GARGOYLES: Re-Awakening

Encounters: 1

New Jersey Bearings, Inc. was thoroughly unimpressive. It was funny, Elisa thought to herself, how some of the world's most powerful, most wealthy, most impressive and pretentious people owed their fortunes to such utterly banal products. Xanatos Enterprises was one of the world's largest conglomerates and was responsible for some of the most impressive innovations in modern history, and at the same time, they ran ball bearing manufactories in dumpy parts of New Jersey. Maybe she'd take one and keep it on her desk, just to remind herself that powerful people aren't that different than the rest of us. She smiled at the thought.

Elisa had parked down the street from the factory and edged up carefully alongside the neighboring buildings. As a cop, she new that the cameras for this kind of operation were usually fairly cheap. They would capture in front of the building and directly behind. Off to the sides would be blind spots, because it was unlikely that the cameras swiveled—too expensive to maintain. If she kept right up against the neighboring building, she felt confident, she could probably sneak in between the two buildings without ever being in the cameras' field of vision. If she did get caught, well, she was a cop after all—she'd just have some more explaining to do to Captain Chavez.

The street was totally quiet. From the stray bits of trash, Elisa could tell cars did not drive along it at night. Probably the only traffic the street saw was when the workers came and went for their shifts and when the trucks that hauled the product came in and out of the loading bays. Between New Jersey Bearings, Inc. and its immediate neighbor was a fairly wide alley, closed off by a chain link fence that ran between the two buildings. Elisa crept slowly along until she reached the fence, where she found a nice surprise. Since it was clearly not well maintained, it had begun leaning forward right at the corner, which left just enough of a gap for her to slide through. She'd been ready to climb, now she didn't have to.

Once in the alley, she relaxed. There were undoubtedly no cameras trained on this part of the building. She thought back to when she had been a beat cop, early in her career. She had been absolutely amazed by how many buildings left obvious areas of ingress and egress unmonitored by security cameras. Of course, as time passed and she became more experienced, she realized it was because places like this really didn't worry about break ins. What would criminals do with boxes of ball bearings? The cameras, she learned, were more for monitoring the days' activity in case there was an accident, or some other work related problem that the company might want to have the ability to examine.

The ground crunched beneath Elisa's feet. The alley was a gravely, sandy, weed filled lot. She approached the side of the building where several crates and old boxes were stacked, directly below a window. Once again, Elisa thought, who would imagine anyone would actually want to climb in that window. She was not entirely sure why she wanted to, for that matter. Off on wild goose chases again, Maza, she said to herself.

She popped up onto the box and peered through the window. The factory was dark and quiet. She scanned the room for little red lights indicating cameras. She could see two of them in the corners opposite her position. She knew there would be two more in the corners to her right and left, which she couldn't see from the outside. Again, she was not worried. These cameras were almost certainly not recording cameras, she knew. They were most likely there so that management could monitor the floor during the day to make sure everything was running smoothly. At worst, if they did record, the recordings were probably only viewed if something happened, which would be during production hours. It was highly unlikely anyone would view footage from 2am. Confident in her plan, Elisa did the only thing she knew was a minor risk. She pulled a small, flat crowbar from her back pocket and worked the edge under the lip of the window, right beside the latching mechanism. The windows of factories like this were made with fairly low quality aluminum. All it took was a few sharp, upward bangs with the palm of her hand and the frame bent, leaving a tiny gap right next to the latch. She then threaded a small wire hook through, grabbed the latch and gave a quick tug, accompanied by a twist of her wrist. The window tilted suddenly inward. Elisa smiled; it had been a long time since she'd used these tools to open up a car that someone had locked their keys in. Still got it, she thought.

A few seconds later she dropped to the floor inside the factory. It was dark and quiet. Even though she wasn't really worried about the cameras, she stuck to the shadows and close to the machinery. All the conveyer belts were empty. The machines themselves were just large metal boxes. Elisa moved along them quickly towards the far end of the factory. If she wanted a clue as to why Xanatos had upped his investment in this dinky little factory, she'd have to take a peak into some of the shipping crates. As she walked, she looked at everything she passed, but they were all anonymous mechanisms. When she reached the crates she tried the first couple but they had already been nailed shut. She didn't want to have to pry one open so she moved down the line, gently trying each top. At the end, she found what she was looking for. One crate hadn't been sealed. Gently, she pushed the lid aside. It was filled with styrofoam peanuts, which Elisa found strange—why would ball bearings be packed like that? She reached her hand in and pushed aside the peanuts. Suddenly, a sharp pain jumped out from the end of her middle finger and she pulled it back quickly. She held it close and observed a deep cut right on the pad. She looked back at the crate and saw several drops of red blood on the packing peanuts. Shit, she thought. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a tissue, which she pinched against the cut with her thumb. She reached in with her other hand and carefully brushed the peanuts aside.

What she uncovered gave her a flashback. For a second Elisa was back on the roof of Xanatos' headquarters, at castle Wyvern the night that she and Matt had become entangled in the battle. The red exo-suit flashed before her eyes, an explosion, Matt unconscious on the ground, and then—the rushing memory made Elisa gasp—herself falling off the side of the building. She remembered seeing the castle fading away, fast. The terror of being out in the air with nothing below her feet was vivid. A scene of her own own two hands frantically grasping for anything in the night sky flooded her vision. Then suddenly, she felt a hand grab her. Not the hand in her memory though. Not the hand that had plucked her from the open air and somehow carried her to safety when she should have been dead. Not the hand that she had avoided thinking about since it had happened. The one that she had compartmentalized away—that she had buried behind the idea that a regular investigation would reveal regular answers about what had happened to her. No, the hand that grabbed her was real.

When her eyes came back into focused Elisa saw that she had been grabbed by a man. This man was dressed in black and had a black mask over his face. As he came more into focus she saw that there were two others with him, also in black and with masks covering their faces. She also saw that they were holding knives. Elisa could see that their eyes clearly had one thought on them. They were there to kill her.