Thurman Biological Sciences Building
CC State University, Coast City
Apr 17
23:16
Lawrence cracks the window and makes his transformation. The swarm of spiders spills out onto the wall of the tall building and effortlessly begins to climb down. Again, the dull thud, but this time it is louder and has a "crumbling" sound follow for a moment. When about three-quarters of the way down, he sees one of the segments of concrete slab at the base of the building heave up and flip over. It makes the same thud sound he'd heard earlier, and the crumbling sound is the concrete fracturing.
From where the slab had rested moments earlier, a thick mass of gray-green fungus erupts and starts spreading over the surface of the building at an alarming rate. It moves both horizontally and vertically, and the leading edge is climbing toward Tarentula at about half the rate he is capable of moving.
*****
Thomas excuses himself and shifts back to his stone form while jogging toward the stairwell. The shaft housing the stairs is unfinished concrete and metal which amplifies the next thud sound.
Rather than run, Granite leaps down the stairs one flight at a time. He lands on each concrete platform with a considerable thud of his own. Somewhere near the third floor, a door opens in front of Granite while he's mid-air. Unable to redirect, he crashes into the door and partially breaks it off its hinges.
An asian woman, probably in her mid-twenties, leaps back with a startled yelp. When she comprehends Granite's form, her eyes grow wide.
"Oh my god," she says as she takes a step back into the hallway. "Are you the one making all that noise?" Her voice has a heavy Chinese accent, seasoned with fear.
Another of the dull thuds echoes through the stairwell, as if to demonstrate that Granite is only one of the sources of noise at the moment.
*****
Professor Fate said:
"Do you mind if I hold onto that photo," Fate asked, "at least until this whole matter is resolved?"
"And trust me, I understand how strange it sounds," Fate continued. "I'm not certain that it would even work. But . . . it would eliminate one of the possibilities - that the fungus is controlling Paul. The other is that Paul can control the fungus . . . and there are others."
"Yeah, sure, keep the photo," Dr. Linderman says. "Hope it can help. I really can't picture Paul doing anything to the girl, but if he's not in his right mind who can say for sure?"
Professor Fate turns to see what Lawrence was talking about and finds him gone. Where he stood there is now just a window cracked open a few inches. Back near the door, Thomas is also gone. In answer to Fate's puzzled expression, Andrew says, "they went off to see where that noise was coming from."
Another dull thud - clearly louder coming through the open window.
*****
Jorgi pokes at the encrypted files for a few moments to get an idea of what sort of algorithm might have been employed. Certain traits about the encoding suggest where he might start in trying to crack it.
(Computer skill check roll 14+16=30; plenty of success)
The computer he's working on is far too weak to crack the encryption during this decade. Luckily, Jorgi is familiar with some workarounds. He taps into the internet and connects through a little-known backdoor into a mathematics department server cluster at a university in Belgium. Working with practiced ease, he uploads the first encrypted file to the server cluster and then goes about downloading one of his favorite cracking programs from yet another location.
Inside of a minute, Jorgi has put over eighty percent of one of the world's top 100 supercomputer cluster's raw computational power to work at cracking the encryption. If his hunches were correct, this should be done in a minute or so. Of course, there are another eight encrypted files to go after that one.
Jorgi is not exactly aware of the noise going on around him. He has, however, got things set up to work on their own for a couple minutes without his continuous attention.
