Reroll

Ed goes first with the questions, “Let's start with the obvious: Who are you, who do you work for?”

Man this guy is scared… but that's the point… “Jayden… Jayden Jameson. I work for the Federal Bureau for the Preservation of Human Rights.”

I consider, “FBPHR? Hardly rolls off the tongue.  Why that?”

He shrugs, “Ah… not my department… but I think the point is that it's not exactly memorable and the acronym doesn't roll off the tongue.”

“Who's your boss?” Betty’s turn.

“The Director.”

“He have a name?” Ed seems annoyed.

“No,” I hold the grenade against the back of his neck, and he continues, “I mean that! Nothing I've been told. Some Corrupted can make use of names… I'm not the first to get captured, probably won't be the last… so my boss is just ‘The Director’ to me as a precaution.”  Well… he's not wrong.

Betty’s next, “Why kill the healer?”

He looks terrified, “Ah… keep in mind, it was orders….”

I caress the back of his neck with the grenade, “But I'm SURE you have some insight into your boss's reasons… and you do know how well ‘I was just following orders’ went as a defense at the Nuremberg trials, right?”

He audibly gulps, “She had to be stopped.  Sure, she sounds nice… but a lot of violent cults started that way. A light show, a few ‘miracles’ of The Corruption, and soon nobody questions the ‘obviously true prophet’ or whatever of whatever stupid superstition the locals have, and soon you have someone ordering executions just because no one will question their orders anymore.  We have a few dozen of those in the case files… none quite so prolific as that Bi…”

He pauses at the glares, “...beautiful example of a fine person.”

“What's ‘The Corruption’?” Ed has a good question there.

“Blanket term for the power that infects people.  Nobody knows where it ultimately comes from.”

“That's not very helpful…” I whisper in his ear.

“Ah… the power is always tied to stories,” he hurriedly adds, “There's always some legend or superstition that comes before the power.  There's never any nymphs waiting to drown men in the river until AFTER the stories of them start… and people vanish as the nymphs start to appear… because people become the legends.”

I ask something that's been bugging me, “Why avoid contact?”

“The Corruption is contagious,” he states simply, “The nymphs I mentioned only drowned about half the men they caught… the other half were converted into nymphs themselves. Poor souls trapped in the water, doomed to have an unending thirst to be seen and used by men. All Corruption works that way… some contaminate more easily than others, but all will do it.”

So we will eventually draw people into the game, huh? Could be worse. That aside… my next question: “Why haven't we heard much about what's going on at the college?”

“Some of it’s that most want to keep a lid on whatever their Corruption let's them do… but mostly that'd be the spinners,” he pauses, and I tap him with the cold metal in my hand, so he keeps going, “They have most of the news outlets under their thumb, and also manage social media sites…” he sighs, “But there's a limit to what they can do.”

“Speaking of the school…” Ed has his crafty voice out, “what do your bosses know about what's going on there?”

“Oh, that nest makes NO sense at all,” he shakes his head, “normally they're simple and straightforward: A tribe of ogres, a coven of witches, a gaggle of goblins… a lot of the same mythos, because that's how Corruption works.  This, though…” he shakes his head again.

“What have you encountered… I mean, besides us…” I float the grenade in front of his eyes.  Eugh, my hand is starting to cramp keeping it held like this.

He continues to sweat in the cool of the day, “We've collected or killed knights, witches, orcs, some kind of weak troll, vampires, werewolves… all those would be normal enough individually, but together?  Never happened before.  And then there’s the weird stuff.”

“What counts as weird for you?” Betty prompts.

“Well… what kind of old legends include computers merging with human flesh?  Lasers?  Jetpacks?  Cloning vats?” He closes his eyes and crinkles his forehead in frustration, “these just aren’t the Grimm’s Tales we’ve always had.  The eggheads are stumped… but they basically all die in a hail of gunfire, so we don’t need them too much for this nest, at least."

“What do ‘the eggheads’ normally do?” Ed’s up.

“Research,” he rolls his eyes, “the Corrupted are always… well, have been until now… shaped as old legends, and a lot of those have a single way to die.  Werewolves need silver, sure, everyone knows that… but how many know that a wendigo MUST have it’s heart removed and burned?  Heh… or that the undead beastie you’re facing even is a wendigo rather than a draugr that requires decapitation?  What flavor of wendigo?  The modern understanding is a mishmash of different tribal legends, the eggheads sort out which specific legend we’re facing, which is quite the ask: The old legends from which The Corruption takes form are often very local, and are seldom organized.  We have a starting point from WHERE we are and who lives there, but this nest is just…” he shakes his head again, “there’s no pattern.”

 “So why let some live?” I’m thinking of Bambi when I ask that.

He shrugs, “Some we literally can’t kill.  Some are useful.  Some are SO low contagion that it’s not really a problem if they play nice.”  This guy seems to know more than the last one, fortunately.

“You can measure how contagious a given example is?”  That one seems to make Ed extra curious.

“The labcoats can, yeah,” he shrugs, “I’ve no idea how they do it, but it seems to work.  Except for the vampires and wolves, the ones we’ve brought in from the college have all clocked in at almost zero on that score, fortunately… but that just makes it a bigger mystery where they come from.”

Betty’s feeling dense, apparently, “How’s that make it a mystery?”

He rolls his eyes, “Dumb bi…” and pauses as I press the grenade hard into his throat, “ah… right.  Well, they HAVE to be highly contagious, because that’s the only way to go from the first to large numbers.  But they’re barely contagious at all, so this kind of spread would require it have been around for centuries unnoticed… but it’s all too weird for THAT.  The labcoats are scratching their heads more than the eggheads.”

Hmm.  So nobody’s spilled about the contracts?  Interesting.  I wonder… “...” okay, yeah, that explains that.  I literally can’t tell him. That didn’t make any of the parchments… interesting.

“What are the guardians, exactly?” Ed’s changing the subject, which is fine.  Whatever we want to know is what we ask.

“No idea,” Betty glares at him, “No, really!  The labcoats cook them up.  They only work within a mile of a van, and someone’s gotta be inside, and each van only works with four.  They’ve been making them longer than I’ve been around… we’ve got pictures going back to about the sixties, and they haven’t changed since then.  Beastly strong, stupidly fast, and suicidally obedient, they make excellent foot soldiers, which is good, as it means the real people get to live.”

I don’t know if you’re ‘real people’ Jayden… “back to that ‘first’ thing.  How does this kind of thing generally start?”

“I don’t know. My job is to kill the stupid Corrupted before they murder more people.  The Labcoats get me the stuff I need to do it, the Eggheads tell me how, the Spinners keep the press out of my hair.  It starts with one.  I don’t know how that first ‘one’ happens.  Ask the Eggheads or the Labcoats.  I’m sure they’re willing to talk your ear off about their theories."

Hmm… he’s stopped sweating… talking back more… I think he’s close to running out of fear.

“Kind of.  He’s come to the conclusion that he’s going to die and he’d rather take you all with him,” my Sense Motive ‘Al’ tells me.

“Which is probably why he just twitched his left foot oddly,” my Perception ‘Al’ adds, “He triggered something.”

“Boom the man,” Ed jumps in using Shae, “he just knowingly signed his own death warrant, and is delaying us now… which means we have a minute or so… I’m thinking he activated a tracker in his shoe that calls in an airstrike or something.”

“I’ll cover our retreat…” Betty casts some illusions, “There… now he won’t know we’re leaving… probably.  Let’s get to the ‘car’.”

“See you there…” my semi-intelligent animal companion goes with my two real companions over to the car, and I quietly slip the travel pin back in the grenade, drop it to let it go back to the nothingness from whence it came, and move away.

I possess my animal companion, and we calmly drive off as Betty changes the look of the car. We're a good three blocks away when the boom shatters all the windows around us.  Real world explosives aren't nearly as precise as those in games.