With one of Dr. Aaron Silvestri’s goals met, the characters go back to their everyday lives – though the knowledge of what they’ve done starts to drive a few of them to paranoia. Does the Overwatch know? Are their co-workers watching them?
It is only a few days before they again decide to act, with Cypher urging the group to help her destroy Dr. Silvestri’s magic-detection research. She urges them to pursue this goal in spite of a disturbing event that morning. Some ethereal visitor in the night briefly invaded her mind, taking from it her knowledge of the other super-powered individuals she’s met.
They observe the building, with Smokey intending to take the place of Dr. Ichabod Bosch, one of Dr. Silvestri’s colleagues. It soon becomes apparent that he is keeping odd hours and is difficult to track down. With some detective work the group tracks down the location of his house, only to find that he’s taken some of his bedding and other belongings to the lab. Looking at his computer, they find his work journal, though many of the entries are encrypted.
Dr. Bosch was very specific. Annie was to follow the path, and either avoid or crush anyone who got in her way. To her, this was simple. Leaving Dr. Bosch, however, was not so easy. He was the only other being she knew (except for the semi-alive fellow robots in the room) and her creator. However, such things are apparently normal. That’s what he said, anyways.
Gabrielle, through effort of will, made herself and Smokey invisible and intangible. In that state, they simply walked into the building. Upon reaching Dr. Bosch’s floor, they detoured into a bathroom to turn off the lights and allow Cypher to shadow-teleport in.
So, at the specified time (“On ze dot! ZE DOT!”), she crawled up into the vent and went on low-power. What happened next was unplanned. She watched through the vent as the Enforcers came to ensure that AI1 had been completed as requested. AI1, obviously, was not there, and so the Enforcers killed Doc Bosch. Annie waited, silently, for them to leave and then dropped down to say a short goodbye to her Daddy Warbuck, bloody and dead.
Smokey and Gabrielle were watching helplessly from within the wall when Dr. Bosch was lased down. The Enforcer Psychic seemed to detect their presence for a moment, but Smokey tricked its mind and sent it off in the wrong direction. Then a strange figure dropped down and said goodbye to the dead Doctor.
While traveling on her path, she took the guise of a worker in the building, but ran into a glitch when she heard a voice that caught her off guard. She tried to ignore it, but in the end, she had new companions. She showed them Doc Bosch’s lab again, trying to avoid his body on the floor, then led them on the way out of the facility.
Smokey took all he could carry from the terrible Doctor’s lab. He had plans, and needed plenty of equipment to realize them. Fortunately, this robot seemed to know where it was going, and seemed more than capable of taking them with it while Cypher accomplished the goal – destroying Dr Silvestri’s work.
Once in the elevator down, there was an alarm and the elevator stopped, so she got them out and to the next floor, and then traveled out the door.
Cypher disabled the building’s fire suppression system, and destroyed all the computers in the doctors lab with bolts of shadow before being interrupted by an Enforcer squad. Rather than dealing with them, she teleported to another room to set a fire, returning after their departure to set one in the lab as well to make certain that all the work would be destroyed beyond recovery.
It was then that she noticed the gas lines nearby and heard the Overwatch announce the start of a “Suppression Event.”
She raced up the steps to the roof just in time to see a Suppression Unit land there. In a panic, she teleported blindly away, with no idea what her destination would be.
She was uncomfortable staying longer, so she ran, and as she ran, she saw a Suppression Unit drop down. So long as it wasn’t after her, she was fine. When she stopped in an alley – these others following – she began preparing to go back to do business and crush these Overwatch thugs. She was stopped by one of them, who asked her to come with the others to fight against the Overwatch together. She agreed, but she gets the impression this isn’t going to go how she planned.
It is not an immediate solution, but it will do. For now.
When Gabrielle returned home, she went right to sleep. It was late, and she still had school the following day. No sooner was she asleep than a cold feeling gripped her belly as an ethereal visitor clawed it’s way into her mind and body, seizing control and taking her body for it’s own.
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