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NAMT Headquarters, Governors Island
For the hard pressed officers of the National Anti-Metahuman Taskforce, the Headquarters building on Governors Island was one of the few places you could relax. The place was a fortress, enough that no Metahuman who was even remotely sane would try an assault on it. The place was built to withstand a nuclear attack, had motion sensors and auto-turrets covering all the approaches and all the exterior walls were lined with lead – nobody was going to be phasing through those in a hurry. To top that all off, if, by some amazing chance a meta-human did manage to get into the building, the halls were all monitored by cameras with blast doors that could be dropped at a moment’s notice to neutralise the threat. All that and it didn’t have a half-bad view of the city.
This morning was set to begin with John Mortlock’s regular briefing. He was a figure most Taskforce Agents were familiar with, a man from before they had had the gear to fight the meta-humans toe-to-toe, when battles were asymmetric and the slightest mistake could lead to huge casualties amongst the police force. Some people viewed him as a relic of a bygone age, though others found his information useful… even if often irritatingly incomplete.
Today, along with the usual pot of coffee stewing in the corner, Mortlock had some images projected onto the screen behind him. One was a black and white and somewhat blurry image of a woman that looked like it had been taken from a traffic camera. Blurry as it was though, some of the team would recognise her, she had been one of their number ten years ago: Zara Delic – now working for Sanctuary.
The next two images looked to be of the same thing. One was a big chalk circle drawn on a wall, inside which was drawn an intricately detailed picture of a tree. The bottom right corner of the circle had a burn mark bisecting it… which was a dead giveaway for a portal created by the metahuman known as Kaleidoscope. Below it, Mortlock was displaying what looked like a blown-up, faded polaroid of a young couple (the man had a moustache that would have made Tom Selleck proud) in front of what looked like the same tree as the one in the chalk drawing. A bit smaller, yes, but the branch structure was the same.
Mortlock was looking just a little bit pleased with himself today, “Come in everyone, pour yourself a coffee and have a seat. I think I might be onto something big.”
Sanctuary Safehouse, Lower East Side
On the outside the place looked like a camera repair and film development shop and it was about as busy as one would expect given that only a few artistically minded people still used film cameras. Even they would give this place a wide berth; it looked like it hadn’t been dusted in about 20 years, smelt like mould and was operated by a decrepit old man who seemed to be completely deaf… unless you happed to slip the words ‘pole combination’ into a sentence (somehow) at which point he would climb slowly from his stool and usher you into the back room.
The back room was nothing to do with cameras. It had a number of camping beds set up in one corner and a large table, surrounded by chairs across from them. At the far end of the room a trap door went down into… tunnels. There were enough abandoned tunnels under New York that an enterprising group of people with the right skills and equipment could build a network under the city and Sanctuary just happened to be an enterprising group of people with the right skills, equipment and inclination. The network stretched for miles. Most of it was hidden, in passages long abandoned, though it did cross subway lines, sewers and other maintenance tunnels at points, connecting the scattered Safehouses like a vast root system. So far, neither the police nor Vanguard were aware of what Sanctuary were up to. One day they would probably discover the system but until then it served as an essential way of making hunted metahumans disappear from the omnipresent surveillance systems around the city.
Today the agents operating in the city had been called together by Nightjar. She had arrived first, parking her boots, along with a disturbing array of guns and knives on the table, leaning back in her chair in a way that made it look like she might tip herself ungracefully onto the floor at any moment. It would be a surprise if she did. She was pretty coordinated… for a human, “Hello! Hello!” she greeted people as they came in. Most of Sanctuary in the area would be familiar with Delic by now. She didn’t call the shots, but she was very good at getting the information that would help the people in charge to do that.
“Once Jake gets here we can get started.” She announced. Even after years in the country she still sounded Eastern European.
Vanguard Safehouse, Upstate New York
Off a lonely road in Upstate New York there was a house. Nothing particularly remarkable, just a family farmhouse cut off from the world. In the spring the field out the front bloomed full of daffodils, while the forest had crept right up to the back door.
It was pretty normal on the inside as well, unless you looked into the bedrooms. Those looked an awful lot like barracks, with steel framed bunk beds and big metal chests in place of the more homely furniture one might have expected. The laundry was a little odd as well. Yes, there was a washing machine, but most laundries did not have quite so many gun racks or any of the more exotic weapons of death and mayhem that this house had. There seemed to be everything in here from swords to antimaterial rifles to plastic explosives.
Most houses also didn’t have motion detecting cameras on the perimeter or a bank of security screens in a small room next to the upstairs bathroom…
The location of the property was convenient for Vanguard for two reasons. The isolation was the first and most obvious, though the forest out back also made for a convenient place to train or approach from if you wanted to avoid the eyes of drones and satellites.
On this particular morning, there was a rather pleasant smell of bacon wafting up from the kitchen area. This was a pretty good sign that Kaleidoscope was back. Many in Vanguard saw her as something of a loose cannon; yes, she fought hard when called upon, but she was the kind of person who would happily sit down for coffee with someone Vanguard had put a bounty on, share an amusing anecdote and then carry on her merry way again. Though no matter her questionable associations, she was very good at producing actionable intelligence. She also wasn’t above bribing people with food. Cooking breakfast suggested she probably had something big… and it was probably something that was going to put everyone’s lives in danger.
