Issue 1 Downtime

John was in the workshop, working on a circuit board. When his timer chimed, he set down his equipment and checked on his audio feed from the cultist's cell.

For a while there's nothing but background noise, but after a while there's the faint sound of stone grinding against stone, followed by the sound of high-heels on stone. The rhythm of the footsteps suggests stairs of some kind and after a little while the footsteps take on a strange echoing quality while the interference grows more pronounced, a static noise obscuring part of the transmission.

<"Shun. Have you hear----m Rin and the ot----ey should have bee----ith Hin----ter."> Yui voice speaks up in Japanese. It's very quiet, probably because Shun's phone is in a pocket or purse of some sort.

He ran a filter and adjusted the sound levels to hear better.

The sound clears up a little bit but is still heavily distorted. They must be in a basement for the cell-phone signal to be this weak.

<"Not yet. Sh----ore time. Should I go to assis----ith it?"> Shun aswers her.

<"No, we need more than ju----o complete the ritual. Has the most rece----ipment come in yet?">

<"Yes, we were going to mov----on Sunday. We could ha----m prepped on Monday night.">

<"Take care of that, we shoul----epared for when Rin gets back.">

John took notes as he kept listening, hoping for mention of a site for this ritual.

<"Yes, see that they're prep----n case Rin succeeds. Have them take the entran---- eneath the tu----ation. The hino boy ha----nooping aroun----etter to avoid the club.">

"Damnit... what station?" he grumbled.

<"As you wish. We wi----ared and you will tak----rue form."> she answers and there's a pause only filled with the noise of movement against the microphone of the phone as Shun moves, the click-clack of heeled footsteps moving back up the stairs.

As he waited for possible developments, he attempted to access the location history for Shun's phone. Perhaps her recent movements would reveal something. At least he hoped she wasn't savvy enough to turn her Location Services off.

Unfortunately it seems that she was and nothing discernible gets picked up by the microphone after a faint 'thud'. It seems she dropped her purse somewhere and after about an hour of continuous use of the microphone the phone runs out of juice, severing the link.

"Damn it!" he shouted. He failed to resist the urge to throw the phone across the room.

After calming down some, he brought up his holoscreen and searched for tube stations near the club with extra subterranean levels.

There's only one station near the club, though it's part of a subterranean walkways for pedestrians and relatively big.

He scratched his chin. Then he decided to think magical and compare some probably inaccurate ley line map images to the tube system.

Whoever drew random lines across London and put the image on the internet happened to randomly miss the tube station and club entirely.

He sighed. "Well, I'm officially out of ideas."