Luca DR
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34 – Lurkers in the shadows
🕑 Added 2023-05-22 20:39:22 +0000 UTCSamantha was in full panic mode. Nobody had ever seen her lose her cool like that in her long years as the Head of the Bureau, not even when the real shit had hit the fan and the security of the whole nation was at risk, but now she was different. She was agitated. She was not thinking straight, and she knew it.
She left the CARF disoriented, the world spinning around her, for the first time in her whole life reality lurched and passed by too fast for her mind to grasp it. She tried and struggled, but it felt like she was grasping at straws without a purchase, and she could not stop her chaotic motion while the unfeeling world cared not for her suffering. She didn’t even know how she went from the boat to the helicopter, spending the whole time glued to her phone, feeling the acid at the pit of her stomach.
She could barely hold her dinner. Perhaps due to motion sickness, perhaps due to stress. The helicopter ride felt more turbulent than usual. She sat in the back, where the sides were open and the wind blew, but the wind was a storm and she could not feel her fingers anymore.
Then she was inside, in a warm room, and her fingers burned with pain. Perhaps it was the onset of frostbite.
She did not care.
She typed on her phone, furiously violating the thin sheet of glass that covered the capacitive sensors responsible for failing to detect her touches, while she paced around the control room of the Quadrangle. She had requested the satellites to be redirected onto Temalas City for a wide swipe, and another more sophisticated satellite to be used for a narrow-focus search that so far was not giving any results whatsoever.
What should have been reason to calm down instead only became reason to worry even more. Sometimes, the absence of data about a problem did not mean that the problem itself was absent, and in her state of ever-increasing panic Samantha’s mind kept circling back to this very conclusion.
The fact that the satellite sweep was detecting nothing was not a good thing at all. Yet, the CARF confirmed that all was within parameters and that there had been no significant events since her last visit. Despite all common sense, she felt increasingly paranoid. Or was it common sense to be paranoid, and the feeling of not behaving like common sense was just an illusion?
Was it paranoia to think that a powerful psionic mage might be a danger to her and to her family?
For fuck’s sake. PsyOps had name-dropped her son, a thing that had never happened before. She should have known that, being in the presence of a mind reader, information about her private life was bound to leak through, percolating out of her mind despite the layers of shielding.
In fact, she had factored in the event and calculated its risks, deeming the whole thing dangerous but not requiring any particular actions on her part. For all means and purposes, it even happened later than she thought! But suddenly it was no longer an acceptable risk, was it? Why had she thought it would be acceptable when she decided to work with that man?
How foolish had she been?
She always thought that as long as she was the one paying the price, all bargains were worth it if the stakes required them. There was no moral threshold that she could not cross, no lowest point in her ethic system. It was truly a bottomless chasm where she had descended and come out the savior of the United States more than once.
Never had she been celebrated for this, beyond a silent praise and a meaningless medal she could not show anyone. But she was not in for the fame.
What was she in for, actually? She could not remember the last time she asked herself this question and came up with a satisfactory answer. For the nation, she proclaimed when she accepted the position. For the world, she said when she met with the other leaders of the powers that be and forged iron-strong international deals.
For herself, she told her image in the mirror behind closed doors when the world became too much to bear and the stakes were high enough that a normal person would break and their mind flee back to the safety of their subconscious.
But perhaps she had lied to herself all these years. Ever since that dick of her ex-husband had walked out on her and on their child.
Perhaps…
Finally Albert replied to her text.
Nothing out of the ordinary, the text read. He was at home and everything was fine. He was with Marc.
The rest of the staff had been on edge since she arrived at the Quadrangle with more force than even the storm that was raging outside it, ordering people left and right with no sign of pause, preparing all task forces and operators to move out at the first sign of danger. Finally they allowed themselves to breathe a sigh of relief, watching the most powerful woman in the room deflate her anger and panic, and once again they realized that she was someone who had no magic powers but was scarier than the psion currently detained in the CARF.
“Fucking psycho.” She cried out in frustration, while everyone in the room looked down at their feet pretending to be as busy as they could possibly be with their work. “He’s playing mind games.” She said. Her voice was shaking, and there were streaks of dried tears on her cheeks. “He’s playing fucking mind games with me huh? Get me the CARF warden, I’ll show that fucker what real pain looks like.”
***
The night ended when Marc decided it was time for him to go home and for Albert to sleep. Indeed he exhausted by the veritable rollercoaster of emotions and worries of the night. In the end, Marc and him both agreed that there was not much they could do to deal with the Aubrey situation other than wait, and there was no use in worrying. They better wait until things started to happen, and see what to do from there, lest they actually set in motion events themselves, events that perhaps would otherwise have never started to even move in the first place.
Of course, there was always the option of calling Lloyd and getting a second opinion from someone with more worldly knowledge than Albert, but he could feel the storm coming if he did so and would much rather redo the patience quest fifty times than tell his grandpa.
This didn’t mean that he wouldn’t do it. It was the right thing to do and he would do it… after some procrastination. After, for instance, having slept a good night of sleep, which was the least offensive kind of procrastination. He could rewind time after he woke up in the morning to mitigate the problem further, and have the added benefit of having all night to come up with something to say that would not make him look like the fool he was, and to clear his head before the inevitable talking to he would receive.
Marc had insisted on going home on foot, refusing the money Albert offered to give him for a taxi. They had joked about how convenient it was that the system would offer money as a reward for completing the daily challenges, but in the end Marc argued that he could never accept the cash since it was the hard earned prize for the quests. That, and because he needed to clear his head as well. It seemed that Albert was not the only one who was more worried than he looked.
It was on the way back to the dorm that something happened.
The layer of frost sparkled with the light of the moving cars. The traffic was light this late at night, being nothing more than the occasional strobe light passing by, reflected by the myriad of ice crystals that had colonized every surface exposed to the outside cold and had been growing ever thicker over the last couple of days.
Marc struggled to keep his footing. He wondered, for a moment, whether he should have accepted Albert’s offer and taken a taxi back to the dorm. He could also have paid for the ride himself, but the truth was that he was not comfortable with getting into a car with a stranger, even if the stranger was a taxi driver who was literally doing his job.
The idea of having to talk to him, of having to sit in the back… it was better to walk. The biting cold was good for his raging mind too, busy with a million and one ideas and theories. There was no wind when he left Albert’s house but in the few minutes that followed the wind had picked up and the cold was becoming unbearable. The frost beneath his feet made crunchy sounds as the crystals flattened.
There was a shortcut back to the dorm, which would save him a good ten minutes of walking. There, the air was stiller than it was along the main street, the tall buildings and narrow passageways an obstacle for the flow of wind, offering refuge.
He was not scared of dark alleys. He had never been. Besides, what could ever happen this late at night, and with this cold?
He could never have guessed that two magically enhanced individuals, identified by the BSA as Codename:PsyOps and Codename:SpaceOps were there to wait for him, their intentions none too friendly.
