Knocker King/Knockerescape
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Archived Video feed of the Zig Savant wing
Is this thing on? Test...test. Alright. Charley, get an overhead shot of this place topdown like. Focus on that center chamber first. The one that looks like someone set a bomb off in it. According to Magi that's where the FIRST power surge in this wing went off when Arachnos hit the outer wall.
As best we can tell the center chamber where they were keeping some kind of Conduit quite literally blew up. Flooded the entire wing with...what'd MAGI call it....HEY...JOEY...toss me your pocket puter.
Beep. Beep. Beep
...belief based quintessential essence. In short, the wraith conduit overloaded when the Arachnos soldiers attacked and started killing. That much death so close to the zig probably reversed whatever channel she had and blew the center chamber like a grenade with a cement coating. Then all that power leaked out into the wing itself....
Which then set off a sympathetic resonance HERE in the back wing. Four cells. Charley. Pan left.
Camera pans left. Four cells. One of them has a door hanging off it's hinges.
Cell one had a discolored Troll. As you can see here, most of the door is missing. Pretty typical of a superdyne abuser, but this guy WASN'T abusing the green goo. He'd been through every medical test we could throw at him. Looks like a troll, punches through walls like a troll, but wrong color and NOT a troll. Out of the 4 in this cell block he was the first to get out and from what we can tell he busted the other four in this wing loose when he got his power back. Snapped his shackles like they were paper. There's no video of him doing it, the camera is outside the cell, but the scream the guy gives out just before he busts the door down....
It ain't human. It's like something out of Beowulf. Something that used to live in caves and on mountains.
Where the hell did that come from.
Anyway. The Not a Troll busts out. Moves down to cell Two, where a high level, brain dead empathic controller type was being held. Charms, looks. Real succubus by the file. Not really much of a wonder she got bust out first. The video feed you get of her first walking out of the cell. Damn. No one should work a prison uniform like that. It was like softcore porn and the girl next door winking at you all at once.
It gets plain weird after that.
As if you thought it was normal to begin with.
Cell Three. As you can see. Cell three is EMPTY. It is also still locked and secured. Jimmy two grins was inside. We don't know WHY he was in the zig, and we can't find a record on him, which makes him, I guess, some sort of sleeper agent, because there's no other reason to get thrown in the Super-Clink. Two Grins was in to watch these three. And it'll get better, just you remember what I just said.
CHARLEY...give us a view of Gerrards cell.
Alright. This place was clean two hours before the Arachnos attack. Right AS the attack begins Gerrard goes bugnuts. I mean twitching shuddering heroin withdrawal bugnuts. Starts scraping his shackles against the wall. Sparks everywhere. Even manages to light his clothes on fire at one point. Which just seems to set him off even MORE. An hour into the attack and an hour until the conduit at ground Zero went off Gerrard starts drawing on the walls of his cell and calms down. More of a trance really. Don't have a better word for it. I've seen higher ups at GIFT and DATA work like this. They just shut off everything except their work and....DO something. Usually something miraculous happens.
HERE you can see he was drawing complete and total gibberish. This math is in base 12, these sketches are done in a mix of metric AND standard. He's using spirals and swirls as some sort of equation method. The people at cryptology will be pouring over this for years....if it even means anything.
The kicker is the entire cell wall is used for these half-cocked schematics.
And they're done in Gerrard's blood.
He was really on a roll. Drew right through the explosion and the Not-a-Troll busting out of his cell.
Right as the Troll and the Lady are getting the hell out of dodge, Two-grins tosses a radio into Gerrard's cell....and the guy POUNCES on it. Takes it apart with his fingernails and begins re-wiring it. Jimmy! Hold up the baggy with the stupid-tech!
As you can see, it's somehow acquired 3 more yards of wiring, and a small radar dish. We still don't have a clue where he got it...but it also apparently powers a small cutting laser hooked up to the BATTERY, which cut through Gerrard's shackles.
After cutting his shackles Gerrard just pushes the morse-code button once, steps back...and get this....waits.
This is where we lose the video feed of the attack in this wing. The feed on all four cameras goes to this spinning red gear. Considering it's a black and white feed, that's a hell of trick. But we still get audio feed. You can hear Jimmy and Gerrard talking, but not about what.
Then you can hear Gerrard screaming.
And then something comes through the ceiling.
Charley! Pan up.
As you can see, there's a pretty damn huge hole in that. That's bunker-grade hardened concrete, and something just -fell- through it. Armor-buster bombs don't 'fall' through something like that. But something came in.
And that's when Gerrard and the troll start fighting. It started by Gerrard. This guy can SWEAR. Let me tell you, he could make my grandfather blush, and he was a career marine. I had to look up a few of the words. But the end of it..the bit that really starts the fight?
Gerrard calls the guy an oathbreaker. I don't get it. The two don't know each other than what they've been talking about in the cells, and none of the audio mentions oaths, promises, or deals.
But it sets the Not-a-troll off like a firecracker.
It's a hell of a fight from what you can hear. Best we can tell the Not-a-Troll managed to make a hammer of sorts out of a piece of rebar and concrete wreckage. Hells if we know what GERRARD was using....but it wasn't perfect, whatever it was. We found a good splat of blood and some of his hair attached to it. Might of grazed him, given him a concussion.
But you should see the other guy. CHARLEY...point the camera at the wall!
As you can see, this guy is full of BIG holes. Not bullet holes. Just holes. Cauterized, grapefruit sized, precise, burney holes. MAGI never mentioned Gerrard being an Igniter type, so we think whatever came through Gerrard's ceiling did this. Probably right after the troll attacks, because whatever it was, it had enough firepower to light a hero up, much less this blue schmuck.
And it just gets better from there.
Charley! Point the camera into cell two. The morgue hasn't picked her up yet.
This is cell two. We don't have audio from the cell. But there's a LOT of argueing. A lot of pleading. And then a lot of screaming. The funny thing is, once the screaming starts, all the guards in the area report as heading for this section, like they were heading to help her.
Whatever it is...it didn't work. The cleanup team already came and got the wounded and dead guards that made it past Arachnos and into this wing. Gerrard's friend probably did that. More burns. It's like that all the way to the hole that got blasted in the wall just outside the yard where the fliers were airlifting people in and out of the Zig.
But her? Best we can tell, she got whipped with those shackle chains. Shouldn't of been enough to KILL her, but it did. As you can see, there's just superfical bruising, but she's as dead as anything.
GIFT thinks that she probably tried to turn her powers on Gerrard and Gerrard, in his manic state went berserker and got a lucky shot on some lucky part of the skull. Just quick like dead.
But there's not a mark on her. She's just stone cold dead.
The point being: Gerrard killed her, then apparently blasted his way to the yard and got shuttled to the Isles. We alerted Hero Corps about the situation. They'll keep an eye out...
The thing is, and this is the creepy bit, this is the only wing in the 'Sleeper' section of the prison that woke up. Everyone else here is still comotose or trapped in thier cells.
Maybe they were dreaming about freedom when they heard the rukus. Maybe these four made the break every one of them, on some level, wanted.
I bet it tore them up inside.
END.
