Xaviers!

It's early morning and one of the wooden panels on the wall of the '[troublemaker' floor sits a little askew, having given in from the pressure of a bunch of papers haphazardly stuffed behind it during the night...


((open))

Trained to be ever aware of his surroundings, Chase couldn't help but notice the loose board as he passed.

"What's this?" he asked under his breath before crouching to inspect the damage.

The wood paneling doesn't respond, but crouching down Chase can make out the papers stuffed behind it. Some of them torn, others clearly shredded by a machine and only a handful completely undamaged and merely crumpled up.

Curiosity piqued even further, he carefully fished out one of the intact pages and used the wall to help flatten it out.

The page he fishes out is a letter confirming an appointment at Broomfield Hospital without mentioning any specifics beyond some vague treatment. It's addressed to a 'Rick Donahue' with an address somewhere in Lambeth. Depending on how much attention Chase has been paying to local news he might be aware of the substance abuse clinic running out of that hospital, which would explain the lack of details being due to privacy concerns.

What could this be doing here?

He dug out another few pages.

Another, identical letter except for the date and name. The address is the same though, oddly enough.

The third page is a packing slip simply listing 'Medical Supplies' and is addressed to the hospital with a customs stamp from the Maldon harbor and a scribbled in 'CS Wadjet' above an ID code.

The remaining intact pages are a couple more packing slips, all stamped at the same date and almost sequential IDs as well as a bunch more hospital appointment letters.

He checked to see if the other appointment letters were addressed to the same location.

They are indeed.

He took out his smartphone and Googled the address. This was suspicious.

The immediate results just point to a residential building in Mutant Town. Five stories, kind of run-down with a couple of windows boarded up, graffiti on the front door and some of the walls, at least at the time the streetview shots were taken. It seems unlikely it changed too much in the meantime. It certainly looks like it could be a drug den, but many places in Mutant Town do and it'd still be strange for a bunch of people in the same building to be going to a program in Chelmsford on different days.

He wanted to know more, and so needed to find which of his fellow students hid the papers here. The easiest way, he decided was to put them back and see who came for them. After finishing this, he went to watch the stairwell from just out of sight.

It takes a while and some students who are simply passing through give him strange looks, but eventually a familiar face approaches the loose panel a little too casually, glancing back and forth. She could be more sneaky, but Nailah is grouchy and tired and only casts some perfunctory glances around before pulling the wood panel away and quickly gathering up the pages and shredded bits, stuffing them into her backpack.

Assuming tailing her would never work, Chase moved in with his characteristic quiet footsteps and casually leaned against the wall.

"So this is what you've been doing at night."

Nailah jumps a little, clutching her bag to her chest before she recognizes Chase.

"Chase! Eesh... what are you doing sneaking up on people?"

"Can't exactly turn off the ninja," he answered.

"So you wren't sneaking up on me?"

"Well, okay, I was. Sorry. But I didn't want you to scamper off on me."

"So, looking into a drug ring or something?"

"You're not working with the Prefects, are you?" she asks, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.

"Then I suggest we talk somewhere more private. Never know when Reverse Flash will show up."

"Yeah, let's find somewhere else. My roommate's not too nosey, if she's even in. What about yours?"

"Okay, great. Your room it is then. Let's go." she says, grabbing the last bits of shredded paper and pushing the panel back into place with her elbow.

Chase nodded and led the way.

---

Once the door was closed behind him, Chase said, "I looked at a few of those papers. I'm guessing you think this rehab clinic is a front for something."

"Yeah, almost definitely. They're bringing in supplies on that ship that's docked in the harbor and then distribute them through the clinic for sure. I've seen the drugs on the ship and I bet these papers are all for the same person using a different name. Or a couple of people, but it's all going through the same building." she nods, straightening out the appointment letters Chase already read through.

"I'd guess they're using fictional patients to distribute to Mutant Town."

"What kind of drugs are we talking about?"

"MGH. Mutant Growth Hormone. It must be coming from overseas somewhere, right? Why else would they risk shipping it..."

"It wouldn't surprise me if a corrupt country like Madripoor was involved at some stage."

"That's why I grabbed all this stuff. They had most of these letters just lieing around but this stuff..." she says, grabbing a handful of shredded paper "Was in the dumpster behind the building and I'm hoping there's some clues in it, being important enough for a bunch of dealers to bother destroying it, right?"

"A reasonable theory, but it could also be records destroyed for privacy reasons."

"Drug dealing privacy reasons." she amends as she starts laying out strips of paper to try and begin puzzling them together, straightening them best as she can with the flat of her hand.

"This'll go faster with both of us working," Chase said, using his honed attention to detail to help sort out different documents.

It's definitely tedious and, unfortunately, Chase was right for at least some of these things. One page taking shape is definitely just an utilities bill of some sort. But another one has listed percentages and milligrams in the parts they've assembled so far.

Chase worked to put drug names to the amounts listed, but he wasn't optimistic it would prove meaningful. It wasn't like it would say MGH.

It does not. What he does manage to find are some pieces that are missing the occasional strip but still seem to belong together and let him fill in some of the missing letters. Instead of MGH is just lists 'Active Ingredient' along with a list of various chemicals in low concentrations. Mostly preservatives and stabilizers but oddly enough, not ones you'd find in food but rather in biological media. Protein-binders, ph-buffers and the likes. The strips of paper are frayed a little at the top and Chase notices that they're actually two strip stuck together as if there'd been something else stuck to the sheet at the time of shredding. Most of it is blank and would have been near impossible to assemble, but with the strips stuck to the ingredients sheet the order is discernible. It's a letterhead, showing pieces of, presumably, a logo and letter fragments across the top of the page.

W t I du ries
N v l har ceu ic ls D isio

"Found something," Chase said. He grabbed a penil and paper to write down the letters.

W t I du ries
N v l Pharmaceuticals Division

He stopped writing and tapped his chin with his pencil.

"Mean anything to you?"