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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteelDraco" data-source="post: 2582247" data-attributes="member: 359">A Day's Workby D Brooks, aka SteelDracoFor Round 2, Fall 2005 Ceramic DMTo most, it would have just been another office building, tan sandstone and darkened glass concealing all manner of boring paperwork. The manicured lawn and scattered pieces of modern sculpture only added to the mundane appearance of the place. Of course, I knew that there were cameras watching my every move, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn there were gun turrets in a few of those sculptures. It’s what I would have done. Working for the Hoffman Institute can have that effect on a man.    I nodded to the man at the desk inside, and flashed him my Institute identification. He let me pass without comment, and I made my way to the side of the large entryway, where another glass door led deeper into the building. I scanned my card and entered a passcode, and the door hissed open. Couldn’t be too careful, with some of the things stored in here. Fumimaro’s office was just down the hall, past the Xenotech R&D department.    “Good afternoon, Mr. Bertoulli.” That was Marta, Fumimaro’s assistant. She smiled up at me from her desk, looking a bit too much like Rosalyn for me to ever really feel comfortable around her, with long blonde hair and green eyes. Even had the same smile, damn it. “He’s expecting you. Ms. Lyons has already arrived.”    “Thanks.” I walked past her desk, and into Fumimaro’s office. It was one of the few places in the Institute where I really felt comfortable, since it actually felt like someone spent time there. Pictures on the walls, a clutter of paper on most of the flat surfaces. It felt… real.    There were already two people in the room when I entered. Seated behind the desk was Ichen Fumimaro. He was a Japanese man, most of a head shorter than me, and probably sixty pounds lighter. I’d guessed before that he was in his late thirties, but despite going to several birthday celebrations with him, I still didn’t know exactly how old he was. He smiled at me as I entered. “Ah, Michael. Good to see you.”    The woman across the desk from him stood up as I entered, and moved to hug me. “Michael! It’s been too long!” She had to stand on her tiptoes to give me a kiss on the cheek, and I smiled at her warmth. No matter what she saw, you couldn’t get Samantha down. I looked down into her wide face, all friendliness and dimples, and laughed. Her brown hair went most of the way down her back, and she flipped it around as she sat down again.    “You got rid of the glasses,” I said. “Contacts?”    She made a face, almost pouty. “Laser surgery. I was tired of the librarian look.”    I snorted at that. Samantha was the head librarian of the Wolcroft Collection, one of New York’s most prestigious private libraries. Not everybody has heard of it, of course. You have to have some connections among the mystic circles to get an invitation, but there’s probably not a better source of occult lore on the east coast.    I sat down next to her, and looked at Fumimaro. “Well? What’s the catastrophe?”    He looked at me for a second before chuckling, and hitting a few buttons on his computer. “This, actually.” A monitor on the wall flickered to life, showing an image of what appeared to be a grassy field with a sizable pit in the center of the photo. The grass around the edge of the pit was greyed, as though covered with ash. “What you’re looking at is the area above the Baston Particle Collider, yesterday morning. Quite a few of the recent breakthroughs in particle physics have been done here; it’s one of the most extensive supercolliders ever built. Unfortunately, it seems like they were a little too successful at breaking down matter. They seemed to have created a temporary dimensional rift, allowing something from another reality access to our own.”    I leaned forward at that. “Another Chernobyl? I’ve heard stories, from the members of the Order of St. Gregory. If demons are coming through –“    “No, no, nothing to that extent. The rift was small enough that it sealed almost immediately, and the entity that came through hasn’t been nearly as destructive as the creatures that manifested around the Chernobyl reactor. Just… odd.” He hit a few more buttons on his computer, and the screen changed. The view was closer to the damaged area, and there was a scattering of rocks and other debris apparently hanging in the air, over the pit.    “When our technicians went in to examine the area, they discovered something startling. What we initially took to be a breach in the side of the collider actually, well, wasn’t. Everything that was there, still remains. They discovered that the terrain was rendered transparent. The area near the transparent terrain was drained of color, reduced to black and white. Obviously it’s some manner of supernatural effect, since black and white doesn’t make any sense for how color is transferred. It is still not certain exactly what’s going on – samples were sent over to Xenotech R&D Central today, to see if they could make anything of it. We have not yet received word back from them. I don’t expect to for a few days – they needed to run some complex tests to figure out what is going on, as I understand. As of right now, we know this entity’s touch drains color completely, and its proximity causes colors to fade. We have no information on how long this condition lasts, so I’d suggest you avoid getting close. Samantha, you’ll be issued a dimensional containment unit, for when you manage to find the entity.”    That seemed like a problem to me. “How, exactly, are we supposed to do that? Has the thing been spotted? Do we even know what we’re looking for here?”    Fumimaro passed us a photograph from inside his desk. It was a trim young Asian woman with short hair, dressed in drab black clothes. She was standing in an art gallery, looking rather proud.    Samantha . “Suzette Noriko? How is she involved in this?” I stared at her blankly, then at Fumimaro. She laughed. “Boston art scene. Famous painter. Don’t you ever go out?”    “Not there, no.” I turned back to Fumimaro. “How is she involved?”    He hit another button, and the monitor showed a house – decently sized, with trees to screen it from neighbors. And a sizable hole in the side of the wall. “This apparently happened just this afternoon. This is from the police report, and they forwarded it immediately to us. Her cleaning service found the place like this. You should start here. She was supposed to be home, but hasn’t been accounted for. The entity may have kidnapped her.” Fumimaro stood, and bowed to both of us. “Your equipment is prepared for you. Good luck.”    Samantha pulled the company sedan past a couple of uniformed cops. I showed them my ID when one of them flagged us down to explain that the house was under quarantine, and they let us on by. The gravel crunched under the tires as we pulled up to the artist’s house, which looked even more alien in person. There were two sizable holes in the exterior – one on the second floor, near the rear of the property. The other was near the front door, as though the thing had gone all the way through the house. You could see portions of the floor, here and there. It looked like one of those cutaway diagrams you see in books, explaining how things were built. Most of the color seemed to have been leeched from the place, with only a few patches of real color noticeable. It looked like the place might have been bright yellow, at one point.    I stepped onto the porch, and put my hand against the transparent wall. It was perfectly solid, and felt the same as the rest of the wall as I ran my hand along it. The edges seemed ragged, as though the thing that had caused this was irregularly shaped. Something to remember. Samantha had pulled out of some her tools – what looked like a Geiger counter, as well as an amulet hanging from a chain, which she was swinging loosely. She was searching for whatever had been here, or whatever residue it might have left behind.    I went in first, my hand resting on my service pistol. Couldn’t be too careful, after all. Though from the look of things, I might just end up with transparent bullets. The inside of the house was leeched of color, too. I noticed a few picture frames, and that made me stop. There didn’t seem to be a canvas inside any of the frames – just a greyed-out frame, and then the interior of the wall. The thing had brushed up against each painting, rendering it transparent.    “Sam, look at that.” I gestured, and she seemed to ponder for a moment.    “Colors. She’s known for her use of color, with many conflicting and clashing colors in the same piece. It’s eating the colors.” She ran her hand over one of the frames, and nodded. “The canvas is still there. It… it ate the painting.”    I supposed that made sense, in a strange, alien sort of way. “Probably why it came here. If that’s what it eats. But… if it eats colors, where’s the artist?”    Samantha nodded. “Good question. Let me go find out.” She headed upstairs, and I looked around some more. I found a room where it looked like there had been a struggle of some kind. The room was obviously for showing off paintings, with a few little tables and walls covered with frames. One of them was on the floor, obviously pulled down and flung or carried across the room. A few of the little tables were fallen and scattered. Several places in the room had been made transparent, including a sizable patch of floor. I felt around, but didn’t notice anything.    I heard Sam looking for me, and called out for her. She was holding what seemed to be a hairbrush, and the dangling amulet seemed to be pulling toward the back of the house. Probably using magic to find the artist. “She close,” I asked. Sam nodded, concentrating. I followed her, out through the spacious kitchen and into a small garden area.    There were shrubs and flower bushes here and there, and what looked like a small hedge maze near the back. A few stone benches and an easel were nearer the house, obviously where she sat and did some of her painting. Sam led me toward one of the stone benches. ((PICTURE 3)) It wasn’t out of the ordinary – just faded grey stone, weathered with age and the elements. And yet, Sam’s amulet was barely swinging at all now – it was pulled directly toward the bench, a though by a powerful magnet. She nodded toward it, and I reached out to see what was there.    My hands brushed clothes, just above the bench. I felt around, and it was clearly a person – Suzette Noriko, I presumed. She started to stir, slowly. She seemed to be injured, or at least not moving well.    Errr. “Miss? Suzette Noriko?” She made a noise, a sort of groan.    “Y… yes. I’m Suzette Noriko.”    “Are you all ri – are you injured?” I supposed it was obvious she wasn’t ‘all right’.    “Hit… my head. I tried to talk to one of the police, when he came. I scared him. He tried to run, and I grabbed him. He hit me. Sort of… went blank. Hoped it would be over when I woke up. Bad dream. Not… not dream…” She trailed off again, and I let Samantha try and tend to her. She had more medical training than I did – mine was mostly just making sure cops and Knights in the field didn’t bleed to death. This was more of a mental shock. Being turned transparent would probably have that effect.    It was a few minutes before Sam got Suzette coherent enough to give us the full story. She had been working on a new display in her private gallery, when a cloud of tiny motes of light had come through her wall and started leeching the color from her paintings. It hadn’t responded when she’d yelled at it, or when she’d started throwing things. It was only when she entered the cloud – to pull a favorite painting away from it – that the entity had reacted. She said she felt something touch her mind, screaming in agony. It hungered, needed the colors to stay alive. It pulled at her, trying to find where more colors could be found, where she got them. Then she’d passed out, only to wake up when the police arrived later that day.    “Did you get the sense that it was going somewhere?”    “Y-yes. It wanted to know where I got the colors. It left right after that.”    Purposeful little thing, I had to give it that. “Where?”    “A shop. Not too far.” She sniffed. “It’s an art supply place, in Cambridge.”    I looked at Sam. “It doesn’t seem to move too fast. We’ll be able to beat it to Cambridge from here.” I turned to where Suzette was (probably) sitting. “Wait here. We’ll come back when we have the thing captured.”    “No! I – I need to be there. What if it goes away and I never get better? It thinks, maybe I can get it to give me my color back. Or I’ll be a freak forever.” I looked at Sam, but she seemed sympathetic to the woman’s problem.    “All right. Fine. You can come with us.”Sam stood up, pulling Suzette along with her. “I have an idea,” she said. That didn’t sound good.I waited for them for probably ten minutes. I heard water running upstairs, and then what sounded like a hair dryer. And all the while, the creature was getting farther away, probably eating color all along the way. I found a few things in a coat closet that might prove useful later, and put them in the trunk of the car, next to the dimensional containment unit from Xenotech R&D.((PICTURE 2)) They came back down, and I was surprised that I could see Suzette. She was wearing a green-and-black turtleneck, black slacks, white gloves, and high boots, that covered up almost all her skin. What wasn’t covered had been painted with thick make-up, done to look like a mime. Her hair was visible, too – still a little damp, probably freshly dyed. She looked quite fetching, really.“Huh. Good thinking, Sam. She’s visible again. But why?”“Directive 7b, Michael. Don’t scare the mundanes. We couldn’t have an invisible girl running around town, talking to us. She’s going to be with us, she needs to be disguised.”“Decent point.” After everyone was in the car, I sped toward Cambridge, following Suzette’s direction. On the way, Samantha called ahead to the local police, and had the area around the store cleared, so we wouldn’t have to deal with many witnesses. Better safe than sorry. We made it there in good time, and I didn’t notice any greyed-out terrain as we went. Maybe we had actually gotten lucky.We arrived at the shop near nightfall. It was hard to miss the place, really. It had a garish sign that read COLOR, with at least fifteen different, painfully clashing hues. The interior was just as bad, even in the relative darkness after close. Certainly a creature that fed on color couldn’t stay away from here long.Sam got into the trunk, and started pulling out the containment unit. I passed each of the girls my little protective item – a long, black coat, taken from Suzette’s coat closet. “Maybe if you’re dressed like this, the thing won’t be interested in your colors, and leave you alone. Worth a shot, at least.” I pulled mine on, as well – apparently Suzette had had male guests who had left their coats behind at some point. Lucky for me.While Sam set up the containment unit across the street, Suzette and I went into the shop to bait the trap. Apparently she was a part-owner or something, since she had keys. Inside, everything seemed normal. It was an upscale art supply place, with all kinds of paints, brushes, canvases, tools, and such. Each of us grabbed a few buckets of paint, and started a swathe of color to the small bit of grass where Sam was setting up the containment unit. ((PICTURE 1)) The air was thick with fog already, and the containment unit was frozen over. Some side effect of the way the thing worked meant that it was always bloody cold nearby. Sam had explained it to me at one point, but I got as far as “molecular oscillation” and “induced superconductivity” and “Einstein-Rosenberg bridge” before my head got all fuzzy and I had to sit down. I’m just a cop who ran into some bad stuff, after all. She’s the genius. I was just glad I had stolen such a big coat.We had gone back and forth several times, creating a wide line of color between the shop and Sam. After about twenty minutes, Sam radioed us, while we were inside looking for cheap paint to use. “It’s here. Hurry.”We ran across the street, watching the sky above us. Sure enough, there was what looked like a thick swarm of tiny, silver fireflies moving toward the shop. It wasn’t terribly fast, but it was probably a good six feet across, pulsing slowly. We moved behind Sam and the containment unit, and she closed the protective circles around us with a few words. I knew they were designed to funnel the creature toward the containment unit – I’d seem them work before on much more dangerous things.The cloud hovered for a few moments in front of the store, and I could see the colors on the sign flowing into it. The silvery light of the cloud flickered as it absorbed colors, and different hues flowed across it in shifting patterns. The front of the store faded slowly to grey. ((PICTURE 4))The thing moved slowly downward, as if sniffing at our scattered paint. Slowly, it settled over it, and began to move toward us. It inched toward us, quivering and coiling as though suspicious. Past the first circle… just a little more… there!Sam triggered the containment unit, and it began to hiss loudly, like a teakettle on full boil. The entity surged and roiled, but was unable to move away from her, thanks to the containment circle she had created. Slowly, agonizingly, it was sucked into the nova-bright opening at the tip of the containment unit, until every last silver sparkle was gone. Only after that, and a few breaths more, did Sam seal the containment unit. It was over.It was a few months before I heard how everything turned out. Suzette never got better, but she was recruited by the Institute – it’s amazing how useful an invisible operative can be. In the art world, she became known for wearing mime makeup all the time, but then, they’re sort of expected to be eccentric. Her home had to be bulldozed, and the invisible pieces carried away to safe places. The supercollider was modified with the same protective wards the Knights of the Order of Saint Gregory put around nuclear reactors, to prevent extradimensional breaches. Last I heard, they’re working on a way to selectively release the entity, to make transparent materials. Apparently transparent steel goes for a price you wouldn’t believe. Really, all just another day in the Hoffman Institute.</blockquote>

Verification