Chapter 16

Chapter 16 - Why Playing the Lottery Sucks

Since the first one worked out pretty well until we lost it, Alice made us another boat.  We discussed it and started thinking of improvements but ultimately decided not to make it a lot bigger.  While it would be nice to put a sleeping cabin below decks it would also mean that people there would take longer to respond to trouble around us.  Everyone being able to quickly respond saved us from several attacks, including the whorizard.

She did make it a bit faster and used a modified version of the spell she designed for the armor rings to give the boat summonable armor and some pop-up shields to provide cover for us while fighting.  The same pop-up shield effect could be extended to turn the driver seat into an armored wheelhouse or even fully enclose the boat in case of inclement weather, area attack, or another black wave event.  There was also a bubble of calm fresh air created inside the boat which both cut down on our natural wind-tossed looks during flight and meant we wouldn't suffocate if we had to turtle up.  The same air bubble effect would allow us to breathe safely inside our armors in the event we were enveloped in a zombabe poison cloud.  

A funny thing happened on the way to New Manhattan.  Absolutely nothing.  With our new boat that could seal up and had a magical air supply I took us suborbital.  No, the propulsion system did not have any problems with the lack of air.  It turns out the wind blast spell creates new air just like the fireball spell creates new fire and we actually moved faster with no wind resistance.  

It was a long and relatively boring trip, but why expose ourselves to danger unnecessarily?  I used the gps on my dex for guidance and brought us back down as we approached the outskirts of the city.  As far as I'd been able to find New Manhattan was one of the largest cities in the reborn world, only exceeded in size by a few old ones which had survived the revenge war like London.  It used to be a thriving metropolis, but now the streets were choked with the dead and the not-dead-enough.

The coordinates Rachel gave me led to a block in the heart of the city.  We waited until nightfall to drop below the cloud deck to avoid being seen as much as possible.  There was a storm front with heavy cloud cover that, barring the occasional lightning strike, made visibility almost zero.  Landing in the dark would have been impossible if I didn't have a couple of girls with Dark Goggles.

As we approached the area I sent another message to Rachel.  I'd sent her one a few days ago before we left but she'd never responded.  I hoped she was still alive, else we were putting our necks on the line for nothing.  This time I received a response.

"Wilt, if you're watching this then I've already gone feral.  I was afraid this might happen when you said it would be a while so I programmed this message to be sent if you tried to contact me from within a certain distance.  I have several bits of really important information for you so I hope you'll still try to get me.  I found your image very handsome so if you can get into my server room I think you shouldn't have too much trouble taming me.  Now for the bad news.  Operation Mirror Box was a black site project meaning their headquarters are not a normal location.  It's actually located under the bank you will find at the coordinates.  It will be difficult to break into the upper floors and obviously the zombabes will swarm at ground level.  That said, there are alternate entrances in the surrounding buildings.  The easiest one to reach will be-"

And the transmission cut off.  Typical.  Just when you get to the important bit.

The coordinates covered an area that could point to several buildings on the block.  One was a burnt out bank.  It was hard to tell how tall it used to be as the weakened structure had spilled sideways into the street.  I had to assume the headquarters underneath was still somewhat intact or Rachel's reply would have never been sent.  We'd just have to find one of the other entrances. Directly behind the bank was what looked like a five story apartment building.  The next one down contained some kind of offices when we looked in the third floor windows.  Alice said it looked like a law firm and I had to take her word for it since I couldn't see any details in the dark.  The fourth, and my first choice to search, was a government offices building.  It seemed like a no-brainer to put a secret entrance in an easily controlled government building.

We landed on the roof and Friday took point.  She couldn't see in the dark like Alice, Jane, or Ellie, but she could smell well enough to avoid bumping into things and we'd discovered that her ability to sense electrical fields did work on zombabes.  Their bodies did have electrical fields, they were just weaker than those of most living beings.  To her that made them dimmer and harder to "see" at a distance, but it still beat not seeing them until they were on top of you.  

Friday listened at the roof entry and, when she didn't hear anything, ripped the door off it's hinges.  It made some noise but the sounds of her sinking her claws into the metal for purchase and the pings as the hinge bolts snapped were actually lower volume than the ruckus kicking in the door would cause.  She took a moment to sample the air before she entered, the rest of us trailing behind her.  

Jane was second.  Jane had actually blessed all the girls so they'd have access to holy fire.  Scarlett had gained the fewest new abilities over our training period so she'd had more time to practice with it and had become our best marksman, but she couldn't see anything in the pitch blackness and we didn't want to draw attention with lights.  I'd told everyone to stick to fire or holy attacks if possible and to treat our armor like it wouldn't stand up to a solid hit or direct poison spray.  The testing we did showed it was much better than that, but where me and my girls were concerned I preferred to error on the side of caution.  We'd still be going through decontamination procedures before anyone was allowed to lower their armor and that included cleansing the entire boat with flame if we couldn't deal with it before we had to take off.

I should take a moment to describe the armor Alice had come up with.  Because Jane could summon sealed armor from under her skin as well as the Angel type summoning out of thin air Alice had decided to use both when making our rings.  The resultant rings could summon skin-tight sealed armor out of thin air.  As an added bonus they could also create clothes which the girls had a lot of fun playing with and which had greatly increased the diversity of the lingerie I was seeing in the bedroom.  Before this everything we wore was made by Scarlet.  I still had her making a lot of my clothes as did some of the girls because it seemed to make her happy when we wore them.  We didn't object, they were still incredibly soft and durable.  Say what you will, but spider silk boxers are the best.

We started searching room by room to avoid leaving danger behind us.  The third floor contained only a couple of zombabes that had been trapped in a closet when the wave hit, presumably having office sex based on the man's lack of pants and the women's panties he was wearing on his head.  (I didn't WANT to see that.  I was just looking toward the noise when the room lit up.)  A quick dose of holy fire destroyed them and we moved on.  There were a dozen or so corpses scattered throughout the offices in various states of decay and destruction mostly depending on whether or not they were in a place zombabes could reach them.  I was ever so glad that Alice had added the air bubble spell to our suits as the stench must have been overwhelming.  Not a fan of puke.  I'm just going to throw that out there.

The flashes of light from the fires were likely visible through the windows so I figured we might start drawing local zombabes into the building.  There wasn't much we could do about it beyond staying vigilant though.  We scooped up a few pokedexes, portable computers, and other odds and ends we found as we searched to go through later.  After all loot not, want later.  (What?  Waste not, want not beats around the bush.  Loot not, want later gets right to the point, albeit in a less immediately graspable way...and why am I still talking about this?)

The second floor was more of the same.  We were using the stairs to move between floors and as we approached the first floor we could hear the sounds of zombabes through the door.  Lots of zombabes.  Friday had set up a mental link which I now used to tell her to stop before she opened the door. 

"Friday," I thought, "can you 'see' the zombabes yet?"  (Don't ask me how you write italics or parentheses in mental communication.  As far as I can tell your mind just conveys them automatically...man, I have really got to get my mind to stop wandering in the middle of danger.)

"No," she replied.  "I can hear and smell them but they're still beyond the reach of my electric sense."

"Good.  Alice, could you put a wall of hardened air across these doors like you did with the clouds?  It would only need to last for a little while and with luck the zombabes will never know we're here.  I don't think that they'd have put the entrance on the ground floor when they have a basement."

Alice nodded and cast her spell, then we continued down the stairs.  We were still avoiding lights so only Alice, Jane, Ellie, and Friday were out of their balls at this point.  Alice had rearguard while I kept a hand on Ellie's shoulder for guidance, myself being the only person who was nearly blind here.  At the bottom of the stairs we found the basement.  Friday had to pry this door open as it was locked but she managed to do it without being too noisy.

The door let onto a corridor with alternating doorways on each side.  We checked and cleared each door before passing them but found they were mostly storage rooms.  We did find the building's server room, but it was just a pile of hardware without power.  The hallway turned right, then right again, and finally right again creating a full square of the basement.  The center of the square, when we finally found the door to it, turned out to be the building's utility room.  None of the rooms yielded a secret passage out of the building.  I was so sure it would be here.  Now I really just hoped that we could get out of the building quietly and that the passage into the secret base wasn't a long one that came out a few blocks over in some direction.

We headed back up to the roof.  The noise was louder when we hit the stairwell and as we approached the first floor I noticed in passing that the doors and the wall around them were damaged and buckling.  Some of the zombabes must have seen our life force through the floor and either followed us towards the stairs or, more scarily, were smart enough to reason out to go to them.  Fortunately Alice's air wall was providing strong backing meaning the zombabes on the other side had to break the wall pieces loose and tear them out before they could even really hit her construct.  They hadn't quite figured out the part about removing the chunks of wall yet although some were making progress on turning the chunks into powder.  At any rate we cleared the building and lifted off long before Alice's spell would end.  

I let the girls choose our next target and after a brief discussion they settled on the apartment building, their logic being that if the people working at the base could live in the building they would have easy access without being conspicuous about getting there and since this place was supposed to be secret...  Once again we started at the top and began working our way down.  We thought this would be even more dangerous since there were five floors, but it turned out that the top four floors were empty.  Only when we reached ground level did we find any apartments that were lived in.  One contained a dead man who had been a tamer.  I collected the six pokeballs on his belt while trying to touch the rotting remains as little as possible along with his dex before we moved on.  Again, we weren't sorting loot right now.  I'd see what they were later.

In the basement we finally hit pay dirt.  For starters there was power down here.  Someone had a link to geothermal or some other form of generator that would run underground.  I think if they were using pokepower the system would have burned through it's charge by now unless there was someone around to replace the balls.  I released the rest of my girls and we started looking around.  There was a weapons locker which proved to be empty.  There were also a couple of electronically locked doors which had to be cut open by energy blades as even Scarlet couldn't pry them loose.  One led to a block of holding cells, one of which contained a zombabe, straining at the bars to reach us.  Jane ended the poor creature and we left the room.

The other door opened onto a small reception area.  The secretary was not in so we let ourselves past the hermetically sealed doors of the security checkpoint and found a short hallway.  There were two doors on either side which led to offices.  One looked untouched while the other had been hit by a hurricane with papers strewn everywhere, furniture knocked over, and a glass vase full of dead flowers shattered on the floor.

At the end of the hall were a set of elevator doors.  There was no button to call the elevator and when we pried the doors open, after running an energy blade down the middle to sever the lock, we found the shaft empty.  The elevator must be somewhere below.  Scarlet quickly spun us a heavy rope with knots for handholds and we started descending the shaft.  After twenty feet it started getting hard to see so Alice kindly cast a few light ball spells and set them to hover around us.  Then she cast another one and dropped it down the shaft.  The base turned out to be much further underground than expected as the globe dropped at least another fifty feet before it landed on the top of the elevator.  

We were about halfway down the shaft when there was a loud ratcheting sound followed by the hiss and whine of a cable motor as the elevator began swiftly rising to meet us.  Without missing a beat the floating Alice simply reached out and slashed the cables with an energy blade before the elevator could hit us.  It rose another foot or two before gravity caught up with it and it fell to the bottom of the shaft with a resounding crash.  On the bright side the light ball wasn't a lot farther down than it was to start with so hopefully this place had only one or two levels.  Needless to say though, everyone and everything down here now knew we were coming.

The girls in the lead started rushing down the rope but I told them to slow up.  Instead I had Alice and Seren float down to the shaft exit and guard it while the rest of us caught up.  From this side we didn't have to cut the lock, we could simply brute force the levers so Scarlet pried the doors open and Friday leapt through, ready to take on anything that might be waiting.  

The area in front of the elevator was just a hallway junction with corridors going left, right, and straight ahead.  While Scarlet and Alice guarded our exit point the rest of us proceeded down the corridor on the left.  There were only two doors off of this hallway on either side and one at the end.  The door on the left led to a conference room with a long table and chairs.  The one on the right was a larger open space with a hologram in the center of the room showing the Earth.  

The hologram was partially transparent with the basic shape depicted in blue, but large portions of the land mass and not a few spots in the oceans were bathed in red.  If I wasn't mistaken I was looking at a tracking program for zombabes.  I noted several extremely large red dots in the seas and after a few moments could tell they were moving.  Were they leviathans?  Assuming this map was to scale they must be truly immense and moving incredibly fast for me to even be able to see them change position on a global scale.  Then I noticed several small green triangles, mostly in the Noir league.  I couldn't tell what they were marking but I pulled out my pokedex and took video of the image from various angles.

The door at the end of the hall was a storage room containing some prepackaged food (less after we left) and some office supplies.  We crossed back past Alice and Scarlet and checked the corridor on the right  which was laid out to mirror the other side.  Here we found a room containing a storage unit and a pokecenter healing machine.  The storage unit contained four blastits, a joltina, and an air maiden.  

At a guess the blastits were for fighting fires, the joltina might be for emergency power, electrical problems, or maybe even a trained technician, and the air maiden...in case they were trapped and needed fresh air?  At any rate I ejected all of them from the machine and stored them in my pokepack.  I wished we could take both machines with us, but it just wasn't practical at this point.  Getting them up that elevator shaft and to the roof would be at least five and a half bitches, maybe a full six.  Still, they would be handy.  If we could come up with a reliable power source we could look into expanding the boat a little further and...no.  Not now anyway.  Do what you can when you can.

The second room on this side was empty except for stacks of boxes which were full of paperwork.  I guess it made sense if you think about it.  Physical storage was the only way to keep video girls out of something.  I thought I heard a bell somewhere but when I didn't hear anything further decided it must be my blood singing in my ears against the silence down here.  The door at the end turned out to be a combination storage room and janitor closet.  As we were looking around in there Scarlet yelled for us from down the hall.

The girls all sprinted past me so I was the last one to round the corner and see a cluster of a dozen or so zombabes coming down the middle corridor towards us.  Alice and Scarlet were throwing orbs of holy fire at them as they got closer but there were enough targets to overwhelm just the two of them.  The girls quickly formed a firing line and started volleying spheres of white fire.  The hallway filled with acrid smoke, obscuring the zombabes, until Alice stopped firing and concentrated on making a wind gust to clear the smoke back.  I felt an increase in the air pressure as the enclosed space forced part of the air she generated back behind us and out into the open elevator shaft.

With my entire harem on the job none of the zombabes made it into melee range.  Two tried to spray poison at us but it was deflected by Alice's wind and fell short.  Once the zombabes were down Alice stopped her wind and we decided to take a break and let the smoke and dust settle.

"Any idea where they came from?" I asked.

"Down there," Alice replied, pointing toward the end of the center corridor.  "There was a ding like an elevator bell and a few moments later they came around the corner."  Apparently I wasn't imagining those bells earlier after all.  

We waited for five minutes but nothing else happened so with visibility back to normal in the hallway we decided to check it out.  The center corridor was as long as the left and right corridors combined but just had one door leading off it on each side before it made a T at the end with another corridor.  I wanted to see where those zombabes came from so I asked Alice to throw up force walls over those doors to keep us from being cut off before we travelled down to the connecting corridor.

This one appeared to be laid out just like the other side forming a giant H.  At the end of the corridor on our left, where Alice said the zombabes came from, stood a pair of open elevator doors.  I consulted my mental map and decided this might be under the bank.  I grabbed a fake potted tree and laid it down across the threshold of the elevator to keep the doors from closing.  No need to invite further surprises.

There were two more rooms on the left and three on the right just like on the opposite side of the H.  Four of them turned out to be bedrooms.  There were no personal logs or journals but we did leave Scarlet and Alice at the cross corridor long enough to scavenge a few odds and ends.  Two of the rooms obviously belonged to men while a third belonged to a woman.  The fourth looked unlived-in.  At the end of the right-hand corridor we could only open the door about four inches before it stopped but we could see rubble through the gap.  It looked like the area had collapsed when the bank did.

We finally walked back down the center corridor to check those doors which slid open sideways like something out of Star Trek.  Friday tried to look through the walls for electrical signals but said there were too many wires in the walls themselves to make anything out.  Alice released the force wall over just one of the doors and Scarlet went in first.  She wasn't halfway through the door though when she was blasted back into the hallway by electricity.  She hit the force wall on the other side, bounced off, and lay convulsing on the floor.  

Friday leapt into the doorway and intercepted another bolt of lightning which she redirected back into the room without harm to herself.  I grabbed Scarlet's legs and dragged her out of view of the doorway while the others moved up to either side, ready to support Friday.  

"Is it Rachel?" I called to Friday as I examined Scarlet.

"Not unless she grew tentacles and bug parts," she replied.  "It must be another video girl,"  she said while absorbing another bolt of lightning with no effect.

After quickly reviewing my mental pokedex I called out, "Friday, move into the room to draw her attention.  Everyone else but Alice, when she's looking away bind her with rune chains.  Alice, leech seed."

Everyone turned back to the room.  As Friday ran across to the far wall another bolt of lightning flew at her.  The others leaned around the sides of the doorway, Harley and Jane on one side, Ellie and Seren on the other going high and low so they could all fire at once.  There was an inhuman screech from the room and for a moment I really wondered what the hell we were dealing with.  Was it possible this wasn't a video girl?  Either way Alice stepped to the door and several of her vines whipped out firing seeds off to our left.

Scarlet had stopped convulsing by now and was sitting up with my help.  "Are you alright?" I asked her.  "Do you need a potion?"

She started to shrug it off and then winced from the motion before slowly peeling her shirt up.  There was an ugly black scorch mark covering most of her lower abdomen.  The skin was blackened but wasn't quite cracking from the electrical burn and I was thankful it hadn't cooked to the shirt.  That would not have been pleasant.  I quickly pulled out a potion sprayer and hosed down the entire area to her eminent relief.

Meanwhile there was still screeching coming from within the room and Alice and the others stepped back into the hallway moments before another bolt of lightning struck the opposite force wall.  

"Did she break the chains?" I asked.

"No," Alice replied.  "The stubborn bitch is firing lightning bolts from her mouth.  We're just waiting for the leech seeds to drain her."

After a couple more minutes of screeching and flailing and a few more lightning bolts the commotion from the room began to taper off.  Another minute and Friday called out that it was safe to come in.  When I saw her the girl was as horrific as advertised with physical grotesqueries I could not fathom.  If she was a video girl she was clearly corrupted.  Since she was unconscious I tried to capture her but apparently she was already registered to a ball in the vicinity and there was NO WAY I was sticking my dick in that.  Alice said she could keep the leech seed going on low so she wouldn't wake up and the rune chains would keep her immobile if she did so we explored further into the area.

This appeared to be some sort of living area with an atrium, a small recreational area, and several taming rooms coming off of it.  They could have been just bedrooms but the lack of much more than basic furnishings and attached bathrooms said taming, not sleeping.  In one of the taming rooms Friday found the remains of a man in some kind of uniform who appeared to have blown his own brains out.  After she showed it to me I checked him for pokeballs.  Finding none I grabbed the pocket computer off his belt, quietly closed the door, and left him to his rest.  There was also a kitchen area which, per usual, we plundered.

After we'd pretty thoroughly looked over the living area we went back to the last door.  This time we proceeded more cautiously with Friday in the lead.  She stepped into the room, looked around for a minute, and then waved us in.  This was some kind of computer lab.  I didn't know enough about the advanced technology of this universe to guess what half of the equipment did, but Friday pointed to the largest constellation of electronics the others all connected to and said it was a comm array.

We started tracing cables looking for where the video girls were kept.  There were several smaller rooms coming off of this one at the back, but the ceiling had caved in on two of them on the left.  Sadly, the wall near one rubble-choked doorway bore a sign reading "Interface Room".  This would have been the room the vidgirls spent most of their time in, accessing the net.  I stared at the chunks of concrete and twisted rebar for a moment.  They were dead long before we got here.  Was all this for nothing?

I heard Alice shout from the room farthest from the collapse and ran toward her thinking she might be in trouble.  I was still the last to arrive.  This last room was an office of some kind with several large servers against one wall.  As I arrived Scarlet was prying a metal cage off of one of the servers.  Inside the cage was a shiny metal disc, six inches across and about an inch thick.  I'd never seen one before but if I had to guess this was a life disc.  As soon as the disc was free from the cage a body formed around it and I was tackled by an insatiable Rachel who immediately started pawing at my clothes.  

"Girls, please give us some privacy," I said.  "See if you can find her pokeball."

Without missing a beat Alice pointed at the wall where a rack containing seven pokeballs was mounted.  "Found it."

"Okay, smartass," I said with a chuckle, "then take them and find the one to pack up that other girl.  If I understand vidgirls correctly Rachel might be able to fix her."

The others left the room while I got down to some serious taming.

Sean Abbott

Friday - Blessed Lazarus

Scarlet - Blessed Wolf Spider

Harley - Blessed Gun Bunny

Serendipity - Blessed Psifey

Alice - Blessed Archmage+

Jane - NightAngel

Ellie - Blessed Duelist