Ch 5
A Little Knowledge...
VPD Interrogation Room #3
In the human mind, events are not cataloged chronologically- they are sorted by association. Every lover's kiss, every squeeze of the trigger-finger, every time you turn a doorknob or crack open a can pool together. Along the same lines, every time something is remembered it loses its fidelity. The mind warps its own past slightly to meet its present needs.
In Clark's case, every encounter with the police ran together in his mind into a nasty slurry. The flavor distasteful, but the bitterness faded by time and by distance. He'd learned to swallow it with a smile.
Detective Button-Down was seated across from him in his own metal chair. He sipped his coffee, black, but still sweet-smelling. He lowered his paper cup back down to the table, setting it down with a precise tapping sound before rotating its VPD logo to face Clark. No wonder this city had a gang problem, if that was how the cops spent their cash.
Button-Down wiped a drop of coffee off of his bristling mustache. Clark hadn't seen one like it since the seventies, but he was hesitant to use the name porn-stache. It brought him way back, though not back to a place he wanted to go.
Kelly had been in the bed for two days now, and it's sheets were beginning to cling the way hospital sheets tend to.
"Two nights ago, were you in the company of one Pamela Madden?" The Detective's gut shot out five inchesover his belt, when combined with his thick mustache, it made for an absurd sight.
Not much was funny to Kelly right now.
"Yes" he sighed. Hopefully they wouldn't drag this out. Doctor Sam Rosen sat in the right corner, his fingers beating a machine-gun pattern into the arm. The Detective, for his part, took Kelly's curt answer in stride.
"Mr Kelly, yesterday afternoon we found a woman that fits her description-" his hand made its way down to a coat pocket. Kelly said nothing, but Rosen; and he had been Rosenback then, not Sam, not yet, had leapt from his seat and screamed.
"No!"
The Detective had continued unabated, lowering the photograph down to Kelly's face.
"Is this she?" An odd choice of words, but then the photograph made it to eye-level.
No, oh please God no. The picture fell from grasp, fluttering slightly in the air.
It struck his chest. The restraints pressed hard into his thighs, his heartbeat smashed itself against his ears. He was sweating, which made no sense since he could also feel a chill against his skin.
He roved his eyes over the picture again.
Pam's eyes and mouth had been left open, eyes gazing out into the gray morning sky. The gap in her front teeth still evident. Her legs were hanging over the lip of the fountain, the rest of her nude form had been dumped inside.
Like trash tossed in a bin.
The white shoelace around her neck cut a harsh line against the purple coloring of the flesh above it.
There was shouting, and shoving, but despite being less then ten feet away Kelly couldn't make out a word.
All at once, it was over. The pain and loss vaccum-sealed and thrown into the back of his mind for later consumption. He looked up to see Dr. Rosen pinning the detective to the wall. That wouldn't do.
"It's okay Sam-" Kelly let the first name slide out, letting the impropriety shock him into accedencing "-He has a job to do too." One last glance at the photo.
The detective had apologized for his little 'accident' but it had set the tone for the rest of the interview.
"Names?" the detective had asked.
"None that I remember." Kelly allowed his actual shame to show through at the lie.
"Come on, she must've told you something!"
"Didn't ask much, figured that was your job, all I knew was she'd been with people who dealt drugs, who used women for… something-" Kelly let eyes eyes fall slightly at that.
"That's all?"
"Not very helpful, is it?" Kelly certainly hoped so.
The detective went off on some spiel about a pair of robbers who'd been working the area with a sawn-off shotgun, Kelly could tell right away he was lying, even Sam hadn't believed him. It was an obvious effort to bait him. The mustache moved one last time.
"Mr. Kelly, you must have seen something. What the hell would you have been doing there otherwise? Was she trying to buy-"
"No!" The response automatic. Kelly was going to have to work on concealing his emotions. The detective plowed on.
"Look, it's over. She's dead, you can tell me. I need to know."
No, he didn't.
"I told you all I can, I don't' know anything about drugs." Not for long.
The detective shook his head, doing his best to hide a roll of his eyes.
He'd already given up. Kelly hadn't even gotten started.
Once upon a time war had been something that happened somewhere else. The enemies hadn't spoken his language, in accents similar to his own. Stupid, so stupid. A battlefield wasn't some arbitrary place that had been set aside for war. A battlefield was anywhere that you and the enemy were at the same time. There were a lot more enemies out there than he'd thought.
Kelly had never come home from war, the whole world was a battlefield. There was no such thing as being safe, only safer.
It would be mere months from that moment until John Kelly would fake his death, but the boating accident was just a legal nicety. In fact, John Kelly had died like most Americans do. In a hospital room attended by a frustrated physician.
Across the metal table, Detective Button-Down cleared his throat. Clark leaned back into his own chair, stance and smile both as easy as they were wide.
24 Hours Prior
Three of them, young men, none more than eighteen at their absolute oldest. They talked the talk all right, they flashed the signs, and they wore identical heavy green winter coats. The bulges Clark saw under their jackets were the final check mark against them.
They rocked back and forth on their heels at their little street-corner next to a rusted-out park. More showing the colors than anything else. Although they did some light catcalling, they took no actual steps towards the women in question.
Machismo was the same everywhere.
Clark hadn't seen a single child in the park, only homeless men and some small-time hustlers. The gangsters hadn't harassed either, they were probably mentally ill or addicts just like on Earth. The empty needles in the trash pile next to him agreed with this assessment. He forced himself to relax, placing more of his weight against the brickwork.
The biggest thug slugged the smallest in the arm and gestured over his shoulder, he turned and the other two followed him. That one would be Moe, the little one'd be Calvin, which by process of elimination made the last one Hobbes. He was about the right height compared to Calvin.
Luckily for Clark the trio were city-slickers through and through, they hadn't even interacted with a car over the last day or so he'd been watching them. They hadn't even flinched when cars had sped by them, drive-bys were either rare on Remnant or these men weren't long for this life anyway.
Moe entered a combination into a padlock and opened-up a basement access door, the windows of the bottom-level were boarded and covered in layers of peeling spray-painted tags. Both the boards and the paint grayed and faded. Not a bad place, quiet neighbors upstairs.
Moe held the door open for the other two, before giving a glace side-to-side and lowering the doors back down over him, leaving the padlock on a chain by the door.
One less thing to worry about.
Clark stood up from his trash pile, leaving his empty bottle of booze behind. He gave a brief itch of his stubble that was only partially an excuse to take in his surroundings one last time. He slouched towards the entrance. As casually as he could he lifted one of the overlapping doors and took the stairs down two at a time. Since there were really only five, this didn't take long. Clark took in the door as some drug-addled mumble-rap beat its bass at him through the metal.
It looked fairly solid. The sort of commercial steel door you'd find at the back of a decent store. Sturdy enough to take some actual abuse before it went down. A glance to the frame revealed a pair of four-inch gaps in the paint, each with their own pair of screw-holes. The hinges had been moved inside.
Luckily for Clark, he had no intention of a hinge breech.
Clark had spent a good deal of his library computer-time at the library on Remnants own 'Physical Penetration Testing' forums. While that session had given him a list of keys and tools to be sent to a PO box, those would take time. The only thing it had given him of immediate use was information and some nasty computer scripts. Brute memorization would have to do the trick. He was good at that.
This model of door was an Argus International Model Thirty, Clark would only need his aura for this.
He grasped the doorknob and twisted, there was a stop, and then a tearing sensation like prying a can's top up, his wrist finished its rotation, and he was through in an instant.
The place itself had once clearly been a club of some kind, its bar was intact just off to his right. A cluster of gangsters were focused around a flatscreen that was held together with duct-tape. Some rerun of a junior fighting tournament blazed its way through the dark. The blue light reflected off of their pale, sweat-soaked skin. He was able to see their curiosity flash into confusion, then into anger. When he began to sprint at them, it turned to panic.
Gunshots were a somewhat common occurrence in this neighborhood, but it would be no good getting the cops involved this early on.
Huntsmen and huntsmen students trained for years with their auras, a great deal of training was composed of learning restraint, techniques to ensure that regular humans were left disabled or captured alive. They received lengthy lessons on martial arts and anatomy. John Clark was not a huntsman, he was not a martial artist nor was he even a fighter.
John Clark was a killer, and had been for nearly his entire life. His battle-plan looked less like a Bruce Lee movie and more like a LiveLeak video. One that involved heavy industrial machinery and many, many hapless workers.
He spread is arms out and sprinted towards Moe, he made it nearly face-to-face with him before his arms made contact with Calvin and Hobbes's collars. Clark threw them into the rest of the crowd, using the motion to bring his arms in front of him.
Moe reached out a hand to grab him, Clark was already sinking down and under his grasp. He wrapped his fingers around Moe's belt-line. One that was surprisingly complete with a belt.
Clark turned his hips to his right and flung him.
Moe's hip collided into the counter-top. Two barstools were smashed into kindling, the rest knocked over. There was an audible popping sound, but Calvin and Hobbes were already untangling themselves from their buddies. Clark didn't have the time to admire his handiwork.
They bitched and stumbled over one another as they tried to get up.
"Get the fuck off me, man."
"Fucking junkies!"
"Brothers Ivory! Stop moving 'round!"
Clark did a quick scan of the rest of the hideout. The television provided the only light, the room barely fourteen feet across. It wasn't hard to think of this place as an old speakeasy. There was a cloud of fine particles that had been knocked into the air in the fighting, gray piles and dirt in every corner.
They were alone here, assuming you didn't count the dust-mites.
He plodded towards the pile of men, Hobbes had finally made his way to his feet and some of his buddies were going to be soon to join him. Hobbes made to turn around but Clark's hand clamped itself around the back of his neck. He could feel the bones of Hobbes' vertebrae through the skin. He ran his fingers down to one and squeezed.
There was a separation, there was a choked gasp and the gangster slumped limply in his hand. The pale light of the television caught his comrade's reactions. Eyes widened in panic, practically glowing in the darkness of the room.
Clark let the body go and went to grab his next volunteer, Calvin had the good, or perhaps the poor judgment to pull a gun out of his coat, it looked like one of those Scorpi-something guns that the salesman had told him to avoid. Clark wrapped his fingers around the cheap plastic of the slide, pulling it back and out of battery.
There was a click, Calvin's finger's repeatedly pulled back against a useless trigger. Clark's other hand came up and enveloped the handle and digits in his grip. He brought his fingers together, Calvin's screams were cut short by the placement of Clark's now free first hand on his throat.
Crunch.
Drop.
Move on.
The last pair of men men didn't warrant naming. The one on the left pointed something, Clark assumed the worst and leapt over the couch, knocking over his partner back over it and striking the man himself in the temple with a balled fist.
Too hard apparently, a splatter of brain painted a narrow, obscene cone on the floor and some of the ceiling. The top two fingers of Clark's fist warm and wet.
There was a cursing and shuffling from behind him.
No reason to find out the hard way if his aura was bulletproof.
The last thug was also on the ground, doing his best to prop himself up while reaching for something under his coat. Clark discovered the man also had an aura. The faint translucent shell was dispelled with a single kick, or at least shattered as he struck the rough concrete wall.
WHUMP! Thump. The man hit five feet up the wall and then dropped down onto his face.
Silence. Only some light whimpering from by the bar.
Clear, and in good time too.
His eyes took in the room once more. Only Moe remained moving, clutching his hips while the faint yellow of his gritted teeth shone through the dark.
Clark stood over the man. Lucky for Moe, HUMINT wasn't on the menu tonight. A swift kick to the side of the head finished it, then he went sorting through pockets.
Moe's scroll and wallet went into his coat-pockets, followed by scrolls and wallets of the other men. A quick peek behind the bar and under the couch-cushions revealed no goods of any description.
These had to be the most boring gangster's Clark had ever dealt with. He pushed open the basement doors and in an instant was out on the streets. His slouch returned, he let his facial muscles relax, and he took on a slight limp.
The Invisible Man returned home.
The office complex itself hadn't become any less dilapidated over the previous day and a half, but his own little corner seemed like home after a day out on the city streets. He had been tempted to get another hotel, but frankly didn't want to deal with cameras. He'd broken into too many hotels to trust their security anyway.
Clark eased himself down into a dilapidated office chair and removed the gangster's scrolls, laying them out in a neat line on the desk. They were older models, one of them even had a little flip-screen and keyboard.
He withdrew one of the scrolls he'd gotten from Skeevy's and set it on the desk bellow the others, withdrawing a cable from the same bag. The cheap plastic of the plugs briefly pressed into his fingertips as he connected his scroll into the first in line. If he recalled correctly it had been Calvin's.
His scroll flashed on, a white stenciled ducky on a harsh black background. The mouth full of shark's teeth seemed to smile back at him. Isn't this fun? Some smug script-kiddy from Atlas with a major ego problem and a serious grudge against his kingdom had posted this little ditty on a forum. Ego clearly played a role here, and sadly there was no 'revenge' aspect to M.I.C.E to further categorize him.
Ideology perhaps?
With a few button presses, the password screen on Calvin's scroll vanished, replaced a second later with a loading bar.
If Clark jilted any serious programmers, he'd make a point of killing them afterwards.
When the bar reached the end, there was a vibration. An animation of The Duck chuckling played on Calvin's scroll.
Make that a very smug script kiddy.
Four more duckies flashed over four more screens, the flip-scroll vibrated almost as soon as Clark connected it.
Calvin's phone went first, lots of games, a 'Mom' number but no 'Dad'. At least six different girl's names. Nothing else of interest.
Next was one of the other random thugs, than another, and the last of the no-names. There was a locator app that would be useless now that he'd ducky-ed them, showing a few places where the gang had stashed their stuff. In this case stuff meant some shotguns and some ''B's' of some local cannabis equivalent. No telling if it was referring to bricks or bags, but the five-pointed leaf was hard to confuse for anything else.
Clark connected Hobbes' scroll, it vibrated. His lips parted, letting loose a sharp whistle. Then a chuckle.
Hobbes here was somebody important. Drop sites, hangouts, contacts. So many contacts. He also didn't delete his messages, recovering the deleted ones of his fellows was next, but it could wait. Hobbes's contacts and messages were with all mid-level people and clients, he could have done some serious damage with just this, but Clark wasn't looking to solve the city's organized crime problem.
On Remnant as on Earth, gangs tended to form along racial and cultural lines. Four precious hours had found themselves squandered looking up multi-racial and Faunus gangs in Vale. The VPD, sadly were either worthless or kept such information close to their chests. The web forums were somehow even more useless, filled mostly with poorly spelled gangland propaganda and kindergarden-level art.
Clark had eventually just resorted to walking the streets again, mapping out the borders of White-Fang territory and finding a place where their graffiti covered that of the other gangs. It had taken awhile to find a building short enough that the markings shared a space, but eventually the White Fang crossed paint with the "East Arc Street Lords".
Presumably, this meant the "Lords" were not happy with the White Fang, and would be- had been looking for a way to answer the implicit challenge, that had only been an assumption on Clark's part.
Until now.
Hobbes had been in contact with a handful of smaller gangs the Fang had pissed off, trying to trade and compile information on the Fang's activities. Clark scrolled through the backlog of the text-chat, the white background straining his eyes.. He made note of the pen-names, who were the people with data? Who were the one's who just wanted to give their two-cents? The analysts?
Who actually had any clue what was going on?
The gangsters had not been having an easy time, The White Fang were serious people, and were more than experienced at avoiding detection. That said, as they'd ramped up their tempo of operations, mistakes began to pile up. Tired crews, bored sentries, ambitious or overzealous recruits. These fires all piled up faster than senior staff could go around putting them out, until one day somebody ended up getting burned.
Some of them were already close to it. The White Fang had been repeatedly hitting the same stores, waiting just long enough for the insurance company to replace the Dust, then hitting it again. It was a peculiar tactic, and most crews had been careful not to fall into a predictable pattern. One had not, and at least two gangs were putting together an ambush near their local market.
Good for them, but Clark wasn't looking to catch them in the middle of a job, where they would be running off of adrenaline and caffeine. He wanted information, to seriously damage their operations.
Where were all of these crews based? Where did they put all of that dust? Stash their vehicles?
Clark Scrolled back down the chat again. There were rumors, theories of all shades of credibility. Then he came across a picture of large, squat, brick building. An old fire-station.
He tapped the video underneath, and a shaky scroll-video began to play, Clark could tell it was a man due to the reflection of the hand holding the scroll in the window, which was overlooking a lot behind the firehouse.
A van pulled into the lot, the lights in the lot slammed off in time with the lights in the firehouse. There was the sound of garage doors opening, then about a minute of scuffling. The sound of the doors came again, and then the lights slammed back to life, showing an empty lot.
Not exactly the most subtle way to do things, but Clark supposed most people couldn't be bothered to check it out. People in cities like this tended to keep their heads down. In neighborhoods like this one that went double, maybe even triple.
Another scroll down revealed an address.
This is why you got other people to do your work for you.
The Gangs had the long and short of it, all right. Although he should have thought of them as "gangs" really. These little "g" gangsters weren't the movers and shaker's of Vale's underground. Now those, those were Gangs.
Little street gangs like the "Lords" just got to pick on the people and carcass of Vale's Industrial District. They were free to create their own little fiefdoms, but still subordinate, and disposable to, the more established families. The little "g"s fretted a lot over not stepping on the Big G's toes.
Their machismo apparently didn't extend to people who would actually shoot back at them. Good to know.
In the two hours it had taken Clark to wander down to the Firehouse it had begun to rain, though it had pulled back to more of a mere misting by the time he had finally laid eyes on it. The setting sun cast the whole city in a hellish red haze in its fight through the last of the clouds. The smell of wet pavement and fetid garbage absolutely marinated the air.
Christ, how he hated cities.
He ducked his way into another alley, behind some hobby-store that probably could have sold its accumulated dust by the pound- the mundane dead-skin kind, not the powdered elemental magic. There, at least, the dumpsters wouldn't be as full of the stinking food waste as that of the others around here.
That meant it was at least one good place to check for sentries.
Sadly the alley was empty, not a so much as a bum or empty needle. As far as alleys in a major city were concerned it was practically spotless. Only a pair of puddles at the end of it indicated any level of neglect. The black ladder between them ran its way up all four stories of the structure to the building's roof.
The paint covering the metal itself was… grippy? Like a milder version of an anti-slip tape that they put on metal stairs. The paint grew thinner as he made his way towards the top of the parapet. Once over, he took a seat in the gravel of the roof, using the concrete of the parapet as concealment.
Once again, Clark was going to have to wait for nightfall.
As much as he loathed to face the enemy on a battlefield they had an advantage in, the fact of the matter was that the White Fang robbed stores at night, meaning that night was going to be his best time to break in as well. He took his seat and forced himself to breathe, closing his eyes and tuning himself in to the sound of urban decay.
First came the thrumm of the machinery on the rooftops around him, resonating in time. Car ghosting through the air under the power of silent electric-dust engines, the honking of horns, music echoing through the walls of the apartment around him.
Surprising what one's mind learned to filter out, especially in a place like Vale. Again, that was a major drawback of working in a city, but also one of the benefits. It was very easy to fade into the background. His disguise as a homeless man was cheating in that respect, people actively tried to ignore you rather than just not noticing.
Finally, Clark noticed the light fading from behind his eyelids, even as the temperature began to drop further. The rain had finally given up the ghost, but there would probably be puddles everywhere still, and any metal he touched would probably be slick. Unless the coating on the ladder was a safety standard, and a cheap one.
The lot behind the firehouse was ringed-in by four-story structures, the building Clark had ascended made up the farthest corner from it. Fire escapes wound their way all around the inside ring of the structures, even the firehouse.
There was a familiar slamming as the harsh white lights were killed, Clark kept his head under the parapet. If he were a betting man he would say they sent out a lookout before they sent out their van.
There was a slight crunkling of wheels over asphalt, the lights slammed back on.
One Mississippi… Two Mississippi…
The count to sixty was tedious, but he wanted to give the lookouts time to get back inside, to let the relief of a smooth insertion set in, but not long enough that they would be anxious and alert for the return.
Probably a lot of thought to put into countering hypothetical sentries, but the paranoid prospered in this business, and somebody was hitting the lights.
Most of the rooftops didn't have much in the way of gaps between them, it made for decent privacy from the street, but presented some serious drawbacks when it came to security. One of which he was going to demonstrate right now. Clark gave a glance over the ledge of the last parapet, below him stood a twelve foot drop onto the top of the target building, with yet more gravel to break his fall. Very briefly he considered dropping directly down and putting his newfound Aura to the test. He took another look down the ledge, the wind whistled past him, blowing the sounds of traffic past his perch.
Very briefly.
Turns out that Aura didn't magically turn off your old mental alarm bells. Inconvenient.
Luckily he still could just lower himself down and eat the much more stomachable eight-foot drop onto gravel. Clark made sure to give his knees a slight bed even as he kicked off the wall, but landed feeling more like he'd dropped down a single stair.
No witnesses, so no need for embarrassment. His feet crunched their way towards the roof access door. It wasn't even locked, and the hinges were coated in a thick layer of oil. Not the best way to do it in the long term, but terrorists were generally not known for their incredible technical skills. What it implied was that somebody here was a little too impulsively conscientious, at least for Clark's liking. He preferred his enemies complacent.
"In fact," he decided, "lets avoid the door entirely…" It was probably nothing, but probably was not the same thing as certainly. He crunched his way over the rough stones to the inside ledge and peaked over. A rusted fire-escape jutted out of the bricks just under ten feet beneath him. He took a deep breath and hopped down with a CLANG that reverberated down the rest of the escape.
When he turned to face the building itself Clark found himself face-to-face with the texture of a moving-blanket. It took him a fraction of a second to realize what he was looking at. Thick sheets had been nailed to the inside of the windowframe. A glance to the side told him the other windows had gotten the same treatment.
This meant that for whatever reason, the White Fang were worried about people finding out that this place was inhabited. It wasn't just some meeting place then. They were worried about being discovered here, very worried.
There was a lever at the base on the other side of the window, Clark drew out a sharpened coil of wire. He stabbed it through the silicone seal, pushing the wire into the lever. After a couple of false starts the window swung upwards with a soft pneumatic hiss. A flick of his blade did for the fabric. They'd know he'd been here soon enough.
As he stepped through the slit in the fabric Clark was greeted to a view of the Firehouse's kitchen, to his right against the wall there was a table with a rifle leaning against the back of a seat. It looked like a shorter G3, with a large, stamped metal box magazine protruding out the bottom to complete the image.
The kitchen itself was a bland, sterile space with a steel sink and plastic refrigerator. The only thing that separated it from an office break-room was the electric stove-oven combo in the corner. Clark paced over to the countertop, where someone had set out a pile of paper plates and plastic silverware. Sadly, although they had left their rifle, they had remembered their scroll.
Young people...
The door clicked open behind him. Clark turned and depressed the button on his plastic shoulder-holster, releasing his Schwar, whose handle fell into the web of his hand.
" Hey, Pastel, we got any more of those Zinketto-Sticks in the freeze-..." the Faunus's eyes met Clark's as his voice trailed off. They widened slightly when they took in Clark's appearance, and then shot the rest of the way open when they came into contact with his handgun, stumbling a half-step backwards.
"You're not Pastel…"
The Faunus' eyes panned back over to the rifle leaning against the back of the chair. Clark spoke flatly.
"Don't."
The Faunus turned and began the run for his weapon. Clark's pistol rose of its own accord. The red dot came to a rest just under the terrorist's armpit. Clark squeezed, there was a slight kick, and the Faunus collapsed, teeth smacking into the chair's metal rim on the way down and sending the rifle clattering to the floor.
Clark was out the door a second later. He cleared left on an impulse, his barrel swept from the center and into the inside corner.
The hallway itself was odd. One side, the one he had just exited, was lined with doors, the other was covered in a grid of small windows from the waist up, giving Clark a peek into the bays below. A couple loose stacks of whatever this world's equivalent of Pelican crates were visible in a couple of the corners, but there was no time. That terrorist hadn't been alone. Clark needed to find the partner before he called for help, or at least get some worthwhile intel out of this place and make tracks for a quieter neighborhood.
Clark kicked the push-bar of the first door and rolled inside. He hadn't been able to do that sort of thing in decades, and to be honest he hadn't missed it. The smell of cheap floor cleaner, on the other hand did confirm to him that this had once been a government building. Vale had gone with citrus over pine, but the harsh chemical afterburn prickled the same way down his sinuses.
The room itself was barren, except for the single Fireman's pole in the corner, closed off with a simple chain gate. Simple safety.
The square uniform discolorations of the painted walls told Clark that this had once been the locker-room. His eyes and weapon passed over the cobwebbed corners once more.
Nothing. Not so much as a still-living spider. He spun on his heel and back out into the hallway.
The next room was filled with… props perhaps? Clark's eyes found their way to a plastic plaque, all large text and bright colors. This was probably where they brought kids in for "Fire Safety" lessons then. The actual instructions were fairly minimal, most children didn't need to be taught to "Stop, Drop, and Roll" five separate times. They definitely didn't need to be brought into a fire station to learn these sorts of things.
The actual lesson was one that Clark hadn't figured out until his late adulthood. This is a Fireman, he knows what he's doing, trust him. A lesson within a lesson, teach the kids mindless trivia while slipping the real point underneath.
He bit his tongue, forcing his head back into the task at hand. There was a pair of empty sleeping bags at the far end of the room, but no other occupants. Time for that last door.
Clark strode towards the last door, taking a moment to eye the stick-figure symbol on the wall next to it. He pushed through. The men's room was small one, only a pair of urinals and three stalls. Ironically, despite this being a building for firemen there was a handicapped stall in the corner.
He kicked each stall open one at a time. He paused when he reached the last one and stepped aside. His caution was rewarded when two blasts echoed out from behind the sheet-metal dividers. The bullets themselves were either nerts or one of the more subtle Dusts, they smashed right through the metal with minimal flair. Clark jumped back, even as two more shots blew themselves through the door. He ran to the first stall in the line, grabbing the corner to spin himself around like a hyperactive child. Another pair of shots slammed against the steel, but after passing through so many layers of metal the projectiles refused to penetrate.
Not the point of this little maneuver, but welcome all the same.
Clark rammed his shoulder into the divider, crushing it into the stall. Then he kept walking, hoping to crush the stalls together. One after another the brackets that pinned them to the wall failed, until Clark's ears were filled with the sounds of screaming and shards of tile were being kicked into the air by the desperate terrorist's gunshots.
Finally the sound of shots came to an end, replaced by repeated clicking. A terrifying sound to elicit from your weapon, but not a bad one to get from your enemy's. Clark took a look down, where a pair of legs fought valiantly against their metal prison. Clark distantly felt the spray of water spraying against his back from the smashed toilets. Keeping his left palm pressed into the debris, Clark slammed a couple of shots into where the torso roughly should have been.
The dancing stilled.
He yanked the barriers aside, greeted by the sight of a gaunt, rat-eared man. Eyes still wide open. Clark knocked the weapon out of the corpse's hand then began to search pockets. He barely heard the faint vibrations over the sound of the now subsiding spray. He looked to his right to find the scroll vibrating violently against the wet tile floor.
On an impulse, Clark picked it up and held it next to his ear.
"Pastel. Just wait for us, okay! We'll be there in five minutes." Dumbass. Clark remained silent, but began to pace away from the body. The voice spoke again.
"Is that running water? Brothers! Paste- you're supposed to be hiding!" Then why'd you call him on the phone, moron? The fact he was yelling also didn't seem to cross the man's mind. Clark hung up and pocketed the scroll, pushing out of the door and into the hallway.
Five minutes then.
He could work with that.