Interlude 2
"Doctor, what are you doing here? Is our internal security down again? This is a sensitive, internal Protectorate meeting."
Doctor Christopher Lambert turned to face the speaker, and found his vision mostly blocked by a blue and silver gauntleted fist, the index finger of which was mere inches from his nose. He could slightly make out the sight of Miss Militia beside the owner of that fist, a look of consternation on her face as the second of the local Protectorate branch looked at the tactless hero.
"Armsmaster." Piggot responded from somewhere to his right in a loud voice that was not quite a shout.
The fist moved slightly to one side, a side effect of the hero's torso twisting to face the front of the room.
"I invited him." The Director of the PRT continued in her firm, unwavering voice, an authoritative stance he was well acquainted with despite having only been here a week.
"This is a class A-II meeting," Armsmaster stated in an emotionless recital of facts not out of place in a university's lecture theatre. "Dr. Lambert's position as the overall Assistant Head of Powers Research is class B-IV at best. There is no reason that he should be here…"
Armsmaster's stance changed abruptly, lowering his fist. Thus unimpeded, Christopher had a front row view to the dawning comprehension on Armsmaster's face, despite that his face being mostly hidden by his helm.
"Unless a certain someone is involved, yes." Christopher declared, finishing Armsmaster's sentence for him.
"Hmm," Armsmaster hummed an acknowledgement as he nodded his receipt of the statement, before he moved away to retrieve the seat he had kicked aside.
'Not even a hint of apology.' Christopher thought as the leader of the local Protectorate settled down onto his restored seat, while his second in command seated beside him looked like she was silently sighing. 'Well, I've seen worse.' he thought before turning towards the front of the room where Director Emily Piggot was seated. 'Much worse.'
Reaching the front of the room in two steps, Christopher exchanged some short, polite words with the Director before he turned around, facing the assembled audience. Six pair of eyes masked behind all manners of costumes looked back. As expected, Armsmaster sat in the front and center of the room with Miss Militia, portraying purpose and readiness just by being there. To one side, Assault lounged lazily right in the front row, no doubt dragged to the front by Battery, sitting as straight-laced as anyone could. Velocity flanked the front row on the other side, while Triumph sat by himself on the second row, his odd choice of seating as ill-fitting as his brand new spot in the Protectorate team.
There was nobody else in the room, not even the usual heads of PRT departments. For a class A meeting, the lack of the PRT response team leaders and intelligence heads was telling.
The odd man out in the room cleared his throat.
"We all know why we're here, and the investigation report will be printed and distributed soon enough, so I'll skip past the formalities." That earned a nod and a small hint of a smile from a silver and blue helm. "But I will include a brief, just so we're on the same page.
"This morning, at approximately Oh Three Fifty One of April the Nineteenth, this Protectorate base, the Rig came under attack. As there was no indication of an attacker and the Rig appeared to have suffered extensive damage, Code C evacuation and lockdown procedures were activated by the PRT officer on watch, and concurred shortly after by the Protectorate officer on call."
Christopher nodded in Velocity's direction. The speedster nodded back, but the downward direction his lips took showed a hint of worry in his face.
"Shortly after, unable to find any attackers and receiving no further attacks, the alarm was downgraded to Code E secure and readiness procedures at Oh Four Oh Nine. Barely a minute later, at Oh Four Ten a person identified as Oni Lee of the ABB attacked. I will not go into details about the next five minutes, as most of you were involved. We all know what happened next."
Christopher looked around the room. Not one face in the room was lacking in a grim outlook as the implications of the attack sunk in. The villains had gotten the better of them, despite their home ground advantage. A single villain had gotten the better of them and managed to get away before the Rig could manage a response.
Worst of all, Lung was freed from deep within the Rig, from one of the most secure cells in the entire Protectorate, a spot second to very few locations in the entire world.
From any point of view, PR, preparedness, gang dynamics and various others, this attack had 'disaster' stamped all over it.
However, some of the faces in the room were more thoughtful than others, their owners having gotten a hint from the arrangement of Christopher's presentation. Armsmaster and Miss Militia were a given, but seeing Assault being deep in thought was a surprise. Triumph had a puzzled look instead, probably due to seeing the puzzle for what it was but not the solution to it.
"An investigation was carried out immediately after the lockdown of the Rig was lifted sufficiently. An hour later, I was included into the investigation with the Director's orders when certain facts came to light.
"For the record," Christopher made a point of briefly turning to face the Director, "I concur with the investigating overseers. Velocity's reasoning behind the first standing down of the alarm was sound, and he should be absolved of all blame. But it was just so very unfortunately timed; most of the Rig's systems were being cycled down and thus offline when Oni Lee attacked. And what was still running was being hampered by the damage from the first explosion.
"This brings us to why I was called in to assist; why the Rig sustained its first round of damage. Watch."
Christopher had paced himself slowly to the side of the front desk as he talked, and thus he was within arm's length of the room's projector. He withdrew his hand from a pocket as he finished the earlier sentence, plugging a little electronic card into the appropriate slot beside the system. Within moments, the members of the meeting were looking at a video projected onto the side wall of the meeting room.
The video was obviously a security feed of the north gym on the fourth floor, according to the imprints of text for location and time. However, unlike most security videos, this playback's quality was good enough to clearly display a person in the far end of the hall, standing next to one of the machines scattered in the room. He placed a small box onto the floor, walked up to the pressure plate of the bulky impact measuring device in question, posed and… static covered the recording.
The electronic cloud dissipated soon enough, replaced by the same scene, a huge cloud of dust covering where the person used to be. A few seconds later, the earlier person ran out of the cloud in obvious haste. Hurriedly looking right and left in panic, he disappeared off-screen to the right, only to reappear back into the camera's view with the gym's door torn off in one hand, diving back into the dust cloud.
Several moments passed before the same person reappeared yet again, still holding onto the gym's door, and holding the earlier box he had left on the floor in his other hand. He ran off-screen for the second time before the playback ended.
"And here's the aftermath." Christopher tapped the top of the projector, switching its output to an image of the basketball-sized hole on the side of the Protectorate base being projected onto the wall.
"Good news for our PR department, it doesn't look like much externally." Christopher pointed at the damage on the side of the floating base before he tapped the projector. "But the interior is unfortunately not made of the same tinker materials."
The image was replaced by a picture of a much larger tunnel, a lane of destruction through several room identified only by the sheared partitions, smashed filing cabinets, cracked computers, twisted server racks and paper confetti littered all over the floor. Assault whistled, earning a sideways look from his partner, while Triumph whispered something, which Miss Militia replied more audibly, "Yes, it does look like a brute decided to smash straight through the walls."
"Who did this?" Velocity asked, obviously wanting to know who caused the damage to the Rig on his watch.
Christopher tapped the projector yet again. A face showed up on screen, a mugshot of a bald, bored Asian man with various lines of information to one side.
"Meet Simon Tama, the person whom you just saw in the…"
A loud snort interrupted the speaker. The whole room turned to stare at Assault as he giggled in his little world, a shit-eating grin proudly displayed on his face for all to see. Battery was already leaning against him, whispering frantically for him to stop, adding in a dope slap for good measure.
The unruly cape did stop, abruptly even, but not because of his partner.
Christopher turned around and beheld a scene he thought he would never see in his life.
Piggot softly giggling to herself.
The Director recovered quickly, unfazed by the stares of surprised confusion from most of the room's occupants. "Oh, please, DO continue. I really want to hear this." she said in her usual icy self, the act so natural it made the burst of disturbing mirth seem as if it was only a figment of shared imagination.
Sufficiently disrupted, Dr. Lambert took a while before he could reorder his thoughts. "So… in a roundabout way," he spoke before another pause, and resumed again a bit louder to speak above the returning chuckling behind him, "the first blast to the Rig and the resulting lack of readiness capitalized on by Oni Lee was technically my fault. The NonCom procedures worked wonderfully; I just did not expect Simon to do… this."
"Erm, what's 'NonCom'?"
"Ah, Triumph." Christopher turned to address the young Protectorate cape. "Don't worry too much about it; it's something of a nickname specific to my department, not yours. NonCom is short for non-committed, and for us it refers to common tricks and techniques to measure the ratings of the rare cape who approached us on friendly terms, but refused to be rated by the PRT for whatever reasons."
Triumph nodded, before a frown interrupted his features. "How does anyone test a person who doesn't want to be tested?"
"There are ways." Christopher waved towards the paused video on the wall. "For example, planting a suggestion through innocent conversation and a simple beeper to draw attention led to the results you just saw. Other methods include simple observation, interview of eyewitnesses and victims of the cape in question, simple aftermath investigation, and lots and lots of good cameras, microphones, pressure plates and other odds and ends.
"It's about the same bunch of tricks we use to try to pin classifications on villains and rogues, but because of the location, personnel and equipment within carefully prepared PRT or Protectorate locations, we are usually able to gauge the results much more accurately."
Christopher tapped the projector, showing the same viewpoint in the gym from an earlier point in time. He continued onto his next point as the video played. "As you can see, by leaving Mr Tama behind, Battery 'inadvertently' allowed us to find out about…"
"We're not here for NonCom lessons. What is Simon's classification?" Velocity interrupted, the red-clad striped speedster asking with the short, curt impatience surprisingly common in pure movers with momentum based abilities, especially those without flight. The uninterrupted video continued in the background, showing an easily identifiable Simon blurring as he moved across the screen with astounding speed, catching up with Battery as they reached the research team.
With a raised brow, Christopher looked towards Armsmaster, who nodded. Another look was directed at the Director, who also nodded. Wordlessly, the Doctor tapped the projector multiple times, skipping pages and videos in his presentation. A final slide appeared, displaying four lines of text, and three numbers.
There was a collective gasp from some of the members in the room.
"As the bottom of the page suggests, all these ratings are merely speculations due to the NomCom nature of Simon." The old man clarified, "I had already bumped them up a notch to give us a margin of error, but they may still be…"
"He has a good mover score on top of being a Brute Seven?" Assault whistled. "That's going to be a serious pain in a fight."
"Striker/Brute." Christopher corrected. "We do not know if he can take a punch."
"But, that's only one step under Alexandria!" The uncharacteristic outburst from Triumph was the loudest among similar sentiments. "And with Mover Five, aren't we dealing with an Alexandria light?"
"Numbers don't matter that much in a fight." Miss Militia reassured. "It's not how strong you are, but how you use it." Her shifting powers painted her green as she spoke, her hands fidgeting between a knife, handgun and a baton and back again.
"Thinker, Listening?" that particular exclamation came from Battery. "Oh. Oh no…"
On her end of the room, Piggot smiled as she leaned back, lost in her thoughts.
And Armsmaster chose to nod at the display. "That's good. That's very good indeed."
"Care to explain that, boss?" Assault turned to look at the Protectorate leader, much of his earlier relaxed demeanor gone. "Guy's going to be hell to deal with in a fight."
"Of course, but he's going to be our enemies' hell in a fight."
There was a pause in the round of exclamations in the room.
"Because he's on our side."
The pause continued.
"… I assume he is, Director?"
Armsmaster stared at Piggot for a long moment. The chair creaked as he began to lean forward, eventually moving so far that he could be described as getting off his seat. "I did ask him to join when… He is on our side, isn't he?"
"He is unlikely to be an ABB member, but..." Piggot began.
"You didn't." Armsmaster interrupted, aghast. "He isn't."
Piggot eventually replied. "There are reasons..."
There was a crash, and a bang. Miss Militia stood up calmly. "Please continue," she said before she walked around the fallen chair. Accelerating quickly, she made her way out of the room through the dented open door, intent on chasing down the fading echoes of the running tinker.
"And that, my bunny, is why I joined up." Assault quipped. "Never a dull moment with *oof* "
Christopher agreed, just for that once, that the powered-up dope slap was entirely warranted.
