TIME July 2nd (continuing) LOCATION Behind the walls of Get Stuffed
BACKGROUND:
Krusha’s incantation was already building against the freshly repaired brickwork blocking the pipe – the last obstacle, they hoped, between the sewers and whatever Get Stuffed was actually hiding.
WHAT HAPPENED
The blast tore the brickwork apart without quite breaching the room beyond – the debris hung instead in a strange membrane-like gel. Raven found she could puncture it with a sunrod, cut a gap wide enough with her shortsword, and dropped five feet into the room below.
Her light found a restraint chair at the centre, a cabinet against one wall, puddled water on the floor, and every surface coated in the same dark green gel, lumped and textured like bad artex.
The cabinet held long skewers and a strange helmet-like apparatus. Crowe picked the lock on the door opposite and found a corridor beyond – one door left, two right. The nearer right-hand door, heavy and metal-banded, showed a second restraint chair through its window, facing a pedestal topped with an obsidian, bell-shaped object wired by a metal strut to the ceiling, and a pair of valve wheels and a lever below the glass. Curiosity didn’t win out – they moved on to the unlocked south door instead, where two coffin-like containers sat on plinths – sealed, heated tanks, it turned out, rigged to fill with warm, heavily salted water and seal a subject inside behind a fitted mask, cutting off sight, sound and touch alike. Krusha found two bags of rough white powder in a small cabinet, which Raven kept, and the scraps of an Aramis pod skin in a waste bin nearby.
Footsteps from further down the corridor sent them retreating back to the breach room, holding the door shut against someone testing it from the other side. It held. After a few tense minutes they risked the corridor again, and caught two figures near a lit window partway down, one of them thumping the wire mesh over the glass.
“He’s a nutter. That hulk of meat died this morning. We’ll come back later and throw Dr Crawny Fish in the tank – he likes to sleep there – and get rid of the body. Let’s get some food first. Hey, was he a man trying to be a woman, or the other way round?”
overheard, Nesterrook guards
The guards spotted the open breach door before the Agents could withdraw fully and came to investigate. Raven and Crowe held it against a shove, then Raven went through the door swinging, landing a hit on one Nesterrook whose armour ate most of the damage. The second guard flanked her with a sneak attack while Crowe’s shot went wide in the dark. The first Nesterrook broke and fled down the passage, shouting the alarm; Raven caught him with a slash on his way past. Krusha laid a shield of faith on Crowe, Raven finished the second guard with both blades, and Crowe put a shot into the last one thumping on a door at the corridor’s end just before Raven ran him down.
Through a window she’d run past, Raven found a strange doctor with an unsettling interest in her hands. The door was locked from inside. Krusha suggested the metal-banded door at the far end instead – Raven covered the corridor while Crowe worked the lock, and a lit sunrod revealed a row of prison cells. Crowe spotted a sobbing girl in one of them and started on the lock, just as Raven noticed a swarm of spiders erupting out from beneath the dead Nesterrook’s corpse, filling most of the corridor behind them.
She fell back toward the cells with the swarm on her heels, biting as it came; Krusha caught the worst of it too.
A well-placed vial of alchemist’s fire burned out a wide arc of the swarm, scorching Raven in the process but finally breaking it up for good. She went in to the girl’s cell to bring her out – and the girl collapsed instead, twitching and convulsing as though struck by lightning.
Raven backed off and let Krusha take over, diagnosing an epileptic seizure and wrapping her in bedsheets to keep her from hurting anyone, including herself. Crowe finally got Caleb’s cell open.
And then three bolts of energy hit Raven from down the corridor – Dr Griffiths, waiting.
She closed the distance at a dead run and struck a devastating blow. Crowe was next to move.
