Mistrunner 3 - Chapter 25 - Investigation (Patreon)

I’ve never seen someone work as hard or as long as Mira. Sometimes, I wonder how she does it, but then I remember who raised her. I remember the stories she’s told me about her training. And then, it becomes all too clear.

Patrick Ward

I spent two days in that disgusting room, and only once was I forced to dissuade someone from disturbing my privacy. Fortunately, dust fiends are particularly vulnerable to some of my more lethal Ghosts, so it only took one use of Confusion to send the pitiful woman on her way. A good thing, too, because if she’d made it even one step further, she would have been forced to endure the effects of Bastion. And in her state, I suspected she wouldn’t have survived.

The ability wasn’t usually lethal, but dust seemed to compound its dissuasive effects. So, I was grateful that she stumbled down the hall when I was taking a break from working on Robot Disposal.

Interruptions notwithstanding, I’d made a ton of progress on the Ghost front. In doing so, I’d had to completely dismantle the Ghost and start from scratch. The foundations were flawed, and so if I kept going the way I was, the structure would always suffer. And as a result, so would the effect. So, I’d made the choice to rebuild it entirely. It would take a lot longer – weeks, if I was diligent – but I was certain that it would pay off in the end.

I would just be down one of my most potent tools in the meantime. Fortunately, I had plenty of abilities, other Ghosts, and weapons to make up for the lack. I hoped.

Whatever the case, those two days served another, arguably more important purpose in that they gave me the chance to heal. My Regeneration was powerful, and it was supported by the natural healing associated with my inflated Constitution. But even so, I couldn’t heal broken bones overnight.

Instead, it took me two nights.

Of course, the bones weren’t entirely mended. It would take about a week for them to return to perfection. However, by the dawn of the third day, I could use the hand, which was good enough. As for the gunshot wounds and other abrasions, they only took a day to scab over, so after a second day, I was as good as new. Without my subdermal armor or infiltration suit, that would not have been the case.

Muscle, fat, and skin were much easier to heal than internal injuries, I’d found.

During my convalescence, I’d kept in touch with Patrick, but we hadn’t discussed much of consequence. So, I was a little surprised when he finally broke the news that I was a wanted woman.

“What?”

“Well, not the real you. The identity you were using for sure, though. They say you’re a terrorist.”

“Me? I didn’t even do anything!” I insisted.

“Not according to the authorities,” he said before explaining the story the Pillar of Heavan had fabricated, which consisted of me charging into he building and opening fire. According to the official statement they’d given, I’d indiscriminately killed every single dust fiend in the building. The only survivors were members of the Pillar of Heaven.

I sighed. It all made sense. They weren’t going to very well tell the authorities that they’d killed a bunch of people who’d come to them for help. Even if they’d only done so accidently, that wasn’t going to garner much good will from the public. But being the victim of a terrorist attack? That simultaneously made them sympathetic while establishing the cult’s importance. After all, terrorists didn’t attack just anyone.

Making things even better for the Pillar of Heaven was the fact that their members had survived. The message of that was clear: the cult protected its people. That would be enough to get plenty of the city’s population onboard with a potential manhunt as well as painting their organization in a favorable light.

Whatever the case, it was annoying. I wasn’t going to shy away from taking the blame for the things I had actually done. My self-recrimination included the events of Nova City as well as my actions leading up to its destruction. I had killed thousands of people, and the responsibility for many times that could rightfully be laid at my feet. But I hadn’t killed a single person in the headquarters of the Pillar of Heaven, and the fact that they’d blamed me for their own actions made me incredibly angry.

If I hadn’t already been committed to opposing them, I certainly was after that. Maybe they weren’t evil – there was no telling without more information – but their actions certainly suggested as much. After all, they’d responded to a mere disguise with lethal intent, and when I’d escaped, they hadn’t hesitated to mow down a bunch of innocent civilians. Then, they’d had the audacity to blame me for it. None of that said good guys, at least as far as I was concerned.

“Please don’t blow them up,” Patrick said.

“Huh?”

“No explosions.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I lied. In fact, at that very moment, I’d been considering just how easily I could bring that building down. Robots or not, a few tons of plasti-steel would probably incapacitate them.

“I’m serious, Mira,” he said. “Please.”

I sighed, then said, “Fine. But just so we’re clear, I really wasn’t going to blow anything up.”

“Sure, sure. So, what are you going to do?” he asked.

Even though he couldn’t see me – after all, our communication was inaudible and long-distance – I shrugged.  “Investigate, I guess,” I said. “Now that I know they can see through Mimic, I know how to approach things.”

Indeed, I’d given it a lot of thought, and I’d latched onto the simple fact that the guard hadn’t immediately recognized my ability for what it was. Instead, he had led me all around the building, completely unaware that I wasn’t what I appeared to be. That said that, so long as I didn’t draw much attention to myself, I should be able to fly under the radar. That meant that Stealth would almost assuredly yield better results than Mimic.

“I think I’m going to have to go full cat burglar,” I said.

“You think that’s safe?”

“Probably not. But you’re the one who told me not to blow them all up.”

“Which you said you hadn’t been planning to do anyway,” he pointed out.

“I don’t always tell the truth. Keep up, Pick.”

I could practically hear his sigh of frustration, but he didn’t say anything else on the subject. Instead, he told me about his own progress. He and Cyrilla had begun their examination of the Mist circuits, and though they didn’t dare to use them – not yet, at least – they were well on their way to understanding how they worked.

“In a couple of months, we might be ready to start integrating them into cybernetics,” he said. “Virtually, at least. Cy has this simulation program that we can run before –”

“Wait – a couple of months?” I said. I’d hoped to be done in Fortune after a week or two, and now he was telling me that they would be working on the project for at least two months? And that wasn’t even considering the testing and implementation phases that would precede the final product. “How long is this thing supposed to take?”

“Uh…a year? Maybe a little less. I don’t know yet because –”

“Ugh,” I groaned. “You know what, just don’t tell me. I’ll do my best to stay busy.”

“Mira, we don’t –”

Once again, I interrupted him, “It’s fine, Pick. It’ll be worth it. Just concentrate on getting it done.”

After that, our conversation slowly wound down. Even in the best of times, talking over the Secure Connection was a little impersonal, so neither of us wanted to discuss anything important like that unless necessary. Once he started to hint that he needed to get to work, I decided to do the same.

To that end, I left the room that had been my humble abode for the past couple of days. My trip out of the building wasn’t eventful, but when I hit the streets, that changed. For one, most of the people I passed seemed incredibly anxious, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why. From their perspective, some crazy woman had just shot up an organization whose only apparent purpose was to help the disregarded dregs of society. And given that I was currently in the least affluent part of town, it wasn’t hard to see why the people were nervous. Thankfully, I had the option of changing my face. It wouldn’t do much to disguise me from the Pillar of Heaven, but for mundane people like the pedestrians I passed along the way back to the cult’s headquarters, it worked fine.

Even so, I did get a dose of déjà vu as I trekked through the city. It wasn’t really all that long ago that I’d seen those same nervous expressions on the faces of Nova City’s citizens. And that had not ended well. Was I destined to have that effect wherever I went? Would Fortune soon descend into urban warfare?

I hoped not.

But I had to acknowledge that it was a distinct possibility. I didn’t intend to go to war. In fact, I wanted the opposite result. However, things didn’t always work out like I wanted them to, and I knew just how quickly a situation could careen out of control.

After all, I never wanted to destroy Nova City, either. I’d just been so focused on my goal that I never even considered what would happen if I pushed Nora into a corner. And I certainly didn’t consider how my actions would affect the normal citizenry. They were just pieces of an overall puzzle, and thus, were beneath my notice.

That was then, though. Now, after spending three years in the world, I had a different perspective, and I could no longer ignore the consequences of my actions. As such, I couldn’t simply do whatever I wanted to do; instead, I had to think of the repercussions.

So, I approached the building with appropriate caution. It was a hive of activity – far more than it had been a few days before – which supported my supposition that the “terrorist attack” had done wonders for the public’s perception of the Pillar of Heaven. If the amount of people heading into the building was any indication, my visit had been one of the best things that had ever happened to the cult.

After walking past the headquarters, I set up a few buildings down the street so I could observe the comings and goings without being seen. Once there, I quickly made my way to the roof, where I settled in to gather information. I was an old hand at surveillance, but I wasn’t immune to the boredom that inevitably came with it. Still, I only had to remember my previous encounter with the robots in human-face to keep that boredom at bay. I needed whatever intelligence I could gather if I was going to keep from repeating the same mistakes.

Over the next few hours, I grew ever more confident in my assertion that the blue-robed guards were all robots. They moved too predictably, like they were just following an established protocol. More, they never seemed to get distracted or bored. Instead, they just stood there, answered questions when they were asked, and otherwise acted as model guards.

They never even went to the bathroom which, while it was possible they were just really good at holding it in, was improbable.

And that presented a host of problems, not least of which that I had no real assessment of their capabilities. Were they really as durable as they’d seemed? I hadn’t used any of my more powerful weapons – Ferdinand II wasn’t even loaded with armor piercing rounds – so I couldn’t be sure of how vulnerable they really were.

On top of that, I had no notion of how many were there. Nor did I know what kind of support system they had. For all I know, they had a thousand more guards of indeterminate power stashed away nearby.

The whole thing stunk of a death trap, and as reckless as I might sometimes seem, there was no chance I was going to rush in and get myself killed. So, even though I didn’t relish the necessity, I continued to observe. And as the hours passed, I got few answers to my questions, and when I finally decided to head back to the Leviathan, I did so with many of the same blind spots.

By the time I returned to the ship, Patrick was already there. And he looked exhausted.

“Long day?”

“Long couple of days,” he said, plopping down on the well-worn couch in the ship’s common area. He wasted no time before lying down, his head in my lap. I snaked my fingers through his curly blonde hair as he explained that his research into the Mist circuits had already hit a snag. Further complicating matters was that Tate seemed hellbent on hanging around and, subsequently, getting in the way.

“It’s not that she’s useless,” he went on. “She’s smart and pretty capable. If I needed someone to fix the Leviathan, she’d be exactly the kind of mechanic I would turn to.”

“But?”

“But she’s a mechanic. She has no grasp of the theoretical concepts we’re working with on the Mist circuits,” he said. “If you want her to put something together or fix it, she’s your girl. Otherwise, she’s just in the way. I get being interested, but she’s hurting us a lot more than she’s helping.”

I nodded along, but I suspected that she was hanging around not because she found the Mist circuits so intriguing, but rather because her girlfriend’s ex was hanging about. I couldn’t imagine there was a lot of trust in that relationship.

Or maybe I was just determined to see Cyrilla in the worst light possible.

“And now she wants to see the Leviathan,” he finished with a sigh. “She won’t shut up about it, actually.”

“I don’t…I don’t think that’s a great idea,” I stated, and that was the truth. I didn’t like having other people onboard, and not just because of the problems that might come with that sort of thing. It was also because the Leviathan was the home Patrick and I shared, and having other people poking around inside felt like an invasion of privacy.

“I actually agree.”

“Actually? You say that like it’s surprising.”

“Uh…” I had to suppress a giggle as he quickly changed the subject. “So, how goes the cult business?”

“Frustrating,” I stated. Then, I went on to explain my issues. First among them was that I had no idea how strong the robots were. Second, I didn’t know the building’s layout or how many fighters they could muster. Finally, I admitted, “And I don’t know what’ll happen if I push things. I really don’t want another Nova on my conscience.”

“So, don’t attack the nest,” he said. “Seriously – they’re taking all those people somewhere, right? Just follow them. That way, they’ll be out in the open so you can see what you’re getting into. You can also see how they respond to any creatures that attack, which might give you some ideas as to their relative strength.”

I started to respond, but then I realized that he was right. Normally, my go-to strategy was to attack every problem head-on. However, in this case, doing so would be a huge mistake. Attacking the issue from a different angle seemed so obvious that I wondered how I hadn’t come up with it myself.

But then again, I had only slept about two collective hours over the past three days, so perhaps that was a good explanation. The moment that thought crossed my mind, I felt my eyelids drooping. My constitution was high enough that I could keep going for quite some time yet, but there would always be consequences to ignoring my body’s need for sleep. Finally, it seemed that it was catching up to me.

In my defense, sleeping in a den of junkies while I was being hunted by a bunch of androids probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the world. But now that I was safe back in the Leviathan, sleep was definitely calling my name.

Still, I tried to resist. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out. I barely even remember going to bed – just that I woke up some time later to find myself in the comfortable and familiar confines of the bedroom I shared with Patrick. He wasn’t there – regrettably – but I was still too tired to care that much. Before I knew it, I was back asleep; hopefully, my next encounter with the Pillar of Heaven would go a little better.