Undisclosed Location

Time Until First Wave: 2 Years, 8 Months, 21 Days

"Come on Cassie, you already know how I feel about this."

"Hey it's your place not mine. I know I've been saying it for a while now, but given what you want to do here, I think it would be wrong if I didn't tell you again that I think it's a bad idea," Cassie said, falling back into a couch in the large basement that used to be Christopher's "man cave" for lack of a better term. "We've looked in every spec guide you've been able to get your hands on, every single diagram. And how many matches have we managed to find?"

"Zero…"

"Exactly. Zero. This thing might as well be an art project, I don't even know how the hell you've got cables even attached to it at this point," Cassie said, reaching up and rubbing at her eyes.

"It has a charge on it, I've tested it with multiple different voltage meters, every single thing I've done so far suggests this thing can be turned on if I give it some power," Christopher said, gesturing at the large box that held the device. As Cassie had pointed out, there were an odd jumble of cables all wrapped in electrical tape coming from the rear of the box, all heading right into a monitor and keyboard Christopher had set up on his desk. "The attachments and connectors in this thing might be unique, and hell I might not recognize it all… but I'm mostly positive I've traced everything that matters here Cassie. I've been working on this for weeks now, and I'm positive I should have at least most of this working. Obviously there's still going to be some trial and error once I hook up the power, but if I can at least get it started, maybe I can figure out what language the BIOS starts up in and we can actually find a real guide."

"If there's more guides out there that we haven't found, then they're so old that this thing wouldn't be worth the metal it's made out of," Cassie said with a long sigh. "I'm honestly tempted to say we need to report this thing to someone… for all we know it's stolen military tech."

"Please, that's the one thing we know for sure it's not," Christopher said, heaving just a bit as he slowly moved the large cabinet that held the foreign tech further into the corner of the room. He was giving it plenty of space and had even hooked up several AC units directly into the few windows that could see down into the room. The place might as well have been a restaurant grade walk-in fridge, just to prevent any possible overheating.

"What? How can we know it's not stolen military tech?"

"Because there's no way it would have just been left on someone's back door. Hell it would have some sort of labeling somewhere on it. Besides, there's no point reinventing the wheel. Sure you might change a few cables or add new adapters from one generation to the next, but you're not going to suddenly have a complete redesign of almost every single component. This thing didn't come from any of the major players, that's for sure."

"Well then that's all the more reason that we should be reporting it instead of trying to power it on with all the makeshift and, frankly, a bit sketchy adapters you made just to get this thing to hook up. You're not an electrician Christopher, you're a programmer. There's no guarantee you did any of this right!"

"I know I'm not an electrician, but I know how to read manuals, I've gone over this a dozen times Cassie, I'm ready to flip the switch. Now if you don't want to be here because you think it's going to blow up or I'm going to electrocute myself and you don't want to be a witness, I get it, but at this point I've come too far to not at least try."

"Fine, whatever, don't say I didn't try to warn you," Cassie said, reaching up and pinching the bridge of her nose. "I can't exactly leave you to just do this by yourself… Let's at least be smart about this. How about I wait by the breaker and if it does start to electrocute you I can flip the switch. And maybe you could have the fire extinguisher actually on hand when you turn things on? You know, some basic safety precautions."

"See, now you're thinking like a member of the team," Christopher said, looking around briefly before running for the far corner of the room where a brand new fire extinguisher had been left, still in its box from the hardware store. Cassie let out a long, exacerbated sigh.

"I swear you'd kill yourself on accident without me here."

"Does that make you the company's Safety Coordinator?"

"You know it takes more than two people to have a company right?"

"I mean… not really, anyone can set up an LLC and register as a business," Christopher said, tossing the box to the side and examining the device.

"You know that's not what I meant," Cassie said, rolling her eyes as she leaned against the wall next to the breaker panel. "There's no point in having a bunch of assigned titles until we actually have some sort of company to work with."

"Well Pierre did e-mail me back. Even said he'd be willing to take a look at some of my code once we have things back up and running. If um… What's your friend's name? Hinata?"

"Hikari."

"Right. If Hikari does have some friends in the space or even wants to join the art team, that right there makes four people, so we're on our way back to having things going," Christopher said, walking back over to the device and staring down at it. "And hell, if this thing actually does work, I should be able to load up all the hard drives with the data we have already, hell maybe I could talk Cal and Jeff into coming back and we could get right back to work on everything."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're like, naive and stupidly optimistic?"

"I feel like you could have said optimistic without including the extra descriptors," Christopher said, causing her to laugh when he looked back at her.

"I said what I said."

"Okay… you good to go over there?" Christopher asked, deciding to just press forward. His eyes were gleaming with a determination that made even Cassie feel a bit hopeful in the face of all the odds. Even so, she wasn't quite as optimistic as he was.

"Wait wait," she said quickly, looking around and running back over to the couch where her phone was still sitting. She flipped it open as she walked back over to the breaker, hitting three quick buttons and then leaving her thumb hovering. "Now we're ready; have to make sure I'm ready to make this call just in case."

Christopher shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he wasn't about to reignite the discussion when Cassie seemed to at least be partially on board with things. Or at least she wasn't actively campaigning against it like she had been doing on and off ever since they had first loaded the large box into her dad's truck. Christopher wasn't foolish, he knew that logically speaking he shouldn't have ever even tried to mess with this thing since he was just as likely to break it than he was to fix it.

But there had just been something about it that had kept him up at night, tinkering and studying it as the mystery of what the hell it even was bordered on becoming an obsession. It certainly had what looked like hard drive slots and something akin to a motherboard, but there were strange markings all over it that, as Cassie had aptly pointed out, couldn't be placed in any guide they had managed to procure from various computer shops and libraries.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Okay, booting it up in three… two…" Christopher started, leaning down next to the box and hovering his hand over a large square button that he was positive was supposed to be a power switch. After pausing for an extra second just after saying two, he let out a long slow breath before pushing the button, grabbing the fire extinguisher, and scrambling backwards.

For a moment, nothing happened. There was a beat of silence that lingered in the air that made Christopher doubt that he had actually traced things correctly. Then a loud POP, echoed throughout the room that caused him to instinctively lift the fire extinguisher up defensively. The overhead lights very briefly flickered before the sound of a fan kicked on and a loud whirring came right from the device in the corner.

"Hell yeah!!" Christopher said, raising his hands in triumph as bits of a bluish-purple light started to glow from various bits of trim and dimples all over it. "See Cassie, that's what-"

The whirring started to get louder, the lights on the device glowing even brighter as Christopher raised a hand to shield his eyes. It took at least a minute before the light died down, the whirring quieting as things started to return to normal. When Christopher finally cautioned a glance past his hand, the monitor he had managed to connect was no longer blank.

He walked toward the monitor, hearing Cassie following behind him as he looked at the symbols that were starting to shuffle along the screen. Some of them were familiar, though only because he had seen them inside of the device when he was still poking around. Though as they continued to shuffle, first starting to look like an odd combination between morse code and hieroglyphics before different symbols and dots replaced them, even having what looked like the letter "A" in it in one of the series that scrolled over the screen.

"What the hell are these symbols…" Cassie mumbled. Christopher looked over his shoulder at her, a smile spreading across his face.

"Looks like we got some more research to do."

Wildcard Assembly's Squad Base,

Multiple Locations

End of Phase Two: 26

D:18H:07M:21S

"Come on… there's gotta be a trail somewhere… where the hell else would the conspiracy theories have started from," Jon grumbled, reaching for the soda he had placed off to the side in his Command Room. He took a sip from it before he slid it back over on the counter, completely intent on the windows open ahead of him.

Though the group had started strong with their movie marathon, getting through the first two Ocean's movies before Duskbreaker showed up, everyone was a bit ready for a break. Pinky and BrainCraft had Duskbreaker portal them back across the country so that they would be ready for the morning, showing back up through their base door a bit over twenty minutes after they left. Duskbreaker was quick to turn around and head back out so he could portal home and get some sleep for the night, promising to be back first thing in the morning for the next day of searching.

By the time they had gotten back, Nate and Swansong, who had already been giving each other looks and whispering to each other throughout the first two movies, had disappeared to "patrol around for a little while." Jon hadn't been fooled of course, hiding Nate's POV behind several windows as he continued to chug away at his own projects. With those two gone and the momentum on the movie marathon gone, Freakenstein and Pinky went off to the base's Garage Gym to get one of their four weekly stat increases while BrainCraft retreated to the Mechanic's Den once again. Miss Mist still hadn't returned to the base, having opted to stay out and do a bit more base hunting while the city was somewhat quieter.

Jon was honestly rather proud of his friend. Not only was he really coming into his own with his powers and faith in his own choices, he was finally coming back out of the shell he had hidden in after the death of his grandma. He had an entire squad of people around him that Nate had somehow naturally befriended in a way that had never been natural for the relatively awkward dude. Jon wasn't necessarily a believer in fate, or destiny, or even that people only had one possible life that they could live… but seeing Nate truly come into his own as an Augment? It almost made Jon believe it was always what his friend should have been.

That said, the more people Nate surrounded himself with; the more confident Nate became with both wielding his powers and deciding just how he wanted to fight, and the more trouble Nate decided to tackle... well it left Jon finding himself sitting with far more time than he probably needed, feeling like he wasn't quite contributing as much as he really should. He knew that was logically foolish of course, but he wasn't sitting around ideal with the feeling.

Up until Nate had mentioned it, Jon hadn't even been aware that the game he had gotten tangentially involved in had an actual name. That itself wasn't a big deal, most games did have names after all. No. It was the fact that the game was named Infinite Ascension of all things that had drawn Jon's attention. Nate might have just brushed off the cash the two of them had spent to support the game's kickstarter almost thirteen years ago, but Jon had been obsessed with it for most of his life.

He had been so focused on the post history for a subreddit he used to religiously follow for any leaks or bits of information that Jon hadn't noticed as someone approached the glass wall. When he still didn't react after a minute passed, BrainCraft reached up and gently knocked on the wall. Jon jumped in his chair before finally looking over and acknowledging his guest.

"Oh… sorry bout that, everything good Brain?"

"I could ask you the very same question, it looked like you were trying to summon heat vision with how hard you were staring," BrainCraft responded and Jon let out a laugh.

"Yeah, easy to get fixated on research," he said, waving toward BrainCraft. "You first, what's up?"

BrainCraft nodded, reaching over toward the small door that they had been using to pass things through. "I would have brought this to the others but everyone seems to be a bit preoccupied at the moment."

Jon reached over, grabbing the tablet BrainCraft was handing him and staring down at it. He wasn't entirely sure what he was looking at, though if he had to wager a guess, he would have said it was some sort of delivery schedule.

"Are these the other forges?"

"That would be my assumption or at least, that's what they appear to be," BrainCraft nodded.

"What they appear to be? What do you mean?" Jon asked, reading through the list of addresses.

"This file wasn't stored in any sort of redundant way. It didn't have a password for viewing and it was pretty much right in the standard directory the moment I broke through the file system's initial encryption… It was too easy, and if something is too easy… it's suspicious. But I also am worried I may be overthinking this and wanted to get a second opinion."

"Hmmm… Is there anything else that might… I don't know, give us some hints?"

"Maybe. Whether it was Clockwork Tyrant who wrote these files up or the others, they were paranoid. Everything outside of the standard directory is written in at least two layers of code and there's no cypher hidden on the system anywhere. I should be able to crack it but it does raise the question as to why this new file isn't in the same code."

"What if the stuff in code is stuff Clockwork Tyrant had put on there and this new file is just something that was added after Hydramental killed him? If that's the case, this could easily just be a list designed to be a trap," Jon said, reaching back for his drink again. "At least that's my read on it."

"That was essentially my thought as well. We can bring it up to the squad tomorrow perhaps and decide if we want to investigate anyway," BrainCraft said, holding out a hand as Jon passed the tablet back through. Once that was in his hand, he nodded toward the windows Jon had opened. "So what is it that has you so focused and still squirreled away like this?"

"Just a bit of a probably pointless mystery," Jon admitted.

"Pointless how?"

"Well… I'm trying to figure out what happened to the games developers and how it turned from an indie MMO into… well this," Jon said, leaning back in his chair and sipping at the soda.

"Ah I suppose figuring that out does have very limited applications, though I assume if there are developers they would actually be relatively easy to find," BrainCraft said. "Well, perhaps not easy to find but I know who I would suspect as the original developers."

"Huh? Is there something I might have missed?"

"Exactly. From their leaderboards that I have seen, there's only a handful of them even left. It's entirely possible that the entire First Wave consisted of members of the development team, but that amount of people doesn't necessarily scream "Indie game" either, though at this point there are only seven of them last I checked their leaderboard," BrainCraft said, the tablet disappearing in a flash of light as he reached up and tapped at his chin. "Isn't The First technically the most suspicious? Highest leveled player, first wave, Axio has a rather odd obsession with him. It seems plausible that he was involved in some way."

Jon's eyes widened up as BrainCraft offered up the option, the idea apparently not having crossed his mind before now.

"Had you… not considered that before now?" BrainCraft asked curiously and Jon shook his head.

"Sometimes you ignore the most obvious thing…" he said, turning to his station as he began moving the windows around once again. "Suspecting him doesn't exactly do a whole lot given he's vanished into the wind… but I know Calypso, Brightburst, and Mandragos are still active around the world… If The First was a member of the dev team, I'd be willing to bet his entire squad was too. Okay Brain, I think I'm gonna need your help on a little side project."

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