xp_logs | Shadow and Stone (Nathan, Remy)

After getting some more than vaguely unsettling news from Jake about some of his father's business ties, Nathan asks Remy to help him break into the offices of one of his father's company's major investors. They don't find any answers about Saul, but they do find a whole new set of questions. And someone unexpected finds them.

"Glass and steel," Nathan said, looking up at the building that housed Eris, Inc.'s offices. "Why am I not surprised..." This was all giving him a very bad feeling. Verging entirely too close on some of the things he'd seen. "Keep an eye out for anything looking like a key when we get in there, will you?" he asked Remy.

"Tech company. I think dat dey likely using card access." LeBeau fumbled around in his trenchcoat for a moment and pulled out a black box. His eyes flickered over the building for a moment, before sighting on a second story camera. "CCTV, and pin sensors on de walls. No scaling dis one."

"What about coming in from the roof?" Nathan sized up the surrounding buildings. None quite as high as this one, but he could easily get himself and Remy across from one of the other roofs.

"If security is like dis down here, Remy bet de roof equally covered." Remy leaned back for a few minutes, taking in the rest of the walls and grounds, getting a feel for the facility. Not many guards, which was odd. Meant they were relying on technology. LeBeau was happy about that. "Come on." He said, skirting the perimeter without explanation, and pulling up near the loading docks in the back.

"Jake will be so disappointed we didn't ask him to come along," Nathan murmured wryly. Jake had in fact been happy to wash his hands of the matter, after delivering the information he'd dug up.

There hadn't been anything suspicious about Saul's company, in the end; Samara appeared to be what it appeared to be, a well-regarded data recovery company with an extensive client list. The same hadn't been true about its primary investor.

Eris, Inc. was purportedly a holding company and had been for the last ten years. Before that, they had been one of the first-generation of information brokers. Jake had found evidence that they were still carrying on operations on the side, and their client list had been a little alarming.

And the fact that an information-broker owned thirty-odd percent of his father's data recovery company was a little unsettling, in and of itself.

"Jake happy enough to stay 'way from de field." Remy said, uncharacteristically quiet. He caught sight of the heating vents along the wall and smiled. The venting would disrupt pin sensors, so their coverage around the vent would be minimal. Which meant all they had to defeat was any sensors directly on the windows above the venting. Remy began to pull out bits of equipment from his pockets, arranging them by feel as he quartered the building.

Nathan watched him silently, taking in every detail of what he was doing. With Jake's information, and his precog continuing to tug at him, he'd decided that he needed more information to work with now, rather than later. Since Eris was headquartered in Philadelphia, a short hop from the mansion, going right to the source had seemed like the easiest answer. And Remy had been the obvious person to ask.

He hadn't expected to find out that Remy was already looking into his father's background. The identity of who'd asked him to do that shouldn't have been a surprise, though.

He looked up at the office building, frowning a little. #I'm getting deja vu, by the way. Just to let you know.#

#Quiet.# Remy snapped over the telepathic link as he slotted together his towline. Ignoring Nate's sudden scowl, he fired the gas propellent charge, sending the little line with the maggrapple into the steel meshwork above his choosen window. Remy looped the line twice around his hand, and started up the wall rapidly. He didn't bother to look behind, assuming Nate's TK would let him keep up. It didn't take long to reach the third story window, and LeBeau braced himself against the metal slats as he set a small sensor on the glass pane.

Nathan raised an eyebrow as he watched Remy, then shrugged mentally and levitated himself to follow, leaving the line alone. I wonder if he thinks I'd drop him.

The sensor started seeking out variants and irregularities in the proximity of the window, scanning for the telltale currents or energy that indicated alarms and sensors on the frame. Unfortunately, it wasn't a fast process, and Remy shifted himself more comfortably on the side of the building as he waited.

Nathan floated there beside him, waiting. As the moment dragged on, he looked up again at the office building. Deja vu. And not just because of the last break-in he and Remy had done.

The sensor flashed, and Remy pulled it off the window. He carefully pulled a small tin, almost like an oil can, from his pocket, and began to spray the edges of the window. The thin liquid sizzled slightly, making a disgusting smell as it burned from the acid. When he'd finished, LeBeau nodded to Nate and hit the centre of the pane with his palm. The weakened frame snapped easily, and was caught by Nate's TK before it could hit the floor inside.

Nathan followed Remy in, lowering himself to the floor and setting the remains of the window down carefully. #Meeting room, looks like,# he sent, looking around at the room in which they found themselves. There was a long oval table, and a plasma screen on the opposite wall.

"Looks like." Remy's eyes flicked around, but he wasn't seeing any major internal security. Access points would be monitored, but like most places, this one seemed to use the key card access as it's primary internal security.

Nathan hesitated for a moment, then shook his head, angry at himself. They were here. Time to answer some questions. He let down enough of his shields to give him a sense of the entire building. "We're the only people on this floor and the ones above and below," he said aloud, tersely, as he headed for the door. "If that changes I'll know."

"Bein." Remy followed him out the door, and into the large open concept office area. He kept a close eye on the ceiling and walls, but couldn't see anything that indicated additional sensors or security for the building. For all intents and purposes, they were clean.

Nathan sized up the office. "You want to try a computer, and I'll look for anything interesting in hard copy?" Remy was more likely to be able to get into a computer than he was, depending on the security measures involved.

"You got an idea what you looking for yet?" Remy sat down at one of the terminals and hunted through his pockets for some of the periphals that he'd gotten Kitty and Doug to program for him.

"Any mentions of my father. Or Samara. Beyond earnings reports or anything innocuous like that, I mean," Nathan said, moving over to one of the desks. The folders and papers there started to shift, as if invisible hands were leafing through them. "Or anything specific about their involvement with the Hellfire Club, or any of the other suspicious names on their client list... the fact that they're selling info to anti and pro mutant lobby groups here and overseas is something I'd like to understand a little better."

Remy powered up the computer and began to plug in the various devices, setting up the station for some crude cracking. He began to type rapidly with two fingers, bringing up the programs that were worming their way into the company servers and opening holes in the barriers between information stores.

Nothing interesting on this desk. Nathan glanced at the drawers. Two opened, revealing office supplies and personal items, nothing of interest. One didn't, and he knelt down, gazing at the lock. A click, and it slid open as well, revealing hanging file folders. Current items of interest? He tugged at the papers, his eyes widening a little.

Copies of news items. "Remy, you remember that incident in Moscow a couple of weeks back? The explosion they think was caused by a mutant kid living in the building?" The kid had died. Scott had mentioned it to him as one of the things he'd flagged on the news feeds.

"Oui. Bioelectrical blast, as I remember." Remy said, flipping through files and shared drives rapidly. His drive was pulling files based on the searches he'd had developed, and he'd have time later to pour through them.

"They have records on him." Not just news items. Nathan rifled through the rest of the files in that drawer at speed. "Him and half a dozen others whose manifestation problems went bad. Just in this one drawer."

"So dey interested in mutants. Dat comes as a shock." Remy said dryly, running through new files. He made a note to leave one of Doug's nastier viruses behind to scorch out the data. "Dere's big money in de international market for dis kind of intelligence."

"I don't like where this is going." Nathan rose, the desk rearranging itself into the shape it had been. He looked around, then moved to the next. Within a few minutes, he'd established that the contents of that one drawer hadn't been a fluke. "Files on NGOs that carry out relief operations specifically for mutants in the developing world," he reported. "Comprehensive, again."

"Fits. Lots of Eris execs have surprisingly clean backgrounds. Whole years dat can be summarized as 'working' and nothing else." Remy flipped servers and started on the next one. "Which means dat dey likely involved in some sort of work dat dey don't want public."

"Wish we knew more about why they're playing at being a holding company," Nathan muttered, moving on. "What made it necessary..." He walked past a set of glass doors... and froze, turning slowly to stare at the office beyond.

Long glass desk. Black leather chair. And the exact same view from the windows that he'd seen... "Fuck. Remy, come over here and tell me if there's any security on this door?"

Remy looked up from his computer, and looked back down, running a query. After a few moments, he pulled the black box from his pocket and tossed it over to the rattled Nate. "Hold de magnetic stripe at de bottom against de black box, and press de button."

Nathan caught the box and followed instructions, ignoring the slight unsteadiness of his hands. #I've seen this,# he sent as the door unlocked. #This office. I'm not supposed to be able to see my own future, Remy. But I saw this. I don't know what that implies but I don't think it's good.#

As soon as he stepped foot inside the office, the patterns in his head started spinning. The chair was facing the doors, so at least he could see that no one was sitting there. #Gideon Faraday,# he sent to Remy, seeing the nameplate on the desk. #'G. Faraday'. Jake turned up that name. He founded this place.#

#Fucking marvelous.# Remy turned the computer to a new search, hunting down files on the name. #You know, dis kind of information would have been more useful 'bout a month ago.#

#Precog's not particularly reliable even when it hasn't been fucked with from two thousand years ahead, like mine,# Nathan sent.

And then it hit him. It was quiet. It was quiet inside his head, and it wasn't supposed to be. There was an utter, shocked silence, and...

#Remy, something's wrong!# he sent, whirling back towards the outer office, scanning.

"'course it is." Remy muttered as he scooped up his devices and stuffed them into his pocket. He wasn't a precog, but he'd been expecting this. Ever since Moira had sent him digging into Saul, he know the man's far too clean record was a lashup; a fake. Something was being hidden, by very smart people with money to do it well. He snapped open his staff, and moved to the shadows of the room.

There was no warning, really - one moment, Remy was moving, the next he lost his footing, floating up a mere inches above the floor. Suspended in mid air, just enough to keep him from reaching towards anything, the staff snapping closed on its own.

And then he went from a standstill to flying through the window and being lost in the darkness of the night outside within the next second, the tinkling of glass which normally should have followed pausing as the shards of glass slowly floated back from outside - and gently merged together delicately, the window flowing into a smooth pane of glass once more.

"Well." The cultured tones seemed a touch amused, as a form moved out of the darkness Remy has been moving towards. "Isn't this inconvenient."

Nathan took a step back, a shield coming up instinctively. The man that stepped forward, business-suited and bespectacled, was older, unremarkable-looking. But that was the surface, just the surface, and as Nathan's perceptions slipped downwards, unconsciously trying to identify what had just happened, what he was dealing with, he saw something impossible.

His power. His telekinesis, the lines of force and the patterns of energy as familiar to him as if he was looking in the mirror. But there was no mirror, just the other man, glowing with his power.

What the fuck... He snapped back into normal sight, and met the eyes behind the glasses. Black in the dimness, cold and amused and impossibly penetrating... and Nathan staggered as Askani suddenly screamed in the back of his mind, shrieked in something as close to outright hysteria as he'd ever heard from her.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his suit with great deliberation, pausing only to afford Nathan a slightly raised eyebrow as he pulled out a cellphone, the man shook his head slightly. "Acid and broken windows are rather unsubtle, are they not? Signs left behind for anyone to notice. Telekinesis is far more... effective for such things, wouldn't you say?" Tut tutting to himself at that, he reached down to pat his suit into place carefully, the phone still held in place on it's own. The telekenesis was used only in the barest of ways, the two pinprick points of energy holding it in midair visible to Nathan's senses.

"You're late. I was expecting you days ago."

The patterns spun dizzyingly in his mind, faster than they'd ever moved before, as if he was standing here and feeling the centuries ripple around him. Part of Nathan knew that he ought to be heading for the window now, reaching out to find Remy, to see if he'd caught the line on his way out, if he was...

But he couldn't move, couldn't do anything but stare, stare in frozen shock at this stranger with a shadow that stretched for two thousand years. "Who are you?" The words came out in a bare whisper. Askani was still screaming in his mind. Stars falling out of the sky on that interior beach.

Stones. Stone and pyramids and keys and battles and blood and hopelessness, all in his shadow. A black hole in the patterns, warping everything around it...

Eyes narrowing, the man observed him for a moment. "Ah. You don't need to know that just yet, I think," he finally murmured, light flickering next to him. The sound of the cellphone keys being dialed reached Nathan, belatedly, cutting through the fog dimly.

~911, how may I assist you?~

A click sounded to the right, the window sliding smoothly open. #I'd rather not have to break it again.# Even as the words echoed in the mindspace between them, a slight, dry smile was offered in Nathan's direction. "Hello. I'd like to report a break in. Yes, I found a window broken in one of the conference rooms..."

Nathan backed towards the window, never taking his eyes off the man. Expecting him? Days ago? Nathan shook his head doggedly, and the worst of the images fractured. But the shadow was still there, and Askani was... disturbingly silent, suddenly. That part of his mind was dark and it shouldn't have been. The wall was suddenly there at his back and he tried to make himself break eye contact, knowing he had to get down to Remy so that they could get out of here.

"New Mexico. You started in New Mexico," he said dazedly, and the shock of hearing himself say that, of the connection that had to be just coincidence, had to be, broke him out of the haze finally. He whirled and was through the open window in an instant, in a barely controlled fall.

Out of here. He had to get Remy, get out of here, away from him. Couldn't let the circle close yet.