[IC] The Call to Infinity

Pulling up the information, the remnants of Switchblade's vital fluids run cold.

The shipments are the same. The materials are the same. Each identical shipment, each traveling from the KEYstation port to the power plant, listed priority. Your background in cybernetics is more removed, but you know enough about materials engineering to know that the stuff they're shipping is dangerous. Explosive dangerous. Wasn't there a history holo about the catastrophe at Bluhte, and the original gate in orbit that exploded and vaporized most of the home world due to the misuse of this stuff?

And now they're shipping more of the stuff here, to the original destination gate. Orders of magnitude more material.

Overhead, a faint whine of the siren is followed by the roaring thunder of Leviath prowlers screaming over the pavement towards their destination.

---

Meanwhile, in Hephaestus Ceramics, as Dell and Dr. Ava pass by a fabric vendor in the market, a small device hooked onto their tent begins to beep rapidly. Suddenly, many other such devices start chiming together in unison. People stop in their tracks. Eyes widen. Immediately, people start to hurry away. Merchants close up shop. Doors close. The air tenses. These people are barely containing a kind of panic as the empty from the open streets.

What do you do?

As Switchblade and Ulysses discuss their next steps, there's a sudden splash from the now open door to the bathroom. At first an arm, then a head pops up from the hole to the sewer line - the intolerable smell ripens. The person starts to haul themselves out of the hole before they see the station is occupied. Naked shock freezes their face, enough for you to recognize him even as soaked as he is in sewage and clearly much older than his picture.

It's Hans DeVie - Konbanwa himself.

Just as quickly, the frozen moment thaws. He dives back down the hole with a loud splash, and you hear hurried sloshing just above the drone of the running water.

---

The synchronized chime of the alarms start to give way to the distant, approaching wail of sirens. Unseen dogs begin to bark wildly at the high-pitched screech. It will be no time at all until the Leviath forces come down on this area.

What do you do?

Rank water splashes up Ulysses' trousers as he lands. Filth and frigidity foul the air in the sewer pipe, nearly overwhelming as the darkness resolves into a dim, low tunnel. Ahead, a figure shuffles quickly. Though he has to hunch to move, Ulysses hurries after him, his head mere centimeters from the concrete arc overhead.

---

With no visible vehicles in sight from the now deserted plaza, the two identified fugitives pick the easiest answer to hand - an alley in the opposite direction of the approaching sirens and the howls of hounds on alert. It's a tight street starting down a ramshackle descent of several stairs before twisting into the shape of a trail through leaning buildings, midnight diners, and hung lanterns swarming with flies. Stories above you clatter with the sound of closing shutters; lights douse; crying children silence. The entire block must know what it means for the Leviath forces to arrive. How far had some of them come to escape issues like this?

The lane finished with another stumble of stairs before emptying out into an intersection further north of the former ceramic factory and the home of the fighting Novas - a stretch of street soon to be part of the incoming Leviath perimeter, if you had to guess, but clear for the moment. Across the street ahead of you, the remains of a corner cafe slouches towards the corner, its insides partially spilled out onto the pavement - tables, chairs, broken glass. You can barely see the window into the back kitchen from where you stand. Adjacent to the restaurant other shorter grade abandoned businesses stretch off - a game hall, a salon, the burned out wreckage of a chrome-doc.
On the other side of the intersection from the restaurant, low glass windows make up the bottom wall of a building block, most of them completely shattered. A faded plastic shingle above the corner door is also mostly smashed, but the winding remains of a neon sign within are still enough intact to read its intended message: Hydroponics.
Stacked above all of the businesses, anonymous faces of capsule abodes diminish into the darkness.

What do you do?