I am fast losing patience with people at work. xD


Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 107


Blake ducked a plant's vine that reached out to ensnare her, hopped away as a sparking lump of ball lightning floated through and burnt it to a crisp, then watched as that same ball lightning was stung by a bee, swelled and imploded. The bee dropped dead, its stinger used, but a few more buzzed around a hive that was glowing a radioactive shade of green.

"No signal," said Jaune, angrily tapping away at his scroll. "Of all the time! There should be signal all over Patch. Something must be disturbing it."

"No points for guessing it's an anomaly," Blake replied. "And what a number we have to pick from. Heads up."

Jaune didn't ask "what" and instead dove flat, instantly assuming the worst. It was good instincts in their line of work, though in this one case a little out of place since all that happened was a small, gold teddy bear trundled by on its stubby legs, glancing their way once before holding up paw in either greeting or insult. Blake couldn't tell. It trundled into a bush and away from them.

Even so, she didn't critique Jaune for hitting the deck. Embarrassing yourself ninety-nine times was worth it if it saved your life even once. He stood and dusted his suit down, glancing back with an irritated frown.

"This is ridiculous!" he snapped. "Killer scarecrows, super-sized animals, explosive bees, man-eating plants and sentient children's toys. Why am I more afraid of the sentient children's toy than any of the others?"

"Movies."

"Probably. At least it didn't have a knife." Jaune let out a sigh. "There's next to no hope of reaching ARC Corp about this. Whether it's an anomaly blocking the signal or just a piece of tech the Schnee family installed so this place wouldn't be discovered, we're not going to break through. And I'm not sure we can just leave."

"Are you sure?" Blake gestured over her shoulder. "Because I'm all for leaving and coming back later."

"This is a containment breach, Blake. Active and in progress. This ex-Schnee agent of ours won't have released all these murderous anomalies on purpose when they're still in the area. Something has gone wrong. Now, there's a very real risk of these making their way to Patch and becoming Reality Class – and possibly killing a whole lot of people while they're at it."

"Don't say it."

"It's our job to put this to rest."

Blake swore. "Damn it, Jaune."

"And hey, the sooner we find the cache and turn off – or kill – whatever is blocking the signal, the sooner we can call in reinforcements. As for locating it..." Jaune turned, listening to the sounds of chaos all around them. There was a large explosion in the distance. "I'm going to say that way. Follow the combat to its source."

"Yippee..."

Though she said it sarcastically, she couldn't help but worry. They'd found no sign of the person who screamed before, neither a body nor a surviving student struggling against these creatures. Blake could only hope they'd escaped and not been killed.

/-/

The forest was alive with the sounds of death.

Blake shot a stumbling velociraptor in the head, sliced the arm off a six-foot man made of inflatable balloons, and punted a one-foot-tall blue gnome creature into a tree with her foot. Several other blue gnomes lunged for her kneecaps with tiny chips of rock, forcing her to kick and stomp her way through them. They exploded into blue water-like goop on death, making an absolute mess of her suit pants.

The balloon man howled silently and swung his free arm at her face. Blake glared hotly back, letting the balloon bounce off her cheek with all the damage of a... well, of a balloon. The creature hit her again with a squeaky sound, then glanced down at its one arm as if realising how poor a choice it had made.

She poked it once with Gambol Shroud and watched it fly away with a "fweeeeeeeeee—" sound.

"Actual dinosaurs," said Jaune, standing with one foot atop the head of a tyrannosaurus rex that was breathing laboriously and laid on its side. It may have looked the heroic image, but the giant beast had been like that when they found it. "The movies always made it seem so terrifying, but this poor thing can barely stay alive. I guess the atmosphere was different back then. More oxygen-rich. The poor thing can't draw in enough oxygen into its lungs."

"The poor thing would swallow you in one bite if it could."

"If it could. It can't, so no need to worry. How were the velociraptors?"

"Able to move and fight but a lot less agile than they probably would have been if the atmosphere was like their own. Do you think this anomaly is the dinosaurs, or is it just something bringing back fossils in the ground?"

"No idea. Um." Jaune pointed. "Paper plane."

"What?"

Something poked into the back of her head, then whirred past her. It was an aircraft made of paper but not, as Jaune had implied, a paper plane. It looked like an actual old aircraft with two wings, a propellor and tiny cannons under its wings. It whirred around her front, banking back toward her to bring guns online. A tiny pilot maybe half an inch tall roared at her from within a paper cockpit.

Blake snatched it in her had and crushed it before it could fire.

"I mean, fair, but also very cruel," Jaune remarked.

"This is ridiculous." Blake let the crumpled paper fall to the floor. "How many anomalies did the Schnee keep here? Do you think it's because of their aggression? They've all attacked us apart from that teddy bear."

"Probably. Some have been less effective than others but you could argue they're all very dangerous. Maybe too dangerous to sell unless you want your clients to be killed by the anomalies they've just purchased." Jaune bent down and picked up one of the blue gnomes. It waved its chip of stone toward him, but Jaune's arm was long enough to hold it at such a distance that it couldn't attack. "Can you communicate? Nod twice if you understand what U'm saying."

The gnome, suspended in the air, reared back and chucked the stone into Jaune's face.

"I'm going to take that as a no." With a sigh, Jaune turned it around and brought the creature against his chest almost like he was cuddling it. A brief twist and a loud crack as its head was yanked to one side ruined that image somewhat. The creature exploded into goop across his chest. "Would have been nice to interrogate something around here. You know, for all their aggression, few of these have been... well..."

"Good at it?"

"Yes. The scarecrow is certainly a dangerous one but aside from it and the bees, everything else has been more than a little pathetic."

"There was the mimic," said Blake, referring to a rather out of place and obviously-a-trap wooden chest with golden accents they'd come across earlier. Blake had rolled her eyes once and unloaded a clip into it, killing the thing as it rolled back open with teeth and tentacles. "That could have been dangerous."

"Yeah, sure, to a LARP convention."

"What about the fifty-metre snake?"

"The one that was too heavy to move its bulk and just hissed at us?"

"There was the evil-looking tree with the red eyes and mouth full of razor-sharp splinters."

"Rooted to the ground."

Blake opened her mouth to give another example, then stopped. "Huh. Actually, yeah, aside from a few jump scares, the anomalies here have been pretty useless. Do you think that's why the Schnee locked them here? Too pathetic to be of any value?"

"Obviously, not all of them given the spore epidemic we just had in the city, but it definitely looks like this was a place to store anomalies both too dangerous to release and too useless for anyone to want to buy them. Reject anomalies they'd rather forget about."

"Why not let ARC Corp destroy them, then? Why bother investing time and money into making a facility and staffing it when you don't even want the anomalies?"

"Pride, I imagine. Ego."

Ugh. That sounded like the Schnee to be honest. Even if it would have made more sense to surrender up pointless anomalies to ARC Corp, they wanted to keep them just to say they had them, even if they were dumped in a facility buried somewhere far away. Willow and Winter must have enjoyed just owning them, and even coming to visit like it was some zoo for exotic creatures.

It was so stupid, but then rich people often did stupid things, sometimes if only because they had too much time and money on their hands and had grown bored of all the normal things people did to have fun.

"I think we're getting close," Jaune said. "If only because these dinosaurs couldn't have made it very far before collapsing. The entrance must be somewhere around here."

"There!"

Blake pointed, drawing attention at the exact moment a new creature pulled itself up out the ground. It seemed to be made of trash and garbage, up to and including black garbage bags, and filth spilled from it with every lurching movement. The thing lacked legs but dragged its body on two hands made of accumulated trash. It was also covered in tiny white figures, stabbing and shooting down on it. Blake spotted a little paper tank crawl up its arm and shoot a rolled-up ball of paper into the creature's side.

All to very little avail. In turn, the creature rolled on its side and crushed much of the paper army, absorbing some of it into its own mass. It looked at them and lumbered forward, seeking to absorb more prey.

Blake shot it once and watched the bullet tear through its mass and out the back.

Without doing much damage.

"Too much penetration," she said, grimacing. "Ugh. We're going to have to scatter its parts around. Gross."

Jaune cleared his throat. "There could be needles and contamination in there... and I have no aura..."

"You can't be serious!"

"All I'm saying is one needle and I could be infected with some terrible disease. You on the other hand..."

Bastard.

It took five awful minutes to kill the trash anomaly, mostly by kicking and pushing rubbish around and ignoring its weak efforts to fight her by bumping wet bin bags into her. The thing didn't have enough force or weapons, but that didn't mean it wasn't a disgusting experience that left her pants dripping with grime and her nose feeling like it had been burnt by the constant stench. Eventually, she found a metal garbage can at the centre of it with some gelatinous mass inside, and that turned out to be the creature – or the core, it was hard to tell. One good stomp flattening the can and crushing the creature inside made the rest of the garbage fall inanimate.

Jaune applauded from a distance. And upwind.

"Bastard," she hissed, and stomped toward the open staircase leading downward that the creature had pulled itself out from. "Let's get this over with."

The stairs led down into what was obviously the Schnee facility. The walls were concrete and lights had been strung along on wires like those used inside a mineshaft. Given the SDC used fake mines to hide how dust was really made, they probably took the same torches used in those mines and put them in here. It was light enough to see the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dead paper figures littering the floor. A whole war had been fought by an army made of paper, but they'd been helpless against the stream of anomalies leaving.

"It's a massacre down here," Jaune said. "Makes me wonder if these were defending themselves, attacking anything, or maybe working with the Schnee to try and stop the anomalies leaving."

"A paper army like this seems harmless but not useless. I can think of a lot of young children who'd love to have army figures who can actually fight."

Jaune chuckled. "I know I would have."

The point was that someone would have happily purchased this, and that it would even have been a benefit for a toy meant for spoilt rich children if it could only fire paper at them and not be any real harm. Even keeping them in a sealed case, it would have made for an interesting display piece as two paper armies fought for supremacy. And yet the Schnee had hidden it away here and locked it up.

Why? Had their attack on the Schnee manor happened too early for them to see it? Was this perhaps a holding zone for new anomalies, and Winter or Willow had been expected to come down and check which were safe to bring back to Atlas? It made some small amount of sense, but it was all just guesswork until they found some actual information. Hopefully, this place would have some computers in it somewhere. The people running it must have kept notes.

Blake led the way in case of danger, but it seemed as though the most mobile and aggressive anomalies had already gotten out aboveground. Those left below were truly weak, or just unable to move – anomalous objects. Rooms lay right and left of the corridor, every door locked wide open. Many were empty, once having contained anomalies that had escaped, but one or two still had objects inside them.

A coffee mug in a glass case, a potted plant on a pedestal, a state of a woman's bust behind hazard tape stick to the floor with yellow words painted around it saying, "DO NOT CROSS". They didn't enter the rooms, not knowing what might happen if they did but having a good idea it would be dangerous.

It didn't take long to find a sign. This place had been made for people to work here, so it made sense there would be directions. Also, warnings. The first sign showed someone in a lab coat slipping and falling backwards with a shocked expression. The words, "WATCH YOUR STEP" were in bold white beneath it.

"Health and safety concern from the SDC," she remarked. "What irony. Looks like there are directions here. Left for anomalous item storage, right for entities and command. I assume we're going there."

"Sadly." Jaune turned that way. "We can assume some of the items are responsible for the nonsense up top – maybe the super-sized animals – but I don't want to head that way and risk us being caught in something's effect."

"Why have the living anomalies close to your command centre, though?"

"Lack of care?" Jaune guessed, then changed his mind. "No, it's probably because anomalous creatures don't tend to have as drastic effects as anomalous items. For many of them, the fact they exist as a creature is the anomaly. They may be aggressive or have dangerous abilities, but most of those have to be used on someone. If they're locked up, they're typically harmless."

"Items, on the other hand, are much more problematic. You might lock one up but its influence can still be felt for a distance, and they tend to have much more impactful abilities. At least from what we've seen. Ironically enough, I think it's easier from a safety perspective to have your command centre near the aggressive creatures than it is the unknowable, mysterious objects."

"And the cells by the entrance?"

"Processing, probably." Jaune shrugged. "New anomalies that you bring in and throw in the closest cell so you can figure out how dangerous they are and then decide where to house them on a permanent basis. You don't want to risk putting them in a cell next to an anomaly they might have a reaction with, or putting one in containment with the rest if it then reveals it has the ability to open doors or break down walls."

"Fair point. You've put thought into this."

"A combination of looking at our history and planning for containing anomalies of our own," he said, breezily. "A lot of information on why and how the original ARC Corp fell is lost, but Salem turned out to be a huge help in regaining it. The rest of my family may not have cared for the past but I spent ages talking to her, and I think she liked having someone interested in hearing her stories."

"Was this when you were younger?"

"Yes. It was after mom died and I became an anomaly, but before I started the Containments Office. I knew I wanted to contain instead of eradicating, and she was the best bet on finding out how the originals did it. Both the good parts and the mistakes made. There were some interesting points I wouldn't have considered."

Blake was curious despite the situation. "What like?"

"Well, something that sounds obvious is to have a high-danger wing of a facility with thicker walls and doors reserved for dangerous anomalies, but it turns out that's a terrible idea. The original ARC Corp did that and found that keeping dangerous anomalies together meant they had cascading containment breaches where one would break out and cause the escape of others, and hundreds of security agents would die fixing it."

"Yikes."

"Yeah. They learned quickly that what you want to do is spread out your high escape risk anomalies into different zones, often surrounding them with harmless or less dangerous ones. That way if they do escape – or when, for some – it's easy to lockdown that area, and aside from the anomaly that caused the problem, the rest are easy to round up and contain without danger."

Interesting. It made sense too, even if the thought of keeping escape-prone anomalies at all didn't make sense to her. "Why keep them if they keep escaping and killing people?"

"Well, we wouldn't now but it was a different time back then. In their time, anomalies were profit – and they were also infrastructure. Salem told us that ARC Corp had a way of harnessing energy put off by anomalies, and that this was used by just about every city and home in the world. Like dust is today, but renewable and less dangerous for the environment. But, sadly, just as dangerous for those working in ARC Corp."

"So, they couldn't afford to get rid of some?"

"I can only assume they couldn't. Salem was a researcher rather than in finance, so she can't tell us what the situation was like, but she did say that it was exceedingly rare for any anomaly to be decommissioned. That was their sanitised way of putting it. For the most part, even if an anomaly was constantly escaping and killing people, it was considered viable. In fact, she thinks that the more dangerous anomalies were the ones giving off the most of this energy. That'd explain why they didn't just use safe items for it."

"Maybe the energy only came when they were influencing things or using their abilities," Blake said. "Like how we burn more energy if we're active. That'd explain both why they let them stay alive after escaping, and also why they kept researching them. They may have wanted a way to stimulate energy usage by the anomalies."

"That or they sent in researchers as potential prey," Jaune said, cynically. "They obviously didn't need to know how anomalies worked, so researchers might have been used to agitate or excite the anomalies. Send them in, let the anomaly have someone to play around with or try and kill, then reap the rewards of their energy use."

"Seriously?"

"I'm not saying they wanted their researchers to die, but they might have been using them as bait. Like how you dangle a string in front of a cat to make it play. It may also have kept the anomalies happy, too. If they kept tiring themselves out trying to kill single researchers, they'd have less energy to expend on a single, explosive escape attempt."

"That might be the case..."

As they talked, they walked through corridors with open doors leading to containment cells that were all empty. Some were clean, others filthy, and some had signs of combat and damage, suggesting that the anomalous entities hadn't worked together when they escaped. Some had obviously died down here before they could reach the surface, which was kind of sad.

Either way, there was nothing left to challenge them as they reached their destination, a doorway stuck open with numerous warning signs around it to check for containment breach before entering. Those had gone ignored now, and the lights within flickered ominously. Jaune nodded and Blake stepped in first, Gambol Shroud at the ready, only to sigh and wave him in after her.

"They bloomed."

Sure enough, what had once been their mysterious former Schnee agent was now a tree – the remnants of their clothing scattered about the floor along with ruddy shades of blood inked onto the metal tiles. Their bloom had been explosive, and they'd known it was coming, succumbing to the same plague they unleashed on Vale.

"I think they manually started a breach once they realised they were dying," said Jaune, moving past the tree toward the control station. "A final `fuck you` to us, once they knew they were on their way out." Jaune pushed a few buttons and there was a brief alarm, followed by a hiss and a click as the door behind them shut. "And that's every door in the facility closed. Won't bring those up top back down, but it'll seal the rest away. Now we just need to find what is blocking scroll signals."

"Uh." Blake pointed to a sign on the wall, next to a lever.

It read, "SIGNAL BLOCK" and the light beside it was lit green.

"Well..." Jaune smiled awkwardly. "This was a facility meant to be used by people, so I guess you'd want everything to be clearly lit and marked, especially around buttons and levers. Flick it off and let's see if it works."

Blake pulled the lever downward. There was a loud whirr and several clicks like static electricity discharging, and then the light went off. Sure enough, their scrolls started reporting a clear signal again. Blake even had a missed text from Ruby, who was on her lunch hour and wondering how they were all doing.

"You calling your family?" she prodded.

"Yes, yes. But I'm thinking..."

"Uh-oh. Should I be worried?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. We're currently paying rental for some budget containment sets in the city, all because Saphron put an unreasonable demand on us that we have a dedicated containment facility." Jaune sat in the office chair and twirled around on it, kicking his feet up onto the counter. "Well, hey – look. It's a dedicated containment facility with lots of cells, working infrastructure, and no current owner."

"Jaune, no. It's full of unknown anomalies!"

"All of which my family will assuredly destroy. I'm not saying we conceal those and get ourselves killed by my eldest sister. We'll come clean and help them scour the place clean, but once it's empty, surely it'd be a waste to destroy the place. And it'd be a lot safer if you and I could store anomalies away from the city. Right?"

"Sure, until we repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with a cataclysmic containment breach."

"We're not them, though. We're not going to keep super dangerous anomalies for the sake of it, or because we have an energy quota to meet. We'll keep low to medium risk ones." He smiled, and she already didn't like the fact he wanted medium risk at all. "And look at it another way, we'd have a new place to stay at that isn't a crummy apartment. There are whole living quarters down here with a cafeteria, bedrooms." He flicked through the cameras. "There's even a spa with its own swimming pool!"

Against her better judgment, Blake's ears perked up. "A spa...?"

"Looks like it has a jacuzzi as well. The people working here would be expected to stay here in secret and not go into Patch, so they needed to provide enough entertainment and facilities to keep them content. And we could spruce the place up."

"..." Blake looked away. "I mean, your family would never allow it."

"Doesn't hurt to ask."

"Asking could very well get us killed when it's your paranoid sister involved. She'll hear this as you wanting to restart the old ARC Corp and then go on the warpath!"

"Which is why I'll be asking my father instead. We need to report this to him anyway."

Blake groaned and cupped her face with one hand. "Do what you like. Do those cameras work outside as well? I'll try and find the source of the scream we heard earlier. We don't want to leave some poor student up there."

Jaune vacated the chair for her to take. "Sure. I'll call this in. Our very own facility, Blake."

"Don't get attached to what might be taken away from us."

"I shall call it Steve!"

"Don't name it!"


Next Chapter: 8th July

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