2023-03-27 HH: All Joy Will Tarnish And Rot
All Joy Will Tarnish and Rot
Storyteller: Elyse
Location: A building on South Hope & 9th in the Financial District
Date and Time: March 27, 2023 11:58 pm
Summary: Wren attempts to contact the hacker she works with, Nemesis, for a favor in providing her with some information about the shipments that Simon found during Savannah's trash pickup. In doing so, she must install a repeater device in a nearby office building that will allow Nemesis remote access to a server pool. But, she runs into something unexpected.
Mood Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkT-aMgZvQI Ruiner - Nine Inch Nails
The wireless repeater is easy enough. Nemesis usually comes through on these things, though it's unclear if they do it themselves or have it done for them. San Julian park is strangely empty when Wren picks it up, not even the occasional stray jogger. Rain falls from the sky with relentless intent, and the heavy overcast sky threatens to break open even further, flooding the Los Angeles Basin, sweeping it all down the Pacific to drown every last living soul in this place.
But it doesn't. It won't.
Instead, it just rains miserably as Wren makes her way to the Financial District. The repeater has a small note attached to it with an address. The address takes Wren to a building that's a little more squat than normal. The recent violence near here has caused more police patrols to pick up. Apparently three security guards were brutally murdered near the Civic District. Since money and politics are all but lovers, it stands to reason they'd come into this area as well.
The building is about ten floors. There is a code attached to the address. Seven digits and three letters. No indication as to what it might mean.
As always, Wren wears a hooded jacket. This one's at least fairly waterproof. She knows how do keep her head down, shoulders hunched, that 'pay no attention to me' walk. And of course, the first task is to look at the locks, check for a keypad or electronic directory.
There is a directory but it hasn't been updated in years, most likely. There are names that have been scratched out, other names that have been worn away with time. Some even have been rewritten over so many times that it's impossible to read the most recent occupants. Nothing seems to match the collection of numbers and letters on the address. There is a keypad option to open, if someone can't be buzzed in -- likely for employees -- and a traditional key entry lock.
A police car sweeps past the street and slows for just a moment, then moves on its way. Lights flash and someone is pulled over down the block.
Nope, nothin' to see here. Maybe just someone trying to get out of the rain for half a minute in this here doorway.
Wren tries the sequence, all of it the first time.
+LOSE/+BURN> Wren burns 1 Willpower.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Intelligence + Security vs. 6 -> 4 successes. (9 8 8 6)
Wren didn't get the sequence correct, but somehow she hit the correct combination to put the device into factory reset. It flashes twice, the door pops open. Beyond is what appears to be a featureless white hallway with a set of stairs tucked off to the side just inside the door. There also appear to be elevator doors down the far hall.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Perception + Alertness vs. 8 -> 4 successes. (10 10 10 9)
Wren is neither particularly graceful nor particularly stealthy... so she just exudes confidence instead. Now the head down is just purposeful, like she knows where she's going.
Wren was able to read off a series of different businesses. There was one in particular that she recognizes from the recent data dump that was discovered by the others: InnovateMed Solutions. They're on the 2nd floor, office number 217.
Head down in the building, there aren't many places to hide in here. It's just one long hallway with doors to either side. Most of the doors are unlabeled or seem to be open to empty offices. Must be poor commercial sales in this particular property.
Maybe it's a password? But surely it's destined either for a server room (given the way this place looks, seems unlikely) or for the offices of a target company. So given the paucity of renters, she heads for the second floor. She is, of course, wearing gloves. *Always* wear gloves.
Up the stairs leads to a landing that leads to more stairs. Wren finds the second floor mezzanine and steps out into the hallway. It seems to be a duplicate of the one on the "lobby" level. The doors to the left are odd, the ones on the right are even. 217.
It's about midway down the hall. There is not a soul or a sound in this entire building, apparently. Well, it's fairly late in the evening, and finance guys are always going home early, right?
Wren does a swift scan around for cameras. This, at least, is the sort of things she knows how to do: spot them without them spotting you. The cheap cameras, anyway.
+LOSE/+BURN> Wren burns 1 Willpower.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Wits + Intrigue vs. 8 -> 3 successes. (10 9 9 5 5 4)
No cameras down the hall. Nothing really that seems to be around to mark Wren's passage at all.
Another look at those characters on the note. 2jhy1lmbs7
Something jogs in Wren's memory miraculously. Some brief training she was given by some overly paranoid gun runner on Caesar ciphers. It's a base 7 letter shift. The letters are important, the numbers are not. 2car1eful7. 217 careful?
So Wren does need to go into this room, but she should likely be on her guard. The silence in the empty hall is nearly deafening.
The 217, she sees. Because it had to be somewhere, right? After that she has letters, probably just those are significant. Simplest first. Nemesis knows she isn't a math genius unless it's bullet drop math, right? So a character shift is the simplest thing, the easiest thing. One, no. Two, no. Three, no. By the time she gets to seven she actually rolls her eyes a bit and stuff the slip of paper back in her pocket. Quietly, she pulls the little Sig and turns off the safety. The item itself is in a crossbody bag slung securely under her jacket.
She /is/ wearing her vest.
Gun in hand and held low, she carefully opens the door and does that magical door-turn thing one does in urban combat.
Or, at least, the way they taught it to her in mafia school. It's a box move, checking four corners of visual range.
There's a loud clack in the distance as Wren enters the room. Nothing seems to be in the immediate area; it's a simple lobby for a larger office beyond. The lights are down low, and it looks like a light has been left on in the back offices. Someone still at work?
The clack happens again, louder. It looks like the hallway lights are being shut off, each panel of fluorescents shuddering silent with that strange clacking sound, like the sound of snapping plexiglass.
Wren mouths an expletive and crouches low, moving between any intervening desks for cover just in case. She works her way closer to the light, always keeping a barrier between herself and the door, or any glass.
Wren can get behind the secretary's desk, where she sees there is a laptop computer lying on the floor, screen popped open, like it was left there for her. There doesn't appear to be any glass nearby, and anyone coming through the door wouldn't be able to see her. %TThe laptop screen flickers to life. A message box pops up, it looks like a porn ad pop-up, but it reads Wren's screen name she uses buried in the pop-up.
There's a footstep outside the door to the hall. Heavy, purposeful.
Wren can get behind the secretary's desk, where she sees there is a laptop computer lying on the floor, screen popped open, like it was left there for her. There doesn't appear to be any glass nearby, and anyone coming through the door wouldn't be able to see her.
The laptop screen flickers to life. A message box pops up, it looks like a porn ad pop-up, but it reads Wren's screen name she uses buried in the pop-up.
There's a footstep outside the door to the hall. Heavy, purposeful.
Without making a sound (thank goodness for touchpads) Wren clicks the link and huddles under the desk as best she can, checking how shielded she is from the entry door.
Hopefully a little, anyway.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Wits + Elusion vs. 6 -> 1 success. (9 8 8 5 2 1 1)
The heavy footsteps enter the room and begin to move towards the secretary desk. Wren clicks the link.
The laptop opens a terminal and Wren sees text being typed into the terminal. 'Thank you for opening the connection.' Nemesis apparently is deciding to be formal instead of using leetspeak.
The footsteps amble away from the secretary desk, into the doorway leading into the back office. They resound heavily, as if the owner is at least five hundred pounds.
'I do not know why this place is important, but it is. There is something odd about it. No one enters, no one leaves. Not even janitorial staff. For all intents, the building does not exist. In the offices behind the front desk is a cubicle farm, and to the far side of that room is a door that leads to a server pool. Get the repeater to the server pool and you will have your data.'
The lights flicker.
Wren listens as hard as she can, and then starts creeping her way in the proper direction. Front desk... there. Cubicles offer some cover, at least, so she can creep a tiny bit faster.
+LOSE/+BURN> Wren burns 1 Willpower.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Dexterity + Stealth vs. 6 -> 1 success. (6 5 4 2)
+ROLL/+DICE> Elyse: 4 vs. 6 -> 0 successes. (10 5 4 1)
Wren is able to make it to the cubicles, but the way they're organized is from one wall to the other. There is no way to get around the little maze of quasi offices, she'll either have to make her way into the maze and out, or try to find some way to go over. Or she can always go loud. Dealer's choice.
There's a heavy step somewhere nearby. The lighting is poor, save for the light that's on in what appears to be the server pool room that Nemesis identified. To go through this would be like trying to get through a hedge maze, being chased by something she can barely perceive. The cubicle walls are tall enough that any visibility is blocked.
Well... quiet has worked *so* far, and it's a lot easier to be quiet when you're on your feet, at least for Wren. Listening for those heavy footfalls, gun at the ready, she edges into the maze. Literally edges, at least half her attention on /sounds/, listening for the footsteps.
Echolocating through a maze is not what humans were meant to do. That said, Wren is able to do it well enough, tracing the footsteps of the larger creature somewhere in the maze. She passes into one cubicle and through the other side, but accidentally catches her phone on a mouse cord, knocking it onto the ground. She has enough time to get into another cubicle before whatever it is comes stomping around the corner to investigate. If she peeks her head out, she can get a good look at what it is.
Not just no, but fuck no, never expose yourself before the enemy does. Not if you're a small, insignificant creature who weighs ninety-five soaking wet.
Nope. Wren just raises her gun to a likely angle, watches, and waits. Ready to fire if Yuke comes into view.
The man, if that's what it could be called, steps back into view. Easily near seven feet tall, it has a weirdly inflated head, bulbous and round. As it breathes, the head deflates, then inflates again. It carries a steel pipe in its hands, and it is about half as wide as it is tall. Its arms are covered in buboes and sores, lesions that weep pus and blood into an amalgamated mass that drip off of their hands as they move around. It is wearing a large trenchcoat, the only thing that could reasonably fit its prodigious bulk.
Inflate, deflate. The head continues to puff up and down.
They seem to have been thrown off by Wren's sudden jump into the next cubicle after knocking the mouse, and move past where she's hiding to investigate further down the row.
Revulsion twists across her face at that glimpse, but Wren lowers the gun and stays /down/ until those footsteps have traveled a little distance.
(Please, /please/, not toward the damn server room.)
The fomor stops briefly in the center of the cubicle hall. To the left is the exit to where one might gain access to the server room; to the right is just more cubicles. It huffs and snuffles at the air, its head inflating up into a balloon shape. It breathes out, and the skin around its head deflates into a little cap-like flap of flesh that wriggles and writhes with the pumping of its blood. Holding its breath.
After not hearing anything further, it heads off to the right. The tip of the pipe drops to the ground and drags against the tile. SCRAPE. SCRAPE. SCRAPE. CLANK. Breaking fiberglass again. A computer monitor shatters.
It must be getting desperate.
And it knows Wren is in here. Somewhere.
9mm Luger might not be enough. She she stays careful and as quiet as she possibly can, waiting and estimating... cheating her timing so she has a moment to aim. She rounds the corner, turns, takes a second to aim... and opens up on it, going for center of mass and firing twice in quick succession.
+LOSE/+BURN> Wren burns 1 Willpower.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Dexterity + Firearms + 2 vs. 6 -> 5 successes. (9 8 8 8 7 6 3 1)
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Dexterity + Firearms vs. 6 -> 1 success. (10 8 6 4 1 1)
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: 8 vs. 6 -> 3 successes. (9 9 7 5 4 4 4 4)
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: 4 vs. 6 -> 4 successes. (9 8 7 6)
+ROLL/+DICE> Elyse: 2 vs. 6 -> 1 success. (7 5)
+ROLL/+DICE> Elyse: 2 vs. 6 -> 0 successes. (5 3)
POP. POP. The gunshots hit it in the center of its back. Pustules and lesions immediately split down its huge frame as the skin attempts to knit closed and fails, sending little cracks in the flesh and rending bits and pieces of the skin away. It seems as though something had tried to give this thing some kind of regenerative ability, but it simply did not work in the way that the fomor had planned. The chaos of the Wyrm.
It turns and its head blows up to an enormous size like a puffball mushroom. As it releases its air, Wren realizes that it's roaring, but there is no sound that emerges from its lungs. It begins to grow larger somehow. Its body strains and stretches, the clothes popping free to show engorged, veined flesh, marble-like in its intumescence. Its muscles bulge and strain at the skin, the skin beginning to pop free of the muscle tissue and degloving to fall in scraps on the floor as it charges.
Cubicle walls are destroyed by that pipe, now so small in its massive hands, as it swings its body in the charge.
A minotaur in the labyrinth.
The moment it /doesn't/ go down, she runs with adrenaline-fueled (still not impressive) speed toward the far end of that long line of cubicle walls. *Almost* the length of it.
In some place beneath her combat-brain there's a stray thought: *really* should have tried that whole parkour thing.
Run. Turn. Fire.
The gun goes off again and hits the fomor's flesh. The bullet bounces off harmlessly, falling to the floor. Bad luck.
The fomor does that soundless roar again, its head puffing up as if it'll pop, then slings the pipe across to smash Wren in the ribs. One of the ribs breaks under the pressure. Thanks in part to the torture that Wren's suffered, she doesn't feel it. But the force of the blow throws her across the room towards the server room.
If she can make it into the room, the bloated fomor will not be able to follow as quickly. It moves to charge again, this time swinging its fist.
Wren isn't /quite/ knocked ass over teakettle, but just about: careening and half-scrambling and perhaps bouncing off an unfriendly wall somewhere along the way. It's not what one would call graceful, but she manages to stay on her feet after the first blow. Somehow.
Once again the fomor pulls in to attack Wren, this time with one of its fists. It crashes through the particle board wall near the door as it swings around, then gets Wren right in the face. It's a glancing wound but will leave a bit of a shiner.
She is able to clamber back into the server room fast enough to fire off a shot and catch the fomor in the gut. This appears to be the last straw, knocking it to the ground. The head deflates, the body begins to deflate a little as well, the extra skin rippling off its muscles and bones to lay like a flesh suit on the ground.
The server is just right there, waiting for Wren to install that repeater.
Task first, though Wren is definitely keeping an eye on the thing as she puts it... where? Up high? Down low? Somewhere kinda hidden...
Once the device is in place, she sends a quick text while keeping a solid aim on the Thing.
"Yo Vinny. Send a text to Cold Eyes."
"<What do you want to say to Cold Eyes?>
"Enemy down, not down hard. Advise comma execute question mark, yes or no. Please come to the party if you can. Similar to the other day on the row. <Address> suite 217."
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Wits + Technology vs. 6 -> 3 successes. (9 7 6 5 5 2)
Wren is able to see a spot in the server rack where a device might fit. It's a little higher up off the floor, and it looks like the repeater will fit there well. There's a small USB port for it to plug into. Based on what she's got in her hands, it doesn't look like the device requires any external power source.
The creature continues to lie there, unmoving.
Wren gets the thing plugged in, though there's definitely at least one hiss as she feels fractured bone shift. Once the job with the repeater's done, she whispers, "yeah, nope, sorry." Taking a knee by the mess, she delivers two point-blank shots, center of mass and head.
And then she hunts for a supply area, employee lounge, cleaning closet... all she needs is a trash bag, a dustpan and maybe a broom, hopefully.
Cleansing this place? That'll have to wait.
Wren can actually find something more than the kitchen trashbags that were at the AMB the other night. She finds the big industrial strength bags and what appears to be a machete. This will be useful, as she can fit a decent amount of the creature into one bag, but will need to hack through the rest of it to get it into two bags. It's surprisingly light now that it's fully deflated.
Police sirens sound outside. Someone must have heard the gunshots. She'll have to act fast.
And so she does. Adrenaline's a helluva drug, after all. She definitely looks for a back way out, sending another text while she works.
"Yo Vinny. Send a text to Cold Eyes."
"<What do you want to say to Cold Eyes?>
"Meet at corner of Hope and Sixth, PD incoming."
<Okay. Your m-->
"SEND IT."
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Intelligence + Elusion vs. 6 -> 1 success. (10 9 6 2 1 1)
Wren finds a window that will drop out into the dumpster. Perfect for stashing those bags. After cleaning up with the mop, she notes that she could also jump out the window with probably minimal damage to herself. The dumpster seems pretty full. Assuming it's not full of broken glass and used needles, it might be a good cushion. Otherwise, there's down the stairs and an attempt to find a side door.
+ROLL/+DICE> Wren: Dexterity + Athletics vs. 6 -> 2 successes. (7 7 5 2)
...and *those* pants will be headed for another trashbag as soon as she gets back the the Tower. Wren makes the jump, does *not* land on anything pointy or poisonous, and uses some very colorful Italian as she clambers out of the dumpster. Then she's making her way down the alley toward Fifth Street, walking as normally as possible.
Police response stops outside the building she was just at. The Sept has been going pretty loud lately. This time, however, the police will not find anything more than a few shell casings in Suite 217. Wren is long-gone by then, and there's no reason to suspect anything was dropped into the dumpster.
Additionally, there is no reason for them to look into the server rack. The repeater merrily chimes away, allowing Nemesis access to the network. This gives them just enough access to be able to search for the data that Simon had asked Wren to find. A message hits her phone:
< Will have data for you tomorrow. Rest up. >
The rain continues to drive down from the sky, slicking the streets and creating rivulets of water that pile at the gutters, which slowly become more familiarly filled with trash as Wren finds herself in Skid Row.
