[Plot] Ground Control

[Ghost]

"Sir?" Ghosts says, surprised as they see the headmaster.

The darkforce critter meanwhile drops from the ceiling and lands in a six-legged crouch, low to the ground but with long, thin tendrils extending from it's front, swishing across the floor as if sniffing.

[Ballinger Lippincott]

"I'm in the midst of some important work right now, and the power disruptions are considerably ill-timed."

[Ghost]

Ghost narrows their eyes. "That's odd, I could have sworn you were preoccupied with the demonstrators on your front lawn."

[Ballinger Lippincott]

"That's odd," he replies in turn, "I thought that's what I had you for, not disrupting this facility's power grid."

[Ghost]

"See I was told there was something strange going on here. By you. In your office. About 10 minutes ago."

Without Ghost making any kind of movement to indicate so, the darkforce creature leaps at the 'headmaster'.

[The Caretaker]

"Well then, I'd hoped you'd be reasonable," the 'headmaster' says as his image shimmers and wavers into something entirely different.

He lifts a hand, and a lattice of hard-light glimmers into existence, forming around the darkforce beast as it leaps, aiming to hold it in place.

"But I can see we're well past that."

[Ghost]

The creature slams into the lattice and sails right through it, leaving behind a hole in the construct, the edges glitching and smoking while anything that touched the darkforce has simply disappeared. It does the same to the Caretakers image, swiping at it and deleting a wide swathe across his chest. The creature leaps and lashes out until too little of the hard-light remains to maintain it's structure and blinks off.

"Ah, hard-light, meet your antithesis." Ghost grins in a rare display of emotion. "Now, where did you come from..." they go on in what's likely a rhetorical question considering they move straight towards the elevator to the crystal caverns.

[Natalie Denisov]

"You know," says a voice from the hallway behind her, "You should have let me stay in my sandbox. I might have blissfully ignored this whole mess if you had."

[Ghost]

Ghost was just about to step into the Crystal Cave proper but stops when they hear Natalie's voice and turn around.

"Ah, but it looks like you've been hiding some buried toys. Didn't anybody teach you to share with the other kids?"

[Natalie Denisov]

"Oh, that toy? I didn't really want that toy installed," she shrugs, "But it's a big sandbox. And like I said, the Headmaster kicked me out so I wasn't here when it was installed." She leans against one of the walls, idly running a finger along a groove in the wall.

[Ghost]

"Well then we're on the same page. This needs looking into." Ghost says calmly and ducks into the cavern, out of sight. Swiftly following them in their darkforce pet that had been lurking in the shadows of the cave wall.

[Natalie Denisov]

"Except we're not," Natalie says, following, still running her hand along the wall. "Because you're playing soldier for the man who's been experimenting on everyone without their consent. So even though this system probably needs seeing to... eventually. You're hardly the sort of person who should be doing it."

[The Caretaker]

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave," the voice says, seeming to come from all sides of the crystal cavern.

"Your pet may be able to deal with hard-light constructs, but I assure you that you can't cover every angle of approach available to me."

[Ghost]

"Not your call, now is it? And you, gramps. You're a bunch of lights and sparks. Maybe cut the grand-standing."

Ghost's darkforce creature winds itself around one of the crystals and the glittering of light and code inside of it fades to nothing.

"Rude."

"Extremely rude!" even Acala's cheerful voice agrees as she angrily floats towards the enveloped crystal.

"Oh right, the other overly ambitious grey goo." Ghost snaps their finger and the creature pulls itself on top of the crystal and leaps at Acala.

The floating robot struggles to stay afloat, letting out electronic whines as it does, wing twitching in a stuttering motion as the creature drains it's energy until it finally drops out of the air with a loud thunk, the single central lens turning off with a fading hum.

[Natalie Denisov]

Apparently "killing" Acala was the bridge too far as Natalie lunged at Ghost, fist lashing to try to punch them in the side of the face.

[Ghost]

Ghost did not expect that and goes down from the combined force of the punch and Natalie tackling into them. They hit the ground hard and for a moment even the darkforce creature is stunned.

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie does not stop punching as she mutters "Not again" repeatedly rising in volume to the point that she's yelling "NOT AGAIN!"

[Ghost]

Ghost only makes a token effort to protect themselves, most of Natalie's punches landing and after a couple their nose is bloody and their lip splits.

But after what feels like minutes but is probably just moments, the darkforce monster grabs Natalie with numerous hands and slams her against the cave wall, pinning her there.

Ghost slowly pulls themselves up and wipe their bloody lip with the back of their hand, wincing. "Mean right hook for a little nerd." says the pale, scrawny mutant.

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie gasps as the slam drives the air out of her for a moment. She glares at Ghost, arms struggling in vain against the creature's grip. "I do like to surprise people every now and then," she says defiantly.

[Ghost]

"Well, that's enough for one day, I hope. Now, what is this thing and how do I use it?" Ghosts asks, gesturing at, well, the cavern filled with carefully arranged crystals.

Meanwhile Acala's chassis must have broken when it hit the ground, a crack on it's side slowly dripping a silvery fluid that pools on the floor, although it looks... chunkier than before. Not-quite-solid bits of something are suspended in the liquid seeping from the machine. A bit slimy, almost kind of soapy flakes of iridescent bits are mixed in with the nanites and the whole puddle almost seems like it's kind of boiling or bubbling in slow-motion as it's slowly dragging it's way across the ground and towards Natalie.

[Natalie Denisov]

"I've only interfaced with it once and it was in a much simpler state than this. It doesn't *have* a conventional interface and your little light-eating stunt may very well have screwed up what interface it does have. You know what? I am so sick of people thinking that 'well technology is Natalie's thing, surely she can fix my phone' or 'she can recover the laptop I spilled coffee on'. I mean, I can, but I am just sick of people assuming, you know?" She rambles, doing her best not to look at the silvery fluid.

[Ghost]

"People suck, who cares. If you don't want to tell me how to use it can you tell me how to turn it off until we can figure it out?"

[Acala]

As she's distracting Ghost with her rambling the nanite goop continues to crawl towards Natalie like some kind of techno-slug. As it gets closer her power picks up on a tightly compressed packet of data the swarm seems to keep pinging into nothingness with. It takes another couple inches of getting closer that the signal becomes clearer.

Code: Select all

>> Unable to compile data packet
Meta-data extract
Superuser: Professor Vera Minamida
Purpose: Starlight Citadel Authorization Token
File Location: Encoded Special Storage Acala

[Natalie Denisov]

Her codename was not chosen idly. Natalie grabs the packet, pulling it into her brain and running it through her head at hyperspeed, decompressing it, turning it, trying to make sense of it and figure out how to use it as she says, "You realize how hard this thing was to turn on? There's no power button, it's likely self-sustaining by now. You'd have to destroy it to turn it off and based on the the state of this area when we first found it, I wouldn't recommend that method either."

[Ghost]

"It'd be a shame to break it but I can't just leave it be, so I don't exactly have much choice, do I."

The token is, in essence, a handshake protocol. Endlessly complex, but in practice simply a key. An access code that verifies the integrity of the crystal lattice and authorizes resource allocation from the Starlight Citadel through the dimensional manifold.

[Acala]

As she runs through the code in her head the nanite goop briefly blooms with activity, then collapses to the ground, running countless compiler, repair and diagnostic functions.

[Natalie Denisov]

"You always have a choice," she says, mind reaching out to the lattice. Her mental fingers wrap around the crystal computer as her presence leans towards it. "For example, it was your choice to leave me conscious in a room with a giant computer." Her body goes limp in the creature's grip as her presence leaves one set of 'hardware' for another.

[Ghost]

"You little sneak." Ghost notes. The darkforce creature drops Natalie's lifeless body and goes slithering through the cavern and around the crystals, looking for anything that might resemble Natalie's presence within them.

[Narrator]

The last time Natalie was in here, she'd seen a ghostly layout of the mansion and grounds.

This time it's much more solid. In fact, at first glance it simply looks like the grounds as she knows them. But then she sees it's more. She can see the informational networks pulsing through the walls, the pressure in the plumbing. This is... everything.

Or it would be, if parts of it would stop flickering out. There's a ragged scar through the diagram, with parts of the display wavering on either side.

[Natalie Denisov]

Several of the crystals are glowing faintly, a slow pulse that builds and then fades away, kind of like the "sleep" light on lot of electronics.

Natalie takes a minute to orient herself. There hadn't been time to build the usual mental containment barriers that she leans on, so she keeps having to reign her mind in as she regards the tear in the diagram. Her brain races as she tries to figure out where that is in the diagram and what's missing.

[Narrator]

The scar seems to be code unraveling, originating at the crystal that Ghost blanked. The rest of the system is compensating as it can, but there's a cascading effect here.

[The Caretaker]

Standing on the edge of the scar is the Caretaker, directing ghostly outlines of other hired help to try to stanch the damage.

As Natalie watches, the flickering damage around the scar flares up, and for a moment the Caretaker looks older before returning to his youthful avatar.

[Natalie Denisov]

"The system's unraveling," she says, coming closer to the Caretaker. "Can it be repaired?"

[The Caretaker]

The Caretaker seems startled when he notices her, apparently wrapped up in directing the efforts around him.

"I don't know if I should be glad you're here or call you stupid for retreating to the one place that bloody thing can hurt you more."

"I'm trying to bail water here, but some data is just gone, and it's functions that other operations were dependent on!"

[Natalie Denisov]

"So you need someone to fill in the gap in functions," she says, "I can manage that." She reaches out, trying to get a sense of what the system needs.

[Narrator]

The system... responds surprisingly well to Natalie. Better than it did before. She can see what's missing, and she can sense that there's resources to patch this just beyond the Caretaker's reach.

Not beyond her reach, mind you. The Caretaker is doing what he can at the moment, but the system seems to be recognizing her as having a higher level of access.

[The Caretaker]

"What are you... how are you doing that?"

[Ghost]

And even if she might be more vulnerable here, at least she's moving at the speed of thought. Or processor power. So the shadow of Ghost's pet that glides through the simulacrum of the grounds is very slow as it moves throughout the cavern, causing a faint dimming in the crystals it passes even if it's not doing any permanent damage.

[Natalie Denisov]

"Sometimes you just need the right permissions," she says, reaching for the resources she needs to repair the hole, even though that means opening herself up more to the system.

[Narrator]

A voice Natalie has heard before echoes through the system.

"Query from 24212."

"Token mismatch. Token timestamp has not been validated recently."

"Verifying..."