ArchivedLogs:Bloodless Revolution
| Bloodless Revolution | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
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2013-05-22 The cleanest of hostile takeovers. (Part of Thunderdome.) |
| Location | |
The warehouse is an entirely different beast, during its off-times. A quiet place, empty, deserted. The cage in the center, with its faded bloodstains sunk into the concrete even after it’s been washed down, stands testament to the violence that happens here at night. But in afternoon there is little hint of it, on the ground floor. Empty chairs in the arena, closed doors throughout the building. Down one floor there are other rooms -- the makeshift infirmaries with a few people groaning or sleeping inside. A monitoring room with screens and speakers tuned to the security cameras below. It’s between meals, right now, all the fighters locked in their cages by fours or threes or twos or, in the case of one woman muttering crankily to herself and intermittently leaking some unpleasantly greenish fluid from her pores, solo. “-- be her birthday soon,” Kyle is, currently, kind of vaguely /fretting/ to the other officer who sits in the monitoring room at the moment. The other man is shorter, leaner, but older, grey peppered into his dark hair, a shadowing of salt-and-pepper stubble on his jaw. They’re both casually dressed. Jeans. Kyle has a flannel shirt over a plain dark tee; the other man wears a blue polo. “Dunno what the fuck to -- she’s really into.” He frowns. “Chemistry.” Not, evidently, a field in which he has a ton of experience with procuring children’s entertainment. “-- get her a chemistry set,” the other officer suggests pragmatically. “They make those for girls, don’t they?” “The fuck,” Kyle wants to know, kind of aggrieved, “is a /girls’/ chemistry set? Do they do chemistry /different/?” The other man considers this. “Pink,” he informs Kyle. “Pretty sure it’s the same chemicals if the microscope’s blue.” Kyle scruffs his fingers through his short blond hair. “There’s summer camps. For kids. For science. Maybe I’ll send her there.” Hive is not, currently, in this warehouse. Physically, at least. He is instead, physically, parked in a van outside. Possibly zoned out. Possibly drinking a soda. Possibly snarking at Micah. WHO KNOWS. But the /rest/ of him is searching. Stretching, /straining/, feeling out a head-count of the warehouse. Guards and prisoners both. << You hearing this? >> is a soft murmur to his current hivees -- not many of them, right now. Claire. Flicker. On Borgnet his voice lacks its weaponlike painful nature, not an intrusion anymore but an almost (almost!) natural sort of mental /commentary/. << Easier, >> is wry, << when they’re not people. >> << They’re always people. >> This is Flicker, speaking up in a similarly quiet mindvoice. Less /surly/ than Hive’s. << That’s what makes it terrible. >> Claire’s presence in the Borgnet is delicate, crystalline, sharp - not prickly so, but /quick/, like some fluttering hummingbird with razor-precision. Her power has not been cranked up to its fullness yet; at the moment, it just provides a soft, humming /buzz/ of focus that spreads through the Borgnet like a virus - honing thoughts, sharpening wits, tidying up the thoughtspace that everyone shares - making it all so neat and /efficient/. << Recordings, >> Claire speaks, very quiet - her mind is polished and /gleaming/, like a precious stone - it is one that has - remarkably extensive experience with telepaths. Perhaps decades’ of practice, despite not being one herself. << We’ll need them. Everything. If you can get them -- particularly of the fights, but of anything and everything. It will be necessary for... >> What follows are not words so much as concepts, moving images - of police officers, going to prison. Newspaper headlines - ‘CORRUPTION DISCOVERED’. Blurred with an alternative future - nothing. The events erased, the fight club covered up. Suspensions handed down. /Maybe/. << ...save them, first, >> Claire adds, to the back-end of this brief fluttering barrage of thoughts, as if to correct herself. << First priority. But second... the evidence. You /need/ that evidence. Or they will make it as if this never happened. >> The warehouse is -- pretty populated. If quietly so. The kennels in the basement are packed, six cages to the east wall of the room and six to the west, though a couple stand empty and not /all/ have their full complement of four people. The infirmary holds a couple more, one boy strapped into his bed and two others too injured to really /bother/ restraining. They have their collars and a few guards in the rooms, a few more just kind of loitering outside the kennel doors. In the monitoring room, Kyle and his companion have taken out a cellphone and are browsing kids’ chemistry sets on Amazon. There is not so much answer to this as there is a wordless /sense/ of assent. But inside the warehouse, there’s a /pushing/ at minds, first one guard then another. Then Kyle. It’s noticeable, an uncomfortable /pressure/ bearing down. Testing, really, looking for the least-defended minds to take first. Poke. Pokepoke? << Could take them all. Hold in place. Let my team handle the fighters and the cleanup. Shit, I don't do this long-term crap, what's the best evidence to keep? >> Claire responds with a mixed answer; first comes - << Murphy, >> this name comes with the silhouette of storm-clouds swirling across the facets of her mind, a brief flicker of her control - like a climber’s fingers slipping, for just an instant, before finding a much more sturdy hand-hold. << ...mentioned tapings. They’re recording the interior cells, as well. Doubtful they’d keep those recordings, but if they have... >> Another flutter of Claire’s mind, this one hard, edged - eager, but in a grim sort of way. << ...would be /deeply/ implicating. Otherwise? Cashbooks. Receipts. Checks. Anything that provides us with evidence of various ‘celebrated’ attendants. >> Another flush of images and thoughts - judges. Lawyers. Prosecutors. Detectives. Politicians. People in positions of power. << Anything that proves those in power partook in these grisly deeds. Every one of them you implicate is another piece in our favor. They will throw the NYPD to the /wolves/ to save their own blood-stained hides. >> This /may/ be accompanied with the image of hungry wolves. Just for a moment, though. << Invitations, perhaps. Even guest lists. Would they have been so foolish? I dearly hope so, >> Claire adds. There are minds harder and minds easier; none of them, though, particularly practiced or even /familiar/ with telepathic interference. Here Hive's poking finds a mind grizzled-hard from years of careful discipline and there one malleable-soft, too much distraction, too little sleep of late. Kyle's is somewhere between, prickly-tense, cautious and aware, but overworked. Job-stress, family-stress. Running illegal deathfight ring-stress. The usual. It prickle again at the pressure against it, conversation curtailed in favour of a frown, a press at his temple. "Fucking headache," he grumbles to himself. But prickles aside, it is sadly not a difficult mind to hive; for all his capturing of mutants his dealings with telepaths have been nearly nonexistent. The pressure in his head is not remotely recognized for what it is. Among the officers in the building there is a good deal of information available for the eating. The building itself holds little by way of tapes or evidence. The security cameras do not record footage; the streamed coverage of the fights is also not recorded anywhere -- at least not by the people running it. No doubt, someone out there watching has cracked their security to illicitly keep their footage. Every person who purchased access to the livestream had /their/ streamed copy burned with their real name and credit card information so -- any copies that do surface can be easily traced back to the buyer. The ticket purchases are not long saved; guest lists for each night’s fight are deleted (insofar as digital information IS easily deleted) the next day, but there /is/ out there a bank account through which all the transactions took place. Undoubtedly, /here/ there are financial records of all who purchased tickets or bought access to the livestream. But that is there. Here in the warehouse: Just mutants. Just the cages. And the cops guarding them. Hive presses in harder. First at one soft mind and then another. At the harder ones. In the van he is teeth-gritted, kind of tense; kind of successively /less/ tense with each mind he takes, though. Kind of successively less /there/, too. There’s a long moment, afterwards, where he does not do anything. Just probes, exploring what the guards all know about the goings-on. Relaying that information to Claire. And then? And then each guard with a remote sets it down. And every guard turns. And walks out of the building. << {My God,} >> Claire’s voice comes in through the Borgnet, whisper-soft, as the information floods in. Spoken in delicate, rich French. << {The /idiots/--} Hive. That bank account. We need access to it. Do any of them have access? That bank account is /everything/. If we have that account, we can-- >> -- Claire’s thoughts here move so fast they come off as a cluttered jumble, despite their tightness, their /sharpness/. A sea of faces. << Credit cards. All of them -- we /must/ have that bank account. Others will have copied the video feeds. We can find them, use them in conjunction with the account-- >> Another thought here, as Hive leads the officers out. Slightly more faint. <<... the money, >> Claire mentions. << You can use it. To help the survivors. >> The guards -- well. They walk out. What else can they do. | |
