Streets of Hope

"Fortunately, I have extra," Tam said with a faint smirk, before looking around the room to try and fully take in its intent and capabilities. The extent of what was done and what could be accomplished within it was deeply interesting, and equally disquieting.

It was awesome, in every sense of the word.

She had given the plastic bag with its- seemingly- inert cube over to the vampiric scientists with barely a hint of nerves, and now turned back to Matthias.

"Show me where I can strap in. I want to get to work."

OOC: Leam, you forgot to reply to Neasa.

BIC: Ciaran smirked and scoffed. "Of course," he answered.

***

Aislinn nodded. "Let's get to it."

Matthias led Tam back onto the Segway and from there, they came to the opposite point of the ring, only a few hundred meters to the right of where they'd started off. In the Interface Room was nothing other than what looked like a slightly modified dentist's chair, with what she could only surmise to be some sort of head brace. An odd plaque looked like it could be swivelled over the user's chest, the restraints obviously being there to prevent the non-disconnected body from completely aping the armature's movements and limit potential injuries. The plaque, however, was covered in various sigils that felt slightly derived from the Clank business.

"We'll strap you in, secure you and place this plaque over your chest, before electrifying it. The sigils will activate and more or less force you into a dream state. In that state, the etheric transference points will more or less stretch your soul across to the armature - without disconnecting you from your body. You'll essentially dream of whatever it is you'll actually do, while driving the armature."

He shrugged lightly. "Beyond this point, everything rests on you and the tools we've placed in the Clank's room. I will be observing the procedure through a one-way mirror leading to an observation area. You won't see me, of course - but any potentially nefarious entities in this box wouldn't see your true self, either."

The Guildmate gave her a slightly contrite smile. "We can stand our tools being severely mangled. Losing a fellow researcher, however, is another matter. Hence why we've devised this procedure. The Arcane is filled with things that would like nothing more than to kill us all."

***

Percy looked to the corpse's shadow. "This is not the province of Summer, nor of mortal lands. Darkest Winter may feed one's vices, but a deed of this nature? This is most foul. One of the Dark and Deep must be spoken to, lest we assume this to be a coup of Mab and Morgana."

Benson frowned. "I don't know about that, either. Gammell doesn't fit with the Dark. He's too reclusive to fit the bill.
- Nay, he does not conform," agreed Evergloam. "Oberon's ward and protector, however, will assuage mine fears."

The bugbear's eyes widened. "The Wisp? You serious?! You can't bring the White King out here this early; it's May! You'll stick the entire tri-State area with bad weather! You know what Old Jack and Sophia said about what they needed for this year!"

The gruff sighed. "Clement weather, aye. The Sound's fields must be plentiful. Well, then, we shall have to see to it that our fair Queen answers to her Lady's summons."

Harry didn't seem convinced. "So - a summons of the Queen from one of the local Ladies is going to offset the Archduke of Winter showing his ass here for a few days, while you grill him."

Percy let out a good-natured scoff. "Nay, Knight. There will be no grilling. Oberon's ward has the Warmth of the Hearth, and it spreads to his spawn. They are all beholden to our Queen's husband. We needs must contact the Archduke and make our request. His web will be cast into the sea; and information will be collected. If this is a ploy of the Dark, we will know soon enough."

Benson grimaced. "I still don't like this.
- I know the White King," reassured the gruff. "We served together, during the Battle of Hope. He hath saved many a life, whilst Elysium caused its wretched fire to rain from the sky. Disquieting he may be, but Oberon's Hearth doth fill him with honour and glad purpose. He is Winter's Sword, kindly forged by our enemies and tempered by the Winter King."

***

The local Donnola was like all the others across North America: sleek, chic, impressive and, surprisingly, not too expensive.

Well, if you weren't paying for a Clank, that is. If Shamus had a plan besides pigging out on the company's expenses, it didn't seem readily obvious. While the selkie's portion was fairly resonably sized, Wallace's notoriety got him a mixing bowl's worth of carbonara, into which he dug with wild abandon. His firey mutton-chops were speckled with bits of sauce long before the end (which he reached in under ten minutes), and he added to his appreciation of the meal by tipping the bowl forward and gulping down every stray bit of sauce and prosciutto he could potentially catch.

He was done long before Ciaran would have managed to start the second third of his plate, making a little show out of his cleaning out his mouth.

"Nope," he finally said, much louder than he needed to, "not 'nuff salt! Hey, waiter-person! That was crummy, your chef probably figured a couple solitary grains would work out!"

Predictably, nobody came to receive Bucky's complaint immediately. That didn't stop the Clank from using his blade to start a fairly impatient beat on the floor. "HEY, COME ON! WHAT'S A GUY GOTTA DO TO GET SOME SERVICE OVER HERE, HUH?! GET ME YOUR GODDAMNED MANAGER!"

Ah-ha. Annoying the Hell out of the management would annoy the Hell out of Biggs. An irate Weasel would be less likely to be able to cover his dimwit of a cousin. As the mustelid's branch offices were still located right on top of the restaurant proper, they had a fair chance of being able to draw the mobster out.

***

The Firebird Gallery stood across the Hillard, in the gentrified blocks of the industrial district. Point Judith was only a few miles from there and from there, the mainland's own cities and artistic delights. This one, however, had had just over twenty-seven years to make its mark. Even cultural chroniclers working for New York's Village Voice had commented on Anastasius Romanov's artistic pursuits, as well as how... unfathomable they seemed to be for most Terrans.

Stepping inside, it wasn't hard to figure out why. The former Czar had scraped together a small fortune in order to give the former factory vaguely palatial airs, with coffered ceilings and carefully carved wainscotting. All the same, everything was mostly starkly white; made to appear as sleek as could be, in order to be made as featureless in the face of the other explosions of colour that filled the space.

The Karthian's own permanent exhibit was puzzling. Entire corners devoted to strangely Minimalist compositions that defied understanding, blank canvases displayed with an asking price in the two or three million; a black box rigged with an Internet connection and designed to simultaneously upload and capture a bit of thirty-second footage of a dog jumping through some hoops, so that pass after pass, the image and sound would degrade...

It wasn't mad, though. If anyone had had the sneaking suspicion that Romanov could have set the murders up as part of some grisly tableau, that suspicion would now have lost all ground. The alien pushed all the boundaries of artistic expression to the point where even the most educated of all three of them - it being Katherine - would have one heck of a hard time understanding the theme or importance of most of the works being put on display.

Judging by the price tags, though, someone out there did care enough for them.

What was of import, however, was the gallery's left wing. As a small sign claimed, this wing had been rented out to Phyllis and Vergil Laidlaw as part of a project seemingly called Of Grinding Gears and Splitting Flesh.

If Anastasius wasn't mad, if there was at least some sort of hyper-elitist conception of Art to give purpose to what he did, what the Laidlaws had to show skirted the limits of Sense.

Taking it in would be impossible for the trio. There were colours and textures and objects, yes, but they all seemed to move, while not moving at all. Looking at Vergil's sculptures made you swear the locked and soldered gears that were visible could still turn, it made you swear the discarded Clanks could still stare out at you and cry out in agony. Phyllis' paintings were of a mad, Schizophrenic kind of Cubism, flashes of red and ochre on black backgrounds, lines and cubes and rectangles and planes of force jutting this way and that; as if the forces in movement depicted by Italian Futurism had been rabid animals straining to be let loose. Something was stirring behind the paintings, pushing and pulling at the gears, and it felt as though if they were to see, if only they could see...

They'd know.

They wouldn't have been here for more than twenty minutes that the thought would start to snake in all three heads.

All they had to do was cut out their own eyes. There was so much left to see, so much that basic artistic theory couldn't cover. So much that even the flighty Karthian with his emotional ups and downs would never grasp. All they had to do was to see past Sight itself...

It made Three's scars along the nape of his neck itch insistently.

"We've seen enough already," he said, his voice pale and weak.

Poor Anastasius. He'd been suckered into hosting an exhibit of something that took the concept of Art and ripped it to pieces. No wonder Phyllis had prevented him from seeing it!

Ciaran did not prevent Bucky from causing a ruckus, but neither did he join the samurai in causing trouble. He had found the food to be quite good, to be entirely honest. It was just in his nature to observe and only speak up when the occasion called for him to do so. If he was encouraged to join Bucky in irritating the manager, he would. The clank might have found the selkie passive, but it was more about biding his time.

***

Neasa raised an eyebrow at the bugbear. "Why are you apprehensive about the White King coming to Hope when Sir Percival is confident he'll be able to gather information for this case?" she asked. "Even with the Queen coming here."

Balk at restraint, or play with new toy? Those weren't quite the words of what was flash-processing in Tam's head, but it accommodated the gist of it. Even a very young person learned a fair bit of paranoia at being restrained, separated from their belongings, made helpless by strangers in Paradise, if not from personal experience then from the knowledge that came in whispers and gossip of who had angered what gang, and who had shown up again as someone else's successful experiment.

But eleven years is a good distance from that, and Tam was fairly certain that what she saw before her was a valuable research tool- especially to play with something as potentially dangerous as that cube. Pulling off her jacket, she set it in the corner and approached the chair.

"Let's get this party started."

Preparations went as expected. Tam would find the restraints weren't there to bruise her or seriously contain her; it was mostly just a question of preventing her physical shell from being too, well, ambulatory for the process to be seen through to its completion safely.

Once the plaque was electrified, however, a great and heavy weariness would slam on top of her, forcing her eyes closed as if she'd gone through an utterly gruelling workday. The new eyes she'd open would feel slightly odd, and for good reason.

First off, they hadn't designed the armature for quadruple visual organs. Her point of view was limited in comparison with her normal field of view, a fairly large blind spot being perceptible where her upper eyelids would have filled in the picture. She'd surmise she was looking at things through the perspective of your average human or anthro, for the time being. It wasn't exactly unplanned, but it didn't mean it would be any weirder.

Then, there was the odd sense of being, well, a thing. Her awareness of the armature was comprised of all the biggest and expected sensory cues - eyesight, auditory information, the strangely natural sensitivity of the carters and pistons that felt exactly like her own skin and muscles would... Even her voice came out from the thing's voicebox, sounding reliably like her own, if understandably rendered through a bit of a tinny filter.

What was missing, though, was the sense of gender or actual Self. She was limbs, eyes and a mouth, for all intents and purposes, and nothing more. At least, not until she either gave the all-clear for the flux to be reversed so she'd recoil back into her actual Self and wake up naturally - or something happened that forced the rig's failsafes to shunt her out.

In a display that was probably intended to reassure the user, a closed-circuit camera's feed could be seen from within the experimentation room. She'd see herself, seemingly sound asleep, an undead nurse occasionally keeping an eye on her heartbeat. Judging by the little twitches her actual body was displaying, she was dreaming. The odd part was that what she was seeing didn't have the hazy and ephemeral qualities of a dream. She'd remember all of it as if she'd been awake the entire time.

Little tests would confirm the bond. Flex the robotic hand, and the Drifter hand onscreen lazily followed suit, considering how she, like humans and most of everyone else, tended to lock herself down while sleeping. Movement was reduced, but she'd understand the purpose of the restraints. As she sat up from the armature's brace, her body briefly attempted to turn on its side, as if she were asleep in her bed. The restraints kept her in place - and properly connected.

On the other hand, if the tests took long enough, a quick mental test would allow her to see she could still zone in on how the body felt. If she ever needed a bite or a break, she could rest easy in knowing she'd let herself know.

The testing room, as Matthias had said, had been furnished with a small armada of tools. Seeing as nobody was exactly sure as to the box's true nature or contents, the Institute's researchers had left her with a bit of everything; from Clank maintenance ratchets and wrenches to jewellery-store monoculars and microscopes, EMF frequency monitors, voltmeters, devices to measure an object's arcane potential - pretty much everything, right down to basic charting tools. A few thick and brand-new college-lined notebooks stood at the ready, a small flotilla of carefully sharpened pencils joined with a few mechanical and alcohol pens. If any drafting needed to be done, if she needed to break the object down on paper to better reverse-engineer it, she'd have everything she'd need.

Of course, looming in the middle of the otherwise barren concrete space and simply placed on a little wooden stool was that damned box.

"That explains Fulton, then," Katherine muttered uneasily, resisting the urge to scratch at her eyelids as they hurried away from the exhibit hall. "Did he come here too, I wonder? Not that it matters; whatever could have inspired that insanity needs to be locked away." She paused, then turned and walked back. "Help me here, Aidan; we should close the wing off, so no one else walks in on it and faces temptation. There should be gates or something..."

Finding the large double doors that were occasionally used to close off the gallery's wings, Drake tried to pull one of the panels closed, but felt that something was pinning it in place. He put a knee down to the ground and tried to look for some sort of door brake that could be released, but he found no such thing. Hinges could be seen, so the panel wasn't a fake door, either...

In inspecting one of the panels, he noticed something that was fairly troubling.

"Hey, guys!" he called out. "I think someone wanted us to see this - and that can't have been Romanov."

He pointed at the lock. "The bolt was drawn. The doors were locked. Someone cut the bolt with some kind of acetylene torch or laser cutter."

The former soldier turned the lock's handle, causing the rough-edged bolt to recede impractically inward. The other side of the bolt could be seen protruding on the edge of the other panel.

"Anastasius did keep the wing locked, but someone wanted us to see this. We've just missed whoever was here that cut the bolt."

***

Benson shook his head. "It's silly; it's Summer reflexes, is all. The Archduke used to be from the Dark, but Oberon pulled him around with an Oath. Forcing a born and bred killer to start feeling something like sympathy doesn't change the fact that the White King isn't like the rest of us. He isn't even like our Winter allies."

He hesitated in his attempt to explain how he felt. "It's like this: I'm Summer. Life, nobility, good health, prosperity - we're the guys who inspired the whole Land of Plenty cultural trope mortal cultures have going on. Oberon's Winter guys are, well, they're kinda like non-Norse Vikings. Fighting against all odds, being ready to bash heads in for a worthy cause; mass murder and genocide if it's clear they're the Good Guys."

Benson grimaced. "His sister Mab's kinda fucked up in here," he said, poking his forehead with a furry index finger. "Her Wyldfae aren't raised right next to noble Fae courts; they're not like gruffs or us bugbears. They aren't included in the hierarchy. They're client races of her Winter folk, basically. They've promised to help Mab because this chunk of Faerie comes complete with a gigantic chunk of power.

Well, the Archduke's one of those, racially. Wisps. They're not humans, not spiders either, but they feel like both. They have their own king, and nobody's ever seen their queen. Oberon stole their first king away from them and made an enforcer out of him, but it's not like they give a shit. Wisps don't have personality; they don't have a sense of Self. The queen promoted one of her drones to king status and that's it."

He scoffed. "So, yeah. I think I'm allowed to be antsy about this. The Archduke is what happens if you try and show the Slender Man the value of friendship and of preserving lives. He's nice, oh, sure - but he's still a creep. Oberon insisted on his still being a creep. We're all told it has to do with him needing to act like a decent spymaster.

Guy couldn't talk straight to save his life. Everything's a hunt, a game or a gamble. He cares, but that's about all the good Oberon's Oath does. It's like knowing you've taught a giant praying mantis to be all cuddly and protective. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a giant fucking praying mantis."

Evergloam grunted slightly. "Ye of little faith," he said, which seemed to be commentary enough for him.

***

It took a while, but a suited young man eventually stepped forward.

"Can I help you, sir?
- Yeah, I'd like to speak to your manager.
- I am the manager, sir," he replied.

Bucky scoffed. "No, you moron; the other manager! The one who pays your damned salary and without whom you can't make a single fuckin' change to the menu! The one who cooks the books and who uses the place to wine-and-dine with the mayor's so-called buddies! That manager!"

The man's facial features rearranged into a steely mask. "I see. Unfortunately, mister Wallace, mister Biggs isn't disposed to-
- Like Hell, he isn't! What's the time, ten o' clock? He's either sleeping off his latest rounds or checking up on his other close friends. If it's not this, then today's a Pasta Tuesday, and don't you think I haven't noticed that he comes in on those days!"

Bucky was offered a contrite smile. "I'm sure my employer will appreciate the notion of authorities spying on him...
- Yeah, and I'm sure he'll appreciate losing a repeat customer of my calibre! One word to one of the fancy-pants artsy rags and your lunch hours are going to become fairly deserted!"

The main outlet of the franchise being snobbed? That was something that would give any entrepreneur pause. Obviously resigned, the young man pulled out a cell phone.

"No, sir," he said. "No, sir. They're not buying it. Yes, sir. I'll bring them up."

At that sound, Bucky gave Ciaran a beaming smile. "See? Food opens doors. If you ever wanna crack down on one of the Sons-owned local Dim Sums, start by trying out their crab rolls and finding some reason to critique 'em. Never fails."

Neasa frowned and shrugged. "I see. I suppose I'll find out for myself if I get a chance to meet the Winter King when he is here," she answered.

***

"Who, though? Judging by that alone, someone wants us to solve why these murders are happening," Aislinn mused.

***

Ciaran chuckled. "I'll have to remember that for future reference. Now, we just have to wait for Biggs to grace us with his presence."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Katherine said to herself, leaning down to examine the cut bolts more closely. Her powers were more focused on people, sure, but she could still look over places and scenes with them. "Give me a moment here, let me see what I can find..." If there were any hints of a trail or clues to whoever had done this, even small ones, she'd pick up on them.