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  1. In his tattered dreams, Kesed found himself in that room again. He’d had that dream enough times, now. There was a nagging sense of familiarity to the room, to what was going on in it. He stepped forward, and in that moment, felt a deep foreboding in the pit of his stomach: instinct telling him that whatever it was, it was going to be ugly. Something he didn’t want to see. But he found himself walking forward, anyway. Some things you had to see. Call it bad justification, call it a sort of second sense. Some of the investigation team got that way about certain scenes. Kesed’d learned to pay attention to those instincts. As he strode forward, the room took shape about him, hardening into sterile clarity from the fuzziness of the dream. It was a containment room, like any other in the Heron Industries research facility. And there were two figures in the centre of the room, and shadows bleeding into the rest of it, obscuring everything in a shifting murk. He frowned, trying to make out who they were. He never could, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t seem to work out what the shadows were hiding, either. The psych always told him that was important, and he’d tried it all: dream journals, pills, but the dreams never seemed to quite leave him. If someone was trying to send him a message, Kesed’d just rather they have sent him an email. Cleaner and quicker than this sort of broken telephone. He woke up to the sound of his phone going off. It tore him from sleep, as surely as if an alarm had gone off. There was still no light through the shutters, not that he could make out. The glowing green numerals on the digital clock beside the bed were too bloody early for any sane man to be awake. The sense of foreboding only deepened. Few reasons Kesed could think of, when it came to why he’d be getting a work call at this bloody hour. He wasn’t on duty this week, and was off-site, but everyone knew that even when you were on investigation, even when you were off-duty, you were still on tap for incident management if the incident commander saw fit. Kesed reached out for his phone, blearily. “Arnkell,” he growled. “Kesed.” He recognised the voice instantly, and his concern levels only spiked drastically. This wasn’t one of the on-site teams, or the duty officer. She did other work for Heron Industries, some of which Kesed only suspected and had no way of confirming, and expected he’d be ruthlessly terminated if he ever knew the full extent of her activities. “There’s been a containment breach at the facility and the entire facility has been placed under security lockdown. Code Red.” “Sandhya. What’s happened to the on-site teams?” “Lost all contact,” Sandhya replied, briskly. “One of them managed to trigger the lockdown, so we know there has been a containment breach but the site itself is secure.” “Comms?” “None preceding the lockdown.” Which made things worse, Kesed thought. His mind had cleared enough for him to work that out. The situation was ugly as all hell, and he couldn’t for the life of him make sense of why there had been no word from the security teams on-site even before the lockdown had been triggered. “Assets?” “Red Team went in to secure the installation,” Sandhya said. “No word from them, but there was a distress signal from Red Lead’s emergency beacon.” Kesed pinched the bridge of his nose and thought. Wondered if it was worth being yanked out from the dream, thrown into a situation like this. Red Team was solid, which meant that whatever the hell had gone wrong at the facility, it had gone terribly, terribly wrong indeed. “What do you need from me?” Sandhya’s primary work in Heron Industries was asset management, which meant that in any reasonable world, Kesed Arnkell, security officer, black sheep, and overall failure should not be answering to her. In any reasonable world, Kesed should’ve been receiving a call from the duty officer, or the team leader reactivating all possible resources to manage this incident. But this was not in fact a reasonable world, and Sandhya was his handler. What tangled webs we weave, Kesed thought. So many people watching so many people. That was how Heron Industries worked: trust through accountability. Everything you did was watched. “I’m brokering the assistance of deniable assets,” Sandhya said. “You’re Blue Lead. Use them to secure the facility and lift the lockdown. Until the lockdown is lifted, nothing leaves the installation, not even comms. Report on the situation, and ascertain the status of Red Team if you can. Incident report to come afterwards.” “In your assessment, that is necessary?” Kesed asked. “Yes,” Sandhya replied, without hesitation. He’d never known her to hesitate. There was ice water in her veins. “And Kesed—one of the researchers was off-site at the time. Use all possible discretion to ensure he’s clean, but you’ll need his access.” Because they didn’t know what they didn’t know, Kesed thought. And because part of him, the wary, suspicious part of him, had been unable to rule out an inside job. The circumstances: the speed at which the installation had been placed under lockdown without any comms from the on-site security teams—a simple answer to all of these was that the compromise was internal. And that meant the off-site researcher was a potential connection. Did he know too much? Kesed didn’t know. Use all possible discretion, Sandhya had said. Researchers were the most valuable asset Heron Industries had, which meant that she wanted him alive and functional, no matter what. “Understood.” Instinct made him ask the question. Kesed would later wonder if it would have changed anything, if he regretted asking it, after all. “Who is the researcher? Do I know him?” He caught the very slight pause on the other end before Sandhya said, “Whyren Halcyon.” Fierfek, Kesed thought. Hard not for the name to bring that reflexive flash of bitterness and pain; the memory of better days. What had happened? “Do your job, Kesed,” Sandhya said, crisply. “I have mine.” “Roger that.” It was tempting to sit on his bed, in the dim not-light, even after the call had ended, staring into the darkness. Perhaps it was the fact that the dream still haunted him. Sometimes, he had dreams in which he was dying, although he never seemed to be able to see his killer. The shadowed room terrified him more. Whyren Halcyon. It had been at least two years. Emails and text messages that had gone unread; pings that vanished, swallowed up by digital space and the yawning chasm that had grown between them. There was that hostile edge to Whyren, that distance that Kesed had never fully understood, though he’d long since given up fighting it. It happened, Kesed thought. You were friends once; inseparable. Almost like brothers, even. But people changed, and common ground dwindled, grew vanishingly smaller, and then faded altogether. That was the way of the world. You moved on. And there was work to be done. There always was. He forced himself to his feet with a quiet sigh, and padded over to the kitchen unit. At the very least, he was going to make himself a bloody coffee before he tried to work out what was going on with the latest mess that Sandhya had dumped into his lap. “This,” Whyren said, with no small amount of distaste, “Is one hell of a mess.” Sandhya regarded him, eyebrow raised, inviting him to comment. Or, Whyren supposed, to dig himself deeper in the hole. Should’ve figured, of course. The one night he signed out of the installation to take a walk, to get a drink away from the stifling weight of the constant supervision and oversight, would be the damned night that they’d had some sort of containment breach or other. Whyren shivered at the thought. Research teams were tackling a variety of projects in that installation. He was aware of some of them, was one of the lead researchers on a very particular project, for all his sins. Some of which weighed heavily on his soul, even now. “Why don’t you tell me what you think happened, Whyren?” Sandhya asked. As though they were having a conversation over tea. As though Sandhya and her team had not swooped in on him the moment the facility went into lockdown, to secure him. He was an asset. They all were, in the eyes of Heron Industries. No one was indispensable. Even if you were one of the lead researchers on Project Replicant. God, Whyren hoped to hell that the containment breach hadn’t come from Project Replicant. The last thing he needed on his employee files was responsibility for yet another incident. “I don’t know,” he said, bluntly, meeting Sandhya’s gaze. “I was signed out of the installation, as you know. I wanted to get a walk to clear my head, and get a drink.” “There are on-site facilities,” Sandhya said. “Why did you feel the need to leave?” “It can be stifling in there,” Whyren said. Elected for the truth, because anything else would paint him as a potential conspirator if Sandhya was suspecting some sort of insider job. He wouldn’t be surprised, really. Disgruntled employees were wont to try their hands at industrial espionage and sabotage, sometimes as part of a defection. He wondered if that was what was going on here. “I was working on one of the problems that had surfaced with my project, and felt a change of scenery would do me some good.” Sandhya kept a good poker face. Whyren privately suspected it was because she scared more people into talking that way. He was wise to the trick, though, and kept his mouth shut. “Let’s say I believe you,” Sandhya said, at last. “I’m perfectly honest,” Whyren said, which would’ve gotten him an incredulous stare from Kesed, so long ago. The memory was tinged with pain, and a touch of guilt. Conscience, Whyren? Kesed would’ve asked. Even now, Whyren would’ve answered. He wondered why Kesed was coming to mind again, after so long. Perhaps it was the fact he was thinking about the project again, and the problems they were having with memory and identity. It’d been Kesed’s area of expertise, and things had never been the same since he’d left. “The most important step,” Sandhya continued, “Is to lift the lockdown and to re-secure the installation. The ongoing research in there is of paramount importance to Heron Industries.” Whyren nodded absently. He knew that. The higher-ups had their eyes on Project Replicant. He’d lost track of the number of progress updates he’d dispatched, even though the project had begun to get bogged down in a number of dead ends. Sometimes it felt like they were breathing down his neck, expecting him to devise solutions to hard problems that just weren’t tractable. “This means that I need you to re-enter the installation and confirm the status of the research projects. Assess them for damages, or disruption.” Whyren said, “What.” Sandhya simply looked at him. “I’m not security,” Whyren protested. “I’m a researcher.” “That’s why I need you to conduct this assessment,” Sandhya said, coolly. “You won’t be alone, Whyren. I have an operative and a response team underway, and I’m recruiting additional deniable assets in order to ensure your safety. But they will need access, and the only one who can perform this assessment is you.” Whyren resisted the urge to slump in his chair. Of course it was. Of course it came down to that. You were an asset. This meant that you were disposable, and if Heron Industries thought that sending you into a breached installation under security lockdown was the best course of action, then the megacorp would do it, ruthlessly. “Please tell me you’ve got a good team,” he said, resignedly. Sandhya smiled. “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “Kesed has been an exemplary operative, and the team is up to standard.” “You have got to be bloody joking,” Whyren snapped, with disbelief. “Of all people, you choose to send—to send him into a compromised facility?” Whyren had always prided himself on being unsentimental, and coldly pragmatic. Or at least, pragmatic enough. But this decision from Sandhya was throwing him, badly. “Why?” he asked, at last. “Why do you have to do this?” But Sandhya, he thought, was at least every bit as cold as he was, and then just that ounce more ruthless. “Because he’s who I have on tap,” Sandhya said, returning honesty for honesty. “And because I trust him, and I trust his record. We need that installation re-secured, Whyren. Those projects are too important to lose just like that. And that means using every single resource I have on hand—even Kesed.” Especially Kesed, she might well have said. Whyren sighed and gave in. He was going to hate every second of this, he thought. The flickering lights from the sign were neon-bright, even in the light rain and the night mist. The Electric Sparrow, it read, with a simple sparrow, wings spread, stenciled in light after the words. There were districts where megacorp representatives never entered; not without a hi-vis security team armed to the teeth. This was not one of them. The district was run-down, and the woman who leaned against the wall outside the Sparrow wore the sort of mil-spec body armour that might’ve fallen off the back of a truck somewhere. She made no effort to conceal the carbine she carried; a Tekiel M-R7, if Sandhya wasn’t mistaken. She took in the passers-by with a lazy amusement, the sort that said she’d seen the worst the world had to offer, and laughed at it. Sandhya nodded to her. “Twei,” she said. Twei was a bit of a legend among those who ran the mists. You became a legend the same way mistrunners usually did: worked a couple of jobs for megacorps, did something so extraordinary or so daring or so impossible that it catapulted you to the status of a street goddess, an urban deity. In Twei’s case, she’d identified every single infiltrator on a mistrunner crew employed by Urbain Enterprises purely by tapping their comms and listening in on their speech patterns. Sandhya knew these things. It was her job to know things about people: it was what made her so valuable to Heron Industries. That, among other things. “Been a while, Lira,” Twei greeted, casually. No one used real names, not this deep in the districts where some doorways bore bullet holes, not this far below in the shadows, far away from the towering skyscraper offices of the megacorps. This district wasn’t the worst, but it was far from the best; the sort of place you went to to disappear, or to die quietly. It meant it was the best place to find hardened operatives who knew how to be discreet, who knew how to get things done without asking questions. Deniable assets. Mercenaries for hire. Mistrunners. Sometimes, mistrunners were a mixed group. There were those who’d just started to run the mists for the first couple of times. There were some good ones in there, but more often than not, they were cocky and overconfident, and prone to getting themselves killed because they hadn’t worked out where they stood in the very large criminal underworld, much less how to develop reasonable tactics, or assessments of situations. The experienced ones, though. The ones who’d gotten scars, and a few runs under their belt. The reliable ones, the ones with a decent reputation. Those were the ones well worth the boxings paid, and sometimes they achieved better results than full Heron Industries security teams. You could hire a mistrunner crew if you knew the right forums and boards to visit, but in the end, it always came down to a face-to-face meet. Trust was a rare commodity in the mists, and mistrunners wanted to know who was hiring them just as much as Sandhya wanted to know who she was hiring. The Electric Sparrow was one such dive: mistrunners hung out there, and the teams she’d identified and put some feelers out to all indicated a preliminary willingness to meet in the Sparrow and hear her out on the specifics of the job. The woman running the Sparrow, a former mistrunner by the name of Gan, was a fixer who’d worked her contacts for Sandhya and had come through many a time. Booking the entire Sparrow on short notice in order to secure it was a bold move, and one that would put her in Gan’s debt, but that was the way things worked in the mists. Her own superiors knew that. Sandhya stepped out of the mists and into the dim confines of the Electric Sparrow. She had some mistrunners to meet, and the clock was ticking. LG85/AN12: Do Kandra Dream of Electric Sparrows? “And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.” —Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov As Scadrial marches on into the neon-washed reaches of the far future, Heron IndustriesTM is one of the megacorporations at the forefront of innovation, driving technological progress through its extensive R&D investments, and combining engineering with Hemalurgic science to usher in a new era of wonders and prosperity. ...For some. This, however, might be about to change for you. A representative from Heron IndustriesTM has been sighted lurking around the Electric Sparrow, putting out word that she has a job for a skilled Mistrunner crew. This, you hear, is the score: the big one. Heron IndustriesTM has never been stingy in compensating the mercenaries it hires, and for all the times you’ve run the mists, there might never be such an opportunity again. All you need to do is to penetrate a secure installation under lockdown, deal with a containment breach, and the boxings will be wired to your account. The risks are high, but the rewards are greater still. What could possibly go wrong? General Rules: Win Conditions: Roles: Taken House Rules: This is an anonymous game. Please do not post in this thread. Please sign up via PMing me on the Shard, or DMing me via Discord. If your sign-up has been acknowledged, I will tell you so. If not, ping me again in two working days for a reminder. Sign-ups are now open and will close on Monday, 25th April, at 0000hrs SGT [=GMT+8]. The game will begin as smoothly as I can facilitate this, but aim to get everything up and running by 0100hrs. Next post is reserved for player counts and rule clarifications, and will be updated with the player list once the game begins. Please do not ask rule clarification questions publicly either. p.s. hi guys i know kas has been wanting 2 run this but he needed a break from the shard & se so im running this 4 him el says shld be ok how hard can gming a game be amirite pls have mercy tho ive never gmed before will be my first game back since ag8 nice 2 see u all again =) Quick Links:
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