Nuclear Fire 13
The Brockton Bay Department of Education is not located in the Town's Hall, nor anywhere near the city's center. Instead of that, it's located in an apartment block, close to the docks, that the city's renting for that exact purpose. Located in the same block is also a dance studio, an art studio, and a local radio station.
"Is this the place? I was expecting, I don't know, something more?" Taylor is standing next to me on the roof of the neighboring block, sporting her recently retrofitted visor. I'll need several days to finish her upgrade but at least now she's starting to look like an actual ladybug.
"Looks about right to me." I reply with a shrug. The Department of Education in my previous city was just the same.
Now, how are we going to proceed with this entire mess?
I activate my visor's scanner mode and discover that the unassuming front hides a complex network of cameras and motion sensors. It very much looks like an electronic spiderweb. And these work passively, constantly sending an 'ok' signal to the outside, so I can't just destroy them as I did in Winslow.
I suspect it might be to protect the Wards' identities, at least from normals. Against a dedicated cape infiltrator, though? Not much they can do against that. And guess what Deus Ex is about, besides augmentations!
"Do your bugs feel anything?"
Taylor's still having trouble distinguishing shapes and sounds, but her sense of smell is top-notch. That was how she found the bleeding man before my visor did.
"I don't think so? My bugs are acting weird around the air ducts but I think that's bug repellant."
I nod at her words as I continue my investigations. Luckily for us, there's just one guard at the entrance, with all the alarms handled by the automatic system. That system is wired to a central server station on the ground floor, close to where the guard's stationed, which in turn is connected to an antenna on the roof sending information to an outside security agency. No component of the systems seems to be tinkertech, so it's time to see if my hacking device works as expected.
If it doesn't, well, at least we'll have the teleporter to flee from the scene.
"Let's do this." I grab Taylor's arm and we teleport to the opposite roof. The servers are surrounded by cameras, so my first target is the antenna. It works as an input and output system, so I should be able to… there! I put the outgoing signal in a fifteen second loop. It will be quickly noticed by any human on the other side, so we must move fast. We teleport into the servers' room.
"Tech-Priest, something's happening with the guard outside." Taylor shakes my shoulder. "He's coming our way." The alarm in her voice is clear despite her not raising it.
Yeah, the security agency in charge of this place must have noticed the loop, but it's done. We teleport out of the room just in time to see the man enter it through the cameras that now I control. After a quick search, he returns to his post not having found anything. And I made sure that there wouldn't be anything to find as I deleted all traces of our activities.
Okay, so far so good. I can now pick which cameras to loop and which sensors to disable, so we should be good to go and not risk raising any more alarms.
We teleport inside the Department of Education's office. It's a room barely bigger than our living room, with four computers inside, and a single window that leads to an air shaft.
"Help me turn the computers on." I tell Taylor, and slowly the room fills with the hum of cooling fans.
I crack my knuckles.
It's showtime. The security system was no match for my visor, but now it's time to see how it fares when it has to search, sort, and modify information. Hundreds of emails and documents flash over my visor as I run the hacking program. Cracking passwords is a joke, and so is tricking the computer into forgetting this unscheduled connection.
The visor has finished sorting through 75% of the archives when I receive a warning.
"Tech Priest?" Taylor asks in concern, as she too can see what I'm seeing through her enhanced-reality HUD.
"It's fine, we weren't detected." The warning isn't about us triggering an alarm but about the visor finding a heavily encrypted folder and asking me if it should try opening it. It finds three folders like that. One for Arcadia, one for Clarendon, and one for Winslow. "I think I found the Wards' folders."
"Don't touch them!" She yells.
I'm not that stupid. I mean, I guess so. "I won't, don't worry."
Despite my calming words she still eyes me warily. "Good."
I don't think I even could, honestly. My visor calculates a catastrophically low chance of opening it without being detected, so there has to be some tinker tech at play here. But now that reminds me of something. "Say, Taylor, what was the name of that Sophia girl you told me about?"
She goes very still for a moment. "Hess." She spits. "Her name's Sophia Hess."
I search for her name and… well, I was sadly expecting that. "She's going to Arcadia."
"What?! Why?!"
"According to this-" I read further into the transference trying to find what excuse they came up with, "Because of sports credits."
Taylor paces back and forth clutching the side of her head. "She was a member of Winslow's track and field team."
Yes, that probably helped, but I know that the real reason must be because she's Shadow Stalker of the Wards. "Anyone el-"
"Madison Clemens." She says before I can even finish fo
"She's going to Immaculata."
"Okay, that's good. That is good." Her breathing gets heavy. "One last name. Emma Barnes."
Let's see, I search for her name and… shit. "She's going to Arcadia too."
"Why?!" It's a good thing that we're on a second floor and no one can hear us or we'd be in deep shit right now. "She doesn't do sports, the only thing she has is her modeling career! And she doesn't have the scores to get into Arcadia! I should know, that's why she went to Winslow and why I followed her there!" She collapses on a chair like a puppet who got her strings cut.
"You went to Winslow because of her?"
"Yes." She pulls her mask up so she can breathe easier. "I could have gone to Arcadia but insisted on going to Winslow to be with her."
We didn't bring provisions with us assuming this would be a quick operation, but there's a water dispenser in the corner. I fill a disposable cup and offer it to her. "You couldn't have known any of this would happen."
"No, I guess not." She empties the cup in one gulp and gives it back to me. I'll make sure to destroy it later. "How did she get in?"
"She was recommended by the law firm Barnes and Hamlet. Her father must have used his influence to pull that one out." And money. Lots and lots of money.
"Of course he did."
"I could send you somewhere else." I offer. "Clarendon is fairly strict against students who misbehave. I should know. We could also get registered you as homeschooled, or even-"
"No." She cuts me. "They aren't ruining this one for me too. If anything, this convinces me even more to take the test! Not only I'll be there too but I'll be there on my own right, unlike them."
On one hand, she's a bloody stubborn girl. On the other, doing something out of spite is a thing I sympathize with. "Only if that's what you want. If anything, I'd like to see them trying to bully you there. If they try, they'll get stomped hard."
She laughs. "And if Arcadia fucks this one up we can just burn it too!" I can't tell if she's being serious or not. Taylor's scary when she gets angry.
"Oh, we will." I reply with a subtle smile of complicity. "Let's do this then."
Where are the correct documents now?
Found them! And it seems that because of the fire Arcadia got an unprecedented influx of new potential students, making a mess of their paperwork. Several transfer documents are incomplete, and some even contradict others about who should go where. With some luck, this means that Taylor's name will get overlooked. "It's done, Ladybug. Next Friday at nine you'll have to be at Arcadia for your entrance test."
She slowly nods. "Not much time to study but I can do this."
"With my help, of course you can!"
"What about the syllabus? I don't want the answers but I will need that."
That is very true. "Got it. I saved it to your visor."
"Perfect!" She presses the side of her visor, looking through it. "So, is that it? Do we leave now?"
We could, yes, but that honestly feels like a waste. I have access to governmental servers here so there should be something for me to do.
Idea!
"Give me a minute. I want to find out what the schools have been doing with their outdated equipment."
"Their what?"
I reply while browsing through the archives. "When a school receives new equipment, they have to do something with the old stuff. Normally the city would send them to other schools, but I want to check if I can't get that trash."
"Sounds reasonable."
Acquisition of books… no, I don't care about that. Oh, look at that, Arcadia has an infirmary and is correctly disposing of its biological wastes. Neat but I don't care about that either.
Wait, what is this?
"Tech Priest?" Taylor asks, maybe noticing how I stopped at a particular document.
"A moment. I found something weird." I'm reading about the donation of several new computers and other school supplies to Winslow. It supposedly happened a year ago, but the specifications don't match. Those most definitely weren't the computers that I dismantled. "Did you hear about this?" I send the document to Taylor.
"I didn't. Maybe it got canceled or something? It wouldn't surprise me if Blackwell kept it and sold it to someone else."
"Maybe." But there's something that rubs me the wrong way here. The donation wasn't made public, and according to this document the one behind it is... Blue Mountain, a construction company.
Wasn't Fortress Constructions just a fanon name?
I search for more info, browsing the web trying to figure out who the owner is.
I find nothing. There's no name, the webpage is barren of information, but I do find several newspaper articles more than five years old about renovations across the city.
Blue Mountain was the company responsible for building the Endbringer Shelters in Brockton Bay and several neighboring cities.
Fuck me, this is Coil's company.
"So? What did you find?"
"Something big."
What else was this group involved in? If I'm reading this manifest correctly, the donations arrived at their designated storehouse but didn't reach Winslow. No reason is given, and the company didn't reclaim them either. The boxes are still there.
At least boxes that claim to have the donations inside them.
What if Coil used them to smuggle illegal stuff? He could have brought anything in them! From drugs to weapons, to equipment for his mercenaries.
Where did the donations come from?
Boston.
Isn't that great? The same city that has Accord in it, one of Coil's allies and a powerful thinker. What a bloody happy coincidence!
I need more.
Coil not only donated materials to Winslow but also to every other school in the city. Unlike Winslow's, these ones reached their destinations after having been stored in a different warehouse. I even have a newspaper clip here about how happy Arcadia was to receive the material.
Shit, could Coil have bugged the computers? That sounds like something he'd do.
And there's even more still! The old material was scheduled to be recycled and sent to
Boston, where it'd be received by struggling schools there. It was sent to the same warehouse where Winslow's donations were stored -which now I'm sure belongs to Coil- and that's where the trail ends. There are no accounts of the old material leaving for Boston, assuming that it ever did and that the snake didn't use it for something else.
I leaned back, pushing my back against the wall.
"So? What is it?" Taylor sounds concerned, and how could I blame her? I'm very concerned too.
How do I explain this to her? Much of what I found comes from my out-of-universe knowledge.
"I think I found a drug ring?" I blurt out. That sounds like a reasonable conclusion, doesn't it? One that I could have reasonably reached with the information I have here.
"
What?! How?"
"Well, I have no defining proof but I have an entire supply chain here of donations not reaching their intended destinations. They just mysteriously vanish on the way."
"Could they have just lost the registries? I mean, it happened to me and… shit, they totally would care more about a desk than me, wouldn't they?"
"Don't be like that. You are at least as valuable as an A/C Unit."
"Jerk." She folds her arms but I can see her smiling underneath the mask.
"You're right, this could be just a huge coincidence." As if! Not when Coil is involved. "But just in case, I noted down the direction of the warehouse where the stuff was lost."
"Do you want us to go investigate it next?"
"No.
I will go scout it ahead, and call you if I find anything weird. You need to start studying."
She scratches the back of her neck. "Oh, yes. I will need to start doing that, won't I?"
Our plans for the next day made, we cover our tracks and go back home.
