Mega Drive - Haunted (Hunted) >START! Traveller System, Noir, Kingsbury, Gruppen Tanhauss Furcht-Turmschloss Tower Some time in the wee hours of the morning... The mint-coloured neon glow soaking this particular corner of Noir was instantly recognisable, and practically trademarked around this area of town. It was common colour on the wares, buildings, and belongings of the pharmaceutical giant, Gruppen Tanhauss. For those with the money there was a lovely and well-staffed hospital at ground level, armed security standing out front and waving the frequent customers in. The users of these state-of-the-art facilities included the likes of Noir's political and entertainment elite, freely rubbing shoulders with scarred warriors of mob and gang skirmishes. As long as the customers had the money, the doctors, nurses, and shrinks inside the pavilion weren't picky about who came in, or their demands as long as the patients paid. Boob jobs, gunshot wounds, tummy tucks, skin rejuvenation, cybernetics installation, gentle reassurances that it'll all be okay, feel-good doctor shopping - it was all there, for a price. Throw in a little extra and it was no questions asked. What did the cash fund legal and otherwise? To the public, the money went towards furthering Tanhauss' research innovations, and maintaining their extensive health networks. And they would be technically correct. It was funding research, but a funding black hole to 'Special Research and Development' was being covered up by some well-cooked books. Peel it back and you'd see one of Tanhauss' star biologists hard at work, designing fiendish technologies. Tonight, there was going to be a follow up on an issue that'd come up in Sargasso, and SR&D wanted to get involved. A pale, nocturnal Maidenhand woman stood in an elevator, wearing a sleek, dark suit with a cream white shirt, a silver chain necklace, and mid-heels for comfort and practicality. Her blonde hair was cut short with a neat part, while tired blue eyes watched a view of the outside was provided by a viewscreen on the opposite wall of the lift. Neon and fog thick in the night outside, rain hammering against the exterior of the building; A superimposed number ticked down from eighty three rapidly. The display abruptly turned dark at sixty as the elevator moved into the building's interior, morphing into a facsimile of the company's interior and each floor's purpose - number still ticking. "Ilsa, I followed up... the breakout with Driver..." A communicator in her necklace was projecting a masculine, if robotic and rather ponderous voice, skirting the edge of whale songs. "We've managed... to get some Cleaners... on any trace... of Frankie and the others... we planted the red herrings... to keep the investigation stalled." "Excellent Muller, don't forget we have a meeting with the accountants on getting the hole caused by Ewings falling through at 3:30," the woman replied, "I've been feeding the chickens meanwhile - they're buying it all." The floors went down past the ground floor, and the buttons on the side eventually ran out as the elevator got below B8, and everything on the screen disappeared entirely. "With any luck, it'll make our stock recovery go smoother with everyone believing it was a random incident," she rolled her shoulders, smirking, "we can just pin it on misguided EAD lunacy, trying to live out their glory days and going rogue." She resisted the urge to cackle. "Its such a delightful narrative~" The elevator stopped after a few more claustrophobic seconds, and with a ding and sliding doors, the businesswoman walked in the midst of a aquarium. A tunnel of glass lead towards an artificial structure within, pale lights penetrating the inky blacks on a black path, leading into a larger chamber amidst rocks. It begged the question, was it an over-designed water feature Ilsa was striding through all, or was it all natural and Tanhauss was merely renting space in it? Either possibility was delightfully excessive. Looking closer at the water showed that it was alive - Fish, kelps, corals, algaes, and invertebrates swam about. Jarringly, something else was amongst them. Translucent - near invisible. Vaguely humanoid, swimming gingerly in the darkness. A crystalline orange heart beat in its core, its shape held together by strands of noodle-like vessels, dotted with sensory organs, nodes, modems, artificial sensors, and an elongated bone structure. The blonde woman paused to look into its beacon-like brain. "I think you can ply your trends algorithms there," she said, as if she was talking directly to them in the tank. The wobbling, spectral being craned a neck towards the financial officer, maesus lighting up a little more, while his body pulsed some. "Yes, Ilsa..." The voice came from her necklace as a large arm waved slowly at her. It turned out he was reaching for a passing fish, trapping a couple for sustenance. Still, he kept it held up for a little before returning it to his side, content to drift in the current, "Will talk to you... then..." The woman nodded at the glass and continued on. Soon, the path widened and opened into a bigger laboratory. Ilsa was soon illuminated by rushing and pulsing streams of bacteria and nanomachine colonies embedded within the steel walls and rock. Contained and sectioned with transparent hellenium windows, snaking throughout the tubular laboratory, with a floor of panels and mesh in the spots without foot traffic. At the end was a darker corner of the laboratory, lone figure sitting backlit by a sickly, erratic glow. The clicks of Ilsa's heels stopped. "Lange," she called out, standing at the edge of the darkness, arms crossed. "I trust you've bought me here for good reason?" The doctor rose and slunk out of his chair with a slight wobble. "Ja," He stepped away from his desk, eyes shining eerily in the dark, the sound of something bumping along behind him. "After the incident at Devil's Depths," When he shuffled into the light, Ilsa saw the skinny and wild haired Oddbody. Despite having cybernetically perfect vision, he was wearing a pair of glasses - just so he could push them up the bridge of his nose dramatically - which he did towards his superior with a scowl. However, many normal onlookers would focus their attention on the long, scaly tail he was sporting - a top-of-the-line cybernetic product of his own design, tip of an iceberg the doctor had built himself into. "I had to take a closer look at what went down..." a hardlight display behind the doctor lit up, starting with a chip embedding itself in the back of a 3D mannequin's neck, then zooming out and showing a suite of other cybernetics additions to the person. These weren't people, though - looking at the mannequin in closer detail, the way the muscle structure was arrayed didn't look human, and their skeleton was composed of lignin instead of bone. The reality was flash-grown soldiers who had more in common with slime moulds and broccoli in human-like shells than people. They were highly disposable and self-disposing to boot, but able to follow simple instructions and carry out prolonged campaigns of low intensity attacks - drive bys, molotovs, surprise grenades, birthday cake ambushes. Eventually, one of them, however audacious would stick. There was no risk to any valuable assets or human operators. Having a crowd of them around can still be of considerable risk with a few human operators. And Tobias had devised this all himself, but the price might have been his grip on ethics and reality. "And I saw something interesting - I want it when you're done. But first!" he raised a finger and his voice, slightly discoloured and hardened by handling so many chemicals and organisms, entirely artificial and autoclave ready. "Our new suite of implants for der new batch of Brokkoldat shall give them edge in combat, and ensure they follow their instructions quicker." "I suppose giving a former death row inmate a rifle, a paycheck, and all the drugs and pleasure they want isn't enough nowadays," Ilsa sighed, taking a seat at a desk and crossing her legs. She waited for whatever else the Doc had in store. By the War Goddess, what is enough to secure someone's loyalty and skills nowadays? First the Crude, then this...? This must be a test. She ruminated on the loss in Sargasso, glad to have the skills of the Driver there to deal with the fallout and extract Tanhauss' local quisling: Frankie. Lange could see Ilsa was getting impatient. "Moving on," the hardlight display dismissed the chip, projecting a square with an AV feed awaiting input. "I analysed some of our recently deceased Vogeltruppen's biometrics," a shaky looking video materialised inside the square of what a trooper's last moments. A door slid open, and the Vogeltruppen rushed out together and spread out. Blasts of SMG fire rung out from a dark corner of the room and two men fell - followed blind retaliation fire into the dark. They advanced on a blanket of suppressive fire as the armoured leaders. A blinding flash of light and ear splitting boom rung out in the middle of the formation, followed by different gunshots ringing out - throwing the whole picture into chaos. A red blur got into the fray and presumably punched one of the soldier's companions out, "and I have read up on our culprit, from multiple angles." The executive a lit up at this news as the video as the man in the melee turned his attention to the camera after firing at another trooper at close range with what seemed like a short machine gun. Ilsa scowled at their image as Tobias continued, reconstruction playing on: "Our troop's deaths weren't in vain, but I fear we have a much larger problem with this..." The camera froze, fixed on the clear image of the face of a man with wicked sideburns, with a fist about to impact with the cameraman. "...annoyance." The video resumed - the now blazing knuckles travelled into the camera with incredible force, feed cutting into static and the biometrics displaying all the signs of a swift knockout, and at least six broken teeth, followed by the head hitting the floor, and a broken nose just for good measure as someone trod on him by accident later, then landed on him and suffocated them to death. Not a terribly dignified way to go. Ilsa didn't like it one bit, scowling at the last seconds of footage. The man stood alone, appearing to communicate via radio with an earpiece - the reconstruction came to an abrupt stop as it ran out of info. What conclusion could this reach? An embarrassing one. A free agent capable of ripping a secure and out-of-the-way operation to bits, finding and following the trail to it, and extracting their money maker. Even so, there was a bead affixed on this troublemaker. Ordinarily, a 'concerned citizen' would be a standalone issue and just something assigned to the Vogel, just send attacks at them - but they were linked with another thorn in Tanhauss' side: Yttrium Indium Manganese. She owed the conglomerate big for a little lie. "Driver identified him too," Ilsa said, nodding, "apparently they were together in the E.A.D." She punctuated each letter. "They have told me all they can, and with your combat data from our fallen troops we'll get a better picture of how he fights." A grin came across Ilsa's face, eyes narrowing in the pale light of the darklab's soft lighting. "And we can paint a lovely picture of how he dies together, and we'll have our Crude back." "Ja!" Tobias nodded enthusiastically, wringing his hands. "Judging by Driver's accounts and zis footage, this Luka Pavohne," he inhaled nasally, "a.k.a 'Phoenix' seems to have some manner of cable gun, heavy grade hardlight manipulator, and force amplifying apparatus embedded in his arm," he pointed to stills he'd added circles to, identification points in 3D space made by combat analysis programs, and Muller's analysis and reconstruction. Both Muller and Lange mistook Luca's right arm for a cybernetic replacement from the elbow down - understandable given the quality of the available footage. Lange stroked his chin, raising an eyebrow at a still of the Grapple Stunner. "I would like to study zis in more detail. It looks like custom technology - maybe even... Unit designed..." The company getting their hands on something like that, I'd sell it to der Security guys, and make a fortune! Hee hee hee! It'd be a great addition to his Lange Limb program, and something for the next class of Vogelkrieger would ensure a pay rise at least. Appropriating Unit designs - usually reserved for highly valuable members of the UDD - was going to be an amazing find, and it made Tobias crack a wicked grin. I can't wait to steal it! Or so he believed - the truth was a little more mundane, but the novelty of it lead him down a path of his own design. Ilsa could see his interest, and it seemed as though Tobias didn't need further convincing. She trusted him on his fixations - some of them had even resulted in Tanhauss' best selling products. "If Driver leaves a corpse, I'll have him pass it to you once he's done fulfilling whatever it is these," she snorted, "sentimental EAD crazies do with their own..." Ilsa nodded again, almost lapsing into autopilot since she trusted Lange's results, never looking too hard at his methods. "Anyway, you were saying, about the implant?" "Natürlich!" The chip returned to the screen as Tobias begun outlining some of the changes: Updates to firmware biometric signal transmitters, a hardware design change which renders it harder to disorient on blunt force, a few optimizations on neural reading, hardening against EMP, an adjustment to where it is installed for a 0.86% efficiency increase, something to make blurred or flashed vision clear faster, an adjustment to measuring the user's... Verbose, innit? Ilsa mulled, resting her head in her hand and leaning into her chair. She hadn't the opportunity to grab a snack on the way down to the meeting, and her growing appetite was making her lose focus on Lange's technological gibberish. Her gaze wandered towards the desk she was sitting beside - spotting an unattended sandwich on a napkin. Suddenly alert and game for a try, she waited for Lange to turn around, hand tiptoeing gingerly across the desk to grab the morsel when he was distracted - With a smile, she lifted it away, opened her mouth... The doctor spun around without missing a beat and spotted her, causing Ilsa to clack her teeth shut and freeze. "Do not eat that!" Tobias lunged for the sandwich and snatched it out of her hand, placing it back down on the napkin, then picking it back up with the rest of it. The executive looked at the food incredulously, expecting another one of the good doctor's bizarre creations or monsters to leap out. He took the first bite out of it and with a mouth full of half-chewed food Tobias said "dash isht mah luncsh." He fenced towards his boss with the uneaten triangle of the sandwich, shit-eating grin on his face. Ilsa kept forgetting that he could see everything here. It came from a vending machine, cheapo! The exec ruminated. Despite the doctor knowing what makes a body healthy... Ugh, forget it! >PAUSE!
