"Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you..."
Luke 10:19, Holy bible (ESV)
September 6, 2286 (Two weeks after The Split)
As a Senior investigator I was one of many that were hastily deployed to Nashville, Tennessee. We set up an exclusion zone. Not that we needed to. The damn thing's nothing but a crater now, along with much of the surrounding area. It stopped just short of the Kentucky border.
We didn't dare enter until we were sure that there was no fallout. No civilian would be crazy enough to be here. At least that's what I thought, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I stood at the edge of the crater, I was still amazed at the sight of it, even though I've been looking at it since early that morning. My partner, Investigator Hayes, Walked up to me while she was looking down at her tablet computer. She was controlling the camera drones.
She looked at me, she crossed her arms in an 'x' shape and held it against her face, making sure her eyes were cover. It was the blind salute. Usually a method to identify each other in the field, to make sure we haven't been infiltrated by imposter, doppelgangers or enchantresses.
As her commanding officer I did not return the salute. Instead, I waited eight seconds to lift my hand, she lowered the salute, her arm sitting at her side.
Technically I lifted my hand a few seconds early, according to procedure such a blunder would oblige her to assume I'm a fake and shoot me in the head. Luckily, Hayes had a habit of overindulging me.
"You really need to stop acting so laid back, we're doing serious work her.", she lectured me.
"Any sign of life?"
She shook her head, "It has an average depth of thirty feet, even if you were in a bomb shelter you wouldn't survive."
"Did you find any statues?"
"…course not."
"What do you mean 'of course not', you've seen the test results too, those things are indestructible."
"You look then.", she handed me her tablet.
I flicked across the screen, switching from camera to camera. The drones have very good picture quality, I could almost see each individual speck of dirt, but still no statues.
Those things appear completely black in the infrared, so I thought if I turned on the heat camera, I would find them. Just when I was about to reluctantly admit Hayes was right, I found something interesting.
"Hayes, it's a heat signature, it's human shaped."
"Which isn't always the same thing as being human."
"Either way, we can't just leave it there."
"Do we call the Mice?"
"No, I don't want to talk to those psychos today. We'll handle it ourselves.", I cocked my gun.
"Seriously?"
"The thing's six feet tall if it stands on its tiptoes, you've fought bigger."
"Bigger doesn't mean stronger."
"It's probably just some journalist hungry for exclusive footage.", I walked away.
"Damn it, Henderson.", she ran after me.
We climbed down into the crater. It looked even bigger from the inside, standing on its edge really didn't do it justice. The ground felt cold to the touch, I even felt it through my shoes. The air in here felt electrifying, even though it's been two weeks since the calamity.
We walked for about 40 minutes until we reached the source of the heat signature. It was a young… man? If I had to guess I would say he's eighteen.
He was taller in person, about 6 feet. His skin was a deathly pale color and his hair was black as night. He was very thin and wearing a baggy jumpsuit that was as black as his hair.
I thought he was a zombie. He was standing still, somberly holding a framed picture in his hand. He didn't look anomalous at all. Why didn't he appear on our visual spectrum cameras? Only our heat cameras could pick him up.
I took out my flashlight and shined it at him, his pupil dilated, so he was alive and healthy. I walked around him, inspecting him for any possible anomalous properties.
The various gadgets in my pockets weren't detecting anything either, otherwise they would be blaring like a tornado siren. Good I hate those damn alarms.
Hayes decided to speak up, "Kid what are you doing here?", she asked.
His voice was soft and apologetic, "Was I not meant to be here?"
Hayes says, "Listen kid, I know you're probably having a hard time, we all are. But what in God's name made you came to this damned hole in the ground?"
He looked at us for the first time since we got here. Tears begin to flow from his eyes.
"She was from here.", he weakly said.
"You knew someone from Nashville?"
And just like that he disappeared like he was never there in the first place. We ran over to where he stood. Hayes pointed down, it was a back pack.
After calling the bomb squad we were ordered to open it up.
"Hayes, aren't you gonna praise me for following procedure."
"I'm not your mother Henderson!"
"Aw, but I did the right thing this time."
"You just didn't want blown back to whatever barn you were born in."
I brushed Hayes's harsh words off. The thing was filled to the brim with cassette tapes. It was a vomiting of colors, most of the cassettes were this putrid yellow color, the others were in a wide range of different colors.
It's a very compact and cost-effective way of store data. But no civilian would have this many, this means one thing.
We rushed to the nearby base camp, our chopper landing on the strip just in time.
After arriving in HQ, we head down to the basement, where Pascal was held. I lounged at the nearest available terminal. But Hayes stopped me.
"Henderson, calm yourself we have procedures.", she grabbed me and pulled me away from the system, "It's obviously it's encrypted, how are you gonna even read it?"
I fished in the backpack, I took out one cassette that was clear and iridescent, it was labeled 'Master keys'. Hayes saw the smug look on my face. He stiffly sighed.
"No, that's even more suspicious.", he pressed his index finger into my chest, "We scan those first, it's probably logic bombed."
She was right, what would we do if Pascal was hacked at a time like this?
If slid the Data disk into Pacal's sister system, Archimedes, along ten random disk. I assured Hayes that ten is in fact a good sample size and she was just being paranoid again.
I mean, we were eventually gonna scan them all anyway. It took all day for the safety scans to complete. And it took a few more hours to to decrypt them.
I took out the first time, I could tell it was the first one because it was labeled as such. Hayes glanced at the label for the first time.
"Wait, is this why you were in such a hurry? Jesus, you're obsessed with #51."
I sighed, "It's not like that."
Now playing Pathfinder 1…
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