The front doors to the building are locked. Knocking on the door elicits no response. In the
back of the building, there are two chalk outlines on the ground and a wrecked car lying on its side next to that.
The rear of the building contains an oval-shaped, door-sized hole that has been created in the side of the wall by means unknown. The hole in the wall leads through two more interior walls and then directly into the Warranty Room. The four walls of the Warranty room were covered in lockers approximately twice the width of a high school locker, slightly taller and about three times as deep. The doors to all the lockers have been removed by means unknown. Their contents are gone.
Inside the Warranty Room are three other individuals. The first is Max Pestana, who introduces himself as an investigator for the Harmon Insurance Company, which is famous (they run national ad campaigns including TV commercials) for its skyscraper headquarters in Indianapolis. Max is happy to cooperate, and texts a list of the assorted items the robbers got away with. As he reads the list, he sometimes points to the empty lockers as he does so:
- $4 million in uncut diamonds
- $800 grand in rare coins
- $2 million in Brazilian
bearer bonds - a countless number of business and personal papers from millionaires and billionaires
three original paintings by the late Frank Frazetta- “Egyptian Queen”
- “Vampirella”
- “Dawn Attack”
Pestana says that in 30 years of this type of investigation he has never seen anything like this. “I have seen vaults and safes cracked with lasers, axes, compressed air, high-pressure fire hoses, all manner of explosives including ignited space shuttle fuel, liquid nitrogen, and air arc cutters that burn pure oxygen at 10,000 degrees. But I have never seen anything that cut so cleanly.”
He points out the empty post where the video camera had been. (It was the camera that had been positioned here that transmitted the footage noting the blue glow.) The post and the
wires it contained do not show signs of being cut, torn, burned, melted or frozen. It simply terminates at a certain point. The camera is gone. The alarm systems and the electrical power box for the building are also similarly ‘erased’.
One of the other people in the Warranty Room isn’t interested in talking. He seems to be looking for something. The third person introduces themselves as George Jefferson (and yes, he does). He explains that Doctor Alvin Grayson (the other person) is a pediatric neurosurgeon at New York University Hospital. He is part of a development team that had created a microprocessor specifically designed to simulate the function of the ventral area of the human brainstem. Their test subject- an extremely gifted nine-year-old boy named Nate
Forrester- needs to have it implanted in his brain as soon as possible or he will die.
One of the program’s benefactors had a locker here and offered to store the device because this place was reputed to be so secure. The device would have been stored in a small sealed case to keep it sterile. It wouldn’t have necessarily looked like something valuable, although it is worth nearly a million dollars. He was looking for it in the faint hope that it may have been overlooked by the thieves that looted the Warranty Room.
Max suddenly points at the large hole in the wall and says, "wottheell is that!" as a blue glow becomes noticeable. There is an odd thump, and then a menacing growl. Looking in the direction of the glow reveals fifteen feet of menace, with an eight foot tail.
