FF/SPN: Blackout Zone 2/3
Blessings Against the Thunder: Blackout Zone 2/3
by Vanzetti (vaznetti)
Firefly/Supernatural
PG-13
Spoilers for Serenity.
Thanks to musesfool and rez_lo for beta-reading and the_grynne for help with Chinese language.
Previous parts:
Eurydice Settlement
Caieta Port
Xú Landing, 1
Xú Landing, 2
Xinwuwei Docks, 1
Xinwuwei Docks, 2
Blackout Zone, 1
Sam and Simon are still in the upper levels when water starts bubbling up into the basins of the laboratory their minder is showing them. She does her best to ignore it, until a column of water actually shoots up to the ceiling from the sink right next to her; Sam doesn't have to feign surprise as the three of them scramble back to the corridor.
"Should you go tell someone about that?" he asks.
"I'm sure it's under control," she says. She has high-heeled black shoes and pale skin; she lifts her hand to check the tight bun of black hair at the nape of her neck, just as she's done after most of the lies she's told them.
"Don't be ridiculous," Simon says. "This inspection is on a tight schedule. The drainage is not your responsibility: continue the tour."
Sam's kind of impressed by how good Simon is at acting like an asshole bureaucrat. "The building may not be safe," he points out. The floor of the corridor is already wet.
"Nonsense. The building is perfectly safe. But if you must go..." Simon raises an eyebrow at their minder.
Sam sighs. "She can't leave us here."
"We're hardly going to drown in a few millimeters of water." They can hear the pipes moaning and grumbling out in the corridor. "Shall we continue? I believe we have three more facilities to visit on this planet." He turns and heads down the corridor. Their minder takes a few hurried steps after him, her back to Sam. She slips a little on the water, and that's really all the opportunity he needs: one sharp blow and she's unconscious, falling back for him to catch her. Simon swings around, all the panic he's obviously been suppressing clear on his face for just a second; then he shoves the first door he comes to open and they drag her out of the hallway.
"Let me see her," Simon tells him. He checks her pulse, her pupils: doctor things. They're in an office: a couch and bookcases on one side, a desk and chair on the other. There's a miniature bamboo growing from a little pot on the desk and a holo of a couple with two small children. Sam slides in behind the terminal and starts looking around; Simon comes to stand behind him. Nothing on this network will be connected to the Cortex, he bets, but finding things here shouldn't be any different from finding them there.
Ten minutes later, he's not sure. There are references to folders and documents which look promising but turn out to be empty. "It's like there's no information here," he says. "Nothing sensitive. I can get us personnel logs and financial documents, but nothing about what they're actually doing. Nothing about training or research or whatever they're doing to those students."
"The files have to be somewhere," Simon says. "What do those numbers mean?"
"I don't... Oh. Wait a minute." He closes his eyes. "You're right. The files just aren't kept here. Look, this whole batch begins 76823 -- we passed a door with that number on it, right on this floor. Remember?"
Simon's already leaning over the unconscious woman, unclipping her pass-key. "Let's see what's in there -- any idea what those files contain?"
"Subject files," Sam says. "That and training data."
"Let's go," Simon says again.
* * *
The whole place is a mess, techs in lab-coats and administrators in suits, all of them milling around outside the building squawking like chickens about the blocked drains and burst pipes; the guards at the door hardly glance at their IDs. They look like the emergency plumbers, and that's good enough right now.
Zoe takes point, through the wide stone lobby, heading for the stairs, and Mal brings up the rear; judging by the signs River remembered, if there's anything here it'll be underground. Two levels down and it looks like she was right: the EMF meter in John's hand comes to life and starts beeping.
"Looks like we're here," Zoe says. The lights flicker overhead, casting blue shadows on the white floor.
God only knows what those boys did to the plumbing, because there's three inches of water on the floor, and more running down the walls. They slosh their way down the hall, letting the EMF meter guide them to a low metal door. Locked, of course, but Zoe steps back and shoots out the lock; it opens at her kick.
Inside it's dark; John puts the meter away and takes out a flashlight. There are six tables -- altars, from what he can see -- arranged in a circle in the center of the room. There'll be a binding seal in the center, painted on the floor, if it hasn't been washed away. The flashlight picks out some of the items on the altars: the gleam of a silver chalice, the dull glow of candle-wax, a pile of shadows that might be bone. There's a skull, staring back at them, at the center of one of them, something not quite human about the shape of it.
Mal's got the lantern out and lit. "Shen me..."
"Don't touch anything," John says as he steps further into the room. He hopes to hell he isn't about to step on anything dangerous in all this black water; the floor's lower here than the corridor, and the water's a few inches higher. And yeah, these altars are going to be a bitch to take apart, if they don't want six unbound demons wandering around New Canaan.
Zoe comes to stand just to his right. "Well," she says. "This looks like it's gonna be a real pleasure."
"That's what I like to hear," John says. "Mal, you take the EMF and check the rest of the level. They may have more rooms like this down here." He tosses the meter over; Mal looks ready to argue, but there's no way John's planning to let anyone with no experience near this stuff. "Zoe, we're gonna have to take these altars apart real careful. We sure don't want anything getting loose while we're working in here..."
* * *
Sam carries their minder along with them, and that turns out to be just as well, because they need a fingerprint scan along with the card to get in the door. "Wow," Sam whispers as the door slides closed behind them. It's a long, thin room, cut in two by a set of shelves down the middle, shelves along the walls as well, all of them crammed with recordings and data files. And if the computer was right, there were at least eleven other rooms just like this one in this building. He looks down at the paper in his hand. "OK," he says. "Subject files 512, 538 and 618 looked promising. Let's see what we can find in here." It looks pretty hopeless, especially because there's no time to do more than scan the opening of each file -- a few paragraphs or the heading of a tape. But apparently evil and possibly demonic bureaucracies are just as obsessed with record-keeping as the ordinary kind, and soon enough they have a stack of likely tapes and files and are busy copying whatever they can to their data readers.
Simon gets up every few minutes to check on the unconscious woman; they've put her on the floor, since at least it's dry in here. Sam suspects that it's more an excuse to stop reading than because Simon's really worried that she's going to wake up; he kind of wishes he had something like that, too. Instead he tells himself that the chair he's using is too small for him, and stands up to stretch and walk around the edge of the room.
The door's got a tight seal; the carpet under his feet is dry, despite the water running down the hall outside. Sam suppresses the urge to shudder; he'll go check the door, make sure it opens. But as he turns there's a flash of motion in the corner of his eye; he turns back to look, and that's when he realizes that one of the cabinets has a glass front and a lock on it. It was his own reflection that he saw.
"Come take a look at this," he says. "What do you think is back here?"
"Let's try the card," Simon says. He swipes it once, and then a second time. The light stays red. He swipes it once more. "I guess her clearance isn't high enough to get in."
"I want to know what's back there." And Sam knows that this is a bad idea, and very much not part of the plan, but he really doesn't like what he's seen in those files: children and demons and half-made creatures that should not exist. He takes the lab coat he was wearing as part of his disguise and wraps it around his arm. "Stand back."
"Sam, I don’t think that’s a good--"
And then the glass shatters, before he's even touched it. An alarm starts ringing. The lights go dark and come up red. "That wasn't..."
"Gang fashen shenme shiqing?" The minder is sitting up, a hand on her head. "How did you-- You are not legitimate government inspectors!"
"It's all right," Simon says. "You slipped and hit your head, and we brought you in here because it was dry."
It almost sounds plausible, the way he says it, and Sam would like to turn around to see whether she looks convinced, but they have more pressing concerns. "Um," he says. There's a cloud of black flowing down from the broken glass. "Just try to stay calm, OK?"
* * *
The alarm starts going when they're working on the last altar. Mal thinks about saying something, but he don't want to break their concentration. Never thought taking stuff off a table would seem a high-stakes game, but Winchester and Zoe both seem to be taking it seriously enough: everything needs to come off in the reverse order that it went on, Winchester explained to him. Otherwise whatever all that ritual is holding back will just get loose, 'stead of getting sent back where it's supposed to be.
Winchester's mumbling stuff under his breath, spells or prayers or something, and Mal still ain't sure he completely believes in all this. Still, it's something to watch the two of them work, their hands moving across the table, picking things up or shifting them a little, pouring out liquids or lighting and dousing candles. And when Zoe leans forward and blows out the last candle, there's a flash of blue light and the smell of sulphur everywhere.
As soon as the candle's blown, Winchester's moving for the door. "Where are they? What set off the alarm?"
"Kaylee's working on it," Mal says. "River's trying to hack into the comms channels."
"They'll be on one of the upper levels," Winchester says. "We can head in the right direction."
"There's another room like this, just down the hall."
He watches the words sink in. Winchester glances back to Zoe just a second, to where she's standing by the tables. "You two head up, get Sam and Simon out of here. I'll take the other room, make my own way out."
"Better if we stick together," Zoe says.
"Can't leave another assembly like this, and we won't be breaking in here again now," Winchester says.
"Looks like a two-person job," Mal says. Lot of precise timing, from what he saw.
Winchester looks away. "I'll manage it. You two go find Sam and Simon."
Mal nods. "Zoe? Let's go." He ain't going to stand around and wait for the man to say please.
end 2/3
Next Part: Blackout Zone, 3
A/N: The final part should be up at the beginning of next week.
by Vanzetti (vaznetti)
Firefly/Supernatural
PG-13
Spoilers for Serenity.
Thanks to musesfool and rez_lo for beta-reading and the_grynne for help with Chinese language.
Previous parts:
Eurydice Settlement
Caieta Port
Xú Landing, 1
Xú Landing, 2
Xinwuwei Docks, 1
Xinwuwei Docks, 2
Blackout Zone, 1
Sam and Simon are still in the upper levels when water starts bubbling up into the basins of the laboratory their minder is showing them. She does her best to ignore it, until a column of water actually shoots up to the ceiling from the sink right next to her; Sam doesn't have to feign surprise as the three of them scramble back to the corridor.
"Should you go tell someone about that?" he asks.
"I'm sure it's under control," she says. She has high-heeled black shoes and pale skin; she lifts her hand to check the tight bun of black hair at the nape of her neck, just as she's done after most of the lies she's told them.
"Don't be ridiculous," Simon says. "This inspection is on a tight schedule. The drainage is not your responsibility: continue the tour."
Sam's kind of impressed by how good Simon is at acting like an asshole bureaucrat. "The building may not be safe," he points out. The floor of the corridor is already wet.
"Nonsense. The building is perfectly safe. But if you must go..." Simon raises an eyebrow at their minder.
Sam sighs. "She can't leave us here."
"We're hardly going to drown in a few millimeters of water." They can hear the pipes moaning and grumbling out in the corridor. "Shall we continue? I believe we have three more facilities to visit on this planet." He turns and heads down the corridor. Their minder takes a few hurried steps after him, her back to Sam. She slips a little on the water, and that's really all the opportunity he needs: one sharp blow and she's unconscious, falling back for him to catch her. Simon swings around, all the panic he's obviously been suppressing clear on his face for just a second; then he shoves the first door he comes to open and they drag her out of the hallway.
"Let me see her," Simon tells him. He checks her pulse, her pupils: doctor things. They're in an office: a couch and bookcases on one side, a desk and chair on the other. There's a miniature bamboo growing from a little pot on the desk and a holo of a couple with two small children. Sam slides in behind the terminal and starts looking around; Simon comes to stand behind him. Nothing on this network will be connected to the Cortex, he bets, but finding things here shouldn't be any different from finding them there.
Ten minutes later, he's not sure. There are references to folders and documents which look promising but turn out to be empty. "It's like there's no information here," he says. "Nothing sensitive. I can get us personnel logs and financial documents, but nothing about what they're actually doing. Nothing about training or research or whatever they're doing to those students."
"The files have to be somewhere," Simon says. "What do those numbers mean?"
"I don't... Oh. Wait a minute." He closes his eyes. "You're right. The files just aren't kept here. Look, this whole batch begins 76823 -- we passed a door with that number on it, right on this floor. Remember?"
Simon's already leaning over the unconscious woman, unclipping her pass-key. "Let's see what's in there -- any idea what those files contain?"
"Subject files," Sam says. "That and training data."
"Let's go," Simon says again.
* * *
The whole place is a mess, techs in lab-coats and administrators in suits, all of them milling around outside the building squawking like chickens about the blocked drains and burst pipes; the guards at the door hardly glance at their IDs. They look like the emergency plumbers, and that's good enough right now.
Zoe takes point, through the wide stone lobby, heading for the stairs, and Mal brings up the rear; judging by the signs River remembered, if there's anything here it'll be underground. Two levels down and it looks like she was right: the EMF meter in John's hand comes to life and starts beeping.
"Looks like we're here," Zoe says. The lights flicker overhead, casting blue shadows on the white floor.
God only knows what those boys did to the plumbing, because there's three inches of water on the floor, and more running down the walls. They slosh their way down the hall, letting the EMF meter guide them to a low metal door. Locked, of course, but Zoe steps back and shoots out the lock; it opens at her kick.
Inside it's dark; John puts the meter away and takes out a flashlight. There are six tables -- altars, from what he can see -- arranged in a circle in the center of the room. There'll be a binding seal in the center, painted on the floor, if it hasn't been washed away. The flashlight picks out some of the items on the altars: the gleam of a silver chalice, the dull glow of candle-wax, a pile of shadows that might be bone. There's a skull, staring back at them, at the center of one of them, something not quite human about the shape of it.
Mal's got the lantern out and lit. "Shen me..."
"Don't touch anything," John says as he steps further into the room. He hopes to hell he isn't about to step on anything dangerous in all this black water; the floor's lower here than the corridor, and the water's a few inches higher. And yeah, these altars are going to be a bitch to take apart, if they don't want six unbound demons wandering around New Canaan.
Zoe comes to stand just to his right. "Well," she says. "This looks like it's gonna be a real pleasure."
"That's what I like to hear," John says. "Mal, you take the EMF and check the rest of the level. They may have more rooms like this down here." He tosses the meter over; Mal looks ready to argue, but there's no way John's planning to let anyone with no experience near this stuff. "Zoe, we're gonna have to take these altars apart real careful. We sure don't want anything getting loose while we're working in here..."
* * *
Sam carries their minder along with them, and that turns out to be just as well, because they need a fingerprint scan along with the card to get in the door. "Wow," Sam whispers as the door slides closed behind them. It's a long, thin room, cut in two by a set of shelves down the middle, shelves along the walls as well, all of them crammed with recordings and data files. And if the computer was right, there were at least eleven other rooms just like this one in this building. He looks down at the paper in his hand. "OK," he says. "Subject files 512, 538 and 618 looked promising. Let's see what we can find in here." It looks pretty hopeless, especially because there's no time to do more than scan the opening of each file -- a few paragraphs or the heading of a tape. But apparently evil and possibly demonic bureaucracies are just as obsessed with record-keeping as the ordinary kind, and soon enough they have a stack of likely tapes and files and are busy copying whatever they can to their data readers.
Simon gets up every few minutes to check on the unconscious woman; they've put her on the floor, since at least it's dry in here. Sam suspects that it's more an excuse to stop reading than because Simon's really worried that she's going to wake up; he kind of wishes he had something like that, too. Instead he tells himself that the chair he's using is too small for him, and stands up to stretch and walk around the edge of the room.
The door's got a tight seal; the carpet under his feet is dry, despite the water running down the hall outside. Sam suppresses the urge to shudder; he'll go check the door, make sure it opens. But as he turns there's a flash of motion in the corner of his eye; he turns back to look, and that's when he realizes that one of the cabinets has a glass front and a lock on it. It was his own reflection that he saw.
"Come take a look at this," he says. "What do you think is back here?"
"Let's try the card," Simon says. He swipes it once, and then a second time. The light stays red. He swipes it once more. "I guess her clearance isn't high enough to get in."
"I want to know what's back there." And Sam knows that this is a bad idea, and very much not part of the plan, but he really doesn't like what he's seen in those files: children and demons and half-made creatures that should not exist. He takes the lab coat he was wearing as part of his disguise and wraps it around his arm. "Stand back."
"Sam, I don’t think that’s a good--"
And then the glass shatters, before he's even touched it. An alarm starts ringing. The lights go dark and come up red. "That wasn't..."
"Gang fashen shenme shiqing?" The minder is sitting up, a hand on her head. "How did you-- You are not legitimate government inspectors!"
"It's all right," Simon says. "You slipped and hit your head, and we brought you in here because it was dry."
It almost sounds plausible, the way he says it, and Sam would like to turn around to see whether she looks convinced, but they have more pressing concerns. "Um," he says. There's a cloud of black flowing down from the broken glass. "Just try to stay calm, OK?"
* * *
The alarm starts going when they're working on the last altar. Mal thinks about saying something, but he don't want to break their concentration. Never thought taking stuff off a table would seem a high-stakes game, but Winchester and Zoe both seem to be taking it seriously enough: everything needs to come off in the reverse order that it went on, Winchester explained to him. Otherwise whatever all that ritual is holding back will just get loose, 'stead of getting sent back where it's supposed to be.
Winchester's mumbling stuff under his breath, spells or prayers or something, and Mal still ain't sure he completely believes in all this. Still, it's something to watch the two of them work, their hands moving across the table, picking things up or shifting them a little, pouring out liquids or lighting and dousing candles. And when Zoe leans forward and blows out the last candle, there's a flash of blue light and the smell of sulphur everywhere.
As soon as the candle's blown, Winchester's moving for the door. "Where are they? What set off the alarm?"
"Kaylee's working on it," Mal says. "River's trying to hack into the comms channels."
"They'll be on one of the upper levels," Winchester says. "We can head in the right direction."
"There's another room like this, just down the hall."
He watches the words sink in. Winchester glances back to Zoe just a second, to where she's standing by the tables. "You two head up, get Sam and Simon out of here. I'll take the other room, make my own way out."
"Better if we stick together," Zoe says.
"Can't leave another assembly like this, and we won't be breaking in here again now," Winchester says.
"Looks like a two-person job," Mal says. Lot of precise timing, from what he saw.
Winchester looks away. "I'll manage it. You two go find Sam and Simon."
Mal nods. "Zoe? Let's go." He ain't going to stand around and wait for the man to say please.
end 2/3
Next Part: Blackout Zone, 3
A/N: The final part should be up at the beginning of next week.