Rain hammers the service alley as Naira and Broken Leg stand over the opened vault. Cold-storage sleeve fragments glint inside, tagged and half-buried in frost.
A small battered drone skitters out from the debris, chassis scarred and painted with a faded third-war insignia. It ignores the Burning Rose and angles its sensors toward the inventory tags.
The Drone
Asset chain confirmed... finally. You found the crate trail.
The Drone
Do not touch the tags. Those records belong to the dead, and to whoever is paying to erase them.
Naira Versta Nai
Who sent the component?
The Drone
Someone who knows your name, Ash Phoenix. Someone who wanted you looking here instead of at the hand that fed the vault.
The hologram flickers, forming a cracked human face for a heartbeat before breaking into static. Broken Leg shifts closer to the vault lip, ready for trouble, while the drone keeps its lens fixed on the labels.
✓ Quest Accepted
Learn the drone's critical lead on the sender
“i use a old tech trick to get the drones memory banks quietly to get my lead on the ghost who is after me or my ghosts”
SUCCESS (Legendary Mechanics, rolled -3)
“i use a old tech trick to get the drones memory banks quietly to get my lead on the ghost who is after me or my ghosts”
SUCCESS (Legendary Mechanics, rolled -1)
Naira slips a maintenance probe into the drone’s access seam, using a dead relay handshake and a quiet burst of diagnostic code. The drone twitches, then its lens iris widens as its memory stack opens under her touch.
Broken Leg freezes at the vault lip, watching the alley for anyone who might notice the intrusion. Rain ticks off the concrete while the drone’s projector stutters into a thin ribbon of corrupted logs.
The Drone
Unauthorized access... no. Old service key. That signature is buried deep.
A shipment marker resolves inside the flicker, then a routing chain, then one clean identifier stamped over the rest. The component was forwarded under Magos internal clearance to a handler called Sable Index.
The Drone
There. Sable Index touched the chain first. If you want the rest, follow the relay bead before it goes cold.
The drone’s casing starts to heat, warning lights blinking in a tight red pattern as the copied memory bleeds out. Somewhere in the alley, a relay bead clicks once, then begins to die.
Quest Complete
Learn the drone's critical lead on the sender
Quest Complete
Identify who sent the mech component
Attribute Upgrade: Reasoning Good→Great