Vanishing Point - Wake of the Plague - Episode 7 - The Infiltration

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In their new squat hide-out a run-down row-house on the outskirts of New London, they go over the plan. 
Probationary Constable John Smith says that they need to get into a place called Jana House, the London headquarters of the Gossamer Corporation. 
Thankfully they have a few things working in their favour. 
* Tall Dave's signet ring represents the Insider's identity within the Vanishing Point, being a subtle variation on the Gossamer Corporation logo and a family crest.
* Nobody would anticipate such a bold move as a direct infiltration on their headquarters. 
* Unless Tall Dave's activities have been disrupted, they can go for many months without returning to Jana House. 
* They have some resources provided by Inspector Laroux to help with their investigation including £15 and Whilst PC Smith didn't spell it out, he seemed to have access to the police warehouse of confiscated effects, which thankfully includes a lot of clothes. 
* They know the layout of the upper levels and that lower levels exist. Although access is controlled by a monthly password and an elevator and they don't know the extent of those lower layers. 
So they decide the seek out the Whisperers. They trade £20 and information on Tall Dave's operations, among other lesser bits of information at a Whisperers booth in exchange for the password of the Month needed to access the lower levels of Jana House, which this month is "Bloodshot". They also throw in the names of the sub-levels: 
* Storage
* Import/Export
* Human Resources
* Wellbeing and Medical
* Quality Assurance
Dressed up as Tall Dave, one of his accountants/scribes and a couple of his hench-people, they walk up through the manicured gardens towards Jana house, which is brightly lit to almost daylight levels by a long glass tube above the building filled with some impossibly bright burning substance. The receptionist, a Gaunt welcome Andrew, recognising the ring and referring to him as "madam". They recall that Tall Dave is only the mundane identity of the Insider, the Insider themselves is called Zheng Yi Sao and that insiders in general are female, nobody knows much about the males of the species.
Heading inside they pass rows of clerks and accountants busily working in the main hall on a vast collection of ledgers and writing out letters. All of them give the group a wide and respectful amount of space. Heading to the end of the hall stands a tall drider-like automaton, with 8 mechanical legs below a bulbous abdomen and topped by a humanoid mechanical body. They ask for the password, which Andrew gives to their satisfaction and they call the elevator. 
Inside is a small wizened creature carrying a massive sack of keys and operating the elevator by means of several levers. 
The Automaton provides them with keys, which the Scrounger eagerly accepts as "swapsies" for their services. pulling the lever and at their request taking them down to "Storage". They were told that this level was known to the authorities and that it appeared to be legitimate storage. a cavernous warehouse of boxes and freight, presumably being stored and transported through some other unseen exit.
Handing another key to the scrounger they went down again to Import/Export. This required a very separate set of levers and there is no indication on the elevators interior that this existed. The doors open to a corridor which led to a large circular room, above it was a large bulbous stone that they recognised as similar to the one they appeared beneath in the Navigators guild. Here were some of the Insider's loyal servants, bladekin and sanguine. They explained that everything was on schedule and at that moment, two people from the modern world popped into existence in the centre of the chamber. The servants ushered them into a tube at the far side of the room where they seemed to drop downwards. Amelia wanted to see their ledgers, which they explained obviously couldn't leave the room, but she was allowed to copy some of what she saw there. It referred to "units" and avoided all mention of human trafficking, but it was clear that that was what this operation represented. They went back to the elevator and continued down. This time to Human Resources.
Human Resources was quite a literal name. Inside a large hall were large numbers of prone nearly naked human bodies, almost all of which were on life support, being tented to by faceless medical staff, IV bags suspended from the ceiling. Here they could see the two tourists they had just seen in the rooms above, being restrained by a pair of large automatons with heavy padded handed and long arms designed for grappling. 
As they approached, they saw that once restrained, an adult insider crawled over their head, gaining access to the skull via the nose, ear or eye. They were hollowed out and their brain matter consumed by the parasites over a period of days. However one had evidently just finished the process and stood up from the couch, lacking any sort of eyepatch. The spider sat directly in the eyesocket of their victim as they walked towards the group. 
Andrew tried to bluff, but evidently the Insider suspected something and asked to see the "real" person. As he actually didn't have a spider sat in his eye this would be awkward, so they tried to pluck the insider from the eye socket. It was a difficult task and they had little advantage save surprise, so missed. The attack clearly alerted the automatons and faceless who leapt to the Insider's defence. 
The bulky automatons were well suited to handling humans and boasted relatively heavy armour. Amelia's batons, Firez's blades and Albrecht's guns did little to damage them. The insider they were fighting was caught in a wrestling hold by Andrew and they tried to scurry across into Andrew's eye, but Firez was fortunately able to catch it and squish it just before it reached Andrew's head. 
However as they fought and wrestled Albrecht went down to the prone form of the insiders on the bed who were still in the process of consuming their hosts and held a gun to the head of one of them, demanding the automatons deactivate, or their masters would be killed. The automatons dutifully obeyed, the Faceless initially scattered but when Firez told them not to, they asked if they could return to work, which they seemed happy enough to do. Shaking their head at the insanity of this, the group proceeded back to the elevator to the next floor, but not before gathering all the documentation that they could. The scrounger once again accepted swapsies for his services. 
Wellbeing and Medical, did not seem particularly well and contained numerous quarantine signs. Inside was a Fetch working manically on a vivisection of a human body that looked as though it had been merged with an arachnid. This was doubtless the feared Red Pox, harmless to other genera but fatal to Insiders. Lining the walls were dozens of large glass jars filled with yellowish liquids and the corpses of the diseases victims. It seemed as though they had been fused with their human hosts and the host its self had transformed into a nightmarish spider-human hybrid. They gathered more paperwork and headed down to what was surely the lowest level of the facility. 
Quality Assurance had the air of a set of old offices with dark panelled wood and frosted glass. Inside were a number of thugs and hired muscle of various genera. But among them was the blade-kin form of Miss Hands, made from sharpened clock hands. She turned and recognised the group and called her goons to get them. Joining them was a hulking humanoid form of pure muscle, with an eyepatch and a tattoo upon the chest of the same symbol that Tall Dave's ring showed. 
As the enemy geared up for a fight, Amelia did a quick scan of the area and happened to find the "Quality assurance ledger" in a cubby hole by the elevator. 
Firez grabbed the urn full of assorted keys that were used to pay the scrounger and they gave him all of them in exchange for taking them back upstairs leaving Zheng Yi Sao and the others stranded. 
They knew that this reprieve would not last long and so made their way out the way they came once they hit the main hall on the ground floor. However the alarm had been raised and as they fled, Albrecht and Amelia were swarmed by clerks. Andrew had an opportunity to scare them off and rescue his comrades, but too gentle a warning might not send the right message, so he shot one of the largely innocent accountants in the chest, causing the others to scatter in fear, allowing them all to escape together. 
Fleeing into New London and towards the offices of the New London Gazette they burst inside with the evidence and announced to the front desk that they had clear proof of a terrible scandal that would be front page news. The front desk man, a Lost seemed to be unsurprised by this and pointed them to a back room, which they found deeply suspicious, so dragged him along with them at gunpoint. However it turns out that they get a lot of their hot tips this way and in a few minutes a reporter arrived to take the details of what they had found. 
The documents they retrieved told a story of widespread extortion, corruption, bodysnatching and perhaps most damning, their involvement in the illegal immigration trade to prop up their diminished workforce. 
After the newspaper was released, the damage was done and killing them would served no further purpose for the Gossamer Corporation, so they were able to meet up again with their police sponsors. The flagrant murder of one of the clarks of the Gossamer Corporation was a crime punishable by death, so Inspector LaRoux seemed intent on holding it over Andrew's head for a while, but for now she was satiated and needed to plan formal raids on the Gossamer Corporations other businesses once the political elite gave her the authorisation to do so. For now they could retire to their squat and finally find a place to call home in this alien world. 
The End (for now).
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