[b]Strawberry:[/b]

It’s almost like feng shui, isn’t it? Just instead of a power line, a power structure. Spring makes himself obvious as the piece in the pattern he is compelled to fill. But of course he’s a little too good, a little too convenient. But once you know what to look for, where to look becomes obvious. Find him on the cameras. Compare it to the two weeks of [i]good[/i] footage of Goat’s Vault. There he is on this week’s crew, on a team of three. The other two aren’t with him, but if they show up later - you’ll know. 

He’s burned, his team’s burned, and he has no way to know it yet. 

Hold up, I’ll get back to you. 

[b]Flood: [/b]

Good thing about your solution solution is that it’s going to stop Knightly’s plan from working - or was it always Spring’s? - when his team manages to get through Strawberry’s stalling efforts, anyway. 

Bad news is it might not stop them from trying. As far as they know this is still just a hack on the Cloud pumps. They’re not going to have a reason to know their plan’s not going to work. They’re still going to try. 

But with all the damage your sugar play just did? They’re going to need [i]one hell of an extension cord[/i] before they can start on it. And the main rail access shaft isn’t salvageable.

[b]Strawberry:[/b]

One of the private security companies making their way on scene is Chase Black. You remember that one, don’t you? You can recognize them easily, they move like a team of Frank Castles and they’re cybernetically armored like freon-cooled Saurons. There’s six of them. Two would be enough to take the SES building and kill White and Pink, if they knew. There’s six. 

The security teams already there can’t keep stalling Knightly in the face of the Chase Black team trying to get to [i]their [/i]scene. Flood’s work has been exceptional though. The monsters are learning how bad the damage is, and it’ll take a beat for them to even work out what their options could be to get to defend their assigned lair. 

[b]Waffle:[/b]

The cabinet only had spare parts in it, but you weren’t to know. How bad would it have been to be wrong? And if you fudge the smash and grab, you’ll probably end up grateful you had them.

Goat’s catafalque is a black cube, as tall as a man standing up and as wide as a man lying down. Black, black, black. It swallows the red emergency lighting and spits none back out. The hull sits in the middle of the room like it inhabits its own shadow. 

He’s surrounded by a warehouse. Redundancies and redundancies and redunancies and redundancies. Enough planks to rebuild the Ship of Theseus ten times over. At a glance? Only a tenth of it’s been used. Call that, what? Three hundred years of planned parts? That filing cabinet you preserved was one of many-manies. 

An entire transatlantic cable runs out of him. Water pipes torrent against his sides, a closed system. Normally it transfers into the Cloud line. Now, though, it’s making do using the frame of the room itself as a radiating fin. With the cutting as well, the ambient room temperature is already hitting thirty degrees. Safety systems prevent it rising above that, for now, but it means the room’s going to have a head start when Knightly tries his doomed plan. 

There’s a problem. That cube chassis looks as solid as the exterior walling, and there’s no way to cut through without risking a vaporizing lobotomy. But spare parts [i]have[/i] been used before, so there’s got to be a way to open the chassis and apply them. 

Actually, it’s simple when you get close enough to look, run your hands along his face. Four locks, one on each face, pinning it shut. But the locks run into Goat.

On one face, an interface panel. A process for awakening Goat from data-stream torpor. On a shelf, a faded, laminated sheet in pictographic language - a relic of a time before English was the monolanguage. Hieroglyphs meant to be understood by a five year old, maintenance instructions. 

Which means it’s impossible to misunderstand what they mean.

Goat is solely in control of unlocking his own chassis. If you want to swipe his cores and get out of here, you need to wake him up and ask. The interface boots him in a diagnostic mode, where he runs slow enough to be someone you can speak to.