Chapter 6: Intelligence Gathering

Evelyn woke up feeling more than a little ashamed of herself. She'd told herself she wasn't going to obsess about the fact that Elaine, Alexis and Ophelia had been having a hot, steamy, mostly lesbian threesome a couple rooms down the hall and she'd mostly done a fine job of it. Unfortunately, the way she'd managed to distract herself had been a little raunchy. She may or may not have gotten slightly obsessed after her talk with Sam and may or may not have found out yet more stuff about herself she hadn't expected to. In this case it'd been something she'd always been a little interested in but hadn't ever pursued. Until now.

She was really grateful for her Font of Soma and the superhuman regeneration it bestowed upon her right then because what she'd done last night likely qualified as self-abuse. Good lord but it had felt amazing.

She shook it off and headed to the bathroom. She'd already showered last night after... but she still needed to get presentable. Today she was going to be helping the Professor with his little request and after that she had a very long talk with Elaine to go through. Except, not a talk.

Talking to her in person would be far too mortifying considering what she wanted to talk about so she was going to do it via the CARD's messenger function.

**

For the first time Cassie found himself the only member of his team at the breakfast table. He'd had a pretty good idea of why Elaine, Alexis and Ophelia were late judging by the noises he'd heard from Elaine's room as he'd headed to bed and he'd seen and heard Abigail giving a little impromptu concert to keep up morale so her being late also made sense, but Evelyn didn't have an excuse like that.

But he was fine with being alone for once. He'd chatted with Kate and she'd almost chased him out of the kitchen when he'd tried to wait the tables, forgetting for a moment that he was no longer working as a waitress. And now he was sitting at the table, chowing down on his prodigiously sized peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or rather, his peanut butter and jam sandwich. Strawberry jam, to be precise. Cassie was very particular about that and he was beyond glad that they had all the ingredients here. Or rather, they could conjure up all the ingredients. That replicator was a pretty freaky piece of gear but Cassie really couldn't argue with the quality of the stuff that came out of it.

His situation had been a bit of a roller-coaster ride the last few months. Going from finally being a successful streamer with tens of thousands of subscribers to waiting tables in a flyover town while the apocalypse was raging outside to being treated like cattle by a bunch of cultists to being chosen as the sacrifice to a being with more teeth than brain cells to being rescued by a team of gorgeous women and then being allowed to join them and gain superpowers, it had been a lot to handle. But he always made sure to make the best of whatever he was given. He was fairly adaptable.

And right now he had a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich, the white bread just golden brown without being burned, the peanut butter creamy and salty and sweet and the jam sweet and tart and fruity and cool, alongside a big old glass of caffeinated soda. And after spending the last couple days catching up on some really, really overdue grooming he finally felt like himself again. Or, in other words, at this precise moment he was in heaven.

“What are you eating?”, Ophelia asked from right next to him.

Cassie almost bit his tongue off and jumped into the air so hard his knees smacked against the underside of the table.

“Jesus, Cassie, relax”, Ophelia said when she saw his reaction.

“Sorry, I get a little lost in my own world when I'm thinking”, Cassie said, doing his best to get his heart rate back under control. “You're really quiet when you move, you know that?”

“I've been told that”, Ophelia said with a smile that exposed one of her fangs.

“Is it a vampire thing?”, Cassie asked, then paused. “Sorry, was that rude to ask?”

Ophelia snorted. “You can ask about the vampire thing all you want, I won't get offended. And no, I just had super strict parents so I had to sneak around a whole lot. But yeah, becoming a vampire did make it way easier to move quietly.”

“I see”, Cassie said. “So, are your parents vampires as well?”

“No”, Ophelia said. “I was turned. I'm not one of the pure-bloods. I wasn't even turned by a pure-blood.”

“Is that a big deal?”, Cassie asked.

“For some”, Ophelia said.

In truth there was no discernible difference between a turned vampire and a born vampire, with one tiny little exception and that exception was so rare that she'd only heard stories of it: Varghulfen, creatures that were half vampire and half werewolf and as strong as both put together. But the only two ways of making one of them were to either get a born vampire infected with lycanthropy or take a born werewolf and turn them into a vampire. Turned ones would die during the second transformation, those two diametrically opposed sets of instincts tearing the mind apart until the body followed suit.

But instead of telling him about that she continued: “But I'm not self-conscious about it, if that's what you're asking. I don't get invited to the upper crust meetings that I wouldn't want to join anyway. Big fucking deal. So, back to you. What are you eating?”

“You don't like talking about this stuff, do you?”, Cassie asked.

Ophelia groaned. “I had a big discussion about that last night with Alexis and Elaine. If you want to have your own private interview with a vampire we can do that some other time. Right now I want to talk about you.”

You being a vampire definitely wasn't the only thing you three talked about last night, Cassie thought but instead he said: “Well, if you're actually curious and not just making conversation it's a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich.”

Ophelia's nose wrinkled.

“Don't knock it till you try it”, Cassie said.

“I did”, Ophelia said. “When I was five. Is that seriously what you're eating?”

Cassie gave her a thin smile. “When Elaine asked me what she shouldn't say to avoid insulting me I clearly forgot one thing”, he said, then looked her square in the eyes and pronounced very clearly: “Do not insult the pibble jibble. You can call me whatever slurs you fancy but you do not insult the mighty pibble jibble.”

“Pibble jibble?”

“P, B and J”, he said. “Pibble jibble. Protein, fat, carbs, everything you could ever want. It's even got a dash of vitamins from the jam.”

“I-I see”, Ophelia said, dumbfounded. “I'm sorry.”

“Rule of thumb”, he said, slipping into his southern drawl. “If you don't got nothin' nice to say about the pibble jibble, don't go talkin' about the pibble jibble.”

“Okay, got it”, Ophelia said, looking a little chastised.

He grinned at her, showing her he wasn't actually upset. “So, now that we're done talking about the breakfast of champions, how about you tell me what you really wanted to talk about?”

That brought Ophelia's smile back. “Sure. How would you like a date with Elaine? Just the two of you?”

Cassie's blush was all the answer Ophelia needed.

**

There was a knock at Stollos' door.

“Come in”, he called. He'd been looking forward to another day of puzzling out the mysteries of the two fascinating samples Sergeant Caldwell had brought her and he feared his day was about to be ruined by some administrative bullshit yet again. Who knew leading a research project during the end of the world came with so many responsibilities?

But when the door opened it was Private Dupree who stepped in. “Professor”, she said. “I was wondering if you wanted my help now?”

He blinked, then smiled. So, not a distraction from his plan of studying the samples but assistance in doing so. Yes, this would do nicely. “I would, Private”, he said. “Have you already bought the skill?”

“Not yet”, she admitted. “But if you want my help I'll buy it right now.”

He nodded. “Please do.”

This was actually the first time Stollos had ever been present for one of these level increases and he found it fascinating. Private Dupree didn't change physically but her presence suddenly grew a good bit stronger. Compared to him she was still no stronger than a child but soon enough she would be a force of nature, same as all the others. And as he'd stood in the presence of Indra once before he could clearly tell that, yes, she did feel noticeably more like the being her Soul Shard belonged to.

He shook it off and told her: “Very good, Private. Now, what I want you to do is to come with me and then use your new scan function on a few of the samples I keep there. You may even recognize some of them.”

**

Singing was Abigail's answer to most problems. If she felt sad she sang. If she needed time to think she sang. If she needed money she sang and put an upturned hat on the ground in front of her. But there was one problem singing couldn't help her with: Having a sore throat from singing for hours the night before.

Or at least that's how it had been before.

She'd woken up with a sore throat. She'd sung for half the base last night. She hadn't exactly planned to give a concert but when she'd started singing to clear her head and more and more people had gathered to listen to her she'd gotten into it, had summoned her lyre and had kept going until she'd been too exhausted to continue. What had happened yesterday had shaken her a little more than she'd been willing to let on. Firing her gun was something she had become accustomed to and firing at insane, slavering monsters didn't cause her to lose any sleep either, but the gore they'd found while checking out Elaine's hunch had been beyond the pale. She didn't blame Elaine, of course, but that hadn't made it any less gross. All those people savaged, dismembered, eaten, and then left to rot while these beasts gouged themselves on the meat and then turned into horrifying cocoons made of raw meat to become even grosser and more dangerous. She'd needed a good, long, cleansing singing session to get that out of her system. And it had done a good job at getting her back into shape. But now her throat ached. Her physical stats were high enough that she healed faster than a normal human but it still hurt a little.

Except... she had another trick up her sleeve now. She smirked and then started humming to herself, willing herself to use her Song of Healing. It would speed up the regeneration of any allies that could hear it and she didn't have to hum very loudly in order to hear herself, now did she? In short order she felt good as new again and she reflected that maybe this project wasn't so bad after all.

When she reached the cafeteria it was mostly deserted. She checked the time and realized just how long she'd slept, feeling just a little embarrassed for it. The only one of her team who was around was Cassie, who was chatting with the line cook he'd arrived with.

Cassie confused her a little. Him and her were practically polar opposites. They both worked in entertainment but she hated being in the spotlight and preferred to hide in the shadows and let people appreciate her music while Cassie's day job had been to hog the spotlight and interact with lots and lots and lots of people. He was so confident it was kind of scary to her. She couldn't even imagine being so comfortable with that kind of attention. Didn't he care about people perving on him? Or was it simply not an issue for him because he was a streamer and therefore a world away from the people he interacted with? She had considered releasing her music online before but she liked playing for an audience, liked gauging their reactions and seeing the emotions her songs were meant to evoke on their faces, she just didn't like that she had to be in the spotlight in order to do so.

Her favorite gigs had always been at dark pubs and bars, sitting in the corner with a big piano. In those dark, musty places she could pretend people weren't staring at her and was thus able to sing and entertain in peace.

It wasn't even that she minded people looking at her. It was that she minded people ogling her to the exclusion of the music she was making. The amount of sleazy producers she'd met who had promised their help to make her famous if she was only willing to give them 'a little private performance' had been far too high. That was also why she had reacted so badly to the thought of Elaine being more interested in the women around her than in fighting those monsters and so it was also why she was now feeling lonely, because she'd decided to drive off a genuinely good person.

Sure they'd made up but she was still alone despite having a team. She didn't blame Elaine for not spending time with her, either. Elaine had three beautiful girlfriends to occupy her time with so why would she talk to Abigail instead?

“You alright?”, Cassie asked, startling Abigail out of her self-pity.

“Huh? What?”, Abigail asked eloquently.

“Is your throat alright?”, Cassie asked. “You kinda overdid it a little last night.”

“Y-yeah, I'm fine”, Abigail said. “I used some healing magic to fix it up.”

“Wow, that's handy”, he said. “But seriously, I can barely handle four hours of streaming before I have to rest my voice and you just kept going and going there.”

Abigail gave a small smile. “Well, I have been practicing for years.”

“So singing isn't just a hobby for you?”, he asked.

She shook her head. “I've been studying at music schools for most of my life.” She paused. “Are you just making conversation or are you actually curious?”

“Both?”, he asked with a silly grin. “We're both the new ones in this team so I thought we'd band together a bit.”

“You don't seem like you're having any trouble fitting in”, she said.

“Oh, I do”, he said. “I babble too much when I'm scared people don't want me around and more often than not that makes people think I'm annoying and then they tell me to get lost. But you're just plain old sitting in the corner looking lonely.”

She cringed. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yeah”, he said. “Did they do anything to offend you? You seem so down.”

Abigail let out a huge sigh. “Actually, it's the other way around...”

**

“It's showing me a whole-ass biography of this guy”, Evelyn told the Professor as she used her Akashic Knowledge skill on the head cultist Elaine had dismembered in Albion. “Who he was, how he lived his life, everything, down to the smallest detail.” Jason Fuller had been his name but she didn't really care enough about that fact to even mention it.

“Fascinating”, Stollos muttered. “Anything about how he became the leader of an Outsider cult?”

“Hold on”, she said. “I'm scrolling past his high school years right now, now we're in college, and... here we go, pay dirt.” She stayed quiet as she read. Finally she said: “Oh, charming.”

“What is it?”, he asked.

“So he was already a cultist before the Invasion happened”, she said. “He was trying to curry favors with Shub-Niggurath so that she would give him a body he wouldn't need to be ashamed of. Apparently he was kind of ugly before. Well, he wasn't exactly a looker as a Blessed but that had more to do with the goat legs and the cancerous growths... Anyway, he found a tome that... wait a minute, that can't be right.”

“What is it?”, he asked again. He was getting impatient.

“It says here that he found the tome that taught him how to communicate with Shub-Niggurath in the Silverman Library at the University at Buffalo”, she said.

That made him sit up and take notice. “Are you quite certain?”

“I mean, it says so in the scan”, she said. “No idea if it's actually true.”

“The Akashic Knowledge doesn't lie”, he said.

“But that doesn't make any sense”, she said. “As I understand it this isn't the kind of thing you just find at a library. Or can you just flip open a collection of Lovecraft short stories and conjure up an Outer God?”

“You can't”, he said. “And thank the stars above for it. But you're right. It doesn't make sense. Such knowledge should not be so freely available. Does it say anything about someone giving him the book?”

“Nope”, she said. “Just that he found it at the library, in the history of medicine section.”

“So not exactly out in the open but not exactly hidden, either”, Stollos muttered. “Well, once you all go to liberate Buffalo we'll need to make sure to raid the library and make sure there aren't any more copies of this. But that would only cure the symptom, not the disease...” He trailed off.

“Anything else you want to know about this guy?”, Evelyn asked.

“Well, if there's a description of how the transformation into a Blessed worked and if you can stomach reading it out then I would be very interested in hearing that”, he said, shelving the previous thought. The idea of such literature being so freely available was worrying but he had to remember that Private Dupree's time was also valuable and he had to use her for as long as he had her.

“Alright”, Evelyn said dubiously and started scrolling. When she finally found the section the Professor was interested in her lips curled up in distaste. “Oh, charming...”

**

“I really didn't expect you to be such a good shot”, Cassie said.

“Likewise”, Abigail said. “I mean, you told us why you're good with them but still.”

“I mean yeah, I trained with guns all my life, but look at you go”, Cassie said, pointing at the target Abigail had fired at. None of her shots had missed and she had more bull's eyes than any other hits.

“I don't know”, she said. “Something about fine control just comes naturally to me.”

“I'll say”, he said. “So, what about that bow of yours?”

They'd talked for hours, finding common interests and getting to know each other, and eventually they'd gone down to the shooting range when Abigail had admitted that she enjoyed using guns and wasn't terrible at it.

Cassie reflected that Abigail and Elaine actually had a lot in common, not in terms of hobbies but certainly in terms of personality. They were both driven, intelligent, reserved and ever-so-slightly insecure. They were also both good with guns and enjoyed training with them. But the main thing they had in common was that they were both incredibly self-conscious about their bodies. From kinda-spying-but-not-spying on Elaine Cassie knew that Elaine was, or at least had been, ashamed of the penis she'd grown after becoming an Awakener and Abigail was pretty and knew she was pretty but didn't like it when people were staring at her because of it. He might have thought she was a hypocrite since she was clearly putting effort into looking this good and if she didn't like the attention all she had to do was not put as much effort in, but he knew from experience that that wasn't the case. Abigail clearly put the effort in for herself, not for the benefit of others. And Cassie respected that. He was the same.

He'd started crossdressing not to impress others but because he loved seeing himself dolled up. Even if others would have called him an ugly transvestite for it he would have liked it. Except they didn't. When he'd had the guts to show his looks off he'd garnered a hugely positive response. People had loved looking at him, had found him just as cute as he'd found himself, and he'd in turn loved being praised for it. It had given him a huge confidence boost to see so many people praising his looks. But clearly Abigail didn't like people ogling her. And that was likely why the two of them got along so well. Cassie could tell that Abigail didn't like that kind of attention and so he didn't give her that kind of attention. Of course he found her attractive. He would have been insane not to. But while he could appreciate her beauty she didn't really do it for him. She was the tall, lithe supermodel type that so many normal guys couldn't keep their eyes off of but that kind of look did nothing for him. He found her kind of beauty intimidating rather than captivating.

It wasn't because she didn't have a penis, either. With Elaine and her other women he could see the appeal. Alexis had this cute, hyper, nerdy thing going on, Evelyn was a sexy bratty sub and Ophelia was a bombshell and could probably get really freaky in the bedroom. And of course, Elaine was just about everything Cassie was looking for in a partner.

But the fact that Abigail wasn't really doing anything for him also meant that the two of them got along splendidly. Abigail didn't have to worry about him ogling her and he could focus on just talking to her. And so that's what he was going to do.

The fact that he was going to earn a date with Elaine by learning more about Abigail of course played a role in his enthusiasm but he had to admit that he genuinely enjoyed talking to Abigail, so at least he wasn't just doing this to earn himself a date.

**

Subject 259 had to press her lips tightly together in order to hide a satisfied smirk. Someone had apparently destroyed the entire Outsider cult in Albion. There was no trace left of any pure-blooded Outsiders. As they dissolved into ectoplasm when killed she had to assume someone had destroyed them all. She might have believed they had just been sent away if not for the giant, still-burning pile of Thrall and cultist bodies in the center of town. Unlike pure-blooded Outsiders the hybrids did not dissolve neatly.

“Your heart rate has become elevated”, a robotic voice said from her right and as she looked at the source she only barely stopped herself from cringing. The voice had come from the speakers worked into Subject 202's muzzle. The voice wasn't 202's and the consciousness behind it didn't belong to her either. The 'person' speaking to her was the slaver consciousness that bypassed 202's brain and made her body act according to its will instead. “You do not have to worry, 259. We are here to defend you, to make sure you can finish your work in peace.”

I'm not scared, just happy someone's out there killing all the Outsider filth, she thought. She knew better than to say such things out loud, though.

What she said instead was: “Search the area for clues. Someone has to be responsible for this.”

“Do you wish to pursue the perpetrators?”, the AI hijacking 202's body asked.

“Our Master put us in charge of checking if Project Seedbed is compromised”, Subject 259 replied. “We can pursue leads on who uprooted the Albion cult once we are done with our primary assignment.”

“Affirmative”, the AI replied. “The primary directive takes priority. You have my gratitude for reminding me of our priorities.”

What a load of shit, Subject 259 thought. You were checking if I remembered my priorities.

It was getting increasingly harder to think of the thing speaking from 202's body as a separate entity from the life form it was speaking through. But Subject 259 refused to forget that the slaver AI and 202 were separate people, especially since she would prefer people remembered that she was her own person once she was inevitably turned into something just as bad for her eventual disobedience.

So, her cooperation once again affirmed, she began to dig through the town, trying to find who or what had gotten to Jason Fuller. And as she did, she thought.

Fuller hadn't even known who he had been working for. Her creator had distributed pamphlets containing forbidden knowledge in several college libraries, mostly in towns and cities he maintained outposts in, and Fuller had been one of the useful idiots who had jumped at the chance to sell his soul for power and immortality. Subject 259 had been tasked to pretend to be a wise mentor to him, one to give him guidance in his endeavors. Her creator had forced her to hint to him that he might get what he wanted if he managed to feed a Dark Young until it became a Shoggoth. Worse, the idiot had actually done it, feeding a thousand souls to a being that could digest souls so thoroughly it'd keep them from reaching any sort of afterlife. After that he'd been granted his ascension and then he'd kept feeding the Shoggoth, desperately trying to bring it to its next stage of evolution, to turn it into an Avatar of Shub-Niggurath.

Her creator had had big plans for that Avatar. He'd wanted to use the mutagenic substances the Avatar would have produced for his own ends, had wanted it to teach him of the Dark Mother's foul spellcraft, and maybe he'd even considered dissecting the Avatar of an Outer God and then putting it back together again after 'improving' it, as he was wont to do.

But now those plans were all for naught. Fuller was dead and so was his pet Shoggoth. And Subject 259, a genetic experiment that had been more about form than function, a person who had been working as a glorified call center operative for the last year or so, was out in the field, investigating a crime scene and having to pretend to be upset that someone had killed a mass murdering leader of a death cult and his pet eldritch horror/execution method.

Because if she didn't do her job she'd end up like the mindlessly obedient cyborg dog next to her.