East Bright never sleeps, it just lowers its voice. In Shelly’s cramped analyst cubicle, neon from the casino strip stains the glass blue and red.
Cyndar kremshelli steps in as Shelly jerks a chair back from a terminal. Her face is pale, one hand hovering over the keyboard like it might bite.
Shelly
Look at this. Don’t touch it, just look.
The cracked cipher scrolls across the screen, broken by a trail of internal server pings. The route winds straight through Cyndar kremshelli’s own agency network.
Cyndar kremshelli
That access path is real. Someone knew exactly where to hide.
Shelly
It hits our servers, Cyndar. Not South Blood’s, not the rival gangs. Ours.
Shelly’s trembling fingers clamp around the edge of the desk. She swallows hard, then turns the monitor a fraction more, as if the answer might look different from another angle.
Shelly
Tell me this is a trap. Tell me our colleague didn’t sell you out before they disappeared.
✓ Quest Accepted
Uncover who sold Cyndar out
“I need a starting point, can you trace the Cypher to a location?”
SUCCESS (Great Reasoning, rolled -2)
Cyndar kremshelli
Trace it to a place. Give me a starting point.
Shelly drags the trace wider, fingers flying. The broken cipher collapses into a single routed endpoint, a dead-drop maintenance node under East Bright’s old transit spine.
A tiny warning box flashes, then vanishes. The lookup burns one of her cleanest proxy threads, and the terminal spits a soft error tone that makes both of you wince.
Shelly
There. A service access beneath Helix Arcade, lower utility level. It is not public, and it is not supposed to answer to our network.
Shelly zooms the map until the cursor settles on a narrow hatch line. The route is real, physical, and close enough to reach before dawn.
Shelly
If this points where I think it does, someone in-house used a buried corridor to sell her location.
Shelly
Cyndar, I have the place. If we go there, we go together, or not at all.
✓ Quest Accepted
Go to the maintenance access under Helix Arcade
− Scene Quest Removed
Uncover who sold Cyndar out
“No, I need you here in case I need you to hack alarms and door locks. Plugs in the co-ordinate on her smart watch and heads out”
SUCCESS (Good Agility, rolled +0)