Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 84: Darkness Revealed

Isaac had been sitting in the lobby, tapping away on his phone, while the rest of the team was giving witness statements to Habicht. They’d already done so to the local department, but GSG-13 had its own questions.

What had once been intended to be just a tactical unit had acquired a few additional responsibilities and the people to do those things. They were still going to be primarily a tactical unit, but it was easier to grab a handful of personnel from various units and stick them together than it was to create an entirely new branch of law enforcement.

That would have to happen sooner or later, but even if the government had been working on that since the very beginning, throwing every scrap of its considerable might behind the effort, an organization that size took time to create. And until that was achieved, stopgap solutions like a strike team with an expanded degree area of responsibility.

And then, after listening to five different versions of the exact same tale, one after another, followed by several thorough additional questions, he got the call he’d been waiting for.

“So, this thing was buried deep, those letters should really be sorted properly or digitalized, but I found it. There were a bunch of letters out of California, only one of them was obviously rude, but I decided to pull them all, just in case.” Khaled announced, rattling of a whole list of names and associated universities, one of which belonged to a certain Professor Webber, who worked out of Los Angeles.

“Shit.” Isaac said softly “Alright, great work Khaled, could you scan that letter and send it to me, then research Professor Webber’s work with the [System] to date and email me that was well?”

“Sure thing.” Khaled said and hung up.

Well, that was one hypothesis that was looking more and more probable. Sure, the presence of a possible target in a city which was then attacked with a method consistent with the Systemers’ single modus operandi as ascertained from a single incident wasn’t that damning, but it was a step in the right direction.

And investigating that incident was the United States’ various alphabet soup agencies’ highest priority and the unknown perpetrator had been on the FBI’s most wanted list since two hours after the Stormheart Gestalt had been summoned.

His phone dinged, indicating that he’d received an email. It was a new account, one meant solely for intra-university communication, as his old account was, in a word, overflowing with job offers, even more so after that [Aura] instruction booklet had been published. It was a digital scan of the letter, along with a link to one of Professor Webber’s published ‘papers’. It wasn’t a full paper, but rather a stub that had been published a week after the incident with the Gestalt as a way to make all the research gathered to date available as Webber would be unable to complete it with the bias against summoning related research.

It was surprisingly good and thorough, not on the same level as what Bailey had already published at that point, but Isaac had been nudging that along. The fact that Webber had gotten so damn far with so little to go on was nothing short of astonishing.

But in the other timeline, Webber hadn’t become famous and other than dumping all of his gathered information out for all the world to use, he’d dropped off the face of the Earth in this one, so he’d probably left this field of research completely. What a fucking waste.

For a brief moment, Isaac felt the impulse to run over to Bailey to suggest he try and hire Webber, somehow, to rescue him out of the funk he’d clearly ended up into, but then decided quite solidly against it.

The only reason he even knew about Webber was that the man had sent them a very acerbic letter after they’d done some research faster than he could have. He might be genious, but he sucked with people, that much was apparent. A talented researcher was valuable, but only if he didn’t ruin team cohesion and other’s focus by his very presence.

Professor Bailey’s current team might have been thrown together pretty much at random, but they got along. They liked each other and occasionally met outside of work. Mostly, they were doing the same thing that they did during work time, summon monsters on Isaac’s property with some burgers on the grill at a safe distance, but they did meet, and they had fun in the process.

Throwing in a new person who, based on their one and only communication with the team, was a complete ass and jealous to boot was a truly terrible idea.

But there were other options that didn’t involve him taking a direct hand in things. There were other people who worked to research the [System] but weren’t him and his team.

He snapped off a quick email to his ‘friends’ in Vegas, pointing them in the direction of a likely traumatized and grouchy but incredibly talented researcher that they might want to look into. Depending on his current state of mind, that might not pan out, but if it did, it would pay off in spades.

While Webber’s future research would mostly be focused on blocking high Perception stats, but that was alright, the principles he would uncover in the process should be widely applicable.

And that was the biggest hole in Isaac’s knowledge, the basics, the underlying concepts. He knew plenty of recipes for useful potions, he could create an electricity generator from the core of an Elemental and a bunch metal scraps, he could use basic blood enchantments and the like, but that was practical knowledge. It was the equivalent of a soldier knowing how to fieldstrip their weapon or a baker knowing how to bake.

He didn’t know why that shit worked, he just knew that it did. Therefore, he was publishing the shit he knew and making other people figure out said principles.

Now that he’d taken care of that, he went looking for Habicht, which was surprisingly less easy than it should have been. He wouldn’t be blasting around his [Aura], as per the man’s request and while the light touch method would have worked, using a technique he didn’t want people to know for something like this would be idiotic. Also, Habicht wasn’t talking, so tracking him like that wasn’t easy either.

In the end, he had to resort to tracking the man by the sounds of his boots on the ground, identifying him by the rhythm of his footsteps. It was something that was quite with people he knew well, but Habicht wasn’t one of them.

“Hey, I found that letter I was talking about earlier.” he called out and jogged up besides Habicht, though what he considered a ‘jog’ was a blur for most people.

“That was quick.” Habicht deadpanned “So, what about it?”

“It was sent by a certain Professor Webber out of Los Angeles, who stopped his research after the Stormheart Gestalt incident. He dumped the unpublished results of his various experiments on the internet a week afterwards and stopped working. Professor Webber was a brilliant researcher, the exact kind of person these so-called ‘children of the [System]’ would go after, but that Gestalt successfully killed his drive.” Isaac explained.

“Scheiße.” Habicht muttered, then shook his head “If we’ve caught the people responsible for that massacre, that would be great, but an international terrorist cell forming mere weeks after initialization? Gott verdammt! Anyway, I’ll pass that on to the FBI via Interpol, and hopefully, they’ll manage to get a clean sweep.”

“Let’s hope so.” Isaac growled “There are criminals, and then there are people who make me want to believe in hell just so they can go there, and these fuckers are in the latter category.”

“You don’t believe in an afterlife?” Habicht asked.

“I’m … agnostic, sort of. I believe that there’s something out there, something greater than what we currently know and can be explained by science, but it’s not any given religion.

“I can’t worship the old gods because they’re all so fucking petty and I dislike the new religions because they’re all just cherry picking passages from their holy books to justify whatever stance they have, even if it’s contradicted elsewhere. There has to be something out there, but I don’t think it’s something we’ve already discovered.”

“One too many run-ins with the judgmental, fundamentalist aunt, then?” Habicht asked, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smile.

“Coworker, but yeah. Called out people for every little thing, but either did the something equivalent or worse and thought herself divinely justified in everything she did.”

“Oh, I know the type.” Habicht winced “The nice thing about being the boss is being able to tell people to knock it off. Now, I’ll go ahead and send this out, and then, we need to talk. Could you forward that to me?”

Ten minutes later, the two of them were heading out of the buildings and towards the woods. Both of them were sweeping the area with both [Auras] and heightened Perception to make sure no one was around. There wasn’t a place in the precinct with anything approaching even remotely approaching the right level of soundproofing, especially with the rest of the team there. According to Habicht, they wouldn’t be talking about anything overly sensitive, but privacy was still nice to have.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?” Isaac asked.

“If you decided to do something, anything, you could do it, couldn’t you?” Habicht said thoughtfully “No matter who or what tried to stand in your way.”

There were a few places he could be going with this, ranging from a talk about the ethics of having powers, aka the ‘with great power’ talk, or maybe a sneaky interrogation? Or maybe Habicht just wanted to talk to someone about this new reality, one that had to be utterly terrifying for him, with someone who wouldn’t immediately run to his boss with concerns regarding the man’s mental health.

Regardless of what was actually the case, he was going to respond the same way, absolute honesty unless he was about to incriminate himself, in which case he’d be as honest as it was possible but not actually say something incriminating.

“Hm, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t survive someone deciding to carpet-bomb the general area I’m in, but there are few things short of drastic measures that could stop me.” Isaac shrugged “But is that really what you’d like to know, that I still have some weaknesses? Or is there something else?”

“You were an accountant before all this, right?”

Isaac nodded.

“Then you must be pretty new to all this?”

Another nod.

Habicht sighed “I’ve spent almost two decades with this badge, seeing the worst of humanity while holding this badge, a badge that gives me a hell of a lot of power. And that, in turn, begets temptation.

“You occasionally hear stories of the police looking the other way when an abused wife kills her husband, or taking a pedophile they just barely can’t convict out back and kicking the snot out of them, stories of people with power fixing problems they see with said power, because that power lets them get away with it. Now, it’s never happened where I’ve worked, but I’ve heard the stories and gotten the usual ‘remind your subordinates that this is fucking illegal’ memos.”

Isaac turned his head to look at him and raised an eyebrow.

“My point is, I know what it’s like to have power and be aware of problems said power could solve, and I’ve seen countless cases of people doing just that. So, from an old man to one so young he’s barely out of diapers, that’s a damn slippery slope.”

“I can imagine.” Isaac nodded. It looked like this was going down the ‘be responsible’ route, but with a hefty dose of suspicion mixed in. Also, this was definitely a reaction to what he’d done to the Systemers, otherwise, he’d have gotten this talk during one of their previous encounters.

Habicht sighed, again. He seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course. But only if it doesn’t put lives in danger.” Isaac replied, earning himself a frown “The two kinds of people who’ll always be exacting and overly correct with their statements, lawyers and scientists.”

The corner of Habicht’s mouth twitched but he didn’t smile “I suppose that’s fair. Now, I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but a while ago, a couple of days after we caught Krebs, I got a ‘call’. A call about you. Basically, I was asked to write up a full report on what you’re capable of, and then I was told about an ‘unofficial policy change’.

“For the most part, it was about how we should be careful about how we handle high-Level individuals and that even though, for any given crime, at least one of them would have the means to do so without getting caught, that we should be very sure of our case before going to meet with any one of them and accusing them.”

“On a personal level, I think it’s nice to know that I won’t get harassed if I look like a good suspect. On a rational level, the idea of someone with power being treated with kid gloves is bloody terrifying.” Isaac replied grimly.

“That, it is. It’s also how the world has worked since time immemorial. It doesn’t matter how much a nation focusses on the concept of equality, there will always be people who somehow get treated better.” Habicht literally spat to the side after that comment.

“My point is that, well, someone chopped up a bunch of terrorists with terrifying efficiency, and we both know you’re capable of that.”

Isaac opened his mouth to respond, to point out that he’d been halfway across the country when that had happened, but Habicht cut him off before he could get a word out.

“Now, this is the part where you shut up don’t say anything that could be construed as being self-incriminating and listen, because this part is actually kind of funny.

“See, whoever did that, they saved lives. Those of my people, sure, but also those people in that horse place. Storming an entire building full of literal terrorists usually ends with most of the terrorists dead. Whoever did that, they actually owe them their lives.

“And tonight, I’m probably going to get another phone call, reminding me to watch out who I accuse, because there are certain people that shouldn’t be taken on lightly … or discouraged from future cooperation with the department. I don’t know if that call will have been needed, but I’ll probably get it.

“At the end of the day, what I’m trying to say is this: people who seem to be able to do the impossible start looking very good for crimes they couldn’t possibly have committed, but whether those people and those impossible crimes will be at the top of everyone’s priority list, well, that depends on the exact nature of those crimes, doesn’t it?”

Well, that was certainly the most thorough, clear speech that was nonetheless circumspect Isaac had ever heard. The point was pretty clear though: I know you did that, I don’t know how, and be fucking careful next time.

He’d gotten away with that through a combination of being helpful and a complete and utter lack of evidence.

Maybe, if he pulled similar stunts in the future that also had very clear and beneficial reasons, he’d also be given a certain degree of unofficial leniency, but that was something he neither wanted or should count on.

On the suspicion front, he’d very clearly failed, but the real question wasn’t what Habicht thought, it was what his superiors thought that mattered. Had that phone call been because they’d actually thought he was a shady sort of character, or had it merely been a reminder a la ‘please don’t piss of the guy who can chop buildings in half’?

And why had Habicht told him about it? Did he want Isaac to pull more stunts like that? Or had it been a warning of the fact that even if he couldn’t be convicted of anything, suspicion was a hell of a lot harder to completely avoid.

The only thing Isaac was certain about was why Habicht had said things as circumspectly as he had, and that was to avoid truth-telling [Skills]. The most reliable of these was a simple [Ascertain Truth] which could determine whether a given statement was true or false, and did so with almost 100% accuracy, but there was a catch: technicalities could fuck that over royally.

[Sense Guilt] could get past that hurdle, but it detected, well, guilt, which was an emotion, not its source, which made it unreliable.

But using either [Skill] extensively enough to get past the various countermeasures would require a damn good reason to avoid alienating the person being interrogated.

At the end of the day, it seemed Isaac had gotten away with everything and normally, he wouldn’t be so damn close to something like this, normally, there wouldn’t be any connection between him and the people he went after, at least none that could be seen without knowledge from the other timeline.

Or had he? Had that all just been a way for him to accidentally incriminate himself. Or maybe …

“But there’s one more thing I’d like to pass on to, a piece of advice given to me by my mentor. And that is ‘a good cop must be as yielding as steel’, and I think that applies to you as well.”

“Shouldn’t that be as un-yielding as steel?” Isaac asked cautiously.

“Probably.” Habicht chuckled softly “But this is a different sort of metaphor. See, steel is damn tough and doesn’t like to bend, but it does have a tiny bit of give, every time it is affected by an external force, it shifts a little bit. If it didn’t, it would shatter like glass at the first impact. But it doesn’t, because it can yield to a tiny degree.

“And according to my mentor, the same goes for a good policeman. 99.9% of the time, rules and procedures will be all you need to go by, and they’ll be enough. But there is no guarantee that it’ll always be enough. Sometimes, in the 0.1% of the time, the rules and procedures won’t tell you what to do, or they’ll be straight up wrong. That’s when people who are utterly fixated on the rules, who forget that they have a brain, break.

“Replacing your own personal morality and offloading the need to think onto a little booklet of rules doesn’t make you smart, or a good cop, it makes you a zealot, and I don’t think I need to tell you how destructive zealotry can be.”

Now what did that mean? Was the main message ‘use your head even if the rules tell you something otherwise’ or was Habicht indirectly letting him know that he secretly approved of what Isaac was doing?

And once again, was he letting Isaac know that he himself had suspicions but wouldn’t say anything, or was he passing along the government’s stance, which it couldn’t hold publicly?

Really, the core meaning still remained the same, Isaac needed to watch himself and what he did.

“Anyway, I was wondering whether you’d be willing to give up a couple of those timeslots you have with your blacksmith?” Habicht asked, completely interrupting Isaac’s train of thought and making him gape in surprise at the non-sequitur.

“Wait, what?”

Habicht chuckled softly at his expression “You sent Wirt to him to get himself a master crafted melee weapon to be used in case of emergency and I tried to get one for every person in my unit but apparently, you two have a deal that involves you providing Aspects in exchange for a monopoly on a fair bit of his work time. So I was wondering if you could find it within yourself to give up your claim to some of that time for the next couple weeks?”

“I’m afraid that won’t quite work, sadly. There’s a project I’ll be working on next week, but after that, I’ll be out of the country and he shouldn’t be busy with my crap. You can have that time.” Isaac shook his head.

“I suppose that’s all I can reasonably ask for.” Habicht replied, inclining his head “I suppose you’re all eager to get back home, do something a little more peaceful than dealing with terrorists?”

“Yep. How about you?” Isaac asked.

“Once we’ve dealt with all the new sharks in the lake, I’ll have my guys running drills until they drop.”

“Actually, could I ask you for one little favor? See, there’s this Aspect I’ve been looking for …”