Session 07 - Telkratzer's surgery

Domingo’s odyssey

Whilst Janus Alkers and Kenny Bourbon hatch and execute their plan to insinuate their way into Telkratzer’s surgery and offices, Domingo Flores hangs back at Olivia Sage’s sect’s Verdant Veil. She and the air and fire element cult leaders, Forrest Zerrick and Ignatius respectively, have each undergone the transformation from mundane citizen of one sort or another to wielder of metaphysical powers. Domingo has been having dreams of what internet culture dismisses as ‘The Enderman’, a reference to the character from the still-popular game Minecraft, and so suspects he has this journey to undertake in his immediate future. What is this experience like? Are the supernatural ‘growing pangs’ painful?

The sect leaders are more or less in agreement that developing the powers is like developing a skill – or giving in to an addiction. The more you do it, the easier it gets. They’ve each dealt in their own way with the extreme divisiveness and negativity aimed at people like them, which has been fuelled by the Earth-bound media. Sage and her followers have withdrawn behind the facade of AgriHub Central whilst Zerrick has chosen a more public, ‘out’ approach. How Domingo chooses to deal with being an ‘Endie’ is up to him, although the three leaders of the Order of the Elemental Trinity make it clear he will always have a home with them.

Domingo thanks Sage, Zerrick and Ignatius and leaves. He gets his journalistic head on and goes back to Genesis Toroid’s hub, the zero-gee region where ships – including the stricken Dawkins – dock with the station.

By now, the window of opportunity for sneaking around The Dawkins provided by Ran Lambert’s hacking has long since expired. The ship, now an official multi-casualty mystery, is cordoned off with black and yellow tape. A hazmat-suited, mag-boot wearing official recovery team, overseen by two arguing men, is leaving the ship as Domingo arrives. One of the quarrelling men is Russ Quinn, the CIA agent who interviewed Domingo about Janus, when the two went to the police station to give witness statements about the unrelated ‘slushy stand killings’. The other has a broad Scottish accent, making him in all probability Hamish McLean, the administrator of the space station.

Quinn wants The Dawkins flown into the sun as it’s, “the only way to keep us safe from whatever killed everyone on board.”

McLean will not hear of it, “The Dawkins and everything on it is valuable evidence. Besides, the recovery team found no viruses or anything of the sort. That right, lads?”

The recovery team nod.

If Quinn is unhappy to see Domingo, he hides it well enough. The CIA agent congratulates the journalist on his piece in the papers about the inter-cult killing on The Concourse, which Quinn has read since the two first met in the police station. However, the agent becomes cagey when Domingo starts firing questions about The Dawkins. Quinn wants Administrator McLean’s ‘no virus’ narrative kept from the public and states that the ship is quarantined under, “bioagents regulations”. Domingo agrees to go along with Quinn’s version of events – or at least says he does – and the two part on reasonable terms.

By the time Domingo returns to meet up with the rest of the quintet, Janus and Kenny are getting ready to break back into Telkratzer’s surgery. Both the doctor and his receptionist have left the medical facility, with Telkratzer being the last to leave, locking up behind himself.

Telkratzer’s surgery

When the coast is clear outside the surgery, Janus picks the mechanical lock on the front door, forcing access for all five of the group. Kenny raids his disguise kit for a handful of fake eyes. He plasters these over his face, with the goal of confusing any facial recognition technology which the five might encounter. He also ties the doors shut from this inside, using a padlock to make extra sure.

In the reception area, two more sets of heavy doors kept shut by electronic keypads seal the way to parts of the facility not intended for the public eye. Neither Janus nor Kenny saw what is beyond these during the ‘loss-adjuster’ phase of the plan. A third is unlocked and opens into a cubicle opposite the examination room where Janus and Kenny met Telkrazter earlier. Opening this door, the quintet find the practice’s pharmacy. There are racks of blood samples here, but Owen Dunda has more interest in the nearby collection of stool samples. The Australian rigger grabs a bunch, opens them and flings their contents around the reception area. He hopes to make the break-in look like the work of maniacs, rather than a coordinated group with a clear goal. Whilst Owen is dishing the dirt, Janus pockets several packets of a synthetic opioid medication, as this could be what drew the fictional faeces-flinging crazies to break in.

Once the party have well and truly covered their tracks, they tackle the problem of getting either of the two big doors open to the complex beyond the public surgery. The five raid the receptionist’s desk, hoping that Telkratzer’s assistant is clueless enough to have written down the codes to the electronic locks. Sadly, she has not. Next up is Telkratzer’s office itself. The doc is old-school when it comes to note-keeping and prefers notebooks over electronic devices. As luck would have it, he has written a reminder to himself not to forget his receptionist’s – Patricia’s – birthday. Apparently, Telkratzer is the one who needs the lesson in cyber security, because the date of the special girl’s big day, numerically formatted, opens the first of the two doors the quintet attempt.

The corridor, harsher and more clinical, has doors on either side. None of them are locked and the first the group tries leads into a small room similar in in size and shape to Telkratzer’s surgery and the pharmacy opposite. Amongst pieces of lab equipment is a powered-down laptop, to which the group helps itself. There could be a goldmine of information stored on the computer which could be Domingo’s next big scoop or a way for Janus to keep her Soviet employers happy, at least long enough to consider her next move.
What the quintet sees when they open the doors on the other side of the corridor will haunt them for the rest of their days. Suspended in tall cylinders of formaldehyde are what can only be called Telkratzer’s failures. The five recognise the creatures from which they’re derived: rats, birds, lizards and so on, but are thankful that the specimens are dead. They are genetically mutated, and it’s not clear with what DNA the poor animals’ genomes was spliced.

Reeling from the shock, the five try the door at the end of the corridor, which leads into a unit with cell-sized cubicles in each corner and a lift, or elevator as Telkratzer would call it, sandwiched between the two cells opposite the door through which the quintet entered. All four doors have a keypad next to it, suggesting they are locked.

Kenny has a mirror and takes the reflective surface out of its frame, so he can slip it under one of the cell’s doors. Inside is a young human man, un-mutated, as far as Kenny can tell and dressed as if for a night out clubbing and partying. The group wants to keep its identity a secret and so they don’t talk to the man inside the cell. Instead, Kenny slips messages written on paper under the door, asking the man who he is, much to the inmate’s confusion.

Meanwhile, the others find a fourth main chamber. The corridors have been looping round and the quintet realise this leads back to the second, unopened electronic door they saw in Telkratzer’s public surgery. The fourth chamber’s side rooms are full of captive animals: all of them healthy and not obviously genetically engineered, although none too happy about being caged. There are dogs, insects, lizards, and even, in one of the larger side rooms whose cages are sturdy enough to hold it, a grizzly bear. Telkratzer would presumably have housed housed the polar bears on The Dawkins in the other heavy enclosures nearby. All the animals, as far as the five can identify, are female.

In the room with the bears is a shipping crate containing dried food for the animals. Kenny takes back a piece of dried mackerel thin enough to be passed under the party-goer’s cell door. The occupant is disgusted but Kenny hears sounds of eating moments after.

Both Domingo and Janus have plenty of evidence to take to their respective patrons, not to mention what’s on the laptop. The five decide to make their escape via Telkratzer’s lift. The latter can be opened using the keycard Janus saw the doctor wearing, when she encountered him at Club Anti-Matter. Telkratzer keeps this in his desk when he’s not at the facility and the party does a quick double-back to retrieve it. The quintet feel the responsibility to free the human captives in the four cells. Goodness knows what Telkratzer has planned for them. Domingo whips the doctor’s laptop open and hacks into its desktop via the BIOS. Again, the doctor falls foul of his technophobic ways: a document detailing how he enciphers the cell doors’ codes based on nearby visual prompts tells Domingo all he needs to get all four doors open.

The group time the opening of the doors with their exit via the lift. They free all four captives without them becoming witnesses to the perpetrators of the break-in.

Telkratzer’s elevator has buttons for far more floors than most lifts. There’s one for the same level as Club Anti-Matter, so this likely to be the elevator Janus saw the doctor use to whisk away his drugged-up victims. The five want to go somewhere quieter, however, and press the lowest button on the panel next to the lift’s door. The lift shaft bottoms out much closer to Genesis Toroid’s hub, where the apparent gravity, caused by the station’s rotation, is only 0.6 that of Earth. The doors slide open onto a transit hub, where the occasional worker schleps past, wearing mag-boots at half power and making the most of the lesser gravity to haul cargo.

The quintet reckon here is safe from prying eyes – safer by far than Telkratzer’s facillity, at least. It’s time to see what other treasures – or horrors – the party can find on the doctor’s laptop. Telkratzer has used the same encryption system to hide all his documents as on the cell doors’ locks in the chamber from which the five have just emerged. The Earth-animal hybrid program is supposed to breed creatures suited for life on Mars, once the red planet’s terraforming progresses to the point it can host Telkratzer’s creations. Offspring based on birds, mammals, insects and other species are commissioned. In other words, all the major bloodlines the five found caged in the holding area. Domingo opens the doctor’s emails and sifts through them for clues which could reveal who else is involved in the genetic engineering scheme. One Ecklage Hall has sent Telkratzer emails over the last few months, setting out the specifications of the breeding program and how it will be funded in great detail. Janus copies the incriminating files to a device of her own and Domingo takes extensive notes. The agencies to which the two answer will doubtless be very pleased with the team’s work.