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I took a brief rest to recover while considering all we had learned. But that’s all I could afford. Things were getting bad quickly. The offshore storm was turning into a hurricaine. Everyone was sleep deprived from demonic nightmares. Anybody with the means was streaming for the exits.

A bunch of Auntie’s thugs were holding back refugees trying to flee Kowloon. They said Auntie wanted to prevent riots and huge refugee camps. I told them bottling things up would only make them worse. They didn’t like it, but they backed down.

Auntie wasn’t happy about it, but she was far more interested in what we had learned from Plastic Man. She pointedly asked what we had done with him. She was *not* pleased with my answer. She gave me a hard look, but I met her gaze straight on. I was done being intimidated.

She finally asked what we had learned from Plas that was worth letting him go. I told her Josephine had taken Uncle Ray to reprogram him. And that he had been involved in a “secret project” of hers in Kowloon. She leaned back in thought. “Even I didn’t think she was enough of a bitch to kidnap her own son.” Then she nodded. “Alright. Do it“.

She figured Uncle was clearly vital to whatever Josephine was brewing. Helping us rescue him gave her a way to hit Tsang where it hurt. She had Bao give us security passes to get us in the door, and asked us to lay out our plan. She also asked us to also do her a “favor” while we were there. Dig up any dirt we could find that she could use against Josephine and Tsang Industries. It was clear she was offering this “favor” as a way to make amends for refusing to off Plastic Man. I figured we’d pushed our luck with her enough and agreed. Its not like I had any objection to screwing with Tsang.

I wasn’t sure we actually had a plan yet, but Iz and Dunk cut in. It seemed they’d been busy while I slept. They’d cashed in the favor Jarl’s crew owed us. Turned out Jarl had done a job at Prosperity Towers not long ago, and had pretty good intel on the security layout. Three major nodes coordinated much of the building’s security. One on the maintenance level in the basement. One nested in among Sales and Accounts. And one holed up in their Thaumaturgic research center. If we could get Iz access to those nodes, she could severely hamper their ability to respond to emergencies. Like the one we intended to cause. And while she was in the system she could find dirt for Auntie and see if she could figure out exactly where Ray was being held.

We hit the tower that night. Didn’t want to wait any longer. Didn’t know how much longer Uncle would still be Uncle – if it wasn’t already too late.

We flashed Auntie’s badges at reception, and claimed to be new hires here for orientation. We claimed maintenance – as that seemed the most believable. It would also get us down near the first of the security nodes, and give us a potential cover for the rest of the job.

The maintenance manager was a surly dwarven woman who immediately seemed irritated by our presence. She cursed under her breath about Human Resources, and then sent us over to the locker rooms to get fitted for uniforms.

Not the most flattering outfits in the world. Not the most protective either when it eventually came down to a fight. But they would give us more ability to move around the building than anything else.

Our first assignment was to tweak the power cycles on the turbines running air circulation for the building. Iz and Gob had little trouble with that. While they were working at it they noticed a request from above to reboot the system and rebalance the turbines.

That seemed to good an opportunity to pass up, so we accepted the work order. The Manage was *not* happy. She’d left the request unopened for a reason. But she walked us through the procedure. Unfortunately for her Dunk and I deviated from the procedure just a little…

That did a pretty good job of distracting everyone on the level. It also got us called in to be chewed out by the Manager – who sent us to Security to fill out an incident report.

Direct orders to log in to the Security node on this level while Security was distracted? Couldn’t beat that! Iz took full advantage to jack in. She found a few useful codes, some notices about enhanced security on Level 12, and an excellent opportunity to thoroughly subvert the first of our targets.

Next we headed up to Accounting. There I found a harried woman in Sales complaining that Accounts was stealing all the credit for their work. She also had an off-the-books pass for Security on this level. She was secretly dating a guard. I talked her into letting us borrow the pass in return for “acquiring” some financial records for her from Accounts. Records that would let her one-up her rival and rebalance the score. I didn’t care about the corporate in-fighting one way or the other, but it seemed an easy way to score access.

I didn’t like the manager in Accounts from the moment I met her. Bossy, self-important, and condescending. I convinced her we needed to do some immediate work on the air system in her area. That it was in danger of an imminent rupture that would cost her days of downtime. It was not a hard sell. That gave Iz a chance to muck about in the Accounting systems and get both the records that the woman in Sales wanted… and some useful leads for Auntie.

When we headed for Security we were interrupted by a corporate big shot… with goons in tow. He didn’t say it outright, but he hinted that he knew what we were. And wanted to talk to us in his office. I was afraid our cover was blown, but that wasn’t what he had in mind.

He was an ambitious VP who thought Josephine was taking Tsang in an “unprofitable” direction. He wanted access to records that would tell him how best to undermine her with the board of directors. But he wanted no evidence pointing back to himself. So he offered a deal. Hack into the system in his office, get the data he wanted. And he would look the other way as we continued our mission. If the intrusion was ever discovered it would be assumed to have been part of our run. There would be no link back to him. Clever. And gave Iz direct access to the node on this level literally under Security’s noses. And Auntie would find the dirt the VP wanted every bit as useful as he did.

It wasn’t hard to talk my way past reception up in Thaumaturgy either. We ran into an irritating researcher who was happy to drone on, and on, and on about his “revolutionary” research. Basically a way to map Astral space with a form of magical sonar. It wasn’t clear to me what this accomplished that I couldn’t achieve by simply LOOKING, but Gob and I understood enough to pretend to be impressed. Eventually he got so excited he told us the access codes to Containment, and told us we just HAD to check out what was there.

It turned out “what was there” was one of the ugliest,most horrifying monstrosities I’d ever seen. It looked like someone with a tooth fetish had attempted to design a nightmare. It also looked like a prime opportunity…

A bit of finessing the control systems, and we release the thing into the hallway. Where it promptly began rampaging through the level and drew the undivided attention of the entire Security contingent. Leaving Iz with pretty easy access to the final Node on our target list.

Afterwards we had one final goal before we could go for Uncle. The personal systems of the head researcher. That would give Iz high-level access to the research archives, which would be the best place to learn about the “Uncle Ray” project.

The chief thaumaturgist would ordinarily never allow us to trick her into leaving with her system unsecured. Fortunately, the now dead big ugly from containment had finally been brought down at her literal doorstep. And it smelled even worse than it looked. She was all too eager to have maintenance clean up the mess… and to take a coffee break far away while we did so.

That scored Iz access to an odd Matrix – unlike any she’d seen before. Decked out like an Imperial Palace. She found data there on a “Special Project” called ASIST. A highly clandestine project involving “memory modification”. The lead researcher on the program – a David Yu – was extremely skeptical that it would be possible to effectively rewrite a “seminal event” in someone’s memory. But Josephine overruled all of his objections. Bingo. Iz also found a trove of passcodes and the outline of a shutdown procedure for the project.

It was time to head to Level 12. I tried to bluff our way past Security there too, but they just weren’t buying it. There simply wasn’t any believable reason for them to let us past.

So we did it the hard way. We knew we were going to have to go loud eventually.

We burst into the lab, and there was Uncle Ray. Older than I remembered. Not looking well at all. And wired into the ASIST device. Didn’t take much more than waving guns to evict the lab assistants.

Iz examined the controls and read through the notes she had stolen. But the extraction procedure was completely theoretical, and the writer hadn’t believed it would even work. And the whole interface was completely beyond her experience. She didn’t know if she could even get Uncle out *alive*, much less with his mind intact.

I told her she was the only hope we had. The only hope Uncle had. And that I believed in her. Completely.

I couldn’t think of anybody I would rather have trying to pull him out.

Then Gob yelled out, “Incoming!!!”. The cavalry was here.

I had Gob focus on keeping Iz safe. She was very vulnerable while jacked in. Fortunately the guards were avoiding explosives and high caliber weapons. I suspected they were under strict orders not hurt Uncle.

Inside Iz was sorting through memory engrams. Trying to tell the difference between real and artificial. And trying to put all the right ones back into Uncle’s mind in all the right places.

Dunk tried to keep the grunts busy, but even without grenades and heavy weapons there were a lot of them.

Gob tried to help out there too.

I was tied up dealing with CorpMages. Tsang kept some top end spellslingers on hand. It was hard to fend them off, much less get in a counterattack.

But I was no newb. Not any more. And eventually they left themselves a little too open trying to get at me.

But that still left an awful large goon squad throwing lead our way. And as more piled in it got to be difficult find space to fire back.

But I wasn’t going down now. Not when we were so close. Not with Uncle right there. I let ’em have it. Chain lightning. As much juice as I could channel. Fried the lot of em.

That… took a lot out of me.

But Iz had done it! Uncle was waking up! We quickly smashed our way in, took him out of the pod, and took the leads off his head.

He wasn’t great. He couldn’t talk yet. But he recognized Dunk and me. And he could walk – with help.

There were more guards back near the elevator. A small group left behind to hold the line. They ordered us to surrender. So I asked *exactly* what they thought they were going to do that their fifty companions lying charbroiled back in the lab hadn’t been able to pull off.

The leader gave a surprisingly rational answer. “Put down our guns, take a LONG smoke break, and pretend we didn’t see a thing, Ma’am“. Good answer.

We didn’t meet anyone else on the way out. We’d left a lot of distractions in our wake, but I also suspected that what was left of Security was just as happy to let us “slip through their fingers”. We changed back to our street clothes at the subway terminal, and then headed back to Heoi.

Apparently we looked like trouble, because everybody else in our car quickly found reasons to move. Dunk laid into Uncle as soon as he could talk. He was NOT happy. About the secrets, and the lies. Any of it. And as Uncle tried to explain it just made things worse.

And then we all experienced… something…

“She’s here“, Uncle stammered. “She’s here. The Queen with a Thousand Teeth“.

He curled up rocking himself, repeating “I left my Prosperity in there“.

I eventually got him settled. Then we got the full story.

Decades ago Josephine had taken on a contract to revitalize the Kowloon slums. It had been sold as urban renovation, but she had actually had something much bigger in mind. Uncle had been in charge of a project to build a “Fortune Engine’. Codename “Prosperity”. It was supposed to be a giant Feng Shui device. A circulator for Qi. Artificially accelerating Qi flow to clean up the bad vibes in Kowloon and bring in fresh energy to revitalize it. I’d only ever known Uncle as an engineer. But apparently he had advanced degrees in metaphysics and thaumaturgy as well. No wonder he’d never fallen for my childhood attempts at illusion.

Anyway, when the Fortune Engine had gone online it had soon gone bad. It had gotten “stuck” on something in Astral Space. And rather than accelerating the circulation of Qi as intended it had completely stopped it up. Like damming up a river. And the stagnant Qi had gone foul and toxic.

I asked why they hadn’t just turned the thing off. Dunk asked why they didn’t bury it in explosives and blow it to kingdom come. But Uncle said that Josephine had insisted the seal it up and leave it. That is when he had run away.

“Stuck on what, Ray?”, Dunk asked. “Stuck on *what*”

Uncle was stuttering now, as if fighting off a seizure. But he pressed on. The Fortune Engine had gotten lodged in another world. It had made a rupture from Astral Space into *her* domain. The Queen. And now, after decades of the Fortune Engine tearing at the boundary between worlds, she was coming through. She was coming. Here.

Dunk was *furious*. “So you didn’t just have a secret past “Uncle”. You didn’t just have a whole life as a corpo bigwig you never told us about. You’re responsible for Kowloon. *YOU* brought *HER* here. And rather than staying to fix it YOU RAN AWAY!! You left EVERYONE THERE to rot in the mess that YOU MADE!!“

“Yes Duncan. Yes. I was a coward. I ran away. And that’s why I came back. That’s why I wanted your help. If you can get me to the Engine. If you can get me to the door. Then I can stop it. I can end it.”

And here I’d been worried about going up against Josephine Tsang…

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Author’s Notes:

Movies and renders getting more precious now. There’s some funky stuff coming rendering-wise. The Yama Kings lean more “Clive Barker” than “Asmodeus”. Nasty.

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