Our story resumes at Andromeda's Sorrow, as Darri flips the switch on a mysterious device in an upstairs room, while Alex, Kiko, and Jack chat with Zakkai inside, with Brune outside lurking and watching.
Upstairs, the machine whirrs to life. A light starts flashing as the disk begins to spin, faster and faster until it's just a blur. Nothing else happens that you can see from within the room.
Brune drums his fingers anxiously on the armrest as he watches people walk by. He takes out his notepad, occupying himself while he waits for another signal, and flips past several pages of scribbled nonsense and begins sketching, poorly.
Brune's sketch turns, gradually, into a rough map of the town. He drums his pen on it for a moment, pondering something, and then flips another page and begins lightly drawing a picture of the arch from the library.
@bobble Extreme (?) success, and a Success on the "looking cool" bit. Agile, nimble, quick - all you could ask for. From Brune's perspective, you could be an acrobat.
Brune looks up just in time to witness Darrion's acrobatics, and laughs, which he hasn't done in a while. He flips another page and writes something, and holds it up: 10.
Back inside, Zakkai stands up. "If you'll excuse me for a moment, friends, I have to check something. Please do think on my offer - I'll be right back."
He heads around the back of the room and starts climbing a wooden staircase, not quickly but moving surprisingly easier than you'd expect from someone over a hundred years old.
Brune closes the notepad and tucks it back into his sweatshirt pocket, and peers, squinting, at the dark screen. "Is that supposed to be displaying something, Darri?"
Brune takes out the notepad again, flips a few pages, and begins scribbling, the handwriting almost incomprehensible: machine -> (unintelligible) -> music
"We should check in again." Brune vigorously draws a few harsh lines connecting the music player to other unintelligible scribbles, then closes the notepad. "I think - well. I have new evidence. I think there is one more place we should visit today."
"I knew it," Brune mutters, feverishly. He sounds a bit more unhinged than usual. He flips open his notepad and pages frantically. "Alex, you mentioned before that you replaced someone who once held your position. Someone who does what you now do. What was their name? What did they look like?"
"Tell you later. He's distracted right now but I don't know how much longer he'll be gone for, and I don't want him following us. He gives me the creeps..."
Brune is staring off into space, wild-eyed, only half-listening to the conversation. His mind is racing. ...if DuBois is being held to control the plant...
There are a few other bars open on the wharf, within fairly close distance (the Gasping Gull, the Smiling Lion, and the Jester's Tavern). There's a store selling freshly caught fish, and the restaurant you visited before, Harbor Wave. There's also a place that looks like it might sell pizza.
Jack and Alex head off toward the hotel. Darri and Brune head toward the pizza shop. Kiko looks confused, but follows Darri, although at a rather slower pace. "Pizza... not very hungry."
Her eyes are unfocused and the pupils are dilated. She's a little flushed. As she walks, her feet are barely being lifted past the level of the boardwalk. Something's clearly off - probably a substance.
"Drugs? No... haven't done those in a long time," she says, a half-grin appearing on her mouth. "What's the-" She cuts off mid-sentence and looks like she's about to vomit. "Oh."
"Get off the sidewalk, come on now, come along -" Brune reaches her frantically and grabs for her arm. He's seen a lot of overdoses and poisonings, does this resemble anything he's familiar with?
@Sciborg It bears some resemblance to Z-drugs, but doesn't specifically match any formulation you're familar with.
Kiko obligingly follows Brune's lead, the nauseous look turning into a huge yawn. "Look, I'm already feeling better. Just-" Another yawn. "...a little tired now."
"You'll be all right," Brune says, reassuringly, dropping into his soothing doctor voice. "We need to get you sitting down somewhere, monitor your breathing, keep you awake." He looks fervently around for any open shops or buildings in the vicinity.
@Sciborg Hard success. She's breathing fine, but she seems to be slowing down. It's likely that she'll be out cold very soon. There doesn't seem to be immediate danger to life and limb; what's more concering is the mental confusion, which could indicate some effect on memory.
Brune stares at her. Memory... Something foggy, something dark and uncomfortable, swims in the back of his mind. He pushes it down - that can wait - and says, soothingly: "Let's just get you settled down somewhere, you'll be just fine, lass."
Any chairs in the pizza shop we can plop her down in?
You straggle into The Emporium of Cheese and plop Kiko down onto a chair. She mumbles something in Japanese as her eyes close and she nods off. Behind the counter, a student Darri recognizes by sight as a Linguistics student watches bug-eyed.
@Ginger Not necessarily. It's usually by majority.
Brune keeps one hand on her arm, monitoring her breathing. Now his mind is roiling for a very different reason. He's thinking about the coffee Abe was drinking. The coffee Klaus was always drinking. The whiskey he had with Jack. Every substance he's ever imbibed is suddenly suspect. Memory...
The water... Brune's breath starts to catch as the implications grow darker. What if it's in the water? He remembers all the dreams, the floods, drowning...
"He suspects we're up to something. We need to find a fax machine." They rifle through their backpack, looking for the scraps of cipher. "And then we need to either destroy or hide the rest of the scraps. As long as we have physical copies, we're not safe."
Suddenly Darrion thinks of something he could do. Granted that thing is just sending all the images he took to Alex. He quickly dumps them all via text, ending with the video and a note "turned device on for a bit and then left"
"A glass of water for me, if you would be so kind," Brune tacks on, hastily. Not to drink it - he needs to examine it. He's definitely not insane, he reassures himself. It is very normal to want to examine a glass of water for secret drugs planted by the shadow people.
Brune picks up the glass and suspiciously examines the sloshing liquid, turning it this way and that, trying to look for anything out of the ordinary. He's not really sure what he's looking for.
"Anything unusual. Chemicals." Brune gestures vaguely, thinking amusedly that he wouldn't be out of place on a conspiracy podcast right about now. "Non-water in the water."
It's not the best water in the world, but it doesn't appear to have any foreign substances mixed in with it. Swirling it around and looking at it in the light, you don't spot any cloudiness in the water or anything. It appears to be normal water.
"What? We stopped at the hotel, and then we walked over here... and... funny, I don't remember coming into the pizza store." She looks a little anxious.
"We went in the bar. I may have let on that we knew stuff. Then I ran out, did some legwork, turned on a record player, everyone scrammed, and Alex said we should split. So now you're here and they're at the hotel. You were falling asleep on the walk here."
Brune stares at his glass of water, pale, still and silent. The dark thing swimming in the back of his mind seems to whisper. Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
Hard success. It's hooked up to a radio transmitter. Who knows where it came from; in any case, the CD player is attached to a professional radio transmitter, which will send a signal on the chosen wavelength, and break through the signal if it's closer than whatever else is broadcasting on that wavelength.
@Ginger "What are... What's with the photos?" Jack says with more than a modicum of curiosity. He's rusty now, but he's done some amateur electronics repair before.
In the restaurant, Kiko breaths hard, and then sits back. "So we went to the bar, I got drugged, lost my memory, and now we're here. Did we at least get the information we need?"
"This is a CD player, connected to a professional-grade radio transmitter. I suspect there's a broadcast antenna on the roof somewhere. It looks like this unit's been modified, possibly to broadcast outside amateur radio bands?"
