Log:Robot Aftermath, Review

Guilt Complex 2013/08/07 	 Bee Regan Porter Sapphire Shield Forge

11

Champions Mush - Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 8:06 PM

Bee steps into the gym and looks about.

As is her wont, Regan stands behind the counter dealing with some sort of administrative/clerical/research task that involves pages of tet and graphics displayed on the counter.

Why come to the gym? Well, that is an easy one for Vicki. She's still stuck on trying to track down leads and such for the case. Sometimes, starting over fresh works. Sometimes it takes sitting and staring at the facts until something new appears in her head. In every case she's worked, she has been able to find the one mistake the criminals made, even an obscure mistake they weren't even aware of... by sheer stubbornness. So she lands outside and strolls in to do pretty much what she's been doing daily.... stare at the same stuff in the holos.

Bee waves and strolls up to Regan. "Hey, how goes it?"

Regan's head swivels smoothly to the doorway at the sound of people entering and Vicki and Bee are met with a smile. "Hello Bee, Vicki." The text on the countertop is dispelled with a wave of her hand. "I'm very well thank you, how are you both this evening?"

Giving a bit of a grin, Vicki has a cup of coffee in each hand. She places one on the counter before Regan and gestures towards the back room without speaking up. The question is left unspoken, but still likely heard. The coffee... well -hers- is just plain black strong stuff. Regan's is... however Vicki thinks Regan might like it.

Bee grins and says without malice, "Suck up."

Regan's brows lift and she nods. "The simulation room is free. Yameen has programmed in a list of items stolen from the museum archive and some of what they left behind." She takes up her coffee. "Mille grazzi. We can look over the data sets together if you want, six eyes are better than two. Unless I suppose you have conjunctivitis."

Bee nods and walks with the other two toward the simulation room. "Have either of you two you had any luck findig a magic authority? I've been trying to track down a guy called Longbow that is supposed to know a lot about magic, but I swear the guy is a ghost."

Regan moves with the other two women toward the smulation room. "Well, there's Ellbeth, and I know sometimes she would go to some antique store to get advice. Mystique is also magical, don't know about Longbow." Her lips purse. "I thought he was an archer but I guess you can be both... and of course Doctor Reynard."

Bee frowns "I don't know that last one."

"Huh? Musceum archive?" asks Vicki? She shakes her head.. she's been so focused and stubborn and persistent about the ambulance thing that she hadn't even heard about the other breakins. After all, she's not on the police force anymore, so folks don't just toss things on her desk to work on. "What museum?" she asks as she sips more coffee.

Bee pulls up the local paper on her PDA

Workout Room

Glancing over at the PDA, Vicki notes the article name, and then nods. She gestures.. and a translucent blue PDA appears in the air before her. She loads up that article and starts reading, going almost totally still to focus on it. Once she finishes reading it, she reads it all the way through again before looking up to the others, "Are you implying that this is linked somehow to the kidnappings and bombings at the hospital?" she asks.

Bee looks to Regan to answer Vicki's question. "I know about it, but I'm not aware of any connection."

If there was ever someone who could could effortless explain the the intricacies of the arcane, he must be somewhere else. It's just Porter that walks into the gym, much more calm, collected, clean, and presentable than he was on his last visit. When he doesn't see anything interesting in the lobby, he sticks his head into the workout room.

The simulation room looks like Picasso, one corner contains a cale holoprojection of the hospital, bomb locations marked in red, small biographies and pictures of the patients accompanied by other data. Another corner shows the railyard, mechs, train, water tower while a third contains a projection of the Museum off-site archive and the path the villainy are known to have taken. The remaining corner contains holographic projections of the haul from the archive, displayed in three sections, jade, gems, ritual paraphernalia.

"So apparently, to access the vault in the archive the bad guys slit the throat of someone they brought with them and turned the blood to acid which ate through the vault door. So the two crimes show the following similarities, massive resources, large scale distraction exploiting emergency procedures, a blatant disregard for civilian casualties, and a reliance on the arcane when they could instead use technical skills." Regan explains.

Bee assists Regan and Sapphire Shield pulling up images. She doesn't restrict herself to pulling up just those two crimes, but *any* violent crimes locally in this time period. She smiles and waves to Porter. At Regan's explanation she halts with a surprised expression. "How did you deduce *that*? Does acid blood have a particular signature?"

Regan looks to Bee, then pulls up an image of the vault door, clearly ravaged by an unnaturally agressive caustic fluid of some sort that has been splashed and spattered somewhat haphazardly. In front of the door is what appears to be a human shaped thing that has liquefied and collapes into a puddle of congealed goo. "That seems to be the consensus interpretation of the crime scene but if you have an alternative hypothesis I'd be delighted to hear it."

Bee says, "Somebody poured acid on the door and this guy accidently got it dumped on himself as well."

"Oh," Porter offers as a surprised sort of greeting. He expected people flinging fireballs or bullzdozers or slapping each other with glowing hands or something. He didn't expect a giant collage of news stuff.

Looking at the projection, Vicki reaches up and rubs her chin. "She's right Bee." she says. "The splatter pattern indicates that what struck the walls came from the wounds inflicted upon the man, but that blood... must have had properties like an alien in a movie." She goes over and indicates with blue highlights on the image, the bloodspatter pattern along with the acid burn pattern.

Bee nods at Vicki's explanation and says sourly, "So magic is more than a possibility. Again." She sighs and adds, "I haven't inpected the site thoroughly. I was there shortly after the hazmat teams left, but encountered some corpses that needed my assistance ... including one that didn't stay dead."

Regan moves to the hospital corner. "In crime one the villains use large bombs as a distraction, using the hospital evacuation as cover to remove five patients suffering osteogenesis imperfecta type I, a condition that makes them supremely fragile." She moves to the railyard. "Crime two, again, istarts with an anonymous tip off, this time not of bombs but of contraband, authorities respond and walk into an ambush of military grade mechs with heavy weapons who fight their way to the railyard, damage the water towaer and then the track. In front of a train whose crew have disappeared and carrying a few tonnes of a pesticide component that will react with water from the water tower to create a cloud of extremely toxic smoke. Again there is an evacuation, again the evacuation is exploited this time to retrieve these items." Regan moves over to the collection of items. "So the bad guys have five patients, four train crew and these items... if the theory of the crimes being connected is valid."

Porter does a double-take at the melted thing after hearing people talk about what melted it. Then there's dead bodies not staying that way? "Aliens? Zombies? What channels are you watching?" Now all the displays seem a bit more interesting.

Regan continues her presentation, moving between the images. "The items stolen from the Museum archive fall into three categories. 1)" A selection of items enlarge. "Items of small physical value but ritual significance, sacrificial daggers, priests masks, alchemical parpahernalia. 2)" A different selection of items is highlighted. "Objects made of jade, statues, bric a brac, whatever, if it was jade they wanted it. Docotr Reynard tells me that jade is, in Chinese mysticism associated because of its hardness with immortality and forms an important component in Taoist sorcery, especially that connected with immortality and strength. 3)" The final section of items is highlighted. "Items of intrinsic material value because of their construction, gold, platinum, silver, gems, jewellery. None of this stuff is directly sellable, no collector will touch anything this hot, it could be broken down and sold for components or it can, because of historical connections be used for magical ceremonies that somehow relate to a particular item's provenance."

Bee hmms, "Immortality and patients.... is it possible that one of the patients *wasn't* kidnapped?

Images are projected on every available surface (and a few 3D holograms added where no surface is abailable). All seem to have to do with violent crimes. Bee, Regan and Vicki are all at the cotrol panel, adding to the growing pile, while Porter stands near the door.

Cue Malcolm's arrival. The tall man slips into the room, squeezing past Porter a little awkwardly since he's still bandaged up in various places. Malcolm smiles and nods to Porter as he looks around the room, eyes scanning from surface to surface as he strolls slowly. "Same em-oh on the hospital and the train, huh?"

Bee nods, repeating something Regan said earlier nearly word-for-word, "The two crimes show massive resources, large scale distraction exploiting emergency procedures, a blatant disregard for civilian casualties, and a reliance on the arcane when they could instead use technical skills."

"And according to this documentation, some FEMA personnel as well." offers Vicki. She shakes her head as she studies it all. "I dunno, something about this is just off. It's like... it's too much. Like whomever is coordinating this is trying too hard to be clever. Trying to do over the top BS stuff just as a cover when it would actually be more likely to succeed by -not- doing these diversions. I mean, it's like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. It works, but it's messy, and likely makes more problems than it's worth."

"Where was magic involved in either of them?" asks Malcolm. He seems genuinely surprised by the mention of "the arcane". The tall man meanders over toward the ladies, peering at the consoles and the projected images equally.

Bee says, "Magic antitampering sigils on the bombs at the hospital and some type to blood to acid ritual involved in the dead man at the vault door at the train derailment. The use of magic has been the major stumbling block for me. It is hard to figure out what people are doing when they are using a different rulebook than the rest of us."

"Oh! The acid guy," replies Malcolm, nodding sagaciously. Apparently this makes perfect sense to him now. For a few moments, Malcolm seems pre-occupied with examining a crime scene photo from the hospital, tilting his head this way and that as he studies it. "They're hiding behind layers of incongruous and unnecessary stuff, you mean?"

Bee says, "The kill a fly with a bazooka thing may be relavent in a different way. What if all they have is a bazooka?" she sighs. "Which makes no sense at all.""

Regan nods. "Sapphire has a point, if you can use magic why not use magic to stealth in? Killing lots of people isn't their primary objective, but it's something they'd like to see happen. And even if they don't succeed they make the news, which is what terrorists are in the business of, inspiring terror."

Bee says, "Did the magic expert you consulted have an explanation?"

"Did they take anything of value at the hospital?" inquires Malcolm, turning around slowly to study the ladies again. Absently he scratches at the bandage over his right eye. Stupid bandages, always itchy.

Porter leaves Workout Room and enters Steel's Gym.

"Doctor Reynard did not really go into too much detail." Regan replies. "I don't think he was able to deduce too much, as you metnioned earlier, there is the possibility that this theft is to allow some ceremony to be performed on the patients. The big question is why, what do they get out of that? WHo is benefitting out of all of this, and how?"

Regan looks to Malcolm. "They took the patients, and equipment necessary for the care of the patients."

One eyebrow quirks upward at Regan's reply. "They took the patients," reiterates Malcolm, tone deathly serious. He swivels to study Regan intently as he adds, "They took the crew of the train too. Or, at least, the train crew is MIA."

Regan nods to Malcolm, "It seems unlikely in this case the train crew were the primary target, they had succeeded in vanishing the crew well before they broke into the off-site archive. It seems more likely they took the crew so the crew could not stop the train from crashing."

Bee says from memory, "The five kidnapped at the hospital were Penny Wong, age 20: Student at CBSU studying finance and public policy. Sarah Mulligan, age 33: Public Servant - Virgnia department of public health - records section administrator. Francis Ramirez, age 26: Runs a web design and programming business from his home. Marcus Ablett, age 45: Owns an auction house specialising in objets-d'art. James Pattinson, age 28: Unemployed - normally lives with parents. All five people kidnapped have type one Osteogenesis imperfecta."

"Right, that was noted, what about the FEMA personnel from the trucks they appropriated? "Maybe they overlooked some small detail, like one kidnapping victim may have a locater implant, an active communication device... something, anything." offers Vicki. She is quite obviously growing frustrated.

"Still," replies Malcolm, "That's the one thing shared amongst all of their crimes. People are taken along with actual stuff."

Bee nods in silent agreement with Vicki's frustration. "We have piles and piles of data and no clues. Everything that looks like a clue generates questions instead of answering them."

Regan's shoulders lift. "I don't have any information on the theft of the FEMA equipment,nor have I heard tell of any missing personnel, but that's no guarantee at all. To the authorities I am a parolee, not someone to be trusted."

Regan says, "The crimes share many characteristics, a cavalier disregard for human life, significant material resources and discipline, reliance on magic where technical skill would serve, heavy use of misdirection, almost always involving some sort of emergency response."

Bee says, "Is it possible that we are thinking *too* much?"

"Ninety nine percent of investigations succeed because the perps are human and humans make mistakes... even tiny ones." says Vicki. The trick to being an investigator, is to capitalize on those mistakes and don't miss them when they get made."

Bee says, "I'm serious. What if we are overthinking this? What if the person we are looking for is just a random crazy who likes violence, is good with magic and kidnaps people based on random commonalities like 'all workers in an office building wearing mismatched socks? What if the connection between the Osteogenesis imperfecta patients and jade statues is really no connection at all besides the whim of a madman?"

"I've been told there's always a chance you're over-thinking things," comments Malcolm to Bee. He leans against a holographic wall, mulling things quietly for a long while. Looking over at Bee, Malcolm quirks his eyebrow again, "Wait. Wait. I didn't get to the report on the statues yet. Was there anything significant about them? Some kinda legend or mythos or, y'know, occult thing?"

"Wait. Let's start over. Okay... we have a handful of Mister Glass kidnap victims." says Vicki, gesturing and making a list to add that at the top of it. "We have a breakin at the museum here. We have the train crew missing. We have a FEMA van stolen and one guard missing there. That was the only crime scene that was -not- local. Maybe..." she pauses. "Maybe they contracted outside help and didn't take the van themselves. Do we have any reports or footage from that scene?"

Bee waves her hand negligently, "Regan's expert said it had some connection to longevity, but I don't see any evidence that supports the idea that one of the patients is working with kidnappers."

"They apparently stole everything made of Jade that was in the facility, not nailed down, and would fit in their van, statues, vases, plates, screens, Chinese imperial seals, imperial butt plugs - I kid you not - everything." Regan explains to Forge. "Doctor Reynard suggests that the mystical significance of Jade is its hardness, in Chinese mysticism it is a component of immortality rituals." She looks to Bee. "You don't need someone's cooperation to perform a ritual on them, a ritual that might deeply indebt them to you."

"Wait... longevity? Maybe... maybe they want test subjects for a treatment. They could've gotten those differently." Vicki shakes her head. "It says here that the FEMA van and missing guard was a scene in Tampa. I should go talk to the officer who was on site there, maybe get a look at crime scene photos." And she calls up the Starguard switchboard. "Nancy. Can you connect me to.." she studies the file. "Tampa police, precinct 17?"

"Don't look at me," replies Malcolm to Vicki, "I'm just here to be eye candy and deflect any incoming trains."

Malcolm looks over at Bee, an eyebrow arching. He smiles slyly, tipping his head a bit. "You know what hostages make in cases like this, Bee? Perfect guinea pigs for getting the ritual just right." A moment later, Malcolm looks intensely thoughtful. "The mystical significance is hardness? And the patients all have a bone problem? This osteogenesis thing wouldn't happen to make their bones unusually soft, would it?"

Bee says, "Vicki, have you found any evidence to support your hunch that only one of the patients was targeted?"

"Fragile." submits Vicki before she gets the call patched through. It's a vid-call, and her end shows a cop of the precinct she was trying to reach. She smiles to the pickup and says, "One moment." before saying to Bee, "No, it's still just a hunch." And then she says to the cop there, "Evening, this is Agent Victoria Maitland of Starguard. May I speak with the officer in charge of the investigation into the theft of a FEMA van on.. (Insert date here), from (insert address here)?"

"Beginning to sound like we've found the pattern," comments Malcolm, a sly grin creeping across his features. Rubbing his chin, Malcolm strolls around the room full of images again, looking at this and at that.

Bee says, "Osteogenesis imperfecta is more commonly known as brittle bone disease. People with OI are born with defective connective tissue, or without the ability to make it, usually because of a deficiency of Type-I collagen. The bones don't become soft, quite the opposite: because the bones lack collagen they become hard and brittle. "

Vicki's call is fielded by a desk sergeant in Tampa. "Sergeant Logan, how can I help you Agent Maitland?" Once she explains. "Okay, putting you through. "Detective Marco. How can I help StarGuard?"

"Detective Marco. Agent Maitland, formerly Detective Maitland of Colonial Bay PD." She's hoping for a bit of professional courtesy here. "I am investigating a case up here, and part of it is linked to the theft of a van from a FEMA facility. I am told you are the lead on that case? I wonder if you could send me like... anything, everything you are comfortable sharing? Most notably crime scene photos, your notes and impressions... "

Bee suggests "Email would be great. We can download the results straight to the computer."

"Well Agent Maitland, you would have to fill out some form or another and then I would need to consult my federal colleagues to see that it was okay, and there would be a background check of you and me, our families, hairdressers, that sort of thing, and eventually you'd get the information you wanted bundled in with your pension notice. I don't want that sort of headache so I'm just going to say no you can't have it and hangup before I accidentlly click on the 'send data' button. Y'all take care now." With that he hangs up, but a glowing light shows that Vicki has received what must have been an accidental email transmission.

Bee asks, "Anything useful?"

With a thought, Vicki activates the data function of the sapphire. She loads up an email browser and checks her inbox.

Helpfully, Malcolm looks over toward Vicki with an inquisitive smile. He's currently in the process of circling the room for the fourth time, thoughtfully scratching his chin as though this will help him Sherlock Holmes the case.

Looking at the photos, Vicki projects the images onto the wall. Smash and grab. "Looks like I was right. They outsourced. Anyone feel like a road trip?" she asks with a smirk. On the screen, what looks like a biker gang is smashing cameras and driving off with the van and the guard (other cameras likely caught that end footage.)

Bee says, "You two go without me. I have something local to deal with. I'll compare notes later."

Bee teleports away.