Kapitel 25: Record scratch (Pt 2)

Both Lily and Alice had both mostly lost their appetite, but it still wasn't the type of world where you could waste food and not feel awful about yourself about it, so they quickly ate breakfast anyway and repacked their tent.

Alice asked Lily as they finished searching the dead cannibals for anything useful, of which they had almost nothing, "So, what does the word Golgotha mean anyway, Dr St. Claire?"

Lily hummed as they walked side by side slowly back to the hospital, "It is a name of a place, not a word, precisely. Where a supposed god was killed... or inconvenienced for a few days, depending on your belief." She changed her tone to the one she affected when she quoted someone: "When they came to the place called Golgotha, they crucified him there, along with the criminals."

She then coughed and continued, "I did not bring any books back from the library about proto-European religious mythologies. Although the place may or may not have actually existed somewhere in the Levant, I have serious doubts about both the existence and divinity of the man allegedly crucified there."

Lily turned to face Alice seriously, "It is important for any lettered person to understand myths, especially the process of formation of them -- but if you have a particular interest in the divine, my recommendation is to become a god yourself. It's all a matter of perspective and knowledge -- any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from miracles."

Alice smirked, "That's really arrogant, Dr St. Claire! Is that your goal, godhood?"

Lily chuckled and tried her best to sound mysterious, "If everyone is a god, then nobody is a god." Internally, she smirked, 'Nobody has seen The Incredibles in this universe, so that probably sounded really profound. It's good to keep the Apprentice thinking we are wise.'

Returning to the hospital, they briefly retraced their steps from yesterday just to ensure they hadn't missed anything. Lily took about ten minutes to completely disconnect the best Auto-Doc from its power, water and other connections so that the people she hired could just slide it out without using any tools or accidentally break something in the attempt to free it.

"Alright, let's be about it, Apprentice. There's likely more ghouls upstairs," Lily warned the girl to get her game face on.

However, when they got to the staircase, they discovered both stairs up and down. Humming in thought, Lily nodded, "Change of plans; we'll check the basement first. Let's leave the mule up here."

They were in full skulk mode, with Lily warning Alice not to shriek in alarm this time if they saw ghouls. Lily had her silenced pistol out, 'I should get a silencer and some subsonic ammo for the Apprentice if she is also going to be tag skilling Sneaking, I suppose. She seems better at it than I do, almost.'

The basement door was locked, to Lily's annoyance. She was about to laser the hinges off when Alice surprised her by being able to pick the lock quite quickly. Lily just raised an eyebrow, like Spock, at the girl who merely shrugged.

As soon as they opened the door inwards, there was a feral ghoul; it was in the process of turning to face them, so Lily popped it in the head twice with two relatively quiet *chuffs*. The working of the action on the pistol was the loudest part of firing the gun, and it sounded like a Swingline stapler.

Lily wondered if there was actually a sneak damage multiplier because the first shot may have killed the ghoul, but the second shot, which blew half the head off, certainly did. Alice did whisper a quiet, "Eww," but Lily did not scold her because she almost said the same thing too.

In the hall was another ghoul pacing away from them. Lily handed her pistol to Alice and nodded towards it. The girl apparently wasn't confident enough to try for a headshot, so she put two quick shots into its back, very close to its heart. It was likely, a fatal wound but not fast enough to stop it from roaring in pain and confusion.

Standing up from her crouch, she unslung her laser rifle and nudged Alice with her thigh, "Go loud, now." Alice nodded, quickly thumbing the pistol safety before shoving it casually in the small bag she carried her first aid equipment in before unslinging her carbine.

Two Bright Ones this time and three regular ghouls coming out of three rooms made the hallway pretty crowded pretty quickly. However, Lily didn't waste any time, sending lasers blasting into the closest Bright One, quickly followed by a long burst of five or six rounds from Alice, which put the radioactive ghoul on the ground.

Lily realized that she wasn't even slightly afraid of these enemies. Was that overconfidence? She didn't quite think so. Their armour, while not full coverage, was quite resistant to slashing attacks, although less so for blunt force damage. She even had time to complain to her Apprentice, "Shorter bursts! Aimed short bursts!"

She really needed to find this girl another laser rifle. Ironically enough, recharging energy cells was much easier than finding 5mm ammunition. Plus, then they would match.

She was taking only slow aimed shots at the last Bright One, aiming only for headshots now as practice, and although she missed about every two out of three shots, it only took two solid hits to put the glowing ghoul on the ground.

Alice had dropped one of the regular ghouls and severely injured a second one when she ran out of ammo. She froze, trying to decide what to do. Lily internally shook her head at the display before yelling, "Switch to your pistol! CQB!"

Alice then dropped her carbine, which fell to sling to her side, and she made a pretty good show of pulling her pistol from her holster and firing about four times from retention into the injured ghoul, killing it. She kept backing up to put some space between her and the last ghoul.

Something came over Lily, and she decided, for some reason, to pull her knife out and throw it at the ghoul. She had not practised throwing knives at all. Not even once. She threw it in an overhand, end-over-end throw that looked cool as hell. Except not only did she not know how to properly throw a knife, but she also did not really know how to build a knife balanced for throwing either. She had been counting on her peak human proprioception, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness.

And she was accurate! The knife hit the ghoul directly between the eyes, except it hit solidly hilt-first. The ghoul seemed the most confused; it even rubbed its forehead slightly, pausing its charge. Lily shot it four times while it was confused at what hit its head. Alice was giving her serious side-eye, and Lily could see the girl's lips twitching upwards!

"Nice uhh distraction, Dr St. Claire! Are you sure these ghouls are really completely feral? I'd swear that one said, 'Owe'," Alice tittered and pantomimed, rubbing her forehead as the ghoul had.

Privately, Lily thought it said something like that too when the knife hit its forehead but would never, ever admit it. She ordered the girl solemnly, "We never speak of this again." To which Alice nodded, except her solemnity was betrayed by the stupid grin she had on her face.

'Okay, maybe I was a little overconfident. I guess throwing a knife is harder than it looks in movies,' Lily thought while policing up her knife and dragging the two glowing ghouls out of the way in one of the broom closets.

"There doesn't seem much interesting here, Dr St. Claire. Maintenance areas, laundries, kitchens..." Alice commented as they explored the rooms one at a time.

Lily was about to agree with her, but in the last laundry, she found gold! At first, she wasn't quite sure what she was looking at, except it was a large machine that was about the size of a large stand-up office printer of her old life. After a few minutes of examining it, she realized what she was looking at, "Oh! This is an Auto-Tailor!"

Alice asked, "Auto... Tailor? It makes clothes?"

Lily nodded excitedly. "I have wanted one of these for some time! It even includes the cloth recycler attachment. I bet they would produce their own scrubs, hospital gowns and such and recycle them with these types of machines and only used the laundry for the linens or clothes this couldn't produce."

Lily looked at it sadly, "It is too big for us to take back ourselves, but this is going to be Priority 1 instead of that Auto-Doc upstairs." She started rummaging through the drawers and cabinets nearby the device until she found a whole box full of holotapes, "Here! Here are the outfits it can make. Scrubs of various sizes and colours, hospital gowns, ooh, lab coats. Hmm, that's it."

Lily carefully stacked all the accessories and holotapes with the machine, "Alright, let's head to the second floor now."

The second floor was split between ICUs, private rooms and offices. Surprisingly, all the ghouls up there were missing. She noted a possible mobile x-ray machine that could be carted off and a PET scanner, but the PET was so big that it would take a crane and demolishing one of the walls to free it from the hospital, so she considered it a long-term project, if anything. Honestly, PET scanners were pretty low-tech and a niche medical technology anyway, and she might be able to build a compact MRI machine since she had access to room-temperature superconductors.

In the offices, she hacked several terminals and read through the hospital executives' e-mails. Most were of little interest, but two were of incredible interest.

FROM: R. Helweg, CEO

TO: All Management

SUBJECT: Fourth floor

As a reminder, all unauthorized access to the fourth floor is restricted to only those clinicians required to meet our KPIs to the DoD. The Department of Defense has contracted with Saint Mary's to offer convalescent care for service members involved with PROJECT PHOENIX and PROJECT NEMEAN LION.

We've also signed a lucrative contract to store certain sensitive materials for Vault-Tec, which will be referred to as PROJECT [REDACTED].

Security officers should triple-check IDs and provide continuous escort to all Vault-Tec employees picking up [REDACTED] material.

FROM: J Mellott, SVP Patient Care

TO: Dr M. Peerson, PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

SUBJECT: Re: PHOENIX devices

>My department has recovered over two dozen project PHOENIX devices during routine post-mortem forensic pathological examinations these past six months.

>What do you want us to do with them?

>The DoD won't take them back since they're used goods, but it seems like a waste to incinerate them like current protocols demand.

Dave, it really was a waste for the Army to pick terminally ill patients for these tests. The project PHOENIX devices can't cure stage 4 cancer! But the DoD is paying our bills, and they have the whip hand.

Ignore protocol and don't trash them; sterilize them and keep them in the level four secure storage room. Just keep them well away from the [REDACTED] material. We don't want to have anything to do with that shit anyway; we're just holding it for Vault-Tec temporarily. They're supposed to come to take it for their already running [REDACTED] project in Vault [REDACTED] next Tuesday.

Still on for the game on Friday? I need a chance to win back some of my money!

-John

'Well, if that isn't interesting. There was only one Vault experiment in DC that started before the bombs dropped that would have needed storage only a hospital could provide. The Experimental Evolution Program in Vault 87... or was it the Evolutionary Experimental Program? Whichever...,' Lily mused.

Lily did not recognize any of the other special projects, but the code names were certainly evocative, and the second e-mail seemed to imply that cancer was beyond the ability of a PHOENIX device to heal, which seemed to imply that there were other things that it could heal.

And the Nemean Lion was a famous mythological creature who had fur that was immune to most mortal weapons; it was a real pain for Hercules to kill if she recalled. Lily hummed, 'Didn't he strangle it? Or was it that he drowned it?' Could these projects be a healing implant like her medichines and dermal armour, perhaps?

If these were Fallout cybernetics, she was very interested -- and, she had to admit, kind of horrified -- to see them. She doubted, very, very much, that she would be too impressed with them, but at the same time, it was important to understand and emulate the state of the art if she intended to sell her products to the public.

Getting a sample of FEV would be very nice as well, assuming that was what the mysterious EEP material was. Lily wondered what else it could be if not FEV samples being shipped to the Vault. The only thing she could think of was, possibly, medical equipment, which would be a coup if she could acquire also.

While she did not strictly speaking need FEV for any reason, it would be quite useful and interesting to have a sample of the pure strain that created the Captial Wasteland's branch of Super-Mutants. She would just have to be very careful and cagey about it. The Brotherhood did not really tolerate scientists studying FEV.

It sounded like an insane and borderline impossibility to reverse a Super Mutant transformation, but it might theoretically be possible. Or at least it might be possible to transform a Super-Mutant entity back to a human, even if it wasn't strictly speaking the exact same human the Super-Mutant had been before.

She had no doubt that Elder Lyons would accept the fruits of FEV research if it was research on how to reverse a Super Mutant transformation. Super Mutants were his white whale, almost.

Theoretically, they could put such a cure in Project Purity like President Eden was hoping to do with the lethal strain of FEV, although Lily did not know if her ethics would permit her to do so without more universal testing than she could ever accomplish.

The odds that the Capital Wasteland would become a net water exporter if Project Purity was activated approached unity. There was just no way to test such a hypothetical counter-virus on every Super Mutant and human strain in the Wastelands. But, even if that possibility were foreclosed, it would still be quite useful.

But the question was, was the fourth floor a death trap? She definitely wouldn't be taking Alice up there with her.

Nodding, she decided she would risk it, but cautiously. From the CEO's e-mail, it sounded like while they restricted entry to the fourth floor, they still had ordinary employees working up there, so it wasn't likely to be a death trap filled with auto-turrets and Sentry Bots.

"Alright. Let's clear the third floor; then I will search the fourth floor by myself. It might be too hazardous to bring you up there. Even I will be very, very careful up there," Lily said, although Alice looked like she wanted to mutiny at the idea.

The third floor had its ghoul population intact, and they methodically moved through and eliminated them. Lily was happy to see that Alice was no longer as afraid and used small two or three-round bursts or even single-aimed shots on the ghouls now. This trip was a success on just that metric alone, Lily felt.

"Okay, search through this floor for anything valuable or interesting and then let us meet on the ground floor where we left the mulebot in an hour or hour and a half," Lily ordered.

Lily left the girl to her scavenging and ascended the stairs to the top floor. This door was locked but with a terminal. Lily booted up the screen and then tilted her head to the side. She was about to start hacking it, but... "Surely, no. Surely, Missy didn't mean every door in the hospital had the same code."

Carefully, Lily typed in 91177# in the Numpad, which caused a dim green light to flash and generated a loud clicking noise as the door unlocked.

"Well... thanks, Missy," said Lily as she opened the door.

Lily was as careful as she was on the first day when she cleared the female dormitory in Vault 108, peering around each corner and carefully scanning each dim area and all the ceilings for deadly traps and deadly robots.

Although there were unusual panels on the ceilings in regular intervals, they did not appear to be auto-turret emplacements. Lily thought they might be vents or NBC filters installed in the ventilation system.

The top floor was set up with about three quarters as wards and the rest being offices, presumably for the DoD personnel involved. There were a number of skeletons lying in bed, which indicated that they hadn't survived the bombs falling.

She immediately noticed some anomalies on most of the skeletons. They had what appeared to be thin armoured plates fused in the rib cage. Clucking her tongue, she scanned the formations and muttered, "If this is the glory of the Nemean lion, then I am not impressed."

She did notice that almost all of the dead skeletons had this modification, and there was no sign of the other project phoenix patients. Could that modification be complete bioware, and it degraded? 'No, the coroner said he recovered intact devices. More likely, this project Phoenix was actually effective and gave the subjects a significant survival advantage over the Nemean subjects.'

Leaving the wards, Lily found a locked security door, wholly made out of steel, "Could you be the secure storage I have been looking for?" Lily examined the door for a couple of minutes but couldn't see an obvious way to open it.

No matter. Lily had played enough Fallout games to know that just meant she needed to find some terminal or similar gimmick to open the door. Even though this Universe was clearly real, some things did not change. She skulked into the office areas and thoroughly searched them.

These terminals, compared to the ones downstairs, were almost universally interesting. Not only did it contain detailed patient records on all of their test subjects, but it even contained engineering drawings, user manuals and detailed design documents for both the Nemean sub-dermal armour and the PHOENIX monocyte breeder system.

Lily used a couple of blank holotapes to download the entire archive to take away with her as she read briefly about these project phoenix devices. She was a little sad to discover that they weren't medichine hives like her own healing system... but... honestly, they were not TOO far off, either. They were physical, mechanical devices that produced artificial blood cells, stem cells and platelets. What were human cells, if not excessively large and unorganized organic nanomachines, after all?

The system designers claimed that the device would give a user a slight healing factor, which certainly seemed to be borne out by the patient records of their test subjects.

Shaking her head, Lily once again got a sense of profound confusion. The duality of this universe was so odd to her. On the one hand, you had something as barbaric as grafting combat plates onto a human's skeleton, and on the other hand, you had a device that actually wouldn't be that out of place in her memories.

The PHOENIX monocyte breeder and Lily was unsure why it was called that aside from the fact that it sounded cool. The device wasn't as sophisticated as something she could design, but Lily wasn't willing to call it primitive, either.

And the way the people in this universe treated these two things? As if they were equivalent high technology! Shaking her head, she stored the holotapes she had copied their archives onto in her bag and continued the search.

In the corner, sequestered by itself, Lily finally found what she was looking for. It was a security office, and Lily could already see a faintly glowing terminal that Lily hoped would unlock the secure storage.

Opening a metal locker, Lily couldn't help herself and shouted, "Score!"

It was a weapons locker, and inside were four mint-condition-looking laser pistols. There were indentations for a similar number of laser rifles, but they were empty. Lily started to complain, "Where's the rifles, huh??"

But thinking about it, she calmed down. She was already beyond fortunate to receive these. There probably were never any laser rifles assigned to this post in the first place, and they just used standardized lockers.

Lily was happy with her find, 'Once I refurbish these babies, I'll give one to Apprentice. Then we'll be blue beam buddies!'

She carefully transferred the weapons to her bag before booting up the terminal. This terminal she did have to hack, but it wasn't that difficult to work through the security. It had been the collective work of two hundred years to find security vulnerabilities in even the latest version of RobCo's OS, and it wasn't like they had OTA patching still going on, so all the same exploits tended to always work, just varying on which version of the OS you were up against.

The system was barely functioning; the only option she could see was to unlock the magnetically locked door, which she selected.

Lily retraced her steps and found the previously locked door now unlocked. Normally with her healthy knowledge of horror films, she would be a little paranoid about stepping into a room that might lock behind her, but she noticed all the magnetic locking mechanisms were plainly visible on the inside of the door, and it wouldn't be the work of more than two minutes to disconnect them from power to open the door even if it mysteriously closed and locked her in.

Inside the storage room, the walls were secure steel bars in front of drywall, so it wouldn't have been an option to just kick through the drywall to get in, Lily noted.

On one side of the room, there were about two dozen metallic briefcases. Similar to the famous Halliburton style aluminium briefcases that always seemed to be used in films and TV shows as a MacGuffin. Was she looking at a real-life MacGuffin now? Each of them had a Vault-Tec logo embossed onto them, too.

Ignoring those for now, Lily walked to the other side of the room, where she found a small crate, 'If those briefcases are the EEP material, then this crate has to have the phoenix devices.'

Opening the crate, she found almost thirty small metallic devices packaged in thin clear plastic bags. Lily smirked, "I'll be taking you guys." The crate was barely full, so she didn't even consider taking it with her. Instead, she carefully unloaded it and put all the devices in her backpack, which was mostly empty in the first place since most of her gear was downstairs.

Turning, she approached the briefcases. She took one out of the rack and laid it on a small table in the room. It wasn't locked, surprisingly, so she just clicked it open. Instead of finding a glowing light like in Pulp Fiction, she found three dozen vials, packed carefully in foam and filled with an ambiguously green liquid, each labelled "FEV-Milton-271."

Letting go a sigh, she quickly closed the briefcase. She stared at the other briefcases, wondering what she should do with them.

Nothing. She would need to hire a merc team that she could trust wouldn't try to poke around on the top floor of this hospital while bringing her the AutoDoc and AutoTailor. It helped that it was locked with a pretty sophisticated lock, even if the code was not sophisticated at all, she supposed.

With a blush, she wondered briefly where Grace's Grenadiers were. It wouldn't be just an excuse to see her, either!

With the terminal on this side of the door, she configured the door to lock behind her and took her briefcase full of viruses with her out of the door.

Almost instantly, she heard a deep klaxon of an alarm and could see a flashing light on those strange ceiling panels.

Lily panicked, 'Fuck! There was some kind of sensor on the door and probably is some kind of near-field communication device in these fucking briefcases, or something ridiculous like that!'

She glanced at those ceiling panels. Were they going to fold out into automatic heavy machine guns?! She shifted the briefcase to her left hand and pulled her laser pistol out of her holster, and aimed at the nearest panel.

She got her answer very rapidly. It wasn't auto-turrets, at least. But the panel slid open and weaponized eyebots fell out of the ceiling.

Well, Lily assumed they were weaponized. She didn't give the one she was staring at a chance to shoot her to find out definitively. She filled it full of holes while it was still hovering down from the roof, causing it to fall and crash to the ground in a shower of sparks.

Some danger sense she did not realize she had pinged her, and she moved to the side in a rush. Almost simultaneously and from behind her in the secure storage room, a red laser beam filled the area of space where her torso just used to be. "Fucker!" she yelled and slammed the door closed that led to the storage area and started a flat-out run.

Her spatial awareness was quite good. She knew where she was in relation to the mental map she had made of this floor, and she did not think she could make it all the way to the stairs and probably safety. There were over twelve panels in the ceilings if she followed that route. Eyebots were fragile, as she had just proved, but there was no way she could fight through thirteen floating laser bots.

If she had Power Armour, she wouldn't have thought twice about it and would have rushed the stairs or even just systematically hunted the eyebots. But, she had customized her own armour with significant amounts of graphene, carbon fibre and diamondoid plates. All of which burn at relatively low temperatures, to say nothing about the temperatures a combat laser can produce, so she is at significant risk from all energy weapons at present.

But there were windows in the patient wards, and in the closest room, she would only have to pass two ceiling panels. She felt a lot better about the potential to survive a four-story fall than about staying put right now.

Turning the corner at a flat sprint, a red laser beam flashed over her head. She didn't understand. Certainly, eyebots weren't designed specifically to be security bots but why would a combat robot fire its weapon if it was going to miss?

Were the spatial combat algorithms so poor in the Fallout universe? She knew precisely how much computing power the quantum core of an Eyebot had, and at this range, every shot should be a guaranteed hit, no matter how fast or unpredictable Lily zigged or zagged.

She decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth; she fired two blue beams at the eyebot, hitting with one and causing it to wobble back and forth before blowing past it.

The second eyebot did not miss, however, and she took a glancing hit from its beam weapon on her left shoulder and arm. Grimacing in pain, she shot the bot three times in its smug-looking face, sending it to the ground while she continued to move towards the patient ward. Her fingers still worked, clenching the briefcase of FEV, so the damage couldn't be too serious.

One-on-one, the Eyebots were dangerous but did not seem to be an existential threat, but if they could swarm her, even three would kill her in an instant.

Kicking the door to the patient room open at a run, she raised her laser pistol and started firing beams as quickly as the weapon could discharge at the intact window. In her peripheral vision, she could see two Eyebots turn the corner and float down the hallway toward her, and she saw the flash of a red laser beam miss her as she ran into the patient room.

Lily didn't even slow down; if anything, she dropped into a dead sprint and, at the last moment, leapt at the weakened window, boots first.

She crashed through it quite cinematically, she thought and had the momentary feeling of Wiley Coyote, Super Genius, as he ran off the cliff before beginning her own plummet to the ground.

In life and death situations, her own perception of time did slow considerably. As she was falling through the air, staring at the rough-looking ground three stories below her, Lily was momentarily reminded of a trope in American films in the early to mid-2000s where the film would begin by showing something horrible happening to the main character; for example, she could be falling three stories, and then with a record scratch sound effect the film would pause, and the character's voice would be dubbed over along with some cheery music, saying something along the lines of, "Yeah, that's me! You're probably wondering how I got into the position where I am falling three stories through the air!"

But, life was stranger than fiction sometimes. As she passed the third floor, she locked eyes with her Apprentice through one of the windows, who had a look of slack-jawed shock.

Lily did not have enough time to laugh, but that was really funny. However, she did have enough time to consider how best to handle this briefcase of potentially fragile vials of concentrated FEV.

If she did not have her medichines, she would have tossed it away as even one vial smashing might prove enough to turn her into a stupid brute, but she was actually fairly confident in her body's ability to fight it off, as long as she didn't mainline the stuff or skinny dip in a vat of it she should be fine. However, she hugged the briefcase to her chest to try to shield it as much as possible.

In the past, she had asked her Apprentice how she might have improved the skeletal structure of a human's feet and legs. The answer she was hoping the Apprentice would give was beyond the obvious strengthing of materials was to build in shock absorption. Flats could die from a sudden deceleration of as few as 50Gs, which Lily thought was insanely fragile.

While she wasn't in a position to solve the underlying cause of such fragility, she could built-in shock absorbers in her legs that would allow her to spread the deceleration of a fall over a longer period of time, which could save her life. Both her femurs could contract briefly, like a spring or an air piston. Since Lily had, of course, played Portal in her past life, she called them her Long Fall Legs.

'Still, this is going to hurt,' thought Lily as the ground approached her. Rather than immediately take the fall in a roll, which would undoubtedly break a number of her bones that weren't made of diamond, she took it full on her legs until she felt them contract to the maximum, then she threw herself forwards in a roll to convert all that downwards momentum into horizontal momentum.

Grunting in pain, she completed two complete rolls before she came to a stop on her back. She just stared at the sky briefly, slowly taking in air after having the wind knocked out of her.

Wiping away the tears at the corner of her eyes before anyone could see them, she took stock of herself. She momentarily set the briefcase of FEV aside and palpated her hips. Her acetabulum didn't appear to be fractured, which was her greatest fear in this insane leap of faith. While her femurs were diamond, her hips certainly weren't -- yet, anyway. While she had attempted to design sponginess into the interface of the femur and her hip joint specifically for this contingency, you never knew if it would be enough.

It wasn't fractured, but it was certainly bruised. Lily sighed, 'It's going to be a bitch walking home. Maybe it will be fine to turn off my sense of pain, but then again, that is quite dangerous on a hike in the desert, too. Maybe just take some of those Percocet-equivalents?'

She sat up and grabbed the briefcase, and laid it on the ground. Rather than opening it, she grabbed her scanner from her messenger bag and scanned its interior from the outside.

Peering at the scan results, Lily sighed in relief. None of the vials, which appeared actually to be made of sapphire, were fractured. She was lucky.

She just sat there for a moment, relaxing and staring quietly murderous dagger-eyes at the fourth-floor windows.

She heard the Apprentice girl screaming, "MISTRESS!! Are you okay?!"

Lily stopped plotting her vengeance on the fourth floor to look down at Alice flat-out running towards her. As the girl got closer, Lily could see her eyes were puffy with shed tears, 'Aww.'

Lily sighed theatrically, "I'm fine, Apprentice. Go back and get the mulebot; let's go home. I'll tell you about it on the way. And bring me two of the painkillers and some water when you come back."