W NN FITNESS: the decrepit sign in front of the former gym is the only indication of what the former squat, one-story building used to be. Now, the windows and doors are nailed shut and boarded up. A wide side vent occasionally lazily coughs out a green-orange belch of smoke.
Grace peeks around a corner at the ugly, broken down building, stooping and rifling through her backpack. She brought her usual kit - flashbangs, incendiaries (and accelerants!). Nothing too special or fancy. She takes a deep breath. Everything looks like it’s there.
Havelock stubs out a half-smoked cigarette as he looks on at the building. He has his messenger bag hanging in front of him from his shoulder, assessing the items within. With the reports of anti-bee gas on the premises, he has a few precautionary items stashed: a fully kitted-out first aid bag, a compact machine pistol, and a little photo of Cass for luck.
There’s no response as the two Witch Hunters approach, but you can swear the vent starts to belch bee smoke a little more quickly than before. Or maybe that’s just nerves.
“...Kinna wonder how they’re pumpin’ out that much.” She reaches into her coat. Did she even remember her shotgun? Please. Yes! She did! A miracle. “..Like.. What’re they doin’ is the place full’a that shit,” she wonders. On the approach, Grace sticks to the shadows, frowning slightly.
Havelock checks his weapons. A pump action shotgun lies across his back as he kneels down loading the machine pistol, and he positions spare clips and shells for easy access as he looks on towards the abandoned gym. The smell of the smoke plays around in his nostrils, though at this distance it must be the imagination. Marilyn’s head rests on the ground, her handle attached to his hip.
“Eugh. Yeah, whatever’s going on in there can’t be good.”
He spits on the ground.
“I ain’t like being so cautious, but… fuck, this looks worse than I expected.”
Havelock holsters the pistol and stands up straight, stretching.
“You ready to roll?”
Grace takes the brief pause to check her own shotgun, simplistic and pump action, too. Looks good. Looks clean. She stuffs shells in her pocket, not really expecting to use them. “Yeh. This’s.. a bit more than I was thinkin’ we’d see… But yeah. Yeah, I’m ready. Y’all got a plan or…” She lets it hang, glancing questioningly at Derek.
“A plan?”
Havelock chuckles softly to himself.
“Well, you know how I roll. It’s too bad we probably don’t have that whole Agartha insurance going for us, though, so maybe a smarter approach. Thinking we don’t really have the luxury of going loud right away, at least not until we have a better idea of what exactly’s inside there, so…”
Havelock stretches and cracks his knuckles.
“I’m thinking we go in, we take out any hostiles we can as stealthily as possible, and when we can formulate a real plan of attack, we fuck the place all to hell.”
He cracks a grin.
“Sound good?”
“Yeah. Sounds fantastic,’ she says, voice - flat, although, probably because she’s thinking. “...Yeah. Alright, we’ll do that, ‘cause I Sure as shit ain’t got any better ideas.” She tilts her head, eyeing the building. “Wonder if they got cameras or anything.”
A quick scan of the building reveals that there are cameras that aren’t hooked up anything, a dead lens staring at you from the plastic casing. There’s a side door marked STAFF ONLY that is locked, but not nearly as boarded up or restricted as the rest of the building.
Havelock creeps over to the door, careful to keep out of sight as he gives it a slight tug to test.
“Is it locked,” she mumbles. “If it is, I can probably pop it. Probably.”
It is locked!
Havelock motions towards the door to Grace in a polite “Go ahead!” gesture. He grabs the pistol and holds it at the ready in case of a nasty surprise.
She fishes through her backpack, drawing out a small pouch full of things she is definitely not registered to own. Unless it’s a super complicated lock, it shouldn’t be particularly noisy. Or troublesome. She pokes her tongue out as she works. She’s one of those people.
The door pops open with a click, revealing a hallway that opens to a small room full of lockers. The lockers are full of weapons - rifles, grenades, machetes, blunt objects...
Grace offers the lockers a cursory inspection. “...Nice. Got some explosives he- …Fuck, look’t all this hardware,” she whispers. “There’s - So much…”
So much.
Derek holds up a machete and looks at it appreciatively.
“Sorry, Marilyn, but something like this could be a bit quieter…”
He affixes a sheath on the opposite side of his belt and slides the machete in place.
He tucks a couple grenades on his belt as well, hoping he won’t have to use them before their little anima insurance plan kicks back in.
Grace snags a grenade of her own, picking up a rifle, too, and sighting it. It’s a bit clumsy and novice, but she at least has the option of full-auto suppression if she needs it. She slings it on her back. “...Th’ fuck did we end up at, is what I wanna know,” she says as she grabs spare clips
The next door, leading to the main section of the gym, opens. A man, wearing grey and purple, walks in. “Remember, folks.” He calls over his shoulder, not noticing the two Witch Hunters right away. “We switch up patrols in five. Be ready.”
Grace steps closer, reaching out and jerking him closer, clamping a hand around his throat - if not totally cutting off his airflow, certainly reducing his ability to make much more than a strangled ‘urgle’ noise. “check the door,” she hisses, dragging him further into the back.
As the door opens, a heavy dose of anti-Bee smoke begins to drift in.
There are gas masks in the lockers, conveniently enough.
Grace tosses one to Derek, tossing the unfortunate Dawnbreaker on the ground and grinding her bootheel into his neck as she affixes a gas mask of her own.
Derek smoothly catches the gas mask and pulls the mouthpiece over his face. You hear his muffled voice sound out as he shouts “Alright! Let’s go loud!!”
Havelock rushes past Grace over to the gym doors, holds his machine pistol in his left hand, and unslings his shotgun and grips it with a single quick motion before kicking the door open.
“Knock knock!”
As you move into the main section of the gym, you see something equal parts horrifying and astounding. The center of the gym floor has been converted into a forge, which is belching out anti-Bee smoke and producing some sort of thick slurry of a liquid into glass canisters. Dawnbreakers are feeding corpses into the great machine.
One of them looks up in horror. “WHO’S THERE?!”
Grace gives the prone Dawnbreaker one good solid stomp before hurrying after Derek. She skids a little as she stops. “HELLO CHILDREN HOW ARE YOU DID YOU MISS ME I MISSED YOU,” She hollers in response.
Havelock raises his shotgun and lets fly a blast of buckshot into the cultist as he sprays wildly with the pistol. “Impromptu building inspection! Management has been found lacking, and we’re here to make some changes!” His fingers work madly, pumping buckshot and bullets through the air.
“This - this is outrageous!” The Dawnbreakers seem to realize that they’re unarmed, and they turn to flee. One of them shoves one of the big glass canisters at you to slow you down as his fellows run.
“Hey now, whoa now! This is...” - Havelock struggles to keep the canister upright - “...nrgh! ...doing nothing to help your approval rating!”
Grace could stop to help Derek, and she really should, but there are so many fleeing ants. So very many. She gives the canister a shove in the up-right direction - then ducks under it and chases after them. “WAIT! Come back! We can be friends! For maybe a whole half-a-minute! Don’t be like thiiiiis!” ...it is at this point she remembers she stole some grenades. Pull the pin annnd - throw. Right into the path of the biggest group she can spot.
Cultist limbs and organs spray everywhere like nightmare confetti. The rest begin to try to pull boards off the doors to the gym, as the canister Grace barely saved teeters precariously.
“Derekdoyouneedhelpyesno. Yesorno.” She is clearly starting to slip into that berserker state. She can see them, they’re the enemy, there are so many problems with them still moving.
“I’m good, go do your thing!” Derek grunts as he stabilizes the canister. He slings his guns back into their holsters as he unsheathes Marilyn and the machete, holding them in either hand as he looks for a target that might actually fight back a little.
“Yesgood.” She lets off a low little laugh as she charges the dawnbreakers at the doors, drawing her axe and wading in, vicious horizontal slashes to clear her path. “Could surrender. This is only a suggestion. I am perfectly happy with what’s happening right now.”
“Never give up, never surr- Hghhghghghghghg-” is the brave response from one valiant cultist.
The two Witch Hunters do their grisly work, and soon, the gym is silent except for the roaring of the forge and the slow drip drip drip drip of sludge into canisters.
“Mluh. Gross...” says Havelock, peering towards the corpses piled by the hungry forge. The assorted bits and pieces of freshly slaughtered cultists lying behind him bleed profusely onto the floor as he expresses his disgust.
Grace’s coat is distinctly a redder shade of black than it usually is. She pauses her staredown with a gasping man with another stomp and peers around at Derek. “...So. What izzat,” she wonders. “...Like. Th’ fuck? Is that Soylent Green or somethin’?”
Her voice is harsh, raspy, probably from all the shouting.
Derek lazily kicks away the single grasping hand from a man cut in two diagonally from the neck to the waist, his dying reflexes working his body’s last motions as he expires.
“Something… wrong.”
“..yeh I kin see that much. I was hopin’ y’all knew more’n me,” she says simply. “...I reckon this is most or all of ‘em. Same as last time, look around for anything useful? ‘Cause right now my plan is “throw a grenade at it,” and mebbe that ain’t the best plan. It would be sorta satisfyin’ though.”
If you search the gym, you find papers - a recipe for the solution. It is described as “the next stage in anti-anima-enhanced-enemy measures”
“...they’re- gonna. What. Spray this shit on us?” She frowns beneath her mask. “...Or- I don’t… fuck.”
”Yeah, I don’t like the sound of this.” Havelock thumbs through the documentation, looking for exactly what makes this ‘the next step in anti-anima’.
It’s hard to tell anything concrete from the plans, which seem to shift between insanity and actual scientific research. Perhaps an expert would be able to tell more?
Havelock carefully packs up the notes and sets them in his bag.
“Fuck, let’s just find someone to take a closer look at this.”
He looks up at the forge.
“As for this… shit. I don’t know if we should trash it or -” Havelock gives himself a light smack on the forehead. “What the fuck, it’s fueled on human flesh.”
Havelock grabs a grenade from his belt, puts his finger through the ring, and looks over to Grace.
“Alright, let’s do this thing.”
Grace’s response is less moral. “Regardless of fuel, it’s a potential resource. We have the schematics. We have the formula. We really wanna know what it does, we have a way.” She tugs a grenade off her belt. Probably her last one. Finger through the ring. “Ready.”
Your grenades clatter around inside the great forge for a moment. You should probably run before they explode.
“Other way. Other way! I mean I LIKE explosions but REALLY that’s a little bit much, c’mon,” Grace says, backpedalling. Then turning and booking it.
Both of you make it out of the W NN FITNESS building before it explodes in an incredibly cool way.
Havelock tears off the gas mask, eager to suck in some actual air.
“Goddamn. Did you see the totally rad manner in which that building blew up?”
She pulls off her mask too. “Haha did you just say totally rad - I mean, yeah, I totally saw it but-” She snickers quietly.
Grace peeks around a corner at the ugly, broken down building, stooping and rifling through her backpack. She brought her usual kit - flashbangs, incendiaries (and accelerants!). Nothing too special or fancy. She takes a deep breath. Everything looks like it’s there.
Havelock stubs out a half-smoked cigarette as he looks on at the building. He has his messenger bag hanging in front of him from his shoulder, assessing the items within. With the reports of anti-bee gas on the premises, he has a few precautionary items stashed: a fully kitted-out first aid bag, a compact machine pistol, and a little photo of Cass for luck.
There’s no response as the two Witch Hunters approach, but you can swear the vent starts to belch bee smoke a little more quickly than before. Or maybe that’s just nerves.
“...Kinna wonder how they’re pumpin’ out that much.” She reaches into her coat. Did she even remember her shotgun? Please. Yes! She did! A miracle. “..Like.. What’re they doin’ is the place full’a that shit,” she wonders. On the approach, Grace sticks to the shadows, frowning slightly.
Havelock checks his weapons. A pump action shotgun lies across his back as he kneels down loading the machine pistol, and he positions spare clips and shells for easy access as he looks on towards the abandoned gym. The smell of the smoke plays around in his nostrils, though at this distance it must be the imagination. Marilyn’s head rests on the ground, her handle attached to his hip.
“Eugh. Yeah, whatever’s going on in there can’t be good.”
He spits on the ground.
“I ain’t like being so cautious, but… fuck, this looks worse than I expected.”
Havelock holsters the pistol and stands up straight, stretching.
“You ready to roll?”
Grace takes the brief pause to check her own shotgun, simplistic and pump action, too. Looks good. Looks clean. She stuffs shells in her pocket, not really expecting to use them. “Yeh. This’s.. a bit more than I was thinkin’ we’d see… But yeah. Yeah, I’m ready. Y’all got a plan or…” She lets it hang, glancing questioningly at Derek.
“A plan?”
Havelock chuckles softly to himself.
“Well, you know how I roll. It’s too bad we probably don’t have that whole Agartha insurance going for us, though, so maybe a smarter approach. Thinking we don’t really have the luxury of going loud right away, at least not until we have a better idea of what exactly’s inside there, so…”
Havelock stretches and cracks his knuckles.
“I’m thinking we go in, we take out any hostiles we can as stealthily as possible, and when we can formulate a real plan of attack, we fuck the place all to hell.”
He cracks a grin.
“Sound good?”
“Yeah. Sounds fantastic,’ she says, voice - flat, although, probably because she’s thinking. “...Yeah. Alright, we’ll do that, ‘cause I Sure as shit ain’t got any better ideas.” She tilts her head, eyeing the building. “Wonder if they got cameras or anything.”
A quick scan of the building reveals that there are cameras that aren’t hooked up anything, a dead lens staring at you from the plastic casing. There’s a side door marked STAFF ONLY that is locked, but not nearly as boarded up or restricted as the rest of the building.
Havelock creeps over to the door, careful to keep out of sight as he gives it a slight tug to test.
“Is it locked,” she mumbles. “If it is, I can probably pop it. Probably.”
It is locked!
Havelock motions towards the door to Grace in a polite “Go ahead!” gesture. He grabs the pistol and holds it at the ready in case of a nasty surprise.
She fishes through her backpack, drawing out a small pouch full of things she is definitely not registered to own. Unless it’s a super complicated lock, it shouldn’t be particularly noisy. Or troublesome. She pokes her tongue out as she works. She’s one of those people.
The door pops open with a click, revealing a hallway that opens to a small room full of lockers. The lockers are full of weapons - rifles, grenades, machetes, blunt objects...
Grace offers the lockers a cursory inspection. “...Nice. Got some explosives he- …Fuck, look’t all this hardware,” she whispers. “There’s - So much…”
So much.
Derek holds up a machete and looks at it appreciatively.
“Sorry, Marilyn, but something like this could be a bit quieter…”
He affixes a sheath on the opposite side of his belt and slides the machete in place.
He tucks a couple grenades on his belt as well, hoping he won’t have to use them before their little anima insurance plan kicks back in.
Grace snags a grenade of her own, picking up a rifle, too, and sighting it. It’s a bit clumsy and novice, but she at least has the option of full-auto suppression if she needs it. She slings it on her back. “...Th’ fuck did we end up at, is what I wanna know,” she says as she grabs spare clips
The next door, leading to the main section of the gym, opens. A man, wearing grey and purple, walks in. “Remember, folks.” He calls over his shoulder, not noticing the two Witch Hunters right away. “We switch up patrols in five. Be ready.”
Grace steps closer, reaching out and jerking him closer, clamping a hand around his throat - if not totally cutting off his airflow, certainly reducing his ability to make much more than a strangled ‘urgle’ noise. “check the door,” she hisses, dragging him further into the back.
As the door opens, a heavy dose of anti-Bee smoke begins to drift in.
There are gas masks in the lockers, conveniently enough.
Grace tosses one to Derek, tossing the unfortunate Dawnbreaker on the ground and grinding her bootheel into his neck as she affixes a gas mask of her own.
Derek smoothly catches the gas mask and pulls the mouthpiece over his face. You hear his muffled voice sound out as he shouts “Alright! Let’s go loud!!”
Havelock rushes past Grace over to the gym doors, holds his machine pistol in his left hand, and unslings his shotgun and grips it with a single quick motion before kicking the door open.
“Knock knock!”
As you move into the main section of the gym, you see something equal parts horrifying and astounding. The center of the gym floor has been converted into a forge, which is belching out anti-Bee smoke and producing some sort of thick slurry of a liquid into glass canisters. Dawnbreakers are feeding corpses into the great machine.
One of them looks up in horror. “WHO’S THERE?!”
Grace gives the prone Dawnbreaker one good solid stomp before hurrying after Derek. She skids a little as she stops. “HELLO CHILDREN HOW ARE YOU DID YOU MISS ME I MISSED YOU,” She hollers in response.
Havelock raises his shotgun and lets fly a blast of buckshot into the cultist as he sprays wildly with the pistol. “Impromptu building inspection! Management has been found lacking, and we’re here to make some changes!” His fingers work madly, pumping buckshot and bullets through the air.
“This - this is outrageous!” The Dawnbreakers seem to realize that they’re unarmed, and they turn to flee. One of them shoves one of the big glass canisters at you to slow you down as his fellows run.
“Hey now, whoa now! This is...” - Havelock struggles to keep the canister upright - “...nrgh! ...doing nothing to help your approval rating!”
Grace could stop to help Derek, and she really should, but there are so many fleeing ants. So very many. She gives the canister a shove in the up-right direction - then ducks under it and chases after them. “WAIT! Come back! We can be friends! For maybe a whole half-a-minute! Don’t be like thiiiiis!” ...it is at this point she remembers she stole some grenades. Pull the pin annnd - throw. Right into the path of the biggest group she can spot.
Cultist limbs and organs spray everywhere like nightmare confetti. The rest begin to try to pull boards off the doors to the gym, as the canister Grace barely saved teeters precariously.
“Derekdoyouneedhelpyesno. Yesorno.” She is clearly starting to slip into that berserker state. She can see them, they’re the enemy, there are so many problems with them still moving.
“I’m good, go do your thing!” Derek grunts as he stabilizes the canister. He slings his guns back into their holsters as he unsheathes Marilyn and the machete, holding them in either hand as he looks for a target that might actually fight back a little.
“Yesgood.” She lets off a low little laugh as she charges the dawnbreakers at the doors, drawing her axe and wading in, vicious horizontal slashes to clear her path. “Could surrender. This is only a suggestion. I am perfectly happy with what’s happening right now.”
“Never give up, never surr- Hghhghghghghghg-” is the brave response from one valiant cultist.
The two Witch Hunters do their grisly work, and soon, the gym is silent except for the roaring of the forge and the slow drip drip drip drip of sludge into canisters.
“Mluh. Gross...” says Havelock, peering towards the corpses piled by the hungry forge. The assorted bits and pieces of freshly slaughtered cultists lying behind him bleed profusely onto the floor as he expresses his disgust.
Grace’s coat is distinctly a redder shade of black than it usually is. She pauses her staredown with a gasping man with another stomp and peers around at Derek. “...So. What izzat,” she wonders. “...Like. Th’ fuck? Is that Soylent Green or somethin’?”
Her voice is harsh, raspy, probably from all the shouting.
Derek lazily kicks away the single grasping hand from a man cut in two diagonally from the neck to the waist, his dying reflexes working his body’s last motions as he expires.
“Something… wrong.”
“..yeh I kin see that much. I was hopin’ y’all knew more’n me,” she says simply. “...I reckon this is most or all of ‘em. Same as last time, look around for anything useful? ‘Cause right now my plan is “throw a grenade at it,” and mebbe that ain’t the best plan. It would be sorta satisfyin’ though.”
If you search the gym, you find papers - a recipe for the solution. It is described as “the next stage in anti-anima-enhanced-enemy measures”
“...they’re- gonna. What. Spray this shit on us?” She frowns beneath her mask. “...Or- I don’t… fuck.”
”Yeah, I don’t like the sound of this.” Havelock thumbs through the documentation, looking for exactly what makes this ‘the next step in anti-anima’.
It’s hard to tell anything concrete from the plans, which seem to shift between insanity and actual scientific research. Perhaps an expert would be able to tell more?
Havelock carefully packs up the notes and sets them in his bag.
“Fuck, let’s just find someone to take a closer look at this.”
He looks up at the forge.
“As for this… shit. I don’t know if we should trash it or -” Havelock gives himself a light smack on the forehead. “What the fuck, it’s fueled on human flesh.”
Havelock grabs a grenade from his belt, puts his finger through the ring, and looks over to Grace.
“Alright, let’s do this thing.”
Grace’s response is less moral. “Regardless of fuel, it’s a potential resource. We have the schematics. We have the formula. We really wanna know what it does, we have a way.” She tugs a grenade off her belt. Probably her last one. Finger through the ring. “Ready.”
Your grenades clatter around inside the great forge for a moment. You should probably run before they explode.
“Other way. Other way! I mean I LIKE explosions but REALLY that’s a little bit much, c’mon,” Grace says, backpedalling. Then turning and booking it.
Both of you make it out of the W NN FITNESS building before it explodes in an incredibly cool way.
Havelock tears off the gas mask, eager to suck in some actual air.
“Goddamn. Did you see the totally rad manner in which that building blew up?”
She pulls off her mask too. “Haha did you just say totally rad - I mean, yeah, I totally saw it but-” She snickers quietly.