TIME August 15th, afternoon (continuing) LOCATION The Section House, then Garden Row, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
The Scrapshell’s horrors were finally over, its owner dead and its victims recovered – but the paperwork, and the questions about what it all meant, were only just starting.
WHAT HAPPENED
Bowlohr had barely started processing Carak and the survivors when a Dranathess agent – a younger double of the Overseer Kaleb the Agents had encountered before – stepped in to claim the Northside boss for ‘official Dranathess business’ before he could be booked.
When Krusha pressed the point, he called for backup rather than answer – a trooper stepping in through the front door a moment later to settle the argument outright.
“Dranathess Cobalt Ranger Division. Back away and lower your weapons. Lethal force is authorised.”
Krusha’s pointed questions got the officer himself nothing but a smile and a whispered reminder that Griffiths, too, had once been ‘inconveniently’ taken off their hands.
The message was clear enough without being said outright: the Dranathess were operating above and around the Section House’s own authority, and had been for a while.
The debrief with Skarr and DikDik afterward filled in grim detail on Griffiths’ own experiments – telepathic-pairing work.
Skarr, hungry as ever, asked outright whether there were any spare slaves or prisoners he could eat.
DikDik’s scrunched-up disgust was answer enough, though it didn’t stop the conversation drifting back to the subject of brains more than once.
Sam’s own findings filled in what Skarr’s lecture left out.
Tilly’s autopsy had turned up a wormlike parasite at the base of her brainstem, her teeth already fusing and sharpening, small holes opening through her jaw and cheekbones where something had started pushing out from the inside.
Brad showed the same damage.
Skarr also pressed for an answer on the Sunset Ray’s missing heads – the original report had turned up none, though one surfaced later; the rest of the recovered boxes held only ice and fragments of what Sam’s notes delicately called cerebral tissue.
Mordhu, the Children’s dog-like specimen, had died the old-fashioned way – stab wounds, not infection – though its body carried the same growth deformities as the others.
And Dew’s own father, Joren, found days too late on the wharfside, bore identical holes through jaw and cheek, his teeth already lengthening toward something closer to a lamprey’s.
Whatever this thing was, it didn’t need the Children themselves to spread.
The case file on the five children recovered from Griffiths’ basement months before made for grim reading all over again.
Caleb hadn’t responded to any treatment and showed no sign that he would.
Janice, seven years old, stayed withdrawn and silent, sedated more often than not to keep the seizures down.
Andre carried two small, recent holes drilled through his skull and was only just beginning to respond to anything around him, Twitch withdrawal making the process worse.
Alia wouldn’t be parted from a battered doll she called Onzaa, convinced it ate her nightmares and kept some half-remembered horror called Zlota Babbaa from finding her in her sleep.
Jay Sun, the healthiest of the five by a wide margin, kept insisting he had a gift – that he could break things just by thinking about it – and kept answering questions out loud that nobody in the room had actually asked him.
Reece and Perkins filed the interviews from the Scrapshell’s three survivors later that day.
The Blue Thumb elf hadn’t broken from the gang fight that nearly killed him – he’d broken from what came after, dragged helpless through the streets by something nobody but him could see, and shut in that well room to wait.
The boy – sharp-mouthed, still furious days before he’d even healed, and no more forthcoming about what Krusha had done to him than a string of promises about what he’d do back – had come through it in noticeably better shape mentally than physically, for all that he’d first been found hiding under his own father’s body.
The young woman gave the least, and the most: scared, scarred, and bound for the street again the moment she was fit to walk it, running with the Cat Tales like every gang kid in Chuza whose future had an expiry date built in.
A trip to the infirmary for a proper clean-up came next – Krusha never did manage to get fully clean, by his own account – with Sam quietly taking a sample from the dried gore on his clothes before anyone thought to ask why.
Recovered items from the Scrapshell – a camera-like device, an enchanted dagger, a ring – went off for identification, with DikDik offering to help for the cost of the components.
A routine prisoner transfer turned into anything but routine.
The cargo was Jensen – mid-twenties, most of his own teeth already gone, convicted of burning down an apartment building with his estranged wife and another family inside it, and entirely unbothered about it from his cell in the back of the transport.
Raven spent the ride toying with the idea of a trap for him – alchemist’s fire rigged over the cell like a sword of Damocles, primed to drop if anyone tried to spring him – before deciding, given her own recent record with improvised traps, that riding up front with the driver was the safer plan for everyone involved.
Escorting Jensen to the courthouse through the crowds at Garden Row, the transport carriage was caught in the open as streaks of fire began falling from the sky.
Small at first, clipping a chimney.
Then larger, slamming into buildings.
Raven grabbed the reins herself to clear the road and overcorrected, cracking an axle against the gutter and jolting the carriage to a dead stop.
Ash, left covering the windows, told a wide-eyed Jensen it was
“just routine training”
and left it at that.
The largest object yet ploughed through the park itself, carving a furrow through the grounds before coming to rest as a scorched, coffin-shaped metal pod.
Krusha peeled off to treat a street vendor caught by flying masonry, a bad head wound bleeding freely, before the KemerLexi in his hands settled it.
Raven reached the pod just ahead of a second, larger impact – and watched its lid hiss open on an elven-featured woman.
Tattooed in spiralling patterns, a black teardrop inked beneath one eye, blood matting her hair, clutching an oversized sword she plainly didn’t know how to use.
She spoke only fragments of Common, but the two phrases she managed left little room for misunderstanding:
they’re coming
and
run if you want to live.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- The Dranathess are quietly pulling high-value prisoners out of Section House custody – Carak is at least the second case.
- An unknown woman has crash-landed in Garden Row from the sky itself, warning that ‘they’re coming’.