"I'm hoping there'll be a way to get the clan's attention in here," Pockets said. "But from first glance it looks like somebody - likely our friend here - wiped out all the ShreckNet programming before the power shut off. It also looks like the Cam cut the hardlines when they sealed 'em all in."

"They just... buried them all. Let them starve. When they figured out that the only food source they were ever gonna see again was each other, everyone turned on everyone. It would have been a mercy to kill them."

Liam reread the crumpled note. "You left me to die," he said. "She's one of them. She wrote this to Keisinger knowing that the next person to break down her door would be Red Watch. Only it wasn't. They were never going to come back down here again. They left them to hunt each other and die in the dark. Keisinger didn't care about them at all."

"This - this is the next nail in the Camarilla's coffin..." Liam realised after a moment. "The Nosferatu wont stand for it. If I can get this to Flores before the clans are convened..."

"We'll need proof. A witness, preferably, but footage, notes. Whatever you can scrub off those servers."

And then it hit him.

"I never checked her other hand. How much do you want to bet she was planning on taking one more person down with her in the end? Two, counting the shotgun."

"Let me get everything out of the blast radius, just in case..."

iPad, last confession, any piece of hardware that could be moved Liam carefully spirited to safety. Then he considered how he could reposition the dresser as a blast shelter if needed.

"Alright. I'm going to take a look," he said at last. "Hang on to your butt."

"I'm uploading all the camera footage," Pockets said. "It's going to take a long-ass time over relayed LTE, but that's what we got to work with. I'm seeing what I can scrape from the main server, but someone scrubbed it pretty clean. Shame, I really would have liked to tag the Nossies in the bag. Can't have everything, I guess."

"I'll see if there's anywhere else worth checking, but it's a lot of footage to sift through. And some damn fool killed the only computer with a map. Why don't you see about securing your friend?"

She had indeed planned to go out with a bang. Wedged between her thighs was a pineapple grenade, pin removed. Her desiccated limbs held the lever in place, and her hand covered it from view. Were she to crumble to dust, the trap would have sprung. Liam was quick enough to catch it when he rearranged her mummified body.

He was able to wrest the grenade from its hiding place without popping the lever. There was no sign of the pin.

"Can't imagine what sort of fool would have done that," Liam said in reply. "Must have been a really handsome fellow."

"But we have a map. Its in her head."

"Look what we have here."

Liam carefully removed the grenade intact without releasing the lever. Searching around for a makeshift pin he settled on the copper wiring he'd found in the Nos's pocket. It would do. For now.

Then he set about binding the mummy's wrists and ankles. He was not sparing with the zipties.

"You never answered me about the time. Can I still extract her tonight? Or am I looking at spending a night in this tomb first?"

"And if we do pull out am I leaving you plugged in?"

As Liam ran down the potential ramifications of what he was proposing he hesitated. "You know what, I think I'm getting ahead of myself here. There's a time pressure certainly, but its not imminent until I pull the trigger and its not like she's going anywhere. This is what we're going to do, you see how far you can make it with the server tonight. I'll explore some of the other outlets in the conduit with your help and I'll bring back any data pads and other small personal effects that I find."

"Tomorrow night we speak to Robyn about the wards. Maybe there's a way to bypass them or temporarily silence them. And I'll confer with Hasan as well, since we'll probably need his help once we get to the surface. Don't have to spring an uninvited house guest on him tonight."

"Its probably worth a call to Jacob as well. This whole thing would go much smoother with a few more Gangrel, but they don't make landfall for a few nights still."

"Sound good?"

"That'll give me time to cobble together something resembling a map," Pockets said. "Just make sure to kill the power on your way out. We don't want to tip our hand, here. With the hardlines cut and the security hub dead, we didn't trigger any alarms. But who knows how closely a watch they're placing on the power draw."

"There's not a hell of a lot left to salvage on this machine, but all the camera footage is intact. Nearly a hundred separate feeds, motion-activated footage, timestamped and running back years. We're talking terabytes of information. The more I have, the better. But to get it all I'd need to keep it running through to tomorrow evening. It's a risk."

"There's still time to get some rooms explored and make it back to camp tonight, but you might want to have a kip down there if you can manage it. I can even reach out to the Boys for you, seeing as you're not gonna get reception with your satphone down there."

"Yeah, lets do that," Liam replied. "Let Hasan and Jacob know what we found. They can start planning."

"I'm going to go dark and check the next junction. Hopefully there's a camera in whatever room I pop up in so you can keep tabs on me."

"I'll  do that. And as long as it's not somebody's personal room, I can pretty much guarantee there'll be cameras. Might take me a bit to locate you. Wave for me."

It was a tight squeeze through the conduit, but as he was essentially at the head of a great branchwork of systems. Even with Liam's limited knowledge of technology, he knew that a single branching cable likely led to a single terminal, and thus the chances of encountering anything interesting were relatively low. The largest branch ran straight back to the security room where he first entered. Thus, the logical step was to take the next-largest bundle and follow it to the source.

Unfortunately for Liam, it appeared as though this conduit ran afoul of the Alhambra's subterranean redevelopments. The cables had been cut, stuffed into the conduit, and sealed off with some sort of expanding foam. Even if he was able to worm his way through that, there was likely a concrete wall on the other side.

Traversing back, and following the next-largest branch down yielded a similar result. It was time-consuming and more than a little frustrating, but after a slow float down a third tube he reached what was left of the grand foyer.

The machine gun that had been housed in this pillbox was missing, but Liam could easily identify it from having had the view on the other end. At one point, this room would have overlooked a long, high-ceiling corridor where anyone coming from the Alhambra had the pleasure of being a sitting duck.

Of course, as he came to understand the Nosferatu, and the Camarilla in general, he knew that the security was less about protection from any threat from the Alhambra, and more a message to the high-minded other clans that they had left the haven of Jacob Holloway's grand ideals, and had set foot on sovereign soil.

Now, it was an unfinished concrete wall, so close to the edge of the pillbox that Liam could reach through and touch it. The annexed edge of the new and improved Alhambra Resort & Casino. In many ways, the changes served as a message of their own.

Everything of value had been stripped from the room. Cabinets lay bare. The heavy steel door sealing the room lay unlocked and ajar. There had been a remote monitoring station, with an array of monitors showing camera feeds in a wide spectrum of imaging technologies.

The monitors were still intact, but displayed only backlit blankness. The control panel had been ripped open, and vital parts had been removed - possibly during the lockdown, or during the Camarilla's subsequent renovations. The camera pointing into the pillbox, thankfully, was intact.

Were Liam to drop down from this perch, he would find himself in the remaining end of the grand hallway. He could not tell from this angle if the access to the warrens was still intact, but he did see some sort of feature on the new Alhambra wall that seemed worthy of further inspection.

After Liam had a few minutes to take it all in, Pockets' voice came from a tinny PA speaker near the door. "There you are. Feed says 'Pillbox'. Any good drugs in there?"

"Looks pretty picked over," Liam said, prying through the remains of the control panel. "The poured a new wall just the other side of the aperture. Looks like somethings on it, but I can't really make it out from here."

"I'm going to have to get closer, but I should probably change just in case its a motion sensor or another charge."

Liam didn't have to float far to satisfy his curiosity. The Camarilla had left an access door to the catacombs in the wake of their renovations. It was a heavy vault door, locked from the other side. He could tell from a distance that the doorway was also heavily warded, and a pair of security cameras - wired to the Alhambra and not the warrens - discouraged a closer inspection, even as a fog. It was a way in, but surely not the easiest. And not without serious backup.

Liam drifted back out of sight and regained his usual guise. "There's an access door set in the wall and its being watched. Don't think I'm getting any closer."

"Looks like I'm turning back around."

"Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch," Pockets exclaimed. "They got things wired into the wall there? With a blind spot and nobody standing guard? Cocksucker, I wish I could get a closer look, but they've taken out all the Nosferatu feeds around there. I just got a raging fuckin' hacker boner, man. Whoof. Fuck everything else, get me into that camera."

"We'll put a pin in that, though. You know I love you but you're hot dogshit with electronics. This requires a surgeon. Just do me a favour and make sure you don't leave a fuckin' trace when you leave. Not. A. Fuckin'. Trace. You're probably fine leaving the phones plugged in, but be quiet as a mouse fart on your way out."

"Speaking of which, if you head back right now you might be able to sneak on home. You're probably grounded, though. It's a rough night, even for you. You probably can't hear it now but it's bad enough we stopped the turbine. But either way, remaining undetected got much more valuable than the rest of the surveillance footage. Better to kill the power now."

"I'm texting with Hasan and he says to come by for the night," she added. "I think he's lonely. Wants a slumber party."

"Alright," Liam said. "Tell him I'm coming. I'm going to need you to pull my contacts and set me up with a new phone. I'll drop the tablet off tomorrow. And do me a favour and let me know when Logan gets in safe."

"The m'af'k' showed up a while ago," Pockets said. "Everything's in the sewing room. Except the beer. The phone'll be ready when you get back; you won't even hafta change the number. I'm putting the two that are plugged in into sleep mode. They should be good for a couple months without power."

"I hear some activity upstairs," she added a moment later. "Looks like Robyn is back from her trip. I'mma go see if they need anything."

This gave Liam plenty of time to billow his way back to the breaker room. Pockets was waiting for him when he materialized. Her voice came over the PA as he reached for the switch.

"Hey, make sure you turn on the news when you get in," Pockets said. "Ya boy's fuckin' us."

"Alright," Liam said. There was nothing he could do about it now. "I'll check when I get in. Its going to take me some time to get back."

"I'll let you know when I get in safe."

There was no opposition on his way out. With Hasan's hideout in mind, he was left with plenty of time to retrace his steps, double down on trail marking, and commit the wards he came across to memory. The two-man team and their cooler of blood were long gone - though with all the shapeshifting he'd been doing that cache sounded mighty tasty.

The safest - albeit wettest - route took him back up to the storm system through the closed bulkhead door. Even this section was now gutted with rain. It rushed down from the grates above in steady streams. This was a real Maritime storm.

It would not be possible to swim upstream to the storm drain he'd jumped down from. He was somewhere on the north end of downtown. A brisk walk from here would get him to Hasan's about an hour before sundown. There would be no aerial patrols in this weather, but the city's new security system was likely out in the terrible weather anyway.

Liam scampered out of the storm drain and darted for shelter in one of the downtown centre's many alleyways. A waterlogged rat escaping the sewers would not draw much attention if seen at all against the backdrop of the driving rain. He could move pretty quickly on four paws, but perhaps not quite as quickly as two legs. Getting home unseen would require an art this evening, trading off one form for the other without getting caught. When he deemed it safe to do so, he hunkered down out of view.

"I'm top side," he said into his ear piece. "Can't get back across town through the sewers tonight. Going to have to walk."

The earpiece was dead. The satellite phone, however, was abuzz. He had messages waiting for him when he reformed.

"CALL ME RIGHT THE FUCK NOW - A.D." read a text from a burner phone. Augusto was unhappy about something.

"Cell networks dead," read a text from Pockets. "City-wide. Power, too. Fortunately we're OTG."

The streets were flooding out. Windows were dark, and mooks were still standing on every street corner, trying to look casual in what was becoming hurricane weather. Without the cell towers to call them off, they were still brandishing phones surveilling nothing but dark gray static. The system was down, and the establishment was blind.

This meant that the way was clear to Hasan's. Even if he flashed his ass at a passing mook, he doubted it was even possible to sound an alarm.

"Got it," Liam texted back to Pockets. Augusto would have to wait.

Liam pulled up his gaiter, made sure his arm band was secure and started walking.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:48, Sat 26 June 2021.

Liam arrived at Jacob and Hasan's hideout without incident. The city's disused auto parts factory was built in the wake of the Second World War, and had an extensive bomb shelter system built beneath the basement. This had been removed from the records by Jacob under his tenure, and now it served as an ideal refuge within the city.

The entrance to the hideout was barely visible when it was closed, but it was waiting open for Liam when he arrived.

"Come on in," Hasan said from within the complex. "Close the door on your way."

The lounge reminded Liam a lot of the mess hall from the old hideout. He evidently wasn't the only one who thought so. A singed "No Smoking" sign from the burned-out bunker had been hung above a doorway.

Hasan was standing by the fridge. He had a bag of blood in one hand, and a bottle of Jack's whiskey in the other. "Want something filling, or fortifying?"

"Filling first," Liam replied. "Fortifying later. Pockets tells me I made the news."

"Its good to see you with no bullets flying at us for a change, Old Man."

"Hey, bullets I know how to deal with," Hasan said, tossing Liam a blood bag. "Fuck me."

[+2 BP]

"You didn't make the news. We did," Hasan said. "News stories about a new variant of Covid brewing in the city." The British Variant, as it was being called at the time, was becoming the first variant to make headlines.

"They're claiming it spreads faster, and has a high mortality rate among infants, dogs and cats. All bull, of course. But your witchy friend did some sort of checking up on your government buddy and says he's working on locking the city down. My guess is they're going to use it to justify cordoning the city off. But I didn't get to see much before everything went dead. Even Pockets can't get a connection."

There was a time this would have rendered her comatose. Perhaps the curse wasn't all bad.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:33, Sun 27 June 2021.

"That's... actually pretty damn smart," Liam said, polishing off the blood bag with zest and wiping the corners of his mouth clean. "I mean, its going to spook the Tremere and cause us no end of problems, but I can see what they're thinking."

"Doesn't explain why Augusto is blowing up my phone though. I'll take the whiskey next, thank you. I think I'm going to need a drink under my belt before I call him."

"Because he's nuttier'n squirrel shit and the government's hairy eyeball is turning his way," Hasan said with a shrug. "He needs us as much as we need him. Let him bluster, but he won't break a deal."

He measured two generous helpings out in red solo cups, and passed one to Liam. He plopped down on a sagging sofa. "And damn right it's smart. You want to get the Western world quaking in its boots, you threaten their pets. This is going to hurt the Tremere a lot more than it hurts us, but it definitely hurts us."

"Yeah." Liam also flopped down on a love seat and raised his cup. "Here's to hurting them more," he said. "Cheers."

Liam took a healthy swig and savoured the taste on the way down. "God damn, that's good."

He looked up at Hasan. "Pockets tell you what I found? Or rather, who."