reaching into his jacket and whipping something out.
The first thing Ellen heard when she touched off and started heading towards Zeta and Panther's position was a gunshot. Panther was struck in the forearm by a .50 Lorath Handcannon round, spinning him sideways.
Enzo's thorough search of the desk yielded some bullets, a dinky pistol and some stimulants to keep you awake on the job. However, a grin came across his lips when he spotted something that didn't belong there: A large wad of money with a band across it hiding in an envelope taped to the underside of the desk drawer. The logo on the band appeared to be a seven pointed star with a black laughing skull in the middle.
A paycheck for the stiff that was in the water - and he didn't have the time to spend it. What Enzo didn't recognise was the symbol on it. It didn't belong to any of the gangs he ran with or interacted with in his past. Maybe it was some new outfit, he guessed. As he weighed the envelope, he felt something in there that wasn't money. Touching it further, it felt like a memory card of some sort.
Pulling it out and looking at it further, it had "BACKUP" etched onto it and a symbol for the Water Plant that he'd seen on the way in.
"...Shit, that cloud's gettin' big, innit?" Melissa observed dryly over the radio.
-
Luca, meanwhile was facing a different problem as he watched the crowd start to descend upon him. His Grapple Stunner was crackling with life as his earpiece awaited input from the person he'd called. He had to do two things at once, hold conversation and fight. He had to get her input, he knew that her medical skills probably surpassed that of Panther, Smith and Dr. Shakes.
Oh, he was good at holding a conversation while fighting - but only to belittle his enemies, not to discuss business with someone in a completely different location and who was in all likelihood in a bunker several miles beneath the sea on a completely different planet.
Well, he was
half correct about that wild tangent. He raised his fist into the air and sent it towards the ground, flaring with stray arcs of electricity and punching the concrete, sending a wave of electricity through the crowd ahead of him to buy him some time.
"Aiesu, you there?" He asked as he watched a few people stumble towards him.
The response came late. But it came.
"Unh.. Yeah...?" a groggy voice replied. Though the communication was essentially real time, she was on a different world, let alone different timezone. "What do you want?"
"I need something -" The sound of a fist impacting with an abdomen could be heard on his end of the line.
"Anger manageme--"
"-analysed."
"Oh."
"Got a moment?"
"Mmm. I do," she drawled. He could hear the sound of a seat squeaking and then the clatter of keys. "Hold onnn..." she hummed softly to herself. He could make out the sound of a coffee machine.
"Excelle-URK!" Luca could be heard trying to pry someone off of him in the crowd as he started trying to wade through the crowd. "Get off me!"
"Hum..." she said, a beep sounding quietly over the comms: A familiar pang of an error dialogue alert.
"PC Load... Letter? What...? Uuuhhnn... Hold on..." the keys clattered more now. He could hear her yawning.
"Take your-" The sound of the Grapple Stunner could be heard reeling out - a very distinct noise as though a boulder was hurled off a cliff with a steel cable attached to it and rasping against the edge of the cliff. "-time." The sound of rushing air could be heard muddying the communication line. "Did I wake you?" He was sticking to the side of a building and looking down on the crowd who were jumping up and clawing at the walls to try and get a piece of him.
"What are you... doing at this... NNh..." she yawned again. "Yeah. Ugh... Why does it have to be bothersome when I
NEED it? I'm just gonna reboot, okay?"
"Fie. Okay, can I send you something while that's happening?" He now had his communicator in his spare hand, flicking it open and making access.
"Um... What like video or like... Chemistry?"
"Bit of both plus some photos."
"I can do photos but ... Alright, hold on--"
The line went dead.
Luca growled and sighed for a bit as he looked down. He was beginning to watch the crowd of angered,
blued people start to lose interest in him and start heading towards the warehouse where Vita and Aoi's companions were.
He couldn't let that happen. He pocketed the Communicator, set it to take mental commands, and disengaged the grapple stunner's piton from the wall he was grappled to as he leapt off of it and landed in the very middle of the crowd with his crackling fist leading the way.
"Phoenix..."
cracka-THOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!
"PUNCH!"
Aiesu's end of the line would probably have picked up a huge wave of signal interference from Luca's end as excess electromagnetic pulses bled from the Grapple Stunner. She would've heard the sound of a thunderbolt. The crowd dispersed and scattered, sent in all directions flying as Luca remained in the centre.
Indeed, elsewhere she was patting the side of her display and clinging to one of her ears as she grumbled - a ringing filling her ears. The line finally resumed, crackling through the interference.
"Gyuh... RIP headphone users... Load... Load... Hokay! 'Ready to accept sample'!" she read the dialogue in front of her... "Sorry for my waits... I sorta uh... 'Nodded off'...?" she struggled. Unlike the Aiesu he'd met, she didn't speak trade quite as fluently.
Luca was kneeling down with his fist stuck in the concrete. He pulled it out and realised that his right arm was on fire. He patted it out casually like a casual annoyance. "Sure, here we go." He pressed a button and off it went.
A screen popped up on Aiesu's end. It appeared to be a custom-made file transfer protocol for large files and quick compression. This archive, however wasn't so big, and its best capabilities would go unnoticed.
Code:
╔═══════════════════════════════╗
║ Transfer Protocol: VitPro-72a ║
║-Archive Name------------------║
║ Handler'sReachJob_Now.tar ║
║ 0.15gb ║
║-File Listing------------------║
║ ◊ ccs_00223.img ║
║ ◊ ccs_00224.img ║
║ ◊ ccs_00225.img ║
║ ◊ ccs_00226.img ║
║ ◊ ccs_00227.img ║
║ ◊ gcs_00228.img ║
║ ◊ img_01701.img ║
║ ◊ photo_33012.img ║
║ ◊ photo_33013.img ║
║ ◊ results_med_p_0231.csv ║
║ ◊ results_med_p_1464.csv ║
║ ◊ results_med_p_0434.csv ║
║ ◊ results_med_p_0123.csv ║
║ ◊ mri_scan_data.mri ║
║ ◊ chem_sample_15-04-35.che ║
║-------------------------------║
║ ... 45 more Files; Total:60 ║
╚╣ Accept Files? y/n ╠══════════╝
Aiesu hummed quietly to herself, hitting return - surprised by the latency of the thing.
The file contained photographs of what everyone had been seeing when they got to Handler's Reach. Photos of people who looked like they were in a trance, pictures of blue algae floating on the water in a water treatment plant, the strange intrusion made to the pipeline that Zeta's WIND armour saw.
Medical results from Dr. Shakes in Sargasso, Scott, Panther and Aoi, all heading in different directions and getting different answers, all there and cumulated into a great big tarball. The most recent additions were Luca's photos of some medical waste he was unable to identify. There was also a photo of a Lorath passed out that Aiesu might've recognised as someone from her University - Echelon found it.
"The people around this town have lost their mind, and now that its dark, they're waking up and, well-" He started streaming what he was seeing from his headset to them. Multiple people were writhing on the ground, having being shocked by the Phoenix Punch. Their bodies were arranged as though they had all been tossed from a single point; exactly where Luca was standing. "-I've had to discipline some of them. The team thinks its a chemical or a bioweapon of some sort, and we've seen the symptoms. What could it be?"
"Huh..." Aiesu's voice crackled over the comm. He could hear a key press every few seconds and the heavy clicking rasp of the processor decks on her end - and the whirring of the cabinets either side of her desk as the system came to life, starting to really work with her now.
"That's what Scott said too."
"Did he mention piracy?"
Luca drew a blank and shook his head. Aiesu would watch his streaming view wave side to side. "I don't follow, why?"
"It looks like a mutated version of something we made. Whoever copied it tried to make it barely different enough for the patents not to apply."
Luca's lips dropped for a moment as tried to comprehend that at a biological scale. "They... stole your stuff?"
"Yeah. Its actually not a bad knockoff. Until it meets local stuff in the body and then it metabolises when the body's defences panic because they screwed the composition up..."
"Judging by what I'm seeing, I don't think it was entirely a mistake."
"Who does a cheap knockoff of something then has it fuck up its customers? That's bad business, isn't it?"
Luca looked around himself and all of the
blued people were still moaning, and afraid to get up to confront Luca again. "If I didn't know any better, I'm standing in the middle of a testing bed for a chemical weapon." He looked over to the Water Processing plant and watched the cloud start to accumulate in the sky above him.
"A weapon?" she went silent for a few minutes. "Did you find this in a water supply? ... And are they performing repetitive behaviours... Like, whatever they were doing five minutes before infection?"
"They all seemed to be in a haze before sundown... huh." His tone hushed. "Weather looks nasty."
"According to this, you're set for storm. If I were you - and I am not - but if I were, I'd climb into a nice cozy hazmat suit."
"Hazmat? Wait-" Luca looked up at the clouds starting to darken the sky and blot out Nepleslia Prime's satellites and surrounding stars. He blinked for a moment as two and two begun to come together.
"Oh,
fuck me running." His tone had dropped considerably as he heard the bad news from Aiesu.
"
Excuse me?"
