Quirky Row Chapter 56: Tomb (Lab) Raider (Patreon)

Chapter 56: Tomb (Lab) Raiders

(Tuesday, April 17th, 2124)

Several days after Playa had his secret meeting with the Ultor whistleblower, and Johnny was not happy after hearing what his boss had to say. Indeed, the words ‘Apocalyptically Furious’ would probably describe the Quirkless man better than anything else Playa could think of.

He was ranting and raving angrily off to the side, just barely resisting the urge to whip out a gun and start firing it into the ceiling.

And in all fairness, Playa was just as angry. Really, it was hard not to be, what with the evidence Tera Patrick had scrounged up regarding not only Ultor’s dealings with All for One but also his sister-in-law’s own actions. He’d taken the time to investigate and confirm it, and to his immense disappointment, the scientist had not been lying about Johnny’s sister-in-law’s deeds.

Namely, the repeated murder of other whistleblowers. Not all of them had been killed by Silver Swan, but seven out of ten people who’d tried to go to the media or cops or even other members of the Ultor board of directors with information on what was being done within the bowels of the Pyramid had died at Silver Swan’s hands.

‘And her power is perfect for it, really. With her ability to manipulate emotions, all Maya had to do was make the victims feel suicidally depressed and watch them walk off a building or something,’ Playa thought to himself darkly.

“What do we have on those caverns, Pierce?” Playa asked, looking to the lieutenant. The Inner Circle were in his office, discussing what to do with the information they’d been given.

“We reached out to Mr. Wong, given that he pretty much runs the Underground these days. Here’s the intel he has on Stilwater’s caverns,” Pierce said, handing over the documents.

They were a bunch of maps. Some were from the 40s when the military had scouted them out for the naval base. Others were a bit more recent, but only from a decade ago, when they’d refurbished the caverns for the underground tours. And then there were the ‘secret’ maps Wong provided. They were simple sketches of the surroundings, though they did mark down sections where Ultor had sealed off certain tunnels. Last but not least, a few notes from city hall about the plot of land Ultor had purchased, which revealed the dimensions of it.

“Damn, the Pyramid is huge,” Shaundi muttered, staring at the layout.

Public information about the underground structure was limited but what could be found spoke of a truly massive and sprawling place. Combined with the information Tera had provided, it was clear trying to get inside would require guile to avoid detection.

“The good news is we do have a way in,” Mink said, pointing down onto a map of the subways. “We take this tunnel here down into the service ducts, and then we can enter the sewers. From there it’s less than a minute from the Pyramid’s sewage overflow. Well, where it should be, at least.”

“Yeah, there’s no easy way to get in. Odds are Ultor has paid through the nose for top-quality sensors to make sure even that part of the Pyramid cannot be entered, even through the sewers, but it’s probably the best choice we have,” Playa grunted.

“What about when we get in?” Carlos wondered.

“Twenty-One said she had a way for us to steal data without getting detected,” Playa said, looking over at the tech expert.

“Got it right here,” Twenty-One said, holding up a USB drive. “Slot this into any machine you find in the Pyramid and it will automatically start to download everything on its hard drive.”

“Wonderful,” Playa said with a grin.

“And what the fuck are we gonna do about Maya, huh?!” Johnny demanded angrily, spinning around towards Playa and the rest.

“Nothing, for now,” Playa said. “We have to get more evidence. But as soon as we do… well, I won’t stop you.”

The grin that graced Johnny’s face was a sickening, twisted thing, and Playa hated to see it on his best friend.

‘Is that what I looked like after Lin’s death?’ Playa couldn’t help but wonder.

“We’ll need something to keep the public’s eyes off of us while we do this,” Jean-Paul pointed out.

“Yes, that’s true,” Playa agreed, snapping back to the present. “We need something grand, but not exactly against the law. Don’t want the heroes to break things up.”

“Actually… what if we do?” Shaundi suggested. “We could cause a bit of trouble to draw attention! But we don’t actually break the laws. We just… annoy people.”

“Like those influencers who try to pick fights for Nok-Nok?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Exactly! Really make a nuisance of ourselves but never outright do something illegal. Big, flashly, but harmless. People will be wondering about it all day!”

“Having a bunch of Saints do that across the city could really cause some chaos,” Carlos said with a grin.

“It sounds to me that we’ve got a plan, then,” Playa said. “Time to bring down the big bad corporation.”

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(Thursday, April 19th, 2124)

Here and there, enormous pillars held up the underground tunnel. It was dark as some of the lights weren’t working, and the skittering of rats and roaches made it clear certain things had decided to move in, but beyond that, the service ducts connecting there was no ‘mud’ or any other nasty things within the tunnel, despite being so close to the sewers.

“How long has all this been down here?” Pierce wondered as he, Playa, and Johnny walked through the tunnels.

“Decades. It was built during the rise of Quirks in the 2020s in order to act as some sort of fallout shelter by a doomsday cult. But then it got co-opted by the city when the cult got wiped out in 2052 by another cult. Stilwater expanded it, turning them into the service ducts you see today,” Johnny said.

“Oh. And how do you know all that, Johnny?” Playa wondered, ducking under a pipe.

“I used to work down here. Learned the history during job orientation,” the lieutenant explained.

“Jeez, I can’t imagine such a burly guy like you working in these cramped tunnels,” Pierce commented.

“It wasn’t pleasant, but I had to earn a living somehow,” Johnny shrugged.

“How did you end up in the Saints, then?” Playa wondered. “If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Mostly by accident. I was at a gun range, working some of my ‘annoyance’ at my coworkers out when a handful of Vice Kings came in. Apparently, the place smuggled guns for ‘em,” Johnny revealed. “Julius was scoping out the place at the same time, and one thing led to another and he and Vice Kings got into a shootout. I got drawn in and saved Julius’ life. Ended up recruited afterwards.”

“Sounds wild,” Playa said.

“I certainly don’t regret it,” Johnny laughed. He then paused and held up a hand. “Heads up! We’re almost there!”

Playa and Pierce craned their necks, and spotted a large steel door in the tunnel’s wall up ahead.

“Looks heavy,” Pierce muttered.

“That’s what your muscles are for,” Playa said, slapping his fellow villain on the shoulder.

“Wait, is that why you brought me?!” Pierce gasped.

“Yeah, you’re like the strongest person in the Saints,” Playa admitted. “And we don’t have any super-strength Quirks, so that’s pretty impressive and puts you on the shortlist of ‘Saints who can move heavy stuff.’”

“…Is that a real list? Because I’ve been asked to move a lot of couches recently,” Pierce muttered.

Playa and Johnny remained silent, and let him think what he wanted to think. It was better that way.

After a moment Pierce shrugged and walked over to the steel door, squeezing past Playa and Johnny to reach it. A turn-wheel style handle barred the path, and Pierce’s muscled bulged as he cranked it. The wheel was a little rusty and got stuck, but after some grunting it spun and unlocked.

The steel door was pretty heavy, but Pierce managed to pull it open. Of course, doing so caused the horrific stench to pour out now that it was no longer sealing the sewers.

Yes, the entrance to Stilwater’s fetid depths awaited them, and while none of them looked excited to be there, it was the only way to get into the Pyramid that didn’t involve getting pounded into mulch by Ultor’s security.

“It stinks,” Playa uttered with a wince.

“You’ll get used to it,” Pierce said, even though his face was pretty green.

“I feel sick,” Johnny groaned.

“Do not throw up in here!” Playa warned.

“Why? It’s not like it can get any grosser,” the Asian-American gangster pointed out.

“If you start upchucking, then I’ll start as well, and then everybody’s gonna have to deal with that,” Playa retorted. Pierce sighed, rolling his eyes at the duo.

“Come on, buckle up, buttercups! This ain’t even the worst of it!” he scolded. “Now let’s go! We only have a short window of opportunity!”

“How can it get worse?” Johnny wondered, but Playa simply winced. Things could always get worse. Smells were no exception.

Thankfully for everyone’s noses and boots, they did not have to wade through waist deep sewage. It was only ankle-high. And there were walkways, too, so they didn’t have to enter the shit stew.

Tromping through the sewers, they eventually spotted their destination: a massive steel wall with a grate covering it. Despite how out of place it seemed surrounded by crumbling bricks and concrete, it could have been easily missed thanks to being smeared with algae and odd stains.

“There it is, the back entrance into the Pyramid,” Playa said, eying the grate closely. He raised his hand and activated his Quirk, spraying some smoke into the pipe beyond it, revealing several red lasers crisscrossing the interior.

“Just as expected,” Johnny snorted. There was no way Ultor wouldn’t have had some measure of security in the one weakness they couldn’t directly observe. A secret camera was also likely there, watching them, but none of the villains were worried about that.

After all, the three Saints were wearing specialized clothing. To an outside perspective they were weird-looking, with barcodes and QR codes littering every item. Their shirts, pants, hats, even shoes and socks! Everything they wore had at least one on them.

There was a reason for it, too. Each code would, if captured by a camera, download a virus into the system that would cause the device to only see static-laced blurs instead of people.

It was Twenty-One’s Magnum Opus, a way to allow anybody to go undetected by security cameras. There were issues with it. Namely that it was very crude and could be defeated by non-digital methods of observation, so ordinary eyeballs would see right through it. Plus, it only scrambled images so a camera could still notice them and thus trigger alarms. But it was better than nothing and it kept their identities secret.

“Can you tell what kind of laser sensors are being used?” Johnny asked curiously.

“Let me see… looks like the Ultor brand Aurora Laser Tripwire System,” Playa said, squinting into the tunnel at the pieces of technology guarding the grate.

“Then our information was correct,” Pierce said happily. “That scientist lady came through for us!”

“She sure did, now let’s get in there,” Playa said, and began to pump out a thick cloud of obscuring smoke from his pores.

The Ultor laser-based security system was impressive enough, Playa supposed, but it had one weakness: it could be disrupted with smoke. A solid object would trigger it, even liquids, but thick enough gases could cause the sensor to malfunction and not detect anything.

So long as the Saints moved through the tunnel while the smoke was covering everything, the laser tripwires wouldn’t be triggered.

It was a neat life-hack, and a glaring weakness for the security system. But what could be expected from bleeding edge technology Ultor had developed and rushed out into production only a year prior. Tara Patrick had learned of this weakness thanks to overhearing some of the scientists in the Pyramid, and had dutifully informed the Saints.

‘Now, it’s time to see if the rest of her intel was good,’ Playa thought to himself as Johnny unscrewed the grate. When it was removed, they scurried through the drainage pipe past the laser sensors and into the Pyramid.

Playa felt like a rat as he and his friends squeezed through the last couple of feet out of the pipe and into the depths of the Pyramid, only to end up in front of another steel door. They were in the very bottom of the place, and behind that portal was where the waste from the facility was stored before being flushed down into the sewers.

Now, obviously, this would be bad for the Saints trying to sneak in. Prying open the door would just release all of the Pyramid’s stored sewage, and drowning in piss and chemicals wasn’t how any of them wanted to die. But luckily, there was a way in that didn’t involve triggering a purge of the waste containment system.

Like all things involving plumbing, sometimes the waste removal tunnel needed maintenance. And so there was a tiny hatch in the ceiling of the tunnel that could be opened for the Pyramids janitors to enter the pipe directly without having to open up the containment chamber’s door.

The hatch was not that difficult to open, and Playa pried it up. Climbing out of the sewers, the trio found themselves in a large room full of pipes, wires, cables, and a lot of other things that kept the rest of the facility chugging along.

Carefully creeping along, the trio left the basement and emerged into the stark white hallway. Nobody was around at the moment, which was another point towards Tera’s information being correct.

‘Nobody ever comes down to the plumbing section unless there’s a problem,’ Playa recalled her telling them. ‘And when it’s lunch, the labs clear out so if we aim for a noon-time infiltration everyone else will be gone.’

That gave them a thirty-minute window to get in and do their thing. Hopefully, that’d be enough. Moving along, they soon came to a large glass observation panel which looked out over a laboratory.

“Shit,” Playa muttered, staring into the lab. Pierce and Johnny were already taking pictures and filming everything with their phones, and there was a lot to take in.

Test tubes filled with people with tar-black skin and exposed brains were lined up in rows. Playa counted ten in total, but the room they were looking at was only one of several, if the number above the doorway was any indicator.

Further along the hallway, the trio came across a room that had a bunch of naked corpses lying on medical beds, partially dissected.

The horrors stopped there, thankfully, as the rest of the level was just workrooms full of computers and high-tech lab equipment like electron microscopes and such. But even so, what they’d seen only cemented the truth that Ultor was doing some seriously shady shit.

“Sick bastards,” Johnny spat. “Gonna enjoy tearing Ultor down after this.”

“Same,” Playa nodded before pointing to a room. “Let’s get in, grab the data, and get out.”

“I can live with that,” Pierce agreed, and the three of them headed towards the work station. The doors to this particular lab did not need keycard access which was why he’d picked it, but once inside things went pear-shaped.

There was a single person in the room, an elderly Indian man in a lab coat working on a computer, oblivious to his surroundings. Seeing him, all three froze, staring in disbelief at the sight.

“I thought the place was supposed to be empty right now!” Johnny hissed at his companions.

“It should be! It’s lunch time!” Pierce shot back. “Who works during their lunch break?!”

“What is that smell?” the old man suddenly wondered aloud, wrinkling his nose, before coughing. “Ugh! The damn sewage overflow must be malfunctioning again!”

He turned around to contact somebody about fixing the issue, but froze when he saw three unknown people wearing odd clothing standing in the doorway, also frozen in place and staring back at him.

“Err, we’re… janitors?” Playa tried.

“INTRUDERS!” the man screamed, and began to scramble for an alarm system on the wall near him, but Johnny reacted faster, whipping out a handgun and firing it.

The shot caught the scientist in the back, killing him instantly as the bullet punched through his heart. He fell to the ground with a thump

“Shit, you killed him!” Pierce hissed.

“What was I supposed to do?! Let him sound the alarm?!” Johnny shot back.

“No! But you didn’t have ta kill him!” the other Saint whined.

“Shut it! I’m not happy, either, but what’s done is done!” Playa snarled. “Let’s just grab the evidence and get out of here!”

They hurried over to the computer terminal and slotted the USB into it, and began stealing all of the data they could find. The good news was that the computer was already logged in on the scientist’s account, so they didn’t have to use any of the passwords Tara had stolen for them. It made it less likely for her to be identified as a conspirator, at least.

“Okay, got some files, downloading it all,” Playa said, watching as the loading bar filled up.

“Hey, Playa, what was the crazy, evil, no-good scientist guy working for Ultor on behalf of All for One supposed to be called, again?” Johnny asked after a bit.

“Uh, Rasheed Gupta-something,” the villain replied. “Why?”

Johnny just kicked the corpse over, revealing the nametag on his lab coat: Rasheed Guptamara.

“Oh, it was ‘Guptamara!’” Playa said, before frowning. “Uh-oh.”

“Did we just kill an internationally wanted war criminal?” Pierce asked, surprised.

“Seems like it,” Playa muttered. “Lucky.”

“Yeah, but Ultor can probably dispose of his corpse and claim he was never involved,” Johnny huffed.

“True, but there’s no way to cover up all the rest of this!” Pierce claimed, waving a hand at the rows of test tubes filled with Nomu.

“Maybe not immediately, but they’ll know somebody was here, and Vogel will definitely cover shit up, probably with the end of a gun,” Johnny pointed out. “We’ve only got a few days before they hide their dirty laundry and try to eliminate us.”

“You’re right,” Playa acknowledged with a wince. “We have to unveil everything sooner than we planned.”

“How?” Pierce asked. “Upload the shit we’ve recorded to the internet?”

“Not good enough,” Playa muttered before blinking as an idea hit him. “Huh. You know what, I think I’ve got an idea!”

“You do?” Johnny asked.

“There’s a big Ultor party this weekend. All the bigwigs and shareholders are gonna be there. And since I own one percent of the company, I got sent an invite,” Playa said. “I think rolling up to their little soiree and broadcasting all their dirty secrets there, as well as also uploading it to the party should work. Then we can be totally justified in taking down Dane Vogel, vigilante style!”

“Could work. Risky, though,” Johnny replied.

“Not sure what else we can do. Won’t have a better opportunity, either,” Playa claimed.

“Fine! But I want it on record that this is a bad idea!” he retorted after a moment to think it over.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure Ultor gets everything they deserve,” Playa vowed.

A beep interrupted the solemn moment, and the villains looked over to find the download was complete. Grabbing the USB stick and putting it into a plastic bag for safety, they quickly hurried out, leaving the corpse to be found by whoever came back from lunch first.

They had to leave through the sewers again, but by that point their noses were already numbed. Of course, the rest of the Saints back at the hideout had not had time to get used to their aroma, and weren’t allowed inside the Mission until they’d been heavily rinsed off.

‘Thank God my Quirk lets me make deodorizing substances as well as nice perfumes,’ Playa thought to himself as he walked out of his private shower, hair damp and body smelling much fresher.

He was about to leave and find out if Twenty-One had found anything interesting in the files they’d stolen when his phone started to ring. The villain recognized the number and frowned before answering.

“What are you contacting me for, Mr. Vogel?” Playa asked, keeping his voice steady.

“Just wondering if you’d be attending the party this weekend,” the executive replied. "As one of Ultor’s shareholders, your presence would be appreciated.”

“I was thinking about it,” Playa admitted.

“Good, good! I think that’s a great idea!” Dane said, and the supervillain frowned. Why was he sounding so excited?

‘This is a trap,’ Playa realized. ‘He wants me at the party for some nefarious reason.’

But what was the end goal? Did he know about the break-in already? No, if he did, there’d be some evidence of that in his voice, right?

“Well, if you think so, I guess I have to attend,” Playa said.

“Wonderful, I’ll see you there!” Vogel said cheerfully before hanging up.

‘Yeah, definitely a trap,’ Playa sighed. ‘And now I have to get a suit. Yay.’

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Dane hung up, his pleasant, easy-going expression twisting into a scowl as soon as he was done. The villain could try and act dumb, but he knew he was responsible for the break-in at the Pyramid that’s happened a few hours ago! He couldn’t exactly prove it, but who else could it have been?!

‘I needed an excuse to get rid of that slimy piece of gutter trash. This works out for me,’ he thought to himself.

As he leaned back in his chair, his mind flashed back to that morning. He’d been summoned by the CEO and the board to attend a ‘performance review.’ They’d given him the usual platitudes and bullshit, but he’d been able to read between the lines: he was being pushed to the side!

He was being removed from the Stilwater Development Project, despite the whole thing being his brainchild, and they were giving it to some of their fucking cronies and nepo-babies!

‘Arrogant old bastards!’ he thought to himself, clenching his hands into fists. They were not the ones who’d build the company into the monolithic behemoth it currently was!

Dane also knew why they were doing this. His hiring of the Masako had spooked the shareholders and they wanted to punish him and remind him where his place was!

‘Well, if they want a fight, they’ve got one!’ he declared. ‘I did not claw my way to the top just to be knocked down by fossils who’ve never worked an honest day’s labor in their lives!’

The Third Street Saints would make for the perfect patsies. Skunk would be attending the party, and it’d only take a few ‘mishaps’ to occur to the board members that he could then blame on the villain.

‘The Saints don’t use poison, but I’m sure the Masako will be more than happy to earn a bonus,’ Dane Vogel thought to himself, a cruel smirk slipping onto his face. He just had a few more calls to make to ensure everything was set up properly.

Nobody messed with him and got away with it!