Ch. 5 Van House

"Welcome to Van House." Dani opened the front door to a medium-sized victorian-style house to reveal it was teeming with life. Eliot, Savannah, Parker, and Dani filed in. All but Dani were wearing the discreet cam glasses. Hardison was back at headquarters cursing behind his laptop. He had no interest in coming along, but he was understandably short-tempered and finding usable information on Strife they didn't already know was not proving especially fruitful with the group being so unorganized. It was becoming more and more of a shock that these fools had busted into Van House.

Several people who were clearly administrators in the house like Dani rushed up to Savannah to welcome her. They quickly realized the visit was business-oriented and cleared away. "Follow me," Dani said.

Like soldiers in a march, Dani and Savannah walked in-step with each other. The habit had been ingrained into them with the assistance of malevolent chemicals and brought out with their proximity to a fellow commando. They followed Dani, looking around to give the cameras a good view, and Eliot started to notice something as they passed students and administrators who were students past. He'd seen a lot of these faces at The Academy.

"Wait a minute, was The Academy all-girls."

"Yeah," Dani and Savannah answered in unison.

He couldn't stop the question. "Why?"

"Women are more dangerous." It came in unison again.

"How so?" It was almost a demand and he may have been offended, especially being vastly outnumbered.

"Put a man in a uniform and give him a gun, you automatically see him as a threat. Hell, even a man in a black suit will make you wary," Dani explained.

"But put a woman in a gown and give her a champagne flute or even jeans and a tank top with backpack, and you see a friendly, a civilian, an innocent."

Eliot snorted...since he couldn't exactly argue. Compared the two, and the female counterpart is less threatening, more easily overlooked. "Makes sense," Parker shrugged.

"Shut up, Parker."

They had reached the basement. They descended the stairs which were hidden behind a door locked by a fingerprint scanner hidden in the knob. At the bottom of the stairs, lights finally hummed to life to reveal a lab. It wasn't a dank, poorly constructed basement lab. They could've been in a professional lab on a military base if they didn't know any better. Metal tables full of tools, monitors, computers, scanners, and a half-dozen of what Savannah had described as "bastardized dentist chairs". Her description was accurate. They were dentist chairs covered in straps, IV apparati, and monitors. Of course, there were scattered empty spots where there clearly used to be equipment. It looked like about half the lab had been ransacked.

Eliot glanced around at his companions. Dani was still stoic. Parker looked disgusted. Savannah stared glassy-eyed at the chairs. She was literally staring at the object of her nightmares reconstructed by a comrade. "Savannah?" he whispered. She flinched. "Are you...?"

"Copesetic," she nodded, finally looking away.

"Van?" Dani questioned, looking at Savannah with concern.

Savannah shook her head, looking up at Dani. "I'm stable, I promise."

"Van?" Eliot asked.

"Sa-van-nah," Savannah explained, emphasizing the middle syllable, "nickname."

Parker spoke thoughts aloud. "Van. Van House. Van House is named for you?"

Savannah shrugged and nodded. "She is the reason it exists," Dani added.

Savannah coughed. "We should, um, see the break-in site."

"Right, this way." They followed Dani again as she explained. "There are six levels underneath the house. The topmost is the lab, the next is the medical bay, the one after that is the gym, two levels of classrooms and the bunker." She lead them to the west wall where there was a hole in the wall with a partial tunnel to the surface and mounds of rubble and shrapnel. "The opening to the surface was filled in the morning after the break in, for safety."

"Right."

In sync, Parker, Eliot, and Savannah sunk to kneeling positions and examined the damage. "Looks like a basic shrapnel bomb. Just some homemade kind of pipe bombs with nails and metal projectiles."

"Most of the place is soundproofed for obvious reasons, so we never heard them go off."

"I know you repaired the outside, but did you take pictures of the damage?" Savannah asked. Eliot was concerned. Savannah usually had this work-mode she got into where her whole being changed. Everything she did was calculated she performed like some sort of cold government agent. Eliot was used to that, but at that moment, it was different. Work Mode Savannah had taken most of her over, but he could see something else peeking through her oddly unfocused eyes: The Animal.

"Yeah, I have to grab them from my office, hang on." Dani jogged upstairs.

Parker started to climb up the tunnel to inspect for more clues. Eliot took the opportunity of semi-privacy to sidle over to Savannah and whisper assuringly, "They're not going to hurt you." She flinched hard like someone hit her and squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to escape something inside of her. He lightly touched her arm. "Hey." She sucked in a desperate breath and shook her head. Then Work Savannah was back, shaky, but back.

She brushed his hand away. "No," she whispered.

A few moments later, their privacy was gone when Dani jogged in holding a haphazard file folder. Savannah took it without making eye contact and started rifling through the pictures. "They were in a moving truck, a small one. There were at least seven of them." She looked back and forth between the pictures and the room. "They took off their shoes so their footprints in socks would be less discernable."

Parker called from the tunnel, "There's nothing traceable in here. Just more

bomb shrapnel. For amatuer hooligans they sure know how to cover the important stuff. There's not even wheel marks where they would've dragged equipment out."

"Because they used pulleys and ratchet straps and pulled the weight with the truck," Eliot pointed out.

"Brings the number of guys up to nine to help with the weight of this stuff," Savannah worked out.

Parker dropped in from the tunnel. "We should walk around, give Hardison a better idea of the schematics he needs to search for. Also, Dani, we're going to need equipment profiles."

"Right, they're in the file."

Savannah shifted on her feet. "Do we, um, just need to walk the lab or do we need any other levels."

"The lab should be enough since it's the only place they entered. There aren't any marks by the entrance to the other floors. If we need to we can come back, we can. Right?"

"Right," Dani answered.

"Right," Savannah repeated. She sounded the opposite of thrilled, but no one said anything.