Chapter 41.4: Suiting Up

The two of them reached the tree line without any further problems, hopefully disappearing once more from sight. Minkus worked to catch his breath.

“Did you three make enough noise out there,” Jindel asked, “or do you want to send up a flare? I’m sure someone in there didn’t hear you.”

”Funny,” Penny replied. “I don’t remember you offering any help.”

Jinkke bounded past the norn and his two captives and laid hands on her brother’s shoulders. “Are you alright? What were those devices: magical, electrical, thaumaturgic? Were you injured? Look me in the eye. Do you feel any signs of concussion? Did you overexert yourself? Magically speaking, is overexertion even possible? Are you—”

Penny pulled Jinkke back a step. “Gods, give him some room. He just saved our hides.”

Jinkke glowered but nodded acceptance just as quickly. She kept a grip on her brother’s hand and walked alongside him. Penny shrugged, rubbing at her burned hand and playing the scene over in her mind as she followed. On the heels of the norn, the group retreated a short way into the thicket, toward Wepp.

The remaining asura stood between a pair of mimosa trees, watching the party curiously. “The quest was a success?”

Penny nodded. Jinkke and Jindel did the same.

“Was anyone injured in the confrontation?”

Penny scowled, tugging out the strip of cloth Jindel had given her and wrapping it around her hand. Damn thing was already blistering. “Were we injured? Gods, yes. Your buddies out there tried to fry us where we stood.

“Don’t tell me you still think the Inquest is just a big, innocent science club.”

He looked away. “I never said precisely that, but yes, in a sense, that is correct. The moral fiber of our organization’s constituents is as varied as that of any other population. The Inquest as a whole cannot be blamed for the actions of any singular rogue element.”

Penny groaned, pushing past him.

Several feet away Yult flopped the guards to the ground like overstuffed sacks of grain. Beside him Jindel glanced over each shoulder at the landscape behind them, beyond the trees. 

Jindel knelt and began tying legs and hands together as Yult maintained a grip on the conscious one. “We need to move,” she said, moving on to the next and binding him in the same manner. “There’s only so long before the next patrol comes.”

Jindel nodded at the unconscious guard and wiggled magical fingers. “Minkus, would you mind?”

Still catching his breath, Minkus leaned down and pressed his hand to the asura’s head, screwing up his face as if searching for something through closed eyes.

It took him a moment of intense concentration, but as Minkus slumped, the guard gasped and popped forward. “There it is,” he said, satisfied.

The other asura wasn’t quite as glad as Minkus was. Tugging reflexively at his bonds, he barked a series of asuran curses. Wide eyes did nothing to soften the sharp lines in his face as he took stock of the ropes at his wrists and ankles and then the people surrounding him. His fine, black hair standing up in all directions, he looked like an angry dandilion.

“What— where— ?” The guard fumbled for questions until his focus fell on Penny. He glared daggers. “You?! You should be dead!”

Penny rolled her eyes. She’d knocked the sense out of him once already, and she’d gladly do it again.

“When the krewe realizes our patrol is missing,” he went on, “there will be—”

“Hollow threats.” Fjornsson interjected. “No one is finding you anytime soon, so shut your mouth.”

The other guard sat in the dirt a few feet away, hunched over and all but whimpering. “Wha— what do you want with us?” Snot bubbled from the fat nose that seemed to contradict the rest of his slender body. “Let me go, please. You don’t need me, and I won’t cause trouble—I promise. I’m just a feasibility analyst!”

Raising an eyebrow, Penny met Minkus and Jinkke’s gazes. They seemed just as confused as she was.

“We don’t care if you’re the grandson of Dragonrender,” Bjornsson barked, looming farther over the two of them, “we want your leader.”

“No,” Jindel corrected, stepping between the norn and the miniature pair. She cast Yult a cold glance before attending to the guards. “We want a captive you’re holding. A pair of captives. An asura and a sylvari. That’s all.”

Penny grimaced.

Yes, Ventyr was most of the reason they were there, but the thought of him made her guts twist. Even if she and the others managed to rescue Ventyr—a prospect that was seeming less likely by the minute—Penny knew that any interaction with him would be ugly. That sylvari had a righteous streak, and she was unquestionably on the wrong side of it. He could think what he wanted, of course: about her or anything else. His opinion didn’t make a skritt’s tail of difference to her. She’d just— well, with Ventyr, she’d— it wasn’t worth thinking about, not right then. Penny had to put her focus on Kikka: on putting down that tiny, big-eared monster once and for all, for everything she’d done to Penny and everything she’d done to that girl in Rata Sum—for everything, all of it. That was where her focus belonged, not on Ventyr. That anger, it was the only way Penny was getting through any of this.

With a huff, she stepped forward; leaned down; and gripped the coward-guard’s collar, pulling him up off the ground with two hands. “No,” she growled through gritted teeth, “the norn’s right. We want your boss Kikka, and you’re going to tell us where she is. That sound good to you? It sounds really good to me.”

The other guard, the mouthy one, shuffled despite his bound limbs and thrust himself at the asura in Penny’s grip, bumping into him and thumping unceremoniously back to the earth. “We will give you no such satisfaction!” he barked.

Penny let his companion fall back to the dirt, and Valliford leveled a short, asuran rifle at the one struggling back up off his face. “It’s not going to do you any good.”

The plaintive one rolled over and looked up, clearly recognizing the weapon as his own. He glared at Jindel, at all of them, then spat at her feet and hunched in on himself, blocking them all from view. “You and your imbecilic species will get nothing from me.”

“Imbecilic species?” Jinkke shook her head in disgust. “Half of us are asura, you halfwit.”

“Enough!” the norn bellowed. Everyone took a step back. “Bear’s right paw, we don’t have time for this! Tell us where your leader is.”

“You want Kikka?” the meeker of the two guards asked.

Penny crossed her arms tightly over her chest. Gods, these two were going to make every step of this harder. “That's what we said.”

“Specifically Kikka?” he asked again, licking his lips uncomfortably. “No one else? Nothing else? Kikka and only Kikka?”

“We don’t even want her,” Jindel interjected. “I told you, all we want are the sergeant and the scholar you people have trapped in there.”

“What do you know?” Penny demanded.

The captive guard shook his head, and for the first time, Penny noticed the weariness in his eyes. He’d certainly been whiny so far, and a chicken, but now he seemed worn—pathetic and worn. “My ears,” he said, his fingers fidgeting. “Kikka certainly excels at making enemies.”

“What are you talking about?” Jindel asked. “You work for her.”

His eyes finally met each of theirs, though he seemed to shy away from the asura among them. “Employment to her is irrelevant,” he said, looking back to Jindel and Penny, who now stood side by side. “It speaks nothing to loyalty. She is an overbearing, self-seeking narcissist with an almost comical penchant for—”

“Quiet!” the other guard barked. “You’re speaking of things your paltry intellect couldn’t possibly hope to—”

Yult leaned to the earth and backhanded the asura so hard it nearly spun his head. He looked back at the feasibility analyst. “Go on,” he said.

The helpful one blinked hard, forcing his attention off the norn. “There must be more of you somewhere, yes? On the plateau? At the northern end of the gorge?”

Penny glared down at him. “Why the hell should we tell you—”

“No. Only us,” Minkus cut in. “Why do you ask?”

“Six?” His mouth fell open. “Six of you? You’re pulling my ear.”

The other guard flexed his jaw and winced. “They’re dead,” he growled. “That’s what they are. You’re a traitor, and they’re dead. Likely worse.” He glowered up at the lot of them, and his pain gave way to a sharp and cruel grin. “Kikka is always seeking test subjects.”

Yult all but roared, balling a fist and striking down again. Jinkke’s hands went to her mouth, and Minkus gasped. The crack of huge knuckles meeting an oversized temple was enough to make even Penny turn away.

When she regained herself, Yult stood upright again, and this time the asura lay still. His chest still rose and fell, but he wouldn’t be participating in the conversation again anytime soon.

The conscious captive, now shaking visibly, scratched his leg with roped hands and worked to keep his eyes off the swelling face of his companion. “There are six of you—only six of you?”

Jindel nodded, pulling arms tight across her chest.

The guard licked his lips, his bound hands fidgeting. “Kikka operates a research krewe of over four dozen, half of whom are trained guards and combatants.”

Fjornsson sneered. “Like you?”

“Not like me,” he countered. “I told you. I’m a feasibility analyst, not a fighter. Kikka had me put on guard duty after I gave her some unfavorable analyses—gave my assignment to Mikk, that incompetent yes-man who—”

“We don’t care who Mikk is,” Penny said.

“Yes, of course.” The asura jabbed his bound hands out toward her, toward them all. “Please, just release me. For my life and maybe a few silvers, I’ll inform you of anything you want.” He searched each of their eyes.

“Please. I don’t want to perish here, which is precisely what will happen if you leave me shackled here. I am already approaching Kikka’s blacklist, and a failure of this magnitude will certainly put me over the edge and into a testing cell. However, if I were to simply disappear during your incursion, there’s reason to believe Kikka will assume my death and forget about me entirely.”

Penny’s eyebrow raised nearly to her hairline. This guy wanted out of Kikka’s grasp so badly, he was willing to fake his own death?

Though more subdued, Jinkke gave a similar expression. “All you want is a means of escape?” she asked. “And you’ll provide any information we request?”

He nodded.

“Because your boss scares you?” Penny added.

He nodded again, his head almost bobbling off his body.

Penny turned to Wepp,  who’d been curiously removed from this whole interaction, even though he himself was also one of these Inquest people. ““What do you think, Mr. Inquest expert? Does this deal sound good to you?”

Wepp stumbled a little, looking at her as though waking up, but he quickly fell into that matter-of-fact tone he assumed when uncomfortable. “His intention is unclear,” he said, “though possibly benevolent. Kikka has indeed made her share of enemies, even within the Inquest. Provided we usher him off in the right direction, it seems like a reasonable exchange.”

Penny exchanged a look with Jindel, Jinkke, and Minkus, and there was a silent agreement between them as well.

“You’d better get talking,” Jindel said. “Where are the people we’re looking for?”

The guard sighed, then licked his lips again, seemingly for focus this time. “Depending on your associates’ location, and current condition, they could be anywhere inside Thaumacore.”

“Gee, you think?” Penny shook her head, bent down, and picked up a stick that she tossed at the guard. “Draw us a map and give us some pointers if you want your way out.” Her stomach twisted tighter, but she shoved the feeling aside as best she could.

With a gulp, the captive scrabbled to hold it between his bound hands. He cleared a piece of ground and drew a crude representation of the complex in the dirt. He glanced about them furtively as he explained the basic layout.

The western structures, he told them, housed barracks, leadership chambers, a medical station, and other administrative elements of the operation. The eastern side of the canyon was primarily the workspace for development teams. While Kikka could be anywhere on the grounds at any given time, the captive explained that their friends were almost certainly in the eastern structure, which had a primary testing room toward the southern end. Subjects were occasionally held in smaller units closer to the labs who used them, but as far as he knew, it was rare.

After he’d finished pointing out a few internal guard stations, the asura rolled back onto his heels and dropped the stick, inspecting the faces towering over him.

Penny frowned. She hadn’t imagined this was going to be easy, but looking back at the complex in the distance, she realized she hadn’t really appreciated the scale of the place, much of which was apparently underground. Having a map, however shoddy, was better than nothing, but this would still take time and a whole lot of luck.

The norn’s thundering voice roused Penny from her thoughts. “I've seen a dozen of your people moving in and out of those buildings.” He was looking down at the guard intently. “They're all interested in some wagon down in the gully. What’s that about?”

The pale asura grimaced, glancing at each of them. “I— well, I do not know much about that— nothing of consequence. I told you: I’m only an analyst turned guard because Kikka—”

Raking hands through her hair, Penny cut him off. “Then tell us whatever you know that’s not of consequence.”

He gulped, paling further. “I— well, this is just a rumor, although it is one consistent with probability calculations I made prior to all this.” He gestured vaguely at his uniform.

“Go on,” Minkus said softly.

Penny glanced at her friend. How did he keep that grossly gentle tone even now?

“Yes, yes, of course,” the guard chittered. “It—the rumor—goes that Kikka is sending several personal projects to a handful of other Inquest sites.”

“That’s it?” Penny said. “She’s sending gifts to her Inquest buddies? That’s what you’re so nervous about?”

The guard’s eyes darted between her and Wepp, who stared back at him intently. The expression on Wepp’s round face wasn’t intimidating or angry or anything else that should give someone pause, but it seemed to be enough to throw the frightened asura off his train of thought.

“It—” he finally fumbled, addressing Penny once more. “You promise to release me? By the unchanging mechanics of the Alchemy, you promise? All of you?” 

His attention flickered to Wepp again, but Jindel stepped in. “That’s what we said. We swear it.”

“Fine.” The guard smacked his lips again, unconsciously fidgeting his hands. “This is a research facility predominantly focused on chaos magic.”

“Yeah, he already told us that.” Penny pointed at Wepp.

“That was,” the seated asura continued, “until Kikka discovered something— at least I believe she discovered something. All indications point to a change, including these strange shipments, which were, as far I understand, never a part of our objectives and highly out of character for our krewe chief.”

“Kikka?” Minkus clarified.

“Yes. Kikka.” The guard’s brow furrowed curiously at Minkus, but he shook it off and continued. “This shipment— you see, it comes in direct succession to the calculations I was— demoted for.”

Jinkke crept closer to Penny, who still hovered over the informant. “How incorrect were your shipment calculations that you were reassigned to guard duty for them?”

Wepp huffed. “It wouldn’t require much.  Kikka doesn’t understand commensurate retribution. Skixx proved that.”

The guard nodded, agreeing with the gist. “She does not,” he said. “It also wasn’t a shipping calculation that I was demoted for. Mistress Kikka— she shifted our work from estimates of chaos-variance parameters to permutations of energy output levels and trajectories. I didn’t recognize them at all. We’d never worked with anything like it, not here.”

The guard’s thoughts were scrambled as he spoke, which was something Penny hadn’t seen in an asura other than Minkus. These people generally spoke in riddles and formulas, but even when she didn’t understand what they were getting at, their words were always strung together in logical, orderly progression. This guy was jabbering. He went on about a rumored weapon somehow similar to the numbers he’d been told to calculate. The story among his peers was that the magical device had proven to be as uncontrollable as he’d predicted. There were new designs, unplanned work being done on energy fields, a human consultant, and droves of mentally compromised test subjects: all stories circulating through parts of the krewe they weren’t supposed to.

Penny gripped her forehead. “Gods, for a race of geniuses, you people are horrible with information security.”

The little man was nearly hyperventilating now, but he shrugged awkwardly. “There’s not much to do out here. We have our work and lunchtime chatter. You’re still letting me go, right? You promised that—”

“Yes, we’re still letting you go,” Jindel said.

Wepp suddenly took a step closer, wiping sweat off his glistening pate. “Before that, though, please explain how everything you’ve so discombobulatedly expressed pertains to that shipment.” He pointed down toward the complex. “What is it they’re distributing?”

The asura pulled away a little, bracing himself for something. “I— I don’t actually know, alright? Not absolutely. It just— the threads of probability are there. So many oddities happening in direct sequence imply some type of causality, either direct or of a common origin.”

Wepp rubbed his chin, drifting off into some other thought. They all waited for further questions, but nothing came from the plump, little man. He was somewhere else now.

“That information is helpful, I suppose.” Jinkke turned from the captive to address the group. “ But we still have little chance of a successful incursion if we don’t know precisely where the sergeant and scholar are.”

The other human let out a long breath. “Plan B?” Jindel asked.

“Plan B,” Jinkke agreed.

Fjornsson swore, slamming a fist into his palm. “Enough with plans,” he boomed. “Let’s just take the fight through their door. The peon has given us enough direction to make us dangerous.”

“Yeah, maybe to ourselves,” Penny snapped back. “You heard him: dozens of them. And it looks like half of that number is in the open down there with that wagon. I’m not wading into that with my pants down.”

He stomped forward, glaring down his fat nose at Penny. “Cower as you like, woman, but I’m here for justice.”

Penny’s fire flared, but not nearly as brightly as it had days before. The wheels spun in her head, and her fists tightened at her sides, but none of the biting remarks made it past her lips. Half of them, she realized, were aimed at herself now. All this fighting, heroic bullshit had her twisted up in knots. What the hell was she even doing here?

Penny glowered up at him despite her thoughts, but it was Jindel who pulled her massive comrade away. “Yult, I hate to admit it, but they’re right. I want to go cut down a few of them myself, but we need more intelligence first. We need to know where we’re going, or all of this has been a waste. I can’t see the sergeant or the captain being OK with that.”

Fjornsson roared. “The weight of avenging my brothers-in-arms is on me, and by the Bear I’m going to bring it down violently on these little rats!” The broad, mountain of a man bore down on Jindel like a threatening avalanche. To her credit, she didn’t balk.

Penny’s hand started to twitch. It was just what she wanted on top of the rest of this mess.

She pressed up beside Jindel and stared the norn in the eyes. “You feel better now, big man, getting that off your chest?” The norn cast his withering gaze on her. “So, plan B. Who's going in? Has to be an asura, right?”

The guard’s puzzlement reached its apex as he looked around at them. “Plan B?”

“Plan B,” Penny repeated, putting a hand to her hip. “We steal your clothes.”

She couldn’t tell if it was modesty or fear, but the asura turned pink and worked to hold his tunic against his body with still-bound hands. She only shrugged, turning back to everyone else.

“So, who’s it going to be?”

Jindel threw a thumb at Wepp. “Among us, doesn't he know the most about these people?”

Penny scowled. “Sure, I guess. But he passes out at the sight of a weapon.”

“It isn’t a matter of weapons,” Wepp harrumphed. The little man’s cheeks were actually reddening. “More accurately,” he said, “I lose consciousness at the immediate threat of physical harm.”

Jindel’s eyes darted between Penny and the asura. “You two are serious?”

“Oh yeah,” Penny snorted. “I couldn’t make that up. Raise a pistol, look at him wrong, and he’s out like a candle in Colossus.”

Dolefully Wepp nodded, cheeks still red.

The now silent attention on Wepp’s admittedly strange condition was finally broken by Minkus. “I can go,” he said. It had the cadence of a statement, but his eyes asked it as a question as he scanned their faces. “I— well, I don’t know my way around the Inquest, but I can explore.”

Before anyone could respond, Jinkke lurched forward. “No, Big Brother.” She quickly made eye contact with each other member of the party. “Let me go. I’ll do it. I can certainly masquerade as an Inquest engineer long enough to find your friends.”

Penny groaned. “This isn’t exactly your wheelhouse.”

Jinkke glared up at her for a moment. “Roving about a series of laboratories in search of a test subject isn’t my wheelhouse? You think I’m unable to navigate in and out again? Or is it the memorization of floor plans that you doubt I can manage?”

Penny pressed at her temple. A headache? Really? On top of everything else, she was getting a headache? Just great.

“Gods,” Penny groaned. “This has nothing to do with any of that, and you know it, Smalls. What are you going to do if those lunatics catch you? Talk them to death?”

Her eyes narrowing, Jinkke opened her mouth to snap back, but Jindel interrupted. “There’s no time for this,” she snapped, pointing beyond their informant to the unconscious guard behind him. “And there’s no need for it. We have two uniforms.”

Everyone’s eyes followed her gesture, and the importance of her point registered to the lot of them, perhaps especially to Jinkke.

“Minkus,” Jindel asked, pointing a thumb again at Wepp, “can you do something magical to keep him standing, like you did in the Queen’s Forest?”

Minkus screwed up his face in forced confidence and nodded.

“Good. It’s you two, then.” Jindel pulled a string out from a pocket and began tying her hair back. She wiped sweat away from her neck with a sleeve. “Change up, get in, find Sergeant Ventyr and the scholar, and get back out. We do the rest together.”

Jinkke began to protest, but the crusader eyed her stonily, and she quieted once more. For a moment, Penny didn’t find the overzealous vigilwoman entirely obnoxious.

Wepp took his cue and moved toward the guard, gesturing uncomfortably between their two outfits as Jindel cut him loose. Penny went ahead and did likewise, following Minkus to the unconscious one.

Several moments had passed when Minkus broke the quiet. He’d just gotten his chest plate off and looked particular confused, even for him. “Uh, Jindel?” he asked, just loud enough for her to hear.

“Yeah?” the soldier called back.

“What’s the rest that we’re doing together?”

“What’s that?” she called again.

“The rest,” he repeated, playing now with his ear. “You said that— well, we said that after Wepp and I find Ventyr, we— we all will do the rest together.”

Penny blinked, keeping an eye on Minkus, who genuinely waited for a response. She heard Jinkke starting to respond, but the asura quieted just as quickly.

Minkus looked unsure if the silent group understood his question. They had, though. One by one, they looked at each other, suddenly realizing a huge step in the scheme was missing.

“What I mean,” Minkus said, “well, what I mean to ask is—”

“Yes, we see, Minkus,” Wepp said, nodding. They were all at attention now. “The disproportionate numbers do remain our greatest challenge. A terrifying one, in fact, and it doesn’t change simply because we know where our quarry is.” Beads of sweat began to fall off Wepp’s naked forehead. 

The norn, towering over them all, crossed his thick arms and glowered smugly. “You mean our intelligence doesn’t solve that?”

In turn, they all looked at him, but no one answered. Silence fell, and Penny was left with that sickly tightness in her belly. Gods, they’d been hiking across the wildness for hours, and none of them had realized their idiotic plan stopped here, with two fake guards, two humans, and a norn walking into a complex full of angry, sadistic asura? They’d stand out like charr at Adelbern’s birthday.

Feeling as dumb as she ever had in her life, Penny let snark fly before she had too much time to think about it. Anything to diminish the abject terror welling up inside.

She forced a smirk, “I don't suppose asura keep a lever around that makes them all just disappear? That sounds like something you people would concoct.” 

Jindel glanced sidelong at her, and Jinkke shook her round head in disgust, but it was Wepp who met Penny’s eye and held her gaze incredulously.

“Gods, it was a joke,” she grumble. Bile rose inside her. “Never mind. We’re all just screwed.”

Wepp shook his head, stumbling a step toward her as he pulled a pant leg up. Excitement had replaced terror. “No,” he said, eyes darting back and forth as he ran the calculations in his mind. “Indeed, that just might work—likely an 81% chance of success. It's simple, but it's ingenious!”

“Just stop,” Penny sneered. “Don’t be an ass.”

“No, no,” he insisted, circling her as he continued spinning plans inside that bald head of his. “There is such a button. Perhaps not in such outlandish terms, but there is such a button—or buttons, plural, in most cases—in any standard Inquest facility. It won't make the krewe disappear exactly, but triggering the right evacuation alarm could drive the krewe far enough away that they might as well have disappeared.”

Penny blinked in disbelief. “What? Are you serious?” Everyone else was listening intently now as well.

“It won't corner Kikka for us, blast it, but it should provide all five of you sufficient access to your friends and hopefully whatever Kikka’s been so keen on developing.” Wepp orbited Penny once more and clapped an approving hand to her forearm. “Well schemed. You are certainly an abnormal human intellect.”

Penny blinked, stupefied and no less scared.

Wepp turned, meandering back to the half-naked guard as he thought out loud. “We just need the right evacuation code. If my memory of protocols serves me, a fire in a southern wing of the complex should drive the whole of the krewe north. A fire in the north will drive them south—it’s all quite logical, of course, especially in a confined landscape like this one.”

“You're implying we wait for this alarm and follow you in?” Jinkke asked. “Assuming we can hear it out here?”

Wepp all but snickered. “Oh, you will certainly be able to hear it. Even the drill alarms have enough volume to wake the undead.” Penny didn’t know what had changed, but suddenly the odd, little man seemed entertained. “And yes,” he went on, “the alarm will be your indication that (a) the guard’s intelligence was accurate, (b) we were not able to quietly get your friends out, and (c) it is time for you all to assist.”

He spun around, eyes now alight. “Alchemy, we won’t even need to exit the building to retrieve you! We simply drive the krewe north, away from the southern entrance, and you can meet us at the door. Assuming standard protocols, we should have half an hour to liberate your friends, perhaps even allowing us time to find and ambuscade Kikka.”

Though not all shared Wepp’s sudden enthusiasm, the group did agree that it was as logical and plausible a plan as they were likely to get in their current circumstance. For better or worse, they had their plan.

Silence fell as everyone prepared. The only sounds they made were the scrape and rustle of changing. A slight breeze blew through the upper boughs of the thicket, broad leaves slid across each other high overhead, and in the distance there were the caws and croaks of whatever creatures called this place home. Minkus was somber but hopeful. Jinkke seemed more than a little uneasy. Penny wanted to throw up.