Lucifer starts wandering around the room himself, getting dressed and gathering his stuff as he continues the call.

"It's good you called so soon, raises our chances of interrupting whatever they're up to before it's done. Are you going to be ok?"

It was a question that'd be very absurd directed at any other person who looked like they'd went through a woodchipper, but Daniel had heard about Ilari's medical genius - add Lunar tenacity on top of that and he wouldn't be surprised if he could stitch himself back together from a fine paste.


He frowns. "A second heart? That's... certainly a first as it shouldn't be possible. Any pieces under half a meter from one another should merge instantly, bound in corpus or not. And that'd happen even if there were two separate spirits within the armor. Definitely something strange going on here that needs to be investigated."

He pulls up his jeans and reaches for his coat. "Where was this? Should we inspect the carcass first or shall I leave that to you and go looking for the remaining operatives?"

"I'll be fine.  Superficial damage mostly.  Fake skin's easy to repair and I'm tougher than I look."  He tugs on a tie, "There was only one spirit in the armor, they're fully materialized so I guess that makes it easier for them to avoid tripping some of the spirit wards within the ship.  I'd like you here to inspect the carcass.  After that we'll formulate plans.  I may have to tag along.  If they're here, there's a good chance they're already spreading around an Abyssal plague for the hell of it.  If I'll get in the way, please inform me, we'll work out alternatives."

"Makes sense. On the plus side what makes them harder for spirit wards to detect makes them easier to find with conventional methods. Just a minute."

Just one more step. Daniel walks to the heavily armored closet in the corner of the room and places a hand on a glass plate, his Caste Mark flashing briefly. The thick metal of the closet's door... doesn't open at all but warps unnaturally, making a clattering sound as it reforms into a heavy weapon in his hands- the Manifest Destiny. He starts walking back to the video screen while muttering a chant, causing the massive weapon to shudder and melt, then creep up his arm before spreading to his back and finally settling to the form of a high-tech backpack.

"If you're fit to fight it's good to have you along. You know a lot more about fighting Abyssal plagues than I do. Give me the place and I'll be there soon to take a look at the corpse."

Unless Ilari's response gives him reason to do otherwise, he turns to leave.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:18, Sun 06 Nov 2016.

"Quite.  But there aren't that many who're good at it."

Ilari watches as Lucifer works the Manifest Destiny over his arm, obviously impressed but at least he's not gawping like some mortal.

"Head over to Crossroads.  I'll meet you at a bar called King Fisher, it'll be the one that everyone's avoiding like a plague.  See you there."

That's not too far by Grand Rail.  Lucifer can conceivably be there in an hour or so.

"Gotcha. See you there in about an hour."

Daniel slings on his coat, hiding the backpack under it as he heads out the door.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:31, Sun 06 Nov 2016.

The Grand Railway is always the same:  stand in line for train.  Wait a few minutes for train.  Try to ignore the random people gaping at him.  Get onto the train.  Try to find a place to stand.  Try to ignore the random people reaching out to brush their hand against him.  Get off at the wrong station because the conductor's too overawed that Lucifer's on the train.  Miss the train going the opposite way.  Wait way too long as some kid makes 'pew pew' noises at you.

Get back on the goddamn train.

By the time he gets to the King Fisher he's attracted a crowd of thirty people, wasted two full hours of his life, and he's pretty sure WAL is fucking with him because the lights keep getting brighter as he walks down the street.

But he makes it.  And the crowd backs off once they see the 'PLAGUE AREA, DO NOT CROSS" tape strewn around the bar.

Ilari is sitting alone at the bar, drinking a glass of the shit they call vodka here.  "Need a drink?"  He asks, "You look like hell."

You'd think one would get used to the gaping and the brushing and the little setbacks that followed being a divine icon in regular traffic. Well, at least the public had learned to not actively slow him down when he had his 'on a mission' face on over the years.

He didn't mind the crowd much normally... as long as he wasn't in a hurry or it didn't hamper his mission. As he stands on the pier waiting for the second train Daniel is pressing on Spiderweb's little paper strip very hard, however. If only he could've at least heard the automatic station announcement over the 'whispers' of the crowd around him.

As he nears the bar he rolls his eyes at the gradually brightening lights. At least they weren't flashing inappropriate things in morse code this time.

Finally stepping into the King Fisher, Daniel makes his way to the bar and takes a seat next to Ilari. The sheer sullenness he emanates makes the need for booze very evident.

After he downs whatever is handed to him, he puts the glass down and exhales deeply.

"Never been so happy to cross the line into a plague area. Sorry for the delay."

He arcs a look around the bar, wondering whether the tape around it had been put up for legitimate reasons or not.

The drink is sort of horrible concoction burns his throat and warms his insides- it tastes like the usual horrible Underdecks Vodka mixed with an equal part of an unidentifiable citrus-analogue and turpentine.

"Not really a plague area," Ilari confides in him, "But it doesn't hurt just in case.  Well."  He's well-dressed now, in a shirt, tie, vest and slacks, "I'm going to show you the vent and the corpses.  If they're plague carriers I'll be able to tell, but I don't think so.  Then we'll inspect the corpse.  Work from site of first infection and then follow the clues."

There's a few extra things Daniel can see:  a few bullet holes, laser scorches, artwork of a winking pink elephant with a dagger stuck in it.  Oh, yeah, and a giant hole in the ceiling.

Ilari sets up a ladder and goes up first, then allows Daniel up.  Once they reach the hole they have to climb up jagged metal and ductwork that'd rip open the hands of any mortal, but not them.  Eventually they find one of the cavernous air ducts that criss-cross the Last Refuge like arteries.  Two dozen bodies lie still in the midst of the duct.  Some are releasing wisps of Essence- that'd be the gods. There's an earth elemental sparkling like a diamond.  Four mortals lay in final positions of agony.

"Doesn't look like they're plagued.  There's the hotbox,"  Ilari points to a room that sprouts from the duct, the doors ripped from their hinges. "Probably a maintenance station.  Get in there, smoke all the bugnose you want, get your high.  I'm betting the Imperator needed access to the air duct vent controls.  But as far as I know that'd do very little by itself.  You need to do a whole lot more than take over one maintenance room to shut down the air vents.  You'd need to take over thousands."

Daniel doesn't have the nose of a Lunar but he can smell the corruption, the sickly sweet smell of death, wafting from the inside of the maintenance room.  It's probably an abattoir inside.

Ah, Underdecks swill. One way to keep in touch with reality if the privileged life in the Upperdecks threatened to make one complacent.

"I'm glad to hear it's not but would've considered it an acceptable trade even if it was", he mutters jokingly. I mean it's got to be a joke, right?

He pours and downs another shot of rotgut as Ilari goes through the itinerary, knocking the cheap glass on the bar as he gets up. "Sounds like a plan. Let's do it."

He climbs up to the duct, taking in the sights but focusing his perception most of all beyond the material. After Ilari confirms the corpses are of no particular interest, his Caste Mark flares momentarily and the mortals' bodies go up in golden pyres.

"Might not be about shutting down the air vents but the opposite. Perhaps to spread something airborne, or open access to somewhere else. Let's check it out in case one of its companions came to finish the job, and maybe find out what could be done by messing with this control room in particular."

He pushes onward, his nose scrunching up from the smell but otherwise undeterred.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:12, Mon 07 Nov 2016.

Once Lucifer burns the corpses- their bodies flashing away in an instant- Ilari looks visibly impressed.  "That's handy."

For obvious reasons, the Zenith method of burning away bodies doesn't often get publicized, so it's not a big leap of logic to see that the epidemiologist is excited about the ability to quickly and cleanly dispose of possible infection vectors.

"I thought about it.  There's a problem with that logic.  It goes through too many filters,"  He points up and down the ductwork, "And they've got to make a trade-off:  more points of infection or a faster spread.  This is a main trunk.  The air goes just about everywhere in this section of the ship.  Even the worst Abyssal plagues can be contained rapidly if there are one or two victims, but it gets a lot more troublesome when you have a cluster.  Ideally they'd hit a train full of passengers if they want maximum infection."

Lucifer steps into the room.  Yeah, this is a slaughterhouse.  There are bodies everywhere, most of whom were creatively killed.  The Imperator came down like a wolf on the fold.

But the big mundane thing that he notices is something Ilari might very well miss.  When the Last Refuge was still under construction and Michael wasn't yet the fully integrated Core, they had an old 'land-line' phone system for some of the more integral parts of the ship.  One of those old phones is still in place.  There's probably only a hundred of those terminals left, and this is certainly the only one in the general vicinity.

"More than handy. I can not only cleanse their earthly remains but to purify the soul, assuring its proper and peaceful transition", Daniel explains as he frowns in concentration. "Which means..."

His Caste Mark flares up brighter as he walks by the gods' and demons' remains, lighting them up as well. "...It works on anything with a soul."

As he steps into the room, Caste Mark illuminating the grisly scene, he shakes his head with a sigh. Poor things probably never knew what hit them. "Let me know when I can cleanse them", he notes grimly to Ilari as he walks further inside.

Looking around the controls in the room, Daniel tries to figure out what could possibly make this place worth infiltrating... before his gaze finally settles on the practically ancient phone. He points it out to Ilari.

"That phone's a holdover from when the Last Refuge was still being built, a 'land-line' of sorts between most of the critical parts of the ship. Not a lot of them left these days, something around a hundred if I had to guess. That's something that puts this place apart from anything else in the vicinity."

He walks closer, checking the phone out carefully before picking it up to check if it still works.

Ilari follows behind, opting for a far more practical method of lighting- a hand-held flashlight.  He prods a body with a finger, taking a sniff. "Very handy indeed.  Hmm.  A bit early to tell for sure for some of these.  It'd be a poor choice to infect these, not enough chance to spread, but enough bodies all together like this should be cleansed on principle."

He looks at a body twitch.

"On second thought, the Abyssals were known to raise bodies as zombies during Ragnarok.  That's what destroyed Tampere.  I'm not going to risk one of these walking and spreading contagion.  Go ahead with it as soon as you can."

Daniel picks up the land-line, getting a primitive automated message listing extant Line Numbers.  His is 571.  Obviously he has to type in the other side- a horrifically bad system but back in those days, you had your shit memorized.

But what might stand out to Daniel the most is that it's automated.  There's a good chance they're not being directly monitored by Core.

"Know where any of the others are?"

Daniel listens to the automated message for a bit. It was a sobering sound from a bloody past, one that he'd never really had time to listen to in length. There was always someone dying, someone asking for help, someone reporting a break-in or structural failure...

He sets the phone down with a sigh, making a round through the room to purify these corpses as well before returning to the phone, picking it back up and typing in three numbers... 8-9-9.

As the line beeps he looks to Ilari. "I know a few, but they're set to repeat an automated message listing the most common ones. Main thing here is the lines are old enough to not be constantly monitored by Core. Let's see if Smoker has any ideas."

Ilari nods his agreement.  He pokes around the room, examining the area with a critical eye.

"899 here."  Smoker sounds surprised and worried, "Who the hell is this and how did you get my line?"

"It's me."

Maybe it was Smoker's paranoia rubbing off on him, but Daniel subconsciously avoided using names as well. He'd recognize his voice.

As usual, though, he goes straight to business. He speaks clearly and concisely, slowly enough to grant time for considering his words but fast enough to be efficient. "I'm calling from 571. Our former associates have killed everyone here. One of them's been eliminated and pending investigation due to a second Imperator heart that merged with the other only on the moment of death. Very likely there are others but we don't know what they're trying to do or where they are."

"Hell, that ain't good." He growls on the other line, "571?  Shit, this reference book's heavy.  Hold on."

There's the sound of paper flipping on the other line.

"Huh.  Underdecks Ductwork 571.  That's a weird place to be.  Only reason I can think they'd be there is to throw something in the air system or to just use the phone.  How'd you find the first one? "

Then a pause,

"Awwwww man!  They want to use the phones.  Makes me wonder how they got the reference book but it'd be a secure way to communicate across the Last Refuge and not get easily caught.  Any idea how many there are?"

"My thoughts exactly. Got an epidemiologist here who says it's unlikely they'd accomplish too much by using just this one point to spread something so communication's the likelier candidate. Could be contacting sleepers, could be coordinating with other teams as part of something bigger."

He looks to Ilari to confirm he's understood correctly as Smoker asks about numbers. "Only thing we have is whispers from the radio of the slain one... So at least one infiltration squad. Unless there's a way to check previous calls in this system we don't know whether there's more teams and if so, how many."
This message was last edited by the player at 22:53, Tue 08 Nov 2016.

Ilari nods and gives Lucifer a thumbs-up.

"Any idea what the dead one's role was?" He asks over the phone, "There's no way to check calls here.  And sounds like they'll stop using radio if it's gone totally dead.  Damn."

He exhales.  No doubt he's lit up another cigarette.

"During Ragnarok, the ol' coworkers didn't change from their old tactics.  The Last Refuge is big but if you send in two teams, it's a low-percentage move.  Twice the chance to get busted, twice the chance to lose them all.  So if they're following old rules we're looking at one team, with six total members.  Two scouts, a demolitions specialist, a heavy weapons expert, one standard soldier, and all tied together by a captain.  Since one broke off, I'm gonna assume a scout.  That means they're still operating at 95% efficiency by the old books. They're going to act as a group, split up only if it means making your life hell, and if you eventually corner one you're gonna have to deal with all five pretty quickly."

"Sounds about right. Could be some variation in the composition but Candlelight training is seated so deep that I doubt the enemy would go through the trouble of retraining them too fundamentally when what they have works."

Daniel frowns, scratching his forehead as he thinks. "We probably still have the radio but it's been dead long enough that they've likely switched frequencies already."

He pauses, looking around the blood-soaked room. "This one accidentally ran into some hotboxing locals which led to his demise. We'll look around a bit but failing that, I guess the best we can do is inspect the corpse, keep an ear to the ground and double-check any other communication points. The system's pretty old which makes it impossible to trace what's already happened... But perhaps you could tap it?"
This message was last edited by the player at 23:31, Tue 08 Nov 2016.

"No can do, muchacho.  Those things were meant not to be tapped at all.  Funnily enough for the very reason we're having problems- we were worried a lot about people tapping into our calls and figuring out where to fuck us up."  He inhales and exhales, "There's a lot of wards in the way.  It's still useful, especially if we ever had something that hits Core hard.  Problem is- how do they know about it?  I barely know where they all are and I've got the only copy of the book sitting right on my lap.  Juno has one in her head."

"There's an alternative."  Ilari says to the two, "We try to track where he started and hope we find evidence that points us to the rest."

"Could be a sleeper agent, could be they've killed and tapped into the mind of someone who knows. Or maybe hacked into some system containing the info", Daniel muses.

He nods to Ilari. "Either way, not much we can do here then. Would you have the time to go through potential people or systems that could've leaked the information while we try to backtrack and see where the slain one was coming from?"

"I think that's all for now, then. Let me know if you come up with something." He moves to hang up unless something comes up that merits continuing the conversation.

He looks to the Lunar once more. "I'm not the best at tracking, but I have a feeling you might be? If the trail goes cold we can go see the carcass, maybe we can figure out a way to track them due to the deviant twin-heart condition or something."

"Don't know, I'll talk with Juno.  In the meantime I'll keep an ear to the ground.  Err, phone.  Get dangerous,"  And then he hangs up.

"I'm a good hand at it,"  Ilari says as he sweeps around with the flashlight, looking at the pools of blood and ichor, "You've got to be in order to be a combat epidemiologist.  That's about what I'd suggest.  The corpse can sit and wait."

Ilari steps out into the ductwork. "Now here's another question.  How did they get here?"

Daniel nods. "That's what I thought. You lead the way then."

As he follows Ilari to the ductwork, he looks around to see which ways the ducts go and how far.

"Shouldn't be from too far away unless they've cut through some filters and grids or found another way to bypass them. Dematerialization would normally be an option but the armor they're wearing prevents it. As for where they came in from before that... No idea."

Maneuvering in a 3D tunnel maze is pretty difficult, but:

The Last Refuge is an elongated oval, oriented in two major axes:  Core and Pole.  The main airducts of the Underdecks travel from Pole to Pole, with the secondary airducts heading Core to Extremity.  They're currently in a Pole-Pole duct, and Ilari follows the blood to make them move towards the 'Northern' pole.  This is one of the bigger ducts, and they could conceivably walk the entirety of the Last Refuge if they had a lot of time on their hands.  The duct itself is big enough to drive a tank through.

"I'm most worried how they arrived in the first place.  The Buchenwald was quarantined, wasn't it?"  He asks as they head down the duct, with him pausing every so often and turning off his flashlight.  He sniffs the air,  "Damn.  Downside of trying to track people in an air duct- scents get blown away too quickly."

Daniel walks along, focusing mainly on things beyond the physical as Ilari no doubt had sharper physical senses.

"It was. Could've escaped before the quarantine, could've snuck inside the Odysseus while it was hanging unmanned near the Buchenwald for a moment during the battle. One Imperator even managed to infiltrate the Odysseus during the initial approach, but that one wasn't bound in armor so it probably just materialized. We had visual on the Odysseus but all of us were rather occupied with something so it's not impossible something might've snuck in under the radar."

He frowns as Ilari struggles to follow the scent. "Mmh, not an optimal environment. If you've lost the trail we should make note of the last place you had it; if nothing else, we can narrow down the search by noting it had to be somewhere ahead of that point."