Stacey's pov
"Why didn't we think to look here before?" I murmured under my breath. It was so...obvious, when you looked back on it? Or, maybe obvious wasn't the right word. Fitting? Yeah, fitting. It was fitting that Morgan would have some sort of activity or something important in the Factory back in Paris. It was the place that once housed the Supercomputer. Well, it still did house the Supercomputer, but now it housed a blown up Supercomputer; dead and useless.
I had only been in this factory once before, when we thought we were killing Morgan. Man, were we naive then...We actually thought we killed her. Jeremie and Aelita still weren't sure how she managed that one. According to Jeremie the program was written correctly. By all logic it should have killed her. But...these were hardly logical times we were living in.
After the attack on Rengrade, none of us were really sure what to do. That was when Odd reminded everyone I was supposed to be their spy, and that I had helped before, and that I could help again. Since we didn't know what to do, I could gather intell to try and predict Morgan's next move, so that we could out maneuver her. They asked me if I would be ok with that and with pretty much going solo into enemy territory. I said it would be my honor.
I saw a lot of lives ruined or ended by Morgan Xanthos over the past...what had it been? Weeks? Months? I could barely tell anymore. One day came after another, and everyday I was grateful I was still alive and still had a few people to spend my time with...That was the only thing that could get you through the day, after all. Morgan killed my family, and countless others. If there was anything I could do to take her down, I would do it, no questions asked.
So Jeremie, alongside a bunch of Rengrade guys who survived the attack, made some spy gadgets for me. They were pretty nifty. The one that brought me to the Factory was this little doodad that picked up on signals of every wavelength. See, we knew Emily was working with Morgan, and we knew Emily was human, and that Morgan and Emily were often in completely different locations. So...if all those things were true, Morgan had to be contacting Emily every now and then, most likely through cell phones. Also, pretty much everyone's cell phones were unusable now. So, if I picked up on the signals, it was possibly them. It was a hell of a shot in the dark, but it was the best thing we had.
So Jer and Odd and Aelita brainstormed some places she might be, so I wasn't just searching the entire world for cellphone signals. They thought she would probably stay close to home. If she was going to be somewhere, it would be Paris. So I had to get back there. Everyone agreed on that one, but there was some disagreement on where exactly in Paris she would be, especially since we had been away from Paris for a while and had no idea what was going on there anymore. They suggested Kadic, the Factory, the Hermitage, my dad's old shelter, the surrounding city, and Odd even suggested the Eifle Tower. He thought Morgan might just have THAT big of an ego. Honestly, it wouldn't have surprised me too much if he was right. She did have a huge ego...doing all this over the death of her father and home. Others had lost that before, and certainly many others had lost that after. But she decided it was a good idea to bring about the apocalypse and brand the entire world with that stupid symbol.
But I'm getting a bit off track. I searched around the city, some, and actually managed to pick up on a signal. I followed it and it lead me to the abandoned Renault car factory on the Seine river. I contacted Jeremie and let him know. We didn't have cell phones anymore, but the Rengrade guys provided some super charged walkie-talkie type things. Also they gave me some weapons for the monsters and a grappling hook, because what kind of spy doesn't use a grappling hook at least once?
Well, anyways, I tried to use a grappling hook, but there wasn't really much time for...practice. So I ended up getting about three quarters of the way across the river, losing my grip, and falling into the river with all my clothes and gadgets and stuff. I spent at least fifteen minutes trying to dry everything off and making sure it all worked. There was no way to get the grappling hook back right now. It was just going to hang there on the underside of the bridge for a while.
I couldn't just go in through the front door, after all. There were monsters. I had some tools to deal with monsters or those big robots if I had to, but I really didn't want to have to. I was planning to Metal Gear my way through this thing. If I wasn't seen by monsters or security cameras, I couldn't be touched. I would slip in, get whatever information I could to inform our next move, and get out of there. I would mostly have to go through back rooms. And uh...where would information be? Not the Supercomputer. That thing blew up. But that didn't mean there was nothing here. There could be...I didn't know...physical storage? Something? Humanity was losing numbers fast and we needed to stop her before we went extinct. The team and I...everyone in the world...we were getting kind of desperate at that point. We needed some kind of foothold, something to give us hope. Real hope, this time, not the kind we got superficially before it was ripped away. Morgan was toying with us, I knew she was. Trying to break our spirits before she broke our bodies...and I couldn't say it wasn't working. But I wasn't dead yet, and until that point, I had to do everything I possibly could.
My prayers were answered as I made my way around the back rooms and eventually opened the door on a room full of screens. When this was a car factory, this had to be the place where all the security camera footage was fed. Now most of the screens were lit up, but only one or two of them showed scenes inside the factory. There was footage of the bunker...of places I had never seen before. And occasionally a few of the screens changed to different locations, more that I didn't recognize, but they looked foreign. In a room like this...someone could keep track of the whole world. That was precisely what she was doing. Or maybe keeping an eye on her active projects? Well, maybe if I flipped around the feeds...I could see what she was planning next? We would at least have some leads...some locations to check out. Every screen had coordinates associated with them. Although, I had no idea what places the coordinates corresponded to. Maybe Jeremie or Aelita would? I'd just memorize the numbers.
Just as I was about to touch the console, one of the screen changed to show something...peculiar. There was a maze made out of trees, crawling with monsters and, uh, wolves. There were wolves just prowling around in there. And at the center, there was an old man in a dirty lab coat and turtleneck and glasses. He had a pretty impressive scraggly beard, too. This could only be the man Aelita described to me once, her father.
It was Franz Hopper.
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