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[h2]Phantasm[/h2]
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[u]Location: Unknown, Tenebrae[/u]
[i][color=lightgray]Time: Late Morning[/color][/i]
[@Estylwen]

Myriad skipped down the grated walkway gleefully, hands behind her back and she spun in an easy movement to face Gloria, continuing to walk backwards. Gloria winced at the echoing sound of every footstep. Yeah, she'd had one too many last night.

Still she watched Myriad sashay down the hall. She was... [i]fun[/i]. There was an ease to the way she moved and the way she talked, that belayed the heavy situation she was involved in.

Gloria was almost envious. She'd had to learn to look after herself at a very young age. She'd never really gotten the time for 'fun'. Not that she didn't enjoy herself but she was always guarded even when she was cutting lose, always on watch for an attack. She could never truly just let everything fall away the way Myriad seemed to be able to.

But then, the woman in front of her had joined an organization called 'The Shadow Knights'. Who know how much of what Gloria was seeing was the real Myriad.

"Aren't you curious where you are? What these are?" She said with a laugh.

Gloria would have been lying is she said she wasn't. Lining both sides of the walkway were the large tubes Gloria had glimpsed from the portal. On closer inspection, they contained what looked like rays of light, suspended in clear liquid. It was like looking at an optical illusion. The more Gloria tried to pin down a shape in the containers the more twisted they seemed to become. Some vanished all together if she stared at them too long.

"Honestly, I figured those were the kinds of questions no one would want to answer."

Myriad put her hand on one of the tubes and turned it so Gloria could see the interior. The liquid inside was an violent electric green and seemed to be boiling angrily. "Do you know where meta abilities come from? There are lots of theories out there, sure, but has anyone actually told you?" she asked.

"I suppose you're going to tell me you make them here?"

Myriad's grin grew wider. "No silly, we collect them. Each one of these vessels contains a meta's abilities, directly as a manifestation shining off their soul. You know," her hands made a circle, fingers wiggling behind it in a pantomime of a sunset, "like a sun, and the sunlight coming off? That's what these are."

That set off alarm bells in Gloria's head and her eyes darted to the side of the corridor, considering how dense and thick the stone walls might be. There were [i]a lot[/i] of test tubes here. If each one represented a metahuman ability... that was a large number of metas, more than Gloria could believe would turn themselves in for such a procedure willingly. Assuming that one could survive having their abilities harvested. That was also a lot of potential leaks for a project that as far as Gloria was aware, had remained completely under the radar.

Was that why she was here? To add one more cylinder to their lab? She wondered vaguely what her power would look like, pickled and put on display.

Her feet shifted, ready to sprint depending on the answer to her next question. "What happens to the metas after they have their powers harvested?" she kept her voice flat, not betraying how the cylinders on either side of them now made her nauseous.

Myriad looked up from the glass she was examining which seemed to contain an aurora borealis. “They’re alive and well," she shrugged "living it up in one of the recovery facilities with cakes and custards all day. I’m a little jealous, myself.” She sighed wistfully and Gloria let her footsteps relax.

It wasn't that she believed it. She was sure that for every one of these glass cylinders there was a metahuman corpse lying in a ditch somewhere. But something in Myriad's voice suggested to Gloria that she believed what she was saying. Whoever did the meta harvesting was higher up the food chain than she was and if her bosses didn't want her to know about it then Gloria felt a certain sense of safety in her being nearby. If they wanted to harvest her powers, they'd have arranged for Myriad not to be a witness.

They walked a few paces down, and Myriad pointed to a tube. "Oh, look at this one. Some of these are really pretty, like that one there." Gloria looked through the glass. It looked like flames burning underwater, turning the fluid it was engulfed in into liquid sunlight. "This is what a fire meta's ability looks like."

Myriad shrugged and they kept walking "Some don't have a visible trait of their meta ability," she pointed to another glass tube that looked for all the world like it was just water. "They might look a little boring. But they're just as important. At least, that's what Eos told me."

Eos would be her boss and from the sound of it, the scientist of the operation.

They stopped in front of the door, and Myriad paused with her hand on the knob. "Hmm, you know," she grinned. "You might get to meet him today."

She held open the door for Gloria who scanned the next room warily, determined not to be taken by surprise. The room was, well the room was bizarre. It looked like another piece of the industrial complex, cement walls and flooring, but it had been decorated like a hastily thrown together birthday party. There was a large 'Happy Birthday' banner along the back wall. In front of it was a portable banquet table, the type that typically decorated the lawns of church picnics. Twelve folding chairs 
were placed around the table and balloons and streamers had been scattered haphazardly across its surface.
 
There were three men in the room, the two facing the door signalled to her that this display was meant for her. One of the three was Arc, half his body still bandaged from their encounter last night. The other looked injured as well with his eyes blackened and an IV inset into his arm. However it was the third that drew Gloria's eyes for despite their injuries both Arc and the black eyed man where standing around him like a protective detail. He was in charge.

He was tall, pearlescent gold scattered through his brown hair and lab coat worn neatly over a dress shirt. He nodded solemnly as they entered the room. "What a pleasure, Phantasm." A stiff silence fell between the group before the man in the lab coat glanced at Gloria's escort. "Myriad." he said promptingly. 

"Oh, yes," she said with a sheepish smile "Phantasm, this is Eos. He's uh, well..." she trailed off in the way that people did when they suddenly realized they didn't know how much about a topic they were allowed to talk about. She instead changed the subject. "Beside him is Arc, you've already met," Arc narrowed his eyes at Gloria. "And the other one is Chronos. He likes to be intimidating." She made a face at Chronos. He silently glared back.

Eos politely inclined his head. "Ma'am."

Arc made to turn away from Gloria, refusing to meet her eyes but as he did so, Eos leaned in and whispered something in his ear. Gloria saw the colour to drain from Arc's face. Instead of turning away he faced her straight on and actually bowed his head.

"Please forgive me for disgracing myself in front of you last night. It won't happen again," he said.

A satisfied smile stretched across her face and she was glad they couldn't see it beneath the mask that made her face look like a gaunt skull. She said the most aggravating thing she could think of between two people who both knew the other was incapable of being sincere with them. "I forgive you."

They were playing to her ego. She knew it. The pretty girl sent to fetch her, the tour, Arc's apology. The balloons and the banner were definitely a step too far but she couldn't deny that this tactic was a lot more effective than the brute force one that Arc had attempted the previous night.

The other bodyguard, Chronos, stared at her silently before he turned and pushed his way through the double-swinging side doors, dragging his IV with him, out of sight. She didn't know exactly what to make of him. She hadn't seen enough to even form a hypothesis about his abilities. All she could be certain of was if he could stand next to Arc as a bodyguard then he was dangerous.

Eos turned toward her, a calm expression on his face. "This is for you if you choose to take it, Miss Phantasm of the Valkyries."

In his hands he held out a thin black briefcase. She took it and clicked it open. Inside was a thick file. She skimmed it briefly, identifying blueprints, reports, and layouts within. The thing that caught her eyes was a sketch of a computer chip that looked to be their target.

"I've spoken with your colleagues already to get approval for this two-person mission. The job itself is simple enough, to steal a microchip from a lab here below the coastal reefs of Tenebrae. We have a submarine and a pilot, but our point of entry is blocked."

"You spoke with the Valkyries?" she asked.

This wasn't how Lady Hel did business. Not that she was above contracting out to other groups but she didn't do it like this. She always made sure that the introductions were done on her terms, Gloria suspected to cut down on other gangs trying to poach her best members. Lady Hel was... she was an absolute terror but she took care of her own. Gloria couldn't imagine a scenario in which she'd have sanctioned Arc's attack last night. Not least of all because that had been the girl's downtime. For as demanding and forceful as she often was, Lady Hel let them rest when they needed it. Either the Shadow Knights were dealing with one of Hel's lieutenants who was not playing by the rules, or Eos was lying about having contacted them.

Eos paused, seemingly caught by the detail. "Ah yes, I don't believe you two have met."

Someone with command enough to sanction a mission but not someone she'd met personally. So the Knights weren't dealing with Hel. That left the question of if they knew their contact with dealing behind Hel's back or were under the impression that they had the Lady's blessing. On the off chance it was the former she didn't want to tip to something being wrong.

He smiled softly. "That is unless you want to try that device Arc gave you."

She had been right. It was some kind of amplifier for her powers. If this operation could extract meta abilities, juicing them was probably a pretty easy ask. 

"Are you asking me to go in, retrieve this, whatever it is, and get out. Or are you asking me to phase a submarine and its pilot through an obstruction?" Her tone was incredulous but it also carried a hint of a warning of how poor an idea that was.

"My body was built for phasing. Other people's, not so much." She took Myriad's hand to demonstrate. "Solid." she said, showing off the two making contact. Then she took her other hand and passed it through the woman's shoulder. There was a tingle, like the feeling of licking a nine volt battery as their electrical fields interacted but it didn't hurt. "Not solid." she dropped Myriad's hand.

"I can do both at the same time. My body can handle being in multiple quantum states at once. Other people can't. You don't want to know what it looks like when half of a dude phases through the other half." It wasn't actually as easy to do as her carefree tone made it sound. Matter on a fundamental level wanted to stay cohesive. She'd bisected people and objects only by accident or fatigue, at least in her normal state. When her powers had been pushed to their limit on Cypher, ripping things apart had been a hell of a lot easier.

"If you're asking me to phase an entire sub and something goes wrong... well I'll be fine but I can't make any promises for your sub or your pilot."