Three weeks after the lab collapse, Sally stands in the prison’s high-security wing, under white lights and camera domes. Across the reinforced glass, Doctor Polpovich sits in a steel chair, calm as a surgeon.
Sally
How did you give me my powers?
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
I did not give them to you. I built the conditions. You were the first body to survive the harvest chain intact.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
Subject Zero was never meant to ask questions this soon.
He taps the glass with one thin finger, then smiles at the file folder on Sally’s side of the booth. A red Department seal peeks from the pages inside.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
Your transport logs are the key. They do not move people. They route signatures, bodies, and power histories through shell records. Follow the seal, and you will find who ordered the extraction.
A warning light blinks over the door. Somewhere in the prison, a scanner chirps, then chirps again, as if something upstream has noticed her presence. Polpovich’s eyes narrow, not in fear, but in recognition.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
If you want the source, Sally, you must decide whether to expose the hand behind the program, or let the Department bury it with you.
✓ Quest Accepted
Extract the source of Sally's powers from Polpovich
✓ Quest Accepted
Meet The Rose and Amilia for lunch
“Dr Polpovich, what is the source of my powers?”
SUCCESS (Superb Persuasion, rolled +0)
Sally
Then tell me the source. What started this in me?
Polpovich does not look away. He folds his hands, measured and precise, as if the answer is a specimen he has been waiting to present.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
The source is not a drug, or a machine. It is a chain. Intake, transfer, harvest, each body taught to carry a signature until one survives the routing intact.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
You did. You were the first successful convergence of the program, the body that held the pattern without collapsing.
He nudges the red seal on Sally’s folder with one finger, and the warning light over the door flashes harder, throwing brief color across the glass.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
The Department did not create your power from nothing. They harvested the conditions for it, then traced it back through shell records until they found a way to own the result.
Doctor Vladamir Polpovich
If you want the true origin, follow the courier shell signature in those logs. It points higher than me, and the paper trail is still alive.
For the first time, his calm slips into something almost curious. He sits back and waits, letting the information hang between them like a locked door he has finally opened a crack.
Quest Complete
Extract the source of Sally's powers from Polpovich