[b][center][h2]Paige Kennedy[/h2][/center][/b]

To his credit, it was not difficult for Tao to produce a list of the doors that Agent Barrett’s keycard had opened. Though, what Paige hadn’t really considered was matching those doors to their physical locations which had become somewhat of an exercise in tedium for the past couple of hours. The list that he came up with was something like an Excel sheet, but the very basic programming of the security system only gave a date, time and a transponder number that corresponded to the card readers mounted next to a given door the card was used to access. In the design of the building, no one had ever really considered having to compare keycard passes to their actual locations. The cards either worked or they didn’t based on the user’s assigned access level. The logic behind the transponder numbers wasn’t intuitive, just utilitarian. Paige could remember roughly the time she had confronted the FBI Agent and after they had found that entry on the list,  the rest more logically fell in line by time.


What she also hadn’t considered was how bizarre the trail was going to get after they initially got on the scent. She carried a tablet in one hand with a map file that displayed various engineering drawings that Tao had also been easily able to provide. They had gone [i]downstairs[/i] several times to the point where the architecture appeared more original and much more basic, not updated and modern like the main floors. They had walked a long drab hallway of bare, white cinder block walls, fluorescent lights and VCT tiles that looked like surplus supplies from a schoolbuilding project. The only thing missing was the lockers. It was eerily familiar.  From what it looked like on the maps, the long hallways seemed to have been some sort of method of direct travel from different points across the huge facility and was simply a special design feature of the building. Other than the low hum of the lights and the steady squeak of sneakers, it was [i]stark quiet[/i]. From what she could tell, it appeared they were somewhere [i]beneath the fifty-yard line of the football stadium.[/i]


The room they found themselves in was fairly large; surprisingly so for something underground and seemed to be some sort of records storage area. Vertical metal racking housed stacks of palletized boxes in neat order. The smell of aged cardboard and musty paper was thick in the air as soon as they opened the door. Out of curiosity, Paige pulled the top off of one of the boxes finding several [i]very[/i] old copies of the Star Messenger with various articles from the construction of the Matthews Bridge, Daedalus Airlines and Rhinos being added to the Sol City Zoo. Other boxes seemed to denote bank records, sports contracts and a legion of other subjects related to the city back through the decades- there were hundreds of boxes, all neatly stacked and placed in their racks. A solitary forklift sat covered ready for use to access the higher racking. Dust was thick over everything and Paige rubbed her hands together as she put the top back. Frustration was setting in.

The logsheet was perfectly clear and they had eliminated all other possibilities. There were two transponder pings close together and they had to have come from [i]inside[/i] the room, but they had searched up, down and all over the walls, finding nothing. In addition, the transponder codes were distinctly different from all the others, like they hadn’t been part of the original layout or that they were a different brand or even installed at a later time. There were any number of scenarios, but whatever it was, they couldn’t find them. Paige was getting frustrated and felt like she was being outsmarted. She backtracked her steps through the room trying to think of anything they would have missed, but still nothing. Shaking her head, she leaned against the forklift and began stroking her braid with both hands, almost pulling it as her mind continued to churn. Her lips were a narrow line as her eyes nearly bored a whole through the concrete floor. She wasn’t going to admit defeat, but she wasn’t sure what to say to Tao either. Interestingly, she could tell he was just as frustrated at not being able to solve the puzzle. 


“I don’t know Tao,” She said finally. It was cool in the room, but she rolled her sleeves back slightly and crossed her arms. They had walked [i]a lot[/i]. Never in her wildest dreams did she ever think she’d be hunting underground for what was apparently some hidden passage underneath the stadium in shithole Sol City, but here she was and had dragged the local computer hacker along for the ride to boot. [i]Good job, Paige[/i] An internal voice boasted sarcastically. She shook her head.

[@Allycat]