Session 42 - The Wolf of Wall Meat

Previously, across the Horizon...
The Viesen-Croyle factory holds secrets.
Somewhere within this factory lies a cannon of great experimental strength, a cannon that has been promised to the party (with the appropriate legal forms signed, of course) if they can lift the labor stoppage that has locked the facility down.
Somewhere within this factory lies the reason for the stoppage, a mysterious event that caused a building-wide evacuation that did not lead to everyone's safe return home, something that has led to the entire building being sealed up for nearly two weeks.
Somewhere within this factory lies the cause of death for one Cirri Idraen, a technician who met her untimely end observing the experiment, and was apparently rent from existence itself.
Somewhere within this factory lies a great deal of danger, and the party can only hope they find the danger before the danger finds them. We join our heroes in the hallway, leaving the terrors behind them in their search for more...
**
Isa looks at Linnet for a moment, and comes to a decision. Without hesitating or looking, she pushes her spear into Orrey's hands and steps forward. She takes the sylph's shoulders. "Hey. Look at me." It's firm, but it's not harsh. "This is what we're here to do. What we can fix, we'll fix. What we can't fix, we'll stop. We won't let it happen to anyone else. I won't let it happen to anyone else. But I'm going to need your help to make sure that's the way it happens. Alright?"
Linnet nods slowly and mutely, wrapping the scarf around her neck. "Lead on." She's still quite pale, almost translucent, but no longer looks completely shell-shocked.
Orrey stares at the spear he's awkwardly holding, admiring both the weapon and Isa's words.
Bast seems to be thinking about something before he speaks up. "Isa? How big would you figure the thing that left those claw marks would be?"
"Depends on claw to paw to body ratio," Yves mutters, a bit shaky.
Isa gives Linnet's shoulder a last squeeze (with the unarmored hand) and pulls back to reclaim her weapon. "Big," she says to Bast. "Smaller than Diabolos was, but to have enough mass behind it to do that to the window it won't be small."
"I'm thinking we want to leave it for last, and see what we can find out about it and whatever they were doing here first. Upstairs is probably our best bet for that," Bast says.
"Do we want to explore the rest of this floor before heading up?" Orrey asks.
"I'd leave it for later. For all we know all that noise already got its attention."
"...if we cover more ground," Yves says, hesitantly, "then if there's anything big we'll run into it anyway, and if anyone is, uh, calling for help, we'll hear them sooner. Right?"
"We're not splitting up," Isa declares.
"And anyone still here after two weeks probably knows better than to be calling for help," Bast says.
"Yeah, no, we should definitely stick together." Orrey draws his knife in one hand and has his watch ready in the other. "I'm ready whenever you are. Who goes first?"
Isa gives Orrey a quirked smile. "Guess," she says.
"Bast because he's shortest and quietest?" Orrey asks. "Or you because you stab things?" Orrey grins at Isa.
"Got it in two," Isa says, and heads back up the hall towards the stairwell.
"Stabs things, /and/ easier to hide behind," Yves says.
Bast briefly rests a hand on Linnet's shoulder as he walks by. "Let's go do some research."
Orrey glances up and down the corridor as he waits for Isa to head up the staircase first.
The metal stairs creak underfoot as the party climbs to the second floor, leaving the locked door to the lowest level behind them. The hallway up here looks a great deal like the one they just left, albeit with less room to the north. Two large doors are down to the south, with a pair of locked doors closer up.
Orrey walks over to the locked doors to see if there's any window into the rooms, and then puts his ear up to the doors to listen for anything moving inside. "I don't hear anything." Orrey waits for further orders.
The locked doors here are simpler keyed deadbolts, versus the special keycard door to the lowest level.
Bast glides past Orrey and runs his hands over the lock on the north door.
Isa motions to Yves to watch the south hallway, while she watches the north.
(Linnet appears to be floating aimlessly in the background, but she's listening hard.)
The unlocked door opens into... an office. This office is clearly for someone very important, from how much nicer the room is from the rest of the factory. It is also in shambles, with very clear signs of a fight that broke out here -- burn marks on the desk in the center of the room, scarred carpet, a file cabinet tipped over, folders all across the floor.
There are two... large fruits in the center of the office? Purple fruits with four large green leaves extending out from the base. They smell medicinal and sweet, like someone poured sugar into cough syrup.
Yves is watching the south, as instructed. Ready to thunder. On command. Or possibly on lack of command.
"The hell?" Linnet squints closely at the fruits, sniffing, poking tentatively at one.
"...this doesn't look like an evacuation. And somebody locked the door after?" Bast says.
"What's the scene?" Isa calls in from the hall.
"Horticultural weirdness in the middle of a combat zone," Linnet replies.
"...are we missing any cactuars?" Yves asks, still watching the corridor he's been assigned. "I mean, I wouldn't expect so, but, uh... Worth asking."
"Are cactuars normally purple?" Linnet mutters, not really expecting an answer.
"Do Cactuars fruit?" Isa asks Yves, honestly perplexed.
This is an artificial fruit, Linnet realizes, as she carefully pokes and prods it. There is something in the smell here that doesn't make sense. Not from nature. More from... well, like from a lab, like how Linnet would pass on her way back from the library. Especially the chemistry lab. The next two things happen at once.
"I don't know, I just hear 'horticultural weirdness' and wonder what other terrible things people could be turned into," Yves says.
Linnet's circuit of the fruit has her vision pass over a pile of debris that, at that glance, is more of a 'body' than 'debris.'
The leaves on the fruit spin in a circle.
And then keep spinning.
And they both lift up into the air.
And the room suddenly feels dangerous.
Orrey KNEW this was going to happen. He launches a dark ball of energy out that surrounds the slightly taller Monodrive B. The ball collapses in, crushing the fruit and dragging it down.
"Hey! Get back here and be scienced properly!" Linnet throws two fists of ice in the general direction of the flying plant things.
Isa reaches an armored hand to the side of the door, using it as a pivot to swing herself into the room. As Orrey blackholes one of the fruits, she spends a quick moment to look utterly confused before taking up a more cautious stance and moving into attack position.
The (slightly) taller plant bobs down from the wave of gravity in time to rise up into a spray of ice shards from Linnet alongside its (infinitesimally) shorter compatriot.
Orrey VERsists his friend, copying Linnet's ice throw and hair toss.
(He really doesn't have the hair to pull it off, but the effort is appreciated.)
"Can anyone tell me why we're fighting biomagi-engineered eggplant?" Linnet shouts.
Nothing Yves is hearing from the hallway makes much sense, though that's not unusual in and of itself anymore.
Bast swears under his breath, backpedaling and raising the crossbow he briefly set down while tinkering with the lock. As he aims, he twists something on the stock and the mechanism changes. The shape remains the same, but it's as though a miniature blizzard plays along its surface as Bast lets a bolt fly at the plant that received Orrey's unkind attentions earlier, and then at its companion.
"...do you need help with plants?" Yves calls over his shoulder, still trying to watch his assigned corridor direction, which has not, so far as he can tell, been menaced by angry fruit. Yet.
"We're probably fine," Linnet calls back. "But be prepared to charge in if that changes."
"No idea how to turn the fruit off otherwise! I'm trying to think like Isa and just attack anything that moves and figure it out later!" Orrey manages to get out.
"Turn the fruit off? What are you talking about? It's an eggplant! It doesn't have an off setting!"
"All machines have a manual, don't they?" Orrey asks.
"...okay," Yves calls, "good luck with the.... fruit, then."
"Orrey, do I need to sit you down with an eggplant and explain how it works?!?"
The (just barely) taller eggplant explodes into elemental shrapnel, leaving the (by a hair) shorter one to spin around in what really looks like disarray.
For lack of anything else to do, it floods the room with a sudden gout of flame, fire roaring at Orrey and Linnet.
The flames rip through the room at head height, both Linnet and Orrey ducking out of the way. The scarf Linnet grabbed from Idraen's... remains... however...
The edge catches fire, and then a gust of wind whips through it, fueling the fire, the scarf consumed in the shockingly sudden flames, embers whirling around Linnet, dancing through her vision just like words lighting themselves in a darkened cave.
Orrey grips his knife tightly and charges the fruit, swinging FIERCELY!
Yves listens to the various sounds from the nearby room, and figures that if he's needed, there'll be a specific call for him. Or some proper shrieking.
Orrey swings under the fruit, and stumbles through to the far side, turning around for another pass.
Isa steps into the gap created by Orrey's forward stumble. She tosses the spear in the air, reversing her grip on it and bringing it down into the fruit with an overhand plunge that all but skewers it to the floor.
The Monodrives have been driven out.
"Ok what the fuck," Isa asks.
Still muttering to herself that that's not how eggplants work, Linnet crouches to inspect the body on the floor.
"That was...odd. Some kind of assassination device? Sneak the fruit in on a platter, kill your target?" Orrey wonders out loud.
Bast shrugs, crossbow swerving to point at the wall. He doesn't seem inclined to put it away.
Yves hums faintly to himself. He can hear voices that probably still belong to his friends, so he'll just assume no one got eaten by fruit or replaced by plant people or whatever the heck happens when you fight vegetation and the flora wins.
"It's not like they were a particularly appetizing target, even," Linnet says.
Isa plants a boot to pull her spear free. "Maybe something left behind?" She doesn't seem too concerned about the answer though, and sticks her head out of the door to say "Hey, all clear!" to Yves.
"That look like our other missing person? Beard? Eyepatch?" Bast asks Linnet.
There are two points of immediate interest in here -- the dead man on the ground -- human, middle-aged, badly burned -- and a silver and red keycard on the ground near the body, fortunately unharmed.
The body -- what you can see of it -- matches the description.
Orrey crouches down and picks up the keycard.
It reads: AZYS Vice Director of Crystal Development: Weiss Glassman
"This might open a few doors for us." Orrey says as he checks for gore on it before stuffing it into a pocket.
"Nothing to report out here," Yves calls back. "Unless it's invisible, in which case, that'll be a problem. So, probably nothing."
"Crystal development? What the breezes does that have to do with mutant flying eggplants?" Linnet asks.
"Poor guy got betrayed by his own weapons?" Orrey half states, half asks.
"Or assassinated. These didn't seem the type to lock the door behind them," Bast says.
"And...why is my neck hot? Wait." Linnet flashes back to the scarf burning off her neck. Unconsciously, she brushes flakes of ash from her braid and runs her hand over where the scarf sat just a minute ago, pale and shaky again.
"Orrey, did you get a good look at them, before and after?" Bast asks.
"Speaking of which, do we try the next locked door?" Orrey asks.
In a particular bit of bitter irony, the back of the office door has a layout of the building, showing the quickest way to exit in case there is a fire.
Isa heads fully into the hallway, shaking her head at Yves. "We found the second potential survivor. He didn't."
"At the fruit? Sure. Can't tell much more about them than that they had spinners and shot fire, though." Orrey shrugs.
Bast thinks. "Good enough for a sketch? I think...we want a record of what we find here."
Yves grimaces. "Reduced to essential aspects of his nature, or taken out by, uh, fruit?"
Orrey nods. "I'll see what I can do."
"Burned to death by a giant floating eggplant. Should have seen it coming," Isa says.
Resolutely, Linnet crouches by the remains of the Monodrives and pokes and prods at them, carefully lest they explode.
Bast occupies himself with looking through the documents in the meantime, trying not to leave obvious signs that they have been...disturbed more than they already were.
The smell of overly sweetened cough syrup is not helping anything here.
"I mean, I didn't go into biology or zoology for a reason, but..." Yves shakes his head. "...that wasn't the reason, y'know? No one ever says, 'Hey, join our exciting new research ventures, only a moderate chance of death.'" After a longer moment of pondering, he concedes, "We might say that, a bit, to our crew. But not so much 'research' on the ventures, and the chance of death so far is pretty low. Or we've been very lucky. Probably the former!"
Isa nods. "I seem to remember being very clear about the risk of being part of the crew, and no one left. So either they're very brave or they didn't believe me."
"Either way, informed consent, and all that." Which comment seems to take Yves' mind down darker paths, as he frowns at the hallway.
Linnet puts a tiny bit of one Monodrive on her tongue and almost immediately spits it out. "Blech, don't do that. Okay, let's get out of here. I have officially filed this under Weird Shit, subcategory Potentially Lethal Weird Shit, and if we see them again, now we know what to do. And we know not to eat them."
Bast, looking bored out of his mind with the paperwork in the office, quietly pads off north to check around the corner of the hallway.
The corner of the hallway ends in a dead end, which is strange. The wall here looks a little newer than the rest -- it would appear that this used to fully circle the top floor, but they decided to limit access to even viewing the center room at some point and put up a new wall to block this other passage. They added a fake plant at the end. For color.
Isa shrugs as Bast goes by, and sets off following.
Bast gives the plant a suspicious glare and decides to leave it be for now, returning to the rest of the party.
"Should we open this door?" Orrey eyes the door handle expectantly.
Yves steps slightly behind Isa and says, "Sure, why not?"
"Is it locked?" Bast wanders over to check without waiting for an answer, in case Orrey decides to test this. He listens for several seconds before trying the handle, holding his breath.
The handle turns easily.
Bast eases the door open, trying not to make a sound.
There are no sounds out here either, for reasons that become clear increasingly quickly.
The central room, the heart of the factory, looks like a bomb went off.
The central room used to hold workbenches along the perimeter, with conveyor belts carrying equipment to a central station for loading and unloading the test material. An even lower level is hinted at, with a large industrial elevator taking up much of the middle of the room, for raising and lowering heavy machinery for testing purposes. Windows to the east and west viewing rooms give great vantage points for researchers observing the experiments.
At least, that's how it's supposed to look.
Workbenches are in pieces, strewn around the room. Conveyor belts are shredded, gears and supports shrapnel embedded in the walls. The ground itself is uneven, metal plates dented and uplifted from intense pressures applied to both sides. The industrial elevator is broken, the back half raised up to your level, the front half broken off and in pieces, disappearing into the darkness below.
There is one point in the room where there is no shrapnel, a center for the explosion of carnage visible in this room.
It is, Bast notes, exactly where he would put a target, if he were testing a cannon.
Bast looks for a cannon.
Isa whistles, low and quiet.
Yves swallows.
Linnet stares silently, rubbing her neck.
"I do not want to get hit by whatever did...that." Orrey lets out a breath.
After a moment, Bast spots it, despite the carnage, despite the poor light, despite the darkness. The cannon snapped off of its base on the elevator, and tumbled forward, down into the darkness, the back end of it just barely visible, a different, shinier ceramic pale yellow against the gunmetal gray.
"Best keep quiet out here" Bast almost whispers, pointing to the darkness below.
Orrey almost responds out loud with an "Aye Aye" but then just nods and keeps quiet.
He starts saying something else to Orrey, then stops himself and mimics a sketch, gesturing at the entire scene below.
Orrey nods and pulls out his sketchbook, eyes flicking down at the wreckage and back to his sketchbook repeatedly. He show Bast a quick map outline and then a picture he drew and points back and forth questioningly.
Isa skirts around the catwalk to the north, gauging the distance to the floor in case she needs to jump down.
Bast blinks a couple of times at Orrey's inquiry, tilting his head, but finally nods in response.
Yves edges forward a little for a better view. Not much forward.
Orrey taps Isa's shoulder and points at a couple places on the walls where there are additional claw marks, all similar to each other, but varying in the scale. Some are larger, some are smaller than the ones we saw before.
Isa's brows knit together "More than one?" she says softly.
Then he points down to the ground, where there are no claw marks at all, but where it seems like something HEAVY walked around. Orrey makes sure Linnet is not watching and points out a blood stain above the room where Idraen died.
Isa nods, grimly.
Orrey finishes up his sketch and points at the far room and draws a questionmark in the air.
Bast gestures back at the office and leads by example, holding the door open for the rest of the party.
Isa waits to take up the rear.
Despite Orrey's careful avoidance, Linnet is looking, and she does see the bloodstain over the door.
Yves is keeping close to the party. And, okay, close to Isa, who is a lot better at dealing with exploding fruit than he is, to date.
She doesn't say anything, only bites her lip and rubs her neck harder as she follows Bast.
Once everyone is through, Bast closes the door as carefully as he opened it and exhales slowly. "Well."
"Something real bad happened here," Isa says.
As soon as the door's closed, Orrey says, "Something BIG. Or at least heavy. And either multiple of different sizes, or the same one changing size somehow."
"And it's not done yet," Linnet says.
"Rapid growth?" Isa asks.
"We've...account for everyone, right?" Yves asks. "All the /people/ who might still be in here?"
"Those were the only two we heard about, anyway," Linnet says.
"Everyone they told us about." Orrey sighs.
"No bodies out there, and we found the two people not accounted for. So...planned test gone bad, broke the elevator and most of the floor, that thing got loose? Doesn't explain how either of these two died, though," Bast says.
"...and wasn't there something about a cold sample somewhere? I figure that's an on-the-way-out project, but just thinking," Linnet asks.
"We need to get through the rooms on the ground floor first, but we're going to have to go below at some point," Isa says.
"What about all the other rooms? Are they worth looking at?" Orrey asks, eyeing the map.
Yves looks over his shoulder, to the closed door. "So we don't think there's, like, some/one/ in here still who was... coming in for tests, or something, who maybe they didn't account for?"
"Finish this floor, sure. After that...well. I figure we decide if this cannon is worth this, and dealing with AZYS." Bast tests the other locked door as he talks.
"If we're firing Behemoths at other ships, I don't know if it's worth it." Orrey says.
"We have any evidence at all that whatever's in here is going to stay nice and contained if we walk away from it?" Isa says.
"We're not leaving." Linnet stares at Bast, slightly red-eyed. "We're not leaving without holding AZYS accountable for this. Don't ask me how, but they are not going to get the chance to cover all of this up and blame the deaths on a...workplace accident or something." She nearly spits the words "workplace accident."
"We should let our newsy friends in on this. We haven't signed any NDA covering what we've seen here yet," Orrey says.
"I have a supplementary idea." Linnet pulls Perilune's crystal from her bag. "Before we try downstairs, I'll send Perilune a quick message. The journalists would certainly be more...immediately useful, but this is quicker."
That gets a surprised grin from Bast. "Moonlighting as a reporter now, Linnet? Good idea."
"Might as well do something useful besides panic and flash-freeze eggplants." She's grinning, a tiny bit. "Where to, fearless leader?"
"Down the hall. Let's see if they have a nice little farm up here," Bast says.
"What the hell's next, killer tomatoes?"
"I don't think they grow that kind of fruit on a farm, Captain," Orrey says with a smile.
"I vote we let Yves go first; he didn't get a turn at the eggplants." Isa might be serious.
"So long as it's not mushrooms," Yves says. It's not clear if he's serious or not on this point.
The next room, the large room at the south end of the second floor, might be where you could find more eggplants, depending on what the workers brought in with them on that last day of work.
This cafeteria serves as the rest area for any of the workers. There are multiple tables and chairs, benches, even a jukebox and some pinball machines. This is not a cafeteria, in that no food is prepared here by the company, but there are multiple refrigerators, plus lockers for employee storage. There is a huge, ugly dent in the center floor and wall, as if something slammed into it from underneath and bent the metal, matching a piece of the carnage you saw from the walkway.
Orrey opens a refrigerator.
The corners of the cafeteria hold multiple bathroom doors.
The refrigerators still have power -- whatever outage is afflicting the first floor appears to be localized. There are a lot of bags with names on them -- Evans, Solat, Kreis, Schmidt, among others.
Linnet checks the lockers for any that are used-but-open or busted.
Bast, after establishing to his satisfaction that no one is about to jump them in the main room, comes up to the nearest bathroom door and pushes it open, crossbow at the ready.
"Doesn't seem like there's anything here for us," Orrey says.
There are multiple lockers that are open, many of which have stuff still inside, bags that ripped or tipped over during the evacuation. Linnet finds 250 gil spread across six lockers, should she so desire.
The bathroom is empty, and also clean, thankfully.
He relaxes - only slightly - and proceeds to check the rest.
Linnet closes up the lockers - as undisturbed as possible - and joins Orrey in checking the refrigerators for any killer tomatoes.
Bast's bathroom patrol turns up one copy of Breaking My Limits, which looks to be the sort of novel Linnet enjoyed on the train, and one Ether, seal broken but still capped, by the sink.
Everyone left here in a hurry.
"Ether here if anybody wants one." Bast gestures back at the bathroom he just left, with an expression.
Isa is crouched down by the dented floor, trying to get a sense of just how much force it would have taken to deform.
Orrey wanders to the far side of the room and looks up and down the west side corridor.
The hallway remains empty.
Bast crouches alongside Isa. "I'm thinking...if we fight this thing - things? - we might want to do it from this floor."
"I'm never going to argue against the high ground, Bast. The catwalk, maybe? Offices to duck into for cover, good mobility, I can get up and down."
"But we don't even know where this thing is, much less what it is or how to fight it," Linnet says.
"And hope it can't just rip it out of the wall, yeah. Seems like better odds than down on the floor either way," Bast says.
"I also won't argue against learning more before we pick a fight," Isa says.
"I think we can safely assume that the eggplants did for Mr. Glassman, but something that slammed Ms. Idraen into the wall like that - " Linnet points in the general direction of the wall stain, carefully not looking at it - "well, we're going to need a bit more than just a height advantage. ...we've got to go downstairs, don't we."
"One more room up here." Orrey says, looking down the hallway.
"Probably another office like Glassman's. Might be more records," Isa says.
"Let's go take a look." Bast straightens up from the dent in the floor. "No takers on the bathroom ether?" He pushes open the door to the south to check the corridor on this side, just in case.
Linnet makes a face and follows him out.
Isa stands, and follows.
"You never know what someone already put in a bathroom ether," Yves says firmly, following along.
"...unless that was the sample we were supposed to keep iced..." Linnet wonders.
"If it was I am content to lose that bounty," Isa says.
This office is empty, and looks much like the one on the other side of the building, minus the fire damage and the dead body and the Monodrives. The smell here is just stale flowers, from the dead plants on the south wall, lost to nearly two weeks of no light or water.
Orrey checks for files and things.
There is a nameplate on the desk - Larami Jirimu - plus a lot of papers, reports, and bureaucracy.
Isa looks around. "Caelonde's nuts that's a lot of paperwork," she mutters.
"Dead end?" Orrey asks.
Bast mutters something under his breath as he goes through various folders. One in particular catches his attention. The top paper in the sheaf he pulls out is a requisition order from AZYS, authorized by Kuganepo authorities. "Anyone know if 'wildlife extractions' is some sort of term of art here?"
Isa pushes a few papers around almost idly, and then freezes.
"Monster hunting," Isa replies, her voice completely flat. She hasn't looked away from the paper her fingers are resting on.
"Honestly, that's tamer than I was expecting."
"...is the bottom floor full of traps? Are we heading into some sort of Zoo of Death?" Linnet asks.
"Th'hell for, though, if they have their in-house material for testing already?" Bast asks.
"Testing their material on monsters?"
"You can't tell if your in-house material is accurate if you never compare it to anything... actual," Yves says.
Isa is quiet for a long moment. Sensitive folks might see the argument going on behind her eyes. Finally, "I know where we can get some answers."
"Any particular monsters that leave the sort of marks we saw?" Bast leafs through the order paperwork for any clues, then looks up at Isa.
"Where?" Orrey asks, confused.
Isa moves her hand away from an invoice. For an honestly offensive amount of gil. Signed by one Kjier Osler.
"One of your relatives?" Orrey asks after glancing down at the paper.
"My uncle's husband. They do research and development for airship technologies." Isa's face is stone. "We paid for this."
Yves opens his mouth. Thinks better of that. Closes it.
"This...project?" Bast might as well be asking about the weather.
"Significant investment in the facility as a whole," Isa openly rationalizes. "Cooperative venture between this lab and my uncle's. He might not know. Or, he might."
"Well, unless you can get a hold of your uncle while we're still in this building, we might as well keep going. Maybe there really are killer tomatoes on the bottom floor." Linnet's joke doesn't reach her eyes, or the rest of the party.
And with that... End session.