Adel Torrez's Story

"JA!" shouted an inmate with an obnoxious German accent at Moxxi and Torgue. "Ve vill make ze best strudel togezzer!"

---

Crane arrives at Alex's cell, moving the guards previously interrogating the Koopa aside.

"Hello, Alexander," said Crane. "Can I call you that?"

Alex is distracted with a TV behind Crane. Crane turns to see Adriel Killian on the news, delivering a speech about superpower-granting nanites. Alex smirks.

"So that's what he's up to," said Alex.

Crane turns to Alex and clears his throat.

"I'm Captain David Crane," said Crane. "I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"You know, sending in guys with higher rank to ask me the same questions doesn't magically make me know the answers," said Alex. "I don't know who attacked Sanctuary this morning, and I don't know what Doc was doing in Ingenium. I'm on the outs with the White Platoon these days."

"I'm not here to ask you about the White Platoon," explained Crane. "What do you know about Majestic?"

A brief pause. Alex chuckles and leans back in his chair.

"Enough to know you shouldn't be asking that question," said Alex.

"THAT'S A TOTALLY AWESOME IDEA!!!" Torgue yelled, "THE ONLY THING IT NEEDS ARE EXPLOSIONS!!!"

"Urggh.... This is the worst day of my life..." Moxxi facepalmed.

Not sure if Andy and the others have any view of Crane and Alex's interrogation room. For now, they just sit around, cooling their heels (impatiently, in Nankoro's case).

They do not, in fact, have a view of Alex's interrogation room. In fact, they're free to go. Crane said so himself.

---

"What do you mean?" asked Crane.

"They've got a nasty habit of finding anyone who looks too closely into their affairs," said Alex. "And making them suffer. While I'm sure you've got something coming to you, being a police officer in Haven and all, I feel it would be remiss of me not to at least warn you."

"I appreciate your concern," said Crane, incredibly sarcastically.

"Now is that all?" asked Alex.

"... You know, I don't get you," said Crane. "You're going to be executed in the morning. You've got a few hours left to live. We're offering you the chance to help..."

"You're demanding that I give you information I don't have," said Alex. "Besides, I've died more times than I care to count. Knowing this planet someone's going to bring me back."

---

"Ja!" shouted the German guy, giving off some unfortunate implications.

"...Uh, you realize that they've finished asking us all they need, right?" Adel said to the others. "We can go now."

"Hu - ? Oh! Right, of course, heh..." Andy said, having almost fallen asleep from waiting around.

So, Andy, Kaia, Nankoro, and Adel left the station.

"You realize that german nitwit doesn't mean that literally, right?" Moxxi asked Torgue.

Adel, Andy, Kaia, Nankoro, and Riley have just been dismissed from the prison area, and have headed out.

"So, now that we've got some fresh air," Andy said, "let's see what I missed."

He checks his phone, finding the latest news - namely, Killian's speech.

"Wait..." Kaia spoke up, reading the article. "He...intends to grant anyone superhuman abilities?"

"Huh. Doesn't sound too bad," Nankoro commented, "or new. Hell, this mask stuck to my head is hundreds upon THOUSANDS of years old! And it turned me into a firebreathing superfighter!"

"I'm...not sure your mask is a good enough example," Adel commented. "I've done my homework, even over at Taiyomashi. And I learned that the Mask of Karyu was designed with a charm that doesn't let just anyone wear it - it's selective!"

"And these nanites, as it seems, are not," Nemea continued.

"Uhhhhh....okay, so its makers were ahead of their time back then," Nankoro responded.

"I personally don't know if it's a good thing or bad..." Kaia said. "Anyone around during this raid has seen what such powers can do for those that don't know how to keep them in check."

"He can't be planning anything beneficial with those nanites," mused Riley. "How any man can look on this chaos and promise order from it, using the same tools that sowed that chaos, is beyond me."

Meanwhile, in a hotel room somewhere in Sanctuary, Tempo made sure the door was closed and locked and Rita, who finally made it to Sanctuary, made sure the windows were closed and locked and the shades were drawn. At Cole's insistence, she also checked to make sure the room wasn't bugged. She didn't know why he thought they'd watch the room of three random street kids, but she checked anyway. Finally, the two of them sat down at the table in the room with Cole, where he was downloading the footage from his camera onto the laptop he brought with him.

"Okay, let's get this started," Cole said. "We've all been searching and looking for evidence. We came here looking to disprove the terrorism accusations against the White Platoon, but since then this attack on Sanctuary happened. We've all got different things to show. Let's see what we got."

"You mean you got stuff to show," Rita said. "I checked that airship from Ingenium and got jack squat."

"Did you take pictures anyway?" Cole asked. "We can use it for comparison."

Rita pulled her phone out and showed the two guys in the room the picture she took of the inside of the ship at Ingenium.

"Okay, see, that's way different than what we saw here," Tempo said. "Cole, show her."

Cole turned his laptop around after bringing up a freeze frame of the video he took inside the airship.

"Whoa," Rita exclaimed. "Looks more like something you'd see here."

"That's not all I got a bunch o' stuff from there," Tempo said. "Check it out."

Tempo dumped the contents of his bag on the table and after taking away the things that were already in his bag at that point, the items he grabbed from the airship were left sitting out.

"{sigh} Man, it feels like common sense is dying 'round here!" Andy groaned. "So...no point in us hanging around."

As the group proceeded forth, they passed by a woman dressed in an ornate white cloak (with glowing cyan lines on it). She kept silent.

Many people are on the streets of Sanctuary, still recovering from what the nanites did to them. At the bus station, Amsel and Hopscotch wait in a line; clearly, recent events have convinced many that now is not a good time to stay in Sanctuary. Or Haven at all.

Riley does not follow. Answers have to still be in Haven, answers about his current situation... answers about this whole rotten situation. He heads deeper into downtown Sanctuary.

---

Meanwhile, at the bus station, a new guard is on duty, since the old one (the one who held up Mordred) is now... well, dead.

Cole, Rita, and Tempo looked over the evidence they managed to gather, which turned up few results. The only definitive thing they could find is that comparing the inside of the ship Rita saw in Ingenium to the inside of the ship Cole and Tempo saw in Sanctuary meant that they couldn't have come from the same place.

"It's not much, but maybe it'll be enough to keep things from going in the wrong direction." Cole said. "This has to be a set-up for something."

"Like what? Some kind kind of excuse to go to war with Coronach?" Tempo said, half-jokingly. Cole and Rita just stared at him as the pieces fit together.

"I don't know what's scarier, what he said or the fact that he said it." Rita remarked.

"That actually sounds right. A case of 'they bombed us, so we're bombing back'." Cole said. "And who's to say whoever did this won't pull the same stunt with any of the other continents?"

"So what're we gonna do?" Tempo asked.

Cole thought for a moment and said, "Rita, how fast can you print out pictures of the insides of those ships? We need to show these to someone before things get out of hand."

Rita was working on a sort of flyer that compared to two pictures. One half showed the picture of insides of the regular ship with a caption that read "A Coronach airship." The other half had a picture from inside of the ship Cole and Tempo were on with a caption that read "Whatever the !%@& that thing was over Sanctuary." A final caption at the bottom read "Notice a difference?" Rita's sense of humor aside, she managed to find a link to a printer in the hotel lobby and sent a command to print out the flyers. Tempo exited the room to pick them up.

Meanwhile...

"Hey, man!" shouts a shady-looking man from a back alley near Riley. "I bet you're feeling pretty vulnerable after all of that craziness, huh?"

"I suppose," said Riley, peering into the shady back alley.

"Well, have I got the stuff just for you!" exclaims the man. "Some 100% authentic W-Gas! After you take a snort of this stuff, ain't no one gonna be able to hurt you!"

W-Gas? It sounded disturbingly similar to Grimace Gas. If his formula was so public that a common street punk could get his hands on it, something must have gone terribly wrong since Riley fell asleep.

"Where did you get this gas?" asked Riley.

"Why's that matter?" asks the man. "All that's important is that I got the stuff, dude."

Riley grabs the man and shoves him against a wall, taking a knife out of his lab coat and putting it to the man's neck.

"Oblige me," said Riley.