Episode 4 - Acceleration

Stealth-chan stood outside the warehouse as the sun went down. She had seen the pictures in the files, but they hadn't quite prepared her for how the place looked in person. The walls were old and weatherbeaten, the roof was dotted with rust and dents, and there was a decidedly chemical smell that lingered in the air. It wasn't the worst conditions she’d seen, but it hardly felt welcoming. There wasn't even a proper sign.

If it wasn't for her intel she would have no reason to believe there was anything special about this place at all.

Still, this was her only chance. Contacting a Subject directly was a breach of protocol but if what the fortune teller had said was really true… if the anomaly that ruled over this place had its eye set on her, then she needed to know what that meant or else she couldn't complete her assignment.

And she never failed to complete an assignment. She would sooner die. But a part of her knew that was, at least partially, the conditioning talking.

Those troubled thoughts got swept into the corner of her mind as she willed herself forward and through the door before the sun set on her indecision.

Much like the building, Subject 008 was different in person compared to her profile photos. For one, she smelled like sweat, motor oil, burnt hair, ozone, and pork broth, and SC’s enhanced senses weren't making that combination any more pleasant.

008, or rather Ember Spannagel, looked up at her from behind her thick safety goggles. She was in the process of either disassembling or reassembling some mechanical device on the reception counter like it was a workbench.

“Yeah?” she asked, looking back down before SC could respond. She sounded tired.

SC was expecting to have to convince her, but the moment she produced her secure terminal Ember’s eyes lit up.

“NO. WAY.” She dropped her tools and lost her work gloves in a flash and practically snatched the device from SC’s hands.

SC had to fight several competing layers of muscle memory to let the terminal leave her hands without incapacitating Ember in one way or another.

“Is this what I think it is?! A Pandora Terminal? It's real right?!”

SC nodded. “I was hoping you could help me forge an access key.”

Ember froze. “This isn't a sting right?”. SC almost missed it, but Ember tapped something under the counter and several motors quietly whirred to life in hidden corners of the room. Clever girl. She would have made a good Scathanch candidate.

“No, I-”

“Good. This is gonna be tricky without-”

SC held up her access key. “This?”

Ember blinked. “I love you. Follow me.”

She led SC to a side room which was covered floor to ceiling with junk parts and cleared a table for use by sliding its contents off the side, and immediately started working. Ember was so absorbed, that SC could only watch in an almost morbid curiosity as she proceeded to crack her terminal’s top secret encryption like it was a home computer lock screen.

“Done.” Ember said abruptly after nearly two hours of uninterrupted typing and let out a sigh. “That was fun.”

The screen didn’t look any different. “What did you do?”

Ember shrugged. “I told the system that you had total access.”

“Just like that?”

“No, but that’s the layman's version. If I have to explain the Hadamard gate to you we’ll be here all night and then I’ll have to charge you. Oh, and I have no idea how permanent that is so do what you gotta do and then I need to pick your brain.”

SC didn't really know what to do other than nod her thanks and try to pull up the file for Subject Zero again. But she wasn't prepared at all for the file to open into a directory tree. It wasn't a datafile. It was an ongoing SpecOp, and at the center of it was something she hadn't expected at all…